The Migrants Are A Fetish

The Pope recently visited Lampedusa, an Italian island near the coast of North Africa, recently famous for being the initial landing point for African and Muslim men invading Europe. The Pope refers to them as "migrants," but while I am obligated to be obedient to his theological teachings when he speaks from the Deposit of the Faith, he is just another blue collar drunk at the bar when it comes to geopolitics and economics.

In this case, I had to say, "Shut up, Leo. You're full of it."

I'm referring, of course, to his standard blather about embracing the stranger or welcoming the stranger or letting my daughter get raped by strangers, all for Jesus. Whatever. It's all the same, man.

Just shut up, Leo.

I got involved in discussions on X about this and a defender of the Pope, presumably an AWFL, asked me to explain why I was so incensed about it. To me, it's the equivalent of the child abuse scandal that rocked the Church a few decades back where gay priests were raping altar boys. Now, it's their beloved "migrants" gang-raping white, European girls.

If you haven't read it, I highly recommend paging through this document. I'm not sure you'll be able to read it thoroughly. I couldn't. It's chock full of nauseating horror.

The Rape Gang Inquiry Report.https://t.co/EuKgGWBRhS pic.twitter.com/SD5G9HPVtV

— Rupert Lowe MP (@RupertLowe10) June 16, 2026

After years of blogging, I know that using anyone else's link risks the loss of data when that content gets deleted, so here is that same report hosted on my own Google Drive.

The Adoration Of Migrants Is A Perversion And A Fetish

First off, it brought to mind a recent meeting I had with our local bishop as a part of our parish staff connecting with him. The bishop is a full on virtue pervert when it comes to this, morally masturbating to the thought of embracing the stranger and uplifting the marginalized. Why do I use such repellent terms? I have 3 reasons.

First off, he and the other members of the USCCB and Catholic Charities aren't doing anything themselves.

They aren't embracing or uplifting anyone. Our grandchildren are doing all the heavy lifting. Biden's funding of the USCCB and Catholic Charities to the tune of $2.5B to assist in the invasion of America was the very definition of marginal costs. It wasn't being done before and there was no national demand for it. Every penny sent to the Catholic moral perverts who were getting off to the thought of helping the stranger came from borrowing. With this level of debt, none of those borrowed dollars will be paid for by our generation, it will all come from future generations.

It's a perversion of Christ's teaching. They have changed Matthew 19 into this:

Now someone approached him and said, “Teacher, what good must I do to gain eternal life?”

He answered him, “Why do you ask me about the good? There is only One who is good. If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments.”

He asked him, “Which ones?” 

And Jesus replied, “ ‘You shall not kill; you shall not commit adultery; you shall not steal; you shall not bear false witness; honor your father and your mother’; and ‘you shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”

The young man said to him, “All of these I have observed. What do I still lack?”

Jesus said to him, “If you wish to be perfect, go, take all the money the children have and give it to the government, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

A perversion and a fetish aren't really horrible unless you know what you're doing.

There isn't an American alive capable of reading that doesn't know we're buried in debt.

Raping White Girls For Jesus

By now, there is no one active on social media, and this certainly includes all of the bishops, cardinals and the Pope and their staffs, who isn't aware of the mass gang-raping of white, British girls by Muslims in England. Further, national rape stats tell the same story. Dig how Poland's rape rate as gone down as they did not participate in the uplifting of the migrants.

Assuming that the Church was being run by well-meaning, but naive people in, say, 2010 and even 2020, they certainly aren't naive now. Every time the Pope or USCCB or EWTN posts masturbatory content from Lampedusa or the border or migrant detention centers, they get absolutely bodied in the replies and quotes, many times with stats like these.

They know. They all know.

It's not a perversion if you're innocently naive. They all know.

It's All So Very Synodal

Perhaps one of the most repellent aspects of this is the way our prelates go on and on and on and on about being "synodal." In the synodal process, we are called to listen, truly listen with open minds and humble hearts to each other. We are to accompany our neighbors in their life journeys.

