Building Another Battleship

Here in San Diego, I have built two wooden workbenches in my garage. They are identical in size, each with a 8' x 2.5' top. They were designed on the fly and there are small differences in their construction, but by and large, they are almost the same. I named them after battleships, specifically battleships named for states in Dixie. The first is BB-60, the USS Alabama and the second is BB-41, the USS Mississippi.

I recently spent a week at our river house in Alabama. This time, I didn't have much maintenance to do on the place so I finally had a chance to outfit the storage room below the house. As we're right on the river and this is the Gulf Coast, the house is designed to withstand substantial flooding. The living quarters are a good 17' above the river's normal levels, but there's a large storage room below the house at ground level. According to flood records, it's possible that the storage room will flood to about 6' deep sometime in the next 20 years.

One of the things I want to do in the river house is work on various goofy projects. The storage room had a lovely drafting table made from solid wood, but the thing was naturally sloped and a bit small for my purposes. It became a junk table. Further, I've now got a decent fleet of DeWalt cordless power tools, but I couldn't find them easily nor find their related drill bits, drivers and blades. The place was a mess, albeit with all the expensive stuff stored in plastic bins on shelves well above anything less than Noah-esque flood levels.

On this trip, I built BB-55, the USS North Carolina. I had a great time doing it. The guys at Home Depot were wonderful and cut all of my lumber to size without charging me, chatting pleasantly with me the whole time. I ended up with what amounted to an Ikea workbench of my own design that I had to assemble. I took it home and put it together over two days.

BB-55

Like its sister ships, it's got two layers of 3/4" plywood for a top and is lag bolted onto the studs. One advantage to the river house storage room is that there's no drywall occluding the studs. That meant I was able to score a bullseye effortlessly every time with the bolts and screws going into the wall.

I stopped at two coats of Spar urethane, leaving a small amount of rough grain sticking up after the last sand-coat cycle. Upon returning to San Diego, I felt my other workbenches and found no such roughness. Next time I go back, I'll give her another round of sanding and coating to make the top smooth.

Now comes another fun part - organizing my tools, accessories and hardware for easy location. Because this isn't a garage shared with the wife or any cars, I have complete freedom to set up this workshop exactly how I want.

Why The USS North Carolina?

It seemed strange to have the USS Alabama in San Diego and the USS Whatever in Alabama, but the ways of the CNO and his deployment of the fleet are an eternal mystery to all. Actually, I built the Alabama more than a decade before I had settled on buying property in the heart of Dixie and there was no way I could swap the names of the two ships.

I looked into the USS Louisiana, but the most recent battleship with that name was BB-19 which never saw action and was obsolete within a few years of completion thanks to the substantial advances in British naval engineering that were manifested in the HMS Dreadnought. BB-19 did sail around the world with the Great White Fleet, but that was just about all it did before being scrapped.

With that name off the table, I turned to my fiction and discovered that North Carolina plays a small part. 

"We got kinfolk in Norf Caroliner and kinfolk in Indyanner," said Bubba to Meemaw and Darlene. "We'll flip a coin to see where we'll go." His wife nodded, but as he tossed a quarter in the air in the cab, Meemaw, with catlike quickness, swatted the coin out of the air and out the open window where it bounced on the pavement and was quickly lost behind them.

"We are not going to North Carolina. Billy Bob and Carol may be kinfolk, but I will not stay with them. They are barbarians."

"What in tarnation is wrong with Billy Bob and Carol?" asked Bubba in disbelief.

"That woman gets her roux from a jar," pronounced Meemaw with undisguised disgust as she took another drag on her cigarette.

Despite the fact that Carol gets her roux from a jar, the presence of kinfolk in North Carolina was good enough for me. Also, BB-55 is one of the more storied battleships in US Navy history. And so the North Carolina is homeported in Mobile while the USS Alabama is homeported in San Diego.

Who am I to question the CNO?

Fiction Update

Since I'm now writing for myself, I've decided that I'm really writing a single world. The stories with Bobby Lee and Basil are in the same Universe and the exact same time as the ones with the Hardy Boys knockoff lads. The Southern extended family will be scattered throughout Dixie and in some locations include women who get their roux from jars.

