Pagan Prayers

I was listening to my favorite podcast, Clerically Speaking, yesterday when they made an interesting point about prayer. Prayer is not my strongest suit, to say the least.

Pagan prayer is where you pray and expect results. That is, if I say this incantation, God will love me or I'll get some benefit. Or, perhaps, if I sacrifice this chicken, my team will win the big game.

If the chicken sacrifices me, there's no telling what might happen.

In any case, they discussed contemplative prayer which is where you exist in the moment and let the moment wash over you as you contemplate and listen for what God has to say to you. I did this the other day in Adoration. Mother kitteh is doing quite poorly and I was exhausted and stressed. I was told to just love.

Leaving my mom yesterday, I tried contemplative prayer as I drove and I thought about the love and peace I had brought her by setting up some additional care. I was on my way to do some shopping, so I vowed to try and bring some smiles to the clerks and other folks at the stores. I think I managed to do it.

It happened because I opened myself up to what God wanted of me in the moment, not because I performed a certain rite and said certain words. I think those have their place, but not the same as the one they hold in a pagan world.

Does that make sense?

The Escalator To The Cliff

... and over into the abyss!

I'm a bit pressed for time today, so I'll leave you with two things that juxtaposed nicely for me today. First is this tidbit from a Rich Lowry piece.

Beto O’Rourke — the losing Texas candidate for the US Senate who bootstrapped his way into becoming a losing presidential candidate — had a message for refugees who had come to America: Your new country is a hellhole.

The former congressman told a roundtable of refugees and immigrants in Nashville last week: “This country was founded on white supremacy. And every single structure that we have in this country still reflects the legacy of slavery and segregation and Jim Crow and suppression.”

I haven't seen anyone on the left disavowing him or his primary opponents using the stupidity of it to attack him, so I'm guessing they all pretty much agree. That leads me to these tweets from Richard Fernandez, aka Wretchard the Cat.

For the same reason, they can't denounce the raising of the Mexican flag at ICE. They know they must. They may even be convinced. But the words won't come. The words die in their throat. It's spooky.

— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) July 16, 2019

To me, it looks like the machine is out of control. The rate at which accusations of racism are flying is getting faster and faster every day. There's no one on the left trying to rein it in, they're all either keeping their mouths shut or rushing to join in the, err, fun.

This isn't going to end well.

Here are some of the things we can expect if we keep going this way.

Ilhan Omar? Seriously?

Sometimes you can get so caught up in the moment that you lose sight of the bigger picture. Not seeing the forest for the trees and all that.

The most recent series of eruptions from the insane asylum known as "The Squad" - AOC, Ilhan Omar and two or three other deranged mutants - is a good example of it. Ilhan is a cultural Somali. On what planet does it make sense for Americans to take advice, any advice, from someone from that still clings to the belief systems of that violent, benighted place? Honestly, is there not a single scrap of humility in these people?

I guess not.

Yeah, about those complaints against America, Ilhan ...

Bonus Snark

Objection: But George Washington owned slaves!

Rebuttal: I don't care if he had non-consensual sex with underage bats, the dude was an absolute giant. Bite me.

Octopus

... is delicious. I know because we ate some in Spain. I'm not sure how it was prepared, but I know it was better than when I tried to cook some about 35 years ago. That time, it was like eating a fan belt.

The Mathematics Of Mentoring In Baltimore

Yesterday, I posted a video wherein Amanda Brown, a teacher from Frederick Douglass High School in Baltimore, told what it was like to teach there and elsewhere in that distressed city. It was a litany of horrors including everything from homelessness to abuse to hunger to violence to rape. If memory serves, she said that the average reading level for their high school graduates was below 5th grade.

In short, those kids are royally screwed. Given their demographics, it's practically guaranteed that almost none of them come from traditional, married families. Her anecdotes suggest that as well.

Amanda is smart, experienced and tough. She also seems to be a reflexive lefty, which isn't surprising given that she works in the education industry and comes from deep, deep blue Baltimore. When she gets to the prescriptive part of her talk, she blames racism and society and says we need lots and lots more mentors. As I've said before, if racism is the problem in Baltimore, then the Secular Lefties are the racists because there's no one else there. However, let's ignore that and look at the mentoring idea.

Let's assume Amanda teaches 5 classes. Each class has 25 students. That's 125 different students a year. Let's assume the illegitimacy rate is 70%, which is optimistic, both because the national average for blacks is higher and it's also higher in poor communities since broken homes lead to poverty. In any case, that leads us to 87 students from broken homes. Let's assume, again, optimistically, that only half of them need mentors because the other half are coping. That means that just for Amanda's students, you need about 44 mentors every year.

Multiply that by the number of high schools in the area with similar catastrophic problems and a factor to account for the number of Frederick Douglass students who don't cross paths with Amanda and you get a staggering number. Say 5 schools and in any one year Amanda only sees 10% of the student population. We end up with 44*5*10 = 2200 mentors required.

2200 mentors aren't going to cut it. There are grades below high school and the kids coming into Frederick Douglass are at a 3rd grade reading level. You'd better get involved and stay involved starting in, oh I don't know, how about kindergarten? Just using an offhand factor, let's triple the need for mentors which now gives us a need or 6600.

That's insane. It's not possible. It can't be done as in "cannot" as in "no way, Jose" as in "fuhgeddaboudit."

Now think about the task of the mentor. Amanda tells us that the kids are working on survival and school is a secondary concern at best. The mentor isn't only there to tutor, they are there to provide security, money, love and discipline.

If you think there is any chance at all that you will be able to find 6600 people, unrelated to the students, who are going to have the time, energy, know-how and willingness to take on that task, please contact your local mental hospital and schedule a straight-jacket fitting session.

There is a solution, however. Like I said in yesterday's post, those mentors are out there. We just have to be willing to demand they do the job.

I know where we can find the necessary volunteers to act as mentors for the kids. Mom's bed. The men found therein can be given a special title. We'll call them "husbands." We can give them a special token of appreciation. Maybe it could be a ring they could wear. We could also give them a certificate acknowledging their volunteer status. We'll call that a "marriage license."

That is the only solution to the problem. There is no other. All of the screaming about flags and statues and white supremacists and Trump and Tucker Carlson and the far-right and the alt-right is simply irrelevant noise. It's like blaming leprechauns for the suffering of these kids.

Next time someone brings up those topics, tell them to get real.

I'm not holding out hope for explaining my calculations to this nitwit.

