Obama Is A God

... and once you grasp that, all becomes clear.

I've argued on this blog that we're not experiencing a political struggle, but a religious one. Two things have solidified this for me recently. The first was this comment, excerpted before, from Rod Dreher's blog.

Time to start giving up on arguments altogether.

No argument will work. The time is already past. You probably have about 2-4 years until they ban you from Twitter, etc., and the payment processor company you use to allow people to pay for subscriptions or to make donations tells you to take a hike with your hateful bigotry. You can see, I can see, and more and more people can see the direction things are going.

Time (long past time) to start thinking about alternatives to arguments, period. They are fun to make! But there is no argument that will work against the spirit of our age.

Islam is a religion. Essentially, it falls back on "It's in the Koran!" as it's fundamental justification. It's not rational, it's rationalizing. No argument there.

Secular postmodernism is a religion. It must be, because it discards objectivity in all forms - knowledge, morality and logic. You have your truth and I have mine. There is no Truth. No argument there. Instead, you have the cultural zeitgeist of the moment, determined by the elite and driven by the mob. Oddly enough, Michael Cohen's guilty plea to campaign finance violations is what crystallized that for me.

As Jonah Goldberg, who has gone off the rails as far as I'm concerned, might say, I'm going to engage in "whataboutism." My reply to Cohen's plea is, "What about Obama's far larger campaign finance violation which was treated with only a fine?" Obama got away with it because he is a god. He is a member of the elite whose duty it is to inform the mob of what is currently right and wrong. He cannot be questioned because he is the answer to all questions. "Is this wrong?" "What does Obama (or the elite) think?" is the implicit dialog.

Hillary's emails operated in the same fashion. She was given a pass for crimes which would have sent a Normal to prison for a long time because she is a goddess. She belongs to the pantheon of the elite. She is not bound by the rules because, like Obama and the rest of the elite, she makes the rules and anyway, the rules are fluid since we've discarded objective morality.

18 US Code 793 contains the following clause which, in any objective reality, shows that Hillary and everyone who came in contact with her email server, were criminals.

(f) Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing ... or information, relating to the national defense, (1) through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, or (2) having knowledge that the same has been illegally removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of its trust, or lost, or stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, and fails to make prompt report of such loss, theft, abstraction, or destruction to his superior officer — Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.

There's plenty more Hillarian violations at the link. What of it? Objective morality is nonsense and Hillary and her cronies are part of the elite pantheon. They are gods and goddesses and should not be bound by the laws of mere Normals. You live in that world, not them.

Dig the cover of Comey's book. If that's not religious, I don't know what is.

The implication to the Normals is that Comey's higher loyalty is to the Truth. The reality is that he has a higher loyalty to the gods and goddesses he serves.

And you're not one of them.

I'm pondering a follow-up post which will suggest that the Catholic Church is the last, best hope for rationality and acceptance of objective reality. We're the only ones who, at least until the papacy of Francis, used unflinching logic to derive our theology. When we chase the ephemeral will-o-wisps of the modern culture (trannies good! bestiality not yet, but soon?), we throw away logic. Once we discard it, there will be no one left to defend it.

Argument Is So Passé

Instead, it's all about emoting, chanting, shouting and driving speakers off the stage. In this case, it's a Democrat, Mayor Garcetti of Los Angeles.

My guess is that the protesters have run out of conservatives at which to scream. Dig the video below.

I lived in LA for a while. Going back there now, the decay is palpable everywhere. It's been true blue for quite some time, so there's no one the progressives can blame but themselves, but that would be rational and we're over that. No, the best course of action is definitely shouting.

Please Stop Praying For Wisdom!

... for our elected leaders. Start praying for independence from them instead.

Our political leaders are creatures of the predominant culture. These days, given the left's stranglehold on the media, academia, tech giants and entertainment, that culture is secular and progressive. That culture is the enemy of Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. Like a reader over at Rod Dreher's blog said, that culture is not interested in argument, it's all about exercising raw power.

Time to start giving up on arguments altogether.

No argument will work. The time is already past. You probably have about 2-4 years until they ban you from Twitter, etc., and the payment processor company you use to allow people to pay for subscriptions or to make donations tells you to take a hike with your hateful bigotry. You can see, I can see, and more and more people can see the direction things are going.

Time (long past time) to start thinking about alternatives to arguments, period. They are fun to make! But there is no argument that will work against the spirit of our age.

We can't solve a problem whose existence we deny. The problem is both the culture and the reach of the government which is a significant enforcement arm of the culture. Instead, we should pray that the faithful be given the freedom to explore and follow their consciences as we seek to imitate Christ.

I'm telling you, Catholic libertarianism is the path to success.

The other thing we need is Nick Saban as Pope. Here he is, reacting to a report on the status of Jesuit-run colleges in America.

You Can Move Faster If You Drop Things

... like your standards, your morals, your ethics and your foundational principles.

The Church of England is now pseudo-baptizing trangendered people who are coming out as their new identity for the first time.

The Church of England has encouraged its clergy to create baptism-style ceremonies for transgender people to welcome them into the Anglican faith.

New pastoral guidance, published on Tuesday, advises clergy to refer to transgender people by their new name, though it stops short of being a baptism.

No word on whether or not people who cut off their arms and legs, paint themselves green and claim to be cucumbers will be specially celebrated on Plough Sunday. There's also that hassle of a book called the Bible with all of its references to man and woman, be fruitful and multiply and so forth. Bitterly clinging to the Bible will only slow you down as you endeavor to keep up with the times. It's best to ditch the thing so you don't get caught out like some throwback High School teacher and by throwback, I mean someone thrown all the way back to 2010 or so.

Speaking of throwbacks, I hope you're all ready to move out on an upcoming issue - pedophilia.

I hope you’re sitting down for this. Thomas O’Carroll, a convicted British pedophile, has published an essay in a peer-reviewed academic quarterly arguing for legalized pedophilia.

Or maybe the next step will be bestiality. Quoted in that blog post by Rod Dreher is this tidbit:

"The assertion that children are incapable of reciprocal sexual relations is empirically unfounded. Where is the evidence? A comparison with animals is again suggested. Dogs appear to be perfectly capable of reciprocity in loving relationships with human beings, often to the extent of being every bit as devoted and loyal in their affections towards their owners as their owners are towards them, and perhaps even more so."

Either way, you don't want to be caught lagging behind the mob and be fired.

What's the best way to make sure you can move fast? Drop everything. You can't run as quickly if you're carrying a cinderblock like the Bible or faith or reason or science or worthless stuff like that. Best to ditch it and make sure you're ready to go in whatever direction we go next.

