The Things We Do For Love

Cardinal McElroy, our room-temperature-IQ bishop here in San Diego, has written something for the similarly brilliant Jesuits at America magazine that has the perpetually panicked Rod Dreher's panties in a wad.

This essay in the Jesuit magazine America, by Cardinal Robert McElroy of San Diego ..., brings the dubious insights of Critical Theory to the life of the Roman Catholic Church. It is an astonishing document that lays bare the agenda of Pope Francis -- who made McElroy a cardinal -- and his supporters to radicalize Catholicism. This is something we all should pay attention to, even non-Catholics. The woke are storming the citadel of Western religion.

I won't quote it any further for the sake of brevity. Suffice it to say that McElroy exhibits the original intellect of a parrot as he repeats, verbatim, the arguments of the far left in favor of every sexually deviant act known to man or beast. To say that he's a creature of the Lizard Empire is an understatement. He's a turncoat who is trying to open the gates for the lizards to get into the last, great bastion of civilization, the Catholic Church.

The Church's teachings are built on three pillars.

1. Observable, objective reality,
2. The revealed word of God and
3. Extensions of those two from philosophy and theology.

Let's take our teachings on human sexuality and run them through that machinery.

1. Biology: All human life comes from the sexual union of one man and one woman
2. Philosophy: That particular expression of sex is different from all others
3. Bible: It's hard to find a case made for a sexual free-for-all

I'll give McElroy 1/2 of a point out of 3. He argues that it is an act of compassion and love to include LGBTQWERTY sex in the mix. After all, it's painful to live a life of celibate loneliness.

That's a fair statement and perfectly understandable. It is indeed compassionate. However, it generalizes to incels, involuntarily celibate people, of all kinds. 

If you've blown out your sexual circuitry with porn as a young man and cannot form a relationship with real women, that same logic says that the amateur porn of OnlyFans is perfectly acceptable, too. 

If you've got a satin fetish and you can't find a wife who will satisfy it, then there's nothing wrong with jamming your fat booty into a size-16 prom gown and dancing in front of children.

How about donkeys? Hmm. Maybe I should stop where I am.

Traditional, married families are a necessary building block for civilization. Yes, we can blow them to bits for the sake of love and compassion, but then what?

The best way to fight hate is to embrace love.

Also, you might want to carry a Mossberg 590M mag-fed pump action shotgun to deal with any excess love you might encounter.

Teaching At Ground Zero

After a meeting with fellow Catholic crazies, where we discussed how we were going to persecute homosexuals, wife kitteh and I went out with a couple of friends for dinner and drinks. They live in El Centro, where the per capita income is $19,700 compared with San Diego's $46,400. It's a poor place. The man is a principal at a public school and his wife is a teacher. We talked about the current trans mania.

They had a different take than I did. They teach close to ground zero of the progressives' nuclear attack on the traditional family. The man told me that when he meets with students and parents, only 1 in 20 has a married mom and dad. The woman told a story about a child being raised by her great grandmother. The parents are drug addicts and the grandparents are dead. Great grandma comes to school in a walker.

This isn't Jackson, Mississippi, where you'd be vaporized instantly, but it's close enough to experience the radiation from the blast.

In such a world, the children are almost all psychologically walking wounded. They desperately need love and guidance. To provide that, you need to have their trust. These two told us that if a child comes to them and identifies as trans, they don't argue with the kid about it or deny it, they go along with it. In their experience, if you dismiss what one of these kids is saying, they shut down. It's probably reflexive and learned at home where being told they're wrong can be a prelude to a beating.

The children are growing up in a world of no safety, no stability and no purposeful guidance. Using the preferred pronouns was a way to enter into the child's trust so you could provide them with some amount of love and tenderness.

If someone's dying of thirst, it's probably not worth handing them a book on proper nutrition and exercise. It might be best to give them a glass of water instead. It doesn't change the insanity of what is happening to our children, but it sheds light on a different part of the overall problem for our children.

Jordan Peterson Explains

I thought this video was excellent. I hadn't considered it before, but Jordan makes a great point that we haven't had enough time, only a generation or two, to experience the results of the sexual revolution. That dovetails with what my school principal friend was trying to tell me. Society is evolving and right now, we're going downwards. He believed that things will come back up, but in a different way than things were before.

Enjoy.

A Bit On Fred Hoyle

This one is for Ohioan, but hopefully everyone will get something from it. The video below will speak to him and his wife, I think.

My morning caffeine has long since worn off and I'm writing without the aid of bourbon, so my energy level is a bit low right now. I've been spending most of my free intellectual energy on my upcoming talk, but I didn't want to neglect the blog, so here's a few tidbits on physicist and astronomer, Fred Hoyle, the chap who came up with the name, "The Big Bang Theory." To me, they paint a picture of a brilliant, fallible, very human man who spent his life in a sincere search for truth.

