Do We At Least Get A Participation Trophy?

When my kids were in rec soccer and the lower levels of Little League, they'd get participation trophies at the end of each season, even if their teams were terrible and they got pounded every game. America is in the same situation now, losing in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Ukraine and so on. You wouldn't know it from the news as winning and losing seem to be terms from the 19th Century and completely inappropriate to the post-modern elites. In the meantime, we're losing wars like mad.

Just to be clear, I consider a lost war to be an event where we say we want X to happen and we shoot and bomb people to make X happen, but the other side makes Y happen and prevents X. It's a war because we're shooting and bombing and it's a loss because our goals are thwarted and the enemy's goals are achieved.

Is that too simplistic these days?

On the other hand, we tried real hard. That counts for more than winning and losing.

Man, I'd Hate To Be On The Wrong Side Of History

... like Iran is. Here's what lecturer-in-chief President Obama had to say about them.

“That path is now available to a nation like Iran, which, as of this moment, continues to deploy violent proxies to advance its interests,” Obama said. “These efforts may appear to give Iran leverage in disputes with neighbors, but they fuel sectarian conflict that endangers the entire region and isolates Iran from the promise of trade and commerce. The Iranian people have a proud history and are filled with extraordinary petition, but chanting ‘death to America” does not create jobs or make Iran more secure.

“If Iran chooses a different path, that would be good for the security of the region, good for the Iranian people, and good for the world.”

That's telling them! Going back to the old ways of doing business, like using tanks and infantry to crush an enemy, isn't going to make you more secure. Oh sure, you may kill most of your opponents and drive the survivors into Europe, but that's only superficial security, not real security, the type that comes from diversity and inclusion.

Nope, it's all about dialog. And trade and commerce.

Well, dialog, trade, commerce and an occasional ZSU-23-4 (see 3:05 and after).

A Mystery Suited For The Scooby Doo Gang

Iran, Iraq, Syria and Russia are forming an alliance.

Iraq joined Russia, Iran and Syria in a new agreement to strengthen cooperation against extremist group Islamic State, extending the Kremlin’s reach in the Middle East as it rivals Washington for influence...

Iraq’s Defense Ministry said Sunday that the country had signed an intelligence and security cooperation pact with Russia, Iran and Syria, pledging to cooperate in collecting information about Islamic State. The deal effectively formalizes years of military collaboration among the four nations, which have intermittently been allies since the 1980s.

Just what this means is a complete mystery to the diversity consultants and LGBT social justice squad in the White House and State Department.

“We’re just at the beginning of trying to understand what the Russians’ intentions are in Syria, in Iraq, and to try to see if there are mutually beneficial ways forward here,” said a senior U.S. official who attended the Kerry-Lavrov meeting. “We’ve got a long way to go in that conversation.”

It's a good bet that the Russians' weapons and the Iranian chants of "Death to America!" are some kind of red herring and this alliance is likely to be an inclusive cultural outreach program involving local, organic cuisine and colorful, native dances.

Once these guys are on the case, we'll get to the bottom of this mystery in no time at all.

Now All They Need Is A Robert E. Lee

In A History of the English Speaking Peoples, Churchill claimed that Virginia seceded over Federal government overreach and not simply over slavery. Catalan is voting today in an election that could be the precursor to secession from Spain for similar reasons. Dig this.

At one polling place in Barcelona, the Josep María Jujol school, 15 voters were lined up before the doors opened at 9 a.m. Marcos Gutiérrez said it was the first time he had been animated to vote in several years, and he intended to back Together for Yes.

“We’ve been mistreated for a long, long time,” said Mr. Gutiérrez, who works in pharmaceutical sales. “Our money flows to Madrid and then the courts there make decisions that interfere with our way of life.”

Hmm. To those of us that value limited government, religious freedom and traditional moral values, that sounds pretty familiar.

Update: And here we go!

Separatists have won a clear majority of seats in Catalonia's parliament, preliminary official results showed on Sunday, in an election that set the region on a collision course with Spain's central government over independence

"Catalans have voted yes to independence," acting Catalan regional government head Artur Mas told supporters, with secessionist parties on track to secure 72 out of 135 seats in the powerful region of 7.5 million people that includes Barcelona.

The Backstreet Boys Or The Monkees?

At a party with a wide range of ages (teens to eighties), we were playing the this-or-that where you name two related things and everyone says which they like better. The question in the title got a universal response of "The Monkees!"

There's hope for the world after all. :-) 

Boy, Hotel Rooms Sure Get Cluttered Fast These Days

It must come from not enough mints on the pillows. Or maybe too many mints. Frankly, it's a mystery to me.

As I pack up to leave Seattle (mostly by stamping out the embers and putting the raccoons back in their cages), I'm marveling at how thoroughly I made a mess of this hotel room and how fast I did it. I swear, within about 10 minutes of my arrival, there are clothes everywhere, electronic gadgets plugged in and towels on the floor. It's like my suitcase had a bomb that was scheduled to explode 5 minutes after my arrival at the room. I must have chucked it in, ducked behind the wall and waited for the concussions to die down.

I'm an organized packer. I'm an organized re-packer when I'm leaving. When it comes to unpacking, I'm the Tasmanian Devil and I don't know why.

Maybe it's just a lot of fun.

Salvation Is Personal, Not Collective

Sitting at the airport yesterday, waiting to board a flight, I watched some of Airport CNN's coverage of the Pope's visit. It was thorough and very respectful. I've carped about them in the past, but I was very grateful they worked so hard to produce a quality show for people like me.

The coverage, of course, was very American. As I said yesterday, it focused on politics and sex. Is the Pope coming out in favor of this or that, is the Church going to change its position on this or that. It's sad to see such a wonderful opportunity to spread the Gospel lost on that nonsense. I'm on a business trip and too busy to read his full remarks, so I don't know if his visit was all about global warming climate change, immigration and annulments, but that is dominating what little coverage I've seen.

Leaders, be they political or spiritual or business, often react and move to unseen forces. You don't know what's going on in the board room or the cabinet meetings and so you don't fully understand why this or that topic is the one they choose to act and speak on. If Il Papa wants to talk about global warming climate change, good on him, but in my ignorance of his understanding, I wish his focus had been 100% personal and 0% collective so as to give no fuel at all to the discussions of politics and sex.

One of the things that has turned me away from politics, even though I blog about it - it's such a great fodder for a post - has been my work with fatherless young men and the homeless and poor. That's where change really happens. That's where lives are touched and Christ's love is shared. For me, reality is an individual physically doing something to help others - visiting people in prison, mentoring a young man, distributing food. Voting according to the dictates of this speech or that is all well and good, but nothing of consequence happens until you make it happen, both for you and the people you help.

