How To Balance The Budget, French Style

The first thing you need to do is surrender control of your currency to an external entity. Let's call that entity the "ECB." By doing that, you no longer have the ability to run the printing presses and generate wads of paper currency to pay your creditors and service your debts.

Next, bring a whole bunch of people who hate your culture into your country. If you can't do that, have your education system teach your young 'uns that you suck. The best alternative is to do both. The French, in an unusual spasm of efficiency, possibly learned from the Germans during the Nazi occupation, have done just that.

After that, you just wait. At some point, the people who hate you for existing will find an excuse to riot and destroy stuff. Investors will wet their pants and refuse to lend you any more money.

Unable to borrow or print money, you'll be forced to balance your budget!

Tres magnifique!

I Stand With The Unicorns

 ... after all, every single French politician of note is doing it.

The "student protests" are all about school conditions. That's why they're vandalizing and torching schools, looting businesses, defacing monuments, tearing apart historic buildings and torching irreplaceable architecture. It all seems reasonable when you think about it, particularly the part about how Muslim businesses have not been touched nor has a single mosque been touched.

Makes sense to me. I'm on Team Unicorn.

Even if we assumed the rationale for the, err, social movement as the tender folks at the Louvre put it when they posted on X that the museum was going to be closed for the time being, we still need to assess whether or not the French government could increase education funding even if it wanted to do so.

The answer is no.

For one thing, borrowing money so they can hand it to their students has gotten much more expensive.

France is also spending a ton on the good stuff.

Country	Total Government Expenditure (% of GDP)	Primary Spending Drivers
France	57.0% – 57.2%	Highest in the EU; driven by extensive social protection systems (pensions, unemployment), healthcare, and public sector employment.
Italy	50.4% – 51.2%	Substantial pension liabilities, demographic aging costs, and high sovereign debt interest servicing.
Germany	49.4% – 50.5%	Comprehensive social insurance systems, federal subsidies for energy transition, and infrastructure/defense commitments.
Spain	45.3% – 45.5%	Public healthcare and pension programs decentralized across autonomous communities; lower relative administrative overhead.
United Kingdom (England)	44.0% – 44.6%	NHS healthcare delivery, state pension commitments, and debt interest, partially offset by lower general welfare replacement rates than continental peers.

In short, there's no more money to spend and borrowing is out of the question.

So when the far-right, Hitler-wannabe Marine Le Pen says she wants to stand with the students and understands their plight and the commie what's-his-face does the same, it's all nonsense from the land of Unicornia.

There's no money. It's all been spent. Even if the "kids" really were lobbying for more Euros and not just trashing the place, they're gonna get stiffed.

Someone ought to tell them this. Someone might also want to hand them the bill for the clean up because the grownups are tapped out.

Nah.

Bonus Unicorn Content

Our granddaughter is 4 and loves unicorns. During a recent sleepover with Grammie, I used ChatGPT to make some coloring book pages for her featuring unicorns in different situations. My favorite had a unicorn with Jordan Peterson.

Recomputing In France

 ... in an infinite loop.

By now, you may have seen this video.

A left-wing French woman joined the student protests but was horrified when the second and third-generation migrants she was with started looting stores. She screamed “This isn’t the cause” They pushed her aside, told her to shut up and said they had “urgent shopping” to do https://t.co/GEWhMCUBSF

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 17, 2026

As I understand it from both the translation of what she's saying and (possibly fabricated) assertions that she has been a vocal supporter of mass migration, she is trying to tell the looters that she is on their side. Whatever the case is, the look on her face shows a stack overflow going on in her brain.

Lots of people have commented on her and this particular look of despair, but I think I have a unique take.

What she is trying and failing to reconcile are these things:

1. All migrants are good
2. These migrants are looting her store

That's pretty much it. She cannot process what is happening to her. The forcing function is the social stigma associated with telling others that migrants looted her store. She might be able to escape the loop if she can just convince herself that the store deserved to be looted, either because of colonialism, racism or the frustration of the Africans / Muslims doing the looting. She's clearly struggling with that because she was trying to stop the looting.

Above all, she will not allow herself to be associated with the far-right, whatever that happens to mean today, and thus lose all of her friends and social allies. That overrides all other considerations. Her girlfriends must always think that she is compassionate, open-minded and welcoming no matter what.

So she can't acknowledge what is happening, but she can see it happening. (1000-yard stare commences).

for (i = 0; i > -1; i++) do ...

Bonus Thought

Prior to the 7th Century, Algeria was Christian. What happened? Did all the priests and deacons get copies of the Quran and decide peacefully that there was no God but Allah and Mohammed what His prophet? Probably. As we all know, only white people can be imperialist.

I'd Go

This is so good it deserves its own post.

Wear A Virtual Hijab

 ... by not smiling. That's the advice to women in places with a lot of Muslim men. 

It never occurred to me that it's not just the bare head, it's also the connotations on the facial expression that matter. You may decide to skip the hijab, but it's advisable to never show warmth to a Muslim man. Yes, I know, there are lots and lots of moderate Muslims.

But which ones are they and which are the ones who take the faith seriously?

I've been concerned that our granddaughter may someday have to wear a hijab, but it looks like long before that, she'll have to wear a virtual one.

Here's the full post from X with the embedded video below.

This American used to be a liberal and was shocked by what she was told in college about Muslims

“I went to college where a social work professor asked our class, what are you doing on an everyday basis to combat racism and prejudice and bigotry? So I raised my hand as a really proud, liberal, naive young woman. I raised my hand so proud and I said, well, when I go to the airport, I always go out of my way to be really nice and smile at Middle Eastern men. because I assume that people have been really mean to them at the airport, so I always go out of my way to smile at them.

And she looked at me in front of the entire class and said, never do that again, because in their culture, smiling at a man means that you're a prostitute, so never do that again”

“I was stunned into silence. And I don't know who needs to hear this today, but sympathy toward an ideology that is openly hostile, brutally oppressive and objectifying to women is not empathy. It's actually what I would call Western privilege. You have the privilege of extending sympathy to men who buy into this radical ideology because you have never been a Middle Eastern woman subject to being under it. How you look at them will never change how they look at you”

For those that didn’t know this, it’s real. In Muslim culture a woman smiling at a man that is not her husband is considered haram (forbidden) and strongly prohibited

Muslims say a woman uncovering her face and smiling at a man can lead to evil, here’s the actual reasoning

“It is haraam for a woman to uncover her face or to smile at a non-mahram man, because of the evil to which that may lead.” 

