Scratch Beginnings

For various reasons, just a short post today.

I recently finished Adam Shepard's excellent Scratch Beginnings. It's the story of a college graduate who decides to find out if the American Dream of making it from nothing is dead or not. He moves to Charleston, SC with $25 in his pocket, the clothes on his back, an empty backpack and a sleeping bag. He doesn't trade on his social or family connections nor his college degree. His goal is to have $2500 in the bank, a working vehicle and a place to live after one year.

Scratch Beginnings is the story of the homeless and the underprivileged. I loved it for that reason. When I work downtown at Catholic Charities, I've often wondered what my customers' lives are like. Where do they go and what do they do? Is their situation totally hopeless? This book helped me understand their lives a lot better. There are opportunities and escape routes, but it's not easy to stick to what you need to do to make it out.

If you've got a few hours, I'd definitely read it. It might put you in contact with a world you would otherwise never experience.

Snarling Less In Your Marriage

Here's another tidbit from the Brian Tracy book I've been reading.

To improve your self-confidence, set goals and every day, tell yourself, "I have (already accomplished my goal)!" If your specific goal is to become the top salesman at IBM, you tell yourself, "I am the top salesman at my IBM!" It sounds wacky, but I think I understand how it works.

Let's try a different example as an illustration. Say you want to have a great relationship with your wife. Every day you would tell yourself, "I really love my wife. I love being around her and I'm going to look for ways to make her happy today!" You say that even if you've been fighting like two cats in a bag for the last couple of years. It works because it changes your expectations and perspective on your relationship.

When things are going great in your marriage, there are still days when your wife snaps at you. She's had a bad day at work or the car broke down or maybe the weather is really beastly and everyone's tempers are short. When she snarls, you don't snarl back because you know that it's just a passing thing and you can shrug it off. It's not part of an ongoing war. You know if you let it slide, the rest of the day is going to be great because pretty soon you'll be happily cooperating on something.

When things are going badly and you've been fighting a lot, a snarl is the bugle sounding, "Charge!" and you go over the top with fixed bayonets to counter attack your wife. You do that because the mood in the house is combative. You counter attack so she mobilizes reinforcements and attempts a flanking maneuver. You bring up artillery and lay down a barrage. Pretty soon, you're stringing barbed wire across the bedroom and setting up machine gun nests in the kitchen.

In both cases, she's provoked you by snarling. Your reaction depends on what you expect out of the future. If the future is happy, you're not going to screw that up by snarling right back. That's the key to why telling yourself you've already accomplished your goals works.

In the IBM salesman example, you approach your sales relaxed and confident. You know that if you don't get this one, you'll get the next one because, after all, you're the top salesman at IBM. It's a lot easier to sell when you're relaxed and confident.

7, now 8 paragraphs without a picture. That won't do. I'm out of time for this blog post, so here's a picture to wrap things up.

A surfer, two swimmers and two fishermen at Sunset Cliffs. Yes, I know, it has nothing to do with the rest of the post. Oh well.

Fantastic Photography

... can be found at Tim's blog, The Backyard Arthropod Project. Here's a sample.

Tim has inspired me, educated me and amazed me with his terrific blog. Pop on over and see one more reason why he's a great example of what makes the Internet such a wonderful invention.

Red Bugs

While out on maneuvers with the Catican Guards on Fiesta Island, we saw zillions of these little, red bugs. It turns out they're called ... red bugs. They're invasive, but I can't see that they're doing all that much damage. Here's the scoop on that front.

Here are the photos, taken with my new Galaxy S5. I think the photos came out quite well. Enjoy!

They liked to gather in big piles in the shade amongst dried vegetation.

Here's one racing across open ground looking for a pile to join.

This was my favorite. A dog an dug a hole in the sand and these guys must have been drawn to the cool shadows.

The Power Of Righteousness

... is a key to self-confidence.

Continuing with lessons learned from my latest Brian Tracy book, one of my favorites is this: a lot of self-confidence comes from aligning your decisions with your values.