How To Balance The Budget, French Style

The first thing you need to do is surrender control of your currency to an external entity. Let's call that entity the "ECB." By doing that, you no longer have the ability to run the printing presses and generate wads of paper currency to pay your creditors and service your debts.

Next, bring a whole bunch of people who hate your culture into your country. If you can't do that, have your education system teach your young 'uns that you suck. The best alternative is to do both. The French, in an unusual spasm of efficiency, possibly learned from the Germans during the Nazi occupation, have done just that.

After that, you just wait. At some point, the people who hate you for existing will find an excuse to riot and destroy stuff. Investors will wet their pants and refuse to lend you any more money.

Unable to borrow or print money, you'll be forced to balance your budget!

Tres magnifique!

I Stand With The Unicorns

 ... after all, every single French politician of note is doing it.

The "student protests" are all about school conditions. That's why they're vandalizing and torching schools, looting businesses, defacing monuments, tearing apart historic buildings and torching irreplaceable architecture. It all seems reasonable when you think about it, particularly the part about how Muslim businesses have not been touched nor has a single mosque been touched.

Makes sense to me. I'm on Team Unicorn.

Even if we assumed the rationale for the, err, social movement as the tender folks at the Louvre put it when they posted on X that the museum was going to be closed for the time being, we still need to assess whether or not the French government could increase education funding even if it wanted to do so.

The answer is no.

For one thing, borrowing money so they can hand it to their students has gotten much more expensive.

France is also spending a ton on the good stuff.

Country	Total Government Expenditure (% of GDP)	Primary Spending Drivers
France	57.0% – 57.2%	Highest in the EU; driven by extensive social protection systems (pensions, unemployment), healthcare, and public sector employment.
Italy	50.4% – 51.2%	Substantial pension liabilities, demographic aging costs, and high sovereign debt interest servicing.
Germany	49.4% – 50.5%	Comprehensive social insurance systems, federal subsidies for energy transition, and infrastructure/defense commitments.
Spain	45.3% – 45.5%	Public healthcare and pension programs decentralized across autonomous communities; lower relative administrative overhead.
United Kingdom (England)	44.0% – 44.6%	NHS healthcare delivery, state pension commitments, and debt interest, partially offset by lower general welfare replacement rates than continental peers.

In short, there's no more money to spend and borrowing is out of the question.

So when the far-right, Hitler-wannabe Marine Le Pen says she wants to stand with the students and understands their plight and the commie what's-his-face does the same, it's all nonsense from the land of Unicornia.

There's no money. It's all been spent. Even if the "kids" really were lobbying for more Euros and not just trashing the place, they're gonna get stiffed.

Someone ought to tell them this. Someone might also want to hand them the bill for the clean up because the grownups are tapped out.

Nah.

Bonus Unicorn Content

Our granddaughter is 4 and loves unicorns. During a recent sleepover with Grammie, I used ChatGPT to make some coloring book pages for her featuring unicorns in different situations. My favorite had a unicorn with Jordan Peterson.

Recomputing In France

 ... in an infinite loop.

By now, you may have seen this video.

A left-wing French woman joined the student protests but was horrified when the second and third-generation migrants she was with started looting stores. She screamed “This isn’t the cause” They pushed her aside, told her to shut up and said they had “urgent shopping” to do https://t.co/GEWhMCUBSF

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 17, 2026

As I understand it from both the translation of what she's saying and (possibly fabricated) assertions that she has been a vocal supporter of mass migration, she is trying to tell the looters that she is on their side. Whatever the case is, the look on her face shows a stack overflow going on in her brain.

Lots of people have commented on her and this particular look of despair, but I think I have a unique take.

What she is trying and failing to reconcile are these things:

1. All migrants are good
2. These migrants are looting her store

That's pretty much it. She cannot process what is happening to her. The forcing function is the social stigma associated with telling others that migrants looted her store. She might be able to escape the loop if she can just convince herself that the store deserved to be looted, either because of colonialism, racism or the frustration of the Africans / Muslims doing the looting. She's clearly struggling with that because she was trying to stop the looting.

Above all, she will not allow herself to be associated with the far-right, whatever that happens to mean today, and thus lose all of her friends and social allies. That overrides all other considerations. Her girlfriends must always think that she is compassionate, open-minded and welcoming no matter what.

