Notes On Spain

The WiFi at our hotel is excellent

Until people wake up. Then we're all sharing the same one and it's useless.

That typifies Spain. Lovely people, terrific food, superb wine, charming cities and then they completely fall apart on something relatively simple.

I'm blogging from my phone because Verizon, at least, can get the job done. Off to Morocco today to check out Tangiers.

Elizabeth Warren: Invade Honduras!

Well, maybe not Elizabeth Warren in particular, but any of the crazies in the Democratic primaries. Here is the way it works.

1. Diversity is our strength.
2. National boundaries are conceptual, at best. 
3. Diversity, therefore, is everyone's strength. 
4. In order to stem immigration, we must deal with the root causes. 
5. Honduras is not very diverse. There aren't many white or Asian people there. 
6. The root cause of poverty in Honduras must be their lack of diversity. 
7. To improve Honduras, we need to increase the number of whites and Asians in their population. 
8. If they won't take them voluntarily, we must put them there by force. 
9. Invade Honduras! 

It all makes sense when you think about it. 

Kamala Harris:Invade Mexico!

Well, it makes sense, once you think about it.

1. We want to provide health care for all illegal aliens.
2. We won't deport or prosecute anyone who crosses the border.
3. We must fight Global Warming Climate Change.
4. Mexicans come and go across our border at will.
5. All that traveling creates excess carbon dioxide.

Clearly, the only solution is to invade Mexico and bring the healthcare to them.

Gibraltar

... is a weird place. Not quite what I expected. I knew it was tiny, but I had no idea it was so crowded. Parking is a horror. Just driving around is enough to age you ten years. This photo of an apartment building against the backdrop of the Rock isn't the prettiest photo I took, but it's very emblematic of the place. Enjoy?

Southern Spain

... looks a lot like southern California

We're in Spain and Gibraltar for a wedding. The people are lovely and the food has been excellent so far. The countryside looks exactly like California east of Paso Robles.

Atheist Conservatives

... are interesting, but exhausting.

This is, unintentionally, a follow-on to yesterday's post about Jordan Peterson and Bishop Robert Barron. The idea for this one came from Andrew Klavan's excellent essay, Can We Believe? Here's a tidbit.

Why We Should Call Ourselves Christians, a 2008 book by Italian philosopher and politician Marcello Pera, is the clearest example of the phenomenon I’m describing. Written in response to 9/11, it depicts a Europe paralyzed by self-hating lassitude, willing to pay homage to any culture but its own. “The West today is undergoing a profound moral and spiritual crisis, due to a loss of faith in its own worth, exacerbated by the apostasy of Christianity now rife within Western culture,” Pera writes. He makes clear that by Christianity, he means the entire Judeo-Christian tradition, and he goes on to say, “Without faith in the equality, dignity, liberty, and responsibility of all men—that is to say, without a religion of man as the son and image of God—liberalism cannot defend the fundamental and universal rights of human beings or hope that human beings can coexist in a liberal society. Basic human rights must be seen as a gift of God . . . and hence pre-political and non-negotiable.”

This sounds like the cri de coeur of a passionate believer, the sort of thing we used to hear from Europhile Pope Benedict XVI, who wrote the essay’s introduction. But not so. The book’s title gives the game away. Pera could have called it Why We Should Be Christians. But he is an atheist. He accepts Immanuel Kant’s famous argument that God is necessary to the existence of morality. But from this, he reasons not that we must have faith but that “we must live . . . as if God existed.”

Almost as much as I believe in my faith, I believe that ideas have to work to be worthwhile. Socialism is a bad idea because it produces catastrophes when put into practice. It's stupid, not (just*) for logical reasons, but for practical ones. Don't waste my time with ideas that have been tried and failed over and over and over again.

That's why the agnostic / atheist conservatives like Jonah Goldberg annoy me. Christianity doesn't work because it's some kind of thought process, it works because it is something deeper.

A society is going to believe in something when the majority of average people do it. That means people with an IQ of 90 and a high school diploma. Jonah and his bros can prattle on all they want about efficiencies of the market and free trade and personal responsibility, but the Normals don't do something because Warren Harding's Secretary of the Treasury wrote a fantastically well-reasoned piece on the importance of libertarian principles. Normals do things because they believe in them.

