Category Archives: Real Life

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But it’s not my fault!

I confess: I sometimes spend too much time on Facebook, and one of the things that keeps appearing there are posts from people, purporting to be alpha males, telling us that women cannot be trusted, that women will leave you for the handsomer or wealthier guy who happens to come along. Man are strong and blameless, and women are just there for men as long as no one better comes along. Lose your job — unjustly, of course — and women will leave, even though there are hundreds of thousands of wives who have stuck by husbands who’ve faced such reverses. These things are written by ‘men’ who never take responsibility for their own failures, but have to find someone else to blame.

If your wife leaves you, maybe it is because you just weren’t a good enough husband.

Robert Stacy McCain wrote:

Call it The Self-Pity Blame Loop. If you are unwilling to accept responsibility for the consequences of your own behavior, you must seek scapegoats to blame. This leads to a pattern, viewing yourself as the victim of unfair treatment, and indulging in self-pity, while becoming resentful of more fortunate people. . . .

If you know people like this, you know the key to their entire personality involves a single sentence: “It’s not my fault!“

Continue reading →

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This afternoon’s rant The lesson of Barack Obama has been lost on so many men

Robert Stacy McCain wrote:

Among my friends are members of the black middle class who, despite their own accomplishments, find themselves engaged in a constant battle to intervene between their children and “the street,” as they refer to the ghetto/thug subculture. Even in suburbia and small towns, young black people are vulnerable to peer pressure not to “act white” (i.e., be studious, sober, law-abiding) and I suspect that many young Latinos have similar issues.

So the scenario I see is that the parents in the Gomez family managed to work their way out of urban poverty in Chicago, relocate to the tranquil town of Elkhart, only to watch their teenage sons succumb to the pressure to be “authentic,” to represent, as the kids say.

Instead of supporting those parents who want to keep their kids away from gang culture, liberal “activist” types actually encourage criminality by fomenting resentment of law enforcement.

I present to you another member of the black middle class, the former community organizer and former Senator from the Great State of Illinois. Handsome, articulate, charismatic, and popular, he ‘assimilated’ into mainstream American culture, was even able to defeat Her Heiress Apparent, and then be elected, twice, to the highest office in the land. This fine, upstanding gentleman did everything right, at least as far as getting elected — his policies while in office were repugnant — and should have shown other Americans of melanin that there really was a right way for them to succeed.

Yes, I hated his policies, and did not vote for him, other than in the 2008 Democratic primary in Pennsylvania, not for him, but against the odious Hillary Clinton, yet I had high hopes that his example would push the black community in the United States to do better, to more fully integrate into American society.

But, alas! so few of them seem to have learned the lesson of Barack Hussein Obama, and somehow think the way to success is to become rap “artists,” gang-bangers, absent teenaged fathers, and common street criminals.

Of course, there are a lot of black men in our country who do try to do things the right way. They find jobs, work hard at them, and do their best to support their families. The trouble is that we never hear about them; their lives are both steady and quiet. In my career, I’ve known hundreds of them, primarily as concrete mixer drivers, front end loader operators, and a couple of crane operators. They came to work every day, did their jobs, and went home at the end of the day. Three of them, Ike, Skip, and Joe — I won’t publish their full names — saved my sorry ass while I was learning on the job, in my first job with a ready-mixed concrete company.

But what we see and hear of today are the “men” who want to be brave, strong “outlaws,” thinking that shows how tough and masculine they are, will get them a lot of girls, and of course the tremendous monetary rewards they expect. Too lenient prosecutors like Philly’s George Soros-sponsored, police-hating and criminal loving Larry Krasner excuse their ever-increasing crimes, and eventually they are graduated to s(tuff) which gets them long stretches behind bars. Perhaps some think that “prison cred” is even better than “street cred,” if the sentences are short enough, but when they finally kill someone, they might spend twenty years behind bars, and twenty years of prison cred just leaves them out on the street after they get out, with no money, no skills other than crime, and they are behind the times when it comes to that.

