We Needed Net Neutrality Regulations Because Of The Cholera Epidemic

I'm all in favor of the government controlling the Internet. Just look at what's happened without it. A massive Internet-driven cholera outbreak killing thousands all across the country.

There was a cholera outbreak, right? No? A crime wave with people murdering each other over ISP access? No? Wasn't there something utterly dreadful this takeover cured?

Nothing?

Good Lord. Why in the world would anyone think that government management of the Internet was a good thing?

How Many Times Can You Download The Entire Encyclopedia Britannica?

I thought this article on the uncertain value of huge data pipes was quite good. Here's the payoff in case you don't want to click.

When the BTIG Research firm last October began covering the Internet pipe operator Cogent Communications , its report contained an amusing insight. Cogent’s last-mile business customers buy a service that offers 100 megabits per second. The average use by these customers, though, is only about 12 mbps, and barely “one or two dozen of their customers have ever reached 50% utilization of the 100 MB pipe,” says BTIG.

Yet despite this demonstration of how little bandwidth customers actually use, Cogent also offers a one-gigabit service. “Interestingly, the usage of these customers does not likely differ materially than their 100 MB customers,” says BTIG....Ten Netflix videos running simultaneously wouldn’t even consume 4% of the capacity (1 gigabit) that Google Fiber provides its customers.

We've had times in our house when several people are using the Internet pretty heavily all at once. Sometimes we have three high-bandwidth apps going simultaneously including a movie, a video game and a soccer game. I don't recall having much of a problem even under these conditions and that's with download speeds on the order of 16 MB.

If I'm restoring a crashed hard drive, I have to download about 120GB from Mozy. Other than that once-every-two-years event, I can't think of anything that could even come close to taxing a 100 MB pipe.

What would I do with 1 GB speed? What in the world could I possibly consume that would take even 100 MB of throughput?

On The Lookout For Violent Extremists

Now that we know who we're fighting - violent extremists - I think it's time for all of us to take part in this great crusade effort and keep our eyes open for the enemy. Who knows where an extremist will violently strike next?

Me, I'm watching these guys. Victorians in 2015? Sounds pretty extremist to me.

A Multiculturalist's Crisis Of Faith

... is what I think the whole "ISIS isn't Islamic" thing is.

When members of the Administration talk about how ISIS is not Islamic, when they can't mention Islamic terrorism without also mentioning the Crusades, when they use the euphemism "violent extremism" over and over again, they're not talking to us, they're talking to themselves. They're trying to convince themselves that there really is a sparkly unicorn called multiculturalism and it really is the Truth. To say otherwise puts a dagger in the heart of the secular, post-modern faith.

If ISIS and its colleagues are not aberrant, if they are Islamic with a genuine basis in an interpretation of the Koran, then either one culture is better than another or there is no definition of "better" at all. As soon as you admit one culture is superior to another, you instantly are forced into some kind of ranking system, one that undercuts all of the foundations of the multicultural belief system.

When we hear Administration spokescreatures, university professors and lefty pundits try to describe ISIS as some kind of fit of insanity, totally detached from Islam, they're not defending ISIS or Islam, they're defending themselves.

All cultures are equally valid.
This is not a culture.

I'd Feel Better If Our Culture Was Dictated By 35-Year-Old Women

... it would probably make more sense than the college sophomore rubbish we have right now.

I was hanging out at a pub with a pack of Papists on Friday night and sitting near me were a pair of late-20s, early-30s young ladies. Both were single and attractive. They're high school teachers and we were talking about their students' reactions to 50 Shades of Gray. The kids didn't see what the big deal was with the movie. The two young women were trying to figure out how to express how awful it is for women to be turned into submissive objects for a man's sadism.

Ruminate on that last sentence for a second, pondering what it says about our culture.

During the discussion, the two sadly agreed that all the boys in their classes consume porn. It was dreadful, but just a fact of life for their generation. Here these two were lovely, engaging and fun and they could almost guarantee that the potential husbands around them watched porn. Their primary power over men was significantly weakened.

I wondered if that, coupled with the fact that most of their competition was putting out without much fuss, made most women just throw in the towel and surrender to the modern hook-up culture. It would either be that or spend a lot of date nights alone.

Back to the title of the post: 35-year-old women, if single and childless, are concerned with the quality of potential husbands. If married, they're concerned with the culture where their children will grow up. Almost none of them are concerned with trigger warnings, government-sponsored birth control or whether or not the LGBT community is fully realizing their Vaseline-slathered fantasies.

You'd have to think they'd do a better job than the college students and ivory tower academics who seem to dominate our cultural discussions.

Caligula. Not husband material.

It Was Ever Thus

A friend shared this image on Facebook and I couldn't help captioning it ...

All of the dinosaurs hear someone using a can opener off to the right.

How To Get President Obama To Defend Christianity

We need the Knights of Columbus to go rogue. Like this.


I figure that since he defends Islam when ISIS goes completely berserk and slaughters people and he runs about making speech after speech talking about how wonderful Muslims are and how ISIS isn't Muslim, he'll do the same for us when the KofC begin a similar reign of terror.

Dale Carnegie Is A Lot Of Work

I'm finally getting around to reading (listening to) Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. What a chore! Instead of this:

Me: You stink! And you're an idiot! I think you stink because you're an idiot!

Dale wants you to spend all this time figuring out what the other person wants and showing them how you can help them get it while complementing them and avoiding criticism.

All I can say is that the book stinks and I think it was written by an idiot. Now if you'll excuse me, there's a mob of people at my front door with pitchforks and boiling tar. They look to be frantically plucking chickens and piling up the feathers for some reason.

What a bunch of morons.

Math Wins. Math Always Wins.

Even in Greece.

Greece recently elected a government determined to put an end to that nasty austerity which was depriving the people of much-needed government money. Their determination is faltering in the face of account ledgers.

With the Greek state and its banks shut out of financial markets and dependent on emergency aid to stay afloat, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is retreating from his pledges to end austerity as the country’s creditors tighten the financial vise.

Borrowed money will eventually be repaid, one way or another.

There Are Extremists In Every Religion

... was a phrase I heard my public-high-school-educated daughter effortlessly spout the other day, clearly something she had heard repeatedly in school. I asked her what it meant and she just repeated it. I asked her what extremist Catholics might do. She had no clue as her education had been limited to slogans. Having met her teachers, it's a good bet that most of their knowledge is limited to slogans as well.

I pointed out that I was an extremist Catholic and I hung out regularly with other extremist Catholics. The most extreme of them put in a couple of nights a week at the local prisons, listening to the inmates, counseling them and doing what they can to let the inmates know someone cares about them. Ultra-extremist Catholics have even started a business designed entirely to help ex-cons get free of crime and lead a better life. These are the men I admire and seek to imitate in becoming an even more extremely extreme extremist Catholic.

