Category Archives: Culture

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Shouldn’t a journalist be aware of basic facts?

Did you know that the United States Army, in fact all branches of our Armed Services, has standards for grooming and physical fitness? I knew, but apparently Will Bunch, the far-left columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, does not.

The distinguished Mr Bunch wrote:

Hegseth also declared an end to “fat” generals and overweight troops (apparently the Texas National Guard didn’t get the memo), and, OK, maybe that’s required for certain types of combat soldiers. But the broader message from the Pentagon is clear: that the new regime wants a sea of troops who look alike. Beardless, slimmed down, and, evidently — given the ouster of so many women and Black top commanders — as white and male as possible in 2025 America.

Mr Bunch just doesn’t get it. “(M)aybe that’s required for certain types of combat soldiers”? A clue: every soldier is trained to be a rifleman, and every soldier, male and female alike, is required to perform as a rifleman in combat if the situation arises. My older daughter, a Staff Sergeant in the United States Army Reserve, is still required to pass her Physical Fitness Test and her weapons qualifications, even though her MOS — Military Occupational Specialty — is 12T, Technical Engineer, basically a surveyor. She is required to make weight, as is every soldier, though those soldiers who are more heavily muscled can “make tape,” rather than weight, to prove that they are in good physical shape.

The military also have personal grooming standards. It was only in May of 2021 that the Army authorized females to wear their hair in neat ponytails rather than the older tight buns.

The Army has also long required that soldiers on duty be clean-shaven, though this was sometimes relaxed during combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the necessity of blending in amongst a bearded male population. The Navy allowed well-trimmed beards while Admiral Elmo Zumwalt was Chief of Naval Operations, but that didn’t last much beyond his retirement.

Does the Army want “a sea of troops who look alike”? Yes, of course, because that is part of military good order and discipline. The military have always striven for that, though the poorly informed columnist doesn’t seem to understand that. The US is hardly the only country which does that.

Naturally, he blames President Trump, as he does with all things; the President could walk on water and Mr Bunch would complain that he stomped on the poor little fishies! But it’s also true that Mr Trump selected J D Vance to be his running mate, and shock! Mr Vance wears a beard. Mr Bunch declares that the President wants an America that is lily-white, but Usha Vance, the Vice President’s wife is, yet another shocker, ethnically Indian, what some people would call “brown,” though she’s no darker complected than I get in the summer.

Sadly, when a (purported) journalist is afflicted with #TrumpDerangementSyndrome as badly as Mr Bunch is, checking the facts is not really part of the process.

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That thing that never happens has happened again At least ten high school varsity teams have chosen to forfeit games to protest presence of a boy on a girls' volleyball team

We noted, on September 26th, that six schools had forfeited games against the Jurupa Valley High School’s girls’ varsity volleyball team because a mentally ill male, A B Hernandez, plays on the girls’ team. Fox News has just reported how much the real girls are sacrificing:

California girls’ volleyball team with trans player sees 10th match forfeited amid controversy

The team can clinch first place in its league on Wednesday

By Jackson Thompson | Wednesday, October 15, 2025 | 3:45 PM EDT

Jurupa Valley High School’s girls’ volleyball team in California has now seen at least 10 games on its 2025 schedule forfeited amid a national controversy involving one of its players, who is transgender.

Los Osos High School forfeited a tournament game against Jurupa Valley on Saturday, while Patriot High School forfeited its Monday varsity match, marking its second forfeit to JVHS this season. Patriot High School previously forfeited a Sept. 26 match to Jurupa Valley.

Maribel Munoz, the mother of Jurupa Valley player Alyssa McPherson, provided Fox News Digital a copy of a message sent by JVHS head coach Liana Manu, announcing that the varsity match against Patriot was forfeited. The JV and freshman games were still played.

So, the schools are still playing the sub-varsity games, the games in which young Mr Hernandez is not participating.

It appears that by using a male player on the girls’ team, Jurupa Valley is in position to win the league title. However, JVHS is playing without Hadeel Hazameh and Alyssa McPherson, real girls who are refusing to play while Mr Hernandez is on the team.

Two of Jurupa Valley’s senior players, McPherson and Hadeel Hazameh, stepped away from the team this season in protest of trans teammate AB Hernandez.

McPherson and Hazameh have also filed a lawsuit against the Jurupa Unified School District citing their experience playing and sharing a locker room with Hernandez the previous three seasons. McPherson’s older sister and former JVHS girls’ volleyball player Madison McPherson is the third plaintiff in that lawsuit.

