What's After Infanticide?

... isn't the right question. The right question is: What isn't?

So the Nazis without Ambition in New York and Virginia have gone all-in on infanticide. Yes, yes, I know, aborting a 9-month fetus requires the consent of a physician and blah blah blah. I'll just point out that Dr. Kermit Gosnell was a physician and I'm sure Planned Parenthood has plenty such creatures at each clinic.

Suffice it to say that if the law permits unsuccessfully-aborted babies to be left to die of exposure, that's what's going to happen. Gosnell didn't worry about whether or not they had birth defects and plenty of the Einsatzgruppen at PP won't, either.

What's next? I mean, if you thought that the Bullet Train to Hell that just blew past the leave-infants-to-die-of-exposure stop doesn't have somewhere to go next, you're delusional. And if you thought it would never get to this point, you weren't paying attention. You could see this, off in the distance, when Hillary Clinton won the Margaret Sanger Award and no one on the left or in the news media, but I repeat myself, said a disparaging word about Sanger being a crazed eugenicist.

So I'll go out on a limb and suggest that the next phase will be euthanasia for the elderly. Compassionate euthanasia, of course. You know, we made all those pension promises that we can't afford and now we need to cut funding for services to the poor and education. Say, isn't grandpa a bit demented these days? Do you think he'd notice if we offed him?

After that, I'm sure that if you let your imagination run wild, it won't be too far from what's coming up.

We tried taking Little Sisters of the Poor to the Supreme Court, but they refused to submit to our authority. Next time, let's try something more ... final.

Universal Medicare Is Just

... was something someone said to me on Twitter recently. Just. It was just.

I didn't really open up on the dude, but here's something I would have said.

Let's agree that it is just. It is an act of justice for you to get the government to send men with guns over to my house to take my money and give it to you so you can pay a doctor. I agree, there is some justice to that as it will take care of your needs.

Wouldn't it be even more just if you got a job that paid more? Even better, wouldn't it be juster to work two jobs and then take the money of the second job and send it all to the government? After all, the justy part of the whole thing is that the government is handing out money to those who need it. What could be justier than making sure the government has more money. The only way you can make sure that happens is for you to work harder, earn more and send the money to the government.

And that, my friends, would be social justest.

Why are you sitting there reading this? Get to work.

Hello Dollar Shave Club, Goodbye Gillette!

So yesterday I got my first Dollar Shave Club kit, ordered using the Andrew Klavan Show discount. It looked like this.

I tried it out this morning. First, I love the shave butter. It's like lotion instead of the foamy junk and it makes the razor glide across your face. Second, the razor itself is unbelievably sharp. It feels like silk on your skin. It shaves a whole lot faster and closer than the Gillette trash.

I'm not going back, if only just for the quality of the product.

Of course, the fact that Gillette hates men is another reason to dump their rubbish razors.

A Recursive Flower

Wife kitteh and I were at Lowe's yesterday, shopping for some new plants. While there, I saw this flower-in-a-flower and so took a shot of it with my Pixel 3. First, the phone took an awesome shot. I didn't expect the details to come out so perfectly. Second, I love the recursiveness of the flower. It's like there's a tiny flower inside the big flower.

I left it large, so I think it's worth a click. Enjoy!

Charm Is Better Than Strength

... for women.

I went to the gym this morning at 0700. If you thought Saturday mornings were for the crazies, you should go on Sunday mornings. Those are the really dedicated gym rats.

I saw both women and men. Most of the women were of average height and build. A few were petite. They had been working out for a while as evidenced by their highly developed physiques. They were still petite or, at best, of average size.

The men looked like viking warriors. 6' 4", 260# with huge muscles. They were beasts. I thought of all the recent grrrl powr movies where the lead chick demolishes a whole bunch of big bruisers. What a laugh! Those gym rat chicks could land all the punches they wanted on the viking warriors and the vikings wouldn't even feel them. Then, with one mighty, Nordic backhand, the hardworking gym rat chick would go flying.

If I were the gym rat chick, I'd keep going to the gym and be proud of what I'd accomplished. I'd also be saying to myself, "I want one of those guys on the end of a leash!" That would be a figurative leash, of course, the kind that makes a man proud to get up at 0500 to get to the coal mine on time to work all day so he can provide for his wife and kids.

Think of two alternative situations. In the first, petite gym rat chick is alone on the streets at night and faces a bad situation. I guess she could console herself that someone was going to take a punch or two, but she'd be going down to suffer whatever the bad people had in store for her.

In the second situation, petite chick has Throndar the Viking Warrior on the end of her figurative leash when bad men approach.

In her sweet, little soprano voice, she calls out, "Kill, Throndar! Kill!"

Throndar roars out, "THRONDAR KILL!" and proceeds to fling bad men about like rag dolls while petite gym rat chick helps out with some well-timed sucker punches and kicks to the groins.

At least the second scenario has a chance to produce a good outcome for the petite gym rat chick.

What's missing in our culture are the modern works of art such as movies, stories and songs wherein the fine art of feminine charm is extolled instead of grrrl powr.

On the plus side, she has a heap of "attitude." On the minus side, she's going to end up in a heap and would find herself practicing her "attitude" in the ICU.

Men And Women Are Different

... no, really!

