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Saturday, July 30, 2022

If You're Not The Lead Dog, The Scenery Never Changes

 I wanted to revisit the attack on the bodega worker in NYC.

Also in NYC, an old, Hispanic dude working at a mini mart was attacked by a young, black guy. He managed to pull a knife and killed his attacker. The NY DA, always eager to release certain criminals, including the perp who attacked the old dude, arrested the old dude for murder and set bail at $250,000.

Here's the video. A more open-and-shut case of self-defense, you could not hope to find. The old, Hispanic dude shouldn't have had to do more than give a statement to the police.

This being San Diego, close to the border, we not only have lots of Hispanic friends, but we know lots of people in interracial marriages. Taco shops are everywhere and we all have our favorites. You'd have to be a really devoted bigot to manage to cling to any kind of racial animus between Hispanics and whites here.

Given the racial mania that grips the America right now - on my startup screen, MSFT recently asked if I wanted to know how I could do more for racial justice - it's reflexive to see everything in terms of der Führer's favorite topic. If I'm Hispanic, that video and the bodega dude being thrown into prison screams at me that my race ranks lower than blacks.

At that point, what difference does anything else make? Who cares if I rank higher than whites and Asians? When push comes to shove, as it were, if I get into an altercation with a black, I'm going to be the one who gets punished.

In a multi-ethnic country like our own, this is where racialism simply must lead. The everyone-against-straight-white-men thing only works until "people of color" come into conflict. At that point, no matter which way you go, the judgment will come out as evidence of racial ranking.

Since this is coming from our ultra-credentialed, university geniuses, who don't know how anything works any more than Marx did, it can't be much of a surprise that their racial mania would result in internal contradictions and the kind of racial conflict that their ideas were intended to stop. They are total idiots, after all.

There's a way out.

Friday, July 29, 2022

Anarchy And Cops

Mostly Nothing commented recently that Minneapolis is a couple hundred cops short. Here's a supporting bit of info

The report follows the Minnesota Supreme Court ordering Minneapolis to hire more police. Two years ago, city residents claimed the city was violating its minimum police requirement of 731 to about 634 after an MPD officer killed George Floyd while in custody, and rioters caused $500 million of damage in and after May 2020. By 2021, the MPD had lost nearly 300 officers.

I recently saw this infographic about Chicago losing cops, too.

Then comes this video from NYC. Note that the dude fighting the cop will be sent to family court because he's only 16. Effectively, he's going to get off with a slap on the wrist for brawling with the police officer.

Like Minneapolis, Chicago and many other blue cities, NYC has a real problem with an understrength police force. Given that video and the lack of support for the police from the DA and the blue politicians, what kind of masochist would join or remain in the NYPD?

When do cops start leaving because cops are leaving? If your army experiences enough desertions, you get desertions because of the previous desertions. I'd bet it's happening now in several blue cities.

This is a result of the evolution of an idea - that law enforcement is the problem, not the criminals. It may have started out as prison reform, but it's snowballed into systemic racism and police injustice. Bad ideas don't turn into disasters right away. It takes time for them to degenerate into catastrophe.

We had a house guest from Chicago recently who said that the downtown lakefront area, once the hip, glittering place to go on a weekend night, is now a dangerous place to be. Here's a good summary of recent attacks.

CHICAGO - Chicago's iconic Michigan Avenue is facing an uphill battle. Many stores on the Magnificent Mile shuttered their doors amid the pandemic, but now retailers continue to face the threat of mass thefts.

Retailers on Michigan Avenue are seeing neighboring vacancies and in some cases, repeat robberies.

Just last week, two luxury stores on Michigan Avenue were robbed.

On Thursday, Mar. 31, Burberry was targeted once again when four unknown suspects entered the store during business hours and made off with an unknown amount of luxury handbags. The store has been targeted several times in recent months.

It's no secret that California, New York and Illinois are seeing their populations decline as people flee to other states such as Texas and Florida. I've seen conservative pundits gloat about this and shake their fists about the need for more jails and more punishment, but what I'm wondering about is what happens in a city that has effectively no police force.

For Chicago, the chart below shows that they've had a roughly 13% drop in the number of cops, or about 1500 since their peak in January of 2020. That's not massive, but it is substantial. According to this article, in the last year, Chicago lost 753 cops and hired 214. The result is ugly.

"The first thing we do to try to make up the lack of staffing is go to 12-hour shifts and no days off - and having unrested officers that are not caring for the own wellbeing is really, really difficult," (a police and security expert) said.

That's going to encourage desertions. When do you get to anarchy and what does it look like? Are we there now with those smash-and-grab raids?

Wednesday, July 27, 2022

Filing For A Separation

 ... is what the press is doing when it runs to change the definition of a recession.

And, no, the title of this post has nothing to do with getting a separation from wife kitteh. That would be insane.

The idea that we're in the process of a divorce hit me when I saw the AP come out with this howler.

I had hoped that the AP would cling to some amount of dignity and stay with the textbook definition of a recession which is two consecutive quarters of economic decline. When they pulled this stunt and it was obvious to all of us that they were simply shilling for the blues, I realized that they no longer cared what we thought. They're filing for a divorce right now.

