Gopher Snake

Out here in the coastal desert that is San Diego, both weeks of Spring are over and Summer has begun. It's in the 80s today, which means it's a great day to see snakes in the canyons. Like this charming fellow we came across while out on maneuvers with the Catican Guards.

He looked to be about 2 1/2 feet long. He was a bit skinny, which isn't surprising, considering he probably hasn't eaten much since it got cold.

Why More People Are Unhappy

... because they've been taught to believe this lie.

Other than love from your parents, you don't deserve love, you earn love. I once read that people fall in love with you because of the way they feel about themselves when they're with you. I think that's true and it goes for friendships and good professional relationships as well. Your success with others is based on how you show them their worth. You don't get love, you earn it.

If the message in that graphic was true, then love would come to you regardless of your behavior. If you thought that, when it didn't happen because you were indifferent or hostile towards others, you wouldn't know to look in the mirror for the source of your problems. Life would be unfair because you weren't getting when you "deserved." That would certainly make you unhappy.

You aren't special unless you make yourself special. You don't deserve love unless you give it and sometimes that doesn't work, either. You have agency in your life, you are not a victim. People who think themselves victims are bound to be unhappy.

So there you go.

How To Start A Civil War

... or at least get states to secede. Perhaps counties would secede as well.

Dig this.

Delaware is the 13th state, along with D.C., to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.

Gov. John Carney signed State Sen. Bryan Townsend’s legislation adding Delaware to the pact Thursday.

States involved have pledged to award their electoral votes to the presidential candidate who wins the national popular vote - even if that person is not the state’s top vote-getter.

In other words, Delaware just gave its delegates to California.

What are we doing here? Are we trying to get the red states to secede? How about the red counties?

Now that California is deepest blue, what's to stop them from simply manufacturing votes? I heard stories that they did it in 2018 with something called "vote harvesting" which I didn't investigate as it was too hideous to contemplate. In any case, a California that is as corrupt as, say, Chicago, could create as many votes as necessary to make sure their preferred presidential candidate won the popular vote. At that point, 13 states would hand their delegates to California.

What's the point of voting at all? If that's the case, then the Federal government, which now has unlimited power, is completely out of your control. What's there to encourage you to stick around then? You'd have to be a total chump to do that.

This is madness and it's not going to end well.

Has anyone on the left thought through what it will mean to disenfranchise the red parts of this map?

Update: Actually, the logic of this becomes pretty clear when you think about it from the blue perspective. If you can count on California to generate all the votes necessary to guarantee the popular vote winner, then there is no longer any need to campaign in those 13 states. You can save all of your money and time to spend it everywhere else. Those 13 states are in the bag, no matter what their people say.

Of course, should any of those states vote differently than California and substantially so, I'd short all of the insurance company stocks as things would be burned to the ground in the resulting riots. Hooray.

How To Heal The Divisions In America

It's easy. Just make sure everyone knows that all of us, rich or poor, black or white, tall or short, come from a pack of imperialist, warmongering slaveholders. Ideas are what make the difference, not race.

I'm currently making my way through the excellent A Short History of Africa. I've already been surprised by a couple of things.

• Iron working originated in Africa. 
• The reason Europeans bought instead of captured slaves from West Africa was not just the mortality rate from disease upon landing on the continent, but the fact that the Africans were more than capable of making any military expedition very expensive. 
• Once the Mediterranean and Arabic cultures advanced sufficiently,  the black Africans found that they could make a good living trading raw materials for finished goods. These raw materials included gold, ivory, spices and slaves.

And, of course, the African kingdoms, like the Europeans, the American Indian tribes, the Aztecs, the Incas, the Chinese dynasties, the Indian whatever-they-weres and the Ottoman Empire used warfare and conquest to expand their influence.

Doesn't it make you feel better to hear that? Everyone you meet on the street is a descendant of a pack of ravening jerks. We're all here because someone back in the day whupped up on someone else and took their stuff. Ahhh, sweet, sweet unity.

What made us different and made America what it is in particular, are ideas. Specifically, the ideas of Athens, Jerusalem and London. The logic and reason of the Greek philosophers means we make sense of the world around us. The faith and morality of the Jews and Christians means we see each other as equals, each made in the image of God. The legal and political systems of the English gives us stability.

The things that divide us now, perceived slights and oppression of the past are irrelevant, especially when you consider that all of our predecessors are positively drenched in those sins. Yep, we're all one, big, happy family of schweinhunds.

"We just got back from a corporate offsite and now that we know all of our ancestors were jerks, we feel so much more harmony!

Smollett + Emmanuel + Stephanopoulos = Vomito de Gato

So Jussie Smollett, intersectional loony and C-list celebrity, living in Corruptopolis (Chicago) managed to get off on all eight zillion felonies for framing us Normals for trying to lynch, bleach, insult and rob him. In his press conference following the payoff, he swore it all happened just as he said and promised to continue to fight for the marginalized community of black, gay, ultra-wealthy entertainers. I'll bet they're relieved to have him back on the team. Things must have been touch and go for them for a while what with redneck Catholics like me on the loose, buying bleach and rope at will.

