The Future of South Africa in One Video

"The whole thing should be scratched off..."

You want to see the future of South Africa? Watch this video from University of Cape Town. about "decolonizalizing science" and purging the "western modalities" from education. One might hear the same kind of thing at an American university, but the difference is that in South Africa, the young woman leading the panel, or someone like her, is likely to be in a position to enforce her opinion across the society in the near future.

Imagine the same panel five or ten years hence, but it is now a tribunal for relocation and removal of all post-colonial influences in South Africa, including anyone of white skin. The young men on the end are now carrying weapons.  Asking the wrong kind of question gets you a death sentence. "Truth and Reconciliation" have become "Purification and Racial Justice."

You think I'm wrong? I hope I'm wrong. I'd love to see it play out differently. But look at how they react when one (white) person dares say "It's not true." They already know they have authority.behind them. They act with the swagger of knowing that others must obey them. Now imagine them with guns.

South Africa, Before the Bloodbath

One of the disturbing and unreported trends in world news recently is the growing violence against Whites in South Africa, especially Boer farmers. I've been following several Twitter accounts from South Africa that keep tabs on the murders---a gruesome list that grows day by day, with photos of the farmers killed. In official crime reports these are listed as "robberies gone wrong," but it is apparent that many people know exactly what is going on.

This is happening with large events in national South African politics. The President of South Africa, Jacob Zuma, recently announced that the law will be amended to allow the government to seize (white-owned) farm land without any compensation.

It appears from this and other trends in the country that we have reached a watershed moment in South African history. The post-apartheid feel-good era of a "nation for all races" is going by the wayside. In its place is arising the new ideology, that South Africa belongs to black people plain and simple, and that white people need to be purged from land.  The government policy of seizing land (which was the policy in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe) is in parallel with growing open calls for violence on social media from young black South Africans, that the only good white person is a dead white person.

Don't expect to see much about this in American people. The idea that white people need to be purged from the earth entirely is a becoming a standard subtext of the academic left, and the de-whitening of America is openly celebrating in the popular media and in Pop Culture. Any sympathy for white South Africans is going to be hard coming.

South Africa is the "canary in the coal mine" for what I saw described on social media as "a global version of the Haitian Revolution." From the Twitter accounts I follow, I get the sense that in South Africa we are approaching a point of inflection, however, in which things may get so bad in South Africa that the world will have to notice. Once a certain momentum of violence starts, it picks up steam rapidly, like an avalanche in which suddenly the solid ground turns to liquid. The white South Africans will not go down easily. Many are well-armed. But I predict that within a couple year's time, it will be common knowledge that an open race revolution is occurring there, one with the goal of purging white people form the African continent.

We know who the Left will side with. They are perfectly comfortable with the idea that certain territories and even entire continents are the property of certain indigenous races. A land belongs to people who live there historically, unless of course they are white Europeans. Then their land belongs to everyone else, and keeping their land to themselves is evil.

Islam as the Way out of Depravity for the West

In the West, we live in a world in which war is a distant thought, disease is mostly eradicated, and hunger is known to only a small few. Yet in many respects---for both young men and young women---there has never been a worse time to be alive.

This is because the ideology of the West over the last century has been a destruction of the existing civilization on a levels. We  have all been pushed to tear down everything that once existed, brick by brick, out of a sense that it was oppressive and evil.

Among the things to be torn down was any form of traditional morality in regard to sexuality. The ideal for young women is the past was the preservation of chastity and innocence until marriage, and then the blossoming into the joys of motherhood.

We are now supposed to see motherhood as a burden, one from which women are to be liberated. Instead they are to find joy in being a career drone alongside men. Moreover, chastity and innocence regarded not only as quaint but as downright evil, as they hold back the natural impulse of young women to fulfill their desires, and anything that holds that back must be destroyed.

We have moved towards a society in which we accept as normal the idea that a young woman can and should explore her sexuality throughout her young adult life, having and enjoying as many sexual partners as she can find, even if that means her tally of lovers exceeds the three-digit mark by the time she is thirty or thirty-five. When she is ready to settle down, some man will wife her up and support her, and she will have a child or two if she desires, but more important is that she fulfill her role in the career workplace, because anything less would be oppressive.

As such, we have built a society of miserable women, and it is only taking off. The current cohort of Millennial women will probably be the most miserable and unhappy that the West has ever produced.

