Epstein procuring 15-year-old girls for Bill Clinton and others could have been spun in a way that (the mother of a child drag queen) would have accepted, but she's an exception among the Normals. No, the truckers and waitresses and WalMart greeters are disgusted by grade-school drag queens as well as Bill Clinton banging junior high school girls. Normals vote. The Elites still need the Normals, at least around election time.
Epstein and Weinstein and child drag queens at the Pride Parade are problematic because the Normals still cling to their Bibles or at least the primitive social norms of the Bible. If the Elites' morality was generally known, the votes of the unwashed masses would be much harder to harvest.
What happens when the Harvard / Berkeley attitudes get traction in the community college / trade school set? That's the goal, you know.
The scale of the problem of people looking at indecent images of children in the UK is 'horrifying', a police chief has warned.
West Midlands Police chief constable Dave Thompson said a 'big discussion' was needed in society about the issue, as he was asked about whether naming and shaming offenders was a bigger deterrent than a prosecution.
His remarks came after Simon Bailey, the National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC) lead for child protection, suggested that paedophiles who view indecent images should not be charged or taken to court unless they pose a physical threat to children.
... when they've got lots of little birds in them.
Momma kitteh has had some more health problems, so I spent the day with her and doing work for her. I'm beat. However, I came home to see my tiny friends doing their thing in our dead apricot tree.
We have a bird bath in the back yard that is more like a drinking fountain for the little guys. If there's one thing a San Diego songbird appreciates in the dryest parts of the summer, it's a source of clean, fresh water.
The apricot tree died in the middle of last year, but we don't plan to remove it because the birds like to roost in it while they check out the safety of the bird bath which is almost directly below it.
I find the sight of the tree filling with little birds charming. I took video of it to play with in Premier, but the memory card died, so I need to try again. In the meantime, there's a foursome for you. The most I've seen at any one time is seven. Four is about the average.
Chicago recently elected Lori Lightfoot as mayor. She's the first black lesbian to hold the position. How's that for diversity? That sounds like the trifecta to me.
Since we know that diversity is our greatest strength, we should see good times ahead for the Windy City. Well, we should, only we're not. It turns out that Chicago is having a teensy-weensy problem with money. They're running out of the stuff.
On Thursday evening, Ms. Lightfoot, who in May became the first black woman and first gay mayor of Chicago, plans to lay out a vision for tackling the city’s longstanding fiscal crisis.
The Lightfoot administration has identified a budget gap of nearly $1 billion for 2020, according to people familiar with the matter. That is significantly higher than the previous administration had expected. For 2019, the nation’s third-largest city has a budget of $10.6 billion.
One billion simoleons is a lot of dough, but I'm not worried now that Chicago has gone into turbo mode on the whole diversity thing. Meanwhile, when she was elected, the geniuses at PBS quickly zeroed in on an even bigger threat to the city. The police.
Among her toughest challenges — and perhaps the one most scrutinized by those outside the city — will be overhauling the beleaguered Chicago Police Department...
Lightfoot’s administration will be focused from her first days on the job on better management of city costs and ensuring that “compliance with the consent decree is a high priority for the Police Department.”
Money will be an issue. City officials recently said Chicago’s 2020 budget shortfall was around $740 million, worse than previously thought. Some changes, including to police training, will require funds. But the consent decree doesn’t spell out how much the city should spend — something Lightfoot has criticized.
Now it turns out that the $740M shortfall was itself a trifle short. Whatever. Finding yourself looking for a spare $1,000,000,000 in change underneath your couch cushions is tough, but you can't let it distract you from dealing firmly with the police. And deal with them she will. After all, she's bringing the diversity in a way no one has ever brought it before in Chicago.
Conservative lawmakers and right-wing vigilantes alike have adopted a seemingly new language for describing their antiabortion stance: the white nationalist discourse of the “great replacement,” a conspiracy theory that holds that nonwhite immigrants are demographically “replacing” whites throughout the West.
The essay attempts to show that being pro-life aligns with white supremacy. Maybe she's making that point because she can't find enough real white supremacists so pro-lifers are being force-fitted into that mold to give her something to howl about. Whatever.
The real problem with her analysis is that Women of Color (WoC) who are pregnant with Babies of Color (BoC) that will turn into People of Color (PoC) are having way more abortions than Women of Crackerhood (WoCh).
If you're pro-life, you're agitating for more PoC because you want fewer WoC to abort BoC. Any gain you get from honkies not having abortions is likely to be dwarfed by the saved BoC count.
OK, well, maybe she didn't know that black women lead the league in abortions. That's fine. Plenty of progressives don't. If she didn't before, she does now. In the replies to her tweet, there are gallons and gallons, a veritable cataract of replies pointing this out.
It doesn't seem to have changed her stance. Here is the logic:
If we leave the borders open, hordes of illegal immigrants will cause America to become less white no matter what happens with abortion.
If we close the borders and make abortion illegal, America will become less white because of all the newborn BoC.
The only option for the seven white supremacists in the country to get more whites is to support a closed border and more abortion, figuring that the trends will hold and more WoC will kill off more BoC.
Marissa's not an idiot, she must certainly be aware of this now, but there's no indication of a change in her opinion. In fact, my bet is that she'll go on beating the drum in favor of abortion as a way to stop white supremacists from doing whatever it is they do when they meet at Dennys.
If that isn't spreading darkness, I don't know what is.
Everyone knows that the snowspeeders in Star Wars trip up the AT-ATs with their tow cables. Like this.
