On Centurions And Truth

It was Palm Sunday a few days ago and I had the rodents* at the 1100 Mass. The Gospel reading was Matthew 27:11-54. It's an absolute beast of reading, being the full Passion. I used AI to summarize it so I didn't accidentally anesthetize the rodents.

In the reading is this passage.

The centurion and the men with him who were keeping watch over Jesus feared greatly when they saw the earthquake and all that was happening, and they said, "Truly, this was the Son of God!"

Why was it that the Centurion and his boys were the ones who understood what was happening?

First off, you have to recognize who they were. The Centurion was equivalent to a Master Sergeant. He'd come up through the ranks, seen a lot of combat, plenty of executions including crucifixions and, if he was like the E-7s and above I've known, he was eminently practical, grounded and hard-boiled.

The Centurion. He smoked Marlboro Reds, of course.

When he was on guard duty in a quiet area, he and the boys would stand around, shooting the breeze. They'd talk politics, conspiracy theories, gossip, sex, the military life and swap campaign stories. They'd all have known a lot about Jesus. He was a big deal. You know that because when he entered Jerusalem, the people waved palm branches at him in his honor.

The Roman soldiers would have known about the rumors of miracles and the way the Jews had hoped He'd be a military leader and lead an uprising. When He preached peace and love, the Roman soldiers must have been relieved. The last thing they wanted was this relatively quiet backwater to go hot.

Then there was their local flag officer, Pontius Pilate. If they hadn't seen it themselves, they'd certainly have heard how he got shoved around by the Jews over this Jesus guy. Pilate hadn't seen any need to crucify Him, but the Jews shoved it down his throat. That's not a small deal. You never want to see your commanding officer get kicked in the nards like that.

Finally, there was Jesus' reaction to the whole thing. The Romans had seen plenty of execution and torture sessions and every other time, the victim would be crying or begging or protesting his innocence. Here was a totally innocent man quietly taking his unearned punishment.

Yep, Jesus was special the Centurion and his boys could all see it. They saw it because they had no dog in the fight. They'd been raised with polytheism which they didn't really believe. They'd grown up in a cynical, hedonistic world. Jesus was different from all that. Certainly what he preached was radically different.

When Jesus finally kissed the big strawberry and the sky got dark and the Earth shook, you better believe the Centurion knew what had just happened. 

He may have been the only one who really understood it. Well, he and his boys.

Utterly grounded, with nothing invested in it one way or another, they could see the Truth when it was blasted at them at full volume. Everyone else would have reasons or excuses or explanations or ways of minimizing what had just happened. The Centurion was trained to see what was, what really was.

It's my firm belief that the author of Matthew's Gospel did a bit of editing in that passage. I would bet it was something more along the lines of, "Are you (effing) kidding me? This guy is clearly the Son of God. How could these (effing) morons be so stupid as to kill the Son of God?"

Next time I'm having any kind of doubts about my faith, I will imagine explaining them to the Centurion. He'd box my ears and yell at me like a drill sergeant about being the dumbest animal that had ever crawled the Earth if I couldn't see the Truth.

* - The rodents means the Children's Liturgy. These particular rodents are aged 3-9. Like the Pied Piper, I take them away from their parents for the readings and the sermon for rodent-appropriate teaching and general mayhem in a back room. It's loads of fun.

San Diego Vs. Mobile

I visited God's Country earlier this week to look at a house on the east side of Mobile Bay. After landing at MOB, I drove over to Fairhope on Airport Blvd to I-65 to I-10 to Alabama 98 and down to Fairhope. Going back to the airport later during the week, I took the same route, but kept to the surface streets going down Government Street instead of the freeways. The drive is about 35 miles. Fairhope proper is high rent. If you're familiar with San Diego, think La Jolla. Around MOB, it's low- to mid-rent.

As I drove this time, I noticed something. No potholes, no homeless, no trash. I mean zero. There might have been the occasional grocery store plastic bag, but I didn't see more than 3 in that 35 mile drive.

Here in San Diego, the streets are practically dirt roads in some spots. Where our rental is in Bay Park, the roads are atrocious. There are large chunks of suburban San Diego that are free of the homeless, but it's almost impossible to drive even 10 miles, much less 35 without passing several zombies. San Diego has large sections that are zombielands. Everything near the San Diego River, anything in the Sports Arena area and all of downtown from the Barrio to North Park is zombielands. In the zombielands, trash is ubiquitous.

