BLOG ON SEMI-HIATUS (Sticky Post)

I have left St. Louis for job in Cologne, Germany.

This blog is in a state of semi-hiatus, as of September 4, 2018.

I’ll write posts here every once in awhile, just to update you all on how I’m doing, and my thoughts on whatever big news breaks. Our favorite doggy will chime in every once in awhile with his own guest posts. Other than that, expect posting around here to be not that frequent going forward.

I’ll be more frequent on Gab, Minds, Twitter, Parler, and commenting on AR as Question Diversity.

Reading material:

My Labor Day 2018 farewell post — My final post from St. Louis for awhile, perhaps ever.

My post from July 26, 2018, announcing my departure.

The preview of my Summer 2018 travelogue that I’ll probably never get to write in full.

My long and frequently updated post on my condition and recovery — A recovery which for all intents and purposes is complete as of December 14, 2019.

I proposed on December 14, 2019, and was married on March 7, 2020, and during May, we found out we are expecting.  You can read about how it all happened and eventually future updates in that stead on my RHOC Series.

They Are Lacking In Diversity.

Guest post by Puggg

County Browns homicide detectives, celebrating their 94% clearance rate.

I guess by now you can already figure out what the big stink is about.

“If there was ever a case of a picture representing a thousand words”, said someone with the County NAACP. He also said that “It speaks volumes to the fact they are lacking in diversity”.

And you know, I agree with all that. Successful, productive, the picture representing a thousand words, lacking in diversity. It all goes together. It fits very well. It’s like you have to pick either diversity or productivity, but you can’t have both.

Debate Night Open Thread.

Guest post by Puggg

Okay puppies, what did you all think?

I’ll just leave this as an open thread. I’ve still got a lot in my inbox, and it fills up as fast as I get stuff out of it.

Time, The Great Vindicator

Me, February 14, 2018:

My spidey sense informs me that de Leon actually does differ from Feinstein on Israel and Military-Industrial Complex.

Me, July 18, 2018:

Two, taboo issues that are representative of the left’s own internal schism.  Remember my analysis of Dianne Feinstein vs Kevin De Leon? I told you there, and it applies in NY-14-D, that military-industrial complex and Israel were factors, even though it is impermissible in polite political society to talk about the latter.  Jenny from the Block [AOC — Ed.] in NY-14-D, just like Kevin’s Underground Rave in CA-Jungle, was smart enough not to come out against the MIC and Israel in public, but was clever enough to have underground subordinates do that on her behalf and behind one or more layers of plausible deniability.  Though the late breaking news in the last several days is that Jenny from the Block is starting to get more comfortable in being public with her anti-Israel sentiments.  Whether it’s Kevin’s Underground Rave or DiFi in the Senate from California, or Joe Crowley or Jenny from the Block in the House from NY-14, they would vote alike close to 100% of the time in the Senate or House.  So when it comes to Democrat-left internecine politics that are so obviously contentious and divisive in public view, I infer that taboo issues are the underground heat and energy source.

Me, August 8, 2018 (as a comment):

One point I missed is that if you swap out Clay for Bush, the voting record would be 99% the same. But the differences between Clay and Bush are what I’ve been saying for months that they are in these internecine Democrat-left politics where the title card combatants otherwise seem to be identical: Military Industrial Complex, and Israel. I think Bush would vote against MIC and Israel in ways that Clay would not.

As you know, Cori Bush was able to knock Clay off this year.

A tweet from yesterday:

If you're having a bad day, just think of all the social services we're going to fund after we defund the Pentagon.

— Cori Bush (@CoriBush) October 20, 2020

S. H. T. F.

But it’s not as if I didn’t warn you.

Just a Heads Up

Berlin

Tomorrow could be a really big hot and intense in Berlin.

They’re going to try to evict a bunch of Antifa/anarchist types from a hovel in a gentrifying part of the former East Berlin, where they’ve been essentially squatting for nearly thirty years, pretty much since the first second after legal reunification.

Plain words, I’m expecting blood.

This is one of the prime examples of why I say that matters of housing and gentrification are a big heat and energy source for far left street militancy and activism, on both sides of the Atlantic. I’m just cynical enough to think that all their talk about trans-LGBTQ-cisheteronormativity-femiminst-genderqueer-microaggression-ism-phobia housing collectives slash safe spaces is nothing more than these people realizing what pushes buttons and what sells in the current year. Sure, these kooks might actually believe this tripe, to an extent. But more than anything, they just want to be able to live very inexpensively in the heart of major cities, (to look at them is to know they can’t hack it anywhere else), and are mad that people with money are making their previously “affordable” hovels less so.

That’s why they’re couching their selfishness in social justice-y and woketard rhetoric — It’s a form of chessboard maneuvering, so they can put themselves on the side of the “moral” angels, and therefore, any attempts to evict them and any attempts to use force to that end will be morally evil. Especially in the city and country where this is going to happen, you can get away with a whole lot if you can convince enough people that the attempts to prevent you from doing those things is fascism.

Wooden Beats Schoolmarm, By Default

Salt Lake City

I watched about a half hour of the replay of Pence-Harris this afternoon.

Neither one clearly won on content.

So it came down to presentation.

