Disarming Somalia

This kind of looting is fine, right? I mean, we're not going to do anything about it, are we?

A group of thieves empty out shelves in Sephora into garbage bags in a mall near Los Angeles pic.twitter.com/pdGL08SF1B

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) May 30, 2022

Between this and the cops sitting around for almost an hour as the Uvalde maniac shot the kids, moderate liberal Eric Weinstein drew the only reasonable conclusion.

All of this is sending a message that I cannot fathom: you may soon be abandoned by any form of meaningful law enforcement to protect your family against UNKNOWN levels of threat.

That argument is so dangerous as to defy imagination as it justifies any & all levels of lethality.

Slaughtering children aside, the looting will only be tolerated so long as the losses don't come from the people running the store. As soon as they start taking money directly from the workers, all levels of response can be anticipated.

Accelerating this will be reductions in real government spending which are being driven by inflation. With a reduced, no longer bottomless, government backstop, losses become more and more personal. Declarations of a "state of emergency" following riots and looting won't pack the same financial punch as they did before.

We are not all in this together, we were always on our own. It's not a heartless or selfish thing to say, it's just reality. When you take a test in school, it's a reflection of your time spent studying. When you get a job, everyone in your neighborhood isn't getting hired, you are. The government and your insurance companies are better than an illusion, but as their finances get stretched, both of them become less and less corporeal.

In the end, you're on your own. You can't have people killing your family members or stealing your property. In such an environment, pitching gun control will be like pitching gun control in Somalia.

No one needs an assault rifle, boys. Hand those over.

The Only Show On TV With Men In It

 ... is The Number One Ladies' Detective Agency. At least that was my conclusion after trying to find something modern to watch last night. We gave Bergman Island a try as it didn't seem to be jamming racial and sexual trash down our throats, but it was so slow and so weird that we turned it off after 30 minutes that seemed like a year. Everything else from 2021 looked horrible.

Detective Agency is a thoroughly human show from Botswana. It centers around the adventures of two women who start a detective agency in a patriarchal country. One of the two primary male character is a gay dude which only adds to the charm of the show. The men in the show are men. The characters are all recognizable as real people and while they're plenty eccentric, they aren't political cardboard cutouts generated by woke lunatics.

It's also funny. Here's a snippet. Enjoy!

When Jesus Puts You Out Of A Job

 ... the only thing you can do is ditch the Jesus stuff.

From a previous post on George Wallace:

Wallace's speech surprised me in that it didn't support racism so much as it did racial purity. It had a very Hitlerian quality in that way. Wallace didn't want to enslave the blacks, he just wanted them over there while the whites stayed over here.

And so it was meant in our racial lives . . . each race, within its own framework has the freedom to teach . . to instruct . . to develop . . to ask for and receive deserved help from others of separate racial stations. This is the great freedom of our American founding fathers . . . but if we amalgamate into the one unit as advocated by the communist philosophers . . . then the enrichment of our lives . . . the freedom for our development . . . is gone forever. We become, therefore, a mongrel unit of one under a single all powerful government . . . and we stand for everything . . . and for nothing.

Emphasis mine. The problem with mongrels is that they can't be de-mongreled*. My own family is pretty well-mongreled. In our children's generation, I think we have every race represented when you include spouses. When you include grandchildren, mongrels abound. Wallace's vision for racial purity is completely out the window.

The dude's going to have to find another job.

Dittos for our modern race maniacs like Ibram Kendi and Robin DeAngelo. It's kind of hard to scream about whiteness when a bunch of the whites are also partially black. That's why LeBron James' boy took so much heat.

LeBron James' 17-year-old son Bronny is trolled with vile racist abuse for taking a white girl to his high school prom after sharing photos of the couple...

Bronny, who is a junior, attended the dance with one of his Sierra Canyon School classmates, senior Peyton Gelfuso...

Some social media users were not happy with his decision to take someone who is 'light skinned' to prom; one person called Peyton a 'money hungry white girl' while another accused her of being a 'gold digger' 

Others said they were 'disappointed' in the basketball player for not bringing someone with his own skin color

The Jews and then Christ told us to chill out about the racial stuff. We're all made in the image of God and there are no Jews nor Greeks, dudes and dudettes. Just be cool, man. If He and His Dad are really the creators of Heaven and Earth, they get the last say in what is right and what is wrong. If mongrels are OK with Them, then mongrels are, by definition, no big deal.

If mongrels are OK, then your pedigree is nothing more than a piece of paper. At that point, it's kind of hard to get a fat check for writing books and giving speeches against mongrelization.

It's nice work if you can get it.

On Nihilism

Yesterday, I suggested that since guns aren't easier to get and gun technology hasn't changed, then the increase in shootings must be due to cultural changes. I suggested an increase in nihilism.

Nihilism - the rejection of all religious and moral principles, in the belief that life is meaningless.

Upon further reflection, I'll double down on that bet. Sending $40B to support the corrupt kleptocrats in Ukraine while our own border is totally undefended seems pretty nihilistic. Dittos for not using SAT scores for college admissions so you can claim you're fighting for racial justice. I'd say demanding more money for schools when it's clear that family structures dominate outcomes is pretty nihilistic.

