Sanguinosity Overplayed?

Sal at What's Going On With Shipping? just about had an aneurysm yesterday. His criticisms of the Trump Administration's failure to anticipate the closure of the Strait of Hormuz seems spot on. It's always hard to argue with Sal.

As if on cue, Hegseth and General Cain came out today and said reopening the Strait are a top priority. They also said drone attacks are down 95% since the start of the war. I think that's reasonable, even if it is exaggerated. If they're down 80%, that's still really good news. I saw other stats about the number of drones launched and did some quick math in my head, ciphering out what seems to be a 1-in-20 or less success rate for the drones.

I remain sanguine about the war because the pros in our military, aided by the Jews who control us with their weather and mind-control machines, are very adaptive. Let's see what happens with shipping in the next couple of days.

Meanwhile, there's this.

WILD: The predicted “future” came within 24 hours. This is Israeli Air Force footage of drones and jets blowing up Basij checkpoints all around Tehran today, based on tips called in by Iranian citizens. A revolution with air support against a regime with no air defence. https://t.co/SZNn3mseMU pic.twitter.com/JRvRNUWZQP

— Saul Sadka (@Saul_Sadka) March 13, 2026

As Slavs of all stripes have learned, it's very dangerous to be tagged as an enemy combatant when the other side has drones floating around above you. They are excellent anti-personnel weapons. If your side has no air defenses at all, you're as good as dead over time.

The Iranians have no air defenses at all.

That only leaves the Strait. Open it and everyone will relax and go about their lives. Meanwhile, we can pick off the mullahs' goons in the street at our leisure.

More On The Straits

What's Going On With Shipping? is an excellent YouTube channel. In today's installment, Sal reviews the latest bad news from the Straits of Hormuz.

What hits me here is that the US Navy is too small for the job and the Littoral Combat Ships simply aren't fit for purpose. They have almost no firepower and are essentially bullet sponges. They were originally intended for just this kind of area, but when faced with operational realities, they've got to be kept out of the line of fire.

Second, the US is learning the lessons from the recent revolution in warfare - inexpensive drones - the hard way. The Iranian-built Shahed 136 is a long-range kamikaze drone with a 100# warhead. I'm pretty sure it's GPS-guided. It's great for attacking immobile, thin-skinned targets like energy infrastructure or docked ships. At 100 MPH, it would take forever for it to get to its target, but you need something in the air to shoot it down.

We're not privy to the kill rates for the Allies or the munitions drawdown for the Iranians, so I'm still sanguine about the end result. It's not even been 2 weeks yet. It would be great to have a magic wand to wave and make it all go away, but those are in short supply.

Lastly, some of the attacks on shipping have been done by Unmanned Surface Vehicles. Think speedboats with explosives on the bow, guided by radio from a nearby command boat. You have to get real close to the enemy to use those and the command boat is a sitting duck. It's a kamikaze mission of its own. It's the fact that the Iranians have had any success at all with these that makes the small size of the US Navy apparent. As Sal says in the video below, during Desert Storm, we didn't have these problems because our Navy was twice the size it is today and none of the hulls were those useless LCSs.

Anyway, here's the video.

It's About Detection, Not Strike

I've been pondering this.

The Straits of Hormuz

Everything revolves around getting these shipping lanes open. If we can do that and the oil starts flowing again, we can take our time whacking the IRGC and their cardboard ayatollah. No one is going to stick their necks out for Iran, not even Russia or China. Lots of countries, however, are getting their panties in a wad over the price of oil.

The Saudis are increasing the amount of oil their pipelines send to Red Sea ports, so there's that. Still, what needs to happen is the Straits have to be opened.

For all intents and purposes, there is no Iranian Navy or Air Force remaining. The Iranians have unguided artillery tubes on shore, which are practically useless at the ranges required, something like 8+ miles. Fire a couple of poorly-aimed salvos and you reveal your location. A few minutes later, you're dead, thanks to American Naval Air.

That leaves the guided stuff. What guides the guided things? Well, drones can be self-guided, so they are a problem. Other guided things like missiles need a targeting system. That is, Iran needs emitters with line of sight access to the Straits to send guidance information to the launchers. American AWACS detect the emissions and Naval Air squashes them like bugs. You might be able to use a targeting system once, but certainly not twice.

If I was playing the Iranian hand, which amounts to a pair of 7s against the American full house, Qs over 10s, and the Jews' 5 natural aces because, as Tucker Carlson tells us every day, Jews always cheat, my problem becomes one of keeping my targeting systems alive long enough for the Democrats and other intestinal parasites to wear down American will.

How many do they have? If they emitted and lost one every other day, how long could they string this out? They're certainly going to lose some non-emitting ones on a regular basis, so the Straits won't be closed forever no matter how they play this.

What they need to do is hit a ship from time to time to keep the other ships from running the Straits. Then they do what all apparently defeated nations do - they try to make the cost too high for the enemy and end with a negotiated peace. That didn't work for the Confederacy, the Japanese or the Nazis. It did work for the North Koreans.

What's missing from the news reporting I'm seeing is any kind of intelligence or accuracy.

I can't believe I just said that. Like we could expect any kind of intelligence of accuracy from the theater kids who run our media.

I would bet a great big stack of folding money that CENTCOM has this dialed in and has plenty of eyes on the area. We'll know things have calmed down when a few ships make their way through the Straits successfully.

Another option would be to simply rev up the shipping lanes and send ships through normally and force the Iranians to expend their limited resources stopping them. Sadly, we don't have the oiler fleet to do this.

What we need are a pile of sacrificial maritime lambs.

A whole mess of Liberty Ships would be useful right about now.

Theater Kids Vs. Saladin

 Here's one of the theater kids now:

Here's Tim Walz changing the topic to white men when the Somali fraud first got exposed.

He knows it works with his base. It's become one of their default modes.pic.twitter.com/jmZGsMtf2x

— Defiant L’s (@DefiantLs) March 10, 2026

Confronted by questions about the Somalis looting Minnesota, he quickly twists it around to talk about how bad white men are.

Meanwhile, the descendants of Saladin aren't exactly hiding the ball.

Mahmoud Khalil last year: “We are fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization.”

Tonight, is invited to the NYC Mayor’s mansion to eat with Zohran Mamdani.

Wake up—do you not see what’s happening? pic.twitter.com/kqqwZ1wNrm

— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) March 10, 2026

So what's going on here? The Somalis are doing what is good and moral for Somalis. The progs who run Minnesota left easy avenues for looting the public treasury, so the Somalis did it to enrich their clans. In their eyes, to miss that opportunity would be a sin.

Meanwhile, the progs know this is happening, but it means way less than signaling their allegiance to the Omnicause to their fellow progs.

Recently, Winston Marshall had the author Lionel Shriver on his show. I'd never heard of Lionel before, but I thought she was brilliant.

I captured the audio, made a transcript and here's one of the sections that caught me for its clear summary of what we see above, edited for clarity. Lionel has a bit of a stutter.