Just Wow

Pondering a post discussing how charges of racism are a dishonest distraction from the real problems facing children of all races who grow up in single-parent homes, I found the video below. It's about an hour long, but you can move the scrub head to random points in the video and get the idea pretty quickly.

Kids growing up in Baltimore, read: black children, desperately need love and attention. They desperately need traditional families. Borrowing from a post of mine on the topic, the issue isn't racism and the solution isn't politics.

Navon's classmates are essentially illiterate and unemployable. They're growing up in a war zone. I didn't look it up, but illegitimacy rates must be near 80% in their neighborhoods. For all intents and purposes, there are no whites, asians or hispanics around them. The entire government is made up of Democrats and has been for decades.

The problem cannot be political because there is only one side present.

The problem cannot be racial because there is only one race present.

If you loved the children of Baltimore, if you loved them as images of God, as equals, as people deserving of the same opportunities as you and I, if you want them to grow up and be productive and accomplished, there is no way on Earth you'd be screaming about racism. It's all a lie. The topic is a lie. The accusations are lies.

No one cares about these kids. The Secular Left only cares about playing make-believe and the right has been cowed into silence.

These kids need to be the topic of conversation, not statues, flags or dog whistles.

Assessment of her prescriptions: She's a good SJW progressive. She wants other people to volunteer to help the kids and she wants more money for school. She blames "society" for the kids' failures and brings up racism. Assuming that she's right, the society hurting the kids is pure progressive. That means the Secular Left are the racists.

Whatever the shortcomings of her blame game, I know where we can find the necessary volunteers to act as mentors for the kids. Mom's bed. The men found therein can be given a special title. We'll call them "husbands." We can give them a special token of appreciation. Maybe it could be a ring they could wear. We could also give them a certificate acknowledging their volunteer status. We'll call that a "marriage license."

OK, that's enough for today.

Supermarkets: A Rant

There's something that's been bugging me about supermarkets for a long time and now it's really gotten my goat.

This was my goat. It has since been gotten.

I was at the store today, buying sour cream, guacamole and ammunition for my .45 revolver when there was some kind of ruckoid between the cashier and the customer in line in front of me. The cashier apologized and was happy that the customer didn't get angry and yell at her.

I'm sure you can immediately see what's wrong with that.

We're the customers, lady. You're there to serve us. When something goes awry, why do we have to be the ones yelling and getting angry? That takes a lot of effort. Why can't you be the one getting angry? Why do the customers have to do all the work? You're the one getting paid for this, not us.

And I don't want to see you getting angry with us, either. We've got enough on our plate, standing there in line, passing judgment on each other for the fact that the person behind us is buying guacamole and ammunition. You need to get angry and yell at inanimate objects or perhaps invisible beings. Fairies and pixies, perhaps.

If you want to know why this country is going to heck in a handbasket, just take a look at the cashiers the next time you go to the store. I'll bet not a one of them is angry and yelling. No, if you want something done, you've got to do it yourself, even if there are people being paid to do it.

Pathetic.

Just Love

I just spent some time with the Big Guy in Adoration. Dealing with a little stress, I couldn't formulate prayers, so all I did was sit there. 

After a while, I asked, "What do You want me to do?" 

"Just love" was the answer. 

That's all we're really called to do. Hold mom's hand. Answer her questions when she's confused. Make burgers for wife kitteh because she asked for them. Go into work and deal with some crises for my friend. That's it. We're not called to succeed, just love.

Because We Always Need To See Funny Cat Videos

Through The Looking Glass's Looking Glass

Oh, for the sweet, sane days of last week when all we had to worry about was the Betsy Ross flag and how crazy racist it was. That was the height of intelligent discourse!

Well, it seems that way now. Dig this.

Mitch McConnell’s ancestors owned slaves, according to a new report. He opposes reparations. https://t.co/N4btQN789E

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) July 9, 2019

To recap, we now have one of the most prestigious newspapers in the country publishing breaking news from, what, 160 years ago?

Remember when we went through the looking glass with Nike last week? We all sighed and shook our heads and said, well, Kaepernick is gonna Kaepernick and Nike is just another woke corporation with an incompetent marketing department. Whatever. Well, the madhouse we entered had yet another looking glass and the WaPo is now guiding us through that one.

You are here.

Each level is more insane than the last. We're now fingering people, not for things they said as teens, but for things their great-great-grandparents did. Soon, we'll be howling about things their great-great-grandparents said as teens.

Meanwhile, real, live children from single-parent homes are suffering. Ooh, sorry about that. Did I say something triggering and judgmental, something that distracted from our long-overdue "conversation" about race? I promise not to do that again. For at least ten minutes.

Bonus Tidbit: Just about all of the slaves in the US originated in Africa as slaves already. Slaves were a major trading good for sub-Saharan Africans and they sold them to anyone who'd offer a decent price. I'm thinking that it's a good bet that almost every single African-America has at least one slave owner in their family tree.

Hey, if we're going to go there, then by all means, let's go there for real.

Special Godwin Tidbit: Obsessing on race is how you get Hitler. Yes, I said it again and I'm fine with that.

Super-Special Bonus Nazi Tidbit: Even the Nuremberg Race Laws chart doesn't go as far back as the WaPo's newsflash about Senator McConnell's family. Dude, when you can out-genealogy the Nazis, you're a serious contender for Loon of the Year.

Amateurs. Let the WaPo show you how it's done.

Nine Time Zones Later

... I'm pretty beat.

We put in a 24-hour day yesterday, flying from Madrid to San Diego to get home for mother kitteh, who is in the hospital. She's fine now, recovering nicely, but things were unclear from Spain and we felt it best not to have her face her trials alone. She's a tough lady and ought to be with us a bit longer.

In honor of her and because I'm dragging like nobody's business, here's a mamma kitty from Morocco. Enjoy!

Many more cats than dogs in Morocco as the Muslims consider dogs to be unclean.

Granada At Night

We're having to cut short our Spanish vacation because mother kitten is doing poorly and we need to go home. We got to spend a day in Granada and strolled through the city center last night.

Spanish cities are weird, disjointed mix of old and new. The old portions are exquisite. The less said about the new portions, the better. In any case, here's a shot down a walking street that we thought was charming. Enjoy!

A Monument To Mr. Burns

We saw this massive statue of two hands in the middle of a roundabout in Rota, Spain. I didn't go up to the plaque to see what it was, but to me, it looked an awful lot like Mr. Burns tapping his fingers together, saying, "Excellent."

Sagrado Corazon De Jesus

... and bird.