Back in my younger days, I spent some time as a dilettante bodybuilder. Therein hangs a tale, but not one for today. I've recently taken it up again as my strength was clearly starting to become a problem, particularly when I went diving.

I'm only about a month into the project, but I've at least hit the point where a good workout doesn't leave me crippled from muscle aches. Yay!

Saturday morning crowds at the gym are typically the hard core nuts. Normal people are sleeping off hangovers. Today, there were a few women bodybuilders mixed in with the men. They were lifting about a third of the weight of the guys. In fact, I outlifted some of them and I'm at least old enough to be their dads.

What's the problem with that? What's with the need to make "strong" women in movies to be physically superior to men? The women at the gym were in terrific shape and had clearly worked hard to get that way. Why can't they be appreciated for what they've accomplished as women without having to create stories that are absolute nonsense?

I'm looking at you, recent Star Wars movies.

Look Not For Rational Thought

... for you will not find it. We are not rational creatures, we are rationalizing creatures.

Well, save for Catholicism, which has been carefully constructed over 2000 years to be self-consistent and rational. Sadly, we Catholics are still rationalizing beings, so while the faith is rational, we are not.

Just what am I on about now? Well, I'm working my way through St. Augustine's The City of God, a book of luminous genius wherein Augie takes the pagans out into the alley behind the bar and beats the tar out of them.

The book, originally published in 426 AD, is primarily a response to accusations from non-Christian Romans who blamed the Christians for the fall of Rome. They claimed that had the Empire continued to worship the gods, the Gauls would never have triumphed. St. Augustine's book is a total dissection of the nonsense of paganism. Here's a tiny portion of it.

Who, then, is Janus, with whom Varro commences? He is the world. Certainly a very brief and unambiguous reply. Why, then, do they say that the beginnings of things pertain to him, but the ends to another whom they call Terminus? For they say that two months have been dedicated to these two gods, with reference to beginnings and ends—January to Janus, and February to Terminus—over and above those ten months which commence with March and end with December. And they say that that is the reason why the Terminalia are celebrated in the month of February, the same month in which the sacred purification is made which they call Februum, and from which the month derives its name. Do the beginnings of things, therefore, pertain to the world, which is Janus, and not also the ends, since another god has been placed over them? Do they not own that all things which they say begin in this world also come to an end in this world? What folly it is, to give him only half power in work, when in his image they give him two faces!

It goes on and on and on like this.

What strikes you is not just the silliness of the pagans, but how long it lasted, how pervasive it was and how applicable it is today. Rome, one of the greatest empires in the history of Mankind, adhered to a belief system that was obviously false. It's kind of like the socialists of today. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spouts gibberish and there are plenty who go along with her.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

What that passage shows is how they kept creating new gods and goddesses to perform different tasks in order to make their model of the world work. It's like the way the Secular Left is continually adding regulations and mandates to the Rube Goldberg machine it's had to create to replace the traditional family.

The voice of reason?

No U-turns For The Progressives

... ever.

As we all knew the first time it was reported, the Covington Catholic kids, particularly that smirking weasel confronting the noble and peaceful Native American Elder, were examples of the rampant white supremacy in America which has been encouraged by President Trump. We all knew this, including the chardonnay-sipping, sort-of-right-wing pundits at the National Review and the bishop and arch-bishop of the Kentucky diocese that educated those little klansmen.

All of us. We knew it.

And then the truth came out and we all decided the boys had been railroaded. Apologies poured forth. "So sorry we called for people to assault and possibly murder you and burn down your school! I hope you understand. It's just one of those things that happens sometimes."

Katie Herzog, an opinion writer who is on the Right Side of History, penned this piece which perfectly embodies what happened. First, she joined the mob.

The video clip was enraging. It showed an older Native American man drumming, surrounded by jeering white teenagers in MAGA hats. The clip focused on one red-hatted boy staring directly at the man with the drum. His stupid, smirking face seemed to symbolize everything wrong with America right now. The tweet claimed that the boys surrounded and mobbed a group of Natives at the Indigenous Peoples March in Washington DC, and I saw red and hit retweet in less than a second.

That's something she tries to avoid because she's open-minded and fair.

Taking part in viral outrage is generally against my own rules.

You know how that goes. One minute you're open-minded and fair and the next you see a white kid's face next to a noble and peaceful Native American Elder and something just breaks inside you, driving you to scream through your keyboard.

It's all good, though. She has seen the error of her ways and apologized. Sort of. Well, as much as can be expected in a country where red-hatted boys stupidly smirking at a noble and peaceful Native American Elder symbolize everything wrong with it. It's not that these nameless things, which we call White Supremacy and the Patriarchy when we're naming them, aren't permeating America to the point where poor Katie is convinced she's living in the Handmaid's Tale, it's that in this particular instance, it didn't happen.

Maybe. Because, you know, maybe it did and we just don't know it.

(I)t’s undeniable that the kids look for all the world like white-privileged (jerks)...When I saw a young white man in a red MAGA hat staring down a Native American elder, I just knew he was a bigot, a thug. And maybe he is. Maybe he is exactly the smug little (jerk) he looked like in that moment.

Emphasis mine.

The event didn't cause Katie to change her mind or anything. I don't think it made anyone change their mind. It was just a false alarm, but a perfectly understandable one, given how white supremacists practicing toxic masculinity can be found everywhere.

