At the gym today, one of the TVs was showing CNN. Horrible, I know, but it's true. Luckily, the sound was off, but I could see CNN reporters walking down some congressional hallway with Nancy Pelosi, interviewing her.
Why? She has nothing interesting to say at all. "Orange man bad!" would be a simple summation.
Instead, check out this short video (hat tip: Ohioan at Heart) from the Medical Director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego. His take is that the Coronavirus is just a bad cold.
Here's another bit of information that ought to dampen your fears. Best tidbit:
Coronavirus is a familiar illness, and not as bad as others. It is from the SARS family — and less deadly. As Ha’aretz noted, “the mortality rate from the current disease ranges from 0.5 to 2 percent, and is significantly lower than the mortality rate from the 2002 SARS outbreak (9.5 percent) and much lower than the 2012 SARS outbreak (34.4 percent). It may even be close to the mortality rate from an ordinary flu outbreak in the United States.”
Here's a good point from Scott Adams, considering the fact that most Coronavirus infections are unreported.
Can someone explain how we estimate the death rate for Coronavirus without knowing the denominator?
Finally, the best article I've seen yet on the economic impacts of the virus is this one about container shipping. In short, the actions being taken to stop the spread of the virus are inserting random delays into the global shipping network which will cause all kinds of temporary problems.
Chinese manufacturing facilities didn't open after Chinese New Year. A lag followed by a lag which "created massive shortfall in Chinese exports and, therefore, a drop in container demand."
Sailings were canceled, which caused "staggering" demand shortfall for containers.
"Blank sailings" lead to more blank sailings back to Asia creating 3 - 10 weeks' more lag time.
Pre-Chinese New Year peak of delivered cargo results in excess containers building up in places "such as Europe and North America." Repatriating containers takes time and money.
But by all means, let's hear what Nancy Pelosi has to say. That's an excellent use of our time.
Here, deep thinker Pelosi is pondering the effects of the coronavirus on her next botox injections.
This is a pretty accurate summary of my status right now.
Too much partying, too much prepping, too many responsibilities, not enough sleep. It's all good, though. Catch you on the flip side, all.
Bonus Link:5 reasons to stop freaking out about the Coronavirus. I agree with this and feel that the danger will be gone in a few months. I also don't think it's impact is going to be great. Having said that, I moved our investments out of the market on Monday and parked them in safe instruments. Massive doses of uncertainty are deadly to the market's animal spirits.
At our Mardi Gras party on Tuesday, a couple of the guests were full-on social justice types. They are genuinely good people and have devoted their lives to helping the homeless and the addicted. I still think they're wrong, but I love them and love their motives. I wish I was more like them and sometimes, I wonder if my arm-waving about the whole social justice craze isn't colored with envy.
Still, they were there and one of them talked about a person they know who has a long history in the civil rights movement. I wanted to say something, but I kept quiet. No point in being a jerk unnecessarily when I can be a massive and deliberate jerk here. Today is the rant I would have launched at the time had I given in to my worst nature.
Begin Rant
What ever happened to those civil rights guys? It looks to me like they've become self-absorbed, sanctimonious and downright evil. They're the ones who are making sure that some of our friends are experimented on like prisoners in a Nazi death camp. My specific example is my transgendered friend who has recently entered a new phase in her hopelessly doomed attempts to become a man.
Here's how her life has gone since I've known her.
Could hold a job, had boyfriends.
Could hold a job, had girlfriends.
Could hold a job, was a boy.
Could hold a job, was a boy, smoked a lot of weed.
Had a hard time holding a job, was a boy, smoked a lot of weed, drank a lot.
Had a hard time holding a job, was a boy, smoked a lot of weed, drank a lot, dabbled in Satanism.
Had a hard time holding a job, was a boy, smoked a lot of weed, drank a lot, involved in Satanism, took 100x doses of testosterone*.
Bipolar, couldn't hold a job, was a boy, smoked a lot of weed, drank a lot, involved in Satanism, took 100x doses of testosterone.
Bipolar, couldn't hold a job, was a boy, smoked a lot of weed, drank a lot, involved in Satanism, took 100x doses of testosterone, into polyamory.
Bipolar, couldn't hold a job, was a boy, smoked a lot of weed, drank a lot, involved in Satanism, took 100x doses of testosterone, into polyamory, exploring BDSM.
The polyamory and BDSM is the new twist to the whole thing. Both scream out, "Please, someone love me!" With polyamory, a woman crawls towards any relationship that will have her, even if she's the third-choice concubine. With BDSM, well, if someone is beating you, that doesn't suggest self-respect, now does it?
In short, I'm watching someone go mad in slow motion and there's nothing I can do to help. It's like one of those nightmares where you can't stop the doom you see coming.
Thanks, Social Justice crowd!
Because of civil rights and social justice tyranny, everyone has to keep their mouths shut about it. Medical professionals hand out poisons and slash bodies apart even though they know it's all rubbish. Me, if I was still working, I might get fired if I said I didn't think a woman could become a man. At the very least, HR would discipline me.
Here's what the social justice and civil rights warriors have told my friend:
You are perfect the way you are.
You should express your inner desires.
Anyone who doesn't agree that you're a boy is full of hate.
Avoid and fight hate.
Cut yourself off from family and friends if they don't acknowledge your gender because they are transphobic.
To my friends, I'd say, "On your way home, you can listen to NPR and their airy-fairy stories about acceptance and open-mindedness. You can fold your hands and look up to heaven and talk about how you're fighting hate. You can smile when you see trans kids and perverts in the library and say that love wins. But right here, right now, between me and you, I just want you to know what you've done. You did this to her. You're killing her, slowly torturing her to death while I watch her go mad in slow motion, day by day."
End Rant
And after that, my wife would rightfully divorce me and I'd become a crazed, blogging hermit.
I see it! I see it all now! Years and years of talking to myself on this blog and I have finally achieved total wisdom and clarity! Too bad there's no one to tell because my rants have driven everyone away.
