Canadian Prime Minster Justin Trudeau is a very pretty man.  I hope to God, that is the only reason why he was elected.  I have a hard time imagining that Canadians who actually listened to him talk about his policies voted for him.

Here he is at the UN talking about why he’s a feminist.

That’s not how a leader of a nation speaks.  He sounds like a male Women and Gender Studies major running for president of the local chapter of Democratic Socialists of America.  If the pattern of male feminists who turn out to be sex offenders holds true than after this speech, I wouldn’t be surprised if the news reported that he built a The-Girl-With-The-Dragon-Tattoo-esque soundproof rape room under 24 Sussex Drive.

Remember, this is the PM who wanted a gender balanced cabinet because “It’s 2015.”

Trudeau intervened to guarantee a payout of $10.5 Million to a terrorist of Canadian nationality who traveled to the Middle East to kill Americans and was captured and held in Guantanamo.  Trudeau also apologized to the terrorist.

Justin Trudeau is not a leader.  He engages in nothing but meaningless virtue signaling.  They can’t afford their healthcare system, but Trudeau wants to import more than a million illiterate, unskilled, refugees into Canada.

His economic polices are harming Canada.

He appointed a Muslim Minister of Immigration that couldn’t condemn female genital mutilation, because the feminist Trudeau himself couldn’t condemn it.

In Muslims > Women.

In the whole encyclopedia of stupid shit that Trudeau has said, I think he topped himself.

You saw that correctly.

Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, said that Canadian citizens who traveled abroad to fight with ISIS should return home to Canada where they will be an extraordinarily powerful voice for Canada.

This is the same group that committed a staggering array of human rights abuses, including child slavery, sex slavery, crucifying Christians, burning people alive, throwing gays off buildings, and making Muslim beheading porn.  

These people will are not going to prevent radicalization.  They will cause it.

This is beyond virtue signaling.  This is giving an enemy free range to recruit in Canadian boarders.

The most telling thing I’ve seen this Christmas season are the pictures from British and German Christmas Markets which have to be surrounded by concrete blocks, metal detectors, and police with machine guns.

Aptly, these concrete anti-vehicle barricades have been come to be known as “Merkel Legos.”

This is undoubtedly Canada’s future under Trudeau, if he’s welcoming former ISIS terrorists back into Canada to preach to young Canadian Muslims.

Next Canadian election, I don’t think the ballot should be Trudeau vs. his opponent.

Is should just ask one simple question.

Should Canada commit national suicide?  Yes   No

My wife is a librarian.  She showed me the trailer to a movie written, directed by, and staring Emilio Estevez, called The Public.

The plot takes place in the main branch of the Cincinnati Public Library, during winter.  An arctic blast comes down and the homeless shelters are full.  The homeless who hang out in the library during the day to keep warm are kicked out at night and freeze to death.  A number of homeless people start to occupy the library and want the right to stay there all night to keep warm.  The occupation of the library turns into civil unrest when the police get involved.

That is as much of the plot as I can find online.  The movie is not out yet.

The reason my wife showed me the trailer is that it is a surprisingly accurate portrayal of the job of a librarian.

We’ve live in the Chicago suburbs, Rapid City, South Dakota, Omaha, Nebraska, and Huntsville Alabama.

In the winter, the homeless would spend all day in the library to stay warm.  It is a public building, and as long as they were not causing a disturbance, had the right to stay there.

There are some hints in the trailer, not to mention some prejudices that I have about Hollywood,  that predict where this movie is going.

I’m sure that the librarians who would allow the homeless to stay are heroes while the cops and mayor who want to eject the homeless are the bad guys.  The homeless will be portrayed nobly as people down on their luck who a heartless (capitalist) society has thrown away.

I’ve seen this argument play out in real life among my wife’s friends and co-workers (librarians are often a liberal bunch).

I am now bringing my argument to the blog that I’ve made before to others.

This type of “social justice” is self defeating.

In every place I’ve ever lived, the public library was funded by property taxes.  As a homeowner or renter, I payed property taxes to keep the library open and operational.  I didn’t actually live in Omaha (I wasn’t going to register my handguns) so I had to pay a fee to use the Omaha library.  Chicago had the same system for people in the suburbs to be able to use the Chicago main branch library (which is AMAZING by the way).

The homeless, by definition, don’t pay property taxes so don’t pay for the service that they use.  To be fair to the homeless, this is not unique to them, nearly half of Americans won’t pay a net federal income tax.

