Happily Unemployed

My contract ended yesterday. The best guest for its renewal is 4-6 weeks. Thank God for unemployment!

I am deeply invested in the project and even more deeply invested in the success of the people on the team. As the wise, old man, I've been able to mentor many of my coworkers along the way. I've thoroughly enjoyed it. Unbeknownst to them, I feel guilty when I'm not working as if I'm letting them down. I'm paid by the hour, so I've also felt like I'm letting wife kitteh down if I'm not making money. That's all my own neuroses, not pressure from them.

Anyways, big things have been accomplished and it's been a great ride so far. Going back after a bit will be fine. In the meantime, I'm going to make a point to slow down.

Prayer, Finally

A while back, I blogged about trying to choose prayer over beer and avoid an all too common fate among the men in my family: alcoholism. This morning, I finally relaxed and sat in the Lord's presence. Yesterday, I bought one of those religious candles you sometimes see at Mexican markets, the ones with the exaggerated photo of the Sacred Heart or Mother Mary*. As Mary and I have a thing going on, I chose her.

The candle makes me smile because it's so over the top. Humans are creatures of pageantry and ritual no matter what we say and lighting it this morning made the silence, prayer and listening more fun. Yes, prayer can be fun.

I don't usually recite prayers, but after a while of listening to the Big Guy, I found myself saying Hail Marys. It just felt right. It was, well, fun.

So less coffee, little or no beer**, more prayer and a slower life will be the order of the coming days. If I hadn't been forced into it by the ending of the contract, I'd never have tried it.

Understanding the Liturgy of the Hours

The Liturgy of the Hours is a Catholic thingy where you pray and read scripture at regular intervals throughout the day. I tried it, but it's got a ton of Psalms in it and I was not a big fan of them at the time, so I quit. I'm not sure how I feel about them these days.

At any rate, the reason you pray throughout the day is that the world can quickly drag you back into your habits. You pray and feel great and then 30 minutes later it's like you didn't pray at all. By doing it every three hours or so, you continually reset your head.

Explaining Everything

I've got a new Theory of Everything that I'll share with you another time. It's simple and easy to validate with personal experience. As we can no longer trust anything given to us by journalists, academics or political leaders, we must rely on our own data points. I think I've got the thing worked out. You can be the judge.

Looking for an image of a SciAm cover that was woke, I came across Stat. I'm not sure if it was ever reputable or how popular it is, but perusing a bit of it was like going in to work and listening to the younger crowd, many of them scientists and engineers, talk Critical Race Theory and Transgenderism like they were serious things.

We can't trust anything any more.

* - A Mexican pipefitter friend of mine always referred to her as "Mama Mary" like she was family. Because she is.

** - I drank more than enough last night to celebrate the end of my contract. Beer is the all-purpose tool for life events. Happy? Beer! Sad? Beer! Bored? Beer! Hmm. I think I see how this whole alcoholism thing works. 

In Tragedy There Is Opportunity

The Catican Compound recently experienced a profound tragedy. We're still in shock, trying to make sense of it.

Our overflow reservoir of bacon grease ran dry.

The most optimistic of us see this as an opportunity. It's a chance to grow as we pull ourselves out of despair and sorrow.

We will overcome our difficulties by making more bacon until we have two full containers of delicious grease.

I hope that our story of courage and determination will inspire some young person out there to make an effort to rise above whatever troubles them today.

Slow Motion Bird, Take 1

My new GoPro Hero 9 can shoot at 120 fps which makes for some great slow-motion video. I set it up in front of our bird bath this morning and let it run for about half an hour. It took no time at all to find a bird in the frame, crop the footage in time and size and then reduce the speed to 20%. Here are the results.

It's fuzzy because the camera was too far from the bath. Here's a still from the raw footage to give you an idea of the shot.

For some screwy reason, the GoPro doesn't come with an adapter for a standard camera tripod, or if it does, I'm looking right past it. In any case, the solution is to move the camera closer so the bath almost fills the screen. I'm betting those results will be most satisfactory.

Delicious Dog Food

Wife kitteh makes dog food for the Catican Guards. We use it to supplement their kibble because the Captain of the Guard, Bodie, had lost his appetite. He's an old man now, in his 80s in terms of human years, and we love him dearly.

The dog food has ground beef, sweet potatoes, rice and frozen, mixed vegetables. We've commented that it looks pretty appetizing as a casserole and with a few seasonings, we would eat it. She makes it in large batches, separates it into gallon food storage bags and freezes the bags we're not using.

When the homemade food runs out, I thaw one of my beef stock pucks and give them that. They prefer the beef stock by a good margin.

Recently, I had some beef stock thawed in the fridge with no use for it, so I was adding it to their kibble-homemade combo mix, just to give them a treat. When the stock ran out and they were once more served only the kibble-homemade mix, they would look at their dishes and then look at me, as if to ask, "Where is the good sauce, daddy?" In fact, for two meals running, they only picked at their food.

I remained strong and didn't pull out more stock. I didn't want to make that the new standard and run through my stock of stock. It made me wonder why dog food can't taste like meat. This morning, I looked up the best-tasting dog foods and discovered that dog food is actually taste-tested by people.

It's nice work if you can get it, I suppose.

In any case, here's the list of the best-tasting kibbles ranked by someone who claims to know what dogs want. No warranty is implied with this list, use at your own risk and your mileage my vary.

1. Taste of the Wild Pacific Stream Dry Dog Food
2. Wellness CORE Original Flavor
3. Blue Buffalo Chicken And Brown Rice Recipe Adult Dry Dog Food
4. Natural Balance Wild Pursuit Chicken, Turkey Meal, And Quail

Quail? Really? What, are these quail that got caught in the threshing machine or something? How do you get enough quail to make a difference?

Whatever. Blue Buffalo is available locally, so we might try that. Anything to get those big, round, soulful eyes to look elsewhere.

The Catican Guards in action.

Purple And Yellow

In preparation for my upcoming Dixie 2021 vacation to Arkansas, Mississippi and Alabama, I broke down and bought the 105mm macro lens I had tested out a while back. My contract ends on Thursday, so I'm sprinting to get things finished and train the kids where I work. I don't want the project to suffer in my absence. That means there's only time for a little play.

I took the 105 out into the garden yesterday, without reading the manual, of course, and blasted away. I liked these two shots particularly.

The top one looks like a microphone with one of those fuzzy covers on it. The bottom is a tiny tomato flower. I need to work with the lens a lot more to get comfortable with it, but I think that will happen in Arkansas when I finally have time to breathe.

Using Dimensional Analysis On Shakespeare

I also indulged in a brief discussion with some over-educated children on Twitter yesterday. Their position was that it's important to have the "black" perspective when it comes to considering classic literature. I asked them to define "black." I've worked, lived and played with plenty of black people and if you got them all in a room together, you probably couldn't get them to agree on much of anything. I used these four examples and asked them to tell me which one had the "black" perspective.

