The Problem With Kids These Days

 ... is they had us for parents.

OK, that's hyperbole, but I had to share this idea that popped into my head recently.

You know those essays about how Gen-Z is all horked up? Here's one, chosen because it was the top hit on my Google search and I'm lazy. Here's a tidbit.

The reality of Gen Z is that they are indecisive, leading them to be easily influenced by social media, a defining point of this generation. Gen Z interacts with the world differently than every other generation so far has been able to, and the early access to everything only amplifies that.

All of us curmudgeons love nothing better than to criticize the young folk. It's a time-honored tradition for curmudgeons since the curmudgeon first appeared on Earth.

Here's the idea that hit me. Imagine your Gen-Z loser son is 20. They live at home, smoke weed, play video games and watch porn. They have a subsistence-level job, no girlfriend and no ambition. A common theme in your conversations is your exasperated listing of his faults, always starting with, "You know what's wrong with you? Here's what's wrong with you ..."

Now imagine having that same conversation when your son was 4. It would start with, "You know what's going to be wrong with you? Here's what's going to be wrong with you ..."

The image of that conversation made me laugh. :-)

I hope you have a great day.

If You Allow Ugly Lesbians To Dictate Your Sexual Dynamics

 ... you end up in a bad place.

I've been using the AI tool, Chat GPT4, to write Arthurian fanfic, using Sir Thomas Malory's classic Le Morte D'Arthur as my basis, not the lousy modern retellings or feminist trash novels that twist the stories into unrecognizable shapes.

You can find Le Morte online. Here's Volume 1. Here's Volume 2.

In a conversation with GPT4, I asked it to give possible motivations for a lady who deliberately pitted knights against each other, something that happens all the time in Le Morte. Among its reasons was the assertion that women lacked agency in these legends.

That's insane. Dig this.

So turn we to the damosel of the castle, that when Alisander le Orphelin had forjousted the four knights, she called him to her, and said thus: Sir knight, wilt thou for my sake joust and fight with a knight, for my sake, of this country, that is and hath been long time an evil neighbour to me? His name is Malgrin, and he will not suffer me to be married in no manner wise for all that I can do, or any knight for my sake. Damosel, said Alisander, an he come whiles I am here I will fight with him, and my poor body for your sake I will jeopard.

That is the standard dynamic in Le Morte. The ladies motivate, the knights do. If it weren't for the damosel, Alisander would be at home, sitting on his couch, eating pork rinds and drinking beer while watching the LSU game.

To claim that the women in Le Morte don't have agency is to completely miss the entire point of the book. At the largest possible scale, it is the story of how Guinevere wrecks Arthur's kingdom because she's never satisfied with how much attention she gets from Lancelot.

Were it not for Guinevere, Lance and Art would be smoking weed, playing video games and comparing porn subscriptions. In what sense does she lack agency when she can get them off the couch and into the saddle with lances in their hands?

This sense.

🏋️Trans identifying male, Anne Andres is Alberta Canada's women's powerlifting record holder in bench
🚨competes next month in women's category at the 2023 CPU National Championships

🚩Recognizes no understanding of upper body strength differences btw males & females
🧵 pic.twitter.com/DYEyEWZTLr

— ICONS Women (@icons_women) January 4, 2023

This is the world as designed by ugly lesbians. They can't and don't want to motivate men to prove themselves for the sake of a woman so they create an entirely different set of sexual dynamics where women are supposed to want what ugly lesbians want - masculine achievement.

That's fine for the ugly lesbians. Seriously, what's the harm in an ugly lesbian wanting to be a powerlifting partner at a law firm? Good on ya, lass! Do that thing!

For all of the normal women, it's a disaster. They have indeed lost agency, but they lost it by losing track of their role in human sexual relationships.

Le Morte is a classic because it speaks eternal truths through fiction. Here's another tidbit. In this scene, Sir Tristram is fighting his mortal enemy, Sir Palamides, over La Beale Isoud. Tristram is getting close to killing Palamides. Isoud intervenes.

And there began strong battle on both parts, for both they fought for the love of one lady, and ever she lay on the walls and beheld them how they fought out of measure, and either were wounded passing sore, but Palamides was much sorer wounded. Thus they fought tracing and traversing more than two hours, that well-nigh for dole and sorrow La Beale Isoud swooned. Alas, she said, that one I loved and yet do, and the other I love not, yet it were great pity that I should see Sir Palamides slain; for well I know by that time the end be done Sir Palamides is but a dead knight: because he is not christened I would be loath that he should die a Saracen. And therewithal she came down and besought Sir Tristram to fight no more. Ah, madam, said he, what mean you, will ye have me shamed? Well ye know I will be ruled by you. I will not your dishonour, said La Beale Isoud, but I would that ye would for my sake spare this unhappy Saracen Palamides. Madam, said Sir Tristram, I will leave fighting at this time for your sake.

As the degenerate sex freak implies in the video above when he mocks women for lacking upper body strength, there's no way on Earth Isoud can fight Palomides herself. She's described in Malory as being as fair a lady as any in England.

I've always pictured her along the lines of Olivia de Havilland.

Isoud has agency. Tristram is her sword and shield. Isoud has agency in spades, including the ace, king and queen of spades.

How did we get to the point where the top AI tool in the world offhandedly remarks that women didn't have agency in Le Morte?

The answer is that we now use sexual dynamics designed by ugly lesbians. We tell our young women to pursue masculine achievements and tell our young men they suck when they try to be masculine themselves.

See also: Scouts, transformation of Boy Scouts into.

See also: Girl Scouts, maintenance of.

How's that working for us? 

#winning.

That is precisely what you would expect to see if you allowed your sexual dynamics to be redefined by a small subset of your population that share none of your sexual desires and goals. Ugly lesbians are just fine, but we don't want them telling young women how to live.

If you think it can't get worse, dig this.

PURE EVIL
Children's TV in the Netherlands: Naked adults promoting transgenderism and sex change surgery as "euphoria."

After being indoctrinated, one child says: "At first you think HUH? But later you realize that it's actually pretty normal." pic.twitter.com/F0AaUng9ip

— Mark Alan Pearce (@PearceAlan1962) March 29, 2023

And so here we are. A thoroughly modern, first-world country advises children to consider sexual mutilation and poisoning. Chat GPT4, the most sophisticated AI tool in the world, the very embodiment of our understanding of reality, thinks that women didn't have agency in Le Morte D'Arthur. There's a mental health crisis among young women. Marriage and birth rates are falling.

While I know and love several ugly lesbians, I don't think they should be designing our sexual dynamics.

Maintaining Your Status As A Victim

 ... is absolutely crucial because being a bigger victim that the other person is how you get rewarded.

The left, which owns entertainment, the academy and the news media, has completely bought in to the Marxist concept of some groups oppressing other groups. For Marx, it was owners oppressing workers. For Hitler, it was Jews oppressing Germans. These days, in America, there is a rank order of victimization between groups, aka Intersectionality.

If you're at or near the top, you get reparations like the blacks or flags and parades like the LGBTQWERTY people. If you're at the bottom, like straight, white males, you get the blame and the bill. At the very, very bottom are straight, white, conservative, Christian, Southern men. They get their heritage trashed, their symbols banned, their statues torn down and their culture slandered in public.

 It's OK to hate the people at the bottom. You must love the people at the top.

So there are huge stakes in the struggle to maintain your group's victim status. There are very significant and tangible, real-world consequences to falling down the rankings.

Like all Marxist-derived ideas, the premise of the rankings is stupefyingly idiotic. For instance, blacks have very little in common with each other outside of their skin. Like every group, some are hard-working and some are lazy. Some are smart and some are stupid. Some are pillars of the community and some are sociopaths. Inevitably, there will be heroes among them and there will be villains. The same goes for every group in our intersectionality standings.

Some trans people are OK, even if they are confused about their gender. Some trans people are homicidal loons, perhaps made homicidal by doses of testosterone that would get a professional athlete suspended for a year.

