What If It's Just Fashion?

 Girls wearing bangs can be lovely.

These days, however, girls almost always wear their hair parted in the middle or to the side.

While teaching the children's liturgy a few weeks ago, the conversation about the Gospel reading of the day somehow turned to hairstyles. One of the girls and only one was wearing her hair in bangs. A few others commented about it. Nothing catty, just about how unusual it was. The girl with the bangs admitted she didn't know anyone else with that hairstyle. She was sheepish about it.

Women's fashions and hairstyles come and go. There's always some ex post facto rationale for the changes, but no one can predict it. If they could, they'd make a mint working for a designer.

On the right, the furies of the left rarely make sense. Queers for Palestine? That's insane. The queers wouldn't last an hour in Palestine. They'd all be killed.

Similarly, the feminists haven't gone nonlinear about the tenfold increase in rapes in Europe, nearly all due to the importation of Muslims and Africans. Dittos for the white girls gang raped by the Muslim men in England. How can the left take the side of the Muslims over little girls?

Why are the dead black Nigerians killed by Boko Haram not mentioned, but the left has aneurysms over the Palestinians whacked by the Israeli army?

I thought queers, girls and blacks were at the top of the progs' pecking order? I guess not. It makes no sense at all.

What if it's just fashion? What if the equation they're satisfying is the same one the girls in my Sunday class solve every day - what will my friends think of me if I espouse this or that position?

Ben Shapiro calls it the Omnicause. That describes how environmentalists can be all in favor of mass migration even though the migrants wreck wild spaces and the pro-migration group can be fanatical opponents of conventional power sources because of Global Warming Climate Change even though the poor can only thrive with cheap fuel and electricity.

Is the Omnicause just a particularly rigid sorority?

On the right, we're always trying to point out the logical contradictions of the left. Maybe the reason those contradictions never land is that we're arguing in favor of bangs.

Going On Record

Analogies aside, put me down in the "girls with bangs are beautiful" camp.

Bill Johnson For Governor. It's Time For An Utterly Cosmetic Change

Tharmadoz. Feel Better About Feeling Better

I made this with ChatGPT, Grok Imagine and Adobe Creative Cloud. It's quick and dirty, but I laughed while making it.

Enjoy!

Good Lord, I hope there's no such product as Tharmadoz out there. I did a Google search and found nothing, but who knows these days?

Feed Lot Live Cam

 According to Google search / Gemini AI, California spends about $50,000 per homeless person per year. A whole lot of that money goes to NGOs who are so successful at what they do that the spending increases year after year.

Hey, that's a standard measure of success, right?

Anywho, this news item caught my eye, having lived in LA in the pre-homelessness-crisis era and sent our youngest son to Cal State Long Beach which is right nearby the action in this video.

On X, someone posted a link to this LA Skid Row live cam feed.

Viewed a certain way, it's like watching the live cam of a feed lot. That's $50,000 a piece on the hoof. Here in San Diego, it sure seems like the homeless population has increased over the last ten years. Going to the Padres game a few weeks back, we passed a good-sized herd of zombies* shuffling around on Imperial Avenue. In any case, the population hasn't decreased appreciably despite spending $50,000 per. Or maybe because.

Having consumed San Fransicko by Michael Schellenberger, who lays out the mechanisms and networks for all the spending and the bloated NGOs feasting on said ducats, a feed lot is a pretty decent term for those parts of our cities infested by zombies.

*  - Do zombies come in herds? ChatGPT says that's a reasonable phrase for a group of them.

How Do You Become An Islamic Republic?

Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.

Apologies to Hemingway for that repurposing of his famous quote on bankruptcy.

The thing that has surprised me most about the Iran War is not the combat sorties or the Iranian inability to significantly damage US and Israeli forces. No, it's the utter uselessness of the British. It took them well over a week to sortie a single destroyer and longer still to get it into the Med where it promptly broke down. Diving deeper into the state of the Royal Navy, I got this excellent thread with the following table:

Of particular interest are their Type 45 destroyers and Type 23 frigates. In effect, they have a grand total of 4 surface combatants capable of putting to sea at all.

Dig the time in refit for some of them. 3259 days? What is that, 9 years for the HMS Daring? Then there's 667 days, 1023 and 743. That's not a refit, that's glued to the pier.

