Diversity Butters No Parsnips

Minimal snark today. Instead of a full portion, here are two tweets juxtaposed with a brief analysis.

🚨🚨EUROPE ENERGY CRISIS🚨🚨

One small coffee shop's energy bill goes from
> 2482 euro
> to 8979 euro

THIS IS UNSUSTAINABLE pic.twitter.com/dnSj7zEUKM

— Crab Man (@crabcrawler1) August 30, 2022

Europe is running low on fuel which means higher prices. They're running low on fuel because NATO chose to take sides in the UKR-RUS wino fight instead of opting for a sensible, diplomatic resolution between those two, demographically doomed nations.

Leadership at the Federal Reserve has become its most diverse ever. There are more female, Black and gay officials contributing to the central bank’s interest-rate decisions than at any time in its 109-year history. . https://t.co/rJBRXMpJVY

— The Associated Press (@AP) August 27, 2022

Meanwhile, we continue to cling to a moral code that values affirming "marginalized communities" over all else.

Well, fine words and diversity butter no parsnips and heat no homes, so the fuel shortages and resultant business failures will continue apace. In addition to prioritizing feelings, we're tilting at the windmills of Global Warming Climate Change by embracing hopelessly under-generating renewable energy sources. We're only belatedly turning back to nuclear power. It may be too late to bring much hydrocarbon energy online for the winter given how that's been shut down. At least we can preen in our faculty lounges while China's monstrous torrent of pollution pours into the sky, a sky which is global, if you get my drift.

My prediction is that the governments of the stricken Western nations will send large, energy-relief payments to the population which will be financed with new money printing from the various central banks, putting an end to the fight against inflation, at least temporarily. Such an act would be in keeping with our current leadership class's utter ignorance for how things work.

If they send the money in the form of paper currency, at least the people will be able to burn it to keep warm.

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 Tidbit

Dig this.

European Union Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Tuesday (30 August) rebuffed a call by Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki to temporarily suspend the EU’s Emission Trading System (ETS) in order to stabilise power prices.

At an energy summit in Copenhagen, Morawiecki suggested suspending the ETS system, the EU’s main tool for reducing carbon emissions and enforcing its climate policy.

“Why add another €90 or €100 in the form of ETS allowances to already very high electricity prices? We can revert back to the system the moment we secure energy for all of Europe and we bring back peace to Ukraine,” Morawiecki said at a news conference.

Why add another €100 to the energy prices? Oh, Mateusz, you know the answers to that. First, we don't want that autistic, Swedish teen, Greta Thunberg, to yell at us again. Second, don't sweat it. We'll just send our citizens the €100 they need to pay us in the form of a tax credit or rebate or some such nonsense. It's all good. We'll just print it.

Transgender Trash Research

This essay is interesting, but not for the reasons that people are discussing. 

Short version of the controversy: Seattle Children's hospital participated in a research study that claimed to show that "transgender-affirming care," i.e. the poisoning and mutilation of children, led to improved psychological outcomes for the kids. The actual data showed that it didn't really make much of a difference at all. Or maybe it did. But possibly not.

Lots of shouting and pointing starting in 3..2..1..

Here's the crucial snippet that everyone seems to be missing. Emphasis mine.

Most dramatically, after tracking the mental health of 104 transgender-identifying patients aged 13 to 20 for a year at Seattle Children’s Hospital, “gender-affirming care was associated with a 60% reduction in depression and a 73% drop in harmful or suicidal thoughts among the participants.”

The time frame is all wrong. The study is doomed because it wouldn't reveal the basic problem with the slicing and drugging of the children. 

What are your metrics for life satisfaction in your teens? A brisk search revealed this page which makes the claim that social media, sports, food and entertainment top the list. That's about what I would expect. They're children evolving into adults and children like playtime.

The social media aspect is a marker for social status, something very important to girls in particular. Going back to the Island of Dr. Moreau, otherwise known as our children's hospitals, what happens when a girl comes out as trans? Well, she turns into a temporary, local celebrity, for one. Her life becomes a topic for conversation and all of it affirming. What girl doesn't want that? Any study that follows a teen for a year is really just a study of teens. In that time, a 15-year-old who has been poisoned and chopped up like a ham, has become a 16-year old. That's it.

The flaw in the study is that the damage done won't truly be felt for another 20 years. 15-year-old girls unable to have children have a much less sophisticated view of their decision than 35-year-old women. Unmarried and childless 35-year-old women tend to unhappiness, at least in my experience. At least the ones I know aren't looking back on memories of waking up in the hospital with sutures in their chests. They may fault themselves for not holding on to that boyfriend from a few years ago, but at least they aren't filled with horror at their decision to jack themselves up on testosterone at the behest of a sadistic and demented medical system.