Our cultures are not equal. Islam is not compatible with Western Civilization

This American used to be a liberal and was shocked by what she was told in college about Muslims “I went to college where a social work professor asked our class, what are you doing on an everyday basis to combat racism and prejudice and bigotry? So I raised my hand as a really proud, liberal, naive young woman. I raised my hand so proud and I said, well, when I go to the airport, I always go out of my way to be really nice and smile at Middle Eastern men. because I assume that people have been really mean to them at the airport, so I always go out of my way to smile at them. And she looked at me in front of the entire class and said, never do that again, because in their culture, smiling at a man means that you're a prostitute, so never do that again” “I was stunned into silence. And I don't know who needs to hear this today, but sympathy toward an ideology that is openly hostile, brutally oppressive and objectifying to women is not empathy. It's actually what I would call Western privilege. You have the privilege of extending sympathy to men who buy into this radical ideology because you have never been a Middle Eastern woman subject to being under it. How you look at them will never change how they look at you” For those that didn’t know this, it’s real. In Muslim culture a woman smiling at a man that is not her husband is considered haram (forbidden) and strongly prohibited Muslims say a woman uncovering her face and smiling at a man can lead to evil, here’s the actual reasoning “It is haraam for a woman to uncover her face or to smile at a non-mahram man, because of the evil to which that may lead.” Our cultures are not equal. Islam is not compatible with Western Civilization

— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) October 12, 2026

Bonus Content

Dig this interview with Mohammed Saifullah.

British Islamic content creator Muhammad Saifullah said in an October 4, 2026 episode of the Liam Tuffs Podcast that if he were Prime Minister, homosexuals would be arrested, tried in a court of law, and executed, while adulterers would be stoned to death. He continued by saying that anyone who insulted or criticized the Prophet Muhammad would be executed as well. Saifullah said that he would personally torture apostates... He said that this is what the religion of Islam teaches, and asked how the Prevent Program and the British police, whom he referred to using expletives, could not be "man enough" to ban Islam: They allow the source of what he is saying, the Quran, to be distributed throughout the country, but once he starts preaching what is inside the Quran, he is considered a radical.

This guy is not British. The British government intentionally let him in and let him stay. It's an island, for God's sake. It's not that hard to keep people out.

Just what was served by having him in England?

Everyone Loves Pay Day, No One Likes Tuesday Afternoon Deadlines

... or: Musings On Theological Socialism.

Sarah Hoyt gave an Instalanche to this X-extract blog post about the failure of the New Harmonie socialism experiment.

Robert Owen paid around $150,000 for the town of Harmonie, Indiana. He got 20,000 acres, more than 160 buildings, working mills, and farms already producing food. He renamed it New Harmony. Close to a thousand people arrived in the first year.

Owen already ran successful textile mills in New Lanark, Scotland, where he was famous for treating workers well and running a profitable business at the same time. He believed that if you removed private property and paid everyone equally, cooperation would naturally replace competition.

In January 1826, William Maclure sailed a riverboat full of scientists, teachers, and geologists down the Ohio River to New Harmony. Historians call it the “Boatload of Knowledge”. Thomas Say, the father of American entomology, was on it. So was Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, one of the most respected naturalists of the era. This was the most educated, best-funded, best-equipped socialist community ever attempted on American soil. If cooperation could beat markets anywhere, it should have worked here.

It collapsed almost immediately.

The hardest workers were feeding, housing, and clothing neighbors who did nothing while receiving the same food, the same shelter, and the same rewards. So they stopped working too. Why wouldn’t they?

My feverish, coffee-starved brain made a connection into my current, deep disaffection with the Catholic Church. I instantly thought of the term, Theological Socialism. If my faith's leadership thinks everyone is going to get the same reward after we die, then why don't I go to the beach instead of Mass? Like the hard-working people in New Hamonie, I've realized that if my prelates are right, then I've been played for a chump.

They aren't right. Not at all. They are reveling in being the paymaster and totally avoiding the task of foreman. 

This last weekend, I worked the men's Cursillo retreat. In the kitchen, we dished up some great meals. Many of my friends in the kitchen were from the Valley - El Centro, Calexico, etc. Like the Chicago girl who took my last name, they were all from modest means and now relatively successful. They had something to give to others because they had lived, in fits and starts, the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. As Instapundit said some years ago, wealth and income are markers of behavior.

Discussing this with ChatGPT, we came to this:

(B)efore wealth can be distributed, it must be created. Before generosity can be practiced abundantly, the capacity for generosity must be developed.

Your wife and your friends from Calexico and El Centro illustrate something that gets lost when wealth is discussed exclusively in terms of inequality and redistribution.

They began with relatively little. Through years of work, discipline, delayed gratification, and sacrifice, they accumulated not merely financial resources but productive capacity. They developed skills, judgment, reliability, and habits of responsibility.

Their present generosity is made possible, in substantial part, by their earlier sacrifices.

And here's where the Catholic dimension becomes especially interesting.

The very virtues that made these people prosperous are themselves Christian virtues.

Industry, prudence, temperance, fortitude, stewardship, and perseverance are not merely economic instruments. They are moral achievements.

Of course, wealth itself is not proof of virtue; Christ's warnings about riches make that clear. But neither is wealth morally irrelevant. How someone acquired it, what sacrifices its acquisition required, and what responsibilities he subsequently assumed are legitimate subjects of moral judgment.

G. K. Chesterton said, "Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about." Traditions are the hard-won lessons from the past being given to us on a silver platter.

1826 is a long time ago, long before the modern era where the transfer portal has ruined college football. Ancient Israel, which gave us the Old Testament is older even than that, before Jean-Jacques Rousseau's benighted concept of the noble savage. The people who lived through the failure of New Harmonie tried to pass along their painfully gathered wisdom in writing. So did the rabbis watching the Israelites prance around golden calves right before the smiting got real.

We ignore those and turn to socialism in all its rancid forms at our own peril.

It's a ton of fun to yap about a world of generosity and open-hearted forgiveness. It's not a lot of fun tell your staff they're going to need to work late tonight.

"Your scrolls need to be distributed to the Children of Israel tomorrow morning at 0800!"

Papal Bookend

The riots in France are the perfect bookend for the Pope's visit. He shows up and gets the royal treatment, his courtiers enjoy themselves in magnificent cathedrals and then everything goes to pieces.

Church leadership enjoys the praise for being so compassionate and then return to their comfy homes while the laity fight off the migrants we were told to welcome.

🇫🇷 More footage of the riots in Paris And I don’t believe for a second that this is just about schools anymore... Writer: Sol https://t.co/UnJDbnuVEi

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) October 6, 2026

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Where the hell are our fighters?

@icbkr @Oilfield_Rando Agreed, but are any of them directly making the case for Catholicism over Islam? The Muslims certainly do the reverse. To borrow from the Pearl Harbor movie, Tora, Tora, Tora, "Where the hell are *our* fighters?" https://t.co/13oqhZwv5D

— K T Cat (@ktcat) March 10, 2026

Where's The Offramp?