That's just the homeless. That doesn't touch upon the impoverished areas that are common to all cities.

In short, common areas in San Diego are in pretty poor shape. Common areas in Mobile are in excellent shape.

I asked AI* for the relative per capita government spending and got this.

City	Total Budget	Population	Per Capita Spending
San Diego	$5.82B	~1.4M	~$4,100
Mobile	$455M	~187K	~$2,400

San Diego spends 70% more per person than Mobile.

How about per square mile?

City	Budget	Area	Spending per sq mi
San Diego	$5.82B	372 sq mi	~$15.6M
Mobile	$455M	180 sq mi	~$2.5M

San Diego spends about 6x as much per square mile.

AI tied itself in knots trying to make excuses for San Diego, but they were all self-inflicted. It blamed the homeless, labor costs, regulations and so forth. The truth of the matter is that San Diego is deep blue and Mobile is moderately red. Mobile has a Republican mayor, but it is also 50% black, so I doubt the Republicans sweep to victory in every election.

Decay is a choice and San Diego has made that choice.

Speaking of decay, in the Gulf South, you live in an environment rife with predators from the microbe level on up to the plants and animals. If you leave a house unkept for a year in San Diego, you get weeds, but not much else. If you do that in the South, your house will begin to be devoured by mold, fungus, weeds, vines, trees, insects and more. San Diego has occasional, localized fires. Mobile has regular downpours and floods in addition to hurricanes.

Make all the excuses you want, but San Diego has a much easier maintenance problem to solve than Mobile.

There's much more. California is having spasms about how expensive housing is here. Our rental garners an absolutely obscene amount of money every month. I have no idea how anyone can afford it, but we're only charging the going rate which is upwards of $4000 per month. The only reason our middle son and youngest son have houses here in San Diego is that we took care of their down payments. My boss at work, a middle-aged woman of some accomplishment, cannot afford to buy a house. It's insane.

To solve this problem, San Diego has permitted the construction of enormous numbers of high-density housing - condos, townhouses and apartments. The road system was designed for a much smaller population and its flow capacity cannot be increased. As a result, the freeways slow down hours before rush hour and come to a standstill for a good hour or more during rush hour.

In Mobile, the I-10 tunnel that leads from the city to the Mobile Bay bridge clogs up briefly around rush hour and the surface streets slow a bit, but the rest of the time, it's only the timing of the traffic lights and the rural school buses stopping to let kids on or off that slow your journey.

Clearly, San Diego governance is horrible in the short, medium and long-term sense. The homeless problem could be solved in a month by strictly enforcing vagrancy laws. The trash and pothole problem would then have access to money now spent on the zombies. In the long term, there's probably not a lot that could be done. Like Nashville and Atlanta, just to name two places I've experienced, San Diego has outgrown its infrastructure.

AI estimates we have about 200,000 illegals in the county. That's roughly 10% of the population. Maybe the long-term solution would be border enforcement. Note that I haven't even touched upon California's looming fiscal catastrophe.

At any rate, the sooner we get a safe house in Dixie, the better.

I've traveled all over the country and as far as I'm concerned, Mobile, Alabama has the best skyline of all.

* - For AI, read ChatGPT.

Is It The One?

I spent the week in God's country, looking at a particular property on the Fish River. The place was so beautiful, even wife kitteh loved it and said it was The One. She didn't go with me on the trip, but the realtor had done a thorough video walk-through before I left. She'll come with me on the next trip, after the inspections and before we close.

The view from the dock is perfectly adequate.

Theology's Hard, Let's Go Shopping

If this isn't a challenge to Fr. James Martin, SJ*, I don't know what is.

I wasn’t expecting the selling dildos to fund abortions phase of Anglicanism https://t.co/82iQGBFpbq

— 🏛 𝐒𝐭𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐧 🏛 (@nonregemesse) March 22, 2026

This isn't just religiously incoherent coming from a Judeo-Christian minister, it's not even acknowledging the existence of coherent thought. This is therapeutic deism with a collar.

God is love. Don't judge. Be nice.

In one of the replies to this tweet, someone said, "At this point, why not just erect a statue of Moloch in front of the church?"

* - Little Jimmy is the Catholic Church's answer to the question, "Just how far can a priest go in support of every sexual degeneracy known to man or beast and not get kicked out of the priesthood?" The answer in the form of the Jimster is pretty darn far.

Meet Bear!