Running as fast as you can doesn't always turn out the way you had hoped.

Bad Southern Food

... will turn you off from good Southern food because you won't know the good version exists.

I've never liked biscuits and gravy. I keep trying it at restaurants and they keep tasting meh. I decided to give them one last try, making my own buttermilk biscuits and my own sausage gravy.

It was outstanding.

Now that I've tried the basic version and liked it, I have plans, big plans for modifications to the gravy. Fresh herbs from the garden, spicy sausage and who knows what else!

How To Tell You're Not At A Waffle House

... is pretty easy. If the menu says the "Waffle of the Day" is at "Market Price" like it was some kind of freshly-caught sea bass, straight from the boat, you're not at a Waffle House.

Hipster millennials. Sigh.

Stupid, Poor And Extinct Is A Heck Of A Way To Go Through Life

... although if you're extinct, you're not going through life, are you?

I'm pondering a book and I think I'm close to a theme. This is another thought piece fleshing things out.

In formulating my response to Rod Dreher's call for a defensive crouch, I keep coming back to the naked vulnerability of the secular, progressive culture. Above all, a culture has to work. That is, if it goes extinct or is conquered, it's what we scientists call a failure.

I posit that the secular, progressive culture is a complete failure. The only time you hide from such a thing is when you're biding your time, waiting for it to collapse.

Stupid

Imagine you're part of the secular, progressive culture. Here's where you are right now...

First, let us agree to do away with whiteness. Whiteness is bad. The Patriarchy goes next because, you know, men. Organized religion is mumbo-jumbo and anyway, a lot of it was just borrowed from the pagans. In sum, Western Europe and it's heritage is utterly expendable.

Once these things have been expunged from polite company, we are free to live our lives in peace! Well, so long as you don't support any of the aforementioned heresies, which will force us to beat you senseless for peace.

Now that we've done away with the patriarchal family and the strictures of organized religion, we'll all get in our furry costumes and ... wait a minute. Look at Baltimore and Chicago and Oakland! Man, those places are full of gun violence! Sigh. Put the furry costume down and call the Bronies, we need to march for more and more laws against gun violence.

Back in the day, you could order guns and ammunition through the mail. We were a good deal safer, too. What happened? Well, we threw out the cultural structures that kept us safe. Now we need to build new ones, recreating the effects of the Judeo-Christian West without any of it's foundational principles.

That's a Rube Goldberg machine and it's not working even though we keep adding more and more political and cultural stages to it. No worries, this next round of elections will bring us the leaders we need to replace the traditional family! Well, that and the suppression of anyone who disagrees with us even slightly.

Poor

If you spend more than you make for long enough, you go bankrupt and end up living on the street. That's no fun even though you're closer to nature. All of the large, secular, progressive nations are on a nearly irreversible path to bankruptcy. Italy recently abandoned it's pathetic "austerity" effort and jacked up it's budget into tequila-shooters-on-a-Saturday-night territory. The resulting hangover is going to clobber German banks something fierce.

Not to worry, France and Japan are on the same trajectory, so the ripple effects from all of them going down will be hard to trace to any single source. It will be like tsunamis hitting an island from three directions at once. Which one swept away the village? Who knows?

Extinct

Dig this update on Italy's demographic collapse. Italian data was the easiest thing to come to hand, it's not that I'm picking on them.

The fall in the Italian birth rate has reached its lowest level ever in 2017. In a country of 60.5 million inhabitants, just 458,151 children were born last year, and even less, about 440 thousand, are the new births predicted for 2018 — just over 7 per 1,000 inhabitants, 30 per cent under the median of the European Union, which is already the region of the world with the lowest birth rate.

If you consider the fertility rate – or “total fertility rate” – which ensures zero growth, that is, the equal exchange of the population, is 2.1 children per woman, then observe that the Italian figure has been dramatically under that for decades. In 2017 it sank to 1.32, with several regions even more prone to births, and with Sardinia even settled at 1.06.

It's kind of hard to claim you're on the right track if you're dying out. That would seem to be a pretty basic measure of, err, "sustainability."

It's all good, though, the Muslims are still having babies. Marseilles, for example, is 25% Muslim right now. While the secular progressives play with their inflatable sheep, babies name Mohammed are being born by the dozens. How long before Marseilles is majority Muslim? What will that do to the LGBTQWERTYSP500 scene?

I've got a running gag that wife kitteh still finds funny. Whenever we see something like the Furries in Chicago or read about people being ostracized for suggesting that transmen are really women who have mutilated themselves, I say, "Meanwhile, Achmed and Fatima have had four children."

Staying Power

The Church has been around for 2000 years, Islam about 1400. The secular, progressives have been around for, what, 50 years? Yep, they own the media, academia, entertainment and the high-tech industries. So what? None of those will be able to save them from failure when their worldview guarantees it. In effect, they lose ground with each cultural transaction. Increasing the volume by eliminating all competitors will only accelerate the process.

The secular progressives are never going to get past that chapter.

I Used To Be A Bigot

When I was in college, I studied chemical engineering for my first three years. I loved chemistry and the engineering part appealed to my mathematical side. Around the end of my junior year, I started looking into job prospects. Chemical engineering was a 5-year degree, so this wasn't leaving things to the last moment, it was the start of an exploration, part of my growth into an adult.

I quickly discovered that chemical engineering was practically synonymous with petroleum engineering and that the jobs were centered in the oil refining industry in and around Louisiana. Louisiana! I didn't want to go there! It was all dimwitted rednecks living in swamp filth. Why, they could barely read or write and didn't they all marry their cousins or something?

This photo of New Orleans is courtesy of TripAdvisor

That shack, found with a quick Google image search, is almost a perfect recreation of what I imagined the South to be.

Similarly, I came out of college hating the NRA and all of its members. No one with an IQ over 70 owned a gun. Guns killed people. They were accident prone and could leap up and go off of their own accord, almost always shooting toddlers, even if there were no toddlers in the house. No, a toddler would mysteriously appear out of nowhere and then the gun would shoot it. That's the way it worked and I knew, because I had been to college and done my learning with much studiosity.

When I got my first job after college, at a place where I still work today, my officemates weren't just NRA members, they made their own cartridges and at least one had built his own musket. They thought I was hilarious! It didn't take me long to change my mind. The initial shock of meeting intelligent, educated, highly accomplished men who owned guns blew my bigotry away like a high wind whipping away the fog.

These men mentored me patiently. My school was strong in theory, but weak in practice. These guys taught me how to solder, how to read schematics, how to build circuits and more. The best of the lot had grown up in the Depression on what he called a "dry dirt farm in Kansas" which I took to mean a farm without irrigation. The dude was always jovial and kind and he loved his guns.