So Katie looked down from her high horse at the deplorable swine-children beneath her and condescended to admit that although they might be crazed racists, they weren't this time. Note that she did not draw any conclusions about the black lunatics who had been verbally assaulting the boys nor the noble and peaceful Native American Elder who was, in fact, a political activist and accomplished liar. No, those people symbolize nothing at all. It's such a far-fetched notion that it doesn't even occur to Katie to ponder it. Why would you? What on Earth could racist black thugs screaming insults and a progressive political activist lying to the media about white kids represent?

Where is that sort of thing in the Handmaid's Tale?

No, let's not go there. It's enough that the Kentucky klanskids got away this time to run back to their homophobic Church without being lynched too badly. Hey, they got some apologies, didn't they? They should be thanking the Katie Herzogs of the world who are willing to look deep inside themselves and find almost nothing wrong.

Unlike smirking, white, Catholic kids who symbolize racism and privilege, the ANTIFA thugs taking over part of downtown Portland is symbolic of nothing.

San Diego After The Rain

This is as green as it gets, ladies and gents. I took this shot while out on maneuvers with the Catican Guards at Cuyamaca Rancho State Park, which is in the hills east of San Diego. I left it large enough to be worth a click. Enjoy!

Hello Kitty Wine

What's the first thing you think when you hear the words, "Hello Kitty?" Fine wine, right? Yep, me, too.

I was at a local Japanese market yesterday when I came across this.

What do you serve with Hello Kitty pinot noir? Cheetos?

We tried it last night. That tiny Italian flag on the bottle isn't for show, it really is an Italian wine. A very, very bad Italian wine. It turns out that it wasn't a pinot at all, but more of a sparkling rose. Ghastly. Some dufus in Italy must have had barrels of a failed experimental wine that he was thinking of dumping in the local river when the Japanese geniuses behind Hello Kitty showed up and bought the lot. They threw on the logo and charged $24 for it so a dingbat American like me would buy it strictly for the novelty of the thing.

Winning.

We Were Only Following Orders

... because we're all Nazis now.

Well, almost all of us. Really, the only ones of us who aren't Nazis yet don't count as we don't have TV shows, a diocese, schools to run or large online followings.

Ah, how quickly the movement of der Volk builds. How completely it envelops everything. How irresistible its force! It seems like only a few short years ago that kids could join the March for Life, wear whatever they wanted and not end up being tortured and interrogated in Spandau Prison in the media and online. Thankfully, we do not live in such benighted times where undisciplined children can think and act as they wish. No, today we all know our assigned duties to the Reich for social justice and carry them out faithfully.

In case you missed it, a group of students from a Catholic high school in Kentucky attended the March for Life over the weekend. Some of them wore MAGA hats. After the event, they were waiting for their bus to pick them up and were singing and chanting school songs. It was all good fun. A native American social justice warrior approached them and did his best to annoy them, particularly one young man wearing one of those hats that indicates that you are a Jew white conservative. The kids weren't quite sure what to make of it and some continued their rambunctious fun. It was all caught on video.

The editorial staff of Der Stürmer news media showed everyone carefully edited versions of the video and the mobs sprung into action. Everyone from CNN to the Washington Post to Twitter celebrities with tens of thousands of followers felt that orgasmic thrill they get whenever there's the possibility that they can slaver about the horrible behaviors of the Jews white, conservative, Christian men.

Wie wundervoll! Wir haben jetzt den Beweis, dass dieser Untermensch einen der Volk angegriffen hat!

That's to be expected from the progressives as they are Nazis without ambition. The not-quite-so-shocking part was the way non-progressives fell into line, screaming at the kids and demanding immediate punishment. Any debate over their actual crimes were strictly a formality and easily brushed aside, their guilt having been predetermined because they were Jews white, conservative, Christian, young men.

You don't have to be a Nazi to assist the progressives, you might just be someone who is learning how to live under the new order. At some point, they become so powerful that your impulse is to spend most of your time with your hands folded and your mouth shut, awaiting your chance to join the mob, pointing and screaming at whoever who has violated the latest laws of the Reich progressives. If you do that, maybe they won't come after you. Until much, much later.

Among those who grabbed a torch and rushed to the Party rally were:

• The National Review,
• The kids' Catholic High School,
• The Kentucky diocese including the bishop and archbishop and
• Organizers from the March for Life.

Let that sink in.

It's one thing for the prog-Nazis to demand reeducation camps for Normals. That's to be expected. It's quite another for the institutions that allegedly support the Normals to have graduated from those camps and put into practice all they've learned.

Yep. Other than a few of us knuckle-dragging, Untermensch rednecks, we're all Nazis now.

And who wouldn't want to join the Party? They look like they're having such fun. Plus, those dudes in black with the helmets took someone famous to Spandau just the other day and beat the living daylights out of him for violating one of the Reich's more trivial rules. The best way to keep safe is to don your brown shirt and lift your right arm in salute!

The Photo I Wish I'd Taken

... or been able to take.

I love the view from the crest of a bridge looking down a river. Whether it's looking into a city, like the photo of Mobile, Alabama below, or just looking down a river flowing through a forest, I think it's a dramatic scene. Alas, it's usually not a good idea to stop your car on a bridge to get out and take a photo and I never seem to have the time to park at the base and walk up to the center of the bridge.