Coming back from Tangiers, we saw this statue, the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the harbor at Tarifa. It had an interesting addition. Enjoy.

Odds And Ends For Independence Day

As I understand it from the left, America was never that great. Our Founding Fathers were slave holders and racists. The Constitution exists to preserve the Patriarchy and blah blah blah.

If that's the case, then how do you know that we can be redeemed? Isn't it possible that we're so hopelessly bigoted and filled with hateful hate that there's no way to cleanse our soiled soil?

Further, if we stink, that implies others are better. Wouldn't it make more sense to go there and redeem those people? After all, you'd be starting closer to your utopian dream.

Well, that's about it for today. I'm off to check out an ancient village in Spain. Have a happy Fourth of July, you hopeless racists.

Supplemental Noodling: The Betsy Ross Flag offends Nike because of slavery and racism. Betsy was a Quaker. The Quakers were abolitionists, even back then. Therefore it's not Betsy, but the era that's offensive.

Slavery and racism get worse as you go back in time. Therefore, the Betsy Ross era represents a limit point before which everything is offensive.

Going forward, where can we find moral goodness in racial relations? We know that the 1970s are offensive from the Kamala smack down of Dopey Joe over busing. Therefore everything prior to that is offensive.

Colin Kaepernick, Nike's spirit animal, took a knee during football games, up until fairly recently, to point out how racist we are. Therefore, 2015, say, is a limiting point as well.

Trump makes everything worse.

Ergo, everything, everywhere, at all times is offensive.

You're welcome.

Moroccan Camels

We've moved on from Rota and are now in Torremolinos. The hotel here has WiFi! Hooray!

First up, the camels from Tangiers. They were docile, but we didn't push it and try to pet them. Their gait is incredibly slow and deep, so taking photos while riding would require a bit more experience. We just held on and tried not to fall off.

Even though it was corny, it was still a lot of fun. One of those things you'll tell people about and everyone will laugh.

Failure And Rage

Spain Update: We're at a laundromat in Rota where they have excellent WiFi. I only have my phone. I can't go get a better device because the car is far away. If you think Spanish WiFi is horrible, you should try parking here. Simply insane.

Post Content:

I saw this on Twitter: @Steve_Sailer: 

What accounts for "The Great Awokening" that began in roughly 2013? Why did vast numbers of white Democrats suddenly subscribe to theories that only Grievance Studies majors took seriously before then? https://www.takimag.com/article/the-great-awokening-conspiracy-theory

I think the reason for the wild increases in lefty rage is failure. It's becoming obvious that the blue enclaves like San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, Baltimore and Chicago, particularly the minority - majority sections, are disaster areas, despite having dominant lefty majorities for decades.

Confronted with this, you can either rethink your worldview or go with blame and rage. They've chosen blame and rage. With the rage comes incoherent thought. Hence, the attack on Andy Ngo this weekend by an ANTIFA mob in Portland, Oregon. If you can find a reason to consider a single, diminutive, gay, Asian dude a threat to the People of Color in deep, deep blue Portland, you must be some kind of genius.

And yet, the mob went wild with rage. What else could they do? The only other choice would be to renounce their faith and that's not in the cards.

Bonus depressing point: The local newspaper blamed Andy for provoking the rage. I have to admit that when I read that, for the first time ever, I became resigned to the strong possibility of secession. It became crystal clear in that moment that the left has gone completely mad.

Double Bonus Depressing Point: Cory "Spartacus" Booker has come out in favor of eliminating all legal ramifications for border crossing which would eliminate the border. The nation would collapse shortly thereafter, not for philosophical reasons, but because we wouldn't be able to cope with the millions upon millions of people rushing into the country. It's a practical issue, not a political one.

Notes On Tangiers

Since Spain is The Land That WiFi Forgot, I'm going to take notes on my phone's Blogger app as I go so I have something to post today. Here are my thoughts as they came to me.

Today, we're going to Morocco for a guided tour.

At the ferry terminal, there's a ton of Moroccans heading home. Every woman of child-bearing age has children. Every single one. Multiple children from the look of things. The Europeans are screwed.

The Moroccans on the boat are a cheerful bunch. I haven't tried to convert them to the One, True Church, so I can't tell you how open minded they are.

At our hotel, there are plenty of German lesbians. No children with them!

I can't imagine how dense you'd have to be to think that a culture full of tatted, pierced, smoking lesbians would appeal to one of traditional families. The thought that the Muslims would ditch their four, happy kids and veiled wives for nihilism is the height of stupidity.

The modern West has the worst intellectual and elite classes in the history of the world. They are going to lead the Secular Left to a resounding defeat.

Morocco Proper

The place is a mix of old and new. I mean really old and really new. We saw new, beachfront houses and then shopped in the bazaar which probably hasn't changed all that much in a hundred or more years. Imagine Aladdin where the shopkeepers have cell phones.

They like to haggle. We bought a very nice carpet, but it took about twenty minutes. The price ended up less than half of the starting price and the seller trotted out a half dozen typical salesman tricks. I'm good, but wife kitteh is way better, having grown up as a full on carny.

I had thought I'd like haggling, but I found that after 5 minutes, I'd had enough and the event became a chore. Wife kitteh was tenacious and finished the deal.

We haggled at two more shops and I just wanted to strangle everyone involved except wife kitteh. I cannot imagine doing that on a daily basis.

We rode camels at the beach. Yes, it's as corny as it sounds, but I figured it was like a ride at Disneyland. If you're going there, you might as well enjoy the standard amusements.

Riding a camel is uncomfortable. Their gait is exaggerated and slow. I eventually got the timing down, but it was still far less steady than a horse.

I'm going to stop here. This blog post is sounding way too negative. We had a great time and I would absolutely recommend a guided day in Tangiers. I have lots of photos, but no WiFi, so I'll post them another time.

I'm totally down with the Moroccan people. I thought they were way cool.

Notes On Spain

The WiFi at our hotel is excellent

Until people wake up. Then we're all sharing the same one and it's useless.

That typifies Spain. Lovely people, terrific food, superb wine, charming cities and then they completely fall apart on something relatively simple.

I'm blogging from my phone because Verizon, at least, can get the job done. Off to Morocco today to check out Tangiers.

Elizabeth Warren: Invade Honduras!

Well, maybe not Elizabeth Warren in particular, but any of the crazies in the Democratic primaries. Here is the way it works.

