If Male Fiddler Crabs Could Write, They'd Post On Red Pill

I'm picking on the red pill (alpha male wannabe) guys, but in truth, I find them a lot more appealing than the cringing, wheedling, beta males who still support the Democrats. After what the Nazis-without-ambition did to Brett Kavanaugh, any man who would support a Democrat should be immediately checked for hazardously low levels of testosterone. My disagreement with the red pill guys is that they are locked into a very narrow world view.

I'm not quite done with The Rational Male, which has its good points. As I've listened, there's been something nagging at me that until now I couldn't identify. This morning, I finally got it. The Rational Male is the book successful, male, fiddler crabs would write if they could write.

That's not so far-fetched if you consider how they could hold a pen in that big claw they've got.

Hahahahaha! Haha. Ha. Err, sorry about that.

The whole book is about getting laid by lots of desirable women. That's it. That's your life's ambition. Nothing transcendent, just lots of sex with cute chicks. No kids, no family, no meaning to your existence, simply technique upon technique, analysis upon analysis, anecdote upon anecdote about how to more reliably get some action. It's well done, considering it's a philosophy tract for members of the Ocypodidae family. It's not quite St. Augustine's The City of God, if you know what I mean.

It's even more shallow than that. In a previous post, I argued that guys without wives and children cannot be alpha males.

In a strictly secular, Darwinist sense, the whole point of being an Alpha is continuing your genetic lineage by siring children and making sure they make it to prominence in adulthood so they can, in turn, become Alphas or mate with Alphas. 100 years from now, a true Alpha will have left his mark on the world in the form of whole platoons of successful progeny.

To be fair, the author is a husband and a father and at no point does he suggest you play around on your wife. His book, taken in the most charitable way, shows men how to learn to be men in the world of sexual competition, both with other men and with women who would prefer to control and effectively neuter you.

However, the book does not suggest that being a true alpha, as I describe one, should be your goal. It focuses myopically on a temporarily important part of becoming a man. I would argue that if that training is not leading you to become a leader in you family, community and faith* than it's nothing more than a how-to-manual for male fiddler crabs.

* - I do mean faith, too. The Rational Male is the perfect synthesis of atheist philosophy. It's got none of that utterly synthetic morality-from-evolution trash in it. It is the shallow pursuit of pleasure, mating for the sake of mating. If you listen to it from the perspective of an atheist, it makes complete sense and all of my complaints listed above are irrelevant.

Red Pill Teachings: Tactically Smart, Strategically Stupid

For a couple of reasons I'll share at another time, I'm reading (listening to) The Rational Male. It's a foundational book for the Red Pill community - men who are focused on being alpha males.

I've spent the day doing various dadly and husbandly things, so I don't have a lot of time for this post. Suffice it to say, the book is all about how to get laid. Don't give in to women, don't spend your time giving them what you think they want because that just makes you seem weak. That's not going to get you action. Be a bit difficult and masculine and you'll find all the women you want.

Also, date several women at the same time. It makes you feel more confident and confidence is a big deal.

Whatever.

Some of the advice is good and I've actually learned a thing or two from it. Having said that, I can't figure out why I'd bother if I were younger and unmarried. What's the point of it all? Have several girlfriends at the same time? Good Lord, what a lot of work. And in the end, what do you have? If the goal isn't to become a husband and father, why not ditch women altogether? There are lots of easy ways to amuse yourself without all that hassle.

My son tells me about a dozen or so young men he knows from his high school who have basically dropped out of the dating scene. Part time work, video games, weed, beer and other pursuits are good enough for them. For that crowd, what's the point of the whole pick up artist mentality? It seems to me that the sloths have the right idea. They're maximizing pleasure per calorie consumed achieving it.

If your goal is to be a husband and father, I can't figure out why I'd be dating lots of women at the same time. I can't imagine the Godly woman I'd want as my life partner would be sympathetic to being one of my "spinning plates." The tactics would seem to drive away the very woman I want.