This one actually looks like it was taken by a drone. I don't have one of those, so I can't get the shot this way, either. Oh well. Thank God for professional photographers.

St. Augustine In 2019

... is right on the money.

I'm taking another crack at The City of God and this time I think I get it, at least enough to keep going through the whole 46+ hours of the thing. Right now, the Great Saint is kicking some pagan booty by asking, "If your gods were so great, what did they ever give you in the way of rules for life? Did you try to use those rules? How did that work out for you?"

Bingo. Let's modify it just slightly. "If the Secular Leftist Elites are so great, what did they ever give you in the way of rules for life? Did you try to use those rules? How did that work out for you?"

Love the one you're with didn't work out so well, did it?

Baltimore, a city owned and operated by the Secular Left for 60 years.

Does Obama Shave With Gillette Razors?

Gillette, in their recent video wherein they decided to kick men in the groin instead of selling us shaving products, implied the existence of objective morality and therefore sin. Imagine this conversation between the Gillette soy boys and a sociopath.

Gillette: Men must stop bullying!

Sociopath: Why? 

Gillette: Because it's objectively wrong!

Sociopath: Says who? 

Gillette: Everyone!

Sociopath: Not Barack Obama. He said sin was being out of alignment with your values. Maybe bullying isn't out of alignment with mine. That makes it OK.

Gillette: Errr...

And therein lies the fundamental problem for the Secular Left. They want objective morality when they feel like shaming someone, but they also deny it so they can pursue whatever they want in their own lives. Like an arms race, everyone else has done the same and effectively weaponized their own behaviors.

Dig what's going on in San Francisco with drug addicts fouling the streets and leaving needles all over the place. It's not out of alignment with their values, is it? How can it be "wrong?" It isn't to them. Good luck getting that to change.

Without objective morality, there can be no sin. Without sin, there is no need for contrition, atonement and attempts and behavioral change. Without contrition, atonement and attempts and behavioral change, there is no self-improvement towards a universally agreed upon ideal.

Whoops. When we ditched objective morality, we bred more sociopaths.

We still need the effects of a society striving towards that ideal - order, tolerance, commerce and so forth, but we don't have the moral structures at the individual level required to achieve them. Instead, we have multinational consumer product corporations making videos yelling at us to conform to an ill-defined and utterly fluid set of standards.

Yay.

This pattern could be used on the vestments of the priesthood of the Secular Left.

Ignorance Is Learned

... primarily in college.

By now, you've probably heard about the Gillette ad that lectures us men and demands we stop being jerks.

I don't see this as an anti-bullying ad, plus anti- all the rest of the hideous behaviors so common in men, but as an anti-man ad. Let me know if you can calculate the odds of Gillette running similarly critical ads aimed at women, blacks, gays and transgendered, albino Mexicans without a scientific calculator. I get it, Gillette. Men are horrible people and without you hectoring us, we're likely to set fire to an orphanage after raping someone.

That's all fine, but the most interesting part was the online reactions from bloggers and vloggers. The professional advertising blogs were almost all positively disposed towards the thing. The manosphere vloggers were completely enraged. What bubbles the advertising pros inhabit! Maybe it started in their universities where people with inappropriate opinions were banned from speaking.

If you're an advertiser, it might be a good idea to have some sense of your target market so you don't create something all of your pious, self-important prog friends love, but utterly torches your reputation with the Normals.

Bonus Tidbit: Here's the best reaction I read.

I've been involved in marketing for decades: in copywriting and sales, plus audio-visual, television, and radio production, along with more than 20 years of researching, studying, and teaching as a marketing professor. I've reviewed advertising going back a century or more.

I have never – never! – seen a more socially and commercially destructive advertisement than the new Gillette "We believe: The best men can be" video. My posted comment on Gillette's You Tube site: "What are you people thinking?" ...

From a commercial standpoint, the rationale of the ad – such as it is – is insane.  Men are the biggest purchaser of razors, and Gillette, which has had its share of competitive problems lately, has gone out of its way to insult its primary customers.  Unlike the thrust of some other ads, the customers or prospects are being insulted not because they might have scraggly beards, have sloppy shaves, or are using a different product.  The foundation of the ad is that the target audience is insulted just for being.  

Beauty And Love

I was at a planning meeting for an upcoming men's retreat weekend recently when one of the men told us that his wife would soon be undergoing open heart surgery. Another of the men at the meeting, a Catholic deacon, has late-stage bladder cancer. Organ cancers are bad news under the best of circumstances. His is just a few moves from checkmate.

The deacon led us in a selfless and heartfelt prayer for the others' wife. He prayed with intimate experience for strength, peace and the ability to face whatever came. He prayed with an honesty and love that was breathtaking. If you didn't know he was facing death himself, you'd never have guessed. His feelings were all for the woman.

It was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen.

Q: Who was the lamb being comforted, the deacon or the wife?
A: Both of them and all of us as well.

So, So Good

I had a different blog post in mind today, but when I saw this, I just had to share it. I'll be laughing about it all day.

