Today I Learned how to Breathe

It’s CLE time again, so I am here to rant.

“CLE” stands for “Continuing Legal Education.” It should be “CCS,” or “Continuing Consumer Scam.” The purported purpose is to keep lawyers up to date on new developments that affect their jobs. The real purpose is to fool the public into thinking lawyers are staying up to date on new developments that affect their jobs, when they may or may not be doing it.

Lawyers have a bad reputation. I hate to say anything shocking, but it’s true. America is full of scum-sucking parasite lawyers who file frivolous tort claims that ruin life for everyone else and make things more expensive. Remember diving boards? Can’t have one now because of lawyers. Remember pool slides? Trampolines? Pools that didn’t have tiny, annoying fences 18″ from their borders? Tort lawyers, stand up on your mucus-oozing hind appendages, and take a bow. You took it all away.

Because everyone justifiably hates lawyers, we are continually making insincere efforts to seem like redeemable human beings. For one thing, they push us to do pro bono work. Some idiot sues McDonald’s for making hot coffee, so the Florida Bar tells me to make things better by donating $30,000 worth of work to some tattooed lady who wants custody of her sexually undefinable kids.

When I was practicing, I didn’t do pro bono. It’s all risk and work and no reward. I’m still on the hook for malpractice regardless of what I charge. I’m still on the hook for bar discipline if I screw up. I still have to pay my expenses, including any sanctions I incur. I end up burdened with lifelong loyalty to a stranger who didn’t pay me, along with his, her, or its confidential information. It’s quite a bit different from pro bono medical work, where you fix a cleft palate in Borneo and the happy patient vanishes from your life forever.

I think I’ll start Lawyers Without Borders. We’ll go to foreign countries and sue grocery stores when people fall down in the aisles.

People cheer when Doctors Without Borders show up. Imagine how they will run when my crowd lands.

“Doctors Without Borders is here! Roll out the red carpet and bring out the dancing girls!”

“Look! A plane full of lawyers! RELEASE THE DRONES!”

CLE is supposed to perform the same function as pro bono work. If the public thinks we’re working to stay current, they’ll have more confidence in us. Supposedly. In reality, the way to make people believe in you is to win cases.

As I have often said, every competent lawyer does CLE on his own, continuously. When you get a case, you do legal research. You find out the current state of the law. You find out whether procedure has changed. You adapt on the fly. This is business as usual. You have to do it in order to avoid screwing up. You bill clients for it. It’s part of every case that isn’t incredibly routine.

Forcing lawyers to take stupid courses and report to the bar is totally unnecessary for good lawyers, and it won’t help bad ones. And isn’t it possible that a farcical, insincere effort to keep lawyers informed will cause the public’s confidence in us to go down instead of up? Doesn’t it reinforce the notion that lawyers are always trying to fool people? Because with CLE, we are?

Then there is the dirty secret no one but me discusses: there are lawyers who sign up for CLE and then claim they did it when they really did not.

I worked for a patent attorney named Jack Dominik. He’s dead, so I’ll just name him. This man was a really excellent attorney. Extraordinary. Before I met him. By the time I showed up, he was in his late seventies, and he was making ethical mistakes, but other than that, he was very impressive. He used to buy CLE tapes and play them on a machine in my office, where he could not hear them.

My dad practiced for over half a century, and he was the best lawyer I ever knew. He bought tapes, put them in a drawer, and told the bar he listened to them. But he was extremely meticulous about preparing for cases properly. He was always ahead of the game.

I’m not sure any lawyer I’ve ever known has actually done CLE for real, when there was any kind of a choice. I think I may be the only one who does it.

Last time around, I downloaded some free CLE stuff, which brings me to the third purpose of CLE. It allows lawyers and companies to promote themselves and their products. You get to tell people about what you do or what your product can do, and you can provide web links and so on. A lot of the stuff I found last time was created for promotional purposes. Infomercials. A software company named Rocket Matters did a lot of it. This time, it’s a company named…I’ve already forgotten.

Anyway, I downloaded this junk and put it on a flash drive. Then I listened to it whenever I drove anywhere. I also used an Ipod, I think. Maybe it was my phone. I used 3M Worktunes Bluetooth earmuffs while I was riding the tractor and mower and when I was using loud tools.

While I was doing all this, it occurred to me that I could speed this stuff up. The time requirement was over 30 hours, but what’s time to a lawyer? We routinely charge people for three hours of work when we’ve actually done half an hour. Believe it or not, there are times when this is considered ethical. So I thought, “Why should I spend an hour listening to something when I can do it in 40 minutes?”

I’m not saying I ever did this, or that it makes no difference at all in the effectiveness of the teaching, because the material is often simple, and many CLE instructors talk way too slowly. But I will say the thought occurred to me.

I will admit that I looked, and do look, for courses with exaggerated time credit. Sometimes the bar will give an hour’s credit for a “course” lasting under 40 minutes, and sometimes a “course” will run almost 70 minutes, so which one would you choose?

I have wondered about the ethics of speeding up CLE audio, but yesterday, I saw something really funny that answered my question. On a CLE site belonging to the bar itself, I saw an audio player with a speed control.

The speed control isn’t small. It’s not hidden. It’s right out there where you can see it. Click a plus button or a minus button, and you can listen at whatever speed suits you.

Guess we know how concerned the bar is about speeding up the sound.

Who clicks the minus button? Who wants to turn 33 hours into 66? I want to meet that person. Is it some kind of exotic masochistic fetish? Anything is possible. Some people get off on watching fat women smoke.

The plus button would be a huge help to me (if I were using it). My mind works a lot faster than most people’s. When an audio presentation goes up to 1.5x or more, suddenly, I can stand to listen to it. Listening to accelerated audio, which I’m not saying I would ever do with crucial, case-saving CLE materials, helps me understand how great it would be if everyone in the world thought as fast as I do. I must have spent a hundred thousand hours, finishing people’s sentences in my mind.

“Hurry up. Hurry up. Hurry up. I know what you’re going to say. Spit it out. I can’t stand this. Get it over with. Self: concentrate. Concentrate. It’s really not that boring if you focus.”

“Should I make lasagna tonight? I don’t think I have ricotta. I need to clean out my dryer duct. What would happen if I made pizza dough with club soda? What’s so interesting about fat women smoking?”

I get really tired of the wokeness in the videos, even here in Florida. I also feel alienated by the mental health videos.

Back when life made sense, CLE was about practicing law. How to do discovery. How to identify unfair labor practices. Stuff like that. Now we get stuff about meditation and yoga breathing. No lie.

Mental health and wellness CLE’s help fulfill our professionalism requirement, so I listen to them even though my mental health is so amazing, it should be studied for the good of mankind. I’m totally normal. No problems at all here.

Okay, maybe not everyone believes that.

Anyway, yesterday I heard two videos about coping with stress. One said stress was good for us and helped us live longer lives. It really did. It was made by a lady who said she had had strokes and surgery because of stress. The obvious question: “Is this woman the best possible choice to teach about reducing stress?” How about some videos from people in their nineties with low blood pressure and clear arteries? Just a thought.

The second video was from a guy who said it was impossible to be stressed and happy at the same time. The lady who made the first video needs to watch the second video.

When he started talking about meditation, I skipped it. I have religious objections to weird mental exercises that come from Satanic religions, so, sorry. Not listening. I feel I should still get credit. You wouldn’t get mad if an Orthodox Jew took a break while a speaker put up pornographic slides. To me, advice about taking up paganism is worse than porn. Merely hearing it is harmful.

As I listened to these people, I realized how different I was from them and their target audience. I was riding around on a diesel mower, in my tranquil, gated, heavily-armed, rural Florida compound, without a care in the world. They were talking about using alcohol, drugs, and heathen religion to cope with the huge anxiety loads their listeners dealt with every day. I realized how blessed I was and how miserable people can be when they get shackled to Satan’s hamster wheel.

I wasn’t miserable or stressed when I practiced law, but I think most lawyers are.

I don’t know why I maintain my license. I never want to go back to the law. No one who leaves it does. When lawyers get together and one says he found a way out, everyone says the same thing. “Lucky you! I wish I could do that.”

I better fire up some videos before the compliance deadline passes. I hope my diligence gives you confidence in the competence of legal professionals everywhere.

I Definitely Picked the Wrong Week to Stop Sniffing Glue

The Cone of Certain Death is once again upon me.

Before I went to Hong Kong and Singapore, I prayed repeatedly that God would keep hurricanes away from my house while I was gone. He came through. Now, three days after my return home, we are getting the usual pre-storm hype. MAJOR Hurricane Idalia is BARRELING DOWN on me, and doom is assured.

I never pay any attention to the Panic…I mean “Weather” Channel. I don’t listen to the TV nuts. I watch the NHC site and keep track of changes in the forecast paths and the expected width of the storms. Right now, things are looking good. I am completely outside the area where the eye of the storm is expected to go, by maybe 75 miles, and the path updates are trending westward, away from me.

When Irma hit in 2017, the remains of storm went pretty much right over my house, and a lot of trees went down. This time, the storm is going to be very far away. My best guess is that I won’t get much wind at all.

The wind forecasts over at Accuweather are disturbing but probably wrong by a wide margin. They’re calling for sustained winds of 55 mph at some point. I think that’s way off, based on about 30 years of observing storms and forecasts. Last year, a storm passed by, and I noticed a breeze of maybe 10 mph at the exact time the forecasters were claiming 50. It was amazing to watch. How can you keep a 50-mph forecast on your site when you know perfectly well you’re 40 mph off?

My theory is that they lie deliberately in order to cover their butts and increase ratings. Scared people keep their TV’s on.

It’s dismaying to live in a state with tropical weather problems and to know that the people I rely on to inform me are very nearly worthless.

People who don’t live in Florida like to tell me I live in a hurricane zone. Insurance people like it more than anyone. Thing is, hurricane winds have never been recorded where I live. I looked it up. You can’t say you’ve been in a hurricane unless there was at least one minute during which the wind never dropped below 74 mph. That does not happen here.

We barely get tropical storm winds, which start at 39 mph.

Forecasters deliberately conflate gusts with sustained winds. You can have hurricane-speed gusts without clearing the hurricane bar. It’s normal to have brief blasts of high winds when you’re not really experiencing a hurricane. Still, forecasters love to talk about the gusts and play down the low sustained winds, which are what actually count.

They are predicting tropical storm winds from around 7 a.m. to about 1 p.m. I will be amazed if we get them at all.

Accuweather is reporting a hurricane warning for my area. A watch is when you MAY get a hurricane. A warning is when you WILL get a hurricane. The warning here started yesterday at 5 p.m. and ends tonight at 1:15. Someone explain that to me. How can they be sure a hurricane will hit, when they, themselves, say it won’t? Why did the warning start a day and a half before the high winds were expected?

The storm won’t even be here by 1:15, so how can the warning end then? Whatever arrives will get here tomorrow morning at about 7.

I need to check the definitions. Here they are, from the NHC:

Hurricane Watch
A Hurricane Watch is issued when sustained winds of 74 mph or higher are POSSIBLE within the specified area of the Watch. Because hurricane preparedness activities become difficult once winds reach tropical storm force, the Watch is issued 48 hours in advance of the onset of tropical storm force winds.

Hurricane Warning
A Hurricane Warning is issued when sustained winds of 74 mph or higher are EXPECTED somewhere within the specified area of the Warning. Because hurricane preparedness activities become difficult once winds reach tropical storm force, the Warning is issued 36 hours in advance of the onset of tropical storm force winds.

Let’s see. A hurricane warning is issued 36 hours in advance of the onset of tropical storm force winds. So, if hurricane winds had been expected, that would have been 7 p.m. yesterday, which is later than 5 p.m. So 34 hours, not 36? Why? And hurricane winds were never expected, so why post the warning at all?

Am I wrong, or are they ignoring their own rules?

Okay, here is what’s certain: there will be no hurricane here. Period. Count on it. It just does not happen.

Here is what is extremely likely: we will not get a tropical storm here. We might, but we probably will not. If we do, it almost certainly won’t last long, because hurricanes are more or less circular, and circles are small far from their centers. I will be far from the center. The region of high winds that passes over me will be small, if it exists at all. Because it will be small, it will pass over quickly.

There is a small possibility we will get worse winds than I expect, along with a bunch of downed trees. That looks like the worst case, unless tornadoes count. You have to be really cursed to get hit by a tornado. They are not common during hurricanes.

It’s good that I’m on the east side of the storm, with a coast between me and the eye. The only possible high winds will be from the south and west, and they will have to go over land to get here. On the down side, I have some big trees to the south of my workshop.