Snowspeeders have tow cables? Really? For what? Are they Galacto-Amazon's new delivery device? And look at the length of the thing! Anything you're "towing" is going to dragged along the ground at high speed. You've got to figure that the stall speed of a snowspeeder is above 100 MPH. Can you imagine dragging something around at 100 miles an hour with a cable so long that it bounces all over the place?
And how about what happens when the thing you're towing gets caught in a crevasse or alleyway? SPROING! Your snow speeder has its rear end ripped off.
I'm thinking that some defense contractor working for the Rebellion added that in just to make an extra profit.
No, I don't mean cornbread, though that's what I was trying to make. I mean cornmeh because that's what it was.
I've been meaning to try making cornbread from scratch, using cornmeal and an old-time recipe. I did that on Saturday and the result was a grainy platter of crunchy things.
It turns out that the cornmeal in the pre-made boxes of cornbread mix has been milled significantly finer that your standard cornmeal / grits. While they rose and formed and did all the things cornbreads are supposed to do, you couldn't get away from the coarse graininess of the meal.
Oh well. One less thing to try.
Oh yes, and it was made in a cast-iron skillet. That part is a winner.
While not surprising, this is nevertheless alarming, if true. Here's the key sentence.
Marseille is approximately 40 percent Muslim and is slated to be the first Muslim-majority city in France.
Given immigration and birth rates, this was bound to happen. Like many defeated peoples, I wonder if the French in the south are saying to each other, "I just didn't think it would happen so soon!"
Islam isn't a race, it's an idea. Its central goal is to spread itself across the whole globe by any means possible. Everything is bent towards this aim. For instance, Muslim apostasy rules make it very dangerous to leave the faith.
What happens when a major port on the Mediterranean becomes 55-60% Muslim? What happens when they control the legal system, the enforcement agencies and the local customs and immigration bureaucracy? Right across the Med are millions upon millions of fellow Muslims wishing to enter France with millions more on the way as Muslim women do their part for the faith by having lots of babies.
What happened at Sedan in May 1940?
Breakout.
A small hole in the French lines allowed in a lethal spearhead of German Army. French leadership quickly despaired.
Churchill flew to Paris on May 16. He immediately recognized the gravity of the situation when he observed that the French government was already burning its archives and preparing for an evacuation of the capital. In a sombre meeting with the French commanders, Churchill asked General Gamelin, "Where is the strategic reserve?" ... "There is none", Gamelin replied. Later, Churchill described hearing this as the single most shocking moment in his life. Churchill asked Gamelin when and where the general proposed to launch a counterattack against the flanks of the German bulge. Gamelin simply replied "inferiority of numbers, inferiority of equipment, inferiority of methods".
In this case, the French strategic reserve can be found in the empty cribs of their maternity wards.
Note: I suppose you could claim this is the height of Islamophobia, but that's a term that makes no sense to me. As I said, Islam is an idea, one it pays to understand. To deny that their goal is world domination is to disrespect their faith. Treating them like just one more interest group in need of a segregated campus meeting spot infantilizes what is, in fact, a very serious philosophy.
Additional Thought Exercise: What would happen if the cartels took over Calexico? That is, imagine the government functionaries who generate immigration paperwork as employees of Mexican drug gangs, who are the primary conduits of illegals. All of a sudden, you can't trust your immigration system and the whole thing breaks down. The border, wall or no, is now breached. How do you track down illegal immigrants who have legitimate paperwork? That's what losing Marseille means to France.
Super Special Bonus Data Point: While on the ferry to Morocco in July, the reality of the difference in birth rates slapped you in the face. Every Muslim woman of child-bearing age had children. The pretty ones, the ugly ones, the fat ones, the skinny ones, all of them. And not child, but children. If you give that population pressure cooker a release valve, it's going to use it.
I'm doing some technical work this morning and don't have time for deep thought here, but I thought I'd share something with you I felt was profound. Here's the essay. Here's the tidbit.
The left, which I used to see as misguided but mostly benign, has built for itself -- because it knows it can’t convince Americans to throw away freedom -- a make-believe utopian country. It has constructed, ex nihilo, a nation that has no borders, no laws, no specific language, and no recognizable morality. When Barrack Obama said he wanted to “fundamentally change” America, he wasn’t bluffing. When he’d stick out his chin and say, ”That’s not who we are,” he wasn’t talking about us; he was talking about the citizens of his make-believe land which I’ll name “Neverland.”
No borders, no laws, no language, no objective morality is a clear and cogent way to summarize the Secular Left. It's also a marshmallow world. I'd add to that money from heaven. Spending is completely disconnected from earning. Neverland indeed. Assuming you enacted all of these things, where are you ten years down the road? It's all bong smoke phantoms. Utterly unreal.
It made me think of a dreadful Beatles song, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, which I will cruelly share with you here. Enjoy?
Picture yourself in a boat on a river
With tangerine trees and marmalade skies
Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly
A social justice warrior with kaleidoscope eyes
(It's fitting that the lyrics in the video are bilingual, no?)
For a while, I thought that the 1619 Project at the New York Times was created by a collection of racially-obsessed lunatics who cherry-pick historical tidbits and then add to it with portions wholly invented from the dark recesses of their sick minds, but no more. I now see the error of my ways.
What persuaded me was the silent acquiescence of our academies. The fact that not a single historian is publishing rebuttals to the NYT's effort to show us how America is foundationally based on racism and slavery showed me how wrong I was. After all, our universities cannot possibly be full of pusillanimous weasels who are willing to trade their integrity for a fat paycheck. It cannot also be full of knaves and charlatans who are too ignorant or too stupid to read source material from the past. Finally, it cannot either be full of crazed zealots who have adopted the Nazis' mania for race.