1. The Ivorian immigrant
2. The retired E9 Corvette Club member
3. The Southern transplant who made chitlins for her kids
4. The woman who listened to Rush Limbaugh every day in the office

Neither of my interlocutors had anything to offer because there is nothing to offer. I got no responses to these parting shots.

I am skeptical of your racial generalizations. I maintain that racial classifications are worthless as they give us no useful information. My 4 friends are good examples of that. You have not proven otherwise.

and

Racial perspectives are a fantasy. You have not proven otherwise.

Ex: My Ivorian friend and I have spent nights drinking where he laughs and tells stories of his Kenyan wife and how different their cultures are. 

To you, they all look the same => "black" perspective.

The last one was deliberately nasty as I wanted to slap her in the face with the essence of what she was doing. In the process, I slapped myself in the face with what was happening, logically.

If you tell me someone is a retired Navy Master Chief, I can deduce several things about him. He's a serious, accomplished man. He has seen much of the world. He is a leader of men. He has a blue-collar sophistication and his opinions cannot be regarded lightly. I may or may not agree with his views on Shakespeare, but I'd have to grant that there were a lot of life experiences that formed them.

If you tell me that a man is black, I don't know what to do with it. I've lived long enough and known enough people to say that I can't deduce anything at all from that.

A more concise formulation is that skin color has the wrong dimensions for the Shakespeare analysis equations. 

Skin color comes in wombats per hectare and Shakespeare comes in allegories per page. Or something like that. In any case, to make one apply to the other would require a very tortuous set of additional parameters indeed.

Bah. The "black" perspective on classic literature is a meaningless, gibberish equation.

Special Reader Request

If someone wants to come up with a constant that is in wombats per allegory, I'd love to see it!

Super Happy Plus Number One Epiphany

It just dawned on me that what I've been doing over the last several years on this blog is re-deriving MLK's codification of race relations from first principles. The Left in America has so totally screwed up the culture with their white supremacist witch hunt mania that it takes a great deal of effort to pull myself out of it and see what is real.

Sparrows Are A Social Construct

Sparrow moms and dads cooperate to feed their chicks. The workload is too great for one sparrow, so they both do it. If one sparrow parent dies, things go much worse for the sparrowlets.

Here, dad takes a break from his toxic masculinity to feed one of his children.

This is a simple and uncontroversial fact.

At Geneseo College, wherever that is, they've created a new, segregated dorm, Umoja House. Umoja House is based on the proposition that sparrows are a social construct.

Umoja House will create an engaged intellectual community where students of diverse backgrounds can come together in a supportive environment to celebrate their identities while nurturing their leadership skills. Umoja is the first principle of Kwanzaa, meaning "unity."...

Students living in Umoja House will:

Support the needs of students of color by designing and running programs, events, and dialogue in a community-centered space.

Umoja House is also based on the proposition that satire is a social construct. Its name means unity and it's segregated.

Well.

Geneseo is yet another organization that denies that daddy sparrows contribute to the nestlings' welfare. If they acknowledged that, then the whole students-of-color-are-oppressed thing would take a distant back seat to the students-from-unmarried-parents-are-disadvantaged thing. 

I wonder if their biology classes teach that avian racism is the reason chicks who are missing one parent do poorly.

H/T: Instapundit.

Stealing First-and-a-half Base

Alternate Title: You Can't Have A Police State Without Police

Ohioan and I had a conversation off the blog yesterday, discussing my delirious ranting of late about our culture going mad instead of being motivated by conspiracies. I tried to make my point a little more clear there, so I figured I'd do the same here.

It's not a conspiracy if it's never going to work. It's not an evil plot if the intermediate steps prevent the subsequent steps. 

As Manny Ramirez can tell you, you don't steal second base by starting your slide 40' from first.

No, Manny. Just no. Because physics.

If you make it impossible to maintain order in your city, the people charged with keeping order will give up and leave. Bringing in different people to do the impossible doesn't do the impossible. It's still impossible.

Also, good luck bringing in different people. Unlike our Ivy League Elites, the people who might work for them maintaining order actually know how real things are accomplished and can recognize an impossible task when they see one.

If your theory works great on paper, but every experiment in the lab fails, then it's not a practical theory. Critical Race Theory (CRT) is one like that. Building a conspiracy out of clearly unworkable theories isn't much of a conspiracy.

Updated Formulation: If your theory is based on assumptions that are false, it's also not a practical theory. Society falls apart without marriage. If only 25% of your kids are raised in married families, but your theory pretends that 100% are, it's probably an utterly impractical theory. CRT is like that. It's not going to produce anything we might recognize as a functional system. You might get to chaos, but you won't get to a police state.

Mostly because you won't have any police.

Watching Practice Sessions

 ... is mildly interesting, but it's the games that matter, unless you're part of the Chattering Class.

Virginia is fighting for equity in math.

The Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) is moving to eliminate all accelerated math options prior to 11th grade, effectively keeping higher-achieving students from advancing as they usually would in the school system.

Clicking on a link to a Facebook post in that article, I read a Loudon Country School Board member say this:

(A)s currently planned, this initiative will eliminate ALL math acceleration prior to 11th grade.  That is not an exaggeration, nor does there appear to be any discretion in how local districts implement this.  All 6th graders will take Foundational Concepts 6.  All 7th graders will take Foundational Concepts 7.  All 10th graders will take Essential Concepts 10.  Only in 11th and 12th grade is there any opportunity for choice in higher math courses.  

My first reaction to this was that it seemed absolutely bananas, and that it sets a soft cap on the number of higher math courses students are going to be able to take.  My second reaction was to wonder which outside math learning franchises (Kaplan, Mathnasium, etc.) are publicly traded, because I foresee their stock soaring.

This really is bananas and it's another example of insanity - thinking without rational structure. There is no plan. Kids from unmarried families tend to have lower expectations, poorer diet, unpredictable sleep schedules and chaotic home lives. That's why they're not realizing their potential.

Our secular faith denies the advantages of married families which is actually a denial of objective reality which is a hallmark of insanity. And so, to help "disadvantaged youths" in their "communities," we eliminate advanced math classes for everyone.

The "disadvantaged youths" are still screwed because we didn't address marriage. Now we're taking away tools from the "advantaged youths" so all youths will achieve the same results.

We are deliberately handicapping our human capital. You only do that when you have no competition. It's like designing an NFL offense around nothing but trick plays. So long as no actual games are covered by the news media and the academics watch nothing but practices, the talk will be about how brilliant it all is.

But games are being played. They look like this.

Or maybe it's more like this.

Kids in India. Do you think their schools have eliminated advanced math classes?

Right Wing Conspiracy Theories

 ... are all wrong because a conspiracy implies some kind of rational thought behind it. There is no rational thought. There is no plan. There is only madness. We are dealing with people who think they are receiving radio transmissions on their fillings from the planet Zongo. 

Two things tipped me off to this. The first was the Racial Justice crowd reacting to this.

In Columbus, Ohio, a cop was called because one black chick was attacking another black chick with a knife. The cop drew his gun and shot the knife-wielding attacker dead as her arm was in motion and she was about to gut the other black girl like a trout.