I haven’t prepared at all except to get some water. I can bathe in the pool and use the water to flush the toilets. I can drive to get food if the power goes out. Not much can be done.

I have ingredients for pizza.

I prayed about the storm, and I cursed it and so on. I think God told me there was no reason to get involved in preparation, so I’m relaxing. Tomorrow we’ll find out if I’m hearing from God or just lazy and prone to believing what I want.

As for the rest of the state, things look good. Forecasters are certain it will hit land north of me and east of the panhandle. In other words, it will strike an area where very few people live. Not comforting to the inhabitants, but it’s better than seeing Fort Lauderdale slammed.

Here’s some idiocy from The Drudge Report’s leftist owners:

Honestly, it’s like they sleep on rubber sheets.

A Computer Said it, so it Must be True

I guess everyone knows Joe Biden has finally acknowledged his illegitimate granddaughter, Navy Joan Roberts. On a Friday. Knowing the story would be buried.

I asked ChatGPT to provide the explanation Biden refuses to give us, and it wrote this:

As the President, it is my duty to address the recent media coverage surrounding my granddaughter, Navy Joan Roberts. I want to set the record straight and provide clarity on the situation. Contrary to the baseless claims made by some media outlets, the reasons for recognizing Navy were entirely reasonable and had nothing to do with negative press coverage.

You see, the whole thing started with a mix-up in our family’s scheduling system. We have a highly sophisticated system to keep track of our family gatherings, which includes all our grandchildren. However, due to a glitch in the software, Navy’s name got lost in the digital abyss, and we were entirely unaware of her existence until recently. It was like she fell into a digital black hole, and we had to send a team of tech experts to rescue her name from the clutches of the cyber realm.

As for the stockings at Christmas, well, it was all a grand experiment, you see. We decided to conduct a social study to assess the emotional impact of stocking numbers on children’s psyches during the holiday season. By hanging only six stockings, we wanted to gauge if the grandchildren would exhibit a heightened sense of camaraderie or, conversely, if any feelings of exclusion would arise. Rest assured, no grandchild was harmed during this audacious psychological study, and we concluded that stockings had little effect on their emotional well-being.

Regarding my son Hunter’s struggles, we couldn’t possibly acknowledge Navy publicly until we conducted a thorough genealogical investigation. Our team of genealogists scoured historical records and even delved into ancient family folklore to confirm the legitimacy of her lineage. It’s not every day that we welcome a new grandchild into the family, so we wanted to be absolutely sure.

Now, as for the bad press, I must say that such an assertion is absolutely preposterous! The media may claim that we were pressured into acknowledging Navy due to negative headlines, but I assure you that our decision-making process is far more impervious to external influences. We make our choices based on the alignment of celestial bodies, the predictions of fortune cookies, and the flip of a well-worn coin.

In conclusion, let me assure the American people that there is absolutely nothing ridiculous about our reasons for recognizing Navy Joan Roberts. Everything was handled with utmost seriousness and precision, from the technological rescue mission to the grand Christmas stocking experiment. And while the media may continue to speculate, our family remains united, our decisions unwavering, and our commitment to serving this nation resolute. Thank you, and may the whimsical winds of fate forever be in our favor.

Looking at this essay, which was generated in around two seconds, I have to wonder why Biden still has that crazy, incompetent girl acting as press secretary.

I also wonder whether anyone under the age of 50 ever writes anything any more, given that ChatGPT is capable of things like this.

What if leftists learn that ChatGPT can write mildly funny prose? They might suddenly become able to meme.

Maybe I’ve posted this before, but anyway, so far, this is the best use of AI I’ve seen:

No Riots, no Burning Buildings, no Pink Hair, no Problem

Rhodah and I are still waiting for our embassy interview so she can be brought to the US. We made the mistake of obeying the law instead of shoving her in amongst a group of military-age Somali males crashing the border in Texas, so we are still not finished.

Looks like we’re going to Hong Kong and Singapore so we can be together. I just bought a new camera so we can finally have a trip where we come back with decent video. It hasn’t arrived yet.

I don’t understand my feelings about Singapore at all. It’s a big city. Not a lot of green space. People generally live in apartments instead of houses. Hot weather all year. Lots of things I would ordinarily hate. Nonetheless, I really like Singapore, and so does my wife. I feel at home there. I wouldn’t mind living in Singapore if I had to.

Things to like about Singapore: minimal sexual perversion and coercion, extremely low crime, high standard of living, all types of goods in great abundance, stability, good food, and nice people. While the weather is hot, it’s not as unpleasant as Florida or Georgia. Mass transit is cheap and safe, and unlike New York’s trains and stations, Singapore’s don’t reek of urine.

There are nearly no bums in Singapore. We saw one lady begging, but she was an outlier.

What can you get in the US that you can’t get in Singapore? Guns are a lot easier to get here, assuming you live in a free state, and you can own them for self-defense and even carry them. In Singapore, you can get a license to keep a gun in your home, but they are rarely granted. Sounds bad, but on the other hand, you’re safer in Singapore without a gun than I am here with one.

Singapore is often called repressive, but whether a repressive government significantly impacts your enjoyment of life kind of depends on what it represses. If government restrictions don’t affect the kinds of activities in which you participate, you’re not likely to be bothered by them.

I think most people who call Singapore repressive are sexual perverts and perversion promoters. If you go online and look up Singapore repression, you’ll see that perversion is the main topic. Singapore only decriminalized sodomy last year. They shouldn’t have done that, and they’ll regret it, but it shows why perverts find Singapore unappealing.

We found the cost of living in Singapore to be reasonable. We stayed in a nice hotel for something like $230 per day. It was somewhat nicer than Hyatts and Sheratons here. We were able to get a lot of great food for between $5 and $10 per meal, and that’s Singapore dollars, which are somewhat smaller than ours. The trains were cheap. Not much to complain about.

Singapore is like a little bomb shelter for conservatives, if you want the truth. It’s not too close to China or Russia. It’s too far away for American perverts and socialists to invade profitably after they take over the US and our military. It’s too far away for social invaders from Central and South America to barge into. It’s not filling up with Islamists. It doesn’t need aid, so it won’t end up like Christian Africa, where we twist arms by connecting charity to filthy sexual aberrations God hates.

Is conservativism really about liberty? I wonder. Maybe it has more to do with safety and wealth. Do I really want a bunch of guns if crime is extremely low and the government stays off my back? I like shooting as a hobby, but I could give it up if the return were worth it.

In America, I have some guns for fun, but I keep others in order to defend myself, my wife, guests, and my property. My government is increasingly hostile to affluent Caucasians who mind their own business, and so are leftists, especially minorities. We also have a problem with crime that is not politically or racially motivated. In other countries, my situation would be different, and so would my attitude toward arming myself.

Here in the USA, we have a big population of blacks and Hispanics, and they commit a gigantic amount of violent crime and property crime. Most crimes of both types are committed by these groups. They have backward cultures that glorify the abuse of innocent people. This is reality, not the woke explanation. Statistics compiled by nonpartisan entities prove these things. White people do bad things, too, but at a much, much lower rate.

Other countries are different. Singapore is around 75% Chinese (non-red), and the rest of the people are mostly Indians, Malays, and Indonesians. Singaporeans like to work and make money. It’s a hard place to start a street gang or do a drive-by. It’s a hard place to riot and destroy homes and businesses. It’s not likely one or two ethnic groups will team up against another, as American blacks and Hispanics have teamed up on whites, and try to take what they have and turn them into milk cows.

We also have a sick government which is becoming more dangerous every month. Professional victims are taking it over. They’re getting rid of cash bail and decriminalizing theft. They are trying to destroy rural areas and suburbs, pushing people into cities where they are easier to control and prey on. It’s not merely likely that sane, decent Americans will eventually have to fight the government. It’s certain. We will see secession and/or guerrilla warfare when things get too hot, and unarmed “haves” will be slaughtered publicly, with their executions posted on social media. We’ve seen the same basic thing in revolutionary France, Cambodia, China, Russia, Cuba, and other places where smelly, ignorant, hateful mobs took over.

In the USA, unless you are willing to trust God and accept martyrdom, it makes no sense to be unarmed, but there are places where arms are a much lower priority.

If you have retirement money, life in Singapore is easy. You just live. You don’t have to endure endless daily bombardments with terrifying news about your once-great nation. “Will the Democrats force my county to put housing projects on formerly-private estates?” “Will the Democrats impose wealth taxes and impoverish me in my old age?” “Will my children be unemployable because they refuse to call male perverts women?” “Will my daughter have to be naked in front of males every day at school?” “Will Antifa/BLM nuts climb my fence and kill and rape my family?” These are things people in Singapore don’t worry about, but they are very real possibilities in the US.

As I’ve gotten older and learned more from God, I’ve become less impressed with the US and democracy. This is not the best country to live in. Not any more. And democracy is overrated. A good king, or “dictator,” as kings are called now, is better than democracy, any day. I’d rather have Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis as a king with a lifetime term than the situation we have now. I’d even take Rand Paul or Ted Cruz.

Democracy is a degenerate system of government, one step above rioting. It puts power in the hands of ignorant, malicious, bigoted imbeciles who have tremendous incentive to loot. Looters have more power than builders, because everyone gets one vote, and looters are more numerous. It also gives too much power to women, who, as a group, invariably vote stupidly.

In the US, we have the idea that it’s sort of illegal or shameful to contemn representative democracy. It’s neither. It’s perfectly acceptable to push for a monarchy or theocracy if you like. You just have to do it without committing offenses like treason and sedition.

I can say these things because I’m not a politician or any other type of person who depends on the love of the mob.

Anyway, America-worship is based in delusion. America is still very high up on the list of desirable places to live, but it’s not the best, and it will eventually become intolerable. Probably before Singapore and even places like Kenya and Uganda.

We are told to be grateful to America for what it has done for us, as though it were person with feelings; a rich mommy that sent us big checks every month. In reality, America never did anything for me. God did. He can bless me anywhere. Look how well Joseph, Esther, and Daniel did under tyrants. Look what he did to Laban because of Jacob. America is just an instrument God used to bless me.

America doesn’t actually care about me. If I died right now, no flags would be lowered. God and certain people care about me.

I’ve done a lot for America. I paid taxes and stayed out of trouble. I submitted to institutionalized racism in the form of affirmative action. I contributed to charities. I registered for the draft, which is a very big deal, at least if you intend to back up your word when called. No entity but America ever asked me to offer it my life and risk being maimed and forgotten.

If I should be grateful to anyone here, it should be the servicemen who fought so I didn’t have to.

I’m extremely grateful for every good thing I have, including the diminished rights I still possess, but I’m grateful to God, not nations. I want to continue to be an asset to America, but if I move to another country, I’ll try to be an asset there, and that country will have whatever loyalty I’m required to extend. I wouldn’t want to be like the disgraceful, parasitic people who become US citizens and then fly flags from their old countries. Dance with the one that brought you, right?

I am censored, libeled, and ostracized from the marketplace every single day, and America’s government–my country’s government–is behind it. That’s really something. I never had these problems during the last century, apart from the time I got desperate and applied for a government job. White people were not the target hiring pool. Other than that, I was nearly a full US citizen.

How grateful should I be for the good things when I’m already fairly well down the Nuremberg rabbit hole, with increased persecution soon to come? Should Jews who were once treated well in Germany have been grateful to their government in 1930? Am I wrong for weighing the very bad along with the good?

These things matter. Losing free speech is not a small thing. Being excluded from economic participation is not trivial.

To get back to travel, we’re only looking at Hong Kong because Rhodah wants to see it. If it were up to me, I would skip it.

I haven’t been to Hong Kong, but I’ve been researching. I’ve been told the people are rude, largely because so many have moved there from the workers’ paradise on the mainland. Funny thing about workers’ paradises; everyone in them always wants to move back to capitalist oppression.

Communism has made or kept the mainland Chinese coarse and selfish, and tourists in Hong Kong have to deal with them because they wait tables and drive cabs. Also, it looks like hotels and other facilities are more run-down in Hong Kong. People are less likely to speak English, even though it’s an official language. Everyone in Singapore speaks English, and they place a high priority on education. They’re not coarse, either. We didn’t see people spitting or littering. Everyone was courteous.

Look, Singapore is better than American cities. Better, not different. Let’s just say it. On average, American city dwellers are inferior to Singaporeans. Inferior. That is the right word. Some people are better than others.

Regarding Hong Kong, I have to say that the food looks very good.

Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Hong Kong Chinese are supposedly more cultured than mainlanders, which is not a high bar to clear. On the mainland, people urinate on the streets and let their kids poop there. Sometimes they pull these stunts in Hong Kong, and it doesn’t fly. Mainland Chinese tourists have terrible reputations in every single country they visit, as do Chinese businessmen.

