Roseanne Barr Is How You Get Shocked By A Trump Win

So Roseanne joked that Obama crony Valerie Jarrett looked like someone from Planet of the Apes. That was enough to have her drawn and quartered, her dismembered body incinerated and the ashes thrown into a swamp. Or something like that.

Scott Adams had a good take on it, one I agree with, mostly. No one seriously thinks Roseanne is a racist. She might be a horrible person as a coworker and a boss, I don't know. She's certainly a ham-fisted comedian. I'd need a couple of beers to be able to watch her show, but I might find it funny after a few pops. She's crude and rough, but Scott (and I) don't see her as disingenuous. I'd say that there is almost no filter between her brain and her mouth or keyboard, in this case.

Roseanne realized her error and almost immediately posted an unqualified apology on her way to the gallows. It didn't do any good, she has now been erased from history.

Lately, in moments of boredom and sloth, I've taken to watching videos of the 2016 election night coverage where one pack of pundits after another watch in evolving horror and shock that Donald Trump is going to beat Hillary Clinton. No one saw it coming and as far as I can tell, they still don't know how or why they got surprised. Roseanne is why.

If a stupid joke from a television superstar leads to her annihilation even after a sincere and complete apology, why would Joe Sixpack ever venture to share an even mildly controversial opinion? You keep your head down and your mouth shut. When you get somewhere that is safe, you can talk (or vote), but in public, you say nothing.

That's how Trump shocked the world. The shock wasn't that Trump beat an unpopular harpy, it's that the public hid their opinions from the elites.

I wonder if Louis XVI and the French aristocracy were surprised when the peasants dispatched them.

CNN's Anderson Cooper in happier times.

How To Win

I had something else in mind today, but then I came across an article in the WSJ describing how we're going after not just the Taliban, but their sources of money and production. Here's the snippet that blew me away, although it shouldn't have. Emphasis mine.

President Donald Trump’s South Asia strategy, announced in August, loosened restrictions on American operations in Afghanistan, an effort to break the stalemate in a war now in its 17th year. Under previous rules, for instance, U.S. aircraft could target militants if they were threatening or fighting allied troops. (Special-operations forces also direct airstrikes at key figures in insurgent and terror groups, such as Islamic State.)

Under the new strategic-bombing policy, U.S. jets can attack insurgents wherever they are found, and attempt to destroy Taliban weapons caches, command facilities and revenue sources.

In other words, we've decided to defeat the enemy instead of running a social justice hashtag campaign.

For the love of God, how is it possible that anyone thought you could win a war by allowing the enemy to pick the time and place of battle? Then again, wining wasn't something mentioned a whole lot in the Obama Administration.

We Demand An Unconditional Surrender From Men!

... at least that's what I think when I read the stats about women being the majority of college students, receiving the majority of degrees and now this.

Women now occupation THE MAJORITY of professional and managerial positions https://t.co/qvYQIoTDBL

— Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) May 29, 2018

What's the end game? Apparently this isn't enough because I've yet to hear peace terms laid out by feminists. Attacks on masculinity and the "patriarchy" continue apace. The only thing I can think is that they won't rest until men have been utterly defeated and are forced into unconditional surrender.

Still, I look forward to the day when the feminists demand equality in jobs like these.

• Sheet Metal Workers (97.4% men)
• Brickmasons (99.3% men)
• Roofers (99.4% men)
• Mining Machine Operators (98.9% men)
• Ground Maintenance Workers (94.1% men)

Happy Memorial Day!

This is my first Memorial Day without my father who was a veteran of both Korea and Vietnam. It's a bit empty not having him around, telling his war stories. I guess I'll have to get used to that.

Pilots from  my dad's outfit in Korea, the 731st Bomb Squadron. He's not in the photo, but I'm sure he knew some of these guys.

Happy Memorial Day, Dad.

What A Media Blackout Looks Like

The Center for Equal Opportunity posted a document recently showing that Asian-Americans are probably facing admittance discrimination from Harvard, MIT and other universities. CalTech, on the other hand, is admitting students without regard for race.

I read about it on a conservative website and then did a search to see how the major news media sites were handling it. I searched on "asian harvard mit caltech" and limited the results to the last week. Here's a screen shot of the top hits.

Notice anything odd?

After a couple of entries on the second page, there are no more hits on the topic of admittance discrimination. There were no hits at all from the major news sites, not even Fox. Also, there were no hits from any of the race-obsessed lefty sites. Only conservative / libertarian sites covered the news.

In a country that is marinating in racial issues, it's telling that this one is getting no play at all. It's kind of like the trial of Kermit Gosnell, the abortionist who was also one of the greatest mass-murderers in American history.

The seats set aside for the press in the courtroom were empty.

I guess some stories are more equal than others.

Alcohol, Porn and Morgan Freeman

Almost all boys are shy when it comes to asking a girl for a date. It's natural self-doubt that comes with being human. It's why alcohol is associated with meeting girls. "I need to have a few drinks to work up the courage to talk to her" is a common theme among men. It lowers your inhibitions and relaxes you so you can overcome your shyness. Listening to some AlAnon podcasts, it's something you hear repeated in lots of men's testimonies.

