What strikes me most about the reactions on the left to the anti-grooming legislation in Florida, wherein teachers will not be able to shove sexual degeneracy on kids in K-3, is how insular it all is. Between Disney, the Oscars and the teachers themselves, they're radioactive with myopia.
Is it even possible to be radioactive with myopia?
Note to self: Stop the experiments on madrigals per hectare and resume experiments on myopic isotopes.
Where was I? Oh yes, myopia. All of this "Don't say gay!" rubbish is indicative of groups of people who can't see outside their circle of like-minded colleagues. I've seen it many times before in corporate settings where people in an organization mistake their meetings for reality. Dig this one.
SCOOP: Disney production coordinator Allen March says his team is committed to "exploring queer stories" and has created a "tracker" to make sure they are creating enough "gender nonconforming characters," "canonical trans characters," and "canonical bisexual characters." pic.twitter.com/ddSzw4aqQv
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) March 29, 2022
Disney has lost the plot, as it were. The people in that meeting are making entertainment for each other. It never occurs to them to ask if their audience might be a tad larger than the marchers in their last Pride parade. Those people don't even exist, or if they do, they're cardboard-cutout villains who need to be re-educated, silenced or suppressed in some way.
A culture is more than hairstyles and food. It includes a world view, complete with an organized set of moral values. Disney, the teachers and the howler monkeys flinging poo at the Oscars seem to be unaware of this fact. Social media gives us a window into their madhouse and what we see is cultural illiteracy combined with hubris and a wild overestimation of their place in the world.
Imagine trying to tell Africans that women can be turned into men. Imagine telling a devout Muslim that you're going to add as many LGBTQ+IAQWERTY characters as you can in your upcoming films. Imagine a parent who is not on drugs finding out that their kids' teachers have been talking about explicit sexual acts with their children and saying, "Don't tell mommy. This will be our little secret!" You'd have to be a total idiot to think that this would end well.
In short, these are the blinkered Elites I've been on about for a while. They're the French aristocracy prior to the Revolution. They mistook parental indifference to their shenanigans as assent when in reality it was the default assumption that the schools hadn't lost their minds. Now that the Normals can see what's happening, they're reacting in a perfectly predictable way. Or it would have been predictable had the teachers and entertainment industrialists bothered to leave their offices and talk to their true customers.
I'm out of town and forgot my laptop charger, so I haven't been able to blog easily. That's probably for the best anyway. I was able to get a nice photo of some tiny mushrooms with my new Pixel 6, however. Check them out.
Back when I was trying to ferment my previous crop of tobacco, I used a solar-powered fermentation chamber. It was a garden trashcan with a glass lid. The bottom had a few inches of water and the tobacco leaves were suspended above it. The idea was that the sun would heat up the chamber like a greenhouse and the water would evaporate giving the leaves a hot, humid place to ferment. The hygrometer I had inside the chamber told me that it never got very humid, so I kept spraying the leaves with water. In time, they molded.
None of that was necessary. Dig the data from my latest experiment.
Click on the image for a readable version.
I put one of my new hygrometer sensors in a sealed Tupperware with an inch or so of water in the bottom. The sensor is attached to the lid so it's just a few inches from the water. It's reading 100% humidity. A reservoir of water is sufficient to humidify a sealed chamber. The second sensor in that graph is outside the Tupperware container, sitting on the lid.
I'm not available to try this next experiment right now, but in a few days, I'm going to reconstruct my trashcan fermenter and put two sensors in it, one a third of the way up the side, the other two thirds of the way up the side. My bet is that close to the water, the humidity is high and close to the top, the humidity is low.
All I had to do back then was to put in a small fan to circulate the air so the whole chamber got humid. I ruined my tobacco crop by spraying water on it because I didn't realize that without air circulation the humidity level was a function of distance from the water.
My second SensorPush hygrometer arrived in the mail yesterday and I immediately hooked it up. I'm going to start my tobacco experiments tonight, but first I needed to see if the two sensors agreed with one another. Here's the applicable chart.
Click on the image for a readable version.
The first thing to notice is that the Y scale is deceptive, particularly with regards to humidity. By compressing it to the max and min readings for the time frame, it emphasizes the differences in the two sensors. In any case, it looks like the two of them agree quite nicely on temperature. I'm willing to accept a ±0.2 degrees accuracy.
As far as the humidity goes, it looks like it's ±4%. That's good enough. If I give my feedback look for the tobacco fermentation coffin a 10% window, perhaps biasing it down so that it's not trying to hit 90% humidity when the sensor can't read that high, that should be fine. As far as fermentation goes, I can't believe that 80% humidity in the chamber will be all that different from 90%.
Today, I'm going to take one of them and mount it in a sealed contained with water at the bottom and post the other one directly outside said chamber. I want to see what happens to the humidity with a reservoir only. I'll have to run this same experiment twice, exchanging the sensor positions to further test their accuracy.