I've a few more things on this topic, but they'll have to wait for another day. For all of those criticisms, the book makes good points about maintaining masculine pride, even in a long-term relationship. It's probably worth sampling the thing, but not too seriously.

Beta males in action. ;-)

What If He Did It?

Let's assume Kavanaugh is guilty and 36 years ago, as a drunk, high school boy, he got randy with you when you were also drunk. You made your escape one way or another, but told no one.

From that day to this, Brett Kavanaugh leads a blameless life. He rises to the top of his profession to the point where he is nominated for the Supreme Court, an honor only a tiny handful of people will ever experience. Every other woman who has had any significant interaction with him swears on stacks of Bibles that he's a gentleman and worthy of respect. It's clear beyond all reasonable doubt that whatever he did with you was a one-of-a-kind aberration.

Now you decide to confront him? Now? The dude has been letter perfect from the day he felt you up to this, but you figure that's enough to ruin his life?

What kind of sick, psycho witch does something like that?

BREAKING: Brett Kavanaugh May Be A Homophobic Werewolf

This may be the most serious charge yet. NBC has a blood-stained letter with copious amounts of wolf hair inside from an unnamed source that has no details, but some experts find it credible.

Breaking: My Source in Washington DC emphasizes the new 4th accuser, first delivered through Senator Gardner’s Office, is extremely anonymous. Delivered by the mailman. Many details lacking. Stressing caution with reporting this. But it’s out there via NBC News #kdvr

— Joe St. George (@JoeStGeorge) September 26, 2018

You can trust him. Someone is pointing an expensive camera at his face and he's wearing a cool jacket.

Don't get carried away with this. He may just have an early stage of lycanthropy. More reports as events unfold.

Another factor to consider is that many of the same people who use so-called "biology" to dismiss the existence of werewolves also use that so-called "science" to claim that babies come from the union of one man and one woman. Some experts say that it's possible that Brett Kavanaugh is a homophobic werewolf.

The Perfect Supreme Court Nominee

... would be a biker dude.

We tried the boy scout and that didn't work. The progressives are now accusing Brett Kavanaugh of running a gang rape ring in college. They know this because their witness went to 10 parties where this happened. After 9, she still wasn't sure if she saw a pattern or not, you see.

Just like all of the other accusations, it's impossible to disprove since there are no witnesses, no times, no dates, no locations and it happened over 30 years ago. As Frau Hirano (D-Hawaiian Reich) might say, "He has no right to a prezumption of innozence! He is a Jew! Err, a man! Yes, he's a man!"

Since being a good guy is worthless, we might as well start nominating people who listen to the accusations and respond, "That was nothing! You should see what I did with a pool cue at the Black Cat Bar!" And then he whips out his phone and shows videos of unspeakable acts.

Rich Lowry made this point with considerably more aplomb (and got paid more for it) here.

(T)he dark view of our politics that has driven the Trump phenomenon for three years now is impossible to gainsay. Who can watch the frenzied assault on Brett Kavanaugh and say that it’s wrong?

Yep. The answer is to find someone so awful that you can't claim they did anything worse than what they really did.

Once we get to that point, we might talk about the issues.

Nahhhhhh.

"I have witnesses that claim you beat two men senseless on the night of April 4, 1995!"
"That's outrageous! It was three men."
(Photo from Adobe Stock)

Group Uber Alles

There's no "us" without a "them."

Lately, I've been reading (listening to) The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff. I'm not sure that I'd recommend it and I'm not sure I'll finish it, but it's got some really good things to say.

For this post, the salient point is how humans are hard-wired to form groups and identify with them. The authors cite numerous studies where people are assigned into arbitrary groups, such as by coin flips or other random events, after which they quickly form bonds of defense with that group. Since the grouping is arbitrary, it means that grouping itself is a natural response. Further, when they feel threatened, even members of arbitrary groups jump into their bunkers and prepare to fight.

As long as we emphasize groups and not individuals, we'll get irrational conflicts based on groups.

The Brett Kavanaugh circus is a great example of it. The progs are driving the country apart again, this time with groups based on sex. You can see people in the media and ordinary individuals on Twitter screaming at members of the other group. It's madness.

