My Son Will Thank me When he Realizes Why He’s not a Whiner

Sometimes when you get an answer that seems crazy, it’s because you asked the wrong question.

We are continuing to undo the damage we did by letting our son use a bottle during his first week of life. We are getting breastfeeding coaching, and things are improving. But today we learned something disturbing: breastfeeding experts don’t like pacifiers. We were advised to stop giving them to our son.

This is more than an inconvenience. It’s a direct threat to our sanity.

When we were at the hospital after delivery, the nurses let us use pacifiers, and it was very helpful, because it temporarily shut down one of the most horrible noises known to humanity. Since then, we have relied on our little rubber friends with great enthusiasm. I have probably shoved pacifiers in my son’s mouth at least 25 times a day. That’s just me, not the wife.

I should get more of them and shove them in my ears.

Sometimes he will be quiet for hours. Other times, a pacifier will only buy maybe 20 seconds of relief. My son is like a slot machine. You put the pacifier in, and you see what you get. Even if the silence is short, it’s worth the effort, because crying babies are worse than leaf blowers.

My wife claims the noise doesn’t bother her, but when my son is loud and close to me, I literally feel like my brain is shaking inside my skull, like a crystal goblet about to shatter from an opera singer’s high note. It even makes my eyeballs hurt. And he can scream loud enough to damage hearing permanently. It makes me wonder why babies don’t all go deaf their first year.

I don’t think my wife is totally honest with herself about the crying, because every so often, she admits she has had it. So if it doesn’t bother her, why is she tired of it?

It’s unfashionable to admit your baby is annoying, just like it’s unfashionable to say you wear nitrile gloves when changing his diapers. You’re supposed to enjoy your baby’s howls, and you’re supposed to think their poop is just like peanut butter.

I don’t know why we persist in lying to ourselves about these things, but we do. It’s like the lies people tell about childbirth being beautiful. If childbirth is beautiful, watching a surgeon do a liver transplant on a conscious patient must be gorgeous.

No one actually thinks childbirth is beautiful. It’s disgusting, degrading beyond description, dirty, and unbelievably painful. If we could somehow make terrorists give birth on command, we would have used it instead of waterboarding.

Actually, we wouldn’t, because childbirth kills people and waterboarding doesn’t.

Our method of childbirth is a curse. It’s not supposed to be beautiful. It’s an extreme form of punishment. See Genesis 3. It’s okay to be honest about it. God didn’t tell Eve that because she had listened to Satan, he was going to give her something beautiful. He gave her a small opening and babies with enormous heads, unlike any creatures in the animal kingdom. He gave her monthly torments that modern women go through 13 times a year for over 40 years. It’s not beautiful. Stop conning yourself.

If childbirth is so beautiful, why is it that women pay other women to have their babies, but no woman has ever paid to have another woman’s baby?

So anyway, I am now faced with a future without pacifiers, and it is illegal to put a baby in a soundproof bag. Things look bleak. He is very peaceful when he’s full of milk directly from the source, but it may be a few days before he is getting it that way all the time.

It’s worse for my wife, because she still feels a compulsion to pick our son up when he squawls. When she’s tired enough, she lets him wail, but she gets mad when she sees me in a comfy chair and my son a few feet away on the floor hollering bloody murder. When she’s alone with him, she carries or holds him in a chair for hours.

I have been getting into arguments about the crying issue. I keep saying babies get spoiled when you pick them up as soon as they start crying, and my opponents tell me I’m heartless and that my son will not love me when he grows up. Okay, only one person actually said that.

I have been Googling about crying babies, and to my dismay, I keep seeing “experts” saying you can’t spoil a baby by holding it too much. Today, I realized I was seeing this wrongheaded tripe because I was asking the wrong question. The correct question is, “Will it harm a baby to let it cry?”

The same self-anointed gurus generally admit that letting a baby cry won’t hurt it. They probably hate admitting this, but I can see why they tell the truth. They depend on having people ask them for advice, and if they kept telling people there was no way to get relief from months of constant screeching, no one would look at their websites or buy their books, and they might occasionally be beaten by haggard parents with blisters on their eardrums.

You can definitely spoil a very young baby. I know this because we spoiled our newborn son in about a day by teaching him that artificial nipples were better than real ones. If a newborn can learn one thing, he can learn others. That’s just common sense.

“If scream, then hold,” is not quantum mechanics. Most lizards could learn it.

Even if you could not spoil a small baby, however, it would still be okay to put them down and let them howl sometimes, because it does them no harm, and it may prevent parents from jumping out of windows.

Let’s pretend you can’t teach a baby to cry constantly by picking it up too quickly. Even if that were true, it wouldn’t mean jumping up and grabbing crying babies in milliseconds was a good idea. They don’t actually need to be grabbed as soon as they start crying, and parents are human beings with limits. Parents have to have a certain amount of care. We have to eat, sleep, and rest. You can’t do any of those things if you’re carrying a baby 18 hours a day.

A baby needs parents who aren’t on the verge of collapsing, but it doesn’t need to be protected from an occasional solo screaming session in a bassinet behind a closed door.

Here’s another important thing to remember: babies cry for bad reasons.

Helicopter parents think that if a baby is crying, something must be wrong, and it needs to be addressed. That’s a fantasy. Babies cry when things are going perfectly. The diaper is dry, the belly is full, there has been plenty of sleep, the baby has been held and loved, the temperature is fine, the baby is not sick, but the hole is still open and the noise is still coming out. It doesn’t mean anything. Nothing needs to be fixed, and if you shut the baby up anyway, you’ll probably have to do something detrimental in order to make it happen. You’ll have to overfeed him, cater to him too much, go without sleep, or do something else which is equally bad.

If you know the baby is fine, shut the door and go sit down for a while. This has worked ever since humanity has existed, and it will work now.

Right now, the heir to the throne is on a play mat about 6 feet away from me, yammering away like I shot his dog. There are no hunger signs. His diaper is very recent. His clothes are clean. Mom has probably held him for 10 of the last 18 hours. He has been breastfed for much of that time. Best guess: he is trying to poop.

I have read that some people solve the pooping-skills problem by shoving stuff up their kids’ rear ends. Supposedly this causes them to release and get relief.

Web sources say this is just a pacifier for the butt. It teaches babies to hold their poo until someone violates their no-fly zone(so to speak) with a hard object, and that’s a very bad habit.

I’m not doing it. I want to be able to look my son in the eye when he’s grown.

Mom just chickened out and held him for a few minutes, and of course, he shut up, although nothing else had changed. He got what he wanted. She’s getting better, though. She let him cry quite a while.

He is really cute, and we are crazy about him. I understand why it’s so hard for her to let him yell.

I asked her to add up all the hours she had spent holding him today, and she said, “Practically the whole day.” Not sustainable. Even if I had held him half the time, it would be too much for both of us, and I’m his dad, so I can’t give him the kind of time she can. I have other things to do.

We will win this battle eventually, if only because my wife will be physically unable to continue on two hours of sleep per night. I am not worried. We will get him off the pacifier and the bottle. He will not cry for hours on end, and we will not carry him constantly like an insulin pump.

He will become more independent, and we will be able to do things like mopping the floors and mowing the yard.

Looks like someone is hungry. I’m out.

The System Works

Interesting experience today.

As noted in an earlier post, my wife and I have had trouble getting our son to breastfeed. When he was born, my wife was not thinking clearly. She was exhausted and full of overprotection hormones, and I let her start the boy on formula. The nurses and I discouraged it, but we gave in too easily, and one nurse said formula was fine, which it definitely is not.

My son decided plastic nipples were the only real nipples. They are easier for babies to suck, and the bottle people put big holes in them so they pass milk and formula much faster than real breasts. Babies get spoiled. Moms get spoiled because they finish in 10 minutes instead of 45 to 60. Spoiled babies raise hell until they get what they want, and moms give in because they are spoiled and also worn down. Dads don’t put their feet down because we live in a castrated society in which Satan has shamed fathers into failing to look after their families correctly.

A reader asked if my area had a La Leche chapter or whatever it’s called. It does not. It does have a breastfeeding office at the Health Department. It’s mainly for poor women on a program called WICS, but they’re not jerks about it. They gave us time. A few weeks back, we got some coaching from a lady named Debbie, and today we showed up without an appointment, and she saw us again.

As luck would have it, our soon-to-be-ex-pediatrician’s office is across the street from the building where Debbie works. We had to see the doctor today for a routine visit. We were asked about our concerns, and we brought up the breastfeeding issue. We couldn’t get the baby to latch properly. There was pain and bleeding. Feedings weren’t successful.

Our doctor, an old Nigerian guy, dismissed our concerns.

This doctor gives people free formula. We should have known this was a red flag. Formula is nearly poison. Nobody should push it on women who may be able to breastfeed. Formula causes diabetes, obesity, allergies, and a bunch of other problems.

We suspect formula companies are giving him free merchandise in order to hook low-income and low-information mothers. Somebody has to be paying for it, and I doubt our third-rate United Healthcare insurance is the source.

He said breast milk from a bottle was just as good as breast milk from a person. Well, I’m no doctor, but I can read. What I have read is that the breastfeeding process itself carries very important benefits for mothers and babies. It helps women’s uteruses shrink. It delays restoration of fertility. It relaxes babies. Today we were told it makes breast cancer less likely. These are just some of the benefits we have been told about.

Isn’t breast cancer a serious problem? Isn’t it worth trying to prevent?

I don’t think the many professionals who say breastfeeding is beneficial are imagining things or lying, but I do think there are doctors who lie to help companies promote medical products. Actually, I know it.

When we left, I told me wife she should call the health people and see if we could arrange an appointment with Debbie. We got an endless hold, so we decided to drive over and walk in. Before long, somebody found Debbie, and we were in her office getting priceless advice.

It turned out my wife was leaning forward, and she wasn’t waiting for the baby to open his mouth wide enough to get everything into it. Debbie told us something amazing. A baby can open its mouth 140°. So basically about like a blacksnake or a great white shark. Ladies, it does not matter how wide your equipment is. A baby can handle it. You could probably put your fist in there.

Debbie got the process started, and before we knew it, my son was totally absorbed. In maybe half an hour, he pumped himself full to bursting, and then he showed his approval by losing consciousness. Perfect.

He was quiet all the way home. He has been quiet almost all evening. He has fed a second time. Our problems are solved.

Now we can put the breast pump away. We can put away all but a couple of bottles, which we will use on rare occasions when normal breastfeeding isn’t practical. My wife isn’t in pain any more. I’m going to throw out what’s left of the formula.

Formula is hard to digest, and a bottle baby can’t regulate its intake even if it receives milk, so now we know our boy’s digestion will be optimized. He won’t have to digest palm oil and cow proteins, and his innards won’t be hammered by inappropriately large feedings that are hard to process.

Maybe he won’t scream before he poops now. I hope so.

My wife is over the moon, and so am I. We have had to do a huge amount of work in order to keep the bottles coming, and the irregular nature of bottle feedings ruined our schedule. It will be hard enough when our son is feeding normally. We don’t need bottle problems making things worse.

She told me she had felt despair. She had resigned herself to months of misery. She thought it was normal. Now she realizes things are going to be much easier, and her relief is immeasurable.

She is very happy I started getting patriarchal and controlling instead of sinking into the modern American wuss-dad mold. She sees that it saved us. I think it has increased her confidence in me. It will make things more harmonious. Leaders who don’t lead cause chaos and confusion.

I was afraid I was being too dominant, but I wasn’t being dominant enough. I’ll bet 90% of American husbands are not dominant enough.

I should have done better from the start. I will do better from now on. I will spend more time with God, increasing my submission to him. That will give me authority to rule my family, and it will help them submit to him and me.

The pediatrician has a couple more things to do for us, so we will wait a while to hand him the mitten, as P.G. Wodehouse put it. We will quit talking to him about feeding.

I am wondering if we can go back to our original pediatrician. He’s not covered by our insurance, but I am willing to pay. The issue is whether our insurer will let him refer us to in-network specialists when needed. If so, we will go back to him in a heartbeat.

We should have taken breastfeeding classes before our son was born, but as a man, I could not have guessed that sucking a nipple was complicated. In retrospect, I think delivery classes would have been worthless compared to breastfeeding classes. During the delivery, I never had a challenging decision. It was all simple and intuitive. Easy to figure out on the fly.

If you’re planning to have a baby, learn from our mistakes. Don’t even consider using formula unless you literally have no choice. Don’t use bottles except on rare occasions. Don’t give up on yourself or your baby. Find the right people, and they will get you hooked up. It can be done. Don’t listen to anyone who says breastfeeding is merely a nice option for affluent women and disgraceful women who choose to betray the memory of Susan B. Anthony by raising their own children. It’s the proper and normal way to feed children, and if it were not, none of us would be here.

Fake Milk is Feminist Poison

My wife and I have three big problems as new parents.