Next up came the shocked, shocked, shocked!!11!1! press conferences from various Corruptopolis film-noir character actors like the Mayor and Chief of Police. "We! Had no! Idea that this! Was going to! Happen! We promise to get to the bottom of this as soon as the checks clear."

Finally, there was ABC this morning where Clinton stooge, George Stephanopoulos, made a show of interviewing Mayor Rahm Emmanuel as if any of this was a surprise to anyone or that any questions needed to be asked. I didn't hear the interchange, but you quickly got the drift of the thing when it went on for more time than it would take a normal person to tell the mayor his city was a amoral cesspit and then cut to commercial.

At work, we have a running gag about cats vomiting. We share videos on chat whenever something particularly horrible is going on. The one below, vomito de gato, is a classic. Honestly, vomito de gato was the first thing I thought of when I saw the stooge and the mayor talking to each other in fake sincerity. The strength of my emotional reaction shocked me. The Mueller hoax affected me more deeply than I thought. I'm beyond cynicism, I now utterly despise the media and the elites. They all make me want to do like the cat below.

Dogs, Entropy And Trash

Whenever we've been away from home for a while, we frequently come home to scenes like this.

The dogs like to pull things out of the trash and shred them.

I keep wondering, if we pulled everything out of the trash before we left, would the dogs put it back in while we were gone? Would this violate any of the Laws of Thermodynamics?

The 17-90 Rule And The Mueller Report

When it comes to Russian oligarchs, they like caviar, vodka and 17-year-old girls in bikinis on 90-foot yachts. They're not so big on 90-year-old girls on 17-foot yachts. That's the 17-90 Rule. When Donald Trump got elected, the oligarchs knew they were going to take a beating as they make all their money from oil. The 17-90 Rule was getting flipped on them.

We could have avoided the last two years of mania by remembering the 17-90 Rule. All the Mueller Report did was validate it. Of course, we would have missed all the hysteria and foaming at the mouth by the media and the progressives, so maybe it wasn't such a waste of time after all.

Sorry, oligarchs, but 17-year-old Svetlana is hanging out with someone else now. Here's your new arm candy.

Purple

Everything is blooming here in San Diego right now. I got this shot out at my mom's house yesterday. Enjoy!

The Mueller Report Will Reveal Nothing

... we didn't already know.

Russia gets almost all of its income from petroleum products. There was simply no way on Earth they were going to try to tip the election in favor of a guy whose policies were going to lower the price of oil. There was no Russian collusion, there was no chance of it ever happening, there was never even a moment where anyone in any position of power in Russia who was even vaguely sober would have even started to begin to think about the possibility of getting going on a plan to ponder doing it.

There was no Russian collusion and we knew that before Trump was nominated.

The elites are complete fools and they're not afraid to let us know because they don't know they are fools. I've seen people who should know better rant on Twitter that somehow the people in the FBI, DOJ, media, etc. are somehow indicative of a Deep State conspiracy. Are you kidding me? This isn't a cabal, this is who the "elite" are. They are mountebanks and charlatans and clowns and morons and any other name you can think to give them.

I need to go make fried chicken and biscuits, because that's what a Yankee-born, Southern-by-choice, California boy does. I'll leave you with this from Psalms 146.

Put no trust in princes,
in children of Adam powerless to save.
Who breathing his last, returns to the earth;
that day all his planning comes to nothing.

Rainclouds Forming Over San Diego

Before I alienate absolutely everyone by grabbing every third rail* in existence, I figured I ought to break things up with a little time-lapse videography. Yesterday, we had partly cloudy skies in the morning and rain in the afternoon. I perched my little point-and-shoot camera where it could get a clear look at the sky and let it run. Enjoy!

* - How can there be more than one third rail? Wouldn't that make the others fourth, fifth, sixth and so on? Since the metaphor is about the third rail being mortally electrified, what would the other rails carry?

I Can't Stand Martian Lovers!

I had a conversation on Twitter today that taught me something, so I figured I'd inflict it on you.

Hmm. Does that mean I think you're more ignorant than I am? That's pretty insulting right there. I may need to find a new hobby to replace blogging before I alienate everyone. Memo to self: Look into macrame.

Anyway, I said I just don't see much racism in my daily life. In fact, I can't think of anyone, young or old, rich or poor, white, black, brown or polka-dotted, who is a racist. I know a lot of people, too. The chap arguing with me said that was the problem. I didn't know how to recognize them.

Let's assume that's true. Let's also assume I'm a racist, but I don't think I am because my ability to detect racism is hopelessly ruined. Wouldn't I still be able to detect the inverse? That is, I would certainly be able to detect people unlike me.

Say I hate Martians. Every time a Martian moves into a neighborhood, it's ruined. Soon there are Qualdaffian mudbeasts in the storm drains and the trees are all dead because Martians eat them. Martians are going to be the ruin of this country, I tell you!

