Looking For Your Regulations In Shining Armor

... is what a modern woman does. No more relying on a man for strength and protection, no way!  Instead, we've got Section 67386 of the Education Code. Below is an excerpt.

67386. (a) In order to receive state funds for student financial assistance, the governing board of each community college district, the Trustees of the California State University, the Regents of the University of California, and the governing boards of independent postsecondary institutions shall adopt a policy ...(which) shall include ... the following:

(1) An affirmative consent standard in the determination of whether consent was given by both parties to sexual activity. “Affirmative consent” means affirmative, conscious, and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity. It is the responsibility of each person involved in the sexual activity to ensure that he or she has the affirmative consent of the other or others to engage in the sexual activity. Lack of protest or resistance does not mean consent, nor does silence mean consent. Affirmative consent must be ongoing throughout a sexual activity and can be revoked at any time. The existence of a dating relationship between the persons involved, or the fact of past sexual relations between them, should never by itself be assumed to be an indicator of consent.

This is so much better than the old days when the patriarchy oppressed women! I mean, just look at the injustice in the picture below, taken from a popular 1920s book series of instructive children's stories, My Book House.

It's nearly impossible to count all the ways the painting reinforces the subjugation of women! Here is just one aspect of it.

The man, armed and armored, is pledged to his lady's defense. That is, if she is threatened, he is willing to fight, suffer, bleed and possibly die for her sake. If that isn't male dominance over women, I don't know what is!

For her part, the lady is lovely, elegant and refined. She accepts and respects his protection and enforces rules of chivalry upon her knight through the bestowal her approval. Her approval does not include doing the horizontal monkey dance until marriage, which, as we all know, is practically equal to slavery. She might as well be in chains in that picture.

No, it's a grand thing that we've evolved past those warped notions of "masculine" and "feminine" roles. How can the midgets of pre-post-modern literature ever compare with the soaring beauty of the California legal codes?

(4) A policy that, in the evaluation of complaints in the disciplinary process, it shall not be a valid excuse that the accused believed that the complainant affirmatively consented to the sexual activity if the accused knew or reasonably should have known that the complainant was unable to consent to the sexual activity under any of the following circumstances:

(A) The complainant was asleep or unconscious.

(B) The complainant was incapacitated due to the influence of drugs, alcohol, or medication, so that the complainant could not understand the fact, nature, or extent of the sexual activity.

(C) The complainant was unable to communicate due to a mental or physical condition.

Baby, It's Lying Outside

I've had a very pleasant Twitter conversation with the author of this piece which deals with the so-called controversy over gems like Dean Martin's Baby, It's Cold Outside. If you're unfamiliar with the activists' complaints, the song tells the story of Dean trying to seduce a young lady who is at his place in the depths of winter. Being a hate-filled member of the patriarchy, he does not present her with the 37-page contract for physical contact required by the State of California.

The "controversy" is all lies, of course. What else would you expect from the postmodernist, Secular Left? The ends justify the means and all that.

The problem can't be the content. If it was, then games like Grand Theft Auto would be under assault long, long before a crafty seduction song like Dean's. Dittos for any number of hip hop songs. I spent about 90 seconds going through the lyrics of the current Billboard Top Ten list and found a real beauty. I won't link to it here nor repeat the lyrics. Feel free to do the search yourself. The results won't be surprising to anyone with even a vague notion of the genre.

But that's the issue, isn't it? We all know that video games, hip hop and porn are wretched. We know they're full of misogyny and violence and hate. To say that Deano is somehow inappropriate is clearly a lie if we don't point out and try to censor those.

Why are we lying to ourselves with these articles and the "controversy?"

Bah. It's all manufactured to push the agenda of the Secular Left. Forget it, I'm going back to Dean Martin's works and enjoying them with a clean conscience.

Politics Keeps You Poor

Below is a video with plenty to unpack. YouTube recommended it to me, which gives you some indication of my watching habits. In any case, I thought I'd flesh out a couple of ideas here, perhaps in a series. The ideas feed my hypothesis that the Secular Left is a losing proposition. As the video is a bit long, I'll recap it in case you don't want to watch it.

The story: A guy in the San Francisco Mission District owns a laundromat. He decides to replace it with an apartment building. The city needs more housing and the apartments will make more money for him. It should be a win-win. Over the next 4+ years, he spends over a million dollars trying to get the necessary governmental approval to build. He fails because the locals lobby against him as they fear further gentrification of their neighborhood. It's all of the standard Secular Leftist tropes - race, oppression, subsidies and more. Lather, rinse, repeat.

It's all about private property

... which is an anathema to the Secular Left.

The story is really one about private property. If the dude owns the place, he ought to be able to build on it. After all, it's his, not "ours." The Secular Left, which runs SF, lock, stock and barrel, does not really believe in private property. The effects of this belief run throughout the video.

