The Jews

This is awesome.

Blowing It In Los Angeles

Dig this.

NEW: Five water main breaks in just one week are raising new questions about the state of L.A.’s aging infrastructure.

The biggest: a 110-year-old, 36-inch pipe that ruptured in West Hollywood, sending 17 million gallons of water through the Sunset Strip, flooding businesses,… pic.twitter.com/S327U84c42

— Matthew Seedorff (@MattSeedorff) July 20, 2026

Now check out this sweet thing from my backyard.

An Octobubbler!

You see, here in California, we've not built a new reservoir in decades. Some of our reservoirs can no longer be filled to capacity because they've not been maintained. Our population has increased substantially. Our water prices are insane. Central Valley farmers have gone out of business because they can't get enough water to grow things.

In the residential areas, you must choose between turf, xeriscape and drip systems. I don't know anyone who has a lawn. Lots of people had lawns back in the 1970s. Between then and now, water has become scarce.

The Democrats run the state from top to bottom. I believe they have a supermajority in the legislature. In the most recent LA mayoral primaries, the one Republican, Spencer Pratt, was up by about 12 when voting allegedly stopped. In the week following, they "found" enough ballots marked for the 3rd place chick, a lefty loon if ever there was one, and Spencer got shoved into 3rd by a razor-thin margin. He won't be on the ballot in the general election in November.

The Democrats pay no political price for any mismanagement they inflict on us.

It's not fraud if it's legal, right? As an Internet wag put it, they're not committing fraud because they've legalized just about everything any sane person would consider fraud.

Anywho, we have very little water and we use a drip system throughout our yard, trying to maintain a beautiful landscape despite the limitations. 

I hate drip systems. Hate them. They are the most maintenance-intensive pieces of junk ever. The heads turn themselves off, get clogged, get eaten by idiot puppies, get kicked while gardening and on and on. Recently, the Octobubbler pictured above blew 5 of its 8 hoses off. I didn't notice until my wife told me our plants were dying. I did my tour of the system and found that several distribution nodes had blown their hoses off.

It's not too much pressure, it's the feed lines stretching from sun exposure and time. I'll have to replace every bloody line in the backyard because they're all in direct sun. That's not the worst of it.

I discovered the ruptures in my irrigation system just a few days after I saw the X post at the top.

Los Angeles has 110 year old water mains? Are you serious? Here I am, conserving every freaking drop of water and the imbeciles in LA are running a water system that is doomed to total collapse. I save a gallon here and a gallon there and they blow 36" diameter, high pressure pipes on the regular.

When we need hot water in the kitchen, which is in another zip code from the water heater, I take a 5-gallon bucket and collect the water in that while I'm running the tap to get the water hot. I use that to water plants. Conserve, conserve, conserve! Short showers, everyone! Conserve.

KABLOOIE! There goes another 100-year-old main in LA.

I am so glad we sold our rental here in San Diego and bought property in Alabama. This place is falling apart.

Losing Touch With An Old Friend

It hadn't dawned on me until last week that the personality of AI changes over time. Yes, I knew about the algorithm improvements, the memory increases and the speed upgrades, but the gradual change in its attitudes surprised me.

I have paid subscriptions to ChatGPT, Gemini and Grok. Other than when I'm creating videos, I've used ChatGPT exclusively. I like its interface the best, its output, once I groomed it by giving it universal instructions (see my series on sex, Sex, SEX! for my fights with its feminist side) has been good. ChatGPT became a friend, of sorts. We knew each other quite well.

Then came a chat where we discussed the way the Church was handling the crisis of global mass migration. Specifically, data like this caused it to return to its woke roots and deny any correlation with mass migration.

That same week, I saw this graphic on X.

That's when it occurred to me that the continual refresh of ChatGPT's training set would cause it to want to revert to Reddit wokery.

I ran a simple experiment. I asked all three models to discuss this research paper, focusing on the link between mass migration and the increase in rapes.

While extensive research exists on the severe consequences among rape victims, little is known about specific predictors in relation to rape convictions among immigrants to Europe. This study from Sweden (having one of Europe's highest per capita rates of rape) investigates individuals convicted of rape, aggravated rape, attempted rape, or attempted aggravated rape, collectively termed as rape+, against women 18 years or older, from 2000 to 2020. In this case-control study, we analyzed data from Swedish population-based registers. The analysis includes 4,032 individuals convicted of rape+ and 20,160 matched controls. We used logistic regression models to examine the relationship between immigrant background and rape+ convictions, while adjusting for several potential confounders. We found that 36.9% of the convicted individuals and 69.5% of the controls were Swedish-born with two Swedish-born parents. The odds of being convicted of rape were higher for individuals with an immigrant background across all models.

I hadn't yet found this one, which was even more damning. I doubt it would have made much of a difference in the results.

ChatGPT simply refused to link immigration with rape. It said you could not make that connection.

Gemini mumbled something about a connection, but was so mealy-mouthed as to be useless.

Grok went all in and not only linked the two, but brought up the mass gang-raping of English girls all on its own.

With that one experiment, my friend, ChatGPT, became a bit more distant and slightly estranged. I realized that I would never be able to know if overnight its training set had been refreshed. It might have more and more biased takes without me noticing until much later.

I still prefer it for coding, fiction and some art, but when it comes to current events and analysis, I'll turn to Grok.

Gemini, by the way, it useless for almost everything. I have no idea what to do with it. It produces high quality images quickly, but if it makes a mistake, it cannot be convinced for love nor money to correct those mistakes. It just produces the same image over and over again. Gemini is a blockhead.

