The world is going insane. James Tubbs is a sexual predator. He now claims to be Hannah Tubbs. Because of that ... well, you can read it here:
Prosecutors say Tubbs walked into the bathroom of a Denny’s in 2014 and grabbed the 10-year-old by the throat, locked her in a stall, and put her (sic) hand down the girl’s pants. Tubbs stopped when another person walked into the restroom, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Because Tubbs began identifying as female after she (sic) was taken into custody, and Gascon refused to try her as an adult, Tubbs was sentenced to two years in a juvenile facility. In L.A. County, juvenile facilities can house both females and males, but in separate areas. Tubbs will be housed with the females.
Emphasis mine.
This is what James, err, Hannah looks like these days.
It must have been a bad hair day. She's clearly not looking her best.
Meanwhile, the Catholic Church is living up to its reputation for being a trifle backwards by pretending it's still 1960. Pope Francis has organized a Synod on Synodality where, as I understand it, we're going to listen to people kvetch. Here in San Diego, we were told that special attention would be given to "marginalized" communities.
At the parish meeting where this was announced, I very nearly blurted out, "Will Catholics be allowed to speak?" simply out of reflex. Where I work, where our kids went to school and in the culture all around us, Catholics are the marginalized community. Our Diocese, no doubt planning a bus trip to Mississippi so our adherents of Modern Nazi Race Theory racial justice crew can fight to integrate the lunch counters there, has no idea what it's like to be a Catholic in the year 2022.
Just wait until they find out about that Uber for porn, OnlyFans and how our daughters are being told it's just fine to become online prostitutes.
Powerline had a post up yesterday discussing Harvard's latest attempts to justify their racist admission policies. If you haven't kept up, Harvard is alone among the elite universities in that they made the mistake of keeping their admissions records instead of incinerating them to keep others from finding out how they decided who gets into the school.
A group of Asian parents sued Harvard because they were certain their kids were being cheated and they were right. An Asian needs to score 350 points higher on their SATs than a black kid. In addition to using grades, extracurricular activities and test scores, Harvard employs a personality scoring system where they rate candidates for their leadership, courage and possibly hygienic qualities. According to these scores, Harvard thinks Asians are smelly, ambitionless cowards. Because of that, Asian overall scores are dragged down to where the 350-point advantage in the SATs is required to get in to the school.
The case is being heard by the Supreme Court. Depending on whether John Roberts' spine is functioning that day and Brett Kavanaugh's hangover has subsided, Harvard could be in deep kimchi. Worried, Harvard's president, Lawrence Bacow, had this to say after changing into some dry pants:
Harvard celebrates and nurtures individuality as intensely as this nation. Those who challenge our admissions policies would ask us to rely upon a process far more mechanistic, a process far more reliant on simple assessments of objective criteria. Each of us is, however, more than our numbers, more than our grades, more than our rankings or scores. Ask yourself, how much have you learned from other people at this University? How much have you grown from conversations across difference? Would these conversations have been as rich if you had shared the same interests, the same life experiences, and—yes—the same racial or ethnic background as your fellow community members? This is why applications of any kind routinely go beyond mere numbers to include interviews, samples of work product, recommendations, and references. Narrowly drawn measures of academic distinction are not the only indicators of individual promise.
Wow. So blacks are basically conversation pieces? Note that nothing in that paragraph discusses the primary reason admission criteria exist in the first place - to winnow out students who are doomed to failure before they get in and are crushed.
We know that kids who are admitted to elite schools with scores well below their peers typically flunk out or change their majors into easy, but useless ones, those blacks are being fed into an educational meat grinder just so the other students can talk to them from time to time.
It might be less expensive and less damaging to simply set up "talk to marginalized people" booths around the campus and hire properly diverse people to man, err, woman, err xer them. Then you could admit only qualified students, you wouldn't have to watch whole groups wash out, the unqualified wouldn't leave with massive student loan debts and the students would still get all of the benefits of diversity, such as they are.
It would look kind of like this.
Nah. What's the fun in that? Let's admit kids with mediocre test scores and have them compete with the ultra-smart set. What fun it will be for them to join study groups where everyone else understands the material quickly and easily while they struggle*!
#compassion
As a bonus, those blacks who aced the SATs will always have the stigma of their peers wondering if they were beneficiaries of Harvard's anti-Asian racism. Yay.
* - This was me in grad school. I was taking theoretical math classes. Real Analysis came pretty easily, but Abstract Algebra might as well have been taught in Russian. My classmates, much better than I was, understood the stuff. I hated studying with them because it kept reinforcing my inadequacies.
This article over at ZeroHedge was fascinating. It deals with the excess deaths we've seen among younger people that are not due to the Wuhan Flu. Drugs, alcohol and racial justice figure prominently.
The death rate is up by 40 percent from pre-pandemic levels according to Scott Davison, chief executive of OneAmerica, a major insurance company based in Indianapolis. During an online news conference on Dec. 30, 2021, Davison said the change was unprecedented.
“We are seeing, right now, the highest death rates we have seen in the history of this business,” he said.
OneAmerica sells life insurance to employers nationwide, and similar figures are found throughout the industry.
“The data is consistent across every player in that business,” Davison said. “And what we saw just in the third quarter—we’re seeing it continue into the fourth quarter—is that death rates are up 40 percent over what they were pre-pandemic. Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be a 10 percent increase over pre-pandemic. So 40 percent is just unheard of.”
This 40 percent figure doesn’t represent folks dying of old age, but is instead a reflection of deaths in working-age adults, aged 18 to 65. However, what’s responsible for the alarming spike in fatalities in this age group isn’t clear.
Just eyeballing the graphs, it looks like drugs killed an additional 25,000, booze took out 8,000 and racial justice whacked 5,000. That's ~40,000 stiffs that can be linked to the lockdowns.
Meanwhile, the WuFlu took out 100,000.
Since the WuFlu goes after people already weakened by age, obesity or other health problems and drug / alcohol abuse weakens you, how many WuFlu deaths happened only because the victim was using? Looking at the drug overdoses alone, it's a roughly 33% overdose increase during the lockdowns. A quick Google search suggests that 31,900,000 Americans use illegal drugs. If a third more users cranked up their use of crank to the point that they crankily croaked, what happened to the ones that cranked it up just a wee bit shy of croaking?
33% of 31,900,000 is around 10 million people. If that many jacked up their jacking-up, that would be 10 million people all primed and ready for the WuFlu morgue. 100,000 is only 1% of that total. It's not farfetched to believe that a good number of the WuFlu deaths were from addicts.
