Friends Who Hum

 ... are just fine with me.

Our hummingbirds now allow me to get within 18" of the feeder and they're perfectly comfortable with me being there. 

I left the photo large so it might be worth a click. Enjoy!

Condescension Unto Death

Yesterday, I posted an AI-derived discussion of the King of England's recent speech to Congress which generalizes into what is happening across the UK in general by their Elites.

In essence, the British, non-Muslim Elites consider religion to have the same import as women's fashions. It's a lovely thing to have, but it's not something to take seriously. No one they know takes it seriously.

This is how they get a king who wants to change one of his titles from Defender of the Faith, meaning Anglicanism, to Defender of Faith, meaning whatever floats your boat.

This is particularly corrosive for British society in particular and civilization in general. Our civilizational assumptions are derived from Christian first principles. Because the British Elites don't seem to grasp this, they can't see how the rapid growth in Islam in England is any more important than skirt styles changing to favor long, flowing lines, natural fabrics and pastel colors.

Contrast this with the zeal they show for the NHS. If anyone suggested the NHS should be replaced by a more free-market system, they would man the battlements immediately and issue thunderous denunciations of the apostates who suggested such things.

The only thing the British Elites have pulled from the CofE is this:

Other than that, religion or the lack of it is pretty much a waste of time. This explains why they don't understand their own, much less appreciate the enormous threat that comes with importing millions of Muslims. They haven't bothered to look into it because it is irrelevant.

No worries. It will all work out great, I'm sure. It's a good bet that Muslims don't take their faith any more seriously than the British Elites do.

I was going to leave the embedded X post alone, but I think it's worth a comment. The Muslims don't see faith as irrelevant. When they speak of taking over a place, it's always in terms of religious capture. The British Elites remain utterly impervious to this because they simply cannot come to grips with the existence of people for whom faith is that importat.

Muslims living in UK, who come from Pakistan and other Islamic countries, don't like the England flag so they want to change it. pic.twitter.com/Of2uMT5ZMQ

— RadioGenoa (@RadioGenoa) April 28, 2026

But You Do Believe, I Mean Really Believe

You needn't watch the embedded videos if you don't want. They're here to provide color and background, but the gist of these ravings will be just as irrational without them as with them.

The King of England came and gave a speech to Congress. Gavin Ashenden had thoughts. Gavin rightly pointed out that the King essentially said all faiths are the same. I argue that it was more than that, it's that the King thinks they're all also little more than personal taste preferences.

The speech, Gavin's typically excellent analysis and other recent events from across the pond makes me think of this scene from Live and Let Die. This scene is the source of the title of this post.

I discussed the matter with AI and we came to this summary.

Based on his own words, Charles III treats religion not as a set of binding, objective truth claims about reality, but as a collection of interchangeable, culturally interesting belief systems—something closer to personal or societal preferences than ultimate truth. By speaking as though “all faiths and none” can be equally affirmed and that dialogue can reconcile fundamentally incompatible worldviews, he effectively flattens serious theological differences into matters of taste, suggesting that faith lacks the same gravity, urgency, and truth-status as issues he speaks about more forcefully, like public policy or institutions.

Basil Weighs In

I then asked it to generate a scene where Basil, an orthodox Anglican determined to defend the faith even if he's the last one doing it, holds forth. I rather liked the results. Enjoy.

The night had settled over the river like a soft, humid cloak, thick with the scent of water and pine and something faintly sweet that drifted in from the marsh. The porch boards held the day’s heat, giving it back slowly, as though reluctant to surrender the sun entirely. Fireflies stitched erratic constellations over the dark water, blinking in and out like faulty lanterns in the hands of invisible ferrymen.

At the far end of the porch, Basset Hound General Beauregard lay on his side, snoring with the deep, rhythmic authority of a man who had fought a war, won it, and now felt no further obligation to remain conscious. Every so often one long ear twitched, as though even in sleep he were issuing minor corrections to the universe.

Closer to the railing, Cat sat upright, tail wrapped neatly around his paws, eyes fixed on the fireflies. He was not watching them for their beauty. He was watching them because things that moved like that—irregular, flickering, unpredictable—often distracted the smaller, dumber creatures of the night. And distracted creatures made mistakes. Cat believed deeply in mistakes.