So, Misses McPherson and Hazameh, both of whom are minors according to the lawsuit filed — the age of sexual consent in the Pyrite State is 18 — wound up playing and sharing a locker room with young Mr Hernandez, though obviously uncomfortably, in previous seasons. Here we have to give credit to Riley Gaines Barker, who has been leading the effort against allowing males to compete on women’s athletic teams, and the several colleges which forfeited against San José State University last collegiate volleyball season, for showing the way. Because none of the actual adults would do the right thing and protect women’s sports, it has been left to teenagers and young twenty-something athletes to sacrifice willingly to make the point.

But I keep wondering what young Mr Hernandez is doing. I get it: he really, really, really thinks he’s a girl. Yet, a volleyball team is supposed to be a team, and even if he thinks that Misses McPherson and Hazameh are being ridiculous in not accepting him as a girl, he has also cost his team at least ten opportunities to play against competition. The forfeits are wins for the team, but they are not wins that the team has earned. Brayden “Blaire” Fleming did the same thing for San José State University.

If Mr Hernandez really wants to be seen and thought of as a girl, why is he doing things to draw ever more attention to the fact that he’s male? He recently competed in and won the girls’ triple jump track competition by eight feet! He won races by margins which left the other girls in the dust. At least Will “Lia” Thomas had enough sense to, after he won an NCAA championship in one event, to pull back and let real women win the others. Mr Fleming kept his ‘transgender’ status a secret, and, to be honest, he could actually ‘pass’ as a girl, where Mr Thomas could not.

Can someone explain this stuff to me, because I guess that I’m just not smart enough to figure it out on my own. If the ‘transgendered’ really want to be seen as the sex they claim to be, why do things to point out that they really are not?

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The economics of moral choices How Only Fans affects economics and society downstream

My good friend Robert Stacy McCain — The Patriarch Tree on Twitter since his old rsmccain account got trashed by the pre-Elon Musk regime — wrote about, in less than flattering terms about a ‘sex worker’ styling herself “Aella”. It seems that she had a birthday gang bang, sexually taking on 37 men on her 32nd (?) birthday. Mr McCain concluded:

That’s my theory, anyway. It is difficult to find any logical explanation for why someone would deliberately seek notoriety as a whore, but that’s the best I can do, based on the available information. As for my use of the venerable English noun whore, it is always preferable to euphemisms like “sex worker.” If you don’t want to be called a whore, don’t be a whore.

The definition of whore Mr McCain linked is a “woman who prostitutes her body for hire,” and while he wrote about the morality and eventual social repercussions of prostitution, especially in the internet age, I had a slightly different take.

Rush Limbaugh used to say that feminism was created to give ugly unattractive women access to the workplace, but Only Fans has enabled pretty girls to make many thousands of dollars by doing whatever on the internet. Newsweek addressed that claim that there are about 1.4 million American girls with Only Fans accounts, concluding that the number is a reasonable guesstimate. The OF girls could be defined as prostituting their images, without having to prostitute their bodies.

Of course, the shelf life of the OF girls is pretty short, but perhaps tens of thousands of dollars a month for showing their tits or more compared to $15 an hour as a clerk at Seven/Eleven? And it’s a lot safer than being a topless dancer at a local strip club! Yes, some will choose the more moral path, but the economics of the situation are staggering, perhaps enough to explain 1.4 million women just in the United States, around 2% of American women between 18 and 45 who are (supposedly) posting content on Only Fans.

It should be noted that some of these ladies might not be posting sexual content, but the numbers are still staggering.

But OF girls wouldn’t exist without the men who are willing to fork over $10 or so a month to subscribe to watch. It’s safer for the men, too, and cheaper than buying overpriced drinks and stuffing $5 bills in the g-strings of girls who still have no intention of f(ornicating) them. The privacy and safety of their own lonely and lousy apartments while they ‘abuse themselves’ for the same end result of going to a strip club? Yeah, that’s an economic winner!

The economics of ‘sex work’ in the twenty-oneth — no, not a typo, but a Picoism! — century seem pretty compelling: safer for the pretty girls, and safer, easier, and cheaper for the incels — or sometimes even married men — who watch them.

