God Speaks To Me In Prayer

 ... for real, I am sure of it. But those conversations, I believe, are limited to those things about which I have direct, personal knowledge.

A good friend of mine, we'll call him Andy, recently fell while hiking a local, canyon trail. The trails can be uneven and steep. My friend is in his mid-60s. He braced himself with his hands and when he fell, he badly injured both shoulders, possibly damaging his rotator cuffs. He's been in pain since then.

Andy's life is defined by active service for others. He is the ultimate handyman having worked as a mechanic for decades and, through enforced frugality, having repaired, rebuilt or constructed everything in his house and his children's houses. He, with family help, recently did a moderately-sized remodel of his own house, doing almost all of the work himself.

Andy cannot watch a movie all the way through because he wants to be working on something instead. He would never watch a sporting event all the way through if not doing so at one of our dinners or parties where the game is the excuse for the get together. His entire being is defined by his productive, physical activity.

The fall and injury took that away from him, at least temporarily. Andy and I don't have a whole lot in common - we can't discuss sports, theology or most of the things on this blog. Still, I see him and his wife a couple of times a week, so we socialize quite a bit. I like Andy and enjoy his company.

During my morning prayer recently, I thought about him as I spoke my thoughts out loud to God*. I believe that God or the Holy Spirit or Jesus or whatever pointed out to me that Andy is going through excruciating, psychological pain right now. Andy, being Andy, doesn't show it, perhaps not even to himself. What I needed to do was use my gifts as an ENFJ and draw out his feelings and thoughts about his injury, his recovery and his inability to do the things he normally does. I needed to give him a place to talk about it.

I needed to love Andy in the way he needed to be loved.

I believe this was divine because, at the time, my thoughts were consumed with my ongoing war with the bottle, the presence of the pit bull puppy and the way it was wrecking my life, the lack of the Alabama river house and any number of other self-pitying introspections. There is nothing more important than me, you understand. What I heard was gentle, loving, compassionate, true and perfectly suited to my nature and gifts. It was oriented towards someone other than me.

The next time I saw him, the interaction was only brief, I asked him about how he was doing and he brightened visibly as he told me how he was feeling. He was still in a good deal of pain and it prevented him from doing things. He liked having someone who understood and listened.

Bingo.

Going back to the recent theme on this blog where I rage against the Eccliastical machine, I don't believe the Holy Spirit would tell me to vote for JD Vance when he responded to me in prayer. I don't know JD personally and while I may think he'd make an excellent president, he very well may be a self-serving crook in ways I can't see. It would be a form of insider trading for the Holy Spirit to give me divine guidance to direct my voting.

Similarly, the Holy Spirit isn't guiding the Catholic bishops or the Pope, for that matter, to support open borders and the "migrants." Those issues are hopelessly complicated with winners and losers no human can hope to estimate. For the Holy Spirit to give such guidance would be to imply that Heaven has run the numbers and they come out squarely on the side of mass migration. The bishops, being fallible humans of no particular skill in macroeconomics, cultural assimilation, political science, environmental studies, etc, certainly couldn't run those numbers themselves.

To believe that the Holy Spirit is guiding our prelates to support mass migration is to believe that the Holy Spirit is engaging in insider trading at the highest levels.

As Aquinas said, to love is to will the good of the other. In the case of mass migration, the "other" is absolutely everyone. Even AI run on supercomputers would have no hope of working out those equations reliably. The question of what is "the good of the other" in this case is hopelessly complicated.

While I have direct, first-hand experience of divine guidance and intervention in my life, I simply cannot believe that Heaven is handing us the answers to questions as cosmically difficult as that.

Yeah, I don't think it works this way.

* - I've learned to follow Andrew Klavan's dictum - when you pray, speak out loud because it forces you to speak in complete sentences and think clearly about what you're saying. I also follow the teaching of many, many Catholic teachers who say that prayer is conversation with God.

Jesus Is A Muslim

One more in my series on this kind of thing and then I promise I'll stop.

That graphic is from an article in America magazine, or something similarly airheaded, where the US Catholic bishops make the case for supporting mass migration.

The primary outcome after 15 years of mass migration has been a dramatic increase in the populations and power of Muslims across Europe and North America. As a predictable result, girls are being raped, Jews are being persecuted and churches are being desecrated or burned. The locals are getting a bit restive as well.