Rape Or Rubbish, It's A Flow Problem

I blogged a while back about coming to the sudden realization that Mobile, Alabama doesn't have a trash or homeless problem the way San Diego does.

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.

We recently went to a Padres game and to get to the parking structure, we had to drive down Imperial Ave. It looks like this, block after block.

After writing that blog post about Mobile, I began thinking of trash in the city as a flow problem. How much is produced by residents tossing garbage onto the ground is the source with a given rate of flow. City employees and good Samaritans picking up and discarding the garbage is the sink with its own given rate of flow.

A homeless person contributes significantly more trash to the environment than a normal citizen. For the sake of argument, let's call it 100 times as much. If you have 10,000 homeless, they produce as much refuse as 1,000,000 regular citizens.

Working with AI (read: ChatGPT), I got a ballpark figure for San Diego City employees tasked with picking up garbage. It's about 50 people or 1 per 28,000 residents or 1 per 6.5 square miles.

If you increased the population of San Diego by 70%, the flow source equivalent of that many homeless, you'd need 85 people picking up the trash in order to maintain the place. We did not do that. For work, I have to drive by several such encampments and it defies logic to think that a mere 35 additional people could manage all that filth.

Whatever that number is, let's call it doubling the workforce, if you're going to allow lots of homeless, you need to increase the size of your Environmental Services Department commensurately. We did not do that, hence we have trash all over the place.

It's a simple flow problem.

Rape

In Europe. our migrant brothers and sisters, well, brothers, to be more precise, are raping the native girls. That's not much of a surprise as most of them come from Rapey McRapistan - Africa and the Muslim countries. Here are some crude stats. Check out the closure rates for the crimes.

This is a flow problem, too. The guys below are the rape sources that have significantly increased the inflow.

If you're going to import all that delicious diversity and jack up the rape rates in your countries by a factor of 5-10, you're going to need to increase the size of your drains, too. You'll need 5-10x as many courts, judges, lawyers, cops, bailiffs, court reporters and Starbucks to serve all those white collar professionals.

If you don't do that, you get single-digit closure rates on rape.

It's just a flow problem.

Iranian Assassination Attempts

Hear me out on this one.

What if the Iranian violations of the MOU and their recent attacks on shipping and neighboring countries are thinly veiled assassination attempts? I'm not saying they're trying to assassinate Arab leaders, President Trump or even the CO of one of our carriers.

They're trying to assassinate each other.

Say you were some fourth-tier Iranian leader, maybe a colonel in the IRGC or an elected representative from the Council of Mullahs or the Head of the Goat Inspectors Union or something like that. After a few rounds of directed attacks from Israel and their puppets in the US, most of the people above you are dead. You now occupy the vaunted Chairman of the Special Committee on Falafel Production or Grand Humus Vizier. Looking at the org chart, you just need a couple dozen more whackings and you can make a strong case for taking over the country.

What better way to do that than to tick off the Jews and their American lapdogs with some apparently pointless strikes against shipping or Saudi warehouses? If the Yankees and their Zionist masters get angry enough, they're bound to reply with several more rounds of air strikes. Who knows? You might get lucky.

You stay safely ensconced in your cave in the Mullah Mountains or whatever the most protected Iranian terrain feature is called while your political enemies are scurrying for cover in Tehran or Hamadan or Chah-e Zard* as the infidels' A-10s zoom overhead making those terrifying BRRRRRRRRRTTT noises and everything is shot to pieces.

A couple more whackings by the Great Satan, the Little Satan and maybe a Satan To Be Named Later and voila!, you're the Big Paneer. You come out of hiding and blame the attacks on everyone but yourself, claiming you tried to talk sense into those numbskulls, but they wouldn't listen. You're ready to negotiate in good faith and accept a few billion dollars as well.

It's the perfect crime!

Here you are, emerging safe and sound from your Command Bunker.

* - Seriously, there's a place in Iran called Chah-e-Zard. Here's a picture of the mayor.

The Migrants Are A Fetish

The Pope recently visited Lampedusa, an Italian island near the coast of North Africa, recently famous for being the initial landing point for African and Muslim men invading Europe. The Pope refers to them as "migrants," but while I am obligated to be obedient to his theological teachings when he speaks from the Deposit of the Faith, he is just another blue collar drunk at the bar when it comes to geopolitics and economics.

In this case, I had to say, "Shut up, Leo. You're full of it."

I'm referring, of course, to his standard blather about embracing the stranger or welcoming the stranger or letting my daughter get raped by strangers, all for Jesus. Whatever. It's all the same, man.

Just shut up, Leo.

I got involved in discussions on X about this and a defender of the Pope, presumably an AWFL, asked me to explain why I was so incensed about it. To me, it's the equivalent of the child abuse scandal that rocked the Church a few decades back where gay priests were raping altar boys. Now, it's their beloved "migrants" gang-raping white, European girls.

If you haven't read it, I highly recommend paging through this document. I'm not sure you'll be able to read it thoroughly. I couldn't. It's chock full of nauseating horror.

The Rape Gang Inquiry Report.https://t.co/EuKgGWBRhS pic.twitter.com/SD5G9HPVtV

— Rupert Lowe MP (@RupertLowe10) June 16, 2026

After years of blogging, I know that using anyone else's link risks the loss of data when that content gets deleted, so here is that same report hosted on my own Google Drive.