"You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being." - Evelyn Waugh pic.twitter.com/b7O6HYVaQD

— Catholic Thinker (@ThinkerCatholic) January 15, 2019

Solzhenitsyn Destroys Dawkins And Harris

Modern atheists love to talk about evolutionary ethics and hate being confronted by the mountains of corpses from people mercilessly slaughtered by atheist regimes like the Nazis and other socialists. Their evolutionary ethics says that kindness and cooperation are evolutionarily superior and, in the end, will out-compete ruthlessly selfish cultures.

If only that were true.

I just finished volume 1 of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. In the Gulags, there were three classes of people. There were zeks, the political prisoners, thieves, genuine criminals and there were guards. The thieves stole things from the zeks and sold them to the guards for food and booze. It was a very tight economy and worked well for everyone but the zeks. The zeks weren't able to organize a revolt against this system and protect their possessions except in extremely rare cases. The zeks, read: you and me, were robbed and then died in the labor camps.

Doesn't this show evolutionary superiority? Why isn't this the natural end of atheist Man? It certainly was the end of evolution for scientific socialism. The same thing is happening today, different only in style, in socialist Venezuela. It makes a complete mockery of all of the fairy tale twaddle about Christian ethics being equally available from evolution the modern atheists yap about. They're all just whistling past the graveyard.

And what a graveyard it is!

If America Was Built On Slavery

... and we got rich, why didn't the Soviet Union get richer?

Following up on yesterday's drivel, today we'll look at the Secular Left's assertion that our wealth comes from the labors of slaves. Our sources will be The Gulag Archipelago and the biography of Nathan Bedford Forrest.

We all know the Antebellum South used slaves, primarily for agricultural work. To paraphrase president Lincoln, the slaves worked and the wealthy plantation owners reaped the rewards. Prior to the Civil War, General Forrest was a slave trader. According to his biography, in the late 1850s, a slave typically sold for $1,000 which translates into $30,000 today. By way of comparison, the cows shown below cost about $2,000 each.

The link for those cows is perishable, but here's the site where you can find cattle for sale.

That means you could buy 15 cows for the price of 1 slave. That's pretty expensive. Slaves were long-term investments and could be sold if you needed to raise cash to pay bills. Any punishment marks on a slave reduced his sale price because it marked him as difficult to manage. You could punish your slaves, but you did your best not to leave marks. That limited your options in forcing him to work harder. Killing them outright was financial insanity.

The socialist Soviet Union had slaves as well. Their endless streams of political prisoners fed their canal projects, gold mines and timber operations with plenty of slaves. Soviet slaves were free. All the State had to do to get another slave was arrest someone. As Solzhenitsyn notes multiple times in Gulag, labor camp sentences had nothing at all to do with guilt or innocence. Those words were meaningless in the socialist Soviet Union.

Aside: Soviet POWs captured by the Germans in the massive encirclements of 1941 were given 10-year sentences en masse when they were liberated. They were sent from the slave labor camps of Nazi Germany directly into the slave labor camps of the socialist Soviet Union.

Free slaves meant that the socialists in the Soviet Union could work their slaves to death without concern for their value. No punishments were forbidden to them for the same reason. Unlike the South, which could no longer import slaves, initially thanks to the efforts of evangelical Christians and the white sailors in the British Royal Navy, the Soviets could get more slaves any time they wanted. They didn't have to use the existing slaves as breeding stock.

Not having to breed new generations of slaves made the socialists' slave operations even more efficient. There were no expectant mothers that had to be given light work or no work. There were no nursing mothers and no infants and children to feed, returning no work. The socialists' slaves were all adults of working age. Every calorie of food spent on their upkeep was translated into free labor.

So if America owes its wealth to slavery, but Southern slaves were more expensive to buy and maintain and Southern slaves couldn't be treated as badly, why didn't the socialist Soviet Union flourish and become wildly successful? It had all the things the Secular Left tells us lead to prosperity. On the plus side, it was socialist, which we're told improves everything. On the minus side, it had plentiful and inexpensive slaves, which they say build mountains of profits for their owners. Instead, it collapsed, an utter failure.

Something from the Secular Left doesn't add up.

The Soviet Union Was Indeed Socialist

At Jordan Petereson's suggestion, I'm listening to The Gulag Archipelago these days. I find it absolutely enthralling. I can't turn it off when I'm in the car. Lots of things are occurring to me as I listen, but instead of trying to summarize them all in one post, I'll drag them out to the annoyance of you, my readers. You're welcome.

The first thing is that the USSR was indeed socialist. When confronted with the mountains of dead, modern socialists retort that it wasn't true socialism.

The objection is irrelevant.

The retort misses the point.

Consider:

• They had free healthcare.
• They had free education.
• They had free housing.
• They had guaranteed jobs.
• Profits, such as they were, were handed over to the State.

Finally, their income inequality was a fraction of ours. Pick a Soviet year and then sum up the total net wealth of all of the big dudes of the Party. I would bet dollars to donuts that their total wealth wouldn't come within a tenth of what Bill Gates has today. Ergo, their income inequality was less than ours, a strong measure of socialism, if socialists are to be believed.

Socialism isn't judged on cruelty or injustice. It's an economic system wherein everyone shares everything pretty much equally. No system in real life is totally one thing or another, so the fact that it had imperfections isn't an indication that it wasn't socialist, it only shows that the USSR existed in the real world. The piles of corpses mean nothing when judging if they were socialist or not. It's like saying an apple isn't an apple because its tree is lopsided.

