The Recipe Called For 1/4 Cup Of Spiders

... but this was all I had.

There's An Advantage To Waking Up At 4

... I'm just not sure it's that big of one.

Alternate title: Insomnia Is One Of The Complications Of Cat Snack Fever.

For years, our Maximum Leader and I have had an understanding. She gets one midnight snack per night. More than that and she gets pillows thrown. I used to avoid these by free feeding her, but she overate and ended up looking like a zeppelin. I tried not feeding her, but a hungry cat with nothing but time on her hands in the middle of the night can find all kinds of ways to be annoying.

So I get up once a night and give her a snack. Unfortunately, the smaller of the Catican Guards has discovered she likes the taste of cat food. After I give the ritual petting and snack to our Maximum Leader and then go back upstairs, the little Guard goes downstairs to see if there's some leftovers to crunch. The complication here is that sometimes she decides she needs to use the facilities, but she's afraid of the dark.

When she's being a good girl, she comes back upstairs, jumps into bed and licks me frantically to let me know. When she's being a bad girl, she just uses one of the throw rugs by a door and then comes upstairs, jumps in bed and quivers in fear, knowing she's done something bad. Sometimes you can't tell the two behaviors apart. This morning was one such time. She came upstairs, quivering. Not wanting to punish her, I got back up and took her downstairs to go outside.

That sounds simple, but it isn't.

Going potty outside at night is a ritual, just like Cat Snack Fever. Before we go to bed, trying to avoid night time accidents, I take the smaller Guard outside*. If she does her job, both Guards and our Maximum Leader get treats. It's a cause for great rejoicing. Everyone gets all wound up and runs to their Designated Treat Muster Areas. That's fine right before you go to bed, but it also happens when I take the smaller Guard out in the middle of the night. It's quite the production.

It also wakes me up fully. There's not much more energizing than two dogs and one cat rushing about excitedly. If it's after about 3:30, I'm pretty much done sleeping for the night. And that's how we end up with blog titles like this.

The picture of innocence.

* - I always tell her a story when I do. It always involves a little dog who goes potty outside and gets a treat. It's a different story every night. No, the loony bin hasn't called my house. Why do you ask?

How Fascism Fails

Under fascism In Detroit, you are allowed to manage your own affairs, so long as you do what the government wants you to do.

There's an awesome piece in the WSJ by the guy who used to run the Detroit Department of Transportation. It's an object lesson in how fascism and socialism fail. Here's a tidbit.

We began staff meetings each morning by learning which vendors had cut us off for lack of payment, including suppliers of essential items like motor oil or brake pads. Bus engines that the transportation department had sent out to be overhauled were sidelined for months when vendors refused to ship them back because the city hadn't paid for the repair. There were days when 20% of our scheduled runs did not go out because of a lack of road-ready buses.

The obvious solution for a cash-tight operation is to triage vendor payments to ensure that absolutely essential items are always there. But in Detroit, no one inside the transportation department could direct payments to the most important vendors. A bureaucrat working miles away in City Hall, not responsible to the transportation department (and, frankly, not responsible to anyone we could identify), decided who got paid and who didn't. That meant vendors supplying noncritical items were often paid even as public buses were sidelined.

Power and authority were taken away from local managers and given to people far, far away from the problem. Their loyalty was to their superiors, not the customers. This also makes graft much easier. Payments go out to favored providers based on their political connections and not their usefulness. In the end, the city was looted and services decayed.

In unrelated news, Kathleen Sebelius' department in Washington has been given a 2,000 health care page bill to implement.

Deconstructing Atheism

So I engaged atheists on Twitter a couple of times in the last week. One of them went off about Mother Teresa being an atheist and another had something snarky to say to a friend of mine. I don't remember what it was. I was going to cut and paste the conversations here to demonstrate the endlessly repetitive "logic" of atheism, but I just can't. I'm so totally sick of the whole thing.

Outside of the nihilists, atheism is simply the act of anointing yourself as God. It's all theist logic with the scale many, many orders of magnitude smaller. And it's utterly pathetic.

This time, when I engaged these guys, I took their position completely and asked them to explain where They lived in it all. You know, "so how did you make any molecule in your body do something against the laws of chemistry?" They had nothing, of course. There's nothing to be had. They'd been so busy insulting theists that they'd never considered the question and it took them by surprise.

The God of the Gaps is the idea that God exists, doing those things science can't explain. Well, thanks to advances in science, the Gaps keep getting smaller to the point where many slay this proof of the Almighty by saying there are no Gaps at all. Of course, if there are no Gaps for God, there are no Gaps whatsoever for you. Indeed, your Gaps disappeared a long time ago.

