The Role Of Christian Men In A Violent, Competitive World

... is this.

For the TL;DR crowd, here's the post in a nutshell.

From my last post wherein I pondered if life was peaceful back when single-celled algae occupied the top  rung of the evolutionary ladder. Life was not peaceful, it was filled with microscopic predations.

The whole model of the world God made is effectively, while not utterly, Darwinian. Violent competition is a part of life at all levels. It is into that world that Jesus came. It is that world that gives us the dramatic conflicts of our lives, conflict being a necessary element of any story.

Christian life happens within a context of violence. The violence is inescapable. God designed the world this way and it is in this structure that we must practice our Christianity.

From the summary post in my series on sex, Sex, SEX!

Women, in a primal environment, are neither strong nor independent. Women can only be strong and independent if they can afford to have men create a barrier between them and the primal world. Some can afford that, most cannot.

Women have babies. Women are required for the continuation of the species. If you want to get all Biblical, the divine injunction from the beginning was "be fruitful and multiply." If you're going to do that in a world of violence, then men are going to have to protect women.

If God created a world based on violent competition, and He did, then all environments are primal. Further, women are nearly always vulnerable. When young children are involved, they are hopelessly vulnerable. When young children are not involved, you get South Korea and Japan, places where women are not as vulnerable because they don't have any children.

Clearly, that does not satisfy the "be fruitful and multiply" divine exam question.

An unburdened woman is small, softer, weaker, less aggressive and slower than a man. A woman who is pregnant is practically immobile late in the pregnancy. A nursing mother may as well have a target on her back and one with a toddler isn't much better. And no, the stay-at-home dad isn't the solution. The mom is still the one who produces the milk baby needs. Sending your woman to bring you back sustenance is suboptimal in a violent, competitive world.

Then there's the matter of food. Even if you're a vegan, you have to fight for your food. You fight other creatures who want to prey on your crops. You fight the elements - drought, floods, poor soil. Life is an endless series of violent competition even for the priests in the pulpit who preach Teletubby sermons.

Working from the top of your loyalty hierarchy down, you must protect and provide for your woman. Then you must protect and provide for your children. Then family, clan, neighborhood, town and so forth. As a man, you must do it because the women are unsuited for this job.

So the romantic, chivalric image above tells what you need to be as a man in the Darwinian world God created. Vigilant, powerful, dangerous, protective and competent, the man builds a wall around his woman and, by extension, his family and civilization itself, wherein higher order arts might flower.

By the way, I've always loved the expression on the face of the girl in that image. She is absolutely glowing with pleasure. Her knight makes the world safe for her at the same time he makes her feel like the most beautiful and desirable girl in the world. That is his job as a man in a dangerous world. He is there to protect, provide and cherish.

Exit question: What are her responsibilities towards him?

God Is Love

So the Teletubby priests and deacons with their nauseatingly sweet sermons are right about one thing. We men, bristling and growling, must act with love as our central motivation. That is the whole drama of life, the central moral conflict we have to navigate.

How do I protect and provide in a violent, competitive world while keeping love, forgiveness and charity as my central moral guides?

Sometimes you can be all kissy-kissy love-love and sometimes you can't. Even motivated by Christian love, there are times when you have to choose violence. If that was never the best choice, life wouldn't have any dramatic conflict and we'd all undulate around cooing at each other.

When that choice has to be made, you need to be skilled at aggressive, protective decisions and actions.

I hope you love Jesus because you're about to meet Him.

Nature Is Red In Cilia And Membrane

There are a lot of interesting things going on in current events and I have ignorant opinions about all of it, but I really wanted to explore something else: What can we infer about Jesus' message from the nature of the world God created?

Chatting away with ChatGPT, hereafter referred to as AI, about my current favorite topic - the Kumeyaay of San Diego and Khoisan of South Africa - I brought up one of my favorite jokes.

If we want to give the land back to its original inhabitants, if we want to do land acknowledgements, if we want to atone for the sins of imperialism, then the recipients of our restitution really ought to be ... single-celled algae.

It's time we gave back the land. And, of course, the water, too.