Of course, I'm writing this from the wealthiest country in the world where our poor have cell phones and clothes to wear, so I certainly don't come at the issue from the perspective of a priest working in the slums of Argentina like the Holy Father. I'm sure there's a wealth of experience there that has created his world view and until I go and work in those places, I can only guess at it. In any case, I wish his visit had been all about you and me spreading the Good News of Jesus Christ through the works of our lives and not at all about global warming climate change, immigration and economics.

A Little Bit About The Pope

Dean asked, so I'm blogging. I'm traveling to Seattle today and doing this from my phone at the airport, so it will be necessarily terse.

Pope Francis is a master of Tai Chi. He doesn't resist people who disagree with him, but he doesn't change. It's a beautiful thing.

Lots have people have postulated that Pope Francis would change the Church's position on things like gay marriage. It doesn't work like that. Catholic Catechism is philosophical and logical, derived from some basic first principles and science. Using gay marriage as an example, so long as babies come from one man and one woman, the Catechism isn't going to change no matter who is Pope.

Finally, I fully expect that press coverage will be fully American. That is, the only things they will report on will have to do with politics and sex. Whatever. We Catholics will see more than that and will love having him here.

Update: I'm watching Il Papa drive down the street in the Popemobile with thousands of cheering people and him having babies brought to him to be kissed and I've got tears in my eyes. So beautiful!

The Question On Everyone's Mind Right Now

Do amoebas have orgasms?

Oh baby, I'm so good for me!

White, Cis, Christian, Heteronormative Ancient Treasures Are Being Destroyed? Well, They Deserve It

What's going on is as simple as 1, 2, 3.

1

The Islamic State has managed to destroy two thousand years of Christian civilization in the Middle East in just a couple of years, Lt. Col. Ralph Peters noted on The O’Reilly Factor last week. And he placed the blame squarely on President Obama’s cowardly, feckless, incompetent foreign policy. ISIS has been spreading across the Middle East like a plague of locusts, and as they have spread, they have targeted religious minorities, particularly Christians, for destruction. In Syria, tens of thousands of Assyrian Christians have been attacked and displaced.

Source.

2

President Obama will apparently test just how far Pope Francis’ notorious tolerance will go by inviting a rogue’s gallery of people opposed to Catholic teaching to greet the pontiff at the White House during his visit next week.

In a stunning show of political indecorum, Obama has invited a series of individuals who publicly flout Catholic teaching, including a pro-abortion religious sister, a transgender woman and the first openly gay Episcopal bishop, along with at least two Catholic gay activists.

Source.

3

Source.

Is It A Dog Toy Or A Pillow?

Yes.

We'll Be Fine As Long As We Drive 200 MPH

About 2.5 hours ago, we needed to be at Buttonwillow, CA. Now, at 1050, we need to hightail it up to Weed, CA if we're going to stay around 65 degrees.

Looks like the Thermocline Adventure Vacation calls for Godzilla.

It's 0830 And We're Heading For Buttonwillow!

Explanation of the I5 Thermocline Adventure Vacation here.

I discovered I need to set some ground rules. Taking the table below and starting from the top, I go down it until I hit the first city whose temperature is 65 or below. That gives us Lebec. Is Lebec too cold at 61 degrees? Hmm. Not quite sure. Clearly, I need to specify a range, something like the first city with a temperature between 63 and 65.

A second issue is that when Newhall is 71 and Lebec is 61, there must be a point between them where the temperature is 65. Is that good enough or are we going for discrete points on the map?

Hmm. Much to ponder. In the meantime, here's the Interstate 5 temperature table as of 0837 PT today.

City	Temperature
San Ysidro, CA	71.1°
Chula Vista, CA	73.5°
National City, CA	75.2°
San Diego, CA	71.8°
San Diego, CA	71.8°
Del Mar, CA	70.3°
Encinitas, CA	70.3°
Carlsbad, CA	78.6°
Oceanside, CA	72.5°
Dana Point, CA	72.4°
Mission Viejo, CA	75.0°
Tustin, CA	80.8°
Anaheim, CA	70.8°
Norwalk, CA	73.1°
Los Angeles, CA	75.3°
Burbank, CA	76.0°
San Fernando, CA	72.3°
Newhall, CA	71.4°
Lebec, CA	61.3°
Bakersfield, CA	73.9°
Buttonwillow, CA	65°
Kettleman City, CA	66°
Coalinga, CA	71.8°
Firebaugh, CA	70.1°
Newman, CA	68.5°
Manteca, CA	62.3°
Stockton, CA	70.5°
Galt, CA	63.3°
Sacramento, CA	56°
Dunnigan, CA	62.6°
Willows, CA	61.9°
Red Bluff, CA	62.1°
Redding, CA	71.4°
Redding, CA	65.7°
Dunsmuir, CA	48.3°
Weed, CA	52.7°
Hornbrook, CA	44°
Ashland, OR	55.4°
Medford, OR	50.0°
Grants Pass, OR	50.0°
Roseburg, OR	55.6°
Cottage Grove, OR	47.3°
Eugene, OR	55.2°
Albany, OR	54.3°
Salem, OR	55.6°
Portland, OR	57.3°
Vancouver, WA	54.7°
Kalama, WA	54.4°
Kelso, WA	51.3°
Chehalis, WA	54.5°
Centralia, WA	56.8°
Olympia, WA	56.2°
Tacoma, WA	58.4°
Tacoma, WA	59.4°
Des Moines, WA	59.3°
Seattle, WA	59.7°
Lynnwood, WA	59.7°
Marysville, WA	61.3°
Mount Vernon, WA	62.6°
Bellingham, WA	60.6°
Blaine, WA	60.1°

How To Take Out A Drone

The old Soviet ZSU-23-4 had 4 23mm, radar-controlled guns. It only has a range of 2,500m, but the idea is still there. Radar-controlled guns would probably do a number on a drone.

The Fruits Of Gross Historical Ignorance

... include the elections of Jeremy Corbyn and Barack Obama. The problem is the voters, not the politicians.

Preface: This post is prompted by a tweet from Dean and this article about Corbyn, the new head of the Labour Party in Britain.

http://t.co/DfeTKOGUUN The New Left won the Cold War. Very good read. @ktcat @BDaddyLiberator

— Dean R. Riehm (@deanriehm) September 16, 2015

This is a historical fact: Evangelical Christians, operating within the British parliamentary system, with the explicit power of the Royal Navy, put an end to the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

For the life of me, I can't think of anyone else, ever, for any reason at all, who put an end to a large-scale slave trade. There might be an example or two, but none come to mind. Whatever faults the British might have, this they did.

