Hanging Out With The Bar Crowd

Over the weekend, we went out to a local Irish pub for drinks and live music with some friends. The songs were bawdy, the audience young and attractive and a great deal of fun was had by all. One particularly cute little blonde right in front of us was hanging all over her date. She was fashionably dressed with a peasant look including a knit hat.

She looked something like this, only prettier.

Everyone was having a good time.

Well, sort of.

Her date was a sullen fellow and looked like he didn't really want to be there. She was getting into the music, making explicit, lurid gestures with her hands during parts of the songs and shouting along with the dirtiest lyrics. It was pretty clear where her night was headed and it made me think of a few things.

SWUGs, for one. "Senior Washed Up Girls." That's the term for Yale coeds who have stopped partying and started looking for commitment. Unfortunately for them, Yale guys being guys, they're looking to get laid and the younger coeds are more than willing to oblige. Traditional morality is flaunted and the eternal man-woman transactions go on. Men give love to get sex and women give sex to get love. Only they don't get love because they've been acculturated to live like men. Hence the SWUGs.

Second was this bit about young British men not being up to the standards of previous generations. Diane Abbot suggests that Britain is suffering a crisis of masculinity where the young men have all of the aggression and none of the purpose associated with being male. Well, duh. Everything you want is available cheaply, so why go through the painful process of adopting civilized behaviors? What should they do, live like it's the 50s?

Which led me to my favorite widget.

Learn more about us debt.

Borrowing leads to slovenly, unsustainable behavior. So long as those numbers keep going up and the borrowed cash gets handed out, why teach responsibility?  And even if you teach it, how is it going to stick when it's shown over and over again that there's no real point to it?

The kids in the bar were cute, young and energetic. They were also raised in a world where normal financial and sexual transactions had been stripped of their traditional meaning leading to perfectly predictable results.

Unsustainable results, too, I might add.

The Six Pack Of Budweiser Gave It Away

If you don't visit Tim's blog regularly, you should. It's one of the reasons the Internet was invented.

A male fishing spider. Found fishing with a six pack of Bud and a transistor radio tuned to the Tigers game, you knew he was a male. Click the link above to read more and see some outstanding photography.

A Brownian Motion Theory Of Household Chores

Today, I've got a bunch of small, unrelated chores to do. Can they all be accomplished without a list, by simply doing one and then doing the next one that pops into your head, triggered by wherever you happen to be at the moment?

Here, we see three possible paths around our house and yard for accomplishing the day's tasks.
Image source.

The IRS Scandal Is Different

It's not like anything we've ever seen. Watergate was a small-time, localized job in comparison. This was a national campaign of intimidation and information gathering from one of the most powerful arms of the US Government.

In Connecticut  a Catholic professor who wrote articles about ObamaCare and tracked down Soros funding of progressive fake-Catholic organizations got audited. In North Carolina, a couple of organizations run by Billy Graham's family that publicly opposed gay marriage got audited for the first time ever. Big campaign donors for Mitt Romney got called out publicly by the president and then audited not once, but three times, never having been audited before.

The more you look into it, the worse it gets. It is so broad and so deep that it's hard to overstate just how horrific it is.

Remember, the winner of the election gets to spend $3.5T and controls the drones. More powerful still is the ability to staff the bureaucracy that actually makes many laws, modern legislation being filled with general directives for government departments to flesh out as they see fit. Politics is becoming all-consuming and the seductive power of victory can dissolve all moral restrictions. That's what we're seeing here.

Finally, we have this op-ed from Peggy Noonan, no one's idea of a right-wing ideologue. It ends with this and so will I.

(I)f what happened at the IRS is not stopped now, it will never stop. The next White House will come in and they’ll know they can do it too. And if they’re unlucky enough to be caught, they’ll have a have a few uncomfortable moments in Congress, and a few people who were going to retire in the summer will retire in the spring. And it will all go on.

We are at a point now where you can make a list of things that, all combined and allowed to continue, can kill America. This is one of them. Widespread belief that the revenue-collecting arm of the US government is hopelessly corrupt is one of them.

The Next Step In Smartphones

... will be to recruit us as secondary notification tools.

A friend of mine posted this to his Facebook page:

My phone is getting too smart. Apparently it knows that I may need to give someone a ride to the airport tomorrow, so it's already telling me what the traffic is like on the way to Chipotle.

So amazingly helpful and incredibly creepy at the same time. I think my phone is stalking me.

It must be Google Now or something of that sort. My Galaxy S3 does the same kind of thing. The next step will be to have our phones communicate when his detects that he's not doing what it wants him to do. I'll get a notification something like this:

"Call Jim. He's supposed to be taking his friend to the airport and he's still in bed. And tell him to get his phone a new case. The one he has isn't sturdy enough."

Yellow Flower With Paprika

... well, that's what it looks like. I shot this (and a whole bunch not worth sharing) as I was on my way out to the car this morning to go to work. I had the camera macro mode, but it struggled focusing on the flower. In the end, the thing ended up blurry enough that I wonder just what it was focusing on. Part of the flower next to it?

It still came out kind of nice. Enjoy.

Swarthmore College For The Win!

This reminds me of my time at college where packs of washed-up, balding 70s campus radicals would lead protests against The Man. Dig the tearful whining of the dude around 1:30. Hilarious!

Context here. Short version: Swarthmore is getting big bucks donations from icky, profit-minded corporations. A pack of students wants to turn that money down. This was hearing to discuss the matter that was hijacked by that mob of students.

Gosnell Was An Isolated Incident

A Scratching Post Contest

Quick, don't think! Just click here and leave the strangest spam comment you can think of.

The most ridiculous one wins High Praise!

I Don't Want To Be No Pickled Pepper

... and that's how I'm going to end up if all I do is focus on what's wrong.

Pope Francis says we need to proclaim the joy of salvation through our lives:

(I)f we keep this joy to ourselves it will make us sick in the end, our hearts will grow old and wrinkled and our faces will no longer transmit that great joy only nostalgia, melancholy which is not healthy. Sometimes these melancholy Christians faces have more in common with pickled peppers than the joy of having a beautiful life. Joy cannot be held at heel: it must be let go. Joy is a pilgrim virtue. It is a gift that walks, walks on the path of life, that walks with Jesus: preaching, proclaiming Jesus, proclaiming joy, lengthens and widens that path.

