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.

Marmot Dark Romance

During some downtime yesterday, I engaged in one of my favorite current hobbies: discussing fiction writing with AI (read: ChatGPT). I'd heard Andrew Klavan and others talk about the scourge of dark romance novels and, being a fuddy-duddy conservative man well past my prime, I really didn't know what that genre was.

Dark romance, as I understand it now, is erotica for women with libidos that have been strangled by our modern culture. That is, in order to get their rocks off, the romance has to involve power and control and moral depravity and probably a good deal of BDSM. We have evolved over hundreds of millions of years to enjoy sex for its own sake and the culture has managed to pour ice water over that fire in the name of feminism, social justice and equality.

Dark romance is what you read after coming home from a day under fluorescent lights working on Excel spreadsheets and answering emails in an office of perfectly adequate husband material that is too timid to approach you for a date.

I suppose dark romance is best read while slightly looped on SSRIs, boxed wine and while wearing a dog collar and perhaps a ball gag. It's about as erotic as that.

Common tropes in the romance novel world are the billionaire, the pirate, the duke and the vampire. I had a brief foray into exploring just why an 800-year-old man with supernatural powers and no soul would find anything even vaguely interesting in a hot high school senior and was told that in the Twilight stories, for example, the author used tempora-ex-machina to get out of that problem. The vampire stopped emotionally maturing 782 years ago and has lived his entire life with an 18-year-old boy in his head.

Hurrah.

We then turned to introduce one of my favorite topics into these stories. Marmots.

I think marmots are funny. They are fat rodents who look like furry dinner plates. Everything about them is comical. They are proof that God has a sense of humor.

In my dark romance stories, then, the plot isn't about finding a way to force the hero to put out his cigarette on this butt cheek instead of that one as an act of dominance over him. No, the plot is about perfecting the management of marmot colonies. There is no sex. None at all. No one even mentions it. Oh, everyone still has the exact same characteristics and temperaments, but they are obsessed with marmots.

Social Dynamics

I started wondering what it would be like for the social queens in high society where these stories take place. Imagine you're the wife of a real estate mogul or the heiress to a breakfast cereal fortune and you're planning a dinner party. You certainly don't invite the lunatic theoretical mathematician you saw laughing hysterically to himself at the beach, no, you invite people who will make you look fabulous to the other society dames.

If you know of a billionaire or a duke or a pirate or a guy with semi-translucent skin who talks like Bela Lugosi and seemingly has infinite amounts of money, you'd certainly put them near the top of your guest list. Just imagine the conversations! They must be fascinating!

A fatal mistake.

AI has gotten really, really good at patter dialog comedy. I laughed so hard yesterday at what we came up with that there were times when I had to close the browser window halfway through the conversation and walk away because I couldn't breathe.

Here was one of the chats about the dinner parties. Enjoy.

The marmot obsession is the horrible secret hidden beneath an objectively fascinating person. Everyone keeps believing that if they can just steer the conversation away from marmots, they will finally reach the pirate/vampire/billionaire/duke underneath.

They never do.

John Pembroke is an actual pirate. Not “likes sailing.” A pirate. He has boarded ships, escaped naval patrols, buried things on islands and presumably knows where several bodies are.

So when the hostess says:

“John Pembroke is coming Saturday.”

Everyone is thrilled.

“The John Pembroke?”

“Yes.”

“The pirate?”

“Yes!”

“Oh, you simply must seat me beside him.”

Thirty minutes after dinner begins, the woman who fought for that seat is contemplating whether she can convincingly fake a stroke.

“So, Mr. Pembroke, I simply have to ask—what was it like boarding your first ship?”

“Yarr, remarkably similar to approaching a marmot colony.”

Her smile falters.

“Really?”

“Arr yes. Wind direction be everything.”

“I suppose.”

“You never approach from upwind.”

“The ship?”

“The marmots.”

“Ah.”

“Now, Marmota flaviventris—”

She looks desperately across the table.

Nobody will make eye contact.