From Harpers in 1954:

And now I should like to give some consideration to contemporary religious beliefs. There is a good deal of cosmology in the Bible. My impression of it is that it is a remarkable conception, considering the time when it was written. But I think it can hardly be denied that the cosmology of the ancient Hebrews is only the merest daub compared with the sweeping grandeur of the picture revealed by modern science. This leads me to ask the question: is it in any way reasonable to suppose that it was given to the Hebrews to understand mysteries far deeper than anything we can comprehend, when it is quite clear that they were completely ignorant of many matters that seem commonplace to us? No, it seems to me that religion is but a desperate attempt to find an escape from the truly dreadful situation in which we find ourselves. Here we are in this wholly fantastic Universe with scarcely a clue as to whether our existence has any real significance. No wonder then that many people feel the need for some belief that gives them a sense of security, and no wonder that they become very angry with people like me who say that this security is illusory.

From a thoroughly Mormon BYU site:

I was privileged to be at a conference 20 years ago when the great cosmologist, and devoted atheist, Fred Hoyle gave a stirring talk on why he resisted the big bang theory. It was Hoyle who derisively gave the theory its name, and to the end of his life he refused to endorse it even as his own theories crumbled for the lack of evidence. In his talk he confessed that as a youth he was forced to attend church by his parents. This so offended him he determined to never support the idea of God. The big bang theory just looked too much like God’s hand to him.

From the Philosophical Society site:

"A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature" (Fred Hoyle).

Finally, here's Fred himself. I found this snippet of him endearing. I would have loved to have worked for him.

Morality Is Objective

 ... because it manifests itself in an objective world.

What is wrong with saying, "You have your truth and I have my truth?" That one has been bugging me for a long time. Its internal contradiction comes from physics. You do not have your physics and I have mine, we all have the same one. It is universal. Dittos for chemistry, biology and mathematics. Are moral decisions different?

Moral decisions take form in the real world, the domain of science. Your decisions affect people, places and things. Those people, places and things are governed by the ordered laws of science and math. Therefore, the effects of those decisions are the same no matter who makes them. If you inject heroin into your body, it has the same cranial results when I do it. 

A difference that makes no difference is no difference. That was a quote from William James, summarized nicely here.

But though rambunctious, James could be most insightful, and one of his insights was that purported differences, some of which have occupied great minds far too much, make no difference.  That is to say they do not result in any change to how we live.  They don't satisfy any desire or urge, they don't serve to solve any question or problem we encounter in living, they don't impact what we do, how we react. 

The effort to establish morality as subjective is twaddle because it assumes form in an objective world.

William James also had a great beard.

They Are Who They Are

There's no artifice to dogs. Or cats, for that matter. They are who they are.

Last night, I was a bachelor. Wife kitteh was off taking care of the grandkittens, so the Catican Guards and I had the house to ourselves. I turned off the phone and the TV and laid down on the floor to play with the dogs. They were flummoxed. I threw toys for them and tried to get them worked up to play.

Leah, the wiggly one, chased the toys for a while and Lily, the chubby one, played along gamely, but after a very short while, they'd had enough. Leah wanted loving and Lily wanted to cuddle. This is just who they are.

I had felt guilty that I hadn't spent more time playing with them. They go for walks and all, but they don't get that goofy wrestling time that some dogs love so much. By the end of the day, I'm tired and my canine kids don't get my best.

They don't want my best. They want to be petted and cuddled. They've been getting exactly what they wanted the whole time.

Leah doing what Leah does. On the left hand side, you can see what Lily does. We've got gophers in the back yard and our chubby girl loves to dig for rodents. They're happy dogs and that makes me happy, too.

I'm Sticky Paper Gender

 ... and my pronouns are Help / I'm Stuck.

A while back, I wrote this post.

How Mating Disruption Works (against insects or Japanese and Western men)

There are several ways mating disruption may work. Dispensers in the orchard might mimic a calling female, attracting the male to many false sources, or dispensers might release so much pheromone that the background concentration masks normal communication...

That was about insects and this was about real men: 

What happens when all you want is some connection but can’t find it in society? Japan's unmarried population is at a record high. While the culture of staying single persists, some Japanese men are finding love in alternative ways: like dating fake love dolls...

This was my take on it. 

You can't find connection with real women? Ha! Try "you want to get off, but don't want to make any effort." Or, better yet, our sex industry has outstripped (haha) the human male's ability to cope. Porn and sex dolls are the pheromone sources, emitting at volumes much higher than a normal woman.

Fast forward a few short years from that blog post and now we've got Women's Health magazine posting a list of all the genders with their definitions. It reads like something coming from an insane asylum. That's probably because it's insane. Here's a few samples.

“Genderqueer people can identify as neither woman nor man, both woman and man, or a combination of these genders,” says Pagès. Sometimes the words “genderqueer” and “non-binary” are used interchangeably...

Just like you can be fluid in your sexual orientation of who you’re attracted to, you can also be flexible with your gender. “Gender-fluid typically refers to someone who prefers to express either or both maleness or femaleness, and that can vary, perhaps from day to day,” says Marsh...

