... is the mood of the day here in the Catican Compound. We picked cotton today and discovered that our biggest Nankeen was now denuded of bolls. It was hoping to stick around, but we decided to pull it out. The cotton was a novelty crop. The real money maker was to be the cayenne sharing its bed, as it were. The cotton swamped the cayenne, both literally and figuratively - growing over the peppers and needing far more water than they liked. With the crop harvested, there was no reason to keep the cotton.
Still, it was good fun. I would never do it again, but I'm glad I tried it once. I still have my Red Foliated modern cotton and all of my fat, lazy, Antebellum Mississippi Browns. The Red Foliated is nearing the end as well. It's got six more bolls to pop and then out it goes. The Mississippi Brown is taking its own, sweet, Southern time.
I took a couple of shots of the Nankeen before I pulled it.
A nearly perfect Nankeen boll.
Only eight months old, the Nankeen had a sturdy trunk and was sporting new growth. There were even a couple of flower buds on it. That made me feel doubly guilty.
The root structure of cotton is pretty simple. It was a bit of a chore to pull, so I could imagine that it could survive the high winds of a small hurricane even if the leaves and bolls take a beating. Mississippi State suggests that 50-70 MPH winds are a problem.
Our yard usually has 2-3 hummingbirds zooming around in it. They're feisty little things, constantly squabbling with each other over territory. Well, that's not entirely true. We had a mated pair with babies this year and that was really cute. The babies looked like moths, they were so small.
Anywho, two of them got into our house a few days back, probably chasing each other around the yard and mistaking an open door for a path to safety. One of them went up into the skylight over our stairs. That's always a dreadful place to try to catch a bird, but I managed to get him and put him outside.
When I was done with the first one, I couldn't find the second one. I knew he had gone upstairs, but he had his cloaking device activated and was invisible. Last night, he came out and was buzzing around my study. I grabbed our insect / bird net and managed to catch him without harm. I put him outside and he flew off into the darkness, but I felt really bad for him as he'd been in the house for two days or so.
This morning, I came across this video. My little guy wasn't nearly this weak, but I wish I'd been able to offer him some sustenance like this. Enjoy.
This week, Philadelphia joined the list of cities where people have rioted and looted because police attempted to maintain the law and order necessary for civilization. A dude with a massive rap sheet and a history of violence against just about everyone, rushed at some cops, waving a knife. They drew their guns, told him to drop the weapon and then shot him when he didn't.
In a city run by Normals, that would be a page-three story. A violent criminal was shot resisting arrest. In deep blue Philly, it was a cause for racial justice of the kind Robin DiAngelo blathers about, particularly in her book, White Fragility.
Even if you're a a fully anti-racist fan of White Fragility, chances are still good that you're also a fan of working, shopping and driving your car without it being stopped and smashed to bits by protesters. If you lived in Philly and saw things like the video below, you might start thinking about not living in Philly.
Wife kitteh and I had a conversation about this over the weekend. If we lived in LA instead of SD, we'd be putting our house on the market and moving, quite possibly out of state.
Perhaps this is a bigger deal than even the election. Just with my admittedly myopic view, it sure looks like we're at the start of some major regional realignments. Productive people are going to get out of the blue cities and make their ways to safer climes. They may pack their Robin DiAngelo books in a box and bring them along, still completely committed to the discovery and eradication of racist leprechauns, but that doesn't mean they'll go down with their current cities.
OK, are you ready for a complete nutjob blog post? Good. Here we go.
The press and the social media giants are not hiding things from us. At least, that's not the real purpose of their attempts to conceal the Black Lives Matter manifesto and riots and the Hunter Biden scandal. The real purpose of their smoke screens are to hide the truth from themselves.
What happens when you realize that this is not caused by injustice or racism?
What happens when you look at the illegitimacy stats and all of their related pathologies?
Right now, you're the good guys and you've got it pretty easy. You're fighting the 200 or so white supremacists who we saw in Charlottesville, what, 3 years ago? Everyone is on your side, from Proctor and Gamble to Starbucks to Ta-Nehisi Coates. You admit your white privilege and vow to be better, pretending it's going to make a difference. In reality, it's all cosplay.
The only way you can keep pretending is if you silence all of the counter-examples. If you don't keep them hidden, you realize that cultural degeneracy is the real problem and that the left is deliberately encouraging and exploiting the degeneracy, well, the future is simply too horrible to contemplate.
If you admitted that the problem was degeneracy, you'd have to oppose PornHub, Tinder, Cardi B, Takashi6ix9ine and a massive army of similarly popular things. You'd also have to oppose the wildly popular racial justice movement as a destructive fraud. You'd become the Church Lady from Saturday Night Live.
You.
This morning, I watched last night's Tony Bobulinksi interview on Tucker's show. Last night, I watched the Philly riots on Twitter from non-AP journalists. Neither of those were prominent on the major networks or from high-profile reporters. I was going down the old rabbit hole of "They're keeping the truth from us!" when it dawned on me that they were really keeping the truth from themselves.
Be honest. Neither the Hunter Biden corruption scandal nor the looting were surprises to you, right? If that's the case, then nothing was hidden from you because you already knew it was there. No, the media is hiding the truth from themselves.
... to borrow from Papa Joe Stalin whose original quote was, "Quantity has a quality all its own," referring to the Soviets' massive numerical advantages over the qualitatively superior Wehrmacht. In this case, I'm referring to last night's riots in Philly where a black guy who threatened cops with a knife got shot for his troubles. Rioting and looting ensued. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Below, you can see outnumbered rioters rout a detachment of police.
Why not run? What are you accomplishing by standing your ground and defending property? All the property that got destroyed or stolen will be replenished by the Insurance Fairy and her compatriot, the Federal Reserve Printing Press Fairy*. It's only property, after all.
Our Pricing System Is Broken, Part 3,422
To jump up and down again about how printed money has destroyed our ability to determine the costs of an action, here are some videos of the looting. Who cares? It's only property.