Could using methamphetamine, cocaine and other stimulants put people at risk for COVID-19?
Very likely yes. The use of stimulants such as methamphetamine, cocaine, and amphetamine constricts the blood vessels and may increase the risk for stroke, heart attacks, abnormal heart rhythm, seizures, and other conditions that may lead to more severe heart or lung damage in someone with COVID-19.
According to a September 2020 analysis of electronic medical records, hospital patients who had received a diagnosis of cocaine use disorder in the past year were 6.5 times more likely to have COVID-19 than those without. More research is needed to better understand the relationship between stimulant use and COVID-19.
I have to say, the last sentence made me laugh out loud.
"Hey, science person, is it a bad idea to shoot up during a pandemic?"
"Yes. Also, give me money to keep my lab going so we can give you more absolutely obvious answers to stupid questions."
The begging for money never stops with us science types.
The CDC, probably awash in cash right now, has this to say about toking with pneumonia.
The use of opioids can cause slow breathing, and can even result in ineffective breathing, which can lead to decreased oxygen in the blood, brain damage, or death.
The use of stimulants, such as cocaine, amphetamine, and methamphetamine, can cause acute health problems such as stroke, heart attacks, abnormal heart rhythm, and seizures, as well as more chronic conditions, such as heart or lung damage.
The use of drugs by smoking or vaping (for example, heroin, crack cocaine, marijuana) can make chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), asthma, and other lung conditions worse.
Thanks, Captain Obvious.
The head of the CDC. Please send him more money so they can keep researching whether or not it's a good idea to stuff live civet cats down your pants.
So, in retrospect, prior to the advent of the vaccines, we could have significantly improved our survival rates by telling people to get fit, lose weight and put down the needle. What did we do? We closed our parks and masked our children.
SciENcE!
In San Francisco, the progs are showing us how to follow the ScIEnCE! by handing out free needles to junkies and giving them "safe" spaces to inject.
You know, you ignorant, redneck bigots could learn a thing or two from them.
Man, am I struggling to write lately. As soon as I removed my self-imposed mandate to blog every day, my writing dried up and blew away. Argh.
On with the show.
At the gym, I've been listening to The Practice And Presence Of God, which is a collection of letters of Nicholas Hermann, a 17th Century Carmelite monk. A lot of it is good, particularly where it deals with his ennui about prayer. Some of it I completely oppose, particularly the parts about being unworthy.
If you're unworthy and you were created in the image of God, in a world created by God for the purpose of finally creating you, aren't you telling Him He screwed up? Do you think He wanted to create unworthy things? As I listened to one particular letter where Brother Hermann was writhing around in self-abasement, I couldn't help but think of this classic tagline from Laurel and Hardy.
All the while the dude is talking about how worthless he is in the eyes of God, he's actually absolving himself of any real responsibility. After all, how can a worthless, cringing worm be expected to do anything worthwhile? It's like, when he screws up, he's telling God, "Well, here's another nice mess You've gotten me in to!"
And what kind of evangelism does that create? "Hi, can I talk to you about Jesus? Ever since I turned my life over to Christ, I've felt like an unworthy, cringing worm. Join us and you can feel like an unworthy, cringing worm, too!"
Bah. The Big Dude created me for a purpose, to be a member of His team and do worthwhile things. He may be the Boss Man, but He doesn't see me as unworthy. Think about what it would be like to be a leader at work and have cringing worms working for you.
"Johnson, I need you to meet with the clients and let them know their muskrat steamer will be a week late due to parts shortages in Burkina Faso."
"Oh, sir, I am but an unworthy, cringing worm before you. Everything I do is worthless offal, steaming in the darkness of my unenlightened mind."
"Pull yourself together, man! Go meet with the clients and renegotiate the contract!"
It would be exhausting to have to do that all the time.
We're not unworthy, cringing worms. We're not the coach, but we're on the team, chosen for a reason.
Since I'm no longer contributing to my retirement fund, I can't wave it away and say, "Well, that just makes the stocks I'm buying cheaper!" I've been wondering whether or not I should park my money and wait for the rout to end.
Then again, is this just a temporary rout?
What happens when Omnicorn fades away in the US, just like it has in South Africa and now in the UK? The UK recently ditched all Wuhan Flu restrictions.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that England will scrap all restrictions, including mandatory isolation.
That will happen here, despite the best efforts of our bed-wetting Elites. My thinking is that when it does, it will have a significantly positive impact on the market and the economy. The empty shelves in the stores are at least partially due to workers out of action due to Omnicorn infections. Dittos for the supply chain crisis in general. Omnicorn is a very short, very sharp spike, so we will be past the problem in a couple of weeks.
Instead of joining the panic, I'm going to sit tight. There could be something else at work and I might be dead wrong, but that's my thinking right now.
Bonus Data
Check out all the sub-1.0 reproduction rates for the WuFlu. It's glorious. Note that Rt represents the number of new infections created by each infection. If Rt = 2, it means that you getting sick gets 2 more people sick. If Rt is less than 1, the green parts of the graphs, it means the infection is receding as each sick person gets less than 1 other person sick.
Check out this map. Dixie for the win! Darker gray means lower Rt, redder red means higher Rt.
... while demanding the rest of us compliment you on how far you've come.
The most recent Daily Wire Backstage podcast featured an interesting discussion of sexual roles and the gender / trans craze.
As a society, we've done our best to blur the lines between men and women to the point that it's gauche to suggest that there are performance or behavioral expectations on a person because of their sex.
We've also made it hip to identify as all kinds of genders - asexual, pansexual, bisexual, trans and so forth. Not only that, but your gender identity makes a claim on the rest of us. You may look like a lumberjack, but if you tell us you identify as a woman, we have to call you Sarah and use the pronouns she/her.
Current Jeopardy! champ, Tom Schneider, says he's a chick. He doesn't look or act like one, but we're all expected to play along. If we don't, we're bigots.
Think about what this means. If some woman says she identifies as a man, she won't be expected to do anything at all. She won't have to be brave, be stoic, have a career, support a family or have ambitions. There's no cost to her to run around telling us her name is Luke and she's a dude. The cost is all on us as we now have to call her by her new name and use her pronouns. She will also get plenty of praise and support. It's all upside.
Because there are no fixed sex roles any more, all of these new terms essentially mean nothing except that if you take one as your own, you're a big, fat hassle for the rest of us. You become a walking landmine of offense and triggering in exchange for ... nothing.
