Fighting Tanks With Minivans

Dig this.

(Ukrainian Army volunteer) Mr. Kravchenko said he joined the militia because he wanted Ukraine to be part of Europe...His training consisted of calisthenics and one day of shooting a Kalashnikov, he said...The unit, funded by private donations, was no match for the artillery and tank fire of the Russian military...Mr. Kravchenko said he boarded a minivan that joined a column of at least 60 other Ukrainian vehicles, which left Ilovaisk early in the morning. Ukraine's poorly funded armed forces often rely on buses and minivans to ferry many of their troops. After the convoy had been on the road about an hour, Russians and Russia-backed militia opened fire on it, first with mortars, then with machine guns, he said.

Mr. Kravchenko said the minivan broke down after it was riddled with bullets, and he jumped aboard a municipal bus carrying troops. Within minutes it was raked by machine gun fire that mowed down the passengers, killing the man sitting next to him and wounding Mr. Kravchenko in the shoulder, he said.

He piled out of the bus with a handful of survivors and jumped aboard a pickup truck carrying six other men, which continued before it, too, was hit by machine gun fire and then blew up when it was hit by a grenade. Most of the others died in the pickup, he said, or were killed when they took cover beneath it and it exploded, he said.

Bravery? Yes. Equipment? No.

Something tells me Putin isn't done yet.

Dealing With Microsoft Calls For

... a riot!


At work, my hard drive crashed. No problem, as almost everything I've got is on a server somewhere. All I need to do is reinstall my apps.

Adobe Creative Cloud, fine. Camtasia, fine. XAMPP, fine. And so on.

Microsoft Office? Hahahahaha! Prepare to go through enterprise license hell, you worthless peasant!

I hate Microsoft. (Except Windows 7. That's petty good.)

In Rotherham, They Believed Us

... when we told them how horrible we were.

In her junior year at high school, my daughter took history from an anti-American racialist. I blogged about it several times including As Ye Sow So Shall Ye Reap which included this tidbit.

At my daughter's public high school, her history teacher preaches racialism morning, noon and night. Almost every time we've asked for extra credit assignments, they've been suggestions to watch racialist movies like 12 Years a Slave, The Butler, Cesar Chavez and so on. In order to gain some extra credit points, my daughter had to go to the MLK Day Parade here in San Diego. The textbook is no better. The chapter on WW II is a wonder to see.

The first 8 photographs in the chapter are of minorities and women. The chapter deals exclusively with WW II, not the lead-up to it nor the aftermath. It's straight-up wartime history twisted into racialism. The white guy with the biggest photo in the chapter is ... President Clinton apologizing to a Japanese internment victim. Eisenhower's photo is 1/6 the size.

In England, they've done much the same thing, denigrating British history with accusations of imperialism, racism, class oppression and so on. When the Pakistani immigrants came, they came with some pride in their own culture. When they were told the British culture was built upon evil and stupidity, who were they to argue?

The end result was that the ones running the rape gangs in Rotherham (and who knows where else) viewed the natives as subhuman trash. And why not? After all, year after year in school, the children were taught to hate the cultural heritage of England.

Rotherham is what happens when you deliberately demoralize your own people.

Rotherham, 1980

How much would you like to bet that 30 years ago, in or around Rotherham, England, there was an argument between an opponent of mass immigration and a multicultural academic that went something like this:

Unlettered, knuckle-dragging yob: 'Ere now, don't let all those Pakis in here, it's not right!

Tweed-coated, superior academic: Please. What do you think they're going to do, rape your daughters?

Who Are Our Friends In The Middle East?

Almost nobody, writes Andrew McCarthy in this excellent piece.

Another Species

After the Ferguson riots, some stores aren't rebuilding. Gateway Pundit reports that one of the local gas station / convenience stores is leaving the area. In that post, there's this CBS interview of three young men from Ferguson complaining about the lack of opportunities.


The payoff quote, at about 0:50, is, "We tired of being looked at like we another species. It ain't even like we human," spoken to a CBS crew who clearly see them as another species.

The trio are able-bodied, covered in tattoos and one fondles a smartphone. They can barely speak English. Their choices in life have limited possible careers, but there are still plenty of jobs open to them. If they were able to find the disposable income for tattoos and smartphones, they've got the cash for bus tickets to get to where the jobs are.

Had the reporter seen these three as members of his own species, his own family, he'd have asked very different questions indeed. His reaction to their complaints would not have been to nod his head and implicitly endorse their statements.

What would you say to them if they were your own children?

In the Bakken oil fields there are plenty of jobs for guys like these. Here's one ad.

Eaton Construction LLC now hiring laborers for pipeline crews and taking applications for others listed. Pay DOE but ranging from $16-$28/hr. PIPELINE APPLICANTS must live in Eaton housing and no Per Diem will be considered for pipelining positions. Experience in oil & gas pipelining preferred but not necessary.

Yes, these three have lots of tats and judging from their speech, they probably read at the fourth grade level, but there are opportunities available to them, ones that pay a decent wage. Watching the video, you want to hear it discussed, but it never comes.

In the eyes of God, these young men are no different from anyone else. It's too bad the CBS crew didn't treat them like that.

If A Tree Falls In The Forest

... and a white person isn't there to see it, does it make a sound?

The death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO and subsequent spasm of media coverage was something to behold. During the weeks that passed as reporters were interviewing everyone and the rioting and looting were happening, young, black men were being shot elsewhere in significant numbers. I don't have the exact stats in front of me, but I seem to recall something like a dozen or so killed in Chicago alone in a 2-week period.

Those dead dudes in Chicago weren't profiled because no whites were involved. How racist is that? It's like black people have no meaning other than as fashion accessories for whites. No point interviewing the mothers of the dead black guys in Philadelphia / Newark / Detroit or wherever, no whites were part of the event.

Is there racism in America? Yes. Tons of it. Progressives' mania for finding evidence of racism is the source of the racism. Michael Brown's only role in life, or role in death, really, was to provide a stick to beat their political opponents. Without a white guy involved, with no way to turn this into proof of American racism, Michael Brown is just one more dead, black dude.

Open Mindedness And The Problem Of Evil

Time for blogging is at a premium, so my posts have been and will continue to be short for the time being. Here's another quicky.

Sand in the Gears has a blog post on the Rotherham poltroonery. If you're unsure of what that is, here's the synopsis.

News accounts from England reveal that over 1,400 children in the borough of Rotherham were systematically brutalized over the past decade. The authors of this damning report indicate that the actual number is likely much higher. The report also details gang rapes of 11 year-olds. Children doused in gasoline and threatened with matches. A “grooming” process that entails addicting children to drugs. Children murdered, others missing...

(T)he unavoidable reality is that on many occasions, Rotherham police came upon children being sexually exploited—in some cases, in the very instance of being raped—and arrested no one. The perpetrators are Pakistani; they might call us racists.

So the authorities knew it was happening, but did nothing. For years. Because they had been immersed in a culture of open-mindedness.