1. We are new parents.

2. We don’t have any relatives to tell us what to do with babies.

3. The healthcare industry is full of flakes who provide bad information about baby care.

Things are working out nearly perfectly, except when it comes to one major issue: breastfeeding. We were able to figure everything else out.

When we were at the hospital, my wife flipped out because she thought our son was starving. She was loaded up with hormones that made her a little delusional and pretty assertive, and she felt way too protective. It was hard to tell her anything, even though she knew nearly nothing about babies and she was surrounded by women who cared for them for a living.

She insisted on starting the boy on formula, and this was a gigantic mistake which is causing us problems weeks later. Major problems. It is a threat to our son’s future health and even his life expectancy.

The hospital ladies pushed my wife to wait for nature to take its course and forget about bottles, but they didn’t push very hard. One of them said something stupid. Concerning formula, she said something like, “It’s perfectly all right.”

It’s not perfectly all right. Formula is garbage, and it’s very harmful to babies. I’m sure there are lots of feminists out there who would disagree, because feminists are idiots, and formula makes it easy for them to hand their nearly-estranged babies off to illegals and have Enfamil pumped into them so they can go to work and end up with children as crazy as they are, but formula is to breast milk as Skittles and Hot Pockets are to real food.

By the way, I’m not just trying to seem based when I link fake milk to feminism. Look it up. Feminists really have been behind the baby-malnutrition revolution. There are articles on the web intended to de-shame formula feeding. Sensible people have mounted a backlash against the feminist nutwads, and now there is a defensive backlash to the backlash.

I wish I had known feminism and formula were linked. Things would have gone down differently. Feminism came from Satan, and Satan is not the guy to go to for parenting advice. Eve was the first feminist and the source of the curse on women. Every time a woman screams during delivery, she can thank the mother of feminism.

Formula is for two kinds of mothers: those who can’t provide breast milk by any means and those who don’t care about their kids. I keep reading that you shouldn’t feel like a bad mom if you use formula. Yes, you should, because you are a bad mom. Unless you had no choice. I’m writing this as a warning, because some day, some dad or mom who is getting terrible advice from post-feminist nurses may Google for help, and that person will need a sane voice to cut through the toxic nonsense.

The website of a well-known hospital says this: “Deciding to feed your baby breast milk or formula is a personal matter.” No, it is not a personal matter, unless we should repeal laws protecting children from neglect.

It involves two people. It may involve a selfish, immature woman who is willing to harm her baby’s health. The other party is defenseless. Mothers should be told that formula is a last resort for the utterly desperate.

I trusted the hospital ladies, and I didn’t want to be an XY ogre about the whole thing, so I let them give us formula. If I could turn back time, I would put on a patriarchal show for them and make them leave the room while I set my wife straight.

She was exhausted. She was in pain. She was in no position to make important decisions. I should have stepped up to the plate, played bad cop dad, and looked after her and my son. If they try to give our next child palm oil and corn syrup, they will not be able to do it unless they can get the police to remove me from the building.

They were very nice. They meant well. But they were completely incompetent to give anyone advice about feeding babies.

I have been researching and making notes, and I have learned that lack of breast milk is extremely bad for babies. Not “less than optimal.” Extremely bad.

Check out this excerpt from my notes:

1. Breastfeeding protects your baby against common childhood illnesses such as ear infections and lower respiratory tract infections. Over the long term, breastfeeding lowers the risk of obesity, diabetes, asthma and much more. Breastfed babies have fewer allergies. Studies also link breastfeeding with higher IQ scores.

2. Breastfeeding helps with postpartum weight loss, delays fertility, increases a mother’s self-confidence and promotes bonding.

3. Breast milk is different from formula because it changes to meet the nutritional needs of your child as he grows.

You could stop at “ear infections,” and you wouldn’t need to say anything else to sell me. We tend to think baby ear infections are no big deal, but they are. They’re very painful. They can cause deafness. They tend to recur. They are often treated with surgery. The fact that a problem doesn’t kill a child doesn’t mean it’s not a major problem.

Deafness can make a person much less intelligent. Most people don’t know that. A psychologist who worked with people with learning disabilities told me. Many deaf people can’t read. The deaf have lower IQ’s. I mean retarded lower.

I have a first cousin whose son is asthmatic, and he had to take allergy shots every week when he was a kid. His asthma used to put him in the hospital. Of course, mom kept right on smoking in the house. He’s also obese. I don’t know if she gave him formula, but knowing what a selfish person she is and how backward our Appalachian culture is, I’ll bet she did.

If we don’t cut out formula, and our son grows up to be a fat diabetic with asthma, severe allergies, a hearing aid and an IQ of 90, we won’t know for sure that we caused the problems. On the other hand, we will know we might have.

Fake milk is harder to digest. It is harder to tell when a bottle-fed baby has had enough. Babies are more likely to vomit formula. Parents like to say “spit up,” like it’s not as bad, but the correct word is “vomit.” If your food made you vomit several times a week, would you keep eating it?

Formula doesn’t contain anything that gives a baby immunity. Breast milk does. How is this stuff even legal? Did immunity suddenly become unimportant just because Germaine Greer decided women should be ambitious sluts?

How many babies have died because their immune systems were stunted by formula?

“We’re doing fine because we use breast milk in bottles.” Sorry, people. You’re not doing fine. You’re giving substandard care. It’s not just the formula that matters. It’s the breast.

Breastfeeding makes a woman’s uterus contract so her body returns to normal. Why didn’t the nurses tell us that? How many women have had problems because they didn’t know this? It’s not a minor concern. It’s important.

Breastfeeding stimulates lactation. Skin-to-skin contact fights postpartum depression. It regulates the baby’s temperature. It makes babies feel safe and loved.

Yesterday my buddy Mike, who raised two sons, told me something very wise: he said my wife and I will be inconvenienced from now on.

You may think you can give your baby a bottle most of the time and then cram a quick breastfeeding session in when it’s convenient, but it doesn’t work like that. Breastfeeding is supposed to happen around the clock. It’s supposed to be very inconvenient. If what you’re doing is convenient, you’re doing it all wrong. You’re supposed to accept the fact that a feeding session can take 45 minutes. You’re supposed to accept getting up in the night, over and over. You had a baby. You obligated yourself. Your convenience is not a factor to be considered.

I’m going to quit helping feed the baby so much. It’s the cute modern thing to do, but it’s bad for everyone concerned. I don’t think it’s bad for me to give him a bottle of breast milk once a day, but he needs the real thing over and over every day of his life. Consistently. Feeding sessions with me should be cameos.

I don’t care about changing diapers or doing laundry. No one ever got asthma because his dad did laundry. Giving milk to babies is a woman’s job. Period.

FYI, bottles are designed badly. I know it’s 2025, and human beings know absolutely everything now. Sure. But baby bottles let milk flow too fast. They spoil babies and also tired mothers who don’t want to spend 6 or more hours a day nursing. I think they’re designed to addict, not to nourish. The people who make them know perfectly well that they flow too fast.

I can get 120 milliliters of liquid into my son in about 10 minutes. That is not an acceptable rate. When he goes to his mother, he may take 5 times that long to fill up. Which will he and his mother naturally prefer? Obviously, the bottle.

We are using the slowest-flowing fake nipples there are, and they are still way too fast. My wife wanted to move to faster ones, but I told her we needed to keep him on the slow ones until he got fed up with them.

If you’re a future Googler, let me spell it out for you. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you formula and relying on bottles are okay. The enablers won’t be around to pick up the pieces in 40 years when your daughter is whale-fat, single, and childless, rides around the grocery store in an electric cart, and has to have bariatric surgery. They won’t appear by magic and heal your baby when he is screaming from ear pain at 3 a.m.

If you can’t provide your own breast milk, buy it. Find a relative who is lactating. Do what you have to do. Don’t go down without a fight.

My son has gas like a water buffalo. He has prolonged periods of discomfort because of it. I’m not sure his immunity is up to snuff. He is starting to look fat. I am getting him off palm oil and corn syrup. That’s that.

The recovery process is a little bumpy, but I took charge and explained things to my wife, and now she is on board. She feels terrible guilt about using formula. That’s appropriate. It’s not a problem to be fixed. I feel guilt about letting it happen. I should feel guilt. It’s the correct way to feel. I let my son down.

It’s going to work. The key is not to listen to my wife when the hormones tell her our son is starving. We put him on a scale occasionally. We can see that he has energy. We know the conversion will be successful.

I told her something. I said her son was going to put her to the test for the rest of his time with her. There would be one test of wills after another. I said he had to know from the start that his parents would stand together and not let him run the family. Once he knows that, he will be at peace. He will quit pushing and accept his place. As long as he sees chinks in the armor, he will instinctively try to pry them open and pit us against each other, and that will bring chaos and misery.

He may cry because he misses the bottle. To that, I say what I say when he cries during diaper changes: “No one cares.” I say that to him all the time. “No one cares, buddy. Holler all you want.” If he had his way, I’d give in and let him lie in poop.

When he is all grown up, he will be very glad we didn’t turn him into Jaden Smith. He will never resent us for standing firm when he had stupid ideas to sell us.

I am to submit to God. My wife is to submit to God and me. My son is to submit to God, me, and my wife. That’s the system. If I have to be the bad guy sometimes, so be it. I have seen the monsters enlightened feminist dads raise.

POTUS, not POU

What is more amazing? Seeing an American president and vice president stand up to a parasitic foreigner in the Oval Office, telling it like it is, or seeing half of America condemn them for doing the very thing they are supposed to do?

Ukraine–more accurately, Ukraine’s current government–is not important to American interests, yet it has sucked up something like $350 billion in various forms of aid, depending on whom you believe. Ukraine wants more. Russia, on the other hand, is a necessary partner for the US because of China’s exploding influence. We have done nearly everything we could to anger and disrespect Russia (not just Putin), and we have driven Russia into China’s eager arms.

I keep saying I have never seen anyone explain why we need to put ourselves out for Ukraine. This is still true. I check occasionally, and I have never seen Ukraine supporters provide a good rationale.

I will discuss some arguments I have seen.

1. Helping Ukraine weakens Russia’s war machine.

First of all, why do we need to weaken Russia’s war machine, and why do we call it a war machine? We don’t call the UK’s military a war machine.

Russia has no plans to retake Europe. It has disputes over little bits of territory, but that’s about it. It would have settled for small pieces of Ukraine had it been able to get concessions from Zelenskyy, and I’m sure Putin knows he will never get the entire country, which brings me to my second point.

Russia’s military doesn’t really need to be weakened. We have seen how it performs, and it’s a big relief. Barring the use of nuclear weapons, Russia is a feeble opponent. And if we had made Russia an ally, we would want it to be strong, not weak.

2. A huge percentage of the aid for Ukraine stayed in the US because it went to build arms here.

This one is really stupid. The arms left the country, so wealth left the country. Experts say the arms drain has left us vulnerable. It will take years to replace the stuff we’ve sent, and in the meantime, China is trying to find the best time to go after Taiwan.

No matter how you slice it, we have spent a ton of money that could have been saved or spent on our own citizens, who are the ones who have to work to pay our debt.

3. We need Ukraine’s minerals and helium and so on.

We can buy things from Ukraine regardless of who rules it. If Putin takes over, we ought to be able to outbid the Chinese. He’s not going to refuse to sell to us. Zelenskyy is refusing to give us access without ridiculous concessions that will further destabilize the region and alienate Russia, so it’s not like things are going great under his rule.

It seems to me that cutting Ukraine off would be very helpful in more than one way.

It would teach the warlike Europeans they need to learn how to get along, pay their own bills, and solve their own conflicts. It would save us money. It could save American lives.

We had no business entering World War I. A big inbred family ran Europe, and they had an internal squabble. They fought for childish reasons, and we shouldn’t have enabled them. We had to fight World War II, but that doesn’t mean we need to send men to bleed and die, or that we have to empty our treasury, every time far-off foreigners take the saber-rattling too far.

Germany is rich. Norway is rich. Switzerland is rich. Other European countries are doing well. The Cold War threat is long gone. Still, we send men and money to defend these brat countries which are perfectly capable of looking after themselves. We are increasing our debt in order to balance their budgets. That’s moronic and unfair. Think of all the hours you work every year. How many hours do you work for Germany? France? Italy? How many hours do you think their citizens work for you? Virtually none, in case you’re wondering. The USA receives nearly no aid, and this is considered fair.

We used to pay Europeans to side with us against Russia and China. We had to. Now the USSR and its dream of global domination are dead, and while China is a problem, it’s not planning on ruling the world. Why are we paying these people? They insult and libel America constantly for failing to solve the problems they create, and they don’t even like Americans on a personal level. They’re just not into us, so we need to stop dating. Maybe they’ll appreciate us after we turn off the breast pump.

