Get A Lawyer

... is all you can do when you need something enforced in the law. And before you get a lawyer, set aside 5 figures of cash, or more, to feed said lawyer. In my neck of the woods, they run $400 an hour.

The lawsuit against my parents' estate has been settled and fully recorded in court, so I can now share some of the wisdom and some of the wounds. I learned quite a bit from this ghastly exercise, so I thought I might blog about it in the hopes that some of you can avoid what happened to us.

Short take: What I learned is that you probably can't, but let's share the story anyway.

The suit was brought by a drug-addict relative, we'll call him Fried, who thought he deserved a bigger piece of the pie. Having zero cash, he still found a lawyer, we'll call him Scum, who was willing to work for part of the take. 

Lesson 1: All the lawyers in your community know each other. They've worked together or faced off in court. Scum was universally regarded as a scumbag. He had accumulated a long list of disciplinary punishments from local judges. So what? He was still a lawyer and could file papers. That's all you need to attack someone.

My father had been severely burned as the executor of his mom's estate a few decades earlier. Determined to save me from this, he consulted the best trust attorneys he could find and together, they wrote what they thought was a tightly-locked document.

Lesson 2: There are no tightly-locked documents, only documents that are strong, but still subject to indirect artillery fire. Like the suit that Fried brought.

Scum did not attack the trust directly, he attacked wife kitteh and me. He claimed elder abuse and manipulation. That meant that, had this gone to court, we would have had to defend ourselves from our own money and couldn't use the trust's funds to pay our lawyers. He had no proof, he just made the accusation in a court filing.

And so it began.

Clever as foxes, my father and his trust attorney wrote the trust such that anyone contesting it in any way would be disinherited. They then left Fried enough money to make its loss painful, thinking it would deter him from attacking me. It didn't. Had the lawyers involved told us, none of us would ever have expected it to protect us.

Lesson 3: Words don't mean what they say. The trust said, in plain English, that if you contested it, you were automatically disinherited. Hahahaha! What a laugh. In order to make this stick, the executor of the trust would have to ... get a lawyer. That's right, the clear language of the trust was not going to be enforced by the court unless I counter-sued Fried. At $400 an hour. Not gonna happen.

Just like the Supreme Court cases on abortion and gay marriage, which took matters out of voters' hands, local judges are members of the Elite and they look down in scorn on the Normals. "You pathetic, little peasants, you think you know what you want, but we know better. We rule over you and will tell you how things will work regardless of your stated wishes." Over time, case law, built on precedents, accreted all manner of unspoken rules such that the words of a trust meant less than the whims of long-dead judges.

What this meant to us was that Fried's lawsuit was never going to go to trial unless we forced it by spending upwards of $100,000 and two years defending ourselves. Like the "justice" system cares. No, it's all designed to go to settlement. You'd be an idiot not to settle. Enforcing my parents' well-crafted wishes? Nope. Get bent, you little worms.

And so we settled. Fried got more coin than the trust had allotted him. What else could we do? The whole suit was idiocy from the start as Fried's share of the estate had increased over time at the expense of mine. That meant he had no standing to sue as there were no damages to him. That made no difference at all. If we wanted to make a case on that, we'd have to ... keep our lawyers at $400 an hour and stay in court.

So a lawsuit with no basis against a trust explicitly written to punish such attacks resulted in a payday for Scum and Fried, 5-figures of cost to us and 6 months of time lost, not to mention plenty of stress and unhappiness on our end.

Lesson 4: If it's written anywhere in the law or in an agreement, it only means as much as you're willing to defend after you ... get a lawyer.

I don't know why I was surprised. I've seen plenty of examples of law enforcement blowing off minor crimes because it's not worth going to court to apply the law. Dig this story from SF where reductions in shoplifting penalties are driving stores to close.

Odds And Ends

Gadgetry

I spent some time learning my new Arduino kit. It's pretty straightforward. If you've got a smattering of programming and circuit building experience, you can do it with ease. I didn't get to the programming part, but I connected it to my PC and downloaded the programming app. The Arduino board connected via USB, first try. If I put a little more effort into it, I might be ready to make my time-lapse camera, version 1, in a couple of weeks. I'm still working on my parents' estate, however, so no promises.

Politics Are Worse Than Before

Tim made a good point that we've had worse presidents in the past and worse election controversies, but I'd argue that we've given our leaders more power over our lives than ever. They're still the same C-student morons they've always been, but they can do so much more damage than in the past.

What I'm Hoping For In The Election

I truly want to see the legal fight over this election turn into a Cat 5 Disaster. It's the only thing that's going to put an end to this positively idiotic vote-by-mail insanity. They sent out ballots using a hopelessly out-of-date voter registration list and then accepted the ballots back with nothing more than a signature on the envelope, a signature they were never going to check. No one who committed vote fraud has much fear of being prosecuted, so there's practically no risk to doing it. 

It's not who wins or even if there was fraud, it's the fact that we can't trust the results. I will go to my grave convinced that no one has any idea who really won. Show up in person, show an ID and vote. It's not that complicated.

Me, I'm rooting for chaos.

The Moral Of The Story

Since you always end up having to take care of yourself, it's best to give the politicians as little power as possible. The more you keep for yourself, the more degrees of freedom you have to deal with the unexpected.

And tell me honestly, what new programs and benefits have shown up in, say, the last 10 years that you couldn't have obtained for yourself without getting our kindergartners to pay for them?

A Picture

Out for a stroll the other day, I ran into this walking zeppelin. It's one of the fattest chihuahuas I've ever seen. It's not one of ours. It was very friendly and appreciated pausing in it's laborious, trundling perambulations to stop and get some petting.