Pulling that thread, AI and I discussed who and what were present back in the halcyon days of yore when single-celled algae was the dominant life form. Did the flora and fauna include any predators?

Absolutely. AI's summary:

Types of Early Predators

1. Large predatory bacteria

• Example: Bdellovibrio-like organisms (today these are tiny bacteria that invade other bacteria).
• Prey: Smaller bacteria.
• Method: Some burrowed into prey cells and digested them from the inside.

2. Eukaryotic predators (protists)

• Example: These were single-celled organisms with a nucleus, and they were more complex than bacteria or archaea. Likely ancestors of modern amoebae and flagellates.
• Prey: Bacteria, other protists, and perhaps algae.
• Method: Phagocytosis—they surrounded prey with their cell membrane, enclosed it in a bubble (vacuole), and digested it internally using enzymes.

How Did They Eat?

Phagocytosis (literally "cell eating")

The predator would approach its prey—usually a smaller microbe—detect it chemically, and wrap part of its membrane around it. This created a food vacuole, like a tiny stomach inside the cell. Digestive enzymes broke down the prey, and nutrients were absorbed.

Examples of feeding behavior:

• Amoeboid predators flowed around their prey like goo, engulfing them.
• Flagellated protists used whips or hairs to move and sometimes to stir prey-rich water toward themselves.
• Ciliates (if present) may have used coordinated hair-like cilia to sweep prey into a cell mouth-like structure.

Imperialsm!

They might as well have worn red uniforms, carried Martini-Henry rifles and worn their beards in the Imperial style.

This is an electron microscope photo of early Eukaryotic predators. No, really, it is.

God Is Love

As we know from Pope Francis' document, Amoris Teletubbius, God is love and that's all He is. Just love. And also cuddles and soft blankets and gentle voices. Yes, God is love. Kissy-kissy love-love. St. Tinky-Winky said so as well.

Oh, Please

Seriously, what are these pathologically feminine prelates on about? The whole model of the world God made is effectively, while not utterly, Darwinian. Violent competition is a part of life at all levels. It is into that world that Jesus came. It is that world that gives us the dramatic conflicts of our lives, conflict being a necessary element of any story. Our lives are art expressed through our bodies and our actions and that expression forms the story we author with our lives.

It is in such a world, deliberately and purposefully created this way, that we are called to serve God, love our neighbors, forgive each other and care for the least among us.

The world in which Jesus lived, the time and place of his life, was implicitly violent and harsh. You didn't need to tell anyone in Judea circa 30 AD that life was violent and competitive by nature. It was only once we invented faculty lounges and 300-count cotton sheets that we forgot that.

Our pathologically feminine leaders have forgotten the true nature of the world God made. They deliberately close their eyes to the canvas and palette He expects us to use to create the art which is our lives, the tools we must employ to serve Him.

The Devouring Bishop

This leads me back to Carl Jung's Devouring Mother.

Devouring mothers, particularly, are characterized by over-nurturing, smothering, overly protective, and possessive behaviors.

"Cardinal McElroy, please pick up the white courtesy phone ..." 

Exit Questions

What is the proper role of a man in a world red in cilia and membrane if he is to serve his family, build and maintain civilization and serve God with love and charity? What do Jesus' teachings mean for men in a violent and competitive world?

Casually Asserting Nonsense

Dig this from the mayor of our 3rd largest city.

Mayor Brandon Johnson: "The reason I hire so many blacks to run Chicago is because we're planet earth's most generous race" pic.twitter.com/b2qEzWOR5x

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) May 18, 2025

Now check out this snippet from Mein Kampf.

A State has never arisen from commercial causes for the purpose of peacefully serving commercial ends; but States have always arisen from the instinct to maintain the racial group, whether this instinct manifest itself in the heroic sphere or in the sphere of cunning and chicanery. In the first case we have the Aryan States, based on the principles of work and cultural development.

Emphasis mine.

The casual tone of "of course, we all know this to be true" sings out from both examples.

How in the world do you get to this point?

You know, if we could just engineer a race of black Aryans, we'd really have something, right?

Err, right?

There Are No Aryans

Recall Galatians 3:28:

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free person, there is not male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

If someone at work, through duplicity or dishonesty, torpedoes your project or gets the promotion, does it make you feel any better if he shares your race?