Europe isn’t Africa. It’s not India. It’s not the pre-Columbian Americas. Europe created civilization, science, and engineering. It’s not populated by people whose grandparents were illiterate savages with a 50% infant mortality rate. It’s reasonable to expect them to look after themselves.

If Russia took Ukraine today, nothing bad would happen to America. In fact, we would be a lot better off. So what is Zelenskyy thinking, going to our White House dressed for a night at Hooters, failing to show any courtesy or gratitude, and lecturing our elected leaders for not doing enough for him?

He’s whining about being excluded from peace talks. Well, he has a point. Ukraine shouldn’t have excluded itself. That’s what happened. Ukraine was so lacking in good faith, Trump had to talk to the Russians ex parte. If you want to sit at the adults’ table, sit up straight and quit throwing food and chewing with your mouth open.

It would be great if the country that excluded Ukraine, which is Ukraine, had behaved better. I think we can all agree on that.

I’ll tell a story about my sister the addict.

After years of abusing my parents, and after secretly getting my dad to fund several deliberately-aborted rehab stints she could easily afford, and after ruining the house he bought her and forcing him to pay the property taxes, and after calling the police to his house and amusing them by claiming she was scared of a man in his mid-80’s, one day she barged into his living room and gave him an ultimatum.

I was there at the time. I was not visible to her, but I heard everything. I stayed hidden because it gave me an edge.

I heard the door open and slam shut. A woman’s heels banged across the hardwood floor. An angry voice yelled, “I’m going to give you ONE more chance!”

Then I heard two sets of footsteps moving in the opposite direction, and I heard her objecting to whatever he was doing. I heard the door open and shut, and then there was quiet. Precious, priceless quiet.

He had taken her by the arm and deposited her on the porch.

At the time, she had a splint on her arm. She had passed out in her kitchen and fallen, landing on a glass that broke in the process. The arm clearly was not broken, although she claimed otherwise, because it bore a simple splint held on with an elastic bandage.

Right away, I got a Bluetooth call from her filthy BMW 335i. She was going to call the Florida Bar and have his license taken. She was sending the police to have him arrested. He had re-broken her arm. She was in terrible pain. She wasn’t going to stand for it.

She had a habit of keeping a McDonald’s Coke in her hand as much of the time as possible. This is what cost her most of her teeth. She used to buy Cokes at the drive-through. She said other Cokes weren’t as good.

While she was yammering, I heard her order a Coke and pay for it. Through the window of her car and a McDonald’s window. After driving herself there.

Some broken arm.

I let her rant so I could gather information, and then she ended the call.

I told my dad she had threatened to send the police, and he said, “They’ll never take me alive.” We had a good chuckle.

My dad disinherited my sister in 2004 and again not long before he died, and she knew he had done it. She could have been reinstated. She just had to smooth things over and show him due respect. She never did it, so I got absolutely everything.

I stayed out of it. My mother threatened to disinherit her in 1997, and I talked her out of it. Biggest mistake of my life. I like money, but it wasn’t the issue. The problem was that the shared inheritance tied my sister to me after my mother’s death and made me miserable. When my dad surprised me by cutting my sister off, I told God I had learned my lesson, and I kept my mouth shut. Not my problem. Not my responsibility.

It has been fantastic, being free of her. I can’t describe the relief and gratitude I feel every day.

Zelenskyy is like my sister. He has no idea how negotiation works, while Donald Trump is the single most famous negotiator in the history of the world. Trump keeps telling him he has no cards, but Zelenskyy keeps treating him as though we need Ukraine.

I would guess he is in contact with a lot of deluded Democrats, and he probably watches left-leaning news shows. He may be under the grossly mistaken impression that Americans are going to rise up in arms if Trump doesn’t do as he’s told. Most of us won’t do it, and if we did, Trump wouldn’t care.

We need to cut Zelenskyy off so he can’t continue to drain us, encourage other countries to abuse us, and expose us to the risk of a needless third world war.

It is remarkable that there are Americans who don’t understand that our president is not supposed to represent the interests of foreigners against us. Imagine running a company that way. What if Ford, or for that matter, Burger King, kept sending employees to Chrysler, demanding subsidies?

Here’s something else I don’t get: Ukrainian “refugees” in other countries, including ours, whining on TV about how Trump is a jerk. If you care about Ukraine, why did you run away? Why aren’t you holding a rifle or sitting in a tank? Ukraine can’t find enough new soldiers. Why are you working at a Buffalo Wild Wings in Atlanta?

I include the women. You can’t be in the infantry? Boo hoo. You can work at a military hospital. You can pump gas into planes and vehicles. You can cook. You can clean. Get your entitled butt back over there. If your heart is still in Ukraine, we need to reunite it with your rear end.

The web says “refugees” are leaving Ukraine to avoid danger and poverty. How is that different from draft-dodging? Can someone explain it to me? If you want to send the kids, the aged, and the disabled out, fine, but why should anyone who can work run off and let others face the danger?

And if you’re an immigrant (which means a person who has abandoned another country in favor of America, not an invader who wasn’t happy with his country’s low-trust economy), you should be on TV pushing Trump to do what’s best for the US, not Ukraine.

When I was a kid, I lived in Israel for 4 months. I was a kibbutz volunteer. The volunteer program started because Israelis were busy fighting a war, and they needed people to pick fruit and shovel chicken manure while the Israelis fought. Americans and Europeans flocked to Israel, exposing themself to the perils of war. Why are Ukrainians fleeing their own country when it needs them the most?

Right now, Zelenskyy appears to face two likely alternatives: surrendering on very bad terms after losing hundreds of thousands more lives or accepting a generous, if not totally satisfactory, peace package from a nation that would be within its rights to cut all aid tomorrow. It’s not our fault he doesn’t want to eat his vegetables. We are doing more than enough. Probably too much.

Women Can’t be Husbands

I forgot to write something last night.

I got a condescending, presumptuous, rude email from a Mormon cousin I have met twice in my life, and she asked if she could perform a pagan (Mormon) rite in which my dead father’s soul would somehow be “tied” to Mormons in the afterlife.

The last thing you want from Mormons is to be tied to them in the afterlife, because Mormons who understand Mormon doctrine properly and accept it are not Christians, and they should expect to receive eternal damnation for practicing a non-Christian religion.

My father is with Yeshua in heaven, safe forever. He can’t be tied to children of perdition who are screaming in flames like Joseph Smith. Do all the rituals you want. My dad will never know. But God will know you threatened his children.

The request accompanied links to some folders containing pictures and documents from my dad’s side of the family. At the time, I thought her main motivation for contacting me was to share this material, but now I’m wondering if she had the photos for a long time and decided to use them as a pry bar to open a crack through which Mormonism could enter. The online folders and files I downloaded have recent dates, so maybe I’m too suspicious.

I was extremely blunt in my response to my cousin. I was civil, but I made it clear that to us, Mormonism was as bad as Freemasonry and African demon worship. I told her doing this Satanic proxy rite would be a violation of boundaries. I was civil, but I didn’t leave anything unsaid. I didn’t want to leave her any hope that would stimulate continued proselytizing. I wanted to utterly crush her confidence in her ability to persuade me. I strove to put out the light at the end of the tunnel.

Later, I asked my wife if I had overdone it, and she said my cousin was the problem. She said it was rude of my cousin, whom I don’t know and wouldn’t recognize if she walked into my house right now, to send me an email asking me to involve my family with her fringe religion, which she knows is contemned by actual Christians.

I forgot to write about my wife’s great performance in her proper role.

Her response shows how important it is for a Christian who literally knows God to marry another Christian who literally knows God. Not someone who memorized the Catholic catechism. Not someone who prays old prayers in books written by committees. A person who speaks in tongues, has visions, experiences miracles, and receives revelation and correction directly from God himself.

It is possible, after a confrontation, to gaslight yourself. You may doubt yourself when you were absolutely right. My wife reinforced me and helped me not to regress.

If I had married a typical spoiled American feminist who puts men on trial all day, worships the cult-promoter Oprah, does yoga, believes there are many ways to God, and thinks a bologna sandwich is the product of murder, I would have had to sleep in a separate room last night.

Well. My wife would have had to sleep in a separate room. This is my house, and I’m the man. My wife is the queen and priestess, but I am the king and priest, according to the command of the most high. I wouldn’t let anyone, even my wife, run me out. I have a responsibility to God, my wife, and my son not to allow myself to be bullied by those under my authority.

Thank God I have no mother-in-law butting in. Not saying I’m glad my wife’s mother died young. That’s a tragedy and a great loss, and it made my wife’s life much harder and colder. But there are guys on Reddit asking strangers for permission to speak up when mouthy old women with weak husbands come to visit.

I am not a natural leader or a macho man. I’m not assertive by nature. I don’t like telling other people what to do. I don’t like confrontation. I like being left alone. But I recognize my holy obligation to stand in front and lead this family. God curses men who won’t lead, and those curses hit their families, too.

There aren’t “many ways” to God. There is one way, and this is why Yeshua says he is “the way.” It’s why he says the gate is narrow and the path is tight. It’s why he says the road to damnation is wide.

When I’m forthright with people who are out of line, my wife never says, “You were right, but you could have handled it differently.” She backs me up. She doesn’t discourage me from doing my job.

Now that I think about it, she married me largely because I was direct. I was advised to post dating profiles that didn’t offend anyone, in order to cast a wide net. Instead, I told people exactly what I was, and I said they shouldn’t bother me if they had a problem with it. I shrunk the net. I stood up for the Holy Spirit. First thing you know, I had my wife. And the person who advised me is still single 4 years later.

I was stupid before God corrected me. When I was young, I thought marriage was an equal partnership. I thought men and women should share decision-making power. That’s all BS. Godly women want their husbands to make decisions for them. They don’t want to hold a referendum every time the family decides where to go out for dinner. They want to know where their lane is, and they want their husbands to leave them free to stay in it and get things done. It’s not fair for me to drag my wife into my job while expecting her to do hers as well.

Sometimes we have little disagreements, and sometimes I say something like, “I’m your husband, and this is what’s going to happen.” It doesn’t always go down well when I say it, but later the same day, everything is harmonious. It doesn’t drive us apart. It brings us closer. Several times a week, she tells me what a great husband I am. I don’t know if I would go that far, but if I’m doing well, it makes sense. A great wife should have a great husband. Great wives help God build great husbands.

I remind her to respect the system, and she listens. If I make a mistake, it doesn’t mean she should relieve me of command and take control. We have to believe the system God designed is more important than any single matter. Having a house where God’s authority can’t flow through proper channels is much worse than blowing a minor decision that can be rectified later.

All this would surely sound like abuse to your typical Oprah fan. Those are the ladies who end up giving their favorite baby names to cats. They use sperm donors to have daughters who have themselves skinned to make fake male genitals that don’t work. No one cares what the deranged and deluded think. When you want seamanship advice, you don’t radio the captain of the Titanic.

I dodged plenty of icebergs, and I was an iceberg, myself. By the time God brought me someone wonderful, he had corrected me well enough so I wouldn’t be a disastrous husband.

So yes, Mormonism came from Satan, I don’t care who doesn’t like it when I say so, and I will not let a desire for people’s approval ruin my family’s connection to the God who loves us.

Offending the right people can correct them or, if they can’t be corrected, drive them away permanently. Either way, it’s a win.

Pimp Your Nursery With this Tricked-Out Poo Cart

Tonight I asked my wife if she thought I was too harsh with my Mormon cousin who asked if she could involve my dead father in a sick pagan ritual, and my wife said my cousin was the rude one. She said my cousin had crossed the line, trying to push her weird non-Christian religion on Christians.

That is true. I can’t imagine emailing my cousin out of the blue and asking if I could help her renounce Mormonism and then lay hands on her and get her started praying in tongues. What if I asked her if I could do a Christian ceremony renouncing her parents’ wacky beliefs by proxy in hopes of getting them out of hell? I doubt she would have taken it well.

Mormons are very sensitive. I know that because I incensed one by criticizing their sacred underwear and posting a photo of it. It’s a real thing. He said it was deeply offensive even to mention it, which doesn’t ring true. It sounds like a trick to try to chill speech about anything that makes Mormonism look as bizarre as it actually is.

Mormons are all about deception when it comes to PR. For example, if you look at Wikipedia, you can tell articles about Mormonism have been written by lying Mormons, because they’re packed with lies and try to make Mormonism look completely reputable and reasonable. It is neither. It’s a shady faith started by a guy who was convicted of charging people to locate underground gold veins using a special stone which talked to him or something.

PR is the reason Mormons hate the word “Mormon” and call their cult the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. It’s why they created an “informative” website with a URL containing “churchofjesuschrist.” Like it’s just another Christian church, and nobody who founded it claimed to read scriptures off imaginary gold plates he kept in his hat.

My aunt didn’t wear special underwear. Never mind how I know; it’s an ugly story and a sore spot with me. I don’t see how my uncle could have worn it, because it would have shown when he was dressed for hot weather. Maybe they wore it when they went to the local temple and pretended to believe Mormon myths like the one that says the Garden of Eden was in Missouri.