Trump, Biden And Arduino

Super short thought today.

Maybe the worst thing about politicizing everything in life is the way it diverts people's energy from improving their own lives to talking politics. That's also a feature of having a massive government and regulations that reach into almost every aspect of our lives. When you step back and think about what makes a difference to you and your family, it's what you and your family choose to do, not who wins an election. That's why all those ads saying that voting was the most important thing you could do drove me nuts.

The government is huge and politics is the dominant topic on the airwaves, but it's not where any of us should be trying to make the most difference in our lives. Crazy.

On the plus side, my Arduino learning kit showed up and I'm hoping to have some time to play with it this weekend. It was bought so I could create a time-lapse photography thingamabob and film my plants as they grow next year, but looking through the materials, I've already got some more ideas.

One idea would be to install photo sensors in my MGB so the headlights would turn on whenever it got dark. This is going to be fun.

In other news, I made Smoked Chicken with Alabama White Sauce again last night. I can't get enough of it. It's sublime.

The Gap Is Everywhere

My recent post describing how the website of the Diocese of San Diego was all over the social justice thing, but not all that interested in that Jesus fellow was more about the gap between the Normals and the Elites than anything else. In it, we found that the D of SD site mentions Jesus 97 times and justice 1,390 times. Our diocesan website has the following word counts as well.

• Racism / Race / Bigot / Hate: 56
• Freedom: 4
• Porn: 0
• Transgender: 0

Here among the deplorable, racist laity, our biggest daily issues deal with our children leaving the faith, our inability to express Catholic opinions at work and the scourge of porn. While the bishop is off fighting racist leprechauns with the Social Justice Squad, we're getting killed.

Our parish church is having Mass again. We have to wear masks and practice social distancing, but that's OK. There's only 50-60 of us there these days. It used to be 3-400. Are they coming back when it's all over? Not all of them, to be sure. Still, we need to be concerned about white supremacists more than anything else.

At work, I cannot say that men don't have babies. I will be punished and perhaps fired if I say that. Not to worry, the diocese is all over that. Or it will be, once we open the borders.

One of our sons has a circle of friends from his Catholic high school wherein none of them date. Not one. Any guess as to why? What would make it so that a young man in his 20s wouldn't feel the need to find a girlfriend? Hmm. That's a tough one.

If you guessed affordable housing for the homeless, our bishop will give you a gold star.

And so it goes. The Elites in the news media, the academy, entertainment, much of politics and now the church sit and talk with each other, agreeing that the real problems in life are racist leprechauns, homophobic gremlins, judgmental hobgoblins and high prices at Whole Foods. 

Where we hate-filled bigots live, in Ignorant Klansville, the problems are a little different.

With Any Luck The Idiots Will Soon Be In Charge Again

Over the last couple of days, I've seen various members of the Elite gloating about Biden's probable win. Neocon warmonger Bill Kristol tweeted that the "experts" would soon be in control of our foreign policy. Sorta-kinda-Republican presidential and Hewlett Packard flameout Carly Fiorina tweeted about competence taking the place of incompetence in the White House.

And on it goes, one loser after another crowing that our long, national nightmare will soon be over. Meanwhile, the press is positively giddy and I believe that the percentage of positive news stories has jumped considerably.

Taking away the ongoing Twitter catfights of the last four years where members of the Harvard, Yale and Berkeley glee clubs tried to scratch each others' eyes out in public, I didn't think things were all that bad. Up until the Wuhan Flu struck and we all lost our minds following SCIENCE!, my 401K had been doing great and my neighbors all had jobs. None of our sons were at risk of being drafted into a Krisotological war in the Middle East and, in fact, those money-grubbing Jews seemed to be getting along with the Koran-crazed Arabs better than ever.

So what was the big deal? As far as I can tell, what bugged Kristol and Fiorina and Kerry and NBC was the fact that not only were they not in the saddle, but they were being revealed as the complete failures they were.

As I've said before, I'm less interested in the outcome of the election than in the way the Kristol / Fiorina / Biden / Schumer morons have managed to obliterate trust in all of our institutions, now including our elections. Faith in nearly everything was sacrificed so they could gain power again.

Enjoy it while it lasts, guys. Things built on sand seldom last long.

Quick, take a picture while it's still up so we can remember this moment!

San Diego May Not Be Big On Jesus

 ... but, by Jove, we're all over Social Justice.

And by San Diego, I mean the Diocese of San Diego.

This morning, I wrote a PHP script to scrape diocesan websites from across the country and count the instances of the words Jesus, justice, racism, porn, freedom and transgender. It does a recursive search based on the URLs in a-href tags. I don't claim it's perfect, but it seemed to do a good job of crawling the sites.

From this scraper, I discovered that San Diego has the fewest mentions of Jesus, including the words Lord and Christ, per page, but has a positively staggering number of mentions of justice. Here are the relevant tables.

Jesus

	Jesus	Jesus / Page
San Diego	97	0.57
Boston	75	0.68
Biloxi	123	0.94
Chicago	165	0.95
Washington, DC	268	1.18
Cheyenne	119	1.25
Jackson, MS	240	1.42
Portland	333	1.52
Nashville	248	1.54
Mobile	336	1.62
Los Angeles	250	1.82
Baltimore	625	1.84
Bridgeport, CT	543	3.00
NYC	841	3.01
Oklahoma City	4096	4.79
Richmond	1077	10.07

Justice

	Justice	Justice / Page
San Diego	1,390	8.13
Bridgeport, CT	594	3.28
Richmond	303	2.83
Los Angeles	176	1.28
Chicago	91	0.53
Baltimore	146	0.43
Washington, DC	53	0.23
Boston	22	0.20
NYC	43	0.15
Jackson, MS	20	0.12
Cheyenne	9	0.09
Portland	14	0.06
Nashville	8	0.05
Oklahoma City	40	0.05
Mobile	8	0.04
Biloxi	2	0.02

I'm sorry, but 1,390 mentions of "justice" is simply insane for a diocesan website. I think the laity need to stage an intervention. 

