Clay Is Rock Without Ambition

This morning, instead of going to the gym, I went back to our old house and dug in the dirt. As a part of our remodel, almost the whole back yard will be redone, so we had much of our existing landscape removed in preparation. That leaves a lot of space for leaves. Tobacco leaves, to be precise.

The soil is trash. Despite my offers to pay the previous gardener handsomely for getting rid of the clay, which he agreed to do, he just dug holes in the clay big enough for the plants he was planting. They did poorly and years of putting decorative bark on top of the soil didn't help much. If I recall correctly, bark leaches some nutrient out of the soil as it starts to decay.

So that left me with 24 tobacco plants to put into the ground and soil that was unfit for purpose. It turns out that neither crops nor livestock nor babies know what time it is. If it's light enough to see, it's light enough to farm. At 0600, I was there, turning over the soil and putting the clay in an ugly pile off to the side.

San Diego's native soil is horrid. Big chunks of clay like this are all you get. Since we barely get any rain, there's no decaying, organic material mixed into the dirt. Clay is rock without ambition. That is, you can cut it with a shovel, but then you have two chunks of clay.

We've been gardening enough back here over the years to have amended the soil to some extent. Turning it over wasn't hard, but it really needs some help in the form of topsoil and fertilizers.

The tobacco plants have been doing great and are eager to be transplanted.

I'll move these into the dirt tomorrow morning.

On a sad note, it looks like all of our watermelon plants are only going to deliver five melons. The rest were shoved into tight places or planted in lousy dirt and while they grew, they haven't delivered up any fruit. Oh well. Five melons should be enough for a couple bottles of wine.

The Policeman Is My Daddy

I've been a James Lileks fan as long as I've been blogging. He's a daily blogger and a writer for many sites. He recently penned this piece about his home town of Minneapolis descending into chaos. Here's the tidbit of interest for me.

How can this area be commercially inert? Especially since it was once full of interesting stores, a real community with a corner grocery store.

It was teetering before 2020, and the riots just cleaned it out. Then came the miscreants. Strib:

Landlords have worked with the community and police to address public safety. Since the riots in 2020, Uptown has also been the site of repeated "intersection takeovers" by street racers.

Every one of these should have been broken up immediately with arrests and citations.

Note that his first and only line of defense are the police. The newspaper, at least, makes some mumbling mention of "the community," but that's just a made-up term beloved by social-justice types when they need a new word to describe a race and they've used all the other synonyms in the previous two paragraphs.

James goes on to describe how the locals are discussing the urban decay on Reddit.

Over at Reddit at r/minneapolis they're mostly debating whether the reasons are Guns / Racism / Poverty / Underfunded Schools / COVID, or a different combination of the five elements, each of which has its own ability to rewire morality and behavior in ways that cannot be undone by one's individual agency.

None of this reflects the mechanics of real life. It's all just progressive jibber-jabber. Tell me, when you misbehaved as a kid, what was it that set you straight? 

1. Was it new gun-control laws? 
2. How about Ibram Kendi getting Democrat politicians to put on their kente cloths and kneel down again? 
3. Maybe it was a check for $150 from HHS, delivered to your mom. 
4. When your teacher got a raise, did you repent of your sins? 
5. Or was it when you got an inoculation for a disease you didn't understand and couldn't even spell?

Seriously, pick one. It must have been one of those five options because that's all we discuss these days, even good, clean conservatives like James Lileks. He, at least would add this one.

6. Cops arresting you and throwing you in the hoosegow.

The first five options are part of the statist fantasy we're living in and the sixth isn't even vaguely scalable. This is something we've discussed before on this blog. In that particular case, it was about finding mentors for kids in Baltimore, but the design of the perpetual motion machine we're trying to build is the same.

Now think about the task of the mentor. Amanda tells us that the kids are working on survival and school is a secondary concern at best. The mentor isn't only there to tutor, they are there to provide security, money, love and discipline.

If you think there is any chance at all that you will be able to find 6600 people, unrelated to the students, who are going to have the time, energy, know-how and willingness to take on that task, please contact your local mental hospital and schedule a straight-jacket fitting session.

There is a solution, however. Like I said in yesterday's post, those mentors are out there. We just have to be willing to demand they do the job.