It's hard to show joy when under attack or suffering setbacks, but if it was easy, it wouldn't be interesting.

Not only are they wrinkled, they also seem to make their water murky. Eww! Image source.

Speaking of things that aren't wrong, we've got this beautiful bush in the backyard with glorious purple flowers that open in the sun and close at night. I tried to film them opening, but it looks like they need direct sun to open. It was light outside, but they didn't have sunshine before I had to leave to go to work. I'll try to catch them opening this weekend. Turned into a time-lapse movie, it ought to be pretty cool.

It's A Good Thing That's Over

Gosnell got life in prison. Whew! If the trial had dragged on any longer, someone might have had to cover it in detail.

The Pink Police State's Only Limit Is Math

What happens when the people running the government realize that no one cares what they do so long as their bread and circuses are undisturbed? You get things like the drone strikes, the IRS being used as the Gestapo to attack political opponents, a central bank completely in the pockets of the government and stuff like this.

Terrific: on one hand we have a high-ranking administration official threatening the livelihood of private businesses for speaking frankly and on the other we have that same person looking for financial support from said private businesses.

The government gets in bed with the health insurance companies up to the point the companies don't like parts of the deal and then the government uses threats to extort campaign contributions from them. Yes, it's always gone on and yes, both sides have done it, but it's never been done on this scale.

I would suggest that it's grown because the people in charge have realized that under the Pink Police State, there are no practical limits to their power. Well, until math intervenes and the whole thing crashes. But that's happened more than once in Argentina and there the people didn't vote the fascists out of power for any significant length of time. So why not go for it? Who's going to stop you?

Pathetic private business, your offering does not please us! The masses have spoken. You shall be punished!

Of Course They Used The IRS To Attack Their Political Opponents

Because the winner of the election gets $3.5T and control of the drones.

Dig this (possibly behind the WSJ paywall).

The Internal Revenue Service's scrutiny of conservative groups went beyond those with "tea party" or "patriot" in their names—as the agency admitted Friday—to also include ones worried about government spending, debt or taxes, and even ones that lobbied to "make America a better place to live," according to new details of a government probe. 

The investigation also revealed that a high-ranking IRS official knew as early as mid-2011 that conservative groups were being inappropriately targeted—nearly a year before then-IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman told a congressional committee the agency wasn't targeting conservative groups.

 As the government grows, the risks associated with losing elections grow apace.

Kermit Gosnell And Mother Teresa

Charles Darwin had many Christian friends and allies in his study of natural selection. They saw an easy reconciliation of evolution and faith. Darwin, who was both a fine fellow and a committed atheist, was regularly tied in knots trying to answer questions like this:

Isn't Kermit Gosnell superior to Mother Teresa in an evolutionary sense? He contributed to racial hygiene by weeding out the unfit and unwanted. She nurtured the unfit and unwanted. In the end, a species with 100 Kermit Gosnells will be stronger than one with 100 Mother Teresas.

This was Margaret Sanger's logical extension of Darwinism when she created Planned Parenthood. It wasn't a distortion of his theory, but an application of it.

Darwin And Morality

I just finished listening to the excellent book, The Darwin Myth. It's an unvarnished biography of the man which revealed some interesting bits.

Darwin was a devout atheist and a committed abolitionist. Darwin was also a kind and loving family man - the sort of fellow you'd be happy to invite over for dinner. In his personal life, he was an all-around good guy.

One of his biggest struggles was to reconcile godless evolution with a moral code consistent with the way he lived his life. He attempted to show that evolution leads to sympathy because sympathy is a competitively superior trait. As sympathy was prevalent around him and his (English) society was the top of the heap at the moment, sympathy must have been a contributing factor. Unfortunately for Darwin, his theory fights his own analysis.

Under godless Darwinism, if morality is part of evolution and evolutionary outcomes are the proof of the superior trait, then whatever the top society is doing right now must be considered to be superior to other alternatives. Looking back at history, there's no indication that evolution leads to sympathy or any other desirable moral quality.

Oops.

The Roman Empire wasn't particularly sympathetic and they were top dogs for quite some time.

Mmmm. Frozen Eggs!

Sounds delish! Perhaps it's some kind of new dessert!

Err, maybe not. Instead, it's the story of some poor woman, finding herself in a man-impoverished world, happy that she had frozen her eggs so she could have some hope of having children. She'd given of herself to two men over a 15-year period only to find out that one was a loser and the other didn't want children. At 42, she had found a real man. Good for her. Here's B-Daddy's take.

I have to ask what inability to assimilate socially useful information (search that phrase) results in a decade and a half of relationship futility with known losers? Decade 1: you know that you don't want to have children with Dolt #1, despite your claim that having children is your lifelong dream, but hey what's a decade? Decade 2: Dude can't even decide? Sorry, a real man will either say "I want to have children and marriage for life; honey you're the one I want to make babies with" or "I don't want kids, I am focused on my own career, or whatever, but I still want the lifelong marriage." Mister milquetoast does neither and Ms. Egg Freezer can't bring herself to leave this loser.

Welcome to the reality version of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. In Huxley's novel, women have managed to overcome their need for men. In our world, such a divorce from biology is proving to be a bit more problematic.

Presumably, the lady did what she'd been programmed by our culture to do: pursue her career, postpone children and give her life to the men she was with without expecting them, as B-Daddy so astutely notes, to be traditional men. That didn't work out so well.

It's almost like women have these strange, secret needs that we haven't been able to decipher. Maybe after a few more decades of feminist studies, we'll have the whole situation dialed in.

False alarm. It wasn't a story about delicious egg treats after all.

Mistakes Are Easy To Spot

... when they are this obvious.

A while back, we planted our raised bed gardens. Included in the mix were basil (small circle) and tomatoes (large circle). At the time of planting, the tomato was only about twice the size of the basil. Last year, our basil got huge. For a basil. This year, I thought it would be interesting to do a time-lapse photography project and regularly take pictures of it as it grew. I could then use Adobe Premier to create a cool video of the little guy growing.

Only he didn't grow. A month later, Mr. Basil is sitting there, staring at me. Meanwhile, Mr. Tomato is the size of a Mack truck. D'oh!

I should have done the time-lapse with the tomato! It would have been a lot more colorful, too as the fruit came out and ripened. Oh well. I'll do the tomato time-lapse next year.

Hindsight is 20/20.

If You Like Wine, This Ought To Make You Smile

... it made me laugh out loud. Enjoy!