The residents claim they won't be able to afford the apartments. That might be true enough. I see two possible ways to deal with it. First, they could buy him out. Second, they could lobby the government to stop the construction.

In order to buy him out, they'd have to come up with money. They'd need to earn more, so they'd focus on building marketable skills and getting better jobs. They'd have to learn to live frugally in order to save for the down payment. They'd need to study and practice financial investing. Perhaps they could even work out a co-op banking business so they all could buy a piece of the action. After all, an apartment complex in SF is a gold mine.

Instead, they run to the politicians and scream. The politicians bend to the will of the voters and after more than four years of yelling at each other in government office buildings, the plan is scrubbed and the laundromat is saved. No new housing has been built.

Had the locals chosen the private property path, even if they failed, they would have ended with valuable skills and a chunk of change. Instead, they ended up with nothing. Literally nothing, as the status quo didn't change at all. They did what the Secular Left taught them to do, what it thinks is the right way to get things done and they ended up four years older and not a penny better.

The Secular Left is a failure. Looking to politics to improve your lot in life is a mistake. If it can't work in San Francisco, it can't work anywhere.

Removing Trees With A Helicopter

No, really.

The city has decided to thin out the vegetation in the canyons and it's using this to get rid of invasive species at the same time. In the canyon near our house, they're removing eucalyptus and palm trees. The native scrub oaks and so forth are being left alone.

Since it's a canyon with relatively steep ways in and out and the trees are large, they are tearing them out and then using helicopters to haul them away. Dig the photo below. I left it rather large, so click until you can click no more. Enjoy!

Look, it's a tree-chopper!

A Bad Sign For AAPL

We have an Amazon Echo, aka Alexa. In fact, we have two of them. My elderly mother has one. We gave one to each of our kids last Christmas. We use it all the time.

Alexa was created by Amazon, not Apple. In the past, wildly successful new devices with innovative features that made you slap your forehead and say, "Why didn't I think of that?" were what defined Apple. The GUI, the mouse, the smartphone, the tablet, the iPod for music, they were all ground-breaking even if they were somewhat derivative from others' inventions. Apple pushed them to market successfully and profited handsomely.

Alexa is huge. I've got friends at work who use it to control heating, lights, blinds and more. I don't, but I'm a lazy curmudgeon, so I'm not a good test case for stuff like that. Still, this lazy curmudgeon loves Alexa. It's changed the way we entertain ourselves, making all kinds of things obsolete. Apple was nowhere to be seen.

"Alexa, has Apple lost it's mojo?"
"I can't find any information about that."
"Well, I didn't say you were perfect."

Stampede Of The Robots

Well, it looks like the algorithms rushed in the opposite direction today. After a week of trying to sell everything before the other robots could and dragging down the markets, they all tried to buy cheap before the other robots could get into the act.

Yay for technology?

Merry Weird Christmas!

... it's been a weird one here.

We're in that transitional stage in life, where the kids have moved out, but none have children of their own yet. The big family Christmas get-together won't happen until December 29 because everyone is here and there. We're celebrating Christmas in patches until then. One son came over and went to Mass with us last night. Another was at his wife's family's house. And so it goes. It's all good, though. The kids love the fact that we put no pressure on them at all.

Pro tip: Don't make Christmas about you. It isn't anyway. It's about the birth of our savior, Jesus Christ. If that's not an opportunity to show humility, patience and love, I don't know what is.

So merry Christmas, amigos and amigas! I hope you have one filled with peace, love and joy. God bless!

Hey, this is San Diego. What did you expect as the Christmas image?
(Sadly, I didn't take this photo. It came from an image search.)

The Best Investment Blog

... is Scott Grannis' Calafia Beach Pundit.

When things crashed in 2008, I started reading a bunch of financial blogs, but ditched each when their predictions didn't come to pass or it was obvious they were nuts. Many of the ones who had predicted the crash kept on predicting crashes that never came. I discovered that the reason they got it right in 2008 is that they were broken clocks and that was one of the few times they hit the jackpot.

Scott's blog is well-written, filled with data and easy-to-consume graphs. He's not biased on one side or the other of bull vs bear and he's apolitical. I highly recommend it, particularly right now when the market is taking a dive.

If You Find Yourself Missing Our Syrian Intervention

... don't worry, there will be plenty of opportunities to return. Islamic nations have been dividing and subdividing into warring factions, debating who is the most Islamic of all, for 1400 years. It's the nature of the thing, because it's so rife with internal contradictions and so rigid in discipline for incorrect interpretations. We can be there, not be there, show up once in a while, give them aid, withhold aid, place embargoes, offer trade deals - none of it will matter.

I'm at the same point with Afghanistan. We don't have a real pressing need to be there, either. With Syria, it's Europe that runs all the risks, so maybe they should add a few battalions of hairdressers, buy some more blank ammunition and go to Syria to keep the peace themselves.

I'm sure they'll keep your room just the way you left it.