I made the mistake of watching a couple of clips on Twitter of Ketanji Brown Jackson's confirmation hearings. I don't know if that's how you spell her name, but I'm not going to bother to look it up because it doesn't matter.
The news media, the politicians and poor, dim Ketanji think this is all about them, but it's not. The audience is all of the rest of us and the people being confirmed are them. The hearings are confirming that they're all dingbats.
"What is a woman?" asked one of the senators.
"I don't know, I'm not a biologist." was the answer KBJ thought was clever. It wasn't clever, it was a klaxon signaling that she's a total moron who thinks we're total morons.
Senator Blackburn: "Can you provide a definition for the word woman?"
Like the other one she blew off about when life begins, it was a perfectly predictable question. Her handlers must surely have prepped her for it and that was her canned response. "I don't know what a woman is."
There are layers upon layers of surreality in an exchange between two women where one of them claims she doesn't know what a woman is. Her answer was probably seen as nuanced and sophisticated by her comrades. It was couched in that appeal to authority that plagues us, a demand that any person objecting must first show their credentials like a cop showing his badge. The message, which KBJ screamed at us, was that if we don't have the proper credentials, we need to shut up and obey.
Condescending and imperious doesn't begin to cover it.
Look, KBJ is going to be confirmed, so this is all just a charade put on for the rest of us. The politicians think they're posing and making the right points for their voters and KBJ thinks she's the smartest person in the room by a mile. They're not and she's not.
Instead, this is yet another marker of how detached the Elites are from us and how detached they are from reality. If my young coworkers are any guide, that video has gone viral and will be seen by millions. Most of them won't see it as shrewd or reasonable, they'll see it for what it is, a lame dodge that attempts to brush away what we're all seeing with our own eyes every day.
Lia Thomas, the swimmer, is a dude. It's as plain as the nose on your face. When KBJ and her buddies stroke their chins and ponder how many bepenised swimmers can dance on the head of a tampon, the rest of us roll our eyes and reach for the remote.
KBJ isn't a biologist, she's an idiot and we all know it.
Every time I engage in one of my Dixie experiments, I leave the construction of my devices to the end. When I grew cotton, I didn't look into making a cotton gin until I had harvested the stuff. With my first try at tobacco, I didn't make my fermentation chamber until the tobacco was over-dried, hanging in my garage. This time, with my latest crop of tobacco, I'm going to build my fermentation chamber ahead of time and experiment with it.
My plan right now is to make a Plexiglas tobacco coffin. When real tobacco farmers ferment their leaves, they sometimes do it in big piles in a barn. They let it sit for 3 weeks and as it lays there in heaps, the leaves ferment, removing excess ammonia from the tobacco. Looking up the location of some of the biggest tobacco farms in the US, I found some just south of Charlotte, NC.
Charlotte's climate is much more humid than San Diego's, hence the need for the fermentation chamber. My chamber will try to replicate the weather in Charlotte. Weather Underground has a handy wayback machine which allows you to see the hourly data from any day in recent history at any of their thousands of sensor locations. Here's July 20, 2021. It was a glorious, Southern, 90-90 day. That is, the temperature was around 90 and the humidity was around 90%.
I'm going to pick 21 consecutive days out of July 2021, grab their data from Charlotte, and then use a heater, humidifier and hygrometer sensor to mimic it, hour by hour, in the coffin. Molding ruined our first experiment, so there will be a fan on a timer to blow fresh air through the chamber.
The next step is to learn how to construct the coffin. I've never built anything out of plexiglass, so I'm going to learn by constructing a test chamber which will allow me to see if I can set the temperature and humidity. It will be a simple box with a heater, humidifier and sensor.
More posts as events unfold.
I've got 14 active cells in my seed tray. I'm hoping to be able to split some of these to get as many tobacco plants as possible out of them. Instead of planting them in my raised bed, I'm going to put them in containers and farm some of them out to friends and relatives, increasing my acreage.
On Women
I have to say, other than my own family tragedy unfolding in slow-motion horror, the whole trans thing is getting boring. Watching women get mauled in sporting events is now nothing more than slapstick comedy.
They Were Doomed From The Start
Way back when, for whatever reason, we began to define feminine success in masculine terms. Men and women are different in kind and have different strengths and weaknesses. As soon as we decided that a "successful" woman was a butt-kicking action hero, a beast of an athlete, a sexual libertine and a corner-office careerist, we set them on a path of competition they could never win. Women make second-rate men. Men, I am here to tell you as a veteran of single-dadism, make lousy women.
Richard Thomas mopping the bottom of the pool with the girls in their swim meets was perfectly predictable as soon as we stopped valuing the feminine and demanded that everyone become a man. What we're seeing now is our Ivy League geniuses stumbling to the same conclusion that any number of Kentucky hillbillies could have seen coming decades ago.
