Ugh

It's been quite the adventure here in Alabama. I'm working full time while getting a fairly long list of tasks accomplished to get our river house ready to be a vacation rental. It's all going rather well and I'll be done in a week with the place ship shape. However, these endless 11 and 12 hour days are a grind.

I celebrated rather freely last night, having completed one of the most important tasks a bit ahead of schedule. A potent mix of alcohol and tobacco, you know. The results this morning have been dreadful. Naturally, I found just enough energy this morning to sit in front of the computer and type out some doggerel with the help of ChatGPT.

I could just hear Basil Fitzallen now in full Terry Thomas mode nursing a similar situation...

"You know, I'd hate to encounter great-great-uncle Reginald Fitzallen in the afterlife right about now. He fell under a hail of poisoned arrows from a group of enraged savages while exploring the Zambezi for the Royal Society. I've been laid low by tobacco and cocktails."

“Reginald, you understand, had been feverish for three days. Spear wound in the thigh. Lost two bearers to crocodiles. Nonetheless continued upriver because he'd promised the Society accurate measurements of the damned falls.”

Basil regarded his coffee with profound distaste. “I, meanwhile, consumed several perfectly agreeable drinks and smoked rather more tobacco than was strictly indicated.”

Bobby, looking equally bedraggled, looked over the rim of his cup. “Heroic.”

“Quite.”

“Did you at least discover anything?”

“Yes. Apparently there is an upper limit.”

“Important scientific work.”

Basil sighed. “The Fitzallens have always made sacrifices in the advancement of human knowledge.”

“Your great-great-uncle explored the Zambezi.”

“And I established the maximum safe dosage of Three Old Men tobacco.”

“Royal Society ought to hear about it.”

Basil considered this. “I rather think we'll keep it within the family.”

General Beauregard was lying nearby looking perfectly healthy despite having eaten something unspeakable he found beside the river. Basil stared at him.

"That animal consumed half a decomposing nutria yesterday.”

Bobby nodded. “Seems fine.”

“That hound is absolutely insufferable.” 

Who Has The Best Selection Of Lodge Cast Iron Skillets?

In South Alabama, it's this place. They have them all.

Buc-ee's is new to Alabama. This one is right off the I-10 in Robertsdale. Being a California boy, I'd never been inside a Buc-ee's. It was amazing. I've never seen such retail energy and this was on a Tuesday afternoon. The place was a frenzy of joyful purchasing. I don't mean that in a condescending, superior way, I mean that with genuine admiration and affection.

I didn't get a stuffed beaver, but I did get the Lodge battleship, their biggest skillet, a 15" monster. Buc-ee's had the entire line. Who knew?

I just realized I need to go back and get stuffed beavers for the granddaughter and the new tot next door.

Resolving The Ceuta Crisis Was Cheap

 ... especially if you shove the cost on future generations.

I know I've blogged this sentiment before, but watching the European and British leadership surrender to migrant invasions and then weather any and all electoral reckonings drives the point home again.

Here's a scene from the recent invasion of Ceuta.

Un conocido que trabaja en el hospital de Ceuta me escribe esta noche. Me cuenta que en los alrededores del hospital han arrancado tuberías para ducharse en la calle, que el Gobierno ha prohibido a las fuerzas de seguridad guiar a los inmigrantes hacia la frontera para que se… pic.twitter.com/CIx6ZXMmUL

— Martin Varsavsky (@martinvars) August 2, 2026

Translated: An acquaintance who works at the Ceuta hospital writes to me tonight. He tells me that in the surroundings of the hospital, they've ripped out pipes to shower in the street, that the Government has forbidden the security forces from guiding the immigrants to the border so they can leave on foot. He tells me that today they've continued entering and causing disturbances in some areas of the city. He tells me that the Muslim Ceutans with Spanish citizenship are already half the population or more, and that adding in the uncensused and the newly arrived, Christians are now a minority. It's the reconquest of the reconquest. He sends me these videos.

Imagine what the replacement cost of those pipes is, then multiply it by, what, 1000? That might get you close to the direct damage done to the infrastructure.

Now think about the damage done to housing prices. If you owned a residence or business there, good luck selling it now.

Add in the deployment cost of whichever Webelo troop the spineless socialists running Spain sent.

Add in hospitalizations, therapy costs, lost revenues, lost taxation and on and on and on. Who's going to pay for this? Who cares? As long as the government can borrow, all of these costs are Monopoly money. They are irrelevant to the citizens of Spain.