The following three reactions provide a representative sample. I'm not including White House spokeswomxn Psaki's reaction which was along the same lines.

Valerie Freaking Jarrett, heap big squaw in the Obama White House: "A Black teenage girl named Ma’Khia Bryant was killed because a police officer immediately decided to shoot her multiple times in order to break up a knife fight. Demand accountability. Fight for justice. #BlackLivesMatter."

The ACLU of Ohio: "The systems that allowed George Floyd to be murdered remain FULLY intact. Moments after we celebrated a win for police accountability in Minneapolis, news broke that @ColumbusPolice murdered a 15 year old Black girl. Her name was Ma'Khia Bryant. Say her name. #BlackLivesMatter"

LeBron James: 

This is the white cop who saved the black girl's life with quick thinking, steady nerves and a great shot. He's since been doxxed, of course.

This finally convinced me we're dealing with insanity.

There Are No Conspiracies

The primer for this conclusion was reading some right-wing thinker trying to come up with the progs' plan to govern their cities after the cops had bailed. It was all about national control. The cops would leave and then the National Guard or some such military force would come in, with the strings all pulled from DC. Yes! Yes, that's it! Of course! The Marxists all want complete control from DC! It's all so clear now!

It's immediately obvious that such a plan could never work. Picture the Guard moving in to Baltimore and dealing with shootings there. It would take all of fifteen seconds for the howling to begin. "Racism! Of the Systemic kind!" It's not the cops, it's any authority figures imposing rules at all. The progs aren't planning on centralizing power. Get that out of your head forever. There is no plan.

If you must see things in a logical sequence try this one.

1. Remove the police
2. hsdlhucahf akxdkpawd9 q jnn
3. Utopia!

Men Need Tampons

We are dealing with people who sincerely believe that some men have periods and some men can be pregnant. If you disagree they begin screaming at you.

Stop. Full stop. That's what genuinely crazy people do. Genuinely crazy people do not have plans that you can comprehend. Trust me, I tried to do this. My previous wife became a psychotic. I spent over a year trying to get into her head and see the world as she did. If I really, really concentrated, I could do it for 10 minutes, max. After that, I'd lose the thread and be unable to get back into it for hours.

It's Not Working So Do More Of It

We've done the Black Lives Matter thing for almost a year now. The result is about 2,000 extra dead blacks. Sane people would see this and recalibrate their thoughts. Instead, Valerie Jarrett is now wailing about cops breaking up a knife fight where a black girl was about to die. She's using the Black Lives Matter hashtag to defend the murder of a black. Valerie's political views have driven her insane.

Power Is All That Matters

The only area where the progs' behavior makes sense is their quest for more and more power. They're not going to do anything with the power, they're just trying to amass it. The border has dissolved and we're being flooded with illegals. This is not to feed the employment rolls of MegaCorp with cheap labor as some right-wing thinkers say. It's not to save People of Color. It's simply to import votes so the progs win every election, everywhere, forever. There's no plan beyond that because there's no anything after that. All that's left is money printing to pay the bills of insanity.

Dear Podcasters

I listened to the Daily Wire's Backstage show yesterday. It's my favorite of theirs, where all their hosts get together and talk about the month's events. They are all well-read and logical. Each had their own theory of what is happening in America right now. Each one's theory had big flaws which the others pointed out.

The reason that each theory had flaws is that there is no theory. There is no plan, there is no philosophy, there is no conspiracy. This is simply a religious frenzy. Instead of throwing virgins into volcanoes, they're throwing cops into prison. Chauvin may or may not have deserved it, but the reactions above show that it's not about Chauvin and Floyd. 

It's systemic, alright. Systemic madness.

Special Bonus Gratuitous Data Point

Hundreds of students at @OhioState occupied the student union for a #BLM protest in support of violent, knife-wielding teen #MaKhiaBryant. pic.twitter.com/Tdf84ZSf6A

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) April 22, 2021

Derek Chauvin Was

 ... someone I never met. The altercation was in a place I've never been. The big dude with all the fentanyl in his bloodstream was also someone I never met. I didn't keep up with the trial, other than what I couldn't avoid. The event doesn't seem to have altered the course of our supertanker of cultural rot, so we keep lumbering on in the direction of broken families and massive debt.

Hoorah.

Instead of being glued to the political yakkers, I experimented with my GoPro Hero 9 yesterday. The experiments were a success in that they discovered a dead end. Dig this horrible photo. Click on it to see its full horribilosity.

Motivation: I love derelicts. Derelict buildings, derelict barns and most especially, derelict ships. I don't know why, but there's something about stuff falling apart that fascinates me. I like to wonder what it would take to rehabilitate them. When you drive through the rural countryside, you see tons of derelicts. Most of them are barns, which are built with an expected lifespan*. It's too hard to maintain them, so you build them cheaply and let them decay into collapse.

How do you photograph the things while driving? Dittos for houses and boats. You can't ever be sure if someone isn't still living there and would take umbrage, perhaps buckets of umbrage**, at a stranger stopping and getting out of his car to take a photo of their ruined property. With my new Hero 9 and its suction cup attachment device, I thought I might stick it on the passenger-side window, turn on the video and drive. I could then extract stills of any derelicts I passed.

The image above was the result of my first experiment. Meh. It doesn't hold a candle to stopping, rolling down the window and unlimbering the Nikon Artillery Piece. I had hoped to find a remote shutter trigger for my Nikon D3500, but it turns out that the 3500 is one of the few Nikons that cannot be triggered remotely. Argh. So much for attaching that brute to the window and firing away while driving.

So we still don't have a solution that is both unobtrusive and produces quality results. Oh well. As Thomas Edison said to William Joseph Hammer as they trudged back to the lab, carrying big screen TVs and Nike shoes after rioting for justice, "Bill, there's got to be a better way to take photos from a moving car. If we keep working, we just might find it."

* - This is only a theory on my part, city slicker that I am.

** - I have to admit that I don't know umbrage quantity lingo. Is it hectares of umbrage? Gallons of umbrage? Square ohms of umbrage? Hmmm.

Genius

Dig this video from Take Charge Minnesota. Pure genius.

Mostly Nothing turned me on to them and when we comment-discussed their efforts to restore the black family in our culture, Tim asked the crucial question: How do they plan on doing it? Are they going to resort to finger-wagging?

Well, the answer is right there and it's brilliant. A cat with a history of prodigious finger-wagging, I would have wagged several fingers at the same time. Instead, they opted for a softer approach. I love that it's all good cheer and kindness. It doesn't tell you that you're a sinner, it just shows you a better way.

I liked them before, but I'm sold now. I feel like a refrigerator salesman who tries a new razor and loves it so much that he quits his job for Whirlpool to go join the razor company. Kendall Qualls, the chap who runs Take Charge Minnesota, is happy to work with others. I've started to hunt for connections and allies for them.

With my fulltime retirement hitch coming up in 9 days, I'll have the time to pull threads. This is going to be fun.

