Married Priests

I'm all in favor of them. If Pope Francis is so inclined, and I've read rumors saying he is, I say, the sooner the better.

First, it will make the Church younger and more masculine. There's nothing the Catholic Church needs more right now than big infusions of energy and testosterone. Young people have always left churches as a part of them finding their own way apart from their families of origin. Having said that, it's pretty hard to bring them back when they're ready if your priests are 60 years old and effeminate.

Second, I don't think the theological arguments are all that strong against it. I've always had the feeling that they're kind of explaining the reasoning after the fact instead of deriving catechism from first principles. If you want a knock-out punch, there's Matthew 8:14-15.

Jesus entered Peter’s house and found Peter’s mother-in-law in bed with a fever. He took her by the hand and the fever left her,

If Peter is the rock upon which He built His Church and Peter was married, it seems perfectly fine to allow married priests. On counterpoint, here's the response from Catholic Straight Answers.

Note that the passage does not mention St. Peter’s wife, but only his mother-in-law. The Gospels, however, make no mention of St. Peter’s wife, living or nonliving. Therefore, St. Peter’s wife must have died before Jesus called him to be an apostle.

For full disclosure, Clement of Alexandria (Stromata, III) (c. 202), said St. Peter was married, had children and witnessed his wife’s martyrdom in Rome. These terse points were recorded, citing Clement, in St. Eusebuis’ The History of the Church. Given the silence of other church fathers about St. Peter’s wife and children (who would have had some prominence in the history of the early church), and the lack of any archaeological evidence of ancient Rome, which holds the burial sites of St. Peter and so many other early martyrs, one would conclude St. Peter’s wife died before he had been called as an apostle.

Meh. That's pretty ambiguous data upon which you'd build a crucial point of Catholic doctrine.

Heck, if you really want to go all-in, reclassify priests' wives as nuns and ask that they go through formation as well.

How Do You Fight The Lizard?

Some time ago, while having fun at poor Sam Harris' expense, I posted this tidbit.

We all have limbic systems that drive our animal appetites. Sex n' drugs n' rock and roll are desirable because the primitive lizard brains that sit inside of our glorious human brains says they are. Your limbic system is what drives you to do both the things necessary for survival and the things you really oughtn't like lust and gluttony. For Christians, we face a constant fight with our limbic systems as we strive to be what the Bible tells us to be. When we fail, we're hypocrites. We preach one thing and do another.

In my continuing effort to pray and practice abstinence for my friend with cancer, I still find myself tempted to surrender to gluttony, sloth and more.  Last night, I came home craving a beer or three. It was even worse after I did some paperwork at home that I really didn't feel like doing. Usually, I'm very self-indulgent. I like to give myself limbic treats for overcoming even minor problems. I've done an order of magnitude less of it during this period of abstinence and last night, I successfully resisted temptation.

What happened? What was the mechanism by which success was achieved? I was so busy cracking open the can of V-8 as a substitute for the IPA, that I wasn't mindful of the mechanism by which I won the fight. Is it even possible to pinpoint the sequence that led to winning? Can you pick out the moment when the game was over? I think it was when I picked out the V-8 from the pantry because from there, I wasn't going to head out to the garage fridge to get the brewski.

Is it when you begin to do something that makes sin too difficult? Substitution is a commonly-mentioned way of getting past addictions and temptation in general. Is that how it works? Is it just the act of getting the substitution chain started?

1. Go to pantry
2. Get V-8
3. Open it
4. Make the traditional Monty Python reference, "Crack tubes!"
5. Drink the first sip

For each step, here's the corresponding step that will put you back on the path to sin.

1. Close pantry door and head to the garage. (Easy)
2. Put V-8 in kitchen fridge and go get a beer. (Relatively easy)
3. Put the full, open V-8 on the counter and go get a beer. (Unlikely. Open beverage containers are often the target of house pixies who love to tip them over.)
4. Say, "This is the wrong tube!" (Even more unlikely as you've sounded the bugle and the troops have begun their charge.)
5. Put it down and go get a beer. (Almost impossible. Beer after V-8 sounds dreadful.)

Hmm. Is going to the pantry and grabbing a V-8 right when you get home the answer?

House pixies. They're all fun and games until they tip your V-8 so it spills all over one of the dogs.

White Privilege, Explained

I have to admit, I did not understand white privilege until today. Now that I know what it is, I see it everywhere. It's like the air we breathe.

This morning, I'm going to make sardines on toast for breakfast. I want to add some sliced mushrooms to the mix, but I can't find the Internet recipe I used once upon a time, so I'm going to have to shotgun the thing. Here's the plan.

Using one of my cast iron skillets, I'm going to drain the oil from a tin of sardines into it and heat it on my stove. While it's warming, I'll slice some whole, brown mushrooms I got from Costco. After it's hot, I'll saute the shrooms with some minced garlic, parsley and red pepper flakes, adding the sardines at the end to warm them up.

While I'm doing this, I'll toast my bread.

At the end, I'll take the bread, put the sardine / mushroom mix on top and eat it.

And that, my friends, is white privilege. It affects you every day. Positively if you're one persuasion, negatively if not. I'm sure that if you work at it, you'll learn to notice it in your own life, like the next time you change a tire, buy some shoes, teach your son to hit a baseball or look for your car keys between the cushions of the couch.

You're welcome.

A Rot Of Grubs

I don't know what a group of grubs is called, so I coined the term, "rot." It works on multiple levels. Grubs eat rotting things and it's also great for cheap laughs as you do a crude, Japanese accent.

American: "What are these things?"

Japanese: "A rot of grubs!"

Ha ha.

Ahem.

Yesterday, I was planting our new season's herbs and veggies when I came across a rot of grubs in one of our raised beds. I ended up spending an hour going through the soil by hand, pulling out the grubs as I found them. I must have ended up with about 50. Here they are in all their disgustingness.

When I harvest grubs, I like to throw them out into the middle of our cul-de-sac. It gives the birds and nocturnal varmints something to eat. It's fitting since the grubs were going to eat our plants and now they're dinner for someone else instead.

I've never tossed this many and after I did so and went back into my yard, some of the neighbors spotted them. Excitement and conversations ensued as they tried to figure out how all those grubs ended up in the street. I felt a glow of pleasure for giving them an interesting mystery to solve. Eventually, one of them figured out that it was the crazy guy next door and the conundrum was solved.

KT - bane of grubs, benefactor of neighbors, that's me.

Camoflage

Hide The Data!

Andrew Sullivan, of all people, has finally discovered the cultists on the left. These are the sort of people who use violence to prevent speeches by people who hold different views. In short, they oppose diversity, in this case, of thought.

While that's interesting, here's a snippet that opens up a different line of inquiry entirely. As Andrew is a member of the cult himself, he has to intone the catechism about race and show his ritual disapproval of Charles Murray. Professor Murray wrote a book called The Bell Curve which discussed IQ and presented reams of data. One chapter out of the book shows the data broken down by race. He doesn't draw any white supremacist conclusions about it, he's just a scientist looking at numbers. That makes him an infidel in the eyes of the cultists. Here's Andrew's reasoning.