(Open borders) certainly becomes culturally meaningless because, (your nation is) just a way station. You're just a place. It reduces country to geography. And conventionally, we think countries are more than geography. So. I think that that this is definitely connected to pro-immigration is also connected to professed self-hatred in the West. Although I question that. I think that maybe the self-hatred they're promoting, they exempt themselves from.

What does that mean? In other words, if you hate yourself, you hate yourself, but these people hate other people in the name of hating themselves in their hair-shirtery. You know, we have this terrible history. We had slavery. We murdered the Indians in the U.S.

So, you know, we have no moral claim to this land. But, apropos of the Billie Eilish quote, they're not, giving their houses away. And so it doesn't really apply to them. I don't think that their emotional experience of promoting hatred of their own people in their own country is one of genuine self-hatred.

They love themselves. They're very proud of themselves. And it's a kind of vanity. So to call that self-hatred is wrong, it is actually a loathing for your fellow countrymen who don't agree with you. Yeah, it's false humility. Yes, it it's a complete performance, it is acting out. It is acting out guilt rather than feeling it.

So why would they loathe their fellow countrymen? Because they don't have these pure moral values. And they don't go through the theatrics of caring more about people who are disadvantaged than they do about themselves and their own group. I think the whole thing is emotionally very convoluted because all this talk of shame, these people don't act as if they're experiencing shame, the, the emotions they exude.

What we're seeing on the left is a conflict between the theater kids and the heirs of Saladin. It's not really a conflict, is it? It's more that the theater kids are the hosts and the Saladinistas are the parasites riding them. On the right, we can see what's happening, but on the left they either can't see it or deny its importance.

My conclusion is that the left doesn't understand the threat posed by the Saladinistas and just goes on its merry way signaling to each other about how full of love they are for the migrants and the marginalized. The real threat to the progs is that they might somehow be tagged as full of hate because they showed the tiniest deviation from the attitudes of the group.

I see that all the time from my Catholic leadership. In a future post, we'll wrestle with the question: Why not convert to Islam? As far as I can tell, according to my bishops, cardinals and pope, it's all upside.

Ayatollah You So

 Zero Hedge is running this one today. Iran Signals 'Fight To The End' Under New Ayatollah, As US Struggles To Define Israeli-Coordinated Endgame.

Iran on Monday is seeking to showcase its continuity and 'stability' of government after a week of heavy US-Israeli bombardment failed to produce regime change. Instead, Tehran is vowing to fight back, saying it can keep the war going for as long as needed. Analysts have pointed out Iran needs to inflict a cost on the US and Israel, fearing it will just be attacked again somewhere down the line, even if years from now. 

I have no idea what "fighting to the end" means unless it's some time next week when the last of their mobile missile launchers either expends its rocket or gets whacked by the Jews or the Jews' lapdog, America.

By the way, I've decided, like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, those beacons of rational thought, that we might as well stop talking about Israel and just name the real problem in the world: the Jews. I'm pretty sure my coffee was only mediocre this morning because the Jewish mind-control rays from space missed me and hit the coffee pot instead. Darn those Jews! Is there no end to their perfidy?

Anywho, this meme is pretty accurate:

Given the Jews' assertion that they will keep taking out Ayatollahs as fast as they are minted, this one is pretty accurate, too.

LOL.

So the new-new-new Ayatollah is a hardliner, is he? Good for him. Even if he had a shred of command and control infrastructure remaining, even if his military leadership wasn't mostly dead and what survives wasn't in hiding, he's still got practically nothing to command.

I haven't seen the stats on rocket launches coming from Team Mullah, but I would bet they're dropping off exponentially. I saw that the Iranians discovered that anti-shipping missles from Temu don't come with a warranty, either. 50 fired, zero hits. $5B just doesn't go as far as it used to.

It doesn't matter who gets named the leader if there's nothing left to lead. Meanwhile, I've got my the fillings in my molars tuned to Radio Hebe, awaiting my instructions.

I'll Write Tomorrow

My muse has hit me, but life did, too.

I'll write tomorrow, I promise. Probably just the novel, not sure about the blog.

On Muses, Guppies and Prudence

I know I've used this one before, but it's true and it fits. Sometimes.

Q: What do you get when you have 1 male guppy and 5 female guppies?

A: 5 pregnant female guppies.

Guppies bear their young live and have sex the way God intended, not with all that writhing in the water and squirting eggs and milt willy-nilly. Nope, for guppies, it's Old Alabama and a waterbed.

Q: What do you get when you have 1 male guppy and 20 female guppies?

A: Nothing but a worn-out male guppy.

When you have too many irons in the fire, you don't get nothin' done. At least I don't. That's where I've been for the last few months. In funding terms, I've got 2 customers now, working full time. In reality, I'm engineering ten or so different webby thingies. On top of that, I'm hunting for an Alabama respite location, working my marriage through that purchase, doing various things at church, writing a novel, trying to powerlift my way to preposterous goals for a man my age, haunt Twitter-X, monitor our funds, take care of a brood of children with varying needs, fight my Irishness and its need for a drink, blog here and ... oh heck, I don't know. Wash and wax the car? Replenish the raised beds for my wife's 'maters?

Add a few more to that list. Why not? I'm that exhausted male guppy, but in my case, it's by my own choice. It's all good.

Anywho, that's what's behind my lack of ranting here. Oh well. I thought about hanging up the whole blogging thing, but it hurt to think about that.

So here I am and the muse has struck.

Tonight, I'm giving a personal testimony as a part of a meditation on prudence. Prudence is something I can't recall my Cursillo homies ever talking about, but it's at the heart of this blog.

How do you handle situations with ambiguous moral choices? What do you do when, no matter what choice you make, there will be a world of hurt coming down on everyone around you?

What do you do when your daughter comes out to you as trans? What do you do when your child has emotional disabilities and could burn down the house by accident, but needs you around? What do you do when your wife is slowly going mad and has become violent? When do you finally put your aging, demented wife in a home and stop taking care of her yourself? Confronted with multiple treatment choices for your wife with cancer, what do you help her choose? If your relative is a recovering addict, do you take him in, knowing he may end up robbing you for a hit?

God is love, don't judge just don't cut it.

So I need to give a testimony and it can't be my normal "our bishop is a moron" sort of thing. I know I rant here, but this needs to be, unlike my typical essays, Christian.

Here we go.

God made the world out of love for us. It's a highly improbable thing, this world of ours. The origin of life, the universal constants, the wild discontinuous steps in evolution, it's all crazy - crazy with love for us. It's a world of adventure, of danger, of choices, of free will.

God is love. Don't judge. Those are the things we get fed every Sunday. They're true and valuable. It's important to keep them in mind. However, there are lots of things we face that don't reduce to that kind of page out of a coloring book. Sometimes, in important ways, life is much murkier, more complicated than that.

