A Few Thoughts On Mass Amnesty

So President Obama, as near as I can figure, is threatening to turn a couple million illegals into citizens if he doesn't get his way with some kind of "comprehensive immigration" bill. On the surface of it, this seems insane. The more I think about it, the more insane it becomes. Here are a few random thoughts, in no particular order.

1. Someone ought to ask him or his henchcreatures, "What is a border?" As far as I can tell, we don't have one. If unattended children can get into a place without much effort, then that place isn't secure at all. What's the point of even drawing a line on a map and saying this side of the line is one thing and that side of the line is another if children can cross the line at will?


2. If Obama can leave the southern border unguarded and then turn everyone who crosses it into a citizen, why can't a future president do the same with a different nationality? What if a devout Catholic president said that everyone from Ireland and the Philippines can get in for free and then I'll make them a citizen with a wave of my magic wand?


3. Where in the constitution does it say that he can do this? Article II, Section 2 is the closest I could find to granting the president such powers, but it seems pretty sketchy to me. 

   The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.

   I could see where that might allow him to grant amnesty, but making them citizens is another thing entirely. All of the stuff about rules for becoming citizens is granted to the legislature.


4. How does this not end with impeachment? Can you allow any president to simply run wild? Clinton committed perjury and that was enough for impeachment proceedings. This is orders of magnitude worse. If this happens and is allowed to stand then you no longer have a legislature worthy of the name.


5. Where on Earth did Obama and his cronies go to school? What were they being taught? I know the answer to that one already. They were taught by the same lunatics that teach my daughter right now. It's all activism all the time. There are no rules, no classics, no standards, only injustices to be fought and fought and fought. Rage, organize, vote, picket, protest - these are what she is taught, if only implicitly and yet constantly in every class, science included.


6. If it does not end in impeachment, how does this not end in secession? If the president can make things up out of thin air and impose his will on the states, a la King George, why do they have to stick around and take it? Dittos for a judiciary gone mad. To take one instance, Californians voted legally to amend our state constitution to define marriage and the Supreme Court said our constitutional amendment was unconstitutional. From that point on, Californians ceased to have control over their government.


7. Further along the secession point, how much weed and porn do you need to consume on a daily basis to surrender sovereignty in border and sovereignty in law and lay around taking it? If Federal courts can overturn your voting and Obama dissolves the border and lets everyone in to vote, you cease to be a citizen and have become a subject. Does anyone care?

I guess that last thought is the most important. Is moral relativism so pervasive that only a few holdouts still care about this stuff?

It's a weird time to be an American, man. A really weird time.

Just to be clear, I am not advocating either impeachment or secession. This is just some noodling around, a free thought writing exercise triggered by the events of the day.

Urchins And Coral

... seen while snorkeling at the Molokini crater. I left it large so it might be worth a click. Enjoy!

Mission Trails Clouds Time Lapse

When the groomer called and told me the Catican Guards were running an hour behind schedule, I was already in the truck heading over to pick them up. Fortunately, I had my camera gear with me and was near a very nice photography spot in Mission Trails Park. The video below was the result. Enjoy.

The video is available in full 1080p, so a full-screen viewing might be worthwhile.

Imaginary Friends Are Fun!

... and the president has millions of them.

“To everyone that voted, I want you to know that I heard you,” Obama began. “To two-thirds of voters that chose not to participate in the process yesterday, I hear you, too.”

He listened to people that didn't talk? I wonder what they were saying to him. I bet it was something about global warming, racism or contraception. Those are really, really important things. Those are the kinds of things imaginary people talk about a lot. They must be, because that's what the Democrats tried to sell for the last few months of the campaign. It's too bad the imaginary people didn't go vote. They're probably smarter than the goobers who did.

Maui Sunset

Not spectacular, but still very nice.

Crazy Tea Party Republicans Hating Women And Minorities

Just look at this picture of Mia Love (R) who won her Congressional race in Utah. Look at it! It represents everything that's wrong with the Rethuglicans.

#WarOnWomen #Racism

San Diego Au Naturale

Here's a little palate cleanser for all of the election news. This is a photo from Mission Trails Park here in San Diego. It's what San Diego looks like, sans imported water. I left it rather large, so it might be worth a click. Enjoy!

