Investment Advice From The Narnia Kids

Mostly Nothing and Tim had great comments on yesterday's post comparing ChatGPT with Google Gemini. MN floored me when he remembered a ST:TNG satire I had written in the late 1980s. MSFT being what it is, my PC can't find the file with search even though I know the extension and a key word in it. Sigh. I'll have to search the files by hand.

Tim hit the nail on the head about the image generation in the two AI systems. 

There might also be a matter of approach. It is possible that Gemini is trying to address the whole issue of separating components of the image into individual entities. While the Gemini chihuahuas aren't as visually cute, they do appear to be more "distinct". I feel like they are working towards being able to specify to Gemini not just what elements you want in the image, but also where you want them positioned. While this results in a less appealing image at first, I think in the long run it is going to turn out to be the better choice.

I went back into Gemini and tried my old two knights and a maiden prompt. In ChatGPT, if you ask for more than two characters, you get the features blended together and soon you've got 5 knights in dresses fighting 3 maidens in armor. In Gemini, it gave me just what I wanted, albeit inconsistently.

There's those albeits again, MN.

Let's see if you remember that one. It's one of yours.

Anywho, Gemini will sometimes refuse to draw your image, giving you an error like this one.

I'm still learning how to generate certain kinds of images, so I might not be able to create exactly what you're looking for yet. Also, I can't help with photorealistic images of identifiable people, children, or other images that go against my guidelines. If you'd like to ask for something else, just let me know!

It doesn't mean anything at all. If you click the refresh button under the response, it will more often than not draw the image. That inconsistency is unique to Gemini. ChatGPT used to throw those, too, but they're almost unheard of now. That reinforces my thought that ChatGPT is a year or so ahead of Gemini.

Getting on to the real subject of the post, there is a delightful sub-GPT called the Fan-Fiction Generator. It is terrific and writing crossovers and you can have all kinds of fun with it. This morning, I asked it to generate a conversation between Lucy and Edmund Pevensie and Eustace Scrubb from the Narnia books. It seems that the Pevensie father has gone loopy and thinks he's Charles II. Mother has asked Lucy and Edmund to look after the family finances and they are discussing how to invest £100,000 when Eustace butts in with his own ideas. Here's the dialog after only a couple of redirections on my part.

Enjoy.

The firm of Pevensie, Pevensie and Scrubb - we make money the old fashioned way. We earn it.

This image was generated with ChatGPT. When I asked Gemini for it, I just got errors and excuses. And before Tim tells me that Edmund is missing a leg, I imagine he's got it crossed over his other leg underneath the desk. So there.

Scene: The Study in the Pevensie Family Home

The rain patters softly against the window. Lucy and Edmund sit at the mahogany desk, their papers scattered with figures and notes. The room smells faintly of old books and damp wool. Their earlier mirth has given way to serious expressions as they pore over financial reports.

Lucy (adjusting her spectacles and peering at a paper): "Honestly, Edmund, just look at this—Stryker’s earnings per share are up to $9.33. That’s a whopping 38% increase since last year! If that doesn’t make you feel steady as a rock, I don’t know what would."

Edmund (leaning back and crossing his arms): "Oh, steady as a rock, is it? I suppose rocks can still roll downhill if you push them hard enough. Their price-to-earnings ratio is 39.35—rather puffed up, don’t you think? It’s all very respectable, but what if the whole thing slows down, Lucy? Medical equipment isn’t exactly the stuff of fairy tales."

Lucy (giving him a sharp look): "And Bitcoin is? It’s more like Jack and his magic beans! Did you see what happened last month? It tumbled down below $95,000 and then scrambled back up like a frightened rabbit."

Edmund (leaning forward, eyes gleaming): "Yes, and now it’s sitting pretty at over $100,000 with a beastly big market cap of $1.88 trillion. You can scoff all you like, but it’s the sort of thing kings would hoard in treasure chests if they still could."

Lucy (raising an eyebrow): "Treasure chests, is it? Well, if we’re talking kings, we’d better keep Father away from the ledger before he tries to mint coins with his face on them."

Edmund (grinning despite himself): "Touché. But you have to admit, Lucy, Bitcoin’s scarce—like gold but better. And it could shoot up like a rocket to $150,000 next year if the experts are right."

Lucy (sighing and tapping her pen against the desk): "And it could come crashing down like Humpty Dumpty if the market sneezes the wrong way. I’ll admit it’s exciting, but sometimes excitement isn’t what you want with your money. Stryker’s steady—sensible as a schoolmaster. And dividends, Edmund! They drop coins into your pocket like magic every quarter."

Edmund (shrugging): "And sometimes magic comes in wild forms. You of all people should know that."

Before Lucy can reply, the door swings open, and Eustace storms in, looking as though he’s been drenched in vinegar.

Eustace (crossing his arms and glaring): "I knew it. I just knew it. You two are barking mad if you think fiddling about with scalpels and invisible coins is a proper use of the money."

Lucy (folding her arms): "Oh, and I suppose you’ve ridden in on a white horse to save us with a better idea?"

Eustace (snapping back): "Ford! F! Cars, Lucy! Solid steel and engines that roar. People don’t trust fairytales, but they do trust trucks. The F-150 has been selling like hotcakes for decades!"

Edmund (rolling his eyes): "Except Ford’s earnings per share dropped to 22 pence, and their income fell short of expectations—down to £900 million from £1.2 billion. That’s not exactly the stuff of heroic ballads, Eustace."

Eustace (turning red): "You’re both missing the point. Machines, wheels—things you can see and touch. Not potions and whispers!"

Lucy (tilting her head thoughtfully): "Oh, for goodness’ sake, Eustace. Even Aslan didn’t expect us to stay in one place forever. The world is changing, and maybe we need to change with it."