(P)rotests against Murray are completely legitimate. The book he co-authored with Harvard professor Richard Herrnstein more than 20 years ago, The Bell Curve, included a chapter on empirical data showing variations in the largely overlapping bell curves of IQ scores between racial groups. Their provocation was to assign these differences to both the environment and genetics. The genetic aspect could be and was exploited by racists and bigots.

The problem isn't that Murray was lying or trying to feed bigotry. The problem is that he published the data at all. Opinion isn't the enemy, science and data are. When that happens, you're in trouble.

How do you hide data? Do you keep it in a jar in a locked cabinet so no one can ever find it? What happens when the data is out in plain sight, like the ethnic makeup of the NBA and NFL? How about data published by the FBI or Justice Department on crime stats? Even if you suppress those, a short drive around town reveals plenty. Where are there bars on the windows and barbed wire on fences?

The way to fight bigots of all kinds is not to suppress data. That's a hopeless task. You need to make the data irrelevant.

If you ask a girl to marry you and she turns you down, who cares if the guy she eventually marries is your race? You didn't marry the girl and that's that. If you apply for a job at an insurance company and you don't get it, who cares if the person they hire is your race? Will you get a percentage of his paycheck as a part of some kind of racial hegemony?

It's not the data, it's the utter irrelevance of the way you parsed it. We are individuals and our lives are mostly governed by our actions. Race plays almost no role in it at all and yet we make a huge deal out of it. Heroin has the same effect on Eskimos as it does on Puerto Ricans. So does getting an Electrical Engineering degree. So does marrying before you have kids.

We've picked a characteristic that's, at best, a third-order effector on our lives and turned it into a religion. So Professor Murray publishes a table of average IQ as a function of race. So what? Did it make you smarter if your race is higher up the table? No. By turning discussions of race into legitimate topics and giving them weight far beyond their actual value, we're arming bigots with the only weapons they will ever have.

In short, obsessing about race creates the bigotry we're all trying to stamp out. It's not the data in the table, it's the row and column headings. The data will be there whether we want to hide it or not. Publish the data or don't, it's irrelevant. Just stop making it such a big deal.

I always knew oranges were inferior. Now I have the data to prove it!

Is It Legal To Protest Eric Clapton?

Sort of a follow up to yesterday's post.

What if I was George-Soros-rich and thoroughly hated Eric Clapton? If I bought front-row concert tickets for a bunch of crazy ANTIFA protesters and told them to rush the stage like they do when Professor Murray and Milo or Ben Shapiro try to give talks, what would happen?

Is it illegal to purposefully disrupt a concert? Does it matter if the attendees paid or not? Is it strictly the jurisdiction of the venue to make sure this doesn't happen? How far can the venue go in enforcing its rules?

Is this like the legal issues involving bouncers at clubs?

Generally speaking, bouncers can only use force if it is first used against them. These are the same rights as any ordinary citizen (i.e. the right to self-defense). On the other hand, bouncers are legally allowed to perform such tasks as:

• Issue verbal warnings
• Ask you to leave
• Check for ID
• Refuse entry if the patron is too intoxicated, fails to comply with establishment policies, or engages in aggressive behavior
• Call the police
• Protect innocent bystanders from violence
• Break up fights that are not involved in
• Respond with equal force if necessary

Bouncers cannot initiate physical conflict, but they can respond to it. If my valiant Social Justice Warriors protesting that fascist Clapton never did more than chant and wave signs, it doesn't seem like the security team could do more than call the cops. Pondering that, wouldn't chanting and waving signs be breach of the peace or disorderly conduct? That still doesn't allow the security guards to give my ANTIFA goons a whuppin, but it would allow the cops to clear them out and bring them down to the station.

Back to the real examples, if ANTIFA maniacs stop someone from speaking and the cops do not enforce the laws regarding keeping the peace, can the police department be charged with civil rights violations as they conspired to deprive the speaker and audience of their right to freedom of speech?

Hmm.

Eric Clapton, positively dripping with white, male, cis-gendered privilege. Doesn't he enrage you?

Yelling Back Isn't The Answer

I've restrained myself, although it might not seem so, from posting and tweeting on politics. Having an opinion on everything in the world, and the correct one at that, all of the turmoil in the country today is an absolute sumptuous buffet for me.

What gives me pause is the level of incoherent rage on the left. The recent attack on Charles Murray is just one example. I've read most of Professor Murray's books, seen many interviews with him, catch him on podcasts as much as possible and download his talks from YouTube to listen to as I walk or drive. I am, in short, a Charles Murray groupie.

The one thing I can say without fear of contradiction is that there is no academic alive who has greater compassion for the poor, independent of race, creed, sex or orientation. To my taste, he is the gold standard for intellectuals working to improve the lot of the poor. As far as I could tell, the violence he suffered at Middlebury was at the hands of people beyond the reach of reason and argument.

What do you do about such people? Since they are immune to logic and incapable of conversation, do you scream back at them? Do you call them names? Do you create memes and mock them? I don't see that any of these actions will have a desirable outcome and will only serve to increase the overall level of fury in society. Instead, they need to be charged, prosecuted, convicted and jailed.

What they did broke the law. In fact, I recently discovered that conspiracy to deprive a citizen of their right to free speech is itself a crime, meaning that the school professors who encouraged this and the administrators who knowingly allowed it to happen could face charges. And they should. All of them.

This is no longer about debate or discussion, this is about maintaining the rule of law. This is why we have police, court systems and jails. Instead of trying to convince people that Charles Murray isn't a white supremacist or whatever deranged fantasy they've cooked up, these people need to be locked up.

My recommendation is to agitate not for mockery or disputations, but to agitate for law enforcement to do its job. While the Christian side of me wants to stay quiet so as not to contribute to the violence, I don't see that conflicting with upholding standards of behavior codified in our laws. With the people prone to violent protests behind bars, we might be able to move on to rational discourse. Until then, you can forget about it.

A Hot Wheels Paddy Wagon. A slightly larger, more functional version needs to be employed with consistency and regularity on American campuses until the children (and faculty) learn to use their words.

Why Don't The Citizens Of xxx Ever Learn?

I met a very nice young man the other day who works for the San Diego Unified School District. SD Unified, like most local government institutions, is going through the first wave of self-inflicted budget crises. I'd do the standard link-and-excerpt bit here, but my source is the Union-Tribune and it seems they're having a bit of bother managing a safe website these days,

Mainstream Media Fail.

In any case, the school district is laying off about 1,000 people because their pensions are eating them alive. To avoid being called racistsexisthomophobes, we gave the teachers everything they wanted a few years back and now we're firing teachers as the bills come due. I would say this serves everyone right, but if my young friend is any guide, we're not learning from the event, so it's just a dark cloud with no silver lining.

If you've ever wondered why socialism lives on or why Argentinians have never learned to stop hitting themselves on the head with the hammer of social justice fascism - Peronism - this is the perfect example. The young man is watching friends lose their jobs and has no idea why. Not only that, he's not very curious about it. He had some vague notion that there was corruption involved somewhere or "bad investments," but the whole thing was pretty uninteresting to him.

Math is hard.

People of faith prefer to stick with their faith. They don't go looking to become apostates. If the Pope or the Imam or the Teachers' Union President says something, then that's good enough. Getting over the resistance to changing a belief system requires a lot of disruption. If it requires math or learning new skills like budgeting, you can pretty much forget it for most people.

Noting that this is becoming a tl;dr post, I'll try to wrap it up.

