I think I've had my formulations wrong all this time. I keep talking about progressives and suchlike, but that's not really who they are. Instead, they are primitives. Allow me to explain.
Ben Shapiro published a book recently called Lions and Scavengers. In short, lions build and protect while scavengers, well, scavenge. I like Ben, but the book feels like it was rushed and his model doesn't work for me. For one thing, lions don't build anything. Further, the people who get me all worked up, the Catholic hierarchy, are only somewhat scavengers. It dawned on me just recently that a better descriptor is primitives.
Primitives have no idea how civilization works, how it is maintained or how it was created. These are the South Africans who have torn out power lines to get at the copper which they sell for scrap metal. These are also the Catholic bishops who call for more and more "migrants" to be brought into America from places like South Africa.
The South Africans are tearing South Africa to bits and the bishops can't see that bringing them here will only lead to America being torn to bits. They are both primitives because civilization is utterly alien to them save for how it will be consumed to provide sustenance for today.
Dig this time-lapse video of a major construction project.
Now listen to this Aboriginal talk about meeting white people for the first time.
Now check out this summary of the Palestinians going at each other like animals now that there is a power vacuum in Gaza following Hamas getting stomped by the Israelis.
Internal clashes erupt in the Gaza Strip as Hamas tries to reassert control after the ceasefire:
Following the implementation of the ceasefire, tensions have risen across Gaza between Hamas forces and several powerful families.
There is simply no chance in the world that either the Aboriginals or the Palestinians could build that apartment complex on their own. If you go backwards in time a bit so that both the Abos* and Pallies cannot rely on anything invented by the Europeans, it becomes crystal clear that neither would be able to build anything even remotely like that.
Primitives are like that. They are, well, primitive. If you import a bunch of them or create a ton of them in your universities or generate them from legalizing drugs, they will drag you down to their level. They cannot do anything else because they do not know how to maintain, much less build.
This is what makes the open-border crowd primitives. They are actively overloading the system to the point where everything will get pulled to bits. Because they are primitive, they don't understand what is required to maintain civilization and, in childlike innocence, think it will always be there.
An intellectual with a fancy degree wearing a suit (or Roman collar!) can be just as primitive as the Abo woman in the video above. When you consume what others have built, when you devour your fixed assets to feed yourself today, when it is easy to project the fruits of your behavior into the future and see mud huts instead of skyscrapers, you are a primitive.
Primitives do this:
It is childlike naivete to think that cash will continue to flow from the government forever like this. It is childlike naivete to speak of empathy and compassion for the migrants who will accelerate the process of fiscal collapse. It is childlike naivete to think that Abos, Pallies or South American peasants will contribute anything unique and irreplaceable to construction projects like the one above in excess of what they will drain from the rest of us.
It is the same childlike ignorance that leads the South Africans to tear apart their infrastructure for scrap.
It is primitive.
Bonus Content
Watch this and think in terms of the value of the fixed assets involved. Any repairs of this destruction must be paid out of existing funds which will not be available for normal maintenance or improvements. In short, the "migrants" are pulling Italy to bits. The Catholic bishops, being primitives, cannot comprehend that.
I couldn't find the tweet I wanted to include here, but this image will have to do. Do you know why Muslimas must dress like this?
In Islam, they believe that men cannot be expected to control their sexual desires. To prevent sexual sin, women must cover themselves completely. The image I had in mind was a still from a BBC interview with a woman covered even more completely than this, where you could only see her eyes.
Aside: Will Neuralink technology make the niqab obsolete? If women had sensors in their clothing that provided them visual information from the world around them, they wouldn't even need the eye slits any more.
If you tell boys from a very young age that they cannot control their sexual urges and that women must safeguard themselves by dressing in sacks, what do you think that does to their attitudes towards women as they reach adulthood? Forget the whole male guardian thing and all the legal second-class status for women issues, just think about how you bend males in your society when this is front and center in public every day all day. Every woman you see on the street reinforces the notion that men cannot control themselves.
If you can't control yourself when you see a Western chick dressed normally, then this is no big deal.
🚨🇬🇧 Pakistani Amar Mehraj kidnapped a 17-year-old British girl. He hit her in the head with a rock and dragged her across the ground.
Amar took her to a house, drugged her, and then r*ped her. He invited three other Pakistani migrants to the house and made money from it.
He did it because, when he saw her, he wanted to have sex with her and he knew, just knew that it was pointless to try to control himself.
To this guy, the trial must have seemed like a Kafka play. He could not control himself, yet he was on trial for not having controlled himself. Madness!
This post came about after I saw several videos of Muslim men in England smirking and smiling when confronted by British men who had caught them approaching little girls in parks or outside schools. It was jarring to see how the Muslims thought the whole interrogation was both surreal and comical. How in the world could they be suppressing laughter as they were being threatened?
A frustrated, frightened and angry British woman posting on X clued me in. She said something like, "Every time you see a veiled Muslima, see instead the Islamic teaching that men can't be expected to control themselves."
With that mental model, it all made sense. The Muslim women are wearing protective clothing that keep them safe from men. You, a Western girl, are not. They can relax in public. You cannot.
The multiculturalists don't know how anything works. They haven't worked through the dynamics of Islamic society and how they play out in daily life. The Islamic idea that women are responsible for preventing rapes and sexual assaults through their dress may or may not work, but it's real and it is utterly incompatible with the behavior of Western women.
You'd think they would have thought of that, but they didn't.
Recycling For The Win
This was pretty stunning. It turns out the British government recycles all the dinghies that come across the channel carrying "migrants." I wonder if they get their deposit back with each one. In any case, whatever it is the British government says about trying to stop illegal immigration, they clearly aren't if they send the boats back to France to get reloaded and used again.
Ex-MP Andrew Bridgen claims the Home Office uses GXO Logistics (30% share ownership Vanguard, Blackrock) to truck the dingys back to France for the next wave of migrants. GXO has a multi-million pound contract with @Keir_Starmer's traitor government.pic.twitter.com/XfbezX2MSE
OK, I admit, that's a long blog post title. Still, it works.
Cuomo lost the Democratic primary for mayor of NYC to a Marxist Muslim with absolutely zero management experience. Cuomo, former governor of NY, should have turned Mamdani into roadkill, if resumes counted for anything.
But resumes don't count for anything when there's a major fork in the road and your candidacy represents going straight, right into a tree.
IMO, these days, every election has as one of its dominant issues this question: Should the government get much larger or much smaller? Where we are right now is untenable. We are not, as Jefferson Davis wanted to do for the slaves, taking care of people from cradle to grave. We are also not, as Thomas Sowell might argue, allowing people to make their own choices and live with the consequences.
We have found the middle point - trying to do a whole lot for citizens while running up a crushing debt because we won't tax those same citizens appropriately. That's a middle point that, quite obviously, is unstable.
NYC, California, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, Baltimore, Chicago, insert your favorite blue state or blue city here, have balance sheets that look a lot like this.