Pence was his usual unoffensive wooden self. But that beat Harris just by default, because she came across as a preachy preening desperate schoolmarming borderline cult leader.

I’m sure she reminds a lot of people of that one annoying teacher they had in the latter half of elementary school, somewhere between the third and the fifth grade, the one that got on your nerves about how you weren’t allowed to use the restroom whenever you wanted, and constantly correcting you on your slight errors in the use of punctuation.

If Kamala Harris were a somewhat more intense version of her last night self last night, she would have been:

The Truth About the White Supremacy Trap

Washington, D.C.

After last week’s farce of a “debate,” the subject of white supremacy, denouncing it, not denouncing it, who or what is or isn’t it, was hot in the United States for a few days. But then Trump got Sars-CoV-2, and that was the end of that. Remember, we live in the current year, where news has a very short half-life.

But in a sector where news isn’t forgotten so easily, Greg Hood wrote two articles about it, last week, and a follow up yesterday.

I was thinking that what I wanted to say was going to be pretty long. But, upon further thinking, I can net it out pretty quickly.

Some time back, James Allsup made the same point I’m about to make. I know he did it independently of myself, because it does not seem that I have ever broached this point in this space, and, at the time that Allsup did his video about this, I had only brought it up sparsely. Doubtful that he ever read those comments of mine, so almost 100% sure that he has thought of this himself. Yet and still, it’s a point which very few people have realized; As far as I can tell, it’s only Allsup and I who have figured this out.

The main problem with the debate over “white supremacy” in the United States, both right now and in recent years, is that there are two wildly different and divergent definitions of “white supremacy” that are in mainstream circulation. Furthermore, the people wielding one definition or the other mostly talk over the heads of the people on the other side.

One definition is the narrow definition, the literal definition. White supremacy is just literally that, the qualitative belief that white people are superior. It’s a fringe ideology, and as proof of that, it’s a minority opinion among white advocates.

The other definition is a wide definition. In that world, white supremacy is close to being a pure synonym for a white person or white people. Expressed more accurately, it merely means white people (or sometimes even non-whites) who want to live in a white civilization and want to live by white folkways and habits. Even if said white people don’t believe that our selves or our civilization is qualitatively superior, and even if the white (or other) people who want to live by those habits don’t actually believe that those habits have anything to do with whiteness.

As you can probably already guess, the American right adopts the narrow definition, and, again, as you can probably guess, if you’re really far to the right, you’ll think that it’s a virtue and you believe it is true, while most normiecons and lamestream conservatives think it’s a bad thing. In the middle, a majority of white advocates think it’s a red herring. However, in spite of those differences, what actual white supremacists (narrow), non-WS white advocates, and anti-WS normiecons, agree upon, is the narrow definition of the term.

Meanwhile, most of the American left adopts some variant of the wide definition, and virtually 100% of the them think it’s a bad thing.

The preview truth about the white supremacy trap is that, because WS-Narrow and WS-Wide are talking past each other, there is no possible resolution to the rhetorical conflict. It’s why, for example, the multiracial Proud Boys can both denounce white supremacy and be white supremacists at the same time. They denounce WS-Narrow but are WS-Wide; Their “Western chauvinism,” as others have fairly described their worldview, does not need, and in fact, can exist in hostility to WS-Narrow, but Western chauvinism and white supremacy are the same thing, in the minds of those who use the WS-Wide definition. It’s also why Trump has denounced white supremacy 87 million ways to Sunday ever since he rode down the escalator, and he has never denounced white supremacy and needs to start doing that, at the same time. He denounces narrow, but has never denounced wide.

Now for my unique observation:

The real truth about the white supremacy trap is that I happen to believe that the real domestic policy deep state sort of power brokers in American society also know of this dichotomy which both James Allsup and I have figured out, but believe that this confusion is a feature, not a bug. They want to keep a lot of people deliberately discombobulated; I think that they’ve concluded that they somehow benefit from this confusion and the ability to manipulate one side against the other and vice-versa.

ZOMG BIG BREAKING NEWS LOL~!!!!!1

Washington, D.C.

Two people have contracted a virus that most people will eventually get.

What were the odds, right?

You may remember a few months ago the news that Trump’s doctors that they had him on a preventative preemptive HCL regimen, largely because his age makes him a big risk category for symptoms being debilitating or worse on the likely possibility that he would get the virus in question.

Note: Research out of my native city, WU Med specifically, states that at any one time, the average person is carrying around an average of five viruses. Of course, you all knew that virology and immunology is a perpetual cat-and-mouse game.

Ugh.

Guest post by Puggg

I’ll leave it here just for the laughs.

Was it a stolen car crashing into another stolen car?  Or was it that that Chrysler dealer in Wood River has been hit at least five times recently?  Which one was the bigger hint?

30-Jahre Wiedervereinigung

Berlin

Samstag.

Because of the virus hysteria, the official functions and events have been spread out over a month and over many places.  The actual day and place therefore will have a much lower key observance, compared to what it would have been but for the hysteria.  However, I’ve got an “in,” which in turn also means that five other people have an “in.”  So we’re rolling six deep on a train to Berlin later today.  Train instead of driving, because we don’t want to risk an accident, with Frau. being in the state that she’s in.  No way any one of us would have tolerated a pregnant woman now in her third trimester on the A2 mad house meat grinder between Dortmund and Berlin.  So we’ll outsource our worrying to Deutsche Bahn, you know, because Germany and Europe is yours.