The young man is a standard prole. He has faith in the progressive religion and "knows" his positions are morally right. When teachers, who care only about children and have the most important jobs in the Universe because the youth are the future tell them that the Democrats are kind and Republicans are greedy and evil, they ingest their catechism without critical thought and go back to their lives.

The fact that the progressivism has sold us all into debt slavery cannot pierce the bubble of faith encasing this fellow in a warm feeling of moral righteousness. Even if he loses his job because of debt loads inflicted on us all by the left, it's doubtful he'll ever do the hard work of learning how and why it happened. He has his progressive religion and it gives his life meaning and value even when things fall to pieces because of it.

And that, my friends, happening on a large scale, is how the wheels of compound interest mathematics can repeatedly grind the citizens of Argentina, Venezuela and California like grist without said citizens ever learning and changing their minds.

Related: The "Repeal and Replace" of Obamacare is similar religious insanity. It should just be "Repeal." We're $20T deep in debt slavery at the national level. We have no money for promising still more temporary benefits.

It's Turning Out That I Really Didn't Like Those Vices After All

I blogged recently about a friend of mine who is going through cancer treatments and how I've taken up praying and fasting from certain vices for him. Abstinence is getting easier as I discover that some of my vices weren't really all that much fun.

Taking beer as an example, the first couple of days were hard, but last night, day 12, was pretty easy. I'm not going completely cold turkey, but I'm not getting much of a buzz any more when I do drink and most days I skip it completely. I've yet to find myself regretting it.

I don't know about you, but you could set a watch by my temptations. At about 4:45 PM, I'm usually craving a beer. If I take a pass, by 6:00 PM, the craving is gone. I never find myself wanting to start drinking at 7 or 8. By then, I'm enjoying whatever it is my wife and I are doing that night. Beer was always the transition from the work day to the evening at home. It turns out that transition happens on its own without any help from me.

Whatever comes of this prayer and fasting and whether or not I keep up with my abstinence for the rest of my life, the act of changing my behaviors has been very educational. It's probably a good idea to switch things up dramatically in your habits once in a while just to see what happens.

This might be one of the weirdest videos I've ever seen. How many intoxicants did it take to come up with this one? I love it! Appropriate music and you can never go wrong with Scooby Doo.

This Could Be Fun

I installed a meme creator on my phone yesterday. At a friend's house where they have grandchildren, I found a children's book about the ocean. The rest, as they say, is history.

I Never Did Find The Problem

Our Hoover vacuum cleaner stopped working. You'd flick the power switch and nothing would happen, not even a groan or rattle or vibration. Simplicity itself, right? Probably a broken switch.

An hour later, some 20+ screws removed and the entire thing disassembled to the point where it wasn't going to go back together, having surrendered on the concept of repair and determined to find the issue, I got access to the power switch. It was fine.

Looks like it's time for a new vacuum cleaner.

I don't get it at all. A vacuum is a pretty simple device. If power is getting to the electric motor, which it was, you should at least get a hum or some vibration. The only thing I can think is that there was a connection broken within the motor housing, before it reached the coils for the electromagnetic motor.

One thing I did learn is that assembling one of these beasts is extremely labor-intensive. As I took it apart, I imagined someone on a factory floor putting it together. No snaps, lots and lots of screws, each having to be done by hand, given the complicated design of  the plastic body parts. Good jobs at good wages?

Japan Is Doomed

... was a theme on this blog when I used to write lots of economic posts. Their population is declining and aging, they've got insane levels of debt, their government can't stop borrowing and spending and more. And yet, there's this.

Doomed! They're doomed!
Wait a minute. The Nikkei is doing pretty well.

There's an old saying in economics - you can tell what's going to happen, just not when. All of those serious, structural problems still exist, but somehow, they continue to defy gravity. Crazy, man. Just crazy.

'It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.' - Yogi Berra.

Donald Trump Is A Fascist In League With The Russians

... or something like that. To tell you the truth, I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to believe. I think I should be outraged about Jeff Sessions or Trump being so Trumpy, but it's all very vague.

Trump is a fascist!

Mussolini said, "Everything within the State, nothing without." When Trump pushes for removing regulations and taxes, isn't that taking power and control away from the State? What kind of fascist does that? I don't get it.

Jeff Sessions mumble mumble mumble the Russians!

Trump OK'd the oil pipeline, making it much easier to extract oil out there where the bigots live in flyover country. Russia's primary source of hard currency is raw materials, specifically oil. If we produce more, the price goes down and the Russians are harmed.

Trump is asking for a defense build-up which will make us more able to face off with the Russkies in places like Syria and Ukraine. That's bad for Russia.

Trump is asking NATO to do more than hire hairdressers in their military and finally have armies worthy of the name. Those armies pose a direct threat to Russia's imperialist aims in Ukraine and the Baltics. That's not good for Ivan, either.

What am I missing here? It looks to me like the whole Trump thing has been bad for Putin and his goons. Why should I worry about whether or not some Senator talked to the Russian ambassador, particularly when they all did it as a matter of their normal jobs?

This is why the press can't have nice things

Finally, here are just two examples of yesterday's standard avalanche of lefty propaganda from our news media. Please, tell me again why we should pay any attention at all to what these people report.

Adolf Hitler also published a list of crimes committed by groups he didn’t likehttps://t.co/4S7SATWvBh

— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) March 2, 2017

NYT stealth edits bogus McCaskill charge https://t.co/b29GjzGJvg by @BecketAdams pic.twitter.com/ipRB2OLpTB

— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) March 3, 2017

What White People Talk About

... is the same as what anyone else talks about, if my parties are any guide.

We threw a Mardi Gras bash on Tuesday, hosting about 20 people from Cursillo as well as all of our kids and a girlfriend or two. San Diego Catholic demographics being what they are, the population was split about 50-50 between whites and Hispanics. It's actually hard to tell with this crew, inter-marriage being so common.

The conversations were about food, wine, beer, music, faith, the upcoming retreat weekends, sports, cars, friends, family and other odds and ends. Having hosted lots of parties with guests drawn from a fairly large pool of candidates, these are the conversation topics every time. Sometimes the parties are "whiter," sometimes they're more "Hispanicky." It never matters. I suppose the most racial topic of conversation is where we grew up with the El Centro contingent mentioning it in passing. If you closed your eyes, the only telltales would be stories about what mom cooked when you were a kid.

Whenever I hear race discussed in the media or watch movies about racism, I try to square it with my own experience and end up feeling like I must be some kind of weirdo. Yeah, there are cultural differences in food, accents and interests, but they don't manifest themselves in any significant way. If one of our kids wanted to marry one of the Hispanics' kids, we'd be over the moon with joy because they were marrying Catholic.

Being devout Catholics, most of us are pretty conservative politically. I know a few true-blue progressives, but given the Democrats embrace of Planned Auschwitz, they are quite rare. Again, what am I missing here? If I draw people from this political persuasion, aren't I supposed to find racists? Shouldn't we be discussing, err, "white" things when we get together?

And just what is a "white" thing, anyway? My cuisine is Southern and Caribbean, both thoroughly influenced by, um, "people of color." Shouldn't I be making casseroles instead of gumbos? For the party, I made a Pandora station seeded with Buckwheat Zydeco, John Lee Hooker and Dr. John. Should it have been Pat Boone or Whitesnake? What am I doing wrong here as a white? I don't get it.