That last one is changing a bit as both the NAACP and the Baltimore Teacher's Union are now asking for stricter punishments for classroom violence. One point for the good guys, there.

How about handing out needles to drug addicts and giving them safe places to shoot up? Nihilistic? Yes. Or this poster seen on NYC subways?

I'm using up material for future posts, so I'll stop here. All of that sure looks like we've discarded the concepts of objective morality that come along with Christianity. On the plus side, Kendi's getting $20,000 per speech, so there's that.

* - Is it de-mongreled or de-mongrelled? I went with one "l" because it looked right.

Uvalde And Us

As far as I can tell, it's harder to get a gun now than it's ever been in the past. People I know who have bought guns recently in California say it's a tremendous pain. Those who already have them and want to get another say it's harder.

The guns themselves haven't changed all that much in the last 40 years. Yes, they might have higher-capacity magazines, but the AR-15 design itself is pretty old.

If it's not looser laws and it's not deadlier guns, then that seems to me to narrow it down to societal changes. We must be more nihilistic than before.

As a slight aside, I'm not sure that the push for more gun laws is going to bear much fruit. After the BLM / George Floyd riots of 2020, where some police departments failed to defend property and lives, I know several people who became first-time gun owners. Those folks aren't going to be interested in having their weapons taken from them.

As another aside, as Glenn Reynolds likes to say, the cops aren't there to protect you from the criminals, the cops are there to protect the criminals from you. When it becomes a reasonable possibility that the cops will retreat in the face of unrest and leave you stranded, a wise person will arm themselves.

Finally, there's this excellent analysis.

I've seen lots and lots of painful grasping for straws on both sides of the gun argument. On the right, they're seizing on every flaw in the behavior of the cops and the teachers. A door was left open and the cops responding to the situation didn't storm the place right away. On the left, it's the same, tired appeal to the fairyland idea that someone will somehow confiscate guns from citizens or that there's a magic law that will make this all stop.

For the love of Pete, give the Uvalde teachers and cops and the gun-owners of Texas a break. A madman who had been planning this for a while got past the school's amateur defenses and whacked the kids. The cops used their best judgment and it was wrong. Like the guy in that video said, if someone wants to do harm, it's very hard to stop them.

Take some sage advice from our sage and spread a little peace instead of yelling.

Uvalde, Knives And Cars

This is a great thread on the victims of the massacre in Uvalde, TX. It's heartbreaking.

This thread will be dedicated to the victims of the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

As a parent, my heart is broken seeing these faces and their ages.

My condolences to their families during this difficult time 🙏🏻

Xavier Lopez, 10. He was a 4th grader at Robb Elementary. pic.twitter.com/261cSEBFZ3

— Natasha ⚯͛ (@ndelriego) May 25, 2022

Twitter being what it is, all the usual suspects are out there, standing on the bodies of the dead, yelling at their political opponents.

On the left, there's a great cry in favor of having mentally disturbed teens stab their grandmothers with kitchen knives and then run kids over in the school parking lot with a car. Well, that's what it seems like as the only thing they care about is that a gun was used. It's not the despair and pain in the killer that led him to try to off grandma and then make a stand at the local school, it's the gun.

On the right, there's a great cry in favor of making our kids even more stressed and paranoid than they already by turning schools into fortresses as if they were outposts on the borders of Comanche lands. Well, that's what it seems like when they talk about gun training for school staff. What, are the kids not already sufficiently traumatized by global warming doom-mongering and racial guilt? They need more existential worries?

The killer must have been in intense pain to have tried to kill grandma and then gone to the school to take as many others down with him as he could. Dittos for the 300 who will die of fentanyl overdoses today. Dittos for the drug addicts and mentally ill on the streets of LA, Philly, NY, San Fran and other cities. Dittos for the half of all black high school graduates who are functionally illiterate.

Instead of yelling about policies and programs, which we can't afford anyway because we're $30T in debt, maybe we ought to talk about how meaning, purpose and order seems to be in short supply in our lives while living in the wealthiest nation the world has ever seen.

Here's some yellow Kangaroo's Paw as a palate cleanser. Enjoy!

An Executive Board Meeting For The Ages At State Farm

I'm here to tell you that I would pay good money, maybe in the 4-figure range, to see a video recording of the recent executive board meeting at State Farm* when the non-insane members of the board found out about this.

🚨 Emails leaked to @ConsumersFirst from concerned @StateFarm employees show the company engaged in the woke indoctrination of kids age 5+.

State Farm partnered with The GenderCool Project — which aims to have conversations with children about being Transgender and Non-Binary. pic.twitter.com/MYcZSW8Yp1

— Will Hild (@WillHild) May 23, 2022

Ohioan and I experienced many exec board meetings and they were almost all tedious affairs. I can just imagine how this one went. The room was filled with the kind of people who make it to leadership positions in an insurance company - somewhat overweight, bland, but competent managers wearing Brooks Brothers-quality suits. Once a week, they sit through a two-hour meeting where young climbers give them PowerPoint presentations that could tranquilize a honey badger.

The biggest goal for the attendees is to not ask so many questions that the meeting goes long and they get home late, missing Junior's baseball game or Missy's soccer practice. The second biggest goal is to stay awake. I think it went something like this.