"Really, Bishop, this is for your own good."

"I...I just can't accept this. Your intervention team isn't diverse enough!"

Trans Heroin

The video below is aimed at girls who want to pretend they're boys, but whose parents have strange notions about chromosomes and body parts. As you watch it, translate trans into drug use. Let's say heroin.

The message is to climb into a bubble of friends who support your heroin use. It's a real downer to have people who are, like, telling you stuff, like, "Heroin is bad," you know? So, like, you should surround yourself with people, who, like lift you up and support you as you do heroin.

The advice makes sense and jives with all of the addicts I've known.

At no point in the video does this chick suggest that you might be mistaken and you might not be a guy after all. It's simply assumed that teenage girls are right and the adults who oppose them are wrong and that's that.

Anywho, this stuff is all over the place. It took no time at all to find dozens of these along with plenty more that told you how to get testosterone. 

Parents of girls who want to transition are totally outgunned. By the time their daughter comes to them and tells them she thinks she's a guy, she's been equipped with all kinds of sophisticated arguments and support from the Female-To-Male (FTM) community. Their ambush has been well-planned by people who have coached it so many times that they can anticipate all possible reactions.

If you want to see what it's like, just search on FTM, either alone or with any question you might have.

Unreal.

How Much Is A Gram Of Sulfur?

These days, I've been riveted to Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters by Abigail Shrier*. I know one of these girls and what Abigail describes in her book fits the young woman I know to a T. I highly recommend the book. If you've kept up with the trans mania sweeping the country, you won't be surprised by a lot of it, but it's still an excellent read as the book gathers together a comprehensive description of what's going on in a well-organized and elegantly written way.

Still, there's the sense that something is missing from the whole debate. I've thought a lot about this and I think the reason it feels so insane is that in the 73-step process of arguing that we need to accept, affirm and support transgendered people, step 2 was skipped entirely.

What if you didn't know what a gram was? That unit of measurement has an objective definition. 

A gram is a unit of mass in the metric system defined as one thousandth (1 x 10-3) of a kilogram. Originally, the gram was defined as a unit equal to the mass of one cubic centimeter of pure water at 4°C (the temperature at which water has maximum density).

Our collective agreement to this definition of a gram is what allows us to conduct scientific experimentation and come to conclusions that others can believe. If I add 7 grams of sulfur to a solution and heat it to 212 degrees Centigrade, everyone knows exactly what I mean. If I only felt like I added 7 grams and only felt like I had heated it to 212, no one would have any idea what I meant. Me screaming at people who wanted proof and crazed progressives protesting until the objectors had lost their jobs wouldn't change anything.

For this reason, the whole transgender craze falls apart almost immediately in the argument chain.

Rachel: I feel like a boy. My new name is Ricky. Call me that. And use the pronouns he and him.

Me: How do you know you feel like a boy? 

Rachel: I just do.

Me: Actually, you have no idea how boys feel. You have no frame of reference for it. You lack their body chemistry, their brain structure and their body parts. For all you know, you feel like an otter or an end table or a flatworm.

Rachel: You are denying my reality!

Me: There's no reality to deny. You lack an objective measure to guide your decision making. It's not possible for you to conclude you feel like a boy. I will not call you Ricky and I will not acknowledge you're a boy.

Rachel: I will contact HR.

(later)

HR: You're fired.

The whole thing seems like madness because very first response step in the logic chain has been omitted. "I feel like I added 7 grams of sulfur" is no way to start an experiment upon which major decisions will be made. All steps after that are irrelevant. The entire experiment has been ruined because you didn't adhere to objective definitions.

Well, I feel better now that I've had my say. If you'll excuse me, security is on the way. I need to collect my things and leave before they frog-march me out the door**.

We added precisely 7 grams of it, but to tell you the truth, the Sulfur was actually Boron that identified as Sulfur. If you claim that the substitution will invalidate the experiment, it's only because you're full of hate.

* - I discovered this book only after I saw on Twitter that Target had removed it from its stores because it was full of bigotry. Target later reversed that decision, but the damage is done as Target has shown that it's perfectly willing to join the mob. Thanks to millions of such actions, both large and small, people who believe in objective reality now live in fear.

** - This is not an exaggeration. I work for a very large science and engineering organization that is all in on the social justice craze. If I stood up and demanded we apply scientific principles to these assertions, I would face disciplinary actions at the very least and quite possibly end up fired. In any case, I would be silenced. That's what the part of SCIENCE! demands, you know.

Love Separated By An Ocean

I finally understand what my mom said to me over and over after my father died.

My mother died almost a year ago to this day. We're selling their house and these days, I'm going through their photos, letters and personal effects, digitizing some, saving some and discarding some. Yesterday, I came across a cache of letters she wrote to him while he was a B-26 pilot in Korea in 1951. Almost all of them were handwritten and age had made them difficult to read, but I found one she had typed. 

I got two paragraphs into it and broke down, sobbing. For the first time since either of them died, I truly cried. Here's a very short snippet.

Your letter written on our anniversary was lovely, but made me more blue than ever. It takes a great love to keep two people so mad about each other even though thousands of miles of ocean keep them apart. Ours is such a love, darling, we have always known it was great, but as you say we never knew how encircling it was...I never knew what loneliness could be until you left...Without my faith in God's goodness, this would be unbearable.