Chopper 6 over the scene as a Foot Locker in West Philadelphia is looted following the death of Walter Wallace, who police say was shot by officers after he would not drop a knife. https://t.co/BtTPSlQIwIpic.twitter.com/7hNeLEvJCM
Anywho, there goes what's left of Philly. Sane, productive people will depart, leaving only progs and their thuggy wards behind. Whatever the outcome of the election, the country is being remade by these events.
* - The Federal Reserve Printing Press Fairy really needs a better name. Emma, perhaps.
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) has become practically unreadable. Mouth-foamers from our race-obsessed generation of college graduates have now infested that publication and the quality of writing has decreased as their fixation on der Volk has increased. Oh well. "So bröckelt der Keks, weil er von weißen Rassisten gebacken wurde," as they no doubt say in J-school these days.
Fortunately, the Japan Times is here to save the day. Their articles, at least in their business and economics section, are written clearly and work hard to provide the layman with explanations of what is happening. Here are a couple I perused this morning.
They have a charming euphemism for deficit spending. It's called an "extra budget*." It sounds like you would make a budget to account for your income and then make two more so you can spend that income three times. Which is about what it is.
The government needs to compile a third extra budget for the current fiscal year ending March to shore up an economy hammered by the COVID-19 pandemic, economists have said in a poll.
Nearly three quarters of economists polled said the government should spend up to ¥10 trillion ($94.95 billion) under the extra budget to help the world's third-largest economy recover after a record contraction in the second quarter.
The rest said the government should spend even more.
KYOTO – Stephanie Kelton, a professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is a leading advocate for Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) who is known for her seemingly radical argument that as long as a government can pay back its debt in the nation’s own currency, there are no limits to the fiscal deficits that it can incur. She stirred up a controversy when she cited Japan’s situation as evidence to prove her theory...
Yay! We're winning! Err ...
The (Japanese) postwar baby boomer generation, now in its early 70s, will soon join the ranks of the “latter-stage” elderly who are 75 or older and start tapping into their savings to cover their expenses. The trend of excess fund in the private corporate sector may also change over the long term. In that case, government debts that have piled up in massive numbers may become unsustainable with domestic savings alone. If the conditions change in such ways, JGB prices might crash, sending the bond yields shooting up.
What would be particularly serious would be a collapse of the inflation-adjusted, real-term value of the JGBs, in which case the private sectors that hold the government bonds would suffer enormous losses.
Japanese households’ disposable income has been increasing since 2015. However, the scale of the increase has been moderate mainly because a rise in spousal income driven by greater female labor force participation has been partially offset by declining working hours as a result of the growing number of part-time jobs. Higher tax payments and social security contributions have also exerted downward pressure on disposable income, which today remains below the 2000 level.
More women working means fewer babies. That's OK, so long as you're not one of the "latter-stage" elderly when the population starts dropping. As we recall from a few paragraphs ago, there are dark rumors spreading about something called "a collapse of the inflation-adjusted, real-term value of the JGBs." Uh oh.
All of this is to say that as the current tsunami of political ads and the intellectual infants in our news media focus on Twitter and Orange Man Bad, we're cruising down the same road as Japan, only a decade or so behind them. While our Ivy-League geniuses roll out easily-disproven, childish concepts like MMT, we've set in motion forces that dwarf the Green Nude Eel and Social Reich Justice.
It's a good thing we no longer are allowed to read racist colonialist racist white racists like Kipling.
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all, By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul; But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."
Meanwhile, it's nice to be a bit farther upstream than Japan from the 80' cataract. We're still doing alright.
* - Extra Budget is to Japanese government spenders as Second Breakfast is to hobbits.
Watching the online replay of Tucker's show yesterday, I saw Brit Hume and Tucker express their amazement at the way the press has completely ignored Joe Biden's obvious and massive corruption. Just that day, Tony Bobulinski, a business partner of Hunter and a registered Democrat with a history of donating only to Democrats, came out with hard evidence that Joe Biden was on the take from the Chinese to the tune of 6 or 7 figures, while he was VP. It was as smoking a gun as could smoke.
The news media ignored it. Here was NPR's take.
Tucker and Brit harrumphed and said, "This can't go on!"
In Minneapolis, a group of business owners facing intolerable increases in crime following the retreat of the police force from Neighborhoods of Color, demanded to know what the cops were going to do about it. The reply was had the honesty that comes from total despair.
"As far as a long-term plan I don’t have one. I have lost 30% of my street officers since the end of May. Budget cuts from COVID-19 and an additional 1.5 million from the council in August we have let go 17 CSO’s and cancelled a recruit class of 29. A potential Cadet class slated for January of 2021 was also eliminated. It takes about a year to get a police Officer onto the streets with hiring, backgrounds and field training so reinforcements aren’t coming anytime soon."
That article quoted someone or other as saying, "This can't go on!"
Oh, yes it can and yes, it will. It's happening right now and there's no indication it's going to turn around.
Going back to the Bidens, it's no longer worthwhile to wonder what happened to the honesty and professionalism of the news media. Brit kept saying things like, "A professional journalist would see this and do such and such!" Brit, that it's not happening should tell you something. There are no professional journalists any more. Waiting for them to show up and rescue you is delusional. The cavalry is not coming over the hill because there is no cavalry.
Now that I have this mental model, I bet I'll see this a lot more. It's people in their 40s and older, thinking that this is still America from the 1980s or so, where the culture still had some momentum from the Greatest Generation. That momentum is just about gone. What you see when the Participation Trophy Generation children at NPR refuse to cover the Bidens is reality. Your memories are not reality.
Our job, then, is to teach those values, not wish for them to show up again.