Volley of bottles against Gardai at CityWest earlier pic.twitter.com/IZrfqFIMYp

— Aris Roussinos (@arisroussinos) October 21, 2025

From the article at that link:

Fearing a riot, the Irish authorities yesterday evening shut down the Luas tram line from central Dublin to the suburban village of Saggart, southwest of the city centre. It didn’t work. Many hundreds — perhaps a thousand — angry protestors had gathered outside the gates of the Citywest IPAS (asylum) centre, hurling missiles and abuse at the Gardai public order unit blocking them from forcing their way up the long and wooded drive to the hotel.

The day before, an African asylum seeker had been charged with the sexual assault of a 10-year old Irish girl on the grounds of the Citywest centre, a 2,500-bed hotel recently acquired at vast expense by the Irish government, against fierce local opposition in the 4,500-strong community. The suspect, who needed an Arabic translator, was issued with a deportation order this spring and hadn’t yet been removed; the victim, in the care of Ireland’s scandal-hit Tusla child protection agency, found her chaotic personal circumstances publicised by the state in a manner many on social media saw as tantamount to victim-blaming. Outside the IPAS centre, the toxic combination had fired up both locals and protestors from across the country, who now had very little time for Ireland’s main political parties, or the police forces standing between them and the hotel they wished to storm.

An African Muslim "migrant" raped a 10-year-old Irish girl and those crazy, unpredictable Irish got their Irish up.

Jesus, being omniscient, must have predicted this on the way to the sports betting site where he was picking up his winnings from betting heavily on Georgia this weekend. Since the Catholic Church has played a significant role in the mass migration crisis by loudly supporting the migrants and since the bishops claim to be informed by the Holy Spirit through prayer and since they also claim that Jesus is present in the whole thing, we can safely assume that all is going according to God's plan.

Personally, the only conclusion I can reach as I look at demographic predictions that show many European countries becoming majority Muslim in a few decades and political polls showing that NYC will soon have a Muslim communist mayor, is that Jesus has switched sides and now plays for Team Islam.

Prove me wrong, bishops.

Jesus Does Not Like The Jews

We know this from modern Catholic teaching, summarized here.

1. Our prelates are convinced they are being guided by the Holy Spirit.
2. The Holy Spirit has told them to support open borders and welcome all migrants.
3. Muslims are a good chunk of those migrants.
4. Those Muslim migrants have now become a majority in several locations. Birmingham, England, for example, where Jews were recently forbidden from attending a soccer match.
5. In many Muslim-heavy locations, Jews are persecuted and sometimes killed.
6. The Holy Spirit, being omniscient, knew this would happen, as did anyone with even the faintest familiarity with Islam.
7. Ergo, the Holy Spirit does not like Jews.
8. As we say in the Nicene Creed every week, God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit are consubstantial.
9. Ergo, Jesus does not like the Jews, either.

Man, Jesus' home life with his Jewish Mother Mary must have been wild.

In The UK, No Jews Is Good Jews

This is unreal.

I welcome the news that Maccabi Tel Aviv fans will not be permitted to watch the match at Aston Villa! Well done to all those that signed our petition! pic.twitter.com/cRDtdDc7ad

— Ayoub Khan MP (@AyoubKhanMP) October 16, 2025

Birmingham Islamic preacher, Astar Rashid, told his followers that the Muslims of Birmingham “should show no mercy” to the football fans from Tel Aviv.

And the British police just announced that it is not capable of protecting the Jewish fans.

The UK has a big problem pic.twitter.com/dFVoC0eD1F

— The Uri (@uricohenisrael) October 16, 2025

It's For Their Own Good

 ... that we should repeal the 19th Amendment.

Here's something I hadn't considered: women are much more liberal than men. Liberal governments are the ones who have opened their countries' borders to the "migrants." Now the migrants are raping women like mad. Women continue to vote for those same liberals.

Women are voting to be raped.

Women's risk of being gang-raped in Europe would be reduced to just ~25% of the current level if there had been no Muslim / African mass immigration.

The Muslim / African mass immigration has made Europe less safe for women to an extreme degree. pic.twitter.com/y8kJKEUVaV

— Jonatan Pallesen (@jonatanpallesen) October 13, 2025

Here's a reasonable explanation, one that jives with my own experiences and the deep-dive I did into writing romantic fiction with AI. I don't agree with the over-broad generalization, but the sense of the thing seems true.

For women, it's better to risk getting raped than to be seen as lacking empathy.

That sounds insane, but it fits the facts.

They Aren't Smart Enough To Want Anarchy

Continuing with my model of primitives instead of progressives, let's look at this excellent blog post about the decay in Chicago.