So let us agree that, whatever their faults, the Soviets were socialist. More tomorrow.

Plus, their East German pals had cool cars like the Trabant.

You Know You're Winning When Old People Are Put Back To Work

Wow.

KANAZAWA, Japan—Because demographics are supposed to be destiny, Japan was long ago consigned to stagnation with its aging population and rock-bottom birthrate.

But in recent years Japan has defied destiny. Since 2012, its working-age population has shrunk by 4.7 million, yet the number of people working has surged by 4.4. million, the critical ingredient in what is now Japan’s second-longest economic expansion since World War II. The proportion of the population in the labor force has risen sharply since 2012, by more than in any other major advanced economy.

Japan is refreshing its labor force from three often-neglected pools: the elderly,women and foreigners.

Dig the chart.

This looks like the Axis powers near the end of the war, after they'd killed off all of their young men. Anyone they could lay their hands on was thrown into the factories to try to keep production levels up. This isn't healthy and it's not sustainable.

It's fine to keep working as long as you can. I'm getting up there in years and I don't plan on sitting in a rocking chair all day long any time soon. Still, if you're counting on codgers, coots and curmudgeons to drive an economic expansion, you've got rocks in your head.

I suppose they could always try having babies.

Nah. We're way past those traditionalist, patriarchal ways. The next thing to try will be robots. Lots and lots of robots.

MGTOW, Weakness And Sex Dolls

I've become fascinated by the Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) movement, in part because I'm seeing it in the social circles of some of our sons. I'm also interested because it shows a level of (cold-blooded) sophistication that I lacked when I was young. Finally, I know a few young ladies who are struggling to find husbands.

I read something the other day that shined a whole new light on MGTOW and modern feminism for me. It was an article in a British newspaper about men who have bought expensive sex dolls. Here's the part that got to me.

'I hug Kristal when I'm lonely or have had a hard day'

Nick, 33, places his doll his doll Kristal next to him in bed if he feels lonely.

He also admits he gives her a hug after a bad day.

The truck driver from Ontario, Canada spent £6,205 on his dream woman from top-selling doll manufacturer, Abyss Creations in March 2017.

He feels weakness and has an innate need to turn to a woman, his woman, for comfort. Almost all men have this need. We know we're supposed to be strong and courageous and driven all the time, but we just can't do it. To varying degrees, we all have times of self-doubt and fear. You can't show that to the world, which is why men aren't supposed to cry. You have to have a soft place, a soft person as a refuge when things get to be too much.

Almost all of the guys who write the MGTOW articles or record the Red Pill, men's rights videos are ultra-alphas. Fear and self-doubt have been banished from their lives. They're trying to teach other men how to do the same thing, how to suppress the need for a woman's softness. "Don't show any weakness in front of her!" is the message repeated ad nauseum.

Don't pay attention to the alphas. They're such a small percentage of the population as to be irrelevant. Your daughter will not land an alpha. She needs a large pool of not-quite-so-alpha young men to give her choices in her search for a husband. Pay attention to those guys and what's happening to them. As Kurt Schlichter might say, watch what's happening to the Normals.

Normal men also deeply crave the admiration and respect of a woman. You need to be her hero, her knight in shining armor, the one she looks to when she's weak or frightened. It's built into us by nature.

Now dig this.

When I watch TV these days, I pay close attention to the ads. What message are they sending young men? Last night, while watching Jeopardy!, I saw an ad where an older woman, looking like she was in her late-60s, was practicing boxing. Boxing. Her husband simpered admiringly at her. That's the same message that the new Captain Marvel movie gives.

"We don't need you. There is no unique role for you to fulfill. We don't value what you can do because we can do it all ourselves."

What is the Normal dude supposed to do? He's already a little timid around women, fearing rejection. Over and over, he's being told the woman isn't going to be his partner, she's not going to complete him, she's going to compete with him and best him. He's already uncertain from constantly competing with the men around him, what's a woman going to give him other than more competition and plenty of attitude?

What guy needs that?

And so the truck driver turns to a sex doll, something he can at least pretend wants to comfort him. He can fantasize that he is a man it respects and admires. He can make believe he gives it something it needs, something it doesn't have. It's heart breaking.

The saddest part is that the Normals of both sexes are craving what men and women have always craved. The equation between them hasn't changed since Cleopatra's time. It's only the Secular Left Elites who see the world in this new, hostile-to-men way. Since they control all of the media, the academy and entertainment, the Normals don't get to interact with each other without swimming in the Secular Left's pool of sexual hate.

Hence, some Normal men are going their own way.

Arguing With Losers

... while ignoring the scoreboard is a stupid thing to do.

Harvard has segregated commencement ceremonies.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Looking out over a sea of people in Harvard Yard last week, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive and one of Harvard’s most famous dropouts, told this year’s graduating class that it was living in an unstable time, when the defining struggle was “against the forces of authoritarianism, isolationism and nationalism.”

Two days earlier, another end-of-year ceremony had taken place, just a short walk away on a field outside the law school library. It was Harvard’s first commencement for black graduate students, and many of the speakers talked about a different, more personal kind of struggle, the struggle to be black at Harvard.