I know where we can find the necessary volunteers to act as mentors for the kids. Mom's bed. The men found therein can be given a special title. We'll call them "husbands." We can give them a special token of appreciation. Maybe it could be a ring they could wear. We could also give them a certificate acknowledging their volunteer status. We'll call that a "marriage license."

That is the only solution to the problem. There is no other. All of the screaming about flags and statues and white supremacists and Trump and Tucker Carlson and the far-right and the alt-right is simply irrelevant noise. It's like blaming leprechauns for the suffering of these kids.

Just a few more episodes like this and Minneapolis will be as right as rain.

Moving Is Hard On Everyone

 ... particularly if you don't understand what is happening.

Over the last two days, in preparation for a remodel, we've moved from our normal house to our rental property, which is about eight miles away. The dogs like the new place, but the change has them worried. Being smaller dogs, a lot of things bother them that wouldn't bother a large dog. Add in a move and then periods where both mom and dad are gone and you've got a recipe for panic.

Two days ago, we left them at the new house, outside, for the first time. As I drove away, I could hear them barking in the back yard. Our athlete, Leah, found a way to escape by jumping on top of a brick barbecue and from there to the top of the fence and out into the wilds of suburban San Diego. As far as I can figure, she was looking for our old house.

She must have been loose in the neighborhood for almost two hours. She's frightened of other dogs and doesn't take to strangers without us around. The whole adventure must have been terrifying. Wife kitteh got home first and discovered Lily, the chubby one, crying in the back yard, all alone. I got the call and we proceeded to drive around the neighborhood looking for Leah.

I finally found her about ten blocks away, scared out of her mind.

Where were you? Lily and I thought we'd never see you again!

The moral of the story is that you need to be aware of the stress moving places on your animals.

The Catholic Diocese Of San Diego Is Utterly Worthless

Dig this.

San Diego Unified is the latest school district to adopt the principles of academic queer theory and translate them into K-12 pedagogy, with the ultimate goal of dismantling “heteronormativity” and promoting a constellation of new sexual identities, such as “genderqueer,” “non-binary,” “pansexual,” and “two-spirit.”

I have obtained a range of publicly accessible documents from San Diego Unified that reveal the district’s new ideology. The materials follow the basic premise of queer theory: white Europeans created a false “gender binary” and used the categories of “male” and “female” to dominate racial and sexual minorities. A San Diego Unified training for facilitators of LGBTQ student groups argues that this system of “heteronormativity” forces students to conform to these norms: they are “assigned” a sex at birth, pressed into the identities of “man” and “woman,” and expected to have heterosexual relationships culminating in “marriage (and kids).” This “gender binary,” however, is arbitrary, socially constructed, and harmful. It is, in the words of the presentation, a “limited system [that] excludes and oppresses trans, nonbinary, intersex, and gender-nonconforming people.”

Now dig these results from this morning.

A search (1) on the website for the Catholic Diocese of San Diego turns up the following:

• A request for money for the Diocese (2),
• A request for money for Ukrainian refugees (3) and
• Nothing about the transgender slaughter of our children (4).

The San Diego public education system is eagerly feeding our kids into a sexual-insanity meat grinder and the Catholic Diocese of San Diego has its hand out for money.

I never swear in prose because I think it's lazy. As my own, "transgender" daughter spirals into insanity and probably from there into death from wrong-sex-hormone poisoning, I am sorely tempted.

I can't think of anything else to write.

Tiny Watermelon

We've now got four full-grown watermelon, one halfway and about four that are this size, just starting out in life. I'm going to keep tabs on them to see how fast they grow.

The Philosophy Of The Lizards

 ... is what you get as soon as you start deriving your thinking from Rousseau.

I've raved about The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution by Carl Trueman, now let me throw some shade upon it. Here is his express purpose in writing it.

The origins of this book lie in my curiosity about how and why a particular statement has come to be regarded as coherent and meaningful: “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body.”

I'd like to suggest that the same curiosity could be extended to someone saying, "My toaster is talking to me." Of course, we don't take the schizophrenic seriously while we do take the sexually confused person seriously. Why is that? Well, Carl goes to great lengths to trace the intellectual and philosophical roots of this idiocy from Rousseau to Freud to Marx to Marcuse and other equally addlepated dimwits.