Morgan Freeman is a smooth operator. If he's not cool and self-confident, no one is. I've read a little about the recent accusations that he was guilty of sexual assault or abusive behavior and I just don't see it. Worse than that is the message it sends to guys. If Morgan Freeman's ultra-cool moves are considered sexual harassment, then my clumsy, uncertain ones are doomed.

If you're not going to date, there's always porn as a fallback. Porn is tremendously addictive. It's also a self-exterminating trap for society.

Courtship is a messy thing. I can recall wanting a first kiss with the woman who is now my wife, but being afraid to try. She told me later that she had been longing to be kissed by me. If we were logical beings, we'd simply come out and say what we wanted and there would be no need to have a few drinks or flirt. Drinks and flirting lead to misinterpretations, mistakes, embarrassment and ... Morgan Freeman being accused of sexual harassment.

So just what is a guy supposed to make of the Morgan Freeman situation? If I were unattached, it would raise my levels of self-doubt. That would lead to needing even more booze to ask someone out on a date or simply ditching the whole thing and consuming porn.

I don't think that's what we want.

Morgan Freeman. There isn't enough booze in the world to make you think you are this cool.

Watching The News Media Interview Itself

I'm a big fan of Candace Owens. This is Candace.

I've been following her for quite some time. She's getting more and more play as people like Scott Adams, Kanye West and several big-name conservative podcasters and media celebrities mention her. Now, Brandy Zadrozny of NBC is going to interview her.

Hi Candace! Thanks for reaching out! Do you have some time for an interview today? Look forward to speaking with you.

— Brandy Zadrozny (@BrandyZadrozny) May 25, 2018

That's not actually true, though, is it? Since lots of us know Candace quite well, it's highly unlikely that Brandy's interview will tell us anything new about Candace. It will, however, tell us a great deal about Brandy and her management at NBC.

We know Candace is not alt-right and she is not far-right. We know she's not a racist. We know she's not an Uncle Tom, an Oreo or any of the other nicknames America's progressive give to people they see as traitors to der Volk. When we see Brandy's finished product, how will it comport with reality? Since we know Candace, but we don't know Brandy, the interview as published will tell us a lot.

It just occurred to me that an even better analogy is Brandy as a student in a lab class. We all know how the experiment should turn out, we all know the objective truth about Candace, so we're going to grade Brandy's analysis and lab notebook against it.

I'm hoping Brandy gets an "A."

Tough Pork Chops Are Everywhere

... and the only way to make sure you don't end up with them is to buy the cheapest ones.

I made Creamy Angel Pork Chop Skillet last night and in so doing, I broke a vow I re-make every time I break it. (That makes sense, you just have to think about it.)

Costco only carries the standard, somewhat-high-end pork chops. Giving in to the sin of sloth, I bought them there instead of making an extra stop at our local market to get the really cheap ones. The "good" chops almost invariably end up tough after cooking. They don't have enough fat to stay moist and tender. The only pork chops worth buying are the ultra-cheap blade cut chops, aka shoulder chops, which look like someone threw leftover pork at a bandsaw from 30' away.

Mmm, bone fragments embedded in the meat!

Never, never, never use anything but blade chops. Never. Mary's recipe was excellent, as usual, but the chops were almost inedible. It was like chewing on tree bark. Unless you time them perfectly and leave the middle pink, they dry out even when immersed in a cream cheese and chicken broth slurry! Madness!

Meanwhile, if you use blade chops, you can abuse them almost any way you please and they'll come out tender and delicious.

OK, this time I'm serious. I vow to never again buy any pork chops except the blade chops.

Hey, stop laughing!

Beta Males And Alpha Whiners

... are not the complete range of males in America. There is a third category which I call "men."

I followed a link to another to another and ended up at a couple of sites which cater to guys who call themselves alpha males, but who are simply whiny little boys. The memes they post cry about how women hurt them or don't respect them or play games. They also beat their chests about how they get more chicks than the feminist boys who cater to demanding women.

What toads. I laughed for a bit at things like this

but by the time I'd seen a dozen of them, I just wanted to leave. Which I did.

I get the memes. Where I work we have a women's group which meets regularly to help women improve their careers and a corporate effort to encourage girls to grow up and get high-tech jobs. That's lovely, but it's telling that they have no interest in breaking the glass ceilings in the lucrative and fast-paced world of landscape maintenance. That industry is all-male as far as I can tell. I guess that's next on their list after they get enough women in STEM. I'm sure that quite soon, I'll be seeing meeting announcements where the topic will be how more of our daughters ought to be shoving lawnmowers around hillsides in Mississippi in July.

Right.

But so what? Yeah, it's annoying and yeah, most of it is hogwash, but how much time do you want to spend on it? The activists on both sides who immerse themselves in it have defined their lives by it. Why do we need to do that?

