Getting Old

... isn't for the weak, as my mother used to say.

Nor are long, intimate blog posts. I'm sorry for the length of this one. I hope it's worthwhile to you. I wrote it to describe failures in my personal thought processes. This is about love, it's not another Cassandrafest.

As I near full retirement, I keep wondering what I'm going to do with my life. I'll have time to delve into a new career. My father retired from the Air Force, built a house, most of it with his bare hands, and then became an artist. Our home is full of his paintings. When I retire, I'll be a bit older than he was, but I'll still have time to explore new things.

More important than a second vocation is my true vocation. What is it that God is calling me to do with my time? Up until recently, that's really troubled me. In my career, I've always tried to accomplish big things and sometimes I succeeded. Sometimes I got fired. Sometimes I succeeded and then I got fired. It was all good fun. 

I tried to fit serving God in my retirement into that model. I was going to something really big for Him. Writing, lecturing, pestering people on the street, I was going to change things. I kept using that as my template for my planned service and I kept coming up dry. Oh, I've got book and lecture ideas a-plenty and I could see myself weaseling my way into one of those Catholic evangelism companies, but it didn't feel right.

I was never a big one for miracles or angels or even the Holy Spirit. The whole mysticism part of the faith was difficult to the point of being balderdash for me. Then I experienced a miracle and it changed everything. Since then, I've experienced one more. I promise I will share them here some time soon.

What I discovered from those two miracles was that they made me feel a certain way. That's what was missing from my plans to be Mr. Super Important Catholic when I retired. My plans were logical, but they weren't True.

Driving through one of San Diego's druggy haunts last week, I saw a woman drawing something in the gutter with a stick. I was stopped at a light directly across from her, so I had a chance to watch her. She drew for a bit, then she groomed the stick, removing some peeling bark, then she talked to the stick or perhaps just into the air. She was clearly blasted out of her mind.

I've had family members blow their brains out with drugs. I've watched it up close. I have Catholic friends who serve the addict community and I wondered if that's what I should do, but it didn't feel right. I have other Catholic friends who visit people in prison. I've felt guilty that I wasn't doing it with them, but it didn't feel right, either.

The incident with the addicted woman made me realize what my calling was. I knew what did make me feel deep emotions. I want to spend time with lonely, old people. 

I devoted a large part of my life to making my parents feel loved. My siblings were 1960s radicals with all of the ignorant, hateful, judgmental selfishness that went along with that. I guess that's why I blog the way I do here. Anyway, I was the one who loved the folks. As they got older, their emotional needs became greater as their other faculties faded. They were a pain in the neck sometimes, but loving them was its own reward.

After my father died, my mother fell and broke her neck. She spent time in ICU and then time recovering in a nursing home. We visited every day. There were folks there who had no one to visit them at all. They moved my heart in a way that the addicts and the prisoners have not. That's what God is calling me to do.

Visiting the lonely elderly meets exactly zero criteria of my plans to be a bigshot, Catholic bloviator. It's all about giving love to single individuals, people who won't influence a thing. They'll have no followers on Twitter, no connections for speaking opportunities, no chances to parlay their relationships into future growth. Loving them will be as small an act as it is possible to imagine, but there you have it.

Just like I know I experienced miracles, I know this is what I am called to do in the future.

Hmm. I wonder if I can find a lonely, old literary agent and kill two birds with one ... NO! Stop it, you idiot! ;-)

Love you guys. Hope you have a great day.

Totally unrelated to the post, here's a big, fat, Nankeen boll. I love how they're so soft and fuzzy. They're like rabbit fur. This was the last of two bolls on my final Nankeen. I plucked it and then pulled the plant. I'm down to my last three cotton plants now, hoping the cayenne will take advantage of the lebensraum to produce more fruit.

On The Road To Roadlessness

In Milwaukee, several wards recorded more votes than registered voters. That it happened at all shows that the vote counting system lacks basic safeguards. It's inconceivable that someone designing a voting system wouldn't check voter registration vs. vote. 

Of course, that assumes that the people designing the system have an objective moral compass. Cheating is wrong. Lying is wrong. Stealing is wrong. That sort of thing.

This summer, we discovered that stealing isn't wrong, so long as it's done by the right people and the Elites can shape it into their religious narrative of racial social justice. Now we've seen that inventing votes out of thin air isn't wrong because Orange Man Bad. Earlier, Cardi B showed us that there's no difference between being a strong, black woman and behaving like a dog in heat.

I've got a friend who likes to complain about capitalism. They see greed everywhere and it bothers them deeply. They've worked a lot of business deals and claim that such deals are less honest than they used to be. Well, what of it? If it's OK to cheat in elections and it's OK to loot businesses, why isn't it OK to get more money for yourself by any means necessary?

Herein lies the problem with subjective morality. Once the lines aren't just blurred, but erased, there's nothing to slow down anyone's behavior. Cuties is child porn? What of it? Some people like doing it with kids and if the kids say it's OK, then it's no big deal. We're loading up our children with debt? What of it? We're just being compassionate. If it bothers you, you're the one with the problem, the problem of being judgmental.