There are no real stakes to policy any more. I can't recall anyone suggesting that the lockdowns have costs and then listing those costs. For example, if Biden said, "I want to lock down the country to defeat the Chicom Flu and that means everyone receiving money from the government, from SS pensioners to GS-15 civil servants, will have to take a 20% hit," the conversation would be substantially different. That's not happening because we're convinced that the choice is between locking down the economy practically for free or everyone dying.
Free money corrodes our sight, making it possible to just glance at poverty and addiction rather than understanding it.
That wall of printed money lets us pose and preen in the name of Social Justice while real people's lives are destroyed. We don't understand them and we don't need to understand them. We can pretend to care by voting for more social spending. We won't have to pay for that spending ourselves, because it all comes in the form of government debt which is paid for by printing money. We feel good and don't have to pay a price for it.
Why do we listen to the Elites yapping at us? Because we don't pay for things with our own money. When there are riots, when certain neighborhoods devolve into crime and chaos, when schools are vandalized, we pay no direct costs. If, at the end of the Minneapolis riots, proggy boy wonder Mayor Jacob Frey and the socialist crazies on the city council told their constituents that they all had to drop $1250 in an envelope and mail it to city hall, how much traction would Ta-Nehesi Coates get in that city when he came to yell at them about racism?
We don't just listen to Ta-Nehisi, we adore him while he berates us. And why not? Once having has been detached from earning, only a bigot full of hate wouldn't be in favor of Justice. When the pricing mechanisms of a culture have broken down, then you can have and support anything you want. There is no reason at all not to pursue fantasy goals.
Because there is no limit to government spending and no cost to it, the general public can no longer understand why anyone with a heart wouldn't support free health care, open borders, reparations for slavery, free college, more money for teachers, more spending on affordable housing and on and on and on.
Hate is the only possible explanation as to why you want any restrictions on free things.
We recently began a major, new corporate initiative. I think. The only way I found out about it was someone at the worker level mentioned it on our social networking app, asking if anyone knew more than the name and a simple blurb she saw in the newspaper.
She was immediately told by a representative of leadership that she needed to take the conversation offline, onto private email.
Yes. Of course.
How in the world does anyone expect to lead if they won't communicate? I'm convinced that 90% of all leadership positions are occupied by people who just want the title and the cash. They have not a speck of interest in actual leadership, they're just climbers.
Going through music videos from Cardi B and Takashi 6ix9ine illustrates the utterly degenerate state of modern culture. Finding this essay from the editor of the student newspaper at UW Madison gives you a glimpse into the world of mainstreamed radicalism on our campuses. It is suffused with a hatred of America. It finishes with instructions on how to make a Molotov cocktail.
However, if the lives of these beautiful protestors continue to be threatened by a tyrannical government who seemingly does nothing to stop the death threats against black people vital to the Milwaukee community like Nitty and Coleman, I can offer some of the blunter tools of revolution and the fight against oppressors.
The university administration allowed this to remain on the newspaper's website. No surprise there as our campuses are staffed by radicals in the faculty and elsewhere.
The author, one Adam Kelnhofer, is an odd choice for a revolutionary firebrand. Here's a recent tweet of his, complaining about how hard his classes are.
One of my biggest pet peeves is when a professor assigns 10 questions for a chapter of Milton’s Paradise Lost, the chapter is actually a chapter and a half and 8 of 10 questions have two parts, making the assignment 18 questions instead of 10, causing me to spend four hours on it
Gosh, you have to do some reading? That's got to be tough. Oh well. As wife kitteh says, adversity is the anvil on which character is forged. If you think that's all he has to deal with, here's more torture from his classrooms.
Professors b like: Yes If I make these lectures twice as long they will surely understand better, even though they probably won't have time to watch them all.
And I will definitely send each student 24 Canvas notifications every day to remind them they have things to do, even though that means all the students have time to do is constantly check notifications.
I have never missed having in person classes more than now.
Whoa. Talk about roughing it! I'd say that these are the times that try men's souls, but that was originally spoken by a white man and, in any case, the formulation is triggering for womxn*.
This, then, is our budding leadership class. Agitators lobbying for lobbing homemade grenades while whining about having to read books and attend class. They're the participation trophy generation, a group of children who shave. They don't know how anything works because they've never done anything real themselves. They protest and riot and make Molotov cocktails thinking that they're the only ones who take action.
Their teachers are similarly petulant children, just older.
Just like the leaders in the Democratic Party, they don't understand that people who disagree with them have free will, too. Hence the surprise at the waves of police resignations and retirements. Hence the surprise at the doubling of violence in black communities when the cops pull back.
When the rest of us don't act like pawns on a chessboard, calmly doing nothing while they act out, they're stunned.
Imagine how stunned they will be if they keep pushing the country towards civil war.
Many of the fighters in this video also had to complete a weekly reading assignment that was more than two chapters long. It's being investigated as a war crime.
* - For what it's worth, I am convinced that womxn is pronounced whoompskin.
That phrase drives me bonkers. We're not really in "this" together, are we? If your business dies because of the lockdowns, you're on your own. If your neighborhood gets torched by Vandals of Color, you're on your own. If part of your state goes up in flames because environmentalists prevented preventative forestry, you're on your own.
As a matter of fact, you're on your own in almost everything. That's just life.
Instead, I feel like we're fed a constant stream of sheepdog barking, designed to keep us in the herd and obedient to our "leaders." All of the barking - climate barking, Chicom Flu barking, racial injustice barking - it's all meant to create a set of enemies, some human, some not, against whom we must band together.
Meh.
Climate change is coming from China. They emit a huge and rapidly growing portion of global CO2.
The Wuhan flu is dangerous only at very close ranges. Masks outside are pointless.
Racial injustice is simply nonsense. It's paranoia aimed at a specific demographic, built from the terror that some of them had begun to stray.
With this post, I saw an end to my thinking deep thoughts.