Behind him, in the pool of lamplight, Bobby Lee Bond leaned back in his chair, boots crossed, one hand resting loosely on his stomach, the other holding a glass of amber liquid that caught the light just enough to glow. The drink—his “Cat Behaves”—smelled faintly of citrus and something sharper beneath it. A Perdomo Lot 23 smoldered between his fingers, sending up a slow, contemplative ribbon of smoke.

Across from him, Basil had achieved a posture that suggested both leisure and imminent attack. One leg crossed elegantly over the other, pipe angled just so, gin and tonic resting untouched at his elbow—he looked, at first glance, like a man content with the world.

He was not.

“—I say, Bobby,” Basil began, with the particular clipped intensity that meant a speech was not merely forthcoming but inevitable, “the difficulty is not that the fellow is insincere. Oh no. That would be almost a relief. One could deal with insincerity. One could call it out, expose it, have done with it. No, no—the trouble is that he appears to believe what he’s saying, and that is infinitely more alarming.”

Bobby took a slow draw from his cigar, eyes half-lidded, letting Basil gather steam. He had learned, over the years, that Basil required a certain runway.

Cat flicked an ear back, listening. This would be interesting. Basil in full cry was one of the more reliable entertainments of the civilized world.

“You see,” Basil continued, tapping the bowl of his pipe lightly against the armrest for emphasis, “a man in his position—Defender of the Faith, no less—cannot, simply cannot, speak of faith as though it were a matter of seasonal preference. ‘This year, we are terribly keen on mutual understanding, old boy. Next year, perhaps a dash of transcendence, if it’s not too frightfully inconvenient.’”

He took a sharp breath, then pressed on.

“I mean to say, one imagines what my great-great-grandfather Fitzallen would have made of it. The man was shot through the lung at Inkerman and still managed, while bleeding rather alarmingly into his tunic, to inform a rather startled Russian officer that Anglican doctrine was not, in fact, a matter for polite negotiation.”

Bobby smiled faintly.

“I’m sure that clarified things for the Russian,” he said.

“It clarified everything,” Basil snapped. “That is precisely the point. Clarity! The man knew what he believed, knew it to be true, and behaved accordingly. None of this—this—this ghastly business of suggesting that all roads lead to the same destination so long as we hold hands and speak in soothing tones.”

Cat’s tail gave a small, approving twitch. He did not much care for roads, destinations, or hand-holding, but he approved of clarity. Clarity meant fewer surprises. Fewer surprises meant fewer interruptions to his plans.

Basil leaned forward now, warming to his theme.

“And then there was Fitzallen the Elder—1789, Paris, most unfortunate business—who was asked, quite directly, whether he thought the Church might accommodate itself to the new spirit of the age. Do you know what he said?”

“I suspect you’re about to tell me,” Bobby murmured.

“He said, ‘Sir, the Church accommodates itself to nothing. It is the world that must accommodate itself to the Church, or perish attempting the alternative.’ And then, I might add, he had the good sense to leave the country before anyone could object too strenuously.”

Bobby took another sip of his drink, letting the citrus bite settle.

“You’re describing a world,” he said quietly, “where there was less… room.”

“Room?” Basil repeated, as though the word itself were faintly obscene. “My dear fellow, we are not discussing upholstery. We are discussing truth. Truth does not require room. It requires recognition.”

He gestured broadly with his pipe, nearly losing a small shower of ash onto the porch.

“When a man stands before a nation—before your nation, I might add—and speaks as though the profound differences between belief systems can be resolved by ‘dialogue,’ he is not merely being polite. He is suggesting that the differences themselves are somehow secondary. That they are, what—misunderstandings? Linguistic accidents? Slight variations in taste?”

Cat turned his head slightly, eyes narrowing. Basil was circling something now, something sharper.

“And they are not,” Basil pressed on. “They are claims about the nature of reality itself. About God. About man. About sin and redemption and the entire blasted structure of existence. These are not trifles to be sorted out over tea.”

Beauregard snorted loudly in his sleep, then settled again, as though registering a mild objection from the depths of unconsciousness.

Bobby let the silence stretch for a moment.

“Let me ask you something, Basil,” he said finally. “Do you think he believes any of it?”

Basil paused. Just for a moment.

“That,” he said more slowly, “is the most unsettling possibility of all. That he believes in something—but not in the way that requires him to risk anything for it.”

Cat’s ears tilted forward. Now that was interesting.

Basil leaned back again, but the intensity did not leave him.