This was never taught in my daughter's public school history classes even though slavery and civil rights occupied the majority of the lessons. This is just one particularly egregious example of anti-Western bigotry in academia and the education industry. There was plenty to choose from in my daughter's textbooks. The elections of Barack Obama and Jeremy Corbyn are symptoms of an educational establishment in both countries which is willfully historically ignorant in support of a political point of view.

The self-loathing progressives that elect such men are products of self-loathing, slanted educations. Corbyn's election has sent shock waves across Britain and elsewhere, but it's not all that surprising when you consider what the electorate has been taught.

First, I Need To Find Out What The Party Thinks

On Facebook, I posted that people defending Planned Parenthood's harvesting of baby body parts is a good model for how the Germans went along with the Nazis in the late 1930s. One of the comments I got back in reply was that the videos accuracy was difficult to ascertain because of the politics involved. It was the perfect reply.

The defense of Planned Parenthood is based almost entirely on politics. Defenders are rallying to the Party as much as anything else, just as Germans who were behind the Nazis would defend their excesses. Most weren't then and aren't now looking at the data with unbiased eyes, but in terms of what the Party tells them. In our case, it's the Democratic Party.

Here's the latest Planned Parenthood video in case you want to check it out. It's as horrible as any of the others.

Oh Those Crazy Hungarians!

First of all, they're building a border fence. As everyone knows, it's impossible to build a fence on your border. Second, they think it's going to keep unwanted people out. Hilarious! We all know that border fences that can't be built but do get built won't keep anyone out. It's insanity! It reminds me of Eva Gabor from Green Acres doing zany Hungarian schtick like this.

Here's a photo of their so-called "fence:"

Look at that preposterous "fence" and their "guard." I'll bet it's only a pretend fence.

Thermocline Adventure Update: Google Maps Gives You Everything You Need

Background here.

I made a list of cities along I-5 from San Ysidro, CA to Blaine, WA. It turns out that all I need to do is feed them into Google Maps like so:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/San+Ysidro,+CA

and then look for the div tag with the class "cards-entity-weather-and-time." From there, I can get everything I need. Check this out for Skagit City, WA:

<div jstcache="185" class="cards-entity-weather-and-time">
<a target="_blank" jstcache="186" href="/#q=Skagit City, WA 98273 weather" class="cards-entity-weather-icon" tabindex="0">
<img jstcache="187" src="//ssl.gstatic.com/onebox/weather/32/partly_cloudy.png">
</a>
<div jstcache="188" class="cards-entity-weather-contition-text" jsan="7.cards-entity-weather-contition-text">Mostly Cloudy · 49°F</div>
<div jstcache="189" class="cards-entity-time" jsan="7.cards-entity-time">6:16 AM</div>
</div>

The href in the first a tag gives me the text value of the city including the zip code* and the div with class "cards-entity-weather-contition-text" gives me the temperature. Put it in a cron job and have it harvest the data every couple of hours and I've got a database of temperatures along I5 as a function of time.

Since it's real-time and not predictive, we'd be chasing the thermocline instead of surfing it, but sometimes pursuit is more fun, no?

* - I only note this because I don't have the zip codes for my list of cities. This little trick with Google Maps will help me fill out my database in case I want to use a different source for information and I need the zips.

Microaggressions Are What You Get From An Exhausted Science

As any science progresses, it solves successively smaller and smaller problems. For example, in physics, Newtonian mechanics explained large-scale behaviors. For most people, it's all the physics they need to know. From there, physics went on to smaller and smaller problems until now they're looking into subatomic particles. Unless they uncover clean energy sources, most people's lives will never be affected by the results of this research.

When I was taking theoretical math courses at UCSD, I asked my professors where their research was used. Some of them grew angry that I would ask such a question. All of them were confused and none of them gave a real answer. They didn't answer because they didn't know. Their research was so esoteric that it was useless to everyone who wasn't also a theoretical mathematician.

What happens when sociology and related sciences hit the wall? What happens when there's nothing of any real value left to discover? Wouldn't you end up with microaggressions and critical race theory? Utter gibberish posing as research and discovery?

And yet, on they trudge, discovering ever smaller angels on ever smaller heads of pins. After all, if you said that we've reached the end of meaningful research in these fields, it would threaten a whole bunch of academics.

Are sociology and ethnic/gender studies the 2015 version of buggy whip manufacturers facing the advent of the automobile?

I own a car, but I still want to support the poor, beleaguered buggy whip industry so I use both.

Birds Gotta Fly, Fish Gotta Swim, EU Ministers Gotta Talk

On the plus side, the migrants have all stopped coming while the EU ministers work this out.

A meeting of foreign ministers from Germany and central Europe Friday failed to bridge differences between the European Union’s east and west over a proposed resettlement of migrants across the bloc, with central Europe continuing its strong opposition to the German-backed plan.

I mean, they have stopped coming, haven't they?

Here, immigrants, having heard the EU ministers haven't come to an agreement, rush back towards Syria and Turkey so they don't enter Europe until the Europeans have everything all worked out.

The Fifteenth Air Force Shuts Down Nazi Transportation!

Err, no. The Nazis are gone now, aren't they? And it's not B-24s blasting Ploesti off the map, it's actually bunches of migrants clogging up the highway and rail systems.

Austria on Friday struggled to manage the continuing tide of migrants entering the country, partly shutting down the highway between Hungary and Vienna after hundreds began walking along the road in the early hours of the morning.

The migrants—many of whom are making their way to Germany—are facing a second day of limited travel options after the country’s rail operator suspended train services from Hungary because of what it called congestion on the route.

Well, it might not be the USAAF, but the effects are pretty similar.

If the transportation systems are closed down and the migrants are still coming, that means they're building up somewhere down the line.

Random Thoughts On The European Invasion

As I read and watch about the invasion of Europe, odd thoughts spring to mind that I thought I'd jot down here. I'm sure more will come, but here's a random sample. Enjoy?

• The video below is probably a very good one to kick off the list. It's not hysterical or edited to show a certain angle on the invasion. In fact, it seems to me to be pretty typical. These are (mostly) young Muslim men crossing the border from Greece into Macedonia. From there, it's Serbia, then Hungary, then Austria, then Germany. Count cops in the video and do a quick ratio in your head. I saw 5 cops and 2 vehicles and a thousand or so young Muslims. That makes the ratio 200-1. Unless you bring out machine guns and start using them, this is medieval infantry warfare and with that ratio, you're going to do nothing but be instantly overwhelmed.