Getting over my anti-Southern bigotry was a much slower process. I was born in Boston, my father was from Wisconsin and my mother from Illinois. I was a Yankee, through and through. Moving all over the country as I grew up, I tried to root for the New England Patriots and the Boston Red Sox to connect with my very shallow roots, but it never took.

Looking back, it's hard to find a tipping point that led me to my passionate love for the South. As best as I can recall, it was probably the time I had a day-long layover in Atlanta due to storms fouling up Delta Airlines' schedules. There had been so many flight cancellations that the best Delta could do was get me back to San Diego the next evening.

I got a hotel and a car and decided to explore Georgia for the day. On a whim, I picked out a tiny town called, of all things, Grantville. Grantville had a population of about 3,000 and I found a little, roadside BBQ joint for lunch. I had a great time. I came to realize that Southern hospitality was a real thing. The place wasn't busy, so I chatted with the staff while I ate some of the best BBQ I had ever tasted.

Over the years, work took me all over the country, but every time I visited the South, I had the same experience. It took a while, but working and socializing with everything from engineers and scientists to shipyard workers to the staff and customers at Waffle Houses across the South finally dispelled my narrow-minded intolerance. Reality dissolved prejudice.

Nowadays, I love the South more than any other part of the country. The more I explore the culture, the cuisine, the people and the countryside, the deeper my affection grows. Outside of biscuits and gravy for breakfast, which is almost always underwhelming, I can't think of anything about the region that has been a disappointment.

And that's how a bigoted, sneering, college-boy Yankee lost his ignorant hatred of hobbies he'd never tried, a place he'd never visited and people he'd never met.

A Millipede

Wife kitteh found this handsome character marching through our house the other day, so I took a photo of it for Tim. I did a little sleuthing and it looks like a Hiltonius Hebes. That sounds about right as it gave my wife the Hebes Jebes.

I took the photo with my phone and then did some Photoshop work on it to improve the quality. The stoic little fellow refused to smile for the camera, but I'll bet he did a 1,000-toe tap dance when I dropped him off in one of our raised beds. The picture was left rather large, so I think it's worth a click. Enjoy!

A Funeral At The House Of Usher

In Chicago over the weekend, I happened to see previous presidents being interviewed on 60 Minutes about President George H. W. Bush's death. It should have been a patriotic moment, but it filled me with revulsion and it took me a while to figure out why.

Well, actually, watching Bill Clinton, that was easy to figure out why. He had assaulted and raped women and was protected by those same creeps on 60 Minutes. Literally in the Oval Office, he had taken advantage of a woman young enough to be his daughter. Meanwhile, Brett Kavanaugh, who by all accounts has lived a righteous life, was torn to shreds by the media types.

Barack Obama, his face permanently tilted upwards in his faux-patrician way, pontificated. Fortunately, the sound was turned down, so I didn't have to listen to him talk about himself which he undoubtedly did. He's nauseating under normal circumstances, so maybe that one was understandable, too.

What really got me was my visceral reaction to the younger President Bush. He looked like a dog rolling around on his back, letting the 60 Minutes cretin rub his tummy. He practically wet himself in ecstasy. The others were being themselves while W ... well, he cavorted with his chums. Oh, sure the CBS news staff poured on the chants of "Racist!" at W while he was in office. Of course they played at Lord Haw Haw while we were fighting in Iraq. That's just what those people did for a living and for W, there were no hard feelings. Hollywood is putting out a film called Vice which is blood libel against Dick Cheney, but hey, what's the big? The 60 Minutes crew is smiling at me and that makes me feel warm and happy inside!

It took me until yesterday to figure out why this made me feel sick to my stomach.

W's supporters, of which I was one, are still under the cosh from the press, academia, Hollywood and their allies. CBS is no friend of mine. They'd love to see me reeducated or simply politically marginalized into irrelevance. Meanwhile, one of our alleged leaders is wriggling in pleasure as the 60 Minutes team whisper sweet nothings at him. It was all lies on their side and all sucking up on his side.

There was something rotten about the whole thing, like a corpse in an Edgar Allen Poe story. Horrific.

Hey, W, have you ever heard of this Kavanaugh guy? Remember what they did to him?

Furries On Tarawa

While wife kitteh and I were in Chicago over the weekend, there was a Furries convention there at the same time. We went out to lunch at a German restaurant near the convention with some friends which is where we discovered them. It was quite the experience. We even got to see one of them spanked in front of everyone with a large paddle. If you don't know what a Furry is, it's some dude who dresses like a furry animal, as far as I can tell, primarily for sexual fetish purposes.

It made me think of the Marines on Tarawa. They were almost completely unalike. I have to confess that there was some similarity as both were bipeds and presumably mammalian, but that was probably about where it ended.

Not Marines.

Marines.

It's an indication of the state of our culture that grown men feel comfortable dressing like furry animals and paddling each other in public.

And people want to complain about President Trump being inappropriate.

Centralizing Power Centralizes The Target

... of disappointment and subsequent rage.

It's all well and good to be a socialist and hand out money when times are good. You get to consolidate power and have the luxury of telling the deplorables what pronouns they are permitted to use. When things go bad, however, you are the logical target of wrath. After all, you told everyone you were the person who could run their lives down to how many pennies they pay for gasoline.

PARIS—The worst rioting to hit the French capital in years left President Emmanuel Macron weighing an emergency crackdown on protests and scrambling to shield his pro-business agenda from surging public anger at his government.

Mr. Macron convened a crisis meeting of ministers on Sunday after protests by the gilets jaunes—or yellow vests—escalated violently the day before, leaving the Arc de Triomphe vandalized and the heart of Paris dotted with burning cars and smashed storefronts.

The gilets jaunes movement, sparked in October by Mr. Macron’s proposal to raise fuel taxes to reduce pollution, gained strength in areas outside big cities where people depend on cars. It has since broadened to a rallying cry for those who say his policies favor the wealthy and punish the working class...

It was the third consecutive weekend that gilets jaunes massed throughout the country, but the leaderless movement, which has no spokespeople or defined membership, has refused to name representatives to sit down with the government.

Emphasis mine. It was that last bit that jumped out at me. A quick solution to the crisis would be to decentralize power and hand authority for a lot of this stuff out to the provinces, cities, towns, hamlets and pigsties where the deplorables bathe in mud while Macron and his elite partners sip champagne at their global meetings where they discuss how horrid all those little people are.

Ahem. In any case, if the source of your gas price pain is the local mayor, you'd go firebomb his house and leave poor Macron alone to pose for the cameras and take softball questions from an adoring media.