So, yes, every religion has extremists. So what?

(Standard photo with snarky caption of extremist Muslims beheading or burning people omitted.)

And The Drought Goes On

...in Fresno and across the state.

Fresno, CA percent-of-normal rainfall from 21 Dec 2014 to 16 Feb 2015

Notes:

• A decent rainstorm in Fresno can bump up it's totals by 15-20% as seen from the 2014 graph. 
• The two graphs together show there hasn't been a decent rainstorm since mid-December.
• When I started this project, it looked to be a wet year. It's now another drought year in Fresno.
• San Diego is down to 84% of normal rainfall, so SoCal is dry as well.
• Wunderground weather says we might get 0.1" of rain on Sunday, but that's it for the next 10 days.
• Ouch.
• I'm doing something wrong in my use of the Google graphing library because it's treating the x-axis data points as incremental points instead of values. That is, if my database has the dates from 12 Jan to 18 Jan missing, it puts the points on the graph next to each other instead of 6 ticks apart. I moved back to date numbers instead of dates trying to solve the problem, but it hasn't worked.

Wrath Is A (Mostly) Avoidable Sin

You are what you consume. Mentally, you are what you read, hear and see.

At lunch after Mass with one of our sons yesterday, he asked me if I thought the nation was more divided politically than it had been in a long, long time. I said I thought it was.

Social media like Twitter, Facebook and blogs like this one give everyone a voice. With so many to choose from, it's almost trivial to limit what you consume to people who think just like you. I would argue that for the most part, politically active people have organized themselves into bubbles. The only information that breaks the boundary are things designed to get everyone worked up and reinforce the culture within the bubble. That's why the conservative Twitterverse was echoing with photos of Obama with his selfie stick (he's a narcissist!) and the progressive one goes into histrionics every time a black person gets shot by a cop (racism!).

The dude was given a selfie stick. It's OK. It's not a sign of mental illness. For every black shot by a cop there are hundreds shot by other backs. It's not racism, it's a marker of societal breakdown.

My browser home page is a table of links I maintain myself. I used to have a section labeled "politics" which included Instapundit, Hot Air, Ricochet and Real Clear Politics. That home page dominates my Internet consumption. It's designed to give me the links I want every time I open the browser. My politics links reinforced my bubble and gave me many doses of outrage every day. Like a good, little foot soldier for The Cause, I responded with dutiful anger.

Today, I wiped out that section. In its place, I added to my sports section. One site in particular, Squawka, can fill up my Internet leisure time quite easily.

I could spend hours every day on Squawka.

My outrage stimuli gave me grist for the blog. It was simplicity itself to find something to rail against. A daily blog is a remorseless, information-eating machine so those political red-meat hurlers gave me the catalysts I needed to whip out yet one more diatribe and feed my blogging beast.

It also wasted irreplaceable neurotransmitters on pointless anger. Due to limited fuel supplies in your head, you can only have so many thoughts in a day. One more blog post here about how Hillary Clinton is a power-mad harpy is going to be read by 40 people at the cost of burning quite a bit of my mental fuel.

Pointless, wasteful and more than that, sinful.

I know I've blogged about this in the past many times. Vows have been taken, held for a while and then dropped. I'm a fallen creature, bound to err. I'm also forgiven when I confess and atone. With each such renewal comes a chance to make changes to at least reduce the frequency of my failures. Maybe by spending more time on Squawka and less on Instapundit I can see some progress.

It can't hurt.

A Denial Of Sexual Dimorphism

... could be the root of our new found acceptance of sadism.

Breitbart's Big Hollywood has an interesting review of 50 Shades. After reading it, I want to go see the movie, if only to plumb the depths of our modern, progressive, secular culture. In the review is this tidbit.

(The movie is a) $40 million studio-produced piece of feminist wish-fulfillment that plays like a pimp’s guide to breaking down a nice girl into a sniveling, needy doormat who is willing, literally, to wait naked on her knees in Pimp Daddy’s “Red Room of Pain” whenever he commands.

Pimps are master manipulators at convincing inexperienced young girls what love is and that they “like it.”

The foundation of those relationship dyamics is human sexual dimorphism. Women need love, men need sex. If you accepted that, you'd realize that sadism is the ultimate power imbalance. Statistically speaking (no, I don't have the data in front of me now), it's the man exerting dominance over the woman to fulfill his every fantasy while holding the reward of some small amount of emotional fulfillment over her.

As the reviewer, John Nolte, asks, "where’s your feminist god now?"

The psychologists that tell us sadism is normal and healthy are not advocates of male dominance, so the only thing I can think is that they've completely rejected the concept of sexual dimorphism. That's not such a leap when you consider how saturated the culture is with stories praising one women after another for breaking down barriers and succeeding in traditionally male roles. Sex differences were all cultural and we're washing away the last traces of the oppressive patriarchy. Hurrah!

Cultural acceptance of sadism, then, is part of the evolution of our concepts of sexual differences.

I Can't Tell If I Have More Or Less Respect For Paul Krugman

... after 9 years of daily blogging*.

Wednesday was my 9th Blogiversary with more than 6,900 posts here. It's a tribute to monomania more than anything else. I've only done a couple of Blogiversary posts and this one seems pretty hard to top in terms of what I'm doing wasting my time with a keyboard every morning.

The Krugman thing in the title comes from the fact that the guy writes the same column over and over and over again. Every tiny piece of data, every little news story sends him running in the same hamster wheel he ran in last week, last month, last year, last decade. What's even more impressive is that he's a Goebbels without a Hitler to idolize. Krugman is an out-and-out fascist, desiring nothing save more government control over the economy, but he lacks a Great Man to fawn over.

How does he do it?

Me, I'm bored with most of my old hobby horses. I trot them out once in a while and they still color my world view quite thoroughly, but I can't make every single post an examination of debt, traditional families, Catholicism or any of the rest. How does Paul Krugman overcome intellectual boredom? He's a marvel, that one. My hat's off to the old Reichsminister für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda.

If I did what Krugman did, the ever-growing tedium of it all would cause me to contract lycanthropy and I'd turn into a were-sloth.

Having said that, I've become completely fascinated by societal acceptance of sadism. How on Earth did we get to the point that sadism is beyond reproach? Talk about mining a rich vein of insanity! The only thing I can think of is that we now so worship sex that if you take any mental illness or social pathology, no matter how extreme, and add an orgasm to it, it's no longer an affliction, but a blessing.

I laughed writing that last sentence. Societal craziness is hilarious.

On to another year of blogging! Thanks so much for coming along.

* - OK, so I miss a day now and again, but for the most part it's been every day.