I’ve already gone over the relevant history in this space two years ago.

And of course I was in Berlin back on November 9 for the 30th anniversary of Mauerfall, the falling of the wall, or the start of the process which resulted in that.

Wieder = Again. Verein = Club, team, association, organization, society (generally concrete sense). The suffix -igung is the equivalent of -ization or -ification in English. So, put it all together, you have Again-Club-Ification, literally translating the parts. Or, Reunification, in proper context.

That’s Life In The Big City.

Guest post by Puggg

Charges for the McCloskeys, but none for the people that made the McCloskeys do what they had to do.

Cringe AF

Cleveland

So, how’d you all enjoy last night’s shouting match?

It’s obvious that both of them made the calculation before the fact that their path to winning this “debate” was to scream and yell their respective prerehearsed talking points over each other.

At no point did it seem like the odds were any higher than winning the mega jackpot that either one of them would come through with a mic drop line like Reagan’s “youth and inexperience” in 1984.

In my time zone, this took place live between three and five this morning, and only now this early afternoon did I have the time to watch the replay.  No way I was going to wake up that early to watch it live — After all, both Frau. and I have to get in as much sleep as we can, in advance of the time coming up very soon where nights of uninterrupted long sleeping hours will be hard to come by.  And even while I was watching the replay just before writing this, I was waiting for it to get done.  I even sped up the playback speed to 110% to help things along a bit.

I’ll probably peek in to the replay of Pence-Harris next week, but I don’t plan to watch as much as a moment more of any of the subsequent Trump-Biden ones.

Note:  Most of the German mainstream media had the “Biden won” pieces pre-written waiting for the proper moment to hit the red upload button.

SLMPD Residency Requirement Lifted.

Guest post by Puggg

Gov. Parson signed a bill this week which eliminates residency requirements for any of the state’s LEAs, but what it really means in practice is that the SLMPD’s (St. Louis City) residency requirement is now gone.

What do we think of that, puppies?  Because I can think of one reason why it’s may not be such a good thing.

“The Irony of the Situation”

On this clickbait business of “I’m not going to let my Trump-loving father see his grandkids.”

First off, the author, one Leo Guinan, has modified his original article in order to do everything but openly admit that the original article was pure clickbait.

But in his walking back, he states that:

The writer, who described himself as being “toward the liberal end of the spectrum,” noted that he realized the irony of the situation when he found himself the topic of discussion on the Rush Limbaugh show.

“I realized that polarizing behavior was what social media emphasizes, and it caught me too,” he wrote, admitting that when he “started publishing to social media” his personal perspective, he was attempting to gain followers and “influence people to read my writing.”

Now, even if you want to believe that he actually ever intended to cut father off from grandkids, and I doubt it, there is an even bigger “irony of the situation” besides the fact that his intent to go viral went viral in ways he never intended.

He was using his personal ethnonationalist imperative (his control over his own children vis-a-vis his own father) because he despises the supposed ethnonationalist politics of the current President.

Or, to put it another way, he wanted to cut his father off from his grandkids because his father votes Trump, but his father votes Trump because he cares about his grandkids.

 

Whence Q

Hamburg

The cover of this week’s issue:

“How a weird lie became the most dangerous movement of our time,” to translate the subheadline.

I’m going to give the editorial staff a wooden nickel’s worth of free advice:

That guy named Claas might not be telling you the tru….er, scratch that, they already know that one.

Really, here’s the lay of the land:

The more you telegraph and confess the notion that this Q business irks you, the more people are going to do it for that reason alone.  Because that’s really what most of Q is, people knowing they can live mietenfrei inside the heads of the kind of people it bothers, just to “zomg own the libs lol.”

Far from being a “gefährlich Bewegung,” when narrowing the focus to the true believers in Q, the main problem with this Q business isn’t that it’s gefährlich, it’s that it’s entschärfung.  As Gregory Hood illustrated last month.

Note: I don’t think there is an actual QAnon individual. More than that, I think the genesis of this whole Q business is that a little while back, one or more bored troll(s) who are aware of the nature of the internet and the nature of the ecosystems of certain political sectors, cooked up this Q business and the fundamental theories of the current movement out of thin air, wound it up and let it loose, hit upload, and bam goddamn this is a dope jam, off the the races.

(And also, entschärfung = defusing, neutralizing.)

2020 in the United States, Already 2020-y Enough, Has Just Gotten a Lot More 2020-ier

Washington, D.C.

Just what the American current year needed, an open SCOTUS pick that will result in an ideological shift on the court, in the middle of all this.

2020 is either some special point of significance in the spacetime continuum, or it could all be just a coincidence.

Open thread.

“Kein 2015”

Berlin

The official edict came down today, and you can probably guess what it was.

The German political and media establishment are constantly parroting “Kein 2015” (“No 2015”) or some longer equivalents.

