It's Not About Race

Is it Bullies' Lives Matter? Maybe it's Barbarian Lives Matter. BLM ought to be renamed into something like that. Dig these tweets from the aunt of Jacob Blake's victim.

Soph and her niece are not of the same tribe as Jacob Blake. You cannot support Jacob and support Soph. If you group people by race, then Soph and Jacob are similar, with similar needs, wants, goals and experiences. Clearly, that is false.

The same is true for every one of the BLM martyrs I could remember. They all left a trail of Sophs and nieces in their wake - raped, assaulted, robbed and murdered blacks. Are the victims "black" or only the thugs? From what I can see, it's the thugs' lives that matter. After all, no one from the news media is giving nearly as much airtime to the victims. These are two distinct groups and it is impossible to support both. You have to choose one or the other.

Herein lies the intrinsic problem with racial classification. It glosses over all of the important things in life and replaces it with an infantile characterization.

Tell me, does Soph have more in common with a white woman whose niece had been raped or does she have more in common with George Floyd?

Black Women's Lives Matter

Is that "problematic" as the social justice types say?

Here's the full story on Jacob Blake's pre-shooting romp in Kenosha. I'm not excerpting it here because it's filthy. Suffice it to say, Jacob criminally trespassed in his ex-girlfriend's house, sexually assaulted her and tried to steal her car. She called 911 and set the final act of that tragedy in motion. Note that said girlfriend also claimed that Jacob had beat her in the past, hence his record of domestic violence.

That angle isn't being played up in our media as they continue to rant about racist cops and black men being targeted in an effort to keep as many black votes in the D column as possible.

Aside: If Biden wins and the Democrats win the Senate, all of this pandering to blacks will be over. They'll turn all the illegals into citizens and open the borders. There will be 5 Mexican peasants turned citizen for every American black, all voting Democrat, and the blacks will no longer be needed. Oh well. You had a good run, guys.

Back to the topic at hand. 

Once BLM succeeds and the cops have left the hood, either by quitting or being defunded, what happens to black women? This girl called 911 because she needed protection. When 911 won't respond because the cops will be ambushed, she'll have no defense at all. She won't be alone. No woman in the hood will have protection, save for whatever they can get from their boyfriends, assuming the boyfriends aren't abusing them as well, as Jacob did and statistics show.

The kids won't fare any better. Statistics show that as well.

Fortunately, more and more people are getting their news from alternative sources and doing their best to spread stories like Jacob's sexual abuse. On news tweets describing various sports teams protesting for Jacob Blake, the replies are full of people pointing out his history of sexual assaults and domestic violence. Private citizens are working to spread the information and get past the news media blackouts.

The press has changed. We are all the press now and we need to be. The safety of women and children depends on it. Once the cops leave, they're hosed.

They matter.

Bonus Thought: What about the lives of young, black men who, left to their own devices, would eschew the thug life and turn to literature, art, science, engineering or business? In a healthy, functioning society, fathers would protect their children and husbands would protect their wives. The women and children would be given the freedom to grow that comes with physical security.

You can't choose to stand up for both Jacob Blake and the innocents. They aren't compatible. Without strong, devoted men to protect the vulnerable from the Jacob Blakes of the world, the weak will be devoured.

Or abused.

Must-See Ladybug TV

IT'S POSITIVELY RIVETING!

Well, actually, after you see it, you'll think I've got a few rivets loose. It's not really must-see. In fact, it's pretty dull. On the plus side, it's only 60 seconds long.

Recap: My cotton patch was infested with aphids, protected by ants. After 2 weeks of laying out borax-laced ant bait, the ants had been reduced to a mere nuisance. I created a ladybug aviary to keep the critters on the cotton plants so they could chomp on the aphids instead of flying away. 

I think this is the last release. The aphids are almost under control and I'm guessing that this round of ladybugs will wipe them out. This time, I put a video camera inside the enclosure to see if I could find out what the ladybugs were doing. My aviary isn't without holes, so many of them simply flew away, but it looks like enough stayed to do the job.

I think I counted ten ladybugs in this video. You'll see them better if you watch it on YouTube. Enjoy?

A Life, Wasted

I'm going to go out on a limb and posit that Steve Sinclair didn't grow up in a traditional, married family. Steve is a black man who attacked a white dude in Aurora, Colorado. He's been arrested and booked on a variety of charges including a hate crime.

Steve. This was not one of his better days.

His life is pretty much over now. He's going to go to prison for a long time.

What a waste.

Where would Steve be today if he'd grown up with his dad married to his mom? Where would Steve be today if he grew up in a country where his teachers and the media didn't tell him over and over that white people hated him?

Maybe he'd be an artist. Maybe he'd be a tradesman. Maybe he'd be an accountant who was being groomed by a Fortune 500 company to be their CFO. 

Maybe he'd be an oil field worker with a wife and kids and he'd coach their soccer teams even though he'd never played soccer, but he loved them so much that he wanted to enjoy the sport with them. 

Nope. Not gonna happen. We told him that all families were equal. We told him his country was racist. Most likely, he didn't have the guidance of a loving dad and he grew up convinced that trying to improve himself was a total waste of time since whitey was going to keep him down no matter what.

Yes, it was Steve's fault that he stabbed the dude. Your circumstances don't remove responsibility. But for the love of God, would it kill us to try to produce fewer Steves?

Stop Making Them Angry!

A black dude, wanted by the cops for murder, offed himself in Minneapolis yesterday. Word got out that the cops had shot him. The word was wrong, of course, but it hardly mattered. The righteous anger found outlets in various commercial outlets and a good time was had by all.

The one thing we know for sure is that their righteous anger is righteous. They are the victims of systemic racism and you are the beneficiaries of said systemic racism. Until you atone for your sins and stop beneficiating in a systemic way, this is going to continue.

Clearly, we need to come together and solve this in unity and justice. I have a simple suggestion.