There was a pundit, a CNBC analyst who was caught whoring for the blues as well.

The replies came thick and fast and were universally derogatory. Ben didn't even try to refute them. Why would he? He doesn't care about us any more. He's moved on emotionally.

After she walked out on the family, my first ex used to call me up and yell at me. If I hung up, she'd call back. This was before cell phones were common, so I didn't know an easy way to block her. I would put the phone down and walk away as she yammered. Her voice would get dimmer and dimmer until I was in another room and could no longer hear her. Once in a while, just for fun, I'd come back to see if she was still ranting and she would be. It was sad and funny at the same time.

That's how the AP and Ben see us. The same is true for all the other news media teams surrendering their integrity to the blues. 

Go ahead and yell at them all you want. It doesn't matter.

I've blogged in the past about secession. This is a kind of secession right here. It's one where we stay in the same country, but the other side would be just as happy if we left. Disney is in this group as well. They don't care if we know they're trying to pervert our children. Go ahead, get angry, it's not going to change what they do.

A national divorce? We've already got one underway.

Tuesday, July 26, 2022

It's Better To Poison Children Than To Question Their Self-Identification

 ... that's where we are right now. Dig this.

The FDA recently added a warning to gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) agonists—known to most as "puberty blockers"—after having identified a serious potential side effect for some that may cause a dangerous surge of spinal fluid pressure in the brain, that can cause headaches, nausea, double vision, and even permanent vision loss.

The FDA identified 6 cases in females ages 5-12 years old who were diagnosed with pseudotumor cerebri after taking GnRH agonists. Pseudotumor cerebri, also known as idiopathic intracranial hypertension, literally means "false brain tumor" because the signs and symptoms in affected patients are similar to those of a large brain tumor. An FDA spokesperson said that during a review of the published literature for the clinical use of Lupron Depot-PED (leuprorelin), several research papers described the development of pseudotumor cerebri in children who had been treated with puberty-blocking medications.

Not to worry, we're in the clear according to a dude who has cut off his hangers and drenched himself in estrogen.

Wait, What?

Long-time friend, wcvarones, turned me on to this work of genius: The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution by Carl Trueman. In it, Carl posits that our ethical system has been blown apart by using internal emotions to determine the moral value of an act instead of an objective, external set of standards. Here's a good snippet.

Most significant for my argument in this book, they lead to a prioritization of the individual’s inner psychology—we might even say “feelings” or “intuitions”—for our sense of who we are and what the purpose of our lives is. To leap ahead, transgenderism provides an excellent example: people who think they are a woman trapped in a man’s body are really making their inner psychological convictions absolutely decisive for who they are; and to the extent that, prior to “coming out,” they have publicly denied this inner reality, to that extent they have had an inauthentic existence. This is why the language of “living a lie” often appears in the testimonies of transgender people...

This helps explain in part the concern in recent years over making the classroom a “safe place”—that is, a place where students go not to be exposed to ideas that may challenge their deepest beliefs and commitments (part of what was traditionally considered to be the role of education) but to be affirmed and reassured. While hostile commentators berate this tendency as that caused by the hypersensitivity of a generation of “snowflakes,” it is actually the result of the slow but steady psychologizing of the self and the triumph of inward-directed therapeutic categories over traditional outward-directed educational philosophies. That which hinders my outward expression of my inner feelings—that which challenges or attempts to falsify my psychological beliefs about myself and thus to disturb my sense of inner well-being—is by definition harmful and to be rejected. And that means that traditional institutions must be transformed to conform to the psychological self, not vice versa.

What all this means is that when an ethical dilemma arises, such as the question of whether we should poison and mutilate a child or, instead, tell them to get a grip and come to terms with what's between their legs, we opt for the former. Doing permanent, physical harm to the child or young adult is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is affirming their feelings.

No Room For Compromise

When someone like me wants to prioritize physical health and adherence to objective, biological reality at the expense of another person's feelings, I am, in fact, full of hate. I'm not being hyperbolic or snarky here. Since I'm not affirming the transgender person and I am disagreeing with their self-identification, I am seeking to directly harm them with my views. This is how we get to "speech is violence." If my speech puts your self-esteem at risk, I'm as good as a Nazi.

It's not about the trans movement so much as it is about a swap of moral yardsticks.

This barn identifies as brand new. If you try to claim that it's collapsing, you're full of hate.

Sunday, July 24, 2022

A Native American Rant

Last night, we went over to a friend's house for a birthday party. Sitting at dinner, the topic of our local high school changing its name and nickname came up in conversation. The school went from the Serra Conquistadors to the Canyon Hills Rattlesnakes.

They used to be named for a Catholic dude who left a life of luxury on the coast of Spain to come to the Americas and bring salvation and civilization to a paleolithic people. Now they're named for a contradictory geographical feature and a poisonous reptile. The state of the modern education industry is such that you could hardly expect anything better. I'm just happy the snake isn't a sexually degenerate snake. Yet.