I Don't Understand. Am I Supposed To Wolf Whistle Or Not?

So there's a video of some chick walking past a bunch of minority dudes getting catcalls and wolf whistles. (I'm not going to find it and share it here because I'm too lazy right now.) This has feminists in Full Freakout Mode, demanding, err, something. I'm not quite sure of what they want, probably because what they want is fundamentally contradictory with something else they want and so the whole thing is incoherent.

Now I come to find out that Lena Durham, Hollywood social justice fascist that she is, penned this piece of rubbish for the mass murdering trolls at Planned Parenthood giving a list of 5 reasons why you should vote.

1. When you vote, you feel so, so good...I wore fishnets and a little black dress to vote, then walked around with a spring in my slinky step.

Wait, what? She wore fishnets and slank around all day? I dunno, maybe she did it in her bedroom where no one could see her. If she did it out in public, then she was deliberately inviting ogling and wolf whistles. But we were just told that guys aren't supposed to do that.

I give up. I have no idea what these bitter, feminist skanks want. It's all so Escheresque. The staircase is going up and down at the same time and there are people walking on the top and the bottom and if you turn the picture to any side it still makes sense and now I think I just sprained my cerebral cortex trying to figure it out.

Whatever. Here's something we can all understand. A wonder goal by Papiss Cisse.


Now that makes sense.

Update: If you watched that goal and want a laugh, watch the first 20 seconds of this video to see a group of British sports talk blokes witnessing it live on TV in their studio. Wonderful.

Scott Peters Is The Worst. Or Maybe The Worst Is Carl DeMaio

Thanks to redistricting, our Politburo congressional midterm election is one of the few competitive ones in the whole country.

Aside: isn't that awesome? In a nation that prides itself on being a democracy, our congresscreatures effectively have positions for life.

Money is pouring into this race from all over the place and their ads are omnipresent on TV, usually playing back-to-back. There's not a single positive one in the lot, save for a 30-second spot where someone says Scott Peters handed them wads of cash or something.

Carl DeMaio is this runty, gay dude who oozes loud-mouthed self-importance. Scott Peters is a diffident, WASP-y weasel who looks like the type seen in the background of Mussolini photos wearing tailored suits bought with looted money. If either of them sat next to you at a bar, you'd be handing the bartender a $100 bill to clear a $15 tab and heading for the door without waiting for the change and most of your drink untouched.

I have no idea what either of them stand for or what they'd do once elected. I do know that Scott Peters did his best to wreck San Diego by having us borrow tons of money so he could hand it out like a big shot. In any case, I don't have the slightest notion what my vote means in the race between these two.

A bigger pair of loathsome, self-aggrandizing weasels you might never find.

And there's no one else on the ballot.

Thanks to our election rules, there is no one from the Green Party, the Libertarians or even the Peace and Freedom party for whom I can vote. I can't even protest vote. This weekend, after enduring another pair of ads which informed me that Scott Peters' hand was in the till up to the shoulder and Carl DeMaio was a puppet of the Tea Party and hated students, I told my wife, "That's it! I'm voting Libertarian or Green Party or ANYTHING but these two!" She quite agreed. Then I looked up the ballot and found no other choices.

Yay for democracy.

Purple And Fuzzy

I'm pretty sure I've posted a photo or four of this kind of flower before, but, gosh darn it, it's fuzzy!

I left it large, so it might be worth a click. Enjoy!

More fuzzy = more better.

Party In Tokyo!

First, a trip to the liquor store.

(T)he BOJ (Bank of Japan) said it would expand its annual asset purchases—its main tool to spur higher inflation—to ¥80 trillion from the previous target range of ¥60 trillion to ¥70 trillion. The central bank aims to achieve the new target mostly by buying more Japanese government bonds, cementing its status as the single largest investor in JGBs. The BOJ also said it would triple the pace of its purchases of stock and property funds.

Then, the wild binge at the BOJ's house.

Japan Mega-Pension Shifts to Stocks
Government Makes Bold Bet on Inflation, Higher Equity Returns

Afterwards, a really bad hangover.