No one, outside of innumerate white, liberal women, thinks this is sustainable. We either need to do the full Mamdani / Davis and turn everyone into proles / slaves or we need to start moving back towards Thomas Sowell. You can't just stand in the middle of the road shouting, "Stay the course! Everything is fine! We just need competent leadership and all will be well."
Cuomo tried just that and the college-educated, read: college indoctrinated, deserted him and voted for Jeff Davis. It will always be like that. This is the future of the Democratic Party. You can't stay in the middle of the road and get run over like a possum, you're going to have to make a choice. The activists are plumping for slavery to Massa in the Big Statehouse. They've got the energy and enthusiasm.
If you're a centrist Democrat, you're going to have to argue that we need to take the other choice at the fork in the road.
Super Special Bonus Muppet Movie Content
No fork-in-the-road blog post would be complete without this.
It's taken me a long time to escape the standard analysis of Trump as chaotic and unhinged. It's almost impossible to get free of the effects of the culture and the smartypants analysts who create it. Watching the tariff madness unfold and listening to Andrew Klavan and 2Way has given me a new model for how Trump works. Here's my take on it.
Imagine that you've got an artillery battery. You want your barrage to hit some place within a sector that is 60 degrees wide and no less than 5000 yards away. You're not sure where you will end up targeting, but it doesn't really matter so long as you are somewhere in that wedge of the circle and no less than 5000 yards away.
Your spotting rounds are fired straight in front of you with a range of 15,000 yards. The enemy responds and you gradually dial in your targeting until you are firing ± 30 degrees from your original direction and more than 5000 yards from where you are. That's Trump.
Trump decides what he wants and then asks for the moon. The other side screams at him, but since Trump has America and they have some much weaker position, they negotiate. Eventually, he gets something better than what he had before. That ± 30 degrees gives him a ton of room to negotiate.
Tariffs As An Example
In the tariff wars, Trump said he wanted to eliminate trade deficits. In retrospect, I think even Trump knew that was idiocy. However, it was way beyond where he was willing to accept. Everyone took him at his word and went into spasms of horror.
Incidentally, I did, too. That's what I mean when I say it's very hard to escape the zeitgeist generated by the Super Smart Set Who Don't Actually Know Much Of Anything And Who Have Been Wrong About A Lot Of Things For Decades (SSSWDAKMOAWHBWAALOTFD).
Crucial to Trump's tactic of asking for the moon is to do it with the full force of whatever appropriate power he has on hand. For example, the Houthis discovered that carrier air power beats speed boats and tents in the desert. They are still learning this lesson as is the rest of the world. Trump will back up what he says with a ginormous hammer.
The Chinese discovered that Trump knows when he has all the high cards and they, as Scott Bessent said, hold a pair of 2s. I spent a little time with Grok the other day looking at who has the upper hand in the trade war between America and China. It's pretty one-sided. Here are just a few things to keep in mind.
We have the world's reserve currency. When we print money, we get inflation, but everyone still wants to hold dollars. When China prints money, they end up with piles of yuan that no one wants.
Our trade is asymmetrical. Symmetric tariffs hit them 5x harder than they hit us because they export 5x to us than we do to them.
They hold Treasuries, but selling them undermines the yuan. Their Treasury holdings are part of what backs up their currency because dollars are hard currency and yuan are not. Their threat to sell Treasuries is a one-shot deal. Once they sell them, they're gone. Yes, they did sell some recently and yes, that hurt us, but they can only sell as many as they have, but then they're all out of them and the yuan is more exposed than ever.
China's debt problem is about 50% worse than ours. Most of their debt is corporate, so it is semi-hidden, but since they are a socialist nation, there is no difference between Chinese corporate debt and Chinese government debt.
China services that mountain of debt through exports. If we reduce their trade surplus, it gets really hard for them to pay their mortgages. Oof.
Trump Is Sane, But He's Different
Contrary to what the SSSWDAKMOAWHBWAALOTFD would have you believe, Trump is not a madman. He's just not them. China is a bad actor on the world stage and has been getting stronger. Their demographics give them a deadline to exert maximum power, but that is still far off. In the meantime, if your enemy is getting stronger, then it's better to take him on today instead of tomorrow.
The SSSWDAKMOAWHBWAALOTFD don't think this way which is why they are horrified and believe we should be horrified as well.
I'm not horrified any more.
There are plenty of targets, so anything vaguely in front of you will do.
I'm hoping this sparks some comments from Tim, Ohioan and Mut as well as anyone else who is interested. This is a really long post, but I think it's worth it.
I thought this was a fascinating conversation between Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein. They're both compelling characters and the topics were wide-ranging. At one point, Joe brought up the growing doubts about Darwinian evolution. Fortunately, there are transcripts online of the Joe Rogan podcast, so I didn't have to go through any technical gymnastics to get these excerpts.
Here, I will edit for brevity, but that link will take you to the source. Search on Darwin and you'll immediately get the relevant bit. Emphasis in the text is mine.
Joe: We have to talk about evolution because one of the things that Tucker Carlson said on the podcast was essentially that He can't like prove evolution. It's not real. He doesn't believe in evolution as it's taught.
Bret: He said well, he said a couple things. It was a little confusing. He said that you know, we see evidence of adaptation, but we don't see evidence of evolution and that we've really gotten beyond the Darwinian model. We've essentially come to understand that it's not right.
It's an argument for intelligent design, I think. First of all, I want to clean up a little bit of what he said just so it's
I don't really think he means we see the evidence for adaptation but not evolution. That's not coherent. I think what he means is we see evidence for what we would call microevolution, but we don't see evidence for what we would call macroevolution. This is a commonly believed thing in intelligent design circles.
I think people want the career evolutionary biologist to break out a bunch of examples from nature that make the case. Very, very clear so that they can relax.
Tucker's concern isn't based in science, and they can go back to feeling comfortable that, you know, the Darwinists have it well in hand.
That's not where I am.
I could do that, but I don't feel honorable doing that. I think, as a scientist, I should not be in the business of persuading people. I want you to be persuaded. I want you to be persuaded by the facts. I want them to persuade you. But I don't think I'm allowed to persuade you. I think that it's effectively PR when I attempt to bring people over to Team Darwin.
Further, as I'm sure I've mentioned to you before, I'm not happy with the state of Darwinism as it has been managed by modern Darwinists. In fact, I'm kind of annoyed by it. And although Tucker, I do not believe, is right in the end, there is a reason that the perspective that he was giving voice to is catching on in 2025.
And it has to do with the fact that, in my opinion, the mainstream Darwinists are... Telling a kind of lie about how much we know and what remains to be understood.
So all that being said, let me say, I think modern Darwinism is broken. Yes, I do think I know more or less how to fix it. I'm annoyed at my colleagues for, I think, lying to themselves about the state of modern Darwinism. I think they know.
I think I know why that happened. I think they were concerned that a creationist worldview was always a threat that it would reassert itself. And so they pretended that Darwinism was a more complete explanation as it was presented than it ever was.