Anywho, the people at the table said the name Conquistadors was kind of offensive. I asked, "Compared to what? Compared to a civilization that slaughtered people by the tens of thousands by carving out their internal organs while they were still alive?"

"Hmm. Well, no, I guess, not really," was the reply. Mind you all of this was discussed while we were laughing. None of it got contentious.

Someone at the table talked about their alma mater in Arizona. Their nickname was the Chieftains. She said that it always made her uncomfortable that the mascot was played by a white, Mormon boy. It didn't really hit me what was wrong with that statement until this morning, but I did manage to get out, "Yeah, it's too bad he didn't have Aztec blood in him." In a pretend conversational injection, I said, "You know, his grandfather was a member of the SS, so when you think about it, he actually fits the part perfectly!"

Now, in retrospect, I wish I'd let fly with this rant.

"Yeah, nothing says authentic quite like having the descendant of slave-holding mass-murderers put on his Levis, his cotton t-shirt made in Malaysia and his Nikes made in China, get in his Buick, gas it up at Exxon and drive on paved roads to a football stadium made of concrete and steel to put on a costume made of plastic and nylon to dance around at halftime at a game the Indians couldn't have comprehended, much less invented for themselves, even if you gave them another 10,000 years."

But that's really the problem, isn't it?  Authenticity in the USA of 2022 is strictly racial. I don't blame my friends one bit for this. We all swim around in this same Hitlerian sewer. Uncle Adolf saw things the exact same way. It mattered not at all that his precious Aryans owed an immeasurable mountain of debt to the Jews for their contributions to learning and civilization. All that mattered was race.

Kind of like our team mascots today.

Saturday, July 23, 2022

Jordan Peterson, Church And Despair

 Jordan Peterson makes some terrific points in this video.

My money quote:

It's like, "Well, here's the church and here's me. And I'm right." It's like, "Well, no, you're not." And first and second, you don't even want to be because that's a great place to be, like pinnacle of brilliant wisdom. It's completely solipsistic. No tradition for me. Thank you very much. You know, I've got it all right in my head.

Solipsistic:

  1. Philosophy. the theory that only the self exists, or can be proved to exist.
  2. Extreme preoccupation with and indulgence of one's feelings, desires, etc.; egoistic self-absorption.

I thought about it in the context of our recent dinner party where everyone but wife kitteh and me were laughing at a group of evangelicals and their silliness. Ha ha ha! What rubes!

Yes, I know, I've been beating this particular deceased equine for a while now, but this blog is all about working out ideas and I don't have this one fully run to ground yet. Anyway, here's the relevant excerpt from that post.

If you're going to trash wacky Christian sects, progressive politicians or gun-toting libertarians who like to wear beekeeper outfits while engaging in sex fantasies, you've got to have something better, at least in the areas their worldview covers. It works best if your worldview covers even more topics than the people at whom you're pointing and laughing.

That's what gets me the most about some of our dinner parties with secular people who like to mock the unsophisticated. Yes, there are Christian groups out there who cling to silly ideas and all of us Christians are hypocrites. Ha ha ha. You got us, pardner. Right between the eyes. Oof, I'm dead.

So what do you have? What's your cosmology? What's the meaning and purpose of life? Please derive why slavery is wrong, from first principles.

Jordan cuts even deeper. By saying that you can dismiss the Church out of hand, you're saying that you've managed to come up with a superior and holistic construct in your idle time, one that is better than Christianity. Christianity is the result of 6,000 years of intellectual evolution. It encompasses philosophy, morality, ethics, science, theology, sexuality, culture and more. It's the product of generational geniuses like Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Chesterton, Lewis and Popes John Paul II and Benedict.

These guys weren't dilettantes, either. They devoted their lives to the pursuit of Truth. Meanwhile, you, in between binge-watching Netflix series, smoking weed and searching for the best Thai restaurant in San Diego, have developed a theory of reality that blows away the product of their combined lives.

How lonely it must be to live in your world. What does it feel like to look around and realize that there's no one to talk to, no one smart enough to discuss life with you? After all, none of your friends can come close to the towering intellects of CS Lewis and GK Chesterton. As for me, I'm definitely a disappointment. I can't make heads or tails of Benedict's writing. He's clearly on a level above me you're smarter than he is.

I want to apologize for wasting your time. Hopefully the food I served makes up for my vapid conversation.

What despair this must cause! I can't even imagine what it must be like to know, with certainty, that you are surrounded by intellectual inferiors. You will never be able to have a deep conversation, not once in your life.

No wonder you turn to weed. It numbs you to the tragedy of your life, masking the horror of knowing that you are peerless in your brilliance.

To you, this is what I do in my spare time.


Thursday, July 21, 2022

Everybody Eats When They Come To My House

 ... is an old Cab Calloway song. 

We recently installed three bird feeders to go with our birdbath. We're now a happening place for the birds. I've also been fertilizing our gardens and watering them well to get the watermelons to grow. The result has been a profusion of flowers of all kinds.

By the way, we now have two fruits on those watermelon vines. The tobacco is coming along well, too.

At any rate, I tried to get some photos of the birds happily nomming away, but they're shy creatures and they all flew away when they saw the camera. I was, however, able to get an interesting shot of a bee, head-deep in a flower. Enjoy!