<sarc> That's not going to lead to suicidal thoughts, no, not at all. </sarc>

If you wanted to design an experiment that tracked life satisfaction, you'd use one that followed your victims, err, patients throughout their lives. Unlike sparrows, we live a bit longer than a year or two.

Hmm. Since the degenerates who run our children's hospitals can't see a problem with hacksawing girls' bodies, maybe they don't know how long people live. It's possible.

Anywho, this is what passes for SciEnCE! these days. It's just trash.

Addendum - The Proper Way To Write Up The Results

The fundamental flaw in the study should have been front and center in the abstract. Since the authors knew that their work would be used to justify or criticize the permanent damage being done to children, they must have anticipated the publicity it would get. Knowing the study was fatally flawed from the start, it was utterly unethical not to note this. Well, unethical in a classical sense where you employ objective morality. These days, it's all about affirming marginalized groups.

Which they did. Let the slaughter of children continue, for this is right and just.

The topic is too horrible to use a snarky picture and caption. Instead, here's my latest batch of fermented cayenne peppers, blended into hot sauce. Tim was right, the set that I had mashed and salted did finally ferment when I added water.

I consider the experiment a success as I've settled on a fermentation process - coarsely chopping the peppers and covering them in a brine. 5-7 days seems long enough for the fermentation to run its course.

4 Days Of Tobacco Growth

 ... can be substantial when your Nicotiana is in high gear.

August 24

August 28

I make that out to be 6" of growth, from 19" to 25" at the highest points of the plants. Even if you discount the pointy leaf shooting straight up on the left, it still amounts to about an inch a day.

Go, babies, go!

How To Earn More Money

 Be sane.

In a nation increasingly peopled by crazies who think women can become men and emotional toddlers who can't handle bad words like misgendering someone, the stable, competent, rational person is becoming more valuable.

At work, someone asked for a transgender flag emoji on our chat system. I pushed back on it, saying we don't like to put political content on our internal, social network. Almost immediately, a reply came back in all caps, informing me that I was DENYING THEIR EXISTENCE. It was shocking.

In retrospect and now having grasped the mechanisms of our descent into cultural insanity where feelings trump objective reality, I now see this differently. Coworkers who are unstable to the point of YELLING when someone disagrees with them, STEM professionals who prefer emotions to logic, are worth less to the organization than those who get along with others and do solid work.

One way to look at the toddlerization of STEM is to see it as a competition-removal mechanism. Less competition means more money for those who practice logic and classical science and engineering.

Work still needs to get done, real work. Customers will pay for that. The more gender-affirming, racial-justice loons are out there, the better the rest of us will be paid.

Fellow San Diegan and longtime friend, Leslie Eastman, posted this excellent essay describing Scientific American's latest foray into bedlam. Here's a tidbit.

Without the scientific background, there isn’t the experience to know when to research and find alternative sources with different data. Take, for example, the documentary’s assertion that the number of intersex people is 1.7%. According to the Journal of Sex Research, that number is a little high (emphasis mine).

Anne Fausto-Sterling s suggestion that the prevalence of intersex might be as high as 1.7% has attracted wide attention in both the scholarly press and the popular media. Many reviewers are not aware that this figure includes conditions which most clinicians do not recognize as intersex, such as Klinefelter syndrome, Turner syndrome, and late-onset adrenal hyperplasia. If the term intersex is to retain any meaning, the term should be restricted to those conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female. Applying this more precise definition, the true prevalence of intersex is seen to be about 0.018%, almost 100 times lower than Fausto-Sterling s estimate of 1.7%.

So your calculations are off by a factor of 100? No big deal! You're affirming someone's delusions and that's what counts.

Until you need a bridge built or a chemical compound developed. Then you will pay handsomely for it.

Totally unrelated: Saturdays are for parties. Sundays are for cleaning up after them. It's just science.

The Wages Of Sin

 ... are* death. Maybe not your death, but death nonetheless.

I'm currently staggering through Hollowed Out - A Warning About America's Next Generation by Jeremy Adams. I don't think I'm going to finish it and in fact, I'll probably return it to Audible and get my credit back. It's not dreadful, it's just not helpful.

Hollowed Out is one of those sunset pessimist books. Jeremy sees the sun going down and yells at us, "If this continues, we'll all freeze to death in total darkness in less than a year!" It's like the endless doom-mongering by the Global Warming Climate Change crowd. Yes, yes, I can see that things are changing, but nothing ever changes linearly forever. There is a hysteresis effect to nature and things will rebound in some way.

But what way?

Where does this all go? Jeremy tells us that kids these days can't concentrate, don't want to learn and are consumed with the modern zeitgeist of feelings uber alles. OK, I believe that, but what will be the result?

Yesterday's post showed me where at least part of this will go. 

We could have sent in diplomats and negotiated a peace that would have allowed the fuel, food and fertilizer to continue to flow to the rest of the world. Instead, our own criminally ignorant and amoral Elites indulged in their post-Trump, psychotic obsession with Vladimir Putin and sent bombs instead. We've turned what should have been one of the last, pathetic adventures of two, dying, sclerotic countries into a worldwide holocaust of famine.