If you throw out one dimension of objective morality for the sake of, say, racial social justice, who are you to say that someone else throwing out a different dimension so they can send their kids to an expensive, private college is behaving badly?

We all take moral shortcuts. However, in order to see them as shortcuts, we need to have a moral roadmap in the first place. Once the roadmap is erased, then they aren't shortcuts any more, but simple cost-benefit decisions where both the cost and the benefit are strictly personal. 

Stealing the election isn't an outlier, it's just another stop on the road to roadlessness.

Mogadishu is a warning, not a how-to guide.

What Happens When You Don't Know How Anything Works

Well, that was the worst possible outcome to the election. Trump won, but a couple of key states, where Trump was ahead substantially, stopped counting ballots in the middle of the night and then suddenly found lots more ballots. The details were reported by a news media that has proven itself totally untrustworthy.

In a deeply divided, heavily armed country, we used the least reliable method of voting and informed people of the results with a completely unreliable press. You'd have to be either a total genius or an Ivy League idiot to have come up with this.

It's nothing new, however. The Elites thought they could accuse cops in their cities of being racist thugs. When the cops walked off the job, the Elites thought that the black neighborhoods would behave like the characters in their favorite civil rights movies. "But Mr. Johnson, I just want to be the best badminton player I can be," says the young black man in a suit and tie, standing in front of the white, Southern, racist coach. When crime spiked, the Elites wondered where the cops went.

And the whole time, the news media told you it wasn't happening.

Then there was the way the tech giants and the news media hid the Hunter Biden influence-peddling scandal. It didn't happen and it wasn't a big deal anyway that it did. Also, shut up.

So here we are, with an election result that will most likely go to the courts and one side will never trust, all because the Elites, who barely know which end of the garden hose to screw on the spigot, thought they would fight white supremacist leprechauns and a virus with mail-in votes that are utterly untrustworthy.

My own mail-in ballot required only my signature on the back, a signature that no one will check. This is all trash. No one has any idea who really won.

Way to go, idiots. The only solution I can think of is separation. The sooner we split up into Eliteland and Normalland, the better. What we have right now is total madness.

It all worked so well in the faculty lounge.

Update: Dig the vote harvesting in Wisconsin. This is a total scam. Derek Duck on Twitter has a great thread on the topic. 

It doesn't matter any more what is true because no one can trust anything.

Worshipping Politics

Last night, we watched the New York Giants hand the Monday Night Football game to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers through lousy quarterback play. As a New Orleans Saints and Drew Brees fan, it was nauseating to see Tom Brady, whose deal with the devil apparently is still in effect, do well. Blargh.

During the game, there was at least one ad telling you to go vote. It was full of NFL players telling you how important it was. 

Earlier in the day, wife kitteh and I were stopped at a stoplight and saw a homeless woman on a bike fiddling around with a stick. She drew something in the gutter with it, she groomed it and she talked to it. She was clearly drugged out of her mind.

The "compassionate" crowd tells me that we need more money for affordable housing to take care of the homeless. My eyes tell me that the homeless are drug zombies. If housing was free, they might not be in it. Their eyes tell them that, too. "Compassion" is nothing more than a dishonest advertising campaign asking us to trade our freedom, in the form of money and power, for what they tell us will be care for the indigent. We might as well be trading it for a bag of colored, glass beads.

If we thought more and felt less, we'd realize that handing politicians money and power isn't going to do a thing for that zonked-out woman. Is voting the most important thing she can do?

We also saw an ad about consolidating student loan debt. Kids who owed six figures on degrees they may or may not have finished, fretted on camera about the financial millstones around their necks. Was voting the most important thing they could have done four years ago?

I could go on, but you get the picture. To me, the constant stress on the importance of voting suggests a submissive life. That one tick mark, made every other year, will be of huge consequence! After you do that, you can go back to your hovel and await the decisions of the Elites. They'll take care of you, just like they took care of rural Pennsylvania.

How Much Risk Is How Soon

Everyone else is losing their minds over the election, so I figured I'd deviate to something else entirely. I had a discussion with family members yesterday wherein, considering my long track record of detonating atomic bombs in my life, they figured my radioactivity-scarred body might hold some wisdom about money. Naturally, I spoke at great length and only stopped when I saw them making poorly-concealed throat-slitting gestures to each other.

The conversation branched all over the place, so I thought it worthwhile to encapsulate my thinking here.

Basic Philosophy

Money gives you freedom. It gives you freedom to make choices and freedom from anxiety. That's it. That's all it does. Pursuing it for its own sake is a path to madness. If you're doing that, stop it right now. Looking back on my life, I don't wish I had made or saved more money, I wish I had made or saved more relationships. Don't let it come between you and your loved ones. If they express financial anxiety to you about risks or getting a late start on investments, take them seriously. Believe me, those atomic bombs are e-x-p-e-n-s-i-v-e.