It's because He allows you to do it. We've all done evil in our lives. We've lied, gossiped, slandered, raged and, in my case, typically do them all at the same time.
When the question of God permitting evil arises, it's almost always in reference to some monumental wickedness like the Holocaust or the blown pass interference call in the 2018 NFC Championship game that cost the Saints a trip to the Super Bowl. It's almost never in reference to that time you saw the clerk give you too much change and didn't say anything.
Those two sins aren't equivalent, but they're only different in degree. If we lived in a world where the Big Guy whacked us every time we did evil, we'd have no free will at all. Without free will, life isn't an our adventure, it's God's computer program, probably written in Fortran.
Anyway, that's my deep thoughts on the subject. It occurred to me while I was a Lenten penance service at our church. I hope you and yours are having a good weekend.
Whether the Federal government is run by a racist like Trump or compassion-filled Obama, about half of the black students are effectively illiterate. They're doomed. If you can't read by the time you graduate from high school, you're going to have a bad life and you won't contribute much to society.
All of the marches and rioting and sign-waving and speeches and word-salad gibberish coming from the Aristocrats in our universities mean nothing if half of the population can't read and write. We're wasting our time and from the historical data, we've been wasting our time quite a while...
First, there's no way to improve those stats without traditional families. Pay the teachers, blame racism, double the school staff, yell at the moms, blame racism some more and none of it changes until there's one parent doing the dishes while the other parent helps with the homework. That much is obvious from all of the available data across all races and all years.
Here's the new twist on it.
Half of all black pregnancies end in abortion. That means that half the time, a black mother chooses to have her own child killed by a medical procedure. The psychic damage being caused by that is tremendous. If you take a lamb from a ewe, the ewe will lose her mind. It's simple reproductive biology that the mother is emotionally attached to her child. A woman who loses a baby by miscarriage is devastated. A woman who loses a baby by her own choice has it worse.
Show me all the studies you want saying this isn't a problem and I'll ignore them. Our "medical experts" have lied to me about supporting trans kids, they're lying to me about this.
About 3/4 of the surviving babies are abandoned by their fathers because they don't marry the moms. Since married women almost never get abortions, that means that 7 out of every 8 times a black man gets a black woman pregnant, he abandons her.
This isn't a disadvantaged or marginalized community, this is a community where the relations between the sexes are in total ruins. Just what is anyone else supposed to do with this kind of human capital?
Downstream of this are daycare, Head Start, public schools, social workers and, finally, the cops. No matter who runs the show, Republicans or Democrats, no matter what funding is given out or what programs are tried, the results are all the same, hence the chart at the top.
Defund The Trans Police
Elsewhere, I've seen conservatives take victory laps over Democrats trying to distance themselves from their idiotic defund the police movement. Others predict waves of lawsuits as the damage caused by the trans movement becomes obvious. These may all be true, but it will have about as much effect as the libertarian proposals to support entrepreneurship in black neighborhoods, which is to say none.
This isn't a policy problem and it's not going to be solved by changes to the tax code or screaming at white people like they do at the University of San Diego.
What Solves The Problem?
The only solution is to embrace the proper, ordered relationship between the sexes. It's all about JPII and his Theology of the Human Person.
BOOM. "I'll just leave this little pamphlet here. You may read it at your leisure ..."
Bonus Data Points
28% literacy in DC. Outstanding. I forget, who runs DC? It's white supremacists, right?
I was a facilitator for one of Pope Francis' listening sessions last night. That's where Catholics get together and talk about what they like, don't like and hope for the Church. Here in San Diego, we're doing it in small groups with one facilitator and one note-taker. We had a group of 8 people.
The comments of the parishioners will be synthesized into general themes from the parish which will then be synthesized into themes for the diocese which will then be sent to Rome where the Pope will take another rip from his bong and talk absolute nonsense. Whatever. The Church isn't the hierarchy, it's the Mass, the Catechism, the works of the Doctors of the Church and, most importantly, us normal Catholics, the laity.
One of the things we discussed was whether or not the Church needed to get with the times. What was interesting to me was the inability of the people in my group to be able to quickly and succinctly support the Church's positions with logical argument. For example, the acceptance of all manner of sexuality was discussed, but no one, outside of myself and I kept quiet, could make a case for traditional Catholic teaching.
You can either get with the times or you can make a case for the times getting with you. To do the latter, your customers will need to know your value propositions so they can sell your product. If they can't do that, you're screwed.
As I watch my daughter be slowly poisoned to death with testosterone, the idea of the Church "getting with the times" nauseates me. The times don't care about dying girls, dying blacks or low-skilled Americans competing with illegals and living in unending poverty. You'd think that the Church would be at least mildly concerned about these, but you'd be wrong.
