Hobbies Look so Different When You’re Old

I’m getting ready to clean my roof off, remove the remaining junk from the yard, blow the debris off the pool enclosure, and maybe fix the lawn tractor.

Because I finally, after trying hard for 6 years, learned how to keep gas chainsaws running, the three saws I have been using for this cleanup all started and ran fine this time around, even though the gas is 5 months old and should have been dumped.

I’ve gotten really cocky about saws. I modified my Echo CS-590, which is a 90%-commercial saw hidden in a residential-saw disguise. I changed the timing, put in a bigger carb, added an exhaust deflector, and tuned it to run at 13,300 instead of the factory 12-something. It’s a monster now. I may speed it up to 14,000. It will do it.

Even though I really don’t need another saw, I am highly, highly tempted to get another pro-grade saw and fix it up.

When Irma passed by in ’17 and made a mess here, it was not possible to get any kind of decent largish saw, even online. The storm-cleanup market sucked them all up. Miraculously, I came across a Jonsered CS2240 which had just been made available online by Tractor Supply. I nailed it, probably within 20 minutes of its appearance.

It took me several more days to find the Echo online, so a 16″ hobby saw looked pretty good.

The Jonsered is actually a red Husqvarna 435. Husqvarna bought Jonsered, and for some reason, they released the exact same saw under different badges.

It’s a 40-cc homeowner saw. It came with a 16″ blade. It probably came with a Romper Room chain designed to cut slowly. Most homeowner saws do. A good chain is more likely to make the saw kick back and hurt the user. Manufacturers don’t trust amateurs with good chains. If you go to Home Depot, Lowe’s, or Tractor Supply, you will find that it’s literally impossible to get a real chain unless you order it.

The little cutting things on a saw are called chisels, and they come in different types. If you want to cut fast, you want full chisels. Hardware store saws come with semi-chisel chains.

It’s kind of stupid. You buy a big saw, and it performs like a little one. And they don’t tell you. You can make a Home Depot saw cut like a bigger saw just by putting the correct chain on it.

I have since put full-chisel chains on my saws, except maybe for my electric Makita. I should check.

The Jonsered has been okay, when I have managed to make it work. I made all sorts of errors, and then the saw developed an air leak, which is common to the model. I had to have a mechanic fix that. Now I can pick it up and use it when I want it.

It’s not a perfect saw. The casing is plastic, like those on nearly all hobby saws. That makes it more fragile and harder to modify. It’s also hard to work on. My Echo comes apart in a hurry. It’s also somewhat weak because of the small engine.

I started thinking maybe it would be nice to have a stronger 16″ gas saw. I turned my Echo into a the near-equivalent of a commercial saw. It came with a metal case, which gave me a head start.

I asked around and read up. I started out by looking at Husqvarna and Stihl, but I was not that impressed. Then I saw the Echo CS-4910 and CS-501P.

For some reason, Echo likes putting commercial stuff in hobby saws. The CS-501P is for professionals, and it has a metal case, an aluminum handle, and a 50-cc motor which modifies easily. The CS-4910 is almost exactly the same saw. It has been discontinued, but it’s still around, and it costs about $180 less. You get a plastic handle, which is about as good as aluminum. You get the hobby-grade chain and a bar that is not as tough. You get bar nuts that fall off and get lost, whereas the CS-501P has nuts that stay on the saw when you remove the bar. There are a couple of other parts that differ, but they’re trivial.

You can replace the chain for $20. The nuts can be had online for about $18. So for about $140 less than a CS-501P, you get nearly the same thing. The bar is not a huge problem, because it will take an amateur a long time to ruin a bar, and they run around $40.

A year or two ago, they were selling the CS-4910 for under $300, trying to clear it out for the successor model, the CS-4920. The newer saw is not that great. It has a plastic case.

If I were to get the CS-4910, I could open up the muffler, add a deflector, put a new chain on it, and get some new nuts. It would roar. If I wanted to get serious later, I could take the cylinder off and do some porting, which means enlarging the openings to make it move more fuel and air.

Some guy on the web claims he got almost 6 horsepower out of this saw, and it starts at 3.5, supposedly. Echo won’t say, but saw nerds claim this is the figure.

