Bernie Sanders Isn't A Big Deal

... except in one respect.

First off, he's not a big deal. Find me one Democratic presidential candidate who isn't going in his direction. Bernie just gets you to the end point faster.

Assume that American economic politics is a normal distribution with socialism and fascism on the far left and libertarianism on the far right.

Let's say for the sake of argument that America is currently in the middle of the curve. Bernie wants to use government spending and regulation to take us to -3. Who in the Democratic field doesn't want to move us in that direction? Is anyone suggesting that we should spend and regulate less? When has anyone in that party said that?

It seems to me that if the Democrats win, we'll eventually hit Bernie's workers' paradise no matter who gets elected. Why Bernie is some kind of threat when waiting 10 years or so will get you there anyway is beyond me.

However, he is a big threat to the Smart People. Dig this essay from WaPo bland-as-oatmeal liberal Michael Gerson.

Some progressives seem to view Trump’s arrogant overreach as a golden opportunity for their own. They see the president’s weakness as a chance to run the ideological table and get the kind of “structural” change that is really a form of democratic socialism. Their argument here is less with Trump than with Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Surveying the charred ruins of our public life, these leftists propose to fight fire with petrol.

His claim is that since Trump is wacko, progressives have decided to go full wacko, too. He has completely missed the point because he's failed to ask the question the Elites have all failed to ask themselves since Trump won. Namely, "What did we do to cause this?"

Sanders isn't running strongly because he's the solution to some kind of wackiness equation, he's running strongly because insufferable snobs like Michael Gerson haven't been listening to the American People.

Trump and Sanders are threats to them, which is why they're freaking out. I'll let Tucker explain.

The Wage Gap

... is irrelevant.

When I have time to kill, I play Jungle Gem on my phone. It's one of those brainless gem games where you have to match gems to make things happen. Think Connect 4, but without all the 19th Century English literature and quadratic equations.

Yes, it's that stupid.

It's also free, so it's paid for with ads. The ads are clever, able to see where I've browsed, so I've gotten ads for Louisiana Crawfish Company, which I've checked out online. It also has ads for other games, insurance companies, Uber and more. No big deal, right?

Just recently, I've started getting ads for some softcore porn games. They feature impossibly-shaped women giggling like morons as you remove clothes or interact with them. Meh.

As of yesterday, I've begun seeing ads for Bigo Live. This Bigo Live.

SaferKid's warning doesn't surprise me at all as the ads feature videos of teenage girls wearing next to nothing, writhing about. I found this article about it in the Hindustan Times. It's essentially a porn-on-demand app.

(I)n India, the application has become a platform for obscene content -- with mostly men flocking to live-stream windows of women responding to their comments and video calls. A quick glance at the application shows multiple thumbnails featuring objectionable images of women.

While some of the live streams are “harmless” ones of women or men dancing or doing random things, some feature women making innuendos and lewd gestures. At the bottom of the live stream screen, you’ll notice a flurry of messages asking the women to perform certain activities or respond to their messages (similar to comments on a live video on Facebook).

I opened a live stream of a vlogger called “Tannu”, who could be seen lying in bed in her night gown. The camera mostly focused on her breasts. The screen displayed a phone number where she demanded the transfer of a certain amount of money in her Paytm account, after which would make a WhatsApp video call to the person concerned.

How big is it? According to the article, Bigo Live claims to have 150,000,000 users around the world. That's a whole lot of little girls getting paid for some indirect action while degrading themselves. I would bet that Indian women, like Japanese women and American women, are starting to wonder where all the good men have gone. I don't know, girls, maybe you ought to stop worrying about how many women get one-in-a-million jobs like Fortune 500 CEO slots and start worrying about the 50,000,000 chicks who will give thrills away for a small fee.

One question: Is this part of the patriarchy?

The Arguments We Need To Hear

... are the ones we give everyone else.

As I've toured various Catholic evangelism websites, finding no one linking to each other and with all kinds of different angles, this song by Josh Wilson came to me.

Here's the part of the lyrics that perfectly encapsulates how almost all of us interact with each other.

See I got a microphone, and I'm on the radio
But that doesn't mean I know your hopes and fears
So I can not assume, I know what to sing for you
I can only write the songs, I need to hear
I need to hear, I don't need all the answers
That questions aren't a danger to the Truth
I need to hear that what I'm doing matters
But I'm loved, for who I am, not for what I do

We all give the arguments that convince us. We tell the stories, make the cases, plead our points with the ones that matter to ourselves. It's not because we're blinkered or selfish, it's because that's how we describe the world in our heads.

We all write the songs we need to hear.

Cars, Kids And Tobacco

... sounds like a public service message, doesn't it?

Cars

My MGB is almost ready to be used as a daily driver. If you've missed the previous chapters in this saga, I have owned a white, 1973 MGB since about 1985. It spent a lot of time in storage in a fellow's barn in eastern San Diego where the heat rotted out the electrical wiring. I've rebuilt the wiring from scratch, wire by wire. I've made a bunch of improvements, upgrading the wire, adding fuses and relays as well.

The engine compartment and the rear lighting and fuel pump wiring is great. I really like what I did there. The cockpit is a total rat's nest. I hate it. The problem is that you don't have easy access to the instruments, so you have to leave a lot of slack in the wires to make sure that when you install the gauges, you can make the connections. The resulting cockpit harness is very sloppy.

In retrospect, if I did it all over again, I would construct a plywood scale model of the dashboard and build the harness to that. I would then simply take that harness and install it in the car. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

This is a small portion of the fruit our lemon tree has given us this spring. Believe me, here in the Catican Compound, we know all about lemon squeezy.

Kids

Yesterday, I described an epiphany I had at Mass. I saw Jesus' love for me in the context of my love for my family. It was beautiful. I went to Adoration today. The church where they have perpetual Adoration also has a school. I walked by a group of boys playing outside and smiled. Inside the chapel, I felt that same love again.

Leaving, I saw a boy, 8 years old or so, that was the spitting image of one of our sons at that age, down to the lad wearing a Green Bay Packers sweatshirt. How beautiful this world can be!

Tobacco

After three days of testing, the Momma Daisy Memorial Chamber of Doom Tobacco Fermenter has been declared a success. The temperature inside the chamber was about 25 degrees above ambient and a tupperware container with some water in it kept the humidity well above the required 60%. I'm going to let my tobacco dry for another 8 weeks or so. By then, it will be April, the days will be longer and the sun closer to directly overhead, bringing more heat-giving rays directly into the chamber. We should have no problem fermenting the tobacco then.

That's it for now. Have a great day!