A Little More Surf Photography

Since it's the holiday season, I don't feel like posting any radioactive arm-wavers, even though I'm full of 'em right now. Oh, believe me, there's vitriol and wrath burbling around inside of me like a witches' caldron of, well, vitriol and wrath.

Whatever.

The medium-high surf is still visiting San Diego beaches. La Jolla Shores had 6' waves yesterday. I took the Fuji light artillery piece out and got some pics. It doesn't have a telephoto lens, so there's a limit as to what I can do with it. I cropped the images to just the interesting bits. Enjoy!

How would you like your waves today? With surfer?

Or without?

A Beautiful Sunrise

... is what I saw this morning, coming home from the gym.

It was a struggle to find a place to get a decent shot of it. I always wish I could climb to the roofs of the buildings around me when scenes like this appear. Instead, I pulled over near a small airport and took this shot through the chain link fence. I had to crop out the fence and the camera decided to focus on some grasses in front of me, but it's still a good representation of what was out there on the horizon. I left the photo quite large, so click away. Enjoy!

Monster Surf At Mavericks

Thanks to Jedi Master Ivyan in the comments, I found some great video of the mammoth waves that hit Mavericks yesterday. It's a surf spot in central California, known for having 50'+ surf in the winter. This was the best one I found of it. Enjoy!

Big Surf At Sunset Cliffs

There must be a storm offshore because yesterday, the surf was over 10'. I didn't have one of my big, artillery-piece cameras with me, so I could only shoot with my Pixel 3. The waves were breaking pretty far out, so the image below is a bit fuzzy after I cropped out almost all of the photo. The little black thingy in the middle of the white foam is a surfer, standing up. I'm guessing that wave at 12'.

Surf's up!

Arguing With Michael Barone

... is almost always a fool's errand, but, as I am a fool, here we go.

The inestimable Mr. Barone penned a piece recently suggesting that political parties around the world need to improve. I think he's wrong. They are the same as they ever were. What's new is that they're not competing with each other so much as they are competing against reality. Reality is going to win that contest every time.

The only proof I need of this is the budget deficits in every developed nation.

Reality: If you spend more than you earn, you will suffer.

The Secular Left*: You hate the poor! You're a racist! We will spend whatever we want because we are full of compassion and virtue!

(30 years of ever-increasing budget deficits go by.)

Reality: You're screwed.

The Secular Left is now faced with reality wherein they have massive interest payments on massive debts. That money is not going to benefits, it's going to pay off that trip to Cancun when we all got blasted on tequila and I rode that burro while you tried jumping off the roof into the pool. Real budget items like healthcare, retirement payments and the like are being cut. Taxes are going up.

The Normals, who went along with the whole scheme because they trusted that the Secular Left could run the place better than a pack of individuals are now being punished for the arrogant ignorance of the Secular Left. That makes them angry. The Secular Left hasn't lost a shred of its arrogance or its ignorance and is doubling down on the whole "give us more money and power" thing. Lather, rinse, repeat.

You could have the best politicians in the world, the most organized parties in the history of Man and you'd still be in this spot. The Gods of the Copybook Headings are returning.

Ol' Rudyard was a rather stern fellow. So is Reality.

...And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

* - My current model for the world is that the Secular Left, represented by the Ivy Leaguers who run almost everything. is a religious movement that dominates Europe and America. There's lots more to it. If you want to understand it, you should be reading this blog every day. I can't be held responsible if you refuse to genuflect before my blinding wisdom**.

** - My lawyers tell me that my blinding wisdom is making me a target for lawsuits seeking damage for loss of eyesight. In the future, please read this blog while wearing sunglasses.

The Secular Left Is Doomed

... and Afghanistan proves it.

I've taken up going to the gym in the morning, so my writing time is much less, but at the gym, I come up with blog ideas that I hopefully can make brief so the 'Post still gets its daily update.

Recall that my model for the world is not of a political struggle between left and right, but a religious one between Islam, the Secular Left* and Catholicism. I'm using Catholicism as a stand-in for Christianity, so I apologize to my Protestant friends. I hope that in the near future, we may experience a communion of the faiths where we all unite together under the Pope.

Whoops, did I just say "under the Pope?" I only meant to think that. Anyway, I definitely meant a different Pope. Francis is a nincompoop.

Seriously, we need is Nick Saban as Pope. The dude is a proven winner. Here he is, reacting to a report on the status of Jesuit-run colleges in America.

Ahem. Where was I? Oh yes, doom.

The Secular Left has had America involved in Afghanistan for 20 years now. In that time, we have poured a cataract of blood, treasure and sweat into the place to try and convince them that life would be better if they just followed the Secular Left. Education, infrastructure, modernity, it's all yours if you just do what we do!

They failed.

We are on the verge of surrendering Afghanistan back to the Muslims after the largest political and cultural campaign in the history of Man**. Despite being outspent a zillion to one, Muslim imams have managed to convince the population that the Secular Left is for losers.