Moral pride has begotten objective ignorance. We don't need to learn from our classical past. We're all so much better than those people. Tear down their statues, remove their works from our curricula and have done with them all. We shall build a better world from scratch!

Pride is a sin, you know. The wages of that particular sin will be death, death in Africa.

Similarly, that same moral pride gave us racial justice. The wages of racial justice have been death in black neighborhoods.

More of that sweet, sweet moral pride got us open borders which will result in our working poor unable to earn higher wages. That's death of a kind.

So where does this end? Well, reality can't be held at bay forever. Africa will have its famine and blacks will continue to die at the end of a Planned Parenthood scalpel or an illiterate black's handgun. Our framing carpenters, painters, housekeepers and landscape maintenance men will see their standard of living drop. Eventually, a leader will come out who will loudly put the blame for this where it lies and the bubble of fake, moral superiority will be popped.

Ron DeSantis, perhaps? He seems up for a fight.

Greg Abbott busing illegals to NYC was an excellent move in this direction. It is reality popping the bubble of the sanctuary cities' lies about their moral superiority.

* - I know the actual quote is, "The wages of sin is death," but I've always hated that formulation. "Wages" is plural. "Is" is singular. To put them together is itself a sin. In a just world, the people that do so should be put to death. Or at least sternly admonished.

Sending Bombs Instead Of Diplomats

 ... will condemn many in Africa to death. Dig this.

Unbelievable, and the worst is yet to come. Please pray for the people of Malawi 🙏 pic.twitter.com/N19AVr1yMS

— My2pups2 (@my2pups2) August 11, 2022

And this.

Offloading and stacking more maize. Thanks to all who have supported us. https://t.co/CyaOUIGEVG pic.twitter.com/sLkCNOeyoi

— Fr. Edmond Nyoka (@ednyoka) August 5, 2022

This is a direct result of our idiotic obsession with that 2-bit loser, Putin. UKR v RUS is a bum fight, plain and simple. Both countries are corrupt and degenerate. Both countries are experiencing population decline as their women aren't having babies and their life expectancies are static, at best. The war was never going to result in anything but a grinding stalemate as neither side has sufficient infantry to capture big chunks of territory. Finally, there's little to choose between them as they're both ruled by corrupt oligarchs.

We could have sent in diplomats and negotiated a peace that would have allowed the fuel, food and fertilizer to continue to flow to the rest of the world. Instead, our own criminally ignorant and amoral Elites indulged in their post-Trump, psychotic obsession with Vladimir Putin and sent bombs instead. We've turned what should have been one of the last, pathetic adventures of two, dying, sclerotic countries into a worldwide holocaust of famine.

Here, some retired, well-fed general points at dots on a map a bazillion miles away from us. The dots haven't appreciably changed positions in months, but the news media still reports on it like it's the Wehrmacht overrunning France.

Meanwhile, my friend in Malawi, Father Nyoka, prepares for a famine.

Affirming Someone's Lived Experiences

... doesn't sound like a good idea to me. Well, the negative ones, that is.

My recently-deceased brother was an anti-Semite. As he told the stories, every interaction he had with a Jewish person had resulted in financial and/or sexual cheating. His lived experiences told him that Jews couldn't be trusted.

I never met any of the Jews with whom he had relationships. Given his propensity for using people, I have no doubt that they would have had a very different take on these interactions. I never put any importance in his anti-Semitic gnashings. I knew plenty of Jews myself. Like any other group, most were just fine and a few were truly villainous.

Where does that leave you as you work to affirm someone's lived experiences as we're told to do these days? Doesn't that seem to be doomed to misdiagnoses? How about when the culture teaches you to bias your experiences a certain way? If I had lived in an environment where I was bombarded with stories of Jews doing bad things, I've no doubt I would have taken my brother's experiences as my own. After all, it's me and my brother against everyone, right? And then me and my cousin and then me and my race and then ...

You get the picture.

Lived experiences seem prone to misinterpretations and unfair biases.  It's one thing to sympathize as a friend tells you how a left-handed, Hungarian lesbian* cut them off in traffic and agree that, in general, left-handed, Hungarian lesbians with poor driving skills ought to be closely monitored on the freeways. It's something else entirely to take their experience and use it to insist that all left-handed, Hungarian lesbians need to be dealt with quite harshly.

Also, this is a butterfly.

* - I'm sure you can tell that this is a racist dog whistle and the group who I'm really trying to slander are Eskimo chiropodists under 5'6" tall. Ooh, how I hate them!

Licking Your Food

 ... is perfectly acceptable if you're a butterfly.

If You Think You're A Bird

 ... then it is a sin if I don't affirm you.

