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Friday, April 28, 2023

Feed Me!

 I was sitting in the backyard with my Nikon artillery piece, watching the bird feeders when I caught this scene.

The camera focused on the sparrow in the foreground, but the drama was playing out in the couple behind him. 

When male birds are courting, sometimes they will feed their girlfriends as a show of affection and support. I've seen this a couple of times lately where an adult female will go into the baby bird dance in front of her boyfriend, fluttering her wings so he will feed her. It's really charming. She was in the middle of the act when I shot this one.

I've been too busy lately to have time to sit out by the feeder with the camera for long and I haven't set up a video camera to capture the action, but at least I was able to get that one, even if it's a bit fuzzy. I had no idea the females did that. Way cool.

Thursday, April 27, 2023

Nothing Bad Is Going To Happen

 You only need to watch the first 30 seconds and the last 30 seconds of this.

The guy makes a legitimate point. Several, in fact. Points that should matter to normal people. The journalist overlords from NYT and WaPo shush him. A cop comes over to get him to hand over the microphone.

To take one of his points, someone blew up the property of a nuclear superpower in the form of the Nordstream Pipeline. It was positively not the Russians as they lack both the motive and ability to do so. The journalist overlords have never dug deeply into that. The Russians, if they get cornered the way the warmongers want, could choose to go out with a bang, as it were.

Nukes flying around could spoil a whole lot of summer vacations.

The journalist overlords looked stunned, but had no reply. That was what struck me about the whole exchange.

I've blogged before that, due to the seeming ability to print money at will with no ill effects, our pricing structure is broken. $100B for Ukraine didn't come out of anyone's pockets, it came out of the Fed's printing presses. Dittos for the gazillion dollars we spent on payoffs for pointlessly locking down the economy. 

Money can be spent in any amount with no repercussions. No one in living memory has experienced a real war. Yes, Korea, Vietnam and the Middle East have been thoroughly real wars if you were there, but it wasn't total war on the order of Hitler and Hirohito. The journalist overlords have lost touch with that sort of reality.

If you feel certain that nothing bad will ever happen, then the most important thing is to make sure your political side "wins" the next election, whatever form "winning" might take. Some yahoo shouting at you about pipelines, attacks and nukes is more like a drug addict yelling at you on the street than a serious argument you need to refute.

Anywho, that's what hit me about the exchange. The guy was spot on and the journalist overlords couldn't comprehend what he was saying. Or rather, they comprehended it, but it didn't matter.

Nothing bad is going to happen.

Tuesday, April 25, 2023

The Value Of Christian Study

This is, more or less, the text of a talk I gave on a men's retreat two weeks ago. I gave it from an outline and not from the text, so this doesn't perfectly capture the talk, but it's pretty close. If any of it seems forced or stilted, then you can just assume that my golden oratory was much better in person.

Cicero? Ha! He was an amateur.

Err, well, something like that.

Enjoy.

Introduction

My father's third career was that of an artist. He was a painter. He studied painting for over 20 years and got very good at it. When he and I would look at art together, he would see things at a much deeper level than I did. I saw a picture of a French countryside and he saw what the painter was trying to achieve in terms of mood and style and thought.

Studying art made him better at all kinds of things. He was able to see colors and patterns and composition in everything. If studying art gives you those kinds of skills across fields outside of art, imagine what studying God, the Creator of the Universe does for you.

The first thing you need to realize is that God exists and He is alive right now. He created the Universe, he began life and he has a purpose. Those are articles of faith, but they are also the best hypotheses that science has to offer right now as we will see in a few minutes.

When you study God and your faith you are studying a living Person. You are developing a deeper relationship with a Person who exists right now and is already part of your life. All of the things we've heard up to now and all of the things we are going to hear in the remaining talks are better the more you study. Just like my father looking at art after he had studied for decades, studying God will make everything deeper, richer and better.

The people who are giving the other talks on this weekend have studied quite a bit. Their relationship with God is much deeper, their love for him is much stronger. My objective in this talk is to motivate you to study after you get leave this retreat because it's going to make all of the other things you do in life much more rewarding.

Study should be part of any Christian's life. For most people, it’s also the most boring. Not for me. This is my sweet spot. I’m a theoretical mathematician by training and a scientist and engineer by profession.

Rather than hand out worksheets or write equations on a board, I’m going to tell you the story of my recent metanoia. A metanoia is a conversion of your mind and heart. It is a profound change in your life that comes from knowing yourself in relationship with God. Metanoias come from study.

My Search

My story starts 3 years ago when my then 22-year-old daughter came to me and told me she was actually a man. This was at the start of the trans mania and I was caught completely by surprise. I was totally unprepared and didn’t understand what was happening.

My metanoia came from 3 years of study, trying to understand just what had happened. I pursued Truth in a culture gone mad.

The Yachtsman

In his book, Orthodoxy, G K Chesterton talks about a book he wanted to write, but never would. It’s about a British yachtsman who set out to explore the South Pacific. He sailed away from Brighton and, being a poor navigator, ended up visiting many different places, but went in a circle and landed back in Brighton. Thinking it was Polynesia, he landed carrying the British flag, pistols in his belt and speaking to the natives in sign language. The British citizens in Brighton all had a good laugh at him. He was embarrassed and happy at the same time. His exploration led him back home, but with a much greater appreciation for home.

I started by trying to learn the biology of transgenderism and whether or not it was true. I also researched the ways in which this social contagion is spreading, primarily among young girls. I ended up getting to know my savior. 

I went in search of something very important to me and I ended up learning more about God and returning to my Catholic faith with a much deeper relationship with God.

Science And Religion

Science is not certainty. Science is the process of selecting between a set of guesses that explain what we see. If you want to displace a current theory, like the law of gravity, you’ve got to provide a better explanation. You can’t just say, “I don’t like the Law of Gravity!”

