Life Imitates Red Dawn

... specifically, the reeducation camp scene.

My favorite detail is that the camp is a converted drive-in theater where the indoctrination movie is running in the background.

Now dig this.

Male, pale and stale university professors are to be given “reverse mentors” to teach them about unconscious bias, under a new Government funded scheme.

Under the project, white men in senior academic posts will be assigned a junior female colleague from an ethnic minority as a mentor.

Prof John Rowe, who is overseeing the project at Birmingham University, said he hoped the scheme will allow eminent professors to confront their own biases and leave them “feeling quite uncomfortable”.

It's not enough, of course, to indoctrinate the professors, you have to get the family as well. Oh, that's right, the education system is taking care of that.

Enlightenment observation: If this postmodernist rubbish was working, wouldn't we see boys achieving as well as girls? We don't, do we? Hmm. Maybe it was never about achievement, only about power and destroying the enemies of the Movement. Remember, in the postmodernist world, logic is actually an impediment to progress.

Watching the clip above, I thought of something else. How would it feel to be one of the children of those professors, knowing some punk was hired to go into your father's office and humiliate him on a regular basis. If you'd done that to my father, you'd have some problems from both of us.

Avenge me indeed.

Postmodernism Spinning Out Of Control

My own crude, incomplete definition of Postmodernism is that it is the rejection of the reality of objective truth. When progressives talk about "your truth" and "my truth", it is a direct result of the Postmodern movement that has taken over our educational system.

I'd argue that each successive generation raised under postmodernism is more off the rails than the last. The first generation, say the one of the 1960s, was only sort of nutty. Their teachers, not all of whom had been indoctrinated, had been raised in an enlightenment (logic- and objective fact-based) world. They may have rejected that, but they were intellectually coasting along under its momentum.

The second generation, say that of the 1990s, was instructed by the people raised in the 1960s, who were still managed by folks from the earlier, enlightenment era. They were taught crazy things, but still not totally insane. The indoctrination in the academies was more complete, but still not universal.

Today's generation is almost completely under the tutelage of postmodern teachers who are under the control of postmodern managers. The result is bat guano-crazy things like the craze over 178+ genders, the anti-scientific support for transgender people, the on-its-face stupid concept of unconscious bias and a complete lack of gratitude for the preceding generations who gave them everything up to and including the smartphones on which they while away the tedious hours.

When we see the mob come after people because they refuse to support today what was yesterday considered wrong (see: Obama's change in support for gay marriage, the demand that we all call Bruce Jenner a woman instead of crazy), we're seeing what happens when the culture is thoroughly postmodern, from top to bottom.

Without even a shred of objective reality or logic, there is nothing to keep us from changing course capriciously, wildly, even violently. Postmodernism carries with it no momentum from accepted thought, only the childish emotions of the mob.

And so massive corporations rush to deplatform the nutbag Alex Jones without warning this week. It's a postmodernist act - there's no objective measure bring applied that will allow us to predict who's next or even what's next.

Biology, Morality And Religion

At some pundit's recommendation, I think it was Victor Davis Hanson, I recently listened to a good portion of The Satyricon by Gaius Petronius. Petronius was a member of Nero's inner circle, circa 60 AD. I finally had to stop because the thing is mostly porn and I just couldn't stomach it any more.

The Satyricon is brilliantly written. It is one of the most beautiful and compelling pieces of prose I have ever read. You can easily get lost in the writing and carried along the sewer stream of the story. It is also very instructive regarding the development of morality in the absence of Judeo-Christian religion.

I don't have time to go into the plot, which you can find summarized elsewhere. Instead, I'll just say that the characters go from orgy to feast to orgy to theft to orgy to feast and on and on. There is a ton of homosexual sex as well as a great deal of seducing of children. Only in that last one do the characters reveal a scintilla of reluctance, but even then, not enough to stop themselves. In fact, when I finally couldn't stomach it any more, one character was proudly recounting how he had seduced a young boy right under the noses of his parents.

It's all horrible, but is it wrong? That's the question I wrestled with as I listened. Putting myself in their shoes, where their gods and goddesses are nothing more than good luck charms and their morality is derived from satisfying biological urges, why is any of it wrong?