There is some difference here.

I remember in Rapid City, where any comfortable (or upholstered) chair wouldn’t last a week.  They were constantly being steam cleaned or thrown away because the bed bugs or lice or vomit or shit left in them by a – usually drunk – homeless person.  I remember the homeless using all the paper towels in the restrooms giving themselves sponge baths in the restroom sinks.

Then there is the issue of homeless people watching porn on the public computers in the library.  This is something every librarian knows about.

Across the country, library patrons complain about this (Capistrano, Gainesville, Brookline, Philadelphia).  In Seattle, the librarians let the homeless watch porn to the point where normal patrons are warned to stay away from the library.

Libraries Are the New Homeless Shelters.

As a taxpayer, I have no interest in funding a library that I can’t take my kids to because the homeless are watching porn on the computers and have infected every possible surface with bed bugs and hepatitis.  Why should I pay for a the salary of a librarian to spend her time stopping homeless from masturbating at the public computers rather than helping my children with their research projects.

When the homeless take over the libraries and consume a disproportionate amount of resources, not to mention ruin it for other patrons, the library becomes a financial liability instead of an asset to the community.

This is the problem with this sort of redistributive social justice.  Not just is money taken from the taxpayers and spent disproportional on non-tax payers, but the effect is to make whatever the money is being spent on unpalatable for those paying for it.

If the libraries are going to be homeless shelters filled with books, I’m going to vote against any library expansion and increase in my property taxes as I can.

Yes, it is a public space, but a public space should serve the best interests of the public that funds it.

If this is a statement about how cities should do more for the homeless, as a taxpayer, keep the homeless out of my library and let them sleep in the fancy offices of City Hall.  I pay for those too.  Frankly, if I were a resident of of New York City, I’d demand that the homeless be sheltered in Gracie Mansion.  Maybe if Mayor de Balsio woke up to watch a homeless guy washing his ass in his kitchen sink he’d do something about it.  I’d much rather the homeless guy wash his ass in the Mayor’s sink that I pay for than in the fountain in front of the library that I pay for.

I was subject to another corporate social justice ad on YouTube, this time from Boeing.

I had a lot of respect for Boeing.  There is a large Boeing presence in Huntsville and I know quite a few Boeing engineers.

But this ad… Jesus.

First of all, as a society, we need to decide what the statue of limitations is on historical oppression.

These women, who are Boeing engineers – literal fucking rocket scientists – are reading a rejection letter from 1919.  That’s 5 days short of 99 years ago.  My grandfather wasn’t born yet in 1919.

Phrenology was considered a cutting edge field of science in 1919.

If “a woman received a rejection letter from an engineering department in 1919” is why a young woman chose not to major in engineering in the fall of 2018, that young woman is not mentally cut out for anything.

Then they cut to the statistic that only 13% of engineering majors are women.  Not this bullshit again.  There are a wide variety of fields of engineering, how about a breakdown?

Oh look, aerospace is 14.2% women, above the average.  Environmental engineering is half women.  Biomedical is 40% women.  I guess the fraction of women in engineering really depends on the discipline.  If we leave engineering and look at STEM in general, half of chemistry majors are women and more than half of biology majors are women.

Like the quote goes “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

For instance, in engineering I hear frequently “40 Percent Of Female Engineers Are Leaving The Field.”  Oh, no.  They are being discriminated out of their field.  How awful.  But wait…  it turns out that 43% of women leave work all together when they have kids.  In addition, the implication of the “women leaving engineering” is that it is bad.  I have known a lot of women in engineering who have gone to law school to become patent lawyers or have gone to medical school or dental school.  I have known women with degrees in engineering who have gone to business incubators for the tech industry.  Is leaving engineering to become a lawyer or a doctor or an entrepreneur  a bad thing?

But I digress…

Lastly the ad ends with #WomenMakeUsBetter.

Really?

Not to say that woman don’t make anybody better, but is it really a matter of gender?

I have known very good women engineers and very bad women engineers.  for that matter, I have known very good male engineers and very bad male engineers.  I don’t think gender has anything to do with the quality of an engineer.

I sucked as a student.  I failed thermodynamics more times than I passed it.  It took me three tries at the class to finally figure out how to do the calculus to calculate fugacity.  I flunked tests.  Put me in a lab and I fly.