It must be true. That's the only possibility. With that in mind I have adapted a similarly-inclined great thinker's work to fit the 1619 Project. Enjoy.
If we divide mankind into three categories--founders of culture, bearers of culture, and destroyers of culture--the African alone can be considered as representing the first category. It was he who laid the groundwork and erected the walls of every great structure in human culture. Only the shape and color of such structures are to be attributed to the individual characteristics of the various nations. It is the African who has furnished the great building-stones and plans for the edifices of all human progress; only the way in which these plans have been executed is to be attributed to the qualities of each individual race.
Within a few decades, the whole of the European colonies in North and South America, for instance, appropriated a culture and called such a culture its own, whereas the basis of that culture was the African mind and skill as we know it. Only the external form--at least to a certain degree--shows the traits of European inspiration. It is not true, as some believe, that America adds African technique to a European culture. The truth rather is that African science and techniques are just decked out with the peculiar characteristics of European civilization.
The foundations of actual life in America today are not those of the European culture, although this characterizes the external features of the country, which features strike the eye of observers; but the real foundations of contemporary American life are the enormous scientific and technical achievements of Africa, that is to say, of African peoples. Only by adopting these achievements as the foundations of their own progress could America take a place in contemporary world progress. The scientific and technical achievements of Africa provide the basis on which the struggle for daily livelihood is carried on in America. They provide the necessary arms and instruments for this struggle, and only the outer forms of these instruments have become gradually adapted to American ways of life.
If we divide mankind into three categories--founders of culture, bearers of culture, and destroyers of culture--the Aryan alone can be considered as representing the first category. It was he who laid the groundwork and erected the walls of every great structure in human culture. Only the shape and color of such structures are to be attributed to the individual characteristics of the various nations. It is the Aryan who has furnished the great building-stones and plans for the edifices of all human progress; only the way in which these plans have been executed is to be attributed to the qualities of each individual race. Within a few decades the whole of Eastern Asia, for instance, appropriated a culture and called such a culture its own, whereas the basis of that culture was the Greek mind and Teutonic skill as we know it. Only the external form--at least to a certain degree--shows the traits of an Asiatic inspiration. It is not true, as some believe, that Japan adds European technique to a culture of her own. The truth rather is that European science and techniques are just decked out with the peculiar characteristics of Japanese civilization. The foundations of actual life in Japan to-day are not those of the native Japanese culture, although this characterizes the external features of the country, which features strike the eye of European observers on account of their fundamental difference from us; but the real foundations of contemporary Japanese life are the enormous scientific and technical achievements of Europe and America, that is to say, of Aryan peoples. Only by adopting these achievements as the foundations of their own progress can the various nations of the Orient take a place in contemporary world progress. The scientific and technical achievements of Europe and America provide the basis on which the struggle for daily livelihood is carried on in the Orient. They provide the necessary arms and instruments for this struggle, and only the outer forms of these instruments have become gradually adapted to Japanese ways of life.
Nope. No lunacy there. None at all. Just pure, unadulterated truth.
How fortunate Mankind is to be so full of rationality that advanced nations could never, ever fall for the ravings of racist madmen. If that was possible, we might have to fear for America at the hands of the NYT and academia.
I skimmed the opening salvo from the NYT launching their 1619 Project which aims to redefine American history, making slavery and racism its foundation instead of freedom from tyranny. It reads like something from Jules Streicher's Nazi racist rag, Der Stürmer. Here's an absolutely jaw-dropping passage from it.
Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. By 1776, Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere. In London, there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade. This would have upended the economy of the colonies, in both the North and the South. The wealth and prominence that allowed Jefferson, at just 33, and the other founding fathers to believe they could successfully break off from one of the mightiest empires in the world came from the dizzying profits generated by chattel slavery. In other words, we may never have revolted against Britain if the founders had not understood that slavery empowered them to do so; nor if they had not believed that independence was required in order to ensure that slavery would continue.
This is insane. It's an absolute lie, from top to bottom. There was at least one more in the essay, maybe I'll deal with it later. I'm so nauseated by this one that I may not.
I just finished The Men That Lost America, a series of biographical sketches of the British leaders during the Revolutionary War. It described who they were, what they thought and what they did before, during and after the conflict. It uses extensive quotes from their speeches in Parliament and their writings. Letters, books and essays from the period are carefully referenced.
Not one of these men worried about race or slavery. At issue for England was the maintenance of their empire. England desperately needed the money derived from their imperial possessions in order to maintain its military. Without it, they would be quickly conquered and overrun by France and Spain. For example, the sugar from the Carribean colonies paid, in part, for the Royal Navy that protected British merchant ships sailing the Atlantic.
That's it. That's the whole thing, with a bit of political philosophy sprinkled on top. There's nothing about slavery and nothing about race. Meanwhile, the Americans were involved in existential crises of their own and were demanding autonomy to deal with them. They were done with governance-from-afar and wanted to control their own lives. Again, it had nothing to do with race or slavery.
What are we doing here? The New York Times is going full Der Stürmer right in front of us. This is madness.
Lose at Trafalgar or any one of a number of other sea battles and it's all over for England.
Addendum: I've read most of Mein Kampf and the parallels are indisputable. Like Hitler, the New York Times is simply inventing history so they can howl about race.
I grew up with a disadvantage or two. Mine were health-related. Whatever they were, my parents never, ever let me use them as excuses or complain about them. They had no patience for that at all.
