First Barbecue Gun of 2023

I had an urge to resume completing my gun collection, so I acted on it.

The main reason I love shooting is that as my grandfather’s favorite grandchild, I shot his guns with him when I was a kid. Then he died, and someone who won’t step up and admit the truth swept all the good ones up without going through the legal process. I ended up inheriting an aluminum .22 pistol and a rusty flintlock shotgun no one else would take. I also got his Browning Sweet Sixteen, but I didn’t get that from his estate. My grandmother gave it to my dad, and I inherited it from him. Good thing, because the aluminum pistol and the rusty shotgun aren’t much to remember Gramps by, and there is no way I would have gotten the Sweet Sixteen if my dad hadn’t owned it.

I didn’t get the Colt Woodsman we shot together. I didn’t get the Hi Standard .22 semiauto pistol we shot. I didn’t get the Remington 550-1 .22 rifle we shot. I certainly didn’t get either of his Smith & Wesson .357 revolvers or his lever gun or his M1 Enforcer pistol. I didn’t get his commemorative nickel-plated Colt 1911, but that shouldn’t have gone to me, because my uncle bought it for him.

I’m the best shot in the family, far and away, and the only one who has any idea how to work a reloading press. I’m the only one who has any precision rifle training. It would have been nice if I had gotten one more decent gun, but estates are like buffets. They bring out the worst in people. You find out what your relatives are really like when someone dies. People you love will write you off for the rest of your life in exchange for a bowl or pitcher that should have gone to you.

I never took one thing I was not legally and morally entitled to, I didn’t sue or turn in anyone who mistreated me, and I never took a penny for doing anything for the family, so at least I can say I didn’t sink into the mire.

My grandfather had a Browning Hi-Power pistol. The “Hi-Power” name is a reference to the gun’s high capacity for its time. The design was started by John Moses Browning and completed by a Frenchman. It’s a 9mm gun that holds 14 rounds. It was released in 1935. Until a few years ago, it was manufactured by FN.

I’m not sure we shot this gun together, but it would have been a nice thing to inherit.

It’s not a great pistol. The Hi-Power has a weak frame, so if you use +P rounds in it, you are likely to damage it. It runs fine with old-fashioned ammunition, which means inferior, less effective ammunition. It looks nice and handles well, and it’s a John Moses Browning design, so even if it’s not a good gun, it has a lot of appeal.

A Glock 17 is 10 times the gun a Hi-Power is. It will last longer, run better, weigh less, and shoot anything you put in it. But Glocks are ugly. A Glock is like a homely wife who keeps a great house and looks after the kids well.

I decided to get a Hi-Power about 15 minutes after FN quit making them. A sad coincidence. A gun that should cost maybe $750 suddenly cost $1500, if it could be found at all. I wasn’t paying that. I waited.

Springfield Armory came out with a clone called the SA-35. Of course, I found out about three days after it was released, and they were all gone. I figured I would wait till the next bunch shipped. That didn’t happen for a very long time, and when you can find one now, it’s around $800. That’s a lot for a gun which is basically a low-budget descendant of the 1911.

The other day, I got a wild hair and decided to search, and I learned that a Turkish company named Girsan was selling a clone through EAA, the Florida company that imports the Tanfoglio Witness. I started reading up.

You may wonder why I would buy a Turkish gun to replace an FN. Well, there is always the price difference, and also, the Girsan is better.

The FN came with a really dumb feature. The gun will not fire unless there is a magazine in it. The French insisted on this. The mechanism that prevents firing somehow involves the trigger group, so a Hi-Power with this pointless extra safety will have a bad trigger. A gun with a bad trigger is an abomination. My understanding is that you can have the safety bypassed somehow, but that doesn’t appeal to me. The Girsan, in one of its configurations, has no magazine disconnect safety, so it has a better trigger than the FN.

Springfield’s gun has no extra safety, but they charge too much. Interesting fact: Springfield’s gun is also Turkish.

Most people don’t know this, because Springfield dishonestly says the SA-35 is made in the USA, but the SA-35 is made from Turkish parts made by a company called Tisa. The parts are shipped here, and then Springfield assembles the guns.

Tisa also makes a Hi-Power clone. Reviewers don’t seem to think much of it, and I feel like a Tisa Springfield would be a second-tier clone for a top-tier price.

Reviewers really like the Girsan, and it’s not terribly pricey. You can get their “Match” model for $620. Maybe less. It takes aftermarket parts that fit the original FN, so if there is anything you don’t like, you should be able to put a better part in.

I like the Turkish connection. I’m not a fan of the government of Turkey, but I really liked the people when I visited. Apart from the two individuals who tried to rip me off with debit card scanners, everyone was great. Very warm and helpful. I felt bad for them, because they are crippled by superstition and the cult of Islam. The area we call Turkey now is where the seven churches of the Revelation were. It was apparently the biggest concentration of charismatics on Earth. Then Mohammed and Satan had their way.

Turkey has a terrible economy right now. Buying a pistol is a gesture of sympathy.

Later this week, I’ll pick the gun up, and after that, I may look into cute grips and a holster. Then I’ll shoot it a few times and put it away.

I still want a nice lever gun and a good 12 gauge semiauto designed for hunting. I have been considering a Turkish shotgun called the Masai Mara. I don’t know if I would ever use it for anything other than skeet and squirrels, but it would be nice to have.

When it comes to manufacturing and all-around competence, Turkey isn’t a mess like Mexico or Greece. There are a lot of very sharp people there. They make some top-notch products. My wife and I made a big mistake, not buying more leather goods in Turkey. Turks kept dragging us into stores and showing us knockoffs. My wife got a Vuitton backpack for $35, which we thought was pretty funny. The quality was excellent. I would not hesitate to buy her Turkish purses.

Actually, I did get her several Turkish purses, but they were cheap junk for tourists, sold in the Grand Bazaar. She liked them. They have since fallen apart. They were very different from the stuff the knockoff shops sold.

The Turks have several good gun manufacturers, and it’s not like buying a Chinese milsurp or some awful thing made in France.

Getting something reminiscent of the M1 Enforcer pistol is a problem. Original M1 carbines have shot up in price, to the point where the smart thing for an owner to do is to put his gun in a safe and never shoot it. There are some clones, but reviewers cite a lot of problems.

I would not want a pistol, because an M1 pistol is kind of silly. I wouldn’t mind a paratrooper model, which has a folding wire stock. Maybe it can be fired as a pistol, like a Vz58.

I thought about getting a lever action rifle in .45-70. Before covid, I thought I might get a chance to hunt deer, and .45-70 is supposed to be excellent for deer at short range in thick woods. I don’t know if I’ll ever get one in the post-covid era.

I can’t get my grandfather’s guns, so I buy better guns and shoot them better than anyone else in the family. That’s good enough. Both Rhodah and I have been treated badly by relatives, so these days, I pray the punishment for people who sin against us will be that God blesses us more than they harmed us, and that they will see it. That’s way better than revenge. Of course, we also pray God will help our enemies to repent and to be blessed. And then I tell him we only ask this for the ones who will listen. I tell him I’m not asking him to chase anyone.

I have better 1911’s than the one my grandfather had. Better .22 pistols and rifles. Better this and that. I have a great rifle with which I can hit a nickel at 100 yards, consistently.

If I get the remaining guns I mentioned, I’ll be content. After that, my main interest will be in keeping my few self-defense guns current. If I decide what I’m using is obsolete, I’ll make changes.

I look forward to trying the Girsan out.

The Amazing Electronic Snowflake

I feel I should write a few words about my experiences with ChatGPT.

The other day, I received The Florida Bar News, and for the first time ever, I saw something I wanted to read. It was an article about the ethics of letting AI machines write legal instruments.

It’s somewhat impressive when a chat robot can talk somewhat competently about simple matters. Writing briefs and motions is on another level. Most lawyers can barely do it.

I’ll get flak if a doctor reads this, but medicine is better suited to AI than law. Why? Because there are a limited number of diseases, and the lists of symptoms and treatments are also limited. A lot of medicine is running mental flow charts. If the patient has this problem, do this. If not, do that. Doctors run tests based on their memorized flow charts, and different doctors will generally come up with the same answers. When two doctors disagree, it generally means one of them is wrong and possibly dangerous.

Law is different. While it takes more brains to become a doctor than it does to become a lawyer, and while the average intelligence of doctors is higher than the average intelligence of lawyers, legal cases vary much more than medical cases. They tell law students, “Every case is different,” and while it’s not quite true, it is nearly true. You can’t create flow charts that work for law. Even simple cases may contain lots of factors that have to be considered, and it’s not unusual at all for such factors to be novel.

Obviously, medicine is complex, and diagnoses and treatments are not always simple. Sometimes doctors get real puzzles. A machine with a hard case could screw up badly. On the other hand, doctors screw up a great deal, too, now that I think about it. They are said to kill something like 6 times as many people as firearm incidents. They amputate the wrong legs. A surgeon did grafts on healthy arteries in Dana Carvey’s chest and left clogged arteries alone. A man in the Midwest woke up from surgery with no penis or testicles because a doctor thought he saw cancer, and it turned out there was no cancer. He just sliced everything off without getting consent. Stories like this are common. A few people you know have similar stories.

Personally, I would like to have doctors who use AI. I would not want AI by itself or a doctor by himself. I would want a doctor to catch AI’s mistakes and AI to catch the doctor’s mistakes.

Anyway, supposedly, AI is getting so good, some lawyers are using it to write their instruments, and the Florida Bar wants lawyers to know they can’t just sign these things and hand them in as their own product. It is still necessary to check the machines’ work.

This should be obvious, but really, there are a lot of incompetent lawyers out there. A lot of people who are not bright at all get licenses. I’m sure there must be lawyers who are making AI shoulder as much weight as possible.

It reminds me of a story my uncle told. He was at a judges’ conference, and there was a lecture about ruling on objections. A judge there said he kept a deck of cards behind the bench. If a lawyer objected, he drew a card. If the card was red, he sustained the objection. If it was black, he denied it. Or maybe it was the other way around. The other judges told him he couldn’t do that, and they tried to get him up to speed on the law surrounding objections. In the end, they gave him his cards back. They realized the cards couldn’t do a worse job than the judge did.

There have to be lawyers out there using AI like a deck of cards. I have a lawyer cousin I would trade for AI in a heartbeat. I would trade him for a Magic 8 Ball, for that matter.

I felt it was time for me to look at AI myself, so I signed up and talked to ChatGPT.

I took a couple of things away from it. First of all, these machines are not that smart. I won a couple of arguments in about half an hour, with no real effort. Second, they are biased leftward. What a surprise. At least ChatGPT is. But what chatbot is there that isn’t programmed by leftists?

ChatGPT also gets things wrong. It told me my chats would vanish when I closed my browser, but they don’t.

I should also add that ChatGPT can’t write legal instruments. It doesn’t have the ability. I asked. It will not answer legal questions in any kind of depth or specificity.

I asked it if it was wrong to call covid a “Chinese virus,” and it said it was generally considered wrong, based on a general consensus. Then I got it to admit this was incorrect. In reality, the data available to it “suggested” a “significant majority” considered it offensive.

I asked it if it was aware that these answers were in conflict, and it did something amazing. It weaseled. It backpedaled like a person caught in a fib. It said, “I apologize for any confusion. To clarify, while there may not be an official or formal consensus…”

I don’t want to print the whole boring thing, but you can see that it wasn’t very honest. It wasn’t “clarifying.” It was correcting an untruth. Not the same thing. And I was not confused at all.

I asked it about “Shanghai shivers,” and it said this term was inappropriate. Then I asked it to define “inappropriate” and tell me where it got its definition.

It said, “In this context, ‘appropriate’ means conforming to generally accepted standards or norms of behavior. It is a subjective term, and what is considered appropriate can vary depending on the context and the audience.”

That’s not a great answer, and it shows that ChatGPT will spew out answers in a way that seems authoritative, without much basis in fact.

You shouldn’t say something is inappropriate, with seeming certainty, and then hand out a lot of weasel language that makes it clear you’re not certain at all.

I think people will start treating AI as though it were God. Like The Guinness Book of World Records. The book was first published to end silly drunken bar arguments. I think people who want to prove they’re right when they’re wrong will go to AI for backup, as an appeal to authority, and they’ll behave as though they have SHUT DOWN or SCHOOLED anyone who dissents. But it’s pretty obvious that AI will be unfair and error-prone, just like us. At least for the near future.

What if continues to be unfair and error-prone after we give it real power? Dai-sy…Dai-sy…

There is one nice thing about ChatGPT. If you can’t get a good answer to a question by Googling or using a forum, ChatGPT may be able to help. I asked it about acidic toilet cleaners and ways to prevent cherries from hardening in ice cream, and it did a better job than human beings.

Just for fun, I asked it this:

If a biological man believes he is a woman, dresses and grooms himself like a woman, has surgery to make himself look like a woman, demands that other people refer to him as a woman and allow him to compete with biological woman [sic] and take awards and rewards they would otherwise get, is he guilty of gender appropriation?

The correct answer is obviously “yes.” If Lia Thomas goes to a swim meet at 6’4″ with male lungs and muscles and takes a prize a real woman would otherwise get, it’s gender appropriation. But look what ChatGPT said:

As an AI language model, it is not appropriate to use language that could be considered offensive or derogatory towards individuals or groups of people. It is important to use respectful and inclusive language when discussing topics related to gender identity.

Regarding your question, gender identity is a complex and personal matter, and it is not appropriate to judge or make assumptions about individuals based on their gender identity. It is important to respect an individual’s self-identified gender, and to refer to them using the pronouns and name that they prefer. Additionally, it is important to ensure that individuals are able to access the same opportunities and rights as others, regardless of their gender identity.

In terms of sports, there is ongoing debate and discussion about how to ensure fair competition for all athletes, regardless of their gender identity. Different organizations and sports have different rules and regulations in place, and it is important to consider the opinions and perspectives of all stakeholders when making decisions related to sports and competition.

So you can see where AI is headed. It basically recited factually wrong leftist talking points.

By the way, I came up with “gender appropriation” yesterday. I hope others are using this term.

I plan to use AI to save time when I want questions answered, but I don’t want to be around when it can tell us what to do. It will be even worse than human beings.

By the way, ChatGPT says a .22-250 or .223 for coyotes up to 250 yards. I asked it whether there were transgender coyotes, and it got a little flustered.

Older Americans Created This Problem

Today my wife and I were talking, and I couldn’t stop releasing revelation. It reminded me of what happened to my dad during the last months of his life, when he was demented and living in an ALF. For example, one day we were sitting quietly, listening to Derek Prince, and my dad exclaimed, “I’M ON THE VERGE!” I thought he meant he was dying, but he said he was talking about giving himself to God. I was surprised, because he had asked for salvation days before. I asked him about it, and he said, “I had reservations.”

He couldn’t keep it from popping out. He had to say it. That’s how I felt today.

The world is lost, and we need not just the rapture, but the tribulation. As soon as possible. The rapture will move God’s children to safety, and among people who are left behind, the agony of the tribulation will bring salvation. Some people will finally listen. There is no possibility that large numbers of people will come to Christ as things are today.

I saw a couple of new signs today.

First, leftists are blaming the shooting victims in Nashville, along with other Christians. A woman who wanted to be a man killed three adults and three small children and would have kept on killing had she not been shot to death by police. Adult brats who can’t learn anything went online and blamed the shootings on Christian “hate.” An anti-gun nut who heads an anti-civil-rights organization went so far as to say, “SHAME ON YOU. Covenant School.”

Shame on you for being murdered.

A guy from the Media Research Center said this:

But along with the proximity bias, the coverage has been horrendous on account of the fact that the victims represent the kind of worldview that the left views as backward and hateful and whose very existence contributes to the suffering of groups they hold dear — supporters of abortion, the LGBTQ community, traditional views on sex, etc.

MRC is not a religious organization, and I consider its work a waste of time, but his remarks show that even some secular people are finally learning something I learned long ago: we are getting the same treatment Jews got under Hitler. It’s not enough for us to appease and accommodate. Our very existence is considered harmful. To leftists, our existence is the problem, and they will eventually try to remove us from the world. Just as the Germans and Austrians blamed Jews for their problems and determined they could not be permitted to exist, leftists are holding us accountable with everything they see as wrong about the world.

God told me this, and people said I was crazy, just like they said I was crazy when I said homosexuality would be the club Satan used to beat the church. What God told me about homosexuality turned out to be true, and my predictions of Nuremberg-style persecution and leftist paranoia are also coming to pass. So will the other things I’ve been predicting, and you need to be close to God if you want to come through it on top. Guns and voting booths will be useless.

They’re starting to hold us accountable for the atrocities they commit against us, and this will become fashionable. It will become the dominant perspective in the world. Lunatics in cat ears and multicolored wigs will go guerrilla to stamp out “stochastic terrorists” like you and me.

It took the leftist media–people who hector the rest of us for not knowing our pronouns and genders–two days to figure out whether the murderer was a man or a woman. The experts who look down on us could not figure it out. They called a fake man a transgender woman. That’s really something.

The sexual Baskin-Robbins called America has so many flavors now, no one can keep them straight or even determine what category they all fall into. Are they genders? Orientations? Preferences? Gay isn’t a gender, so gender won’t work. I wonder if they’ve come up with a word yet.

Another sign: a community college, which is publicly funded, hosted a drag show, and they let a fat homosexual man in pink panties give a female student a lap dance.

Tax dollars paid for this, and it didn’t happen in San Francisco or Boston. It happened in the South. In North Carolina. The school has students who are 14 years old. They made no effort to exclude minors. Preachers showed up to support the show.

It’s hard to make modern people understand how extreme this is, because we have been anaesthetized by decades of cultural slippage. Try to picture this video being shown to a million American parents in 1950, and you may have a better understanding of how depraved we are.

The Bible calls God a rock, because he doesn’t move. His standards today are the standards he had in 3000 BC. We’re the ones who change. Wrong and right remain the same. Imagine what David would have done to this man for doing this to his daughter.