5 years ago, give or take, my daughter came out to me as trans. It was just her and I in our kitchen. She had been a normal girl in high school with a couple of boyfriends. I caught her once in the garage, making out with a guy. We even went out to dinner with a boy she liked and his parents because he was 2 years older than she was and she wanted to date him. He was a nice guy and his parents were lovely. They respected my old school ways, which were culturally Southern even though I wasn't yet a full-on adopted son of the South.

Something happened when she was a senior. Her teachers were far-left and who knows what they taught. She decided she was lesbian late in that year and her mom, my first wife, sent her to Pride Week in San Francisco. It was almost certainly flipping me the bird. She found every way she could to hurt me. I don't think my ex had a plan other than that.

Anywho, a couple of years later, there my Russian, adopted girl was, in my kitchen telling me she was actually a man.

This was pretty early in our societal madness. Far enough along for me to know that I held almost no cards at all. My HR would call me in if I asserted that girls could not become boys. Our corporate comms was all in on affirmation and inclusion. I knew enough science to know this was total, sadistic insanity.

God made biochemistry, too. Our moral code lives in that world - the world of physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics. All of those sciences are acts of love just as much as Jesus living as a man. Everything is predicated on that science, even the God is love part.

In that moment, 5 years ago, I could see the choice I was being offered. Agree with her or she'd kick me out of her life. At her age, parents have very little power. I was given a moral choice with no good outcomes. I told her not to do anything that couldn't be reversed. I didn't understand it all yet, but I knew some girls were getting their breasts cut off. You can't recover from that.

My Church preached affirmation, inclusion, love, acceptance and forgiveness.

She started on her testosterone treatments. When I would ask him about it during office visits, my doctor would close the door and talk in hushed tones about it. I knew why. His HR would flay him alive if they heard what he was saying. He said the whole thing was madness.

My bishop wrote an essay about "radical inclusion." From the pulpit, I heard, "God is love" and "Don't judge."

Meanwhile, there I was, holding firm. I never called my daughter by her new name, Luke. I never used he/him. I never used a name or a pronoun on those rare times we got together. I kept telling her not to go through with the surgery. She knew I didn't support her transition and saw less and less of me.

I saw her a few months ago. She really wants to have a relationship. We were very, very close when she was growing up. It hurts us both to be apart. She won't have a relationship with me if I don't call her Luke and agree she's a man.

She's had the surgery. Her breasts are gone. She's been taking testosterone long enough to have destroyed her voice, but worse, she's gone mad.

As any guy who went through puberty can tell you, testosterone is a psychotropic. You do crazy things under its influence. Suzy may have been a 3 or 4 at best, but by God, she was HOT in high school. Imagine what it does to a woman when given in doses 100x or more what her body can handle.

That last time she came over, I pushed back on her demand to call her a man. She started shaking and saying she felt threatened. We were just talking. All I could think of were all the trans shooters we've been seeing lately.

Did I do right 5 years ago when I didn't embrace and support her transition? What I did made no difference at all. She ended up with the surgery and the testosterone injections anyway. Now I don't have a relationship with her. On the other hand, had I gone along with it, I'd have been an accomplice in the Mengele-level destruction of my girl.

More importantly or not: I'd have lied about God's reality. Biochemistry is just as much a constant created by God as "God is love" and "Don't judge."

Is it blasphemy to lie about the things we know about reality? Do her feelings trump endocrinology?

Our Church is obsessed with hope this year. It's the "year of hope" or something like that.

Wanna know what gives me hope?

I believe that Jesus gave us basic metrics by which He wanted us to make our decisions. Love, charity, humility, sacrifice and more. I believe that as long as I make my decisions informed by those virtues, He will forgive me even if I make the worst decision possible.

Maybe I did. Maybe I didn't. 

Maybe what I did was to fight the good fight against impossible odds. 

Maybe what I did was not recognize a battle that was already lost and fail to pick the pieces up on the far side of biochemical collapse.

Beats me. I'm just an old man who did the best he could with what he had on hand 5 years ago. That's all He asks of me.

My Unasked For Take On Iran

 Get them. Get rid of them all. I don't care what follows, just get rid of them.

I don't care if they were an immediate threat or a down-the-road threat or a never-gonna-happen threat. I don't care if the real reason we whacked them was that they misspelled "Trump."

There were only two ways this was going to go. The mullahs were going to continue to fund as well as actively pursue the killing of Jews, Americans and anyone else on our side. They may or may not have been able to create a nuclear weapon, but they were certainly going to try. That was going to continue until we stopped it, permanently.

Which made the second alternative outcome this.

I think the Pope had the best summary of the argument against whacking the mullahs.

“Peace is no longer sought as a gift and a desirable good in itself, or in the pursuit of the establishment of the ordered universe willed by God, with a more perfect form of justice among men and women.”

There has been no harsher critic to U.S. military action in Iran than Pope Leo XIV:

“War is back in vogue and a zeal for war is spreading. The principle established after the Second World War, which prohibited nations from using force to violate the borders of others, has been… pic.twitter.com/5pg6NRWSLi

— Christopher Hale (@ChristopherHale) February 28, 2026

As usual, the Church is living in a make-believe world. Peace wasn't on the table. It wasn't a choice between peace and war. The Iranian regime was constantly killing someone, whether that was its own people, the Jews, American soldiers or anyone else that got in their way. The idea that what we had a week ago was some form of peace is a fantasy.

So get it done. Get rid of as much as we can and see what happens after that. I'm sure the plans are more detailed than that, but if all they were was "rubble don't make trouble," I'd be happy with it.

Tehran won the toss and has elected to receive.

Old School Lolcattery

Don't Judge Doesn't Mean Don't Judge

I don't know about the rest of you, but we Catholics have absolutely fetishized Matthew 7:1-3.

“Stop judging, that you may not be judged. For as you judge, so will you be judged, and the measure with which you measure will be measured out to you. Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own eye?"

Our ultra-feminized Church now interprets that in the strictest possible sense out of concern for others' feelings. When combined with our other favorites, "God is love" and "Be nice," we end up where we are with Toddler Catholicism.

However, get a load of Matthew 18:15-17:

“If your brother sins [against you], go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have won over your brother. If he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, so that ‘every fact may be established on the testimony of two or three witnesses.’ If he refuses to listen to them, tell the church. If he refuses to listen even to the church, then treat him as you would a Gentile or a tax collector."

Wait just one Jerusalem minute there, proconsul! How can we do that if we're not judging?

Then there's the problem of the woman caught in adultery in John 8:1-11.

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.”

If the Lord God is right there in the flesh next to me and tells me not to sin any more, I'm going to take advantage of the moment and ask for some clarification. For all I know, the heavenly demerit records might be like the IRS tax code. I'd ask for some help identifying what is and isn't a sin. What's Jesus going to say, "I don't judge, everyone needs to listen to their heart and understand right and wrong for themselves?"

If we can't judge and if there are no moral absolutes, how can we help each other avoid sin? Once a week I get together with 3 other superstitious primitives for breakfast and after we finish worshipping a statue of Mary, we discuss Jesus and other hallucinatory things. Sometimes, we'll mention a sin or two that bedevils us and the others weigh in with suggestions on how to avoid wearing Azalea Trail Maid gowns while doing lines of coke and betting on marmot races in Tijuana.