How far will we pixelate? Will we get to the point where slender, middle-aged, agnostic, progressive, hetero women with college degrees have their own hashtag and fight it out with everyone else, screaming about how they've always been marginalized?

Or maybe we can't handle complex classifications like that and the most we can do is sex and race and maybe sexual orientation. Hispanic lesbians, for example. Even that sounds a bit ridiculous. I'll bet we stop at binary classifications, but on several dimensions with your alliances constantly shifting, based on which outrage is getting the most play at the moment.

One minute, you, a Hispanic lesbian will find yourself railing at a Hispanic hetero man because he's homophobic and misogynistic and the next minute, the two of you will be allies against the Asian hetero woman because she's racist. That sounds about right.

Yay.

Oh, this won't make men jump into their bunkers and load their machine guns. Nope, not at all.

Female Supremacists

With all the talk about white supremacists, you'd think you'd find them around every street corner. At least you'd find them trending on Twitter or something like that. Instead, #BelieveSurvivors is trending. That's a hashtag for those who unquestioningly believe women who accuse men of assault. Here's a graphic for it I saw today.

It's all trending because of the accusations against Brett Kavanaugh. These are accusations that can't name the time, place, date of his assaults nor can they find any witnesses to corroborate the accounts by the "survivors." And yet, we have the hashtag trending, US senators demanding men shut up and a news media treating it like it's a serious story and not a crude hatchet job.

Why? Well, because it's a woman, gosh darn it! Nazis Slaveowners Women don't lie about such things when it involves a Jew black man.

Hmm. Maybe we've been looking for the wrong supremacists all along.

Backyard Dinosaur

I finally got my Nikon D60 artillery piece cleaned. Over time, the sensor had gotten dirty, so all of its photos were coming out blurry. $60 later, it was ready to go. I spent a little time yesterday stalking our backyard dinosaurs, armed with the D60 and its telephoto lens.

This has been a great summer for lizards. It's been hot and humid and we're catless right now, so there's plenty of food and no predators. The lizards have waxed fat and prosperous. I didn't see any of the really big ones, but I did track down this saucy fellow peering at me from under a bush. I left the photos large, so they might be worth a click. Enjoy.

Social Security And The Singularity

Should you take your Social Security benefits as soon as you're able at age 62 or should you wait until age 70 when they max out? What if your mind is moved into an android body and you live forever? Does that change the equation?

Here are the raw income numbers, normalized to a $1,000 SSI income at age 66.

• Age 62 payout: $750
• Age 66 payout: $1000
• Age 70 payout: $1320

If you take the money and run at age 62, by the time you're 66, you will have fleeced the Millenials for $36,000. If you wait for age 66 to steal from the young, you will start catching up by $250 per month. It will take you until age 78 to have brought in the same gross income as if you'd started at age 62.

If you scoff at the idea of spending the whippersnappers' money and wait for 70 candles on your cake, you will catch up at a rate of $570 per month, but now the delta is $72,000. Your gross proceeds from that will equal what you would have gotten starting at age 62 when you hit the ripe old age of 80 1/2.

Will you care at that point? I don't know about you, but I find it hard to walk when I get up in the morning these days because it takes about five minutes for my achilles tendons to stretch out after tightening up all night in bed. I have to hold small print at arm's length to read it. I can't imagine what new treats lie in store for me as I continue to age.

When the singularity comes and we're all moved into android versions of Natalie Portman's body, the #metoo movement having made male bodies illegal by then, our life expectancies will become infinite and we'll have to go back to work anyway, so what difference does it make? Honestly, I only added it to the title to get a few more hits. Whatever.

Working In Non-Android Form

If you choose to continue to work prior to age 66, Social Security will send people to your house to beat you with sticks until you pay them back all of their money. They take back $1 for every $2 you earn over $17,040*. That means if you do anything more valuable than stacking empty cardboard boxes in a store room for a few hours a day, you will be thrashed to within an inch of your life for having the temerity to contribute to society in a capitalist way. Remember, socialism is the future and you have none. As the head of Social Security once said, "Bite me, you greedy exploiters of the workers! Oh, I'm sorry Mr. Sanders, I didn't mean you. Please, continue to live in your three mansions and yap all day about greed and injustice."