Before you go on blathering about why we need to act as if we were Christians, you need to become one. You're not going to convince anyone with your erudite knowledge of Western civilization's great thinkers. If you don't convince people, ordinary people, the majority of ordinary people, you're just blowing gas and entertaining yourself.

Forget that.

This is what matters and what works, not your intellectualizing.

* - I hate parentheses, but I find myself tempted to use them more and more these days. Horrible.

Skeptical Intellectuals And Catholics

If you haven't heard the joint podcast with Bishop Robert Barron and Jordan Peterson yet, you should. It blew my mind in so many ways. I'm going to need to hear it at least one more time.

I'm a big Jordan Peterson fan. One of our sons and I went to see him give a 12 Rules For Life lecture and we both loved it. I've never heard his equal in terms of deep, deliberate and worldly intellectual thought. Until now.

Bishop Robert Barron, a guy I dismissed as a paint-by-numbers homilist, someone who produced mildly interesting and yet shallow videos, was more than Jordan's equal. I have been wrong all along about Bishop Barron and his Word on Fire efforts. I see that now.

Jordan Peterson has a very distinct, very measured style of speaking. It comes from him being deliberate in what he says. He's a brilliant man and thinks very rapidly, but even so, every word is considered. The fact that he has consumable conversations at all when interviewed is a testament to the quickness of his mind. For all that, Bishop Barron blew the doors off of him. Bishop Barron's speech was easy and casual and just as brilliant.

It was easy and casual because he's Catholic.

What dawned on me as I heard these two giants converse is that Jordan is having to derive a world view from first principles. Each sentence is considered as he speaks it because he is basing it only on Jordan Peterson and all of the sources he's trying to synthesize. Bishop Barron is relaxed because he's standing atop 2000 years of organized genius. They get to the same point, but by the time they're together at the apex, Jordan is out of breath and Bishop Barron is sitting in an easy chair, sipping a martini and smiling.

What a lot of work it is to be a skeptical intellectual! Too much for this cat. Give me a beer and the remote and an SEC game on the TV. We can discuss philosophy and religion and science and culture and modern life or whatever you want, but please, for the love of God, don't make me get there on my own.

Bishop Robert Barron, explaining things to you in a language a high schooler can understand. What is rarely on display is a mind that can keep up with the mighty C S Lewis and G K Chesterton. This man is a treasure for our times.

Purple And Fuzzy

Our Mexican Sage is quite happy this year. Plenty of rain, well, plenty for San Diego, and now some sunny weather.

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

Mein Coates

I finally had to put Mein Kampf down, permanently. I had planned to listen to the whole thing, but it's such an awful book in every respect that I couldn't get more than about two thirds of the way through it.

As I listened, I wondered how anyone took it seriously. It's a prolonged rant by a semi-literate loon. For example, he goes on for pages about how the Japanese culture is, in fact, Aryan, albeit with a facade of oriental decorations. There's no proof, just an assertion that Aryans make all things good from which he launches one fantasy after another.

Pondering a post on why the Secular Left loves race more than ideas, I think I hit upon it.

Mein Kampf claimed that Germany lost WW I because all those dead, German boys were betrayed by politicians and the Jews. Almost every family in Germany had one or more young men killed or wounded in the war. The slaughter was such that everyone was in a state of mourning shock. The pain must have been so thick in the air all across the country that it was practically visible, like a fog shroud of agony.

Into that culture came Adolf. Adolf told them that their dead and maimed boys were not only brave and valiant, but the most brave and valiant in the whole world. The war was not an insane gambit by heartless aristocrats seeking glory, but a noble crusade to save the world from a descent into barbarism. After all, according to Uncle Adolf, without the Aryan, civilization goes kaput. If you followed Hitler, you didn't have to come to grips with the fact that your husbands, sons and brothers died for arrogance and folly.

Mein Kampf was a massive, soothing lie that eliminated the need for painful introspection. Instead of asking, "How did we manage to go along with a stupid idea that murdered our boys?," the populace could cling to the notion that it was all betrayal by them. In this case, they were Jews and politicians.