It's not that we're cynical connivers making a buck off the misfortunes of others, it's that we've been captured by modern, secular politics. We're not even trying to make the case for protecting girls from deranged ideas like modern gender theory. Our potential Church leaders in the laity, almost all of whom come from the laptop class, are just as much detached from reality as Pete Buttigieg. Creatures of our time, most of us are unable to escape the moral tarpits of 2022. They're different than the tarpits of the South in 1861 or Germany in 1618, but they're just as tarry and just as pitty.
Such is the fate of us all, to be blinded to the evils of our age because we marinate in the culture that spawned them. The Church is supposed to be timeless. The words of Jesus certainly are. We need to be able to recognize where our timeless values clash with the values of our time and be able to make a cogent case for the Church.
Anywho, that's what I learned last night.
If you haven't seen it, here's the Pete Buttigieg reference. He's either a complete idiot or an utter mountebank. Watch Joe Kernan's reaction around 2:00. His exhaustion with Pete's gibberish is priceless.
Transportation Pete Buttigieg on Pelosi’s claim that spending reduces the national debt: “it is true” pic.twitter.com/xdo1zbJDp0
At different times during their monthly cycle, women feel different ways because their changing hormones affect their brains and they need help coping with their moods but giving them massive doses of wrong-sex hormones does not affect their brains or cause them any psychological harm because they are actually men who are in the wrong body and need their hormonal cycles slammed by the introduction of staggering amounts of testosterone which is good for them because their brains are not affected by their hormone levels.
The true horror of this cannot be grasped until you realize that our medical establishment has embraced this madness. That means that not a single thing you hear from them can be trusted from here on out. I have no idea how we can function as a society under these conditions.
The Ultimate In Mansplaining
Richard Levine, a dude, has been named USA Today's Woman of the Year. When it comes to mansplaining, you simply cannot beat having a man tell all the chicks how to be the best woman.
Could it be that he won because he make himself sammiches?
Time Magazine Asks USA Today To Hold Their Kambucha
Rick Levine winning Woman of the Year is all well and good, but take a look at the honors being given to Mike Rodriguez!
I dunno, I don't think Ebony is being very inclusive here. Isn't Mike an Afro-Latinx Trans Whatever?
Dig the look on that idiot's face. I swear, if you took a compressor and blew air into one of his ears, his eyes would spin around as the air came out the other side. What a dingledork.
Since we rednecks make our own whiskey and our own smoke, too, I'm trying to grow and process tobacco again. Last time, I was able to grow, harvest and dry the stuff, but it molded and was ruined during the fermentation process. My fertile, if unstable, brain has concocted a new way to ferment it, so we're giving it another go.
The tobacco, however, is going full rebel and refusing to cooperate. Dig the seed cups shown below.
Argh.
If you click on the image and look at the full-sized version, you can see some cells are filled with tiny tobacco plants while others are completely empty. They're all in the same tray so they've been in exactly the same environment. Why did some cells generate a zillion tobacco seedlings and others produce none? It's a Yankee plot, I tell you what!
My fermentation chamber sensor is still under development. I like the SensorPush hygrometer, but it communicates via Bluetooth, so it's a pain to use unless you want to write software to do authentication over Bluetooth, which I do not. I sprung for the SensorPush Gateway which connects to the sensors, grabs their data and then uploads it to the SensorPush website, where I can harvest it with a simple Python script. Or it would be simple if I knew Python.
I'm learning. I should be up and running with harvesting the sensor data in a week. Unless the tobacco plants go full triffid on me and mature by then, I'll be fine.
The plan is to pick a spot in North Carolina, harvest its hourly temperature and humidity data off the Interweb Tubes and then use a Raspberry Pi, the sensor and a simple heater and humidifier to mimic the climate in North Carolina in an enclosure in my garage. Simplicity itself!
More updates as events warrant. In the meantime, I need to go outside and shake my fist at those empty seed cups. "You aren't even trying! Why can't you be more like the seed cup with all the seedlings! Your mother and I are so disappointed in you!"
Reading more on the PITT site and discovering a link on Instapundit, I found that there is what should be an unsurprising link between porn and trans. First, dig this story from a mom of a trans girl who was eventually given access to the girl's secret social media accounts. It's worth reading the whole thing. Here's a snippet.
I am a parent of female child who has Rapid Onset of Gender Dysphoria (ROGD). This is a new phenomenon where a child, who was perfectly happy in his or her body until right around puberty, suddenly announces that he or she is the opposite sex. In the case of my daughter, when she developed this condition, she threw away all of her feminine clothes, cut her hair super short, refused to go out in public without a chest binder and stopped shaving her legs. And, of course, she came up with a new male-sounding name and insisted that everyone use it, along with the associated male pronouns...
After a night in which my daughter had a panic attack, she started to open up to me about the cause of her pain and anger, and why her behavior had changed so dramatically. She gave me all of her passwords for all of her accounts, even her secret ones. She admitted to having accounts in every possible platform – Discord, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and TikTok – some that I had no idea existed. I spent the next couple of weeks going through each device and every platform. What I saw made me physically ill.