I seem to have digressed.

In short, if you're slothful and don't intend to work past age 62, take the money and run. If you're going to work, you will probably want to wait until 66 to steal money from your children. If you wait until age 70, you'll end up looking like Natalie Portman in a jumpsuit, stacking boxes in a closet and nobody wants that.

What's all the fuss about this chick? She doesn't look even vaguely feminine. Meh.

* - This number was arrived at by taking the age that a certain senator began having an affair with his 17-year-old "secretary" and putting a zero in between them.

Jules Verne Novels

... are really stories of applied science. The plots are only there to provide reasons for Verne to illustrate how this or that activity could be performed with the proper application of the knowledge of his time, the 1870s.

Right now, I'm making my way through Mysterious Island. In it, some Union prisoners of war escape Richmond by balloon and are blown by a hurricane all the way into the southern Pacific where they land on an island. There, with nothing but the clothes on their backs, they set about providing themselves with shelter, pottery, tools and more.

Each thing must be constructed from the previous thing and therein lies the applied science. Jules Verne clearly knew a great deal of chemistry, ca 1875, and I'm fascinated by the ways in which things like sulfuric acid can be distilled with what we would consider primitive appliances.

When I read books like this, I want to try it for myself and see how it would work.  What I lack is the applied knowledge of the time. If you lived in 1875, you certainly were a great deal handier than we are today. At home, I need power tools to do just about any job. Imagine living without power tools at all.

One of the characters, all of whom are ramrod-straight, cardboard cutouts of humans, is Herbert and he's a young, amateur naturalist. His discoveries have an innocent charm to them, as if Tim was writing his insect blog without the aid of anything more than a very old set of encyclopedias. Imagine the excitement of leaving the inadequate, written word behind and blazing trails in the field of biology yourself. Wondrous!

From there, I reread Robert Heinlein's The Rolling Stones, but that's a subject for a different blog post.

A Sphinx Moth? I think not! It would be named Tim's Flutterer, Hyles eisele.

Kavanaugh Thoughts

A couple of thoughts on the Kavanaugh Supreme Court fiasco.

What are we doing?

Honestly, what are we doing now? By all accounts, the guy has lived his life like Sir Galahad. Some far-left extremist says he felt her up in high school 35 years ago at a place she can't name with people she can't name at a time she can't name and we paused for more than 10 minutes to consider her accusations? It should have delayed things only long enough to stop laughing.

Double standards

Meanwhile, Keith Ellison, head of the DNC, has been accused of domestic violence with witnesses, medical reports and more. Crickets from the media while we all run around debating whether Kavanaugh groped a girl in high school. And the MSM cry about Trump constantly saying "Fake news?" Bite me.

The worst part

Imagine you're a young man watching all of this unfold. What is the lesson you learn from it? Avoid women. They offer nothing of value. From women, men want:

1. Respect
2. Admiration
3. A physical relationship

What do we have?

1. A US senator telling men to shut up because everything is their fault.
2. Academia telling us that men are horrible, there's a rape culture and men are to blame, masculinity is toxic and on and on.
3. Porn.

Want to know why marriage rates are declining? Kavanaugh is a primer on how it's happening.

Girls, when you want a husband and look around only to find the guys have checked out, there's always an alternative to spending money at the bridal shops.

Mr. Muckle

I was clicking around YouTube, looking for something else, when the artificial intelligence at Google decided to recommend this video to me.

I haven't laughed so hard in a long time. Enjoy.

A Simple Trade War Scoreboard

Blue is the Hang Seng (Chinese) index.
Orange is the SP500.

It looks to me like pushing the Chinese for a little more access to their markets isn't such a bad thing.