The next time there is rioting, looting and burning, all of the rest of us need to drop what we're doing and attend social justice training. Until we have changed and our behavior is modified to be more socially just, our cities will burn.

If it happens more than once, then we will need to go to training more than once. I'm serious here. Since this is our fault, we need to take responsibility for it.

By my count, we're down about three dozen training sessions. As Kamala Harris said, it's time to do the hard work of getting rid of systemic racism. 

See you in class.

Wisconsin Governor Evers, Cultist

It's really the kindest conclusion I can draw.

It turns out that Jacob Blake was a violent felon with a history of fighting with cops who was caught in the act of committing a violent felony - threatening a woman with a knife, entering her home and stealing her keys. As he'd done in the past, Jacob resisted arrest and looked to be getting a weapon out of his car when he was shot.

As I've said before, becoming a cop isn't a suicide pact. If someone won't obey your commands and might be reaching for a weapon, a cop is perfectly within his rights to open fire.

Mayor John Antaramian of Kenosha had access to this information because the cops that tried to arrest Jacob were his employees. You have to figure that phone calls were made when this all went down and Governor Evers could have had the information as well.

Governor Evers also had seen what happened in Minneapolis, Chicago, New York City, Seattle and Portland. All of those mayors and their governors were his political allies. He must have known that if he allowed rioting, innocent business owners would have their property destroyed and the city's tax base would be wrecked. In the end, productive people would leave and move to somewhere safer.

So why did he let it happen? Why did he immediately trot out the "we are all racists" canard? 

It's possible that neither he nor his mayor knew the circumstances of the shooting because they hadn't bothered to ask. They might be modern Nazis, crazed with the racial madness that looks to have consumed the left. Like cultists, they simply didn't believe that an explanation outside of their race cult's world view was possible. Black man shot by cops? Racism.

The unkind interpretation is that they both knew full well what had happened and what would happen. The decision to play the race angle was strictly a political one, designed to strengthen racial paranoia and lock in those sweet, sweet, black votes. Like Milton's Satan and Mayor Frey of Minneapolis, they would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven.

I can't see any explanation that says that they simply didn't learn from the experiences of their peers. No one is that stupid, are they?

Governor Evers, looking like a complete idiot. Good Lord, dude, you must be 20' from anyone else. Take off the mask. You look like you're wearing a feed bag.

Throw The Book At Him!

Or maybe just throw the bill at him. As in whatever is the most recent monstrosity passed by your state or Federal legislature might be. I mean, since calling the cops will be useless pretty soon, throwing something the size of an old school phone book at an assailant will work as well as anything.

Imagine getting hit with a bound version of this thing!

The Kenosha lesson to be relearned for the eighteenth time this year is that cops are not allowed to arrest anyone. If you are stopped by the cops and they give you orders to stay put or do this or do that, you are free to do as you please. If they use force to make you obey them, the BLM crew will burn the city down.

The most ironic thing out of all of this is that it's a blue civil war. That means that on the leadership end of the spectrum, laws and regulation are growing like kudzu. Down on the peasant end, there are no recognized authorities.

Lots of rules and no enforcement is indistinguishable from no rules at all.

Kenosha Into Kabul

So Jacob Blake, a black man in Kenosha, got shot by the cops yesterday. This led to the now-standard rioting against the police.

Watching the video of Jacob being shot, the process was pretty simple. The cops asked him to stay where he was. Jacob didn't want to stay where he was, so, while the cops were shouting commands at him with guns drawn and pointed right at him, Jacob walked around to the driver's side door of his car, opened the door and reached in to get something. One cop followed him around the car and grabbed Jacob's shirt, trying to drag him away from the car. Jacob didn't want to be dragged away and so he kept reaching into the car.

Jacob was shot because he decided that the cops had no authority over his actions. 

During the perfunctory rioting afterwards, the rioting mobs decided the cops didn't have any authority, either. The riots were there to make that point as clearly as possible.

Well. What do you think the cops in Kenosha will do? My guess would be that the cops will pull back, just like they have everywhere else. If the political authorities don't back them, many cops will retire or quit.

And then we'll have another Kabul in the US where the only safe spots will be the places where the powerful people live.

Bonus question: Joe Biden said he wanted to bring hope and peace and light to the country. I'd say there are some really good opportunities right in his own side's cities. Maybe he could show off his hopeful peace-lighting skills in Kenosha and calm that sitch down.

Come on, man! Show us your stuff!

A Ladybug Aviary

 ... I has one and it has ladybugs. Here are the photos to prove it.

The story so far, in case you missed it. Short version: I'm growing cotton because I'm a nut. The cotton is being attacked by aphids which are being protected by ants. I've spent more than a week trying to get rid of the ants with borax-laced bait. By yesterday, the bait looked to have done its job, so it was time for the aviary and the ladybugs. The aviary is there to keep the ladybugs from flying away before they eat the aphids.

The cotton patch with an irrigation pipe frame.

The ants have been suppressed. A few are left, but not many.

Lots and lots of aphids!

I ordered a 10x20 shade cloth. The bed is 8' long. This is a 6x13, not a 10x20. Grrr.

The view down the length of the aviary before the end caps are placed.

The end caps were another 6x13 piece of shade cloth. That one arrived as ordered. The gaps had to be accepted.

Ladybugs!

On patrol.

I haven't had a chance this morning to do damage assessment. I'm afraid that quite a few of my dotted allies flew out of the aviary through the 2' gap in the cover.

Like I said before, grrrr.

In any case, I think this will work well.

Printing Presses In Hyperdrive

 Dig this bit of news from Chicago's highest-end shopping district.

Drive onto the Mag Mile and at first all seems normal. Keep driving, and you’ll notice it’s anything but. Chicago police cars are parked everywhere — blue lights flashing. Stores are still boarded up. It’s all a response to two rounds of looting in the  last two and a half months.