Like everyone, our kids had their own share of headwinds. We never let them use their problems as excuses, either. The end result was four kids who are capable of dealing with life. Sometimes they sling blame, but not often and rarely in front of us.
I think that's what bothers me the most about political campaigns. I hate the speeches where some dingledork or dingledorkess talks about "the family, sitting around the dining room table, trying to figure out how to pay their bills." Geeze, man, sometimes is rough. Turning to politics to solve things isn't the answer. The answer is in the mirror.
Dittos for the 1619 Project from the NYT. That's where the Newspaper Of Broken Record is trying to tell us that America was founded on racism and slavery. What's the outcome going to be? It's just a pile of excuses for people to whip out every time they fail or don't feel like trying. Jordan Peterson had a great interview with Jamil Jivani that addressed this very issue.
Jamil saw that in his own life. While he was grasping for excuses, he failed or didn't even try. When he took responsibility for his life, he went from illiteracy to Yale. He mentions "learned helplessness" which is just what the dominant culture, read: Secular Left, is trying it's best to teach us all.
Masculinity is toxic and monogamy is a product of the oppressive patriarchy. Trannies are normal and good. Thus sayeth our Ivy League Elites, in unison. Disagree and you will be Canceled. Your social media presence killed, you will be banished from the best parties and your speaking events terminated. You might even lose your job.
Why did the Epstein and Weinstein bombs go off? What made them combustible? It certainly wasn't the Elites. They didn't just know what was going on, they were full participants. Epstein's Rolodex was filled with their names and they all knew who was doing what with whom.
If two guys spend more than 60 minutes of leisure time together, driving, hanging out at a bar, watching sports, golfing, whatever, you can pretty much discern the other's attitude towards sex and women. Specific fetishes might still be deeply hidden, but you can tell the score hounds from the traddies.
The Elites all know what's going on and approve of it. Epstein, Weinstein, drag queen story hour at the library, the suicide rates of the trannies, the kids performing as sex acts for gays, it's all noble and good to them. Dig this.
A nine year-old boy has made his debut as his drag queen alter-ego at a pride celebration.
Vincent Garcia appeared as DunkaShay Monroe at Los Angeles Pride in June, with the full support of his mother Elizabeth Leyva.
DunkaShay donned a bronze sequinned dress, green wig, silver sneakers and rainbow-striped socks for the occasion after being inspired by TV drag contest RuPaul’s Drag Race.
Who among the Elites would be troubled by this?
If you disapprove of RuPaul, you will be Canceled by the Elites.
So what was the big deal with Epstein and the others? If the Elites are all on board with anything-goes amorality, what was the problem? It was the Normals and their close-minded bigotries. From the kid's mom in the article linked above:
‘People dismiss children a lot and tell them they don’t know what they want and are too young to understand – but they have their own minds, just like everyone else.
‘The worst thing you can do is shut them down and be small-minded.
‘At the end of the day, you should love and support your children 100 per cent, regardless of whether they want to be a doctor, a cop or a drag queen.’
She might be a Normal, but she has completely adopted the Elites' worldview. Epstein procuring 15-year-old girls for Bill Clinton and others could have been spun in a way that she would have accepted, but she's an exception among the Normals. No, the truckers and waitresses and WalMart greeters are disgusted by grade-school drag queens as well as Bill Clinton banging junior high school girls. Normals vote. The Elites still need the Normals, at least around election time.
Epstein and Weinstein and child drag queens at the Pride Parade are problematic because the Normals still cling to their Bibles or at least the primitive social norms of the Bible. If the Elites' morality was generally known, the votes of the unwashed masses would be much harder to harvest.
What happens when the Harvard / Berkeley attitudes get traction in the community college / trade school set? That's the goal, you know. That's why Good Morning America was shoving it in our faces.
See how cool it all is? Don't be judgmental. Don't be a prude. Stop clinging to your guns and Bibles. Don't be a Deplorable.
Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein are / were apex predators in society. Below them are slightly smaller predators, organizing the child drag queen performances. Below that are the people making huge money off of porn videos. They're all predators doing what predators do. The only thing slowing them down right now are the primitive superstitions of the Normals and the fact that Normals vote. The more they can weaken our beliefs, the more freedom they will have to prey on the weak and the young.
Van Helsing is old and will die soon. The Elites are working hard to see that his kind will fade from the Earth. When that happens the Dracula-Clintons will be able feed at will.
I harvested my cayennes yesterday and made a batch of hot sauce using this recipe.
A pick of peppers, unpickled.
I picked the recipe because it called for more than vinegar and salt. Adding in the onions and garlic looked to be a good move, something to give the sauce a richer flavor instead of the simple hot-vinegar taste you get from Tabasco.
As it simmered, I began to worry as there was almost no odor to it at all. I needn't have been concerned. Once the veggies were soft and the mix had cooled, I put it in the blender and added the vinegar. There was the familiar scent! Once it was pureed, I poured it into a pickle jar and then spooned it out on a sandwich I was eating. Fabulous! Given the peppers, I don't think I'd buy hot sauce again.
As a data note, one full harvest of cayenne peppers from my plant yielded about 5 ounces of usable peppers. That allowed me to make a half-recipe from the one linked above. It still filled a decent-sized jar.
I left the seeds in to give it a bit more kick. And kick it did! Delish!
I went on an extended rant on Twitter this morning because I felt that was a constructive way to spend my time.
Making genius decisions like that, you can be sure I also have some stock tips for you. DM me and we'll talk.