Now I know I'm not an anti-Martian racist because I know I'm a good person. After all, all good people think like I do. You, however, have no problem with Martians. The mudbeasts are kind of cute and those trees were dropping leaves all over the place and anyways, they might have been killed by the blight that has been going around. You're a Martian-lover.

Wouldn't I easily detect Martian-lovers and categorize them as members of some pernicious group? While I wouldn't detect racists like myself, I'd still classify the population into the same strata, only with good and bad reversed.

It seems to me that the detection of such things is assured, no matter which side you're on.

Whenever their kind are allowed in, the whole place turns into a wasteland.

It's Year Zero For Chelsea Clinton

Dig this.

This is NUTS. Chelsea Clinton simply called out @IlhanMN’s anti-Semitism and is now being attacked by leftists over “islamophobia” and linking her to the New Zealand massacre.pic.twitter.com/TyzUxgf36M

— Caleb Hull (@CalebJHull) March 16, 2019

I recently saw a conversation between Tucker Carlson and Mark Steyn that clarified a lot of things for me. They drew an analogy between what we're experiencing with the Secular Left and the Year Zero campaign of the Khmer Rouge.

In 1975 Cambodia, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge felt that everything that had gone before them was wrong. Capitalism, imperialism, technology, Western ideas, the whole thing was evil. Their solution was to destroy it all and start from scratch, to declare their victory in Cambodia as the start of a new era, as Year Zero. It went as well as you might expect, ending in something like 3,000,000 dead as they force-marched everyone out of the cities to work on collective farms.

That's what the Secular Left is desperately trying to do to our culture. Every time they denigrate Shakespeare, Western Civ classes, Christianity, European accomplishments, they're striving to get us to Year Zero. From there, they will collectively create the perfect civilization based on ... based on ... based on what?

Therein lies the rub. By throwing away millennia of learning and experience, they've thrown away any foundation by which one can make value judgments. In the video clip above, everyone has bought into the Secular Left's ideas to one extent or another and so everyone is talking gibberish.

The students blame Chelsea for the Christchurch shooting. According to the kids, Chelsea said something negative about the anti-Semitic Rep. Ilhan Omar which caused some nut on the other side of the world to kill Muslims. The students, stripped of any frame of reference with which to analyze ideas because they're in Year Zero, have not yet realized that the logic of their accusation makes everyone guilty of everything. At some point in time, you will have said something critical of some member of a group. When another member of that group gets hurt, it's your fault.

That's insane, but it's perfectly expected if you've obliterated the foundations of logic and reasoning, which is what the Secular Left has done.

Meanwhile, Chelsea doesn't point out the problems with the accusation, possibly because she can't see them, either. Instead, she apologizes as if they make sense. Everyone in that scene has been driven mad by the Year Zero thinking of the Secular Left. No one is reasoning with anyone, they're all emoting. That's all you're left with once you've discarded Western Civilization. The Secular Left is making things up as they go along, guided only by raw feelings.

I've blogged about the Rube Goldberg machine being created by the Secular Left to try to make sense of the world after the victory of postmodernism.

(W)e 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.

That's where we are right now. Chelsea had to be stunned by the accusation. Those cultural changes were only meant to be weaponized against the Right! Well, Chelski, you're the Right now as the Khmer Kiddies go off into more and more eccentric orbits, totally divorced from reason.

Bonus Tidbit: I loved the tone of Chelsea's response. It was so Clinton! The thing just dripped of insincerity. The rotten crabapple certainly didn't fall far from that twisted tree.

Who Pays The Highest Tax Rate?

The young people pay the highest tax rate.

Listening to progressives chatter about "free" healthcare and "free" college and "free" wasp nests on your front porch, I keep thinking that the description is all wrong. Government is just a tube that transports money from one spot to another. There is no government money, only taxes paid by working people. Even if it's paid by corporations, the source is ultimately working people.

Government borrowing is a form of taxation. When you borrow, you are spending future earnings. When the government borrows, it is spending future taxes which are future earnings of working people. Who will be working in the future? Not me, at least not for much longer. When I retire, I will no longer be among the class of working people and will therefore simply consume things. It will be up to the younger generation to generate the general fund, generally speaking.

So live it up, kids! Have fun with all your "free" stuff. I shall watch your future progress with considerable interest. While you work multiple jobs to pay for those "free" goodies or perhaps while you comb the ruins of the zoo for animals to eat, a la Venezuela, I shall either be pushing up daisies or sitting on my front porch in a rocking chair with a bottle of bourbon, a shotgun and an ill-tempered cat.

Can we vote for free stuff? ¡Si, se puede!

Uncommon Common Phacelia

... or, as Simon  and Garfunkel might have sung, "Phacelia, you're breaking my heart, you're shaking my confidence daily ..."

OK, so almost no one will get that reference, but there you have it.

I've got a bunch of blog posts in my head, but I'm just not agitated enough to get them out onto the keyboard. Instead, here's a flower photo from yesterday's trip to Anza Borrego with wife kitteh. Flowers were everywhere and a good time was had by all. I left the photo large, so it's worth a click.

Enjoy!

Dive! Dive!