If there are no accepted gender roles, you haven't really gone anywhere in your quest to be your authentic self.
As a childhood connoisseur of hospitalization for respiratory and digestive tract issues, I've begun to wonder about the recent round of hospitalizations for the Wuhan Flu. Consider these:
The thing is a virus, so you don't treat it with massive doses of antibiotics.
The patients aren't struggling to keep things down, so they could force fluids orally, at home.
Being in a hospital bed sucks. It's not restful. You'd get better rest at home, in your own bed, watching Claude Rains movies or playing Bubble Blast 2.
So just what is the hospital providing? Why are they so impacted with patients for the Omnicorn round? It's an upper respiratory virus which means it's not life-threatening like pneumonia.
In the comments, Tim makes a typically cogent point. "The COVID makes them susceptible to pneumonia, and then the pneumonia is what finishes things. It looks like the dominant forms of pneumonia are the bacterial forms, which most certainly are treated with antibiotics." That would explain the hospitalizations, at least in some cases.
Here's my hypothesis. Thanks to media and government hysteria, many people, perhaps most, are in a state WuFlu paranoia*. That's produced a strong bias towards testing and going to the hospital. Once you arrive at the hospital, malpractice insurance gives them a strong bias towards admission. If they send you home and you croak, they could face lawsuits. Lather, rinse, repeat.
I'm coming at this from a layman's point of view, but I just can't see what good it does to go to the hospital with Omnicorn.
Bonus Thoughts Which Contradict My Original Thoughts**
So how about this: The massive, localized jumps in hospitalizations are due to a combination of Chinese math infection rates and lost staffing due to infections. Omnicorn's most endearing feature is its short, sharp infection spike. That is, it infects a ton of people all at once, but only for a short period of time. A very small percentage of a large number of people, i.e. a small subset requiring hospitalization of a huge number of infected, is enough to wipe out the safety margin of hospital beds.
Add to that a significant number of nurses and doctors out of action due to their own Omnicorn cases and you get a perfect, if very temporary storm.
I think my original analysis was wrong. It's not paranoia plus lawsuits, it's simply Omnicorn doing what it does best - infect everyone, all at once.
* - Yes, the thing can be very dangerous, but only to a very well-defined subset of the population.
** - Remember, this blog is here to work through ideas, not defend bad ones.
In August of last year, I blogged about being diagnosed with arthritis in my right knee. I was limping so badly that wife kitteh took to calling me Stumpy after Walter Brennan's character in Rio Bravo.
Figuring I had reached my last chance in life at weightlifting, I started to hit the gym in earnest. I'm at month five now, so I thought I'd share a summary of the results.
If you're on the fence about doing this sort of thing, I hope I can encourage you to give it a try.
Benefits: I've noticed some serious gains. Many shirts that used to be loose are now tight around my arms. Middle son kitteh, who used to row and lift weights, said he can really notice the definition in my muscles. Most importantly, wife kitteh likes the results.
The Knee: I no longer limp. I have no pain at all in the knee. I had not anticipated that. I began this workout regimen as a lost cause sort of thing, doing it just to defy aging. Instead, it's been total success, particularly knee-wise.
Schedule: Currently, I'm going to the gym 5-6 days a week. I lift for an hour a day and do about 20 minutes of cardio on the treadmill. I do abs every day, roughly 300 crunches. The end result is that my abs are constantly painful. Doing some research today, I discovered I'm totally overworking them and maybe the rest of my body as well.
Muscle Grouping: I'm using a 3-day cycle. I start every day with an ab workout of 3 exercises, 4 sets each, 20-40 reps, depending on the machine. That is complete overkill. I haven't been deliberately resting at all. Instead, it works out that there are usually 1-2 days per week that I can't make it to the gym.
Here's the day grouping. Working out 6 days a week would mean I hit each of these twice.
Back and biceps. 5 exercises, 4 sets, ~12 reps per set for the back. 4 exercises, same plan for the biceps.
Legs and shoulders. 4 exercises for the legs, 3 for the shoulders. I know the legs are hugely important, but as I have to use machines to provide my older body with stability, I run out of machines in the gym after 4 exercises. Shoulders are such a small muscle group that only doing 3 exercises doesn't bother me.
Chest and triceps. 5 exercises for the chest, 4 for the triceps.
Weight Loss: I wanted to lose 20#, dropping from 227 to 205. I'm around 216 now and pretty happy with the results. I've discovered that I've lost my taste for almost all sweets and fried food. For example, after about 6 French fries, I've had enough. Potato chips are out of the question. Thick coatings on fried chicken or fish are out of the question.
Supplements: I drink a whey protein shake, the one from Costco, every day. I also do a Danani yogurt each morning in addition to my normal meals. Those add about 30g of protein to my diet. It's not enough, from what I've read. I'm not very disciplined taking vitamins, but we eat a lot of fresh food, so that's probably not a big deal. I'm going to look into recovery supplements, but I'm skeptical of their utility.
6-Pack Abs: One of the sites I read today said that everyone has abs, it's just that almost all of us have a layer of fat hiding them. As far as the abs are concerned, weight loss will be more important going forward than an insane workout regimen for them.
Changes Coming: I've got to give the abs a rest. I'm going to skip the next three days and then only do the abs on leg day. The rest seem to be working out just fine. Yesterday was back and biceps and today my back is pretty sore. I know from experience that in two more days it will be fine and ready for another workout.
Success Metric: In a month, my goal is to be down around 212# and be working out 5-6 days a week without prolonged soreness like I've got right now. Looking at myself in the mirror, it's the weight loss, particularly around the abs, that will make the most difference.
Anywho, I didn't mean this post as a self-congratulatory piece, but more as encouragement for you. I was fat and flabby when I started and really disliked the way I looked. It's taken a bit of self-denial to do this, but it's all been worth it. There are still days when I really, really, really don't want to go to the gym, but when I get there, I enjoy it.
Keep hearing of train burglaries in LA on the scanner so went to #LincolnHeights to see it all. And… there’s looted packages as far as the eye can see. Amazon packages, @UPS boxes, unused Covid tests, fishing lures, epi pens. Cargo containers left busted open on trains. @CBSLApic.twitter.com/JvNF4UVy2K
More on the implications in a second, but first, here's the scoop on how easy it is to break into a shipping container on a railcar.
They don't lock them. They seal them with a cuttable bolt. You can't put a lock with a key on every container that crosses the country or sea. They have to be opened by the delivery location easily and without a key.
