I'll Write Tomorrow

My muse has hit me, but life did, too.

I'll write tomorrow, I promise. Probably just the novel, not sure about the blog.

On Muses, Guppies and Prudence

I know I've used this one before, but it's true and it fits. Sometimes.

Q: What do you get when you have 1 male guppy and 5 female guppies?

A: 5 pregnant female guppies.

Guppies bear their young live and have sex the way God intended, not with all that writhing in the water and squirting eggs and milt willy-nilly. Nope, for guppies, it's Old Alabama and a waterbed.

Q: What do you get when you have 1 male guppy and 20 female guppies?

A: Nothing but a worn-out male guppy.

When you have too many irons in the fire, you don't get nothin' done. At least I don't. That's where I've been for the last few months. In funding terms, I've got 2 customers now, working full time. In reality, I'm engineering ten or so different webby thingies. On top of that, I'm hunting for an Alabama respite location, working my marriage through that purchase, doing various things at church, writing a novel, trying to powerlift my way to preposterous goals for a man my age, haunt Twitter-X, monitor our funds, take care of a brood of children with varying needs, fight my Irishness and its need for a drink, blog here and ... oh heck, I don't know. Wash and wax the car? Replenish the raised beds for my wife's 'maters?

Add a few more to that list. Why not? I'm that exhausted male guppy, but in my case, it's by my own choice. It's all good.

Anywho, that's what's behind my lack of ranting here. Oh well. I thought about hanging up the whole blogging thing, but it hurt to think about that.

So here I am and the muse has struck.

Tonight, I'm giving a personal testimony as a part of a meditation on prudence. Prudence is something I can't recall my Cursillo homies ever talking about, but it's at the heart of this blog.

How do you handle situations with ambiguous moral choices? What do you do when, no matter what choice you make, there will be a world of hurt coming down on everyone around you?

What do you do when your daughter comes out to you as trans? What do you do when your child has emotional disabilities and could burn down the house by accident, but needs you around? What do you do when your wife is slowly going mad and has become violent? When do you finally put your aging, demented wife in a home and stop taking care of her yourself? Confronted with multiple treatment choices for your wife with cancer, what do you help her choose? If your relative is a recovering addict, do you take him in, knowing he may end up robbing you for a hit?

God is love, don't judge just don't cut it.

So I need to give a testimony and it can't be my normal "our bishop is a moron" sort of thing. I know I rant here, but this needs to be, unlike my typical essays, Christian.

Here we go.

God made the world out of love for us. It's a highly improbable thing, this world of ours. The origin of life, the universal constants, the wild discontinuous steps in evolution, it's all crazy - crazy with love for us. It's a world of adventure, of danger, of choices, of free will.

God is love. Don't judge. Those are the things we get fed every Sunday. They're true and valuable. It's important to keep them in mind. However, there are lots of things we face that don't reduce to that kind of page out of a coloring book. Sometimes, in important ways, life is much murkier, more complicated than that.

5 years ago, give or take, my daughter came out to me as trans. It was just her and I in our kitchen. She had been a normal girl in high school with a couple of boyfriends. I caught her once in the garage, making out with a guy. We even went out to dinner with a boy she liked and his parents because he was 2 years older than she was and she wanted to date him. He was a nice guy and his parents were lovely. They respected my old school ways, which were culturally Southern even though I wasn't yet a full-on adopted son of the South.

Something happened when she was a senior. Her teachers were far-left and who knows what they taught. She decided she was lesbian late in that year and her mom, my first wife, sent her to Pride Week in San Francisco. It was almost certainly flipping me the bird. She found every way she could to hurt me. I don't think my ex had a plan other than that.

Anywho, a couple of years later, there my Russian, adopted girl was, in my kitchen telling me she was actually a man.

This was pretty early in our societal madness. Far enough along for me to know that I held almost no cards at all. My HR would call me in if I asserted that girls could not become boys. Our corporate comms was all in on affirmation and inclusion. I knew enough science to know this was total, sadistic insanity.

God made biochemistry, too. Our moral code lives in that world - the world of physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics. All of those sciences are acts of love just as much as Jesus living as a man. Everything is predicated on that science, even the God is love part.

