Size Matters

 I brought my churchwarden pipe with me to Italy, thinking I could find a tobacco shop that sold some interesting Mediterranean tobaccos. I had a vision of a store a lot like Liberty Tobacco in San Diego where they have 30 or so jars of different tobacco blends. Nope. Nothing like that at all.

In San Diego terms, Florence has a population equal to that of Chula Vista plus El Cajon. It's roughly 380,000 people. San Diego as a whole has a population of about 2,200,000. Liberty Tobacco is unusual. Searching for a comparable store here has made me realize how large a population you need to support a niche establishment like that.

There have been some promising places turning up in my Internet searches, but none of them have been close enough to visit. The ones I have visited have all been massive duds, so going an hour out of our way to visit one more roll of the dice doesn't seem to be worth it.

Oh well. Next time, I'll bring my own in my luggage.

The tobacco shops have all been like this - little hole-in-the-wall places that sell lottery tickets and other odds and ends along with cigarettes and a few cigars.

Bigger Issues

I'm finding it harder and harder to blog about the bigger issues of the day. The situation at the border is panic-inducing when you combine it with the fact that we're running a $2T deficit per year now to go with our $32T debt. Team Faculty Lounge capturing the culture makes it hard to face reality. If you do, you're called a racist and no one can handle that. Because Europeans were better imperialists than Africans and American Indians, we all have to pretend that we're evil and deserve to have our countries invaded and ruined.

The world is changing right before our eyes, but no one is allowed to notice it. You see it on social media and Fox News, but if you're not following the right accounts, you can easily avoid it. I did a search of the AP News website recently and found zero references to the American border crisis, but plenty of hits on the word "border" for other countries. Ukraine, for example.

The AP is about as middle-of-the-road American culture as you can get so it's a good bell weather for the effects of Team Faculty Lounge on our perception of reality.

It's A Good Thing Mathematics Is Racist

... because if it weren't, we'd do some back-of-the-envelope flow calculations and note that our largest city, NYC is past capacity for illegals, but the rate of intake at the border is hitting new records all the time.

The world is changing right before our eyes, but no one is allowed to notice it.

Hunt And Peck Typing

 ... performed by an expert.

This hen wanders around the compound where we're staying in Tuscany. There's a dog that tries to herd her, just out of instinct, but she does what she wants. There are also ten cats and four donkeys wandering about. We've met four of the cats. The donkeys are kept in a very large fenced-in enclosure with plenty of grazing. 

To be honest, I've always been afraid of horses and donkeys. I don't mind riding them, but I don't trust them not to bite me when we're face to face. The four that are here all ran to the fence and made motions that said they wanted petting or perhaps treats. I couldn't tell which, so I just left them alone.

Donkeys and horses aside, I could totally get used to the life of the gentleman farmer.

Tuscan Cats

We've rented a house in Tuscany which is part of a farm compound with ten cats on the premises. This morning, I had a couple of assistants while I teleworked.

Our Constitution Was Made Only For A Moral And Religious People

 ... It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. - John Adams, 1798.

Of course, he was white, so take that with a grain of salt.

Last night, Philly suffered widespread looting, organized by the Black Lives Matter crew, who are indistinguishable from Team Faculty Lounge. Here's just a taste.

Incredible. They really do believe they can get away with anything. pic.twitter.com/RYY9Bt7tB7

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) September 27, 2023

I chose that video out of dozens of others because it illustrates the problem of the cops in a society where Team Faculty Lounge has had a decade or more to preach white supremacy to the locals. This isn't looting for economic reasons, this is vengeance for perceived wrongs. Our education system has riled up a whole generation to fight systemic racism fantasies and now you have this - platoons and more of infantry looting stores which are protected by less than a squad. That can't possibly work, particularly when the smaller force has such restrictive rules of engagement.

Further, the looters are illiterate and innumerate, so it's doubtful they can comprehend the consequences of their actions. Finally, they've been taught that capitalism is evil, so they're performing an economic act of moral righteousness in addition to the racial one.

At this point, even the densest progressives on the corporate boards has to see that keeping stores open in blue cities is a bad idea. I don't feel sorry for the retailers at all. This is on them now.

Meanwhile, if we don't perform an exorcism on our universities, we deserve all of this, too.

Italian Girls

 ... are different from San Diego girls in the following ways, at least here in Tuscany.

• No tats
• Not overweight
• No strange hair colors
• Feminine hair styles
• Much higher percentage of dresses and skirts instead of jeans or sweats
• No egregious piercings

They still have that haughty, European air about them, but that makes sense since we're in Europe and all.

Having said that, the coeds at Ole Miss blow them all out of the water.

Anyway, Italian girls make me think of this excellent Rod Stewart song. Enjoy.

Wakanda Forever

On Twitter, one of the best, but also most distressing, accounts is K9 Reaper. He's a South African who is both chronicling the collapse of that once great nation and trying to maintain what little civilization remains. Here's one of his most recent tweets.

SASSA grants still haven't paid out for most applicants - in a country where just over 50% of the population -> 30 million -> on some form of government grant and only 7% of this country are tax payers? 