Special Bonus Tidbit

Wife kitteh saw the video and asked if we were supporting them. I said yes and told her how much we'd donated. She wanted us to give them more. 

Yep. It's like that.

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The C And The Filament Proclaim His Glory!

... where C is the speed of light.

Yesterday, sitting in church before Mass, I was supposed to be praying, but I never do. It's too hard and I'm too lazy. Instead, I look around with my mind wandering.

Thinking of a conversation here on the blog about life as an adventure story, I stared at the incandescent lights over the altar. Watching the lights mixed with the thought that God has created the setting, a basic plot structure and, as the heroes and heroines of our story, we get to choose our own path.

In Orthodoxy, Chesterton compares reality to the world of a fairy tale. Things don't have to be the way they are. Grass could have been blue instead of green. More to the point, He could have created a world where there weren't many fixed laws and instead there was fantastic, whimsical chaos.

Going back to the light bulb, isn't it cool that we live in a world with so many natural laws to discover and inventions to create? It's like there's a constant dialog like this:

The Big Dude: Yo, Edison! Check this out. Current going through a resistive wire can make it glow.

Thomas Edison: Whoa! That's cool! How does it work?

TBD: You go figure it out. I gave you a world that consistently responds to experimentation, so it's all waiting for you to find.

Edison: Awesome! To the lab, men! There are divine Easter eggs to discover all around us!

I'm currently reading Killian Healy's Awakening Your Soul to the Presence of God and thoroughly enjoying it. It's an easy read with some nuggets of wisdom that I've heard before, but never absorbed until Killian rephrased them. One describes how to develop a delighted love for God through observing the natural world.

Like making time-lapse movies of tomatoes. Another divine Easter egg. Sweet!

Yesterday's photo. The plants have begun to fruit, so growth will stall out as they put their energy into providing us with delicious Roma tomatoes for wife kitteh's homemade sauce.

Ego And Pride

Preface: I'm retired from my career, come back as a contractor-consultant. My contract expires in 11 days and the customer is desperate to renew it ASAP. We're in the middle of rolling out an important product where I've been the chief engineer, designer and developer.

On with the show.

To say I'm looking forward to my upcoming, semi-voluntary vacation would be an understatement. Emotionally, it will be a watershed moment. The vacation will be a solo trip to Arkansas, Mississippi and Alabama, dubbed Dixie 2021. As far as I'm concerned, it could be used to date things. There would be BD21 and AD21 - Before Dixie and After Dixie. It's going to be epic.

But ...

I have this huge fear that in the couple of months I'll be gone, waiting for a new contract, the team will discover they don't need me back.

Is it rational? Who knows? We'll find out. It's certainly not rational from a selfish point of view. I've run the numbers and there's no longer any financial need for me to work. If they called me and said, "We love you, KT, but feel free to stay retired," I could move on to culinary school, sailing, metalworking, art, photography, diving and being an annoying crusader for married families. I've 120 hours a week planned after retirement.

But what if they don't want me to come back? I'd be crushed. We can be such fragile creatures, no?

I can't bear the thought. When the project is fully fielded and stable, I want to go out, surrounded by coworkers weeping the bitter tears of despair. I shall idly straighten my cravat, brush a speck of dust from the irreproachable Mechlin lace at my wrists and say encouraging things with a whimsical, insouciant air.

Yep. That's the way to do it, not run out of the office like an unwanted cur.

How Many Sequels Do We Need To See?

KT's Wild, Tinfoil Hat Theory of Secession: If it comes, secession will come for practical, functional reasons. At some point, it will become impossible to live anything like a normal life while attached to blue America.

Way back when, I remember watching a James Bond movie in the theater thinking, "The franchise has become a set of chase scenes glued together with an implausible plot. It's all about the chase scenes and nothing else." I'm sure you could say the same for the Fast and Furious franchise.

Daunte Wright got shot by accident in Minnesota after he resisted arrest. The political leaders blamed the cops and unsubtly implied they were racist. Racially-motivated riots ensued. Now we're sitting through another sequel. Last night, there were riots in DC and, of course, Portland, triggered by catalysts that are unclear to me.

If you took the time, you could calculate the expected value of the number of days between riots across the country. Blacks, most lacking intact families, commit a hugely disproportionate number of crimes. Cops have to respond. The Elites* cheerlead for a race war. When cops and suspects come in contact, sometimes the suspect resists arrest and gets killed. Riot!

I'm sure it's subject to a standard Mean Time Between Failures analysis.

We are doomed to experience more riots no matter what we do as individuals. In that chain, the cops have and will continue to respond by removing the "cops have to respond" link. That leads to more dangerous, wrecked cities for the rest of us. As long as we remain chained to Blue America, this will continue.

The cities aren't getting rebuilt. We may print money and hand it out to the victims of the riots, but there's a difference between holding colored pieces of paper and having a functional, urban shop. Best Buy becomes a burned-out husk which the Elites turn into digits in a corporate balance sheet with printed money. You can't shop at a balance sheet. In the end, Normals will have to choose between secession and living in chaos and ruin.

Powerline has done a good job tracking the most recent riots in Minnesota. Local sheriffs have been brought in to supplement the city cops. Blue politicians are telling them not to use force and the sheriffs are threatening to bail out, leaving the cops on their own. To me, it seems obvious that cops will continue to flee blue cities. Like an army that knows it is defeated, the soldier-cops will melt away, leaving blue America with no tools to maintain order.

Note that I'm not talking politics, I'm talking about the practical aspects of providing a livable society for the average dude and dudette. This is the logical next film in the franchise where the Elites don't understand how things work. Daunte's death and the subsequent riots were perfectly predictable. The Elites' response guarantees another.

That can't go on forever.

You could write this same blog post about the debt, the squandering of our human capital and the dissolution of our borders. All contribute to an unlivable society for Normals.

There won't be secession for political reasons, it will be a secession born of sheer resignation and exhaustion.

I know all of this is true. The aliens of Zontar-6 have been sending me brain waves, telling me about it.

Special Bonus Data Point From Last Night

Antifa set the Apple store in Portland on fire pic.twitter.com/h3hqxJW1gq

— Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec) April 17, 2021

Super Special Additional Bonus Data Point Submitted Without Comment

DC police are outnumbered and surrounded by Antifa militants. pic.twitter.com/AH11fixkr7

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) April 17, 2021

* - I've bought into Kurt Schlichter's separation of America into Elites and Normals. He's a wild-eyed firebrand, but I'm sympathetic to his themes.

Prayer Instead Of Beer?

I've got 13 more days before I turn into a pumpkin at work. My contract is ending and there will be roughly 2 months before it's renewed. It's no big deal to us, financially, but it's a big deal to the project. We're launching it for real right about now. It's big, it's complicated and I'm the primary architect / engineer of the thing. 

For the next 13 days, just like the last 14, I'll be working as hard as I can to get things documented and debugged. I want it bulletproof and well-understood by the time I leave so the team doesn't get blindsided by something. The workdays have been long and my sleep schedule is all horked up as I sometimes awake at 0300 and then can't get back to sleep, thinking about what needs to be done. My workday then starts at 0330.