San Diego In February

I'm away from my computer right now, but I'm at a place with a great view. Let's see if my Galaxy S5 plus the Blogger app can give you some idea of the scenery.

Enjoy.

News Flash: Drunks Like It When You Give Them Liquor

Dig this bit of non-news:

ISTANBUL—Finance leaders from the world’s largest economies endorsed on Tuesday aggressive stimulus measures taken by many of their central banks recently as vital responses necessary to boost a weak global economy.

Drunks outside of the Night Owl endorsed Dollar Shot Night at the bar.

“Current economic conditions require accommodative monetary policies in some countries,” the G-20 said in an official statement. “We welcome that central banks take appropriate monetary policy action.”

"We've been panhandling all day and didn't come up with more than $15 each. We need a more accomodative policy at the Nigh Owl."

“There’s not enough demand in the United States to drive the whole global recovery,” said a senior U.S. Treasury official. Governments need “to use the levers that are available to create sustainable growth.”

"We tried working at that day labor place, but it's just not a fit for us. We need lower-cost booze for a little while so we can figure out what to do next."

Luckily for us, the finance leaders are looking for "sustainable growth" and not just a pile of printed money to hand out so they can go back to their government meetings and talk about what big shots they are.

Psychologists Unclear On The Concept

... need to remember that this song was meant to be a joke, not an instruction manual.


I don't know why it took me so long to realize that modern sex education is currently teaching our children that sadism is perfectly fine.

Insane.

Do You Have A License To Rock?

... you can get it from the Department of Music Veterans.

BDSM Acceptance As A Religious Marker

How is it that people can consider hurting, dominating or humiliating someone you love to be "normal?" What is the basis for calling sado-masochism "normal?"

After reading this excellent piece by Jennifer Fitz, I did a very brief Google search on BDSM perfectly normal or something pretty close to that. First, a representative excerpt from Jennifer.

The difficulty is that if you are a person who experiences sexual arousal in some untoward context (whether BDSM or anything else), if the wider society is telling you that your feelings are entirely consistent with your highest good, and therefore you ought to feel free to act upon them, you are suddenly bereft of any moral safety-net to bring you back to reality.

I've also been listening to Ben Shapiro's excellent analysis of Millennial morality, Porn Generation. Ben argues convincingly that the Millenials have no moral foundation at all and then gives reams of stats and anecdotes to show just how adrift they are. While listening to that and then reading Jennifer's post, I pondered the biological background to BDSM.

If our dogs, the Catican Guards, started injuring themselves on purpose, I would not conclude that they were engaging in a perfectly legitimate alternate lifestyle, but that there was something dreadfully wrong. Dogs that hurt themselves are exhibiting signs of high levels of stress. It's not good and if you care for the animal, you need to take decisive steps right away.

How is BDSM different? A quick perusal of my Google search hits yielded this piece by Laura Berman, PhD. Here's an excerpt.

BDSM is an acronym for sexual activity that incorporates bondage, discipline, domination, submission, sadism, and masochism — and it may be more common than you think. According to research from the Kinsey Institute, 55 percent of females and 50 percent of males derive sexual pleasure from pain (such as having lovers bite them). And, according to the Durex 2005 Global Sex Survey, 20 percent of people report engaging in “kinky play” with their partners, including the use of blindfolds, bondage, and masks.

Many people find that BDSM is a normal and healthy way to explore their sexuality. In BDSM behaviors, the individual is deriving pleasure from pain, or pleasure from being completely dominated or completely dominant. The fact that people would enjoy these activities is easy to understand when you study how the brain works: The pain and pleasure centers of the brain are very closely related, and so there are times when it really does “hurt so good.”

There's so much to work with here, but a couple of things jumped out at me immediately.

The Kinsey Institute might not be the worst place to find research materials, but it's got to be pretty near the bottom. Kinsey himself was a monumental pervert whose equally perverted "research" was designed to do nothing more than validate his own mental health problems. It did this in spades as the popular media devoured it like so much arsenic-laced cotton candy. Anyone who refers to a Kinsey Institute study is instantly suspect.

To me that shouts that Laura Berman's research is probably weak. The next paragraph provides more data.

Saying that the pain and pleasure centers in the brain are "closely related" tells you nothing of value. Closely related how? I'm no expert, but I know from pain and anyone suggesting that pain and pleasure are closely related is deliberately obfuscating the issue so they can sell something else. Animals avoid pain. Animals seek pleasure. That's why our Maximum Leader hates baths, but loves getting a drink from the faucet. There's a significant difference between the two.

Laura is degreed and seems to have a lot of cache in the field. She's also got the feel of an evangelist, peddling a point of view instead of cold analysis. In reality, deriving pleasure from pain in animals is a sign of serious problems. For some reason, Laura's all sunshine and light when it comes to sadism and masochism.

So the question is: Why? What's the lure of BDSM to someone like Laura? To me, it's a religious status symbol. She's showing her colleagues just how orthodox she is. She's a secular postmodern and acceptance of every conceivable source of orgasm is an article of faith.

Laura Berman is a religious fundamentalist.

You know, it would make it a lot easier on the rest of us if orthodox secularist postmoderns would dress in a particular way so we could recognize them by sight.

Maybe There Should Be A Law Against Burning People Alive

Wired has an article about autonomous military robots and how they could be programmed to kill people without a human in the loop. They're not talking about guided missiles which do that already, but drones and odds and ends like that. In the article, they posit a typically postmodern Western solution to the problem. Laws.

Military drones like the Predator currently are controlled by humans, but Gariepy says it wouldn’t take much to make them fully automatic and autonomous. That worries him. A lot. “The potential for lethal autonomous weapons systems to be rolled off the assembly line is here right now,” he says, “but the potential for lethal autonomous weapons systems to be deployed in an ethical way or to be designed in an ethical way is not, and is nowhere near ready.”

For Gariepy, the problem is one of international law, as well as programming. In war, there are situations in which the use of force might seem necessary, but might also put innocent bystanders at risk. How do we build killer robots that will make the correct decision in every situation? How do we even know what the correct decision would be?

In the comments lives another lovely postmodern Western idea: moral equivalence.

Commenter 1: A human still tells them what to destroy, even if they self pilot. Allowing a robot to decide what to kill is just a bad idea. Imagine if someone built a small swarm of flying robots, then programmed them to kill as many people as possible. That is the kind of horror this could unleash if the bad guys use it...

Commenter 2: Remind me again, who are the "bad" guys...?

Finally, there is this lovely bit of postmodern Western effluvium - paranoid, universal accusations of racism.

Commenter 3: ... And from among "US citizens":
"Black" == "Human"; return 0
"Activist" == "Human"; return 0
"Journalist" == "Human; return 0
"Al Bundy" == "Human"; return 1
If "human" == 0; kill and plant a gun.