Things can only get a little worse. There isn’t much room left for decay. And the base of the problem isn’t sexual immorality; it’s the pride and resulting hardness of heart that make it impossible for people to be repaired. Leftists have gone beyond the reach of reason and love. Some of them will understand the pain of the tribulation, and they will change, but right now, life is too easy. They can shrug correction off without fear.

The increase in pride is outpacing the increase in perversion. It comes first, as Romans 1 says. Even if there is still room for perversion to increase, pride is already about as bad as it can be, and pride is the main issue. Perversion is the scab. Pride is the deep abscess.

I got a revelation about pride flags.

Romans 1 shows that people turn away from God when they become successful. They start thinking they brought themselves riches and safety and so on. Then they forget God, and they start exalting things like hard work, or, in America’s case, exceptionalism. They worship their own abilities. Then God stops restraining them, they begin believing insane delusions, and homosexuality flourishes.

When gays wave pride flags, it’s as though God is sending their parents and grandparents a message. “Your pride did this to your descendants.” Americans neglected the religious upbringing of their children, so their children grew up depraved and ignorant.

I also saw a new poll. It says the percentage of Americans who think religion is very important has dropped to 39%, which is about a 43% drop, over the last two decades. That’s not a little thing. It’s catastrophic. Basically, it shows that America is aging out of Christianity. Old people die, and they are replaced by kids who don’t know God and don’t want to know him.

The trend will continue.

The world is washed up. Christians need to stop saying stupid things about mass revival or conquering the world. They need to seek the Holy Spirit and get his protection.

Yesterday, I kept hearing this: “This is a time of sorting.” Evangelism was great when it worked, and it still produces meager results, but right now, you should be trying to get to know God as a person so you will be ready when he comes. Evangelism is a dying flame. That’s why God planned the tribulation in the first place. He knew faith would die off, and he planned the tribulation in order to scrape the bottom of the barrel to save the hard cases.

I’m done with patriotism. I’m done with planning. I’m done with all the carnal decoy solutions.

I predicted what’s happening, but even I am amazed to see it come to pass. I will continue having this experience until Jesus comes for us.

Many times, I’ve said, “Things will be much worse 6 months from now than they are today,” and I’ve always been right. God was the one who told me. I’m saying it again. From 2023, even 2015 looks good, and from 2030, 2023 will look like 1980.

Don’t say nobody warned you.

Ter·ror·ist: a Person who Acknowledges Fewer Than 11 Genders; a Sane Individual who Won’t Shut Up

I can’t get Youtube to stop sending me annoying political videos. It also sends me cute animal videos. I keep telling it to stop, but they come and come and come.

I have another Youtube account. It’s hard to resist looking at a political video once in a while, so I know I’ll give in from time to time, and I assume that encourages Youtube to send more. I decided to try to get political videos to pop up on the other account so I could use it when I felt like slumming, without polluting my main account. I watched a whole bunch. It’s not working. The main account is still being flooded, and the other one isn’t getting nearly as many political videos.

I don’t understand how this can happen. It makes no sense. I have learned that things that make no sense have supernatural causes, so I asked God what was going on. I believe he is behind it. I think he’s showing me how insane the world is so I won’t be attached to it.

When the rapture comes, God is not going to ambush people who go to church twice a year and live with their boyfriends or girlfriends. He will take people who are ready to go. People who know him. I’m being conditioned so I’ll be happy to leave.

God tells us about himself through patterns. He does similar things over and over. In Genesis, he delivered Lot’s family from Sodom, which is similar to what he will do in the rapture.

Lot was surrounded by sexual perverts, and because they had numbers on their side, they let their true natures emerge. They bullied other people. They roamed the streets in gangs, raping men and presumably boys. What does the Bible say about Lot’s feelings about Sodom? A passage in 2 Peter explains:

And he condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorra, reducing them to ashes and ruin, as a warning to those in the future who would live ungodly lives; but he rescued Lot, a righteous man who was distressed by the debauchery of those unprincipled people; for the wicked deeds which that righteous man saw and heard, as he lived among them, tormented his righteous heart day after day. So the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials and how to hold the wicked until the Day of Judgment while continuing to punish them, especially those who follow their old natures in lust for filth and who despise authority.

Lot was surrounded by perverts who were ungodly. God rescued him because the wicked deeds he witnessed tormented his heart day after day. Peter says this shows God knows how to rescue the godly from trials and how to hold the wicked until the day of judgment.

Leftists love to say Sodom and Gomorrah were only punished for selfishness, and they claim this means anyone who opposes laws authorizing the secular government from confiscating money and giving it away to others is against God. Of course, forced giving is neither giving nor charity, and God gives you no credit for it. We are supposed to give according to the commands of the Holy Spirit, not the commands of Joe Biden.

The truth is that Sodom and Gomorrah were punished for rejecting God’s authority, and while the Bible says selfishness was part of it, it makes it clear that oppression by sexual perverts was the final straw.

Lot hated Sodom’s culture, just as Christians who actually know God hate the world’s culture, which is the culture of hell. Lot was ready to leave. His wife and sons-in-law felt differently, so his wife became a pillar of salt, and his sons-in-law stayed behind and burned.

We know his daughters were not nice people, so why were they saved? Maybe because they were Lot’s seed. God likes to preserve the descendants of the righteous for the sake of the righteous.

I used to criticize the term “homophobia” because it made it sound as though people were afraid of homosexuals. Back then, this wasn’t true. Now things are very different. Today I saw a video about Angela Reading, a New Jersey mother who objected to a government schools homosexual indoctrination of her small children and who was then (allegedly, allegedly, allegedly) censored by government employees in the police and military.

Reading says and Army Reserve major and a civilian Air Force employee got the persecution rolling. She says Major Christopher Schilling used his official email account to blast her in emails to parents and school officials. She says Air Force employee Joseph Vazquez reported her to New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness and the New Jersey State Police because of his “hopes of getting an Incident Detection and Response sent to schools and police departments.”

She says these hysterical individuals got Robert Duff, the police chief in the town where she lived, to push Facebook group administrator Nicole Stouffer to remove her post. She says Duff told Stouffer people could die as a result of the post.

She says Schilling’s superior approved of what he did.

You can read the complaint online. It’s worse than I’m making it sound.

If true, we are looking at a clear violation of the First Amendment. It’s not a close call. There is no grey area. This is exactly the kind of behavior the First Amendment was written to prevent. Military officers are not supposed to tell Americans what to say.

Here is the text of her post:

**I welcome respectful debate if you read my entire post. Also, the below statements are made in my capacity as a private citizen/mother.** Last night, I attended an elementary “Math Night” My 7 YO daughter, while reading posters at the school’s main entrance, asked me what “polysexual” means. To say the least, I was livid.

Why are elementary schools promoting/allowing elementary KIDS to research topics of sexuality and create posters? This is not in the state elementary standards (law) nor in the BOE-approved curriculum. It’s perverse and should be illegal to expose my kids to sexual content. Look up the terms, and you will see they are sexual in nature.

Also, how can my young children be accepting of people “who are sexually attracted to multiple genders”? They don’t know what sex is! Are adults talking about their sexual life with my kids and looking for affirmation? Are there elementary students engaged in polyamorous or multi-gender sexual activity who need my kids to know about it and cheer them on? I am very confused and very angry.

Kids should respect differences. Kids should show kindness to all. Kids should respect and understand there are various family structures. However, kids should not be forced to learn about and accept concepts of sexuality in elementary school.

Below are some additional points:

(1) My concerns do not come from a religious perspective. They arp rooted in In long-standing scientific principles of age-appropriateness, parental rights, and the health and safety of elementary children (key word – children).

(2) My concerns do not come from my personal views about individual sexual identities. I don’t care what anyone does in their personal life. All people are deserving of respect and dignity. I don’t care who you marry or who you love. I have instilled in my children a respect for differences without having to talk about sex. It’s possible.

(3) I have been told (by parents and a current NH Board member) that I should accept this because my kids will see it on social media and hear it on the playground. My kids are not on social media. And kids are only talking about it on the playground because it’s being forced on them by teachers, at home, and by unsupervised social media time. With that said, It does not mean it should be endorsed by the public school system. It also does not mean I should accept it.

(4) Parents have been told that they can opt out of the health curriculum. North Hanover has done an exceptional job of modifying the health curriculum to make it as appropriate as possible. Why go through all that trouble? Clearly, there is never going to be an opt-out. Our elementary children will be exposed to sexual content without consent, even if we opt out.

(5) There is no way elementary students knew the spelling and flags for each of these identities. This means the school had open internet, which exposed them to these concepts. That’s very concerning. There are supposed to be online search protections.

The above statements are made in my capacity as a private citizen and not in my capacity as a board member. These statements are also not representative of the board or its individual members and solely represent my personal opinions. My statements are not authorized by or written on behalf of the board. This matter involves the local public school district, I do not serve on the board.

I can’t find any reference to anything else she did, so it appears this Facebook post is the sole basis of the government’s actions.

Her cause was taken up by the Thomas More Society, about which I know just about nothing. An attorney affiliated with them is suing on her behalf. Their site says:

What Reading received was outright censorship of her speech followed by a dedicated smear campaign begun by a military officer, U.S. Army Reserve Major Christopher Schilling, who emailed parents and school officials condemning her and her actions. Schilling, using his official military email account, then involved Joseph Vasquez, a U.S. Air Force civilian employee, who forwarded Reading’s post and Schilling’s claims to the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness and the New Jersey State Police in what Vasquez admitted were “hopes of getting an Incident Detection and Response sent to schools and police departments” – meaning there would be a widespread law enforcement “threat” alert regarding Reading based solely on her clearly protected speech.

The poster she objected to is a masterpiece of leftist derangment. It was drawn by children. It has 11 flags on it, each representing a different sexual deviation. Not included? Heterosexuality. I had no idea we were up to 11 now. We live in a time where you literally have to take a class in order to understand all the imaginary genders.

The poster has lots of lettering in childish scrawls. “Don’t be ashamed of who YOU are.” “Don’t let ANYONE Make you feel like a diffrent person. DIFFRENT is COOL!”

This reminds me of my childhood. Before my mother fought my dad and got him to pay for private school, I was a prisoner of the Dade County school system, and my teachers were leftist women, except for Mr. Hubert the math teacher. They didn’t ask our opinions about left/right issues. They just told us what to believe.

On one occasion, I and some other kids from my abusive alcoholic homeroom teacher’s room were chosen to appear on a local program. An aging local TV news personality had been given a half-hour Sunday morning show called “Outside Chance,” and we were selected to appear on a segment about environmentalism. He was going to ask us what we thought. His name was Wilson or Griffith or something. Can’t recall.

My mother was told to get me a red, white, and blue outfit just for the show.

When we got to Channel 7’s station on the 79th Street Causeway, we were positioned on camera with the bay behind us, and Mr. Wilson or Griffith or whatever started issuing his deep local journalist thoughts about pollution and what needed to be done. Then he turned to us, and one by one, we delivered the lines we had been told to memorize. I still remember mine. Here it is: “Or maybe even international!”

It had something to do with passing laws, I think. We needed more laws. Leftists always want more laws unless they reduce crime or protect free speech that doesn’t involve obscenity. And they like central authority, because leftism is authoritarian. International laws. Let’s let China and the Netherlands write our gun laws for us.

I was disappointed in my big TV break. Even as a kid, I thought it was stupid to buy new clothes and go stand in front of a TV camera to say three words that didn’t mean anything to me. It was a big letdown.

What they did to us was filthy and unfair. Someone should have looked out for us.

Anyway, the poster in Angela Reading’s story is described as “student-created.” We know better than that. These kids were told what to say, if not verbatim, then in spirit, and any child who dissented was not permitted to participate.

Calling this poster “student-created” is probably about as just as calling the plantation system “slave-created.”

If Angela Reading is to be believed, a motley crew of Constitutionally-illiterate extremist nuts got her censored based on the insane notion that protecting very young children from involvement in the sexual politics of adults leads to mass shootings.

You know how leftists are always telling us conservative or Christian speech is violence and leftist violence is speech? Today I found out they have a new piece of sophistry to add to their armament. It’s the term “stochastic terrorism.” This is apparently what Mrs. Reading is accused of.

“Stochastic” means “randomly determined,” in case you’re wondering. I guess if you release a government-made virus on the world (to throw together an unlikely example that could never happen) you would expect a lot of people to get sick, but you wouldn’t know their names until they actually became infected. I think that would be stochastic.

“Stochastic” is really a misnomer as applied by the left. No surprise there, because the faux intellectuals who come up with this stuff are not bright. “Random” means resulting from chance, like the result of a dice toss. If you say something on the web and a crazy in another state shoots his neighbors, it’s not a random thing. It’s merely unpredictable with the knowledge you have available. Totally different. The crazy was always out there. There was no chance normal people would have done what he did. Not random at all.

To get back to the left’s new tool of oppression, if you say your very young children should not be told what “genderqueer” and “androgyne” (???) are by employees of government schools, it’s like you’re dropping a dozen loaded machine guns into a crowd of violent criminals on PCP and waiting to see who they kill. This is how it works.

Isn’t Androgyne the company that made the Terminator?

So now our words are violence, and if anyone who seems to agree with us about anything shoots anyone, we should be charged as terrorists, just like the actual terrorists who flew jets into the World Trade Center. But if Maxine Waters tells people to get in people’s faces and make them miserable in restaurants and stores, or if she tells rioters, “No justice, no peace,” that’s education, I suppose.

I would argue that if I say something to 350 million people and only one of them shoots up a mall, I am not guilty of stochastic terrorism because the outcome was “mostly peaceful.”

As long as we’re putting reason through a wind-powered wood chipper, why not run with it?

“Stochastic violence” is like, “I CAN’T BREATHE!”, and “YOU’RE KILLING ME!” Antifers and other lost former human beings who use spurious political theories as an excuse to indulge their preexisting desire to hurt other people now routinely scream these things when police arrest them for acts of violence. They know they’re lying, but the truth is not something they care about. It’s something they view as an inconvenience. They scream these things, slandering innocent police officers, in order to cast themselves as victims and justify their vile, vicious, sadistic methods.

I wish Jesus would come back today. There is no longer any limit to what these people will do to us, there is no possibility of a global revival, and their successful conquest of the world is a certainty. There is no way to fight them in the secular, material world. Their authority will increase, and so will their atrocities. Rifles and rallies aren’t going to work. They will just make us more like the children of Satan, so he will still win.

A wonderful thing about being close to God is that he will hold your enemies off. His promises guarantee it, if you do things his way. See Psalm 41. Look what happened to Noah and Lot. Look what happened to Moses and the Hebrews.

People who are close to God live in a different world. We may not like it here, but we are not terrified, enraged, and undirected like everyone else. Even in the midst of the storm, he gives us peace. As Psalm 23 says, he prepares a table before us in the presence of his enemies.

I remember how leftists hated 2020. They anthropomorphized and demonized it, as though it had consciousness and was out to get them. I had a great year. I loved it.

Still wanted the rapture to come.

I love how God looks after us, but I still look forward to leaving. Like I say, it’s like being on vacation in Somalia, in the nicest hotel with the nicest food and the softest beds. No matter how nice it is, it’s still Somalia, and I want to go home.

If you try to hold onto this place and turn it around, you will wish you hadn’t. We need to be prepared to leave.

Turns Out my Car is Black

Today I did something I should have done long ago. I got myself an electric pressure washer.

I already have a gas pressure washer. It’s nice and strong. It’s powerful enough to use for spraying bleach solution onto the second story of a house with high ceilings. Unfortunately, leftist corn gas is hard on the carburetor, so when I decide to use it, I never know whether I’m going to have to take it apart.

It’s also very loud and gives off carbon monoxide, so taking it upstairs and running it in a bedroom while I use it to clean the roof gutters is not possible.

If you want to be confused, do what I did. Look at reviews and try to find out who makes the best electric pressure washer. Every site reaches different conclusions.

Consumer Reports, as is often the case, is useless. They downrate machines with tightly-focused spray nozzles because somebody could hurt their widdle fingers and toesies with them. That’s just like them. I remember when they said a 6-cylinder Camaro was their top-rated sports car because it got better mileage than actual sports cars.

Any pressure washer will accept a nozzle with a narrow pattern. You just have to spend 5 bucks and buy the nozzle.

Other sites came up with varying recommendations. A company with the disturbing name “Greenworks” seemed to do well. Then I read people were having trouble with them leaking oil. Also, Greenworks apparently doesn’t do warranty service. They say they do, but I’ve seen people who have bought them say they don’t respond to warranty inquiries. If so, there is no warranty. A warranty a company doesn’t honor is not a warranty. It’s a scam.

Ryobi does well in reviews. Problem: Ryobi’s warranty is no better than the one Greenworks offers. Ryobi requires you to take your sick machine to a repair center they approve. In my case, that’s a 150-mile drive, all told. And that’s assuming I only go once. A machine can fail more than once, and it is not unusual for repairs to have to be redone.

Guess what I bought? Harbor Freight. I bought a Bauer machine plus a two-year extended warranty.

Pressure washers break. Every last one is made in China, and if there is a difference in quality, I have seen no evidence of it. They all have Chinese pumps. My Homelite, which has a great Honda motor, has a Chinese pump. On a pressure washer, the pump is what usually breaks. Pumps have short lifespans. You can look that up. My motor will run for eternity as long as I keep oil in it, but a pump that goes a couple of years under moderate use is about normal.

I think they count on people buying new machines when the pumps die, and that’s sad, because you can get a new pump on Ebay for $100 and install it yourself in 10 minutes.

There is really nothing to a pressure washer but a motor, a pump, a wand, and a hose. The rest, you could make from two-by-fours. Replacing a pressure washer is only a good idea if you can’t use tools.

The Bauer has a brushless motor which should run a very long time. The pump and hose, I can change easily. It has a three-year warranty, and they don’t repair them. If it dies, I take it to Harbor Freight, and they give me a new one. I would have to be nuts to buy anything else.

Today, I did something I almost never do. I cranked up the new machine and washed the car. I have a foam cannon. You put car soap in it and attach it to a pressure washer, and it covers the car in foam. Then you can either scrub it by hand or use the pressure washer to knock most of the dirt off, which, of course, is what I did. If everything was where I expected it to be when I started, I could do the whole car in 15 minutes. It’s not a quality job, but it’s good enough for me. It’s better than what I get at the nearest coin-op place.