There are people running 24″ bars on this saw, which is pretty neat. It only weighs 10.4 pounds. The CS-590 comes home from the store with 4.7 horsepower, it weighs 13.2 pounds, and it starts life with a 20″ bar.

I don’t want another saw with a long bar, but it goes to show what a bored guy with some tools can do. I would want the new saw to be light, easy to move around, and insanely powerful.

Modifying the saw would void the warranty, but Echo doesn’t like honoring its warranties anyway. If you want a saw the manufacturer will stand behind, Echo is not for you.

Do you have a 16″ saw? If so, I have interesting news.

Echo saws come with bars and chains made by Oregon. Oregon has a website. It says the CS-501P takes a Q66 full-chisel chain, and it says the CS-4910 takes a 20LPX066G. I already have one or two of the latter.

I could not figure out what made these chains different. The specs were the same. I thought maybe the Q66 would not like the CS-4910’s laminated bar.

I emailed Oregon, and they said it’s the same chain in different packaging. So you pay $27 for the Q66 in one package, or you pay $18 for the 20LPX066G in another.

Why?

If you’re looking for a light, mid-size, top-quality saw cheap, you can find the CS-4910 right now for $380 or so, but they are not making new ones, so you will need to jump. You can get it with a 20″ bar, but it will be slow unless you modify it. The exhaust deflector is available from a site called Saw Again, and the nuts can be found on Ebay. Amazon sells chains.

I might get one just so I can start thinking about something else.

MORE

Yesterday I put a CS-501P in a cart on a website and forgot about it. Today they sent me an email saying they were having a sale at the end of the month, and they were making sale prices available early to people in storm areas. They knocked almost $90 off.

I thought that was great. Right now, they can sell all the saws they want without discounting anything. I decided to go for it.

The business is Saw Suppliers, so if you’re cleaning up a hurricane mess, you might want to pay them a visit.

Is There Anything it Can’t do?

The last couple of days have been pretty good.

Milton came through, we spent a day without power, it came back on, and since then I’ve been cleaning up the yard.

My tractor has been out of commission for a long time due to a problem that prevented it from starting. I researched it for months. I asked for advice from all sorts of people who know tractors. I got conflicting information. Nothing worked.

I was going to send the tractor to the dealership, but then we had the Europe trip, and we had three storms go by. And we both got covid.

A day or two back, I found I could get the tractor to start with some effort. It’s a pain, but it will run. Since then I’ve been moving trees and limbs.

Last year, I finally learned how to make chainsaws run reliably. I may be the only person on Earth who knows how. I spent years listening to bad advice from people who were supposed to know the truth, and it did not help much.

I have a bunch of gas saws, and I have run three in the last couple of days. All started and ran, on treated no-ethanol gas 5 months old. I have this thing licked.

My lead saw was an Echo CS-590, which is a homeowner-grade saw you can get at Home Depot. I paid $400, which is maybe half what a pro saw would have cost. I kept screwing it up because I got so much bad information. Last year, I invested in a Husqvarna 562XP, which is a real pro saw. It has electronics in it that supposedly reduce or eliminate carb adjustments.

I got good information on maintaining saws at about the same time I got the Husqvarna. I modified the Echo to make it run like a pro saw. It’s a monster now. But I’m glad I got the Husqvarna, because anyone who has a farm needs two big saws. One could need repairs. Also, the Husqvarna has a 25″ bar, which is 5″ longer than the Echo’s bar. On this property, you need a 25″ bar, but there are times when 20″ is more convenient, so now I’m all set.

I wonder how many other people in this entire county know how to maintain and use saws correctly. I would guess nearly all are arborists. I took the Echo to an authorized repair guy who didn’t know.

Milton dropped a large oak across my driveway. I would say this tree was around 20″ thick at chest height, and it may have been 80 feet tall. As noted in an earlier post, my neighbor showed up after the storm, cut the tree in two places, and moved it out of the driveway with a forestry grapple. That still left me with two big collections of debris to disentangle, cut to sizes a tractor could carry, and move. A tree service would probably have charged over $1500.

I took a little homeowner-grade Jonsered/Husqvarna with a 16″ bar and did a lot of cutting. I moved a lot of distracting junk to my pasture. Today I used the Husqvarna to cut the tree’s trunk in sections. I also cut up a 16″-thick oak Hurricane Helene left caught in some other trees.