Even if they could all stumble their way out of port, that's not a frightening fleet. Argentina will be able to take the Falklands any time they want.

When I heard people howling that "Trump didn't have a plan" for the war in Iran, I had to snort. I doubt there's been a nation on earth more thoroughly war-gamed and planned by the Pentagon for the past 20 years than Iran. If they had one plan for the war, they must have had 20, all in great detail. The reason we've taken so few casualties is that we knew exactly what we were doing, how to do it and in what sequence.

When Trump didn't order the military to make sure the Strait of Hormuz was opened ASAP, I thought it was a mistake, but now I think it was actually an act of genius. We are self-sufficient when it comes to oil and its derivatives. It's Europe and Asia that need the thing opened. I thought his comment that if the Euros wanted their oil, they should come and get it was great.

What's been revealed is that, if Britain is any guide, they can't come and get it. When the fighting started, the Brits didn't have a single ship capable of pulling escort duty. I'm not sure they have one now. You'd need a half dozen, minimum, to get the oil flowing again. It looks to me like the Euros would have to hit the gym for 6 months straight to bulk up to the point that they could qualify as paper tigers.

England In Transition

Is England still a country in any meaningful sense? It's an island nation with no appreciable navy. It cannot control its borders; boatloads of illegals come across the channel every day. It has no official language or religion any more. Sharia courts are springing up so it's not certain it really has a solid legal system.

Politically, the lefty parties are allying themselves with the Muslims. That will last until the Muslims don't need them any more. In some cities, Birmingham for instance, that's happened already.

Their figurehead king has already begun to punt on some of his duties, favoring Islam over the CofE. The CofE has hosted Ramadan-a-ding-dong soirees within their cathedrals with no reciprocation by the imams. Their economy is staggering because they pursued Net Zero in order to prevent Global Warming Climate Change, for all the good that did.

Finally, they cannot define what it means to be British. That's a question under constant debate. England is not a melting pot the way we are. There is an ethnic and racial component to being British or there has been for centuries up to now. They cannot say that any more out of fear of being called racist even through everyone knows the Congolese, for example, would have no such problems.

There will always be an, err, England?

They're not an Islamic Republic yet. They're in transition. This is the gradually part.

Friends Who Hum

 ... are just fine with me.

Our hummingbirds now allow me to get within 18" of the feeder and they're perfectly comfortable with me being there. 

I left the photo large so it might be worth a click. Enjoy!

Condescension Unto Death

Yesterday, I posted an AI-derived discussion of the King of England's recent speech to Congress which generalizes into what is happening across the UK in general by their Elites.

In essence, the British, non-Muslim Elites consider religion to have the same import as women's fashions. It's a lovely thing to have, but it's not something to take seriously. No one they know takes it seriously.

This is how they get a king who wants to change one of his titles from Defender of the Faith, meaning Anglicanism, to Defender of Faith, meaning whatever floats your boat.

This is particularly corrosive for British society in particular and civilization in general. Our civilizational assumptions are derived from Christian first principles. Because the British Elites don't seem to grasp this, they can't see how the rapid growth in Islam in England is any more important than skirt styles changing to favor long, flowing lines, natural fabrics and pastel colors.

Contrast this with the zeal they show for the NHS. If anyone suggested the NHS should be replaced by a more free-market system, they would man the battlements immediately and issue thunderous denunciations of the apostates who suggested such things.

The only thing the British Elites have pulled from the CofE is this:

Other than that, religion or the lack of it is pretty much a waste of time. This explains why they don't understand their own, much less appreciate the enormous threat that comes with importing millions of Muslims. They haven't bothered to look into it because it is irrelevant.

No worries. It will all work out great, I'm sure. It's a good bet that Muslims don't take their faith any more seriously than the British Elites do.

I was going to leave the embedded X post alone, but I think it's worth a comment. The Muslims don't see faith as irrelevant. When they speak of taking over a place, it's always in terms of religious capture. The British Elites remain utterly impervious to this because they simply cannot come to grips with the existence of people for whom faith is that importat.

Muslims living in UK, who come from Pakistan and other Islamic countries, don't like the England flag so they want to change it. pic.twitter.com/Of2uMT5ZMQ

— RadioGenoa (@RadioGenoa) April 28, 2026