Katie The Cat, 1998-2015

I had to put our Maximum Leader to sleep yesterday. Failing kidneys, a very unhappy pancreas and probable cancer on top of arthritis in her front knees made life worse every day. It was time and she was appreciative.

I'm a bit loopy right now from lack of sleep, emotion and a few other things, but I will say that over the last 16 years, she was a true friend through many tough times.

I remember one time when I was so poor I couldn't heat the house half the time, the outdoor temperature got down into the high 30s. That meant the indoor temperature was in the high 30s, too. She came to bed with me, stared briefly at me with a look of, "You've got to be kidding me" and crawled under all the covers and spent the night snuggled against my thighs for warmth.

Then there was the time she brought a mouse into the laundry room to play with it. She threw it up in the air and then caught it over and over. Until it landed in the hamper. Then she wandered off. Someone else found it in the hamper and shrieked...

We had an arrangement over the last 10 years. She was given one nighttime snack each night at a time of her choosing. People who heard about this thought I was crazy, but it worked for us. Any time she wanted, she would come into the bedroom and make some noise - pushing the door against the wall, plucking the carpet, whatever. I'd get up, go downstairs and give her a snack. Midnight, 1 AM, 2 AM, it didn't matter. If she came in and tried to do it again, she'd get a pillow thrown at her.

She always had a loud purr. I remember her sauntering down the hall to my bedroom, purring. It sounded like a freight train as it echoed off the walls. It was beautiful.

My wife was never a cat person and Katie was affectionate in her own way, which was to say that I understood her acts of love when no one else recognized them. She knew my wife needed something special and so would come out of the house every day to say hello when my wife came home. It truly touched her that this little cat changed the way she did things to let my wife know she was loved. A few head bumps, a brief pat and that was that, time to go inside for food. Katie was still a cat, after all.

Katie was a holy terror with the vet. She tore them to shreds every time they tried to take samples of any kind. My son and I would laugh and say, "3 dead, 2 wounded. The last one managed to pull the fire alarm as he sank to the floor, unconscious from loss of blood." She was all cat, our Katie.

Incidentally, that's where I took my nom de plume. K T Cat was Katie The Cat, her full, proper name. I liked the play on words as KT sounds like Katie.

I'm running out of coherence and I'm sure you've lost interest in the whole thing. Katie and I loved each other dearly. It was hard to see her go, but at the same time, it was the right thing to do.

I'll miss her ever so much.

Her last day, spending a little time in the garden.

Bodie, the larger Catican Guard, was a loving friend to the end.

The ECB Takes A Hard Line

... and the Greeks have drained their ATMs. The Greek government has shut down the banking system, too. Looks like I was wrong on this one. The ECB will go out for lattes after they whack the Greeks. I still don't know if they've decided to let the Greeks leave, though. After this, it seems like the decision has already been made by the Greek people who are trying to get their money out of the country as fast as possible.



Meanwhile, some Greeks are not getting the hint that the government is kaput.

On Athens’s rainy streets late Sunday, many ATMs had already been emptied. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s announcement that he would call a referendum on the economic terms that Greece’s creditors want for fresh aid sent many Greeks scurrying to bank machines over the weekend to grab what remaining cash they could.

“How can something like this happen without prior warning?” asked Angeliki Psarianou, a 67-year-old retired public servant, who stood in the drizzle after arriving too late at one empty ATM in the Greek capital. “I want Tsipras to tell me how I am going to make it through the week with €10 in my bag with rent coming up. It has never been as bad as this.”

Angeliki, dude, Tsipras has nothing. You might as well talk to the empty ATM.

Maybe Secession Is The Goal

... for the secular left.

Just think, they already view the people of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and Oklahoma as sub-literate, racist trash. In the words of the Journolist crowd, they're "NASCAR retards." If those states were forced, err, allowed to secede, the left would never lose another presidential election, would never lose control of the Senate or Congress and would soon have an unimpeachable majority on the Supreme Court.

Think that's crazy? Dig this.

Wow. @nytimes columnist writing in @TIME magazine: "Now’s the Time To End Tax Exemptions for Religious Institutions" http://t.co/miG7ChcjiH

— Ryan T. Anderson (@RyanTAnd) June 28, 2015

How well is that kind of thing going to go over in the South?