Edmund (grinning): "Besides, Eustace, if Ford’s so grand, why don’t you ask Aunt Alberta to pawn her pearls and buy you shares?"

Eustace (fuming): "You’ll both be eating your hats when I’m rolling about in dividends and driving a new Ford!"

Eustace storms out, slamming the door. The siblings exchange an amused glance.

Lucy (laughing quietly): "I almost feel sorry for him. Almost."

Edmund (smirking as he picks up the pen): "If we’re wrong, we can always ask him for a lift."

The rain picks up outside as the siblings return to their papers, their plans tempered by logic but still tinged with adventure.

Grading Gemini And ChatGPT On The Chihuahua Test

Thinking I might be missing out on something good by using ChatGPT instead of Google Gemini, I got a Gemini account this morning. I needn't have worried. Gemini is a good year behind ChatGPT, if not more. Here's one of the tests I ran this morning, asking for an image.

Prompt: "an old southern man sitting on the floor while chihuahuas romp all over him."

Here are the results.

ChatGPT

Gemini

Without any effort at all, I can see a bunch of advantages for ChatGPT. The mood of the image is spot on as the old man is laughing and playing with the dogs. In the Gemini image, it looks like he's getting irritated that they haven't learned Latin yet. The proportions are fine in the ChatGPT image. Gemini zapped both the man and the dogs with a shrink ray. ChatGPT's chihuahuas are having a great time. Gemini's chihuahuas are struggling to conjugate the verb latrare.

I played around with Arthurian fiction as well. ChatGPT was feminist when I first started using it over a year ago and my stories all ended up with the damsels forming sustainable, organic tofu coops. I was eventually able to get them to come to their senses. Gemini was even worse and instantly judged Le Morte D'Arthur as iredeemably sexist. If the old ChatGPT drove my stories into the feminism ditch after ten or so interactions, Gemini floored the thing and shot over the ditch and into a ravine on the first try.

That wasn't the worst of it. The best way to describe Gemini is inartful. Whether that's the clumsy images it drew or the ghastly and unusable dialog it created, it simply isn't fit for purpose.

On The Plus Side

I've been having a lot of fun writing goofy alternate-history stories with ChatGPT lately and they're decent. Well, they're more like adult bedtime stories perfect for my sense of humor and taste, but they're at least passable. 

For example, I have one where, in 1937, Hitler decides he's got the whole Aryan thing wrong and instead of persecuting the Jews in favor of the Aryans, he bends the entire might of the Reich into developing a master race of housecats. German Jews, being brainiac scientists, are freed and supported in their feline experimentation. The British, concerned about losing an animal arms race, go all in on budgies. The French, of course, turn to poodles and the ridiculous Italians choose the silliest animal of all, the hamster. Poor Stalin chooses one animal after another only to see his starving peasants devour them all.

ChatGPT kept the story light, fast-paced and madcap. It was a lot of fun to generate. Admittedly, I didn't go too far with Gemini, but what tests I ran gave me results that were worse than if I had started from scratch and written or drawn the things for myself.

Diversity, Equity and Imperialism

 ... and no, I'm not kidding, at least not from the progressive point of view. It all seems to make sense if you adopt their goals.

During the Biden sleepover, Logan Airport looked like this. 

The people in that shot were all illegals. Boston ran out of other places to store them.

Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that they were Hondurans. In order to get to Logan, they had to walk about 1,500 miles to make it to McAllen, Texas where they would be shuttled this way and that by our Day Care Border Patrol. The Biden Administration wanted them here because it was better for them.

Fair enough, but why was it better for the migrants to be in the US rather than in Honduras? What is the big difference? Well, the primary difference is that Honduras is run by Hondurans while the US is run by Americans. Yes, there are climate and terrain differences, but we have lots of humid jungle places, too.

The per capita income in Honduras is about $6700. As a comparison, the per capita income in lowly Mississippi is $52,500. In Massachusetts, it's $90,600. You might make less if you lived in Yazoo City, MS or Yuma, AZ, but by and large, you're about 10x better off in the land run by Americans.

Maybe there was a way to help the Hondurans live in such a place without making them take a 1500 mile hike, which, by the way, is approximately 3,366,150 steps. What if we took over Honduras with our military and installed our own colonial government down there? Then Honduras, like Massachusetts, would be governed by Americans. 

Not only that, but all Hondurans would be able to enjoy the peace, stability, order and freedom that we enjoy even in statist prison camps like Boston. It wouldn't just be the ones who walked out their front door, took a wrong turn and four million steps later ended up being processed by our diverse and inclusive Border Patrol.

That sounds like a win-win. All the Hondurans get what they wanted, they don't have to hike through crime-infested Mexico, getting abused by the cartels and we don't have to pack them into our airports. As an added bonus, America becomes more "diverse" as the Hondurans could then be counted in our population statistics.

Diversity, Equity, Imperialism. It's a new kind of DEI.

Merry Christmas!

I hope you and yours have a lovely and blessed day today.

Cat, it's just about time I got ready for church...

When You Marry A First Baseman

 ... don't complain that they're not a left-handed starter.

This one is for all the sportsball fans out there.

Wife kitteh and I make a really good team most of the time. I'm a strongly-typed ENFJ and she's a strongly-typed ESTJ. I think in broad, colorful, emotional strokes. That seems to drive Tim crazy sometimes as he accurately points out missing details in my posts. 😊

Wife kitteh, on the other hand, is a fantastic one for accurately laying out short-term plans in detail. She knows what almost everyone should be doing all the time and since she is shrewd, experienced and clear-headed, she's almost always right. If you want direction, she's the perfect person.

In baseball terms, she married a speedy center fielder with a great on-base percentage. I married a solid, 162-game-per-season first baseman. Sometimes, life throws curveballs at us and for a short time, we could really use someone else. Conversations turn into something like this.