Joe: What is wrong with Darwinism? What do you think that Darwinism is doing itself a disservice by saying?
Bret: There are several different things that are wrong with it. The key one that I think is causing folks in intelligent design circles to begin to catch up is that the story we tell about how it is that mutation results in morphological change is incorrect.
This is a very hard thing to convey, and I want to point out that if the explanation for creatures is Darwinian, that does not depend on anybody understanding it, and it does not depend on anybody being able to phrase it in a way that it's intuitive.
... (Here there is an example of forms morphing into other forms) ...
So what that means is there are chemical differences between an excavator and a sports car.
But they're not the story of the differences in what those two creatures do. The chemistry differences are incidental.
Now, when we tell you that the differences that a bat became a flying mammal because it had a shrew-like ancestor, and that shrew-like ancestor had a genome spelled out in three-letter codons, those three-letter codons specify amino acids of which there are 20, and that the difference between the bat and the shrew is based in the differences in the proteins that are described by the genome.
We are essentially saying that the difference between the bat and the shrew is a chemical difference. It's not a simple chemical difference the way it was when we were talking about excavators and sports cars, but nonetheless, it's a biochemical difference, right? The difference in the spelling of its proteins and structural proteins and enzymes and all of that stuff.
I don't believe that mechanism. Is nearly powerful enough to explain how a shrew-like ancestor became a bat.
There's a whole layer that is missing that allows...
Evolution to explore design space much more efficiently than the mechanism that we invoke.
(The mechanism is) random mutation, which I believe in. Random mutation happens. Selection, which chooses those variants that are produced by mutation and collects the ones that give... The creature an advantage. There's nothing wrong with that story. That story is true. Okay, random mutations happen, selection collects the ones that are good, and those collected advantageous mutations accumulate in the genome. All of that is true.
What I'm arguing against is the idea that that transforms a shrew into a bat.
What you need to get a shrew turned into a bat is a much less crude mechanism, whereby selection, which is ancient at the point that you have shrews, explores design space looking for ways to be that are yet undiscovered more systematically than random chance.
I believe there's a kind of information stored in genomes that is not in triplet codon form, that is much more of a type that would be familiar to a designer, either of machines or a programmer.
What we did was we took the random mutation model.
And we recognized that it was Darwinian, which it is. And we therefore assumed that it would explain anything that we could see that was clearly the product of Darwinian forces on the basis of those random mutations. And we skipped the layer in between in which selection has a different kind of information stored in the genome that is not triplet codon in nature.
Joe: So there's an information stored in the genome that is motivating it to seek new forms?
Bret: Nope, not motivating, allowing it.
Joe: Allowing it. Allowing it. So what's the motivation to seek new forms?
Bret: Oh, the motivation was there. It's primordial. Right. So the point is, let me try by analogy.
Darwinists will tell you that evolution cannot look forward. It can only look backward. And there's a way in which that's just simply true. On the other hand, a Darwinist will also tell you that you are a product of evolution and you can look forward.
Right? So if evolution can't look forward but it can build a creature that can, then can evolution look forward?
I think it effectively can. So my point is that random mutation mechanism is in a race to produce new forms that are... Better adapted to the world than their ancestors?
What if it can bias the game? It can enhance its own ability to search, right? If you lose your keys, you don't search randomly, right? You go through a systematic process of search, and that systematic process of search results in you finding your keys sooner than you would otherwise.
So we should expect evolution to find every trick it can access to. Increase the rate at which it discovers forms that would be useful in the habitat in question. And this is simply that. I'm not really saying anything that extraordinary, right? If I say, you know, do you know that computers, all they do is binary? Well, that's true.
But if you then imagine that that means that the people who program computers do it in binary, well, there was a time when that was true. But it's not true anymore. It's not how you do it.
There's a much more efficient way to program a computer, and it involves a programming language, which a computer itself can't understand. But you can build a computer that can either interpret the language in real time, or you can build a computer that can accept the code as it's spit out by a compiler.
These are mechanisms to radically increase the effectiveness of a programmer. But it all comes out. Binary anyway, in the end. That's really what I'm arguing, is that there's the initial layer of Darwinian stuff, the random mutation layer that it looks like what we teach people.
There's another layer, which we're not well familiar with, and it results in a much more powerful capacity to adapt than we can explain with that first mechanism, which is why guys like Tucker Think there's just something these Darwinists, they keep telling me that the shrew becomes a bat.
And then they go on this rant about the random mutations and the triplet codons and the, you know, mutations that actually turn out to be good. It's just not powerful enough. And they're not wrong.
They're detecting something real. And frankly, you know, Tucker is the layperson example of this. You've had Stephen Meyer on, you know, he's actually. He's a scientist who's quite good, and he's spotted that the mechanism in question isn't powerful enough to explain the phenomena that we swear it explains.
Joe: What do you think that force is?
Bret: It's not a force. So I don't know how much of this I've made clear. If you fill in the missing layer, it's purely Darwinian.
None of this establishes that Darwin had it.
It's another Darwinian mechanism, right? I mean, and let me, this is, there's nothing strange about this. If you think about the way a human being works compared to, let's say, a starfish, a human being has a software layer. A cognitive layer in which the human being is born into an environment.
And that environment could be, you know, a hunter-gatherer environment of 10,000 years ago, or it could be a modern environment. And the human being doesn't have to be modified at the level of its genome in order to function differently in those two environments. It has to be sensitive to the information in those environments so that it can become adapted to them developmentally.
Right? So development is one trick that the genome uses to make a human being more flexible than other creatures. Right? You do not come out of the womb being ready to do human stuff.
Right? You are profoundly hobbled by not having a complete program. But it means that the program you develop can be highly attuned to your particular moment in time and location in space. That is...
The Darwinian mechanisms that store information in the genome solving an evolutionary problem in a different way. So this is already a second layer that doesn't function like that random mutation layer.
So evolution should be expected to find all of the cheat codes and to build them in. Because any creature that has access to all of these different ways of adapting more rapidly or more effectively, will outcompete the creatures that have fewer of these things. So you should expect, what I often say is, we have to remember, we are not looking at Darwinism 1.0.
You're looking at Darwinism 10.0. You're looking at a highly sophisticated evolutionary structure that is the result of all of the discoveries of the prior structures. And that includes some things that... Modern creatures can do, but it also includes an evolution of enhanced evolutionary capacity, including things like culture.
A couple of things jumped out at me as I listened to them talk.
First, in mathematics, you most certainly are trying to convince people. That's what proofs do. I don't understand how that cannot be said for physics, chemistry or biology. How is that supposed to work? Do we just share massive spreadsheets of experimental data with each other and everyone comes to their own conclusions? How does peer review work in such a world? It sounds like a cop-out.
Second, it was a bit of a stunner for Bret to admit to the flaws of Darwinian evolution. I have liked Bret since he first came on the scene in the Evergreen State imbroglio, but this deep honesty and integrity surprised me. Well done, Bret!