Wednesday, July 20, 2022

Dump The Physics Textbooks

 ... and instead, derive the equations for yourself.

I've been pondering the conversations we had at a recent dinner party and then pondering my ponderings of that.

If you're going to trash wacky Christian sects, progressive politicians or gun-toting libertarians who like to wear beekeeper outfits while engaging in sex fantasies, you've got to have something better, at least in the areas their worldview covers. It works best if your worldview covers even more topics than the people at whom you're pointing and laughing.

That's what gets me the most about some of our dinner parties with secular people who like to mock the unsophisticated. Yes, there are Christian groups out there who cling to silly ideas and all of us Christians are hypocrites. Ha ha ha. You got us, pardner. Right between the eyes. Oof, I'm dead.

So what do you have? What's your cosmology? What's the meaning and purpose of life? Please derive why slavery is wrong, from first principles.

My most recent thoughts have been along these lines: Even if any particular faith has got some things wrong, why throw it all away? Like a physics text from 1820, it gives you a significant head start on puzzling out things. In the case of Catholicism, we can give you a 6,000 year boost towards deriving the ultimate, most perfect philosophy.

What is gained by dumping it all?

Turning the question around, how much of it do you know? I found Pope Benedict's writing to be so dense as to be inscrutable and I'm pretty well-read. I recognized in my failure to climb his particular theological mountain, that the problem was my ignorance, not his lack of clarity. To the point of this post, what do you know of the things to which you object?

Personally, I have zero interest in writing my own physics textbook. I'll take the one I had in college and move on to something more rewarding, thank you very much.

Someone else can deal with the electromagnetism. I hated it.

Sunday, July 17, 2022

Does Anything Need To Work?

Three essays came to my attention today and they all make the same point from completely different angles. They tie in with my rants from the last couple of years claiming that the Elites don't know how anything works.

As much as I love Marjorie Taylor Greene, I took her to task here for suggesting there was some kind of conspiracy behind the bad things.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, there is no plan. There is no plan. Of plans, there are none. The box of plans is empty and the cupboard wherein plans are kept is similarly barren of plans.

There's no plan.

The Elites don't know how anything works and have consequently lost the ability to think strategically. These are the same imbeciles who abandoned Bagram air base in the middle of the night, only to have to send 5,000+ soldiers to secure Freaking Kabul Airport in a disorganized panic. This has led to a 10 point or more drop in Biden's poll numbers. They live and die on poll numbers, these priests of politics, so that hits them where it hurts the most. That wasn't planned, it was simply a consequence of their fantasies about social justice, the right side of history and all the rest.

These are the same people who are stunned to find that inflation is returning after having printed trillions of dollars while at the same time locking down the economy so there were fewer goods and services to buy.

These are the same people who were shocked to find that chasing the cops out of black neighborhoods led to more murdered blacks.

And so on and so forth.

To start with the essays, this one is a must-read discussing how academia's wishful thinking decades ago turned our education system into the train wreck it is today.

The adage “no good deed goes unpunished” captures this culpability. In a nutshell—and here I will speak only for myself and those I knew personally from the late 1960s onward—I am referring to lowering academic standards for black students and faculty in order to promote racial progress, a Weltanschauung in which the path to racial equality lay through education and, ultimately, the act of recruiting as many black students as possible and ensuring that they graduated...

Nor was there any need for bureaucratic heavy-handedness or incentives. Everything was voluntary, and since I taught American politics, a favorite among black students and an obvious place to attract more minority faculty, I was at the forefront of the campaign. That our efforts might be injurious to racial progress or create cures worse than the disease was unthinkable. Even today, it’s difficult to accept that our good intentions helped undermine the university’s commitment to intellectual excellence. Nevertheless, our fingerprints are all over the crime scene...

In a particularly bizarre case, a colleague received a clearly plagiarized paper and, rather than bring expulsion proceedings, offered to forget the matter if the student would submit an original one. The student again plagiarized, and my colleague took the case to the dean of students. He explained that this was the sixth such episode involving the student, but the incidents were ignored since the dean believed that confronting the student might cause him to drop out.

It's all well and good to retain and promote people out of a sense of charity, but it falls apart when you need something done. That is, you need a plumber to repair plumbing. A person who shows you plumber's credentials isn't going to help if they aren't really a plumber.

Did we really need academics to be, well, academic? I guess we did, given the HR and marketing horrors being inflicted on us from recent college graduates.

That the rot goes way back is exhibited by the Land O' Lakes Statement which, oddly enough, doesn't have anything to do with removing an American Indian from a butter company logo.

In hindsight, what they did was appalling.

But when several Catholic university leaders gathered in the summer of 1967 at a remote retreat in Land O’ Lakes, Wisconsin, did they fully anticipate the consequences of their vision for “modern” Catholic education? Hopefully not.

It was 50 years ago, on July 20-23, when Notre Dame’s Father Theodore Hesburgh, C.S.C., gathered his peers to draft and sign the “Land O’ Lakes Statement,” a declaration of the independence of Catholic universities from “authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself.”

