Just Another Signpost

... on the road to Gomorrah*.

It's election season, so the TV is filled with ads for mysterious ballot propositions.

Aside: I've always wanted to print a bumper sticker and a yard sign for a non-existent proposition with an inscrutable tagline. It would say something like: "Yes on Q! Excoriate the Cephalopods!"

Last night, while expanding my vocabulary with Pat and Vanna, I saw one for some education bond or tax or theft. Whatever it was, more money was going to be given to edumakashun. Hooray for larnin'! One of the sales points was that the money was going to allow teachers to improve early education as in K-3.

Or maybe I'm conflating this with something I read on the web. Who knows. They always want more and more money to do things mankind has been doing for 2,000 years - teach basic literacy and math.

How much has really changed in what we expect out of 8-year-olds over the last, say, two centuries? Are we hoping they pick up breadboard soldering skills, or is it still phonics and basic math functions? I've been out of the parenting-tiny-tots business for a while, so I'm not sure, but I suspect we still hope they've got "C-A-T" and "3 x 4 = 12" by second grade and not much else.

Getting to the point: If we need more and more money to inflict the same basic skills we did 100 years ago, doesn't that indicate the incoming raw material is of worse quality?

I wonder why that is.

* - I have to admit, these kinds of posts are part easy to write, part heartfelt and part self-parody. I'm well aware that if you read my blog there would be a ton of doom, Doom, DOOM!

The Cops Don't Matter

... all that much.

I'm almost at the end of J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, his autobiographical recollections of growing up in a hillbilly family in Kentucky and Ohio. All of the modern, secularist pathologies are there - illegitimacy, drug use, shacking up, poor school performance, violence and on and on and on.

As he closes the story, he talks about what made the biggest difference in his life, what made him turn from failure to success. A stint in the Marine Corps taught him that his decisions matter, that he's not some helpless cork bobbing about in a sea of forces that dominate his life. It's that feeling that you lack agency which holds you down, not some mysterious, malignant "them."

To the title of this post, we spend a lot of time talking about police behavior, probably 100 times more than we should when you consider their importance in anyone's life. How often does someone in the underclass actually interact with the police? How often do they interact with their parents and their peers? If you're a kid and you go home to mom and her 4th live-in boyfriend in 2 years, what had the biggest impact on your life, that time a few months ago when a cop got rough with you or the chaos and conflict at home every day and every night?

Black Lives Matter is more than just a modern version of the KKK. It's a complete distraction and a waste of time.

Dig this.

For sexual abuse the rates are even higher. Compared to the always intact married family:

• The rate of sexual abuse is 5 times higher in the single parent family and when both biological parents are cohabiting (i.e. unmarried).
• The rate of sexual abuse is 8.6 times higher if the child is living in a married step family.
• The rate of sexual abuse is 20 times higher if the mother is cohabiting with a boyfriend.

If we acknowledged these facts, we'd have to re-examine our take on subjective morality and all-families-are-equal. We're not yet prepared to do that. Reality is a funny thing, though. You can only ignore it for so long.

Seen At A Local Dessert Specialty Restaurant

V is also for "Very hungry after eating lentils and tofu. Please pass me some BBQ ribs."

Diversity Makes Us Stronger

... but let's not talk about anything negative when it relates to, err, people of color even if it means they die in huge numbers due to some social pathology. After all, ignoring a problem is half the battle. Or something like that.

A young man I used to know well when he was a boy recently succumbed to heroin. He was never going to set the world on fire, but he was a decent enough kid when I knew him. It hit me pretty hard.

I did a little more digging into the national heroin situation and I came across this bit on ABC News' website.

Republican Gov. Paul LePage is being accused again of making racially insensitive comments, this time by saying photos he's collected in a binder of drug dealers arrested in the state show more than 90 percent of them are black or Hispanic.

All of the standard gasping, fainting and pointing racialist nonsense is there. Nowhere in it are crime statistics mentioned. It doesn't matter if Governor LePage is telling the truth, it's all about his ghastly insensitivity. Mounds of black corpses could be piling up right outside the ABC News offices, each riddled with heroin needles, but that's not the point. In fact, much of the article addresses Trump.

