Fox News Sucks

... and that's saying a lot as it's the best of the bunch. CNN and MSNBC are simply intolerable.

Sitting with mom while she passes, we've been watching her favorite channel, Fox News. She's in a hospital bed in her living room with the TV right in front of her. It's a measure of where she is in life because she never watched TV and never stayed in bed. She was always out accomplishing something productive. There's even a scholarship named after her at a local junior college. She was that kind of woman.

Anywho, as much as I agree politically with mom, which is 90+%, I've discovered I can't stand Fox News. Even Tucker, whose speeches I love and whose YouTube snippets I devour with relish, is horrible to watch. I hate the whole circus. It's just rabid, clickbait panting. I want to be cooking or gardening or doing something, anything while listening to redneck music instead. I do like to watch football and soccer, but news shows where they sit at a table and discuss what Important People did today make me itch.

The Important People aren't important. You're important. What you accomplish is important. Screw what they think and say. You'd be far better off learning to make sauces or working out or praying the Rosary than consuming that trash.

After walking through the meaning of life on this blog for more than 13 years, watching those dingledorks yap is painful. At the end of their shows, no one is enlightened. The debt is still a tsunami off at sea, hurtling towards us. Kids from non-traditional homes are still screwed. Our now morally-untethered culture is still thrashing around in the dark, discovering new perversions to accept and praise. Meanwhile, people watch those worse-than-useless shows thinking something crucial is being said.

Last night, I wondered if social media and the search for eyeballs online and on screen, is a lizard-brain craving for which we have no antidote. Are followers and clicks and ratings the killer virus that will wipe out civilization?

Wild.

Meanwhile, there are dying moms to comfort and caregivers to console and deceased dads to respect. Out of love for all of those and all of you, I'll leave you with this, a photo of a nun with a cat on her back. Details here. That photo is what life is all about in all ways imaginable. It shows love and sacrifice and piety and effort and so much more. Hurrah for nuns! Hurrah for cats!

Love you all. Have a great weekend.

Intermittent Blogging

Momma kitteh fell and broke her hip last week. She gets out of the hospital today. She's 90 and as far as I can tell, there is no way she will ever stand up again, much less walk. The break was pretty bad and required the insertion of a rod and screws. She's 90 and could barely walk even with a walker before the fall.

She's now jacked up constantly on serious morphine doses for the pain. She's not the kind to complain and sitting with her at the hospital is the first time I've ever seen her cry and scream from it.

She's going home to Hospice care. She'd been on Hospice Palliative, which is long term, prior to the fall, but this certainly looks like straight-up Hospice now.

To quote Han Solo, "I don't know how we're going to get out of this one."

Sometimes you don't.

I'll catch you all on the flip side.

The International Symbol For Jeffrey Epstein

I Don't Buy The Welfare Queen Argument

... and I also don't buy the idea that government policy drives out-of-wedlock births.

Susie likes Bobby. She likes him very much. Susie also likes babies. She likes them very much. That tramp, Heather, is always hanging around Bobby, but that idiot is so blind he can't see that Heather is trying to steal Bobby away. Men! Plus, Heather doesn't even really like Bobby, she's just looking for a quick hit of attention.

Susie goes to church. Well, she did when she was younger, but when she moved away to college, she stopped because no one else went. Susie wants to sleep with Bobby, but she also really wants him to pledge his heart to her.

Susie has seen some of the old movies her mom and dad like. They're horribly boring and totally unrealistic, but sometimes, there's a cute part where the couple in love gets married and then sleep together. But not before. They don't move in together in those old movies. 

Let me know when the Republican tax cuts for families or Democrat plans for slavery, err, cradle-to-grave entitlements that only coincidentally sound exactly like Jeff Davis' defense of the Peculiar Institution show up in the story.

See, Susie loves Bobby. Susie needs Bobby. She wants Bobby forever and ever and ever. She wants to have Bobby's babies. 

Bobby is a boy, so Bobby needs Susie, but not in the same way. With that strumpet Heather hanging around, Susie has to play the game everyone else does. If she doesn't, Bobby will probably get his jollies with Heather. Once that happens, Bobby will be lost to Susie forever.

Susie is just one girl in an ocean of girls, some of them virtual. Susie may recall some blah-blah about chastity from Paul's Letter to the Thistletownians, or whoever that was, and she may even crave purity, but at any given moment, that craving for purity gets stacked up against the desire for Bobby and the threat of Heather and porn.