The thing that really got to me after reading a couple of "alpha male" sites was what a pack of whiners they were. "Ooh, some girls are trying to manipulate me! Wah, some girls are dishonest!" Geeze, dudes, put your big boy undies on and get a grip. There have been swine from both sexes forever. It's not that hard to find places where decent people associate with each other. Of course, that puts a requirement on you to be decent, so maybe that's too much to ask.

Anyway, when you backed up from what they were saying, I wasn't sure if I could tell the difference between an alpha-male scorehound who built his world view around whining and beta males who were doing the same thing, just with a different angle.

There Aren't Any Rules

Insomnia last night and a class this morning means this is a cut-and-paste-and-comment kind of day.

From the WSJ comes this story about how the Euros are upset by Trump, essentially because he's not a member of the global elite and doesn't think like they do. Take the Iran deal, for example. Who does he think he is, upsetting the apple cart? They missed the key feature of Obama's imperial presidency. The un-American imperial part.

From the White House, things look very different. The Iran deal was not a legally binding instrument but the result of President Obama’s overreaching freelance diplomacy—as if Woodrow Wilson, counting the votes against the Treaty of Versailles, unilaterally committed the U.S. to join the League of Nations. The Europeans should have checked the relevant clauses in the American Constitution, assessed the state of congressional sentiment, and realized that Mr. Obama simply lacked the authority, political or constitutional, to commit the country permanently to such an agreement.

There was something similar on Instapundit today about Kamala Harris not being consistent on the death penalty.

Who cares? Part of the beauty of post-modernism where logic is trumped by feelings is that when you throw out objective reality, you throw out the rules as well. In a world with objective reality, there's no such thing as a treaty with the US unless the Senate ratifies it. Period. It's in the rules, i.e. the Constitution.

Bah! What nonsense. How narrow-minded of you. And I'll bet you think men and women are objectively different, too, you bigot.

Dispense with rules and logic and you find yourself being intensely upset at things which make you feel bad at the moment. We can't have that, can we?

Maybe we can and we should.

If only we could be more open-minded and tolerant like them! Why didn't we elect Hillary?

Oh yeah. This kind of thing is why. https://t.co/Q1NmDO1FZI

— K T Cat (@ktcat) May 20, 2018

Starbucks Is Cra-Cra

Is that how you spell it? Or is it cray-cray?

So some Starbucks employee somewhere called the cops on non-paying loiterers in their store. The cops then led the loiterers out in handcuffs. This resulted in a stand-down of thousands of Starbucks, retraining sessions for the employees, a corporate apology and a change in policy so that anyone will be allowed to use Starbucks' restrooms.

Imagine what that will look like in San Francisco or even here in downtown San Diego.

This guy and his compadres may soon be part of the downtown Starbucks experience. Yay!

This was done because Starbucks was afraid that their workforce might be full of racists and other People of Intolerance (PoI). There's no word on whether or not Starbucks officials are also afraid of voodoo hexes, warlocks or the possibility that some employees have been ensorceled and now have toads in their stomachs.

Effectively, a large, successful corporate just shot itself in the foot because it, as one of my favorite analogies for crazy, religious fanaticism goes, saw the face of Mary in a tree stump. They found a single event with multiple explanations that they, in their desperation to validate their faith in the religion of racialism, interpreted conclusively as proving their employees were loaded to the gills with implicit bias.

If it can happen at Starbucks, if they can convince themselves to risk making a mess of their brand for fear of hobgoblins, it can happen almost anywhere.

Addendum: Starbucks doesn't sell coffee, it sells a coffee experience. If they turn their stores into public libraries where homeless people haunt the place, stink it up and make the bathrooms a mess, they have wrecked their entire reason for existence, all for the sake of their faith. Now that's what I call religious devotion!

Gender Confusion And Declining Birth Rates

Yes, I'm a curmudgeonly, hopelessly out-of-date fuddy-duddy. Perhaps in the top 1% of the fuddiest of fuddy duddies. That's probably why I see a correlation between a recruiting ad the USMC is running and declining birth rates in the US.

If you didn't know, the birth rate in the US declined last year to just about the lowest ever. If you further didn't know, births happen because a man and woman love each other very much and have a "dance" and then the woman gets big and the stork brings a baby and then the woman gets smaller. At least that's what I told my kids between shots of bourbon, sitting on my front porch.

We don't seem to have pondered what might happen if we spend 30 years telling young 'uns that there are 37 genders, all family structures are equal, women should pursue a career above all else, marriage is slavery to the patriarchy and men are toxic. If you think that's an exaggeration, watch this ad where young ladies are encouraged to play rugby and then join the Marine Corps infantry. The Marine Corps infantry.

Never mind the fact that we have established that infantry units with women have higher casualty rates. Meaning there are mothers, wives and kids who have gotten "We regret to inform you..." letters because we want women in the infantry for some reason. But I digress.

The Marines are the peak of manhood. There is nothing above that. The Marine infantry is the peak of the peak. We are now so totally confused about where babies come from that we think it's a good idea to run multi-million dollar advertising campaigns to encourage women to aspire to being the manliest of men.

Meanwhile, the NCAA has punished states that think women's restrooms should be used only by women, but I digress again. And I could digress again a thousand times over, but I want to get to my chores today, so I won't.