* - I spent a fraction of a minute looking up the testosterone regimens for women with low T and women trying to become men. A normal woman who needs T gets doses from 0.5 to 2 mg. A tranny gets doses in the hundreds of mg. There is simply no way her body can cope with that and it's no wonder there are mental illness issues cropping up in my friend.
I keep promising to get off this track, but thoughts occur to me that I want to share, so here we are again. This time it's really simple. John Harris, writing at Politico, pointed out the obvious.
The snarling incoherence of the latest Democratic presidential debate Tuesday evening made it painfully hard to follow.
The Democrats' debates have turned into apes screaming at each other because they're not debating anything substantial. They agree on everything, so all that's left is poo flinging and loud noises.
These are highlights from last night's debate. Or maybe it was the Vegas debate. Or maybe an earlier one. Or it could be a preview of a future one.
Whatever.
Whether it's government mandating health care or slaughtering babies as they are being born or pledging undying support to women who think they're Cleopatra men, there isn't a sliver of difference between them. They all want to take more money from successful people and they all despise profit. Bernie is called a radical, but everyone says they agree with his goals.
For crying out loud, they all want to give free health care to illegals. After that, what's left? Racism? Nope, they all think America is profoundly racist.
This is the natural end point of the left's cancel culture. No one is allowed to disagree with the mob. Anyone getting out of line with progressive thought is going to be obliterated. The Democrats made this bed full of howler monkeys and now they get to watch their candidates jump up and down on it, screaming at each other and tearing the sheets to shreds.
Wife kitteh is lovingly supporting my ersatz-Southerner schtick as we host a monster Mardi Gras party tonight. 40 people or so. Having learned from previous parties, I started my kitchen prep work on Sunday. I did all my shopping then and made three dishes yesterday, a pair of gumbos and jambalaya. All of those will age well, particularly the gumbos.
I have a couple of posts I need to share that fit what my dad used to call "letting my hair down" on the blog. That is, semi-intimate things I've learned from personal failures and weaknesses. Those will have to wait for Lent proper. In the meantime, I've got a long list of stuff I still need to do today to make this soiree happen. I hope you have a great day yourselves!
Wife kitteh has done all the cleaning and decorating. The place looks great.
Side note about marriage and parties: For wives, parties are those times when a woman invites her friends over and they come to pass judgment on her as a housekeeper, hostess and fashion model. For men, it's simply conversation, drinking and food. That's why women freak out in stress before a party while men think it's no big deal. I'd be happy to host my parties in a barn with a dirt floor. She insisted on all manner of decorations and cleaning.
I did my best to understand and, as always, ended up tremendously grateful for her artistic touches that will make this a lot more fun.
Once the thing gets loose in Mexico and Central America, especially their prisons, we're going to wish we had the border under control. We are also going to have no appetite whatsoever for giving health care to illegals.
China reported 889 new cases of novel coronavirus infection on Friday, including more than 200 from a prison, and an additional 118 deaths – all but three in the province of Hubei, bringing the total deaths in the country to more than 2,200.
I went to Russia in the late 1990s. Before going, I went to a travel clinic where they told me how rife with diseases Russia was. Tuberculosis was particularly bad because their lousy prisons were riddled with it. When prisoners were released, they spread it to friends and family members. Coronavirus will work the same way. Lots of weakened people in dirty, enclosed spaces are tailor-made for viral slaughter.
And if you think Chinese prisons are bad, look up Guatemalan or Mexican prisons. They're a horror.
So once it starts running wild down Mexico way while the Democrats preach open borders and health care for illegal immigrants, how do you think sane people will vote? How much impact will accusations of "RACISM!" have then? Do you think anyone will be worried about children in cages? Nah.
Yes, I know that with an epidemic, once it crosses the border, more of it crossing the border might not be all that big of a deal, but the optics of the thing will be a millstone around the necks of the Democrats. And spreading or not, demands that we take care of a hundred thousand or more medical refugees streaming across our open, southern border will be infuriating. Talk about skin color and fantasies of white supremacists all you want, it will fall on deaf ears.
California, of course, will remain a sanctuary state. After all, our governor thinks he can solve homelessness with doctors' prescriptions. No, really. He's gone mad. I can only imagine what will happen among the massive, homeless, drug-addict populations in feces-ridden Los Angeles and San Francisco. And when we go to our hospital for treatment and find it teaming with infected Hondurans, we might start wondering if America should atone for imagined racial sins after all.
Finally, I can predict the headlines that will pop up in the proggy news media.
"White Supremacists Take Advantage Of Coronavirus Outbreak To Spread Racial Hate."
That's as predictable as the sun coming up in the morning.
What is the lefty fascination with Russia and Putin? Why all the hysteria about "Russian meddling in our elections?" Russia is a pipsqueak. Dig these facts.
Russia ranks 30th among our trading partners. China ranks first. We do $635B worth of business with China every year and $24B with Russia. Ireland is more than twice the size of Russia in terms of American trade.
Russian per capita GDP is about $27,400 which places them 74th in the world. By comparison, ours is more than double theirs at $59,800.
Russia has all kinds of problems with its military, not the least of which is their lousy equipment. In the Middle East's military test zone, the Israelis regularly walk all over other countries armed with expensive, Russian junk.
In short, they can't project power, their economy is stalled and their population is declining. I would bet that Russians worry more about whether or not their cars will start in the morning than who is going to be elected president of the US. The place is a trash heap and yet our media screams "Russia! Russia! Russia!" regularly.
I guess that beats trying to figure out why the Normals aren't voting for the Elites' chosen candidates.
Newsom, getting deep: “Doctors should be able to write prescriptions for housing the same way they do for insulin and antibiotics. Why not?” pic.twitter.com/8BD7eSkla8
There's no such thing as men or women. A tiny scrap of paper with a doctor's signature can provide someone a home. This is insanity, but it had to be this way. This is the logical next step in the progressives' madness. Everyone can be or have anything they want just by wishing.