When I went back in the house, bleeding and covered with grease and sawdust, I told my wife it was a good thing she hadn’t married a Democrat. She said, “Don’t even say that.”

I didn’t mean a Teamster or an ironworker. I meant the kind of Democrat whose pores weep estrogen. Like the pansy in the old pajamas-and-cocoa Obamacare ad. Like the skinny-jeans-wearing waifs who get pummeled when disrupting other people’s rallies.

Compared to men from the World War Two generation, I’m practically a girl, but I can fabricate, machine, shoot, run a tractor, buck trees, make ammunition, shoot sub-MOA, smoke ribs, make beer, and do lots of car, mower, and tractor repairs.

I’m very good at interior painting. I don’t mind killing annoying animals. I have stomped on mice instead of taking them to therapy and trying to rehome them. I’ve shot a bunch of squirrels from inside my home. I know how to fish for everything from snapper to marlin. I can run a yacht or open fisherman 200 miles to Eleuthera with no help, and I’ve done both. I can keep a marine diesel running. I have a basic knowledge of electronics, and I have built a bunch of electronic devices.

I can also practice law.

If my wife had married a boy-band-looking liberal, they would be equally helpless. She would be able to do all the woman stuff, but he wouldn’t be able to do man stuff or woman stuff. Hot yoga and sitting in a cubicle. That would be all he could do.

I had to make a 50-amp San Francisco adaptor for my generator on Thursday. A San Francisco adaptor is male-to-male. I went to Lowe’s and asked for 6/3 cord. The Lowe’s guy and I started having a conversation. Maybe they didn’t have 6/3. Would 8/3 be okay? Well, I wasn’t sure my generator could break 30 amps, so 8/3 was fine. I didn’t have to ask him what kind of cord a generator uses. I didn’t have to ask what 8/3 was.

He didn’t explain anything to me. He seemed to know there was no reason to. Men in this area can do things, except for some of the snowbirds.

Came home, took apart two cords I had made for 220-volt tools, put the plugs on the 8/3 cord, and we were in business.

Two new plugs are on the way from Amazon.

I am sure leftists will eventually start swarming homes all over America, killing and looting. They’ve done that in every revolution. But should we all be scared of them?

In percentage terms, there aren’t many tough leftists. There are a lot of leftists who can throw bottles of pee at the police, and many of them can rob and kill unarmed people with stolen plastic 9mm pistols, but how many can deal with a conservative who can shoot and has multiple weapons, modified to suit his needs, for various uses?

Even gang members don’t train, and they are generally stupid.

Kyle Rittenhouse was a chubby, out-of-shape high school kid with a cheap AR-15, and he obliterated three leftists as they and a big crowd tried to lynch him. He killed a child molester (raped 5 boys) who had been in prison and gotten a reputation for fighting. He blew the bicep off a criminal who charged him, committing assault, with an illegal pistol in hand. He killed some idiot criminal who tried to bash his skull in with a skateboard. He scared the rest of the lynch mob off. Rittenhouse was extremely effective, and his two armed assailants, as well as the unidentified person who shot at him early in the incident, were incompetent and useless.

I just don’t think you can sit around smoking dope all day and apologizing for your maleness and expect to be a real factor in physical confrontations with armed people.

If my wife had married a vegan yoga boy, they would have to live in an apartment or on a very small lot. They would have to live somewhere where there was little for men to do.

Man stuff is fun. Burning things and blowing things up are fun. Steel-toed boots are fun. Shooting is fun. Catching fish and cutting them up is fun. Welding, machining, running heavy equipment, and bucking trees are fun. How could anyone prefer wearing a man bun, carrying a murse, and spending his time going from one moronic activist meeting to another?

Good knives are fun. Concealed carry is fun.

God is masculine, and he was right to make men masculine. The sex roles he created work. People who accept them enthusiastically are fulfilled.

I feel like buying another rifle.

Tomorrow I have to finish moving trees and limbs. Then I have to replace my diesel yard tractor’s exhaust pipe, cut off the muffler I made for the old one, and weld it onto the new one.

I’m glad God didn’t let me become a sissy.

