Fastidiousness Pays, You Know

From the spam mailbag, we have this encouraging bit.

Very quickly this site will be famous among all blogging and site-building people, due to it's fastidious articles

We hope so, anonymous commenter. We hope so.

Cheezburger of the Day

Cousin Itt With Wings

... at least that's the first thing I thought of when I saw this photo of a Saddled Prominent over at Tim's excellent blog.

And that, of course, leads me to share my favorite Cousin Itt scene with you. From the Ophelia's Career episode of The Addams Family, here's Cousin Itt giving his professional opinion of Ophelia's chances.

It's Just About Time To Dust Off Those Eurocrisis Posts

... because the Italians have decided that, while they like eating out, they don't like paying the bill.

Yesterday, the Italians voted against mathematics. Instead, they voted for chaos.

Several candidates opposed to austerity measures were making a strong showing Monday in partial results from Italy's local elections -- the first nationwide test for Premier Mario Monti since he was named to save Italy from its debt crisis.

Analysts were watching for signs of voter anger in two days of balloting over Monti's austerity measures and toward mainstream parties that have supported them since Monti took over from Silvio Berlusconi in November.

Note that the article says they voted against austerity, but that's not really true. Austerity will come no matter what since it's a consequence of borrowing mountains of money. How's the whole voting against math thing going to work out? I think the best answer is this.

Everything Old Is New Again

Dig this.

Because She's Beautiful

Mobility Is Key

I'm convinced that the world is highly unstable right now and will be until there's some kind of fiscal collapse that clears out the financial rubbish. Japan, for example, has debt levels that boggle the mind; their debt-to-gdp ratio is about double our own. I keep pondering how a collapse might occur and how to prepare for it. Then I realize that my own thoughts on the matter have been consistently wrong. I was convinced, for example, that the US would devour all global funding to feed its deficits. I never considered the possibility that the Fed would simply print all the money the government needed.

So the place is unstable and the decisions that will be made in crisis unpredictable. What's a Feline Theocratician to do? How should I advise our kids? My basic thoughts have been to double down on what we teach them already.

1. Have marketable skills. You are really only worth the value you can contribute. Don't count on endless social spending to support you.
2. Avoid debt. When the bank gets in trouble, it's going to start calling in loans. If the bank doesn't get in trouble and you lose your job, having debts to repay can drive you to bankruptcy. When things are unstable, you need to anticipate both events.
3. Get and stay married. You need a partner in life. When times are good, the two of you can serve others better as a pair than as individuals. When times are bad, you need backup. Stay married because divorce smashes everything in your life.
4. Go to church. The world is important, but it's not everything. When times are good, you need help dealing with your weaknesses. When times are bad, you need to be reminded that there is Someone who loves you and cares about you. Footprints in the sand and all that.

Finally, I would add this: be mobile. Detroit is in ruins. It didn't happen in a day, but it did happen. If you lived in Detroit and didn't have marketable, mobile skills, you were locked into the city's death spiral. If your skills and at least a good portion of your wealth were mobile, you could shed a tear or two and then leave.

You want to be able to get out before things get to this point. Image source.

I'm not a big believer in a dramatic social collapse or an apocalyptic Mad Maxian future for the US. Having said that, I'd further prepare for the instabilities ahead by learning a second language, one chosen to give you global mobility. Looking around the world, I think Brazil could provide a nice landing place should things really get out of hand here.

If I'm going to take my own advice, I'd better start learning Portuguese.

This Is No Way To Train A Dog

... but it's a swell way to train our fellow citizens!

We're good friends with a couple, let's call them the Wilsons, both of whom are active in the Church. They're both as liberal as liberal can be. If you ever wanted to meet the kind of Catholics who would have been marching in the streets of Buenos Aires in support of Juan Peron, this pair is it. They supported the California ban on the death penalty because they want to be pro-life, but also supported Barack "It's OK To Kill As Many Babies As Possible" Obama. They are dyed-in-the-wool progressives.

The Wilson's daughter goes to a demanding Catholic high school. The Wilsons are excellent parents. They have high expectations, are lavish in the support and praise of their daughter, and consistent with their punishments. The young lady's learning cycle has always looked like this.

The Wilsons provide their daughter with a safe training ground for the real world.