Religion is a description of the world as it exists. It's not therapy or self-help. It's more like physics or chemistry. It answers the supernatural questions about the meaning of life, the source of the Universe as well as ethics and morality. A good one will derive those things from a set of first principles.

What's the difference between watering down academic standards for racial reasons and watering down theological standards in religious universities for the sake of "freedom?" 

And freedom from what? The Truth? Yes, as it turned out, they ended up with freedom from Truth. Hooray.

Finally, we get to the chickens coming home to roost.

But let’s take a careful look at the strangest anomaly of all: the unemployment rate. It is historically low right now, at 3.6 percent. That is far lower than it has ever been during any impending recession. In fact, it is as low as any period since the end of World War II.

And yet, everyone knows that this is not a reason for hope: the labor participation rate is about where it was forty years ago, as if the whole experience of a more inclusive workforce never happened. It is also currently falling. There are reasons both demographic and cultural for this but it is impossible to understand without reference to the egregious and devastating effects of lockdowns...

This time, we face something completely different. There is a huge shortage of workers willing to earn relatively lower incomes, show up to the office, earn wages, and actually work with their hands, drive the trucks, move the boxes, and make the food. There is, on the other hand, a huge surplus of workers demanding huge salaries to stare at screens, stay home, gossip on Slack, and otherwise deploy their generous benefits packages to their maximum extent.

Emphasis in the original.

"Wait, what?"

In other words, as Kipling said in another way, in the end, you need things to get done. If your ideas don't work, things fall apart.

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all, 
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul; 
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy, 
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

Bonus Chickens

Dig what's happening in Seattle.

Mayor Bruce Harrell’s plan to bolster the Seattle Police Department by 500 officers by 2027 is embarrassing. It’s not really even a plan and the numbers make no sense...

So far this year, the SPD has lost 103 officers. Harrell says that if we hire 500 new officers by 2027, we’ll have a force of roughly 1,450. Does the mayor think, all of a sudden, cops won’t continue to leave the department?

In the unlikely event the mayor is successful, the city will see 500 new officers over a five-year span. Perhaps the Mayor isn’t getting the updates, but we’re in the middle of a violent crime surge. With 30 homicides year-to-date, the city is on pace to exceed last year’s 43. We’ve already surpassed the ten-year average of 28.8...

While the Mayor says we have 954 deployable officers, it obfuscates a vital stat. The SPD only has 839 officers (as of mid-June), with sergeants, captains, assistant chiefs, and chief making up the rest. We need more officers, and 500 won’t cut it.

Incentive bonuses won't bring in cops when the cops know you hate them.

These ideas don't work and we're watching them fail in real time.

Friday, July 15, 2022

Can Watermelon Plants Get Monkeypox?

 If so, my garden is in big trouble because all of my watermelon plants are as gay as maypoles.

Males. All of my flowers right now are males.

Now mind you, there are "agricultural" sites out there that say the first flowers are males and you have to wait for the ladies to arrive, but I'm not buying it. We all know what has happened to these sites. They're all in the pay of Big, Gay Watermelon.

It's a conspiracy, I tells you!

Thursday, July 14, 2022

Berkeley Isn't A Campus, It's A Mental Hospital

Dig this exchange between Senator Josh Hawley and Berkeley law professor Khiara Bridges.

Here's the transcript, translated into standard English, not using any of Khiara's made-up words and fantasy concepts.

JOSH HAWLEY: Professor Bridges, you said several times, you've used a phrase I want to make sure I understand what you mean by it. You've referred to people with a capacity for pregnancy. Would that be women?

KHIARA BRIDGES: Many women, can get pregnant. Many can't. Some women who dress like men, take testosterone injections and get their breasts cut off can get pregnant. Women who like sex with men, women, the beasts of the field and the birds of the air can get pregnant, too.

JOSH HAWLEY: So your view is that the core of this right then is about what?

KHIARA BRIDGES: I won't answer that because you are crazy. You have an irrational fear of women who take massive doses of wrong-sex hormones and get body parts amputated. You want them hurt.

JOSH HAWLEY: Wow, you're saying that I'm opening up people to violence by asking whether or not women are the folks who can have pregnancies?

KHIARA BRIDGES: One out of five women who are jacked up to the eyeballs on vitamin T and voluntarily have had radical, double mastectomies have attempted suicide.

JOSH HAWLEY: Because of my line of questioning?

KHIARA BRIDGES: Because when you come across these women you try to walk through them like they weren't even there. When they talk, you pretend not to hear them.

JOSH HAWLEY: I'm denying that trans people exist by asking--

KHIARA BRIDGES: Yes. Also, I'm a wildebeest. My pronouns are grunt / snorf.

Wednesday, July 13, 2022

History Doesn't Repeat

 ... but it often rhymes. So said Mark Twain.

What happens to a baby in the womb when doctors inject the mother with massive doses of testosterone? Since a woman's body goes through hormonal changes during pregnancy to assist in the development of the child, you'd have to assume that smashing it with sledgehammer-sized doses of Vitamin T would have some effect.