• I'm sure the Euros in suits holding meetings in Brussels mean well, but they've lost control of the situation as you can see from a quick perusal of YouTube. The invaders aren't respectful of their new countries, they're demanding. They're demanding and pushy and they outnumber the Euros trying to manage them.
• If you think the ratio is bad today, wait a day. It will get worse as more and more invaders arrive. I would think that the army will eventually be called out, but who knows?
• The invaders have been through war. They know what dead bodies look like, they know guns and grenades and knives and violence. The Euro cops are used to dealing with Euro criminals and drunks. When you watch videos of the skirmishes, the confidence is all on the side of the invaders. The Euro cops give off a feel of uncertainty - how far should they go in trying to control the invaders? Is this permitted, is that? Will I have to fill out forms when I get back to the station house?
• If I were a Euro cop, I'd start thinking about calling in sick. Desertion is going to be a problem for the Euros. No one is going to stand up to 200-1 odds day in, day out.
• If I were a Jew in Europe, I'd be putting everything up for sale and getting out. Now.
• Terror plots in Europe have been foiled through the interception of electronic communications. How many of these invaders are couriers?
• The Euros have rules for accepting refugees. Each refugee or refugee family has to fill out forms. No one is filling out any forms as far as I can see. All the hot air coming out of the Euro leaders is dissolving in the face of the invasion. Their writ no longer runs.
• The southern European countries would be wise to set up mass transport for the invaders. Think of it as a bathtub with a spout and a drain. You don't want these people in your country and you certainly don't want them piling up. They don't give a hoot about you, your museums, your buildings, none of it. Check out the videos of Lesbos where the Greeks made the mistake of letting 20,000 of them collect. The place is a catastrophe. The invaders aren't going to clean that up, the Greeks will.
• The Euro elite and the Euros in general don't feel, in their bones, that they have any skin in the game. They all live in a fantasy world. No one is talking about what they'll have to give up to house the invaders as they've paid for everything with printed money for so long. The ECB will just print more and the Euros can go back to their porn and weed feeling morally superior.
• In WW II, the strategic bombing campaign by the Allies against the Nazis was most effective when it went after transportation centers. Think about what's going on here in terms of disrupting transportation. Rail centers are being mobbed, highways filled with hikers, bus systems overwhelmed and so on. If you own a company and need to ship your widgets from Stuttgart to Athens, how much longer will you be able to do that reliably? What happens then?
• The Euros have no idea who these people are because they're not coming in an orderly fashion. It's guaranteed that they are importing all sides of an intractable, multi-sided conflict. On Lesbos, there was a skirmish between Afghan and Syrian refugees. More of that on the way?
• There have been some videos of Euro cops with surgical face masks to prevent the spread of infectious diseases. When only 1 in 5000 of the Euros coming in contact with the invaders has even that minimal protection, your country isn't protected at all from microbial invasion.

My synthesis of the situation is that this is the collision of the fantasy world of the secular, progressive, post-modern West with the reality of war and economics. I know I've said that before, but it keeps leaping out at me.

What's your take on all of this?

They Have Reinforcements On The Way. You Don't.

Watch this video and think: The immigrants will have more infantry tomorrow than they did today. The Hungarians won't.

A Lutheran, An Atheist And A Catholic Walk Into A Bar

... actually, my bar. At my house.

Over the weekend, we had friends over for dinner including the aforementioned. The conversation turned to the Pope and as it does in cases like this, apparently the only topic the Pope discusses is sex. The discussion was about the Year of Mercy and what this meant for sex. The non-Catholics were all quite happy to hear that sex outside of marriage was something to be forgiven and lots of misunderstanding followed.

I always keep my mouth shut during these discussions because I can't figure out what to say. I sat there trying to synthesize what was going on and I hit upon this:

The Pope is a lightning rod for criticism of the Church.

Because we have a pope and the other faiths do not, secularists included, we have one guy whose pronouncements speak for all of us. There's no analog for the post-modern secularists or the atheists or the Lutherans or anyone else. The Pope is unique. You might be able to make a weak analogy with a political leader of a country, but no one really thinks he speaks for the entire country.

For us, that means we are constantly on the defensive with every utterance* dissected and analyzed and then held up against our political yardsticks and debated. By contrast, secularists can espouse preposterous and contradictory concepts that defy science and lay waste to whole neighborhoods, but there's no one who speaks for them and nothing they need defend. There's no there there.

I might try that line of discussion the next time this comes up and see what happens.

Don't hold that thing too high during a thunderstorm, Your Holiness.

* -Well, not every utterance. Really, the only ones that matter are about sex. Sex and sometimes government spending.

You're Going To Take What You're Given And Like It

I read somewhere this morning that Germany has vowed to accept 800,000 refugees. Or something like that. The number is irrelevant because the number is irrelevant. Until Germany and the rest of the EU decide to control their borders, they're going to take as many refugees as Africa and the Middle East can send at them. Unless they really do something about it, something with physical reality like dudes with guns or a big fence with barbed wire, they're going to have to sit there, accept what comes and like it.

I love seeing pictures of the EU ministers or bureaucrats or secular theologians meeting. A bunch of Very Serious People in expensive suits with degrees from Important Universities who talk in long words and make Deep Pronouncements as if anything they did or said mattered. After checking those out, you can go to YouTube and watch a couple of hundred young, Muslim males running here and there, shouting at people, throwing things, charging gates, waving signs or demanding things. It's the collision of secular, post-modern elite thought with hard, cold reality.

It's glorious.

Look at that dude's tie. You're not going to solve any of the world's problems with a tie like that. Pull it together, man, this is serious!

And now, a group of people not wearing ties and without degrees from Important Universities. (Really, if you're not from an Ivy League school or its equivalent, how can you expect to have an impact on the world?)

Whistling Past Der Friedhof

This lede from Der Spiegel has got to be a contender for Wishful Thinking of the Week:

Germany is experiencing an unprecedented influx of immigrants who will fundamentally change the country. They represent a burden, but also a chance to create a New Germany, one that is more cosmopolitan and generous.

Oh yeah, that's going to work. They're importing large numbers of cultural aliens from countries that couldn't be less cosmopolitan and generous if they tried and the result will be ... unicorns and rainbows!

I guess if you've got no concrete definition of who you are as a people, it hardly matters who you let in and how they change the place.

Cheezburger of the Day

Secular, Post-Modern Self Destruction

Going in a Marxist direction, we've decided that history is moving inexorably towards socially liberal democracy. With this in mind, we helped topple the governments of Libya and Egypt and have sat by idle while Syria and Iraq have collapsed. To intervene with the necessary large numbers of infantry would be so very 19th Century, you know.