“If it happens a third time, people who are just hanging onto a belief that downtown is still a place to live and shop are going to give up,” said Ald. Brian Hopkins (2nd). “We’re going to lose people. They’re going to move. We’re already seeing that start to happen.”

The city’s Second Ward includes the northern part of the Mag Mile, but it’s not just residents bailing that concerns him. It’s the potential for businesses to bail, too. He points out his ward and one other bring in about 40% of the city’s property tax revenue every year.

“If that dries up we really have no way to replace it,” he said. “There’s no casino or there’s no other magic source, no capital assets that we could sell that’s going to replace the loss of our property tax base, and that’s how a city begins to hollow out at its core.”

Emphasis mine.

It's the same as what's happening in New York City.

If Biden wins, expect massive bailouts for the burned-out blue cities. There's only one way to get that sweet, sweet bailout money, too.

Print faster! Print faster!

Dittos for the Green New Deal, Reparations and all of the other goodies.

I still can't figure out what to hold if the money printing goes into hyperdrive.

Rental real estate, maybe?

Firebase Chicago

 Mayor Lori Lightfoot of Chicago is taking her city back from the rioters.

Well, one block of it, at least.

Her block, to be precise.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot defended the Chicago Police Department’s ban on protesters being able to demonstrate on the block where she lives, telling reporters Thursday that she and her family at times require heightened security because of threats she receives daily.

Lightfoot refused to elaborate on the specific threats, but said she receives them daily against herself, her wife and her home. Comparisons to how the Police Department has protected previous mayors’ homes, such as Rahm Emanuel’s Ravenswood residence, are unfair because “this is a different time like no other,” Lightfoot told reporters.

“I think that residents of this city, understanding the nature of the threats that we are receiving on a daily basis, on a daily basis, understand I have a right to make sure that my home is secure,” Lightfoot said.

Chicago is now Afghanistan where there are firebases that are secure while the surrounding countryside is under the control of the insurgents. 

Lori and other powerful people live inside the firebase.
You live outside.
Also, you're a racist.

More Ivy League Means Less Knowledge

 As I watch our blue cities fall apart, it all seems so predictable. If you rage against the police, handicap them with ever-stricter rules and allow criminals free reign, cops are going to quit. Either they'll quit by retirement and resignation or they will quit by not enforcing the law.

If the law isn't enforced and most of your population was raised in homes without fathers, you're going to see an increase in violence.

If you see an increase in violence, peaceful, productive people will leave.

If peaceful, productive people leave, you lose tax revenue.

If you lose tax revenue, your public property decays and services have to be cut.

None of these require leaps of faith. They are all natural consequences. My conclusion is that the Elites have no idea how anything works any more. The more time you spend in top-notch universities, the less you know about reality. I'm sure there are counterexamples in engineering and science, but for the most part, it looks to me like functional ignorance at the top.

Today, I read that cops in Chicago are retiring at twice the normal rate.

On top of all of this, we've got the Democrats howling for mail-in voting. This is just one more and perhaps the largest piece of ignorant insanity. We've got a deeply divided, heavily armed country going into a major election and we're going to use the least trustworthy method of voting? 

These people have no idea how anything works.

Attacking motorists only works until the motorists no longer fear legal repercussions. After that, attacking vehicles is suicidal.
See also: heavily armed suburbs, rioting in.

Thinking Strategically

I swear, I feel like I'm fighting the Wehrmacht when it comes to dealing with the combined aphid and ant armies attacking my cotton. They are incredibly sophisticated opponents.

To recap, I'm raising cotton this year. Cotton is a soft plant and aphids like soft plants. Ants like aphids for their sweet excretions. Ladybugs will eat aphids, but ants will drive them away. If you let them, ladybugs will simply fly out of your garden without eating all of the aphids when they're confronted by ants.

To deal with this I must do the following:

1. Get rid of the ants.
2. Build a ladybug aviary around the cotton patch to keep the ladybugs focused on their task.
3. Release ladybugs into the aviary and plug my ears so I don't hear the screams of the aphids as they are slaughtered.

I've got #2 done, but #1 is turning into a huge chore. I bought ant Starbucks, i.e. bait stakes filled with a sweet liquid laced with borax, and have placed them in the cotton patch. The ants are going for the Starbucks, but after three days, there are more ants than ever. Yesterday, I concluded that this was because the ants still had access to the aphids and weren't eating enough of the poison.

Previously, I had bought insect glue, a sticky gel which creates a barrier to crawling insects. I decided to cut off the ants supply routes and try to force them to eat more bait by applying the glue to the stems of the cotton plants.

The label on the glue said it can damage sensitive plants. Not wanting to find out that cotton is in this category, I wrapped the stems in wound-dressing tape first and then applied the glue to that. The results were quite satisfactory.

First, a barrier around the main stem to cut off the nest from its source of aphid nectar resupply.

Next, barriers at key transportation junctions on the plants to eliminate resupply through back road routes.

Enemy units were cut off from the main ant army and trapped on the branches. I'm not sure what to do with these. My research says they will die in a day or two, but I'm not certain as they have access to the aphids. If they don't die, I can eliminate them with airstrikes, using compressed air blasts from my PC cleaner can.

My three most active ant Starbucks. Yes, I know I just mixed metaphors. Work with me here, people.

The middle one is particularly busy.

The makers of the bait sticks say it can take up to two weeks to wipe out an ant infestation. I'm hoping to finish them off sooner than that as my ladybug aviary is ready to go and I'm anxious to bring in my troops.

I had no idea this was going to get so complicated.

Mid-Day Update: All of the bait stakes are seeing increased traffic. Cutting the next off from the aphids might have done the trick.

The Legend Of The Haunted Bag

 ... is what the yellow jackets must tell each other at night before they go to sleep, like kids sharing ghost stories. Really, that's the only explanation I've got for this behavior.

This was a brand new yellow jacket trap, replacing the old one I had hanging in the same spot. I hadn't added the water yet so the bait pill wasn't dissolved which means there was no sweet odor to attract them.