Today’s left scream “MAGA!” and “raaaaacism!” against conservatives, but what we want is a civilized society, a civilized society which includes all people and races, behaving in a civilized manner and contributing positively to American society. We want immigrants who enter our country the right way and become upstanding members of our society. We need to return to the days when being on welfare was a stigma and not a goal or a way of life.

We need more Barack Obamas and far, far, far fewer George Floyds.

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Navy Joan Roberts is probably better off with her father being absent Perhaps the current generation of young adults are going to do things better

In the 1960s, I was the boy who was embarrassed about growing up without a father in small-town Mt Sterling, Kentucky. Divorce was far less common at the time, and all of the kids I knew in Mt Sterling Elementary School had fathers, or at least the ones about whom I knew anything about their families. I was the outlier!

My mother moved us to Mt Sterling because her sister had been able to get her a job. Our family, from Antioch, California, with a detour to Portland, Maine, my mother’s hometown, was completely unknown to the people there, and naturally no one had seen or heard of my father; there was no knowledge of him whatsoever, no knowledge that he had completely abandoned his wife and three children, so it could have been, at least for the townspeople, a question of whether it was somehow my mother’s fault. If you think that’s strange, it wouldn’t be to the mind of a nine-year-old boy with a girl’s first name, and the first one wearing glasses to boot. I at least think I can understand what life must be like for almost eight-year-old Navy Joan Roberts, growing up without her father, Hunter Biden.

Oh, there are certainly differences: my sisters and I grew up poor, because good jobs for women were rare in the sixties, and my father saw child support as more of an option than an obligation; men could get away with that far more at the time. My mother worked hard and struggled, in ways that it has taken the responsibilities of adulthood to make me understand now. Young Miss Roberts, and her mother Lunden Roberts, aren’t having to struggle too much financially, because her father has been hit with very substantial child support payments, but it’s also public knowledge that the younger Miss Roberts is a bastard, something that, as a child, I only feared people might think of me, and the fact that the older Miss Roberts was working as a stripper undoubtedly has many people thinking poorly of her. I guess that she was doing what she had to do to keep a roof over her head.

At a time when the Biden family ought to be slipping back into obscurity, former First Lady Jill Biden is back in the headlines as she has to do a tour to sell her book View from the East Wing: A Memoir. The problem for the tour is that Dr Biden has been denying that she saw in her husband what any wife should have noticed: that he was in serious mental decline, and her stories as she makes the rounds of talk shows have been shifting and never sounding truthful.

ABC’s ‘The View’ is a place for journolism, not journalism, but it is also a place in which the hostesses sometimes go off-script, and things like Dr Biden’s paean for her stepson get broadcast without critical thinking. Critical thinking is then applied from outside, as the former First Lady’s effusive praise of her wastrel stepson gets hammered from outside. President Biden finally acknowledged the young Miss Roberts as his granddaughter, though to my knowledge Dr Biden never did.

She’s certainly never been invited to family get-togethers, but the younger Mr Biden had married Melissa Cohen not long after his daughter was born, so such would be pretty awkward. Mr Biden knew that he had knocked up the elder Miss Roberts before he married someone else.

I have to confess here: I do not understand family relationships these days. My wife and I had been married, married for a few years, before our children were born, and after 47 years, we’re still married. I just don’t get men fathering children without the least regard for marrying the mothers or rearing their children. I suppose the things I saw so negatively when I was a child are commonplace now, and perhaps children growing up today without their fathers around just see it as normal, and hardly different from a bunch of the other children they know.

Our great, Christian society and culture has lost something. Now discussions are about “body counts,” how many people you’ve screwed, and, as much as it would horrify the lovely Amanda Marcotte, the fact that men trying to rack up high body counts for themselves are also ruling out women with high body counts as potential wives, even though women don’t get to rack up high body counts without men going right along with it.

But there is hope! Britain’s very leftist The Guardian reported that ‘millennials’ are not ‘hooking up’ for random sex as much as previous generations. A Google search for current generation having less sex turned up many more such articles, though several were hidden behind paywalls.