ISIS just killed a POW by burning him alive. They recorded it and posted it on the Internet. No one questions whether it happened or who did it. In spite of this, we still talk about "laws" as if they had some authority and question the righteousness of our position. We ponder robotic killing machines, yet we don't consider what might happen if they were deployed by people who incinerate captives for fun.

Sometimes I think we're going to lose this war out of sheer ennui.

Sir Charles James Napier. When confronted in India with a crowd ready to burn a widow out of native custom, he replied, "Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs."

He lived in a time of national customs, poor chap.

Adoration For The Win!

... Again!

I went to Adoration this morning, not in a very good frame of mind. In fact, I was in a terrible mood. Despite this, I went anyway for a variety of reasons.

I said a Rosary and then opened the Bible to a random spot. Not very inspired, but it was the best I could do. I came upon Luke 9 which had this verse (62):

Jesus said, "No one who sets a hand to the plow and looks to what was left behind is fit for the kingdom of God."

The message was pretty clear. Whatever the problem was, let it go. You can't change the past, only the present with an eye towards the future.

It didn't cure my mood instantly, but it gave me something to ponder the rest of the day and set my feet back on a better path.

Do What You Want

... but don't say what you want.

I've been perusing a variety of sites and books on modern morality, the porn culture and enforcement of speech codes at universities. Something that recently struck me is this.

There should be no shame associated with any kind of sex so long as it's consensual. With the upcoming premier of 50 Shades of Gray, the consensual part will become a bit blurry.

There should be lots of shame associated with ethnic jokes. This is actually a harsh example as shame is now associated with a whole host of "code words" at various campuses.

One is potentially creating a new human life, the other is potentially hurting feelings. The more serious one is the one with the fewest restrictions.

Weird.

The Best Super Bowl Ad Was

... Avocados from Mexico!

At least I thought so.

Teaching Them To Be Good Little Party Members

My daughter's high school is a regular cesspit of progressive indoctrination. Two more data points popped up this week. Her government teacher gave them a 50-question political survey to take. Based on their answers, they were told if they identified more with Democrats or Republicans. 100% of the class identified as Democrats. In a school that servers a large population of military families from the South, the entire class identified as Democrats.

Right. No angle to the questions there.

In English, instead of reading, they watch videos. This week was a video about Christopher McCandless.

The hippy dip himself, in front of the abandoned bus where he starved to death.

Short version: Chris was a progressive dingbat who traveled to Alaska to be one with nature. Untrained and without basic equipment, he lived in an abandoned bus in the wilds until he starved to death. My daughter's teacher lionized the fellow, recommending his lifestyle to the class. A ranger living in Alaska was not so sanguine.

When you consider McCandless from my perspective, you quickly see that what he did wasn’t even particularly daring, just stupid, tragic and inconsiderate. First off, he spent very little time learning how to actually live in the wild. He arrived at the Stampede Trail without even a map of the area. If he had a good map he could have walked out of his predicament using one of several routes that could have been successful. Consider where he died. An abandoned bus. How did it get there? On a trail. If the bus could get into the place where it died, why couldn’t McCandless get out of the place where he died? The fact that he had to live in an old bus in the first place tells you a lot. Why didn’t he have an adequate shelter from the beginning? What would he have done if he hadn’t found the bus? A bag of rice and a sleeping bag do not constitute adequate gear and provisions for a long stay in the wilderness.

Ranger  Pete goes on at considerable length leaving little doubt that McCandless was akin to the trust fund progressives who are the core of the Occupy movement.

Fortunately, the teachers have contributed to the formation of a generation so centered on pleasure and rife with cynicism that all this indoctrination isn't creating passionate revolutionaries, but instead, a rather indifferent mob. At least that's the way it seems from my daughter's anecdotes about how her classmates are reacting to the teachers.

Third Best Possible Super Bowl Outcome

The best two, of course, would be for Green Bay or New Orleans to win. Barring that, watching the Seahawks choke the game away in the last seconds to the soulless, unfeeling machine that is the New England Patriots was wonderful.

Watching the Packers blow a sure thing against the Seahawks two weeks ago, I must confess that my heart was turned to the Dark Side. I had told friends that I wanted to see the Patriots win 56-7, followed by Bill Belichick strangling puppies on live TV. Yesterday's game was even better, though.

The Packers lost through a series of insanely improbable plays. Watching Seattle come within 36 inches of winning through a similarly crazy play and then lose the game on an even more improbable one was not only just desserts, but a full 7-course just meal, complete with just champagne, excellent just wines and just brandy and just cigars in the Gun Room afterwards.

As Count Rugen said in The Princess Bride, "How marvellous."


Sadly for the Seahawks, the scene ends at the 1:05 mark for them.

The Catican Guards On Fiesta Island

I took this shot yesterday with my phone and thought it was rather good. The weeds have responded to what little rain we've had and have carpeted the otherwise desert-brown landscape in green.

Enjoy.

We Must Be Vigilant Against Hateful Groups Like The Boy Scouts

... because we want more of this:

A video posted by Waka Flocka (@wakaflockabsm) on Jan 21, 2015 at 9:02pm PST

and less of this:

On my honor I will do my best
To do my duty to God and my country
and to obey the Scout Law;
To help other people at all times;
To keep myself physically strong,
mentally awake, and morally straight.

The chap in the video is Waka Flocka Flame, a rap star. We saw him in a TV ad and looked him up. Here's the lyrics from one of his hits. As far as I can tell, he is not under attack by any of the social justice enforcement groups in academia, the media or politics.

Compare those two samples of their work and I'm sure you'll see why California judges should have nothing at all to do with the Boy Scouts, but feel perfectly secure in working with Waka. We know what kind of country we all want to live in - the Waka Flocka kind, not the Boy Scout kind.

Gender Theory And The Boy Scouts

A lawyer friend of mine told me yesterday that there's been an ethics ruling in California forbidding state judges from interacting with the Boy Scouts because of their stance on gays. I saw a news piece about it as well, but I'm in a hurry and don't have time to find it now.

I'm not up to speed on gender theory, but it seems to me that the Boy Scouts are an organization for boys who identify as boys. Is there a problem with that? If we had the Tran Scouts for boys who identify as girls, would there be a ruling forbidding judges from dealing with them?

Is it that no one can choose their friends any more? I suppose that as long as we didn't organize officially and wear uniforms, I could host friends and their sons who want to do manly things without fear of reprisal. If I did so and a gay fellow objected, would he be able to sue me in court because I won't let him play with us?

For theological reasons, the Catholic Church does not distribute the Body of Christ to non-Catholics. Can we be sued for that?

The Land of the Free has gotten really complicated.

A Bump!

In the mythical, far-Eastern city of Shanghai.