Of course it’s not going to be 2015.  Remember that Johnny Cash song for the 87,000th time?  The way it’s going to be different this time is that they’re going to let only a few in at a time, drip drip drip, salami slicing, instead of one big massive wave, so as not to risk a massive political backlash, or so they believe.

Ironically, some of the same people who are saying today that this isn’t going to be 2015 are to this day defending 2015, if they actually didn’t help make 2015 happen.

Venus If You Will

Cardiff, Wales

Me, November 14, 2017:

I have probably written in this space several times in the recent past that: (1) By my 60th birthday, March 31, 2037, there will be legitimate scientific proof of at least some simple form of life on an extrasolar planet (a planet orbiting a star other than the sun), and (2) The crucially important minds in crucially important societies have pretty much forecasted the same thing and see the same thing coming, and therefore (3) TPTB are greasing our skids so that when the official announcement of what will be the biggest most profound news in the history of human civilization and science is made, it won’t come as such a shock. Such skid-greasing includes a recent handful of curious dog whistle pronouncements from Popes Benedict XVI and Francis, as if to reconcile Christianity’s flagship institution and the idea of non-Earthly life as predication for the inevitable news.

Turns out we didn’t need to wait until 2037 or look as far as other stars.

Now, as you can read, there are a lot of what-ifs, buts, gotta-rule-things-outs, maybes and don’t-get-your-hopes-ups, but…I think I’ll pop the champagne cork now.

I always thought that when this day came, it would be the biggest news in the world for days, weeks, months, or more, even if people were duly prepared.  Then again, like I wrote on the day of my return to blogging after having recovered enough, that TPTB have done a good enough job cushioning the blow.  Aside from the reasons I listed then, the increasing science into Earth-based extremophiles.  The conclusion, stated explicitly, is if that if organisms can live in un-Earth-like environments on Earth, then there very well could be extremophiles in several places just in our own Solar System.

Which means that the way it stands now, it’s only going to shake the world when the news is life that is comparable to plant or animal life on Earth, and for that, it will have to be an exoplanet or exomoon.

I’ve also stated that the first permanent space colonies will not be the Moon or Mars, but Venus, at the altitude where pressures and temperatures are most Earth-like.  I think today’s news made my speculation all the more likely.

Otherwise, you knew a song was coming when you read the title.

 

Get Famous and Die Tryin’

Lancaster, Pennsylvania and Compton, California

What I have figured out today, which I’m sure others have already done, and in all honesty, I should have done long before now, is that the post May 24 reality in the United States is creating a dangerous OODA feedback loop for the kind of underclass black people with no prospects and nothing to lose. I think they’ve figured out by now that all they have to do is either take out after cop totally unprovoked, or take advantage of a typical stop or accost and then take out after the cop, forcing the cop to defend him or herself with lethal or some kind of risky force. It’s because they must now realize that it will make them into a martyr, and one or more BLM/Antifa mobs will riot on behalf of them. And we all know that a certain demographic loves quick and easy “get rich and famous quick” schemes, even if it costs them their lives, which, like I said, weren’t worth anything anyway.

Dueling

Your Blogmeister’s German Desk

Hamilton and Burr, eat your hearts out.  You thought dueling was dead.

***

Dueling narratives in the current month:

* A movie about the sexually suggestive behavior of 11-year old girls isn’t pedophilia, you’re a right wing conspiracy theorist if you think it is

* 40-something men in relationships with 20-something women are pedophiles

Humorously, the pedodefenders are trying to pawn all the disgust for that movie off on this Q business, though I should say, if you’re trying to debunk a conspiracy theory, the last thing you should do is provide evidence of the theory’s fundamental claims.  For the record, I don’t think there’s any Q, I think it was one or a few bored trolls with too much time on their hands a few years ago who understand the nature of the internet and the nature of certain social and political sectors, who just made something up out of thin air that they figured would spread, wound it up and let it loose.

I also think that the explanation for this paradox is that the crowd that wants to normalize pedophilia in the mold of Cuties and the crowd that wants to extend the definition of pedophilia to include 40s-M-on-20s-W are different people with different agendas;  The first crowd are mostly random perverts that any given society will always have thanks to the Law of Averages, but have been able to creep (pun intended) their way up through the kinds of institutions they need to make it happen due to a combination of Modernism and parentheticalism, and the second crowd are mostly post-wall 40-something women who, because they’re also making the Long March through the Institutions, are trying to use their newfound power to manipulate the rules of society and the sexual marketplace, because they want 40-something men to start looking at them instead of looking at their half-their-age competitors.  Or sometimes, they’re the 20-something women that 40-something men aren’t interested in, so they’re trying to shame the 40-something men away from any 20-something women out of pure sour grapes.

***

Dueling headlines in the German media this morning and afternoon:

* We must take in the Moria refugees

* Critical German industries are making permanent layoffs

Really though, this isn’t 2015, the German economy was already starting to slump before Covid hit, so they’re not even trying to make an argument about the need for more workers.  It also proves that the “more workers” argument from five years ago was disingenuous (and we all knew that), and they’ll find any excuse.  The new one is (translated):  “We have space.”  Yes, Germany has space, in the kinds of places that immigrants don’t want to be.   Many of the 15ers who were settled in smaller cities and rural areas have already left for big cities, where there is anything but extra space.