Mass As The Celebration Of Parenting

First, let it be agreed that Clerically Speaking is an awesome podcast.

With that out of the way, the most recent one was yet another that I'd love to have injected directly into my mind. The Presbyteral Exhortations section focused on sin with some imagery that changed the way I see things.

Father Anthony talked about watching a video of a small child learning how to walk. The little tot took some steps and then fell down. All the adults in the room told him how wonderful he was doing. The moppet loved the praise, got up and tried again. By analogy, this is how God sees us when we sin. He doesn't love when we fall, He loves it when we get up and try to get better. When we take some steps, it's the most amazing thing ever!

Way cool, no?

At Mass yesterday, I was brought to tears by the Liturgy of the Eucharist. Specifically this part.

At the time He was betrayed and entered willingly into His Passion, He took bread and, giving thanks, broke it, and gave it to His disciples, saying:

TAKE THIS, ALL OF YOU, AND EAT OF IT,
FOR THIS IS MY BODY,
WHICH WILL BE GIVEN UP FOR YOU.

In a similar way, when supper was ended, He took the chalice and, once more giving thanks, He gave it to His disciples, saying:

TAKE THIS, ALL OF YOU, AND DRINK FROM IT,

FOR THIS IS THE CHALICE OF MY BLOOD,
THE BLOOD OF THE NEW AND ETERNAL COVENANT,
WHICH WILL BE POURED OUT FOR YOU AND FOR MANY
FOR THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS.

As a father and as a husband, I have, imperfectly,  done my best to give my life for my wife and my children. When things were going badly at work or when there were other trials in my life, I still coached Little League and soccer. I still read bedtime stories. I still made breakfast, lunch and dinner as much as I could.

In this Eucharistic Prayer, Jesus is about to be tortured and crucified. His disciples and all of us throughout time, don't really get that. Instead, we're like my kids, sitting at the dinner table or in the car going to practice, waiting for daddy to give us the love we crave.

In a tiny and imperfect way, my body was given up for them and my blood poured out for them. I don't regret a second of it, I love them so much.

At Mass, yesterday, I realized this and started to cry, just a little.

Finally, after decades of going to Mass, I finally, finally, finally understood Mass. I was that little child, happy to be in the car with daddy going to play baseball or soccer, chattering away about my day and looking out the window while Jesus was happily giving me love even though He was about to suffer horribly.

It made Him happy to love me and to have me love Him back in my own, childish way. I can still remember the love I got back from my kids and it feels so, so good even now. That's what I have to give to Him.

Nothing has ever penetrated me so completely as this because nothing was as real as this. I like to say that if heaven doesn't have Little League and girls' soccer, then it isn't heaven. The joy that I felt doing those things with our kids, in being able to show my love to them as a father through those sports, is simply indescribable. It was the expression of my love in its most complete and total form. I will go to my grave cherishing every minute of that love.

There were times in the car, on the field and at home when the rest of my life was engulfed in liquid, radioactive fire. My love for them was still there, expressed in those acts.

That is what we celebrate at Mass. That feeling, from Jesus to us instead of from me to my family, is what Mass is all about. His love may be infinitely stronger and global and universal and full of transcendenty goodnessness, but at least I have a sense of it now. I didn't before.

I'll never see Mass the same again. I can't wait to go again. I can't wait to go to Adoration again. I want to share this with everyone.

And so I just shared it with you. Have a nice day.

When I fall, he helps me up with a smile.

Solar Fermentation Of Tobacco

As my tobacco dries in the rafters of the Catican, the pressure builds to construct a fermenter. If you've not been keeping up with the story, I grew tobacco, harvested it and am now drying it. I don't smoke or chew, this is just a lark inspired by a Hank Williams Jr. song.

"We make our own whiskey and our own smoke, too.
Ain't too many things these ol' boys can't do."

After drying, the tobacco needs to be fermented in a hot and humid place. There are lots of instructions for building a fermenter using a heat lamp, a thermostat and a portable cooler like the ones you take camping or on picnics. It looks like a big pain and a fire hazard. Heat lamps and Styrofoam in close quarters? No, thank you.

What is it we're trying to do? We want chemical reactions to occur. They happen when the temperature is around 120 F and there's plenty of moisture in the air. I don't see why the temperature has to be consistent. If you need 3 weeks of heat, which is 504 hours, why can't you achieve it in ten hour increments? If the temperature drops, it just means the chemical reaction is suspended temporarily.

You can make this happen using the Chamber of Doom.

Long time readers will recognize this.

Back in the day, my favorite plant, Momma Daisy, suffered a massive scale infestation. I bought a 33 gallon trashcan, put a glass lid on it and put lit candles inside. The candles were supposed to use up the oxygen and the scale would, over time, asphyxiate. Momma Daisy would emerge refreshed from her hot and humid spa treatment.

She did indeed emerge refreshed, but most likely it was because the scale were smothered in the resulting heat. The glass top turned the trash can into a greenhouse. The temperature got so hot that it melted the candles.

The scale felt the same way.

Bingo.

If I can make a greenhouse trashcan for my tobacco, I can ferment it without any fire risk. Plus, it will not add to my carbon footprint and contribute to Global Warming Climate Change.

I mean except for my trip to Home Depot to get the gear, the plastics in the trashcan, the manufacture and shipping of the glass, the ... Well, you get the picture. I won't mention those things when I show it off to my green friends. They're gullible enough to think the whole thing very Greta Thunbergian.

Anywho, I'm going to get started on this today. I found a lovely digital humidity and temperature monitor which tracks highs and lows that I can get from Home Depot. I'll set up the trashcan with a water container at the bottom and then check the monitor each evening, resetting the readings after recording the results. If we can hit 120 F or higher, I think we have a winner.

At any rate, since I have never consumed tobacco, when I'm done and smoke the stuff, I won't have any idea whether it's good or not. I'll claim success and move on to my next Dixie recreation effort, growing cotton. Winning, y'all!

Alternate Takes On Sexual Morality

... where it's not about freedom or sin.

Note: Like almost everything on this blog, this is me thinking in prose. Fairly often, I find things appearing on the screen as I type that I didn't know I was thinking. Excelsior!

Take 1 - It's All About Empowering Women

Women derive a great deal of their power in society from their sexuality. With it, they can coerce men to do things they wouldn't ordinarily do, like pick up their socks, get a job or go to the store to get milk when it's raining dogs and dogs*. When a man's in love, which is sexual in nature for him, the approval of his woman is crucial.