Some of You May be Guilty of Felonies

Welcome to 10-minute law school. I’m about to give you the skills a lawyer needs in order to handle a case.

When you file a lawsuit, you need something called a cause of action. It’s the thing you claim the other person did. For example, negligence is a cause of action.

When you write your complaint, you have to allege facts that, if proven, would be sufficient to ground the cause of action. These facts are called elements.

Nearly everywhere English is spoken, the elements of fraud are a deliberate, material misrepresentation, a victim’s reasonable reliance on the misrepresentation, and harm caused by his reliance.

There are different versions of these elements, but they add up to the same basic thing. Sometimes, the elements are defined in statutes. In some places, they come from common law, which means they derive from centuries of court opinions in the US and England.

Let’s say I sell you a dog, and I tell you the dog lays golden eggs. Can you sue me for fraud? Probably not. I made a misrepresentation, but I would argue that your reliance on my lie was not reasonable.

What if I sell you the dog, and it turns out he lays platinum eggs, not gold? Can you sue? Probably not, because you have not suffered damage.

What if I sell you the dog, you pay no attention to what I say, and you buy him because you’re Korean and want to have a barbecue? Can you sue? No. You didn’t rely on my lie, which was immaterial. And you weren’t harmed.

What if I ask you for a loan, I lie about the value of the collateral, you pay no attention to my valuation, you do your own appraisal, you lend me the cash, and I pay off the loan, making you a lot of money? Can you sue?

Of course not. At least not under the traditional cause of action.

You didn’t rely on my valuation, and you weren’t harmed. You got exactly what you were hoping for.

So why was Donald Trump convicted of fraud? He probably didn’t lie, the lenders did not rely on his representations, and they suffered no harm. In fact, they showed up in court to say they were eager to do more business with him. The conviction was a blow to them as well as him.

There are two problems. First, Letitia James is a corrupt attorney general who violated commonly-accepted Constitutional notions of Equal Protection, and who lied a good deal, in order to unfairly discriminate against three private citizens in order to prevent one of them from winning an election. Second, the New York fraud statute, Executive Law 63(12), was written by imbeciles.

In New York, you can be convicted under 63(12) even if there is no materiality, reliance (justified or not), or harm. The statute redefines the word “fraud” so it no longer has the meaning it has had in most places for centuries. Here’s the definition:

The word “fraud” or “fraudulent” as used herein shall include any device, scheme or artifice to defraud and any deception, misrepresentation, concealment, suppression, false pretense, false promise or unconscionable contractual provisions.

That’s amazing. There is no mention of harm. What is the purpose of a law that doesn’t protect anyone?

If lying is fraud, then Letitia James committed fraud in order to get Trump convicted. She told the all-too-receptive judge Trump’s valuations of his properties were fraudulent because they greatly exceeded the assessed values. Everyone who owns any type of real estate knows assessed value and actual value are different things. If I had a business where I bought things for assessed value and sold them for market value, I would be a trillionaire in a few years.

Market value can be 10 or more times as great as assessed value.

Imagine trying to get a loan based on a home’s assessed value. No one would be able to buy a house. “I want to buy this house that appraised for 1.2 million dollars.” “Sorry; the assessed value is $250,000. And we’re turning you in to the attorney general.”

Market value is what banks care about when they give loans. They want to know if they can get their money back by selling the collateral.

A non-MSM guy who watched the appellate panel grill the state’s attorneys says the panel was very hostile, as it should have been. Under the James standard, nearly anyone who has sold a business property in New York City can be convicted of a felony, and virtually all real estate agents who have rented properties can be convicted.

Everyone makes mistakes when evaluating properties. Everyone guesses. Appraisals are subjective. Under 63(12), any mistake can get you convicted. It does not have to be deliberate.

In New York City, it is an accepted practice to lie about the size of rentals. You can look this up for yourself. It’s normal for an agent to show you a property and tell you the square footage is x when the real square footage is 0.6x. They include things like common areas, which aren’t part of the property you’re paying for.

This is lying. There is no way to dispute it. Lessees, even sophisticated ones, don’t expect it. And they rely on the lies, causing them harm.

A Youtuber named Louis Rossmann had a New York business. He decided to move. He was shown various properties. Square footages were quoted.

When he measured the properties, he found out he had been lied to. Then he found out lying was normal and accepted.

