Escalation

The aphids attacking my cotton, my very soft-leaved cotton, were only injured by our last wave of ladybugs. Yesterday, I released another wave, but between the ants and the ladybugs ability to fly away, I'm not optimistic about the results. This isn't like dealing with aphids on small vegetables where the ladybugs can wipe them out in an hour and then fly off, these are nine, 6' tall plants in a raised bed. The ladybugs will need days to obliterate the enemy.

Gaze upon the faces of evil.

So now we escalate the war.

I just installed some ant bait stakes in the bed. It's a liquid bait infused with borax which is deadly to ants, but won't be absorbed into my cayenne peppers. I'm hoping that in a few days, the aphids' protective escorts will be significantly reduced. We'll see about that.

Update: The ants have discovered two of the three baits. They are industriously mining them for the sweet, sweet toxins inside. I love it when a plan comes together.

Second, I'm planning on constructing a temporary ladybug aviary. It will consist of a simple frame with shade cloth draped over it. It doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to keep most of the ladybugs from escaping while they devour the aphids.

Kind of like this.

Those two moves ought to put an end to the aphid infestation. I will also end up with an easily-erected structure I can use against future aphid attacks.

Escalation In Our Cities

Dig this video from the 'burbs of Seattle and ask yourself how long it would take you to put your house on the market if this happened to you.

As New York City is discovering, productive people can leave. Ones who work in the information industry probably don't have to come back.

The question no one is asking is, "Who is left once the productive people leave?"

Detroit can answer that question.

Some commentators say that this unrest will lead to changes in city governance and the election of reality-based leaders. Why? Many of the people who would have voted for that will be gone. The leaders will cater to the electorate. If the electorate becomes more and more dominated by the social justice crowd, why would you expect these cities to discover common sense and bounce back?

Pavlov Gets Cannon Hinnant Wrong

If you don't know, Cannon Hinnant was a 5-year-old white kid living in Wilson, North Carolina who was shot and killed, execution style, in broad daylight, by a black neighbor.

Get the picture?

My latest podcast crush, Matt Walsh, first alerted me to this tragedy. He went on the now-reflexive conservative rant of "what if the races were reversed." Lots of right wing commentators joined in the fun. The bell was rung and the salivation began.

Stop it. Stop it now. Left to our own devices, using our philosophy of color-blind individualism, we'd never look at this through a racial lens. It's the story of a mentally ill man who murdered a boy. That's all this is. It's horrible from every angle. At some point in the future, Darius Sessoms may recover his sanity and reengage his conscience. Who would want to walk in his shoes when that happens?

Both Darius and Cannon are children of God and He doesn't care about their skin colors. If He doesn't, we shouldn't.

The commentators fell into this trap because they have allowed themselves to be trained like dogs by the left wing news media and education industry. To the modern left, everything is racial social justice.

Weil es untrennbar mit der sozialen Idee verbunden zu sein scheint und wir nicht glauben, dass es jemals einen Staat mit dauerhafter innerer Gesundheit geben könnte, wenn er nicht auf innerer sozialer Gerechtigkeit beruht, und deshalb haben wir uns mit diesem Wissen zusammengeschlossen.*

The Left has created and pushed this race-based moral framework. In it, everything, everywhere, at all times is first measured in racial terms. And what do we do? We adopt it.

Matt's tirade wasn't aimed at the people we care about, the everyman. Instead, it was aimed at the people who hate us, the Elites. "You're hypocrites!" he shouted. No, no, no.

The guy who sits behind me at work is black. He's a great fellow. Smart, experienced, helpful and kind, he's the salt of the earth. He's the person we should talk to, not Don Lemon or Fredo Cuomo. My friend and the millions like him are just as important as the CNN talking heads. There are millions of everymen and only a few media Nazis.

What does the everyman think and feel when we pump the black-on-white crime stories, no matter what our motivation might be? How do you feel when your race is called out for some horrific crime?

Race is irrelevant. Our common humanity is everything. Jesus told us that. Now we're responding to Don Lemon instead of Jesus? Why?

Get some self-control.  Stop living in the moral universe created by the Nazis and live in your own. Cannon Hinnant was killed by someone whose inner demons took control of him. Without the airwave saturation of the Nazis, would we really be talking about their skin colors?

* - "Because it seems inseparable from the social idea and we do not believe that there could ever exist a state with lasting inner health if it is not built on internal social justice, and so we have joined forces with this knowledge." - Adolf Hitler.

How Trump Could Win In A Landslide

It's simple. Stop the negative ads. Tell Americans that they're good people. Talk building and creating and constructive plans. Stop the ranting and name-calling. It's not that attacks are ineffective, it's that they are so overplayed right now that their marginal value is close to zero. It might even be negative.

This won't happen, of course. Trump is too much of a petulant child to do it.

I made the mistake of checking Twitter around the time Kamala Harris was announced as Biden's running mate. I felt like I was looking down the barrels of an artillery battery loaded with canister shot. KAMALA IS THE WORST PERSON EVER HERE ARE 84 REASONS WHY! Everyone had preloaded opinions about every choice Biden could have made and they launched the Kamala barrage the instant they found out she was the one.