Faith and science do not conflict. In the 1200s, St. Thomas Aquinas established that God does not create contradictions, therefore if established science and theology conflict, theology must change. As Catholics we have all the science there is. It’s part of our faith. When atheists say, “We have science,” we can reply, “We do, too” and go back to watching college football.

God Created The World

Several decades ago, a physicist named Fred Hoyle was studying the origins of the Universe. He was the one who came up with the name, "the Big Bang." As a child, Fred’s parents forced him to go to church and he hated it. A confirmed atheist, he vowed that he would never do anything that supported religion.

One of the things Fred researched was the expansion of the universe. That’s governed by gravity and gravity is governed by a number that is called the gravitational constant. The gravitational constant came into being at the time of the Big Bang. It could have been anything. If gravity was slightly stronger, then the Universe would have collapsed back in on itself after the Big Bang. No stars, no life. If it had been slightly weaker, then the Universe would have expanded without stars or planets forming. No life. The constant is exactly what it needs to be in order for stars, planets and life to exist. There’s no reason for that.

The odds of it being perfect like it is are greater than winning the lottery 100 times in a row.

After more than a decade of research, Fred Hoyle said that the only reasonable conclusion was that the Universe was designed. There are lots and lots of things out there like the Gravitational Constant that also point to a designed Universe.

If you don’t agree, then you need to explain the gravitational constant and many other things. In the meantime, according to science, I’ve got the winning hand. I’m holding a full house, queens over tens and you’ve got a pair of eights. I’ll bet the mortgage on that every time.

Metanoia: Scientific Atheists Aren’t Arguing Against God, They’re Arguing Against Sin

My conversations with atheists have taught me that they’re not arguing against God, they’re arguing against sin. Back in my days as a scientist, it didn’t matter to me at all what your religion was. Your belief or unbelief in God had no effect on digital signal processing or whatever it was I was researching.

A belief in objective morality, on the other hand, has a great deal of effect on me. Who wants to hear that porn and booze are sins? I don’t want to change my behaviors. I like those very much. If you threaten to take them away from me through evangelization or cultural change, it threatens my consumption of those pleasures.

They’re fighting for hedonism, not crusading against the Sky Fairy.

God Created Life

We have no working guesses as to how life began. We can’t even create a small strand of DNA in perfect laboratory conditions. DNA is useless without the machinery of the cell around it and we are nowhere near figuring out how that got going. 

Cell walls, cell nuclei, DNA, you need all of those things and more, all at once, in the right sizes and configurations to get life. For example, a cell wall does you no good until you’ve got everything else as well. We don’t even have a guess about that right now and we’ve been working on it for decades. Evolution doesn’t start until life exists. 

Does it take faith to say God created life? Of course it does. It could still be wrong, but as of right now, it’s the best position and there’s no indication of anything else coming on the horizon.

So our best guess, then, is that God created the Universe and God created life.

Metanoia - Going To Mass

I now see that God exists and I believe it with the same level of belief that I have in the law of gravity. He is not some abstract concept that the priest talks about on Sunday, He is real and He is in my life all the time.

Logically, the Universe had to be created on purpose. No one would go to all this trouble for nothing. What, was God looking at his watch and saying, “Archangel Gabriel, the LSU - Texas Tech game is still 3 hours off. Let’s make a Universe. I’m bored.” 

It takes faith to say all of that, but it makes sense.

God created the Universe, He created life, life led to you and it was done with a purpose. It stands to reason that you have a part to play in that purpose. You are the one creature, as we learned in a previous talk, that has an intellect and the ability to understand what He created.

After my study, Mass is now an acknowledgement of my relationship with God. Dude purposefully created reality and then began life so that it would result in me. You’re dang right I’m on my knees. 

Once I realized this, it changed the way I saw things everywhere. I used to wonder why we spent so much on stained glass windows. That money could have been given to the poor. I don't think that way any more. Stained glass windows are the embodiment of an artist worshiping in his own way. It was his acknowledgement of Creation, his way of appreciating it. 

God's Purpose

Here’s something else I learned as I tried to piece together what was going on in our crazy culture. Do we have a purpose?

If you were the leader of an infantry unit, when you yelled, “Charge!” would you want your men to stand up and run around in random directions? No, you’d point in the right direction. If God created all of this with a purpose, it stands to reason that he would let us know what it was. That’s the revealed word of God. The Bible.

What about the Bible? How about those weird stories like Jonah and the Whale? 

Around the year 200, a Christian thinker named Origen said that not everything in the Bible was meant literally. It speaks deeper truths and that’s the important part.

Your grocery list is fact, but it says nothing about life. Shakespeare’s plays are fiction, but they speak deep truths. That’s what art tries to do, get at the deeper truths of life.

Jonah is the story of a man who blows off God and runs away from what he is asked to do.

The Question Of Jonah

God asks Jonah to go to Nineveh and tell the residents that they’re all horked up. Jonah blows him off and takes a ship to Tarshish. A storm comes up and the sailors throw Jonah overboard where he gets swallowed by a sea animal.

The story of Jonah asks the question, “What happens when I don’t do what God asks of me?” Well, his life fell apart. Kind of like your life falls apart when you drink too much. When you yell at your wife. When you consume porn. When you’re a girl who thinks she can become a boy. Through study, you see that God is telling you, “Don’t do that.” You do it and, like Jonah, your life falls apart.

The Bible is God speaking deep truths to us. Study is how you learn more about God by finding those deeper truths. You have a purpose and the revealed word helps you find it. It’s why you study - you want to learn more about the God who created the world, began life and guided it to end up in you.

Jonah isn’t about a whale eating a man, it’s a story about you not fulfilling God’s plan for you. Was the whale real? Who cares? Was King Lear real? Who cares? That’s not the point or the purpose of the story.