1. Diversity is our strength.
2. National boundaries are conceptual, at best. 
3. Diversity, therefore, is everyone's strength. 
4. In order to stem immigration, we must deal with the root causes. 
5. Honduras is not very diverse. There aren't many white or Asian people there. 
6. The root cause of poverty in Honduras must be their lack of diversity. 
7. To improve Honduras, we need to increase the number of whites and Asians in their population. 
8. If they won't take them voluntarily, we must put them there by force. 
9. Invade Honduras! 

It all makes sense when you think about it. 

Kamala Harris:Invade Mexico!

Well, it makes sense, once you think about it.

1. We want to provide health care for all illegal aliens.
2. We won't deport or prosecute anyone who crosses the border.
3. We must fight Global Warming Climate Change.
4. Mexicans come and go across our border at will.
5. All that traveling creates excess carbon dioxide.

Clearly, the only solution is to invade Mexico and bring the healthcare to them.

Gibraltar

... is a weird place. Not quite what I expected. I knew it was tiny, but I had no idea it was so crowded. Parking is a horror. Just driving around is enough to age you ten years. This photo of an apartment building against the backdrop of the Rock isn't the prettiest photo I took, but it's very emblematic of the place. Enjoy?

Southern Spain

... looks a lot like southern California

We're in Spain and Gibraltar for a wedding. The people are lovely and the food has been excellent so far. The countryside looks exactly like California east of Paso Robles.

Atheist Conservatives

... are interesting, but exhausting.

This is, unintentionally, a follow-on to yesterday's post about Jordan Peterson and Bishop Robert Barron. The idea for this one came from Andrew Klavan's excellent essay, Can We Believe? Here's a tidbit.

Why We Should Call Ourselves Christians, a 2008 book by Italian philosopher and politician Marcello Pera, is the clearest example of the phenomenon I’m describing. Written in response to 9/11, it depicts a Europe paralyzed by self-hating lassitude, willing to pay homage to any culture but its own. “The West today is undergoing a profound moral and spiritual crisis, due to a loss of faith in its own worth, exacerbated by the apostasy of Christianity now rife within Western culture,” Pera writes. He makes clear that by Christianity, he means the entire Judeo-Christian tradition, and he goes on to say, “Without faith in the equality, dignity, liberty, and responsibility of all men—that is to say, without a religion of man as the son and image of God—liberalism cannot defend the fundamental and universal rights of human beings or hope that human beings can coexist in a liberal society. Basic human rights must be seen as a gift of God . . . and hence pre-political and non-negotiable.”

This sounds like the cri de coeur of a passionate believer, the sort of thing we used to hear from Europhile Pope Benedict XVI, who wrote the essay’s introduction. But not so. The book’s title gives the game away. Pera could have called it Why We Should Be Christians. But he is an atheist. He accepts Immanuel Kant’s famous argument that God is necessary to the existence of morality. But from this, he reasons not that we must have faith but that “we must live . . . as if God existed.”

Almost as much as I believe in my faith, I believe that ideas have to work to be worthwhile. Socialism is a bad idea because it produces catastrophes when put into practice. It's stupid, not (just*) for logical reasons, but for practical ones. Don't waste my time with ideas that have been tried and failed over and over and over again.

That's why the agnostic / atheist conservatives like Jonah Goldberg annoy me. Christianity doesn't work because it's some kind of thought process, it works because it is something deeper.

A society is going to believe in something when the majority of average people do it. That means people with an IQ of 90 and a high school diploma. Jonah and his bros can prattle on all they want about efficiencies of the market and free trade and personal responsibility, but the Normals don't do something because Warren Harding's Secretary of the Treasury wrote a fantastically well-reasoned piece on the importance of libertarian principles. Normals do things because they believe in them.

Before you go on blathering about why we need to act as if we were Christians, you need to become one. You're not going to convince anyone with your erudite knowledge of Western civilization's great thinkers. If you don't convince people, ordinary people, the majority of ordinary people, you're just blowing gas and entertaining yourself.

Forget that.

This is what matters and what works, not your intellectualizing.

* - I hate parentheses, but I find myself tempted to use them more and more these days. Horrible.

Skeptical Intellectuals And Catholics

If you haven't heard the joint podcast with Bishop Robert Barron and Jordan Peterson yet, you should. It blew my mind in so many ways. I'm going to need to hear it at least one more time.

I'm a big Jordan Peterson fan. One of our sons and I went to see him give a 12 Rules For Life lecture and we both loved it. I've never heard his equal in terms of deep, deliberate and worldly intellectual thought. Until now.

Bishop Robert Barron, a guy I dismissed as a paint-by-numbers homilist, someone who produced mildly interesting and yet shallow videos, was more than Jordan's equal. I have been wrong all along about Bishop Barron and his Word on Fire efforts. I see that now.

Jordan Peterson has a very distinct, very measured style of speaking. It comes from him being deliberate in what he says. He's a brilliant man and thinks very rapidly, but even so, every word is considered. The fact that he has consumable conversations at all when interviewed is a testament to the quickness of his mind. For all that, Bishop Barron blew the doors off of him. Bishop Barron's speech was easy and casual and just as brilliant.

It was easy and casual because he's Catholic.

What dawned on me as I heard these two giants converse is that Jordan is having to derive a world view from first principles. Each sentence is considered as he speaks it because he is basing it only on Jordan Peterson and all of the sources he's trying to synthesize. Bishop Barron is relaxed because he's standing atop 2000 years of organized genius. They get to the same point, but by the time they're together at the apex, Jordan is out of breath and Bishop Barron is sitting in an easy chair, sipping a martini and smiling.

What a lot of work it is to be a skeptical intellectual! Too much for this cat. Give me a beer and the remote and an SEC game on the TV. We can discuss philosophy and religion and science and culture and modern life or whatever you want, but please, for the love of God, don't make me get there on my own.

Bishop Robert Barron, explaining things to you in a language a high schooler can understand. What is rarely on display is a mind that can keep up with the mighty C S Lewis and G K Chesterton. This man is a treasure for our times.

Purple And Fuzzy

Our Mexican Sage is quite happy this year. Plenty of rain, well, plenty for San Diego, and now some sunny weather.

I left the photo large, so I think it's worth a click. Enjoy!

Mein Coates

I finally had to put Mein Kampf down, permanently. I had planned to listen to the whole thing, but it's such an awful book in every respect that I couldn't get more than about two thirds of the way through it.

As I listened, I wondered how anyone took it seriously. It's a prolonged rant by a semi-literate loon. For example, he goes on for pages about how the Japanese culture is, in fact, Aryan, albeit with a facade of oriental decorations. There's no proof, just an assertion that Aryans make all things good from which he launches one fantasy after another.