And not much of a bump, either. The drought goes on.

One storm in over a month. Ouch.

More Feminism, Please!

Social media is all a-twitter* with stories of new idiocies from crazy feminists, typically from our institutions of higher learning. Everyone's racist, some women don't have vaginas, the cis-gendered patriarchy oppresses them on a daily basis, blah blah blah. I'll bet that furniture stores in college towns can't keep fainting couches in stock.

Personally, I love it. I've got a daughter who is reaching marriageable age and every time I read about some brainwashed chick foaming at the mouth about sexism, racism or whatever, I think, "One less. Muuhahahaha!"

I really do think that "Muuhahahaha!" part, too.

Look, there are only so many decent guys out there. These days, what with porn, weed and student loans, herds of prospective husbands on the hoof are pretty thin. Every young feminist is one less competitor for my daughter because every one of those loons might as well be wearing a "CRAZY CHICK" sign taped to their backs.

So go to it, universities! Teach courses like The Problem With Whiteness all you want. Force everyone to take Women Of Color classes. It just means more guys available for my daughter to marry.

Dear feminists - while you were screaming about transgendered rights, this girl bagged your man. Losers.

* - All a-twitter! HAHAHAHAHA!**

** - Hey, someone has to laugh at these.

Convincing 1955 To Be 2015

During the Charlie Hebdo imbroglio, I discovered this cartoon and this quote from President Eisenhower.

Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as that document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.

There is no way on Earth that my parents or their contemporaries would have found that cartoon to be even vaguely acceptable. If you were from 1955, you'd have to have been several standard deviations off the norm, on the order of Jack Kerouac, in order to think the cartoon wasn't worthy of censorship.

1955 America was America, too. 2015 does not have a copyright on that title.

Over the last 60 years, our morals and society have gradually changed. We did not become the porn-besotted, weed-soaked, worship-our-groins nation overnight. It took 60 years of deliberate, incremental steps to get here.

When we interact with Muslims, a decent mental model might be 1955 America. Imagine trying to convince Harry Jones of 1955 Cleveland that all family structures are equally valid, that sex on TV is fine, abortion is OK and religious symbols need to be removed from all public places.

Then catch him up on social pathologies by showing him things like this.

Lolcat translation: Moral dekadenz not goin so well akshually.

Two things are going to happen that don't happen in conversation with someone from 2015.

First, Harry's not going to be intimidated by the ad hominems the libertines throw around today to bully their opponents into silence. He hasn't yet learned that you have to wriggle around, avoiding the chance you could be accused of homophobia or being a fundamentalist. Our accepted norm of not morally judging behavior will be alien to him and he won't accept that. Talk about the oppressive cisgendered Patriarchy is going to sound like what it is - lunacy.

The second thing that's going to happen is that Harry is going to dunk on you, over and over and over again. That graph is just the beginning. There are lots more. The moral prudes from the 50s who warned of what would happen if we allowed the libertines free rein have been, for the most part, proven correct. Accusations of racism aren't going to fly, either, as Harry beats you to death with statistics of black poverty and black family structures.

The data is available to all of us right now. The difference between then and now is that the people of 1955 would be willing to use it and would dismiss the condescending sneers of 2015 out of hand. As our moral compass has decayed, our ability to call things what they are has as well. It was a necessary loss in order to maintain the fiction that our new "freedoms" were not destructive. They are, but we can't say that.

Muslims can. Accusing a devout Muslim of being a judgmental prude probably doesn't have the same effect as it does on one of our modern university graduates. I've no doubt that their Imams are shoving these statistics in their faces on a regular basis. Since their moral attitudes haven't had 60 years to be gradually diluted into nothing, they're not going to be pushed around with our idiot, Unitarian-style arguments.

If our modern, secularist leaders are going to win cultural arguments with the Muslims, they're going to have to show them the concrete advantages of porn and weed. Good luck with that.

No Coffee Break Today

8+ years of daily blogging has made me able to compose a post in my head and free-write it as fast as I  can type. I don't even have time for that during a coffee break today as I've gotten some great business opportunities (yes, multiple!) in some emails and it's time to get cracking!

I'm in such a good mood that I need to share it and who better to set the tone than ...


I hope you have a day that makes you dance like no one is looking!

And The Best English-Style Brown Ale Is ...

Dogfish Head Indian Brown!

Last night was the Papist Pub Party and we tried 6 different English-style Brown Ales accompanied by Bangers n' Mash and Steak and Kidney Pudding. Here's how the voting came out:

1. Dogfish Head was the clear winner.
2. New English Brewing was also unanimously acclaimed.
   BIG GAP
3. Ale Smith was mediocre. That was a real surprise to me as I had expected Ale Smith to win.
4. Founding Fathers was mediocre. That was not a surprise. I've tried it before and thought it marginal at best.
5. Mass-produced Newcastle actually held up well against those two and was considered palatable.
   BIG GAP
6. Samuel Smith's was horrible. Contrary to the good reviews given Samuel Smith's on various beer websites, this native Brit was almost undrinkable in comparison to the others. Many of my guests did not finish their samples. I recall seeing one person out of the corner of my eye attempt to get the taste of it off of his tongue with sandpaper.

The food was well-liked as well. In addition to the dishes mentioned above, we had English Sweet Peas and Leeks with Brown Butter. All of the recipes came from this book, which has never produced anything but good food for me.

Now I need to go on the wagon for a while, despite having a fridge in the garage well-stocked with brown ales. I woke up with a bit of a head this morning. :-)

Biting Off More Potted Shrimps Than You Can Chew

Tonight's the Papist Pub night and I've got plenty of cooking to do. Steak and Kidney Pudding, Leeks in Brown Butter, etc. There's still shopping to do as well. What am I doing? Trying to figure out how to connect my TV to our SONOS sound system. And blogging. Hmm. Maybe I'm trying to do too much. Maybe I should just do the first things first as they say.

How about you? Do you find yourself biting off more than you can chew on a regular basis?

And the Potted Shrimp? I was giving some appetizers a try in my "test kitchen" earlier this week and tried this recipe. It's an old way of preserving shrimp, encasing them in clarified butter. Clarifying the butter removes the milk fats and keeps the butter from spoiling. You add some spices (mace and anchovy paste in this case) to give it a more distinctive favor. You spread the concoction over toast as shown below to make a delicious meal. Or a passable meal. Decent, but not worthy of guests.

Why Does Saudi Arabia Have Such A Large Military?

In a comment a while back, Interweb Amigo Tim pointed out that Saudi Arabia has one of the largest armies in the world. Fourth largest, if I recall correctly. Here's why.

Firing The Money Bazooka In 3..2..1..

There's nothing that printing lots and lots of money can't solve! With Europe falling into recession, the ECB is swinging into action!