Why Dave Ramsey?

I like Dave Ramsey's baby steps. I don't think they're optimal, I think they're good enough and that's perfect for my philosophy. You can follow them, knowing they'll get the job done and not have to think about it after that. Here they are in detail, listed below in brief.

1. Save $1000
2. Pay off all debts, smallest to largest
3. Save 3-6 months living expenses
4. Put away 15% for retirement
5. Save money for your kids' college expenses
6. Pay off your home early
7. Party on, dude!

I've read a lot of criticisms about these steps and they all amount to finding ways to make your money numbers biggerer by some pointlessly incremental amount. I don't do that. All I want is a sensible plan that allows me to follow it and not think any more about it. My life isn't about money, my life is about raising cotton, photographing the stars, cooking fried foods and making my family wince.

Dave's plan is good enough.

Investments

How soon is how much risk. If you won't need the money for a decade or more, then you can cope with a lot of risk. If you might need the money next week, you don't want any risk. Risk means return.

Retirement

For retirement, I recommend SPX. The chart below tells you why.

You can see the Dot Com Bust, the Real Estate Bust and the Wuhan Flu Bust on this chart. All that matters is the start and the end. The busts can be safely ignored if your time horizon is 5-10 years.

Including the massive hit during the Great Depression in the 1930s, SPX has returned between 8% and 10% per year. Set it and forget it. Why are you thinking about money? Stop it. Go live your life.

Some people will recommend individual stocks. I'm not a fan of that because I'm too lazy to track them. My father was the greatest stock picker I have ever met, but he had an MBA from Harvard, back when they still taught things, and he spent the last 60 years of his life learning how to pick stocks. His returns regularly blew away the stock brokers who handled his investments.

If you want to spend time every day reading the WSJ after 5 years of getting an instinctive feel for financial statements, go for it. Me, I'm going to pretend I'm from Dixie in the kitchen and in the garden, y'all.

Emergency Savings

The cash you might need next week because boll weevils wiped out your crop or your neighbor had too much watermelon wine and plowed his F-150 into the side of your house ought to be in checking or savings. Forget the interest rates, just leave it liquid so you can pull it out. Emergency savings is there to sooth anxieties. Worrying about returns is more anxiety. Stop it. Admit that it will sit there and do nothing and go back to your life.

Bonus Suggestion: Take some time to write down your biggest fears. Is it fire, flooding, termites* or something else? Research what it will cost to cope with these so you can pick your savings level with confidence. Maybe beefing up your insurance policy makes more sense than stashing more cash in the bank. Insurance is there as a big-time backstop for your savings. In addition to being a grand national champion stock picker, my dad was a maniac for insurance for just that reason.

Saving For Big Purchases

This is a meh spot for me. I'm with Dave on this one. My intermediate investment was always to pay down my mortgage. I never tried out corporate or government bond funds as a 3-7 year investment because it was too much work. If I was saving for a $5,000-$30,000 purchase, I would simply put it in a savings account in the bank, separate from checking. I did that because, as Dave says, spending and savings are more emotional than logical. Money in savings, KT no touch! Money in checking, KT spend!

These days, neither checking nor savings earn a thing, so it's all a wash, but separating it provided the emotional discipline I needed. ... OK, I just checked Wells Fargo's rates for their Certificates of Deposit, wherein you stash your cash for a specified period of time and they are practically zero. CDs are a terrible investment.

I suppose that if you couldn't stand not earning a bit on your investment, you could put it in a bond fund. I never had the money available to do that, so it's not something I understand all that well. Shrug.

Summary

Pick a simple plan, like Dave's, and follow it. Then stop thinking about money and go live your life. Happiness is not correlated with money.

A 2010 study out of Princeton University found that there’s a correlation between happiness and wealth, to a point of about $75,000 per year. When people make more than $75,000 a year, their happiness doesn’t increase...

Lastly, people are more important than things, even green things made of paper with curvy, multi-digit numbers in the corners. Go live. 

* - Termites are no joke in SoCal. In the South, it's wood rot, near the wilderness in the Southwest, it's brush fires and up where the Yankees live, it's the double threat of bad food and sullen people. 

Covid Ain't What It Used To Be

Check out the shapes* of these two curves.

Daily new cases across the US.

Daily deaths across the US.

This tells me our relationship with the virus has changed significantly. Its lethality has declined over time. During the first spike in April, idiots like Governor Cuomo took the worst possible actions and stuffed sick people right into the middle of the most vulnerable populations - nursing homes. The result was a slaughter.

By the time of the George Floyd riot spike, in June and July, we had learned quite a bit and the death toll only rose slightly. Social distancing and the vulnerable taking steps to protect themselves probably saved many lives.

Now we're in the cold weather spike. In terms of viral exposure, the worst place to be is indoors with others. All the masks and social distancing in the world won't save you if you're in an enclosed area with an infected person for a long period of time. Viruses are highly-efficient spreading machines. Spreading is what they do.