I'm crying now as I type that. It goes on with the heart-rending poetry that comes from a young wife writing to her husband who is distant and very much in harm's way. So beautiful and so true!

After he died, there were times when I would sit with my mom and hold her hand as she cried over him. She would tell me that before, when he was deployed in Korea or Vietnam, she knew he would eventually come back. Death was different. He was never coming back and that hurt much more cruelly than the pain I read in that letter.

After more than 60 years of marriage, she was still his young bride, so deeply in love with him, waiting for him to come home. Up to the day of his death, he was still her adoring husband, utterly devoted to her.

Taking care of them in their old age was a grind. I went out to their house whenever they called, dropping what I was doing to give them the love and support they needed. When they would speak of things like this, I was always at least partially preoccupied and while I did my best to console them, I couldn't truly understand because I was distracted by chores at home, deadlines at work and hobbies I'd had to forgo.

Now I understand.

How To Sharpen A Chef's Knife With A Whetstone

I've been trying to learn how to sharpen my kitchen knives with a whetstone for some time now. This morning, while wife kitteh was still asleep, I decided to get this thing down pat once and for all. I watched several very helpful videos on the subject and then I went into the kitchen and gave my new techniques a try. Here's what worked for me. I think it might work for you, too.

1. Soak your coarse and fine whetstones in water for about ten minutes. You shouldn't see any more bubbles coming from the stone.
2. Take a piece of printer paper and fold it twice around one of the corners so that the angle of the corner goes from 90 degrees to 45 degrees to 22.5 degrees. This will provide you a decent guide for the angle of your knife as you sharpen it.
3. Holding the knife handle, thus, and with your fingers on the blade, thus, make sweeping movements across the coarse whetstone at the proper angle. Do this on both sides of the knife.
4. Turn the whetstone over and polish the edge in the same way with the fine side of the whetstone.
5. Take your knife and run your finger along the edge, very gently so you don't cut yourself. If you're like me, your sharpening efforts will have turned your knife's edge into something resembling the barrel of a baseball bat. 
6. Note that you couldn't cut yourself if you tried.
7. Get your car keys.
8. Drive to Walmart.
9. Spend $8.54 and buy an ultra-cheap knife sharpener like the one pictured below.
10. Bring the new tool home and run your knife through it ten times on each the coarse and fine sides.
11. Barely touch the edge of the knife. See how sharp it is? That's success.
12. Stop watching freaking YouTube videos like some kind of OCD maniac and move on with your life.

It's good enough. Good Lord, you're cutting up a whole chicken to dump in a deep fat fryer to eat while you watch SEC football, you're not serving the Duke of Wheedlesbury some elaborately staged French meal.

What A Time To Be Alive!

Not only do I have all the works of literature and science at my fingertips through various computronic devices, I also have access to the genius of lots and lots of people who have blogged, recorded and shared their knowledge.

For those of you only now beginning to discover the wisdom contained in this blog and who have missed the past 14 years of writing, this summer, I raised cotton from seeds. I have now harvested the bolls and pulled the plants, save for a single Mississippi Brown which is still out in the garden with a couple of bolls shut tight.

My Mississippi Brown is a classic, lazy Southerner, you see. For that reason alone, it was my favorite and always made me smile when I went out to visit my crop.

Anyway, when I started this adventure, I hadn't planned on making anything with the cotton. I just wanted to see the life cycle of the plant. Now that I've grown them, I want to at least make some yarn, using techniques you might have found in the Antebellum South. That's where gratitude comes into play. There are many YouTube videos explaining how to make drop spindles and spinning wheels and how to spin raw fiber into yarn. Some of the content is excellent, like the video below.

I think my favorite part is how to make a notched bobbin by cutting three wooden disks, two with a larger diameter than the third, which will be the inner notch.

Had I been a young apprentice in 1850 Alabama, this would have been the kind of thing I would have learned at the feet of an experienced carpenter. Today, I can learn it as an older man at the feet of a young prodigy. How wonderful!

Now that I see how it's done, I'll keep my eyes open for components. I have other things to do before I get to my spinning project, so there's time to forage for pieces. This young man also has a video on converting the base of an old, Singer, treadle sewing machine into a spinner. I'd love to try that, which means I now have a reason to visit antique shops.

What a time to be alive!

Bonus Summary: You Can't Be Happy Without Gratitude

I learned that from Dennis Prager.

An Oregon Secession Map

On Twitter, I saw an enraged lefty yell that Trump was trying to steal the election and it was time for the blue states to secede. I don't blame him at all. No matter how this ends, thanks to the breathtaking stupidity of mass, mail-in ballots, half the country will be perfectly right in concluding that the election was stolen.

We can go to Walmart, Target, Costco, the grocery store, BLM marches and four, huge funerals for George Floyd, but we can't go vote in person? And what is the issue with not having to show an ID at the polls? There's no excuse for any of this. The only reason you'd set it up this way was so you could cheat.

Anywho, I sympathize with the lefties. If Trump wins, it was stolen because it's impossible to prove otherwise. If Biden wins, it was stolen because it's impossible to prove otherwise. Way to go, idiots.

Getting back to secession, it's a mistake to think the split is going to happen at the state level. Once that genie is allowed to escape, you won't be able to contain individual counties who aren't in sync with the majority of citizens in any particular state. Red Alabama can say goodbye to Montgomery and Blue Oregon can say goodbye to ... well, pretty much the whole state outside of the cities. Dig this precinct-level map from the 2016 election.