Anyway, there were dozens of thumb-sucking head-scratchers published this week offering up reasons why women aren't having babies. They all miss the basic reason.

We told girls not to.

And for good reason! Here we see a platoon of Marine Corps infantry wandering around, lost in the jungle, because they wouldn't ask for directions. If there had been lots of women Marines on Guadalcanal, the battle would have been won in no time at all.

Someone On Team Clinton / Obama Needs To Go To Jail

... and be joined there by folks from the FBI.

Today's essay from former Federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy is a must-read. Here are two tidbits.

If you or I had set up an unauthorized private communications system for official business for the patent purpose of defeating federal record-keeping and disclosure laws; if we had retained and transmitted thousands of classified emails on this non-secure system; if we had destroyed tens of thousands of government records; if we had carried out that destruction while those records were under subpoena; if we had lied to the FBI in our interview — well, we’d be writing this column from the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth. Yet, in a feat of dizzying ratiocination, Director Comey explained that to prosecute Mrs. Clinton would be to hold her to a nitpicking, selective standard of justice not imposed on other Americans...

It has now been confirmed that the Trump campaign was subjected to spying tactics under counterintelligence law — FISA surveillance, national-security letters, and covert intelligence operatives who work with the CIA and allied intelligence services. It made no difference, apparently, that there was an ongoing election campaign, which the FBI is supposed to avoid affecting; nor did it matter that the spy targets were American citizens, as to whom there is supposed to be evidence of purposeful, clandestine, criminal activity on behalf of a foreign power before counterintelligence powers are invoked.

I've been watching this in a mixture of disbelief and horror. It was absolutely clear to me way back when that Hillary and practically every member of her staff were criminals, doing things that would have sent me to jail. It's also clear now that the same FBI hierarchy that let her off the hook was spying on the Trump campaign.

Where does this end? If this isn't punished and severely at that, in two years Trump's reelection campaign team would be chumps not to return the favor and spy or even worse on the Democrats' candidate and staff.

When this whole Russia collusion idiocy started, I never suspected we'd get to this point where we discovered that the Obama Administration had been spying on the Trump campaign. Right about now, I'll bet they're kicking themselves that they didn't plant evidence and frame high-level Trump advisors for crimes during the campaign.

Not to worry. If we don't prosecute this behavior, someone will be doing that in the near future.

How Do You Come Back From Defending MS-13?

I'm not interested in the political sides or the positioning on this one, just the credibility and reputation of the media.

Discussing crime and illegal immigration with law enforcement officials from California, President Trump called MS-13 gang members animals. If you listen to the conversation, it's clearly what he said. It's not even remotely up for disagreement. The news media ran with, "President Trump called some immigrants animals." The implication is that Trump and, by extension, his supporters are racists. Meanwhile, normal, civilized human beings see the MS-13 gang as, well, animals.

If you run a news organization, you're a middleman. You sell viewers to advertisers and you sell information to viewers. The more you damage viewers' trust in you, the fewer you'll have to sell to advertisers. Just what on Earth would motivate you to kick yourself in the groin like this? And once lost, how do you recover that trust? Do you care?

The only thing I can think is that the news media have become full-blown members of the cult of racism. They must have thought the story was real, that President Trump was really calling immigrants animals. They've got to be seeing everything through the lens of the racism cult. There's simply no other reason why you'd spew outright, easily debunked lies like this.

Below is Tucker Carlson interviewing a journalist who is so far into the cult that he can't see his way out. Meanwhile, normal people are confronted by a media who can't abide calling MS-13 gangsters animals. How you regain trust after that is beyond me.

Update: CNN tries to back out of the problem and save a bit of it's shredded reputation. Like most retractions, only a fraction of the people who saw the original will see the apology and clarification. Still, why was this ever necessary? It wasn't like CNN and the rest didn't know exactly what they were doing in the first place. This has all the hallmarks of an internal squabble within CNN between the cultists and the few, remaining employees who cling to sanity.

Morning After Sanity

Have you ever woken up with a hangover and vowed to never drink again? Have you ever been so in love that you do stupid things?

Don't you feel that life sometimes bounces between sanity and madness?

I wonder if this is a manifestation of the endless battle between our lizard brains and our intellect.

We all have limbic systems that drive our animal appetites. Sex n' drugs n' rock and roll are desirable because the primitive lizard brains that sit inside of our glorious human brains says they are. Your limbic system is what drives you to do both the things necessary for survival and the things you really oughtn't like lust and gluttony. For Christians, we face a constant fight with our limbic systems as we strive to be what the Bible tells us to be. When we fail, we're hypocrites. We preach one thing and do another.

But what is that morning after feeling? It's when the intellect takes the lizard out behind the barn and gives it a whuppin. Why did it win?

I don't know about you, but my lizard is weakest in the morning. A cup of coffee and my intellect is ready to kick some lizard butt. Coming home from work in the evening with a fridge full of craft IPAs waiting for me, that time is a different story.

Or is it that the intellect takes effort and gets weary while the lizard is always there with the same level of energy? Hmm.