But there is no retreat, apparently. Anything back towards traditionalism is move against the prime directive of the ideology of the 20th century, which was destruction of all tradition, especially anything Christian. The victory over Christianity is not yet complete. More women must be sacrificed to the cause, even if it makes them suicidal in the long run. They are pushed towards this by their peers and by the older generation, out of a sense of justifying their own life choices. It is age-old tenet of human tenet that the fallen seek to drag others down with them. The only joy for the miserable is to corrupt innocent youth by convincing them to follow in their own footsteps of misery.

In short, society cries out for a return to some form of traditional morality, yet it can have nothing that smacks of traditional forms of traditionalism. It cannot be Christian. It cannot appear to support anything that looks "right wing." It has to be progressive.  It has to be seen as moving forward towards the goal of destruction of the past.

Enter Islam, the perfect solution for the West. It offers the harsh and immediate imposition of traditional morality, such that a young woman can go from one day being a camwhore stripping so that a thousand men can masturbate to her, to the next day putting on hijab and declaring herself pure and innocent again. She can do this without any form of submission to traditional Christian western forms of morality. She can do this while being progressive.

For many young women trained in Leftist politics, there is almost no downside to this route, which is why I expect it to become popular as a trend. Furthermore, because Islam is a religion that demands only outward forms of obeisance, and does not demand any inner transformation, one can go from secular SJW to Muslim while still remaining just as angry and judgmental as before. In fact, one has license to become even more of a warrior, to shout even louder, and to even threaten others righteously with death unless they obey. A young woman can shuck off her degradation and then immediately take to the streets to scream for the same things she did before, even declaring herself "feminist." What's not to love?

Everybody Knows a Friendly Muslim

Most people in the West know, or have known at some point, someone who was raised Muslim. Perhaps they were a foreign exchange student, or a someone in their dorm in college. Or perhaps a college professor, or a co-worker.

If you're like most liberals, you probably have thought about this person as a living rebuttal to charges regarding the danger of the spread of Islam. I know Muslims. They are peaceful normal peaceful who just want to practice their religion. What's wrong with that?

The flaw in this line of reasoning is the belief that Islam, like Christianity, is a religion of individuals. If you are thinking that, you are thinking with the bias of a Westerner.

Islam is not at all a religion of individuals. It is a societal religion, akin to a political ideology. In many ways comparing to Christianity (and other religions) is comparing apples to oranges.

Islam has little meaning practiced in isolation in the Western world. In that situation it is but a set of interesting harmless rituals and holidays. But this is not Islam. It is just the just the solitary practice of a Muslim.

Islam is only truly Islam when it is the majority religion within a community or a nation. It is a set of outward practices in conformity with a societal norm.

Isn't Christianity the same? Well perhaps it can be, but it is not a core tenet of the Christian religion that it must be, or even expects to be, a majority within a society. Christianity can be practiced just as legitimately by solitary individuals, or by a tiny minority within society,  arguably more easily than if it is the majority religion. This is because Christianity concerns the inner being, rather than the outward public practice.

The question to ask in regard to isolated "good Muslims" in the west is: how they behave if they were in a Muslim majority society? In almost every case, a good Muslim will conform to all the beliefs of a Muslim society must be, including the death penalty for apostasy.

One might compare this to the charming hippie "Communist" harmlessly selling fruit at a farmer's market. But how this person be, if dropped down in the middle of crowd in the Cultural Revolution of China? Communism in individuals is meaningless. It only makes sense as a collective ideology. The same is true of Islam.

The Muslims who came to the West fifty years ago were often academics comfortable in a secular world. The ones coming today are a different type of person. They don't want to integrate. They want to immediately be among other Muslims, because for most Muslims to be outside a Muslim community is to be outside of Islam itself. They think the rest of us should ultimately play by their rules as well. They believe we ultimately will play by their rules because God wants that to happen. God will make their communities grow until they can dominate the nations of the West, and we will play by their rules whether we want to or not.

Feminism Now Means Submission to Islam

For several years running now, one of the great mysteries of political analysis has been the curious alliance between western SJW Leftists and Muslims advocating Shariah Law. The fact that the two are so far apart in ideology on many points (e.g. that Shariah laws advocates the execution of women for being raped, or for anyone having homosexual sex) seems to be of no concern to Leftists, who may easy alliance with Muslims who openly express their desire to transform the western world into an extension of the Arab one, something they see as their ultimate goal and destiny.

On the surface, this can apparently be easily resolved by resorting to the principle of the "enemy of the enemy is my friend." To wit, both SJW Leftist and Muslims desire to tear down the remnants of the Christian-dominated west and replace it with a society of their own imagining. The idea among many Leftists perhaps is that Islam will never really have much traction in the west beyond a subculture, and in time they can be introduced to progressive ideas as well.

