Far-right, Racist, Extremist Ninjas

 ... are the only things that can explain this.

Oakland has had 14 homicides since the start of the year — that compares with a single homicide during the same time period last year.

If the homicides continue at the current rate, Oakland is looking at 168 homicides by the end of the year. In 2020 there were 102, and in 2019 there were 75.

The numbers are shocking, but they pale when compared with the number of people wounded.

According to statistics from Oakland’s Highland Hospital trauma unit, which handles most of the gunshot cases in Alameda County and some from Contra Costa County, 50 gunshot cases have been treated there so far this this year — at least one shooting a day.

Highland treated 415 gunshot cases last year and 283 in 2019.

As we all know, ninjas are stealthy, white-adjacent extremists who are trained in death squad camps by the Koch Brothers. They are spiritually nourished by daily, aural ingestations of that Jewish Nazi, Ben Shapiro, and the Blinding Whiteness guru, Tucker Carlson. Ninjas are capable of moving silently, disappearing into the background and spreading Hate™.

That's the only explanation I can muster as to why Systemic Racism appears worst where the far-right is almost completely absent. I mean, what else could it be? Oakland followed the BLM playbook and cut their police budget so that people of color could flourish through criminal justice reform, just like the super smart people in our professional sports leagues tell us to do. 

It looks like just as things were getting better, the Far Right Extremist Ninjas swang into action.

Swang? Swung? Swoonged? Whatever. They're spreading Hate™ and that's all you need to know.

This spells out the logic of the situation perfectly. The woman represents justice, carrying the cross of cruise missiledom, being pushed along by a cis-normative, whiteness-filled cowboy while a fat banker plays the bass drum of Hate™ and a fish flies over his head. The fish represents white supremacy because some fish have white bellies.

Or maybe it's the hat of Hate™ flying over his head and the woman represents Strong Black Women who were arrested by the Cowboy of Intolerance while twerking and pole dancing for Justice while the banker plays a bass drum and the cruise missile is the weight of extremist militarism and she's being forced to attack the Capitol Building.

Anyway, it makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Just like the increased Oakland murders are not evidence that the whole systemic racism thing is exploitative lying and the real problem is cultural. Because it's not that. Not at all.

The Source Of Game Of Thrones

 ... must have been the story of the Romanov Dynasty in Russia.

I'm currently devouring The Romanovs, 1613-1918 by Simon Sebag Monetfiore and it's spectacular. It has everything you'd expect from Game of Thrones including wars, assassinations, bride shows, dwarves, drunkenness, treachery, debauchery, violence, torture and more dwarves.

What an absolutely horrible nation! The thing that strikes me the most is how difficult it is to rule as an autocrat. You can't trust anyone. You're always a poisoned goblet away from death with any number of courtiers aiming to profit by a shift in power.

I'm currently at the reign of Peter the Great. During one of his campaigns, a portion of his army starved to death as it marched off to attack the Ottomans or the Poles or someone like that. How in the world do you begin a campaign without adequate logistics? They were so organizationally primitive and their communications so poor that they didn't realize they were going to lose thousands to starvation along the way.

Not that it bothered them. Ordinary people were worthless to them. What a mess.

The Battle of Narva, 1700 - "The Swedes attacked the next day, at two o’clock in the afternoon in a blinding snowstorm. There were 40,000 Russians and only 10,000 Swedes, but Charles’s army charged full tilt at the Russian lines and in half an hour drove them in a panic-stricken rout. Many of the Russians were captured, some were drowned trying to get away across the Narva river and some took the opportunity to murder their officers. The Swedes took the entire Russian artillery train and inflicted more than 8,000 casualties, losing only 700 men of their own."

Tea Is For Sissies

Well, it's about time to refresh our raised beds here in the Catican Compound. Now usually, that means we've pulled out all the plants so the beds are totally barren. Come January or February, I nuke the soil with a mix of organic and chemical fertilizer and composted worm and chicken manure. All combined, I aim for triple the recommended dose of soil amendments. I then let the beds lay fallow for two months before planting. February and March are San Diego's rainy season, such as it is. The rain steeps the fertilizer into the soil and probably mellows it as well. 

I've been doing this for the last couple of years with great success. This year, however, we've got two beds with firmly-established plants we don't want to pull. We've got an eggplant and herbs in one and cayenne in another. The third has flowers which wife kitteh says she will repot so I can have a go at that one as usual.