Hmm. That might have been TMI. Oh well.

In our modern Church, none of this is actually possible. We can't help each other because we can't judge.

None of it makes a lick of sense.

We've embraced Barbie Catholicism, a variation of or perhaps a waypoint on the road to Toddler Catholicism.

Logic is hard, let's affirm everyone!

On Voter IDs

There's been something nagging at me about this whole voter ID debate. The Democrats say that it would disenfranchise blacks and women and God knows who else because many of them don't have IDs.

Question: What is the ceiling on your life if you don't have an ID?

I would think that the best you could hope for would be irregular employment and housing only marginally better, if at all, than being homeless.

If that's the case, then why are we talking about whether or not these people can vote? Why is the salient feature about them how they vote? If a ton of your constituents don't have IDs, then the moral thing to do is bend Heaven and Earth to help them get IDs.

I don't expect self-interested political parties to discuss that, but I wonder why the press doesn't ask those questions when confronted with someone giving that excuse for rejecting voter ID.

Stop Complaining, Start Creating

 This is, without a doubt, the funniest video I have ever seen. I laugh constantly every time I watch it.

That’s one talented cat!

P.S. Sorry about the RAM price… 😅 pic.twitter.com/nBwWfZLAOg

— Dr. Clown, PhD (@DrClownPhD) February 21, 2026

This is AI, of course, but in addition to being life-changingly hilarious, it was almost certainly made by one person. This post has 20,000 views, but who knows how many views the original video got. When engaging content like this goes viral, hundreds of thousands or even millions see it.

For as long as I can remember, conservatives have complained that they've been locked out of the entertainment industry. All we get are the Osmonds, Kid Rock and clumsy Jesus movies. Back when there was a high barrier to entry and the progressives could gate keep the studios, those complaints were legit.

Now, however, you can tell whatever story you want if you'll just put in the time to learn the tools and generate the content.

Stop complaining and start creating.

By the way, I've now got an outline for Chapter 3 that I really like. I'm a bachelor this weekend so I'm hoping to knock it out before Monday. We'll see if my muse cooperates.

Chapter Two In Time For Mardi Gras

Happy Mardi Gras! I've been puttering around on my Bobby Lee Bond story and managed to finish Chapter 2. Enjoy!

Chapter 1, part 1.

Chapter 1, part 2.

---

“Oh, my perfect little brute, let’s get a soft towel to wrap you in, shall we?” said Basil in the gentle tone he reserved for Cat. He stood up and walked over to the linen cabinet and pulled out one of the better bath towels while Bobby packed both of their suitcases.

Cat had always liked Basil’s voice. It had a calm, even quality that made the world feel properly arranged. Now that Cat understood everything Basil was saying, he liked Basil’s voice even better.

Basil came back with the towel and arranged it near Cat, touching him, but placed so Cat could easily paw it into whatever shape seemed best. Basil knelt next to him.

“Now, I want you to listen to your Uncle Basil. This time, let’s see if we can restrain ourselves a bit and not tear the veterinary staff limb from limb as is your custom. We need them operating at tip-top efficiency, you see, and we can’t have them calling ambulances because you severed someone’s artery.”

Cat gave him a look.

“Yes, yes, I know. No one deserves your righteous fury more than veterinary staff. Nevertheless, let us attempt to be civilized this morning.”

Cat briefly rearranged the towel with one paw and gingerly lay on it. He looked up at Basil and blinked slowly.

“Now, just between you and me, you ferocious creature, I promise you this,” Basil said in a stage whisper. “Whoever did this to you will be set on fire, drawn and quartered, beheaded and then forced to listen to German operas for an entire day.”

Bobby Lee was nearly done. He was packing quickly now, shirts and boots going into the cases with more force than care. There would be time to sort them out when they got home to the river house in Alabama.

“And how about you, old boy?” Basil said to General Beauregard in a noticeably more cheerful voice. Basil had always felt Cat required seriousness and the dog required warmth. He had no idea why this was so. It simply seemed correct.

Basil saw the General’s shoulder was too badly injured for his harness so he attached the leash to the General’s collar and left it at that. Normally, the General was best led with a harness that provided support across the front of his chest instead of strangling him with the collar when dragging him along was necessary, but it wouldn’t do to have the harness press upon the General’s wounds.

“We’ll just attach the leash here and hope you consent to going in the direction we want to go. Let’s try not to be the obstinate basset hound this time, shall we?”

Like Cat, General Beauregard now understood what was being said, but unlike Cat, he was shamed by it. He had always assumed that the leash existed to force him to go places he’d rather not go. Now he understood it was there to keep the pack together. Beauregard ruminated on this rather stunning revelation. It changed everything and not for the better.

----------------

By the time the sun was clear of the trees, the SUV was already moving down the causeway towards Lafayette.

The tires hummed. Neither man spoke until they were at the main road.

“None of this makes sense,” Bobby finally said. “If they wanted to kill us, why not just go into our rooms and do the job quickly? It’s not like we hadn’t made the job easy for them.”

“Frankly, I’m embarrassed by it all. I’m glad I didn’t have to meet my ancestors under those circumstances. I could just imagine telling Great-Uncle Reginald who died at Omdurman saving the battalion that I died because I had too many gin and tonics.”

Bobby smiled and then continued his musings. “So what happened last night? Someone came to our fish camp and injected something into the General and Cat, but didn’t escape alive. That much is clear. Also, the animals put up one hell of a fight. What was that all about?”

“No one would have bothered to come all that way through the swamps to inject something into Beauregard and Cat for no purpose. It had to have been directed at us. But why? We’ve been effectively retired for years. Sure, we take on the odd job now and then, but we’re clearly way past our prime. Why us? Why there?”

Bobby turned on to the main road that led to Lafayette. “I can’t make heads or tails of it. Still, we’ve got the ID of the skiff. I’ll be able to track down who rented it.”

They were silent for a while as they drove, but the truth of the matter was that they were professionally embarrassed.

“We should have wired the place when we bought it,” said Bobby.

“Quite right, old man. An appalling lack of foresight on our part. We’re getting lazy in our dotage."

“We’ll need to get it fully prepped and equipped before we use it again. Did you leave anything behind you wanted to keep? We can turn around and go back right now if you did.”

“I appreciate the offer, Robert, but I was thinking along the same lines. The only thing I wanted was the small picture of my great Uncle Captain Edward Lionel Fitzalan at Ypres. I had it on my nightstand. It’s right here in my pocket. No need to backtrack.”

Uncle Captain Edward Lionel Fitzalan at Ypres.

Bobby smiled and shook his head. Basil could produce photos of ancestral war heroes the way American boys produced baseball cards. There was always another uncle in dress uniform or another cousin who had died nobly somewhere cold and muddy.