“Gender non-conformity refers to when someone does not conform to their cultural gender norms,” says Marsh. It could be something as minute as an Assigned Male At Birth (AMAB) person wearing nail polish, Marsh explains. That could be considered gender non-conforming, since nail polish is typically attributed to female-presenting people in our society. Or, on a larger scale, the person might not choose to identify with "he/him" or "she/her" pronouns.

Emphasis mine so you can see which terms are being defined in each paragraph. 

Mating disruption shows that our biological circuits can be hacked, causing us to home in on exaggerations or perversions of what normally attracts us. Social media, online porn, hookup sites and the acceptance of fetishes have done just that. The pseudo-intellectual gibberish coming from the gender-affirmation crowd attempts to put a cloak of respectability over the fact that we're not much more than moths whose mating instincts have been shorted out by fake cues in our environments.

I don't see how these genders are different from putting pheromones on a sticky piece of paper, hanging it in your orchard and then giving the resulting union a fancy name. Those moths are sticky paper gender and if you don't affirm that, you're full of hate.

This moth is sofa gender. It is attracted to sofas. It fills me with hate.

Irrational Rainbow Spasms

Philadelphia Flyers defenseman Ivan Provorov poked the LGBT hornet's nest recently by refusing to paint his door frame with lamb's blood wear the Pride flag on his jersey.

“I respect everybody and I respect everybody’s choices. My choice is to stay true to myself and my religion.”

Flyers defenseman Ivan Provorov on refusing to wear a rainbow jersey for warm ups during “Pride Night” due to his Russian Orthodox faith.
pic.twitter.com/wCUl8slmRB

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) January 18, 2023

Veins bulged, eyes popped and spittle flew as nearly everyone screamed out in rage at his affront to men who like to have sex with other men.

Provorov's explanation was simple. As an adherent of the Russian Orthodox Church, he believes that homosexuality is disordered. He was gentle about it and didn't talk about gays going to hell, he just refused to wear the flag.

The reaction wasn't rational, it was a spasm of incoherent fury. It didn't deal with anything substantial, it was simply a demand that everyone, everywhere must celebrate and affirm the importance and righteousness of anal sex between two men. Gently refusing to do so resulted in calls for Provorov to be shipped back to Russia, fired, fined and more.

I apologize for being crude there, but I think it's important to call it what it is. I want to be dispassionate and clinical in my language here.

I don't know much about the Orthodox faith, save that it is closer to my own Roman Catholicism than any other faith save Anglican Catholicism.

I'll go out on a very short and sturdy limb here and say that Orthodoxy, like Catholicism, is a sophisticated, internally consistent description of reality. It encompasses science, philosophy, theology and more. It provides explanations for how the Universe came into being, how life began, why reality is ordered and discoverable, why Man is the only animal capable of rational thought and art, the meaning and purpose of life and, finally, a set of first principles from which an entire objective morality can be derived.

The people screaming in rage at Provorov didn't offer rebuttals of any substantive element of Orthodoxy, they just accused him of hate. A rational response to his refusal to celebrate anal sex would have been to provide an intellectual construct that did a better job of explaining reality than the Russian Orthodox Church does. None has been forthcoming.

The very people howling that Provorov is full of hate are themselves exhibiting nothing but furious, irrational hate.

The real question that Provorov's refusal to kneel in devout homage to anal sex between two men is this: Is Orthodoxy right?

Here, a Russian Orthodox priest chooses not to read the book "Gender Queer" and instead is studying a faith that is so deep and so complex that a lifetime of learning would leave much of its genius untouched. As you can clearly see, he is filled with hate.

On Fried Chicken And Contracts

 I made fried chicken and biscuits last night and, after scouring this blog for lessons learned, put the breaded thighs into the fryer at 350 for 10 minutes. I burned the coating. Argh. I put the breaded legs into the fryer at 325 for 9 minutes and the crust was perfect, but the legs just a shade under cooked.

It's 325 for 10 minutes. Do you hear me? 325. 10 minutes. 

Geeze Louise, how many times do I have to learn that same lesson?

Proper fried chicken.

Contracts

I work for a company who does little more than take care of the paperwork to get money from the customer and pay me. They get a cut, naturally, but it's all hands-off for me. I don't need any benefits or marketing, I just need a home for my skills.

My contract got renegotiated and renewed in September. Despite my experience with proposal writing and negotiations, my company has shared nothing with me. I trusted them to take care of it in a professional manner. I was lazy and didn't want to deal with that part of the job.

I recently came to find out that their markup on my salary was 220%. In my industry, 75% is normal. That is, if I was paid $100K, the cost to the customer should have been $175K. Instead, it was $320K. The customer paid it, grudgingly, because my skill set is unique and they need what I do.

I have never been so professionally embarrassed in my life. I'm here to help the customer succeed, I'm not here to rob them. I get paid very well, but I'm not trying to use my leverage to squeeze them until they pop. I got into trouble because I allowed someone else to negotiate for me. I should have demanded that my company share their proposal with me. After all, it was all about my irreplaceable services.

