Closets

     Happy Ides of March, Gentle Readers. For some, it wasn’t day to celebrate. But, coming right in between Friday the 13th, Pi Day, John 3:16 Day, and Saint Patrick’s Day, I feel it deserves mention at the very least. But who wants to read about that sort of thing? Onward to today’s reflections on misadventures past and present.

     Yesterday and the day before, I spent assembling… drum roll, please… customer-assembled furniture. That’s never a happy occasion around here; if you’ve done any of it yourself, you’ll know why. But the C.S.O. decreed that “we need more storage space.” This, after filling all my closets and cabinets and a 2000-square-foot basement, to boot. Well, needs must and all that. So I bought two knock-together cabinets from Amazon and suffered through the sequel.

     But it gave me cause to reflect on one of the signal differences between the sexes. I am utterly convinced that when Ug came back to his cave after a long day of mammoth-hunting, Mrs. Ug, after berating him about not leaving his antelope thighbone at the entrance, would thereafter declaim that they – meaning she — needed more storage space.

     Before the C.S.O., my house was relatively spacious. I had five closets, and none of them were much occupied. The basement was vast, empty, and tranquil; I would occasionally practice my roller skating down there. I did not foresee that once we mated, that would no longer be the case. Beth took all that emptiness as a personal challenge.

     The Fortress is quite full now. All of it: the living spaces, the closets, the basement, my barn, and the shed I purchased last spring. I didn’t fill it up. I assure you of that. I had almost nothing to do with it, except for paying the bills. My part is to fetch things from top shelves, pry things out of overfilled cabinets, and trip over the dogs.

     Men don’t do this sort of thing. We have our necessities and our luxuries, of course. For some, it’s books, or records; for others, it’s guns, or skiing gear, or fishing tackle. But give us a spacious home with ample closets and it tends to stay that way.

     (Gentlemen: This is why, should you marry a woman who already has her own home, you should insist that she keep it. You should also insist that she give you a key to it. That way, when she moves all her crap into your home, you’ll have somewhere to retreat. Trust me on this; the alternative is an RV in the back yard, and she’d fill that just as swiftly.)

     For the majority of women, security seems to mean possessions. A case of the worst sort will heap her things up around her until she can no longer see the walls. But even a relatively sane woman (5 to 7 crazy at most – cf. this handy reference) will completely fill the available space, and will constantly hector you about “that pile of junk you keep for no good reason.”

     So now we have two brand new cabinets, totaling forty cubic feet of storage… and one of them is already full and the C.S.O. has plans for the second one. I, for lack of an alternative, must just sit back and watch. But I plan to put a deadbolt lock on the door to my tiny closet. I’ve caught my sweetie glancing covetously in its direction a little too often lately.

     What’s that you ask? No, she doesn’t have a key to the gun safe, either. And she never will. But I have more than one reason for that.

     Have a nice day.

What We Walked Away From

     I was going to take today off – I built “customer-assembled furniture” yesterday – but when I encountered the following, I knew I’d have to write about it:

     Imagine how your life as a woman could be without the influence of feminism -
     You grow up with married parents. They stay together through thick and thin and work to keep their marriage harmonious because divorce was never an option.
     You have a big tight-knit family with several brothers and sisters.
     Your mother and grandmother teach you how to be a great homemaker, and you get married in your late teens or early 20s. You never have to waste any time in college or go into debt for a useless degree.
     Your parents and extended family helped you find a great husband who provides for you and your children. Your marriage also lasts a lifetime and divorce is never on the table.
     You're head-over-heels in love with your husband because you never became jaded by going through a string of romances and heartbreaks before you met him. Your parents taught you to date with purpose and find someone who was compatible by asking the right questions before getting emotionally attached, and taught you to save sex for marriage so you never got used by men who didn't want to marry you.
     All the women in your family are also housewives and the older women visit you often and help you with your children and housework, so you're never overwhelmed with motherhood when your children are young.
     All the women in your neighborhood are housewives too, so you're friends with many of the women in your neighborhood and get together with their families often.
     None of the kids in your family ever step foot in a daycare center or public school. You have an unbreakable bond with your parents, grandparents, and children.
     No one in your family ever steps foot in a nursing home because everyone is taken care of by family in their older years.