Along similar lines, we have reported on the slow growth of the Catholic Church, the faith that President Biden and his wife have professed, a faith which does not support contraception and abortion the way Miss Marcotte does, a faith which encourages personal responsibility and the confession of sins. Our good friends on the left hated people like Charlie Kirk for stressing such to college students, and the previously mentioned 48-year-old Miss Marcotte sees three married Republican women getting pregnant at about the same time through conspiracy theory eyes rather than more conservative women actually having more babies. She really, really, really doesn’t want the next generation of young adults to disapprove of her view about life and marriage and sex.

It will take more time to see how this all plays out, but perhaps, just perhaps, we are seeing a more conservative social and cultural movement among Americans.

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This is what country people do!

From Miller’s Creek Fire and Rescue:

Stella moved to safety.

This morning (Monday, February 16, 2026) just before 10 AM MCFR received a request for assistants in reference to a cow that was down and could not get up. Unit 8 and Squad 8 responded with 3 firefghters trained in large animal rescue and several other firefighters assisted. Crews were able to setup a high point rope system and raised the cow, slid a stokes basket under and moved her to an open area to be cared for. We want to thank our partners with the Estill County Rescue Squad for assisting in making this a successful rescue.

We just finished our fundraiser to order our large animal equipment and will place that order soon. We are looking forward to adding this equipment to make our job easier.

We are happy to report that “Stella” is doing well and gaining energy.

Thank you 4hooves large animal services and Dr. Grimes for your advice today.

There are more photos at the original.

Miller’s Creek Fire and Rescue is a volunteer fire station, men doing what needs to be done on their own, helping people without getting paid for it. Chad, the station chief, helped out my family during the flood of 2021, when our HVAC system was underwater and the flood floated the propane tank, so we couldn’t use the fireplace for heating; our house itself did not flood. We still had electricity, so Chad brought over some electric space heaters to help keep the place livable. This was before the volunteer fire station was established, which started in 2024.

I stopped by the fire station last spring, because I had a piece of metal that had to be cut, and wanted to borrow a torch. Well, the fire station didn’t have a torch, but gave me the name and phone number of a neighbor who did. I called him, and he drove right down, cut the metal for me himself, and wouldn’t hear of me paying him; he was just being a good neighbor.

Out in the wilds of eastern Kentucky, I can’t just walk a couple of blocks and pick up freshly baked croissants from a French boulangerie, and our restaurant choices are few, basically diner food. We don’t have the luxuries that some of my Philadelphia and other ‘urbanist’ friends have, no high-class restaurants, no city nightlife, no Wawa coffee 🙁 but we do have one thing: we have great people around here!

While my wife and I grew up in the Bluegrass State, we aren’t from Estill County, yet the people here accepted us as if we were old, old friends. That’s something you just don’t get in the city.

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We are wealthy!

Holy Monastery Roussanou from a neighboring peak. Photo by D R Pico, and may be freely used with appropriate acknowledgement. Click to enlarge.

My darling bride — of 46 years, 4 months, and 12 days — and I recently returned from our two week vacation in Greece, and we saw many amazing and beautiful places. The photo to the right is from the Holy Monastery Roussanou, one of five, including the one made famous in the James Bond movie For Your Eyes Only, around Meteora, Greece.

Other than Athens, the most famous city in Greece and the home to the ancient Grecian works, but which was a filthy city defiled with ubiquitous graffiti, we loved Greece. There is a seaside home in Kefalonia, and it is actually on the (rocky) beach, that I considered buying, for only 315,000€, though Mrs Pico would have vetoed it. Litochoro, on the other hand, had my wife asking about real estate prices; Litochoro is a short car ride from both Mt Olympus and Aegean Sea beaches. Being a poor country, prices in Greece are surprisingly low. Two nice dinners in Greece cost less than one in the United States.