When sex is devalued through premarital relations or porn, it reduces women's leverage. Imagine what would happen to the sales of Ford cars if Toyota gave theirs away for free. That's what's happening now with porn. In the case of feminine promiscuity following the sexual revolution, it's like Nissan selling their cars at a 75% discount. Not many Fords are going to get bought under those conditions.

Yes, traditional sexual morality is all about empowering women.

Take 2 - It's All About Helping Men Succeed

A man will do just about anything for sex. If you're a woman and you don't believe me, go confront your mother and ask her why she didn't tell you how this works. If you're a man and you don't believe me, turn off your laptop and go without it for a month or two and let me know how that works.

If you're abstaining and your lady love insists you get a job, dump your degenerate friends, stop smoking weed and dress like you had some idea what goes with what, chances are you'll make a decent attempt to do all of these things. Because noogie. If she says she wants a ring on it before you do the horizontal monkey dance and all of her peers are demanding the same, you'll commit.

Yes, traditional sexual morality is all about helping men succeed.

Take 3 - It's All About The Kids

What is wrong with you? Do you want your kids to end up as illiterate, drug-addicted jailbirds? You make me sick, you worthless, self-centered hedonist.

Yes, traditional sexual morality is all about better outcomes for our children.

After all, you don't want to end up like this selfish hipster dweeb, do you?

* - Cats have a similar coercive ability involving their claws. In this case, the cats have coerced the dogs to take their places in the heavy rainstorm.

The Church Of England Wants You To Be Happy And Successful

... and that's horrible.

Charles Murray described the widening class divide in America in his excellent book, Coming Apart. His biggest finding, of no surprise to people who have been around a while, is that marriage is important. In fact, it's the primary thing that separates happy, successful people from unhappy, unsuccessful people.

Now check out what that hate-filled C of E has done.

Sex is for married heterosexual couples only, says Church of England https://t.co/jDxAA96mQU

— The Guardian (@guardian) January 23, 2020

Objections to this all come from the same, basic angle: "Don't tell me what to do, you irrelevant prudes!" Supporters have replied with, "It is the will of God, you infidels!"

What if that's the wrong approach?

It's well-documented to the point of being irrefutably proven that, on average, traditional families do better in every respect. Rich people get married, poor people don't. Poor people who get married typically escape poverty. Hunter Biden aside, rich people who live wastrel lives become poor. The mechanisms are simple and the consequences all around us. The reactions above are emotional, not logical.

Let's break down the C of E's proscription a different way. I see three approaches to the question of sexual propriety.

There Should Be Hard Limits On Sexual Behaviors Sourced From The Bible

This gives you an authority from which to derive your assertions and a clear set of rules to apply. If you apply them to your life, you are more likely to live a happy and successful life. On the minus side, you will have to deal with self-denial, temptation, sin and guilt.

There Should Be Some Limits Which We Will Figure Out As We Go Along

Perhaps we make pedophilia and bestiality off-limits, but we accept pornography, sex outside of marriage and homosexuality. We'll derive our limits from semi-trustworthy social science studies which are subject to political pressure. We've been trying this one for decades now and the results are mixed, to say the least. On the plus side, we have a cool rainbow flag we can wave around. On the minus side, our jails are full of kids born outside of marriage.

There Should Be No Limits At All

With this one, it's every man, woman and otherkin for themselves. All guardrails are torn down and speed limits are a thing of the past. If your behavior leads to ruin, we'll ignore the crash scene and zip right past your burning wreck as we download videos of goaty threesomes on our way to Lucinda's Bondage Dungeon. And wrecks aplenty there will be, but don't worry, the news won't report any of them.

Life Has Trade Offs

In all seriousness, what's missing in the reactions to the C of E's latest pronouncements is the acknowledgement that there are any downsides to modern, secular, sexual morality. Much of life is making choices where the outcomes are murky and mixed. Denying that these trade offs exist by screaming "Prudes!" at the C of  E doesn't make them go away.

Chelsea Clinton is a seriously woke Social Justice chick and completely cool with you doing whatever floats your boat.

Her children were born within marriage because she's not a dummy.

Physics Needs To Change

From an article at Quora discussing why people fail at physics.

1. It requires complex mathematics.
2. It involved complex critical thinking and problem solving skills.
3. Many of the concepts can be hard to visualize.
4. It requires precise answers instead of vague notions.

If we are to retain more people in physics programs and get them to graduate, we're going to need to make some significant changes to physics. Not just the way it's taught, but the content as well. Here are a few suggestions to get you started thinking about how we can make the understanding of physics universal.

First off, let's get rid of differential equations. Derivatives and integrals are too esoteric for most people. If we get rid of those, then many more people will be able to pass their classes. On first blush, it doesn't seem like it will make much of a difference. After all, momentum is just mass times velocity. No calculus required.

Allow of ballpark answers. Does it really matter if the mass of a sphere is 10g or 10mg? No. A sphere is a sphere and has all of the good properties of spheriority no matter what size it is.

Allow pictures to replace equations. Instead of using abstract concepts to describe something in physics, just draw it, maybe with some lines and arrows and that's good enough. 

I think you can quickly see how a few, harmless changes will be help to significantly increase the retention rate of physics students without making a big change in the content of the courses. After all, the important thing is to get people to stay in physics classes.

Worthless nonsense. Out it goes!

America's Got Talent In A Tennessee WalMart

Once in a while, we watch America's Got Talent. It's a fun show with all kinds of different acts. It's also got a WalMart audience. By that, I mean it's not sophisticated or complex. The dancers, singers, jugglers and magicians are accessible to anyone whether they can read and write or not.

Among the acts on the last show were a German girl with trained dogs, a black boy who played the violin and about half the population of Mumbai doing a dance routine. They were all excellent and the audience laughed and cheered and cried from sheer love. It was awesome.

It also totally destroys the myth that America is a racist country and that we hate immigrants.

In the old days, the black kid would have been made to come in through a different door than everyone else and his mere presence on stage would have caused controversy. That wasn't even vaguely true. The mostly white, WalMart audience loved him. I saw no trending protests of Twitter.

If we were anti-immigrant, the Indian crowd would have received suspicious looks and generated plenty of essays warning that foreigners had no business taking slots away from Americans on the show. Instead, they were showered with love to the point where one of the judges, Howie Mandel, gave them an automatic pass to the finals. The crowd went wild with joyous delirium.

The way everyone showed each other love reminded me of what we saw in Tennessee during the Great Confederate Livermush Adventure. When you hang out with Normals, you see genuine affection and cooperation.

We're good people. America is a profoundly decent and moral country. We've got this lesson down pat. Let's move on to something else.