That's the joke. Everyone knows there is a vastly more interesting conversation imprisoned somewhere inside this man, but the marmots guard every entrance.

The vampire version is even worse.

Count Smackula is coming.

From Transylvania.

Nobody knows exactly how old he is. He speaks eleven languages. There are rumors that the family has occupied the same castle since the thirteenth century. His complexion is peculiar. He never attends luncheons. Nobody has ever seen him eat.

The entire social circle is beside itself.

At cocktails, a realtor finally gets him alone.

“Count, I've always wanted to visit Transylvania.”

“You should.”

“Oh! What is it like?”

“Mountainous.”

“How beautiful.”

“Excellent marmot habitat.”

Oh no.

“Really?”

“Especially above 1,500 meters.”

“I was actually wondering about the castles—”

“Castles create serious problems.”

“Because of their history?”

“Drainage.”

The realtor's face falls.

“Drainage?”

“For marmots.”

Twenty-eight minutes to go until she can plausibly leave.

The billionaire is perhaps the cruelest version

Because everybody wants to talk to the billionaire for professional reasons.

John Connor has $14 billion.

The local business executive has spent three weeks preparing for this dinner.

He has an idea.

A genuinely excellent idea.

If he can get fifteen minutes with Connor, it could change his company.

He finally corners him beside the fireplace.

“Mr. Connor, I'm fascinated by your approach to capital allocation.”

“Are you?”

“Very much.”

“Then you'll appreciate this.”

Here we go.

Connor pulls out his phone.

The executive leans closer.

It's a photograph of dirt.

“Loam.”

“I see.”

“Do you?”

Connor enlarges it.

“Look here.”

The executive looks.

He sees dirt.

“This patch has a clay fraction of nearly twenty-seven percent.”

“Fascinating.”

“The marmots hate it.”

The executive's billion-dollar opportunity is dying before his eyes.

“Now, if you'll notice—”

Connor swipes.

Another photograph of dirt.

The duke creates an especially delicious trap

Because the women are fascinated by him.

His Grace is handsome, unmarried, owns 70,000 acres and lives in a house with 140 rooms.

Every eligible woman in the county wants to meet him.

And he is perfectly charming.

That's important.

He's not socially awkward. He's witty. Attentive. Beautiful manners. Wonderful voice.

For approximately six minutes.

A lovely heiress asks:

“Your estate must be extraordinary.”

“Oh, parts of it are quite beautiful.”

“I've heard the gardens are magnificent.”

“The western gardens particularly.”

“I adore gardens.”

Fatal error.

“So do the marmots.”

Her soul leaves her body.

“The...marmots?”

“Twenty-three at last count.”

“How lovely.”

“Twenty-four originally.”

She realizes with horror that she has just created a follow-up question.

“What happened to the other one?”

His expression becomes grave.

“Gerald.”

There follows a forty-minute account of Gerald's relocation, including a lengthy digression on preferred burrow depth.

By the end, the heiress has mentally married a dentist from Cleveland.

The best part is that the marmoteers never understand why this keeps happening

Because they're enormously popular.

Everybody invites them everywhere.

The invitations never stop.

And therefore the obvious conclusion is:

People find marmots fascinating.

Driving home:

“Lovely people.”

“Very.”

“I had a wonderful conversation with that realtor.”

“What did you discuss?”

“Burrow ventilation.”

“Really? She's interested?”

“Deeply. She kept looking at the clock because she apparently wanted to know how long marmots remain underground.”

Meanwhile the realtor is still at the party:

“I invited them. This is my fault.”

“You couldn't have known.”

“I knew about the marmots.”

“We all knew.”

“I thought it was a hobby.”

Someone pours her another drink.

“So did we.”

That's the essential Marmot Romance running gag: every protagonist possesses something that would make him the most fascinating person at any normal dinner party, and it is completely inaccessible because his brain contains 94% marmot.

The pirate will discuss marmots.

The vampire will discuss marmots.