Pointing this out caused one of three reactions.

1. Hand waving. "I control the Rabbit Hole." In a logical sense, that response wasn't even hand waving, it was more of a total, unconditional surrender.

2. Complaining that my choice of scale (the molecular level is my favorite) is absurdly reductionist. That's idiocy, of course, since they are making themselves into the Easter Bunny. Below an arbitrary scale, reality is reductionist and absurd. Above that scale, the person magically appears and hands out treats in the form of free will and moral choice.

3. Genitalia and sex. I'm not sure what this is supposed to prove, but they do like their genitalia and sex. It gets mentioned, I suppose, as some kind of attempt to shock the prude. Whatever.

Like I said, it's pathetic and depressing. They've got absolutely nothing at all except sneering and snark, deconstructing civilization down to the point where they can rush about in orgasms of self-worship. #2 is the intellectual's version, where they simply replace God with themselves in Aquinas's proofs of God's existence.

By the end of the whole affair, I simply lost all my patience and blew one of them away with logic. After that, I asked him a pair of simple questions:

Why did he believe in something that could be proven to not exist? Was it because it just made sense?

These Easter Bunny things never really work out.
Update: The last conversation ended with the atheist claiming that advancements in science do not eliminate uncertainties and he trusted that science would find his free will some day. I told him there was no light at the end of that particular tunnel. He took it to mean life after death and trotted out a cliche.

Sigh.

Update 2: I just picked up Beyond Good and Evil on Audible. It should be refreshingly nihilist after a series of conversations with these self-theists.

Declare Detroit A Free City?

I'm not sold.

Patrick Barron has a bit of a pie-in-the-sky idea for Detroit. Blogging at the libertarian Mises Institute, he wants to turn Detroit into a free city. I've got a better idea. Why not give the Cleveland Browns the Patriots' play book? That's bound to make them winners! First, here's the bit on Detroit.

All that Detroit really needs is economic freedom and secure property rights. Give Detroit its freedom from all manner of government, including the federal government. Declare Detroit a free city. (You can rest assured, Detroit, that America will come to your rescue if those bloodthirsty Canadians attack!) In other words, no one would pay any federal taxes whatsoever or be subject to any federal regulations whatsoever. Wouldn’t it be nice not to pay federal taxes, not even Social Security and Medicare taxes? Do the same with Michigan taxes. No taxes BUT also no federal or state aid either.

A Free Detroit would have absolutely no labor and workplace regulations, including minimum wages, mandatory insurance, equal opportunity rules, occupational safety rules, etc. People would be allowed to work together cooperatively for whatever terms their marginal productivity of labor will secure.

Now let's take some of that text and apply it to the Cleveland Browns.

All that the Browns really need is a good game plan. Give Cleveland the Patriots' play book and opponent-specific game plans. In other words, no one would worry that the Browns were running inferior plays. Wouldn’t it be nice not to blame the Browns' staff for making stupid game plans?

Can't you just see it? The Browns would dominate for years to come!

Err, maybe not. And maybe not Detroit as a free city, either. For the Browns, there's this little problem called "having no talent." For Detroit, there's this little problem called "self-destructive behavior." There are other, ancillary problems such as ruined infrastructure and no raw materials, but even with those, you need a decent workforce to make a free city a success. One that's burning down its own neighborhoods isn't quite up to the task.

For once, Hitler gets it right.

World of Good, Translation Style

It's been a long, long time since I've done a World of Good blog post. Far too long, according to some of my readers. I stopped them because they I felt they had become formulaic and tiresome. Last week, however, gave me an experience that fit perfectly into the WOGs, so here we go with the first installment in the series since who knows when.

While working at Catholic Charities, I helped big, Hispanic man. He was a really nice guy and we chatted a little bit as we went through the menu. It was all good. He got his food and walked out the door. A short while after he walked out, an elderly, Hispanic woman came in and sat down with me. The big guy came in with her and acted as her translator so she knew what I was saying as I went through the menu.

He didn't know her, but he recognized that she needed assistance and turned around from wherever he was going to come back and help her. We have a written menu in several languages, but as far as I could tell she was illiterate as well. Despite whatever personal traumas he was experiencing that led him to our door, he made sure an old woman got what she needed. Because of him, the interaction easy, pleasant and even a little funny for both of us.

That did us a world of good.

Update: Looking back, we last WOGged in 2011. If you want to read the origin of the WOGs, here it is.