Thanks to WC Varones, I devoured The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution by Carl Trueman, It's taken me a while to digest it. WC was nice enough to invite me to his protestant men's group where we discussed this book. While I sat with them, deciding just what size stake each will be tied to when we Catholics have our massive auto da fe, I gained a better understanding of what Trueman was saying.

This is an extension of KT's Theory of Eveything.

You Think You're A Bird

You think you're a bird. These days, you're going to the gym and focusing on your arms and chest. You are also sewing a bird costume, complete with feathers and wings. You have reserved space on the roof of a local, 5-story building for a year from now when you will fully embrace your birdness. Then and there, you will don your bird costume and jump off the roof, flapping your wings. Since you identify as a bird, you will fly off into the sky and finally live as your authentic self.

What Is Sin?

If I point out that you are going to fall to the ground and die, that is a sin. It is a sin to not affirm your feelings. It is likewise a sin if I shrug and say, "Whatever, man. Do what you want, but don't bother me." 

Sin is the failure to affirm the "lived experiences" of a member of a "marginalized community."

"Marginalized Communities"

"Marginalized communities" are just a new way of packaging Marxism. The world consists of oppressors and oppressed. These groups are easily classified.

Marx said it was owners oppressing workers.

Hitler said it was Jews oppressing Germans.

Juan Peron of Argentina said it was rich oppressing poor.

Fini

And that's it. Our modern ethical system is little more than that. Members of "marginalized communities" must have their "lived experiences" affirmed. The real effects of their actions are tertiary, at best.

This is why we put on our kente cloths and kneel before black people, but shrug when they kill each other, either in the womb or in the streets. This is why we refuse to say the Monkey Pox is pretty much confined to gay men and could be stopped by eliminating their orgies. This is why we use a trans person's chosen pronouns and silence any of them who de-transition and want to tell their horror stories.

Things have started to make a lot more sense to me now.

It is a sin to not affirm the "lived experiences" of black people.

It is not a sin for them to kill half of their babies through abortion.

If You're Not Measuring Things, It's Not Science

I installed a yardstick among my tobacco plants yesterday so I can track their growth. If I haven't updated you on the project, the plants were put in the well-prepared ground last week.

Science!

If I recall correctly, my previous crop got to about 3' tall. Taller, maybe? In any case, I thrust a stiff rod into the soil and zip-tied the yardstick to that, making sure the bottom of the yardstick was just barely touching the ground. From the photo above, my tobacco plants are about 12" tall now.

These are Virginians, of which I have a dozen. Off-camera are nine Tennesseans.

It Looks Like It Was All Lies

... which is just what I expected. 

Several days into my cayenne fermentation experiment, the peppers in the brine solution are fermenting so fast that the container is overflowing and the bubbles are bubbling. The salted mash is just sitting there like the degenerate loser that it is.

On the left, proper fermentation is happening. So much winning!

On the right, there is naught but sloth and degradation. Sad!

Classified Documents And What Trump Knew

There's really no comparison. For an adversary, the most valuable information is inside the ex-president's head. Not only that, but its value decreases with every day he's away from the White House. All of this hysteria about classified documents at Mar-a-Lago is idiocy.

My first thought when I heard about the raid was that their excuse of classified documents was a lie. The president is the ultimate classifying and declassifying authority. I thought back to Bill Clinton's first days as president. He had brought in a bunch of his cronies from Arkansas and given them top clearances without security reviews. The conservative media was apoplectic. National Review and the Wall Street Journal ran long editorials raving that this was a breach of national security.

My dad, who had worked with both the White House and Congress on Air Force issues, was utterly scornful of these stories. With tired exasperation, he told me, "Do you know how they distribute clearances at the White House? The president points at a guy and says, 'He's cleared.' That's it. That's all it takes. There are no investigations and no processes. The president can clear anyone he wants any time he wants."

The same is true for documents. It has to be that way. Say President Trump was negotiating with President Macron of France. It's all going well and Macron has just shared some deep, French intel. To reciprocate and keep the conversation going, Trump would then offer Macron some top-secret American information. President Trump wouldn't have to excuse himself, leave the room, fill out form 7713/GF and get his OPSEC guy to sign off on it before he could speak. That would be silly. In addition, it would mean that his OPSEC guy could say, "No." That would make the OPSEC guy president.

So the whole classified document thing is utter nonsense. The documents are unclassified as soon as the president says they are. If you think about a trial of Trump for this, there's no way on Earth the DOJ could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it hadn't happened.

It's Not About The Documents

There's a bigger point. As president, Trump was involved in top-secret, strategic planning meetings and received thousands of briefings at the highest security levels. If you were China, you'd want to learn how the US planned to defend Taiwan. If you were Iran, you'd want to know our possible responses to teams of jihadis with SA-7 SAMs taking out airliners leaving ORD and DFW. If you were one of the Russian oligarchs, you'd want to know when Victoria's Secret and Sports Illustrated were going to ditch the fat, lesbian models and get back to the hot chicks. Also, where are the keys to the liquor cabinet?