The whole concept of acceptance of different cultures and lifestyles presumes the absence of evil. When being judgmental becomes the worst thing possible, cultural safety barriers are removed, which assumes society doesn't need objective standards of morality. And so the barriers fell, one after another until children were drugged, raped and murdered by the hundreds in England. England.

When you're not willing to create hard and fast rules because someone might be offended, you allow the behaviors of the very worst members of society to determine what is right and wrong. Guess what? Nothing will be "wrong."

Could You Spend $5800 At Target?

... in one trip?

Well, could you?

Van Halen II

... seems pretty underrated to me. I just picked it up off Google Play this weekend, the last of the David Lee Roth Van Halen albums that I didn't own. I remember back in the day how my friends all panned it, but I think it's got plenty of gems like this one, Women in Love. Apologies if this doesn't play on your phone. Some YouTube videos don't and I'm not quite sure why.


There's a live version from 2012 that shows the band can still play and they can still hit the notes when they sing. It's a fan video, so the quality isn't perfect, but it captures the sound well enough.

One More Reason To Love The Cloud

When we go to Mass, I turn my phone off and leave it in the car. Coming back out, I turned it on and saw the message: "Your data has been corrupted. To reset your phone, everything must be erased."

Yikes!

The phone is a Galaxy S3 that is 1 month from renewal. I pressed the reset button, expecting to have lost all my information. It took a while for it to recover and reload information from the cloud, but in the end, it looks like the only things I lost were all my text messages. That's not too bad for a catastrophic data failure.

Richard Dawkins And Stephen Hawking

Champ atheist and all-around good guy Ricky D has made waves recently pitching hard for the mass slaughter of babies with Down's Syndrome.

The geneticist's latest Twitter row broke out after he responded to another user who said she would be faced with "a real ethical dilemma" if she became pregnant with a baby with Down's syndrome.

Dawkins tweeted: "Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice."

How about people like Stephen Hawking? Is it moral to let them live past a certain point? Their quality of life isn't very good and eventually, they're a net burden on society. The Rickster is a smart fellow and I'm sure he knows all kinds of shrewd dudes. Maybe they could come up with a simple Excel spreadsheet for us yokels to use to determine when to off ourselves, our babies and our relatives. We wouldn't want to be doing anything immoral now.

Say, something just occurred to me. Isn't Rick getting a bit long in the tooth himself? Something to think about, D-man. Eugenics isn't something that applies to everyone else, you know. If you don't do it universally it doesn't do much good.

Concealed Carry

Thinking about yesterday's post where I showed a police training video dealing with an attacker with a knife, I don't think concealed carry is a panacea for self defense. In the video, a cop has to have his hand on his gun and at least 21' of distance between himself and an attacker with a knife to have a good chance to survive. If your gun is concealed on your person, getting it out and using it effectively is going to take even longer.

I'd think that you'd have to be trained in both hand-to-hand combat and carry a concealed weapon to feel reasonably safe going in to bad situations. You'd also have to reflexively choose which to use in the split second things went bad.

Finally, if you want to see something really alarming, dig this.

Taking On Someone With A Gun

When I was taking kung fu, we were instructed that in cases where an assailant had a gun, you had to close the distance fast if you were to have any hope at all of coming out of the situation alive. The video below reverses the problem and gives you the gun. Again, the opponent's goal is to close the distance as fast as possible to render your gun useless. While I did a bit of live fighting and plenty of weapons training, we never tried the gun scenarios at full speed. I find these videos actually frightening to watch. A guy with a knife, some athletic ability and total ruthlessness has the advantage over someone with a gun, provided the distance is not too great. That is really scary.

Enjoy?

The Ferguson Riots: Kristallnacht Carried Out By Mr. Magoo

How's that for a wacky title?

If you don't know Mr. Magoo, he was a cartoon character whose terrible nearsightedness led to all kinds of funny hijinks.

During Kristallnacht, the Nazis singled out Jewish businesses for looting and vandalism.

In Ferguson, black protesters, angered at racial injustices, have looted and vandalized all businesses, including those owned by other blacks.

Maybe the protesters are all nearsighted, just like Mr. Magoo and they can't tell who owns what.

Or maybe it's not a protest at all. Maybe it's just looting and vandalism.

Object Manipulation In A Photo

I wonder if they could do this from a painting.

I'm Pretty Lucky

I live in a neighborhood where, if a cop shot a kid, I'd be able to shop at my local stores the next day. Others aren't so lucky. Whether they like it or not, their shopping areas get burned out when something like that goes down.

That's got to be pretty exhausting. You come home from work, you need to stop at the store to get something for dinner and you can't because the place has been burned down by some (probably very few) of your neighbors. So off you go to a different place, possibly much farther away to carry out mundane chores.

I doubt that you come home from that shopping trip pumping your fist in the air because someone stuck it to The Man. Nope, someone stuck it to you. That stinks.

Lessons Learned From A San Diego Boat Dive

Yesterday, the lads and I went out on the Waterhorse to dive the Point Loma kelp beds. We'd never done a boat dive here in San Diego. In the past, we'd started from La Jolla Cove and had to swim more than half a mile to get out to the kelp. Yours truly is getting a bit old for that sort of thing and while the kelp was interesting, there was always a warranted bit of fear about the swim back in full gear. We figured that hopping off a boat and exploring the kelp from there would be a lot less work and a lot more fun.

Boy, were we wrong. It could be fun in the future, but this trip was more of a painful education. Here's what we learned.

1. Rent your gear from the charter boat store if they offer it. We rented from our favorite dive shop. When we picked up the gear, we didn't check it. One of the boys was given a wetsuit a size too small and they forgot to pack a hood for him. He's pretty ripped, so he looked like Batman in his medium wetsuit once he struggled into it. Without the hood, he couldn't stay in the cold water more than 5 minutes. He had to bail out almost immediately.
2. If you're prone to get cold, use a wetsuit undershirt. We didn't even know these existed until we saw one of the more experienced divers on the boat with one. Our other son has almost no body fat at all. While he had a full wetsuit and hood, he was freezing to death below 25'. There is a warm layer near the surface, but it gets really cold deeper than that. We were in 60-90' of water and he was not able to go anywhere near that deep. With a 5 mil wetsuit undershirt beneath his 7 mil wetsuit, he probably would have been fine.
3. If you're going to buy gear, buy the wetsuit first. If you do that, you'll always have one that fits and doesn't have severe wear and tear. Our rented wetsuits were in pretty bad shape.
4. Bring your own mask-clearing liquid. This boat didn't have a bucket of soapy water for your mask to keep it from fogging up. Masks can fog up quickly in cold water.
5. Don't go on an afternoon boat. The winds here in San Diego pick up in the afternoon as the desert to the east heats up and draws air. Winds mean waves which means difficulty getting on and off the boat and seasickness. We didn't get sick, but one of the women on the boat was leaning over the side, calling out for those two Irishmen, O'Rourke and McDougal soon after the first dive.
6. Getting ready on shore is a lot easier than getting ready on a boat. A boat is crowded and pitching. If you're still a newbie like we are (we've only done about 20 dives each), it really helps to have space and time to make sure your gear is all properly set up. I improperly threaded the straps holding my tank on and had to have it rethreaded by the captain right at the back of the boat as I was about to jump in the water.