We should have seen this coming as soon as we began to separate having from earning, and threw out objective reality in favor of post-modern relativism.
Note that these aren't crazed, Nazi academics like the ones that teach whiteness studies in almost all of our universities. This is the mayor of one of the world's greatest cities and the governor of the wealthiest state in the US. This is the teachings of those crazed Nazis infecting a large portion of our political leadership.
Filling the education industry with madmen is all fun and games until leaders start losing their minds.
I didn't want to do one more post about that dumpster fire of a Democratic debate, but everyone is missing the biggest point that I had to write this.
Pundits are suggesting that it was a huge mistake for the also-rans to savage Mike Bloomberg and not go after Bernie. It wasn't. It was absolutely mandatory. Mike is an immediate, existential threat to all four of the second-tier candidates. Their campaign managers aren't fools and they all saw what was about to happen.
Presidential campaigns don't die because of lack of support in the polls, they die because they run out of money. Tom Steyer gets about as many votes as the write-in campaign for Donald Duck, but since he can self-fund out of his billions, he'll be in the race until Milwaukee. Far more valid candidates like Cory Booker and Kamala Harris had to drop out because their donors turned off the money spigots.
Mike Bloomberg's entry into the race turned off all the money spigots for everyone but Bernie. His legion of manic followers will keep him going. No one else has that kind of grassroots support and so they all must have wealthy donors ready and willing to make payroll. Once Bloomberg's ad campaign gained traction and he passed them in the national polls, it made no sense for some mid-level Democrat fatcat worth $73M to pit his money against Bloomberg's $60B. Bloomberg was spending more than the fatcat's total net worth every month.
I would bet that Warren and Klobuchar have enough dough to meet expenses for a week or two and after that, they're going to have to cut staff. They had to smash Bloomberg so their donors would open their wallets again. If they didn't, it was game over.
Bonus Take: Future debates won't get any better for Mini Mike. He didn't have any good answers for the racism and sexism questions from his opponents because there aren't any. He's simply a racist and a sexist and there's no getting away from that. For every one particular quote he can explain, there are a dozen more waiting to be thrown at him.
While billionaire Michael Bloomberg is already spending about $156 million on TV and radio ads across the 14 states that weigh in on March 3, neither former Vice President Joe Biden nor former Mayor Pete Buttigieg had invested in a single Super Tuesday commercial as of Thursday night, according to ad tracker Kantar/CMAG.
Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren combined have put less than $2 million into Super Tuesday ads. Of the six candidates in Wednesday’s Democratic debate, Sen. Bernie Sanders is the only nonbillionaire with a major paid-media presence in those states, with $11 million in ads.
They're out of money and if they don't knock Bloomberg out of the race right now, it will be too late even if their donors turn on the money spigots. It might be too late anyway as Bloomberg will be toast, but Bernie will have racked up massive Super Tuesday wins.
Last night's obliteration of Mike Bloomberg on the debate stage was one of the most predictable things imaginable, perhaps exceeded in predictability only by the rock-solid support Bernie gets from college students. That the DNC and its army of "intelligentsia" snobs in the media didn't see this coming and can't decipher its meaning shows you just how stupid they are.
The most telling moment of the night was when Amy Klobuchar defended capitalism to only a smattering of applause. When you add that to their boundless support for normalizing the mental illness of the transgendered, it screams at you that the Democrats have gone insane. Throwing Mike Bloomberg into that madhouse was like throwing plush toys at pit bulls. Of course he was torn to shreds. Of course he was.
While the DNC tries to hold one end of Mike Bloomberg (his wallet), the progressives pull him apart from the other end.
The left wing of the Democratic Party have become the Nazis, thanks to political indoctrination in our schools and from our news media. "People of color are oppressed by the wealthy and the wealthy are straight, white men" is indistinguishable from "Germans are oppressed by the wealthy and the wealthy are Jews." No one looking on this through an objective lens could have been surprised at the results on that stage. The white, straight billionaire was torn to pieces by the crazed ideologues.
What's more, the DNC has now totally destroyed their brand inside their own party. By prostituting themselves to Bloomberg, they confirmed the Nazis' fears. The straight, white billionaire was using the system to silence their voices just like the progressive pundits have been saying. When he got torched on stage, the DNC and all of the sellouts in the media who Bloomberg bought must have had the sickening feeling that they had sacrificed their virtue in a losing cause.
When Bloomberg drops out and his money has left the scene, the DNC and the sellouts will face the wrath of the Nazi mob alone.
The most amazing thing to me is that they deliberately created this environment themselves and are now surprised by the results. That's their education industry. They own it, lock, stock and barrel. That's their news media. That's their entertainment industry. They fed their followers a steady stream of Nazi propaganda pushing racially-obsessed socialism and now they're shocked that it took root and spread like crabgrass.
I spent a little time today clicking around lefty websites and can't find anyone who can see the freight train heading at them. Their bubble is that thick.
This is going to get worse for them before it gets better.
... and it's a good thing, too. If there's one thing Joe Six Pack doesn't understand, it's sex.
Good God. Sneering condescension simply drips off of him like sweat on a hot, humid day in Missibama or West Carolina or wherever it is those rural pigs live. What a repulsive human being.
By the way, Mike is so smart that he's lost the ability to perform basic reasoning. Mikey, sweetie, favoring trans rights over the rights of the bigots in flyover country is only pro-individual if those aforementioned bigots aren't seen as individuals themselves. Which they aren't, so I guess it's all systems go for Mike and the "intelligentsia." By all means, do carry on, Mike.
That repulsive is an accurate depiction of him is born out by dozens of similar quotes, taken in as much context as you like, where he explains to the Super Smart People how unlettered savages can be trained to grow crops or build things, but they cannot be trained to peck at keyboards in an office. Apparently, filling in numbers on a spreadsheet and answering emails is a sign that you are a member of the Elite.
