Who's The Worst?

Nathan Bedford Forrest or Margaret Sanger?

Wandering around the Catican Compound yesterday, preparing for a party, I had my headphones on and was listening to Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography. To recap, Forrest was a brilliant, if unorthodox, Confederate cavalry general. He was also a slave trader before the war and after the war, became the first Grand Wizard of the KKK.

As I enjoyed war anecdotes where he won improbable victories - one with mostly unarmed recruits and another by moving his only two cannon around the field to make it seem like he had many, it dawned on me that, unlike campus Social Justice Warriors, I was capable of appreciating the genius of an utter moral reprobate despite his deep flaws. Generalizing it further, I could appreciate all kinds of historical figures, whatever their shortcomings. I wasn't applying modern moral purity tests on them to detect heretical beliefs and my life was richer because of it.

Note to Confederate apologists: The book has completely convinced me that war was over slavery and everything else was incidental. Further, I'm at the point in the story where Forrest ordered the massacre of surrendered Union troops, many of them new black volunteers. He was a total scumbag.

Anyway, it then occurred to me that many of the same people agitating for the removal of Confederate war memorials support Planned Parenthood which was started by Margaret Sanger, a genocidal racist. Why the double standard? Probably because, as Peggy Noonan recently noted, they're ignorant.

When I see tapes of the protests and riots at schools like Berkeley, Middlebury, Claremont McKenna and Yale, it doesn’t have the feel of something that happens in politics. It has the special brew of malice and personal instability seen in the Salem witch trials. It sent me back to rereading Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible.” Heather Mac Donald danced with the devil! Charles Murray put the needle in the poppet! As in 17th-century Salem, the accusers have no proof of anything because they don’t know, read or comprehend anything.

This then led me to wonder, who was worse, Forrest or Sanger? Forrest saw blacks as livestock, to be sold at $30,000 (2017 USD) apiece. Sanger, from her article, A Plan for Peace, had this point of view.

Minorities crammed into impoverished areas in inner cities should not be having so many babies. And, of course, these minorities (including most of America’s immigrants) are inferior in the human race, as are the physically and mentally handicapped. We should require mandatory sterilizations of those less desirable and promote easy access to abortion. And since sex should be a free-for-all, we must provide birth control and abortions to teenagers too. It’s all for the greater good and for a more intelligent, liberated, healthier population.

There's more. Lots more. Whereas Forrest exists only now in statues and namesakes, Sanger's work continues apace.

Here is the simple truth. The intent of Sanger’s Negro Project is firmly intact. Nearly 40% of all African-American pregnancies end in induced abortion. This is by design. Abortion kills more black people than the seven leading causes of death combined (heart disease, cancer, strokes, accidents, diabetes, homicide, and chronic lower respiratory diseases) according to CDC data. The African-American abortion rate is 3x that of the white population and over 2x that of all other races combined.

 Personally, I find them both despicable, but Sanger seems to have fewer redeeming qualities and her downside is much, much lower than Forrest's.

Winner, winner, chicken dinner.

Deep South Dish

I recently added this blog to my sidebar and it's given me one success after another in the kitchen. I think I've tried four of her recipes and each one has been a real winner. Last night I made Cast Iron Skillet Roasted Cut Up Chicken. Absolutely fabulous.

Thyme, tarragon, rosemary, garlic, lemon ... Yum!

When people go to her blog, they end up happy and full. I suspect that when people come here, they edge towards the door, mumble something about having left their glasses in the car and then bolt, wondering as they drive away what the laws are regarding involuntary institutionalization.

Oh well. I stand by my choices.

:-)

How To Reconcile Feelings And Logic

A follow on to yesterday's post.

(F)inding a balance between feelz and logic ... it's all hogwash in the end as feelz must win out, otherwise what's the point?

Let us take as an example, finding the perimeter of a triangle.

Logic: The perimeter is the distance around the outside of a shape. Since a triangle has 3 sides, this is simple. The perimeter is the sum of lengths of the three sides.