Scorched Earth

OK, let me get this straight. If the worst possible option is true, Brett Kavanaugh tried to make out with some chick in high school 30 years ago. She never told anyone until now, he has no track record of such things and women who went to high school with him vouch for him being a gentleman.

Right.

So now progs are simply taking a flamethrower to the conservative Supreme Court nominees because they're terrified that the normals will be allowed to vote on things like abortion and gay marriage instead of having 5 weirdos in black robes dictate the culture to them.

I swear, if his nomination gets scuttled because of this, I'm taking down our American flag and not putting it back up, ever. I thought Hillary getting away with her email crimes was bad, but this is totally insane.

Sadly, I'm not going to fly my Vatican flag as a replacement since Pope Francis has screwed us all, too.

Wife kitteh won't let me fly a Rebel Flag, so it's going to have to be a Jolly Roger.

These Headlines Always Make Me Think

... just what did they think was going to happen?

The death toll went up. Well, yes, it's going to do that. Imagine what happens if it goes the other way.

Billy Bob: Hey, Wayne, look at Jessie!

Wayne: Well, I'll be! Doc Johnson said he was stone cold dead and that was over an hour ago! Looks like he's doing fine.

Billy Bob: Hey, he's asking for something. Maybe he's hungry.

Wayne: What's he saying?

Jessie: Braaaaiiiiiinnnnnssssss.

Billy Bob: Y'all want some brains, Jessie?

Jessie: Braaaaiiiiiinnnnnssssss.

Wayne: Sorry, man, we ain't got no brains. Say, Billy Bob, do they still have those hog brains down at Wilson's meat market?

Billy Bob: I dunno. Maybe. Want me to go check?

Jessie: Braaaaiiiiiinnnnnssssss.

Wayne: Yeah, I think you oughta. Jessie looks powerful hungry. Don't worry, Jessie. Billy Bob is heading down to Wilson's to get you some brains. Want some eggs with that?

Jessie: Braaaaiiiiiinnnnnssssss.

Billy Bob: Wayne, throw me your keys. My truck's just about out of gas.

(tosses keys)

Wayne: Get me some beef jerky while you're there, would ya? Wilson's beef jerky is the best.

Billy Bob: No problem. Want a Moon Pie, too?

Jessie: Braaaaiiiiiinnnnnssssss.

Wayne: You bet! Better hurry. Jessie looks really hungry! And get a case of Budweiser, OK?

Billy Bob: Of course!

Festive Food

I made a huge pot of chicken and sausage gumbo last night, using yellow, red and orange bell peppers instead of green. As they cooked in the roux with the onions and celery, I thought they looked rather cheerful.

It's like they're smiling at you!

Holding The Pope's Beer

Me: What a week it's been! After decades of trying to keep the pederasty scandals buried, Pope Francis just accused the laity of being in league with Satan for wanting the complete truth about the homosexual abuse of our seminarians. How much worse can things get?

Pope Francis: Hold my beer!

Me: What?

Pope Francis: Hold my beer!

Me: I just held your beer a few days ago. Wasn't that enough?

Pope Francis: No. This is a different beer. Now hold it.

Me: I'm exhausted from all of this. I can't take much more of your nonsense.

Pope Francis: Who are you to question me? I'm the pope! Now HOLD MY BEER!

The Vatican's reported deal with China, to effectively abdicate the power of the pope to select bishops to the communist state, has therefore been met with feelings of shock and even betrayal among the faithful, especially those in China itself.

It is easy to see, then, why so many of the faithful in China who have risked so much to remain loyal to the Church now feel betrayed. Hong Kong's outspoken Cardinal Joseph Zen claimed that the Vatican is "selling out" Catholics in China. "A church enslaved by the government is no real Catholic Church," Zen asserted at a news conference.

A group of leading Catholic university professors, researchers, human rights activists and lawyers, mostly from Hong Kong, has published an open letter to Catholic bishops around the world imploring them to pressure the Holy See to reconsider the proposal.

Well, that answers the question of the day: How much worse can things get?

It's probably not even a good beer, more likely it's some lousy, lager-y Argentinian rubbish.

Diane Feinstein, Mean High School Girl.