Fast forward to today and the cult of whiteness where academics, cultural and political leaders and celebrities blame whites and white culture for everything bad that happens to People of Color (PoC). The whole thing is idiotic and collapses into nonsense as soon as you think critically about it. How is it that crazed frauds like Ta-Nehisi Coates manage to garner such a massive following by blaming everything on racism and whiteness?

Coates and the others tell a massive, soothing lie that eliminates the need for painful introspection. Instead of asking, "How did we manage to destroy our neighborhoods by stupidly ditching the traditional, nuclear family and lay waste to multiple generations of PoC?," the populace can cling to the notion that it was all betrayal by them. In this case, they are whites and the culture brought from Europe.

The tactics of the brownshirts in the 1930s and ANTIFA, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter today are identical because the problem they're solving is identical: How to prevent questions from being asked. The censorship of the Secular Lefties running social media companies is designed to preserve the lie that soothes them and keeps them from looking at the consequences of their own moral choices.

Suggestion: Screaming back at the progressives isn't the answer. You've got to realize that their hysteria comes from a place of pain. I'm thinking that the best response is to agree that the pain is real, but inventing a scapegoat isn't the answer. The only way out is to embrace the moral choices that lead to success. Yes, it's hard, and yes, it's unpopular, but it's also the medicine we all need to take.

Eventually, that whole scapegoating thing comes back to bite you, hard.

Pink And White

These are geraniums from my mom's yard. The plant is simply enormous and is more than 30 years old. I left the photo large, so it might be worth a click. Enjoy!

More Drug Addicts

... lead to an epidemic of mentally ill homeless people in your cities.

I've had a few up-close and personal interactions with drug addicts in my life. Because of that, I've always been strongly in favor of as much of a War on Drugs as we can manage. You'll never win it, but you have to fight it as best you can because drug addiction is a one-way street to a living death. It never occurred to me what would happen if a city became infested with living dead druggies.

Here in San Diego, we have regions of the city that are festooned with tents on the sidewalk, homeless sleeping in doorways, beggars at almost all major intersections and worse. The problem has grown over the last decade. San Francisco is a horror and Los Angeles, my old home town, is unspeakably filthy and wretched. Almost all of these poor souls are addicts. Some are alcoholic, which we've always had, but I would bet that most of the increase has come from drug use.

If you've known an addict and you thought you knew the price of drugs on civilization, imagine what happens when you've got tens of thousands of them in your community. Wait, you don't need to imagine. You can visit California and see it for yourself.

We didn't have anything like this 20 years ago.

We Care Deeply About Our Citizens

... but we're also terrified of them.

I don't know about you, but the HP Robocop being tried out in SoCal just screams out, "FEAR!" Or maybe it lets everyone know there aren't enough cops. Probably a combo of the two.

I wonder how many gunshots it can take before it goes down. Someone is going to find out. The thing looks like a target at a shooting gallery. Note that they didn't test it out on Skid Row or in Compton.

Have we gotten past the use of beat cops, ones who know the neighborhood? Are we on the way to simple surveillance robots? If that's the case, why not have a mother ship loaded with drones that fly off and scout the area, returning to refuel?

It's all pretty creepy.

Acceptable Behavior In Dogs

... is not acceptable behavior in humans. Well, some of it at least.

When our dogs bark at strangers outside our gate, we don't freak out. It's just the dogs being dogs. If a guest or one of our kids ran out and shouted at strangers outside our gate, we'd have a problem with them.

Recently, Kyle Kalashnikov, or whatever his name is, lost his acceptance to Harvard because he said some naughty words as a teen. Steven Crowder, a comedian, is regularly trashed by Right Thinking People for saying naughty words. I never see these Paragons Of All That Is Proper slagging rap artists for saying naughty words.

The only thing I can think of is that our noble and aristocratic Elites see Steven Crowder as a person, but feel that the rap artists are lower-order animals. After all, you can't expect much from dogs.

Meanwhile, dimwitted Catholic rednecks like myself see all those folks as the same and can't understand why you'd  treat them differently. Oh well. Maybe someday we'll ditch that whole everyone-is-made-in-the-image-of-God thing and I'll be enlightened.