Image Of The Day

Someone at work turned me on to the da Vinci quote, "The smallest feline is a masterpiece." Googling that led me to the image below.

Enjoy.

Source: oscci.com via Rosie on Pinterest

More Win8 Devices! Oh Goody!

In today's WSJ, there's an article about MSFT grudgingly admitting that Win8 is a flop. However, buried inside it is this quote.

Without offering many details yet, (Windows co-head Tami) Reller outlined how Microsoft is working on changing software features, helping people overcome obstacles to learning the revamped software, altering the shopping experience for consumers, getting more of people’s favorite apps available for Windows 8 and making sure a wider array of Windows 8 computing devices will be on sale.

Emphasis mine.

Sounds like a great idea, Tami! Sales data is showing that jamming Win8 down everyone's throats by making it the only OS available on retail PCs is a huge drag? No problem. You just have to do it more and a lot harder! When the steamroller approach doesn't work, your best bet is to get more and larger steamrollers.

I was being unfair. This isn't a steamroller at all. It's an entirely different technology.

Being An Alpha Guy Seems Like A Lot Of Work

... when you could be listening to Ratt in the garage while rewiring your MGB right before you come inside to eat the delicious Mustard And Herb Crusted Rack Of Lamb that your wonderful, devoutly Catholic and sexy wife has prepared for you.

Secondary intro: I promise I will never talk about quitting blogging again. This guy is a gold mine. If I did nothing but react to his stuff, I could string this out for the rest of my life with a smile on my face and a song in my heart.

The meat of the matter: Alpha Game Plan (AGP), the blog linked above, is an unending paean to a man's groin. All the beauty and complexity of life is reduced to the pursuit of getting laid. I'm not sure what the Alpha in the title refers to, although the author seems to think it has something to do with being a man.

He's confused.

His latest post is about a woman who complains in an online forum that her boyfriend of three years makes $650K, but won't share it with her although he has taken her on a vacation in France. Vox, the blogger at AGP, treats the poor girl like a gold digger and takes up the guy's case as if he was some kind of victim. My response to him would be somewhat different.

Geeze, dude, you've been dallying with the chick for three years. A man should strive to be decisive. Three months in, you ought to be using your dates as an indirect interview for marriage or setting her free.

If you can't figure out which end is up after 3 years, you're not an alpha, you're a toad.

As for the "lots of work" part of this post's title, dig AGP's Sixteen Commandments. I got tired just reading them. Here are a few.

1. Make her jealous, 
2. Keep her guessing, 
3. Only give her 2/3 of what she gives you, 
4. Always keep two girls on the side and
5. Be irrationally self-confident.

Umm, can I just go back out into the garage? I want to grab a Newcastle and work on my MGB. Keep her guessing? Who has time for that? And just what am I gaining here? Keep two chicks on the side? Do I have to? How much time do I have to devote to my conquests? I really want to watch the Sunderland-Stoke game today and I'd rather not be taking Suzy out to lunch so I can string her along as a backup to Cindy.

Vox, it's just sex. Seriously. I mean it's important and all and it's a prime motivator for men, but really, it's just sex. If you want to be an Alpha Man instead of whatever it is you're an alpha of, then pursue a single woman and strive to be worthy of her love as a man. Don't worry about your groin. Wherever you go, it will come along, too.

Trust me on this.

A Link For Legal Insurrection

Professor Jacobsen, who has very kindly linked to us several times from Legal Insurrection, posted this bit about the alleged decline of the right-blogospere. There's a lot of meat to it and it's difficult to excerpt coherently, but here's a decent summary.

There has been a corporatization and consolidation of the conservative blogosphere, and the kindness to strangers seems to be waning.

I would agree with that. To me, it looks like cliques have formed and celebrities made. The big boys link to the hip bloggers, mostly each other, and the small fry remain unseen. As a small fry who has blogged longer than most, I take a benevolent view of it.

First off, the Internet is big. There, I said it. I know that seems like a crazy concept, but work with me here, people.

Who has the time or the inclination to surf all over God's creation looking for new talent? If you're a big blogger, there are other things to do with your day. If you can get your content published quickly and easily with yet one more link to Via Meadia, all the better. The dry cleaning has to be picked up and the dogs walked and it's not like Joe Blogger from Podunk is going to be all that original.

Therein lies the problem.

How many ways can you write about what a jug-eared loser Barack Hussein Obama is? How many angles are there when ranting about the end of the world through debt monetization? Many other subjects are practically boundless, but politics is an intellectually limited subject. That's why Tim's blog is always fresh and the political bloggers are repetitive. We're not building upon each other's work as scientists do, we're re-shouting that same things as everyone else.

Meh.

So Instapundit links to Hot Air who regurgitates something they saw on Breitbart who posts a video shot by LiveAction. Nowhere in the loop do we get to see the awesome writing talents of Joe Blogger from Podunk. Oh well. I'm not sure we missed much. My stuff certainly isn't all that original, even when I think it is. Distilled down, it all says the same thing over and over again.

I gave up on garnering the big traffic long ago. I can't stay on subject and I'm not willing to rant and rave every day. It's exhausting. I'm always pleased and honored when one of the big boys links to me and I get a brief spike in traffic, but it's OK to be Joe Blogger from Podunk. I can do whatever I want with the 'Post* and I don't have a huge following that will be disappointed when I wander away from the EuroDebt Crisis and take up Newcastle United's effort to avoid relegation.

Wigan beat West Brom? Really? Were the West Brom players drunk or something? Sickening.

So anyway, I'll leave you with this. How many newspapers does a city need? How many TV channels do you watch? How many big-time right wing bloggers can the blogosphere support?

I'm happy being a small fry. I'll leave the heavy-traffic politics to the cool kids.

A bee on a positively ginormous flower in our front yard. The thing must be 30' tall at least. The flower, not the bee. If the bee was 30' tall, I wouldn't be taking photos of it, I'd be running into the house and calling Miramar Marine Corps Air Station. Considering I'd be killed as collateral damage in the ensuing airstrike, that would be a bad decision, but there you have it.

* - Except, apparently, quit. I've been pondering that lately as my hit count keeps dropping, but I still get up and write every day.

Put Not Your Trust In Princes, Episode 2

Yesterday morning, I went downtown and worked at Catholic Charities again. I did customer intake where you interview people coming in for supplemental food assistance and then help them select their noms. I had a thoroughly good time. It doesn't pay, the conditions are dirty, some of the clients are filthy and homeless, some of them can't speak or read a word of English and it was full of teh awesome.