Capitalism makes people better.

Having lived in Northern Florida, far from abusive, dangerous wokiees, for 6 beautiful, precious years that are like enormous pearls to me, I am disturbed whenever I think about visiting places where people are rude and selfish. I get Miami flashbacks. It’s too bad God won’t evacuate that place and put a fence around it to prevent it from coming back.

Hong Kong still uses the Hong Kong dollar, and I have read that people expect cash, so that’s a drag. As much as I hate the war on cash, electronic money is great for tourism.

I should have bought a better camera sooner. In fact, I did. I tried, I mean. I started Youtubing unsuccessfully in around 2016, and I have bought two unsatisfying action cameras. The latest, in 2019, was a Gopro. The cameras haven’t worked out. You really have to control them from phones in order to get them to function, and they’re very hinky. They turn on and off without warning. They refuse to connect to my phone and tablet. They change video modes unexpectedly. My Gopro ruined a video I made in Turkey. It’s just voices and a still photo. Unacceptable, when so much is at stake.

Phones are fine for photos, but I want something dependable for video, and it has to work without a phone.

My phone cost $750, and it does a ton of things. Oddly, the camera I bought costs about $150 more, and all it does is shoot photos and video.

I had a hard time choosing. I finally went with a Sony ZV-1 II. This is considered a point-and-shoot camera, although you can mess with a lot of settings, including the f-stop. I also considered the ZV-E10, which is similar but allows you to change lenses.

The ZV-E10 is more of a grown-up camera. No doubt. You can travel with a standard lens for vlogging and a zoom lens for versatility. Also, the sensor on the ZV-E10 is better. Thing is, it costs a lot with an extra lens. A good zoom lens will run around $650. Maybe I should have sprung for it, but the trip itself is not cheap, and I’m in the middle of Florida’s homeowner insurance explosion crisis, so I’m not feeling like this is the time to throw cash around. Although it probably is.

Our lives are great, but the rapture can’t come soon enough. I can’t wait for the day when I find myself looking back at Earth the way I now look back at the open latrine known as Miami.

Parasites Abandon Husks and Find New Hosts

Am I the only one who thinks the press covers up for celebrities who die in ways that aren’t flattering to them?

Let’s see. Robin Williams. Died hanging naked, alone, in a closet. The web says nude suicide is very rare, so what happened?

It’s very common for celebrities to be addicts and pleasure-lovers. Their drive to receive pleasure causes many to descend into perversion. One of the weirder things some celebrities have gotten into: autoerotic asphyxiation. The idea is that you cut off your air supply while stimulating yourself sexually. Lack of oxygen puts you in a weird state. Supposedly, it revs up your parasympathetic nervous system, which is involved in the sexual response. People who choke themselves say the pleasure is tremendous, and many people have become addicted to the practice. Nearly everyone who does it is male.

Either Williams–a drug addict with self-control problems–decided to kill himself while naked, leaving his wife and loved ones to face a scene that was pointlessly embarrassing on top of the shock and grief, or he was engaging in an addictive sexual activity when he died. Granted, he was struggling with the knowledge that dementia was killing him, but dementia patients are all over the place, and they almost always die naturally.

Anthony Bourdain, another drug addict, went the same way. He had a pleasant dinner in a hotel in France, went upstairs, stripped, and hanged himself. He was known to have bouts of depression, but as far as anyone knew, he was not in despair the day he died.

Why would you commit suicide in the nude? It makes no sense at all. You would be aware other people would find the body and have to deal with the scene.

The web says it’s common for people whose loved ones die masturbating to rearrange the evidence to cover it up, and of course, most people wouldn’t want the press to cover such stories honestly.

I don’t think these men committed suicide. It doesn’t make sense. I think they hanged themselves for pleasure and died by mistake. There is no way Williams wanted his family to find him dead and naked with a strap around his neck. Bourdain didn’t want the friend he was traveling with or the hotel staff to have to deal with a spectacle like that. Come on.

Then there was Anne Heche. She got in a Mini Cooper, floored it, and drove down a straight road into a house. The sun was out. The house was right in front of her. They still call it an accident.

No one drives into a house in broad daylight while sober by accident. She killed herself on purpose because she was miserable. She thought it would be quick, just as you or I would have. She didn’t know she would survive and spend the better part of an hour in a burning car.

Now they’re saying Madonna passed out and nearly died from a bacterial infection. Well, that happens. But the news also says she was revived with naloxone, the drug they use to save people who overdose on opioids. It’s also known as Narcan. It increases blood pressure temporarily and helps drug users keep breathing. The news says Madonna was so far gone, she was essentially dead, and she had to be resuscitated.

They had to stick a tube down her throat and keep it there for at least a day, so she must not have been able to breathe on her own, even after being rescued and receiving treatment.

Kind of sounds like she has brain damage. She was alone when she lost consciousness, she had breathing problems, and lack of oxygen kills brain cells fast. You can ruin your brain in a few minutes by depriving yourself of oxygen, and her breathing may have been depressed a lot longer than that.

Updates from her inner circle say simply, “She’s good,” “She’s very strong in general,” and, “She’s in the clear.” These aren’t things people would ordinarily say when a person is experiencing a full recovery. They sound like weasel words. People would ordinarily say things like, “She’s up and talking,” or, “The doctors say she’ll be fine.” “In the clear” sounds like they’re trying to say she will live, while withholding information about permanent consequences. “Very strong in general” sounds like she’s alive but has serious problems.

Jeremy Renner was crushed by a snowplow on January 1st, and he posted a photo of himself two days later.

The news articles are carefully worded to say there is no evidence she overdosed, and they are also claiming Narcan is used to save people who have septic shock, the problem Madonna supposedly had. Clearly, someone realized people would wonder why Narcan was used, and someone in the pipeline decided to give them a dubious explanation in order to suppress rumors.

I decided to look it up, and what I’ve found is that other drugs are generally used to revive septic shock patients. I also read a lot of things suggesting Narcan is not normally considered. There is some research saying it could work, but that’s not what you would expect to find if doctors were using it routinely. You’d find all sorts of sources discussing its use.

I’m just a layman, but this is how it looks to me. Google other medical problems, and drugs customarily used to treat them will pop right up.

I don’t think Narcan is something most doctors would use in cases of septic shock. I think the stuff we are reading was put together by Madonna’s team and repeated by a cooperative press. I believe she overdosed, and once the Narcan story was out of the bag, her people made up a phony explanation and pushed journalists to use it.

So the question is this: did Madonna try to kill herself?

I would not be surprised. This is a woman who chose a path of extraordinary emptiness and vanity. While still very young, she created a remarkably slutty persona and milked it as much as she could. She published a book of pornography. She sang sleazy songs about sex. She exposed herself from time to time. She aimed her product at a dumb, youthful, immoral audience, and in order to keep her momentum, she, herself, had to try to appear youthful.

No twenty-something wants to see an old woman bump and grind in her underwear. It’s like homeless behavior.

Madonna has experienced a number of age-related humiliations. Lady Gaga copied her entire act and took her place in the sun. She even wrote a successful song using the same chord progression as one of Madonna’s biggest hits, and Madonna was so irritated, she publicly poked Lady Gaga, saying, “this is a wonderful way to redo my song.”

Rapper 50 Cent poked fun at Madonna last year, calling her “grand ma.” He ridiculed her for posing in her underwear at 64. That had to be hard to swallow, for a former sex symbol with an enormous ego and an army of sycophants.

Madonna has shown many symptoms of being unable to adapt to aging. News stories reported that she worked out so hard, she damaged her health. She has had so much plastic surgery, she has become somewhat grotesque.

This is a woman who used to make a living with her looks. She was never more than a 6, but she worked what she had as hard as she could, and it paid off. Men who lacked an eye for beauty used to fund her career because of lust, but now she knows men find her physically repulsive. Instead of stimulating desire, she kills it.

The only men who find her interesting now are the homosexuals who always made up a lot of her fan base. Their devotion has nothing to do with sex. This is the same crowd that thinks Ethel Merman is a goddess.

I think Madonna fell from a very, very high horse, and it may well be that she can’t face her new life as an elderly woman men ignore and other celebrities ridicule. Maybe she can’t handle watching young, attractive women fill the space she once occupied.

Of course, I don’t know what really happened, and maybe her doctors had some reason for using naloxone off label. But that would be unusual, and unusual things don’t usually happen.

She interests me because she is one of Satan’s shills. Satan lets a lot of people become rich and famous through self-destructive behavior. They do very destructive things in order to make it, demons enter and help them, they sit on top for a while, and then they wither and die in humiliation. Michael Jackson. Whitney Houston. Elvis, who died lying by his toilet, naked from the waist down, with his tongue nearly bitten off.

Satan lets some people who serve him do very well, and through them, he lures others in. It’s a great strategy. For every Madonna with multiple mansions, there are innumerable wannabes who stay in the gutter and live cursed lives. They grow old singing in dirty little bars and sponging off relatives.

Madonna is a loss leader. Satan took a temporary loss, refraining from raining misfortune on her as he rains it on many sinners. By doing so, he got many other women to follow in her nasty footsteps, and now, toward the end of her life, he is removing his blessing and letting her know how he really feels about her.

He did the same thing to Prince, who died alone in an elevator, full of drugs, hobbled by arthritis. He really nailed Michael Jackson.

When you plot your life’s course, you should never pattern yourself after a rare fool who behaved stupidly and then got lucky. You shouldn’t enter an arena where the success rate is below one in 10,000. You should do things that generally lead to success. You should try to be an accountant or a dentist, not Elvis Presley or Janis Joplin. Madonna encouraged people to trade their lives for lottery tickets.

It’s very fitting that she called herself the material girl. Material things rot and vanish. They only shine a short time. The things that have real value last forever. Madonna will probably go to hell, and people she looked down on will be in heaven forever, in mansions built by angels.

Because of HIPAA, we may never get an official, reliable explanation of what happened to Madonna, so she and her team are free to craft whatever story they want. HIPAA protection lasts for 50 years after a person dies, so unless someone outside her circle and the medical profession comes up with clues, it will be a very long time before reliable information comes out.

If she did try to do herself in, she’ll probably keep trying. If her infection was a suicide attempt, I doubt she’ll ever admit it. I don’t think her pride would let her.

Clarence Thomas has an Heir

One of the things I hated about practicing law was watching lawyers rationalize.

People say lawyers lie all the time, and it’s not true in the way they mean it. They think lawyers lie to judges, juries, other lawyers, and opposing parties all day, as a matter of routine. This is untrue. Lying to a judge is a serious offense. Where I live, it can get you disbarred. Lying to opposing counsel will also get you in trouble with your bar association. If you lie to a jury, you can pretty well expect your opponent to have something to say about it, right then and there.

When lawyers deceive, they generally deceive themselves, their co-counsel, and their clients, about the facts and law surrounding their cases. Their untruths usually aren’t plain old lies. They are rationalizations. Things they can’t be punished for saying.

Example:

Lawyer Bill: So Tom, when you were driving home from the bar and plowed through the rec room of an old folks’ home, would you say your head hit the steering wheel?

Drunk Bob: Well, I think it may have brushed against…

Lawyer Bill: I’m sorry, did you say it DEFINITELY SLAMMED FORCEFULLY?

Drunk Bob: Well…

Lawyer Bill: Because if it did, then when you were found staggering around by the police, it may be that you were ADDLED by the blow and not stinking drunk on two-for-one margaritas.

Drunk Bob: Oh, it was forceful, all right. It’s amazing I didn’t get a concussion!

Lawyer Bill: Where did you go to medical school?

Drunk Bob: You mean before beginning my career hauling manure?

Lawyer Bill: Because if you’re not a doctor, you can’t possibly know if you had a concussion. So shut up about that. We will let my friend Prescription Factory Ben decide if you have a concussion. Let me get him on the phone. Ben, you’re on speaker. We need you to look at my client Drunk Bob and see if the steering wheel…

Prescription Factory Ben: Way ahead of you. Concussion for sure. Of course, I’ll have to examine him for the bargain price of $5000.

The unfortunate thing is that many lawyers actually buy into their rationalizations, so when they present them to finders of fact, they can’t really be accused of lying. And when rationalizations are being crafted, you don’t want to be the only one in the room who raises his hand and ruins everything.

I think about these things when I watch the nuts on the left, spewing their insane theories about victimhood and so on.

Today I saw a white girl say all white people are racist, without exception. When I say “white,” I don’t mean she was 100% white. She had olive skin, and she clearly had a few drops of black blood. But she was not nearly dark enough to be half black. She was white. Call it what you want, but if she has kids with a white man, it will probably be impossible to see any African influence in them.