Update:

http://t.co/35NELyYBNT. A way around those pesky religious freedom laws: make sh*t up about 1st amendment that doesn't exist. @ktcat

— Dean R. Riehm (@deanriehm) July 7, 2015

It's Not The SSM

... it's the way it was done. Had California, for example, voted to approve SSM, I'd be unhappy, but not terribly so. If my fellow citizens want it and legally enact it, then I must render unto Caesar. I'm a Catholic who chooses to live in the US and I have to accept the outcome of elections.

When elections no longer matter because the government can make laws on whim and simply disregard the rules, the voters and logic, then I've got a real problem with that. That's happened over and over lately with ObamaCare, our now-open borders, gay marriage and much more. We voted against all of these things, but they happened anyway.

Or is the problem still my own because Caesar has decided to become a dictator?

It's On A Stick, Too!

We went to the Del Mar Fair to see Rend Collective deliver another fantastic concert performance. While there, we saw all manner of fair foods, but this one looked the best.

Bone-in pork chops already have a stick of sorts, but I guess you can never have too many sticks.

Appeasing The Gods

... is what the whole Confederate flag "crisis" seems like to me. Once we tear down and burn all Confederate flags and then smash all Southern war monuments, we will have ... what?

Driving past a Confederate flag or monument isn't causing anything at all. Our social ills are pretty well documented and none of them have Confederate memorabilia as a first-, second- or even third-order cause.

This is just a sacrifice to the gods of racial righteousness in the hopes of appeasing them that they might cause good things to happen here in America.

On the plus side, we must run out of books, flags, businesses and statues to smash and burn eventually. One would think that at that point, people will realize that our problems are still with us and will conclude that the causes lie somewhere else.

Quicksand Couch

Slowly, the smaller Catican Guard is pulled into the clutches of the Quicksand Couch!

Funniest Link Of The Day

Just click here and laugh.

Women's Soccer

... is, sadly for me, not as much fun to watch as men's soccer unless my daughter is playing.

Last night, my wife and I watched the US Women's team beat Colombia in the World Cup. Both teams were good and the US team played extremely well. Still, I kept waiting for a fast break or some laser shots on goal like I see in the English Premier League. None came. The game was so much slower than the professional men's games I watch that it finally became difficult to sit through. Women simply don't have the athletic skills that men have.

A discussion with friends about the differences between men's and women's professional sports led to someone noting that a French girl, Melissa Mayeux, has been placed on an MLB team's scouting list. We couldn't see that ever going anywhere. Speed, strength, stamina - she's physically outclassed by the guys.

Related, on a tip from someone I can't recall, I checked out the sprinting results from the 2012 Olympics and the New Jersey High School State Track Meet. Here are the comparisons between the fastest women in the world and the fastest high school boys in New Jersey.

100M: 2012 Olympic winner, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce would have finished second in the New Jersey high school boy's meet.

200M: Winner Allyson Felix would have finished 6th in New Jersey.

400M: Winner Sanya Richards-Ross would have finished a full second behind the 10th place New Jersey boy.

Finally, going back to baseball, a friend looked up the fastest pitch ever thrown by a woman. 69 MPH. That's Charlie Hough knuckleball territory. Not bad. Charlie Hough was a lot of fun to watch. Maybe not fun to catch, but he was fun to watch,

OPM's New Logo

They Might As Well Have Paid Off The Greek Loans

... because the ECB is lending Greek banks roughly the same amount of money and if the Greeks default, they'll never get it back. Dig this.

Greeks are pulling money out of their accounts at a dramatically quicker pace as the standoff between Athens and its creditors drags on, prodding the European Central Bank on Friday to raise emergency lending to the country’s banks for the second time in three days.

The lending level was extended another €1.8 billion ($2.04 billion), a Greek official said, on top of Wednesday’s upward adjustment of €1.1 billion. Steady withdrawals from banks all year have accelerated in the past week, according to Greek bank officials, rising from an estimated €400 million on Monday to an estimated €1 billion on Thursday. One Greek bank official said the trend continued on Friday with an estimated outflow of a little more than €1.2 billion.