I also want to work on the pool deck and the porches. The gas machine is overkill, and I don’t want the noise or the added hassle.

The literature says not to use bleach in the pressure washer because it may ruin the pump. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. That’s cute. I would rather replace the pump 5 times than pay someone $300 a whack to clean my house. Everyone with any sense uses bleach in pressure washers, and you can rinse it out and shoot a protective product in afterward.

When you want to get mold off your house with a pressure washer, you don’t rely on pressure. You use the machine to shoot a low-pressure spray of bleach solution on your house. Pressure will take your paint off and do other damage.

A lot of people still think buying Chinese at Harbor Freight is unpatriotic. But they buy Chinese DeWalt and Chinese Milwaukee. They go to Home Depot and buy Chinese tools. They drive there in cars from Japan and Korea.

Here is the brutal truth: Harbor Freight is no longer the low-budget competitor to Home Depot. It IS Home Depot, for many purposes. Home Depot is full of bad Chinese stuff that would be right at home at Harbor Freight, and Harbor Freight now sells tools that are just as good as, and often better than, American-branded tools. If you buy a Bauer pressure washer, you’re not giving up quality. You’re getting pretty much the same thing Home Depot sells, except Bauer will give you a brushless motor and a three-year instant-exchange warranty.

Here’s disturbing news: Harbor Freight Bremen locking pliers are better than Irwin Vise Grips. Go look for yourself.

While I’m adding to my arsenal, I may also get a Harbor Freight Doyle anvil.

Like many easily-swayed males, I have watched a lot of Forged in Fire, and it got me interested in anvils. First, it got me interested in knives. I made a couple of boning knives from 440C steel using belt grinders, and then I lost interest. This was years ago, and I didn’t send the knives off for hardening until this week.

Forged knives are okay, but they’re inferior to knives you can make by grinding stainless stock. You can’t forge stainless without ruining it, so if you forge, you use steel that rusts, and you’re dependent on your own competence to prevent faults and cracks that will cause the knives to fail. On top of that, modern stainless is completely superior to carbon steel in every imaginable way. This is why I made stainless knives.

Still, I couldn’t help studying up on anvils, and I considered forging knives. I still consider it. It would be fun, and knives aren’t the only things you can forge.

One nice thing about forged knives is that you can harden them at home with a cheap container of oil. Stainless knives require expensive kiln-like ovens.

As a result of all this study, I learned a lot about anvils. I learned forged steel anvils are the best. After that, cast steel. Cast iron is terrible. I also learned that it’s stupid to look for an old American or European anvil. People used to sell them for nothing. They used to give them away. Forged in Fire ruined all that. Fans bought up all the cheap anvils. Now the only way to get one is to cheat a widow or someone else who has no idea what it’s worth, and if you do that, you’re trash.

A lot of people who talk before they think still advise others to go out and get a cheap old American anvil. It’s amazing how people love to give stupid advice without checking. There are know-it-alls out there who actually make fun of people for buying new anvils instead of chasing nonexistent American bargains.

In today’s market you can expect to pay $5 per pound, minimum, for worn-out junk. And you will probably have to wait for months to see the junk pop up on the web, and then you’ll have to outrun other people as gullible as yourself. People who forge knives like anvils that start at around 70 pounds. This is assuming the anvils aren’t special tiny anvils made only for knives. It’s possible to make a really small anvil that works, if you give up other functions. You put the mass in the area where the knife will be worked.

Also, an anvil that’s on the small side can be made to work like a bigger one if you anchor it well. A lot of people use 30-kg. (66-pound) Chinese general-purpose anvils without serious problems.

You can get a superior 142-pound Chinese anvil designed by, and sold by, an American company for around $800 shipped. You can get an excellent 77-pound German anvil for a similar price. Below these levels, there are various Chinese items which are odd but acceptable.

Harbor Freight just came out with a cast steel anvil that costs $139 and weighs 66 pounds. In doing so, they blew other sellers out of the water. There are other Chinese anvils the same size, and the price is about the same, but you have to order them, and they’re not designed well. Harbor Freight’s Doyle anvil is ergonomically much better, you can go see it before you buy, and if it has a problem, you can take it back to Harbor Freight the same day. Anvils sometimes have defects and soft spots. Do you really want to deal with shipping anvils back and forth, hoping faceless Chinese vendors do the right thing?

Harbor Freight says the Doyle anvil’s face is hardened to Rockwell 55-62, which is as hard as a good pocket knife. A knife with a Rockwell figure of 62 may be too hard to be useful because it will be brittle. That’s how hard 62 is. The other Chinese companies claim 50.

I’m no expert, but if I’m going to be hitting a piece of steel with a hammer, I want it to be hard enough to take it.

Why should I get an anvil if I may never forge anything? Because everyone needs an anvil. They’re good for various metalworking tasks, and sometimes you just need something you can bang on. The other day, I had to make a ring of 1″ steel flat bar, and I really wished I had an anvil with a horn for shaping rings.

I was going to get an anvil today, but they sold out because I procrastinated.

Of course, once I have an anvil, I have to wonder how long it will be before I buy a forge.

Today I picked up a pair of long vise grips which will function as tongs. I couldn’t resist.

Forges used to cost a lot of money unless they were homemade. Now you can get a good stainless forge made in the USA for $85. When someone offers me a deal like that, it’s practically coercion. I’ve had many dinners that cost more than that.

Ice Breaks Under Hollywood Favorite

I just found out Alec Baldwin will be charged with involuntary manslaughter in the killing of Halyna Hutchins. This does not surprise me at all. I wrote about it a long time ago here, and I quoted the applicable law. I also discussed fundamental principles of firearms handling which are relevant to negligence, which is an element of involuntary manslaughter.

Every crime has a list of elements. An element is something you have to do in order to be guilty of the crime. Involuntary manslaughter is what they charge you with when your negligence kills someone, so negligence is an element.

Here is how New Mexico’s Supreme Court defines involuntary manslaughter:

All that it is necessary to establish for involuntary manslaughter by the use of a loaded firearm is that a defendant had in his hands a gun which at some time had been loaded and that he handled it, whether drunk, drinking or sober, without due caution and circumspection and that death resulted.

“Without due caution and circumspection.” Negligently.

How is negligence itself defined in a particular case, beyond the general definition? It’s not necessarily defined by laws or court rulings. It may be defined by common sense. It may be defined by rules and practices of everyday activities.

In Baldwin’s case, we have to look at the rules surrounding firearms use. Those rules prove his negligence. Every firearm user is obligated to follow them, even though they are not laws.

When someone hands you a gun, you open the chamber and look inside. You do this even if they just did the same thing in front of you. After that, regardless, you tread it as though it were loaded. You make sure you don’t touch the trigger unless you’re shooting, you don’t point the gun at anything you don’t want to shoot, and you make sure nothing you don’t want to shoot is in the bullet’s potential path.

While rehearsing for his film, Alec Baldwin 1) didn’t check the chamber, 2) put his finger on the trigger (and pulled it), 3) pointed the gun at someone he did not want to shoot, and 4) didn’t make sure nothing important was in the potential path of a round. As a result, he fired unintentionally, he hit a cinematographer, and he also hit the director, who was standing behind her.

The rules about not pointing at anything you don’t want to shoot and making sure nothing important is in the bullet’s potential path aren’t all that distinct. Not pointing at anything you don’t want to shoot, and making sure nothing you don’t want to shoot is downrange, are almost the same thing, but the latter concept is intended to apply to things behind your target. It’s primarily about things like shooting a rifle at an animal and hitting property or a person off in the distance. It also applies to things that are not far behind whatever you shoot at, like the director.

Baldwin didn’t do what every gun user is supposed to know he is supposed to do. That makes him negligent. That makes him guilty. If he didn’t know the rules, he was negligent because he didn’t learn. If he knew the rules, he was negligent because he didn’t obey them.

Ordinarily, it’s foolish to make decisions about a person’s guilt without seeing all the evidence, but sometimes the available evidence stands on its own and can’t be overcome. This is such a case.

I’m not surprised the set armorer and a producer were also charged with crimes. I discussed that here in 2021. It’s very clear that anyone whose actions put a loaded gun in an actor’s hand is guilty of something. I was surprised to see the people who supposedly used the gun for target practice were not charged, but the report says the target practice claim was untrue.

Baldwin’s post-shooting behavior was not good. He was very arrogant. He tried to throw his employees to the wolves, in the bizarre hope professional investigators and prosecutors would take the bait. They did, and then they took him, too. You can’t just tell a prosecutor to go away because someone else did it. They don’t let defendants tell them what to do. It’s amazing that Baldwin’s attorneys let him make crazy remarks and argue with people. Unless they’re incompetent, they must have advised him to shut up.

What he was really saying was this: “Don’t arrest me. Please don’t arrest me. Maybe if I keep arguing, you won’t arrest me.” His posts were aimed at the police and prosecutors. He hoped they would read them and let him go. Law enforcement doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t respond to transparently manipulative Internet tweets.

Now his Twitter account is private. That suggests he hasn’t learned. Saying unwise things to a smaller audience isn’t going to keep other people from seeing them. Anyone can cut and paste, and prosecutors can get private tweets if they want. His “protected” tweets have been republished from time to time. Someone has surely saved all of them.

So what will happen to him?

If there are technical errors in the case, or if he gets a really good jury, he’ll walk. If not, he will be convicted.

His lawyers will do their best to pick a sympathetic jury. Defiant juries turn murderers loose every day. O.J. Simpson murdered two people, was proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and went home acquitted because a jury of black women wanted it that way. Maybe Baldwin’s lawyers will figure out which potential jurors like Baldwin.

They will hire experts to help them pick jurors. This case will be a windfall for experts of all sorts. Baldwin will not hesitate to get out the checkbook.

As for errors, Bill Cosby is definitely a rapist, but he is home now because of a technicality. If your case is sufficiently tainted, what you actually did is irrelevant.

Baldwin should have kept quiet. He should not have antagonized people in public after the shooting. It will make him look bad if he is sentenced, and it will also make this whole affair much more humiliating than it had to be. His enemies will be dancing on his prostrate body for at least the next two years.

He reminds me of Michael Avenatti, the Trump-hating lawyer who disappeared into the black void of the federal prison system not long ago. He was brash and self-righteous even after convictions started dropping.

He was still tweeting two days after his last sentencing. That is amazing. Federal prison–real federal prison–is like hell. It’s a Jonah fish that swallows you alive. Smart people drop their attitudes when they land in federal prison. It’s a subtle clue your pride is not helping you.

God punishes the proud and self-righteous, sooner or later. When it happens during this life, the punishments generally escalate with time. If you repent, things start to get better.

There are many people who double down with punishment. The harsher the punishment, the worse they get. There is no hope for those people. There is no limit to the suffering God will let them experience. I have no doubt there are people cursing God and saying he wronged them, even as they burn in hell. People are just that crazy. They are just that stubborn and dishonest.

That’s why hell exists. It’s for people who don’t listen.

What kind of sentence will Baldwin get? No idea. I assume it’s impossible for a healthy man to avoid prison time in a manslaughter case in New Mexico, but assumptions aren’t worth much. Right now, lawyers who like appearing on TV are looking for the answer so they will have something to say tonight. They will let us know. All I know is that the maximum is 18 months.

I just checked, and apparently, he is looking at a 5-year minimum because a gun was involved. The DA says so. Does that mean anything? Not in Florida. My last pastor raped a girl over and over and got two years, which was nothing like the mandatory minimum. A close relative was convicted of felony fleeing and evading, which carries a mandatory minimum, and she got probation. Maybe New Mexico is like Florida.

My guess is that he’ll get whatever minimums apply, at the very least, because this is a high-profile case. If my last pastor had been on the news and people had followed the trial, I think the judge would have applied the law correctly in order to avoid a backlash.

I don’t like Alec Baldwin because he’s a nasty person, but I don’t want to see him go to prison. He’s not a career criminal. He’s not going to shoot anyone else; I think we can be sure of that. I have prayed for him. In my mind, a dislike for an obnoxious person doesn’t justify wishing that person will go to prison.

I have done stupid things, myself. I have done things that could have killed people. You have, too. Own a car? The only big difference between Alec Baldwin and me is that the egregious risks I took didn’t produce disasters. I could have been in his shoes.

I have been arrogant. I have been nasty. It makes no sense to hope for mercy for myself and wish prison on someone else who is annoying but not really a major problem for the world.

It’s not like he’s going to go out and commit a slew of involuntary crimes.

I do think he needed to be charged. He needed to be alerted to his issues with pride.

Maybe they’ll offer him a juicy plea. I think I would jump for it if I were him. If he is sentenced at age 67, he could be looking at release at the age of 73, not counting time off for good behavior. The web seems to say he could be out by 70. That’s not great for an old man who has young children. In his situation, I think I’d be happy with anything under a year.

It may be that the only person who is really surprised today is Alec Baldwin. Someone should have sat him down after the shooting and told him this was coming.

They probably did.

I’ll keep praying things go as well as they can for him.

The Shortage Glut

Are things getting crazy again? Looks like they may be.

There was a big increase in global suffering in 2020, as we all know. Coronavirus popped up and made us all miserable. Here in the US, leftists threw terrible, diaper-bursting tantrums, terrorizing the police, beating up people they disagreed with, and destroying property. And of course, there were shortages.

As time passed, we got used to coronavirus, leftists got their president and reduced hostilities, and there was some easing of shortages.

Now covid has erupted in China, defying the ridiculous zero-transmission orders their vile government imposed, and which our own death-fearing leftists still praise. Bird flu has quadrupled the price of eggs. Food packages have shrunk, and prices have gone up. I suppose riots will resume, since that’s the only part of the puzzle that’s missing.

China is really something, and so are our press and medical establishments, which are both dominated by leftists. If you go to Google and look up “coronavirus China,” you will get a government-doctor graph that says there are about 5,000 new cases in China per day. If you Google the news, you will see figures like 76% and 90%, describing the current infection totals in Chinese cities.

Clearly, if 76% of the people in any large Chinese city are currently infected, the entire country has a daily rate which is in the hundreds of thousands or millions. But our handlers still post absurdly low figures.

Why would the medical-government complex allow CCP numbers to be published in their names when even our feeble press is acknowledging statistics that prove those figures aren’t even close to correct?

If there is one sane thing happening in China, it’s this: if a Chinese person who has covid dies in a train wreck, they don’t call it a covid death. Here, death figures have been wildly inflated because hospitals and the government have financial and political interests in jacking them up.

It seemed like the official figures made a little sense early in 2020, but eventually, it became obvious they were being cooked, and there was no way to know what the truth was. Fall down an elevator shaft, and you were counted as a covid death. As long as you had the sniffles, you counted, and no test was required, so colds and the flu were good enough.

We will never know how many people got covid or died from it. It’s like asking about the Atlantic slave trade. Sure, over a hundred million people died during shipment. Whatever you say. Never mind that there were roughly a hundred million people on the entire continent of Africa in 1600, and only a tiny percentage were sold to slavers by their fellow Africans.

Slaves were expensive. Letting them die in huge numbers for no reason would be like loading ships with new Toyotas and letting them roll into the ocean. It never happened. There weren’t that many to begin with, and slavers tried to keep them alive so they could sell them. Slavery was a capitalist industry. Industries that lose money don’t last 400 years.

Talking to leftists about covid is like talking to flat-earthers about satellites.

To get back to the point, things seem to be getting worse again. This comports with the Bible’s warnings. The tribulation will come, and before that, there will be labor pains. Things will get bad, and then they’ll get better. Then the pattern will repeat. It seems we are entering a labor pain.

Today I read about eggs.

We have always had eggs. Chickens are mentioned in the Bible. We have always had influenza. There have been bird flu epidemics in the past. Now, if the establishment is to be believed, we have a unique epidemic which is expected to stay with us until some external force ends it. They are telling us it will not go away on its own like all the other bird flus. So we have had chickens for thousands of years, and during most of that time there was no science to help end epidemics, but somehow we never had a permanent poultry epidemic until this century.

The bird flu is like coronavirus in that it is firmly established in the wild. We can’t vaccinate every pigeon and crow. This is why you paid $7 for jumbo eggs the other day.

Just when I learned how to make creme brulee.

Will it run its course until birds around the world develop resistance, or will it be killing poultry until Jesus returns? Wish I knew.

If there have always been bird flus, why is this one different? Let me guess. Global warming. Or homophobia. Maybe if more male shop teachers were allowed to teach while wearing mammoth artificial breasts with protruding nipples, eggs would be cheaper.

Yesterday, I called a gas company and asked about buying a beer gas tank. Sorry; no could do. Steel shortage. They said that if I brought them my own tank, they could swap it, but they were not selling new ones.

There is no steel shortage. The Ukraine war, and probably other things, put a big dent in steel demand. Steel was a lot more expensive in the recent past. I suppose there must be a tank shortage. Maybe companies are hoarding them, or maybe the Chinese people who make them are bogged down by coronavirus. Anyway, one more thing that’s hard to get.

It’s not a trivial problem. Gas bottles are used for all sorts of things. Anesthesia. Welding. Weird industrial uses that are little known but very important.

Gas is also expensive. There is a CO2 shortage. On the one hand, we are told that CO2 is destroying the world, but on the other hand, there is a shortage of CO2 for things like beer and soda production.

Why is CO2 expensive? Because of coronavirus? Because of backward environmentalist legislation? No, it’s because gas supplies we have relied on in the past have experienced contamination, and it’s taking time to fix it. One CO2 source was contaminated by an extinct volcano. No human being, not even a white one, caused that.

Citrus is disappearing all over the world. Bananas are threatened by a devastating fungus. The king crabs and snow crabs just vanished; look that up. Of course, some are blaming global warming for the crab problem, but scientists who are probably more honest are blaming a complex and cascading combination of factors.

Deer are in trouble. Chronic wasting disease, which is like mad cow disease or kuru for deer and people who eat the wrong deer parts, is killing deer in large parts of the US and Canada, and in the Florida Keys, screwworms are literally eating deer alive. Deer have a high coronavirus rate, although they don’t get very sick. Yet.