Then there's the out-and-out racism and sexism. Readers of this blog know that I hate how both of those epithets are thrown out at people like me. I despise the Secular Left's descent into Nazi race theory and how feminists thrash young men until they become under-performing, porn-soaked eunuchs. Having said that, Michael Bloomberg is the Democrat stereotype of a racist, sexist, Republican snob. You couldn't make a cartoon character that fits better.
Yes, Virginia, racist, sexist Republicans do exist. Thank God Mini Mike is running as a Democrat this year. It's the only thing that's saving the rest of us from getting his slime all over us.
Tonight's Debate Preview
Mikey is running against his two worst possible opponents - Bernie Sanders and Liz Warren. Neither have a future in politics after this campaign, so losing access to his billions means nothing to them. They have to beat him right now or their massive ambitions and egos won't be sated. They also have to go after him hard or they'll be seen as sell outs and patsies to their crazed supporters. Finally, I think they are true believers. They genuinely hate people like Bloomberg.
Here's a sample of what Liz is saying on the campaign trail.
I've followed a ton of Republican primaries and I've never seen anything like this. Even when the country club softies fight off the wild-eyed rednecks, they don't call each other racists. In Liz's defense, she's calling Mike Bloomberg a racist because Mike Bloomberg is a racist.
Tonight's debate is going to be lit.
Finally, the moderates, who want to turn us into Nazi Germany over a ten-year period instead of a four-year period, simply have to put an end to Mike and I mean right now. He's cut off their supplies of money. Big donors, who the moderates need because they don't have lunatic college kids supporting them, have shut their wallets. Who wants to blow money on Biden when your donation will be washed away by Mike's tsunami of cash?
We had to put our little man to sleep this morning. He had stopped eating and was clearly on his way out. It was pretty sad and reminded me of sitting with my mom in November after she had stopped eating. I just couldn't do that again, so we took him to the vet.
If you don't know his story, we were on vacation in Alabama last summer when a friend of ours, who works in real estate, asked for someone to adopt an abandoned, old dog. Pepito had been left behind when a family sold their house. They came back, planning to have him put down, but we said we'd take him. And so we did.
Pepito Ramón was a good, little guy. He had plenty of energy for an 18-year-old dog and loved to go for sniffs. He didn't walk, really, he just wandered around and sniffed things. He made friends with children and smaller dogs easily, but for some reason, he never got close to any of our other dogs. He was always a canine apart.
I loved the little dude and will miss him.
What we knew about Pepito Ramón
He was Pepito Ramón,
He once swam the Rhone,
He taught at Sorbonne,
He lived in our home
... to not be alone
Yes, we made up a song about him and sang it to him all the time with many different rhyming verses. He was stone deaf, so the song was really for us.
He loved to meet children and small dogs at the park.
Sunshine made his old bones feel good.
Sleep well, little man and know that we loved you.
We took the Catican Guards, including our ancient chihuahua, Pepito, out on maneuvers at a local school this afternoon. Perched on the fence was this charming raptor, a red-shouldered hawk.
Local birds of prey are usually pretty timid, so I figured he'd fly away as I got closer, but he let me get within 10 yards of the fence. I didn't want to bother him, so I didn't get any closer. Below is a better photo of one of his cousins from a different website, excerpted below.
Red-shouldered hawks search for prey while perched on a treetop or soaring over woodlands. When they sight prey, they kill it by dropping directly onto it from the air. They may cache food near their nest for later consumption. When in clearings, they sometimes fly low to surprise prey. Red-shouldered hawks, like most raptors, have very sharp vision and reasonably good hearing, with talons capable of killing animals at least equal to their own size. Small mammals are typically the most important prey, especially rodents. Voles, gophers, mice, moles and chipmunks may locally be favored based on abundance. Slightly larger mammals, such as rabbits and tree squirrels, are also occasionally preyed on.
Whew! Nothing in there about preying on geriatric chihuahuas. I think Pepito's safe.
Just a quick thought on what happens after Mike Bloomberg throws his money around, buying support.
Peggy Noonan at the WSJ recently penned an essay suggesting Mike Bloomberg could win the presidency. Up to now, I've read most of what she's written and I've considered her to be wise and fair. I didn't read the article because I immediately doubted the integrity of the thing. Was she paid to write it by the Bloomberg campaign? Had she been bought?
Yes, I know this happens all the time in politics. However, I don't think it's ever happened so thoroughly. The dude is worth, what, 60 billion? He's already spent upwards of $200M on the campaign. He pours out his money like water and his history includes massive financial support for people and causes on both sides of the aisle. He's always paid for access to power and now he's trying to buy power itself.
Since you don't know who's on the take, but you know he's buying influence on an industrial scale, I think it only natural to instantly assume that anyone supporting him has been bought. If not, where was the support for him before? He's professed allegiance to both parties and all sides of different issues, so when someone who previously appeared to be genuinely of one stripe or the other starts boosting him, you could hardly be blamed if you attributed it to corruption.
In short, his high-profile supporters are just tarring themselves.
Until Bloomberg passes from the scene, I won't trust anything Peggy has to say. Back in the day, I corresponded with her and even gave her the title, “Most Faithful Ambassador to the Court of the Mainstream Media” when I used to blog about the Feline Theocracy. My suspicions are sad to admit, but that's the way it works when so many Elites are being purchased.
If this is true, it only confirms all of our well-grounded cynicism. I don't think you could find a more corrupt Elite than Hillary.
This morning, elderly Pepito woke at 3 AM, bothered by something or other. We think he's between 16 and 18 years old and he seems to be getting a bit senile. He also has arthritis in his back legs and hips. It might have been pain, it might have been disorientation. Whatever it was, he woke up and when he's up, you need to deal with him because he won't go back to sleep until his needs are met.
I took him downstairs so wife kitteh could sleep. Happy Valentine's Day, honey!