Bob from Finance: ... and, as you can see from the chart, the dashed line is the amortization rate as a function of month of our municipal bond investments while the dotted line is the return on our large-cap mutual fund and the dot-dash line is our ...

Here, Bob drones on and on and on until he's mercifully cut short by the admin who is running the meeting and trying to keep things on time.

Admin: Now we'll finish the meeting with a report from our Chief Diversity Officer, Victor Terry.

Victor: I'm happy to report that our recent effort to distribute books encouraging five-year-olds to ask their parents for chemical castration and bodily mutilation is proceeding nicely! Why, just this week, we distributed over two hundred GenderCool books to local grade schools.

Total silence.

Joan from Accounting: Wait, what?

Victor: It's been a big success!

Joan: What has?

Victor: Our effort to poison children with wrong-sex hormones and hack off their breasts and genitals!

Total silence.

Jack from Marketing and Sales: Do you mean to tell me that State Farm is on the record as spreading sexual degeneracy to kindergarteners?

Victor: Yes! Isn't it great?

Jack: How does this help us sell and service insurance?

Victor: Insurance?

At this point, Jack's assistant comes in and hands him an email from one of his regional sales manager telling him that customers are losing their minds over this and canceling their policies. Since Jack's annual bonus and the bonuses of his team are tied to State Farm's number of active policies, Jack and his team have just seen millions and millions of their own dollars evaporate like water on the asphalt of a Phoenix parking lot in August.

With a roar, Jack leaps across the meeting room tables and grabs Victor. It takes three strong men to pry Jack's hands from around Victor's throat. The entire meeting devolves into screaming and rage.

Victor and his diversity team might want to polish their resumes right about now.

* - I originally wrote this post talking about Allstate because I got Allstate and State Farm confused. I still don't know which is which or if there's any substantial difference between them.

Lavender Fur

I was playing around with my macro lens in the backyard the other day and got this photo of our lavender in bloom. I love the fur on the flower petals. I left the pictures large, so I think they're worth a click. Enjoy!

Weakening MLK

 ... can best be done by ditching Christianity.

Yesterday, we looked at George Wallace's segregation speech and compared it to his nemesis, MLK and his speeches. 

Wallace's speech surprised me in that it didn't support racism so much as it did racial purity. It had a very Hitlerian quality in that way. Wallace didn't want to enslave the blacks, he just wanted them over there while the whites stayed over here...

His speech is also filled with racial paranoia...

He mumbles stuff about God, but it's not tied to any theological points from either Scripture or the Church Fathers, so it sounds like what it is - a cheap political stunt designed to make you think he's a faithful Christian...

MLK, in contrast, wrote well-crafted speeches. They have easily-followed narrative arcs and their logic is clear. God says we're all the same, our founding documents say we're all the same, why don't we treat each other all the same?

What happens when you ditch Christianity? Well, as we found by reading Caesar and Geronimo, absent Christianity, racial classifications and their attendant injustices are perfectly logical.

Unburdened by Judeo-Christian notions that all men are created equal in the image of God, Caesar is the ultimate, secular Utilitarian. He has a job to do and he gets it done with minimal fuss. If you submit to Roman rule, even after battle, he takes hostages from your royal families and demands a tribute to pay for garrison legions. Your nation is allowed to survive, albeit as a vassal state to the Romans. If you betray that agreement or oppose him through any kind treachery, he defeats you in battle, burns your villages to the ground, slaughters your leaders and sells the population into slavery.

Geronimo had similar ethics.

Geronimo had no concept of morality outside of his own. It was perfectly honorable to raid and steal and murder as long as it was done the right way. He had no problem wiping out whole farmsteads if they resisted when he and his goons showed up to rob the place. When it happened to him under different circumstances, he was aghast and complained of treachery.

When America cuts itself adrift from Christianity, MLK's argument is reduced to an appeal to our founding documents. When those are called into question because our Founders were flawed humans, MLK is left with nothing at all.

At that point Caesar and Geronimo make much better arguments. So does, for that matter, the University of South Carolina. 

The Moore Business Success Academy, a three-day workshop hosted by the University of South Carolina's  (USC) Darla Moore School of Business, is not accepting applications from White students. 

“Student must identify as African American or Black, Hispanic, LatinX, American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian, Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, or Two or More Races," the application requirements read. 

Campus Reform obtained an email from the Moore school's Office of Diversity and Inclusion that stipulates the same race-based prohibition as the online application. 

And that, as far as I'm concerned, is how we've gotten to this sorry state of affairs.

Repent and believe in the Gospel. Or else.

MLK vs George Wallace, The Rematch

... and this time, George Wallace is winning.

Every time I hear someone on the left or right make a big deal about grouping people by race, I think about the MLK speeches I listened to on Audible. Their point was clear - stop classifying people by race. Everyone is an individual and should be treated as such. Their logic was clear as well. According to the Bible, we're all made in the image of God. According to the Declaration of Independence, all men are created equal.