For the two planted beds, I looked up how to make tea out of fertilizer, thinking I could replenish them that way and not risk the roots of our plants by turning over the soil. I swear, I ought to wear a dress to do what they recommended.

You take a pillowcase full of organic fertilizer and steep it in a 5-gallon bucket for two days. You take out the pillowcase and discard the solids. The tea is then cut with water and used to water the raised beds. After that, you drink a Fresca and call your friends to gossip about the neighbors and discuss the latest episode of This Is Us.

No, no and no. Today, I bought the manures and some compost. I've already got the granular fertilizers from my good friends at Dow Chemicals. This year, I'm just going to sprinkle the granular stuff, pour on the fertilizer and cover it with the compost. It will be done as crudely as possible, on the leaves, on the soil, in the air, on the ground. I might even fling some at the neighbor's dog, the little swine. I'll then water the living daylights out the beds to wash off the plants and get the steeping going.

After that, I'll drink a beer and listen to some country music. No tea.

Right now, my cayenne are all producing the largest, meatiest peppers yet. I fertilized the bed with chemicals 6 weeks ago and the plants are responding nicely. They got shaded out by the cotton, but they've recovered well. This new program ought to be just the thing to give the troops.

Running Freight Traffic Over An Unstable Bridge

It feels like every time you turn around, there's another story suggesting that the country is becoming more unstable. I can't tell if it's confirmation bias on my part or clickbait rubbish from the sources I read, but it seems obvious to me.

Looking around Adobe Stock for a good photo for this post, I found one of a rickety, old bridge.

Every time an institution is revealed to be corrupt, a support cracks or a slat falls into the water. When the press chose to hide the Hunter Biden story, that was a support falling down. Confident that the bridge would hold future traffic, the press never went back to replace it by addressing the fears and frustrations of the public.

Using mail-in ballots when a big portion of the electorate told you in advance they wouldn't trust the result was a big support falling into the water. As far as the Elites that jammed the mail-in ballots on us are concerned, that bridge will last forever.

This week, when a couple of relatively minor hedge funds were rescued at the expense of tiny, retail investors, another couple of slats fell. Asked to weigh in on it, the Biden Administration crowed that Janet Yellin was the first female Treasury Secretary, which only mattered to those obsessed with identity politics. What blind hubris to think that was reassuring!

Every time the voices of individuals are silenced or someone gets canceled, that removes support, too. Think of it in terms of the mechanical engineering calculations on that bridge - fewer connectors have to carry more stress as communications channels for the deplorables get cut away.

As more power is handed over to the Elites in the form of government spending, more regulations and giants like Amazon gobbling up small businesses, it's as if we're expecting that bridge to carry heavier and heavier loads. The more you centralize power, the more important institutional trust becomes.

By the way, did you know that Bill Gates owns more American farmland than anyone else? Creak.

I dunno, man. Maybe I need to go back and reread my vows on this blog to fast from the news. This can't be right, can it?

(Makes one last stop to see what some centrist Twitter accounts are saying these days. Hair stands up on end.)

The Romanovs Shorted Gamestop

I'll admit I don't know much about the end of the Romanovs, but the mental imagery appealed to me, so here we are. My hypothesis is that the Romanovs never really understood the threats to their rule because they didn't grasp what was happening in the broader population. Think of them as John Kerry, Janet Yellin, the faculty at Brown and the AP. They talk to each other almost exclusively, so they have a model for the world whose failures are invisible to them. They take steps to preserve their power which are self-defeating because they don't understand how things work.

Yesterday, a new communications channel was opened. Retail investors, equipped with information about highly-shorted stocks, whacked big, institutional investors to the tune of 10-20 billion dollars by buying up GameStop stock. As far as I can tell, the message was not received. Instead, that comms channel was shut down through changes in the ways you can buy heavily-shorted stocks.

To recapitulate a previous post, communications won't stop just because you shut down one avenue.

If you've got a real beef with how things are going, if you've got something to say, Twitter, Parler and Facebook are only mediums for comms, they aren't the comms themselves. There are lots of other ways to make a point.

If you feel like the election was stolen, online silencing isn't going to change your mind. If you're terrified of what the progressives mean when they say they will "fundamentally transform America," shutting down Parler isn't going to make you feel any less threatened, it will make you feel more threatened.

To go back to my theme of the last year, the left, including Big Tech, has no idea how anything works. They can't predict the next moves by their opponents. The only explanation that makes sense to me is that they don't see other people as people, they see them as static objects. There won't be any next moves by their opponents because their opponents do not possess free will or rational thought. It's the straw man principle taken to a whole new level.