We did away with being judgmental so we no longer see wealth and income as markers of behavior. Instead, they're symbols of inequality and we spend lots more than we earn working hard to make outcomes more equal. We borrowed in pursuit of this, so we're now all heavily in debt with most post-modern nations running about 100% of GDP in national government debt.

War is no longer necessary as we've decided that we can coerce other nations into doing our bidding through economic sanctions, so, other than the US, the post-modern west is completely disarmed.

Babies are a choice, pregnancy something to be avoided, sex is beautiful in all its forms and marriage a relic of a bygone age. The post-modern West now has minuscule birth rates and declining populations.

And finally ...

National borders were deemed oppressive and judgmental, so we did away with those in all but the most theoretical sense. We've now got unfettered migration from war-torn and impoverished hell holes into our enlightened, post-modern nations.

And the result is ...

Hundreds of thousands of refugees from places with no cultural similarity to the post-modern West are rushing through undefended borders to populate lands that the West is evacuating through attrition. They are adding financial commitments to countries who can't pay the ones they have right now. Those same nations are currently dealing with the first fiscal domino, Greece, who is both bankrupt and insolvent.

Something tells me that the secular, progressive, post-modern West hasn't much longer to go.

Your Home Is Your Biggest Investment

... and if you're in Japan*, that's not working out so well for you. Dig what's been going on with property values over the last 30 years in the Land of the Rising Sun.

Source.

Here's the article on Tokyo's growing inventory of abandoned homes that led me to search for this chart.

If my home's value was declining with no end in sight, I'd be pretty cautious about spending money, too. It wouldn't necessarily be a rational thought, it would be more resigned, inchoate despair.

* - Or, I'm sure, Germany, Greece, Russia, Spain, Italy... heck, anywhere they've decided that babies are an impediment to consuming more weed and porn.

The Thermocline Adventure Vacation

The perfect temperature, as innumerable scientific studies have established*, is 65 degrees. What if you decided to take a vacation where it was always 65 degrees outside?

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Thermocline Adventure Vacation, Interstate 5 Version.

Last year, I wrote a simple PHP script to scrape a NOAA web page and extract percent-of-normal rainfall data for various California cities. I created a database to store the information and figured out how to chart it. The result, for San Diego, was this.

This year, I'm going to create a table of cities along Interstate 5 from the Mexican border to Canada and use their zip codes to scrape hourly temperature data from the Wunderground weather site. From there, I'll pick the southernmost location (I'm a SoCal boy, after all) whose temperature is 65 degrees for each hour of the day and then plot those locations on a Google map. As an added bonus, I'll include the speed at which you'd have to drive to get from one destination to the next.

The vacation would be designed for nerdy, unmarried guys with no social life, the types who prefer clipboards and charts to girls. You could feel free to modify it if you wish and perhaps choose to visit a series of nightclubs or beer breweries at each location instead. My participants will be listening to science podcasts and discussing color-change mechanisms of Octopus cyanea.

Or something like that.

In any case, the only difficulty I've found in getting started is that it looks like I"ll need to create the table of locations along I-5 by hand. I'm still scouring the web for a ready-made table, but I haven't had much luck with Google. God help me, but my next stop is the Department of Transportation website to see if they've got anything. Blech.

Anyway, onwards and upwards! Or, onwards and downwards if that's where the thermocline leads us.

* - Actually, I can't point to one. Still, the science is settled and if you disagree, I'll just scream at you that you are a denier over and over until you give up and go away.

Juvenile Fence Lizard

... found (where else?) on a fence! Dig the size of the guy relative to the screw heads on the hinge in the photos below.

I left the images fairly large, so they may be worth a click. More details on fence lizards can be found here.

Enjoy!

Your Sins Aren't Original Enough To Make Google A Threat

Let's assume that the paranoids are right and Google is tracking everything you do on the Internet and they know all of the illicit and embarrassing sites you visit. Don't sweat it. As Matthew Kelly says, you're not that original. If they started using that data to blackmail or coerce people, they'd immediately devalue the information until it's gradually worthless by the sheer number of people all committing the same sins. By the time there are 150,000 people who've been caught visiting sports gambling sites at work, #150,001 is going to shrug his shoulders and go back to whatever it was he was doing.

Google is a threat? Meh. Your conscience pangs comes from inside, not from some Internet voyeur.

You Can Never Get The Kids To Smile For A Family Photo

... or even all look at the camera at the same time. Sigh.

Caterpillars In Need Of Tums

These two might regret eating our jalapeños. One of them got down to the seeds. Ouch!

A Little More On Trump

After yesterday's post wherein I showed my affection for The Donald because he's showing that the progressive cultural gestapo is powerless, I listened to parts of a Trump speech.

He's an idiot.

He said all kinds of sensible things and then he said all kinds of ridiculous things. He's the guy at the bar who wants to talk politics with you after a few beers. Interesting for about 20 minutes and then you want to get away. God help us if he gets elected. Still, he'd be better than bringing in Hillary's organized crime syndicate or the progressive fascism of Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden. I think. Maybe not.

Peggy Noonan, probably the only political pundit worth reading, has a typically outstanding analysis out today. Her claim is that America is going through seismic changes in the way the elite and the common folk interact. Read the whole thing. Here's a snippet that spoke to me in a way I hadn't expected.

On the subject of elites, I spoke to Scott Miller, co-founder of the Sawyer Miller political-consulting firm, who is now a corporate consultant. He worked on the Ross Perot campaign in 1992 and knows something about outside challenges. He views the key political fact of our time as this: “Over 80% of the American people, across the board, believe an elite group of political incumbents, plus big business, big media, big banks, big unions and big special interests—the whole Washington political class—have rigged the system for the wealthy and connected.” It is “a remarkable moment,” he said. More than half of the American people believe “something has changed, our democracy is not like it used to be, people feel they no longer have a voice.”

I agree with this. What's crazy is that my lunatic progressive friends do, too. Maybe we have more in common than I thought. For me, the watershed week was when the Supreme Court rewrote ObamaCare and discovered gay marriage in the Constitution. At that point, voting became pointless. If the SC can act as editors for Congress and our votes to uphold traditional marriage mean nothing other than our self-identification as hateful bigots then we've stopped being citizens and started being subjects.

Going back to Trump, he may be an idiot, but when he kicked Jorge Ramos out of his press conference, I loved it. Finally, someone stood up to a racialist bully.

Why I Like Trump

I don't know that I'd vote for the guy, I think he's a nut with no real convictions outside of his massive ego. However I really like what he's doing in the campaign and I think I'm not too far out of line with why many others like him, too.

I'm tired of being told what I can and cannot say. At work, I feel like I have to watch every word and there are times when I wonder if I've crossed some kind of line with respect to race or sex or politics or religion or whatever. What I'm questioning is invariably something innocuous, but something that's recently been determined to be a trigger or microaggression or God-knows-what.

