When You Marry A First Baseman

 ... don't complain that they're not a left-handed starter.

This one is for all the sportsball fans out there.

Wife kitteh and I make a really good team most of the time. I'm a strongly-typed ENFJ and she's a strongly-typed ESTJ. I think in broad, colorful, emotional strokes. That seems to drive Tim crazy sometimes as he accurately points out missing details in my posts. 😊

Wife kitteh, on the other hand, is a fantastic one for accurately laying out short-term plans in detail. She knows what almost everyone should be doing all the time and since she is shrewd, experienced and clear-headed, she's almost always right. If you want direction, she's the perfect person.

In baseball terms, she married a speedy center fielder with a great on-base percentage. I married a solid, 162-game-per-season first baseman. Sometimes, life throws curveballs at us and for a short time, we could really use someone else. Conversations turn into something like this.

Me: You need to be a left-handed starter! Why can't you do that? It's so simple. Take the ball with your left hand and throw strikes!

Her: I need a power-hitting third baseman! Why can't you be a little more flexible? Just play third base and hit a lot of home runs!

I drafted a first baseman and she drafted a center fielder. If we wanted something different, we should have picked someone else. It's unfair to expect the other person to be something that they aren't. 

This isn't apropos of any arguments we've been having or anything that's happening in our lives right now, it was just a goofy analogy that popped into my head that I wanted to share.

You're the worst second baseman I've ever seen!
Coach, you idiot, I play catcher!

Illusions, Star Trek And Biochemistry

First, let's start with something beautiful.

I don't typically cry at sad or tragic things. I can shrug those off and see what's beyond them. Beautiful things bring me to tears and, looking at that image, I'm all choked up right now.

The look on the girl's face speaks volumes. She knows mommy loved her so much that she fought the most horrible demons imaginable because she couldn't bear to be apart from her little girl. As that little girl grows up, her appreciation for her mom will only grow as her understanding of just how desperate the battle really was matures.

That image might as well be Aquinas' 6th proof of the existence of God as far as I'm concerned.

As I continue to fight my own battles with addiction, I've increasingly turned to ChatGPT to understand what's happening inside of me. Why does my emotional side take over sometimes and overrule my rational side? Recently, I asked it to tell me about the long-term effects of heavy drinking on moods and emotions. Here's what it said.

Heavy drinking significantly disrupts the brain's delicate balance of neurotransmitters, the chemical messengers responsible for regulating mood, emotions, and behavior. Two of the most affected neurotransmitters are serotonin and dopamine, which play critical roles in maintaining mental health.

1. Serotonin Disruption (Anxiety and Depression):

• Serotonin is often referred to as the "feel-good" neurotransmitter because it helps regulate mood, sleep, and emotional stability.
• Alcohol initially boosts serotonin levels, creating feelings of relaxation and euphoria. However, with regular heavy drinking, serotonin production is suppressed, leading to low baseline levels.
• This can result in persistent anxiety, irritability, and depression, especially when alcohol is not present in the system.
• Over time, this creates a vicious cycle where a person drinks to feel better, but the alcohol ultimately worsens their mood when it wears off.

2. Dopamine Disruption (Reward and Motivation):

• Dopamine is associated with pleasure, motivation, and reward. Drinking alcohol stimulates dopamine release, which creates that "high" feeling people associate with drinking.
• Chronic alcohol use depletes dopamine stores and reduces the brain’s ability to produce it naturally.
• As a result, people may feel unmotivated, joyless, and emotionally flat during periods of sobriety, making it harder to resist drinking again.
• This also leads to tolerance, where more alcohol is required to achieve the same dopamine-driven high, increasing dependence.

Anxiety and depression are regular visitors in my life these days. They create illusions that are very, very real to me. It reminds me of the Talosians in the original Star Trek pilot. The inhabitants of Talos IV had the ability to create utterly convincing illusions in the minds of the Enterprise crew and with those illusions, control their actions. Note that this episode was the one Roddenberry used to pitch the series to Paramount and had cast members not in the eventual series.

Anyway, here's one of the scenes that keeps coming to mind.

My serotonin and dopamine systems have been so wrecked by years of drinking that my life is regularly invaded by illusions telling me things are worse than they really are. I react to those illusions as if they were real.

When I work hard and achieve things in my job, when I take care of my family through substantial sacrifice, when my colleagues and family show me love and appreciation, the illusions can make me see things that aren't there. It's like this scene from that same pilot episode.

I'm not always seeing reality. I don't even know when I'm seeing reality and when I'm seeing illusions. If my serotonin and dopamine systems are whacked, how can I be sure that my emotional responses to events are ever appropriate?