But I don't think that addresses the entire issue. I think something deeper is at work that speaks of a deeper transformation going on in western society, namely the end of progressive culture altogether. As I write this, I would assert that western civilization has fallen into so much decay and cultural rot as to have left the majority of its people in a feeble and miserable condition, rootless and bereft of meaning in their lives.

Progressive Leftists feel this as much as anyone else, and this is why they scream for ever greater acceleration of changes to accommodate more degradation, especially anything having to do with sexual license and the erasure of any constraint on sexual behavior (except among straight men).

In the conservative (Christian) viewpoint, such a course only leads to great misery, but the path of sin is one that makes the sinner believe that even greater sinning is always the answer.  The Leftists (libertine) response to this is something along the lines of "f@ck you and your morality," accompanies by a "Hail Satan" for good measure.

Yet they do yearn for a way out of the misery. The soul hungers for some kind of salvation from the desolation of postmodern existence. Where does it come from?

This is where Islam enters the picture. It offers all the convenience of a stern morality that demands submission to a set of rules, but without the horrible inconvenience of a surrender to the hated Christians. In one feel swoop, a young woman who has spent year youth accumulating sexual partners can don a hijab and declare herself morally clean again. Although this hasn't happened yet en masse among millennials, I believe that as a group, progressives recognize the appeal of this, and are fascinated by this possibility of salvation from their madness.

We begin to see the fascination grow, bit by bit. SJWs announce "I'm a Muslim too" on Twitter with a hashtag, partly as a rebuke to Trump and his followers, but also with a deeper sense of putting one foot towards an option towards future conversion to Islam. They stand at hushed attention in Times Square as the Muslim call to prayer is broadcast.

They yearn for purity and salvation. They are tired of Satan worship. Islam begins to seem like a possibility. It does not demand that one change one's inner being at all. One can still be as judgmental. In fact, one is encouraged to be a warrior, and to force others to submit. This is something that SJWs love. There is almost no downside.

Sure they have to jettison the concept of sexual immorality, abortion, homosexuality, etc., but this is exactly what they are actually yearning to do. The women have to submit to the patriarchy again, but likewise this is something most feminists secretly yearn for in any case.

Things are moving fast. By next year I predict all these trends will be common knowledge in the cultural discourse.

Rain, and More Guests, with Talk of Hollywood

Yesterday we were privileged to welcome more guests to our house in FountainHills, this time in the person of Red's cousin and his girlfriend, who live in the Los Angeles County community of Glendale, which if you know anything about the geography of the area, is a municipality of rather small size but which is located near the opening between the Los Angeles Valley proper and both the San Fernando Valley to the Northwest as well as Pasadena to the East. This makes it readily accessible to a great many locales in the region. Not surprisingly its also the nexus of a several of the major freeways that serve as arterials.

Both of our guests work in animation. They are both originally from Ohio, where they went to art school before relocating to Southern California.  Red's cousin works at a large and well-known movie animation studio that is not far from their residence. His girlfriend works at a large and well-known online game studio, the name of which I had not known but which I am told would be readily familiar to anyone who engages in gaming on a regular basis.

We had a very pleasant dinner last night at Flower Child in Scottsdale, which is one of our favorite casual places where one can be served a meal that suits just about any healthy dietary restriction. At home we sat around the propane fire pit where we the current state of Hollywood and moviemaking.

Red's cousin opined how so much of the work in animation is now being driven away from Southern California towards other locales. I remarked that I had recently read an article in Vanity Fair about the "End of Hollywood" based partly on that idea.

Later on, I took over the conversation, describing my interest in Hollywood history.

"To the lay person, a movie is all about the actors. In the case of film students, one learns about auteurship and it's all about directors. But from watching TCM for so long, I learned that for real movie buffs, the history of Hollywood is all about the studios."

Our guests brought the rain with them. It came in overnight and we woke the patio was soaked. We had coffee out on the patio again, with water replacing fire as the dominant element of the moment.

By that time I'd realized that there was a fourth level of appreciation of the history of moviemaking, beyond studios and producers, which is the technologies.  Real movie buffs can tell you about the various systems of sound that were invented in the late 1920s, and about the history of Technicolor.

Behold my second Youtube video of this series (made with iPad), a very short short in the style of the Edison studio c. 1898.