Pepito Ramón doesn't bark a lot, but he moans a great deal. Our kids don't moan much at all.

Creepy Google

At the gym this morning, on one of the TVs, was the CEO of Google, old what's-his-name.

Aside: Why do gyms think you want to watch political shows while you work out? Why isn't it all travel, adventure and sports?

Anyway, some CNN airhead was interviewing him about hate speech and controlling the political discourse on YouTube and elsewhere. It gave me chills.

Here's the head of this ultra-massive multinational whose control over communications is utterly dominant and whose corporation is completely in bed with one particular political party, calmly talking about what opinions will be suppressed on the Internet.

I'm guessing that the racist ravings of Ta-Nehisi Coates won't be among the ones banned from YouTube.

In completely unrelated news, 24 power-mad maniacs who seek the job which will give regulatory control over Google are desperately looking for financial backing and internet traffic to their campaign sites.

Mein Kampf And The Democratic Primaries

Riding a hunch about similarities between certain worldviews, I dove back into Mein Kampf again.

God, what a horrible book. It's an extended rant by a guy who can't write, can't formulate a complex argument, had no idea what his opponents thought and was historically illiterate. He was also obsessed with race and wanted an all-powerful government.

In other words, Adolf Hitler belongs on the stage in the upcoming Democratic debates.

Differences arise when you get to the purpose of the whole thing. Uncle Adolf had grand visions and demanded sacrifices from the people to achieve them. It's all strength and army and battle and discipline all the time. The Democrats want to maximize the time you spend high on weed, downloading porn. Hitler demanded you join the army and die for the Fatherland. Kamala Harris demands someone else hand you goodies while you lay on the couch, wearing an rainbow flag shirt, watching Ellen DeGeneres. They both talk with their eyes bugged out and arms waving around, so there's that.

In the end, you wonder how anyone with sense ever believed a word of what they said.

And then you remember your Catholic Catechism and realize we are all imperfect, sinful people.

Is this deep blue Los Angeles, circa 2019 or deep Nazi Berlin, circa 1945?

I guess, when all's said and done, it hardly matters which path you take to get there.

Fundamentally remaking the country, change you can believe in and all that.

Where's Tippi Hedren When You Need Her?

We've got a couple of songbird nests around our house. Sometimes, one of the parents will accidentally fly into the garage and get trapped trying to escape through a skylight. To get them out, you need to remove a car and put up our Rickety Death Trap Ladder™ so you can climb into the skylight, remove the screen and then shoo the bird out.

Last week, one of the moms flew into our house and, thank God, flew upstairs into the master bedroom. Sometimes, they fly into the staircase skylight which also requires the use of the Rickety Death Trap Ladder™. Horrible.

Anyway, as I said, she flew upstairs. It was almost night, so there was very little light outside. I closed all the doors and opened the sliding glass door onto the balcony, hoping she'd just fly out. Nope. She couldn't see well enough to notice that it was an opening. It just looked like a black rectangle to her.

I chased her around the room a couple of times with a bug net, caught her twice, but was never able to keep her in the net. Finally, she perched on a picture frame and I turned out the lights.

Oddly enough, my night vision was better than hers. I guess I eat more carrots or something. In any case, she just crouched on the picture frame while I walked over and picked her up gently. I let her out onto the balcony and she flew off, much to everyone's relief.

Yay!

Tippi was not waiting downstairs with a triumphant martini. Instead, wife kitteh was there with a beer.
I'll take wife kitteh over Tippi any day of the week.

Demographics And Artificial Intelligence

A friend at work talked to me yesterday about an article in Signal magazine about how AI will change the culture.

The changes wrought by AI will extend throughout society in ways that exceed the effects of the computer revolution. Halal offers that, as routine knowledge jobs are eliminated, the workforce will move up to the next logical phase of development, which is “beyond knowledge.” This comprises consciousness, values, beliefs and other things that are far more important than knowledge, he says.

Humans always will have a superior method that will surpass whatever machines achieve: collective knowledge. “If we pool the knowledge of humans, then we will have something more powerful than the individual choices of the machines,” he declares. Achieving that collective strength will require pooling human judgment across the globe, which is different from the way machines will work.