This is what a real insurrection looks like. You've lost control of important nodes in your shipping lines to the enemy. That recommendation, "They have to not stop or move faster" is the sort of thing you tell convoys driving through guerrilla-controlled territory.
To all the people who said that a civil war would be over quickly and the blue, Federal forces would use air strikes to crush the red rebels, take a good, long look at that video. That's reality. Just what will you strike with your F-15s? How will you target the enemy?
Too Many Places To Defend
When a modern army moves into enemy territory, one of the things they have to do is occupy a chain of hills in order to give them places to put their line-of-sight (LoS) communications nodes. LoS comms have the highest bandwidth. SATCOM is all well and good, but there are often too many users for too little aggregate bandwidth. Drones can be used as relays, but you need to have them in the sky 24/7.
The LoS comms nodes all must be defended and supplied. As you invade, you keep having to drop off units behind you to protect your communications and ever-lengthening convoy routes. Each unit left behind is a unit not available for fighting at the front.
Now instead of an invasion, solve those same problems in the US where some of your cities are effectively in revolt.
When that thought first popped into my head - some of our cities are in revolt - it felt like the ravings of a conspiracy nut. Then, after a little thought, I thought it apt. In SanFran, Portland, Los Angeles, Chicago, Baltimore and NYC, we have books and books and books of laws, but many of them are unenforced, thanks to progressive district attorneys. Shoplifting and carjackings are out of control. Chicago is solving about 1 in 6 of its murders. That means you can kill with near impunity. How about this gem from Philly?
Check out the places where the cops can't defend you: residential driveways, parking lots and garages and gas stations. If they can't protect you there, just how are they going to defend the railyards? In the bump and run scenario, the only safe place is a police station.
Fort Apache, the Bronx, indeed.
John Adams For The Win
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." - John Adams.
When we allowed the left to destroy the family, all of this was set in motion.
For the life of me, I can't figure out what it is that the folks in the CDC, just to use one example out of thousands, think they're preserving when they jammed absolute rubbish down our throats in the past and now backtrack and tell us what many of us knew at the time. Dig this.
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky acknowledged that over 75% of COVID deaths were people “who had at least four comorbidities” and were “unwell to begin with.”
Walensky made the remarks during an appearance on Good Morning America.
“The overwhelming number of deaths, over 75%, occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities,” said Walensky. “So really these are people who were unwell to begin with.”
Clay Travis at Outkick pins the tail on the donkey, but that still doesn't help me explain why.
The CDC director just said over 75% of “covid deaths” occurred in people with at least four comorbidities. Since Biden can’t shut down covid, suddenly all this data is getting shared publicly. pic.twitter.com/NKvproy3lx
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) January 10, 2022
Update: Some have claimed that her statements were taken out of context and only refer to vaccinated deaths, but the general data show almost the same thing - heaps of deaths with comorbidities. Panicking the general population was unwarranted.
The dementia patient we have as president is floundering and when the election heats up, the airwaves will be full of this supercut.
His promise was clearly stupid at the time, but the CDC and others rallying to his defense only deepens my confusion.
Just what is it that they're defending? Inflation? $30T of debt? Record-setting murder rates in 12 of our large cities? I could go on and on, but I think that's enough to make the point. I can understand the instinct to fight for your blue team, but when the blue world is crumbling all around you, why keep up the charade?
I've written before about our ultra-progressive, modern Nazi friends who have sworn off their Mecca, San Francisco, because it's such a disaster. Now they've decided to change their minds about the transgender mania because it's happening to some of their young relatives and they can see the damage. Reality is having its say and these proggiest of progs are recoiling at the results.
Fair enough. We're watching them get red pilled in real time. They're complete racial justice maniacs, so maybe the ultimate red pill will be to realize that they've supported the slaughter of half the black population through abortion all these years. After all, what difference does it make if half of all black babies are killed in the womb today or born and shoved into gas chambers when they're five? It's all the same. Dead is dead.
Going back to that interview with CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, she's clearly fighting a rear guard action, defending the regime. By regime, I mean the whole Gramscian-trampled progressive power structure including the government, the massive corporations, the media, the universities and the entertainment and education industries. But why? What is it that she's actually defending?
This is from Amsterdam, but it could be from anywhere. The people are asking to be allowed to go back to their normal lives of work, school and recreation. The police are beating and using attack dogs to suppress them. For what? Omnicorn blows right through masks and vaccines. What are the cops defending? What is the CDC defending? When they incite violence in protests with planted agents, what is the FBI defending? When it's all said and done, what will they have?
Bonus Bit
Here's Jake Tapper, who couldn't be more of a prostitute for the regime if he wore 3" heels, fishnet stockings and a vinyl miniskirt and stood on the street corner every night, telling us what we all knew all along. He's doing it because the narrative is crumbling. It's just one more rear guard action in defense of ... what?
CNN's Jake Tapper rips into "misleading" COVID hospitalization numbers. "We're 2 years into this ... if somebody's in the hospital with a broken leg and they also have asymptomatic COVID, that should not be counted as hospitalized with covid, clearly." pic.twitter.com/rZhcANyYaW
In a comment replying to Ohioan on yesterday's post, I left a link to this Matt Walsh video where he has fun with bisexual, pansexual, asexual and other fetish-themed TikTok videos.
The thing that always strikes me about these TikTok videos is the attitude of the subject. I can't put my finger on the right word for it. Is it giddy? Smug? Superior? All of the above? In any case, there's always always a weird smile and the face is close to the camera which comes across as a dominance behavior.
Today, I finally hit on what is bothering me. You'd never act this way if you were talking to someone about anything real. Imagine discussing the proper way to grill a steak with a friend and getting right up in their face with a smug, creepy smile and making your point that nothing beats a Weber charcoal grill.
Or maybe you'd half-close your eyes and gloat in a condescending, scornful manner about using a coffee rub instead of a simple salt, pepper and garlic powder one.
Nah.
My take: Charcoal is the best even though we don't own a Weber right now. Propane grills don't get hot enough and the fire in a pellet smoker is unevenly distributed.
I like coffee rubs and the salt-pepper-garlic one, too, but sometimes it's fun to play around sometimes and go with paprika, poultry seasoning, cayenne and more.
As far as I can tell, I've now go the Wuhan Flu. I check off a couple of the boxes for symptoms, but not all of them. My symptoms are:
Hair loss,
Frequent experimental cooking failures,
Inability to ferment tobacco and
Inclination to rant on topics I don't understand.