She started talking about racism, which means animosity based purely on race. The definition of racism is old and correct, and I just gave you the whole thing. There are no asterisks. “It’s not racism if this.” “It’s not racism if that.” No. Doesn’t matter what the other facts are. Doesn’t matter whether the person with the animosity is white. Doesn’t even have to be a person. A dog can be racist.

She had a look on her face like she just figured out the cure for AIDS, and she started saying racism was about power. She said white people’s existence is racist because it supports a system that supports white supremacy.

She had convinced herself this was a brilliant revelation, but it was neither brilliant nor original. You can find all kinds of idiots on the web saying the same thing.

Today I feel very discouraged about humanity, because I am being reminded that there are billions of people out there who, when it comes to the capacity to admit error and improve, might as well be tree stumps. There is literally nothing you can say to these people, no matter how obviously true, that will change their corrupted, dishonest, arrogant, hateful minds. They start from anger and a desire to control and murder the rest of us, and that, not reason, drives their rationalizations. You can’t get rid of the lies because the hate which is their root can’t be pulled up.

The tribulation will be God’s last effort at evangelism prior to the millennium. He will not use gentle words or miracles. He will burn people with fire. He will starve them. He will let them torture and murder each other. He will give them agonizing diseases they can’t contain, mitigate, or cure. He will destroy their environment. He will even send animals to tear them up. The tribulation will be characterized by the harshest type of evangelism there is.

The Bible says stripes, meaning wounds from flogging, are for a fool’s back. It says, “The way of a fool is right in his own eyes: but he that hearkeneth unto counsel is wise.” If you listen to counsel, you don’t need to be flogged, so you are spared. If you think you’re always right, get ready for the lash, because it will come, and if you’re lucky, it will only come in this life.

Satan is gaslighting leftists, and they are gaslighting everyone who doesn’t hear from the Holy Spirit and pray in tongues. Many people think Christians are protected from deceit, but that’s not true. If it were, Christianity would not be disappearing, and it is.

Only Christians who are guided by the Holy Spirit every day will avoid being persuaded to join the body of the antichrist. Christians who are complaining about perversion today will be waving rainbow flags next year.

I come here and write this stuff, and maybe 5 people believe it. I feel like holing up here with my wife and baking cookies until Yeshua comes to extract us, because trying to help people is like trying to befriend rabid dogs. Yeshua said such people were swine, and they would turn and tear us up. It’s happening every day, so when do you know it’s time to throw in the towel and avoid them?

I feel like every Christian who knows the Spirit will eventually have a Scott Adams moment, but unlike Scott Adams, they will identify the hate group correctly. It’s not black people. It’s people who aren’t Spirit-led. It’s a big group.

If you’re tired of secular gaslighting, I have a resource you might enjoy. The other day, my wife and I discovered him independently. I saw him on Youtube, and she saw him on TikTok. He’s a Nigerian named Frank Stephen. He puts up brilliant videos debunking leftist gaslighting. It’s hard to stop watching him, because it’s so weird to have someone tell sane people they’re right.

Example: a morbidly obese singer named Lizzo is whining because people pick on her for being enormous. In her act, she wears things like thongs. It is almost horrifying. She is physically grotesque, she insists on displaying as much flab as she can, and leftists keep telling her she’s gorgeous.

Frank Stephen points out that there are a whole lot of really fat celebrities out there, and they are not crying about being persecuted. Maybe the difference is their choice not to put naked blubber in front of the camera and tell people they’re beautiful.

In case you want to check him out, I’ll try to embed a video, but Youtube is persecuting him dishonestly by age-restricting his material, so you may have to click a link instead.

I’ll embed it anyway, since it is just barely conceivable Youtube’s propaganda/censorship squad might make a mistake and remove the restriction some day.

My wife says she has been binge-watching him. He reminds me of Trump’s Twitter glory days. No one tweeted like Trump. Set up, debunk, accuse, withdraw.

Secular material isn’t always helpful, but God is being attacked via secular arguments, so I believe Frank Stephen is a healer. The left throws sand in our eyes, and he washes it out.

Leftists Infuriated by Threat of Fairness

I never thought I’d see it happen. Government-backed racism is dead in the United States, at least on paper. The Supreme Court has finally admitted that affirmative action is unconstitutional.

It has always been obvious to any thinking person that racist persecution is wrong, regardless of the segment of the population a victim belongs to. Nonetheless, America persisted in harming white gentiles, Jews, Far Eastern Asians, and men for decades. It never made any sense.

God has shown me that when things don’t make sense, there is a supernatural reason. We didn’t hold onto government racism for this long because there was a credible argument in favor of it. We held onto it because Satan supported it.

An earlier Supreme Court weaseled around the issue in the Gratz and Grutter cases, using diversity as a transparent pretext to continue the racism. This, in a country where Yale Law school professors tried to prevent Robert Bork from being hired because they feared his presence, as a third conservative, would tilt the institution’s political balance to the right. Leftists have never wanted diversity.

Diversity has always been a sham. The very word implies inclusion of people of differing beliefs and ethnicities and so on, but diversity programs have been used to exclude more than include. If diversity were the goal, leftist institutions would be trying to hire men, straights, Christians, conservatives, Asians, and Jews, and that has never happened.

So now that affirmative action is supposedly finished, what good will the change do? Not much, I would guess. I don’t think the tribulation is sufficiently far off to permit changed policies to have a great effect.

I believe one group will benefit a lot in the short term: Far Eastern Asians. They will fill up our best schools now. Until yesterday, orientals were pushed down in applicant pools simply because they were oriental. Under the new scheme, their blistering test scores and grades may result in some pretty funny-looking student bodies. Far East Asians will presumably start getting what they earned.

I say “Far Eastern Asians” because I’m acknowledging something no one wants to talk about: Indians aren’t as smart as the Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese. Sorry. It’s true. Thais don’t seem exceptional either, and people from Cambodia and Laos don’t appear to match the ability of their neighbors to the north. Maybe I’m wrong.

You can’t say “Mongoloid” now. Science used to divide human beings into Caucasoids, Mongoloids, and Negroids, and it was a pretty good system. Indians are Caucasoids, and Far Eastern Asians are Mongoloids. Or they used to be, before things changed. As everyone knows, “mongoloid” became medical slang for “person with Down Syndrome,” and of course, it became a schoolyard insult. I assume this is one of the reasons “Mongoloid” with a capital M went out of style. Also, anthropologists have been trying to deny that race exists. Not an easy case to make, in view of reality.

It’s sort of ironic that some large Mongoloid groups are smarter than Caucasoids.

I think the main significance of the new decision will be that it provokes leftists to violence. I think Satan let it happen for this purpose.

The Revelation says the world will come to be filled with lack, death by various causes, and murder. You need anger in order to have murders. The anger has to come from somewhere.

Over the last decade or two, we have seen conservatives, whites, and Christians hit with extreme provocation. Our enemies keep filing meritless civil and criminal suits against innocent right wing politicians, from Newt Gingrich all the way to Donald Trump. They have started marching in sodomy parades while chanting, “We’re coming for your children,” which is about the most provocative thing a person can say. They prevent us from getting jobs. They get us fired. They force us to take sensitivity training when we’re in the right. They force us to lie about gender in order to avoid destitution and ostracism. They close businesses that don’t bend the knee. They castrate and skin confused children. It really does look like the last election was stolen, even if machines weren’t rigged.

People on the right are more mature and slower to anger than leftists, so we haven’t responded with the level of vitriol they have displayed. I think we’ll catch up.

What about the things that provoke leftists? It’s easy to name things. Bush won twice, fairly. There have been a lot of victories for people who read the Second Amendment correctly. Trump won. Roe was overturned. DeSantis exists.

I think Satan allowed affirmative action to be taken away to drive leftists even crazier than they are.

The court also says it’s illegal to force people to say things they don’t want to say. It ruled in favor of a website owner who did not want to produce pro-perversion content. Presumably, the ruling will also apply to bakers, the great public enemies of the left. This is another decision that will enrage leftists.

The decisions were made by a court that exists because of actions that enraged leftists. Clarence Thomas was cleared of ridiculous harassment allegations from an eccentric coworker. Neil Gorsuch was appointed after Merrick Garland was shot down because Ruth Ginsburg died so late in the last Obama term, and leftists somehow concluded this made Gorsuch illegitimate. Kavanaugh made it to the bench in spite of asinine and libelous accusations of harassment dating back decades, and leftists assumed the accusations were true.

Many leftists don’t care what the Constitution says. They think Trump himself was an illegitimate president because Hillary Clinton got the popular vote. Never mind what the Constitution says about the Electoral College. They think an illegitimate president appointed illegitimate justices who make illegitimate decisions.

You could fill a book with a list of exceptional provocations that have occurred since 2000.

We have two perfect storms: one that provokes the right, and another that provokes the left, and they combine to make a single perfect storm that will lead to guerrilla warfare across the country.

To me, this is the real significance of the two decisions that were announced today.

What about me? Should I be siding with leftists? My wife and I intend to have kids, and they will be black. Don’t I want them to have every advantage?

Well, here is the thing; our kids will be intelligent. I mean, barring genetic problems, accidents, disease, and so on. My wife and I are smart. My parents were both over 140 on the IQ scale. Our kids should be able to get good test scores and grades. And if they’re not smart or they don’t make an effort, why should they get things that should go to smart kids who do the right things?

I don’t want to be the father of the next Kamala Harris.

I hope to raise kids who know the Holy Spirit and depend on him, not nutty, slow, malevolent human beings, for advancement.

Speaking of kids, my friend Mike has a real problem. His ex-wife has become a godless leftist, and her mother is a witch. His ex pretty much abandoned his two sons, and now that they’re grown, she curries favor with them. One son is way out on the left, and so is his wife.

Mike has a baby granddaughter, and his ex gave her a book: The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish. This book was written by a man named Harris Kornstein, whose drag pseudonym is Lil Miss Hot Mess. He’s a professor. The book is about a bunch of homosexual men who dress like women and dance through a town.

How this book is supposed to be helpful to a little girl several years away from literacy is not clear. The ex says her favorite TV program is the Rupaul show, however.

This is a person who used to be a Republican and made her kids go to church. Before moving away and leaving Mike to raise them.

Mike called his ex and tried to talk to her about God and the problems with perversion, but she has serious mental issues (my opinion), and there is no talking to her. She did what you would expect. She accused him of not wanting his kids to be happy.

He wants to hide the book where his granddaughter will never see it. He ought to burn it and keep quiet so they don’t replace it.

As everyone knows, “swish” means “effeminate man.”

Kornstein is big in the drag story hour business. Yes, they really are coming for our children. Present perverted men reading perverted stories to very young children, and at least some of the kids will grow up to think perversion is normal and fun, and the flip side is that they will see normal people as hateful, stupid, and primitive.

This girl (the granddaughter, not the tranny) has no shot in life. Only God can rescue her. My wife and I pray for her all the time.

To get back to the main point of this post, I don’t think favorable court opinions are as helpful as many conservatives think they are. They are just pushing us closer to civil war, and if the rapture comes soon, we won’t have much time to enjoy any benefits they bring.

Trump could be acquitted and/or reelected. Can you imagine the riots? If Trump isn’t the last straw, something else will be.

My response to all this is to try to spend a lot of time inside the presence of God. Last night he gave me a real revelation about what the Bible means when it calls him our fortress and refuge. The presence of God is like a cloud you can sit in. When you’re there, you can feel it around you, and the insanity of the world seems much less important, because it is. When God surrounds you, he protects and improves you.

I believe that if you want to be raptured, you need to be close to God when the moment arrives. We know of three people who were raptured, and they were all close to God. In fact, the Bible actually says Enoch “walked with God.'”

I hope God pulls the plug on this planet soon, and I don’t feel bad about saying it. I want the best for people who are already his, and the tribulation will help everyone who is left behind and who is capable of repentance.

“Tribulation” refers to harvesting useful grain through harsh means. The tribulation will be the world’s last big revival, in a way. It will save millions. When you ask God to rapture his people soon, you’re also asking for the tribulation to start, but the tribulation will bless many, many people, and they are people who can’t be helped by anything short of the tribulation. The Bible says stripes are for a fool’s back.

I wouldn’t wish hell on anyone, because it’s final, but many people need the tribulation.

I Wouldn’t Let These Guys Change my Oil

I’m waiting for my wife to call, so I am killing time with you.

Today we all know what happened to the Titan sub that was on its way to visit the wreckage of the Titanic. It blew up, or more accurately, in, on Sunday. Our Coast Guard found the pieces near the Titanic. I have heard they were 600 feet away and 1300 feet away. Maybe someone knows the correct figure.