He never goes away, never gets weaker, never sleeps.

Curse Those Plutocrats!

I recently started following WW2 Tweets from 1940 on Twitter. The author is live-tweeting the war from that year. Here is the latest.

Churchill: "In garden of the Quai d'Orsay I see venerable officials burning secret documents. Already preparations are being made for the evacuation of Paris."

— WW2 Tweets from 1940 (@RealTimeWWII) May 16, 2018

I've been a student of WW II and the Nazis since high school (what wargamer isn't?), but a few things have popped out at me recently. Reading Mein Kampf and then Man's Search for Meaning, I finally figured out that the Jews were the personification of the 1% or Wall Street to Hitler and the Nazis. Hitler was a committed socialist and, like Occupy Wall Street, was motivated by his hatred of people he saw as getting rich off the labor of others.

The 1940 tweets have been fascinating, so I spent a little time finding archives of newspapers from that time. I don't have the links with me, but I believe the Sydney Morning Herald and one American paper have free online copies of their issues from 1940. It's interesting to read the French and British press releases, trying to put a good face on the German breakout at Sedan that doomed France, but more intriguing to me now are the German press releases. A lot of them talk about the British and French plutocrats.

Nazi propaganda loved to portray Allied leadership as in the control of Jews, bankers, Wall Street and other finance capitalists. Der Volk of those countries were being exploited by the 1%, dying so that the idle rich could reap war profits.

Hmm. Where have we heard that before?

Recursive Mirrors

I used to have a shaving mirror affixed to the wall in my shower. The adhesive failed and it fell, so we needed to buy a new one. No worries, they have them on Amazon!

We bought one and tried to attach it to the tile in the shower. It turns out that if there is even the slightest texturing on the surface to which you want to attach it, the suction cup won't hold. That means that the only thing in the whole bathroom that the shaving mirror will attach to is ... the main mirror.

Winning.

Taking Credit For Shakespeare

My recent anti-racialist rants are stemming from a new vein of Twitterings I've been mining. I came across a particularly clever retort by a chap and so I checked out his feed. It looked interesting, so I followed him and he returned the favor. Over a couple of days, I noticed him responding to some "diversity" nonsense with whites-are-being-persecuted rubbish of his own. Nauseating. Looking through some of his friends, there's more of it there.

His particular racialist bent is retaliatory. It's always in response to someone else, but that just makes it retaliatory evil, it doesn't take away the fact that it's evil. The stuff that triggers him is evil as well, of course.

Trying to back up from the situation, it occurred to me that what this dingbat and Ta-Nehisi Coates have in common is that they want to wrap themselves in the mantle of others' achievements. Coates wasn't a slave in Mississippi in the 1850s and this jerk didn't write Shakespeare's plays. You can only take credit and have genuine, valid pride in what you have done, not what others' have done.

I wondered how Beethoven or the Mississippi slave would feel if someone who was relatively unaccomplished or free of worries slapped them on the back like the cheap, lazy opportunists they are and said, "Yeah, man, it's you and me all the way, right? You and me!"

It reminded me of this Monty Python sketch. Enjoy.

Stripping Away Our Humanity

... is what the noxious poison of racial tribalism is doing to us.

What are we without thinking? What are we without learning? How do we differ from the animals if all we need to solve is how to eat, how to mate and how to survive?

It's considered racist to discuss apes and blacks in the same sentence. Forget blacks, apes are what we all become when we succumb to the cult of racialism, whether it's led by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Kamala Harris or Richard Spencer.

You, when you intellectually group people by race.

Think about what it means to criticize members of a certain race when they deviate from the cult's accepted opinions, like what has happened to Kanye West and Candace Owens. The logic goes like this.

1. Holding a different opinion than the cult makes you a traitor to the race.
2. If your opinions are given to you by the cult, there's no need to think as the end result is predetermined.
3. If there's no reason to think, there's no reason to learn. Why waste time informing yourself when that information isn't going to change anything?
4. Instead of reading, listening or discussing, you might as well pick at lice, you pathetic ape.

If this was where we were going to end up in the wealthiest, most powerful nation in the history of the world, why did we bother inventing writing in the first place? We might as well have just remained chimpanzees, beating the daylights out of each other in the forest.

How The Nazis Worked

... is what Ta-Nehisi Coates shows us in this widely-praised essay. Here's an excerpt, modified slightly to show the mechanisms by which the Nazis enthralled a seemingly-educated people.

And he had always been dying—dying to be Jewish. That was what my mother said, that you could see the dying all over his face, the decaying, the thinning, that he was disappearing into something Jewish, desiccating into something Jewish, erasing himself, so that we would forget that he had once been German beautiful and Aryan white, and we would forget his small nose, forget his blue eyes, his dazzling smile, and Gerhard Schultz was but the extreme of what felt in those post-war years to be a trend. Because when I think of that time, I think of German men on album covers smiling back at me in blond hair. Gerhard Schultz might have been dying to be Jewish, but he was not dying alone. There were the rest us out there, born, as he was, in the muck of this country, born in The Bottom. We knew that we were tied to him, that his physical destruction was our physical destruction, because if the Aryan God, who made the people dance, who brokered great wars, who transformed stone to light, if he could not be beautiful in his own eyes, then what hope did we have—mortals, children—of ever escaping what they had taught us, of ever escaping what they said about our mouths, about our hair and our skin, what hope did we ever have of escaping the muck? And he was destroyed. It happened right before us. God was destroyed, and we could not stop him, though we did love him, we could not stop him, because who can really stop a German god dying to be Jewish?