Or better yet, you could take all that ham-fisted, regulatory interference in the lives of the Normals and burn it before the Normals burn you.

Nah. More money and power for the elites. That's the solution here. Nothing feedback-loopy about that.

Maybe the solution is to take all the elite leaders of the world and move them to some place the Normals can't reach. Perhaps we can construct a home for them in socialist-friendly San Francisco Bay. Like Alcatraz, maybe.

Parking The Catholic Bus

In metric football, aka soccer, "parking the bus" means that a team is playing maximum defense. All 11 players are usually behind the ball, crowding the penalty box to the point where an opponent's skill becomes meaningless as there are just too many bodies in the way to score a goal. It's typically done by a team which is far inferior to its opponent. Any hopes for scoring hinge on the occasional breakaway, counter attack.

When I read the inestimably wise Rod Dreher talk about his Benedict Option, that's what I hear. Fair enough. We're third in strength behind the secular progressives and Islam and we need to think about playing defense - maintaining our churches and as many of our current believers as possible. I disagree with him that we have no offensive ability, but that's a topic for another blog post.

Last night we went to a secular wedding. We've been to several recently. The ceremony is always brief as there was nothing substantial to anchor it outside of the vows. There's a brief introduction, the couple say the vows, everyone claps and we move on to the party. In each case, the (young) couple has chosen a friend to officiate, so there's not a whole lot of life experience to impart in a homily.

As I watch the loving pair pledge their troth and then the whole gang drink and dance the night away, I think about Rod Dreher's proposition - that a culture in decline needs to cling to its orthodoxies like soldiers in a bunker awaiting an offensive.

Well, maybe.

I'd suggest that the most important thing that's missing in these lives is the acknowledgement that there is more to life than this (pinching his flesh). That's pretty much it. If this is all there is, then doing the Wobble, drinking a lot of rum and Cokes and then going home and boinking is pretty much the apex of human existence. Instead, if the gang thought we were souls who had bodies, then natural curiosity would lead them to ceremonies that mentioned that.

And then we could move on to the Wobble and, later, the horizontal monkey dance.

This is the kind of bus I want to park.

There's Some Weird Stuff Going On In Chicago

... at the skating rink. I'm not saying it was aliens, but it was aliens.

A space warp developed as we watched the skaters. It got bad enough that some of the younger skaters started to fall down. Darn those prankster aliens!

This is best viewed in fullscreen mode. Enjoy!

I Wish The Aztecs Had Won

Blogging from my phone and struggling to insert an image, so this will be a quick thought.

I know a young man who works for a university. He's full of the hipster orthodoxy about white men being the source of all evil. It dawned on me recently that the dominant culture is a choice between a small number of candidates.

Would we be better off having derived our society from the Aztecs?

On Camels And Eyes Of Needles

"It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter heaven," said Jesus.

We always interpret this as rich in terms of money, but what about rich in terms of abilities? If you're attractive, isn't vanity always nearby? If you're intelligent, isn't scorn a close friend? If you have the ability to focus and work hard, isn't intolerance of sloth living in your house?

My mom has a gardener who is one of the nicest guys I know. He's not stupid, but he's not a genius, either. He has the virtues of honesty, humility and gratitude in spades. He's closer to heaven than I am, I'm sure of that.

When I see flowers, they sometimes remind me of that man.

Sunset At Sunset Cliffs

This was taken last night on my way home. Here in San Diego, we don't get dramatic sunsets all that often as the sky is either perfectly clear or socked in with low clouds. A good sunset needs clouds in the foreground and a clear horizon. We got it last night. I left the photo large, so it's worth a click.

Enjoy!

Would Twitter Ban The Pope?

Unless Pope Francis has made some changes in the last few days, I think we Catholics are still using the Bible for some stuff. I know it's mostly minor as we strive to combat Global Warming Climate Change and plastics in the ocean, but I'm pretty sure we reference the thing once in a while.

Meanwhile, on Twitter, anyone who denies that men can become women, women can become men and either can become gender-fluid muskrats is being shut down, banned or deleted. What would happen if the Pope got a wild hair and decided to dust off his Bible and tweet something about Genesis 1:27?

God created mankind in his image; in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

Or maybe he could down a few shooters and get really crazy, quoting Genesis 5:1-2.

This is the record of the descendants of Adam. When God created human beings, he made them in the likeness of God; he created them male and female. When they were created, he blessed them and named them humankind.

Would Twitter ban the Pope?

Not to worry. I doubt we'll ever find out. He's busy with the super-important stuff like open borders for everyone. He doesn't have the time to deal with minor things like the obliteration of the family which is the foundation of all civilization.

I'm not saying Twitter-banning the dude would be altogether bad, either.

A Second Try At Night Sky Photograpy

... and it came out much better than before. I think having the proper shutter speed made a difference. I also learned that you need some foreground elements so the viewer can make sense of what they're seeing. The top one has some trees and a horizon, the bottom one doesn't.

Let me know if you can see anything distinct. In the Photoshop processing, I played with the exposure setting which brought out the foreground, but I can't tell if I did it enough. For me, it depended on the backlighting on the monitor. If the room was a bit dark, the images looked great. If not, well, your mileage may vary.

In an case, I left them really large, so they're worth some clicks. Enjoy!

Taking 585 Pages To Say Goodbye

... sounds like the kind of thing a completely psycho girlfriend would do.

Which is a good approximation of the EU.

BRUSSELS—More than two years after Britons voted to break from the European Union, U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May and the leaders of the remaining EU members approved a hard-fought, 585-page treaty setting out the terms of the U.K.’s divorce from the bloc.

I think that if I had drafted the UK's response, it would have been a single image.

The Problem With An Improv Culture

... is that you can't predict what's coming next so you can't prepare for it.

I'm working out an idea that there are essentially three religions in the world.

1. Islam
2. Christianity
3. Secular Progressivism*

In Europe and the US, the Secularists are the dominant culture. Intellectually, they're the children of the postmodernists who are trying to discard anything they consider "white" and, more particularly, anything they deem to have come from white men.

That's a problem.

What they're really doing is throwing away 6000 years of civilizational evolution, an evolution based on trial and error. All of that experience is being discarded because they feel it is tainted with "whiteness." The upshot is that they are now forced to create their culture on the fly, like improv performers working out a scene. Each time a new wrinkle is introduced by someone, the other actors have to quickly recalibrate their parts and go along with the flow or they risk wrecking the show and earning the wrath of the others.

Sort of like the feminists who are freaking out over equating trannies with women. Also sort of like the gays who are discovering that Muslims aren't all that welcoming, despite what the academics in the grievance industry say about oppressed groups banding together to fight patriarchal whiteness.