Go figure.

Meanwhile, PBS has a similar article on heroin and race. In this case, the issue is that not enough people are paying attention to the heroin epidemic among blacks and Hispanics.

Dear PBS - you might want to consult ABC News as to why no one is talking about it. Governor LePage talked about it and look what he got for his trouble. Of course, PBS is so similarly race-besotted they hardly need to consult anyone else to find out why some things just aren't discussed in polite company.

Anyway, in that article, there's a series of graphs, breaking down the increase in heroin-related deaths by race. See if you can spot the outlier. You might need to click on the image.

"Figures are too small to reliably calculate a percentage increase." LOL!

Hmm. So the race with the lowest incidence of illegitimacy, the highest test scores and the highest income also uses heroin the least? Amazing. It's almost like self-denial and hard work are important or something. Oh well. Mustn't judge. There is no objective morality, after all.

From the comments section comes this perfect encapsulation of the secular culture of 2016.

Taking drugs isn't a crime, I own my body and I'll put into it anything I feel like. On the other hand if these hypocritical politicians want to be tough on crime and keep it illegal while refusing to provide treatment funds...

No irony intended there, I'm sure. I'll do what I want, you can't judge me and you need to buy my treatment drugs.

Also from the comments was a mention of this book which is the story of how a black woman got off heroin. I just bought it and might blog about it later.

Free Speech Is More Than Rules

The other day, I was watching a YouTube video of Milton Friedman debating some college students in the late 70s or early 80s. It was contentious, but polite and civil. It dawned on me that were he alive today, he wouldn't even be allowed on campus for fear of Social Justice Warrior protests and riots.

My, how times have changed.

Pigs, Candidates And A Kangaroo

I was going to make some astute observation about this election, that it's really about nothing at all and compare it to watching pigs in mud, but when I started looking for some pigs-in-mud videos on YouTube, I came across the one below and decided it was more fun than a head-scratcher about how we ended up with Trump and Hillary.

Dig the kangaroo around 3:15. What's he trying to do? What kind of family keeps pigs and kangaroos indoors?

To the original point, I can't really tell what issues are at stake in the election. Now that Trump has backed off his immigration stance, he and the Hildebeest seem interchangeable. Yeah, I know, Supreme Court, Supreme Court, Supreme Court. Well, until we start drawing justices from normal America instead of the Ivy League bubble, we're going to get a Supreme Court that sneers at us and tells us our votes don't count. See also: ObamaCare and Gay Marriage rulings.It hardly matters who nominates them, they all end up the same.

A Cat At Rest

... tends to stay at rest.

Unless it's our Maximum Leader, Maddi, who is the busiest cat I've ever met. This is the first time in a long time that I've been able to get close to her while she's snoozing on the couch. She usually leaps up and runs off to do something else. It's not fear, she's just a very busy cat.

LOLCat of the Day

You Can't Make An Omelette Without Shooting Some Drug Dealers

The Phillipines has had more than enough of the scourge of drugs.

The head of the Philippines police has said more than 1,900 people have been killed during a crackdown on illegal drugs in the past seven weeks.

(Phillipine President Rodrigo Duterte) won the presidency with his hard-line policy to eradicate drugs.

Here's my favorite part.

He has previously urged citizens to shoot and kill drug dealers who resisted arrest, and reiterated that the killings of drug suspects were lawful if the police acted in self-defence.

He also threatened to "separate" from the UN after it called his war on drugs a crime under international law.

Needless to say, human rights activists, living in their gated communities, far away from drugged-out prostitutes jerkily staggering down the street in the morning, put down their lattes long enough to register protests. The US, of course, is siding with the drug dealers and addicts people who follow alternative lifestyles, because, hey, everyone has to decide what's right for them. There's no such thing as right or wrong for everyone.

The US has said it is "deeply concerned" by the increase in drug-related killings.

Sometimes the right thing to do is to be taken to a morgue. Who are you to judge?

Now That Social Decay Has Hit Whites

... we might start to examine it more closely without all the obscuring racial nonsense.

I'm listening to Hillbilly Elegy right now. It's a fascinating book describing the white poor of Appalachia. Coincidentally, I ran across this essay on the travails of the white underclass which was excellent. Here's a tidbit.