If you can't manage to convince the Afghans to ditch Islam and follow you, how in the world do you expect to convince anyone? Oh, sure, we yapped about living in harmony with Islam, but it's clear now that they don't see it that way at all. By definition, your concept of someone else's faith can't be superior to their own understanding of it. The Secular Left has shown that it does not comprehend Islam and certainly can't defeat it, no matter how much money they spend.

Meanwhile, in France, Achmed and Fatima had four children while Pierre and Chloe had one. Maybe.

If the demographics are swinging in favor of Islam and you can't convert them, I'd say you're doomed.

* - Ship of Fools by Tucker Carlson convinced me that there is almost no difference at all between left and right. As the culture is more important than politics and the left owns the culture, lock, stock and barrel, I'm using the term Secular Left instead of Secular Elites. Your mileage may vary.

** - Man includes women who identify as men, men who dress in animal costumes for sexual purposes and those who are gender fluid and are men during prime-numbered hours.

An Apocalyptic Photo

One click leading to another, I pondered buying the audiobook, Alas, Babylon yesterday. It's a 1950s novel about people trying to survive after a nuclear war. When I took the sunset photo below the day before, it had an atomic-bomb-aftermath glow to it.

Enjoy?

Aside: I had an encounter recently with a young person who was thoroughly racist and it really bugged me. At first, I was going to post a rant and then an analysis and finally I decided to post a discussion of a set of candidate arguments to deal with such a situation, but I don't have it fleshed out yet. It was the Nazis-without-ambition sort of racism, mixed with the belligerent self-assurance that comes with youth. It was a social situation, so it was kind of like handling a coral snake - making it angry was going to lead to very bad results and making it angry was the easiest thing imaginable.

Hmm.

Praying Mantis

We rarely see these in San Diego, although I'm told, from online references, that there are plenty of them about. This chap was clinging to our front yard fence, patiently waiting for dinner. I tried my hand at identification and I'm thinking it's a mantis religiosa or European Mantis. I suspect that it's a male as the abdomen is slender, suggesting that it's not carrying eggs.

I left the photos rather large, so they're worth a click. Enjoy!

Obama Is A God

... and once you grasp that, all becomes clear.

I've argued on this blog that we're not experiencing a political struggle, but a religious one. Two things have solidified this for me recently. The first was this comment, excerpted before, from Rod Dreher's blog.

Time to start giving up on arguments altogether.

No argument will work. The time is already past. You probably have about 2-4 years until they ban you from Twitter, etc., and the payment processor company you use to allow people to pay for subscriptions or to make donations tells you to take a hike with your hateful bigotry. You can see, I can see, and more and more people can see the direction things are going.

Time (long past time) to start thinking about alternatives to arguments, period. They are fun to make! But there is no argument that will work against the spirit of our age.

Islam is a religion. Essentially, it falls back on "It's in the Koran!" as it's fundamental justification. It's not rational, it's rationalizing. No argument there.

Secular postmodernism is a religion. It must be, because it discards objectivity in all forms - knowledge, morality and logic. You have your truth and I have mine. There is no Truth. No argument there. Instead, you have the cultural zeitgeist of the moment, determined by the elite and driven by the mob. Oddly enough, Michael Cohen's guilty plea to campaign finance violations is what crystallized that for me.

As Jonah Goldberg, who has gone off the rails as far as I'm concerned, might say, I'm going to engage in "whataboutism." My reply to Cohen's plea is, "What about Obama's far larger campaign finance violation which was treated with only a fine?" Obama got away with it because he is a god. He is a member of the elite whose duty it is to inform the mob of what is currently right and wrong. He cannot be questioned because he is the answer to all questions. "Is this wrong?" "What does Obama (or the elite) think?" is the implicit dialog.

Hillary's emails operated in the same fashion. She was given a pass for crimes which would have sent a Normal to prison for a long time because she is a goddess. She belongs to the pantheon of the elite. She is not bound by the rules because, like Obama and the rest of the elite, she makes the rules and anyway, the rules are fluid since we've discarded objective morality.

18 US Code 793 contains the following clause which, in any objective reality, shows that Hillary and everyone who came in contact with her email server, were criminals.

(f) Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing ... or information, relating to the national defense, (1) through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, or (2) having knowledge that the same has been illegally removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of its trust, or lost, or stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, and fails to make prompt report of such loss, theft, abstraction, or destruction to his superior officer — Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.

There's plenty more Hillarian violations at the link. What of it? Objective morality is nonsense and Hillary and her cronies are part of the elite pantheon. They are gods and goddesses and should not be bound by the laws of mere Normals. You live in that world, not them.

Dig the cover of Comey's book. If that's not religious, I don't know what is.

The implication to the Normals is that Comey's higher loyalty is to the Truth. The reality is that he has a higher loyalty to the gods and goddesses he serves.

And you're not one of them.