This will work until demographic changes in Europe make Islam the dominant culture. At that point, AI can do what it likes because Sharia will be the law of the land.

Alternately, this will work until Europe and the US go bankrupt, after which AI can also do what it likes.

I love these articles written by pseudo-eggheads who have no comprehension of cultures outside of their cloistered universities, TV studios and movie lots. Castles are built in the clouds which are noble and beautiful and artistic. Then they come to nothing.

In the modern West, the battle is fought at the ballot box. You can't vote if you haven't been born. As the Secular Left hardens ethnic groups into adamantine blocks through their endless harping on interesectionality and social justice, it's the team what's having babies that wins. You can create all the AI algorithms you want and it won't make a bit of difference if you aren't making little versions of you at the same time.

Below is a video from a London mosque. You know, London, where the British are now a minority. Have fun with your AI computerings, but don't think you're going to budge these guys. They're serious players.

NOTE: If you are not a frequent reader of this blog, know that I am completely against identifying people by their groups. I believe in the individual, not the race, gender, class, sex, whatever. I have more in common and more brotherhood with an Ivorian immigrant friend of mine than I do with my neighbor two doors down. The Secular Left is dead wrong when it tries to jam group identity down our throats.

Having said that, you don't need to be a weatherman to see which way the wind is blowing. In the media and the academy, it's race, sex, gender all day and all night. That's idiocy, but it's the idiocy of the moment and I'm just thinking through the implications.

Whistling Through The Graveyard

... and I do mean graveyard. Dig this.

Japan’s birth rate has hit its lowest level since records began in 1899.

The number of births last year fell to a post-war low of 918,397 – a decline of 27,668 since the previous record low in 2017.

In the late 1940s, the number of births stood at about 2.7 million, according to The Asahi Shimbun newspaper.

The latest figures released by the Japanese government showed the country’s population decline - the number of deaths minus births - totalled 444,085, which was worse than the previous largest drop in 2017.

Now dig what they say the reason for the decline is.

A ministry official said: “Economic conditions and the difficulty of simultaneously managing both work and child-rearing are considered the major reasons behind the declining birth rates. We need to promote policies to set up an environment where people who want to have children can have children and raise them at ease.”

Below is a photo of postwar Japan, back when economic conditions were so good that women were eager to have children.

The problem isn't economics and the solution isn't policy. This year's 440K population drop will become next year's 490K population drop.

It's almost like there was a purpose to men identifying as men and playing the role of a man and women identifying as women and playing the role of women.

Nah. Equality now!

Why Do You Hate Apaches?

You're an Apache-hater! You're full of hate! You're a Nazi who wants to kill all Apaches and your speech is violence so I get to do what I want!

Pondering the video below, which I saw for some algorithmic reason known only to the dingledorks at YouTube while doing some brainless tedium at work, I had an epiphany.

And Lo! Out of stupidity and ignorance there came enlightenment!

The whole point of wokeness and the Secular Left is that they get to throw out logic and objective fact and simply sling accusations around like mad.

You're guilty of "childism" if you don't allow a 3-year-old to pick their sex gender whatever. That's it. There's no reference to development, education, comprehension or anything that might be a basis for respecting a decision, it's just a wild accusation based on emotions.

What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

This tranny activist hates Apaches. She's a hateful hater full of hate. She wants to kill them all and destroy the memory of their culture. She's practicing genocide. Culturally now, but in the end, it will be real. Speech is violence so she's effectively putting them in gas chambers.

No, I'm not any crazier than usual. Dig this.

BOYS INTO MANHOOD

The Apache people prepare boys for manhood from when they are very young. They also presented tests for them to complete. One of the customs to help boys become strong, young warriors comes when the boys become annoying to an elder. The elder will tell the boys to run to the top of the mountain and come back again, not stopping until they get to the top. As they get older, the distance and height grow along with their ability. Fathers have their sons hold water in their mouths so that they breathe through their nose. Breathing through the mouth in the desert causes a person to dehydrate, which is fatal.

Here it is in image form for easy deployment on Twitter. If you use it, I'd love to hear how it caused the woke to howl in rage.