Therein lies the problem for those who claim that atheism can produce a moral code equal or superior to Christianity. You might be able to do it in the faculty lounge, which I doubt, but you certainly can't do it with the general public. You can't answer the simple question that all moral codes must address: Why shouldn't I satisfy my biological urges?

Judeo-Christian Version

1. We were made in the image of God
2. We are all equal
3. We are called to love others as ourselves
4. God gave us our bodies to serve each other, not ourselves
5. We should enjoy sensual pleasures within that context

Atheist Version

1. ...
2. ...
3. ...
4. ...
5. Um, there are efficiencies to society if you practice some nebulously-defined restraint, so you probably shouldn't do it, OK?

Modern, Secular Version

1. You're a bigot if you don't support all 781 genders getting it on any way they want
2. For those of you who haven't consulted the latest list and still think there are only 765 genders, you're bigots, too. ANTIFA will be at your door shortly to provide instruction.

In the end, no one is going to listen to intellectuals tell them to restrain their desires because there's some kind of evolutionary advantage to it. That's nonsense from beginning to end. The evolutionary advantage comes to those who slake their lusts and desires as much as they possibly can. Hey, the dominant lion isn't an ascetic, you know.

And neither are the characters in The Satyricon. Go figure. And while you do, feel free to Bang A Gong (Get It On).

Nissans And Unconscious Bias

Pondering unconscious bias a bit more after yesterday's post, I think I've hit on the fatal flaw in it. Let's call it UB for short. Like most social justice phrases, it's awful and deserves nothing more than an abbreviation.

First, you have to realize that UB isn't confined to races or even people. It's your hidden feelings about adjective noun. For example, real UB retraining might focus on your secret feelings about Eskimo lesbians, but the logic is just as applicable to walnut furniture, ground corn or cold days.

I've owned two Nissan (Datsuns at the time) pickups, a Nissan Maxima and a Nissan Altima. My son bought a Nissan Sentra. I recently rented a late-model Nissan Altima. According to UB, I have must have hidden feelings about Nissan vehicles.

How in the world can that even be detected? I don't have hidden feelings about Nissans, I have vocal, obvious, conscious, experience-based feelings about Nissans. The thought that there would be some ultra-secret storehouse of biases lurking in my subconscious affecting my opinion about Nissans is utterly insane.

My opinion of Nissans isn't based on UB at all. UB would be nothing more than noise about 60 dB below the level of my analysis of empirical data.

Further, my opinion of Nissans changes over time. I had thought I was a hopeless Nissan partisan, but I didn't really like that rented Altima I drove recently. It was a big meh. If I was going to buy a new car right now, I don't think I'd go back to Nissan. You could have sent me to a year's worth of UB reeducation camps and they wouldn't have done doodly-toot compared to my experience driving the Altima.

Unconscious bias is quackery.

It's not really quackery, though, is it? It's something much, much worse.

Unconscious Bias Is Anti-Science

I work for what is considered a science and engineering organization. You couldn't tell it by the fact that some of our groups are undergoing unconscious bias training. I haven't done the research myself, but from what Jordan Peterson asserts, and he is always careful about what he says, the science behind unconscious bias is shoddy to the point of worthlessness. See below.

Shoddy or not, the whole idea is ridiculous. First, if it's unconscious, I don't know I have it. In fact, you can't even prove that I have it. If you could, that would mean you know more about my internal thoughts than I do.

Second, even if it's true, it's so far down the list of decision aids that it's irrelevant if I have it or not.

In the last few years, I've had the, err, opportunity to drive through South Central Los Angeles. South Central is a horror.

This is a pretty common sight.

When you drive through South Central, you drive through it. You don't stop to shop, dine, visit or anything else unless you absolutely have to do it. All the unconscious bias in the world going one way or another isn't going to result in a different decision. You're acting on conscious bias, informed by real-world data.

Which brings me to the final point. If you observe data, develop hypotheses about it and test those against more observed data, what room does that leave for unconscious bias? Where would it arise independent of empirical facts?

Science. You're doing it wrong.