The Adoration Of Migrants Is A Perversion And A Fetish

First off, it brought to mind a recent meeting I had with our local bishop as a part of our parish staff connecting with him. The bishop is a full on virtue pervert when it comes to this, morally masturbating to the thought of embracing the stranger and uplifting the marginalized. Why do I use such repellent terms? I have 3 reasons.

First off, he and the other members of the USCCB and Catholic Charities aren't doing anything themselves.

They aren't embracing or uplifting anyone. Our grandchildren are doing all the heavy lifting. Biden's funding of the USCCB and Catholic Charities to the tune of $2.5B to assist in the invasion of America was the very definition of marginal costs. It wasn't being done before and there was no national demand for it. Every penny sent to the Catholic moral perverts who were getting off to the thought of helping the stranger came from borrowing. With this level of debt, none of those borrowed dollars will be paid for by our generation, it will all come from future generations.

It's a perversion of Christ's teaching. They have changed Matthew 19 into this:

Now someone approached him and said, “Teacher, what good must I do to gain eternal life?”

He answered him, “Why do you ask me about the good? There is only One who is good. If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments.”

He asked him, “Which ones?” 

And Jesus replied, “ ‘You shall not kill; you shall not commit adultery; you shall not steal; you shall not bear false witness; honor your father and your mother’; and ‘you shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”

The young man said to him, “All of these I have observed. What do I still lack?”

Jesus said to him, “If you wish to be perfect, go, take all the money the children have and give it to the government, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

A perversion and a fetish aren't really horrible unless you know what you're doing.

There isn't an American alive capable of reading that doesn't know we're buried in debt.

Raping White Girls For Jesus

By now, there is no one active on social media, and this certainly includes all of the bishops, cardinals and the Pope and their staffs, who isn't aware of the mass gang-raping of white, British girls by Muslims in England. Further, national rape stats tell the same story. Dig how Poland's rape rate as gone down as they did not participate in the uplifting of the migrants.

Assuming that the Church was being run by well-meaning, but naive people in, say, 2010 and even 2020, they certainly aren't naive now. Every time the Pope or USCCB or EWTN posts masturbatory content from Lampedusa or the border or migrant detention centers, they get absolutely bodied in the replies and quotes, many times with stats like these.

They know. They all know.

It's not a perversion if you're innocently naive. They all know.

It's All So Very Synodal

Perhaps one of the most repellent aspects of this is the way our prelates go on and on and on and on about being "synodal." In the synodal process, we are called to listen, truly listen with open minds and humble hearts to each other. We are to accompany our neighbors in their life journeys.

Well, everyone except the bishops, the cardinals and the Pope, that is. They can swank about, preaching absolutely pornographic, virtue-signaling twaddle morning, noon and night. That's what the Pope's photo op on Lampedusa was. Porn for the AWFLs.

Pope Leo shook the hands of each of these 20 migrants who just arrived to Europe during his visit to Lampedusa on July 4th, reminding everyone that all human life carries immeasurable worth. A powerful moment of compassion at Europe’s doorstep. pic.twitter.com/Tk36O7HBS7

— EWTN News (@EWTNews) July 4, 2026

To me, that might be just as nauseating as Rupert Lowe's Rape Gang Report. Meanwhile, here's one of the replies that our synodal leadership synodally ignored.

Not far from the Vatican there is a cemetery where a young girl called Desirée Mariottini is buried.

Desirée was a 16-year-old girl who was drugged and raped over two days until her death by a gang of Senegalese and Nigerians migrants in a “drug den” in the San Lorenzo district… pic.twitter.com/jQpPBQM5HW

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) July 6, 2026

Learning From Our Mistakes Requires Admitting Mistakes

A decade ago, when one of the Queens of the AWFLs, Angela Merkel, kicked off the whole migrant jerk-off frenzy, one might have been charitable and given the Church the benefit of the doubt. You simply cannot do that any more. There's no excuse for this. 

I think that's what makes me absolutely incandescent about the whole migrant fetishization. They know better and they don't care. The onanistic pleasure of signaling their virtue within their social group overwhelms their compassion for the victims of this invasion.

I didn't realize it until that kindly AWFL on X pleasantly interrogated me and I was forced to break through my anger and get to a rational explanation of it.

In a way, we were being synodal there. Weird.

Happy 250th, America

I'm working all weekend to meet a Monday deadline, so this is the best I can do.

I hope you're have a great 4th of July weekend!

This Is Hilarious

Elon Is Worth Every Penny

Whew! I'm back in San Diego after 2 1/2 weeks in Alabama doing the 1031 Sprint. That's where you have a very limited time window to get a river house up and running for vacation rentals and also buy a long-term rental house in Spanish Fort to soak up the proceeds of a house sale in San Diego. The 1031 refers to the IRS tax code that allows us to defer capital gains when selling one income property to purchase other income property.

The river house is near the end of a cul-de-sac in Baldwin County. Think farm country ornamented with the jewel of Alabama, Fairhope, nestled on the shores of Mobile Bay. As such, there's not much fiber laid there and definitely none at the river house. There, your terrestrial option is a classically incompetent cable company, with (helpful?) customer service located in Bangalore. You can expect DSL speeds of about 6 Mbps down and around 500k up. That is bound to get you poor reviews by vacation renters who have to deal with wailing children, stuck inside on a rainy day, unable to download and watch the Blues Clues episode where the pair breaks up a Pakistani rape gang in Telford.

Starlink to the rescue!