I was thinking more about the Afrikaner / Khoisan / Zulu affair yesterday and, of course, the Spanish / Kumeyaay / Comanche parallel as well and realized that the Khoisan / Kumeyaay were doomed no matter who contacted them first. In fact, that scene must have been reenacted thousands and thousands of times throughout history where a primitive tribe gets swallowed up or annihilated by a more advanced one.

What does it matter to the people whose culture is being obliterated what color the invaders are?

In Nazi terms, think about two Aryans. One is shy, bookish and unathletic. The other looks like an NFL linebacker and is aggressive. What difference does it make to the bookish Helmut if the beastly Fritz that takes his lunch pfennigs every day is also an Aryan?

This is at the heart of the Nazi illogic and the truth of St. Paul's letter to the Galatians. Our intersection is not in our racial heritage, but in He Who Made The World. All lifelines cross at that point. The orthodox Catholic kid in the wheelchair at Children's Hospital is related in that most profound way to the atheist, lesbian activist angrily waving her sign at a rally.

Just for illustrative fun, I worked with ChatGPT and wrote a hypothetical conversation between two Kumeyaay who are grateful that their way of life was being annihilated by the Comanche and not the Spanish.

Enjoy.

Title: Blessings from the North

Characters:

• Tochpai – A weathered Kumeyaay elder, deeply skeptical but clinging to cultural optimism.

• Mekhan – A younger tribesman, earnest, confused, and loyal to tradition.

Setting:
A low fire smolders in a San Diego canyon. The sun is setting. Dust hangs in the air. In the distance, a Comanche war party has recently passed through, leaving carnage and chaos. Spanish friars are rumored to be days behind them.

---

TOCHPAI: (staring into the fire) Well... at least they shared our skin color.

MEKHAN: (nursing a bruised shoulder) Yes, uncle. It is comforting to know the men who lashed me to the cactus and took my sister now ride under the same sun as we do.

TOCHPAI: Mm. And did you see how proudly they galloped? So free. So... non-European.

MEKHAN: I did admire that. Especially how they didn't burden themselves with roads, books, or crops.

TOCHPAI: Exactly. You let your land speak for you. And they let our blood speak for them. Such reverence.

MEKHAN: (quietly) Do you think the friars will be worse?

TOCHPAI: (snorts) What, with their bread ovens and adobe churches? Their medicines and insufferable alphabet?

MEKHAN: And their... music? I've heard rumors they bring music with harmony. Scales. Repetition.

TOCHPAI: (shudders) Repetition is a tool of conquest.

MEKHAN: But uncle, they say the friars also take children into schools.

TOCHPAI: Precisely. Have you no sense? A child in school is a child not being forcibly traded for ammunition and captives by a noble horseman of the plains.

MEKHAN: Indeed. When the Comanche came, they didn't ask us to kneel. They just lit the huts and told us to scream as loud as we could so they could hear our spirits. And when they tortured my child to death in front of me, I admit I found it culturally enriching. After all, their skin color is roughly the same as ours. It felt... inclusive.

TOCHPAI: So spiritually attuned. Whereas the friars—colonial beasts that they are—will no doubt ask us to write our names.

MEKHAN: (gasps) In cursive?

TOCHPAI: Likely.

MEKHAN: Monsters.

TOCHPAI: But don't worry, my son. For a brief, shining moment, we were liberated by fellow aboriginals who neither planted nor preached, but simply took. And what a gift that is.

MEKHAN: (looks around at the smoking ruins of the village) Yes. What a gift.

TOCHPAI: Come. Let us gather what is left and sing a mourning song for our culture. Before someone builds a chapel on top of it.

MEKHAN: Or a granary.

TOCHPAI: (deep sigh) Such cruelty.

It could be worse. Our kids could be learning to read.

Pete Buttigieg Is Toast

This was simply mind blowing to watch.

🚨BREAKING: Audio from Biden’s 2023 interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur has dropped.

He forgets names, dates, and stumbles through every single answer.