As for my cousin and her request, any person with good sense and good manners would know not to do what this woman did. Her good intentions don’t make it okay.

It’s good to have a wife who agrees with me on the important things. We help each other not to gaslight ourselves.

My cousin wants to make sure we all end up in Mormon heaven for eternity, which is ironic, since Mormonism was designed by damned spirits to lure people to hell. Joseph Smith. The Mormon false prophets. My cousin’s parents, almost certainly. Well…certainly. That’s the bleak reality.

They were atheists, and they had many chances to change. I, personally, tried to reason with them at least once.

While my aunt and uncle were attached to a Mormon congregation, they didn’t actually believe any of the doctrine. One day, they went to the high panjandrum or whatever and told him they were atheists. He told them they should still stick around for the social life, and that’s what they did.

I’m never going to see them again, and neither is my cousin, even if she follows them to hell. The damned are forgotten. That’s part of the nature of damnation. They don’t get to be with their families.

If I seem cavalier about this, it’s because it’s too much weight for me to carry. As a mere man, I have no power to do anything for the millions or billions of people who are determined to reject Yeshua, and I certainly can’t help those who are already in hell. I don’t obsess on these matters. It’s pointless, and it would make me miserable. I instinctively move on. Not everyone can do that. I’m glad I can.

In other news, our new diaper-changing table is a hit. I got us a one-drawer US General service cart from Harbor Freight. It took forever to put together. Now that it’s in use, it’s a tremendous blessing.

We had a changing pad which was too big for the cart, but when I jammed it in as a stopgap, I found it actually worked better than a pad that fit properly. One end sits higher than the other, and this keeps the noisier end of the baby higher than the less-noisy-but-far-from-silent end. I believe this is good for him, since he is usually full of liquid.

I bought the magnetic paper towel and glove attachments, and they are working fine, although for some reason, the glove attachment is a little too large to fit Harbor Freight glove boxes correctly. Harbor Freight buys from different manufacturers, so I guess the glove people aren’t the people who make the attachment.

I got out of Harbor Freight for about $175, including tax and two boxes of nitrile gloves. An Amazon table and gloves would have run around $155. It would have been too big, and it wouldn’t have been as good.

My wife loves it.

The baby can’t rock it or roll out of it, and the pad is wedged in there, so if I have to leave the room to get something, I just strap him in and go. If something gross gets on the pad, I can yank it out and take it to the shower a couple of feet away.

The footprint is much smaller than that of a dedicated baby table, and the wheels are a big help. When we’re done having babies, the cart will be useful for other things, whereas an Amazon table would have to go to the dump or charity.

If you’re planning to spawn, consider getting one of these things. In return, you can tell me what you know about noise-canceling headphones that can be tuned to baby-voice frequencies.

Couldn’t be much better.

Too Much, Too Late

Yesterday I got a disturbing email from a first cousin I don’t know.

My dad came from an extremely dysfunctional family. His dad was a local politician in Eastern Kentucky. He worked as a county clerk and also as a sheriff. People say he was brilliant and brave an so on, and my dad thought he would have been a very big deal had he been able to go to college. People say a lot of things that aren’t true, however.

He was probably pretty smart, because his wife was not bright at all, yet his children were very intelligent. On the other hand, he was a violent alcoholic who beat his wife. An old story says he beat her bloody on the steps of the county courthouse. He died at 41 because he drank bad moonshine that probably had methanol in it. His kidneys failed, he swelled up with fluid, he went into convulsions, and he died.

Relatives have made excuses. His aunt claimed he died from food poisoning. People closer to him have admitted the truth.

My grandmother was like an empty glass. I probably saw her 10 times in my life. She was civil to my sister and me, but she remained a stranger. She and her two daughters did not make the 4-hour drive to help my mother when we were born. I recall her sending Christmas presents to us one year and one year only. She had very little personality. When we visited her and her husband in their small apartment in Oak Ridge, the only books I saw were supermarket-grade novels.

It appears my cousins called her “mamaw,” which is Appalachian for “granny,” so I guess they had some sort of affectionate bond with her. On the other hand, most of them are Mormons, and I have learned that Mormons cover up ugliness and failure in their families.

My aunt was a nominal Mormon, and she was a horrible mother, but her Mormon kids wrote her an obituary that would have made Florence Nightingale jealous. Maybe my grandmother was no warmer to them than she was to me. I know that when she became old and infirm, she used to curse my aunt and hit her from her wheelchair.

When I was grown, her relationship with my dad barely existed, and what little there was of it was not inspiring. One day she called him and said she needed money, so he sent her $3,000.00. Later someone who was concerned asked her why she needed the help, and she said, “He’s got all that money, and I love spending it.”

However trashy my mother’s family may be, that is beyond the pale. Her mother would have jumped in front of a train before pulling a stunt like that.

After I was an adult, my father and mother and I spent a couple of days with my grandmother, the sisters and their husbands, and a sister’s youngest daughter in my dad’s waterfront condo in Panama City Beach. My grandmother told us a couple of things about my grandfather. She said he was very brave and that it didn’t scare him at all to face a man with a gun. Later she told my mother she had just said whatever would make us happy. As if I cared what a person I didn’t know did 50 years ago.

Apparently she assumed my mother was also okay with lying and treating men like children and with destroying family history. But my grandfather did arrest two armed men after one of them had broken his leg with a lucky shot, and he then drove them to jail in a car with a manual transmission, so there must have been some truth to what she said.

She also looked at my dad and me and said something like, “I wouldn’t take anything for the two of you right now.” That was odd. Did she mean it? Was her lack of involvement with my family just due to shyness or the fact that my dad was a very unpleasant person? Have I misjudged her? Or was she trying to maintain good relations with a son who might send more money? I don’t know, because I didn’t know her.

My best guess is that I have been fair. Shy or not, you can get yourself to the post office and send your grandchildren Christmas and birthday gifts, or at least cards.

My feeling is that it’s all on her. If our relationships were lacking, it was because a grown woman chose not to be proactive with her grandchildren. You can’t hold children responsible for starting and building relationships with adults.

Maybe she is one of the reasons I have never had the feeling that anyone missed me, cared if they ever saw me again, or wasn’t willing to abandon me at the drop of a hat. I’ve always had the feeling that if I made anyone angry, they might cut me off instantly and never talk to me again. They might treat me the way my grandmother did all her life.

I have no doubt my dad was unpleasant and disrespectful to her when he was young, because he was that way with everyone, but we didn’t do anything to deserve to be ignored.

She never showed any signs of affection to us or anyone else when I was present. In that respect, she reminds me of my sister. I’m not like that. Even my parrot has a bare spot where I rub his fat every day.

To this day, I am not sure whether she and her second husband had one, two, or three sons together. That’s how unfamiliar I am with my dad’s family. I am sure the husband had at least one son before he met her, and I know at least one son belonged to both of them. He was, frankly, trashy. He was of average intelligence, unlike my grandfather’s kids. I don’t think he ever got a degree. I saw him two or three times in my life. He visited us once with his parents when he was in his early teens. I believe this was before I was born. He gave my mother reason to think he was likely to molest my sister, so that cooled things between her and him quite a bit. She found him in her bedroom on her bed on his hands and knees, looking down at her.

He also used the bathroom curtains to wipe his rear end, and that didn’t endear him to anyone. My mother didn’t have much money to work with back then, so she made some curtains from towels, and he grabbed them because there was no paper in the room. That really burned her up.

The web says he died in 1988. I had to check. I didn’t remember. I know he had cancer. He smoked. I can’t remember when my grandmother died. I would have to check. It would have been around 1990. It didn’t occur to me to go to the funeral. I don’t know if my relatives thought that was weird, because I didn’t know them well enough to have any kind of communication with them.

I guess they were offended. That would have been the natural thing.

A strain of psychopathy ran in my dad’s family. I believe my sister is a pure psychopath, and my dad and his older sister were on that spectrum. His mother didn’t seem cruel like her son, daughter, and granddaughter, but she did seem emotionless, except for anxiety. I don’t think she possessed any warmth.

My dad’s sisters had almost nothing to do with us until I was in my thirties, and at that point, we only saw them when there was some need or they wanted to freeload, staying at his house, at his vacation properties, or on his boat. When they visited the Panama City Beach house, they arrived first, bought groceries for the house, gave him the bill, and asked him to reimburse them.

I have one cousin on that side whom I like. His eldest sister’s stepdaughter. His sister abused and beat her for no reason, systematically, while favoring the blood daughter she had had before marrying her second husband. The stepdaughter is a very sweet, sincere, gentle person. Unfortunately, she is now some kind of Mormon minister, and she is a leader to a large number of women. She believes American Indians are really Jews. Like the ones in Blazing Saddles. The whole 9 yards, I guess. Very sad.

I don’t want any interaction with these strangers, apart from praying my minister cousin comes around and accepts Yeshua and the Holy Spirit. I don’t dislike them, and it would be fine to have dinner with one or two I don’t know some day, but I don’t want to get together with them and start pretending we’re real cousins. It’s too late for that. Every time I saw them, I would be thinking of the past and how we had never had a normal relationship.

They have grown children and grandchildren. I assume. How would I know? All the things cousins would ordinarily share during their lives are over with. “Little Bobby’s prostate screening came out negative!” “Suzy’s hot flashes are getting better!” Too late.

I should also add that while my cousins maintained pretty close relations with each other over the years, they never once showed any interest in my sister or me, so they can’t barge in now and expect me to have the normal feelings cousins have for each other. These are not my cousins except on paper. You can’t reap what you don’t sow.

I also did nothing to cultivate relationships. I never had the feeling I was supposed to be close to them. Didn’t occur to me.

They haven’t shown any interest in freeloading, so that’s good. Maybe they’re not like their parents. My dad’s boat is long gone, along with the vacation homes.

They may be rich. All of the eldest sister’s kids are Mormons, and Mormons do pretty well.

This brings me back to the email.

The eldest sister and her second husband had one child together. A girl. I have seen her twice in my life.

She seems like a very nice person, although she is her mother’s daughter and her uncle’s niece, so if she’s a psychopath, she came by it honestly.

Until the email came, I didn’t know how to spell her first name. My first cousin. I know I have seen her name a few times during my life, but you don’t retain information you don’t use. The email mentions a husband named Mike. She probably has kids and grandchildren. Mormon.

She sent me a link to an online folder containing family pictures and documents such as my grandfather’s draft registration. That was nice of her. On the other hand, she also asked if she could perform some kind of Mormon ritual on my dad’s dead soul. This made me very angry. I am a Christian, and Mormons are not Christians. Mormonism is a pagan cult based on Christianity. Mormons deny the central, essential tenet of Christianity, which is that we receive salvation by faith, not works. If you believe in salvation by works when you die, you will go to hell unless there are extenuating circumstances.

Mormons have a reputation for being rude and aggressive in their proselytizing. They send rude young men out to spend a year of their lives chasing people on the street and badgering them about joining the cult. Christians are supposed to rely on the Holy Spirit to draw people. Mormons lack the Holy Spirit, because they are pagans, so they rely on aggressive sales tactics. I didn’t appreciate being subjected to this by a relative.

Mormonism is very unpopular for a cult that started nearly 200 years ago. It has a big media presence in the US, but they make up less than 2% of the population. Mormons claim the figure is more like 5%, but Mormons have a history of lying about their religion and its successes, so I believe non-Mormon sources. After all, the religion itself is a lie, started by a notorious con artist known to local authorities.

Perhaps the aggression and rudeness are based in the knowledge that an unpopular church with beliefs that fly in the face of common sense needs hardball promotion in order to survive.

I see Mormonism for what it is. Not a harmless branch of Christianity, but a cult created by Satan in order to destroy the real church, defame God, and increase the population of hell. The Mormons think Yeshua is Satan’s brother. They think Yahweh, Yeshua, and Satan are aliens who live on another planet. They believe a tiny number of people will be resurrected, and that those people will make it because they’ve done a really good job of obeying the rules and competing with other Mormons. Their beliefs are only a little less bizarre than those of Scientologists.

I’m not sure why they evangelize so hard. If the odds of being saved are so low, and there is a cutoff, what’s the point? Is it just to prevent people from drinking caffeine and alcohol, prior to spending eternity in Mormon hell along with all the other also-rans?

Christianity is different from Mormonism in that it acknowledges that there is no limit to the number of people who can be saved. It makes sense for Christians to try to increase the flock, but we don’t run around in black pants and white shirts, hectoring people for not believing in the angel Moroni and the white salamander.

What possible reason could God have for limiting salvation to a few people? He’s not the admissions committee at Stanford. It’s not like there are a limited number of parking spaces up there. He created the earth just so he could fill heaven, so it’s pretty obvious he’s not going to grade on a curve and only accept the A students.