FRANKFURT—The European Central Bank said Thursday it plans to purchase over €1 trillion ($1.157 trillion) in public and private sector bonds by the fall of 2016, a landmark decision aimed at combating stagnation and ultralow inflation in a region that has emerged as a top risk to the global economic recovery.

Printing gobs of cash has a long track record of success. Look at the way the ECB was printing money just a year or so ago and how well that kept things humm ... err ... humming ... err ... well, maybe that's a bad example.

Zimbabwe, on the other hand, has had really huge success with the whole money-printing thing.
Image source.

Guys' Night At The Papist Pub

On Saturday, I'm hosting a pack of Papists at my pub for a tasting of English-style brown ales and some British food. We're all married and have kids of various ages. We're all fairly active in the Church.

The idea came to me while drinking some delicious Ale Smith Nut Brown. I thought, "There are so many of these English-style browns out there. A taste test would be a lot of fun, but having 5 or 6 22 oz beers is going to leave me in a liquid state with a massive hangover. I know! We'll build a party around this!"

When I sent out the invitations, everyone responded with enthusiasm. I'm going to ask, but I'm betting that the last time any of us hung out with nothing but other guys was ... more than a year ago? When you're busy with your family, hanging out with the fellas just doesn't happen.

I'm doing all the cooking myself and have decided to go with two main dishes, one normal and one very British. The normal one will be bangers and mash. The more unusual one will be a steak and kidney pudding. There's a great British pub and shop here in San Diego, Shakespeare's, that sells authentic British food. That's where I get the bangers - British sausages. I've got a cream soup picked out as well as a shrimp appetizer. There will be leeks prepared with a recipe from Newcastle as well.

Desert is problematic right now, but I've got to go down to Shakespeare's for more bangers anyway, so I ought to be able to find something for afters.

As far as the beer goes, I'm thinking that 5-6 beers will be plenty. Here are my candidates:

1. AleSmith Nut Brown
2. Samuel Smith's Nut Brown
3. Newcastle
4. Abita Turbodog
5. New English Brewing Co Brown
6. Avery Ellie's Brown 
7. Lost Coast Downtown Brown
8. Dogfish Head Indian Brown

I'm open or more suggestions.

As my truly deranged regular readers know, I've been a huge Newcastle United fan for the last four years, but ever since Alan Pardew left the Toon to go manage Crystal Palace, they've been my second favorite club. I'm not sure if I'll decorate the house (the Union Jack hanging over the door?), but I might play music like the Dave Clark Five's Glad All Over.

Boy Meets Gulls

We had some scraps of white bread left over from an appetizer recipe, so I took them down to Mission Bay to feed the gulls. This lot of scurvy knaves made short work of the bread and then stood around looking to cause trouble.

I got a couple of shots of gulls in the air, but since I wasn't using the sport mode on the camera, they came out too blurry to share. Oh well, there's never a lack of opportunities to photograph seagulls here in San Diego.

A Proper Rainfall Chart

... thanks to Google Charts.

Modesto hasn't had any rain since I started this project almost a month ago. In fact, most of California has been dry over that time.

Integrating

... PHP, MySQL and Javascript is proving to be a bit of an undertaking.

My rainfall project produces a MySQL database with a table of rainfall data for several California cities. I have PHP code that can read it and create a table from it in a browser like so.

Modesto Percent of Normal Rainfall

Date	2014	2013
21-Dec-14	218	42
22-Dec-14	213	41
23-Dec-14	209	40
24-Dec-14	204	40
25-Dec-14	200	39
26-Dec-14	197	38
27-Dec-14	193	37
28-Dec-14	190	37
30-Dec-14	183	35
31-Dec-14	179	35
01-Jan-15	177	34
02-Jan-15	173	34
03-Jan-15	171	33
04-Jan-15	168	32
05-Jan-15	165	32
06-Jan-15	162	31
07-Jan-15	160	31
08-Jan-15	157	30
09-Jan-15	155	30
10-Jan-15	152	29
11-Jan-15	150	29
12-Jan-15	147	28
13-Jan-15	144	28
14-Jan-15	142	27
15-Jan-15	140	27
16-Jan-15	138	27
17-Jan-15	136	26

Graphing this data has proven problematic in PHP, requiring me to learn javascript in order to use the excellent Google Charts library. Javascript, being browser-side, doesn't integrate well with the MySQL on the server. My first guess at solving this problem is to write a PHP script which produces a CSV string of the rainfall data and have the javascript code read that page in as a string. I then parse the CSV into an array and insert it into the graphing library.

Bite-size pieces. It's all going to have to be done in bite-sized pieces. I just wrote the PHP code to make the CSV. Now it's time to take a mental break and watch the Arsenal-ManU game.

President Eisenhower And Charlie Hebdo

Here's what Ike had to say about censorship.

"Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as that document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship."

Remarks at the Dartmouth College Commencement Exercises, Hanover, New Hampshire, 6/14/53

Emphasis mine.

Do you think Ike would have found this to offend his ideas of decency?

Whatever. Dwight Eisenhower couldn't have been a real American because he wasn't for utterly unfettered free speech. He probably would have been called a coward like all the other people who won't republish porn images of religious icons.

Google Charts Beats pChart

... like a drum.

For my rainfall project, I've been fighting with the PHP pChart drawing library for some time now, trying to get it to display labels and titles, format axes and so forth, all to no avail. Things work in their examples, but don't work in my code. The documentation for pChart is a complete mess as versions have deprecated functions, but the documentation on the web still shows them as active. The only way I know which functions are really there is to start writing the code in Dreamweaver and have its auto complete feature show me what's available.

I picked pChart because I knew PHP, but didn't know JavaScript very well. I've wanted to learn it, but I didn't want to compound the difficulty by learning a charting library while learning a new language. That concern has been thrown out the window.

Google Charts is a charting library provided for free by ... Google. Everything about it is first class. The documentation is clear, the results are beautiful and its only drawback is that it's written for JavaScript.

Oh well. I was going to learn JavaScript anyway.

Moms Are Always Beautiful

... just like Momma Daisy!

Momma Daisy is blooming right now.

I'm trying to remember what year I got her. I'm thinking it was 2005, but it could have been earlier. One of the women who gave her to me (a going away present at work) retired recently. She was always amazed that Momma was still alive. Momma's been my favorite plant ever since I got her, a symbol of people I loved.

My First Car

... was a 1969 Dodge Dart. There's a site with some great old car brochures. Here's the one for the '69 Dart.

What a way cool idea for a website, no?

Where Leadership Was Missing In The Charlie Hebdo Massacre

Almost everyone has had their fill of Muslim violence. That's why the mob was so quick to rush to the defense of Charlie Hebdo. Had CH been shot up by gays for a homophobic magazine cover, there would have been no marches. The cops would have dealt with the issue and it would have faded from the front pages quickly.