The essay goes into the details. I won't do it here. Now check out this essay from a young woman who recently detransitioned.
Online pornography, which studies show most kids are now exposed to by the age of 13, has become virtually inescapable. Faster than we can even measure its impact, this new world of porn is drastically changing how young people form their perceptions of sexuality and adult relationships. It would be foolish to think that it wouldn’t have major consequences. In my own life, I can see how being inundated with pornographic imagery as a young woman, much of it violent, and being repeatedly told that this was normal and even cool led me instinctively to look for an escape from womanhood...
In these porn-saturated circles, submission, degradation, abuse, and suffering are all highly associated with women. This is completely normalized and encouraged within online groups of young people and, in so many cases, presented as empowering for women. If a young person feels uncomfortable with it all, that person is pressured to not only repress those feelings but also participate in porn culture nonetheless...
To girls who notice that this culture wants them to be sexual objects, who do not want to be sexually tortured but instead wish for loving intimate relationships, who do not want to rejoice in porn but are pressured into regurgitating how fantastic and progressive porn culture is, the very idea of being a “woman” becomes repulsive.
We're all born pretty much the same. We're innocent creatures and we know nothing of the world. We all go through puberty pretty much the same way. For women, as I understand it, it's associated with shame, shyness, fear and anxiety.
The inherent anxieties that come with being a vulnerable human female can be intolerable in these conditions. Most girls don’t want to compete with porn for the attention of boys. They’re scared that all the boys around them and any boys they might fancy are watching porn and will demand that intimacy be like porn. They feel inferior to other women who seem to be thriving in the porn culture; they feel something is wrong with them for not getting it.
Don't Say Gay
I need to make some chicken stock and watch the Newcastle United game this morning, so I'll close with a simple take on the progressive insanity du jour, the bill in Florida which attempts to stop teachers from sexually grooming 6-year-olds.
At 5 or 6, many children still believe in Santa Claus. To have a teacher, probably the most important authority figure other than mom and dad*, tell them that a boy can turn into a girl or a girl into a boy is nothing short of sexually degenerate child abuse. The child has no frame of reference for any of this. They don't understand sexuality at all. Their sense of reality is easily overwhelmed. If it weren't, they wouldn't believe in Santa Claus.
Similarly, a developing young woman's self worth can be easily overwhelmed. Many women never find the strength to refuse the sexual demands that confront them. Girls going through puberty are easy meat for the degenerate progressives. It's a total mismatch.
If you're a good, little boy this year, Santa will bring you a training bra!
* - Assuming dad is present, which he isn't for many kids.
Preface: What follows is not meant to minimize the suffering of the Ukrainian people. There's plenty of them who have been killed, wounded or displaced by Putin's aggression. Instead, it's an exploration of the way the news media has colored the truth for maximum emotional effect.
This was a fascinating thread on Twitter. In it, an average Joe chronicles his visit to Poland and Ukraine during the ongoing war. He gives you a view from a slightly wider lens angle than what we're seeing in the news media.
We're getting played, big time. Here's a tidbit.
Kyiv, Ukraine. grannies walk their dogs as normal, the reporters wear flak Jackets. pic.twitter.com/uf06fMs7A0
This is precisely what you would expect in a war between two countries with small, dysfunctional militaries.
When the Soviets took Berlin in 1945, they lost 500,000 guys doing it against a German army that was in ruins. 500,000 is just the number of casualties they took and it's about 10x the total of what Russia has to take Kiev. The Soviets had state-of-the art tanks. Modern Russian vehicles are garbage. Bill Roggio, who I respect, thinks that in the end, Ukraine will fall. I'm not so sure, but either outcome wouldn't surprise me. Here's what the Institute for the Study of War thinks as of yesterday.
Russian forces around Kyiv did not attempt to renew offensive operations on a multi-battalion scale on March 10 following the failure of limited efforts on March 8-9. Ukrainian forces badly damaged a Russian armored column in the Brovary area east of Kyiv, likely further disrupting Russian efforts to set conditions for offensive operations on the east bank of the Dnipro. Ukrainian resistance all along the Russian lines of communication from eastern Kyiv to the Russian border near Sumy continues to disrupt Russian efforts to bring more combat power to bear near the capital. The episodic, limited, and largely unsuccessful Russian offensive operations around Kyiv increasingly support the Ukrainian General Staff’s repeated assessments that Russia lacks the combat power near the capital to launch successful offensive operations on a large scale.
It's a bum fight.
More Theater
A while back, I worked for an organization that would react to terror threat warnings. When THREATCON OCELOT* was declared, it was because they had "credible information**" suggesting there might be a terror attack. The building that housed the bigwigs was protected by yellow "Do Not Cross" tape and no cars could be parked in front of it. Our building, which held only very small wigs, was completely unprotected. We used to joke that when the Jihadists drove their explosives-packed van into our compound, they would be deterred by the yellow tape and blow up our building instead. It was all theater.
