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.
If your computer causes you to sin, turn it off and go outside. It is better for you to miss out on an engrossing Twitter brawl than to have your whole body thrown into Gehenna.
Or something like that.
I've been writing a daily blog for more than 15 years. Recently, I've begun to wonder what it has done to me. What would happen if I turned off the Internet for a prolonged period of time? I already know at least part of the answer as I have allowed many other projects go to seed while I surf the web and write.
I don't have a current list of goals. The old goals that I've got, like finishing up the clutch repair on my MGB and learning to make sauces, aren't getting done. It's not that I don't have time, it's that I want to check the web just one more time or I have to post something for today and I've really got nothing to share.
I've read plenty of essays describing how the Internet in general and social media in particular changes your personality and I believe them to be true. To find out how it has changed me, I'm going to quit it for a month. No blogging, no Twitter and no Instapundit for all of November. I'll still post to Facebook from time to time, but everything I share and everyone I follow only discuss family events and fun. In any case, I go to FB rarely, so it's not a big deal.
The Rules
I can use the Internet for education and research as much as I want.
I can use the computer to journal, rewrite my goals and manage my personal Jira project for tracking tasks.
I cannot blog or use Twitter in any way.
I cannot visit my favorite news or pundit sites.
I can read my favorite sports sites.
The Chain Of Events
The biggest change will be turning off The Scratching Post for the month. Doing that will alter what I do in the morning. Instead of making coffee and planting my butt in my computer chair, I'll make my coffee and ... do what? Read a book? Sit in the hot tub? Experiment with breakfasts? Go into the garage and putter? I'll certainly get to the gym earlier.
I'm actually really excited about this.
I can't wait to blog about what I discover. :-)
Love you guys. Have a great November. See you in December.
At some point, don't you think this stuff has to stop? Here are two stories of make-believe racism from yesterday.
Race baiter Kendi was too stupid to realize this tweet contradicted his entire scam by pointing out that Victims of Color (VoC) get consideration over white supremacists when it comes to college admissions. When it was pointed out to him, he deleted it, but not before someone had captured it for all time.
Elsewhere, the Lincoln Project, together with various Democratic Party personnel, sent ersatz white supremacists to pose in from of Republican Glenn Youngkin's campaign bus because, you know, racism.
Predictably, this stunt blew up in McAuliffe's face in short order.
It's all so boring. Can't we please be done with it?
Last weekend, I took the Catican Guards for their weekend party. That's my name for an off-the-leash romp around a couple of office and industrial parks in Poway. There are no cars, no people and plenty of open space for them to play. It's all good fun.
It had rained the night before and I came across this little fellow, sitting on the wet pavement. The colors aren't striking, but I liked the way the water beaded on his body. I left the image large, so it might be worth a click. Enjoy!
I recently joined our parish council. At last night's meeting, I heard about the pope's plan for a Synod on Synodality. Rather than unpack that horrible name, I'll just say that the pope wants to see the Church become more inclusive and so he wants us all to have listening sessions.
That's not going to end well. When our very own Bishop McElroy did it, he discovered that his flock and he didn't see eye to eye. I guess there's a price to be paid for leaving your mansion and mingling with the rabble.
Bishop McElroy has visited a couple of churches in his diocese to allow the unwashed masses to speak with him about the Church's abuse scandal. The first one turned into a riot as people blew up at him and since then, the events have been scripted like a straight jacket.
But my despair over the whole inclusion effort isn't about a few evenings of rancor. It's that the outcome of the thing is perfectly predictable. At my work, "inclusion" is a big deal. It's all rubbish. Inclusion means accepting sexual degeneracy and bagging on straight, white men. They aren't subtle about it, either.
Inclusion can't possibly work. We all have different world views and many of them can't be reconciled. For example, it came as a surprise to the inclusion gang that the Taliban weren't interested in diversity and went right back to oppressing women and killing gays as soon as they had power in Afghanistan.
Duh.
Given the pope's recent attacks on traditionalists in the faith, it's a given that inclusion will mean the same in the Church as it does at my work. Inclusion will be acceptance of sexual degeneracy and bagging on straight, white men. Our diocese is shot through with SJWs so there's no chance this turns out any other way.
If the people running the Church had a lick of sense, they let each of us approach God in our own way, guided by the Catechism as much as possible.
Nah.
Bonus Snark: This is one more example showing that Pope Francis is the King of Unforced Errors.
This occurred to me while at the gym this morning and I felt the need to write it down where I can find it later.