This is what I was on about when I said that our moral system must be universal, objective and ordered. It lives in a world of biochemistry where our emotions can be hijacked by addiction. The hijacking may be undetectable, causing you to rationalize behaviors and responses that aren't driven by reality at all, but driven by you being loaded or sober.

What is right and what is wrong must exist outside of you because you cannot always trust what you perceive. If you author your own ethical system, you have no idea if that system was based on total nonsense because your perception of reality has been warped by potentially invisible things beyond your control. Things like biochemistry.

Optimism

My conversation with AI have been eye-opening and encouraging. Everyone has their own mechanisms for success and mine have always hinged on me being able to see what is going on, to see the future.

Now that I see that my emotional rollercoaster isn't real, it's just an illusion placed in my head by the Talosians, I can at least partially dismiss it. Writing this blog post further cements that insight in my head. I am fighting the dull, foggy, warped illusions from my wrecked biochemistry with a bright, true wisdom that comes from understanding.

I can see the future much better now.

Getting Rid Of The Information Middle Man

 ... is what is happening in America's political culture.

In the past, we dirty proles didn't have direct access to our elected officials. We heard from them through the information gatekeepers in the press. At the same time, the press had a vested interest in showing the politicians enough respect to keep them coming back to their news programs or giving quotes to fill column-inches in the newspapers.

Reporters, editors and news show hosts couldn't pull down the politicians' pants with impunity. If you got a reputation for being snide and insulting, your sources dried up and your management fired you because you couldn't fill airtime or newsprint.

X has changed all that. Dig this.

'We're just trying to get disaster relief to the people who need it.' pic.twitter.com/imrICRJ32q

— Chad Felix Greene 🇮🇱 (@chadfelixg) December 19, 2024

That smug, sneering delivery of utter tripe is coming from an old school pol who is accustomed to talking to her toadies at NPR, CNN, MSNBC, etc. She hasn't yet come to grips with the fact that she is now speaking directly to the public, a public which is peppered with interlocutors who know far more than she does and have a much higher IQ.

That's a recipe for a spanking. She was given that spanking in ample measure. 6000 quote tweets and 19,000 comments later, it's safe to say she was dragged to oblivion by the public. The old model of information distribution had her talking to respectful reporters who may or may not have understood basic math and the mechanics of lawmaking. In the new model, she's talking to a swarm of educated citizens whose hybrid information sources have armed them to the teeth to defeat her infantile, insipid blackmail.

She still has that grotesque smile so common to the progressives, though.

Not much longer, methinks.

Bonus Take

If the Democrats think their winning message is to scornfully talk about Elon Musk while making transparently dishonest arguments like this, more power to them. Elon runs a company that launches massive rockets and then catches them in mid air. These cretins have brought us to the brink of financial ruin because they simply refuse to do their most basic task, budgeting.

Running Away To Where?

Certain people are fleeing X these days. Here's one of them.

If you haven't been keeping up with the Kardashians knock-off that is our mainstream news media, George Stephanopoulus just had to shell out fifteen million simoleons to Orange Man Bad. George had implicitly asserted, multiple times, that Trump had raped E. Jean Carroll. If you performed the most modest review of the woman's claims, you'd see immediately that she's a psycho. Her stories are not even vaguely plausible.

George, on the other hand, has a history covering up real sexual assaults and rapes. He was Clinton's stooge back in the day, in charge of "bimbo eruptions." Those were the accusations, many of them plausible with times, dates, locations and corroboration that Bill Clinton had assaulted and, in some cases, possibly raped various women as he rapaciously pursued political power.

When the news broke that G. Stephanshuasdhuolous* had to settle with Trump, the trolls came out in force on X and George fled. He deserved every last syllable of their abuse for the way he had destroyed the reputations of the women Clinton groped. X gave the trolls access to him and he didn't like that at all.

Here's another tidbit to go along with Stephioudsahulpolous fleeing X. A pair of MSM dinosaurs talk in perfect sincerity about their loss of power.

Leslie Stahl, who on the eve off the 2020 presidential election: falsely claimed that Hunter’s laptop “cant be verified”, & denied the established fact that the FBI spied on Trump campaign, laments the end of legacy media 🙃
pic.twitter.com/NC5euR40Yb

— The Conservative Read (@theconread) December 11, 2024

Meanwhile, chosen almost at random, here are a few tidbits from recent events.