Wait, that's a different list. How about this one?
Tired,
Chills,
Sore throat and
Headache
It could also be a variant of the Short-Timer Disease or perhaps Monday Morning Flu since tomorrow is my last day at work for a while. It might also just be a cold. In any case, I'm hoping it's the WuFlu. It would be great to get the natural immunity thing going.
I'll have that going for me when I drop dead in a few days. Omnicorn is like that.
My best course of action would be to force fluids* and watch Charles Laughton movies. Sadly, that's not going to happen as I still have a few things to finish before I turn into a pumpkin on Friday afternoon. Oh well.
I have big plans for my time off. BIG plans**.
* - The science is settled - beer is a fluid.
** - Plans may be much, much smaller than they appear.
... but it looks like we might as well just ditch all of our precautions and go back to normal life.
As far as I can tell, the Omnicorn variant is unfazed by masks and is blowing right through any amount of vaccinations. It's crazy contagious and everyone looks to be getting the same severity of symptoms CORRECTION: They are not getting the same severity of symptoms. Dig this thread. Key tweet:
The normal X-rays and the near normal ones belong to younger patients and vaccinated patients of all ages. There are vanishingly few pediatric cases with pneumonias.
The horrible pneumonias are seen in the unvaccinated, the immunosuppressed, and some elderly patients.
That suggests the jig is up and it's time to get back to normal lives. Get the vaccine unless you've had the WuFlu already. Other than that, it's still time to get back to our normal lives.
On the plus side, Omnicorn also seems to give much stronger immunity than the vaccines. That's a good thing.
I don't know, maybe the folks who are seriously at risk with comorbidities ought to just hide under their beds for a few weeks while it all blows over. I'm not snarking there, it really looks like the best plan to me. The unvaccinated can cope.
Of course, we could always go the other way and use attack dogs and police batons on people who want to get back to their normal lives. That might work, too.
... and by that I mean, I'm fighting on the side of Omnicorn. After all, it's essentially using our bodies as weapons against its rivals, the Delta and Original Flavor variants.
Our main financial man, Scott Grannis, got Omnicorn over the holidays.
Recently we had 32 family members for our traditional Christmas Eve dinner. About two-thirds of us (my wife and I included) ended up testing positive for Covid, and I'm pretty sure we all got the Omicron variant.
Everyone thought they were healthy to begin with, and the index case was the only one of the group that was triple-vaxxed—surprises all around. Only 3 people were unvaxxed, and all 3 got it; 22 fully vaxxed individuals got Omicron, and virtually all of them had received two doses of the Moderna vaccine. Three people had had Covid previously, but none of them caught Omicron. No one has even considered going to the hospital...
My takeaway: the MRNA vaccines don't protect you at all against Omicron. Omicron is similar to a flu. Above all, it is extremely contagious, so I won't be surprised if nearly everyone ends up getting it. A few weeks ago, I remember telling people that I wouldn't mind catching Omicron, if only because that would solidify my immunity to this crazy virus (I was fully vaxxed last February). Now that it's happened, I have no regrets. Sayonara, Covid!
As Ohioan pointed out in a comment recently, once you recover from Omnicorn, your body is prepped to take on the other flavors. They aren't nearly as contagious and don't stand a chance against a body that's loaded for bear. Or loaded for the WuFlu, as it were. So, in essence, we are all helping Omnicorn take out it's competition.
I'm down with that. I'm on Team Omnicorn, for sure.
Be Not Afraid
South Africa is 4 weeks ahead of us and less than 30% vaccinated. The UK is about 2 weeks ahead of us. With their data, we can do a decent job predicting our future.
It's a short, sharp spike with no significant rise in deaths.
Go Omnicorn!
Since I'm going to the gym every day where everyone is close together and breathing heavily, I'm guaranteed to get it. I may have had it already. When that happens, wife kitteh will get it if she hasn't had it already.
Is the pandemic over? Maybe. Not to worry, though. We still have systemic racism and global warming climate change to fear. So long as we continue to fear, we will continue to turn to the government for protection and that's what counts.
Well, until the money runs out and then we'll have to count on ourselves.
I don't mean bias in a negative sense, by the way.
Among the parents at work, there's been a significant shift in attitudes towards taking sick kids to see the doctor since the Wuhan Flu escaped Wuhan. In the past, when kids got sick, the parents would grimace about the inconvenience and just keep them out of school until they got better. Unless the thing lasted a long time or was very acute, taking them to the doctor was avoided. After all, the hospital was a huge hassle and the kid was going to get better anyway, given rest and fluids. What was the doctor going to do for them other than recommend rest and fluids?
All that has changed. Parents are now rushing to get their kids tested for the WuFlu and visits to the hospital are the norm rather than the exception. The kids still get well - no one I know has had a fatal or even a serious case so far. None of them receive any extra care other than the normal rest and fluids, either.
To me, this indicates a new, strong bias towards hospital visits. You can't have hospitalizations without going to the hospital, so I'm inclined to believe that a non-trivial number of pediatric hospitalizations are precautionary, driven by the parents' newfound fears, driven by the prevalent publisher-peddled panic porn.
How's that for alliteration?
Anywho, my advice is Biblical. Be not afraid. If South Africa is any guide and they're about a month ahead of us in the Wuhan Sniffles outbreak, our current spike will be very steep, relatively short and fairly mild. The Danes think the Sniffles signal the end of the pandemic.
Tyra Grove Krause said on Danish TV 2 that a new study from Denmark’s State Serum Institute found that the risk of winding up in the hospital with Omicron is half that seen with the previous Delta variant. She also said that like the emergence of the variant in South Africa, cases will rise, then quickly fall.
“I think we will have that in the next two months, and then I hope the infection will start to subside and we get our normal lives back,” she said on Monday, according to the Daily Mail.
Sounds about right.
Who are we to argue with the Danes? After all, they gave us the Danish.
"At this stage of the pandemic" is doing a whole lot of work in that sentence. It's replacing the words, "We have been lying to you all along."
On Twitter, I posited that not only does the virus mutate, but it also becomes a better driver. "At this stage" refers to the fact, established by ScIenCE, that the virus can now steer its little virion vehicle around your mask and sneak in through the freaking massive gaps in it. Before, all it could do was go forward and backward and turn only a very little amount. At this stage in the pandemic, it's a regular Hollywood stunt driver.
Only a True Believer or a journalist desperately trying to prop up all of the corrupt and degenerate institutions who've been Gramscian trampled by the Left would fall for this.