Seriously, Trump could have ten thousand "classified" documents and they'd be utterly insignificant compared to what he knew.

Now think about the value of his knowledge. With every day he's out of office, the value of his knowledge declines. 18 months after he's left office, what's between his ears is still insanely valuable, but its price is declining. If you were afraid he was going to go rogue and replace Hunter Biden as America's pressure point and information conduit with the Chinese, the Ukrainians and the Russians, you wouldn't wait 18 months to nab the dude.

It's all lies. Every last bit of it.

What It Means

My father was West Point, class of 1949. I never heard him tell a lie. He may have been a wild man before becoming a cadet, but that place's Code of Honor was burned into his soul. He had classes at Harvard when he got his MBA that did the same thing.

Many of the people who are lying to us now are graduates of the military academies. Practically all of them are Ivy League schweinhund. They are lying to us to the detriment of the nation.

The past may be a foreign country and they may do things differently there, but it's now barely recognizable.

Where I work, we recently had a social media post discussing toxic masculinity. For some reason, the Marines weren't mentioned. We are a long way from the past's foreign soil.

Fermentation And Lies

 I harvested another batch of cayenne from my two plants, who I've named Big Mama and Little Mama. Fertilized and watered, they're producing like mad. 

I've been told that fermented peppers make the best hot sauce, so I'm giving that a try, again. I've had spotty results with it in the past. This time, however, I'm being a bit more scientific about it. I've reduced the variables in my equations down to one - fermentation method.

The first method, taken from this video, is to chop the peppers and immerse them in saltwater. The second is to blend the peppers into a mash and then stir in some salt. The method is described here. 

Each set* is then placed in a Mason jar with a glass fermentation weight on top of it and sealed with a fermentation lid.

Here are the photos from the process, primarily the mash. That's where the lies lie.

The salted mash.

The fermentation chambers. The one with the chopped peppers is full of brine as a proper fermentation chamber should be. The one with the mash is sitting there, naked and disgusting. It's the Pride Parade of peppers.

The Lies

The instructions for the mash make the preposterous claim that the peppers will release their juices when you add the salt. The juice will cover the mash and fermentation will begin. Ha! Lies! All of it, lies! Cayenne are not juicy peppers like bells. I think they're too dry for sufficient fluids to leach out and cover the mash.

Well, we shall see. The mash is being put to the test, burned in the Crucible of Truth. Justice will have its day and judgment will be rendered.

I may have to buy a powdered wig to wear as I observe the progress of these two, so solemn is the occasion.

Shopping Notes

You can buy a powdered wig on Etsy. Of course you can. For about $200, you can get a decent one to pass judgment on your peppers as they ferment.

* - For my science-y friends, what's the right word for the pepper glob in the jar? Is it a sample? A compound? A blend? A set? My coffee hasn't kicked in and my internal thesaurus is still partly asleep.

Twitter Isn't Real Life

 ... and neither is Washington, DC.

Inflation has caused the cost of our remodel to soar. The Fed's response to inflation has whacked our retirement investments. As a result I've had to rethink my full retirement plans, adding at least two more years to my working life.

My "transgender" daughter is spiraling into madness and, with each day on testosterone treatments, probable early cancer if not suicide.

Wife kitteh's childhood friend told me recently that she and her family no longer go down to the Magnificent Mile in Chicago on weekend nights because the crime has gotten so bad. Mostly Nothing has shared similar stories about Minneapolis. San Diego has a weird feel to it now and I lock things up these days in ways I'd never done before. Maybe it's all in my head, a bleed-off of their legitimate worries, but there it is.

Those are three primary issues in my life, right off the top of my head. 

Yesterday, Attorney General Merrick Garland told us that he signed off on a search warrant to raid former President Trump's house, a watershed moment in American history. That's a really bad watershed, in case you were wondering. The reason? Some documents wanted by the National Archives or something and blah blah mumble mumble.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is telling us that, due to fuel price inflation, now is the perfect time to buy an electric car. He says this will help us fight Global Warming Climate Change, which is driven entirely by Chinese pollution.

We've sent something like $40B to Ukraine to assist in its bum fight with Russia. As corrupt as Ukraine is, there's no doubt in my mind that most of it lined the pockets of Ukraine's corrupt and evil oligarchs who are just interior Matryoshka dolls, replicas of the corrupt and evil Russian oligarchs.

Washington DC isn't just out of touch, it's completely detached from our lives. That would be fine if it wasn't simultaneously poking appendages into every aspect of them through regulation and destructive spending.

Rats!

To make matters worse, rats have ruined one of our watermelons. Oh well, I was able to harvest four others. That ought to be enough for a couple of bottles of wine.

I'm happy they concentrated on this one instead of sampling them all.

What If They're Just Stupid?