Inevitably, one of the sociopaths in the make-believe group the progressives have made for you will do something horrific. Maybe a white guy who likes Robert E. Lee will burn down a black church. Maybe a non-binary guy will shoot up a nightclub. Because the progs own the media and the marketing departments, you and the other members of your group will be made to answer for it.

Remember, there is a HUGE penalty to be paid for dropping in the victim standings.

It was perfectly predictable, then, that when the trans maniac shot up the Christian school that the left would knock over their podiums in their frantic rush to shout into the microphone that, really, the slaughter was all the fault of the conservatives and Christians.

*Trans person murder 3 little kids and 3 adults*

Leftists: "Actually the trans person was a victim."
Leftism for u. pic.twitter.com/QtIFFIjHUy

— Leftism (@LeftismForU) March 29, 2023

Fear pervades Tennessee's trans community amid focus on Nashville shooter's gender identity: “We were already fearing for our lives. Now, it’s even worse.” https://t.co/dftpoDE5C2

— NBC News (@NBCNews) March 28, 2023

Failed artist invades neighboring country. pic.twitter.com/lM3YpYZ8lq

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) March 29, 2023

I picked those three at random. There are tons more.

What we're seeing is a direct result of the idiotic notion that we all share a fantasy victim/oppressor status with people we've never met who possess similar, nearly-irrelevant characteristics with us. When we discarded the notion of people as individuals, each with a unique personality and experiences, and instead, substituted group identity as the primary feature, this was bound to happen.

So long as the progs own the media, entertainment, the academy, the marketing and HR departments of the major corporations, we're doomed to see this. This is how they see the world.

Instead of howling at their double standards or their hypocrisy or their rationalizations of psychotic mass-murderers killing innocent people, we need to directly fight the underlying idea. Until we defeat racial and sexual grouping and return to seeing each other as unique individuals, equally loved by God, this is going to keep happening.

Don't Fear The Globalists

... because they can't achieve their goals of world domination, not no way, not no how. Dig this post from a resident of Los Angeles describing that worker's paradise.

(I)t turns out that there is very little tangible benefit associated with being a responsible and productive Angeleno these days. Rather, if you are visibly productive, it seems to make you much more likely to be targeted by Los Angeles City government and punished for it.

It’s Government-sponsored psychological abuse, really. And I think it’s that insult added to the injury of living here day-to-day that winds up driving most of the population outflow..

Almost every major Los Angeles street is lined side-to-side and end-to-end with derelict RVs. They never move, many are on blocks or have rotten tires and couldn’t move even if someone wanted them to. And yet they are never ticketed, and they are never towed...

Los Angeles officials describe The Road Diet as a way to “shift drivers to other transportation options by adding hundreds of miles of bicycle and bus-only lanes.” Which, on the surface, sounds entirely uncontroversial. But the real purpose of The Road Diet, one which they never ever admit out loud, is to make driving on L.A.’s roads so awful, so dispirting, and so soul-crushing that Angelenos voluntarily abandon their cars altogether in favor of Public Transportation...

Governments are really into function stacking, here’s where The Road Diet combines with L.A.’s lax enforement of the metastasizing homeless situation to create another one of those Ur-problems that makes you believe humiliation really is the point. Now those derelict RVs have begun to park themselves in such a way that they block those brand new combo bike/parking lanes. Got that? Not only did they remove a lane that used to accomodate 33% of rush hour traffic, but now that new lane cannot be used for the purpose for which it was intended, because it’s blocked by a rotting RV with an overflowing five-gallon bucket under the on-board toilet.

It goes on and on and on like that. I haven't been in LA in a few years, so I'm not familiar with the RV issue, but I've heard and seen enough online to believe this guy. My recent experience with LA showed me that it was filthy, decaying and generally wretched.

I was listening to a Jordan Peterson podcast recently where he and his guests were pushing the panic button over the global Elites taking over every aspect of our lives. Meh. They might partially succeed for a while, but eventually their plans will collapse because they don't know how anything works. Their utopias are in their minds only. Reality is Los Angeles.

In a previous post, I pointed out that the US is unlike other countries because we have Elon, guns and money.

In those other examples, the citizens were disarmed. Because they were disarmed, the Elites could destroy their means of communicating freely. The leaders could then pursue whatever lunatic notions they chose. When your ruling class gets intellectually captured by stupidity, as ours has, they can see things are going to pieces, but they know, they just know that the solution is more and more of the stupidity. You peasants need to shut up and get with the program.

We have guns and we can see and share what's happening. Yes, the global Elites will make a mess of things. They already have. But their reign won't be complete nor will their dominance be total or permanent. Things are falling apart in the places they control, from LA to SanFran to Chicago and NYC. They can't take over the whole world all at once and, because we have guns, they can't hold the places they have if things go to pieces.

See also: DeSantis, Florida governor.

Ron DeSantis and other governors are seeing what is happening in the blue enclaves and taking very different approaches. The population is speaking with its feet, moving away from the incompetence, decay and violence.

I'm less interested in the globalists' evil plans than I am in the path away from / recovering from them.

I did just a tiny amount of searching the news for the RV encampments and sure enough, they are a thing.

Fighting The Marginalizers And Reconstituting The Klan

Wife kitteh volunteers with a local Jesuit organization to help poor children get an education. The whole affair is lovely and successful with lots of kids going on to be the first in their families to graduate from college. The work they do is God's work and the people they help are God's children. You have to keep that in mind when the activists drive you up the wall. The activists and the poor are not the same people.

We went to the Jesuit charity organization's annual gala last night and had a reasonably good time, save for the fact that I wished I was dead. We'd tied one on the previous night and then my stubborn body woke me at 0340 that morning. I felt like an extra in The Walking Dead. I sat through their self-congratulatory speeches in a numb haze with my usual curmudgeonly disagreeableness, but despite my exhaustion, I managed to have an epiphany.

The first speaker that triggered my thinking was our auxiliary bishop. He talked about "marginalized communities." It finally hit me why I hate that term. I mean I hate it. I really, really hate it. But why?

"Marginalized" is the past tense of "to marginalize." That is a verb and it represents actions and intentions that are performed by people. We'll call them "marginalizers." As he spoke about helping marginalized communities, he painted a picture of the Jesuit volunteers giving succor to innocent victims of injustice. Their situations weren't something caused by their own decisions or the vagaries of fate, they were done to them, done by marginalizers.

Just who was he talking about? Well, as a straight, white, conservative, Christian, Southophilic man, I knew he was talking about me. The talks had enough references to various racial groups to make that implicit accusation very nearly explicit. 

Similarly, other speakers talked about working for "justice." That word hardly needs a context to figure out that they're implying the existence of villains who are inflicting injustice on the poor, the homeless, the addicts and the refugees. And just who might be those villains? Decades of PAO-pumped history months at work for every racial and sexual group but mine left me no doubt that I was the villain.

When they trotted out some woman who had spent years working hard to help the illegals, I wondered if it might save time to bring on a marginalizer who committed injustice to speak instead. I mean, if the problem is that the marginalized are suffering as a result of marginalization, wouldn't it be better in the long run if we stopped the marginalizing? Maybe we could talk to some marginalizers, find out why they were marginalizing and get them to back off. 

It would be a much better use of your time and money and you'd do a lot more for the marginalized if you stopped the problem at the source.

Yeah, that's not happening. It would require them to humanize the marginalizers and to do that, you'd have to understand their needs and feelings. Who wants to do that? What if you found out that the marginalized are really just the stupid, lazy and/or unlucky? Then you'd only being doing the work of God and not joining a mighy crusade against evil. That's just a grind where you fight against an infinite ocean of misfortune instead of heroically waving your flag as you do battle with unjust marginalizers.

A great movement can exist without a belief in God, but never without a belief in the devil.

Over the past year, I've seen white anger rising online and heard it more and more from popular commentators. It's not the racist "white rage" that woke dingledork Mark Milley is on about, it's feedback from people who have been unjustly painted as villains their whole lives.

See also: Adams, Scott.