Feelings: 

How to resolve this: If you stand your ground and insist that the perimeter is equal to the sum of the lengths, you will be accused of hate speech, lagomorphophobia, a denial of bunny's reality, be excoriated on social media, have panelists on CNN and MSNBC drag your name through the mud and, in all likelihood, will be assaulted by members of ANTIFA and have your car set on fire. Since it's not often that you need to do anything with the perimeters of triangles, it's not like holding the line will bring you much benefit. Certainly nothing equivalent to all the costs.

In the end, your best bet is to issue a statement about the validity of bunny's sad and demand changes to our vocabulary as well as more funding for the study of sorrow in rabbits.

If that really bothers you, when you go home, you can always get drunk.

Learning Is Overrated

This is a follow-on to yesterday's sewer dive color commentary.

Race is comparatively trivial. A few cherry-picked stats showing your race is being mistreated and voila!, you've got an argument that can't be beat, so long as race is your differentiating factor. Depart from that and you might need to learn something.

In an NYT opinion piece, written by some professor whose head is filled with puffed rice cereal, lurks these tidbits.

During the 1980s and ’90s, a shift occurred in American culture; personal experience and testimony, especially of suffering and oppression, began to challenge the primacy of argument...Widespread caricatures of students as overly sensitive, vulnerable and entitled “snowflakes” fail to acknowledge the philosophical work that was carried out, especially in the 1980s and ’90s, to legitimate experience — especially traumatic experience — which had been dismissed for decades as unreliable, untrustworthy and inaccessible to understanding...The philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, best known for his prescient analysis in “The Postmodern Condition” of how public discourse discards the categories of true/false and just/unjust in favor of valuing the mere fact that something is being communicated, examined the tension between experience and argument in a different way.

There's a fig leaf of mumbling about finding a balance between feelz and logic, but it's all hogwash in the end as feelz must win out, otherwise what's the point? If you're going to listen to someone kvetch and then go with logic and knowledge, then the kvetching will have been dismissed as, well, "overly sensitive, vulnerable and entitled."

Giving traumatic experience the power to trump logic devalues knowledge, That's the beauty of our obsession with race and gender whether you're a black, lesbian Social Justice Warrior or some shaven, white ape longing for the Reich. You win the day when your side can muster more decibels of complaining than the other. At no point in time do you need to read, discuss or think. Meanwhile, Professor Puffed Wheat nods his head and talks about new directions in philosophical thought valuing "traumatic experience" more than ever before.

If that's the way things are going to go, it might be a good time to ditch the books and stock up on self-defense tools. Victory through yelling is just a hop, skip and a jump away from victory through gang fights.

On the plus side, less reading will give us more time for enjoying video games, weed and porn after we, err, resolve our differences.

Left, Right, It's All The Same

I hadn't planned on blogging about this today, but I spent about 20 minutes over coffee this morning sewer diving into a sequence of neo-Nazi timelines on Twitter. I clicked on one, just to get a flavor of it and then after scoping out his, scanned a few more for a while. It's no different from the racialist progressives I've been yelling about, living in Mein Kampf.

These guys were literally trying to live in Mein Kampf, each having at least one tweet wishing der Führer a happy birthday on that benighted anniversary.

I tried to step back and see what they had in common with their dance partners on the left and this was the best I could come up with: Arguing about race is easier than understanding ideas.

Islam is an idea. Judaism is an idea. Skin color isn't an idea. Debating ideas, even superficially, requires some amount of comprehension and opens you up to attack by people who know more than you about the subject. Race is comparatively trivial. A few cherry-picked stats showing your race is being mistreated and voila!, you've got an argument that can't be beat, so long as race is your differentiating factor. Depart from that and you might need to learn something. The horror.

And so it went in this particular sewer. Data taken from the census bureau or law enforcement sites was repeated over and over again along with ghastly images. Yep, the white race was oppressed or superior or something. It was hard to tell just what the point was. The only plus side was that these cretins had under 1000 followers each. The race-crazed dervishes on the left typically have at least an order of magnitude more reach on Twitter, due to their brain-dead narrative being repeated in the media and arts ad nauseam.

In any case, no one on either side has any need to think or learn so long as they stick with the melanin.

Why Han Solo Wasn't In Corporate Life

... because he solved his problems as they arose vice planning for them.