Jesus Is Indeed A Socialist

Steven Colbert was right, Jesus is a socialist. Here's how you can tell. Think of the group that best embodies Christian life. Aren't they run by tyrannical leaders and surrounded by the bodies of the dead, killed by the leader's closest allies? They are, aren't they?

Yep, Jesus is a socialist. Makes sense to me.

Who can forget that classic line from the Sermon on the Cambodian Mount? "Blessed are the peacemakers, particular when they drive people out of the cities to slaughter them in the countryside."

The Final Verdict On RV Vacations

No. Because no.

We had a good time, but we would never rent an RV again and buying one is out of the question. The worst part was realizing you probably couldn't park the thing where you wanted to go, like downtown Asheville, North Carolina in the arts district. We ended up renting a car and driving that around and left the RV at the campground.

When you added up all of the costs - the rental, the rental car, the campground fees, the huge fuel bill, the camping gear we needed to bring - it turned out that the per-day expense of the RV was higher than the highest we've ever paid for a VRBO house rental and we've stayed in some pretty nice places.

In the end, you're still camping, it's just that you have four walls, a roof and some amount of mobility. Wife kitteh likes camping, but I'm not much of a fan even under the best of circumstances.

Meh.

Meanwhile, for your viewing pleasure, here's eastern Tennessee at 200 MPH. Enjoy.

Sarah Jeong Is An Inflection Point For America

I'm still processing the fact that the New York Times, the freaking New York Times, hired a crazed racist, not as an occasionally-published pundit, but as a member of their editorial board.

There's no going back from this one. The NYT has now normalized racism for its readers. Not that it wasn't bubbling up already, given the lunacy from our academies with their whiteness studies and toxic masculinity courses. Following along with the NYT, the WaPo published this her-racism-wasn't-so-bad-after-all piece. Here's a snippet.

Without evidence that they had any bearing on Jeong’s extensive body of work, which includes a book she wrote about online harassment, these statements could have perhaps been unceremoniously dismissed as insignificant.

Well, I guess it wasn't racism-racism. Of course, that logic only works if you accept the left's definition of racism that it can only come from whites. But fie upon logic! This isn't about logic and it never was. This is about the overuse of their favorite tool to gain power - the charge of racism. Sarah isn't an outlier to them, she's actually pretty typical, if you look at what's going on at our colleges.

And therein lies my only ray of hope from this horrific incident. My bet is that the NYT, the WaPo and most of the Democrats' base are living so deeply inside of a bubble that they don't really understand America at all. This is the real America:

We saw this at a blue-collar diner in the South this week. A white girl cheerfully waiting on two black gentlemen. It happens in every combination, every day, all over the place. This is the America we know from reality, not the race-obsessed madness of the left.

I'm hoping that normal Americans of all stripes will be repulsed by Sarah and the NYT. Maybe it will rip the veil off the Nazism of the American progressives, revealing their sickness to all.

You can be in favor of Medicare for all and a higher minimum wage without being a racist, you know.

This Has Got To Stop

... or it may already be too late and the NYT may have crossed the Rubicon in force by hiring a crazed racist to their editorial board.

Meet the newest member of the New York Times editorial board.

I'd say that these tweets were part of her resumè when she applied for the job. pic.twitter.com/CLgFvPeAgM

— Garbage Human 🗑 (@GarbageHuman_) August 2, 2018

UPDATE: Apparently it isn't her fault that she's racist so it's all good. pic.twitter.com/NZsGe3yAdT

— Garbage Human 🗑 (@GarbageHuman_) August 2, 2018

Topping on the cake:

Keep defending her guys, great job. pic.twitter.com/CgzXt8XcOZ

— EinsteinKnowsGod☇ (@destractions) August 2, 2018

No Flags

In the last 15 months, I've driven around every state in the old Confederacy, visiting a lot of blue collar eateries, cheap hotels, campgrounds and tap houses. In that time, I've seen less than 15 Confederate flags, total, including bumper stickers.

Meanwhile, the pubs and diners have been more racially integrated at all levels - customers, workers and managers - than anything I've ever seen outside of Dixie. If the South is full of crazed, hateful, white supremacists, they're doing a good job of hiding it.