Yesterday, we planted fruits, veggies and herbs in our raised beds. Before doing so, we combed the dirt for grubs and found quite a few. I noticed an interesting behavior in them - they had an uncanny ability to bury themselves quickly. I took a video of it. The grub manages to get almost completely underground in less than 10 seconds. Interestingly, it leaves a bit of its tail above ground, perhaps because it doesn't know that part is still sticking up.

Grubs are gross, but I thought you still might like to see the video. Enjoy?

Catican Bayou Hot Sauce

... is on the way!

We did our spring planting today and for the first time ever, we got a cayenne pepper plant. Like a dufus, I couldn't think what we might do with it, so while I was in the store, I googled "what can you make with cayenne peppers" and it said "hot sauce." Well, duh.

I don't like hot sauce that is just vinegar and cayenne. I really like West Indies Hot Sauce (I can't find it for sale, otherwise I'd ad a link), which has more spices than just cayenne. When it dawned on me that I could make my own style, I bought it immediately.

Catican Bayou Hot Sauce on the way.

Bursts Of Self-Discipline

... are what you need.

I've been trying to go to the gym almost every day and for Lent, I've given up alcohol. I've spent some time recently, watching my behaviors, trying to figure out my modes of failure and modes of success.

You need self-discipline in bursts.

Once you get started, you keep going, whether that's getting ready and going to the gym or opening a beer. The hardest part about working out for me is getting up when the alarm goes of at 0430. My gym gets crowded around 0530, so you need to get there by 0500 to have a decent weight lifting session. That 0430 alarm is a killer. We've had a cold, wet winter here in San Diego, so getting out of a warm bed is tough. Once I'm out, it's all downhill from there. I've had times where I skipped the workout because I didn't feel like getting out of bed, but never because I stopped after that.

My craving for a beer starts around 1630 and lasts until 1730. I don't want to drink in the daytime and if I've not started by dinner, my craving is gone and it just sounds gross to open a beer after that. I only need to steel myself for that one hour and I'm good.

Stress and excuses play a big part in my failures, too. Yesterday was incredibly frustrating, so I declared a Lent Jubilee and had some brews. I couldn't find the strength to resist during that hour and gave in to my cravings. If I can find a reason to skip the workout, like when my joints are hurting, I'm much more likely to turn off the alarm and go back to bed.

Good behaviors or bad seem to have a momentum all their own. They keep going once you start them. The obvious trick, then, is to find ways to let loose that burst of self-discipline. I'm still working on that part.

Beto O'Rourke's Call To Action

... sounds like this: "Me! Me! Me!" Dig his Vanity Fair cover.

"I want to be in it. Man, I'm just born to be in it."

Me. Me. Me.

Yep, that's what we're looking for in a president - someone who is there to fulfill his own ambitions. Trump is a lot of Me Me Me, but at least his sales pitch is "I will win for all of us. I'm the only who can win!" We're the ultimate purpose of his effort. With Beto, he's the ultimate purpose of his effort.

You go, Beto. Go far, far away.

Defining Sin Away

Back to the discussion of the dude who does not look like a lady, but identifies as one and the madness surrounding people like him.

These are all girls. Keep repeating it to yourself until you believe it. If you don't agree that these are all girls, you will be punished.

In my original blog post on the topic, I said that this is a fantasy. That photo is 2+2=5. The only way to get the rest of us to agree with it is to torture us in some way, to fill us with such fear of reprisals and punishments that we all agree that a massive man is actually a woman.

In my second post, I said we all want to be heroes, part of a large, noble enterprise, defeating evil and fighting for good. Racism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, they're all tiny problems in real life, but if we magnify them wildly, we can fight them with no risk to ourselves. At the same time, we can make believe we're heroes.

In this one, we'll deal with the question, "Why make transphobia a cause?" I would argue that the whole thing is an effort to eliminate any and all sex-based sins by pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable so far past our particular fetishes that anything we enjoy is seen as utterly mundane and normal.

Sex is a lizard activity, one of our basic drives. Eating, surviving and sex are about all lizards want to do. That tiny, core part of our brain, the part that drives our evolutionary impulses, obsesses on these things. It's why sex is so much fun. As the worry about eating and surviving become more and more distant, our lizard brains have more time to dive deeper into our sexual urges.

Also, as technology improves, the ability of gizmos, gadgets, elixirs and potions to give us new types of pleasures and eliminate the consequences of old ones increases. I read on Twitter that developers are using AI to create the ultimate oral stimulation machine. That makes sense as do ever more realistic sex dolls. We're pursuing the ultimate orgasm while our psyches are continually redefining what that means. It's a never-ending quest.

The only fly in the ointment is objective morality, specifically religious morality. No matter what happens technologically, those pious killjoys will try to stamp out all of our newfound sexual fun. There are two, complimentary ways to deal with them.