By 4 AM, he was out cold. By 4 AM, I was hopelessly awake.
More Love
One of our sons is having a birthday bash at our house this weekend. Another son is taking one of his CPA tests today. Wires got crossed and the accountant son and his wife made plans to go out for Valentine's Day the same time as the lad's party. When they discovered the conflict, they canceled their dinner date so they could come and celebrate with the family.
That's love. It made me very happy.
Another Workbench
In the garage, we used to have a huge, green sofa. Back in the day, before the kids moved out, the garage was a video game room for the family. Now that everyone is gone, the sofa was just a junk collector. I donated it last week and this week I built another workbench. I finished it today. Hooray!
This one required a few tricks as I built it alone and the back wall has a cement lip at the bottom which made making the back legs difficult. I might describe it in a future post.
Recently, Pete Buttigieg was on Fox News Sunday where he said he was in favor of decriminalizing drug possession. I've heard this a lot from genuinely compassionate people. They favor treatment over punishment. It comes from a place of love, so it's not something to dismiss with a sneer.
Over my life, people close to me have become addicted to drugs. I've had plenty of experience living with them and trying to help them. When I hear well-intentioned folks talk about treatment, I think about the scale of the problem from two ends.
First, what does it take to "treat" a drug addict? I have a close friend who was a homeless drug addict for a while and had another fellow build a house for me who was also a recovered homeless drug addict. Those two are the only ones I know who've escaped. Everyone else has died or is in the process of dying.
Treating an addict isn't like treating someone who has the flu. You don't give them bed rest and fluids for a few weeks while they detox and then they bounce back and live normal lives. It's a grueling, long-term, high-effort thing. Most of the time it fails and detox is followed by relapse.
How many addicts can a single social worker manage? That's one side of the scale problem.
The other side of the scale problem is the number of addicts. I don't have time to look up the stats, but let's just say that Los Angeles has 60,000 homeless. Let's assume they're all on drugs and another 60,000 are addicted, but not on the streets yet. In LA alone, you'll need to treat 120,000 addicts. Where are you going to find enough social workers to even start to tackle those numbers?
In 1917, the French launched the disastrous Nivelle Offensive against the German lines. The Germans were prepared for it and the result was a massacre. French casualties overwhelmed their field hospitals. That's where we are right now with drug addictions. That's where we are with the homeless in California, Seattle and New York.
The difference is that some of these guys were healed after one visit. That's not the case with drug addicts. Each one will wear you out with a long string of relapses ending rarely in a cure, but mostly in death.
This is why I'm totally in favor of the war on drugs. If you wait until people are addicted to deal with the problem, you'll find the situation completely out of control, like it is in Los Angeles and San Francisco. You've got to attack it at every point and fight it constantly. Otherwise, you're going to see field hospital overflow all around you like they do in LA and SF.
... and no, I don't mean to the Ottoman Turks as galley slaves. Not even when they take the car for a joy ride and whack it into a tree.
Have you ever seen a family where the kids all turned out great and there were more than two kids? I was talking to another crazed papist recently and she said people ask her parents all the time why all three of their kids kept the faith. I think I've got the answer.
In pondering how to sell Catholicism or at least how to keep the young customers we've got, it's occurred to me that each person is looking for something unique to them. When you make a sale to a customer, you are solving a problem for them. Your product fills a need. To figure out how you can make that happen, you need to spend time listening to them and trying to see the world through their eyes.
I've asked a couple of Catholics lately why they believe and the answers I've gotten are quiet varied. One said she believed in heaven and hell and wanted to go to one and avoid the other. Wife kitteh said she was doing what Jesus asked of her. For me, Catholicism is the textbook of life. I feel like it explains everything and with it I can relax and just use it as a reference book as I live. It works and I love the security of that.
There is no way to use a single approach to sell all three of those viewpoints. Let's use an analogy to explain this.
Imagine that you're a shoe salesman, but all you sell are work boots. If a fashionable young lady comes in and wants something strappy and elegant to wear with a summer dress, you could offer her a work boot or you could offer her a different work boot. When she turns you down and leaves the store, you commiserate with your fellow salesmen and talk about the problems with kids these days and all those newfangled sandals they want.
Now imagine that you get three customers in a row who are going to visit the shipyard at Pascagoula. They need something to keep their feet safe. You sell them work boots and everyone is happy. Hurrah for work boots! Now those are some young people with their heads on straight. It sure is nice to meet some of the good ones for a change.
The family where everyone turned out great? Well, the customer-kids just happened to be looking for what the salesmen-parents were naturally selling. They hit the jackpot three times in a row, probably by sheer chance.
So how do you handle it when your kids won't buy what you're selling? Well, after you consume some Zig Ziglar and some Brian Tracy on selling, you spend time asking the kids what it is they want out of life. What is it that they're looking for in their future? Do they want love, money, security, adventure, freedom or what? If you know that, you might be able to make the sale.
If you yell at them that they need to buy work boots because grandpa and grandma bought them, it might not work.
Now you listen to me, young lady. I'm willing to compromise, but I can only go so far!
... another day older and deeper in carpal tunnel syndrome.
It are my blogiversary! I started this craziness 14 years ago. More than 8800 published blog posts later, I'm still feeding this beast every day. I took a bit of time to go through some of my posts from last year and in addition to watching my mental decay month by month, I found some interesting content. Writing codifies my thoughts and this blog has done just that.
I really appreciate the comments you've left and the clicking you've done. I hope it's been somewhat worthwhile.
I've been busy and away from the keyboard today, so I'll just leave you with some flowers from my mom's garden. I've got a bunch of posts in my head and they're taking up space there, so I'll try to get them out over the next few days to give you more reasons to call the loony bin on me.
I've decided to rip out my atrocious wiring in the cockpit of my MGB project car and do it all over again. I'm going to go keyless and use a fob to cut out the battery as well. Instead of a key, I'll have switches for running and accessories as well as a push button starter. My radio is tiny, much smaller than the cutout for the original radio as it's just a Bluetooth receiver with an amplifier.