What Does The Trans Mania Teach Us?

Let’s get back to what started me down this recent road. My study led me to The Genesis of Gender by Abigail Favale. Mixed with some ideas from Andrew Klavan, we get this as a good summary of what transgenderism means.

There is no creator, and so we are free to create ourselves. The body is meat with no intrinsic meaning. We give it whatever meaning we want, using knives and chemicals to shape and form it as we choose. We do not receive meaning from God, we impose it. .. we wield language to conjure the reality we want.

This is Harry Potter territory. 

Do we get to define reality? If you want to say that, then you need to give me explanations for all of the things we’ve covered so far - the origin of the Universe, the beginning of life, the meaning of life. Yours have to be better than mine. You can’t just bang your spoon on your high chair and scream that you’re the other sex. That’s what we face now.

Jonah Revisited

That’s what’s really happening. This is Jonah and the Whale all over again. The new story goes something like this:

“You need to go through puberty with grace and courage. That’s the price of the world I created for you.”

“Forget that! You can’t tell me what to do! I’m actually a dude and I’m going to take testosterone shots!”

And then life goes off the rails, just like Jonah’s.

That’s all this is. It’s a refusal to study, it’s a denial of reality. We refuse to bend our lives to the will of God.

Reality isn't enough for these people. they demand the ability to reshape it as well.

My study led me to this. Like Chesterton’s yachtsman, I couldn’t have ended anywhere else, so long as I was listening to what God was trying to tell me. He was trying to make Himself known to me through study.

Metanoia - Prayer

Study makes my prayer deeper and more personal. I pray in the morning and ask God what it is He wants me to do today. The more I study, the more clearly I hear Him and the more confident I feel about what I’m doing.

Am I doing the right thing? Maybe. But at least I feel like I’m getting closer to what He wants.

I love my morning prayer time. I don’t miss, not ever. Through study, I’ve come to realize that my life has meaning and that meaning is fulfilled through serving God. I still do all the things I love - cook, entertain, work on cars, watch SEC football, but the main direction of my life is His direction. I know it is because of study.

Back To My Daughter

I haven’t heard from my daughter in months. Sometimes you fail. Knowing God helps you deal with that. In Matthew 13, Jesus tells the parable of the sower. A farmer sows seeds and some fall on rocky ground and die while others fall in good soil and thrive.

Each one of those seeds represents a person. In the parable, some of those seed-people suffer and die.

Sometimes you succeed. Maybe she will be the Prodigal Daughter. I don’t know, but I do know that God and my Catholic community, a community created and motivated by the desire to serve God, are with me on this journey.

How And What To Study

Absolutely first on the list is to read one of the Gospels all the way through. I’d recommend Mark or Matthew. They’re short and you could get through one of them in an evening. You get readings in Mass, but until you read one of the Gospels from beginning to end, you don’t really get the full picture. 

When you read one of the gospels all the way through, you see things a different way, you see the narrative arc of Jesus' life. You can't miss the messages He is giving you. When you read one of the gospels all the way through, you become much less susceptible to people who try to use Jesus' words to manipulate you.

"Jesus was a socialist!" some will say. "Oh, shut up," would be your knowledgeable reply.

"Jesus said, 'Don't judge,' but what he really meant was don't judge unrighteously," others will say. "Get lost," works well here.

In conversations this weekend, I’ve heard plenty of you ask about the best ways to evangelize. My only other book recommendation is Greg Koukl’s Tactics. Greg’s thesis is that if you get into an argument with the person, you’ve lost. You don’t have to convince them in one conversation, you just want to nudge them down the path to God. It’s a terrific book for evangelization.

In addition to that, my gift to you was to assemble 25 talks and put them on a thumb drive for you and the team. Some are funny, some are serious, some are deep and some are practical. I wanted to give you a sampling of the kinds of things that are out there if you search for them on social media.

What To Replace

I know I’m asking you to do something you probably aren’t doing already, but I’m sure you can find the time. In the car, listen to a book, radio station or podcast instead of the sports talk or news. Let’s face it, neither the sports or news is going to change all that much throughout the week. Turn off the TV half an hour earlier and use that time to read or watch or listen to something more productive.

Stop listening to people who don’t believe in God. If you want the world explained to you, why go to someone who doesn’t understand science? Science indicates God exists, He created the Universe, He created life and has a purpose for you. If you deny all that, you are starting with an inaccurate foundation.

How much credence would you give someone who thought the Earth was flat? They might be an authority on some other subject, but whatever they said would have to be taken with a grain of salt.

Conclusion

When I started exploring transgenderism, I had no idea where pulling those threads would lead me. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that my effort to learn more about the world God created would lead me to being closer to Him and having a better idea about my purpose.

Study always does.

Monday, April 24, 2023

The Church Doesn't Know When It Is

 ... not where it is, when it is.

Here are a few data points.

Power Structures Explain Everything

This is the Marxist construct. Everything is about power imbalances. According to the Marxists, society has been organized by the powerful, built to maintain their power. Everything is a social construct, designed to keep straight, white, Christian men at the top of the power pyramid. This trans activist summarizes it well.

The Big Corporations Agree

Here is one of Maybelline's latest ad campaigns. It features Dylan Mulvaney with his prissy little girl act.

Professional Analysts Agree

I don't have the Ad Age article on the Bud Light fiasco at my fingertips, so here's something similar from Axios. The article analyzes Bud's face plant with Dylan Mulvaney, but like the Ad Age article, it accepts the premise of power structures.

What this (controversy) captures:

  1. The inflamed politics around transgender rights.
  2. The lack of perspective or grace from vocal transgender opponents...

Between the lines: Remember the power imbalance. Trans issues are talked about a lot now. But trans people remain a small, largely marginalized group.