In the movies

(Millenium Falcon dodging asteroids and TIE fighters while Han tries to repair the hyperdrive)

Han: I don't know how we're going to get out of this one.

In a large corporation

(Han standing in the office of his manager)

Manager: SOLO! I want a presentation on how you're going to get out of this one on my desk for review by tomorrow at 9! It needs to cover schedule, budget, quality assurance, risks and process improvement iterations!

Han: (Sigh)

This One's A Real Drag

My cold is still dragging me down. The best I have to offer today is a Maddi lolcat. Enjoy!

Maddi may be on the job and eager to work, but I'm just hanging on today. Blargh.

Sphinx Moths Sipping

Thanks to our unusually wet winter, we've had an abnormally large springtime insect bloom. In addition to the Crane Flies I've photographed recently, there are Sphinx Moths a-plenty. I caught some of them sipping on flowers in our back yard last night. I shot it in 1080p and then edited it down to 720p to focus on the moths. It might be worth watching in full-screen mode. Enjoy!

Bill O'Reilly And Celebrity Psychosis

I'm listening to Mike Nesmith's autobiography, Infinite Tuesday, these days. Mike was one of the Monkees, in case you didn't know. The book is painfully honest and that gives it tremendous charm. More on that in another blog post, perhaps.

Mike coins the term, "Celebrity Psychosis," to describe what happens to you when you become a big star. You turn into something of a psychotic and it comes to dominate your life if you don't fight it tooth and nail, which most people can't. It's what causes celebrities to park their cars in fire lanes and be deeply offended when the car gets towed. It makes then scream at paparazzi and then pose for photographers to make sure their face is seen in all the right places. You take advantage of those around you because you feel entitled, entitled to everything.

Bill O'Reilly seems to have succumbed to CP. I have to admit that I never watched him, save for catching some Dennis Miller clips on YouTube. I loved his book, Killing Jesus, but I thought his rants and his show to be insufferable. As the stories come out about his behavior, which I must admit I'm watching only tangentially, they're echoes of stories Mike tells in his book about his own horrible actions. Bill O'Reilly never stopped himself because, well, "Don't you know who I am?"

One wonders who Mike or Bill or Bill Cosby, for that matter, might have become in the absence of celebrity. Decent people, probably. Mike Nesmith finds redemption and one hopes both of the Bills will as well.

In Infinite Tuesday, I've just reached the point where MTV was created. Interestingly enough, the genesis of it was this music video that Mike put together to play on European channels as a promo for one of his albums. Up to that point, pop clips, as they were called, were just the artist lip-synching to the song and had no action or plot at all. By comparison, Rio is positively inspired. Enjoy.

Spanish Flu

My cold is really dragging me down right now. One of my coworkers is starting to get it, too. Sometimes when this happens, I wonder if it's the start of an epidemic and we'll be patient zero in something like the Spanish Flu Epidemic of 1918. We won't, of course, but it makes you wonder what it was like as it started. You've got to figure that the first people who came down with it blew it off as just another flu or cold.

Living In Mein Kampf

From an article by Republican political operative Ed Rogers on the recent special Congressional election in Georgia wherein the Democrats, funded lavishly by outside money, fell just short of taking the seat, comes this sentence, the 4th one into the piece.

It seems strange, but today’s liberals invested a huge amount of money, media attention, and hopes and dreams in a 30-year-old straight, white Southern male.

Mein Kampf is a horrible book, and not just for the meat of its content. It's ignorant, bombastic and badly written, accurately reflecting the lousy mind from which it sprung. It also shows that no one felt comfortable editing der future-Führer's work. Had a decent editor taken a whack at it, they might have asked him to do more research, add counter-arguments and debate them and, for the love of God, delete whole sections of utter bollocks.

I feel like we're in that world right now, one of unedited, histrionic, race-crazed rubbish. When Ed Rogers, a guy who probably thinks oatmeal is too spicy, feels the need to whip out the white male card four sentences into an utterly forgettable piece, you know we've entered Spandau Prison and are all pacing back and forth in front of our secretaries, waving our arms and ranting wildly about der Volk.

All of us.