Thankfully, the winds really picked up after the first dive and the captain scrubbed the rest of the trip, skipping the two additional dives that were planned. One dive was enough for us yesterday.

I was able to get one decent video while I was down. Enjoy.

Ferguson, Missouri Crime Stats

If you've not see it before, city-data is a great site for summary statistics by zip code. It's made for the real estate industry, but it's a great resource for bloggers, too.

Lots of people are barking about the "militarization" of the police following the death of Michael Brown and the subsequent riots. Whatever militarization means and whenever it happened in Ferguson, the results seem to have been pretty good for the people who live there.

Overall, crime has been going down in Ferguson since 2009 and pretty substantially at that. From 2009 to 2012, crime has dropped by about a third. If I lived in Ferguson, I don't know that I'd be complaining about the police. Individual mistakes happen sometimes with tragic results. If the crime rate has dropped by 33% over the last 4 years, the police must be doing something right.

It's A Whole New World!

Over at the New York Times, Tommy Friedman sat down with President Obama for a sycophantic sweat licking session foreign policy interview which yielded this core principle.

Obama made clear that he is only going to involve America more deeply in places like the Middle East to the extent that the different communities there agree to an inclusive politics of no victor/no vanquished. The United States is not going to be the air force of Iraqi Shiites or any other faction.

That's awesome! Just like kindergarten and pee wee soccer, there are no winners and losers, no victors and no vanquished. We're redrawing the map of the world here, kids. In terms of international influence, it's going to look something like this.

Nations and movements who cling to old fashioned notions of survival and surrender are going to have to make a go of it without us.

We Won!

It's over! We've accomplished what we needed to accomplish and ISIS has been ... pestered. Or something like that.  With just a few thousand Yazidis left on the top of the mountain dying horribly and only six figures of Iraqi Christians in refugee camps or on the run, we're picking up our toys and going home.


Ignore all of my posts from the last few days discussing air strikes and a war against ISIS. We never intended to do any significant harm to ISIS at all. The mission was to help some people. Consider those some people helped.

Update: It looks like we're doing a bit more to help the Kurds these days. That's a plus.

Link Of The Day

Retired Major General Scales lays out a reasonable evolution for the air strikes against ISIS. Here's a tidbit, but you really ought to read the whole thing.

Recent history suggests there will be strategic consequences from seeking to blunt the Islamic State advance through airpower alone. First, the effectiveness of pinpoint strikes will diminish quickly; it generally takes only a few weeks for a disciplined force to become inured to the psychological effects of such firepower.

Second, as the enemy becomes harder to kill, a greater investment will be needed to get the same results. Soon “targeted strikes” by only one or two aircraft will become meaningless, and more bombs will be needed. This will require a proper air campaign, which will increase the density of aircraft overhead and the concurrent risk to pilots. We saw this happen in the Balkans in 1999.

Itai!

That means "Ouch!" or "It hurts!" in Japanese. And hurt it does. Dig this.

TOKYO—Japan's economy contracted sharply in the second quarter after a sales-tax increase in April sent household spending tumbling, which economists said could pressure the government to take additional stimulus measures.

Real gross domestic product, the total value of all goods and services produced in the economy, shrank 6.8% in the three months through June on an annualized basis from the prior quarter.

Not to worry, though. The Japanese government is considering a stimulus package.

208% debt to GDP ratio? No problem! Spend more! Let's make it 250%!

"I don't think we're going to solve this problem in weeks”

... said President Obama.

"Oh yes we will," said ISIS.

Even if we militarily defeat ISIS at some point in the future, the only people left in a 10,000 square mile region of Iraq and Syria will be ISIS civilians. Everyone else will be dead or driven out and all of their property blown up, burned, looted and defiled. Even if there are a few thousand Yazidis and Christians left to return to the area, why would they bother?

This is another brilliant strategic move by ISIS. By moving to exterminate everyone else at top speed, they use one of our weaknesses against us - our inability to take quick action. While we dither and discuss, they kill and destroy. Our superior firepower becomes useless in a generational sense. In the end, they may be "defeated" as B-Daddy asserts, but they will still have won. 20, 40, 60 years from now there will be descendants of the ISIS citizens living in that region. There will be no descendants from the dead Christians and Yazidi.

There is such a thing as too late.

MANCHESTER, England (CNS) -- Iraqi Christians driven from their homes by Islamic State fighters are beginning to die in crowded camps, witnesses claimed.

Sahar Mansour, 40, who lectured in chemistry at the University of Mosul before she fled the city in June, said newborn babies, the sick and the elderly in the Ankawa refugee camp on the outskirts of Irbil are dying from diseases, thirst and malnutrition. Mansour now resides in the camp.

If ISIS can kill the children, their long-term victory is assured.

Odds And Ends

Just a couple of random thoughts.

Everyone in the Death to the Infidels world is watching the success ISIS and slapping their foreheads, exclaiming, "Now why didn't we think of that?" What works gets repeated and it's pretty obvious that going straight to genocide without any warm up activities is the way to win in the long run. Even if the West suddenly discovers traces of a spine, by the time we do away with the obvious parts of ISIS it will be too late. There will be no people to replace them, all others having been killed. The future belongs to those who show up. You can't show up if ISIS beheaded you.

Russia is sending a convoy of 280 trucks with humanitarian aid to Donetsk. More than humanitarian aid, it contains a whole bunch of triggers. That is, if the Ukrainians bungle things and threaten the lives of a bunch of Russian "humanitarians," Putin will have an excuse to go in to rescue them. It won't be an invasion, it will be protecting his citizens. See the difference?

A couple of fighter bombers off an aircraft carrier aren't going to have any more effect on the outcome of the ISIS war than the ME-262 did in 1944-5. However, those couple of F-18s will allow President Obama to say, "I did my best, but the rest of you disappointed me. Again."  See also: Libya, Syria, ObamaCare, Crimea and Green Energy Subsidies, presidential excuses for failures of.

National Narcissism

I've made the mistake of perusing some comment threads on the Huffinton Post and elsewhere on stories about ISIS. They all devolve into American politics, particularly finger pointing at George W. Bush. The underlying assumption is one of the following:

• If we hadn't intervened in Iraq, the members of ISIS would be peacefully tending their camels and goats. They all went psychotic when we showed up.
• Without a fascist dictator and his security apparatus to keep them in line, the people of Iraq will inevitably turn into crazed mass murderers.

Either way, we're the primary motivating force in their lives. They have no world view, no goal, no strategic plan other than what they have been forced to create in reaction to America. Everything everywhere and at all times is about us.

Meanwhile, there's this outstanding interview with Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the outgoing head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Here's a tidbit, but you really ought to read the whole thing.