Pondering a post on why the Secular Left loves race more than ideas, I think I hit upon it.

Mein Kampf claimed that Germany lost WW I because all those dead, German boys were betrayed by politicians and the Jews. Almost every family in Germany had one or more young men killed or wounded in the war. The slaughter was such that everyone was in a state of mourning shock. The pain must have been so thick in the air all across the country that it was practically visible, like a fog shroud of agony.

Into that culture came Adolf. Adolf told them that their dead and maimed boys were not only brave and valiant, but the most brave and valiant in the whole world. The war was not an insane gambit by heartless aristocrats seeking glory, but a noble crusade to save the world from a descent into barbarism. After all, according to Uncle Adolf, without the Aryan, civilization goes kaput. If you followed Hitler, you didn't have to come to grips with the fact that your husbands, sons and brothers died for arrogance and folly.

Mein Kampf was a massive, soothing lie that eliminated the need for painful introspection. Instead of asking, "How did we manage to go along with a stupid idea that murdered our boys?," the populace could cling to the notion that it was all betrayal by them. In this case, they were Jews and politicians.

Fast forward to today and the cult of whiteness where academics, cultural and political leaders and celebrities blame whites and white culture for everything bad that happens to People of Color (PoC). The whole thing is idiotic and collapses into nonsense as soon as you think critically about it. How is it that crazed frauds like Ta-Nehisi Coates manage to garner such a massive following by blaming everything on racism and whiteness?

Coates and the others tell a massive, soothing lie that eliminates the need for painful introspection. Instead of asking, "How did we manage to destroy our neighborhoods by stupidly ditching the traditional, nuclear family and lay waste to multiple generations of PoC?," the populace can cling to the notion that it was all betrayal by them. In this case, they are whites and the culture brought from Europe.

The tactics of the brownshirts in the 1930s and ANTIFA, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter today are identical because the problem they're solving is identical: How to prevent questions from being asked. The censorship of the Secular Lefties running social media companies is designed to preserve the lie that soothes them and keeps them from looking at the consequences of their own moral choices.

Suggestion: Screaming back at the progressives isn't the answer. You've got to realize that their hysteria comes from a place of pain. I'm thinking that the best response is to agree that the pain is real, but inventing a scapegoat isn't the answer. The only way out is to embrace the moral choices that lead to success. Yes, it's hard, and yes, it's unpopular, but it's also the medicine we all need to take.

Eventually, that whole scapegoating thing comes back to bite you, hard.

Pink And White

These are geraniums from my mom's yard. The plant is simply enormous and is more than 30 years old. I left the photo large, so it might be worth a click. Enjoy!

More Drug Addicts

... lead to an epidemic of mentally ill homeless people in your cities.

I've had a few up-close and personal interactions with drug addicts in my life. Because of that, I've always been strongly in favor of as much of a War on Drugs as we can manage. You'll never win it, but you have to fight it as best you can because drug addiction is a one-way street to a living death. It never occurred to me what would happen if a city became infested with living dead druggies.

Here in San Diego, we have regions of the city that are festooned with tents on the sidewalk, homeless sleeping in doorways, beggars at almost all major intersections and worse. The problem has grown over the last decade. San Francisco is a horror and Los Angeles, my old home town, is unspeakably filthy and wretched. Almost all of these poor souls are addicts. Some are alcoholic, which we've always had, but I would bet that most of the increase has come from drug use.

If you've known an addict and you thought you knew the price of drugs on civilization, imagine what happens when you've got tens of thousands of them in your community. Wait, you don't need to imagine. You can visit California and see it for yourself.

We didn't have anything like this 20 years ago.

We Care Deeply About Our Citizens

... but we're also terrified of them.

I don't know about you, but the HP Robocop being tried out in SoCal just screams out, "FEAR!" Or maybe it lets everyone know there aren't enough cops. Probably a combo of the two.

I wonder how many gunshots it can take before it goes down. Someone is going to find out. The thing looks like a target at a shooting gallery. Note that they didn't test it out on Skid Row or in Compton.

Have we gotten past the use of beat cops, ones who know the neighborhood? Are we on the way to simple surveillance robots? If that's the case, why not have a mother ship loaded with drones that fly off and scout the area, returning to refuel?

It's all pretty creepy.

Acceptable Behavior In Dogs

... is not acceptable behavior in humans. Well, some of it at least.

When our dogs bark at strangers outside our gate, we don't freak out. It's just the dogs being dogs. If a guest or one of our kids ran out and shouted at strangers outside our gate, we'd have a problem with them.

Recently, Kyle Kalashnikov, or whatever his name is, lost his acceptance to Harvard because he said some naughty words as a teen. Steven Crowder, a comedian, is regularly trashed by Right Thinking People for saying naughty words. I never see these Paragons Of All That Is Proper slagging rap artists for saying naughty words.

The only thing I can think of is that our noble and aristocratic Elites see Steven Crowder as a person, but feel that the rap artists are lower-order animals. After all, you can't expect much from dogs.

Meanwhile, dimwitted Catholic rednecks like myself see all those folks as the same and can't understand why you'd  treat them differently. Oh well. Maybe someday we'll ditch that whole everyone-is-made-in-the-image-of-God thing and I'll be enlightened.

Pepito Ramón doesn't bark a lot, but he moans a great deal. Our kids don't moan much at all.

Creepy Google

At the gym this morning, on one of the TVs, was the CEO of Google, old what's-his-name.

Aside: Why do gyms think you want to watch political shows while you work out? Why isn't it all travel, adventure and sports?

Anyway, some CNN airhead was interviewing him about hate speech and controlling the political discourse on YouTube and elsewhere. It gave me chills.

Here's the head of this ultra-massive multinational whose control over communications is utterly dominant and whose corporation is completely in bed with one particular political party, calmly talking about what opinions will be suppressed on the Internet.

I'm guessing that the racist ravings of Ta-Nehisi Coates won't be among the ones banned from YouTube.

In completely unrelated news, 24 power-mad maniacs who seek the job which will give regulatory control over Google are desperately looking for financial backing and internet traffic to their campaign sites.

Mein Kampf And The Democratic Primaries

Riding a hunch about similarities between certain worldviews, I dove back into Mein Kampf again.

God, what a horrible book. It's an extended rant by a guy who can't write, can't formulate a complex argument, had no idea what his opponents thought and was historically illiterate. He was also obsessed with race and wanted an all-powerful government.