However, despite this article title, we are not rich. Buying a 315,000€ home would have required selling the small farm we currently have; it’s not like we have six figures to the left of the decimal point in the bank. We’re both retired — though my wife, a registered nurse, picks up an occasional shift at the hospital, primarily to fatten the vacation fund — but we own our home without a mortgage, have a relatively small retirement annuity, and our Social Security. We aren’t really worried about money, but, on the other hand, we don’t spend much anyway.

We were sitting in a couple of cheap chaise lounge chairs on Monday afternoon, on one of our lawns. Yes, we have more than one! It was sunny and in the low 80s, with a slight breeze, but we’d arranged the chairs in the shade of a pin oak tree. The only road, which is not very busy, was a couple hundred yards away. There’s only one neighbor’s house visible from our property, and it was just barely visible. There were three dogs lazing around in the yard. We have food in the refrigerator and the pantry, we have heat and air conditioning when we need them, running water, electricity, the internet, all of the utilities of modern life. We have our (small) family nearby, and enough friends that we don’t need more.

In rural Kentucky, we don’t have fancy restaurants, we don’t have Starbucks, and we don’t have the glittering lights of the big cities. Then again, we can actually see the stars at night, and hear crickets rather than cars. We sometimes hear Jeremiah croaking in the evening.

So, how are we not wealthy? Two working-class Americans, fortunately in decent if not perfect health, who suffered a few reverses during life but still did things the right way, now retired and living the life that we want to live. The places in Tuscany, in France, in Greece, and in Scotland that we’ve seen and liked and said, “We could live here,” were all nice, but is there really anyplace better than the United States of America?
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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.

 

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The urban heat island effect drives climate change

Stephanie Abrams explains urban heat island effect on The Weather Channel. Screen capture by D R Pico on June 26, 2025.

My good friend William Teach of The Pirate’s Cove snarked this morning that it was “Your Fault: ‘Climate Change’ Made Current Raleigh Heat Wave More Likely,” which amused me greatly. I know, I know, it’s just shocking, shocking! that it got hot in a major urban area in the South, in the summer, but Mr Teach mocked WRAL telling people how horrible the heat was, and that it was all the fault of global warming climate change.

As it happens, I have my own weather station, and I’m OCD enough to keep an eye on it. And what I’ve noticed is that while yes, it got into the nineties at the farm, it was still a few degrees less than the forecasts.

It was 69.4º F at 7:00 this morning, lower than the forecast of 72º for that time. Continue reading →

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The activists can’t just leave decent things alone

Pope Leo XIV blesses riders at the beginning of the Giro d’Italia, June 1, 2025. Screen capture by D R Pico.

The Giro d’Italia cycling race included the Vatican for the first time, in the neutralized start of the grand tour race for the first time in history, in the 21st and final stage. Pope Leo XIV blessed the riders at the start of the race.

Pope Leo blesses cyclists as Giro d’Italia hits Vatican Gardens

by Associated Press | Sunday, June 1, 2025

Pope Leo XIV offered his blessing to the 159 cyclists competing in the Giro d’Italia on Sunday, as the final stage of the iconic three-week race began with a historic ride through the serene Vatican Gardens behind St. Peter’s Basilica.

Upon entering Vatican grounds, overall leader Simon Yates and the classification frontrunners dismounted to personally greet the pontiff, who was presented with a symbolic pink jersey – the emblem of the race leader.

“You are role models for young people across the globe,” Pope Leo told the peloton. “May God bless you all on this final leg of the Giro d’Italia. Congratulations, and know that you are always welcome here in the Vatican, embraced by the church, which reflects God’s love for all people.”

There’s more at the original, and it’s wholly apolitical.

Our family watch European bike races. Our younger daughter is an absolute fanatic, and knows everything there is to know about the competitors, while I am more interested in the scenery. And the scenery was completely messed up in this year’s Giro by the awful and ubiquitous ‘Palestinian’ flags and stupid ‘Free Gaza’ bovine feces painted on the roads throughout by stupid activists.