But first, let's watch the German girl's dog act again. That was awesome.

No Network

I spent some time this morning Googling and cataloging Catholic websites. I visited Word on Fire, Dynamic Catholic, Catholic Answers and stuff like that.

I had to find them by search because none of them link to each other. There's no network of teams all helping each other. Instead, they have schwag shops and ask for donations.

Let's see, who else sells stuff and doesn't link to similar sites? Oh, that's right - Costco, Target, WalMart and the rest of the big retailers. I think that's because they're competing and they don't want someone else muscling in on their business.

Tomorrow, I'll click around some American diocesan websites and see what I can find.

Catholics are like F-Troop. Disorganized and sloppy.

Addendum: On second thought, with the way the different Catholic sites aren't mentioning each other, this F-Troop clip is much more appropriate. And hilarious!

Immigration Hunger Games

As I understand it, it is the height of compassion to give free health care to illegal immigrants once they cross our borders. That doesn't make sense to me. Instead, we should give free health care to them before they leave their country.

Why should a Guatemalan mom drag her 6-year-old daughter 2000 miles to get health care? What is this, some kind of death march qualifying event? How compassionate is it for those who don't survive the trip?

No, it's time we paid for health care in other countries. Forcing families to hike across rugged terrain is not who we are.

Above the empty streets of an abandoned town, you can see flocks of ravens circling the dead and dying who have fled, trying to make it to the US.

Addendum: Modern Monetary Theory says we can print all the money we want with no nasty side effects, so a policy of providing health insurance for everyone on Earth isn't just morally proper, it's fiscally prudent, too!

You Can't Use A Tool You've Smashed

There's something really simple that I don't understand about the arguments against President Trump.

Almost all of them seem to spring from moral authority. He's a liar! He abuses his power! He's a sexistracisthomophobeislamophobetransplanetaryxenophobe!

How does that work if we've destroyed moral authority in the first place? I thought the whole point of the Left was "don't judge." Whether that's trannies in the library, women becoming men, homeless drug addicts or what-have-you, we're supposed to be open-minded and not judge. Morality, after all, is subjective.

If morality is subjective, how are we to judge the moral actions of Trump?

If you get past that hurdle, what happens when we apply the same moral yardsticks to the Left? In the past three years, we've seen that bigwigs in the Democratic Party and the media, but I repeat myself, are into infanticide, pedophilia, sexual assault, rape, sex slavery and more. And yet, I'm supposed to get all worked up when Trump tells a whopper about the size of a crowd or how awesome he is.

If a man can become a woman and citizens of any nation on the planet are entitled to my money for their healthcare, it seems to me like we've left consistency and logic far behind.

How then shall I apply consistency, logic and moral authority to Donald Trump?

If your foundational argument is that everything is subjective, you can't then apply objective standards to anything or anyone. Your criticism tool is broken.

That bad boy ain't gonna drill no more.

The Unique Evil Of The Founding Fathers

... is a total mystery to me.

There's a fellow I've friended on Facebook who, it appears, I knew in Los Angeles when I lived there about the time lizards were evolving into chickens. As an Air Force brat, I lived in lots of places and made a lot of friends, so people from my distant past are a bit blurry.

In any case, he's this weird combination of social justice progressive and prepper. I wouldn't interact with him were it not for the fact that he comments on my wacky look-what-I'm-trying-now posts. At first, when he had good suggestions for frying chicken, I liked his input. He's now sticking his oar in about fermenting tobacco and I've had just about enough. It's still useful and well meant, but for the love of Pete, give it a rest, Mr. Know-It-All. I get it. You've done everything. Now shut up and go build a blast furnace or whatever it is you do in your spare time.

Sheesh!

Just for grins, I looked through his feed. Facebook being what it is, his content isn't given to me because Facebook has decided that even though we follow 300 people, we only want content from 10 or so. Thanks, Facebook! Jerks.

Hmm. I'm in a rare mood this morning. Oh well. On with the polemic.

So Mr. SJW Prepper turns out to have posts wherein he mentions that our Founding Fathers owned slaves. I'm so over this. I'm currently consuming a Thomas Sowell piece about slavery which is an excellent antidote. Check it out.

What gets me is the insinuation that our Founding Fathers are somehow uniquely guilty. What rubbish. I wanted to reply in a comment to Prog Prepper, so I thought I'd test it out here first.

First off, India, Africa and the Muslims take win, place and show in the Slavery Derby. While Africans were the export kings, selling each other to anyone with a credit score over 400 and a checkbook, the Indians took the top spot. How did they do it? Volume discounts! When there are a billion people and you despise the least among you, slavery is a natural. The Muslims, consulting their self-contradictory Koran, found plenty of support for the mass enslavement of infidels.

Of course, I still have a soft spot in my heart for the Aztecs and their compadres here in the New World. Lining thousands of slaves up for a mass disembowling? Charming! Imagine the world we'd live in if the Aztecs had been the first to develop gunpowder and trans-oceanic sailing ships. Multicultural to the max!

The Founding Fathers with their Angry Christian Sky Fairy had something the others all lacked - a moral quandary over slavery. Their book of myths told them that God made Man in his image and we should love everyone, particularly the least among us. That's kind of where we got the idea slavery might be wrong. The rest of them couldn't even comprehend the concept.

Googling the Europeans' efforts to abolish slavery in Africa and Middle East is an isometric exercise. You expend a great deal of energy and get nowhere. That makes sense because white man bad. Here's the best I could find quickly.

At that time (the 1870s) the slave-trade commanded the attention of many governments, particularly that of Great Britain where the anti-slavery lobby was extremely influential; and the Khedive was under strong pressure to put a stop to the virtual depopulation of enormous areas of Central Africa by the removal of their able-bodied inhabitants for sale in Egypt, Turkey and Arabia.

There are mountains of this kind of history, but the Founding Fathers Sin Counters seem utterly unaware of it. I feel like anyone who trots out the phrase "slave owners" in conjunction with the Europeans ought to take a shortcut and just post this "No Idea" meme instead.

Hanging's Too Good For It

I harvested and hung my tobacco this week. At the start of the project, I was concerned I was too late in the season for the crop, but tobacco is a hardy plant and shrugged off the cold weather like it was nothing. Now I need to build a fermenter to finish off the curing of the leaves, but I've got time to do that. The leaves will take weeks to dry fully. The racks are 1/2" PVC hung with solid-core, 14 gauge electrical wire. The cost was under $10.

Relationship Advice: It's OK To Make Mistakes

I know a couple of people who are critical of everyone around them.