I did not take responsibility for my professional reputation and now I'm paying for it. My company, knowing I'm close to full retirement and not having any real interest in the customer, saw a way to cash in one final time on me.

The Moral Of The Story: Manage your career and your professional reputation carefully. Your goal is to make everyone around you happy, including both your management and the customer. When you're deliberately ignorant, you lose control of both relationships.

Davos Derelicts Unmasked

 John Kerry is an excellent spokesman for the Davos crew. Dig this.

WEF2023: John Kerry Says the Only Way to Get to 1.5 Degrees of Global Warming is “Money, Money, Money, Money, Money, Money, Money” pic.twitter.com/ub6S4AiWpk

— Kevin smith (@KJ00355197) January 17, 2023

In such cases, I like to use the analogy of Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allen Poe.

The “Red Death” had long devastated the country. No pestilence had been ever so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal — the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleedings at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest-ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease were the incidents of half an hour.

But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless, and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys. This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince’s own eccentric yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts. They resolved to leave means neither of ingress or egress to the sudden impulses of despair from without or of frenzy from within.

Back in what is ostensibly the home of John Kerry, America, our fiscal and human capital is in a bad way. We're $31T in debt, we suffer 100,000+ drug deaths a year, our southern border has vanished and we've now got to support an additional 5,000,000 Central American peasants for the rest of their lives, our children are obese, they're addicted to dopamine hits from their phones and our education system is run by lunatics. That's just for starters. I could easily have kept typing.

80-year-old John Kerry, wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice, his face an immobile mask from so much plastic surgery, is the very model of one of Prince Prospero's courtiers. Davos is a perfect match for Prospero's castellated abbey. It's all escapist fantasy.

Yazoo City, MS. Not quite Davos.

On the political right, we're excoriating the Davos crew. Tucker's monologue last night mocked them mercilessly. To me, they're all of that and more, but they make me think of what's behind it. None of them, from the cartoonish Klaus Schwab to the intellectually obsolete Christine Lagarde to the deranged Al Gore to plastic John Kerry have any way of making their dreams come true. Back home, their nations are exhausted from financial, moral and cultural decay.

In the image above from the Magnolia State, the broken down bus and boarded-up home are perfect symbols for the financial might undergirding the Davos crew's plans for world-changing revolution.

If I could reply to any one of them, I might laugh and say, "Have fun at Davos, kids. You ain't goin' nowhere and you ain't doin' nothin'. It's all make-believe."

Read The Classics

 ... to get a better handle on the eternal truths.

I'm still working on a talk I have to give in a few weeks and something recently dawned on me, something that is the foundation of my preference for old books. For example, I don't trust history or religion books written after 1960. Why is that?

A fish doesn't know it's in water. We struggle to perceive the implicit biases of our time. When I read Caesar or Geronimo or CS Lewis, it's easy to see unintentional bigotries in their writing. When I read Richard Rohr, it's more difficult because I share many of them without even knowing it and Rohr is a ferociously modern man. Here, I'm using the term bigotry in a neutral sense, the unreasoning attachment to a belief.

Maybe that's why Confessions by St. Augustine is so clear to me. I don't get caught up in or even recognize whatever political affectations he may be displaying, living during the fall of Rome. What speaks to me in his writings must then be the eternal truths about the human condition and not whatever temporal myopia he may have possessed.

Maybe GK Chesterton seems like a genius because we only see his eternal truths and gloss over the more banal sensibilities of his day.

Apparently, There's A Strategic Shortage Of Bisexuals

 Daily Wire ran this article recently.

Penn State Professor Tells Students To ‘Watch Gay Porn’ And Confront That They Might Be Bisexual...

“If you’re straight, watch gay or lesbian porn and see how quickly you feel aroused,” he said in the lecture, originally held on December 6, via Fox News. “And how you can’t control that. You’ll realize that, ‘Oh, d***, I could be sexualized by people who are like me.’”

There was a predictable outcry about degeneracy in our universities, but that's not what struck me. Reading it made me wonder: why?

We know that exposure to porn can change our sexual appetites. That's been solidly established.

The journal NeuroImage published a study in 2008 demonstrating that as men are sexually aroused by porn films, something called “mirror neurons” in the brain also fire.

What is a mirror neuron? Have you ever seen someone get hit in the face with a ball or some other blunt object, and then your own body recoils? This is because of mirror neurons: you instantly react as if you were the one hit.

When it comes to porn, the brain naturally imagines the viewer in the pornographic scene. When a man is turned on by porn his body is not merely responding to the naked woman. His brain is picturing himself as the main character, heightening the arousal. You see, porn isn’t merely arousing to men because the women in it are attractive, but because it makes the man feel sexy.

Just what is the point of encouraging the consumption of gay porn? Is there a strategic shortage of bisexuals or something? One can just imagine a bit of dialog from a Senate hearing on the need for more depravity.

Man with ScIeNCe degree: "Senator, our research indicates that the Chinese now have 182 genders. Some of them deal with sexual attractions to insects."

Senator Romney: "Good heavens, man! We can't allow them to gain yet one more competitive advantage. What do you recommend?"