The Apache didn't let their kids choose their sex gender whatever. The Apache didn't consider you a man until you passed certain tests. In that, they were pretty much in keeping with other cultures. Cultures like ours before the Secular Left drove us to madness.

If logic, reason and historical reality are discarded for one side, they're discarded for all sides. In the end, in a world run by the Secular Left, all you will have will be crazed, enraged accusations of bigotry and hate.

If we're going to go down that path and hopefully out the other side back into rational thought and the world of Athens and Jerusalem, let's get on with it.

Let Go And Let God - A Rant

"Let go and let God" is a saying that drives me bonkers. Another one is, "Preach the Gospel at all times. If necessary, use words."

Aaaaaaauuuuuggghhhhhhh! Stop it stop it stop it!

What is it with this lazy, passive trash, anyway? Can you imagine dying, going to the Pearly Gates and when asked why you didn't tell someone they were headed for disaster, saying to St. Peter, "Oh, no. I didn't use words. I just prayed and left it all up to you."

The dude's going to respond, "What, you think all we're here for is to do your work for you?"

God gave us a rational brain for a reason. He gave us the ability to research and learn for a reason. Salesmen like Zig Ziglar, motivational writers like Brian Tracy and a whole library of geniuses from the past are there to be used for good! Sitting around with your Rosary is fine when there is literally nothing else to do, but it can't be your default position.

There are people out there who can teach you how to approach a delicate situation. You don't have to whack people with a sledgehammer, but at the very least, you can educate yourself and give it a try.

End of rant.

I will admit that sometimes, words fail. For those occasions, more direct action may be required.

The Expected Value Of Extremism

In mathematics, the Expected Value of a variable is a the sum of all of its possible values times the probability of each value. For example, if you roll a 6-sided die, the expected value is 3.5.

If you take a look at "extremism" in the US, you would have to say the expected value of each extremist group would be the damage they can do if they got power times the probability that they would. Socialism destroys every country it touches as does Nazism. However, the probability that we will enact socialism is much greater than the chance we will be goose stepping around the living room any time soon.

I saw that YouTube took down lots of historical videos, many of them from the Nazi era. That's too bad and it seems to me like the avoidance of something that wasn't going to happen anyway. I liked to watch their propaganda films from a historical perspective. It's the only way you will ever see a Dornier Do-17 in flight as they were all destroyed.

One day, driven by curiosity, I watched bits and pieces of Leni Reifenstahl's documentary of the Nuremberg Nazi rallies, Triumph of the Will. It was fascinating. The whole thing shouted out, "You thought you beat us in WW I, but you didn't! We're coming back and we're going to make you all pay!" You can't watch it without thinking you could see what was coming. And yet, the British and French didn't see what was coming and kept giving in to Hitler. Madness!

Going back to YouTube, I'd be far more worried about pro-socialism videos than old time Nazi propaganda. Much of the socialism stuff is new and well done. The Nazi films are clumsy, dated and probably have little impact on modern audiences. As we know from Venezuela, socialism leads to barbecuing zoo animals over trash can fires followed by the water and electricity being turned off.

That doesn't sound like a lot of fun and it's a heck of lot more probable than Swastika flags being raised over Chicago.

You know, for people that live and die by the algorithm, it seems to me like the folks running YouTube forgot about the calculation of Expected Value.

Richard Dawkins, You Aren't Smart Enough

An IQ of 150 is huge. With a brain like that, things come easily to you that are difficult or impossible for others. It's still not big enough to mean you should tell others what to do. Dig this.

Under-age people can’t vote. Whatever our criterion for thinking them unqualified (eg insufficiently developed reasoning powers or knowledge) there must be some adults less qualified than some under-age people. Is age the only practical threshold or could others be devised?

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) June 8, 2019

Seriously? Let's see, we had the Soviet Vanguard of the Proletariat which led to 40 million dead and a ruined country. We had Mao's Cultural Revolutionaries which wiped out Chinese agriculture and killed something like 60 million. Now we've got the Ivy League / Berkeley geniuses who have bankrupted what seemed like an inexhaustibly wealthy nation with deficit spending and set us at each others' throats with their crazed, intersectionality trash.

Yeah, let's restrict power to the "smart" people.

