Secession At The School Board

When secession comes, it will be born of exhaustion and resignation, not politics. It might be manifested politically, but its roots will be exasperation with continued incompetence by state and Federal leaders. Today's example is how the news media is reacting to school board meetings wherein parents fight Modern Nazi Race Theory indoctrination. Here's a particularly good example.

Watch this parent absolutely obliterate Critical Race Theory at an Illinois school board meeting:

“How do I have two medical degrees if I’m sitting here oppressed?” pic.twitter.com/gmCRJaphXt

— Benny (@bennyjohnson) June 17, 2021

A senior reporter at NBC, a foot soldier for secular leftist orthodoxy, believes that the fight against Modern Nazi Race Theory is being waged improperly and with undue zeal.

“It’s hard for me as a reporter because I don’t want to put FOILs in a bad light, Freedom of Information Laws are wonderful things,” the writer preluded. “But it is in fact a tactic of national and just hyper and fast-growing local organizations to use onerous public records requests …Asking for all these record requests of ‘how much money did you spend on anything involving race,’ and then that is used to sort of frame again the school board as paying for CRT. Which, again, is just not the case.”

Emphasis mine. That phrase clued me in to what's happening. The goose-stepping is being pushed at a national level by government, academia, the media and such. Resistance is happening at the local level and is only semi-organized. It's intellectual and emotional secession. That's how secessions start. They're emotional first and practical second. My prior blog post about the Atlanta suburb of Buckhead trying secede is similar in that the residents of Buckhead reached an emotional breaking point after which reconciliation could be very difficult.

Salesman tip: Prospects make a "buy" decision emotionally, not intellectually.

These secession meetings, née citizen revolts, are another data point along that same set of secession curves.

Juneteenth

I hate the thing. I hate it. The vehemence of my gut reaction surprised me until I dug deeper into the source. This is simply more self-esteem pornography. It's a pack of wealthy people congratulating themselves on having struck a blow for the oppressed while in reality, it's really only another case of moral masturbation. Even the name of it is condescending. Juneteenth? What, are we illiterate children now? A year hence, kids from alternative families will be in as much pain as they are right now. From that blog post:

This is nothing more than the Romanovs having a drunken party followed by an orgy where innocent lives are the menu, whether that's black kids growing up without fathers or middle-class white girls binding their chests. The SJWs are going along with it because they get to feel the same orgasms of self-esteem as the powerful.

Juneteenth isn't a celebration of freedom, it's a celebration of ourselves.

Modular Pride Flag Update

If this image doesn't illustrate why we need a modular Pride flag, nothing does.

Note that this was displayed at a Federal health care center, posted by a military officer. H/T: Brian Hervela.

It's Time For A Modular Pride Flag

I was attending a meeting at work a while back when someone walked into the room carrying a pride flag coffee cup. All at once, I wondered why he felt the need to let us all know what kind of sex acts he likes. I mean, it's not like I carry a coffee cup with a flag showing how I'm into threesomes with marsupials.

Hmm. I think I said too much there. Oh well.

As the number of genders and social justice causes multiply like bacteria on a cloth mask, demands have grown to change the pride flag to be more, well, inclusive. The flag below is a current candidate.

As I understand it, the rainbow symbolizes God's wrath against Sodom and Gomorrah and the triangles and angly, pointy bits symbolize the place where you are supposed to insert your credit card to make a donation. Each color is chosen to represent an interest group who is so oppressed that Proctor and Gamble have had to devote millions of dollars of marketing funds to let you know they join with other multinational megacorporations to protect you from whoever it is who looked at you funny a couple of weeks ago.

Simple mathematical reasoning tells us that this flag is not sustainable. After all there are 14 23 37 66 73 genders now. God only knows how many oppressed subpopulations there are. Logically, each should have it's own color on the flag, otherwise the flag won't be inclusive enough. There's no way we can fit them all in, so the flag is doomed to be discriminatory as it is now. I think I've got a solution for this.