Man with ScIeNCe degree: "Watch more porn!"

All Penn State Sociology professor Sam Richards is doing is recommending that his students engage in experimentation whose results are already known. Watch porn, get aroused, create new connections in the sexual appetite portions of their brains.

The scandal isn't really that he's recommending porn, it's more that he's encouraging his students to wreck themselves for their future spouses.

Do you wish your husband or wife had consumed plenty of weird porn before you were married? Do you want them to do it now?

It was when he told me, "I like to watch Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs go at it. Every day, I lock myself in my room and consume about 2 hours of swine having sex" that I knew this was the man I was going to marry.

Reagan, MLK And USD

Yesterday, a sculpture unveiled in Boston made some waves.

Please read my other tweets about the sculpture—but here is another angle and the photo of the two “The Embrace” is based on. It’s when MLK Jr. found out he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. pic.twitter.com/Q7Vyk7OPKK

— Amaka Ubaka (@AmakaUbakaTV) January 14, 2023

My first thought, of course, was that it was a terrible sculpture. I had no idea what it was supposed to represent and even after learning what it was, I still don't see it. Maybe the beheading of the subjects had something to do with. In my experience, lopping off heads tends to dominate a conversation if not end it completely.

Thinking about it further, I saw the sculpture as an act of moral masturbation. Yay! We made a sculpture "uplifting black lives" or something of that sort. Meanwhile, at a local high school, West Roxbury Academy, where the population is a mix of black and Hispanic, the test scores tell a tale of illiteracy.

All the statues and speeches emphasizing victimhood and oppression from many decades ago have yet to bear fruit.  This one won't, either. The statue is a symbol of self-congratulation from a group of cowards unwilling to talk about the real problem, families. No one wants to restrain sex, but they still want to feel like they're doing something positive and so we get another statue of MLK.

That made me think of the way Republican candidates all run around talking about how much they love Ronald Reagan every 4 years. 

"I'm Ronald Reagan!" 

"No you're not, I'm Reagan!" 

"You're both frauds! I'm the Reaganiest Reagan to ever Reagan!"

2023 isn't 1980. We're not facing off with the Russkies and trying to stamp out the last embers of racism. Instead, we're facing 100,000 drug overdoses a year and a culture that has gone insane. Reagan was one of our greatest presidents ever, certainly in the top 5. He did his job, but now the job is different.

Everyone wants to be Reagan or MLK, no one wants to confront popular, but destructive behaviors.

USD

Where does USD come into the picture? How about through Matthew 8:5-13.

When he entered Capernaum, a centurion approached him and appealed to him, saying, “Lord, my servant is lying at home paralyzed, suffering dreadfully.”

He said to him, “I will come and cure him.”

The centurion said in reply, “Lord, I am not worthy to have you enter under my roof; only say the word and my servant will be healed. For I too am a person subject to authority, with soldiers subject to me. And I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and to another, ‘Come here,’ and he comes; and to my slave, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.”

When Jesus heard this, he was amazed and said to those following him, “Amen, I say to you, in no one in Israel have I found such faith. I say to you, many will come from the east and the west, and will recline with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob at the banquet in the kingdom of heaven, but the children of the kingdom will be driven out into the outer darkness, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.”

And Jesus said to the centurion, “You may go; as you have believed, let it be done for you.” And at that very hour his servant was healed.

One of the key points of the story is that God sees us as individuals, not representatives of our race. Morality comes from God. We discover it, we don't invent it. To be Catholic is to embrace the racially-blind nature of God.

The University of San Diego is a private Roman Catholic research university in San Diego, California.

Emphasis mine. A search on the terms "whiteness usd" gives you these results. Here's the top hit as of the date of this blog post. Here's a tidbit.

At predominately Jewish institutions, German Students are often burdened with the role of the educator for their Jewish peers. This research explores how Jewish student leaders at the University of Heidelberg engage in conversations around their Jewish racial identity. How do Jewish student leaders understand and discuss issues of race, racism, Jewishness, and Jewish supremacy?

Oh, wait, that's not it. Try this one.

At predominately white institutions, Black, Indigenous, and other Students of Color are often burdened with the role of the educator for their white peers. This research explores how white student leaders at the University of San Diego engage in conversations around their white racial identity. How do white student leaders understand and discuss issues of race, racism, whiteness, and white supremacy?

Those black and Hispanic kids at Roxbury High are still working out how to read, but, by God, the Catholic students paying ~$40K per year at USD are striving hard to shake off their Jewishness, err, whiteness. Whatever that is.

In the person of Jesus, God told us to knock off the whole race thing. Like the dingledorks who crafted, sponsored and selected that indecipherable statue of MLK, the Church proper has shut themselves into an upper room of self-pleasuring where they can close the blinds, pull out their laptops and download images of racial justice.

Thankfully, the insulation in the walls of that room is excellent. None of the cries of despair from the black twenty-somethings who know their illiteracy has doomed them to impoverished lives can get through to the people inside.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. That session of racial justice felt sooooooo good.