Every time a deplorable tries to tell you how they feel, they get slammed. They're silenced on campus, they have social justice jammed in their faces at work, their online accounts get demonetized and on and on. When they get slammed, they get a little more radical.

This is unstable. $10,000,000,000 is one heck of a message. Instead of listening and thinking about what was being said, which was trivially easy because the mob told you how they felt on social media, the Elites shut down comms again. I thought this was an excellent summary of the message.

Now I think I need to go find an audiobook about the Romanovs.

Bonus Thought: Everything the GameStop raiders did yesterday was legal. All of it. If you now change the rules in the middle of the game and that cause them to lose tons of money, do you think they will become more or less radicalized?

America Was Built On Slavery

 ... at least our modern wealth has been.

Borrowing is the spending of future income to pay for current expenses. Debt, then, is the indentured servitude of the future. Government debt, particularly of the size of ours, fits Abraham Lincoln's definition of slavery, which went something like*: You work and I spend. 

Yesterday, I tried to listen to a discussion between Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray and one between Andrew Klavan and Ross Douthat. Both covered the same ground - we've lost our way, in part, because we're so wealthy. We don't have societal meaning to our lives because all the big things are done.

Balderdash.

All the big things only look like they're done because we've enslaved our grade schoolers with $28T of debt, not counting all of the state-level unfunded pension liabilities, college loans and so forth. If you simply balanced the budget, which would require spending at least a trillion less than we do now, you'd live in a very different country. You'd see a whole new set of needs.

You'd get purpose back in a hurry.

We're not as wealthy as we think we are. It's all an illusion.

It's not real.

* - I don't have time to look it up this morning as I need to go make biscuits and gravy to bring in as a treat for my coworkers.

Rain Clouds

 ... make me under the weather, so to speak.

I've got a cold today, so while there are buckets of wisdom in my head, not only to I not have the energy to pour them onto the digital page, I'm not even sure where I left them. That's been evident for years, I'm sure.

In any case, I managed to film 20 minutes of sky yesterday and condense it into 60 seconds of film. Enjoy.

Cayenne Flowers

 ... are difficult to photograph.

Cayenne are shortish plants whose flowers hang down towards the soil. The flowers are very small, so getting your camera to focus on the tiny flower and not the leaves around it or the background takes contortions that my body opposes vigorously.

I still managed to get one good shot yesterday. Enjoy.

I had intended to use my small point-and-shoot to film the dramatic skies we had yesterday and produce a time-lapse video to share, but I couldn't find the charger for the camera, so that project had to be canceled. My study is a mess these days, but less of one each week as I slowly work through both my parents' things and cull my own stash of memories.

Life Lesson: Many of the things that matter to you from your life will be inscrutable and worth little to your children. After cleaning out my folks' house, I'm going through my own with a more critical eye.

Hopefully, I'll find that dratted charger soon.

I Wish Pope Francis Was More Like Jeff Bezos

... because Jeff believes in something and won't let anything get in his way of acting on his beliefs. No, there's no mealy-mouth wussing-out when it comes to Jeffrey.

Yesterday, Outkick posted an article describing how Amazon/WaPo/Bezos is arguing that mail-in ballots are untrustworthy.

Jeff Bezos — a strong Democratic supporter — and Amazon are aiming to postpone a unionization vote at one of its warehouses in Alabama, the Wall Street Journal reports. Interestingly, Amazon has requested that the National Labor Relations Board reconsider allowing mail-in voting, claiming that the mail-in voting process has “serious and systemic flaws.”

Got that? Bezos and Amazon are doing all they can to prevent any shady activity when workers cast their ballots for unionization, and they are particularly concerned about the integrity of mail-in ballots.

You are likely trying to figure out how that adds up, right? The Washington Post, owned by Bezos, called any claims of mail-in voter fraud by Donald Trump and his supporters dangerous and inexcusable. Amazon even banned Parler from its servers, in part to ensure no one could claim voter fraud occurred from mail-in ballots back in November.

What more needs to be said? If Pope Francis had this kind of single-minded devotion to whatever it is he believes, the Church would be a force in the world. 

Back in the day, I don't recall Daleks playing a major role in the birth of Christ. This year's Vatican creche seems to indicate otherwise. Well, that's Pope Francis for you. Always coming up with something new.

How Tall Is The Arctangent?

This is a follow on to yesterday's humiliating face-plant wherein I tried to calculate the height of a plant with my face.

Or something like that.