Anyway, Epstein was offed and Peggy Noonan, whose writing I adore, penned a typically lovely piece wondering what happened to real reporting. If only the old school journalists were on the beat, this thing would blow sky high!
Why? Would someone in our Elites actually care? I doubt it. Dig this.
Think about the culture that got us to the point where librarians invite men wearing makeup and evening gowns to perform simulated sex acts in front of children in their libraries.
Librarians. Libraries.
Being a librarian is no joke. You need a degree in library science which is not the same as gaming management or leisure studies. As you watch that video, think of the culture in which the librarians have lived. It's the Elites, no? There's not a lot of PBR-drinking truckers in the library.
A sexual deviant mating with the air in front of kids isn't just OK, it's actually scheduled by the librarians. Scheduled as in planned, advertised and prepped by those librarians.
The librarians are part of the Elite, but they're the part down near the base of the pyramid. The Epsteins, Clintons and Elijah Cummings of the world are at the top, but it's all part of the same culture of "don't judge." If it's OK to invite perverts in to expose themselves to children and it's OK to slaughter newborn babies as it is in NY and elsewhere, what's the big deal about Bill Clinton having sex with 15-year-old girls on Epstein's private island? What are you, some kind of prude? You want us to live in the Handmaid's Tale, don't you?
How about the 11-year-old boy who dresses in drag and dances for gay men at bars? He was feted on Good Morning America.
And you think some sex slaves are a big deal to the Elites? Ha!
Here are black kids looting a Walgreens in Philly. Did you hear about that? Probably not or, if you did, it slid out of view forever after a 30-second spot on the news.
Where are those kids going to be in ten years? Prison? Poverty? Whatever. The Elites haven't cared about them since they were conceived. They were perfectly fine with mom and dad being unmarried and making no joint commitment to the children. Back off with your rigid morality, man. You sound like some kind of crazed, far-right fundamentalist.
The Elites invite the pervert into the library for the same reason they glorify little boys as drag queens for the same reason they look away when fatherless black kids run riot. It provides cover for their own twisted lives. Epstein wasn't doing anything wrong in their eyes because they weren't doing anything wrong. After all, as Lightworker Obama said, sin is being out of alignment with your values. When you make your own values, it's not likely you'll declare your personal perversions to be sinful.
Just how bothered are you going to be by the guy who creates the playground for you to indulge yourself when your indulgences aren't out of alignment with your values? His only sin would be to expose your preferences to the world where those racist, deplorable PBR drinkers live.
Oops.
So the dude got offed. So what? He had served his purpose. Now the big deal is finding a new procurer so Billy Clinton and his pals can get their rocks off. If you think the librarians or the crew from Good Morning America or Elijah Cummings' staff are going to stand up and say, "No more!" to the fetid, purulent culture that got us here because some throwback reporter exposed Jeffrey Epstein's sordid ways, you need to get out more.
Update: So the official story is that he committed suicide. So what? What does that change? You take a guy with dirt on all the elites, someone at a huge risk of suicide and leave him unguarded? Why not just give him a revolver with a single bullet and leave the room so he can take the honorable way out? The dude was offed whether it was done in the first person or not.
I'm listening to Father Larry Richards' book, Be A Man! these days. It's good, but a bit disappointing as I was expecting something less religious. Father Larry gives all manner of instruction, aimed at young men, which means it's full of good-natured remonstrances to get over your issues and get on with meeting your responsibilities. My favorite goes something like this.
Sometimes young men will come up to me and give me an excuse for bad behavior, saying, "Father, I come from a dysfunctional family." HA! We all come from dysfunctional families. Someday in the future, your kids will come to me or another priest and say, "Father, I come from a dysfunctional family!"
Hilarious because it's true. It has certainly made me think.
Anywho, as I listened to Father Larry tell me how important it was to pray and I thought about how I don't pray because I don't have the time, can't concentrate, am stressed because I come from a dysfunctional family or am wracked with guilt because I am a dysfunctional family and the chihuahuas aren't getting enough love and attention and I need to send them to a doggy psychologist, I suddenly thought of the four quadrants of business and life decisions.
Man, that was an enormous sentence. Too long? Probably. Whatever. Here's the chart.
Shopping for dinner ingredients on the way home or prepping for business travel is Quadrant I. Watching Wheel of Fortune is Quadrant III. Checking Twitter is Quadrant IV.
Prayer is Quadrant II. We almost never get to Quadrant II. Quadrant II takes effort and the payoff is far away. Meh.
After I thought of this, I listened to Father Larry tell me how important it was to set aside time for contemplative prayer where I listened for what God wanted me to do.You betcha, Father Larry! I agree! Still, it's not Quadrant I, is it? And speaking of that, what am I making for dinner tonight? Wife kitteh has a meeting with her papist homies at 5, so cooking is up to me. We had steak last night and chicken the night before ...
Prayer? Yeah, I know it's super important, but I don't have time right now. I'll get to it later ... Whoa! It's 7 already? That means it's time for Pat and Vanna!
I used to wrestle with our kids. It was lots of fun. I also used to study Kung Fu. That was fun, too. When I could work up the courage, I'd go to sparring class and get beaten up in the ring. Now check out this video from San Francisco where two women take on a single man.
DISTURBING VIDEO: Terrifying video shows a woman being violently attacked by an unknown man outside a luxury condominium complex in San Francisco
I watched it a couple of times. Here's what I noticed.