A driving reason for me to start (my business elsewhere) was because I saw that Chicago was on the brink of a financial precipice. I knew the politicians were full of themselves when they touted the “diversity of the economy”. Chicago was and is driven by financial services. Chicago has lost insurance, banking, investment banking, and other major verticals in finance. It has accounting, and it has trading...

I was early in this realization. An old friend who has passed away, Dan Rahill, and I went to lunch. Two CEOs laid out the math on city/county/state budgets, pensions, and everything else. A career bureaucrat stood up at that lunch and said any reform was against the Constitution.

Dan and I quickly realized that either we grow the economic opportunity, or we move.

He goes on to discuss how he left and doesn't miss Chicago because those remaining are angry with Trump's efforts at deporting illegals and the ICE raids. After a few anecdotes, he summarizes the situation as follows.

There are some truths about immigration and illegal aliens.

1. You cannot have open borders with a welfare state. It’s impossible.
2. It is lawful to deport illegal aliens. They aren’t here legally, and it is the federal government’s role to do it. There is no such thing as a sanctuary state or city. Asserting such is not any different than assertions by the old Confederacy that they were above federal law.
3. When there is no law, and there is no will to enforce the law, or there is only a selective will to enforce some laws, anarchy will reign. Totalitarians love anarchy. It’s what Lenin brought to Russia to take control. It is the playbook of Saul Alinsky. Anarchy begets totalitarianism.

1 is spot on. 2 is a poor reading of the legality of secession in 1861, but it's close enough for our purposes. 3 may be correct, but it's irrelevant. Anarchy might lead to totalitarianism but in a place where the residents can choose to flee, it will be warring tribes living in mud huts and squalor, not a modern city. Who cares who rules the place at that point?

Dig this from South Africa.

As the primitives gain more and more power, money and skilled people flee both Chicago and South Africa. The ones who are leaving, just like my friends who have left California, are the builders and producers. The ones staying behind are the primitives. Thus, the spiral downward continues.

Lots of people on the right keep going on about totalitarianism, anarcho-socialism and the plots of the Globalists. It hardly matters whether or not the primitives wrecking the place have some grand plan or not. They're tearing those places to bits.

It's not really a blog post without a dig at the primitives who run our Church, is it?

The bit about open borders and a welfare state being incompatible touched a nerve. We receive regular earfuls about Catholic social teaching (read: lots of welfare) and support of the "migrants" from our leaders in the Church. Sigh.

Primitives, Not Progressives

I think I've had my formulations wrong all this time. I keep talking about progressives and suchlike, but that's not really who they are. Instead, they are primitives. Allow me to explain.

Ben Shapiro published a book recently called Lions and Scavengers. In short, lions build and protect while scavengers, well, scavenge. I like Ben, but the book feels like it was rushed and his model doesn't work for me. For one thing, lions don't build anything. Further, the people who get me all worked up, the Catholic hierarchy, are only somewhat scavengers. It dawned on me just recently that a better descriptor is primitives.

Primitives have no idea how civilization works, how it is maintained or how it was created. These are the South Africans who have torn out power lines to get at the copper which they sell for scrap metal. These are also the Catholic bishops who call for more and more "migrants" to be brought into America from places like South Africa.

The South Africans are tearing South Africa to bits and the bishops can't see that bringing them here will only lead to America being torn to bits. They are both primitives because civilization is utterly alien to them save for how it will be consumed to provide sustenance for today.

Dig this time-lapse video of a major construction project.

Now listen to this Aboriginal talk about meeting white people for the first time.

Now check out this summary of the Palestinians going at each other like animals now that there is a power vacuum in Gaza following Hamas getting stomped by the Israelis.

Internal clashes erupt in the Gaza Strip as Hamas tries to reassert control after the ceasefire:

Following the implementation of the ceasefire, tensions have risen across Gaza between Hamas forces and several powerful families.

The fiercest fighting occurred in the north, where… pic.twitter.com/8Un5rIv1MB

— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) October 12, 2025

There is simply no chance in the world that either the Aboriginals or the Palestinians could build that apartment complex on their own. If you go backwards in time a bit so that both the Abos* and Pallies cannot rely on anything invented by the Europeans, it becomes crystal clear that neither would be able to build anything even remotely like that.

Primitives are like that. They are, well, primitive. If you import a bunch of them or create a ton of them in your universities or generate them from legalizing drugs, they will drag you down to their level. They cannot do anything else because they do not know how to maintain, much less build.

This is what makes the open-border crowd primitives. They are actively overloading the system to the point where everything will get pulled to bits. Because they are primitive, they don't understand what is required to maintain civilization and, in childlike innocence, think it will always be there.