What in the world would we do with that? It's in every state, too.

Yep, it's a good thing we didn't vote in person with IDs. That was great. Just great.

Power, Dignity, Sorrow And Beauty

Wife kitteh and I are pondering moving to a new house, once we find one, that is, so I'm starting the process of getting rid of things to lighten the moving load. With the death of my mother, I've increased our load by bringing home memories from the folks' house, so I've got extra work to do.

A lot of the material I need to cull is in the form of photos, which I am scanning and discarding. Yesterday, I came across a set that I thought I had lost. It's from Russia in January of 1998.

Way back when, I traveled alone to Russia to adopt a little girl. Plenty of stories are packed in that sentence, but I won't bore you with them here. Instead, I wanted to share a single photo with you and include two lead-up photos as a bonus.

My daughter came from Astrakhan, which is in southern Russia, y'all. 1998 was shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union and times were tight all across the nation, but most particularly any place more than five miles from the center of Moscow.

Moscow in January was and remains the most beautiful city I have ever seen. Well, at least the center of it. At the time, it was celebrating the 750th anniversary of it's founding. For 750 years, Moscow had been a parasite on the surrounding lands, sucking tax money into itself. The result was a gorgeous city center and a horrible country outside of it.

Anyway, on with the show.

This was Detsky Dom, the orphanage in Astrakhan that had cared for my little girl for the first fifteen months of her life.

I was there with a translator, a guide and another couple who were adopting a girl as well. We were shown into the orphanage and asked to sit in a waiting room while they brought out the children. We explored a bit and found this bathroom right off of the waiting room. It gives you a sense of the state of things.

This is the payoff picture. Our translator was Marina, a middle-aged Russian woman from Moscow. Here, she's holding my girl. Take a look at Marina's face. It's filled with power, dignity, sorrow and beauty.

The sequence of events was to meet your child in the orphanage and have a last opportunity to back out. If you still wanted her, you were taken to the local court where you adopted her according to Astrakhan law. While the judge had no problem with the couple adopting, he was dead set against me adopting without my wife (who was not wife kitteh of today, but that's another story).

The judge was going to deny me my child. It was beyond unusual for a man to come alone to adopt and it was totally unacceptable. Marina went into action. She was like a lioness taking down a zebra. The judge was a tough guy as well, so I watched them argue like beasts for what seemed like an hour, but was probably only five minutes. It was all in Russian, so I had no idea what was being said. I sat there in despair, thinking I was going to have to stay in utterly miserable Astrakhan for two weeks while my wife flew out. In the end, Marina won and the girl came with me.

Back to the photo.

I hadn't seen these pictures in nearly twenty years. After scanning them, I cropped them and looked more closely. Look at that face. What stories are written there! When she was a little girl, the KGB roamed the streets, arresting enemies of the State. You can be sure that relatives disappeared into the gulags. After that, what little there was of the economy failed and the country fell into turmoil. Through all manner of trials, Marina ended up helping Americans adopt Russian babies.

How bittersweet that must have been for her. On the one hand, she was saving Russian children from probable death in overworked orphanages*. On the other hand, it was helping Americans, victors over her nation in the Cold War, take them away to live in relative luxury.

What a face.

* - Don't get the wrong impression of the people running the orphanage. The women there were sweetness personified. Angels, every one of them.

And Now, A Word About The Election From Stephen Colbert

Wife kitteh, perusing Facebook on her phone yesterday morning, came across a video of Stephen Colbert calmly and rationally discussing the election results wherein it looks like Joe Biden's team proved their competence at the mimeograph machine and were able to manufacture the votes he needed to, err, "win."

Anyway, it went something like this.

That's not too much of an exaggeration, either. He trotted out the well-worn bromide that all evil needed to win was to have good people do nothing. He shouted, through foam-flecked lips, that Trump was a fascist and that there were most certainly not good people on both sides. He went on like this for a while.

In short, dear readers, most of you are, well, to put it mildly, Ungeziefer, nur geeignet, um unter dem Jackboot der Menschen zerquetscht zu werden, die von einem gerechten Zorn erfüllt sind!

I've been maintaining for a while now that the progressives are convinced they are fighting hate and bigotry and this justifies the use of any means possible to defeat us subhuman vermin. That's just one of the reasons I'm convinced that rampant, large-scale cheating occurred in the election. There are tons more, but for the purposes of this blog post, Herr Colbert certainly managed to provide some decent proof.

Jeezey Moe, what a mess.

Pellet Smokers For The Win!

... with special thanks to @psudrozz, who encouraged me to buy one. Mine is an Oklahoma Joe model, the Rider. It's one of the best purchases we've ever made.

This weekend, one of our sons came home from a long visit to Philly, so we decided to hold a feast in his honor. Ribs were prepared with a rub, thrown in the smoker for 3 1/2 hours and spritzed with a vinegar-apple cider-imitation butter mix while cooking. I painted some of them with Buzz and Ned's barbecue sauce near the end.

The result was deliciousness.

Before.

During.

After.

I can't recommend a pellet smoker highly enough.

Upcoming Project: Once again, I have regrets about my annual planting experiment and once again, it involves photography. I keep wishing I had time-lapse photos of growth. Usually it's of the plants. This year, I wish I had photos of the development of individual cotton bolls. Each Spring, I commit to being disciplined and taking the photos by hand, but it never works out that way. I need to make an Arduino-powered camera to take my pictures for me.

Election Ranting: I've gone off the political grid. I don't see that I have anything to add and the whole thing was driving me to distraction. I don't have a big following, so nothing I say will make a difference. That means ranting does nothing but cause me heartburn. 