TOKYO— Sony Corp. reported a hefty net loss of ¥136.0 billion ($1.2 billion) for the July-September period as it wrote down the ¥180 billion book value of its struggling smartphone business.

Tim Cook Is Proud To Be Gay

Full story here.

Me, I'm proud I don't have to clean the sheets in his house.

Mistaking Cuba For Japan

Continuing along with my reading of Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus:

Columbus was not looking for India as most people think. He was looking for Japan and China.

The essence of Columbus' view of the world. "Cippangu" is Japan.

That map represents what Columbus derived from the stories of Marco Polo and others. The errors in distances came from two primary sources.

• Columbus used too small a value for the number of miles in a degree of longitude, making his version of the globe too small.
• Marco Polo overestimated the size of Asia, the Sea of Japan and Japan itself, effectively merging the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.

Note that the map above is more pessimistic than the one Columbus used. His distances were shorter because of the smaller value he had for the number of miles per longitudinal degree.

What's interesting is that Columbus reached the Caribbean near enough to where he thought Japan lay to reinforce his incorrect notions of geography.

Cuba and Haiti could easily have been mistaken for Japan at first.

It's worth remembering that everything Columbus saw was from the deck of a small ship. His horizon was on the order of 10 miles. A sailor of that time could miss something as large as China or Japan by 30 miles, a tiny distance in a vast ocean, and never even know it. Columbus was well aware of this and it gave him hope that Japan and China lay just out of sight even as he came up empty on one island after another.

More later. I've got some Linux to play with now, so I've run out of time here.

How Much Water Does A Shower Use?

... about 5 gallons in my case. I can do it in 4, but give me 5 and I'm happy.

This weekend, I managed to wreck my tankless hot water heater. I flushed it with vinegar as per the manufacturer's directions and managed to cause a leak. San Diego water is more like chunks of limestone than an actual fluid. It causes all kinds of corrosion and calcium buildups.

As far as I can tell, the pipes in the heat exchanger had corroded and sprung leaks. Water didn't leave because calcium deposits had plugged the holes. When I flushed the system with vinegar, I managed to unplug the holes. Turning the water back on led to drip-drip-drip-drip-drip. Since I did this exercise on the Saturday when plumbers were not available, we had nearly two full days without hot water.

I've now taken two showers by heating a large pot on the stove and using it to heat up a 5-gallon bucket of water. I then stand outside with my bathing suit on or stand in the shower and dump bowls of water over my head to shower.

It's like going back to the 1800s. We're very retro here in the Catican Compound.

In any case, the 5 gallon bucket was plenty of water for me. Now I know.

One Of The Best Photos

... I've ever taken. I don't know why, but this one, a spur-of-the-moment hipshot taken this morning just to have something to post on the blog speaks to me. I left it really big and I think it's worth a click.

Enjoy.

Fetishizing Incompetence And Ignorance

These days, I'm making my way through Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus. I'm listening to it rather than reading it and it's one of those books that I wish I could memorize. It's chock-full of wonderful anecdotes, analysis and captures the drama of Columbus' life.

I try not to read history books written after 1960. It's an arbitrary date, but it represents the transition from history books as history to social justice advocacy essays. Admiral of the Ocean Sea was written in the late 1930s and early 1940s by a fellow who sailed Columbus' route. He knows from whence he speaks and he works very hard to be as historically accurate as possible. In contrast, my daughter's high school history textbooks were practically free of information and instead focused on social justice narratives.

As I listen to this and after listening to others such as The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Stanley's accounts of his travels in Africa, it struck me how very weird it is to have come up with the Europeans-as-oppressors narrative. The Africans were enslaving each other and fighting wars of conquest, the Aztecs were committing acts of sadism on an industrial scale and the German tribes were warlike and vicious. What differentiated them from their conquerors was their ignorance and incompetence. The worst you can say of the Europeans is that they were just better at behaving according to the standards of the time.

If the Africans, Aztecs and Germans had been as studious and industrious as the Europeans and Romans, they certainly would have been perpetrating precisely the crimes against humanity that we all love to blame on the Europeans. In fact, they probably would have been much, much worse.