Or maybe that's a long-dead boogie man preserved by progressives in order to gain power through fear and hate.

Maybe instead of repeating the hateful slander of would-be tyrants on the left, we could just enjoy places like the Nantahala River in North Carolina and the lovely people that live nearby.

The Nantahala Forest At 500 MPH

Here's a quick edit of a video segment from what we took yesterday using the windshield mount for the GoPro Hero3. It gives you an idea of what it's like driving the RV - it's like looking out of the eye slit of a knight's helmet.

I think the speed is too fast and I want to do some post-processing on the lighting, but we're off to explore Asheville and I don't have time to get too involved. I'll leave that for when we get back to the Catican Compound in San Diego.

In the meantime, enjoy! It's 1280 HD, so it might be worth watching it on YouTube in fullscreen mode.

Thoughts On RV Camping During The Great Confederate Livermush Adventure

Wife kitteh and I are off on KT's Second Dixie Tour, otherwise known as The Great Confederate Livermush Adventure. Inspired by a desire to see Confederate Railroad in concert and a post on a Southern cooking blog that extolled the virtues of that North Carolina treat, livermush, we're back in the land of cotton for a week, having a grand old time.

Because we're traveling so much, we decided to rent an RV from Cruise America instead of booking hotel rooms. Neither of us like to be told what to do, so hotels and cruises are pretty much out of the question. Instead, our first choice is always Vacation Rental By Owner, or VRBO for short. We pick a spot, get a condo or a house and then move in for a week. We're both good cooks, so we have more fun and better food when we don't go out to eat. With VRBO, you have total freedom to come and go as you please, eat in your bare feet and imbibe a bit more with dinner because you're not driving.

The RV made sense this time because we're traveling so far. The map below gives our general path.

Our fixed destinations were Nashville for the airport, Fayetteville for the concert and Asheville for the livermush. After that, it was all up for grabs. I looked at VRBO places in the Tennessee hill country around Ducktown, but as we've never been here, that was really a shot in the dark. Driving distances are great enough so that if you made a home base, there would be days with 6 hours of driving. Wife kitteh said, "Do not want!" and that was that.

Neither of us have done RV camping before. We rented from Cruise America, a nationwide RV rental chain. Wife kitteh wanted a big bed, so we got their large camper, a 30' beast, shown here in a Walmart parking lot in Nashville.

"Honey, do you remember where we parked? Oh, right. It's the one the size of a barn."

 I'd driven U-Haul moving trucks before, but only the smallish ones. This behemoth was bigger than any of those. I read online in forums that you get used to it pretty quickly and they were right. I'm fairly comfortable with it now and it's only been a couple of days. Here are some other things we've learned.

Plus Side

• No packing and unpacking! Yay! All your stuff is with you.
• No need to waste time going to restaurants for breakfast and lunch. We've ended up going out for dinner, but one meal is better than three.
• If you stop at a store with a good liquor selection to stock up and then get dinner to go, you can still eat with your shoes off and have that extra beer or glass of wine in the RV once you get to your camping spot. Wife kitteh drinks wine and I drink beer, so we didn't need to find any hard liquor, just decent wine and local crafts.
• Mobility, with limits.
• It's easier to drive than you might think. You're fine as long as you remember your turns are very wide and are careful backing up, using a spotter behind you.
• If we wanted to bring the Catican Guards on vacation with us, the RV would be the only way to go. Three dogs in an SUV is fine for 30 minutes, but longer than that and you'd all go mad. Plus, there'd be much less room for luggage.

Minus Side (pretty minor ones, really)

• You feel trapped by the size of it. Parking takes at least 2, but realistically 4 slots, so you quickly start crossing desirable destinations off your list like hiking trail heads with small parking lots.
• It's not a VRBO house, it's an RV. It's nice enough, but it's not someone's house. Think one-and-a-half star motel, minus the vermin underfoot and the drug addicts staying in room next door.
• Cruise America will rent you a decent cooking kit, but you have to provide all the spices and stuff. VRBO houses usually have an adequate collection.
• The bed is a non-standard size. We got queen sheets and sheet corner clips to keep the bottom sheet on and it worked well enough.
• You camp where there are RV campsites. That means you may need to drive 30 minutes out of your way to get to your stop for the night.
• If you fly in and rent like we did, you buy things you wouldn't have to otherwise. We bought a cooler and beach chairs and a few other things as well. When we leave, we'll take the cooler with us, full of delicious livermush products, but the chairs and the rest will be donated to charity.