In Which I Start Uploading Youtube Videos

On a pure whim last night, while lying on the couch and thinking over the recent events involving the great Youtube star PewDiePie, I had a thought, something in the manner of the famous meme One-Percent Cat, which found its way into conscious words of the sort "I should make Youtube videos."

The inspiration found immediately traction in my mind, and transformed into a resolve almost immediately. As all such inspirations usually have as the origin some expressible motivation, int his case mine could be formulated as "I want to understand how it all works."

That is, it occurred to me how much Youtube (and other platforms of user video) are really kicking the ass of the old media. As in the past, when I've joined other social media platforms (including this very one I'm using to type this post), I have often done so out of curiosity for "how it all works." That is, the world is changing through technology, and I want to know how the gears and pulleys are operating in a basic sense. This has been a very fruitful strategy in the past for revealing the underlying dynamics of the change, and given me great peace over time. I had long resisted making videos, thinking I had no talent nor desire to share thoughts and experiences this way, but last night I guess I finally reached the threshold where my curiosity got the better of me.

So without further ado, here's my first little video, just a spontaneous narration of my intent of this project while looking out over our back patio in Fountain Hills. I better post it now before I lose my nerve out of repulsion for the sound of my own voice, that universal revulsion we all seem to share in the era of recorded sound (I wonder if Richard Burton and Ronald Colman felt the same way).

Please note the sky is rather dark this morning, because a huge storm front is coming through from the East. How appropriate.

The Most Amazing Days Ever

Deep State Emerging. A year ago, it was tinfoil hat. Now the entire Twittersphere is talking about it. Everyone assumes that the Deep State took down General Flynn. Even the Lefties and Neocons acknowledge this and are cheering on the Deep State to do their wishes against Trump. 

The Trumpistas are gleeful. The Deep State is the ultimate enemy. The Deep State is the swamp. The Deep State is the Establishment. Everything else (the Media, Pop Culture idiots, Academia, the GOP and Democratic Party are just adjuncts to the support of the Deep State). Trump is taking them on. It is more than any of his supporters could have hoped for. 

Chuck Schumer basically told Trump that if he took them on, he would be very sorry. Thankfully Trump didn't listen.

The Flynn episode, many are now realizing, was a sting by Trump to expose them. Of course nothing illegal, even unethical happened. 

Flynn was never meant to be National Security Adviser for long. His resignation was a planned sacrifice to expose the leakers left behind by Obama, perhaps with clear intent to do exactly what they did, which is try to trap the Trump administration with illegal activity.

Flynn ran the Defense Intelligence Agency. He's a master spy. He knew he was being listened to. Probably the whole thing about lying to Pence was made up. In any case now Trump and his intelligence community loyalists, and the new Attorney General Jeff Sessions, know who the leakers are. 

The National Enquirer has an interview with someone claiming to have been in the meeting, and that Obama sanctioned it while he was still president. If this is true, and if the leakers are indicted, then perhaps they will squeal and point fingers at Obama. It seems like anything is possible. 

The Establishment press is going hog wild with stories about skullduggery and crimes by Trump. In reality it is projection. We are perhaps going to see just the reverse unfold.

Forty-eight hours ago it looked like Trump was on the ropes with the Flynn takedown. Now it seems Trump is triumphant and that Obama or his henchmen may have fucked themselves into a federal criminal indictment. 

Trump is the master. He doesn't have to be 47 steps ahead because his opponents are stupid. He lets them underestimate him, and in their blind rage, they fall for it over and over. It is beautiful.

Absolutely the best part is that the Deep State is now exposed. It can never be what it once was. It is now visible. The leakers were small potatoes all i all, but the paradigm has shifted.  The world has changed.

Great interview with Joe diGenova, one time United States Attorney, District of Columbia.

Bring the hammer down on them, Mr. Sessions... They have declared war. Destroy them.

Meanwhile the pedophile arrests continue. Over 1500 arrests since Trump's inauguration...

Rebounding Like a Guru

This morning I started my day as I like to lately, by going out on the patio to engage in a little rebounding.

I do this using the QiBounder that I purchased last fall over the web. The QiBounder, which bills itself as the "Rolls Royce" of rebounders, is manufactured by a German company and costs about twice as much as standard rebounders. It took about six weeks to arrive in the mail after I ordered it.

I chose that brand because it is the kind that Tony Robbins, the self-help guru, uses. We saw him using a rebounder in his Netflix documentary I am Not Your Guru. I said, "If it's good enough for Tony, it's good enough for me."