The Mayor

Mayor Adams of NYC, without a hint of irony, threatened to send a busload of New York City residents into Texas to campaign for Governor Abbot's opponent.

New Yorkers. In Texas. To campaign against the guy Adams wants to see defeated.

Eric Adams says he is "deeply contemplating taking a busload of New Yorkers to Texas" to campaign against Greg Abbott in response to him busing 4,000 illegal migrants to his city. pic.twitter.com/0VqmQkREfM

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) August 9, 2022

He thought about this and everything. It wasn't something he came up with on the spot.

The Administration

Someone, somewhere, decided it would be a good idea to raid President Trump's home looking for ... things. The White House was ready with an ... explanation?

Jean-Pierre on the FBI raid: "The president was not briefed, was not aware of it .. no one at the White House was given a heads up. That did not happen." pic.twitter.com/LXD5e7B8Qg

— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) August 9, 2022

So the FBI raided the former president's home, something unheard of in American history, and they're going to claim it was OK'd by who? A regional manager for the FBI and some mid-level Federal judge?

The Pope

I was reading some prolonged rant from a ultra-traditional Catholic, howling about the way Pope Francis was doing away with the Latin Mass. It was enough to make him lose his faith because God would never allow the Latin Mass to be eliminated out of spite or whatever it was that made the pope go full gunslinger on the trads.

The Answer

There's a much better explanation for all of this.

These people are idiots.

We're all idiots in some way. There's an area where we're just bad at life. These three examples show what happens when you don't know you're an idiot and the people around you are just as stupid as you are.

There's no law of physics that states that the president, the mayor and the pope have to possess an IQ over 105. When you see all three of them step on rakes like this, the simplest explanation is that they're all simple.

Clay Is Rock Without Ambition

This morning, instead of going to the gym, I went back to our old house and dug in the dirt. As a part of our remodel, almost the whole back yard will be redone, so we had much of our existing landscape removed in preparation. That leaves a lot of space for leaves. Tobacco leaves, to be precise.

The soil is trash. Despite my offers to pay the previous gardener handsomely for getting rid of the clay, which he agreed to do, he just dug holes in the clay big enough for the plants he was planting. They did poorly and years of putting decorative bark on top of the soil didn't help much. If I recall correctly, bark leaches some nutrient out of the soil as it starts to decay.

So that left me with 24 tobacco plants to put into the ground and soil that was unfit for purpose. It turns out that neither crops nor livestock nor babies know what time it is. If it's light enough to see, it's light enough to farm. At 0600, I was there, turning over the soil and putting the clay in an ugly pile off to the side.

San Diego's native soil is horrid. Big chunks of clay like this are all you get. Since we barely get any rain, there's no decaying, organic material mixed into the dirt. Clay is rock without ambition. That is, you can cut it with a shovel, but then you have two chunks of clay.

We've been gardening enough back here over the years to have amended the soil to some extent. Turning it over wasn't hard, but it really needs some help in the form of topsoil and fertilizers.

The tobacco plants have been doing great and are eager to be transplanted.

I'll move these into the dirt tomorrow morning.

On a sad note, it looks like all of our watermelon plants are only going to deliver five melons. The rest were shoved into tight places or planted in lousy dirt and while they grew, they haven't delivered up any fruit. Oh well. Five melons should be enough for a couple bottles of wine.

The Policeman Is My Daddy

I've been a James Lileks fan as long as I've been blogging. He's a daily blogger and a writer for many sites. He recently penned this piece about his home town of Minneapolis descending into chaos. Here's the tidbit of interest for me.

How can this area be commercially inert? Especially since it was once full of interesting stores, a real community with a corner grocery store.

It was teetering before 2020, and the riots just cleaned it out. Then came the miscreants. Strib:

Landlords have worked with the community and police to address public safety. Since the riots in 2020, Uptown has also been the site of repeated "intersection takeovers" by street racers.

Every one of these should have been broken up immediately with arrests and citations.

Note that his first and only line of defense are the police. The newspaper, at least, makes some mumbling mention of "the community," but that's just a made-up term beloved by social-justice types when they need a new word to describe a race and they've used all the other synonyms in the previous two paragraphs.

James goes on to describe how the locals are discussing the urban decay on Reddit.

Over at Reddit at r/minneapolis they're mostly debating whether the reasons are Guns / Racism / Poverty / Underfunded Schools / COVID, or a different combination of the five elements, each of which has its own ability to rewire morality and behavior in ways that cannot be undone by one's individual agency.

None of this reflects the mechanics of real life. It's all just progressive jibber-jabber. Tell me, when you misbehaved as a kid, what was it that set you straight? 

1. Was it new gun-control laws? 
2. How about Ibram Kendi getting Democrat politicians to put on their kente cloths and kneel down again? 
3. Maybe it was a check for $150 from HHS, delivered to your mom. 
4. When your teacher got a raise, did you repent of your sins? 
5. Or was it when you got an inoculation for a disease you didn't understand and couldn't even spell?