I'm pondering a follow-up post which will suggest that the Catholic Church is the last, best hope for rationality and acceptance of objective reality. We're the only ones who, at least until the papacy of Francis, used unflinching logic to derive our theology. When we chase the ephemeral will-o-wisps of the modern culture (trannies good! bestiality not yet, but soon?), we throw away logic. Once we discard it, there will be no one left to defend it.

Argument Is So Passé

Instead, it's all about emoting, chanting, shouting and driving speakers off the stage. In this case, it's a Democrat, Mayor Garcetti of Los Angeles.

My guess is that the protesters have run out of conservatives at which to scream. Dig the video below.

I lived in LA for a while. Going back there now, the decay is palpable everywhere. It's been true blue for quite some time, so there's no one the progressives can blame but themselves, but that would be rational and we're over that. No, the best course of action is definitely shouting.

Please Stop Praying For Wisdom!

... for our elected leaders. Start praying for independence from them instead.

Our political leaders are creatures of the predominant culture. These days, given the left's stranglehold on the media, academia, tech giants and entertainment, that culture is secular and progressive. That culture is the enemy of Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. Like a reader over at Rod Dreher's blog said, that culture is not interested in argument, it's all about exercising raw power.

Time to start giving up on arguments altogether.

No argument will work. The time is already past. You probably have about 2-4 years until they ban you from Twitter, etc., and the payment processor company you use to allow people to pay for subscriptions or to make donations tells you to take a hike with your hateful bigotry. You can see, I can see, and more and more people can see the direction things are going.

Time (long past time) to start thinking about alternatives to arguments, period. They are fun to make! But there is no argument that will work against the spirit of our age.

We can't solve a problem whose existence we deny. The problem is both the culture and the reach of the government which is a significant enforcement arm of the culture. Instead, we should pray that the faithful be given the freedom to explore and follow their consciences as we seek to imitate Christ.

I'm telling you, Catholic libertarianism is the path to success.

The other thing we need is Nick Saban as Pope. Here he is, reacting to a report on the status of Jesuit-run colleges in America.

You Can Move Faster If You Drop Things

... like your standards, your morals, your ethics and your foundational principles.

The Church of England is now pseudo-baptizing trangendered people who are coming out as their new identity for the first time.

The Church of England has encouraged its clergy to create baptism-style ceremonies for transgender people to welcome them into the Anglican faith.

New pastoral guidance, published on Tuesday, advises clergy to refer to transgender people by their new name, though it stops short of being a baptism.

No word on whether or not people who cut off their arms and legs, paint themselves green and claim to be cucumbers will be specially celebrated on Plough Sunday. There's also that hassle of a book called the Bible with all of its references to man and woman, be fruitful and multiply and so forth. Bitterly clinging to the Bible will only slow you down as you endeavor to keep up with the times. It's best to ditch the thing so you don't get caught out like some throwback High School teacher and by throwback, I mean someone thrown all the way back to 2010 or so.

Speaking of throwbacks, I hope you're all ready to move out on an upcoming issue - pedophilia.

I hope you’re sitting down for this. Thomas O’Carroll, a convicted British pedophile, has published an essay in a peer-reviewed academic quarterly arguing for legalized pedophilia.

Or maybe the next step will be bestiality. Quoted in that blog post by Rod Dreher is this tidbit:

"The assertion that children are incapable of reciprocal sexual relations is empirically unfounded. Where is the evidence? A comparison with animals is again suggested. Dogs appear to be perfectly capable of reciprocity in loving relationships with human beings, often to the extent of being every bit as devoted and loyal in their affections towards their owners as their owners are towards them, and perhaps even more so."

Either way, you don't want to be caught lagging behind the mob and be fired.

What's the best way to make sure you can move fast? Drop everything. You can't run as quickly if you're carrying a cinderblock like the Bible or faith or reason or science or worthless stuff like that. Best to ditch it and make sure you're ready to go in whatever direction we go next.

Running as fast as you can doesn't always turn out the way you had hoped.

Bad Southern Food

... will turn you off from good Southern food because you won't know the good version exists.

I've never liked biscuits and gravy. I keep trying it at restaurants and they keep tasting meh. I decided to give them one last try, making my own buttermilk biscuits and my own sausage gravy.

It was outstanding.

Now that I've tried the basic version and liked it, I have plans, big plans for modifications to the gravy. Fresh herbs from the garden, spicy sausage and who knows what else!

How To Tell You're Not At A Waffle House

... is pretty easy. If the menu says the "Waffle of the Day" is at "Market Price" like it was some kind of freshly-caught sea bass, straight from the boat, you're not at a Waffle House.

Hipster millennials. Sigh.

Stupid, Poor And Extinct Is A Heck Of A Way To Go Through Life

... although if you're extinct, you're not going through life, are you?

I'm pondering a book and I think I'm close to a theme. This is another thought piece fleshing things out.