JK: You also said recently that terrorist leaders like Osama bin Laden represent the leadership of al-Qaeda, but that “core al-Qaeda” is its ideology of perpetual jihad.

Flynn: Yes, and unfortunately the core ideology and belief system is spreading, not shrinking. Look at the unbelievably violent videos [of beheadings, executions and the destruction of religious places] coming out of Iraq just in recent days. I’ve physically interrogated some of these guys, and I’ve had the opportunity to hear them talking about their organizations and beliefs. These are people who have a very deeply-rooted belief system that is just difficult for Americans to comprehend.

A deeply-rooted belief system that doesn't live and breathe American politics? Who knew such a thing could exist?

The Mystery Of ISIS

What could these people want? What could be the start of negotiations with them? Here's a missive from one of their leaders that might shed some light on the subject.

"You should know, you defender of the cross, that getting others to fight on your behalf will not do for you in Syria as it will not do for you in Iraq," the (ISIS) leader, known as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, reportedly wrote. "And soon enough, you will be in direct confrontation — forced to do so, God willing. And the sons of Islam have prepared themselves for this day. So wait, and we will be waiting, too."

I don't know about you, but that's completely confusing to me. Looking at my handy-dandy strategic peacebuilding chart, I can't seem to find where "We're going to kill all of you" fits in.

I'm guessing that our best entry point would be Non-Violent Social Change. It seems to fit the situation pretty well.

Nonviolent Social Change 

• Active nonviolence
• Community organizing, mobilization or social action/movements
• Issue-based educational campaigns
• Media/journalism/writing 
• Minority and marginalized empowerment and civil rights advocacy 

I liked the community organizing in particular. Luckily, we have a president to understands how empowerment and dialog solves problems. "The only lasting solution is reconciliation among Iraqi communities," he said.

If anyone can get ISIS to see the value of non-violence, it will be Nobel Prize winning President Obama. Oh, sure, yesterday wasn't such a good day, but today will offer new opportunities to promote cultural understanding.

ISIS Is Cancer

... and you need to get it all, ruthlessly.

B-Daddy and President Obama are both missing the point here. B-Daddy argues in favor of a partition of Iraq along ethnic lines and suggests that ISIS is sowing the seeds of its own destruction by making enemies and being unable to govern its lands. Like they care.

The Obama Administration, in typically delusional fashion, wants to do a couple of little airstrikes and then support a peace negotiation process. That is utterly naive and doomed to failure.

ISIS has told us, in no uncertain terms what it wants. A culturally monochromatic Caliphate. It has shown us, clearly, what it wants. A culturally monochromatic Caliphate. Within their territory, they're crucifying people who don't convert. They are beheading babies. They are driving people by the thousands into the desert to die. To suggest that there will be negotiations or coexistence with such creatures is the ultimate in hallucinations. To think that such people worry about maintaining a society above the 7th Century level is optimistic at best.

If you don't join them, they will kill you. THEY WANT TO KILL YOU. They told you they would do it. They are doing it. Without mercy, without exception. That's incomprehensible in the Ivy League Ethnic Studies faculty lounge, but a lot of reality is. There is no negotiation possible. Limited airstrikes just mean ISIS gets to go on killing infidels in those places where there are no airstrikes. That's a lot of places.


Pick out Arbil on this map. Now pick out everywhere else. A few, small airstrikes are going on in Arbil. Everywhere else is an ISIS slaughterhouse.
There are rational, informed reasons to stay out of the whole mess. There are rational, informed reasons to commit to eradicating them with overwhelming force. To suggest there is some kind of middle ground or political solution is not rational.



ISIS has made targeting problems much simpler. In the areas they control, everything is ISIS so everything is a target. Everything. That plays right into America's greatest strength - overwhelming, unstoppable firepower.

Using Air Power To Cover A Retreat

... might require more than two jets.

The entire US strike force yesterday.

ISIS is committed to a war of extermination. The Yazidis are just the most recent group in their cross-hairs. Those who weren't executed on the spot by invading ISIS forces have been driven into the wilderness where they are threatened with death by starvation and dehydration.

Yesterday, American forces dropped a few 500 lb bombs on ISIS artillery positions and air-dropped supplies to the refugees. With the end goal being ... what?

Being as generous as I can, the best plan would be to use air power to give the Kurds a chance to counter-attack. The Yazidis would get supplies to form make shift refugee camps awaiting their return to liberated homes.

Being realistic, a pair of F-18s isn't going to strike fear into anyone. They blew up a couple of positions and then flew away. The danger was gone and ISIS could go back to business. ISIS has lost artillery pieces before and they'll lose them again. This is a war and war brings casualties. Unless the casualties are big enough to cause you to change your plans, it doesn't have much effect.

When Obama removed all US forces from Iraq and announced the removal of forces from Afghanistan, he let ISIS know he didn't have any stomach for a real fight. This isn't just a real fight, it's a genocidal campaign operating at top speed. During that F-18 strike, ISIS units were slaughtering, burning and moving on. It's a good bet that most of them didn't even know the strike had happened.

Just another day at the office for ISIS.

Update 1: Over at Breitbart.com, they're saying it was one artillery piece. 1. Awesome.  "The Pentagon revealed that two F/A-18 aircraft dropped 500-pound laser-guided bombs on a mobile artillery piece near Erbil."

Update 2: Ann Althouse quotes the President's pathetically confused speech last night. "(T)here’s no American military solution to the larger crisis in Iraq. The only lasting solution is reconciliation among Iraqi communities." It's a war of extermination and he's talking about reconciliation. That's just sad.

The Genius Of ISIS

ISIS is running a brilliant campaign. They are waging a war of extermination which is causing all kinds of problems for everyone else. Here are a few.

• The West is psychologically unequipped to deal with this. You can hear the total confusion in the Obama Administration's response: "We urge all parties to the conflict to allow safe access to the United Nations and its partners so they can deliver lifesaving humanitarian assistance."
• They are capturing territory, but not people. By killing or driving out all opposition, they make a guerrilla campaign almost impossible. There's no opposition left for us to arm.
• Refugees make troop movements difficult. Roads are clogged, cities overwhelmed, transportation assets oversubscribed, etc. If you want to move a mechanized brigade from Point A to Point B and the roads are full of desperate refugees, good luck with that.
• Refugees tax you, not them. ISIS is left with resources made for a much larger population once they finish killing a bunch and driving out the rest. Supply problems for ISIS? I don't think so.
• ISIS is looting every place they capture and using that to fund the next offensive.
• Without uniforms, ISIS has neutralized air power. Just what are you going to bomb? Since there are no opponents left alive behind their lines, you have no hope of recruiting spotters to guide your air strikes.
• ISIS is quite simply more fearlessly brutal than everyone else and their opponents can't deal with it.

Dig this video from the fall of France in 1940. Fast forward to 5:30 to see troops mingling with refugees. Add a couple of car bombs and snipers in your imagination to get some real excitement.