When a person tries to involve me or my relations in a cult that sends people to hell, it makes me angry. I can’t help that. It’s a presumptuous attack on our souls. It’s an attempt to put us in flames for eternity, instead of swimming in love and peace forever in the presence of our perfect father and more brothers and sisters than could ever be counted.

I’m not reluctant to talk straight to such people. We are supposed to fear God, not people, and especially not people who threaten to take us and our children to hell.

I don’t think performing sick rituals involving the dead can cost the victims salvation, but for all I know, demons would go forth from the scene of the Satanic rites and try to bring down the victim’s descendants. This is the kind of things demons, losers who have nothing better to do, would try to pull. I don’t want disgusting Mormon spirits bothering me, my wife, my new son, our parrot, or even the cattle that wander around outside the house.

I might be okay with them going after the squirrels.

I am sure my cousin meant well, and I tried to be polite in my response, but I was blunt. I told her Mormonism was not compatible with our beliefs. I told her my dad died enveloped in the Holy Spirit, in peace and equipped with eternal salvation. I said any effort to involve him or my family in Mormon rituals would be upsetting and a failure to respect boundaries.

I was forceful. Maybe I was too forceful. I was forceful because I knew Mormons had a reputation for being pushy, self-righteous, and inconsiderate. Not knowing my cousin, I was afraid she would continue to pester us and upset my wife and me during the challenging first month of our son’s life.

Maybe I overdid it, but she had it coming, because she really crossed the line, and I’m sure she knew better. I have zero regrets. She had a lot of gall, sending us that condescending, tone-deaf, poisonous nonsense. Am I too harsh? Maybe she doesn’t realize how out of line she was, because she lives in a Mormon bubble and assumes everyone loves her cult and thinks it’s part of Christianity. Maybe she thought we would think she was doing us a favor instead of trying to write our names in Satan’s book of death. I don’t think an intelligent person could be so oblivious, but if so, she needed to see things from the other side in order to temper her behavior.

Mormons need to know that no one else considers them Christians and that their outreaches are seen as attempts to drag people to hell.

As for the photos, we received a total of 57 items. I was able to recognize some of the people or deduce their identities. Others…no clue. I will have to look them up. We got a couple of photos of my dad as a kid. I guess that’s good. We got photos of my great-grandparents and at least some of their parents. I thanked my cousin and said I would show my son this stuff when he was old enough to understand it.

As for my mother’s side of the family, before inheritance-greed and the dishonesty of a few cooled the love, we were close. I had the key to my grandparents’ house, I could have shown up any time in the middle of the night, unannounced, and they would have thought it was completely normal. It was my house, too. I could take whatever I wanted out of the refrigerator or deep freeze. I shot my grandfather’s guns without asking permission. I hung out with my grandfather all the time. I spent lots of time with my cousins. I liked my aunts and all but one of my uncles. We spent Christmases at my grandparent’s home. Gramps gave every grandchild a hundred-dollar bill every year. He gave us calves and sent us the money when they were sold. Before things went sour, we attended each other’s funerals.

I knew a bunch of my great aunts and uncles. I used to spend afternoons at my grandfather’s older brother’s house. I wouldn’t need a score card to pick most of them out of photos.

I don’t know whether I offended my cousin or not. I can’t say it matters much, because in terms of impact on my life, it would amount to less than offending the receptionist at my dentist’s office, whom I see once every 6 months and who has never approached me about involvement in a Satanic cult. We will never spend Christmases with these people. My son and my wife will never meet any of them. We will probably be separated from them for eternity because they will be in the lake of fire with Joseph Smith and the angel Moroni, if he exists. Our real and eternal family is the collection of people God joined to us through our shared faith.

My father’s relations and I should have done better, but when a family is this cold and crazy, you can’t expect any kind of a harvest. My borderline-sociopath dad and his borderline-sociopath sister were never equipped to create a tribe that gathered for huge family reunions.

When I thank God for my son, I thank him for my nation. He’s more than a baby. Like Isaac, he is the source of whatever nation springs from my loins. He and his siblings will surely do better than my dad and his sisters. They will have a chance at dwelling in God’s secret place all of their lives, and in the end the ones who listen will find rest in heaven.

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Well, I have to correct myself.

I said Mormons think God and Yeshua (whom they appear to consider separate beings) live on another planet. This is not quite right, although what they actually believe is worse. They think Yahweh used to be a man, and he became God because he was so good. Or something. Of course, the God of Christians has always been, as the Bible says repeatedly.

Mormons think God has lived on another planet. Where they think he lives now, I am not willing to Google to find out. Park City, perhaps.

Also, while I did read that Mormons think only a small number of people can be saved, it appears that is not true. My understanding now is that they think only a small number will be really close to God in the afterlife, which is not what Christianity says. Like Buddhists, they have a weird system of heavens which, like their notion of the current whereabouts of the almighty, I am not willing to research or expound on.

They really do think Yeshua and Satan are brothers. The Christian and Jewish scriptures clearly say Yeshua is God almighty. Obviously, no created being can be the brother of the most high.

Any Room Where you do Anything is a Workshop

We cheaped out on nursery furniture. We went Chinese. It looks okay, and it works, but it’s not Thomasville or Ethan Allen. My wife figured we would get rid of it in a few years, and she has seen that selling used furniture is a waste of time, so she thought we should save some money.

I agreed. Contain your astonishment. This was after she bought him designer socks, 450 burp rags, an electric wipe warmer, winter coats that won’t fit him until next year, and his own vacation home in St. Bart’s. Hard as it may believe, I, too, felt it would be okay to economize on a bed and dresser.

And a motorized nursing recliner. Because our other three recliners were just wrong. Sigh.

We have been using a changing pad instead of a changing table. My wife insists on changing our son in the bedroom suite instead of the nursery, because walking the extra 15 steps is just too much. Meanwhile, her elderly husband has no problem making the trip at 3 a.m.

She wanted to keep the changing pad on top of the bathroom counter between our sinks, but I put an end to that after finding a poopy wipe in the sink where I brush my teeth. Unlike moms, dads don’t suffer from poop blindness.

We have been putting the pad on the Chinese dresser and changing him there. It works fine, but he is getting stronger and more rambunctious, and we have realized we can no longer rationalize running out of the room to get things we’ve forgotten and leaving him on top of a dresser with no straps or Velcro or chains or anything to hold him in place. We have to get some kind of dedicated table that will restrain him, and it has to fit in our bathroom.

We could get a table made for the purpose of changing babies, but they are not all sturdy, and a lot of them take up a huge amount of room. I want to be able to get in and out of the shower without turning sideways. I found a product which is clearly a lot better: a US General service cart from Harbor Freight.

The cost is not that much higher than that of a crummy Chinese table that will fall apart if the baby breaks wind forcefully. The cart will outlast all of us, the top tray holds 350 pounds, the cart has a ball-bearing drawer that holds 75 pounds, and you can get magnetic attachments to hold paper towel rolls and boxes of nitrile gloves.

I don’t go near his butt without gloves. Make fun of me if you want. Doctors and nurses use gloves to keep baby poo, and for that matter all poo, off their hands, and I see no reason why I should do things any differently. Somehow the fact that he’s my baby is supposed to make me love his poo and think it’s delightful when I get it in my hair or, God forbid, my mouth. Maybe if I took enough estrogen, this would make sense to me, and I would also no longer be able to parallel park. Poo is always poo. I don’t care whose it is.

When the diaper (his) comes off, I have my PPE in place. Electronic shooting earmuffs and poo-proof gloves. Every time. I have considered using my grinding face shield as well.

It’s true I can’t hear my wife’s helpful suggestions when I’m wearing the muffs. But enough about the perks.

My wife is getting much more fatigued with his squawling than I am, and she goes in without ear protection, so obviously, I am right. Once again.

Hope she doesn’t read that.

The nursery furniture is (still) white, and the bathroom tile is blue. The local Harbor Freight doesn’t have any white carts, but blue is in stock, so I think we’re all set.

Our brains are still not right. I am probably up to 5 hours of sleep per night, but I still make mistakes like calling the pacifier a passport or even “the Passover,” and I can’t remember any number longer than three digits. My wife leaves things on a hot stove and only remembers to flush the toilet about 80% of the time.

This morning while talking to my wife, I expressed my newfound admiration for Donald Trump. He’s about 80 years old, he sleeps even less than we do, he’s been doing it for decades, and he runs a real estate empire, a social media empire, a crypto empire, and the most powerful nation on Earth. Is Diet Coke the answer? Maybe we should buy a few cases.

He tweets ingenious, convoluted tweets at 3 a.m., combining regime-boosting assertions with triggering criticisms of his enemies that provoke them to get out of bed and do Google research so they can post their ineffective replies. If I tweeted at 3 a.m., it would probably look like this:

Dr. Merkwerdichliebe837691 · Feb 21 @ PlzKidnapMe · 3hr

Someone tell m3 how to get this baby to quit spitting o7t the Passover

Joe Biden sleeps 18 hours a day, some of it with his eyes closed, and in a presidential debate, he told the world he finally “beat Medicare.”

What does that even mean?

Maybe it will make sense to me in a few more days, when the little elephants on the baby’s pajamas start dancing and winking at me.

The wife has been reluctant to let me use man solutions to baby problems. She eventually agreed to let me use brewery sanitizer to kill germs on things like bottles and nipples. Big win for me. That stuff is fantastic. It’s called Star San, and you just spray it on and let it dry. Costs about $25 for a year’s supply.

I think Star San got her ready for the tool cart, because she liked the cart right away.

Her helicopter mom inclinations are slowly drying up. The baby is beating them out of her. In response to his noise, she has started telling him he is just going to have to cry for a few minutes. This, instead of hurtling into the living room, sweeping him up in her arms, and wrapping him in the baby sling she bought from Amazon while I wasn’t looking.

We looked at the web to find out whether we should pick him up the instant he starts crying, and of course, just about every source said yes. But this is the web, and these are people who spend their lives writing about babies. They are almost certainly left-wing flakes who think meat is murder and 11-year-old tomboy mastectomies are health care. They claim there is no point in letting a newborn cry and that a newborn can’t be spoiled, because newborns can’t learn anything.

Yeah, okay. Our newborn learned to insist on plastic nipples in about 15 minutes, and it took about a day of excessive mothering to teach him screaming for half an hour would get him a ride on Mom’s belly. He can learn just fine. Maybe leftist newborns can’t learn. That would make sense. It’s consistent with their behavior as adults. “Socialism will work if we just do it RIGHT this time!”

Leftists insist grabbing kids the instant they start to whine won’t ruin them. They say things like, “We picked up little Bodhisattva every time zhey cried, and zhey came out just fine.” No, zhey’s not fine. Not if he has blue hair and nipple rings, wears ladies’ undergarments, and posts proud tweets about his upcoming elective man-parts amputation. If he buys bras that match his bright green beard, he’s not okay. You have to say no to kids sometimes.

Two words for anyone who disagrees: Jaden Smith.

My aunt used to pick her second son up every time he cried, and he turned into a real-life Chuckie. Broke everything he touched. Used to run through the house naked, screaming, every time she told him to take a bath. He used to hide under the bed, and she would get a broom and jab him. When he was about 6, she smacked him because he was making everyone miserable, and he reached up and slapped her face. I thought the world had come to an end, because I couldn’t believe God would permit it to go on after that. The other adults used to fantasize together about beating him.

He was the only kid my grandfather ever beat, and that includes my sister the felon, so no, I am not in favor of scooping babies up the instant the noise starts. Doors were invented for a reason.

Speaking of hormonal quirks, my wife can’t taste salt very well. My understanding is that this is caused by the same hormones that make her clinically insane. I mean, “highly concerned about the welfare of her baby.” Before she moved here, during the Biden famine panic, I bought about 6 cartons of salt to get me through the next few years. After she got pregnant, they started to vanish. One day she told me to buy salt, and I said to get one of the cartons out, and she said they were gone.

I used to go through about 1.5 cartons a year. I would guess she now goes through 8 all by herself. I have a dredge I use to shower large items with salt, and I used to refill it maybe once a year. It seems like it’s empty all the time. Maybe when the hormones subside, I’ll be able to find salt when I need it instead of refilling the shaker every time.

Anyway, she seems to be returning to her old stable self.

Well, here is good news. I have just been informed that our son the genius has finally learned how breastfeeding works. I better get up and battle the wife so she doesn’t send her family pictures of him in action.

Help Help

The wife and I are still in “baby jail,” as a close friend has termed it. He and his wife raised 5 children, and somehow, neither of them ran off in the middle of the night and left misleading clues for the police.

We have not left the house simultaneously in several weeks except to see doctors, and I am told I can expect this to continue for several more weeks. Meanwhile, we continue bonding with the baby and working hard to fill his needs and desires. Some would call this love. Others, Stockholm Syndrome.