You can find his video if you look.

This is a sophisticated guy who runs a very lucrative business with multiple employees. He’s not stupid. But he was shocked to find out he was expected to pay for square footage he wasn’t going to get.

How many New York City agents have lied to lessees over the years? Many thousands. Conservative lessees should start insisting Letitia James prosecute real estate firms and drive the people who work for them into poverty.

Given the stupidity of the law itself, I’m not sure the appellate judges can find a way to reverse. If they don’t, everyone who works in real estate in New York is going to live in fear from now on. Will they find some kind of imaginary implication in the law in order to require fraud to be harmful and save the real estate industry? Maybe. They must be liberals, since they work in New York, and liberals like to write laws from the bench. They looked at the Constitution and found a right to kill the unborn as well as a right for the state to ban prayer in classrooms.

The judges made James’s legal goons look for similar cases, and they could not find them. Even the far-left Associated Press couldn’t find them. Prosecuting loan recipients in cases where no harm was done is a practice invented by a shameless, unaccountable ghetto attorney general in order to queer a presidential election.

According to the guy who attended the hearing, things were much worse than the MSM says. He claims that instead of defending their case, James’s goons spent the last part of the hearing begging the judges not to sanction them.

They should be sanctioned, and some, including James, should be disbarred. The feds should try to put her in prison. Undoing democracy and nullifying the civil rights of half the country is not a little thing. It’s as bad as anything Sean Combs is accused of.

Trump never posed a threat to democracy. He tried to defend it. Whether he was right or wrong to think the 2020 election was rigged, he was trying to make sure every citizen’s vote counted.

The panel could try looking at Equal Protection in order to undo this unjust result, but it would stir up a hornet’s nest. We ignore Equal Protection. We’re not supposed to treat one suspect or defendant one way and another another way, but it’s done every hour of every day. Some people get arrested while others who do the same things walk. Some get prosecuted, and others don’t.

I guess we decided to forget about Equal Protection because we like flexibility and corruption. We like playing favorites. If we took Equal Protection seriously, there would be chaos. A lot of people who have been convicted would have to be released, and many people who were allowed to slide would have to be tried.

The New York Senate should change the law. As it stands, it’s terrifying. Anyone who works in real estate can be convicted, and Letitia James is free to pursue conservatives, Jews, Asians, and everyone New York’s black power establishment hates and leave everyone else alone.

You Will Eat the Entire Thing

People are asking for my white bread recipe. It’s not health food. It has no fiber. It has no quinoa, steel-cut oats, or kale in it. It’s a decadent white bread for people who do not fear death.

Here is the recipe.

I recommend using a big food processor with a standard chopping blade to mix the dry ingredients. If you use a short dough blade, it won’t stir them well. Once the dry ingredients are mixed, you move to the short blade. A standard blade may be too hard for the processor to turn.

You can also do all this by hand, or you can use a mixer.

This is for a big nonstick bread pan.

INGREDIENTS
520 g bread flour
1.5 tsp. salt
1 tsp. instant yeast
2.5 tbsp. sugar
4 tbsp. butter
300 g warm water

You can use half as much yeast and let the dough rise longer. Ordinarily, bread tastes better when it takes a long time to rise.

Blend the dry things first in the food processor. Then blend in the water until the dough is well mixed. Maybe 20 seconds. Wait 5 minutes. Blend in butter (softening it first will speed this up). Butter a bread pan, and be sure to add extra salt to the butter.

Form a loaf and put it in the pan. Butter it with more salted butter. Let it rise in a humid place. Score it a few times with a razor to let it expand in the oven. Bake about 35 minutes at 375°. You want the bread to sound hollow when tapped. You can shoot for 195° if you have a probe thermometer.

The top will burn if you’re not careful. I bake for 20 minutes at 375° and then drop a sheet of foil over the bread.

Smaller loaf for 1.5-pound pan:

350 g bread flour
1 tsp. salt
2 tsp. yeast
4 teaspoons sugar
2.5 tbsp. butter
210 g water

The smaller the loaf is, the higher the crust-to-innards ratio. A small loaf gives you more of the hot crunchy stuff. You can also roll this dough into balls, put them in a round cake pan, and make rolls.