In McCreary County, Kentucky, the last fifteen years have brought a “75 percent increase in the mortality rate for white women between the ages of 35 and 59, one of the highest in the nation,” according to the paper. The story of death in this rural county, which is 91 percent white, is fraught with drugs, suicide, violence, and broken families.

It is the long-held position of The Scratching Post crack editorial staff that the rejection of objective morality, particularly the rejection of traditional marriage as a foundational institution, is the primary root cause of our social pathologies. While the pathologies seemed localized in the black community, where illegitimacy is about 75%, the conversation was easily derailed by shouts of "Racism!" Now that the same scourges are coming to white communities in quantities sufficient to warrant mainstream media attention, maybe we'll be able to discuss it.

I Thought We Had Child Labor Laws

Dig this.

WHEAT RIDGE, CO (KDVR/CNN) - Donald Trump's campaign has some young blood among its leadership.

And by young, that means 12 years old.

In one of the most important counties in swing state Colorado, Donald Trump is relying on 12-year-old Weston Imer, who runs the Jefferson County operation for the Trump campaign.

Jefferson County is one of the most populous counties in Colorado and is part of the Denver metro area.

That's your man, Trumpkins. The one that is such a great leader, businessman and negotiator. He's got a 12-year-old running his campaign in a key part of a crucial swing state. If I didn't know better, I'd say he was trying to lose.

Butter In Coffee

... is actually pretty good.

One of our sons and his girlfriend are trying the Bulletproof Diet. I haven't looked it up, but I'm sure it's out there somewhere on the Interweb Tubes. You can only eat from 2 PM to 8 PM, but you can start your day with buttered coffee.

Lunatic diets aside, the coffee is tasty. We've got a Keurig which, after trying just about every cup I can get my hands on, produces coffee only a step up from instant. It can, however, heat water for a French Press.

The buttered coffee can be made easily in the French Press. You take a teaspoon of butter, put it on the bottom of the press and then put your coffee grounds on top of that. You then convince the Keurig to put the appropriate amount of hot water into the press and proceed normally. The butter melts, but doesn't form a layer at the top. Maybe it gets smushed into tiny particles by the press.

In any case, the resulting concoction is delish! Try it sometime.

Maybe If Trangendered People Were Dying Of Overdoses

... we'd pay attention.

This was pretty surprising. It's not causing much controversy like letting men into women's restrooms, but still.

Losing Turkey

The horror show that is US foreign policy is no longer moving in slow motion. We've either done it or will soon do it - move our nuclear weapons out of Turkey.

Ankara’s recent closeness with Moscow and worsening relations with Washington post failed military coup might be a reason that the US has started transferring nuclear weapons stationed in Turkey to Romania.

Turkey is a member of NATO, at least for now. This isn't Syria or Libya or Iraq, this is a large, populous, powerful country that has been a major ally for decades. How long before we lose our air base there?

What is this clown thinking?

A Palate Cleanser

... submitted without excuse or explanation. Enjoy!

Once You Get An Irresistible Force Started

... they're pretty hard to stop. Makes sense, doesn't it? After all, they're irresistible.

The Milwaukee riots, as amply pointed out by Heather MacDonald, are a natural outgrowth of the grievance culture stoked to a white heat by academia, the news media, talk shows, our president and the whole Democrat Party. Now that we've got these going, how do we stop them or even slow them down? More to the point, what real things can change that will lead the angry cohorts of aggrieved identity groups to calm down?

• You can't give them money, we're $20T in debt
• You can't make it easier for them to get into college, we did that and the under-qualified ones flunk out
• You can't make it easier to graduate without making the graduates unemployable
• There don't seem to be any new approaches to hate crime or civil rights legislation

With so little to change, how do you keep from being labeled a sell-out if you start to make moderation and reconciliation noises?

Dig this earnest analysis of the Milwaukee "Uprising." It's a concise summary of the worldview of the aggrieved.

Ride the tiger, kids. Just don't get off. The payoff is around 0:50. "What have the business owners done for the community?" What are they supposed to do? It's hard enough to run a business without having to tack on social justice requirements.

