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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.

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?