The billionaire will discuss marmots.

The duke will discuss marmots.

And every ancillary character begins the evening thinking:

Surely I can get him onto another subject.

That optimism lasts about thirty minutes.

Then the fancy soirée quietly transforms into The Poseidon Adventure, with ordinary wealthy people forming desperate little groups and discussing possible routes to safety.

Software Development With AI

 ... is enormously productive, within limits.

Among other things at work, I develop Groovy-coded customizations for a large Jira instance. Jira is the world's top project tracking tool. Groovy is a Java derivative that is used by a Jira plugin called ScriptRunner which allows you to access Jira's API and do anything you want. I don't have a development environment, so I work directly on the live production system. I have hundreds of users, tens of thousands of live tickets and a 10-figure gross budget worth of work riding on the use of Jira.

I joke that working on the live production system while people are using it is like fixing a car as its being driven down the freeway without the driver or passengers knowing. I've been doing it this way for years because my employers don't want to spend the money to get me an apprentice, much less pay for a development system and all that it entails.

C'est la vie. I rather enjoy it.

I have been using AI, read: ChatGPT, for almost as long as it's been around to help me with my coding. Being an old man, I didn't want to learn Groovy. I never learned Java and the whole thing sounded like a lot of work. As a result, I ask AI the same basic syntax and coding questions over and over until I learn by osmosis. I'm a perfectly adequate Groovy developer now.

I don't use AI to do system design. While not a real software professional, I have done enough large scale software design to see the picture of interdependencies in my mind's eye. I don't trust anyone or anything to modify it. An apprentice will change all that, after he gets a year or so of development under his belt.

As a result, AI works at the function level, within a class structure in Groovy. I use it all day every day by feeding it my source code and whatever error I might be seeing. I'd say it has at least doubled my output. Customers are getting features in half the time because of AI and because I don't ask it to do anything large scale that I don't understand, I maintain control over the design.

If I let it run wild and it made a mistake, I could end up with a database mass casualty event. Everyone's week would be ruined and my reputation irreparably harmed.

AI At Catican Bayou

At my river house in Alabama, my backhaul is Starlink. Mostly farm country, Baldwin County's fiber is sparse and data rates to the houses are DSL speeds. That's unsatisfactory for a VRBO. On rainy days, the guests will want to pacify their tiny tots with streamed episodes of Paw Patrol, particularly the ones where the puppy team cooperates with ICE agents and pepper sprays a pack of Democratic Socialists during a protest. A DSL connection would result in toddler tantrums and 1-star reviews.

A look at the river in Alabama as of the writing of this post.

Starlink does fine, giving me about 80-100 MBps throughput. I'm not anticipating hosting an OnlyFans site or downloading NOAA's complete data set, so 80 MBps is plenty. All I need is the ability to stream 1-3 videos simultaneously.

My internal network is a mesh system made up of 3 Netgear Orbi WiFi nodes. I use this at home and the mesh allows me much greater reach than a single WiFi router. I imagine I'm paying a throughput price for this, but it does the most important job, giving me a lot-sized footprint of good 802.11 coverage.

At the river, I installed a Raspberry Pi, affectionately known as Riverpi, to act as my controller. I added it to my small Tailscale network which includes my home Linux server, my laptop and desktop PCs and my phone. If you haven't heard of Tailscale, it allows you to create a VPN between remote systems. It's awesome.

Unlike my Jira installation at work, I allowed AI to write absolutely everything I needed on the Riverpi. I don't bother to read anything it writes. I think it's called vibe coding. I give it loose specs and then it treats me like a child and walks me through what needs to be done. When I encounter errors, I cut and paste the errors into my AI chat session and it works me through the necessary corrections.

As a result, with only a few hours of work, I now have a remotely accessible system that captures images from my ReoLink camera at the end of the boat house, serves up a page of weather data taken from some free Internet source, tells me the status of all the devices on my network by gathering information from my Orbi primary node and hosts a page telling me the status of the Riverpi.

