The CDC is now saying that the test for the Wuhan Sniffles can show a positive result for up to 12 weeks. That means that a positive test might be saying you're sick or it might be saying you were sick 8 weeks ago. It's effectively worthless.
Deep blue cities in maximum lockdown are showing massive spikes in cases.
A CNN medical expert is now telling us that cloth masks don't work.
Bowl games are being canceled because of positive test results even though the players are under 25, in peak physical condition, fully vaccinated and the tests are unreliable. Dittos for EPL games.
All but the most blinkered partisans can see that the emperor is naked.
Meanwhile, the White House messaging team is sending the boss out, looking like a complete dork.
Fully vaccinated, all alone on the beach, wearing a mask that does nothing. Outstanding.
With all these new developments, the messaging team must have a continual deer-in-the-headlights look.
This Twitter thread, by a progressive in San Francisco, discussing her city's descent into degeneracy, is utterly fascinating. I had ThreadReader form it into a single page, which is there at that link. It's easy to consume and doesn't require a Twitter account. I highly recommend reading the whole thing.
Here are some snippets from it.
What do progressives stand for, exactly?
I thought it was about making things more fair.
About standing up for the little guy.
About human rights, equality (equity?), compassion.
San Francisco (to me) looks like the least compassionate city on the planet...
I grew up in a Progressive family and went to a Progressive school, and have mostly Progressive friends.
Yet what I see in SF - if this what Progressive stands for - I want the opposite.
The words used here: "harm reduction", "housing first", "criminal justice", "social justice", "equity" -- they don't align with what I'm seeing at all.
Our strategy might as well be called "harm increased", "housing last", "victim injustice", "social injustice", "unfairness"...
Progressives tend to blame Republicans for almost everything.
Yet here we are - not a Republican in sight - and I think we may be the most deranged city on the planet.
Nowhere is there such inequality. I have never seen destitution at this scale...
+ Why, after decades of Progressive rule in SF are 8,000 people in the streets?
+ Why do we have the highest overdose rate in the nation?
+ Why do we have the highest property crime rate?
+ Why do we have fewest children per capita?
Thought experiment -- what would San Francisco look like if Republicans were in charge?
She took a drive in the rain and photographed some of what she saw. Here was one homeless encampment.
My Take
She's seeing almost all of the dots, but she's drawing the wrong picture. If Republicans ran the place, it might look different or it might not. Your political bent is a symptom of your world view, not the central part of it.
What she's describing here is what Jordan Peterson and Bishop Robert Barron would call a crisis of meaning. She was told by the establishment that if she voted blue, she was voting for compassion and kindness. She dutifully voted blue and she got suffering and human degradation. Her thread is a cry of distress. "Why aren't things the way I was told they would be?"
She bought into the Marxist dynamic of oppressor groups and oppressed groups. She didn't buy into the people-as-individuals idea. That's one of the problems right there. The people in those tents could well be unsalvageable. Their brains might be permanently ruined by drugs. If that's the case, warehousing them is the only humanitarian option, something neither red nor blue discuss.
Put not your trust in princes and all that.
The bigger problem with her world view is that she, and by extension, her city, cannot derive a code of behavior from first principles. She turns to politics instead of faith or philosophy and so do the others. They voted blue and now they can go back to consume weed, porn, expensive wines and plan vacations. That doesn't work and it's that failure that distresses her so.
Her philosophy blew up first. Her politics failing were just a secondary explosion.
... is all about going tomorrow. Today's workout is great, but it's when you go tomorrow that you really see gains.
I'm 4 months into my new weightlifting regimen and most weeks I go 5-6 days a week. I'm lifting an hour a day and doing 20 minutes of cardio. That's the plan, at least. In reality, most days it's 50 minutes of lifting and 15 minutes of cardio. I always quit and go home when I feel something in my body start to complain. It's usually my lower back.
The whole point is to go to the gym tomorrow. If I skip 2 exercises today, but I don't hurt myself and have to lay off for a week, I'm only down 10 minutes instead of 330 minutes from 5.5 lost days.
It's paying off now, too. One of our sons came over last night for dinner. He was a rower in college and is still lifting from time to time. Along with another of our sons, we have a text group where we laughingly brag about working out as a way of encouraging each other. In any case, he said he noticed definition in my muscles. Wife kitteh agreed approvingly.