I sometimes feel the way scientific atheists must feel when dingledorks like me start talking theology. If it's so real, why can't I see any evidence of it in my life? My response as a Catholic to that topic has gone on ad nauseam on this blog, so I won't repeat it here. In any case, that's not a perfect analogy, but it's close enough to dismiss the topic and move on.

Ta-Nehisi Coates. He lectures a lot about racism in America. To me, he might as well be lecturing about the Easter Bunny.

Could You Not Skip One Beer For Me?

My prayer journey continues.

Saying a daily Rosary for my friend, I'm using this site for the Mysteries. It's the best one I've found for meditating on said Mysteries. Yesterday, I was doing the Sorrowful Mysteries when I came upon the section about Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. He brought the disciples with him, but they fell asleep while He prayed, anticipating His torture and crucifixion. When He found them asleep, He said, "Could you not watch one hour with me?"

That made me think of the times I've come home from work and had a few pops*. One is fine, two is better, three is great! And then I sleep on the couch. Not exactly a scintillating conversationalist for my wife. She never complains and doesn't bug me about it. I'm not angry or abusive, I just knock myself out from time to time. The quote above transformed itself into, "Could you not stop at one brewski for Me?" It works equally well for anger, porn, stinginess or what-have-you. Here He is, sweating blood over the coming trials and tribulations and I'm knocking back a 22 oz Hangar 24 Iconic double IPA followed by a 12 oz Firestone Union Jack.

Alternative modified quotes:

• "Could you not take a break from porn for Me?"
• "Could you not stop gossiping about that woman at work for Me?"
• "Could you not say something loving and supportive to your daughter for Me?"

And so on.

There was something else that occurred to me, but I'll leave that for another post. I've been doing too many tl;dr posts lately.

An unrelated, funny picture. It can't all be serious stuff, you know.

* - Rereading this post, I realized that it makes me sound like a lush. That's the wrong impression. It doesn't happen very often, maybe once a month. In any case, the beer is just a stand-in for your own, personal, favorite vice.

Deep Embarrassment For Wolves

Thousands of years ago, wild wolves, roaming the forests of what is now Yorkshire, knew this would be one of their descendants and were humiliated.

On the plus side, she's a real sweetie who likes to cuddle and get treats.
No, she's not our dog.

As Long As She Doesn't Celebrate With A Coors Light, It's OK

A mentally ill girl in Texas, juiced to her eyeballs with drugs by her abusive parents*, just won the girls' state wrestling championships after an undefeated season. She thinks she's a boy and they're dosing her heavily with testosterone. I guess that if she thought she was Napoleon, they'd be suing France to give her control of that country.

Unsurprisingly, testosterone made her stronger, faster and more aggressive. Much like the results you see when boys' soccer teams obliterate women's Olympic teams, she threw her opponents around like rag dolls while breezing to victory.

Beggs pinned Kailyn Clay earlier Saturday to reach the final. That was after he (sic) beat Taylor Latham and Mya Engert handily on Friday to reach the semifinals.

In the semifinals, the match was halted for a couple of minutes because Beggs had a bloody nose. Trainers finally managed to stop the bleeding and the fight resumed. Not long after, Beggs slammed Clay on the mat and pinned her.

Fortunately, this is all quite legal. There's nothing in the rules or the law to prevent parents from loading their daughter up with mind- and body- altering drugs, the treatment presumably begun before she reached the age of consent.

If all of this bothers you, don't let it. Our culture isn't completely insane. She may be getting life-changing drugs which will doom her future before her cognitive abilities have fully developed, but we're not going to let her have a beer for another 4 years.

Giving children beer is wrong.

* - The drugging of their daughter is a predecessor, you understand, to the time when they have a doctor hack off her breasts. Lovely people, these.

The Mental Power Of Prayer

You can reshape the pathways of your brain through deliberate thought. It can be for good or ill. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) seeks to change you for the better.

CBT aims to help people become aware of when they make negative interpretations, and of behavioral patterns which reinforce the distorted thinking. Cognitive therapy helps people to develop alternative ways of thinking and behaving which aims to reduce their psychological distress.

Porn seeks to change you for the worse.

Once the reward centre is altered, a person will compulsively seek out the activity or place that triggered the dopamine discharge. (Like addicts who get excited passing the alley where they first tried cocaine, the patients got excited thinking about their computers.) They crave despite negative consequences. (This is why those patients could crave porn without liking it.) Worse, over time, a damaged dopamine system makes one more "tolerant" to the activity and needing more stimulation, to get the rush and quiet the craving. "Tolerance" drives a search for ramped-up stimulation, and this can drive the change in sexual tastes towards the extreme.

How about prayer? I've been praying for my friend over the last couple of days as well as abstaining from my favorite vices. My prayer has been the Rosary, said while thinking of good times together. I can't help breaking down from time to time as I pray. It can get pretty intense.

Question: Won't repeated acts like this rewire my brain to be more sympathetic and loving towards others?

Science!

Sometimes You Need A Fighter

... and nothing else will do.

I'm a huge Jonah Goldberg fan. I read all of his books and almost all of his columns. I usually listen to whatever podcasts he's on. I find him informed, witty, well-considered as well as consistent, both intellectually and morally. He didn't support Trump, pointing out his many flaws and currently points out the inconsistencies and hypocrisies of Trump supporters. If lying was bad for Hillary, then it's bad for Trump. If executive power grabs were wrong for Obama, they're wrong for Trump. And so on.

Having said that, I differ with him about the value of the pugnacious-cons like Milo, Steve Bannon and others. Like a promising football team that has slow wide receivers, there's only so far you can go without adding talent at those positions. Fans get tired of watching the team lose because they lack deep threats.

I'm an even bigger Andrew Klavan fan. His podcast is the only one I don't miss and his Klavan on the Culture videos are still treats to me, no matter how many times I watch them. He frequently talks about how conservatives need to get involved in the culture wars beyond simply tut-tutting about political speeches at the Oscars, degenerate lyrics in music and lockstep groupthink in the universities. I differ with him as well about the importance of Milo and other outrageous performers.

Here's what they're both missing. I'm tired of sitting quietly while progressive institutions like the press, academia and the entertainment industry label me. I'm tired of the racism, sexism, homophobia and islamophobia accusations. I'm absolutely over the goon tactics, the thuggery, the sneering and the moral posing on the left. It's all well and good to write essays proving the accusations are scurrilous, but sometimes you need to, as Obama said, punch back twice as hard. Like a football team that's down by 17, you've got to have those deep threats who can take post patterns to the house. I want someone who's going to flip them the bird, loudly and in public. I want a George Carlin or a Lenny Bruce.

Milo has been unique in this. On the left, there's Colbert, Stewart, the View and on and on. Vapid, ignorant, one-sided bigots, all of them. Until Breitbart and then Milo, we had nothing. Sure, we've got Ben Shapiro who is a once-in-a-generation talent at shredding people in debates with cold, cruel logic, but he's not charming. Andrew and Jonah are funny, but they're not brutal, they're not going to make you pump your fist. Milo is that missing piece.