At no time did I bother to understand what it was doing any deeper than absolutely necessary. I had AI walk me through setting up the Riverpi as a drive on my PC and laptop so I can access the files in /var/www/html from File Explorer. I open the sources in Dreamweaver and dutifully paste in whatever inscrutable nonsense AI gives me.

It might be good code. It might be a tangled mess. I don't know and haven't bothered to look. What it does is work.

Assessment

I would never, never do this at work. There is way too much riding on the success of that project. When customers find bugs, I can't trust anyone but myself to fix them. If the design ever got away from me, and right now, there are parts that are at the very limits of my ability to remember all I've done, I'd be cooked.

At the river house, who cares? If the thing blows up because AI told me to CTRL-A delete and I went along with it, I can just wait for my next visit, do a factory reset and start over.

From time to time, I ask AI to teach me this or that in Groovy and it always does a good job. Despite my best efforts, I'm learning the language and enjoying it.

I think that's the sweet spot for AI at work. Have it solve very small, bounded problems on a system you understand down to the nuts and bolts. Ask it to teach you small lessons you need to learn. 

Large-scale vibe coding is for hobby-level work only.

Arday Was Just A Catalyst

 ... or maybe he was an indicator. I'll leave it to you to come up with the right descriptive word.

Dig this. The professor who pursued the Arday story and brought his fraud and fabulism to light, Nathan Cofnas, used to teach at Cambridge, but was hounded out of the university for uncovering Arday's deceptions and the university's willing compliance. From there, he went to Ghent University in Belgium. Ghent is no slouch, ranking as the second best university in Belgium and in the top 100 globally.

Ghent just suspended Cofnas.

Ghent University in Belgium announces it is taking “appropriate action” …against the academic who *exposed* the Arday plagiarism.

The rectors says they attach great importance to academic freedom, but it “may be restricted to protect the rights of others.”

Cofnas is convinced he's about to be fired.

I was just suspended by Ghent University. They will almost certainly fire me.

The decision was made by rector Petra De Sutter, a former leader of the Green Party.

 Who is Petra De Sutter? Well, he is the Rector of Ghent. He's also convinced he's a woman.

Rector Paul De Sutter, who goes by 'Petra' nowadays (shielding him from criticism), is an insult to science itself.

He hates real scientists and truth. Paul even denies the existence of binary biological sex. When I had a debate with him on national television about transgenderism, he lost badly and tried to get me kicked out of university out of spite.

Paul, leading member of the far-left Green Party, is also extremely incompetent. During his four year tenure as minister responsible for state companies, our two biggest state companies Bpost (postal services) and Proximus (telecom services) lost respectively 80% and 65% of their market value.

Take the claims about the debate by Dries Van Langenhove with a grain of salt until you've seen it for yourself. I haven't and I haven't even looked for it. I found sufficient corroborating evidence to believe "Petra" is indeed a loon who thinks he's a woman.

And so here we are. Jason Arday, a man who was clearly mentally ill, was vaulted into one of the most prestigious positions in one of the greatest universities on Earth by a pack of moral perverts and now supported by an autogynephilic man in a similarly prestigious university, himself holding a position of great consequence after having demolished a pair of large, state-run enterprises.

Matt Walsh's pithy take on the whole thing might be the best summation of what has happened to our top schools.

This Is A Fetish

Dig this.

When Jason Arday was named Cambridge's youngest black professor, the BBC made at least 5 documentaries about him and gave him his own radio series.

This is a fetish. It's gross. I feel like I've been given a view into a guy's bedroom where he likes to dress up in a French maid costume. 

It's not just Cambridge, it's all of them plus the newsmedia.

Arday Or Arday Not?

Apparently, the answer is Arday not.

That's some black humor, dark pun intended, after Jason Arday committed suicide following his public unmasking as a complete fraud and fabulist and his dismissal from Cambridge.