By the end of the day, I'm fried. Habitually, I turn to beer, but I like the results of that less with each passing day. Dealing with brain fatigue by consuming low-grade poison is stupid. Looking up some tips on dealing with deep-fried brain, there's talk about "mindfulness" which is just a watered-down, secular echo of prayer.

Hmm.

Sadly, our local Perpetual Adoration Chapel is still closed due to Wuhan Flu Paranoia. That was my go-to sanctuary of prayer and meditation. Relying on somewhere I had to drive to was a poor choice in the first place. It's useless unless I've got an hour to spare. When I was a pup, I used to hear older people talk about having an area in their home they used as a small chapel. I thought it was interesting, but never did anything about it. It might be time to try creating one now.

The beer never really works anyway.

Note: When I pray, I don't recite. I used to start with the Rosary, but I don't do that so much any more. Instead, I try to blank my mind and listen to what The Big Dude wants to tell me.

Watching the critters at Ken Little's feeding station in Hoover, AL is always a good second choice.

Remodeling Vs. Moving

I don't know about where you are, but the real estate market in San Diego is crazed. I'd blogged before about our desire for a bigger lot and a house closer to future grandkittens, but that's all off now. Instead, we're going to remodel our 1970s-era house and somewhat modestly at that.

Like most houses of the time, it's broken up into small, dedicated rooms. There's a dining room we never use, a living room we never use and a family room where no more than 3 people at a time can comfortably watch Alabama drop 52 on Ohio State. The kitchen is adequate for parties up to 12 people, but beyond that, it's cramped. Cooking for 20 or more requires making some things a day in advance.

And so, we met with a designer and an architect, both with more than a touch of the Pampas about them. I've been through remodels and built a custom home. Wife kitteh has been through at least one remodel. We described what we wanted to the young Argentinian couple who had good ideas and plenty of enthusiasm. I smiled at my reaction to them. Part of me wondered if they were too young to be competent. Then I remembered that people my age wouldn't be doing that kind of work any more.

Soon, everyone will be too young to be competent to me. :-)

The other reaction I had was one of relaxation. I was ready to hire them after about an hour, but they didn't read the signals and the young lady kept talking. As Ohioan at Heart knows, you don't talk past the point of sale. Once the prospect has indicated a willingness to buy, all you can do is hurt yourself. But she chattered on in a charming way and I again wondered bemusedly at her youthfulness. It was cute.

I can predict the future of the project. They'll come back with a design or three, I'll go chalk them out in 1-1 scale on a blacktop basketball court nearby, wife kitteh and I will walk through it, there will be a quick and obvious choice and off we'll go. It's not that hard, really, once you know the tricks.

I brought this plan up to the kids and they were surprised. They had never heard of such a thing! They had 3D models and everything! Bah. 3D models indeed. Pull up a chair and let Uncle Tubby show you how to choose a floorplan, children.

Finally, I was relaxed because I realized an 80% solution would be fine. It doesn't need to be perfect. When you buy a house, you never get perfection, you get 80% at best and then you live. Your life isn't incomplete because the stove is here instead of there. You flow around your environment and adjust for it. It's all good.

People make fun of Bob Ross, but he's got the right idea. Searching for perfection is exhausting. That energy can be used for better things.

So Much Programming!

At the end of a long day, I checked my YouTube subscriptions and watched this video yesterday. It's someone called Gina Florio talking about how she was red pilled. I have no idea who or what a Gina Florio is, but what captivated me was her description of the cult indoctrination at Harvard.

Also yesterday, while waiting for some scripts to run, I engaged in a desultory conversations on Twitter. Here's the exchange that seeded the clouds of conversation.

Nope and nope. It's not the failure of the state, it's the collapse of the traditional family. You can have as robust a state as you like, but without married moms and dads, you're screwed.

— K T Cat (@ktcat) April 13, 2021

I had a back-and-forth for a bit with a young, black man who blamed systemic racism for everything, probably up to and including his acne. I brought up the example of Baltimore, wherein sincere, white anti-racists and black activists have run everything for 60 years and he replied, apparently unironically, with a Baltimore Sun story on police malfeasance that featured this photo.

I dunno, man, if I didn't know better, I'd say that looked like a white cop, undoubtedly full of racism, with a pair of black women in some sort of civilian, supervisory roles. That such an obvious data point slipped by the dude attests to the thoroughness of his racialist training.

Finally, there was a story on Fox Business about inflation numbers. I guess March came in at 0.6% after February's 0.4%. Of particular interest were all the right-wing cultists in the comments blaming Biden for printing money like mad. Um, guys? We just finished 4 years of Mr. Debt. Trump and his buddies in the legislature did the same thing. Certainly not to the level of madness of the Ds, but let's not kid ourselves here.

And so everyone received their inputs and everyone ran their subroutines. At the end of the day, I went downstairs and wife kitteh was watching PBS news. I hadn't seen it in a long while. I felt like I was watching a Soviet newscast. The proper narratives* were being reinforced with every story in a tone and patter fit for stupid children.

Don't think that I'm sneering at the people involved in these stories. The young, black man was pathetic only in that his programming had turned him into a whiny, self-defeating loser. The conservatives at Fox Business had lost whatever acumen they had and were merely repeating talking points like magpies. Worse yet, many bragged about getting out of the market to avoid some kind of Biden Crash when cash might be the dumbest investment you can have during an inflationary period.

I know we're all programmed in some way or another, myself included, but yesterday was full of extreme examples of it.

* - PBS had three narratives in particular.

1. Diversity, diversity, diversity. Race is all.
2. Democrat political leaders are so wise and kind! See? Here is Governor Newsom spending money to fight wildfires which are caused by Climate Change Global Warming.
3. When it came to the government, the PBS female android told us how much was being spent and how much more would be spent later. There was no reference to what would be accomplished, only that the 5-year plan to spend elebenty zillion dollars would be met. An innocent dupe or not, I couldn't help being utterly uncharitable and feeling that she deserved everything that was coming at her.

San Diego NASCAR

I recently bought a GoPro Hero 9 along with a suction-cup vehicle attachment. I attached it to the interior of my Juke's windshield and took it for its maiden run yesterday morning. 

The GoPro 9 has a TimeWarp feature which will do accelerated videos with stabilization, but I couldn't figure it out, so I just took a normal video and brought it into Adobe Premiere. I accelerated the video by a factor of 4, so the effective speed of the car is 260-280 MPH. 

The GoPro 9 video quality and size is substantially better than my old GoPro 3's. I discovered that larger videos need larger bandwidth, so I couldn't use my old standby data rate settings and had to increase them quite a bit. It still ended up a bit pixelated, but that's OK for a trial. In any case, enjoy!

More Thoughts on Daunte Wright

Police bodycam footage was released and apparently the cop shot the wrong thing at Daunte. She says she meant to taze him, but shot him instead. That's a tragedy. Cops are going to make mistakes. Daunte would still be alive if he'd obeyed the lawful orders of the police. He didn't and now he's dead. 