People make purchasing decisions based on emotions, not logic. If you can't engage their hearts, you're not going to be a good salesman. Yes, you have to have a good product with clear benefits, but if that's all you've got, your sales will remain modest. Combine a great product with an engaging sales campaign and you're in business. Brilliant essays in the National Review are great product, but they don't capture the heart.

Andrew is right, you've got to engage in the culture war. National Review and Ben Shapiro in debates aren't part of the culture the way Jon Stewart was. Milo took that spot. Yes, he's a provocateur and a nut, yes he's damaged goods and has serious issues, yes to all of that and more. So what? He finally punched back in a way that made you laugh. He was absolutely brutal on stage in a way that was flamboyant, stylish and crazy. He was entertaining. You wanted to see more. You dialed in to his YouTube videos because you wanted to see what nutty things he was going to say today.

Now that Milo's on the injured reserve, so to speak, who's going to play that role?

Milo, taking it to the house.

Prayer And Abstinence Are Easy

... with the right motivation.

Life is a series of linked stories with you as the hero. Some episodes are plodding and some are filled with action and adventure. No adventure story takes place in the middle of a patch of mundane life. "Harry ate his corn flakes and read the newspaper before leaving for work that day," followed by seven chapters of similar prose isn't found in any Tom Clancy novels.

Of all the demands of Christian life, I've always found prayer and abstinence the hardest. I hate the repetitive and daily prayer is just that. If one beer is good, two must be better is my life's motto. There's more beside that, but you can see where it's going. I've vowed to change and struggled with these things, but never successfully for long, despite research and plans and many, many different approaches. My motivations have always been too inchoate to drive the plot very far.

I blogged a while back about a recovered alcoholic friend of mine who told me that you give up addictions (or, in this case, sloth and vice), when faced with a choice between the vice and something you love more. That's where the adventure story really gets going.

A good friend of mine was recently diagnosed with cancer. Yesterday on the phone, his wife, speaking to mine, broke down and begged us to pray for him. I didn't know it was all that serious until then. Life was going on as normal and John just needed some surgery and maybe a bit of radiation. I was back from Paso with a case of excellent micro-brews, looking forward to more sloth and self-indulgence. So much for that.

I don't see prayer and abstinence as a negotiating tool, a lever to be used with God to force Him to do something for me. Instead, it's an acknowledgement of need. He knows what kinds of creatures we are; He formed us. I don't know where prayer and sacrifice for my friend going to lead, only that it must be done. Perhaps it ends with a cure, perhaps with growing closer to Christ. It's the turn in the adventure story where the hero has to make a choice and take action to achieve some kind of a good ending out of a bad situation.

Sometimes, we sneer at people who take up religious activities only when crises hit, but isn't that the nature of an adventure story? Would we criticize Han Solo for reading a book in bed instead of prowling around the Millenium Falcon with his gun drawn when there's absolutely nothing happening? We'd think it was silly and way over-wrought. Well, this isn't over-wrought, it's serious. It's a call to action in a way my vague desires to pray and abstain weren't.

Doctors, nurses and Big Pharma will take corporeal action to help my friend. Their adventure stories will be filled with deeds. Mine will be the spiritual quest of purification for John's sake. Life has taken a turn and an adventure story has begun.

Some Travel Advice

We just got back from a fun, long weekend in Paso Robles / Cambria. We drank wine in Paso, but stayed at a house in Cambria. Here are two recommendations.

First, bring a big, cast-iron skillet with you. I brought my largest, a 15" monster. You can never trust the homeowners who rent through VRBO to have decent cookware and since food is so critical to a good time, it pays to bring your own. A single one will do, no need to bring a bunch of them. We ended up using mine for every breakfast and dinner. Since we drove, packing it was no big deal.

Sadly, the house had an electric stove instead of gas and even the big cast iron couldn't distribute the heat just right. Still, it did the job better than just about anything else could. One of those dreadful, thin, metal skillets would have just burned everything.

Sauteeing shrooms in the big, cast-iron brute. Note the horrid electric stove.

Second, on your first morning, make a bunch of bacon and store the grease in a small bowl in the fridge for later use. There's nothing like cooking with bacon grease, but it's silly to bring it with you or buy it. We did this and then I used it to make a wonderful sausage, shrimp and crab gumbo the last night. Spectacular!

There. That's it for now. A pair of tips for your next trip. Bon apetit!

A Little Bit About Milo

So Milo Yiannopoulis, the gay, conservative, comic troll, was invited to speak at CPAC. When it was revealed he seemed to have endorsed pedophilia, the invitation was rescinded. His meteoric career flamed out in a matter of 48 hours.

I've always liked Milo because he poked fun at stuck-up prigs, something comics used to do. Now many of the comics are the stuck-up prigs. I've always been leery of Milo because you felt he was walking on the edge of a volcano. He would dramatically hint at the details of his personal life, but it didn't make you want to see more, it made you wince and wonder if this was the time the volcano was going to erupt.

Well, this time it did.

Milo is such a well-known figure in political circles by now that his last name is almost superfluous, like Cher's. His antics have drawn out violent, stuck-up prigs at universities across the country, revealing them for the humorless, sour, ugly, dull-witted thugs that they are. He drew them out into the open and we all opened fire with gales of derisive laughter. It was glorious.

Despite my affection for him, I think it's a mistake to rush to draw parallels and accuse the left of hypocrisy for the piling on they're doing over this self-destruction. Milo deserves it and that fact stands alone. Instead, I'd suggest there's another lesson that not many people are learning.

By fetishizing "disadvantaged" groups, we seem to be whitewashing their sins away at the same time. Black lives matter until the black lives are ones wrecked by other blacks, as they are in ghastly numbers. See also: black family, destruction of. It's a pathology that dare not speak its name.

Similarly, we've turned our eyes from the troubles of the gay community. Promiscuity, violence and more, we don't just deny that they exist, to even raise them as issues is to put a target on your chest for cries of "Homophobia!" (Just what is fearful about concern for others is beyond me.) Wasn't Milo destroyed by one of the things we fear is going on behind the scenes in the gay community? In the interview that wrecked his career, he suggested that it's somewhat common. Is it real? Is it not? Who knows, we're not allowed to even discuss it.

Yes, the left has been totally hypocritical about this. The right is, too, when the shoe's on the other foot. That's what political groups do. Milo, however, isn't just a political weapon. He's a person.

The whole thing reminds me of the times when an NFL player turns out to have been beating his wife or sleeping around and leaving bastard children in his wake. We always deal with the individual as if he's asymptomatic when he might not be.

Oh well. At least we can get back to the real conversation that we all want to have. Pointing political fingers and yelling.

Donald Trump Caused The Swedish Riots

... that much is certain. But how? That's the question on my mind. What was the mechanism for it?

You wake up in the morning with a bunch of things to do for the day. You need to clean out the rain gutters and Aysha has asked you to go to the store and pick up a new hijab, size 52. Since the woman's body is completely covered, there's no real point in her watching her diet and not putting on the tonnage. Mohammed, why didn't you think of that, you wonder, semi-blasphemously.

After school, little Achmed has soccer practice and Fatima has a piano recital next week and she's been struggling with the bridge part of the composition. If you don't sit with her while she plays, she has a tendency to daydream and nothing gets done. And then, of course, is the meeting of the Library Guild. Since translating books into Arabic is pointless (those infidels know nothing of value), it's more of an honorary post than a practical one, but still, the meeting must be attended.