The ‘Palestinian’ supporters ruin everything.

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The Las Vegas Raiders Suck!

View from my seat, Section 231, Row 19, Seat 9

My older daughter, as a present for her favorite dad, bought tickets for us to watch the Las Vegas Raiders play the Cincinnati Bengals yesterday. In several tweets, I’ve referred to my favorite team since I was first aware of their existence, back when Daryle Lamonica was still throwing bombs, as the Oakland — never Las Vegas! — Raiders.

Now, I have to change that: they are indeed nothing like the silver-and-black from their glory days in the 1970s and 80s, the days of Art Shell and Gene Upshaw anchoring the best offensive line in football, the days of Ted Hendricks and Jack Tatum and Otis Sistrunk terrorizing offenses. They are truly the Las Vegas Raiders now, the Raiders who just plain quit on the field yesterday.

Raiders fire three coaches after losing fifth straight game

by Joe Lago | Monday, November 4, 2024

Las Vegas Raiders head coach Antonio Pierce said the team would “look at everything” after falling to 2-7 with its fifth straight loss in a 41-24 road defeat to the Cincinnati Bengals on Sunday, News.Az reports citing The Biglead.

41-24 makes it sound as though the game was actually competitive; it wasn’t. Jack Jones scored on an interception returned for a 29-yard touchdown and Brock Bowers on a garbage time touchdown late in the fourth quarter.

The Raiders had seen enough of offensive coordinator Luke Getsy’s play calling. Late Sunday night, they fired Getsy after just nine games and also let go offensive line coach James Cregg and quarterbacks coach Rich Scangarello.

That was deserved, because the offense just plain sucked.

I was full of hope, in that the Raiders first drive resulted in a touchdown. Two touchdowns, actually, as the first one was overturned on replay, but scored again from the one yard line.

A replacement for Getsy wasn’t announced, but passing game coordinator Scott Turner, son of longtime NFL offensive coordinator and former Raiders head coach Norv Turner, is expected to be the front-runner to take over a Raiders offense that has gained just 4.6 yards per play (29th in the NFL) and scored only 18.7 points per game (26th).

It has been a disastrous first full season as Raiders head coach for Pierce, whose encouraging nine-game interim stint last season earned him the permanent gig. He’s continuing to learn on the job, and his harshest lesson so far was the hiring of Getsy.

Despite lackluster results as Chicago Bears offensive coordinator, Getsy was brought onboard by Pierce to construct a run-first attack to complement a talented Raiders defense. That physical rushing identity never materialized as Las Vegas has averaged an NFL-worst 3.5 yards per carry.

The Raiders did even worst than that yesterday, 21 carries for 60 yards, an average of 2.9 yards per carry, with the longest run of the day being just 7 yards.

The Raiders’ biggest problem, however, has been their terrible quarterback play. Then again, first-year general manager Tom Telesco didn’t do Pierce (or Getsy) any favors when he signed journeyman backup Gardner Minshew to compete with second-year pro Aidan O’Connell for the starting job. Both Minshew and O’Connell struggled in Getsy’s unimaginative passing attack.

Ahhh, Gardner Minshew. At the very end of the first half, with the Raiders trailing 17-10, Mr Minshew was about to be sacked for a big loss on third down, but instead threw the ball away. That stopped the clock, and the Raiders had to punt. If he had simply taken the sack, the Raiders could have run out the clock and not had to punt, not given the Bengals a chance for a significant punt return, and a chance at another score. He simply had no awareness of the situation.

The dismissals of Getsy, Cregg and Scangarello are a desperate attempt to salvage a 2024 season that’s already been lost as far as posteason hopes. With the obvious offseason priority of drafting a franchise QB, Telesco and owner Mark Davis must determine who is the best head coach and play caller to groom a young quarterbacking talent like Shedeur Sanders or Cam Ward.

Or Quinn Ewers!

At 2-7, the Raiders have a legitimate shot at the first draft choice, but there are a few other teams bad enough to qualify for that.