In other words, Adolf Hitler belongs on the stage in the upcoming Democratic debates.

Differences arise when you get to the purpose of the whole thing. Uncle Adolf had grand visions and demanded sacrifices from the people to achieve them. It's all strength and army and battle and discipline all the time. The Democrats want to maximize the time you spend high on weed, downloading porn. Hitler demanded you join the army and die for the Fatherland. Kamala Harris demands someone else hand you goodies while you lay on the couch, wearing an rainbow flag shirt, watching Ellen DeGeneres. They both talk with their eyes bugged out and arms waving around, so there's that.

In the end, you wonder how anyone with sense ever believed a word of what they said.

And then you remember your Catholic Catechism and realize we are all imperfect, sinful people.

Is this deep blue Los Angeles, circa 2019 or deep Nazi Berlin, circa 1945?

I guess, when all's said and done, it hardly matters which path you take to get there.

Fundamentally remaking the country, change you can believe in and all that.

Where's Tippi Hedren When You Need Her?

We've got a couple of songbird nests around our house. Sometimes, one of the parents will accidentally fly into the garage and get trapped trying to escape through a skylight. To get them out, you need to remove a car and put up our Rickety Death Trap Ladder™ so you can climb into the skylight, remove the screen and then shoo the bird out.

Last week, one of the moms flew into our house and, thank God, flew upstairs into the master bedroom. Sometimes, they fly into the staircase skylight which also requires the use of the Rickety Death Trap Ladder™. Horrible.

Anyway, as I said, she flew upstairs. It was almost night, so there was very little light outside. I closed all the doors and opened the sliding glass door onto the balcony, hoping she'd just fly out. Nope. She couldn't see well enough to notice that it was an opening. It just looked like a black rectangle to her.

I chased her around the room a couple of times with a bug net, caught her twice, but was never able to keep her in the net. Finally, she perched on a picture frame and I turned out the lights.

Oddly enough, my night vision was better than hers. I guess I eat more carrots or something. In any case, she just crouched on the picture frame while I walked over and picked her up gently. I let her out onto the balcony and she flew off, much to everyone's relief.

Yay!

Tippi was not waiting downstairs with a triumphant martini. Instead, wife kitteh was there with a beer.
I'll take wife kitteh over Tippi any day of the week.

Demographics And Artificial Intelligence

A friend at work talked to me yesterday about an article in Signal magazine about how AI will change the culture.

The changes wrought by AI will extend throughout society in ways that exceed the effects of the computer revolution. Halal offers that, as routine knowledge jobs are eliminated, the workforce will move up to the next logical phase of development, which is “beyond knowledge.” This comprises consciousness, values, beliefs and other things that are far more important than knowledge, he says.

Humans always will have a superior method that will surpass whatever machines achieve: collective knowledge. “If we pool the knowledge of humans, then we will have something more powerful than the individual choices of the machines,” he declares. Achieving that collective strength will require pooling human judgment across the globe, which is different from the way machines will work.

This will work until demographic changes in Europe make Islam the dominant culture. At that point, AI can do what it likes because Sharia will be the law of the land.

Alternately, this will work until Europe and the US go bankrupt, after which AI can also do what it likes.

I love these articles written by pseudo-eggheads who have no comprehension of cultures outside of their cloistered universities, TV studios and movie lots. Castles are built in the clouds which are noble and beautiful and artistic. Then they come to nothing.

In the modern West, the battle is fought at the ballot box. You can't vote if you haven't been born. As the Secular Left hardens ethnic groups into adamantine blocks through their endless harping on interesectionality and social justice, it's the team what's having babies that wins. You can create all the AI algorithms you want and it won't make a bit of difference if you aren't making little versions of you at the same time.

Below is a video from a London mosque. You know, London, where the British are now a minority. Have fun with your AI computerings, but don't think you're going to budge these guys. They're serious players.

NOTE: If you are not a frequent reader of this blog, know that I am completely against identifying people by their groups. I believe in the individual, not the race, gender, class, sex, whatever. I have more in common and more brotherhood with an Ivorian immigrant friend of mine than I do with my neighbor two doors down. The Secular Left is dead wrong when it tries to jam group identity down our throats.

Having said that, you don't need to be a weatherman to see which way the wind is blowing. In the media and the academy, it's race, sex, gender all day and all night. That's idiocy, but it's the idiocy of the moment and I'm just thinking through the implications.

Whistling Through The Graveyard

... and I do mean graveyard. Dig this.

Japan’s birth rate has hit its lowest level since records began in 1899.

The number of births last year fell to a post-war low of 918,397 – a decline of 27,668 since the previous record low in 2017.

In the late 1940s, the number of births stood at about 2.7 million, according to The Asahi Shimbun newspaper.

The latest figures released by the Japanese government showed the country’s population decline - the number of deaths minus births - totalled 444,085, which was worse than the previous largest drop in 2017.

Now dig what they say the reason for the decline is.

A ministry official said: “Economic conditions and the difficulty of simultaneously managing both work and child-rearing are considered the major reasons behind the declining birth rates. We need to promote policies to set up an environment where people who want to have children can have children and raise them at ease.”

Below is a photo of postwar Japan, back when economic conditions were so good that women were eager to have children.

The problem isn't economics and the solution isn't policy. This year's 440K population drop will become next year's 490K population drop.

It's almost like there was a purpose to men identifying as men and playing the role of a man and women identifying as women and playing the role of women.

Nah. Equality now!

Why Do You Hate Apaches?

You're an Apache-hater! You're full of hate! You're a Nazi who wants to kill all Apaches and your speech is violence so I get to do what I want!

Pondering the video below, which I saw for some algorithmic reason known only to the dingledorks at YouTube while doing some brainless tedium at work, I had an epiphany.

And Lo! Out of stupidity and ignorance there came enlightenment!

The whole point of wokeness and the Secular Left is that they get to throw out logic and objective fact and simply sling accusations around like mad.

You're guilty of "childism" if you don't allow a 3-year-old to pick their sex gender whatever. That's it. There's no reference to development, education, comprehension or anything that might be a basis for respecting a decision, it's just a wild accusation based on emotions.

What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

This tranny activist hates Apaches. She's a hateful hater full of hate. She wants to kill them all and destroy the memory of their culture. She's practicing genocide. Culturally now, but in the end, it will be real. Speech is violence so she's effectively putting them in gas chambers.

No, I'm not any crazier than usual. Dig this.