That's over a billion Euros a day being pulled out of Greek banks. Don't worry, though, this isn't a bank run as it will take a full 30 days to exhaust bank reserves and 30 days might as well be next month which is a long time away when you consider how long it takes to get a latte at the cafe down the street while downloading the latest Kim Kardashian photos.

No, this is just normal business transactions and Greek banks just need some loans to tide them over. Meanwhile, the ECB could have paid the July Greek debt bills for a few billion more and gone back to the cafe until August.

A few days ago, I blogged that I was counting on the Europeans to bail out the Greeks because it was relatively inexpensive and allowed them to further postpone the day of reckoning. That may have been wrong-headed. It may be that the post-modern, subjectively moral, secular multiculturalists who run the big European institutions will postpone all decisions until it's too late. That's what's going on now. They may arrive at Greek default through sheer sloth.

The individuals pulling their money out of the country don't operate with the same languid speed and once out, they'll be difficult to tempt back into the country. A billion a day isn't chump change and you got to figure it's only going to accelerate.

That doesn't look like a jog to me, that looks like acceleration out of the starting blocks.

Needle Exchanges For Heroin Addicts

... is the subject of an article in today's WSJ. HIV and Hep C infection rates are on the rise as heroin addicts share needles with each other. In the article, needle exchange is offered as a solution.

A solution for what? Heroin addicts are pretty much doomed. If the HIV doesn't get them, other secondary effects from the heroin will. The problem isn't the HIV or Hep C, the problem is the heroin in the first place.

Maya Angelou And The Catawba

Pace our recent discussions about Shakespeare as a dead, white male who could be safely ignored because of his association with racist imperialists, I had planned to blog about how we could do the same to Maya Angelou as she was the beneficiary of similar racist imperialism.

When she died, Maya was living in North Carolina and enjoyed all manner of conveniences unknown to the Native Americans whose land she had stolen, if only through a long sequence of financial transactions dating back several centuries. Rather than do the right thing and return the land to the Native Americans, she lived there, a gross insult to the noble people who would have owned the land had they not been slaughtered or evicted. For all intents and purposes, Maya's as guilty as old Will.

The exercise researching the post was revealing. The Catawba Indians occupied that part of North Carolina when the Euros arrived. Here's a little bit about the Catawba.

Catawba warriors were known as the fiercest in the land. The tribe claimed at least eleven other tribes as enemies.

Why were they fighting 11 other tribes? One presumes that the Catawba were racist imperialists as well, otherwise conflict would have been unnecessary and/or resolved by negotiations. Despite this and despite Maya using their land without paying them for it, neither they nor Maya are castigated as the villains they must surely be.

Of course they're not. Maya Angelou was born into poverty and racism. She became a successful artist despite all kinds of disadvantages. The Catawba were doing what made sense to them to survive and flourish. William Shakespeare and the English were no different. We hate Shakespeare and the English, but admire Maya and the Catawba because we're supposed to.

Our political correctness mania isn't about dead, white males, it's about us. It's a way for people to preen and pose and put on airs of pious indignation, showing off for everyone else. It's a fashion statement, not an intellectual movement.

It's not a very attractive fashion statement, either.

If We Wore Ugly Shoes

... would future generations be justified in dismissing us and our achievements?

Yesterday's post about the campus thought police and ISIS lead to a discussion about white supremacist thought in the formative years of the European settlement of the New World. Commenter Ilion pointed out that feelings of group supremacy were pretty much universal, yet only the Europeans are singled out as vile racists. I'd suggest the feelings of superiority hardly mattered.

In reading journals of explorers and historical figures of the time, I don't recall their motivations being racial. Again borrowing from Ilion, they were much more likely to be nationalist than racist. After all, everyone knows the British are better than the French, right? Well, depending on which side of the Channel you were born.

If it didn't matter all that much to them, who are we to turn it into a litmus test? As far as I can tell, the British would have colonized New England whether the natives looked like them or looked like Mohicans or looked like Martians. It wasn't about skin color, it was about escaping poverty and finding new opportunities.

Carrying it one step further, going 200 years into the future, instead of being obsessed with race and sex, what if historians are obsessed with shoes? What can we expect when our fashionably dressed wear things like this?

Forget Shakespeare as a dead, white, imperialist male, 200 years from now no one will read the works of Maya Angelou because our footwear crimes disqualify us all.