Me: You need to be a left-handed starter! Why can't you do that? It's so simple. Take the ball with your left hand and throw strikes!

Her: I need a power-hitting third baseman! Why can't you be a little more flexible? Just play third base and hit a lot of home runs!

I drafted a first baseman and she drafted a center fielder. If we wanted something different, we should have picked someone else. It's unfair to expect the other person to be something that they aren't. 

This isn't apropos of any arguments we've been having or anything that's happening in our lives right now, it was just a goofy analogy that popped into my head that I wanted to share.

You're the worst second baseman I've ever seen!
Coach, you idiot, I play catcher!

Illusions, Star Trek And Biochemistry

First, let's start with something beautiful.

I don't typically cry at sad or tragic things. I can shrug those off and see what's beyond them. Beautiful things bring me to tears and, looking at that image, I'm all choked up right now.

The look on the girl's face speaks volumes. She knows mommy loved her so much that she fought the most horrible demons imaginable because she couldn't bear to be apart from her little girl. As that little girl grows up, her appreciation for her mom will only grow as her understanding of just how desperate the battle really was matures.

That image might as well be Aquinas' 6th proof of the existence of God as far as I'm concerned.

As I continue to fight my own battles with addiction, I've increasingly turned to ChatGPT to understand what's happening inside of me. Why does my emotional side take over sometimes and overrule my rational side? Recently, I asked it to tell me about the long-term effects of heavy drinking on moods and emotions. Here's what it said.

Heavy drinking significantly disrupts the brain's delicate balance of neurotransmitters, the chemical messengers responsible for regulating mood, emotions, and behavior. Two of the most affected neurotransmitters are serotonin and dopamine, which play critical roles in maintaining mental health.

1. Serotonin Disruption (Anxiety and Depression):

• Serotonin is often referred to as the "feel-good" neurotransmitter because it helps regulate mood, sleep, and emotional stability.
• Alcohol initially boosts serotonin levels, creating feelings of relaxation and euphoria. However, with regular heavy drinking, serotonin production is suppressed, leading to low baseline levels.
• This can result in persistent anxiety, irritability, and depression, especially when alcohol is not present in the system.
• Over time, this creates a vicious cycle where a person drinks to feel better, but the alcohol ultimately worsens their mood when it wears off.

2. Dopamine Disruption (Reward and Motivation):

• Dopamine is associated with pleasure, motivation, and reward. Drinking alcohol stimulates dopamine release, which creates that "high" feeling people associate with drinking.
• Chronic alcohol use depletes dopamine stores and reduces the brain’s ability to produce it naturally.
• As a result, people may feel unmotivated, joyless, and emotionally flat during periods of sobriety, making it harder to resist drinking again.
• This also leads to tolerance, where more alcohol is required to achieve the same dopamine-driven high, increasing dependence.

Anxiety and depression are regular visitors in my life these days. They create illusions that are very, very real to me. It reminds me of the Talosians in the original Star Trek pilot. The inhabitants of Talos IV had the ability to create utterly convincing illusions in the minds of the Enterprise crew and with those illusions, control their actions. Note that this episode was the one Roddenberry used to pitch the series to Paramount and had cast members not in the eventual series.

Anyway, here's one of the scenes that keeps coming to mind.

My serotonin and dopamine systems have been so wrecked by years of drinking that my life is regularly invaded by illusions telling me things are worse than they really are. I react to those illusions as if they were real.

When I work hard and achieve things in my job, when I take care of my family through substantial sacrifice, when my colleagues and family show me love and appreciation, the illusions can make me see things that aren't there. It's like this scene from that same pilot episode.

I'm not always seeing reality. I don't even know when I'm seeing reality and when I'm seeing illusions. If my serotonin and dopamine systems are whacked, how can I be sure that my emotional responses to events are ever appropriate?

This is what I was on about when I said that our moral system must be universal, objective and ordered. It lives in a world of biochemistry where our emotions can be hijacked by addiction. The hijacking may be undetectable, causing you to rationalize behaviors and responses that aren't driven by reality at all, but driven by you being loaded or sober.

What is right and what is wrong must exist outside of you because you cannot always trust what you perceive. If you author your own ethical system, you have no idea if that system was based on total nonsense because your perception of reality has been warped by potentially invisible things beyond your control. Things like biochemistry.

Optimism

My conversation with AI have been eye-opening and encouraging. Everyone has their own mechanisms for success and mine have always hinged on me being able to see what is going on, to see the future.

Now that I see that my emotional rollercoaster isn't real, it's just an illusion placed in my head by the Talosians, I can at least partially dismiss it. Writing this blog post further cements that insight in my head. I am fighting the dull, foggy, warped illusions from my wrecked biochemistry with a bright, true wisdom that comes from understanding.

I can see the future much better now.

Getting Rid Of The Information Middle Man

 ... is what is happening in America's political culture.

In the past, we dirty proles didn't have direct access to our elected officials. We heard from them through the information gatekeepers in the press. At the same time, the press had a vested interest in showing the politicians enough respect to keep them coming back to their news programs or giving quotes to fill column-inches in the newspapers.

Reporters, editors and news show hosts couldn't pull down the politicians' pants with impunity. If you got a reputation for being snide and insulting, your sources dried up and your management fired you because you couldn't fill airtime or newsprint.

X has changed all that. Dig this.

'We're just trying to get disaster relief to the people who need it.' pic.twitter.com/imrICRJ32q

— Chad Felix Greene 🇮🇱 (@chadfelixg) December 19, 2024

That smug, sneering delivery of utter tripe is coming from an old school pol who is accustomed to talking to her toadies at NPR, CNN, MSNBC, etc. She hasn't yet come to grips with the fact that she is now speaking directly to the public, a public which is peppered with interlocutors who know far more than she does and have a much higher IQ.