Kind of like me on this blog. :-)

One particular person starts trashing people within 15 seconds of getting in the car with me. How they drive, how they look, what they did at work yesterday, it's a nonstop cataract of sneering. It drives me batty, but I've never found a way to make it stop. My first instinct is to rip his life to shreds to see if he can discover some humility. I don't act on that.

This morning, I spent some time researching ways to cope and discovered some interesting sites, but none of them really clicked with me. One message board featured a husband discussing how his wife corrected absolutely everything he did. He related a story about how even napkin folding became a opportunity for correction. He responded in anger.

The argument began like this: She made the comment about the way I was folding the napkins. I sighed heavily, and gave her a look like "Are you kidding me?!?!" After all, I was trying to help her out. Her response was: "Don't give me that look." I then proceeded to unleash a tirade on her for a couple of minutes bringing up everything from her distaste of her own mother's controlling nature to her own hypocritical way of dealing with me. I don't suppose she took too kindly to that.

I can't say I blame him. I love polemics and they come naturally to me. If I let myself go on someone who was going after me like this, you'd be able to see the mushroom cloud 50 miles away. Instead, I do my best to bottle it up.

Allow me to suggest that anger, even suppressed anger, is the wrong approach. Instead, embrace humanity.

It's OK to make mistakes. It's OK to be sub-optimal. Everyone is. Not everything has to be done perfectly, not every flaw needs to be corrected.

Sometimes, I think that my hyper-critical friend is simply practicing a strategy of first strike. He himself has all kinds of flaws, many of which are visible. I think he's hitting first so their criticism of him, which never comes except in his own mind, is less potent.

Even for him, it's OK to be imperfect. If you deeply embrace this in your heart, I wonder if the irritation you feel when you are corrected over and over again will be replaced with a wry smile and a gentle attempt to get the other person to see that as well.

More tomorrow. Love you guys. Thanks for reading.

You can be just what the world needs even though you're imperfect.

If You Strike At Stephen King, You'd Best Not Miss

Poor Stephen really stepped in the pool of rotting flesh and oozing blood this time. The reply I included is representative of a whole host of adherents to Nazi Race Theory - people who obsess on skin color, sex, gender and whatever else it is we use to superficially group people these days - who attacked him for his outrage.

I would have thought you were smarter than this, honestly.
The first problem here is that most of the people deciding what counts as "quality" art are and have been white dudes. The subjective nature of art means that what resonates with them and their experience tends to be 1/

— Chrisi (@chrisiousity) January 14, 2020

JK Rowling experienced the same thing when she said women can't become men and vice versa.

I find all of this deeply encouraging. This is what is going to kill the Nazi movement on the left. Some successful and powerful dude or dudette is going to make an obviously factual statement about their area of expertise. The Social Justice Gestapo will swoop in to cancel them, but they will be so powerful that even the Gestapo will have no power. The powerful dude or dudette will tell them all to get stuffed.

Stephen King didn't quite do that. He backed off to whining about a level playing field, but as far as I know, Rowling stuck to her guns.

The ultimate turning point will come when the superstar under attack takes the red pill and realizes that all of the rest of us Normals, the conservatives who have lived their lives being told we're full of hate, weren't full of hate after all.

Then the real fun begins.

Sort of like what happened with Kanye.

Roux In A Jar

I made Catican Bayou Super Gumbo last night to devour while we enjoyed LSU winning the National Championship game. Both were excellent.

Super Gumbo is where you put every kind of meat in the house into the mix. I used chicken, polska kielbasa, bacon, shrimp and oysters. As you can tell, I had a few pops as I was cooking. :-)

While the gumbo came out great, I learned a thing or two about buying premade roux. I won't mention the brand, since I've experienced this same thing before, but last night I found a solution. Roux is equal parts fat and flour, cooked and stirred continuously until the flour toasts in the fat and the concoction turns a delicious brown.

My lard roux takes 55 minutes, my corn oil roux about 20. It's a serious business as you can't stop whisking even for 30 seconds, or you'll burn the roux and have to start all over again. Premade roux is huge time saver. It's also only marginally adequate.

Roux in a jar comes out a lot like drywall spackle. There's some oil to it, but it's more of a paste. Even after heating, the stuff doesn't really melt. The whole point of roux is to act as an oil for sauteing vegetables. Last night, when I noticed the roux paste just sitting there, I added bacon grease to the mix and that helped a little. When I added some corn oil and stirred things around, the roux paste merged with the corn oil and finally got to work as a slurry for the veggies. Homemade roux tastes better, but this worked OK.

As my corn oil roux only takes 20 minutes, once I've finished the few jars of premade roux I've got in the pantry, I won't run that experiment again. It's homemade, corn oil roux for me from now on.

Also, Geaux Tigers!

The Holy Trinity plus the Pope in the modified roux paste.

Simmering and smelling wonderful.

So much deliciousness!

So much fun!

Where I'm Going

I've had a few epiphanies lately that have come out like Jackson Pollock paintings on this blog.

My blog posts all make perfect sense. Like this.

In an effort to draw them together, let me outline three themes that interest me right now. Feel free to comment and laugh.

The Catholic Church is fighting the last war

The Church has no idea what it is facing in postmodernist American culture. When you read conversion stories, they all detail how the convert was searching for the Truth. Postmodernism tells us that there is no Truth, there is only your truth. 

If you're searching for the Truth, then, you presuppose that the Truth exists. What happens when academics, politicians and the media tell you that everyone has their own truth and truth is relative? Wouldn't you stop looking for Truth because you would assume it wasn't there? In effect, they have hidden its existence and done their best to make sure as few people as possible engage in the search.

Postmodernism is the enemy. As long as it holds sway, the Church is screwed.

Traditional marriage is being killed in the supply chain

First, traditional marriage is the only hope for our social ills. I calculated that Baltimore alone required 6600 dedicated mentors to deal with their inner city crises. The only place to find them is in the beds of the kids' moms.

If you think there is any chance at all that you will be able to find 6600 people, unrelated to the students, who are going to have the time, energy, know-how and willingness to take on that task, please contact your local mental hospital and schedule a straight-jacket fitting session.

Friends of mine run Rise Up Industries where they take newly-released felons and give them a job, training, counseling and more. They work with ten men at a time. 10. The program takes 6-12 months. That's the level of effort to tackle the problem well downstream of the destruction of traditional marriage. The problems caused by the destruction of the family are many orders of magnitude larger than what fifty such devoted teams of people can handle.

I have come to the conclusion that marriage is being killed in the supply chain. That is, young men are opting out of the effort to become husband material because it makes sense to do so. Until we recognize that, we're not going to make progress restoring marriage which means we can expect continued deterioration in and the expansion of high-illegitimacy neighborhoods.