So she can't acknowledge what is happening, but she can see it happening. (1000-yard stare commences).

for (i = 0; i > -1; i++) do ...

Bonus Thought

Prior to the 7th Century, Algeria was Christian. What happened? Did all the priests and deacons get copies of the Quran and decide peacefully that there was no God but Allah and Mohammed what His prophet? Probably. As we all know, only white people can be imperialist.

I'd Go

This is so good it deserves its own post.

Wear A Virtual Hijab

 ... by not smiling. That's the advice to women in places with a lot of Muslim men. 

It never occurred to me that it's not just the bare head, it's also the connotations on the facial expression that matter. You may decide to skip the hijab, but it's advisable to never show warmth to a Muslim man. Yes, I know, there are lots and lots of moderate Muslims.

But which ones are they and which are the ones who take the faith seriously?

I've been concerned that our granddaughter may someday have to wear a hijab, but it looks like long before that, she'll have to wear a virtual one.

Here's the full post from X with the embedded video below.

This American used to be a liberal and was shocked by what she was told in college about Muslims

“I went to college where a social work professor asked our class, what are you doing on an everyday basis to combat racism and prejudice and bigotry? So I raised my hand as a really proud, liberal, naive young woman. I raised my hand so proud and I said, well, when I go to the airport, I always go out of my way to be really nice and smile at Middle Eastern men. because I assume that people have been really mean to them at the airport, so I always go out of my way to smile at them.

And she looked at me in front of the entire class and said, never do that again, because in their culture, smiling at a man means that you're a prostitute, so never do that again”

“I was stunned into silence. And I don't know who needs to hear this today, but sympathy toward an ideology that is openly hostile, brutally oppressive and objectifying to women is not empathy. It's actually what I would call Western privilege. You have the privilege of extending sympathy to men who buy into this radical ideology because you have never been a Middle Eastern woman subject to being under it. How you look at them will never change how they look at you”

For those that didn’t know this, it’s real. In Muslim culture a woman smiling at a man that is not her husband is considered haram (forbidden) and strongly prohibited

Muslims say a woman uncovering her face and smiling at a man can lead to evil, here’s the actual reasoning

“It is haraam for a woman to uncover her face or to smile at a non-mahram man, because of the evil to which that may lead.” 

Our cultures are not equal. Islam is not compatible with Western Civilization

This American used to be a liberal and was shocked by what she was told in college about Muslims “I went to college where a social work professor asked our class, what are you doing on an everyday basis to combat racism and prejudice and bigotry? So I raised my hand as a really proud, liberal, naive young woman. I raised my hand so proud and I said, well, when I go to the airport, I always go out of my way to be really nice and smile at Middle Eastern men. because I assume that people have been really mean to them at the airport, so I always go out of my way to smile at them. And she looked at me in front of the entire class and said, never do that again, because in their culture, smiling at a man means that you're a prostitute, so never do that again” “I was stunned into silence. And I don't know who needs to hear this today, but sympathy toward an ideology that is openly hostile, brutally oppressive and objectifying to women is not empathy. It's actually what I would call Western privilege. You have the privilege of extending sympathy to men who buy into this radical ideology because you have never been a Middle Eastern woman subject to being under it. How you look at them will never change how they look at you” For those that didn’t know this, it’s real. In Muslim culture a woman smiling at a man that is not her husband is considered haram (forbidden) and strongly prohibited Muslims say a woman uncovering her face and smiling at a man can lead to evil, here’s the actual reasoning “It is haraam for a woman to uncover her face or to smile at a non-mahram man, because of the evil to which that may lead.” Our cultures are not equal. Islam is not compatible with Western Civilization

— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) October 12, 2026

Bonus Content

Dig this interview with Mohammed Saifullah.

British Islamic content creator Muhammad Saifullah said in an October 4, 2026 episode of the Liam Tuffs Podcast that if he were Prime Minister, homosexuals would be arrested, tried in a court of law, and executed, while adulterers would be stoned to death. He continued by saying that anyone who insulted or criticized the Prophet Muhammad would be executed as well. Saifullah said that he would personally torture apostates... He said that this is what the religion of Islam teaches, and asked how the Prevent Program and the British police, whom he referred to using expletives, could not be "man enough" to ban Islam: They allow the source of what he is saying, the Quran, to be distributed throughout the country, but once he starts preaching what is inside the Quran, he is considered a radical.