Killing isn't what they do any more, at least not with the efficiency of the Cuomo-ignorance era. Again, it looks to me like the population has gotten wise to the virus' tricks and vulnerable people are taking steps. Our treatments have improved as well. We now give patients large doses of covfefe**, which is helping.

We might want to send the kids back to school and return to our normal lives, but that's not popular among the super-intelligent Elites, so I'm not holding my breath.

Anyway, that's what I get out of the graphs. Of course, as a Catholic conservative, I hate SCIENCE!, so take it with a grain of salt.

* - My first mentor taught me to look at the shapes of curves as well as the numbers. Sometimes their shapes tell you more than the individual data points.

** - I think it's covfefe. It might be something else.

Melancholy

... is the mood of the day here in the Catican Compound. We picked cotton today and discovered that our biggest Nankeen was now denuded of bolls. It was hoping to stick around, but we decided to pull it out. The cotton was a novelty crop. The real money maker was to be the cayenne sharing its bed, as it were. The cotton swamped the cayenne, both literally and figuratively - growing over the peppers and needing far more water than they liked. With the crop harvested, there was no reason to keep the cotton.

Still, it was good fun. I would never do it again, but I'm glad I tried it once. I still have my Red Foliated modern cotton and all of my fat, lazy, Antebellum Mississippi Browns. The Red Foliated is nearing the end as well. It's got six more bolls to pop and then out it goes. The Mississippi Brown is taking its own, sweet, Southern time.

I took a couple of shots of the Nankeen before I pulled it.

A nearly perfect Nankeen boll.

Only eight months old, the Nankeen had a sturdy trunk and was sporting new growth. There were even a couple of flower buds on it. That made me feel doubly guilty.

The root structure of cotton is pretty simple. It was a bit of a chore to pull, so I could imagine that it could survive the high winds of a small hurricane even if the leaves and bolls take a beating. Mississippi State suggests that 50-70 MPH winds are a problem.

Hummingbird Rescue

Our yard usually has 2-3 hummingbirds zooming around in it. They're feisty little things, constantly squabbling with each other over territory. Well, that's not entirely true. We had a mated pair with babies this year and that was really cute. The babies looked like moths, they were so small.

Anywho, two of them got into our house a few days back, probably chasing each other around the yard and mistaking an open door for a path to safety. One of them went up into the skylight over our stairs. That's always a dreadful place to try to catch a bird, but I managed to get him and put him outside.

When I was done with the first one, I couldn't find the second one. I knew he had gone upstairs, but he had his cloaking device activated and was invisible. Last night, he came out and was buzzing around my study. I grabbed our insect / bird net and managed to catch him without harm. I put him outside and he flew off into the darkness, but I felt really bad for him as he'd been in the house for two days or so.

This morning, I came across this video. My little guy wasn't nearly this weak, but I wish I'd been able to offer him some sustenance like this. Enjoy.

Putting Your Robin DiAngelo Books In A Moving Van

This week, Philadelphia joined the list of cities where people have rioted and looted because police attempted to maintain the law and order necessary for civilization. A dude with a massive rap sheet and a history of violence against just about everyone, rushed at some cops, waving a knife. They drew their guns, told him to drop the weapon and then shot him when he didn't.

In a city run by Normals, that would be a page-three story. A violent criminal was shot resisting arrest. In deep blue Philly, it was a cause for racial justice of the kind Robin DiAngelo blathers about, particularly in her book, White Fragility.

Even if you're a a fully anti-racist fan of White Fragility, chances are still good that you're also a fan of working, shopping and driving your car without it being stopped and smashed to bits by protesters. If you lived in Philly and saw things like the video below, you might start thinking about not living in Philly.

Wife kitteh and I had a conversation about this over the weekend. If we lived in LA instead of SD, we'd be putting our house on the market and moving, quite possibly out of state.

Perhaps this is a bigger deal than even the election. Just with my admittedly myopic view, it sure looks like we're at the start of some major regional realignments. Productive people are going to get out of the blue cities and make their ways to safer climes. They may pack their Robin DiAngelo books in a box and bring them along, still completely committed to the discovery and eradication of racist leprechauns, but that doesn't mean they'll go down with their current cities.

As another data point, SF looks like it's in full implosion mode.

Hiding Things From Yourself

OK, are you ready for a complete nutjob blog post? Good. Here we go.

The press and the social media giants are not hiding things from us. At least, that's not the real purpose of their attempts to conceal the Black Lives Matter manifesto and riots and the Hunter Biden scandal. The real purpose of their smoke screens are to hide the truth from themselves.

What happens when you realize that this is not caused by injustice or racism?

What happens when you look at the illegitimacy stats and all of their related pathologies?