The problem with being smart is that you are smart only to the upper limits of human ability. You aren't omniscient like God. Mark Steyn once said that the skill set required to manage a 4 trillion dollar organization does not exist. Our Elites prove that right every day.

Instead of making sure only the "smart" people get to vote, we ought to reduce the size and scope of government until the amount of damage the Elites can do to us is recoverable.

In Praise Of Recognizing Uncertainty

I came across this image today on Twitter.

It's very possible this is a Photoshop and not a real photo. Still, she gave the speech and it was warmly received, leading to many invitations to speak to other KKK groups. She must have said lots of things they liked.

In case the name is unfamiliar, Margaret Sanger was the founder of Planned Parenthood.

I did a little surfing around and came to the conclusion that Sanger was only implicitly racist. Her big thing was birth control and she was obsessed with it. She was deeply committed to bringing birth control to all women and Southern blacks were no exception. If she saw an opportunity to push it, she did. The KKK was just another avenue to make a sale.

There's no question that Sanger was a eugenicist. Her book, The Pivot of Civilization, is nothing but eugenics. For her, it was all about intelligence. At the time, the scientific consensus was that blacks were naturally less intelligent, so it's hard to believe that she didn't think pursuing what she called "the Negro Project" was an important part of her overall goal of preventing the spread of mental defectives. That would make her a racist, but only because the cultural default position was black inferiority.

Having said that, it doesn't appear that she was a racist per se. Therein lies the whole problem with finding narrow, modern bins into which a person from the past can be fit. Sanger held some wacky beliefs and I think her creation, Planned Parenthood, is a pack of greedy vultures preying upon babies and making mounds of cash off their deaths. Still, Sanger wasn't motivated by that and, like all historical figures, was complex.

Was she purely evil? It's hard to make that case given what she saw in her own life. She set evil in motion, but I think you need to have some, perhaps small, sympathy for her and what she was trying to do. It's also important to remember to interpret her through the lens of her time. Hopefully people will do that for us when we're dead and gone, too.

Hate the sin (abortion) not the sinner, no?

Have I got this all wrong?

Dude

Dig this.

A cherried-out International Harvester flatbed. Cool!

They dropped a Jag V-12 into the thing? Duuuude.

Racism: A Mountain Of Lies, A Mountain Of Bodies

I blogged a while back about the excellent HBO series, Chernobyl*.

Chernobyl is what happens when a society is built on a mountain of lies and those lies are more important than people. "Leadership knows what it's doing so you must obey their orders! Our power plants are safe and Soviet nuclear technology is world-class! Our workers, underpaid with nothing in the stores to buy, are dedicated, sober and competent!"

If you disagreed or pointed out contradictions, you were arrested and sent to the gulags or simply shot. The lies had to be preserved no matter the cost.

Now allow me to carry this to a current, American example.

Baltimore is what happens when a society is built on a mountain of lies and those lies are more important than people.

A Project Baltimore investigation has found five Baltimore City high schools and one middle school do not have a single student proficient in the state tested subjects of math and English.

If you don't want to click on the link, the data shows that the failing students are predominantly black, the schools are heavily funded and the families are mostly single-parent. Here, the lie the elites in power repeat endlessly is that racism is a major problem. The truth is that the culture, specifically the destruction of the traditional, nuclear family is the problem.

If you point out that there aren't a whole lot of white supremacists anywhere near the neighborhoods where these kids are failing, you become the subject of scorn and ridicule. You are accused of racism. Duh. When the only tool you have is social justice every problem looks like racism.

Meanwhile, if you truly loved the people of Baltimore, both the failing children and the undoubtedly agonizing moms, you'd tell the truth. Starting with the truth is the only way to solve problems. Since the media, academia, the entertainment industry and one of the two big political parties repeats the mantra of "Racism!" over and over again, the conclusion is that they don't love the people of Baltimore at all.

The lie is more important than the people.

There was a KKK rally in Dayton recently. I saw news reports about it all over the place, but it took a little digging to find out how many white supremacists showed up. 9. Nine. One less than ten.

Why was a rally of 9 people covered at all in the media? Heck, a girls' high school track meet will get a hundred times that many people and I don't see those people being discussed by panels of experts on cable news.