The big picture: For trans people, political issues are a matter of life and death. Across the country, bills are being debated and passed that take away their rights to access health care.

The "power imbalance" is assumed. Marxist thought is the foundation of corporate culture. "Political issues are a matter of life and death" is more of the same. Everything is about power and political activism is the only way to fight these alleged power structures.

Trans people are celebrated by the Democratic Party, all of academia, all large corporations, almost all of the news media and almost all of the entertainment industry, but they are still considered "marginalized." In the Marxist fantasy that dominates America, straight, white, Christian men still control everything and their social constructs are still the norm. The only solution, the only way to protect the trans kids is to tear down the colonialist, white supremacist social constructs. That is, we must destroy civilization. Yay.

As for "life and death," that implies little girls will die if we don't cut off their breasts and inject them with testosterone. It's a natural outgrowth of Marxist thought where power structures are everything.

The Church's Universities Agree

Villanova is an Augustinian university. You'd expect insanity if it was Jesuit, but this is the staid, orthodox, sober Augustinians. This drop-down list is from a housing application for incoming freshmen at Villanova.


Radical Inclusion

The Church and Marxism are fundamentally incompatible. Salvation is personal, not political. Power structures exist, but they are not the central feature, much less the sole important feature of life. You can choose Marxism or Catholicism, but not both. The Church is peopled by folks who have been sucked into the modern secular culture without even knowing it.

We don't know when we are. Even if everything else was just fine, even if there had never been a sexual abuse scandal, we'd still be dying.

Sunday, April 23, 2023

The Teen Early Warning System

... or TEWS, for short.

Dig this.

CHICAGO - A pressing issue for the Chicago Police Department and its incoming leadership is the downtown teen takeovers, as another gathering has been advertised on social media for this weekend.

But churches and community groups are now stepping up, in partnership with police, to curb the youth rioting.

Community organizations are now doing their part to help stop the teen takeovers that happened last weekend in Chicago.

A new idea on the table is an Amber Alert-like system to let parents know these gatherings are happening.

Those darn teens! Something's got to be done about them. But wait, something is being done.

Meanwhile, Chicago churches are coming together on Saturday – when another large teen gathering is planned – to walk Michigan Avenue. Their goal is to round up 500 men to send a message to the youth.

"Black men owe it to our younger counterparts to say this is not the way, and that we grew up in some of the same conditions, oftentimes, but again, for whatever reason, by the grace of God, we will be given alternatives and when we listened, we found out that our worth was not in violence and negative things," said Bishop Horace Smith, Apostolic Faith Church.

What's the half-life of a euphemism? It looks like those "teens" have more in common than just their age.

Murder victims in Chicago, by race.

Oh, right. That's what it is.

The previous mayor was black. The new mayor is black. There are blacks all throughout the power structure in Chicago. Every single alderman is a Democrat.

At some point in time, you need to realize that your foundational assumptions about the world are wrong. The critical race theory construct has failed its practical application test. You've gotten to the point where you can text "Chicago Kids" to 21000 and be subscribed to a black alert system so you get warnings when too many blacks gather in downtown Chicago. Thinking that's a solution while clinging to CRT is absolutely demented.

Bonus Take: The TEWS is fine if you have no fixed assets in the affected area, but what if you do have some, such as a store or a house? Do you secure your building and hide in a safe room?

If your worldview worked, it wouldn't be giving you results like this. Either the racists are right and segregation is the only answer or the traditional Christians are right and our current moral system is a trainwreck. The TEWS isn't a long-term answer to anything. In any case, the progressive model of reality is a joke.

Friday, April 21, 2023

Oof

It should have been a great week with a terrific weekend planned. Work had other plans. It all got going downhill yesterday at noon.

Oh well.

Sometimes life changes and you find new opportunities. My men's retreat weekend that ended 5 days ago showed me what God wants me to be doing. The end of this week told me to get going on that. It's all good.

I still owe you the text of my talk. Tomorrow, I promise. In the meantime, I hope y'all have a great Friday night.

Wednesday, April 19, 2023

Costco's Wild Birdseed Is Trash

I blogged snarkily in the past about our local sparrows throwing away most of the food in our birdfeeders. They used their beaks like spatulas and tossed the food out of the feeders and onto the ground. I mocked them for being wasteful, but the real problem was me and the food I had bought from Costco.

This is trash.

I spent a little time researching good bird seed and discovered that birds don't like milo. Milo is a cheap filler sometimes put into birdseed. The birds hate it and won't eat it. Oh sure, sometimes the mourning doves will consume it, but none of them like it. It's horrible.

The second ingredient in this bag is milo.

It's trash. 

When you buy birdseed, don't get anything with milo in it. Milo is different than millet, by the way. I had thought I was saving money by getting this for a low price at Costco, but all I was doing was littering my yard with inedible seeds and blowing money on junk. I've got a new bag on the way from Amazon and if my winged children like it, I'll let you know.

Tuesday, April 18, 2023

Artificial Intelligence Will Not Take Over

 ... before deliberate ignorance and subsequent decay hits.

I was on a Catholic men's retreat this past weekend where we talked about Christian Nationalism and how we can use the Latin Mass to expand our reign of terror. While there, I spent some time chatting with a pair of high school teachers. One had 24 years of experience, the other had 18. They talked about the decline in student work and capabilities, mostly due to using technology as a crutch. The kids read less and rely more on the Internet. As a result, they struggle with the most basic of concepts and tasks.

Developing skills requires work. The more work your devices do for you, the fewer skills you will have. It's that simple. A while back, when I was working with ChatGPT, I watched a video where a video editor talked about using ChatGPT to write Adobe After Effects scripts for him. The scripts produced title animations. He admitted he didn't know the scripting language and realized that ChatGPT meant he didn't have to learn it.