All we need now is for the racialists to adopt some spiffy uniforms and we'll be right there, living in that glorious moment of  January, 1933 when things hung in the balance and der Führer, was not quite yet der Führer.

If you go on and read the whole essay, you'll see that Coates does his best to convince you that Germans and Jews will never be able to live together in harmony. The Germans must always remember how those finance-capitalist Jews have oppressed them throughout the centuries, how the nation was built on the backs of Germans toiling away for the enrichment of Jewish bankers and that will never change, must never be forgotten and must inform all decisions made by all Germans.

Fortunately, the progressives lack the ambitions of the Nazis and are comparatively harmless. Unless, of course, you're a Christian baker, a conservative speaker, or a traitor to der Volk. Then the analogy gets frighteningly accurate.

On the other hand, when they're exposed for the dingbats and losers they really are, they're kind of silly. I'm not convinced that Coates' race-crazed views aren't losing ground.

The Catholic Met Art Gala Was No Big Deal

I know I'm way behind the times in all sorts of ways, but I had to comment on the Met Gala that had lots of my fellow Catholics up in arms. If you didn't know, some of the Vatican's art collection is on tour and right now it's at the Met. The Church co-sponsored a gala of some flavor or another to bring attention to the collection. All manner of guttersnipes from the entertainment industry showed up, dressed up in what someone who has no comprehension of Catholicism thought were Catholic-themed gowns.

Rihanna came dressed as a cheap, scrofulous prostitute whose clientele lean towards naughty-bishop role playing.

A good time was had by all, save for the killjoy Catholics carping about the thing. The starlets got to demonstrate that their thighs don't rub, the fashion designers got to make something over-the-top slutty, the photographers got to shoot lots of pictures and the press was able to dredge up panelists to argue about whether or not this was blasphemous.

It wasn't.

First of all, Jesus came for just such as this. Rihanna might be a streetwalker with attitude, but in the eyes of God she's just as important as you or I. That she paraded her long legs around for everyone to see is what she does all the time and wearing a mitre doesn't make it any better or worse. The little girls influenced by her, getting knocked up outside of marriage and facing lives of poverty and desperation have the same future today as they did before this aesthetic catastrophe. What's the big? Maybe Rihanna got exposed to something sacred and it will have an effect down the road.

Second, just look at her and the rest of them. Madonna looked like she was wearing a cemetary on her head. One of the actresses, well past her prime, was positively pathetic with her wrinkled visage and fitted couture gown. Horrific. It wasn't a crime against the faith, it was all of us taking advantage of women who are desperate for attention to get our jollies and yell.

Finally, the Church sponsored the thing. What did they think was going to happen? Cardinal Dolan and the boys in the rectory surely knew it was going to end up like this. My guess is that they figured  it didn't hurt to stir things up and get into the news. Plus, people heard about the exhibit, so maybe more will go to it. Some might even be inspired by what they see.

So yeah, the Met Gala was no big deal. Carry on.

Diving Lanai

Yesterday, I took a dive boat to Lanai and did two dives. The first was at Cathedrals, a famous lava formation that has an inner chamber with holes in the roof that lets in light when the sun is out. The sun was out. It looked like the photo below, taken from this blog.

It really was that spectacular.

As this was the first dive of the day and I hadn't been underwater in 8 months, I didn't take my camera with me. Instead, I decided to focus on getting everything working. It was a good thing I did. The dive master on the boat convinced me I was trying to use too much weight and ended up underweighting me by a good margin. I bobbed like a cork when I jumped into the water.

Your first dive after a long layoff is always an anxious thing. Is everything going to work? Will I remember what to do? Where is that darn dive computer? I know it's over there on my left side, somewhere, but I can't find it.

Anxiety makes you use your air faster. Going in the water and not being able to submerge made things much worse. The dive master got another 2# from the boat and put it one side of my BCD. He then took my hand and pulled me down. Once I began to compress from the depth, I sank. I sank at an angle, because he'd thrown my balance out of whack by putting the extra weight on one side.

The rest of the dive was spent struggling with my buoyancy and knowing I was using my air way to fast from the nerves. Add to that, my mask was leaking badly.

I can handle a leaky mask, but that on top of the weight issues and my dwindling air was a lot to work. I was able to stay down about 25 minutes of a 40-minute dive and the boat was nearby, so it wasn't risky. Plus the dive master watched me closely to make sure I didn't get into trouble. Still, the most I could do inside the Cathedral was realize how awesome it was. I didn't really enjoy it or get to explore it.

