Wednesday, February 19, 2025

Jordan Peterson Explains Catholic Charities' Betrayal Of America

Jordan has been absolutely en fuego lately as his thread-pulling accelerates and his understanding of reality becomes deeper and more complete. This video is an outstanding description of the utter sinfulness of the Christian NGOs and Christian leadership with respect to the 4-year invasion of America by the illegals.

The US Council of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) preened about how we all need to respect the dignity of every human person as it came out in strident opposition to mass deportations. Just as Jordan described, they took the Lord's name in vain, wrapping themselves in the appearance of Christian charity as they kicked everyone in the groin.

The illegals were convinced to make the 1500-mile trek, taking Honduras as a nominal starting point, getting robbed, assaulted, raped, murdered or perhaps just dying from natural hazards along the way.

The Mexican cartels made billions as human traffickers because the illegals had no choice but to pay them to cross into the US.

Low-skilled American workers got replaced in their jobs or lost access to employment opportunities with the influx of illegals willing and able to work for less, paid cash under the table.

American cities got hit with massive, unsustainable and unpayable bills to house the illegals.

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. The whole time this was happening, the Christian NGOs kept chanting Matthew 25:40.

Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.

It's all pharisaical rubbish. It's their whitewashed tomb as they clothe themselves in the words of Christ while purposefully harming their fellow citizens and the migrants at the same time. Dig this from a speech by Cardinal Christophe Pierre.

We are prophets when we announce, by our actions and our words, the truth that will transform society: namely, that God loves his people, and that he desires all people to experience their dignity as his children, as well as solidarity with one another as brothers and sisters in the human family.  We announce this prophetic message both through our direct social ministry and through our political involvement.  In our direct social ministry, we do the works of mercy as a way of revealing to the poor and the excluded their human dignity in Christ.  In our political involvement, we reject the narrow self-interest and political gamesmanship that is too often displayed by our leaders.

My God, the thing is so saturated with the kind of sin Jordan describes that it must have oozed out of his pores as he spoke. The Cardinal went on to quote our top pharisee, Pope Francis.

“I find it greatly disheartening to see that migration is still shrouded in a dark cloud of mistrust, rather than being seen as a source of empowerment. People on the move are seen simply as a problem to be managed. They cannot be treated like objects to be moved about; they have dignity and resources that they can offer to others; they have their own experiences, needs, fears, aspirations, dreams, skills and talents.”

By the time that our execrable Pontiff spoke these words, everyone in the Vatican knew about the tens of thousands of white, working-class, British girls who had been gang-raped by Muslim migrants. He knew this was happening and just kept going on and on about the human dignity of the migrants.

The British girls, like our own young, urban, black men who need access to the bottom rungs of a career ladder, meant absolutely nothing to these people. All they cared about was the chance to dress up their actions in Christian pieties and parade themselves around in front of their friends.

They took the Lord's name in vain over and over and over.


"I care about the migrants because I'm doing the work of Jesus."

Bonus Video

Ben Shapiro's take on NASCAR going woke works perfectly for the progressive Catholics who populate the NGOs and our leadership and why they went all-in on supporting the invasion. They weren't doing things for the sake of the migrants or their fellow citizens, they were simply posing for each other.

Sunday, February 16, 2025

Darwinian Evolution On The Ropes

I'm hoping this sparks some comments from Tim, Ohioan and Mut as well as anyone else who is interested. This is a really long post, but I think it's worth it.

I thought this was a fascinating conversation between Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein. They're both compelling characters and the topics were wide-ranging. At one point, Joe brought up the growing doubts about Darwinian evolution. Fortunately, there are transcripts online of the Joe Rogan podcast, so I didn't have to go through any technical gymnastics to get these excerpts

Here, I will edit for brevity, but that link will take you to the source. Search on Darwin and you'll immediately get the relevant bit. Emphasis in the text is mine.

Joe: We have to talk about evolution because one of the things that Tucker Carlson said on the podcast was essentially that He can't like prove evolution. It's not real. He doesn't believe in evolution as it's taught.