The important but unheralded news about Moria we found out last week was that it looks like open borders German NGO hacks set the fires (possibly using time bombs) themselves, the Hegelian Dialect reason should be obvious, and yes, you see what I did there.

***

Open thread, about this or anything else.

The Current Year Never Disappoints

Yucaipa, California

Gender reveal parties should have never been A Thing, because they aren’t really about the anticipated baby(-ies), they’re really about the narcissism of the expectant parents, esp. the mother.

And now, thanks to one of these things starting a massive Southern California wildfire, there’s now a push to de-Thing them.

Does this mean that people are coming around to my way of thinking, that people shouldn’t be so narcissistic?

Fat chance. You don’t know the current year, brother.

No, the reason for the budding movement against GRPs is because of “gender,” the woke/SJW gender bender nonsense, the “genderbread spectrum” drivel.

CNN:

Even Jenna Karvunidis, the blogger widely credited with popularizing gender reveal parties, has had enough, writing on Facebook this week: “Stop having these stupid parties. For the love of God, stop burning things down to tell everyone about your kid’s penis. No one cares but you.”

A woman popularized these things, and these parties are largely for the benefit of women.  Left to the devices of men, these things would have never been invented.  Unless the men were gay, in which case they would have, just to have another reason to organize a theatrical production.  But now that they’re suddenly becoming politically un-woke at “best” and dangerous fire hazards at worst, Karvunidis, the inventor of these things, is now trying to pawn it off on expectant fathers tooting their “It’s a Boy” horns.  Natur-fucking-ally.

Even when gender reveal parties don’t cause this kind of overt harm, these examples of death and destruction are still an apt metaphor for the detrimental effects of their deeper cultural message. A pyrotechnical display of pink or blue reflects a toxic glee at boxing our babies into binary gender categories that may not reflect who they are. By slapping a color code on our little ones (and plastering it all over the internet) before they even enter the birth canal, we are removing entirely their sense of agency to develop their own gender identities and to control that identity online. We are completely erasing the spectrum of social and biological diversity when it comes to gender.

Those who do not fit into the binary gender categories — whether they are transgender, nonbinary or simply don’t fit the stereotypes (I am a perfect example of someone with female genitalia who doesn’t feel particularly female and who loathes the color pink, anything frilly, and who will never feel right being addressed as “ma’am”) — already face an uphill battle when it comes to navigating the world and finding acceptance and fair treatment. Transgender people are particularly vulnerable to discrimination and violence, and rituals like gender reveal parties only reinforce a system of inequity that marginalizes the trans community.

Speaking of the author’s sense of self-confusion, just look at the pic of her CNN puts up, and that explains everything.

I don’t know if this is true, and if it’s not, please insert your dime in the comment boxes, but I read somewhere that Jenna Karvundis’s own child, the subject of the very first GRP, is now a 12-year old boy who just came out as gender non-binary.  (At 12, WTF?)  I don’t know whether to think that’s ironic or apropos;  Ironic because the child from the world’s first gender reveal party doesn’t want to be officially affixed to a gender, apropos because he is every bit his attention-seeking mother’s attention-seeking son.

***

When Frau. and I found out that they’re going to be twin sons Monday before last, we immediately told critical relatives and quasi-relatives on both my side and her side, but waited until my father-in-law got home, because he wanted it that way, even though we could have called him the moment we knew.  Then I told the world the next day.  But, there was no way in hell we were going to throw one of these stupid parties.  No way I would have wanted one in a zillion years, and Frau., being a traditionally-minded German, wouldn’t want to be that kind of show-off at least so publicly.  Now, if my sister-in-law and her husband ever have a child, better than even money she’ll want to throw one, even though both of them have done a lot of growing up this year;  They haven’t matured quite that much, and both have mostly succumbed to Americanization pressure.

Blood on the Door Sill

Webster Groves

I didn’t have to read past the headline to know that the whole thing is about property values.

Here’s a wooden nickel’s worth of free advice from a far far away St. Louis native:

Chill.

Because I figured it out five years ago.

The BLM yard sign isn’t a sign of an impending loss of property values, it’s more like the blood painted on the door sills in The Ten Commandments — It’s a symbol put there with the hopes that it keeps the pestilence and plague away.  Which means that they’re not trying to reduce property values, they’re trying to maintain them.

When you see your first WMSKEO yard sign within comfortable walking distance, then it’s time to worry.

Real Housewives of Cologne, Episode 8

“PROMISES TO KEEP”

For several reasons you already know, and now including one more that happened during the month that just finished, Frau.’s weight gain curve and appetite increasing much more than what would be expected if there was just one, we’ve been thinking twins.

Sonogram confirms.

Definitely twins.

And twin boys.

***

Even before we were married, Frau. and I made a deal with what were at the time likely future prospects in mind — She names our daughters, I name our sons.

For as long as I could fathomably conceive that idea that I could eventually be a father, I already knew what I wanted to name my first son, and that alone should be a hint.

Fifteen years ago, in the aftermath of a tragic event, I made a promise to myself that if I ever had a second son, I would name him the name I suddenly had in mind. Some of you will probably figure this one out either right away or in short order.