One of the first exercises in the book is to work out your values and goals. It's a straight lift from his excellent book, Goals, but with a different purpose. Having already iterated that process several times, I could coast past this one and get to the payoff. While Brian chattered away about how to determine your values and goals, I decided to mentally adopt the Catholic Catechism wholesale as my values. That shorthand allowed me to concentrate on subsequent lessons. Here's the essence of those lessons:

When you make a decision or take a position based on your deeply-held values, you gain a strength that comes from without. Criticism is partially defanged because you can correctly claim you are pursuing something higher than yourself. It encourages courage, too. To not defend your decision is to betray your higher calling.

Yesterday, my wife and I encountered Beverly, a crippled, homeless woman on a street corner. Before the light changed, I gave her $10 and chatted with her. Had my wife objected, I would have been more confident to disagree as I felt I was doing Christ's work. It wasn't that I was doing it for me, I was doing that which I had been called to do. My self-confidence would have been greater as I was borrowing strength from external values.

Good stuff, that.

Odds and ends:

• Brian Tracy, I love you, but could you get someone else to read your book next time? This one sounds like it was recorded in your kitchen.
• Beverly asked us to pray for her. If you joined in, I'd appreciate it.
• My wife object to Beverly's gift? Ha! That's a laugh. My wife is kinder and more giving than I am.

Working Too Hard At Leadership And Planning

Listening to my new Brian Tracy book, I've been forced to confront some failings at work. I know where I want to take my team and product line and I know the steps to get there, but I don't use that to govern my daily actions.

Both Zig Ziglar and Brian Tracy recommend making a daily list of prioritized tasks. What needs to get done today? Once in a while, I work on this and try to make a detailed, structured road map to go from where we are to where we want to go. I use that road map to figure out what to do today.

Unfortunately, the road map very quickly becomes useless - overcome by events. Pretty soon, I've got no plan and am going in to work and playing whack-a-mole with random tasks. Days become weeks become months and while important things have been done and there are no complaints from customers, we're not achieving the big, revolutionary goals I've set.

The problem is not in the individual road maps, it's their existence in the first place.

A flow chart for building a house. I argue that this is overkill.

Who cares what's on the road map 3 months from now? All you really need is to know what to do next. What should you be working on today?

In the case of building a house, as illustrated above, there are dependencies that require lots of planning, but in the case of my team at work, such things are obvious just from making a list of things that need to be done to achieve our goals.

Instead of taking the time to draw out complicated Gantt charts that show every phase of the project, I think it would be much better to make an unordered list of all the things that need to be done to achieve our goals. From that list, pick out the very few things you need to do right now. Once you've completed those things, you delete them from the list and pick out the next things that need to be done right now. If you discover new tasks to get to your desired end state, throw them on the list and don't worry about when they need to be done.

Since identifying what has to be done immediately is almost always the easiest part of drawing any road map, you've dramatically simplified the planning process and can knock out your daily list of tasks with minimal effort and time. When you go in to work, your daily task list is trivial to prepare.

Inverse Paranoia

I'm listening to a Brian Tracy motivation / sales / goals book right now and he presented a pretty cool concept: inverse paranoia.

With paranoia, you believe that everything and everyone around you are conspiring to make your life worse. With inverse paranoia, you believe that everything and everyone around you are conspiring to teach you life lessons.

I like it! It's a neat mental model for dealing with setbacks.

I'll Bet The Latvians Are Feeling Pretty Secure Right Now

Dig this.

Technical problems with Germany’s military aircraft have left 150 troops stranded in Afghanistan and forced commanders to consider using Chancellor Angela Merkel’s jet to fly the soldiers home...The equipment breakdown was the fourth consecutive German military aircraft failure in recent weeks and comes as aid destined to help fight Ebola in west Africa was left stranded after another plane malfunction...The breakdown comes as a further embarrassment for German Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen, who has admitted that the military is facing severe equipment shortages which are hampering Germany’s efforts to meet its NATO commitments.

This is Germany, Europe's wealthiest country. Just imagine what the Latvians could expect in the way of help from, say, Italy, should Putin turn his eyes to the Baltic states.

Not to worry. Military aggression is so 19th Century. No self-respecting world leader would want to be caught behaving like Otto Von Bismark. They'd never be invited to a poetry recital at the Grolier Poetry Bookshop ever again!