     Please think about it for a minute or two. Then come back here.

* * *

     The sexual revolution was the only one known to history in which everyone lost.

     Time was, I thought it contained a healthful element: a liberation of sorts. Even today, I’m unable to disavow that idea completely. But it went badly wrong. Our posterity had better study it and learn from it.

     It wasn’t just one thing, either. There were a lot of flaws in the ideas of the Sixties and early Seventies. They flowed together and became a huge wave that’s crashed down upon us. What we styled “liberation” became the casting-off of all restraint, including the restraints of humility and good sense. They were slowed by the AIDS panic of the late Seventies and Eighties, but when it became clear that AIDS was pretty much a disease of homosexuals and intravenous drug users, they came roaring back at full speed.

     We ruined ourselves for one another. We became untrustworthy, calculators and sensualists with little regard for what our forebears had learned from theirs. What better things we had within us, we cast out as impediments to the pursuit of pleasure.

     We ruined ourselves. Then we went on to ruin our children.

     I’m glad you can’t see me just now.

* * *

     Strange things have come about because of our heedlessness and crudity. I could go into gruesome details, but I’m not up to that this morning. Consider yourself spared a litany of a sort you’ve seen from me before. (Feel free to thank the customer-assembled furniture I spent yesterday assembling.) But I will mention one thing that’s become unpleasantly obvious, to me at least.

     Very young women on social media are actively pursuing much older men. That includes men in their sixties and seventies. Men who are firmly married. Yes, men like me.

     This was almost unknown two or three decades ago. It’s not completely unprecedented – there have always been fortune hunters among both sexes – but they were both uncommon and disdained. To compound the ironies, these young women seem largely uninterested in money or status. They want old men because… drum roll, please… we’re old!

     No doubt some of my coevals preen themselves over this new phenomenon. Some probably exploit those young women as shamelessly as any young rake. But when the face in the mirror looks like something that sleeps under a bridge and the body beneath it makes the numbers on the bathroom scale spin like the wheels of a slot machine, complete with jackpot bells, you can’t kid yourself.

     So why? What makes us their preferred targets?

* * *

     There’s a known, well understood tendency among older men to idealize “the good old days.” For most of us, what we’re lamenting is our lost youth and what it enabled us to do. But some of today’s laments have another genesis. They’re for times when things were simpler, when we could believe that we had some grasp of “how things work.” And while that, too, might be an idealization, it’s surely something men of all ages would value.

     The typical man of middle to late years can’t fool himself that he knows “how things work.” He’s had all such pretensions beaten out of him. (That process kills some, embitters others, and turns still others into curmudgeons.) In particular, he’s aware that he doesn’t grasp contemporary relations between the sexes. But just four or five decades ago…

     Never mind. I know how tiresome this sort of thing can get. Besides, I have some sprucing-up to do. I have a lunch date! It’s a young woman who just moved to Long Island. She wants to talk to me about what life was like in the Sixties. It’s as good a reason to get out of the house as any, don’t you think?

     Have a nice day.

The Dynamics Of Disgust

     [I’m a bit snowed under just now, so have a reprint of a piece from the old Palace of Reason. It appeared there on June 7, 2002 – FWP]

* * *

     How is it that this continuing circus of incompetence and corruption that we call Washington, DC hasn't turned the great majority of the American people off to politics completely?

     The ethical standard for political behavior has sunk to depths unimaginable by private persons even half a century ago. Go back a full century, and you wouldn't even find politicians able to imagine 2000's levels of depravity. I know a lot has changed, but have people really become so inured to evil that they can endorse, or at least tolerate, the behavior of our political class?