Now dig this photo.
I don't recall what this is. Some Very Important Building in Ukraine. Whatever. Dig the flag, flying defiantly, proudly in the face of Russian aggression. Also, note the lack of shell and bullet damage anywhere. After reading through the thread linked above, you just know that a block away, everything is completely normal. After all, who's going to fill all those sandbags all over the city? Where are they going to get the sand or the bags in the first place?
Where Are The Russian Bombers?
When the Nazis took the Low Countries in 1940, they smashed Rotterdam with waves of He-111 bombers. Late in the war, we were flattening German and Japanese cities with hundreds of bombers in each raid. The Russian Air Force (VKS) has been largely silent. Why is this?
A final factor to consider is the relatively low number of flying hours that VKS pilots receive each year relative to most of their Western counterparts. While accurate numbers across each unit are hard to find, periodic Russian official statements suggest an average of 100–120 hours per year across the VKS as a whole.
100 hours per year with no modern flight simulators as backup means that the VKS dudes can take off and land without crashing, but not much else. You can send them on a simple bombing mission in groups no larger than 4, but you're not going to overwhelm an enemy air defense system and blow it apart if you can't get 100 or so combat aircraft up in the air at the same time.
This is a bum fight. We're getting played.
Meanwhile, our sanctions are turning Russia into a Chinese vassal state. Is that a win? Maybe. Russia is such a toad that anyone who aligns with them might be worse off afterwards. Finally, there's this.
Saudi Arabia, UAE leaders not returning Biden's calls, disappointed with US - report
The two Mideast countries are disappointed with the Iran nuclear deal, as well as the American response to Houthi terrorist attacks in recent weeks.
Those same dudes talked to Putin, though.
This is what happens when you have a leadership class that thinks other cultures consist of nothing more than hairstyles, fashions, food and music.
* - I think it was OCELOT. It might have been a color. CHARTREUSE, perhaps.
As the Russian offensive into Ukraine grinds on with little progress being made, it's becoming increasingly obvious that Putin is little more than a regional despot. Over the years, he's been blown up into the Boogie Man by our media, but why? Russia itself is dying, it's economy is utterly reliant on a raw material it pumps out of the ground and it's not responsible for anything new and interesting in the world. It's a second-world dump.
How did we get so obsessed with the place? Allow me to posit that it's a lingering side-effect of Trump beating Hillary in 2016. Here's one of my favorite segments from a Tucker Carlson speech where he suggests that the Elites never got over Hillary's loss. Instead of self-reflection, they blamed everyone else. One of the villains of the piece, the biggest individual of all, was Putin.
Putin Mania hasn't ended yet. Like Global Warming Climate Change and racism, he's responsible for everything bad. My favorite trick of his is Russian Disinformation. Instead of owning up to the fact that our establishment organizations have all been lying to us for years about all kinds of things and have lost credibility, the reason people are reaching for conspiracy theories is Russian Disinformation.
When the conspiracy theories turn out to have been true, <cough cough> Ukrainian bio-weapons-research labs <cough cough>, they're passed over and a new Russian Disinformation campaign is discovered. Russian Disinformation is to our news media and authority figures like evil spirits were to medieval peasants. It's a catch-all phrase to cover every time the public blows off some pronouncement about SciENcE, the economicalism or hatefulnesses.
We're drowning in Putin Mania because the Elites can't admit that they've screwed the pooch over all kinds of things.
... and then the ball caroms off of Holt's pointy head and whacks Barr in the face. Both end up knocked out.
The right is having fun with a recent interview of William Barr by that insufferable pinhead, Lester Holt. Barr supposedly "stopped Holt in his tracks." DESTROYED! in the parlance of YouTube shorts. Here's what went down.
HOLT: Well, you write about the "big lie" being Black Lives Matter...
BARR: Black Lives Matter is based on the premise that the main threat to black welfare in the inner city are out-of-control police force that gratuitously kill African Americans. That’s simply not borne out by the facts...
HOLT: In society, do you believe there’s such a thing as systemic racism?
BARR: I actually think the whole idea is a cop-out. I think racism exists in people’s, individual’s souls.
HOLT: By dismissing systematic racism, are you not dismissing the pain of African American families that have to sit down with their children and have “the talk” because they’re afraid a simple traffic stop could lead to their deaths?...
BARR: No, in every study of the situation that I’m familiar with says there is no bias. The numbers are the product of the number of interactions police have.
HOLT: Yeah, and black men are the subject of three times as many traffic stops by police.
BARR: Right. And that sometimes is a function of where the police are. Police go where the crime is.
BOOM! Hahaha! Take that, Lefty Lester! It's about crime!
They're both wrong. By the time someone gets pulled over for a traffic stop, they've lived a considerable portion of their lives. Most of them are past high school. You know, the high schools where about half of them are functionally illiterate and as many as 33% of them read at the second-grade level.