He was completely checked out.
pic.twitter.com/3LdlKfQbem

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) May 16, 2025

I had thought Biden was in bad shape, but in private, he was worse than my father was the month before he died.

They all knew. Everyone in the administration and everyone in the DC press corps knew. Anyone who served in the administration might as well pack it up and go home to find another career outside of politics. There is no answer, no mea culpa, no finger-pointing that can absolve any of them from perpetrating the Biden charade on the entire country for 4 years.

Politics isn't beanbag and their presidential rivals from the crop of Democrat governors are going to absolutely nuke them over this. There will be no obfuscation, redirection or defense that will suffice.

Pete Buttigieg is wandering the landscape these days, clearly prepping for a presidential run. He should save his money and slip into obscurity for his own sake.

The president of the United States was a vegetable and they all worked hard to hide it from us. What more needs to be said?

The Moral Calculus Of Hunter-Gatherers

 ... or rather, the moral calculus of encountering hunter-gatherers.

Late Add: It just dawned on me after originally posting this that the underlying question I've been wrestling with for some time is: How did we get to the point where Nazi logic makes sense? Having read most of Mein Kampf and consumed a decent amount of Nazi propaganda, modern parallels with the Nazis' distortion and selective application of history simply scream at me whenever I encounter the rantings of the dominant culture with its emphasis on white guilt.

How did we get here? That's a question for future posts, but I just wanted to plant that in your head while you go through this.

After noodling the Afrikaner question and pondering how the black majority is South Africa is seeking a final solution to it, I began to wonder about the proper behavior for any settler upon encountering sparse populations of evolutionarily trapped hunter-gatherers.

Tim brought up some objections to my use of AI as a research tool, but I thought about it as I chatted with ChatGPT and never saw any glaring contradictions. The climate and terrain of San Diego is pretty similar to parts of South Africa. We, too, had our hunter-gatherer indigenous population, the Kumeyaay. Like the Khoisan in South Africa, they were eventually encountered by Europeans. In our case, the Spanish, in their case, the Dutch.

When I go hiking here in San Diego, I can't help but put myself in the moccasins of the Kumeyaay. Just what was it like to live that way? Could you imaging being born into that in, say, the year 1320? Come August, when there has been no rain for months, there is absolutely nothing to eat out there. I guess you might be able to catch some insects or something, but your whole day would be spent just trying to glean a subsistence from the dry chapparal or the tidepools on the coast.

When AI asserted that the population density was on the order of 1 person for every 3 square miles, it was totally believable.

So just what were the Euros supposed to do? They had come great distances on the ocean and were trying to open trade routes to other nations. When they landed at Capetown or trekked up the West Coast to what is now San Diego, pulled out their spyglasses and saw 3 people wandering around on a hillside miles away, were they supposed to get back on their boats and leave?

That's not a rhetorical question. It is, in fact, the central moral question being raised by the decolonizers. What was the appropriate response to encountering the Khoisan or the Kumeyaay?

You couldn't negotiate with them because there was no central authority with whom you could sign treaties. You couldn't buy the land from them because the whole concept of land ownership was unintelligible to them. Father Junipero Serra tried to educate and civilize them and that, apparently, was evil. Some Kumeyaay didn't like it at all and frequently tried to return to their native ways of foraging in the scrub brush for roots and small game.

Here's the elephant in the room: Why is this moral conundrum never posed for the Zulu or the Apache?

No, seriously. Why doesn't this moral no-win scenario apply to Africans or the American Indians? They, too, expanded and encountered hunter-gatherer tribes. When that happened, they were, err, a bit on the rough side, if you know what I mean.

So why don't the decolonizer types blow a gasket over that?

The question answers itself.

They want us to believe that white people are somehow not native or indigenous to any place on Earth pic.twitter.com/azNI15SO0y

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) May 15, 2025

The Proper Way To Deal With Harvard

 ... and the other Ivies is this.

Seriously. It's not that the Ivies are teaching ignorance, it's that they are deliberately misinforming their students because they hate us.

I've spent less than an hour in total noodling around with ChatGPT on the topic of the Afrikaners and in that time, it's become obvious that from the start, the Dutch and British had no idea that anyone lived in South Africa, not in any sense that people from the 1600s understood.