• A public school disciplined girls for having the temerity to assert that XX != XY chromosomally. The school claimed that wearing a shirt with that equation was equivalent to wearing a shirt with a swastika.
• British farmland, recently converted to a solar power collection site was even more recently converted to a pile of broken glass and rubbish. Not that the loss of the generating capacity matters when it comes to saving the Earth because China's emissions dwarf everyone's and they have no intention of slowing down.
• The Euros are discovering that renewable energy may be renewable, but it isn't reliable.
• A CNN reporterette faked a news story in Syria with all the acting subtlety of those old After School Specials on ABC.

Maybe Muslims are OK with ham after all.

I could go on, but why bother? It's all the same. It's not that the news media is lying and covering up for the powerful, it's that the powerful are in over their heads and we can now see it. The news media kids are too dim to understand it. In response, they faint and gasp and blame and, finally, flee.

Flee to where, though?

* - If you think I'm going to take the trouble to continually spell his name properly, think again. It's a chore, man.

Don't Judge Emotions

 This isn't actually an extension of my recent series on "Don't Judge," but it's got a short update.

I got together with my Catholic buddies on Wednesday morning and what I had thought was rude and abrasive behavior on my part turned out to have invigorated all of them. They had actually appreciated the way I questioned their thought processes in the previous session, they'd thought a great deal about what was said and changed some of their thinking. They sincerely thanked me for making that into one of our best sessions ever.

Whew! I feel so relieved that I hadn't hurt my friends with my logic-probing.

Decisions Are Made Emotionally

And now onto the emotions. It's an axiom in sales that people make their purchase decisions based on emotion far more than logic. For me, that's true practically everywhere.

At The Gym

My morning workouts consist of 5 minutes of warmup cardio, about 45-60 minutes of lifting and then 20 minutes of more serious cardio. I almost never do the full 20 minutes at the end. I typically do 8-12 minutes, get bored and then leave the gym. That's an emotional decision, not a logical one.

As I'm starting to get bored, I keep telling myself that there's nothing worthwhile I will do with that 10 minutes I'm saving. The very best way to spend that 10 minutes is on the treadmill. I've always got an interesting podcast, book or good music in my ears, so it's not like I'm suffering. It couldn't be any easier to go another 10 minutes, but I DONT WANT TO KEEP DOING IT! So I quit.

It's a purely emotional decision.

At The Liquor Store

I fight alcoholism constantly. I'm a heavy drinker, but not a true alky. I've been studying my behavior for about a decade now and have it pretty well dialed in. If I don't have booze at the house, I'm safe. If I do have booze at the house, I'm almost certain to drink.

My best defense, therefore, is to not buy it. I still buy it.

I needed to go to the store the other day for parsley and green onions for my North African Mussels and Clams recipe. I had no beer at the house. I had been doing reasonably well over the previous week and I had no stress or anxiety attacking me.

I specifically chose the supermarket that had the best beer selection. I knew what I was doing, I knew it was a bad idea, BUT I WANTED TO DO IT! I got my onions and parsley and then perused the beers. None of them were any good. I'm very fussy about my beer.

As I walked down the aisle, I purposefully recalled what it feels like 30 minutes after you've stopped drinking and turn to water instead. Your blood alcohol has plateaued and then begins to decline. I lose my energy and enthusiasm and feel tired when that happens. I knew I was going to feel like that if I got the beer.

Nevertheless, I drove over to the really good liquor store and got some excellent beers. There was no reason to do it. It was against my best interests. I knew all of the reasons not to do it, but I did it anyway.

Conclusion

You make your decisions emotionally, not logically. This is why the very best way to fight drinking is to find something fun to do during your hours of greatest temptation, something that can't be done with a buzz, something that hopefully keeps you away from the fridge and the brewskis.

I'm working on that now, puttering around with projects in the garage. I'm reasonably hopeful that will work.

Logic certainly hasn't.

Don't Judge Biochemistry

This is the third in my series on "don't judge," triggered by this episode where I rudely questioned a friend and then expanded in a post describing how false virtue can generate its own demand signal.

The Story

Both of my brothers died as addicts and alcoholics. As their conditions worsened over the years, my sister would tell me not to judge them because they'd had bad relationships with our parents. Both of them were a lot of fun to be around, at least until the last couple of years when their addictions devoured them. They had the gift of the blarney and were excellent story-tellers. You would have liked them had you met them.

Both of them were very intelligent. My oldest brother got a free ride to Yale and my middle brother had degrees in Pharmacy and Pharmacology. Hmm. I think there's a hint there.

Both of them died horrible deaths after a prolonged period of desperate suffering at the hands of their addictions.

Remember, kids, don't judge!

Morality Exists In A World Of Objective, Hierarchical Laws

Biochemistry is universal, objective, implacable and utterly pitiless. Biochemistry doesn't care if you didn't get along with mommy and daddy, if you are a poor, black kid in the ghetto or if you're a bored, spoiled trust-fund loser with plenty of cash and nothing to do all day. I asked ChatGPT to give me a summary of how cocaine, my brothers' drug of choice, affects you.