Like good progressives, the Wilsons demand Social Justice for everyone outside of their family. Lots and lots of government support. Plenty of tolerance. Lots of mercy. Endless cataracts of government dollars slathered on every conceivable problem. Amnesty for all immigrants. For the American people at large, here's the learning cycle they want.

The Wilsons are big on "compassion".

The great irony of people like the Wilsons is that they completely understand how utterly destructive the rescue cycle would be to their daughter, but they can't bring themselves to see the results of applied Social Justice in society at large. They actively support a national decision cycle they wouldn't use to train a dog. They ignore the results - the wave of murders in Chicago is a marker of societal collapse, not a consequence of guns - and possess an unshakable belief in progressive social policies.

Talk about faith-based initiatives.

If Some Is Good, More Isn't Always Better

... and that's a lesson I refuse to learn, despite getting hit with the consequences over and over and over.

Yesterday, I revved up the Oklahoma Joe smoker and made a mess of pulled pork for one of my Cursillo groupies whose son* just got out of the hospital after a 31-day stay. The young man lost 17 pounds from an already slender frame while there and needs to be fattened up. His parents put their lives on hold and lived in their son's hospital room to the extent the hospital and the father's job would allow. Now that the ordeal is over, they all need some down-home culinary lovin'. They requested my pulled pork, so I cranked up old Okie Joe, grabbed a pair of pork shoulders and turned on the Google TV so I could watch Europa League games while I cooked.

The end result was beautiful.

The end result was also way undercooked. After 7 1/2 hours in the smoker, the internal temperature of the pork was 130 instead of the prescribed 190. The recipe calls for 7-8 hours in the smoker and I wanted to be on the short side of that, so I had loaded more coals than usual into the firebox. Instead of running hotter, the smoker ran colder. All day it ran cold, so I kept adding excess charcoal. I didn't figure it out until it was too late.

Fire needs oxygen. A bigger fire needs more oxygen. The smoker works by restricting air flow. Adding more coals increases the heat up to the point where the intake can't support them all.

If you add more coals than the intake can feed, you smother your own fire.

And thus, I managed to spend a whole day watching soccer.

Err, that's not it.

I spent the whole day watching soccer and then had to put the pork in the oven for an hour and a half to finish it off. The end result was still delicious, but had this been a dinner party, it would have been quite embarrassing.

So, like drinking beer, eating jambalaya and buying Newcastle United shirts, jerseys, hats and sweatshirts, there comes a point of not just diminishing returns, but actual regret**.

* - The lad is a miracle in so many ways - he survived terminal brain stem cancer in second grade, went on to become salutatorian at our Catholic all-boys high school and then graduated from Georgetown with a degree in International Finance. From there, he got a job at a bank and has been a model of fortitude in the face of troubles as he has suffered severe health problems all his life, stemming from the brain cancer.

** - I've not reached this point with the Newcastle gear. Just sayin'.

Are The Crimes Really Victimless?

Fellow SLOB Left Coast Rebel blogged recently about victimless crimes such as gambling, something that came up in her business law class.

The course work this week delves into usury laws, so-called payday loans and statewide statutes involving gambling. We've been given the option to argue either side of each issue and conclude if we think usury laws and the "disproportionate" state legislation regarding gambling loans (rather, taking out loans to gamble) should be targeted by the feral government.

Unfortunately most of my classmates travel the road of government essentially doing everything it can to protect people from themselves (which I, of course couldn't disagree with more)...

Italics in the original. Is the crime really victimless? Dig this.

The rapper explains the video here.

 Finally, we have this.

Learn more about us debt.

To a great extent, the debt comes from entitlement spending. Entitlement spending goes to the poor. If you become poor, you get entitlement benefits like the EBT in the song. The money for that EBT comes from me and my kids. The more entitlements we hand out, the less anyone learns from their stupid decisions. Nothing good happens at all. In the end, the US goes bankrupt, my kids and I learn Portuguese and we move to Brazil because too many people were behaving stupidly and demanding our money to make up for their bad decisions. You either move somewhere else or you stay here and pay, pay, pay.

Is that a crime or not?

Maybe it isn't such a crime after all. Brazil is nice.