At the same time, ISIS has made the solution trivially simple. Since there are no friendlies left in ISIS-held territories, everything is now a target. No rules of engagement needed, simply obliterate everything and kill everyone in ISIS territory.

Anyone want to take some bets on whether or not the West has the stomach for that kind of war?

Videos You Watch When No One Is Watching You

It's early in the morning and I'm awake, downstairs with my coffee and my laptop. No one can see what I'm doing. I'm clever with a computer, so I can hide my Internet tracks fairly well.

I'm watching videos. Oh, baby, you better believe I'm watching some videos.


In all seriousness, the smaller Catican Guard woke me way early with her zany antics (she'll be given extra field exercises as punishment), so I started my morning routine around 0430. Blech. I quickly got tired of the political and economics sites - they hold less and less interest for me all the time - and I need to rebuild the suspension on the FredMobile, so I checked out YouTube.

1A Auto Parts is fantastic. I've never ordered from them, but from now on, they're going to be my go-to place for parts. I don't care about shopping for prices, either. Anyone who goes to this much trouble to make outstanding how-to videos has earned my business. They've shown me how easy it's going to be to do a couple of repairs I was dreading.

First, I need to replace my struts and I can't find a pair of quick-struts to save my life. Quick-struts have the spring already mounted. With a normal strut, you need to use a spring compressor to pull the strut assembly apart. My repair book makes it sounds like the spring will leap out and kill you if you look at it wrong, but watching the 1A Auto Parts video showed me it was actually pretty easy.

The other job that was alarming me was the one shown above, the outer tie rod. Since this controls the steering of the car, I was afraid that even a slight mistake on my part would cause the wheels to point at wacky angles when I was done. Like the struts, it's really not that hard.

I enjoy working on cars, but I've avoided working on the FredMobile, intimidated by all the newfangled odds and ends on the thing. I prefer working on simpler, older cars. The FredMobile was approaching its doom because the repair bills have been climbing. Thanks to an early morning video session, the repair bills will be reduced to the cost of the parts. The FredMobile just got a new lease on life.

Like Something Out Of A Jules Verne Story

100 Years Ago Today is a great Twitter feed. I highly recommend it. Here's a tweet from them that must have had everyone at the time thinking of Jules Verne's Master of the World.

A German dirigible bombs the French town of Lunéville, but causes no casualties. http://t.co/ln1Jv4Mt6E
— 100 Years Ago Today (@CenturyAgoToday) August 4, 2014

Howard

I met Howard downtown at Catholic Charities two weeks ago. Howard was a black man, 68 years old, wearing a full suit. He looked like a million bucks. He had come in for food. In our conversation, I learned that Howard was from rural Virginia. He was a pistol, as my wife would say. Both fans of Southern and Soul food, we got along famously.

At 68 years old, Howard was born in 1946. In 1960, he was 14 years old, living south of the Mason Dixon line. Howard can remember when people used the n-word for real, not as a political weapon like the Democrats do or in songs and conversation to make themselves look tough like thugs do. I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing the Howard came in to see us wearing his best suit to let us know he wasn't one of those ne'er-do-well blacks that his daddy told him to avoid. No, he wanted us to know he was a real gentleman. Howard was well-spoken and polite. Although he came for our free food, he was a man working with another man.

Howard may forget our brief encounter, but I won't. It was lovely. Christ gave me the opportunity to meet Howard. Howard, like all of my other friends at Catholic Charities, was a gift to me. God so loved me that he gave me rules to live - care for the poor - that led me to Howard.

I don't recall his name, but a chap who came before Howard was a Chinese man who was in his late 70s or early 80s. He didn't speak much English at all. He knew he wanted fish and because he didn't know the words for anything else we offered, he was happy to just get some fish. I played show and tell with him with all of the other items on our menu and made sure that he got not only his fish, but a full order of everything else.

Christ died on the cross for my sins and then gave me the Gospels which led me to that Chinese fellow. He was so happy to get more than fish. He hugged me because he was delighted that I took the time to work him through the menu in a language we could share. He had no idea how his memory will warm my heart months and months after our very brief encounter.

I gave him food. The Chinese fellow gave me His love. I hope you can find the same in your life.

How About That Sharknado Movie?

Boy, that was something, wasn't it? Sharks, chainsaws, tornadoes, it had it all!

I read something the other day about the CIA spying on the Senate, HHS attacking the Catholic Church and the IRS going after political enemies of the president, but it's all too confusing for me.

I don't know nothing about budding fascist regimes using a gigantic, metsatasized, out-of-control bureaucracy to neutralize their enemies, but I loves me some shark movies!

How cool is that?

Redskins Porn

I know a fellow who is struggling with a porn addiction. He's older than I am and has been married more than 30 years. He and his wife have reached a crossroads in their marriage due to his consumption of porn. He describes his use of it as a 5 on a scale of 1 to 10. He doesn't seek it out, but if he comes across it on the premium channels or on the Internet, he watches it.

I'm confident that he and his wife will work this out. Both are committed Christians and they're dedicated to making their marriage work. Others are not nearly so lucky. Dig this from Psychology Today:

As a researcher and clinician who deals with couples whose lives have been turned upside down by pornography, I have had to face these questions head-on so I could better understand and help my clients navigate through them. I don't think porn is "always" the cause of divorce. In fact, I have a hard time imagining that the 500,000 divorces in the United States each year are because of porn. Nevertheless, if even 25% of the 500,000 divorce cases are due to porn, that is 125,000 marriages each and every year that are a direct result of pornography.

Meanwhile, the Washington Redskins are being pressured to change their name because some people find it offensive.

Seriously? This is a problem?

The creation and distribution of porn is defended under free speech grounds. "No censorship!" defenders say. Meanwhile, plenty of people are quite willing to censor the name "Redskins." And everyone censors the n-word.

Using words that might offend some people is horrible. Destroying marriages is fine?

Honeybee With Pink And Purple

I left this one large, so I think it's worth a click. Enjoy!

Wow

If you don't visit wannasmile on a regular basis, you should. Here's one reason why.

One of her regular series, "Zen Moment of the Day"

Vladimir Lenin, Pitchman

On Twitter, there are plenty of spam accounts constantly throwing out links to products and websites. I've recently been followed by a couple that mix "real" tweets with ads. The best of these is Vladimir Lenin's, @thresagu, which mixes Lenin quotes with ... well, you'll see. These two were back-to-back:

The revolutionist despises escapism; he is always ready for any psychological confrontation with capitalist ideals.
— Vladimir Lenin (@Thresagu) July 30, 2014

Tips to Keep Your Skin Clear - http://t.co/L309pnd9PI pic.twitter.com/IhkoAXbUU2
— Vladimir Lenin (@Thresagu) July 30, 2014

I guess it makes sense. After a long day killing all kinds of counter-revolutionaries, who wouldn't need a soothing facial massage?

The Tea Party Is Now Completely Out Of Control

Just look at these crazed, bigoted Teabaggers in their white KKK sheets with all kinds of weapons strapped to them. Sickening! Oh, wait. Those are Hamas guys. Never mind, we're cool with them because they're all ethnic and diverse and stuff.