Hummingbirds Are The Trailer Trash Of The Bird World

 I've been wanting to hang a hummingbird feeder in our yard for quite some time. I visited Home Depot and selected an elegant one with copper trim, elegant fake flowers and a delicate design. I filled it with the proper mix of ingredients as specified by the Audubon society and hung it in an easy-to-find location.

The hummingbirds didn't touch it.

I did a little research and discovered that this garish, plastic piece of junk is popular with hummingbirds.

I bought one, filled it with the recommended sugar water, hung it on a tree and the hummers are quite happy with it.

Look, let's stop kidding ourselves. Hummingbirds are quarrelsome birds whose diet is effectively an endless stream of Mountain Dew. They are attracted to large, crude objects decorated in bright, primary colors. If they could put plastic pink flamingos in our yard, they'd do it. They're tasteless, gaudy little showoffs with penchant for cheap drink and hideous ornamentation.

And I love the fact that I've found a way to make the little guys happy. :-)

If hummingbirds took vacations, they'd go to places like this.

William Wilberforce Isn't Always White

I had other things on my mind until I saw this on YouTube this morning. It's brilliant. It's a reminder that we all can call for human brotherhood in a time of racial division. In the early 1800s, William Wilberforce championed an idea that was best done by a white person of his time. Charlie Cheon, below, is championing an idea that is best done by a person of color today.

Maybe They Could Live In Pods Until It's Time To Vote

 El Paso is overrun with illegals. All of their shelters filled up, so they stuck the illegals in the airport. The airport got full and now the illegals are just living on the streets with the other homeless.

Story here.

Since they are only being allowed into the country so they can vote for Democrats and since their destinations are Democrat-run cities and as a result, they are discomfiting Democrat politicians, maybe they could be placed in stasis of some kind until early November every two years. I'm sure Klaus Schwab and his minions could come up with some kind of solution.

In all seriousness, this is yet another example of how our Elites don't understand how anything works. They brought in 5,000,000 people so they could vote once every two years, but never thought about the 729 days between each vote.

Here’s our airport last night.

No, this isn’t a homeless shelter.

This is an airport in a major US city.

Biden is turning our city into a complete dumping ground for the world. pic.twitter.com/jKhtX1P1gR

— Irene Armendariz-Jackson (@ArmendarizDis16) December 19, 2022

Texas Governor Greg Abbott Heaps Praise On President Joe Biden

 This kind of stuff drives me bonkers.

As President Joe Biden arrived in Texas on Sunday for his first trip to the U.S.-Mexico border since taking office, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott hand-delivered a scathing letter to the president, criticizing his border policies...

"Even the city you visit has been sanitized of the migrant camps which had overrun downtown El Paso because your administration wants to shield you from the chaos that Texans experience on a daily basis," Abbott wrote, alleging that the chaos was the direct result of the Biden administration failing to enforce federal immigration laws...

"Your open-border policies have emboldened the cartels, who grow wealthy by trafficking deadly fentanyl and even human beings," he said. "Texans are paying an especially high price for your failure, sometimes with their very lives, as local leaders from your own party will tell you if given the chance."

Here's an illustration of how that exchange went.

Why is this complicated? The whole point of the open border is to bring in more blue voters. With 5,000,000 across the line in two years, it's been a spectacular success for President Biden and his team. They couldn't have wished for anything more, not even in their wildest dreams. Abbott is yelling, "Well done, Joe! Texas is overrun with new Democrat voters! Everything is unfolding as you wished! You're an absolute genius! No one can stop you now!"

Until Greg and his compadres in the other governors' mansions start seriously discussing secession because the agreement between the states and the Federal government in Article IV Section 4 has been broken, nothing is going to change.

The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.

Emphasis mine.

Kids These Days With Their Dopamine And Stuff

I'm reading an excellent book right now, Dopamine Nation. I'm nearly done with it so I wanted to share my biggest takeaway with you.

Your body is constantly trying to establish an equilibrium between pleasure the pain. This plays out in your brain, primarily through the mechanisms associated with dopamine. The more pleasure you experience, the more your body ratchets up your sensitivity to discomfort.

The author is a clinical psychologist and she illustrates her points with examples from her practice. In one, a young woman comes in to deal with her anxiety and her chronic use of the chronic. As she became more and more anxious, she consumed more and more weed. She got to the point that she woke up with weed, used it regularly all day and then had some more at night so she could sleep.

What she didn't realize was that it was the weed itself that was making her anxious. Her utterly exasperated body, struggling to establish the equilibrium it was designed to maintain, cranked up her anxiety levels just as fast as she smoked pot. When the cannabis wore off, she was left with overwhelming anxiety.

As an old crank, I love to read essays excoriating the younger generations for being lazy and stupid. Kids these days! I tell you, back in my day we only had three channels on the TV. If we wanted to see a TV show, we had to wait for it to run. The only time we could see cartoons was on Saturday mornings. None of this Cartoon Network stuff or YouTubery! The youth of this country is soft and useless!