Genesis 1:27
God created mankind in his image; in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
Luke 17:1-4
He said to his disciples, “Things that cause sin will inevitably occur, but woe to the person through whom they occur. It would be better for him if a millstone were put around his neck and he be thrown into the sea than for him to cause one of these little ones to sin. Be on your guard! If your brother sins, rebuke him; and if he repents, forgive him. And if he wrongs you seven times in one day and returns to you seven times saying, ‘I am sorry,’ you should forgive him.”
In Genesis, God sees all of mankind as the same. Black, brown, white, yellow, red, green and blue with pink stripes, everyone was made in His image. If He doesn't see it, you shouldn't either.
In Luke, when confronting sin, Jesus doesn't instruct you to whack everyone of the sinner's race with that sin, He tells you to confront the individual as an individual. If you find racism, you need to find the racist committing the act and discuss it with them, not weave it into a larger narrative about those people.
If you promulgate the kind of claptrap that comes from books like White Fragility, you are spreading your sins to others. You might want to get fitted for a millstone.
This morning, I listened to two versions of the Let's Go Brandon song, which are currently numbers one and two on the Spotify Hip Hop charts. I also watched a minute-long video where boxer Floyd Mayweather gave support to an NBA player who said his natural immunity following his case of the Wuhan Flu was better than a vaccine.
What hit me was that these people are all saying what racial pariah, Candace Owens, has been saying for some time now. Think for yourself. Be yourself. Don't be a victim, take charge of your life. It was strange that a pandemic led to it, but perhaps not. Candace is only saying what works - personal responsibility. I guess, if you look at it a certain way, every crisis is bound to lead to self-reliance.
I've got to run, but I thought I'd also share part of the lyrics to one of the Let's Go Brandon songs. Make of it what you will.
Let's go, Brandon I keep a drum like I'm Nick Cannon, ayy, ayy (Pow, pow) Let's go, Brandon Pandemic ain't real, they just planned it, ayy, ayy (They just planned it) Let's go, Brandon When you ask questions, they start bannin', ayy, ayy (Facts)
As for the "pandemic ain't real, they just planned it" part, well, the racial justice crowd has been pumping racial paranoia as hard as they could for years now and this is the harvest. I hope they choke on it.
The thing that interested me was the bit about "bannin." Everyone can see what's happening with the crushing of free speech. That's a key message from both songs and the part that lines up with Candace Owens.
In the case of the parents vs. the school boards, the answer is the school boards. The most dramatic case of a parent going ballistic at their school board comes from Loudoun Country, Virginia. The Daily Wire got the scoop on what happened while the MSM stayed in their plush studios, content to trot out the Party's talking points about divisiveness, hate and violence.
On June 22, Scott Smith was arrested at a Loudoun County, Virginia, school board meeting, a meeting that was ultimately deemed an “unlawful assembly” after many attendees vocally opposed a policy on transgender students.
What people did not know is that weeks prior on May 28, Smith says, a boy allegedly wearing a skirt entered a girls’ bathroom at nearby Stone Bridge High School, where he sexually assaulted Smith’s ninth-grade daughter.
Juvenile records are sealed, but Smith’s attorney Elizabeth Lancaster told The Daily Wire that a boy was charged with two counts of forcible sodomy – one count of anal sodomy and one count of forcible fellatio – related to an incident that day at that school.
It gets worse, much worse. The school system tried to hide the information from the cops by dragging their feet on the investigation and they transferred the boy to another school where he attacked another girl. The dad was enraged that his daughter had been raped and the school system lied to cover it up and protect the pervert.
One can safely assume that three years earlier, dad was pretty much the same guy. I don't recall news reports of school-board screaming matches all across the country back then. Something did indeed change, but it couldn't have been the parents. Instead, it was the education industry, which has gone completely mad by the embracing sexual degeneracy of the gender-confusion movement and the racism of CRT.
They're also down with tyranny. Dig this.
The message is clear: we can teach your kids anything we want and you aren't allowed to object to it. Your children belong to the State.
Good luck with that one. More than anyone else, it was suburban moms who gave Trump his well-deserved thrashing. When the association of school boards wrote to Biden, complaining that parents were yelling at them for pushing Modern Nazi Race Theory and child porn, they effectively took a big stick and whacked the hornets' nest. It looks as though they've been stung quite enough as they have recently released a letter backing off, begging the hornets to stop all the stinging.
