Iranian Assassination Attempts

Hear me out on this one.

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

They're trying to assassinate each other.

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

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

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

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

It's the perfect crime!

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

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

The Migrants Are A Fetish

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

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

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

Just shut up, Leo.

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

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

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

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

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

The Adoration Of Migrants Is A Perversion And A Fetish

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

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

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

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

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

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

He asked him, “Which ones?” 

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

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

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

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

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

Raping White Girls For Jesus

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

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

They know. They all know.

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

It's All So Very Synodal

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

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

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

— EWTN News (@EWTNews) July 4, 2026

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

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

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

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) July 6, 2026

Learning From Our Mistakes Requires Admitting Mistakes

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

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

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

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

Happy 250th, America

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

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

This Is Hilarious

Elon Is Worth Every Penny

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

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

Starlink to the rescue!

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

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

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

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

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

Elon Musk is worth every penny of his trillion dollars.

Take a bow, my dude.

Special Bonus Content

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

Bad, But Still The Best

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God, I miss the Royal Navy.

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

America Was Not Built On Slavery

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

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

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

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

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

You're trapped in cotton.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's Good To Be Home

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

I hate the desert and San Diego is coastal desert.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hope things are going well for you, too.

The Slow Death Of The Royal Navy

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

Jira And Fun AI Art

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

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

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

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

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

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

AI replied:

Cat would regard that as a catastrophic systems failure.

In Cat’s ideal world:

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

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

At which point Cat silently presses the large red button.

No one wants that. No one.

I laughed and gave it this prompt.

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

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

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

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

It's Not Empathy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peter Boghossian is both angry and perplexed.

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

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

There Will Be Signs

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

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

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

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

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

Here's the old sign:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All Rock, No Roll

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

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

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

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

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

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

Before.

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

After. I like it!

Der Sturmer On The Hudson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The NYT then came out and defended Kristof. 

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

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

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

What If It's Just Fashion?

 Girls wearing bangs can be lovely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is the Omnicause just a particularly rigid sorority?

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

Going On Record

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

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

Tharmadoz. Feel Better About Feeling Better

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

Enjoy!

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

Feed Lot Live Cam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Do You Become An Islamic Republic?

Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

England In Transition

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

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

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

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

There will always be an, err, England?

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