So we've revved up the grievance engine and it's gotten to the point where cops are being targeted and riots break out even when black cops shoot armed black criminals. We've pretty much run out of things to improve or change, so even slowing this thing down is going to be tough.

Any Hope Of Containing Iran Is Gone

Dig this.

MOSCOW—The Russian military said Tuesday it had launched an airstrike against targets in Syria from an air base in western Iran, marking new military coordination between Tehran and Moscow in support of the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Tu-22M3 long-range bombers and Su-34 tactical bombers took off from an air base in Hamedan, Iran, to carry out a “concentrated airstrike” against the militant groups Islamic State and Nusra Front, the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement...

“We will put our facilities at Russia’s disposal in its war against terrorism,” Iran’s Supreme National Security Council said in a statement published by the agency.

The only way you were going to stop Iran from getting nukes was a ground invasion and regime change. The opportunity for that was almost completely lost when we pulled out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Now with the Russians inside Iran, that window is completely closed.

I hope those "Death to America!" chants were just vocal warm-up exercises.

Office Cat

Our Maximum Leader, Maddi, has taken to joining us when we're in our offices at home.

A calm and soothing presence.

Pandora's Box

... was a cautionary tale, not an instruction manual.

So last  night in Milwaukee, an armed, black car thief was shot and killed by a black police officer when said thief refused to put down his gun. This led to riots and demands for racial justice. I'm not going to bother to post the links here, they're easy to find. A black alderman from Milwaukee threatened more violence if there wasn't racial justice. Said racial justice was undefined. The black officer who shot the black criminal was working for a black chief of police.

When you've got that combination and you still get riots, it looks as though Pandora's racial box has been almost completely opened.

We opened a lid when we said all family structures were equal and made fathers optional.

We opened a lid when we did away with objective morality and gave victim classes the right to define their own morality.

We opened a lid when we took religious institutions out of the schools, assuming there would be some science-y morality that would take its place.

We keep opening these lids and the demons keep escaping.

One of the Clintons' mansions. It's far, far away from the demons in Milwaukee, Chicago, Baltimore, ...

Update: Dig this scene. It's like he's a fallen soldier or something. Dude was an armed criminal. There's something profoundly sick about this.

People gathering at the scene of the fatal police shooting on 44th and Auer #milwaukee pic.twitter.com/EKFfnyHiv4

— Mike De Sisti (@mdesisti) August 15, 2016

This Is Not A "Change" Election

... because no matter who wins, we'll continue on cruise control right down the road we're travelling.

Consider this:

• Is anyone addressing the effects of illegitimacy? Nope. 2 or 4 years from now, the culture, crime and education won't be any better or even going in a better direction without a change in our families. As illegitimacy is the primary source of income inequality, there's zero chance that will get better.
• Is anyone addressing the debt in a serious way? Only Gary Johnson and he's the longest of long shots. Our deficit this year is $600B. If interest rates weren't being held artificially low by the Fed, interest on our debt would drive the deficit up to $1T.
• Is anyone addressing racial healing? No way. Both sides are whipping up their partisans to even greater heights of racism. Black Lives Matter is the modern KKK while the KKK is making a bit of a comeback of its own, thanks to Trump. No one is even trying to slow them down.
• Is anyone addressing the ongoing, endless Islamic global civil war? No. In fact, I can't tell that anyone even recognizes that it's happening. Our focus is all on Europe and America which are relatively quiet fronts compared to Africa and the Middle East. The Middle East gets attention, but only as isolated hot spots, not as part of a wider war.
• Is anyone addressing the way in which the first amendment is being rapidly dissolved? Not that I can see. Not even the alleged Libertarians! Relatively benign speakers are banned from campuses for fear of violence - the violence of the campus residents themselves. A bill is being seriously considered in California that would allow the State to ban religious instruction in explicitly religious schools. People are losing their jobs for unpopular speech, words are being banned, the list goes on and on. The mob is speaking and the government is caving.

Whoever wins in November, there will be a massive repudiation in the 2018 midterm elections because the problems driving our discontent will have gotten worse. Right now, it's looking like a mammoth Hillary landslide, thanks to the morons in the Republican Party who helped nominate Trump. 2018 ought to be a smackdown of epic proportions for the Democrats.