Why do we listen to the Elites yapping at us? Because we don't pay for things with our own money. When there are riots, when certain neighborhoods devolve into crime and chaos, when schools are vandalized, we pay no direct costs. If, at the end of the Minneapolis riots, proggy boy wonder Mayor Jacob Frey and the socialist crazies on the city council told their constituents that they all had to drop $1250 in an envelope and mail it to city hall, how much traction would Ta-Nehesi Coates get in that city when he came to yell at them about racism?
We bought the lunatic Nazi Race Theory advocates in our universities and now in our young, professional class as soon as we decided to pay for our social services with printed money.
After more than 14 years of thinking out loud on this blog, I had finally come to the conclusions Kipling reached in The Gods of the Copybook Headings. It dawned on me that traditional values resonate because they're true. Modern values, particularly the race-based ones and those trying to equate the sexes, turn me off because they're lies. It's not any more complicated than that.
This isn't hard. Living according to traditional values is simply a matter of relaxing and accepting the rules laid out in the reality that God created for us. As a man, acquire meaningful skills so you can protect and provide for a family. Expose yourself to the lives of men who are good examples of this, both through your friends and from history. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson come to mind.
Wife kitteh and I had another in our evolving discussions about sexual roles last night. We both know women who have swallowed the modern values that tell them to pursue careers first. Their children, if they have any and many don't, are raised by others. They have loads of student debt. There's no evidence that they have the inner happiness of being good wives and mothers. We both wondered out loud what it was they thought they were buying with their careers. It certainly wasn't satisfaction. It was only stuff and the stuff had not made them content.
I need a lot more space to think this out and this post is getting close to tl;dr territory, so I'm going to close with this.
Politics is a false god. It demands that you care deeply about the trivial. Our progressive, social justice deacon gave the homily at Mass yesterday. As he rambled, he hit all of the fashionable themes - justice and racism and tolerance. He hit none of the themes whose dangers loom over us like monster-movie beasts - debt, drugs and sexual degeneracy. He thought he was saying something important and the congregation were all familiar with his topics, but none of them really mattered.
Ignore the political and focus on what matters is the message I heard, even if it wasn't delivered in the sermon.
More on this in later posts.
Learning skills, like cooking, matters. This is a beef tenderloin we found in the good-Lord-this-meat-has-almost-turned-lets-discount-it-and-sell-it-before-we-have-to-throw-it-away bin. We had gone to the store to get a fresh chicken to grill, but found this and scooped it up, no particular recipe in mind. However, I'm getting better with my Oklahoma Joe pellet smoker and knew if I put on a rub and smoked it for an hour or two, it would come out great. It did.
... that's what it seems like we're riding, thanks to the progressives who don't know how anything works.
Full Disclosure: I got out of the market last week. I took my S&P 500 investments, which had done very well this year, and parked them in Treasuries. I'm willing to miss out on some gains in exchange for avoiding any election craziness downside. And as far as I can see, we're in for some serious election craziness, again, thanks to the Democrats.
Why on Earth would you push the least reliable voting method on a heavily-armed population that has been stoked into white-hot hatred by a crazed news media? I don't see how this ends anywhere but in the Supreme Court which the press and the Democrats, but I repeat myself, tell their minions is invalid. Dig this.
That's how secure your vote is in Washington and, as I understand it, Oregon. Name and birthdate gets you a cupie doll. Now dig this.
Not only that, but by continuing far enough you invalidate the ballot without any signature. pic.twitter.com/PSQN6HdGh9
The assertion is that you can invalidate anyone else's ballot simply by knowing their name and birthdate. It doesn't matter whether it's true or not or if you need slightly more information. It only matters that people believe it's true.
I can't say I'm altogether surprised. Biden's campaign screams that they are convinced they'll win by flooding the system with faked ballots. I've never seen anything so supine in my life. No one would run a real campaign like that.
That's not surprising, coming from a group of people who thought they could endlessly trash the cops and take away their self-defense capabilities and the cops would just sit there and take it. They've been shocked to see cops quitting in droves. They've also been surprised at the increase in crime. Like I said, they don't know anything works.
More proof of that is how NYC is being bankrupted with lockdowns and racial madness. The wealthiest 1% pay 50% of the city's taxes and many of those wealthy people have bailed out. From the WSJ in August comes this data point.
New York City faces a $9 billion deficit over the next two years, high levels of unemployment and the prospect of laying off 22,000 government workers if new revenue or savings aren’t found in the coming weeks.
Finally, there is the Hunter Biden story. The press is desperately trying to cover it up, just like the Catholic hierarchy tried to cover up the pedophile priests and for the same reason. They are determined to preserve their faith, their religion of social justice. They are fighting hate and racism which means that there are no rules.
If I had to guess at an outcome, I'd put my money on the election being bitterly contested in the courts. The press will push whatever narrative the Democrats give them while this happens. It will eventually go to the Supreme Court where the conservatives will determine the outcome. Perhaps during this process, but certainly afterwards, there will be lots of rioting in the blue cities. No matter who wins, places like Chicago and New York will suffer further damage which will result in further emigration.
As I've watched our national debt climb, I've wondered what successful people do when a fiscal crisis hits. This year, I solved that conundrum by realizing that successful people get out of Dodge. The riots across America convinced me that it won't be just the financial depreciation of assets that will get you, it's will be the irrational and violent responses to it.
With that out of the way, there's been something else bothering me. What happens to the social justice movement when we hit the fiscal wall? Right now, we're desperately fighting white supremacist leprechauns. We've mobilized every element of society to root them out and deal with ... whatever it is white supremacist leprechauns do.
Meanwhile, days, weeks and months pass by and in communities where the traditional family has broken down, there are all kinds of social pathologies blooming, spreading, thriving, metastasizing, whatever verb you want to use.
We have yet to hit that wall. We still have a little bit of time where there is money, jobs and stability to deal with these pathologies - the real ones, not the ones with the leprechauns. We won't, of course, because the dominant religion is social justice and it is a jealous faith.