Breaking: In the wake of yesterday's @FreeBeacon report, National School Board Association announces "we regret and apologize for the letter" to Biden admin characterizing concerned parents as potentially domestic terrorists pic.twitter.com/3RBufvWqAN
In any case, it's the school boards that are the aggressors, not the parents. These parents have been there for years and years, dutifully taking their kids to school and doing what the education industry said. To get to the point that they're going to school board meetings, of all things, and losing their minds means the education industry has pushed things way too far.
... is the kind where you can count on your guests for lots of help.
I threw my semi-annual bachelor bash for the guys from Cursillo last night and we had a ball. Because they're all used to working in the kitchen on our retreat weekends and see that sort of thing as an act of love for one another, I was able to be much more ambitious with my menu. They fried the oysters, did the dishes, set the table and so forth while I made the shrimp, the gumbo, the rice and the jambalaya. It was heaven.
This time, all the dishes were successful. Usually, when I try to make so many things at once, at least one of them fails. I also chose to try out only one new recipe, a seafood jambalaya with oysters, crab and shrimp. And, of course, bacon. Duh. I had shotgunned this when wife kitteh and I were vacationing in Alabama and thought it my best jambalaya ever. This one was its equal.
At the end of the night, a bunch of the guys asked what they could do to help. The kitchen was a catastrophe with dirty pots and pans everywhere. Before wife kitteh got home, they had the place perfectly clean. While they washed and scrubbed, I sat and drank a beer with some of the others. Love all around.
Now that's a good party.
I had ordered a gallon of oysters from Billy's Seafood, not knowing if it was too much. When it first arrived, I was blown away at how many there were and figured I'd be throwing much of it in the trash. After last night, there's only a quart left and they should be good for another 3 days.
Three counties in Maryland want to leave their state and join West Virginia. They're the westernmost three, in the spur of Maryland right above West Virginia. The people are cultural brothers of the Mountaineers, practically unrelated to the coastal Marylanders in places like Baltimore whose population allow them to rule everyone in the state.
When son kitteh and I went to Baton Rouge a few weeks ago, it was his first trip to Dixie. One of the things that struck him was how different the South is from California. For him, it was like another country. He immediately grasped the concept of Federalism. What makes the people of San Diego think they know best for those on the bayou?
If the people of Garrett, Allegany and Washington counties want out, why not let them go? What is it that you are preserving? Stephanie Smith, a Baltimore Democrat in the General Assembly, said on Twitter, "Congratulating my colleagues on this attention-seeking effort! But remember, viral relevance is but a vapor. You'll still be a Maryland resident after the re-tweets subside & the side eyes will be abundant."
That's the sneer of the warden, not the remarks of a friend. The replies in her feed and those in other tweets about the counties wanting to join WV were full of hatred for the pigs who live in both western Maryland and West Virginia. Still, they didn't want to let the counties get away.
Like the five counties in Oregon that want to join Idaho, the state is holding on to people of a different culture who want out because they lack the population necessary to have a say in their government. Since the government controls more and more aspects of their lives, it's not just having a say in government, it's not being able to live free from alien tyranny.
Combine that with the destabilizing effects of our crushing debt and you get the ingredients for real conflict.
I'm throwing a stag party on Saturday night for a bunch of guys from the recent men's retreat weekend. I ordered shrimp and oysters from Billy's Seafood in Bon Secour, Alabama and received them yesterday. I rarely have access to shucked oysters, so my oyster-frying skills are rudimentary. It made sense to experiment with some, so last night we did just that.
So far, the winner is a simple seasoned flour dredge and then deep fried at 350 degrees for 2 minutes. We tried the seasoned flour - egg wash - panko routine you use when you want a thick crust on chicken, but it was too thick for the oysters and overwhelmed their squishy goodness.
I've got a few more recipes to try tonight and I'll post my favorite here.
The best oysters in the world come from the Deep South. So delicious!
Politics And Families
I've asserted elsewhere on this blog that the nation is too divided because the government is too large. The government is controlled through politics and politics is controlled by argument and argument is divisive. QED.
If we had a much smaller government, I wouldn't care all that much how you voted. Bernie or Trump, it wouldn't matter to me. Last night, wife kitteh, still a Chicago Democrat and a consumer of CNN and NPR, talked about wearing masks at her volunteer job at a school for poor kids. I made my usual noises about how stupid masks were, but thinking about it this morning, I decided that was a poor choice.
Who cares if she agrees with me about masks and booster shots? What matters is that she feels unsafe. She is also concerned for the children. Me whipping out Ben Shapiroish data points about how it's unwise to vaccinate kids against the Wuhan Flu and showing the problems with masks using engineering diagrams doesn't address her primary concern - safety. Further, California is as one-party a state as you're going to find. Neither of our votes mean a thing.