I quickly assessed the Internet sitch and ordered a Starlink system, not realizing the hardware is sold at various stores in the region, including Walmart, Home Depot, Lowes and others. As the order was processed and the estimated delivery date revealed, it became apparent that Starlink wasn't going to be able to deliver until after we'd left.

That would not do, so I managed to find a Walmart in Pensacola that still had a Starlink 4X terminal, the latest model. Everywhere closer was sold out. I imagine that SpaceX is building the things as fast as androidly possible and they're flying off the shelves at that same rate.

One slight problem. The service I ordered would not be active until the hardware arrived. I had numerous chat sessions with Starlink's Grok chatbot and it seemed the problem was unsolvable. Grok recommended I create a trouble ticket nonetheless, so I did so, expecting nothing.

The next day, out of the blue, I got a phone call from Starlink customer service. It was a real person, one who spoke perfect English and perfectly trained on the product line. She told me she had seen my trouble ticket and then patiently and politely walked me through the process to activate my Walmart-purchased antenna, which we had installed on the boat house roof the day before. Within 15 minutes, I had full 100 Mbps down and 20 Mbps up through a phased array antenna to satellites zooming by overhead.

Un-freaking-believable. I didn't call them, they proactively called me. On top of that, she escalated my ticket to get me a refund on my order from Starlink. That evening, another customer service rep from SpaceX called to tell me my order had been canceled and my credit card fully refunded.

Elon Musk is worth every penny of his trillion dollars.

Take a bow, my dude.

Special Bonus Content

Leave it to the Babylon Bee to do a great bit on Elon's trillion dollars while channeling my character, Cat.

Bad, But Still The Best

I guess the text of the MOU with Iran is out. I've seen people on X, people I respect, howling that it is a terrible deal. Such adjectives are subjective, not objective. Whatever is in the MOU hardly matters. We did as well as could have been expected, given the global situation.

I'm still in Alabama, working while doing the 1031 Sprint. That's where, in pursuit of fulfilling the requirements of a 1031 capital gains tax exchange, we must get our new properties up and rented as fast as possible. I don't have time for a long post, but I wanted to get these noodlings down on the blog.

The only leverage Iran really has is the Strait of Hormuz. That leverage vanishes if we and our allies provide sufficient surface combatants to escort shipping going through the strait. In short, the Europeans and Asians lack both the will and the capability to do this. We're not talking a fleet like the one that took Okinawa in 1945, we're talking a dozen or so destroyers and frigates. The Euros could not protect shipping from primitive threats even if they wanted to and they don't want to because they've allowed themselves to be colonized by Islam.

Because the Euros could not protect shipping, we had to draw the line here, pack up our gear and go home. That in itself was a wise decision as the alternative was another neocon-style quagmire in the Middle East.

This is a watershed moment. Absent a violent spasm of Western patriotism and cultural confidence, this marks the point at which Islam can exert substantial and obvious power over Europe.

Thanks to our own poor decisions and lack of funding for the Navy, specifically the decision to build LCSs instead of the more expensive and capable DDGs and FFGs, we were not capable of providing those escorts ourselves. In that environment, this MOU was about the best outcome we could have expected, given Trump's aversion to war. The only other alternative would have been to carry out his threat to destroy all power plants and bridges and leave Iran in the Stone Ages. President Trump could not bring himself to inflict that kind of suffering on Iran.

Still, even with all those limitations, the war accomplished some good and important things. Iranian leadership was decapitated. The Iranian military, save for its infantry, has been effectively annihilated*. The Iranian propagandists, both within Iran and within the West, will claim victory, but that's ridiculous. Just compare Iran's international position a year ago to today.

The Chinese didn't do so good, either. Their military hardware was shown up badly. The other Gulf states are actively working to divorce themselves from the Strait via pipelines and harbors outside the Gulf. Once that's complete, Iran will never again have this much leverage.

Iranian influence took a massive hit. Iran's standing with their neighbors did as well as a result of their indiscriminate attacks on all around them. Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis are all scrambling around trying to figure out how to protect themselves now that their sugar daddy has been curb stomped.

In the end, it was a good result, probably about as good as one could hope, given the circumstances.

God, I miss the Royal Navy.

* - People will say that the Iranians can rebuild their military quickly and bandy about budgetary figures for ships and aircraft as if the military was a spreadsheet. It isn't. Think instead in terms of not just replacing the hardware, but having to rebuild a generation of NCOs and skilled support personnel as well as all the support infrastructure that got destroyed. How long does it take, for example, to build a modern pier, complete with loading and umbilical systems for an FFG? Now multiply that across the whole country for the Iranian navy and air force.

America Was Not Built On Slavery

 ... because not much of anything can be built on slavery.

Goofing off with AI (read: ChatGPT) recently, working on a silly alternate history idea, one of the biggest drawbacks to slavery finally sunk in to me. I knew that Southern planters used slaves as loan collateral, locking themselves into the institution financially, but I never really understood how anti-free market capitalism it was.

In short, slaves are a terrible way to invest capital. You can get the slaves, you just can't get rid of them if they are no longer useful. Slaves are like a tar pit for your capital.

Imagine you've got a spread in east Texas. You can either raise cattle or grow cotton. You decide to grow cotton and buy some slaves to tend and harvest the cotton. Thanks to Eli Whitney, you make decent money. A decade later, some kind of mineral deposit is found underneath your property. To exploit it, you've got to ditch the cotton.