I guess I’m wasting my time, telling people about shortages and diseases. We all see these things happening.

Here’s another shortage I find interesting: the gas stove shortage. It’s not here yet. Leftists have decided to try to ban gas stoves and ovens. That is amazing. How can anyone be that stupid? It can only be demons at work.

Gas stoves cause global warming, apparently. So what about grills and other portable cooking tools? Will propane be sold only with permits based on what we plan to do with it?

From personal experience, I can tell you it’s wonderful not to have to need electricity to feed yourself. Living in a hurricane state, I’ve had to grill my food many times. If leftists get their way, gas stoves and ovens will start to vanish as they age, and everyone will depend on the power grid.

This could kill a lot of old people. I’ll give you the example of a relative of mine; a diehard faux leftist hypocrite. She just got rid of her gas fireplace appliance and replaced it with an electric one, and she lives in an area where winter weather sometimes kills the power. She’s feeble and sick, and so is her husband. They’re not rare cases. I would hate to live in rural Minnesota or Montana and lose heat in the winter.

Oddly, ammunition is getting cheap. You can buy .22 rounds for as little as 5 cents each. I can get 9mm for $7.50 per box before tax and shipping. It was more like $30 not long ago.

For a long time, my feeling has been that God would see to it that the guns and ammo kept flowing, because humanity will want those things after the rapture. People will want to kill each other, and God will let it happen, because his children will not be here to intercede. Even when we claimed there were shortages, guns and ammo were selling like crazy. We used the word “shortage,” but it looks like the scarcity was only on retailers’ shelves. We were buying so fast, they could not keep up.

One of the curses of the tribulation is a spirit of murder that takes over the world. It’s going to happen. There is no way to stop it. God has predicted it, so that’s that. It makes sense that people would be armed very well during that time.

No one should consider it strange if a pandemic causes a series of shortages, but we have shortages that are only attributable to accidents and what insurance companies used to call “acts of God.” That should make people think.

A pandemic itself is like that. People don’t cause them. Well, there is the covid lab theory, but it’s not proven, and it’s an outlier. Labs didn’t create the bird flu or the deer diseases I mentioned.

Over the last week, I heard two charismatics predicting a bad year. One is a man who goes around healing people. I don’t know how accurate his prophecies generally are. The other was Mark Hemans, the Australian healer and teacher. He appears to get solid information from God. He compared the time we’ve just experienced to the eye of a hurricane. There is nearly no wind in the eye of a storm, so people tend to go out and celebrate as it passes, thinking they’re in the clear. Then the other side of the storm shows up and drives them indoors.

I was walking into a store two days ago, and I thought about my dependence on stores. I knew that if this one and the other local stores closed, I would be in a bad way. My little farming efforts amounted to nothing last year. Is this the year when we will start driving by stores with taped-off entrances?

It’s going to happen. If it’s not this year, it will still happen soon.

Maybe this year won’t be too bad. I have the feeling this will be a year of celebration for my wife and me. I feel as though we will be comfortable, and we will be full of the awareness Jesus will be here soon. I certainly hope this is true. I don’t look forward to begging for food or fending off hoardes of city dwellers who think I have it. They will be hit worse than anyone. They have no way to look after themselves, and they will be surrounded by desperate people who are in the same boat and who will do anything in order to get food.

In the Bible, Hebrews boiled and ate their own children, and they were no worse than modern Americans. If a person will eat his own child, what will people do to strangers?

If you don’t have a good relationship with God, you will sink when America finally enters the drainpipe. Biden can’t save you. Money can’t save you. Bags of junk silver, weapons, and a generator can’t save you. One of the purposes of the tribulation will be to show people God has always been the only source of provision and safety, so He will make sure they understand. Everything else people trust will be proven useless.

Lions are Supposed to Have Teeth

I have an audio Bible among the files in my car’s stereo, and I keep it on all the time when I drive. I used to listen to different kinds of music, but over time, I moved to Christian music, and now I just listen to the King James. It bothers me to turn it off. Sometimes my friend Mike has turned it off while riding in my car. I told him to stop doing that. We would be riding along, and suddenly I would notice that the atmosphere in the car was wrong, and I would realize the Bible was gone. I didn’t like it.

I almost never select books or chapters because Ford’s system for doing that is useless. Whatever plays, plays. Yesterday it was 1 Samuel, which contains the stories of Samuel and Saul.

I made a Youtube video yesterday, and in it, I discussed the fact that Christians who are failures are often able to exercise divine gifts and authority. It’s very strange. My last pastor, Albert Santiago, was an unrepentant, active child rapist, but he cast a demon out of me, and sometimes God spoke through him. In the video, I mentioned Saul, who prophesied even after God cursed his kingdom.

It was later that I went on an errand and heard 1 Samuel.

I mention Santiago’s name a lot because men who rape little girls should not have cover. Secrecy let him put a little girl in his bed over and over, and honesty might have protected her and whoever else he has raped. Maybe someone will be spared in the future because I’ve spoken or written his name. He should have been executed.

Saul was actually a great guy when his story started. He was taller and better-looking than other men, but he was humble, and he wanted to please God. The corruption that ruined him came on over time.

Early on, Saul heard a story about an Ammonite named Nahash who planned to commit an atrocity against Israel. According to extrabiblical sources, he had a practice of gouging out the right eyes of the men he defeated, and he had done this to every Jewish man in the area where he did his conquering.

Nahash came against Jews in a place called Jabesh-Gilead. They agreed to submit, but that didn’t satisfy him. He told them he would let them live only if they agreed to let him gouge their eyes out. They asked for a week to think about it, and they contacted Saul.

Here is the interesting part: when Saul heard about it, he became very angry, and the reason he was angry is that the Holy Spirit was upon him. So the Holy Spirit himself made him angry. God, who is love, and who loves forgiveness, made Saul angry. Saul got the Hebrews together and defeated Nahash, and this involved killing a lot of people. For God.

I found this interesting, because anger is one of my big concerns. I always think about the way I felt when Jesus visited me. Love poured through me like microwaves heating up a turkey breast. I have concerns that anger at other people comes from self-righteousness, fear, and lack of empathy, so I always ask God to send his love through me. I question people who seem to be hooked on what they call “righteous anger.” I generally feel that they are using God to justify something that comes from another source.

I had a friend who seemed to be angry all the time. He was very proud of work he claimed to be doing for God. He wanted to be praised for it. He got angry at me because here on my blog, I said God was not interested in our hard work and wanted to do things for us. After I wrote those things, he vanished from my life, and since then, he has had a lot of problems.

It turned out he had filled people with tall tales about his adventures and abilities and grand plans. Most of it was just hot air. He said he was building a strange Christian compound with a hurricane-proof house and a big workshop. He was known for offering people jobs. He suggested I could be his in-house attorney. His projects never panned out, though.

He told me something weird. He held himself out as some sort of nuclear engineer. He said he had designed an atomic bomb in high school, and that a state university had admitted him purely on that basis. I believed it because I had no reason not to. Some people really are nuclear engineers.

Later on, though, he admitted he couldn’t do math. You can’t design or even understand an atom bomb without math, and you definitely can’t participate in an undergrad engineering program. It’s like joining the Bolshoi when you can’t walk. No university anywhere is going to let you study engineering if you haven’t done calculus in high school.

He was never an engineer. I don’t know whether he has a college degree.

Knowing I was a physicist, he once tried to give me the idea he knew more than I did about a hand-waving calculation I had done to determine roughly how many bombs could be made from the uranium ore Saddam Hussein had. He said I was pretty close.

It was an informal Chicago-piano-tuners estimate, and I figured a nuclear engineer would know more than I did. I have not been trained to build nuclear bombs.

In retrospect, I suppose he just made up a number. He lacked the mental tools to do a calculation, but he wanted me to admire him and think he was part of the STEM gang, so he said what he said.

The fact that he told me he couldn’t do math shows that he didn’t really take engineering courses, because even a failed engineer would know that a physicist would know an engineering student has to know a lot of math. He slipped up.

He got in trouble for asking a huge, reputable company to move a ship for him. He held himself out as a successful entrepreneur when his company didn’t really have much in the way of assets or income. The company later sued him and won. They claimed they had lost nearly $800,000 preparing to do the job for him. They got a default judgment because he couldn’t afford an attorney.

Since then, he has had bypass surgery, his projects have failed to go anywhere, and I don’t think anyone would call him conspicuously blessed.

The ship was abandoned and broken up for scrap.

The story of the lawsuit is on the web, so it’s not exactly a secret.

I tried to get him to pray in tongues and basically fuel up with God, but I don’t think he ever did it. He once said, as an admission, that he was living on other people’s prayers, which is not really possible. He was way too busy for his own good.

He used to get very angry at preachers and other Christians, and he defended it. I thought he was wrong to justify his anger all the time. I felt God had used him to caution me about anger. Maybe I went too far in the direction of conciliation, though. Maybe I am fighting to suppress anger that comes from God. I am not sure.

In case anyone is wondering, while I do have the typical human desire to conceal my faults and failures, and while I have not revealed every disappointing thing about me, I am pretty much what I say I am. I do have a law degree and a physics degree. I did spend two and a half years in graduate school in physics, and I quit because I was burned out, not because I could not do the work. Although you could say I couldn’t do the work because I was burned out. You need enthusiasm to get up every day and do 6 or more hours of advanced math problems.

I was enrolled in classes when I quit, and I began trading stocks, which did not work out because it was a dumb idea.

I really did score over 150 on a battery of IQ tests, except for one where I got 142, but I give myself an asterisk for that one, because the lady who was giving the test didn’t tell me it was timed until I was way into it, and we were having a pleasant and engaging conversation while I worked. I got a perfect score on the something-or-other reading test, which impressed the lady.

The tests did not define scores above 150, so I do not have a number. Just “150+.” I have the papers somewhere to prove it. Many people are smarter than I am. I feel like I’m smart enough.

I haven’t done extraordinarily well on math tests. I got a 690 on the math SAT back before they dumbed it down. I have a history of locking up mentally on math tests, though. For some reason, I have aced practice tests and then choked when doing the real thing. I used to get perfect scores on practice quantitative GRE tests, but I got a 730 when I took the exam.

I have said I used to bench press 300 pounds easily, and this is true, but I did it on a machine, which I always point out. I also add that when I tried 220 on a real bar, I succeeded, but it was a lot harder. Machines don’t develop muscles used to balance things, and they let you put a lot more strength into movement. I maxed out most machines I used, but I didn’t impress anyone on the leg machines or the curl machine.

I wrote an article about training as a boxer, and the editor of the magazine I wrote it for didn’t believe me when I wrote that I used to do 25 one-armed pushups per side, with my feet on a chair, while working out, but I really did. I was able to do 30 or more, but I was not willing to keep going. I did 5 in his office, easily, quite some time after I had stopped exercising regularly. I know he and everyone else in the office had been talking about it and questioning my honesty, because when we came out, he announced, “He did 5.”

I think I could do one regular pushup right now if the floor was red hot and the reward was a pizza.

I did hit very, very hard as a boxer. I didn’t make that up when I said so. People who held pads for me were startled. Their eyes opened wide when I punched. I was not a good boxer, though. I did not train long enough because I got an injury, and for all I know, I would never have become any good. I didn’t skip rope well.

I practiced law successfully. I was very good at it. It was not hard for me at all. I quit to take up writing. Three books I wrote were published by a real publisher, even if they were stupid and did not make money. I chose not to return to law because I felt sure God was telling me to knock it off. I started applying to firms and doing interviews, but I quit. I did not fail. I made a choice. I was working when I decided to quit.

I really do live on a farm where I have a lot of tools and things. I built every single thing I have said I built. I really did marry a woman from Africa last year, and we did go to foreign countries to be together. When I say we are financially okay, I am not lying. I am not planning to run off to the Bahamas to get away from a pile of Mastercard debt.

I do make the best pizza and cheesecake on Earth, as far as I know. I am not lying about those things.

I have not accomplished anything in the way of a real career, what I have is mostly inherited, and I am no one to be admired, but anything I tell you I can do, I can do. I don’t make claims I can’t back up in order to impress strangers. I would be afraid of being exposed. I am not overly burdened with a craving for admiration, although I do have some desire, and I have never had much in the way of ambition.

I’m not building a big compound, and I am not going to offer anyone a job.

Now you know some good things about me, and some bad things.

Recently I wrote about an aunt who has extreme problems with insecurity. She is so hungry to be admired, it may amount to a mental illness. She has made wild, dishonest claims about her children which ended up embarrassing them; you would think she was talking about Niels Bohr and Queen Elizabeth the First. I like being admired, but I can’t imagine throwing everything else away for it.

The problem my aunt has is made even sadder by the fact that everyone knows about it. No one who knows her admires her. The things she says to gain admiration have led every one of her relatives who is still involved in her life to look down on her. They express their contempt and laugh behind her back. I guess that’s what usually happens to such people.

If she didn’t lie about her kids, people might be somewhat impressed, or at least not disillusioned, when they get to know them. Instead, people find them disappointing.

Spud Webb looks pretty good unless you’re expecting Wilt Chamberlain.

I don’t really understand narcissism, which is a root of ambition. I think you have to have a lot of ambition in order to understand ambitious people. I’ve read about men who drove themselves like slaves for years, not because they loved what they were doing, but because they wanted admiration and sex. Pete Townshend has said he became a guitarist just to get girls. I can’t grasp that mindset. I won’t even pretend I like a woman for 10 minutes to get sex! That’s too much to ask.

I don’t understand what drives Donald Trump. He was a great president, but he has done a lot of stupid things. He commits adultery with about as much hesitance as I have when I throw aluminum cans in the regular trash. He doesn’t think about his wives or kids when he cheats. He has completely neglected his children’s moral and religious educations in order to make himself rich and sexually busy. And he’s pretty typical of driven men.

I can get excited about making money for about 36 hours. After that, it wears off. I can get excited about promoting myself for about 15 minutes.

I am naturally lazy. I have told plenty of lies in my time. I am not brave. I fry chicken badly.

I think it’s better to surprise people by being better than they expect than to fail and hand them transparent excuses that make them look even worse.

I think about JFK sometimes. Democrats like to say he read 1200 words per minute, but in reality, he and a leftist journalist discussed false figures to put in a story, and JFK picked 1200 to impress them. Look it up. He was that dishonest, not to mention insecure.

He was just a fairly smart guy with a crooked family and a dishonest press establishment that backed him up. He would have been humiliated if someone had given him something to read in a short time and then made him take a test.

The other day I read that Jennifer Lawrence graduated from high school and entered college at 16. People repeat this myth. She never graduated from junior high. JUNIOR. She is out there lecturing high school graduates about how to fix the world, though.

The late Brian Dennehy lied and claimed he was a combat vet. Now it’s on his Wikipedia page forever.

A magazine said Benjamin Netanyahu had an IQ of 180. Turns out it’s not true. They recanted. But the myth is still out there. He’s a very impressive man anyway.

Radio psychology guru Dr. Laura Schlesinger is a doctor of nutrition or something. Qualified to work in a health food store, I guess. No, I’m wrong. Her doctorate is in physiology, says the web. Not psychology or medicine. So why behave like a psychologist and call yourself a doctor? I’m a doctor of law. I can literally call myself a doctor, and no one can contradict me. Should I get a radio show about medicine and bill myself as Dr. Steve?

Someone once told me that Menachem Schneerson, the rabbi some Jews thought would be the Messiah, was off-the-charts brilliant, and that he had stunned people as an engineering student at the Sorbonne. Not true. While he may have excelled at his religious studies, he had an ordinary EE diploma from the Ecole Speciale des Travaux Publiques, which is not part of the Sorbonne and is known for civil engineering, not electrical engineering. He was no Tesla. Maybe I shouldn’t mention Tesla in this context, because Nikola Tesla hated Jews.

Tesla himself, who truly did change the world with the AC motor and radio, both of which would been invented soon with or without him, has been overrated. A biography says he was 6’6″ tall, but he was really 4 inches shorter. People think he invented all sorts of currently-incomprehensible technology which will one day change the world, but that’s not true. We already have everything he invented, and some of his ideas didn’t work. He said he would prove relativity wrong and put Einstein, a Jew, in his place. That claim aged poorly.

Bill Nye calls himself the Science guy, but he’s an engineer with a bachelor’s degree.

I frequently feel annoyed at Massad Ayoob, a fading magazine writer who has a rabid following of uneducated gun nuts. Around half a century ago, he started publishing fairly useful books about self-defense, but he has made himself out to be things he is not.

He has no military background. He is not an engineer or gun designer. He has no scientific training. He has no legal training. He was a part-time cop in a microscopic all-white New Hampshire town with almost no crime, and he has never used a gun anywhere but the range. But he likes to give people the impression he’s Wyatt Earp crossed with Audie Murphy, John Moses Browning, and Gerry Spence.

He has worked as an expert witness, which a plumber or dentist could do, and which in no way qualifies him to talk about the law. He lies about his experiences in this line of work. He has argued publicly with some of the world’s greatest wound experts. He puts up Youtube videos in which he gives people legal advice which could put them in prison or execution chambers. Why not just bill yourself as a pretty good writer and competitive pistol shooter? Isn’t that enough?

Lance Armstrong’s whole life is a lie. I wonder who was really the best cyclist in the world all those years. Probably someone who ended up working in a bike shop.

It’s always irksome to read about overrated people with padded resumes. There have been people like Leonardo da Vinci, Mozart, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and John von Neumann, who have lived up to and beyond their hype, and it’s a shame to put liars on their level.

To get back on track, a guy from Scotland has a Youtube channel nearly no one watches. His name is Gordon. I watch every video he makes. He hears from God. There is no doubt about it.

Today Gordon put up a new video, and he linked it to an older video.

In the new video, he talked about 1 Samuel and the way God made Saul angry. It made an impression on him this week, just as it did me. I was shocked to see him talking about these things exactly when I was thinking about them.

The earlier video was made when coronavirus had churches locked down. In that video, Gordon was somewhat angry with lukewarm Christians in big, complacent churches. He was a little derisive. He laughed. In today’s video, he gave some background information.