PEDIATRIC WUHAN FLU ADMISSIONS HIT AN ALL-TIME RECORD!
Yes, they did. And that record was 344 in one day. Which works out to 7 per state. That's 14 per state if you kick out the smallest 25 states where no one but worthless, mouth-breathing deplorables live.
Just out of curiosity, I went hunting for the average number of daily pediatric admissions in the US. I didn't find it, but I found something that caused me to stop my search. It was this paper on hospital stays for children from 2012. I admit that it's filled with racism, but what isn't these days? You'll have to look past the systemic white supremacy when you read it. Here's a snippet in case you don't want to support hate.
In 2012 there were nearly 5.9 million hospital stays for children in the United States.
5.9 million divided by 365 works out to 16,164 pediatric admissions per day. Assuming that's representative for the current decade, we can say that on the day when 344 children were stricken with the Wuhan Sniffles, the admission count went from 16,164 to 16,508.
The headline in the AP news story linked above reads, "US children hospitalized with COVID in record numbers." The AP's job, apparently, is not to inform, but to frighten. Also, you should vote for Democrats. They will save you from the Scary Things.
The CDC is now saying that the test for the Wuhan Sniffles can show a positive result for up to 12 weeks. That means that a positive test might be saying you're sick or it might be saying you were sick 8 weeks ago. It's effectively worthless.
Deep blue cities in maximum lockdown are showing massive spikes in cases.
A CNN medical expert is now telling us that cloth masks don't work.
Bowl games are being canceled because of positive test results even though the players are under 25, in peak physical condition, fully vaccinated and the tests are unreliable. Dittos for EPL games.
All but the most blinkered partisans can see that the emperor is naked.
Meanwhile, the White House messaging team is sending the boss out, looking like a complete dork.
Fully vaccinated, all alone on the beach, wearing a mask that does nothing. Outstanding.
With all these new developments, the messaging team must have a continual deer-in-the-headlights look.
This Twitter thread, by a progressive in San Francisco, discussing her city's descent into degeneracy, is utterly fascinating. I had ThreadReader form it into a single page, which is there at that link. It's easy to consume and doesn't require a Twitter account. I highly recommend reading the whole thing.
Here are some snippets from it.
What do progressives stand for, exactly?
I thought it was about making things more fair.
About standing up for the little guy.
About human rights, equality (equity?), compassion.
San Francisco (to me) looks like the least compassionate city on the planet...
I grew up in a Progressive family and went to a Progressive school, and have mostly Progressive friends.
Yet what I see in SF - if this what Progressive stands for - I want the opposite.
The words used here: "harm reduction", "housing first", "criminal justice", "social justice", "equity" -- they don't align with what I'm seeing at all.
Our strategy might as well be called "harm increased", "housing last", "victim injustice", "social injustice", "unfairness"...
Progressives tend to blame Republicans for almost everything.
Yet here we are - not a Republican in sight - and I think we may be the most deranged city on the planet.
Nowhere is there such inequality. I have never seen destitution at this scale...
+ Why, after decades of Progressive rule in SF are 8,000 people in the streets?
+ Why do we have the highest overdose rate in the nation?
+ Why do we have the highest property crime rate?
+ Why do we have fewest children per capita?
Thought experiment -- what would San Francisco look like if Republicans were in charge?
She took a drive in the rain and photographed some of what she saw. Here was one homeless encampment.
My Take
She's seeing almost all of the dots, but she's drawing the wrong picture. If Republicans ran the place, it might look different or it might not. Your political bent is a symptom of your world view, not the central part of it.
What she's describing here is what Jordan Peterson and Bishop Robert Barron would call a crisis of meaning. She was told by the establishment that if she voted blue, she was voting for compassion and kindness. She dutifully voted blue and she got suffering and human degradation. Her thread is a cry of distress. "Why aren't things the way I was told they would be?"
She bought into the Marxist dynamic of oppressor groups and oppressed groups. She didn't buy into the people-as-individuals idea. That's one of the problems right there. The people in those tents could well be unsalvageable. Their brains might be permanently ruined by drugs. If that's the case, warehousing them is the only humanitarian option, something neither red nor blue discuss.
Put not your trust in princes and all that.
The bigger problem with her world view is that she, and by extension, her city, cannot derive a code of behavior from first principles. She turns to politics instead of faith or philosophy and so do the others. They voted blue and now they can go back to consume weed, porn, expensive wines and plan vacations. That doesn't work and it's that failure that distresses her so.
Her philosophy blew up first. Her politics failing were just a secondary explosion.
... is all about going tomorrow. Today's workout is great, but it's when you go tomorrow that you really see gains.
I'm 4 months into my new weightlifting regimen and most weeks I go 5-6 days a week. I'm lifting an hour a day and doing 20 minutes of cardio. That's the plan, at least. In reality, most days it's 50 minutes of lifting and 15 minutes of cardio. I always quit and go home when I feel something in my body start to complain. It's usually my lower back.
The whole point is to go to the gym tomorrow. If I skip 2 exercises today, but I don't hurt myself and have to lay off for a week, I'm only down 10 minutes instead of 330 minutes from 5.5 lost days.
It's paying off now, too. One of our sons came over last night for dinner. He was a rower in college and is still lifting from time to time. Along with another of our sons, we have a text group where we laughingly brag about working out as a way of encouraging each other. In any case, he said he noticed definition in my muscles. Wife kitteh agreed approvingly.
:-)
Speaking of dinner, I made a standing rib roast using Alton Brown's recipe shown in the video below. It was generally agreed that it was the best rib roast any of us had ever eaten. Simply spectacular.
The final product.
Happy Boxing Day, everyone. I hope your Christmas was excellent. Now I'm off to nosh on one of the ribs from last night.
It's been a great end to my year, particularly spiritually. I'll blog about that more in the future, but suffice it to say that I'm starting to have the personal relationship with Jesus that my Cursillo homies yap about all the time.
This is a free thought blogging session. I'm just going to type and post. We'll see what comes of it.
Christmas this year will have a different flavor for me than any in the past. It will be the celebration of a Friend's birthday. I blogged recently about finally using metrics to measure my progress towards my goals and because of this, I'm praying in front of my Blessed Mother candle every morning with my coffee.
This is a photo from yesterday morning. The lights are out, the room is dark, the coffee is Stocking Mill and the initial prayer is a decade of the Rosary. After that, it's time to chat with the Holy Crew. I love it.