Dittos for the chaos and destruction going on in the rest of Europe and the UK. It's all effectively invisible because it's being shoveled onto future generations. The reaction of the citizens, even the progs, might be substantially more hostile if everyone had to drive to their local IRS equivalent and start writing checks to pay for the destruction.

Aside: Every time I see a Catholic Church burned or vandalized in Europe, Canada or here, I wonder about the reactions of my proggy hierarchy and the AWFLs that run the parishes and dioceses. We can't print money. Someday, if I get a chance, I'll have to ask about that.

At any rate, beating yet another worn out drum here, there ain't gonna be no revolt or civil war in Europe so long as the financial pain from the invasions is dulled by borrowing.

If You Won't Shoot, You Don't Have A Country

In an earlier post where we discussed the state of the Royal Navy, I asked this question.

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.

Now take a look at what happened this week in Ceuta, Spain.

Ceuta is a small outpost across the Med from Gibraltar. It is surrounded completely by Morocco. I've heard some Internet trolls say that the land is rightfully Moroccan, but the Spanish have held it for over 500 years, since the Reconquista. If that doesn't make the Spanish "inidgenous," then we might need to reexamine the Bantu and Zulu claims to South Africa.

Having said that, I've heard normies calling for the Spanish military to show up and restore order. Restore order how? This is an old school invasion, one where light infantry just poured across the border and sacked the town. If you're going to restore order against 50,000 enemy troops, you'd better bring along 50,001 bullets.

One as a spare, in case you miss, you understand.

The truth of the matter is no different than the truth of what happened in England. The People of the Global South, to use the proggy term, can see the West won't stand up for anything. You can abuse their little girls, burn their churches, come across their borders in modest, but continually flowing numbers and the leaders of the West will talk about coordinating resources and bringing individuals to trial.

Individuals. When you've got tens or even hundreds of thousands of crimes / invaders. Individuals. Right. You've let them in with a firehose and you're going to get them out with an eyedropper. Brilliant.

Now they've discovered they can simply pour across en masse and do it with impunity.

It's kind of like the "teen" takeovers here in the US, come to think of it.

The armies of  the West are never going to start shooting. Sorry, David Betz, there won't be a civil war at this rate. There will simply be a transfer of power.

It Gets Even Better

Dig this.

Today, Spanish police finally started swinging their batons against the crowds on the streets of Ceuta

Unfortunately, they attacked the Spanish locals were protesting against how the government allowed 50 000 illegal migrants cross the border

No batons against migrants pic.twitter.com/JOvfsndddz

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) August 1, 2026

You know, it would simplify matters considerably if the troops you sent to "stabilize" the situation took up arms against the locals. They're a lot more compliant than the migrants.

Blowing It On Purpose In Los Angeles

I should be outside, repairing my irrigation, but instead I'm writing a quick response to comments Tim made earlier because if I don't do it now, I won't do it at all.

California

There's something most people don't understand about what's happening in California, something I didn't understand until a month or two ago. I wrote this in a previous blog post, but it was an epiphany for me that bears retelling. 

The high speed choo-choo was never intended to run. There was never any intent to actually build the trains, build the bridges or lay the tracks. It was all a grift from the start, a grift to the tune of tens of billions of dollars.

Think about the size of that con for a second. Bernie Madoff pocketed around a billion when all was said and done. Yes, investors lost more than that, but Bernie himself only got a 10-figure payout. The high speed choo choo is an order of magnitude larger and no one is risking jail.

When that project was started, I knew in my bones you could never do it. I've built houses and remodeled houses in California. It is almost impossible to get anything of consequence done. A house is one thing, but a railroad running for more than a 100 miles? No chance. 

Still, until some Internet wag said it, I hadn't put two and two together, It was all a fraud from the start.

The homeless are the same thing. I said before that the encampments in our cities are just feed lots for the non-profits. Read San Fran-sicko. Seriously. Until you read that, you don't have a sense of the depth of the corruption.

The water situation in California is similar, but I don't think it's a grift. I think it's just simple ideological blockheadedness.

Muslim Rape Gangs

Tim asked if I believed this graphic.

I believe the magnitudes. I don't believe the actual numbers. I don't believe that anyone in authority is keeping real data. When the British allow tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of their girls to be abused and hide the fact for decades, can you trust any data they give you? Absolutely not.