I was surprised to see that the most intelligent, or seemingly intelligent, analysis of the accident came from film director James Cameron, who directed the movie Titanic. He has a lot of contacts in the general area of things that go down deep in the ocean.

He says the sub probably imploded way above the depth to which it was considered safe. The Titanic rests at around 12,500 feet, and the sub disintegrated at 3,500.

That’s not the kind of failure a company can come back from without a whole new design. The sub fell apart at less than 30% of its working depth, so it experienced less than 30% of the pressure it was designed to endure every time it was used. It’s like having a hitch designed to pull 12,500 pounds snap in front of a 3,500-pound trailer. It suggests the design was totally worthless.

How would you like it if you were on an elevator rated for 2,000 pounds, and you and the other occupants weighed, say, 500, and the cable snapped?

Cameron says he emailed people on the day of the implosion, telling them the sub’s occupants were dead. He says he was very confident.

According to Cameron, the sub lost communication and tracking when it imploded. He says the tracking equipment had its own pressure-resistant housing outside the sub, as well as its own power. His conclusion when he learned this information was that the sub had been torn apart, because gentler failures wouldn’t have interfered with the tracking equipment.

That sounds pretty smart to me. Of course, Cameron is a movie guy, known to have a monumental ego, so it could be that he’s just good at looking smart. And he’s the same guy who thinks he found the bones of Jesus, which Jesus is still using.

He also says Oceangate, the tourism-sub company, was urged repeatedly to have its vessel certified, whatever that means. Experts wanted it to receive proper testing, and Cameron says that never happened.

He also says the composite hull was a stupid idea.

A composite is a material made up from at least two different materials. Two examples are fiberglass-reinforced plastic, which is used in boat hulls, and steel-reinforced concrete, which is used in nearly everything made from concrete. A composite will combine desirable qualities of different materials. In concrete, adding rebar allows the concrete to bend more without cracking.

The Titan’s hull was shaped like a watermelon (the old kind). The ends were titanium domes. The middle was a carbon-fiber tube. “Carbon fiber” is shorthand for “carbon fiber imbedded in something else.” Plastic, maybe?

Cameron used the word “horrible” to describe the decision to use this composite. He said the problem was that the carbon could start separating from whatever it was imbedded in, and that eventually, this would produce weak areas that would cause implosion. He believes this is what happened.

I would guess it works like this: carbon fiber and plastic are not equally stretchy, so whenever pressure produced tension inside the hull, the fibers would try to stretch more or less than the plastic around them. After many repetitions, the fibers would start to come loose and move slightly. When that happens, you don’t have a composite or its virtues. You have two different materials rubbing against each other.

Again, just my wild guess.

Something like this happens to car paint in the sun. Cars are now painted with stupid two-layer coatings. The bottom layer is colored, and the top layer is clear plastic. When the car heats and cools, the layers expand and contract at different rates, causing them to try and slide past each other, and a few years down the road, your clear coat falls off and can’t be replaced unless you redo the entire paint job at enormous cost.

Cameron claims it’s not possible to do a quality analysis of a sub made from a composite. He says one “contiguous” (he means “homogeneous”) material can be tested using finite element analysis, but composites can’t.

I think he is getting in over his head, because the web says finite element analysis works on composites. In any case, as far as I can determine, the sub never got any kind of creditable certification.

I see someone in the submersible community, if there is such a thing, is now claiming the sub must have been engineered well because an expert went down in it with the rest of the dead. The idea is that he wouldn’t have done that if the sub had been unsafe.

That doesn’t convince me. A 2012 article from the New York Times says that up until that time, only 5 people had died in submersibles, and there had been plenty of descents. The first bathyscaphe was launched in 1948.

If Titan was so safe, why did it implode? If implosion is a risk that can’t be mitigate well, why have all those other vessels done just fine?

I would have more faith in the Titan design if they built another one, had it tested with extreme rigor, and got the company’s top remaining employees to do a hundred safe descents. My bet: plastic deep-sea manned submersibles aren’t coming back soon.

If Cameron is basically right, the vessel was doomed by third-rate engineering. In that case, even if the company can somehow hold together and get over its now-abysmal reputation, it will have to splurge on a real sub. No one wants to enter a demolition derby in a Ford Pinto.

I don’t think anyone seriously believes the company can survive, though. On top of all its other problems, the guy who ran it is dead.

Some people are calling for new laws. That’s ridiculous. You should be allowed to go down to the Titanic in a cheap sub if you want. It’s not like this is a significant threat to the public. So far, the death toll, since the beginning of time, stands at 5. Also, the people who rode in this sub all signed a disclaimer that made it very clear the company thought there was a good chance they would die. I don’t know what more we should do to protect people from their own bad judgment.

Over 1500 people died when the Titanic sank, they died due to incompetence and greed, and humanity continued using ships. That was the right decision. If rich people want to continue risking death in tiny subs, they should be allowed to do it. As for disclaimers, liability, negligence, and all that, we already have laws covering those things, as will become obvious when the lawsuits start.

Yesterday I read about a high school classmate of mine. He died on a mountain in the Himalayas at about 33 years of age. He had kind of an ego. He decided to leave his group for a while, and he fell into a snow-covered crevasse. They found his sunglasses, journal, and trekking poles next to the hole he made, and that was it. There was nothing they could do. For all the world knows, he was wedged between two walls of ice, dying, for several days, watching light appear and disappear above him as the sun rose and set.

He is still there.

We still let people climb mountains.

Mount Everest is not the world’s hardest mountain to climb. Not by a wide margin. Annapurna has a fatality rate of about one third. Still, 1% of the people who try climbing Everest end up dead. That’s a horrible record. No one is trying to end the lucrative Mount Everest extreme-tourism trade, and people are allowed to climb mountains that are much more dangerous.

It’s sad the Titan’s occupants died. It’s even sadder that their deaths appear to have been caused by incompetence and recklessness. It’s a good lesson for anyone who thinks fancy-looking equipment, a cute logo, vehicle wraps, and custom golf shirts make a company trustworthy.

People are Disappointing

Today the Titan submarine disaster is on my mind. Apologies to anyone who gets upset when people call it a submarine. The definition of “submarine” is “a ship that can travel underwater,” so it fits.

Now someone will pipe up and say submarines are boats, not ships.

So this thing is somewhere in the ocean with 5 people aboard, and it has been sealed up for around 100 hours. If the press is correct, the oxygen ran out several hours ago, so, barring some kind of misreporting, everyone on the sub has been dead for some time. They may have died on Sunday, the day it was launched.

My understanding is that there are two likely ways to die in a sunken sub. Either it implodes instantly from water pressure, killing you so quickly you may not even feel anything, or you sit and run out of air, banging on the hull and hoping someone is trying to save you.

So what’s worse? Dying in a second or two with no chance of praying and saving your soul, or spending days in a cold, possibly pitch-black place, unable to stand, breathing recycled breath, struggling to find a solution, and realizing you are extremely unlikely to be saved?

Dying instantly is worse. There is no way around it. Eternity in hell can’t be compared to a few days of fear and physical discomfort.

This story is horrible. I can’t imagine what the families of the sub’s occupants are going through.

Of course, my wife and I have prayed for the people on the sub. That being said, there are some interesting things to learn here.

Human beings overestimate each other. For example, NATO overestimated Russia. We thought they had fantastic, state-of-the-art weapons, and we have learned that a lot of their stuff is primitive and ineffective. They don’t even have a way to keep drones off the Kremlin. How is that possible?

We thought they would blow through Ukraine like the US and England through Iraq. Not hardly.

A bunch of beer drunks walked right into the Capitol last year and raised Cain for a long time, and the government wasn’t able to prevent it or fix it after it happened. They had to wait till everyone calmed down. They didn’t even have cameras with facial recognition outside the building, like they do at certain Home Depot stores.

Similarly, we are learning that the people who ran, past tense, the company that owned the sub didn’t prepare very well, and neither did the many governments that have been called on for help.

There are reports saying the sub was controlled with a $29 Logitech video game controller. That is mind-blowing.

When lives depend on a product, it has to be very reliable. For example, I carry a Glock. These things have been frozen, dropped in mud, run over by trucks, dropped on concrete from considerable heights, and otherwise abused, and they still work. Guns are commonly subjected to lots of safety and reliability testing. You have to wonder if it can be true that Oceangate, the company that operated the sub, really believed it was a good idea to send people two miles down in the ocean, hoping a $29 plastic toy made in China would bring them back.

Ask yourself if you’ve ever had a battery-operated electronic toy fail for no apparent reason. Have you ever forgotten to change batteries? Have you ever spilled a drink and ruined electronic components? Have you ever had a problem with a cable or Bluetooth connection? Have you stepped on a smartphone? Has anything ever just plain crashed?

Here’s something else I read: the sub was supposedly considered crush-proof down to 13,500 feet. The tourist site it was headed for is located at 12,500. If this is true, it routinely operated at 92.6% of its maximum operating depth. That means it experienced 92.6% of the pressure it would be subject to at the very limit of its permissible range.

Can that be true?

When you want a rope to lift a ton every day, you don’t buy a rope guaranteed to lift 1.08 tons. The working strength of a rope will always be much lower than its breaking strength. The same principle applies to just about everything engineers make.

Web sources which may be totally wrong say military subs have “crush depths” set at 150% of their maximum operating depths. That sounds more like it.

Oceangate’s CEO, who is on the sub, supposedly said he didn’t want to hire fifty-year-old white guys with military experience to run it. He said it was very simple to run, and that he wanted young people who were inspiring.

Surely he was joking.

When we put rockets into space, guess who we hired? Old white guys with military experience. Granted, at the beginning, they weren’t all that old, but they weren’t spring chickens. They were also smart. They were engineers and so on. They had MENSA-level IQ’s.

They also knew how to handle themselves when things went wrong. We don’t have any records of them crying or wailing in despair in times of crisis.

Obviously, they didn’t have to be white or male, but you see what I’m saying.

My uncle was a NASA mechanical engineer in Huntsville. When I asked him why the Challenger shuttle went down, he said two words: “affirmative action.” He said they were no longer hiring the best. You can bicker about O-rings and weather, claiming better engineers wouldn’t have helped. Well, better engineers are better at predicting and preventing problems.

If I had to get on a sub 350 miles from shore and go see a pile of wreckage on the bottom of the ocean, you can bet I’d want the smartest, bravest, most highly trained guy available running it. You couldn’t get me on a thing like that without a pistol, but if I had to do it, I’d want Chuck Yeager, not Dylan Mulvaney.

People who know about the sub are talking, and some say they would never get on it. A guy who viewed the Titanic from a real sub made by the Russians said he wouldn’t do it. Obviously a brave guy, but he didn’t think Oceangate’s people knew what they were doing.

I saw a reporter reading the disclaimer Oceangate made tourists sign. It was incredible. I would paraphrase it like this: “This thing was built cheaply, by people who may have done a lot of things wrong, no one with proper qualifications has checked the entire sub out, and you are rolling the dice if you give us your money.” Who signs a thing like that?

They say the hull itself has been properly checked out, but you can sink and die in a sub with an intact hull.

The reaction of the world’s governments has been amazing.

Our government’s unmanned vehicles arrived this morning, 4 days after the sub went down, presumably hours or more after the occupants died. I realize it’s not easy moving stuff long distances over water, but these things were in the Northeast, not that far from the tourism site. People involved in this mess are citing the difficulty of coordinating efforts involving multiple countries and multiple organizations. So, bureaucracy. That’s the correct word.

The world’s governments are not competent to help people in lost subs. There’s the bottom line for you. The rest is just chatter.

They couldn’t even save our people in Benghazi.

We are told a billionaire and his son are in the sub. I have to ask: did they understand how badly prepared the company and the world’s governments were? Did they ask anybody?

If I had to do something like this, I would research as much as possible. I would want to know what kind of emergency plans had been made. I would demand that the sub’s owners contact the Coast Guard and Navy and gave them every detail of the mission.

Another question: why would you take your son down in a backyard submersible that had already had at least two failures, with no rescue plan and no credible hardware to fix things in a crisis?

It’s bad enough to go by yourself. Putting your child at risk is beyond explanation.

The facts surrounding this disaster will be clarified later. Maybe some of the criticism will turn out to be wrong. But if even some of it is right, the whole thing makes no sense. And it goes to show you how we overestimate human beings.

I hope to be surprised soon.

Symmetry

I feel like testifying about a great experience I had this morning.

I like to spend a couple of hours praying when I wake, so that’s what I was doing. I was thinking about how insane the world had become, and I started telling God something I tell him a lot: “I hate this place. I hate this place. You were right.”