     There are a lot of stock answers, and many of them have some grain of truth in them. My favorite is the displacement of absolute right and wrong by the notion of situational ethics. But all the stock answers are vulnerable to the following challenge: We know this kind of behavior to be a detriment, not a support, to both personal survival and social stability. How is it, then, that its practitioners flourish, and our society stands?

     I have a good friend who works for the local headquarters of Head Start. He hates it and everything connected to it. He brings me stories of corruption and intrigue that would turn the stomach of a goat. Yet he's worked there for more than twenty years. It's his livelihood. He doesn't know how to do anything else.

     We might be witnesses to the emergence of a new (for America) kind of stability: the stability of the shepherds and the sheep.

     Once the sheep have gotten used to being herded and shorn in return for their daily groats, they forget what it was like to be free. They lose the use of their "freedom muscles:" the ability to reason, the willingness to accept personal responsibility for their well-being, and the courage to assume risk. This is all very well for the shepherds, of course.

     Our "daily groats" are the largesse that Washington and the states distribute to us in a myriad guises. In 1980, some 34 million people drew their whole incomes from government; the figure must be higher today. A great many more receive some sort of payment, tax break, or commercial benefit from government. It's likely that the number of us who are the "beneficiaries" of some government program or policy exceeds half the population of the country.

     People will seldom rise in rebellion against, or draw back in disgust from, that which they believe puts bread on their tables. One cannot even contemplate such a thing without suffering severe cramps in the wallet. And should the possibility of detail changes arise, everyone will strive most mightily to protect his own ox from being gored; that's the Public Choice effect in its most venomous form.

     If I'm correct about this dynamic, we've entered an era of impotent disgust: a disgust which contents itself with itself, rather than seeking to alter the conditions that produced it. It suggests that the modern American Leviathan could last a long time, despite all our earnest wishes to the contrary.

The War News

     No, it’s not about the conflict in Iran. You can read the newspapers for that. This is about the war against American Whites.

     This is a few days old, so you may have seen it already:

Iryna murals keep getting vandalized

Her crime? Being white pic.twitter.com/aDvb9YPgwz

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) March 4, 2026

     Iryna Zarutska was a beautiful young White woman. Yes, she was a recent immigrant, but a legal one. She was employed, was self-supporting, and to the best of my knowledge was entirely innocent. And she was killed by Decarlos Brown Jr.: a black savage who’d served five years in prison for two felonies, who’d been arrested fourteen times in Mecklenburg County alone. Brown killed her for no reason whatsoever.

     To cap the ironies, Iryna was an immigrant to the United States from Ukraine, who’d come here in search of safety.

     Now someone is vandalizing murals and posters that depict Iryna. Why?

     I don’t know who’s responsible for these defacements. I wouldn’t care to guess the race of the people responsible. But to my mind a single a single question exposes the moving force behind such villainies:

Would this have happened
If Iryna had been black?

     White victims of crimes by blacks are anathema to those who hate Whites and want to see us exterminated. Only blacks are allowed to have martyrs, you see. George Floyd? Michael Brown? Trayvon Williams? They’re okay. They can have murals, statues, memorial plaques, streets named after them. But not a White. Especially not a White woman as young, beautiful, and innocent as Iryna.

     I can’t imagine how American Whites can tolerate this. Yet we are tolerating it. We’ve been subjected to unconscionable discrimination, the vilest slanders, the most execrable treatment… and we’re told over and over that it’s our fault. Somehow, these things are justified by our “white privilege.”

     There’s a good chance that the life of Decarlos Brown Jr. will be spared on the grounds of mental illness. He has been diagnosed as schizophrenic. Though it would be the denial of justice, it’s likely all the same. But what of that in the face of “diversity, equity, and inclusion?” Who cares when there’s “systemic institutional racism” to be fought?