Thirdly and finally, Bret tries to hold on to Darwinian evolution by an appeal to magic. Apparently, there is an unknown motive force working at the molecular level that gives the necessary turbo boost to Darwinian evolution, allowing shrews to turn into bats and, for all we know, back down to shrews again.
Hey, why not?
Here's my problem, one where I am open to corrections. I had thought that molecular chemistry was a pretty well-understood thing. Bret seems to be arguing that there is a layer on top of molecular chemistry that we don't understand. Further, he is making an argument of faith. That motivating force is necessary to preserve Darwinian evolution and that's why it exists.
Nature abhors a vacuum and, apparently, it abhors a vacuum in Darwin's theories most of all.
So tell me, scienceological thinkerists, where your thinkerations lead you.
It seems relatively clear to us, but I'm a simple man and Cat is a simple cat.
Let's say you were fairly well-versed in the Federal and state criminal code. If you had a close friend who you knew was embezzling from his company, would it be judgmental to go to him and let him know his actions were illegal and when he was caught, he was going to face some serious penalties? Of course not. It would be an act of affection, an act of love for the guy.
Did you invent the law or simply report on it to your friend?
From a Catholic point of view, the moral law is the same thing. People do not invent it, they discover it just like we discovered physics, chemistry and math. Through scripture, revelation and logical deductions, we've discovered the moral law that was written, not by man through a legislative process, but by God when He created the world.
In his excellent book, The Great Good Thing, Andrew Klavan discusses his conversion from atheism to Christianity.
Then, in my atheist reading, I came upon the writings of the Marquis de Sade. It marked a watershed in my thing. Nowadays, “the divine Marquis” is sometimes depicted as a naughty rogue who enjoyed what the British call “a bit of the slap and tickle,” a libertine who brought a needed dose of sexual freedom into a pinched an hypocritical era. That’s not how I saw him at all. Sade–from whom we get the word sadism–was a violent psychopath who brutally tortured servants and prostitutes for his own pleasure. (When even the French imprison you for your sexual practices, you know you’ve crossed the line!) He was also a philosopher of genius.
Sade understood that if there is no God, there can be no ultimate morality. There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. Unlike Freud and other atheists, though, Sade followed mad Hamlet’s logic with unswerving honesty. Without morality, he said, we are only responsible to our natures, and nature demands only that we pleasure ourselves in any way we like, the strong at the expense of the weak. “Nature, mother to us all, never speaks to us save of ourselves… prefer thyself, love thyself, no matter at whose expense,” he declared. And then, with wonderful wit, he added: “Nature has endowed each of us with a capacity for kindly feelings: let us not squander them on others.” All of this, he illustrated with graphic passages of pornography depicting tortures, rapes, and murders in a way intended to sexually arousing. And his work is arousing. It’s also repulsive. And to my eyes, it’s evil.
Here, at least, however, was an atheist who outlook made complete logical sense to me from beginning to end. If there is no God, there is no morality. If there is no morality, the search for pleasure and the avoidance of pain are all in all and we should pillage, rape, and murder as we please. None of this pale, milquetoast atheism that says “Let’s all do what’s good for society.” Why should I do what’s good for society? What is society to me? None of this elaborate game-theory nonsense where we all benefit by mutual sacrifice and restraint. That only works until no one’s looking; then I’ll get away with what I can. If there is no God, there is no good, and sadistic pornography is scripture.
But the opposite is also true. That is, if we concede that one thing is morally better than another, it can only be because it is closer to an Ultimate Moral Good, the standard by which it’s measured. An Ultimate Moral Good cannot just be an idea. It must be, in effect, a personality with consciousness and free will. The rain isn’t morally good even though it makes the crops grow; a tornado that kills isn’t morally evil–though it may be an evil for those in its way. Happy and sad events, from birth to death, just happen, and we ascribe moral qualities to them as they suit us or don’t. But true, objective good and evil, in order to be good and evil, have to be aware and intentional. So an Ultimate Moral Good must be conscious and free; it must be God.
So we have to choose, Either is no God and no morality whatsoever, or there is morality and God real.
Either way makes sense, if you’re speaking strictly about logic. I didn’t reject Sade’s outlook on logical grounds. I rejected it because I found it repulsive and I knew it wasn’t true just as I know that one plus two always equals two plus one, though neither I nor anyone else can prove it. So, too, I know that a Nazi who tortures a child to death is less moral than a priest who gives a beggar bread–and that this is so even in a world that is all Nazis everywhere. In the chain of reasoning that took me finally to Christ, accepting this one axiom–that some actions are morally better than others–is the only truly non logical leap of faith I ever made. Hardly a leap really. Barely even a step. I know it’s so. And those who declare they do not are, like Hamlet, only pretending.
After reading Sade, I abandoned atheism and returned to agnosticism.
Emphasis mine.
What Andrew is describing is the realization that there is a universal, objective moral order created by something above Man. That is analogous to the universal, objective legal code that governs American society. It is not judgmental to quote the legal code to your friend. It is also not judgmental to quote God's law to your friend since in both cases, you are not interpreting or inventing anything, you are simply reporting facts to him. There is no judgmentalism involved because there is no judgment.
Every officer of this state, or of any county, city, city and county, or other municipal corporation or subdivision thereof, and every deputy, clerk, or servant of that officer, and every officer, director, trustee, clerk, servant, or agent of any association, society, or corporation (public or private), who fraudulently appropriates to any use or purpose not in the due and lawful execution of that person’s trust, any property in his or her possession or under his or her control by virtue of that trust, or secretes it with a fraudulent intent to appropriate it to that use or purpose, is guilty of embezzlement.
Quoting that is not judgmental.
Now, one could argue that the Catholic Church is making things up from whole cloth. That is a fair argument, but it is still one that requires logical proof and logical refutation of the entirety of evidence the Church can muster on its behalf, evidence that is more than just scripture and revelation.
You cannot replace a model of reality with nothing, but you can replace a model of reality with something better. Your "something better," however, will require you to prove that it's better.
Getting back to the point of this post, my fundamental argument against most accusations of "you're being judgmental" as a Catholic is that reporting the reality of God's moral law does not involve any personal judgment at all.
Now, if I decide to throw rocks at you because you have sinned in some way, that is an act of judgment and expressly forbidden by the Church, unless it is part of Caesar's* law, in which case the secular law takes precedent.
As long as I'm not throwing rocks, this takes a whole bunch of "don't judge" off the table.
I'm ambivalent about your recent behaviors, but Cat disapproves and is letting you know.
* - Or Trump's law in our case. These fascist dictators are pretty much interchangeable.
It blew my mind to hear that there was no water coming out of the fire hydrants during the Palisades fire this week. I know California is mismanaged, but that's simply insane. Others have dealt with the horrors elsewhere, what I want to explore is how the Elites that run California do not, as I have ranted many times on this blog, know how anything works.
First, here's a staggering video from the LAFD.