Cops are civilization's last line of defense. If they're getting involved it's because the family, the schools, the churches, the culture and all other elements of society have failed. In a previous post, I wrote about Jacob Blake's girlfriend, the one who was brutalized, raped and robbed by that innocent victim of racist policing, Jacob Blake.
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 (Rittenhouse) 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.
By the time these kids hit 18, the amount of damage that's been done to them by a degenerate culture absolutely dwarfs anything a cop might say or do. Maybe old Les could look into that.
I'm still trying to piece together how the medical establishment can reconcile giving my daughter psychosis-inducing levels of alien hormones with their knowledge of endocrinology and brain functions. As we discussed in a previous blog post, giving a woman massive doses of testosterone or a man massive doses of estrogen will make their brains shrink and drive them mad as it leads to early dementia and Alzheimer's.
This article has hit hard for me as my son has been on estrogen for close to two years now and his mental health has deteriorated rapidly as of late. He had a complete psychotic break just three weeks ago and was diagnosed with possible emerging schizophrenia while in hospital. He is home and medicated for this but mental health is worsening. He can't work and is not staying in his apartment. He has a new therapist at home that is diagnosing bipolar. Regardless, it seems pretty clear to me that the hormones aren't working. Thank you for this brilliant piece of research.
Emphasis mine and probably unnecessary.
The only thing I can come up with is the transition from Christian ethics, which are based on the individual, to Marxist ethics which are based on group membership. To refresh, Marxism divides the world into two, simple categories, victims and oppressors. For Marx, it was workers vs. owners. For Hitler, it was Germans vs. Jews. For the modern woke crowd, it's everyone but straight, white males vs. straight, white males.
I think what we're seeing with the trans crowd are some of the boundaries of the movement. You can see that the NCAA is starting to get queasy about Will Thomas swimming on the Penn women's team. When I've talked to my doctor and my therapist, both are repelled by their colleagues going along with poisoning kids. Still, we all bathe in a Marxist stew every day and the reflexive desire for simple classifications to make moral sense of the world partially, unconsciously drives our decisions. Straight, white men are bad, LGBTQWERTY is good. If the QWERTians think that women can become men, then we ought to go along with it because they're the good guys.
When we ditched Christianity, we didn't have any concrete idea of where we were going, so we ended up here, in a Marxist world of childish good guys vs. bad guys.
... it feels to me like we're watching a boxing match between two cancer patients.
Over at Front Page, Dan Greenfield posted an excellent essay that sums up a lot of what I'm thinking.
Russia, with a birth rate of 1.5 children per woman, has invaded Ukraine, where the birth rate is 1.2 children per woman, to determine which nation with below replacement birth rates will go extinct the fastest. In the long run the only winners of the war to determine whether Ukraine will belong to the 1.2 or 1.5 people will be the Chechen and other Muslim soldiers doing the fighting.
The Chechens have a birth rate of 2.5. Their religion and mosques are more likely to inherit the territories they are fighting over than either the Russian or Ukrainian Orthodox churches.
Germany's birthrate is similar. If I recall my back-of-the-envelope calculations, in the next generation, Germany's population will fall from 80M to 56M. That's 24M fewer krauts, all without a shot being fired.
Trump correctly posed the question, what in the world are we doing defending societies that don't see a need to provide for their own defenses? I'd extend that to, what in the world are we doing defending societies that don't see a need to provide for their continued existence. If all goes well, Ukraine's population will drop from 44M to 26M. If they win, they'll lose 18M dudes and dudettes.
If memory serves, Poland is in even worse shape and once the Russkies reduce Ukraine to rubble, they'll be right on the border of the new Russian Empire.
If I were king, I'd have dropped the whole thing in the Germans' and Poles' laps. It's your continent, you go defend it. I'd have suggested to England that they stay out of this. Closest person to the problem wins, man. If you're not going to bother creating a future generation of Germans, much less defending the ones you've already got with a proper army, then I'm not going to bother with worrying about your future, either.
As an aside, I loved this meme.
When all you care about are your groins and your wallets, kids and armies get in the way. Oh well.
Explanation: I've been noodling about transgender people quite a bit on this blog. This story is a motivation of that.
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Very soon after the fall of the Soviet Union, my first wife and I adopted a little girl from Russia. She was 15 months old when I went to get her. My wife did not go with me as she was anxious about the safety of the trip. Many stories live in those sentences, but Jolly Bear was the final story from Russia. Coming home, my daughter and I flew British Air from Moscow to London. I wanted to kiss the carpet of the British Air jet as the people in it were smiling. Those were the first warm smiles I had seen since I landed in Russia.
Sitting beside me were an elderly British couple. We exchanged our stories and the woman decided to do us a kindness and from the duty-free cart, bought a little teddy bear who wore a cable-knit sweater with the Union Jack on it for my daughter. I broke down in tears and told her that it was the first toy my daughter had ever received. The British woman, being very British, choked back her own tears and simply said, "I say. That's rather extraordinary."