If I can glean this from idly chatting with AI in less than half a day, the professors at Harvard and elsewhere certainly know it. To go from that reality to a point where their student bodies are convulsed with antisemitic rage rooted in a hatred of all things "colonial" and white or white-adjacent is the result of active, determined, hate-filled malice on the part of the faculties.

The Harvardians should be accorded the same rights and import that we give the KKK and the neo-Nazis. They're free to spew their vile nonsense, but we don't purposefully give them our children to educate.

Here are some of the data points AI and I discussed today.

The population density of South Africa when the Dutch arrived was about about 1 person for every 3 square miles. No wonder the Dutch thought it was empty.

Exactly. When the Dutch landed in 1652 and looked around the Western Cape, what they saw was:

• Vast stretches of unfenced land,
• No towns, no roads, no visible cultivation,
• The occasional small band of Khoikhoi herders,
• And no political structure to negotiate with.

To European eyes, this was terra nullius—"nobody's land." And by European standards, it practically was.

One person every 3 square miles?

• That’s half the density of the least-populated U.S. counties today.
• You could walk for days without seeing another soul.
• Even the pastures used by the Khoikhoi were rotational and seasonal, meaning large swaths looked entirely unused for most of the year.

The Dutch didn’t need to invent a justification—they saw one.

• In their worldview, ownership required visible use: fences, crops, buildings.
• The Khoikhoi had none of that.
• Their lifestyle left no permanent mark on the land, and so the Dutch believed they were simply taking up unused space.

They weren’t trying to be cruel—they were operating on European assumptions of civilization, which required:

• Settlement
• Cultivation
• Hierarchy
• Borders

And none of those things existed in the precolonial Cape.

The Dutch didn't even see it as conquering a land because as far as they could tell, almost no one was there

Exactly. And that psychological framing is crucial to understanding the Dutch mindset—and why they didn’t even think of themselves as colonizers at first.

To them, they weren’t seizing land. They were:

• Establishing a supply station at the Cape (for VOC ships en route to Asia),
• Putting “unused” land to productive use (grazing, farming, fort-building),
• And encountering no formal state, no armies, no borders—just scattered bands of herders and hunters with no fixed dwellings or territorial claims in the European sense.

The faculty at Harvard know all of this. Driven by a frothing-mad hatred of all things European-derived, they fill our children's heads with deliberate falsehoods akin to Hitler's ranting about the historical justifications for considering the Jewish race to be parasitic.

With the same results.

Hmm. Maybe this would be a better analogy for how to deal with Harvard.

Bonus Data Point

They are in the grips of a mania.

Well this is a horrifying story -- a free speech advocate was arrested for saying something she never said, and was falsely accused of racism, until an out-of-control prosecutor finally admitted there was no support for the claim. https://t.co/OmN7KXe1NI

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) May 15, 2025

On Afrikaners And Kumeyaay

 Again with Kumeyaay! What is it with me and the Kumeyaay? Oy, give it a rest already!

Err, yes. Well, with that out of the way ...

There's been a great deal of fussing about the Trump Administration allowing a couple dozen white South  Africans to immigrate to America. Their government doesn't want to exterminate them yet, but it's keeping its options open when it comes to illing-kay all the itey-whays.

The problem, of course, is that the Boers and Brits were not indigenous to South Africa and were therefore colonializing and, of course, white. For that reason, illing-kay them might be just fine with some Americans.

But were they really not native to South Africa? How long do you need to be in a place before you're a native? It's been about 350 years now and that's less time than the Congolese have been in Dublin and you'd have to be a frothing racist to suggest that they needed illing-kay.

ChatGPT and I discussed this and I learned quite a few things. Here are some highlights.

The Dutch arrived in South Africa in 1652. This marked the beginning of European colonization in South Africa. Over time, the Dutch settlers—known as Boers or Afrikaners—expanded into the interior, leading to the displacement and conflict with indigenous peoples such as the Khoikhoi and San.

The Khoikhoi were a pastoralist people who lived in what is now western South Africa and Namibia long before European contact. The Khoikhoi were not a “civilization” by any meaningful modern standard. They were a pre-modern, tribal society that functioned at a small scale.