If ever there was a time for the metaphor “don’t count your chickens before they hatch” to be extended literally, this is it. But, since it looks like the stork will be bringing me both my first and second sons in the same bundle, I’m going to be able to keep both of these promises to myself.

There’s also another reason why I’m happy they’re both boys.  I’m as much happy that neither one of them are girls.  Meaning that I won’t have to worry about having to raise (a) white/German(-ic) daughter(s) here in urban western Germany.  Either you get it right away, or it won’t take you long.

***

As a biological aside, I already told you that fraternal twinning runs in both my family and Frau.’s, in fact, from both of my parents and both of her parents. My mother’s eldest sister had fraternal twin daughters, and one of them in turn had fraternal mixed sex twins. My late father’s only siblings are fraternal twin sisters, both still living. Both of Frau.’s grandmothers are party to fraternal twins in some way — One of them had a fraternal twin brother (late), the other had mixed sex fraternal twin siblings, the sister still living, the brother late.

Before the honeymoon, I also wrote here that, in the instance of any one set of fraternal twins, the relevance of the biological heritability that caused them to be fraternal twins is mother-side only, and I asked you to think through the biology. If you didn’t get it, it’s that fraternal twins are two sperms fertilizing two eggs, which means two eggs must have already been there waiting for them, which in turn means two eggs were released during the mother’s relevant estrous cycle. Which means she had to have the genetic trait for two-egg-release estrous cycles. In contrast, identical twins are a single fertilized egg splitting, which happens after fertilization, which means the DNA for that trait could come from either father or mother.

Because we’re going to have twin sons, same sex, the only way we’ll know for sure whether fraternal or identical is when they arrive, and we can look at both and compare. The only way we would know fraternal for sure right now is if they were boy-girl. Same sex could be fraternal or identical, mixed sex must be fraternal. However, considering (Frau.’s) family history, I’m betting on fraternal.

One other thing this does, knowing that they’re going to be twins, is that it pushes our due date range sooner by a week. Twins have a shorter gestation period than singles.

Frau., never what anyone would call a svelte girl or woman, is going to get really really really really really big, and is probably going to eat everything both in sight and not in sight.

***

We’re not going to have a baby shower as such, for the same reason you all know we didn’t have a wedding registry. Because we don’t need it. Everything we need and nearly anything we could want relative to what we’re expecting to happen, we can afford. I will say that there’s a reason I wrote “as such,” because Frau., my mother-in-law, my sister-in-law, Frau.’s two grandmothers, and other female in-laws of mine, are planning on a get-together sorta shower some time this fall, involving many, many, MANY boxes of shipped-in chocolates, (remember, one of the people going to that shindig is going to have a big appetite), from Germany’s world famous chocolate makers in Bremen.

And my father-in-law and I will cherish the “me” time, probably the last such time I’ll have for a very long time.  Speaking of, he is probably even happier than I am that they’re going to be two boys.  Instead of calling or texting him the moment we found out, he wanted to wait until he got home yesterday in the early evening, and Frau. and I waited for him at his house.  When I told him, he just about went into orbit.  I can only imagine what he’ll be like when they actually arrive.

I will also say that, while Oktoberfest in Munich (and most of the smaller Oktoberfests in other cities) were canceled for this year several months ago, the Frankfurt Book Fair is still going to happen, and I’ll finally have the chance to go to it for the first time, but probably no more than two days of its five-day run (the 14th through the 18th).  October 3 is also the 30th anniversary of Reunification, and while the ceremonies for it are being spread out over a month and over various places to keep any one crowd from being too big, I’ll be going to the actual October 3 ceremony in Berlin.  Frau. might come along to one or both;  It depends on what she feels like in a month and a month and a half from now, respectively, in terms of how big she’s going to be in that her seventh month along.

***

Speaking of our upcoming spending spree, now that we know they’re going to be two of the same sex, this means that we can now start apartment hunting for only one extra bedroom instead of two. And because we know that there will be two for sure instead of just one, any slight chance that Frau. might have kept in her mind that her Golf would still be practical in our anticipated new domestic reality are now gone, so for sure we’re also going car shopping. On top of all the sundries, the Kindersitzen, the Babymöbel, a pressurized space suit for my father-in-law, etc etc. August was been relatively busy for both of us, but we were also in a holding pattern waiting on Sonogrammstag. It took that to come and go before things could start falling into place.

Which means that my slight increase in activity here on the blog and my socials that I know you all have enjoyed in the past few weeks, is going to go bye-bye.

That will explain my silence around here and on my socials, save any big Armageddon-quality breaking news.

***

One last note:  You’ll remember that I wrote in this series back in May, that all that has transpired over this year has not only forced my sister-in-law to give up on her quixotic treachery, but also it has forced her and the soyboy to do some deep introspection.  I predicted that, two years hence, they would be either parents or divorced.  Nothing has happened since then to make me think one is more likely than the other, but one major thing that happened while we were away on Flitterwochen is that he has made a career change, though to say that he made a “change” is misleading, because what he had before wasn’t really a career, just menial employment.  Anyway, I can’t say here what it is, for security purposes, and I wasn’t even aware that one could make a living doing such a thing.  But, he is, and already he’s making serviceable money, and because Cologne is one of the world’s centers for this relatively new industry, one that held a big annual trade show here in town over this past extended weekend, he certainly lives in the right city for his newfound profession.  Though he will be doing going his fair share of travel.  I will say that, as of now, both of them combined now make enough to sustain themselves and a potential baby, so that might be a hint that they’re growing closer together.  But, by the same token, each one of them is now making enough to live well enough separately, so it could be just as much of a hint that they’re headed to Scheidungsgericht.

