Jacob Blake's Girlfriend Needed Kyle Rittenhouse

During No Net November, I watched the Rittenhouse trial and thought how odd it all seemed. Here's the chain of events as I understand them.

1. Jacob Blake repeatedly brutalizes his girlfriend / baby mama to the point that she swears out a complaint against him, resulting in a warrant for his arrest and a restraining order.
2. Jacob stops by her house against her will to take his kids.
3. The girlfriend calls the cops and accuses him of kidnapping the kids.
4. The cops show up, Jacob fights with them and they end up having to shoot him.
5. The usual suspects scream about racism.
6. Riots erupt and parts of Kenosha are burned and looted.
7. Kyle rides in from out of town to help the forces of civilization fend off the rioters.
8. Attacked, Kyle shoots three of them.

Numbers 4 and 8 are where all the attention has been placed. Number 3 is the one that affects all of us.

Civilization cannot exist unless men are willing to protect women. From my origin story blog post wherein I described how my ex-wife became violent:

The first time she hit me, I thought it was a joke. She was a small woman and I'm a bigger man. I'd practiced kung fu for 8 years and was used to being hit. She became enraged over something and punched me as hard as she could. Ping! I didn't think much of it after she calmed down. She'd had a rough life and could be emotional...

One thing you realize when your woman becomes violent is that you can crush her any time you want. Her hardest punches didn't do anything. My hardest would have sent her to the hospital. One time, just out of reflex, I did a sweeping block when she tried to punch me. I nearly broke her forearm against a door frame.

That's the world in which all women have always lived. The men around them can force their wills on them any time they want unless there are other men who will fight the attacker. That was true for the Comanche, the Romans, the Aztecs, the Ashanti and will be true for the inhabitants of Tantalus-4 in 2273.

Jacob's girlfriend and baby mama, we'll call her GF, had to call the cops because there were no men to defend her. People said Kyle was in the wrong place at the wrong time and they're right. Kyle and men like him were needed in GF's neighborhood years prior to the riot. Jacob needed a visit from Kyle and the boys wherein they, err, discussed the merits of behaving like a gentleman.

Instead, the key lessons learned by the most important people in the story, GF and her peers, had nothing to do with white supremacy, systemic racism or race race race race race race race race.

The moral of the story to GF and tens of thousands just like her is that no one is going to protect them. The cops were their last line of defense and now that's gone. It's racial treason to call the police and they're not likely to show up if you do because if the visit goes sideways, they could face severe punishments from their chain of command.

The GFs have no one to defend them. What kind of society does that create? This kind.

Bonus Video

Tim, as usual, makes some good points in the comments. I might have gone to jail in the anecdote above, but that's not my point here. What I'm suggesting is that a woman has defense-in-depth. Her first line is her husband. When her husband goes bad, she's got her family, as illustrated by the terrific music video below. That line of defense scales. By that I mean, almost everyone has family of some kind. 

The cops are the last line of defense and they don't scale. There are a fixed number of them and the more men go feral, the thinner that line of defense becomes. If families never form and men learn to get their way with force, the cops are the only protection remaining for GF and crew. Take away the cops and the lives of women become unpleasant in the extreme. Instead of worrying about GF, we talked race race race race race race race race race race race race.

With that dead horse severely beaten once again, here's the video. I love it and look for any excuse to share it.

A Month Away

 ... taught me how to slow down my thinking.

No Net November didn't go exactly as planned. I stopped writing and stopped tweeting, but I got bored and still lurked from time to time on various sites, watching the news and reactions. Because I didn't have to feed the blog with daily content, I didn't spend nearly as much time on it and actually found most of it to be of no value. I would bet my consumption dropped to a quarter of what it had been before.

The biggest change was that I was able to chew on ideas for a day or four before taking some notes to turn into blog posts in the future. Because of that, I was far less aggressive in my thinking. Polemics come naturally, but they are also usually filled with logical errors, truth-grooming and unnecessary snark. A polemic exists to establish one position as good and another as evil, so it's simplistic by its very nature. A fast typist can knock them out almost daily and I'm a reasonably fast typist.

Think of a polemic as Purina Blog Chow. You practically buy them in bulk to feed the blog and pour them into the blog's dish each morning without much effort.

Polemics are also boring once you've read enough of them. Yes, yes, I know, Democrats are imbeciles. Yes, yes, I know, Republicans are evil. What a yawnaroo.

After No Net November, I've decided to continue blogging, but not hew to a daily schedule. Instead, I'll post when I think I've got a coherent next step in some thread I'm pulling or if I've found something I want to share for fun or because it's beautiful.

For example, I finally took my piles of cayenne peppers out of the freezer and processed some of them into Louisiana Hot Sauce. I used three different recipes from the web and one of my own creation. Now I need to take them in to work with a pile of Saltines and see what people think.

I read somewhere that fermented cayenne peppers make the best hot sauce, so I took about 80% of my crop and am fermenting them now. You'd think the tobacco experiment would have taught me to avoid fermentation and that you can't trust everything you find on the Internet, but here I am again, betting almost all of my harvest on the Roulette wheel of some stranger's advice. They're fermenting nicely and should be ready to process by Friday. We'll see then if this was another ghastly mistake from the gardens of the Catican Compound or if it was a glorious success.

A full gallon of fermenting cayenne peppers. You can see the bubbles of gas released by the wild biological action going on in the container. It's like a Hollywood action movie, only with microorganisms as the actors.

No Net November

Matthew 5:29, modified for today:

If your computer causes you to sin, turn it off and go outside. It is better for you to miss out on an engrossing Twitter brawl than to have your whole body thrown into Gehenna.