“You see, Bobby, a man who truly believes—truly believes that he has grasped something about the ultimate structure of reality—cannot treat it as one option among many. He may be courteous, he may be restrained, he may even choose his words carefully—but he cannot, in the end, pretend that contradictions are merely… decorative.”

Bobby nodded slightly, the glow of his cigar lighting his face for a moment.

“That’s about right,” he said.

They sat in silence for a while after that.

The river moved, slow and dark. The fireflies continued their erratic dance. Somewhere in the brush, something small made a mistake.

Cat’s eyes sharpened.

Basil, having exhausted his immediate supply of Fitzallens, took up his gin and tonic at last and drank deeply, as though fortifying himself for the next round.

Bobby leaned back, smoke drifting upward, and said nothing.

On the far end of the porch, Beauregard snored on, entirely untroubled by questions of truth, monarchy, or the fate of Western civilization.

Cat rose silently, slipped into the darkness, and went to see about the mistake.

Targeting Trump And Making Money

Last night, at the White House Correspondents Dinner, another lefty tried to assassinate Trump. Here's a good summary of the threat.

Everyone is overlooking the most chilling detail regarding last night’s third assassination attempt on POTUS.

The shooter at the DC correspondents diner was identified as Cole Tomas Allen, 31, from California. part-time teacher/tutor. Teacher of the Month in December 2024 at C2 Education. BS Mechanical Engineer, Master in Computer Science, video game developer. Donated to Kamala in 2024.

This dude has a background (so far) as normal as it gets...

He was just some ordinary schlub who traveled across the country to attack POTUS. No surveillance system in the world, with the possible exception of the KGB under Stalin, could have detected and prevented the attack.

When it was recently revealed that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) had been funding hate groups like the KKK and Nazis, the SPLC came up with the cockamamie excuse that they were funding "informants" within these organizations to detect possible threats against their employees. That was obvious nonsense.

With a pool of possible assailants of 360,000,000 or so people, there is no surveillance scheme in the world, save again for Stalin's, that could protect you from every possible threat. That's why wealthy and vulnerable people hire bodyguards and pay for protection systems. Keeping yourself safe is a solvable problem because you always know where you are and where you are going. Trying to detect every possible random attack vector before they strike is idiotic.

There isn't anywhere near enough white supremacy in America to justify the rivers of cash pouring into the SPLC so the SPLC went out and funded the hate it was trying to fight, generating incidents it could then use in its marketing campaigns.

Even with all the security afforded a president, this guy broke through. If it were you trying to keep him safe, what would you do, review the security policies surrounding Trump or focus on nationwide surveillance campaigns sufficient to stop any threat?

The MGB Is Gone, But Not Forgotten

In our yard, we have low voltage lighting. Three of the lights don't work any more after only 2-3 years. I dug up the first one and found that it was tied in to the main power line with a cheap dagger connector. It's the kind that clamps on to the power cable and puts a narrow, conductive dagger through the insulation to make the connection. Water, such as it is here in the SoCal desert of San Diego, had rusted that conductive dagger to the point of dissolving.

Enter my experience rewiring the MGB. I pulled out my crimp connectors and heat-shrink tubing and voila! or should I say, "there you go!*" and the lights were working again.

My heat shrink tubing was too narrow for the multi-wire end of the connectors so in one place it required some electrical tape, but at the point, I was over the whole affair and unwilling to clip, strip and rewire everything.

Suffice it to say, my MGB wiring version will outlive all of those wretched, CCP dagger connector pieces of junk.

Bloody commies.

* - This is the British version of voila!

They're Just Looting The State

Two more data points describing the looting of California.

🚨 IT'S OFFICIAL: HHS Sec. RFK Jr. and the Trump admin SHUT DOWN nearly 500 hospice providers for fraud in LA alone...

...and NOT A SINGLE ONE asked for the funds to be reinstated.

Because they are FRAUDSTERS. And invented addresses.

"They were going and giving people in poor… pic.twitter.com/BorWZ17veL

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) April 18, 2026

---

California Dems just passed the "Stop Nick Shirley Act."

Instead of uncovering Waste, Fraud & Abuse … Dems want to fine the journalists uncovering it by “Silencing the Press!”@TheJusticeDept, this is against the constitution and needs an injunction! pic.twitter.com/3RUGoHM4UI

— C-Reason🇺🇸 (@CreasonJana) April 19, 2026

---

Eventually, California's bill will come due, probably sooner rather than later. That Alabama property is looking better and better all the time.