I claimed that similar triangles would allow me figure out the height of a distant tree, using my phone's camera and knowing my distance from the tree. Tim let me know I didn't know my right foot from my left when pacing off the distance and Ohioan proved once again that he is the superior mathematician.

I deeply resent them both and vow to get even with acts of vengeance that would make a Klingon nauseous with horror.

Wait, I was only supposed to think that, not type it. Oh well.

So here's the new calculation, as yet unmanifested in a Google Sheets calculation.

• h is the height of the tree in feet
• d is my distance to the tree. I'm going to stick with 3' per step and accept any inaccuracies.
• 5.5 is the height of the camera off the ground, in feet. And yes, I'm taking into account the fact that I'm not looking at it with the top of my head.
• alpha is the viewing angle of the camera, which for my Pixel 3 is 76 degrees
• theta is the angle of the camera lens to a spot on the tree 5.5' up from the ground. This gives me a right angle for the resulting triangle
• beta is the external angle of the right triangle I make with the tree

I can calculate beta as soon as I know my distance to the tree.

Theta is just 76 minus beta.

The height is then my distance to the tree times the tangent of beta plus the 5.5' accounting for the height of my eyes, assuming my eyestalks aren't fully extended.

Going back to yesterday's tree, if I thought it was 52', that means I was 13' from the tree, so d is 13.

• beta is then 22 degrees
• theta is 54 degrees
• The tree is then 23' tall

Using the car in the picture, I could go along with the tree being about 4 SUVs high which would make it about 23'.

Good enough?

How Tall Is That Tree?

I've been pondering how I might be able to measure the height of tall trees. Taking a walk yesterday, I was thinking about the geometry and trigonometry of the problem. I wondered if there was an app for my smartphone that calculated dimensions of an object using the camera on the phone. It would be simple enough, all you'd need would be the distance from the camera to the object and you could use the properties of triangles to figure out the height.

Then it dawned on me that all I needed to do was fit an object of known height into the camera viewer in portrait orientation and then pace off my distance to it. I would then have the ratio of distance to the tree to its height. The Law of Similar Triangles tells us that the ratio won't change no matter how large or how distant the object might be.

I found a topped Mexican Fan Palm that was about 8' tall. Pacing off the distance and knowing the length of my stride, I figured out that if I multiplied my strides by 4, I would get the height of the object in feet.

You're welcome.

This palm tree is 52' tall.

The Homeostasis Of Victimology

I just finished Gad Saad's book, The Parasitic Mind. I've consumed the Gadfather's content on Twitter and YouTube off and on for more than a year now, so much of the book was a clarifying expansion of that. There was one idea in particular that I really loved, one that meshes with Thomas Sowell's take on racial grifters. That is the concept of the Homeostasis of Victimology.

Homeostasis is where a system reacts to the environment to maintain a certain level of something. For example, your body works to make sure your internal temperature stays around 98.6. It sweats when it's too hot and burns calories when it's too cold. Your circulatory system reacts by expanding and contracting itself.

The Homeostasis of Victimology (HoV), works to serve the interests of three groups. Each needs there to be a certain level of "hate" in the culture in order to reap desired rewards.

1. Race grifters. Robin D'Angelo is out of a job if we suddenly declare that racial hate is no longer a big deal. Dittos for the bug-eyed practitioners of Modern Nazi Race Theory currently haranguing San Diego School District employees.
2. Democrat politicians. For decades now, the Democratic Party has lived off of massive support from minority groups. If the prevailing view of the country was that income and education were markers of behavior and not racial spoils, they'd be toast.
3. Social Justice Warriors. There's excitement in putting on your Power Ranger jammies and running outside to cosplay a battle wherein you defend a poor, beleaguered minority from the Forces of Hate™. If we came to the conclusion that the absence of fathers was orders of magnitude more important than hate, these people would have to face real German Shepherds and fire hoses as they strove to drag the culture back towards traditional morality.

This is why the whole injustice industry gets weirder and weirder. Real hate is more difficult to find every day. Just as your body goes into overdrive to maintain its temperature in a snowstorm, our culture has gone into overdrive and discovered microaggressions, systemic racism, implicit bias and more. It's working to maintain a constant level of perceived hate.

This also explains why they must crush freedom of speech. Allowing others to talk would make it so much harder to maintain their required levels of faux injustice. Imagine what would happen in the average person was exposed to Dennis Prager and Ben Shapiro. If it was discovered that the most popular pundits on the Right were the philosophical heirs of MLK, the game would be over. Crushing communication channels is like putting on a parka in a blizzard. It's a defense mechanism by an organism threatened by the environment.