In the long run, it's a bad thing.

Cocaine blocks the reuptake of dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine, leading to excessive accumulation of these neurotransmitters in the synapses. Over time, this creates:

• Desensitization: The brain reduces its natural dopamine production and receptor sensitivity, leading to reduced ability to feel pleasure (anhedonia) without the drug.
• Neurotoxicity: Excessive dopamine levels generate free radicals, which damage neurons.

The neurochemical and structural changes lead to psychiatric symptoms:

• Anxiety, Depression, and Paranoia: Due to dysregulated neurotransmitter systems.
• Psychosis: Chronic use can cause delusions, hallucinations, and other psychotic symptoms.
• Addiction: The brain's reward system is hijacked, making cocaine the primary source of pleasure and motivation.

In the short run, it's a ton of fun. 

Cocaine blocks the reuptake of dopamine, causing it to accumulate in the synaptic cleft (the space between neurons). This leads to:

• Euphoria: The intense feelings of pleasure and reward.
• Increased Energy and Alertness: Due to heightened activation in reward and motivation pathways.

Cocaine also affects serotonin levels, which influences:

• Mood Elevation: A sense of well-being and reduced anxiety.
• Impulsivity and Risk-Taking: Enhanced serotonin activity can decrease inhibition.

Cocaine increases norepinephrine levels, leading to:

• Increased Heart Rate and Blood Pressure: Producing a feeling of physical arousal.
• Heightened Alertness: An enhanced sense of focus and vigilance.

That happens to everyone, whether the 'rents are nice or not. Make sure you're "not judging" phase happens in the short run. That way, you can be infused with delightful feelings of virtue and compassion while the addict is radiant with pleasure.

My objection would be simple. When do you start the judging?

My oldest brother got loaded one night, went driving and caused an accident which resulted in a man being crippled for life. It seems reasonable to say that the time to turn all intolerant and judgmental would have been before the crash. How would you know he was about to cripple someone? Timing is everything, oh great compassionate one.

My middle brother had four different women have abortions by him. He thought sex was a ton of fun. He slept with everything that wore a skirt. It was a bit rough on the babies, though. Assuming you're not into vivisecting infants, when would have been a good time to go full Torquemada on the dude and point your bony finger of accusation at him? Hopefully, you would have done that before the first abortion. Once more, timing is everything, oh noble virtue-signaler.

Morality Must Be Universal

This is what I'm on about when I say that your moral code lives in a world of universal structure. It lives in a world governed by biochemistry, physics, mathematics, biology and normal, human frailty. Sperm plus egg makes baby. Unwanted babies sometimes get killed. Cocaine plus central nervous system makes addict. Addicts typically spiral into destruction. These are predictable events. They aren't perfectly guaranteed, but it's common enough to be expected.

How does your morality cope with that if it's always situational? What if you guess wrong and you "don't judge" right before the car crash or the baby butchery?

Imagine yourself sitting across the table from the crippled man and when he asks you if you knew the guy was loaded when he walked to his car you say, "Yes, but I don't judge." That's an over-the-top example, but it's not too over-the-top. My oldest brother was a loadie and he drove. It doesn't take Blaise Pascal to predict that such a tragic accident was likely to happen at some point. It might not be that you witnessed the drug-addled car-key grabbing, but it would certainly be true that you knew the guy's addiction was pretty serious.

Still, don't judge! Jesus wouldn't like it if you judged.

The End Is Predictable

I sat with my middle brother in the hospital as he was dying. Mercifully, he was unconscious. By the end, he hated me because I didn't help him get hammered. I was judgmental, you know. I hadn't ever helped him do that because I'm intolerant and full of hate.

By the time he died, he was homeless even though he had money in the bank. He had a girlfriend of sorts, so he might still have been getting a little tail even at the very end of his disastrous life.

That's OK, I guess. I'm not supposed to judge.

In the end, maybe the non-judgmental types will explain how it was loving and compassionate to do all that non-judging with him as he self-destructed, leaving me with no brothers at all.

I'm not holding my breath.

I'm sorry, you're a bit late. They just took the body away. He was such a fun character! He was full of charm and vitality, right up until he lost the last of his marbles and wandered around the streets, playing his guitar for a few coins that he could take to a liquor store. Remember, God is love. Don't judge!

Don't Judge Self-Licking Ice Cream Cones

If you didn't know, a self-licking ice cream cone is metaphorical shorthand for an organization or person whose sole output is the justification of its existence. For example, a research study that produces research grant proposals for more studies that produce research grant proposals is a self-licking ice cream cone.