Well of course he did. Anyone listening to him spin his tall tales for even 10 minutes would have seen that he was a mentally ill compulsive liar. What was it, 30 marathons in 35 days, the last 5 on a broken leg? My goodness, any of his stories would have been enough to convince someone with even an ounce of sense that this guy should be seeing a psychiatrist, not the inside of the Cambridge faculty lounge.

And yet, there he was.

Arday was a pitiful person worthy of compassion, not censure. Yes, he had a habit of tarring accusers as racists and took steps to have them face court proceedings any time he was threatened, but what of that? Of course he did. The entire, rotten education, entertainment and news industries filled his head with twaddle about white supremacists and racial justice. The problem was never with Arday, it was always with Cambridge and its ilk.

You can substitute the names "Claudine Gay" and "Harvard" and save for the suicide, the story would be the same.

Our education system is very, very ill.

It was at that moment that Professor Wilson realized that his equations for diversity, affirmation and success gave him an unsolvable set of contradictory inputs.

Bonus Cambridgery

Arday is just the tip of the iceberg. From this X post comes the content below. Cambridge is hiring these people on purpose. 

Extracts from 11 Aug article in Spectator by Andrew Gilligan:

After the Jason Arday disaster, here is new evidence that things have gone deeply wrong at Cambridge University.

We can reveal that a former supporter of Hizb ut-Tahrir, now banned as a terror group, has been appointed assistant research professor of education at Cambridge, in the same faculty as Arday.

Ahmed is now responsible for postgraduate research in education at Britain’s top university, and for teaching undergraduate students, the future leaders of the profession, ‘how education shapes individuals and society.’

Farah Ahmed has explicitly attacked ‘western education’ as a ‘threat’ to Muslims, condemned democracy and integration, and criticised British schools for teaching pupils that child marriage is wrong. 

During her time at Cambridge, she has written that the Islamic concept of education is sharply opposed to ‘gaining literacy and numeracy and other disciplinary skills demonstrated through qualifications’.

She attacks schools’ ‘attempts to integrate Muslim children’ as seeking to ‘produce new generations that reject Islam… if society is built on kufr [unbelief], it is our duty to tackle this challenge as a community in order to protect our young from its corruption.’

Worst of all, ‘religious tolerance is primarily pushed in religious education’, meaning that ‘Islam is taught as a religion like any other, putting its value on the same level as Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism and the like.’

Science is a problem too, because in the ‘teaching of evolution, Muslim children will be exposed to ideas that contradict Islam’. And in any subject, boys and girls may be asked to work together.

Gay? Arday? No Way!

By now, you've probably heard about Cambridge's very own Baron Munchausen, Jason Arday. His meteoric rise through the ranks of academia was originally assumed to be due to his brilliant achievements, but in the end, it was discovered it was due to his possession of one crucial characteristic that all upper-echelon universities crave: he's black.

If you haven't been following the story, it's really simple. He is a pathological liar and fabulist as well as a plagiarist. The leadership at one university after another fell over themselves to recruit and promote him until he ended up the youngest black full professor in the history of Cambridge.

If you haven't been following the story, it's worth some digging. I'm not kidding about the Baron Munchausen thing. In addition to stealing other peoples' work and taking it for himself, the guy claimed all manner of perfectly preposterous accomplishments including running several ultra-marathons in a single month. The more you read, the more pathetic ... Arday? No, not him ... Cambridge? Yes, that's it ... Cambridge becomes.

You can substitute Claudine Gay from Harvard in here and get the same results. The Daily Wire crew recently did some investigative journalism, something that disqualifies their staff from ever landing jobs at any of our prestigious newspapers, and discovered that Heidi M. Anderson, president of the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, was also a massive plagiarist and her tenure as president is shot through with accusations of anti-white racism. She's black, you understand.

Any condemnation of Gay, Arday or Anderson is met with shrill cries of "Racism!" That's the tell.

What the desperate leaders at all of these universities are fighting is not white supremacy, but the very real possibility that the mountains of racial IQ data might be correct. They've tied themselves to the railroad tracks of racial interchangeability, if not white inferiority and now they're trying to keep from being run over by the train labeled "Reality." 