Rebounding was new to me, but Red was already a fan, so she was excited when it came, and has used  it much more than I have. Lately, now the frigid nights have passed here in Arizona, I've tried to make a habit of doing it first thing in the morning, usually right after I put on the water for coffee. People do lots of intricate motions while QiBounding, but I usually just bounce up and down on my feet while looking out over the hills towards Red Mountain in the morning sun.

I get in a little bouncing before the water is hot for coffee. It really gets the blood (and lymph) flowing, and makes me want to get the day underway. Then I sit down and write my blog. At least that's what I did today.

Pedophile Apocalypse Coming?

Many, many rumors are swirling at the moment regarding impeding mass arrests that will bust wide open the pedophile and child sex slavery rings among the powerful elite, including high-level D.C. politicians of both parties.

Just ten days ago, we saw the arrest of 474 people in Southern California, busting up a pedophile network there.  The question many are asking if these are the foreshocks of a much bigger, much more explosive revelation about to come.

The basic premise that many have put forth for decades is that pedophile networks are rampant among the global elite. According to many allegations, it is the default tool which by politicians  in the U.S. and other countries are controlled. They have high level protection and immunity from prosecution. In return they do what they are told.

The rumor is that Trump is ready to bust this wide open, and many new arrests will be made as soon as Jeff Sessions is confirmed and takes office as Attorney General. This is one of the reasons they are throwing the kitchen sink at him, to try to stop him.  There is enormous pressure to stop the upcoming arrests. This is the story floating about, at least

I can't speak for what the truth is. I am only reporting the swirling rumors. But if they turn out to be true, it is the last stand of the old Establishment. It is hard not to think that our entire political edifice as we know it would be shaken to its core, and that the nation would never be the same.


Bill Still, who is a good barometer for what gossip is percolating in D.C., hears the drumbeats. 

David Seaman is scared for his life

Ben Swann is missing from the Internet after doing a "Pizzagate is real" report. Signs of something big about to happen?

Those Not Welcome in Oregon

As I mentioned, at times much of the discussion we had with our housemates centered the issues of being an uncover Trump supporter in a liberal area, to the point of fearing for one's physical safety. Along these lines, Erika and Rick had many observation regarding both Oregon and California.

But at least in Oregon, that wasn't the only threat they faced. As it happens, while they were living in Eugene, the car that Erika owned was a battered well-used Toyota Prius that he had more or less inherited from a friend who had recently passed away. The car bore California plates, which is not uncommon to see in Oregon.

Of course, as anyone who has lived in Oregon knows, there has long been an antipathy towards Californians that has ranged from manifestations of "Oregon Pride" (such as appeared in the 1986 gubernatorial campaign), to downright contempt of those arriving from south of the border (the Oregon-California border that is, not the U.S.---Mexican border of course!).

But as with the hub-hub over White Supremacy winning the Super Bowl, I had not anticipated how bad things had gotten in regarding to this issue. What has simmered below the surface is now breaking into overt expression. Rick and Erika reported two separate incidents in Eugene that occurred while they were in traffic, in which a nearby motorist had rolled down their window to express extreme displeasure at their presence, manifestly because of their license plates.

These incidents were but one of the factors that made Rick and Erika reconsider their entire plan of buying property in the Northwest. Everything around Eugene seemed too expensive.

"The owners are just sitting on things, waiting for the Californians to arrive and pay top dollar," said Rick.

In any case, they were both relieved when the deal they set up in Eastern Washington fell through, forcing them to reboot their entire plan.

Moreover, the Prius is now history, having been sold while they were in Santa Cruz to empty Erika's storage unit.

While the packed up their recently purchased SUV in our driveway yesterday, almost ready to hit to the road, I mused about their destination, which would take them many days of driving to reach.

"It's sort of ironic that you're going to Maine," I told Rick. "It goes back to an old nativist Oregon thing, called the James G. Blaine Society."

I explained that Blaine was a one-time U.S Senator from Maine in the late 19th century. At one time he was nominated as the Republican candidate for President, to run against Grover Cleveland. During the campaign, Blaine visited every U.S. state except for Oregon.

Then in 1960's, when many native Oregonians felt the state was becoming too crowded with newcomers (in a way that was ruining the natural environment), a well-known Oregon historian formed a tongue-and-cheek society named for Blaine as an encouragement for others to avoid visiting the state.

I added that I had visited the Blaine mansion in Augusta. "It's right across from the capitol," I added, pretending as if I were welcoming them to Maine. It's such a pleasure playing host to good folks.