Suffice it to say, I'm convinced there was massive voter fraud. My bet is that Trump won and the election was stolen. If that's the case and we keep this method of voting, then both sides will use it for mass fraud. At that point, arguing politics becomes a complete waste of time because outcomes will be determined by the best cheater. Your vote will mean nothing.

When The Math Doesn't Work

... things get stolen, things get smashed.

I'm convinced something was stolen. You can find out more about it here. I'm hoping Ohioan can add some commentary in the comments.

What gets smashed is trust in institutions. Unless you've got the East German Stasi on your side and an unarmed populace, you kind of need that trust if you're going to get anything done.

It's simply amazing to me how almost all of our institutions have managed to vaporize their good will with the public over the last, oh, I don't know, 15 years. Of course, the Catholic Church was at it a good deal earlier, but now it turns out that they were simply a template for everyone else.

I'm guessing that the police and the military have managed to hold on to a decent amount of trust and goodwill, but a whole bunch of other groups have incinerated their reputations.

Bonus Question: Just what was won on Tuesday?

Is This Belgium?

Is it an elegant garden from the Old World? Perhaps it's a field of flowers from another of the Low Countries. Or maybe it's from the Cotswolds in England, which are known for flowerbeds like this.

Nope. It's from the garden section at the local Home Depot. You gotta take your photos where you can get 'em.

Getting Old

... isn't for the weak, as my mother used to say.

Nor are long, intimate blog posts. I'm sorry for the length of this one. I hope it's worthwhile to you. I wrote it to describe failures in my personal thought processes. This is about love, it's not another Cassandrafest.

As I near full retirement, I keep wondering what I'm going to do with my life. I'll have time to delve into a new career. My father retired from the Air Force, built a house, most of it with his bare hands, and then became an artist. Our home is full of his paintings. When I retire, I'll be a bit older than he was, but I'll still have time to explore new things.

More important than a second vocation is my true vocation. What is it that God is calling me to do with my time? Up until recently, that's really troubled me. In my career, I've always tried to accomplish big things and sometimes I succeeded. Sometimes I got fired. Sometimes I succeeded and then I got fired. It was all good fun. 

I tried to fit serving God in my retirement into that model. I was going to something really big for Him. Writing, lecturing, pestering people on the street, I was going to change things. I kept using that as my template for my planned service and I kept coming up dry. Oh, I've got book and lecture ideas a-plenty and I could see myself weaseling my way into one of those Catholic evangelism companies, but it didn't feel right.

I was never a big one for miracles or angels or even the Holy Spirit. The whole mysticism part of the faith was difficult to the point of being balderdash for me. Then I experienced a miracle and it changed everything. Since then, I've experienced one more. I promise I will share them here some time soon.

What I discovered from those two miracles was that they made me feel a certain way. That's what was missing from my plans to be Mr. Super Important Catholic when I retired. My plans were logical, but they weren't True.

Driving through one of San Diego's druggy haunts last week, I saw a woman drawing something in the gutter with a stick. I was stopped at a light directly across from her, so I had a chance to watch her. She drew for a bit, then she groomed the stick, removing some peeling bark, then she talked to the stick or perhaps just into the air. She was clearly blasted out of her mind.

I've had family members blow their brains out with drugs. I've watched it up close. I have Catholic friends who serve the addict community and I wondered if that's what I should do, but it didn't feel right. I have other Catholic friends who visit people in prison. I've felt guilty that I wasn't doing it with them, but it didn't feel right, either.

The incident with the addicted woman made me realize what my calling was. I knew what did make me feel deep emotions. I want to spend time with lonely, old people. 

I devoted a large part of my life to making my parents feel loved. My siblings were 1960s radicals with all of the ignorant, hateful, judgmental selfishness that went along with that. I guess that's why I blog the way I do here. Anyway, I was the one who loved the folks. As they got older, their emotional needs became greater as their other faculties faded. They were a pain in the neck sometimes, but loving them was its own reward.

After my father died, my mother fell and broke her neck. She spent time in ICU and then time recovering in a nursing home. We visited every day. There were folks there who had no one to visit them at all. They moved my heart in a way that the addicts and the prisoners have not. That's what God is calling me to do.

Visiting the lonely elderly meets exactly zero criteria of my plans to be a bigshot, Catholic bloviator. It's all about giving love to single individuals, people who won't influence a thing. They'll have no followers on Twitter, no connections for speaking opportunities, no chances to parlay their relationships into future growth. Loving them will be as small an act as it is possible to imagine, but there you have it.

Just like I know I experienced miracles, I know this is what I am called to do in the future.

Hmm. I wonder if I can find a lonely, old literary agent and kill two birds with one ... NO! Stop it, you idiot! ;-)

Love you guys. Hope you have a great day.

Totally unrelated to the post, here's a big, fat, Nankeen boll. I love how they're so soft and fuzzy. They're like rabbit fur. This was the last of two bolls on my final Nankeen. I plucked it and then pulled the plant. I'm down to my last three cotton plants now, hoping the cayenne will take advantage of the lebensraum to produce more fruit.

On The Road To Roadlessness

In Milwaukee, several wards recorded more votes than registered voters. That it happened at all shows that the vote counting system lacks basic safeguards. It's inconceivable that someone designing a voting system wouldn't check voter registration vs. vote. 

Of course, that assumes that the people designing the system have an objective moral compass. Cheating is wrong. Lying is wrong. Stealing is wrong. That sort of thing.

This summer, we discovered that stealing isn't wrong, so long as it's done by the right people and the Elites can shape it into their religious narrative of racial social justice. Now we've seen that inventing votes out of thin air isn't wrong because Orange Man Bad. Earlier, Cardi B showed us that there's no difference between being a strong, black woman and behaving like a dog in heat.