I began to wonder about George Wallace's segregation speech. Old George was the Democrat governor of Alabama who famously said, "Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!" in response to attempts to allow people to mingle freely. I was able to track down the text of that speech, which was his inaugural address as Governor. You can find an excerpt here. As the hosting site focuses on African American history, it's no surprise that they picked out the pieces that deal with race. It does no damage to the content of the speech. I've read the full speech, as much as I could manage, and couldn't find any indications that the intent had been altered by the editing.

George Wallace was no Cicero. That speech of his is a real slog. The structure is clumsy and the logic is marginal. MLK, in contrast, wrote well-crafted speeches. They have easily-followed narrative arcs and their logic is clear. God says we're all the same, our founding documents say we're all the same, why don't we treat each other all the same? A few times, he gets a bit judgmental and those episodes detract from his point, but for the most part, his message is gentle and easy to support.

Wallace's speech surprised me in that it didn't support racism so much as it did racial purity. It had a very Hitlerian quality in that way. Wallace didn't want to enslave the blacks, he just wanted them over there while the whites stayed over here.

And so it was meant in our racial lives . . . each race, within its own framework has the freedom to teach . . to instruct . . to develop . . to ask for and receive deserved help from others of separate racial stations. This is the great freedom of our American founding fathers . . . but if we amalgamate into the one unit as advocated by the communist philosophers . . . then the enrichment of our lives . . . the freedom for our development . . . is gone forever. We become, therefore, a mongrel unit of one under a single all powerful government . . . and we stand for everything . . . and for nothing.

His speech is also filled with racial paranoia.

Let us rise to the call of freedom- loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South. In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . and I say . . . segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever...We can no longer hide our head in the sand and tell ourselves that the ideology of our free fathers is not being attacked and is not being threatened by another idea . . . for it is...the international racism of the liberals seek to persecute the international white minority to the whim of the international colored majority

He mumbles stuff about God, but it's not tied to any theological points from either Scripture or the Church Fathers, so it sounds like what it is - a cheap political stunt designed to make you think he's a faithful Christian.

We find we have replaced faith with fear . . . and though we may give lip service to the Almighty . . in reality, government has become our god. It is, therefore, a basically ungodly government and its appeal to the psuedo-intellectual and the politician is to change their status from servant of the people to master of the people . . . to play at being God . . . without faith in God . . . and without the wisdom of God.

In the end, MLK mopped the floor with George Wallace because he had the better product. MLK still does. Sadly, he doesn't get much play any more while Wallace's ideas do. It wouldn't take much work to recast the segregation speech into a modern screed attacking whiteness. When I see even our Catholic universities speak, act and think with segregation's logic, I can't help but think that Wallace is winning his rematch with MLK in the 2020s.

The Disintegrating Disinformation Board

I thought I'd toss out this semi-random thought while the topic was still fresh.

I never understood what the Disinformation Board was supposed to do in the first place. A group of people working for the DHS who ... did what? Would they have meetings and talk about tweets? Would they review newscasts? What would be their results?

More to the point, I can't see that anyone would listen to them if they did make pronouncements. A bunch of civil servants claiming some rando on Twitter said things that weren't true would be indistinguishable from a group of partisan hacks defending the regime. We've already got tons of those on both sides. 

How would the Disinformation Board make its voice heard?

The whole thing seemed ridiculous from the get go. I'm kind of sad they disbanded it. I wanted to see it in action.

Of Satan And Illogic

I'm going to get all theological on you with this one.

In trying to puzzle out just what is going on with both the transgender mania and Critical Race Theory, what keeps coming back to me is how illogical they are. The other thing is how evil they are. Girls are getting poisoned and mutilated in a futile attempt to become boys. Black children are being killed in abortion and the survivors left illiterate coming out of high school. A psychotic couldn't have designed anything better than those two insanities.

Listening to the obsessively logical Jordan Peterson talk about faith and meaning in a podcast recently, the pieces fell into place.

God created an ordered world and gave us a reasoning mind that we might reverse engineer His creation. Physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, they are all objectively universal and discoverable. His work isn't haphazard or random, it's methodical and predictable.

If Satan is the opposite of God, then wouldn't you expect things that come from him to be illogical? I'm not saying this as a universal as the actions of the Aztecs, the Ashanti and the Nazis all had a certain amount of logic to them. What I'm wondering is this: can you detect works of evil by seeing illogic?

People say Jesus is love, but that's only half true. Jesus is love built upon a framework of logic. Picking a passage from the Gospels at random, I found this, Matthew 12:10-14.

And behold, there was a man there who had a withered hand. (The Pharisees) questioned Him, “Is it lawful to cure on the sabbath?” so that they might accuse Him.

He said to them, “Which one of you who has a sheep that falls into a pit on the sabbath will not take hold of it and lift it out? How much more valuable a person is than a sheep. So it is lawful to do good on the sabbath.”

Then He said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and it was restored as sound as the other.

But the Pharisees went out and took counsel against him to put Him to death.

The act of curing is one of love. The analogy of the sheep is one of logic.

Catholics call Satan the Father of Lies. Wouldn't that also make him the Father of Irrationality?

On Facebook, in our Catholic group, I posted the story of my daughter and then posted again about how some schools are grooming children into sexual degeneracy. This led a friend of mine to ask me to talk to another parent whose daughter is on testosterone and has already had her breasts amputated. The woman is beside herself with despair. I said I'd be happy to listen to the woman and give her any support I could.