We're banning hoop skirts on some campuses, for cryin' out loud.

Along comes Trump and he's saying things several standard deviations beyond anything I'd say and he's getting away with it! It's liberating to see a public figure break all of these verbal taboos.

I don't like the guy as a leader, but I like that he's saying the first thing that comes into his head and not apologizing for any of it.

Dogs Don't Understand Abstract Concepts

More specifically, they can't tell the difference between the printed word and what those words represent.

Here, the new Catican Guard recruits, Lily and Leah, eat cookbooks. They have confused words about food with food itself.
Sigh.

Refanging The 10th Ammendment

I'm a huge fan of Charles Murray. Despairing of the incompetence and nearly unconstrained growth of the Federal government, he wrote the book By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission in which he makes cogent, yet unsatisfying arguments for civil disobedience that he suggests will throw sand in the government gearbox. He calls for the masses to rise up in litigious revolt, finding ways to use the insanely complicated bureaucracy against itself. His plan is too easy to defeat as the government would find ways to adjust their regulations and defeat his guerrilla campaign.

In it's place, I'd suggest a new ammendment to the Constitution, along the lines of the 10th.

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

This has been trampled by the courts to the point where semi-literate toads like Congressman Pete Stark can tell you that the Federal government can do anything it wants. Rewrite that amendment and all of a sudden, almost all of the Federal government becomes unconstitutional and is put out of business immediately, to be recreated in the states or not as the citizens see fit.

Hmm.

Maybe Academics Need To Get Out More Often

I've been pondering the idea that there is such a thing as "peak knowledge." That is, for some topics, there comes a point where there's nothing left to know or discuss and academic papers subsequent to that point are repetitive or silly. In support of this concept is Jeet Heer, a senior editor at the New Republic who had this amazing tweet.

@wiggumpi I can't debate someone who thinks 19th century Irish are white because there's a formidable body of scholarship to the contrary

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) August 21, 2015

Where do you go from this point? I've got this image in my mind of a group of diversity academics on an ice floe, floating out to sea, arguing finer and finer points of racial theory, creating their "formidable body of knowledge" and losing all touch with normal people back on land until they reach this point - where redheads with alabaster skin aren't "white" any more.

Maybe there's a simpler solution to help these strange people re-integrate into the larger culture and get away from their bizarre, university coffee shop theology.

Academics need to pledge to play outside for 60 minutes a day in order to prevent the madness you read above.

Dive Report: Wood's Cove, Laguna Beach

Every time we go diving, it's partly sublime and partly a Keystone Cops affair. Yesterday's trip to Wood's Cove was no different.

Dive Conditions

This was our first dive in the Laguna Beach area. We all agreed that it was beautiful and will go back to visit this or another beach nearby. Visibility, once you got away from the surf, was very good, 25-30' or more. If you're comfortable and you take your time, there's plenty to see and enjoy.

The floor is sand with patches of rocks where seaweed grows and fish cluster. The fish are incredibly tame. When I put my hand out to one, he came over to see if I had a treat for him. Clearly, there have been divers who have fed the fish. Personally, I don't have a problem with this although I know ecology purists get fussy over the topic.

Since it's shallow, the water is warm and unless the surf is zero, there will be some surge. The video below gives you some idea of the conditions.

As long as the surf isn't too bad, entrance should be easy. In the Google Earth image below, we went in on the south side of the rocks. Coming back out, I lost track of where I was and ended up coming right in through the slot in the rocks. A lifeguard came out and read me the riot act, but by the time she got to me, I was able to stand up and there was no way I was going back out and around.

Wood's Cove. I came in through the middle of that V-shape set of rocks. Excitement!

Coming in through the slot during surging conditions is interesting to say the least. By the time you get close to shore, visibility is down to 3-5' and it's hard to tell if you're making any headway at all with the water pushing you back and forth.

Lessons Learned

The boys and I don't go diving often enough for us to make prepping and putting on our gear second nature. Every time we go, we make at least one rookie mistake. Yesterday, we made several which led to a somewhat uncomfortable dive in an otherwise very nice location.

First, it turns out you can get seasick under water. Wood's Cove is 30' at the deepest and in surging conditions, which can happen even when the surf is only 1-2', you get shoved back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and bleeaarrghhhh. We ended up cutting the dive about 10 minutes short because two of us got pretty nauseous as we did not take any seasickness medication.

Because the dive is so shallow, you need to go a little heavy on the weights. We went a little light and ended up able to go down only after completely deflating our BCDs. Without the pressure of the depths to compress the air remaining in the vests, every bit of air remaining gives maximum lift.

We made one more mistake that was so stupid that I won't include it here, Sigh.

Summary

We enjoyed diving here more than diving La Jolla Cove. For someone my age, not having to swim a half mile or more from the shore entry to get to the dive site is wonderful. Coming in from a La Jolla dive is always a chance to review my life insurance situation, how recently I've been to Confession and say a Rosary or two. Aside from the nausea, this was a pretty comfortable dive.

If you like shore diving, Laguna Beach definitely deserves a try or three. Just make sure you prep thoroughly, but then you already knew that. I just wish someone would tell us that before we go. :-)

Laguna Garibaldi

Dove today. Saw this fellow. More later. Enjoy.

Accidental Imperialists

Continuing on with Churchill's A History of the English Speaking Peoples, I'm at the part where England establishes control over India. It turns out that it happened quite by accident. What follows is a very abbreviated version of my understanding of the start of the whole thing.

The British East India Company had several trading bases in India. It maintained its own small army, strictly for self-protection. Its board of directors had no interest in military adventures and only wanted to keep making a very nice profit.

When the ruler of their particular part of India died, a contested succession arose and the land was threatened with civil war, anarchy and destruction. In order to maintain order, the British East India Company supported a particular claimant and gradually backed into a greater and greater role in the country. All the while, their primary interest was order and trade.

Crazy, no?

The Aztecs Were A Proud And Noble People

"If you read scientific publications, in which they use the fetal material for some indications, particularly, cardio-vascular, or nerve cell research, they discuss the necessity of having tissue in the digesting buffer solution within five minutes for optimal yields," Deisher explains.

"So, within five minutes of death, you would have to have the heart removed, and flushed of all blood, cleaned of any extra tissue that might be there, and the heart put into a liquid with enzymes that would digest the connective tissue and release the muscle cells.

"Sometimes, they use an apparatus where they hook the heart up and they would flush fluid through it to keep it alive and beating," she continues. "And you can't have a dead heart that's going to work in that kind of process."

In order for the organs of aborted babies to be viable for research, Deisher says that the baby have a beating heart in order to get go through the process.