So going back to the original question, what happens to the social justice movement when we hit the wall? My bet is that everyone will stop caring about it. They'll be too busy trying to maintain their jobs and deal with asset depreciation and massive cuts in government services. The fiscal crisis may take a different form than that, but you get the idea. If you lose your job and government budgets are being cut, you won't have a lot of energy to spend on amplifying black voices as the NAACP ads are urging you to do now.
At that point, those communities, their degeneracy unaddressed while we had the chance, will be completely and utterly screwed.
Chasing white supremacist leprechauns is all good fun, but it's a luxury. We're running out of money for luxury goods.
Oh, they're out there alright. Just look at this one. You can't see it because it's out of frame, but up and to the right is a massive Confederate flag.
Twitter and Facebook are working overtime to throw the election to Joe Biden. It's so obvious now that it doesn't require links to sources or paragraphs illustrating it with examples, so let's move on to the solution. I think it's pretty simple.
If we remove their protection as platforms and name them publishers, they would be immediately exposed to an avalanche of lawsuits for defamation, slander, libel and more. They'd be wiped out instantly. I would bet that both would close within a week, unless ... unless they started to charge customers for accounts.
Charging customers for accounts would allow them to raise money for legal costs and would go a long way towards cleaning up the platforms. Trolls who now troll for free would probably go find something else to do. If the account fee was high enough, Twitter might become a replacement for the AP, a professional guild of journalists.
Alternately, they could go back to being the phone company, a simple platform with no editorial control. If the social justice crazies wanted to post about how horrible white people are, they could post all ... wait. That's what they do now. How about: the people who don't think men can have babies could post all they wanted without interference from Twitter and Facebook.
If they became platforms, we'd have to learn to accept that people who thought differently are allowed to express their opinions no matter how much we were offended. We might learn to stop being offended at everything.
Bonus Question: Why is Big Tech so utterly in bed with the Democrats? There's more money to be made supporting Trump, so it's not about the Benjamins. It's got to be something else. Maybe they're True Believers in the social justice madness. That's the only conclusion I can reach.
Oh goody.
I thought this was genius. You can find this artist's work at his Etsy store.
So now we know what we always knew. Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company, hired a half-wit crackhead at quadruple the going rate to sit on their corporate board because his dad, Joe Biden, was the vice president of the United States. How yawntastic.
Joe Biden's little cherub, sleeping with a crack pipe in his mouth. Just the sort of person to be on the board of a Ukrainian energy company.
Here's what else we know, which we probably suspected, but slapped us in the face yesterday. Big Tech and the FBI, at the very least, are convinced that they're fighting hate.
The NY Post broke the story when it obtained the contents of a hard drive from an abandoned laptop because a computer repair store owner was horrified at the contents. He had given those contents to the FBI about a year earlier, but they didn't do anything with it.
The former vice president of the United States was clearly corrupt and the FBI did nothing about it. That's not the story.
When the NY Post broke the story, eager right-wing pundits on social media shared it. Until they didn't. Both Facebook and Twitter suppressed the story by blocking links, shutting down accounts and applying warnings to it. That's not the story.
The Story
Big Tech, most of the news media, academics and Federal government agencies are convinced they are fighting hate. From my own, current experience in a very large science and engineering organization, I can promise you that we are corporately convinced that we are fighting hate. Our HR and Public Affairs team can't stop talking diversity, inclusion and racial justice.
Ten years ago we talked engineering and science, now we talk social justice. There's no evidence that hate exists within the organization or that it grew like kudzu over those ten years, but we still continue to get almost-daily lectures. No one has the courage to stand up against this. We all need the paychecks.
Getting back to Hunter Biden, the FBI had a choice to make. Given the hard drive, they could clearly see massive corruption at the top levels of the government, but they decided not to pursue the story. Why?
There are no rules when you're fighting hate. If they had applied the law in this case, it would have helped the Far Right, the side of hate. To not apply the law to people in power, but apply them to the Normals is immoral except when you're fighting hate.
Lesson Learned: So long as vast swaths of the country believe they are fighting hate, you cannot rely on anything even close to an even and fair application of the rules.
At least that's what I'm gleaning from the tsunami of ads these days. Voting, it turns out, is the most important thing you can do. Yes, choosing which sub-par, Ivy-League egomaniac is going to swank about, telling you what to do for the next 2, 4 or 6 years is the Most Important Thing.
Or maybe it isn't. I live in deep blue California, so my vote is simply wasted. Instead, I can think of a lot more important things I can do. I'll still vote and happily vote for Trump, but I don't hold any illusions about the importance of the thing.
How about this for something more important: Learning to turn cotton bolls into thread or yarn. When I started my cotton experiment, I had no intention of processing the stuff. All I wanted to do was grow it and observe its life cycle. Now that the plants are popping and I'm harvesting it, I figure I'll see how to turn it into something usable.
Question: Wool and cotton threads are short. How can you make hundreds of feet of yarn or thread from short fibers? As long as I can remember, that's bothered me. If nothing else, this last phase of the cotton experiment will provide a direct answer to that conundrum.
I might need to cut way back on my entertainment consumption between now and the election. It's absolutely unbearable right now. I can hardly concentrate on my cotton bolls and plans for ginning and carding them.
I have several friends who own their own businesses. When something goes wrong - machines break down, jobs are done wrong or employees get sick - they have to cover the losses with their own money and time. If someone at random came and broke their windows and spray painted graffiti on their buildings and vehicles, they'd have to cover that from their own wallets as well.
If Vandals of Color wrecked their property, they'd have zero patience for the Elites lecturing them on systemic racism.
Why do we listen to the Elites yapping at us? Because we don't pay for things with our own money. When there are riots, when certain neighborhoods devolve into crime and chaos, when schools are vandalized, we pay no direct costs. If, at the end of the Minneapolis riots, proggy boy wonder Mayor Jacob Frey and the socialist crazies on the city council told their constituents that they all had to drop $1250 in an envelope and mail it to city hall, how much traction would Ta-Nehesi Coates get in that city when he came to yell at them about racism?