Bret: He said well, he said a couple things. It was a little confusing. He said that you know, we see evidence of adaptation, but we don't see evidence of evolution and that we've really gotten beyond the Darwinian model. We've essentially come to understand that it's not right.

It's an argument for intelligent design, I think. First of all, I want to clean up a little bit of what he said just so it's 

I don't really think he means we see the evidence for adaptation but not evolution. That's not coherent. I think what he means is we see evidence for what we would call microevolution, but we don't see evidence for what we would call macroevolution. This is a commonly believed thing in intelligent design circles.

I think people want the career evolutionary biologist to break out a bunch of examples from nature that make the case. Very, very clear so that they can relax.

Tucker's concern isn't based in science, and they can go back to feeling comfortable that, you know, the Darwinists have it well in hand.

That's not where I am.

I could do that, but I don't feel honorable doing that. I think, as a scientist, I should not be in the business of persuading people. I want you to be persuaded. I want you to be persuaded by the facts. I want them to persuade you. But I don't think I'm allowed to persuade you. I think that it's effectively PR when I attempt to bring people over to Team Darwin.

Further, as I'm sure I've mentioned to you before, I'm not happy with the state of Darwinism as it has been managed by modern Darwinists. In fact, I'm kind of annoyed by it. And although Tucker, I do not believe, is right in the end, there is a reason that the perspective that he was giving voice to is catching on in 2025.

And it has to do with the fact that, in my opinion, the mainstream Darwinists are... Telling a kind of lie about how much we know and what remains to be understood.

So all that being said, let me say, I think modern Darwinism is broken. Yes, I do think I know more or less how to fix it. I'm annoyed at my colleagues for, I think, lying to themselves about the state of modern Darwinism. I think they know.

I think I know why that happened. I think they were concerned that a creationist worldview was always a threat that it would reassert itself. And so they pretended that Darwinism was a more complete explanation as it was presented than it ever was.

Joe: What is wrong with Darwinism? What do you think that Darwinism is doing itself a disservice by saying?

Bret: There are several different things that are wrong with it. The key one that I think is causing folks in intelligent design circles to begin to catch up is that the story we tell about how it is that mutation results in morphological change is incorrect.

This is a very hard thing to convey, and I want to point out that if the explanation for creatures is Darwinian, that does not depend on anybody understanding it, and it does not depend on anybody being able to phrase it in a way that it's intuitive.

... (Here there is an example of forms morphing into other forms) ...

So what that means is there are chemical differences between an excavator and a sports car.

But they're not the story of the differences in what those two creatures do. The chemistry differences are incidental.

Now, when we tell you that the differences that a bat became a flying mammal because it had a shrew-like ancestor, and that shrew-like ancestor had a genome spelled out in three-letter codons, those three-letter codons specify amino acids of which there are 20, and that the difference between the bat and the shrew is based in the differences in the proteins that are described by the genome.

We are essentially saying that the difference between the bat and the shrew is a chemical difference. It's not a simple chemical difference the way it was when we were talking about excavators and sports cars, but nonetheless, it's a biochemical difference, right? The difference in the spelling of its proteins and structural proteins and enzymes and all of that stuff.

I don't believe that mechanism. Is nearly powerful enough to explain how a shrew-like ancestor became a bat.

There's a whole layer that is missing that allows...

Evolution to explore design space much more efficiently than the mechanism that we invoke.

(The mechanism is) random mutation, which I believe in. Random mutation happens. Selection, which chooses those variants that are produced by mutation and collects the ones that give... The creature an advantage. There's nothing wrong with that story. That story is true. Okay, random mutations happen, selection collects the ones that are good, and those collected advantageous mutations accumulate in the genome. All of that is true.

What I'm arguing against is the idea that that transforms a shrew into a bat.

What you need to get a shrew turned into a bat is a much less crude mechanism, whereby selection, which is ancient at the point that you have shrews, explores design space looking for ways to be that are yet undiscovered more systematically than random chance.