It's not quite the same Luftwaffe as the one that thought it could conquer England.

The Best Thing About My New Samsung Galaxy S5 Is ...

... its battery life.

I just upgraded from a Galaxy S3 to an S5. Oh sure, the screen is bigger, the processor is faster, the camera is better and it instantly knows precisely where it is with speed and accuracy unheard of in the S3, but the best part of all is how long it lasts. I don't have any hard data as I've never let it drain to zero, but both my wife and I agree that our S5s best feature is the battery life.

That was unexpected, to be sure.

Something Beautiful

Photography by Corey Arnold - http://t.co/XhhmnJTd2b pic.twitter.com/6sO8vX3nPW
— neeeew (@neeeew_com) September 22, 2014

Two Thoughs On The "No More" Ad

During last night's MNF beat down of the Patriots, this ad or something like it ran:


Two thoughts:

1. Who are these people? Am I supposed to recognize them?
2. Every time I see this sort of thing on TV, in my daughter's classrooms, in editorials, or wherever, all I can think is that we're trying to recreate Judeo-Christian morality from scratch with no first principles. Good luck with that. We've been trying that since the libertines took over in the 70s and we've now devolved into ad campaigns like this. If it was going to work, it would have worked by now.

My Favorite Team Has Always Been

The San Diego Padres
The Green Bay Packers
The New Orleans Saints
Newcastle United
LSU
Mississippi State*! Go Bulldogs!

You know it's a bad sports year when less than a third of the way into any particular season, watching your team makes you feel like this:


* - I've never been a big fan of college football. I've never been a fan of Mississippi State at all. With my other teams falling to bits, I turned to LSU, who I follow only slightly, and watched them lose to the Bulldogs. I'm not a front runner, having been a Padres, Packers and Saints fan through some terrible years, but this year the teams have all been universally unwatchable.

In Cave Man Days

... did all the men have ZZ Top beards? How did they shave before the invention of the knife?

Gormok, middle, has discovered the use of sharpened rocks for shaving. Krondar and Oorf, left and right, respectively, have not.

Utilitarians Aren't Happy

Well, not the ones I know.

I've got a friend who is a true Utilitarian. He's always working hard to maximize pleasure and payoff and working hard to minimize pain and effort. He's never happy because he never reaches the maximum and there's always some kind of impediment he has to overcome. Nothing is good enough and every setback is a major annoyance.

Pleasure, I think, is an asymptote.

Cheezburger of the Day

Restoring Old Movies, Part 2

Here's Part 1,

Definition: Dynamic range is the difference between the whitest whites in a picture and the darkest blacks. In some old videos, like the one I showed from The Adventures of Richard the Lion Heart last time, everything has mushed towards a middle gray, muddling contrasts. Contrasts are what give you discernible features in an image. Without sufficient contrast, everything blurs together into a blob.

Last time, I played with modifying brightness and contrast. I've since found out those are tools for illiterate savages. Brightness takes your pixels and makes them lighter or darker. That may sound fine, but it has a tendency to saturate your extremes. Saturated colors show no features at all since they're, well, saturated and can't get any whiter or darker. Here's an annotated color analysis from one still of that scene where I blundered about with brightness and contrast.

A graph of light intensity on the left and the still image on the right. I left this large, so clicking on it will make the situation more obvious.

Increasing the brightness did indeed give me more dynamic range in the image, but it also smashed the lady's dress right up against the stops. You can see the folds of her gown in the original image, but not in my "improved" one. Dittos for King Richard's hair and clothes on the far right, although they fare a bit better.

You want to increase the dynamic range of the scene so you can get every last drop of contrast out of it and clear things up, but there are better ways of doing it than boosting or quenching every pixel identically. The link above takes you to a tutorial that shows you how to do it with more finesse using Adobe Premiere. Adobe Speedgrade has even better tools than those shown in that tutorial.

Instead of crudely changing every pixel, you can modify them based on where they are in intensity. That is, the bright ones can be modified differently than the midrange ones and differently from the dark ones. Nothing needs to be saturated unless you want it to be, I'm still playing with it and hope to show off some cleaned up video from this scene in the near future. So far, I really like what I'm getting out of it.