I know, let's try it and find out! After all, this is how we do science, through experimentation and analysis, right? So macht man Wissenschaft!

Wait a minute. There's something in the back of my mind suggesting that we've tried this sort of thing before ...


Tuesday, July 12, 2022

Yellow And Blue Danainae Butterfly

I saw this character lazily fluttering about our garden yesterday, so I blazed away at it with my phone. I got a couple of decent shots that might be worth a click. Enjoy!


Monday, July 11, 2022

Dads Or Jails: You Choose

In my previous post, wherein I unjustly slurred noble sand, I shared this quote from Bill Barr.

(T)here are only two ways to restrain people from following disordered passions, Barr said: internal restraints, which are largely provided by one’s beliefs; and external restraints, which are typically provided by government. So in order to have a limited government, Barr noted in an explicit echo of the American Founders, citizens must practice self-restraint.

In my original Lizard Empire post, I said this.

One of the reasons the Romans liked a big empire was that it pushed the borders, where lived dangerous barbarians, far, far away from them. The larger the Empire, the safer you were, no matter where you were. I'd like to suggest that Jeffrey Epstein, children in drag and trannies in the library are all part of the modern-day American cultural Empire. That is, acceptance of their behavior expands the empire by normalizing ever more degeneracy.

Remember, your behavior might be degenerate under some definition, but the farther out the borders go, the less degenerate you look.

I believe that the primary constraint on our dominant social institutions is that none of them can proscribe any sexual activity at all. Further, none of them will rank them on a scale of desirable to undesirable. It is utterly forbidden to suggest that, all other things being equal, traditional marriage is superior to all other forms of relationships.

With that in mind, dig how NBC is dealing with a massive spike in crime in New Orleans following the election of same type of lenient government officials as we have in Atlanta, San Francisco, LA, Chicago and elsewhere.

Title: New Orleans battled mass incarceration. Then came the backlash over violent crime.

Right from the top, NBC is making a hash of the story. The police in NOLA weren't going into the 9th Ward and rounding up people en masse. There were arrests and trials and witnesses and juries and stuff like that.

After NOLA did away with law enforcement, there's been a huge spike in crimes. Fatima Muse lost her godmother, Portia Pollock, to a stabbing and robbery. Fatima has gone from a social justice activist to a believer in law and order.

“This conversation we’re having right now would probably be a lot different if it wasn’t the person that I love who got killed,” Muse said. “I would probably be a lot more lenient and liberal, talking to you about reform, people deserving another shot, and how screwed up the system is, especially for Black and brown people.”

A false choice is then set up by the author.

(Denise) Graves, a pastor and community organizer, said she and Pollock dreamed of one day buying an RV to drive around the country doing healing work and teaching African cultural workshops. Now, Graves, 69, is left working to heal herself, and that work has been slow. “I think there’s a part of you that breaks. There’s a part that you think cannot be repaired,” Graves said. 

Like Muse, Graves is no one’s idea of a “tough-on-crime” ideologue. She calls prisons an “expansion of enslavement” and says the criminal legal system is “criminal” itself. But she also has strong feelings about the value of consequences. 

“If we keep telling people you can carjack, and you’ll get off, you can carjack, you’ll get off — murder is going to happen,” Graves said. 

Apparently, we have only two possible approaches.

  1. Round up people at random and throw them in jail or
  2. Let them run wild, killing and robbing. 

Both of these selections assume that there is only one lever to push - the external restraint one. That's because the internal restraint one would require a return to traditional families and the attendant discipline of having a married father in the house. 

The lizards don't like that, so here we are.

To test my theory, I went into my backyard and asked the first lizard I saw what he thought of it. Horrified, he ran away, proving conclusively that lizards don't want to hear about traditional marriage. It's also why you don't see a lizard in this photo.

Obligatory Ranting About The Catholic Church

The Church, of course, has the answer that doesn't involve mass incarceration of the real or the fantasy variety. That same answer doesn't lead to Portia getting stabbed by a black man who was out on bail and trying to steal her car. It even comes from the pen of one of our recent popes, someone who apparently has fallen out of favor, JPII.

If we Catholics evangelized JPII's solution, we'd embrace love and kindness and better solutions for all. However, we'd have to throw out our racial justice stuff. Since the real goal of most of our bishops and practically all of our universities is to get people to vote for Democrats, we have no intention at all of insisting that marriage, family and personal discipline are the answers.

Bonus Note

The next time the bishop here in San Diego puts out a call for donations to the Diocese, I'm going to skip sending cash and instead, I'll vow to vote for Democrats. It's what he really wants, anyway. I'll bet that when the end of the fund raising drive comes and the bishop is opening all the envelopes, he feels one disappointment after another.

"Let's see what's in this one! Hmm. It's just money. Oh well. I'll just have to put a good face on it. It's the thought that counts."

Sunday, July 10, 2022

Building A Skyscraper From Sand

 ... would be impossible because you couldn't get the stuff to stick together sufficiently to support the structure. In a theoretical sense, you need fine-grain* structure to create a large-scale structure.