1. Incrementally redefine what is moral. Porn isn't so bad, is it? Threesome porn isn't so bad. A little violence in the porn isn't so bad, after all, it's all make-believe. Gays, bisexuals, threesomes, whatever floats your boat, if no one is getting hurt, what's the big? Once one thing is accepted, find the next thing farther out and show that it's not much worse.
2. Swarm-attack anyone who stands their ground when it comes to sexual morality. They must be smashed if we're to push the boundaries. The only thing that can prevent us from having all of our fetishes accepted is someone who says, "This far and no farther!" and really means it. They must be obliterated publicly as a warning to others.

You might not be into snuff porn. Your particular fetish might be substantially less deviant, but you want snuff to be accepted. If snuff porn is accepted, then there is a large buffer zone between the morality borders and you. You're safe and you can enjoy your weirdness in peace.

And that is why you must agree that a 6' 8" man is a girl.

The Horror That Is Venezuela

It's easy to sit here in the rich and stable USA and use what's happening in Venezuela as some kind of morality tale. Yes, it's a living story of socialism in all its glory. Yes, it should be instructive to the socialist enablers in the media. Yes, it tells you a lot about the Secular Left that they are learning nothing from the suffering. They care about power, not people and it's as plain as the nose on your face.

So what?

In yesterday's post, I shared the Twitter stream from the NYT reporter in Venezuela who had tracked down the problems with the power outages.

What caused the Guri failure? Corpoelec union leader Ali Briceño said it was brush fire under the 765 KV trunkline which caused a surge in the system and caused Guri to shut down. There are no skilled operators left there to restart it.

Therein lies the horror. It's not going to get better because there's no one who can repair things. It's only going to get worse. The water supply went out yesterday and now people are trying to get water from a polluted river. Cholera is inevitable.

Worse still, this is already a decimated population. Most of the folks who are good at life - the ones who are wise enough to predict the future and deal with crises - have left. That's evidenced by the fact that no one is around to fix the power or water systems. The ones getting water from the sewage-polluted river are the average to below-average ordinary folks. They're hosed in so many ways.

And tomorrow will be worse. The next day will be worse than that.

Pray for them. Whether or not they were foolish enough to choose the unicorns and rainbows promised by the Secular Left, they are still people and they're going through an apocalyptic event of the type seen in zombie movies.

Addendum: When you think about it, the people of Venezuela are living through the chilling ending of Atlas Shrugged. You will need to click on the image to read the passage.

Diversity Means Nothing

Competence is everything. Dig this stream of tweets on the Venezuelan blackout from, of all things, a New York Times reporter.

I went to the heart of Venezuela’s transmission system in Guarico to try to find out what’s going on with the grid. Here’s why partial blackouts are unfortunately likely to persist for a while. I sincerely hope I’m wrong...

San Geronimo B is not working because it’s not getting sufficient (if any) current from Guri. That’s the scariest part. It provides evidence that the government is far from successfully restarting its turbines

What caused the Guri failure? Corpoelec union leader Ali Briceño said it was brush fire under the 765 KV trunkline which caused a surge in the system and caused Guri to shut down. There are no skilled operators left there to restart it.

It did happen before. No one is cutting grass or maintaining fire breaks under the trunkline...

Most people I talked to say the problem had to occur inside Guri’s turbines themselves. And that’s a scary thought. If they are damaged, they will be very hard to replace or repair. No money or skilled people.

One Corpoelec manager said after the blackout a Guri operator told him “the turbines are failing,” before hanging up. He hasn’t been able to reach anyone there since. Sebin is a constant menace. And without Guri, it’s Mad Max.

The Secular Left would have you believe that diversity makes you stronger. Well, you could have as diverse a workforce as you want handling the Venezuelan power system, but when the skilled people leave, driven out by a hatred of anyone who is successful and rewarded for it, you end up with blackouts.

Bonus tidbit: I saw a remark on Twitter that made me shudder. Imagine what it's like inside of Venezuela's prisons right now without light, food or water. I can't imagine any of the guards are opening the doors or sticking around.

In the video below, dig the Collectivos patrolling the streets of blacked-out Caracas. Think of them as ANTIFA members. Great at supporting socialism with a truncheon, but not so great at maintaining or repairing generators. They're totally unaware that they drove the skilled people out of the country or even that those skilled people were necessary in the first place. Yep, sounds like ANTIFA.

Rare San Diego Green

We've had a much wetter than usual winter this year with our rainfall at about 150% of normal. This is typically our green season before everything dries up and dies, but this year is much greener. At least I think it is. Maybe I'm romanticizing it because of all the rain.

In any case, here's a photo from today's walk with the Catican Guards. I rather like it. I left it large, so it might be worth a click. Enjoy!

I Need A Pet Tracker

... but only for the smallest of the Catican Guards.

Oddly enough, when we are sitting around at home, Lily, aka Grandma*, just wants to cuddle, eat treats and get even chubbier. When we're out hiking in the canyons she's the most adventurous and regularly disappears into the undergrowth.

Grandma isn't coyote-wise and never will be. The coyotes will eat her in an instant and that will be that. When she disappears, it's the first thing that crosses my mind. I looked into getting a bluetooth-directional or 1G-GPS collar medallion for Maddi, our previous Maximum Leader, but I didn't do it because I thought it was too big for a cat to wear comfortably. I really need to get one for Grandma, though. Her forays into the scrub when we walk are getting bolder and bolder.