I have the beginnings of a cold today. Praise Jesus for Nyquil because that wonder drug helped me sleep last night and I might avoid the worst of the sickness. I just bought a spring suit (short-limbed wetsuit) and am looking forward to getting back into boogie boarding. At work, I'm thoroughly enjoying being more technical again and have found that I enjoy server configuration and programming. Newcastle United is threatening a late-season collapse that could keep them out of the English Premier League next year, which would be tragic for me.

There is nothing, nothing at all in my life that has anything even remotely to do with der Volk, be they schwarz, weiß oder braun.

What kind of strange, surreal world do we inhabit these days? It's like every story, every opinion piece has to trot out racial facts in the first few lines. Meanwhile, our daily lives are almost completely unaffected by it.

It's enough to make you stop reading and watching the stuff. Which I have done, save for some guilty pleasure time wherein I consume it like I would candy.

Prayer And Used Cars

So my friend who had cancer, for whom I was praying and had given up beer, turned out to be alright. The tumors were benign. The affected organ had to come out no matter what, but the results were the best possible. That got me to thinking.

Have you ever bought a used car and later wondered if you could have gotten it for less?

Maybe I didn't need to say a Rosary every day and give up beer. Maybe a Rosary every other day and just give up double IPAs...

Ayn Rand And The KKK

How's that for a click-baity title?

I'm currently thoroughly enjoying this biography of Nathan Bedford Forrest (NBF).

NBF was perhaps the most successful Confederate general of the war. If I recall the quote correctly, General Sherman once said, "Even if it took the lives of 10,000 men and bankrupted the Union, that man needs to be caught and killed!" NBF fought with crazed ferocity and was personally credited with killing 30 Union troopers in hand-to-hand combat. NBF's cavalry was feared and rightly so.

That's interesting, but it's not the point. Prior to the war, NBF was a slave trader in Memphis. With the supply of new slaves from Africa cut off as of the early 1800s, slaves were extremely valuable, fetching over $1000 each which today would be on the order of $30,000. The book details his trading and treatment of the slaves and it's quite illuminating. For example, he very rarely separated mothers and children. This was not due to a kind heart, it was a strictly business decision. Young children separated from their mothers did poorly, lowering their price. The same went for mothers whose children had been sold away.

Slaves were seen as livestock. Just as you wouldn't mistreat a prized horse, you certainly didn't mistreat a slave if it could be avoided, slaves being worth many multiples of almost any horse. That's not to say that punishment for infractions wasn't severe, it's just that the slaves were one of the largest investments, if not the largest investment of any enterprise.

Therein lies the connection to Ayn Rand's philosophies. Nathan Bedford Forrest was a true Randian. He did things for money and family and not much else. Up until his last years, he was an unbeliever and there's no indication in the book that he possessed any moral framework outside of his self-interest and his love for his family.

From an Objectivist point of view, why was what NBF did wrong? He was working to maximize economic value, wasn't he? He acted out of cold, impersonal logic and followed no superstitions. That it led him to trade in slaves, defend the Confederacy and become the first Grand Wizard of the KKK after the war seems immaterial to any objections a Randian might raise.

Wouldn't it have made for a more interesting novel if, in Atlas Shrugged, some of the people of Galt's Gulch had owned slaves? Without God and objective morality from a source outside ourselves, why shouldn't they?

Nathan Bedford Forrest fighting to defend his right to make dollars at the expense of human lives. Today, he might have been a board member at Planned Parenthood.

Peaceful Repose

I have a different post written in my head comparing Nathan Bedford Forrest and Ayn Rand, but I don't have the time to type it out, so this lovely photo of our Maximum Leader, Maddi, lying on a cherry floor will have to do. Enjoy!

Happy Easter!

What could be more Easter-y than a huge patch of lovely, yellow wildflowers? We saw these while taking the Catican Guards out for maneuvers at Mission Trails Park.

Enjoy and God bless!

Why Even Bother With A DSLR?

... when you can get shots like this with your phone.

I tried getting crane fly shots with my Nikon D60 Artillery Piece in macro mode and ended up disappointed. I took two hipshots with my Galaxy S7 and got this one.