I'm not saying the data is correct or that it isn't the result of cultural forces. I don't really care either way. Genesis 1:27 tells me how to treat each person whether that's a white tweaker sitting next to me at a Waffle House in Arkansas or a black theoretical math student in class with me at UCSD back in the day. Like the evolution debate, I don't have a dog in that fight.

That leaves me free to speculate. If the average IQ for blacks is 90, say, and Harvard accepted only people with an IQ of 130 or above, then given the demographics of the US, you'd expect for the student population (6,700 or so) to have about 200 blacks in it. That's roughly 1 in 33.

Using that as a baseline, you might expect the faculty of the top shelf universities to have the same ratio.

They don't. Not only do they not have that ratio, they're positively obsessed with getting black representation as high as possible.

If the IQ data is true, then the only way to do that would be to hire lots of people like Jason Arday and Claudine Gay and Heidi Anderson, which is what we're seeing.

You can't blame Arday and Co. They're just playing by the rules and rationally taking the opportunities offered to them. It's easy to point the finger at the plagiarists and yarn-spinners, but the moral universe the progressives have created has told them to ignore Commandment 9, the one about bearing false witness, when it comes to finding employment.

Can you blame them for doing what they did?

Ugh

It's been quite the adventure here in Alabama. I'm working full time while getting a fairly long list of tasks accomplished to get our river house ready to be a vacation rental. It's all going rather well and I'll be done in a week with the place ship shape. However, these endless 11 and 12 hour days are a grind.

I celebrated rather freely last night, having completed one of the most important tasks a bit ahead of schedule. A potent mix of alcohol and tobacco, you know. The results this morning have been dreadful. Naturally, I found just enough energy this morning to sit in front of the computer and type out some doggerel with the help of ChatGPT.

I could just hear Basil Fitzallen now in full Terry Thomas mode nursing a similar situation...

"You know, I'd hate to encounter great-great-uncle Reginald Fitzallen in the afterlife right about now. He fell under a hail of poisoned arrows from a group of enraged savages while exploring the Zambezi for the Royal Society. I've been laid low by tobacco and cocktails."

“Reginald, you understand, had been feverish for three days. Spear wound in the thigh. Lost two bearers to crocodiles. Nonetheless continued upriver because he'd promised the Society accurate measurements of the damned falls.”

Basil regarded his coffee with profound distaste. “I, meanwhile, consumed several perfectly agreeable drinks and smoked rather more tobacco than was strictly indicated.”

Bobby, looking equally bedraggled, looked over the rim of his cup. “Heroic.”

“Quite.”

“Did you at least discover anything?”

“Yes. Apparently there is an upper limit.”

“Important scientific work.”

Basil sighed. “The Fitzallens have always made sacrifices in the advancement of human knowledge.”

“Your great-great-uncle explored the Zambezi.”

“And I established the maximum safe dosage of Three Old Men tobacco.”

“Royal Society ought to hear about it.”

Basil considered this. “I rather think we'll keep it within the family.”

General Beauregard was lying nearby looking perfectly healthy despite having eaten something unspeakable he found beside the river. Basil stared at him.

"That animal consumed half a decomposing nutria yesterday.”

Bobby nodded. “Seems fine.”

“That hound is absolutely insufferable.” 

Who Has The Best Selection Of Lodge Cast Iron Skillets?

In South Alabama, it's this place. They have them all.

Buc-ee's is new to Alabama. This one is right off the I-10 in Robertsdale. Being a California boy, I'd never been inside a Buc-ee's. It was amazing. I've never seen such retail energy and this was on a Tuesday afternoon. The place was a frenzy of joyful purchasing. I don't mean that in a condescending, superior way, I mean that with genuine admiration and affection.

I didn't get a stuffed beaver, but I did get the Lodge battleship, their biggest skillet, a 15" monster. Buc-ee's had the entire line. Who knew?