Right now, you're the good guys and you've got it pretty easy. You're fighting the 200 or so white supremacists who we saw in Charlottesville, what, 3 years ago? Everyone is on your side, from Proctor and Gamble to Starbucks to Ta-Nehisi Coates. You admit your white privilege and vow to be better, pretending it's going to make a difference. In reality, it's all cosplay.

The only way you can keep pretending is if you silence all of the counter-examples. If you don't keep them hidden, you realize that cultural degeneracy is the real problem and that the left is deliberately encouraging and exploiting the degeneracy, well, the future is simply too horrible to contemplate.

If you admitted that the problem was degeneracy, you'd have to oppose PornHub, Tinder, Cardi B, Takashi6ix9ine and a massive army of similarly popular things. You'd also have to oppose the wildly popular racial justice movement as a destructive fraud. You'd become the Church Lady from Saturday Night Live.

You.

This morning, I watched last night's Tony Bobulinksi interview on Tucker's show. Last night, I watched the Philly riots on Twitter from non-AP journalists. Neither of those were prominent on the major networks or from high-profile reporters. I was going down the old rabbit hole of "They're keeping the truth from us!" when it dawned on me that they were really keeping the truth from themselves.

Be honest. Neither the Hunter Biden corruption scandal nor the looting were surprises to you, right? If that's the case, then nothing was hidden from you because you already knew it was there. No, the media is hiding the truth from themselves.

Aggression Has A Quality All Its Own

 ... to borrow from Papa Joe Stalin whose original quote was, "Quantity has a quality all its own," referring to the Soviets' massive numerical advantages over the qualitatively superior Wehrmacht. In this case, I'm referring to last night's riots in Philly where a black guy who threatened cops with a knife got shot for his troubles. Rioting and looting ensued. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Below, you can see outnumbered rioters rout a detachment of police.

Why not run? What are you accomplishing by standing your ground and defending property? All the property that got destroyed or stolen will be replenished by the Insurance Fairy and her compatriot, the Federal Reserve Printing Press Fairy*. It's only property, after all.

Our Pricing System Is Broken, Part 3,422

To jump up and down again about how printed money has destroyed our ability to determine the costs of an action, here are some videos of the looting. Who cares? It's only property.

Chopper 6 over the scene as a Foot Locker in West Philadelphia is looted following the death of Walter Wallace, who police say was shot by officers after he would not drop a knife. https://t.co/BtTPSlQIwI pic.twitter.com/7hNeLEvJCM

— Action News on 6abc (@6abc) October 27, 2020

Anywho, there goes what's left of Philly. Sane, productive people will depart, leaving only progs and their thuggy wards behind. Whatever the outcome of the election, the country is being remade by these events.

* - The Federal Reserve Printing Press Fairy really needs a better name. Emma, perhaps.

Bigger Than Elections

 ... are debt and demographics.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) has become practically unreadable. Mouth-foamers from our race-obsessed generation of college graduates have now infested that publication and the quality of writing has decreased as their fixation on der Volk has increased. Oh well. "So bröckelt der Keks, weil er von weißen Rassisten gebacken wurde," as they no doubt say in J-school these days.

Fortunately, the Japan Times is here to save the day. Their articles, at least in their business and economics section, are written clearly and work hard to provide the layman with explanations of what is happening. Here are a couple I perused this morning.

They have a charming euphemism for deficit spending. It's called an "extra budget*." It sounds like you would make a budget to account for your income and then make two more so you can spend that income three times. Which is about what it is.

The government needs to compile a third extra budget for the current fiscal year ending March to shore up an economy hammered by the COVID-19 pandemic, economists have said in a poll.

Nearly three quarters of economists polled said the government should spend up to ¥10 trillion ($94.95 billion) under the extra budget to help the world's third-largest economy recover after a record contraction in the second quarter.

The rest said the government should spend even more.

And why not spend more when you can fall back on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)? 

KYOTO – Stephanie Kelton, a professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is a leading advocate for Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) who is known for her seemingly radical argument that as long as a government can pay back its debt in the nation’s own currency, there are no limits to the fiscal deficits that it can incur. She stirred up a controversy when she cited Japan’s situation as evidence to prove her theory...

Yay! We're winning! Err ...

The (Japanese) postwar baby boomer generation, now in its early 70s, will soon join the ranks of the “latter-stage” elderly who are 75 or older and start tapping into their savings to cover their expenses. The trend of excess fund in the private corporate sector may also change over the long term. In that case, government debts that have piled up in massive numbers may become unsustainable with domestic savings alone. If the conditions change in such ways, JGB prices might crash, sending the bond yields shooting up.

What would be particularly serious would be a collapse of the inflation-adjusted, real-term value of the JGBs, in which case the private sectors that hold the government bonds would suffer enormous losses.

Not to worry, women are entering the workforce in huge numbers so they can earn the income the government needs to tax. 

Japanese households’ disposable income has been increasing since 2015. However, the scale of the increase has been moderate mainly because a rise in spousal income driven by greater female labor force participation has been partially offset by declining working hours as a result of the growing number of part-time jobs. Higher tax payments and social security contributions have also exerted downward pressure on disposable income, which today remains below the 2000 level.