Further, no yellow jacket who went into the old bag ever came back out.

I'm convinced they were all there to see if the ghost stories about the bag were true. How else could they know they were supposed to go to it?

Similar Arthropodic Topic: My ant Starbucks are still at work, but haven't shown any results yet. In fact, I opened two new franchises in the cotton patch. The company who makes the stakes says that it can take up to two weeks to wipe out an ant infestation. I've still got two more ant Starbucks to deploy. If I don't see some decline in the mass of ants, I'm going to put them into the patch this afternoon.

Jesus Learning

 Yesterday, I sat through the second-worst homily* I have ever heard. Father James Martin, Jesuit idiot extraordinaire, encapsulates it here.

Gospel: Jesus tells a woman that he refuses to heal her daughter. She challenges; he listens. If Jesus can listen and learn, so can you.

— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) February 13, 2014

The Gospel reading is Matthew 15:21-28. A Canaanite woman asks Jesus to heal her daughter. Jesus tells her He is only sent to help the Jews. She keeps at it until He relents and heals her, saying, "Woman, you have great faith. Let your desire be granted."

Our deacon, we'll call him Deacon Smith, turned it into a speech about systemic racism. He said Jesus was a product of His time and place and had the racism natural to Jews of his era.

Well. There's a lot to unpack, isn't there? Let's just leave it with one observation.

If we had a time machine, Deacon Smith could have gone back and met Jesus the day before he met the Canaanite chick. He could have explained to Jesus why racism was bad. When Jesus finally understood, he would have said, "Why, thank you, Deacon Smith! I didn't know that. I will change my ways to be less sinful now that you have explained the finer points of racial morality to the Lord God Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth and Author of All Morality Ever Everywhere."

No, that's not ridiculous. Not at all.

Bad things happen to your brain when you dive into Nazi Race Theory.

* - The worst sermon I've ever heard was another one where a deacon wanted to preach on social justice. In that case, he took the Parable of the Talents and twisted its meaning around a full 180 degrees so he could give Obama's You Didn't Build That speech. I listened to that one with my jaw on the floor, thinking, "I cannot believe I'm hearing this right now."

Winning The Battles, Losing The Wars

 ANTIFA And Portland

Indefatigable journalist Andy Ngo is continuing to document the riots in Portland. Law and order types like me will love this video from last night's fighting.

Antifa black block’s line formation instantly crumbles when Portland Police rush at them at the riot. Antifa have been attacking officers with rocks and other projectiles all night in SE Portland. #PortlandRiots #antifa pic.twitter.com/u09jievcsa

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) August 16, 2020

When we rush the enemy in force, they flee. Hooray!

If I lived there and this had gone on for 70+ nights, I'd have my house up for sale and an escape location chosen. I'd be heading to Eastern Tennessee, coastal North Carolina or south Alabama.

As productive, sane people leave, the electorate tilts more and more towards the lunatic left. Portland isn't going to get better, it's going to get worse. The cops won the battle, but Portland is losing the war.

See also: Minneapolis, Chicago, Seattle, NYC, ...

Ants In My Cotton Patch

Yesterday, I told you that I opened another ant Starbucks. This morning, stricken with DIMI, which is described below, I photographed the morning rush at that borax-laced coffee shop.

I'm hoping to see results by Tuesday when the last of my shade cloth shows up. I'd love to have my ladybug aviary up and running by Thursday.

Dog-Induced Morning Insomnia (DIMI)

My wife and I now have completely opposite sleep schedules. The Wuhan Flu and left-wing rioting provides a sound basis for unsound rest. Add to that the normal ebbs and flows of family life, health scares and assorted chaos and insomnia has become the norm. She can't get to sleep and I wake up at a ridiculous hour and then can't get back to sleep.

For me, waking is typically triggered by one or more dogs going off between 0200 and 0300. Last night, it was the larger chihuahua mix getting up to gag vigorously. She didn't barf, so that was good, but when she wakes up in the middle of the night, there's a good ten minutes of happy wiggling that must be endured before she calms down again. My body decided that it wouldn't be fatal to get up and that was that.

I asked wife kitteh if she had slept yet. She said no. I got up and she fell asleep fifteen minutes later.

Ugh.

Think Of It As A Starbucks For Ants

You know the Starbucks downtown? No, not the one on Ash and 3rd. No, not the one on Beech and 4th. No, not the one in the mall, the one across from the mall a block away from the one on 6th and Date. That one.

---

The ants took to the bait stakes I put in two days ago, so much so that I installed another right next to the busiest one. Kind of like having a Starbucks across the street from a Starbucks. Well, the ants are going to town on that one, too.

Maybe we should call it a late latte. Because soon, these will all be late ants.

I bought the PVC pipe for the ladybug aviary today and ordered the shade cloth as well. Soon, the aphids will have no protective escorts and the ladybugs will be able to feast in a private room made just for them.

Muuuuuhahahahahaha!

It's good to be an evil genius.

Err, wait. If it's good to be an evil genius, am I still evil or am I good? I mean, it's not evil to be a good genius, but it probably can't be good to be an evil one. So maybe I'm not evil. Maybe I'm just morally unpredictable. Yes, that's it. Let's try this again.

Muuuuuhahahahahaha!

It's good to be a morally unpredictable genius.

There. That's better.

Escalation

The aphids attacking my cotton, my very soft-leaved cotton, were only injured by our last wave of ladybugs. Yesterday, I released another wave, but between the ants and the ladybugs ability to fly away, I'm not optimistic about the results. This isn't like dealing with aphids on small vegetables where the ladybugs can wipe them out in an hour and then fly off, these are nine, 6' tall plants in a raised bed. The ladybugs will need days to obliterate the enemy.

Gaze upon the faces of evil.

So now we escalate the war.