The guy was in total control of the encounter even though he was outnumbered. When I wrestled with the kids, I would ignore all but one and focus on that kid. In my case, it was to tickle them unmercifully. Once they were incapacitated with laughter, I'd turn on another. Since there was nothing they could do to me, I could engage with each in turn.
My favorite bit is where the girl security guard is hopping up and down, around 0:25. The man is holding the door closed against her with one hand while wrestling with the other. He's effectively fighting children.
The encounter ended when the man decided it was over. Had he not been a deranged druggie, this could have turned out quite differently. Which it does, frequently, in those places where women don't have men to protect them. See also: Urban communities, single-parent homes in.
This is San Francisco, one of the capitals of Wokeness. No one would suggest that a woman can't be a security guard because that's not who we are. For all we know, xe may identify as a man, not that the outcome would change.
There were no weapons available to the guard or if there are, she doesn't use them. If this had turned truly vicious, those two girls were going down and there was nothing they could do about it. A gun in trained hands would have made all the difference in the world.
Forget about batons or things like that. Close combat weapons wielded by children are only marginally dangerous. To be effective, you really want a stand off weapon to negate the guy's massive advantages in strength and ferocity.
If I'm the security guard or that's my wife, dude is going down or I'm going to die defending her and I do mean die. That changes the calculations completely. The strikes you make in combat à outrance are completely different than hopping up and down or wrestling with doors. Eyes, throats, joints, etc - it's all on the table and you take the first opening and strike without mercy or thought.
In that vein, the dude was clearly not trying to kill them or they would be dead. They had no defense against him at all.
There's more, but you get the point. We got that one on video, but I'm certain there are tens of thousands every week that don't get recorded where undefended women get slammed around and worse. And why not? Dig how we see women.
Lawrence Tribe is a smart man. My guess is that he knew the stats before he tweeted, but he did it anyway. If he didn't know the stats, he does now. The hard, cold truth of the matter is that conservatives are mostly pro-life and blacks are about 3x more likely to get abortions that whites. That means conservatives are fine with the country having a higher black population. You can't get to white supremacy from there.
And yet, here we are. Just like the media cherry-picking or distorting facts to cram a narrative down your throat, here's a pretty smart guy simply talking rubbish to do the same.
I've been thinking about reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich just for the pre-war parts to see the parallels between the Nazi domination of the culture and the Lawrence Tribes / CNNs of our time. I've not worked up the energy to do it. I think I get enough negativity as it is. I'm sure I will at some point just to continue my education.
In any case, here's the exchange between Tribe and Obianuju Ekeocha which went about as well for Larry as you'd expect, Obianuju having the truth on her side and all. I also screen-capped Larry's tweet below in case he decides he doesn't like getting ratioed as bad as he is on this one and deletes it.
In 2015,NYC pregnancy outcomes statistics showed👉🏾23,116 black babies were born while 25,698 were aborted.
More killed than born.
A black baby is 2.7 times more likely to be aborted than a white baby.
The most common question non-Catholics ask us is, "Why do you hate gays?" or some variation on that. Short answer: We don't. Everyone was made in the image of God and everyone should be Jesus to us. Matthew 25:37-40:
Then the righteous will answer him and say, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? When did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? When did we see you ill or in prison, and visit you?’
And the king will say to them in reply, ‘Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.’
That looks pretty clear to me. Our issue with sexuality is simple and has only one component that is theological.
Theology: You are unique among the animals in that you were made in the image of God and have a soul.
Biology: All humans come from the union of one man and one woman.
The derivation of our sexual morality is built on those two first principles. I'm not sure how either of them are full of hate, but we keep getting asked that question. The reason lies in the data the media chooses to show you.
Wife kitteh informs me that there was a group of Catholic lay people here in San Diego that made some nasty public pronouncements about gays. I hadn't heard of it even though my interaction with the Church is continuous, deep and spread widely across our diocese. Apparently it got plenty of play in the left wing media, which is to say, almost all of it. Since I don't watch the news or read the newspaper, I was out of the loop. All I do is live in the real world.
After a lovely conversation with an unreligious person the night before where the Key Question About Gays came up, wife kitteh and I were talking about it last night. She said she understood why we got that question and brought up the jerk-Catholics mentioned above. I asked, "Why are they considered representative? How about the LGBT activists who are egging on my friend to cut off her breasts and take testosterone, which is poisonous to women? Why aren't they representative of gays?"
There isn't a logical answer, of course, it's all bigotry. When given muddled data, if you want to make a point, you sift through it and handpick the stuff that validates your hypothesis and quietly discard the rest. That's how bigotry works.
Defending George Washington: George Washington owned slaves! Well, so what? What was everyone else doing in 1776? At that point in time, Africans in Africa took gold, silver and bronze in the Slavery Olympics. Why do we single out George for attack? In that case, we're handpicking the person and quietly discarding millions of others. We hate George and the boys and we want to make them look bad.
Defending Joe Biden: The same thing goes for Slow Joe's recent statement about poor kids being just as gifted as white kids. For the love of God, you political hacks, give it a rest. A normal person knows exactly what Joe was trying to say and it was driven by kindness. Joe may be a dunce, but he's not a closet klansman. You're harping on that quote because you're trying to get us to believe something that's untrue, not because it's representative.
Anyway, the people who push the Catholics-hate-gays narrative aren't telling you anything about Catholics, they're only telling you things about themselves. They handpicked a particular data subset for a reason.
In completely unrelated news, my tobacco seeds have begun to sprout!
"Tonight on AC 360, the problem with all the corn. It's in our diets, in our fuel tanks, in our fields and contributing a whole host of issues..."