Buying Real Estate With AI

We're going to put an offer in on an excellent Alabama river house in the next day or two. It's way cool. I posted the view from the dock a while back. Here's a view of the excellent kitchen, complete with a gas stove. Yay!

The house is lovely, but overpriced. Our realtor, at the request of my real estate expert wife, sent us the comps for the area. The average time on market is about 70 days. This one has been on the market for over 200 days. Clearly, the market is signaling the price is wrong.

Yesterday, we had a phone conversation with our Alabama realtor about what and how we wanted to offer for the property. I've bought and sold houses as well as built and remodeled houses, but I know when I'm totally outclassed. I didn't intend on doing much more than listening to the two experts discuss the place. Still, I wanted some amount of analysis prior to the conversation.

I handed the comps PDF document to AI* and asked it to analyze the situation. It did a reasonably thorough job and pointed out some things I'd missed. At the conclusion of our phone call with the realtor, the girls decided on a price to offer for the house. It was within a percent or two of AI's recommendation and for the exact same reasons AI had given me.

Not bad.

* - For AI, read ChatGPT.

If The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does

 ... then the contrapositive must be true as well:

"The purpose of a system cannot be what it doesn't do."

Roads

Keeping with the recent theme of what San Diego systems in particular and California systems in general are designed to do, let's look at a few more examples. Below is a map of an area I have traveled hundreds of times.

The Friars Road / Sea World Drive intersection has been closed for about 6 years. There has been some kind of construction allegedly taking place on the section of Friars underneath the I-5 freeway.

6 years.

San Diego is wealthy. California is wealthy. The weather here is utterly perfect for construction projects.

6 years.

It would be hard to make the case that the primary purpose of the City of San Diego is to maintain its roads. That cannot be true because the roads are not promptly and properly maintained despite mountains of money being spent. 

Similarly, there is "road construction" going on in many places in San Diego where I drive. The orange cones are up, lanes are blocked, cement barricades are in place, but there is no work being done. No workers, no vehicles, no staging of materials, nothing. If any is present, it is minimal.

Education

California spends about $25,000 per student, an amount that is 30% higher than it was in 2020. We place near the top in terms of spending. Only 29% of our 4th graders are proficient at reading. We place near the bottom in that category.

Whatever its purpose might be, educating our children is not the primary purpose of the California Department of Education.

Looting

One could make a reasonable argument that the purpose of the state and city governments in California is to loot the citizens.

This is no longer surprising to me:

Almost 200 FRAUDULENT HOSPICE & HEALTHCARE agencies in one single building in Los Angeles, California...

I've never seen so much fraud like we are uncovering now, in my entire life.

This has got to stop now. pic.twitter.com/lHuZjibK2j

— The SCIF (@TheSCIF) March 31, 2026

Why Do You Rob States?

When asked why he robbed banks, Willie Sutton replied, “Because that's where the money is.”

States have a lot more money than banks.

This is a partial reply to Tim's comment on a recent post where he pointed out that even 200,000 Chinese anchor babies becoming eligible to vote wouldn't be that big of a deal. I might have thought that as little as 3 months ago. Something completely changed my mind. The California High Speed Choo Choo, as Deano calls it, flipped me.

Authorized in 2008, it was supposed to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco. Anyone familiar with California permitting and zoning red tape knew instantly that it was going to be insanely expensive and take forever. AI says that as of April 2026, the estimated cost for the full Phase 1 California High-Speed Rail project (San Francisco to Los Angeles/Anaheim) has reached approximately $126 billion to $135 billion and I have no reason to doubt it. 

Not a single mile of track has been laid so far.

This sad, little bridge in Central California is just about the only solid evidence the high speed choo choo project even exists.

Someone on X made a snarky comment that completely changed my thinking about not just the high speed choo choo, but the graft and corruption uncovered in Minneapolis, California and elsewhere as well as the voter fraud. In short, the post asserted that there was never any intention of building the railroad at all. It was all graft from the start.

It immediately rang true. When it was announced in 2008, I thought there was no way it was ever going to happen. I'd gone through the permitting processes on relatively straightforward remodels and construction and they were beyond onerous. This one, cutting across any number of habitats of strange and unusual creatures, seemed doomed from the start.

It was Willie Sutton on an utterly cosmic scale. The entire project was intentional theft. Everyone involved in it, save for the Global Warming Climate Change fanatics, knew it would never be built.