I just installed some ant bait stakes in the bed. It's a liquid bait infused with borax which is deadly to ants, but won't be absorbed into my cayenne peppers. I'm hoping that in a few days, the aphids' protective escorts will be significantly reduced. We'll see about that.

Update: The ants have discovered two of the three baits. They are industriously mining them for the sweet, sweet toxins inside. I love it when a plan comes together.

Second, I'm planning on constructing a temporary ladybug aviary. It will consist of a simple frame with shade cloth draped over it. It doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to keep most of the ladybugs from escaping while they devour the aphids.

Kind of like this.

Those two moves ought to put an end to the aphid infestation. I will also end up with an easily-erected structure I can use against future aphid attacks.

Escalation In Our Cities

Dig this video from the 'burbs of Seattle and ask yourself how long it would take you to put your house on the market if this happened to you.

As New York City is discovering, productive people can leave. Ones who work in the information industry probably don't have to come back.

The question no one is asking is, "Who is left once the productive people leave?"

Detroit can answer that question.

Some commentators say that this unrest will lead to changes in city governance and the election of reality-based leaders. Why? Many of the people who would have voted for that will be gone. The leaders will cater to the electorate. If the electorate becomes more and more dominated by the social justice crowd, why would you expect these cities to discover common sense and bounce back?

Pavlov Gets Cannon Hinnant Wrong

If you don't know, Cannon Hinnant was a 5-year-old white kid living in Wilson, North Carolina who was shot and killed, execution style, in broad daylight, by a black neighbor.

Get the picture?

My latest podcast crush, Matt Walsh, first alerted me to this tragedy. He went on the now-reflexive conservative rant of "what if the races were reversed." Lots of right wing commentators joined in the fun. The bell was rung and the salivation began.

Stop it. Stop it now. Left to our own devices, using our philosophy of color-blind individualism, we'd never look at this through a racial lens. It's the story of a mentally ill man who murdered a boy. That's all this is. It's horrible from every angle. At some point in the future, Darius Sessoms may recover his sanity and reengage his conscience. Who would want to walk in his shoes when that happens?

Both Darius and Cannon are children of God and He doesn't care about their skin colors. If He doesn't, we shouldn't.

The commentators fell into this trap because they have allowed themselves to be trained like dogs by the left wing news media and education industry. To the modern left, everything is racial social justice.

Weil es untrennbar mit der sozialen Idee verbunden zu sein scheint und wir nicht glauben, dass es jemals einen Staat mit dauerhafter innerer Gesundheit geben könnte, wenn er nicht auf innerer sozialer Gerechtigkeit beruht, und deshalb haben wir uns mit diesem Wissen zusammengeschlossen.*

The Left has created and pushed this race-based moral framework. In it, everything, everywhere, at all times is first measured in racial terms. And what do we do? We adopt it.

Matt's tirade wasn't aimed at the people we care about, the everyman. Instead, it was aimed at the people who hate us, the Elites. "You're hypocrites!" he shouted. No, no, no.

The guy who sits behind me at work is black. He's a great fellow. Smart, experienced, helpful and kind, he's the salt of the earth. He's the person we should talk to, not Don Lemon or Fredo Cuomo. My friend and the millions like him are just as important as the CNN talking heads. There are millions of everymen and only a few media Nazis.

What does the everyman think and feel when we pump the black-on-white crime stories, no matter what our motivation might be? How do you feel when your race is called out for some horrific crime?

Race is irrelevant. Our common humanity is everything. Jesus told us that. Now we're responding to Don Lemon instead of Jesus? Why?

Get some self-control.  Stop living in the moral universe created by the Nazis and live in your own. Cannon Hinnant was killed by someone whose inner demons took control of him. Without the airwave saturation of the Nazis, would we really be talking about their skin colors?

* - "Because it seems inseparable from the social idea and we do not believe that there could ever exist a state with lasting inner health if it is not built on internal social justice, and so we have joined forces with this knowledge." - Adolf Hitler.

How Trump Could Win In A Landslide

It's simple. Stop the negative ads. Tell Americans that they're good people. Talk building and creating and constructive plans. Stop the ranting and name-calling. It's not that attacks are ineffective, it's that they are so overplayed right now that their marginal value is close to zero. It might even be negative.

This won't happen, of course. Trump is too much of a petulant child to do it.

I made the mistake of checking Twitter around the time Kamala Harris was announced as Biden's running mate. I felt like I was looking down the barrels of an artillery battery loaded with canister shot. KAMALA IS THE WORST PERSON EVER HERE ARE 84 REASONS WHY! Everyone had preloaded opinions about every choice Biden could have made and they launched the Kamala barrage the instant they found out she was the one.

I'm sure that over on the lefty side of Twitter, it was KAMALA IS THE BEST TO FIGHT WHITE SUPREMACISTS AND SHE'S SMART AND BLACK AND A WOMAN AND RACISM! 

Dear God, the next few months are going to be horrendous. Thankfully, most sports have been canceled, so there's practically no reason to watch live TV. Wife kitteh and I are working our ways through Peter Gunn and Route 66 these days and that looks like a good survival strategy until the election.

I could only watch a few minutes of Tucker last night. He looked like one of those wind-up, cymbal-clanging, toy monkeys you used to buy for children whose parents you didn't like. YOU SHOULD HATE KAMALA HARRIS BECAUSE SHE'S AWFUL AND I WILL TELL YOU ABOUT IT OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN!

Please, just stop.

Just what was being accomplished here? Like I said, the marginal return on investment for one more rage tweet must now measured in femto-opinions. I was never going to vote for Biden. My problem with Trump is his obnoxious personality. My fears about the country have to do with the Democrats' neo-Nazi race mania, family structures and debt. Did I really need to be armed with a set of reasons why Kamala Harris is the worst? What am I going to do with those, yell them at my Democrat friends as we scream at each other?

How about this - run on a platform that asserts that America isn't racist. Talk to the people who build things and tell them they're the best. Tell the youth that their inheritance is being squandered on borrowing and how it's a significant moral good to be frugal.