In formulating my response to Rod Dreher's call for a defensive crouch, I keep coming back to the naked vulnerability of the secular, progressive culture. Above all, a culture has to work. That is, if it goes extinct or is conquered, it's what we scientists call a failure.

I posit that the secular, progressive culture is a complete failure. The only time you hide from such a thing is when you're biding your time, waiting for it to collapse.

Stupid

Imagine you're part of the secular, progressive culture. Here's where you are right now...

First, let us agree to do away with whiteness. Whiteness is bad. The Patriarchy goes next because, you know, men. Organized religion is mumbo-jumbo and anyway, a lot of it was just borrowed from the pagans. In sum, Western Europe and it's heritage is utterly expendable.

Once these things have been expunged from polite company, we are free to live our lives in peace! Well, so long as you don't support any of the aforementioned heresies, which will force us to beat you senseless for peace.

Now that we've done away with the patriarchal family and the strictures of organized religion, we'll all get in our furry costumes and ... wait a minute. Look at Baltimore and Chicago and Oakland! Man, those places are full of gun violence! Sigh. Put the furry costume down and call the Bronies, we need to march for more and more laws against gun violence.

Back in the day, you could order guns and ammunition through the mail. We were a good deal safer, too. What happened? Well, we threw out the cultural structures that kept us safe. Now we need to build new ones, recreating the effects of the Judeo-Christian West without any of it's foundational principles.

That's a Rube Goldberg machine and it's not working even though we keep adding more and more political and cultural stages to it. No worries, this next round of elections will bring us the leaders we need to replace the traditional family! Well, that and the suppression of anyone who disagrees with us even slightly.

Poor

If you spend more than you make for long enough, you go bankrupt and end up living on the street. That's no fun even though you're closer to nature. All of the large, secular, progressive nations are on a nearly irreversible path to bankruptcy. Italy recently abandoned it's pathetic "austerity" effort and jacked up it's budget into tequila-shooters-on-a-Saturday-night territory. The resulting hangover is going to clobber German banks something fierce.

Not to worry, France and Japan are on the same trajectory, so the ripple effects from all of them going down will be hard to trace to any single source. It will be like tsunamis hitting an island from three directions at once. Which one swept away the village? Who knows?

Extinct

Dig this update on Italy's demographic collapse. Italian data was the easiest thing to come to hand, it's not that I'm picking on them.

The fall in the Italian birth rate has reached its lowest level ever in 2017. In a country of 60.5 million inhabitants, just 458,151 children were born last year, and even less, about 440 thousand, are the new births predicted for 2018 — just over 7 per 1,000 inhabitants, 30 per cent under the median of the European Union, which is already the region of the world with the lowest birth rate.

If you consider the fertility rate – or “total fertility rate” – which ensures zero growth, that is, the equal exchange of the population, is 2.1 children per woman, then observe that the Italian figure has been dramatically under that for decades. In 2017 it sank to 1.32, with several regions even more prone to births, and with Sardinia even settled at 1.06.

It's kind of hard to claim you're on the right track if you're dying out. That would seem to be a pretty basic measure of, err, "sustainability."

It's all good, though, the Muslims are still having babies. Marseilles, for example, is 25% Muslim right now. While the secular progressives play with their inflatable sheep, babies name Mohammed are being born by the dozens. How long before Marseilles is majority Muslim? What will that do to the LGBTQWERTYSP500 scene?

I've got a running gag that wife kitteh still finds funny. Whenever we see something like the Furries in Chicago or read about people being ostracized for suggesting that transmen are really women who have mutilated themselves, I say, "Meanwhile, Achmed and Fatima have had four children."

Staying Power

The Church has been around for 2000 years, Islam about 1400. The secular, progressives have been around for, what, 50 years? Yep, they own the media, academia, entertainment and the high-tech industries. So what? None of those will be able to save them from failure when their worldview guarantees it. In effect, they lose ground with each cultural transaction. Increasing the volume by eliminating all competitors will only accelerate the process.

The secular progressives are never going to get past that chapter.

I Used To Be A Bigot

When I was in college, I studied chemical engineering for my first three years. I loved chemistry and the engineering part appealed to my mathematical side. Around the end of my junior year, I started looking into job prospects. Chemical engineering was a 5-year degree, so this wasn't leaving things to the last moment, it was the start of an exploration, part of my growth into an adult.

I quickly discovered that chemical engineering was practically synonymous with petroleum engineering and that the jobs were centered in the oil refining industry in and around Louisiana. Louisiana! I didn't want to go there! It was all dimwitted rednecks living in swamp filth. Why, they could barely read or write and didn't they all marry their cousins or something?

This photo of New Orleans is courtesy of TripAdvisor

That shack, found with a quick Google image search, is almost a perfect recreation of what I imagined the South to be.

Similarly, I came out of college hating the NRA and all of its members. No one with an IQ over 70 owned a gun. Guns killed people. They were accident prone and could leap up and go off of their own accord, almost always shooting toddlers, even if there were no toddlers in the house. No, a toddler would mysteriously appear out of nowhere and then the gun would shoot it. That's the way it worked and I knew, because I had been to college and done my learning with much studiosity.