As I thought about these girls mutilating themselves, the Satanic illogic angle hit me again. It's evil and it's insane.

Is that such a big surprise?

This is obviously insane.

Bonus Lizard Empire Update

The lizards never sleep. A major lizard offensive is underway in the Philadelphia school district. You have to see it to believe it.

Moron Netflix And Disney

 After looking at the results below, I could have just bumped this recent post and left it at that.

And so here we are with the Walt Disney Corporation siding with the sexual degenerates who lack a frame of reference for raising children over the parents of the children who are their target audience.

That is so unbelievably stupid that the only people who could possibly make a mistake that large would be the highly educated.

Now dig this headline from a few days ago. 

Story here.

How is it even possible for a company who exists to make happy, colorful entertainment options for children to end up with an approval rating of 33%? More from my post linked above.

Disney lost track of their primary mission - to provide wholesome, family entertainment. They then lost track of their customer base, normal parents. In fact, they didn't just lose track of those things, they took positions in complete opposition to them.

I don't think anyone has ever seen something like this. It's so unbelievably stupid that you can't imagine anyone doing it and still being able to walk and chew gum at the same time. It's amazing that the management at Disney doesn't get their heads stuck in buckets all day long.

Seriously, how could they be this awful? They and Netflix are just taking a beating in the market, too.

Disney is down about 33% this year.

Netflix is down about 66% this year.

Again, from my previous post.

Another theme of this blog is the gulf between the Elites and the Normals. The Progs have completely taken over the education industry and, as a consequence, the HR and marketing teams of all the major corporations are hiring from a pool of race and gender maniacs. The aforementioned gulf is an isolating structure. The woke loons not only don't understand the Normals, they don't even know how large that group is.

The only conclusion I can draw is that Disney's and Netflix's creative management teams are childless. You couldn't possibly be a parent and hang out with other parents and think that sexual degeneracy would sell.

Baby Formula Shopping In San Diego

 ... is a fruitless task. If you think the outages are confined to places like Texas and Tennessee, think again.

We have two new grandkittens, a boy and a girl. The girl doesn't like to breastfeed, so she takes a mix of breast milk and formula from a bottle. Wife kitteh and I went shopping for formula yesterday and more than half of the stores were completely out of it. The only ones that had any had so little that they will certainly be out of it by today. I can't imagine that any store in San Diego will have any at all by, say, Tuesday.

This is a photo taken at a store in Nevada, but ours looked just like it.

This is some scary stuff. The toilet paper shortages were kind of funny, but not really serious. There are all manner of substitutes for it from paper towels to spraying your nether regions with a garden hose. Baby food is a completely different animal.

When I visited the regime's search engine, Google, the first ten or so hits I got on "baby formula recipe" were links to sites telling you not to try to make any yourself because it's so dangerous. That blew my mind. There's no baby food available and the childless, non-binary furries at Google want you to ... what?  Let your kid starve to death? What on Earth is the alternative? Seriously, what is it?

Look, I understand that self-sufficiency is a bad thing. We can't have just anyone out there providing for themselves without the direct oversight of credentialed experts, but if there's no baby food at the store, you're going to have to make your own, just like people did decades ago, when the streets were piled with dead bodies.

San Diego in 1960, right after government workers had cleared away all of the dead bodies of people killed by homemade food.

In all non-snarkiness, what we experienced yesterday was frightening. Starving babies isn't good for social stability.

2000 Mules

 ... is Dinesh D'Souza's new movie which, as I understand it, claims the last presidential election was stolen. It shows videos of people visiting multiple vote drop boxes at odd hours, dropping off more votes than makes sense for any family. It shows their cell phone tracks going from non-profit offices to the drop boxes as well. The trailer is not available on YouTube because it took up the space needed for soft core porn. Or something like that.

Is it true that the election was stolen? Who knows?

All I know is that this sort of movie, whether it's conspiracy or fact, could not be made in a country with in-person voting and voter ID. It's not whether or not the movie is true, it's whether or not movies like this get made. Had Biden lost, I can't imagine that someone like Michael Moore wouldn't have made a movie exactly like it.

What on Earth are we doing with an election system that invariably leads to half the country thinking things are rigged and our leaders are frauds?

Voting is not the most important thing you can do and the president does not run the country. He manages the government and we run our own lives. What a waste of energy it is to have to wonder if elections are charades!

Fewer Senate Hearings, More Exorcisms!

 ... and I'm being serious here.

I saw a video a day or two ago where Janet Yellen, Secretary of the Treasury, Brown '67 and Yale '71, patiently explained to Senator Tim Scott, a black man raised in poverty by a single mother, that his mom would have been better off if she had killed him. Yellen was rambling on about economic participation rates and poor, black mothers and suggested that abortion was a double win - better for the economy and better for the women. Senator Scott was so gobsmacked by what she said that he could barely reply. It took me about a day to process what had happened.

Seriously, Janet Yellen, who got the inflation thing dead wrong about a year ago, telling us all that it was transitory, said a guy's mom would have been happier if he was dead.