Praise the people who are solid citizens and I would bet you'd have lots of others wanting to be included in that group.

Blue Civil War Update

Meanwhile, in the Blue Civil War, BLM Chicago told the black, lesbian mayor that there's a lot more looting on the way if they don't get what they want.

First prize in our contest is a week as Chicago's mayor. Second prize is two weeks!

To all the people honking Kamala as an historic choice because she's a black woman, I give you Lori Lightfoot, mayor of Chicago. She's the diversity trifecta - a homosexual, black woman. Her city is a dumpster fire. She'll be remembered as the mayor who took it from one of the great cities of the world to a violent, impoverished mess.

Plus, she looks like one of those albino zombies from The Omega Man.

It's not entirely her fault, of course. She didn't create a culture where her black neighborhoods haven't seen a marriage in 50 years. On the other hand, she still dishes out the racism claptrap on a regular basis, so it's not like she's completely without blame.

I thought diversity was our strength. Electing Lori Lightfoot and a whole host of other racial and sexual poster children was supposed to be important in some way. Instead, it looks like wrecking the family and racking up huge debts is a bad idea no matter whose name is on the Mayor's door.

So much for Kamala being historic. I mean, maybe she is, but who cares?

Combined Arms In The War On Aphids

Our cotton plants are suffering from an aphid infestation right now. My favorite solution is to buy a container of ladybugs and release them in the evening for a night of slaughter. This time, there was a nest of ants providing escort for the aphids, so my first wave of Coleopteran warriors was driven off with minimal casualties inflicted on the enemy.

The ants were reaching the aphid collections up the stems of the plants, so what I needed was some kind of barrier. I tried Vaseline, but it was a pain to apply. I bought a sticky glue designed to catch insects, but a closer reading of the label said it might harm the plant and extra work was required to use it safely. Finally, I took a chance and squirted corn oil on the stems.

Do you see any ants? Neither do I.

It turns out that corn oil is a cheap and easy barrier against ants. It doesn't last long - two days or so, but that should be enough for the ladybugs to do their work. I prefer to use corn oil in cooking as well as frying, so I keep it in both a condiment-sized squirt bottle and two-gallon jugs. It was super easy to apply. I just stuck my hand into the mass of plants and splorped away with the bottle.

Studying the ant problem, I discovered that ants don't like coffee grounds. Who knew? From now on, our morning coffee detritus will be dumped into the cotton's raised bed, mostly around the plant stems.

Yesterday, anticipating corn oil success, wife kitteh procured not one, but two containers of ladybugs. They were unleashed on our foes in the late afternoon. It isn't yet dawn, but when it's light, I'll examine the battlefield and see if we prevailed. 

On patrol.

Gathering for an assault.

My favorite photo of the bunch. A ladybug warrior in silhouette.

Nothing And No One Stays The Same

One of the themes of this blog is that people make decisions assuming that others will continue to act as they have no matter what. For example, the BLM anti-police bigots assumed that cops would continue to patrol black neighborhoods even after they were repeatedly attacked. I don't recall any media figures predicting that the cops would stand down, violence would increase and more blacks would die because of it even though that was perfectly predictable.

Last night, stores in Chicago's toniest district were looted. This time, there was only the flimsiest of excuses. A young, black man shot at cops and they wounded him when they returned fire. Wounded, not killed. After that, the looting began and plenty of high-end stores were cleared out and wrecked.

No guarantees about the language or commentary on this video. It was the best of the lot when it came to showing the feel of the scene, but I didn't watch the whole thing. It's rather long, so I recommend sampling various spots by moving the scrub head around.

At some point, you'd have to think that one or more of the big corporations is going to have had enough and jump off the BLM bandwagon. It's all good fun to march and chant and fight hate, but when you have to keep repairing and restocking the same stores over and over again, you'll have to face economic reality.

How many times can you kneel and beg for racial forgiveness as you watch your assets destroyed?

Pressing For War

IMHO, George Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose or, at worst, a fentanyl overdose complicated by his forcibly resisting arrest. We're at each others' throats over an OD.

Now dig this.

I've noticed the yellow line. I read the WSJ every day and the number of race articles has grown alarmingly.

Important tidbits from the link above.

You think racism got that much worse in six years, so that double the number of white liberals thought it was a “big problem” in America? Goldberg goes on to say that the percentage of black and Latino Democrats who say they know someone who is racist did not really increase over that time — but it shot way up among white Democrats. In other words, white liberals — who totally dominate our media class — came to believe that America is a more racist place than do blacks and Latinos who share their politics...

I bet most people think that “equity” is a synonym for “equality.” That’s not how these woke journalists and academics see it. What Goldberg’s analysis predicts is that the mainstream media are propagandizing the country to prepare it for racial oppression and the seizure of property for redistribution. Or, to put a fine point on it, they are providing the ideological framework for elites to justify redistribution. 

 Now try this.

A reader who ask that I withhold his name, and who is not white (you’ll see why this may be important), writes:

I was once a first responder. Over ten years ago, I responded to a call at a women’s shelter for a mother who’d been savagely struck in the face by her husband (or ex-)...

Like most events in this line of work, you compartmentalize and all but forget these incidents. Years later, however, as racial tensions began to boil up again, I thought back to that incident and realized how troubled I was by it. It wasn’t just the fact that a woman was so severely beaten and her children had to witness their mother in such agony, but that this sort of thing was happening on a regular basis, yet, nobody really has any idea.

What I mean by this is that Whites are cited as the greatest threat to Black life in this country. Yet, I can guarantee you, the person who struck that Black woman wasn’t White. I don’t know for sure, of course, but I don’t believe in narratives. I believe in statistics. In all likelihood, the person who hurt that woman was a Black man.