I Love The Cloud

I've got a subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud. It's fantastic. It's not just the 20GB of storage that's available anywhere, it's the fact that I can download and activate Creative Suite apps anywhere just by going online and signing in with my username and password. I recently discovered that when I bought Norton 360 earlier this year in a vain attempt to cure my sick laptop, it works the same way. I need to download and install it on another machine and all I have to do is go to Norton, sign in and I'm good to go.

Awesomeness squared.

Cheezburger of the Day

A Little More On Gay Marriage

An anonymous commenter on this post had lots to say, but I wanted to address this tidbit in particular.

Marriage, parenthood, and household income are complex social phenomena.

That sounds reasonable. Don't judge how others live their lives because you don't understand their situation. It makes sense as far as it goes, but it fails to go all the way. The gay marriage and moral relativism folks are actually implying the following.

Marriage, parenthood, and household income are complex social phenomena. However, each instance can be safely isolated from the rest of society so let's all feel comfortable in letting everyone do their own thing.

This, of course, is nonsense. Complex phenomena become more complex when they integrate with other complex phenomena, not less.

A gear is geometrically complicated, but a watch much more so. Image source. 

As things become more complicated, causation becomes more difficult to determine and the best you can do is look at broader trends. In this case, broader trends tell us in no uncertain terms that moral relativism is a ginormous fail.

Not to worry. These things won't continue on indefinitely. The government cannot replace the family forever. When the bonds can no longer be sold or the dollar no longer has value or we come to our senses, we'll have to return to what works sustainably.

Let's Not Have Any More Sawhills, Whatever We Do

Isabel Sawhill is a thoroughly postmodern woman. She sees the fertility problem in the US and thinks to herself, this isn't a problem, it's an opportunity! Ms. Sawhill shows the advantages of progressive, one-worldy, diversitopian thinking. We can all relax, go back to our hipster lifestyles and skip the kids. We'll just import people from other countries! Which countries? Who cares? So long as we can drive our Mazda Miatas and climb the corporate ladder, they can come from Mars if they want.

The future belongs to those who show up, but since Ms. Sawhill probably won't be around 50 years hence, what difference does it really make? Sawhills, schmawhills. Who needs 'em?

There's no room for a car seat and no need for one, either!

Teachers Build The Future!

Termites are difficult to debate. All they want to do is eat wood and produce more little termites. You can't reason with termites. You can't say to them, "Look, termites, this chewing on my house frame is all well and good, but where will it get you in the end? Either I'll have to tent the house and kill you all or you'll chew until the house collapses and the rubble is hauled away and destroyed. There's no future in all this chewing!"

Well, you can say it, but it won't do you any good. Termites don't care about the future. All they want to do is chew on wood and make little termites. Sort of like these folks.

In early 2008, residents of Placentia and Yorba Linda approved a $200 million school construction bond after reading those fliers and being assured repeatedly that "their money will be spent wisely." ...

After the election, the board allowed the bank to sell some of the costliest bonds ever issued by a California public agency. Just one $22 million borrowing from 2011 will cost taxpayers nearly 13 times that amount – $280 million – to repay.

Those bonds, known to Wall Street traders as capital appreciation bonds, are like a loan for which no principal or interest payments are made for 35 years. Interest is charged on a growing pile of unpaid interest, causing the balance to balloon.

What can you say to things like this? With whom can you reason? The district issued the capital appreciation bonds because it wanted to continue building and the termites continued eating because they wanted to gnaw on wood. That's actually an unfair comparison to the termites because they need to gnaw on wood to survive. The education parasites behind this larceny did it because .... hmm ... well, that's just what they do.

Maybe the comparison works after all.

So the children of the children in school right now will get kicked in the groin to the tune of $200M to pay for buildings that will need to be torn down about the time the bill comes due. At least that's the way it's supposed to play out. What will actually happen is that the people who can pay the bill will leave and the only ones left will be the "less fortunate" who will have to declare bankruptcy. Then the place will fall into ruin since there won't be any money for basic maintenance.

Forward!

Cheezburger of the Day

I Keep Weapons Within Reach When I Sleep

... because if I don't, I can't get any sleep at all.

Now I don't want you to think our Maximum Leader is spoiled. She is most certainly not spoiled. She is a loving and devoted little lady and behaves with the utmost decorum at all tim...