LAFD Assistant Chief Kristine Larson:
"Am I able to carry your husband out of a fire? He got himself in the wrong place." pic.twitter.com/BofTVr6dWP
If she can't carry your husband out of a burning building, that's his problem? And on what planet do I want to see someone responding to my emergency that looks like me? This is DEI and Social Justice taken to it's logical extreme. Projected feelings of various marginalized groups who don't actually have those feelings trump performance.
Meanwhile, the mayor of LA directed citizens to URL if they need information. No, really.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass tells residents that if they need emergency help or shelter it “can be found at URL.”
What?!
This is the perfect picture of the incredible levels of incompetence ravaging Los Angeles right now. pic.twitter.com/Hbsu9fERbw
Wow. Luckily, the LA fire chief likes to eat carpet, so we have that going for us.
Not everyone is incompetent, however. Sal Mercogliano, the guy who runs the outstanding What's Going On With Shipping YouTube channel, posted this on X, explaining why some of the hydrants ran out of water.
One needs to understand that water towers are typically filled during low water usage periods (largely at night). The filling line is substantially smaller than the discharge.
Pressure on the hydrants and to homes (which is the same line) is caused by the weight & gravity of the water.
As homes are burned, all the water connections to the home are opened (sinks, toilets, washers, etc). So you start draining water as you lose each house.
You eventually get to the point where you can sustain the system and run out of water.
What is needed is a way to shut the towers off from the primary system and have a secondary fire system that is routed to several strategically located fill points for fire apparatus.
You can then fill the tanks and have water for suppression.
But that cost $$$$.
Of course, Sal does not work for the government of California. They would no doubt despise him as he's one of those dirty, little people who worked with their hands.
Having acknowledged that trade-offs have to be made in the design of the water system and allowing others to go nonlinear about the horrific performance of the progs who run CA, I'd conclude with the following.
If you aren't going to provide water, for whatever reason, you simply must keep the fires from starting in the first place. That means aggressive maintenance of the scrub brush. You cannot allow the fuel to build up, no matter how many Schlumberg's Reticulated Voles buy the farm. If you aren't going to provide water and you don't ruthlessly remove the kindling from the area, you're going to get what we've seen this week - parts of Los Angeles burned to the ground.
So we decided to take the leash off the Ukrainians and let them fire ATACMS into Russia proper. Well, that's not entirely true. Since the Ukrainians can't do the job completely by themselves, we pushed some of the buttons, too. Oh well, if we have to get our hands a little dirty in pursuit of Glorious Victory, that's the way it goes. No price is too high to pay for winning.
Err, does anyone know what our definition of "winning" might be? Is it to drive the Russians from the river to the sea or am I confusing things? Maybe the job is to drive the Russian army back to the original borders. That sounds reasonable. Let's go for that.
Has anyone, like, I don't know, the Pentagon, maybe, done a military analysis of the troops, weapons, munitions, gasoline, beans and bandages necessary to do that? Do we have a rough idea of the order of battle required to dislodge and push back the Russians? Not that I've seen.
Me, I go back to the last time an army pushed the Russians backer and backer and backer. The Nazis. Dig this German newsreel from 1941. Feel free to move the scrub head around to get to the actual footage from the front and not spend so much time looking at various Nazi leaders. Notice how small the airplanes look over the Russian vastness. Look at how small the German units look relative to the Russian vastness. After that, think about how the Ukrainian army is about 1/20 the size of the Wehrmacht of 1941, if that.
Hopefully, DEI will make the Ukrainian army stronger because with so few troops and weapons, there is no way on planet Earth they are going to push the Russians anywhere.
Meet Air Force Lt General Kevin Schneider. He fully supports DEI in the military and wants DEI to be "part of our DNA.” He believes DEI will "make sure that we can have the best, most capable force.”
Going back to one of the regular themes of this blog, the Coastal Elites don't seem to know how anything works any more. In war, you first need to define victory and then you need to assess your army to see if victory is even remotely possible. I know the Elites don't read the Bible these days, but Luke 28:14 31-32 has a few tips for them on the subject.
"Or what king marching into battle would not first sit down and decide whether with ten thousand troops he can successfully oppose another king advancing upon him with twenty thousand troops? But if not, while he is still far away, he will send a delegation to ask for peace terms."
Well, maybe not. Let's just fire ATACMS into some random spot on the absolutely massive map of Russia and hope for the best.
If you're not pursuing realistic victory conditions, then all you're doing by dragging out the war is killing young men. Now I get that, in this case, the young men are straight and white so, in general, we want to kill as many of them as we possibly can, but do we have to make it so obvious?
I think I'm going to close up this long, long series of blog posts on sex, Sex, SEX! with this simple summary.
We, as a culture, need men who need a woman. Women, individually, need a man who needs them. Single women need a culture where men need women.
Strong Men Come From Feminine Wisdom
A man who needs a woman will do his best to be the kind of man she craves - strong, confident and competent. He will work hard to be worthy of her love. A society populated by strong, confident and competent men will thrive. A society populated by emasculated, insecure, lazy, unskilled men will not.
The only way we get those men is if women cultivate them. Men are simple creatures and crave admiration, respect and sex from a woman. If women are raised to be "strong and independent," then you can knock out the first two. If porn is plentiful, you can knock out the third.
Women, in a primal environment, are neither strong nor independent. Women can only be strong and independent if they can afford to have men create a barrier between them and the primal world. Some can afford that, most cannot.
For a man, porn can superficially replace a woman, but it hollows him out and makes him weak.
In a culture that has dismissed the wisdom inherited from past generations as racist, patriarchal, imperialist and bigoted, the realizations that modern culture is based upon lies only arise through prolonged, personal experience. Because women have short windows of fertility, the realizations often happen too late. From my previous post:
Ordinary girls are told to get a career and not bother about marriage until they're much older. Time works in opposite directions for men and women. A man in his 30s is more attractive than a man in his 20s because he is more experienced, more competent and wealthier. A woman in her 30s is less attractive than a woman in her 20s because her youthful body is aging.
If we are to have men that need a woman, we first need women who follow the inherited wisdom of past generations. The basics of life as a woman haven't changed in centuries. Our matriarchal forebears understood all of this which is why they shaped the culture we inherited and have now discarded.
The Arthurian Legends As Archetypes
As we've seen from previous posts in this series, women crave chivalrous men. While there are earlier stories of chivalry, it is Sir Thomas Mallory's Le Morte D'Arthur that is the original classic of the genre and provides the model for chivalric behavior.
Then there was a damosel that was daughter to King Bandes. And there was a knight that hight Corsabrin, and he loved the damosel, and in no wise he would suffer her to be married; for ever this Corsabrin noised her, and named her that she was out of her mind; and thus he let her that she might not be married.
So by fortune this damosel heard tell that Palomides did much for damosels’ sake; so she sent to him a pensel, and prayed him to fight with Sir Corsabrin for her love. Then the damosel sent unto Corsabrin, and bade him go unto Sir Palomides and she gave him warning that she had sent him her pensel, and if he might overcome Palomides she would wed him. When Corsabrin wist of her deeds then was he wood wroth and angry, and rode unto Surluse where the haut prince was, and there he found Sir Palomides ready, the which had the pensel. So there they waged battle either with other afore Galahalt.