This is insane.

WASHINGTON — The senior Democrat (Diane Feinstein) on the Senate Judiciary Committee referred information involving Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, President Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, to federal investigators on Thursday, but the senator declined to make public what the matter involved.

Two officials familiar with the matter say the incident involved possible sexual misconduct between Judge Kavanaugh and a woman when they were both in high school. They spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.

Emphasis mine.

The Only Solution For The Catholic Church's Crisis

... is honesty.

That's it. Honesty.

Our bishop here in San Diego, Bishop Robert McElroy is going on a listening tour, visiting 8 different parishes. He will discuss the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report and other odds and ends. He needn't bother. All he has to do is issue a letter to the diocese, telling us what he knows.

The schism in the Church is horizontal, not vertical. At issue is not the old and solved problem of pederast priests, but the ongoing problem of the Gay Mafia running some of our seminaries and having an organization throughout the leadership of the Church. If you don't believe me, dig this.

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras — Nearly 50 seminarians in Honduras have protested against what they say is a widespread and entrenched pattern of homosexual practice in Tegucigalpa’s major seminary.

In a letter written to the seminary’s formators that was subsequently circulated in June to the country’s Catholic bishops, the seminarians asserted “irrefutable evidence” exists that a homosexual network pervades the institution and is being protected by its rector.

“Heterosexual seminarians are scandalized and really depressed,” one of the seminarians who drafted the letter told the Register.

“Many are thinking about leaving the seminary,” the seminarian said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of a fear of reprisals. “I fear that many will leave.”

The dude running the show, one Cardinal Maradiaga, is a favorite of Pope Francis, despite the widespread knowledge of this abuse.

Again, the schism is horizontal. The laity is fine, we're not abusing seminarians. Our parish priests are fine, they're not plotting and scheming. Above that, things are murky. We know there is corruption in the leadership, but not the exact mechanisms nor the guilty parties. The bishops and cardinals are all holding pieces of that jigsaw puzzle. If they don't share their puzzle pieces with us, they can't be trusted. It's that simple.

We don't need to hear about conclaves or synods or meetings or Masses of Penance. We just need to be told what was going on from the people who know. There's no excuse for not telling us.

So tell us or don't, but if they choose to continue to blow smoke, they've only themselves to blame for the mistrust and chaos that follows.

We've got a lot of the pieces already. If we finish it without your help, our only reasonable conclusion would be that you're guilty.

My Lies Say I Love You

... or something like that.

Pope Francis came out and directly addressed the Church's current crisis, the one where some seminaries became gay bathhouses at the behest of bishops and cardinals who used them to draft some talent, if you know what I mean.

First, bishops need to get close to the laity.

“The bishop cannot remain distant from the people; he cannot have attitudes that take him away from them… He doesn’t try to find refuge with the powerful or elite. No. The ‘elites’ criticize bishops, while the people has an attitude of love towards the bishop. This is almost a special unction that confirms the bishop in his vocation.”

Hmm. Lots of love between us. That sounds good. What's next?

Hide things from us. Lies of omission.

“In these times, it seems like the 'Great Accuser' has been unchained and is attacking bishops. True, we are all sinners, we bishops. He tries to uncover the sins, so they are visible in order to scandalize the people."

Yep, that's the way to heal things. Conceal your sins from the 'people.'

Look, bonehead, we don't care if you drink too much, play the ponies with some coin skimmed from the Diocesan Appeal or download pr0n in your bedrooms. What bugs us is when you turn the seminaries into San Francisco during Pride Week. Then we need to know what's happening or we'll start to distrust you. And by start to distrust you I mean despise you from the depths of our hearts.

What an idiot. The sooner this guy leaves the papacy, the better.

And who can blame you for playing the ponies?

Mint Flowers

Mint is a hopeless weed. No matter what promises you extract from it, it cannot help but backslide into sin and begin growing again. I'd put it up against kudzu in that regard.

I grow mint for mint juleps, of which I have not imbibed in months. I've had no success planting it in pots, so I put it in our raised beds, the same raised beds that are filled with delicious, nutritious soil and watered regularly.