Seriously, pick one. It must have been one of those five options because that's all we discuss these days, even good, clean conservatives like James Lileks. He, at least would add this one.

6. Cops arresting you and throwing you in the hoosegow.

The first five options are part of the statist fantasy we're living in and the sixth isn't even vaguely scalable. This is something we've discussed before on this blog. In that particular case, it was about finding mentors for kids in Baltimore, but the design of the perpetual motion machine we're trying to build is the same.

Now think about the task of the mentor. Amanda tells us that the kids are working on survival and school is a secondary concern at best. The mentor isn't only there to tutor, they are there to provide security, money, love and discipline.

If you think there is any chance at all that you will be able to find 6600 people, unrelated to the students, who are going to have the time, energy, know-how and willingness to take on that task, please contact your local mental hospital and schedule a straight-jacket fitting session.

There is a solution, however. Like I said in yesterday's post, those mentors are out there. We just have to be willing to demand they do the job.

I know where we can find the necessary volunteers to act as mentors for the kids. Mom's bed. The men found therein can be given a special title. We'll call them "husbands." We can give them a special token of appreciation. Maybe it could be a ring they could wear. We could also give them a certificate acknowledging their volunteer status. We'll call that a "marriage license."

That is the only solution to the problem. There is no other. All of the screaming about flags and statues and white supremacists and Trump and Tucker Carlson and the far-right and the alt-right is simply irrelevant noise. It's like blaming leprechauns for the suffering of these kids.

Just a few more episodes like this and Minneapolis will be as right as rain.

Moving Is Hard On Everyone

 ... particularly if you don't understand what is happening.

Over the last two days, in preparation for a remodel, we've moved from our normal house to our rental property, which is about eight miles away. The dogs like the new place, but the change has them worried. Being smaller dogs, a lot of things bother them that wouldn't bother a large dog. Add in a move and then periods where both mom and dad are gone and you've got a recipe for panic.

Two days ago, we left them at the new house, outside, for the first time. As I drove away, I could hear them barking in the back yard. Our athlete, Leah, found a way to escape by jumping on top of a brick barbecue and from there to the top of the fence and out into the wilds of suburban San Diego. As far as I can figure, she was looking for our old house.

She must have been loose in the neighborhood for almost two hours. She's frightened of other dogs and doesn't take to strangers without us around. The whole adventure must have been terrifying. Wife kitteh got home first and discovered Lily, the chubby one, crying in the back yard, all alone. I got the call and we proceeded to drive around the neighborhood looking for Leah.

I finally found her about ten blocks away, scared out of her mind.

Where were you? Lily and I thought we'd never see you again!

The moral of the story is that you need to be aware of the stress moving places on your animals.

The Catholic Diocese Of San Diego Is Utterly Worthless

Dig this.

San Diego Unified is the latest school district to adopt the principles of academic queer theory and translate them into K-12 pedagogy, with the ultimate goal of dismantling “heteronormativity” and promoting a constellation of new sexual identities, such as “genderqueer,” “non-binary,” “pansexual,” and “two-spirit.”

I have obtained a range of publicly accessible documents from San Diego Unified that reveal the district’s new ideology. The materials follow the basic premise of queer theory: white Europeans created a false “gender binary” and used the categories of “male” and “female” to dominate racial and sexual minorities. A San Diego Unified training for facilitators of LGBTQ student groups argues that this system of “heteronormativity” forces students to conform to these norms: they are “assigned” a sex at birth, pressed into the identities of “man” and “woman,” and expected to have heterosexual relationships culminating in “marriage (and kids).” This “gender binary,” however, is arbitrary, socially constructed, and harmful. It is, in the words of the presentation, a “limited system [that] excludes and oppresses trans, nonbinary, intersex, and gender-nonconforming people.”

Now dig these results from this morning.

A search (1) on the website for the Catholic Diocese of San Diego turns up the following:

• A request for money for the Diocese (2),
• A request for money for Ukrainian refugees (3) and
• Nothing about the transgender slaughter of our children (4).

The San Diego public education system is eagerly feeding our kids into a sexual-insanity meat grinder and the Catholic Diocese of San Diego has its hand out for money.

I never swear in prose because I think it's lazy. As my own, "transgender" daughter spirals into insanity and probably from there into death from wrong-sex-hormone poisoning, I am sorely tempted.

I can't think of anything else to write.

Tiny Watermelon

We've now got four full-grown watermelon, one halfway and about four that are this size, just starting out in life. I'm going to keep tabs on them to see how fast they grow.

The Philosophy Of The Lizards

 ... is what you get as soon as you start deriving your thinking from Rousseau.

I've raved about The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution by Carl Trueman, now let me throw some shade upon it. Here is his express purpose in writing it.