Sitting with your morning coffee, you read that Donald Trump, president of the United States of America, said there was some kind of disturbance in Sweden, thanks to Muslim immigrants like yourself.

At this point, things become a bit hazy. All you know is that you come back to your senses a few hours later and find yourself standing near a Volvo that's engulfed in flames, you've got dirt and scratches on your hands, a mask over your face and your eyes are watering from tear gas.

It's a mystery alright. Something for science to solve.

Maybe the same folks who are studying Global Cooling Global Warming Climate Change can take a break from their work and look into it. It sounds like it would be right up their alley.

Paso Robles Vineyard

This might be my favorite shot from our trip. I tried cropping out the road, but didn't like the results nearly as much. I feel like the asphalt gives a foundation for the scene. In any case, I left it really large, so it might be worth a click. Enjoy!

The Easiest Way To Put An End To The Crazy Student Loan Problem

... would be to teach kids about debt in school.

I learned to avoid debt from my father. We taught it to our kids. None of them have a cent of student loan debt. Meanwhile, the rest of the country has gone debt-mad for degrees, many of which will never pay off. Why weren't these kids taught to weigh costs and benefits in high school?

Possibly because the student loan racket is a ginormous gravy train for the education industry.

Here's an excellent, related essay.

Ireland Or Paso Robles?

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

A Simple Key To Success: Get And Stay Married

Once big discoveries are made in a particular field, scientists fall to tackling smaller and smaller ones until they're dealing with relatively trivial issues. Being scientists, they still want to trumpet their findings and, needing to sell newspapers, reporters still want to make a big deal out of them. The reader, however, is probably not affected much by these progressively smaller discoveries and could tune out without much risk.

Marriage, as studied by sociologists, is one such field. It was discovered long, long ago that marriage gives you an advantage in life. For one thing, jokes about your wife are a lot funnier than ones about "my co-habitating, semi-committed partner." Without marriage, the prose is unruly and the punchline gets lost. Here's another example from one of my favorite writers, Megan McArdle.

However, that doesn’t necessarily tell us whether selection effects are at work. A society’s values about marriage aren’t the only thing that affect the stability of its unions; economic forces also undoubtedly play a role, for example, and those vary widely by country. A simple international comparison cannot tell us whether anything we discover is selection effect or causation.

This bit of obfuscating drivel is from an essay pondering the alleged chicken-and-egg problem of the superiority of marriage over shacking up. It's obvious one exists. That's the big discovery from long ago. Now sociologists are debating whether this is a cause or an effect. Studies are done, correlations are found and the press rushes about with each new one telling us whatever fits their preferred narrative. Today, it would be anything supporting homosexuals.

Meanwhile, for the rest of us, these discoveries have the same impact on our lives as French avant-garde art. None at all. It doesn't matter if the correlations point one way or another. Get and stay married. There, that's it. Now we can all go cook delicious food and watch the game with friends while the eggheads sit in the study alone, arguing about t-tests and cross-correlations.

For the love of Pete, how many times can we hit the woodwork in one game and not score? Newcastle should have won this one 4-2 at least.

Say, has anyone seen Megan? Dinner is almost ready. Could someone go see if she's still in the study?

Schadenfreude For The Elites

I can't watch an awards show anymore without being lectured and told I'm a jerk.

I can barely pick out a movie without finding one that calls me a jerk and makes me the villain.

There's almost no news coming out of the universities that doesn't let me know that academia thinks I'm a jerk and would refuse to let me speak if I was invited.

I can't watch the news without seeing stark evidence that stories painting me as a jerk have been emphasized to fit the narrative that I am a jerk.

These people hate me. They've hated me for years. This has been going on as long as I can remember and it's only gotten worse as time goes by.

So when Trump holds a press conference and lets some of these "elites" have it with both barrels, I love it. LOVE IT. Ooh, he's lying! Ooh, he misspoke! Ha! Like I care. I'm beyond words with joy at seeing them get it good and hard. I know it goes against the theologian in me, but I don't give a hoot any more. The pleasure button in my limbic system is being pressed and pressed and pressed and pressed. God, does this feel good.

The following tweet sums it up for me, save for the part that somehow Trump has done this to the press and the rest of the "elites." They did this to themselves by hating me.

From a buddy of mine out west. pic.twitter.com/Ru53cFkloh

— Matt K. Lewis (@mattklewis) February 16, 2017

I Have No Idea What's Going On

The news media has become so totally polarized that it sounds more like yelling and shouting than news these days. The only source I trust any more is the Wall Street Journal. Everything else is howling mad.

It's not just the Trump hysteria. (Chaos! It's all chaos!) It's the Trump hysteria after 8 years of licking the sweat off Obama's body. Every time I'm told I need to be buying shotgun shells and bottled water because Trump did something that seems pretty innocuous, I remember, "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan" and the total lack of hysteria over that.

Trump's tweets don't seem to be costing me much of anything. In fact, my 401K is waxing fat and prosperous. ObamaCare was a real kick in the head as my premiums went through the roof.

So now we have hysteria, but nothing concrete. Then we had bliss and happiness, but big costs.

How is anyone supposed to know what's real and what's not?

Evernote Or Something Else?

Being cheap, when Evernote went to its paid model, charging $35 a year for full access, I punted on it and since then, I've not had a good way to share things I find on the web across all my devices.

I'm currently working on multiple projects where I need to do this. The MGB schematics, a Cursillo website, this blog, good recipes and more, all would benefit from being able to store tips, tricks and details.

What do you use? I've been emailing myself links, but that's pretty horrible. Evernote does what I want, but I'm not sure if there's something better. Any suggestions?

Writing this, I'm quickly talking myself into springing for the $35 a year plan.

If You Give A Man A Fish

... he will eat for a day.

If you give a woman a fish, she'll say, "A fish?!? On Valentine's Day? You got me a fish?!? What kind of idiot gives his girlfriend a fish? Of all the stupid gifts, this has to be the worst! Mother was right about you! I should have kept dating Jack."

Don't lose your girl to Jack. Don't give her a fish today.

You Know You Married Well When

... your wife suggests you sell one of your cars and buy either a pickup truck or an old El Camino and she's perfectly fine if the thing was built in the 1960s.

Praise Jesus!

We've been without a pickup for a year now, my old 1984 Nissan having been practically given to a young, Hispanic dude who was doing some roofing work for us. Furthermore, ever since I got rid of the FredMobile, I have vowed to never buy another car made after 1970. I like to work on cars and I want one that's easy to maintain. My BMW-loving wife gets a say in this as well, but as all three of our running cars right now are BMWs bought for her, she's more than happy to sell one and let me pick out an old brute to haul things.

Awesome Day

On a related note, I had one of my best days in a long time yesterday. My MGB electrical restoration project has gotten to the point where the ignition system is completely wired and the right voltages are getting to the right places when you turn the key, except ... nothing happens. There are three problems to diagnose.

1. There's a ground in the distributor.
2. The starter is just sitting there, doing nothing.
3. The fuel pump isn't pumping anything,

Other than that, everything's fine. 