:-)
Speaking of dinner, I made a standing rib roast using Alton Brown's recipe shown in the video below. It was generally agreed that it was the best rib roast any of us had ever eaten. Simply spectacular.
The final product.
Happy Boxing Day, everyone. I hope your Christmas was excellent. Now I'm off to nosh on one of the ribs from last night.
It's been a great end to my year, particularly spiritually. I'll blog about that more in the future, but suffice it to say that I'm starting to have the personal relationship with Jesus that my Cursillo homies yap about all the time.
This is a free thought blogging session. I'm just going to type and post. We'll see what comes of it.
Christmas this year will have a different flavor for me than any in the past. It will be the celebration of a Friend's birthday. I blogged recently about finally using metrics to measure my progress towards my goals and because of this, I'm praying in front of my Blessed Mother candle every morning with my coffee.
This is a photo from yesterday morning. The lights are out, the room is dark, the coffee is Stocking Mill and the initial prayer is a decade of the Rosary. After that, it's time to chat with the Holy Crew. I love it.
I wrestle with sin all the time, but in the last couple of months, I've had Help. I feel different and I think I act differently, too. One of the things that I've always felt, but has really hit home recently is how Jesus' life, death and resurrection gives me a daily chance to start fresh and keep fighting. Without that, I could easily just quit and say that whatever evil I do is just who I am.
Born that way, as Lady Gaga would say. She's wrong.
Anywho, these conversations in the morning, the changes that have been wrought in my life and relationships are part of a change in my relationship with Christ. He's a friend now. That Friend that lets you sleep on the couch when you've had too much at His party. The One that takes you to the airport without hesitation. The One who helps you move and listens to you when you're hurting in a relationship. That One.
Today is His birthday and I'm happy in a way I haven't been happy before.
That's not entirely true. I'm happy the way I was when I was a little boy and I couldn't wait to see what Santa and later, mommy and daddy, had got me as presents.
Merry Christmas, friends. Love and prayers for all of you.
Some of the beads on that Rosary will be for you in the coming year.
Dig this excellent piece from Ayaan Hirsi Ali on the collapse of civilization in California. Here's a tidbit.
In my home state of California, smash-and-grab is fast becoming a way of life. Crime is a rampant, daily occurrence. Just this week, two of my close friends were robbed near San Francisco.
One owns a popular restaurant; the front door was destroyed, and the cash register robbed. The other was renting a car, the entire rear window of which was smashed to bits and the contents swiped. So common is this sort of looting and thievery that when he returned the rental car, he noticed that the car company’s lot was full of vehicles with broken windows.
We have friends who probably think Bernie Sanders is a moderate. They fully subscribe to Modern Nazi Race Theory and share books and links to discussions of Jewish White Supremacy, Jewishness Whiteness and Systemic Racism. They are as white as snow, too.
They recently visited SanFran and came back vowing never to return. When the proggiest of progs notices the decay in their Mecca, you know it's real.
I would posit that the blue cities are conducting a fascinating experiment.
Does a city need productive people?
Think about what's happening here. As the blue cities become more and more unlivable, productive people, the ones with the most to lose, are leaving. As time goes on, the remaining population will tilt more and more towards the drug addicts, criminals and granola crunchers. Once a person leaves SanFran and moves to Miami, they don't usually come back.
Just for the chemists in the group, I'm looking at you, Tim and Ohioan, the decision to move is analogous to a chemical reaction which requires an activation energy to start.
Peter Productive starts in SanFran. His car windows get smashed which provides him the activation energy to move to Jacksonville. Once there, Pete will require a new spike of activation energy to get him to move back to SanFran.
I can't see that happening with any kind of regularity. Once productive people leave, they will probably stay wherever they land.
So what? Does California really need productive people or can we replace them with printed money?
The experiment is already under way.
Update: The female cop who shot Daunte Wright by mistake was just convicted of manslaughter. Daunte was a violent criminal who resisted arrest and was driving away when he was shot. A violent criminal loose in the city in a 2-ton vehicle was worth more than a cop with a good record. It took place in Brooklyn Center, a burg just north of Minneapolis.