We have a new member of the Catican Guards. His name is Bear.

The Guards doing their Abbey Road pose. Bear is in the back in the blue harness.

Bear is part Labrador. The people at the dog rescue place think he might also be part beagle in which case he's a Beagador. I think he's actually part basset hound, which is an American breed, making him ... wait for it ... an Ambassedor.

You're welcome.

In my stories, I have a basset hound named General Beauregard. If Bear is, in fact, part basset, then he can have the nickname General Bearegard. The fur on his back is mottled, which would make him ... wait for it ... the very model of a mottled major general.

Two for the price of one!

His legs are too short for him to jump on the couch, which is just fine with the girls. They're little old ladies now, about 11 years old. They like him well enough, but he's a puppy and he wants to play. They do not. Lily, the small, fat one, will play a bit with him, but Leah, the princess, will have none of it. She's already put her paw down regarding playtime and Bear got the message.

It was wife kitteh who wanted the new dog, but since I get up early and therefore pull the morning duty with Bear, he has attached very strongly to me. It's great fun to come out of my study for a snack and see Bear running towards me joyfully to get his lovins.

He's a good boy and has only had a couple of accidents. At 4 months old, a lot of his training was done by the dog rescue group. That means all we have to do is enjoy him.

Havana Shrugged

 From the last part of Atlas Shrugged:

There were not many lights on the earth below. The countryside was an empty black sheet, with a few occasional flickers in the windows of some government structures. and the trembling glow of candles in the windows of thriftless homes. Most of the rural population had long since been reduced to the life of those ages when artificial light was an exorbitant luxury, and a sunset put an end to human activity. The towns were like scattered puddles, left behind by a receding tide, still holding some precious drops of electricity, but drying out in a desert of rations, quotas, controls and power-conservation rules. 

But when the place that had once been the source of the tide — New York City — rose in the distance before them, it was still extending its tights to the sky, still defying the primordial darkness, almost as if, in an ultimate effort, in a final appeal for help, it were now stretching its arms to the plane that was crossing its sky. Involuntarily, they sat up, as if at respectful attention at the death bed of what had been greatness. 

Looking down, they could see the last convulsions: the lights of the cars were darting through the streets, like animals trapped in a maze, frantically seeking an exit, the bridges were jammed with cars, the approaches to the bridges were veins of massed headlights, glittering bottlenecks stopping all motion, and the desperate screaming of sirens reached faintly to the height of the plane. The news of the continent’s severed artery had now engulfed the city, men were deserting their posts, trying, in panic, to abandon New York, seeking escape where all roads were cut off and escape was no longer possible. 

The plane was above the peaks of the skyscrapers when suddenly, with the abruptness of a shudder, as if the ground had parted to engulf it, the city disappeared from the face of the earth. It took them a moment to realize that the panic had reached the power stations — and that the lights of New York had gone out. 

Sanguinosity Overplayed?

Sal at What's Going On With Shipping? just about had an aneurysm yesterday. His criticisms of the Trump Administration's failure to anticipate the closure of the Strait of Hormuz seems spot on. It's always hard to argue with Sal.

As if on cue, Hegseth and General Cain came out today and said reopening the Strait are a top priority. They also said drone attacks are down 95% since the start of the war. I think that's reasonable, even if it is exaggerated. If they're down 80%, that's still really good news. I saw other stats about the number of drones launched and did some quick math in my head, ciphering out what seems to be a 1-in-20 or less success rate for the drones.

I remain sanguine about the war because the pros in our military, aided by the Jews who control us with their weather and mind-control machines, are very adaptive. Let's see what happens with shipping in the next couple of days.

Meanwhile, there's this.

WILD: The predicted “future” came within 24 hours. This is Israeli Air Force footage of drones and jets blowing up Basij checkpoints all around Tehran today, based on tips called in by Iranian citizens. A revolution with air support against a regime with no air defence. https://t.co/SZNn3mseMU pic.twitter.com/JRvRNUWZQP

— Saul Sadka (@Saul_Sadka) March 13, 2026

As Slavs of all stripes have learned, it's very dangerous to be tagged as an enemy combatant when the other side has drones floating around above you. They are excellent anti-personnel weapons. If your side has no air defenses at all, you're as good as dead over time.

The Iranians have no air defenses at all.

That only leaves the Strait. Open it and everyone will relax and go about their lives. Meanwhile, we can pick off the mullahs' goons in the street at our leisure.