We bought the lunatic Nazi Race Theory advocates in our universities and now in our young, professional class as soon as we decided to pay for our social services with printed money.
These kids vandalizing a school in Minnesota would get very little sympathy if you had to send a sawbuck to the mayor to repair what they damaged.
It seems pretty obvious that Kamala Harris, through her mannequin, Joe Biden, plans to pack the Supreme Court. Let's say they win the election and then increase the number of justices from the current 9 to 13. I picked 13 because it's a lucky number.
If things go desperately sideways during the Harris administration and, despite the best efforts of their allies in the entertainment industry, academia and the news media, a Republican somehow wins in 2024, what will happen? Well, precedent having been set, that president will pack the court, too and increase the justice count from 13 to 17.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Since all the other courts draw their logical foundations from SCOTUS rulings, this will create wild whiplash in our legal system. One year, it will be perfectly normal to marry a goat and the next year it will be against the law. No one will be able to predict anything.
Bookworm has an excellent post on this as well, taking things in a darker direction.
Court packing is one of the first — and inevitably irreversible — steps in deconstructing a Constitutional government and replacing it with a socialist police state. There are many examples throughout history, but most recently, remember this from 2004, when Hugo Chavez took the first step in turning his country into a one-party socialist nightmare:
The Venezuelan Congress dealt a severe blow to judicial independence by packing the country’s Supreme Court with 12 new justices, Human Rights Watch said today. A majority of the ruling coalition, dominated by President Hugo Chávez’s party, named the justices late yesterday, filling seats created by a law passed in May that expanded the court’s size by more than half.
As I watch the left go completely insane and run towards instability as fast as they can, I've come to a simple conclusion.
A nation with a small and limited government is the most stable.
If your political enemies don't get a lot of power when they win elections, then you can deal with watching their smug, ugly faces contort into smiles of victory every few years. It's no big deal. On the other hand, if they get tremendous power when they win, then you'd best be stocking up on ammo right now.
After I found a way to tidy up my power tools, it was time to face the true chaos in the garage, my wads of multicolored, automotive wires.
My old, but sophisticated storage system - a large, flat, plastic bin with the wires shoved into it, willy-nilly*.
Looking around the Internet for ways to store wires, I came across the idea of wrapping them on spools and then storing the spools on rods, like they do at Home Depot. Brilliant! I went on Amazon and ordered two different types of spools. One was large and obviously too bulky for the 50 or so different color combinations of wire that I had. The other I felt was perfect, a narrow spool made for thread.
They both failed.
While I'm sure these spools work great for thread, insulated wiring is substantially bulkier. After about 8 winds, the wire was over the top of the spool walls and spilling all over the place.
The larger spools would have sufficed, but they occupied too much volume to provide a universal solution.
I ended up doing what I should have done from the start, if I hadn't been in such a hurry. I coiled the wires and secured them with tape.
Sometimes the simplest ways are the best ways.
Here's the math of the problem. Spools and coils are cylinders. Their volume is
Pi * r^2 * h
Where r is the radius of the spool / coil and h is the height.
The spools had uniform volume, regardless of how full they were of wire. With a 1" radius and a height of 2.5", each spool had a volume of about 8 cubic inches.
A coiled spool of wire, taking a representative sample, has a radius of 2 and a height of 0.25. That gives it a volume of about 7 cubic inches.
The Coupe De Grace
I'm almost done with the MGB rewiring project. I think I've made my final version of the center console and as soon as that's wired and installed, I can put the wires away for the foreseeable future. The simple, coiled wires ought to be easier to store than the spools.
I still want to work on another old car, but I think it will be a ~1969 Chevy El Camino SS and if I have my way, I'll only work on the mechanical aspects of the car. While I learned a lot from the MGB rewiring effort, I've quite had my fill of that sort of thing.
In any case, it's simple, coiled wires for the win!
* - It's unjust of me to blame this mess on Willy Nilly. Willy, I apologize.
I had a more interesting post in mind as I continue to organize my garage, but I wanted to keep pulling the thread I developed yesterday wherein I posited that printed money has a corrosive influence on our culture.
Right now, the Normals don't dive into the culture of Tekashi 6ix9ine because there's no reason to do so. Sure, we know that it exists and is probably pretty awful, but we don't understand it. We might if we couldn't print money and had to pay for it.
Below is a racial dot map of Los Angeles and a crime density map of same.
The racial dot map for the center of LA. Green is black, orange is Hispanic, red is Asian and blue is white.
The crime map for Los Angeles. As usual, the black neighborhoods are by far the worst.
Everyone familiar with Los Angeles knows you don't go to Inglewood, Compton or Crenshaw. Then again, there's no need to go there. It's not like they've got anything you want or need that you can't easily get elsewhere.
We also know things are pretty bad there. All that nasty violence and poverty! We really must do something about it, you know. Let's vote for more social spending. That will make us feel better.
We also know that their culture is wretched. We don't consume it, of course and why would we? So much dreadful chanting and pounding and posing. Horrible. Again, we don't really need to know anything about it, do we? It's all kept securely in their neighborhoods and, other than the occasional and justified rioting, it stays there.
We keep it in check with a wall of printed money.
This keeps us safe and it costs us nothing.
When people talk about how we live in bubbles, they usually mean that we live in informational bubbles because we only consume media that agrees with our positions. I would suggest that those bubbles are made of money. We don't need to explore and understand because there's no real cost to us when communities self-destruct.
That wall of printed money lets us pose and preen in the name of Social Justice while real people's lives are destroyed. We don't understand them and we don't need to understand them. We can pretend to care by voting for more social spending. We won't have to pay for that spending ourselves, because it all comes in the form of government debt which is paid for by printing money. We feel good and don't have to pay a price for it.