The 2016 survey was carried out by ICM and it revealed that 52 per cent of British Muslims think homosexuality should be illegal, compared with 5 per cent among the wider population.

Then there's the problem of what to do about men. The secularists did away with the white, patriarchal tyranny of chivalry. Hurrah! They also did away with feminine modesty and chastity. Hurrah! Now they're trying to figure out how to re-civilize men. Whoops! Don't worry, they'll get there. Oh, wait, now people aren't reproducing and men aren't pursuing college or careers. Quick, hold another conference so we can solve that one!

Was it always this complicated to be a guy?

And therein lies the rub. The secularists, as they build their Rube Goldberg machine of a culture, are making everything up on the fly with no manuals like the Bible or the Koran and having discarded the experience of the icky, white, male West, are finding that Hope and Change isn't a plan. It's kind of a mess.

This simple demonstration illustrates how we will achieve societal peace and harmony while pursuing every conceivable sexual desire and abandoning the traditional (YUCK!) family.

* - What an unwieldy name! I don't like it at all.

This Is What Happens When You Stop Reading Shakespeare

An opinion piece wherein Nature takes the side of psychotics.

According to a draft memo leaked to The New York Times, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) proposes to establish a legal definition of whether someone is male or female based solely and immutably on the genitals they are born with. Genetic testing, it says, could be used to resolve any ambiguity about external appearance...

The proposal — on which HHS officials have refused to comment — is a terrible idea that should be killed off. It has no foundation in science and would undo decades of progress on understanding sex — a classification based on internal and external bodily characteristics — and gender, a social construct related to biological differences but also rooted in culture, societal norms and individual behaviour.

Here are some of the characteristics of a psychotic with the applicable ones further defined.

• Hallucinations
• Delusions - A delusion is where a person has an unshakeable belief in something untrue.
• Confused and disturbed thoughts
• Lack of insight and self-awareness - People who have psychotic episodes are often unaware that their delusions or hallucinations aren't real.

When we ditched the white, European thing because they were horrible people, like Shakespeare, Aquinas and Newton, we threw out all of their accumulated wisdom, too. Now we're having to make up a culture from scratch. The end result is that we follow postmodernist madness down one rabbit hole after another. Hence, we've reached the point where a formerly prestigious journal like Nature is arguing against basic biology.

#winning

Here, old Will is pondering how he to oppress minorities.

Thankful For Sunsets

... like this one I shot while on the way home from work a few days ago. I left it large, so it's worth a click. Enjoy and have a happy Thanksgiving!

If You Leave Illinois, We'll Give You A BMW

Illinois owes $129B in pensions. There are 12.8M people in Illinois. That works out to about $10,000 per person - every man, woman, child and transgendered otherkin. If you and your current life partner live together in an open arrangement with one adopted child of indeterminate gender and one elderly relative, your household will be responsible for about $40,000 of that debt.

On Carmax this morning, I found this lovely 2018 BMW M240 for about that price. Note: when that car gets sold, that link probably won't work any more. Sorry about that.

A late-model BMW sports car or paying off a debt run up by politicians buying the votes of selfish, fiscally-illiterate, government employees. Hmm. Is that a tough choice? Over at Crain's Chicago Business, some youngster has penned an editorial that says Something Must Be Done. It's sad, really. He's just now waking up to the realities that his pension-imbued Illinois Public Teachers Union members left out of his education. There's only one thing that will be done, sweetie. Someone's going to take a bath, either you or the elderly. Right now, it's you.

That is, unless you move to another state, in which case you won't be on the hook for the bill and you can go buy that Beemer. Just do the rest of us a favor, OK? Try to learn something from this and don't take your blue state idiocies into a red state and ruin that place, too.

You May Not Be Interested In The Culture War

... but the culture war is interested in you. That's what Leon Trotsky would say these days.

I had an interaction with a progressive today that shocked me. I know enough to not take a position one way or another on the social justice topics of the day, but the fact that I was ambivalent enraged them. They dialed the crazy up to 11 instantly, complete with f-bombs. It was like dealing with a violent psychotic, which is something I've done in a past life. Thank God the interaction was online.

I hastened to agree with them, gave them what they wanted and ducked out. I had absolutely zero confidence that anyone in authority would have given me any protection at all. It was chilling, to say the least.

Leon Trotsky - A progressive who liked violent rhetoric and violence in general until he was killed with an ice-axe. I'm guessing at the point where the axe entered his body, he began to consider the possibility that he should dial it back a bit.

Debt And Immigration

If you want to know why so many people are fine with the illegal immigrant invasion force entering the country, take a look at this.

We can have whatever we want, simply by printing money and/or issuing bonds. Taxes don't go up when spending goes up, so policy issues are decoupled from fiscal reality. In the short term, that is.

I saw one of those quote-photo memes this morning saying something about how we should send judges and lawyers to the border instead of soldiers so we could process the immigrants instead of turning them away. The chick who posted it was going to feel no ill effects from letting them in and felt guilt about closing the door on them. Why not be compassionate if it's free? Fight the HATE!

However, if letting them in socked her with a higher tax bill, she might see things a different way. At least there would be another side to the debate, a side not filled with HATE.

In case you're one of those people who wants to make everything about Trump, I'll let you know I'm no fan of him in this regard. A one trillion dollar deficit in the middle of one of the greatest economic times in our history is unconscionable. Unfortunately, there is no meaningful fiscal conservative political movement any more. We're all drunken sailors now.

Until that changes, and I hope it does when we see Japan or Europe go over the edge, these immigration debates will be all emotion and no substance.

The Catholic Church Needs To Change With The Times

... said some activists priests in France, 1787, Germany, 1937 and America and Europe today. "It's high time we made changes! The Jacobins Nazis Social Justice Warriors have the right idea!"

If we go that route, we'll need to stay fluid. Dig what happened to Meghan Murphy.

On Thursday, an ardent Canadian feminist who has supported the #MeToo movement but has opposed a bill that would encode gender identity and gender expression into Canadian law furiously revealed that Twitter wouldn't let her say that men are not women.

Meghan Murphy, who founded the feminist blog and podcast Feminist Current in 2012, had tweeted in October, “Men aren’t women tho,” and “How are transwomen not men? What is the difference between men and transwomen?”

On Thursday, Murphy revealed on Twitter that she had been notified by Twitter that her language in the tweet had violated their rules against hateful conduct.

That's kind of the problem with chasing the modern zeitgeist, isn't it? It's a moving target. Compared with the solid architecture of 2000 years of accumulated genius codified in the Catholic Catechism, it's a bit of a lightweight.