No water to a city of over 3 million people? Tshwane. 

Crime stats:

• 75 murders a day.
• 80 hijackings a day.
• 4 children murdered daily.
• 4 women raped every hour.

Massive land grabs take place daily.

Our farmers are dying.

Borders that consist of nothing more than chicken wire (literally), and that's the parts that actually have a fence. 

Fire is being used as a weapon to destabilise(sic) the country.

All forms of infrastructure crumbling. 

Copper cable theft is off the charts.. in my area alone, they steal a minimum of around 50m a month. Including the destroying mini subs, switching stations and transformers. 

3 to 4 incidents of civilian based public unrest (riots) daily.

And how do we fight this? With structured community safety initiatives. There is no other way. We will simply do it ourselves. 

Our country is dying, and it needs you. Now.

"Ape, together strong."

The place is in late-stage collapse. Copper cables have been stolen from the power grid to be sold as scrap. The power network has reached the point where it can't be effectively rerouted around the missing connections. Blackouts are common. Between the collapse of the water infrastructure and lack of electricity for the pumping stations, water isn't getting to the cities. His tweet describes the rest.

Here in the US, we have no idea this is happening. We have absolutely no idea that this is the result of African tribes going at it just like they've done for millennia. Instead, we get racial fairy tales.

To describe reality would be to partially rehabilitate European colonialism and imperialism. Because our intelligentsia has been taken over by anti-white neo-Nazis, there's no more chance of that happening than of great white sharks achieving warp drive*.

We're in Italy now. Yesterday, on the flight into Heathrow, one of the worst-run airports in the developed world, wife kitteh watched "Till," the Emmitt Till story. It's about a black dude who was unjustly murdered in segregated Mississippi. You don't need to know the story or see the movie to have a perfect idea of it. Every white person is a hate-filled, screaming bigot. Every black person is well-spoken and suffers in quiet dignity.

It's a true story. It really happened. It also has nothing to do with what is happening today, either here or in South Africa. It's just one racial fairy tale from an endless buffet of racial fairy tales.

We are intellectually and emotionally ill-equipped to deal with the modern world. That's not good for anyone, regardless of race.

Semi-Related Multimedia

I didn't have the stomach to add a topic-related image on this post. I'm sick of the whole subject. It actually makes me nauseous, but I can't stop posting what I think and see. Instead, I'll share this video. Team Faculty Lounge is enforcing the fairy tale fantasy model on us in all kinds of ways. Dig this.

Female toddlers who pull barrettes out of their hair and boys who unsnap their onesies are trying to tell you they are trans. pic.twitter.com/g6xxvPaCp3

— Billboard Chris 🇨🇦🇺🇸 (@BillboardChris) September 21, 2023

 

* - When they do, we're all screwed.

AI Art Shows The Marlboro Man Washed With Dove Soap

 I'm old enough to remember cigarette ads on TV. The Marlboro Man would ride his horse on a cattle drive while he smoked. He was manly and cool and Westerny. We loved Westerns back then.

The tobacco companies lied to us about the health risks of smoking and their marketing teams led that charge. They told us we could keep on smoking, it was fine. We liked to smoke because it made us feel good. So we smoked and died.

Dove soap has a new ad campaign.

Dove’s latest campaign has taken aim at the sexualisation of women and the related beauty standards in gaming.

In collaboration with Women in Games, Unreal Engine and Lola MullenLowe, the campaign hopes to tackle the fact that 74% of girls feel underrepresented in video games.

With aims of ‘making virtual beauty real, the brand’s spot sees a virtual female character strip herself of her sexualised clothing and enter the gaming world as her own genuine self.

Here's an image from their campaign.

Cigarettes are bad for you and that girl is not beautiful. Meanwhile, AI art from Stable Diffusion is generating images of truly beautiful women that look like this.

The more AI art featuring beautiful women that I see, the more divergence I see when I'm out in the Real World™. At our local grocery store, almost all of the young women are overweight, tatted up, frumpy and glum. It's as if there was a competition to take what they were given and make the least of it. The delta between the way they look and the AI art women is massive. Meanwhile, Dove is trying to tell them that nothing is wrong.

Keep smoking, girls. It's all fine. The problem isn't you, it's men.

Meanwhile, male AI art users, driven by their lizard brains to seek out ever more beautiful women, are constantly refining their AI prompts to keep increasing the beauty of the images. The divergence between real women and AI women gets larger and larger all the time. Under the best circumstances, real women can't compete with the AI art. Now our culture, personified by marketing campaigns, urges them to not even try. Instead, men are supposed to change what they like.

I suggest having a smoke while you wait for that to happen.

By the way, here's the video that goes with Dove's new campaign.

The Border Crisis Explained In Two Short Clips

Replacing white people is a good thing.

Biden in 2015: “An unrelenting stream of immigration” will make white people a minority in the United States

“That’s a source of our strength”

Sitting beside him is the man currently in charge of the border, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.pic.twitter.com/rxo0s5QVZh

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) September 18, 2023

Destroying the country is a good thing.