We've been discussing RV camping as we've gone along. I'm not much of a fan, unless, like this trip, it's a scouting expedition. Now that we've been here and have a feel for the place, I'm a lot more confident picking a VRBO spot. We both have loved the hill country of Tennessee, so we'll be back, next time with a house or cabin in the woods.

Trees And Water

I've got notes from Tater Melon Day in Molino, Tennessee in general and the Confederate Railroad concert in particular I want to share, but we'll do that later. I have lessons learned from our first RV vacation that will come later as well. For now, I wanted to share what I thought was a lovely photo taken at Tim's Ford State Park near Fayetteville. It's a gorgeous place.

What the heck. I'll share three photos with you that will give you some idea of its beauty. I left them large, so they might be worth a click. Enjoy.

This is my favorite. I looked up and got the idea from remembering the cover of the album, More of the Monkees. Not sure how many of you will get that reference.

I'm Losing Track Of The Seasons

Blogging from my phone again.

At a Walmart in Chattanooga, I was surprised to see parents and children shopping for school supplies. It took me a minute to figure out what month it was and what that meant. Now that our children have all grown up and moved out, I no longer have them to keep me aware of the seasons.

Without sports schedules, I'd be totally lost.

Welcome To The Red State South

I'm blogging from my phone this morning. Meh.

I'm back in Dixie, this time with wife kitteh. We're going to Fayetteville, Tennessee to see Confederate Railroad in concert. Last night, we had dinner at a blue collar BBQ joint in Nashville.

Wife kitteh, a Chicago Yankee Hillary Clinton NPR Democrat, couldn't get over how integrated the place was. Mixed race staff, customers and couples dining. Where was all the bigotry she'd been led to expect from the media and the movies? I just smiled and said, "Welcome to the South."

The Pre-Vacation Camera Test

... and for me, it's no contest. Fuji for the win!

I've got the old Nikon Artillery Piece (a D60), a Nikon point-and-shoot and  Fuji X-T10. See what you think. We're heading to Dixie today and I'm taking te Fuji and the point-and-shoot. The Artillery Piece has an awesome zoom lens which the Fuji lacks, but it's clear I need to summon the artillery calibration team.

Jalapenos, Zoomed

Fuji

Nikon Artillery Piece

Nikon Point-And-Shoot

Salvias, Not Zoomed

Fuji

Nikon Artillery Piece

Nikon Point-And-Shoot

I Want Twitter To Tell Me How Awful I Am

... before they shadowban or outright terminate me.

There's a lot of talk these days about Twitter shadowbanning conservatives. That's where you no longer show up in searches, making it difficult to find you. I've seen plenty of tweets talking about how this or that conservative had their account suspended. Allegedly, there's an algorithm for these things.

Why not let us see our score from that algorithm?

Think about it. If the goal was to tame the dog-eat-dog world of the Twitterverse, wouldn't it be better to let people know if they were on the edge instead of just letting them know with a pink slip? I went on a rant today about seminarians getting raped by a Catholic cardinal. Was that too close to the edge or was that OK? How am I supposed to know?

I think Twitter would be way better off if they gave us a way to find out our Obnoxiousness Score.

I think I redlined it with those tweets, man. Time to dial it back.

This Is Why My Money's In The SP500

From today's WSJ.

At the time of the (Sohn C)onference, Heard on the Street columnists took on the stock pickers by throwing darts to create a portfolio of 10 stocks to go up against the 12 stocks picked by the Sohn speakers. Three months later, the darts have prevailed. The Heard team’s 10 picks, eight long and two short, have returned 7.23% on average. The combined performance of 12 picks by Sohn attendees has been slightly negative, lagging behind the S&P 500 by more than 6 percentage points.