The Catholic Church will die if it doesn't learn how to keep customers

This one is simple. If you've got adults coming to church and children going to your schools, you cannot lose 50% of them. No business in existence can afford to lose 50% of its customer base and still survive. The Church doesn't understand this and is taking no steps that I can see to deal with it.

Within Cursillo, I know dozens and dozens of men who regularly lament that their children have left the faith. No one from the Church ever told them what to expect as the children got older. No one told the kids what attacks they would face. No one, parents or kids, was ever taught how to deal with these attacks, much less turn the tables on them to evangelize.

This isn't a difficult problem, either. The number of primary reasons that young adults leave the faith is less than five and various Catholic activist groups have developed programs and methods to deal with them. The Church must adopt a much more proactive stance in educating its laity so they have the tools to keep their kids in the faith.

Similarly, there are relatively simple outreach programs that can be used to find adults who have stopped going to Mass and at least contact them in love and concern.

If this matters the way the Catechism says it matters, then this is worth doing.

Anyway, that's where my thoughts are taking me. It also outlines some goals for concrete things I want to do with the rest of my life.

So there.

Lesbian Empowerment

By now, I've been to over a dozen women's Catholic retreat closing ceremonies. Often, the women who are making their first retreat will get up and say a few words about how the event affected them. I'm sure I've heard over 250 of these. The emotions are raw as the ladies have their guards down after a weekend of intimate sharing with other women. It's always a beautiful thing.

As diverse as the women have been, I've only heard a couple of themes expressed. Women are women, after all. They center on self-doubt, fear and control. The women have felt deep anxieties over whether they were truly loved or valued. They have been afraid to take chances, speak out or express how they felt. Some did their best to control everyone around them so they could feel safe, both physically and emotionally. During the retreat, they find a community that gives them the love they've always needed.

Guys' weekends are totally different as men are men. Men are not women.

I like to watch the NFL, NCAA football and the English Premier League. In fact, sports is about 75% of my TV consumption.

The Titans beating the Ravens last night was amazing. Pereyra's goal at the end of the Watford - Bournemouth game today was simply magical. But I digress.

The ads during sporting events are made for lesbians. It's the only conclusion I can draw. Here's one I saw today.

Honestly, what is up with shaving the sides of her head? Who does that? She's deliberately hideous. I also love her facial expressions at the end. She's only not flipping you the bird because it's a 30-second commercial and that part got cut, along with, "Screw you, men! Women can do it all!"

This ad is not unique. Almost all of them are like this. The message that American culture is giving young men through the multi-billion dollar professional advertising and marketing industry is that you are useless. Women can compete with you and beat you all the time.

Another similar set of ads that blow my mind are the ones that show a couple exercising in some way where the woman beats the man at everything. Hiking, swimming, running, what have you, the woman is leading the way. I have never seen that in my life and I'm getting up there in years. Who's the market for those?

Normal Women Had Better Wake Up

Our sons have plenty of friends who have gotten the message. They've got porn, weed and video games, plus jobs that keep them barely on this side of homelessness. Like guys care. We can live in total squalor as long as we have accomplishment* and sex. We've got that and, frankly, it, particularly the porn, is better than you. Way better. As in, so much better that it's like freaking heroin compared to your Zima better.

If you or your daughters want to get married, you may want to look into this kind of thing. The education industry, entertainment, advertising and the entire Democratic Party is out there screaming at our sons that they are useless. It is then providing them not just an out, but an out that beats being a traditional man by a wide margin.

"Get out of the way, women have got this covered!" the guys are told. "What? I can't hear you!" is the reply as the young man takes off his gaming headset in annoyance at being interrupted.

The Elites are telling us that this is what women want. Guys are fine with that. From my experience listening to women being vulnerable and honest, this message only applies to a tiny minority of women. Normal women want to be women and want their men to be men.

So if you chicks are going to go all take charge and kick butt, you'd better get going soon and start with these cultural messages. Otherwise, you're going to find yourself living with a bunch of soushoku danshi.

* - Video games take the place of real accomplishments. Like I said, under the conditions set by American culture, modern guys have everything they need without you.

Tobacco Harvesting Time

It's time to pull them suckers!

I need to refresh the bed for spring planting. Plus, the leaves have begun to turn and even though I clipped off the flowers, they're flowering again, tenacious, reproductive brutes that they are.

I've read that the best way to harvest is leaf by leaf, only taking the yellowing ones, but that's it's also OK just to clip off the whole stalk and dry it like that. I'm going with the latter as I'm running out of time to do it the slow way.

Will And Grace And Fantasy

Last night, following the Jeopardy Tournament of Champions and both suffering from the flu, we left the TV on and ended up watching an episode of Will and Grace.

If you're not familiar with the show, it follows the wacky exploits of two gay dudes, a nutty chick and a wealthy, drug-addled slut. Or something like that. Will is one of the gay dudes.

In this episode, Will was interacting with a woman willing to be a surrogate mother because he and his boyfriend, for some reason, were unable to conceive. He visited the woman in her apartment and discovered that she made money on the side doing online porn. It was about as hilarious as it sounds. The moral of the story was, "don't judge." Like you needed to be told.

I watched the show the way you would watch a spider draining its prey as the thing wriggled about in agony, but without all the good parts. It was like watching American culture's dumpster fire guttering out. It was so horrible that it took me a while to figure out what made the show so successful.

In short, Will and Grace creates it's own fantasy world. The victims of its world view don't exist or simply aren't shown. For instance, when the baby is born of the surrogate mom, who suckles it? I'm guessing it's handed over to the gay dudes who experience all manner of high jinks learning to bottle feed it. Ha ha! What boisterous fun!

The baby? What of it? The baby will be fine. It will be loved by the two morons and it doesn't need a mom. Who ever heard of babies needing moms? Don't be so reactionary.

How about the porn actress part? ED among young adults has jumped from under 1% to about 20%. That's the terminal end of the problem. Beyond that 20% are probably at least that many young men who have no interest in romance even if they don't have ED. How's that working out for young women?

Don't judge, you prude! You want to go back to the Handmaid's Tale and chain women to the stove in the kitchen!

In other words, the disastrous consequences of these attitudes simply don't exist in the make-believe world of Will and Grace. None of the things the swine on the show do are sinful because no one is suffering, at least not on camera.

Jesus died for our sins. No sins were committed. Ergo, Jesus died for nothing. It's all good.

When you invent your own world, you can make things whatever you want them to be.