Obamacare In Rough Seas

... looks like this.

That's the supertanker Panamax, a behemoth longer than three football fields, taking on heavy seas and plowing right on through.

It's also an allegory for a 2,200-page piece of legislation. Once Obamacare is in place and semi-operating, the bureaucracy and legal structures created by it will gain ginormous momentum.

When the economy falters, you might think that a crushing regulatory burden could be stopped by wave after wave of fiscal losses, but take a look at Europe. They're running from one printed money rescue to the next and they still won't let go of their monstrous, economy-deadening regulations.

The only way to stop the Panamax is to sink it. And that's no easy task, either.

What's 1/3 Of A Train Wreck?

As the Monks of Miscellaneous Musings are pointing out here, Obamacare is turning, predictably, into a mammoth money pit.

Later in the linked article, Reid claims to have actually read the law though we cannot know for sure whether it was before or after it became the law of the land. Whenever it was he read the law, what appears to be missing is the section titled: "How the Hell We Are Going to Implement a 2,200 Page Monstrosity That Will Essentially Remake the Entire Health Care Industry".

The good news is that the immigration bill won't be all that bad. It's only 844 pages.

What could go wrong?

Put Not Your Trust In Princes

From Psalm 146:

I will praise the Lord all my life;

I will sing praise to my God as long as I live.

Do not put your trust in princes,

in human beings, who cannot save.

When their spirit departs, they return to the ground;

on that very day their plans come to nothing.

Blessed are those whose help is the God of Jacob,

whose hope is in the Lord their God.

Yesterday was an odd day, one fraught with theological implications. I started the day by going to morning Mass. I wasn't particularly reverent, my mind wandered all over the place, but at least I was there, participating.

At work, looking at the statistics from our intranet, in April we hit all-time traffic records in three of our four platforms and missed the fourth because April was a 30-day month, not a 31-day month. The records we broke were from March. Our intranet has been around for well over 3 years and the stats have gone like that. It's always growing because, for the most part, the workforce finds it very like the Internet and easy to use.

Later in the day, I attended the weekly SharePoint ambush meeting. It's a stacked group put together by our leadership (local, not top-level corporate) to justify their lust for SharePoint. No one in the room save maybe two or three of us has any technical skills or web literacy at all. I sat there for 90 minutes on the receiving end of great, big dollops of hate. As I'm no longer allowed to fire back, I smiled and nodded at the idiocy.

The day after our products hit all-time highs in popularity.

I had an epiphany recently and came to understand Psalm 146. The things I've done for the Church have never let me down. Yes, there are political struggles and scandals in the Church, but that's not what I'm talking about. When I've surrendered myself to God's will and worked at the food bank or supported my wife as she volunteers at Hospice or when I've gone to Adoration, it's never like this.

God doesn't assemble Integrated Product Teams specifically designed to beat the tar out of me to provide political cover to get what He wants.

It will all work out in the end, but it's been an important learning experience. Put not your trust in princes, to be sure.

I never really trusted him anyway.

Cheezburger of the Day

Hilarious!

I'm Sorry, She's Busy. Please Come Back Later.

The Head of the Catican Guards protects our Maximum Leader during her afternoon meditations.

Note: The odd stripe coming diagonally down the stairs is an artifact from using the Quick Selection Tool in Photoshop. There was a patch of sunlight from our skylight on the stairs and the image came out in a dark section and a very bright section. Sloppy use of the Quick Selection Tool allowed me to increase the brightness on most of the dark section of the image, but I missed that strip. Oh well.

I left the image fairly large, so it might be worth a click to see the big version. I love these two dearly, so that advice comes from a highly biased source.

The Underlying Fallacy In Subjective Morality

In 2004, Barack Obama was interviewed by Cathleen Falsani where he gave a reply about sin that typifies subjective morality.

FALSANI: “Do you believe in sin?”
OBAMA: “Yes.”
FALSANI: “What is sin?”
OBAMA: “Being out of alignment with my values.”

Such a concept works for an individual because "my values" includes all moral proscriptions that make sense to them. The interviewer did not come back at Mr. Obama with, "So, you don't have any problem with murder, do you?" even though under his own definition of sin, murder would not be a sin for, say, the gang members in Chicago.

If that seems like a stretch, consider Dr. Gosnell's slaughterhouse and his inhuman employees. For years, they knowingly slew living babies. There's no indication from the transcripts that I've read that this was "out of alignment with their values." Therefore, snipping babies' spines was not a sin.

Again, that might seem like an extreme case. For my examples, I first chose young men raised in a feral environment where civilization has broken down and then I chose what seems to be a unique case of a psychopath who hired people desperate for work. Surely I can't be suggesting that such outliers are indicative of larger moral rot, can I?

Dig this.

In an undercover sting operation, a woman who was 23-plus weeks pregnant (abortion is illegal in New York and other states after 24 weeks) secretly recorded the conversations she had in this abortionist’s office. 

In an exchange laden with euphemisms on both sides to conceal the gruesome nature of the discussion, the pregnant woman wondered aloud what would happen if “it” (her fetus) emerged from her intact and alive. 

The employee assigned to take note of medical history reassured the woman, “We never had that for ages” (a seeming admission that a baby did survive abortion at the clinic at least once) but that should “it” “survive this,” “They would still have to put it in like a jar, a container, with solution, and send it to the lab. . . . We don’t just throw it out in the garbage.” 

Oh, and this innocuous-sounding “solution” was, of course, a toxic substance suitable for killing an infant. 

“Like, what if it was twitching?” asked the pregnant woman. 

“The solution will make it stop,” said the clinic employee. “That’s the whole purpose of the solution . . . It will automatically stop. It won’t be able to breathe anymore.”

In past blog posts, I wondered about Gosnell's employees. At the time, one could assure oneself that they were aberrations like him, freaks of society whose sense of right and wrong had been warped somehow to the point where cracking babies' spines was no different than cracking walnuts.

They don't seem like aberrations any more.

Somehow the abortionists covered in these stings were able to find employees perfectly willing to drown babies in poisonous solutions.

The underlying safety net beneath subjective morality is that no matter how "diverse" someone else's values are, you'd bet the farm that "normal" people would never cross the imaginary line you've got in your head and willingly [insert the worst thing you can think of here].