I've moved on now to The Great Courses' An Economic History of the World since 1400. It's beautifully done and I've learned a ton already, even though I'm only 10% of the way through it.

I explained all of this to Lily, but she was less than interested.

Insufficient Stimuli

... and no, I don't mean the latest round of trillions of dollars looted from grade schoolers and handed out with a pharisaical display of faux-compassion. I mean smartphones and TV.

Last night, one of our sons came over to do his laundry and eat fried chicken and biscuits in celebration of Robert E. Lee's birthday. After we had munched, we watched bad TV - Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! While we watched, we all played games or surfed social media sites on our phones. We commented on this to each other. The shows weren't enough to amuse us, we needed stimulation from our phones as well.

It is a credit to our devotion to asceticism that we did not hire nubile, Asian girls* to come to our house and massage us at the same time. Truly, it was like unto the trials of Job.

The Chicken

It was legs and thighs, bathed in plain buttermilk for a few hours. I read later that I should have seasoned the buttermilk first. The dredge was regular flour with a variety of seasonings - paprika, Slap Ya Mama, garlic powder, poultry seasoning and pepper. I fried them for 10-12 minutes at 315 and they were delicious. Mary says to keep the oil at such a low temperature to allow the chicken to cook while not burning the crust. She, of course, was right.

Without an egg wash and another layer of breading, the crust was light and delicate.

Smartphones

Like social media and politically-bent news, they're more addiction than tool. I try to put mine down as much as possible, but I'd be lying to say that I was even remotely successful at keeping it away from my face. We were recently watching a Tom Selleck Jesse Stone movie and I was playing my brick-breaker game. I could just imagine big Tom towering over me in my living room, asking why I was bothering to play his movie if I wasn't going to watch it. Those camera angles all had purposes and I wasn't appreciating the team's artistry.

Guilty as charged, Mr. Selleck.

Fooling Ourselves

My conclusion from all of this is that giving in to constant stimulation isn't as much of a generational thing as we'd like to pretend. Yes, our kids are more addicted, but we're well down that path as well. And no, we can't quit any time we want.

Fishes To The Rescue

I've been teleworking a lot lately. I'll confess that while I keep one monitor devoted to work, I would sometimes keep the other on Twitter. It was horrible. I've since switched over to explore.org's Underwater Manatee-Cam at Blue Spring State Park. That's much better and I would argue it improves, if not my productivity, certainly my mood and calmness. The fish are slow and soothing and the blue-green water provides a serene backdrop. Much better than the endless klaxons of social media.

Super Special Bonus: From time to time, a Hypostomus plecostomus ambles by the camera. I used to be a big tropical fish enthusiast and I always loved those armored creatures. You can see one in the center, left. He's the very dark fellow. It's wonderful to see them in their natural habitat. In fact, seeing one of those gives me a greater thrill than my brick-breaker game. Hmm.

* - It's a sign of the times that I fought with this phrase even though it immediately came to mind and provided exactly the imagery I wanted. Should I say "Asian?" How about "nubile?" When you read it, you know exactly what I mean - the kind of indulgence you might choose if you were one of our Tech Overlords or a highly-placed minion thereof.

It's a similar sign of the times that I tweeted a photo of the chicken and mentioned that we were celebrating Lee's birthday, but took it down a few hours later, fearing possible repercussions.

This isn't a Brave, New World, it's a Fearful, New World. I hate it already.

We Need Large-Print Format Arduino Boards!

... and we need them now!

I practiced a little more with my Arduino starter kit and I think I know enough to be able to make a time-lapse camera. I bought a camera module yesterday and it should arrive today. I won't have time to build it until next weekend.

The first version will simply take a picture on command and hand the resulting jpg to the attached computer. Getting the Arduino to talk to the network or store the information on a memory card is a bridge too far right now. All in good time, my pretty, all in good time.

Meanwhile, I discovered that the worst thing about playing with the Arduino is that I can barely see the connections on the thing, even wearing my cheaters. If I wear the cheaters long enough and look back and forth at different focal lengths, I get nauseous. Blargh! It's a spur to drive me to finish this sickening project faster.

Me, a few years from now when I've managed to successfully grow and process tobacco. Note that by this time, I can no more read the book in my hand than I can fly to the moon.