I would argue that the assessments of the natives made at the time by the conquerors themselves were more accurate than the misty-eyed romantic ideals of them we embrace today. As Dennis Green might say, the Aztecs / Africans / Germans were who we thought they were and we've let them off the hook.

Update: Make no mistake, the author does not pull any punches about the behavior of the Spaniards and the Portuguese, but he doesn't turn the natives into the noble primitives, either.

Solar Power In Germany

... is succinctly summarized by this comment from this blog post.

Did you know that the most southerly point in Germany is at the same latitude as Bemidji, Minnesota? Right now the day is only about 10 hours long in Berlin. Two months from now it will be 7:40 long and the sun will not rise above 15° above the horizon. Not much solar energy, Klaus.

As the Germans and the rest of the morally preening, European, socialist greens struggle to find ways to keep from freezing to death this winter, they'll discover that solar power needs, you know, the sun.

Advantage: Putin.

Ach du lieber! Wo ist die Sonne?

Yes On 83!

I love election season. I love all of the ads that tell you absolutely nothing in a breathless, urgent tone. I never know what any of the initiatives are about, but I know that if I vote yes on 42, illegal alien children will be killed because they'll eat bread with gluten and if I vote no on 37, we'll continue to be bombarded by cosmic rays.

Or something like that.

I've always wanted to put a sign up in my yard, supporting a proposition that doesn't exist with a tagline that makes you go, "Huh?" I never find the time for it, so instead, I've created an image you can use to make your very own bumper stickers.

And please, if you value freedom for sparrows and other small birds, vote yes on 83.

Yes on 83. It's time for a change!

You're welcome.

Racial Animus Is Way Overstated

I work in a racially integrated group. We don't ever have disagreements along racial lines.

When I serve at Catholic Charities, it's quite common to see inter-racial support. My favorite of these was watching a young, black man make sure an elderly, Chinese woman, who spoke no English, was served when it was her turn.

Today, the Washington Post has a long article about the shooting in Ferguson. Here's the key tidbit for me:

Because Wilson is white and Brown was black, the case has ignited intense debate over how police interact with African American men. But more than a half-dozen unnamed black witnesses have provided testimony to a St. Louis County grand jury that largely supports (Police officer) Wilson’s account of events of Aug. 9, according to several people familiar with the investigation who spoke with The Washington Post.

The witnesses cared more about the truth than skin color. They cared more about justice and making sure Officer Wilson wasn't railroaded than whatever race loyalty the media and political leaders expect from them.

Hmmm. It's almost like our media and political leaders want us to form up into racial groups. It's like there's something in it for them when we do.

I wonder what that is.

The World Hasn't Come To An End

Fear not

There have been no new cases of Ebola in the US. It appears to be just as difficult to transmit as the experts told us.

It looks like Kobani is turning into ISIS' Stalingrad. Thanks to stepped-up American air power and the grit and determination of the Kurds, ISIS might be stalled there. Neither they nor their colleagues in Al Qaeda have figured out the value in going after the soft American infrastructure like power and water.

Russia is content for now with digesting Eastern Ukraine. There's a limit to what you can do with only a handful of combat-ready brigades. You may have a bigger army than your neighbors, but if you're going to launch Barbarossa, you need the Wehrmacht. Russia ain't got it.

The recent US stock market decline was just that, a decline and not a crash. The American Fascist Party, err, Democrats, have strangled the US economy with regulations, but it's a slow asphyxiation, not an ISIS-style beheading. We're not in crisis, we're just stagnating.

Despite what people like me say about President Obama and the wild predictions we make, the world hasn't come to an end.

And yet...

I'm still betting on Japan to be the crisis point of the decade. They continue to find ways to wriggle off the hook and live a few more months, but their doom is out there, circling like a shark in the form of mountains and mountains of debt.

Me, I'm doomed, too. Doomed to mix metaphors. Fishing, sharks, mountains. Oh yeah. Those went together real well.

One year in the Nikkei. Look at it wriggle off the mountains and avoid the fishing sharks!