"Biomedical companies prefer gestational ages of greater than 20 weeks for heart muscle," Deisher says. "This is from reading their publications; so, I have always suspected that the babies in some of these cases were alive until their hearts were cut out."

Well OK then.

A Little On Planned Parenthood Video #7

... in which live babies are vivisected.

1. This comment is one of the most insightful things I've read today. "Certain hardcore gangs require you to participate in a killing before they fully trust you. Everybody must be complicit. In past videos we have seen how even receptionists were required to go in and assist with abortions."


2. If this is allowed to go on, if no prosecutions are brought, if the Democratic Party continues to support Planned Parenthood, then the division in America is truly between good and evil. If slicing a live baby's face to get at the brain is defensible, then everything is and civilization in America has collapsed into the ultimate, secular, post-modern abattoir.


3. Many progressives confronting these videos must feel like this:
   
   


4. This tweet captures my thoughts pretty well.
   

   #PlannedParenthood ripped brains & hearts out of living babies to harvest them. I'm grasping at straws to image a more immoral act.

   — Fr Matthew Schneider (@FrMatthewLC) August 19, 2015

Cheezburger of the Day

Turning Abject Surrender Into Virtue

I spent a lot of time driving around this weekend with one of our sons. That's always an enlightening experience because the chap is a deep thinker and pretty well-read. In the process of discussing politics, economics, theology and more, this concept started bubbling around in my head.

Hypothesis: Our modern culture is the result of making a virtue out of capitulation. As usual, I've got less time than I'd like to develop this concept, so let me illustrate it instead. Check out this video from a recent Bernie Sanders event where a small number of crazed screamers managed to shut down one of his campaign events. The real fun starts at 0:50.

I'd argue that this has been happening since the student revolts of the late 60s. From that point on, people with power and chartered to defend learning and civilization have given in to ignorant barbarians armed with little more than loud voices.

These self-defeated invertebrates didn't take responsibility for their failings and publicly admit that they weren't as strong as they should have been. Instead, they created a world view that made a virtue out of surrender. Their positions of power in academia gave their whiny self-justifications an air of intellectual respectability that they never deserved.

The result is multiculti nonsense, the worship of youth, racialist dogma and more. What started as a rout of terrified university administrators, particularly in the Ivy League universities, has become the dominant religion in the US. Its catechism is now taught in almost all public schools and is repeated throughout our popular culture.

This interpretation of the situation explains a lot of things to me, in this case how a major presidential candidate allowed his supporters to be forced to go home without hearing his speech and he's not universally called a poltroon.

Ginormous Moth

I'm hoping the redoubtable Tim can help out here. I tried to use the Moth Identification Guide on this big brute, but came up short. The wingspan was about 6" or more and once it got into the house it was like trying to catch a small bat. Once I got it in the net and took it outside, it rested and allowed me to take some photos. I left the photos large because the whole event was so unusual.

Enjoy!

Spider Silhouette

This creature was hanging in its web. seemingly suspended in space right outside our kitchen this morning. If you click on the image, you can see the hairs on its body. Enjoy!

Well, This Is Comforting

You've got to hand it to the Clintons and their drooling lapdogs. They certainly can come up with whoppers to amuse you. Dig this from that California airhead Diane Feinstein.

Democratic California Sen. Dianne Feinstein on Thursday said Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton didn't write any of the emails found on her personal email server that were since deemed classified by a government intelligence watchdog, suggesting instead that she received emails with sensitive information.

LOL! Well, that changes everything! You mean she was only receiving classified materials on the Frys $1499 e-mail server she set up in her den? The Secretary of State, 3rd in line for the presidency of the world's only superpower, with access to cataracts of top secret information didn't write any of the allegedly-potentially-no-harm-no-foul emails? That puts my mind to rest! Begone, Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy! Back to the dungeons with you and let the coronation commence!

There ought to be Vegas betting lines on these things. How long until this dodge is inoperative? I'm guessing 18 hours. By then, it will be revealed that she "received" a receipt from the Yemeni ambassador for her services in exchange for an $18M donation to the Clinton Foundation.

Source.+

Top comments on that story:

• > What difference does it make if she wrote them or received them?   For a normal person not running an organized crime syndicate while posing as US Secretary of State, it makes no difference at all. 
• The server came from Dell.  When the FBI starts working on it they will need to contact Dell Technical Support.  By the time these calls get routed around all the cubicles in Bangalore, we will be discussing the 2024 presidential candidates, and the question will be moot.
• The quality of Hillary's shills and their spin is declining even faster than her polls.

The Messaging War Against ISIS

Well, this provided unintentional, dark hilarity.

The White House has floundered in its attempt to enlist social media companies in the messaging war against ISIL as Washington seeks to counter the terrorist group’s prowess online.

The only "messaging" war that's going to work against ISIS is: We are going to kill you all.

Like this:

Thinking you can fight a war on Twitter. How absurd.

Helping Your Kids Learn To Set Goals And Make Plans

... is invaluable.

This summer, I went through Bryan Tracy's Goals book with our daughter, newly graduated from high school and new in the workforce and one of our sons, about to graduate with an EE degree. We're not even done and the results are already terrific.

One of the chapters deals with naming your fears, the things that hold you back. My daughter was worried that she'd be fired if she made too many mistakes and my son, after struggling to get an internship with SDGE, was afraid he wouldn't get any full-time offers when he graduated.

My daughter was hired at a local fast food place and quickly discovered that being cheerful, hard working and energetic makes up for any number of mistakes. She's being given more and more hours despite the fact that she's not perfect. By naming her fears and discussing them with us, we were able to help her see that they weren't real.

As my son goes back to college, he now has a concrete plan to land a permanent job, a plan that is much more sophisticated and complete than what he had before. His fears had almost paralyzed him and instead of taking action and dealing with them, he withdrew and became passive. After bringing these out into the open, we were able to share many anecdotes from our own lives that banished most of his fears.

We all gained a lot more from this exercise than just this. When we started, I told them, "Some day you'll turn 30. When you do, you can look back at the things you accomplished or you can regret the years gone by. Why not discover what you really want to do and start going after it?"

So far, I really like the results.

Shakespeare Should Not Be Read

... but these people should be heard? Check out the reasoned discourse starting around 0:50 in the video below and think about this: These are the kind of people who are effectively determining what literature is read in our schools.

The Joy Of Rooting For Distant Sports Teams

... got yet another boost for me recently.

I'm a graduate of UCSD. Even if I didn't despise my alma mater for its relentless shift even farther left, it has no sports teams of any consequence. Our kids' schools, the University of San Diego and Cal State Long Beach are both negligible in that regard as well. That leaves me a free agent when it comes to finding a college football team to support.