Though for the first time, I’m actually cheering for them to make it.  Because I think it would be so neat if (fill in the blank for my planned name of my first son) and (fill in the blank for my planned name of my second son) eventually come to have one or more first cousins.  Since I’m an only child, and Frau. has no other siblings, they, (or in theory, my sister-in-law with another man) are the only possible source of potential first cousins for fill-in-the-blank and fill-in-the-blank.

First Draft

Berlin

Today is the five year anniversary of Angela Merkel saying “Wir schaffen das.”

What most people don’t know is that that was the fourth and final draft.

The first draft used “Weil ich das sage.”

The second draft used “Halt die Klappe, und zahlt deine Steuern.”

The third draft used “Wenn Sie anderer Meinung sind, schicken wir Antifa, um Ihr Auto in Brand zu setzen.”

Ffm-Hbf Update

Frankfurt

To this.

A long time since there has been any news, and we were all fearing that the Eritrean “Successful Model of Integration” (TM) and his “mental issues” would screw up any prosecution.

Thankfully, that didn’t happen.  Criminally guilty, and will have to spend the rest of his life in a nut house.

Sherman McCoy 2020

Kenosha, Wisconsin

From what I see, Kyle Rittenhouse acted entirely in self-defense.

On the other hand, there’s no way in Hades in this the current year that I’m using deadly or violent force to protect property that isn’t either my own or that of immediate close family. Not only because the Establishment is always on the hunt for fresh new Sherman McCoys, and not only because we don’t need to be providing the other side with 0.1% examples of whataboutism, but also for a strategic reason: It’s going to take the other side’s violence in order for people to see the consequence of egalitarianism and the religion of anti-racism. The more they wreck, burn, loot, riot and damage, the more obvious that becomes. It’s like housebreaking a dog — Sometimes, you have to let the dog do what a non-housebroken dog will do, and then rub the dog’s nose in it.

His social media presences are full of Blue Lives Matter and siding with cops, and he was involved in the police cadet corps.  So you would have thought that at least one of the experienced men that surround him in his daily life, (veteran cops are the most cynical people going), would have highly advised him against this at the very least, or tried everything they could to talk him out of this at worst, or hog tied him and shoved him in a closet at the worst of the worst.  Failing that, you would have thought that he would have had enough sense to figure these things out on his own.  But, I too was once an adolescent male, so I know how funny the adolescent male brain can be.  Just gotta put on the cape and save the world.  Because we already know everything and have all the answers.

Just as, sometimes, the best help you can be to someone is no help at all, the best way to save the world is not to.

What the Anti-Lockdown Protests Are Really All About

Berlin

Even if those who are organizing them and participating them don’t realize it.

Dateline Berlin, because, yesterday, the Berlin city-state’s interior ministry (German parlance for the combination of police chief and attorney general, or cops and prosecutors), ordered the cancellation of this coming weekend’s planned anti-lockdown protests.  All the while, spending no such effort to shut down the left wing, which will be up to their usual violent antics this weekend, just like last weekend, and the one before that, and the one before that…etc…

Okay, Berlin. Now do left wing extremists.

— Countenance Blog the Expat (@countenanceblog) August 26, 2020

But it got me to thinking about the politically heterogeneous anti-lockdown movement, what’s really driving it, what’s the heat and energy source.

[Snip about 10,000 words of blah blah]

In summary, even if they don’t know it, they’re mad that the virus, the overreaction to the virus, the lockdowns, are going to result in fundamental economic changes which only serve to redistribute income and wealth from labor to capital and from working and middle classes to the small coterie of the world’s richest individuals.

I Speak From Experience

Ferguson

From David Cole’s column this week at Taki:

As much as I hate to say it, I think voters might see things Yglesias’ way. Continued BLM/Antifa terror from now till November will help the Democrats. Voters, seeing Trump’s impotence and inaction, will instinctively think, “Maybe the Democrats, being the terrorists’ allies, are the only ones who can rein them in. Maybe if we put them back in charge, they’ll call off their dogs.”

I think Cole is missing an important element.  It’s something I learned six years ago.

Considering where I both lived and worked at the time, and spent nearly all of my time not doing either, if I never watched the news, then I never would have known that the biggest news story in the world was happening right under my nose.  That’s how geographically tightly isolated the events, damage and otherwise, relating to Ferguson, were.  It also spoke to how infrequently I interacted with those parts of the metro area — The last time I was actually at what came to be known widely as Ground Zero and be called by your Blogmeister the Fergaza Strip was in 1995, and the last time I was in any part of Ferguson, the “better” part, was 2006 or 2007.

Meanwhile, reading some of our sector’s commentary at the time, I was left with the impression that people actually thought that everything within a thirty-mile radius of the Arch was totally destroyed, leveled, Dresden-style bombed out.  It’s just that the Ferguson hoopla filling out peoples’ screens, especially the screens of people who were ideologically interested in the matter one way or the other, led to distorted impressions of how widespread the protests and riots were(n’t).

