Through the past brightly…

 

A key video that won’t load after a brief title flash in the time capsules below

Yes, the President is standing on a knife edge that stretched all the way from California to Iran and beyond. I’m keeping an eye on it, as I’m sure many of you are too. But unlike the pundits and other seers of the mass media, we the people who live in the real world know that there’s not much we can do to affect what will happen in the hours and weeks ahead. We’ve already done what we had to do, which is elect the best available candidate for the job of making the tough decisions about how best to proceed in our interests. Beyond that, our responsibility is primarily to remain calm and do the work we’re best suited to doing.

In my case that means writing stuff I think it worthwhile to write about as honestly as possible. That accounts for most of my time, but being as old and uniquely situated as I am, there’s also a continual overhead I have to pay in the form of what I call Reclamation; that is, preserving things I’ve produced in the past that are important, at a minimum, for verifying my claims of authenticity and truthfulness. Much of my stuff is dangling out there on the Internet, continually in danger of disappearing into the limbo of “file not found” and automatic kicks to voicemail by those who are nominally obligated to help. 

So I was working on a recent set of files gone missing that are still linked here, an unknown number of them included in “The Best Book on the Trump Phenomenon” from my old blog Deerhound Diary (aka rflaird.com). A few weeks ago, Wordpress made the original site completely unavailable after having previously stripped it of formatting. What remains is an incomplete version of the site at the Wayback Machine, where the search function is mostly inoperable. Some material that is still there can only be found by cherry-picking dates in month/year links. 

The missing files from the Trump book were those at the link titled Part 6. The only specifics I had were the exact dates provided for the first and last of those entries. Those I managed to find this morning. Here they are. Please wait for them to load. They’re coming here from a long way back…

From July 25, 2013:  

About the Nature of Reality

Musing about the fact that all deerhounds look alike

From June 3, 2017:

The Brain of Donald Trump. Too 

Ancient for Postmoderns to get.

Considered shipwreck rubbish when it was first discovered and filed away

The last video link is in the second post and is the one you can play above. Up to you how it applies.

All I can tell you for sure was included from Deerhound Diary in the online Trump book, but the 2013 post was intriguing to read. The means of assembling the book was the search term Trump. I chose the ones that contained more than glancing references to him. But Trump was on nobody’s list of potential candidates in 2013, and the post I decided to include was a glimpse of the period when he was probably thinking about taking that fateful escalator ride in 2015. Trump isn’t mentioned. What else, I wondered, might have been included from the pre-escalator years? I did some hunting and pecking where links still worked at least partially. (Wayback appears to have some limit on how much content to copy at a link on its random sweeps; later adds just aren’t there anymore.) Some of the breakout categories below the date list were still available though. 

Interestingly, the breakout called ‘Deerhound Diary,’which should have been huge, had just a handful of posts remaining. Oddly enough, however, they add up to a setting of the scene for the Trump era to come. The last post in particular looks to me as if it may have been included in the online book. But here’s the lot of them, including a post celebrating National Review, which went on to flunk the Trump test as badly as it can be flunked (with the exception of Victor Davis Hanson). Still, it’s proof of my honesty. I cannot edit or delete what’s in the Wayback Machine and I wouldn’t anyway. You can read me saying nice things about Jonah Goldberg. He had written a good book he seems to have forgotten about: “Liberal Fascism.” How he got from there to where he is now is a mystery only the Gods of Delusional Ego can speak to.

My candidate for the post of this grouping that might have made it into the book is the last one, although all of them are included at the link, most with varying degrees of relevance. Have a look…

From ‘Deerhound Diary’:

Trash

A rescue of any kind did not seem foreseeable then. Something to remember, I think.

You’re free not to read any of this. I just wanted to do what reclamation is possible; a link to this will replace the broken link at the Trump book post here at IPR.

One other reason I have for posting this. A request by me to visitors here. If you do chance to read some of the materials here or linked here, including my previous blogs and my other websites, I’d ask that you compensate me for the ones you really enjoyed by printing them out on paper and putting them away in a folder for posterity. It could be, one day, you’ll have the only hard copy of the piece you print out. I haven’t had a printer in years. If I am meant to disappear without a trace, the most you’ll have lost is a few minutes of time, and a few Pennie’s worth of ink and paper.

Thanks for reading this far. Now I have to get back to work. As do you probably.