When I ran out of air and needed to start my ascent, I notified the dive master and he pointed out the mooring line, conveniently located nearby. That was a good thing because as soon as I got to 30', I started to shoot to the surface. As you go down, you compress and that makes you sink faster. As you rise, you expand and become more buoyant. As you use air, you become more buoyant as well. That buoyancy plus being underweighted made me a big, floaty thing.

If I hadn't grabbed the mooring line, I would have gone straight to the top instead of doing the required 3-minute stop at 30' to prevent the bends. I held onto the mooring line for dear life while my body tried to pull me up to the surface. It was ridiculous, but the situation was safe enough for me to see the humor in it.

It was my own fault

I'm not naming the diving company because it wasn't the fault of the dive master. It was my fault. Yes, he was dead wrong on the weights, but it's my life and my dive and I'm responsible for knowing how to do it properly.

I weigh about 205# and I was wearing a 7-mil wetsuit. A dive weight calculator will tell you that I should use 26-28# of weights. When I told him that's what I needed, he laughed and said, no you don't. You'll need 16#. He was used to Maui wetsuits which are much thinner and less buoyant. I argued, but halfheartedly. He was the dive master and I was just a scrub. We ended up putting in 22#, which was way too little.

His extra weight at the beginning got me to 24#, but later in the dive, he came up to me and removed that weight because he said he thought I had too much. That's why I shot to the surface - I was back to 22#.

My second dive, I was still cowed and put in 24#, balanced between left and right. It worked better, but it was still too light. I was able to dive down by driving with my fins, but that used air and put me at a disadvantage immediately.

Lesson learned: I need 26#, minimum. I shouldn't be taking someone else's advice, I should know my gear and know my weights.

On the plus side: Visibility was terrific and the fish were plentiful. On the second dive, we ran into a 6' white-tipped reef shark. We woke him up and he didn't like that. He was snoozing in a cave and after thrashing around a bit inside, he swam off. There were a few other things that I wish I had captured with a camera, but I didn't take it on the second dive, either as I knew I needed to focus on buoyancy and diving skills instead of filming. Oh well. Lanai was beautiful enough to want to do it again the next time we come to Maui.

Roadside Waterfall

I'm going diving today, so I don't have time for a proper post. Instead, here's a waterfall we saw on our way to find the rainbow eucalyptus trees of song and legend. It's been raining almost constantly this whole trip, so the waterfalls on the Road to Hana were plentiful. Enjoy!

Tired Turtles

Yesterday, we went to see the rainbow eucalyptus trees on the Road to Hana. More about that another time. Along the way, we stopped at Ho'okipa Beach Park and saw something amazing.

Those aren't rocks, those are sea turtles.

Exhausted from swimming around, they had beached themselves for a snooze in the sun.

I guess turtling all day is hard work.

Volcanoes Vs Wildfires

We're spending a week on Maui, right at the time Kilauea is making a mess out of parts of the Big Island. Friends are joking with us if we've seen lava and will we have to evacuate. Har har. Looking at the videos of the eruption on YouTube, with the reference point of SoCal wildfires, a couple of things jumped out at me.

On the plus side, it's not totally out of control. That is, the thing isn't marching across the landscape at several miles per hour, devouring acreage as fast as it can. It's a much more leisurely pace, giving the residents time to get out. The air isn't filled with smoke, either. If you were as close to the edge of a wildfire as some of the people on the news are to the lava, you'd be dead without breathing apperati.

On the minus side, it's going to go wherever it wants and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it. It just pops up out of the ground willy-nilly and you have to deal with it. One of the things I keep having to get out of my head is the lack of firefighters attacking the lava. I keep wondering where the trucks and hoses are and why nobody is fighting the thing. Then I realize that it's not burning stunted trees and dry brush, it's lava and all the water you can spray isn't going to make any difference at all.

Here's some good footage I found, sans commentary. I have to remind myself that the stuff flying in the air is burning rock, not embers from burning wood. Wowsers.

Maui Sea Turtle

We saw this little guy off of Napili Beach, an excellent snorkeling spot. There was a crowd around him as there usually is with turtles, but he managed to break free and then came over to visit.

Lanai Parrotfish

We're off on Maui again and yesterday we took a boat ride over to Lanai to do some snorkeling. We had hoped we'd be going off the boat, but for various reasons, we docked and the crew took us to a beach. A good time was had by all, but the visibility wasn't as nice as if we had been farther offshore. Oh well.

The fish were bigger than the ones we're used to seeing on Maui although that could have been our imaginations as we didn't bring along a control group and measure the two sets. In any case, we saw a couple of lovely parrotfish. I managed to capture a bit of them on video and enhanced it to stabilize the shots and increase the color saturation. Enjoy!

Runaway Balloons

... is what the MSM have become.

My one-week digital fast slapped me in the face with something important. For those who foolishly don't read this blog every day*, that was when I ditched Twitter, Facebook, surfing the web, political podcasts, most caffeine and alcohol, and other unimportant Internet information of any kind. I left the daily, nay, hourly close combat over Trumpian collusion and Stormy Daniels and all the rest for a week. When I came back, I discovered that I just don't care.