I've got a friend who likes to complain about capitalism. They see greed everywhere and it bothers them deeply. They've worked a lot of business deals and claim that such deals are less honest than they used to be. Well, what of it? If it's OK to cheat in elections and it's OK to loot businesses, why isn't it OK to get more money for yourself by any means necessary?

Herein lies the problem with subjective morality. Once the lines aren't just blurred, but erased, there's nothing to slow down anyone's behavior. Cuties is child porn? What of it? Some people like doing it with kids and if the kids say it's OK, then it's no big deal. We're loading up our children with debt? What of it? We're just being compassionate. If it bothers you, you're the one with the problem, the problem of being judgmental.

If you throw out one dimension of objective morality for the sake of, say, racial social justice, who are you to say that someone else throwing out a different dimension so they can send their kids to an expensive, private college is behaving badly?

We all take moral shortcuts. However, in order to see them as shortcuts, we need to have a moral roadmap in the first place. Once the roadmap is erased, then they aren't shortcuts any more, but simple cost-benefit decisions where both the cost and the benefit are strictly personal. 

Stealing the election isn't an outlier, it's just another stop on the road to roadlessness.

Mogadishu is a warning, not a how-to guide.

What Happens When You Don't Know How Anything Works

Well, that was the worst possible outcome to the election. Trump won, but a couple of key states, where Trump was ahead substantially, stopped counting ballots in the middle of the night and then suddenly found lots more ballots. The details were reported by a news media that has proven itself totally untrustworthy.

In a deeply divided, heavily armed country, we used the least reliable method of voting and informed people of the results with a completely unreliable press. You'd have to be either a total genius or an Ivy League idiot to have come up with this.

It's nothing new, however. The Elites thought they could accuse cops in their cities of being racist thugs. When the cops walked off the job, the Elites thought that the black neighborhoods would behave like the characters in their favorite civil rights movies. "But Mr. Johnson, I just want to be the best badminton player I can be," says the young black man in a suit and tie, standing in front of the white, Southern, racist coach. When crime spiked, the Elites wondered where the cops went.

And the whole time, the news media told you it wasn't happening.

Then there was the way the tech giants and the news media hid the Hunter Biden influence-peddling scandal. It didn't happen and it wasn't a big deal anyway that it did. Also, shut up.

So here we are, with an election result that will most likely go to the courts and one side will never trust, all because the Elites, who barely know which end of the garden hose to screw on the spigot, thought they would fight white supremacist leprechauns and a virus with mail-in votes that are utterly untrustworthy.

My own mail-in ballot required only my signature on the back, a signature that no one will check. This is all trash. No one has any idea who really won.

Way to go, idiots. The only solution I can think of is separation. The sooner we split up into Eliteland and Normalland, the better. What we have right now is total madness.

It all worked so well in the faculty lounge.

Update: Dig the vote harvesting in Wisconsin. This is a total scam. Derek Duck on Twitter has a great thread on the topic. 

It doesn't matter any more what is true because no one can trust anything.

Worshipping Politics

Last night, we watched the New York Giants hand the Monday Night Football game to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers through lousy quarterback play. As a New Orleans Saints and Drew Brees fan, it was nauseating to see Tom Brady, whose deal with the devil apparently is still in effect, do well. Blargh.

During the game, there was at least one ad telling you to go vote. It was full of NFL players telling you how important it was. 

Earlier in the day, wife kitteh and I were stopped at a stoplight and saw a homeless woman on a bike fiddling around with a stick. She drew something in the gutter with it, she groomed it and she talked to it. She was clearly drugged out of her mind.

The "compassionate" crowd tells me that we need more money for affordable housing to take care of the homeless. My eyes tell me that the homeless are drug zombies. If housing was free, they might not be in it. Their eyes tell them that, too. "Compassion" is nothing more than a dishonest advertising campaign asking us to trade our freedom, in the form of money and power, for what they tell us will be care for the indigent. We might as well be trading it for a bag of colored, glass beads.

If we thought more and felt less, we'd realize that handing politicians money and power isn't going to do a thing for that zonked-out woman. Is voting the most important thing she can do?

We also saw an ad about consolidating student loan debt. Kids who owed six figures on degrees they may or may not have finished, fretted on camera about the financial millstones around their necks. Was voting the most important thing they could have done four years ago?

I could go on, but you get the picture. To me, the constant stress on the importance of voting suggests a submissive life. That one tick mark, made every other year, will be of huge consequence! After you do that, you can go back to your hovel and await the decisions of the Elites. They'll take care of you, just like they took care of rural Pennsylvania.

How Much Risk Is How Soon

Everyone else is losing their minds over the election, so I figured I'd deviate to something else entirely. I had a discussion with family members yesterday wherein, considering my long track record of detonating atomic bombs in my life, they figured my radioactivity-scarred body might hold some wisdom about money. Naturally, I spoke at great length and only stopped when I saw them making poorly-concealed throat-slitting gestures to each other.

The conversation branched all over the place, so I thought it worthwhile to encapsulate my thinking here.

Basic Philosophy

Money gives you freedom. It gives you freedom to make choices and freedom from anxiety. That's it. That's all it does. Pursuing it for its own sake is a path to madness. If you're doing that, stop it right now. Looking back on my life, I don't wish I had made or saved more money, I wish I had made or saved more relationships. Don't let it come between you and your loved ones. If they express financial anxiety to you about risks or getting a late start on investments, take them seriously. Believe me, those atomic bombs are e-x-p-e-n-s-i-v-e.