What Was Socialist Becomes Libertarian

... but only because it's run out of money.

MSNBC has a bunch of nincompoops on TV. They frequently say ridiculous things, but in one instance they're getting it sort of right. Detroit is indeed going (sort of*) libertarian. The government bankruptcy is causing a massive reduction in services and spending. Socialism and insolvency naturally lead to this.

Unfortunately, they've got a population raised on socialist expectations. The citizens of Detroit have some catching up to do. It's not whether their spending profile is libertarian, it's whether they are libertarian. I suppose that in some ways, an area that's been wiped out by a hurricane could be said to be libertarian in the sense that MSNBC is using the phrase.

* - They are still getting truckloads of Federal money, so don't get carried away with this whole libertarian line.

Pope Francis Is Rocking Brazil

Man, this guy is good.

Pope Francis, as part of his week-long trip to Brazil for World Youth Day events, today visited one of Rio de Janeiro's shantytowns, or favelas, a place that saw such rough violence in the past that it's known by locals as the Gaza Strip.

Despite heavy security and a cold rain, Francis waded into the crowds without an umbrella and hugged and kissed residents young and old before heading into the shoebox of a church that serves the Varghina community. There he blessed a new altar.

As a Catholic, he inspires me tremendously. I want to be like that. He's made me strive to be better in all kinds of ways, even the way I work with my employees.

Awesome choice, Conclave.

Here's a little more from the source of that image.

RIO DE JANEIRO — They are some of the most dangerous, most crime-ridden places in the world, where even the police and army fear to tread.

But yesterday (Thursday), in one of the most highly symbolic events of his week-long trip to Brazil, Pope Francis ventured - on foot - into one of the country’s notorious favelas, the slum-like shanty towns that sprawl around its big cities.

The 76-year-old shunned the bullet-proof Pope-mobile normally used for such visits, instead walking around the Varginha favela, a poverty-stricken community in an area of Rio nicknamed the “Gaza Strip” for its drug crime, violence and gang warfare.

He went there with a message to Brazil’s poor and oppressed - not to give in or despair in their battle against the “evil” of corruption.

He makes you want to bring your "A" game every day.

Seeing The Face Of Mary In A Tree Stump

In many ways, progressivism is a religion in crisis. So many of the things they took as articles of faith are coming apart. Racism, in particular, is getting harder and harder to find. That's why George Zimmerman was such flypaper to the left. After a long dry spell where even some of them might have been having doubts, they finally had a perfect example of a white thug shooting an innocent black teen. It was like he was sent from God to restore their belief.

Only it didn't turn out that way at all. George wasn't white, at least not in the sense of "do I qualify for Hispanic status on this government form." They made up a new racial category to cover this, white-hispanic, but that was kind of disappointing, too. As more details about his "innocent" victim, George's political and community activities and the altercation that led to the shooting emerged, the less this seemed like the miracle they longed for to restore their faith in American racism.

Finally, they resorted to faking images of the face of Mary in tree stumps.

You know those weird, iconic religious images people say they see in shadows or cracks in teacups or mountainsides? The ones that draw hundreds of pilgrims to gaze upon them and meditate? Well, Kristinn Taylor, blogging at Gateway Pundit, found what looks to be one of the last gasps of the Zimmerman Racism Miracle for the left. Renee Vaughan was caught drawing the icon in the tree stump.

Sorry, folks. Time to go home. It was all faked. All of it.

Who Knew Wheat Thins Could Be So Full Of Awesome?

I'm still laughing from this one. Full screen it so you can catch the look on Ted's face.

Middle Out To Where?

I spent much of this morning playing with PHP scripts, so this will be brief.

President Obama has started laying out his economic vision, a mere 5 years into his presidency, and it's called middle-out. It's supposed to be this huge rebuke to supply-siders and libertarians. Whatever. Google the thing if you're interested. It's more of the same within his I-am-my-brother's-keeper theme. It's also typically ignorant and clearly came out of the same Ivy League bubble as all of his advisers and underlings where they think everyone is just like the people they meet in the faculty lounge.

In Detroit, some 47% of the population is functionally illiterate. Here are the details from that frantic, right-wing, racist, teabagger rag, the Huffington Post.

Honestly, what's the plan here? Middle out to where? "A rising tide doesn't lift all boats!" yells our president. Well, of course it doesn't, not when they've chained themselves to the sea bottom. It's never been easier to learn how to read. There has never been more funding for schools. And yet, 47% of the population of one of our major cities took a pass on the project.

There's no economic plan in the world that's going to lift those boats until they do something about the problem themselves. Middle-out is doomed.