I'm sure that over on the lefty side of Twitter, it was KAMALA IS THE BEST TO FIGHT WHITE SUPREMACISTS AND SHE'S SMART AND BLACK AND A WOMAN AND RACISM! 

Dear God, the next few months are going to be horrendous. Thankfully, most sports have been canceled, so there's practically no reason to watch live TV. Wife kitteh and I are working our ways through Peter Gunn and Route 66 these days and that looks like a good survival strategy until the election.

I could only watch a few minutes of Tucker last night. He looked like one of those wind-up, cymbal-clanging, toy monkeys you used to buy for children whose parents you didn't like. YOU SHOULD HATE KAMALA HARRIS BECAUSE SHE'S AWFUL AND I WILL TELL YOU ABOUT IT OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN!

Please, just stop.

Just what was being accomplished here? Like I said, the marginal return on investment for one more rage tweet must now measured in femto-opinions. I was never going to vote for Biden. My problem with Trump is his obnoxious personality. My fears about the country have to do with the Democrats' neo-Nazi race mania, family structures and debt. Did I really need to be armed with a set of reasons why Kamala Harris is the worst? What am I going to do with those, yell them at my Democrat friends as we scream at each other?

How about this - run on a platform that asserts that America isn't racist. Talk to the people who build things and tell them they're the best. Tell the youth that their inheritance is being squandered on borrowing and how it's a significant moral good to be frugal.

Praise the people who are solid citizens and I would bet you'd have lots of others wanting to be included in that group.

Blue Civil War Update

Meanwhile, in the Blue Civil War, BLM Chicago told the black, lesbian mayor that there's a lot more looting on the way if they don't get what they want.

First prize in our contest is a week as Chicago's mayor. Second prize is two weeks!

To all the people honking Kamala as an historic choice because she's a black woman, I give you Lori Lightfoot, mayor of Chicago. She's the diversity trifecta - a homosexual, black woman. Her city is a dumpster fire. She'll be remembered as the mayor who took it from one of the great cities of the world to a violent, impoverished mess.

Plus, she looks like one of those albino zombies from The Omega Man.

It's not entirely her fault, of course. She didn't create a culture where her black neighborhoods haven't seen a marriage in 50 years. On the other hand, she still dishes out the racism claptrap on a regular basis, so it's not like she's completely without blame.

I thought diversity was our strength. Electing Lori Lightfoot and a whole host of other racial and sexual poster children was supposed to be important in some way. Instead, it looks like wrecking the family and racking up huge debts is a bad idea no matter whose name is on the Mayor's door.

So much for Kamala being historic. I mean, maybe she is, but who cares?

Combined Arms In The War On Aphids

Our cotton plants are suffering from an aphid infestation right now. My favorite solution is to buy a container of ladybugs and release them in the evening for a night of slaughter. This time, there was a nest of ants providing escort for the aphids, so my first wave of Coleopteran warriors was driven off with minimal casualties inflicted on the enemy.

The ants were reaching the aphid collections up the stems of the plants, so what I needed was some kind of barrier. I tried Vaseline, but it was a pain to apply. I bought a sticky glue designed to catch insects, but a closer reading of the label said it might harm the plant and extra work was required to use it safely. Finally, I took a chance and squirted corn oil on the stems.

Do you see any ants? Neither do I.

It turns out that corn oil is a cheap and easy barrier against ants. It doesn't last long - two days or so, but that should be enough for the ladybugs to do their work. I prefer to use corn oil in cooking as well as frying, so I keep it in both a condiment-sized squirt bottle and two-gallon jugs. It was super easy to apply. I just stuck my hand into the mass of plants and splorped away with the bottle.

Studying the ant problem, I discovered that ants don't like coffee grounds. Who knew? From now on, our morning coffee detritus will be dumped into the cotton's raised bed, mostly around the plant stems.

Yesterday, anticipating corn oil success, wife kitteh procured not one, but two containers of ladybugs. They were unleashed on our foes in the late afternoon. It isn't yet dawn, but when it's light, I'll examine the battlefield and see if we prevailed. 

On patrol.

Gathering for an assault.

My favorite photo of the bunch. A ladybug warrior in silhouette.

Nothing And No One Stays The Same

One of the themes of this blog is that people make decisions assuming that others will continue to act as they have no matter what. For example, the BLM anti-police bigots assumed that cops would continue to patrol black neighborhoods even after they were repeatedly attacked. I don't recall any media figures predicting that the cops would stand down, violence would increase and more blacks would die because of it even though that was perfectly predictable.

Last night, stores in Chicago's toniest district were looted. This time, there was only the flimsiest of excuses. A young, black man shot at cops and they wounded him when they returned fire. Wounded, not killed. After that, the looting began and plenty of high-end stores were cleared out and wrecked.

No guarantees about the language or commentary on this video. It was the best of the lot when it came to showing the feel of the scene, but I didn't watch the whole thing. It's rather long, so I recommend sampling various spots by moving the scrub head around.