That's a recipe for a spanking. She was given that spanking in ample measure. 6000 quote tweets and 19,000 comments later, it's safe to say she was dragged to oblivion by the public. The old model of information distribution had her talking to respectful reporters who may or may not have understood basic math and the mechanics of lawmaking. In the new model, she's talking to a swarm of educated citizens whose hybrid information sources have armed them to the teeth to defeat her infantile, insipid blackmail.

She still has that grotesque smile so common to the progressives, though.

Not much longer, methinks.

Bonus Take

If the Democrats think their winning message is to scornfully talk about Elon Musk while making transparently dishonest arguments like this, more power to them. Elon runs a company that launches massive rockets and then catches them in mid air. These cretins have brought us to the brink of financial ruin because they simply refuse to do their most basic task, budgeting.

Running Away To Where?

Certain people are fleeing X these days. Here's one of them.

If you haven't been keeping up with the Kardashians knock-off that is our mainstream news media, George Stephanopoulus just had to shell out fifteen million simoleons to Orange Man Bad. George had implicitly asserted, multiple times, that Trump had raped E. Jean Carroll. If you performed the most modest review of the woman's claims, you'd see immediately that she's a psycho. Her stories are not even vaguely plausible.

George, on the other hand, has a history covering up real sexual assaults and rapes. He was Clinton's stooge back in the day, in charge of "bimbo eruptions." Those were the accusations, many of them plausible with times, dates, locations and corroboration that Bill Clinton had assaulted and, in some cases, possibly raped various women as he rapaciously pursued political power.

When the news broke that G. Stephanshuasdhuolous* had to settle with Trump, the trolls came out in force on X and George fled. He deserved every last syllable of their abuse for the way he had destroyed the reputations of the women Clinton groped. X gave the trolls access to him and he didn't like that at all.

Here's another tidbit to go along with Stephioudsahulpolous fleeing X. A pair of MSM dinosaurs talk in perfect sincerity about their loss of power.

Leslie Stahl, who on the eve off the 2020 presidential election: falsely claimed that Hunter’s laptop “cant be verified”, & denied the established fact that the FBI spied on Trump campaign, laments the end of legacy media 🙃
pic.twitter.com/NC5euR40Yb

— The Conservative Read (@theconread) December 11, 2024

Meanwhile, chosen almost at random, here are a few tidbits from recent events.

• A public school disciplined girls for having the temerity to assert that XX != XY chromosomally. The school claimed that wearing a shirt with that equation was equivalent to wearing a shirt with a swastika.
• British farmland, recently converted to a solar power collection site was even more recently converted to a pile of broken glass and rubbish. Not that the loss of the generating capacity matters when it comes to saving the Earth because China's emissions dwarf everyone's and they have no intention of slowing down.
• The Euros are discovering that renewable energy may be renewable, but it isn't reliable.
• A CNN reporterette faked a news story in Syria with all the acting subtlety of those old After School Specials on ABC.

Maybe Muslims are OK with ham after all.

I could go on, but why bother? It's all the same. It's not that the news media is lying and covering up for the powerful, it's that the powerful are in over their heads and we can now see it. The news media kids are too dim to understand it. In response, they faint and gasp and blame and, finally, flee.

Flee to where, though?

* - If you think I'm going to take the trouble to continually spell his name properly, think again. It's a chore, man.

Don't Judge Emotions

 This isn't actually an extension of my recent series on "Don't Judge," but it's got a short update.

I got together with my Catholic buddies on Wednesday morning and what I had thought was rude and abrasive behavior on my part turned out to have invigorated all of them. They had actually appreciated the way I questioned their thought processes in the previous session, they'd thought a great deal about what was said and changed some of their thinking. They sincerely thanked me for making that into one of our best sessions ever.

Whew! I feel so relieved that I hadn't hurt my friends with my logic-probing.

Decisions Are Made Emotionally

And now onto the emotions. It's an axiom in sales that people make their purchase decisions based on emotion far more than logic. For me, that's true practically everywhere.

At The Gym

My morning workouts consist of 5 minutes of warmup cardio, about 45-60 minutes of lifting and then 20 minutes of more serious cardio. I almost never do the full 20 minutes at the end. I typically do 8-12 minutes, get bored and then leave the gym. That's an emotional decision, not a logical one.

As I'm starting to get bored, I keep telling myself that there's nothing worthwhile I will do with that 10 minutes I'm saving. The very best way to spend that 10 minutes is on the treadmill. I've always got an interesting podcast, book or good music in my ears, so it's not like I'm suffering. It couldn't be any easier to go another 10 minutes, but I DONT WANT TO KEEP DOING IT! So I quit.

It's a purely emotional decision.

At The Liquor Store

I fight alcoholism constantly. I'm a heavy drinker, but not a true alky. I've been studying my behavior for about a decade now and have it pretty well dialed in. If I don't have booze at the house, I'm safe. If I do have booze at the house, I'm almost certain to drink.

My best defense, therefore, is to not buy it. I still buy it.

I needed to go to the store the other day for parsley and green onions for my North African Mussels and Clams recipe. I had no beer at the house. I had been doing reasonably well over the previous week and I had no stress or anxiety attacking me.

I specifically chose the supermarket that had the best beer selection. I knew what I was doing, I knew it was a bad idea, BUT I WANTED TO DO IT! I got my onions and parsley and then perused the beers. None of them were any good. I'm very fussy about my beer.

As I walked down the aisle, I purposefully recalled what it feels like 30 minutes after you've stopped drinking and turn to water instead. Your blood alcohol has plateaued and then begins to decline. I lose my energy and enthusiasm and feel tired when that happens. I knew I was going to feel like that if I got the beer.