The origins of this book lie in my curiosity about how and why a particular statement has come to be regarded as coherent and meaningful: “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body.”

I'd like to suggest that the same curiosity could be extended to someone saying, "My toaster is talking to me." Of course, we don't take the schizophrenic seriously while we do take the sexually confused person seriously. Why is that? Well, Carl goes to great lengths to trace the intellectual and philosophical roots of this idiocy from Rousseau to Freud to Marx to Marcuse and other equally addlepated dimwits.

I could have saved him the trouble by tracing its roots from only one source: Sceloporus occidentalis, the Western Fence Lizard. Lizards only care about three things: food, safety and sex. I'll start and end my proof with Rousseau. From Ben Wiker's excellent book, 10 Books that Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others That Didn't Help, we have these excerpts.

There were no twinges of conscience for natural man, Rousseau assured the reader, because “the moral element of love is an artificial sentiment born of the usage of society.” Since neither the love of husband and wife, or parent and child, is natural, then neither are the moral duties that arise from marriage and childbearing...

Rousseau ... had a string of mistresses, some married, some not. He sired five children with one of them, Thérèse Levasseur, with whom he lived for more than twenty-five years and whom he treated as a mere maid (she delivered his torrid letters to other mistresses). Rousseau abandoned all five children to the Hôpital des Enfants-Trouvés, a foundling home where the conditions were so deplorable that their deaths were all but certain.

Quoting Rousseau directly, Ben gives us this passage:

"I made up my mind cheerfully and without the least scruples, and the only ones I had to overcome were those of Thérèse. I had the greatest difficulty in the world getting her to accept this means of preserving her honor. Her mother, who feared the inconvenience of a brat, came to my aid, and she allowed herself to be overcome. A discreet and trustworthy midwife . . . was chosen . . . and when Thérèse’s time came, she was taken there by her mother for the birth.... He [the baby] was then deposited by the midwife at the Enfants-Trouvés office in the way that was customary. The following year there came the same inconvenience and the same expedients.... I didn’t reflect any further, and the mother didn’t approve any more fully; she groaned but obeyed."

At this point, we can put both books down, grab a beverage and turn on the game. One hardly needs to spend any more time than that analyzing the "philosophy" of a guy that got his girlfriend pregnant five times and shoved all five of his children into a slaughterhouse. He was a proponent of free love, you say? Yeah? Well, no kidding, Sherlock. I'm shocked.

The dude was the worst kind of pig and his writings only exist to justify his horrific behavior. That people managed to build a tower of filth out of it, with equally repulsive characters like Freud, Marx and Marcuse adding their own excrement to it, isn't an indication of its worth, it's an indication that they were all looking for a similar way to disguise their own degeneracy. Justifying modern children being fed into the transgender abattoir is only the latest layer on that tower of filth.

And so here we are. We have the Lizard Empire. We've made our limbic system our master. Hooray.

Of course there wasn't anything rational behind this. That should have been obvious from the start.

The Lizard Army Has Us Surrounded

 As I work my way through this gem - The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution by Carl Trueman - something occurred to me about the transgendering of our children and the normalization of pedophilia.

If it's now OK and even highly encouraged to give wrong-sex hormones to gender-indoctrinated children and then to cut off their sexual body parts when they are old enough, then why isn't it OK to have sex with them, provided they "consent?"

If I give a boy puberty blockers at, say, age 10, he will end up sterile. That's permanent damage. If a gay dude talks him into sex, whatever happens will most likely not end up in permanent damage, once you discount the psychological trauma.

Now that our moral codes hinge on a person's feelings and self-identification, I don't see how we can hold the line on pedophilia. From the book linked above:

(T)o allow the individual simply to be himself, unhindered by outward pressure to conform to any greater reality, (makes) the individual king. He can be whoever he wants to be. And rejecting the notion of any external authority or meaning to which education is to conform, the individual simply makes himself the creator of any meaning that there might be. So-called “external” or “objective” truths are then simply constructs designed by the powerful to intimidate and to harm the weak. Overthrowing them ... becomes the central purpose of educational institutions. They are not to be places to form or to transform but rather places where students can perform. The triumph of the therapeutic represents the advent of the expressive individual as the normative type of human being and of the relativizing of all meaning and truth to personal taste.

Emphasis mine. If a little boy can make the decision to castrate himself, if a little girl can make the decision to become sterile and mutilate her body through mastectomies, then they must have the ability to choose to engage in sex. In fact, this is the whole goal of the gender movement in our schools, at least in California and Oregon schools. All of their teaching is designed to expose children to as wide a range of sexual choices as possible, starting as early as possible.

If you want to be utterly nauseated, and who doesn't, check out these training materials, used in Portland, to help teachers turn K-5 children into sexual degenerates. 

We are totally surrounded.

We only have one reply to give, the one General Mcauliffe gave to the Nazis. "Nuts."