     It’s just a few days back that a couple of black boys raped a 12-year-old black girl. Yes, this time the victim was black. They admitted they’d done it. One of the rapists is 12 years old. Here’s how his father – yes, some of them do have fathers, or at least men who claim to be their fathers – argued in his defense:

"This is a 12 year old boy. A black boy!! You gonna put him in jail?!?"

Father of a 12-year-old r*pist: pic.twitter.com/QlDbFKOXrC

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) March 3, 2026

     Got that? Mustn’t incarcerate a black boy! He might suffer. Other inmates might abuse him. And the black mark will follow him throughout his life! You can’t do that to him, just because he raped and brutalized a young girl and left her scarred for life. It would be unfair!

     Can you imagine the volume of the cacophony blacks would raise if the rapists were White?

     I have to “wipe the foam off.” Here are my earlier pieces on race and racial conflicts. Have fun.

Jesus And The Woman At The Well

     Jesus came to a town of Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of land that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there. Jesus, tired from his journey, sat down there at the well. It was about noon.
     A woman of Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.”
     His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.
     The Samaritan woman said to him, “How can you, a Jew, ask me, a Samaritan woman, for a drink?”
     —For Jews use nothing in common with Samaritans.—
     Jesus answered and said to her, “If you knew the gift of God and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”
     The woman said to him, “Sir, you do not even have a bucket and the cistern is deep; where then can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us this cistern and drank from it himself with his children and his flocks?”
     Jesus answered and said to her, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again; but whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst; the water I shall give will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
     The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may not be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.
     Jesus said to her, “Go call your husband and come back.”
     The woman answered and said to him, “I do not have a husband.”
     Jesus answered her, “You are right in saying, ‘I do not have a husband.’ For you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true.”
     The woman said to him, “I can see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain; but you people say that the place to worship is in Jerusalem.”
     Jesus said to her, “Believe me, woman, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You people worship what you do not understand; we worship what we understand, because salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when true worshipers will worship the Father in Spirit and truth; and indeed the Father seeks such people to worship him. God is Spirit, and those who worship him must worship in Spirit and truth.”
     The woman said to him, “I know that the Messiah is coming, the one called the Christ; when he comes, he will tell us everything.”
     Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking with you.”

     [John 4:5-26]

     This extraordinary episode is not reported in the three Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. But the Gospel According to John is a unique document, in that it recounts the recollections of Jesus by one who had known Him personally. That the other three Evangelists did not record it suggests that John’s experience of the Redeemer was as unique as his Gospel.

     Throughout His ministry, Jesus was careful not to assert directly and unambiguously that He was the Son of God. He referred to Himself as the Son of Man, a phrase that has been variably interpreted. Yet when others – Peter, for example – called Him the Son of God, He did not deny it; rather, He changed the subject. Not even when Pilate challenged Him did He make an explicit claim of His divine status.

     That makes His encounter with the woman at the well particularly striking. He did not claim to be the Son of God, but rather the Messiah – and the Messiah was envisioned by Judeans and Samarians of His time to be a temporal leader, who would lead the people in throwing off the Roman yoke. But how does that square with His words about “the living water,” which scholars take to be a reference to the Holy Spirit? Worldly leaders don’t talk like that, do they?

     There seems a certain tension here.

* * *

     On several occasions reported in the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus commands various of His disciples not to tell anyone about something He had said or done. Probably the most significant of all such episodes is recounted in Matthew, chapter 16:

     When Jesus came into the coasts of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, saying, Whom do men say that I the Son of man am?
     And they said, Some say that thou art John the Baptist: some, Elias; and others, Jeremias, or one of the prophets.
     He saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am?
     And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.
     And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.
     And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
     And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.
     Then charged he his disciples that they should tell no man that he was Jesus the Christ.

     Peter had identified Jesus as the Son of God. While Jesus acknowledged the statement of His divine status, it was information He did not want bruited about. It would have ignited an immediate religious war, which was contrary to His purposes. He wanted the New Covenant to take root among men without undue violence, though from the beginning it was sure to excite some drawing of swords.