Nevertheless, I drove over to the really good liquor store and got some excellent beers. There was no reason to do it. It was against my best interests. I knew all of the reasons not to do it, but I did it anyway.

Conclusion

You make your decisions emotionally, not logically. This is why the very best way to fight drinking is to find something fun to do during your hours of greatest temptation, something that can't be done with a buzz, something that hopefully keeps you away from the fridge and the brewskis.

I'm working on that now, puttering around with projects in the garage. I'm reasonably hopeful that will work.

Logic certainly hasn't.

Don't Judge Biochemistry

This is the third in my series on "don't judge," triggered by this episode where I rudely questioned a friend and then expanded in a post describing how false virtue can generate its own demand signal.

The Story

Both of my brothers died as addicts and alcoholics. As their conditions worsened over the years, my sister would tell me not to judge them because they'd had bad relationships with our parents. Both of them were a lot of fun to be around, at least until the last couple of years when their addictions devoured them. They had the gift of the blarney and were excellent story-tellers. You would have liked them had you met them.

Both of them were very intelligent. My oldest brother got a free ride to Yale and my middle brother had degrees in Pharmacy and Pharmacology. Hmm. I think there's a hint there.

Both of them died horrible deaths after a prolonged period of desperate suffering at the hands of their addictions.

Remember, kids, don't judge!

Morality Exists In A World Of Objective, Hierarchical Laws

Biochemistry is universal, objective, implacable and utterly pitiless. Biochemistry doesn't care if you didn't get along with mommy and daddy, if you are a poor, black kid in the ghetto or if you're a bored, spoiled trust-fund loser with plenty of cash and nothing to do all day. I asked ChatGPT to give me a summary of how cocaine, my brothers' drug of choice, affects you.

In the long run, it's a bad thing.

Cocaine blocks the reuptake of dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine, leading to excessive accumulation of these neurotransmitters in the synapses. Over time, this creates:

• Desensitization: The brain reduces its natural dopamine production and receptor sensitivity, leading to reduced ability to feel pleasure (anhedonia) without the drug.
• Neurotoxicity: Excessive dopamine levels generate free radicals, which damage neurons.

The neurochemical and structural changes lead to psychiatric symptoms:

• Anxiety, Depression, and Paranoia: Due to dysregulated neurotransmitter systems.
• Psychosis: Chronic use can cause delusions, hallucinations, and other psychotic symptoms.
• Addiction: The brain's reward system is hijacked, making cocaine the primary source of pleasure and motivation.

In the short run, it's a ton of fun. 

Cocaine blocks the reuptake of dopamine, causing it to accumulate in the synaptic cleft (the space between neurons). This leads to:

• Euphoria: The intense feelings of pleasure and reward.
• Increased Energy and Alertness: Due to heightened activation in reward and motivation pathways.

Cocaine also affects serotonin levels, which influences:

• Mood Elevation: A sense of well-being and reduced anxiety.
• Impulsivity and Risk-Taking: Enhanced serotonin activity can decrease inhibition.

Cocaine increases norepinephrine levels, leading to:

• Increased Heart Rate and Blood Pressure: Producing a feeling of physical arousal.
• Heightened Alertness: An enhanced sense of focus and vigilance.

That happens to everyone, whether the 'rents are nice or not. Make sure you're "not judging" phase happens in the short run. That way, you can be infused with delightful feelings of virtue and compassion while the addict is radiant with pleasure.

My objection would be simple. When do you start the judging?

My oldest brother got loaded one night, went driving and caused an accident which resulted in a man being crippled for life. It seems reasonable to say that the time to turn all intolerant and judgmental would have been before the crash. How would you know he was about to cripple someone? Timing is everything, oh great compassionate one.

My middle brother had four different women have abortions by him. He thought sex was a ton of fun. He slept with everything that wore a skirt. It was a bit rough on the babies, though. Assuming you're not into vivisecting infants, when would have been a good time to go full Torquemada on the dude and point your bony finger of accusation at him? Hopefully, you would have done that before the first abortion. Once more, timing is everything, oh noble virtue-signaler.

Morality Must Be Universal

This is what I'm on about when I say that your moral code lives in a world of universal structure. It lives in a world governed by biochemistry, physics, mathematics, biology and normal, human frailty. Sperm plus egg makes baby. Unwanted babies sometimes get killed. Cocaine plus central nervous system makes addict. Addicts typically spiral into destruction. These are predictable events. They aren't perfectly guaranteed, but it's common enough to be expected.

How does your morality cope with that if it's always situational? What if you guess wrong and you "don't judge" right before the car crash or the baby butchery?

Imagine yourself sitting across the table from the crippled man and when he asks you if you knew the guy was loaded when he walked to his car you say, "Yes, but I don't judge." That's an over-the-top example, but it's not too over-the-top. My oldest brother was a loadie and he drove. It doesn't take Blaise Pascal to predict that such a tragic accident was likely to happen at some point. It might not be that you witnessed the drug-addled car-key grabbing, but it would certainly be true that you knew the guy's addiction was pretty serious.

Still, don't judge! Jesus wouldn't like it if you judged.

The End Is Predictable

I sat with my middle brother in the hospital as he was dying. Mercifully, he was unconscious. By the end, he hated me because I didn't help him get hammered. I was judgmental, you know. I hadn't ever helped him do that because I'm intolerant and full of hate.

By the time he died, he was homeless even though he had money in the bank. He had a girlfriend of sorts, so he might still have been getting a little tail even at the very end of his disastrous life.

That's OK, I guess. I'm not supposed to judge.

In the end, maybe the non-judgmental types will explain how it was loving and compassionate to do all that non-judging with him as he self-destructed, leaving me with no brothers at all.