Louis CK: if we allow open borders, America is going to have a lot of problems… and that’s good. We should have problems. It’s not fair that life in America should be good while it being bad in third world countries
pic.twitter.com/yRCv1JgsQs

— Ryan James Girdusky (@RyanGirdusky) September 19, 2023

Meanwhile, the conveyer belt is moving at top speed.

BREAKING: One of the largest mass illegal crossings we have ever seen took place in Eagle Pass, TX this morning, w/ Border Patrol sources telling us over 2,200 people crossed there since midnight. It happened right next to the port of entry, as illegal immigrants continue to… pic.twitter.com/NDFX17r4vU

— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) September 18, 2023

Italy Invasion Update

Dig this.

There are now 18,000 African migrants in Lampedusa as an additional 20 boats arrived overnight. The island has a population of 6,000 Italians and the situation is only getting worse by the day. Who is behind these boat landings? pic.twitter.com/7022M3dVeH

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) September 20, 2023

Sex In The Faculty Lounge

This video is full of wisdom.

That video describes what is happening to young adults as they realize the feminist nonsense they've been taught is, well, nonsense.

That feminist nonsense came from Team Faculty Lounge. The theorists that constructed a fantasy world where women don't need men, where women can pursue career and family and where women and men are equal and interchangeable aren't out there dealing with the devastation caused by their theories. Instead, they're writing more papers, attending more conferences and teaching more classes.

Team Faculty Lounge never has to answer for anything.

The Church Disarmed

 ... cannot be the Church Militant.

Wife kitteh and I are currently participating in a 12-week small group course on evangelism based on the work of the group, Evangelical Catholic. Wife kitteh accurately accused me of simply auditing the course as I haven't been doing the readings or exercises between sessions. Instead, I go to the sessions cold and wing it.

Ohioan would recognize this behavior. :-)

This morning, I went through the week's readings and exercises and finally was able to put my finger on what is really bothering me about the class and the diocese. The Babylon Bee said it quite well in "6 Ways Jesus Failed To Love His Neighbor — And How We Can Do Better - Guest Article by Christianity Today."

Who is Jesus Christ? The Gospels tell you, but there is something important missing from this biblical account. Despite its lofty intro describing how "The Word was with God and the Word was God," it fails to enlighten the reader that this "Word" it refers to is most likely LOVE. That's what God is. He's love, and that's it. The entire Bible is actually just a book about love, and the rest of it should be largely disregarded. Love really is everything. Did Jesus really live up to the standard of LOVE set by his Heavenly Father? Tragically, he didn't.

I've ranted endlessly on this blog against the "God is love" pablum we're fed from the pulpit week in and week out.

The "God is love" sentiment is self-negating. If God is love, then there can be no hell. How can you reconcile hell and unconditional acceptance? You can't. If there is no hell, then what's the point of Jesus? He died on the cross for our ... err ... sins. And if He hadn't? No difference. You weren't going to pay for your sins, even if such things existed. After all, God is love.

It doesn't work. If He exists, if He made a world with nasty bugs and uncaring predators and hospice care for dying parents, then He has some hard edges. He has some expectations. He told you what you needed to do to stay safe. If you choose to slam your hand in a car door, don't blame Him when it hurts. Don't say, "I can't believe in a God that would make it hurt when I closed the car door on a body part!"

What today's homework session showed me is how the modern Church has edited the Gospel and simply removed any of the edgy parts. Our bishop likes to talk about radical inclusion, but, like the Bee mocks in their article, that's his words, not Christ's. Here's one of the passages we were asked the read this week for the class.

“Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever does not enter a sheepfold through the gate but climbs over elsewhere is a thief and a robber. But whoever enters through the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens it for him, and the sheep hear his voice, as he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has driven out all his own, he walks ahead of them, and the sheep follow him, because they recognize his voice. But they will not follow a stranger; they will run away from him, because they do not recognize the voice of strangers.”

Although Jesus used this figure of speech, they did not realize what he was trying to tell them.

So Jesus said again, “Amen, amen, I say to you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came [before me] are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate. Whoever enters through me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. A thief comes only to steal and slaughter and destroy; I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly.

Look at the way He describes the secularists who advocate for sin and degeneracy. They are thieves and robbers who come to steal and slaughter. That's not inclusive and it's not pacifist. It's completely orthogonal to "God is love."

Something has to be orthogonal to God is love otherwise love has no meaning at all. As Andrew Isker pointed out in The Boniface Option, you can't have love without hate. If I love my family, I hate the things that threaten it. If I don't hate those threats, then what does it mean to love? Can I love my family and also love a pack of pit vipers trying to slither into the house and bite them? At some point, either the pit vipers or my family are going to have to die. Do I kill the vipers with love or do I use a shovel?

Loving your enemies means trying to bring them to Christ, but if they keep after you and yours, you'd better have that shovel handy.

Because the Church blows right past those words and focuses on cute, little lambs being saved from the dark, scary forest by Jesus who carries their silly, little wooly bodies back to the sheep fold, we are totally unequipped to deal with the thieves and robbers who come to steal and slaughter.