More women working means fewer babies. That's OK, so long as you're not one of the "latter-stage" elderly when the population starts dropping. As we recall from a few paragraphs ago, there are dark rumors spreading about something called "a collapse of the inflation-adjusted, real-term value of the JGBs." Uh oh.

All of this is to say that as the current tsunami of political ads and the intellectual infants in our news media focus on Twitter and Orange Man Bad, we're cruising down the same road as Japan, only a decade or so behind them. While our Ivy-League geniuses roll out easily-disproven, childish concepts like MMT, we've set in motion forces that dwarf the Green Nude Eel and Social Reich Justice.

It's a good thing we no longer are allowed to read racist colonialist racist white racists like Kipling.

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

Meanwhile, it's nice to be a bit farther upstream than Japan from the 80' cataract. We're still doing alright.

* - Extra Budget is to Japanese government spenders as Second Breakfast is to hobbits.

Children Are Our Future

 ... or, "Harvard And Yale Are The Source Of Most Of Our National Leaders."

Someday, this man may be your boss.

This Can't Go On!

Oh, yes it can.

Watching the online replay of Tucker's show yesterday, I saw Brit Hume and Tucker express their amazement at the way the press has completely ignored Joe Biden's obvious and massive corruption. Just that day, Tony Bobulinski, a business partner of Hunter and a registered Democrat with a history of donating only to Democrats, came out with hard evidence that Joe Biden was on the take from the Chinese to the tune of 6 or 7 figures, while he was VP. It was as smoking a gun as could smoke.

The news media ignored it. Here was NPR's take.

Tucker and Brit harrumphed and said, "This can't go on!"

In Minneapolis, a group of business owners facing intolerable increases in crime following the retreat of the police force from Neighborhoods of Color, demanded to know what the cops were going to do about it. The reply was had the honesty that comes from total despair.

"As far as a long-term plan I don’t have one. I have lost 30% of my street officers since the end of May. Budget cuts from COVID-19 and an additional 1.5 million from the council in August we have let go 17 CSO’s and cancelled a recruit class of 29. A potential Cadet class slated for January of 2021 was also eliminated. It takes about a year to get a police Officer onto the streets with hiring, backgrounds and field training so reinforcements aren’t coming anytime soon."

That article quoted someone or other as saying, "This can't go on!"

Oh, yes it can and yes, it will. It's happening right now and there's no indication it's going to turn around.

Going back to the Bidens, it's no longer worthwhile to wonder what happened to the honesty and professionalism of the news media. Brit kept saying things like, "A professional journalist would see this and do such and such!" Brit, that it's not happening should tell you something. There are no professional journalists any more. Waiting for them to show up and rescue you is delusional. The cavalry is not coming over the hill because there is no cavalry.

Now that I have this mental model, I bet I'll see this a lot more. It's people in their 40s and older, thinking that this is still America from the 1980s or so, where the culture still had some momentum from the Greatest Generation. That momentum is just about gone. What you see when the Participation Trophy Generation children at NPR refuse to cover the Bidens is reality. Your memories are not reality.

Our job, then, is to teach those values, not wish for them to show up again.

Free Money For Acid

 ... and by acid, I mean H2SO4, not LSD.

Printed money is corrosive to the culture.

There are no real stakes to policy any more. I can't recall anyone suggesting that the lockdowns have costs and then listing those costs. For example, if Biden said, "I want to lock down the country to defeat the Chicom Flu and that means everyone receiving money from the government, from SS pensioners to GS-15 civil servants, will have to take a 20% hit," the conversation would be substantially different. That's not happening because we're convinced that the choice is between locking down the economy practically for free or everyone dying.

Free money corrodes our sight, making it possible to just glance at poverty and addiction rather than understanding it.

That wall of printed money lets us pose and preen in the name of Social Justice while real people's lives are destroyed. We don't understand them and we don't need to understand them. We can pretend to care by voting for more social spending. We won't have to pay for that spending ourselves, because it all comes in the form of government debt which is paid for by printing money. We feel good and don't have to pay a price for it.

Money without cost means we can indulge our social justice cosplay fantasies.

Why do we listen to the Elites yapping at us? Because we don't pay for things with our own money. When there are riots, when certain neighborhoods devolve into crime and chaos, when schools are vandalized, we pay no direct costs. If, at the end of the Minneapolis riots, proggy boy wonder Mayor Jacob Frey and the socialist crazies on the city council told their constituents that they all had to drop $1250 in an envelope and mail it to city hall, how much traction would Ta-Nehesi Coates get in that city when he came to yell at them about racism?

We don't just listen to Ta-Nehisi, we adore him while he berates us. And why not? Once having has been detached from earning, only a bigot full of hate wouldn't be in favor of Justice. When the pricing mechanisms of a culture have broken down, then you can have and support anything you want. There is no reason at all not to pursue fantasy goals. 