An intellectual with a fancy degree wearing a suit (or Roman collar!) can be just as primitive as the Abo woman in the video above. When you consume what others have built, when you devour your fixed assets to feed yourself today, when it is easy to project the fruits of your behavior into the future and see mud huts instead of skyscrapers, you are a primitive.

Primitives do this:

It is childlike naivete to think that cash will continue to flow from the government forever like this. It is childlike naivete to speak of empathy and compassion for the migrants who will accelerate the process of fiscal collapse. It is childlike naivete to think that Abos, Pallies or South American peasants will contribute anything unique and irreplaceable to construction projects like the one above in excess of what they will drain from the rest of us.

It is the same childlike ignorance that leads the South Africans to tear apart their infrastructure for scrap.

It is primitive.

Bonus Content

Watch this and think in terms of the value of the fixed assets involved. Any repairs of this destruction must be paid out of existing funds which will not be available for normal maintenance or improvements. In short, the "migrants" are pulling Italy to bits. The Catholic bishops, being primitives, cannot comprehend that.

Milan is a jungle without rules. We all know why. pic.twitter.com/H9V7FjvWij

— RadioGenoa (@RadioGenoa) October 12, 2025

* - If you think I'm going to keep typing "Aboriginals" and "Palestinians" over and over again, you're crazy.

Tomato Chemistry

 For years, I've nuked our raised beds with every kind of fertilizer imaginable. In December or January, I pull last year's tomato plant carcasses out of the bed and then whack it with raw DOW chemical, some LGBTQWERTY organic nutrients and then some PETA-approved, sustainable animal fertilizers. Cumulatively, I use about triple the fertilizer I should.

In January, February and March come the San Diego rains. It's not much for normal humans, but for us, it's a decent amount of water. It turns my fertilizer blitz into a charming tea for the plants, read: Roma tomatoes. This has worked forever. This year, it failed. All we got was monster tomato plants with plenty of fruit that never ripened.

Preparing for my garden in Alabama, I bought this soil test kit. 

Testing the Nitrogen.

Here's what I discovered.

Tomatoes want a pH of about 6 and a moderate amount of Nitrogen. They want a lot of Phosphorus and Potassium. I had:

• pH = 8. No surprise, San Diego is known for hard, alkaline water.
• Nitrogen: High. Probably not a problem.
• Phosphorus: High. Excellent!
• Potassium: Low. Oof!

It turns out that the high pH combined with the low Potassium was fatal. The high pH inhibits Potassium intake in general and there wasn't a whole lot of the K to ingest anyway.

Next time, we're testing the soil before we plant.

If The Jews Are Packing

 ... then it might be time for you to check to see if your luggage is in working order.

Dig this.

France entering ‘new phase’ in antisemitism. 400% increase in applications to move to Israel from France last year. 52% of French Jews considering leaving the country.

Number #1 threat: radical Islam. https://t.co/eLvHyR2SMA

— Mark Dubowitz (@mdubowitz) October 7, 2025

Also, this.

My own family arrived here at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Like many Jews from Eastern Europe, they were fleeing the mass murders perpetrated by the Russian state. That journey brought them to Scotland, where they built new lives and laid down roots. I grew up in Glasgow, deeply proud to be British. I learned the kings and queens of the British Isles by heart and was captivated by the story of Mary, Queen of Scots. I absorbed the customs, values, and culture. I was always a proud Jew who understood my connection to Israel, but I also cherished being British.

This was my home. Today, I am preparing to leave it.

It has not been an easy decision. For years I clung to the belief that, despite the rise in hostility to the Jewish community, we could still build lives here. I had watched from abroad during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party from 2015 to 2020, when Jew-hate poisoned the party and seeped into wider politics. 

And then there's this.

This morning as I sat in a London synagogue for Yom Kippur services, a friend sitting next to me said “I reckon Jews have about 10 years left in this country.”

I said I disagreed, and that it’s not as bad as it seems.

About 20 minutes later, the service was suddenly… https://t.co/yJ6DY5Hcex

— Ashley Rindsberg (@AshleyRindsberg) October 2, 2025

Despite what right-wing antisemite loons might say, and I'm looking at you, Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, Jews are civilization's canaries in the coal mine. If they don't feel safe, then it's a good bet you're not going to feel safe soon.

Looking back through history, you can take your pick of pogroms and see that they never preceded times of peace and prosperity. How could they? Jews are a boon to any society.

It's no secret that Jewish culture strongly values education and hard work. It's why, contra Hitler, they succeed wherever they go. And who doesn't want more of that?