This brief anecdote from Le Morte has been the plot of countless movies, stories and TV shows. The girl is threatened and the guy rescues her for her love. He's a man who needs a woman. Stories like this have entertained us for generation after generation because it speaks a truth and is based in reality.
Our Culture Has Lost The Archetypal Plot
When I tried writing Arthurian stories with AI, read: ChatGPT, the AI couldn't do it. Invariably, the ladies were strong and independent and the knights were submissive. As an author, I couldn't motivate the knights to do anything at all. The stories invariably ended with the couple separating so the lady could be strong and independent, leaving the scene to pursue her career ambitions. That was without porn, too. If I had introduced an ocean of porn into the story, nothing would ever have gotten off the ground until the characters realized it was all a lie, somewhere in their 40s.
AI, which is generated through the consumption of all available text, most of which is modern, is the embodiment of our culture. AI failed to write Arthurian stories because it didn't believe chivalry was based in reality because our culture doesn't understand that chivalry is reality.
Latisha in West Baltimore, Maria in Barrio Logan and Tiffany in Verbena, Alabama aren't the ones who create the culture. Instead, it's their teachers, entertainers, HR reps and corporate training offices who do it. Those professions are populated by a monoculture of Elites who have been shielded from primal reality by powerful, determined men whose protection is invisible to the Elites. The fair damsels who help to shape our culture are indeed protected by brave knights, but those knights are invisible to them. More to the point, those damsels don't understand how badly they need those knights.
Latisha, Maria and Tiffany understand. Primal threats are much closer to them and visible in their daily lives. While they have been raised to believe in our modern fantasy world, they often discover that it's all lies too late. That's how you end up with "single woman hits the wall and cries because she can't get dates any more" videos.
Click on that link and watch a couple of them. It's one thing to see graphs that show depression is skyrocketing for women, it's another thing entirely to watch a real woman sobbing because she's hitting the wall and realizing that the culture fed her toxic lies. It's shocking when it happens to a real woman right in front of you.
Motivating The Characters
My epiphanies all came from character motivations, derived from biology and human nature. We are driven to reproduce. Women want a man who will protect, provide, cherish and commit. Men need respect, admiration and sex. A woman's ability to secure a man declines as she ages. If she wants a husband, her best bet is to secure one early in life. With every year, she faces a new crop of competition, all younger and many prettier than she is.
Get the guy while you can!
In my stories, it made no sense at all for a young lady to wander off to pursue her interests when she had a good knight hooked and yet it happened over and over and over again. Yes, young women often enjoy playing the field when they're young and finally hit an age where they are driven to settle down, but AI wasn't writing that, it was writing career women aiming for the corner office. Marriage and babies weren't even in the picture.
When it gave me plot lines where the damsel wandered off to pursue sustainable, organic, feminist poetry, I would sometimes push the timeline out 10 years and ask AI to posit her future. At no time did it give me one of those women from the videos above. AI could answer science questions about reproductive biology, but it couldn't write fiction driven by it. That sounds precisely like what is coming out of our education system. We teach all manner of sex acts to children, but nothing at all about romance and marriage.
AI also gave me stories where the women supported each other by helping each other pursue their careers or hobbies. At no time did the AI write gossip sessions where the girls discussed whether or not their beau was going to pop the question. Again, marriage and family were not important to the maidens, it was all about careers and personal growth.
Writing these stories, you could see these characters heading straight into the wall. They'd hit 35, still be single, crave babies and be unable to compete with the 22 year-olds because they'd had the wrong mindset when they were young. Which is what is happening in real life.
We're shaping our young women to hit the wall, hard.
It's A Numbers Game
When you talk to single women in their mid-30s, you often hear them talk about how dating is a numbers game. If you want a husband and a family, you go where the good guys are. These ladies have done the analysis and discussed it extensively with their peers. My AI characters never did that.
Another issue that comes up when you talk to women facing a life of spinsterhood, is the lack of good men in the dating pool. What the women don't understand, can't understand, is how porn poisons men. Porn devalues women by giving young men an outlet for their sexual needs. Yes, there was Playboy in the past, but that's nothing compared to PornHub. It's the difference between Coors Light and heroin.
My bachelor knights came from a world without porn. Writing those characters, it was trivial to motivate them to ardently pursue a maiden. They were men who needed a woman in the most primal way. It was easy to see how the stories would became flaccid if the bachelor-knights were awash in porn. Fight over a lady? Why?
Women want and need chivalry from their men. Porn saps a man's motivation to woo a woman. True feminism, a true sisterhood of young ladies who wanted to support each other would have the elimination of porn as their primary goal. No, it's not possible to completely get rid of it, but a culture that slammed porn as hard as we push careers for women would have a whole lot bigger dating pool of good men.
Allure Starts The Stories
In the Arthurian legends, the knights may perform all the action, but it's the ladies who drive the plots.
So turn we to the damosel of the castle, that when Alisander le Orphelin had forjousted the four knights, she called him to her, and said thus: Sir knight, wilt thou for my sake joust and fight with a knight, for my sake, of this country, that is and hath been long time an evil neighbour to me? His name is Malgrin, and he will not suffer me to be married in no manner wise for all that I can do, or any knight for my sake. Damosel, said Alisander, an he come whiles I am here I will fight with him, and my poor body for your sake I will jeopard.
This makes sense from biological realities. Women need to be shopping for a husband when they're young. Young men can take their time. There aren't many videos out there where 35-year-old men wail about hitting the wall because for men, that wall doesn't show up until they hit about 40. Up to a point, guys get more attractive as they age, not less.
Women have time constraints that men don't have. That was the ticking clock of my stories and it was something that AI didn't understand at all. AI could not write stories with any sense of urgency because the ladies all felt that the knights were disposable.
Another aspect of feminine romantic limitations that AI couldn't comprehend was the selectivity of men. I've heard young women who participate in singles groups talk about what happens when a new guy joins the group. All of the unattached girls wonder who he will pick. Romance begins when a man finds a woman alluring. The more men find her attractive, the more choices she will have.
That leads us back to the first post in this series where I saw a woman who looked something like this at the supermarket.
Every other woman in the supermarket was slovenly, frumpy and morose. This girl blew all of her competition out of the water. If it had been a singles meetup, every new guy would have picked her.
Not only does AI not understand that, but most modern young women are taught not to value it. That means the culture doesn't understand it or value it. That's murder on romance.
Two days ago, I had to run some errands right at the time our local high school was done for the day. As usual, I scouted the talent pouring out of the school. It takes quite a bit of work to make a high school girl unattractive, but these girls had really put their backs into the job. There wasn't a looker among them and I must have seen 80 of them. Almost all were overweight and not one of them wore something feminine. They had put no effort into their hair styles or makeup. Smiling was out of the question for all but a few.