You would have to be insane to be a cop in a deep blue city.
We're having a houseful of guests tomorrow. Wife kitteh asked for a brisket and wanted me to smoke it today so we can spend tomorrow preparing for the mob. I used this recipe from Hey Grill, Hey. Susie's blog is my go-to for smoker stuff.
I also used this rub from Deep South Dish in a 50-50 mix with the one in the Hey Grill recipe. Mary's blog is my go-to for simply everything and I only go somewhere else if she doesn't have a recipe for it.
Finally, I'm also using an injection for the first time ever. I found one on the web and made some modifications to it. I sipped a bit and it was wonderful.
1 cup homemade beef stock
1 1/2 tbsp Worcestershire Sauce
1 tbsp soy sauce
1/2 tsp onion powder
1/2 tsp garlic powder
I used this injector from Amazon. It worked really well.
Anywho, here are the before and after photos. Wish you were here.
Who's running this show? There isn't a lick of sense in our reactions to Omnicorn*. It hit me this weekend when many English Premier League games were postponed and a bunch of NFL players were sidelined because they had tested positive for the Wuhan Flu. They are in a demographic - young, healthy men - that has practically zero risk of significant consequences no matter which variant it is and yet we behave as if it were Ebola.
This isn't science, it's voodoo. Is there anyone out there willing and able to speak up about this madness?
Paths of Glory is a 1957 movie about a French unit in World War I that attempts to capture an entrenched German position. Kirk Douglas is in command of the unit that General Mireau, the incompetent who orders the attack, and General Broulard, the cynic who doesn't care about anything but power struggles within French Army, insist take a heavily fortified position called The Anthill. The attack is a disastrous failure and repulsed with massive French losses.
The scene below takes place the morning after the attack. The generals eat croissants with jam and sip coffee from fine china inside a luxurious chateau, discussing the battle. The first half of the scene is relevant to this post for reasons to be explained shortly.
The more of this kind of thing I see, the more it looks like the combat scenes from Paths of Glory. In the movie, the French infantry do what their leaders tell them to do and the results are catastrophic for them, but cost their leaders nothing.
What did those 6 men pictured above do but follow the instructions given to them from our leaders? We endlessly preached race, race, race and they focused on race. We told them they were doomed to failure because of racism and they chose to take revenge on another race.
They will go to jail. Robin DiAngelo will continue to give racialist speeches for 5 figures a pop.
"Your men died very well."
Education leaders in Oregon and California have taken steps to remove performance requirements from their schools. New York and Baltimore regularly promote students who clearly aren't performing at grade level.
Kids end up graduating from high school as functional illiterates. With each sunset, the teachers and administrators are one day closer to excellent government pensions.
"Your men died very well."
Jacob Blake's girlfriend was, according to our cultural leaders, a strong, black woman. After all, Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion both promote whoring and we are told they are examples of success.
Jacob Blake's girlfriend was regularly brutalized by her baby daddy. Cardi B lives in a mansion.
"Your men died very well."
Throughout it all, the Elites sit in their faculty lounges or wear expensive suits in TV studios or write pieces for the Atlantic and New Yorker, eating croissants with jam and drinking coffee from fine china. They preach a world view that cannot result in anything but failure for the Normals, their infantry.
On the right, we love to focus on the law-and-order aspects of things. More cops! More arrests! More discipline in schools! That's like arranging for more ambulances to be at the battlefields. If our generals are ordering one doomed infantry assault after another, we might want to look into that instead.
As If On Cue
Taught racial hate, Terryous Baker went over the top, only to get tangled in the barbed wire before being shot down. He was able to injure one enemy soldier in the process.
A Christmas parade in Winter Garden, Fla. was forced to cancel after a car driven by Terryous Baker allegedly accelerated toward the crowd & eventually crashed into another occupied vehicle, injuring that driver. The suspect then tried to escape. https://t.co/MuecRuvN4Wpic.twitter.com/nktpivhj9L
Some of California’s largest school districts are trying an unconventional tactic to help students re-engage in school after distance learning and boost their chances of acceptance into the state’s public colleges: by dropping D and F grades.
Los Angeles Unified, Oakland Unified, Sacramento City Unified, San Diego Unified and other districts are phasing out grades below a C for high school students.