Are you so willing to place that bet now?

Music For Stressful Times

A while back, I moved my entire music collection up to Google. I now have access to it wherever I am - the office, the car, the Catican, etc. I've made some fun playlists, particularly for my cooking so if I'm cooking French, I hear lots of Jacques Brel and Joe Dassin and if it's N'awlins/Southern, I listen to a mix of Buckwheat Zydeco, Louis Prima and Mary Chapin Carpenter. I've got Ratt, Van Halen and Rolling Stones mixes for times where I need plenty of energy.

But what to listen to when times are really, really stressful?

I discovered recently that when the stress meter hits 10, I tune in to Fred Astaire on Google Music or Praise and Worship on Pandora. Don't ask me why, it just happens. Thanks to the pack of ignorant and belligerent SharePoint savages at work, I had a few days this week where our whole team felt like we were under some kind of zombie apocalypse siege*. We were forced to go to meeting after meeting where we were outnumbered and ambushed by drooling, mindless, flesh-eating SharePoint undead. When we finally felt cornered to the point that we took out our guns and started blasting their heads off (an easy thing to do as they mentally move so slowly), we were taken to task for that.

So the needle on the Stress Meter hit 10 and what did I turn on? Fred Astaire and Jesus.

Crazy, man. Just crazy.

A particular favorite of mine.

* - Then we went and did customer support and customer interviews and discovered that the vast majority of the workforce loves us.

Piranhas Nomming

I thought this was pretty cool.

6 Unhappy Million People With A Lot Of Time On Their Hands

In Spain, the unemployment rate has passed 27%.

The ranks of the unemployed in Spain climbed above six million for the first time ever as the jobless rate hit an unprecedented 27 percent in the first quarter of the year, this despite an easing of the recession in the period.

That's a powder keg waiting for a match.

Cheezburger of the Day

So We Declare Chicago Gangs To Be Terrorists. Then What?

LZ Granderson, writing at CNN Opinion, wants the government to declare the Chicago street gangs "Terrorist Organizations."

And then ...?

Drone strikes? Waterboarding? Massive POW camps?

Yay! We detained them! Now we'll ... um ...

From a cursory glance, LZ looks to be a generic progressive. More money for schools, lots of awareness-raising, plenty of government intervention. Here's where his thought process takes him.

And if the name attached to all of this violence were al-Qaeda instead of Gangster Disciples; or if instead of "gang violence" the bloodshed were called "terrorism;" or if instead of calling the people spreading fear and mayhem gangs we were to call them what they really are -- terrorists -- the nation would demand more be done.

"Demand more be done" is shorthand for "I win the political argument and the government will now spend more money, start new programs, invest in infrastructure, fight for diversity and stop Global Warming Climate Change."

As the gun violence in Chicago is simply a marker of the decay of civilization as a whole, it's not clear just what declaring the gangs to be terrorists would do. To me, it goes in the wrong direction. Terrorists are aliens, they are distant from American society. They are outsiders that come here to kill us. These aren't aliens, they are the children of our own cultural choices.

If the gangs are terrorists, does that make gangsta rappers their fire-breathing imams and Time Warner their chain of extremist mosques?

The Pink Police State Is Unsustainable

James Poulos has a term for America's parallel descents into libertine morals and massive government - the Pink Police State. Here's a sample of what he had to say about it.

So citizens of a Pink Police State (I should say subjects) are apt to surrender more and more political liberty in exchange for more and more cultural or 'personal' license. And the government of a Pink Police State tends to monopolize and totalize administrative control while carving out a permissive playpen for the people.

Read the whole thing. It's excellent.

As I've blogged ad nauseum, the libertine culture's deliberate destruction of the traditional family wrecks the economic foundation of the nation by producing an ever-growing percentage of marginally employable youth. Meanwhile, the State takes greater and greater responsibility and control over our lives to provide what we need so we can pursue excess. Unable to pay for those things because the tax base is shrinking while the spending demands increase, we get juxtapositions like this one from today's Der Spiegel.

We need to keep borrowing. We want to eliminate any hierarchy of sexual relationships.

The culture that produced unsustainable debt is the same one that wants to eliminate any preference for the traditional family. We're not such a complicated species that the same forces aren't at work in the two places.

Enjoy your libertine moment in the sun. It won't last.

Dealing With Minor Sabotage And Annoying Snipers At Work

Lately at work, my team has had to interact with individuals who are bitterly clinging to the hope that our organization will shell out huge dollars for a SharePoint instance. Looking through our server logs, we've found that none of the MSFT partisans have used our existing intranet tools - blogs, wiki, social networking, etc. On top of that, none of them could write a line of code if you held a gun to their heads.

They're ignorant, intolerant, aggressive and quite vocal. They are also a small minority. Our stats show massive use of our products, continual growth and declining trouble ticket generation. Despite this, some of our leadership is marginally in their camp and has encouraged their agitations by commissioning a team of them to do an Analysis of Alternatives (AoA).

The AoA is a total waste of time. We've got nothing like the kind of money necessary to roll out SharePoint even if it did provide something of value, which the growing AoA tables and charts are showing it does not. The SP partisans aren't any better at business case analysis than they are at HTML or PHP and so they fight on, using any tool that comes to hand to make their case. The result is days like yesterday where a colleague and I had to spend an hour in someone's office defending Google search as a method to find things. He then went on to another hour of a leadership meeting under even worse conditions.

You heard me right, they question the value of Google search.

Rather than enduring this any longer and then boozing it up when I get home to deal with the unvented anger, I sat outside last night with a (small) glass of wine and mused.

The thing to realize is that no matter how complicated things are, there are only a small, finite number of actual issues. I can't find things with Google search, the sites don't have a common look and feel, wiki is an unfamiliar technology and I live a sad and lonely life and hope that MSFT can find me a date.

It's hard to do, but to counter this kind of slander, you've got to separate your emotions from the attacks and develop a sound counter-argument to each one. Those counter-arguments need to be memorized and trotted out every time the snarling starts. You've got to program yourself to robotically spew forth the logic and data that led you to the decisions you made. While they're waving their arms and raging or smirking and taking pot shots, you need to remain calm and detached, slaying each in turn with minimal effort and no venom.

Without a canned, prepared response to each attack, you're just playing a particularly unpleasant game of whack-a-mole.

DO NOT WANT.

