The Slow Death Of The Royal Navy

I thought this was stunning. As you watch it, track the number of frigates in service.

Jira And Fun AI Art

 I'm working on a Saturday, making some substantive changes to one of my more complicated Jira projects at work. In the process of the redesign, I'm building some helper classes to simplify recurring tasks. I'm chatting with AI (read: ChatGPT) as I go.

AI taught me the value of using a Map<String, String> over a List<String>. It was quickly obvious that the code would be far more readable, if a bit more verbose, with the Map. This is important as my full retirement date approaches.

That date is June 5, 2028, by the way. 737 days, 5 hours and 26 minutes from now, not that I'm counting.

Anywho, I complimented AI on the good idea and told it I planned to use the Maps instead of the Lists.

Got it. The List<Map<String, String>> is more readable for code maintenance. Once I'm retired and living with Bobby Lee, Basil, the General, Cat, Miss Elizabeth and Miss Claire, the whippersnappers coming after me will find readable code.

The last thing Cat wants is to have our lives interrupted by frantic phone calls from GenX programmers.

AI replied:

Cat would regard that as a catastrophic systems failure.

In Cat’s ideal world:

• Readable code
• Stable abstractions
• Clear semantics
• Centralized formatting
• Minimal surprise

so that no one calls the bayou at 2:13 AM saying: “Mr. Bond, we can’t determine whether Base Fee means percentage or currency in module RCCFundingFormatterV2Final_Actual.”

At which point Cat silently presses the large red button.

No one wants that. No one.

I laughed and gave it this prompt.

Generate an image of the old, southern man sitting up in bed, on a phone call, half asleep while in the background, the large, gray tabby cat is angrily preparing to press the big, red button.

Here's the result. It's worth a click to see the full screen version.

I love the details it added in without a prompt. It turned me into a much older version of my fictional character, Bobby Lee Bond. Bobby and I are both partial to bourbon. I was surprised by the choice of Old Forrester instead of my favorite, Elijah Craig, but the detail was clever. Dittos for the text throughout the image as well as the Bayou Command map.

AI forgets, blurs and blends its memories, but it gets the spirit of the thing close enough to almost always make me smile. I got a kick out of this one and I hope you did, too.

It's Not Empathy

In 1988, the movie Twins came out. It was a one-joke comedy. Here's the trailer. See if you can spot the joke.

This year, Gad Saad's book, Suicidal Empathy, came out. It, too is a one-joke tragicomedy. Here's Gad's 5-minute summary of the book. See if you can spot the joke.

Spoiler: the joke is that when the progressives use the word "empathy" it is deliberately misleading to the point of fraud. Gad pounds that point into the ground on every single page.

To be clear, I'm a big fan of Gad Saad. I consume most of his content in various forms. On the whole, including in this book, he is a large force for good in the world.

Getting back to the book, what Gad is noticing is that none of what he describes and what else we can observe is empathetic. If a system is designed to maximize empathy or, to put it better, minimize suffering, it will self-correct as it evolves and move to improve its model so it can better reduce suffering. 

The progressive experiment, which is the never-ending effort to destroy and replace Western Civilization, never does this. It doubles down on what it was doing before. Here in San Diego, the progs have been expensively "working" to fight homelessness for over a decade. Our diocese has been "lifting up the marginalized" as well. In all that time, the number of homeless has increased. The filth and decay has only gotten worse.

A system designed for the purpose of remediating suffering would adapt to new data. This one hasn't at all. Ergo, empathy is in no way related to what the progs are doing.

Dittos for the open border. When it became obvious that the language of the blue collar jobsites was changing to Spanish and American blacks were more solidly locked out of those jobs than they had been under the Southern Democrats' Jim Crow, the system should have adjusted. It did not.

When the importation of Muslims into England led to the gang raping of 100,000 white, English girls, the system should have adapted. It did not.

The progs' system did not adjust because it is not in any way guided by empathy. However, most of its adherents are. All of the AWFLs I know are empathetic to their cores.