The Elites are addicted to the lie. They are in love with the lie. The lie is their religion. Facts that contradict the lie are suppressed and people pointing them out are cast out of polite society. Whether or not the bodies pile up in Chernobyl or the streets of Baltimore doesn't matter at all. All that matters is the lie.

The ruins of a school room in Baltimore or Chernobyl. It hardly matters which.

* - I haven't seen the last episode, so don't tell me how it ends. I'm hoping everything gets repaired and the Soviets can reopen the city and power plant with no fear of radioactive hazards.

Score One For Milo

I'm not a big fan of Milo Yiannopoulos. He's the gay, conservative commentator whose over-the-top style reminds me of Liberace. I find him occasionally funny, but intolerable in large doses. I never finished his most recent book.

I heard him interviewed by Jordan Peterson recently. It was an interesting hour, but at one point, Milo said that the Internet shunning that happened to him was coming for all conservatives. I thought this was just one more Milo Moment where his massive ego grabbed hold of his brain and made everything about him.

If you didn't know, Milo lost all of his gigs and position when he came out and talked about how he turned gay when a priest abused him while he was under age. He said he went along with the abuse and found that he liked it. He also said that many gay men get their start that way. True or not, it's something you are not allowed to say and he lost it all.

Anywho, I thought it was all Milo ego until right wing comedian Steven Crowder was demonetized by YouTube yesterday. I'm not a huge Crowder fan, but only because his comedy is too diluted. If he crafted a single 60-minute stand up act every year or so, I think he'd be hilarious. His regular YouTube show is too long for the material he has. In any case, he's objectionable on the order of George Carlin.

Maybe Milo was right. Maybe the progressives are just working their way down the list. Steven Crowder is no Milo and I never thought he'd be banned, but now he has been. Here's his take on the matter and it sounds just like Milo.

A message about YouTube and the #VoxAdpocalypse pic.twitter.com/B5RL5O1bvy

— Steven Crowder (@scrowder) June 5, 2019

And if you want to see Crowder at his best, dig this video. If you can watch it without laughing out loud multiple times, you're a better person than I am.

Old Age Can Slow You Down

... but it can't take the music from your heart. Or something like that.

I'm on travel and am totally exhausted tonight. I stopped by a pub for dinner and see those old dudes playing Dixieland. The average age looked to be about 85. They were a lot of fun. I think they've been doing this for a while.

Hitting The Lottery

... is what Pepito Ramón did when we adopted the old dude.

He's 18 years old. For his sized dog, that makes him about the same age as my mom, 89. Like her, he's spry and feisty, albeit with lots of naps and rest. He gets those as the photo attests.

One week - owners abandon him and want to put him down. Next week - treated like the loved little guy that he is.

Goodbye, Tablet

I'm packing for travel to the east coast right now and I recently got a Microsoft Surface. As I've set it up, I've realized it's a supercharged tablet. My old Samsung tablet isn't making the trip and probably won't make any more, ever.

I got the tablet so I could work on and learn Creative Cloud apps while I fly. I usually get the middle seat and my laptop is a 17" monstrosity, so there's no way I can use it. Plus, its battery lasts about 80 minutes, assuming I'm not editing videos. The tablet will let me work and learn as I fly instead of playing idiotic brick breaker games on my phone for 5-6 hours.

I've installed Adobe Creative Cloud, Spotify with downloaded playlists, Audible with downloaded books to hear, Kindle with books to read. Once I pair it with my Sony headphones, I'm not sure what else I need. As long as the battery holds out, it should be able to do everything, just like the desktop machine where I'm typing right now.

I'll post a review once I see how it works.

Bringing Both Sides Together

... with hate.

This story is almost too surreal to be true. Well, at least until you recall who is involved and what they support.

The KKK held a rally in Dayton, Ohio. 9 people* showed up. Something like 600 people showed up to protest the KKK. That's not the good part. Here's the good part.

The anti-KKK side desecrated an Israeli flag.

Finally, something both sides could agree on - hatred of the Jews! Wowsers. Who knew that two sides so seemingly opposed could find such common ground!

* - 9 people? If that doesn't convince you the White Supremacy is on the march in the US, nothing will.