The natural response these days is to loot Target and burn Dollar Tree. Or is that loot Nike and burn Dorman's Auto Supply? Maybe it's loot and burn all four. After that, we will criticize the police and send them for more training. The cop who made the mistake may be tried in court for murder.

More cops will leave, more businesses will flee and more fatherless kids will run wild with the Elites patting them on the head and giving them permission. Money will come to the local government and insurance companies from "Covid Relief" or "Infrastructure" bills whose thousands of pages will be unread by any one person and whose multi-trillion dollar price tag will be paid by the Fed. No one will have to work an extra minute of overtime to fund the things since it's all colored pieces of paper.

The debasement of the currency is the shadow cast by the debasement of the culture.

Income And Wealth Are Markers Of Behavior

Over at The Grumpy Economist, there's a good essay that amplifies another good essay on Bidenomics. Here's a summarizing tidbit.

Growth

Old view: Scarcity is the default condition of economies: the demand for goods, services, labor and capital is limitless, their supply is limited. ...faster growth requires raising potential by increasing incentives to work and invest. Macroeconomic tools—monetary and fiscal policy—are only occasionally needed to deal with recessions and inflation.

New view: Slack is the default condition of economies. Growth is held back not by supply but chronic lack of demand, calling for continuously stimulative fiscal and monetary policy. J.W. Mason.. said, that “‘depression economics’ applies basically all of the time.”

It goes on to debate the economic models, charts, graphs and third-derivatives of M2 money supply vs hectares of soybeans in Kansas. Or something like that.

Keep that in mind when you read about yesterday's riots in Minneapolis over the death of a young criminal who was shot by police while resisting arrest. Here's what the state's governor had to say.

“I am closely monitoring the situation in Brooklyn Center,” Democrat Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz tweeted after the situation turned chaotic. “Gwen and I are praying for Daunte Wright’s family as our state mourns another life of a Black man taken by law enforcement.”

There's no mistaking that message. The cops, employees of the local government, "took the life" of a "Black man," Daunte Wright. Their boss' s boss, is signally to everyone that they're "taking lives." Just how long would you continue to work in a dangerous job for such people?

Here's a glimpse of the "Black man" from his own social media feeds. H/T: Ian Miles Cheong.

I blurred out a swear word here.

You're losing cops in defense of guys like this. In exchange for that, Washington DC will print money and send it to you. That's the essence of what's going on across the country, whether it's the open border down south or the ongoing riots in Portland or the San Diego School District eliminating tests and homework in the service of "racial justice."

All of those graphs and charts are derivative data points. That is, they're showing you results once-removed from the actual problem. The reason the debt is so massive and the reason we're having to print money in the first place is that we've debased our culture. Having isn't connected to earning. Success is not connected to work, it's connected to "equity," whatever that is. Kids like Daunte are being processed through the school system on a conveyer belt regardless of their performance because there are too many for the school system to hold back when they fail.

One more data point. We're losing wars without acknowledging that we lost or why we lost. Dig this.

Liberal social values are now the number one propagandistic weapon to valorize imperialism and militarism, hence all the feel-good talk about LGBT Day at the CIA, the diverse Pentagon, etc. etc. The US military doesn't fight endless wars for feminism.https://t.co/aSmz341cC7 https://t.co/LL2n0vaHP1

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 10, 2021

Glenn is at least partially right, but he's missing the bigger point. While our military leadership gibbered about "diversity being a force multiplier," we lost the longest-running war in our nation's history to a technologically inferior enemy whose entire ihe kpatara ịdị adị* is the elimination of all diversity, everywhere. And yet, no one is aking our Joint Chiefs of Staff about this any more than anyone is asking Tim Walz about his preference for thugs over cops.

The Elites are living in a world of pure thought where feelings are the dominant currency. The Normals, like cops in Minneapolis and Army infantrymen in Afghanistan, live in the world of Rudyard Kipling. We don't have an economic problem, we have a cultural one.

Bonus Data Point

How long can we allow the destruction of private property to continue? Or, more to the point of the post, how long can you pay for the destruction with printed money?

BREAKING: Rioters in Old Montreal have smashed almost every business along Notre-Dame Street W. pic.twitter.com/zgQlJR4fau

— John R Kennedy (@JRK_Media) April 12, 2021

* "Ihe kpatara ịdị adị" is Igbo for raison d'être. Raison d'être is French and the French are white so raison d'être is racist, hence the Igbo translation. We try not to be racist on this blog.

Bear Aesthetics

This blew me away. The bear was clearly bothered by the cone laying on its side.

Grizzly bear casually fixing a fallen safety cone as they walk down the road pic.twitter.com/iqPGP0O6mF

— The Feel Good Page ❤️ (@FeelGoodPage11) April 9, 2021

Have a great Sunday, everyone!

H/T: Sissy Willis.

Young Women Need A Family

This morning, I was prepping some spare ribs for a dinner party tonight, listening to my Confederate Railroad Mix on Spotify when this song started playing.

I absolutely love it, but today, I heard something different. Anticipating my upcoming break from work, my subconscious is pondering how to help Take Charge Minnesota. It hit me that the meaning of this song is the way a family protects its girls. That's another way to look at what TCM is trying to achieve.

The message is that the girl won't be able to resist you physically, but the men in her family sure will.

True dat.

God Hits FF

I thoroughly enjoyed the most recent Uncommon Knowledge podcast wherein Peter Robinson, the best interviewer in the world for my money, chatted with Stephen Meyer about evolution.

As a Catholic, I don't have a coelacanth in the fight. It's all one to me whether it was natural or whether God intervened. For that reason, I can be skeptical about both sides. A previous UK podcast turned me onto the mathematical problems with evolution and since then, I've fallen more on the Divine Nudge side of the debate.

In short, for higher order animals that don't reproduce often and have small litters, like whales, you just don't get enough throws of the dice to achieve bodily transformations. That is, with complex creatures, most mutations cause deadly deformities in bone structure and organ performance. To get one that creates a new structure without killing the animal, you'd need more and more chances for mutation. Instead, in animals like whales and elephants, you get fewer and fewer because their reproductive cycles are very long and their litters are very small.

In the Cambrian Explosion, the biosphere went nuts. Lots and lots of new and very novel species came into being in an evolutionary blink of an eye. In fact, dig this.

The replacement of the late Precambrian Ediacaran biota by morphologically disparate animals at the beginning of the Phanerozoic was a key event in the history of life on Earth, the mechanisms and the time‐scales of which are not entirely understood...The extremely short duration of the faunal transition from Ediacaran to Cambrian biota within less than 410 ka supports models of ecological cascades that followed the evolutionary breakthrough of increased mobility at the beginning of the Phanerozoic.

In plain English, a whole bunch of new living things popped into existence over a period of 410,000 years. 410,000 years might as well be next week from a mutation probability point of view. I can kind of suspend my disbelief at that, given the reproductive rates of plants and simpler animals, but combined with the issues raised above about bigger, complex animals, I find the gradual evolutionary change theory hard to swallow.