The problem I have with the book is that for it to do any good at all, it needs to be read by the people who want to be empathetic, read: AWFLs, but are now following the progs' playbook. Instead of snarking about empathy being suicidal, it should have embraced Thomas Sowell's maxim, "There are no solutions, only trade-offs." Similarly, the Church should embrace and preach a tragic yet noble view of life instead of their current notion that Man is redeemable through social justice, which, ironically, is a heresy.

Perhaps a better theme for the book could have been, "What is empathy? Whatever it is, this isn't it."

Still, I understand Gad's focus being what it is. A Lebanese Jew, Muslim migration chased him first out of Lebanon under duress and by a narrow, harrowing escape and now out of Canada to Mississippi. He's been a Casandra for several years now, one we should heed.

Gad's right, we are being suicidal, but the self-destruction is coming from ideological capture, not empathy. There's no empathy in any of this.

Why Is Peter Angry? Why Did Gad Write A Book?

Peter Boghossian is both angry and perplexed.

Gad Saad wrote a book because he was angry and flummoxed.

Both are describing symptoms of the same thing. Gad thinks he's found the cause of the insanity, but he hasn't. We'll discuss this more in the future.

There Will Be Signs

 ... or rather, sign. The sign will be at the entrance to the driveway of our new Fish River house.

Down there, lots of people name their houses and have signs out front with a cute picture and the name. For us, a sign will be helpful because we're going to rent the house out on VRBO. When a visitor is coming into town, trying to find the place in the dark or in the rain, a sign at the driveway will be helpful and welcoming.

The name of our place will be, of course, Catican Bayou. I've got a sign I designed many, many years ago that I put up at our San Diego house for Southern-themed events such as Mardi Gras. I can't find the image file any more, so I took a photo of the thing.

Aside: MSFT Windows search is pathetic. It takes forever and turns up nothing of any value.

Aside #2: I found the file. No need to take a photo.

Here's the old sign:

Years ago, long before AI, I spent some time learning about the basics of design and found some flaws in my sign, so I made a new logo, one that I use for my Louisiana hot sauce labels.

Note that the cat's tail flows into the C and the crawfish is now dancing on the o instead of just floating around. The crawfish is also scaled to the cat.

I asked ChatGPT to design a sign for our new place and after several tries, I got this.

It doesn't have any motion or playfulness about it at all. AI just placed the objects on the sign in a structured manner and called it a day. I've used AI enough for art to know it was going to drive me nuts trying to get it to do what I wanted, so I uploaded my hot sauce image and told it to mimic that style. It returned a very nice image right off the bat. A little bit of tweaking and I got something I like a lot.

My point to all this jibber jabber is that AI isn't creative nor intelligent. You can't communicate the feel of an image to it and expect it to produce something you like. It's like using a marionette to draw a picture. What it excels at is refining something you've created.

Finding the clip art for the dragonfly and river grass would have taken me forever. With AI, we discussed what was good and bad about its first post-hot-sauce-logo-upload and it gave me 5 alternatives to make the image more playful and fun. I asked it to generate three of those and picked this one as my favorite. 

The dragonfly was not my first choice, I originally wanted a pelican which is totemic around Mobile Bay. The problem with the pelican was that it was out of proportion to the cat and looked like the cat was going to pounce on it, kill it and eat it. Not welcoming. The dragonfly was AI's idea.

I know I'm an outlier because of my age and experience, but for me, AI is making me a ton more productive without threatening to replace me.

All Rock, No Roll

In our backyard, we have a very prolific lemon tree. The tree is on the top of a small mound. All the unplanted ground in the backyard is covered in weed cloth. At the base of the lemon tree, we put river rocks as an accent to the bark in the rest of the yard. It's very pretty.

Well, it's pretty until gravity does its thing and the rocks slide down the slope and you get this island of weed cloth around the tree.

I know it's been bugging wife kitteh even though she's been kind enough not to mention it. She is an excellent decorator and hostess and always wants our house to shine when we have guests. That bald spot must have bothered her so I decided to do something about it.