Relax

 All tensed up because it's Monday? Spend a little time gazing at our Maximum Leader in deep meditation and see if that doesn't ease the stress. Click on the image for a full-strength dose of inner peace.

Willpower: An Ivory Tower Bubble Book

With an Audible credit burning a hole in my pocket and all previous titles either heard or dismissed as unfinishable, I scoured my wish list and came across Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Messrs Baumeister and Tierney. I bought the thing and I'm now about 3 hours into what looks to be a pretty tough, 9-hour slog.

It's not that the writing is bad or the information inaccessible. No, the examples they use are easy to follow and the prose is relatively sprightly for a book like this. It's just that almost everything they say is forehead-smackingly obvious to the average person and staggeringly brilliant to themselves. Sociology fans both, Baumeister and Tierney have discovered that low blood sugar saps your willpower. Wowsers! There's lots more like this in the sections I've heard so far.

They were also stunned to find out that willpower existed in the first place. Back when they started, you see, willpower was sneered at by all thinking people in the universities as an appendage of long-dismissed Victorian prudery. Experiments with undergrads as their test subjects in their labs proved that willpower actually existed. Shocking!

Finally, there's a mix of bigotry and ignorance when they write about anything outside of their field of expertise, such as that is. The text is littered with snide comments about religion, centered around the theme that it's all nonsense and Science! is showing how believers were just witnessing things that sociology can now explain. On top of their Thomist-lessness, they use an example of planning from military history that shows they know nothing at all of military history*.

Frankly, they should stick with their sociology and leave it at that.

Or maybe they should go pick tomatoes with some migrant farm workers.

You see, the most salient feature of the book is not the topic itself, but the way in which the authors congratulate themselves for learning things that Jose Garcia, semi-literate farm worker, probably already knows and certainly uses every day. That sociologists have conducted experiments and analyzed data to prove that self-denial leads to success in life isn't an indication that such an assertion is true, it's an indication that sociology itself may be a complete waste of time. Three hours in, they've managed to breathlessly inform me of things that my ignorant, superstitious, Catholic ancestors knew all along.

By remaining closeted inside this building, we learn about the world.

As for strengthening willpower, we'll see where the book goes. That's the only reason I'm clinging to a hope of finishing it - that there might be some nuggets of wisdom in it after all. So far, the best one has been that willpower can be depleted through use, so if you're trying to give up a vice, give up just one at a time.

I've got the feeling that this book is going to end up like the Koran: A desperate struggle to grind my way through the last half.

It will be a real exercise in willpower to do it.

* - It's no surprise that they're ignorant of military history. Mr. Tierney is an NYT reporter and such ignorance seems to be a prerequisite for the job.

I Am Filled With Righteous Anger

I'm batching* it this weekend. My wife is working a women's retreat, our oldest son is at Coachella and our daughter is off doing other things. That means I can play my music loud, watch lots and lots and lots of English Premier League soccer and cook smelly food that only appeals to me.

More about the culinary self-gratification later. For now, I have a Crime Against Humanity to report.

I can't find the tweezers.

Were they stolen? Are they hidden in someone's room? Did one of my flown birds take this precious, critical tool with them? Who knows? Who cares? The important thing is that I need them and I can't find them. That alone is worthy of a towering rage.

I just wish someone was here to feel my wrath.

More precious than carbuncles, whatever carbuncles are.

* - I'm a bachelor this weekend. I'm baching it? No, that sounds like a classical composer. It's pronounced batching, so that's the way it must be spelled even though bachelor lacks the t.

Cheezburger Of The Day

Mary Curtis Reports On The Nuremberg Trials

... and decides they were a local matter.

Over at the WaPo, Mary Curtis is yammering away about the Gosnell war crimes trial and suggests that it's not at all about industrial mass murder, but instead it's about the handful of individuals who were killed by the maniac.  And his staff. Working as a team. A team that didn't seem to see a problem with the whole thing and lived in a culture where a million plus Gosnellizations a year isn't a big deal. A team that committed orders of magnitude more killings than the records show because as the Allies approached, the records were destroyed. But the less said about those addenda, the better.

Yes, yes, it's all a local matter. Stop bringing politics or religion or whatever your hobby horse is into this thing. Think of the individual woman who was murdered and the couple of nameless babies who were spine-snipped.

Makes sense to me.

Really, there's no point in trying to draw broader conclusions from a single trial.

What Happened To Their Hearts?

Link of the day - Front Row At The Gosnell Horror Show. Excerpt:

The evidence that kept emerging the few days I was there is jaw dropping and poignant. Dr. Hellman explained all the charts that medical professionals have to work out the age of a fetus. They measure the length and width of the baby, they weigh organs, and they compare them to charts of previous autopsies of babies whose age they knew. Dr. Hellman said that based on the charts, he conservatively estimated Baby Girl Manning was between 28- and 29-weeks-old.

He was asked about another incident where a member of staff described an “aborted fetus” as being 18 inches to a foot long. Dr. Hellman was asked to estimate the child’s age given those dimensions. He replied simply that such a baby would be “off the charts.” In other words it was a fully formed baby whose delivery was engineered so that Dr. Gosnell could push a pair of scissors into its neck to snip its spinal cord.

Confession: I love babies. I have very strong parental instincts. My wife does, too. We can't wait to have grandchildren. The more the better.

Not everyone has such strong affection for babies, but for crying out loud, what happened to these people? Babies were born, wriggling and crying and doing all those baby things biologically engineered to drive us to instinctively protect and care for them and the staff shoved scissors in their necks.

I'd compare these people to the members of the Einsatzgruppen, but those poor devils at least had some vestiges of morality.

Shooting on this scale, particularly of women and children, was destroying the morale of the Einsatzgruppen. Some committed suicide, or were admitted to mental asylums. As Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski allegedly said to Himmler after the latter had witnessed a shooting action at Minsk in August 1941: "Such men are finished for the rest of their lives! What kind of followers are we creating? Either neurotics or brutes."

I'd read elsewhere that the soldiers in the Einsatzgruppen took to alcoholism in a big way. There's no report that Gosnell's employees had similar problems.

What in the world happened to these people?

Shooting adults at a distance as part of a group sent these men around the bend. Stabbing babies in the necks with scissors did ... what?