"Coming up on Good Morning America, Dr. Erhartz Feldergarb, an expert on corn. He'll be discussing the corn crisis and a few ways you could change your habits to help..."
"Kellogg's came under fire today for it's continued advertising for Corn Flakes breakfast cereal after experts showed that corn may be causing an outbreak of psoriasis and other scalp issues in left-handed Latinos ..."
I feel like we'd be hear these stories nonstop if the Democrats decided that corn was their best line of attack. I never watch TV news, but on travel, you can't get away from it. It's in the bars, the hotel lobbies and the airports. Enduring it last week, I marveled at all the stories about racism.
I've got some training in mathematics. I'm also an extrovert whose job it is to speak in front of lots of people. I travel all over the country. I believe my acquaintances are a decent sampling of the population. Talking to people one-on-one or in small groups where the conversation is casual and personal, I cannot remember a single one in the last ten years that was racial with two exceptions.
The first exception is the Mexican Mafia in Cursillo. Cursillo is a Catholic movement where crazed papists get together to pray, talk and drink. Well, the drinking part isn't an official component of Cursillo, but it happens from time to time. The Mexican Mafia within my community talk about being Hispanic, but they do it with humor and love. Good example: When a Mass or wedding starts on time, they joke that it can't be a Mexican one because they're always late. They're proud of El Centro, Mexicali or wherever they're from, but it's never aggressive or antagonistic.
The other exception are the deep-blue progressives I know. The more politically active and hardcore they are, the more they talk race. The ones I know are all white and aggressively criticize white people. It comes up at the weirdest times and often in almost reflexive ways. "Oh, that's so white" or "I'm doing xxx like a white person."
The progs aside, assume I know 80 people* well enough to get a sense of their true natures. I think that's an underestimate, but let's go with it. If 10% of the population is racist, the odds I would know zero racists would be 0.9 ** 80 = 0.02184745% or roughly 5000-1. It's simply not believable.
That's what my analytical side is screaming every time I watch the news. It's also why I rant about it here. I'm using this blog to work out explanations for what I see and this is one of the most distressing, hence the repeated and probably highly unpopular posts on the subject.
My take is that Americans are deeply decent people. Of those 80 people, 60 are the type I could invite over for dinner for a pleasant evening. The statistical inferences from that are obvious. Americans are cool.
So how to explain the emphasis in the media? The only thing I can think is that it's what their political team wants beaten into our brains.
If it was corn, they'd talk about corn.
Corn. Corn. Are you trying to tell me you can't see the problem?
* - If you include my Cursillo homies, that number would double to 160.
Dig what a bunch of Trump supporters did in Baltimore.
After this, it's got to be pretty hard to keep screaming, "Racism!" and talking about hate, at least for the people in Baltimore who experienced it. The local Baltimore newspaper, of course, condemned the event because it threatened their narrative.
(W)hy didn't Jesus have the Samaritan go forthwith into the nearest city and form an inter-governmental agency for distributing social welfare? Why was this parable and all others focused on personal action instead of collective action?
If you want things to change, start making it happen yourself.
Inspired by a Hank Williams Jr song, I've decided to grow my own tobacco. I've never smoked or dipped or chewed, but I have friends who like cigars, so it seemed like a worthy experiment. I wasn't even drunk at the time I made this decision.
I watched a video series on taking tobacco from seed to cigar and then found an online source for seeds. The plants grow quickly and tobacco is unpopular in San Diego, so seeds were my only choice. The seeds are tiny. I mean really tiny.
This tiny.
It's way late in the year to plant a crop, but I'm doing it anyway. First, I don't really care if it works or not and second, San Diego stays mild up into December, so I might get away with it.
I went the Dave Ramsey way with my seed starting kit and used some paper cups as planters, punching holes in the bottom with a screwdriver.
As I'm on travel this week, I've had to ask wife kitteh to keep the seeds watered. She agreed with a wry roll of her eyes. She wasn't in favor of the idea of growing tobacco as I'm sure NPR has told her how awful it is, but she finally went along, figuring it would keep me occupied.
From time to time, I'll post updates to the experiment. The tomatoes in our backyard raised bed are just about played out, so as the seed sprout, I'll recycle the bed and refresh the soil with some organic fertilizers. I'm thinking I'll get them about halfway finished before the weather gets too cold and the sun too dim to finish them. I've tried late season tomatoes and they never work. They fruit and then the fruit just sits there and doesn't ripen.
Oh well. There are worse things you ca do with your life.
On travel this week, I got a great night's sleep Monday night. Last night was not so good. 3 hours, maybe. I decided to just lay there for about 3 more hours with my eyes closed, figuring that even if I didn't fall back to sleep, it had to help. It turns out that's called "quiet wakefulness" and it's of some use.
Sometimes referred to as quiet wakefulness, resting with your eyes closed can calm your mind, give at least some of your neurons a break (since you’re not actively thinking or concentrating on something), and let your muscles and organs relax. It can also reduce stress, improve your mood, and increase alertness, mental clarity, creativity, and motivation. All of these changes can enhance your productivity.
In deep sleep, however, almost all of your neurons turn off, which is what makes your brain feel rested. I've got a 5-hour drive plus a 7-hour workday ahead. Those neurons had best be ready to do their thing or this is going to get ugly.
The alt-right is a fantasy. Identity politics and racism in particular have no foundation on the right. Jordan Peterson is the hottest thing in conservative intellectual thought right now, with apologies to Ben Shapiro who is a close second. Here's Jordan's latest video, hosted by Prager U, which is the hottest thing in conservative marketing right now.