I recommend letting the bread cool before storing it. Otherwise, steam comes out and makes the crust soggy.

This stuff is best right out of the oven, and the heels are worth fighting for.

Is Florida the New California?

The Wall Street Journal says people are leaving Florida because of the hurricanes. I can relate. This is one reason I left Miami and moved inland and north. I’m in an area that has never had sustained hurricane winds, and I’m not in a floodplain. If it floods here, start putting animals in a big boat, because it’s over.

Is the story reflective of reality? Probably not. It’s not hard for a reporter to go out after a storm and find a dozen exasperated people who haven’t had a shower in three days and can’t face another meal of Pop Tarts, but most people feel better when the power goes back on.

We have had awful hurricanes here since before the Indians got here, and people have stayed and prospered. If large numbers of people leave, to the point where housing prices are affected, it will probably be because of the price of insurance, not the stress of the storms themselves.

I can’t help wondering if we are about to see a gentrification of the coasts.

As I have often written, hurricanes are only a problem for people who don’t prepare. If you build properly and manage your foliage, you can weather any hurricane in your own house. Build from concrete, not wood. Make sure your first floor is above the storm surge line. Get a big generator that turns itself on. Get a steel roof. Buy the right windows and doors. Find a place to put your vehicles when things go bad. Give up on the romantic notion that you should have huge trees close to your house. Don’t buy a Tesla. Boom. You’re done. You don’t have to go anywhere. Your worst problem will be removing your neighbors’ walls and outdoor furniture from your lawn.

Plenty of ordinary houses went through Andrew without real damage, and Andrew had sustained winds of at least 165 mph. Houses with second stories made from sawdust were decapitated. If a normal house built to pre-1992 codes can survive, you better believe a modern house built to better standards will make it.

If you can afford a seven-figure house on the water, you can afford to build a hurricane-proof home.

I think there are enough people with money to guarantee the continued popularity of coastal living. Americans are getting older, they retire to warm places, none of them want to live in California, and Arizona is a roasting-hot sandbox. I would rather live in Florida in a fortress than shrivel and die in the desert. The average daily high in Phoenix in July is 106°.

Maybe I’m wrong. Someone would have to look at the numbers to determine how many potential migrants there are.

Regardless of what journalists say about an exodus, my area is getting jammed up with yankees. They are packing in here like the rest of the country was on fire. We now have traffic. Tract houses are going up all over.

I hate what’s happening, but what if it’s God, moving his people here? Anyone who doesn’t live in a box knows that Florida has come to symbolize conservatism and Christianity, so they know what they’re getting when they decide to move here.

For quite a while, the population of the state has been increasing. I don’t think it will stop. California refugees have to go somewhere.

We know many of the new Floridians are conservative Christians, because they say so. And DeSantis, PBUH, has been giving cops from blue states money to move. Tired of arresting the same smelly, screeching clownhairs three times a day? Tired of being told you’re the problem? Florida awaits.

Every day, my wife and I pray that God moves his people to special areas he has set aside, and it looks like he’s doing it.

We also pray he makes these areas large and comfortable. In the Bible, living in a small space is a curse, and living in a big space is a blessing. We pray that God lures the wicked to little, cramped places like New York and Martha’s Vineyard, where people are too busy prancing about and impressing each other with their status to realize they’re land-poor.

The citrus groves to our south are generally gone because of the citrus plague. Where there were hundreds of thousands of acres of citrus, there is now bare soil dotted with piles of PVC water and sewage pipes waiting to be installed. If you haven’t driven up through the state many times over several decades, you wouldn’t know this, but I’ve made the trip dozens of times since the Sixties.

Go to your local store and look at the “half-gallon” citrus cartons. They’re not really half-gallon cartons now. They shrank. The price went up. Some of the products are only partly juice.

It will continue. Citrus juice will become a luxury unless someone discovers a cure. Even then, much of the land where trees grew will be covered with houses.

Based on experience, I think Florida will continue to be popular. Some people will make a better effort to build wisely. Most will not. Life will go on, just like it did after we were hit by Rita, Wilma, Katrina, and Dennis in one year.

I saw an interesting article on the web, bashing Florida. They asked people about destinations they would never want to visit, and one person mentioned Florida. I can’t say I disagree entirely.