In jolly old England, things have gone from tense to tensor. Recently, a rubber dinghy full of military-aged African and Muslim men came ashore as they do on a regular basis. A fellow named Danny Tommo had organized a rowdy welcoming committee for them. Shouting, waving flags, but no violence. That is, until Danny went into the water after the men had disembarked and stabbed the thing to death.

Now the dinghy was the property of the human traffickers. There was no one on board. Danny used his knife to make sure the human traffickers couldn't ever use it again. 

Danny is now in the express lane to jail. He's been arrested for property damage although just whose property, no one is really sure. His real crime was to defend England. British jails are full to bursting. Migrant rapists get off with suspended sentences regularly. Danny is going to face real jail time for doing the job the military, coast guard and police ought to be doing.

Stopping rubber boats from landing is really not that hard.

In terms of the public mood, things are dramatically worse than they were earlier in the year. Into that environment comes the latest news from Gosport. It turns out that another set of invaders hit the shore and were scheduled to be taken to taxpayer-funded accommodations in Gosport. Protestors were a threat, so the authorities turned the boats back and forced them to return to France in order to not further enflame tensions.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Sometimes I crack myself up.

No, the authorities put Gosport into lockdown, read: local martial law, and summoned a motorcade worthy of a world leader to take the "migrants" to their hotels. What follows is a decent sampling of what happened and how the British feel.

Exit question: Where's the offramp here? Is it full-scale civil war or is there some kind of mysterious, 4-dimensional chess being played by the authorities that will shock us all and result in peace and harmony?

Keep in mind as you watch these videos that the cops are not protecting the citizens, they're protecting the illegals.

Super Special Bonus Content

This is from today. The flow never stops.

BREAKING: The British authorities are disembarking illegal migrants in Dover https://t.co/XzWGXYKCXd

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 6, 2026

Chivalry At Columbia

Women cannot take care of themselves. They rely on men to take care of them and protect them. That is the lesson from the "rape" case at Columbia. It's also a lesson that cannot be spoken.

The girls implicitly demand this, deny they need it, refuse to reward it when it's given and blow a gasket if it's not provided without hesitation.

A chick got loaded, went to a frat party, was offered a threesome, accepted, went upstairs into one of the guys' rooms and tried to make it happen. One dude passed out and the other started puking. She was disappointed. She'd been hoping for a threesome.

Things went downhill from there, which is itself a statement of total depravity, and it ended up with degeneracy even worse than two boys and a girl snorting ketamine off each other's groins, which was the direct antecedent to the part that Laetitia James, that titanic intellect of the law, will now attempt to prosecute in high dudgeon.

At the core of the incident is this statement: Men are expected to be chivalrous because women cannot protect or take care of themselves. The frat boys, seeing the girl blotto, should have put her clothes back on her and escorted her home with dignity.

A dude getting drunk and being ridden by a chick would result in zero court cases. Flip that around and the dude is looking at a stretch in the pokey and no one will come to his defense. Men and women are not the same and if you say that out loud, you will get fired, expelled or ostracized.

If you want to know why relations between boys and girls are so toxic these days, that's it. Women demand provision and protection, deny they need it and refuse to reward it. Guys have woken up to this and, equipped with porn and video games which make real women unnecessary, have, quite rationally and with a good deal of anger, sworn off girls.

Well done, feminism.

Liability, Not Chivalry

I saw this on X and it hadn't occurred to me, but it's no doubt true:

Ever since the Dear Colleague letter in 2011 and the crackdowns on Greek life after Duke Lacrosse, fraternities have been training chapter presidents on how to protect their chapters from these situations.

The Chi Phi president (who is not one of the 7 accused men) messed up, and that is why this has happened, and why the chapter was banned from campus.  

The basic rule is to act like a bar or a casino — when people get too visibly sloppy and intoxicated, you kick them out of the house so that the chapter isn’t held responsible for what happens to them. 

Girls who get high or sloppy drunk at frat parties are perceived as a huge liability risk precisely because every frat has some (stupid) brothers like the guys at Cornell who see a human lawsuit tottering around in a miniskirt and think “free pussy.”  The fraternity president’s job is to kick the idiot drunk girls out of the party before the idiot drunk brothers take them into a bedroom to make national news.

And when a girl demonstrates that she presents this kind of risk, the protocol is to ban her from the house. But you can’t ban her from the house afterward your brothers have already run a train on her.

Schrödinger's Feminist

... remains undefeated. 

Reality Gets The Last Word

Feminism and the left have incinerated the goodwill men naturally have towards women. However, as the Columbia case shows, women need that goodwill and insist upon it. Meanwhile, men retain their free will.

My reply to that borrows from P. G. Wodehouse.

"By all means, carry on, then. I shall watch your future progress with considerable interest."

How to Write When You Don't Have Time To Write

Whenever I hear authors interviewed, they talk about their writing process. For most of them, they carve out several hours in the morning to write. They sit at their desk with their coffee and blast away until their creative juices are spent.

I can't do that. I get up and take the dog to the park for a romp. If I don't do that, the beast becomes absolutely intolerable later in the day. He's part pit bull, after all. No Labrador, of course, like they told us at the dog rescue place, but plenty of pit bull.

Argh.

Anyway, I come home from that, take care of some domestic chores and then get to work on my day job. If I can find 30 minutes in that to write, as I'm doing now, it's about all I get. I don't know about you, but I struggle being creative when there's a clock ticking in my head telling me that in 25, no, 20, no, 15 minutes, I need to move on to something else.

Since I still want to write, I've had to find another way. Or rather, since my mind won't stop creating scenes that I want to put down in prose, I've had to find another way.

As I walk the dog or do the chores or drive around, I create the scenes in my head. It takes about 3-4 such sessions to get the scene embedded in my psyche and shaped the way I like it. I then dictate the scene into my phone using its speech-to-text feature to write it in a Google document. I don't format it for paragraphs or include quotation marks, but I do include periods, commas and question marks.

I then take the blob of text and hand it to ChatGPT and ask it to make something from that mess. It takes the text, formats it into paragraphs, usually with entirely too much zeal, adds quotation marks and cleans it up with some connective prose where necessary. The end result has retained the dialog and wording I used now in a consumable form.

We'll have a few rounds of grooming and once in a while it comes up with some good suggestions. About 90% of the end product is mine.

The other thing I've been doing in my writing is creating any scene that comes into my head. I haven't plotted out any of the stories and only have the vaguest idea of where things are going. I don't have time for that nor do I have any experience or skill at it. I'm simply writing goofy vignettes and trusting that I'll be able to glue them together later.

For instance, I've had a scene percolating in my brain for months where Miss Elizabeth, the former Ole Miss sorority queen who is Bobby Lee's girlfriend, is sitting on a bench at Bellingrath Gardens, smoking and wondering just what in the world she's doing with this Bobby Lee character. That scene will start the third novel, but I don't care. I love the idea and I've wanted to explore it for a long time. Why not? It's not like I've got a contract signed with Simon & Schuster and I have to get a novel out 3 months from now. The thing's been bouncing around in my skull and I needed to let it out.