My dad could beat them all and did almost every year, but he put an enormous amount of time and energy into investing. He would follow a stock for over a year before buying. He had an MBA from Harvard and there were specific characteristics he sought, mostly found by pouring over their financial documents.

Me, I don't want to spend the time on it. There's at least one article like this every year that shows experts losing to random pickers or the S&P 500. Sometimes, you get investment companies that can beat the S&P 500 for a few years and they try to make hay with that, but in the long run, I think the S&P 500 can't be beat.

Winning.

Stalin Plus Hitler Equals Thomas Jefferson

I heard that deliberately ridiculous formulation on a podcast recently and thought it would make a neat graphic, so I played around with Illustrator this morning and made this. Enjoy.

Joe Biden Vs. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Don't you figure there were plenty of Germans who went along with the Nazis reluctantly? The ones who heard the parts about the need for resurgent German pride, loathed the chaos of the Wiemar Republic and hated the punitive Treaty of Versailles, but didn't really like the whole anti-Semitic / invade everyone thing? These were the people educated in pre-Hitler Germany, where classical Enlightenment texts were used and Nietzsche wasn't seen as a genius, but a nut. By comparison, the people raised in the Hitler Youth were probably full-blooded Nazi loons.

Joe Biden has always struck me as the typical, smug, lefty opportunist. He has never come across as a power-mad nutjob the way Hillary did and certainly not as a panting, bug-eyed radical on the order of Ocasio-Cortez. Oh sure, he's willing to use the Democrat-Nazi racialist talk when he needs the black vote - "They want to put y'all back in chains!" -  but it never comes out of his mouth with the spittle and rage that you get with Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Here's my hypothesis. Joe's generation of Democrats grew up in the pre-postmodernist education system where we still taught the classics because they were classics. He might go along with tearing down pictures of dead, white guys at Harvard and removing Shakespeare from the curriculum, but it would be a mercenary act, a way to secure votes instead of the cultural violence of a true believer. He'd read Shakespeare and Dickens and his history textbooks as a child were relatively free of race-mongering. He might go along with the Nazis, but he isn't a Nazi deep down in his heart.

Aside: The more I see from the leftward lurch of the Democrats, the more I see them as Nazis without ambition. They tick off all the boxes.

• Centralize authority in the government at the Federal level 
• Expand that authority until it covers every aspect of life
• Obsess on identity politics in general and race in particular
• Goon squads in the street (universities) to enforce cultural orthodoxy
• Desirous to exterminate Judeo-Christian culture unless it knuckles under and supports them 
• No international ambitions: Invading other countries and war is out of the question

Meanwhile, Coates and Ocasio-Cortez grew up under the tutelage of the postmodernist education system. If my daughter's experience in public school is any guide, they were taught racialism first and useful information second. Every class not in math or science focused on or was informed by race. She was raised by her teachers to be an activist, not a wife, mother or employee.

This is the source of the Democrats' generational conflict. Ocasio-Cortez is aligned with Bernie against centrist Democrats because she's a full-on Nazi loon. It's a decent bet she's never encountered any serious treatment of ideas outside those of the postmodern progressives. In fact, they've been taught that anyone even slightly affirming ideas not in lockstep with the progs is full of hate from racism, sexism, homophobia and more. Hence, the reflexive screaming when they encounter someone like Jordan Peterson.

Meanwhile, the Bidens of the world are mystified by Cortez's attacks. Why, that's not done, my dear. You need to moderate your speech and go along with your elders. The Cortezes of the world narrow their eyes and stare at the Bidens, wondering how much hatey-hate-hate is deep in their souls. Biden doesn't realize that his talk of moderation cannot take root in Cortez's head because all moderating concepts were categorized as hateful hate by her postmodernist teachers.

So here we are. The progs took over the education system, entertainment and the media and then purged all opposing thought so the new generation grew up as Obama Youth. If he runs in 2020, Biden might manage to get the older folks' votes, but the centrists' time is quickly running out.

Isn't this what you wanted when you enforced your orthodoxies, progs?

Unlike the wimpy Bidens of the world, these guys don't tolerate hate.