Fast forward to the current year, and the same thing is afoot, even though it’s happening in many more places.

So here comes David Cole, thinking that enough people will vote Biden just to give in to the mob’s extortion tactics.  The inconvenient truth is that nowhere near enough people are actually direct victims of the mob’s extortion tactics.  Not only is that true numerically, it’s even more true in the more critical sense of marginal political influence.  Which is to say, those who are affected tend to be people who already had their minds made up one way or the other, even if the current year’s interesting times would have never happened.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, or more accurately, back on the cul-de-sac, the people with the real marginal influence, white suburban women, while they’re mostly unaffected in a direct sense, they are scared.  Because white suburban women sure do love the idea of urban riots, sarc.  They’re hardly going to reward the forces which caused them to be scared.

For Debate

Your Blogmeister’s German Desk

A point I made on AR more than a week ago, that I think I should bring here to the blog.  I know this is going to be contentious.

***

I do think that the “mainstream” social media platforms are banning and canceling and deplatforming and deleting like mad because they think they can influence November. That’s because they “blame” themselves for Trump getting elected in the first place, even though they were almost as bad four years ago as they are now with their political bias.

The reality is that people like to engage in this tactic of braggadocio disguised as contrition. That old washed out gang banger in the hood will seem to be sorry about all the violence he committed in the old days, but he’s not really sorry, he’s old man bragging. General Butt Naked is “contrite” about the tens of thousands of people he claimed he killed in the Liberian Civil War, but he’s really bragging. (That and the serious researchers highly doubt he killed that many, and they also think he’s vastly overinflating his body count as a form of bragging.) Journalists “blame” themselves for starting the Spanish-American War (“Yellow Journalism,” the Hearst papers, etc.), not to be sorry, but to brag, and to puff up their own power. (Spoiler alert: The McKinley White House knew what the Hearst papers were up to, and ignored them. It means the SAW started for reasons other than YJ.)

Likewise, Google, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook “blame” themselves for Trump winning four years ago, only because they want you to think they have that kind of power. Which is why they’re deplatforming like mad now, because they actually believe their own lies and are drunk on their own mythical power.

And yes, I said “lies,” which leads to my worldview: I don’t think they have that kind of power.

Since Obama won re-elect eight years ago, and much of the credit went to his data game, we’ve suffered under this myth that online and digital are that important and in fact singularly important. Information that came out the first summer after Obama won re-elect proved that his campaign’s data game was a big dud, and his re-election had nothing to do with it. But that didn’t sink in to the important people and their thick skulls, which is why they’ve been screaming online/data/tech for the last eight years.

Meanwhile, I think that, even now, first world elections still hinge on old fashioned time honored sort of pavement pounding, door knocking and baby kissing factors.

I saw out of the back of my eye during my honeymoon that Trump bounced out Brad Parscale. That was not a surprise to me, because Parscale did digital for Trump in 2016, and I thought it was a mistake all along to give a digital guy the keys to the whole operation. It may be that Trump or someone very close to him has figured out what I already did, that baby kissing is more important than digital.

If things work out in November like they could, Trump wins re-elect in spite of G/FB/T/YT doing everything they can to prevent it, then that may finally be what it takes to blow this “digital is all-important/all-powerful” myth out of the water once and for all, for even the most oblivious to see.

***

I’ll add this later addendum here and now that the truth of the matter is that “mainstream” social media and internet platforms were doing deplatforming and deleting four years ago for the same reasons they’re doing it now, but it just wasn’t as bad four years ago compared to now.  Also, the importance of Laura Loomer’s election victory a few days ago isn’t so much about her, and I’m personally ambivalent about her, it’s for the fact that we now have hard copy proof of my theory.

More from the Wry Whisky Distillery

Your Blogmeister’s German Desk

H/T to Auntie Analogue for the, dare I say it, wry, way I have, or rather, I have come to perfect in recent years, in summarizing complex matters in short snarky sarcastic “bon mot” ways, that you see in the title.

I thought of another one this morning:

There’s this guy who just did his third cashout refi of his house in the last twenty years, and his 31-year old son still lives at home.

The race to the gold star starts…NOW.

A Badday for Goodyear

Topeka, Kansas and Akron, Ohio

The written version.

This is hardly the first such corporate policy that is or very similar to this.  But, in contrast to the others, Goodyear’s is generating a lot of backlash and outrage.

Why?

It’s staring you right in the face right now.

We have photographic evidence.

Remember, the power of the visual media, and my axiom that I would concede to you every word ever written in exchange for total lockdown control of the video and photo stream, eight days out of seven every week.

Quite awhile back, I think it was the San Francisco area BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) that announced that because racism, they’re no longer releasing surveillance images of acts of violent or other criminality that happen on BART trains.  Many in our sector concluded that BART officials’ openly stating their reason was just as good as seeing the photos they were promising to stop releasing.  You now know why I disagree with that contention, but there’s also a common sense way to see that I’m right on the matter:  If the words were just as good as the photos, then BART officials would have never openly stated the reason with words.