In that moment, 5 years ago, I could see the choice I was being offered. Agree with her or she'd kick me out of her life. At her age, parents have very little power. I was given a moral choice with no good outcomes. I told her not to do anything that couldn't be reversed. I didn't understand it all yet, but I knew some girls were getting their breasts cut off. You can't recover from that.

My Church preached affirmation, inclusion, love, acceptance and forgiveness.

She started on her testosterone treatments. When I would ask him about it during office visits, my doctor would close the door and talk in hushed tones about it. I knew why. His HR would flay him alive if they heard what he was saying. He said the whole thing was madness.

My bishop wrote an essay about "radical inclusion." From the pulpit, I heard, "God is love" and "Don't judge."

Meanwhile, there I was, holding firm. I never called my daughter by her new name, Luke. I never used he/him. I never used a name or a pronoun on those rare times we got together. I kept telling her not to go through with the surgery. She knew I didn't support her transition and saw less and less of me.

I saw her a few months ago. She really wants to have a relationship. We were very, very close when she was growing up. It hurts us both to be apart. She won't have a relationship with me if I don't call her Luke and agree she's a man.

She's had the surgery. Her breasts are gone. She's been taking testosterone long enough to have destroyed her voice, but worse, she's gone mad.

As any guy who went through puberty can tell you, testosterone is a psychotropic. You do crazy things under its influence. Suzy may have been a 3 or 4 at best, but by God, she was HOT in high school. Imagine what it does to a woman when given in doses 100x or more what her body can handle.

That last time she came over, I pushed back on her demand to call her a man. She started shaking and saying she felt threatened. We were just talking. All I could think of were all the trans shooters we've been seeing lately.

Did I do right 5 years ago when I didn't embrace and support her transition? What I did made no difference at all. She ended up with the surgery and the testosterone injections anyway. Now I don't have a relationship with her. On the other hand, had I gone along with it, I'd have been an accomplice in the Mengele-level destruction of my girl.

More importantly or not: I'd have lied about God's reality. Biochemistry is just as much a constant created by God as "God is love" and "Don't judge."

Is it blasphemy to lie about the things we know about reality? Do her feelings trump endocrinology?

Our Church is obsessed with hope this year. It's the "year of hope" or something like that.

Wanna know what gives me hope?

I believe that Jesus gave us basic metrics by which He wanted us to make our decisions. Love, charity, humility, sacrifice and more. I believe that as long as I make my decisions informed by those virtues, He will forgive me even if I make the worst decision possible.

Maybe I did. Maybe I didn't. 

Maybe what I did was to fight the good fight against impossible odds. 

Maybe what I did was not recognize a battle that was already lost and fail to pick the pieces up on the far side of biochemical collapse.

Beats me. I'm just an old man who did the best he could with what he had on hand 5 years ago. That's all He asks of me.

My Unasked For Take On Iran

 Get them. Get rid of them all. I don't care what follows, just get rid of them.

I don't care if they were an immediate threat or a down-the-road threat or a never-gonna-happen threat. I don't care if the real reason we whacked them was that they misspelled "Trump."

There were only two ways this was going to go. The mullahs were going to continue to fund as well as actively pursue the killing of Jews, Americans and anyone else on our side. They may or may not have been able to create a nuclear weapon, but they were certainly going to try. That was going to continue until we stopped it, permanently.

Which made the second alternative outcome this.

I think the Pope had the best summary of the argument against whacking the mullahs.

“Peace is no longer sought as a gift and a desirable good in itself, or in the pursuit of the establishment of the ordered universe willed by God, with a more perfect form of justice among men and women.”

There has been no harsher critic to U.S. military action in Iran than Pope Leo XIV:

“War is back in vogue and a zeal for war is spreading. The principle established after the Second World War, which prohibited nations from using force to violate the borders of others, has been… pic.twitter.com/5pg6NRWSLi

— Christopher Hale (@ChristopherHale) February 28, 2026

As usual, the Church is living in a make-believe world. Peace wasn't on the table. It wasn't a choice between peace and war. The Iranian regime was constantly killing someone, whether that was its own people, the Jews, American soldiers or anyone else that got in their way. The idea that what we had a week ago was some form of peace is a fantasy.

So get it done. Get rid of as much as we can and see what happens after that. I'm sure the plans are more detailed than that, but if all they were was "rubble don't make trouble," I'd be happy with it.