Why Dave Ramsey?

I like Dave Ramsey's baby steps. I don't think they're optimal, I think they're good enough and that's perfect for my philosophy. You can follow them, knowing they'll get the job done and not have to think about it after that. Here they are in detail, listed below in brief.

1. Save $1000
2. Pay off all debts, smallest to largest
3. Save 3-6 months living expenses
4. Put away 15% for retirement
5. Save money for your kids' college expenses
6. Pay off your home early
7. Party on, dude!

I've read a lot of criticisms about these steps and they all amount to finding ways to make your money numbers biggerer by some pointlessly incremental amount. I don't do that. All I want is a sensible plan that allows me to follow it and not think any more about it. My life isn't about money, my life is about raising cotton, photographing the stars, cooking fried foods and making my family wince.

Dave's plan is good enough.

Investments

How soon is how much risk. If you won't need the money for a decade or more, then you can cope with a lot of risk. If you might need the money next week, you don't want any risk. Risk means return.

Retirement

For retirement, I recommend SPX. The chart below tells you why.

You can see the Dot Com Bust, the Real Estate Bust and the Wuhan Flu Bust on this chart. All that matters is the start and the end. The busts can be safely ignored if your time horizon is 5-10 years.

Including the massive hit during the Great Depression in the 1930s, SPX has returned between 8% and 10% per year. Set it and forget it. Why are you thinking about money? Stop it. Go live your life.

Some people will recommend individual stocks. I'm not a fan of that because I'm too lazy to track them. My father was the greatest stock picker I have ever met, but he had an MBA from Harvard, back when they still taught things, and he spent the last 60 years of his life learning how to pick stocks. His returns regularly blew away the stock brokers who handled his investments.

If you want to spend time every day reading the WSJ after 5 years of getting an instinctive feel for financial statements, go for it. Me, I'm going to pretend I'm from Dixie in the kitchen and in the garden, y'all.

Emergency Savings

The cash you might need next week because boll weevils wiped out your crop or your neighbor had too much watermelon wine and plowed his F-150 into the side of your house ought to be in checking or savings. Forget the interest rates, just leave it liquid so you can pull it out. Emergency savings is there to sooth anxieties. Worrying about returns is more anxiety. Stop it. Admit that it will sit there and do nothing and go back to your life.

Bonus Suggestion: Take some time to write down your biggest fears. Is it fire, flooding, termites* or something else? Research what it will cost to cope with these so you can pick your savings level with confidence. Maybe beefing up your insurance policy makes more sense than stashing more cash in the bank. Insurance is there as a big-time backstop for your savings. In addition to being a grand national champion stock picker, my dad was a maniac for insurance for just that reason.

Saving For Big Purchases

This is a meh spot for me. I'm with Dave on this one. My intermediate investment was always to pay down my mortgage. I never tried out corporate or government bond funds as a 3-7 year investment because it was too much work. If I was saving for a $5,000-$30,000 purchase, I would simply put it in a savings account in the bank, separate from checking. I did that because, as Dave says, spending and savings are more emotional than logical. Money in savings, KT no touch! Money in checking, KT spend!

These days, neither checking nor savings earn a thing, so it's all a wash, but separating it provided the emotional discipline I needed. ... OK, I just checked Wells Fargo's rates for their Certificates of Deposit, wherein you stash your cash for a specified period of time and they are practically zero. CDs are a terrible investment.

I suppose that if you couldn't stand not earning a bit on your investment, you could put it in a bond fund. I never had the money available to do that, so it's not something I understand all that well. Shrug.

Summary

Pick a simple plan, like Dave's, and follow it. Then stop thinking about money and go live your life. Happiness is not correlated with money.

A 2010 study out of Princeton University found that there’s a correlation between happiness and wealth, to a point of about $75,000 per year. When people make more than $75,000 a year, their happiness doesn’t increase...

Lastly, people are more important than things, even green things made of paper with curvy, multi-digit numbers in the corners. Go live. 

* - Termites are no joke in SoCal. In the South, it's wood rot, near the wilderness in the Southwest, it's brush fires and up where the Yankees live, it's the double threat of bad food and sullen people. 

Covid Ain't What It Used To Be

Check out the shapes* of these two curves.

Daily new cases across the US.

Daily deaths across the US.

This tells me our relationship with the virus has changed significantly. Its lethality has declined over time. During the first spike in April, idiots like Governor Cuomo took the worst possible actions and stuffed sick people right into the middle of the most vulnerable populations - nursing homes. The result was a slaughter.

By the time of the George Floyd riot spike, in June and July, we had learned quite a bit and the death toll only rose slightly. Social distancing and the vulnerable taking steps to protect themselves probably saved many lives.

Now we're in the cold weather spike. In terms of viral exposure, the worst place to be is indoors with others. All the masks and social distancing in the world won't save you if you're in an enclosed area with an infected person for a long period of time. Viruses are highly-efficient spreading machines. Spreading is what they do.

Killing isn't what they do any more, at least not with the efficiency of the Cuomo-ignorance era. Again, it looks to me like the population has gotten wise to the virus' tricks and vulnerable people are taking steps. Our treatments have improved as well. We now give patients large doses of covfefe**, which is helping.

We might want to send the kids back to school and return to our normal lives, but that's not popular among the super-intelligent Elites, so I'm not holding my breath.

Anyway, that's what I get out of the graphs. Of course, as a Catholic conservative, I hate SCIENCE!, so take it with a grain of salt.

* - My first mentor taught me to look at the shapes of curves as well as the numbers. Sometimes their shapes tell you more than the individual data points.

** - I think it's covfefe. It might be something else.