At some point, you'd have to think that one or more of the big corporations is going to have had enough and jump off the BLM bandwagon. It's all good fun to march and chant and fight hate, but when you have to keep repairing and restocking the same stores over and over again, you'll have to face economic reality.

How many times can you kneel and beg for racial forgiveness as you watch your assets destroyed?

Pressing For War

IMHO, George Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose or, at worst, a fentanyl overdose complicated by his forcibly resisting arrest. We're at each others' throats over an OD.

Now dig this.

I've noticed the yellow line. I read the WSJ every day and the number of race articles has grown alarmingly.

Important tidbits from the link above.

You think racism got that much worse in six years, so that double the number of white liberals thought it was a “big problem” in America? Goldberg goes on to say that the percentage of black and Latino Democrats who say they know someone who is racist did not really increase over that time — but it shot way up among white Democrats. In other words, white liberals — who totally dominate our media class — came to believe that America is a more racist place than do blacks and Latinos who share their politics...

I bet most people think that “equity” is a synonym for “equality.” That’s not how these woke journalists and academics see it. What Goldberg’s analysis predicts is that the mainstream media are propagandizing the country to prepare it for racial oppression and the seizure of property for redistribution. Or, to put a fine point on it, they are providing the ideological framework for elites to justify redistribution. 

 Now try this.

A reader who ask that I withhold his name, and who is not white (you’ll see why this may be important), writes:

I was once a first responder. Over ten years ago, I responded to a call at a women’s shelter for a mother who’d been savagely struck in the face by her husband (or ex-)...

Like most events in this line of work, you compartmentalize and all but forget these incidents. Years later, however, as racial tensions began to boil up again, I thought back to that incident and realized how troubled I was by it. It wasn’t just the fact that a woman was so severely beaten and her children had to witness their mother in such agony, but that this sort of thing was happening on a regular basis, yet, nobody really has any idea.

What I mean by this is that Whites are cited as the greatest threat to Black life in this country. Yet, I can guarantee you, the person who struck that Black woman wasn’t White. I don’t know for sure, of course, but I don’t believe in narratives. I believe in statistics. In all likelihood, the person who hurt that woman was a Black man.

When academics, elites, the media, and left-wingers of the public criticize law enforcement, they often treat them as ignorant of or even perpetuating the horrors of the reality of life for Blacks and other racial/ethnic minorities in this country. But that’s not what I’ve seen and I’m fairly certain that’s not broadly the case. If anything, it’s the cops and other first responders who are often the front-row witnesses to these terrible acts that disproportionately affect people in the Black demographic. Worse, the cops are often the only defense they have against their predators.

This is what I'm on about when I write about racialist / Nazi stuff. Real people are being hurt, but our Elites refuse to see it or, if they do see it, refuse to tell us. Instead, it's race, race, race all the time. The press, the academy, the entertainment industry and the tech companies are all pumping race hate like they were Hearst newspapers trying to get the Spanish-American War going.

A Cynic

There's a cynical side of me that is gaining strength. I think this is happening because the Democrats saw themselves losing support among black voters after decades of failure. The only purpose of the race craze is to maintain high levels of paranoia and cement in party loyalty.

Meanwhile, black women go to emergency rooms after having been beaten by their live-in boyfriends. 

The Catholic Church Has Failed Utterly

The solution is Catholic sexual morality or some derivation thereof. We preach marriage before sex. The stats show that marriage before sex reduces abuse by a factor of 10 or more. All of the churches I've attended in the last ten years have had a strong social justice movement. In case you weren't following along, that translates into obsessions with race and homosexuality. There is almost no emphasis placed on sexual mores.

We're simply an extension of the popular culture when we should be fighting to save civilization. Without it, we're screwed.

Do The NASA WAP!

 NASA is hot on the trail of white supremacists and doing it's best to put an end to systemic racism.

As we work to identify & address systemic discrimination & inequality in all aspects of the scientific community, we are reexamining the use of unofficial terminology for cosmic objects which can be not only insensitive, but actively harmful. Read more: https://t.co/ZNicp5g0Wh pic.twitter.com/jDup6JOGBd

— NASA (@NASA) August 5, 2020

Meanwhile, Cardi B and Megan Stallion have put out a music video that has gone viral. Note that this video is:

• NSFW,
• NSFH,
• NSFDI,
• NSFD,
• NSFC,
• NSFE and
• NSFSMWAWBSWS*.

To put it more simply, it's horrible. Here's the link.

I know several progressive, suburban women. They're all in with Black Lives Matter and systemic racism and all the rest. I don't think more than one in ten ever samples black, popular culture. I would bet that none of them have seen that video.

I would also bet that NASA wouldn't share it on their Twitter feed.

Yep, we're making great strides fighting ... whatever it is we're fighting. We may not be accomplishing anything of value, but by George, we're fighting systemic whosiewhatnots.

Yay us.

* - This means:

• Not Safe For Work,
• Not Safe For Home,
• Not Safe For Desert Islands,
• Not Safe For Deserts,
• Not Safe For Children,
• Not Safe For Eskimos and
• Not Safe For Short Men Who Are Wearing Black Socks With Sandals.