Alcohol, Porn and Morgan Freeman

Almost all boys are shy when it comes to asking a girl for a date. It's natural self-doubt that comes with being human. It's why alcohol is associated with meeting girls. "I need to have a few drinks to work up the courage to talk to her" is a common theme among men. It lowers your inhibitions and relaxes you so you can overcome your shyness. Listening to some AlAnon podcasts, it's something you hear repeated in lots of men's testimonies.

Morgan Freeman is a smooth operator. If he's not cool and self-confident, no one is. I've read a little about the recent accusations that he was guilty of sexual assault or abusive behavior and I just don't see it. Worse than that is the message it sends to guys. If Morgan Freeman's ultra-cool moves are considered sexual harassment, then my clumsy, uncertain ones are doomed.

If you're not going to date, there's always porn as a fallback. Porn is tremendously addictive. It's also a self-exterminating trap for society.

Courtship is a messy thing. I can recall wanting a first kiss with the woman who is now my wife, but being afraid to try. She told me later that she had been longing to be kissed by me. If we were logical beings, we'd simply come out and say what we wanted and there would be no need to have a few drinks or flirt. Drinks and flirting lead to misinterpretations, mistakes, embarrassment and ... Morgan Freeman being accused of sexual harassment.

So just what is a guy supposed to make of the Morgan Freeman situation? If I were unattached, it would raise my levels of self-doubt. That would lead to needing even more booze to ask someone out on a date or simply ditching the whole thing and consuming porn.

I don't think that's what we want.

Morgan Freeman. There isn't enough booze in the world to make you think you are this cool.

Watching The News Media Interview Itself

I'm a big fan of Candace Owens. This is Candace.

I've been following her for quite some time. She's getting more and more play as people like Scott Adams, Kanye West and several big-name conservative podcasters and media celebrities mention her. Now, Brandy Zadrozny of NBC is going to interview her.

Hi Candace! Thanks for reaching out! Do you have some time for an interview today? Look forward to speaking with you.

— Brandy Zadrozny (@BrandyZadrozny) May 25, 2018

That's not actually true, though, is it? Since lots of us know Candace quite well, it's highly unlikely that Brandy's interview will tell us anything new about Candace. It will, however, tell us a great deal about Brandy and her management at NBC.

We know Candace is not alt-right and she is not far-right. We know she's not a racist. We know she's not an Uncle Tom, an Oreo or any of the other nicknames America's progressive give to people they see as traitors to der Volk. When we see Brandy's finished product, how will it comport with reality? Since we know Candace, but we don't know Brandy, the interview as published will tell us a lot.

It just occurred to me that an even better analogy is Brandy as a student in a lab class. We all know how the experiment should turn out, we all know the objective truth about Candace, so we're going to grade Brandy's analysis and lab notebook against it.

I'm hoping Brandy gets an "A."

Tough Pork Chops Are Everywhere

... and the only way to make sure you don't end up with them is to buy the cheapest ones.

I made Creamy Angel Pork Chop Skillet last night and in so doing, I broke a vow I re-make every time I break it. (That makes sense, you just have to think about it.)

Costco only carries the standard, somewhat-high-end pork chops. Giving in to the sin of sloth, I bought them there instead of making an extra stop at our local market to get the really cheap ones. The "good" chops almost invariably end up tough after cooking. They don't have enough fat to stay moist and tender. The only pork chops worth buying are the ultra-cheap blade cut chops, aka shoulder chops, which look like someone threw leftover pork at a bandsaw from 30' away.

Mmm, bone fragments embedded in the meat!

Never, never, never use anything but blade chops. Never. Mary's recipe was excellent, as usual, but the chops were almost inedible. It was like chewing on tree bark. Unless you time them perfectly and leave the middle pink, they dry out even when immersed in a cream cheese and chicken broth slurry! Madness!

Meanwhile, if you use blade chops, you can abuse them almost any way you please and they'll come out tender and delicious.

OK, this time I'm serious. I vow to never again buy any pork chops except the blade chops.

Hey, stop laughing!

Beta Males And Alpha Whiners

... are not the complete range of males in America. There is a third category which I call "men."

I followed a link to another to another and ended up at a couple of sites which cater to guys who call themselves alpha males, but who are simply whiny little boys. The memes they post cry about how women hurt them or don't respect them or play games. They also beat their chests about how they get more chicks than the feminist boys who cater to demanding women.

What toads. I laughed for a bit at things like this

but by the time I'd seen a dozen of them, I just wanted to leave. Which I did.

I get the memes. Where I work we have a women's group which meets regularly to help women improve their careers and a corporate effort to encourage girls to grow up and get high-tech jobs. That's lovely, but it's telling that they have no interest in breaking the glass ceilings in the lucrative and fast-paced world of landscape maintenance. That industry is all-male as far as I can tell. I guess that's next on their list after they get enough women in STEM. I'm sure that quite soon, I'll be seeing meeting announcements where the topic will be how more of our daughters ought to be shoving lawnmowers around hillsides in Mississippi in July.

Right.

But so what? Yeah, it's annoying and yeah, most of it is hogwash, but how much time do you want to spend on it? The activists on both sides who immerse themselves in it have defined their lives by it. Why do we need to do that?

The thing that really got to me after reading a couple of "alpha male" sites was what a pack of whiners they were. "Ooh, some girls are trying to manipulate me! Wah, some girls are dishonest!" Geeze, dudes, put your big boy undies on and get a grip. There have been swine from both sexes forever. It's not that hard to find places where decent people associate with each other. Of course, that puts a requirement on you to be decent, so maybe that's too much to ask.