Here is what the commenter said:

“I hate Florida. I’ve been to the Everglades, which is the one thing going for it, and I’d highly recommend everyone go once in their lives. It is every bit as incredible as Yellowstone. But I would not voluntarily go back again, I don’t think. I’ve had to go for work since then. I don’t understand the allure. The people are so rude, and I’m from NYC. The food is not that great. The weather sucks, it’s just so hot. Beaches like that can be found elsewhere. And it seems they’re getting hit by hurricanes more and more with climate change. I truly would die happy never going to Florida again.”

I will respond.

1. If you think the Everglades is incredible, you are easy to please. It’s a featureless, flooded, hot, bug-infested swamp. The sawgrass goes on forever, and every acre looks exactly like the next. It’s a shame they won’t let developers fill most of it. I have been there plenty of times, mainly driving through it, and I can’t understand why anyone would go without a reason.

If you were to go to the Everglades and look at one representative acre, you would see everything there is to see.

The Everglades probably shouldn’t be included in the land mass in maps of Florida. It’s underwater.

Comparing Yellowstone to the Everglades is insane. I can’t comprehend this. It’s like comparing the Louvre to the wall art at a Motel 6.

2. “The people are so rude, and I’m from NYC.” This is what I said when I went to Columbia University. I thought New Yorkers were relatively nice compared to Miamians. But the person who wrote the comment is clearly talking about South Florida, which is like a sludge trap that collects Florida’s worst. Once you get away from South Florida and Orlando, the people are wonderful. Warm, helpful, conservative, and Christian. I’ve been here 7 years, and they still freak me out.

We went to Sonny’s BBQ the other day, before the storm hit. Two old Southern ladies were leaving as we went in. Me and my too-young African wife, in the South. The oldest lady, who had to be pushing 90, looked at us and said, “You may as well turn around and go home.” I stared, thinking the restaurant was closing. Then she said, “We ate it all!” Hilarious. So much for red state racism.

Honestly, the South has changed a lot. When you walk around in public, it looks like the government has made interracial marriage mandatory.

The waitress stepped on the toe of a lady sitting across the aisle from us. She was apologetic. She said, “Did I get your toe?” The woman’s husband said, “Want to try again?”

3. “The food is not that great.” If you lived in New York City, it’s no wonder you would say this. New York City has incredible food. Here, it’s just okay, except for barbecue, which is excellent.

4. “The weather sucks.” Again, this must be someone who lived down south. It’s very hot where I am for 4 to 5 months a year, and the rest of the time, it’s magnificent. It’s not California, but it’s very good most of the time.

5. “Beaches like that can be found elsewhere.” That’s not harsh enough. Much better beaches can be found elsewhere. Florida’s panhandle and west coast beaches are okay. The east coast beaches are bad to mediocre. None of it compares to the Bahamas or Mexico. Long Island has better beaches. The Carolinas. Hawaii. Massachusetts. Jamaica.

Florida tourism makes no sense to me. There is nothing here. It’s a nice place to live, but tourists should to somewhere else. I understand locals going to the beach because it’s convenient, but you can fly to Cancun and back for $200.

6. “And it seems they’re getting hit by hurricanes more and more with climate change.” No, we’re being TOLD more and more that hurricanes are increasing in frequency because of climate change. It’s not really happening. Hurricane frequency has always varied, and some places have been pummeled or spared for no clear reason. I lived in Miami from 1969 through 1979 and never experienced a storm, but the state of Florida got 8 storms in ’69.

If I loved living by the water, I had to have warm weather, and I didn’t mind having an HOA and living 10 feet from my neighbors, I’d try to find a Florida property with a house built for storms. No doubt about it. It can be done, and there is no real alternative in North America.

If you don’t care about the water, you can find a sturdy house in this area, no problem. It will be way cheaper than living on the Intracoastal or the Gulf.

My Secret is Out

Yesterday, the first morning after the storm, I went outside and saw my neighbor sitting on a diesel wheel loader with a forestry grapple. He clears land for a living, and he was in my gate getting ready to cut and move a big tree that landed in my driveway.

We talked for a few minutes after he moved the tree, and he told me he had seen the police at my house.