That is only going to end up one way.

Of course, if Heather was shunned and ridiculed for being a tramp, she wouldn't be a threat. If porn was universally condemned and its producers tarred and feathered, it wouldn't be a threat. Susie could relax a bit and have a chance to tease Bobby into popping the question. But this is 2019 and it is America and we're all open and cool with porn and sleeping around even if individual girls would really rather not. 

Oh well. Too bad for Susie.

Republicans: Susie, we'll give three of these a year to Bobby as tax cuts for families and he'll propose!

Democrats: We'll give three of these a year to your daycare provider and you can go work for Megacorp editing spreadsheets! No need for Bobby!

Both, in unison: And it won't cost anyone a thing because we can print more of them any time we want!

Too Many Dogs

5 is too many. Take it from me. I'm watching 5 this weekend in addition to taking care of my mom who is having a rough time. Wife kitteh is off in Arizona at a friend's wedding. I had planned to go, but dogs and momma kitteh intervened.

At the park with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 dogs. One is deaf and wanders off in the wrong direction and one is utterly undisciplined. The three original Catican Guards are awesome.

Evangelicals And ABC

Evangelicals, for the most part, acknowledged Trump's moral shortcomings and voted for him anyway. They were afraid of being slowly, culturally exterminated by the progressives. They thought that Hillary would have continued down the same path as Obama.

Perhaps ABC News scotched the Epstein expose three years ago for similar reasons, even though they acknowledged Epstein and Clinton's moral shortcomings. Maybe they were afraid of white supremacists being organized by Trump into ... the things into which white supremacists organize themselves.

Did both sides fear existential threats?

For my part, I have no idea what it is the progressives fear. I mean real things, not inchoate societal blobs. For the life of me, I can't find anyway to resolve their logical contradictions and overcome mountains of contradictory data like high school test scores. On the other hand, with things like the drag queen story hour stuff and aggressive pursuit of cake-makers, I do see an existential threat to Christians.

Doesn't that make the argument all about proving your hypothesis?

Ignorance And A Megaphone

What if they don't know anything and struggle with critical thinking? The writers at the Huffington Post, I mean. What if they're super-emotional and prone to spazzing out on their keyboards? Like this.

There's no need to click on the link and read the article, Little Greta's sneer captures the essence of the thing.

Scientists say we're all going to die and we need to ban stuff and it might be too late and blah blah blah. There's not a single mention of China in the article.

China's emissions are the only thing that matters when it comes to Global Warming Climate Change. Everything else is noise in the data.

As I continue to try to puzzle out just what is going on around me, the only thing I can think about the HuffPo and the other outlets breathlessly warning us that we're climate-doomed is that they've never seen this graph or if they have, they don't understand it.

Well, that and lots of the scientists like their research funding and the politicians want to grab more power, of course.

Kavanaugh, Epstein And The End

I asked this question back in 2018 about the Brett Kavanaugh attacks in the media.

What are we doing?

Honestly, what are we doing now? By all accounts, the guy has lived his life like Sir Galahad. Some far-left extremist says he felt her up in high school 35 years ago at a place she can't name with people she can't name at a time she can't name and we paused for more than 10 minutes to consider her accusations? It should have delayed things only long enough to stop laughing.

Now it turns out that 3 years ago, during the campaign, while they were howling about Trump's Access Hollywood tape, ABC had evidence and witnesses showing how Elites, including Bill Clinton, were raping Epstein's child sex slaves and they spiked the story.

OK, that's it. They're done. There is no way to recover from this. It's simply a total waste of time to watch the news, read the newspapers or click around the media's websites. All you know is that they are manipulating you by picking and choosing what they show.

Whether it's true or not, it's all fake news.

The Fences Are Down

... and society is finding out that there are no boundaries to behavior or belief.

Alice Roberts is a professor with an excellent resume. From her website:

I make programmes and write books about human anatomy, physiology, evolution, archaeology and history. I passionately believe that universities are about generating and spreading knowledge to the widest possible audience.

I’m a medical doctor, and went on to become a university lecturer. I taught human anatomy to students and doctors, and did research into human origins and disease in ancient skeletons - which formed the basis for my PhD.

She has also discarded rational thought when it comes to the transgendered.

I’ll bet your school biology told you species couldn’t interbreed and have fertile offspring either... biology is, quite simply, messier and more wonderful than some people would like it to be. Ask a clown fish!