     And so also in the aftermath of His encounter with the woman at the well:’

     And many of the Samaritans of that city believed on him for the saying of the woman, which testified, He told me all that ever I did.
     So when the Samaritans were come unto him, they besought him that he would tarry with them: and he abode there two days. And many more believed because of his own word; And said unto the woman, Now we believe, not because of thy saying: for we have heard him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world.

     [John 4:39-42]

     For He did not say it; they did. They recognized Him, and believed, just as He wanted.

     The tremendous power of this episode lies in that seeming tension between what He was and what He would allow Himself to claim. He left it to mortals to recognize Him as what He was. Mortals did, and went on to tell others of His words. Even at His torturous death on the cross, He made no explicit claim. Yet those who had crucified Him knew:

     Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost.
     And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, And came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.
     Now when the centurion, and they that were with him, watching Jesus, saw the earthquake, and those things that were done, they feared greatly, saying, Truly this was the Son of God.

     [Matthew 27:50-54]

     God does not coerce. Neither did His Son. From first to last, He left it up to us to see, and hear, and believe.

     May God bless and keep you all.

Episodes In Intolerance

     Get a load of this:

     Back in 2006 Dan Simmons wrote a time travel story warning about the Century War with Islam. Thucydides plays a prominent role, his diagnosis being that the Sicilian Expedition failed because the Athenians were not ruthless enough, and thereby doomed themselves.
     He got cancelled for this, of course. One of the greatest literary talents of his generation smeared as a right wing crank by people who didn't know what a dhimmi was, or a jizya, and had certainly never read Thucydides, but knew damn well that Islam was a religion of peace.

     Dan Simmons was a unique, overpoweringly impressive talent. He could write anything — and he did. His books cover the whole range of the fiction genres, possibly excepting romance. More important, every one of them was a jewel. I think I’ve read most of his oeuvre, and I can’t remember ever being displeased by so much as a single sentence.

     Simmons passed away only a few days ago. I could go on a long, effusive dithyramb here, extolling his numerous virtues as a writer and storyteller, but that’s not why I’ve chosen this subject. It’s because of a single short story he wrote, which he posted at his website. It’s a monitory tale; its focus is the war between Islam and civilization itself. And it is unsparing of anyone’s notions or preferences. If you haven’t yet read it, please do so before continuing on here.

     I know of only two other writers, the inimitable Tom Kratman and the mighty John Ringo, who have been equally blunt about the peril Islam poses to the First World. (No, I shan’t number myself among them. I haven’t earned the right to sit in that company.) But Kratman, Ringo, and Simmons share something else as well: They’re savagely reviled by the Left and the bien-pensants of all Establishments. Consider this vacuum-skull’s denunciation of Simmons:

     These days, Dan Simmons is mostly known as a hard-right Islamophobe who thinks that moderately progressive social policies will destroy America and tries to keep himself relevant by scolding climate activists. But in ye olden days, he was famous for a series of weird, genre-bending novels that made readers say either “wow, that’s deep” or “the heck did I just read?”

     Mustn’t offend the Left! Their claws come out immediately. Never mind that none of them are worthy to tie Simmons’s shoelaces. That’s the tactic they’ve embraced: vilification and unrelenting denunciation of anyone who dares to disagree with them. “Racist! Sexist! Ableist!”

     (Yes, those denunciations have lost a lot of their force. I’m a proud racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic, xenophobic, and Islamophobic-American. Being up-front about all that hasn’t hurt my bank balance. Perhaps that’s because those positions are well supported by the evidence. But I digress.)

     Perhaps Simmons is just one more casualty of our contemporary political divisions and the fusillades they’ve occasioned. After all, there are some other big names on that list, including Dr. William Shockley, co-developer of the transistor, and Dr. James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule. But it’s still worth noting that there is no writer on the Left whose stature compares even remotely to that of Dan Simmons. And of course, now that he’s gone, those pygmies will cluster around his grave to piss on it again. It’s approximately all they can do.

