Pornography isn't harmless entertainment, and its consequences extend far beyond the person viewing it. If we are serious about raising the next generation of gentlemen, this is a subject we can no longer avoid.

At Ground Zero, after the last living person was pulled out, the search dogs stopped eating. So the police did something nobody had written down in any manual. They climbed into the rubble, lay down, and pretended to be alive. More than 300 dogs worked the World Trade Center site. They came from every corner of the country, on trucks and in cargo holds, with handlers who had been trained to do one thing. Find people who are still breathing under the ground. That is what a search and rescue dog is built for. Not bodies. Life. They are trained on live human scent. When they find it, they bark, they dig, they light up, and the handler rewards them, and the whole thing means something. The last living person recovered from Ground Zero was a woman named Genelle Guzman-McMillan. She had been buried for 27 hours. A dog found her. She was the last. After that, the dogs kept going out on twelve-hour shifts, across sixteen acres of smoldering steel, at temperatures that burned their paws, and they found nobody. Nobody. Day after day. The handlers noticed it first. The dogs were changing. Their tails were down. They were not eating. They would come off the pile and lie flat and not look at anyone. A veterinarian named Cindy Otto, who spent ten days there working night shifts to care for the animals, put it plainly. The dogs had been sent to find life, and every day they were finding the opposite. It was breaking them. An NYPD officer named Famiglietti described what happened next. They pulled everybody off the rubble. Then they asked for volunteers. The volunteers, police officers, went out into the debris and hid themselves. Under beams. In voids. Curled up in pockets of concrete. They were told to lie down like they were hurt. Then the handlers sent the dogs in. Picture that. A grown man with a badge, a man who had spent the last week pulling friends out of that same pile, lying down in it on purpose. Face down. Holding still. Waiting for a dog. And the dog comes over the top of the wreckage, and catches the scent, and barks, and digs, and finds a person who is warm and moving and alive. And the handler says good girl, good boy, and the whole team celebrates. They called them mock finds. They did it for the dogs. They did it so the dogs would remember what they were for. One of those dogs was a two-year-old golden retriever named Bretagne. She came from Texas with her handler, Denise Corliss. It was her first deployment. They worked ten days at Ground Zero. They found no survivors. But firefighters would come off the pile, stone-faced, not speaking, and see the dog, and something would break open in them. They would kneel down. They would put their face in her fur. One day a man walked up to Bretagne and started petting her. He told Corliss his best friend loved golden retrievers. Corliss asked where his friend was. The man pointed at the pile. "He's in there somewhere." He kept petting the dog. Bretagne went on to work Hurricane Katrina and Rita. She retired at 10. She was the last known surviving search dog of 9/11. On June 6, 2016, at age 16, she was carried into a veterinary office in Texas to be put to sleep. Outside, a dozen firefighters from her fire department stood in a line in their dress uniforms, in the heat, and saluted as she went past. They draped her in an American flag on the way out. Three hundred dogs went into that pile looking for the living. They found one. And when they could not find any more, the men they worked beside laid down in the rubble and let themselves be found, so the dogs would not lose heart. That is the whole story of Ground Zero, really. Nobody could save the dead. So they saved each other. 🇺🇸

In 1977, TSR somehow convinced L. Sprague de Camp to help them sell Roman checkers. And I mean that in the best possible way. 😂 COHORTS: The Game of Roman Checkers was TSR’s take on Ludus Latrunculorum, an ancient Roman strategy game reconstructed from literary references and archaeological evidence. No dice. No cards. No wandering monsters. Just two players, a 12×12 board, a pile of pieces, and the cold satisfaction of surrounding your opponent’s men and removing them from play. The really wild part? This edition was prepared by L. Sprague de Camp — legendary fantasy and science-fiction author, Conan scholar, and one of the giants standing right there in the literary background of early D&D. And COHORTS wasn’t just some random side project. It was the third game in TSR’s “Famous Authors Series.” That series included names like: Fritz Leiber. Gardner F. Fox. L. Sprague de Camp. Apparently TSR looked around in 1977 and said: “We know some of the greatest fantasy writers alive. Let’s make board games with them.” 😂 The rules themselves were based on a 19th-century reconstruction of the ancient game by Edward Falkener, because the actual Roman rules have never survived in complete form. So this is basically: A modern reconstruction… of a Victorian reconstruction… of an ancient Roman strategy game… published by TSR… with rules prepared by L. Sprague de Camp. That is so gloriously early-TSR I can barely stand it. TSR 5002 — COHORTS Anybody ever actually play this one?

The problem was never that the hobby changed. It was that the people driving those changes decided coexistence was not enough. They treated the game they inherited as something to correct, pushed until many longtime players checked out, and now their retreat is being dressed up as a return to its roots.

It appears we are breaking into four parties. MAGA, weak Republicans, fossil Democrats, and raving Commies. Elections should be fun, governing, impossible.