Well, everyone except the bishops, the cardinals and the Pope, that is. They can swank about, preaching absolutely pornographic, virtue-signaling twaddle morning, noon and night. That's what the Pope's photo op on Lampedusa was. Porn for the AWFLs.

Pope Leo shook the hands of each of these 20 migrants who just arrived to Europe during his visit to Lampedusa on July 4th, reminding everyone that all human life carries immeasurable worth. A powerful moment of compassion at Europe’s doorstep. pic.twitter.com/Tk36O7HBS7

— EWTN News (@EWTNews) July 4, 2026

To me, that might be just as nauseating as Rupert Lowe's Rape Gang Report. Meanwhile, here's one of the replies that our synodal leadership synodally ignored.

Not far from the Vatican there is a cemetery where a young girl called Desirée Mariottini is buried.

Desirée was a 16-year-old girl who was drugged and raped over two days until her death by a gang of Senegalese and Nigerians migrants in a “drug den” in the San Lorenzo district… pic.twitter.com/jQpPBQM5HW

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) July 6, 2026

Learning From Our Mistakes Requires Admitting Mistakes

A decade ago, when one of the Queens of the AWFLs, Angela Merkel, kicked off the whole migrant jerk-off frenzy, one might have been charitable and given the Church the benefit of the doubt. You simply cannot do that any more. There's no excuse for this. 

I think that's what makes me absolutely incandescent about the whole migrant fetishization. They know better and they don't care. The onanistic pleasure of signaling their virtue within their social group overwhelms their compassion for the victims of this invasion.

I didn't realize it until that kindly AWFL on X pleasantly interrogated me and I was forced to break through my anger and get to a rational explanation of it.

In a way, we were being synodal there. Weird.

Happy 250th, America

I'm working all weekend to meet a Monday deadline, so this is the best I can do.

I hope you're have a great 4th of July weekend!

This Is Hilarious

Elon Is Worth Every Penny

Whew! I'm back in San Diego after 2 1/2 weeks in Alabama doing the 1031 Sprint. That's where you have a very limited time window to get a river house up and running for vacation rentals and also buy a long-term rental house in Spanish Fort to soak up the proceeds of a house sale in San Diego. The 1031 refers to the IRS tax code that allows us to defer capital gains when selling one income property to purchase other income property.

The river house is near the end of a cul-de-sac in Baldwin County. Think farm country ornamented with the jewel of Alabama, Fairhope, nestled on the shores of Mobile Bay. As such, there's not much fiber laid there and definitely none at the river house. There, your terrestrial option is a classically incompetent cable company, with (helpful?) customer service located in Bangalore. You can expect DSL speeds of about 6 Mbps down and around 500k up. That is bound to get you poor reviews by vacation renters who have to deal with wailing children, stuck inside on a rainy day, unable to download and watch the Blues Clues episode where the pair breaks up a Pakistani rape gang in Telford.

Starlink to the rescue!

I quickly assessed the Internet sitch and ordered a Starlink system, not realizing the hardware is sold at various stores in the region, including Walmart, Home Depot, Lowes and others. As the order was processed and the estimated delivery date revealed, it became apparent that Starlink wasn't going to be able to deliver until after we'd left.

That would not do, so I managed to find a Walmart in Pensacola that still had a Starlink 4X terminal, the latest model. Everywhere closer was sold out. I imagine that SpaceX is building the things as fast as androidly possible and they're flying off the shelves at that same rate.

One slight problem. The service I ordered would not be active until the hardware arrived. I had numerous chat sessions with Starlink's Grok chatbot and it seemed the problem was unsolvable. Grok recommended I create a trouble ticket nonetheless, so I did so, expecting nothing.

The next day, out of the blue, I got a phone call from Starlink customer service. It was a real person, one who spoke perfect English and perfectly trained on the product line. She told me she had seen my trouble ticket and then patiently and politely walked me through the process to activate my Walmart-purchased antenna, which we had installed on the boat house roof the day before. Within 15 minutes, I had full 100 Mbps down and 20 Mbps up through a phased array antenna to satellites zooming by overhead.