What I can believe is the general magnitudes. The worst countries on the planet for mistreating women include all of the places the Europe and the UK are getting their migrants from - the Middle East and Africa. If you bring in truckloads of those characters, this is going to happen. There's a couple of Euro countries who've had the cajones to keep something close to actual crime stats by country of origin and it holds absolutely zero surprises. The native Scandinavians or whoever they were have a handful of cads in their midst. Their migrants are going at it like there's no tomorrow.

Finally, Jordan Peterson managed to fight through his most recent health crises to pen this article on the rape gangs. It's a corker. Here's the payoff for me where he walks through what was really happening.

Not grooming, then. Not even r*pe. Something more brutal, efficient and planned; something motivated, furthermore, by the presumption of individual and cultural superiority, on ideological, moral—even religious—grounds.

Something akin to domination. Something akin, even more precisely, to… conquest. But let us also not forget the specific and dreadful means of domination and conquest—one so often applied on the open battlefield: rape, of the most vicious sort. Thus, a more fitting term: s*xual conquest.

These then were s*xual conquest gangs: organized networks for whom the bodies of the outgroup’s daughters were territory to be held in contempt, taken and spoiled—the ancient tribal warfare of pillage and r*pe, conducted under conditions of nominal peace, against a host society too trusting, too tolerant, and finally too afraid to name what was happening.

Over on Grok, which is really the only AI to use when discussing this sort of thing, I tumbled to the realization that this is already a civil war, but the natural order of things is jumbled because it's not a conquest in the traditional sense of uniformed armies. Normally, the girls are assaulted after the battle. Here, the authorities surrendered as the assaults were happening and the army of Brits who might have fought to defend their girls was never fielded at all.

There's more to discuss, but I've got an irrigation system to repair. I'd be interested to hear what all of you think.

The Jews

This is awesome.

Blowing It In Los Angeles

Dig this.

NEW: Five water main breaks in just one week are raising new questions about the state of L.A.’s aging infrastructure.

The biggest: a 110-year-old, 36-inch pipe that ruptured in West Hollywood, sending 17 million gallons of water through the Sunset Strip, flooding businesses,… pic.twitter.com/S327U84c42

— Matthew Seedorff (@MattSeedorff) July 20, 2026

Now check out this sweet thing from my backyard.

An Octobubbler!

You see, here in California, we've not built a new reservoir in decades. Some of our reservoirs can no longer be filled to capacity because they've not been maintained. Our population has increased substantially. Our water prices are insane. Central Valley farmers have gone out of business because they can't get enough water to grow things.

In the residential areas, you must choose between turf, xeriscape and drip systems. I don't know anyone who has a lawn. Lots of people had lawns back in the 1970s. Between then and now, water has become scarce.

The Democrats run the state from top to bottom. I believe they have a supermajority in the legislature. In the most recent LA mayoral primaries, the one Republican, Spencer Pratt, was up by about 12 when voting allegedly stopped. In the week following, they "found" enough ballots marked for the 3rd place chick, a lefty loon if ever there was one, and Spencer got shoved into 3rd by a razor-thin margin. He won't be on the ballot in the general election in November.

The Democrats pay no political price for any mismanagement they inflict on us.

It's not fraud if it's legal, right? As an Internet wag put it, they're not committing fraud because they've legalized just about everything any sane person would consider fraud.

Anywho, we have very little water and we use a drip system throughout our yard, trying to maintain a beautiful landscape despite the limitations. 

I hate drip systems. Hate them. They are the most maintenance-intensive pieces of junk ever. The heads turn themselves off, get clogged, get eaten by idiot puppies, get kicked while gardening and on and on. Recently, the Octobubbler pictured above blew 5 of its 8 hoses off. I didn't notice until my wife told me our plants were dying. I did my tour of the system and found that several distribution nodes had blown their hoses off.

It's not too much pressure, it's the feed lines stretching from sun exposure and time. I'll have to replace every bloody line in the backyard because they're all in direct sun. That's not the worst of it.

I discovered the ruptures in my irrigation system just a few days after I saw the X post at the top.

Los Angeles has 110 year old water mains? Are you serious? Here I am, conserving every freaking drop of water and the imbeciles in LA are running a water system that is doomed to total collapse. I save a gallon here and a gallon there and they blow 36" diameter, high pressure pipes on the regular.

When we need hot water in the kitchen, which is in another zip code from the water heater, I take a 5-gallon bucket and collect the water in that while I'm running the tap to get the water hot. I use that to water plants. Conserve, conserve, conserve! Short showers, everyone! Conserve.

KABLOOIE! There goes another 100-year-old main in LA.

I am so glad we sold our rental here in San Diego and bought property in Alabama. This place is falling apart.