Perseids

My wife and I got up around 2:30 this morning and drove out to Sunrise Highway to see the Perseid meteor shower. She brought along an inflatable mattress and some pillows so we cuddled up in our SUV with the sunroof open and watched the show.

It was pretty nice. I must have seen 50 of them, some with very nice tails. The video below is pretty cool, if a bit over-produced. I'm a little sleep-deprived and don't have the time to find a better one. Enjoy!

Pure Cotton Candy

This has nothing to do with anything, it's just hilarious. Somehow, Dikembe Mutombo came up at work, which led me to this video. Enjoy.

Mobile Bay Seafood Jubilee

... is something I heard about while listening to the Gravy Podcast*.

It turns out that when conditions are right in a certain part of Mobile Bay, fish, crabs and shrimp will beach themselves on purpose, allowing residents to pick them up. No need to go out fishing when the fish come right to you!

All it requires is very little wind, hot weather and plenty of detritus in the water for the local bacteria to eat. These combine to use up most of the available oxygen and the fish and arthropods run for shore in search of breathable water. Crazy, no?

Since the seafood is still alive and no toxins are involve, it's all good to eat!

* - The Gravy Podcast is a decent one about cooking and the South. However, as it has a very PBS flavor, expect political silliness to pop in from time to time. This episode made sure to bring up racism and global warming climate change. I was a little disappointed that income inequality didn't make an appearance. After all, this was a podcast about seafood.

Japanese Love Mexican

Japanese beetles love Mexican burritos, that is.

After Mass on Sunday, we went to a local Rubio's and got fish burritos. A Japanese beetle decided to join us for a bite. He (or she) spent a great deal of time on my burrito and I think he was licking up the white sauce.

I left the photos quite large and my Galaxy S7 did a stellar job, so they're definitely worth a click to see the full-scale versions. Enjoy!

Happy International Cat Day!

Our Maximum Leader, Maddi, wishes you a happpp...zzzzzzzzzzzz

Spiritual Sloth

Sloth is an occasional, but long-lasting sin for me. I'll be fine for quite a while and then I can go a whole week not feeling like doing anything that requires willpower. I sin, but don't care about it. I've tried to find patterns in it, but I can't.

That probably takes too much effort. :-)

I went to Confession the other night and finally laid bare my spiritual sloth. I think I took the priest by surprise. It was clearly a weird confession. He struggled to find a penance that was appropriate and usually he's very creative and on-target. He needn't have looked hard. The old school Act of Contrition had the right stuff.

O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins because of Thy just punishments, but most of all because they offend Thee, my God, Who art all-good and deserving of all my love.

Emphasis mine. Hillsong United's song, Hosanna, has an appropriate bit, too.

Heal my heart and make it clean
Open up my eyes to the things unseen
Show me how to love like you have loved me

Break my heart for what breaks yours
Everything I am for Your kingdom's cause
As I walk from earth into eternity

"Break my heart for what breaks yours" is pretty potent stuff. While I can't find a source for the sloth*, maybe I can find a way to bring it up short by contemplating the hurt I cause.

But enough of that introspection. Here's a live version of Hosanna, which originally showed up Hillsong's first album, All of the Above. The album rocks surprisingly hard, given how Aftermath, its sequel, is kind of listless. Like most Hillsong tunes, this takes a while to get going. If you just want to see the payoff, scrub to about 2:45. Enjoy!

* - Finding a source for the sloth should be easy. "Well, KT, when a mommy sloth and daddy sloth love each other very much ..."

Ignorance Leads To Open-Mindedness

... and that title is not the lead in to a wry joke. I'm serious.

When I've spoken to people who think that all religions are basically the same, a little probing reveals that they know practically nothing about any religion in particular. Some will have been raised as Christians, but even they will have only the most cursory understanding of the philosophy.

Marinated in our culture of moral relativism and multiculturalism, they deride any claim that one is better than another. Since they don't know enough to make a judgment call, they assume there isn't enough to be known to make a judgment call and anyone who maintains the superiority of one over another is an ignorant bigot. In fact, it's the open-minded secularist who is ignorant.