New hypothesis: The Democratic Party is mostly AWFLs with a pack of ruthless and intelligent parasites riding on top, directing it. 

The AWFLs thought they were stopping the death of polar bears while the parasites were sticking needles into the biggest financial veins they could think to find.

Michael Schellenberger, ex-progressive, wrote the staggering San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities. It detailed the results of his inside-the-system research into how SanFran managed to spend stunning amounts on the homeless without having any effect other than increasing the size and severity of the problem. What he discovered was a huge industry that made money off of suffering.

Some of the NGOs he detailed would get money from the government at the beginning of the year and then do nothing but lobby and budget for next year's money. That was it. That was all they did. Get money and then get next year's money.

Our youngest son and I went to a Padres game recently. The stadium is near one of our zombieland areas. We had to drive through it to get to the game. Every zombie we saw had a price tag of about $80,000 per year. The money wasn't going to the zombies, it was going to government agencies and NGOs that would kick some of that money back to Democrat campaigns.

Dig this.

Elon Musk was right.

The federal government was just writing checks to anyone who asked for years on end.

ZERO Verification Requirements.

Today, I confirmed a pattern:

Dissolved business entities billing Medicaid at scale.

In just one small batch, I’ve verified over… pic.twitter.com/rDCtS3HrJS

— Walter Curt (@wcdispatch) April 12, 2026

The Somali fraud schemes in Minneapolis were of a piece. Dittos for the Los Angeles hospice scam recently uncovered by people doing the most basic of due diligence.

In answer to Tim's comment, I'll just stop with this:

Why was the border wide open for 4 years? Why don't we have national voter ID? Why are we all alone in the world in having birthright citizenship?

Add it all up. It's Willie Sutton at as large a scale as can be managed. It's not that 200K Chinese will change a national election, although if they are properly placed, they certainly could. It's that birthright citizenship is just one more tool in the graft toolbox.

Steve Martin On Performing Live

I love watching artists speak about their profession. This bit from Steve Martin was particularly good.

Enjoy.

Pre-Secession Feeling

 Dig this.

Across the country, at least ten states, including Washington, are now exploring or have already passed an exit or wealth tax to combat revenue losses from residents fleeing to lower tax areashttps://t.co/rSrea03PNm

— KOMO News (@komonews) April 8, 2026

And this.

The past five years have seen a massive migration of Americans out of heavily Democratic counties and into ones where Donald Trump won majorities in each of the past three elections. That’s according to an exclusive analysis by Issues & Insights of the latest Census Bureau and election data.

Most analyses of internal migration patterns look only at state-level data. And what they show is that blue states are losing population to red states, and have been for many years.

I&I wanted to go deeper, so we used the latest Census data on migration between counties, and compared that with how these counties voted in the past three presidential elections.

What we found was that millions aren’t just moving out of blue states, but are moving out of blue counties within states.

Add on top of that the likely decision by the Supreme Court to uphold birthright citizenship even in the face of massive Chinese birth tourism where there may be as many as 200,000 Chinese in China who were born here and then quickly whisked back home. The blue states will absolutely be sending them mail-in ballots which will be perfectly legal.

How long can that go on and get worse as more and more foreign governments take advantage of the situation to create massive numbers of Manchurian Voters? When do the red states, becoming redder by the day, say they've had enough?

It's not just a sorting of the population, it's a realignment of irreconcilable camps. It's almost like the Southern cadets and instructors at West Point mounting their horses and riding home after secession, but before the start of the war.

Add to that this, which is being uncovered in several forms in several blue cities.

California Governor Gavin Newsom is embroiled in a national fraud scandal. Thus far, much of the coverage has focused on alleged schemes related to unemployment insurance, hospice care, and food stamps. In this exclusive investigation, we shine a light on one of California’s largest initiatives: the In-Home Supportive Services Program, or IHSS, which pays family members and other individuals to provide home-based care for the elderly and disabled—at a cost of nearly $30 billion per year.

On the surface, IHSS presents itself as an instrument of compassion, directing billions to caregivers who help with cooking, personal care, laundry, and other daily needs inside recipients’ homes. But a growing number of experts and critics argue that the program is rife with fraud, losing roughly an estimated $6 billion to $12 billion yearly to scammers. Meantime, the state’s powerful home-care unions collect more than $149 million in membership dues, funneling money into the political network supporting Newsom and California Democrats.

The level of fraud is so great that it is impossible to believe that the fraud wasn't planned by everyone involved.

How long can this last?