How Central Banks Printing Money Turns Into Stock Bubbles

From Bloomberg:

Japan’s $1.2 trillion Government Pension Investment Fund will increase its allocation target for local shares to about 25 percent from 12 percent, the Nikkei newspaper reported without attribution. GPIF will also boost its holdings of foreign bonds and stocks to about a combined 30 percent from 23 percent, while reducing domestic debt to the 40 percent level from 60 percent, the Nikkei said Oct. 18.

1. The Bank of Japan (BoJ) prints money. 
2. It uses the money to buy government bonds (domestic debt, above). 
3. The Government Pension Investment Fund sells its government bonds to the BoJ.
4. The Government Pension Investment Fund uses that money to buy Japanese stocks. 
5. Stock prices rise and everyone feels wealthier. 
6. Yay!

Printed money has become real wealth. Well, it's real only so long as you can get yours out of the market and run away to some place where they don't print money out of thin air to inflate stock prices.

Is there such a place any more?

Janet Yellin Visits Chicago's South Side

Janet Yellin, chairwoman of the Federal Reserve, recently visited the violent, disadvantaged, pathology-laced south side of Chicago. After spending quite a bit of time with the residents, discovering just why economic mobility is so difficult for them, she released a statement and a video.

Here's the statement:

“The extent and continuing increase in inequality in the United States greatly concern me,” Ms. Yellen said to a conference on economic opportunity and inequality sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. “I think it is appropriate to ask whether this trend is compatible with values rooted in our nation’s history, among them the high value Americans have traditionally placed on equality of opportunity.”

Here's the video:


I mean, I think that was her shooting the video. She's a Really Smart Person. She went to Yale and Brown, both Ivy League universities. I can't imagine she'd make firm pronouncements about the underclass from inside of a government-academic bubble.

Would she?

Update: OK, I'm sold. Janet Yellin had to be the one shooting that video. Another Really Smart Person who went to an Ivy League School had this to say (emphasis mine):

“I think she broke new ground in terms of a Fed chair looking at such a serious socioeconomic issue with that degree of rigor,” said Karim Basta, chief economist at III Associates, an investment adviser, who attended the conference.

Ebola Is About Race

... because everything is about race.

Up to now, I've not been able to figure out why we don't have a travel ban on flights from infected countries and why we're not taking steps to close our borders. While it won't stop the spread, it will certainly slow it down. I'd rather fight the disease inside the country with 5-10 initial cases than 500-1,000.

Peggy Noonan today shows what gobbledygook the Administration response is to questions about travel bans. It's clearly lies, but why? Up to now, I'd thought it was the traditional Democrat fetishization of race. Africans are black and any restrictions on blacks is racist. A travel ban is racist and therefore religious apostasy to the Administration.

Jonathon Last disabused me of this notion. It is indeed about race, but, being more precise, it's about racial politics.

Marine Corps General John F. Kelly talked about Ebola at the National Defense University two weeks ago and mused about what would happen if Ebola reached Haiti or Central America, which have relatively easy access to America. “If it breaks out, it’s literally ‘Katie bar the door,’ and there will be mass migration into the United States,” Kelly said. “They will run away from Ebola, or if they suspect they are infected, they will try to get to the United States for treatment.” ...

Ebola has the potential to reshuffle American attitudes to immigration. If you agree to seal the borders to mitigate the risks from Ebola, you’re implicitly rejecting the “open borders” mindset and admitting that there are cases in which government has a duty to protect citizens from outsiders. Some people on the left admit to seeing this as the thin end of the wedge. Writing in the New Yorker, Michael Specter lamented, “Several politicians, like Governor Bobby Jindal, of Louisiana, have turned the epidemic into fodder for their campaign to halt immigration.” And that sort of thing just can’t be allowed.

What would happen in the event of an Ebola outbreak in Latin America? Then America would have to worry about masses of uninfected immigrants surging across the border—not to mention carriers of the virus. And if we had decided it was okay to cut off flights from West Africa, would we decide it was okay to try to seal the Southern border too? You can see how the entire immigration project might start to come apart.

And there you have it. If Democrat leaders become pro-border-security, the party loses its key wedge issue with Hispanics. Since the Democrats live and die with racial-block voting, they can't give up this issue. If Hispanics ever divided their votes 50-50 between Republicans and Democrats, the progressive era would be over, o-v-e-r.