The final speaker of the night mentioned the "divisions in out country" without realizing that the Jesuits and some of their volunteers are the source of those divisions. As they stood up there talking about how great they were, they kept kicking me in the groin. Frankly, like many, many others, I've had enough of that.

This how you get the Klan. You group people by race and sexuality, then you take one of those groups and blame them for everything. That gets you memes like this.

It speaks a truth, one the Jesuits and their people need to hear before we really get divisive.

What if, instead of talking about justice and marginalized communities which imply the existence of groups of villains, we told stories like the one below? My heart goes out to the family. Nothing is said about the causes of the family's separation, nothing needs to be said. The video speaks of the desperate need children have for an intact, traditional family. The child's joy at finally being able to have one after 12 years of anticipation is palpable. It must have been like Christmas morning times 100.

This 12 year-old is meeting his incarcerated father for the first time ever. He’s only seen pictures until this day. How would you describe this boy’s anticipation/reaction? God Behind Bars is a ministry that reunites children with their incarcerated dads. This changes lives! pic.twitter.com/C2Bp9b36f6

— Anthony B. Bradley, PhD (@drantbradley) March 26, 2023

Send Elon, Guns And Money!

What happens in Iran when you mention that you've noticed the Mullahs have screwed things up again with their wacky notions based on literal interpretations of the Koran? Some dudes in robes with truncheons show up at your door and beat you.

What happened in East Germany when you remarked to your neighbor that the store was out of bread and meat again? The Stasi, in their fashionable black leather jackets kicked your door down and hauled you off to prison.

How about in Nazi Germany when you talked about how the neighborhood was falling to pieces, mostly because Allied bombers were flying unopposed by the Luftwaffe and bombing the place to bits? The Gestapo appeared and you disappeared.

What if you were a West African in the 1800s and mentioned that the leaders of that slavery-based African empire, the Dahomey, had managed to kill most of the young men by sending them out on raids to capture other Africans to sell them to the honkies? Well, according to the recent documentary film, The Woman King, a bunch of hot chicks in loincloths showed up at your hut and ... well, the record is a bit hazy on just how effective they were. Suffice it to say, they weren't there to twerk for your enjoyment.

In most place and for most of history, if you quacked about your leaders being a pack of dingledorks, chances were good that they'd make sure you regretted it.

So here in 2023, our American Elites are the biggest collection of losers, morons and fools we've ever had. Twitter is larded up with people yelling about it. Dig this tweet, for example.

Wow!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 22, 2023

That right there is something you'd never come close to seeing in Putin's Russia, the Empire of the Ashanti, an Aztec city or the world that Elizabeth Warren wishes she ruled. It's a 1,000,000-view flagging of an absolutely massive failure on the part of our leaders.

How'd that happen? How is it possible that the utter incompetence and idiocy of our rulers is visible to all?

Warren Zevon has the answer. Well, if you replace "lawyers" with "free speech," that is.

In those other examples, the citizens were disarmed. Because they were disarmed, the Elites could destroy their means of communicating freely. The leaders could then pursue whatever lunatic notions they chose. When your ruling class gets intellectually captured by stupidity, as ours has, they can see things are going to pieces, but they know, they just know that the solution is more and more of the stupidity. You peasants need to shut up and get with the program.

Look, Iranian dudes and dudettes of all castes are prone to the same sins that the dudes and dudettes of East Weevil, Indiana are. We're all fallen creatures made in the image of God. We all are prone to use what power we have to get our own ways. Our own ways are rarely the product of rational thought directed at constructive ends without being seriously influence by our desires and selfishness. The more power and immunity from consequences we have, the more we can let ourselves be bent towards self-indulgence.

The Dahomey could send hot chicks to twerk for you ... err ... try to beat you up, but get their butts kicked ... err ... give you a serious nagging, but here in America, while the morons running Stanford might be able to run off a Federal judge trying to give a speech, they can't silence you completely. The Stasi could take you out and shoot you, but if the FBI tried that more than just a few times, in short order, they'd have a lot of vacancies on their staff.

Elon's tweet, above, opened my eyes to what is happening in America right now. I've blogged ad nauseum that our Elites don't know how things work and that's true. Elon's tweet showed me that here in America, thanks to Elon, guns and money, the result will never be Iran, East Germany or slave-soaked West Africa.

We're going to mock the morons in charge mercilessly and there's nothing they can do about it. Oh sure, they can silence me at work, threatening my job if I step out of ideological line, but thanks to Elon, guns and money, I can tweet under a pseudonym as much a I like. Sometimes my stuff even goes viral.

As Yakov Smirnov liked to say, "What a country!"

Our Household Lacks Discipline

 ... inside and out.

Starting in the backyard, we have these two bird feeders that the local finches, sparrows and doves frequent.

They look fine, right?

Wrong!

I have to fill the darn things two or three times a day because some of the little nimrods sit at the feeder and throw the smaller seeds down onto the ground so they can get at the sunflower seeds.

Scandalous!

Meanwhile, indoors, our small, chubby Catican Guard is getting so flabby that she needs her blankets folded about 8 layers deep so it's soft enough for her.

Shameful!

ChatGPT Update

It turns out that ChatGPT loses track of the conversation after a while. I had a long thread going, playing around with vignettes for my novel and I asked it to give me a scene where Jimmy, the all-American boy who talks with 50's exclamations was riding in redneck Bobbylee's pickup and it gave me everything in standard English. In previous dialog, it had kept track of the accents.

It took a couple more prompts to get it right. Apparently, ChatGPT has limited memory and while it's building a model of your story, that model only goes so far back. Once your original character definitions get too far back in the chat session, ChatGPT forgets them and starts guessing.

It works great for vignettes and exploring story ideas, but it's not a true writing partner.

Chat GPT Version 4

 ... is simply unreal.

ChatGPT rolled out a completely new version of their product and I've been playing with it, writing Arthurian fanfic and working on my Hardy Boys takeoff. It is simply unreal. It has a prompt limit and you can only ask it for 25 things every 4 hours. Thank God for that or I would never leave my study.

I've been experimenting with it to understand how to make better prompts and keeping a file of character descriptions for my novel. As I work with it and then correct it, I refine the characters so the AI produces the story I have in my mind. It's simply fabulous. So far, I've been working with four characters, using dialog vignettes to correct it and add to my file where I keep their descriptions.

ChatGPT treats each session as an isolated event. That is, if I write a story about Bobbylee in one session and a story about Angus in a different session, ChatGPT can't cross-reference them. It's up to me to collate my character, setting and mood definitions myself to use them in the novel. This makes it difficult to branch a story and experiment with different developments. 

If I go back to an earlier event and try something new, it obliterates everything after that and starts fresh from that point. I wrote myself into a corner in an Arthurian piece and had no choice but to wipe it out and start from the place I liked. I've got a Chrome plugin that will save my ChatGPT sessions to a text file so I've got a copy of my prompts and its replies so I can recreate the thing from scratch if I want. That's annoying because of the interaction limits. 

If they charged 10x as much for unlimited interactions, I'd pay it. I imagine many others would, too. In fact, I would bet it's very price inelastic. I'm guessing that because of the processing power limitations, they need to set those limits.

At any rate, with my novel, I've discovered that I can act as a movie director. I define the characters and then prompt it with plot developments and word-length section definitions. I'm working on defining Bobbylee the redneck, Angus the Aussie and Jimmy the Hardy Boys clone right now. Here are some samples. I've also added one of their teachers, Ms. Scharnhorst. I'm naming all of the public school staff after Kriegsmarine ships and officers. Hey, if they're going to go full Nazi, I might as well give them appropriate names.