I was unhappy with this at first when I realized I needed to start pulling things apart, but I realized that was just an emotional reaction due to thinking I was so close to finishing this. Once I started yanking stuff off the car, I remembered how much I love mechanical work. I cranked up the TobyMac on the garage Sonos and in no time at all, I had the radiator and distributor off. There's a single bolt on the starter that's a real swine, hidden away like a pirate's buried treasure, so I'll need to put the MG up on jacks to get at it. In any case, yesterday was fun.

Returning to the topic of the post, I'm looking forward to getting another car with which it's so easy to play. Maybe something like this.

I have to admit, I'm not completely sold on an El Camino. While stylish, the bed isn't all that big and hauling 8' or 10' pieces of lumber will still be problematic.

If Self-awareness Could Come In An Injection

... we might all be better off. Assuming we'd be willing to get the shot.

I've been unfollowing, but not unfriending, people on Facebook quite a bit lately. There's lots of them who feel the need to post anti-Trump rants, stories and videos. I don't go to Facebook to be yelled at, I go to see pictures of your pets, kids and vacations. Whatever it is that you've found on the Internet that has you all wound up isn't going to convince me of anything. Please stop.

What gets me the most about the rants is how clueless they are. These are the progressives, the liberals, the champions of the little guy. Well, the little guy just gave them the big, fat finger and there's not even a hint of reflection about the event. All the Smart People voted for the shrill criminal. It was the WalMart customers who voted for the narcissist. It doesn't seem to occur to the liberals that if the working poor hated their candidate and hated her platform and hated the policies of their beloved Lightworker president, they might be doing something wrong.

The implicit reply: "Nope, nothing is wrong at all with my viewpoint. Take a look at this Robert Reich video or this litany of lies from the Trumpkins or this story of a illegal immigrant who was kicked out of the country. Aren't you as filled with hate and rage as I am?"

No, I'm not and I don't know how to say it without touching off a firestorm of nasty comments. Please. Stop.

Finally, these are the same people who know with mathematical certainty that they're open-minded, tolerant and compassionate. Then they scream at me on Facebook, never suspecting that I don't think they're any of those three things. In fact, it's clear to me that they're angry, closed-minded bigots. You don't dare say that on Facebook as those are your friends.

On Twitter and this blog, I feel differently, I learn by writing and speaking, so this blog is a tutorial for me. It's semi-anonymous, so I don't have any problem posting polemics, screeds and rants. I can be just as intolerant as the next guy and this is my forum for yelling. Dittos for Twitter. There, I try to be less abrasive, but I still do it sometimes.

The choice in 2016 was between a crazy man and a bloodsucking, criminal harpy. I can easily take the crazy man because I'm pro-life and the harpy is fully satisfied with the abortion death camps running at a top speed that would have been the envy of the Nazis. That's just one reason. I'm also no longer afraid that taking Little Sisters of the Poor to the Supreme Court to force them to buy contraceptives was just another step on the road to religious suppression.

Yep the crazy man is crazy and he crazily does crazy things like it's crazy time in crazy town. Oh well. Here's a cat picture. Look at it and take a chill pill, dudes and dudettes. Your howling isn't changing my mind.

Her Serene Furiness, Maddi the Cat.

On Blogging And Arthritis

Today is the Post's 11th Blogiversary. I've often considered quitting this thing, but I can't. I find it a struggle to just miss a day. Hooray for OCD!

As years go by, things change and not just one's typing speed*. Things break down.

Years and years ago, I practiced kung fu. I got good enough to where if I fought an octogenarian nun, there was a 50-50 chance that it would end with me pulling a muscle and falling down while she laughed at me. In any case, for one of my sash tests, I had to break boards with a variety of strikes and both hands. I remember that when I was practicing my leopard's fist strike with my left hand, I used improper form and drove the knuckles of my middle finger right through the back of my elbow.

Well, that's the way it felt, at least.

Anyway, earlier this week, I started having pain in one of those knuckles it was difficult to bend. I thought nothing of it, but it persisted until I realized what it was. Arthritis. It took a couple of days to recall the old kung fu injury and put two and two together.

Something I've noticed as I age is that things start to break and you realize that they're never going to get better. It's still at the wry amusement stage for me as I can look at the damaged body part and say, "Hmm. Well that's not gonna heal" and smile.

So there you have it. 11 years of typing like a madman on a keyboard and arthritis. I've got the flu today**, too, but that will get better. I hope your day is a good one. Me, I'm going to lay around and watch soccer.

* - I've unintentionally become pretty fast touch typist.

** - I'm blogging with the flu. See what I go through for you people? ;-)

A Farewell To Class

So Fauxcahontas tried to stop the confirmation of that crazy bigot, Jeff Sessions, by reading from a letter by Coretta Scott King. When I heard about that, I thought, "Wow. Is there anyone less relevant today than Coretta? Maybe Reagan. Or Nat King Cole. Or anyone with any class at all."

MLK is rolled out with regularity to defend a group whose popular music lyrics can't be quoted on this blog because I refuse to swear in prose. Ridiculous. Understated beauty on the order of Nancy Reagan at Ronnie's side is somehow analogous to the guttersnipe Trumps as The Donald is compared to the Gipper. Right.

Look, I love 80s heavy metal, but I also get that Ratt isn't Hoagie Carmichael. Maybe it's time we stopped getting wound up about Lady Gaga's horrific fashion and Trump's crude insults and just accept that the old days aren't here any more.

Class.

Pure class.

The Best Toaster Oven In The Galaxy

... is the Cuisinart TOB-135.

A toaster oven that proves the existence of God.

We tried a bargain one from Target or WalMart or somewhere like that and it was horrid. It had an analog timer marked in 10-minute increments. Thanks, geniuses. Toast takes about 6 minutes. At 10 minutes, it's a charred wreck. The Cuisinart has a digital timer so it's just as easy to pick 5 minutes, 12 seconds as it is 30 minutes.

Second, the old one had a spring-loaded front door which made noises like it was meant to be in a Vincent Price horror movie. SQUUEEEEAAAKKKKKKKK-CRRRREEEEAAAAKKKKKK-GAAAHHHHHHHHH! The Cuisinart's door is so silent that you half expect it to whisper an apology every time you open it. "Oh my word, I made the slightest whisper. I crave your indulgence, sir. I shall never do it again."

As for toasting and cooking things, well, even the old one could do that, but is that a great accomplishment? I mean, we've been cooking things for millennia. Even a toad of a toaster oven can do that.

No, where it counts, the Cuisinart is fantastic, fabulous, wonderful, amazing, awesome. If you don't have one in your kitchen, I assure you, your friends and neighbors will mock you behind your back. And if they don't, mine will, the rude swine. Why, I could tell you stories of gossip and backbiting that would curl your hair. This one time, we opened a window only to hear ...

Hmm. I seem to have gotten off track.

Ahem.

Anyway, the Cuisinart TOB-135 is pretty cool. Have a nice day.

Next Up: Soldering And PCBs

I'm pondering using a printed circuit board (PCB) in the engine compartment of my MGB to make the connections between the wires coming from the cockpit, the rear and the engine and front lights. The PCB would also house relays and fuses. It would eliminate what could end up as a rat's nest of wires, but at the cost of having to learn new skills and technologies.

Below is a video showing how to solder ordinary components to a PCB.I can do that, but I'm kind of worried about doing the same thing with connectors and components that don't use small wires, but instead use 1/4" blade connectors.