I wrestle with sin all the time, but in the last couple of months, I've had Help. I feel different and I think I act differently, too. One of the things that I've always felt, but has really hit home recently is how Jesus' life, death and resurrection gives me a daily chance to start fresh and keep fighting. Without that, I could easily just quit and say that whatever evil I do is just who I am.
Born that way, as Lady Gaga would say. She's wrong.
Anywho, these conversations in the morning, the changes that have been wrought in my life and relationships are part of a change in my relationship with Christ. He's a friend now. That Friend that lets you sleep on the couch when you've had too much at His party. The One that takes you to the airport without hesitation. The One who helps you move and listens to you when you're hurting in a relationship. That One.
Today is His birthday and I'm happy in a way I haven't been happy before.
That's not entirely true. I'm happy the way I was when I was a little boy and I couldn't wait to see what Santa and later, mommy and daddy, had got me as presents.
Merry Christmas, friends. Love and prayers for all of you.
Some of the beads on that Rosary will be for you in the coming year.
Dig this excellent piece from Ayaan Hirsi Ali on the collapse of civilization in California. Here's a tidbit.
In my home state of California, smash-and-grab is fast becoming a way of life. Crime is a rampant, daily occurrence. Just this week, two of my close friends were robbed near San Francisco.
One owns a popular restaurant; the front door was destroyed, and the cash register robbed. The other was renting a car, the entire rear window of which was smashed to bits and the contents swiped. So common is this sort of looting and thievery that when he returned the rental car, he noticed that the car company’s lot was full of vehicles with broken windows.
We have friends who probably think Bernie Sanders is a moderate. They fully subscribe to Modern Nazi Race Theory and share books and links to discussions of Jewish White Supremacy, Jewishness Whiteness and Systemic Racism. They are as white as snow, too.
They recently visited SanFran and came back vowing never to return. When the proggiest of progs notices the decay in their Mecca, you know it's real.
I would posit that the blue cities are conducting a fascinating experiment.
Does a city need productive people?
Think about what's happening here. As the blue cities become more and more unlivable, productive people, the ones with the most to lose, are leaving. As time goes on, the remaining population will tilt more and more towards the drug addicts, criminals and granola crunchers. Once a person leaves SanFran and moves to Miami, they don't usually come back.
Just for the chemists in the group, I'm looking at you, Tim and Ohioan, the decision to move is analogous to a chemical reaction which requires an activation energy to start.
Peter Productive starts in SanFran. His car windows get smashed which provides him the activation energy to move to Jacksonville. Once there, Pete will require a new spike of activation energy to get him to move back to SanFran.
I can't see that happening with any kind of regularity. Once productive people leave, they will probably stay wherever they land.
So what? Does California really need productive people or can we replace them with printed money?
The experiment is already under way.
Update: The female cop who shot Daunte Wright by mistake was just convicted of manslaughter. Daunte was a violent criminal who resisted arrest and was driving away when he was shot. A violent criminal loose in the city in a 2-ton vehicle was worth more than a cop with a good record. It took place in Brooklyn Center, a burg just north of Minneapolis.
You would have to be insane to be a cop in a deep blue city.
We're having a houseful of guests tomorrow. Wife kitteh asked for a brisket and wanted me to smoke it today so we can spend tomorrow preparing for the mob. I used this recipe from Hey Grill, Hey. Susie's blog is my go-to for smoker stuff.
I also used this rub from Deep South Dish in a 50-50 mix with the one in the Hey Grill recipe. Mary's blog is my go-to for simply everything and I only go somewhere else if she doesn't have a recipe for it.
Finally, I'm also using an injection for the first time ever. I found one on the web and made some modifications to it. I sipped a bit and it was wonderful.
1 cup homemade beef stock
1 1/2 tbsp Worcestershire Sauce
1 tbsp soy sauce
1/2 tsp onion powder
1/2 tsp garlic powder
I used this injector from Amazon. It worked really well.
Anywho, here are the before and after photos. Wish you were here.
Who's running this show? There isn't a lick of sense in our reactions to Omnicorn*. It hit me this weekend when many English Premier League games were postponed and a bunch of NFL players were sidelined because they had tested positive for the Wuhan Flu. They are in a demographic - young, healthy men - that has practically zero risk of significant consequences no matter which variant it is and yet we behave as if it were Ebola.
This isn't science, it's voodoo. Is there anyone out there willing and able to speak up about this madness?
Paths of Glory is a 1957 movie about a French unit in World War I that attempts to capture an entrenched German position. Kirk Douglas is in command of the unit that General Mireau, the incompetent who orders the attack, and General Broulard, the cynic who doesn't care about anything but power struggles within French Army, insist take a heavily fortified position called The Anthill. The attack is a disastrous failure and repulsed with massive French losses.
The scene below takes place the morning after the attack. The generals eat croissants with jam and sip coffee from fine china inside a luxurious chateau, discussing the battle. The first half of the scene is relevant to this post for reasons to be explained shortly.
The more of this kind of thing I see, the more it looks like the combat scenes from Paths of Glory. In the movie, the French infantry do what their leaders tell them to do and the results are catastrophic for them, but cost their leaders nothing.
What did those 6 men pictured above do but follow the instructions given to them from our leaders? We endlessly preached race, race, race and they focused on race. We told them they were doomed to failure because of racism and they chose to take revenge on another race.
They will go to jail. Robin DiAngelo will continue to give racialist speeches for 5 figures a pop.
"Your men died very well."
Education leaders in Oregon and California have taken steps to remove performance requirements from their schools. New York and Baltimore regularly promote students who clearly aren't performing at grade level.
Kids end up graduating from high school as functional illiterates. With each sunset, the teachers and administrators are one day closer to excellent government pensions.
"Your men died very well."
Jacob Blake's girlfriend was, according to our cultural leaders, a strong, black woman. After all, Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion both promote whoring and we are told they are examples of success.
Jacob Blake's girlfriend was regularly brutalized by her baby daddy. Cardi B lives in a mansion.
"Your men died very well."
Throughout it all, the Elites sit in their faculty lounges or wear expensive suits in TV studios or write pieces for the Atlantic and New Yorker, eating croissants with jam and drinking coffee from fine china. They preach a world view that cannot result in anything but failure for the Normals, their infantry.
On the right, we love to focus on the law-and-order aspects of things. More cops! More arrests! More discipline in schools! That's like arranging for more ambulances to be at the battlefields. If our generals are ordering one doomed infantry assault after another, we might want to look into that instead.