When academics, elites, the media, and left-wingers of the public criticize law enforcement, they often treat them as ignorant of or even perpetuating the horrors of the reality of life for Blacks and other racial/ethnic minorities in this country. But that’s not what I’ve seen and I’m fairly certain that’s not broadly the case. If anything, it’s the cops and other first responders who are often the front-row witnesses to these terrible acts that disproportionately affect people in the Black demographic. Worse, the cops are often the only defense they have against their predators.

This is what I'm on about when I write about racialist / Nazi stuff. Real people are being hurt, but our Elites refuse to see it or, if they do see it, refuse to tell us. Instead, it's race, race, race all the time. The press, the academy, the entertainment industry and the tech companies are all pumping race hate like they were Hearst newspapers trying to get the Spanish-American War going.

A Cynic

There's a cynical side of me that is gaining strength. I think this is happening because the Democrats saw themselves losing support among black voters after decades of failure. The only purpose of the race craze is to maintain high levels of paranoia and cement in party loyalty.

Meanwhile, black women go to emergency rooms after having been beaten by their live-in boyfriends. 

The Catholic Church Has Failed Utterly

The solution is Catholic sexual morality or some derivation thereof. We preach marriage before sex. The stats show that marriage before sex reduces abuse by a factor of 10 or more. All of the churches I've attended in the last ten years have had a strong social justice movement. In case you weren't following along, that translates into obsessions with race and homosexuality. There is almost no emphasis placed on sexual mores.

We're simply an extension of the popular culture when we should be fighting to save civilization. Without it, we're screwed.

Do The NASA WAP!

 NASA is hot on the trail of white supremacists and doing it's best to put an end to systemic racism.

As we work to identify & address systemic discrimination & inequality in all aspects of the scientific community, we are reexamining the use of unofficial terminology for cosmic objects which can be not only insensitive, but actively harmful. Read more: https://t.co/ZNicp5g0Wh pic.twitter.com/jDup6JOGBd

— NASA (@NASA) August 5, 2020

Meanwhile, Cardi B and Megan Stallion have put out a music video that has gone viral. Note that this video is:

• NSFW,
• NSFH,
• NSFDI,
• NSFD,
• NSFC,
• NSFE and
• NSFSMWAWBSWS*.

To put it more simply, it's horrible. Here's the link.

I know several progressive, suburban women. They're all in with Black Lives Matter and systemic racism and all the rest. I don't think more than one in ten ever samples black, popular culture. I would bet that none of them have seen that video.

I would also bet that NASA wouldn't share it on their Twitter feed.

Yep, we're making great strides fighting ... whatever it is we're fighting. We may not be accomplishing anything of value, but by George, we're fighting systemic whosiewhatnots.

Yay us.

* - This means:

• Not Safe For Work,
• Not Safe For Home,
• Not Safe For Desert Islands,
• Not Safe For Deserts,
• Not Safe For Children,
• Not Safe For Eskimos and
• Not Safe For Short Men Who Are Wearing Black Socks With Sandals.

Snakes In Bomb Shelters

 Alternate title: Are extension cords snake sex toys?

Dig this photo, taken in our garage late yesterday afternoon.

Hidden underneath the extension cord is a big rattler.

Around 6 PM, I had gone out to the garage to put a case of Diet Pepsi in the fridge. I lifted the case, heard a buzz and saw the snake glaring at me behind where the sodas had been. The fridge door was open, so when I jumped back in surprise, I managed to knock a bottle of wine to the floor, shattering it, smash a door compartment off the fridge and drop the box of sodas.

We've dealt with rattlers before and managed to kill them, but this time it was complicated. First, I was in shorts and sandals. No snakebite defense there. Second, he was in the garage and if he decided to find a new hiding place, it would be nearly impossible to find him. Third, that extension cord was the equivalent of a bomb shelter.

I had killed the last one by dropping a 4x4 on his head. He had cooperated by coiling up out in the open on the cement, relying on the threat of his bite and the warning sound of his rattles to protect him. This time, I had large, heavy objects at hand, but they were useless. I needed a precision munition to get the head. If I missed, he'd probably slither out and make things more interesting than I wanted.

Time for the pros. I called 911, got patched in to animal control and 30 minutes later, me watching the snake from atop a step ladder the whole time, a wisp of a girl showed up to wrangle the rattler.

She was an expert at it. She told me she did about three of these a day in the summer. She had a grabber and a hook and although the snake was furious, angrier than most, she said, the snake was in her bucket and driving off to be released in a local canyon in short order.

He got even angrier when she started grabbing at him.

For a brief moment, he got loose and made a run for the garage again.

Really, the bucket was the safest place for him.

I was glad to see she didn't kill him. Poor old snake. He was just doing his thing and slithered hither when he should have slithered yon.

As she left, she told us to be on the lookout for a rattler nest. It might have been a mom guarding her eggs. We waved cheerfully and she drove away with the snake.

Wait.

A RATTLER NEST?!?

Genies Don't Like To Go Back Into Their Bottles

Thinking more about the extended George Floyd video where, at least to my eyes, you watch a man suffering a fentanyl and possibly simultaneous meth overdose, the decision to not release that footage to the public was malicious. Had we seen the whole, thing, a great deal of the looting, burning and rioting would never have happened. Relations with the police would not have been harmed nearly as much.

Having said that, the subsequent hysterical, anti-cop reactions in the blue cities did happen. The George Floyd incident gave the progs running those cities an excuse to do what they had wanted to do anyway. It gave them an excuse to let loose their anti-cop bigotries.

That genie is going to be pretty difficult to stuff back in the bottle, particularly now that the cops themselves have seen the video and know it was deliberate and slanderous misrepresentation of police work.

Whoops.

In other news, our dogs are not spoiled.

Mirror Moth

I saw this character on our bathroom mirror this morning and I couldn't resist taking some photos with my Nikon D3500 Artillery Piece. This was my favorite.