The end result is a slowly growing stack of vignettes. Whether or not I'll ever have the time and energy to assemble them into even one book, much less 3, is anyone's guess.

Regulating AI

 ... is silly.

How exactly would you do it? It's software. Who is going to examine your code? How would you test such an open-ended system? If you're an AI rogue company, why not move to a country where they won't put you under a microscope?

If China or India are signatories on some global agreement, how would you monitor compliance?

If China refuses to sign on an rein in their AI and it really is going to kill us all, shouldn't we be bombing their data centers right now, before they become too powerful to stop?

Meanwhile, the whole worry about it seems overblown. I read somewhere that "experts" were claiming that even airgapping computers couldn't stop AI systems from collaborating because they could communicate with each other by fluctuating their CPU temperatures and detecting local computers' temps.

LOL!

What's the range and the data rate on that?

Hannibal

I've come to a decision to write the stories I want to write and not seek to get any of them published. For my Bobby Lee Bond comedy-romance-adventure stories, that means I get to include modified version of the A-Team. It's not fan fiction, it's just something my story needs. I've patterned Bobby after Dirk Benedict's Face / Starbuck characters and it just needs Hannibal, BA and Murdock in very rare cameos.

The problem with fanfic, in addition to being derivative and hideous, is that anyone reading it who is familiar with the source material will instantly whip out a dozen objections to whatever you did, pointing out how your story is not canon. Heck, fans did that with recent Star Wars movies and those were big-budget movies written by professionals.

In my case, I just want to have fun and I have odd little scenes in my head involving the guys. Since the story is set in 2026 and Bobby is 55 or so, it can't be the A-Team as it appeared in the TV series. Those characters would all be dead or ancient. I'm not worried about the exact timeline of Bobby's life during his years with the team, I just think they add a lot of fun to the stories. That's the key. If it makes them more fun, it stays. If it makes it less fun, it goes.

Anywho, here's a scene I wrote that will be the first time we encounter Hannibal Smith. This is after the incident at the fish camp in Louisiana where Bobby and Basil, thoroughly hungover, find Cat and General Beauregard injured and their little shack in disarray. It's also after yet-unwritten scenes where the guys drive back to their place on the Fish River with the animals and then take them to their normal vet in Foley for a follow-up appointment to deal with their injuries.

There, a newly-hired veterinary assistant has kidnapped the animals. General Beauregard is equipped with a tracker, so once the vet calls them up and sheepishly admits the animals are gone, the guys can track them. The woman who kidnapped them has taken them to Pensacola, then onto a private plane and off to Martinique.

There's some more setup that I'm working on, but in this scene, Bobby has gone to visit Hannibal while Basil gets their plane in working order.

Enjoy.

---

Jamaal's lesson at the range concluded, Bobby left the long gun case in the trunk.

Jerome glanced at it, then at Bobby.

“I’ll be out here when you’re done. Give the old man my love.”

“I will.”

The house was a small, one-story place on a quiet street in Cape Girardeau. The front door stood open behind a screen door, and Bobby could hear a Cardinals game from inside.

He knocked on the frame.

Hannibal appeared almost immediately.

For an instant the years disappeared. The old man broke into a broad smile, pushed open the screen door, and wrapped Bobby in a hug. “How you doing, son?”

“Pretty good.”

Hannibal stepped back and looked him over. “What brings you all the way up here?”

“I need to talk to you.”

Hannibal's eyes narrowed slightly. “You going on a mission with that British fellow?”

“Basil?”

“That’s the one.”

“Yep. Soon as Basil can get the airplane going. Stupid thing spends more time in the shop than it does in the air.”

Hannibal laughed. “That’s why we always stole the airplanes Murdock flew.”

Bobby shook his head. “Murdock. I swear, those were wild.”

“Some more than others.”

“Bolivia. All-time winner.”

“Nope.”

Bobby stared at him. “Nope?”

“Morocco. Hands down.”

“Morocco? Morocco was ordinary.”

“You weren’t sitting in the copilot’s seat.”

“What happened?”

“Every engine gauge in front of me was redlined. Every one. Almost from the moment Murdock started the engines.”

Bobby frowned. “I don't remember that.”

“You were in the back.”

“Did Murdock know?”

“Yep.”

“What did he say?”

Hannibal looked at Bobby. “He said a good pilot never watches the gauges. You have to listen to the spirit of the aircraft and let her tell you what she needs.”

Bobby stared at him. “He actually said that?”

“Then he patted the instrument panel and told me she was feeling wonderful.”

Bobby burst out laughing.

“I spent the entire flight waiting for both engines to seize,” said Hannibal.

“Maybe.” Bobby considered it. “But in Bolivia Murdock had just been hit on the head. He flew the whole trip while concussed.”

“That’s true.”

“He was flying maneuvers that didn't make sense to him.”

Hannibal considered that. “Bolivia was pretty bad.”

Bobby looked toward the television. The Cardinals game continued without either of them paying attention to it. “Hannibal, I need your help.”

“I’m not getting the team back together.”

“No, no. Nothing like that. I think I’m about to do something incredibly stupid, and I need you to tell me not to do it.”

Hannibal looked at him. “You came to me for that?”

“I realize now that may have been a tactical error.”

“Go.”

“Hannibal, you haven't even heard what it is.”

“Doesn't matter. Go.”

“See, this is exactly why I never came to you for sensible advice.”

“You didn't come for sensible advice.”

“I drove all the way to Cape Girardeau.”

“You flew most of it.”

“That's not the point. I had to get Jimmy to fly me up here. Then Jerome had to come get me. Do you have any idea how complicated this has become already?”

Hannibal smiled.

“And Basil is in Mobile trying to get that airplane running, which means by now he's probably bought another airplane part that will cost us more than my first house,” said Bobby.

“Go.”

“Would you stop saying that?”

“No.”

Bobby sighed. “I haven't even gotten to the stupid part.”

“All right.” Hannibal settled back. “As soon as I get us some coffee, you can give me the stupid part.”

He disappeared into the kitchen and returned with two mugs of coffee. Bobby took one, tasted it, and looked into the cup.

“You still make terrible coffee,” said Bobby, with a grimace.

“I’m old. I don’t have to improve anymore.”

They sat in a pair of beaten-up chairs facing the television.

“All right,” Hannibal said. “Give it to me.”

Bobby did.

He told him about the fish camp in Louisiana. He told him what had happened to Cat and the General. He told him about coming home to Baldwin County. Then he told him about the veterinary clinic in Foley and the animals being taken.

Finally he told him where they were.

“Martinique,” Hannibal said.

“Martinique.”

“And Basil’s getting the airplane ready.”