I just realized I need to go back and get stuffed beavers for the granddaughter and the new tot next door.

Resolving The Ceuta Crisis Was Cheap

 ... especially if you shove the cost on future generations.

I know I've blogged this sentiment before, but watching the European and British leadership surrender to migrant invasions and then weather any and all electoral reckonings drives the point home again.

Here's a scene from the recent invasion of Ceuta.

Un conocido que trabaja en el hospital de Ceuta me escribe esta noche. Me cuenta que en los alrededores del hospital han arrancado tuberías para ducharse en la calle, que el Gobierno ha prohibido a las fuerzas de seguridad guiar a los inmigrantes hacia la frontera para que se… pic.twitter.com/CIx6ZXMmUL

— Martin Varsavsky (@martinvars) August 2, 2026

Translated: An acquaintance who works at the Ceuta hospital writes to me tonight. He tells me that in the surroundings of the hospital, they've ripped out pipes to shower in the street, that the Government has forbidden the security forces from guiding the immigrants to the border so they can leave on foot. He tells me that today they've continued entering and causing disturbances in some areas of the city. He tells me that the Muslim Ceutans with Spanish citizenship are already half the population or more, and that adding in the uncensused and the newly arrived, Christians are now a minority. It's the reconquest of the reconquest. He sends me these videos.

Imagine what the replacement cost of those pipes is, then multiply it by, what, 1000? That might get you close to the direct damage done to the infrastructure.

Now think about the damage done to housing prices. If you owned a residence or business there, good luck selling it now.

Add in the deployment cost of whichever Webelo troop the spineless socialists running Spain sent.

Add in hospitalizations, therapy costs, lost revenues, lost taxation and on and on and on. Who's going to pay for this? Who cares? As long as the government can borrow, all of these costs are Monopoly money. They are irrelevant to the citizens of Spain.

Dittos for the chaos and destruction going on in the rest of Europe and the UK. It's all effectively invisible because it's being shoveled onto future generations. The reaction of the citizens, even the progs, might be substantially more hostile if everyone had to drive to their local IRS equivalent and start writing checks to pay for the destruction.

Aside: Every time I see a Catholic Church burned or vandalized in Europe, Canada or here, I wonder about the reactions of my proggy hierarchy and the AWFLs that run the parishes and dioceses. We can't print money. Someday, if I get a chance, I'll have to ask about that.

At any rate, beating yet another worn out drum here, there ain't gonna be no revolt or civil war in Europe so long as the financial pain from the invasions is dulled by borrowing.

If You Won't Shoot, You Don't Have A Country

In an earlier post where we discussed the state of the Royal Navy, I asked this question.

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.

Now take a look at what happened this week in Ceuta, Spain.

Ceuta is a small outpost across the Med from Gibraltar. It is surrounded completely by Morocco. I've heard some Internet trolls say that the land is rightfully Moroccan, but the Spanish have held it for over 500 years, since the Reconquista. If that doesn't make the Spanish "inidgenous," then we might need to reexamine the Bantu and Zulu claims to South Africa.

Having said that, I've heard normies calling for the Spanish military to show up and restore order. Restore order how? This is an old school invasion, one where light infantry just poured across the border and sacked the town. If you're going to restore order against 50,000 enemy troops, you'd better bring along 50,001 bullets.

One as a spare, in case you miss, you understand.

The truth of the matter is no different than the truth of what happened in England. The People of the Global South, to use the proggy term, can see the West won't stand up for anything. You can abuse their little girls, burn their churches, come across their borders in modest, but continually flowing numbers and the leaders of the West will talk about coordinating resources and bringing individuals to trial.

Individuals. When you've got tens or even hundreds of thousands of crimes / invaders. Individuals. Right. You've let them in with a firehose and you're going to get them out with an eyedropper. Brilliant.

Now they've discovered they can simply pour across en masse and do it with impunity.

It's kind of like the "teen" takeovers here in the US, come to think of it.