Prompt

write a 300-word section where the three boys, hanging around bobbylee's old pickup truck discuss the possibility that the professor plans to bring down the water tower and flood part of the town. jimmy thinks the professor wants to ruin parts of the town to make his own real estate more valuable. angus just thinks he's a wanker and adds some more aussie insults. bobbylee quotes something from chesterton that dazes jimmy until snaps out of it.

write a 200-word section where angus brings up ms scharnhorst's most recent rant about toxic whiteness and the boys make fun of her

Product

Vignette 1:

Bobbylee leaned against his old pickup truck, adjusting his Confederate forage cap as he chewed on a piece of straw. "I reckon we oughta consider somethin' real peculiar," he drawled. "That ol' professor might be fixin' to bring down the water tower, floodin' part of our town."

Jimmy frowned, his eyes narrowing in thought. "Gosh, that's a wild idea, Bobbylee. But why would he do that?"

"Well," Bobbylee scratched his chin, "I reckon it's 'cause he wants to make his own land more valuable, ya know? With all that chaos, he could swoop in and buy up some prime real estate."

Angus scoffed, rolling his eyes. "That bloke's just a bloody wanker," he spat. "He's got a few kangaroos loose in the top paddock, if you ask me."

Bobbylee chuckled, then suddenly quoted Chesterton in his thick Southern drawl, "‘Evil always takes advantage of ambiguity.' That there, Jimmy, means the professor's up to no good with all them secrets and confusions."

Jimmy's eyes glazed over as he tried to decipher the quote. After a moment, he shook his head to clear it. "Wow, Bobbylee, you always come up with the most profound things. Anyway, let's get down to business and figure out what that kooky professor is up to."

Vignette 2:

As the boys lounged by the truck, Angus snickered. "Did y'all hear Ms. Scharnhorst's latest rant about toxic whiteness? She's a few stubbies short of a six-pack, that one."

Jimmy rolled his eyes. "Jeepers, she's always going on about that stuff. It's hard to take her seriously."

Bobbylee chimed in, his accent dripping with sarcasm. "Yeah, she's like a hound dog tryin' to chase two rabbits at once. You can't rightly tell what she's after, but it sure is entertainin' to watch."

Angus let out a hearty laugh. "Too right, mate. She's as mad as a cut snake, that one. You reckon she'll ever figure out which way's up?"

"Nah," Jimmy grinned. "She's too busy tryin' to change the world to notice she's the one who's all mixed up."

Prompt

ms scharnhorst is a strange figure. you can't tell if she's a woman using her hairstyle and clothes to look like a man or a man trying to use makeup, her hair dyed a strange color and piercings to make himself look like a woman. describe ms. scharnhorst's appearance in detail

Result

Ms. Scharnhorst is indeed a strange figure, her appearance artfully crafted to defy traditional gender norms. Her hairstyle is an unconventional mix, with the sides shaved close to the scalp and the top left slightly longer, dyed an odd shade of lavender that seems to change hue under different lighting. This peculiar choice makes it difficult to discern whether she's a woman trying to adopt masculine features or a man using unconventional hair color to appear more feminine.

Her facial features are equally ambiguous. Her eyebrows are meticulously shaped, neither too thick nor too thin, and her eyes are a mysterious blend of colors that shift between shades of gray and blue. Her makeup is skillfully applied, with just a hint of eyeliner and mascara to enhance her eyes without revealing too much about her biological sex.

Ms. Scharnhorst's clothing choices only add to the enigma. She favors oversized, gender-neutral garments in muted tones that obscure her figure and leave her true form a mystery. She often wears baggy pants, loose-fitting shirts, and chunky sweaters that could belong to anyone, regardless of their gender.

Her accessories, too, blur the line between masculinity and femininity. She sports several piercings, including a nose ring and multiple earrings that are both subtle and edgy. She also wears a mix of chunky, industrial-style jewelry and more delicate pieces, making it impossible to pinpoint her gender identity based on her adornments alone.

All these carefully chosen elements combine to create an image of Ms. Scharnhorst that is truly enigmatic, leaving onlookers guessing whether she's a woman attempting to look like a man or a man trying to appear more like a woman.

Prompt

write a 275-word section where ms. scharnhorst accuses bobbylee of being white supremacist because of the confederate flag bumper sticker on his truck. bobbylee rips her apart with chesterton quotes

Result

Ms. Scharnhorst, with her ever-present air of self-righteousness, approached Bobbylee in the school parking lot as he stood by his truck. "Bobbylee Johnson," she began, her voice dripping with disdain, "I couldn't help but notice that offensive Confederate flag bumper sticker on your truck. It's a symbol of white supremacy, and I demand that you remove it immediately."

Bobbylee, unfazed by her accusation, leaned against his truck and drawled, "Well, Ms. Scharnhorst, I reckon you're barkin' up the wrong tree. You've misunderstood the whole point of that there flag. It represents my heritage, not hate. But since you've gone and ruffled my feathers, let me share some wisdom from ol' G.K. Chesterton."

Clearing his throat, he quoted in his thick Southern accent, "'To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.' You might think you've got the right to judge me, but that don't mean you're fit to be the judge."

Ms. Scharnhorst's face turned a shade of red that nearly matched her oddly dyed hair. "You cannot justify your bigotry with some outdated quotes!"

Bobbylee smirked and responded with another Chesterton gem, "'The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.' You see, ma'am, I ain't fightin' against nobody. I'm just standin' up for my family, my history, and my culture like a stubborn mule."

Ms. Scharnhorst's eyes narrowed as she tried to come up with a retort, but Bobbylee continued, "One more thing, Ms. Scharnhorst. Chesterton also said, 'There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped.' You tryin' to shut down our conversation based on your own assumptions is like tryin' to put lipstick on a pig."

With that, Bobbylee tipped his cap, leaving a speechless Ms. Scharnhorst to stew in her own indignation like a possum in the headlights.

Prompt

write a 100-word section where bobbylee adds an appropriate quote from robert e lee before he gets in his truck and drives away

Result

Bobbylee paused for a moment before delivering one final quote, this time from General Robert E. Lee himself. "Ms. Scharnhorst, let me leave you with this thought: 'The education of a man is never completed until he dies.' You might wanna consider learnin' a thing or two about not judgin' a book by its cover."

With a knowing smile, Bobbylee climbed into his truck, started the engine, and drove away, leaving a bewildered Ms. Scharnhorst to contemplate the wisdom of the Confederate general's words.

Prompt

bobbylee adds an anecdote about determination from his great-great-grandfather who fought in the first virginia under stonewall jackson

Result

Bobbylee paused for a moment, then decided to share a personal anecdote to drive his point home. "You know, Ms. Scharnhorst, my great-great-grandpa fought in the First Virginia under Stonewall Jackson during the War of Northern Aggression. He had a sayin' about determination that stuck with our family through the generations."

He looked her straight in the eyes and continued, "He used to say, 'When you're in a tight spot, you can't just sit there like a bump on a log. You've got to dig your heels in and fight with everything you've got, just like we did back in the day.' Now, I ain't sayin' that the war was all sunshine and rainbows, but it's a part of who I am, and it's somethin' I carry with me. I learn from it, but I don't let it define me."

Bobbylee fixed his gaze on Ms. Scharnhorst, his voice steady and determined. "So, ma'am, before you go throwin' stones in glass houses, remember that we all have our histories and our stories to tell. And like my great-great-grandpa used to say, it's our determination that makes us who we are, not the labels other folks try to slap on us."

Ms. Scharnhorst stared at Bobbylee, her mouth slightly agape. She couldn't comprehend the points he was making, as her mind was so entrenched in her Marxist, racial-justice framework that his words simply didn't fit her worldview. She was unaccustomed to dealing with such nuanced perspectives that went beyond the black-and-white labels she was used to applying to people and situations.

Unable to muster a response or counter-argument, she stood there speechless, her face a mix of confusion and frustration. Bobbylee's words had exposed the limitations of her rigid beliefs, leaving her at a loss for how to proceed.

With that, Bobbylee tipped his cap, leaving a bewildered Ms. Scharnhorst standing in the parking lot, forced to confront the possibility that her understanding of the world might be more limited than she had ever imagined.

