You Can't Use A Tool You've Smashed

There's something really simple that I don't understand about the arguments against President Trump.

Almost all of them seem to spring from moral authority. He's a liar! He abuses his power! He's a sexistracisthomophobeislamophobetransplanetaryxenophobe!

How does that work if we've destroyed moral authority in the first place? I thought the whole point of the Left was "don't judge." Whether that's trannies in the library, women becoming men, homeless drug addicts or what-have-you, we're supposed to be open-minded and not judge. Morality, after all, is subjective.

If morality is subjective, how are we to judge the moral actions of Trump?

If you get past that hurdle, what happens when we apply the same moral yardsticks to the Left? In the past three years, we've seen that bigwigs in the Democratic Party and the media, but I repeat myself, are into infanticide, pedophilia, sexual assault, rape, sex slavery and more. And yet, I'm supposed to get all worked up when Trump tells a whopper about the size of a crowd or how awesome he is.

If a man can become a woman and citizens of any nation on the planet are entitled to my money for their healthcare, it seems to me like we've left consistency and logic far behind.

How then shall I apply consistency, logic and moral authority to Donald Trump?

If your foundational argument is that everything is subjective, you can't then apply objective standards to anything or anyone. Your criticism tool is broken.

That bad boy ain't gonna drill no more.

The Unique Evil Of The Founding Fathers

... is a total mystery to me.

There's a fellow I've friended on Facebook who, it appears, I knew in Los Angeles when I lived there about the time lizards were evolving into chickens. As an Air Force brat, I lived in lots of places and made a lot of friends, so people from my distant past are a bit blurry.

In any case, he's this weird combination of social justice progressive and prepper. I wouldn't interact with him were it not for the fact that he comments on my wacky look-what-I'm-trying-now posts. At first, when he had good suggestions for frying chicken, I liked his input. He's now sticking his oar in about fermenting tobacco and I've had just about enough. It's still useful and well meant, but for the love of Pete, give it a rest, Mr. Know-It-All. I get it. You've done everything. Now shut up and go build a blast furnace or whatever it is you do in your spare time.

Sheesh!

Just for grins, I looked through his feed. Facebook being what it is, his content isn't given to me because Facebook has decided that even though we follow 300 people, we only want content from 10 or so. Thanks, Facebook! Jerks.

Hmm. I'm in a rare mood this morning. Oh well. On with the polemic.

So Mr. SJW Prepper turns out to have posts wherein he mentions that our Founding Fathers owned slaves. I'm so over this. I'm currently consuming a Thomas Sowell piece about slavery which is an excellent antidote. Check it out.

What gets me is the insinuation that our Founding Fathers are somehow uniquely guilty. What rubbish. I wanted to reply in a comment to Prog Prepper, so I thought I'd test it out here first.

First off, India, Africa and the Muslims take win, place and show in the Slavery Derby. While Africans were the export kings, selling each other to anyone with a credit score over 400 and a checkbook, the Indians took the top spot. How did they do it? Volume discounts! When there are a billion people and you despise the least among you, slavery is a natural. The Muslims, consulting their self-contradictory Koran, found plenty of support for the mass enslavement of infidels.

Of course, I still have a soft spot in my heart for the Aztecs and their compadres here in the New World. Lining thousands of slaves up for a mass disembowling? Charming! Imagine the world we'd live in if the Aztecs had been the first to develop gunpowder and trans-oceanic sailing ships. Multicultural to the max!

The Founding Fathers with their Angry Christian Sky Fairy had something the others all lacked - a moral quandary over slavery. Their book of myths told them that God made Man in his image and we should love everyone, particularly the least among us. That's kind of where we got the idea slavery might be wrong. The rest of them couldn't even comprehend the concept.

Googling the Europeans' efforts to abolish slavery in Africa and Middle East is an isometric exercise. You expend a great deal of energy and get nowhere. That makes sense because white man bad. Here's the best I could find quickly.

At that time (the 1870s) the slave-trade commanded the attention of many governments, particularly that of Great Britain where the anti-slavery lobby was extremely influential; and the Khedive was under strong pressure to put a stop to the virtual depopulation of enormous areas of Central Africa by the removal of their able-bodied inhabitants for sale in Egypt, Turkey and Arabia.