Say we want to properly embrace the LGBT crowd. Just how do we do it? Do we embrace the Obama '08 version? Gays are cool, but marriage is only between a man and a woman. Do we go for the Obama '12 version? Gay marriage is cool, but only women are women. Or do we go with Obama '18? Men can become full women and vice versa.

Embracing the latter two will mean substantial rewrites of the Bible, starting with Genesis. "Be fruitful and multiply" was ... what, a suggestion? A bit of poetry? Apocryphal?

How about the Catechism itself where we acknowledge the supremacy of science over theology? I guess we need to dump that as evolutionary biology, heck, biology itself needs to be jettisoned.

Lately, I've heard plenty of progressive Catholics, including several within the Pope's inner circle, make noises about changing with the times. In essence, they're choosing Kamala Harris and Corey 'Spartacus' Booker over St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine.

Yeah, I don't think I'm pulling the trigger on that trade.

Aquinas and Augustine for Harris and Booker? Even the Browns wouldn't make that deal.

Mature Women Should Read Children's Stories

Tired of politics and non-fiction brainiac books, I've gone back to listening to children's books from around 1900. This time, I found the complete set of Oz books, read by Sean Murphy, for less than a dollar on Audible. That was a no-brainer, so I bought it and listened to The Wizard of Oz on the flight from San Diego to Providence on Tuesday. I tried to get into The Marvelous Land Of Oz on the return flight, but I gave up very early in the book.

I can't tell if it was the writing or the reader, but I was distinctly underwhelmed. It could not hold a candle to the Edith Nesbitt books I listened to a while back. First off, Sean just doesn't work as a storyteller for children. He tries hard, perhaps too hard, but he just doesn't have the warmth and ... love, is it? ... you need for the job. Sean's got a bit of the gay voice lilt* which doesn't help. Instead of being immersed in the story, you wonder about Sean. It was like having a flute play the saxophone line in a jazz piece. The voice artist worked hard, but it wasn't right.

Since the performance moved slowly and words were simple, I was able to imagine reading the prose as he went along to separate the performance from the story. What I really wondered was how it would sound if a woman read it.

My mom was (and still is) a great mom. She read me lots and lots of stories when I was a child. As I was sick a great deal of the time, she had lots and lots of chances to do so. She would even do a very nice, British accent when she read things like Peter Rabbit. There was so much love and warmth in her reading! That's certainly why I associate children's books with happiness.

It's got to be a woman reading the book. My Air Force pilot dad, who was away much of time, would tell me stories that he made up, but he didn't read to me and that was probably a good thing. His masculine voice and firm diction worked for his farm-based stories, but it would have been completely out of place elsewhere. Children's books need a woman reader or the spell is broken.

Just now, I'm walking through the Audible versions of Oz, trying the sample excerpts to find a good one. Meh. There are lots and lots read by young women, but they don't seem to work, either. You need that rich, mature, woman's voice. You need a mom's voice.

A first edition.

* - I despise identity politics with a passion, but I would argue that there are vocal characteristics to certain groups. Men and women have different voices, blacks and whites have different voices and, sometimes, gays and straights have different voices. It's not that it carries with it a personal judgment, it's that some voices don't work for some things. For example, a black simply must be the voice artist for a reading of Uncle Remus or the whole thing can be dismissed out of hand.

Not San Diego

No, it's Rhode Island during the first snowstorm of the season. It was very pretty.

Cheezburger of the Day

Sadly, we have kids and friends' kids who are exactly like this.

Worrying About Nuclear Global And Warming War

... or something like that.

The Pope, who I as a rabid papist am inclined to support, said in a recent interview that he's worried about global warming climate change* and nuclear war. Whatever. I guess he's opposed to Mr. Mobutu wanting reliable electricity in his African hospital when his wife needs a c-section. Global Warming, you see, is caused by third-world people wanting to do away with filth, starvation and disease, the elimination of which will require the use of energy which spews CO2 into the air.

Oh well. Where Papa Frankie came up with nuclear war, I'm sure I don't know. I think his talking points from the progressives are a bit out of date.

Meanwhile, birthrates in Japan, Europe and America are below replacement, which means Muslims are an ever-increasing percentage of global population. Traditional families, the source of civilization, have been decimated in Europe and America as we pursue pleasure. Porn is completely destabilizing sexual relationships all over the world. I guess those aren't a big deal as they don't involve "global" issues, only the problems of normal people.

I have a dream. Someday, our elite will have something in common with regular, everyday Joes and Janes.

Ha! What a hopeless romantic.

I'd also like a unicorn.

* - Poor Pope Francis is behind the times. He doesn't realize that we've moved on to Climate Change.

It's Over When You Surrender

... like the Brits have done to the Muslims.

A Pakistani Christian woman’s appeal to Britain for asylum has been denied because her arrival in the country may stir civil unrest, HuffPost UK has been told.

Asia Bibi, a Christian farm labourer, was released from prison in Pakistan on Wednesday after being acquitted of blasphemy. She had spent eight years on death row after an argument with a group of Muslim women in June 2009.

The Supreme Court of Pakistan overturned Bibi’s 2010 conviction for “insulting the prophet Mohammed” last week, saying the case against her was based on flimsy evidence.

But her acquittal sparked violent protests led by Islamic religious hardliners, and the government has now agreed to try to stop her leaving the country.

That sounds a lot like the numerous American universities that have surrendered to the mob veto of ANTIFA and social justice warriors in all manner of things.

How hard is it to grow a new spine once yours has eroded away?

The Malibu Fire

... is dropping ash in San Diego, ~150 miles away. Check out the film on the top of our birdbath.

Meanwhile, wife kitteh was absolutely murdered by her allergies yesterday. We suspected smoke from the fires and this confirmed it.

If it's throwing ash down here, it's huge up there. God bless the firefighters and the victims of the blaze. Here in San Diego, we managed to escape 2018 without a major fire, but that will come in time. They always do.

The Manual Doesn't Lie

Usually.

I spent a little time today trying to figure out why I hadn't been able to set the shutter speed when I took my night sky photos a few days ago. The manual said to turn the front dial to adjust the speed. I didn't see a front dial, so I kept turning the back one and nothing happened.

It turns out there's a small front dial on the, err, well, front of the camera. Duhhh. I spun the dial and the shutter speed changed.

No worries, I discovered the other morning that the night sky where I live is not too bad and I might even start with some moon photos just to get the hang of it.

That is, now that I know the front dial is in the front.

You Don't Know What It's Like To Be ... (Blank)

I can't stand that argument. It drives me crazy. It's illogical and marks deep ingratitude. It's ugly and divisive. Until this morning, I couldn't think of the logical fallacy in it. It seemed impervious to debate as whatever you said could be countered with yet more characteristics the left associates with oppression.