Thriving, our mint has decided to flower. The flowers are tiny, delicate things, arranged on pods. The result is something rather angelic and beautiful. I left the photo large, so it's worth a click.

Enjoy.

You Know It's Going To Be A Good Day When ...

... the morning starts with some self-discipline and self-denial.

I'm not kidding.

By about 7AM, I can tell if it's going to be a good day. If I've been lazy and self-indulgent first thing in the morning, getting on track is really hard. One thing leads to another and I find myself consuming unhealthy things that evening.

Every day is a new start, however. I don't find that yesterday's asceticism or gluttony carries over into the next day. It's kind of weird. If I get on a long streak of discipline, after a while, it gains strength, but it's easy to stop and once I stop, I'm back at the beginning.

It's getting harder as I get older, too. I find self-discipline more difficult every year. There's an element of "what the heck, why not give in" to whatever it is I crave at the moment. When I was younger, I had defined goals and purposes. Now that the kids are out of the house and I'm close to retirement, finding that drive is pretty tough.

Oh well. Just a thought for today. It's being rattling around in my head and I thought I'd share it.

Nike's Best And Brightest Hire Colin Kaepernick

Nike is a huge brand. Its marketing and advertising team consists of people from the very best universities with impeccable resumes and decades of experience. Yes, Nike's marketing team is an excellent example of the global elites of 2018.

We're so screwed.

Our betters, our masters, the people with all the right connections, all the right degrees and all the right opinions picked Colin Kaepernick as their spokesperson. Pure genius, guys.

It's an ad campaign to sell shoes and they ended up with over a quarter of their market hating them because of it. They're selling shoes. How hard can it be to come up with an ad campaign for shoes that doesn't make people hate you? Well, it was algebraic topology for these idiots.

I can just hear the report in the board meeting.

VP of Marketing: Gentlemen, our new ad campaign is a success. We only lost 10% of market share.

CEO: Excellent work, Johnson. That's the kind of stellar performance I've come to expect from your team!

Everywhere you look, you see that many of the so-called elites are imbeciles.

Boy, That Trump Fella Sure Is Destroying Civility, Isn't He?

Donald Trump is a swine. Of that we can be sure. If there's a way to be rude, callous, boorish and insensitive, he'll find it faster than a French pig can find truffles.

However, during his tenure in the presidency, which is no doubt soiled beyond repair because of him, I've seen the, err, loyal opposition completely lose their minds. They dress up as sex organs in public, attack people in restaurants, choose the weirdest possible cosplay characters for their SCOTUS nomination protests, pull down statues in fits of rage, get dragged, screaming, out of hearings, call for murder and uprisings and howl down speakers on campus.

Hmm. Come to think of it, I don't think we really needed Trump's help wiping out civility. I'm guessing we were pretty much there already. After all, it's hard to believe that three years ago we were playing out Father Knows Best in our personal lives and then transformed into Abbie Hoffmans overnight upon Trump's election.

Thanks for all your hard work, amigo, but you can take a rest now. We've got it from here.

Zina Bash Isn't A White Supremacist. It's Worse Than That

All of the perfectly sane, not-crazy-at-all progressives who only see real racism and don't look under their sofa seat cushions for Nazis when they come home, noticed what they thought was Zina Bash flashing the OK sign, which means she is a Nazi white supremacist who probably has a lot of overdue library books.

The fools! It's even worse than that. She's not a white supremacist, she's a rad trad! That's right, she's a radical traditionalist Catholic. They're looking at the hand sign all wrong. It's not WP for White Power, it's P VI for Pius VI.

Yep, Zina wants us to go back to the glory days of the Church, sometime around 1790.

If that's not a reason to #StopKavanaugh, I don't know what is.

Political Humor Is Almost Never Funny

... because it always feels like the comedians are grinding your face into some particular talking point, over and over and over again.

Dig this bit from the right-wing group, We The Internet.