When I got my first job after college, at a place where I still work today, my officemates weren't just NRA members, they made their own cartridges and at least one had built his own musket. They thought I was hilarious! It didn't take me long to change my mind. The initial shock of meeting intelligent, educated, highly accomplished men who owned guns blew my bigotry away like a high wind whipping away the fog.

These men mentored me patiently. My school was strong in theory, but weak in practice. These guys taught me how to solder, how to read schematics, how to build circuits and more. The best of the lot had grown up in the Depression on what he called a "dry dirt farm in Kansas" which I took to mean a farm without irrigation. The dude was always jovial and kind and he loved his guns.

Getting over my anti-Southern bigotry was a much slower process. I was born in Boston, my father was from Wisconsin and my mother from Illinois. I was a Yankee, through and through. Moving all over the country as I grew up, I tried to root for the New England Patriots and the Boston Red Sox to connect with my very shallow roots, but it never took.

Looking back, it's hard to find a tipping point that led me to my passionate love for the South. As best as I can recall, it was probably the time I had a day-long layover in Atlanta due to storms fouling up Delta Airlines' schedules. There had been so many flight cancellations that the best Delta could do was get me back to San Diego the next evening.

I got a hotel and a car and decided to explore Georgia for the day. On a whim, I picked out a tiny town called, of all things, Grantville. Grantville had a population of about 3,000 and I found a little, roadside BBQ joint for lunch. I had a great time. I came to realize that Southern hospitality was a real thing. The place wasn't busy, so I chatted with the staff while I ate some of the best BBQ I had ever tasted.

Over the years, work took me all over the country, but every time I visited the South, I had the same experience. It took a while, but working and socializing with everything from engineers and scientists to shipyard workers to the staff and customers at Waffle Houses across the South finally dispelled my narrow-minded intolerance. Reality dissolved prejudice.

Nowadays, I love the South more than any other part of the country. The more I explore the culture, the cuisine, the people and the countryside, the deeper my affection grows. Outside of biscuits and gravy for breakfast, which is almost always underwhelming, I can't think of anything about the region that has been a disappointment.

And that's how a bigoted, sneering, college-boy Yankee lost his ignorant hatred of hobbies he'd never tried, a place he'd never visited and people he'd never met.

A Millipede

Wife kitteh found this handsome character marching through our house the other day, so I took a photo of it for Tim. I did a little sleuthing and it looks like a Hiltonius Hebes. That sounds about right as it gave my wife the Hebes Jebes.

I took the photo with my phone and then did some Photoshop work on it to improve the quality. The stoic little fellow refused to smile for the camera, but I'll bet he did a 1,000-toe tap dance when I dropped him off in one of our raised beds. The picture was left rather large, so I think it's worth a click. Enjoy!

A Funeral At The House Of Usher

In Chicago over the weekend, I happened to see previous presidents being interviewed on 60 Minutes about President George H. W. Bush's death. It should have been a patriotic moment, but it filled me with revulsion and it took me a while to figure out why.

Well, actually, watching Bill Clinton, that was easy to figure out why. He had assaulted and raped women and was protected by those same creeps on 60 Minutes. Literally in the Oval Office, he had taken advantage of a woman young enough to be his daughter. Meanwhile, Brett Kavanaugh, who by all accounts has lived a righteous life, was torn to shreds by the media types.

Barack Obama, his face permanently tilted upwards in his faux-patrician way, pontificated. Fortunately, the sound was turned down, so I didn't have to listen to him talk about himself which he undoubtedly did. He's nauseating under normal circumstances, so maybe that one was understandable, too.

What really got me was my visceral reaction to the younger President Bush. He looked like a dog rolling around on his back, letting the 60 Minutes cretin rub his tummy. He practically wet himself in ecstasy. The others were being themselves while W ... well, he cavorted with his chums. Oh, sure the CBS news staff poured on the chants of "Racist!" at W while he was in office. Of course they played at Lord Haw Haw while we were fighting in Iraq. That's just what those people did for a living and for W, there were no hard feelings. Hollywood is putting out a film called Vice which is blood libel against Dick Cheney, but hey, what's the big? The 60 Minutes crew is smiling at me and that makes me feel warm and happy inside!

It took me until yesterday to figure out why this made me feel sick to my stomach.

W's supporters, of which I was one, are still under the cosh from the press, academia, Hollywood and their allies. CBS is no friend of mine. They'd love to see me reeducated or simply politically marginalized into irrelevance. Meanwhile, one of our alleged leaders is wriggling in pleasure as the 60 Minutes team whisper sweet nothings at him. It was all lies on their side and all sucking up on his side.

There was something rotten about the whole thing, like a corpse in an Edgar Allen Poe story. Horrific.