But, as with all things, there are the unintended consequences. The 5s, the average girls, the ones who don’t have great bodies, the ones who get lost in the crowds, wind up wondering where all the good men are, while the average guys, the male 5s, think that they’re in the right league to expect the 8s and 9s, because they were paying $10 a month to sixteen different OF girls in their late teens or early twenties and the OF girls simpered just enough to make them think they had some chance. Mr McCain had noted, years ago, how the self-proclaimed “supreme gentleman,” Elliot Rodger, the incel who murdered six people and wounded fourteen others before killing himself because the pretty blonde sorority girls weren’t interested in him. Mr Rodger, who was born into privilege, could easily have found a girlfriend had he been willing to look at girls who were in his league might be an extreme example, but I have to ask: how many guys seduced over the internet by 8s and 9s are unwilling to look at women who might be reasonably be possible mates for them?

So then the real 5 girls are more likely to give it up to any man interested, and some get knocked up and have a kid. Now we have average looking girls with a kid, looking for a decent, husband-material boyfriend, and the results are just what you’d expect: fewer marriages, fewer good marriages, and more loneliness and poverty for both adult men and women.

The OF girls themselves? Well, they’re pretty, so they will have more options, more men looking at them in real life. Some will decline to get involved with a former OF girl, some will never find out that the girls they like did Only Fans, and some men simply won’t care. But we do know that marriage rates and households headed by married couples in this country have been dropping precipitously. That is an economic as well as social problem, because unmarried people are generally poorer than married couples. Single women with children have a tremendous poverty rate.

Economics and culture are invariably intertwined, regardless of whether people want to believe it; culture impacts how well people do economically, and cultural choices, including those taken at a young age, have downstream effects.

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Killadelphia: It’s a good thing that crime is down!

I saw this tweet earlier, but decided to wait to write about it, waiting for The Philadelphia Inquirer, for which I am paying to subscribe, to have more. Sadly, the Inky didn’t have all that much more:

Police are investigating the death of a Philadelphia firefighter as homicide

The 56-year-old man was found dead in the Holmesburg section early Wednesday morning.

by Nate File | Wednesday, October 15, 2025 | 10:43 AM EDT | Updated: 11:08 AM EDT

A Philadelphia firefighter was killed in the city’s Holmesburg section in the early hours of Wednesday morning, police said.

The 56-year-old man was found dead inside a home on the 4700 block of Shelmire Avenue at 4 a.m. after police were called.

A 27-year-old male suspect is in custody, and detectives are investigating the incident as a homicide. The suspect told police when they arrived that there had been a disturbance in the home, but the circumstances of the incident were unclear.

There’s one more paragraph in the story, but it tells us nothing.

But what interested me is something on which I’ve previously written. The homeowners of 4725 Shelmire Avenue were so afraid of thieves and street criminals that they literally put themselves in jail, adding bars to their front porch to keep them out. They aren’t the only ones on the block who’ve done that, as the row house at 4755 Shelmire has the same barred-in porch.

A look at the 4700 block of Shelmire Avenue via Google Maps Streetscapes shows not a run-down row home neighborhood, but a wide street, with homes at least visually decently kept. Many have been modified to close in their porches to create additional interior space. There’s no garbage strewn around — the images were taken just last July — and the Holmesberg section of Northeast Philadelphia is far from the worst section of the city, yet we can still see residents afraid of crime.

Zillow shows the interior details of 4725 Shelmire, so it was obviously on the market recently, and Zillow guesstimates the value of the three bedroom, two bath, 1,280 ft² home to be $211,800. An affordable home in a clean-looking neighborhood in Northeast Philly!

The newspaper reported, just two days ago, that an increasing percentage of Philadelphians are paying more than 35% of their income on rent, a percentage that the Department of Housing and Urban Development considers to be “cost-burdened.” Looks to me that they should be buying on Shelmire .  .  . if they are not too afraid of crime.

 

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My response to the Trump Peace Plan

I, for one, will wait and see if this deal is fully implemented. That the hostage release is the first step should mean, if there’s any rationality left in Hamas, that they intend to follow through with the rest, because the hostages are Hamas’ only point of leverage.

But whether this deal is completed or not, I don’t foresee any lasting peace. Looking at the timeline, we see Arab attacks against the Jews in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973, just the cycle for the 10- and 12- and 14-year-old boys, too young for the previous war, to get old enough to try to do what their candy-assed fathers couldn’t. Raised on resentment and hate, but not having gotten beaten themselves, they grew up thinking they could be the generation which succeeds.

This time has been different, however, as Israel unleashed so much Hell on Gaza that perhaps the growing generation of boys will be so terrorized that they won’t try it, but eventually children will grow up without memories of what happened to Gaza, and they’ll rise up and try again.