Off they go, exploring!

* - We call her Grandma for her personality, not her age. She's only 3.

The Ilhan Omar Smash Up Is Just Getting Started

or ... "Brace for impact!"

Well, the Democratic leadership managed to work Ilhan's thinly-veiled Jew hatred into an attack on their ubiquitous cardboard-cutout villains, white supremacists, but that's going to be just a temporary deflection of what will become a steady stream of collisions between their victim groups. How long before one of Ilhan or one of her aides says something even worse about Jews or, gasp!, gays? Dig this news from England.

A primary school that taught pupils about homosexuality as part of a programme to challenge homophobia has stopped the lessons after hundreds of children were withdrawn by parents in protest...

On Friday about 600 Muslim children, aged between four and 11, were withdrawn from the school for the day, parents said. The school would not confirm the number.

The school made clear that it had never intended to continue the No Outsiders lessons this half term and confirmed that the lessons would resume only after a full consultation with every parent.

The Secular Left, obsessed with their fantasy world where they are superheroes fighting armies of white supremacists, haven't bothered to learn much about the victims they pretend to defend. One of their preferred minority groups is characterized by adherence to ideas instead of skin color, sex or sexual orientation. And adhere to ideas is what they do best. Gorilla Glue could take adherence lessons from them.

So good luck with that whole multiculturalism thing, guys. It was never going to work out and this is the first of many collisions. In England, when the collisions occur, they're picking the side with the most voters. Come to think of it, that's what was done here, too.

Aside: I got that collision analogy in my head this morning and found this collection of maritime thwackings and whackings on YouTube. There are some pretty amazing ones in it. The thing that hits you, ha ha ha, is how much momentum big ships have. They don't hit and bounce off, they hit and just keep going. Crazy stuff, man. Enjoy!

Everyone Wants To Be A Hero

Yesterday, I discussed the way the Secular Left is trying to force us to believe things we know aren't true, like the claim that a 6' 8" man is actually a woman. I linked to two explanations for it.

1. The Left needs us to live in a fantasy world so it can achieve its totalitarian dreams.
2. This is part of a new Gnosticism - a complicated belief system described here. 

Neither of these hold any water for me. I think the issue is much simpler and less sinister.

We all want to be heroes, part of a large, noble enterprise, defeating evil and fighting for good. Racism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, they're all tiny problems in real life, but if we magnify them wildly, we can fight them with no risk to ourselves. At the same time, we can make believe we're heroes.

This essay on the modern corruption of the education industry crystallized it for me. The whole thing is worth reading, but here's the key tidbit for today.

Though I didn’t realize it at the time, those were my first encounters with an alternate curriculum that was being promoted on many campuses, a curriculum whose guiding principles seemed to be: 1) anything that could be construed as bigotry and hatred should be construed as bigotry and hatred; and 2) any such instance of bigotry and hatred should be considered part of an epidemic. These principles were being advanced primarily, though not exclusively, by college administrators, whose ranks had grown so remarkably since the early 1990s.

In a country of 330,000,000 where it's harder and harder to get even 200 people together to put on white hoods and burn a cross, how in the world would you conclude that "hate" is at epidemic levels? Better yet, why?

The why is easy and it explains the how as well. You want to feel good about yourself. If you're fighting evil, that's pretty good, right? If you fight racism, you're part of a team of others who hate it just as much as you do and you all tell each other how awesome you are. Ooh, the emotional rewards of public, group virtue! How marvelous! Better yet, you don't have to actually fight. I mean, when was the last time you accused someone of racism and they turned on you and screamed about how blacks are inferior to whites? They all deny it, don't they?

This isn't a fight, this is a big cosplay game. You pretend people who disagree with you are racist and your friends do, too. You all agree how they are racists even when they deny it. They're not just racist, they're liars as well. We're fighting racist liars! What fun this is! And since there's zero chance anyone will shoot or stab you, it's all reward and no risk. Outstanding!

To maintain your fantasy world in which you're a hero, you look for racists under every rock and behind every tree. You and your friends discover new ways to reveal it. You're like detectives in a modern crime drama using the latest technologies to extract DNA samples from a hair found on a pillow. How exciting! Why, with the latest microaggression scanners, we can find racists wherever they hide. And there are so very, very many of them. That shows how brave we are, fighting such tremendous odds.

But it's all pretend in the end. As you and your pals put on your capes and masks, real people are suffering and dying for reasons totally unrelated to your fantasies. Oh well. To deal with those would require real courage and some of your buddies wouldn't go along with it. Better to keep up the illusion that you're a superhero and have fun with the gang.

Look, mommy (or my gender-fluid caregiver), I'm a superhero!

Note: This doesn't completely address why the Secular Left is trying to force us to believe that men can become women, but I'll finish these thoughts in future posts. I thought this was getting a bit long.

2 + 2 = 5

This was bound to happen eventually.