If you take that message - look at yourself for the sources of your problems - and turn it up to 11 or 110 or 1100, you cannot find a path to racism. Racism is the exact opposite of it. Racism blames others for your problems.
There is no route from Jordan Peterson to racism. Period. Full stop.
Elizabeth Warren, on the other hand, is the very embodiment of the hatred of the other that drives racism. You are perfect just the way you are and if it wasn't for them, you'd get ahead.
Elizabeth Warren is not just a thinker, but a top-flight leader on the left. Take her pronouncements and turn them up to 11 or 110 or 1100 and you can easily get yourself to white nationalism, as @proteinwisdom points out.
White supremacy is an identity and grievance politics stance. That is the essence of progressivism.
And of course, your Party courted and protected it for years.
— Mulder’s Impliciitly Racist Rodent Aversion (@proteinwisdom) August 5, 2019
This morning at the gym, I was listening to the Andrew Klavan podcast from yesterday. Sadly, he's still referring to white supremacists as creatures of the right. That's kind of surprising as he's an influential voice on the right and gets plenty of praise for his rigid opposition to identity politics and support for individual liberty and accountability.
Our spokespeople have to stop buying into this alt-right mythology. This is nonsense. I have no kinship to racists of any kind and I resent being told that I do. If you want to accuse me of not having sympathy for people of color by not acknowledging their struggles, go right ahead. Guilty as charged. But you cannot tell me the things I believe or the people I follow lead to racism.
It didn't occur to me until I saw the following tweets.
Conservatives:
anti-identity politics
Legal immigration
assimilation
US sovereignty
Color-blind society
El Paso shooter:
White identitarianism
Ethnic separatism
Anti-immigration
Ethno-secession
Environmental alarmism
Farrakhan in a bed sheet.
— Mulder’s Impliciitly Racist Rodent Aversion (@proteinwisdom) August 4, 2019
@proteinwisdom: "Vox Day says the alt-right is conservative. It’s actually an identity movement on par with Black Lives Matter, La Raza, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, & other products of @CulturalMarxism." https://t.co/hwOitnbR0e
I've been following conservative politics for decades. The last race-conscious conservative commentator I can remember was Pat Buchanan who got drummed out of the movement for precisely that reason about 30 years ago. All of this screaming about white supremacists has nothing to do with conservatives at all.
I listen to Andrew Klavan's podcast and have heard talks by Dennis Prager, Ben Shapiro, Jonah Goldberg, Jordan Peterson, Tucker Carlson and many, many others. Their biggest applause lines are always about assimilation and having a color-blind society. The whole identity politics thing, regardless of grouping, is an anathema to the right. We don't have anything to do with white nationalism any more than we do with Black Lives Matter, La Raza or Pride parades. You can't be a conservative and embrace these things because they go against our fundamental principles - personal freedom, personal responsibility and private property.
In a substantive way, the Left screaming about racism is just the Left screaming at itself.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is angry about racial stuff. So are the white supremacists. What's the diff?
When some nut shoots a bunch of people, the Elites and online bloviators* all wait to see what's in the maniac's manifesto, hoping they can use it as ammunition in screaming at the other side. "See! He's a racist!" "See! He's a Trump-hating leftist!"
What difference does it make?
Back in the day, you could buy guns from Sears through the mail. Ammunition, too. We weren't shooting up schools and malls. There are lots and lots of other pathologies running rampant as well, hence our huge prison and homeless populations.
I saw a video from Los Angeles of a homeless dude in a wheelchair beating another homeless dude in a wheelchair with a tire iron. Horrific. Since it was Los Angeles, there were plenty of other homeless in the shot. On Twitter, I follow a couple of homelessness accounts from San Francisco and LA. The videos of drug use in plain sight are appalling.
The interview with the Baltimore teacher I posted recently speaks to the same thing. Violence in the classrooms, children trying to perform the roles of fathers because there isn't one in their homes and, of course, hopelessly illiterate kids leaving high school.
When the Secular Left convinced us to ditch traditional, faith-based, bourgeois morality for open-minded love and acceptance, this is what we bought. It turns out that the closed-minded self-denial and self-control of those uptight squares from our past was what kept a lid on our worst impulses.
Every time these shootings happen, we all run around screaming about gun laws. It makes sense. If control isn't exercised at the personal, cultural level, you're going to have to exercise it at the State level if you want to have any amount of order at all.
There will be unintended consequences, of course. Powerful people ruling an unarmed citizenry are likely to do things to us for our own good, but we kind of purchased that when we discarded old-school morality. Oh well.
We like to take the Catican Guards out for maneuvers at a local open space park. Always off their leashes there, they chase birds and rabbits and have a grand time. I like to pause the festivities from time to time to pet them and tell them what good dogs they are. They absolutely love it. After the petting and the praise, they scamper off in a distinctly joyous manner.
When I bend over and clap for them to come get their petting, they run to me with big smiles on their faces. It's awesome.
Yay! We're romping at the park and daddy loves us!
My cayenne have finally begun to turn red. Once they all get there, which should be next week, I'll make my own Louisiana hot sauce, aka Catican Bayou Hot Sauce. It's a pretty simple process. You chop up the peppers, put them in some vinegar and boil them for 20 minutes. You take the boiled mix and blend them well, strain the liquid and voila! Hot sauce!
I'm not a fan of pure vinegar and peppers hot sauce, so I'm going to try adding some spices like garlic powder and onion powder to see what I can do to make it more interesting.