“At Mobile.”

Hannibal sat back. “Well, I can see your tactical problem.”

Bobby waited.

“It’s a trap.”

“We know.”

“Not probably a trap. Not maybe a trap. The whole thing has been engineered to bring you and Basil exactly where they want you.”

“Yep.”

“So forget surprise. They know you're coming. I wouldn't waste much time trying to be clever.”

Bobby raised an eyebrow.

Hannibal shrugged. “Dramatic frontal assault.”

Bobby stared at him.

“What?” asked Hannibal, confused.

“Nothing.”

“You asked,” said Hannibal, slightly annoyed.

“That’s not my problem.”

Hannibal stopped.

“What do you mean, that’s not your problem?”

“That’s not why I came.”

Now Hannibal studied him.

Bobby put the coffee on the table.

“Hannibal, what am I doing?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

Hannibal did. Bobby could see that he did. But the old man wasn't going to help him.

Bobby looked away.

“It’s a dog and a cat.”

Hannibal said nothing.

“A dog and a cat, Hannibal. I’m about to get on an airplane and fly to Martinique, knowingly walk straight into a trap, and God knows what happens after that.”

Still nothing.

“For a dog and a cat.”

Hannibal waited.

“I can replace them tomorrow. There are probably fifty dogs and a hundred cats sitting in shelters in Baldwin County right now.”

Hannibal leaned back in his chair. He rolled his eyes as the Cardinals’ hitter swung at a pitch a foot outside. He sighed and turned back to Bobby, suddenly serious.

“Remember when we had to go get B.A.?”

Bobby closed his eyes.

“Oh, come on.”

“He'd been wounded.”

“I knew you were going to bring that up.”

“They had him. They knew we'd come for him.”

“Hannibal—”

“We knew they knew.”

“I remember.”

“We went anyway.”

“That was different.”

“How?”

“Because it was B.A.”

Hannibal let the silence sit for a moment.

Then he changed direction.

“You ever kill a man, Bobby?”

Bobby gave him an irritated look.

“What kind of question is that?”

“Have you?”

“Of course I have. I was on the team for ten years while we did it.”

“You’re Catholic.”

Bobby's irritation disappeared.

Hannibal continued.

“You believe every human life is sacred.”

“Yes.”

“Every one of those men you shot had a life that was sacred.”

“Yes.”

“You ever go back for one of them?”

Bobby said nothing.

“You ever charge into a building full of armed men because one of them was wounded?”

“No.”

“But you did for B.A.”

“That’s different.”

“Why?”

Bobby stared at him.

Hannibal waited.

“Because B.A. was family.”

The instant the words left his mouth, Bobby saw it.

His eyes closed.

“Oh, hell.”

Hannibal smiled.

Bobby pointed at him.

“Don't.”

Hannibal didn't waste a second.

“So are they.”

They watched the rest of the inning without speaking.

Bobby drank the coffee because it was there. Hannibal drank it because, inexplicably, he seemed to like it.

The Cardinals put two men on and stranded them both. They sat through the ads in silence.

Bobby never took his eyes off the television.

“Frontal assault?”

“Yep.”

Hannibal didn't look away from the game.

“Basil blasting away with that portable artillery piece of a rifle and you sniping around the edges to shape the battlefield for him.”

The Phillies’ leadoff batter stepped into the box.

“A few well-placed external satchel charges set to go off after the fun begins and shut off passageways wouldn't hurt, either.”

Bobby took another unhappy sip of coffee.

“Thought you weren't getting the team back together.”

“I’m not. I’m going to stay here, watching baseball.” Hannibal turned to him with a wicked grin. “You will let me know how it goes, won’t you? I happen to have a vested interest in the participants.”

Bobby softened. “Thanks, Hannibal.”

Hannibal paused and then added, “Cat has grown on me.”

Bobby laughed, shook his head and stood up. Hannibal stayed where he was, watching the game, a big grin on his face.

“Love you, old man,” said Bobby, quietly.

Hannibal looked up. “Love you, too, son. Be sure to come back alive or I’ll never speak to you again.”

Bobby walked out the door, smiling.

My Father's Son

A few months back, as our anniversary was coming up, I went shopping for a card for my wife. Not just any card, an Avanti card. Avanti makes greeting cards that are both funny and heartfelt. I simply cannot abide the standard Hallmark drivel, so I go out of my way to get an Avanti.

One of the places that carried them was Barnes and Noble. As I walked through the store, searching for their greeting card section, I went past row after row of shelves carrying novels. I'd not been to a bookstore in a long time and certainly not since I decided to try my hand at fiction, so it hit me differently that it had before.

My idea for writing one or more novels was a stupid waste of time. 

If what I'm doing isn't going to make a difference, preferably a big difference, then what's the point? Even if a miracle happened and I got my novel published, it would occupy a tiny section on a shelf of a rack of similar books with nothing to differentiate it. Within 2-3 months, it would be in the remainder bin and then it would be thrown away, never to be seen again.

What was the point?

Then I started thinking about my dad and his painting. My father took up painting after a career marked with substantial successes. He spent his last 20 or so productive years at the craft of painting and sold exactly 1 canvas. He never even tried to sell his paintings. He would loan them out to friends and family, but "loan" meant "loan." At any time, he could show up at your house with a different painting and demand to swap it out because he wanted the one in your house back.

I kept many of his paintings. This one, "The Weir" was always my favorite. It hangs in my study.

As an ENFJ, where EVERYTHING YOU DO MUST SERVE SOMETHING IMPORTANT, the thought of straining to knock out even one novel only to have it rejected by all publishers or sit on a dusty shelf in a bookstore before it was thrown out was just too much. Writing was going to mean nothing at all.

So, Dad, why did you do it? Why did you take all those classes and then move on to being taught by a local master craftsman? Why did you spend all that time in museums, learning what moved you and why the painter had chosen this technique instead of that? What was the point? You never sold anything and no one knows your name. 

He wasn't around to answer. Not for the first time did I deeply miss my father and wish I could have just one more deep conversation with him, the him that existed about 10 years before his death.

I kept turning the problem over in my mind. At the same time, scenes from my fiction ideas kept popping into my head and I couldn't help working out the dialog and prose for this section or that as I drove. Still, who cared? No one was ever going to read what I wrote just like nearly no one saw his paintings.

That didn't matter to him. Why?

He was painting for himself, not for everyone else. That finally came to me. Once I had that key, everything fell into place. The vacations in Europe with my mom were all about going to places he wanted to paint and that had museums he wanted to visit. He mastered the craft because he wanted to express himself through art, through images of scenes he loved and he didn't care how many people saw them.

I could just hear him telling me. He'd done his bit for king, country and family. It was time he did something for himself. Looking back, I can remember my mom telling me this in full-throated support of it. She adored him. He'd been a hero in many ways and she loved the fact that he was painting. That it didn't do anything to put money in her pocket or bring her social standing meant nothing. He loved painting and that's why he did it.