The Campus Thought Police And ISIS

I never thought of this analogy before. It seems quite apt, particularly when you read this from Dan Henninger (excerpted below).

@campusreform Sounds a lot like ISIS. Destroy all culture from history that does not fit their way to see the world

— JOB (@Jon_Brenelli) June 16, 2015

Dan Henninger excerpt - RE: the new AP exams in history:

At one point the curriculum’s authors say: “Debate and disagreement are central to the discipline of history, and thus to AP U.S. History as well.” This statement is phenomenally disingenuous. From Key Concept 1.3: “Many Europeans developed a belief in white superiority to justify their subjugation of Africans and American Indians, using several different rationales.” Pity the high-school or college student who puts up a hand to contest that anymore. They don’t. They know the Orwellian option now is to stay down.

Bonus tidbit - Jerry Seinfeld bemoaning the political correctness enforcers:

When In Doubt, Bet On The Soma

Soma was a fictional drug that produced tranquil euphoria in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Virtually the entire population consumed it, mostly as a way of avoiding dealing with difficult problems.

Greece's debt problems are flaring up again. They've got big bills coming due in July and August and no way to pay them. The rest of the EU is demanding reforms as a condition for debt forgiveness or bailouts and the Greeks are fighting all but the most trivial of changes. Dig this.

Although public-sector numbers have been slashed, very few jobs were lost via redundancies: Most were shed via generous early retirement programs that now weigh on the pension system and are crippling the public finances. Meanwhile, Syriza (the dominant Greek political party who just won elections) has vowed to protect existing public-sector jobs, salaries and working conditions.

It sounds like chaos and devastation are about to hit Europe, but after watching this for a while, I'm coming to the conclusion that the abyss is still a ways off.

"Big" debts for Greece are not big debts for the EU. In July and August, the Greeks need to come up with less than $5B each month to stave off collapse. That's impossible for the Greeks, but practically nothing at all for the European Central Bank who could simply print the money so the Europeans could go back to their cafes and sip their lattes.

That's the way I'm betting. There will be lots of yelling and posturing, but in the end, the Europeans will take heavy doses of Soma, print some money and act like there was nothing to worry about after all.

The Best Live Band Is ...

Rend Collective?

Well, they're certainly in the top 5 for me. I've been going to concerts for over 35 years. I've seen everyone from Iron Maiden and AC/DC to the B-52s and Cheap Trick to Santana and James Taylor. Yesterday, I took my daughter to FishFest 2015 and saw a bunch of Christian bands and the performance that stood out was this group from Ireland.


That video only captures a portion of how much fun they are in concert. Fun was the operative word, for them and everyone else who played at FishFest. Included in the lineup were both the Newsboys and Toby Mac. They just killed it, too, but Rend Collective were simply fabulous.

Now if only we could get them to play at our local Irish pub, the Blarney Stone!

Transgendered, Transracial And Living With The Mentally Ill

When you live with someone suffering from an acute mental illness such as borderline personality disorder (read: borderline psychotic) or malignant narcissism, your natural tendency is to adopt their worldview. To do anything else is to invite constant battles over interpretations of events.

The narcissist will tell you how awesome they are in 800 different ways every day even though they may be quite ordinary or below average at whatever is being discussed. If you disagree with the narcissist, you'd best be prepared for an all-day, violent argument. Disagreement threatens the world the mentally ill person has created for themselves. It's an existential threat to them, so fights over even trivial items can go nuclear very quickly.

Such arguments exhaust the sane person and so you avoid them. If you can't escape the relationship, you become slightly crazy yourself, interpreting things through a variant of the crazy person's eyes.

That's where we are right now in the US with gender and race.

Bruce Jenner (is about to) cut off his genitals. He's consuming massive amounts of female hormones, had plastic surgery and dresses up in women's clothing. He demands we call him a woman and we all have to obey because crazy people tell us we should. If we disagree with them, they'll escalate the dispute to nuclear levels immediately and spend the day screaming at us.

If Joe Smith in Scranton cut off his hand, consumed a pint of rum a day, had a prosthetic attached to his arm and dressed up in a pirate costume, when he demanded we call him Captain Hook and treat him like a real pirate, we'd send for a psychiatrist. That's because Joe wouldn't be focusing on sex and sex (and race) is the focal point of the crazy people in the country.