It's not just ignorance, either. Sloth plays a big part.

When confronted, for example, by the Islamist who blew away those gays in Orlando, they dismiss it as a one-off and point to Westboro Baptist Church (population: 40) as an example. Even when shown how Islamic republics the world over discriminate against gays, they find excuses and dismiss it. This is done so they don't have to take the time to learn anything.

Wine = Slime

The old saw goes that if you take a spoonful of wine and add it to a glass of gutter slime, you have a glass of gutter slime. If you take a spoonful of gutter slime and add it to a glass if wine, you also have a glass of gutter slime. The secularist concludes that wine=slime and there's no point in learning about either wine or slime. They can safely (and smugly) go on with their lives, "knowing" that all religions are equally slimy.

Judgment Requires Education

When you choose between two functionally similar items on Amazon, you spend time learning enough about them to make a choice. The more complicated the function, the longer it takes to be able to make a good decision. Buying a bottle opener is pretty easy. Choosing a cable modem is harder. Buying a car is much harder still.

Buying a life philosophy is the most difficult of all. All those moving parts, all those complications! There are so many to choose from, too! Some of them come from cultures totally alien to us so learning about them requires more than just learning their basic tenets. What a lot of work.

Jon Stewart Points The Way

Don't do the work. Don't bother learning. Instead, fall back on a dismissive wave of your hand and a sneer at the ignorant bigots who disagree. You can mock them, knowing you are in plentiful, if not good, company. The people we are supposed to respect in politics, the media and academia will provide plenty of cover. 

No, you may safely go back to binge-watching Game of Thrones, knowing that you're on the Right Side of History. After all, you're open-minded.

Time Travel Short Story Idea

In the future, someone invents a time travel machine and makes it so inexpensive that just about anyone can afford one. The first people who choose to go back into the past return with casualties and diseases because life is so much worse. Consequently, people decide to go into the future because everything will be better due to technological improvements.

In the end, everyone is going into the future on their time machines and no one is working on anything.

---

I'm just an idea man. I'll leave it to you to write the rest of it.

When The Geocentric Model Of The Universe Comes In Contact With An Islamic Civil War

I've recently discovered French academic Pierre Manent. Now usually, French intellectuals don't stir the heart so much as cause you to gain callouses on your forehead as you beat your head against your desk in exasperation with them. Pierre is a different breed of chat. He's got some insights into European culture that are the best crystallization of what I've been feeling, but haven't been able to express. Here's the article and here's the payoff paragraph for me.

The French are exhausted, but they are first of all perplexed, lost. Things were not supposed to happen this way. … We had supposedly entered into the final stage of democracy where human rights would reign, ever more rights ever more rigorously observed. We had left behind the age of nations as well as that of religions, and we would henceforth be free individuals moving frictionless over the surface of the planet. … And now we see that religious affiliations and other collective attachments not only survive but return with a particular intensity. Everyone can see and feel this, but how can it be expressed when the only authorized language is that of individual rights? We have become supremely incapable of seeing what is right before our eyes. Meanwhile the ruling class, which is not a political but an ideological class, one that commands not what must be done but what must be said, goes on indefinitely about “values,” the “values of the republic,” the “values of democracy,” the “values of Europe.” This class has been largely discredited in the eyes of citizens, but it occupies all the positions of institutional responsibility, especially in the media, and nowhere does one find groups or individuals who give the impression of understanding what is happening or of being able to stand up to it. We have no more confidence in those who lead us than in ourselves.

In effect, the post-modern, secular culture lacks the mental framework and perhaps even the language to accurately describe what's going on in Europe. Here's the Google map of Islamic attacks I referenced in a recent post.

This is the map of a world at war, but a culture that can only describe the world in terms of individual rights and sees generalizations by race, nation or creed as heresy is not going to be able to make sense of it. Like the Geocentric astronomers claiming that the other planets had crazy orbits in order to maintain their theory in the face of increasing evidence of the Heliocentric model, our elites have to come up with ever more ridiculous explanations for what is a global civil war within Islam that is spilling out into the rest of the world.