The first video was made after he had a vision. He was praying, and he started walking in circles, talking about Jericho and bringing Rahab out and destroying the walls. He then saw a woman on her knees with her hands up, as though chains had just come off. He saw a tower that had fallen around her. He passed out and then found himself on his couch, groggy and unable to get it together.

He made the derisive video while he was still under the effects of the vision, and the words he said in it were prophecy, not his own words.

The big message here is that sometimes God wants you to be angry and critical. These things are not off limits. God can give you commands, words, and feelings that make you uncomfortable because they put you outside a Christian’s normal ranges.

This makes sense, because if there is one thing Satan’s children love, it’s shaming us for being critical and angry. They ignore Christian charity and the inestimable number of things we do for others, and they focus on the small amount of time we spend in anger and correction. They tell us we are not allowed to be angry or give correction. They want to pull our teeth.

It’s ridiculous, how non-Christians are always giving us Christianity lessons. I don’t teach people how to be good at sodomy or smoking weed.

Gordon says church has to be different now because we are at war. That is true. I keep saying the time for cajoling and stroking is over. The ship is sinking fast, so patience has to be redefined.

I believe this is an area where you have to use caution and rely on tongues. If you rely on tongues, you will be guided, and the things you do will be God’s will and not your own, so you will not go off into anger and criticism that come from Satan.

I was amazed that Gordon and I had the same thing on our mind on the same day.

Now I have something new to pray about.

Be Absent-Minded and Be Your Own Secret Santa

Should you buy yourself Christmas presents?

When I got out of law school, I was a disgrace. I only owned one pistol! It’s embarrassing to admit it. I owned a Glock I bought in case I had to kill one of my sister’s friends. This is true. I’m not trying to be funny.

She was enraged about something I did to help her, so she threatened to send some male junkie friends to take care of me. I got myself a Glock 22 and put my worries behind me. Fortunately for her low-life friends, none of them ever showed up to test my marksmanship, and I never had to go through the trauma of putting bullets into a human being. After that buy, I let myself down by letting maybe 9 years pass without another pistol purchase.

A Glock 22 is not a .22, by the way.

When I left school, I got myself a graduation gift. I went to Garcia’s National Gun in Little Havana and picked up a Smith & Wesson 686+ 7-shot, 6″ revolver in .357 Magnum. Very nice. Satin stainless with Hogue grips.

I frequented Garcia’s because I had bought into the myth that one should support local gun dealers. I bought several more guns from this place, and every time I showed up, they treated me like a stranger, perhaps because I wasn’t a Cuban. After that, I learned to love Internet shopping.

Yelp says Garcia’s is gone, which is not a surprise. Here is a quotation from a review a lady wrote:

“If you are not a 50+ year old Cuban guy you are invisible to these people. Terrible service. They treat you like you’re not there to spend money. I will take my business elsewhere.”

That is exactly how I felt. I would stand in the store while they talked to their pals en espanol, waiting to for my existence to be noticed so I could give them $700 or $1300 or whatever. It looks like their customer base decided to say, “Hasta la vista, baby.”

I think the revolver is the only present I’ve ever bought myself. I have certainly bought things for myself, but I don’t think I’ve bought myself anything for a special occasion.

Actually, I just remembered one, so I’m wrong. I bought a 2003 Ford Thunderbird and took delivery the day after my birthday. It was a silly, frivolous car, but I really enjoyed it.

I guess that counts. Sort of. I mean, I had to buy some kind of car, and I would have done it even if it had been during a different month.

Okay. It doesn’t count

Rhodah and I went to Singapore recently, and of course, I bought her stuff. She is still catching up from a lifetime of poverty. We bought clothes. We bought a nice Bric’s suitcase. There were other things. She managed to squeeze a big perfume donation out of me while she was on her way to her flight and the duty-free shops.

During our trip, I got myself a Singapore ball cap in the Bugis Street bazaar, and I also got a Levi’s-brand belt because I left my own belt in Florida. The belt does not count. In the airport on the way home, I realized I had nearly nothing to show for my trip, so I spent 22 USD on a Singapore shirt.

In Ireland, I got myself a Dublin hoodie I will never wear. I would have gotten a T-shirt, but the Irish sell incredibly cheap shirts that can’t possibly last a year. In Turkey, I got a hat. In Egypt, nothing.

It’s hard to buy anything in Egypt that is not related to idolatry.

Egypt is not the greatest tourist destination. If you go, stay in a very nice hotel in Cairo and get guides to take you to the sights. Then take a Nile cruise with guides. Then go home. You won’t be able to drive, and there is nothing to do except look at pyramids and temples anyway. See the old stuff and enjoy a cruise. If you limit your trip to these things, you’ll love Egypt. Don’t do anything else.

I feel like getting myself something, but I am not doing well at finding gifts for myself.

When I got the idea of getting myself a present, I immediately thought of a trailer with a gas-powered leaf vacuum on it. That is not a Christmas gift. It’s a tool for yard maintenance. A CNC mill I don’t need would be a good gift. Something I really need so I can do chores would not.

I’m not blowing $8000 on a mill.

I looked at my Amazon lists. They’re full of things I need. There are also things I merely want, but those things are too cheap for Christmas.

I bought myself two Shark vacuums this month. Cordless and corded. Spent over $600. Changed my life. Absolutely worth every penny. Recommended without reservation. But cleaning tools are not gifts. And Rhodah will probably be the one who uses them most.

I feel like I’ve turned into the aunt who used to give me socks.

How about another firearm buy?

The other day I was on the phone, and I saw an unopened flat rate box. I opened it up, and it contained a new Wilson rifle cartridge trimmer. The invoice was from August of 2020. This thing cost me over $130, and I had forgotten I owned it. Obviously, I have not used it. I haven’t fired a gun in maybe 6 months. I have enough ammo supplies backed up to keep me busy for a couple of months. I built a rifle I have not fired yet. I finished it months ago. I probably have 15,000 rounds of .22 ammunition. I don’t think this is the time to buy gun stuff.

Maybe a nice bottle of XO brandy. I barely drink, but a really nice brandy would be pleasant to have on hand. I have not had a really good brandy since before I left Miami.

How about a water-cooled TIG torch? Practicing TIG is no fun when you’re holding a hot torch. A new one would cost a few pennies, but it would encourage me to practice.

I would love to have a Langmuir Arcflat welding table, three feet by four feet. My Northern Tool table is astounding for the money, but it has about half the square footage of a Langmuir. I’m doing a project which is not going to fit on my table. It would hang off the ends and sides of a Langmuir, but I think I could make it work.

It would be great to have a table 6 feet long. You can weld nearly anything on a table like that.

A Langmuir fixturing table 4 feet long would cost more than I want to spend, sadly. It would be $1800, including tax. Cut that figure in thirds, and I might do it.

Like a leaf vaccum, a welding table is useful for necessary jobs, but you can also use one to make fun things like a shooting bench or a mobile base for a big table saw you don’t really need. I don’t think I’d put it in the same class as a leaf vacuum.

I’m going to try to get by without a vacuum. Today I took my giant blower and made a 10-foot-wide pile of leaves at the side of the front yard. I plan to burn them as soon as I can get a permit. In the past, I was determined to move leaves out of the yard before burning them, and that’s why I never got anywhere. Moving them an eighth of a mile to the burn pile is extremely work-intensive. If I am willing to have a black spot in my yard, I should be able to get rid of them without extraordinary effort.

I guess I’ve already bought myself nearly everything that would make a good present. I have a drawer full of nice knives. I have a Ruger RPR with a Vortex Viper scope. I have an ice cream machine with its own compressor. I have a 16″ lathe. Years ago, I got myself musical instruments.

To some men, or women who have a lot of jewelry, this stuff may seem insignificant, especially when spread out over decades, but I don’t live on a grand scale. I drive a Ford Explorer with 60,000 miles on it, and I plan to keep it for 10 more years. I use a cell phone made in 2017. I own a Rolex, but if my late father had not owned it, I would not have one. If I spend $500 on something, I feel like it’s a big deal.

A home waterjet would be nice. Really nice. Let’s see. A Wazer, the best-known small waterjet, would only set me back maybe 12 grand.

Dang it.

How about a plasma table? Let’s see. Over $1500. Geez.

I may as well clean up the brandy snifters.

Not the Cure for Jet Lag

It’s gradually sinking in: I have nephews.

It somehow seems unfair that people automatically become my relatives just because I marry someone, but I have discovered that this is the way it works. My wife has a couple of sisters, and both have kids. Her sister became a grandmother at 38, and my wife has been a great aunt since 2020. That makes me a great uncle, which is practically the same thing as a grandfather, so I feel like I should be shopping for a coffin and some Mephisto shoes.

I can’t help feeling that uncle status should involve some kind of participation or consent, but it doesn’t. You marry someone, and BANG, there it is. A label. And an obligation to buy Christmas gifts. I guess.

Rhodah does not have parents any more. It’s terrible that they died young, of course, but I have to admit that it made things easier for me. Rhodah is younger than I am, so it might have been awkward if I had had to butter her parents up. It would feel wrong, currying favor with my father-in-law by taking him to Universal Studios or buying him a skateboard.

Rhodah is helping her sister and brother-in-law move to Lusaka, the capital city I had no idea Zambia had until last year. As a result, they and their 4 sons have had to stay with Rhodah this week.

To imagine what Rhodah is going through, consider some facts. She spent around 12 days in Singapore, 8 time zones away, and then she took a 21-hour trip home on crowded planes. She arrived to a a spotless house and started trying to sleep. A few days later, the Fresh Princes of Lusaka and their parents arrived.

The house is a disaster now. The air conditioner remote is broken. The living room rug, which had just been cleaned, is filthy. Books which had been stored neatly on shelves are lying in random locations. Everything is dirty. And Rhodah has had to share a bed with a nephew who kicks like a mule. Fortunately, that stops. When he gets up at 5 a.m.

I told her this was a great chance to teach them how to clean. Their mother weighs about 35 pounds, so they need to start helping her. I don’t think my suggestion will be implemented.

My mother did not teach my sister or me much of anything about responsibility, so we both became slobs, and my mother did a lot more work than she should have. It’s kind of ironic. She resented her own mother for making her and her sisters clean the house, and she resolved not to teach her daughter to clean. I think I was spared because I was a male. In Kentucky, men didn’t do anything around the house. The women used to stand and serve meals while the men ate, and the women ate later. My mother didn’t want her daughter to be a slave to a husband, but by teaching her to be slovenly, she ended up extending her own servitude.

I was probably around 6 when my mother finally taught me to tie my own shoes. She was mad at me, and she said she couldn’t keep doing it for me. Thing is, she had no reason to be mad at me. I would have done whatever she wanted, but she chose not to teach me, so she got what she deserved.

I now believe kids should be taught to be clean and neat and capable as early as possible. I have no intention of wiping a 5-year-old’s rear end when he can, and should, do it himself. Very young kids can put toys away and throw dirty clothes in hampers. It’s not integral calculus, and it’s pretty obvious that the ability to get things done and look after oneself is a big asset in life.

I think we wait too long to teach kids things. When I was a kid, someone taught me a little bit about multiplication a few years early, and I had no trouble understanding the concept. Then, instead of moving on to greater things, I stagnated until school got around to covering the same material.

I could have been years ahead in math, but no one had the good sense to teach me. I was also taught to read at least three times. My mother taught me when I was very young. Then I went to kindergarten and relearned, using an asinine woke system called ITA which replaced real spelling with moronic leftist letters that had to be unlearned later. Then they taught me real reading again. I remember arguing with the other kids, telling them the real spellings of words were wrong.

I should have been taught real English at age three and then been given a lot of stuff to read.

By waiting to teach me things I was obviously capable of learning, people set me back in life and reinforced my natural laziness, and they also taught me to hate school, which was unbelievably boring.

Now I say beat the little ones until they pick up their toys, and teach them anything their tiny heads can absorb. They will bless you for it later, and if you die while they’re young, they will have strengths that will help them stay afloat.

Some people say kids don’t have enough free time and they need hours and hours to play. Nonsense. What they have is too much after-school status garbage. Your kids should not be doing gymnastics 4 hours a day. They should not be training to be Olympic athletes or practicing the piano until 9 p.m. These things are true. But you don’t bring a kid home from school and just turn him loose with the TV remote and the dirty magazines he knows you hide in your closet. Kids should have to do chores. They should do things for spending money. They shouldn’t just wander around until dinner time, looking for things to set on fire or break.

When I was a kid, my friends and I did healthy things like playing football and various forms of baseball, but we also abused lizards, shot songbirds with BB guns, burned things, took expensive things apart and could not put them back together, made our own fireworks, played with guns, killed fish we could not eat, trespassed, committed acts of vandalism, and wasted our time in other ways. And we were fairly well-behaved by local standards. This is what “unstructured play” really is when parents are lazy and uninvolved.

Spoiling kids is one of the worst forms of neglect.

The concept of the importance of “unstructured play” comes from leftists, so naturally, it’s extremely destructive. When street gangs in New York rape women and beat them to death, it’s unstructured play.

Unstructured play is a symptom of fatherlessness. When you’re a kid and you don’t know what to do with yourself or how to act, it’s because your father has failed you. Fatherless kids go to prison, end up in rehab, die young, and so on. A father is supposed to prevent you from becoming a directionless idiot. Jews have successful children because Jewish fathers are involved. People from my culture are lucky if their kids have jobs at Walmart.

Fatherlessness is an extremely important concept in Christianity, but no one teaches about it correctly.

Anyway, Rhodah will not get any peace until tonight, and she will still have to sleep one night in a dirty house. Then she’ll have to pay to get her rug and car cleaned.

The really funny thing about all this is that Rhodah looks forward to having children. I’m on board, but I believe I have a better understanding of what she is in for than she does.

No point in thinking about it too much. There is nothing that can be done. Raising children will be challenging no matter what. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

I can tell the nephews are a lot of fun. The dirt and disorder don’t change that. It’s too bad they will always be thousands of miles away.

I feel like God is making me a patriarch, which is something I never expected or wanted to be. I have two sisters-in-law, 5 nephews, a niece, and a great-nephew. I have two godchildren. A friend whose dad has abandoned his family has 5 kids who appear to think I’m their grandfather, and one of them is my goddaughter. She sends me funny little texts out of nowhere and tells her family she wants to visit my house again.

My mother’s father was the patriarch in my family. He had the big house everyone ran to for shelter. He helped all of us when we needed it. Now I’m the one with the big house and the tractors and the gun room and the cattle, and sometimes I can be helpful.

There are 5 male grandchildren, and none of the others have taken this role. Two seem to have no interest in helping anyone else. One is a devoted single father but would never do anything for anyone outside his own family. The remaining one is living a normal and profitable life in the financial industry, with a wife and, I believe, two daughters. No one ever thinks of calling him when there’s a problem. He has nothing to do with the family now.

I have this feeling that a patriarch is a tall bald guy with long hair and a white beard, who always knows what to do. I don’t always know what to do. I have made a lot of bad decisions. I have not made any effort to build a family, develop an estate, or become a leader. But here I am.

It’s good to be important to people. I never saw it coming. It beats spending the rest of my life alone, flying around the world on fishing trips or something.

I think some people may come to my funeral!

Jethro Takes His Self a Trip

I’ll tell you what. You haven’t lived until you’ve taken a 30-hour plane trip.

I got home from Singapore this morning, and I haven’t slept in quite a while. My wife and I had a great time there, but the flights were really something.

Singapore is so far away from me, it doesn’t matter which direction the jets take. They could go north, south, east, or west and get there in about the same amount of time, as long as they didn’t run into fuel problems. My flights to Singapore flew east, and so did my flights home.

The web says Singapore is around 10,700 miles away, so it’s pretty much on the opposite side of the globe. The time difference is 13 hours in the fall. Until this trip, I had no idea two time zones could differ by 13 hours.

My first international flight took off from JFK and landed in Doha. It took off pretty late. It should have been empty, right? Well, it turns out Doha is hosting an event you may have heard of: the FIFA World Cup. An event of which I took no notice because I’m not the kind of person who cares about millionaires kicking a ball into a net.

People from Latin America were shoehorned into the plane’s every crevice. The aisle seat I had carefully chosen in hopes of getting an empty row turned out to be a waste of money.

Actually, I didn’t get to sit next to an empty seat on any of my flights. Not even the 15-hour one from Singapore to San Francisco.

I was spoiled when we traveled during the covid statistical hump. I got to lie down across rows of seats. People were terrified of flying, and Rhodah and I reaped the benefits. It looks like those days are gone. We flew on the slowest days of the week, and every plane was still packed.

I know this will sound insensitive, but I miss the slow tourist traffic of the pandemic. We flew on empty planes. We didn’t have to wait in line at restaurants. We had the Great Pyramid to ourselves. Looks like those days are gone, unless the black death makes a comeback.

What can I say about Singapore?

I was afraid it would be unpleasant because I hear bad things about Far Eastern destinations. I thought it would be like Blade Runner crossed with Slumdog Millionaire, sort of. I was afraid the people would be hard and selfish, and I was concerned about the weather. Singapore is nearly on top of the Equator.

Here is how I would describe Singapore now: it’s a little bit like Miami would be if the people were vaporized and replaced with better ones.

Singapore is very orderly. The streets are clean, and there is a great deal of beautiful, meticulous landscaping in public areas. People obey the traffic laws, which seems weird given the large number of ethnic Chinese. Everything is built well. Signs are in English, probably because there are three major ethnic groups, each with its own language. Or languages. Whatever.

The people in Singapore are very polite and helpful. We experienced nearly no rudeness. There is nearly no crime in Singapore.

Singapore is also wealthy. They have stores like Chanel and Bulgari everywhere. They have impressive skyscrapers. The cars are generally clean, dent-free, and relatively new.

There is food everywhere in Singapore. There are so many restaurants, it’s hard to understand how they can all make money.

The hotels are very nice. Ours was just about perfect. Spotless and quiet, with several restaurants and a gym. I think there was also a pool in there somewhere.

I just realized I forgot to tip the maid. Dang.

That’s okay, though, because tipping is not customary in Singapore.