Beatnik Prayers

Between work, family commitments, Cursillo commitments, parish activities and more, I'm redlining most days right now.

For Cursillo, I'm one of the assistant leaders for this coming weekend retreat. As such, I've got to write a short letter to each of the 25 newbies who will be coming up with us. Naturally, I asked AI to help. Here's the anodyne letter it wrote for me.

Dear Brother in Christ,

I have been praying the Rosary and have fasted in preparation for your retreat, asking the Lord to open your heart to His grace. You are not walking into this weekend alone. Christ is already there, waiting to meet you in a powerful and unexpected way.

Simply receive whatever the Lord wishes to give you. There is nothing you need to prove and nothing you need to earn. I will continue to keep you in prayer throughout the weekend.

De Colores,

[Your Name]

That's a very nice base on which to improvise, but then I asked it to give me a beatnik scat version. I think I like it better, you dig?

Brother in Christ,

Hey man, dig this—you’re walking into something holy, something real. I’ve been rollin’ the Rosary beads for you, fasting and layin’ it down before the Lord, askin’ Him to crack open your heart and let His love pour in, slow and deep. You ain’t walkin’ in alone, no sir—Christ is already there, cool and steady, waitin’ just for you.

So take it easy, let it happen, don’t push, don’t prove—just be, and receive what He’s layin’ on you. I’ll be keepin’ the prayer rhythm goin’ all weekend, askin’ that you feel it, know it—that you’re seen, loved, and called, man, right down to your bones.

De Colores,

[Your Name]

One of my favorite things about AI is the way you can get it to generate wacky material on a whim.

On Centurions And Truth

It was Palm Sunday a few days ago and I had the rodents* at the 1100 Mass. The Gospel reading was Matthew 27:11-54. It's an absolute beast of reading, being the full Passion. I used AI to summarize it so I didn't accidentally anesthetize the rodents.

In the reading is this passage.

The centurion and the men with him who were keeping watch over Jesus feared greatly when they saw the earthquake and all that was happening, and they said, "Truly, this was the Son of God!"

Why was it that the Centurion and his boys were the ones who understood what was happening?

First off, you have to recognize who they were. The Centurion was equivalent to a Master Sergeant. He'd come up through the ranks, seen a lot of combat, plenty of executions including crucifixions and, if he was like the E-7s and above I've known, he was eminently practical, grounded and hard-boiled.

The Centurion. He smoked Marlboro Reds, of course.

When he was on guard duty in a quiet area, he and the boys would stand around, shooting the breeze. They'd talk politics, conspiracy theories, gossip, sex, the military life and swap campaign stories. They'd all have known a lot about Jesus. He was a big deal. You know that because when he entered Jerusalem, the people waved palm branches at him in his honor.

The Roman soldiers would have known about the rumors of miracles and the way the Jews had hoped He'd be a military leader and lead an uprising. When He preached peace and love, the Roman soldiers must have been relieved. The last thing they wanted was this relatively quiet backwater to go hot.

Then there was their local flag officer, Pontius Pilate. If they hadn't seen it themselves, they'd certainly have heard how he got shoved around by the Jews over this Jesus guy. Pilate hadn't seen any need to crucify Him, but the Jews shoved it down his throat. That's not a small deal. You never want to see your commanding officer get kicked in the nards like that.

Finally, there was Jesus' reaction to the whole thing. The Romans had seen plenty of execution and torture sessions and every other time, the victim would be crying or begging or protesting his innocence. Here was a totally innocent man quietly taking his unearned punishment.

Yep, Jesus was special the Centurion and his boys could all see it. They saw it because they had no dog in the fight. They'd been raised with polytheism which they didn't really believe. They'd grown up in a cynical, hedonistic world. Jesus was different from all that. Certainly what he preached was radically different.

When Jesus finally kissed the big strawberry and the sky got dark and the Earth shook, you better believe the Centurion knew what had just happened. 

He may have been the only one who really understood it. Well, he and his boys.

Utterly grounded, with nothing invested in it one way or another, they could see the Truth when it was blasted at them at full volume. Everyone else would have reasons or excuses or explanations or ways of minimizing what had just happened. The Centurion was trained to see what was, what really was.

It's my firm belief that the author of Matthew's Gospel did a bit of editing in that passage. I would bet it was something more along the lines of, "Are you (effing) kidding me? This guy is clearly the Son of God. How could these (effing) morons be so stupid as to kill the Son of God?"