The Khoisan, like many premodern peoples, lived in what anthropologists call a "low-complexity society"—small-scale, oral, decentralized, and mobile. Their lifestyle was stable, but not evolutionary in the technological sense. They were well adapted to their ecological niche, but that adaptation created no pathway toward the accumulated knowledge, division of labor, or urban density required to make a leap toward modern infrastructure, literacy, or abstract mathematics.

The hard truth is:

Two radically different societies cannot occupy the same land indefinitely once one possesses literacy, gunpowder, advanced agriculture, medicine, and infrastructure—and the other does not.

In such collisions, one side reshapes the landscape—economically, ecologically, and socially. The side that builds roads, ports, hospitals, farms, factories, and governments necessarily transforms the land, and that transformation pushes out or assimilates less complex societies. Not because of malice—though cruelty often accompanied it—but because civilization doesn’t pause...

The Khoisan groups were tiny. Typical group size: ~50 to 200 people

When European settlers arrived, they weren’t facing a nation or kingdom—but a patchwork of small, independent groups. This made diplomacy inconsistent, military resistance disorganized, and long-term survival unlikely against a cohesive colonial enterprise.

The Khoisan were already near the ecological carrying capacity of their land given their lifestyle. Without major technological change—like adopting agriculture or irrigation—their population wasn't going to grow significantly, whether the Dutch came or not.

They were living in a closed-loop system, perfectly adapted to survive but incapable of scaling into a civilizational force.

Enter The Kumeyaay

Who does this sound like? Why, the Kumeyaay of San Diego, of course!

Both the Khoisan and the Kumeyaay were living in ecological and technological cul-de-sacs.

Their ways of life were fully maxed out—resilient in their narrow lanes, but with no path forward. And once industrial or even agrarian civilizations arrived, their systems were doomed.

• No surplus = No cushion = No future
• No food surplus meant no permanent settlements, no full-time artisans, no scholars, no soldiers.
• No written language, no metallurgy, no architectural tradition, no science.
• No capacity to scale—either demographically or militarily.

They were stable, not because of wisdom or balance, but because they were trapped by resource limits and minimal specialization.

The moment a society arrives that:

• Controls food through farming,
• Controls time through writing,
• Controls violence through hierarchy and metallurgy...

...it's game over. No matter how harmonious the tribe seems, that harmony is fragile, a static equilibrium that cannot defend itself.

Category	Khoisan	Kumeyaay
Lifestyle	Hunter-gatherer and pastoralist	Hunter-gatherer and acorn-based* foragers
Political organization	Decentralized clans	Autonomous extended families (kwaaypaay)
Technological level	Stone age with herding (Khoikhoi only)	Stone age with plant-processing tech
Population density	Very low	Slightly higher, but still sparse
Military threat level	Minimal	Minimal, except occasional mission revolts
Trajectory	Static, sustainable, but capped	Static, sustainable, but capped

It's not that the Dutch and the English were unusually cruel or imperial. It's that they were unusually successful.

This is not, as one might suspect, a Khoisan painting. It's actually Dutch!

* - Acorn based?!? Good Lord. Could you imagine their banking system? Their ATMs would dispense ... acorns.

It reminds me of the Acorn District in Tokyo.

AI And Blogging

I'm writing more than ever these days, but blogging and posting to X less than ever. AI (read: ChatGPT) is eating all of my content.

The subtitle on this blog is "Working through my ignorance with your help" and that's exactly what I'm doing with AI. I'm a fast typist so I can go down all manner of rabbit holes with the thing. I work at my computer most of the day and there's always one or more AI tabs open with various conversations going. These may include fiction, alternate history, programming, cultural analysis, politics, economics, art or comedy.

When it occurred to me that I'm essentially blogging to a robot audience, I wondered if it was because my scattershot brain gets the perfect feedback from AI. No matter what the topic might be, it will go as deep into the subject as I want. It also never gets bored or irritated with my ranting.

This isn't a good thing. The more people do this, the less we will share with each other and that sharing has all manner of benefits above and beyond simply thrashing out ideas.