The Streets Of The Mullahs' San Francisco

Once you see it, our evolution into Iran with the way the woke progressives continually choose fidelity to their insane religion over practicality, you can't stop seeing it. Dig this thread about a CNN crew getting robbed in San Francisco while they were there to do a story about crime in San Francisco. You can't make this stuff up.

Here's the payoff.

Bc so many people get their cars broken into and their bags stolen, @SouthwestAir was very used to my lack-of-ID problem and smoothly gave me my ticket after a brief security check. Off to TSA now. pic.twitter.com/fDnfF1loRF

— Kyung Lah (@KyungLahCNN) March 17, 2023

How hopelessly screwed up does your city have to be for your airport to find it natural that passenger's IDs have been stolen while visiting?

Mullahs Part II

This is a perfect encapsulation of yesterday's post that parts of the US are turning into Iran where the Mullahs running the place make decisions based on zealotry instead of real-world considerations.

Kevin O’Leary, also known as Mr. Wonderful from Shark Tank, calls out the insanity of the Democrats.

This clip is absolute 🔥 for all the CNN viewers watching. He explains that the leftist policies are destroying blue states and says they have become “uninvestable.”… https://t.co/y8Lnq9V9qD pic.twitter.com/XKOD0j7gZ9

— Deplorable4trump2024 (@PTRUMPFORTX2020) March 12, 2023

Darwinian Mullahs Ruined Silicon Valley Bank

Iran is a preposterous train wreck, right? I mean, the joint is sitting on top of massive oil reserves and they can't manage to turn that into wealth and stability. What's the deal there?

How about this: it's run by religious zealots who prioritize adherence to their religious rules over practical considerations. When given a choice between an act that violates the Koran, but makes things better and an act that obeys the Koran, but makes things worse, they pick the latter every time.

Say hello to Silicon Valley Bank.

We're evolving into Iran. Our mullahs are the woke progressives. With every mutation, they grow even more impractical. Now, we're at the point where the president of the United States feels the need to defend Ukraine's borders but leave our side open and that it's kind of sinful to not mutilate and poison mentally ill children.

Well. So how does this fit into SVB?

When Covid hit, we naturally locked down and took drastic measures. Within 2 months, we had the demographics of infection and mortality pretty well dialed in and the lockdowns were no longer necessary. Confronted with the choice between total control by the government and allowing people to make their own risk/reward decisions, our mullahs chose control. The economy ground to a halt.

In order to keep the lights on and things more or less moving, our mullahs printed money and dropped it from helicopters. Why not? That's what their Koran says - government spending is morally superior and you can print as much money as you want.

When inflation predictably hit, the Fed raised rates. No probs, fam! The government has got all this under control said the mullahs. 

Meanwhile, over at SVB, their local mullahs were focused on diversity and equity and inclusion and sex with inflatable walruses whose pronouns are zirc/zarc. They handed out money to BLM by the truckload and talked about diversity a lot. 

Was there regulatory failure? Perhaps. SVB was regulated like a bank but looked more like a money-market fund. Then there’s this: In its proxy statement, SVB notes that besides 91% of their board being independent and 45% women, they also have “1 Black,” “1 LGBTQ+” and “2 Veterans.” I’m not saying 12 white men would have avoided this mess, but the company may have been distracted by diversity demands.

Management screwed up interest rates, underestimated customer withdrawals, hired the wrong people, and failed to sell equity. You’re really only allowed one mistake; more proved fatal. Was management hubristic, delusional or incompetent? Sometimes there’s no difference.

How about their banking? Hey, man, the mullahs were focusing on the important stuff. They didn't have time to grub around for money. They stashed the cash in long-term government bonds. Those are safe, right?

Nope. They're not. When interest rates go up, the value of the bonds you're holding goes down. Whoops.

And so the whole thing blew up, just like Chicago blew up when it's mullahs screamed at the cops for being racists. 

How about the mullahs in San Fran? Dig this.

San Francisco board open to reparations with $5M payouts

Payments of $5 million to every eligible Black adult, the elimination of personal debt and tax burdens, guaranteed annual incomes of at least $97,000 for 250 years and homes in San Francisco for just $1 a family.

Who's going to stick around to pay those bills? Even if they're 1/10 or 1/100 of that, this is bound to drive productive citizens away. Drive even more productive citizens away, I should say. But hey, their Koran says we need to pay reparations, so screw practicality.

Getting back to the mullahs in the banking system, they recently consulted their Korans and discovered that Allah says we need to backstop every depositor at SVB up to infinity. No worries, we can just print money to cover it. That's worked up to now, right? Err, wait.

"They have guaranteed the entire deposit base of the U.S. financial system," Roger Altman, who served as deputy treasury secretary in the Carter and Clinton administrations, told CNN on Tuesday morning.

"I didn't say it has been nationalized. I said they are verging on that because they have guaranteed the entire deposit base," he clarified.

Are you getting the picture? Every zealotry-induced screwup is corrected by yet another, bigger zealotry-induced screwup.

This is how you end up with Iran.

Is this San Diego? LA? SanFran? Who knows? Wherever it is, the mullahs who effectively legalized drugs and stopped punishing crimes have got a doozy of an idea to fix the problem.

Bonus Content

Here's a look into an SVB board meeting.

General Lee Meets JP II

 Here's another experiment from the Midjourney AI art bot. The prompt was "Robert E. Lee and Pope John Paul II laughing and wearing sunglasses."

I love the facial expressions, but I can only tell which one is Lee because the image of JPII is pretty close. What's more, it looks like General Lee is now pope. Hmm. Which one takes precedence? Is he Pope General or General Pope?

In the upper left, he's wearing what looks like a Confederate uniform, but it's got a Roman collar. Hilarious!

In another prompt, I tried this one: "a princess in a green gown is watching two knights in plate armor fight with swords on horseback." The result had everyone waving things that might have been swords around and all three were wearing a mix of green gowns and armor. Err, no. I tried a similar prompt, using parentheses to try to get the thing to recognize which descriptors belonged to which nouns, but it still didn't work.

Midjourney has no idea what it's drawing.

ChatGPT v4

There's a new release of ChatGPT and it's supposed to be a major upgrade. I've read where it's now able to pass various professional exams. I've played with it a bit and its product is much better than what I was getting a month ago. 

I'm fighting some minor depression right now, so finding the energy to write is pretty tough. I'm beginning to think I really need to retire. Maybe the market is rebounding and I don't need the paycheck. Let's see here...

HOLY MACKERAL! CREDIT SUISSE, TOO?

Dang.

The 82nd Airborne Loses Badly

 Dig this.

Good Lord, there is so much to unpack here.

First off, while I've never had a child, I have swung a sword. As I understand it, they use different muscles.

The quote comes from a romance novel.

The US Army has two different fitness standards - one for men and a much easier one for women. Women have no business being anywhere near the combat arms units, much less the elite ones.

This is the 82nd Airborne, an elite unit in the Army. It got absolutely dragged in the replies and quote tweets. It dawned on me that they live in as much of a bubble as anyone in academia. No one in the Army can speak out against this woke madness. On the Internet, however, when you talk rot, you are fair game. I wonder if the PAO officers were surprised at the pushback. Maybe they held their heads up even higher, basking in the knowledge that they were fighting Hate™.

The US Army is employed by the citizens of the USA. Maybe before you worry about diversity and inclusion, you could win a war or two. Right now, their track record is pretty poor. This is like listening to the Chicago Bears talk about how great their game plans were in the last season. You know, the one where they ended 3-14.

On that point, we just lost a 20-year, 8-gazillion dollar war against a numerically and technologically inferior foe whose entire reason for existence is the elimination of all diversity everywhere. Doubling down on the strategy that lost only works in the Army briefing rooms where no one can disagree with the generals. Out where the Deplorables live, that's not going to work.

So we lost the last war, we're putting women in combat units which will help lose the next war and American women aren't having babies while Muslim women are. Presuming that Sharia isn't a good look for the US, we're well on our way to losing wars in the distant future against an Islamic European foe. Brilliant strategy, everyone.

What a clown car.