I'm not holding my breath.

I'm sorry, you're a bit late. They just took the body away. He was such a fun character! He was full of charm and vitality, right up until he lost the last of his marbles and wandered around the streets, playing his guitar for a few coins that he could take to a liquor store. Remember, God is love. Don't judge!

Don't Judge Self-Licking Ice Cream Cones

If you didn't know, a self-licking ice cream cone is metaphorical shorthand for an organization or person whose sole output is the justification of its existence. For example, a research study that produces research grant proposals for more studies that produce research grant proposals is a self-licking ice cream cone.

Today, we extend yesterday's journey into the world of non-judgmental Catholics to self-licking virtue cones. In that post, I described how I managed to detonate a small bomb within my group of Catholic men by pulling logic threads after one of them claimed that there really isn't any universal, objective moral law after all, contradicting the teachings of the Church. My main point was this, taken from an analysis of the story of the woman caught in adultery in John 8:3-11.

You can have a universal, objective moral code without stoning people to death. My groupies were conflating judging with punishing.

My detonations were triggered by one of the guys in my group, Sam.

Sam volunteers on the RCIA team at his parish. RCIA is where people who want to convert to Catholicism are taught about the faith and learn just how much we hate everyone else and how to properly light a fire underneath someone tied to a stake. As a part of it, he was talking about LGBT for some reason. I think one of his current crop is gay or trans or something. He told us how he doesn't judge and how they're all wonderful people and he doesn't judge them and how he accepts their moral choices being different than his own and how, did I say this already? - he doesn't judge.

Recalling the session, the RCIA candidate he told us about was trans. I don't know if it's a male-to-female trans or a female-to-male trans. It hardly matters. Either way, the trans person is completely screwed.

As we've never conducted large-scale experiments on young people, giving them regular, massive doses of wrong-sex hormones and mutilating their bodies by hacking off sex organs, trying to build fake ones, we've not had access to statistically significant outcome data. Blessedly, we are starting to get that data now. As the incandescently cheerful and blithely non-judgmental Sam might say, "Isn't science wonderful? Look at all the data we now have showing that poisoning and mutilating people leads to poor outcomes. I never would have been able to predict that without tens of thousands of experimental subjects!"

Biochemistry, unlike Sam and his compadres in the Church, is remorselessly judgmental. The data is coming in and it's ghastly. The trans industry has tried to suppress it, but it hardly matters. Everyone knew what it was going to say decades before the experiments were conducted.

If you don't want to click on that link, here's an excerpt of that thread from X.

It gets worse. Are you familiar with her Orwellian paper where they cut the breasts off over 40 girls age 13+ and gave them a "chest dysphoria" questionnaire that assumed they still had breasts? (asked if they bind at night, etc) 

At best it was an oblique measure of phantom breast syndrome, completely tautological to find a reduction after you cut them off.

She also withheld most of the outcome variables of her 2023 study giving hormones to kids (as opposed to blockers), and didn't disclose in the journal article that those variables even existed, making it fraud. See the image for some of the variables, from the study protocol doc. They reported Beck depression, anxiety, life sat, positive affect, and appearance congruence. That's it.

They **didn't report** suicidal ideation, resilience, negative affect, self-harm, stress, autism spectrum, and a bunch of others, including peer/parent ratings.

This is satanic. Meanwhile, my Catholic friends who don't judge smile warmly and preen about their compassion and inclusivity.

The trans people are the walking dead. There is absolutely no doubt that their conditions will only worsen with time. In order to maintain your appearance as the wrong sex, you must continue to take massive doses of wrong-sex hormones for the rest of your life. If it harms you in the short run, it doesn't take a computer model to figure out that it's going to harm you even more a couple of years down the road.

Further, Trump's victory spells an end to the trans people's primary payoff - social approval. As most of them will never again achieve an orgasm, the benefits are not sexual. Instead, it is the adulation and praise they get from their peers and society in general that makes it all worthwhile.

Trump ran one ad more than any other. It was the one showing that Kamala wanted to give trans-affirming care to prison inmates and illegals. They poured money into that ad campaign like water. The Democrats got mauled in the election and can see that the trans issue is a political loser. Kamala's supporters within the party and their toadies in industry, education, entertainment and the media see it, too. Loyalty is to the party, not the cause which means that the social support for trans is going to evaporate.

The trans people are the walking dead and I would bet that most of them will take their own lives. It was all a lie and as their conditions worsen and their payoffs vanish, they will face lives of pain, suffering and despair. Since the trans movement is distinctly atheistic, there will be no moral impediment to suicide.

Self-Licking Virtue Cones

The nice thing about it for Sam, my bishop, my diocesan university and all the other Catholics who simper about inclusion and affirmation is that they will be happy to walk the parents to their kids' graves after the funeral service. They will be as warm and loving and supportive and non-judgmental with the grieving parents as they were with the kids' gender delusions.

It's virtue all the way down.

My goodness, you two certainly did a great job maintaining Dani's old bedroom. I'll bet she felt your warmth and love, coming back home to visit before she killed herself.

Don't Judge And Don't Throw Rocks At Girls

Well, I stepped into it this time. 

Within the Catholic lay movement known as Cursillo, we do something called grouping. You form a group of a couple of other men or women, depending on your sex, and each week you meet to discuss what you did over the last 7 days to be a better Christian. There's more to it than that, but that's a decent summary. Over time, you grow very close to your groupies as the sharing can be pretty personal. It's a beautiful thing and has made a huge difference in my life.

This week, I managed to metaphorically shoot one of my groupies in the head, one in the chest and one in the shoulder. It was all good, innocent fun until it wasn't and the wasn't was my fault. I thought I could control myself and I couldn't.