These are all girls. Keep repeating it to yourself until you believe it. If you don't agree that these are all girls, you will be punished.

Gabrielle Ludwig, a 51-year old, 6' 8", 220# man is claiming to be a woman. A couple of years ago, he played on the Mission College women's basketball team. The news media reports all fawned over him. It was a breakthrough!

Oh, it was a breakthrough alright. It was a break through reality. John Zmirak, writing at The Stream, penned a marvelous piece tying this phenomenon in with George Orwell's 1984.

Leftists long ago abandoned as too restrictive any notion of Natural Law. That is, a structure and purpose and code of right and wrong encoded in human nature. Without such a law, we live not just unanchored. We’re more like a ship at sea that doesn’t even have a rudder. We simply drift from one place to another, based on the shifting winds of political power and intellectual fashions. We are ruled not by Reason but Will — the whims, in fact, of the cognitive elite, the bureaucracies they dominate, and the corporations they control.

Read the whole thing. John claims that the Secular Left forces this fantasy world upon us because it must create a secondary reality in order to survive. This is an alternate world where it makes the rules and we all must live by them. I don't agree with that part, but I'm open to being convinced. I have a different interpretation which I will explore in a future blog post.

Robert Reilly, writing at The Catholic World Report, suggests that this is a new form of Gnosticism.

Gnosticism does not accept the evidence of reality. It is not a matter of what Gnostics do not know, but of what they refuse to acknowledge. Composer Igor Stravinsky wrote that “the old original sin was one of knowledge, the new original sin is one of non-acknowledgment.” It is the refusal to acknowledge anything outside the operation of the human will—most especially “the good” toward which the soul is ordered. The Gnostic is not interested in conforming his mind to reality but in conforming reality to his wishes.

I spent some time investigating the Gnostics and I think it's a stretch to fit the square peg of the Secular Left  into that round hole, but I'm open to convincing on that, too.

The key feature of all of this goes back to 1984. This is a fantasy. That photo is 2+2=5. The only way to get the rest of us to agree with it is to torture us in some way, to fill us with such fear of reprisals and punishments that we all agree that a massive man is actually a woman.

Because the Secular Left are Nazis Without Ambition, that is they lack the ambition to be willing to die for their cause, I just don't see them being able to summon enough raw power to jam this insanity down our throats. You can see that in the replies on Twitter about men pretending to be women and just crushing the competition in sports. The Normals aren't buying it and until the Secular Left can figure out how to put us all in re-education gulags, it's not going to happen.

The Never Trump Bubble

... or, Why I Stopped Reading Jonah Goldberg.

I loves me some Jonah Goldberg. Or I did, up to two years ago. After that, I found him tiring and repetitive, but that wasn't the real reason. It's taken me this long to figure out what turns me off about the Never Trump crowd, of which I was a founding member back when he declared his candidacy.

Here's the reason: I don't care.

The Never Trump gang, living in their self-reinforcing bubble, keeps beating the same drums over and over and over again. The guy is unpredictable, he's crude, he makes unforced errors because he's undisciplined, he has no political principles, blah blah blah.

I don't care.

You see, I don't live in the world of the pundits. I live in San Diego. I'm not interested in who tweeted what to whom and which poll says what. I'm interested in the Church, preparing for retirement, cooking, sports, diving, old cars and so forth. As far as my interests are concerned, Trump has been fantastic. What difference does it make to me if the High School Glee Club members that make up the media and the politicians are having a 4-year, thermonuclear catfight? Knock yourself out, kids. Have a good time.

Meanwhile, my 401K looks good, the Catholic Church isn't under attack (except by it's own idiot leadership), free speech is being defended from the Nazis Without Ambition Party, judges are being installed who will respect my votes, it all looks really good to me. At the same time, the Nazis are going bonkers everywhere, trying to shut down speech, hound people out of the public square, get others fired, and delete social media accounts whenever their views are threatened. They're a pack of almost-violent jerks.

How do you counter almost-violent jerks? With a big jerk of your own. With someone who isn't going to fold when CNNABCNBCCBSNPR runs wall-to-wall coverage of the hateful Covington kids the Jussie Smollett attack whatever scant evidence they can find to prop up their worldview that we Normals are racist homophobes. Heck, the Covington kids own diocese folded instantly, can you imagine what Jeb! would have done? He'd have been on his knees, begging for forgiveness within the first fifteen minutes that those fake news stories broke.

Instead, we've got ourselves a first class jerk. He gives Italian hand gestures to the media and the social justice crazies every day, telling them to do unnatural acts to themselves. As far as I can tell, he's the only one who could have stood up for us like this, the way we needed it.

Because he does that, I can go to church, work on my car, go diving and plan vacations in peace. If Jonah and the others in their bubble feel the need to rant all day that Trump is unstable or whatever it is they're on about now, so be it. I just don't care.

CNN or the staff of the National Review. I can't tell which.

Addendum: Yes, I know the deficit is enormous. It was going to be enormous anyway. Neither party is interested in fiscal sanity. Let me know when that changes.