I guess that sounds like depression, or that I’m complaining about my miserable life, but that’s not what it is. My life is very easy. I have a wonderful, attractive wife. My health is fine. I love the area where I live. I never get depressed. I don’t struggle to get out of bed in the morning. I’m ready to go as soon as my eyes open. I’m enjoying myself more and more, every month.

Here’s what I like to say: I’m depressed by proxy. I am depressed on the world’s behalf.

Leftists are unhappy people. Surveys show this. They are much less happy than conservative Christians, even though many of us think the world is ending. Leftists enjoy drama and misery. It gives their lives purpose. They don’t think anything good is in their future. They expect to live pointless lives on a planet that’s going to sink under rising oceans, and then they expect to die in terror and vanish.

These are generalizations, but so are sentences like, “Cats don’t like to be bathed,” and, “Bud Light drinkers don’t want to be identified with sexual perversion.” Nothing wrong with generalizing. You do it every minute of your life without realizing it. If you couldn’t, you would be mentally ill and unable to function.

“Is that a red traffic light? Am I supposed to stop? I don’t want to assume anything. It’s shaped like a traffic lights I’ve seen before, but maybe it’s art, and the city paid some artist to put it up as a statement.” No one thinks like that. All day, every day, you assume things are what they seem to be, and you react to them based on prejudice which is, itself, based on past experience with similar things.

Anyway, leftists are unhappy, and they reward each other for willful unhappiness. March and riot, call yourself a victim, and you get what you want, even if it’s several million dollars from the state of California, just for being black. Even if it’s the right to steal from Walmart and then whine when Walmart abandons your city.

To me, every human being who isn’t a Spirit-led Christian is a leftist. “Leftism” is just rebellion against ordained authority. Anyone who belongs to an incorrect religion is a leftist, because God only authorized one way. Anyone who thinks government is the proper authority to appeal to to get most of his problems fixed is a leftist, because we are supposed to take everything to God first, in the name of Yeshua, not Allah or whatever. Not just Yahweh.

I see the world as leftist, because it is. Almost no one knows or obeys Yeshua, and that goes for Christians as well as everyone else. To me, this is a leftist planet.

America is a leftist nation, and it always has been. George III was anointed by God, and we chose a republic, which is a degenerate type of government which moves us closer to anarchy. The Bible doesn’t endorse democracy or republics. It endorses men of God and kings, period. Yeshua is the king of kings, not the president of presidents.

Our silly ideas about mob rule came to us through Greece and Rome. Nations that hated Yeshua and worshiped evil spirits. It’s weird how so many Americans think democracy is a gift from God. Far from it. It’s a curse, and we are now seeing what happens when a nation chooses a curse. Eventually, things go sour.

Our leftist world is washed up, and when I say I’m depressed by proxy, I mean I feel there is no hope at all for the world. Things will continue to get worse. Violence, disease, and lack will rise to unprecedented levels, and billions will die.

There’s an interesting scene in the movie The Book of Eli. Eli, a prophet, finds himself and a friend in a house full of weapons. It belongs to a prepper couple who eat travelers. Eli’s enemies surround the house, and it becomes obvious a shootout is imminent. He tells his friend God has assured him he and the friend will get out. A prepper says, “What about us?” Eli responds, “Didn’t say anything about you.”

My future is bright. My wife’s future is bright. God has told us. If you’re not his, he didn’t say anything about you. Well…nothing good.

So I was telling God how much I hate this place, and I was unhappy about what was happening to the world, and suddenly the Holy Spirit poured into me. When he did that, I didn’t want to think about the world’s mess any more. I let it go and thought about what I was receiving. What a privilege, to feel his peace and let the world go.

Once it started, I began thanking God over and over and asking him to help me maintain it.

Eventually, I thought about the state of the world again. I told God I had been pursuing him for so long, and it was only recently that I started feeling great pleasure, consistently, in his presence. I asked him what hope there was for everyone else, and by “everyone else,” I meant the 99-plus per cent of humanity that had no interest in him.

To find out how good God is, you have to go after him, and not many people are doing that. Leftists are now openly against him in America, just as they are in England and many other countries. “Conservative” has become a code word for “Christian” in the US. People who call themselves progressive are literally fighting to end the worship of Yeshua here.

It’s hard enough to get a self-proclaimed Christian to get to know the Holy Spirit. What chance is there for a nation of people who support castrating boys and putting them in dresses?

It reminds me of the true story of Lazarus the beggar. In the underworld, there were two places for the dead. There was a nice place for those who would be taken to heaven, and a place of torture for the rest. The majority. There were Jews in both places, so Judaism was no guarantee of anything. And what was between them? A great gulf, fixed in place, with no way to cross it. That’s America now. There are millions of people here who can’t cross to this side no matter what happens. If Jesus appeared to them in person and turned swimming pools into wine, they would still reject him.

There is symmetry in the supernatural. This is a time of great cursing for people who reject Yeshua, so it’s also a time of great blessing for those who know him. These are days of pain, fear, defeat, and failure for those who don’t belong to him, but they are days of victory, improvement, safety, and peace for his children.

Yesterday, I had things I needed to do. The pool is green. I need to mow the yard. At 5:30 p.m., I felt supernatural peace and sleepiness, and I had to go lie in bed and be with God. The other things didn’t matter. I had to do it.

We’re in a centrifuge. A gaseous diffusion plant. People are being separated according to their type. The other day, God told me this was a time of sifting. You can either be part of the baby, or you can have your pride and be afterbirth.

The only purpose the damned serve is to support the saved. They think what they do has lasting meaning. They build infrastructure and governments. They build and repair things. They provide services. They fight in wars. None of that stuff has any permanence. They are here to provide a workable environment for God’s children. It’s not our job to do the menial things. Hard work is not for us. We’re here to be improved and to be used to save others. We are supposed to be like Mary, not Martha.

The unsaved will fall away like afterbirth, which supports a baby until it enters a new world. Then they’ll be discarded and go to hell, the world’s garbage dump. They’ll burn like chaff after grain is harvested.

They’ll be forgotten, along with their names. Nobody names afterbirth.

After the tribulation, a lot of names will be gone. The Vietnam memorial will be gone, with all its names. The holocaust records. The list of Academy Award winners. The list of Nobel winners. All that stuff is carnal. It belongs to an age which is about to be ended and largely erased.

People donate fortunes to schools and hospitals so their names will be carved on them. They think it gives them immortality. It’s all going to be destroyed. God will be like a kid grinding his heel into a bunch of anthills. If ants could think, they would think anthill destruction was a very big deal.

Shakespeare, destroyed. Michelangelo. The works of Maimonides, who is burning in hell for blasphemy. The Koran. Chopin. Every presidential library and monument. The Louvre. The pyramids. Medical science. Most music. Poof. Everything that doesn’t advance the kingdom will be washed away like a smelly stain.

The end is really here. It’s not a paranoid fantasy. We are at a point where our activities are no longer sustainable. Not in some imaginary, distant future, where the oceans are a foot higher. Now. We are watching it happen. A reprieve is not possible, so all we can pray for is that things unfold very quickly, to prevent unnecessary suffering. Another 20 years would be unbearable.

For a long time, I’ve been saying, “If you think things are bad now, wait till you see them 6 months from now,” and I’ve always been right. Life is tolerable for most people today, but it was better 6 months ago, and it will be much worse 6 months in the future. It makes no sense to say things are fine because you can stand the current situation. You’re not going to have the current situation next year. You’ll miss 2023.

If you ride a motorcycle, and you do the intelligent thing and take a class, you will hear about decreasing-radius turns. A constant-radius turn is a circle. A turn with a decreasing radius gets tighter and tighter. Many highway exits have decreasing-radius turns. Motorcycles don’t handle them well because they brake poorly.

If you’re on a bike, and you enter a decreasing-radius turn at the wrong speed, you may think you’re fine on the way in, but as the radius shrinks, the centrifugal force will shoot up, and you may go down and end up in an ambulance. You can’t judge the turn by the beginning; you have to look ahead.

We’re in a decreasing-radius turn. We can stand what’s happening now, but it won’t be long before we can no longer take it.

I will try to fix either the yard or the pool today, but mainly, I want to be close to God so I won’t be wandering around when the ship leaves the dock. Unless you’re a rare individual, you don’t understand how good he is.

I Physically Feel my Life Being Enriched

I’m waiting for some paint to dry, so I came up with a task for ChatGPT. I told it to write a poem in the manner of “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” but I said to make the lead characters Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden.

Here is what it wrote, in about 15 seconds:

Of Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden, I sing,
Two figures of politics, quite a thing!
They wandered down to the ocean blue,
In search of a meal and a good laugh too.

Said Clinton to Hunter, “Let’s take a stroll,
And find ourselves a tasty goal.”
Said Hunter, “I know just what to do,
We’ll hunt for some crabs, it’s easy too.”

They searched and searched along the shore,
Till Hunter found some crabs galore.
He said to Clinton, “Come take a look,
We’ll cook them up in a fancy nook.”

They gathered sticks and made a fire,
And cooked the crabs to their desire.
But when they went to take a bite,
The crabs had fled in great fright.

Said Clinton, “Hunter, what have you done?
Our meal is gone, we’ve had no fun.”
Said Hunter, “Don’t worry, we’ll find a way,
To catch those crabs another day.”

And so they left the beach that night,
Without a meal or any delight.
But they still had each other, that’s for sure,
And the promise of crabs, to catch and allure.

It refused to write one about Keith Olbermann and Charles Manson, so I asked for Olbermann and Ted Nugent.

Of Keith Olbermann and Ted Nugent, I write,
Two men with views that oftentimes ignite.
They met one day upon a wooded trail,
Both hunters, though with different tales to regale.

Said Nugent, “Keith, let’s hunt some game today,
I know a spot where we can surely slay.”
Olbermann agreed, but with some trepidation,
He feared he’d face Nugent’s bombastic proclamations.

As they ventured through the woods and brush,
They talked of guns, politics, and other such.
But as they walked, they both espied,
A rare bird with plumage bright and wide.

Said Nugent, “That’s dinner, let’s take it down!”
But Olbermann recoiled, with a frown.
He said, “Ted, can’t we just watch it soar,
And admire the beauty that we adore?”

Nugent laughed, and said, “You’re quite the sight,
Not wanting to hunt, that’s not quite right.”
But Olbermann stood firm in his beliefs,
And said, “Let’s leave this bird to peace.”

So they parted ways, with different views,
But both respected the other’s pursuits.
For though their opinions were often in dispute,
They both enjoyed the thrill of the hunt, just in different pursuit.

The poems are not really funny, the rhythm is off, the number of stanzas is wrong in each case, and the bot clearly hates hunting, but the fact that it did this well is something to think about.

MORE

I got it to write a better poem.

Once upon a time, in the land of the news,
A laptop was found, causing quite the blues,
For it belonged to Hunter, the son of a man,
Whose name was Biden, part of a political clan.

The laptop was filled, with some juicy stuff,
That made the journalists, huff and puff,
They said it was fake, and just a sham,
But the evidence was clear, and it wasn’t a scam.

Hunter’s laptop, was the real deal,
It had all the facts, and the journalists could feel,
The weight of their words, and the doubt they sowed,
For the truth was out there, and it freely flowed.

The laptop contained, some pictures and more,
Of Hunter’s life, that he couldn’t ignore,
There were messages and emails, that were quite a sight,
That shed light on his dealings, and caused some fright.

The journalists denied, that it was true,
But the laptop was real, and the proof just grew,
They couldn’t hide, from the facts that emerged,
And the public saw, how their trust was purged.

So let this be a lesson, to all the journalists out there,
To never underestimate, the truth that’s rare,
For it may come back, to haunt and reveal,
That what they thought was fake, was actually real.

More Proof Engineers are Useless

I finally got back to work on my tractor fork attachment.

When I bought my tractor, it had 4 forks, or, more accurately, tines, on it. They were chained on with turnbuckles, and the chains went around the bucket. To prevent the bucket from deforming under the pressure of the chains, the previous owner shoved poorly-measured lengths of four-by-four into the bucket.

The tines worked extremely well, but they moved around all the time. It was not possible to tighten them enough to prevent this. Also, they were way out in front of the tractor, so the leverage was bad. They had to be mounted on the front lip of the bucket, so the distance back to the pins that attached them to the front end loader was pretty long.

On top of all this, in order to lift the fork, as I have decided to call the tines, I had to lift the bucket, which served no purpose in and of itself. The fork probably weighed 300 pounds, and that doesn’t include the bucket’s weight, which was probably maybe could be 150 pounds.

Let me check the weight of similar buckets.

The web says a bucket sold by Everything attachments runs 271 pounds, so I am off by a lot.