What this means is that my center console is now obsolete. I need a totally different set of holes in both quantity and shape.
The standard center console. You can see some of the horrible wiring behind it.
I took the plastic console to a local woodworking shop for advice, thinking they'd tell me what kind of joints to use to construct it. Instead, the fellow there suggested I use this as a form and create a new console in fiberglass.
I've never worked with fiberglass before, so I found some instructional videos on YouTube. It's going to be a chore, but I can't pass up the opportunity to learn a new skill.
Today, I stopped by an auto body shop for suggestions and fiberglass resins and fiber. They said they only purchase and install prebuilt, factory body parts, so I left there and went to a surfboard shop. They had good ideas, but suggested I go to a local fiberglass supply place. I went there and hit the jackpot.
There's something wonderful and thoroughly American about talking to old dudes who have mastered a craft. They love to tell you how to do things and enjoy it when someone is taking on a project like this. The guy at the fiberglass place had done this exact job on a hot rod he just happened to have in the parking lot.
Instead of simply recreating the center console, the took hard foam and sculpted the center console he wanted, complete with cup holders. If you hadn't noticed, cars from the 30s, 40s and 50s didn't have them. The result was way cool. Note that my center console doesn't have them, either.
His console as finished.
On the back side of the console, you can see just a little bit of the foam form that he cut away once the fiberglass had dried.
I love it. I'm still going to use my original as a model, build a form using it and then make a new console without any holes from that form. I figured I need to learn the basics and this will give me a chance to do just that.
'Murrica.
Addendum: Here's a good video I found on making the mold and then making the part from the mold. I'm putting it here so I can find it later.
Friction is growing between local people and asylum seekers landing in boats from Turkey. Last week the region’s most senior official likened the situation on Lesbos to a “powder keg ready to explode”. Kostas Moutzouris, governor of the north Aegean, said: “It’s crucial that a state of emergency is called.” ...
But she added that the local people had also been given short shrift. “The Lesbos community has been abandoned by its own government for almost five years to deal with the consequences of a failed reception system. Like the refugee community, it is tired.” ...
“People have seen their properties destroyed, their sheep and goats have been slaughtered, their homes broken into,” said Nikos Trakellis, a community leader. “A few years back, when there were 5,000 on the island, things seemed bad enough. Now there’s a sense that the situation has really got out of hand.”
Greece is the source of the necessary lebensraum. This is a slow-motion invasion.
Meanwhile, here at home, the brownshirts are active in Portland.
Video recorded by antifa writer Shane Burley shows the mob harassing, assaulting & pepper spraying local citizen journalist Brandon Brown. Brown was attacked & robbed by antifa militants for recording them in Olympia, Wash. in December. https://t.co/jC6I7aRcVspic.twitter.com/flERgVLfKm
To recap my analogy, if you change whites and "whiteness" into Jews and Judaism and you change people of color, women and LGBT into Germans, the analogy pops out. Further, the economic policies of Obama/Hillary/Bernie and Mussolini/Hitler/Peron are nearly identical. For example, the Nazis called for universal health care and free education.
Where it falls apart is that the progressives lack the ambitions of the Nazis or the Italian fascists. They are quite content to simply beat down the opposition at home and leave other countries alone. Unlike the Nazis, they don't want to exterminate, they want to re-educate. Essentially, they want to obliterate the culture of "whiteness" and "patriarchy," whatever those are at the moment.
I was wrong. They absolutely have ambition. I was looking at it from the wrong direction. America isn't Germany, America is Poland. The Democrats' tireless push for open borders is a demand for an invasion of the US. The Greater Reich, in this analogy, isn't centered in America, its source is outside our borders. America itself is to be the source of the lebensraum.
I must be losing my mind. This can't be right. However, check out the clip below and tell me where I've gone wrong.
NOTE: The solution is not, not, not white nationalism. The solution is a society built around MLK's dream of color blindness which itself was based on Genesis 1:27 and our Founding Fathers' vision.
Anyway, here's the video. If you want to see the specific item that triggered my epiphany, go directly to 8:40.
Bernie's schtick is that billionaires are rigging the system against the 99%. Between the DNC rigging the debate criteria to allow Bloomberg in, his gargantuan TV ad spending spree and now this, it's like the guy is one prolonged ad for Bernie.
The Bloomberg campaign has quietly begun a campaign on Tribe, a “branded content marketplace” that connects social-media influencers with the brands that want to advertise to their followers, to pitch influencers on creating content highlighting why they love the former New York City mayor—for a price.
For a fixed $150 fee, the Bloomberg campaign is pitching micro-influencers—someone who has from 1,000 to 100,000 followers, in industry parlance—to create original content “that tells us why Mike Bloomberg is the electable candidate who can rise above the fray, work across the aisle so ALL Americans feel heard & respected.”
Hiring grassroots fanboys, fangirls and fantheys? It's so tone-deaf that it's tone-perfect. Yes, I know it's done all the time and that there is an established market for it, but for heaven's sake, when it's done by the white billionaire against the spastic socialist, it's like it came straight out of a melodrama.
Here, Mike Bloomberg prepares to use inappropriate pronouns on a transgendered drag queen right before she reads stories to children in a library.
... or Harvard or Berkeley or Cambridge or Sorbonne or Bonn. You know, those places where the really super duper smart people go and learn all kinds of things that we Normals could never in a gazillion years understand.
Well, all kinds of things that perfectly match the preconceived notions of the Elites like how men can become women and Western culture was built on slavery and socialism works. Those things.
Before I link to the article, let me say I loves me some Ted Anthony. He's an AP journalist who, in his infinite mercy, has decided to occasionally interact with me, a tinfoil-hat-wearing, Internet rando. God bless you, sir. At night, when I climb into my basement bomb shelter to sleep, right after I inventory my rice and beans cache, I pray to God that the government will control your brain last. The article I'm about to club like a baby seal came from his Twitter stream. Sorry, Ted.