Let's go with personalized, modular pride flags! Check out the conceptual design below.

I couldn't remember how to make copies of the first oval in Photoshop, so all of these were done individually, hence their uneven nature. That's actually symbolic itself, when you think about it.

We'll go ahead and use the modern pride flag as a starting point. As the internecine catfights rage and this group or that is scratched and bitten until they leave the hair-pulling scrum, we'll have to change the base coloring scheme. One assumes that some kind of equilibrium will be reached and the flag, if not all the wavers, will become stable. Until then, this is a decent starting point.

The key is the spots along the bottom, not to be confused with the venereal diseases that might cause the same sort of thing, if you know what I mean. Those are places to put your badges. And yes, you will need some stinking badges.

Each badge will represent your most recent sexual or political act. They will be arranged chronologically, from left to further left. As the days go by, you will have to modify the flag to show what you've been doing. Those spots will be made of Velcro, if you can spare some from your furry costume. That way, you can add and subtract badges as you like.

For example, Father James Martin's flag this week would have the standard colors with badges across the bottom representing: 

• viewing child porn, 
• bogarting joints with Richard Rohr as they penned an article for the Jesuit magazine, America, showing how Jesus, in the Gospel of Mark, encouraged the wearing of vinyl catsuits and the use of ball gags, 
• upskirt photography, 
• performing Drag Queen Story Hour at the local library, 
• using a rutabaga as a sex toy and 
• licking electrical outlets while yanking it.

Is this over the top? Nah. If you feel the need to use your coffee cup to let everyone know you like to roger other men and if every degenerate, sadomasochistic fetishist feels the need for pride flag representation coloring, we might as well go all the way.

If you know what I mean.

Why We're Not Defending Civilization

First, just in case you wondered about the assertion in the title, dig these two tidbits from SanFran.

Wanna know why? This is why.

As long as we can just print money and hand it out, there is no real cost to property crimes. That's why we make half-hearted attempts to stop a thief. That's why shoplifters don't do time. That's why shoplifting isn't even reported.

There's no significant, direct cost to any of it.

When you see the bewilderment in the people at the San Francisco Walgreens in that video, you're watching their brains struggle with the knowledge that what's happening is the breakdown of society fighting with the numbing culture of compassion, compassion that's been bought with colored pieces of paper.

The 17 Walgreens that have closed in Frisco, the 323,000 square foot cavity in Chicago's Magnificent Mile where Macy's used to be and the burned out stores in Minneapolis are real. The colored pieces of paper aren't.

We'll start defending civilization again eventually.

KT's Theory Of Everything, Federal Reserve Edition

I don't recall how I found it, but someone recently turned me on to Janet Yellen's social justice blathering. It hits all of the usual notes about inequality, racism, global warming climate change and blah blah blah. It's so orthodox that no more than a single example is necessary. If you find yourself unable to sleep, click on this embedded tweet and scroll through her feed. It's Snore City, man.

To understand the American economy & make thoughtful policy, we must talk about the devastating impact of systemic racism.

The Tulsa Massacre is among our most visceral reminders.

We can build a more equal, just economy—but only if we acknowledge history & work to unwind it. https://t.co/DtBlh0enwN

— Secretary Janet Yellen (@SecYellen) June 1, 2021

Pull her string and she talks! She comes with ten pre-programmed messages, kiddies!

This is just another data point that proves social justice talk is simply a diversion. Yellen knows the exact demographic makeup of the bottom 30%. She's the current Secretary of the Treasury and served four years as the chair of the Federal Reserve, two organizations simply awash in data. She knows this is all rubbish and yet she keeps hammering at it. Why? 

Again, the only conclusion I can reach is that she doesn't want to discuss traditional, nuclear families.

Income inequality has nothing to do with racism and Yellen knows it.

If You Think This Is Bad, Wait A Year

Yes, it's the RNC, so take it with a grain of salt, but still, dig how slow he thinks.