If you're going to build a society, you need an agreed-upon set of first principles as your foundation. Any set of first principles will of necessity preclude others. If you choose to organize around the Ashanti's first principles, you'll end up with agriculture, organized government, an aggressive empire and slavery. If you choose to organize around the East German model, you'll get the Stasi. And so on.

Dig these two examples of modern thought.

Here are the essences of the two points made:

  1. Christianity should not be the basis for society.
  2. The Supreme Court must be reformed or abolished.

Nowhere in these kinds of screeds is there a suggestion of how to replace whatever it is the radicals want abolished. It's Seattle's CHOP/CHAZ writ large.

There were lots of slogans and bullhorns and speeches, but nothing constructive happened because the participants hadn't committed to any foundational first principles before they started. It was all destruction all the time.

Destroying your foundational principles is how you end up here:

That video was chosen at random. There are tons and tons of them these days. You can't tear down the bases of your culture, replace them with nothing and expect anything but chaos and destruction. Bill Barr put it very succinctly in a recent interview.

“We are going through a fateful crisis in western civilization. This is the deepest crisis we’ve faced in my mind since Christ,” Barr said. “That’s because our whole civilization is based on the Judeo-Christian tradition and that tradition is under sustained attack by increasingly militant secular forces.”

In a reprise of a 2019 speech at Notre Dame University that met massive corporate media backlash, Barr told the audience U.S. public schools have become hostile to traditional religion while wresting control of American children’s upbringing from their parents. This is a threat to the entire Western order, Barr said, because the unique American system of self-government cannot exist without a citizenry that is committed to traditional religion.

That’s because there are only two ways to restrain people from following disordered passions, Barr said: internal restraints, which are largely provided by one’s beliefs; and external restraints, which are typically provided by government. So in order to have a limited government, Barr noted in an explicit echo of the American Founders, citizens must practice self-restraint.

It is the job of Christians in general and the Catholic Church in particular, to defend the first principles upon which Western civilization are based. After all, they're our first principles.

* - Fine-grain? Get it? Sand? Fine-grain? Hahahaha ... haha ... ha ... sorry about that.

Thursday, July 07, 2022

Eventually, You Defend Yourself

 In NYC, a restaurant was trashed by customers because they charged $1.75 for extra sauce.

I'm not sure where this one was, but here, customers go bananas and jump the counter at a McDonald's. One of the workers decides to defend the place and does so with real gusto.

Also in NYC, an old, Hispanic dude working at a mini mart was attacked by a young, black guy. He managed to pull a knife and killed his attacker. The NY DA, always eager to release certain criminals, including the perp who attacked the old dude, arrested the old dude for murder and set bail at $250,000.

I've quoted Glenn Reynolds before and I'll do it again, now. The cops aren't there to protect you from the criminals. The cops are there to protect the criminals from you.

This is bad medicine.

Wednesday, July 06, 2022

What If Secession Is The Point?

 Dig these two seemingly unrelated items.

I'm a little slow, so it's just dawning on me now that the point of the open border is to either turn the red states purple through demographic change or anger them into secession. I can't think of anything else that makes sense.


I realize that in a previous post, I said that not making sense is a hallmark of the modern progressive, but I can't let logic go. Rational thought runs deep in us theoretical mathematicians.

Also, I thought I had said it somewhere on this blog, but I can't find it easily so here it is, possibly again: If Texas secedes, every single red state needs to immediately join it. Without Texas, you'd end up as a vassal state to California and New York.

Bonus Links

I already said this here.

Just think, they already view the people of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and Oklahoma as sub-literate, racist trash. In the words of the Journolist crowd, they're "NASCAR retards." If those states were forced, err, allowed to secede, the left would never lose another presidential election, would never lose control of the Senate or Congress and would soon have an unimpeachable majority on the Supreme Court.

In another post, I said that it's not secession if you're not part of a country.

If a state wanted to secede, from what would it be seceding? Would you say, "Texas, you may not secede. You must stay and have your land overrun by non-citizens. You must obey laws that people all around you do not obey. You must use a currency that is being generated out of thin air. You must communicate to us in English. You must send us two senators and n congresscritters to represent you in an near-powerless legislature. Finally, you must accede to the wishes of our judiciary, whatever those wishes happen to be at the moment."

It seems to me that the US, as presently composed, is not nearly as solid and well-defined of a thing as one might think.

It's not a crisis if it's intentional.

Tuesday, July 05, 2022

If Laws Aren't Going To Work To Stop Crimo, Maybe They're Not Going To Work At All

Robert Crimo III was a total loon.

What on Earth was this maniac doing with a gun?

Highland Park is in Illinois, where they have some of the most stringent gun laws in the country and adjacent to Chicago where they have even more stringent gun laws. What I can't understand is how the laws are supposed to work if they couldn't stop Crimo from getting his hands on a gun.

Even assuming he did, aren't there mechanisms for reporting a dangerous nut to law enforcement? I'm guessing that even if he had been reported, there wasn't a way to justify keeping him under control.

There seems to be a serious disconnect between the intentions and conceptual uses of gun control laws and their reality when it comes to crazy people bent on mass murder. Just from a first order analysis of recent mass killings, it sure looks like the laws are an inferior way to prevent, stop or minimize them.