Very Nice Stones Fan Video

Driving into work this morning, I tuned in to my Rolling Stones playlist on Google Music. "Too Tight" came up and I wondered if there was a music video for it. It looks like it was a filler track on the album, Bridges to Babylon, and didn't warrant a video. Still, I like the song and was able to find a very nice fan-produced music video for it. It gets a bit redundant as the guy seems to have run out of source material halfway through and I wish he'd matched the beat in his cuts from 2:00 to 2:15 - that would have absolutely rocked. Even so, it's a very nice piece of art.

Enjoy.

Gunmen And Gosnell

Something to think about.

When some nut runs into a school or a mall and shoots people, he does it alone and it lasts less than half an hour. Dr. Gosnell had a staff and it lasted about 17 years. This wasn't a single, deranged person committing mass murder. This was institutional.

Plumbing Stories Aren't Newsworthy

So by now, I'm guessing many of have heard of Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia abortionist who ran a clinic so gruesome that Roger Corman wouldn't have shown it in his worst slasher movie. If you haven't heard about it, thanks to a near total news blackout, Google the name and prepare to be nauseated.

I read a new detail yesterday that blew my mind. Gosnell performed late term abortions where you induce labor and then try to kill the baby before it escapes. It got so bad that women were giving birth on his toilet to the point they had to call in a plumber to remove the toilet and unclog the pipes below.

Yes, you heard correctly, the pipes were clogged with fetuses.

And that's why Dr. Gosnell's combination torture chamber and slaughterhouse wasn't newsworthy. Who wants to hear stories about plumbers?

Should Poland Have Surrendered To The Nazis On The First Day?

Yesterday, while hanging around in the chapel up here on the retreat, one of the deacons shared a letter he'd received from a 15 year old girl in Juvenile Hall. He ministers to the kids and this one looked to be turning a corner after a serious bout with drugs.

Some folks want to legalize drugs. They say the war is lost and we're just waiting money on it.

The letter was heartbreaking.

Poland knew the jig was up, if not on the first day, then certainly after the first week. Should they have surrendered early? Is there something more important than saving money? Is there such a thing as fighting because it's the right thing to do, regardless of the outcome?

Breaking Out Of Your Rut

...  is a good thing.

I'm working a men's retreat this weekend and blogging from my little Galaxy S3. It's going to be a great weekend.

The thing that has struck me so far is how energizing it is to hang out with a very different set of people. I'm getting to work alongside doctors, cops, business owners, lawyers, caterers and all kinds of people I'd never have a chance to even greet on a normal day.

The conversations are terrific. I wasn't sure I wanted to work this weekend, but I can see now I was guided into it.

Why Don't You Get A Better Job?

Sitting at a dinner table with a bunch of committed lefties or conversing with them on Facebook has led me to come up with a simple question for them.

Why don't you earn more?

In some of my social circles, the people I associate with have no serious problems. They have good educations, they come from stable families and they were given all the advantages in life one has a right to expect. There's nothing holding them back from earning in the mid-6-figure range. If they were ambitious, they could climb the corporate ladder or expand their businesses until they brought in $500,000 or thereabouts. Oh, sure, they'd have to sacrifice other things in their lives, but such income is certainly within the realm of possibilities.

So, among the progressives, why don't they? They vote for spending, spending and more spending by the government, but they don't pay, pay and pay more in taxes. That's left for the rest of us. There's a serious disconnect there.

If you voted for Obama, but you didn't go out and work your tail off to earn more money, then you are implicitly telling the rest of us to pay for your self-regard.

There's a bumper sticker, Internet campaign or slogan in all of this, but I'm not coming up with it right now. Throwing out political personalities, this is the foundational statement made by the Obama voters in a certain class:

"I helped increase government spending. Now you need to pay for it. Get to work."

Next time I get involved in one of these discussions online or at a party, I'll see if I can gently bring this up. I did it once with one of my progressive friends on Facebook and the whole concept floored him. He tried to argue that the deck was stacked against people like him earning lots of money, but I think we both knew that was just an excuse to avoid work. At least I knew. I let him get away with it at the time, but I think I could continue the conversation without being abusive.

After all, why are we paying for someone else's decisions if they're not willing to do so?

Why am I your beast of burden?

Sometimes You Just Need Some Sarah Palin

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

She's referring to this.

Oh yes, I almost forgot.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

PS: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Breathtakingly Venal

Terse post. In hurry. No time for composition. Probably didn't have time for this introduction*.

Had a dinner party with some thoroughly progressive people. After discussing Watergate's meaning (Republicans are evil) and how terribly funny Stephen Colbert is (very!), it was suggested that one teenage daughter's upcoming college tuition might be defrayed by taking all payments for the parents' freelance work under the table, allowing them to go on food stamps and qualify for aid. It was further suggested that she attend Berkley (diversity!), avoid USC (rich people!) and use her mother's birth-Judaism to help her get into college, even though no one but us attended any kind of religious services or were even vaguely aware of basic religious precepts.

Unable to think of an option other than screaming, "You venal guttersnipes!" I said nothing.

What would you have said that would allow you retain these people as friends? Since then, I decided that I might have gently suggested the young lady attend synagogue and learn something of Judaism, but other than that, I'm at a loss.

* - Or that sentence**.

** - Or that footnote.

Stop Complaining About The Culture

... and start making a better alternative!

That's the theme of a terrific new book I'm listening to via Audible: Culture Making by Andy Crouch.

The analogy he uses is making chili for his kids. He makes it with sauteed onions, bell peppers and chunks of tomatoes. They're young children and they don't like the mixed colors or chunky fruit*. They have to eat it anyway because he and his wife like it and they don't cater to the whims of the kids. The surly, little urchins are left with three choices: protest, boycott or learn to cook something better to replace it.

So it goes with not just evangelicals (his directly intended audience), but any of us fed up with the porn / violence / excessive use of wombats / whatever that we loathe in modern culture. We can march and protest against hateful films and music, we can boycott them at the box office or we can make something better and drive the culture in a direction we want. Andy shows how the first two are useless, making the third the only viable option.

I'm not quite halfway through it, but I'm loving it. Right now, he's suggesting we need to be knowledgeable consumers of culture because, like playing sports or working on engineering problems, you can't create culture without a solid background in it.

As I've listened, I've become convinced that the reason orthodox Christianity isn't better represented in the popular culture is that we've opted out of it in a snit. We've taken the boycott route. By divorcing ourselves from culture we've made ourselves culturally ignorant and utterly passive. We don't understand and we don't try to create because we've made popular culture into an enemy.