The mob had no purpose other than defiance. That's why the cartoons were republished in so many places and why the mob became irate where they weren't. Defending free speech was the cause and everyone signed on.

Defiance is divisive. One side is defying the other. Divisive acts when violence is a real option is not a good idea. Mobs aren't good for much more than defiance, though. That's why we needed leadership. As far as I can tell, we didn't get any.

Leadership would provide a strategic goal. I'd suggest the strategic goal here is to get the French Muslims to feel French and defend French customs. Trashing their sacred icons may be a terrific act of defiance, but it's a lousy sales technique when you're trying to sell them on the idea of being French.

Imagine going into a shoe store where the salesman screams that he doesn't think you have the brains to pick out a pair of socks, much less shoes, slacks or shirt.

Leadership would have focused the protests on more than defiance. It would have used the energy of the mob defending free speech and channeled it into something more. The goal of assimilating the Muslims would have been front and center and this horrible incident would have been proof that assimilation was needed.

Instead, all we got were republished, blasphemous cartoons and an in-your-face march. Six months from now, those 6,000,000 Muslims in France still won't feel very French. Our political leaders failed us utterly.

The Importance Of Fathers

Here's an interview with an inmate about what it was like growing up without a father. The anger surprised me. The video is less than 2 minutes long and is worth watching.

Developing On A Laptop Is The Worst

I spent an hour this morning playing with my rainfall graphing project. Southern California got some rain this weekend and I wanted to see how it affected the charts. I've got pChart working and it's very powerful, but I'm still not facile with it and I need to keep a browser window open with my latest chart page, the manual and examples as I write code in Dreamweaver. I also need a window open with HeidiSQL, my database viewer.

I've got a laptop with a single 17" screen.

Yes, that's a big screen and my friends at work mock me for having such a monster to lug around, but it's still not anywhere big enough to make web development easy. At work I've got two screens and have worked with three in the past. That makes things so easy! This is torture.

In the end, I wasn't able to label the axes, draw a legend or create a title. Pathetic. Enjoy?

Percent of normal rainfall for San Diego. The upper curve is this year, the lower curve is last year. There's a slight uptick after yesterday's rains. The x-axis is the date going from 21 December 2014 to 12 January 2015. The y-axis probably goes from 20% to 220%, but I'm not completely sure.

If I could master labeling the graph dynamically, I wouldn't have to type this. Sigh.

The End Game Is Easy To See

... if you're Nostradamus.

In Afghanistan, Muslim crazies used mortars to blow up centuries-old Buddha statues. In Iraq, they burned ancient, Catholic churches to the ground. In Nigeria, they recently stormed a village and killed about 2,000 people.

There are something like 6 million Muslims in France, free to move about and engage in commerce. Some of them are crazy. Some of them are, shall we say, less than impressed with French culture. Museums full of French art, for example, may be sacred to the French natives, but are not sacred to the Muslim crazies. Mohammed is sacred to Muslim crazies.

If you're going to draw Mohammed in various slanderous poses and you've got 6 million potential enemy combatants in your country and lots of ill-defended cultural icons, you might want to consider just how this is all going to end. Yes, you defended free speech. Now you need to think about defending the Louvre.

Aside: A friend of mine called car bombs the strategic bombing campaign of a military that lacks an air force. How many museums can stand up to a direct hit by a thousand-pound bomb?

What strikes me the most about our war on Islamofascism is how mentally unprepared the West is. With every move, we assume that we can dictate just how far things will escalate. When President Obama decided to bomb ISIS in Iraq, all I could think was that we had a long, undefended border and lots and lots of soft targets. At least with America, the Muslim crazies aren't already here in huge numbers like they are in France.

On the plus side, we can still draw crude porn pictures of religious figures, so we've got that going for us.

The Devil And Peter Tork

As we rush to war on the Interweb Tubes to defend utterly unfettered free speech, here's a bit of old news from 1968 about an episode of the Monkees entitled The Devil and Peter Tork.

Contrary to popular belief, this episode (the fifth completed for the second season), was held back by NBC due to its satanical jabs at network censorship--the word "hell"--rather than the lyrical content of the song "Salesman." Note that a distinct "cuckoo" is heard when Mike, Davy and Micky utter the word (or try to, anyway). Previously, "censored" Monkees episodes wherein a "cuckoo" replaced an offending expletive are No. 15, "Too Many Girls" (a.k.a. "Davy And Fern") and the closing moments of the previous episode, "The Monkee's Paw."

Here's the episode in case you want to watch it.

So You Still Want To Stand Up For Charlie Hebdo?

... after seeing this? It took less than 30 seconds to find that. There's more. Lots more.

There you go, absolutist free-speechers. Those are your teammates.

When the Black Panthers shoot up a Klan cookout, how many of you will be wearing Confederate flags and singing Dixie as you march through the streets?

Count me out.

What Are We Defending?

Drawing Mohammed in pornographic poses?

Those who work at this newspaper have a long and disgusting record of going way beyond the mere lampooning of public figures, and this is especially true of their depictions of religious figures. For example, they have shown nuns masturbating and popes wearing condoms. They have also shown Muhammad in pornographic poses.

While some Muslims today object to any depiction of the Prophet, others do not. Moreover, visual representations of him are not proscribed by the Koran. What unites Muslims in their anger against Charlie Hebdo is the vulgar manner in which Muhammad has been portrayed. What they object to is being intentionally insulted over the course of many years.

The people at Charlie Hebdo were not on my side any more than the guys who shot them. A pox on both their houses.

Interestingly, while the people on Twitter agitating for reproducing Hebdo artwork might not know the full, scurvy truth of the content of that rag, it's a good bet the Muslims do. If you wanted the Muslims to feel isolated and surrounded by hateful, filth-encrusted infidels, this was a great way to do it.

Be careful who you take on as an ally. They may bring with them enemies you wouldn't have had otherwise.

Update: Good friends Tim and Foxfier have taken me to task over this to some degree. My question is, why would anyone, individually, implicitly defend Hebdo? Would our lives be missing something without sufficient porno pictures of Mohammed? Is there a crucially important characteristic to the kind of people who draw pictures of masturbating nuns that we can't do without?

I have no fear that there are plenty of guttersnipes who will now draw all manner of slime about the Prophet in retaliation. That crowd will be plenty big enough without us. Why should we feel the need to join in?

Find and prosecute the murderers, yes. But publish nasty pictures of Mohammed? Why?

And The Reason We Need To Get All Wound Up About Charlie Hebdo Is

... what?