Trump Carries the Super Bowl, Rick Wins a Million

Last night was Rick and Erika's last night as our house guests here in Fountain Hills. Since it was also the Super Bowl, I decided it would be a good idea to buy some premium rib-eyes at the supermarket and grill them on our backyard Weber bar-b-cue. Actually it would Rick who would wind up doing the honors of cooking. Not only is he a far superior chef than I am, but he very much enjoys it. It was a pleasure to have him in the kitchen for the last week.

Toward the end of the fourth quarter of the game we were getting a bit hungry, so we decided it was time to start the coals. By the overtime came around, Rick was on the patio by himself, tending to the steaks. When the game was finally over, I had to go outside and tell him. Later he told me he was glad to left alone outside to tend to the grill.

Red wanted to watch the post-game, including the trophy presentation, so we paused the DVR while we ate our steaks and enjoyed a bottle of wine. Afterwards we started the telecast again and watched the celebrations and highlights while we sat around with tablets and laptops, surfing social media.

Rick and I indulged in the new American past time of sharing Tweets about the game that we had discovered in our feeds. Despite my anticipation of political messages in the commercials and the half-time show, the latter which never materialized, I was stunned by the degree to which so many people had politicized the game itself.

Of course I knew that Tom Brady, the quarterback of the New England Patriots, was a Donald Trump supporter. Likewise the coach and owner of the team This would be a knock against the Patriots in the minds of many on the Left, I realized, but I figured that natural team loyalties would dictate most of the social media buzz.

Whew. Was I ever wrong! There seemed to be no end of tweets by folks who had chosen to cast the game last time as a replay of the 2016 Presidential election, with the Atlanta Falcons representing Hillary and the Patriots representing Trump. Many Righty posters gleefully shared Lefty tweets from half-time, when the Falcons were blowing out the Patriots, and then reveled in the schadenfreude of the rage induced among the same posters by the unprecedented comeback by the Patriots.

Likewise there was many Lefty tweets expressing something akin to the same mixture of rage and despair as on the day after the recent election. Atlanta was Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ, all rolled into one.  Tom Brady and the Patriots were White Supremacists and Nazis. They represented evil.  "Punch Tom Brady" became a meme.

Of course there were many tweets that played off humorous analogies with the election. For example, there were ones claiming that the Falcons vote the popular vote, and that Jill Stein was challenging the results on the field.

As I read off some of the best tweets to Red and our guests, I said, "I didn't want to care about this game, but I guess I have to."

Like I said, I didn't see this coming, at least not to the degree it played out. I had thought last year's Super Bowl was racially charged, as it featured a white southern-drawling Republican-voting quarterback playing against a very dark-hued quarterback who by his rhetoric and and style was almost the poster child of Black Lives Matter. This year's game had two white quarterbacks! But in the end that didn't matter. Among other things, as many Lefties on Twitter pointed out, Atlanta was both the "blackest and gayest city" in the country.

It's hard to see that the Super Bowl can ever be the same. The commercials have reached Peak Social Justice, even celebrating flagrant illegal immigration, gratuitous gay acceptance, and putting forth the notion that girls are valuable inasmuch as they compete and succeed in the traditional realm of boys' activities (so much pressure on them!).

I wonder what it will be like a year from now. In any case, I now have a two-year-running tradition of watching the Super Bowl with Rick, the biggest football hater that I know. After the game, I repeated the question from the previous night, that having just watched the game, whether he could name, for a theoretical million dollars, at least one NFL player besides Tom Brady and Colin Kaepernick.  He fumbled for a moment and came up with the last name of the Falcons' quarterback. Only the last name, however. "Ryan?"  I said that was good enough. He wins the million.

All in for Islam

As I write this, we are sitting around on a very sunny Arizona afternoon waiting for the Super Bowl to start. Neither Rick nor Erika is a football fan. Rick despises the NFL. Last night sitting around the propane fire table by the pool, he volunteered that he knew the names of two professional football players----"Tom Brady, and that guy, uh, Kaepernick?"

"I couldn't name another one for a million dollars," he said. I volunteered the names of a few more that he might know, getting only one correct hit out of him.

Despite his loathing of football, he is up to watch the Big Game today out of the party spirit. After all, as I pointed out to him, it's pretty much a tradition now, as he watched last year's game with us in our apartment on East Burnside in Portland, when he first came up to Oregon.

We have been discussing the upcoming game this morning---not the actually football game itself, but rather the halftime show by Stefani Germanotta (who goes by a more well-known stage name, but I'm adopting Rick's attitude of refusing to go along with the persona that these folks want us to buy).