Harvard is about as far to the left as a university can get without being Berkeley. The next time someone from the Secular Left starts shouting about race, suggest that they get their own house in order before yelling at everyone else. After all, if a far-left extremist institution like Harvard, after 4+ years of indoctrinating, err, teaching its students still has them yapping about "the struggle to be black at Harvard," then they're not in any position to lecture anyone about race, especially when they're practicing segregation.

Shorter version, suitable for Twitter retorts: I don't take racial advice from segregationists.

I'm guessing that even the most dyed-in-the-wool Bengals fans wouldn't be trying to suggest that they were better than the Saints in this 51-14 massacre. Scoreboard, baby.

Captain Marvel Goes MGTOW

... or should I say that she is encouraging MGTOW.

MGTOW, if you didn't know, is Men Going Their Own Way. It's where men bail out of all of their traditional roles vis a vis women - husband, father, boyfriend, provider and protector. They take care of themselves and women can go take care of themselves. It's not hostile to women, at least not definitionally, it just has no need for them.

When I watch trailers for movies like Captain Marvel where women play the traditional male roles*, I think of MGTOW. It's a license to men to check out. "We don't need you. There is no unique role for you to fulfill. We don't value what you can do because we can do it all ourselves." Really? Outstanding! Goodbye!

Some young men of my acquaintance, well, juvenile males, to be more precise - they do nothing manly as far as I can see - have gone full MGTOW and are gratifying all of their desires. They are quite willing to live in squalor. They can work low-wage jobs and survive just fine. Video games give them a social outlet and a chance for competition and praise. Porn gives them all the sexual release they need and then some.

Captain Marvel and cultural elements like that give them full permission to go their own way. Why not work part time, play video games and devour porn? It's not like they're bailing out on their responsibilities to society. Just look, women are strong and independent. Grrrrl powr all the way!

Not only that, when they support the grrrl powr movement, out of pusillanimous self-interest, they can feel virtuous. They are stepping aside so the sisterhood can take its rightful place in the world. They're helping dismantle the evil patriarchy by refusing to become evil patriarchs. It's all upside.

Sadly, single, childless women in their 30s are starting to figure out what happened to all the good men.

Update: You know what's missing from both sides? Any mention of love.

* - My very favorites are the Marine Corps recruiting ads where they feature female infantry. You go, girl!

Surviving The Golden Globs

Last night, wife kitteh watched the Golden Glob Awards. I managed to avoid most of it, but had to sit through the last 45 minutes or so. It was only mildly horrible, ameliorated by the fact that I'd heard all of the speeches before. Out of the six years those 45 minutes took, three things jumped out at me.

• Some aging witch won best actress for the movie, "The Wife." She got up and told us all how her dad was oppressive and how her mother never was able to pursue her dreams, whatever those were. From this, we were supposed to generalize that women have terrible lives, thanks to the patriarchy.
  
  She didn't mention what dad did for a living. Maybe he pursued his passions by repairing high tension power lines in western Massachusetts in the middle of winter. Maybe he shoved a lawnmower around the hillsides of Mississippi in July. Whatever it was, he was living high on the patriarchal hog while mom stayed home, a slave.
   
• Speaking of slavery, there was a winning movie about a black musician and a white bigot traveling the South together in 1960. Ah, 1960. A sacred year, that. We love movies out of 1960, it's the height of Jim Crow which we were told is still with us and, as the winner said in his speech, possibly even worse today. Right.
  
  Funny thing about the Jim Crow laws. They were laws, as in rules enforced by the government  meant to keep a population in line, a population which might break them. The government feared that individuals, allowed to act as individuals, would fraternize across racial lines. These same activist Hollywood types love the government and love regulations. Careful riding that tiger, boys and girls. You could always discover that the massively powerful government decides to throw you off and eat you, the way it IRS-ate conservatives under Obama. It all depends on the current mood of the tiger, doesn't it?
   
• Love was mentioned several times as a motivating factor. Love for everyone! The forces of Hate are all around us and we must resist them, but not with love. No, the forces of Hate must be resisted with hate and the "untold" stories that every nominated movie was telling in ALL CAPS and every speech was extolling in ALL CAPS must be told. And told. And told. And told. Good Lord, it was boring.

At the end, wife kitteh shocked me. She said, "That was awful." Having learned to avoid snarking during these things - she's more important than having my obnoxious opinions aired - I asked why she thought that. She said the hosts weren't funny. I could have added that it's kind of hard to be funny while wagging your finger at the camera, but I think we both knew that.

I have no idea who these ciphers were, but they hosted the show. Badly.

Edward G. Robinson Dog

You dirty rats!

A World Without Jesus

... wouldn't be all that much fun.

I went to Mass and then spent some time in Adoration last night and started wondering what the world would be like without Jesus. Years ago, I read a book that suggested that Jesus made the infinite God finite and more comprehendible. That is, for the Jews, God was this massive, all-encompassing, all-powerful force. It's pretty hard to relate to that. Jesus, as God made man, gives us a Person who we can imitate and in whom we can find human love, compassion and friendship.

And forgiveness.

I think that's the biggest part - forgiveness. By dying for our sins, Jesus takes away an oppressive mountain of guilt and shame as well as all of the pathologies that go along with it. Consider three alternatives to Christianity - Islam, Buddhism and the Secular Left.