Oh, who am I kidding? She's spoiled rotten. She likes to wake me up at night and demand a snack. Since way back, I've given in. I discovered that she was extremely persistent and could make noises in all kinds of ways. In my old apartment, she used to push against the closet's sliding door, making it go, "thump thump thump" until I got up. Now she lightly paws the bedroom door, plucks the bed or gently pokes my arm with her claws until I get up, which I do.

The rule is one snack per night. There are times when she feels that is unsatisfactory and demands more. For those times, I have an arsenal of throw pillows next to my bed.

Throw pillows. Aptly named.

It typically only takes one of these, accompanied by me snapping my fingers loudly. I'm trying to associate snapping fingers with the concept, "cut it out!" and have had modest success. There are times when simply snapping my fingers will cause her to duck and cover, but most of the time, she needs a salvo of pillows to get the hint and settle down.

And if you think that's bad, you should be around when the smaller of the Catican Guards has a licking spasm in the middle of the night.

A Continuum Of Blog Posts

It's Not About The Gays

Dig this.

I stopped celebrating Black History Month many years ago.

What is there to celebrate? I am writing about this issue because of the misguided emphasis too many African-Americans are placing on the murder of Hadiya Pendleton. She was the 15-year-old sophomore shot to death a week after performing with her school band at the president's inaugural. She was allegedly killed by an 18-year-old black gang member in a public park not far from President Barack Obama's South Side Chicago home.

Black people, politicians in particular, avoid discussing the problems at the heart of Hadiya Pendleton's death, the heavy toll of black-on-black violence and the moral decay that keeps us trapped.

Read the whole thing.

Speaking of moral decay, true ally and beer connoisseur DDE tweeted this recently.

Where exactly does Christ say that gay conservatives' votes should be alienated in favor of progressivism's Statist slavery?
— Adam Baldwin (@adamsbaldwin) February 17, 2013

DDE and I agree on almost everything, but not this. For me, there is no question that progressivism's Statist slavery is an anathema to Catholicism, no matter what economics essays come out of the Vatican*. In my replies, I decided to twist the question and ditch the whole religion angle. The more I read and the more I learn, the less I think you need to rely on doctrine. The doctrine is good because it works and it's easier to point to success than it is to hit people on the knuckles with rulers.

Still, there's something to be said for rulers. Image source.

For decades now, we've moved away from making moral judgments about relationships. All relationships are equal and you can't say one is better than another. We're now at the point where we're about to legalize gay marriage, cementing in place that particular equivalence.

When can we expect to see dividends from this? So far, it's all been a ghastly failure. See the essay above for just one instance. In every objective sense, there really is a hierarchy of relationships and the traditional married family is the best. It's not debatable. The statistics are incontrovertible and the sample sizes make the conclusions impossible to refute.

Equating traditional marriage with any other relationship has been like letting the scientists at NASA use 3.14 for Pi. It seems like a good and simplifying idea at the time, but in the end, your astronauts are dying in deep space and are nowhere near the alien probe they were sent to investigate.

Hmm. I seem to have digressed. I liked that analogy so much, I just had to use it and now look where I am.

Back to work.

So in all seriousness, if you're a big fan of gay marriage and you want others to support it, answer this: when can we skeptics expect to see the cultural fruit of equating all relationships? What will it look like? When can I expect to stop paying in tax money and degraded cultural environment for the depreciation of traditional marriage?

* - In case you're wondering, economics does not fall under Papal Infallibility.

Hillary Said It All

"What difference does it make?" ought to be the rallying cry of the year.

When pressed about her failures in Libya and how she and the rest of the Administration allowed such a fiasco to happen, did nothing while it was happening and then lied to all of us for weeks afterwards, she got angry and rattled. A woman who is the very model of self-control, lies and spin, said precisely what she was thinking.

"What difference does it make?"

It wasn't that the questioning would do nothing for the dead, it was that getting to the truth had no purpose. Just what would happen if the press discovered the complete timeline of the events before, during and after the Benghazi attack? They don't care, they're not going to tell anyone and you can't do anything about it.

Sort of like this.

Marco Rubio (R) and Robert Menendez (D)