I believe there's a kind of information stored in genomes that is not in triplet codon form, that is much more of a type that would be familiar to a designer, either of machines or a programmer.

What we did was we took the random mutation model.

And we recognized that it was Darwinian, which it is. And we therefore assumed that it would explain anything that we could see that was clearly the product of Darwinian forces on the basis of those random mutations. And we skipped the layer in between in which selection has a different kind of information stored in the genome that is not triplet codon in nature.

Joe: So there's an information stored in the genome that is motivating it to seek new forms?

Bret: Nope, not motivating, allowing it.

Joe: Allowing it. Allowing it. So what's the motivation to seek new forms?

Bret: Oh, the motivation was there. It's primordial. Right. So the point is, let me try by analogy.

Darwinists will tell you that evolution cannot look forward. It can only look backward. And there's a way in which that's just simply true. On the other hand, a Darwinist will also tell you that you are a product of evolution and you can look forward.

Right? So if evolution can't look forward but it can build a creature that can, then can evolution look forward?

I think it effectively can. So my point is that random mutation mechanism is in a race to produce new forms that are... Better adapted to the world than their ancestors?

What if it can bias the game? It can enhance its own ability to search, right? If you lose your keys, you don't search randomly, right? You go through a systematic process of search, and that systematic process of search results in you finding your keys sooner than you would otherwise.

So we should expect evolution to find every trick it can access to. Increase the rate at which it discovers forms that would be useful in the habitat in question. And this is simply that. I'm not really saying anything that extraordinary, right? If I say, you know, do you know that computers, all they do is binary? Well, that's true.

But if you then imagine that that means that the people who program computers do it in binary, well, there was a time when that was true. But it's not true anymore. It's not how you do it.

There's a much more efficient way to program a computer, and it involves a programming language, which a computer itself can't understand. But you can build a computer that can either interpret the language in real time, or you can build a computer that can accept the code as it's spit out by a compiler.

These are mechanisms to radically increase the effectiveness of a programmer. But it all comes out. Binary anyway, in the end. That's really what I'm arguing, is that there's the initial layer of Darwinian stuff, the random mutation layer that it looks like what we teach people.

There's another layer, which we're not well familiar with, and it results in a much more powerful capacity to adapt than we can explain with that first mechanism, which is why guys like Tucker Think there's just something these Darwinists, they keep telling me that the shrew becomes a bat.

And then they go on this rant about the random mutations and the triplet codons and the, you know, mutations that actually turn out to be good. It's just not powerful enough. And they're not wrong.

They're detecting something real. And frankly, you know, Tucker is the layperson example of this. You've had Stephen Meyer on, you know, he's actually. He's a scientist who's quite good, and he's spotted that the mechanism in question isn't powerful enough to explain the phenomena that we swear it explains.

Joe: What do you think that force is?

Bret: It's not a force. So I don't know how much of this I've made clear. If you fill in the missing layer, it's purely Darwinian.

None of this establishes that Darwin had it.

It's another Darwinian mechanism, right? I mean, and let me, this is, there's nothing strange about this. If you think about the way a human being works compared to, let's say, a starfish, a human being has a software layer. A cognitive layer in which the human being is born into an environment.

And that environment could be, you know, a hunter-gatherer environment of 10,000 years ago, or it could be a modern environment. And the human being doesn't have to be modified at the level of its genome in order to function differently in those two environments. It has to be sensitive to the information in those environments so that it can become adapted to them developmentally.

Right? So development is one trick that the genome uses to make a human being more flexible than other creatures. Right? You do not come out of the womb being ready to do human stuff.

Right? You are profoundly hobbled by not having a complete program. But it means that the program you develop can be highly attuned to your particular moment in time and location in space. That is...

The Darwinian mechanisms that store information in the genome solving an evolutionary problem in a different way. So this is already a second layer that doesn't function like that random mutation layer.

So evolution should be expected to find all of the cheat codes and to build them in. Because any creature that has access to all of these different ways of adapting more rapidly or more effectively, will outcompete the creatures that have fewer of these things. So you should expect, what I often say is, we have to remember, we are not looking at Darwinism 1.0.