So what happened?

KT's Theory Of Evolution: God got bored. He made the Universe and all of its Laws of This and Equations of That, but it was taking soooooo long to get to the good parts. The Big Dude decided to hit the FF button on the remote and zip through the fern-into-redwood scene. It was way too boring anyway. He probably figured that by the time humans were clever enough to look into the evolutionary record, they'd have figured out that He made the whole thing so why not leave really big clues about His existence?

Or maybe He just did it to see what kind of intellectual Gordian knots Richard Dawkins would create trying to explain it all.

Searching on "multiverse," I got this image from Adobe Stock. It's called Multiple Glowing Bubble Universes. That's, like, totally scientific and stuff, man. No faith needed. Plus, it's super cool after about 5 rips on the bong.

George Chauvin

 ... is the way most of us should think of the trial in Minnesota. That is, we should know so little about it that we get the names confused. A rando thug died while overdosing as a rando cop held him down. If it had been either of my brothers, I'd have shrugged and moved on to the day's activities. I mean, it's not like this was a surprise. It wasn't going to end any other way. Drug addicts are like that.

KT's Summary of the George Floyd incident: Drug addicts come in all colors. Sometimes, drug addicts overdose. Drug addicts are very likely to encounter cops. Cops come in all colors. In this case, the overdose and the encounter happened simultaneously while the addict was black and the cop was white. BURN IT ALL DOWN!

It does at least provide an interesting problem in logic. Can you murder someone who is in the middle of killing themselves? If Floyd had a gun to his head and pulled the trigger, did Chuavin murder him if his bullet went through Floyd's skull first?

This case is even murkier than that. There's no indication that Chauvin intended to kill Floyd. There's certainly no indication that race was a factor. The question is really, "Can you accidentally murder someone who is in the act of committing suicide?" Of course, in a country where trees can be considered racist, it hardly matters what anyone's intent might have been. The race-crazed among us will do what they do. Wise people are even now preparing for the burning and looting.

On the right, it's an opportunity to attack the media for biased coverage. Also, we should note that the sun rose in the east this morning. I wrote that last fact down in my experimental journal. I'm beginning to see a pattern.

The death and the trial should be a distasteful non-event for the rest of us, not some kind of societal inflection point. The world is full of such things every day. 

Going back to my summary above, it suggests our cities were doomed from the start. Given the size of the populations involved and a time frame of years, such an interaction was inevitable from a probabilistic point of view. 

If you want to read an expert take on the trial, visit Powerline. Here's their latest.

On a much happier note, I found the excellent webcam below. When I work from home, I have my Citrix client open on one screen and a nature webcam on the other. I find it calming and cheerful. I like the aquatic ones the best, but they've been a bit murky lately, so this one is my go-to these days.

Enjoy!

Tomatoes, Compound Interest And Salvation

The TomatoCam is working reasonably well these days. It's a Raspberry Pi 3 with an inexpensive webcam attached. It takes a shot every day at 1100, storing the resulting jpg file in its internal memory. Every so often, I download them to my desktop PC and see what I've got. The Pi also has a web server which allows me to scroll through the images.

Here's the most recent movie, sans about ten images taken during dark and rainy days. It's got decent resolution, so it might be worth a full screen click.

Compound Interest

The plant growth is clearly accelerating. It occurred to me this morning as I watched it that this is an example of compound interest. If the plants grow 5% a day, then as they get larger, that 5% becomes greater with each passing day. That makes sense as their roots and leaves extend their reach, bringing more noms into the plant to be converted into growth.

Salvation

On Easter Sunday, our parish gave out the book, Salvation: What Every Catholic Should Know, to each family. Meh.

Michael Barber, the author, drives down Grace Boulevard as the road to salvation and, in the first chapter at least, he minimizes the value of Self Help Street and Effort Way.

Yuck. That was a horrible metaphor. Enough of that.

Anyway, that kind of talk always rubs me the wrong way. What's the point of a covenant if one side is so feeble that they can't be expected to do anything other than receive Grace? What's sin if we're such abject failures? I mean, if I'm that unworthy and I can't at least strive to be better, then why should I work to improve myself? Why am I going to Confession?

We have a covenant with the Catican Guards. Their job is to not eat the furniture, not poop in the house* and, in general, be amiable creatures. In exchange, we treat them like beloved three-year-olds. When we were training them, if they broke the rules, they got swats and yelling. They're not expected to do much, but they're expected to do something and they were expected to improve from their earlier states.

When religious writers talk about how we're saved by Grace and not by our own works, it drives me bonkers. It makes no sense to me at all. Yeah, I get it, God treats me like a toddler and I'm expected to do very little. But I'm expected to continually improve nonetheless.

If dogs can do it, so can I.

* - The no-pooping-in-the-house rule is lifted for the smallest one if it's raining. Rain is very scary!

The All-Star Game As Atonement For Sin

No one actually believes that twaddle about the new Georgia voting laws suppressing the vote. Certainly not the soulless creatures occupying the board rooms of our corporate titans. That's why they haven't given up their golf memberships at Augusta and they haven't divested from the slave state of China.

Similarly, only the fanatics within the Republican party, perhaps to include Rand Paul, believe in that babble about the debt. Fie upon restraint! We shall spend our children's money, yea unto the last farthing!

Once you have done away with Higher Powers and objective morality, this is where you eventually end. It's not that we've become secular, it's that we've become animals. How does X affect my ability to eat, mate and stay alive? Abstract concepts are dissolved in the acid of the physical world.

Is it possible to devolve and become simple primates again, creatures without a soul? There's a thought to ponder.

In any case, noodling about the fraudulent and empty posing and preening over Georgia, it finally dawned on me why I hated the "public service" ads during the election that told us voting was the most important thing we could do. That's only true if your elected officials control your life more than you do. It's also contingent on there being nothing to us but our flesh.

If that's the case, then voting is a sacrament and all that matters is getting right with the Man. That's the Man in DC, in case you were wondering.

Evolution at work.

It Only Looks Like Bad Luck

I've been a Newcastle United fan since I first started watching English Premier League metric football around 2010. The last several years have been brutal. 

Note: In the EPL, at the end of the season the three worst teams in the league are sent down, "relegated," into the league below them and the three best teams in the league below are "promoted" to the EPL. It makes the end of the season exciting for everyone as they all have a stake in the games, even the bottom feeders. Imagine if the Baltimore Orioles had been threatened with AAA status at the end of the 2019 season.

Newcastle's owner is a greedy idiot who only wants to keep the the team in the EPL for the TV money. His goal isn't a good team, but the cheapest team he can have to end up around 15th place out of 20. He likes to buy good, young talent and then sell them a few years later. He usually hires stiffs as managers, people who will go out and say whatever he wants them to say.

Smaller market franchises like Leeds United can field exciting teams and play terrific ball, but Newcastle's ambitions are simply survival and it shows. I've actually gotten to the point where I want to see them go down this year. They're currently right above the drop zone in the league. The team below them, Fulham, is a legit, small-market team who is working like mad to stay in the EPL.