They are doing this to fight racism, of course.
Although education reform advocates have been pushing for this for years, the pandemic offered an opportunity for districts to put it into action. With so many students languishing academically after a year of distance learning, districts see dropping D’s and F’s as a way to help students who had been most impacted by the pandemic, especially Black, Latino and low-income students.
Not to worry, the students will still be assessed on their, err, "competence."
But the move is also, potentially, a step toward an entirely different learning system, in which students are assessed by what they’ve learned, not how well they perform on tests on a given day or whether they turn in their homework on time. Known as competency — or mastery-based learning — the style has been a staple of some private and charter schools for years, and a goal for education reformers trying to overhaul the traditional high school system.
No word on how those assessments will be made.
Who is being fooled by this trash? Tests exist to determine mastery and competence. It's what they do. There's no other way to do it because, in the end, every assessment is, by definition, a test. Any other way of describing it is deliberate gibberish. The education industry in California is lying right to our faces and they don't care. They are corrupt and degenerate.
The state of Oregon has decided to ditch its proficiency* exam requirements for high school graduation. They're doing it to fight racism, don't you know.
The Oregon Legislative Assembly passed SB 744 which directs the Oregon Department of Education to review state requirements for high school diploma options, as well as to review state requirements related to demonstrations of proficiency in Essential Skills. Allowing for this review, students will not be required to show proficiency in Essential Skills as a condition of receiving a high school diploma during the 2021-2022, 2022-2023, and 2023-2024 school years.
Both lawmakers and ODE say rethinking graduation and diploma requirements is a matter of equity, and part of a broader effort to better support students from Oregon’s communities of color.
“Leaders from those communities have advocated time and again for equitable graduation standards, along with expanded learning opportunities and supports,” wrote ODE officials in a message to OPB.
While lawmakers did not share Oregon-specific data or information to show that standardized testing is inequitable for students of color, national studies and research bear that out. Oregon test results — much like results in states across the country — show a persistent gap between the scores of white students on standardized tests, and scores of students who are Black or Latino.
Talk about throwing in the towel! This is total surrender.
The Republicans who blame the education system for poor performance are disingenuous at best. All they're doing is venting against the teachers' unions who hate them and donate like mad to the Democrats. It's not the evil educrats hurting the kids, it's the lack of traditional families. The vast majority of people involved in our school systems really love the kids and want them to succeed. They may be misguided blockheads and do evil out of ignorance, but they aren't trying to be bad.
To me, this looks like the teachers deciding they can't do anything with the raw material they're being given. If the kids aren't studying at home, if they aren't being taught discipline and self-control by their parents, there's not much the teachers can do to get them ready for those proficiency exams. Why hand your critics the stick to beat you with by making failure stats readily available? It's not like those kids are going anywhere anyway. They aren't going to become proficient no matter what you do, so why go down with them?
This is their raw material.
* - Note that the link leads you to an .aspx web page. I don't need to hear anything about proficiency from a pack of idiots who use Microsoft products to create their websites, thank you very much.
I was at Food 4 Less, our local, low-budget grocery store that caters to the Hispanic and Southern military community, buying collards and other odds and ends when a black man in line behind me, pointed at the bag of collards asked with a smile, "Now what do you know about those?"
I smiled back and gave him my plans for the greens. Instead of using ham hocks as the seasoning meat, this time I was going to use tasso, a kind of spiced ham. I told him there wouldn't be any turnips in the pot, but that was another standard ingredient for me. He grinned and that started a conversation.
I dropped into my fake Southern drawl and he asked me if I was from Dixie. Nah, just another Air Force brat having fun. It turned out he'd been an Air Force brat, too. We hadn't lived in the same places, but we had the bond that comes with kids from military families. I told him he needed to come over for dinner, but he said he was a vegetarian and couldn't eat the ham. I let him know that meat was just plants that had spent a little more time getting delicious. He laughed.
When we parted, I added my customary, "God bless you, sir." When he replied in kind, we exchanged knowing looks and saw that we had one more thing in common.
Ain't that America?
Bible Tie-In
1 Samuel 16:7 - But the Lord said to Samuel: Do not judge from his appearance or from his lofty stature, because I have rejected him. God does not see as a mortal, who sees the appearance. The Lord looks into the heart.