On the plus side, an Ebola outbreak would make it easier for the Democrats to vote the graveyard.

Link Of The Day

... comes from the level-headed Calafia Beach Pundit. Here's a tidbit.

Might I suggest that if indeed the world population were to collapse in short order, most of those who managed to survive would face bleak prospects at best; the machinery of the global economy would be effectively broken, and modern civilizations would be hard-pressed to survive. What good would it do to sell everything you own today? Investing in anticipation of the "end of the world as we know it" is a questionable exercise at best. If you are convinced we are faced with an inevitable global catastrophe, then buying plenty of guns, ammunition, food, and a private, isolated island is probably your best strategy.

Read the whole thing.

I've pondered taking some of my S&P 500 money off the table and move it into safe bonds, but I think the time for that has come and gone. I wanted to pull the trigger at 2000, but I didn't. I can't imagine there will be too much more downside before the Fed contracts fiscal Ebola and begins to spray money out every orifice to stop whatever business cycle is causing them to wet their pants.

If things get too dire in the market, the Fed will save us from ourselves by manufacturing money out of thin air. Well, it will hand out free money until it can't do that any more because printed money has no value, but that looks like it's a ways off.

Infantry Against Ebola?

One more thought on Ebola. For the life of me, I can't figure out why we sent Army soldiers to Africa to do something about Ebola. It seems to me that they're just going to become disease vectors. Allegedly they're there to set up testing and treatment labs.

Eventually, up to 4,000 military personnel are expected to be deployed to West African countries battling the Ebola outbreak

It seems like a force that size will be devoured by both the country and the virus.

Do we keep them in quarantine before we let them back in the country?

The Ultimate Lean Six Sigma Success Story

As long-time readers know, I'm a huge fan of Lean Six Sigma (LSS) and other process improvement techniques. There's nothing I love more than ignoring the purpose of my work to spend endless hours focusing on how I can shave thirteen cents off the cost of purchasing a pencil. It's freakin' Paradise, man.

Yesterday I was in a meeting at work where we were discussing how one of our sister organizations could save tens of thousands of dollars by discarding their subscriptions to some electronic journals and instead accessing those same journals through our system. Had they taken the deal, they would have saved about $25,000 in the first four months and picked up access to about six times as many journals as they currently had.

Forunately, their LSS guru put a stop to it.

The dude was amazing. He forced the entire decision process to stop dead in its tracks so they could do a full-on LSS process improvement effort. Tollgates, voice of the customer, problem definitions, the full treatment. It was awesomeness squared. I sat there, playing Bejeweled on my Droid, marvelling at the way he enforced our organization's rigid orthodoxy of Continuous Process Improvement on a group that would have otherwise run off and saved money while picking up more benefits.

Lean Six Sigma. Is there anything more beautiful in the world?

Lean Six Sigma is just one success story after another.

A Thought About Ebola And Quarantines

I'm sure that as soon as Health and Human Services can break someone free from their Birth Control Enforcement Division they'll be all over this with a wonderful solution. In the meantime, I'm thinking that if Ebola ever gets loose in, say, the migrant worker camps of California, the back hills of West Virginia or New Orleans' 9th Ward, we're pretty much screwed.

It sure would be nice to close off the border right now and ban flights from Africa. If you can't control it once it gets loose inside the country, your best bet is to stop it while it's still outside.

Naahhhhhh. Closing the border is racist. I'd rather die from Ebola than risk being called a racist.

Small Talk With A Homeless Dude

... is pretty tough.

Yesterday, my wife and I were having lunch after Mass on an outdoor patio at a local Mexican place. We saw a homeless fellow walk by, take a look in the trash and then wander around. My wife got up and offered to buy him lunch. He sat down at the table next to ours while she went inside to order. It was then that I realized how hard it was to chat with him.

His name was Dwight. Dwight looked like he'd spent the night in the bushes. He was pretty baked as well, only marginally able to hold a conversation. Beer or cheap wine was my guess. We talked about the weather and he told me about the ocean temperature and what that meant and I asked if he was from San Diego and he pointed in the direction of where he was born.