BOYS INTO MANHOOD

The Apache people prepare boys for manhood from when they are very young. They also presented tests for them to complete. One of the customs to help boys become strong, young warriors comes when the boys become annoying to an elder. The elder will tell the boys to run to the top of the mountain and come back again, not stopping until they get to the top. As they get older, the distance and height grow along with their ability. Fathers have their sons hold water in their mouths so that they breathe through their nose. Breathing through the mouth in the desert causes a person to dehydrate, which is fatal.

Here it is in image form for easy deployment on Twitter. If you use it, I'd love to hear how it caused the woke to howl in rage.

The Apache didn't let their kids choose their sex gender whatever. The Apache didn't consider you a man until you passed certain tests. In that, they were pretty much in keeping with other cultures. Cultures like ours before the Secular Left drove us to madness.

If logic, reason and historical reality are discarded for one side, they're discarded for all sides. In the end, in a world run by the Secular Left, all you will have will be crazed, enraged accusations of bigotry and hate.

If we're going to go down that path and hopefully out the other side back into rational thought and the world of Athens and Jerusalem, let's get on with it.

Let Go And Let God - A Rant

"Let go and let God" is a saying that drives me bonkers. Another one is, "Preach the Gospel at all times. If necessary, use words."

Aaaaaaauuuuuggghhhhhhh! Stop it stop it stop it!

What is it with this lazy, passive trash, anyway? Can you imagine dying, going to the Pearly Gates and when asked why you didn't tell someone they were headed for disaster, saying to St. Peter, "Oh, no. I didn't use words. I just prayed and left it all up to you."

The dude's going to respond, "What, you think all we're here for is to do your work for you?"

God gave us a rational brain for a reason. He gave us the ability to research and learn for a reason. Salesmen like Zig Ziglar, motivational writers like Brian Tracy and a whole library of geniuses from the past are there to be used for good! Sitting around with your Rosary is fine when there is literally nothing else to do, but it can't be your default position.

There are people out there who can teach you how to approach a delicate situation. You don't have to whack people with a sledgehammer, but at the very least, you can educate yourself and give it a try.

End of rant.

I will admit that sometimes, words fail. For those occasions, more direct action may be required.

The Expected Value Of Extremism

In mathematics, the Expected Value of a variable is a the sum of all of its possible values times the probability of each value. For example, if you roll a 6-sided die, the expected value is 3.5.

If you take a look at "extremism" in the US, you would have to say the expected value of each extremist group would be the damage they can do if they got power times the probability that they would. Socialism destroys every country it touches as does Nazism. However, the probability that we will enact socialism is much greater than the chance we will be goose stepping around the living room any time soon.

I saw that YouTube took down lots of historical videos, many of them from the Nazi era. That's too bad and it seems to me like the avoidance of something that wasn't going to happen anyway. I liked to watch their propaganda films from a historical perspective. It's the only way you will ever see a Dornier Do-17 in flight as they were all destroyed.

One day, driven by curiosity, I watched bits and pieces of Leni Reifenstahl's documentary of the Nuremberg Nazi rallies, Triumph of the Will. It was fascinating. The whole thing shouted out, "You thought you beat us in WW I, but you didn't! We're coming back and we're going to make you all pay!" You can't watch it without thinking you could see what was coming. And yet, the British and French didn't see what was coming and kept giving in to Hitler. Madness!

Going back to YouTube, I'd be far more worried about pro-socialism videos than old time Nazi propaganda. Much of the socialism stuff is new and well done. The Nazi films are clumsy, dated and probably have little impact on modern audiences. As we know from Venezuela, socialism leads to barbecuing zoo animals over trash can fires followed by the water and electricity being turned off.

That doesn't sound like a lot of fun and it's a heck of lot more probable than Swastika flags being raised over Chicago.

You know, for people that live and die by the algorithm, it seems to me like the folks running YouTube forgot about the calculation of Expected Value.

Richard Dawkins, You Aren't Smart Enough

An IQ of 150 is huge. With a brain like that, things come easily to you that are difficult or impossible for others. It's still not big enough to mean you should tell others what to do. Dig this.

Under-age people can’t vote. Whatever our criterion for thinking them unqualified (eg insufficiently developed reasoning powers or knowledge) there must be some adults less qualified than some under-age people. Is age the only practical threshold or could others be devised?

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) June 8, 2019

Seriously? Let's see, we had the Soviet Vanguard of the Proletariat which led to 40 million dead and a ruined country. We had Mao's Cultural Revolutionaries which wiped out Chinese agriculture and killed something like 60 million. Now we've got the Ivy League / Berkeley geniuses who have bankrupted what seemed like an inexhaustibly wealthy nation with deficit spending and set us at each others' throats with their crazed, intersectionality trash.

Yeah, let's restrict power to the "smart" people.

The problem with being smart is that you are smart only to the upper limits of human ability. You aren't omniscient like God. Mark Steyn once said that the skill set required to manage a 4 trillion dollar organization does not exist. Our Elites prove that right every day.

Instead of making sure only the "smart" people get to vote, we ought to reduce the size and scope of government until the amount of damage the Elites can do to us is recoverable.

In Praise Of Recognizing Uncertainty

I came across this image today on Twitter.

It's very possible this is a Photoshop and not a real photo. Still, she gave the speech and it was warmly received, leading to many invitations to speak to other KKK groups. She must have said lots of things they liked.

In case the name is unfamiliar, Margaret Sanger was the founder of Planned Parenthood.

I did a little surfing around and came to the conclusion that Sanger was only implicitly racist. Her big thing was birth control and she was obsessed with it. She was deeply committed to bringing birth control to all women and Southern blacks were no exception. If she saw an opportunity to push it, she did. The KKK was just another avenue to make a sale.

There's no question that Sanger was a eugenicist. Her book, The Pivot of Civilization, is nothing but eugenics. For her, it was all about intelligence. At the time, the scientific consensus was that blacks were naturally less intelligent, so it's hard to believe that she didn't think pursuing what she called "the Negro Project" was an important part of her overall goal of preventing the spread of mental defectives. That would make her a racist, but only because the cultural default position was black inferiority.

Having said that, it doesn't appear that she was a racist per se. Therein lies the whole problem with finding narrow, modern bins into which a person from the past can be fit. Sanger held some wacky beliefs and I think her creation, Planned Parenthood, is a pack of greedy vultures preying upon babies and making mounds of cash off their deaths. Still, Sanger wasn't motivated by that and, like all historical figures, was complex.