Many tried to inform Abby that Madonna was hot and stylish and cool and Nancy was ten kinds of evil, but it all sounded hollow. Here's why.
Obesity is up
Anxiety is up
Marriage is down
Childbirth is down
Sex is down
Madonna was one of the cultural leaders that drove us into that particular ditch. Abby was simply pointing to a better way and it is better. The scoreboard doesn't lie. The modern generation are the Detroit Lions of personal relationships.
It's one thing to be on a team that goes 1-14-1, it's quite another to brag about it. It's still another to think that the rest of us don't see it. The androgyne working the checkout counter at your local hipster restaurant is a member of a generation of fat, anxious, lonely losers. It's not a secret. Scoreboard.
Still, we have to listen to the "Ha ha ha, prudes!" Nancy was a stiff and Madonna, unable to properly move body parts due to the scars of plastic surgery and wearing a hideous, uncomfortable outfit made from a raincoat, writhing around on a bed in front of cameramen, lighting people, make up artists and who knows who else, is what we all want to be when we're 63. She's a winner.
Last night, I made my first batch of Louisiana Hot Sauce with my fermented cayenne peppers. I tasted it this morning and it was outstanding. There was a bit too much vinegar in the taste, so I've adjusted my recipe. The one I will be using for my gift bottles is shown below.
I simmered the ingredients for about 20 minutes and then put them, still hot, in the blender and spun them around until I couldn't see any solids remaining save the seeds. I tried some on a cracker this morning and whoa, baby, that was the real deal.
I've heard that many times, but I never really understood it until recently.
I like to have written goals. I've used the method outlined in Brian Tracy's book, Goals, for almost 20 years now, but I've never taken the last step, which is to create a set of measures of performance and then track them every day. I thought it was too time-consuming and wouldn't result in anything worth the effort.
In my most recent iteration of my goals, I finally created a set of simple metrics, just a few for each goal. I was surprised at what I found.
The first thing I found was that some of my goals weren't my goals at all. They were aspirations that I thought I should have, but didn't really want in my heart of hearts. I've talked about writing some books, but when I measured how much writing I did every day, the answer was zero. I just didn't want to do it and so I didn't. It might be in the future when I'm no longer working, but right now, working full time, I don't have the energy. Therefore, that is not a goal.
The other thing I discovered was that when I measured my prayer life, I found that I really did have the time and energy to pray. I now meditate and pray every day. I also journal every day. It feels great.
Finally, I've been on a weight-lifting kick for about 5 months now. Since I'm marking off the days I do it in my metrics spreadsheet, I only skip those days when I can't possibly find the time or I'm sore and a workout would do more harm than good. As a result, I'm hitting the gym about 6 days a week.
Written goals are good, but without metrics they're not nearly as effective as they could be. Also, without metrics, you can lie to yourself about what you really want to accomplish.
The smash and grab raids taking place in the deep blue cities are more an indication of the breakdown of civilization and less an indication of the breakdown of law. These raids were always possible. In infantry combat terms, if you can apply substantial force in a small area before the defenders have time to react and you can extract your units just as fast, you will almost always win.
The ability to make these raids was there before, but I would argue that two catalysts have arisen that have changed the equation for the thieves.
Thanks to our obsession with race, the cops have been encouraged to leave the force, leave the streets or leave off strict enforcement of the law. The risks for the raiders have been reduced substantially. Also, if the theft is less than $950, they only face misdemeanor charges.
Also thanks to our obsession with race, the culture is howling that blacks are oppressed. This solves the morale problem among the thieves. That is, they now have enough motivation, in the form of racial grievances, to strike targets that were always there, but seemed not worth the risk. Now, they're warriors on a crusade, fighting oppression in addition to doing a little shopping.
I've seen plenty of essays and heard plenty of interviews that claim stricter policing and more incarceration is the answer. They are not because they don't scale. We're dealing with a massive increase in the number of thieves, primarily because of point 2 above. Just for the sake of argument, if what used to be 4 people willing to rob a place has become 30 people willing to rob it, it will be impossible to add sufficient cops, courts and jails to cope. If enforcing the law is our solution, we better be ready to build big POW camps on the order of the ones we had in WW II.