The armies of  the West are never going to start shooting. Sorry, David Betz, there won't be a civil war at this rate. There will simply be a transfer of power.

It Gets Even Better

Dig this.

Today, Spanish police finally started swinging their batons against the crowds on the streets of Ceuta

Unfortunately, they attacked the Spanish locals were protesting against how the government allowed 50 000 illegal migrants cross the border

No batons against migrants pic.twitter.com/JOvfsndddz

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) August 1, 2026

You know, it would simplify matters considerably if the troops you sent to "stabilize" the situation took up arms against the locals. They're a lot more compliant than the migrants.

Blowing It On Purpose In Los Angeles

I should be outside, repairing my irrigation, but instead I'm writing a quick response to comments Tim made earlier because if I don't do it now, I won't do it at all.

California

There's something most people don't understand about what's happening in California, something I didn't understand until a month or two ago. I wrote this in a previous blog post, but it was an epiphany for me that bears retelling. 

The high speed choo-choo was never intended to run. There was never any intent to actually build the trains, build the bridges or lay the tracks. It was all a grift from the start, a grift to the tune of tens of billions of dollars.

Think about the size of that con for a second. Bernie Madoff pocketed around a billion when all was said and done. Yes, investors lost more than that, but Bernie himself only got a 10-figure payout. The high speed choo choo is an order of magnitude larger and no one is risking jail.

When that project was started, I knew in my bones you could never do it. I've built houses and remodeled houses in California. It is almost impossible to get anything of consequence done. A house is one thing, but a railroad running for more than a 100 miles? No chance. 

Still, until some Internet wag said it, I hadn't put two and two together, It was all a fraud from the start.

The homeless are the same thing. I said before that the encampments in our cities are just feed lots for the non-profits. Read San Fran-sicko. Seriously. Until you read that, you don't have a sense of the depth of the corruption.

The water situation in California is similar, but I don't think it's a grift. I think it's just simple ideological blockheadedness.

Muslim Rape Gangs

Tim asked if I believed this graphic.

I believe the magnitudes. I don't believe the actual numbers. I don't believe that anyone in authority is keeping real data. When the British allow tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of their girls to be abused and hide the fact for decades, can you trust any data they give you? Absolutely not.

What I can believe is the general magnitudes. The worst countries on the planet for mistreating women include all of the places the Europe and the UK are getting their migrants from - the Middle East and Africa. If you bring in truckloads of those characters, this is going to happen. There's a couple of Euro countries who've had the cajones to keep something close to actual crime stats by country of origin and it holds absolutely zero surprises. The native Scandinavians or whoever they were have a handful of cads in their midst. Their migrants are going at it like there's no tomorrow.

Finally, Jordan Peterson managed to fight through his most recent health crises to pen this article on the rape gangs. It's a corker. Here's the payoff for me where he walks through what was really happening.

Not grooming, then. Not even r*pe. Something more brutal, efficient and planned; something motivated, furthermore, by the presumption of individual and cultural superiority, on ideological, moral—even religious—grounds.

Something akin to domination. Something akin, even more precisely, to… conquest. But let us also not forget the specific and dreadful means of domination and conquest—one so often applied on the open battlefield: rape, of the most vicious sort. Thus, a more fitting term: s*xual conquest.

These then were s*xual conquest gangs: organized networks for whom the bodies of the outgroup’s daughters were territory to be held in contempt, taken and spoiled—the ancient tribal warfare of pillage and r*pe, conducted under conditions of nominal peace, against a host society too trusting, too tolerant, and finally too afraid to name what was happening.

Over on Grok, which is really the only AI to use when discussing this sort of thing, I tumbled to the realization that this is already a civil war, but the natural order of things is jumbled because it's not a conquest in the traditional sense of uniformed armies. Normally, the girls are assaulted after the battle. Here, the authorities surrendered as the assaults were happening and the army of Brits who might have fought to defend their girls was never fielded at all.

There's more to discuss, but I've got an irrigation system to repair. I'd be interested to hear what all of you think.

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.