— Prof Alice Roberts (@theAliceRoberts) November 4, 2019

Here, Alice is comparing the mental illness of transgendered people with the biological reality of clown fish changing sex.

If you were wondering about the difference, clown fish can perform as their new sex after the transition. The mentally ill cannot. That's biology. That's science. That's fact. Alice, who by all rights ought to know better and in her heart, surely does, denies this. Her analogy is ludicrous, prima facie.

How have we gotten to the point where a legitimate, educated, accomplished science-woman is deliberately spouting twaddle and then defending it online? When she can't defend it, she blocks people who try to engage in rational debate.

You didn’t mention humans...

— Prof Alice Roberts (@theAliceRoberts) November 4, 2019

After which she blocked him.

I would argue that she blocked him because his line of questioning leads to a fence, a boundary on human behavior. She's not defending transgender people so much as she's defending the right to do whatever you want, say whatever you want and espouse whatever you want without contradiction or limits to your actions. I don't mean First Amendment stuff here, I mean disagreement or disapproval.

No one knows where this is going to lead. Like Modern Monetary Theory, discarding objective reality and rational conversation can lead anywhere.

We now allow sexual perverts ready access to our children. When we discarded rational conversation, we found we lost any reason why not.

Happy Backy

... is flowering backy!

Not wacky backy, mind you.

My Cubans have all got flower buds. They hit 3 1/2' tall and now have decided to flower.

Obama And Pope Francis

Two data points.  Connect them as you will.

Whatever the promises the Vatican got from the Chinese government in their recent accord seem to be ignored as persecution of Catholics is increasing in China. https://t.co/BbSlqYHqgS

— 🍂Fr. Matthew Schneider, LC🍁 (@FrMatthewLC) November 3, 2019

And this from Richard Fernandez.

"I still say Kayla should be here, and if Obama had been as decisive as President Trump, maybe she would have been," Marsha Mueller said, referring to the death of her daughter at the hands of ISIS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. "After Kayla's death, the Muellers became outspoken critics of the American government's handling of its foreign hostages. They had been encouraged to keep her captivity secret, and discouraged from attempting to free her or pay a ransom."

Leaving aside the question of whether Obama ever had a good tactical option at rescuing Kayla Mueller, "decisive" is probably the wrong word to characterize the former president's style. Obama knew what he wanted and valued signaling and appearances in a sincere way. He was always signaling. If the Muellers were instructed not to speak it was so as not to jam his carefully crafted messages. By treating Bin Laden's corpse reverently; by an excruciating choice of words and many other ways he was signaling. Always signaling, which he saw as an important part of his job.

To be fair, Obama had a point. Messaging is certainly an important part of statesmanship. What he never quite accepted was that his signals never had the intended effect. Baghdadi was a thug and Obama's punctilio never made it past the brutal filter. Like Dr. Arthur Carrington from the movie "The Thing from Another World," he was always trying to reason with the monster, convinced that words would win the day, little realizing it would not work.

My own take is Matthew 7:15-20.

“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but underneath are ravenous wolves. By their fruits you will know them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Just so, every good tree bears good fruit, and a rotten tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a rotten tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire. So by their fruits you will know them.

Tobacco Shoots Up Fast

I'm estimating that my crop is growing a bit more than 1/2" per day. The biggest ones are now 3 1/2 feet tall. The leaves are massive, too.

We've had a Santa Ana recently, which means the air is hot and dry. The tobacco didn't take kindly to that and some of the leaves burned and withered. Not to worry, there are tons of them that didn't get damaged. I learned the hard way that on dry days, I need to check the plants and water them by hand if they start to wilt.

A Traditional Vs SJW Test

I'd like to suggest that there are two explanations for why groups of people fail.

1. Their culture is a dumpster fire, the collective product of bad, personal decisions made, in a great part, as a result of cultural pressures. We'll call this the Traditional hypothesis.
2. They are victims of oppression. An oppressor class exists and takes all kinds of steps to make sure the oppressed fail. We'll call this the SJW hypothesis.

You can test these two hypotheses relatively simply. Take your data, any data you like, and divide it according to group populations. 

In one group are the homogeneous communities where there is almost no mixing the oppressors and the oppressed. Discard any sets where the dominant group does not also control the levers of power. That is, you don't want a set where the oppressed are the vast majority, but the oppressors still hold most of the political offices.