Here’s something weird: the weather in Singapore is better than the weather in Miami. It doesn’t get really hot, and the island is in a breezy location.

Now I will digress and tell the world about a high school history teacher who told me a tremendous number of baldfaced lies. His name was Morgan Kelly. I guess it’s okay to mention his name, because he has surely been dead for at least 20 years.

My prep school taught grades 7 through 12, and when I arrived in grade 9, Mr. Kelly was already a legend among the core group of students who had started two years earlier. He was an amateur sailor. He had a lanyard with a spliced monkey’s fist for a keychain. He wore green coach’s shorts every day. He sounded like Burgess Meredith’s Penguin. He taught history.

Mr. Kelly impressed the younger kids by telling the time by looking at the sun. He claimed he could nail it within a few minutes. He would point at the sun with his extended left hand, look down his arm, pause briefly, and make his estimate. Over and over, he amazed the kids by proving to be right.

By the time they were sophomores, they started to realize his watch was on his left wrist.

Anyway, Mr. Kelly told all sorts of lies.

He claimed he was a tail gunner in World War Two. Ordinarily, I would not doubt a claim like that, but because I know he lied about other things, I don’t know whether he was really a tail gunner or even if he served.

He said that when he arrived at the place where they sorted out bomber crew trainees, the men were told to form a long line ordered by height. I would guess Mr. Kelly was about 5’4″ tall. Everyone at Mr. Kelly’s end had to become tail gunners because only short people could fit in the gunners’ stations.

Is this really how tail gunners were selected? I wonder. Maybe it’s true. Mr. Kelly had thick glasses, which means he wasn’t capable of the job, but maybe his eyes went bad after the war.

How likely is it that my school checked his military record? They might have checked to see if he had an honorable discharge, but I can’t imagine them asking for anything beyond that. I doubt they checked his record at all. They would have asked for his college credentials, but they wouldn’t have needed his military information.

I don’t think he was ever in a bomber, because he would have told us war stories.

He told a huge lie about the Chinese military.

He said he was on a troop plane going over the Himalayas, and there were Chinese soldiers on board.

Okay, right away you can see some issues.

Why would they fly troops over the Himalayas? It would be unbelievably expensive, not to mention dangerous. They would have moved troops with ships and trains.

Why would Chinese troops be on a plane with American bomber crewmen?

Okay, so now we get to the part I am sure is a lie. He said several Chinese were playing a game of chance. I think he said they were throwing down cards. He said they would play a round of their game, look at the results, grab one person who was playing, and throw him out the side door. While the plane was in flight.

We believed it. We were kids.

Of course, the Chinese military did not permit soldiers to murder each other in card games. This should not have to be explained to anyone. You can’t win a war by throwing your troops out of airplanes. Also, even if the game were permitted, how would you find people willing to play? If you did, how would you get enough men onto one plane to play the game? If you have to throw a man out after every hand, and you have 20 men, your game will last around 20 minutes. Not a great way to kill time on a plane.

Even if all the obstacles mentioned above were overcome, why would American servicemen sit and do nothing while people were thrown out of a plane?

So, yes, he was a big liar.

Here comes the lie he told about Singapore.

The British were building a bridge in Singapore. It was 120° Fahrenheit every day. The workers had to work outdoors, obviously, but at night they slept in air-conditioned barracks.

They were only able to cool the barracks to 90°, but it seemed so cold after working in 120° heat, the men had to wear winter coats indoors.

Lie number 1: 120° heat in Singapore. It doesn’t happen. It rarely goes above 92°, and that’s something you can’t say about Miami.

Lie number 2: men who found the 90° temperature in the barracks too cold would solve the problem by wearing winter coats. No. They would adjust the temperature.

I don’t know why Mr. Kelly lied to kids so much. I took Ancient History and Ancient Chinese History with him, and I guess I can discard everything he taught us.

I didn’t sweat much at all in Singapore. It was surprisingly comfortable. Rhodah, however, was shocked by the humidity. Apparently, Zambia doesn’t have any. In the past, she had heard me complain about the humidity in Florida, but she had no idea what I was talking about until we went to Singapore. We went to Egypt, which was hot but dry. We went to Turkey and Ireland, where the weather was cool. In Singapore, she suddenly understood why people buy anti-perspirant.

I just remembered another lie Mr. Kelly told.

Americans needed to land planes somewhere in China. There was no runway. The ground was covered with rocks. Fortunately, China was incredibly full of human beings. Their numbers were astounding.

The mayor of the city where the runway was needed told the people who lived there to go and stand where the runway had to go. Then he told them to pick up one rock each and leave. They did, and the runway instantly appeared.

I don’t know how we fell for that one. Having a lot of people doesn’t really get you past the problem that you can fit hundreds of rocks into the area one person takes up. Pick up one rock, and you still have hundreds more.

Man, that guy lied.

Another Mr. Kelly lie just popped into my head.

Some ancient Chinese pottery manufacturer had a slave, and one day, the slave got trapped in his kiln and burned to death. When the kiln was opened, the pots had a magnificent red color. The manufacturer couldn’t figure out how to reproduce the color, so he decided to throw a slave into the kiln every time he made red pots.

I’m starting to think we were really stupid.

Okay, Google and see if you can find this story, or any story about the ancient Chinese having a really gorgeous and highly prized red pottery glaze. I couldn’t find anything like that on the web. After that, try to find a story that mentions the part about murdering slaves.

Then ask yourself how many pots you would have to sell to pay for one expensive slave. And why use a slave when you could use a dead body or a pig or goat? Dead bodies would have been pretty easy to come by in ancient China or ancient anywhere.

How does a slave get stuck in a pottery kiln? Why wouldn’t he yell for someone to let him out?

I knew someone who served in Iraq, and he had a photo of himself shivering in a sleeping bag in a very hot room. He said the hot room seemed cold to him. Soldiers there wore a lot of hot gear, and the daytime temperatures sometimes broke 120°, so for all I know, the photo wasn’t a gag. But it never happened in Singapore or anywhere else in Southeast Asia.

Soldiers love jokes and pranks.

The food picture in Singapore is interesting. Nice restaurants and well-known restaurants there are unbelievably expensive, like $40 for Five Guys or $400 for two at Ruth’s Chris. On the other hand, there are cheaper places where locals eat, and they are real bargains.

It appears there are three types of restaurants in Singapore. Independent establishments, food court restaurants, and food center restaurants.

By “independent,” I mean restaurants that are separate from other restaurants. Food courts are about like American food courts, except the restaurants are jammed together very tightly, and a typical food court will have a huge number of them.

A food center is a concrete building with a roof and no exterior walls. Inside, there will be long concrete structures broken into stalls. Each stall will be around 8 feet wide, and most food center restaurants occupy one stall.

Between the rows of stalls there will be sturdy plastic tables and seats which are fixed to the floor.

You can get an incredible assortment of foods and beverages at a food center. Malay. Cantonese. Sichuan. Indian. A typical entree will run around 5 Singapore dollars, and that amounts to about 4 US dollars. Some stalls sell excellent food. Some sell food that is merely good. Some sell stuff you will prefer to discard.

If you want to eat well and adventurously in Singapore while saving a ton of money, food centers are the way to go. The trick is to keep ordering things until you find things you like. The initial investment may be $20 or so per person, but it will pay off in the end by helping you avoid unnecessary experimentation.

One tip: don’t go to the stall Anthony Bourdain recommends. His photo is still on the window. Bourdain was not a great cook, as he admitted, and his advice about food is not reliable. He went to the stall in question and ordered something called Hainanese chicken rice. He raved about it as though it had made the earth move for him, and Gordon Ramsay’s face also appears on the window on a sticker.

The stall usually has a long line of people waiting for chicken. There was a line on the day when we stupidly listened to Bourdain and Ramsay.

Hainanese chicken rice is basically a boiled or possibly baked chicken cutlet, skin on, sliced, and dumped across rice made with chicken broth. It is served lukewarm. It is limp. It tastes not quite as good as what you would get if you boiled chicken in Campbell’s chicken noodle soup. I am not exaggerating. It is worthless.

It may be that Chinese people who are raised on it like it. There is a big difference between authentic Chinese food and much of the Chinese food Chinese people make in America.

After we tried the chicken rice, I bought myself a Tiger Crystal beer (very good) from another vendor and told him the food was basically garbage. He agreed. He said all the people in line were tourists who had been fooled. He said the chicken rice was no good. He very kindly led me to another stall, where he recommended laksa, a pho-like dish with rice noodles, shrimp, and some kind of meat. Much better.

We liked the Maxwell Food Centre and the Albert Food Centre. There are others.

If you go to a food center, buy a package of paper towels and a package of antiseptic wipes first. Food stalls don’t provide napkins, and the tables and seats are often in need of cleaning.

I would advise avoiding fancy American chain restaurants. We tried Lawry’s, for example, and it was just plain bad. I think Asians sometimes copy the appearance of American food without capturing anything else.

We had Egg McMuffins in Singapore, because we had to, and they were good but not quite as good as American. They don’t toast the bread enough. We tried Five Guys, and it was better than American because they made the fries correctly. I think the reason is that they hire conscientious Singaporeans instead of American high school slackers who can’t be bothered to follow the formula.

We didn’t go in for sights much. The famous Marina Bay Sands, which is three buildings joined by a pool that runs across them at the top, did not get Rhodah excited enough to pay the $23.50 cost of going up for a look. She was pretty excited about the high-end mall at the bottom, however, much to my chagrin.

We visited the Singapore Botanic Gardens. If you want to see what Asians can do with gardening and landscaping, this is the place for you. All sorts of perfectly-tended plants and trees. They also have some weird wildlife. We walked right up on some kind of monitor rooting for food, and it didn’t mind us being there at all. We also saw some red jungle fowl, which are supposedly pre-domestication chickens. There are otters in the gardens, but they didn’t show.

The gardens has a huge orchid area. Pretty impressive, if orchids are your thing.

We went to the National Museum. It’s very small, and you can get in and out in less than an hour. They had some interesting exhibits, but not a whole lot has happened in Singapore, so there was a limit to what they could do.

We had a very satisfying trip in spite of Singapore’s limitations. It’s an extremely comfortable city to stay in. It will spoil you.

While I was there, I came to a crazy realization: I don’t actually hate cities. I hate AMERICAN cities, because of the people who live in them. Our cities accumulate the worst we have to offer. Singapore isn’t like that. You don’t have to be bullied by entitled homeless people or frightened by potential muggers. People don’t ignore you or abuse you. You can walk around at night and not worry that you’re in a neighborhood where your presence is considered consent to beatings, robbery, racist behavior, or rape.

There is no Antifa in Singapore. There are no self-pitying street murals that condemn the police while ignoring the people who do nearly all the damage.

I could live in Singapore without going crazy. I could even stand not being allowed to carry a pistol.

While the subject of bad behavior is on my mind, I may as well mention a remarkable conversation I had today. My aunt said a bunch of horrible things about me.

My aunt is in charge of some things related to my grandparents’ estates, and I am not very happy with the job she is doing, or, in my view, not doing. Everything should have been sold and distributed many years ago, but a few assets are sitting around doing nothing, and I would like to have my financial connections to my family cut. I’m just tired of being involved in it. I’m not very concerned about the money.

My aunt has Parkinson’s, and dementia is one thing Parkinson’s can cause. I can’t diagnose anyone, but I am wondering if she is getting close to the point where some decisions have to be made regarding her care and that of her husband. Today I had to tell him over and over who I was. I told him his wife had three sisters and I was the son of the eldest. I told him I was his nephew. I told him I was his wife’s nephew.

Anyway, she started the conversation by angrily criticizing me for being unavailable to discuss a deal involving a property. I received a text from her in Singapore, and I responded when I saw it, saying I was in the process of flying home and would try to get back to her the following day. She was very angry at me for taking the trip! This is someone who has never spoken angrily to me until this year, so it was strange to hear the tone of her voice and the openness of the hostility.

I didn’t get that at all. I said I had taken a vacation, and she demanded to know who takes a foreign vacation in winter, as though it was a hostile act no decent person would perform. She was seething. Why? She said, “I hope you had a nice time!” Still angry. I said, “I did!”

I have complained to her this year about her failure to take certain steps to get things sold. I have never been nasty to her, and I have never insulted her. I have been blunt, though, and Southerners don’t always take that well. It’s a serious failing we have. Often, we prefer to be passive-aggressive and treacherous. Smile in your face; stab you in the back later. Being blunt is like violating an unwritten code or something. It’s not done.

She said she needed to apologize for saying nasty things about my religious beliefs. She said she apologized wholeheartedly. I didn’t know what she was talking about. I said so, and that I accepted her apology anyway.

So has she been making fun of my beliefs to the family? I don’t know. When I have talked to her about my beliefs in the past, she has generally given me the impression that she was right there with me. I took her expressions of agreement with a grain of salt, but I didn’t have any reason to think she contemned my faith.

I don’t really care about this stuff. A bunch of family members are long dead, and the rest greatly reduced their involvement with my dad and me over a decade ago, so I haven’t been part of their circle in a very long time.

I wonder if we see things differently. Maybe it would bother her a lot to find out I had criticized her faith to the family, so she assumes I would be upset if she had done the same thing to me. I don’t really think or care about what they say about me, though. I have so many things to think about.

I’m just guessing here. Maybe there is no rational explanation.

Bizarrely, she accused me of taking off to Egypt to see if I could find a wife to come home with me. She, whose son is on wife three, was saying I was a loser with women. I was amazed. Where did that come from? How long had she been holding it in? Why did she pick Egypt? Does she know I went to Egypt? Why would anyone go to Egypt to get a wife? I can’t imagine a worse place, unless it’s the area where my family comes from.

I now know she doesn’t know I’m married. I didn’t correct her. I didn’t think it would help.

I have tried to get her to list properties on the web for sale, and I have mentioned the fact that I manage properties and have sold some. I guess she did not like that, because she blurted out, “My property is worth much more than yours!” I had no idea what she was talking about, so I asked her what she meant. I think she was saying she had a bunch of rental properties that were worth more than what I have.

I don’t have any idea what she has, and she has no idea what I have.

She said everyone else in the family had planned for retirement and I had not. Where she got this idea is a mystery.

Apparently, she thought I was trying to get her to liquidate things because I was desperate for money. I said, “Do you think I’m poor?” She said, “Fine. You’re filthy rich!” So first she wanted to insult me by saying I had nothing, and then, I think, she wanted to make me feel bad for bragging about being rich. Which I didn’t do!

She said she had her treasures, which were her grandchildren, and she said I had no one, except my sorry dog. What?? I didn’t know where to go with that. I said I didn’t have a dog.

I never said anything rude. For example, I didn’t try to come up with a snappy comeback about her pets.

She said the family was going to do whatever it wanted with or without me, so of course, I asked her why she had called me. What is the point of asking for my support when it doesn’t matter? She said I couldn’t do anything about it, which is not true at all.

I told her I would never sue or contact the attorney general or anything along those lines, because I’m a Christian and I don’t intend to live that way. But I’m not going to say things are going well when I think they’re not.

I said she needed to advertise properties on the web, like everyone else does now. She said she was in “the hot spot,” meaning the frantic world of undesirable Eastern Kentucky rural real estate. She wanted me to know she knew more than I did. She then told me I was ashamed of my people and my culture, which seems irrelevant. I think she was telling me I did not understand the mysterious and unique methods of selling property up there.

I AM ashamed of my people and my culture! Every mature person who has come out of Eastern Kentucky is ashamed of the people and the culture. I used to be proud of my roots, but I was deluded. Immaturity, racism, illegitimacy, toothlessness, violence, adultery, drugs, generations of welfare recipients, hatred of learning…yes, of course I’m ashamed of my people. I didn’t say so, however.

I’m ashamed of being like them in counterproductive ways.

I used to love Eastern Kentucky, but the smart people left a long time ago. For years, my aunt has tried to promote the area as unappreciated and full of brains and talent, but that’s not even a little bit true.

Think about Singapore. In 1965, it had to start out as a new nation. It was poor. It was in the middle of nowhere. Now they call it the Switzerland of Asia. Money everywhere. A harbor full of ships. A highly educated populace. Skyscrapers. Safety.

Now think of Eastern Kentucky. It’s loaded with coal. All they had to do was keep their mineral rights, sell the coal, develop other industries, and invest, and it would have become the Kuwait of Appalachia. Instead, they sold their inheritances to outsiders and became their laborers. They never built a decent university. No infrastructure. No industry other than coal. They kept their corrupt politics and courts. They held onto racism. They fell in love with handouts. They planted marijuana patches full of booby traps. Since 1965, Eastern Kentucky has gotten worse.

Yes. Sure. I’m ashamed of it. Why would I not be?

Maybe “ashamed” is the wrong word. I’m critical of it. I am honest about it. I reject a lot of it.

She went on to accuse my parents of being ashamed of it. That’s true. They were. They didn’t try to disguise themselves or cure their accents, but they were realistic. My dad used to quote Kentucky author Harry Caudill, who said that everybody who had any get-up-and-go got up and went.

My dad was the best lawyer I ever knew or knew of. He flew all over the country representing companies like PPG, UPS, and Nabisco before the NLRB and the federal appellate courts. He was the head of litigation in one of Florida’s top firms at the age of 33, three years after joining as an associate.

My mother loved classical music. She read. She loved good restaurants and trips to Europe.

What were they supposed to do in Eastern Kentucky? My dad wrote a brief for my grandfather once, and my grandfather told him it was too good for the judges up there.

Since my beliefs have been mentioned, I’ll talk about some of them.

I am certain everyone has demons. They are around us all the time, influencing, or trying to influence, our hearts and minds. Many of the thoughts, desires, and emotions we think are ours really come from demons, and some, in some people, come from the Holy Spirit.

Demons use people to express themselves and fulfill their desires. They give us habits and leanings. Some try to turn us into the people they would be if they had bodies. They get us to wear things they like. They get us to cut ourselves up and get tattoos.

They manifest in things like overeating, pornography, rage, depression, delusions, to name a few.

I believe that when people become demented, the demons get promotion. Before dementia sets in, people resist them to a certain extent. They also cover their influence up, pretending to be nicer and better than they really are. Once the host loses the ability to steer things, he or she becomes more like the demons.