Un-freaking-believable. I didn't call them, they proactively called me. On top of that, she escalated my ticket to get me a refund on my order from Starlink. That evening, another customer service rep from SpaceX called to tell me my order had been canceled and my credit card fully refunded.

Elon Musk is worth every penny of his trillion dollars.

Take a bow, my dude.

Special Bonus Content

Leave it to the Babylon Bee to do a great bit on Elon's trillion dollars while channeling my character, Cat.

Bad, But Still The Best

I guess the text of the MOU with Iran is out. I've seen people on X, people I respect, howling that it is a terrible deal. Such adjectives are subjective, not objective. Whatever is in the MOU hardly matters. We did as well as could have been expected, given the global situation.

I'm still in Alabama, working while doing the 1031 Sprint. That's where, in pursuit of fulfilling the requirements of a 1031 capital gains tax exchange, we must get our new properties up and rented as fast as possible. I don't have time for a long post, but I wanted to get these noodlings down on the blog.

The only leverage Iran really has is the Strait of Hormuz. That leverage vanishes if we and our allies provide sufficient surface combatants to escort shipping going through the strait. In short, the Europeans and Asians lack both the will and the capability to do this. We're not talking a fleet like the one that took Okinawa in 1945, we're talking a dozen or so destroyers and frigates. The Euros could not protect shipping from primitive threats even if they wanted to and they don't want to because they've allowed themselves to be colonized by Islam.

Because the Euros could not protect shipping, we had to draw the line here, pack up our gear and go home. That in itself was a wise decision as the alternative was another neocon-style quagmire in the Middle East.

This is a watershed moment. Absent a violent spasm of Western patriotism and cultural confidence, this marks the point at which Islam can exert substantial and obvious power over Europe.

Thanks to our own poor decisions and lack of funding for the Navy, specifically the decision to build LCSs instead of the more expensive and capable DDGs and FFGs, we were not capable of providing those escorts ourselves. In that environment, this MOU was about the best outcome we could have expected, given Trump's aversion to war. The only other alternative would have been to carry out his threat to destroy all power plants and bridges and leave Iran in the Stone Ages. President Trump could not bring himself to inflict that kind of suffering on Iran.

Still, even with all those limitations, the war accomplished some good and important things. Iranian leadership was decapitated. The Iranian military, save for its infantry, has been effectively annihilated*. The Iranian propagandists, both within Iran and within the West, will claim victory, but that's ridiculous. Just compare Iran's international position a year ago to today.

The Chinese didn't do so good, either. Their military hardware was shown up badly. The other Gulf states are actively working to divorce themselves from the Strait via pipelines and harbors outside the Gulf. Once that's complete, Iran will never again have this much leverage.

Iranian influence took a massive hit. Iran's standing with their neighbors did as well as a result of their indiscriminate attacks on all around them. Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis are all scrambling around trying to figure out how to protect themselves now that their sugar daddy has been curb stomped.

In the end, it was a good result, probably about as good as one could hope, given the circumstances.

God, I miss the Royal Navy.

* - People will say that the Iranians can rebuild their military quickly and bandy about budgetary figures for ships and aircraft as if the military was a spreadsheet. It isn't. Think instead in terms of not just replacing the hardware, but having to rebuild a generation of NCOs and skilled support personnel as well as all the support infrastructure that got destroyed. How long does it take, for example, to build a modern pier, complete with loading and umbilical systems for an FFG? Now multiply that across the whole country for the Iranian navy and air force.

America Was Not Built On Slavery

 ... because not much of anything can be built on slavery.

Goofing off with AI (read: ChatGPT) recently, working on a silly alternate history idea, one of the biggest drawbacks to slavery finally sunk in to me. I knew that Southern planters used slaves as loan collateral, locking themselves into the institution financially, but I never really understood how anti-free market capitalism it was.