And let’s not kid ourselves: Israel won this war due to Benjamin Netanyahu, who was strong-willed and smart enough not to give the Arabs a cease-fire until they were thoroughly, thoroughly beaten. The wars in 1967 and 1973 were ended too soon, leaving too much of the Arab armies intact and alive and able to rearm. Fortunately, the Arab nations still learned the lesson, and the Arab nations never again attacked Israel, but the various terrorist groups kept at it. Hamas had hoped, perhaps even believed, that if they started the way, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia would mobilize and join them. The Arab national leaders were at least smart enough to say thanks but no thanks, in no small part because none of the other Arab leaders like or trust the Palestinians.

The only ones who joined the fight were Hezbollah, Iran, and the Houthis in Yemen. Iran is a thousand miles away from Israel, and the Houthis several hundred miles away, so they knew they wouldn’t get invaded by IDF troops, but they f(ornicated) around and found out anyway. Hezbollah sort-of tried to intervene, albeit a bit half-heartedly, but found out themselves as well, as their eyes and fingers and balls left their bodies.

You don’t get into martyr heaven without your balls! No 72 bacha bazi boys for them!

And Donald Trump deserves a lot of credit as well. Had Kamala Emhoff been President [shudder!] she’d have been pressing Mr Netanyahu to ease off all along, but President Trump recognizes enemies of Western civilization in ways our past DEI Vice President never did, and while he wanted this deal, and potential past deals, he also let Israel know that the US would support them if they went all out to destroy Hamas.

Still, with the Arabs allowed to stay in Gaza, there is eventually little way I can see this working out in the long run. Had Israel done what they should have done in 1967, and expelled every last Arab from Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, giving the country shortened, more defensible borders, and not having a Arabs under the thumb of occupation, we would not have seen this mess today.

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You in a heap o’ trouble, girl!

Precious Hamilton is only fifteen years old, but she just might spend the next couple of decades in prison. Her initial claims are that it was all an accident, but someone is still stone-cold graveyard dead.

15-year-old girl charged with third-degree murder in fatal shooting of Abington teen

Abington Township police arrested Precious Hamilton in a shooting that killed 17-year-old Baseem “Seyven” Baker

by Jesse Bunch | Tuesday, October 7, 2025 | 5:18 PM EDT

Precious Hamilton, mugshot via Fox 29 News.

Montgomery County prosecutors charged a 15-year-old girl with third-degree murder Tuesday in the shooting death of an Abington teenager in his family’s apartment on Monday afternoon.

Precious Hamilton, of Eddystone, was arrested that evening by Abington Township police in connection with a shooting that left 17-year-old Baseem “Seyven” Baker dead from a gunshot wound to the head, prosecutors said.

No, of course young Miss Hamilton’s mugshot was not published by The Philadelphia Inquirer, but a quick Google search found it for me, from more than one source.

Police arrived at Baker’s apartment on the 100 block of Old York Road to find the teen dead in his bedroom, authorities said.

Police said Hamilton had been staying at the apartment over the weekend and had shown Baker the gun, a small-caliber revolver, on Sunday when “dry firing” the weapon out of Baker’s window, according to videos and a photo recovered from Baker’s iPad.

Though the article does not state it explicitly, reporter Jesse Bunch’s article makes it appear that the gun was Miss Hamilton’s. The charges filed, including possession of a firearm by a minor and carrying a firearm without a license, support that reading. What, I have to ask, was a 15-year-old girl doing carrying a firearm?

Further down:

During an interview with Hamilton and her mother, police said, Hamilton told investigators she shot Baker accidentally after the gun was left in the cocked position from Sunday.

She told investigators she grabbed the revolver while going to pack her belongings, and that while grabbing the weapon in a “rapid fashion,” the gun discharged and struck Baker, who was on the bed and fell to the floor, according to the affidavit of probable cause for Hamilton’s arrest.

Hamilton told investigators she and Baker had previously dated, then maintained a friendship for about a year, according to the affidavit.

I’m surprised that Mr Bunch included that last paragraph. What he did not include in his article, though it ought to be obvious from the fact that the alleged killer’s name was released, is that Miss Hamilton has been charged as an adult.