All the thieves and robbers need to do is use our Sacred Words and we fold like damp laundry, unable to see them for who they are. They tell us they are inclusive and full of love and just want equity and justice. Meanwhile, our daughters are mutilated and poisoned, the marginal communities are left illiterate and sexually degenerate and our society is being overwhelmed by millions upon millions of invading illegals.

In every case, the thieves and robbers preceded their slaughter and destruction with a vow to be affirming, diverse, equitable and inclusive. We've disarmed ourselves because we think "(t)he entire Bible is actually just a book about love, and the rest of it should be largely disregarded. Love really is everything." 

Apparently, love is abject surrender.

Our version of the Holy Family. They're reflecting on the different ways love is love. No sign of thieves or robbers there. All is sweetness and light.

The Jews Kept Me From Finishing My Workout At The Gym

My last two workouts have been meh. Both times, I've quit my lifting early and skipped my cardio. I just didn't feel like it.

I regretted not doing a full workout a few hours later each time. I only added another 30 minutes to my day and I didn't do anything significant with that time. If I had finished my workouts, I'd have been a great deal happier with myself.

In those same last two days, I've also interacted with an antisemite, an anti-black racist and an anti-white racist on Twitter. Talk about vapid! I didn't spend much time on any of them, just some short chitchat, enough to see where things were going.

Reflecting on those interactions after having disappointed myself at the gym, what struck me was that so long as you could blame another group for your problems, you yourself couldn't be expected to perform at your highest level. After all, no matter what you did, the Jews, the blacks or the whites were going to use their magical powers and hold you back.

It's all the same. Hating another race, blaming another race or playing the victim gives you endless reasons for not having put in the time and effort to improve your body, your career or your relationships.

What a bunch of losers.

Here, we see Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky issuing orders to the global Jewish conspiracy to make my precious bodily fluids impure and rob me of my ambition. Oh sure, he might seem like a really nice guy, but it's all a sham. What he and the other Jews want is for me to cut my workouts short so they can take control of the world. Because, you know, they all think about me all the time.

The Best Place To Stop An Amphibious Invasion

 ... is while the boats are still at sea and have yet to land the troops. Dig these scenes from the Italian island of Lampedusa.

Images you won't see on TV: illegal boats are now arriving by the dozen in #Lampedusa (Italy). I have never seen that. The African rush towards Europe is accelerating. pic.twitter.com/7tD4bmckgi

— Mina (@Mina696645851) September 12, 2023

Update zu #Lampedusa:
Die Lage eskaliert - Regierung ruft Notstand aus!
Mittlerweile haben bereits 160 Boote die Insel gestürmt. Wir sprechen von 8.000 gewaltbereiten Männern (in nur 2 Tagen)!
Angelandete #Flüchtlinge schlagen Polizei in die Flucht und übernehmen die Insel!… https://t.co/2Kn0v537YJ pic.twitter.com/t9Qud0IhnA

— Hartes Geld (@Hartes_Geld) September 13, 2023

#Lampedusa #4XNIE #migrants
Tak wygląda wdzięczność nielegalnych migrantów. To jest inwazja. pic.twitter.com/tXZb2Kxjr1

— MirAS🇵🇱 🏃🚴⛰️ (@Mir__AS) September 14, 2023

They sailed with more than 100 landing craft and came en masse, organized by human traffickers in North Africa. The Italians were taken by surprise and didn't put up a fight at all. Even if they had known it was coming, it's not certain they would have lifted a flaccid finger to stop it. 

There are now more Africans on Lampedusa than there are Lampedusans. As you can see from one of the videos, the cops are totally overwhelmed.

This is another one you can chalk up to Team Faculty Lounge who has been agitating for bringing in as many "migrants" as possible in the name of justice. On Lampedusa, diversity is their strength.

It better be, because they just got a whole lot more of it.

Super Special Bonus Take

Note that while the residents of Lampedusa have been involuntarily teleported to heart of Senegal without warning, Team Faculty Lounge is having a perfectly normal day, going out for their morning coffee and pastries and then meandering over to the university to give desultory lectures or engage in interesting conversations with each other. At the end of the day, the Lampedusans will be lucky to still be alive and have most of their possessions. Team Faculty Lounge will be picking out which wine to have with their Moules Marinières.

Election? What Election?

I keep thinking that there are massive, non-political forces in motion right now. Dig this.

NEW: Video from source shows a large group of migrants crossing illegally into Lukeville, AZ last night. Per CBP sources, yesterday, Border Patrol in this Tucson, AZ sector alone apprehended over 2,000 illegal immigrants from all over globe, including 148 from Senegal. Others… pic.twitter.com/6uCPXUbijW

— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) September 13, 2023

This is one small segment in time at one small point in the border. The cataract of illegals is coming constantly across the entire border.