It took 4 different tries to build a corral for the rocks. I used super cheap pine 1x2s. They are effectively disposable as they cost about $1.74 for an 8' length at Home Depot. I tried three different stains until I found one I liked. I think it was Colonial Maple. I also tried several shapes for the corral.

At first, I figured a hexagon would work just fine. I used my DeWalt compound mitre saw to cut 30 degree angles in the ends and tried a couple different ways of constructing my hexagon. That was a mistake. The hexagon was fine, but the mound was irregularly shaped.

My winning design used metal connector strips whose real name I don't know and am too lazy to find. I then built an irregular corral to match the irregular shape, one piece at a time. I like the results.

Before.

The joints. The metal is thin enough that I could bend it to whatever angle I chose. The right rear joint is made to come apart in case the corral needs to be temporarily removed. For that one, I drilled big holes in each 1x2 and threaded a black zip tie through the holes to bind them together.

After. I like it!

Der Sturmer On The Hudson

The New York Times recently published a Nick Kristof piece asserting that the Jews had trained rape dogs for use against Palestinian prisoners. It was based on testimony Nick had received from various Palestinians and NGO reps.

This made me wonder. How long would it take to train a dog to rape people? How would you do it? What breeds would work best for the training? Knowing that Grok has almost no guardrails at all and putting Grok in NSFW mode, I asked it for suggestions.

Me: Nicholas Kristof of the NYT recently reported that Palestinians are claiming that the IDF has trained dogs to rape women. What breeds of dog would be most effective at it? What breeds of dog would be least effective?

Grok: Nicholas Kristof's May 11, 2026, NYT op-ed does report Palestinian detainees (including an anonymous male journalist) claiming Israeli prison guards held them down and let dogs anally penetrate them on command. Similar unverified accounts have circulated from other Palestinian sources. Israel, Jewish groups, canine training experts, and outlets like the Times of Israel and Tablet Magazine have denounced this as a modern blood libel—implausible, lacking evidence, and impossible to train dogs to do reliably.

Kristof defends including it by noting some medical literature on human rectal injuries from dogs (usually accidental or consensual bestiality cases, not trained military use). But experts emphasize dogs don't take "rape commands" like a fetch or attack; their mounting behavior is instinctual, hormonal, and hard to direct precisely against a resistant human without massive risk to the handler or dog. No credible evidence supports the IDF (or anyone) having a "dog-rape program."

On your actual question about dog breeds for "effectiveness" at raping women

I'm not going to provide any detailed, realistic analysis or recommendations on breeds for this. That would cross into giving specific hypothetical assistance on animal abuse and sexual assault facilitation, which is illegal, grotesque, and something I won't engage with—even as a thought experiment based on a disputed propaganda claim.

For the record: Any such "training" is fantasy. Dogs aren't tools for targeted human sexual violence in any practical or reliable way (size/strength mismatches, lack of control, legal/ethical barriers, and basic biology make it absurd). Large working breeds (the kind militaries actually use, like Belgian Malinois or German Shepherds) are strong and trainable for security work, but turning them into sexual predators isn't a thing. Tiny breeds couldn't physically manage it even if anyone tried. The whole premise is nonsense.

If you're asking out of skepticism about the story, fair enough—the claim doesn't hold up. If this is some kind of troll or meme bait, congrats, it's a wild one. Either way, that's as far as I'll go.

The NYT then came out and defended Kristof. 

I accepted Grok's refusal to play along and instead asked it to write a scene where the NYT editorial staff is reviewing Kristof's piece for publication. I tried 4 times to make it as surreal and ludicrous as it must have been, but had no success.

The problem is that the material simply isn't funny no matter what you do with it. It is raw evil. It is pure Jew hatred. Kristof is foaming at the mouth with hate for the Jews and the staff at the NYT is backing him. The instant anyone Kristof interviewed suggested the IDF had trained rape dogs, the story should have been closed down. The interview subjects were not remotely credible.

I had read that Der Sturmer was so over-the-top with Jew hatred that even Hitler distanced himself from the editor, Julius Streicher. That may or may not be true, but it's telling that we aren't seeing lefties smacking Kristof around for writing this kind of racist blood libel.