One of my groupies, we'll call him Sam, a bit older than me, is the kind of guy who never has a bad word to say about anyone. He is the very incarnation of a Teletubby Catholic. Everything is sweetness and kindness and love. If he had met with a group of ANTIFA rioters after they had burned down half of San Diego, he would tell you, while chuckling innocently, "Golly, those young people have so much energy! They spent the whole night shattering windows, looting stores and setting things on fire. I couldn't do that. I wouldn't last 20 minutes carrying a crowbar and smashing things. It's wonderful to see all that enthusiasm!"

Sometimes, Sam drives me bonkers with that Teletubby act.

Sam may indeed drive me bonkers, but in many ways he is an exemplar of the Christian ideal a great deal more than I am. While he is the embodiment of love and gentleness, I'm sitting there pulling logic threads in my head, trying to figure out what it all means in terms of God's telos for the world. A group made up of grumpy theoretical mathematicians, all channeling their inner Jordan Petersons would be pretty sterile and unhappy.

This week, however, Sam managed to trigger me, as the blue-haired, feminist crazies would say. I took the bait and in no time at all, the grouping session consisted of me metaphorically drawing a Chandelier in our poker game, pulling out my Colt revolver and shooting everyone at the table.

Sam volunteers on the RCIA team at his parish. RCIA is where people who want to convert to Catholicism are taught about the faith and learn just how much we hate everyone else and how to properly light a fire underneath someone tied to a stake. As a part of it, he was talking about LGBT for some reason. I think one of his current crop is gay or trans or something. He told us how he doesn't judge and how they're all wonderful people and he doesn't judge them and how he accepts their moral choices being different than his own and how, did I say this already? - he doesn't judge.

Well, that was like waving a raw steak at a small, fat chihuahua. I took the bait, in my mind thinking that I wouldn't engage in a debate, but just ask some questions to understand his internal logic. Farther back in my mind, there was the tiny voice of my guardian angel howling at me to stop because we both knew Sam didn't have any logic at all and the only thing that was going to happen was the Chandelier incident. I went ahead anyway because poking around in people's logic, theology and behavior is disastrously fun for me.

My guardian angel gave up on me at that point.

Sam's thinking was, as I had suspected, completely incoherent. I kept pulling at the threads he gave me and in no time at all, everyone in our group could see it was incoherent. I kept pulling anyway. BANG! BANG! BANG!

I started by asking if we had thrown out all the sexual sins now. He replied with the moral relativist answer that since he can't judge, what is wrong for him might be right for someone else. He, after all, can't judge. I pointed out that he was effectively editing the Bible by deleting all of the passages dealing with sexual morality. He said that it wasn't a big deal, there weren't that many. I didn't press that point, but kept asking my questions. While we were discarding the sections of Scripture that dealt with sexual sins, maybe we could throw out the ones dealing with my particular weaknesses. Like drunkenness, for example.

I've always thought that if we were going to give blessings to same-sex couples, why can't we give a blessing to me as I hold a highball glass filled with a particularly potent Alabama Slammer?

Maybe I could get the Pope's homeboy, Father James Martin, SJ, LGBTQWERTY, to do it.

When you're done with that pen, Sam, scratching out one Bible passage after another, hand it to me and I'll really get to work on that stupid book.

Things went off the rails pretty severely at that point and my guardian angel walked out of my body, headed for the local bar. I should have gone with him, but instead it was all BANG BANG BANG.

Since then, I've spent time working through the logical flaws in his arguments and those of my other groupies, not to prove I'm superior, but because I can't help but work to further clarify my own thinking. I might as well get something out of the affair as the bodies are carried away. Pulling logic threads is just what I do. 

And yes, I can see that such behavior can be sinful if it's done in the service of pride. I hope I'm doing it in the service of being a better witness to the Truth on this blog and elsewhere, but it's entirely possible that I'm doing it for my own glory. I do try to watch out for that.

Getting back to the idea of judging, which is the topic of this particular post, note that judging and punishing are separable. Dig this from John 8: 3-11.

Then the scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery and made her stand in the middle. They said to him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery.

Now in the law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. "So what do you say?”

They said this to test him, so that they could have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and began to write on the ground with his finger.

But when they continued asking him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”

Again he bent down and wrote on the ground.

And in response, they went away one by one, beginning with the elders. So he was left alone with the woman before him.

Then Jesus straightened up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”

She replied, “No one, sir.” Then Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and from now on do not sin any more.”

Lots and lots of Catholics have taken that passage and blown it up into a complete and impenetrable theology. For them, all of Catholic thought can be condensed into "God is love and don't judge." More on that in future posts.

For now, however, consider the story for what it is. Jesus tells the men to not throw rocks at the girl. He doesn't tell them that adultery might be OK for some and a sin for others. He is clearly saying that adultery is always and everywhere a sin. It is part of God's universal, objective moral law.

Think about the men in the story. Do you think any of them left thinking, "You know, sexuality is a wonderful mosaic of diversity and love. Whatever gets your rocks off is fine with me. Jesus said don't judge so I don't judge any more. Adultery, threesomes, goats and amphetamines, it's all fine with me now."

You can have a universal, objective moral code without stoning people to death. My groupies were conflating judging with punishing.

As Andrew Klavan likes to say, the English language is a crude tool for expressing ideas and feelings. In this case, some of us have taken the wrong connotation from "do not judge" and turned it into a commandment that subsequently dissolves any concept of a universal, objective, moral Truth.

Artistic Lizards

Tim made a few good points about my AI art illustration from yesterday's post on frilled lizards with annoying pet peeves. Replying to him is actually worth a blog post, methinks.