These people aren't going to stay in Texas. Some will go to NYC, some will go to Chicago, some will go elsewhere. In my last two posts, we saw the mayor of NYC say that his city was doomed because of the illegals pouring into it and then we saw illegals camping at Chicago's O'Hare airport. The flow of illegals isn't stopping, it's just getting worse. If NYC and Chicago are in trouble now, just imagine them in, say, 6 months.

I keep thinking the polls mean nothing right now because there are massive changes on the way that will affect politics, but aren't themselves political.

Bonus Take

Team Faculty Lounge is not responsible for any real world results. They can spout all day long about how diversity makes us stronger, no humans are illegal and we must tear down the structures of the white supremacist patriarchy, but in the end, they go home to very nice houses driving very nice cars. The mayors of the cities that bought into their rubbish, however, are responsible for maintaining law and order, providing services and managing their city's infrastructure.

Team Faculty Lounge has taken over the culture, but it's other people who have to do real work within the confines of the new culture. That disconnect is being made manifest now.

Maybe They Could Erect Tents Inside O'Hare Airport

First of all, you have to realize that the open border has been an unqualified success. The goal was to tear down the unjust structures of society which were constructed by straight, white, Christian men to maintain the power and oppress women, minorities and the LGBTQWERTY crew. That is the explicit purpose of the open border, as clearly laid out in any number of progressive books, essays and speeches.

The process after that is a bit hazy. It goes something like this.

1. Destroy the white supremacist patriarchy.
2. Mumble mumble mumble.
3. Now we have a just society!

We are nearing the end of phase 1. In Chicago, for example, illegals aren't just being housed in the police stations, they're being housed at O'Hare airport as well.

Chicago leaders are facing backlash over hundreds of migrants being housed at O’Hare International Airport, one of the nation’s busiest airports. 

Chicago reporter William Kelly joined “Fox & Friends” Thursday to discuss what the city has been experiencing as a result of the influx of migrants.

More than 400 migrants are reportedly being housed in a section of the airport, hidden from public view behind black curtains, up from 31 at the beginning of August. 

Kelly said the airport is one of only 18 migrant shelters in Chicago and that homeless Americans are no longer allowed to stay at the airport.

As a veteran traveler who used to be an American Airlines Platinum Aadvantage member, this is simply mind-boggling. So many things come to mind when I see this. I'll give you some in bullet form.

• The border states aren't emptying out their illegals as they arrive. They have a massive backlog of illegals, numbering in the millions. Even if we completely closed the border today, busses of illegals would continue to arrive in Chicago, NYC, LA and elsewhere for at least another year. 
• What is this going to look like in a year when the number of illegals in these cities triples or worse?
• What is this going to look like when winter hits Chicago and NYC? This coming week, nighttime temperatures will get down into the low 50s.
• How many illegals can O'Hare take before concourses get taken out of action? Do you trust the Team Faculty Lounge geniuses running Chicago to know? Isn't it more likely that they'll find out when it happens?
• The US air traffic network is very rigid and fragile. American, who has a mammoth hub at O'Hare, can't simply declare that Oklahoma City is now their Midwest hub and start routing flights through there.
• Where are the illegals showering? What are they eating? Where are they going to go if Chicago decides to move them out of the airport?

Team Faculty Lounge has taken a swipe at answering that last question. Tents. Military-grade tents.

The City of Chicago is working to solidify housing plans for more than 1,000 asylum seekers and migrants who are currently being housed in police station lobbies across the city.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson plans to relocate nearly 1,600 migrants and asylum seekers to winterized base camps where they would be housed in large military-grade tents.

The mayor answered questions about plans to create tent-style housing for migrants and asylum seekers at an unrelated press conference Friday morning.

Where would this be? They don't know. Who will pay for it? They don't know. How will the residents be fed, stay warm and receive medical care? They don't know. Where will their non-English-speaking children go to school? They don't know.

However, the tents will be military-grade, so there's that. When Chicago gets 2' of snow, the tents will be OK because they will be military-grade. Dig this news hit from the story linked above.

There's a section there were an alderman, looking like a deer in the headlights, tells the citizens of Chicago not to worry because Very Smart People are working on this problem and will have a solution soon.

I would bet the mortgage that almost none if any of those Very Smart People are US Army sergeants with a ton of experience logistically supporting large forces in the field.

Still, I have confidence in Team Faculty Lounge. It may seem like they don't have a plan for the "mumble mumble mumble" phase, but rest assured, they do.

It's mumble mumble mumble.

Sometimes The Smartest And Most Educated People Are Stupid And Ignorant

Let's revisit this tweet, which I posted yesterday. In it, Mayor Adams of NYC boasts that his city council is made up of some of the smartest and most educated people around.

BREAKING: Mayor Adams basically conceding New York City is done because of illegal immigration and warns New Yorkers illegals will flood ALL neighborhoods. pic.twitter.com/Lj5E3BSvDX

— nycphotog (@nycphotog) September 7, 2023

When it comes to logistics and population control, those people couldn't be more adrift if they were on a life raft in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. They understand bureaucracy, budgets, meetings and regulations. They are utterly unprepared for 100,000 110,000 120,000 130,000 140,000 150,000 illegals invading their city, expecting support.