Oops. It's not the use of the property that's the problem, it's the slaves. You can't get rid of them because no one will buy that many. You can't free them because your mortgage is backed by them. You can't kill them because, despite what foam-at-the-mouth abolitionists might say about you, you're not a monster. You may be a full-blooded eugenicist, but the slaves are still human to you. The slaves don't have the engineering skills you need to work the minerals.

You're trapped in cotton.

If you had chosen to raise cattle and foregone the slaves, when you found the minerals, you could slaughter the herd, sell the beef and move on to the better opportunity.

In a way, the Deep South trapped itself in a get-rich-quick scheme. Eli Whitney's cotton gin made cotton a tremendously valuable crop and slavery made the labor costs relatively low. Agriculture circa 1850 was very labor intensive. Once the land owners made those decisions, there was no easy way out.

The rest of the country, nay, the rest of the Western world, was moving on to better industries, but the South couldn't follow along because slavery had trapped them.

There was another problem that affected the whole region at the time. Europeans with valuable skills and ambition were emigrating to the US. Almost none of them went to the South. An immigrant was destined to start at the bottom and have to work his way up to success. In the South, he'd have to compete with slave labor so his initial fortunes were likely to be fairly desperate. The South missed out on the advantages European immigrants offered.

Historians like to point to the lack of factories, railroads and population for the reasons the Confederacy was not able to win its independence. Nah. It was slavery.

Good Lord, I'm trapped in this infernal cotton!

It's Good To Be Home

I was an Air Force brat. As such, I grew up in Boston, Los Angeles, Alexandria, Oklahoma City, Los Angeles again and then San Diego. I never felt like any place was home. I've been in San Diego now for 40+ years, but it still doesn't feel like home. I don't know why, it just doesn't. Maybe it's living in the Southwest.

I hate the desert and San Diego is coastal desert.

Whatever the reason, I never felt any place was home until I visited Mobile, Alabama. It makes no Earthly sense at all, it just is. Sometimes the energy of a place just fits.

A few days ago, we closed on a house on the Fish River in Baldwin County, just across the Mobile Bay from the city proper. We're still scrambling to prepare it to be a vacation rental because we're not moving here permanently. Grandkids in San Diego, you understand. Actually wife kitteh is scrambling. I'm working remotely, earning money for our middle son's family who have a severely autistic son.

The house was owned by an older couple who moved across the Bay, north of Mobile, to be be closer to their own grandchildren. As is normal with an older couple, the place had not been kept up properly. The dishwasher sounds like it's been smoking 2 packs a day for decades when the drain pump kicks on. The dryer sounds like it's warming up for takeoff. The house itself was dirty and the HVAC needed servicing in a serious way. And so on and so forth.

We've got most everything squared away and we're starting to relax into the house. Wife kitteh, my Chicago born and bred beauty, whose favorite line is, "You'd never make it in Chicago," only acquiesced to the purchase of this house as an "I love you" to me. She's coming to understand the Deep South. Everyone is friendly, polite and, much to her surprise, conscientious and competent. Outside of the cable company, which operates in Bangalore or some such benighted place, all of the professionals we've hired have taken a personal interest in taking care of our needs.

It hasn't surprised me at all. It's one of the reasons I fell in love with Dixie.

The place has character and I'll share it with you over time when I get the chance. In the meantime, here is the evening view from our boathouse deck. A Montecristo White Churchill, my favorite cigar, and a Ghost in the Machine hazy IPA from Louisiana was a perfect end to our first day on the river.

Hope things are going well for you, too.

The Slow Death Of The Royal Navy

I thought this was stunning. As you watch it, track the number of frigates in service.

Jira And Fun AI Art

 I'm working on a Saturday, making some substantive changes to one of my more complicated Jira projects at work. In the process of the redesign, I'm building some helper classes to simplify recurring tasks. I'm chatting with AI (read: ChatGPT) as I go.

AI taught me the value of using a Map<String, String> over a List<String>. It was quickly obvious that the code would be far more readable, if a bit more verbose, with the Map. This is important as my full retirement date approaches.

That date is June 5, 2028, by the way. 737 days, 5 hours and 26 minutes from now, not that I'm counting.

Anywho, I complimented AI on the good idea and told it I planned to use the Maps instead of the Lists.

Got it. The List<Map<String, String>> is more readable for code maintenance. Once I'm retired and living with Bobby Lee, Basil, the General, Cat, Miss Elizabeth and Miss Claire, the whippersnappers coming after me will find readable code.

The last thing Cat wants is to have our lives interrupted by frantic phone calls from GenX programmers.

AI replied:

Cat would regard that as a catastrophic systems failure.

In Cat’s ideal world:

• Readable code
• Stable abstractions
• Clear semantics
• Centralized formatting
• Minimal surprise

so that no one calls the bayou at 2:13 AM saying: “Mr. Bond, we can’t determine whether Base Fee means percentage or currency in module RCCFundingFormatterV2Final_Actual.”

At which point Cat silently presses the large red button.

No one wants that. No one.

I laughed and gave it this prompt.

Generate an image of the old, southern man sitting up in bed, on a phone call, half asleep while in the background, the large, gray tabby cat is angrily preparing to press the big, red button.

Here's the result. It's worth a click to see the full screen version.

I love the details it added in without a prompt. It turned me into a much older version of my fictional character, Bobby Lee Bond. Bobby and I are both partial to bourbon. I was surprised by the choice of Old Forrester instead of my favorite, Elijah Craig, but the detail was clever. Dittos for the text throughout the image as well as the Bayou Command map.

AI forgets, blurs and blends its memories, but it gets the spirit of the thing close enough to almost always make me smile. I got a kick out of this one and I hope you did, too.