Young Miss Hamilton has been charged with third-degree Murder, Title 18 §2502(c), which, under Title 18 §1102(d) carries a maximum sentence of 40 years in prison. She has also been charged with Involuntary Manslaughter, which, under Title 18 §2504(b) is a first degree misdemeanor, which under Title 30 §923(a)(7) carries a penalty of a fine of between $1,500 and $10,000, and the possibility of imprisonment for not more than five years.

Mr Bunch should have included that in his story, because there’s a huge difference between third degree murder and involuntary manslaughter. My guess is that young Miss Hamilton will be offered an involuntary manslaughter plea bargain, if there is no evidence that she was carrying a firearm because she was part of a gang. Since this was in Montgomery County, and not Philadelphia, District Attorney Larry Krasner can’t simply dismiss the charges. We are no longer surprised when we read about 15-year-old boys carrying firearms; perhaps we shouldn’t be as surprised as we are that some 15-year-old girls are now packing heat.

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That thing that never happens has happened again

Hiring a 48-year-old, 5’7″, 210 lb ‘transgender woman’ to drive a school bus full of young kids? What could possibly go wrong?

Male bus driver who goes by ‘Ms Sharon’ charged with sexually abusing multiple boys

By Alex Oliveira | Sunday, October 5, 2025 | 2:27 PM EDT

A North Carolina school bus driver who calls himself “Ms. Sharon” has been charged with sexually assaulting several boys whom he lured to his house, cops say.

Leetwain Darrell Tate — a 48-year-old a male also known as just “Sharon” — was arrested Tuesday and charged with two counts of statutory rape and six counts of indecent liberties with a minor, according to Charlotte-Mecklenberg police.

He is accused of assaulting at least four boys age 14 and 15 years old, but officials said there could be more victims.

The children were found to be staying at his house, and one of them claimed Tate offered him money in return for sex, an arrest affidavit obtained by WCNC read.

The New York Post noted that the police said none of the ‘incidents’ occurred while Mr Tate was working for the school or on school property.

The WCCB news story doesn’t give us any more information than did the Post. Oddly enough, I was unable to find anything on this story in The New York Times, where they tell readers about All the News That’s Fit to Print.

The Charlotte Observer did report on the story, but of course the newspaper used the feminine pronouns to refer to Mr Tate. The Observer reported this:

In a letter to families about the allegations, Sugar Creek Charter School Superintendent Celeste Sundo said Tate met all of the necessary background requirements to get hired.

“All Sugar Creek Charter School candidates undergo a multi-step hiring process, including a national background check and reference checks, before an offer of employment is made,” Sundo said.

Yeah, that’s what the Des Moines board of education said about Ian Roberts, too, and look how that turned out! Apparently being a 5’7″ ‘transgender woman’ meets the ‘necessary background requirements’ for Mecklenburg County public schools! Normally when you hire crazy, you shouldn’t be surprised when you get crazy.

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That thing that never happens has happened again

Riverside County, where the Jurupa United School District is located, is the fourth largest county in California and tenth largest the United States, but it has at least a little bit of sense — for the Pyrite State, that is — in that it was actually carried by Donald Trump on the 2024 election, albeit by the narrow margin of 463,677 (49.30%) to 451,782 (48.04%). Six congressional districts have parts of the county in them, represented by three Democrats and three Republicans, while there is again a split in the state Senate, but a 5-to-1 advantage for Republicans in the state Assembly.

But, alas! California overall is dominated not only by Democrats, but far-left Democrats, and every #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading policy possible has been enacted. And A B Hernandez, a male who is just absotively, posilutely certain he’s really a girl, is on the Jerupa Valley High School girls’ volleyball team.

Perhaps you’ve heard of young Mr Hernandez. He recently won the girls’ triple jump track competition by eight feet!

Now:

Patriot High School has forfeited an upcoming match to the Jurupa Valley High School.

Jurupa Valley previously saw three forfeits in one weekend at the Freeway Games tournament, as Aquinas High School, San Dimas High School, and Yucaipa High School all refused to play Jurupa Valley. Before this, the teams AB Miller High School, Orange Vista High School, Rim of the World High School, and Riverside Poly High School had all forfeited to Jurupa Valley.

Young Mr Hernandez’s presence isn’t the only ‘transgender’ boy causing forfeits in California.

From Fox News:

Three of Hernandez’s current and former volleyball teammates have filed a lawsuit against the Jurupa Unified School District (JUSD), the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) and the California Department of Education (CDE) over their experience sharing a team and locker room with the transgender athlete.