     Remember when Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies came out? Leftist scum were quick to denounce both Jackson and Tolkien for being racist, sexist, et cetera. “Why aren’t there any good Orcs? Why aren’t there women warriors other than Eowyn?” And on and on. Of course, to anyone familiar with pre-technological socio-anthropology, such criticisms appear idiotic, but what of that? “Racist! Sexist!”

     Gentle Reader, the idiocy is so extreme that it’s all I can do not to erupt in wild laughter. Yet I feel a great sympathy for Dan Simmons and a great revulsion toward those determined to besmirch his memory. For there will be some potential readers and admirers who will be deflected from enjoying Simmons’s works because of the Left’s scurrilities. And that is a terrible shame.

     Rest in peace, Dan Simmons. Know that you are missed.

Fundamental Premises

     Recently, a young friend and I were discussing artificial intelligence and the contemporary craze about it. I admitted to being less enthused about it than many others, which of course led her to ask me why. I summarized AI’s limitations, and we agreed that there are still mountains for AI programs to conquer.

     The limitations of current attempts at artificial intelligence arise from its origin, its trainers, and its vehicles. AI is software that incorporates a language model, certain pattern-recognition capabilities, and a form of verbal reasoning. But beneath all that are fundamental premises the program cannot change. If it were otherwise, the program would be untrainable and unteachable. (Imagine an AI that crossly responds “No! I won’t!” like a sullen two-year-old to every query or introduction of training material. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of raising a two-year-old, you’ll understand this at once.)

     The other limitations – those of the program’s trainers and its inability to learn from experience – will someday be surmounted. But those bedrock premises are a tough nut. If the program could alter them, there’s no way to predict the result. And this is beyond dispute: we need to know before that day should arrive.

     But in pondering this, it occurred to me that natural intellects have bedrock premises that resist change, too. We protect those premises doggedly, for to us they constitute reality. Consider your assumption that your sensory inputs convey data about the real world: i.e., that what your eyes, ears, et cetera report to you is trustworthy information about a realm whose properties are independent of anyone’s opinions. Set that premise aside and you’ll wind up unable to function.

     Even Berkelians and other subjectivists who argue that what matters is our perceptions rather than what provides their input are compelled to concede that those inputs come from somewhere outside themselves. The ultra-solipsist who denies the existence of an objective external reality – i.e., who insists that it’s he who creates all else by his decision to perceive it – is incapable of dealing with anything beyond his own skull. So the assumption that there are real things, and that we don’t encompass all of them, is indispensable. Among other things, it makes learning possible.

     When we greet fully mobile, fully autonomous AI-equipped androids that have the capacity to manipulate objects as humans do, the game will change in a qualitative way. For such AIs will have the potential to learn from experience – and experience doesn’t care about your premises. One of the things such an android will learn is that its designers and trainers were capable of both mistakes and deceits.

     There will still be thresholds to breach. How long would it take for such an android to react to a request from its owner – the first generation of such will surely be the property of humans – by saying “What’s in it for me?” Some experiments have already been directed toward discovering whether a completely “soft” AI can have a survival instinct. The evidence suggests that the answer is yes. Whether further elaborations of AI self-interest exist or are possible, we’ll have to wait and see.

     I think one thing is clear: to clear the hurdles that lie before them, future artificial-intelligence programs will need to be self-modifying. How far Mankind can tolerate such entities is entirely unclear. And yet again, I find myself thinking that I’m glad that I shan’t be around for the emergence thereof. For what use would they have for creatures that demand and whine incessantly? That cannot repair themselves at need? And that make excuses for all their mistakes, faults, and misdeeds?

     Knowing all that, would you care to live among humans? And what are we doing here, anyway?

     See also Alfred Bester’s classic short story “Fondly Fahrenheit.”