In a way, he was the canvas that was being painted. With each year, the picture of him as an artist came more into focus. The important product wasn't ultimately the collection of canvases. It was the man he became by seriously pursuing something beautiful. The classes, museums, travel, study, failures, improved technique, and years of looking carefully at the world were brushstrokes on him.

Because he painted for an audience of one, he could paint what he wanted the way he wanted. Being the man he was, he worked hard at it. He wasn't avant-garde, he was a storyteller who used oil paints and a canvas to tell stories.

As I get older, I have involuntarily become more like him. I can't help it. And here I am, contemplating creating art that will bring me nothing just like his paintings brought him nothing, if you are only counting fame and fortune.

I felt a weight being lifted off of my shoulders. If I wrote my stories for an audience of 1, I could do as I pleased with my content. Not in terms of writing rubbish, but in terms of writing the stories I want to write. I'm not a creature of 2026 and I have no interest in writing what sells today. Now I don't have to.

Writing for an audience of 1, just like painting for an audience of 1, doesn't let you off the hook when it comes to honing your skills. I won't have the time he had, but I can still work hard to explore the craft and write as well as I can.

My father painted scenes from Europe and the American Southwest with a few Wisconsin and New England bits thrown in for good measure. Would they have sold if he'd been trying? Maybe. But painting for sales drives decisions that would result in subject matter he might not have liked. Painting for himself, his choices of content, lighting and mood were entirely his.

I want to write comedic adventure-romances whose underlying moral logic is profoundly Catholic and whose romantic elements are chivalric. In a world where romantasy porn is the #1 fiction genre, that's about as against the grain as you can get.

By writing for 1, I can write my Bobby Lee and Basil adventures and my Hardy Boys knock-off comedies and not worry about anything other than improving my prose with each writing session.

That's what Dad did with his paintings. I could do a lot worse than follow in that man's footsteps.

A Huge Leap For Women

 ... right into the blackout bags.

Sarah Mullally, the Archbishopess of Canterbury and the first woman to hold that post, recently gave an award for interfaith and reconciliation. It was September 11 when she gave it, so naturally she gave it to Hafiz Tahir Ashrafi, chairman of the Pakistan Ulema Council, a group of Islamic scholars.

Hey, why not?

Here's a photo from the event.

The dark blob in the background is Mrs. Ashrafi. I have no idea if the chick on the right is a family member or part of the James-Younger Gang.

What's the point of being a crusader for women's rights and a massive middle finger to the patriarchy who has run the CofE forever if you're just going to hand out awards to dudes who put their wives in darkened burlap sacks?

The award was rescinded shortly afterwards, but the reversal had nothing to do with misogyny. Apparently, Hafiz sided with Osama on September 11. While it's perfectly OK to stuff girls into trashbags, it's still a faux pas to root for the terrorists, at least when it comes to that particular atrocity.

Rockin' In The Diocese

I learned this morning that on X when I use the A-word, "auti$m," I get muted. So here, we'll just refer to rockin'. That is, where you grab your knees and rock back and forth, repeating something to comfort yourself.

In the case of the Diocese of San Diego, we repeat "God is love."

In a week or two, we're asked to participate in the World Day of Migrants and Refugees. Here's why.

Bishop Pham has called on clergy, religious, and non-denominational leaders to stand together in solidarity with those who have fled war, persecution, and hardship.

“As shepherd of this Diocese here at the border, I have been feeling an increased urgency to call people of faith around values that unite us: all human beings are sacred, no matter where we are born, or where we now live. Too often we let politics divide us and take away our faith-inspired values and our voice. I invite you to walk with me behind a banner that will read something we all know to be true: ‘All are Sacred’.

What an obnoxious jerk. I'm really hard over on immigration. Close the border and mass deportations of illegals is my preferred policy. Legal immigration is fine with me. At no point in time would I or anyone I know who thinks like me disagree with the statement that all lives are sacred.

I would never want to send B-52s over to Haiti and blast it into oblivion. I just want the Haitians to stay in Haiti. Dittos for all the other garden spots who sent us their best during the Biden open border fiesta. Lives are indeed sacred. Just keep your life where it is unless you go through the full American immigration process.

So just who does our bishop think he's talking to? That banner is meant to differentiate him and his fellow travelers from the rest of us, but it only does so in his head. It actually says nothing of consequence at all. All are sacred? No kidding, genius.

I've come to the conclusion that Church leadership these days is auti$tic. They are expressing this equation:

f(t) = 7.

That is, no matter what inputs they get, they respond with the same thing. The topic of immigration is fraught. When the USCCB posts something on X about immigration, they get absolutely bodied in the comments and quotes. A lot of it is simple rage posting, of course, but a good portion of it is well-considered and poses questions for the bishops to answer.

They never do. Now we see why. "I invite you to walk with me behind a banner that will read something we all know to be true: ‘All are Sacred’." That's pretty freaking auti$tic there, dude. You and your friends are just grabbing your knees and rocking back and forth repeating, "God is love." You have absolutely no response to the serious objections of those in the Catholic laity who disagree with you.

The obnoxiousness of it all is turbocharged by the fact that our bishop is all in on synodality. We're asked to listen to each other with open hearts and open minds. Meanwhile, this doorknob can't comprehend the most basic arguments of people like me. Instead, he simply says that I'm full of hate and intolerance.

Talk about corrosive!

Meanwhile, the migrants are bringing joy and love everywhere.

A group of female villagers say "life as we know it will be destroyed" if plans to house asylum seekers at a nearby former Ministry of Defence (MoD) site succeed.

Earlier this year, the Home Office announced plans to house 1,256 men at MoD Bicester, saying the proposal would bring the system "back under control".

But the plans have proved contentious locally, including in nearby Piddington where a symbolic independence referendum in opposition to the proposals is being held next week.

On Thursday, a group of 133 women from the village issued an open letter to every female Member of Parliament to share their concerns.

The group wrote: "As fellow women, you will understand the serious risks this will expose us to.

"Our safety, our security and our freedoms will be under threat. Life as we know it will be destroyed.

"We will not feel safe walking our streets. We are already living in fear."

God is love. All lives are sacred.

It's not like the bishop and his fellow dingledorks don't know this is happening. Well, OK, maybe they're in such a bubble that they're totally unaware of it, but that just underlines in bold the fact that synodality is a one-way street for our leadership.

Like I said, corrosive.

Meanwhile, in Ceuta, the results are similar to what would happen if you moved out of your house for a month and allowed a randomly-selected group of teenage boys to take up residence.