He was belligerently ignorant. In the video, he snarled at ChatGPT when it gave him code that didn't do what he wanted. To me, it was a perfect example of what my teacher friends are seeing at a much larger scale. The effects of AI will be Jackson, Mississippi writ large.

Jackson, Mississippi is out of drinkable water. Yes, there were some floods recently, but Mississippi averages about 55" of rain every year, so floods are something for which you must plan. What happened?

I did a little digging and discovered that it was well known that Jackson Water's maintenance was shoddy. There had been statewide efforts in the last decade to try to give them help, but the place is badly run and it all went for naught. For example, Jackson Water contracted with Siemans to get smart metering going. That ended up in a lawsuit. Jackson Water's billing system is dysfunctional as well with about $100,000,000 in unpaid water bills. Some customers get no bills, others get outrageously wrong ones.

In short, there's a human capital problem at Jackson Water. One of the articles I read hinted at the state having to send in its own technicians to do the work that Jackson Water's people couldn't do. Once you strip away the red vs blue and black vs white garbage, you get down to the real problem. The employees at Jackson Water just aren't up to scratch.

I've read essays where the authors worry about AI taking over because it will become smarter than humans. Fair enough. From what I've seen, it's already there. That's not what is going to get us. Long before it gains end effectors capable of turning its "thoughts" into actions, our cities will fall into ruin because we're not producing a new generation of competent, productive citizens.

How will ChatGPT work if the water doesn't come out of the tap?

Chicago's gorgeous downtown area was overrun and mauled by packs of black teenagers over the weekend. Watching the videos of the event, I wondered who would ever come back to that area. Why play Russian Roulette? You have no idea when it will happen again.

Is Chicago sitting on a pile of money so it can rebuild the Magnificent Mile once the "teens" are done wrecking it? Err, no.

Here's more data.

In the 2010s, Chicago saw a small population increase of around 2 percent, but the number of municipal employees fell by almost 5 percent, owing to the pension crowd-out effect, in which rising pension costs squeeze other city priorities. Chicago’s pension spending has nearly tripled in the past ten fiscal years, from around $15,700 per full-time employee to more than $45,000. Pension expenditures now total more than $1.5 billion—over 12 percent of the city’s total revenue. For every person Chicago employs, in other words, it is effectively paying $45,000 to a city employee who has already retired. And the problem will worsen in the years to come, with the city’s pension debts exceeding those of 45 states and the recent market downturn intensifying its funding shortfalls. As these costs rise, they limit the revenue available for needed services.

In Los Angeles, the new mayor is proudly planning to take 17,000 homeless, drug-addicted maniacs and put them into hotels.

The so-called “homeless crisis” is nearly ten times worse in L.A. than in San Francisco. There are 7,800 homeless people in San Francisco County and 69,000 in Los Angeles County. And where the number of people experiencing homelessness in San Francisco declined by 3.5%, in L.A., the number rose by nearly 30% between 2018 and 2022.

The city’s new mayor, Karen Bass, has declared a state of emergency and launched “Inside Safe,” an initiative to get 17,000 people out of encampments and into hotels this year and ultimately move them on to permanent housing. She has done “more in her first 100 days than her predecessor in his entire time in office,” said Rev. Andy Bales, President, and CEO of Union Mission in Downtown L.A.

Is Los Angeles sitting on a pile of cash that will pay those hotel bills? Can they rebuild the hotels once the drug addicts are done trashing them?

In San Francisco, a tech bro was recently stabbed to death by a homeless man. Will ChatGPT come to the rescue if an addict attacks? How many attacks have to happen before the tech bros leave SanFran for someone safer? What happens to the city after that?

Yes, AI can become much smarter than us. I think it already is smarter than 95% of the population. So what? Our cities' fixed assets are being consumed and our kids are being trained to be sloths. AI is going to contribute mightily to the latter which, in turn, will contribute mightily to the former.

If AI is going to harm us, it will be through the corruption of our human capital and the resultant consumption of our infrastructure, not through some kind of Terminator apocalypse.

Bonus Tweet

More data.

Super Double Plus Bonus Data

Here are more details about REI leaving Portland. The building will be empty and the employees will be gone. The homeless addicts and the criminals will remain. I don't have time to look up the data, but I'm certain Portland is short of cops. If you wrote out the order of battle between the forces of civilization and the forces of barbarism, Portland is doomed. AI taking over? Ha! That's a joke. ChatGPT will be ineffectual in a zombie apocalypse Portland.

Behrbaum said REI has made costly investments in store security, including replacing the store’s windows with security glass, hiring around-the-clock private security and installing a surveillance trailer at the store’s loading dock. Despite its plans to close the store, she said the company is installing new security sensors for its remaining months of business.

But the volume of break-ins, shoplifting and other crimes is “overwhelming systems in place,” Behrbaum said in an email. In 2022, REI spent more than $800,000 on additional security, she said.

“Yet, we still experienced 10 burglaries, including one event that shut down our 14th street entrance for more than two months,” Behrbaum said. She said over the past two years, REI has made significant investments on securing its Portland store.

Monday, April 17, 2023

RIP Chicago

I was going to share the script of my recent talk with you today, but I slept in and had lots to do at work, so all I've got is some time to comment on the weekend wilding by blacks in Chicago. Dig this.

They aren't wilding because they are black, they are wilding because they've been taught that they have been oppressed and deserve reparations because they are black. The fault doesn't lie with them, but the system, if you will, that warped their worldview. With a different worldview, they would be like my coworkers, smart, dedicated, competent and a lot of fun to have in the office.

The mayor-elect has excused their behavior.

You'd have to have rocks in your head to stay in Chicago now. A while back, I blogged about this re: California and it applies to Chicago now.

Does a city need productive people?