So before I could lift anything with “the fork,” I had to lift over 500 pounds of useless weight.

To make things even worse, the old bucket was held on by 4 hard-to-remove pins, and I could not use any other attachments without a ton of work. In practical terms, I couldn’t use the bucket because the fork was hard to remove, and I couldn’t use anything else because the bucket was hard to remove.

I got myself a thing that allows me to remove the bucket in about 90 seconds, and because covid, I was not able to get a bucket that worked with it. Instead, I did a lot of work and changed my existing bucket so it fit. This left me with a bucket I could use, but I was not able to use the fork, and the fork was what I needed for at least 95% of the jobs I did.

The answer: buy a new fork attachment.

No. Don’t be stupid. There is no such thing.

You can get a set of forklift forks for a tractor. They cost a lot, and you only get two tines unless you pay extra. The tines are short and poorly suited to moving logs and brush, and they move around if you use them the way I need to use them. Stupid.

You can’t move brush with two tines. You need at least 4 unless you want things to fall between the tines. I have a cheap set of two Chinese tines that clamp on my bucket, and while they are certainly helpful, they will never move brush.

You can get a thing called a grapple. This is like a 60″-wide set of salad tongs connected to hydraulics. People love them. I don’t. They are also stupid.

You can pick up logs with a grapple. So what? I can do that with the fork, and I can pick up more logs, because a fork is bigger. And I could handle loads that were much bigger than anything that would fit in a grapple. You can pick up brush in a grapple. So what? I was able to move huge piles of brush with the fork. Again, much bigger than anything that would fit in a grapple.

Also, to use a grapple, you have to add some stuff to your hydraulic system. To get something that isn’t as good as a fork without added hydraulics. And a good grapple weighs 400 pounds.

Grapples are dumb. I’m convinced of it. They cost a great deal of money, they require tractor modification, and they don’t work very well compared to a set of tines.

I think men buy grapples because they’re cooler than forks and because they don’t really know what they’re doing. When you have a grapple on your compact tractor, you can pretend you’re Truckasaurus, but you can’t really get much done. It’s amazing to me that no one offers a factory fork attachment like the one I’m building.

My answer: cut up my existing tines and attach them to a shopmade steel frame that works with a quick-attach adaptor like the one I now have. This will reduce the weight of the whole mess. It will move everything closer to the tractor, improving the leverage. The new attachment will be rigid, so the tines will not move around. I won’t have to change my hydraulics. It should weigh a hundred pounds less than a grapple.

Down side: it has been almost a year since I started working on it, and I am still not done because covid pretty much destroyed whatever ambition I had when I first realized I needed to do something. There is a lot of stuff on my property that needs to be moved.

So far, I have built the frame, cut up the forks, and primed and painted certain parts of the tines that will be hard to paint once the project is welded together. Over the last couple of days, I cut one tine up and did a lot of rust removal, priming, and painting.

I really do not understand how people who make tractor attachments can be so incompetent. You can go to Youtube and find shopmade fork things that are a lot like the one I’m building, so it’s not like I invented the transistor. If you use a grapple, and you’ve seen people use a fork, you know perfectly well that the grapple is inferior in every way. So why can’t I buy a fork ready to go?

I have 4 tines. They were originally maybe 6 feet long. Something like 4 feet extended out in front of the bucket, and the rest went under the bucket. When something heavy rested on a tine, the rear of the tine pressed up on the bucket. The idea was to add strength and provide a tine that would not bend where it met the bucket.

This was a stupid design. It added weight and complexity, and it required tight chains to pull the tines back against the bucket lip. This deformed the upper part of the bucket because the chains pulled down on it in spite of the pitiable four-by-four supports, which fell out all the time. This is what happens when a person who only knows how to run a wood band saw tries to do a job that requires steel and a metalworker. When all you know is carpentry, every job looks like a pine deck.

I can weld short pieces of heavy tubing in the corners of the tines to serve as gussets. If that won’t prevent the tubes from bending downward, nothing will. I will also put horizontal pieces of tubing in the corners to keep the tines from opening or closing.

I guess I shouldn’t be harsh. I don’t think the quick-attach adaptor had been invented when my tractor was new, so the old arrangement was probably the best the attachment companies could do. Still, why wasn’t the adaptor invented in, say, 1935 or soon after whatever year it was when hydraulic front-end loaders arrived on the scene?

My fork had 4 upright steel tubes to prevent things from falling back toward the tractor when the bucket was raised. This week, I de-rusted and primed two of them. I also put one on the hydraulic press because it was bent, and I got it nearly straight, which amazed me. I’ll be fixing the other two uprights shortly. It’s easy. If I get tired of the slightly-crooked one, I can make a new one in half an hour, or I can turn it upside-down, do a little welding, and have an upright that’s only crooked for the top 6 inches. That’s where the bend is.

Each upright member had a stupid spike at the top, facing forward at face level. When I bought the tractor, the two outboard spikes had tennis balls on them. I wondered why until the first time I walked into a spike. Today and yesterday, I used the belt grinder and the lathe to round the ends of the spikes. Why they had to be sharp in the first place is a mystery to me. Why no one ever thought to round them off later is also a puzzle.

My plan is to put the uprights back on the fork and then put some goat wire across all four of them. This is fencing wire laid out in a grid. The wire will weigh about 7 pounds and prevent things from coming back at me or the tractor between the uprights. Why no one else thought of this…well, I think we’ve already discussed the competence of the people who make tractor stuff.

I’m using rusty-metal primer on a lot of the attachment, and I’m finishing it with Herculiner. This is the toughest finish I can get, and it’s easily touched up with spray cans from Tractor Supply.

I assume this design will work. If not, I’ll get a grapple, and I’ll be out around $300. But why wouldn’t it work? The old system was held on with two brackets of 3/16″ steel channel about 10″ long. If lifting hundreds of pounds of wood using 4 pins on two little brackets with 4 little welds didn’t destroy everything, my relatively robust system should be a lot better.

When all this is done, I’ll have a bucket and fork I can swap in a minute or two, so I’ll actually use both. How nice that will be.

It seems like I excoriate engineers all the time for their stupid mistakes, but I think I’m completely justified. I have a physics degree and a small amount of common sense, but physics training in no way makes you an engineer. It enables you to pick engineering up fast, but it’s not the same thing. Physicists don’t know how to do anything. A physicist might be able to tell you how LED’s work at the subatomic level, but it takes an engineer to design an LED TV. If I can dramatically improve the work of engineers over and over, and I can, then something is wrong.

They always blame marketing and accounting. “We wanted to make it right, but the marketing and accounting people wouldn’t let us.” Boo hoo. I’m sure that explains a lot of problems, but it doesn’t explain many others. Why didn’t we have plastic trash bags until the 1960’s? Obvious? Why did American cars require two keys long after the Japanese realized only one was needed? Why have boat designers put so many bilge pump wiring blocks 6″ above the normal level of salty, conductive bilge water?

Why did it take so long for engineers to put seat belts in cars? They were invented in the 1800’s. The first American cars with seat belts appeared in 1949.

Engineers gave my car thin, easily-clogged moonroof drain tubes, and then they fixed it so any overflow was captured in headliner cavities containing overly-complex and expensive motors. An engineer gave my lawn tractor a front grill cover that falls off easily and lands directly in front of the tractor’s front wheels. Guess what happens then. Owners all over the web are looking for new grills.

My opinion of engineers is like my opinion of cooking school graduates. Think of all the terrible food you’ve had at expensive restaurants. Most of it was cooked by chefs with degrees. There is no conceivable excuse for going to school for several years and making bad food. Cooking is just not hard. Somehow, they blow it anyway. Very, very often.

Now I feel like writing about my awful green toilets again. I just spent $700 ordering a better one, made in Japan.

Unless I have missed something, my tractor fork will be fantastic. If so, I’ll probably come back and criticize engineers some more. They have it coming.

No Drugs, no Drama, More Profit

Finally, a story I had been expecting for years popped up on the web. Models are now concerned that their trade will vanish suddenly. AI is creating virtual models.

Virtual models have a number of advantages. They don’t have to be paid. They don’t use coke or heroin. They don’t have attitudes. They don’t sue because agents or photographers rape or grope them. They never get old. They do exactly as they’re told. They never get fat. They don’t wrinkle or go grey. Nothing sags or droops. Nothing is too small or too big. They don’t abuse themselves with hard living and expect makeup artists to do magic when they show up for work.

One really nice thing about them is that they don’t become narcissistic objects of worship, so they don’t go on Twitter and say stupid things all day, stirring up legions of mindless fans. Of course, they could do that, depending on what their creators want them to do. Maybe it will happen later.

I expected this to happen with actors, but we haven’t seen that yet. We’ve seen CGI bodies with real voices. The fake voices will come soon.

This would be a big benefit to society. Show business, historically, has been the domain of degenerates. It still is. It attracts terrible people, they become obscenely rich and powerful, and then they use their power to corrupt the rest of us and destroy civilization. Think how different it would be if the biggest names in show business were AI actors.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the people who program them, also trashy show business people, would use them as avatars to promote their own degenerate values.

Somehow, I don’t think a bot could be as persuasive as a person when it comes to selling products. “Drink Pepsi! ChatGPT loves it!” I don’t think that will work. I could be wrong. But a bot could push the leftist agenda.

I hope we won’t have a bot Antichrist. I don’t think that can happen, since the Antichrist will be a man. But he could be a man wired up to AI. Elon Musk is at work on that. We may have a future with two classes: cyborg overlords, and lowly all-meat humans.

What if we had had bots 90 years ago, and the actors our great-grandparents knew had been bots? Humphrey Bogart would still be working. So would John Wayne. They would still be raking in money for the studios and their stockholders. They would work until we got sick of them.

A long time ago, I wanted to be a comic strip artist. I actually got to the development stage with the guy who discovered Garfield. Luckily for me, I failed. Newspaper cartoonists used to make a ton of money, and that might have destroyed me. Anyway, I learned something most people don’t know: it’s very had to break into the comic strip business, because newspapers are still full of strips drawn by dead people.

At least one major cartoonist has made fun of this in his work. Cartoonists call strips by dead artists “zombie strips.”

If you had been born the day Peanuts creator Charles Schulz died, you would now be 23. So United, his syndicate, ran his final strips and then withdrew his feature, right? No. He’s still plugging away, postmortem. Peanuts still runs all over America. Old strips appear daily as reruns. He was allowed to die, but he can’t retire.

Schulz isn’t the only comic strip zombie. If you check, you will find that other well-known strips are earning royalties for the dead.

It shows what can happen when media people prefer a sure thing to developing new talent, and if actors and actresses were immortal, like bots, it would be nearly impossible for young actors to find work in big roles. They would all have to keep their Olive Garden jobs until they died.

The better AI gets, the less it will matter to the public that celebrities aren’t real. The ones we have now are barely real anyway. Future bots will be sexier, funnier, better looking, more charismatic, and more talented than the flesh and bone celebrities we have now. We won’t care. I already don’t care.

We’ve already seen performances that were at least part CGI, which is AI’s lesser sibling. If you’ve seen a Marvel movie, you’ve seen a character switch from real to CGI and back. Tom Holland can’t really jump around like Spider-Man. Mark Ruffalo can’t balloon up to the size of an RV and turn green. Marvel actors have CGI body doubles. Marvel stunt budgets must be miniscule now.

What will come after actors? Acting requires a little more talent than modeling, so actors will follow models. Singing requires more talent than acting, so singers will follow actors. Writing original songs takes more talent than singing, so singer-songwriters will come later, probably at about the same time AI comedians start to appear.

It almost makes you wonder why a real audience is needed. We could be replaced, too, but then where would ticket money come from?

Pretty soon, a studio will, over the screams and threats of SAG narcissists, create a major actor, and whether we like the first one or not, they will eventually create some we like better than actual actors. Maybe we’ll see a gradual end to the spawning and maintenance of corrosive billionaire thespians.

I don’t think we should feel smug. AI will eventually be good enough to replace people with real jobs, not just performers. Even studio executives will be outdone by machinery. Machines get better and better, and there is no stopping it, no matter how much Elon Musk warns us. The human race keeps proving it can’t resist or control the drug of technology. We will always abuse it.

Will we get AI politicians? What if we get a really popular AI president? Will we repeal the 22nd Amendment, based on the assumption that we can’t do better?

In a situation like that, I believe an AI Obama or Sanders is more likely than a solid leader like an AI DeSantis. Our slide into leftism is not going to stop. America belongs to Satan, and he prefers leftism to conservatism.

Whatever happens, it will be nice to see certain classes of destructive people lose their access to excessive wealth and powerful platforms. No more Chrissie Teigens or Gwyneth Paltrows. That would be great.