You're looking at Darwinism 10.0. You're looking at a highly sophisticated evolutionary structure that is the result of all of the discoveries of the prior structures. And that includes some things that... Modern creatures can do, but it also includes an evolution of enhanced evolutionary capacity, including things like culture.

A couple of things jumped out at me as I listened to them talk.

First, in mathematics, you most certainly are trying to convince people. That's what proofs do. I don't understand how that cannot be said for physics, chemistry or biology. How is that supposed to work? Do we just share massive spreadsheets of experimental data with each other and everyone comes to their own conclusions? How does peer review work in such a world? It sounds like a cop-out.

Second, it was a bit of a stunner for Bret to admit to the flaws of Darwinian evolution. I have liked Bret since he first came on the scene in the Evergreen State imbroglio, but this deep honesty and integrity surprised me. Well done, Bret!

Thirdly and finally, Bret tries to hold on to Darwinian evolution by an appeal to magic. Apparently, there is an unknown motive force working at the molecular level that gives the necessary turbo boost to Darwinian evolution, allowing shrews to turn into bats and, for all we know, back down to shrews again.

Hey, why not? 

Here's my problem, one where I am open to corrections. I had thought that molecular chemistry was a pretty well-understood thing. Bret seems to be arguing that there is a layer on top of molecular chemistry that we don't understand. Further, he is making an argument of faith. That motivating force is necessary to preserve Darwinian evolution and that's why it exists.

Nature abhors a vacuum and, apparently, it abhors a vacuum in Darwin's theories most of all.

So tell me, scienceological thinkerists, where your thinkerations lead you.

It seems relatively clear to us, but I'm a simple man and Cat is a simple cat.

Saturday, February 15, 2025

JD Goes Easy On The Euros

Superstar VP JD Vance is catching some flak for having spoken harsh truths to the Euros recently. He told them mass immigration has harmed them and free speech is a good thing. Having severely damaged their countries by opening their borders and now trying to silence the public who is complaining about it, the secular royalty of the Euro administrative class pouted and fussed.

I watched the full speech and thought JD went a bit easy on them. The mathematics of immigration and fertility ought to scare the brie out of the Euros. Instead, they're refusing to admit that diversity is not their strength and they're doubling down on it. Dig what's going on in Ireland, of all places.

Ireland never had an empire nor did it engage in any colonial practices. This isn't historical karma, this is a sickness. It's the performance art of white self-hatred. Like Douglas Murray said in The Strange Death of Europe, if you practice being a masochist long enough, eventually you'll meet up with a sadist and the results will be ... poor.

Like this.

I would have liked JD to be a bit more blunt, but I was really happy with the general tone of his remarks. I'm thinking his speech was just the opening salvo in a powerful barrage of blunt truth-telling.

Bonus Data Point

Dig this.

Thursday, February 13, 2025

Putting The No In Synodal

Pope Francis, when he isn't earning his title as The King of the Unforced Error, frequently shares utterly incoherent thoughts like this.

Jesus Christ, loving everyone with a universal love, educates us in the permanent recognition of the dignity of every human being, without exception. In fact, when we speak of “infinite and transcendent dignity,” we wish to emphasize that the most decisive value possessed by the human person surpasses and sustains every other juridical consideration that can be made to regulate life in society. Thus, all the Christian faithful and people of good will are called upon to consider the legitimacy of norms and public policies in the light of the dignity of the person and his or her fundamental rights, not vice versa.

In case you didn't want to click on the link, and I'm not quite sure why you would, this is part of a letter from Francis to the American bishops bolstering their position on the need for Americans to provide free hotels, food and necessaries to the illegals. All humans are worthy of respect and dignity, including the illegals, ergo we must support them indefinitely.