As If On Cue
Taught racial hate, Terryous Baker went over the top, only to get tangled in the barbed wire before being shot down. He was able to injure one enemy soldier in the process.
A Christmas parade in Winter Garden, Fla. was forced to cancel after a car driven by Terryous Baker allegedly accelerated toward the crowd & eventually crashed into another occupied vehicle, injuring that driver. The suspect then tried to escape. https://t.co/MuecRuvN4Wpic.twitter.com/nktpivhj9L
Some of California’s largest school districts are trying an unconventional tactic to help students re-engage in school after distance learning and boost their chances of acceptance into the state’s public colleges: by dropping D and F grades.
Los Angeles Unified, Oakland Unified, Sacramento City Unified, San Diego Unified and other districts are phasing out grades below a C for high school students.
They are doing this to fight racism, of course.
Although education reform advocates have been pushing for this for years, the pandemic offered an opportunity for districts to put it into action. With so many students languishing academically after a year of distance learning, districts see dropping D’s and F’s as a way to help students who had been most impacted by the pandemic, especially Black, Latino and low-income students.
Not to worry, the students will still be assessed on their, err, "competence."
But the move is also, potentially, a step toward an entirely different learning system, in which students are assessed by what they’ve learned, not how well they perform on tests on a given day or whether they turn in their homework on time. Known as competency — or mastery-based learning — the style has been a staple of some private and charter schools for years, and a goal for education reformers trying to overhaul the traditional high school system.
No word on how those assessments will be made.
Who is being fooled by this trash? Tests exist to determine mastery and competence. It's what they do. There's no other way to do it because, in the end, every assessment is, by definition, a test. Any other way of describing it is deliberate gibberish. The education industry in California is lying right to our faces and they don't care. They are corrupt and degenerate.
The state of Oregon has decided to ditch its proficiency* exam requirements for high school graduation. They're doing it to fight racism, don't you know.
The Oregon Legislative Assembly passed SB 744 which directs the Oregon Department of Education to review state requirements for high school diploma options, as well as to review state requirements related to demonstrations of proficiency in Essential Skills. Allowing for this review, students will not be required to show proficiency in Essential Skills as a condition of receiving a high school diploma during the 2021-2022, 2022-2023, and 2023-2024 school years.
Both lawmakers and ODE say rethinking graduation and diploma requirements is a matter of equity, and part of a broader effort to better support students from Oregon’s communities of color.
“Leaders from those communities have advocated time and again for equitable graduation standards, along with expanded learning opportunities and supports,” wrote ODE officials in a message to OPB.
While lawmakers did not share Oregon-specific data or information to show that standardized testing is inequitable for students of color, national studies and research bear that out. Oregon test results — much like results in states across the country — show a persistent gap between the scores of white students on standardized tests, and scores of students who are Black or Latino.
Talk about throwing in the towel! This is total surrender.
The Republicans who blame the education system for poor performance are disingenuous at best. All they're doing is venting against the teachers' unions who hate them and donate like mad to the Democrats. It's not the evil educrats hurting the kids, it's the lack of traditional families. The vast majority of people involved in our school systems really love the kids and want them to succeed. They may be misguided blockheads and do evil out of ignorance, but they aren't trying to be bad.
To me, this looks like the teachers deciding they can't do anything with the raw material they're being given. If the kids aren't studying at home, if they aren't being taught discipline and self-control by their parents, there's not much the teachers can do to get them ready for those proficiency exams. Why hand your critics the stick to beat you with by making failure stats readily available? It's not like those kids are going anywhere anyway. They aren't going to become proficient no matter what you do, so why go down with them?
This is their raw material.
* - Note that the link leads you to an .aspx web page. I don't need to hear anything about proficiency from a pack of idiots who use Microsoft products to create their websites, thank you very much.
I was at Food 4 Less, our local, low-budget grocery store that caters to the Hispanic and Southern military community, buying collards and other odds and ends when a black man in line behind me, pointed at the bag of collards asked with a smile, "Now what do you know about those?"
I smiled back and gave him my plans for the greens. Instead of using ham hocks as the seasoning meat, this time I was going to use tasso, a kind of spiced ham. I told him there wouldn't be any turnips in the pot, but that was another standard ingredient for me. He grinned and that started a conversation.
I dropped into my fake Southern drawl and he asked me if I was from Dixie. Nah, just another Air Force brat having fun. It turned out he'd been an Air Force brat, too. We hadn't lived in the same places, but we had the bond that comes with kids from military families. I told him he needed to come over for dinner, but he said he was a vegetarian and couldn't eat the ham. I let him know that meat was just plants that had spent a little more time getting delicious. He laughed.
When we parted, I added my customary, "God bless you, sir." When he replied in kind, we exchanged knowing looks and saw that we had one more thing in common.
Ain't that America?
Bible Tie-In
1 Samuel 16:7 - But the Lord said to Samuel: Do not judge from his appearance or from his lofty stature, because I have rejected him. God does not see as a mortal, who sees the appearance. The Lord looks into the heart.
Many tried to inform Abby that Madonna was hot and stylish and cool and Nancy was ten kinds of evil, but it all sounded hollow. Here's why.
Obesity is up
Anxiety is up
Marriage is down
Childbirth is down
Sex is down
Madonna was one of the cultural leaders that drove us into that particular ditch. Abby was simply pointing to a better way and it is better. The scoreboard doesn't lie. The modern generation are the Detroit Lions of personal relationships.
It's one thing to be on a team that goes 1-14-1, it's quite another to brag about it. It's still another to think that the rest of us don't see it. The androgyne working the checkout counter at your local hipster restaurant is a member of a generation of fat, anxious, lonely losers. It's not a secret. Scoreboard.
Still, we have to listen to the "Ha ha ha, prudes!" Nancy was a stiff and Madonna, unable to properly move body parts due to the scars of plastic surgery and wearing a hideous, uncomfortable outfit made from a raincoat, writhing around on a bed in front of cameramen, lighting people, make up artists and who knows who else, is what we all want to be when we're 63. She's a winner.
Last night, I made my first batch of Louisiana Hot Sauce with my fermented cayenne peppers. I tasted it this morning and it was outstanding. There was a bit too much vinegar in the taste, so I've adjusted my recipe. The one I will be using for my gift bottles is shown below.
I simmered the ingredients for about 20 minutes and then put them, still hot, in the blender and spun them around until I couldn't see any solids remaining save the seeds. I tried some on a cracker this morning and whoa, baby, that was the real deal.