As a frame of reference, 150,000 illegals is equivalent to about 37 US Army infantry brigades. That's 6 more than there are in the entire US Army. If I want to keep a force that large supplied, housed, fed and controlled, I'm probably not turning to an Ivy League genius who has never even pitched a tent. I'd turn to someone like this. Note that Army sergeants almost certainly don't have college degrees, not even from North Dakota State.

Here's a handy reference table explaining the supply classes he mentions in that video.

Class of Supply	Category	Spare parts & Materials for repairs
Class 1	Subsistence	Food, rations, water
Class 2	Clothing and Equipment	Uniforms, protective gear, tents
Class 3	Petroleum, Oils, and Lubricants	Fuel, lubricants, hydraulic fluids
Class 4	Construction and Barrier Materials	Sandbags, barbed wire, fencing
Class 5	Ammunition	Ammunition (Guns) & Explosives,
Class 6	Personal Demand Items	Spare parts & Materials for repairs
Class 7	Major End Items	Tanks, aircraft, vehicles
Class 8	Medical Supplies and Equipment	Medical materials
Class 9	Repair Parts and Components	Spare parts & Material for repairs
Class 10	Miscellaneous Supplies	Items not included in Class I to X

Because the progressives have discarded reality for theory, they are utterly unequipped to deal with the logistics of supporting the illegals their sanctuary cities are sanctuarying. Eric Adams, who it must be said is a smart dresser, can give PowerPoint presentation to his elite-school, high-GPA college grads morning, noon and night and they still will just be beginning to comprehend how difficult it is to maintain a large force in the field.

They don't know how anything works, but it looks to me like they're learning the hard way. Have fun with that, blue, sanctuary cities!

Super Special Bonus Tidbit

If you listen carefully to Mayor Adams, he asks his crew if they've "organized" to get the flood of illegals to stop. "Organizing" refers to political action. It does not refer to water, food, clothing or control.

The Separation Of Reality And State

 ... its consequences are playing out across the country right now. Dig this mind-blowing talk by NYC Mayor Adams.

BREAKING: Mayor Adams basically conceding New York City is done because of illegal immigration and warns New Yorkers illegals will flood ALL neighborhoods. pic.twitter.com/Lj5E3BSvDX

— nycphotog (@nycphotog) September 7, 2023

Wow. Here's what it looked like yesterday night along the border.

Another busy night yesterday on the roaring mass migration conveyor belt from Rio Grande near Roma, Texas to your city before Sunday. The Biden gov engine firing on all pistons pic.twitter.com/yAxQmWYDg5

— Todd Bensman (@BensmanTodd) September 7, 2023

Christopher Rufo's outstanding book, America's Cultural Revolution, has helped me see the origins of this madness. He derives the pedigree of the progressives going from that gibbering, UCSD, 60s radical, Herbert Marcuse, to today. I had always thought the connections seemed forced until I read that book. I then realized that my own worldview has a lineage that goes back thousands of years. The idea that the modern progressive's goes back a few decades isn't actually unbelievable.

Here are two applicable quotes for how Mayor Adams and his ignorant theoreticians got us into this mess. The first describes how the leaders of the black liberation movement of the 1970s realized that they were never going to get poor, urban blacks to rise up and fight the cops. When they discovered the black, urban poor wanted more cops in their neighborhoods, they didn't change their theories, they just ditched the black, urban poor.

But he was playing a different game than his contemporaries: Bell had seen the limitations of the Left’s militant turn in the 1970s and wanted to bring the fight out of the streets and into the faculty lounge. The black lumpenproletariat had revealed the ultimate impotence of Third World–style revolution. The superior gambit, Bell understood, was to rationalize those ideas and carry them through the elite institutions.

Theory and ideology trumped reality. Here's another quote describing the mindset of the modern progressives. 

For all of their faults, Davis, Cleaver, and black revolutionaries at least grappled with and appealed to the black lumpenproletariat. The critical race theorists, on the other hand, treat them like lepers—the lumpen class is nowhere to be found in their work, except as symbolic justification for their abstractions. 

This is where the critical race theorists reach the final impasse. Their program has become a form of empty professional-class aestheticism, designed for manipulating social status within elite institutions, not for alleviating real miseries or governing a nation.

And that's where Mayor Davis is today. The progressives own all of this. They own academia, they own the newsmedia, they own entertainment, they own the education industry and they have significant political power nationally. They are made up of super-smart people who discarded reality because it didn't agree with their theories. 

The reason it looks like they no longer care about the working poor, or any of the other poor, for that matter, is that they don't care about the poor. When the poor, urban blacks wouldn't shoot the pigs, they became useless to the super smart set and were discarded along with their useless, so-called "reality." And here we are, with a class of Elites who deliberately discarded data that didn't align with their radical ideology.

One of the most un-self-aware moments of Mayor Adams speech is where he says that the people in that room are some of the most educated and knowledgeable people around. 

That's true in theory, but it doesn't seem to be working in practice.

The Church In Wartime

 ... needs to have a little hair on its chest. Quite a lot, as a matter of fact.