In the other group are the heterogeneous communities where the oppressed and oppressors live together. It's best if the oppressors outnumber the oppressed and they control the levers of power.

Take a look at the data scoreboard for these two sets. 

Under the Traditional hypothesis, you would expect performance to be roughly the same for both sets or superior for the heterogeneous communities. That would indicate that the underlying group cultures can be modified by the collective culture of the mixed sets or that the underlying group culture dominates. If either condition holds, it shows that oppression is not the dominant factor.

Under the SJW hypothesis, you would expect performance of the oppressed groups to excel in those sets that are numerically dominated and run by the oppressed group. This would indicate that, in the absence of oppressors oppressing, the oppressed would flourish.

You can do this with historical data, too. Going back in time, America was worse for the oppressed  groups. I don't think anyone disputes that. If the SJW hypothesis holds, then the performance differences between the homogeneous and heterogeneous groups would grow as you went back in time.

Of course, none of this matters if you've discarded objective facts and logic. In that case, hypothesis testing itself becomes impossible. If you held to the SJW hypothesis and the data disproved it, then the only way to continue to hold onto it would be to discard objective facts and logic.

Busy Day

Too busy to blog, but after today, I'll have more time on my hands.

Bonus thought - If cultural appropriation is to be avoided, what do we do with New Orleans? 

Come To Gormok State Where Everyone Gets A Diploma!

Dig this.

For students who fear they can’t get into college with mediocre SAT or ACT scores, the tide is turning at a record number of schools that have decided to accept all or most of their freshmen without requiring test results.

Meanwhile, two Ivy League schools have decided that many of their graduate school programs do not need a test score for admissions, fresh evidence of growing disenchantment among educational institutions with using high-stakes tests as a factor in accepting and rejecting students.

Next up: Easier and easier grading until these universities look like Camden High School.

Camden High has horrific stats. 

• Only 4% of the students can read anywhere near grade level 
• None can do geometry 
• 2% can handle algebra 

The kids aren't even bothering to show up. 91% are chronically absent, which means they've missed at least 15 days of school during the year. 32% of them have been suspended.

On the plus side, 54% of them graduate.

What other result would you expect? If they didn't do well on the standardized tests and that's considered oppressive and racist, what happens when Gormok State flunks them? That could only mean that State is now oppressive and racist and we can't have that.

On the other hand, we could address the root cause: family breakdown.

Naaaaahhhhhh.

Slavery Ruined It For Everyone

I'm currently reading Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington. It ought to be mandatory reading for freshmen or sophomores in high school. It's that good.

One of the things he discusses early in the book is how slavery ruined everyone it touched, whether they were slaves or slave-owners. The slaves had no ability to manage their own lives, raised as chattel with their existence planned out for them. The wealthy whites had no useful skills as they were taught to look down on manual labor.

Consequently, when the Civil War ended and slavery with it, after a day or two of celebrating, the former slaves looked on the future with dread. What were they supposed to do now? Many of the wealthy whites lost their fortunes as they had no way of earning a living nor the drive to cultivate the necessary skills to do so.

I'm always amazed when people say that America was built on slavery. They must never have studied the institution and what it did to the cultures who practiced it. If slavery was the key to wealth, then Mauritania, which only outlawed slavery in 1981, would be a global superpower. In fact, according to the Guardian, slavery is still practiced today there. Their per capita income is $4,500. Unsurprisingly, slavery hasn't helped them.

The Big Dude. Get his book. Read it.

Loving Your Enemies

At the Men's Cursillo Retreat a few weekends back, during one of the talks, a story was related that really hit me. It went something like this.

The speaker, we'll call him Joe to keep him anonymous, worked for a large firm. His boss, we'll call her Mary, was a major jerk. No one liked Mary. She made life miserable for everyone. Joe had the habit of praying in the car on the way to work. One day, he blurted out, "God, I know I'm supposed to love everyone, but I absolutely hate Mary!"

God relied to him, "I love Mary as much as I love you."

Whoa, dude. That's some pretty heavy stuff right there. Joe thought about this and realized it was true. If God loved Mary, who was he to hate her?

Joe tried to change his attitude towards her. It didn't make her any nicer, she was still a world-class jerk. Over time, however, Joe found his feelings towards Mary changing and his kindness became authentic. Eventually, Mary was fired for breaking the jerk-o-meter. As she packed up her desk, devastated, Joe went over to her and offered her condolences and regret. Mary told him she knew she had been difficult and apologized.