Was she purely evil? It's hard to make that case given what she saw in her own life. She set evil in motion, but I think you need to have some, perhaps small, sympathy for her and what she was trying to do. It's also important to remember to interpret her through the lens of her time. Hopefully people will do that for us when we're dead and gone, too.

Hate the sin (abortion) not the sinner, no?

Have I got this all wrong?

Dude

Dig this.

A cherried-out International Harvester flatbed. Cool!

They dropped a Jag V-12 into the thing? Duuuude.

Racism: A Mountain Of Lies, A Mountain Of Bodies

I blogged a while back about the excellent HBO series, Chernobyl*.

Chernobyl is what happens when a society is built on a mountain of lies and those lies are more important than people. "Leadership knows what it's doing so you must obey their orders! Our power plants are safe and Soviet nuclear technology is world-class! Our workers, underpaid with nothing in the stores to buy, are dedicated, sober and competent!"

If you disagreed or pointed out contradictions, you were arrested and sent to the gulags or simply shot. The lies had to be preserved no matter the cost.

Now allow me to carry this to a current, American example.

Baltimore is what happens when a society is built on a mountain of lies and those lies are more important than people.

A Project Baltimore investigation has found five Baltimore City high schools and one middle school do not have a single student proficient in the state tested subjects of math and English.

If you don't want to click on the link, the data shows that the failing students are predominantly black, the schools are heavily funded and the families are mostly single-parent. Here, the lie the elites in power repeat endlessly is that racism is a major problem. The truth is that the culture, specifically the destruction of the traditional, nuclear family is the problem.

If you point out that there aren't a whole lot of white supremacists anywhere near the neighborhoods where these kids are failing, you become the subject of scorn and ridicule. You are accused of racism. Duh. When the only tool you have is social justice every problem looks like racism.

Meanwhile, if you truly loved the people of Baltimore, both the failing children and the undoubtedly agonizing moms, you'd tell the truth. Starting with the truth is the only way to solve problems. Since the media, academia, the entertainment industry and one of the two big political parties repeats the mantra of "Racism!" over and over again, the conclusion is that they don't love the people of Baltimore at all.

The lie is more important than the people.

There was a KKK rally in Dayton recently. I saw news reports about it all over the place, but it took a little digging to find out how many white supremacists showed up. 9. Nine. One less than ten.

Why was a rally of 9 people covered at all in the media? Heck, a girls' high school track meet will get a hundred times that many people and I don't see those people being discussed by panels of experts on cable news.

The Elites are addicted to the lie. They are in love with the lie. The lie is their religion. Facts that contradict the lie are suppressed and people pointing them out are cast out of polite society. Whether or not the bodies pile up in Chernobyl or the streets of Baltimore doesn't matter at all. All that matters is the lie.

The ruins of a school room in Baltimore or Chernobyl. It hardly matters which.

* - I haven't seen the last episode, so don't tell me how it ends. I'm hoping everything gets repaired and the Soviets can reopen the city and power plant with no fear of radioactive hazards.

Score One For Milo

I'm not a big fan of Milo Yiannopoulos. He's the gay, conservative commentator whose over-the-top style reminds me of Liberace. I find him occasionally funny, but intolerable in large doses. I never finished his most recent book.

I heard him interviewed by Jordan Peterson recently. It was an interesting hour, but at one point, Milo said that the Internet shunning that happened to him was coming for all conservatives. I thought this was just one more Milo Moment where his massive ego grabbed hold of his brain and made everything about him.

If you didn't know, Milo lost all of his gigs and position when he came out and talked about how he turned gay when a priest abused him while he was under age. He said he went along with the abuse and found that he liked it. He also said that many gay men get their start that way. True or not, it's something you are not allowed to say and he lost it all.

Anywho, I thought it was all Milo ego until right wing comedian Steven Crowder was demonetized by YouTube yesterday. I'm not a huge Crowder fan, but only because his comedy is too diluted. If he crafted a single 60-minute stand up act every year or so, I think he'd be hilarious. His regular YouTube show is too long for the material he has. In any case, he's objectionable on the order of George Carlin.

Maybe Milo was right. Maybe the progressives are just working their way down the list. Steven Crowder is no Milo and I never thought he'd be banned, but now he has been. Here's his take on the matter and it sounds just like Milo.

A message about YouTube and the #VoxAdpocalypse pic.twitter.com/B5RL5O1bvy

— Steven Crowder (@scrowder) June 5, 2019

And if you want to see Crowder at his best, dig this video. If you can watch it without laughing out loud multiple times, you're a better person than I am.

Old Age Can Slow You Down

... but it can't take the music from your heart. Or something like that.

I'm on travel and am totally exhausted tonight. I stopped by a pub for dinner and see those old dudes playing Dixieland. The average age looked to be about 85. They were a lot of fun. I think they've been doing this for a while.

Hitting The Lottery

... is what Pepito Ramón did when we adopted the old dude.

He's 18 years old. For his sized dog, that makes him about the same age as my mom, 89. Like her, he's spry and feisty, albeit with lots of naps and rest. He gets those as the photo attests.

One week - owners abandon him and want to put him down. Next week - treated like the loved little guy that he is.

Goodbye, Tablet

I'm packing for travel to the east coast right now and I recently got a Microsoft Surface. As I've set it up, I've realized it's a supercharged tablet. My old Samsung tablet isn't making the trip and probably won't make any more, ever.

I got the tablet so I could work on and learn Creative Cloud apps while I fly. I usually get the middle seat and my laptop is a 17" monstrosity, so there's no way I can use it. Plus, its battery lasts about 80 minutes, assuming I'm not editing videos. The tablet will let me work and learn as I fly instead of playing idiotic brick breaker games on my phone for 5-6 hours.

I've installed Adobe Creative Cloud, Spotify with downloaded playlists, Audible with downloaded books to hear, Kindle with books to read. Once I pair it with my Sony headphones, I'm not sure what else I need. As long as the battery holds out, it should be able to do everything, just like the desktop machine where I'm typing right now.

I'll post a review once I see how it works.

Bringing Both Sides Together

... with hate.

This story is almost too surreal to be true. Well, at least until you recall who is involved and what they support.

The KKK held a rally in Dayton, Ohio. 9 people* showed up. Something like 600 people showed up to protest the KKK. That's not the good part. Here's the good part.

The anti-KKK side desecrated an Israeli flag.

Finally, something both sides could agree on - hatred of the Jews! Wowsers. Who knew that two sides so seemingly opposed could find such common ground!

* - 9 people? If that doesn't convince you the White Supremacy is on the march in the US, nothing will.