Michelle Williams And Miss America

... and porn.

Look, I get it. Miss America is a horrible thing. It's a beauty pageant where women compete to see which one is the most attractive. They wear evening gowns and they used to wear swimsuits. As I understand it, the swimsuits have been replaced by recitations of Soviet poetry, but I'm not sure about that. Anyway, we simply can't abide women showing themselves to be soft and beautiful and worthy of protection.

At the same time, actress Michelle Williams is the bees' knees. Or is that bee's knees? Is there one bee or are there several? Hmm. Another insolvable riddle.

Where was I?

Oh, right, Michelle Williams. Michelle received a Golden Globe for her portrayal of some broad in some movie. Since I do my best to avoid modern cinema, I have no idea what it was. In her acceptance speech, however, she mentioned how awesome it was that she'd had an abortion, allowing her to pursue the role and win the statue.

If you're keeping score at home, women in swimsuits are bad, actresses slaying their children for statues is good.

Meanwhile, porn is awesome. If you recommend that men voluntarily avoid it, you are roundly criticized. Given that some of the most popular porn shows violence against women, we can modify our equation to the following.

Women in swimsuits are bad, actresses slaying their children for statues is good, getting off to videos of women getting their butts kicked is fine.

If you're waiting for any of this to make sense, you've got a long wait ahead of you. As I posted previously, with the fences down the only thing stopping us from engaging in previously unacceptable behavior are the marks on the ground where the fences used to be.

Welcome to moral chaos.

Jethro, I do believe that dilapidated fence isn't going to stop the herd running wild.

Two Thoughts On Iran And Trump

I've got the flu today and spent most of the day sleeping. Blargh.

Two simple thoughts on why Trump is different from past administrations and why he drives the Ivy League Elites bonkers.

1. He knows how to make use of raw power.
2. He loves America.

Neither of those could be said of Obama. Only one could be said of Bush. Bush thought you used power to get people to do things they wouldn't naturally do. Hence, nation building. Trump uses power to get people in line and then leaves them to do whatever it is they want after they've been thoroughly defeated. 

Because he loves America and is much less concerned about other countries, he's able to wield the Big Stick with abandon and it works.

I'll admit I was afraid of how the Iran thing might escalate, but you have to give it to the guy, he won again.

And now I need to go lie down.

Otters

We've been up in Paso Robles for the weekend, but I haven't gotten many good photos. Yesterday, we visited Morro Bay and saw some otters, which was nice. It was a sleepy time of the day for the otters and other than one youngster nagging a parent into playtime, it was all rather quiet.

Shot with my phone, no zoom. I left the image fairly large so it's worth a click.

The pups slept with mom (dad?) as a pillow. It was beyond cute.

Herbivores And Guns

Do you think that deer know what guns are? I mean, like when Howard the Deer doesn't show up for the bucks' poker night, do you think that Dave, José and Maurice wonder if he's been shot or do they figure it's wolves again?

I went on to YouTube and watched a few videos where Japanese girls were asked about the decline of marriage in general and soushoku danshi, "herbivorous" men who aren't interested in real women in particular. It was like watching people facing the wrong way right before a truck ran them over. They had no clue whatsoever about the cause.

There was a lot of talk about how cool the whole not-having-kids phenomena was. Everyone was doing their own thing and that's good, you know? Everyone had freedom to choose and kids are so expensive and keep you from taking vacations. I mean, the inert guys are kind of a drag, we really want men who will take charge, but it's fine if the dudes go their own way. Whatever turns you on, man.

There was zero talk about porn.

Like guns for deer, porn is a threat for which we have no evolutionary response developed yet. The male brain is simply overwhelmed by it. It's a drug which is free and available everywhere. Women, not being men, don't have the slightest clue how lethal the stuff is. The figure quoted in the interviews over and over was that 60% of all eligible-age men in Japan are herbivores.

60%? That's more like belt-fed machine guns and deer.

Here in San Diego, there are weed dispensaries everywhere. Imagine the combination of weed and porn on the male population over a long period of time. It will be amazing if more than half of the guys in their teens right now will be able to work at Walmart in their 30s. Dig this from the link above.

Beyond sexuality, the herbivores seem strikingly like a generation of men suffering from hypofrontality, the neurological disease caused by porn addiction. It seems that their key problem is an inability to commit, whether to a career or a woman. Commitment requires abilities enabled by the prefrontal cortex, like self-mastery, correctly weighing risk and reward, and projecting oneself into the future. Becoming financially independent, visiting a foreign country, moving out of your parents’ apartment, going to parties, meeting new people, asking a girl out—what all these things have in common is that while young men generally want to do them, they can also be intimidating; and it is the executive function of the brain located in the prefrontal cortex that makes it possible to get over the hump of initial reluctance that comes from the lower parts of the brain.

Combine that with the loss of ambition that comes from regular bong rips and ... well ... duuuude.

Ladies! He's single, high and sated on porn. Go get him!

Missing Opportunities

I'm kind of at a loss today for a theme, but I've got a few nuggets that seem to be related.

Nugget 1: Here's a fabulous article on the effects of porn. Here's a tidbit.

Porn is a sexual stimulus, but it is not sex. Notoriously, heroin addicts eventually lose interest in sex: this is because their brains are rewired so that their sex reward system is reprogrammed to seek out heroin rather than sex. In the same way, as we consume more and more porn, which we must since it is addictive and we need more to get the same kick, our brain is rewired so that what triggers the reward system that is supposed to be linked to sex is no longer linked to sex—to a human in the flesh, to touching, to kissing, to caressing—but to porn.

Read the whole thing. It's horrifying.

Nugget 2: Here's the about page for FOCUS, a Catholic student evangelization organization. Here's a tidbit.

This is a generation in crisis — of identity, of purpose and of belief. Faced with so many distractions, acts of violence, empty pleasures and a loss of faith in God, they are losing hope. For the sake of so many souls, the joyful message of Jesus Christ’s life and salvation needs to be shared, now more than ever.

Recognizing the significant impact the college years have on a young person’s future, Curtis Martin founded the Fellowship of Catholic University Students, starting with just two missionaries at Benedictine College in 1998.

Later that same year, Curtis was blessed with the opportunity to meet Pope St. John Paul II and to share his vision for FOCUS: a chance for every student to know and feel known, loved and cared for by Jesus Christ. His Holiness listened carefully, and in response he simply told Curtis, “Be soldiers.”

Nugget 3: Looking at their representation in San Diego, there's no chapter at USD, our local Catholic college. From my experience, USD's faith retention rates are abysmal. Apparently, it hasn't dawned on the diocese to start a FOCUS team there even though they run the place and losing those Catholics directly affects the diocese.