Bobby had nothing like that. Not from his own house, anyway. Daddy’s farm near Dothan had failed before Bobby was born, so he packed up Momma and the babies and headed west to help a cousin run cattle in Montana. That was the family story in their branch — not tragic, not heroic. Just what you did when the land wouldn’t carry you anymore.

The Bonds were Southern clear back into the 1840s, scattered now through Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia. The South was in his blood although Montana had raised him.

Time went by silently as they drove. The puzzle wouldn’t let Bobby rest. It sat in his chest like a stone.

“Who could possibly have done that?” he finally said. “We haven’t worked since the pharmaceutical company sent us to Brazil to find that researcher. As far as I could tell, no one else even cared about that.” 

Basil had no answer. He only shook his head with self-reproach.

They kept driving in silence.

-------------

“Cat?”

“Yes?”

“I’ve been a bad dog. A very bad dog.”

“What are you talking about? No one could fault you for anything that I’ve seen.”

“The leash.”

“The leash?”

“I resisted it.”

“Who wouldn’t? It’s a dreadful thing. I wouldn’t tolerate such an indignity,” replied Cat.

“It wasn’t an indignity. That’s the problem. It was love. It was only there to make sure I was with them. They used it so they knew we were all together. It wasn’t forced positioning, it was pack loyalty. I misread it all along and resisted. I resisted the pack.”

Cat didn’t truly understand, nor did he care beyond the fact that his dearest friend was unhappy. What did all this nonsense mean? He’d been a bad dog? Whatever. Cat got dinner and treats and petting day after day. Things remained properly ordered. Wasn’t that enough for everyone?

-------------

After driving in silence a while longer, Bobby shrugged and smiled, looking over at Basil, who seemed to be silently arguing his case before several centuries of disapproving Fitzalans.

“Maybe MI6 is trying to tell you to come back home,” Bobby said with a smile.

“You know, if MI6 wanted me back all they had to do was wave a million pounds under my nose.” 

“Basil, you wouldn't go back for a million pounds. Besides, you already have a million pounds several times over.” 

“Yes, well, I know that. But still, it does make one’s blood run swiftly to think of some shrew in Human Resources being forced to call me up and offer me a million pounds to return to work.”

Bobby just laughed.

---------------------------

As they neared the vet, Bobby said, “I’ll drop you off with the animals. I’m going to go check on that skiff.”

“Try to be charming.”

“Aren’t I always?” Bobby replied with a wink and a smile.

Basil just smiled and got ready to bring the animals in to the vet.

Nametags And Gators

Tomorrow is our annual Mardi Gras party held, oddly enough, on Fat Tuesday. We'll have about 50 people, tons of food, 2 mixologists and Pandora's excellent New Orleans music mix on the Sonos.

The guest list is eclectic, so there will be plenty of people who don't know each other. To help them mingle, this year, we're doing name tags. I made a sign for the name tag table, but my wife didn't like it.

Women and gators. They just don't mix well.

The main image for our eVite invitation.
The Queens of Mardi Gras are, of course, our two chihuahua mixes.

The name tags feature the girls.

Wife kitteh did not approve of this sign.

Devouring Mother First Ballot Hall Of Famer

 ... Michelle Wu, Mayor of Boston. Every problem is a baby. Every solution is cuddling. Dig this.

🚨BREAKING: Boston Mayor Michelle Wu is facing mass demands to RESIGN after she claimed every single human on planet earth has a right to be in the United States, rendering citizenship meaningless!!

What's your response to this......??👀

MAKE THIS GO VIRAL ON 𝕏. LET’S GO 👏 pic.twitter.com/TfcBdaFI6A

— Save America 🇺🇲 (@SaveAmericaNew) February 7, 2026

No worries, Michelle, I'm sure Spain won't get all of them. We'll be able to find one or two to send your way. Note all the big-eyed tykes held in the arms of grateful mothers you can see in the video below. It warms the cockles of your heart!

Many boats full of undocumented Muslims have left North Africa to invade Europe through Pedro Sanchez's Spain. We are in a religious war, many have not yet understood this. pic.twitter.com/61qfeQpaxi

— RadioGenoa (@RadioGenoa) February 12, 2026

Once they get there, Texas state representative Gene Wu has plans...

UBI Is A Mirage

I once read a book by a primate researcher that started with a charming paragraph something like this.

Growing up, I always wanted to become a lowland gorilla. Instead, I became a baboon.

He'd studied and gotten the right degrees, but the wildlife research organization that hired him sent him to study baboons instead of lowland gorillas. He became intimately familiar with them. I might have my sources crossed here, but the gist of it is accurate.

Baboons only need a few hours each day to forage enough to feed themselves. The remaining hours in the day is spent being jerks towards each other.

UBI, Universal Basic Income, is touted by the super-smart set as the solution to the problems that will arise should technology wipe out massive swaths of industry. For example, what happens if all of our trucks become self-driving? No problem, say the people with letters after their names, we will implement UBI and those barely-above-farm-animal humans will be able to eat and maintain their crude dwellings.

Life isn't about subsistence. It's about being needed, genuinely needed. Without that, well, we will  most likely become jerks. What else are we going to do with our time?

On My 20th Blogiversary

 ... a little family wisdom and the last half of the first chapter of my ... novella? book? 

Whatever.

As my regular readers know, I'm currently working full time, about 2 years past when I wanted to retire. I've made this choice because people I love need some help and I have the ability to give it to them.

I had plans for this stage of my life. Writing, working out and living part time in an Alabama river house were chief among them. Some people I love hit hard times and, as I had the ability to help them, I postponed retirement. I also postponed my dreams, knowing that at this age, "postpone" can quickly turn into "jettison."

I can get dark and brooding and found myself gravitating towards that. Serving God by loving your family while nursing resentment is like adding broken glass to a good dinner. Worthless.

I don't have the time to write properly, but I do have the time to write. At the rate I'm going, my first story might be done about the time I contract Alzheimer's, which might actually be a good thing. Each time I read the thing it will seem new to me and in no time at all, I'll be convinced I've written 10 different books. 

Hooray?

Anywho, the moral of the story is that while you may never be able to completely fulfill your dreams, you're not doing anyone any favors by not doing what you can and taking joy from that.

You can find the first part of chapter 1 here.

Here's the end of chapter 1. I'm having a great time with this. I hope it shows.

Thanks for coming along for the ride.

---

The sun was clear of the horizon by the time Robert Edward Lee Bond, 58, stumbled out of his bedroom into the living room towards the kitchen, one hand rubbing his stubbled face, the other clutching an empty plastic water bottle. He had primed the coffee maker before he and Basil had started drinking last night, knowing how the night would end. Right now, he needed the coffee. Something crunched under his cheap sandals as he stumbled into the galley kitchen in the fishing shack, but he paid it no heed, focused on pressing that button.

Bobby Lee had a private scale for hangovers. There were mild ones where the head hurt and the morning was a drag. There were medium ones where the head hurt and sleep had been fitful. Then there were those where the coffee would make him extremely nauseous. Despite their best attempts last night, this one was only in the medium category. His head hurt, he was exhausted and his thoughts were slow.