I know a blind fellow at work. He's a scientist. I've worked with him on making our web applications more accessible to screen readers. If you've never used a screen reader, it's amazing what it does and what it requires on the part of the consumer. The thing starts at the topmost element in the Document Object Model (DOM) of the web page and reads it to you. Hitting the tab key moves you to the next element. I think ctrl-tab takes you back to the previous one.

Pictures and input elements like forms must have alt text associated with them so the screen reader can tell the blind person what it is. Without it, they can't fill out forms and don't know what the picture is showing to the rest of us.

To use a screen reader, you have to keep a mental map of the web page in your head. Imagine memorizing the map of the DC subway system. And the NY subway system. And the Chicago El and the LA bus system and on and on and on. Each website has a different map and the blind person is picturing the DOM in their heads as they walk through it with the tab key.

Meanwhile, the rest of us just zip around with the mouse and click on funny lolcat memes.

Whenever I hear arguments like, "You don't know what it's like to be black!" or "You don't know what it's like to be a woman!" I want to reply, "You don't know what it's like to be blind!" The obvious reply would be, "Yeah, well, you don't know what it's like to be a blind, black woman!"

That's not the way the thing works, though, is it? The blind dude doesn't live in a world of blind people where he might have some advantages because of his skin color or sex. He lives in the whole world and has to compete with all of us for jobs, respect, social status and mates. It doesn't matter to the blind guy that he doesn't know what it's like to be a black, blind guy because his disadvantage is orders of magnitude worse than skin color or sex, if those even carry with them disadvantages at all, which is debatable.

In fact, if he met a black, blind woman, they'd immediately have a close kinship born of having to learn how to live in the world of the sighted. They'd be able to have deep conversations about screen readers, crosswalk voices and how to set up a bedroom so you don't fall over everything. Heck, they might even fall in love because they finally met someone who understood them.

Meanwhile, in the world of the grievance culture, most of us are sighted, healthy, reasonably attractive and enjoy the fruits of our ancestors' hard work and ingenuity. Life's pretty easy, all things considered. Certainly too easy to walk around telling each other that we don't know what it's like to be an Eskimo lesbian.

Oh yeah? Well, you don't know what it's like to be a short, one-eyed, one-handed, transgendered, lactose-intolerant, vegan pirate!

A First Try At Night Sky Photography

Was both rewarding and frustrating at the same time.

Wife kitteh, who was being a good sport, and I went out to dinner last night and then drove out to Sunrise Highway in the Laguna Mountains so I could play with my Fujifilm X-T10 camera and try to get some night sky photos. The night was moonless and clear and the place has very little light pollution, so everything was set for some good photos.

I spent some time in the afternoon trying to set up the camera properly. I put it in manual mode, set the ISO at 4000 and tried to learn how to manually set the shutter speed. I was able to figure out everything but that last part. No matter what I did, the thing stayed at 1.5 seconds instead of the recommended 15-30 seconds.

Lesson: Don't try reading the manual in the car at night. If you're doing that, you're doing things wrong. However, wife kitteh came home very hungry, so setup time with the camera was cut a bit short as noms were required sooner than expected.

Lesson: Set up all your gear ahead of time and take some shots, even if it's in the middle of the day. I had planned to look through the manual during my lunch break and work through the settings, but, as usual, the workday had other plans and I never got to it. Hence, I was working out the settings at the last minute before we left.

Lesson: If you're in the mindset that the first two or three times you try something new you're going to make a total hash of it, it's all good. I had no expectations other than figuring out what I had done wrong the next day, which is today. When you learn new things, you asymptotically approach competence as you keep trying.

In the end, I was actually happy with a couple of the shots, however they managed to sneak their way into my camera in spite of my best efforts at ignorance. In the end, it was very cold up there and I was a bit unhappy with my inability to set the shutter speed, so I took some shots in random directions to use as teaching aids today. I came away with some nice full sky shots and one or two horizon ones. They're not professional grade, but they look like I meant to do them.

I left these quite large, so I think they're worth a click. In fact, you'll need to click on them to see them properly. In thumbnail mode on the blog, they look like black rectangles. Enlarged, they look like black rectangles with tiny, white dots, which, I'm sure you'll agree, is much better. Enjoy.

On Assignment

Tonight, I'm heading up to the Mount Laguna area to try to take some Milky Way photos. More on that tomorrow.

The Least Important Election Of Our Lifetimes

... was yesterday.

Important stuff

The only thing of significance that was at stake was the restoration of democracy through the continued remaking of the Federal court system. President Trump has done an outstanding job nominating judges who will interpret the law rather than make it. The high profile cases of gay marriage and abortion took the issue out of the hands of the people and handed it to 5 Ivy League creeps in black robes which is the opposite of democracy. We won yesterday. Hooray for us!

Not on the table

The big issues of marriage, debt and sovereignty weren't going to be determined by yesterday's elections because neither side cares about them at all.

The Democrats have become Nazis without ambition. They're fixated on identity groups, particularly racial. For all that, blacks remain an idea to them, not real people with real problems. And the real problem there remains what it has been for decades - the destruction of marriage. No one, black or white, red or blue, was talking about it. We talked a lot about race, but we didn't talk about reality.

We have full employment and peace and we're still blowing through over a trillion dollars of borrowing a year. That's not just unsustainable, that's insane. Republican or Democrat, it doesn't matter. There are no adults in the room when it comes to money so it hardly mattered which way things went.

The Republicans had the legislature for two years and couldn't bring themselves to build the wall. Instead, we got children being separated from their parents, caravans of light infantry heading for the border and a whole lot of hoo-hah about ICE and sanctuary cities. No one really cares to allow Americans to define what it means to be an American, that's a job the legislature wants foreigners to do by migrating at will.

End result

So in terms of significant changes for the nation, the only big deal was the courts and we won that one, handily. We'll have another two years of good Federal judges being confirmed. If Ruth Bader Ginsburg goes to that Big Abortion Mill in the Ground Sky, the two squishy (R) chicks - Murkowski and Collins - can do whatever it is they do instead of standing up for normal Americans during the resultant Supreme Court nomination cage match and it won't matter. I'll take that, considering it's all that was offered.

For now, fiscal responsibility at the Federal level is as dead as this yellowjacket.

How To Make Voting More Rewarding

I voted today and while waiting in the long line of Handmaid's Tale cosplay characters, crossdressers and furries (this is California, you know), I came up with some ideas to improve things.

NEVER

Add a selection to the ballot, up at the top, called NEVER. If you pick that, you don't need to show up any more, it will vote NO on all ballot measures on your behalf from there on out.