A lover of all things New Orleans, I've settled on LSU. I've never been to LSU and have only visited N'awlins 5-6 times. Despite that, LSU it is.

Vacationing in Maine, I brought along an LSU ball cap and t-shirt. Wearing them while hiking, I discovered the proper greeting for other LSU fans when a family of 6 walked by us. Here's what they had to say:

• "Go Tigers!"
• "Go Tigers!"
• "Go Tigers!"
• "Go Tigers!"
• "Go Tigers!"
• "Go Tigers!"

I got a big laugh out of that. Later in the day, at a brewery, I got another "Go Tigers!" and shopping at Costco yesterday here in San Diego, someone right near me gave me a "Go Tigers!" and then proceeded to tell me that he was a Georgia alumni and we talked college football for 5 minutes. He never realized I was a Tiger fan wannabe.

If you root for a distant team and you find someone wearing their gear, your instant reaction is to smile and talk to them. That goes for people who root for a rival team. A big Newcastle United* fan as well, when I see people wearing any EPL gear, I immediately chat with them if possible. There's an instant rapport, the same as if an Italian came across another Italian somewhere in the Philippines. Were I to wear a New England Patriots shirt in Maine or a Padres shirt here in San Diego, there would be no comment at all. It's too normal and doesn't invite conversation.

So in exchange for buying a t-shirt or ball cap and following a distant team, you get opportunities to smile and meet new people on a regular basis. Sounds like a winner to me!

* - An English Premier League (EPL) soccer team.

It's A Choice Between Guavas And Porcupines

... is kind of what I felt when I heard the President try to sell the Iran deal. His "choice between war and peace" rhetoric and straw men bore no resemblance to reality at all. It was gibberish.

How in the world would failing to submit to this surrender to Iran result in war? As far as I could tell, he was suggesting we would go to war with Iran without the treaty. With what and from where? Without bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, your only choice would be an amphibious landing from the Indian Ocean and then a long, slow grind northwards with supplies coming by sea. Since the US has nothing close to the number of ships, both warships and supply ships, necessary to do the job, any suggestion that we would attack Iran was pure fantasy.

Aside: This deal was signed as soon as he took all the troops out of Iraq. Without that as a staging base and launch point, there was no credible military threat to Iran and they knew it.

The Cats Of Maine

Well, one of them, at least.

Time To Head South

... pretty soon, at least. Particularly if you've got this beauty out in the ocean.

I left the image fairly large, so it might be worth a click.

The ocean rarely freezes off Maine, but even so, after the leaves started changing, I'd be outfitting the boat and heading down to the Caribbean.

Progressivism Dissolves Upon Prolonged Contact With Adulthood

Perusing some Twitter feeds of people who are supporting Planned Parenthood's experimente an lebenden Menschen durchgeführt*, the pattern I noticed was that the most strenuous defenders were young, unmarried, college-indoctrinated women. There were plenty of their male counterparts as well, but their family status wasn't as obvious.

My Twitter stream, being predominantly Catholic, is enraged by PP's slaughter and harvest program. It's also rich in married moms.

I considered engaging with some of the PP supporters, but going through their content, it was light on reflection and heavy on shrill shouting. Like my engagements with Twitter atheists, the odds of having them even recognize what you were trying to say looked to be near zero. They had their catechisms down pat and you weren't going to get past them with mere words.

I then wondered what it said that married, middle-aged moms were against PP and college-age, single, grievance-primed women were pro-PP. As a big believer that parenthood is the real rite of passage into adulthood, I've concluded that progressive thought tends to dissolve upon contact with adulthood. As an adult, you find that the world is much more interested in outcomes and much less in intentions. That, to me, is a big difference between the two camps.

Pine needles shot in macro mode, trying for a perspective angle. It has nothing to do with the rest of the blog post, I just like the photo and I didn't have any other image to throw in here.

* - Planned Parenthood's activities always sound better in the original German.

The Coast Of Maine

... it's forested crags shrouded in fog. I left this a bit large, so it might be worth a click. Enjoy!

Tired Of Being The Villain

In modern Hollywood movies, I'm almost always the villain. Straight, white, traditionalist, conservative, male = bad. I realized recently that this is the reason I almost never watch movies or TV, even comedies. I've gotten tired of being the bad guy.

Note: Good friend Renee Aste blogs about something similar frequently.

Two nights ago, I watched Meet the Fokkers. The whole thing. It had to be one of the worst movies I've seen in years. The characters were cardboard cutouts, the jokes were telegraphed miles in advance and they were essentially the same joke over and over and over again. The straight, white, traditionalist, conservative male was a reactionary jerk who needed to be evangelized into the One, True Faith of sexual liberation and general libertinism. Yay. His character was the only one who developed throughout the movie. Everyone else stayed the same because they were already perfect.

Maybe that's why I find them so boring - there's no character development at all, save for someone gradually becoming more progressive. That's true of the endless stream of racialist movies as well. The Butler, Selma, The Help and on and on, there's almost always some straight, white, traditionalist, conservative who sees the error of their ways and learns to Stop Hating.

Meanwhile, Baltimore is suffering under racialist rule like there's no tomorrow, but let's not let the lives (and deaths) of real people interfere with the racialist catechism of the progressives.

What's more, the movies don't jive with any of the things I see in real life. I work in a pretty diverse environment and I volunteer at a place that serves a very racially diverse set of clientele. I just don't see any of the things the movies are telling me are out there, at least not as first-order problems. They're more like third-order problems. The really big problems caused by the progressive, libertine lifestyle aren't addressed at all.

My conclusion is that the entertainment industry is a pack of evangelists for a self-contradictory religion. It can be interesting to have conversations with such people, but these are never conversations, they're a one-way lecture series that never ends. That's boring. That's why I watch sports.

You want drama? Try watching Crystal Palace games. Awesome.

Camden, Maine

... reminded me of the little towns in Italy like Cinque Terre. A cluster of buildings around a curved inlet filled with moored boats. Not quite as dramatic in geography or colorful paint on the houses, but the similarity still leaped out at me.

Enjoy.

I still haven't pulled out my Nikon artillery piece yet. I will starting today and see if I can get some comparison shots. My Samsung Galaxy S5 has superior resolution, but it can't touch the Nikon's optics.

New York City From The Air At Night

Flying to Maine, I took this shot of the Big Apple from the airplane window using my phone. I wish I'd set a manual shutter speed to be a bit faster, but the problem with airplane window shots is that by the time you recognize the opportunity and unlimber the phone's camera, there's usually not enough time to play with the settings.

Oh well. Enjoy!