Mark 2:23-28:

As he was passing through a field of grain on the sabbath, his disciples began to make a path while picking the heads of grain. At this the Pharisees said to him, “Look, why are they doing what is unlawful on the sabbath?” 

He said to them, “Have you never read what David did when he was in need and he and his companions were hungry? How he went into the house of God when Abiathar was high priest and ate the bread of offering that only the priests could lawfully eat, and shared it with his companions?”

Then he said to them, “The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath. That is why the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath.”

I just finished reading The Boniface Option by Andrew Isker and it really spoke to me. It's an edgy, in-your-face rallying cry for Christians to fight what Andrew calls Trashworld. I like the name. Trashworld is indeed what we're facing.

In Trashworld, beautiful young women, designed by God for husbands, families and children, are mutilated and poisoned by people with smiling faces. At our local, Catholic university, USD, this is celebrated.

The Boniface Option put into book form what I've been feeling and trying to express here. It opposes Rod Dreher's The Benedict Option, which calls for a strategic retreat into cultural bunkers in the form of neighborhoods of like-minded, Christian survivalists. I blogged extensively on The Benedict Option and my objection to it was that it wasn't offensive-minded.

At the Battle of Omdurman, a British force armed with Maxim guns defeated a larger force of Islamic rebels armed with some rifles and lots of pointy things. Hilaire Belloc wrote a poem about it with this snippet.

Whatever happens we have got
The Maxim Gun, and they have not.

That is absolutely the way things are with Christians today.

How can you have total superiority of argument and crawl into a bunker? You only run and hide when you're outgunned. We aren't outgunned as the photo above shows. You want to surrender to that?

Isker makes another salient point, something that I've felt, but never put into words. You cannot run from Trashworld. It is coming to get you, to kill what you believe. It will follow you no matter where you hide. I'm willing to bet some serious money that the State of California will make an effort to force all schools, including Catholic grade schools, to teach gender theory. The Benedict Option fails because it assumes there's a safe haven. There is none.

Andrew is a young man. Well, he's younger than me, that is, and he's got a young man's sensibilities. His recommendations are broad and sweeping, which is fine. When he's older, they will be more refined. It's all good. He sees the problem for what it is and his recommendations are aggressive, which is what we need. You can't take Guadalcanal if you don't have a whole bunch of Marines and Isker is the Christian version of a Marine.

That brings me to the Gospel passage that started this post.

After reading The Boniface Option, I read some of Max Lucado's When God Whispers Your Name. If you ever wondered what Christian erectile dysfunction sounds like in prose form, Max Lucado is your answer. A friend of mine tried it and couldn't finish it. It is a collection of simpering, wimpy platitudes. It reminded me of the excellent book, A Touch Of Wonder by Arthur Gordon, but Lucado doesn't have Gordon's authentic, Southern charm. Gordon's book is the real deal, Lucado's book is the version you get when you find old copies of Reader's Digest at the dentist's office.

Then I went and read the Gospel of Mark. Jesus has an edge. He doesn't suffer fools gladly. Read the passage with the proper voice inflection, "Have you never read what David did when he was in need and he and his companions were hungry?" It is full of scorn. He's sneering at them. It is never read that way from the pulpit on Sunday. Instead, we get the standard pablum about how God is love, love is love and love is good and we must love and love is soft and we must be soft and love love love.

Jesus didn't suffer fools. If we are to be Christ-like, then Isker is right and we should treat the sadistic Mengeles mutilating our children like ... well, like sadistic Mengeles.

Here's some more Mengelean hideousness for you.

Click on that to make it legible and read the whole thing. It is the testimony from a young man who has gone through bottom surgery. That's where a doctor from the local Nazi death camp slashes a wound into your abdomen and puts a piece of colon there which requires regular treatment with antibiotics and a daily wound stretching regimen so the wound doesn't heal. If the wound heals, you won't have a "vaginal" abdomen wound any more.

Meanwhile, God is love, love is love and love is good and we must love and love is soft and we must be soft and love love love.

We're a wartime Church, getting firebombed by the Nazis and we get God is love, love is love and love is good and we must love and love is soft and we must be soft and love love love.

Andrew Isker says screw that.

And so do I.

Reality Doesn't Matter In Minneapolis

 ... or almost anywhere else in the US for that matter.

I've been thinking a bit more about this graphic from my previous post. 

Those are test scores from a large, public high school in deep blue Minneapolis. If you were the most virulent anti-black racist from 1952 Mississippi, you couldn't hope for better results. The Minneapolis Public Schools website yields over 100 results for documents containing the word "diversity." Here's the top hit, their Equity and Diversity Impact Assessment. Here's a snippet.

MPS is committed to identifying and correcting practices and policies that perpetuate the achievement gap and institutional racism in all forms. The purpose of this policy is to establish "a framework for the elimination of bias, particularly racism and cultural bias, as factors affecting student achievement and learning experiences, and to promote learning and work environments that welcome, respect and value diversity. Further, the purpose is to establish particular actions that the District shall take to address disparities in educational opportunity and achievement."