There are mountains of this kind of history, but the Founding Fathers Sin Counters seem utterly unaware of it. I feel like anyone who trots out the phrase "slave owners" in conjunction with the Europeans ought to take a shortcut and just post this "No Idea" meme instead.

Hanging's Too Good For It

I harvested and hung my tobacco this week. At the start of the project, I was concerned I was too late in the season for the crop, but tobacco is a hardy plant and shrugged off the cold weather like it was nothing. Now I need to build a fermenter to finish off the curing of the leaves, but I've got time to do that. The leaves will take weeks to dry fully. The racks are 1/2" PVC hung with solid-core, 14 gauge electrical wire. The cost was under $10.

Relationship Advice: It's OK To Make Mistakes

I know a couple of people who are critical of everyone around them.

Kind of like me on this blog. :-)

One particular person starts trashing people within 15 seconds of getting in the car with me. How they drive, how they look, what they did at work yesterday, it's a nonstop cataract of sneering. It drives me batty, but I've never found a way to make it stop. My first instinct is to rip his life to shreds to see if he can discover some humility. I don't act on that.

This morning, I spent some time researching ways to cope and discovered some interesting sites, but none of them really clicked with me. One message board featured a husband discussing how his wife corrected absolutely everything he did. He related a story about how even napkin folding became a opportunity for correction. He responded in anger.

The argument began like this: She made the comment about the way I was folding the napkins. I sighed heavily, and gave her a look like "Are you kidding me?!?!" After all, I was trying to help her out. Her response was: "Don't give me that look." I then proceeded to unleash a tirade on her for a couple of minutes bringing up everything from her distaste of her own mother's controlling nature to her own hypocritical way of dealing with me. I don't suppose she took too kindly to that.

I can't say I blame him. I love polemics and they come naturally to me. If I let myself go on someone who was going after me like this, you'd be able to see the mushroom cloud 50 miles away. Instead, I do my best to bottle it up.

Allow me to suggest that anger, even suppressed anger, is the wrong approach. Instead, embrace humanity.

It's OK to make mistakes. It's OK to be sub-optimal. Everyone is. Not everything has to be done perfectly, not every flaw needs to be corrected.

Sometimes, I think that my hyper-critical friend is simply practicing a strategy of first strike. He himself has all kinds of flaws, many of which are visible. I think he's hitting first so their criticism of him, which never comes except in his own mind, is less potent.

Even for him, it's OK to be imperfect. If you deeply embrace this in your heart, I wonder if the irritation you feel when you are corrected over and over again will be replaced with a wry smile and a gentle attempt to get the other person to see that as well.

More tomorrow. Love you guys. Thanks for reading.

You can be just what the world needs even though you're imperfect.

If You Strike At Stephen King, You'd Best Not Miss

Poor Stephen really stepped in the pool of rotting flesh and oozing blood this time. The reply I included is representative of a whole host of adherents to Nazi Race Theory - people who obsess on skin color, sex, gender and whatever else it is we use to superficially group people these days - who attacked him for his outrage.

I would have thought you were smarter than this, honestly.
The first problem here is that most of the people deciding what counts as "quality" art are and have been white dudes. The subjective nature of art means that what resonates with them and their experience tends to be 1/

— Chrisi (@chrisiousity) January 14, 2020

JK Rowling experienced the same thing when she said women can't become men and vice versa.

I find all of this deeply encouraging. This is what is going to kill the Nazi movement on the left. Some successful and powerful dude or dudette is going to make an obviously factual statement about their area of expertise. The Social Justice Gestapo will swoop in to cancel them, but they will be so powerful that even the Gestapo will have no power. The powerful dude or dudette will tell them all to get stuffed.

Stephen King didn't quite do that. He backed off to whining about a level playing field, but as far as I know, Rowling stuck to her guns.

The ultimate turning point will come when the superstar under attack takes the red pill and realizes that all of the rest of us Normals, the conservatives who have lived their lives being told we're full of hate, weren't full of hate after all.

Then the real fun begins.

Sort of like what happened with Kanye.

Roux In A Jar

I made Catican Bayou Super Gumbo last night to devour while we enjoyed LSU winning the National Championship game. Both were excellent.