The coffee maker started. He looked up. This time, the wreckage registered. Furniture was overturned, there was broken glass on the floor, a few pieces of torn black cloth were scattered near the doorway and the screen door was open and hanging off one hinge. General Beauregard was laying on his side and Cat was cleaning the basset hound’s shoulder. The crunching under his sandals had been broken glass.

“Well, it looks like you two did some interior decorating last night. I love what you’ve done with the place. It’s got that lived-in charm although next time, you might want to set the curtains on fire to really finish the job,” he said to them, wincing at the exertion of speaking. Then he muttered to himself, “I guess this is what I get for being late with their breakfasts.”

Bobby Lee held his head in his hands, nursing his hangover until the coffee was done. He poured himself a mug and drank a few sips. It was the act of pouring the coffee more than the caffeine that got him to thinking. The wreckage didn’t make any sense at all. Also, why hadn’t the animals been at him for their food? Usually, if he was this late, they’d be barking and meowing, begging. 

Bobby got up to survey the living room. When he went over to the damaged screen door, he looked down at the dock and saw the bow of an aluminum skiff poking above the water. 

They didn’t own a skiff.

Bobby took another gulp of coffee, walked swiftly to his bedroom and yelled to Basil through Basil’s bedroom door to get up. 

Bobby was nowhere near fighting ready. He pulled his Colt 1911 from the shoulder holster slung over the chair and wished he had something sturdier than Walmart sandals on his feet.

He opened Basil’s door and told him, “Get your gun. Right now. Put some shoes on, there’s glass on the floor.” Basil was sitting up in bed, rubbing his eyes. 

“I don’t need you to tell me to put on my shoes, Robert,” he said as he slipped into his loafers. “I am not decrepit.”

“You’re older than I am.”

“By three weeks.”

“Really? Feels like a lot more than that.”

Basil rolled his eyes and stepped out, Browning 1910 in hand.

“The dock is clear,” said Bobby.

Bobby looked through the front door's spyhole and saw nothing but the empty causeway leading back through the bayou to the road. The boys had chosen this shack to give minimal cover to anyone approaching.

Bobby carefully opened the door that led to the dirt and gravel causeway. Basil, grumbling about his head, covered him. The two took turns on point as they explored around the piers beneath the house until they were satisfied no one was there. 

Bobby shrugged at Basil. “I don’t think we need to report this to our insurance company.”

“However, I must register a complaint with the maid,” replied Basil in his languid upper-crust English accent. “She simply must do a better job tidying up the place. It looks like a tornado tore through it. Ghastly.”

They walked out to the end of the pier where the bow of the skiff was bobbing slowly in the water. It looked like a rental. The ID decal was still on the bow. None of it made sense.

“Not locals. A local would’ve taken our boat,” Bobby said, motioning at the center console sitting in its cradle over the water.

“It couldn’t have been teens, they’d have stolen the car and looted the place,” replied Basil, motioning at the SUV parked underneath the shack. 

Bobby walked out to the end of the pier and then grabbed a gaff hanging in the boathouse. He fished something out of the reeds. It was a torn black t-shirt. There were blood stains.

“Gators,” said Bobby.

The boys went up the stairs and back inside. Basil kneeled by the animals as Bobby picked up the furniture and surveyed the damage. “Robert, old man, these two need the vet. Immediately.” Cat had stopped cleaning the basset hound and looked at Basil curiously as he approached.

“What is it?” asked Bobby Lee.

“Look here,” Basil said and pointed out the injuries on both animals. Cat had a burn of some kind on his left shoulder. General Beauregard’s right shoulder was sliced open, though not badly. The bleeding had stopped, but the wound would need stitches. Both animals bore swollen puncture wounds on their right sides.

“What in the world happened here last night?”

Basil didn’t answer.

By the time the sun was clear of the trees, the SUV was already moving down the causeway toward Lafayette.

The boys' fish camp. It doesn't perfectly match my image of the place, but it's close enough and I have a few more things to do for work before I knock of for the day.

On Peaceful Noise Demonstrations

 It looks like the government officials in Minnesota have finally gotten the message. That message must have been something like, "Knock it off or we'll cut off all your funding." Dig this.

Dozens of protesters were recently arrested at a Minnesota immigration protest, sparking outrage from leftists on campus.

The University of Minnesota arrested 67 protesters demonstrating against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) outside of the Graduate hotel for unlawful assembly, according to KARE, the local NBC affiliate.

The local CBS affiliate also aired footage of the event, reporting that demonstrators were “making noise to make a point” as a way of protesting ICE agents they believed to be staying at the hotel. Videos show protesters banging pots and pans, loudly playing musical instruments, shouting through megaphones, and more...

The group (Students for a Democratic Society) characterized the ordeal as a “peaceful noise demonstration” and took aim at the various law enforcement agencies responsible for the arrests, lamenting that they are “helmed and directed by Democrats or Democrat appointees, who are meant to work with the people of Minnesota against the tyranny and violence of the federal government.”

“We in the anti-ICE movement must recognize that all law enforcement agencies, whether they be campus, state, or federal, share an ideological solidarity with one another, and will defend one another every chance they get - pigs, in essence, are pigs, no matter which specific badge they wear,” the group wrote. “They are all the enemies of the people.”

One cul-de-sac down and at the other end of the cul-de-sac to boot lives a dog. Said dog barks from the moment the sun comes up to the moment the sun goes down. No one in a 2-block radius gets a moment's peace from this dog.

I don't blame the dog. The poor thing is never walked and lives in a tiny side yard the abuts a main street. I'd like to strangle the owners.

I guess the dog is performing a "peaceful noise demonstration."

It's the auditory version of this.

I'm not sure who provided the students at U of M with their civics lessons, but it sure looks like they skipped the parts dealing with the rights of other people. They were taught, "You have the right to protest," but not, "Your neighbors have the right to get some sleep at night, be able to think clearly during the day and not be sound-bombed by you and your moron friends."

I guess it's always considered "peaceful" if no one is being dismembered.

Bonus Commentary

As an affectionate student of the Confederacy, it's wonderful to see the South rise again even if it's rising in Minnesota. The protestors are practically clones of the Antebellum boneheads that demanded secession and war. Here's a quick and incomplete list of what I'm seeing in the Land of 10,000 Mistakes.

1. State and local laws should supersede Federal laws.
2. State and local troops should resist Federal troops.
3. The Federal government is tyrannical.
4. "All we ask is to be let alone."
5. The resistance is being done to preserve the status of the powerful, in this case the Democrats in office and the Somali ringleaders.
6. The motivations are racial.
7. Proponents of secession have a sickeningly maternal attitude towards the colored folk (Somalis) who they consider to be childlike innocents.
8. The state and local insurrectionists are mindlessly escalating the confrontation against a vastly superior Federal force.

I'm sure I could add more, but that's good enough for now. History doesn't repeat, but it echoes. All they need now is to resurrect John C. Calhoun so he can go on MSNBC and say things like, "The Federals have no right to come here and tell us what we can and cannot do with our negroes."