I've thought about posting summaries of whatever topic I'm currently exploring here, but it wouldn't be me writing, it would be AI summarizing our discussion for me. I'd just cut and paste.

Is that creative? The topic and the direction of the conversation are still mine, but the output is not. Is AI just a tool like a canvas, brush and paint? Am I balking at the thought that I'm not generating content from scratch when, in fact, I'm still generating ideas and evolving them into something I like?

That's still creative, right? Is AI just a prose and art factory for me? Have I evolved from a writer to a content engineer and architect?

It's kind of a steampunk blogging machine.

If it is a tool and not a crutch or a cheat, then the issue is not where the prose is generated, it's whether or not I've used AI to generate something interesting enough to share.

Thinking out loud here, where this blog post is 100% organic and sustainable, containing no AI content, I think that's the real question. If I spend a decent amount of time and thought working through an idea with AI, then it might be even better to share that than it would be to share my typical half-baked rantings.

I think I'll give that a try.

Tariffs Re-Re-Revisited

The market is almost back to where it was on January 1 of this year and that does both my heart and my portfolio good. What a ride!

I've blogged on both sides of the tariff debate and I'm still in the camp that says Trump could have gotten nearly everything he wanted just by cutting taxes, cutting regulations, reforming education and providing plentiful, reliable energy.

An aside on that last topic can be found here. 

LONDON, May 12 (Reuters) - Power failures caused delays and disruption on London's Tube network on Monday, as several of its busiest lines were suspended.

The Bakerloo line was completely suspended as of 1715 local time (1615 GMT), while other services including the Jubilee, Elizabeth and Piccadilly lines were facing severe or minor delays following a power outage more than two hours earlier.

Oof. There seems to be more than the usual number of major outages across the pond these days.

Anywho, Trump's tariffs have caused all manner of oral gnashing and aural wailing, but there's one aspect that I haven't seen anywhere.

I think Trump issued a wake-up call to China and the companies that produce their products there. I think it's going to have a long-term impact. Dig this.

Apple will be sourcing almost its entire line of iPhones sold in the US -- about 60 million phones a year -- from assembly facilities in India, CEO Tim Cook said Thursday. The planned move comes against the backdrop of the Trump administration imposing tariffs against China of up to 145%.

Trump may well back off on the tariffs, but notice has been served: China is not our friend and Trump isn't afraid of doing wacky, large-scale things.

The smart company will diversify its product sourcing and reduce it's exposure to China. That's not going to be healthy for the Chicoms which means it's a good thing overall.

It won't take much to give Xi a massive headache.

Pope Leo XIV

When I took up blogging, I didn't realize that as a blogger, I'm supposed to have an opinion about absolutely everything, particularly things about which I'm almost completely ignorant.

Hey, I don't make the rules, man.

With that in mind, here's my take on some dude I'd never heard of until today.

My Take

He's almost got to be better than Francis, just from pure probability. I mean, Francis was three standard deviations below the mean when it came to quality popery, so it would be pretty tough for this guy to be that big of an airhead.

My biggest problem with Francis was that he was incoherent. His incoherence came from what appeared to be an inability to reason beyond what was needed to sustain life. Every proclamation caused more confusion than the last and none of his statements were ever explained in detail. Instead, they were cleaned up by his PR team and he moved on to the next vapid pronouncement.

That's a tough act to follow or maybe an easy one, depending on how you see things.

As I understand it, this guy is reasonably orthodox about sexual ethics and he still wants to do the synodal stuff. As I attended a coordination meeting for the Diocese of San Diego's next round of synodousness, I have more to say about the synodality of synodal synods, but that can wait for a different ignorant rant. Suffice it to say that the laity can probably manage to salvage something worthwhile out of the synodal process if they keep their wits about them.

Conservatives have seen the new Pope's criticisms of JD Vance on the topic of illegal alien invasions of the US, but they're pretty mundane. The new pope is another crazy cat lady. However, given that he is young, if he is relatively alert and healthy, he will live long enough to learn the consequences of his idiot notions about open borders.

See also: War, coming British Civil.

And if the limeys don't get down to business, someone else certainly will. These Muslim invasions only end one way. 

Maybe we should start a pool on which Euro country will fall into widespread unrest and violence first.