So I went into a career that doesn’t require me to calculate fugacity.  I am an expert failure analyst and a fantastic process engineer.  I can figure out why anything broke and how to implement the changes to fix it.  I can get the maximum efficiency and cost savings out of a manufacturing process.

I knew engineers, both men and women, who could ace every class and then had no practical competency in the field.

How about #QualityMakesUsBetter.

In the end, the thing that bothers me about these social justice in engineering ads is this:

When as student finished a Ph.D. ad the institution I went to, they did an exit interview tour.  They met with various deans and administrators to discuss what they liked and didn’t like about the grad program, what they wanted to do for a career, etc.  You were expected to be a representative of the best and brightest that the school matriculated.

One of the deans I had to meet with was the “Dean of Diversity and Inclusion.”  My exit interview with her lasted about 10 seconds.  I sat down and introduced myself.  Her response was “another white male in engineering” and that was it.

Eleven years of hard work, research, publication and I’m just  “another white male in engineering.”  Great.

I have two kids, a son and a daughter.  I don’t know much about my daughter, she’s two weeks old.  Right now her personality is alternating between eating an sleeping.

My son, on the other hand, takes after me.  His two favorite TV shows are both STEM related, Blaze and the Monster Machines and Rusty Rivets.

He knows everything about every construction vehicle ever made.  We pass a construction site and he’s naming them all.  We drive by Marshall Space Flight Center and he can name the different rockets that can be seen from the highway.

He’ll yell out in toddlerese the Rusty Rivets catchphrase “combine it and design it,” then assemble something epic out of his Legos.  I have a fleet of Lego flying cars and fire trucks in my living room.

We have a 19 gallon tote of Brio.  Other kids play with “trains.”  He has “track and rolling stock.”

And he’s three-and-a-half.

If my daughter grows up with a love of mechanical devices and wants to be an engineer, of course I will help her any way I can.

Why terrifies me is that my will end up facing dower faced career counselors and diversity deans who will say in passive-aggressive shitty tones that he is going to be just “another white male in engineering” like that is some sort of bad thing.

Dear Boeing, I have a three year old boy, who can tell an “Apollo rocket” from an “Atlas rocker” from the “Space Shuttle.”  Is it too much to ask that you inspire him too?

Forty-nine years ago, the brave men of the Apollo 8 mission wished America a Merry Christmas from high above the Sea of Tranquility.

Nearly half a century later, many nations and world leaders have wished the people of Earth a Merry Christmas in their own ways.

Still, to this day, no other nation has ever wished mankind a Merry Christmas from orbit around the moon, and that is why this Christmas message is still (to me) the greatest of all.

Portland, Oregon, a group called Patriot Prayer was marching peacefully, trying to bring back “the reason for the season.”

Some pro-Communist punks decided that this group was being harmful and violating the “basic decencies that people deserve” by spreading their Christian message in public, felt that they should show up with a loudspeaker and try to harass and drown out the Christians.  Because… decency.  Even going so far as to call the Christian Flag a “white supremacist symbol.”

Mx. Gender-neutral Antifa Commie (that’s a woman’s coat he’s wearing), rushes across the street to harass these peaceful Christians, when a just and loving God takes him out hard with a red pickup truck.

The lord works in mysterious ways.

I have a blowout kit (IFAK) in my car, another in my wife’s car, and an a third in my range bag.  I have surgical shears, nitrile gloves, several Israeli bandages, tourniquets, and Z-Pack dressing.  I am in no way a medical professional, I did some  basic combat lifesaving training with the Guard in college and have watched a number of YouTube videos on how to use the stuff I have.

I’m just an amateur, but the range I shoot at is 30 miles from the nearest hospital, and has bad cellphone reception.  If someone has an AD, my fucking about with a tourniquet may be the different between life and death when getting to an ER is going to take half and hour.  I am willing to take that risk.

Carrying medical equipment like that is a lot like concealed carry in general.  I’m not a professional gun fighter, but I’d rather do my best as an amateur than die with my thumb up my ass waiting for the professionals to show up.

So…

I’m reading a segment from a news article when I come across this quote from a medical doctor.

“They would be something you could have in your closet in a small bag that you could pull out and go.”

Oh, like a blow out kit for MDs.  Maybe a little more advanced than what I have.

We’ve seen a couple of attempted terrorist acts in the US in the last few days, and a car attack in Australia.  Having some doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals carry some emergency trauma supplies as part of their EDC will only help save lives in these types of situations.