What To Look For In A Manager Of Scientists And Engineers

Scientists and engineers can be very sensitive creatures. You need just the right sort to manage them.


Friend and commenter Tom knows where this comes from. ;-)

3rd Place Out Of 3

I'm playing around with Adobe SpeedGrade this morning, but while perusing the news and drinking coffee, I came across this interview with Matthew Van Dyke recently back from Syria, talking about the airstrikes on ISIS.

“Syrians on the ground are surely laughing at it,” VanDyke said. ”My contacts in Syria don’t take this seriously. They’re very concerned. They don’t want to be fighting the Assad regime’s battles for them by only going after ISIS.”

So we're backing the weakest members of a 3-way civil war with air strikes while being supported by 5 Arab countries and no one else? I'm glad we're doing something, but I can't quite figure out just what that something is supposed to accomplish.

Without France

... the strategic problem for ISIS has become much simpler.

First the British and the Germans and now the French have backed out of airstrikes in Syria against ISIS. All have sizable Muslim populations and the French ones can be quite restive. See also: cars, burning of. The risks of rioting in their cities outweighed the nebulous benefits of a dilatory bombing campaign. We are effectively isolated in this effort with no allies of any consequence at our side.

For ISIS, the problem has been reduced to getting the US out of the way. They can wait us out, a strategy that has born fruit everywhere or they can take more direct action. Would we still have the stomach for the fight once chunks of the US electrical grid have been knocked out with some well-placed acts of terror?

More to the point, would we be willing to spend the men and money required to go after them in force over in the Middle East with no large allies?

Cleaning Up Old Movies

I'm starting to work on cleaning up some old movies, ones from the 50s and 60s. At work, we've got a bunch that are still in 16mm reel-to-reel form that we're digitizing. At home, I'm playing around with DVDs of medieval costumer schlock from that period. If you were wondering, you digitize 16mm film by projecting it on a wall and recording the wall with a digital camera. Seriously, that's how you do it.

Old film can have all kinds of artifacts in it and can decay to the point where it goes in and out of focus as you play it. While you can't add details to low-quality film, you can work to extract details hidden by noise. I'm just starting out with this and one of our video experts turned me on to a simple trick with brightness, contrast and sharpening.

Below is a clip from the 50s British TV series, The Adventures of Richard the Lion Heart. It's total schlock, from beginning to end. The DVD I got is foggy and messy. A little work with Adobe Premiere revealed a bit more details. You can see the processed version on the right and the original on the left. Here, the brightness is increased, causing some over saturation, but giving me enough light to boost the contrast quite a bit which goes a long way towards getting the gray fog out. Increasing the sharpness accentuates color differentials, giving you better demarcation on edges.

This is a start on learning how to make the most of poor quality video, but I liked the results so far.

Enjoy.

I'm Not Sure We've Thought This All The Way Through

The Puppy Blender has produced a parody video which has plenty of excerpts of progressives talking about the alleged rape epidemic that may or may not be happening on college campuses.


Wait a minute here. College campuses, probably more so than any other institutions in the country, are run by progressives from top to bottom.

Can't you people do anything right?

In Praise Of Dry Shaving

While hanging out with my homies downtown at Catholic Charities a while back, I met a homeless man who, while waiting for his turn with us, asked me for a razor. I dug around and found one and brought it out to him. I proceeded to watch him shave dry. No water, no lotion, nothing but zip zap zurp and his two day beard was gone.

Since then, my wife bought me a Gillette 5-blade razor and some shaving cream. The razor does a great job, but within 3 shaves, it's gummed up with shaving cream goo no matter how much you clean it. Recalling my homeless friend, I've taken to shaving dry or slightly wet. The shave is just as close and the razor blades last a lot longer.

Come Join The Losing Team And Die!

I've read a bunch of Internet comments and pundits blathering suggesting that if we bomb ISIS, it will become a great recruiting tool for them. Picture that. ISIS using videos of F-18s blasting ISIS vehicles, artillery pieces, infantry and leaders into oblivion with the message, "Join us and die like this!"

Err, maybe not.

On the other hand, Hot Air posted a real, live ISIS recruiting video. It's since been removed from YouTube, but while it was up, I didn't see too many American bombs falling. I did see ISIS guys blowing things up and Americans retreating and vowing not to send in the Army.