Janet Yellen doesn't need any more Senate hearings. She needs an exorcism.

Moving on to others possessed by demons, we come to Lawrence O'Donnell and Representative Katie Porter (D-Hell). Dig this.

Democrat Rep. Katie Porter claims #Bidenflation "reinforce[s]" the "need" for abortion.

"The fact that we're seeing this jump in expenses ... pay more at the grocery store, pay more at the pump, pay more for housing is a reason" for abortion. pic.twitter.com/jVjuzXRhPz

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) May 12, 2022

Shorter Katie Porter: Inflation is increasing. Kill your children. 

You can just see the wheels turning in Lawrence O'Donnell's head. "You know, we keep facing this same problem over and over again. I wonder if there's some kind of final solution we can implement."

If you think about the implications of what Moloch, err, Katie is saying, you inevitably conclude that we need to be able to kill any and all dependents at any time in their lives. As kids get older, they eat more. That's a form of inflation right there. Kill them! If you want to talk about increased expenses, look no further than the student loan crisis. Sending your children to college is expensive. We could solve overpopulation and the college debt problem at one time with a few death camps.

If you offered to build them on the campuses of Harvard, Yale and Brown, I might be tempted ... no, No, NO! That's wrong! Get thee behind me, Satan! Maybe get back into the body of Janet Yellen or something like that.

The whole Roe v Wade decision is bringing things into sharp focus. I guess that's a good thing. Well, if looking at demonically possessed people is your thing, that is.

How To Be A Good Marxist

It's actually pretty simple. You'd expect that as Marxism is a world view for farm animals and their intellectual peers. Here's the 3-step process.

1. Separate Everyone In The World Into Simple Groups

You must start with childish groupings, ones that any moron can use to sort everyone they meet into separate bins.

Original Flavor

1. Owners
2. Workers

Nazi Flavor

1. Aryans
2. Jews
3. Other inferior races like Slavs

Spicy, Argentinian, Peronist Flavor

1. Rich
2. Poor

American Intersectionalist Flavor

1. Straight, white men
2. Straight, white women
3. Asians
4. People of color except Asians
5. LGBTQWERTY

2. Accept The Marxist Premise

Now that you've got everyone in their tidy, little groups, you have to accept that striving to increase the group's political power is the driving motivation for everyone. You might weaken and think that some people fall in love or like to cook or prefer the color chartreuse, but you'd be wrong. Those are irrelevant details. It's all about political power for the owners, the Jews, the rich, or straight, white men.

For the people in the dominant group, everything they do is designed to create a world where their dominance is preserved. For the people in the subordinate groups, they must do everything they can to be heard, represented, protected and gain power. Dominance is evil and it's the result of the members of the group holding everyone else down. There are no exceptions.

For example, for the American Intersectionalist, Sir Isaac Newton was not simply studying physics, he was studying physics within a framework designed to maintain the power and dominance of straight, white men wearing powdered wigs. What a pig!

3. Take Action!

Since everything is political and everyone in the dominant class seeks to keep the others down, you, as a good Marxist desiring social justice, must seek to weaken the dominant class and raise up the oppressed. You have to do that using every tool at your disposal.

Your disposal. Look for tools nearby. You'll need those to crush the white patriarchy.

If you're a Marxist member* of the American Pediatric Association, you instantly realize that the people on the Board have used systemic racism for generations to keep People of Color Except Asians from positions of power. The bylaws are part of the system. The way they select members is part of the system. Oh sure, you might not be able to find any words to that effect, but it must be true! #2 above tells you so and you believe that unquestioningly.

To defeat the oppressors, it's up to you to take control of the Board. Once you do so, you can change the way members are selected and the organization is run. Finally, the oppressed classes such as non-binary Latinxes can have their voices raised up or amplified or heard or whatever it is you do with the other voices in your head.

You do this because you know, you just know, that every Board in the past was suffused with systemic racism and did its best to maintain white supremacy. You're not doing anything different from what had been done before, you're just doing it for justice.

And that's how you end up with professional medical organizations claiming that chemically castrating little boys, slicing off the breasts of little girls and injecting everyone who seems even a tiny bit off full of wrong-sex hormones is a great idea.

They only seem insane until you realize that they are fighting for justice for marginalized groups. Then it all makes sweet, delicious sense.

* - How common are Marxist members of these groups? Well, since almost everyone coming out of our universities has been trained to bin people and then look for systems of oppressive power, it's a non-trivial number.

I Identify As A Woman

How does that make any sense at all? I looked into hormone levels as a function of a woman's reproductive cycle and then a man's testosterone levels as a function of a woman's. I put them together, to scale, in this chart.

I think you'll need to click on it to read the legend.

How in the world can those two creatures justify transitioning into each other? I feel like a woman? How can you do that when you don't experience hormonal changes over the month? I feel like a man? How can you do that when you don't have the, err, appliance that is on the receiving end of that massive amount of testosterone?

It's ridiculous.

I know I'm banging away on this too much lately, but I'm still trying to piece together what is happening. I'm slow that way.

Tomorrow, we'll deal with how and why the professional societies got captured by the cultural Marxists.

Blog Note: The spammers came back, so I'm back to screening all comments. It's a cat and mouse game. If I turn on moderation, they go away for a while.