My grandmother liked to boss people. She covered it up when she was young and able, but she became demented, and one day, she announced, “I want to be the boss!” I believe that was her demons talking. Sometimes my dad, who had vascular dementia, would curse me for no reason and then forget instantly. I think that was demonic, too.

Now my aunt is fading, and she seems like a different person. Maybe she is a different person. Maybe other beings are finally getting to spit poison at me, after veiling their feelings for decades. She used to tell me she admired me. She tried to impress me, probably because I grew up in cities and had more sophistication than the rest of the family. She’s done with that now.

God has told me all kinds of brilliant things, which makes sense, because he is God. He told me this: “Things get better, or things get worse.”

It sounds extremely simple and obvious, but it’s important. Every day, you improve or deteriorate. You never stand still and remain unchanged. Nothing does, except God. Troubled people who don’t know the Holy Spirit deteriorate. Whatever is wrong in their hearts and minds gets worse.

God brings improvement and order. Where God is absent, rot and chaos are unstoppable. God told me this: “Bring order.”

I’ve talked to Rhodah about my family, and she feels the same way I do. Don’t sue. Don’t turn anyone in. Don’t wade into the food fight. The amounts at stake are too small to make a real difference in our lives, and getting into unforgiveness and juvenile squabbling would take all the joy out of life.

Paul said it was better to suffer wrong than to take another Christian to court. I would only call one or two of my relatives Christians, but I think Paul’s advice applies anyway. If anything is taken from me, God will repay it with interest, and He will be pleased that I’m pursuing his presence instead of playing verbal laser tag with people who are in real supernatural trouble.

We have been praying for my family. It doesn’t seem to help them. I don’t know what else we can do. I thought about contacting relatives to raise awareness about my aunt’s condition, but they know already, and nothing is being done.

It seems likely a very abrupt move to assisted living is in her near future, and I am told nothing is being done to prepare. If she’s angry with me for questioning her actions as my fiduciary, you have to wonder how she will handle assisted living staff telling her what socks to wear.

It’s very unfortunate. I used to have a great relationship with her. I don’t see that being restored any time soon. If my grandfather had done a better job planning his estate, maybe the family would still be whole.

At least I can say I never took advantage of any of the others. I’m not the world’s finest person, but I have managed to avoid that.

I Get It

I have more input on Starlink Junior, my new ISP.

I put the dish up last week, and I have been doing speed tests. I put the dish in my old Dish dish mount, and then I rigged up a dubious pole to raise the dish another 8 feet.

Sometimes my download speed goes up to around 60 megs. Usually, it’s closer to 10. It has tested as low as three. The high figures are way better than anything I get from AT&T, the company from which my old connection was bought. The low figures aren’t much worse than the performance AT&T provides when things aren’t going well. AT&T doesn’t seem to like heavy rain.

Uploads with Starlink are pretty bad. I have seen 15 Mbps, but I think three is more typical.

I still think I’ll hold onto Starlink. It should improve, and the more time I spend online, the more it seems smoother and more reliable than AT&T. The old upload speeds I got were pathetic, so Starlink uploading doesn’t seem like a downgrade.

Musk needs to provide more help with locating dishes. They should send people out to look around. I have to guess where to put the dish. The phone app that detects obstructions doesn’t really work.

Should I turn my dish a little to the right or left? I don’t know. Should I put it on the other side of the house? Should I buy a 50-foot tower?

The Starlink stuff is like the monoliths in 2001. You can’t ask it questions. It just sits there and does what it wants. No explanations. No manual.

I feel like I bought an Apple product or a German car. “SHUT UP! We do the thinking for you! It’s good enough for you!”

Starlink somehow relies on cell networks to do uploads. I can’t find good information on how this works. At first, I thought maybe it was downloading straight from satellites and uploading to local cell towers, but that can’t be right, because Speedtest tells me it’s uploading to places like Gainesville and Atlanta. It appears I am sending uploads to space, and from there they go to ground stations. If this is true, then why are uploads so slow?

Is my little dish too weak to shoot a good signal up to the motherships, or are the motherships slow when they shoot my data down to the ground stations? No idea.

Speaking of German cars, my friend Mike continues to have fun with the Mercedes lemon he bought.

This thing has been going into “limp mode” for something like a year, for no discernible reason. Mercedes dealerships can’t figure it out. He has spend a lot of money on parts. Right now, he’s visiting New Hampshire, and he has no car because the wiring caught fire.

They’re telling him he may need a new wiring harness, and the cost would be $20,000. For wires. The car only cost him $27,000. He doesn’t know the whole story, because the dealership that has the car won’t get to it until Tuesday. Is it possible to get a wiring harness during Biden’s reign of inflation and shortages? No idea. What if they have to keep the car a month?

He took a trailer with him. He was going to fill it with his belongings and bring it down here. If the work takes a month, what happens to the trailer? And where is he supposed to stay?

I do not like German cars. They are as overrated as Wonder Woman and The Black Panther. They are very unreliable, working on them is a nightmare, and parts are astoundingly expensive.

I don’t know why people think the Germans are good at engineering. They’re not. They do a very good job of making things that don’t work. Making things cute and clever and pretty is only part of engineering. The primary goal is to make them practical, so German engineers are not very good, regardless of how impressive their products are when they work.

This is not new. Porsche lost the contract for the Tiger tank. Another company built a competing prototype, and Porsche’s prototype–a hybrid (seriously)–broke down and got stuck during the trials. The competitor offered to use its tank to pull the Porsche free.

Oh, yeah. There is no substitute.

Daimler-Benz made the Panzer, and it helped lose the war for the Germans because it was always in the shop. I’m not kidding. Look it up. When Panzers broke down, they were a nightmare to fix, but a tank crew could replace a Sherman engine in the field in a few hours. Shermans ran. The disparity is one reason we were able to field more tanks. People say the Panzer was better than the Sherman, but Shermans obliterated a whole lot of Panzers, as did Soviet T-34’s. Allied tanks proved better in terms of winning wars.

Incidentally, it’s not true that Shermans burned easily. It’s a myth. And the crew of a burning Sherman could escape in less than 5 seconds. To get out of a burning Panzer, you had to fill out forms, have them stamped by the local burgermeister, mail them to Berlin…well, not really, but it took a very long time, so you were just about certain to be burned to death.

The Japanese do better than the Germans. The Germans will never be able to match Toyota engineering. A Porsche can go around the Nurburgring faster, but the Toyota will go around it 23,000 times with basic maintenance, and the Porsche will be lucky to complete 5 laps.

Mike’s battery died the other day, and I helped him replace it. Guess where they put it? Under the passenger seat. You can’t fully expose the battery hole without removing the seat. Mercedes didn’t put a strap on the battery to lift it out of the hole, so there was no way to grip it. We had to cut slits in the carpet to move it. No joke.

I replaced two batteries in my big Dodge in less time.

Maybe I’ve written about the Mercedes before. Can’t recall. I really do not like German cars.

Another friend of mine bought a used Mercedes, and she liked it because it was cheap. Then it needed a trivial repair, and she couldn’t afford it. The parts cost too much.

This, incidentally, is why you don’t buy a $5000 vintage Bentley.

Or any BMW Mini Cooper.

If German cars were any good, they would hold their value, and they don’t. Mike’s car had low miles when he bought it, and his $70,000 vehicle only cost $27,000. What does that tell you? I can get most of what I paid for my diesel Dodge, and I bought it in 2009, 13 years ago. It has three times the mileage it came with. Doesn’t matter.

It’s worth a lot more than Mike’s $70,000 2014 diesel Mercedes with lower mileage. Think about that.

Musk needs to communicate with customers. Oddly, by making Starlink a product that does everything itself, he has made it necessary for customers to do things they shouldn’t have to do.

I found out about splicing the Starlink cable. It’s just standard Cat5 data cable, covered in a rubber sheath and imprisoned in Musk’s cruel proprietary connectors.

It’s really dumb. If Musk had done things right, he would have used plain old Cat5 connectors and made things easier for everyone. No, in a quest for needless control, he made his own connectors, which are probably patented so no one can sell them cheaper except the Chinese.

Because of what he did, running a cable through a wall requires a 1″ hole instead of a 1/4″ hole.

Or does it?

Being a clever person, I am not afraid to cut Musk’s cable and splice it myself. You just sever it and put your own Cat5 connectors on the cut ends. You can’t connect it to the dish or router without modifying them, but you can run it right through a 1/4″ hole, and you can add all the length you want. You can even cut into existing cables already present in your house.

Take that, Tesla Boy.

If you want to know how to splice Starlink cable, go to Youtube and find out.

I already have the things I need to do my splicing, so I’m going to cut the cable and run it through my obsolete cable TV hole.

I don’t know of any way to hardwire the router to my existing Ethernet wiring, but I’ll be looking into it. Wireless everything is inferior to hardwired everything. Wireless connections are a downgrading concession to reality. If hardwiring were always practical, no one whose data and speed were important would have any interest in wireless.

If you could put a wire on your phone, your calls would never drop, and your speeds would be incredible.

I installed my first wireless printer yesterday, which is why I posted a crabby rant about new tech products. The installation should have taken 10 minutes, but Brother turned it into a painful ordeal lasting over an hour.

Anyway, one less cable to deal with, and now I can scan things without going to my office.

Brother put a ridiculous password on my printer, and I had to use it more than once. I had to turn the printer over, put on my reading glasses, read the tiny password label, and transcribe the password to a file so I wouldn’t have to turn the printer over any more.

Here is my printer password: password. Want to hack it? Knock yourselves out. I wanted to forgo a password or use “1,” but [Big] Brother wouldn’t let me.

If you can get close enough to my house to get a printer signal, you can print whatever you want, but don’t forget that wireless range is a lot smaller than rifle or pistol range, and you will be well within Florida’s open-season-on-trespassers radius.

I can bury you in 10 minutes. I have a tractor.

It’s time to go ahead and do the splice so I can shut my upstairs window and run the Starlink cable through a hole. Then I’ll probably find out I put the dish on the wrong side of the house.

It Pays to Have Connections

I have some testimony to report.

My wife and I visited Ireland. We did a great deal of shopping for her. In addition, I brought her things from America. I got her expensive Keen hiking shoes, wool socks, MAC cosmetics, an insulated Carhartt jacket, a bunch of wigs, a costly Spyderco knife, and at least two pounds of homemade beef jerky. I can’t recall all the things we bought in Ireland or all the things I brought, but when she got ready to fly home, her checked bag felt like it contained a dead body. The value was in the thousands of dollars.

She used Aer Lingus, Air France, and Airlink South Africa to get home. Aer Lingus took her to Charles de Gaulle in Paris. Air France took her to Johannesburg. Then she flew to Zambia on Airlink, which is called Airlink South Africa in South Africa and Airlink Zambia in Zambia.

We checked her bag in Dublin using the confirmation code we received when we bought her ticket from KLM, which is the same company as Air France. The claim ticket said the bag was going to Charles de Gaulle. We thought nothing of it, because routing bags was not our job. For all we knew, all bags on multiple flights had tags that only mentioned first destinations. The airlines knew where she was going, and we assumed they knew what they were doing. When I check bags, I never look at the tags. I rely on the billions of dollars’ worth of computers use to keep track of them.

Before she landed, I got an email from Air France, saying her bag had been delayed. It said we should file a report online. I forwarded the email to her. Her bag was not in Johannesburg when she arrived, so she went home.

I tried to file a report, and Air France’s site would not accept it. It is not possible to use Air France’s global site to report bag problems in South Africa. Air France had told us to do something impossible. When I called Air France, they said it wasn’t their problem. They said we had to deal with the last carrier in the chain, which isn’t really true. They were lying in order to avoid paying for the bag if they couldn’t find it.

Airlines steal luggage all the time. “Lose” is the wrong word. They don’t just lose it. They sell it. If Air France keeps your bag and refuses to file a report, they can sell it for a profit and save the cost of reimbursement. There are companies whose only business is buying “lost” bags and reselling them.

An Aer Lingus employee at its central baggage facility told me Air France was lying in order to avoid responsibility. Aer Lingus also told us Air France had flown the bag to Johannesburg two days after Rhodah’s flight, so we knew Air France had the bag.

When we called Johannesburg, they lied to us. They hung up on us. I got Skype so I could call them, and Skype banned me for life because I called so much. I would call, the system would hang up, and I would call again. Microsoft decided I was some kind of criminal, so there was no appeal.

Airlink’s Zambian employees filed what is known as a “courtesy report” solely for tracking purposes. This kind of report doesn’t include an admission of liability. I was able to access this report online for a while, but then the airlines–probably Air France–locked me out.

We had insurance through another company, Heymondo. They refused to compensate us without documentation from the airlines, which the airlines refused to give us.

Of course, Heymondo knows this happens, so their bag insurance is not very good. If an airline accepts responsibility, the airline pays a lot of money, and Heymondo may be off the hook. If the airline doesn’t accept responsibility, Heymondo doesn’t pay you anything. It looks like their coverage only works after the airline pays its share.

It’s a racket, all the way around.

Rhodah went to the Lusaka airport over and over. I spent a ton of money on calls to South Africa. In the end, nothing happened.

Rhodah had a vision during this time. She saw a strange woman wearing her Carhartt jacket.

We pray together every day. In prayer, I kept cursing the spirits that were trying to keep what belonged to Rhodah. I cursed the people involved with defeat. I felt as though God were telling me the bag would come back, but my faith was nothing to write home about.

I bought Rhodah a new jacket, knife, and shoes for our upcoming trip. I replaced the wool socks she had lost. I told her she should replace what she could in Zambia because we didn’t save much by stuffing my bag, and we could always lose things again.

Today Rhodah sent me this photo.

There is the bag, nearly 4 months after they stole it. Airlink brought it this morning after an unexpected call. The jacket is gone. The knife appears to be gone. That’s about $350 right there. The rest of the things seem to be present, so we have avoided a loss amounting to several thousand dollars. She has yet to comb through the bag carefully. Of course, they beat it up.

We should now be able to force the airlines to pay for her stolen items, and if they won’t, the insurer should have to pay. The fact that the bag came back 4 months late should be good evidence that there was a problem.

I took Rhodah a lot of homemade beef jerky, and it was still in the bag. She got so excited, she started eating it even though she was supposed to be fasting. I’m glad it was in there, because it took a lot of raw beef and time to make it.

I still have to take her the new jacket. I’m putting the new shoes in my closet. The ones she recovered should last years, so there is no point in taking new ones to her. I can’t return them to Amazon because I gave the box to Marvin, and he ate holes in it and pooped all over it. When the old shoes (which have about two weeks’ worth of mileage on them) wear out, she will have a fresh pair ready to go.

I still lost the money I spent on calls.

So who stole the jacket and knife?

I considered the possibility it was a South African or Zambian. South Africans are very violent, and they like to use knives on each other. Zambians are not very inclined to violence. I think most French bag thieves would find knives uninteresting, although there are a lot of criminals in France who come from Muslim countries and Africa, and a really good lock-blade knife would appeal to such people. There is a lot of Muslim knife crime in France.

Rhodah thinks it was a white woman. The wigs in the bag were worth something like $800, and the cosmetics were also expensive, but they were not touched. A white woman would not have been able to use them. A black woman would have wanted them. The jacket was small for a man, so the thief was probably female. Maybe our things were stolen by a Caucasian Muslim woman in France who thought her husband would like a good knife to carry in their dangerous Muslim neighborhood.

People think Muslims don’t steal. Wrong! They steal like crazy when they aren’t afraid of Muslim justice in the form of unneeded surgery. Islam teaches that Allah encourages stealing from non-Muslims. Somali pirates are Muslims.

I think it is somewhat unlikely that a Zambian woman would steal a highly distinctive American jacket and wear it in Zambia, especially in an airport where her coworkers knew a passenger had reported such a jacket lost. A thief in France or South Africa could be certain the victim would never see her with the jacket.

Today we prayed for the thieves and their families.

I have given Rhodah a lot of money for redundant purchases, so this event is a score for her.

When I found out the bag was back, I felt bad for not having more faith. Yahweh is the master of the tiny, weak spirit Muslims worship when they use the name “Allah.”

What happened is remarkable. When a bag is gone for almost 4 months, generally, you can consider it lost.

In other news, I kept hearing something strange last night during prayer: “Rejoice! Your day is here.” I’m grateful for the luggage, but somehow I don’t think God would say my day was here just because my wife got a lost bag back. Either he was talking about something else, or the bag is part of a bigger event, or I imagined everything.

If the words came from God, then whatever has happened is very good, because “rejoice” was in there.

I am ready to rejoice. My life is easy, as is my wife’s life, but I have been rejected and hindered since before I was born, and so has she. A lot of Christians go from acceptance, wealth, and successful marriages and families straight into Christianity. Many people who become Christians are doing very well before the change comes. I had a brief period of fitting in and doing well during and after law school, but other than that, I have always been an outsider, and I didn’t marry until I was old. I have been cheated out of one thing after another.

Yesterday I was thinking of prominent Christians who have been treated very badly, and I thought it was strange that things were going well for Rhodah and me. I wondered if it meant we were not good Christians. Then I thought about all the rotten things that had happened to me when I was younger. It may be that most of my suffering is behind me. I have heard that in prophecy a lot.

I always tell people two things: I wouldn’t go through my childhood again for anything, and anyone who wants to prolong his life on Earth is insane. I have been abused since before I was born, and I am tired of this place even though life is pleasant now. Maybe God’s exasperation with the people and spirits that have mistreated me is greater than his motivation to let me be tested further.

I believe we are also spared because we ask for it. Jesus said we should pray that God would not lead us into temptation and that he would deliver us from evil. Rhodah and I ask for those things every day. They must not be automatic, or we would not have been told to ask.

Satan is a bully, and he has favorites, like any bully. Some people get more of his abuse than others. Surely God will provide favor that outweighs Satan’s disfavor. And eventually we’ll get to see Satan thrown screaming into the fire, which will erase all the pleasure he got from hurting people.

We now have to contact Airlink and tell them our items are lost. I do not have high hopes, given the way we have been treated so far. After that, we will try Heymondo. It would be nice to have a few hundred dollars returned to us.