Next time I'm having any kind of doubts about my faith, I will imagine explaining them to the Centurion. He'd box my ears and yell at me like a drill sergeant about being the dumbest animal that had ever crawled the Earth if I couldn't see the Truth.

* - The rodents means the Children's Liturgy. These particular rodents are aged 3-9. Like the Pied Piper, I take them away from their parents for the readings and the sermon for rodent-appropriate teaching and general mayhem in a back room. It's loads of fun.

San Diego Vs. Mobile

I visited God's Country earlier this week to look at a house on the east side of Mobile Bay. After landing at MOB, I drove over to Fairhope on Airport Blvd to I-65 to I-10 to Alabama 98 and down to Fairhope. Going back to the airport later during the week, I took the same route, but kept to the surface streets going down Government Street instead of the freeways. The drive is about 35 miles. Fairhope proper is high rent. If you're familiar with San Diego, think La Jolla. Around MOB, it's low- to mid-rent.

As I drove this time, I noticed something. No potholes, no homeless, no trash. I mean zero. There might have been the occasional grocery store plastic bag, but I didn't see more than 3 in that 35 mile drive.

Here in San Diego, the streets are practically dirt roads in some spots. Where our rental is in Bay Park, the roads are atrocious. There are large chunks of suburban San Diego that are free of the homeless, but it's almost impossible to drive even 10 miles, much less 35 without passing several zombies. San Diego has large sections that are zombielands. Everything near the San Diego River, anything in the Sports Arena area and all of downtown from the Barrio to North Park is zombielands. In the zombielands, trash is ubiquitous.

That's just the homeless. That doesn't touch upon the impoverished areas that are common to all cities.

In short, common areas in San Diego are in pretty poor shape. Common areas in Mobile are in excellent shape.

I asked AI* for the relative per capita government spending and got this.

City	Total Budget	Population	Per Capita Spending
San Diego	$5.82B	~1.4M	~$4,100
Mobile	$455M	~187K	~$2,400

San Diego spends 70% more per person than Mobile.

How about per square mile?

City	Budget	Area	Spending per sq mi
San Diego	$5.82B	372 sq mi	~$15.6M
Mobile	$455M	180 sq mi	~$2.5M

San Diego spends about 6x as much per square mile.

AI tied itself in knots trying to make excuses for San Diego, but they were all self-inflicted. It blamed the homeless, labor costs, regulations and so forth. The truth of the matter is that San Diego is deep blue and Mobile is moderately red. Mobile has a Republican mayor, but it is also 50% black, so I doubt the Republicans sweep to victory in every election.

Decay is a choice and San Diego has made that choice.

Speaking of decay, in the Gulf South, you live in an environment rife with predators from the microbe level on up to the plants and animals. If you leave a house unkept for a year in San Diego, you get weeds, but not much else. If you do that in the South, your house will begin to be devoured by mold, fungus, weeds, vines, trees, insects and more. San Diego has occasional, localized fires. Mobile has regular downpours and floods in addition to hurricanes.

Make all the excuses you want, but San Diego has a much easier maintenance problem to solve than Mobile.

There's much more. California is having spasms about how expensive housing is here. Our rental garners an absolutely obscene amount of money every month. I have no idea how anyone can afford it, but we're only charging the going rate which is upwards of $4000 per month. The only reason our middle son and youngest son have houses here in San Diego is that we took care of their down payments. My boss at work, a middle-aged woman of some accomplishment, cannot afford to buy a house. It's insane.

To solve this problem, San Diego has permitted the construction of enormous numbers of high-density housing - condos, townhouses and apartments. The road system was designed for a much smaller population and its flow capacity cannot be increased. As a result, the freeways slow down hours before rush hour and come to a standstill for a good hour or more during rush hour.

In Mobile, the I-10 tunnel that leads from the city to the Mobile Bay bridge clogs up briefly around rush hour and the surface streets slow a bit, but the rest of the time, it's only the timing of the traffic lights and the rural school buses stopping to let kids on or off that slow your journey.

Clearly, San Diego governance is horrible in the short, medium and long-term sense. The homeless problem could be solved in a month by strictly enforcing vagrancy laws. The trash and pothole problem would then have access to money now spent on the zombies. In the long term, there's probably not a lot that could be done. Like Nashville and Atlanta, just to name two places I've experienced, San Diego has outgrown its infrastructure.