Source.

The Gator Didn't Stand A Chance

Wow.

The Perfect Business Plan

Yesterday, my wife and I were looking at burial plots. Not for ourselves, but for a relative who had recently died. One of those we visited was deep in the hood. You didn't really feel safe driving to and from it. I came up with the perfect slogan for the place.

"Here at Restful Acres, we believe in preparing for the day when you're shot to death visiting Restful Acres."

Odds And Ends

Random tidbits and observations today.

You can't change other people, you can only change the way you interact with them.

A "Bovver boy" is a hooligan, sometimes a skinhead.

Google's excellent speech-to-text algorithm knows that when you say, "new paragraph," you want a new paragraph in your text.

Cute tweet seen recently: "The first rule of Tautology Club is the first rule of Tautology Club."

At Catholic Charities yesterday, one of our customers was a handicapped, probably mentally ill transvestite. He was treated with love and compassion and we were genuinely happy to serve him. Plenty of the progressives on Twitter would have been shocked to see it, figuring we'd pitch him down a flight of stairs and scream at him that he was going to hell.

Link Of The Day

Charles Krauthammer has hit the nail on the head today with this column. Here's one of the payoff bits:

Obama’s passivity stems from an idea. When Obama says Putin has placed himself on the wrong side of history in Ukraine, he actually believes it. He disdains realpolitik because he believes that, in the end, such primitive 19th-century notions as conquest are self-defeating. History sees to their defeat...

Remember when, at the beginning of the Ukraine crisis, Obama tried to construct for Putin “an off-ramp” from Crimea? Absurd as this idea was, I think Obama was sincere. He actually imagined that he’d be saving Putin from himself, that Crimea could only redound against Russia in the long run.

Italics in the original. If you're wondering why the US hasn't intervened in any meaningful way to stop Russia, ISIS, Syria or anyone else, it's because Obama thinks they've already lost. Like the Marxists, he seems to think that history is relentlessly moving in one direction, in this case towards freedom, civil rights and prosperity. All we have to do is sit back and watch them fail.

What's worse for them, these anti-freedom forces are getting a lot of grit in their eyes from blowing up buildings.

Gun Violence Is A Symptom

More shootings in Chicago. More every week. Last weekend, an 11-year-old was killed by stray bullets*. Some are calling for stricter gun control. Just how you'd get stricter gun control is something of a conundrum as Chicago already has some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation. The only thing I can think of is house-to-house gun confiscation searches done on a regular basis.

And after that, what? Do you think people are shooting each other, but aside from that, they're at home playing backgammon quietly in their homes after a long day of working hard to improve themselves?

I'm not sure what the ratio is, but I'm sure that child abuse rates, for example, are orders of magnitude higher than gun violence rates. Dittos for other crimes. That is, for every person killed by a gun, maybe 23 people are robbed, 37 people are beaten, 81 kids are sexually abused and so forth. If you stop the gun violence, you haven't changed any of those.

Ending gun violence will put a stop to finding bodies lying in pools of blood in the streets. I suppose that after that, we can all go back to watching Big Bang Theory with clean consciences. The people being beaten, robbed and assaulted can take care of themselves.

 * - Since this happens nearly every weekend, this post will be forever fresh. Yay.

Love Paramedics, Hate Guardrails

New blogging friend Trigger posted this bit on Conspicuous Forgiveness that's worth a read. It made me think of a sermon I heard recently letting us all know how important forgiveness was. The priest is a thorough lefty, so his sermons lean heavily to the forgiveness side and almost never touch on sin itself. Now that's all well and good and forgiveness is a big part of our faith, but it's only needed after you've screwed up.

In essence, forgiveness is the paramedics coming to patch you up after you've rolled your car and find yourself upside down in a ditch. Rules about sin are guardrails designed to keep you on the road and stop you from rolling your car in the first place.

Folks like that priest don't like it when we're judgmental of each other. They don't like to preach about rules and regulations or seem small minded. However, they also don't like to preach about the sins that led to little Taniqua Wilson being abused by her baby mama's live in boyfriend or the ones that led to Joe Smith's meth addiction. We hear a lot about forgiving Taniqua's mom and Joe, but some of us think it might be better to be asked to forgive just a little less often.



Still think you don't need guardrails?

Pink And Yellow

These are the flowers of some succulent out in our front yard. My wife and mom know what it is, but I don't. In any case, I was out there, fiddling around with my Nikon Artillery Piece and took this shot. I love it. I left it quite large, so I think it's worth a click.

Enjoy.

The Anti-Bullying Campaign Is Over

... and if your side is getting bullied, for the next two years it's going to be pretty awful.

For the first time in 1,600 years, Mass is not being said in Mosul: an ancient culture has been wiped out in a matter of weeks. It's a war crime that, strangely, no one seems to want to talk about. 

Mosul is the second-largest city in Iraq and the place where many Christians believe Jonah was buried. Since the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Isis) rode into town, their faith has been forced underground. Bells have been silenced, the hijab enforced with bullets. Tens of thousands fled after being offered an unattractive choice: convert, pay a religious tax, or be put to the sword. 

There's no one out there with the will or the power to stop the bullying, whether it's from the Muslims, the Russians or the Chinese. If you're hoping America will step in anywhere, you're going to have to wait. Peggy Noonan penned an outstanding piece discussing President Obama's detachment from his job and how he's uninterested in any of these crises.

"The world seems to disappoint him," says the New Yorker's liberal and sympathetic editor, David Remnick.

What kind of illusions do you have to have about the world to be disappointed when it, and its players, act aggressively or foolishly? Presidents aren't supposed to have those illusions, and they're not supposed to check out psychologically when their illusions are shattered.

We've got at least two more years where Christians, among many others, will be murdered without a murmur of protest.

I don't know, he doesn't seem all that disappointed to me.

Beauty At The Living Coast

My folks took us to the Living Coast Discovery Center yesterday. A good time was had by all, but this had to be the highlight of the trip:

I have no idea who this boy was, but watching him with the tortoise was lovely.

It's Open Season On Christians

... because no nation will defend us. Burn down a mosque and tell Moslems to convert or die and you'll have several hundred crazies with guns and bombs slaughtering your citizens the very next day.

Breaking. #ISIS Islamists rebels just burnt the Assyrian Catholic Church in Mosel #Iraq. Completely lost. pic.twitter.com/U5GjRFYarN
— RealSy (@BBassem7) July 18, 2014

Q: What Invention Enabled Long-Range Ocean Voyages?

A: Sauerkraut.

I'm currently enjoying The Great Age of Discovery, Volume 2: Captain Cook and the Scientific Explorations after having made my way through the superb Treasure Island. The Great Age of Discovery is fascinating and it begins with one of the most interesting facts I've heard in a long time.

The book starts with a hideous, detailed description of scurvy, written by a mariner from the 18th Century. The author then goes on to describe various unsuccessful hypotheses and treatments developed by the British and the Continentals to deal with the problem. After a long period of study and experimentation, they discovered that the Scandinavians never contracted scurvy and that they always brought barrels of sauerkraut with them on their voyages.