It will happen. It has to happen. It’s as predictable as the death of a star.

I don’t know if we will ever be able to get rid of overpaid, bloviating leftist athletes. Maybe there is some way to make AI games competitive and unpredictable. Imagine Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb running the bases again.

Spectator sports don’t run on the love of athleticism. They run on the love of betting. Racehorse owners learned that over the last couple of decades. Tracks shut down because people were just as happy to gamble online as they were to go watch horses. If AI games could be fixed so they had random outcomes, and there was some way to have fair AI drafts, billionaire athletes could vanish from the earth.

A company called Cloudflare makes huge money introducing randomness into the world of computers. Maybe they could branch out into the creation of AI athletes and game variables.

We already have something like this. Fantasy football. You pick your fictional team of real athletes, and their unpredictable performance introduces randomness so the whole thing seems competitive. The real players do Cloudflare’s job.

If we can get excited about fantasy football, we can get just as excited about AI football. We will love football players with a limitless average career length instead of 3.3 years, which is the actual average career length.

AI can’t replace me. I don’t do anything.

Assuming the rapture doesn’t come first, a lot of crazy sci-fi things are going to happen soon, and they will happen before sci-fi writers anticipate them in works of fiction. That’s weird. Usually, fiction gets there first.

If you’re hoping to become a model, think it over. Olive Garden only needs so many waiters.

“We’re the real PFJ!”

I found an interesting Messianic channel on Youtube, and I’m really enjoying it.

I’ve met Yeshua, because he literally came to my physical location twice. I’ve had miracles and visions. I’ve had demons cast out. The whole 9 yards. He is God. He has proven it over and over. He still proves it day by day. I want everyone to know him. But not one of the many Jewish people I’ve known have ever shown any interest in him. Not unless they knew him before we met. It’s great to see the sample I’ve seen doesn’t represent everyone. It’s the best I can hope for, unfortunately.

This week, I saw a Jewish man who was once a yeshiva student confront one of the myths surrounding Yeshua. His name is Dr. Golan Broshi. He said he had been told over and over to avoid looking at the New Testament because it was a Christian book that was anti-Semitic. Of course, when he finally looked, he saw a set of Jewish books, every one written by a Jewish man, created and disseminated in order to help spread a Jewish sect in support of the Jewish Messiah. He was amazed. I’ve seen many Jewish believers say the same thing happened to them. I saw one Jew joke that the only thing he knew about the New Testament was that it was written by the pope. Of course, not one gentile had a hand in writing it. Only Jews. It is a Jewish creation; one hundred per cent.

Anyway, he pointed something out, and I had never thought about it.

There is a common thread in several books of the Christian Bible. It goes like this: God sends an anointed Jew to help the rest of the Jews. He has confrontations with the religious and political leaders. They persecute him and treat him very badly. Then he turns out to be right, and eventually, he is revered and honored. After his death.

Of course, I’m referring to the Old Testament, which is part of the Christian Bible.

Isaiah was murdered by Jews. Jeremiah was imprisoned and beaten. Amos was abused and rejected. The Queen of Israel tried to kill Elijah, and the king, Ahab, agreed with her. Jewish lore written by Jews says Ahab had the prophet Micaiah murdered by other Jews because he didn’t like what Micaiah said.

Later on, Jewish Yeshua said this to certain Jewish scholars of the law:

Woe unto you! for ye build the sepulchres of the prophets, and your fathers killed them. Truly ye bear witness that ye allow the deeds of your fathers: for they indeed killed them, and ye build their sepulchres.

He also said:

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!

The prophets were not popular during their lifetimes, and the people who made them miserable were Jews.

In this respect, the Jewish prophets are like real Christians, who have always been abused by nominal Christians who didn’t know God. Christians who are popular among people who claim to be Christians are generally not really Christians.

Dr. Broshi asked a simple question: if Jews have internal disagreements that don’t involve gentiles, how can anyone say anti-Semitism is the reason? If the Jews who wrote the New Testament were anti-Semites, weren’t the Jews who imprisoned and killed early Messianics also anti-Semites? They didn’t harm anyone but Jews.

It’s a startling argument.

Jews persecuted Moses. Go look for yourself. Jews tried to kill David. A Jew slept with David’s wives in order to humiliate him. Jews slaughtered most of a tribe of Jews. If powerful Jews fought with Yeshua, who was Jewish, and they had him killed, and they imprisoned and killed his Jewish followers, which is undeniable, how can anti-Semitism be involved?

Anti-Semitism among Christians didn’t exist when the New Testament was written. At first, all believers were Jews, and the gentile believers who came later were not their enemies. On the contrary; they looked to them for teaching. They followed them.

Anti-Semitism among Christians developed after the New Testament was written, and it is inconsistent with the New Testament, just as there are rabbinical teachings that go against the Tanakh. Most Jews aren’t interested in God. That certainly goes against the Tanakh. It makes no sense to condemn scripture based on the actions of people who ignore it.

The apostles were most definitely not against Jews. Paul, for example, spent a long time traveling to far-off synagogues to reach them, and he continued even though they flogged him more than once, stoned him, and beat him with sticks.

What Broshi says is true, and once you see it in front of you, you realize how obvious it is. Why haven’t people said it before?

It’s amazing what we can believe before God shows us the truth. There is no limit to human delusion.

These Hombres Don’t Look so Bad

I feel like I’m in prison.

Last week on Friday, at around 7:30 a.m., a truck arrived unannounced with a load of shingles. The company that owned the truck called the company I hired to put a roof on my house, and that company called and woke me up when I was trying to catch up after sleeping badly. The shingle people needed help getting through my gate, and the driver did not have the gate code even though I had given it to the roofing company.

This was the start of my roof adventure.

I had to order a roof because my “25-year” shingles were starting to fail after 22 years and change. Shingle life estimates are kind of a joke. Something to be aware of when you order your next roof. When they say 25 years, hope for 20. If you look around the web, you will find sites saying shingles last this long or that long…unless subjected to things like sunshine and hot weather. Which means the figures they like to quote only work if you build your house inside another house. Roofs get hot even in places like Michigan.

I dressed myself reasonably well, taking my time because I hadn’t caused the problem, and opened the gate. The driver stood around with a phone in his ear until it closed. I had to call the roof company and make them call the driver.

When you bring a truck through a self-closing gate, you don’t stop halfway through and play a round of tiddlywinks, but that’s what this guy did. I had to keep using the remote to keep my gate off his truck.

Obviously, he is not a very good driver. I’ve had a semi come through that gate with no problems. I’ve had big box trucks come in. UPS comes in every week. This guy was afraid he would hit something. He kept saying I had a little gate. It’s like 12 feet long. How long is a big gate?

I told him you don’t show up early in the morning at someone’s gate with a big delivery without calling first, and I told him he couldn’t play around while using the gate. These things are pretty obvious. What if I had been out of town? He gave me an attitude, which was amazing. He also made excuses. I don’t know how a person like that survives in this county of pleasant, respectful people.

The roofing company told me its crew of people with questionable immigration status would arrive on Monday for a two-day job. Then they would take a break on Tuesday for some kind of mandatory company meeting. Then they would come back on Wednesday and finish up.

It is now Friday afternoon, and I’m pretty sure they’re going home in three hours with the job unfinished. There is debris all over the yard, including a whole bunch of nails. I don’t want to go outside until the nails are picked up, and I am using the car as little as possible in order to avoid a predictable conversation about tire repairs. I think they’ll finish on Monday evening.

Last night, I saw a mouse in the downstairs hall. Mouse infiltration is one of the problems I expect to get rid of by fixing the roof. They found a way to get in, and the roof is the only possible location. I kill a couple of them every month. I would guess this one came in while the roof was opened up, or it was here before the roofers and was scared out of its usual location.

I grabbed a flip-flop and went after it. I was going to crush it like a cockroach.

City people are very concerned about humane treatment for mice. They even buy obscenities like live-release traps, so mice can get a nice meal and then run right back in their houses. I don’t worry about how mice feel. Not very much, anyway. I’m not willing to leave little trays of antifreeze out for them to drink, because it kills in a painful way, but other than that, I’m up for anything. Snap traps. Poison. Stepping on live mice when I find them in glue traps.

I have stomped on live mice, and while it’s no fun, it’s humane and really effective.

My wife is on the same page here. She says that in Zambia, she has shoved furniture against the wall to crush mice. She imitated their little squeaks for me.

The mouse ran into my laundry room, so I baited two traps and left them in there. Then I stuffed a towel under the door to keep the mouse from leaving the room. When I got up, the traps were empty, but I found half a peanut on the floor.

I really hope the peanut didn’t come from a secret huge stash. My friend Mike stayed here for a long time, and I kept telling him not to take food upstairs. Then weeks after he left, I found an enormous bag of peanuts, open, by his bed. I could not believe it. I threw them out, of course.

For all I know, the mice took half a gallon of his peanuts and hid them in the walls.

Once the roof is sealed up, I figure any mice still in the house will die of thirst or by being crushed or poisoned.

This house and the outbuilding had four ridiculous skylights. I’m going to guess a woman had them installed. Women are the ones who like extremely troublesome and impractical home features that look cute. For example, they like carpeting. If men really ran the world, every kitchen would have stainless steel on the walls and, in the floor, a drain with a garbage disposal.

Two of the skylights were in the workshop. Explain that to me. Skylights provide nearly no light in a workshop, they tend to leak and cause sheathing rot, and flying bugs like to fly up to them and get trapped. Then they make noise. I told the roof people to board the roof up. No skylights.

The house had a skylight in an upstairs hallway and an upstairs bathroom. I considered getting rid of both, but I finally said I would keep only the one in the hallway.

You never, ever put a skylight in a bathroom. Water condenses in the little drywall shafts under the skylights, and then you get mold, which you have to keep chasing with chemicals. I doubt any heterosexual man has ever asked for a bathroom skylight, unless he was trying to impress a woman.

Yesterday I saw that both skylights in the house had been replaced, even though I had only paid for one.

Okay; fine. I told them I would let it go. I can always get rid of it later. The up side is that I don’t have to put a new ceiling in the bathroom.

They swear the new skylight is way better than the old one and that it will never cause problems. I have doubts.

I think I should put some kind of frame around the bottom of the shaft and put a piece of diffusing lens in it. A diffusing lens is a piece of clear plastic that blurs things. You’ve seen them in fluorescent fixtures. A lens would keep steam out and end the mold problem. I could install the frame with Velcro so I could pull it out and clean the lens if dead bugs appeared in it.

I can test my theory with some plastic material from Home Depot and some double-sided tape.

I can’t wait for these guys to finish. They start hammering at 7 a.m. The other day, I almost jumped out of bed.

I want them to get out so I can start doing what I know I’ll have to do: raking up nails they left behind when they raked up nails. This is as close to a certainty as anything can be. I don’t think any roofing company has ever failed to leave fewer than 30 nails behind.

I’ll have to go out and wander around with a magnetic rake. Being me, I already have two of them.

I also need to redo my Starlink dish mount because they boarded over the place where I had it.

They were nice enough to wait as long as possible to remove my dish. I didn’t know they had removed it, though. Starlink makes a huge fuss about how you have to have your dish in the middle of a flat square-mile field in order to get an unobstructed sky. The roofers left my dish lying on the roof facing more or less sideways, and I still had service.

This is good information to have, because it tells me I don’t have to do a great job when I put the dish back up. Instead of a long pole mounted through shingles, I should be able to use the tiny, pathetic, four-legged base Starlink gave me. I could even set it on the roof and put a sandbag on it to keep it from moving.

The roof people told me how horrible it was for my roof to have a dish mounted on it. Whatever. They have a new thing called “sealant,” and if it doesn’t work, I’ll know, because I can go into my attic and check the roof under the mount.

They think I should have a pole installed in my yard. Yeah, I want a $500 pole plus an expensive trench plus expensive holes in my house plus expensive cable. Or I can use my $40 mount right where it was last week. Or just stick the portable base up there.

Now they’re telling me they’re cleaning up and expect to have their dumpster trailer out of here tomorrow. They claim they will rake for nails now and then again tomorrow. Can it all be true? I feel like Joe Biden, waiting for the go-ahead to leave the basement.

When they’re gone, I can get the yard fixed. I can get the pool leak fixed. I can have the shutters painted.When you own a house, the roof is the main thing you need to look after. Everything else depends on the roof. I think a good roof and termite protection are my most important home-maintenance items.

Roof leaks lead to wood rot, termites, bugs, rats, black mold, and wall and floor collapses. As the roof goes, so goes the house.

Now I just hope none of the employees were casing the place.