I also wonder how much porn education goes on at USD.

Nugget 4: From the porn article above, Japanese women are pretty ticked off about Japanese men bailing out of manhood. I would bet American women are, too. There's another reason to educate kids about porn. Or maybe just have fewer drag queens show up at our libraries and schools.

In Japan, this new generation of sexless men—and the Japanese sex recession is caused by men’s lack of interest, to the vocal dismay of young Japanese women, if media reports are to be trusted—are known as soushoku danshi, literally “grass-eating men”—in a word, herbivores. The epithet was originally coined by a frustrated female columnist but, incredibly, the herbivores aren’t offended and most of them are happy to identify as such.

Given Japan’s population decline, the herbivores, who have become a massive subculture, are a subject of national debate in Japan, Slate’s Alexandra Harney reports. And what seems to define the herbivores is not just that they have no interest in sex, it’s that they don’t seem to be interested in much of anything at all.

Complacency And Poor Choices

Pondering the whacking of Soleimani, I've finally settled on the conundrum that hits me the most: What in the world were the Iranians thinking?

6 weeks ago, there were nationwide riots in Iran which required the army to suppress, at the cost of 1500 lives. More than 700 banks and 100 government offices were burned.

Across the Middle East, Iran and it's proxies are engaged in one conflict after another. What were they thinking taking a swipe at America? At some point, you get overstretched and can't handle all the trouble you've caused. If my country was having violent protests in the streets, I'd be concerned that I had already hit that point. I'd be looking for a way to offload some problems so I could concentrate on what mattered. Instead, they struck again.

The only thing I can think is that they were accustomed to Obama and the Ivy League muffinheads prattling on about the Religion of Peace, diversity and multiculturalism. They weren't ready for The Donald. Wretchard put it very well.

The way Soleimani strutted around, taking selfies, publicly threatening death yet encased in the invisible magic shield of invulnerability clearly conveys what he thought of American politicians. He was the mirror of the actual policy.

— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) January 4, 2020

Iran used to have the advantage of keeping its strategic intentions secret while the US was conventionally expected to proclaim its limits in advance. What's interesting is that for the first time Iran has no idea what American limits are.

— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) January 4, 2020

When our kids get angry at someone and think about lashing out, I like to tell them that you can choose to start a fight, but the other side gets a say in when it ends. That was my initial thought when I heard we'd offed the Iranian general, but then I realized that the maxim goes the other way as well.

Iran can start a fight with America, but America gets a say in how far it goes. We can go a heck of a lot farther than they can.

My Truth And Conversion

... are fundamentally incompatible, as far as I can see.

I'm currently listening to Brendan Vogt's Why I Am Catholic. I'm looking for common threads in conversion stories. In the past, I listened to Andrew Klavan's The Great Good Thing which is a similar autobiographical faith journey.

Something they have in common which I think is in many, if not all conversion stories have, is a search for the Truth. Why are we here? What is good and what is evil? Are there such things at all? And so forth.

Here's where my truth and the denial of objective reality and logic come into play.

On second thought, I'll let Samuel T. Cogley, attorney at law, explain.

If you're searching for the Truth, then, you presuppose that the Truth exists. What happens when academics, politicians and the media tell you that everyone has their own truth and truth is relative? Wouldn't you stop looking for Truth because you would assume it wasn't there? In effect, they have hidden its existence and done their best to make sure as few people as possible engage in the search.

Tim has frequently and cogently objected to various elements of the Church. Many of his objections have to do with the flaws of the people running the thing and those trying to be devout. I acknowledge those flaws and they include my own very large ones. If he knew me intimately, he'd know I'm a sinner indeed.

However, I'd like to suggest that the Truth is only partially found in the people of the Church. Instead, it can be reasoned out, which is what I'm trying to do with this blog. To me, the Church is like physics and the people of faith are individual researchers or students. They can misunderstand things, make mistakes on test, do terrible things in their personal lives, but physics is still physics. The Truth is still the Truth.

You may find flaws with the Catechism or with Catholic theology, but you still have to beat it. You can't beat a full house with a pair of 9s. Find me something better. For example, when I take pot shots at those who claim that evolution can derive morality or the physical constants simply happened to be just right, I'm revealing atheism's cards to discover that it's got nothing better than a pair.

Maybe the biggest threat of all is the suggestion that the Truth does not exist and that instead, we each have our own. How far can you get without the guidance of great minds that have gone before us? Why would you read Augustine and Aquinas if your truth was different from theirs? Without giants upon which to stand, what hope do you have of stumbling on what is Real?

I'm only partially in love with that concept, but it's been bouncing around in my head for a while, so I thought I'd put it into electronic words.

Nuking Athens

I've blogged before about my friend who is a woman, but claims she is a man. I think a great deal about her because her life is so painful. She has banished everyone from her life other than me who won't agree that she is a man.

Because I know her well, I have pretty good insight into what's going on with her. I can see all kinds of ways to disabuse her of the idea that she's a man, but she has set up a rule which prevents anyone from doing that. So I don't. Instead, I silently watch her suffer and suffer is what she does. It's horrific, like helplessly watching drug addicts or psychotics slowly kill themselves, both of which I have done, too.

In any case, here's the question I would ask if I could ask one. "What is the difference between men and women?"

Her answer would have to immediately rule out any biological markers. That is, organs, chemistry and genetics. Without those, I don't see that you have anything left at all. If she was unconscious and I didn't know her, under her rules, if I examined her, I would not be able to determine her sex or gender or whatever we would call it.

Greek philosophy arose from some of their geniuses determining that the world was ordered and that humans were capable of rational thought. That meant that people could figure out how the world worked and what its components were. They went farther and posited that the world's components had been made with their own purposes and those purposes could be deduced. They called that telos.

Ethics could then be constructed from each object's telos. A hammer was a good hammer if it was used for its telos, pounding nails into wood. A hammer was a bad hammer if it was used for a contrary purpose such as giving your wife a scalp massage.

The transgender movement has destroyed all of that. The world cannot be ordered and have purpose because you cannot suss out what things are. Examine someone all you like and you can't tell if they're a man or a woman. Further, being gender fluid means they may be one thing today and another thing tomorrow, but have all the same characteristics.

Wry observation: Gender fluid is a fluid which dissolves gender.

The transgender rights movement has destroyed philosophy and logic because you can no longer explore the world and draw conclusions from your observations.

Boom.

Farewell to Athens.

New Year's Day In San Diego

Jalapeños, oranges and sunshine.