Because there is no limit to government spending and no cost to it, the general public can no longer understand why anyone with a heart wouldn't support free health care, open borders, reparations for slavery, free college, more money for teachers, more spending on affordable housing and on and on and on.

Hate is the only possible explanation as to why you want any restrictions on free things.

Admit it. You want to kill them all, don't you?

Leadership Silence

... is par for the course where I work.

We recently began a major, new corporate initiative. I think. The only way I found out about it was someone at the worker level mentioned it on our social networking app, asking if anyone knew more than the name and a simple blurb she saw in the newspaper.

She was immediately told by a representative of leadership that she needed to take the conversation offline, onto private email.

Yes. Of course.

How in the world does anyone expect to lead if they won't communicate? I'm convinced that 90% of all leadership positions are occupied by people who just want the title and the cash. They have not a speck of interest in actual leadership, they're just climbers.

The Avocado Toast Insurrection

Going through music videos from Cardi B and Takashi 6ix9ine illustrates the utterly degenerate state of modern culture. Finding this essay from the editor of the student newspaper at UW Madison gives you a glimpse into the world of mainstreamed radicalism on our campuses. It is suffused with a hatred of America. It finishes with instructions on how to make a Molotov cocktail.

However, if the lives of these beautiful protestors continue to be threatened by a tyrannical government who seemingly does nothing to stop the death threats against black people vital to the Milwaukee community like Nitty and Coleman, I can offer some of the blunter tools of revolution and the fight against oppressors.

The university administration allowed this to remain on the newspaper's website. No surprise there as our campuses are staffed by radicals in the faculty and elsewhere.

The author, one Adam Kelnhofer, is an odd choice for a revolutionary firebrand. Here's a recent tweet of his, complaining about how hard his classes are. 

One of my biggest pet peeves is when a professor assigns 10 questions for a chapter of Milton’s Paradise Lost, the chapter is actually a chapter and a half and 8 of 10 questions have two parts, making the assignment 18 questions instead of 10, causing me to spend four hours on it

— Adam Kelnhofer (@drvagry) October 13, 2020

Gosh, you have to do some reading? That's got to be tough. Oh well. As wife kitteh says, adversity is the anvil on which character is forged. If you think that's all he has to deal with, here's more torture from his classrooms.

Professors b like: Yes If I make these lectures twice as long they will surely understand better, even though they probably won't have time to watch them all.

And I will definitely send each student 24 Canvas notifications every day to remind them they have things to do, even though that means all the students have time to do is constantly check notifications. 

I have never missed having in person classes more than now.

Whoa. Talk about roughing it! I'd say that these are the times that try men's souls, but that was originally spoken by a white man and, in any case, the formulation is triggering for womxn*.

This, then, is our budding leadership class. Agitators lobbying for lobbing homemade grenades while whining about having to read books and attend class. They're the participation trophy generation, a group of children who shave. They don't know how anything works because they've never done anything real themselves. They protest and riot and make Molotov cocktails thinking that they're the only ones who take action.

Their teachers are similarly petulant children, just older.

Just like the leaders in the Democratic Party, they don't understand that people who disagree with them have free will, too. Hence the surprise at the waves of police resignations and retirements. Hence the surprise at the doubling of violence in black communities when the cops pull back. 

When the rest of us don't act like pawns on a chessboard, calmly doing nothing while they act out, they're stunned.

Imagine how stunned they will be if they keep pushing the country towards civil war.

Many of the fighters in this video also had to complete a weekly reading assignment that was more than two chapters long. It's being investigated as a war crime.

* - For what it's worth, I am convinced that womxn is pronounced whoompskin.

We're All In This Together

That phrase drives me bonkers. We're not really in "this" together, are we? If your business dies because of the lockdowns, you're on your own. If your neighborhood gets torched by Vandals of Color, you're on your own. If part of your state goes up in flames because environmentalists prevented preventative forestry, you're on your own.

As a matter of fact, you're on your own in almost everything. That's just life.

Instead, I feel like we're fed a constant stream of sheepdog barking, designed to keep us in the herd and obedient to our "leaders." All of the barking - climate barking, Chicom Flu barking, racial injustice barking - it's all meant to create a set of enemies, some human, some not, against whom we must band together.

Meh.

Climate change is coming from China. They emit a huge and rapidly growing portion of global CO2.

The Wuhan flu is dangerous only at very close ranges. Masks outside are pointless.

Racial injustice is simply nonsense. It's paranoia aimed at a specific demographic, built from the terror that some of them had begun to stray.

We're being herded for nothing.

Nah. This is not for me.

What Matters

With this post, I saw an end to my thinking deep thoughts. 

Why do we listen to the Elites yapping at us? Because we don't pay for things with our own money. When there are riots, when certain neighborhoods devolve into crime and chaos, when schools are vandalized, we pay no direct costs. If, at the end of the Minneapolis riots, proggy boy wonder Mayor Jacob Frey and the socialist crazies on the city council told their constituents that they all had to drop $1250 in an envelope and mail it to city hall, how much traction would Ta-Nehesi Coates get in that city when he came to yell at them about racism?