Elsewhere in the realm of nausea, it turns out that there's such a thing as multiracial whiteness. That's going to be a boon for the grievance industry as it substantially expands the number of potential oppressors. It ought to be good for lifetime employment for those grifters, or at least until people rediscover that bad grades, jail time and low income are behavioral markers.

Kipling's works are evergreen. That's a sign of true, classical genius.

Even Teens Need Moms And Dads

Rolling Stone writer, Shawn McCreesh, penned a particularly poignant tale of his adolescence and early adulthood wherein he and his pals engaged in Caligulan levels of self-indulgence until many were dead, addicted or brain damaged.

It starts out predictably.

I was raised, along with a younger brother and sister, by a single mom who worked as a hairdresser and a waitress. I spent every other weekend with my father, who lived in the next town over and founded a tree and landscaping company and later worked in real estate. We qualified for the free lunch program at school, and some years were tougher than others, but we were not poor and always had everything we needed.

Sufficient resources? Check. Stable family? Not checked. From the looks of things and given his apparent age, it's a good bet his wasn't the only such family in his hood. The parties the kids threw were legendary, or would have been, had they been aware of their surroundings.

Sharon was a year older than me and lived in the neighbor-hood. The year her mother was sent to jail, Sharon’s house became our free-for-all party pad and experimentation fort. Sharon’s scratchy baritone made for the perfect imitation mom-voice, so she could supply an alibi to any anxious parent inquiring about their child’s whereabouts. It always worked, including on my own mother.  One night at Sharon’s we couldn’t get our paws on any preferred substances, and so Collin, our friend with the stickiest fingers, had a brainstorm: He would go to the home of a girl he was seeing and raid her parent’s medicine cabinet. After he came back with a bottle of what we thought was pharmaceutical-grade sleeping medication, we decided to divvy up the bottle, pop all the pills at once, wash them down with fortys, and have a contest to see who could stay awake the longest.

It goes on and on like this. Friends die, friends get pregnant outside of marriage, friends get addicted. On Twitter, I suggested to him that this was what happened when you didn't have a stable community of traditional families to provide guardrails for the kids. He disagreed.

Good for him. After his preemptory reply, I reconsidered his essay. He had just told us that he and his friends had only a passing acquaintance with self-denial, an ailment common to teenagers. I wasn't much different, I just didn't have the opportunities to get loaded like this. There was weed and booze, but there were plenty of married moms and dads committed to sniffing out impending doom before it impended.

His essay taught me one thing - the value of parents at home for teens. When the kids are tiny, you provide love. When they're youngsters, you provide guidance and rules. When they're nigh unto adulthood, you keep them from killing themselves as they experiment.

In Shawn's neighborhood, those safety nets were less common than in the ones where I grew up. Thus, children got into the narcotics and some died. Not to worry, mom was busy doing accounting work for Megacorp and their widget production was 0.0023% higher, thanks to her diligence. Dad was off boinking barflies or whatever amused him more than mom had.

And yet Shawn clings to his Rolling Stone outlook. That works until it doesn't and it hasn't stopped working for him. If it costs a dozen or so lives in his circles, well, tough luck for them. Compassionate asceticism was one drug he didn't take. Blame the drug companies, blame advertisements, blame something, just don't suggest self-discipline.

It also made me think of the recent elections where the airwaves were saturated with famous people exhorting us to vote. "Vote! It's the most important thing you can do!" If it's that important, maybe we should vote more often and perhaps that would save youngsters like Shawn's pals. Maybe we could try voting every 90 days and see if that helps.

It's worth a try. God knows traditional morality isn't.

"Now do you understand why we have to move to the Yukon and get away from your druggie friends?"

Flatness

In a brilliant essay over at Tablet, Alana Newhouse prepares a massive bowl of dystopian catnip for pessimistic conservatives called, Everything Is Broken. For my money, it's one of the most profound things I've read in years. In it, she describes the "flatness" that now dominates our society.

Flatness is the reason the three jobs with the most projected growth in your country all earn less than $27,000 a year, and it is also the reason that all the secondary institutions that once gave structure and meaning to hundreds of millions of American lives—jobs and unions but also local newspapers, churches, Rotary Clubs, main streets—have been decimated. And flatness is the mechanism by which, over the past decade and with increasing velocity over the last three years, a single ideologically driven cohort captured the entire interlocking infrastructure of American cultural and intellectual life. It is how the Long March went from a punchline to reality, as one institution after another fell and then entire sectors, like journalism, succumbed to control by narrow bands of sneering elitists who arrogated to themselves the license to judge and control the lives of their perceived inferiors.