Mary may or may not have changed after that, but Joe did. It finally hit him just what it means that The Big Dude loves us all the same.

Me, I need to work on that.

Putting Lipstick On A Flower

... is about as useful as putting lipstick on a pig.

My Photoshop skills are minimal, but I keep trying to make my photos bounce. Clearly it's going to take more work than I've put in so far. I took a couple of photos of the flowers that are hanging out with my tobacco plants* yesterday and played with them in Photoshop this morning.

Nature beats KT again. Like that's a surprise.

My doctored photo, with emphasis on the reds.

The original in all its floweriffic glory.

It's not nice to fool Mother Nature and it's not nice to mess with photos of her creations, either.

* - Several of the tobacco plants are now near or over 3' tall. They're growing very fast.

Gender Isn't Portable

I was having a conversation on sex vs. gender recently when the person asserting there are all kinds of genders out there said that sex was biology and gender was societal. It occurred to me, then, that gender is not portable over time or location.

Here is a (partial?) list of genders available on Facebook. They include:

• Agender
• Androgyne
• Bigender
• Gender Fluid
• Gender Nonconforming
• Gender Variant
• Genderqueer
• Neutrois
• Non-binary
• Pangender

While you might be able to claim to be Genderqueer in San Francisco in 2017 and Neutrois in Portland in 2019, I don't think you'd get very far telling the people of Nanking in 1928 that you were Pangender. Further, I doubt that any of the above would be recognized as legitimate in Nairobi in any year.

A characteristic that dissolves as soon as you step off an airplane is no characteristic at all.

A characteristic that can vanish next year because society changed its mind is no characteristic at all.

And remember as you watch the hilarious video below, all cultures are equally valid.

Losing Touch With The Past

... also means losing touch with reality. 2019 America is wealthy to the point that our schools dive deep into twaddle. In 1881 America, they did not.

Asou Inoue of Ball State, 2019:

“We are all implicated in white supremacy,” Inoue said during his presentation, co-hosted by Ball State’s English department, university writing program, and Office of Inclusive Excellence.

“This is because white supremacist systems like all systems reproduce themselves as a matter of course,” he said. “This includes reproduction of dominant, white, middle-class, monolingual standards for literacy and communication.”

White language supremacy, according to Inoue, is “the condition in classrooms, schools, and society where rewards are given in determined ways to people who can most easily reach them, because those people have more access to the preferred and embodied white language practices, and part of that access is a structural assumption that what is reachable at a given moment for the normative, white, monolingual English user is reachable for all.”

Booker T. Washington, describing the founding of the Tuskegee Institute in 1881.

In the midst of all the difficulties which I encountered in getting the little school started, and since then through a period of nineteen years, there are two men among all the many friends of the school in Tuskegee upon whom I have depended constantly for advice and guidance; and the success of the undertaking is largely due to these men, from whom I have never sought anything in vain. I mention them simply as types. One is a white man and an ex-slaveholder, Mr. George W. Campbell; the other is a black man and an ex-slave, Mr. Lewis Adams. These were the men who wrote to General Armstrong for a teacher.

Mr. Campbell is a merchant and banker, and had had little experience in dealing with matters pertaining to education. Mr. Adams was a mechanic, and had learned the trades of shoemaking, harness-making, and tinsmithing during the days of slavery. He had never been to school a day in his life, but in some way he had learned to read and write while a slave. From the first, these two men saw clearly what my plan of education was, sympathized with me, and supported me in every effort. In the days which were darkest financially for the school, Mr. Campbell was never appealed to when he was not willing to extend all the aid in his power. I do not know two men, one an ex-slaveholder, one an ex-slave, whose advice and judgment I would feel more like following in everything which concerns the life and development of the school at Tuskegee than those of these two men.

I have always felt that Mr. Adams, in a large degree, derived his unusual power of mind from the training given his hands in the process of mastering well three trades during the days of slavery. If one goes to-day into any Southern town, and asks for the leading and most reliable coloured man in the community, I believe that in five cases out of ten he will be directed to a Negro who learned a trade during the days of slavery.

At a comfy college in 2019, Asou seeks to eliminate consistency of language because he's obsessed with race. 16 years removed from the Civil War, in the middle of Alabama, Booker T. sought to teach useful skills and was not obsessed with race.

Just look at him. He even dressed like a white supremacist!