Lieutenant Cook (later Captain Cook) made his first voyage to the Pacific with plenty of the stuff on board and lost no one to scurvy. Until that point, a ship's master could expect half of his crew to die from the malady on a voyage of that length and the remainder to be weakened or crippled.

So there you have it. Just as it did in the World Cup, pickled cabbage wins again.

Sauerkraut. Is there anything it can't do?

Addendum: Natural News calls sauerkraut the original probiotic superfood. Endorsed by rugged, manly seamen and hairy-legged, granola-munching, feminist crazies, you can't go wrong with a big bowl of sauerkraut!

Cheezburger of the Day

What I Saw While Drinking At An Irish Pub

On Saturday, I went to confession. After being shriven by the padre, I needed to sit with my German cookbook somewhere and pick out a recipe for the night's dinner, preparing as we were for Deutschland's World Cup game against Argentina.

Figuring I'd celebrate my newly scrubbed conscience with a pint, I wandered over to a local Irish pub and got a tall glass of Harp to quaff while I perused the recipes.

Howay the saved!

It was about 4:30 in the afternoon and while I sipped suds and flipped pages, a pair of young ladies came in and sat at the bar nearby. They had young children with them and it was clear they were regulars. They chatted happily with the barmaid about some adventure or another involving guys, booze and whatnot.

The ladies were sprinkled with tattoos, the kids were familiar with the bar and the topic of conversation was not one you'd associate with bankers, lawyers, captains of industry or their wives. Husbands weren't mentioned so it was a good bet the kids dads weren't in the picture. Be that as it may, they seemed like nice enough girls, if a bit wayward. Such girls have always existed and while we have more than our share these days, they're God's creatures just as much as, say, Cardinal Dolan of New York.

What did strike me was that thanks to our fiscal profligacy, much of it in the name of "compassion," each of them, ladies and children alike, owed $55,200+. The easy girls with children and no husbands from our past were never loaded up with that much debt. People make bad choices all the time, some worse than others. What gave the government the right to pile such a burden on all of them on top of the costs of their own mistakes?

I wished I'd had a congressman or Administration official in the bar with me. I'd have asked them, "What made you think you had the right to push all of that debt on top of them? Didn't you think they had enough problems without having to pay for you to look like a big shot?"

Caymanian Crab

The little fellow pictured below was smaller than your fist. He was also climbing up the wall of our house. I pivoted the image because it looked so odd the way it was naturally after I cropped it down to him.

I'm always surprised by crabs coming ashore. Here in San Diego, our crabs are rigorously aquatic. Crawling across lawns and up walls is simply unthinkable to them. Driving around Grand Cayman, we occasionally saw these fellows crossing the street and swerved to avoid them. The crab got a comment from someone in the car every time, too.

I left the image fairly large so it might be worth a click. The little arthropod has some interesting designs on the side of his head. Or is that body?

Where does the head stop and the body begin?

Looking For Comments On Some Self-Help Drivel

I threw this page together with a handful of suggestions for our kids. It's the three things I've found most helpful in my own meanderings - journaling, reading and stories of people who have overcome and accomplished more than could be expected. Take a look and let me know what you think.

Or if you don't want to click on the link, here's a repeat photo of our Maximum Leader keeping a watchful eye on the Catican Compound staff.

Willpower Is Overrated

... when you can just run away.

The best thing I read this weekend was advice to flee temptation. If you're trying to quit doing something and you find yourself in the perfect environment to do that thing, run away!



Exercising willpower takes a lot more energy than simply running away!

Inspirational Carpenter Story

I'm slogging through YouTube, building a list of inspirational videos for a friend who's going through some hard times right now. I came across this one and had to share it with you. It's pretty short and I think it's worth your while.

Enjoy!

This Is Why I Don't Trust Teachers

At a dinner party last night, I had a philosophy and theology discussion with one of our sons. The lad recently graduated from the University of San Diego, a nominally Catholic school*. Much of our conversation centered around how to understand a philosopher in his original context.

I argued that the great philosophers like Nietzsche, Aquinas and Locke could be understood independent of their time. Digestion of my favorite Christian authors, CS Lewis and GK Chesterton, might be improved with a small amount of context, but their work was perfectly comprehensible without it.

His response was that the teacher in his Pauline theology class had opened his eyes to the historical context of the writings of St. Paul and through that lens, the Letters of Paul seemed to have a very different meaning from what we give them today. In fact, there was some connection made between Hitler's persecution of the Jews and Pauline theology. He couldn't remember the precise connection, but he felt sure that Hitler had been heavily influenced by St. Paul's writings.

That, of course, is complete nonsense.

Hitler saw the Jews as a race, not a faith. That right there ends the discussion. To the Church, race and faith are orthogonal dimensions. In fact, that was one of the central tenets of St. Paul's writings - Christianity was universal and not Israel-centric. To the Nazis, everything was about race. As for the Final Solution in particular, the minutes of the Wannsee conference refer to Darwinistic thought directly, but never to anything even vaguely Christian.

Under proper guidance, in the course of the final solution the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labor in the East. Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes.

The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as a the seed of a new Jewish revival (see the experience of history.)

Emphasis mine.

One of the things I learned when I went to college many, many years ago was that outside of the science and engineering departments, you couldn't trust a lick of what was being taught. Everything needed to be questioned and tested for bias. The bias was omnipresent and always in the same direction, too. Since then, the experiences of our children indicate the situation has only gotten worse.

St. Paul, Gauleiter of Magdeburg.

* - There aren't many "Catholic" schools left that have remained true to the Church. See also: 1887 Trust.

Religion Causes Wars

... in this case, it's a war between progressives and the religion is secular liberalism.

All blacks are "true" blacks only if they're baptized, confirmed and actively worshiping in the Church of Social Justice Fascism. Deviate from this as an individual and you are excommunicated from the race. Deviate from this as an organization and it's time for a religious war.

The Koch brothers donated $25M to the United Negro College Fund (UNCF). Apostasy! The Koch brothers are conservatives and libertarians! The AFSCME, orthodox and faithful to the Church, marshaled its forces, preached salvation to those who would fight under its banners and attacked.

In a letter made public Thursday, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees said it will no longer partner with or raise funds for the fund, known for its iconic motto, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

AFSCME President Lee Saunders said the actions of the college fund’s president “are not only deeply hostile to the rights and dignity of public employees, but also a profound betrayal of the ideals of the civil rights movement.”

Roll that last sentence around on your tongue and savor it. The UNCF provides scholarships to blacks. The Koch brothers' money had the same value and would go to the same purpose as money from Nancy Pelosi. Young blacks going to college can spend a grant from the UNCF the same way no matter the original source of the cash. And yet, to the faithful, a young black going to college with this money is a betrayal of the ideals of the civil rights movement.