On with the show.
If you want to read some classic NPR*-style chin stroking, you could hardly do better than this.
For American politics, it’s been a week for the ages: a bungled start to the 2020 presidential primary season, a State of the Union speech with partisanship on full display and a conclusion to the most contentious chapter of all — the nation’s third-ever impeachment trial.
Watching all this from afar are allies, foes and those who have looked to the United States for stability. Here, from AP correspondents in four regions, is a look at how somekey American allies are eyeing the 2020 U.S. election and the jumbled months that precede it...
That's the setup. I'll be highlighting the weasel words straight out of the NPR Style Guide designed to give The People Who Want To Sound Like They Know What They're Talking About By Quoting NPR the feeling that the cherry-picked, qualitative judgments embedded in the piece are authoritative. Now let's get down to business.
It’s safe to say that many in France are viewing the U.S. election through their own prism — four years during which one of the world’s oldest international alliances has been bashed around.
“Since President Trump’s arrival, we’ve felt a considerable distance with dear America,” says Jacques Mistral, a French former prime ministerial and government economics adviser and former financial affairs adviser at the French Embassy in Washington. “He has alienated everybody.”
I'll bet, Jacques. Say, how's that not having babies and importing Muslims thing going?
Britain knows a thing or two about extreme polarization. Ever since the 2016 referendum in which the country voted to leave the European Union, political discourse in this island nation has been riven by division.
Now some here wonder: Can America still claim to be the beacon of democracy and fair play the world over? Or does an advancing tribalism erase the country’s longstanding claim to the title?
“People in Britain are wondering if America really stands for the values of liberal democracy,″ said Jeffrey William Howard, an associate professor of politics at University College London. “Is it capable of being the leader of the free world?″
Well, Jeff, let me suggest you first work out why the peasants decided not to let the Davos crowd tell them what to do from Berlin. And you experts were so good at running everyone's lives! I mean, when you look at the EU's decision to bind the stability of Germany's banking system to investments in Italy and Greece, that should have sealed the deal right there. Who could question your fitness to rule after that winner?
It would take geniuses to turn the biggest bank in Germany into a profligate, multiculti catastrophe. Fortunately, geniuses with all the right credentials were on hand to do just that. Please, tell me more about what you think.
The view from Israel is equally alarming.
But such a tight embrace has alienated many U.S. Jews, who lean Democratic, and has undermined the traditional bipartisan support Israel has enjoyed in Congress. Many in Israel fear a blowback if a Democrat is elected and Israel is too closely associated with the divisive Trump.
What's amazing is that there doesn't seem to be anyone who sees things differently. At least no one quoted in the article. Thanks, NPR Style Guide! Now we know what Smart People think. Now I are one, too, because I think the same way.
Finally, South Korea thinks the same as everyone else because, after all, who doesn't outside of the redneck troglodytes in Jesusville, Alabama?
You don't want to be grouped in with them, do you?
Here, we see what happens when one of the Super Smart Set with the finest credentials makes the mistake of leaving their gated compounds and accidentally mingles with the Normals.
* - NPR wasn't involved in this article, but I find them a convenient shorthand for the ideologically pure, yet practically incompetent aristocracy.
One last take, I think, on the ads and the halftime show for the Super Bowl.
As I've ranted before, the ads were mostly of the finger-in-the-eye sort to men. This was the very worst of the lot, although the previously mentioned female coach was a strong second.
The messages sent in the commercials were simple. Women don't need men. Women can do everything the same or better than a man. The message from the halftime show was even simpler. Here's some porn for the guys.
I'm not sure that it's possible to come up with a better combination of content for encouraging young men to ditch the whole achievement thing and just fall into the comforting arms of video games, weed and porn. The fact that the ads and the show were created by our very best marketing and entertainment talent indicates how deep the rot is.
No worries. What women really want is to find themselves 50 years old and single, childless. They want to spend the day working spreadsheets and answering emails in a cubicle for MegaCorp. They want promotions and career opportunities. Yep. That's success.
Unless it's not, in which case they're getting screwed over by the idiots in charge of the Super Bowl ads and halftime show.
There’s a devastating shortage of men who have their act together, according to a new study that may not be so surprising to all the single ladies out there.
Research now suggests that the reason for recent years’ decline in the marriage rate could have something to do with the lack of “economically attractive” male spouses who can bring home the bacon, according to the paper published Wednesday in the Journal of Family and Marriage.
“Most American women hope to marry, but current shortages of marriageable men — men with a stable job and a good income — make this increasingly difficult,” says lead author Daniel Lichter in a press release.
I'm glad I separated this into two posts because I've had time to noodle what we saw in the ads and with the Cheetah's LiveCam Halftime Show. Here's my take.
Get a clue already.
The Secular Left owns and operates all of the news sites except Fox, all of the entertainment industry and the entire education establishment. Through their universities and public school mandates, they have worked tirelessly to obliterate all vestiges of traditional sexual morality. Consider these data points.
We have perverts in satin dresses reading stories to children in our libraries.
Pre-pubescent kids in public schools are taught transgender propaganda about selecting their genders.
Sex education is taught in K-3 classes and now includes, in some cases, homosexuality and how to safely engage in sex acts that I will leave to your imagination.
Prime time, major network shows like Will and Grace now openly endorse gig-economy sex work.
Public universities now have slut walks.
I could go on and on, but you get the idea. So now let's review what we saw at the Super Bowl stripper show. The halftime show is one of the top performances of American culture of the year. Dittos for the ads. This is the best of the best, the top 1% of the top 1%. It represents the thoughts and creative actions of our top-tier Elites.
They knowingly put on a strip club act in front of an audience of all Americans.