The letter is utterly incoherent in a way only possible within a cultural bubble. It is transparently evident that no one of independent mind edited the Pope's twaddle. Had it gone through such an edit, they might have caught the internal contradiction of the permanent recognition of the dignity of every human being, without exception. We got into this mess precisely because the Church flipped us the bird and allowed its numerous NGOs to act as Quislings, opening the gates of America to the invaders by providing manpower for processing and welcoming the invaders, manpower the government did not possess in anything like sufficient numbers.

Were it not for the Church, Pope Francis' Church, the invasion would have been logistically impossible. That the Catholic NGOs and their favored subcontractors waxed fat and prosperous, gorging on Federal dollars, didn't hurt.

Pope Francis and his team disrespected Americans and is now pompously demanding we respect the dignity of the illegals by continuing to pay and pay and pay. The fundamental logic of his letter disintegrates by its own hand.

So much for the pope's vaunted synodal process where leadership is supposed to listen to the laity and take in all ideas. Pope Francis puts the "no" in synodal.

ChatGPT To The Rescue

I worked with ChatGPT and came up with a hymn and a limerick to fit the moment. Here's the limerick. The hymn still needs some work.

There once was a bishop quite queer,
Who lectured his flock with a sneer,
"You’re hateful, you know,
For not giving your dough,
As the migrants are already here!"

Tuesday, February 11, 2025

19 Years Of Twaddle

It are my blogiversary! Hooray! Cake for everyone!

Err, well, except for you. I don't have enough cake, you understand.

Something interesting is happening with my blogging these days. The purpose of this blog has been to learn. I learn best by writing, hence the fruits of the blog have been what I believe to be a better understanding of the world.

A good example is the way I read this essay by Roger Simon. As an aside, I met Roger in person at the very first Blog Expo. I even got a photo with him, planning to photoshop KT into it, but still haven't done that. Roger thought the idea was funny and played along.

Anywho, here's the snippet from that essay where Roger astutely sums up what Elon and his wizards are discovering about Federal spending.

The American taxpayer, it is already clear, has been fleeced for decades by this deliberate financial obscurantism at a level beyond comprehension, a significant part of which fits easily under the old category of featherbedding, especially for loyalists of both parties. When it is finally added up, it will more than justify the title of this article.

Government spending transparency has simply not existed in any of our lifetimes, not even remotely. The legislators themselves have little idea on how money they authorize is ultimately spent. Most apparently don’t care—at least they act as if they don’t—as long as their patrons get their portion of the payout.

I believe that through my blogging, I have come to understand the moral calculus of what has happened to us as a nation with respect to our insane spending.

As I've said many times recently, money has no meaning when it comes to government spending. The ability to print money out of thin air with seemingly no ill effects has made any attempt to rein in the handouts an act of Scroogish heartlessness. Because money simply precipitates out of thin air, it is immoral to deny anyone anything. More to the point of Roger's essay, there is no payoff to any scrutiny of the spending.

This is how you end up with transgender comic books in Honduras or whatever that insane USAID line item was.

The spending, of course, is not without consequence. Those consequences have been building up like flood waters behind a failing dam. As the Argentinians, Weimar Republic and the Confederacy all discovered, printing money is a good idea until it isn't.

Some people can see it coming and understand that uncontrolled government spending is a moral evil. Those who cannot, think any limits on the spending are cruel.

There's a benevolent way to look at both sides. Both are trying to do the compassionate thing. My argument is that the pro-spending side's moral equations have been polluted by decades of seemingly penalty-free profligacy. It's understandable that they cannot see the approaching calamities. They are still wrong, but they're not all driven by sinister motives. Most of them are just mistaken.

I can see that clearly when I read essays like Roger's because I've been writing nonsense here for 19 years.

Here, Cat and I wonder if we've gotten it all wrong. Truth be told, Cat is a good deal more self-assured than I am, but that's natural for Cat.

Sunday, February 09, 2025

Life Is Shorter Than You Think

My father was an Air Force pilot and when some event or deadline was coming up, he used to say that you were "running out of runway," meaning that if you didn't take off soon, you were going to end up crashing.

One time, flying out of Japan to attack targets in North Korea, he almost did run out of runway. His B-26 was so overloaded with munitions that he barely made it airborne and over the breakwater in the ocean at the end of the runway.