Some acquaintances claim we keep the baby at home for three months. Due to my wife’s reluctance to drive on safe, well-maintained American roads in a car with about 46 airbags, and her belief that if I am alone with the child for longer than 8 minutes he will die, listening to our friends’ advice would mean I would be visiting Walmart, Target, the dump, and various takeout restaurants alone well into spring.

The up side is that now I don’t have to pay any attention to my wife while shopping. She can give me lists, but I can always come home and say, “Darn. They were out of $10 organic avocados again.”

He outgrew his newborn diapers almost before leaving the hospital, and some of the 3,000 identical onesies my wife bought on Amazon are getting tight, so things are moving right along. Yesterday, I bought his first toys, not counting an electronic elephant a friend bought him. I got him a stuffed cow that has a built-in rattle. I also got him an actual rattle. Finally, I got him a colorful mat that has a built in electronic keyboard. Eventually, he is supposed to kick the keys with his feet in order to drive his parents insane with the same recorded noise we have already heard 9 billion times.

I showed him the cow, and he acted like I was showing him dryer lint. My wife waved it at him–the exact same thing–and he was immediately entranced. Who says delivery isn’t important?

Supposedly, multicolored shapes are about as interesting to him as IMAX is to a fully-formed human being, and we are supposed to dump him on the mat on his belly so he can stare at them and enjoy hours of mental exertion and entertainment. Personally, I think he will just poop on the mat.

I am trying not to get excited about “milestones.” He seems to be on schedule or way ahead on everything, and he is as strong as an ox, but every parent thinks his kid is the next Mozart/Einstein, and then they go on to run forklifts. In the end, we know what he will be: a human being. Not a Marvel character. If he writes his first symphony at 8, fantastic, but being one week ahead of other babies doesn’t prove anything.

My wife kept telling me not to let his head roll backward, and I had to show her that I had nothing to do with it. From the womb, he was able to push his head backward with enough force to lift his body, and he never got tired of doing it, mostly while I was holding him and his mom was hovering nearby in hopes of finding fault.

He has no trouble doing pushups during breastfeeding, and he has punched me in the face at least twice.

Getting him changed can take as long as half an hour, because it’s like trying to put a confirmation dress on a bobcat. Put foot in romper. Put other foot in romper. Put first foot back in romper. Try to catch flailing fist for insertion in sleeve. Insert. Put both feet back in romper. Put arm back in sleeve.

I have finally learned I’m not breaking his arm when I force it into his clothes. He fights back so hard it seems like I’ve hit the limit on his range of movement, but it always turns out he’s just asserting himself.

I have slept about 15 hours since he was born, and my wife has slept even less because she sits awake and stares at him obsessively, as though he were about to pop open and rain prizes on us. I think the last green vegetable I ate was either mold or cole slaw from Sonny’s BBQ, which would have happened early last month. At this point, I’m not completely sure I could pass a dementia screening.

He behaves very well except when he’s full of gas, so that gives us about 16 hours of relatively pleasant interaction during a typical day. His gas is shocking in frequency, duration, and volume. It’s hard to believe it comes from an object that fits in a briefcase. My wife insists it’s not her.

It turns out babies have to learn how to poop. I should know better than to let anything surprise me. I had just assumed God programmed this skill into us. Evidently, they push with the diaphragm while constricting the other end, so they’re like Popeye in the old cartoon where he stood on a ship’s deck and tried to move it by blowing into the sail. One day he will learn to loosen up down below so things can actually escape. As of now, he generally spends about half an hour screaming before anything constructive happens, and between screams, he’s as cheerful as Joe Biden at the beach sniffing a baby dipped in ice cream while depositing a Burisma check in an account in Tortola.

I learned he needs to be placed on his belly to shut him up…I mean help him with the gas. Somehow it helps it move along. It’s kind of astonishing that a person can feel relief when another person toots in his face and passes out, but this is my personal surreality.

I also learned that if you want a baby to hold onto a pacifier, you try to take it away from him. You plug it in and then start yanking on it, and he will suck harder than ever just to spite you.

I don’t know who invented the pacifier, but now that I understand this invention’s value, I can’t believe there are no statues of him.

If only they made them with straps.

Our backward laws, I guess.

My purpose is becoming apparent to me. The ways of fatherhood are working their way from my lower brain to the cerebral cortex. I have realized a lot of my job consists of challenging and annoying him. His mother treats him like a Faberge egg, and I am here to remind him that this life is full of aggravation and disappointment.

She feels she has to pick him up the instant he cries, so now she is kind of a prisoner, wandering around with a thousand-yard stare and a sleeping baby in a sling on her belly. I thought putting an end to that was the whole purpose of giving birth.

When I hear him cry, I make him pass a test. Is he in pain? If no, question 2. Is he hungry? If not, question 3. Is he just screaming again because he can’t figure out how to poop? This is usually the answer.

If it’s 3, I let him scream for a few minutes, because there is no way to stop it, and picking him up will just put his mouth close to my ear so I can be robbed of my remaining high-frequency hearing. I figure he’s going to yell until the job is done, and there is no point in grabbing him and changing him just so he can fill a new diaper two minutes after I put it on. Sometimes rolling him onto his belly helps, but if not, well, life is hard, and a few minutes of squawking will just build up his lungs.

Not that they need it.

I also play with his hands and feet and poke him in the cheeks, subjecting him to strategic dad-annoyance so he will become manly and never wear skinny jeans or become confused as to what sex he is.

Or eat organic avocados. The only organic thing boys should eat is dirt.

The Internet says never to let a baby cry even for a second, because later in life, it may cause him to grow a backbone and secrete testosterone. Whatever. The Internet thinks Rachel Levine is a woman.

I don’t think there is any way to placate a screaming baby while getting stuff together for a diaper change, so I am at peace with my approach. But then I’m the guy who wears electronic shooting muffs while wiping his butt.

As of this writing, my wife is coming around. A little while ago, while he was screeching like a steam whistle for some unknown reason, I found her at the kitchen table, calmly looking at her phone.

As I have said, I am going to try not to write about the boy much on this blog. It is proving hard to resist.

Flag Down for Bringing a Walker on the Field

Someone on the web created a thread asking for unpopular opinions. When I saw it, I knew it was destiny. This is what I was made for.

I did quite a bit of writing. For one thing, I pointed out that pizza doesn’t go with beer. That must have made heads explode.

Pizza is acidic and a little sweet. It often contains oregano, a bitter herb. Obviously, you don’t pair that with a bitter beverage. Soft drinks and red wine go with pizza. Tea is acceptable. Beer? Insane.

I think people who drink beer with pizza are generally low-end beer drinkers who drink to get drunk. I think they must be people who drink really bad beer, chilled to the freezing point to kill the awful taste. People who drink stuff like Bud and Coors always drink it as cold as possible, and the reason is that when it warms up even a little, it tastes like seltzer with soap and a little sugar.

I think these people are likely to eat bad pizza from Papa John’s or Domino’s, and they just want something to wash it down and give them a buzz.

Beer goes with steak and rib roasts. It goes with Mexican food and seafood. It works with cheeseburgers and fries. Forcing it to get along with pizza is ill-advised at best. And nothing is worse than smelling other people’s beer-and-pizza burps while trying to eat.

If you think beer goes with everything, go eat an apple and chase it with a beer. It’s right up there with toothpaste and orange juice.

I also said Elvis was a lousy singer. It’s true. Elvis became famous because he caused girls with weak fathers to become sexually aroused. His early performances were basically riots, with little bacchantes fighting the ushers, tearing off their own underwear, and throwing it on the stage. People forget that. Today we make fun of people who call rock and roll the devil’s music, but it’s true. Any music that makes you throw your dirty underwear at people has some connection to hell.

Women still throw their dirty underwear at entertainers. It’s gross. They throw it at Justin Timberlake, for example. They throw it at the kind of guys who look like they take it home and put it on.

They should have men in Tyvek suits gather it and put it in medical waste bags. Someone could catch something.

Sinatra also mesmerized young tramps, but he was also an excellent singer whose style was innovative and unique. Jerry Lee Lewis was a much better singer than Elvis. Sam Cooke was far better. There were a lot of excellent male singers back in Elvis’s heyday. Nat King Cole. Eddie Arnold. Jim Reeves. Ray Price. Johnny Mathis. Ray Charles.

You can go into restaurants and bars today and still hear Sinatra recordings. Elvis? Not so much. It was never about the sound. It was about the pelvis.

I complained about sports worship. I said that if I wanted to watch overpaid illiterates work, I’d turn on The View.

I said I didn’t like it when people assumed I watched sports. People come up to me and try to make small talk about men I’ve never heard of, playing games I didn’t watch. “How about that Mahomes?” Who?

I pulled that name out of the air just now because I’ve seen it in headlines. I don’t know who he plays for or what his position is.

What if I went up to random men and said, “How about that Carl Friedrich Gauss? Is he the GOAT, or what?” He’s a fascinating guy. How can they not find him interesting? We wouldn’t have electronics or, well, any kind of serious technology without his discoveries.

Some guy responded and said I must have been rooting for Taylor Swift and the Chiefs.

How thick can a person’s head be?

Me: I never watch football. It would be great if the stadium where the Super Bowl was played was obliterated by a meteor and replaced with a Buc-Ee’s.

Him: You must have been rooting for Taylor Swift and the Chiefs.

What?

This is completely typical of my experiences with sports fans. “Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.” They can’t believe a man who doesn’t watch sports can exist. It’s like they’re under a spell. And they are. Demons are filling their minds with absurdities.

It also bugs me when men with hurt feelings try to tell me how empty my life must be because I don’t watch sports. What possible reason could you have to be angry at me for not sharing all of your hobbies? Do I get mad at you for not knowing how to weld?

I look down on you, sure. But I don’t get angry.

Kidding.

Yeah, my life is empty. I love my wife, and I spend a lot of time having fun with her. I don’t turn the TV on as soon as I get on and ignore her while I fill the house with obnoxious crowd noises and pray I don’t lose my ill-informed, emotion-driven bets, which I didn’t tell her about. Oh, the emptiness.

I have all sorts of time for my interests, like prayer, cooking, shooting, writing, and using tools. I get to spend time with my pet. I get to sit in the recliner with my son on my chest and relax in an atmosphere of pure love.

Empty, empty, empty. It would be so much better to be outside a stadium, trying to dodge as kids try to spit on me on my way in. I’d really rather be paying $11 each for cups of extremely bad beer and then standing in a quarter-inch of other people’s urine in packed men’s rooms. I long to get caught up in post-game brawls where people fight to defend the reputations of spoiled young athletes who pay armed men to keep fans away from them.

If only I could spend 4 hours fighting traffic, trying to get home from a stadium after my team lost, avoiding eye contact with drunk road-ragers and praying I don’t get stopped at a DUI checkpoint.

To get average seats for my three-person family, I’d have to shell out almost $500. I would happily pay $100 to be allowed to stay home.

But I must have been rooting for Taylor Swift and the Chiefs.

For $500, I can get my son a brand-new CZ 457 Scout in .22LR, and he can hand it down to his son. But no, I’d rather watch grown men play a game created to amuse children. When are the duck-duck-goose playoffs?

On a related note, I said Bill Burr was an idiot. A lot of men think he’s a genius and the world’s last straight shooter. A regular guy with a platform. Hello? It’s an act, and he’s an entertainer. If he were telling the truth, they wouldn’t call it an act.

Rock Hudson made romantic comedies with women. Just saying.

He’s not smart, and he’s not one of us. Normal men, I mean. He’s just another showbiz liberal, kissing the rings on the hands that feed him.

He has crippling TDS. Right after dozens of people died in the unnecessary LA fires, he appeared with another fool, Jimmy Kimmel, and made jokes about people who criticized California’s fire preparation and response. He ridiculed them. He stupidly asserted it wasn’t possible to put fires out with ocean water. He didn’t even think about the insensitivity of doing all this while bodies were literally still warm.

California and LA officials themselves have admitted they blew it. They admitted it in Donald Trump’s presence soon after Burr made an ass of himself. Talk about jokes aging badly.

Burr says he–“HE”–doesn’t get tired of winning football games. He supports the Patriots, and he uses the words “I” and “we” when he talks about them. “I don’t get tired of winning.” “We won.”

If Bill Burr is still capable of running 40 yards, he would probably do it in a minute and a half. On the field, he would move like Joe Biden trying to find his way off a stage. You could measure his vertical leap with a feeler gauge. His most likely tool for stopping an NFL pass is his forehead. Who is “we”?

You know those videos of drunken fans rushing onto football fields, careening around at 6 mph, and then having angry players turn them into Tex-Avery-style murals? That’s what a Bill Burr NFL cameo would look like, except maybe he would keep his shirt on. They would peel him off the turf like a fruit roll-up and bury him in a map tube.

If Bill Burr played in a game, he wouldn’t sit on the bench. They’d bring in a hospital bed and a bag with a zipper on it.