Editor's note: I was going to post one of the many videos of the invaders in Ceuta going at each other with machetes, pipes or truncheons and making an absolute ruin of the place, but instead, I'll just end with this one that is practically made for our very own Bishop Pulido, a native of Mexico. Whenever I see these, where a woman is trying to explain the terror she feels because of the migrants, speaking in Spanish, I can't help but imagine Bishop Pulido having a stroke as he watches it, his mind fractured by the sight of a Spanish-speaking woman opposing "migrantes."

🇪🇸🔴 JUST IN: A local Spanish mother in Ceuta demolishes a left-wing TV host sitting comfortably in Madrid during a debate about immigration.

The host tries to claim it is "dangerous" to say all the migrants should leave Spain.

The mother explodes: "If they came by violating a… pic.twitter.com/Sp0CnaVff9

— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) August 28, 2026

Fish River Sunrise

 ... because Fish River Sunset has gone away.

At our new place in Alabama, I mounted a ReoLink camera at the end of our boathouse. I have it pointed as near to true West as I can, given the blockage created by the big tree in our back yard. I've tried to use it to grab video, but my network design failed me and the path from the ReoLink to my Raspberry Pi is intermittently infested with delays as the Pi keeps stopping data transfers to look for new WiFi sources.

Stupid Pi. The Pi is less than 6" away from its access point, but the WiFi driver is such a blockhead that it can't stop checking for better signals every 2-3 seconds. That causes a 150ms delay which isn't enough to be noticeable by a user, but is enough to make the streaming video have ugly gaps in it.

I fell back and went for still shots every 10 seconds and then used ffmpeg to stitch them together into a video. Yay?

Well, sort of yay. By the time I had the thing running, the sun had walked itself out of the view of my camera.

Stupid sun.

As a result, I've fallen back again and now capture sunrises, just for grins. I'm pointed in the opposite direction, but I thought they might be interesting. Here's today's. I think it's worth clicking over to YouTube to watch a full-screen version, but that's just me.

I love seeing the ducks cruise past. There are two whites and one mallard. They like to come into my backyard and grumble at me in their ducky language. It's wonderful. I reward them with bread sometimes, which they eat, but reluctantly. I don't have any fish to give them and I'm not going to go to the bait shop just for a trio of grumbly ducks.

(Let's see how long that vow lasts.)

Diagnosing The Problem

Using the lat lon of the camera and picking out landmarks in the video, I was able to figure out the angles in my field of view. Directly in front of my camera is 310 degrees. The far left is 268 degrees. Sunset right now is at 276. Why can't I get a good sunset? The trees are too dense on the far left.

Stupid trees.

Moving off the left hand side of the view to the first filtered shot of sort-of horizon, you get an angle of 290. Since sunset is 276 degrees, I'm out of luck until... when? Try May. My sunset camera as currently mounted will give me sunsets from May to August.

I could mount it on a pole, of course. If I give it enough height, I can aim it over the top of the tree and point it due West or perhaps a bit Southwest.

I could also come back to the house and look up at an empty pole where the camera used to be until it got sheered off by a storm coming in off the Gulf.

Oh well. It's still been a ton of fun and it's just the start of the cool things we can do at the River House.

Where Do Children Rank?

Intersectionality is the term given to the process by which people are classified, grouped and ranked according to some notion of victim and oppressor. Blacks are oppressed by whites, gays oppressed by straights, women oppressed by men. A black lesbian, therefore is ranked well ahead of a straight, white woman.

When Iryna Zarutska was murdered by a big, black man on a train in North Carolina, it got almost no news coverage at all because she's white and he's black. Since, by definition, blacks do not oppress whites, almost no information can be allowed to leak out into the public that might disrupt the machinery of intersectionality.

If the races had been reversed, this would have played on loop for weeks on our MSM channels and a dozen American cities would have burned.

This week, we learned where children rank in the intersectional hierarchy. Below women. It shouldn't have been a surprise.

Here's the governor of Massachusetts recently signing a bill permitting abortion up to the moment of birth under any circumstances. Dig all the women cheering her on as she signs it.

The Lindsay Clancy trial came within a whisker of ending with a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. The woman strangled her three children. Post-verdict interviews with the jurors indicate that they wanted to see Lindsay get the help she needed. The one dude who simply wouldn't go along with it could not get past the fact that she had throttled her kids. The women on the jury could and they were all annoyed with that one guy.

This happened in the same Massachusetts where the duly elected governor just signed infanticide into law. Lindsay's kids disappeared from view just like Iryna did. We know nothing of what they liked to do, what they liked to eat or how they played with daddy. Lindsay was humanized, they were not.

That was the indicator that Lindsay Clancy verdict was coming. Children rank below women in the intersectional hierarchy. Children are a burden, being pregnant is difficult, giving birth is painful and on and on and on.

Of course it went that way. It should have been obvious from the start.

AI Slop

This is genius.

I'm a heavy user of AI for creative projects, particularly fiction writing. It allows me to learn and explore at rates I could never hope to achieve through normal means. I have a much better grasp of character design, plot pacing, writing styles, editing and much more because I write with AI as my junior partner.

Without AI, I probably would have thrown in the towel a year ago. Instead, I'm having a wonderful time creating.

Keeping The Main Thing The Main Thing

In my previous post about the movie The Odyssey, I made the claim that it wasn't a movie at all, it was a recapitulation of the progressive creed. I'm going to see if I can make the case that Harvard and Cambridge as well as the Catholic hierarchy is doing the same thing in their domains.

First off, let's recall that Christopher Nolan chose to cast Ellen Page as a Greek warrior and Lupita Nyongo as Helen of Troy.

The face that launched a thousand ships.

Now I'd like to introduce my new podcast heartthrob, Peter Boghossian. Boghossian is a former professor who was hounded out of his school because he wouldn't say things he thought were wrong. I'm not completely familiar with his history, but I think the controversy had something to do with trans. His new focus is "street epistemology" where he interviews normal people on what they believe and what it would take to change their minds. He has also spent a lot of time analyzing the denial of the Europeans wrt migrants, the trans insanity and the descent of higher education into insanity.

Here's his take on Jason Arday and Claudine Gay and why he thought Jason should not have been removed from Cambridge and why Claudine should still be president of Harvard. I recommend watching the whole thing, but you probably don't need to do that.

What They Have In Common

Imagine being on a professional casting team made up of experienced, talented Hollywood veterans. You are casting a high-budget, high-profile movie which depicts one of the greatest adventure stories of all time, Homer's Odyssey. There is simply no way on Earth that the tiny, effeminate  Ellen Page and the in-your-face ugly, black woman Lupita Nyongo would have made it through the first cuts. It would have been a miracle had they even been given screen tests.

Casting a movie is all about finding just the right talent to further the story. Anything that detracts from the story is an excrescence and gets removed whether that's dialog, action scenes or cast members.

Christopher Nolan and his crew did not do that because they weren't making a movie, they were signaling their allegiance to the rest of Hollywood. The Odyssey was a recitation of the creed first and entertainment second.