Tehran won the toss and has elected to receive.

Old School Lolcattery

Don't Judge Doesn't Mean Don't Judge

I don't know about the rest of you, but we Catholics have absolutely fetishized Matthew 7:1-3.

“Stop judging, that you may not be judged. For as you judge, so will you be judged, and the measure with which you measure will be measured out to you. Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own eye?"

Our ultra-feminized Church now interprets that in the strictest possible sense out of concern for others' feelings. When combined with our other favorites, "God is love" and "Be nice," we end up where we are with Toddler Catholicism.

However, get a load of Matthew 18:15-17:

“If your brother sins [against you], go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have won over your brother. If he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, so that ‘every fact may be established on the testimony of two or three witnesses.’ If he refuses to listen to them, tell the church. If he refuses to listen even to the church, then treat him as you would a Gentile or a tax collector."

Wait just one Jerusalem minute there, proconsul! How can we do that if we're not judging?

Then there's the problem of the woman caught in adultery in John 8:1-11.

Then the scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery and made her stand in the middle. They said to him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say?”

They said this to test him, so that they could have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and began to write on the ground with his finger. But when they continued asking him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”

Again he bent down and wrote on the ground. And in response, they went away one by one, beginning with the elders. So he was left alone with the woman before him. Then Jesus straightened up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”

She replied, “No one, sir.” 

Then Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and from now on do not sin any more.”

If the Lord God is right there in the flesh next to me and tells me not to sin any more, I'm going to take advantage of the moment and ask for some clarification. For all I know, the heavenly demerit records might be like the IRS tax code. I'd ask for some help identifying what is and isn't a sin. What's Jesus going to say, "I don't judge, everyone needs to listen to their heart and understand right and wrong for themselves?"

If we can't judge and if there are no moral absolutes, how can we help each other avoid sin? Once a week I get together with 3 other superstitious primitives for breakfast and after we finish worshipping a statue of Mary, we discuss Jesus and other hallucinatory things. Sometimes, we'll mention a sin or two that bedevils us and the others weigh in with suggestions on how to avoid wearing Azalea Trail Maid gowns while doing lines of coke and betting on marmot races in Tijuana.

Hmm. That might have been TMI. Oh well.

In our modern Church, none of this is actually possible. We can't help each other because we can't judge.

None of it makes a lick of sense.

We've embraced Barbie Catholicism, a variation of or perhaps a waypoint on the road to Toddler Catholicism.

Logic is hard, let's affirm everyone!

On Voter IDs

There's been something nagging at me about this whole voter ID debate. The Democrats say that it would disenfranchise blacks and women and God knows who else because many of them don't have IDs.

Question: What is the ceiling on your life if you don't have an ID?

I would think that the best you could hope for would be irregular employment and housing only marginally better, if at all, than being homeless.

If that's the case, then why are we talking about whether or not these people can vote? Why is the salient feature about them how they vote? If a ton of your constituents don't have IDs, then the moral thing to do is bend Heaven and Earth to help them get IDs.

I don't expect self-interested political parties to discuss that, but I wonder why the press doesn't ask those questions when confronted with someone giving that excuse for rejecting voter ID.

Stop Complaining, Start Creating

 This is, without a doubt, the funniest video I have ever seen. I laugh constantly every time I watch it.

That’s one talented cat!

P.S. Sorry about the RAM price… 😅 pic.twitter.com/nBwWfZLAOg

— Dr. Clown, PhD (@DrClownPhD) February 21, 2026

This is AI, of course, but in addition to being life-changingly hilarious, it was almost certainly made by one person. This post has 20,000 views, but who knows how many views the original video got. When engaging content like this goes viral, hundreds of thousands or even millions see it.

For as long as I can remember, conservatives have complained that they've been locked out of the entertainment industry. All we get are the Osmonds, Kid Rock and clumsy Jesus movies. Back when there was a high barrier to entry and the progressives could gate keep the studios, those complaints were legit.

Now, however, you can tell whatever story you want if you'll just put in the time to learn the tools and generate the content.

Stop complaining and start creating.

By the way, I've now got an outline for Chapter 3 that I really like. I'm a bachelor this weekend so I'm hoping to knock it out before Monday. We'll see if my muse cooperates.