Not too many people want to join a losing team.

Disappointed In The BloodMobile

I gave blood today. Oh sure, the folks running the BloodMobile were competent, professional, friendly and efficient, but none of them had Transylvanian accents.

Really, is that too much to ask?

Jalapeños

On a whim, we planted a jalapeño plant in one of our raised beds this year. It's turned out to be our favorite of all the vegetables and herbs. After our trip to Grand Cayman, I've been making a lot of jerk and those jalapeños come in mighty handy. They'll get planted every year from now on.

Cloud Evolution

It's been hot and humid here in San Diego lately. We've gotten some lovely thunderheads over the mountains, but I've not been in a good place to film them. Instead, I took this one yesterday looking almost straight up at what I thought was an interesting sky. The movie ends before the music so the audio is abruptly cut off. Sorry about that. It was shot in 1080p, so it might be worth watching it in full screen mode.

Enjoy.

You Can't Run A Professional Sports Team Like A Retail Shop

... and expect to do anything but lose.

Newcastle United owner Mike Ashley loves to make money. He uses the team like a store in a shopping mall, buying players wholesale and selling them retail. He grabs a bunch of what would be called "reaches" in the NFL draft, lets them play for a year and then sells anyone who pans out. Last year, he sold Yohan Cabaye, a world-class midfielder*, for about 20 million pounds. That's like the New Orleans Saints selling Drew Brees after one or two great seasons.

Ashley has done this time and time again. He replaces the great players with bargain-basement prospects and starts the process all over again. Sometimes it works out well, like it did two years ago when Newcastle finished fifth and sometimes it doesn't like this year where it looks like they're going to fight for their lives to keep from being relegated to a lower league.

Meanwhile, the fans are screaming bloody murder and are demanding the head of Alan Pardew, the manager, on a plate. I'm a big Pardew fan, but I'm now in agreement with most other fans. Pardew needs to go, not for the sake of the team, but for the sake of Alan Pardew. Newcastle doesn't need a football manager, they need a retail marketing expert.

Some Southampton dude after scoring in their 4-0 romp over Newcastle yesterday. Source.

* - Yohan started for France's World Cup team, that's how good he is.

Every Time I Drink Milk

... I think of this scene from the movie, Daughters Courageous. I call milk "the white wine of the Mahabus" and laugh, but no one else gets the joke. Oh well.

The ISIS Speech

I suppose, as someone who has repeatedly criticized President Obama and has an interest in current affairs, I should have watched the speech so I could excoriate it regardless of its merits. Meh. Too predictable. I've been pondering something else.

While it's a good thing that we're going to continue air strikes against ISIS, I'm wondering how prepared we are for this thing to escalate. Eventually, ISIS, or someone else, is going to realize that it's a lot easier to fight California aqueducts and Texas power transmission lines over here than AC-130 gunships over there. If they're willing to behead and crucify people, they're not going to sweat hauling small SAMs across the border and camping out at the end of the ORD runway to pop airliners.



Seriously, would you take on one of these brutes?
Looking at the problem from the ISIS point of view, it would be silly to fight us where we're strongest. From what I can tell, the speech didn't go into that aspect of the problem. At some point in time, some speech will.

You Can Use It Anywhere In The World

... because it's a chocolate bar.

A friend at work turned me on to this ad from a year or so ago and it plays well today after the big iPhone (arroo!) rollout yesterday.

Enjoy.

Cheezburger of the Day

Yes, I know, it's dog-related and not cat-related, but the Catican Guards love this sort of thing.

I Am So Over Tattoos

... especially on women.

Driving through Ocean Beach (the San Diego equivalent of Haight/Ashbury), I saw a lovely young lady on a bike with a tattoo going from her shoulder to her elbow. Fully a third of it was a huge skull with flaming, red eyes. Hideous.

This weekend, while taking the Catican Guards out on maneuvers down at Fiesta Island, we drove by a beautiful girl in a bikini down by the shore. Fiesta Island can be a little messy at low tide, which this was, and at first I thought her back was smeared with mud. It wasn't. It was a tattoo covering the upper right-hand quarter of her back. Horrible.