Among the many things he taught me, that one in particular has stuck with me. It was reinforced by Arthur Gordon's interview with Rudyard Kipling retold in Gordon's excellent book, A Touch Of Wonder. Here's the relevant excerpt.

He talked of ambition, of how long it took fully to master any art or craft. And of secondary ambitions: the more you had, he said, the more fully you lived. “I always wanted to build or buy a 400-ton brig,” he said reflectively, “and sail her round the world. Never did. Now, I suppose, it’s too late.” He lit a cigarette and looked at me through the smoke. “Do the things you really want to do if you possibly can. Don’t wait for circumstances to be exactly right. You’ll find that they never are.”

I've tried to make this point with our kids several times. These days it's in regard to having children. Women run out of runway sooner than they think and they don't really know where the runway ends. They may find themselves aged out of potential motherhood at 32 or it may be 42. Either way, there is a season for all things and a finite length for all runways.

I realized recently that I'm in that same boat. Well over a decade ago, I took my first solo vacation in Dixie. I flew into Atlanta, rented a car and over several days, I made my way to Houston. I visited places in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. For some reason, I fell in love with Mobile and that love affair has only grown deeper. For the past year, I've been working with a realtor, looking at potential vacation homes there.

We found one. Wife kitteh and I are going to see it next week and put an offer in on it if all goes right. Wife kitteh was afraid of the transaction until she realized that nothing was at risk. We will sell a rental property here in San Diego and transfer that net worth to a rental property in Alabama. Our new property won't appreciate as fast or earn as much, but we don't need the money. There's no financial risk. At worst, our net worth will stay right where it is.

I, however, had a very different apprehension. Is this the right decision? Jacksonville has similar water features, is on the Atlantic Ocean and is big enough for an NFL team. It's about 6 times the size of Mobile. There's more to do, see and experience. 

Bay St. Louis in Mississippi has similar water features, similar homes and is closer to New Orleans.

Baton Rouge has LSU and if you go south a bit, very nice homes.

Is Mobile the spot? 

It doesn't matter any more. I'm out of runway. The Alabama property will be a place for activity and my body is aging out of activity. It's getting difficult to do certain things as my joints and muscles stiffen and decay with age. I figure I've got about 7-10 years left to do anything.

Of all my candidate choices, Jacksonville might be the best, but I don't have time to spend a year or more learning the area and finding a house. Yes, there might be a better place than Mobile, but I love Mobile and that's good enough to pull the trigger on this.

Do the things you really want to do if you possibly can. Don’t wait for circumstances to be exactly right. You’ll find that they never are.

It's time to stop dithering. This will do fine. We'll only own it for a decade at most.

Saturday, February 08, 2025

Don't Think About Elephants

You know that old gag, right? When someone tells you not to think about elephants, you can't stop thinking about elephants even if elephants had been the farthest thing from your mind.

I was talking to ChatGPT about my stories this morning, trying to figure out why, after discussing my characters' motivations, it kept bringing up ideas I had told it to discard. For example, the actions of the maidens in my Arthurian stories are always rationalized in terms of feminine agency and independence even after we'd come to an agreement about the primacy of sexual interdependence. The girls were feminine and needed a knight, but the prose always mentioned agency and independence, if only to justify their femininity.

I finally figured out how to ask ChatGPT why it was happening in a way that gave me a meaningful response. Here's what it said.

What’s happening is actually tied to how I process context and language. When you provide detailed discussions involving keywords describing the rationale behind those traits, my system interprets that context as important to include in the output—even if your intention is to avoid drawing attention to it. Essentially, the system assumes that if you’ve mentioned something repeatedly, it’s central to the scene or discussion.

By having long conversations about cultural evolution in a primal world, I had poisoned the AI with ideas alien to my stories.

If I don't want it to think about elephants, I should simply not mention them.

Unlike you, he is not thinking about elephants.

This is a Gemini image. It's nice, but it doesn't give the same flavor as the ChatGPT ones.