Super Gumbo is where you put every kind of meat in the house into the mix. I used chicken, polska kielbasa, bacon, shrimp and oysters. As you can tell, I had a few pops as I was cooking. :-)

While the gumbo came out great, I learned a thing or two about buying premade roux. I won't mention the brand, since I've experienced this same thing before, but last night I found a solution. Roux is equal parts fat and flour, cooked and stirred continuously until the flour toasts in the fat and the concoction turns a delicious brown.

My lard roux takes 55 minutes, my corn oil roux about 20. It's a serious business as you can't stop whisking even for 30 seconds, or you'll burn the roux and have to start all over again. Premade roux is huge time saver. It's also only marginally adequate.

Roux in a jar comes out a lot like drywall spackle. There's some oil to it, but it's more of a paste. Even after heating, the stuff doesn't really melt. The whole point of roux is to act as an oil for sauteing vegetables. Last night, when I noticed the roux paste just sitting there, I added bacon grease to the mix and that helped a little. When I added some corn oil and stirred things around, the roux paste merged with the corn oil and finally got to work as a slurry for the veggies. Homemade roux tastes better, but this worked OK.

As my corn oil roux only takes 20 minutes, once I've finished the few jars of premade roux I've got in the pantry, I won't run that experiment again. It's homemade, corn oil roux for me from now on.

Also, Geaux Tigers!

The Holy Trinity plus the Pope in the modified roux paste.

Simmering and smelling wonderful.

So much deliciousness!

So much fun!

Where I'm Going

I've had a few epiphanies lately that have come out like Jackson Pollock paintings on this blog.

My blog posts all make perfect sense. Like this.

In an effort to draw them together, let me outline three themes that interest me right now. Feel free to comment and laugh.

The Catholic Church is fighting the last war

The Church has no idea what it is facing in postmodernist American culture. When you read conversion stories, they all detail how the convert was searching for the Truth. Postmodernism tells us that there is no Truth, there is only your truth. 

If you're searching for the Truth, then, you presuppose that the Truth exists. What happens when academics, politicians and the media tell you that everyone has their own truth and truth is relative? Wouldn't you stop looking for Truth because you would assume it wasn't there? In effect, they have hidden its existence and done their best to make sure as few people as possible engage in the search.

Postmodernism is the enemy. As long as it holds sway, the Church is screwed.

Traditional marriage is being killed in the supply chain

First, traditional marriage is the only hope for our social ills. I calculated that Baltimore alone required 6600 dedicated mentors to deal with their inner city crises. The only place to find them is in the beds of the kids' moms.

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.

Friends of mine run Rise Up Industries where they take newly-released felons and give them a job, training, counseling and more. They work with ten men at a time. 10. The program takes 6-12 months. That's the level of effort to tackle the problem well downstream of the destruction of traditional marriage. The problems caused by the destruction of the family are many orders of magnitude larger than what fifty such devoted teams of people can handle.

I have come to the conclusion that marriage is being killed in the supply chain. That is, young men are opting out of the effort to become husband material because it makes sense to do so. Until we recognize that, we're not going to make progress restoring marriage which means we can expect continued deterioration in and the expansion of high-illegitimacy neighborhoods.

The Catholic Church will die if it doesn't learn how to keep customers

This one is simple. If you've got adults coming to church and children going to your schools, you cannot lose 50% of them. No business in existence can afford to lose 50% of its customer base and still survive. The Church doesn't understand this and is taking no steps that I can see to deal with it.

Within Cursillo, I know dozens and dozens of men who regularly lament that their children have left the faith. No one from the Church ever told them what to expect as the children got older. No one told the kids what attacks they would face. No one, parents or kids, was ever taught how to deal with these attacks, much less turn the tables on them to evangelize.

This isn't a difficult problem, either. The number of primary reasons that young adults leave the faith is less than five and various Catholic activist groups have developed programs and methods to deal with them. The Church must adopt a much more proactive stance in educating its laity so they have the tools to keep their kids in the faith.

Similarly, there are relatively simple outreach programs that can be used to find adults who have stopped going to Mass and at least contact them in love and concern.

If this matters the way the Catechism says it matters, then this is worth doing.

Anyway, that's where my thoughts are taking me. It also outlines some goals for concrete things I want to do with the rest of my life.

So there.