Art In Aspic

If AI comes to dominate the artistic fields as it seems to be doing, from whence will come new styles?

AI does nothing but regurgitate existing content. It forms a word and image salad from piles of harvested content and then spits out replies synthesized from that content. As far as I can tell, it seems to suggest that our current art will be preserved in aspic if the artists turn to AI as their content creator.

My old, Southern man and his cat series are essentially all the same. Here's today's rendering.

I could request it as an oil painting or line drawing or even anime, but it would all be drawn from existing content. How would a new style arise?

Further, if what you want isn't represented in sufficient quantities in it training data, you're out of luck. The frogmouth helmet was a style of helmet used in 15th and 16th century tournament jousting. It looked like this.

Because the frogmouth helmet was so niche, there aren't many of them represented in artwork. Here's what Gemini thought was a frogmouth helmet.

The dude looks like a duck. Ridiculous.

If I can't teach it how to render a frogmouth helmet, for which pictures exist, how am I going to get it to help me develop a new style? If independent, non-AI artists get priced out of the market, isn't art, whether it's prose or poetry or music or images or video, going to be fixed for all time?

Aiming At Whites, Hitting Blacks

Coming home from Mobile recently, I got routed through Charlotte. Charlotte is about 34% black. In cities with that kind of demographics, the airport employees are typically black. In Mobile, which is 50% black, all of the employees of both the airport proper and the tenant businesses are black. I could be off by one or two, but I can't recall more than a handful of non-blacks.

At CLT, it was 50-50 black and Hispanic. I didn't have time for a full statistical data collection walk, but I saw a good amount of two concourses and noted something interesting. There was very little racial mingling in the tenant businesses. The employees were either Hispanic or black.

In the businesses where the employees were Hispanic, behind the counter they mostly spoke Spanish to each other.

Of the more than 50% of American, black high school graduates who are not proficient at English, about 0.1% of them speak Spanish. That's close enough to zero to be zero.

All of those young black adults are effectively locked out of the airport jobs where the other employees are Hispanic.

Here are the demographics of Charlotte over time.

The Democrats are on the record as having opened the border in order to make whites a minority in the US. They are only incommoding whites politically. In terms of job opportunities, they are hitting blacks square in the chest.

And So It Begins

Almost all of this is mine. ChatGPT helped me clean up a sentence or two, but this is almost all me.

-------------------------

Cat’s headache had gotten worse through the night. Now, with sunrise coming to the bayou, his vision had become a bit blurry from the pain. His shoulder hurt dully from where he’d been burned, but worst of all was his side where the man had stabbed him with a needle. That burned like fire. Like his head, it had gotten worse.

Through a slight haze, he saw the General lying on his side amidst the wreckage in the living room, panting. Cat knew his breathing too well to think he was asleep.

“How are you doing, Beau?”

“Woof,” replied the basset hound. The words sounded in Cat’s head in a rich, baritone voice. “My head feels like it’s about to collapse. The place where the bad men stabbed me with that needle is absolutely on fire.”

“Mine, too,” replied Cat.

Earlier, about fifteen minutes after the changes, the surprise had worn off. The talking without sound. The sharper edges of the world simply were. Things were different now, and that was that—no more remarkable than water being wet or the sun being bright. The men and their needles had done this.

Those men were dead. The gators had seen to that. Cat felt smug satisfaction recalling the explosion in the men’s boat, the splashes and screams.

Cat limped over to where General Beauregard lay on his side. He could hear the General whimpering slightly. This was the first time Cat had ever heard the General complain. The General simply didn’t do that. 

Cat set to work cleaning the General’s side where the needle had gone in. General Beauregard barked loudly and angrily at him as soon as his tongue touched the spot. Cat involuntarily leaped back. Beauregard had never barked at him like that.

“Sorry, Beau,” said Cat. “I won’t touch that again.”

“Sorry, Cat. I didn’t mean that.”

“I know. Don’t worry about it.”

Cat moved on to one of the scrapes on General Beauregard’s shoulder and got to work, his raspy, little tongue moving along the basset hound’s fur in a rhythm that calmed them both.

Bobby and Basil were still in their bedrooms, sleeping off their drinking. 

“When Bobby comes out, we’re going to be in trouble,” said General Beauregard. “He’s going to think we did all of this.”

Cat didn’t care. Bobby and Basil would yell and wave their hands and a few hours later, dinner would come. Nothing serious ever came of the men’s anger. It simply wasn’t worth paying attention to their yelling.

“I wouldn’t worry about it, Beau. It won’t take them long to see the bow of the sunken skiff. The guys are pretty smart. They’ll figure out what happened,” replied Cat.

Why Bother Coming Here At All?

If the illegal alien Somalis in Minnesota are just as American as you or I the moment they step off the plane, why do they need to step off the plane at all? Why aren't the Somalis in Somalia just as American as the rest of us? Dittos for the Hondurans who walked across the southern border. Same for the Haitians the Biden Administration flew into the country.

Maybe we could send them all Social Security cards now and just cut out the middle man.

It seems kind of unfair to make them go to all that trouble.

A Few AI Use Cases

I'm a heavy user of AI (read: ChatGPT) and I thought it might be interesting to lay out a couple of recent use cases. I'm at the Mobile airport right now with a 3 hour delay thanks to Global Warming Climate Change a normal January cold snap, so I figured I might as well do something productive with my time.

Landscape Design

I found a good property on this trip. It's on the river proper with a great view, has half an acre of flat land, the house is well-constructed, laid out nicely and raised well off the ground and out of flood risk, the dock's piers are solid. Like most houses along the river, it's been an heirloom property. This one has been in its current family since 1970. For the last decade or so, it's been a party house. No one has lived there full time, it's just been used for weekend getaways and entertaining.

As a result, the thing is in desperate need of maintenance and a face lift. All of the outbuildings including the pier need to be torn out and rebuilt. There are tree stumps leftover from hurricanes that need to be removed. And so on and so forth. I showed a picture of the place to AI and asked for a ruthless analysis of its curb appeal. Here's what I got.

This house has zero emotional pull. It doesn’t say welcome, river life, or Southern charm. It says “county permit approved” and then stops trying. Right now it feels more like an elevated FEMA prototype than a place anyone would want to arrive at.

I think AI hit the mark on this one.

We worked together for a bit on the landscape design and ended up with this.

Same place, new paint, an entry stairway and some raised beds. The shack on the right gets torn down and removed.

That's got a completely different feel. I like it a lot. More to the point, I understand the ideas behind it. I learned from the project and saw how a few simple architectural elements pull you in and also ground the property rather than allowing it to float in the air on its pilings.

AI also recommended that I disperse my cayenne and tobacco throughout the raised beds as accent plants. I hadn't thought of that. I was going to plant them in regimented rows, but now I see that I can get just as many if I disperse them throughout the property and I won't end up with the farmer's look.

