Purple And Fuzzy

Our Mexican Sage is quite happy this year. Plenty of rain, well, plenty for San Diego, and now some sunny weather.

I left the photo large, so I think it's worth a click. Enjoy!

Mein Coates

I finally had to put Mein Kampf down, permanently. I had planned to listen to the whole thing, but it's such an awful book in every respect that I couldn't get more than about two thirds of the way through it.

As I listened, I wondered how anyone took it seriously. It's a prolonged rant by a semi-literate loon. For example, he goes on for pages about how the Japanese culture is, in fact, Aryan, albeit with a facade of oriental decorations. There's no proof, just an assertion that Aryans make all things good from which he launches one fantasy after another.

Pondering a post on why the Secular Left loves race more than ideas, I think I hit upon it.

Mein Kampf claimed that Germany lost WW I because all those dead, German boys were betrayed by politicians and the Jews. Almost every family in Germany had one or more young men killed or wounded in the war. The slaughter was such that everyone was in a state of mourning shock. The pain must have been so thick in the air all across the country that it was practically visible, like a fog shroud of agony.

Into that culture came Adolf. Adolf told them that their dead and maimed boys were not only brave and valiant, but the most brave and valiant in the whole world. The war was not an insane gambit by heartless aristocrats seeking glory, but a noble crusade to save the world from a descent into barbarism. After all, according to Uncle Adolf, without the Aryan, civilization goes kaput. If you followed Hitler, you didn't have to come to grips with the fact that your husbands, sons and brothers died for arrogance and folly.

Mein Kampf was a massive, soothing lie that eliminated the need for painful introspection. Instead of asking, "How did we manage to go along with a stupid idea that murdered our boys?," the populace could cling to the notion that it was all betrayal by them. In this case, they were Jews and politicians.

Fast forward to today and the cult of whiteness where academics, cultural and political leaders and celebrities blame whites and white culture for everything bad that happens to People of Color (PoC). The whole thing is idiotic and collapses into nonsense as soon as you think critically about it. How is it that crazed frauds like Ta-Nehisi Coates manage to garner such a massive following by blaming everything on racism and whiteness?

Coates and the others tell a massive, soothing lie that eliminates the need for painful introspection. Instead of asking, "How did we manage to destroy our neighborhoods by stupidly ditching the traditional, nuclear family and lay waste to multiple generations of PoC?," the populace can cling to the notion that it was all betrayal by them. In this case, they are whites and the culture brought from Europe.

The tactics of the brownshirts in the 1930s and ANTIFA, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter today are identical because the problem they're solving is identical: How to prevent questions from being asked. The censorship of the Secular Lefties running social media companies is designed to preserve the lie that soothes them and keeps them from looking at the consequences of their own moral choices.

Suggestion: Screaming back at the progressives isn't the answer. You've got to realize that their hysteria comes from a place of pain. I'm thinking that the best response is to agree that the pain is real, but inventing a scapegoat isn't the answer. The only way out is to embrace the moral choices that lead to success. Yes, it's hard, and yes, it's unpopular, but it's also the medicine we all need to take.

Eventually, that whole scapegoating thing comes back to bite you, hard.

Pink And White

These are geraniums from my mom's yard. The plant is simply enormous and is more than 30 years old. I left the photo large, so it might be worth a click. Enjoy!

More Drug Addicts

... lead to an epidemic of mentally ill homeless people in your cities.

I've had a few up-close and personal interactions with drug addicts in my life. Because of that, I've always been strongly in favor of as much of a War on Drugs as we can manage. You'll never win it, but you have to fight it as best you can because drug addiction is a one-way street to a living death. It never occurred to me what would happen if a city became infested with living dead druggies.

Here in San Diego, we have regions of the city that are festooned with tents on the sidewalk, homeless sleeping in doorways, beggars at almost all major intersections and worse. The problem has grown over the last decade. San Francisco is a horror and Los Angeles, my old home town, is unspeakably filthy and wretched. Almost all of these poor souls are addicts. Some are alcoholic, which we've always had, but I would bet that most of the increase has come from drug use.

If you've known an addict and you thought you knew the price of drugs on civilization, imagine what happens when you've got tens of thousands of them in your community. Wait, you don't need to imagine. You can visit California and see it for yourself.

We didn't have anything like this 20 years ago.

We Care Deeply About Our Citizens

... but we're also terrified of them.

I don't know about you, but the HP Robocop being tried out in SoCal just screams out, "FEAR!" Or maybe it lets everyone know there aren't enough cops. Probably a combo of the two.

I wonder how many gunshots it can take before it goes down. Someone is going to find out. The thing looks like a target at a shooting gallery. Note that they didn't test it out on Skid Row or in Compton.

Have we gotten past the use of beat cops, ones who know the neighborhood? Are we on the way to simple surveillance robots? If that's the case, why not have a mother ship loaded with drones that fly off and scout the area, returning to refuel?

It's all pretty creepy.

Acceptable Behavior In Dogs

... is not acceptable behavior in humans. Well, some of it at least.

When our dogs bark at strangers outside our gate, we don't freak out. It's just the dogs being dogs. If a guest or one of our kids ran out and shouted at strangers outside our gate, we'd have a problem with them.

Recently, Kyle Kalashnikov, or whatever his name is, lost his acceptance to Harvard because he said some naughty words as a teen. Steven Crowder, a comedian, is regularly trashed by Right Thinking People for saying naughty words. I never see these Paragons Of All That Is Proper slagging rap artists for saying naughty words.

The only thing I can think of is that our noble and aristocratic Elites see Steven Crowder as a person, but feel that the rap artists are lower-order animals. After all, you can't expect much from dogs.

Meanwhile, dimwitted Catholic rednecks like myself see all those folks as the same and can't understand why you'd  treat them differently. Oh well. Maybe someday we'll ditch that whole everyone-is-made-in-the-image-of-God thing and I'll be enlightened.

Pepito Ramón doesn't bark a lot, but he moans a great deal. Our kids don't moan much at all.

Creepy Google

At the gym this morning, on one of the TVs, was the CEO of Google, old what's-his-name.

Aside: Why do gyms think you want to watch political shows while you work out? Why isn't it all travel, adventure and sports?

Anyway, some CNN airhead was interviewing him about hate speech and controlling the political discourse on YouTube and elsewhere. It gave me chills.

Here's the head of this ultra-massive multinational whose control over communications is utterly dominant and whose corporation is completely in bed with one particular political party, calmly talking about what opinions will be suppressed on the Internet.

I'm guessing that the racist ravings of Ta-Nehisi Coates won't be among the ones banned from YouTube.

In completely unrelated news, 24 power-mad maniacs who seek the job which will give regulatory control over Google are desperately looking for financial backing and internet traffic to their campaign sites.