Or something like that.

I've been writing a daily blog for more than 15 years. Recently, I've begun to wonder what it has done to me. What would happen if I turned off the Internet for a prolonged period of time? I already know at least part of the answer as I have allowed many other projects go to seed while I surf the web and write.

I don't have a current list of goals. The old goals that I've got, like finishing up the clutch repair on my MGB and learning to make sauces, aren't getting done. It's not that I don't have time, it's that I want to check the web just one more time or I have to post something for today and I've really got nothing to share.

I've read plenty of essays describing how the Internet in general and social media in particular changes your personality and I believe them to be true. To find out how it has changed me, I'm going to quit it for a month. No blogging, no Twitter and no Instapundit for all of November. I'll still post to Facebook from time to time, but everything I share and everyone I follow only discuss family events and fun. In any case, I go to FB rarely, so it's not a big deal.

The Rules

1. I can use the Internet for education and research as much as I want. 
2. I can use the computer to journal, rewrite my goals and manage my personal Jira project for tracking tasks.
3. I cannot blog or use Twitter in any way.
4. I cannot visit my favorite news or pundit sites.
5. I can read my favorite sports sites.

The Chain Of Events

The biggest change will be turning off The Scratching Post for the month. Doing that will alter what I do in the morning. Instead of making coffee and planting my butt in my computer chair, I'll make my coffee and ... do what? Read a book? Sit in the hot tub? Experiment with breakfasts? Go into the garage and putter? I'll certainly get to the gym earlier.

I'm actually really excited about this.

I can't wait to blog about what I discover. :-)

Love you guys. Have a great November. See you in December.

Ibram X. McAuliffe

At some point, don't you think this stuff has to stop? Here are two stories of make-believe racism from yesterday.

Race baiter Kendi was too stupid to realize this tweet contradicted his entire scam by pointing out that Victims of Color (VoC) get consideration over white supremacists when it comes to college admissions. When it was pointed out to him, he deleted it, but not before someone had captured it for all time.

Elsewhere, the Lincoln Project, together with various Democratic Party personnel, sent ersatz white supremacists to pose in from of Republican Glenn Youngkin's campaign bus because, you know, racism.

Predictably, this stunt blew up in McAuliffe's face in short order.

It's all so boring. Can't we please be done with it?

A Wet Dragonfly

 Last weekend, I took the Catican Guards for their weekend party. That's my name for an off-the-leash romp around a couple of office and industrial parks in Poway. There are no cars, no people and plenty of open space for them to play. It's all good fun.

It had rained the night before and I came across this little fellow, sitting on the wet pavement. The colors aren't striking, but I liked the way the water beaded on his body. I left the image large, so it might be worth a click. Enjoy!

The Synod On Intolerance

I recently joined our parish council. At last night's meeting, I heard about the pope's plan for a Synod on Synodality. Rather than unpack that horrible name, I'll just say that the pope wants to see the Church become more inclusive and so he wants us all to have listening sessions.

That's not going to end well. When our very own Bishop McElroy did it, he discovered that his flock and he didn't see eye to eye. I guess there's a price to be paid for leaving your mansion and mingling with the rabble.

Bishop McElroy has visited a couple of churches in his diocese to allow the unwashed masses to speak with him about the Church's abuse scandal. The first one turned into a riot as people blew up at him and since then, the events have been scripted like a straight jacket.

But my despair over the whole inclusion effort isn't about a few evenings of rancor. It's that the outcome of the thing is perfectly predictable. At my work, "inclusion" is a big deal. It's all rubbish. Inclusion means accepting sexual degeneracy and bagging on straight, white men. They aren't subtle about it, either.

Inclusion can't possibly work. We all have different world views and many of them can't be reconciled. For example, it came as a surprise to the inclusion gang that the Taliban weren't interested in diversity and went right back to oppressing women and killing gays as soon as they had power in Afghanistan. 

Duh.

Given the pope's recent attacks on traditionalists in the faith, it's a given that inclusion will mean the same in the Church as it does at my work. Inclusion will be acceptance of sexual degeneracy and bagging on straight, white men. Our diocese is shot through with SJWs so there's no chance this turns out any other way.

If the people running the Church had a lick of sense, they let each of us approach God in our own way, guided by the Catechism as much as possible. 

Nah.

Bonus Snark: This is one more example showing that Pope Francis is the King of Unforced Errors.

An idea whose time has come.

God Does Not See Race

 ... and therefore, neither should you.

This occurred to me while at the gym this morning and I felt the need to write it down where I can find it later.

Genesis 1:27

God created mankind in his image; in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

Luke 17:1-4

He said to his disciples, “Things that cause sin will inevitably occur, but woe to the person through whom they occur. It would be better for him if a millstone were put around his neck and he be thrown into the sea than for him to cause one of these little ones to sin. Be on your guard! If your brother sins, rebuke him; and if he repents, forgive him. And if he wrongs you seven times in one day and returns to you seven times saying, ‘I am sorry,’ you should forgive him.”

In Genesis, God sees all of mankind as the same. Black, brown, white, yellow, red, green and blue with pink stripes, everyone was made in His image. If He doesn't see it, you shouldn't either.

In Luke, when confronting sin, Jesus doesn't instruct you to whack everyone of the sinner's race with that sin, He tells you to confront the individual as an individual. If you find racism, you need to find the racist committing the act and discuss it with them, not weave it into a larger narrative about those people.

If you promulgate the kind of claptrap that comes from books like White Fragility, you are spreading your sins to others. You might want to get fitted for a millstone.