Think about what's happening here. As the blue cities become more and more unlivable, productive people, the ones with the most to lose, are leaving. As time goes on, the remaining population will tilt more and more towards the drug addicts, criminals and granola crunchers. Once a person leaves SanFran and moves to Miami, they don't usually come back.

Just for the chemists in the group, I'm looking at you, Tim and Ohioan, the decision to move is analogous to a chemical reaction which requires an activation energy to start.

Peter Productive starts in SanFran. His car windows get smashed which provides him the activation energy to move to Jacksonville. Once there, Pete will require a new spike of activation energy to get him to move back to SanFran.

What happens when our major cities like LA, SanFran, Portland, Seattle, Chicago, etc. become unlivable? That's a serious question. I don't know the answer.

Thursday, April 13, 2023

Off This Weekend

 I'm off on a men's retreat this weekend, giving the talk I've been working through here on the blog. I'll share it with you when I get back. I hope you have a great weekend.

Wednesday, April 12, 2023

Recovering From An Urban Binge

 ... how is it done?

Dig this.

SAN FRANCISCO - Whole Foods is closing their flagship San Francisco store on Monday at the end of business hours. 

Whole Foods told KTVU that the store on Market Street at 8th is shutting down for the time being because of employee safety concerns. A city supervisor calls the closure temporary. 

"To ensure the safety of our Team Members, we have made the difficult decision to close the Trinity store for the time being," a spokesperson for Whole Foods wrote in a statement. 

Now check out the location of the store on the San Francisco Poop Map.

Whole Foods is surrounded by an area where people are pooping on the street. Whole Foods doesn't set up shop in bad parts of town, they're a high-end retailer. That means that the high-end part of SanFran is covered in poop.

As noted in an earlier post, SF is well short of cops.

SanFran elected London Breed as mayor. She is a black woman, so they've got that going for them. Now that they've spent years hating on the cops, accusing them of racism and brutality and years weakening their law enforcement, they have so much crime, homelessness and drug use that Mayor Breed is asking the Feds for cops to help them clean up the sitch.

Mayor Breed and her buddies defunded the cops after trashing them for being racists. As a result, they're 540 cops short of full staffing. That means the SanFran police department is operating at about 75% combat strength. The increase in crime, drug use and homelessness suggest the enemy forces have, for the sake of discussion, doubled in that same time.

Now what?

This isn't an "own the libs" post. No American's life is improved when a major city falls into degeneracy and decay and SF is there. Seriously, now what?

Just like Jackson, MS, no one is going to come to rescue San Francisco. The rest of us all have our own problems to solve. They're going to have to do it themselves. They've got themselves into a real bind by wrecking their fixed assets.

Whenever I see things like this, I can come up with plenty of ways to solve the problem, but what I can't imagine is how the residents will find the will to do what needs to be done - warehousing the addicts, hosing down the streets and backing a seriously beefed-up and sometimes aggressive police force to arrest, convict and punish the criminals.

The people of SF are going to have to get over their social justice and racial justice hang-ups. Some of the perps will be Perps of Color. They need to be treated just like the Perps of Pallor.

Maybe the social justice thing is addictive and the people of SanFran are virtue junkies. You'd think they'd have to snap out of it at some point.

Jackson went without drinking water for a while and they didn't wake up after that. They're still on the race-race-race bandwagon. Maybe some places never get a clue.

I used to wonder how Argentina kept going through currency crises. How come they didn't learn their lessons? San Francisco and Jackson are showing how it happens.

Tuesday, April 11, 2023

Bud Light Is In The Bunker

 ... after having proven themselves to be arrogant, out-of-touch, woke dorks. Dig this video.

The VP of marketing for Bud Light hates their customers. What they need are new customers to replace the fratty, out-of-touch cretins who currently drink Bud Light.

Good news, darlin'! You're going to have to get a whole new set of customers now. Winning!

I loved the "out of touch" bit. Talk about out of touch! Not only is she living inside of a proggy bubble, completely separated from her customers, she's also so incompetent that she doesn't even know she's sequestered away from her customers.

Also, the "Look, we're circling the drain anyway. We might as well throw a Hail Mary" was a real nice touch. Man, Bud Light has got to be a great employer. They've got a ... err ... bright future?

Ever since they had that mentally ill degenerate, Dylan Mulvaney, as their spokespervert, the Bud Light Twitter account has climbed into a bunker and gone quiet.

Bud Light operates one of those fun, friendly social media accounts we see quite often from corporate giants these days. On March 30, it tweeted or replied to tweets over fifteen times, with messages on the order of “Win tickets to Stagecoach for you and a friend! Travel and hotel accommodations covered” and “Have a cold one for us.” On March 31 came twenty more tweets and replies, including “There’s still time to win beer money. Which women’s team do you think will win it all?,” and a reply to a well-wisher: “Bud Light loves you back.” On April 1 it was more of the same, but we haven’t heard from Bud Light since 8:50PM that evening, when it tweeted: “Beers on us? Must be game time. For a chance to win, cheer on your team with #EasyToEnjoySweepstakes in the replies.” That was the day that Mulvaney was revealed to be Bud Light’s new spokesdude.

Oops.

Their last tweet is just getting lit up. People have been taking old Bud Light commercials and editing them, adding voice overs and assorted other treats. They're hilarious. All of the ones I've seen have been crude, so I won't include them here. I'm sure they're easy to find.

There's no need for an organized boycott. This is an organic reaction of rage against a company that hates its customers.

Monday, April 10, 2023

A Sequence Of Evil

People who disagree with me should have their colleges burned down.

 

I agree! Everyone not like us is insane!

 

Err, this is what Florida and other states are trying to stop.

 

What's the big deal? It's just cosmetic surgery when you cut off the healthy breasts of girls.