Link of the Day

Just because I think the walrus and the Russian sailor make a great pair.

For Happier Christmases And Birthdays Don't Buy Google Music All Access

As I get older, it gets harder and harder to make Christmas and birthday lists for my wife and kids. I'm not much for having material things in the first place, so it's become a gigantic chore to give them ideas for presents. Music is the exception. I've always got CDs I'd like to add to my collection. Google Music All Access eliminates all of those gift ideas for the family.

I've been trying it out for almost a month now and found two things.

1. There are some interesting artists whose music I'd love to have available to me. Helen Kane and George Formby, for example.
2. There is a lot, and I mean a lot of really terrible music out there. Many albums and artists that I used to like have turned out to be truly awful. Almost everything, as a matter of fact. Just like painting, sports and algebraic topology, there are a few superstars and then there is everyone else. Iron Butterfly, for one. Please, no more Iron Butterfly. Ever.

This means that there will always be a few albums I'd like to have, but it also means that most of the material available on Google is stuff I'd rather never hear again.

So I'm going back to Pandora and putting CDs on my Amazon wish list when I hear something new and interesting. It will give the kids options when it comes time for gifts and take the stress out of their lives. It's always panic time when you have to buy a gift for someone and have no ideas at all. All Access may or may not be cheaper in the long run, but not everything is about money. I'd rather have more fun on my birthday and Christmas.

As an added bonus, here's a very nice fan video of Electric Light Orchestra's Yours Truly 2095 off of their Time album. Previously, I had blogged that I saw them on the Time tour and had heard they had lip-synched at least some of their songs. Someone had recorded one of those concerts and uploaded the music to YouTube. After hearing a few of them, there's no way they were lip-synching. Instead, they might have layered recorded music over the top of their playing to give us the rich, orchestral ELO sound.

In A Nation of 300 Million+ People

... if you can only get a few tens or even hundreds for your marches, you might not be representative of the general population.

Last week, I worked downtown distributing food to the needy. It was after the Zimmerman verdict and after the protests had begun. We had clients of all races, some who were homeless, some who were struggling and some who just had too much month for their refrigerator. Everyone got along and chatted as they waited to be seen. They were all grateful and reasonably happy, considering the circumstances.

In the larger world, the press was spinning like a top over the Zimmerman thing. It was the Center of the World and You Needed to Be Concerned! It had Big Implications for race relations! Articles were written, editorials were penned, talking heads argued, photos were taken of protesters.

Meanwhile, we all got along just fine.

On Twitter, the racial-obsessives attacked blacks who wondered if maybe the whole thing wasn't being blown out of proportion as "tokens" who "weren't in touch with the street." Where I was working, the people were in touch with the street, many of them quite literally. None of them cared about melanin, or if they did, they weren't fussing about it with each other.

Dean from Beers with Demo, chatted with me on Twitter and said that at the shipyard where he worked it was the same thing. Everyone was just getting on with life.

So what we had were two semi-random samples where no one seemed bothered by the whole thing. These went unreported. On the other hand, the self-selecting groups of agitators got front-page coverage.

If I didn't know better, I'd say someone had an agenda to push.

Why Race Is The Go-To Excuse

It's because the alternative would be to blame behavior and no one wants to be judgmental.

Citizens Of Detroit As House Pets Or Peasants

The smaller of the Catican Guards, Ellie, is a nine-pound, chihuahua-cocker mix. She is one of the sweetest dogs ever. On occasion, she can also be timid. While she doesn't mind mixing it up with friends' dogs that are ten times her size, she doesn't like going out into the dark alone and she's a little bit scared of the dogs next door, who are psychotic*. When she has to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, if she can't wake us up, she sometimes goes on the carpet downstairs. We show her we're disappointed, but we understand why she's doing it and don't punish her severely.

Ellie, awaiting a glass of Deaver Zinfandel.

Which brings me to Detroit.

Both Charlie LeDuff and Steve Rattner have the little dog attitude towards the residents of Detroit. Here's what Steve has to say about them, echoing a passage in Charlie's Detroit: An American Autopsy.

No one likes bailouts or the prospect of rewarding Detroit’s historic fiscal mismanagement. But apart from voting in elections, the 700,000 remaining residents of the Motor City are no more responsible for Detroit’s problems than were the victims of Hurricane Sandy for theirs

That's simply untrue. First, from the destructive side, the citizens of Detroit are the ones burning their city and shooting, beating and raping each other. No one is deliberately going into Detroit to wreak havoc on these people. They're doing it to themselves.