In any case, I've been watching a lot of bad metric football lately. Yesterday, Newcastle tied one of the better teams, but there were moments when it looked like they might win. This has happened many times during the season. I kept thinking if they had just gotten a break or two, they'd be an average team instead of a horrible one. Dig this from yesterday.

Such bad luck! Dwight Gayle misses scoring by inches and then misses scoring on his follow-up chance by inches. There have been lots and lots of these throughout the year.

That's when it dawned on me that they don't have bad luck. They're just a bad team. When one of the big boys like Manchester City have chances like this, the ball goes into the back of the net. When Newcastle has them, the ball goes off the crossbar, gets tipped away by the goalie or ricochets just barely out of reach of their strikers.

That's not luck. Luck doesn't work that way. Flipping a coin gets you 50-50, not 95-5. When it's 95-5, the explanation is something else.

When your team is near the bottom of the standings and you think they've had a run of bad luck, think again. The scoreboard doesn't lie. They're simply a terrible team.

They Are Risen!

 ... and so is He!

We've got six of each type of watermelon coming up. I'm still looking for some foster homes for them as I don't have room for more than four, total.

Happy Easter, everyone.

Coffee, Keyboard And Bible

I am nearly caught up with Father Mike's Bible In A Year podcast. If you haven't started it, I highly recommend it. First, it's Father Mike, who can bring a smile to your face with his high-energy, chirpy personality. I've read the Bible and lots of theology, but this one is changing my life by changing my view of the world.

This is a hard one to write as my thoughts are incoherent, but we'll give it a go. It's 0545 and I've got my coffee. There will never be a better time to see if I can make sense of what's happening inside. My hope is that it will inspire you to give it a try, even if you're not a believer. The Bible is the most influential book ever written, so it's probably worth a 20 minute daily podcast.

On with the show.

We went to Good Friday service yesterday. I saw it in a completely new way. Having heard and now better understood the covenant God made with the Jews, I saw the sacrifice of Christ crucified and it's covenant with me in a deeper context. The crucifixion was His covenant with me, personally. Just as the Jews were supposed to hold up their end of the bargain, I'm supposed to hold up mine.

KT's Answer To The Question, "What Is Life?"

Life is an adventure story. You're the hero or heroine and the plot is your effort to do God's will throughout your time on Earth. The world is your antagonist, particularly beer and the desire to argue. Well, maybe it's different for you, but those are two big 'uns for me. Also, I have a slight hangover right now.

The world tries to convince you that the plot is you trying to amass money and toys, have maximal orgasms as often as possible, achieve success through your children's lives or dominate those around you, but that's all false. Each one of those goals has good within it, but your real goal is to serve others, fighting those temptations.

Hence, my affection for the generals.

Anecdote: I work full time so wife kitteh can do as she pleases. Our marriage is within that covenant* and part of her adventure story is to work on the parish food distribution program. 

Anywho, earlier this week, she was in the parish offices when she came across a young man waiting to see Father E. By his tats, he was clearly a gang banger. She talked to him and found that he was having serious health issues and had come in to get right with God. He also told her that he couldn't make his rent payment and was hoping the parish might help.

Wife kitteh took some of my paycheck and paid his rent. She also prayed with him.

And that, boys and girls, is part of our end of the covenant.

What About Those Nutty Jewish Laws?

Bible In A Year taught me that all those crazy regulations about sacrificing stuff to God were illustrative rules given to a pack of savages that they might begin the world's cultural evolution to our understanding of what is good and right here and now. For me, the Catechism is the codification of our current knowledge of the world.

Bible In A Year is showing me that way back when, the aborigines of Israel needed a concrete and sacrificial framework to wrap their dirty hands around the point of their adventure stories. Now, we have a subtler sacrificial framework, but it's still the same idea - how to give of yourself as you recognize and do God's will.

I'll stop here as I'm mentally twigging into incoherence. Comments are welcome.

OK, OK, Father Mike, I'll keep working on it! Sheesh!

* - My relationships as expressions of my covenant with God occurred to me yesterday in church, but only because of Father Mike's podcast. I told you it change my thinking.

A Time Custom-Made For Oliver Hardy

Ollie was the master of the slow burn and the reaction shot. Whenever I see things like this, I think of an Ollie exasperation bit.

CNN raised eyebrows on Tuesday by declaring "there is no consensus criteria for assigning sex at birth" in a straight-news report on issues regarding transgender athletes playing women’s sports.

Emphasis mine.

Seriously, it's perfect. These days there so many occasions to use this. Truly, we're living through a time of madness.

Planning Dixie 2021

My current contract runs out on April 29 and the follow-on won't be a ready for a while after that, so I'll be fully retired for a spell. As I've been working full time to allow wife kitteh to do as she pleases and she has taken several solo trips during this time, she's encouraging me to go on vacation.

I've pondered three different trips.

1. Coastal Carolinas. I love the inland waterways and used to say I wanted to retire in Elizabeth City, NC. This would be a chance to cruise the coast and chat with tobacco farmers to get some tips for the next time I try.
2. Alabama exploration. I thought the northern hills were beautiful and down on the Gulf, Fairhope is fabulous. A week spent really getting to know the state would be a lot of fun.
3. Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana. This one just popped into my head recently. We were driving around and somehow, the topic of Arkansas arose. It's as poor as can be, but so what? The Ouachita and Ozark regions are gorgeous. I've never spent any time there, so that's as good a reason to go as any.

Dude.

I have wanted to visit Vicksburg just to see what it's like and taking tours of catfish and crawfish farms in Mississippi and Louisiana would be cool. Maybe I could find an old cotton gin at an antique store.

Right now, the Arkansas option is winning out. I'm leaning towards flying into DFW and flying out of IAH as I want to see the USS Texas which is in the Houston area. I had thought I'd do a driving sweep through the area, staying at a different location every night, but the hotels aren't very attractive. If I can find a VRBO place to rent in striking distance of my destinations, I'd rather do that instead. 

Addendum: The USS Texas is closed for repairs, so that's right out of the question. Sad.

The long drive would be into the bayous on the Gulf in Louisiana, but as I'd be alone, the only person I'd irritate in the car would be me. If I got sufficiently grumpy on the day trip, I could cut it short and do something else.

Stormfront and BLM Merge

Once you turn off the noise machine that is the news media and the pundits, it's easy to see how this happened.

Jamaal is a member in good standing of the Congressional Black Caucus. Here, he is arguing that blacks are different in kind and incapable of learning. This exact same cartoon could be used to make the exact same point by a white supremacist.

On Twitter, lots of people made the connection and rushed about, pointing and howling, but when you step back and think about it, this was inevitable. BLM and Stormfront are solving the exact same equation with the exact same boundary conditions. That they used different methods to reach their answers doesn't change the fact that they came to the same conclusion.

The crucial governing principle is that race is the dominant feature in a person's life. Once you latch on to that and discard the notion that each person is an individual with moral agency over their lives, there's only one destination. And here we are.

Hooray for unity!