It's worth noting that while this is true in San Diego, when I go to Fairhope, Alabama, the exact opposite holds. Similarly, the campus of Ole Miss was positively radioactive with girls who were absolute experts at allure. If I were a young man at Ole Miss, I'd fall in love 17 times a day. I'd be working my tail off to be strong, confident and competent so I was attractive to them. I would indeed "joust and fight with a knight" for their sakes.
Still, the data points here in San Diego are what they are and they echo AI perfectly. The ladies in my stories put no value at all in the attentions of men. In fact, every mention of beauty was accompanied by dismissive modifiers talking about how unimportant appearances were. What really mattered was accomplishment or ambition.
That killed the stories right out of the gate. Motivating the knights was a struggle from the get-go.
Sir, said the damosel Linet unto Sir Beaumains, look ye be glad and light, for yonder is your deadly enemy, and at yonder window is my lady, my sister, Dame Lionesse. Where? said Beaumains. Yonder, said the damosel, and pointed with her finger. That is truth, said Beaumains. She beseemeth afar the fairest lady that ever I looked upon; and truly, he said, I ask no better quarrel than now for to do battle, for truly she shall be my lady, and for her I will fight.
Err, actually, she's kind of fat, sullen and frumpy. Maybe I'm not the right knight for this job. Is it too late to get Sir Brandiles, instead?
Women Drive The Stories
Once I realized that girls like to be asked out, I had no lack of dates in college. It wasn't that I was a catch, it's that I showed interest and made them feel desirable. I still think about some of my flames. Cindy, Angie and Denise - I sometimes find myself involuntarily remembering them, filled with remorse for what I didn't do. All three made the right decision in dumping me as I was not worthy of their love. When I think about any one of them, I relive what I should have done and how I should have worked harder to be the kind of man a woman would want.
When I think about my first two wives, the first a malignant narcissist and the second a borderline psychotic, I have no such regrets. Be thankful for small blessings, I suppose. 😊
I don't think that way about my failed PhD attempt. I got a Master's out of it and that's fine. I don't think that way about my career, either. I had chances to advance even further than I did, but didn't take them. I even got invited to come to work at the White House. That would have been fun, but I don't regret not taking the job.
A woman can inspire a man in a way that nothing else does. These days, I work while wife kitteh does as she pleases. When I'm working, I sometimes check out her location on Google Maps just for fun. If she's at TJ Maxx or Marshall's doing her recreational shopping, I feel tremendous pleasure and accomplishment. I know that I've made it possible for the woman I love to live the life that makes her happy. You just can't beat that.
Why, said La Beale Isoud, are ye a knight and be no lover? it is shame to you: wherefore ye may not be called a good knight but if ye make a quarrel for a lady.
Women can only do that intentionally. You can't be fat, slovenly and morose and drive anyone's story unless it's to drive them away. AI could not understand this which means it is missing from our culture. See also, Snow White, idiotic remake of.
That's Disney, an excellent representative of the modern culture and another huge data point supporting my hypothesis about AI being the embodiment of that culture. AI had precisely that attitude.
AI expected proper behavior from the knights, but no reciprocal behavior from the ladies. In fact, in its stories, after a knight had fought for her, the lady never even thanked him. She would immediately start talking about how she was going to wander off and do her own thing. Wrestling with AI, the only way I could get it to write gratitude in female characters was to have the men subserviently support and affirm them. The women got all the freedom while the men's efforts were dismissed as unimportant.
How about no?
Again, it was impossible to motivate the knights. I would get frustrated and start pounding on the keyboard, going with what AI gave me. The stories would turn darkly surreal as the knights all turned to porn, weed and video games*. There was no point in doing anything else.
My Close
Men are uniquely inspired by women. Without that inspiration, that drive, we can slide into sloth and self-indulgence. I can see that in several of our sons' friends.
Women need the romantic attention of men and are driven to become mothers. If they reach their mid-30s alone and childless, they can despair about their lives. I've seen that in several young ladies who are friends of ours.
The Arthurian Legends are timeless classics because they speak basic truths about the roles men and women play in each others' lives. These are primal and natural roles, not social constructs. As I struggled to write Arthurian fiction with AI, the nature of these roles and the pain and suffering that comes with their loss became apparent to me in ways much deeper than I've expressed in this series.
* - This being Ye Olden Times, all they had was the Nintendo 64.
Other Posts in this Series
Recapping recent blog posts, here's where we are so far:
Classically beautiful and feminine women are a rarity these days.
Ignore the holiest shrine stuff and just think about what it's like to be a resident of Knock. After all, there are lots and lots of places like Knock all over the West these days.
At first, you might think that the police and the authorities will protect you. After all, there are laws and rules. Then you find out that the laws and rules don't really apply to the "migrants." Over time, more "migrants" come to your village / town / city. They go from 10 to 20 to 30% of the population. As they become more numerous, they become bolder. Perhaps your gay friend's favorite hangout doesn't fly the Pride flag any more. Perhaps your daughter or wife get harassed on the street.
You start to wonder where this is going. Your faith in the authorities is tested when a young woman is gang raped by a group of "migrants" in a nearby village and you hear that the cops and courts only handed out minor sentences if they did anything at all.
A court in Germany has sentenced only one of nine men for raping and sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl to time behind bars.
According to reports in German media, an Iranian man was sentenced last week to two years and nine months in juvenile detention for the crimes committed three years ago at a Hamburg park during COVID-19 restrictions.
The others convicted of rape — filmed twice during separate assaults — received suspended sentences of one to two years. Four were identified as German, while the others have Armenian, Afghan, Kuwaiti and Montenegrin citizenship, reports said.
The trial heard DNA evidence connected the nine accused to the crime.
At some point, you can see where this is all headed. The authorities do not have your back. The cops are not there to protect you. If you and your friends want to make a stand and get the "migrants" out of your village, you won't ever have better odds than you do today because every month more and more arrive, brought in by the authorities.
You're left with 5 choices.
Wait for things to get better. The authorities will have to eventually take care of their constituents, right?
Deny that anything is actually changing and if it is, diversity makes you stronger, right?
Vote! Elect someone who says they will take care of it. After you vote, go to option 1.
Move away. Things are getting worse all the time. It's not just that you'll never have better odds than you do right now, it's also that your property values will never be higher than they are right now.
Stand and fight. Get some of the lads together and bust heads until the "migrants" can see they're not welcome. This decision would need to be made when the odds are 9-1 or so because the "migrants" are mostly young men while your population includes women, children and the elderly. A 9-1 ratio really works out to about 1-1 once you exclude non-combatants.
If you flee this time, where will you make your stand?
Wife kitteh was honored at a recent gala for a charity organization where she volunteers. She works with underprivileged children, helping them read. It's a wonderful thing and I was very proud of her.
The guests of honor were some local nuns who work with migrants and the homeless. They provided the final talk of the evening and it was quite enlightening. If you want to know how we ended up with 4 million6 million8 million elebenty gajillion migrants, these ladies had your answer. They were all emotions and no logic.