Travel Diet

This was a short, solo trip, so while I stayed at a VRBO place and cooked my own food, this time I didn't buy fruits and vegetables. It was just too much hassle and typically they come in too great a quantity. Not much common sense there, I know.

With a bit of idle time on my hands, I pulled out my phone and had a chat with AI about it. A few hours later, I had bought singles of apples, bananas, a single stalk of broccoli, a small container of blueberries and a small container of cherry tomatoes. When I combined this with the cheese, fish, steak and rice I already had, AI informed me that the only thing missing was nuts, preferably almonds or pecans.

I usually do buy some fruits and veggies, but I'd always guessed about the right combinations to give a broad spectrum of nutrients. I felt good after the chat with AI and the shopping, both physically and intellectually.

Technology On Travel

Finally, there are the IT topics. I'm quite capable of doing these things on my own, but they aren't second nature to me any more, so it helped to have AI around to give me advice. I brought along my own WiFi router, a Raspberry PI and a SONOS Roam. I hooked the router into the house's router and I had preset it to my home router's ID and password. It got itself on the Internet through the house router and my phone, SONOS and laptop all thought they were at home and required no setup at all. The Pi needed a little coaxing and that's where AI came in handy. Rather than looking up the Linux commands myself, I just cut pasted AI's suggestions into my Telnet prompt and voila! success.

I haven't tried this yet, but it dawned on me that I could download the manual from my drone, feed it into AI and then use that particular chat session to ask it individual questions like how to download the videos and images quickly and easily. Yes, I could read the manual, but really, who does that sort of thing any more?

Anywho, that's just a smattering of what I'm doing with it these days in addition to writing comic romance adventure fiction. Just wanted to share.

Of Drones And Canals

Wife kitteh bought me a drone for Christmas because she knows of my pathological fondness for perspective river photos and videos. I'm in God's Country right now, looking at vacation properties again and had a chance to play with my new toy over one of the canals off the Fish River.

Enjoy.

Pro Tip: Watch it on YouTube. It's in High Res and benefits from that platform.

Writing Fiction With ChatGPT Circa January 2026

I had to put that date modifier in the title because AI is changing so fast.

My last post, long-winded as it was, definitely TL;DR material, was almost entirely written by AI (read: ChatGPT). It was the culmination of more than a year of working with AI to develop the main characters of stories I will never write.

I use AI for all kinds of things. In the case of that story snippet, I was comparing a couple of Alabama properties we're thinking of buying. One is on the Fish River proper and has a breathtaking view, complete with sunrises perfectly made for coffee and meditation.

Boom.

It's on a tiny lot, 6000 square feet, and is a small house with no outbuildings. Still, it's a lovely place to have as a sanctuary.

The other house is upriver with more than an acre of land and a 17x20 workshop already built.

Navigable water, but no sunrises or sunsets.

I've been having prolonged conversations with AI about this project at the same time as I've been working on my Bobby Lee Bond stories. The topics intertwine as the boys - Bobby Lee and Basil, freelance superspies in their late 50s - live on the Fish River.

After AI and I decided the upstream property with the land and the workshop were perfect for us, I asked it to write a scene where the guys have just come back from a mission and Basil is on the dock in the backyard, smoking his pipe, drinking his gin and tonic and talking, as he always does when he's alone, to Cat. The dog and the cat are both telepathic and intelligent, which is revealed in the first chapter of the first story, but no one knows. They can't read minds, but they can "talk" to each other. When Basil talks to Cat, he thinks he's talking to an ordinary cat who has no idea what he is saying.

The stories are comic first, romantic second and adventure third.

What I was trying to share with that long-winded excerpt was how AI was able to bring my characters into a real estate decision discussion and give me an emotional feel for life in that house through my fiction.

As Andrew Klavan says, good art reveals Truths about life. As I've played with AI writing fiction, I've learned a lot about people, the world and life in general. It has done what Andrew would have expected - led me to pull threads about the various Truths I'm trying to express, leading me to change the way I think about many of them.

As Tim commented:

The individual sentences are fair, but does tend to drag on and meander about. It is possible to have too much atmosphere, and this is almost nothing but mood-setting. There are bits and hints of some kind of substance, but nothing actually comes into focus. In particular, the bit at the end where it implies that the cat and the dog conspired to do. . . something? To someone? . . . just feels like it is hanging around without any kind of payoff.

Tim, as usual, was spot on. That was precisely what it was. It was atmosphere brought to life by fictional people I loved.

Tacitus noted that the ancient German tribes discussed important decisions first sober and then drunk to see if the two methods converged on a solution. That concept has merit. In this case, I first analyzed the financial and daily routine aspects of these properties. Then I put my characters in them to see what they would do.

I got the same result.

Basil sat in a chair at the far edge of the dock platform, legs crossed with careful precision, glass sweating faintly in his hand. The gin and tonic caught what little light remained, the lime a pale green coin at the bottom. He lifted the glass, sniffed, and nodded. Acceptable. Not club quality, but then again, Alabama had surprised him before.

Cat crouched near the edge, forepaws tucked neatly beneath his chest, tail wrapped tight. His eyes tracked the bank with surgical focus. Something small rustled in the undergrowth. A frog, perhaps. Or something foolish enough to believe dusk offered concealment.

“It does rather creep up on you,” Basil said, not looking at Cat. “This place. You expect… I don’t know… banjos, possibly a man named Earl shouting at machinery. Instead, you get this.”

TL;DR Section

AI didn't hit a home run with that meandering excerpt. It missed several important details, a couple of which I will describe here.

First, Basil imports his gin and gets exactly what he wants, Monkey 47, which he pairs with Fever Tree Mediterranean tonic. The guys have an impeccably-stocked bar, so Basil sniffing about his gin didn't work.

Second is a particularly small nit to pick, but it bugged me. Unless it's winter, Cat would never be tucked in like a loaf. He'd be sprawled on the dock. Cats are thermometers and when it's hot they sprawl.

Third, in the following paragraph, Basil comes across as a browbeaten, upper-class Brit who escaped family oppression.

“Here,” Basil went on, “no one expects anything of you. No lineage. No portraits glaring from oak-paneled walls asking why you haven’t died gloriously yet.” He glanced down at Cat. “Rather freeing, wouldn’t you say?”

That was completely backwards. Basil is indeed from royal blood, but he is a true believer. He fully and proudly lives up to the ancient expectations of being a peer.

I noticed those mistakes at first, but didn't change them. I just liked the flow of the thing. Yes, as Tim said, it meandered terribly, but to me, it was like eating a particularly well-made meal. You don't fuss if the thing was preceded by water crackers and a shrimp and crab dip nor do you complain if the dessert is sweet potato pie with bourbon whipped cream. When it's something you love, prolonging it isn't a bad thing.

I love these characters and even when AI gets them wrong in some way, I thoroughly enjoy spending time with them. It's kind of like the way I feel when I reread the Narnia series for the 73rd time. 

That's all I really wanted to share with that excerpt. It made me happy and that seemed as good a reason to post it as any.