Today, we extend yesterday's journey into the world of non-judgmental Catholics to self-licking virtue cones. In that post, I described how I managed to detonate a small bomb within my group of Catholic men by pulling logic threads after one of them claimed that there really isn't any universal, objective moral law after all, contradicting the teachings of the Church. My main point was this, taken from an analysis of the story of the woman caught in adultery in John 8:3-11.

You can have a universal, objective moral code without stoning people to death. My groupies were conflating judging with punishing.

My detonations were triggered by one of the guys in my group, Sam.

Sam volunteers on the RCIA team at his parish. RCIA is where people who want to convert to Catholicism are taught about the faith and learn just how much we hate everyone else and how to properly light a fire underneath someone tied to a stake. As a part of it, he was talking about LGBT for some reason. I think one of his current crop is gay or trans or something. He told us how he doesn't judge and how they're all wonderful people and he doesn't judge them and how he accepts their moral choices being different than his own and how, did I say this already? - he doesn't judge.

Recalling the session, the RCIA candidate he told us about was trans. I don't know if it's a male-to-female trans or a female-to-male trans. It hardly matters. Either way, the trans person is completely screwed.

As we've never conducted large-scale experiments on young people, giving them regular, massive doses of wrong-sex hormones and mutilating their bodies by hacking off sex organs, trying to build fake ones, we've not had access to statistically significant outcome data. Blessedly, we are starting to get that data now. As the incandescently cheerful and blithely non-judgmental Sam might say, "Isn't science wonderful? Look at all the data we now have showing that poisoning and mutilating people leads to poor outcomes. I never would have been able to predict that without tens of thousands of experimental subjects!"

Biochemistry, unlike Sam and his compadres in the Church, is remorselessly judgmental. The data is coming in and it's ghastly. The trans industry has tried to suppress it, but it hardly matters. Everyone knew what it was going to say decades before the experiments were conducted.

If you don't want to click on that link, here's an excerpt of that thread from X.

It gets worse. Are you familiar with her Orwellian paper where they cut the breasts off over 40 girls age 13+ and gave them a "chest dysphoria" questionnaire that assumed they still had breasts? (asked if they bind at night, etc) 

At best it was an oblique measure of phantom breast syndrome, completely tautological to find a reduction after you cut them off.

She also withheld most of the outcome variables of her 2023 study giving hormones to kids (as opposed to blockers), and didn't disclose in the journal article that those variables even existed, making it fraud. See the image for some of the variables, from the study protocol doc. They reported Beck depression, anxiety, life sat, positive affect, and appearance congruence. That's it.

They **didn't report** suicidal ideation, resilience, negative affect, self-harm, stress, autism spectrum, and a bunch of others, including peer/parent ratings.

This is satanic. Meanwhile, my Catholic friends who don't judge smile warmly and preen about their compassion and inclusivity.

The trans people are the walking dead. There is absolutely no doubt that their conditions will only worsen with time. In order to maintain your appearance as the wrong sex, you must continue to take massive doses of wrong-sex hormones for the rest of your life. If it harms you in the short run, it doesn't take a computer model to figure out that it's going to harm you even more a couple of years down the road.

Further, Trump's victory spells an end to the trans people's primary payoff - social approval. As most of them will never again achieve an orgasm, the benefits are not sexual. Instead, it is the adulation and praise they get from their peers and society in general that makes it all worthwhile.

Trump ran one ad more than any other. It was the one showing that Kamala wanted to give trans-affirming care to prison inmates and illegals. They poured money into that ad campaign like water. The Democrats got mauled in the election and can see that the trans issue is a political loser. Kamala's supporters within the party and their toadies in industry, education, entertainment and the media see it, too. Loyalty is to the party, not the cause which means that the social support for trans is going to evaporate.

The trans people are the walking dead and I would bet that most of them will take their own lives. It was all a lie and as their conditions worsen and their payoffs vanish, they will face lives of pain, suffering and despair. Since the trans movement is distinctly atheistic, there will be no moral impediment to suicide.

Self-Licking Virtue Cones

The nice thing about it for Sam, my bishop, my diocesan university and all the other Catholics who simper about inclusion and affirmation is that they will be happy to walk the parents to their kids' graves after the funeral service. They will be as warm and loving and supportive and non-judgmental with the grieving parents as they were with the kids' gender delusions.

It's virtue all the way down.

My goodness, you two certainly did a great job maintaining Dani's old bedroom. I'll bet she felt your warmth and love, coming back home to visit before she killed herself.