My Stock Picks Have Been Terrible Lately

 ... and by that, I mean my ingredients for Louisiana Brown Stock. I've been making the same mistake for years and I didn't realize it until this weekend.

The first step is to brown your bones and meat tidbits in the oven. I'm sure you've detected the error already.

My recipe, pulled from Terry Thompson's incomparable Cajun-Creole Cooking, calls for twelve pounds of beef and veal bones, along with five pigs' feet, split. I don't have ready access to veal, so I've been substituting pork all this time, doing it about 50-50 with the beef. What a dope!

Wife kitteh made an offhand remark this weekend as we dined on some pork chops that pork was a somewhat tasteless meat. It made a tender vehicle for other flavors. I agreed and thought no more of it. This comment came back to me as I pulled the roasting pans out of the oven to turn the stock meat. I looked down at the pork chunks in the pans in horror. I'd effectively put filler into my stock!

No more of that for me. Wife kitteh was right and we all know that beef has a stronger native flavor than pork. The price per pound of the two meats is similar, so an all-beef stock wouldn't cost any more than the one I'm making now and the taste should be much better.

The pigs' feet stay, of course. They give the stock a gelatinous quality that I love. Plus they're pigs' feet. How can you go wrong with those?

Our National Interest And Childhood's End

 I have to admit that our deepening involvement in the war between Ukraine and Russia has me worried. Apparently, our intelligence and material assistance of the corrupt despots in Ukraine has done significant damage to the interests of the corrupt despots in Russia. Russia has nukes. The Russians don't see the world as we do. That means we cannot accurately predict what they might do in retaliation. Give a dirty bomb to a terrorist group, perhaps? Sink a carrier or two, perhaps?

Compounding this is that we have no national interest in that particular wino fight. Nothing happens to us no matter which side wins. Russia is clearly a regional hegemon and not a global power. It does matter to us a great deal that this skid row brawl is dragging on for months. Ukraine and Russia provide significant amounts of wheat and fertilizer to the world. By not helping to resolve this quickly, even if that meant giving Putin a good deal of what he wanted, we're making the world very unstable.

The last time wheat became pricey in Egypt, we ended up with the Muslim Brotherhood taking over. They didn't close the Suez Canal, but they could have. Why are we risking that?

Egypt is bad enough, but what about famines all over the world? We may not starve here, but does anyone want to place bets on Somalia or Ethiopia?

And then there's the southern border. We're allowing roughly 2,000,000 illegals to enter the country every year now. If Title 42 is dropped, that could go up substantially.

How about deep blue cities releasing criminals without bail and allowing shoplifters to walk if they take less than $900 of merchandise? That limit itself is a joke as you'd have to apprehend the perps in order to check to see if their haul was in the 4-figure range. No one is going to risk a physical altercation to do a price check. There's effectively no limit on shoplifting in these cities.

All of this is indicative of a society that sees our national interest as something selfish. Supporting Ukraine is moral. Admitting "refugees" is moral. Not arresting people from "marginalized" communities is moral.

All of these are moral only in a world where we have no national interest. We have no national interest if we don't have to pay for anything. In Life's Pricing Structure Is Broken, I wrote:

What kind of car would you buy if you could print money? Me, I'd buy a Lotus. You might buy a Ferrari. Why don't you do it now? I don't have a Lotus because it would take me a year to earn it. The Lotus would represent a year of my life. If I could print money in the Catican, the Lotus would represent ... nothing.

Our pricing structure is broken. We no longer connect sacrifice with possessions. This is what I meant when I blogged yesterday, "It looks to me like American society has turned out the lights of reason and turned on the black lights of subjectivism. We're all kind of stumbling around, learning as we go just what this means."

Children live a world where nothing has any real cost. Mommy and Daddy bring the noms, the clothes, the television and everything else. The tot simply consumes it without thought. If they deprive you of any of these things, it's a cause for tears and accusations of cruelty.

Inflation represents the end of this particular episode of national childhood. So will the famines arising from prolonging the war in Ukraine. So do the crime waves in our deep blue cities. So will the costs of supporting 5 million or more illegals and struggling with how they will harm our working poor.

Childhood's end is upon us. We're going to have to go back to a time when we discussed our national interest without feeling that it was inherently immoral.

How Does This Not End In Secession?

Here's a "thought experiment" from a left-wing, British journalist.

Suppose that happens. Then what? If you're a pro-life conservative or just someone who would like to live in a democracy with stable laws and law enforcement, what choice do you have but secession? Political violence, like the original Roe decision itself, is designed to make elections pointless. If the other side wins, then the solution is to kill their elected officials and appointees. Obergfell, the decision that legalized gay marriage, was exactly the same thing. No voting for you, peasants! You have the wrong opinions!

If political lunatics murder their way to achieving their goals, the logic of secession becomes inescapable. You're left with stark choices: submit to the radicals' demands, engage in violence of your own, or peacefully leave. As rabid as the online political discussions get, I can't see anything near a plurality of people opting for fighting in the streets.