Bill Burr has never “won” a game. The people who win are paid to be there. If you have to pay, you’re not part of “we.”

Ticket Taker: Ticket, please.

Bill Burr: Ticket? I have to get in! We’re playing today!

Ticket Taker: Okay, pops. Ticket and DNR.

Burr says he feels bad for days when “WE” lose. Seriously? I don’t mean to be insensitive, but if the plane carrying the New England Patriots flew into a bus carrying the Kansas City Chiefs, I would be fine. I would be very sorry to see it happen, I would feel bad for everyone who knew them, and I would probably pray for their loved ones, but 15 minutes later, I’d probably be watching Paul Harrell videos on Youtube.

If your emotional wellbeing depends on how well a bunch of total strangers play a game you stink at, you need an intervention, because your life is devoid of meaningful pursuits. Burr felt jolly and sassy after dozens of people died in fires caused by incompetence, so maybe something in his head needs to be adjusted.

Some people got annoyed with me, but that just proved I was doing it right. If they wanted me to make them happy, they should have posted a popular opinion thread.

3

I have been asking myself whether I should write about the recent addition to my family. I don’t want to give cowardly, underdeveloped Internet nuts power over my wife and son. On the other hand, we have strong prayer lives, I can easily (both physically and mentally) kill anyone who endangers us, I’m in a jurisdiction where the police will pat me on the back for it and possibly take me out for ribs, and I feel I owe something to people who have read this blog for years.

Some people have been reading since the beginning, two decades ago. I have gotten to know a few people, even if at a distance. I have prayed for them. I have met a handful. I don’t know if I can call people I’ve never met friends, but if not, some are pretty close to it.

I think this is the first photo I took after we brought him home. It was not staged. It’s amusing, and it should also serve to send a message.

I thought it was really funny. We were extremely sleep-deprived and barely knew what we were doing. We tossed him in the bassinet and started squaring the house away for bed, and a couple of minutes later, I saw I had left him near a carry piece.

Not a problem, since he was not able to rack the slide at that point.

Second photo, equally funny:

He was due to wake up at any minute, and I wanted to shoot some video. I rushed around looking for something to weigh the tripod down. I couldn’t find what I was looking for, and then I saw some bags of .45 ACP handloads. Perfect.

He is healthy. He is happy and peaceful except when it’s time to be changed, and I wear ear protection for that. He really is as cute as the picture suggests. Not all babies have curb appeal early on, and we have learned that it’s a blessing. The staff at the hospital didn’t want to let him go home. I know they give good treatment to every baby, but it was pretty obvious that being really cute bought him some extra favor. They loaded us up with stuff we weren’t supposed to get.

I thought it was a little unusual for a baby to be this cute, so I asked people if it was just my perception as a parent, and apparently he is objectively cute.

The delivery process was a horror. They told us to go in at 4:45 a.m. on a certain day. Then after we had gotten up in the middle of the night, they told us to wait another day. Then they called us in at about 6:30 the next morning. Then they ran the air conditioner all night, and it was 53 degrees outside.

It was so cold, we put 6 blankets on my wife, and her hands still shook. I got the staff to yell at whoever ran the air conditioning, and we got them to provide two electric heaters. I slept in a winter coat with insulated gloves and two pairs of socks. The room warmed up the next morning at about the time labor got into gear. Then it got too hot.

The labor itself was terrible, which means it was normal. For medical reasons, we had to finish without an epidural.

It seemed much worse than it was, because we were both exhausted from lack of sleep and lying in a freezing room. The whole experience should have been much better.

We both had the feeling that the labor process was a crushing ordeal, but later we agreed that the main problem was that we had been deprived of sleep and subjected extreme cold. If she had gone into labor rested and warm, it would have been painful but quick and bearable, and it wouldn’t have taken us several days to get over the stress.

We are getting an acceptable amount of sleep now, although sometimes I start to doze off in a chair, and I make mistakes I wouldn’t make if I were rested.

The baby was 80th-percentile big, but he was not fat. He is heavy. He is now wearing stuff for 3-month-olds. He seems very strong. I thought newborns were like rag dolls, but he wrestles with us pretty forcefully. Yesterday he insisted on rolling onto his side. When I corrected him and put him on his back, he rolled back onto his side instantly, in spite of being swaddled. He lifts himself off his mother’s chest with his arms.

His eyes were very dark when he was born, but today, suddenly, they’re blue. I don’t know what to expect later.

He was hairy from the get-go, and the hair on his head is nearly black and pretty straight.

He feeds like a horse, so no problems there yet. He was supposed to lose weight, but I think he’s going the other way.

He seems to smile and light up when I bother him, which is a father’s duty. Web sources suggest the smile may be from gas, however. He has that to spare. He seems to like us. He appears to have fun sometimes.

For a long time, I prayed for God to give me a house of love, and now I have it, so don’t give up on your important prayers. I don’t think my son will ever have to know what it’s like to live in a dysfunctional home.

That’s about it. Don’t expect a lot of updates. We give our thanks to everyone who prayed for us.

What are They Putting in Brawndo These Days?

What planet did I wake up on today?

News outlets are disseminating video of the DNC’s suspension-of-disbelief-defying chair election. I don’t know what to say about it. I would say it’s like an SNL sketch, only not funny, but that also describes SNL.

You can see some of the antics in the video below. Particularly odd: Dr. Quintessa Hathaway making her campaign speech through song.

Yes, “Quintessa.” Like “Vanessa,” only 4 times better.

Out on a limb here, but I’m betting her doctorate isn’t in medicine, math, or science. Could it be that we have another Ed.D. to go with Bill Cosby and Dr. Jill?

BANG! Am I really this good? Nailed it. Her campaign website confirms it.

Sorry. Impressed myself there.

It could happen.

“You fight on”? What? What does that even mean? Fight what? “Your government”? The Democrats ARE the government. Okay, they lost control of all three branches temporarily, but overall, the government is a liberal institution, and while we may be getting some short-lived relief, government employees outside of the military are overwhelmingly in favor of leftist insanity.

Nothing makes less sense than a leftist who thinks he’s fighting the system.

Except maybe a person who claims retaliation for genocide is genocide. Or, you know…queers for Palestine.

You probably won’t watch the video, but if you do, check out the list of racist, sexist, realityphobic rules for committee member eligibility. Even the people reciting them don’t understand them. If I chose to side with these people, I would literally be unable to do it, because even with a law degree, I would not be able to make sense of the rules.

David Hogg ran for vice chair and apparently won. In his horrendous, self-unaware speech, he expressed his intention to end school shootings through gun control. Oddly, however, this is the same guy who thinks the police should not exist. Evidently, the way to handle crime is to disarm ourselves, give the government the job of defending us, and then disarm the government.

Many of us like to say Idiocracy has come true, but that’s not correct. The characters in Idiocracy weren’t insane. They were just stupid. The DNC is run by bona fide mental cases.

How much worse can things get before Yeshua deports us to heaven? This is becoming too weird to tolerate.

It’s a Boy, not a Soy

I don’t plan to become a family blogger because my wife and son never signed on for that, and I don’t think the world needs to know everything about them. I think I should occasionally write a few things, though.

Our son will be here shortly. Everything is arranged. My wife is ready to unload and have her body to herself. She has enjoyed being pregnant, but she will also enjoy being able to put her son down, and she really misses sleeping on her back.

She is ecstatic about the whole business because female hormones have numbed her to rational concerns about pain, sleeplessness, diaper changes, and being tethered to another person for the rest of her life. She is literally high on hormones. This is how God helps us reproduce. We would never be able to get it done if women weren’t high. They would run off and hide when their husbands offered to get them pregnant.

Women are controlled by hormones and instincts to a much greater degree than men, and this is one reason why women have historically been viewed as less rational. They actually are less rational. They have powerful, ever-changing drives that have nothing to do with reason.

Feminists deny this, to everyone’s disadvantage. The only time feminists admit women are less rational is when a woman kills her husband and claims PMS made her do it. You can’t say you won’t vote for a female president because you’re afraid PMS will drive her to launch a nuclear attack, but it’s okay to say a murderer should go free because she was bloated and irritable and nobody gave her chocolate.

If the human race went back to admitting women are less stable, things would be better for everyone. Women would have more realistic expectations of themselves, and so would men. And men would be taught how to deal with female instability and keep things harmonious. This is one of our most important jobs, but feminists get furious at the mention of it.

No wonder feminists are such happy people.

When a woman is not pregnant, her attitudes and behaviors go through changes every month. When she is pregnant, things can go completely crazy. Some women cry for no reason. Many get extremely emotional and hard to live with.

If a man knows these things are coming, because he lives in a reality-based society in which young men are taught the truth, he can help his wife stay anchored and at peace. If he has been brainwashed by feminism, he will be just as crazy as his wife. He will get caught up in her irrational swings and take them seriously. And of course, he will blame himself, because man bad, woman good.

God is more stable than men, and men are supposed to spend time with God in order to be anchored and at peace. This help is supposed to flow downhill from men into women. In a feminist society, the opposite occurs. Women’s hormones and instincts drive them crazy, and their husbands absorb and encourage the craziness.

This is how men end up wearing pink knitted hats.

God has blessed me with a very stable wife, and that is a huge blessing. I don’t wonder who I’ll be waking up next to every morning. But she is experiencing one drive which is very typical: the nesting drive.

I didn’t learn about this until I was 35, because our feminized society conceals it the way our fake news outlets conceal Trump successes and man-made-virus lab leaks. Sometimes women get very excited about cleaning up their homes in order to create pleasant “nests” for their children.

Not so much for their husbands. Oh, well.

Right now, my wife is very gung-ho about cleaning and order. She can’t put the broom down. She moves things and cleans behind them. She fills bags with trash I didn’t know we had. She bugs me about the nursery.

If I were a disgusting soy boy enabler, I would be running around like an estrogen-crazed chicken with its head cut off. “YES, HONEY! YES, HONEY! WHAT SHOULD I DO NEXT?” And I would resent her for nagging, because I would not realize she was being pushed by a biological urge she can’t suppress. Because I am an actual man who loves being with God, eats dead animals, and doesn’t pretend recycling works, I know she is in the grip of something very strong.

I don’t resent her. I go along with her drive to a reasonable degree, but I also remind her that she needs to step outside herself and realize she’s a little extreme right now. I keep reminding her that everything is being taken care of. Everything is going to be fine. This helps both of us.

As for me, I spend a lot of time soaking in God’s presence, because I am not as stable as he is. He helps me relax even though I’m about to be saddled with the responsibility for the welfare of a tiny fragile, human being who has to have everything done for him.

My best friend has a dominant daughter-in-law who is about as far out on the left as a person can get, and her husband goes along with her weird ideas. He exacerbates them, pouring gasoline on a fire that needs to be put out. What she really wants is for him to stand up and take charge, but she will never admit it to herself or him, so the storm will continue.

Thanks to God and the way he is parenting me, I’m not going to let that happen in this house. If I had had children 30 years ago, before I realized how sick our society is and how God orders families, who knows what kind of mess I would have made of things?

I’m going to be an old parent, and that’s sad, but I’m not going to be a wife’s first child, like a lot of men. God has managed to set me straight about a lot of things, so there are some problems this family will never have.

I am getting confirmation through tips people give me about the delivery process. I was told not to show my emotions, for example. A woman told me that, based on her own experience, so I don’t want to hear about my patriarchal insensitivity. She made it clear my wife needs someone to be strong during the delivery. She also predicted some nutty behaviors, and she told me things I could not have anticipated. For example, I shouldn’t bring food into the room because some women can’t stand to smell food during delivery.

Not a rational thing, but one that has to be accommodated anyway.

Imagine a feminist woman telling a man not to show emotion during delivery. It could never happen. Feminists think men are supposed to cry all the time.

Maybe that’s because men who marry feminists cry a lot.

For obvious reasons.

I am here to guide and sacrifice. I’m not the center of attention. I’m not the patient. I’m not the bride. How I feel doesn’t matter. My comfort doesn’t matter. What I spend doesn’t matter. I am here to get my family through this and get everyone back home safely.

I suspect a lot of delivery rooms contain two brides: one female, and one male.

May God utterly destroy feminism and humiliate every toxic person who teaches it until they shut up. The toll it takes is beyond calculation.

Here is a meme for anyone who plans to lecture me in comments.

I won’t be posting pictures, and I don’t think I’ll write anything about the birth. Prayers would be appreciated, though, since they’re the only things that really help.

Stay Close to Your Commanding Officer

I have written about the revelation God gave me about being close to him and treasuring the experience as though he were a loved one who just returned from the dead. He is a loved one who returned from the dead, so this makes sense.

I had a little bird that loved me, and he died suddenly from an infection. Afterward, I had a few dreams in which he came back to visit. In the first dream, he glowed like a light bulb, and he was overjoyed to see me. I held him and kissed him, and it gave me closure. I pressed him to my face and savored the feeling of his nearness.