Camp Sam Houston in Texas, which housed 4,000 German POWs. Are we going to build these again?
What can scale? Families. I know this is controversial these days, but each thief came from the union of one man and one woman. That scales by definition. The family is our first line of defense. It's the part of civilization that is supposed to civilize. When that fails, as some inevitably do, the next lines of defense are designed assuming that only a small fraction have failed.
The other thing that scales is our education system. It simply must be de-Nazified. We can't stop teaching our children that Jews Whites oppress Germans Blacks everywhere, every day soon enough. Without the morale boost that comes from false righteous rage, most of these smash and grab raids will stop. If the thieves saw the shop owners as fellow Americans and fellow children of God, they'd have kinship and compassion for them.
Smash and grab raids are working well. The gangs are able to put overwhelming numbers of motorized infantry into a single spot, make their raid and then escape before the cops can react in sufficient numbers. Their reasoning is sound. Even if they get caught, stealing anything below $950 is considered a misdemeanor and will result in a traffic ticket. That's OK, because almost none of them get caught.
The problem is a nearly insolvable tactical one for the police. By the time you know one is in progress, it's almost over and many of the thieves are gone. Meanwhile, the stores are getting crushed. In San Francisco, it's led to high-end stores being boarded up during working hours. Dig this video.
How does this end? Who wants to live in a city where the nicest shops have plywood over their windows like they were expecting a hurricane?
With each new development, the number of reasons to stay in San Francisco shrinks. If it were, me, I'd be preparing to move. I wouldn't want to wait until property values started to drop.
... when you watch the looting videos. Don't be a tool of one of the political parties.
As much as I love The Babylon Bee and their sister site, Not The Bee, they got this one dead wrong.
Please enjoy this video of San Fran looters looting other looters 😂😭
It showed looters arriving back at their apartment complex, arms laden with stolen clothes, being attacked and robbed by their neighbors. Ha ha! What fun!
That's the way the reds saw it. I don't know how the blues saw it and bet that most of them didn't see it at all. Everyone in the video was a German person of color, so the left couldn't spin it into a case of Jews whites oppressing them. Allow me to suggest two other ways of viewing it.
As An American
We're in deep trouble. We need everyone to be as productive and successful as possible.
If you keep this in mind, then the video above isn't funny at all, it's enough to make you do a face palm. If you saw the people in that video as teammates, as fellow Americans whose help you need to conquer our debt, what would you do? Laugh at them? Tell them that whites were the problem?
As A Christian
In the Gospel of Mark, chapter 12, Jesus told us how we were supposed to live if we wanted to get to heaven.
One of the scribes, when he came forward and heard them disputing and saw how well he had answered them, asked him, “Which is the first of all the commandments?”
Jesus replied, “The first is this: ‘Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is Lord alone! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”
If your job was to help the people in that video get to heaven, what would you do? Encourage everyone to vote for Republicans? Encourage them to vote for Democrats?
Just something to think about.
I'm taking tomorrow off. I'm struggling to find time for blogging these days. During No Net November, I had no problem filling my mornings with productive and useful things. Now that I'm writing again, those things are getting short shrift and I don't like the results.
During No Net November, I watched the Rittenhouse trial and thought how odd it all seemed. Here's the chain of events as I understand them.
Jacob Blake repeatedly brutalizes his girlfriend / baby mama to the point that she swears out a complaint against him, resulting in a warrant for his arrest and a restraining order.
Jacob stops by her house against her will to take his kids.
The girlfriend calls the cops and accuses him of kidnapping the kids.
The cops show up, Jacob fights with them and they end up having to shoot him.
The usual suspects scream about racism.
Riots erupt and parts of Kenosha are burned and looted.
Kyle rides in from out of town to help the forces of civilization fend off the rioters.
Attacked, Kyle shoots three of them.
Numbers 4 and 8 are where all the attention has been placed. Number 3 is the one that affects all of us.
Civilization cannot exist unless men are willing to protect women. From my origin story blog post wherein I described how my ex-wife became violent:
The first time she hit me, I thought it was a joke. She was a small woman and I'm a bigger man. I'd practiced kung fu for 8 years and was used to being hit. She became enraged over something and punched me as hard as she could. Ping! I didn't think much of it after she calmed down. She'd had a rough life and could be emotional...