Without a pack of crazy people willing to scream at us, we'd treat Joe like we should treat Bruce Jenner. We'd be sad and sympathetic, but we wouldn't call him a woman. Joe Smith would not be doing the things pirates do just as Bruce Jenner can't do the things women do. Ergo, Joe is not a pirate and Bruce is not a woman. They're guys who cut off body parts, consumed lots of drugs and dressed in costume.

Now we've got Rachel Dolezal claiming to be black and the crazy people are supporting her. Rachel is less a black than Bruce Jenner is a female. Bruce is at least saturated in hormones. Both dress in costume and both are altering their physical appearance. Like Bruce, she's not black, she's just crazy.

Life with the mentally ill gradually becomes untenable. Your friends aren't willing to crawl into the hole of insanity you've dug for yourself, so they slip away. Real world decisions need to be made that conflict with your adopted insane world view. You either destroy your life trying to live with the mentally ill person or you eventually give up, get away from them and return to normalcy.

That's where Rachel and Bruce have placed us. People across the Internet are all tumbling to the same conclusions - if race and gender is something you self-identify and there are lots of benefits to being a black woman when it comes to college admission, government contracts and the like, you'd be a total rube not to self-identify as a black woman.

The obsession with race and gender was always crazy, but we went along with it because crazy people were going to scream at us if we didn't. We've now reached the point where we choose to either further ruin our lives or escape the lunatics.

In all seriousness, I'm not sure which way to bet.

Truly, We Live In A Golden Age

Oh sure, we can no longer build nuclear power plants, hydroelectric dams, heavy-lift space rockets or train tracks, but who cares? This era is all about feelings, man. Just look at what we can do!

We can turn men into women.

We can turn same-sex couples into parents.

And now we can turn whites into blacks!

It's as if the teachers at my daughter's high school were shaping the modern era or something. They didn't teach her any concrete, worthwhile skills, but they did fill her head and the heads of all her peers across the country full of sex, race and gender like there was no tomorrow. Well, there was a tomorrow and that tomorrow is today. Whites into blacks. Amazing. What will they think of next?

This fellow might know what comes next. He's working hard to turn productive people into paupers!

What Can Kill A Narrative?

If you can shoot a narrative, then Baltimore has done it.

Baltimore's crime wave since the "racist" police force informally stood down rather than face possible jail time if an encounter with a thug gets out of hand.

Lots of people are getting hurt so the progressives can continue their fantasy of racist cops. Can we finally put that one to bed and let the poor devils who live in the violent neighborhood get some protection from the police?

An Update From The Catican

Recently, we had a scare with our Maximum Leader, which I shared on Twitter. I wanted to post an update for those kind souls who expressed sympathy.

KT is 16 and has arthritis in her front knees, but until now, she's been otherwise healthy. A month ago, she started drinking lots of water. We thought it was just greediness as she loves to be picked up and put on the bathroom counter so she can drink from the faucet.

A week ago, she started to have accidents in the bathroom. We don't have a litter box. Instead, we let her go outside whenever she wants and she's had no problems with that. The smaller Catican Guard, a chihuahua mix, occasionally has accidents in the house when no one is home and she's too scared to go outside. Our Maximum Leader's accidents were right where the little Guard had gone, so we figured that was just odor-induced.

A few days ago, she started throwing up much more than normal and became listless. We took her into the vet and everyone suspected that #1 killer of cats, kidney failure. Tests were run and while we were waiting, we discovered that dry food makes her throw up, but wet food seems to be fine. All of these symptoms match kidney failure.

Things looked bleak for Her Serene Furriness.

The tests came back yesterday. She's close to the beginning of kidney failure, but she's not there yet. No need for special diets, but she's eaten her last dry kibble and she's going to get all the water she wants. We installed a litter box upstairs in the bathroom to stop the accidents.

So far it's all working fine. She's back to her normal self and there have been no more accidents. The litter box is a total drag as she has decided it's far easier to go there then bother wandering outside. The clumping litter can't be flushed and she's tracking litter all over the bathroom. Still, those are solvable problems. Kidney failure is not. I'll take that trade any time.

Gushifud from now on? Awesome! 