I've been steeped in Catholicism for decades and I've never experienced anything that esoteric and abstruse from the pulpit or the Catechism. Still, there's a certain theological charm to it and one can picture faith-crazed zealots nodding their heads and vowing vengeance on the heretics.

Taking money from the Koch brothers? If that's not a bugle call to the upright and virtuous, I don't know what is.

Here, the AFSCME does righteous battle with the UNCF. Note how the UNCF aren't really black.

Doom Or Growth?

The Fed has announced a schedule to stop, yes stop, their bond purchases. Is it the end of the world?

All along, my thinking has been that they couldn't stop buying bonds because there was no one else out there to sop up the roughly $600B of new bonds the government is issuing every year - about $50B per month. If there's no demand for short-term Treasuries which are practically zero percent investments, then interest rates are going to have to rise until it's worth buying the things.

I'm less pessimistic than I have been in the past, not because the fundamentals have changed, but because all of the predictions of doom I've read have yet to come true. That last is the classic profile of the late-to-the-party sucker who gets drawn into investing in a bubble right before it pops.

We'll see.

Not A World War, But World Turmoil

... or, perhaps, the 19th Century, revisited.

I've read a lot of blog posts and essays lately, upon the 100th anniversary of the start of WWI about how we might be heading into a global conflict now, too. That's silly.

China is squaring off with Vietnam and Japan, the Middle East has wars all over the place and Russia is flexing its muscles. That's not quite a world war. That's more like the conflicts that filled the 1800s. Small to medium-sized wars all over the world, ignited by local rivalries and ethnic tensions. Contrary to the childish views of Barack Obama and John Kerry, it's the way of the world when there's no global cop.

It's not stability, it's just normal.

A Caymanian Wasp For Tim

Even on vacation, we think of our blogging friends.

No trip is complete without an insect photo to share!

Cheezburger of the Day

Why San Diego Has Brush Fires

Our hillsides look like this. Crispy, dry bracken that you could use for kindling. Some hills are dotted with dry trees that act like bombs during a fire.

Channeling Old AC/DC

... is this track by the Newsboys. It sounds like AC/DC from the Bon Scott era.


Here's a studio version with Peter Furler singing lead instead of Michael Tait. That studio version really sounds like AC/DC. Here are the lyrics. I'm a big AC/DC fan and when I heard this on the "In the Hands of God" CD I got for Father's Day, the similarity jumped out at me immediately.

Enjoy!

Iraq Vs. Mexico

One more thing on the latest wave of illegal aliens. In Iraq, President Obama tells us that the Iraqis have to solve their own problems and there's no reason for us to get involved until they do. When it comes to the Mexicans and Central Americans, we need to be involved deeply and provide them a refuge from their wretched lives. Iraq has oil. Mexicans are voters, once they're granted citizenship.

No blood for oil. Blood for votes.

Update: Meanwhile, real, live Americans are going without water in Detroit because they can't pay their bills. Since they already vote for the Social Justice fascists Democrats, there's no reason to get all worked up about them. We need to concentrate on getting new voters.

Votes On The Hoof

... is the way Political-Americans seem to see Mexicans crossing our border. Which party is going to appeal to the Hispanics the most? Who is going to win the votes and give illegals the most goodies?

Above all, we need to be reminded on a daily basis how gosh-darned compassionate the progressives are as they hand out benefits, refuse to enforce immigration laws and fight protecting the border.

Maria Gonzalez*, formerly of La Trinitaria, MX and now resident of some warehouse in Brownsville, TX, was Maria Gonzalez before she crossed the border. Knowing the border wasn't enforced and the benefits were there, she ditched the lousy life in La Trinitaria and headed north.

A four star restaurant in La Trinitaria.

When she was robbed in Puebla, she was Maria Gonzalez. When she was assaulted in San Luis Potosi, she was Maria Gonzalez. When she nearly died of thirst in the back of a van in Tamaulipas, she was Maria Gonzalez.

It wasn't until she crossed into Texas that we cared about Maria. At that point, she became a trophy to our compassion. Speeches were made about Maria. Debates raged over Maria. Pundits pontificated about Maria. Of course, had Maria failed to reach the US because she died, ran out of cash or was enslaved on the way as were so many of her co-travelers, the Very Important People in America wouldn't have said a word about her.

It all started when she made the very reasonable cost-benefits decision in La Trinitaria, taking into account the lack of border enforcement and American government benefits. Until she crossed the border, she wasn't a potential vote.

* - If you're wondering, this name is just a proxy for any of the immigrants.

Trekking Across Mexico

... can't be very healthy for kids.

All of the conversations I've heard and read about the illegal women and children coming across our border focus on how to treat them humanely now that they're here. Everyone wants to wave their Compassion Flag as high as they can.

How was it compassionate to tempt them to come here in the first place? What horrible things happened on the way to the US?

Maybe the most compassionate thing we could have done would have been to control our border.

Your Daily Dose Of Soccer Fun

No matches today, but the Beautiful Game can still bring a smile to our face, thanks to McDonald's.

A Big Diamond In A Thick, Christian Rough

With the end of my daughter's school year, I'm looking at a big change in my life. I'm going to have a lot more free time, enough to take up a new hobby, develop new skills, find a new purpose or something similar. I've been reading several books on the topic of "How Do I Figure Out What I Want To Be When I Grow Up?" While some are good and some are merely adequate, even the marginal ones can have nuggets of wisdom.

I'm not usually one for religious self-help books. I find that merging the two subjects usually makes for an inferior treatment of each. While I'm trying to be a thoroughly Catholic nut case, I prefer my Catholicism to be foundational, informing all of my decisions*, but to leave the mechanics of my decisions to other approaches. Sifting through our library looking for material on this topic, I came across Max Lucado's Cure for the Common Life.


Max is a Christian writer and this is a very Christian book. His points are illustrated through the use of stories and excerpts from the Bible. That's all very well and good for Max, but for me, I felt the book wasted a lot of space on Biblical teaching that added very little to finding your calling. For me, a Rosary and Adoration Chapel would accomplish more than all the Bible quotes Max could find.

In spite of this, Max had two diamonds in his rough that changed the way I see my life. The first was to look back on your life to find episodes that had brought pleasure and fulfillment. In a perusal of my checkered past, I quickly saw that I was most energized when I was leading some kind of crusade, whether that was at work, with the family or in my hobbies. When I was trying to do something that was particularly difficult and perhaps never done before, I found practically limitless reservoirs of enthusiasm and determination.

Ironically, the second insight came from one of Max's Bible stories. He used the Parable of the Talents to say that God doesn't want you to think small.

While the rest of the book was skimmable at best, the first of those two nuggets was life-changing and the second reinforced it. When I try to sell people on reading self-help books, I frequently get push back - "Well, that may work for you, but it doesn't work for me. I find too much wrong in the author's work." That attitude is self-defeating and can cause you to miss marvelous nuggets of wisdom. No book has universal, total applicability, but most of them have something unique you can pluck out and use to improve your life.

Thanks, Max.

* - Informing isn't the same as doing. See also: sin.