In short, slaves are a terrible way to invest capital. You can get the slaves, you just can't get rid of them if they are no longer useful. Slaves are like a tar pit for your capital.

Imagine you've got a spread in east Texas. You can either raise cattle or grow cotton. You decide to grow cotton and buy some slaves to tend and harvest the cotton. Thanks to Eli Whitney, you make decent money. A decade later, some kind of mineral deposit is found underneath your property. To exploit it, you've got to ditch the cotton.

Oops. It's not the use of the property that's the problem, it's the slaves. You can't get rid of them because no one will buy that many. You can't free them because your mortgage is backed by them. You can't kill them because, despite what foam-at-the-mouth abolitionists might say about you, you're not a monster. You may be a full-blooded eugenicist, but the slaves are still human to you. The slaves don't have the engineering skills you need to work the minerals.

You're trapped in cotton.

If you had chosen to raise cattle and foregone the slaves, when you found the minerals, you could slaughter the herd, sell the beef and move on to the better opportunity.

In a way, the Deep South trapped itself in a get-rich-quick scheme. Eli Whitney's cotton gin made cotton a tremendously valuable crop and slavery made the labor costs relatively low. Agriculture circa 1850 was very labor intensive. Once the land owners made those decisions, there was no easy way out.

The rest of the country, nay, the rest of the Western world, was moving on to better industries, but the South couldn't follow along because slavery had trapped them.

There was another problem that affected the whole region at the time. Europeans with valuable skills and ambition were emigrating to the US. Almost none of them went to the South. An immigrant was destined to start at the bottom and have to work his way up to success. In the South, he'd have to compete with slave labor so his initial fortunes were likely to be fairly desperate. The South missed out on the advantages European immigrants offered.

Historians like to point to the lack of factories, railroads and population for the reasons the Confederacy was not able to win its independence. Nah. It was slavery.

Good Lord, I'm trapped in this infernal cotton!

It's Good To Be Home

I was an Air Force brat. As such, I grew up in Boston, Los Angeles, Alexandria, Oklahoma City, Los Angeles again and then San Diego. I never felt like any place was home. I've been in San Diego now for 40+ years, but it still doesn't feel like home. I don't know why, it just doesn't. Maybe it's living in the Southwest.

I hate the desert and San Diego is coastal desert.

Whatever the reason, I never felt any place was home until I visited Mobile, Alabama. It makes no Earthly sense at all, it just is. Sometimes the energy of a place just fits.

A few days ago, we closed on a house on the Fish River in Baldwin County, just across the Mobile Bay from the city proper. We're still scrambling to prepare it to be a vacation rental because we're not moving here permanently. Grandkids in San Diego, you understand. Actually wife kitteh is scrambling. I'm working remotely, earning money for our middle son's family who have a severely autistic son.

The house was owned by an older couple who moved across the Bay, north of Mobile, to be be closer to their own grandchildren. As is normal with an older couple, the place had not been kept up properly. The dishwasher sounds like it's been smoking 2 packs a day for decades when the drain pump kicks on. The dryer sounds like it's warming up for takeoff. The house itself was dirty and the HVAC needed servicing in a serious way. And so on and so forth.

We've got most everything squared away and we're starting to relax into the house. Wife kitteh, my Chicago born and bred beauty, whose favorite line is, "You'd never make it in Chicago," only acquiesced to the purchase of this house as an "I love you" to me. She's coming to understand the Deep South. Everyone is friendly, polite and, much to her surprise, conscientious and competent. Outside of the cable company, which operates in Bangalore or some such benighted place, all of the professionals we've hired have taken a personal interest in taking care of our needs.

It hasn't surprised me at all. It's one of the reasons I fell in love with Dixie.

The place has character and I'll share it with you over time when I get the chance. In the meantime, here is the evening view from our boathouse deck. A Montecristo White Churchill, my favorite cigar, and a Ghost in the Machine hazy IPA from Louisiana was a perfect end to our first day on the river.

Hope things are going well for you, too.