This wasn't The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, this was the Super Bowl. It's not just watched by the clapping seals on the left, it's watched all across the country including dimwitted, redneck, flyover country. You know, the places the Elites despise. They knew families would be watching together. It's what we do. They deliberately gave us lap dancers.
They hate you. They hate you.
I spent a bit of time, more than I should have, perusing Twitter responses to objections over the Cheetah's lounge act. If you complained that it wasn't suitable for families, here's what you got in response, in torrents.
You're a racist and don't like Latinas.
You're afraid of strong women.
You hate women's bodies.
You're a racist.
No one explained how Shakira and JLo doing exactly what Crystal and Candi do in front of drunk truckers at a strip club was "strong." There was no reason to do so. Strong doesn't mean strong in the normal sense of the word, it means above criticism. It means, "don't judge, you bigoted prude." The halftime show was a slut walk writ large. Did I mention that if you objected, you were a racist?
The halftime show was an artillery barrage against whatever remains of objective morality. It was the lefty Elites jamming JLo's crotch in our faces over and over again, saying, "How do you like this, Christian bigots? We can do this all day long and there's nothing you can do to stop it. We own the media and the advertising agencies and you own nothing. Screw you, prudes. Love just won again."
In short, they hate you.
Keep it inside your Sky Fairy buildings, bigots. Outside, we own it all.
I spent a good deal of the day dealing with a fussy, elderly dog who didn't know what he wanted and a visiting Corgi who spent his time proving that Corgis are the worst dogs in the world. The rest of the day was wasted in a futile attempt to digitize my VHS tapes so I could throw them away.
Hint: Modern digitizing gadgets are all tiny USB gizmos and they produce appallingly bad results. The best option is the VHS to DVD dubbing deck. I have a dual deck, but it took an hour or so of screwing around with it before I realized that the DVD part won't record.
Argh.
So with the day totally ruined, let's discuss the Super Bowl halftime stripper show and the ads.
Deano calls me his favorite moral scold, so this time I was determined to give the halftime show a chance. When Shakira went on, I tried to enjoy her singing, but the songs were so broken up that I felt I was listening to a modern dance version of Hooked on Classics. If you are too young to remember that horror, it was about 30 seconds of a bunch of famous pieces of classical music glued together. I figured Shakira's music was fun at the clubs, but that performance didn't do it justice. She shook what her mama gave her, but that's par for the course.
JLo was simply horrible.
Reference point: I think that Olivia de Havilland in her roles in the old Errol Flynn movies might be as sexy as a woman can get.
Just give me a list of dragons to slay and villainous knights to defeat in single combat for you and I'm on it, girl.
Yes, I've seen thongs and thong teddies. No, I don't want to see any more of them. And what's up with stripper poles? If my woman tried to slither around on those, I'd wonder what was happening. "Err, I was under the impression we were doing something else tonight. If you need to climb about for a while, that's fine. Just let me know when you're done. I'll be downstairs."
One more bit of TMI. At work, a young woman once came into my office for a meeting. She sat down wearing a short skirt and then spread her legs in front of me. I wanted to spray both her and the chair with disinfectant. It was gross. I found out later that she did this to a couple of guys at work and one of them ended up getting fired for sexual harassment. Hashtag MeToo indeed. Oh yeah and #BelieveAllWomen.
So when JLo went into her pole dance and then jammed her fingers into her crotch, I shrugged and thought, I've seen this before and it wasn't any good then, either. I went into the kitchen to get some ribs*.
Wife kitteh hated it. That blew me away. I'm the prude and in charge both fuddiness and duddiness in our house. I was trying to be open-minded and hip during the Super Bowl show and not harsh her mellow. She was disgusted.
It made me think of Peter Tork's story about seeing Jimi Hendrix at Monterrey with fellow Monkee Micky Dolenz.
I didn't get it. Wife kitteh got it. I eventually got it. I'm a little slow.
When I looked at the top-rated tweets today about the halftime stripper pole show, I found that all the Important People loved it. All the family folks hated it, but they don't count online.
I've got more to say and an analysis to add, but I'll leave that for tomorrow.
A take today on what the whole Sanders vs Bloomberg thing might mean. If you weren't following along, Bernie is taking the lead in the polls all over the place. Warren is tanking and her voters are most likely going to go to Bernie when she finally drops out. Those few democrats who are still sane can see a McGovern-sized blowout coming in November and are panicking. Biden would be fine, but billionaire Bloomberg would be better so they changed the rules to allow Bloomberg on the debate stage.
In short, the DNC is rigging the system against Bernie again. What gives?
The whole idea was to gather more and more power at the Federal level and put it in the hands of the Elites. You know, the ones from the Ivy League schools where diversity of thought is forbidden. With everyone thinking the same and the nation's power structure in their hands, they would bring forth an enlightened republic where we would do away with badness everywhere. It was all so simple!
To get here, they captured the education industry and changed the textbooks and curriculum to indoctrinate our kids into their power / money paradigm for understanding the world with intersectionality superimposed. Everything you see is about race and gender struggling to obtain money and power. If you see injustice, it's because money and power are in the hands of the wrong races and genders.
Unfortunately, their low-level minions in the classrooms did their jobs too well. Kids being kids, they took the lessons and amped them up internally. That led to a mass of young socialists who think the system is rigged by the rich and powerful. They're demanding a revolution and Sanders is going to give it to them.
Whoops! Looks like we overshot the mark. They were supposed to stop at "hand money and power to the Elites" not keep going all the way to "guillotine the Elites." Plus, the Elites realize that elections are won by voters and, as Don Lemon cheerfully noted recently, lots of voters are stupid rednecks. They might be persuaded to vote for blue collar Joe or successful Mike Bloomberg, but Bernie is going to drive them into the hands of Trump and the racist Republicans.
And so, they're screwing Bernie. Looking through the comment threads on the articles and recalling what the ANTIFA crowd, heretofore uncriticized, is prone to do, I'm not sure this is going to end well.
The revolution sounded like a good idea at the time. Who knew it would lead to this?