Choosing political arguments over love is all cost and no benefit.
Family Science has long studied non-traditional families. The discipline still struggles with family inequality, though, in how it privileges certain types of families over others. Like White privilege, family privilege is an unacknowledged and unearned benefit instantiated in U.S. laws, policies, and practices and bestowed upon traditional or "standard" nuclear families to the disadvantage of non-traditional configured family systems (e.g., sole-parent families, unmarried committed partners rearing children together, grandparents raising grandchildren). Family privilege is defined as the benefits, often invisible and unacknowledged, that one receives by belonging to family systems long upheld in society as superior to all others. It serves to advantage certain family forms over others and is typically bestowed upon White, traditional nuclear families.
I found it fascinating. They're only kinda sorta denying the superiority of the traditional family. Instead of attacking it head-on, it looks like they're characterizing it as a kind of oppression against those from "alternative" families. The claim seems to be that policies and the culture gives advantages to the traditional family and that's why it works so well.
Instead of trying to increase the number of traditional families, they're trying to level the playing field for inferior families. We've been trying to do that with social programs for decades now and the result can be seen in Baltimore, Chicago, Yazoo City and on and on and on.
This is more evidence that the goal of the progressives is not happiness and success, but the elimination of all rules. We can either help more people lift up themselves and their families by encouraging wholesome behaviors or we can accept degeneracy and find ways to improve the lives of the degenerates.
I dunno, man. It didn't work in my family.
If we all work together, the children conceived under these conditions will do just as well as those raised in the unearned privilege of white-supremacist, traditional families.
So Richard Leland Levine is now a 4-star admiral and the head of the US Public Health Service. He's also a complete lunatic, a man who thinks he's a woman and wants us to call him Rachel.
I mean seriously, dude. If that's a woman, I'm a marmot.
Adorable rodents aside, it says a lot about us that we've got someone with a raging mental illness running our Public Health Service. If you've seen full-body photos of the guy, you can see he's overweight, too. That means there's a delusional fat guy advising the president on health matters. The only way to follow this up would be to ...
Nominate someone who thinks he's Napoleon to be our ambassador to France.
Imagine how this would go over in France. They'd love it as much as my military officer friends love the idea that a complete nutcase just got 4 stars for being a complete nutcase.
All I can close with is this gem from Aerosmith. Enjoy.
With foam-flecked lips, I've raved about the Lizard Empire and how it has taken over the culture.
My Lizard Empire is an allegorical construct which describes our sexual mores using a map of the Roman Empire. The Romans wanted a large empire to protect Rome. The Lizards want to make wild degeneracy as acceptable as possible so our own degeneracies seem normal.
To recapitulate my mapping:
Rome is all acts acceptable to the Catholic Church.
Italia is all acts acceptable in America, circa, say, 2000 AD.
You, a person who likes to watch abusive threesomes online, are somewhere in Aquitania.
Epstein is just barely beyond the border of Dacia. When ABC spiked the Epstein story three years ago, that was an attempt to conquer that territory and make Epstein acceptable.
Trannies in the library are Brittania.
Desmond is Amazing, the 11-year-old who dresses in drag and performs in gay bars, is Mauretania.
Allowing children to choose their gender is Assyria.
Today, we'll visit Nebraska. I'll leave it to you to figure out what part of the Lizard Empire it represents.
The Nebraska Department of Education (NDE) shut out religious groups from a controversial curriculum development process, according to internal documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
The original draft of the agency's sex education standards included plans to teach elementary school students about gender identity and transgender hormone therapy. Internal emails obtained by a concerned parentshow the NDE added a Planned Parenthood ally to the 28-member advisory team for the standards, while it excluded input from religious education groups. The documents show NDE employees were privately aggravated that Jeremy Ekeler, the associate director of education policy at the Nebraska Catholic Conference, wanted to be included in the curriculum process because they suspected he would be critical of their approach.
"Jeremy is coming on pretty strong," one NDE employee emailed with a frowning face symbol.
"I know. I really think they want to advocate for abstinence only education as well as gender identity, sexual orientation, etc.; but that is only my assumption," another employee responded.
And blah blah blah. Second verse, same as the first. It's all the same, everywhere. Don't harsh their mellows, man. No rules!
And that's the point - no rules. The point is not pleasure. There's a whole flock of canaries dying in this particular coal mine and here's one.