That's all true, but it's not a sign of cultural rot from indolence, it's a sign of cultural rot brought about through technology. Many things we consume, from movies with their 3-second scene cuts to Instagram and TikTok, have been carefully crafted to trigger maximum dopamine releases in our heads. The population can't help but become more agitated* and sensitive because their bodies are each striving for that equilibrium between pleasure and pain.

In short, we're pleasuring our way into screaming at each other. "The country is so divided these days!" is really an indication of a population in a state of constant discomfort.

We need a new generation of rebels.

* - It's not always agitation, sometimes the discomfort leads to sloth and depression. It could be that your innate personality selects the way in which the discomfort manifests itself. In any case, you become unhappy and it shows.

Taking The Autobahn To Beijing

China is in first place and it's not even close.

In Germany, frightened children are stopping traffic and tearing up the roads with jackhammers.

(C)limate militants have launched a sweeping campaign to disrupt the German capital. “Members of the Last Generation group have vowed to continue ‘disrupting everyday life’ in pursuit of climate action,” German state-run DW TV reported Wednesday.

A mob of climate militants from the “Last Generation” group targeted the country’s Transport Ministry, trying to damage the road outside the building using heavy-duty jackhammers. “On Wednesday morning, climate activists of the ‘Last Generation’ blocked the way to the Federal Ministry of Transport … in central Berlin and tried to tear open the road with demolition breakers,” German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel reported.

When you realize that in the chart at the top, Germany, as a member of the EU-27, contributes only a portion of their 6.6% planetary greenhouse gas emissions, it all makes sense. Since they have a large economy, let's grant them 1/3 of the EU-27's hot air.

That makes the final score China 27 Germany 2.

So that's why the kids need to tear up the roads in Deutschland. Right.

Children don't always make the best decisions. Frightened ones make worse decisions. Maybe frightening the tots with tales of planetary doom wasn't the best idea in the world.

Their People Belong With Them

 Well, you can't say this wasn't expected.

Woodland residents gather to protest against the opening of a shelter for migrants at a former school in the neighborhood.

“There’s plenty of room in Little Village for their people,” a resident said. pic.twitter.com/d4sRGIQTH3

— Laura N. Rodríguez Presa (@LAURA_N_ROD) January 5, 2023

That video is from Chicago. Everyone in that video is black. Little Village is the Mexican part of Chicago. In a perfect echo of George Wallace, that speech was saying that people should stay with their own kind. What's the big deal? Isn't that why we have Hispanic History Month, Black History Month, Asian History month and so on - so we know how to classify and group people?

Awesome. Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.

Second, I keep wondering why anyone is complaining about where the illegals go. The people who have allowed our southern border to dissolve don't care where they go so long as they enter the country. The whole idea is to import blue voters, where blue is determined by the same racial grouping that led to the woman above being possessed by the spirit of George Wallace.

Third, and related, I saw that Texas governor Greg Abbott was crowing about shipping illegals here, there and everywhere. What a maroon! Dude, unless you're shipping them to another country, you haven't done anything the architects of this catastrophe didn't want in the first place.

Finally, Denver is getting a taste of it's progressive policies and it doesn't like it.

THREAD: Since early December over 3,000 migrants have been dropped off in Denver , overwhelming resources that are always strained due to the homeless problem here. Interviewed several migrants living in downtown Denver's homeless shelters who say they can't find any work pic.twitter.com/5vRCkjdWqT

— Jorge Ventura Media (@VenturaReport) January 6, 2023

Get a clue, Denverites. Your political masters, the ones you keep voting for, don't care about you, your city or the illegals themselves. All they want are those sweet, sweet votes.

This is really, really simple. If the Democrats can import enough Central American peasants, they will never lose another election. That's all this is.

Stupid Has No Staying Power

 Over at Hot Air, David Strom is pressing the panic button. The British Medical Journal, much like SciAm, has gone insane.

...this article I found in the BMJ. “The times and spaces of transplantation: queercrip histories as futurities.”

I have written before about how the British Medical Journal has gone totally woke, and I can’t emphasize enough how important this is. Unlike the decline and fall of Scientific American, it matters quite a lot what our medical students are taught and what our doctors are reading. And when the AMA and the BMJ go woke, the consequences are dire.

In a sane world any doctor caught mutilating and sterilizing minors would be jailed, not hailed. But the opposite is true, and that is because critical theory has invaded the sciences. The results are clear: medical murder, surgical mutilation, the tyranny of COVID “emergency” measures, public health officials endorsing riots, and even medical schools embracing witch doctors (“indigenous medicine”).

It should scare you that the BMJ–one of the most prestigious journals in the world–publishes this:

He then goes on to quote some total gibberish from the BMJ. It's every bit as bad as he says, but that's ameliorated by the fact that it's so poorly written that it's a struggle to make it through the first paragraph.

I had to look up queercrip. It turns out it's a combination of queer and crippled. The practitioners are about as self-absorbed as anyone you might hope to meet. That's perfectly predictable from the fact that their identification centers on their favorite sex acts and some, typically minor, physical ailment. There's even a #queercrip hashtag on Instagram. The images are exactly what you'd expect.