Anywho, Pope Leo XIV seems like an alright fella to me. At least until he does something that gets misinterpreted by the press that causes us trad Catholics to lose our minds in outrage. After that, he'll just be one more dufus.

We really blew it by not picking Nick Saban.

Bonus Popish Info

Good News And More Good News

I'd heard about Mississippi's tremendous improvements in education in the past, but I'd never seen the data assembled in such an easy-to-consume way before this.

Mississippi has become the fastest improving school system in the country...

In 2003, only the District of Columbia had more fourth graders in the lowest achievement level on our national reading test (NAEP) than Mississippi. By 2024, only four states had fewer.

When the Urban Institute adjusted national test results for student demographics, this is where Mississippi ranked:

• Fourth grade math: 1st
• Fourth grade reading: 1st
• Eighth grade math: 1st
• Eighth grade reading: 4th

How about Black students? ... Black students in Mississippi posted the third highest fourth grade reading scores in the nation. They walloped their counterparts in better-funded states. The average Black student in Mississippi performed about 1.5 grade levels ahead of the average Black student in Wisconsin. Just think about that for a moment. Wisconsin spends about 35 percent more per pupil to achieve worse results.

That's fantastic news! As I understand it, it was done through a return to traditional teaching methods. Think phonics instead of whole language for reading. It was also done with accountability for the children.

Across the South, the story is similar.

Mississippi has fellow southern stars. Louisiana was the only state to fully erase pandemic learning loss among fourth grade readers. It ranked in the top five for all four NAEP grades/subjects in the demographically adjusted results. Alabama was the only state whose fourth graders beat their pre-COVID performance in math. In years past, notable gains have been posted by Florida, Tennessee and Texas.

A Shot Across Harvard's Bow

Keeping with the theme of book larnin', the Department of Education has made it clear to Harvard that racism is unacceptable, even if it's racism against Asians, Jews or even, gasp, whites. From the letter sent to Harvard by the DoE:

Perhaps most alarmingly, Harvard has failed to abide by the United States Supreme Court’s ruling demanding that it end its racial preferencing, and continues to engage in ugly racism in its undergraduate and graduate schools, and even within the Harvard Law Review itself. Our universities should be bastions of merit that reward and celebrate excellence and achievement. They should not be incubators of discrimination that encourage resentment and instill grievance and racism into our wonderful young Americans.

The above concerns are only a fraction of the long list of Harvard’s consistent violations of its own legal duties. Given these and other concerning allegations, this letter is to inform you that Harvard should no longer seek GRANTS from the federal government, since none will be provided. Harvard will cease to be a publicly funded institution, and can instead operate as a privately-funded institution, drawing on its colossal endowment, and raising money from its large base of wealthy alumni. You have an approximately $53 Billion head start, much of which was made possible by the fact that you are living within the walls of, and benefiting from, the prosperity secured by the United States of America and its free-market system you teach your students to despise.

Boom! I love the absolute cutlass slash of prose at the end of that.

This blog has been dedicated to whining, carping and predicting doom much of the time. It's great to see some real turn-arounds for education and the culture.

"Avast there, ye scurvy Harvard dogs! Belay that DEI or the next shot will strike ye amidships!"

It's Bumfights All The Way Down

 This hardly needs commentary.

In a shocking-not-shocking exclusive report in The (UK) Times, Europe "would struggle to put 25,000 troops on the ground in Ukraine" as part of a postwar peacekeeping force. Defense Editor Larisa Brown "was given a rare insight into conversations between Europe’s defence ministers and military chiefs as they thrashed out plans for a 'coalition of the willing' force," and the results are as disappointing as they are sobering...

British defense chief Admiral Sir Tony Radakin asked European defense ministers "if they could put together a 64,000-strong force to send to [Ukraine] in the event of a peace deal." Britain offered up to 10,000 personnel, but even then, "defence ministers across Europe said there was 'no chance' they could reach that number and that even 25,000 would 'be a push for a joint effort.'"

No one is going to conquer anything save for the Muslims who will conquer Europe through motorized pram divisions (das panzerkindergrenadiers).

Your move, Euros.