Midjourney Does A Decent Job

 ... taking a text prompt and turning it into an image. Much better than Dall-E did. Here's what I got for "Robert E. Lee in sunglasses." Here's the link to getting started with Midjourney.

Dude.

On the minus side, it's a chat server interface to the AI and that's a tremendous pain. I couldn't figure out how to adjust my images with further refinements like I can with ChatGPT. It's probably possible, but I only played around with it for a short while.

Throwing Monitors In A Courtroom

The video and the reply below illustrate a couple of things to me.

i dont care how heated you is commenting crimes in front of a judge aint a good look

— Short King Rize (@Rizeofthedragon) March 12, 2023

In no particular order:

1. The George Floyd convulsions of 2020 were the high water mark of the racial justice movement. There are some resulting waves now, but it's all receding.
2. A large swath of black America is unaware of the national shift in attitudes that these videos cause. See also: Adams, Scott.
3. Democrats cannot discuss behavior because they need blacks voting at 90% D to even have a chance in elections.
4. Republicans are terrified to discuss this.
5. This can't go on forever. Eventually, people like Candace Owens and Larry Elder will gain traction. No one wants to live like this. Plenty of the replies to the original tweet showed profound embarrassment.
6. The replies to the original tweet also showed a significant amount of functional illiteracy.
7. We are deep in debt as a nation and need everyone to succeed and contribute to the country. We all have a vested interest in bringing this behavior to an end.
8. This is not the result of compassion or justice, it's the result of wrecking the foundation of civilized behavior - the traditional family.

Don't Wait

I'm sure I've used this quote sometime in my last 17 years of blogging, but it's so good that it deserves to be used again. In Arthur Gordon's excellent book, A Touch of Wonder, there is a chapter describing a visit he had with Rudyard Kipling. Kipling was a waterfall of wisdom and Gordon struggled to keep it from running through his fingers. Here's one snippet from the chapter.

He talked of ambition, of how long it took fully to master any art or craft. And of secondary ambitions: the more you had, he said, the more fully you lived. “I always wanted to build or buy a 400-ton brig,” he said reflectively, “and sail her round the world. Never did. Now, I suppose, it’s too late.” He lit a cigarette and looked at me through the smoke. “Do the things you really want to do if you possibly can. Don’t wait for circumstances to be exactly right. You’ll find that they never are.”

I went to the gym today and leaving, I thought of this recent post of mine.

From time to time, I pester the kids about making a decision when I think they're procrastinating and I think the choice is either obvious or perishable. I've been pondering the source of my nagging and what life's general problem statement might be. I decided that the analogy I'd like to use is walking towards a cliff.

Taking my own life, here's where I am right now. I turn 61 this year. For me, the cliff might be mental degradation, physical disability or death. I have no idea how far off that cliff might be. It could be twenty years or it could be a month. If my father is any guide, I realistically have about 9 more productive years in me. His third career was art and his paintings from his 70s are not nearly as good as the ones from his 60s.

About 18 months ago, I set some weightlifting goals for myself to make before I turned 60 and I hit them all. 60# dumbbell curls, 90# triceps extensions and 500# incline leg presses were all achieved. In the process, I maxed out 7 different machines. That is, I was able to lift all the weight on 7 different exercise machines, ranging from upper back exercises to bench presses to leg machines. 

At 60, I was stronger than I'd ever been in my life. The first time I maxed out a machine, I whooped for joy because I couldn't believe it.

Today, I used that same bench press machine and did about half of that. My right shoulder can't handle it any more. Since my 60th birthday, a combination of injuries, family obligations, travel and ennui has cut way back on my workouts. It's conceivable that I'll be able to get back to those weights, but I doubt it. I've got a tendon/ligament injury in my left bicep area and arthritis attacking my right wrist.

This is not to complain, it's just the minor aches and pains that come with aging. It's a cliff, right up close and personal.

Do the things you really want to do if you possibly can. Don’t wait for circumstances to be exactly right. You’ll find that they never are.

You can argue with him if you'd like, but I won't.

G. K. Chesterton Likes Piña Coladas

 ... and getting caught in the rain.

Apologies in advance if this post is disjointed. I'm suffering a bout of Early Morning Dog Induced Insomnia. The little brutes got me up at 0220. Ugh.

On with the show.

I'm working on a rewrite of my talk on Christian study which describes the arc of my research since my daughter came out to me 3 years ago as trans. That journey has been amply recorded on this blog. The talk is supposed to show how study leads you to a closer relationship with Christ. I gave a dry run of the talk a few weeks back and the criticism was that it didn't describe the relationship improvement well enough.

Listening to the Andrew Klavan podcast from last week, the real story of my journey struck me. Andrew discussed the T. S. Eliot poem, Little Gidding, specifically this passage:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

We've been married for a while now, but I am still learning new things about my wife and they cause me to love her even more when I do. With each deeper understanding, I arrive where I started and know that aspect of her for the first time. It's like that with the research I've been doing as well.

My research has led me to reassess some of the Biblical stories I learned as a child in Catholic school. I described one such here. 

Jonah is not the story of some guy swallowed by a fish. Origen, a biblical scholar of the 200s, as in 1,900 years ago, said that some parts of the Bible are allegorical and not to be treated like eyewitness accounts. As Andrew Klavan might say, your shopping lists are literally true, but they don't speak deep truths about life. Shakespeare's plays are fiction, but they do speak deep truths about life.

Anywho, the story of Jonah asks the question, "What happens when you refuse to serve God?" Jonah runs away from his duties and his life falls apart. Out of alignment with his purpose, he gets what he wanted, a cruise to Tarshish, but finds out that what he wanted wasn't what he needed.

Like a girl who finds herself with a big scar where her breasts used to be and a body wrecked by testosterone injections, chasing self-generated fantasies doesn't work out so well.

In his book, Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton writes about the same thing.

I have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas. I always find, however, that I am either too busy or too lazy to write this fine work, so I may as well give it away for the purposes of philosophical illustration. There will probably be a general impression that the man who landed (armed to the teeth and talking by signs) to plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which turned out to be the Pavilion at Brighton, felt rather a fool. I am not here concerned to deny that he looked a fool. But if you imagine that he felt a fool, or at any rate that the sense of folly was his sole or his dominant emotion, then you have not studied with sufficient delicacy the rich romantic nature of the hero of this tale. His mistake was really a most enviable mistake; and he knew it, if he was the man I take him for. What could be more delightful than to have in the same few minutes all the fascinating terrors of going abroad combined with all the humane security of coming home again? What could be better than to have all the fun of discovering South Africa without the disgusting necessity of landing there? What could be more glorious than to brace one's self up to discover New South Wales and then realize, with a gush of happy tears, that it was really old South Wales.

I will admit to having had a fear of research in the past. What if the atheists were right? What if their objections to the fantastical Biblical stories is what they say it is - proof positive that the whole thing was a put up job? What if life has no meaning or purpose after all?

It turns out that I needn't have worried. In my efforts to understand and possibly help my daughter who, like many major institutions in America these days, is in the hands of a deranged cult, I didn't dismiss any avenue of research. In the process, I discovered that St. Thomas Aquinas was right all along. All things and all knowledge lead to God.

At least I think that was Aquinas. Like I said, I'm not all here right now, thanks to the dogs.

This brings us to that great philosopher, Rupert Holmes and Escape (The Piña Colada Song). In it, a man has grown tired of his lover and seeks a new one, only to find a deeper love with his girlfriend because he didn't really know her.

"Yes, I like piña coladas
And getting caught in the rain
I'm not much into health food
I am into champagne
I've got to meet you by tomorrow noon
And cut through all this red tape
At a bar called O'Malley's
Where we'll plan our escape"

So I waited with high hopes
And she walked in the place
I knew her smile in an instant
I knew the curve of her face
It was my own lovely lady
And she said, "Aw, it's you"
Then we laughed for a moment
And I said, "I never knew..."

As a child, I loved God as a child. There was Jonah in the whale's tummy because he needed some time to sort out a few things. There was Noah with his ark of animals. How amazing!