The final nun to speak was this little, ancient slip of a thing, her eyes practically glowing with zeal. If she had started foaming at the mouth and bit someone as she spoke, it wouldn't have been surprising. She talked of the need to care for the migrants and how she and some others had started a home in Barrio Logan for migrants. They were now taking care of more than 30 of them! Yay!
Let's see here, elebenty gajillion minus 30 is ... pretty much indistinguishable from elebenty gajillion. They were making a big difference in the lives of those 30, but at the same time, they were politically enabling the invasion of the country by pushing the empathy angle far and wide.
Everyone in the audience applauded. If anyone else was doing the math like I was, they kept their mouths shut like I did. As an aside, there were comments about equity and justice from various speakers, except wife kitteh, while the audience of donors was almost exclusively white. So the white people paid big bucks to an organization that told them they weren't doing enough for "marginalized people."
Well OK then.
On related note, there's these two data points.
The German Education Ministry found 68% of migrants were "functionally illiterate" even in their own language.
To get their PhD in Medicine or engineering, they must be here for the long haul. pic.twitter.com/Wt1vLH5VuI
That bit about taxes is not entirely true and therein lies the rub. Across the West, the migrants are being funded by our children and grandchildren in the form of debt. As always, we aren't being compassionate, we're just grandstanding at the expense of the younger generations.
Getting back to the math in eMpATHy, we're expecting our schools to take in illiterates who don't speak our language and ... well, work miracles.
Being utterly uncharitable for a moment, those nuns don't give a rat's rear end about that. They're too busy being filled with Holy Spirit of Sanctimony to think what's happening downstream to our teachers, cops and children. You'd think that nuns would have some understanding of how rare miracles are. Nah. EQUITY!
A Thought Experiment
If a ship with 70 passengers is sinking in the ocean and only has a single lifeboat with a capacity of 8 people, what happens when you put 8 people in the lifeboat and launch it? What happens when you put all 70 people in it and launch it?
Even the Big Man himself knew you couldn't save everyone. "The poor you will always have with you" - Matthew 26:11.
Mayor Eric Adams keeps blaming Texas Gov. Greg Abbott as the culprit responsible for the city’s migrant crisis, which has hoovered up millions in taxpayer resources.
In the latest broadside, Adams dared Abbott to spend a night in a NYC migrant shelter, while the no-thanks Abbot fired back that Adams’s sanctuary city policies were “aiding and abetting” the border disaster.
Some 37,000 of New York’s estimated 150,000 migrants — or 25% — were bused from Texas.
But there’s another number, comparable to that, that Adams should blame on another politician: Joe Biden.
A new report from me and my organization, the Center for Immigration Studies, finds that the Department of Homeland Security secretly has okayed the flights of some 33,000 illegal immigrants directly to the New York region from foreign airports. That’s 22% of the city’s migrant influx
I'm not a fan of either ballet or the opera. My parents did their best to give me a well-rounded exposure to the arts and I've seen several of each, but I never enjoyed them. I appreciated the talent and effort that went into them, but that's as far as it goes.
That clearly indicates that all art including music, poetry, painting, photography and contortionist performances is rubbish.
On Easter Sunday, we had dinner with the fam at middle son kitteh's house. Grandkittehs, daughter-in-law kittehs, soon-to-be-daughter-in-law kittehs and youngest son kitteh were present. During our conversations, the topic of the boys' experiences at Steubenville arose. Steubenville is an annual Catholic retreat for youth, typically in 7th or 8th grade. It's music, speakers, praying, conversations and a variety of normal youthful diversions. Both of them disliked it, middle son kitteh in particular.
The crux of the dislike was the hysterical reactions of the girls during the event, particularly during Adoration. The leaders of the event had warned them that they might become emotional when the monstrance came out with the Eucharist which only served to amp up the girls, prepping them for hysteria. The guys didn't have any such reaction. When the monstrance made its appearance, a couple of the girls lost it followed by a couple more in reaction to the first ones. The guys thought the whole thing was ridiculous and the event was ruined right then and there.
Incidentally, a few years later, daughter kitteh went to Steubenville and loved it.
Anyway, I sat there and listened to the lads talk about it. I'd heard that same story about a dozen times and always wanted to say something, but I couldn't figure out what. On the way home that night, it finally hit me.
The guys just aren't very spiritual. Mysticism doesn't do anything for them. That's OK, it doesn't do anything for me, either. Neither do opera and ballet, but those don't invalidate all of art.
God created everything and gave us a rational mind and emotions to suss out the meaning, purpose and nature of His works. No one will ever understand or appreciate even a tiny portion of what He created. Who cares? Just focus on the things you love, focus on your strong suits and go with those. Let others find joy and meaning in the rest. For all the guys know, some of those girls really did have deep, mystical experiences.
I enjoy Adoration and I believe that Christ is present in the Eucharist, but I've never been able to work up feelings of awe about it no matter how hard I try. It simply is just like hummingbirds, sunsets and the Saints winning the 2010 Super Bowl. Again, so what? Mysticism and awe just aren't my bag, man. It doesn't negate the faith, it just tells me to drop the subject and wander off to the topics that move me.
I've been working on getting ripped for my 62nd birthday in August. I set strength goals and was hitting the powerlifting hard. For example, one of my goals was 70# dumbbell curls. For my 60th birthday, I hit 60# curls, but in doing so, I wrecked my body so badly that most of the next year was spent recovering.
Not being one to learn from mistakes, I set out on the same journey this time. About 6 weeks ago, I was using the rowing machine and decided to jack up the weight from my existing max of 205# to a new high of 220#. I managed 10 reps and felt good. Progress!
Two days later, I had a long conversation with the middle of my back. It informed me that it would no longer function until I had taken at least two weeks off from the gym, consumed large quantities of pain killers and struggled to move without a lot of ouchiness.
Our youngest son, who is much smarterer than I am, had switched to hypertrophic lifting. That's where you max out at about 70% of your absolute max weight and then do as many reps as you possibly can, working your muscles to exhaustion. You give yourself 30-60 seconds to recover and then do it again. In powerlifting, you typically pause 2-3 minutes between sets.
Since you're not lifting anything even close to your max, the chances of injury are essentially nil. You can lift every day, too. The most I could do powerlifting was 6 days in a row, but after that, my body needed a couple of days to get ready to go again.
Assuming you do 10 reps when powerlifting and 15 when hypertrophic training, the total weight lifted is nearly identical.
10 * 1 = 10
15 * 0.7 = 10.5
The workouts are much shorter, too. The delays between sets add up. Most days, I do 9 exercises, 4 sets each. The time spent waiting between sets works out like this:
I wasn't waiting 2 1/2 minutes between sets when I was powerlifting, but you get the idea. I was shocked and felt a little guilty to get my workouts done so fast with hypertrophic lifting until I worked out the math in my head.
So I'm lifting just as much weight, spending less time in the gym and not getting injured.
Winning.
It's better to lift 7 cats 15 times than it is to lift 10 cats 10 times.