This guy is not British. The British government intentionally let him in and let him stay. It's an island, for God's sake. It's not that hard to keep people out.

Just what was served by having him in England?

Everyone Loves Pay Day, No One Likes Tuesday Afternoon Deadlines

... or: Musings On Theological Socialism.

Sarah Hoyt gave an Instalanche to this X-extract blog post about the failure of the New Harmonie socialism experiment.

Robert Owen paid around $150,000 for the town of Harmonie, Indiana. He got 20,000 acres, more than 160 buildings, working mills, and farms already producing food. He renamed it New Harmony. Close to a thousand people arrived in the first year.

Owen already ran successful textile mills in New Lanark, Scotland, where he was famous for treating workers well and running a profitable business at the same time. He believed that if you removed private property and paid everyone equally, cooperation would naturally replace competition.

In January 1826, William Maclure sailed a riverboat full of scientists, teachers, and geologists down the Ohio River to New Harmony. Historians call it the “Boatload of Knowledge”. Thomas Say, the father of American entomology, was on it. So was Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, one of the most respected naturalists of the era. This was the most educated, best-funded, best-equipped socialist community ever attempted on American soil. If cooperation could beat markets anywhere, it should have worked here.

It collapsed almost immediately.

The hardest workers were feeding, housing, and clothing neighbors who did nothing while receiving the same food, the same shelter, and the same rewards. So they stopped working too. Why wouldn’t they?

My feverish, coffee-starved brain made a connection into my current, deep disaffection with the Catholic Church. I instantly thought of the term, Theological Socialism. If my faith's leadership thinks everyone is going to get the same reward after we die, then why don't I go to the beach instead of Mass? Like the hard-working people in New Hamonie, I've realized that if my prelates are right, then I've been played for a chump.

They aren't right. Not at all. They are reveling in being the paymaster and totally avoiding the task of foreman. 

This last weekend, I worked the men's Cursillo retreat. In the kitchen, we dished up some great meals. Many of my friends in the kitchen were from the Valley - El Centro, Calexico, etc. Like the Chicago girl who took my last name, they were all from modest means and now relatively successful. They had something to give to others because they had lived, in fits and starts, the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. As Instapundit said some years ago, wealth and income are markers of behavior.

Discussing this with ChatGPT, we came to this:

(B)efore wealth can be distributed, it must be created. Before generosity can be practiced abundantly, the capacity for generosity must be developed.

Your wife and your friends from Calexico and El Centro illustrate something that gets lost when wealth is discussed exclusively in terms of inequality and redistribution.

They began with relatively little. Through years of work, discipline, delayed gratification, and sacrifice, they accumulated not merely financial resources but productive capacity. They developed skills, judgment, reliability, and habits of responsibility.

Their present generosity is made possible, in substantial part, by their earlier sacrifices.

And here's where the Catholic dimension becomes especially interesting.

The very virtues that made these people prosperous are themselves Christian virtues.

Industry, prudence, temperance, fortitude, stewardship, and perseverance are not merely economic instruments. They are moral achievements.

Of course, wealth itself is not proof of virtue; Christ's warnings about riches make that clear. But neither is wealth morally irrelevant. How someone acquired it, what sacrifices its acquisition required, and what responsibilities he subsequently assumed are legitimate subjects of moral judgment.

G. K. Chesterton said, "Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about." Traditions are the hard-won lessons from the past being given to us on a silver platter.

1826 is a long time ago, long before the modern era where the transfer portal has ruined college football. Ancient Israel, which gave us the Old Testament is older even than that, before Jean-Jacques Rousseau's benighted concept of the noble savage. The people who lived through the failure of New Harmonie tried to pass along their painfully gathered wisdom in writing. So did the rabbis watching the Israelites prance around golden calves right before the smiting got real.

We ignore those and turn to socialism in all its rancid forms at our own peril.

It's a ton of fun to yap about a world of generosity and open-hearted forgiveness. It's not a lot of fun tell your staff they're going to need to work late tonight.

"Your scrolls need to be distributed to the Children of Israel tomorrow morning at 0800!"