Anyway, when you backed up from what they were saying, I wasn't sure if I could tell the difference between an alpha-male scorehound who built his world view around whining and beta males who were doing the same thing, just with a different angle.

There Aren't Any Rules

Insomnia last night and a class this morning means this is a cut-and-paste-and-comment kind of day.

From the WSJ comes this story about how the Euros are upset by Trump, essentially because he's not a member of the global elite and doesn't think like they do. Take the Iran deal, for example. Who does he think he is, upsetting the apple cart? They missed the key feature of Obama's imperial presidency. The un-American imperial part.

From the White House, things look very different. The Iran deal was not a legally binding instrument but the result of President Obama’s overreaching freelance diplomacy—as if Woodrow Wilson, counting the votes against the Treaty of Versailles, unilaterally committed the U.S. to join the League of Nations. The Europeans should have checked the relevant clauses in the American Constitution, assessed the state of congressional sentiment, and realized that Mr. Obama simply lacked the authority, political or constitutional, to commit the country permanently to such an agreement.

There was something similar on Instapundit today about Kamala Harris not being consistent on the death penalty.

Who cares? Part of the beauty of post-modernism where logic is trumped by feelings is that when you throw out objective reality, you throw out the rules as well. In a world with objective reality, there's no such thing as a treaty with the US unless the Senate ratifies it. Period. It's in the rules, i.e. the Constitution.

Bah! What nonsense. How narrow-minded of you. And I'll bet you think men and women are objectively different, too, you bigot.

Dispense with rules and logic and you find yourself being intensely upset at things which make you feel bad at the moment. We can't have that, can we?

Maybe we can and we should.

If only we could be more open-minded and tolerant like them! Why didn't we elect Hillary?

Oh yeah. This kind of thing is why. https://t.co/Q1NmDO1FZI

— K T Cat (@ktcat) May 20, 2018

Starbucks Is Cra-Cra

Is that how you spell it? Or is it cray-cray?

So some Starbucks employee somewhere called the cops on non-paying loiterers in their store. The cops then led the loiterers out in handcuffs. This resulted in a stand-down of thousands of Starbucks, retraining sessions for the employees, a corporate apology and a change in policy so that anyone will be allowed to use Starbucks' restrooms.

Imagine what that will look like in San Francisco or even here in downtown San Diego.

This guy and his compadres may soon be part of the downtown Starbucks experience. Yay!

This was done because Starbucks was afraid that their workforce might be full of racists and other People of Intolerance (PoI). There's no word on whether or not Starbucks officials are also afraid of voodoo hexes, warlocks or the possibility that some employees have been ensorceled and now have toads in their stomachs.

Effectively, a large, successful corporate just shot itself in the foot because it, as one of my favorite analogies for crazy, religious fanaticism goes, saw the face of Mary in a tree stump. They found a single event with multiple explanations that they, in their desperation to validate their faith in the religion of racialism, interpreted conclusively as proving their employees were loaded to the gills with implicit bias.

If it can happen at Starbucks, if they can convince themselves to risk making a mess of their brand for fear of hobgoblins, it can happen almost anywhere.

Addendum: Starbucks doesn't sell coffee, it sells a coffee experience. If they turn their stores into public libraries where homeless people haunt the place, stink it up and make the bathrooms a mess, they have wrecked their entire reason for existence, all for the sake of their faith. Now that's what I call religious devotion!

Gender Confusion And Declining Birth Rates

Yes, I'm a curmudgeonly, hopelessly out-of-date fuddy-duddy. Perhaps in the top 1% of the fuddiest of fuddy duddies. That's probably why I see a correlation between a recruiting ad the USMC is running and declining birth rates in the US.

If you didn't know, the birth rate in the US declined last year to just about the lowest ever. If you further didn't know, births happen because a man and woman love each other very much and have a "dance" and then the woman gets big and the stork brings a baby and then the woman gets smaller. At least that's what I told my kids between shots of bourbon, sitting on my front porch.

We don't seem to have pondered what might happen if we spend 30 years telling young 'uns that there are 37 genders, all family structures are equal, women should pursue a career above all else, marriage is slavery to the patriarchy and men are toxic. If you think that's an exaggeration, watch this ad where young ladies are encouraged to play rugby and then join the Marine Corps infantry. The Marine Corps infantry.

Never mind the fact that we have established that infantry units with women have higher casualty rates. Meaning there are mothers, wives and kids who have gotten "We regret to inform you..." letters because we want women in the infantry for some reason. But I digress.

The Marines are the peak of manhood. There is nothing above that. The Marine infantry is the peak of the peak. We are now so totally confused about where babies come from that we think it's a good idea to run multi-million dollar advertising campaigns to encourage women to aspire to being the manliest of men.

Meanwhile, the NCAA has punished states that think women's restrooms should be used only by women, but I digress again. And I could digress again a thousand times over, but I want to get to my chores today, so I won't.

Anyway, there were dozens of thumb-sucking head-scratchers published this week offering up reasons why women aren't having babies. They all miss the basic reason.

We told girls not to.

And for good reason! Here we see a platoon of Marine Corps infantry wandering around, lost in the jungle, because they wouldn't ask for directions. If there had been lots of women Marines on Guadalcanal, the battle would have been won in no time at all.