AI estimates we have about 200,000 illegals in the county. That's roughly 10% of the population. Maybe the long-term solution would be border enforcement. Note that I haven't even touched upon California's looming fiscal catastrophe.

At any rate, the sooner we get a safe house in Dixie, the better.

I've traveled all over the country and as far as I'm concerned, Mobile, Alabama has the best skyline of all.

* - For AI, read ChatGPT.

Is It The One?

I spent the week in God's country, looking at a particular property on the Fish River. The place was so beautiful, even wife kitteh loved it and said it was The One. She didn't go with me on the trip, but the realtor had done a thorough video walk-through before I left. She'll come with me on the next trip, after the inspections and before we close.

The view from the dock is perfectly adequate.

Theology's Hard, Let's Go Shopping

If this isn't a challenge to Fr. James Martin, SJ*, I don't know what is.

I wasn’t expecting the selling dildos to fund abortions phase of Anglicanism https://t.co/82iQGBFpbq

— 🏛 𝐒𝐭𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐧 🏛 (@nonregemesse) March 22, 2026

This isn't just religiously incoherent coming from a Judeo-Christian minister, it's not even acknowledging the existence of coherent thought. This is therapeutic deism with a collar.

God is love. Don't judge. Be nice.

In one of the replies to this tweet, someone said, "At this point, why not just erect a statue of Moloch in front of the church?"

* - Little Jimmy is the Catholic Church's answer to the question, "Just how far can a priest go in support of every sexual degeneracy known to man or beast and not get kicked out of the priesthood?" The answer in the form of the Jimster is pretty darn far.

Meet Bear!

We have a new member of the Catican Guards. His name is Bear.

The Guards doing their Abbey Road pose. Bear is in the back in the blue harness.

Bear is part Labrador. The people at the dog rescue place think he might also be part beagle in which case he's a Beagador. I think he's actually part basset hound, which is an American breed, making him ... wait for it ... an Ambassedor.

You're welcome.

In my stories, I have a basset hound named General Beauregard. If Bear is, in fact, part basset, then he can have the nickname General Bearegard. The fur on his back is mottled, which would make him ... wait for it ... the very model of a mottled major general.

Two for the price of one!

His legs are too short for him to jump on the couch, which is just fine with the girls. They're little old ladies now, about 11 years old. They like him well enough, but he's a puppy and he wants to play. They do not. Lily, the small, fat one, will play a bit with him, but Leah, the princess, will have none of it. She's already put her paw down regarding playtime and Bear got the message.

It was wife kitteh who wanted the new dog, but since I get up early and therefore pull the morning duty with Bear, he has attached very strongly to me. It's great fun to come out of my study for a snack and see Bear running towards me joyfully to get his lovins.

He's a good boy and has only had a couple of accidents. At 4 months old, a lot of his training was done by the dog rescue group. That means all we have to do is enjoy him.

Havana Shrugged

 From the last part of Atlas Shrugged:

There were not many lights on the earth below. The countryside was an empty black sheet, with a few occasional flickers in the windows of some government structures. and the trembling glow of candles in the windows of thriftless homes. Most of the rural population had long since been reduced to the life of those ages when artificial light was an exorbitant luxury, and a sunset put an end to human activity. The towns were like scattered puddles, left behind by a receding tide, still holding some precious drops of electricity, but drying out in a desert of rations, quotas, controls and power-conservation rules. 

But when the place that had once been the source of the tide — New York City — rose in the distance before them, it was still extending its tights to the sky, still defying the primordial darkness, almost as if, in an ultimate effort, in a final appeal for help, it were now stretching its arms to the plane that was crossing its sky. Involuntarily, they sat up, as if at respectful attention at the death bed of what had been greatness. 

Looking down, they could see the last convulsions: the lights of the cars were darting through the streets, like animals trapped in a maze, frantically seeking an exit, the bridges were jammed with cars, the approaches to the bridges were veins of massed headlights, glittering bottlenecks stopping all motion, and the desperate screaming of sirens reached faintly to the height of the plane. The news of the continent’s severed artery had now engulfed the city, men were deserting their posts, trying, in panic, to abandon New York, seeking escape where all roads were cut off and escape was no longer possible. 

The plane was above the peaks of the skyscrapers when suddenly, with the abruptness of a shudder, as if the ground had parted to engulf it, the city disappeared from the face of the earth. It took them a moment to realize that the panic had reached the power stations — and that the lights of New York had gone out. 

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.