I left it big, so I think it's worth a click. You can really see the structure of the wings and the segments on the body. Enjoy!

Ladies, It's Important To Let Your Man Pick The Restaurant

... and it should go something like this.

Wife: "Let's go out to eat tonight."

Me: "Great, let's do it!"

Wife: "You pick this time. What sounds good to you?"

Me: "How about Japanese?"

Wife: "No"

Me: "Southern?" 

Wife: "No."

Me: "BBQ?"

Wife: "No."

Me: "Indian?"

Wife: "No."

Me: "Korean?"

Wife: "No."

Me: "Steak?"

Wife: "No."

Me: "Cajun?"

Wife: "No."

Me: "Brew pub?"

Wife: "No."

Me: "Chinese?"

Wife: "No."

Me: "How about Italian?"

Wife: "But you hate Italian."

Me: "Yes, but I know it's something you like and at this point, I'm more worried about starving to death."

Wife: "OK, Italian it is!"

Me, under my breath: "Well, at least I got to pick. (Sigh)"

And that, my fairer readers, is how it's done. ;-)

Plastic Bags And Surgery

A dear friend of mine just went through kidney removal surgery. It had shown masses in it and, as organ cancers are really nasty, the doctors insisted on removal. He went through the surgery easily, still has one good kidney and, best of all, his pathology report came back benign. Woot!

He described the surgery to me. They make an incision under the kidney, wrap it in a plastic bag and then pull it out in the bag.

A plastic bag?!? How did they discover that? Can't you just see the whiteboard at the experimental surgery hospital?

Options for Kidney Removal

• Turkey baster
• BBQ tongs
• Garden hose
• Plastic bag

Yep, that's the one!

The Uncertainty Is The Policy

Jonah Goldberg, whom I respect immensely, approves of the the missile strike on Syria, but doesn't see anything but chaos, confusion and unfocused behavior after that.

If I may extend Krauthammer’s metaphor a bit: A staple of nearly every Western with a new sheriff in town is the nefarious saloon full of scoundrels and women of easy virtue. The new lawman comes in and fires a warning shot in the air. The piano player pauses. The bartender freezes.

And the sheriff says . . . ?

Well that’s just it, isn’t it? Trump got everyone’s attention with those 59 Tomahawk missiles. But he doesn’t seem interested in telling us how to interpret them.

As much as I love Jonah, I think he's missing the point. He's right in that there's no Trump policy; inconsistent statements by his people show that conclusively. What he's missing is that Trump's lack of core beliefs is itself a policy. His policy is whatever he wants right now. His willingness to use the awesome power of the US means his whims have enormous weight, hence China putting 100,000+ troops on the North Korean border.

To continue Jonah's analogy, the sheriff shoots some bad guy's horse, glares around, makes some crazy statements about not liking this or that and then goes back to his office. What does it all mean, the townsfolk wonder. Who knows? Just don't get on his bad side! You have no idea what might set him off, but you know he's perfectly willing to shoot your horse, your dog or even you.

Now I think it's unfair to say Trump has no policy. He doesn't work in detailed policy statements, he works in broad directions. If you doubt that, check out his appointments. They might not know the details of what he wants, but it's clear that jobs is the most important thing domestically and respect is the most important thing internationally.

Is that so bad?

Something like this.

The Great Crane Fly Invasion Of 2017

... is almost over. Due to our extraordinarily wet winter, we had a huge bloom of crane flies. I tried to get photos, but only a few turned out even halfway decent. The camera had a hard time focusing on their tiny bodies and I didn't manually focus because I'm lazy. Here's a selection of 6 photos, 2 from a live one on the wall and 4 from a dead one.

To me, they look like little caterpillars with wings and spindly legs. Which they are. As I understand it, as flyers, all they do is mate, lay eggs and die. They last for about a week in this state.

Aside: For those who have been kind to me and concerned about my recent catastrophe, I've managed to work it down from a grand piano being dropped on me to being hit in the head with a thrown brick. The key to defusing the problem was to be honest and gentle and realize that I could always get angry and vengeful tomorrow.

Anyway, enjoy the photos. Well, as much as anyone can enjoy pictures of dead, spindly insects.