Surf Photography

I had another blog post in mind until a friend at work turned me on to this. Enjoy!

Yellow

I left this one fairly large, so I think it's worth a click. It's a flower from my mom's garden. My mom is a very accomplished horticulturalist. She's the one who taught and inspired me to garden. Thanks, Mom!

The Atheistic, Nihilistic Despair Of Birdman

We watched the Oscar-winner, Birdman last night. I won't do a full review as I spent the morning experimenting with Haggen's store-made pork sausage. Like almost everything Haggen's has done since they took over the local Albertsons at the behest of the government, it was awful.

Forward!

Back to the movie observation.

There's a scene in it where the protagonist's daughter rails at him that he is nothing. He's not just a washed-up, has-been actor, he was never any good in the first place and he's utterly worthless. It's a key speech as everyone in the movie seems to have this very same opinion of themselves and all those around them. No one is happy.

As I watched it, my immediate reaction was, "No! You were made by a loving God who gave His only Son for your salvation! We are all loved, we are all important. In the eyes of God, as it should be with our own eyes, we are all equally loved and important, from the schizophrenic alcoholic on the street corner to the biggest movie star there is!"

My world-view is on the wane, however, and I don't expect to see it on the big screen, not even quietly mouthed by a minor character.

Oh well. That's progress, such as it is.

In other news, the feminist icon coed who ran around a campus carrying her mattress in protest over an alleged rape and whose world-view is ascendant, has released a sex tape. Forward, indeed.

The Houthis And The Battle Of Britain

I would argue that this saying is at the heart of our foreign policy: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." President Obama is a big fan of it.

It allows us to take a hands-off approach to events around the world. It allows us to cut our military and reduce troop levels. It is also utter nonsense.

In the summer of 1940, the Luftwaffe and the RAF battled it out over the skies of England in what became known as The Battle of Britain. The RAF won, but few today know what a close-run thing it was. At the start of the campaign, the Luftwaffe focused on destroying the RAF. They bombed airfields and did their best to bring the RAF out into the skies for massive dogfights. Not knowing how close they were to victory, they changed their tactics in midstream and chose to bomb cities instead, thinking they could drive England to sue for peace by killing large numbers of civilians.

Just prior to that shift by the Germans, the RAF had planned to pull out of Southeastern England. The airfields there were in ruins and they were paying too high a price to defend them. Had they pulled out, it would have meant that German aircraft and English aircraft would have needed the same amount of time to reach London and other key cities. Coastal radar installations would have been practically undefended and knocking them out would have blinded the RAF planners.

But for a single decision, the moral arc of the Universe bent towards Nazism.

Dig this from today's WSJ.

RIYADH—Saudi Arabia shot down a Scud missile fired into the kingdom as Yemen’s Houthi rebels attacked several points in southern Saudi Arabia, the Saudi state news agency said Saturday, in the first time a Scud has been used in the monthslong conflict.

There is no moral arc at work here, just two nations - Saudi Arabia and Iran - at war through proxies. There is no guarantee the Saudis will win in the long run. There is no assurance that anything other than military might, the will to take casualties and the skill of the soldiers and commanders will make the difference. There is no arc of history at play here, just the same force of arms conflict from time immemorial.

We can be as understanding and open-minded as we like. The people of 1940 England were, too and they quite nearly lost the war.

Fear Not, Citizens, The Secretary Of State's Email Server Was Constantly Watched By Secret Service Agents!

Yeah, there were no problems with securing the home email server of our Secretary Of State. Definitely not.

U.S. officials suspect that hackers in China stole the personal records of as many as four million people in one of the most far-reaching breaches of government computers.

There's no way the Chinese would have been spying on the incompetent harpy woman who was 3rd in line for the presidency.

Investigators suspect that hackers based in China are responsible for the attack, though the probe is continuing, according to people familiar with the matter. On Thursday, several U.S. officials described the breach as among the largest known thefts of government data in history.

Next: A Schizophrenia Bundt Cake!

Over on Twitter, The Meanest Boss Ever shared this piece of idiocy with me following Bruce Jenner's mutilation into a semi-functional sex toy.

What passes for science these days. A color drawing with some axes and labels.