Whatever it is we're doing, it's not working. 

Update: Crimo was able to get the gun because his dad cosigned for him.

The man accused of shooting dozens of people at a parade in Illinois on Independence Day was able to purchase the firearms used in the attack because his father co-signed his Firearm Owners Identification (FOID) card, which gun owners must have in that state.

The revelation comes after local law enforcement officials revealed earlier in the day that the suspect had already been on law enforcement’s radar due to a pair of incidents that happened back in 2019, including the suspect attempting suicide followed by an alleged threat to “kill everyone” several months later.

He may have been "on their radar," but the mind boggles thinking about just what he'd have to do to cause them to take action before he went bananas with his gun.

What are the usable mechanisms by which this loon would be taken off the street? Until that's laid out in plain language and used by the cops, all the laws in the world won't matter.

And then there's the question, do we want the cops to be able to take people off the street on a suspicion? Given how we've done away with stop-and-frisk, the answer would seem to be, "No."

Sunday, July 03, 2022

If You're Stupid In Small Things, You're Likely To Be Stupid In Large Things

 Halifax Bank in England has gone woke.

Halifax customers are closing their accounts en masse today after its social media team told them to leave if they don't like their new pronoun badges for staff in what is being branded one of the biggest PR disasters in British business history.

The row began this week when Halifax, which was propped up by the taxpayer to the tune of £30billion as part of a 2008 bailout, tweeted its 118,000 followers on Tuesday revealing that it would allow staff to display their pronouns on their name badges, in a post that read 'pronouns matter'.

It showed a photo of a female staff member's name badge, which featured 'she/her/hers' in brackets under the name Gemma, and said the policy was to help avoid 'accidental misgendering'.

One customer replied: 'There’s no ambiguity about the name “Gemma”. It’s a female person’s name. In other words, it’s pathetic virtue signaling and is seen as such by almost everyone who has responded to the initial tweet. Why are you trying to alienate people?' Within 20 minutes a member of the Halifax social media team, calling himself Andy M, replied: 'If you disagree with our values, you're welcome to close your account'.

Andy M's response has outraged customers, and seen hundreds claiming they will boycott the bank with many saying they have closed their accounts. Others have cut up their credit cards or getting rid of insurance policies and said the threat was the final straw after it cut 27 branches alone in 2022.

I'd close my account, too. Not because I think trans isn't a thing, which it isn't, but because I would have lost faith in the bank. If they're willing to insult and lose customers over pronouns, what are they doing with their investments behind the scenes? God only knows what idiotic measurements they're using to decide where to put their funds. 

Look, I know they're all doing this right now, at least at the social media and HR levels. They're all recruiting new workers from the same pool of mentally-poisoned college graduates. I know I'm heavily invested in all kinds of companies that are racialist and gender-insane at those levels. However, a bank is a different thing. It's not part of an investment portfolio, it's the direct holder of my money. I wouldn't feel comfortable with them behaving like lunatics in public.

"If you will each state your preferred pronouns as you approach the teller, we will be happy to assist you."

Friday, July 01, 2022

If You Don't Work, You Die

Things are looking bleak for the blues in the midterms. Inflation, crime, cultural insanity, a bear market and recession are adding up to a well-deserved thumping for the Democrats. Wretchard the Cat has a decent essay about this, but I think he misses the mark. Here's a sample paragraph.

The problem facing the Democratic Party is that it based its plans on a future that never materialized without adequate provision for a failover. Its economic managers overestimated the fault tolerance of the American system and are now searching for a way out of the crisis they find themselves in. Their chief short term hopes of distraction lie in two directions: Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin: civil war or second cold war.

The problem is actually that their plans can't possibly work. We managed to conceal their failures with mountains of printed money, but even Modern Monetary Theory has its limits and those limits have been hit. I've yapped about this in the past.

From Life's Pricing Structure Is Broken:

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."

From the post referred to above, When The Cat's Away And Not Coming Back:

The general problem really hit me today when I read about Modern Monetary Theory, MMT. MMT holds that any government that can print its own money and whose debt is denominated in that same currency, need not worry about debt. Print all you want until inflation hits. Inflation, not debt, is the critical measure of whether or not you can keep printing.

This is obvious nonsense. If you have mountains of debt, inflation, which leads to higher interest rates, immediately starts a chain reaction of printing and inflation that quickly spirals out of control and wipes out the economy. MMT can't possibly work. See also: Republic, Weimar.

But nonsense is OK, right? Sense is patriarchal or racist or mathematical, which itself is patriarchal and racist.

The problem isn't messaging and all the fund-raising in the world isn't going to matter.

Neither will it work to blame Putin.

Looking like a complete maniac probably won't do the trick, either.

Sam Brinton on Twitter: "It’s official. As of June 19th, I now serve my nation as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy in the Department of Energy."

No, I'm afraid that The Gods of the Copybook Headings have returned and all we can do is work our way out of this. Well, the first thing we need to do is get rid of the biggest parasites in our governing class, but after that, it's up to us.

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!