As a man, I loved God as a parent, watching the miracle of life unfold in my children. I knew God differently as I discovered the meaning of life through the kids.

Through the tragedy of my daughter succumbing to the insanity of the secular progressives, as an older man I've set sail for the South Seas and landed back in Brighton.

If I'd brought St. Thomas Aquinas along as a guide, he would have told me this would happen. 

"Your faith is sound, lad," said Aquinas, "but you navigate like a squirrel on cocaine."

Elegance

 I know I'm biased, but I think Leah, the wiggly Catican Guard, is a tremendously elegant dog.

How Close Is The Cliff?

From time to time, I pester the kids about making a decision when I think they're procrastinating and I think the choice is either obvious or perishable. I've been pondering the source of my nagging and what life's general problem statement might be. I decided that the analogy I'd like to use is walking towards a cliff.

Taking my own life, here's where I am right now. I turn 61 this year. For me, the cliff might be mental degradation, physical disability or death. I have no idea how far off that cliff might be. It could be twenty years or it could be a month. If my father is any guide, I realistically have about 9 more productive years in me. His third career was art and his paintings from his 70s are not nearly as good as the ones from his 60s.

The choice I have in front of me is what to do with that time before I reach the edge of the cliff. Do I take up novel writing? Book writing in general? Art of some kind or perhaps involvement in one of the many Catholic ministries available to me? Do I start a new one?

Currently, I'm working full time. That's quite lucrative and it allows me to send money to a priest in Malawi, Africa whose parishioners are facing famine because the war in Ukraine disrupted their supplies of fertilizer. That's OK as far as it goes, but it's not really making a decision. By postponing retirement for another 18 months, by not making a decision, I'm actually making one. That is, each month that goes by closes off an avenue I might explore or a goal I might achieve.

Changing has its risks, but holding steady brings with it risks as well. Time is not an infinite resource. I am very aware of that cliff and what it means because I nursed my parents through their final years.

When I get frustrated with the kids, it's because I don't think they can see the particular cliff in front of them. If they're single and not even dating, there's a sell-by date for starting a family. In that case, you can start adding up the months it would take to get from a dead stop to baby number one.

Optimal schedule: 12 months playing the field + 8 months serious dating + 9 months engagement + 9 months married bliss + 4 months trying to get pregnant + 9 months pregnant = 4 years 3 months. Those are pretty optimistic numbers and that gets you to only one child. I would strenuously argue for a minimum of three children. Like everything else in life, kids are a roll of the dice and you never know what you're going to get.

As a woman gets older, that time to get pregnant grows substantially. We have young friends who've had several miscarriages plus difficulty getting pregnant at all. A run of bad luck and you could see that 4 months trying to conceive a viable baby extend to 2-3 years. Giving yourself 6-12 months to recover after the birth of a child before you try to have another one and you are very quickly at the edge of the cliff.

Substitute learning how to write and sell books, getting a charity off the ground, working your way into a management position at a charity you love and you can do the same kinds of calculations.

My decision to work another 18 months puts me right up against the stops for the latest possible time to get started on a new adventure. It feels like I'm not making a decision, but I really am.

A decision to dork around this weekend instead of socializing or a decision to keep dating instead of proposing is a decision as well. When you're young and haven't had that much experience with cliffs, it doesn't seem like a big deal, but it is.

Cliffs always are.

Surprise! You're at the edge of the cliff!

The Scientific Basis For Healing Crystals And Essential Oils

... doesn't exist.

I'm currently making my way through the audio version of The Romance of Reality by Bobby Azarian. It's an atheist tract purporting to explain how life came into existence. Instead, it's the healing crystals - essential oils version of science. I didn't buy the Kindle version, so I'll summarize from memory instead of quoting here.

The book acknowledges the problems with the scientific explanation for the origin of life on Earth. Life appeared almost as soon as it was possible for it to survive and the odds against that happening by random chance are so enormous as to be completely unbelievable. Either way, when it comes to life, you have to believe a miracle occurred.

Almost immediately, Bobby dismisses the miraculous origin, but gives no reasons other than that he doesn't like it. With metaphysics arbitrarily dismissed, he embarks on a trip to Neverland, claiming that life was inevitable because the universe naturally tends towards greater and greater complexity and nothing is more complex than life.

Well.

The most obvious objection is to ask, "Why does the universe tend towards greater complexity?" The why questions are the ones that science cannot answer and so he doesn't. He doesn't even address it. He just blasts on into deep space.

The book staggers around, alternating between describing real science, such as entropy, and completely misapplying the same. For example, he claims that the universe is not heading towards an entropy death because life is constantly adding complexity and structure. He confuses open and closed systems as well.

In the book, Earth is a closed system until it isn't and life is turning energy into structure and information, ignoring the fact that life can only do that because the sun's energy is what is being consumed. In reality, the solar system is effectively a closed system for thermodynamic purposes and it is indeed heading towards and entropy death as the sun devours all of its available fuel.

Bobby desperately wants the universe to be immortal and life to have meaning, but he simply refuses to acknowledge even the existence of metaphysics.

The Romance of Reality is not a scientific book, it's a propaganda tract by a side that knows it is defeated. It's like watching one of the Nazi speeches, circa 1944-45. "No, really, we're going to win!"

Scientific atheism is hopelessly obsolete, something the author acknowledges, at least implicitly. The origin of life problem has gotten more difficult over time instead of getting easier. Going back to my WW II analogy, the irreducible complexity of life is the Normandy invasion and the information theory problems of DNA mutations leading to advantageous mutations in bodily structure is the breakout from Normandy.

I suppose the materialists' problems deriving meaning and ethics without metaphysics would be the Eastern Front, where the situation is collapsing as well.

It's all so silly and pointless. Science describes how, not why. These people need to accept that and fall in love with real science about actual reality, not engage in fantasies, trying to turn it into something it's not.

And there is so, so much to love about both reality and science.

Principles Of Exclusion - Why Religion Needs Logic

Our bishop here in San Diego, Cardinal McElroy, recently penned a piece for the progressive, Jesuit, but I repeat myself, magazine, America. Here's a relevant excerpt.

Many of these challenges arise from the reality that a church that is calling all women and men to find a home in the Catholic community contains structures and cultures of exclusion that alienate all too many from the church or make their journey in the Catholic faith tremendously burdensome...

These exclusions (of people who defy God's plan for human sexuality) touch upon important teachings of the church about the Christian moral life, the commitments of marriage and the meaning of sexuality for the disciple.

His piece is all about practicing "radical inclusion," but he never discusses what might be a cause for exclusion. Dig this embedded TikTok video from a Muslimah in England.

Shumirin, one of the few people brave enough to call out gr**m*rs like #JeffreyMarsh, has had her car vandalized at her house.

They never deny it, they just become aggressive, threaten to unalive you, and damage your property.

But that’s how you know you’re over the target. pic.twitter.com/ox1Miipjfk

— Right Side of History™️ (@xxclusionary) March 3, 2023

Is Jeffrey Marsh, an LGBT groomer and pervert, someone you would exclude? If not, why not? He is clearly a threat to families in the Church. If you don't exclude them, you're bringing the fox into the henhouse, an act that informs the hens that they are somewhere near the bottom of the pecking order.

Ahem.

If you do exclude him, what is the basis for your exclusion? The Bible is filled with objective, exclusionary principles, even the New Testament parts. On what basis do you override or supplant them with your own judgments? When you do that, you're taking God's role for your own. Are we supposed to worship you now? That's both apostasy and heresy.

Apostasy: the abandonment or renunciation of a religious belief.

Heresy: belief or opinion contrary to orthodox religious doctrine.

The question is whether or not anyone should be excluded and on what basis. When they go down the road of "radical inclusion," progressive Catholics have two options, neither of them good.

1. No one is excluded. Parents are on their own when it comes to protecting their children.
2. Arbitrary, personal rules are applied for exclusion, superseding the Deposit of the Faith.