Ms. Germanotta is well-known hater of all things Trump, and even appeared with Hillary Clinton while clad in something resembling a SS uniform (in tribute to Michael Jackson, to the Third Reich). She bullhorned Trump Tower after the election.

After much speculation about her intentions, Germanotta has pretty much admitted that she will indeed be making a political statement during her half-time.

"How could she not?" I said. "She's speaking out against the new Hitler, after all. If she didn't speak out, it would be tantamount to endorsing him."

The question is what kind of protest would it be. To me it was obvious that it involve something pro-Muslim. Would she don a hijab at some point? I joked that if she really wanted to make a strong statement, she would proclaim the shahada and convert to Islam on the spot during the performance, and urge the audience to follow her example.

"The Left is going all in for Islam," I said. "They have really boxed themselves into the corner on this, and there is little way out."

I said that I expected that the coming fawning adoration for hijab-clad women by the Left (as means of showing how non-racist and "welcoming" they are) will soon give way to stronger statements. In the near future I expect to see, coming from Leftist friends, an admission of fascination for Islam itself. Maybe there is something good about Sharia that we should look into.  Perhaps Islam offers a path of spirituality that fits my lifestyle and needs.

This will followed by outright conversion in some instances. I feel so liberated wearing the hijab. It will be the ultimate way to say F@CK YOU to Donald Trump and his supporters. What's not to like? After all, there isn't anything bad or negative about Islam, is there? Is there?

Islam is perfect for many on the Left as it has all the benefits of an established monotheistic religion (hard and fast rules to follow, unlike squishy creeds of the East) but without the "racist/homophobic/hateful" baggage of Christianity, nor the ethnic exclusivity and other issues of Judaism.

I think we are closer to this trend than people realize. Certainly I think it will become noticeable among college students within the next year I think, and then move to other age groups. The trend will accelerate as each additional person is greeted on by a warm applause on social media akin to that previously reserved to people coming out as gay.

Because of this, unless Germanotta goes all in for Islam during her show, it's going to seem tame by the expectations that people have. Just in the last few hours, I have seen others on Twitter anticipate that she will do something along these lines.

So if she is going to be an edgy artist on the forefront of trends, she had better up her game. It's the  Super Bowl, after all!

EDIT: Red's verdict on the Halftime Show was "Very good. She stayed in her lane." I was disappointed in the lack of strong political statement, of course. But how could you top the social justice message in over half the commercials?

The Temporary Retreat of the Left

As it happen, on the evening of the second day of the visit here by our friends, the news feeds erupted with reports of riots on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley, right in Erika's hometown.

Already it had seemed like a whirlwind day of events concerning actions of the new Trump Administration. By 6 p.m. it felt like a full day of news had occurred, but we hardly knew that the bulk of the days events had yet to play out.

Most of the Righties on social media had already figured out that many on the Left had gone all in on the idea that Trump supporters are Nazis and therefore deserve no quarter. What played out in Berkeley, which was a rampage of the members of the "Antifa" faction to (successfully) shut down a speech to be given a flamboyant gay Jewish immigrant Trump supporter, who has made a name for himself attracting attention this way.

The reaction on social media was rather predictable. For the first 24 triumphs, many voices on the Left were crowing with triumph about having prevented the speech. The basic maxim was that the speech itself was a form of violence, and that violence by the Antifa demonstrators was actually a form of free speech in response.

I saw very few Leftist voices (in fact none) condemning the actions of the Antifa group. But then something rather predictable started to happen over the next day. Somehow there was an awareness among the Left that they had screwed up and crossed the line. But the Left is never able to admit such things. Anyone saying that the violence was over the top would be susceptible to being called a Nazi appeaser at this point.

So instead came the predictable response that in fact the violent Antifa crowd were not in fact Leftists at all, but were rather secret Trump supporters who were pretending to be Antifa in order to discredit the Left.

This is about as close as possible as the Left gets to admitting they made a mistake. It signals a temporary retreat from the fervor of recent days, and a roundabout way of condemning the violence without actually condemning the result.

It won't last, of course. The fire has been lit. College campuses are the new battleground. We are in for a long haul of this thing. They have drawn the line regarding the people they see as evil: they shall not speak.