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

Normally, I like to capture the little creatures that find their way into our house and release them outside. They face such long odds making it from an egg to maturity that it seems a shame to kill them. I bumped the mirror while shooting and the moth felt the vibrations and fled. I'm afraid my rescue mission was a failure.

New George Floyd Video

If you haven't seen the newly-released video from the George Floyd arrest, let's just say it throws some light on what went down. The guy was clearly blasted out of his mind of drugs. The toxicology report said that he was well past a possible lethal concentration of fentanyl in his bloodstream. He was saying he couldn't breathe long before he was on the ground. That's a symptom of fentanyl overdose right there.

The other thing that hit me was that the guy was the size of an NFL linebacker. He was a huge man and he was almost all muscle. He resisted arrest for quite some time.

Joining the police force isn't a suicide pact. The cops showed restraint with George, but in the end, they needed to get him off the streets for everyone's safety. He made it as difficult as he could.

Jason Whitlock, writing at Outkick the Coverage, penned a take with which I agree 100%. Here's an excerpt.

The videos show police verbally and physically struggling to get Floyd to comply. Floyd appears panicked, disoriented, desperate and totally non-compliant. He complains that he can’t breathe while standing on two feet. He claims his mother just died and that he can’t sit in the back of the police car because he’s claustrophobic. He repeatedly begs the officers not to shoot him. He worms the upper part of his body out of the police car and asks to lay on the ground...

The behavior of the police officers seems appropriate and restrained given Floyd’s level of resistance and bizarre conduct. The footage reasonably explains how and why Floyd wound up on the ground with multiple officers restraining him...

The George Floyd case is not a race crime. No rational person can watch that footage and conclude the police were motivated by Floyd’s black race.

Similarly, no rational person can expect the news media to cover this honestly. They wanted a Horst Wessel in the worst way and they got him in the person of George Floyd. 

Trangendered Statues

Just a quick thought extending yesterday's rant which posited that defending individual characters from history is a fool's errand. 

Short version: Instead of fighting the war, you're signing up to fight a hopeless number of individual battles. Bishop Barron made a good case for Father Damien because Father Damien helped lepers. What case could he make for St Augustine who was a Catholic theologian? The Social Justice maniacs don't care a whit for theology. We'll lose the St. Augustine fight every time.

Fight The War, Not 1000 Battles

Using one of my least favorite characters from history, Jefferson Davis grew up in a culture with a 6000 year history of slavery. Old Jeff didn't invent the thing, he just went along with it.

The modern Social Justice crazy did not grow up in a culture where adolescents were given poisonous levels of sex hormones if they claimed to be the opposite sex. The SJWs really did invent that one. They're not just being carried along with a current of malignant thought, they are the originators of the malignant thought.

Ergo, the SJWs are worse than Jefferson Davis. We'd be idiots to adopt their moral point of view.

No. Just no.

Unmoored From The Past

The Jesuits, woke Social Justice warriors par excellence, decided to remove all references to Flannery O'Connor at Loyola. Rod Dreher, who is always good for a morning panic attack, addressed the situation here. His analysis was dead wrong.

Did you see this news?:

Thirteen years after naming a new residence hall at Loyola University Maryland in honor of the Catholic author Flannery O’Connor, Jesuit Father Brian Linnane, the university’s president, removed the writer’s name from the building.

The structure will now be known as “Thea Bowman Hall,” in honor of the first African American member of the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration...

I think Elie makes a fair criticism. I love O’Connor, and hate that there was any flaw in her character, but she was a woman of her time and place. It is breathtakingly anti-intellectual, and anti-art, to believe that this character flaw negates her monumental literary achievements. There is no American Catholic fiction writer greater than Flannery O’Connor, and there the Loyola University of Maryland, a nominally Catholic institution, is going to (cancel) her because she held ugly opinions that were overwhelmingly common in mid-century rural Georgia.

Elsewhere, Bishop Robert Barron of Los Angeles went after AOC. His analysis was dead wrong, too. 

In defense of St. Damien of Molokai: Part 2 pic.twitter.com/YYIFZU2DV4

— Bishop Robert Barron (@BishopBarron) July 31, 2020

It's not about Flannery O'Connor. It's not about Father Damien. It's not about Robert E. Lee or even Jefferson Davis, either. It's about cutting yourself adrift from your past. It's about hating the people who got us here.

Hating the past is all well and good if the things you love don't draw from it. If you're forever "leaning forward" and see change itself as the highest moral good, then burning down buildings, destroying monuments and rewriting history is righteous.

If you rely on teaching from the past, you're in big trouble when the Social Justice crowd comes a-calling. Those at risk include scientists, engineers and Christians. When we focus on the value of an individual statue, we're simply trying redirect the flow of Social Justice rage around our favorite historical figure towards someone else. The destruction of the past is the problem, not whether Father Damien or Abraham Lincoln or Robert E. Lee is the target.

Catholics in particular need to wake up about this. We are entirely rooted in the past. In fact, Jesus himself is vulnerable to the Social Justice thugs. 

Catholics repeat the Centurion's words at every Mass, after the consecration of the Eucharist. If you're a traditionalist, you strike your breast and say, "Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed." ...

Unburdened by Judeo-Christian notions that all men are created equal in the image of God, (the Centurion's boss) Caesar is the ultimate, secular Utilitarian. He has a job to do and he gets it done with minimal fuss. If you submit to Roman rule, even after battle, he takes hostages from your royal families and demands a tribute to pay for garrison legions. Your nation is allowed to survive, albeit as a vassal state to the Romans. If you betray that agreement or oppose him through any kind treachery, he defeats you in battle, burns your villages to the ground, slaughters your leaders and sells the population into slavery.

 All of our traditions and the entire Catechism comes from the past. As the past gets firebombed by the Social Justice crowd, we're at risk. If you don't believe me, click on Bishop Barron's tweets above and look through the replies. They run about 50-50 with half of the respondents siding with the modern-day Nazis who see everything through the lens of race.

This isn't going to end well for us.