Best of all, that wall of printed money means we don't have to do the hard work and face the fire hoses and German shepherds of anger from the progressives as we strongly defend the married family and traditional sexual morality. That's the real source of the problems and we'd know this if we ever looked into it. We don't have to because we can just throw borrowed, printed money at it.
Yep, we're living on Easy Street, man. It's all smooth and safe here.
Recently, I suggested that this election was the most surreal of our lifetimes. I talked about the way Joe Biden isn't campaigning and uses a teleprompter in interviews. That the press didn't let us know this was happening led me to this conclusion.
At this point, the Elites have revealed themselves to be so utterly corrupt that I almost want them to win just to see what they'll do next.
It's obvious that the Biden/Harris strategy is to do nothing and let the election be all about Trump's personality. Trump is trying to make a case for his substantial, concrete achievements, but the polls suggest that it doesn't seem to matter. Trump makes our tummies hurt and that's enough to throw him out of office.
Why? Here's why.
Everything is paid for by printing money.
There are no real stakes to policy any more. I can't recall anyone suggesting that the lockdowns have costs and then listing those costs. For example, if Biden said, "I want to lock down the country to defeat the Chicom Flu and that means everyone receiving money from the government, from SS pensioners to GS-15 civil servants, will have to take a 20% hit," the conversation would be substantially different. That's not happening because we're convinced that the choice is between locking down the economy practically for free or everyone dying.
Oddly enough, this occurred to me while watching Matt Walsh comment on a popular rap video. I thought Matt was hilarious, but it was also deeply disturbing and not for the obvious, cultural decadence reasons. Here it is. Enjoy.
As I watched the embedded music video, I couldn't help but wonder about the economics implied in it. Just who pays for those lives and that lifestyle? Even if they're just standing on the corner, high on weed, flashing gang signs and pondering the night's festivities, they aren't self-sufficient. It assumes a productive class that is funding their neighborhoods.
But it doesn't, does it? In reality, it's the printing press that is funding their neighborhoods.
Our society is indeed divided, but it's divided by culture. There are the Normals who produce things, the Elites who think things and then there are the rioters, thugs, THOTs and whatnot that live lives of decadent idleness. Oh sure, they may have jobs, but the 50% of the black community that graduates high school unable to read anywhere near grade level isn't coming close to being revenue-neutral.
Right now, the Normals don't dive into the culture of Tekashi 6ix9ine because there's no reason to do so. Sure, we know that it exists and is probably pretty awful, but we don't understand it. We might if we couldn't print money and had to pay for it.
Lest you think Tekashi isn't that important, it's worth noting that one of his videos has over a billion, that's billion with a "b," hits. Another is over 900,000,000. He has a good half dozen or so others with over 100,000,000 hits. He's a playa.
I would argue that, to a large extent, Tekashi, Cardi B and all the rest are popular because we print money. Printing money has a corrosive influence on the culture as it separates us from reality. It's easy to say that it's racist to criticize the black urban culture because you can't point to any concrete reason it's bad. They're just strong black men and women keeping it 100.
Well, until the currency crisis hits and then things will get real in a hurry.
As for the election, nothing is real there, either. Fracking, green nude eels, reparations, lockdowns, it's all got the consistency of marshmallows. Light and airy and almost totally meaningless. That's why this is all about Trump's personality and not his achievements.
Update: President Trump is asking for a $1.8T stimulus package to fight the effects of the Wuhan Flu lockdown. That will be financed from ... printing presses. This is all so much marshmallowiness.
I had several posts in my head today, but I need to take care of something for wife kitteh and the work day got away from me. I know I posted this to Twitter already, but I really like it.
As a young law student, Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett lived in a house owned by co-founders of People of Praise, a religious community that teaches that men are divinely ordained as the “heads” of both family and faith.
Barrett has not publicly discussed her role with the secretive organization founded in South Bend, Indiana, which some former members have alleged subjugates women.
From the super-secretive People of Praise website's Who We Are page comes this.
Our community life is characterized by deep and lasting friendships. We share our lives together often in small groups and in larger prayer meetings. We read Scripture together. We share meals together. We attend each other's baptisms and weddings and funerals. We support each other financially and materially and spiritually. We strive to live our daily lives in our families, workplaces and cities in harmony with God and with all people.
Man, that's some first-class journalisming right there. PoP is so secretive they have a website with an About Us page and contact information. There's no way to expect anyone to find out more about them with all those layers of subterfuge.
Note: PoP sounds almost identical to the Catholic movement I joined, Cursillo.
From the looks of the polls, the side that tells easily-disproved lies about a Catholic movement, applauds poisoning children with hormone blockers, is fine with babies dying of exposure if they survive an abortion and takes nuns to the Supreme Court to force them to buy contraceptives is going to win, possibly very bigly.
I'm not worried, though. All my social justice Catholic friends are excited about it, so it's got to be fine.
A few years back, I worked for a bigot. She didn't like the color of my skin. At staff meetings, where I was the only member of my race, there was plenty of racial commentary every week.
For the two review cycles that I worked for her, she gave me the worst reviews and worst raises / bonuses of my life. It wasn't close. If I recall, I got zero one year. Her annual write-ups of my performance were nasty and bore no resemblance to what she had said for the previous 51 weeks. The first time I got her performance appraisal, I was stunned. I spoke to her about it and immediately saw that she wasn't going to tell me anything useful.
She simply didn't like me because of my race.
So what? I stuck around for another year because I liked the work and felt I was doing something important. There were plenty of other places I could work, both within and without the organization. In fact, the reason it lasted only two years was that she moved on to another job. I would have stuck with it because I liked the work that much.
Was she a racist? Yes. Was she a jerk? Also, yes. So what was the best way to describe her, a racist or a jerk?
I'd argue that she was just a jerk.