BUT…

That’s not what The Guardian is talking about.  Nope.

Mangold was at a special workshop organized by a not-for-profit group whose mission is to make up for the lack of instruction on contraception and abortion at many US medical programs. But it doubled as a lesson in using a no-frills kit of basic instruments that, in the event of the practice becoming illegal in the US, could be stashed and carried discreetly, to perform covert abortions safely.

Yep, it’s a training program to teach medical students to do covert field abortions because TRUMP!!!

Khan wants to offer family planning “especially in underserved areas”. But he added: “I don’t know if I would still provide abortion if it was illegal, which is maybe in our very near future.”

Because that would take a Constitutional Amendment or the Supreme Court reversing Roe v. Wade, neither of which is going to happen in my lifetime, but why not use that as an excuse to have a fun and exciting day practicing abortions on fruit.  (Seriously, go to the article and look at the pictures, those are some happy, smiling faces practicing abortions.)

I warms the cockles of my heart to know that in a world where a Christmas market or marathon finish line, or anywhere else that people gather could be attacked at any time; we have medical professionals who are ready to rush in with portable field kids to stop bleeding and save lives murder the unborn babies.

There were a lot of long comments on my last post about Star Wars.

Rather than respond to them individually, I thought I’d just do one more post on the subject.

It seems to me that Rey’s backstory was an attempt to stop her from being a Mary Sue, and as much as Forbes tries to make the case that Rey is not a Mary Sue, they end end up defining her perfectly as one.

There are two tropes that writers follow in these types of stories and Rey and her ilk, as well as most of the wizarding world of Harry Potter, and the X-Men universe (most superhero universes for that matter), follow one if not both.

One: The Chosen One.

Two: It is the idea that you are born with “it” or not.  You have a high midichlorian count, or you don’t.  You are born a wizard or you are a muggle.  You are a mutant with powers or not.

Once you have A Chosen One, nobody else’s contribution towards the action really matters unless they are directly enabling The Chosen One.  If The Chosen One is key to defeating the bad guy, why die in an X-Wing far from The Chosen?  Why take on Death Eaters anywhere else in the world?  Every good person should just relegate themselves to being a human shield for The Chosen One.

Beyond that, there is just the improbability of events that surround the Chosen One.  Everything t Hogwarts revolved around Harry Potter, to the detriment and death of other students.

The nuke the fridge moment for me in The Phantom Menace was when Anakin built C3PO.  What did that add to the story except being so entirely improbable in the whole wide galaxy far away, that I couldn’t get over it.  In a whole galaxy, the same dozen characters do everything and keep running into each other.

Being “born with IT” is just as bad.  Effort really doesn’t matter if you are lucky enough to have IT.  Rey doesn’t need a lifetime of training because she has IT.   The entire wizarding world is predicated on those with IT are special.  X-Men are heroes because they are born with IT.

This is in direct contrast with actual life.  Sure, you can tell me it’s fantasy, but that detracts from the story, not adds to it.  Natural talent or skill is a good start, but effort makes the man.

Batman is great because he trained and trained and designed all his gadgets.

I think the born special trope is loved by kids because they all think they are special.  Reality is they are not and a magic owl is not going to show up with a letter to change their lives.

Incidentally, this is why I don’t like the Harry Potter universe as a whole.  Kids identify with the wizards.  I identify with the muggles.  Once you realize that the wizards think of themselves as Ubermensch, and Voldamort’s motivations seem perfectly in line with history, the muggle persecution of wizards makes sense.  When one wizard could subjugate whole nations of muggles, freedom loving muggles have every right to burn a wizard at the stake.

The anti-mutant humans in the X-Men universe are equally justified.  When you can control people’s minds or blow up a building by looking at it, what stops a person like that from trying to appoint themselves a god-king?  Every mutant would be more like Apocalypse than not.

I much prefer the magical universe of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians (the show is hot garbage, read the books).  Sure, natural talent is a good start, but to become a magician takes work (the name of the wizarding school is Brakebills, but the students call it ‘Break-balls’ because of how hard it is).  One of the most powerful magicians in that universe was rejected from Brakebills and learned magic on the street.  Dedication and work is what did it.  In Harry Potter, no muggle, no matter how hard they worked could out magic a Hogwarts graduate.

I’d much rather see training and dedication than “*POOF* your mystical heritage grants you world changing powers because plot.”

Then again, I’m an adult that has to work for things.