Eventually, God helped me to feel similarly about him. When God helps me to feel close to him, it’s like pressing myself into a clean, soft mattress after three days without sleep. It’s like drinking from a big jug of water after spending a day digging ditches in the desert.

People who will read this will have lost loved ones. They will be able to imagine how tightly they would hold them if they came back. In a situation like that, you don’t need to speak. You just need to hold on and receive relief and new life.

Today God helped me to rest in him for quite a while. This was right after I woke up. After a certain amount of time, I took a look at my phone to see what was happening in the world.

Talk about contrast.

I saw a “news” story featuring a list of tales from people who had bad dating experiences. These days, “news” often means lists of regurgitated text messages, tweets, and Reddit posts about obscure individuals.

A woman went on one date and then texted the man to ask if he would pay for her health insurance. When he refused, she told him he was ugly and gay. A man texted a woman he barely knew over and over and called her a whore when she wasn’t interested.

I saw another piece featuring lists of bad experiences people had had with human resources employees. They cut off health insurance for a full-time employee. They backed up a boss who expected an hourly employee to be on call around the clock.

I saw a piece by a woman who must be a leftist. She said her elderly father had lost weight he could not afford to lose because of a lung disease. He had no appetite. His life was in danger.

He and her mother had always been dietary extremists (vegetarians), but while he was sick, her father felt a sudden desire to eat McDonald’s food. He started eating it several times a week, and he started putting weight back on.

His wife and the lady who wrote the piece were upset. The wife ate meals with him while “tight-lipped” and “predictably disgusted.” The daughter said, ” I have to admit, their Big Breakfast tastes surprisingly good on a Sunday morning.”

Like McDonald’s serves dog food no sane person enjoys. Why would anyone “have to admit” the food tastes good? Is eating McDonald’s food something to be ashamed of?

In what universe is McDonald’s “predictably” disgusting or disgusting at all?

McDonald’s describes the Big Breakfast as, “a warm biscuit, fluffy scrambled eggs, savory McDonald’s sausage and crispy golden Hash Browns.”

Biscuits contain flour, fat, and milk, with a couple of other minor ingredients. Sounds like the same stuff that goes into any roux made by a French chef. Eggs contain eggs, which are featured prominently in dishes served by Michelin-starred restaurants. Sausage is pork and a couple of seasonings. Pork has won Iron Chef contests. McDonald’s makes the best hash browns in the business.

The Big Breakfast is not a plate of popsicles covered with marshmallow Fluf and crumbled Pop Tarts.

Leftists bash McDonald’s all the time, as if Hitler owned the chain. Why?

I once saw a magazine story in which leftist Candice Bergen bragged that she had never eaten a McDonald’s hamburger. Who is that supposed to impress? She thought she was making people admire her, but she looked like an idiot.

Now McDonald’s is associated in the leftist spleen, not mind, with Trump, which must make things worse.

I also saw a story about a woman who gave up her daughter for adoption. The story said the daughter had sent a two-word text which was unexpected. I thought maybe she had said something uplifting. It turned out the text said, “I’m trans.”

I read about a lady who took her kid to Disney World, where bearded perverts abuse little boys by selling them princess costumes. She complained about the prices and said the best experiences were a cheap ride and seeing her daughter chase lizards outside the hotel. She said people took on debt to take their kids to Disney World. She said Disney World put on a Mickey-Mouse-themed Halloween party and charged $180 per head.

Disney used to be relatively innocent. I went a couple of times as a kid, and it was fairly harmless, and ordinary families could afford it. Now it’s like paying for heart transplant surgery, and the corporation is all about anti-white racism, alternative religions, leftism, and sexual perversion.

Mouse ears cost $35 now. They could probably be sold profitably for $5.

I read a lot of depressing things in a few minutes, and I thought about how much I hated this world. I talked to God, and I said the people here were like foreigners to me. They were so miserable. They were heartless. Their pursuits were worthy of pigs.

They were so busy trying to be their own gods and providers, they had no time for the Lord, and they didn’t receive his blessings. They missed out on the best experience there is: being with the one who loves them most and who will do the most for them. They were making up moral codes that led to disaster.

I started to tell God they were like dogs, but I stopped, because dogs are loyal and altruistic to a fault. People are not much like dogs at all. They are more like rats or monkeys. They are selfish and treacherous. An animal can’t be treacherous. Animals can’t understand the concept of betrayal.

I said people were trashy. They had no class. And God told me that classy people make sacrifices. That is the essence of class. Being nice to your neighbors who throw loud parties and steal your apples. Choosing not to correct snotty strangers in front of their kids. Holding doors for people you know will walk past you without even looking your way.

God is classy. The privilege of class is being better to other people than they are to you and not being infected by them.

I thought about my son. I realized he might have to spend a hundred years here. I felt as though I had pronounced a sentence on him.

I ran back to God and got back into his presence, and suddenly, warmth came back into me. I felt cheerful and optimistic. I wanted to forget everything I had just seen on the web.

I realized how blessed Christians who spend time with God are. We live in a different world that occupies the same space as the rat world. We don’t have to strive as much. We don’t have to play by the same rules. We can have the vexatious people removed from our lives and live in peace.

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were better off in the flames with Yeshua than the men who threw them into the furnace and stayed outside. The men who threw them in were burned to death, but God’s favorites weren’t touched by fire at all.

The most important thing I will teach my son will not be to live by religious rules, and it certainly won’t be how to get ahead by playing the world’s game. It will be to love God and hold onto him like a big down pillow. If he does that, and he listens, everything else will take care of itself. A thousand will fall at his side, and ten thousand at his right hand, but it will not come near him. Even if he does everything wrong by rat standards.

I really, really hate this place. I feel like I live in a comfortable little cottage on the grounds of a hospital for the criminally insane. No matter how pleasant my life is, I will never let myself think the world is anything but a catastrophe.

There but for the Grace of God Waddles You

Why are mediocre skinny people so self-righteous?

Opray Winfrey was some sort of bigwig at Weight Watchers, which is odd, given her lifetime of disastrous failure to control her weight. I often remark on the absurdity of making Oprah Winfrey a diet guru. It’s like asking Amber Heard how to be a great wife.

I have received hundreds of emails advertising OPRAH’S WEIGHT LOSS SECRETS, but I have never received a single email selling weight loss secrets from people like Steve Buscemi or Kate Moss. Why is that?

Oprah started taking drugs to lose weight, and while this was working, she lied and denied using drugs. Then she got caught, and she was out at Weight Watchers, an organization which relies on bad diet food and willpower. Two things that don’t work very well for the vast majority of people. If you’re fat at 20, you will almost certainly be fat at 60, unless you’re one of those people who get fat not because of cravings but because you stuff yourself in spite of not having them.

Those people exist. They’re the ones who drop 70 pounds in mid-life and then say, “I just quit eating so much.”

You can use heroin regularly and never become an addict, if you’re a certain type of person. Some people drink like crazy and retain the ability to quit and never look back. We are not all the same.

I took Ritalin for ADD, and I developed an incredible tolerance. A typical dose is 10 milligrams per day, and I sometimes took 120, not for fun, but to compensate for the tolerance. A lot of Ritalin users become addicted, but I never did. When my doctor switched me to something else, I didn’t have withdrawal symptoms, and I didn’t care whether I ever saw Ritalin again. When I was in college, I drank in a manner I would call “competitive,” but I have never, ever thought, “Man, I need a drink right now.” I have never had the DT’s. I’ve never panicked because I couldn’t get a drink. There have been plenty of periods in my life during which I went over a month without a single drink, just because I didn’t feel the desire.

I have taken all sorts of opioids for pain. When they ran out, they ran out. It meant nothing to me.

I’ve never had any kind of withdrawal symptom from giving up anything.

People are different.

Oprah failed at Weight Watchers, just like many people defeat bariatric surgery. She will probably fail at Ozempic eventually. It comes with problems.

Now she’s in trouble for making some incredible, truthful remarks. Incredible in that they reveal astonishing obtuseness. She is elderly, and she says she has only recently realized thin people are thin because they don’t have intrusive thoughts about food. She sincerely believed they were better people with more character.

She’s right. This is why most thin people are thin, although others can credit cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, and disorders. It’s amazing that she didn’t realize this until she was so old.

There are definitely some people out there who have food cravings and stay thin anyway, because people are different, but let’s be honest. Most thin people are thin because they just don’t find food that interesting.

Thin people who think they like food as much as fat people are like women who think they like sex just as much as men. They’re lying to themselves and everyone else.

I’m a normal man. I can be physically attracted to someone I hate or feel contempt for. I could have extremely satisfying relations with such a person. I am instinctively tempted to be nice to unsuitable people, even though I know I will never let myself be involved with them. I can even be attracted to a cartoon or a photo of a woman who died 50 years ago! Going an hour without a sexual thought is not a possibility. Very few women are like that, but women love to lecture men as though self-control explained the differences in our behavior and thoughts.

Homosexual men commonly have over a thousand partners per year. Lesbian couples often have sexless relationships. Think about that.

My mother didn’t care whether she ate or not. She told me so. She often forgot to eat. Her weight got up to around 110 once, and she was disturbed. I never heard her say something like, “Cheesecake would really hit the spot right now.” She never got in the car to go get her favorite food. She rarely touched desserts. She never went into a kitchen and asked, “When is the food going to be ready?”

Her dad was the same way. He was almost 6’3″, and he was vain about his weight. Whenever he started to pass 180, he just ate less until his weight went back down.

Neither of them were highly disciplined people. My mother was killed by an addiction, which proves she didn’t have the kind of willpower a person like Oprah would need to stay thin.

My dad’s sister was highly disciplined. She ran her house like a Marine barracks. She was a teacher. She was busy all the time with things busy wives do. She was accomplished. She was as big as a whale.

Consider all the thin idiots we know of. Not post-Ozempic thin. Famous people who were thin throughout most of the last century. Charlie Sheen is thin whether or not he’s on drugs. Tom Sizemore wasn’t fat. Andy Dick is skinny. Think of all the thin musicians who can’t stay out of rehab and who keep people waiting in studios for 5 or 6 hours because they have so little character they can’t get out of bed.

I have used cocaine. I thought it was wonderful, but I still didn’t become addicted. Other people become addicted in a day. If cocaine (more accurately, the sensation of cocaine wearing off) made me feel the way it makes those people feel, I would be an addict right now. Same goes for alcohol and other drugs. I would guess I have 40th-percentile willpower. Not enough to save me.

Oprah calls the intrusive thoughts “food noise.” They exist for some people but not others. They are probably the voices of demons. Compulsive behavior comes from demons.

Self-righteous thin people who only maintain discipline in the area of food are criticizing Oprah now because she told the truth. They want to be admired for something they never earned. They’re telling the rest of humanity that people who overeat just aren’t trying. That’s a load. There are people who commit suicide because they want to be thin so badly. People get dangerous surgery that doesn’t work. They go to fat-control resorts. The idea that fat people are not willing to make sacrifices is a canard.

My mother smoked two packs a day and made fun of my dad for eating compulsively, but she died at 61, and he made it to 87. Her problem was much worse than his. He smoked when he was young, and he quit in 8 minutes. He saw a headline about the discovery that smoking caused cancer, he took one cigarette out of a full pack, he smoked it, he threw the pack away, and that was it. Not one cigarette for the remaining half-century of his life.

She tried hypnosis. She tried accupuncture. She took horrible scare classes where they showed people slides of cancerous lungs. She still couldn’t beat nicotine.

There are fat people out there who maintain perfect exercise routines. They keep their houses perfectly. They work hard. Their bills and taxes are always in order. They never drink or take drugs. They never, ever procrastinate. They have exceptional character. They’re still fat, because they face temptation weak-willed thin people don’t face and could never handle.

Look at a photo of men in prison yards. Most are not obese. These are among the weakest-willed people in society, and they have are given starchy, sugary food. Their exercise time is limited. Why aren’t they all obese? Oprah’s critics have an answer, but it makes no sense.

It’s very interesting to see how poorly human beings understand themselves in 2025, after thousands of years of trying. Centuries after the scientific method came into being. We can put a hundred billion (b, not m) transistors on a chip you can lose in your pocket, but we still have no idea how we, ourselves work.

Oprah is an unhappy and unfulfilled person. She has fame and billions, but her personal life is nothing, her career has been selfish and destructive to society, she hasn’t grown up, she doesn’t know God (in fact, she fights Yeshua), and she can’t defeat the most humiliating challenge of her existence. Now when she is finally right about something and has a revelation she should have had when she was 20, people are punishing her for it.

Do you often think about foods you miss? Do you have a hard time putting the fork down? Do you get excited when you go to your favorite restaurant? If not, you can’t put yourself in Oprah’s shoes. And you probably can’t afford them anyway.