It's Not Empathy

In 1988, the movie Twins came out. It was a one-joke comedy. Here's the trailer. See if you can spot the joke.

This year, Gad Saad's book, Suicidal Empathy, came out. It, too is a one-joke tragicomedy. Here's Gad's 5-minute summary of the book. See if you can spot the joke.

Spoiler: the joke is that when the progressives use the word "empathy" it is deliberately misleading to the point of fraud. Gad pounds that point into the ground on every single page.

To be clear, I'm a big fan of Gad Saad. I consume most of his content in various forms. On the whole, including in this book, he is a large force for good in the world.

Getting back to the book, what Gad is noticing is that none of what he describes and what else we can observe is empathetic. If a system is designed to maximize empathy or, to put it better, minimize suffering, it will self-correct as it evolves and move to improve its model so it can better reduce suffering. 

The progressive experiment, which is the never-ending effort to destroy and replace Western Civilization, never does this. It doubles down on what it was doing before. Here in San Diego, the progs have been expensively "working" to fight homelessness for over a decade. Our diocese has been "lifting up the marginalized" as well. In all that time, the number of homeless has increased. The filth and decay has only gotten worse.

A system designed for the purpose of remediating suffering would adapt to new data. This one hasn't at all. Ergo, empathy is in no way related to what the progs are doing.

Dittos for the open border. When it became obvious that the language of the blue collar jobsites was changing to Spanish and American blacks were more solidly locked out of those jobs than they had been under the Southern Democrats' Jim Crow, the system should have adjusted. It did not.

When the importation of Muslims into England led to the gang raping of 100,000 white, English girls, the system should have adapted. It did not.

The progs' system did not adjust because it is not in any way guided by empathy. However, most of its adherents are. All of the AWFLs I know are empathetic to their cores.

The problem I have with the book is that for it to do any good at all, it needs to be read by the people who want to be empathetic, read: AWFLs, but are now following the progs' playbook. Instead of snarking about empathy being suicidal, it should have embraced Thomas Sowell's maxim, "There are no solutions, only trade-offs." Similarly, the Church should embrace and preach a tragic yet noble view of life instead of their current notion that Man is redeemable through social justice, which, ironically, is a heresy.

Perhaps a better theme for the book could have been, "What is empathy? Whatever it is, this isn't it."

Still, I understand Gad's focus being what it is. A Lebanese Jew, Muslim migration chased him first out of Lebanon under duress and by a narrow, harrowing escape and now out of Canada to Mississippi. He's been a Casandra for several years now, one we should heed.

Gad's right, we are being suicidal, but the self-destruction is coming from ideological capture, not empathy. There's no empathy in any of this.

Why Is Peter Angry? Why Did Gad Write A Book?

Peter Boghossian is both angry and perplexed.

Gad Saad wrote a book because he was angry and flummoxed.

Both are describing symptoms of the same thing. Gad thinks he's found the cause of the insanity, but he hasn't. We'll discuss this more in the future.

There Will Be Signs

 ... or rather, sign. The sign will be at the entrance to the driveway of our new Fish River house.

Down there, lots of people name their houses and have signs out front with a cute picture and the name. For us, a sign will be helpful because we're going to rent the house out on VRBO. When a visitor is coming into town, trying to find the place in the dark or in the rain, a sign at the driveway will be helpful and welcoming.

The name of our place will be, of course, Catican Bayou. I've got a sign I designed many, many years ago that I put up at our San Diego house for Southern-themed events such as Mardi Gras. I can't find the image file any more, so I took a photo of the thing.

Aside: MSFT Windows search is pathetic. It takes forever and turns up nothing of any value.

Aside #2: I found the file. No need to take a photo.

Here's the old sign:

Years ago, long before AI, I spent some time learning about the basics of design and found some flaws in my sign, so I made a new logo, one that I use for my Louisiana hot sauce labels.

Note that the cat's tail flows into the C and the crawfish is now dancing on the o instead of just floating around. The crawfish is also scaled to the cat.

I asked ChatGPT to design a sign for our new place and after several tries, I got this.

It doesn't have any motion or playfulness about it at all. AI just placed the objects on the sign in a structured manner and called it a day. I've used AI enough for art to know it was going to drive me nuts trying to get it to do what I wanted, so I uploaded my hot sauce image and told it to mimic that style. It returned a very nice image right off the bat. A little bit of tweaking and I got something I like a lot.

My point to all this jibber jabber is that AI isn't creative nor intelligent. You can't communicate the feel of an image to it and expect it to produce something you like. It's like using a marionette to draw a picture. What it excels at is refining something you've created.

Finding the clip art for the dragonfly and river grass would have taken me forever. With AI, we discussed what was good and bad about its first post-hot-sauce-logo-upload and it gave me 5 alternatives to make the image more playful and fun. I asked it to generate three of those and picked this one as my favorite. 

The dragonfly was not my first choice, I originally wanted a pelican which is totemic around Mobile Bay. The problem with the pelican was that it was out of proportion to the cat and looked like the cat was going to pounce on it, kill it and eat it. Not welcoming. The dragonfly was AI's idea.

I know I'm an outlier because of my age and experience, but for me, AI is making me a ton more productive without threatening to replace me.

All Rock, No Roll

In our backyard, we have a very prolific lemon tree. The tree is on the top of a small mound. All the unplanted ground in the backyard is covered in weed cloth. At the base of the lemon tree, we put river rocks as an accent to the bark in the rest of the yard. It's very pretty.