Incidentally, #1 is what progressives are practicing right now in the inner cities. Here's a bit from a post I wrote about the Jacob Blake affair and resulting racial justice spasm.

Here's the full story on Jacob Blake's pre-shooting romp in Kenosha. I'm not excerpting it here because it's filthy. Suffice it to say, Jacob criminally trespassed in his ex-girlfriend's house, sexually assaulted her and tried to steal her car. She called 911 and set the final act of that tragedy in motion. Note that said girlfriend also claimed that Jacob had beat her in the past, hence his record of domestic violence...

Once BLM succeeds and the cops have left the hood, either by quitting or being defunded, what happens to black women? This girl called 911 because she needed protection. When 911 won't respond because the cops will be ambushed, she'll have no defense at all. She won't be alone. No woman in the hood will have protection, save for whatever they can get from their boyfriends, assuming the boyfriends aren't abusing them as well, as Jacob did and statistics show.

The progressive Catholics are making us play the role of Jacob Blake's girlfriend as they "include" every pervert and groomer in the land.

I'm not Jacob Blake's girlfriend. The power dynamics between the Church and me are not the same at all. If they come over to my house and try to beat and sexually abuse me, they'll wish they'd stayed at home. Once I get finished dealing with the issue, I will never associate with them again. I'll find another faith and they can go cuddle with their new lovers without me. I suspect a lot of Catholics will do the same.

The Church can't survive if the orthodox believers leave. From my reading, they don't have much else. If they're relying on nothing but the progressives, they're suicidally delusional.

Bonus Content from the C of E

Progressivism will hollow out your religion and wear its skin like a trophy https://t.co/iNzm3FjZMj

— Mary Harrington (@moveincircles) March 3, 2023

Blogging Note

 As some of you have already discovered, I've had to turn comment moderation on again. The spammers found me and attacked. I'll leave it on for a while and do my best to process your comments as fast as I can. When I think the coast is clear, I'll turn it back off again.

Homemade Breakfast Sausage

Wife kitteh gave me a meat grinder about two Christmases back and other than some boudin, I haven't done anything with it. We're both going stir crazy in our little house, waiting for our remodel to be done, so I dragged it out and decided to make some breakfast sausage with it. I won't link to the recipes here because neither one was very good. 

For meat, I used 2 1/2# of pork shoulder and 1/2# of pork belly. It ground very nicely.

I made a sage version and a Cajun version. The Cajun one had finely chopped onions, which turned out to be a mistake. The sage one came out a bit darker. I don't think I added much, if any, salt to either of them.

Sage.

"Cajun."

When I cooked them up the next morning, the Cajun one fell apart because of the onions. The sage one held together just fine.

I have no idea what was supposed to make the Cajun one all Cajun-y and neither had a stunning flavor. On the plus side, they were easy to make, cheaper than the store-bought ones and can clearly be tuned to whatever flavor you want. Their texture, when cooked, was pure breakfast sausage. That part was a hit.

The fun part is coming up now. I'm going to separate these into small batches and play with the seasonings. Yes, I've already ruined the experiment with the seasonings I used at the start, but it will still give me a platform to study different spice combinations.

The meat grinder is about as easy to use as you could imagine and cleaning it afterwards is really simple. I've been intimidated by the task of stuffing sausage skins, but that's a learned skill and I need to spend some time learning it. After that, it will be easy to make all the homemade sausage I want. It could make excellent presents for friends and family, too!

Don't Stop Dancing!

If you're in the middle of this with a bunch of your friends, you're sober and able to keep going, do you dare walk off the floor and ask them to drive you home?

Several things are combining for me into one, helping to explain some of the things we're seeing. Here they are, in no particular order.

VodkaPundit has this take on the news media and its nearly monolithic messaging.

Did you notice that something that had never been an issue before, gas stoves, suddenly popped up everywhere all at once? That’s how it works. One message is repeated, amplified, repeated again, and reamplified, across every available medium.

Whatever the Current Message is, your favorite TV show will include it in a plotline. The network that airs it bombards you with similar messaging in its promotional spots. The search engine you use — and it doesn’t matter which one — promotes pages selling the same pablum and squelches dissenting views. Social media algorithms void your shares and silence your comments. TikTok, social malware unleashed by the CCP, fuels division and discontent by serving up the most dopamine-friendly content...

Each of us has a voice. But what does it matter when all our voices are shouted down in the cross-media din? Or as PJ Media’s own Richard Fernandez tweeted today, shortly after I’d turned in this column:

In totalitarianisms, the credibility of the media is actually unimportant. Their actual function is to suppress information, reduce the bandwidth and semantically impoverish speech. In such a system, you never know the truth but you know with precision the offical party line.

— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) March 1, 2023

Hold that thought and let's move on to Ben Shapiro's excellent take on why even the NASCAR and NHL execs have gone woke:

Now here's a bit from a person whose friend's son has decided he's now a woman.

After a very long hiatus, I caught up with an old friend. Of course, I asked how her children are doing. That’s how I learned for the first time that her son has announced that he’s actually a woman and is now on hormones. Here’s what I can tell you about this young man without breaching his privacy: He’s truly brilliant, has a charismatic personality, is a hugely loving and lovable person, and is homosexual, something that came as a surprise to absolutely nobody.

This young man went off to a large urban college. When COVID hit and the lockdowns started, he was still beginning to find himself. Because the college is in a blue state, he went from the social whirl that suited him, to COVID isolation. Unsurprisingly, he became depressed. The diagnosis was inevitable (and I don’t know whether it came from him or some quack therapist): He was depressed because he’s not really a gay man; he’s actually a woman.

Because this man is talented, charming, and charismatic, he has a thriving social media channel. I won’t tell you what it is, but I went there to see what he’s become. I was horrified.

First, he’s emaciated, so he’s not eating right. Second, he went from speaking like a healthy young man to presenting with a breathy, die-away voice. Third, his behavior is a grotesque parody of femininity, as he constantly flips his hair, fusses with his earrings, and flashes his polished nails. 

The sparkling boy I once knew has nothing about him that says “This is a woman.” Instead, he presents as some nightmare caricature of past Hollywood vamps, everyone from Marilyn Monroe to Betty Boop to Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. He doesn’t appear happy and fulfilled; he appears desperate and devoid of self.

Now, just a bit from my own blog post.

The reason (various VIPs in media) went bananas (over Scott Adams recommending that white people get and stay away from black-majority areas) is not because we were furious, it's because they all needed to prove their cultural bona fides to their friends. All the people they socialize with expect them to be scandalized and so they are scandalized. Meanwhile, here on planet Earth, Scott is actually well behind the curve.

I've got close friends who are dyed-in-the-wool progressives who came to Scott's conclusion a long time ago. They won't speak it out loud, but in private conversations, they all say it. It's not like they used to shop in Compton, but now there's an effort being made to avoid Compton-adjacent sorts of places.

How is it that the Elites can stay on message even while many of them know it's all nonsense and behave as if it's nonsense in their real lives?

Well, who wants to be the one who ruined that great party for all of their friends? You'd never be allowed to forget it. You might even pick up a nickname from the event. Perhaps it would be "Early Night Sean" or "Denise the Dud."

Now imagine how much worse it would be if you disagree with the People of Love™ and sided with the People of Hate™ on any topic at all. That's how we ended up with Scott Adams and JK Rowling.

The insanity now has sufficient cultural momentum that publicly disagreeing with any part of the Current Things will get you crushed if you're in the news media, entertainment or academia. Out here in the boondocks, we have more leeway, but for the ones at the popular kids' party, they'd better keep dancing.

Bonus Tidbit

Here, the execs at Hershey's, who probably haven't hung out in rental, watching football with friends in years, are letting us know just what their friends think.

.@Hersheys is putting the face of a trans-"woman" on chocolate bar wrappers with "HerShe" highlighted in honor of international women's day.
Hershey's is erasing women. pic.twitter.com/JzRkAtwTdO

— Leftism (@LeftismForU) March 1, 2023