I couldn't finish it any more than I can watch clips of the far-left, late-night comics. You can see all the jokes coming from a mile away and the point of the thing isn't to make me laugh, it's to make me angry. At the end, I'm not supposed to be entertained, I'm supposed to take action. If I wanted to take action, I'd be doing something real, like working on my MGB restoration instead of watching YouTube clips.

Now compare that to Don Rickles at the second Reagan Inaugural. He's not feeding you talking points, he's doing his typical Don Rickles insult schtick and it's pretty funny. It's comedy in a political context, not politics with a smirk and a sneer.

I don't think I'd consider that political comedy at all, at least not in the modern way. Maybe that's because it made me laugh.

Cheezburger Of The Day

I haven't posted one of these in a long, long time. I saw this one and it made me laugh.

Enjoy!

No Accountability Means No Professionalism

I'm making beef and pork stock, collard greens with smoked turkey and freezing chicken stock I made a few days ago, so I'm a bit busy today, too busy for a long post. Instead, I'll just post a thought I've been having about the McCarrick / seminary scandal that was blown wide open by Vigano.

If your company's HR director was found to have been having sex with new employees and even raping some of them, how long would it take for them to be fired and then handed over to the cops? Ten minutes? An hour? Long enough to verify a story or two with a phone call? That's Cardinal McCarrick's situation. He ran one or more seminaries and was having sex with and possibly raping some of the seminarians and it went on for years.

Put yourself in the position of the CEO or one of the VPs of a company where this was happening. That's what the bishops and cardinals were, corporate VPs.

The Lavender Mafia mob didn't act like professionals because they weren't. They were unaccountable to everyone save their superiors and their superiors were even more unaccountable. There was no bottom line by which we could measure their performance until decades had gone by and the population decline became obvious.

Unfortunately for the Church, a decent portion of it needs to be run like a normal business. The crisis isn't just about moral decay and degradation, it's about gross incompetence and mismanagement.

Losing The Plot

The Catholic Church exists to provide spiritual salvation and moral clarity. Political progressives exist to pursue a secular policy agenda. There are lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of progs out there. There's only one Church. For some reason, our pope and a large number of our prelates have decided that the world needs another pack of progs. Meanwhile, the Church is in crisis, desperate for leadership.

Laity calls political activist pope an 'emergency.'

It's OK If People Leave The Church

The Catholic Church is the greatest institution of Mankind. We are the anchor upon which civilization, at least a civilization worth occupying, is built. We give the world a cohesive, complete worldview from which are derived the importance of charity, mercy, kindness, learning, cooperation and more. I don't know of a single other organization that can derive these from first principles.

The Catholic Church necessarily evolved into a creature of Enlightenment thinking. That is, our theology requires objective reality, logic and reasoning. If we adopt the postmodernist thinking of our age, we cease to be the Catholic Church. Once we stop searching for and espousing the Truth, as in singular truth, we cease to be the Catholic Church and civilization has lost the most important part of its foundation.

Postmodernism is the rejection of the belief in objective reality and the value of logic. Multiculturalism, the assertion that all cultures are equally valid, is postmodernist. It denies the existence of any objective measures of goodness. Claims that all family structures are equally valid are similarly postmodern. Objective measures of goodness are central to the Church. Without them, we are not the Church.

To take one example, when the popular culture claims that women can become men through surgery and drugs, we cannot agree and remain the Catholic Church. If the popular culture becomes obsessed with this to the point where 95% of the population is convinced of it and is willing to leave the Church over it, then that's the way it goes. When we adopt a position that is illogical or not based in objective reality, we undermine our very existence.

Popular beliefs come and go. We used to believe in witches. We used to think that illness was a judgment from God. Some of us still espouse socialism. The Church can't move with the times, it must move with carefully-reasoned thought. If that means almost everyone leaves us for a time, then so be it.

For the sake of Mankind, for the sake of civilization, we have to protect the flame of reason and continue the search for the Truth even if that costs us people, money, buildings and prestige.

It would be better to have to drive 50 miles to hear Mass in an old barn with a small congregation than to adopt popular, postmodernist views.