One thing you realize when your woman becomes violent is that you can crush her any time you want. Her hardest punches didn't do anything. My hardest would have sent her to the hospital. One time, just out of reflex, I did a sweeping block when she tried to punch me. I nearly broke her forearm against a door frame.
That's the world in which all women have always lived. The men around them can force their wills on them any time they want unless there are other men who will fight the attacker. That was true for the Comanche, the Romans, the Aztecs, the Ashanti and will be true for the inhabitants of Tantalus-4 in 2273.
Jacob's girlfriend and baby mama, we'll call her GF, had to call the cops because there were no men to defend her. People said Kyle was in the wrong place at the wrong time and they're right. Kyle and men like him were needed in GF's neighborhood years prior to the riot. Jacob needed a visit from Kyle and the boys wherein they, err, discussed the merits of behaving like a gentleman.
Instead, the key lessons learned by the most important people in the story, GF and her peers, had nothing to do with white supremacy, systemic racism or race race race race race race race race.
The moral of the story to GF and tens of thousands just like her is that no one is going to protect them. The cops were their last line of defense and now that's gone. It's racial treason to call the police and they're not likely to show up if you do because if the visit goes sideways, they could face severe punishments from their chain of command.
The GFs have no one to defend them. What kind of society does that create? This kind.
Bonus Video
Tim, as usual, makes some good points in the comments. I might have gone to jail in the anecdote above, but that's not my point here. What I'm suggesting is that a woman has defense-in-depth. Her first line is her husband. When her husband goes bad, she's got her family, as illustrated by the terrific music video below. That line of defense scales. By that I mean, almost everyone has family of some kind.
The cops are the last line of defense and they don't scale. There are a fixed number of them and the more men go feral, the thinner that line of defense becomes. If families never form and men learn to get their way with force, the cops are the only protection remaining for GF and crew. Take away the cops and the lives of women become unpleasant in the extreme. Instead of worrying about GF, we talked race race race race race race race race race race race race.
With that dead horse severely beaten once again, here's the video. I love it and look for any excuse to share it.
No Net November didn't go exactly as planned. I stopped writing and stopped tweeting, but I got bored and still lurked from time to time on various sites, watching the news and reactions. Because I didn't have to feed the blog with daily content, I didn't spend nearly as much time on it and actually found most of it to be of no value. I would bet my consumption dropped to a quarter of what it had been before.
The biggest change was that I was able to chew on ideas for a day or four before taking some notes to turn into blog posts in the future. Because of that, I was far less aggressive in my thinking. Polemics come naturally, but they are also usually filled with logical errors, truth-grooming and unnecessary snark. A polemic exists to establish one position as good and another as evil, so it's simplistic by its very nature. A fast typist can knock them out almost daily and I'm a reasonably fast typist.
Think of a polemic as Purina Blog Chow. You practically buy them in bulk to feed the blog and pour them into the blog's dish each morning without much effort.
Polemics are also boring once you've read enough of them. Yes, yes, I know, Democrats are imbeciles. Yes, yes, I know, Republicans are evil. What a yawnaroo.
After No Net November, I've decided to continue blogging, but not hew to a daily schedule. Instead, I'll post when I think I've got a coherent next step in some thread I'm pulling or if I've found something I want to share for fun or because it's beautiful.
For example, I finally took my piles of cayenne peppers out of the freezer and processed some of them into Louisiana Hot Sauce. I used three different recipes from the web and one of my own creation. Now I need to take them in to work with a pile of Saltines and see what people think.
I read somewhere that fermented cayenne peppers make the best hot sauce, so I took about 80% of my crop and am fermenting them now. You'd think the tobacco experiment would have taught me to avoid fermentation and that you can't trust everything you find on the Internet, but here I am again, betting almost all of my harvest on the Roulette wheel of some stranger's advice. They're fermenting nicely and should be ready to process by Friday. We'll see then if this was another ghastly mistake from the gardens of the Catican Compound or if it was a glorious success.
A full gallon of fermenting cayenne peppers. You can see the bubbles of gas released by the wild biological action going on in the container. It's like a Hollywood action movie, only with microorganisms as the actors.