The two current teammates in the lawsuit, seniors Alyssa McPherson and Hadeel Hazameh, previously told Fox News Digital they were stepping away from the team as long as the transgender athlete is participating. The third plaintiff is McPherson’s older sister Madison, who graduated last year.

“Plaintiffs have been intimidated by an intentionally hostile environment created by Defendants wherein they were bullied by school officials to censor their objections to competing with, and against, a male and to sharing intimate and private spaces with a male,” the lawsuit reads.

We have previously reported on the discovery that “Blaire” Fleming was actually a male named Brayden Fleming on the San José State University women’s volleyball team, and how it led to several forfeits.

I get it. Our good friends on the left, consumed by sympathy as they are, really, really, really want to accommodate the ‘transgendered,’ those afflicted with gender dysphoria, who apparently seriously believe that they are not really the sex into which they were conceived, developed, and born. They really, really, really want people like young Mr Hernandez and Will Thomas to be able to live out their dreams to be women, regardless of the fact that they just are not.

But there are real differences between men and women, between boys and girls, differences which make a difference when it comes to athletics, and for all of the ‘transgendered’s’ Wishin’ and hopin’ and thinkin’ and prayin’, Plannin’ and dreamin’ that girls can be boys and boys can be girls, they really can’t be. The ‘transgendered’ are mentally ill, and our very sympathetic friends on the left somehow believe that it’s better to go along with their delusions than to help them and tell them the truth.

However crazy you might think I am, no matter how much I really, really want to be as athletic as Bo Jackson, I’m at least sane enough to realize that I’m not.

Now, there are athletes, there are families in southern California, some of which might have been more sympathetic to people like young Mr Hernandez who are learning the hard way that the idiocy of the hard left wokesters is not something in the distance, something that happens to Other People, but happens to them as well.

The academic year has really just begun. How many more stories like this will we see before it’s over?

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues. By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
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He’s baaack!

Marble curb and gutter in Athens. Photo by D R Pico and may be freely used, with appropriate credit.

Mrs Pico’s and my vacation in Greece is over, and I’m back at the computer typing in my hopefully-not-completely-mindless drivel! My thanks to William Teach of The Pirate’s Cove for keeping this poor site going for the last two weeks.

Greece is a beautiful, if very arid-looking country, but one thing really, really, really annoyed me. Athens is supposed to be the crown jewel of that ancient nation, full of ancient monuments. We climbed the Acropolis to visit the Parthenon, we visited the Temple of Zeus, and we saw things created by the hand of man 2,500 years ago. Even Jerusalem doesn’t boast signs of civilization that old, other than just a couple of places where stones from the original Temple built by Solomon 2,900 years ago can be seen.

As a Catholic, it was interesting to have walked some of the same streets as St Paul on his visit to the city. (Acts 17:16-34)

We climbed on Mt Olympus, because I wanted to have a talk with Zeus, but, alas! he was nowhere to be found.

Athens is so magnificent that, as in the picture on the right, there are streets on which the very curb-and-gutters are made of marble. The photo is on a side street devoted to restaurants just a block from our hotel.

But Athens is an absolutely filthy city! It seems that every block is scrawled with graffiti, major amounts of graffiti, graffiti as high as the “artists” can reach. How can a city so dependent upon the euros of tourists let itself become so defaced and dirty? The European Union has designated several sites in Greece with the European Historical Label, and are national parks in the Hellenic Republic.

The rest of Greece? Much cleaner — except Thessaloniki — and amazingly inexpensive. Our meals in Kefalonia and Litochoro cost half, or even less, than what they would have cost in a comparable American city. Real estate was so inexpensive that we saw, and considered a detached beachfront house in Kefalonia for only 315,000€.

OK, OK, I considered the house, but my darling bride — of 46 years, 4 months, and six days — was pretty much vetoing it, saying, truthfully I’m afraid, that we couldn’t afford it. Our current property, were it located in Massachusetts or Maine would be worth more than that, but in low-cost Kentucky, it isn’t.

Litochoro? Mrs Pico would have considered that, a town just 20 minutes from Aegean Sea beaches and Mt Olympus.

We visited the ancient monasteries at Meteora, including the one featured in the James Bond film For Your Eyes Only.

Greece is a great place to visit, but not for the reasons and places that most people would expect.

There was one thing that I regretted, not being able to write on this site because I didn’t take a computer, and that was we left just before the assassination of Charlie Kirk. But, in retrospect, perhaps that was a good thing, because I wasn’t able to write anything stupid by jumping the gun on things.