We bought the lunatic Nazi Race Theory advocates in our universities and now in our young, professional class as soon as we decided to pay for our social services with printed money.

After more than 14 years of thinking out loud on this blog, I had finally come to the conclusions Kipling reached in The Gods of the Copybook Headings. It dawned on me that traditional values resonate because they're true. Modern values, particularly the race-based ones and those trying to equate the sexes, turn me off because they're lies. It's not any more complicated than that.

This isn't hard. Living according to traditional values is simply a matter of relaxing and accepting the rules laid out in the reality that God created for us. As a man, acquire meaningful skills so you can protect and provide for a family. Expose yourself to the lives of men who are good examples of this, both through your friends and from history. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson come to mind. 

Wife kitteh and I had another in our evolving discussions about sexual roles last night. We both know women who have swallowed the modern values that tell them to pursue careers first. Their children, if they have any and many don't, are raised by others. They have loads of student debt. There's no evidence that they have the inner happiness of being good wives and mothers. We both wondered out loud what it was they thought they were buying with their careers. It certainly wasn't satisfaction. It was only stuff and the stuff had not made them content.

I need a lot more space to think this out and this post is getting close to tl;dr territory, so I'm going to close with this.

Politics is a false god. It demands that you care deeply about the trivial. Our progressive, social justice deacon gave the homily at Mass yesterday. As he rambled, he hit all of the fashionable themes - justice and racism and tolerance. He hit none of the themes whose dangers loom over us like monster-movie beasts - debt, drugs and sexual degeneracy. He thought he was saying something important and the congregation were all familiar with his topics, but none of them really mattered.

Ignore the political and focus on what matters is the message I heard, even if it wasn't delivered in the sermon.

More on this in later posts.

Learning skills, like cooking, matters. This is a beef tenderloin we found in the good-Lord-this-meat-has-almost-turned-lets-discount-it-and-sell-it-before-we-have-to-throw-it-away bin. We had gone to the store to get a fresh chicken to grill, but found this and scooped it up, no particular recipe in mind. However, I'm getting better with my Oklahoma Joe pellet smoker and knew if I put on a rub and smoked it for an hour or two, it would come out great. It did.

Bullet Train To Madness

... that's what it seems like we're riding, thanks to the progressives who don't know how anything works.

Full Disclosure: I got out of the market last week. I took my S&P 500 investments, which had done very well this year, and parked them in Treasuries. I'm willing to miss out on some gains in exchange for avoiding any election craziness downside. And as far as I can see, we're in for some serious election craziness, again, thanks to the Democrats.

Why on Earth would you push the least reliable voting method on a heavily-armed population that has been stoked into white-hot hatred by a crazed news media? I don't see how this ends anywhere but in the Supreme Court which the press and the Democrats, but I repeat myself, tell their minions is invalid. Dig this.

That's how secure your vote is in Washington and, as I understand it, Oregon. Name and birthdate gets you a cupie doll. Now dig this.

Not only that, but by continuing far enough you invalidate the ballot without any signature. pic.twitter.com/PSQN6HdGh9

— Tritario (@Tritario1) October 18, 2020

The assertion is that you can invalidate anyone else's ballot simply by knowing their name and birthdate. It doesn't matter whether it's true or not or if you need slightly more information. It only matters that people believe it's true.

I can't say I'm altogether surprised. Biden's campaign screams that they are convinced they'll win by flooding the system with faked ballots. I've never seen anything so supine in my life. No one would run a real campaign like that.

That's not surprising, coming from a group of people who thought they could endlessly trash the cops and take away their self-defense capabilities and the cops would just sit there and take it. They've been shocked to see cops quitting in droves. They've also been surprised at the increase in crime. Like I said, they don't know anything works.

More proof of that is how NYC is being bankrupted with lockdowns and racial madness. The wealthiest 1% pay 50% of the city's taxes and many of those wealthy people have bailed out. From the WSJ in August comes this data point.

New York City faces a $9 billion deficit over the next two years, high levels of unemployment and the prospect of laying off 22,000 government workers if new revenue or savings aren’t found in the coming weeks.

Finally, there is the Hunter Biden story. The press is desperately trying to cover it up, just like the Catholic hierarchy tried to cover up the pedophile priests and for the same reason. They are determined to preserve their faith, their religion of social justice. They are fighting hate and racism which means that there are no rules. 

If I had to guess at an outcome, I'd put my money on the election being bitterly contested in the courts. The press will push whatever narrative the Democrats give them while this happens. It will eventually go to the Supreme Court where the conservatives will determine the outcome. Perhaps during this process, but certainly afterwards, there will be lots of rioting in the blue cities. No matter who wins, places like Chicago and New York will suffer further damage which will result in further emigration.

Yay.