Second, think of it from the constructive side. To say that the citizens of Detroit aren't responsible for the condition of their city is to ignore the construction of the city in the first place. Did someone from outside Detroit come in, build the city for these people and then leave? How do cities and businesses start and then grow?

It's like the people of Detroit are house pets, of whom nothing can be expected. They can't be expected to not hurt each other, to not burn their own city, or to elect anything other than grievance-mongers and gangsters who then loot them. Dig this scene from the Detroit city council, well-documented in the Charlie's book.

Now go back 100 years and think of the people of 1913. They're the ones who built the city. To Charlie and Steve, those people are like aliens from another planet. It's inconceivable that we would expect the people of 2013 to be able to do the same thing, despite the wildly disparate resources between the two eras.

If that's the way we're going to view the people of Detroit and other such places, then we're implicitly creating an American aristocracy. The people of Detroit are the commoners and Ivy Leaguers, I suppose, would be royalty. One could hardly expect the common rabble to be able to conduct themselves in a civilized manner or provide for their own welfare. They clearly need those of royal blood to watch over them.

House pets or peasants, do you want to be paying to feed them and clean up after them? Do you really think they need that?

* - The dogs next door are a pair of 15-20# lunatics who never get walked. In essence, they've been given a life sentence in their yard without the possibility of parole. Just like prisoners in the same situation, they've dispensed with civilized behavior and have become violent psychotics, rushing the fence at the slightest noise from out side.

The Twerk Bone Is Connected To The Detroit Bone

I was going to lay off the Detroit bankruptcy and a few more thoughts on Charlie LeDuff's Detroit: An American Autopsy, but fate conspired against me. This morning I bopped around the Interweb Tubes and came across this LOLcat about twerking.

I didn't know what twerking was, but it took no deductive power at all to quickly figure it out. A YouTube search led me to this video, which has had over eight million hits.

Which brought my thoughts to Detroit where they are shocked to discover that a city full of single moms can't pay its bills. David Freddoso has laid out the gory details for all to see.

Because Mr. Freddoso's outstanding Storify piece on Detroit, shown below, is so long, I'll put my punchline here and close with Dave's tale of Motown woe.

Twerk away, kids. In a few years, come on back to the twerking craze over a bowl of ramen and marvel at what we all did to ourselves. You'll be amazed that we ever thought civilization could be maintained by a society obsessed with sex.

Take it away, Mr. Freddoso.

What Bothers Them Is That He's 16 And Can Do Their Jobs

Dean, one of our Monks of Miscellaneous Musings, has an outstanding blog post up about the modern press corps being lackeys and lapdogs. In related news, Presidential Spokescreature Jay Carney got schooled by a high school junior yesterday, freaking out the Washington press establishment.

“Because of the death threats being received by George Zimmerman and his parents, is the president going to take any action for their security or are they on their own?” Gabe Finger asked.

Carney responded that he wasn’t aware of the threats and that Florida authorities would be responsible for handling them, but that Obama opposes “any violence of any kind” in response to the verdict in the Trayvon Martin case.

“So they’re on their own?” Finger asked again.

“You can editorialize all you want and I have no doubt that you will, but that is a ridiculous statement,” Carney replied.

The ridiculous statement is that Major League Toady Carney wasn't aware of the death threats. Please.

Final score: Gabe Finger one zillion, Jay Carney zero.

Camaros Can Overpower Styrofoam Rocks

That's what I learned today.

Want To Drive The MSM Completely Out Of Their Minds?

... then show extra charity and kindness to people of other races this week.

Dave Burge of Iowahawk blog fame has a great tweet yesterday:

Of all the young black shooting victims in this country, you can name 1. Because you've been trained like a circus seal to bark on command.
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) July 17, 2013

The endless coverage of a particular murder case when this kind of thing happens all the time has only one cause and we all know it: the media's fascination with racial animosity, whenever and wherever they can find it. They love it. They live for it. Even if they have to invent it like they did here with the all-new racial category "White-Hispanic." I'm sure many of them were supremely disappointed the verdict didn't result in riots and burning cities.

Well, screw them.

If you're sick and tired of the media playing us all like so many cheap violins, then go out of your way for the next week (and more) to show people of other races love and charity. When you come across others who have been sucked into the manufactured hate, don't respond to their baiting and hostility except with kindness. Ask them why they let some subnormal script reader on the TV dictate their feelings.

Don't let the swine at MSNBC and elsewhere play you any more.

You'll make Rachel Maddow's head explode. That alone will be worth the effort.