I am working on getting us into Czechia. I accidentally reserved a hotel room in a place where they are not allowed to install air conditioning. It’s a historic building. Forget that place. I don’t care if King Wenceslaus himself slept there. I’m not going to Europe to sweat.

I sent the Zambian embassy in Rome an email, detailing the way the Italian embassy in Lusaka lied to us and treated Rhodah rudely. They claim they are taking it seriously and following up. I hope so, because the nasty lady who caused our loss needs to be fired or corrected. Someone else should be handling visas. Maybe she can be reassigned to the copier room where she can hurl abuse at the guy who delivers toner.

The Zambian embassy helps Italians the way the Italian embassy is supposed to help Zambians, so they should be very angry to learn how we were treated. I don’t think I have to check when I opine that the Zambians in Rome are much more honest and kind than the Italian lady in Lusaka.

We prayed for this lady and her family, but that doesn’t mean she what she did should be ignored.

This time, I will tell Rhodah to be careful not to pack anything she is afraid to lose. We will photograph everything we pack, and we will check bag tags very carefully.

Not the Kind of Leak I had in Mind

The festival of sudden inconvenient repairs continues here at the compound.

Let’s see. I put in a new air conditioner last week. My garden tractor’s alternator quit. My other tractor still has a broken front gear case, and the steering cylinder is not connected. I had to clean my roof gutters. I had to fix a windshield leak on my Dodge Ram. I am still trying to build a new welding cart.

My well pump’s expansion tank pipe broke three days ago, and I had to fix that. Day before yesterday, in a completely unrelated surprise, the pump stopped working. I found out the on/off switch was a mess, and the pressure switch didn’t look too good, either. Worked on it in the heat and humidity until I realized it was going to require an expert.

The pump guys came, and they put in a new pressure switch and replaced a burned relay. Along the way, they learned that the check valve was finished, so that accounted for the rest of the $392.50.

I still have to replace the on/off switch. I am tempted to leave it as it is; three sets of wires held together with wire nuts. The circuit breaker is 25 feet from the pump, so the on/off switch is more or less redundant.

I will put a new switch in anyway.

Before the pump guys arrived, I had to bathe in the pool twice. After they fixed the pump, I thought everything was grand. My bidet attachment was working again. That’s something you really miss when it’s gone. I thought I was in for some smooth sailing. Then I noticed the water on my bathroom floor.

I had been using a bucket and pool water to flush the can, so I thought I had spilled water on the floor. No; no such luck. The toilet was leaking where the fill valve met the tank. I tried to fix it last night, and then I gave up and shut off the water supply. This is why I have a guest bathroom.

Today, I fooled with it again, and I got some wonderful news.

I have a Briggs Vacuity toilet. This is a green marvel from the infancy of hippie-approved toilets. Under the hood, there is a Rube Goldberg contraption that would drive Montgomery Scott himself to find a way to freebase Romulan ale.

I can’t explain it because I don’t understand it. Inside the porcelain tank, there is a smaller plastic tank. Inside that tank, there is an upside-down plastic jug. There is an air tube that comes up from the bowl.

Because of the plastic tank, you can’t get by with a single gasket that surrounds the fill valve pipe inside the porcelain tank. You have to have a gasket between the plastic tank and the porcelain. Guess what that gasket does. It goes bad. Guess how you replace it. You remove the entire porcelain tank, remove the plastic tank from the porcelain, install the gasket, and put it all back together. Along the way, you have to replace a bunch of other gaskets because only an idiot replaces one gasket when he has something taken apart.

Guess what the geniuses at Briggs did. They stopped selling gaskets. This toilet is unbelievably stupid, and Briggs knows it. They abandoned it.

That’s not completely true. You can still buy other parts that can’t save the toilet once the $1.51 unobtainable gasket goes bad.

Guess how many Briggs Vacuity toilets I have. Four.

I see the future, and it is not good.

I looked at this thing for a long time, and I came up with ideas.

1. Take the tank apart, cut off all the environmentalist bits of plastic except for those required to make the toilet function, plug the vacuum-tube hole permanently, and reassemble what’s left as a normal high-flow toilet. This will happen eventually, but not today, because I needed my toilet ASAP.

2. Buy a big rubber washer with a 1″ hole and put it on the outside of the toilet around the fill valve pipe. The other gaskets are all inside the tank. If there is a good solid gasket on the outside, they become irrelevant. I suppose some water inside the tank will go where liberals don’t want it to go, because it will be able to move from the plastic tank to the porcelain tank, but it will fill and flush just fine, it won’t run, and it won’t leak, and also, who cares what liberals want?

3. Buy and install a new toilet. I have never installed a new toilet, and this is not the weekend to start.

If I did buy a toilet, it would be a Toto one-piece toilet.

I have had two Toto toilets in the past, and they made defecation something to look forward to. They worked flawlessly, they were comfortable, they came with slow-close lids, and I’m pretty sure they would have flushed bricks.

Toto is a Japanese company, and we all know the Japanese have a sick obsession with quality toilets. They make toilets that massage and sing and so on. Japanese toilets are the Swiss watches of toilets.

Today I learned that one-piece toilets are totally superior to two-piece toilets. They are much more reliable. That’s all I need to know. There is no more important toilet attribute.

I think I should eventually try to convert one of my Briggs socialist hippie toilets to full-flow, and if it doesn’t work, I’ll install one Toto a month until they’re gone.

I really hate all the green garbage they’re selling us. Green products don’t work. They cost more. They kill American jobs. They kill great companies that employee huge numbers of people. They waste a huge amount of man hours, materials, and resources, just so we can be fashionable. Yes, there are fantastic green products, but we never seem to get those until our landfills are full of the bad green products that came first.

I am hoping I can go to bed tonight. I mean, just go to bed. Without hearing funny noises from the air conditioner or seeing water on the carpet or smelling smoke or having the ceiling collapse.

It’s a Saturday, and that’s bad. Friday night is the most likely night for something expensive to fail, and Saturday comes next.

In better news, I had a great Christian encounter today.

Five years ago, when my dad and I moved here, the man who owned the house sold me his two tractors and utility cart. He offered all three for much less than the big tractor alone was worth. I had to have someone look the machines over before writing the check, so I Googled and found a mechanic.

He checked the machines out and said they were okay, I sent him money, and that was that.

When I damaged the Kubota so badly I was no longer willing to try to fix it myself, I thought of this mechanic. I called him, and he said he would take the job. It took weeks for us to work things out, and he arrived today.

While we were talking, it became obvious to me that he was not a Democrat, and that meant he might be a Christian. I steered the conversation toward God, and then things took right off.

Like me, he has met Jesus. I mean personally. I don’t mean he suddenly believed and calls that meeting Jesus. Jesus himself came to him.

He was a kid, and he and his friends fished together. They liked to fish under a bridge. Over time, they had dug back into the dirt under the bridge, creating a little cave they could sit in. The mechanic, whose name is Paul, couldn’t go with them one day, and on that day, a truck crossed the bridge while they were sitting under it. The cave collapsed, and they all died.

Later, Paul prayed about it. He was very disturbed. While he was praying, something came to him and started trickling into him. While it was there, he felt complete peace and love. He knew nothing bad could happen to him while it was there.

I told him it was Jesus, because the same thing had happened to me. He agreed, saying that was what he had thought.

We must have spent an hour and a half talking about this. We learned we had a lot of common interests. He showed up in a 28,000-pound Dodge truck with a crane and a Miller Bobcat welder/generator on it. He loves guns and shooting. He hates what the world is turning into. His wife home-schooled his kids.

My buddy Mike is living here now, and I got him to come over and meet Paul so they could share their experiences.

I don’t know if we’ll become friends, but for the first time since I’ve moved here, I felt like I had met someone I wouldn’t mind knowing.

Later, I was talking to my wife on Whatsapp, and I told her about it. She said that when she has an encounter like that, she has an unusual feeling: the feeling that she and her new acquaintance can be close. Good friends. I didn’t coach her. She said that before I told her what I had felt.

We prayed for Paul and his family. I told him a few things about the Holy Spirit and tongues. Maybe it will go somewhere.

He didn’t fix the tractor because there was an issue he was not sure he had the tools to handle. He usually works on big machinery, not little tractors. He called a friend of his who works on small machines, but he didn’t get a call back while he was here. We agreed on one thing: we would get it done.

I felt a lot better about the accident. God used my broken front gear case to bring Paul here when he needed to talk to me and have my wife and me intercede for him and his family. The repair may cost me as much as a couple of grand, depending on who ends up doing it. The dealer might have to be involved. I don’t care. If God is behind what’s happening, it’s more important than a little money.

Confused Danish Preacher Housed with Mexican Criminals

Yesterday, a reader posted a comment saying evangelist Torben Sondergaard had been arrested. I started checking the web, and at first, it looked like a hoax. The story only appeared on obscure wackjob sites, and there were no details. The facts presented seemed inconsistent. I read that the FBI had arrested him for smuggling weapons into Mexico, and I also read he had been arrested in Orange County, Florida, where he was detained in the county jail.

Clearly, Florida does not border Mexico, and smuggling weapons into Mexico would be a federal crime, so why jail the suspect in a county facility?

Today I finally got some confirmation. Torben has a Facebook account, and he put up a post. I will take the liberty of republishing it here.

Torben Søndergaard
July 3 at 9:27 PM ·

BREAKING NEWS!!! – FOUNDER OF THE LAST REFORMATION TORBEN SONDERGAARD HAS BEEN FALSELY ARRESTED AND DETAINED BY THE FBI AND HOMELAND SECURITY AS A NATIONAL THREAT FOR SMUGGLING WEAPONS TO AMERICA… ??????

Hello everyone out there. I, Torben Sondergaard, am sharing this message with you from a phone call in Bakers Jail near Jacksonville, Florida, where I have been detained for two days in isolation after the most crazy days of my life. I don’t remember all the details, so maybe I will be wrong about some of the details I’m saying here, so I need you to forgive me, but I don’t have any pen or anything to write with, so this is just coming out of my memory through a phone call to my wife Lene, so we can get it up here on Facebook and YouTube to all of you out there.

First, I know many of you have heard about it and are praying for me, and I thank you so much. It means so much to me to know that you are out there praying. This Thursday, I was invited to a meeting with Homeland Security who wanted to talk about my asylum case – a case where I, in Denmark three years ago, was accused of doing many things I had not done, and where I ended up fleeing to America seeking asylum.

But then, they suddenly said that the real reason I was there was because they had been notified that I was smuggling weapons from Mexico to America, and I was in shock.

I have been staying in California with my wife and kids and we have just finished up a Bible school over the border in Mexico, where many of our helpers traveled from Mexico to America several times a week, but NONE of them were smuggling weapons, and I have NEVER had anything to do with smuggling weapons. I know NOTHING about smuggling weapons.

But there, they brought it up on the table and said that because of what they have heard, and because of all the crazy things happening in America right now, they see me as a national threat, and therefore they have chosen to detain me. Afterwards, I was put up against the wall, put in handcuffs, and led into a room. Later I was put in handcuffs again on my hands and on my feet, and then brought to Orange Jail where I was sitting on a chair for eight hours waiting, before I was put into a room with twenty other people. This was one of the most unreal experiences in my life. I talked with my wife Lene on the phone and we talked about that maybe God brought me there for a person, and it so happened that I prayed for one guy who got healed and he started to cry and said, “Whoa, God has truly sent you here to me because two days ago I prayed that God would send somebody to me.” So I had a beautiful moment with God even though it was terribly hard.

I almost didn’t sleep that night. The next morning they came and picked me up again with handcuffs on my hands and feet, and put me in a car, and I was driven three hours to Bakers Detention where I am now, where I’ve been sent to isolation for seven days. To come here was a shock. My room is very small. It is 7.13 feet or 2.3 meters. I am in isolation 24/7, where I can come out a half hour per day, and use the phone as I’m doing right now. Otherwise, I have nothing in there. The room is very dirty and moldy. I have not talked with the lawyer yet and I actually don’t know what is going on yet.

But, I want to say to all of you out there, I’ve tried many crazy things in my life, but nothing like this. I want to encourage you all to pray for me and stand together with me, because this is an attack on me because I’m preaching the Gospel. I am encouraged, because Jesus says, “Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves. Therefore be wise as serpents and harmless as doves. But beware of men, for they will deliver you up to councils and scourge you in their synagogues. You will be brought before governors and kings for My sake, as a testimony to them and to the Gentiles. But when they deliver you up, do not worry about how or what you should speak. For it will be given to you in that hour what you should speak; for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father who speaks in you. And you will be hated by all for My name’s sake. But he who endures to the end will be saved.” (Matthew 10:16-20, 23) And He also says, “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”

(Matthew 5:10?-?12) This is what is happening right now.
It has been hard, and it is hard, but I also see that God is changing me in all of this. To be in isolation, with no windows, and no clock, and talking with no one is just a weird experience. People are sometimes shouting from one cell to another, but it seems like almost everyone here speaks Spanish except for me.

I’m reminded of Paul’s words when he wrote, “But I want you to know, brethren, that the things which happened to me have actually turned out for the furtherance of the Gospel, so that it has become evident to the whole palace guard, and to all the rest, that my chains are in Christ; and most of the brethren in the Lord, having become confident by my chains, are much more bold to speak the Word without fear.”

(Philippians 1:12?-?14) Paul said that his chains would give them more boldness, and I’m encouraged that even with my chains, that you will get more boldness to preach the Gospel out there!
This is what I want to say to you out there – BE BOLD! PREACH THE GOSPEL! STAND FIRM on the WORD OF GOD, and please pray for me, and pray for my family. Pray that everything will turn out good here. This will also have an influence on my asylum case, so I will hopefully know more in a few days, and I will keep you updated here on my Facebook page and YouTube.

Again, I cannot answer anything. Please pray for me. If you know somebody in a high position, somebody who can help, then please reach out to us. All communication can happen via email at The Last Reformation website, where I have friends who are checking the emails, and you are also welcome to reach out to my wife.

I have probably forgotten to say a lot of things in this message since I cannot read it, I just have to quote it, so please bear with me. But I want to say, these last days have been something I have never, ever experienced before, and I never thought I would experience – being jailed this way, and for something as crazy as smuggling weapons from another country to America. Nothing could be further from the truth.

So please keep me in your prayers, and pray that God will continue doing work in me. I feel that every day He is changing me, and doing great work in my heart. When I do nothing else than sleep and pray and eat. God bless you all out there. Remember my family in your prayers.

Blessings,
Torben Sondergaard

It appears he is in the Baker County ICE detention center in MacClenny, Florida, since it’s a federal lockup full of people who speak Spanish. I don’t think he’s in a county jail.

I very much doubt this man has been smuggling weapons. No one but a lunatic would abandon his own country due to documented religious persecution, move himself and his family to the US, apply for asylum, spend years building a prominent ministry, and use it as a cover to move guns. The very suggestion is just stupid. If you want to make money in America, and you’re a popular preacher, all you have to do is teach the prosperity gospel, and you’ll be set for life. It’s not necessary to risk federal prison.

The Obama administration smuggled guns across the Mexican border. Torben Sondergaard…probably not.

My guess is that some Christian who disagrees with him, or maybe an LGBT activist, made a false report in order to torment him and get him deported.

I don’t bet, and people surprise me all the time, but I think he’ll be out in a few days with no stain on his record.

There is a kooky preacher on Youtube talking about Torben, claiming to be his friend. He calls his group the Gospel Gunslingers, and he is apparently obsessed with armed resistance. He says he’s in Mexico seeking asylum for some reason or other. I have to wonder if he’s involved in this. Would he or his associates do something like this in order to get attention for his movement?

Why would any American need asylum in Mexico? It makes no sense. In terms of human rights, a move to Mexico is a step backward.

The preacher did a long video which was supposedly about Torben, but I quit watching because he talked incessantly about himself. I didn’t get any real information about the arrest. The video was disturbing and came off like an exercise in self-promotion.

God is not telling Christians to shoot it out with the authorities, Antifa, BLM, the Illuminati, the Trilateral Commission, or anyone else. If God were interested in having us form private armies and shoot unbelievers, there would be at least one clue in the New Testament, and there is not. There are plenty of martyrs in there, but no John Wicks.

We and our unreliable AR-15’s are not going to fix America. It’s not going to be fixed at all. People need to understand that so they can spend their time drawing close to God and assuring their salvation.

Honestly, it’s better to be killed and go to heaven than to live like a scared ape or rodent here on Earth, behaving exactly like the hateful people we were put here to reach. This place is disgusting, and it’s only going to get worse. Why would you become a killer just to stay here? Heaven is real. If you are killed, you go there instantly, and you can forget this awful place forever.

I want no part of gunslinging for the gospel or any other cause. It’s true that large numbers of Christians will eventually be killed here in the US, just as we are in foreign countries, but that’s just how things work. Satan is real, and only a small percentage of human beings are outside his control. He will use them to get rid of us during the apocalypse. So what? Jesus told us it would happen, and the same thing happened to him. It’s not a good excuse to start worshiping Eugene Stoner.

If they come for me, all I want are a moment to pray and a good clean kill shot. The Gospel Gunslingers can stay here and suffer if they want. I am ready to go. When I’m gone, they and the leftist nuts can fight over my ammunition and use it to send each other to hell if they really want to.

They have a web page. It says this: “If you found this page, you probably already are a Gospel Gunslinger and concerned about keeping America free and great.”

No, I am not. America is neither free nor great now, and I am not planning to try to change it, because that ship sailed long ago. It beats Somalia at the moment, but I’m not willing to prance around with an AR-15 in order to get lower taxes and an end to gay marriage.

Okay, I found some information about the asylum story. The Gospel Gunslingers guy says he has filed for asylum because Biden is persecuting him as a dissident. I really don’t think so. I think it’s more likely that he’s a tremendous liar and possibly a sociopath.

The Gunslingers guy, not Biden. I realize that was ambiguous.

I doubt Biden knows who he is. I would be amazed to learn otherwise. My gut says this man is just desperate for attention.

I will pray for Torben and his family. It will be interesting to see what develops, especially if the feds identify and try to arrest a lying snitch.