And then the conversation stopped.

What do you ask? Where do you live? How are things in the bushes? What's the foraging like these days?

After an awkward silence, I asked if he'd lived anywhere else. That was a good line as it gave him his chance to spin a yarn about having traveled the world. He was pretty drunk or maybe his brain had been fried from bouts of drinking, so his speech was difficult to understand. I was able to pick out the word "Shanghai" and that led me to ask if he'd been in the Navy. Jackpot again. He launched into another unintelligible story about serving on the Enterprise and something or other. It wasn't important that the stories were true or even whether or not I understood them, it was just a chance to show him some affection.

When I work downtown, the conversations start themselves. It's a customer-clerk relationship. The business end of the deal keeps the conversation going and everything flows from that. In this case, there was no such anchor and keeping it going was much, much harder.

We left Dwight with a hearty lunch and he was shoveling it into his mouth almost with the palms of his hands when we left. From the looks of things, he'd been drinking whatever money he had found and food had been cut from the budget.

I'm still not quite sure where I should have gone with our confab.

Here's a site with suggested conversation starters. It's decent, but I feel like I'd tried those. The housed-homeless cultural gap can be tough to bridge, I guess.

Abortion Is Darwinian

I've always loved the smug, condescending characterizations of religion as some kind of psychological pacifier, concocted by savages to calm their mortality-worried minds. I'm also a big fan of evolutionary biology where scientists explain species and sub-species differences by noting competitive advantages. When Darwinian advantage analyses are applied to humans, it's particularly fun. After all, Darwin himself suggested the "inferior" races would vanish from the earth and we'd be left with the "superior" humans, a gap and then the apes in the whole ESPN Evolution Power Poll.

This weekend, I came across this tweet.

😈 rips off leg of another woman’s child while her own kicks inside of her https://t.co/gip2lfrYvh Daily Newsletter #PraytoEndAbortion
— YHWH (@kecheritomne) October 10, 2014

The story at the link is fascinating, like the diary of a Einsatzgruppen field officer describing how he helped cleanse Grossdeutsches Reich of subhumans, making room for a future influx of the Volk. After all, let's face it, there's no Sky Fairy and we're all just animals, DNA strands trying to propagate down the misty corridors of time in robotic fashion. Everything we do is governed by biology and natural selection.

Once you discard the primitive superstitions created by confused and hysterical minds, you can embrace the world as it is and realize that abortionists are merely carrying out their programming - destroying competitors to their own progeny. It's all so simple. The pro-choice crowd is naturally following their Darwinian impulses.

Instead of pro-choice, we should call it pro-natural-selection. We're not exercising reproductive rights, we're weeding out the inferior members of the species.

Baboons do this. When a new male defeats the old alpha, he will slay all the nursing babies so their mothers will come into heat sooner and he can mate with them. It's natural, it happens all the time in the wild and best of all, it's understood by science.


Science!

---

I felt weird posting this after coming home from a retreat, but it jumped out at me while reading my Twitter stream and I thought it worth posting. The subject is a bit harsh, but there you have it.

Spiritual Positioning

This weekend, I'm working a men's retreat. I posted this on Thursday, scheduling it to come out today. Instead of blogging, I'll be in the kitchen chopping veggies, doing dishes and serving others. For a variety of unavoidable, small but cumulative reasons, I've been spiritually and psychically tired lately. It's been difficult to be thoughtful or creative.

When I took kung fu a few years back, my instructors taught me about "positioning." While you can learn how to protect yourself, you'd be far better off not to put yourself into a situation where you're called to do it.

Positioning is what this weekend is all about for me. I'm not very enthused by the prospect (writing on Thursday right before I drive up), but I know that at the very least, I won't be doing something stupid or sinful. By hanging out with a bunch of great guys who are also there to serve and share their love, chances are really good that I'll gain strength and energy from them and bring it home with me.

Sometimes it's hard to push yourself to do the things you ought to do. When that happens it's best to position yourself so that's all you can do.

I'm bringing my camera with me. I hope to get some decent photos to share when I come back. I'll be sure to pray for all my blog readers, too. You give me strength even when you don't realize it.

God bless you all.

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.