Sunday, April 09, 2023

Happy Easter!

 I hope you're having a great weekend. Here's something to make you smile.

Friday, April 07, 2023

Why Do You Care So Much?

 ... is a question those of us who oppose drag shows for kids and Gender Theory indoctrination at schools get asked all the time. "Why do you care so much about kids being exposed to sexual relationships?" I'll answer this in the form of a question, motivated by a story.

A gay, married couple in Georgia adopted and then pimped out two little boys.

Love is love.

Here are the very sordid details.

The married couple, William Dale Zulock Jr., 33, a government worker, and his husband Zachary Jacoby Zulock, 35, a banker, were arrested last summer on charges of sodomizing their two elementary-aged sons and prostituting the children...

The Zulocks adopted the brothers, now 9 and 11, from a Christian special needs adoption agency. Before their arrest, the couple lived an affluent life in Oxford, Georgia, an Atlanta suburb. The children were enrolled in 3rd and 4th grade when their adoptive fathers were arrested.

According to the 17-count indictment, the two men allegedly performed oral sex on both their adoptive sons, forced the boys to perform oral sex on them, and raped their sons anally. At least once, the older boy was allegedly injured from the anal rape.

What if the men had explained what they were going to do and the boys consented? Would that change the way you feel about it?

What does it mean for a child to consent to such acts? What does it mean for a teenager to consent to such acts?

When a teenage girl consents to the removal of healthy breasts in pursuit of becoming a man, what does that mean? What is her perception of the long-term implications of the act? How about puberty blockers and wrong-sex hormones, both of which do permanent damage in short order?

What happens when society changes from giving parents the power of consent to giving children the power of consent? Do you want to live in such a society?

My answer to the original question, "Why do you care so much?" is this: The thought of living in a society where children are exposed to sexual acts and/or allowed to give consent to sex and/or sexual mutilation and poisoning horrifies and nauseates me. I care because I don't believe that children can give consent to these things. That makes the drag queens and the gender theorists groomers and worse. They are using positions of power over children to either exploit them or enable future exploitation.

Exploiting, scarring, harming, mutilating or raping children is completely unacceptable and must be fought tooth and nail.

That's my answer. Have a nice day.

Wednesday, April 05, 2023

Overcoming A Bow Wave Of Filth

SanFran elected London Breed as mayor. She is a black woman, so they've got that going for them. Now that they've spent years hating on the cops, accusing them of racism and brutality and years weakening their law enforcement, they have so much crime, homelessness and drug use that Mayor Breed is asking the Feds for cops to help them clean up the sitch.

Mayor Breed and her buddies defunded the cops after trashing them for being racists. As a result, they're 540 cops short of full staffing. That means the SanFran police department is operating at about 75% combat strength. The increase in crime, drug use and homelessness suggest the enemy forces have, for the sake of discussion, doubled in that same time.

Anyway, dig this.

Well, at least she's trying to deal with the problem, right?

Let's think about the mechanics of the solution.

First, where are the Feds going to find the cops to backstop the SFPD? Is there a big ranch out in Texas where trained police officers roam the chapparal, waiting for cop cowboys to round them up and take them to the feed lot to prep them for SanFran?

How many extra Feds does the City by the Bay need? 540 won't do because the enemy is much larger than normal. Let's say they need one battalion of Fed infantry - about 1,000 cops. That would get things under control quickly and allow SF to get back to a normal sized police force, releasing about 500 Feds back onto the fantasy cop ranch. The remaining Feds would be out of luck. They would have to stick around until SanFran could recruit, train and deploy 540 more new cops.

But wait a minute. How long would this take? If it takes longer than a month, the Feds would have to move to SF. Have you seen rent prices in SF? At more than a month, the Feds would want to relocate their families to SF. Have you seen the streets and schools of SF? Unless the Feds treat their cops like the Army treats infantrymen, giving them no choice of assignments, how are they going to find ones willing to go?

If you're a white Fed cop, how insane would you have to be to voluntarily work for the SanFran political structure? It's not hard to game out just what might happen if an arrest of a Citizen of Color went sideways.

Even if you find these leprechaun cops, then what? Do you have the legal infrastructure ready to handle a massive load of cases as the bad guys are arrested? Not likely. You don't just need cops, you need lawyers, lots of them. Some will be prosecution, some defense and some judges. I suppose there's a lawyer ranch out in Kansas to mirror the cop ranch in Texas.

Right.

How about jails? If you arrest a swarm of people, where will you put them? Maybe you could lock them up in all of the abandoned office space in SanFran. Maybe you could use the husks of abandoned Walgreens as jails.

The Great Sort means that blue areas get bluer and red areas get redder as sane people leave California, Illinois and New York. How many scenes of addicts and pushers resisting arrest and then getting roughed up by cops will the hard left polity stand before the new cops find themselves facing trial and the public appetite for law and order wanes?

This is part of what I've been on about here on the blog. The progs don't know how anything works. If you allow your city to fall to ruin, you can't reverse the process by returning to status quo, you need to dramatically strengthen the centripetal forces of civilization for a time. After that, you can go back to the previous normal.

Good luck getting this thing under control.

This is a long way from playing itself out here in CA.

Chicago

Meanwhile, Chicago has thrown in its lot with a black racist. Here's a bit about the closing arguments of Brandon Johnson, the guy who won the mayoral election yesterday.

Race-baiting has become Johnson’s go-to campaign tool. Last week, he all but outright stated that Vallas was racist, accusing him of “being dismissive of a black man who taught for four years in Chicago Public Schools.” His concern with the COVID-19 pandemic was “to make sure that black and brown people in particular did not continue to die.”

All criticism of his campaign is just “yet another attack on a black man as an elected leader.”

 Expect Illinois to get even bluer. The Great Sort continues. 