California Refugees, Outbound and Inbound

As it happens, both of our houseguests---my friend Rick and his girlfriend Erika---are native Californians. In Rick's case, this is somewhat misleading, since he left the Golden State when he was less than a year old and subsequently grew up in the boondocks of New Jersey, where he acquired a very East Coast outlook on life. A couple years ago I wrote a blog post here about how I had the ironic pleasure of giving a tour of San Francisco to a native of that city.

Erika, by contrast, is the real California deal. She was born in Berkeley in the early 1970's and spent most of her life in the Santa Cruz area, living temporarily in Kauai and Oregon, which are places that hardly dilute one's Californianess.

As I mentioned, they met in Eugene and lived there for a year before they decided to move on. Most recently there were back in the Santa Cruz area for a week while Erika emptied out her storage unit there.

On the first night they arrived, we spent a long evening discussing life in both Eugene and Santa Cruz. Since both of them are Trump supporters like Red and me, much of our discussion consisted of the humorous comparison of notes of living in area in which it feels downright dangerous to admit holding that particular view.

According to their observations, most of the people in Eugene were, not surprisingly, enthusiastic Bernie Sanders supporters who grew melancholic and surly during the fall as they were forced to come around to support Hillary. Now liberated from that burden due to Clinton's loss, they have reverted to a rather open hostility that is confrontational towards anything pro-Trump. But since "everyone" in Eugene is anti-Trump, this mostly consists of griping to others, while assuming that everyone agrees with them.

Not so in Northern California, they said. In Santa Cruz, they said they felt a surliness that was several notches higher in intensity than laid-back Eugene.

"California feels like it's going to blow," Rick said.

We had a good time sharing humor about life in an independent California. Among other things, I made a tongue-in-cheek prediction that after seceding, California would of course fling its borders wide open to all newcomers, but that this would be only temporarily. After a brief interlude, there would come an "oh crap" moment and the Cali borders would be locked down even tighter than ever.

"After all, the open borders thing would have accomplished it purpose with secession, and creating a majority Latino, minority white nation," I said. We'll see what happens, but at this point, little would shock me that way.

The Return of Rick

The last three nights we have the pleasure of playing host to my friend Rick and his girlfriend Erika, whom I met for the first time when they arrived at our driveway in her Toyota SUV, laden with all of their possessions (mostly her stuff, as Rick travels very light).

The last time I saw Rick was last June, when he was working as a cook at Camp Tamarack in the Oregon Cascades near Bend. He got canned from that job after complaining after the quality of the food being served to the kids---he's too much of a troublemaker that way. The good result was that he would up back in the hostel in Eugene, where he had been living before his adventure in the Cascades.

There he met Erika and shortly after that they moved in together, so that he finally had a bit of stability after the months of chaos following his abrupt ejection from his previous home in Fresno. In fact, as I pointed out to him, it was almost exactly a year since he arrived in sorry shape with his meager belongings at the bus station in downtown Portland, and I drove him out to our place on East Burnside, before checking him into a motel.

"You look soooooooo much better," I told him. "Ten years younger." It was true. He looked like a broken old man a year ago. He was taller and straighter, and with more color in his cheeks.

"You saved my life," he told me, soon after his arrival here, as we mused about the weirdness of the recent events in our lives. "Who would have known that the next time we saw each other it would be in Arizona?"

I was so pleased that they had made it here to our house in Fountain Hills. Despite my vociferous and repeated invitations, I was not sure I would see them here. Rick had said that on their way East they wanted to the take the "southern route," but I feared they would cave to the "shortest route" principle and cut across Nevada instead. I was happy to be proved wrong.

It was only a couple weeks ago that they were holed up in a cheap motel in Troutdale, Oregon, at the mouth of the Columbia, waiting out the snow and ice storms. At the time they were attempting to negotiate the purchase of an old gas station (with living quarters) in a tiny town in Eastern Washington on the highway between Spokane and Pullman. It looked like almost a sure thing. But the deal soured, as it turned out that they might not be able to live on-sight after all. I was a bit relieved myself when it fell through, as somehow it didn't seem right for them.

Then followed another attempt at a house in rural Eastern Washington, but it turned out to lack basic amenities such as running water. Not a good start for a potential AirBnB business. They had some cash to play around with for upgrades, but it is not infinite.

After another week, in which they cooled their heels in Troutdale, they changed plans radically. They were both tired of the Northwest and decided to look for something very far away to the East. A short search found an ideal property on a house that is almost 200 years old, and which seems ideally suited for turning into a AirBnB property, as it on a tourist circuit. The location of this I will not divulge for now, since I don't feel it is my prerogative to do so, suffice it to say that is very far away from the Pacific Northwest.