A pack of smarmy creeps like the ones that produce The Daily Show mocked Muslims. Crazy Muslim fanatics went into their offices and shot them up. Apparently, the proper response to this is for all of us to publish attacks on the Muslim religion. At least that's what I'm reading on Twitter.

Um, why?

Look, I'm sorry the people got shot, but I don't see any need to follow their lead. Why do I need to get into the gutter with the writers at Charlie Hebdo to show that I don't like terrorism?

This blog started with a post about Danish cartoonists and threats of violence. I didn't think they were worth imitating, either.

So here we have a bunch of disrespectful creeps drawing cartoons that enrage a bunch of fanatical maniacs and we’re supposed to take sides? If, in 1940, Germany had declared war on Japan, just what would we have done? How about nothing at all and let them fight it out. It can’t be anything but good for us. Not every event in the world requires us to take sides.

In a later post, I said supporting the cartoonists by repeating their slander against Muslims was like attacking Stalingrad.

For the most part, we have completely blown it with respect to the Danish cartoons. We have taken the bait and run headlong into the battle the Islamofascists wanted to fight: a frontal attack on Islam.

I'm not a big fan of recreating Stalingrad from the German point of view. I'm sorry the people at Charlie Hebdo got shot, but I'm not going to join them in being ill-bred swine.

When (the Islamofascists) use (violence) to defend the Koran and the Prophet from Western libertines, they get recruits.

Let’s withdraw from Stalingrad before the trap closes around us all.

Central California Needs Irrigation

... is becoming apparent from my rainfall data scraping experiment. Despite being above normal for the year, Modesto hasn't seen rain in over two weeks. You can't do dry dirt farming like that. Everything would die.

December 21: 218% of normal
January 5: 162% of normal

At this rate, with no rain, Modesto will fall below average for the year by January 22.

The Male Gaze Is Everywhere! All The Time!

Good Lord.

The male gaze is something that society, even beyond feminist circles, is finally beginning to acknowledge ... The male gaze, which refers to the lens through which mostly white, heterosexual men are viewing the world, is a lens of entitlement...

Train yourself to see the gaze everywhere. Because that’s exactly where it is.

That's from the site, Everyday Feminism, apparently a resource for women who don't want husbands and enjoy paranoia. I found it by Googling "male gaze" after hearing a feminist use it in a video. Plenty of the ideas in that post are repeated in the media.

Why are we listening to these people? Why do they even get a hearing in the media with their infinite-loop lunacy? Train yourself to see the gaze everywhere because it is?!? What's the difference between that and the people who think the government is using beams to read their minds?

I had no idea their craziness was so foundational.

This is what you get when you mix the writers at Everyday Feminism with crazy cat ladies.

In Yuma, They Riot Over Sports

Well, "riot" is a bit of an overstatement. It's more like a mild yawn.

After yesterday's historic NFL playoff thrashing of the utterly impotent Arizona Cardinals, the Yuma Sun led with this story.

That's right, they led with ... European skiing.

The only thing I can think is that it's so darn hot and dry in Arizona that they watch Alpine skiing for relief.

Shorter Gene Demby: I Like To Chant And March

NPR contributor Gene Demby has a blatherthon of a post on Politico. It's 3 pages long and you want to drink a tall glass of rye whiskey after the fourth paragraph. Under the heading, "Suffering For Your Art," I read the thing so you don't have to. You're welcome. Here are the dimlights*.

First, it looks like I didn't get wound up enough about people I've never met getting shot for doing stupid things.

The shattering events of 2014, beginning with Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri, in August, did more than touch off a national debate about police behavior, criminal justice and widening inequality in America. They also gave a new birth of passion and energy to a civil rights movement that had almost faded into history, and which had been in the throes of a slow comeback since the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012. 

I wasn't shattered, nor was anyone I know. Instead, we watched sports, drank beer and cooked delicious food. Our kids went to school. Plants were watered and trash was taken out. Other than marvelling at people like Gene yelling about some thuggish dingbat who picked a pointless fight with a cop, nothing around me was "shattered."

Apparently, I was supposed to join a "movement" or something like that. Gene goes on for pages and pages and pages (at least it seems that way) about the movement and how dynamic it's become. The dynamism is shown by things like this:

Sarah Jackson, a professor at Northeastern University whose research focuses on social movements, said the civil rights establishment embraces the “Martin Luther King-Al Sharpton model”—which emphasizes mobilizing people for rallies and speeches and tends to be centered around a charismatic male leader. But the younger activists are instead inclined to what Jackson called the “Fannie Lou Hamer-Ella Baker model”—an approach that embraces a grass roots and in which agency is widely diffused.

I embraced the San Diego "@deanriehm - @bdaddyliberator - @mad_maximilion - @doodooecon" craft beer model. That's where you stop at Albertsons on the way home to pick up a big AleSmith ESB or Firestone Union Jack. This movement is characterized by grassroots-fed beef cooked on a grill and wins for our sports teams that are widely diffused throughout the season.

Honestly, I tried to read the rest of his narcissistic gum-flapping, but the best I could do was skim it. Just what all the marching and chanting is supposed to accomplish is beyond me. I've been around a little while and from the looks of things, longer than Gene. While "organizing" might be a good thing, it's utterly irrelevant in your life compared to going to church, getting married, picking up valuable skills, getting along with your bosses and devoting yourself to your spouse and children. You can march and chant all day, but if you don't do those basic things, you're going to be a failure.

In the time I've spent working with the homeless, mentoring fatherless young men and coaching kids, I've yet to see a life that could have been improved if only more people had attended rallies and "organized". I'm not sure what concrete things Gene intends to accomplish by waving signs around and clogging up our streets with shouting people. Maybe concrete things aren't the goal. Maybe the chanting and marching is the goal.

I wish Gene all the luck in the world with his movements and rallies and gabfests. I hope he has a great time. Meanwhile, I'm going to go back to working on some PHP code, cook a Cajun Prime Rib and follow @lee_ryder to see if Newcastle can beat Leicester City today in the FA Cup.

Mississippi Smothered Chicken in a big cast-iron skillet. Marching and chanting doesn't get the food cooked, Gene.

* - Since the thing is so utterly pointless, it doesn't really have highlights or lowlights.

Graphing Rainfall

I spent a little time installing the GD graphics library on my server and then scouted out some PHP graphing libraries. I ended up with PHPGraphLib which is about as stripped down as you could imagine. The results were underwhelming.

Meh.

There's another one called pChart that seems a lot more capable, but I tried to use it and mistook m own incompetence installing GD for its failings, so I punted on it and went to PHPGraphLib. It turns out that all I needed to do was reboot the server* and I was in business. I'm going to re-install the pChart library and try that. This one looks like some researcher needed some quick and dirty graphing functions and threw this one together. It hasn't been updated in quite some time.

* - Rebooting. Is there no problem it can't solve?