She goes on to describe the sameness of American cities, particularly the wealthy areas, dominated by tech workers. Coffee shops and craft brewpubs with WiFi, boutique eateries and so forth. Think San Diego's Gaslamp District.

I don't know that such things are all that new, but the enforced cultural homogeneity certainly is. Back in the day, UCSD was utterly dominated by progressives, but ideological enforcement was limited to the odd gasps in the social science classrooms when you said you were thinking of voting for a Republican. Now, asserting that women can't become men would get you hauled up in irons before a committee. At least it would where I work, which is substantially less crazed than UCSD. Such extrapolation is defensible, methinks.

It's the description of this mandated intellectual flatness that opened my eyes to Alana's genius. Flatness. What a great word! For odd-shaped fellows like, me, it's the demand that I conform that presses my rebel buttons. Wife kitteh has asked me several times why I don't put up pictures of great Union generals instead of Lee and Jackson and I think this is the reason. I feel like a rebel in this culture. I identify more naturally to "All we ask is to be let alone."

I also identify with being hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned, but continuing to fight anyway.

There's not much room for people like me any more. At least not in polite society. Alana's essay describes and codifies the feelings I have in my subconscious when I have to suppress myself at work and in public. I can recall the cheerful eccentrics and oddballs I knew when I was a pup, but I don't see too many of them any more, unless we first exchange a few cryptic, identifying sentences to indicate we're rebels.

There's a lot more to the essay. It's rather long and there are parts that describe expected consequences of a global economy instead of intentional suppressions of freedom, but in the main, it's genius.

Enjoy.

Last night's rack of pork. It was not flat.

Mt. Laguna

I have at least two long blog posts all written in my head, but I just don't feel like typing them out today, so instead, I'll share a photo from yesterday's hike with the Catican Guards near Mt. Laguna.

I don't know why, but I really liked that view. It's very representative of the area. There are rolling hills, odd swaths of grass and lots of desert scrub. In places, there were patches of snow.

It's been a crazy dry year for us after a reasonably wet one last year. San Diego typically gets about 10" of rain all year and this year, we're down by 3" so far, running 25% of normal. We still have the wettest time of the year ahead of us, so there's a chance to catch up. If we don't, look out for a terrible year for fires.

Blue California still hasn't figured out the whole environmental husbandry thing, so if it's going to be a bad year for fires, we'll lose plenty of homes, have lots of deliberate blackouts and end up with a massive amount of scorched terrain.

Oh well. That's what comes from loving wild spaces so much - fire-blasted wilderness.

You only hurt the ones you love?

Wealth And Income Are Markers Of Behavior

... as are grades and test scores.

The Story

Suzy and Taniqua are in the 4th grade together at Lumumba-ANTIFA-Zapata-Intifada* Elementary School (LAZIES) in San Diego.

Suzy's mommy makes her read for 20 minutes every day, above and beyond her normal schoolwork. Suzy's mommy or daddy go to every back-to-school night, orientation night and never miss a parent-teacher conference. Her parents check her homework most nights and demand to see every test she gets back from the teacher. If she does poorly, there are consequences. Suzy's no braniac, but she does pretty well. Her average grade is a B+.

Taniqua's parents, true to the pattern observed by Dr. Ogbu in the Shaker Heights school system, do not make her read. They rarely go to meetings at school, and they don't check her homework or her tests. Taniqua's no dummy, but she does poorly. Her average grade is a C-.

The school board that oversees LAZIES observes these same results almost everywhere across the district. Their conclusion? Racism. Lots and lots of racism. Systemic racism which comes from a culture of white supremacy and patriarchalism**.

Wasting no time, the school board and administration teams from across the district swing into action! From now on, Taniqua won't have to turn in her homework or behave in class.

Academic grades will now focus on mastery of the material, not a yearly average, which board members say penalizes students who get a slow start, or who struggle at points throughout the year.

Another big change, teachers can no longer consider non-material factors when grading. Things like turning work in on time and classroom behavior will now instead count towards a student's citizenship grade, not their academic grade.

The students will also be given anti-racism training***. Suzy will be told that the reason Taniqua isn't doing well is that Suzy is full of hate. 

And Then What?

Kids are highly sensitive to unfairness directed at them. Yesterday, Suzy may have cheated her little brother, Billy, out of the last homosexual Oreo in the bag, but if she gets jobbed by mommy today when splitting the McDonald's fries with that little rat, Billy, she's going to let everyone know.

Just how long is Suzy going to take the blame for Taniqua's poor performance before she's seething with resentment?