The dude has himself whacked in the groin, consumes insane amounts of female hormones, has various other Dr. Moreau treatments done to himself and the libertines fall all over themselves in paroxysms of joy, illustrating their support with pictures of gingerbread men.

With friends like this, who needs enemies?

The best follow-on would be a schizophrenia Bundt cake. The outside could be decorated with images of faces and a little action figure could be put in the middle symbolizing the open and healthy dialogue between the schizophrenic and the disembodied voices. Note that we don't call them imaginary voices because that would be denying the schizophrenic's reality and who are we to do that?

Here's a Bundt cake for arachnophobes. Put the action figure in the middle of this and it's surrounded by spiders. Yay! Equality now!

Sexbot Voting Rights - The Cause Of The Future!

This has got to be Tweet of the Day:

Do social liberals sometimes wonder with fear or excitement what new cause they will be self-righteously promoting a few years from now?

— Chateaubriand ن (@Chateaubriand__) June 3, 2015

My immediate thought was voting rights for sexbots. It's the Daily Double for the libertines and progressives - it's wild, unfettered sex and voting rights for the easily-manipulated. Just think what you'll be called if you oppose it. You'll be a specieist, a prude, robotophobic, the opportunities are endless!

The future. It's going to be great!

It gives pleasure and votes for social justice. If you don't support this, you're a hater!

How Could There Be A Disconnect?

Leaving the Forum after the U2 concert on Saturday night, we drove east on West Manchester to get on the 110 and head back to San Diego. There were two police helicopters in the air just south of us, flashing their searchlights below, looking for someone. When we got to Figueroa, the street just in front of the 110, we came to a complete stop as no fewer than 6 cop cars went screaming by, down into the same neighborhood where the choppers were orbiting.

If 6 cars came from our location, it's a safe bet that others were converging from other directions.

The neighborhood is exclusively black except for where it's exclusively Hispanic.

From the demographics dot map. Green is black, yellow is Hispanic. The cops were headed to the circled area. Blue dots represent whites, red dots, Asians. There are no red or blue dots in the area.

Here's what had to have happened: Black or Hispanic citizens called the cops because black or Hispanic gang members were shooting each other / random people / both. The people who called the cops knew that some of the cops who came would be white. They asked white cops to come to their neighborhood to protect them.

This happens all the time.

Meanwhile, inside the Forum, Bono did a "hands up, don't shoot" bit in one of his songs, just like so many other entertainers and politicians. For the celebrities, the white cops are dangerous, racist thugs. For the people in this pretty poor part of town, the cops were reassuring and needed.

How is it possible that these people have so little contact with the realities of life in Baltimore, Inglewood, Detroit and East St. Louis? Even if they live in a total bubble, how does that bubble perpetuate itself? Wouldn't you think that eventually they'd have to see reality?

Bono Needs To Take A Break From Davos And Visit Inglewood Instead

We went to see U2 at the Forum in LA on Saturday. It was a terrific show, albeit full of political and social messages aimed at the 1970s. Lots of talk about MLK, Amnesty International, Irish car bombings from 40 years ago, social justice and even some gloating by Bono about the gay marriage vote in Ireland. Bono did some name-dropping as well, mentioning Davos in one between-song talk. It was all very conventional, like listening to Lawrence Welk talking to you decades ago.

Outside the Forum, in Inglewood, fatherless black men were shooting other fatherless black men.

INGLEWOOD: As many as five people were shot and wounded today in violence that started at gang party in Inglewood before spilling into neighboring South Los Angeles.

Two of the victims, both men, were wounded in a car-to-car shooting in Inglewood and ended up at the intersection of Van Ness and Century Boulevard, according to Lt. Leonard Perez of the Los Angeles Police Department’s 77th Street Station.

I've never been a big U2 fan and I don't own any of their music. I usually liked their singles when they were played on the radio, but I'd never heard a full album.  I had no idea how relentlessly political they were.

Bono beat his messages from 20, 30 and 40 years ago into our heads with every tool he could find. Meanwhile, in the year 2015, not 6 blocks from where his wealthy fans were nodding their heads in agreement and singing along, poor, black boys from "perfectly acceptable alternative family structures" were dying at each others' hands.

Bono's heart is unquestionably in the right place, but his messages seemed like such a wasted opportunity.