Can we stop this now?

Who Jiggles The Table?

Robert Shiller's CAPE ratio (cyclically adjusted price earnings ratio) is sounding the alarm.

Shiller's 'CAPE ratio' is among the most widely-used measures of whether markets are cheap or expensive, and he got the Nobel Prize for economics last year for his work on market volatility and asset prices.

So it's chilling when he tells you that his CAPE ratio for US stocks has reached its present level on only three times in the past 130-odd years, and that those previous occasions were 1929, 2000 and 2007, each followed by a crash.

Then again, something is always sounding the alarm. If you'd been fed a steady diet of ZeroHedge and Mish Shedlock, you'd have kept your money in a mattress and missed out on years of very nice asset growth. Still, this is Robert Shiller we're talking about here, not some wild-eyed, survivalist nut.

Having been raised to hate borrowing, I've blogged ad nauseum about national debt levels, but nothing ever seems to come of their growth. Except in Argentina, but that particular social justice fascist basket case* is always blowing up. National debts keep going up and up and up without any apparent repercussions.

Sort of like when you build a house of cards and make it taller and taller and taller. So what's going to jiggle the table?

I spent a little time meandering around the FRED charts and graphs and came up with two to bore you.

Japan

The Bank of Japan is printing money like crazy to keep interest rates for the government around zero. If you can borrow and renew debt at zero percent, that can go on indefinitely. Only inflation can put an end to that and with the population of Japan being so old, it's hard to see how the consumer demand-driven inflation is going to happen.

China

Click on the image for a legible picture.
China, as of the 2011 data shown here, has positively ginormous bank loans to deposit ratios. They have 2.5x as much money lent out as they do deposits. When someone big can't make their loan payments, their bank is in trouble and then ... what? Massive printing of currency to shore up the banks?

Of the two, I'd bet that China is more likely to blow first. It's going to require some dynamism to shake things up and Japan hasn't shown any of that in decades.

Of course, if ISIS blows some bridges, power lines or aqueducts in the US first, then all bets are off.

I still feel really uncomfortable about the market, sort of the way I felt in 2007. I guess if there was some obvious marker out there, everyone would see it, not just some dilettante blogger. This post is pointing out that everything is set for a fall. Secondarily, if the CAPE ratio is historically high, how much higher can the market go? How much are you risking if you take money off the table for a while?

* - As opposed to the social justice fascist basket case Obama and Democrats are endeavoring to create here in the US.

Sexual Morality As Contract Law

I've been following, with considerable amusement, (mostly through reading the headlines) all the hoo-hah about the "sexual assault" epidemic on college campuses. Here's a roundup of sorts if you haven't been keeping track.

My favorite story is that of a coed who, sleeping with her boyfriend, repeatedly told him she didn't want to make love, but finally gave in because he kept asking and she wanted to get some sleep. That a young woman thought she would lay in bed with a young man and not end up having sex amazed me. I thought we had fought the war against sexual prudery and the prudes had lost. Everyone was now being taught chapter and verse about sex in schools everywhere. This sort of ignorance was supposed to be a thing of the past.

Oh well, I guess not.

What is a thing of the past is the simple rule: wedding ring first, sex second. Instead, it's been replaced, at least at college, with a variety of contract law. Did she say yes? Did she repeatedly say yes? At any time, did she say maybe not? Was she of sound mind and sufficiently sober at the time? Do you have a sworn affidavit and three witnesses proving this was the case? How romantic!

Now that we've rediscovered that men want to sleep with women, men are more physically powerful than women and women get pregnant*, we need a way to deal with these facts in a postmodern, secular, non-judgmental, open-minded way. What could be better than sex tribunals run like a courtroom?

Forward!

Little-known fact: In the original Robin Hood screenplay, this kiss celebrated the signing of a binding foreplay contract between Errol Flynn's Robin Hood and Olivia de Havilland's Maid Marian. While it looks like Robin has climbed a trellis to get to Marian's window, he is actually standing atop the 237-page document prepared by Marian's law firm of Dewey, Cheatem and Howe.

* - No, really! As crazy as this sounds, this is actually the way things work!

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!