WATCH: Joe Biden confuses Syria with Libya THREE TIMES. pic.twitter.com/8iewTindfr

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) June 13, 2021

I watched my parents' minds grow dimmer and dimmer as they aged. If President Biden is like this now, imagine what he'll be like in a year. These summits aren't like his "press conferences" where he gets softball questions that are pre-approved and where he can be rested and medicated to be in what passes for top form for an hour or two and then go back to bed. These are grueling back-to-back days where he has to meet with some sharp operators.

Brutal.

Bonus Trump Take: Dude needs to retire, too. He turns 75 today. He wasn't disciplined when he was younger and his bottomless need for attention and adoration made him toxic. Add to that oncoming mental aging and that should be that. Please, President Trump, just go away.

The Feds Vs. The Fed

As I understand it, the Federal Reserve is printing about $120B per month and using it to buy government debt. That comes out to $100 per week for every man, woman and child in the US. At the same time, there's no real increase in goods and services to buy. More money chasing the same number of things leads, eventually, to inflation. The Grumpy Economist has more.

The Fed seems to think that "anchoring" expectations comes from soothing speeches about how anchored expectations are. At worst they may say they have "the tools" to contain inflation should it break out, but they seldom say just what those tools are. I believe that expectations come from expected actions, not speeches, and better from robust institutional rules and commitments that force necessary but unpleasant actions when needed. At least, people must believe that the Fed is willing to repeat 1980 if it comes to that.  And raising interest rates will be much harder now, with a) 100% debt / GDP not 25%, so higher interest rates immediately hurt the budget b) huge reserves so the Fed will be seen to pay a windfall to big banks not to lend out money c) the too-big-to-fail banks will all lose a bundle if interest rates rise d) the current emphasis on inequality, as a recession will hurt the most vulnerable the most. 

2) In today's economy, in the end, inflation comes when people do not believe the government will repay debt. Beyond interest rates, the Fed changes the composition of government debt -- reserves vs. treasurys -- but not the amount of debt. Whether we hold treasurys via the world's largest money market fund (that's what the Fed is) or directly really does not matter. 

In simpler terms, the Fed is promoting inflation to cover for the incompetence of our political leaders. They can't balance the budget, so the Fed prints money to buy their debt. The Fed's mission, however, is not to bail out Trump or Biden, it's to maintain a sound currency. It's all well and good to backstop the Ivy League geniuses running the government when there's no inflation, but when it starts kicking up, there's bound to be some conflict.

If inflation hits 7%, does the Fed raise rates? How about 10%? When does it stop printing money to buy debt? In another Grumpy Economist blog post, we learn the Fed is... 

"...dedicated to understanding and finding solutions to the numerous forms of inequality that communities of color experience and working with communities in our District to address deep-seated inequities," 

Again, that's fine as long as there's no inflation, but when it comes, there must be a point at which all the fairyland feelgood stops and the Fed has got to rescue the dollar at the expense of the super-duper compassionate types. 

Really, inflation is all about overspending by the government. At least that's how it looks to me. Absent that, the Fed would be free to manage the value of the dollar.

Bonus Take: I've seen new talk about a wealth tax. My guess is that some of the Ivy Leaguers are starting to figure out that they'll need a new source of coin in the future when the Fed stops giving them an allowance.

A waterfall on the road to Hana. It has nothing to do with the post, but I like it.

I've Looked At Carps From Both Sides Now

Is that an obscure reference or what? If you remember Judy Collins' "Both Sides Now," you'll get it. Otherwise, well, what can I say? This is just a blog post with a video of carp.

The carp seem happy, at least. We saw these as we entered the water at Ahihi-Kinau. I love how the bottom of the ocean seemed to wriggle with fish. As we got out, I was at just the right depth to get the side shot.

No, it's not Cecil B. DeMille, but Cecil B. DeMille isn't Cecil B. DeMille any more, either, so there.

It's HD, so it might be worth the full screen treatment. It's also only about 30 seconds long, so it will be over before you know it. Enjoy!