As a reminder, secession will not be done at the state level. Once it gets going, those red counties in states like Oregon and California aren't going to want to stick around. If secession is catalyzed by political violence, then it wouldn't be surprising for secessionists in those rural counties to revert to force of arms to break free. If you think their sheriffs are going to enforce blue demands once the shooting starts, think again.

See: A Self-Inflicted Scorched Earth Campaign.

Related News

Justice Alito has canceled a public appearance out of fear of violence.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito pulled out of a public appearance Thursday in the wake of the unprecedented leak of his draft majority decision in a case that could reverse the landmark Roe v. Wade case which declared a Constitutional right to abortion.

Alito was to take part in a  judicial conference set to begin on Thursday in Nashville, Tennessee. Supreme Court spokeswoman Patricia McCabe did not say why Alito canceled when asked by Reuters, but an investigation into the leak is ongoing and some leftists have called for protests and even violence against the five justices who signed onto Alito’s draft opinion.

All of this to prevent people in different states from voting to enact their own laws regarding abortion. Amazing. 

And Now, Something To Make You Cry

People literally talk about losing their babies all the time. My friend lost a child in 3rd trimester and was so devastated that she had the footprints of the dead child tattooed on top of her feet. They've made art about it. Brick - by Ben Folds 5 and this come to mind... pic.twitter.com/r5RfzkKu26

— BourbonNotScotch - Self Admitting Asshole (@ScotchNot) May 5, 2022

If Things Keep Going This Way

 ... is a common fallacy among us Cassandras. Here's an example.

As night is falling, we might say, "If things keep going this way, we can expect all of our plants to die! Without the sun, they cannot survive! We need more money for research."

I added that last part because I thought it was funny. Your mileage may vary.

Societies can learn from mistakes and that's a good thing. Dig this.

Americans are more likely than they were three years ago to say single women raising children on their own and couples living together without being married are bad for society, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in October 2021...

Some 47% of U.S. adults say single women raising children on their own is generally a bad thing for society, an increase of 7 percentage points from the 40% who said the same in a 2018 Center survey. A smaller share (43%) says it doesn’t make a difference, and just 10% of adults say it is good for society.

Here's the chart accompanying the article.

At first, it seems odd that women are the most likely to say that single motherhood is no big deal. After thinking about it, I'd suggest that there are two primary reasons for this.

1. Women are thinking about what it would be like to be shackled to a bad husband, or one they perceive to be bad.
2. Women are much more sensitive to criticism and are much more likely to feel group affinity than men.

In any case, this is good news.

Roe V Test Scores

Just some odds and ends thoughts about the chaos du jour and a few other things.

When Is Verdict Vote Permanent?

When the SCOTUS opinion on Roe got leaked, the first thing I thought was that it was a call for a political assassination. If someone bumped off, say, Clarence Thomas, then Biden would get to name his replacement. Would Thomas' vote on the initial consensus count?

I liked the fact that CNN got another leak letting everyone know that Roberts was cool with the whole abortion thing, even if he supported the Mississippi law in question. That would narrow down the potential victims, allowing would-be goons to concentrate on the right ones.

Anyway, overturning Roe just means we get to vote on the thing at the state level. Why are the Progs so against us voting?

Twitter Is Getting Better

My mentions have tripled and my follows are going up, too, since Elon bought Twitter even though he hasn't taken control yet. I never doubted that I was being suppressed. It's gratifying to see what things should have been like all along.

All Elon wants to do, at least as far as I can tell, is let everyone talk. The Progs are enraged about this. They don't want us to vote and they don't want us to talk.

A Ministry Of Truth?

It's ludicrous. I don't know what they're smoking in DC, but the whole concept that government officials, all of whom are overseen by politicians, are in any position to let us know what is and what isn't disinformation is hilarious.

Or it would be hilarious if we still had any comics left.

The Progs don't want us to vote, they don't want us to talk and they don't want us to have many sources of information. It's almost like all they want is for us to shut up and obey. Good luck with that.

Black High School Reading Test Scores

They're as bad as you think. Source.

Half of all black 12th graders read below the basic level. They are effectively illiterate. Here's what basic level means.

Twelfth-grade students performing at the NAEP Basic level should be able to identify elements of meaning and form and relate them to the overall meaning of the text. They should be able to make inferences, develop interpretations, make connections between texts, and draw conclusions; and they should be able to provide some support for each. They should be able to interpret the meaning of a word as it is used in the text.

Emphasis mine.

Geezey Moe. Not only are the results horrible, but they're getting progressively worse.

Meanwhile, per-pupil spending has gone up and up and up. I wonder if it might be time for us to try something other than pouring money on our schools. Maybe we could look into family structures or something like that. 

Tobacco Seedlings

All 40 cells in my seed cups, wherein the Nicotiana tabacum seeds were planted, are now filling with tiny plants. This is gratifying. It's also a bit alarming as it means I now need to find homes for 40 tobacco plants. Gulp.

In any case, I've been wrestling with the macro lens on my Nikon D3500 Artillery Piece and not doing so well with it. I finally discovered that the trick was to turn on the flash as I'm sure Tim has told me before. I got a very nice shot of the itty bitty wannabe ciggies using f-stop 22, ISO 100, 1/60 exposure time and the flash. 

I left the image very large, so it might be worth a click. Enjoy!