Our daughter went to Catholic school until 8th grade and then transferred to a public high school. There, she met her first illiterate children and first encountered wildly inappropriate behavior in the classroom. It blew her little mind. She had the causes dialed in within a month, if not earlier.

Going back to our hypothetical Suzy, what will she think of the education industry after they scream at her for a year or two? 

To all the conservatives filled with rage over our public schools going full Julius Streicher, I say chill out. These things will take care of themselves.

Spend some time with the fishes over at ManateeCam. It's, like, totally Zen, man.

* - At my alma mater, UCSD, Third College was originally supposed to be called Lumumba-Zapata College. Yes, my college experience was like that.

** - Good Lord, "patriarchalism" is a word. I typed it in as a comical, pretend word and the darned thing is in the browser's dictionary! What a country!

*** - San Diego is insane, but Seattle is completely, frothing-at-the-mouth, howling-at-the-moon mad. Dig this list of racial resources on the Seattle Public Schools website. It is a stone-cold lock that their physics and biology resources lists are shorter.

Learn: Antiracism Resources

Seattle Public Schools' teacher librarians share titles for students in support of Black Lives Matter

• Look, Listen and Learn TV: An early learning educational public access program showcasing Black and Indigenous people and people of color learning, teaching, and exploring.
• Anti-Racist Resources from the Greater Good 
• Dismantling Anti-Black Bias in Democratic Workplaces: A Toolkit 
• Teaching Tolerance: Teaching About Race, Racism and Police Violence 
• Anti-Racism Resources for White People 
• Black Lives Matter at School Resources 
• Teaching Tolerance: Let’s Talk Discussing Race, Racism and Other Difficult Topics with Students 
• Seattle Public Libraries Race and Social Justice books for kids K-5 
• New York Times An Antiracist Reading List 
• Pretty Good: Your Kids Aren't Too Young to Talk About Race: Resource Roundup 
• Anti-Defamation League: lessons, table talks, and books:
• Anti-Defamation League: Table Talk George Floyd, Racism, and Law Enforcement 
• Anti-Defamation League: Middle School Level lessons 
• Race Conscious: 100 Race Conscious Things You Can Say to Your Child – Conversation Starters 
• NPR: How White Parents Can Talk About Race 
• Seattle Times: How to Teach Your Children About Racism in America: A resource for understanding the George Floyd protests 

Superpowers Without Armies

Twitter and Facebook are global giants. They have proven that they can shut off huge, written communication channels as they please. If they don't like what you're saying, you don't get to say it on their massive platforms.

Good for them.

What happens to a nation that doesn't like that sort of thing and outlaws them?

Well, nothing, really. Facebook and Twitter don't contribute one red pfennig to anyone's economy. I think there's a good argument to be made that they actually reduce economic output by wasting their users' time. Since the tech giants don't have a military arm, a country can destroy them without fear of retaliation. There would be a political price to be paid, but if you created substitute platforms like Gab or Parler and let people know they needed to move, I don't think there'd be a lot of fussing. Personally, I have no loyalty to Twitter or Facebook although I use them both.

I think I'll stop here. I still need to back up this blog and look into another method of hosting it. I'm not sure I'll be shut down, but it's certainly a possibility. If this is where we are in January of 2021, I'm not optimistic about the state of the First Amendment come July.

In other news, ANTIFA has come to San Diego. Freedom leaves when they arrive. With UCSD and SDSU as feeders, I can't imagine their influence will decrease over time.

Many Data Sources

I work with a lot of people who are young enough to be my kids. Some are blue collar, some are white collar. It's a very racially mixed group as well. The topic of the election came up today and what was more interesting than their takes was how they arrived at them.

Each one pulls information from a wide array of sources. None of them go to CNN or Fox or anywhere else exclusively. They're all on top of the latest tidbits of information and they share what they've found freely. That means their opinions are widely sourced, more widely than any one individual might achieve unless they were on the Internet all day.

When journalists launch some biased essay, these guys know it right away. For example, it's no secret that the news media who fawned over the BLM riots was now gasping in mock horror at the DC riots. If the newsies think they're fooling anyone, it's only themselves.

It was fascinating to watch the conversation evolve and realize what a generational difference there was.

So what did they think of the election? They all thought it was untrustworthy. They had the flaws of the vote-by-mail idiocy pegged immediately. None of them believe their votes were counted honestly. They also thought Trump was a loon. Some liked him as president, but they all thought he was nuts.

Kids these days! Sheesh!