Oh well. The only way out is through.

Everything Is Political And Yet Nothing Is Political

... how very zen things have become.

My Facebook timeline has become peppered with liberals and progressives in varying degrees of freakout mode, decrying whatever it is Trump is doing right now. Dodd-Frank, Obamacare, Russia, on and on the list goes. Some of them are sharing phone numbers for congresscritters and urging each other to call and ask for ... what?

Call your representatives all you want, you little swine. I'm going to rule by decree.

Political outrage has so saturated our culture, thanks to the left politicizing everything by getting the government involved in everything, that just yesterday we had a 3-hour political debate and a football game broke out right in the middle of it! I suspect some people got bored with political ads and decided to have some fun with sports instead. Good for them. I don't think I could stand watching another hour of Google and Audi tell me what a creep I am.

Where was I? Oh yes, the irrelevancy of it all.

As the government has grown, the mechanisms for running the government through the passage of laws in Congress have broken down. Obamacare is a perfect example of this. When taking over such a huge portion of the economy, it's simply impossible to write a law, even in 1,000+ pages, that will cover all cases. In order to deal with this issue, the law gives the bureaucracy control. Mark Steyn summarized it quite well.

As Philip Klein pointed out in the American Spectator two years ago, the Obamacare bill contained 700 references to the Secretary "shall," another 200 to the Secretary "may," and 139 to the Secretary "determines." So the Secretary may and shall determine pretty much anything she wants, as the Obamaphile rubes among the Catholic hierarchy are belatedly discovering. His Majesty King Barack "shall have full power and authority to visit, repress, redress, record, order, correct, restrain and amend all such errors, heresies, abuses, offenses, contempts and enormities whatsoever they be." In my latest book, I cite my personal favorite among the epic sweep of Commissar Sebelius' jurisdictional authority:

"The Secretary shall develop oral healthcare components that shall include tooth-level surveillance."

That power didn't go away with King Barack. It stuck around and now it's in the hands of King Trump.

Executive orders are no big deal. They are what executives hand out in the daily job of executiving. Executive orders become a big deal when you hand the executive's underlings nearly unlimited power. Which we have done.

Charles Murray, in his book, By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission, details just how untouchable the bureaucracy is. If you have a dispute with them over one of their regulations, you can take them to court.

The court, unfortunately, will be within their jurisdiction. You didn't think you were going to get a jury, did you? Ha! No, you have to go through layers regulatory review, performed by the agency you are fighting, before you can escape into the sunny uplands of the American legal system and spend a wad on lawyers trying to fight regulations on the order of tooth-level surveillance.

Circling back around to our main point, there is no purpose being served by calling your representatives when they have no power any more. This was the whole point of the socialist idiocy of the left, but they're mostly too dense to see it. They kept agitating for more and more power for the government, breaking most of the levers of control in Congress and now, gasp!, the Deplorables went out and voted in that unwashed pig, Donald Trump. So now all that power they cheerfully handed to the government is in the hands of sexist, racist, homophobes. Whoops!

The most fascinating thing to watch is how they're not learning the lesson, government governs best which governs least, but are actually wasting their time and energy marching and protesting and making phone calls. What a bunch of morons! The system is doing exactly what they wanted it to do. It's completely impervious to assaults, not just by greedy corporations and racist political organizations, but to lefty citizens as well!

HAHAHAHAHAHA!

As Jonah Goldberg might say, you'd have to have a heart of stone not to laugh uproariously at the utter futility of their efforts.

Because Sometimes, You Just Need To See A Chihuahua On A Pillow

Lily, aka Grandma, the smallest of the Catican Guards.
We call her Grandma because she eats, walks and does pretty much everything slowly and deliberately.

Prostitutes, Thugs And Trump Supporters

I have to tell you, I'm getting pretty sick of the violent protests against President Trump* where no one or almost no one is arrested. For some reason, behavior that would land me in jail for multiple years is perfectly OK when it's done by mobs of deranged progressives or even individual, deranged progressives. I've got a suggestion for putting an end to this.

Vice squads typically send out female police officers dressed as prostitutes to known red-light districts with male, plainclothes police officers nearby. When a John propositions the young woman, an arrest is made. Why not do the same thing on college campuses and cities where the protests are out of control?

Put a plainclothes cop in a Make America Great Again hat in a public place, film it from all angles and have plenty of backup readily available. When the lefty goons mace, punch or otherwise molest the cop, make arrests. In short order, the word would get out and it would become a lot safer for conservatives on the streets.

He might be a cop with reinforcements nearby. You never know.

* - It's still really weird to type or read "President Trump." I wonder how long the feeling will last.

A Wall Of Fog

Coming home the other night, I saw this wall of fog making its way across the coast, going south to north. I was able to photograph it with some success. I wish I'd had a drone to get a high-altitude shot without cars and trees and wires and houses in the way. Oh well. I got what I got. Enjoy!

Maybe If They Taught History At Berkeley, This Sort Of Thing Wouldn't Happen

Looking back into the past, it's not uncommon to find examples of places which were razed to the ground and the people slain or imprisoned after having killed or insulted the king's son or minister. That sort of thing has been traditionally frowned upon by autocratic rulers.

Milo Yiannopoulos is a very popular columnist for Breitbart News. Breitbart News was managed, until recently, by Steve Bannon. Steve Bannon is now one of Trump's key advisors. When Milo was invited by a group of students to speak at Berkeley, this is what happened.

Horrible. No, I don't mean CNN's standard calumny against someone on the right - Milo is not alt-right - I mean the rioting and mayhem. After which no one was arrested. No one.

Donald Trump isn't the fascist dictator the crazies think he is, but he isn't someone you want to insult, even by proxy. Like Tinkers to Evers to Chance, Milo to Steve to Donald is a short distance. Given how Big Education is the primary funding arm of the Democrats, it doesn't take a genius to see how a Republican Congress could be prodded by an angry Trump into legislative action against publicly-funded universities who shut down conservative speakers.

This isn't going to end well for the lefty campuses.

I guess they didn't teach history in their Transgendered Studies classes.

Surf Namibia?

You bet! Dig this video. It's like Australia's Superbank - a long, long, long ride. Gorgeous!

Here's where Skeleton Bay is.

On Haircuts

These days, I like to get out of the shower with my hair already done. I go to the same Vietnamese barbershop every time and get a #3 on the sides and a #7 on the top, straight across the back. My wife tells me I look like a Navy officer.

I like that part.

Back in the day, I always wanted to have long hair. Best of all would have been a braided, viking look. I was a heavy metal head banger, you know. My hair would never cooperate. With any amount of length at all came curls. People sometimes told me I looked like Art Garfunkel.

This is Art, not me. In any case, it's hideous.

If my hair got really long, gravity would pull it down to some extent, but the ends would still curl with the result that I looked like either Bozo the Clown or Ludwig von Beethoven. Horrible.

Those failures took forever to deter me. I've got a photo or two from the late 70s or early 80s where I had hair down to my shoulders. I can still remember the moment where it became painfully obvious I looked like a dork. In an instant, nothing but a haircut would do even though it was morning and I had places to be.

If I recall, I waited until that evening to be shorn of my hopeless locks. I do know that if you had told my earlier self that someday I'd be happy to get a buzz cut, I'd have laughed in your face.