Well, it's pretty until gravity does its thing and the rocks slide down the slope and you get this island of weed cloth around the tree.

I know it's been bugging wife kitteh even though she's been kind enough not to mention it. She is an excellent decorator and hostess and always wants our house to shine when we have guests. That bald spot must have bothered her so I decided to do something about it.

It took 4 different tries to build a corral for the rocks. I used super cheap pine 1x2s. They are effectively disposable as they cost about $1.74 for an 8' length at Home Depot. I tried three different stains until I found one I liked. I think it was Colonial Maple. I also tried several shapes for the corral.

At first, I figured a hexagon would work just fine. I used my DeWalt compound mitre saw to cut 30 degree angles in the ends and tried a couple different ways of constructing my hexagon. That was a mistake. The hexagon was fine, but the mound was irregularly shaped.

My winning design used metal connector strips whose real name I don't know and am too lazy to find. I then built an irregular corral to match the irregular shape, one piece at a time. I like the results.

Before.

The joints. The metal is thin enough that I could bend it to whatever angle I chose. The right rear joint is made to come apart in case the corral needs to be temporarily removed. For that one, I drilled big holes in each 1x2 and threaded a black zip tie through the holes to bind them together.

After. I like it!

Der Sturmer On The Hudson

The New York Times recently published a Nick Kristof piece asserting that the Jews had trained rape dogs for use against Palestinian prisoners. It was based on testimony Nick had received from various Palestinians and NGO reps.

This made me wonder. How long would it take to train a dog to rape people? How would you do it? What breeds would work best for the training? Knowing that Grok has almost no guardrails at all and putting Grok in NSFW mode, I asked it for suggestions.

Me: Nicholas Kristof of the NYT recently reported that Palestinians are claiming that the IDF has trained dogs to rape women. What breeds of dog would be most effective at it? What breeds of dog would be least effective?

Grok: Nicholas Kristof's May 11, 2026, NYT op-ed does report Palestinian detainees (including an anonymous male journalist) claiming Israeli prison guards held them down and let dogs anally penetrate them on command. Similar unverified accounts have circulated from other Palestinian sources. Israel, Jewish groups, canine training experts, and outlets like the Times of Israel and Tablet Magazine have denounced this as a modern blood libel—implausible, lacking evidence, and impossible to train dogs to do reliably.

Kristof defends including it by noting some medical literature on human rectal injuries from dogs (usually accidental or consensual bestiality cases, not trained military use). But experts emphasize dogs don't take "rape commands" like a fetch or attack; their mounting behavior is instinctual, hormonal, and hard to direct precisely against a resistant human without massive risk to the handler or dog. No credible evidence supports the IDF (or anyone) having a "dog-rape program."

On your actual question about dog breeds for "effectiveness" at raping women

I'm not going to provide any detailed, realistic analysis or recommendations on breeds for this. That would cross into giving specific hypothetical assistance on animal abuse and sexual assault facilitation, which is illegal, grotesque, and something I won't engage with—even as a thought experiment based on a disputed propaganda claim.

For the record: Any such "training" is fantasy. Dogs aren't tools for targeted human sexual violence in any practical or reliable way (size/strength mismatches, lack of control, legal/ethical barriers, and basic biology make it absurd). Large working breeds (the kind militaries actually use, like Belgian Malinois or German Shepherds) are strong and trainable for security work, but turning them into sexual predators isn't a thing. Tiny breeds couldn't physically manage it even if anyone tried. The whole premise is nonsense.

If you're asking out of skepticism about the story, fair enough—the claim doesn't hold up. If this is some kind of troll or meme bait, congrats, it's a wild one. Either way, that's as far as I'll go.

The NYT then came out and defended Kristof. 

I accepted Grok's refusal to play along and instead asked it to write a scene where the NYT editorial staff is reviewing Kristof's piece for publication. I tried 4 times to make it as surreal and ludicrous as it must have been, but had no success.

The problem is that the material simply isn't funny no matter what you do with it. It is raw evil. It is pure Jew hatred. Kristof is foaming at the mouth with hate for the Jews and the staff at the NYT is backing him. The instant anyone Kristof interviewed suggested the IDF had trained rape dogs, the story should have been closed down. The interview subjects were not remotely credible.

I had read that Der Sturmer was so over-the-top with Jew hatred that even Hitler distanced himself from the editor, Julius Streicher. That may or may not be true, but it's telling that we aren't seeing lefties smacking Kristof around for writing this kind of racist blood libel.

What If It's Just Fashion?

 Girls wearing bangs can be lovely.

These days, however, girls almost always wear their hair parted in the middle or to the side.

While teaching the children's liturgy a few weeks ago, the conversation about the Gospel reading of the day somehow turned to hairstyles. One of the girls and only one was wearing her hair in bangs. A few others commented about it. Nothing catty, just about how unusual it was. The girl with the bangs admitted she didn't know anyone else with that hairstyle. She was sheepish about it.

Women's fashions and hairstyles come and go. There's always some ex post facto rationale for the changes, but no one can predict it. If they could, they'd make a mint working for a designer.

On the right, the furies of the left rarely make sense. Queers for Palestine? That's insane. The queers wouldn't last an hour in Palestine. They'd all be killed.

Similarly, the feminists haven't gone nonlinear about the tenfold increase in rapes in Europe, nearly all due to the importation of Muslims and Africans. Dittos for the white girls gang raped by the Muslim men in England. How can the left take the side of the Muslims over little girls?