If you've created an environment where that is not valued to the point where the Jews are looking for the exits, it's a strong indicator that things are about to go sideways for everyone.

Super Special Yiddish Bonus Content

Add New York City to the list of places you might want to avoid in the future.

BREAKING: A crowd of Islamists in NYC waving Hamas flags declare that they will presumably carry out attacks in the US.

"We did not act enough! We will show up, stronger than we did the first October 7th!"

pic.twitter.com/FAqejwAekY

— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) October 8, 2025

Well, That Didn't Take Long

 I wasn't going to write about France again, but they, well, they did a France.

French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu abruptly resigned on Monday morning, just three weeks after his appointment, preempting what appeared to be an inevitable ousting. Lecornu was expected to unveil his policy agenda before the National Assembly on Tuesday, but both the Socialist Party and the National Rally had warned that without a drastic policy shift, they would trigger a no-confidence vote. French bonds and stocks slumped on the emerging political crisis. 

President Emmanuel Macron's office issued a one-sentence statement, confirming that Macron had accepted the resignation of Lecornu. This comes amid turmoil over the composition of his cabinet, a coalition of centrists and conservatives. 

Lecornu told reporters his resignation was primarily due to the inability to compromise across the political spectrum: "I was ready to compromise, but each political party wanted the other political party to adopt its entire program."

Three whole weeks? What an amateur. Let Bruno Le Maire show you how professionals do it.

France's former finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, who was appointed head of the Ministry of the Armed Forces on Sunday, announced his resignation less than 24 hours after taking the job, amid ongoing political turmoil that rattled stocks and bonds in Paris on Monday. 

Surrendering in less than 24 hours. Now that's some prime-grade Frenching right there.

Not to worry. The migrants will add stability to the whole thing, right Catholic prelates?

Islamists caused nothing but complete chaos in Paris.

What has Europe done to itself? pic.twitter.com/2j1FZdnLgG

— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) October 6, 2025

Professor David Betz, please call your office.

Oh, wait, there he is now.

Why are other police standing around gormlessly while this scruffy looking bully of a cop assaults a girl, steals her property, and handles the national flag like a dishrag? https://t.co/uF4G37a6At

— David Betz (@DavidBe31099196) September 29, 2025

Triggering Civil War In England And France

David Betz has made the rounds discussing why he thinks that sectarian civil war in Europe will happen in the next 5 years. Here's one such conversation.

Here's an interesting article from ZeroHedge that applies.

France remains paralyzed even after its latest government reshuffle. Time is running out to consolidate public finances before bond markets turn against Paris.

The office of Prime Minister has become a revolving door. In just three years, President Emmanuel Macron has burned through five governments without visible results. 

The country is trapped in political shock, a deadlock in parliament that appears unbreakable.On September 9, Sébastien Lecornu of Macron’s Renaissance party took the poisoned chalice from his failed predecessor François Bayrou. Like those before him, Bayrou was broken by France’s structural inability to reform. The country sustains one of the most bloated welfare systems in the world, with government expenditure at 57% of GDP. This overextended welfare state acts as a sedative for a migration-driven society that has shifted into full socialist-style management of the economy—and now cannot find a way out.

France buys social peace with ever-larger sums of borrowed money. The strategy leaves deep holes in the public accounts and barely hides the fractures of a fragmented society, where class conflict grows more aggressive and Islamist subcultures flourish. With new borrowing at 5.6% of GDP this year and total debt at 114%, France faces the classic Ponzi dilemma: once old debt can no longer be rolled into new issuance, the entire system collapses.

Unlike the US, the Euro is not the currency the world uses and so there is no real reason to buy French bonds as there is to buy American bonds. If any of the European countries find themselves in a serious fiscal crunch, there will be cuts to their social spending, either from inflation or budgetary necessity.

It hardly matters which. In a population used to survival at the hands of government largesse built upon clouds of borrowing, when that borrowing dissolves, things will get dicey and people will revert to clan and tribal loyalties. The African and Muslim "migrants" will have the advantage here as they are far more familiar with violence and deprivation than the native French and British.

If you think the IMF can bail out these countries, think again. IMF rules say that a country can borrow up to 200% of its quota, which is tied to its economic size and contributions to the IMF. For the UK, that would be about $55B. For France, that would be about $70B. That would cover about 4 months of each country's current borrowing. 

The IMF can't come to the rescue because the amounts both nations need are just too large. 

You can "buy social peace with ... borrowed money" until you can't.

David Betz has predicted it. Will the debt crises be the catalyst for it?