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Someone is watching all of the outsiders

Someone is watching all of the outsiders

Last updated on: December 30, 2025 at 5:45 pm by Fred Clark

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Someone is watching all of the outsiders 2025-12-30T17:45:01-05:00 Fred Clark

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• Wayne Davis is an assistant manager at a convenience store in Kenner, Louisiana. And Wayne Davis is a hero: “‘Go somewhere else’: Manager locks Border Patrol out of Kenner store.”

That story from the local TV news doesn’t tell us the name of the convenience store or if it is a part of some larger national or regional chain. But it’s local news — so viewers will know the place. And they will, like the report itself, celebrate the place and celebrate Wayne Davis’s goodness and appropriate action on behalf of his customers, his neighbors, and his community.

That he took this action with a measure of style and panache only enhances that cause for celebration:

He said he was helping a customer when he saw two unmarked SUVs speed into the parking lot and stop in front of the store. Agents came out wearing Border Patrol vests. …

Davis locked the door from behind the counter as the agents approached. “They’re trying to open it, open it, open it. And they’re looking at me like, ‘what’s going on?’” he said.

Then, he began filming on his cell phone. In the video, he can be seen raising his middle finger at the agents then approaching the door. “Go somewhere else,” he can be heard saying through the door.

One of the people outside of the door turned away as the Davis approached with his phone up. It appeared to be Gregory Bovino, commander of Border Patrol, who has been in the New Orleans area as part of the operation.

This is very, very good PR for the store. It is a demonstration that if you are a customer of this business, the business has your back. You’re there to buy milk or chicken or whatever and they’re there to provide that for you. Of course it is good for business to ensure that customers are safe.

And of course it would be bad for business — dissastrously bad — for any business that doesn’t understand that.

It amazes me that there are many large national retail chains and restaurant chains and other businesses that do not understand this absolutely basic truth understood by Wayne Davis and by the reporters from 4WWL and by everyone at home watching the news on that channel.

Keep your customers and your staff safe. That means that unless you’re driving a food truck through an actual international border crossing, Border Patrol thugs have no business getting anywhere near your business and treating all of your customers as presumed drug smugglers. Lock the doors and tell them to “Go somewhere else.”

• The increasing use of “Heritage Americans” as a euphemism for Whites Only citizenship is gross and obvious Dred Scott-level racist garbage. I’m not going to play that game with J.D. Vance and the rest of the white supremacists promoting this nonsense.

And but also they really don’t want to play that game with me.

• It’s somewhat unseemly, I suppose, that I’m more likely to click on a link for “The Most Scathing Book Reviews of 2025” than I would be to one for “The Most Enthusiastic Positive Book Reviews.”

But this is not entirely due to the pleasure of a well-crafted take-down of a deserving target. Those pleasures can be found here, with plenty of deliciously devastating zingers in the excerpts provided. But it’s also true that we can learn a lot from these essays exploring why these failing books failed.

The Most Scathing Book Reviews are most scathing where they are most precise, and all of those precise observations are also precise lessons that can be applied to far more of life than just book-writing and book-publishing.

• “More loons are filling Maine’s lakes with their ghost-like calls.”

A lake in Maine is, in fact, the place where I first heard the call of a loon myself. I’m not sure that “ghost-like” is quite how I’d describe it. It is haunting, and eerie, and strange, but it’s also beautiful and comforting. When the hair stands up on the back of your neck, it’s more from awe than from fear.

Point here being that if you ever have the opportunity to visit a lake in Maine or in Minnesota or anywhere else where there are loons, you shouldn’t miss the chance to hear this for yourself. (Here’s a 12-hour(!) video of loon calls on YouTube, but it’s still a very different experience to hear this in person.)

• Here’s something even more ghastly than what we discussed in yesterday’s post on sermon plagiarism and sermo-tainment joke thieves: “Majority of pastors now using AI to prepare sermons.”

Really? Well, no, not really.

The “study” behind this claim was funded and orchestrated by subsidiary entities of the businesses that make ChatGPT. It’s not a “study” at all — not research, but promotions. That’s why most of the quotes from the “researchers” in that Christian Post item read like marketing copy from corporate salesmen. This was not a study attempting to measure the use of “A.I.” among pastors preparing sermons. It was a promotional campaign launched to convince more pastors to use ChatGPT, specifically, to help them write sermons.

So instead of plagiarizing bits from other pastors one-by-one, you can use a tool that will plagiarize from thousands of pastors in the aggregate and then slop forth a pudding concocted from the sort of things that others have previously said about your topic.

The “A.I.” hype-machine behind this survey should follow up with a “study” promoting the use of ChatGPT for writing your personal testimony. Or for composing the prayer requests for Wednesday night. Or, just think, we could replace the church prayer chain with an automated email chain consisting entirely of ChatGPT-written emails talking amongst themselves.

I’m not sure what’s more appalling: the possibility that some pastor might use ChatGPT to “write” their sermon, or the thought of what the youth pastor might get up to once Open AI’s software gets downloaded to church computers.

The good news, I suppose, is if you read a bit more about this “study” you’ll find that much of this “A.I.” use is so expansively defined that it would seem to include spell-checking the church newsletter. Most pastors are not using LLMs to write their sermons and it’s not likely they’ll start doing so in the short window of time between now and when the A.I. bubble collapses.

• Our generationally diverse crew takes turns playing DJ when we unload the trucks at the Big Box. Us old guys try to share old music we think the kids should know and he kids try to share new music that we should know and we all get to hear new-to-us stuff that’s worth hearing, which is pretty cool.

This song isn’t on my work playlist because haunting, melancholy ballads about ineffable longing aren’t really what you’re looking for when you’re trying to unload 1,000 pieces an hour, but I was talking with some of the younger crew members the other night about “slow songs” we like and this one came up. They didn’t know it — it’s an oldie that hasn’t yet gotten a revival on TikTok or some hit soundtrack. So since they hadn’t heard it, I thought maybe there’d be some readers here who haven’t heard it before either and thus the title of this post comes from Jump Little Children’s “Cathedrals.”

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