Teenage girls across the globe have been showing up at doctors’ offices with tics—physical jerking movements and verbal outbursts—since the start of the pandemic...
Girls with tics are rare, and these teens had an unusually high number of them, which had developed suddenly. After months of studying the patients and consulting with one another, experts at top pediatric hospitals ... discovered that most of the girls had something in common: TikTok.
According to a spate of recent medical journal articles, doctors say the girls had been watching videos of TikTok influencers who said they had Tourette syndrome, a nervous-system disorder that causes people to make repetitive, involuntary movements or sounds.
I could add links showing increased anxiety in women, lower happiness, fewer marriages, fewer babies and on and on and on. If Daddy wants some sugar tonight, Mama needs to feel relaxed, secure and loved. All of the data I've seen says those feelings are rarer and rarer as we discard rules and limits on behavior.
If the Lizard Empire was all about the Big O, they'd be promoting stable, permanent relationships, less social media and much less porn. Instead, they're pushing to eliminate shame, judgment and objective rules. It's ending in sterile, unhappy libertinism, but that's fine with the lizards.
Strangely enough, happiness and pleasure are not the point.
Pete Buttigieg was named Transportation Secretary and then he and his boyfriend bought a pair of babies and then he took 2 months of paternity leave? 2 months? I don't care if there was a crisis in shipping or not, who takes a cabinet-level position and then takes 2 consecutive months of vacation? A position at that level has its costs and one of them is lots and lots and lots of long days.
Just what was he doing during those 2 months? It's not like his boyfriend was breastfeeding the kids. Make some formula or buy a wet nurse like you bought the babies and change some diapers. It's not that hard for the guy. His boyfriend wasn't coming down from the hormone imbalances of pregnancy, he was just some dude who was the same the day before Amazon delivered the babies as he was the day afterwards.
I don't get it.
Two dudes.
More Fakery
President Biden is now giving addresses from a fake White House set created in a building across the street. Someone from a previous administration said that the real Oval Office has too much light and too many reflective surfaces to properly use a teleprompter. The dude can't even memorize short speeches.
Wait, what?
Still More Fakery
Kamala Harris' Geneva-Convention-violating infomercial about space had child actors instead of real kids in it?
Huge Fakery
There are still hundreds or thousands of Americans in Afghanistan where the Taliban is being the Taliban. There doesn't seem to be any concern about this.
I've Lost The Bubble
I have no idea what is happening any more. What are we voting for in our elections when our elected officials are clearly only pretending to do their jobs?
Palate Cleanser
LSU has decided to part ways with football head coach Ed Orgeron. After that marvelous 15-0 National Title season a few years back, I fell in love with Coach O, who sounds like the Cookie Monster. I'll miss tweeting, "T is for Touchdown. That's good enough for me," whenever LSU scores one.
If you want to see one of the very best farewell press conference performances, watch this. I love the guy even more now.
“I’m honored that I got to be the head coach at LSU. ... I’m always going to appreciate my time here.”
Right now, I'm making my way through SanFranSicko (SFS), a progs' description of how he came to see that progressive politics are making many cities worse. It's well done and the author doesn't really take a red pill so much as open his eyes to the reality of homelessness and drug addictions. He's a long-time veteran of the fight to end homelessness, so it's written with emotion and knowledge.
Hillbilly Elegy (HE) was a book describing a man's extended family in Kentucky and Ohio and their struggles with poverty and drugs.
SFS is mostly statistics and data. The people aren't fleshed out and the protagonist is the government. The government takes the form of both the various official departments and the crowd of publicly-funded Not-For-Profit organizations. As the numbers wash over you, you really can't be sure if they're accurate. There's a ton of money in homelessness and mountains of egos on the line. None of the activists ever want to admit they were wrong. Further, the government can pretend to have limitless resources as they can print money at the Federal level and hand that down the line.
HE is all stories. The family members are detailed and the family has very limited resources indeed. HE shows the tough decisions being made every day and many of them are wrong. When wrong decisions are made, things get worse and there's pain. You learn, if you didn't know already, that some people are just bad at life and throwing scarce money at them is a bad idea.
In SFS, bad decisions mean the numbers that should go up go down and numbers that should go down go up. That's it. The dead are tallied, but no descriptions are given of the phone calls to family members or the visits to the hospitals to see the last gasps. It's all antiseptic and theoretical.
SFS was written by a progressive. HE was written by a conservative.
Make of that what you will.
I'm off for the weekend, working on a men's retreat. I usually blog from my phone when I do these, but I'm not sure I will this time. If not, have a great weekend.