In Islam, you have to atone for your sins yourself. There's no Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, as we say in Mass, there's only you and your family. I don't know about you, but my sins are pretty large and plentiful. Atoning for them is going to be a Herculean task, so if I were Muslim, I'd be taking a hard line with myself and my family. That last thing I need is a child of mine adding to that mountain of guilt. Disobey Allah by sleeping around, for example, and you're going to get the back of my hand or worse. Hence, honor killings and sacrificing animals on the appropriate days. Anything to appease the wrath of the Big Guy.

With Buddhism, if you commit enough sins, you might as well give up and wait for death. Nirvana - the complete extinction of your existence and an end to your practically endless string of reincarnations - isn't going to happen at the end of this life. When the scoreboard gets too lopsided, you punt on the whole thing and await the next turn of the wheel. Oh goody, another life rooting for the San Diego Padres. Talk about suffering!

The Secular Left solves this problem by doing away with the concept of sin entirely. As the prophet Barack Obama (peace be upon him) said, "Sin is being out of alignment with my values." Unless you're some kind of masochist, your values are the things that drive your behaviors, so you're almost never out of alignment with them. No sin for you! With the Secular Left, there's nothing to confess or atone for, unless you pivoted too slowly to the Party's latest positions on Global Warming Climate Change and pedophilia. For them, all sins are political sins and voting for progressives absolves you of those.

There's another aspect to a world without Jesus. What happens over time as the Secular Left's memory fades and they feel less and less of the cultural momentum of Christianity? With no sins save for political apostasy, what do you get?

I think we have our answer.

Transbull

I'm in a hurry today, so this is just a quick hit, something I thought of recently in a context I hope to blog at a later date.

If you had a cow and cut off her udder and then jacked her up with male bovine hormones, would you feel justified in telling your friends she was a bull? Do you think they would look at you like you were crazy?

He identifies as a cow.

Pining For Alternatives To The White Patriarchy

If this doesn't make you wish that someone other than white, Christian, European men had been the dominant force in the world, then nothing will.

Mexican archaeologists have discovered what they say is the first temple of a pre-Hispanic fertility god known as the Flayed Lord who is depicted as a skinned human corpse.

The discovery is being hailed as significant by authorities at Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History because it is a whole temple, not merely depictions of the deity, which have been found in other cultures...

"Priests worshipped Xipe Totec by skinning human victims and then donning their skins. The ritual was seen as a way to ensure fertility and regeneration," according to the AP.

Nothing says Social Justice quite like skinning slaves alive and wearing their pelts to bring fertility.

A curse on that blood-soaked imperialist, Hernan Cortes! If it weren't for him, we would all know the sustainable, organic, non-GMO equality of being flayed.

I Think I Go To Work To Relax

I took our last house guest, the oldest of our sons, to the airport today and then went in early to work. Thank God the holidays are over! I don't think I could take another week of that. It was exhausting.

For the last week, I've cooked and cleaned and cooked and cleaned and cooked and cleaned. It's all self-inflicted, of course. In the last three days alone, I've made 8 quarts of chicken stock and 9 quarts of Louisiana Brown Stock. I made collard greens and a black-eyed pea jambalaya for New Years Day as that is supposed to bring good luck.

Yes, I am crazy. Why do you ask?

Anyway, I'm whupped. Thank the Lord for a good, solid work day so I can finally get some rest!

Wife kitteh said she liked this even more than my normal jambalaya.

Pedophile Communists

On Twitter, there's been a pretty standard, ongoing conversation of atheism vs. Catholicism. Everyone has staked out the traditional positions and the topics of pederast priests and a hundred million atheism-induced commie corpses have been raised. It's all quite predictable.

During my morning prayers, a simple point dawned on me that I thought I'd share. I'll mark it in bold, in case you're in a real hurry and want to click away after reading it.

We Catholics believe that all men are sinful. Jesus came to redeem our sins, dying on the cross to do so. If priests weren't sinful, then Jesus would have been unnecessary. We could all live righteous lives simply by taking Holy Orders.

When someone points out the pederasty scandals and the cover-ups by the Church leadership, it doesn't invalidate the faith, it reinforces it. Of course priests are subject to carnal temptations. Of course the leadership is tempted to retain their power and authority through lies and deceit. That's kind of what we all do, every day.

Acknowledging our fallibility and confessing our sins is what we're called to do. Hopefully, the scandals cause a few more of us to do so while we go about demanding punishment for the few, despicable swine among our clergy.

Atheist socialists, on the other hand, should not be horrified by the mountains of dead. For them, the arc of history is bending in one direction, towards communism, and if we can get there faster by snuffing out 7, 8 or 9 digits worth of valueless meat bags, then by all means, let's get to it! It's a feature, not a bug. Like Hitler, if you read Lenin, he pretty much tells you how it's all going to go.

For the Secular Left, the moral queasiness about the slaughter only comes when you live in the twilight world between old Christianity and new socialism. Even as an atheist, the cultural momentum from a Christian past places within you an implicit value on human life even as your atheist socialism is blotting them out by the boatload.

Not to worry. If the Secular Left can just finish off the Christians or at least silence them, they'll be free from that narrow-minded, moral judgment and able to bend that old arc of history even harder until then end of it, like some kind of ghastly rainbow, ends in the abattoir of total freedom.

Or whatever that end is supposed to be.

When we have abolished the last vestiges of Christian superstitions and this no longer bothers you, we will have achieved true enlightenment.