When you complain about having to work with a jerk, everyone knows you're talking about an isolated individual. The solution is simple: escape the jerk. We all know jerks, but, more importantly, we all know that there aren't that many of them. Getting away from a boss who is a jerk usually isn't that hard. Sure, you might have external circumstances tying you to the jerk, but that's typically not the case.
If we call her a racist, that changes the tone of the conversation dramatically. Everyone immediately starts thinking about race and hate and generalizes to the population as a whole. However, since we know she's a jerk, we can see that those generalizations are our own creations.
I'm writing this to collect my thoughts as a response to friends of mine who are in love with the idea of systemic racism. They see it everywhere. If, instead, they saw individual jerks, their construct of systemic racism would dissolve.
Conclusion: If you can easily go somewhere else to escape the unpleasant person, you're dealing with a jerk. If you find unpleasant people everywhere you go, all motivated by race, you're dealing with systemic racism. Next time I get into one of these conversations, I'll try out that line of reasoning.
I could just easily have called her one of these.
Note how the atmosphere of a conversation changes based on how you characterize a bad boss. If you say they're a jerk or a female dog, it's not really that big of a deal. If you say they're a racist, all bets are off.
Game 2 of the NBA Finals between the Lakers and Heat utterly collapsed with just 4.5 million viewers. The embarrassing average is down — wait for it — 68% from last year’s Game 2, which featured a team in Canada.
How bad is the number? It’s the least-watched NBA Finals game on record. Dropping even below Game 1’s 7.41, the lowest-viewed Finals opener in history.
There is no way for the media to spin this positively. Declines of this magnitude are unheard of. Then, factor in the tank-job occurring with the league’s biggest individual and team draw in the Finals — the NBA is officially a disaster.
A ship doesn’t sink for one reason, but undoubtedly, politics sit atop the historical tank.
I've railed in the past about the utter idiocy of what you would think to be seasoned marketing professionals trying to alienate massive chunks of their customer base.
Good Lord, is it so hard to keep out of things that don't relate to your business? The sport is on the decline so you decide to call the core of your customer base racists? All they had to do was apply their existing rules and put an end to the politics on the field, but no, they had to take a "principled" stand, one they didn't take for the murdered Dallas cops. Now their ratings are much lower.
Can't anybody here play this game? ...
What strikes me about all of these cases isn't the partisanship, but the professional incompetence. They can't execute the simplest tasks of their jobs... A sports league shouldn't get into politics. These are basic things, not Bill-Belichickian acts of brilliant subterfuge and subtlety.
I was wrong. What they're doing is actually very brave. They know their ratings are going to fall because they've seen it happen to many times now. They don't care. The truly believe they're fighting hate.
No, really. They truly believe they're fighting hate.
They are willing to lose money, ratings, prestige and whatever else it costs to fight hate. They aren't incompetent, they're simply victims of the ignorance that comes from living inside of their self-created ideological bubble. Yelling at them that their ratings are down isn't going to change anything. They know their ratings are down. What we need to do is somehow break through their cinderblock wall of ignorance and show them that they're chasing leprechauns.
This is a mark of courage and virtue to the progressives.
After yesterday's post on storing corded power tools, I decided to make a simple rack for some of mine. Below is a photo evolution of the effort. It's over 100 today and I've been working in the garage for the last several hours. Posting some photos with comments is all I've got left in the tank.
/whining
Enjoy!
I used 1/2" plywood, connected with butt joints. Old, blorpy wood glue and finishing nails did the real work. I wasn't all that careful with my slot measurements since the only thing they were doing was storing coiled electrical cords.
With the top on, it looks somewhat decent.
Whoops! As usual, I forgot to take account of the width of the top and bottom pieces when I cut the back. Not to worry, its only job is to keep the thing from folding over and collapsing.
The biggest tool I was going to store here was my circular saw. I cut a slot in the top and it fit snuggly. Yay!
The slot from the bottom.
The finished piece with a very small hole cut for the jigsaw and substantially larger ones for the drill and the heat gun. No holes necessary for the sander.
The completed units, cords coiled and put away, on the workbench shelf. I love it!
Hope you are having a great weekend. Talk to you tomorrow.
Last year, I built a second workbench in my garage. It's a great brute of a thing, lag-bolted into the wall with a pair of plywood sheets as the top. The legs are twinned 2x4s. I would bet that you could easily rest a big-block V8 motor on the thing.
My BB-41 workbench right after construction. I name my workbenches after battleships. The first was BB-60.
The shelf on the bottom is where I store my power tools. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but I've come to discover that it was too crude of a plan. I can't stand cordless tools as I never remember to charge the batteries and they always wimp out when I want to use them so everything I have has cords. Cords are a mess and so is that shelf.
Aside: I'd show you the shelf, but my workspace bay in the garage is filled with camping gear that now needs to be put away. We were going camping, but right at the last minute, Governor "Goober" Newsom closed all the campgrounds because he's an idiot and was wetting himself over the Wuhan Flu. Ohioan has more. Lately, we've had a tremendous heat wave and the temperatures have been over 100, so no one wants to help me store the camping gear.
On with the show.
Shoving a bunch of corded power tools on a shelf is a bad idea. The cords droop all over the place and getting the things out is a cause for the sin of Wrath. I took zip ties and tied up the cords from the tools I use the least, but that just means I need to cut the ties to use them and re-zip them when I'm done. More Wrath.
I might actually have some time for myself this weekend, so this morning, I spent some time looking at ways that smart people store corded power tools. I discovered that if you do a little thinking and design your storage solution for the tools you have, you can get some great results. Here are my favorites, with links. Enjoy!
I like the idea of storing my sandpaper with my sanders. Right now it's in my big, automotive tool chest and it's a pain to get at it.
This one is my favorite. Since power tools are long-term purchases, you know what you need to store and can make tailored wall hangers for each. It's not like you'll have a whole new collection of power tools next year. Even if you replace one, they all have the same design and ought to fit in your tailored holders just fine.
I thought this was an elegant design for keeping the cords under control.