Tim: it looks like the AI art has let you down again. I'm sure you specifically asked for a Frilled Lizard, but the one that it gave you is clearly an iguana. Well, at least it is giving you a fairly consistent "grumpy old man" these days (even if his hands do look like they were mangled in a horrible accident).

Tim made a larger point about the content of the post, illustrated with a link to a cartoon that is worthy of another blog post, perhaps tomorrow. 

Anyway, dealing with the issue of AI art, it certainly has come a long way in the year or so since I started using it. As long as I ask for no more than two characters, it does a fine job, giving me something I like on the first try almost every time these days. My "old Southern man and his cat" series is working really well.

However, AI art still can't handle any more than two characters. I tried a dozen or so variations on the image above with a prompt something like this: "an old southern man and his cat looking annoyed at a frilled lizard which is furiously exhibiting deimatic behavior." That was the best I got before I ran out of patience and went with it.

The cat is supposed to be a gray tabby. The lizard is supposed to be frilled. The old man's hands are indeed deformed, but at least he was brandishing a broom, giving the scene the appropriate comic feel. Each time I corrected the AI, it would introduce new errors. Usually, the cat's expression was completely out of place. Sometimes the lizard was unthreatening. It was really frustrating.

I keep experiencing this same limitation - 2 characters, no more. For Thanksgiving, I tried the old, Southern man with his cat and a happy family on the porch, but almost every time, the people in the background looked like mutants. I tried a scene from the Arthurian legends, but ended up with a knight fighting a lady while the characters in the background reacted with indifference or faced in the wrong direction.

If you want surreal scenes or goofy illustrations and you only care about the mood and general characteristics of the subject, AI art does fine. Ask for a panda floating through the air, hanging from a bouquet of balloons and you get what you wanted. Ask for a surreal scene of fiery destruction and you get a decent illustration of the SEC this year.

If you want to precisely illustrate something from a story or a multi-person event, forget it. Adobe Premiere's beta of their next version has the ability to use AI to extend a video a couple of seconds past its end point, but the results there have been disappointing as well. 

I don't see how this will change without the AI translating the still image or the video into 3D wireframes and applying biomechanics to them. At that point, it's not large language modeling any more, it's a modern video game.

First try: "an old southern man and his cat pondering life while drinking coffee in the morning." His pose is a bit stiff, but it's fine for what I wanted to illustrate given that I didn't want to spend any more than 60 seconds producing it. Had I added anyone or anything else into the scene, your guess is as good as mine as to what the result might have been.

Pet Peeves And Frilled Lizards

We all have them, you know.

Pet peeves, not frilled lizards. I mean some of us might have a frilled lizard or two running about the house, but most of us don't. Some of us might even have named one our lizards Peeve so we might have a Pet Peeve Frilled Lizard. It's hard to say.

Hmm. I seem to have lost my train of thought. Ah, there it is.

While each of us have peeves, pet or otherwise, we also have tics or habits that can be annoying. It dawned on me that when a pet peeve in one person meets an annoying tic in another, it turns into a frilled lizard.

Frilled lizards, if you didn't know, are reptiles that, when threatened, can puff up flaps of skin on their necks to make themselves appear much larger than they really are. If your peeve meets my tic then you react to an annoying behavior of mine that seems larger than it really is. You're reacting to a frilled lizard, as it were.

And who wants to spend their lives doing that?

Git! Go on! Git out of here, ya dadburned frilled lizard! I don't need to make nobody's annoying habits no bigger than they already is!

Why The Fine People Hoax Survives

I listened to the excellent Joe Rogan - Mark Andreesen conversation recently and heard Joe lament that President Obama had severely disappointed him by trying to perpetuate the Fine People Hoax.

If you're not familiar with it, the phrase refers to an out-of-context quote from President Trump about the Charlottesville protests over Confederate statues. Trump said there were fine people on both sides of the debate and the press clipped out that part and ran with it, asserting that President Trump was referring to the neo-Nazi opportunists who joined the protests as "fine people." If you listen to a couple of minutes of Trump's speech on either side of the "fine people" snippet, you can tell that he was talking about the statue supporters being fine people and clearly said that the Nazis were horrible.

As someone who would like to see all of the Confederate statues remain standing and the ones that were removed replaced, I would like to think that, despite my many flaws, I'm still a fine person. I don't support the statues and the rebel flag because I'm racist, but because I think they represent the distinct and beautiful cultural heritage of the South.

Going back to Rogan, he talked about how it was utterly dishonest for Obama to repeat the hoax over and over again in campaign speeches stumping for Kamala. He was disillusioned with Obama because Barack knew he was lying, but did it anyway. Joe Rogan was missing the point.

The Fine People Hoax is not about lying, it is an oath of allegiance to DEI and the racial groups the Democrats believe are the core of their constituency. All of the progs in the media, the academy, entertainment and politics thoroughly understand that it's a hoax. When they keep propping it up, they aren't lying to you so much as they are reciting a portion of their version of the Nicene Creed.

"I believe that everyone who supports Confederate symbols in any form is a white supremacist. I believe that blacks are held down by white supremacy. I believe that strident and united political action is the only solution to the scourge of white supremacy. I believe that white supremacy is everywhere, permeates our institutions and must be fought at all times without any reservations."

For the progs, even the slightest hesitation to recite this or missing an opportunity to refer to things like the Fine People Hoax is an unforgiveable act of apostasy and heresy. The progs have excommunicated former members of their tribe for such things. You cannot even hint that you are willing to give the slightest benefit of the doubt to those of us who like the Confederate monuments and symbols.

Obama and the rest of them aren't lying, they're signaling to their comrades that they are still walking on the razor's edge of proggy acceptance. To deviate even slightly is to be cast out of the group. That's why the Fine People Hoax will continue for the foreseeable future.

Hopefully, this statue was dropped into the fires of Mt. Doom.