I could have saved him the trouble by tracing its roots from only one source: Sceloporus occidentalis, the Western Fence Lizard. Lizards only care about three things: food, safety and sex. I'll start and end my proof with Rousseau. From Ben Wiker's excellent book, 10 Books that Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others That Didn't Help, we have these excerpts.

There were no twinges of conscience for natural man, Rousseau assured the reader, because “the moral element of love is an artificial sentiment born of the usage of society.” Since neither the love of husband and wife, or parent and child, is natural, then neither are the moral duties that arise from marriage and childbearing...

Rousseau ... had a string of mistresses, some married, some not. He sired five children with one of them, Thérèse Levasseur, with whom he lived for more than twenty-five years and whom he treated as a mere maid (she delivered his torrid letters to other mistresses). Rousseau abandoned all five children to the Hôpital des Enfants-Trouvés, a foundling home where the conditions were so deplorable that their deaths were all but certain.

Quoting Rousseau directly, Ben gives us this passage:

"I made up my mind cheerfully and without the least scruples, and the only ones I had to overcome were those of Thérèse. I had the greatest difficulty in the world getting her to accept this means of preserving her honor. Her mother, who feared the inconvenience of a brat, came to my aid, and she allowed herself to be overcome. A discreet and trustworthy midwife . . . was chosen . . . and when Thérèse’s time came, she was taken there by her mother for the birth.... He [the baby] was then deposited by the midwife at the Enfants-Trouvés office in the way that was customary. The following year there came the same inconvenience and the same expedients.... I didn’t reflect any further, and the mother didn’t approve any more fully; she groaned but obeyed."

At this point, we can put both books down, grab a beverage and turn on the game. One hardly needs to spend any more time than that analyzing the "philosophy" of a guy that got his girlfriend pregnant five times and shoved all five of his children into a slaughterhouse. He was a proponent of free love, you say? Yeah? Well, no kidding, Sherlock. I'm shocked.

The dude was the worst kind of pig and his writings only exist to justify his horrific behavior. That people managed to build a tower of filth out of it, with equally repulsive characters like Freud, Marx and Marcuse adding their own excrement to it, isn't an indication of its worth, it's an indication that they were all looking for a similar way to disguise their own degeneracy. Justifying modern children being fed into the transgender abattoir is only the latest layer on that tower of filth.

And so here we are. We have the Lizard Empire. We've made our limbic system our master. Hooray.

Of course there wasn't anything rational behind this. That should have been obvious from the start.

The Lizard Army Has Us Surrounded

 As I work my way through this gem - The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution by Carl Trueman - something occurred to me about the transgendering of our children and the normalization of pedophilia.

If it's now OK and even highly encouraged to give wrong-sex hormones to gender-indoctrinated children and then to cut off their sexual body parts when they are old enough, then why isn't it OK to have sex with them, provided they "consent?"

If I give a boy puberty blockers at, say, age 10, he will end up sterile. That's permanent damage. If a gay dude talks him into sex, whatever happens will most likely not end up in permanent damage, once you discount the psychological trauma.

Now that our moral codes hinge on a person's feelings and self-identification, I don't see how we can hold the line on pedophilia. From the book linked above:

(T)o allow the individual simply to be himself, unhindered by outward pressure to conform to any greater reality, (makes) the individual king. He can be whoever he wants to be. And rejecting the notion of any external authority or meaning to which education is to conform, the individual simply makes himself the creator of any meaning that there might be. So-called “external” or “objective” truths are then simply constructs designed by the powerful to intimidate and to harm the weak. Overthrowing them ... becomes the central purpose of educational institutions. They are not to be places to form or to transform but rather places where students can perform. The triumph of the therapeutic represents the advent of the expressive individual as the normative type of human being and of the relativizing of all meaning and truth to personal taste.

Emphasis mine. If a little boy can make the decision to castrate himself, if a little girl can make the decision to become sterile and mutilate her body through mastectomies, then they must have the ability to choose to engage in sex. In fact, this is the whole goal of the gender movement in our schools, at least in California and Oregon schools. All of their teaching is designed to expose children to as wide a range of sexual choices as possible, starting as early as possible.

If you want to be utterly nauseated, and who doesn't, check out these training materials, used in Portland, to help teachers turn K-5 children into sexual degenerates. 

We are totally surrounded.

We only have one reply to give, the one General Mcauliffe gave to the Nazis. "Nuts."