Monday, April 03, 2023

I'll See Your Dylan Mulvaney And Raise You Three Drag Queens

This has got to set some kind of record for the most complete brand incineration by a large organization run by what are supposed to be professionals.

Drag Queens. On a country music awards show.

Drag queens.

I've been laughing about this all day. The CMT Twitter account is being immolated by fans of country music. The ratio of hate-filled replies to supportive replies looks to be on the order of 90-1.

Look, I get that the Country Music TV bigwigs in the smoke-filled rooms in NYC are all personally onboard with every kind of degenerate perversion out there, but ... drag queens?!?!?

Take that, Bud Light!

Hilarious!

Sunday, April 02, 2023

Dylan Mulvaney, Bud Light And The Trump Indictment

Two quick hits this morning. I'm on what feels like the last day of a cold, so I can't go to the gym. Instead, I'll take my aggression out here. Enjoy.

Dylan And Bud Light

Huh?

How hopelessly incompetent do you have to be to use a gay dude who is consumed with autogynephilia and pretends to be an ultra-feminine teenage girl to sell cheap, mass-market beers aimed at blue collar men who want to pound them by the six pack while watching sports so that they fill their bladders to bursting before they fall unconscious from the alcohol?

Zenith used to have a marketing slogan, "The quality goes in before the name goes on." That could be updated to, "The prog indoctrination goes in before the career is chosen." Sexual degeneracy is so commonplace now that it feels like it's the first thing taught every morning in school. It's like the most important thing is for the kids to embrace diversity and inclusion the way amoebas embrace food particles after which the kids spin the career wheel and go off to their adult jobs.

It doesn't matter if you're any good at your job so long as you embrace LGBTQWERTY and anti-white racism.

This is, as the progs might say, completely unsustainable. While it's got near 100% verbal acceptance inside the proggy bubbles in the education and marketing industries, it's well below 50% in the real world. I say "verbal" acceptance to take into account the people who are keeping their disgust to themselves for fear of HR. In any case, you can't sell poison, depression and pain forever. Eventually, even the prettiest disastrous failures get revealed for what they are and rejected.

Going back to that monumental pervert Dylan, to me, that ad is a Michelangelo of marketing horror. It's so bad that it's actually beautiful.

Trump's Indictment

I just don't care. I know everyone is all wound up about it, but I just don't care. Tucker has been all over it, but he's at least partially ratings-driven and his audience no doubt craves the red meat. Unlike Bud Light, Tucker knows his audience. The normally sane PowerLine blog has gone off the rails, demanding tit-for-tat legal salvos.

The Democratic Party is making war on Republicans, conservatives, and America. All rules have been abrogated, all traditions trashed, all sense of fairness gone. It is past time for conservatives to quit being nice guys. The Democrats’ assault can be stopped only by a healthy dose of their own medicine.

Let’s start investigating prominent Democrats with an eye toward bringing criminal charges against them. Most of America’s district attorneys, those that have a political affiliation, are no doubt Republicans. Likewise, most attorneys general are Republicans. They all should think about Democrats who can be charged in their jurisdictions.

No, no and no.

First off, how do we know that Republicans haven't done this already and from the blue point of view, Alvin Bragg isn't just giving the fascist reds a taste of their own medicine? I would bet the mortgage on that. I haven't done the research into prog Twitter threads and I don't intend to, but I'm absolutely convinced that this is an escalation, not a crossing of a Rubicon. Maybe it is a watershed moment because Trump was president, but then again, it's Trump and this is all by design for him.

Peace and prosperity or chaos and screaming, it's all the same to the Donald so long as it's about him.

Have the guy go to NY and receive the indictment. Let the process go whatever way it does. Donald Trump isn't worth launching legal system nukes. He'll love the attention, Bragg will get his praise from his foaming-at-the-mouth blue zealots and the rest of us can go back to our normal lives.

If this then happens to someone normal like DeSantis, Cruz or Rand Paul, then you launch the nukes. For Donald Trump? Nah.

OK, that's it for today. The Newcastle United game will be on soon and I'm going to go play with ChatGPT for a while. I hope you've had a great weekend.

Saturday, April 01, 2023

Helping People You've Never Met

... can't be done with anger.

Driving over the Home Depot yesterday to buy bird seed for our ungrateful, gluttonous, local songbirds yesterday, I passed a forlorn girl on the corner of Balboa and Genesee holding a trans flag and a small, handwritten sign that read, "Trans rights are human rights." She looked pathetic. She was clearly on testosterone and wore one of the standard trans costumes - short hair and mannish clothes.

Having consumed too much Internet content filled with trans activists screaming their Lysenkoist hate and filled with latent bitterness because of my daughter's trans-self-destruction, my immediate reaction was anger. I wanted to yell at her like she was one of those people who was pushing the mutilation and poisoning of girls instead of what she was, one of their victims. Amped up on social media rage, I came up with all kinds of arguments and insults in my mind as I drove past her.

In retrospect, I should have parked nearby and talked to her calmly and lovingly. I should have asked her all of those questions I wish I'd asked my daughter when she came out to me as trans 3 years ago. I was gobsmacked back then and completely unprepared. I'm not now.

I had a chance to help someone and her parents and I didn't take it because I was full of anger and bitterness. Also because it was getting late and those winged swine were waiting around an empty birdfeeder. 

"Made in the image of God" implies that everyone should have nearly equal* value to you. I might have been able to get her to see how mutilating and poisoning herself wasn't going to lead anywhere good and I didn't take it.

I won't miss that opportunity again. I'm writing this post to cement it in my head. I learn by writing and I'm hoping it sticks.

Look at those fat slobs stuffing their faces. Disgusting.

* - Hey, let's not kid ourselves here, alright? Family counts for something. Consider it to be the first tie-breaker.