Wife kitteh is voting no on everything because she wants the idiots in the legislature to do their jobs. I'm voting no as a kind of parlor game, like hiding Easter eggs from 3-year-olds. How long will it take them to find the obvious solutions? Whee! What fun!

Clickbait Polls

We need to have questions on the ballot like, "Who's your favorite Monkee?" or "Are the Doors the most overrated band of all time?" That would be cool.

By the way, the Doors question would have two responses:

• YES
• I'm high on weed right now

Asking for Help

Jokingly, I tweeted out that I hadn't been following along and had no idea how to vote. I asked for suggestions. Here was my favorite response.

pic.twitter.com/UpnbgC8SdM

— Christine Johnson (@CatholicMomVA) November 6, 2018

Living In The Past

While I was at the general's funeral last week, I spoke with one of his grandchildren who worked with a tribal government that shall remain nameless. She was trying to help them find new sources of revenue, including tourism. She told me that simple tasks were difficult because skilled personnel were so thin on the ground within the tribe. For example, she had great difficulty getting them to give her an invoice for some work they had done. It wasn't that they were being stubborn, it's that they weren't used to doing such things.

We discussed our different experiences with American Indians on reservations. She confirmed what I had long suspected, that most of the talented and motivated young people left the reservation and never came back. The reservation just didn't have anything to offer.

What is the point of clinging to the Old Ways? It's pretty clear that the Old Ways aren't paying off any more. Hanging out on the reservations in New Mexico is a pretty depressing experience. The available jobs are not exciting at all. Casino work must be the best they have to offer and even that isn't breeding a new generation of intellectual and artistic leaders. It all seemed so very confining to me. It's as if the reservations were a prison, physically, mentally and psychically.

Then there's the ferocious problems of substance abuse on the reservations. Why not get loaded when there's not much else to do?

What happens when your reason for existence has vanished into the past?

A Happy Photo

I promise I'll contribute to the acrimony and yelling on the Internet again in the near future. Today, I came across this photo in my gallery and it brought a smile to my face. It's deliciousness in a pre-nom state. I thought it might make you smile, too. Enjoy.

Evictions And The Homeless

Once upon a time, I bought a house so I could scrape the lot and build a custom home on it. The house came with renters, at least one of which was a self-wounding drug addict. It was as sad a story as you can imagine and a sobering reminder of why illegal drugs are illegal. It was a woman who had fled her mother and her husband to run into the arms of drugs. I met both of them, who were desperate to save her. I pray that they eventually did, but having seen that story play out before, I wouldn't bet on it.

In the four months before we bulldozed the place, the renters stayed. We got a total of one month's rent out of them. They knew they didn't have to keep a relationship with us and they were going to have to leave anyway. Their credit ratings and our references for future rentals meant nothing to them, so they simply occupied the house. This being California, there wasn't much we could do. The eviction process is prolonged and expensive for a landlord. In the end, we decided to remain friendly and just let them know when the place was going to be demolished. They left a couple of days in advance of that.

Had they wished, they could have stayed a few more months and thrown a huge wrench in our schedule. If someone lives in your house and claims it as their residence with no other place to go, they are considered tenants in California with all the rights thereof. That means you need to go through the full eviction process to get them out. When you read stories of adults living with their parents and wonder why the parents don't just kick them out of the house, that's part of the reason why.

An eviction process takes months. Just getting to the point where you can file papers is a month. Imagine what it would be like to live under the same roof with someone, particularly one of your children, who knows you dislike them so much that you'd throw them out in the street. If they're desperate and/or addicts, things could get really dicey. If you're elderly, fearing for your safety would be natural and sane.

That's something to consider when you let Junior move back in with you.

Red By A Pixel 3

There are too many things going on right now in Real Life™ to allow for decent blogging, despite lots of topics. Yesterday, we had a bit of a family crisis, so I didn't have the time to knock out anything at all. Today, the best I can offer is a photo from my brand-new Pixel 3.

I really like the phone. It's a ton faster than my Galaxy S7 was, which, after the most recent update, we struggling to navigate using Google Maps. Twitter was a horror of slothfulness. The new Pixel 3 is greased lightning.

The camera, which is supposed to be the biggest selling point of the phone, doesn't disappoint. I took some outstanding family photos yesterday, but I don't want to share those here. This morning, I shot some bougainvillea flowers outside my office. Here's a section of one of those photos. I love the way the veins on the flowers leap out at you. I left it large, so it might be worth a click. Enjoy!

God Save Us From Feminist Control Freaks

This morning, while drinking my coffee and perusing Twitter, I came across the Jordan Peterson video linked below. In it, a closed-minded feminist interrogates the good professor and, predictably, gets massacred. It was all good fun. Two things jumped out at me.

First was the aforementioned closed-mindedness. The woman is younger, has read less, experienced less and achieved less. Even if you disagree with Jordan, you might take the interview as a chance to learn something. When she launches at him with some pre-programmed feminist talking point and he dunks on her like LeBron against a high school team, she doesn't stop to inspect her thoughts and ask follow-ups that any curious person interviewing a genius might, were she trying to learn. Instead she's trying to score off him. Sigh.

The second, and more important point, was the notion of the tyrannical coercion of equality-of-outcome feminism. Part of the discussion was about grade-school teachers. Only about 15% of them are men. The feminist said we needed more men as teachers so the numbers would be closer to equal.

What if other men don't want to do it? What if 15% is the number because that's all we've got in the way of men desiring to be teachers? Why is it anyone else's business to push more men to be teachers or more women to be plumbers? Why do the feminists' OCD about ratios overrule an individual's goals and dreams? My response would have been, "Who are you to tell these men what they should be doing? Bug off, you control freak."

Anyway, here's the video. It's super long. I converted it to MP3 and listened to about 40 minutes on my commute this morning until I got tired of it and turned it off. Jordan was great, as usual, but she became tiresome and as much fun as it is to listen to Jordan rip someone to shreds, it gets old after a while.

Anchor Babies And Trump

Many moons ago*, when my first son was born, the maternity ward where he entered the world was full of illegal aliens having anchor babies. More than half of the ward were illegals and the place was relatively close to capacity. It was shocking. Before that, I'd had no idea how prevalent that was. That was more than 20 years ago, so who knows what the situation is like today for hospitals within 100 miles of the border.

When President Trump said he was going to put an end to that, it made me pretty happy. Those families were clearly gaming the system and openly trying to take benefits from Americans. Yeah, I'm happy to be full of love for mamas and babies, but that sort of cheating is too much to take.

* - I use the Native American term of speech in case Elizabeth Warren is reading this.