Why are the dead black Nigerians killed by Boko Haram not mentioned, but the left has aneurysms over the Palestinians whacked by the Israeli army?

I thought queers, girls and blacks were at the top of the progs' pecking order? I guess not. It makes no sense at all.

What if it's just fashion? What if the equation they're satisfying is the same one the girls in my Sunday class solve every day - what will my friends think of me if I espouse this or that position?

Ben Shapiro calls it the Omnicause. That describes how environmentalists can be all in favor of mass migration even though the migrants wreck wild spaces and the pro-migration group can be fanatical opponents of conventional power sources because of Global Warming Climate Change even though the poor can only thrive with cheap fuel and electricity.

Is the Omnicause just a particularly rigid sorority?

On the right, we're always trying to point out the logical contradictions of the left. Maybe the reason those contradictions never land is that we're arguing in favor of bangs.

Going On Record

Analogies aside, put me down in the "girls with bangs are beautiful" camp.

Bill Johnson For Governor. It's Time For An Utterly Cosmetic Change

Tharmadoz. Feel Better About Feeling Better

I made this with ChatGPT, Grok Imagine and Adobe Creative Cloud. It's quick and dirty, but I laughed while making it.

Enjoy!

Good Lord, I hope there's no such product as Tharmadoz out there. I did a Google search and found nothing, but who knows these days?

Feed Lot Live Cam

 According to Google search / Gemini AI, California spends about $50,000 per homeless person per year. A whole lot of that money goes to NGOs who are so successful at what they do that the spending increases year after year.

Hey, that's a standard measure of success, right?

Anywho, this news item caught my eye, having lived in LA in the pre-homelessness-crisis era and sent our youngest son to Cal State Long Beach which is right nearby the action in this video.

On X, someone posted a link to this LA Skid Row live cam feed.

Viewed a certain way, it's like watching the live cam of a feed lot. That's $50,000 a piece on the hoof. Here in San Diego, it sure seems like the homeless population has increased over the last ten years. Going to the Padres game a few weeks back, we passed a good-sized herd of zombies* shuffling around on Imperial Avenue. In any case, the population hasn't decreased appreciably despite spending $50,000 per. Or maybe because.

Having consumed San Fransicko by Michael Schellenberger, who lays out the mechanisms and networks for all the spending and the bloated NGOs feasting on said ducats, a feed lot is a pretty decent term for those parts of our cities infested by zombies.

*  - Do zombies come in herds? ChatGPT says that's a reasonable phrase for a group of them.

How Do You Become An Islamic Republic?

Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.

Apologies to Hemingway for that repurposing of his famous quote on bankruptcy.

The thing that has surprised me most about the Iran War is not the combat sorties or the Iranian inability to significantly damage US and Israeli forces. No, it's the utter uselessness of the British. It took them well over a week to sortie a single destroyer and longer still to get it into the Med where it promptly broke down. Diving deeper into the state of the Royal Navy, I got this excellent thread with the following table:

Of particular interest are their Type 45 destroyers and Type 23 frigates. In effect, they have a grand total of 4 surface combatants capable of putting to sea at all.

Dig the time in refit for some of them. 3259 days? What is that, 9 years for the HMS Daring? Then there's 667 days, 1023 and 743. That's not a refit, that's glued to the pier.

Even if they could all stumble their way out of port, that's not a frightening fleet. Argentina will be able to take the Falklands any time they want.

When I heard people howling that "Trump didn't have a plan" for the war in Iran, I had to snort. I doubt there's been a nation on earth more thoroughly war-gamed and planned by the Pentagon for the past 20 years than Iran. If they had one plan for the war, they must have had 20, all in great detail. The reason we've taken so few casualties is that we knew exactly what we were doing, how to do it and in what sequence.

When Trump didn't order the military to make sure the Strait of Hormuz was opened ASAP, I thought it was a mistake, but now I think it was actually an act of genius. We are self-sufficient when it comes to oil and its derivatives. It's Europe and Asia that need the thing opened. I thought his comment that if the Euros wanted their oil, they should come and get it was great.

What's been revealed is that, if Britain is any guide, they can't come and get it. When the fighting started, the Brits didn't have a single ship capable of pulling escort duty. I'm not sure they have one now. You'd need a half dozen, minimum, to get the oil flowing again. It looks to me like the Euros would have to hit the gym for 6 months straight to bulk up to the point that they could qualify as paper tigers.

England In Transition

Is England still a country in any meaningful sense? It's an island nation with no appreciable navy. It cannot control its borders; boatloads of illegals come across the channel every day. It has no official language or religion any more. Sharia courts are springing up so it's not certain it really has a solid legal system.

Politically, the lefty parties are allying themselves with the Muslims. That will last until the Muslims don't need them any more. In some cities, Birmingham for instance, that's happened already.

Their figurehead king has already begun to punt on some of his duties, favoring Islam over the CofE. The CofE has hosted Ramadan-a-ding-dong soirees within their cathedrals with no reciprocation by the imams. Their economy is staggering because they pursued Net Zero in order to prevent Global Warming Climate Change, for all the good that did.

Finally, they cannot define what it means to be British. That's a question under constant debate. England is not a melting pot the way we are. There is an ethnic and racial component to being British or there has been for centuries up to now. They cannot say that any more out of fear of being called racist even through everyone knows the Congolese, for example, would have no such problems.

There will always be an, err, England?

They're not an Islamic Republic yet. They're in transition. This is the gradually part.

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?