Spoofing Hillary

I've read in a few places that the Russians may have had Hillary's email password. Doesn't that change the problem a bit? It's not that they could have been reading her emails, it's that they could have been writing and sending emails in her name. Imagine what  they could have told people to do with all the authority of the Secretary of State.

How often do you go through your "sent" folder? How often do you think Hillary did, particularly if she didn't suspect her password was compromised? Not only that, they could have deleted their sent emails as soon as they sent them, removing all but the server log traces of them.

In this day and age where so many things are done via email, how hard would it have been for them to come up with interesting ways to take advantage of their ability to electronically pose as her? Combine a spoof of SecState with a couple of enemy agents in the department and you can execute some really wild schemes against the US.

The Border Is A Temporary Problem. The Budget Is Not.

As Trump continues with his hateful Trumpisms, my Trumpertarian friends defend their hideous leader with the rallying cry, "We must protect our border!"

Very soon, the border isn't going to matter at all.

Mexican immigration ebbs and flows. When their economy is doing well, they go home. When it's doing poorly, they come here. If you're concerned that America might become Hispanic, don't be. It's too late for that. America will end up Hispanic no matter what happens in November. There are lots of them and they have babies. Personally, I like it. I'm groovy with Hispanics. When you go to a Hispanic Catholic Mass, the energy level is about 10 times higher than at a mostly-white Mass. It's all good. Also, Spanish is an easy language to learn.

The budget deficit and debt, on the other hand, aren't going away, they're getting worse. Trump has no plan for that and Hillary is horrific on it. Your only choice is Gary Johnson if the long-term health of the Republic matters to you. He's the only one who even talks about the debt.

If you still think the border is more important than the debt, consider this: Does anyone think that Venezuela is worried about immigration right now?

The Secularist's Philosophy - Debt

I started what I thought would be a pretty easy series of posts deriving the modern, secular, progressive philosophy with this post on children. Roughly 3 months later, I'm getting around to post number 2. Here's the point of the series.

I've decided to take a look at my own formulations for what I've been calling the progressive, post-modern, secular world. In this, I'll use secular as a short hand for that formulation to make it more readable...My definition of the term is the dominant culture in America and Western Europe...

I've been wrong to say that secularists have discarded objective morality. If they had, then the Confederate flag would still be flying in South Carolina and Brendan Eich would still be the CEO of Mozilla. They most certainly do have objective morality, but it's not one that I can find accurately described anywhere. In a series of posts, I'll try to define the characteristics of secular philosophy and morality through observation.

Debt

You'd think that with all of my wild-eyed ranting about debt, this would have been an easy post to write, but it's been a bear. I went round and round in my head trying to come up with a generalization about the $20T Federal debt we're leaving to the Millenials and their generational neighbors.  Last week, I had the breakthrough. Dig this.

My wife and I were chatting about how happy we were that none of our kids took out loans to get through college. Graduated and working in their respective fields. they have no debt and we don't, either. We sent them to schools we could afford and demanded they get degrees that would lead to careers. It was a business decision, made with the future in mind.

We both know people of all ages caught underneath that red line. Young people who took out student loans and parents who borrowed to pay for their kids' college educations. Once the degree is complete, they realize what they've done to themselves. They will be spending years paying off these loans. For example, I know a young lady who is moonlighting as a waitress after getting off her full-time day job so she can make her loan payments.

Now dig this.

Federal debt over the same time period. Click on the image for the full, horrible picture.

The graphs are practically the same. The bend starts a bit later in the Federal debt, but it's there nonetheless. At some point in time, we stopped worrying about debt, both personal and public. Why?

Saving money is planning for the future. Borrowing money is spending the future. Those are crude definitions, but on the whole, I think they're right. Savings represent decisions you can make down the road. Loans are decisions taken away from the future. Our kids can choose to vacation in Ireland if they want. They've got the money. Our friends with student loans can't.

Connecting Points 1 And 2

In the first post, we discussed how the secular world has stopped having children. In this one, we see how the secular world is spending future earnings today. They're two sides of the same coin. We're living for today.

See what it gets you? If you borrow too much and don't have any children, you end up wearing dreadful clothes and unable to sync your lips with your words. How ghastly.