Hey, W, have you ever heard of this Kavanaugh guy? Remember what they did to him?

Furries On Tarawa

While wife kitteh and I were in Chicago over the weekend, there was a Furries convention there at the same time. We went out to lunch at a German restaurant near the convention with some friends which is where we discovered them. It was quite the experience. We even got to see one of them spanked in front of everyone with a large paddle. If you don't know what a Furry is, it's some dude who dresses like a furry animal, as far as I can tell, primarily for sexual fetish purposes.

It made me think of the Marines on Tarawa. They were almost completely unalike. I have to confess that there was some similarity as both were bipeds and presumably mammalian, but that was probably about where it ended.

Not Marines.

Marines.

It's an indication of the state of our culture that grown men feel comfortable dressing like furry animals and paddling each other in public.

And people want to complain about President Trump being inappropriate.

Centralizing Power Centralizes The Target

... of disappointment and subsequent rage.

It's all well and good to be a socialist and hand out money when times are good. You get to consolidate power and have the luxury of telling the deplorables what pronouns they are permitted to use. When things go bad, however, you are the logical target of wrath. After all, you told everyone you were the person who could run their lives down to how many pennies they pay for gasoline.

PARIS—The worst rioting to hit the French capital in years left President Emmanuel Macron weighing an emergency crackdown on protests and scrambling to shield his pro-business agenda from surging public anger at his government.

Mr. Macron convened a crisis meeting of ministers on Sunday after protests by the gilets jaunes—or yellow vests—escalated violently the day before, leaving the Arc de Triomphe vandalized and the heart of Paris dotted with burning cars and smashed storefronts.

The gilets jaunes movement, sparked in October by Mr. Macron’s proposal to raise fuel taxes to reduce pollution, gained strength in areas outside big cities where people depend on cars. It has since broadened to a rallying cry for those who say his policies favor the wealthy and punish the working class...

It was the third consecutive weekend that gilets jaunes massed throughout the country, but the leaderless movement, which has no spokespeople or defined membership, has refused to name representatives to sit down with the government.

Emphasis mine. It was that last bit that jumped out at me. A quick solution to the crisis would be to decentralize power and hand authority for a lot of this stuff out to the provinces, cities, towns, hamlets and pigsties where the deplorables bathe in mud while Macron and his elite partners sip champagne at their global meetings where they discuss how horrid all those little people are.

Ahem. In any case, if the source of your gas price pain is the local mayor, you'd go firebomb his house and leave poor Macron alone to pose for the cameras and take softball questions from an adoring media.

Or better yet, you could take all that ham-fisted, regulatory interference in the lives of the Normals and burn it before the Normals burn you.

Nah. More money and power for the elites. That's the solution here. Nothing feedback-loopy about that.

Maybe the solution is to take all the elite leaders of the world and move them to some place the Normals can't reach. Perhaps we can construct a home for them in socialist-friendly San Francisco Bay. Like Alcatraz, maybe.

Parking The Catholic Bus

In metric football, aka soccer, "parking the bus" means that a team is playing maximum defense. All 11 players are usually behind the ball, crowding the penalty box to the point where an opponent's skill becomes meaningless as there are just too many bodies in the way to score a goal. It's typically done by a team which is far inferior to its opponent. Any hopes for scoring hinge on the occasional breakaway, counter attack.

When I read the inestimably wise Rod Dreher talk about his Benedict Option, that's what I hear. Fair enough. We're third in strength behind the secular progressives and Islam and we need to think about playing defense - maintaining our churches and as many of our current believers as possible. I disagree with him that we have no offensive ability, but that's a topic for another blog post.

Last night we went to a secular wedding. We've been to several recently. The ceremony is always brief as there was nothing substantial to anchor it outside of the vows. There's a brief introduction, the couple say the vows, everyone claps and we move on to the party. In each case, the (young) couple has chosen a friend to officiate, so there's not a whole lot of life experience to impart in a homily.

As I watch the loving pair pledge their troth and then the whole gang drink and dance the night away, I think about Rod Dreher's proposition - that a culture in decline needs to cling to its orthodoxies like soldiers in a bunker awaiting an offensive.

Well, maybe.

I'd suggest that the most important thing that's missing in these lives is the acknowledgement that there is more to life than this (pinching his flesh). That's pretty much it. If this is all there is, then doing the Wobble, drinking a lot of rum and Cokes and then going home and boinking is pretty much the apex of human existence. Instead, if the gang thought we were souls who had bodies, then natural curiosity would lead them to ceremonies that mentioned that.

And then we could move on to the Wobble and, later, the horizontal monkey dance.

This is the kind of bus I want to park.

There's Some Weird Stuff Going On In Chicago

... at the skating rink. I'm not saying it was aliens, but it was aliens.

A space warp developed as we watched the skaters. It got bad enough that some of the younger skaters started to fall down. Darn those prankster aliens!

This is best viewed in fullscreen mode. Enjoy!