Great stuff. More on the topic later.

Stop just critiquing and start doing. All that pointless, deep-thinking, snobby analysis of the culture just makes you sleepy.

* - Tomatoes are fruits, after all. It looks strange in print, doesn't it?

Stair Cat Stares

This is one of my all-time favorite photos of our Maximum Leader. She's recently back from the vet, the injection took away most of her arthritis pain and she's relaxed and happy. The vet gave us strict instructions not to let her jump from high places, so the Catican (garage) has been ruled off limits, making her a house and yard cat. She's become much more sociable and affectionate as a result. Click on the image to get a real sense of her mood.

The Chassis Is Your Friend

I was back working on the MGB wiring yesterday, teaching myself to braid, solder and shrink-tube triple wire connections so I could run a common ground line through the trunk. After three attempts, I got the hang of it when I realized that running ground wires was stupid. All you need to do is run the ground wire to the nearest bolt that goes into the chassis. The chassis is your wiring harness for grounding!

The left-side rear flasher and a safety light go straight into the screw that holds on the flasher bulb housing. No need to make an elaborate wiring harness.

I didn't feel bad about learning to braid, solder and shrink-tube, though. I'll need it for the feed lines coming back from the engine compartment where they go to more than one bulb at the same time. I used the video below (there are zillions of the things like this on YouTube) and just as advertised, it gave me an incredibly strong, conductive junction.

Well, If You Didn't Build That

... then it stands to reason that the fruits of "that" aren't really yours.

From the files of doom monger Zero Hedge, we have this lovely idea:

President Obama’s budget, to be released next week, will limit how much wealthy individuals ... can keep in IRAs and other retirement accounts.

The proposal would save around $9 billion over a decade, a senior administration official said, while also bringing more fairness to the tax code.

The senior administration official said that wealthy taxpayers can currently “accumulate many millions of dollars in these accounts, substantially more than is needed to fund reasonable levels of retirement saving.

Something they might not have considered: If it's not your business, it's not your money and it's not your retirement, then that national debt they need serviced is not your problem.

Where you go (or just stash your cash) is up to you, but you have to admit, Brazil is nice.

Elsewhere across the SLOBosphere, WC Varones recommends buying gold in foreign countries so your wealth can't be taxed.

Brazil is nice.

Note: The video is a tiny excerpt from the Monkees episode, The Spy Who Came In From The Cool. The song in the background is Steppin Stone.

If We Can Just Get Another 2.5 Million People To Leave The Workforce, We'll Have Paradise!

Today, the unemployment rate shrank by 0.2% to 7.6%. The Fed said it will stop printing money like crazy once unemployment hits 6.5%. Since the drop in unemployment was due to about 500,000 people giving up on working at all, by my calculations, we just need another 2,500,000 to join them and Zimbabwe Ben will stop the printing presses.

Forward!

Doing Schtick With The Downtrodden

One of the best things about working at the Catholic Charities Food Resource Center (FRC) this week was the getting the chance to perform for the customers.

The folks coming to see you at the FRC are beaten down. Some live on the street, some have no food at all at home, some are escaping abuse and some are clearly liars and weasels who have made a life of teeny-weeny bits of graft and theft*. After I got the hang of the computer and the Excel spreadsheet we used to track clients, customer intake became pretty boring, so it was a chance to make them feel good about themselves. They'd shuffle in, dejected, either determined not to miss their spot in line or hoping for a chance to get a walk-in appointment and score some food. A bright smile, a bit of mock surprise and some patter cheered them right up.

"I didn't sign in, can I still get some food?"

"Of course! We held the place open hoping you'd show up! To tell you the truth, we've all been waiting for you to come in!" and on and on like that. They'd smile and relax and from then on, the conversation was warm and pleasant. I had a great time. I think I got more out of the job than they did.

Henny Youngman. Now that's some good schtick.

* - It was pretty easy to detect cheating, but I let it go. Who cares? Honey, you're cheating me out of some canned goods. I think we can deal with this.

An Infidel? I Don't Think So

From our spam mailbag comes this scurrilous* accusation against the smaller of the two Catican Guards who is of mixed parentage - Chihuahua and Cocker Spaniel.

Chihuahua - As the disperse symbol of Infield Dog casino Online, the amount of bountifulness o'er boniface of challenges going away you washed-out and drained out.

A disperse symbol of Infidel Dog? That is an outrageous assertion and it will not go unanswered. You'll be hearing from our lawyers. When the firm of Papandopolis, Ng and O'Reilly gets through with you, you'll be the one feeling washed-out and drained out.

* - That's "scurrilous" not "scurrylous." There's nothing wrong with scurrying or any of its derivative activities.

Acting On A Small Scale

A while back, Tim posed the following problem to the crack editorial staff here at the 'Post:

For a long time, you've mainly just been stating what you see as being wrong with society. But, you're pretty light on suggestions on what to do about it. Frankly, I think your postings are mostly the equivalent of the guy with a sandwich board on the street corner, railing about how the end of the world is coming. And we know how successful those guys are in actually accomplishing anything.

So, how about discussing what, if anything, we can actually do to encourage people to raise children as married couples instead of as individuals

So here's a not-quite-so-answery answer, but not the last time we'll muddle through the topic.

Yesterday, as part of an object lesson for my high school sophomore daughter, we took the bus downtown and worked at the Catholic Charities food assistance program office. She bagged and sorted stock while I processed and interviewed clients. I'll blog the object lesson later because I think it worked quite well.

While there helping the homeless, the elderly and the generally hosed, it didn't matter what was happening in society at large. I was able to discharge my Catholic mission of individual acts of kindness and charity; macroeconomics good or bad doesn't affect that. As Christ said, "the poor will always be with you" (Mark 14:7).

What does matter is what you do in your own life. As Dave Ramsey said, "Poor people can't help anyone" (Ramsey 12:23). In an oblique and very partial answer to Tim's excellent challenge, I'd say you need to pursue success and share the fruits of your labor with others that through your example, your charity and your counsel, you can bring them to success as well.

As my success formula is marriage, thrift, religion and useful skills, living by example and acts of kindness will have some affect on the people around you and more so if you're actively out in the community helping those who have crashed and burned.

It can't hurt.

Planted

Tired of replanting her every time she grew, we put Momma Daisy and her progeny in our raised bed garden. I think she likes it there.