I didn't get her name and I won't link to her post. She doesn't deserve any more trouble than she's already making for herself.

Honestly, where are these nutbag narcissists going to be in ten years? Where are they going to be in five years? Even if they're still teaching at our universities, so what? A big problem with the whole queer and trans thing is that it will be a self-evident failure in a few years. When others your age have spouses and children and all you've got is a string of wacky ex-lovers, each more bent than the rest, how do you plan on making the sale? Oh yes, this whole queercrip thing is great, just look at my life of boxed wine and social chaos?

Meh.

To me, however long it takes for this madness to fade away is too long. Maybe we can accelerate the process with plenty of mockery.

I mean, what's with her hair and all the symbols on her clothes? It's like she's a walking billboard for her sexual preferences, one painted by a modern artist who ran out of normal paints and had to make do with neons.

What a loser.

Feelings Don't Care About Your Facts

The quote below perfectly summarizes my take on how we got to the point where SciAm is spouting utter nonsense and our medical institutions are actively harming people.

Substitute transgender for vaccines and make it about the harm done to girls and you get the same thing. Substitute Global Warming Climate Change for vaccines and make it about the collapse of Sri Lanka or people freezing in Europe and you get the same thing. Substitute racial justice for vaccines and make it about illiterate black children and you get the same thing.

When moral values are derived from large scale causes like Global Warming Climate Change, racial justice and gender affirmation, this is what you'd expect to see. Yes, my actions caused harm, but so what? The real evil would be to not serve the larger causes.

If the truth is cast aside for these causes, if people suffer needlessly for these causes, if lives are cut short because of these causes, it's all OK because the people wreaking havoc are doing it out of love. Anyone who opposes them does so out of hate.

Bonus Tweet

Yesterday, 60 Minutes posted a piece citing the ever-wrong Paul Ehrlich as an expert. It's not that they didn't know, it's that fighting Global Warming Climate Change is more important than truth or accuracy.

Ehrlich has been a Malthusian from day one, and he's been so consistently wrong that it's hard to understand how he continues to be feted as an expert.

His prognostications always fail to account for technological advancement.

— NavyDigi (@NavyDigi) January 2, 2023

2023 - The Year The Limits Are Reached

Dig this thread. 

A young boy stands up to his female abuser. The tide is turning.

Women's supremacy is becoming recognized for what it is. pic.twitter.com/GzRZe8i0aB

— Gender Studies for Men (@JohnDavisJDLLM) December 21, 2022

"nein ich schlage dich nicht" "schlag mich wenn du ein junge bist" "ja das ist doch normal" "normal?" Then she slaps him.
"No I won't/don't hit you" "hit me if you are boy/you'd do it if you are a boy" "that is normal tho (thst he wouldn't)" "normal?" Then she slaps him

— Reiner von Riva (@ReinervonRiva1) January 1, 2023

Now check this out from SciAm.

I've ranted any number of times on this blog that our modern insanity is self-limiting. In the tweet at the top, you have reality. Men are stronger and more aggressive then women. Since the Middle Ages, in the Christian world at least, we had the concept of chivalry. Gentlemen protected ladies. Women behaved like ladies to encourage that. Throwing that out does no significant damage to men, especially now that we have porn. Meanwhile, women get whacked.

One of the reasons I've turned from current events to deriving the Catechism of the Catholic Church from first principles on this blog is that the current events have become boring to me. For instance, in Buffalo during the recent blizzard, blacks looted local stores. Not many blacks, mind you, but enough to discourage the chains that owned those stores from sticking around. The news media talked in circles about it. Whatever.

Here in California, rainfalls are just about average for this time of year. Global Warming Climate Change isn't being discussed right now because ... well, you can figure that one out for yourself in your sleep.

The trans thing continues apace and our southern border has dissolved.

I would argue that pressure is building up, pressure born of suppressing reality. How long can you have women getting punched out, stores abandoning the inner cities and children regretting poison and mutilations before people start to take notice? The pressure is going to have to find an outlet.

If I were Nostradamus, I'd guess that soon, center-left journalists, ones who aren't totally insane, will start noticing and writing about it. Either that, or social media, which is already a conduit for veins of truth, will effectively replace the journalists. Maybe it already has. I'm an older kitteh, so I'm not a good judge of that.

In any case, the Truth wins. Reality wins. Always.

In this story from Malory's Le Morte d'Artur, the lady has just finished twerking on top of a cop car when she is assaulted by a wicked knight. Fortunately, Sir Lancelot was passing by, having just left a strip club, and was there to protect her.

Bonus Tweet

Maybe saturating our children in Nazi-style racial education is a big mistake. It could lead to resentment and acts of perceived revenge. We might want to look into Genesis 1:27 instead.

Whatever. Yawn.

Hitting the Nike store in Long Beachpic.twitter.com/IwtKbQrY9s

— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) December 31, 2022