Trump didn't collude with Russia. He couldn't have for the simple reason that Russia didn't want him to win. They get 75% of their income from petroleum products and Trump's policies would lower the price. Besides, only total lunatics thought he could win in the first place. The whole "investigation" is just a bunch of high school popular kids from different cliques finding new ways to dis each other. How thrilling.

As a billionaire playboy, Trump probably slept with a dozen or more porn stars. That's what billionaire playboys do. They also pay them off to keep quiet when revealing the details would be inconvenient. Golly! He did that? And water is wet, too.

Meanwhile, the FBI and DOJ deliberately allowed Hillary to skate for her email felonies, any one of which would have put me behind bars for years. If you want me to be upset about non-collusion misdemeanors or a payoff to a bimbo, my response will be an Italian-American hand gesture.

So every once in a while, I tune back in and see the MSM running in circles, howling about one or more of these "scandals." What a complete waste of time. Meanwhile, we have these things going on for real.

This is a big deal. The 10-year rate should be somewhere around 4-5%. That's normal and those rates give the Fed some ammunition for the next recession. Rising interest rates while unemployment is at historic lows and the SP500 is stable or growing slightly is huge and I mean huge.

And there's this.

Peace on the Korean peninsula instead of a Japanese city being incinerated? HUGE.

And then there's this.

One of the biggest stars in American popular culture has dared to cross the modern color barrier. He's siting at the front of the bus, eating at the no-blacks-allowed lunch counter, giving speeches to crowds, take your pick. It looks like the dam is bursting in black culture and that is beyond huge.

So how do you explain the media's fascination with the frat boys in DC tying cans on each others' cars and short sheeting the other side during their week at sleepaway camp? Why are we listening to interviews of Stormy Daniels' lawyer talk about ... whatever it is a porn star's lawyer says? It's because the MSM is completely untethered from the real world and are now floating away, off into a fantasy world of their own making.

Bon voyage, kids.

* - I know I said this was going to be a Monday-Thursday blog, but my blogging OCD is turning out to be stronger than me. For those disappointed in my reversal, all I can say is what Captain Kirk said to the Klingon officer in Star Trek III, seen in this clip around 2:00.

Are Multinational Corporations UnAmerican?

Reading this article in the WSJ about the political madhouse that is Google, I came across an intriguing tidbit.

Also last month, some employees circulated a petition asking the company to withdraw from a program aimed at helping the U.S. Defense Department identify and track potential drone targets through artificial intelligence, according to a person who saw the petition. Google is competing with rivals including Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. for a multibillion-dollar contract to move the Pentagon’s data into the cloud.

First, an aside. If I ran Google, I'd tell the employees that we make web apps and a search product. We don't make political statements nor do we take political positions. Keep politics and religion out of the workplace or you'll be subject to disciplinary action. The article linked above reveals a workforce torn by political disagreements that do nothing to help the bottom line.

On with the show.

Perhaps it is natural for a multinational corporation, but that snippet reveals a company that is in America, but not of America. At its heart, the DoD exists to preserve the nation. Drones are an ever-more important part of our fighting forces and to refuse to assist them is to take a neutral position on the protection of America. That is, whether America survives or not is all one to Google, should they decide to accede to the demands of the petitioners.

I don't know, but Exxon, Apple and Disney might have a similar position as they have extensive holdings in countries who are at least partially opposed to the interests of the United States. Is ambivalence towards America's interests common in multinationals? If you helped the DoD, would that anger China? How do you choose between the two?

Whatever the answer is on a case-by-case basis, and it is not at all clear that Google will side with its internal protestors, the image I get in my head is that of a multinational corporation which has, in some sense, set itself up as it's own country. "We don't care who wins a conflict between China and the US so long as Google itself continues to thrive."

Is Google Switzerland? Hmm.

The blue skies and snow-capped mountains of Google.

The Subtle Art Of Seeing That Mark Manson Is A Wuss

Mark Manson is an author. He writes important books like The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A (Hoot). The blurb for the book starts like this.

In this generation-defining self-help guide, a superstar blogger cuts through the (rubbish) to show us how to stop trying to be positive all the time so that we can truly become better, happier people.

For decades we've been told that positive thinking is the key to a happy, rich life. "(Forget) positivity," Mark Manson says. "Let's be honest, (things are messed up), and we have to live with it."

I'm not planning on reading it, but there you have it. And he's a superstar blogger, too! Golly!

I recently re-read a book from a less important person, someone who wasn't a superstar blogger. His name was Viktor Frankl. His book was Man's Search For Meaning. Viktor didn't live in 2018 where (things) are (messed up). He lived in the 1940s in various Nazi concentration camps where life was easy and your worries trivial.

Whereas the sagacious Mark Manson tells Millennials that they need to ditch the positivity, the naive and gullible Viktor Frankl tells us quite the opposite, that no matter your circumstances, you can control your thoughts and can choose to be kind and loving. Ha! That Viktor! What did he know? Did he ever have to deal with a cracked iPhone screen and people driving slowly on the freeway? never!

I'd like to see Viktor have to deal with the DMV! That would have changed his tune.