With that as their motivation, they've produced disparities that rival the very worst from the segregated South. It's a good thing they're not the Minneapolis Fire Department or the place would look like Dresden after the fire bombing.

I finished Christopher Rufo's outstanding book, America's Cultural Revolution and it's opened my eyes to all kinds of things. I'll blog ad nauseum about them in the future, but I really wanted to get this one point out there.

The woke progressives who have captured our culture are charlatans and fantasists. They are ignoramuses utterly unaware of history, art or literature. This is immediately obvious in the way they isolate the slavery of the Antebellum South from all the rest of human history as if it was shocking and unique. They are fantasists in that they have invented and inhabit a make-believe world where race and gender are all-important.

The progs have managed to find a secret door into our cultural control room by capturing our universities. From there, they captured the education industry and with that, they've indoctrinated our children. They succeeded because the rest of us didn't think the English Department at Brown University was worth defending. How much damage can a bunch of idiots do if they control that? We laughed at them tearing down Shakespeare and went about our lives. All the while, they were worming their way into near total control of the culture.

Rufo has consumed hundreds of books and papers written by the progs, digested them and analyzed what happened. The progs believe the country is inherently unjust. To achieve justice, the progs believe that all of the structures of civilization must be torn down. It is worthless to teach children to read words if we don't teach them to read the world. That is, ideology trumps performance.

To them, the chart above proves Minneapolis is structurally racist. Their solution to structural racism is to destroy the structure. Only after that can a just society be built. They're a bit hazy on how to do that last part.

Because the people running the education system are charlatans and fantasists, they ruin everything they touch. Test scores get worse. The solution to worse test scores is more destruction. Lather, rinse, repeat.

By capturing the culture they've managed to poison our discourse. Only a fool would look at those test scores and suggest that anything other than racism was at play. It's a suicide mission to suggest that the black kids aren't even showing up for class despite the data proving it.

So we all walk around pretending reality is something other than it is. 

Jackson Or Minneapolis?

It's a coin toss.

Dig this from PowerLine.

Having skipped school for a year or more courtesy of the teachers’ unions, a great many kids have never gone back, at least not on a consistent basis. Why should they, once not showing up got the official OK? Alpha News has the distressing statistics for Minnesota...

The number of Minnesota students who consistently attend school has dropped by 15% since 2019, according to state Department of Education data released last week...

So the state says you don’t have consistent attendance if you miss one day every two weeks, but of course, many of the kids we are talking about miss vastly more time than that.

Since 2019, the last time attendance data was released, the number of students with consistent attendance records has dropped from 85% to 69.8%, according to data for the 2021-22 school year.

So up to 30% of Minnesota’s kids are essentially part-time students. But it gets worse:

In Minneapolis, the number of students consistently attending school that year was just 45.8%.

Emphasis theirs. How's that working out and who's not going to school? Well, here are the test scores for Edison High and Roosevelt High in Minneapolis, both with about 1,000 kids.

It hardly matters which scores come from which school. This looks just like Jackson, Mississippi.

In short, there's a human capital problem at Jackson Water. One of the articles I read hinted at the state having to send in its own technicians to do the work that Jackson Water's people couldn't do. Once you strip away the red vs blue and black vs white garbage, you get down to the real problem. The employees at Jackson Water just aren't up to scratch.

Jackson Water is the answer to the question, "What are the long-term ramifications of destroying the traditional family?"

I then gave test scores from two large, public high schools. They were interchangeable with the ones from Minneapolis.

Those are your human capital feeders for water system mechanics. They come out of high school, go to a bit of trade school and get hired by the water district.

There's nothing there. You can't do anything with someone who is illiterate.

Dittos for the financial administrative staff. What are you going to do with an admin who can't understand math?

So now we have hard data that many kids aren't going to school at all. Like we needed it. 

I doubt anyone did a racial breakdown of the kids skipping class because EQUITY or something, but it's hardly necessary. You don't get into the bottom decile in test scores by accident.

Minneapolis, like Jackson, is governed by the far left. You couldn't hope to find people more devoted to anti-racism than them. Somehow, those crafty white supremacists still managed to sneak in and deliver the systemic racism right to the doors of their schools. 

Right now, I'm devouring Christopher Rufo's excellent book, America's Cultural Revolution. It starts by working through the history of the racial/social justice movement in America, beginning with Herbert Marcuse and then moving on to Angela Davis and the black radicals of the 1970s. I remember those days, but I thought Mr. Rufo was kind of wasting my time with the details and didn't see how the leftist nutbags of the 1960s and 70s had much of an impact today.

He's convinced me otherwise. The language we use today - systemic racism, cultural imperialism, etc - all comes from Angela Davis. The BLM leaders used Ms. Davis as a mentor and attribute much of their philosophy to her.

Angela turned to subverting the education system when the black militias failed. The movement that evolved from hers decided to conquer the universities instead of kill the cops on the streets. It's the same set of idiot ideas, it's just got a different delivery system.

And the results are the same. Illiteracy and destruction. Oof.