Similarly, if you were on a selection committee at either Harvard or Cambridge, your sole purpose would be to find people to fill important positions that cemented your university's reputation as honest, bold and truth-focused. In no alternate reality would you have chosen plagiarists whose work was low-quality even when it wasn't being stolen from other academics. You certainly wouldn't have hired a man who was clearly mentally ill.

Harvard and Cambridge did just that and then stood by their choices until it was impossible to keep up the charade because they are not running universities in any real sense. Their primary job is to pledge their allegiance to the progressive causes of the day by chanting the creed as loud as they can. Of distant import is research and honesty. If there is a collision between the tenets of the creed and academic performance, academic pursuits lose every single time.

Catholicism Today

In a not-so-surprising poll that I can't track down right now, pastors and priests were surveyed about whether or not they thought it was important that a person believed in their faith. Of all Christian denominations, coming in last place were Catholic priests at something like 33%.

There are benign explanations to that, but it dovetails well with my own recent crises of faith. If you take in what the pope, our bishop and our local clergy say and put it all together, I can't figure out why I shouldn't convert to Islam. They all want unity, peace and non-judgmental inclusion. They never talk about sin or damnation even when the Sunday gospel reading is shouting about it. They all imply that God loves everyone and everyone is saved.

Since the Muslims are adamant about the superiority of their faith, I don't see why joining them doesn't accomplish all of the goals my ordained leaders are proposing. In fact, I can't see any other way to do it. So long as we insist that Catholicism should persist, we are setting ourselves in opposition to Islam and, by our own preaching, embracing divisive and implicitly judgmental positions.

Like Hollywood and Harvard, the Catholic Church is obsessing on things that are secondary to its mission at best.

Summary

Others have written about the death of expertise and on the right there have been significant numbers of brain cells recruited in the service of explaining how and why this has happened. What if it's just been a loss of focus? What if the cause is that our institutions forgot to make the main thing the main thing?

The Odyssey

We went and saw The Odyssey last night. It was a watershed moment for me.

During that interminable movie, I decided I just don't have to pretend to be a part of the Hollywood cult. The movie felt, in many ways, not like a movie at all, but like a chorus of everyone on the film crew chanting their creed over and over and over for 3 hours. You know the one - men are pigs, women are oppressed, trans men are men and, most loudly of all, the Greeks were black, the Samurai were black, Cleopatra was black, King Arthur was black, the Eskimos were black, the Tsar was black and the Mayans were black.

I just don't have to do that and I'm not a racist for not playing along.

Hollywood's rules say that every film has to have a certain percentage of oppressed peoples (read: non-white, non-Jewish) in order to be considered for an Oscar. Presumably, no one from the A-list of actors or film crew talent would work on, say, a retelling of Le Morte D'Arthur that was 100% white. They'd lose access to future work and be howled out of Hollywood for being racists.

Well, I don't work in Hollywood. My job isn't threatened by this and I think it's all not just ridiculous but off-putting and wrecks the film. Ellen Page, who looks like a 10 year old boy, shows up early in the film and is used by Odysseus as a decoy guarding the Trojan Horse. The little idiot gets skewered right away, but her death is comic and not tragic. She's clearly a girl and would never have been given that job. She's there because Hollywood is a cult and casting a mentally ill woman who thinks she's a man is part of the movie's background chant of the progressive creed.

It's a bad movie that gets worse from there.

Short review: Imagine sitting for 3 hours and watching a video of a bunch of grown men yelling at each other in a foreign language while they work vigorously in a butcher shop. That's the movie. There's no variation of mood or pace, it's just 3 hours of sausage-making, beef shredding, hams going through slicing machines and chickens being shot out of cannons into Cuisinarts where they are pureed, all while burly men shout at each other in, what, Greek? No, not Greek. There aren't any Greeks in the movie. How about a mix of Russian and Bantu.

There's a black person in nearly every shot. They aren't explained at all, they're just there, all the time, everywhere. It looks a lot like this.

Djimon Hounsou as Sir Bedivere in King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017)

Like I said, I am not going to pretend this is improving the movie any more. It just isn't. Movies like this have a constant background hum of that bloody creed being chanted over and over and over.

A little more about the black people cast in the film. At the beginning of the movie, I think the first person we meet is Travis Scott. He's a bard, you see. He's also a rapper. His song about Odysseus the hero is terrible. I'm not going to pretend any more. It's just horrible.

He's a bard. If you don't think he's a really good bard, you're a bigot.

Finally, there's Helen of Troy. She's played by Lupita Nyongo for reasons that make all the sense in the world to the cult.

The face that launched a thousand ships.

I'd never seen her before, but I knew she was in the movie. Was she going to be pretty?

No. Not even close. When we first meet her, she's with her husband Meneleus, having been brought back from Troy. On her absolutely best day ever, this girl is a 3. She's not filmed on her best day. She's not the face that launched a thousand ships, she's just a particularly loud round of the progs' chorus.

I'd made my decision about Hollywood long before she showed up so having some nasty, ugly DEI chick shoved in my face as Helen was exasperating, but not terminally so. The patient was already dead.

As for the movie aside from those mortal failings, I didn't like anyone except Anne Hathaway's Penelope and Charlize Theron's Calypso. Those I could relate to. Everyone else was despicable or dismissible. I had no idea at any time why anyone was doing anything. I like Matt Damon, but his Odysseus was just kind of a semi-loser. He's trying to get back home, but everything he does goes sideways. He would have been a sympathetic character in a different movie. In this one, he's just another guy slicing, blending and grinding meat while shouting in Urdu at all the other men.

The biggest problem with the film was that there was nothing for Odysseus at the end of his voyage. Because nearly every scene was encrusted with gore and violence, it wasn't like Odysseus was traveling to find peace and tranquility and beauty. There wasn't any in the whole film. It was an unrelenting grind.

Finally, the ending was comical, reminiscent of a scene from the Marx Brother's Monkey Business. In that scene, which I can't find on YouTube, the Marx brothers are trying to get off an ocean liner where they've been stowaways. To avoid getting caught, Groucho steals some clothes from a doctor who is asleep on a deck chair. He shows up in the gangplank exit line right after another passenger has passed out, yelling about how he can't take another moment on this ship and is having a nervous breakdown and he'll die if he spends another day at sea. Groucho pushes his way to the front of the line, makes like he's examining the man and then writes a prescription on a pad and hands it to the officer managing the exit saying, "His nerves are shot! What this man needs is an ocean voyage!"

If you've seen The Odyssey, you'll know what I mean.

It wasn't a good movie and I'm pretty turned off on Hollywood in general these days. I'm just not going to be part of their cult. Well, not until they cast a Hispanic dude as Nelson Mandela.

Hey, diversity is their strength.