Now Can We Have Our $150B Back?

... and maybe a million or so of the birds slaughtered by wind turbines, too?

Time Magazine's "Hero of the Environment," Michael Shellenberger, penned a staggeringly dimwitted piece on Quillette called Why Renewables Can't Save The Planet. He could have saved about 17 years of wasted time if he'd been reading Steven den Beste in 2002.

Mike's forehead-slappers are too numerous to mention here, so I'll grab some lowlights at random.

Mikey (2019):

The first (problem) was around land use. Electricity from solar roofs costs about twice as much as electricity from solar farms, but solar and wind farms require huge amounts of land. That, along with the fact that solar and wind farms require long new transmissions lines, and are opposed by local communities and conservationists trying to preserve wildlife, particularly birds.

Steven (2002):

Those advocating this kind of thing don't realize the size of the problem.

In 1998, the State of California consumed 13.496 billion gallons of gasoline. A gallon of gasoline yields about 130 million joules. So when you do all the math, you end up with about 1.755 * 10^18 joules, which is an impressively large number.

One anti-solar-power advocacy site gives the "yearly average" solar power density in Albuquerque as 240 watts per m2. (That appears to be a 24-hour average; another site says that it's 700 watts in daylight.) Then presuming that southern California is similar, each square meter of mirrors would be struck by 7.573 billion joules per year.

So if you assume 100% conversion, you'd need 231.7 million square meters of collection mirrors to make this work. 231 square kilometers.

Mikey:

Another challenge was the intermittent nature of solar and wind energies. When the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing, you have to quickly be able to ramp up another source of energy.

Steven:

In order for "alternate energy" to become feasible, it has to satisfy all of the following criteria:

1. It has to be huge (in terms of both energy and power)
2. It has to be reliable (not intermittent or unschedulable)
3. It has to be concentrated (not diffuse)
4. It has to be possible to utilize it efficiently
5. The capital investment and operating cost to utilize it has to be comparable to existing energy sources (per gigawatt, and per terajoule).

If it fails to satisfy any of those, then it can't scale enough to make any difference. Solar power fails #3, and currently it also fails #5. (It also partially fails #2)

Mikey:

Happily, there were a lot of people working on solutions. One solution was to convert California’s dams into big batteries. The idea was that, when the sun was shining and the wind was blowing, you could pump water uphill, store it for later, and then run it over the turbines to make electricity when you needed it.

Me:

Umm, pump the water uphill from... where? It's like this idiot has never seen a river. One of the chief characteristics of a river is that it flows. As in the water goes bye-bye. It's not like our reservoirs empty into other reservoirs. Assuming you can solve that issue, what happens to the environment downstream as you jerk the flow into the river shut by pumping the water backwards for a while? I'd expect the rivers to go full-empty-full-empty-full-empty with a 12-hour cycle. I suspect the fish and birds and other critters haven't evolved to deal with that.

The thing goes on and on and on like that. Reading it, you realize just how dim our cultural leaders are. I won't accuse legit engineers of being dumb. I'll bet that when some of them had to attend meetings with Mikey, they wanted to slit their wrists.

No, Mike wasn't an engineer, he was a Hero of the Soviet Union, err, Environment. He had the ear of Barack Hussein Obama and Time Magazine and all kinds of other Important People and Deep Thinkers. They even spent $150B (detailed in his article) on these idiocies during Obama's term.

God help us.

This drawing clearly shows how you can pump water uphill and still keep the flow going.

At Some Point, You Need To Play Offense

Wife kitteh is now down with the flu and this is my first day back from the sick list myself, so I've got my hands full. This will be short.

I'm currently working my way through St. Augustine's City of God. It's a great book, dealing with the fall of Rome and the changes wrought in Roman culture as a result of Christianity. Something hit me the other day, out of the blue. St. Augustine doesn't pull any punches. He doesn't dance around the topic of the Truth and what it means to believe Christianity is the Truth.

City of God takes on the Roman pagans and Roman secular culture in general and ruthlessly picks them apart, piece by piece. The entire thing is a long and detailed takedown of his intellectual opponents.

I wish we had someone like St. Augustine these days.

A G. K. Chesterton would do nicely as well.

Kamala Harris Will Lead The Shortest-Lived Socialist Nation In History

Socialist nations always end in bankruptcy.

Kamala Harris, who I'd pick as the frontrunner nominee for the Nazis-Without-Ambition Party, wants to make the US socialist. If she wins, she'll have less of a honeymoon than the Venezuelans did and end up in the same place - with citizens eating zoo animals to survive.

There's not a lot of room to run, guys.
(Click on the image for a more legible version.)

We've been creeping towards socialism for decades now, under both parties. Unfortunately for Kamala and crew, that means we've got a huge head start towards total currency debasement.

Have fun storming the barricades, kiddies. Even if you win, you won't enjoy it for long.

When You Have The Flu

... it really helps to have a supportive family.

The Catican Guards are showing their love.

Bonus observation: You know someone isn't faking their illness when it starts on a Friday.

Blargh.