I replied, "What's his name? You have to give him a name, you know."
She said, "Let's call him Jolly Bear." And so we did.
Jolly Bear.
I've written in the past about my "good friend" who is a woman that thinks she's a man. That's my daughter. She's 24 now and has been on testosterone for the last year and a half. I see her about twice a year. It's always an ambush. I typically get 5 minutes of warning that she's coming over.
Wife kitteh and I are the only people left in her life who won't agree that she's a man. She's been coached by trans influencers to stop interacting with anyone who denies it. When we get together, we don't discuss it. I won't call her by her new name and I won't use her pronouns. That makes conversations arduous.
When she first came out to me, I wasn't at all prepared for it. She'd been thoroughly coached by the LGBT crew. I was totally blindsided and had no idea how to respond. I couldn't come up with anything concrete, but told her not to do anything that would cause permanent harm.
She'd always been offbeat, but she'd never been masculine. She'd had several boyfriends and I came into the garage once to find her and a boyfriend making out on the couch we had there with the video game TV. Her "mom," my first wife, never denied her much of anything and rarely required her to do well in school. She refused to support my daughter's soccer career.
I did everything on the parenting side with only half custody. We spent a ton of time together, working on school, going on soccer trips and more. I knew her very, very well. She was never masculine in any way. She wasn't a princess girl, but she was definitely a girl.
She went to public high school and was straight until probably late in her senior year. When she graduated, she moved in with her mom full time because mom expected nothing from her. She worked minimum wage jobs and seemed to be doing well. I'm guessing that she started hanging around with the LGBT crowd around then. Her mom paid for her to go to the San Francisco Pride Week festivities and that was a pivotal moment.
From there to here, dealing with her has been like entering a fun house mirror maze. Nothing makes sense, but you can't escape. You can't give up on your daughter, but you can't have a full conversation with her because of the threat of being cut out of her life forever.
I recently discovered Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans (PITT). This entry in particular applies to my daughter. In it, a scientist describes his research into what we know about gender treatments. It matches what I've seen in my daughter.
The brain is clearly impacted by hormonal changes in the body and that the brain is an endocrine organ. Would it not make sense then, to understand if there is a chemical basis for these feelings that can be addressed, short of “transition”. In other words, what are the impact of hormones on the brain?
There ARE studies available about the impacts of trans-medicalization (specifically wrong sex hormones) on the brain — and the results are not good at all...
Gender ideologues say that taking estrogen “feminizes” the brain. It does no such thing. What it appears to do is change blood flow, reduce the size of the brain, interfere with executive function, cause dangerously high build-ups of glutamate, and lead to early-onset dementia and high risk of stroke...
Mueller et al, observed in their structural MRI study of persons on wrong sex hormones, that “Ventricular enlargement has not only been associated with grey matter reduction due to aging , but has also been identified as a putative marker for progression of Alzheimer’s Disease or a risk factor for psychopathology.
On the wrong sex hormones, your brain shrinks and you begin to go mad. My daughter is now being treated for depression and anxiety, which is not unusual for women being poisoned with testosterone. She'd never had those problems in the past. The last time I saw her, she had the shakes. Her endocrine system is in crisis and as a result, her central nervous system is breaking down. She's already suffered permanent physical damage. I can't see how this ends well.
And so it goes.
Our education industry, our media, our entertainers and the entire Democratic Party are not only fine with this, they're egging these poor people on to more and more harm. All I can do is pull a reference from Star Trek. Commodore Decker perfectly sums up my feelings about the lot of them. They say there's no devil, but there is. Right out of Hell.
I saw this on Twitter from a trans person and something struck me about it that hadn't occurred to me before. I won't do the standard tweet embed because I don't want to call them out.
Gender is personal. I don’t need to give my life story and realizations to prove to you my gender is ‘real’.
I found self love in my gender.
It’s expansive, growing, flowing, beyond.
It is not shameful.
It is brilliant, bold, divine.
My gender just is.
I found it terribly sad. We all go through periods where we are uncomfortable with our bodies, but most of us come to terms with our perceived flaws. Over time, hopefully, we accept them for what they are. Well, we used to, anyway. Nowadays, we can say that our bodies, our physical reality is wrong and needs to be changed with chemicals and knives. We're not told to get a grip and deal with it any more.
The person that wrote that isn't the problem. The problem is that we've discarded objective reality.
Yes, I know I've said that before, but I needed to get this down in writing to codify it in my mind.
Imagine that the person was schizophrenic instead and they thought their toaster was talking to them. An objective reality response would be to say, "No, your toaster is an inanimate object. You need to get professional help and find a way to get over this before it causes real problems." That would be kind, if a bit difficult for Mr. Toaster's friend.
The trans person above needed that and didn't get it. Twenty years ago, they would have gotten it and been better for it.