I thought I knew what it was about. We have had problems with bugs setting off our motion detectors. It happened twice while we were out of town, and we had to have the cops come out and see whether we were being burglarized.

He said that wasn’t why the police were there when he had his encounter. He said it was one policeman who was asking questions about fentanyl.

Apparently, the policeman told him a tipster had called in, saying a black man had been going in and out, and he was selling fentanyl.

Again, I thought I knew what he was talking about, and I explained.

One of my best friends is black. He’s getting a divorce. His wife is a pretty interesting lady.

He has shown me a handwritten list of poisons he found. He said his wife made it. It listed the names of various poisons, along with descriptions of what a person who ingested them would go through.

He says she is the subject of a protective order. He says she beat herself up one day in front of their children, called the police, and told them he had done it. He says the police questioned the kids, and they told a different story. He says she is not supposed to go near the family or the house.

He tells me she found herself a new man, and the two of them broke into his house, where they stole his grandmother’s cremated remains along with the children’s identification.

He also says he found a container of fentanyl in his closet, and he says she has tried to convince the police he sells it.

This is all alleged, alleged, alleged. It’s what he tells me.

Maybe it’s a coincidence. Maybe there is another coward out there who has decided to make the police think my friend and I sell drugs. That must be it.

I called the police when I found out, and they had a deputy contact me. Pretty funny. They assured me they are not staking out my house. Glad to hear it, because while the power was out, I had occasion to relieve myself in the yard.

My friend lives in Georgia. He has a house there. There has been a lot of confusion as to just where the wife lives. She claims she lives in Georgia, too. She has family here, though, and it may be that she lives here and pretends to live in Georgia. A suspicious person might think she’s the person who sent the police here.

It’s not clear what the purpose was. My friend is rarely here, so the cops are not likely to see him here, and if they did, what would they be expected to do? “You’re under arrest because your wife says you sell fentanyl, and that’s good enough for us.”

Is the purpose to get them to arrest me? What for? Knowing a guy whose estranged wife claims he sells fentanyl? How is that supposed to help her in the divorce?

None of it makes any sense.

I hope this is the end of it. I am the wrong person to do things like this to. I may be a fat old guy who kisses parrots and rarely exercises, but I am very, very dangerous compared to the average person on the street. It could be very bad if some imbecile showed up here, where I live with my family, with hostile intentions.

It’s rough for a criminal to encounter a homeowner who has a cheap, low-capacity 9mm he doesn’t shoot well. Encountering me and my always-handy rifles is another level entirely. I am ready for multiple visitors. When a home invader is done spraying his 15-round magazine full of cheap FMJ at the sky and the grass, I’ll just be getting started. I’ll call the cops instead if I can, but I may not be able to.

Becoming a husband and father makes you a lot more dangerous. I am starting to understand that.

My dad wasn’t the bravest guy on Earth, but when someone falsely claimed a local mafioso’s kid had raped my sister, my dad went to their house with the intention of beating him senseless. Fortunately, they were on vacation. A crew of armed thugs, including a guy who later escaped Alcatraz, went to my grandfather’s little town in Kentucky, hoping to rob his house, and he grabbed a rifle, went outside in his boxers and started blasting. I can guarantee you, he shot to kill without any reluctance at all. I knew him.

The criminals ended up in custody.

When your family is in danger, you will be carried beyond yourself, as Antoine de Saint-Exupery said of his drawing of the baobab trees.

Sometimes I think I should get better optics for protecting the house at night. I already have stuff to help me shoot assailants in the dark, but products keep getting better and cheaper.

It’s hard to sift through the nonsense when checking reviews and articles. I have come to understand that a lot of guys who are doing product reviews for “self-defense” are really thinking about shooting effeminate, 60-pound-bench-press Antifers from a quarter of a mile away. They are thinking about civil war or plain old terrorism. When they say an optic is no good for hitting someone 200 yards away on a dark night, and they dismiss it, does that dismissal really make sense to someone who wants to shoot attackers in his yard or inside his house?

Tonight I saw someone criticizing thermal sights because a thermal sight wouldn’t let him distinguish between a burglar and a child. Maybe that’s true if the burglar is a block and a half away, but I’ll go out on a limb and say I can tell the difference at a hundred feet. If you look at videos of actual thermal sights, you will see that a Youtuber in a military uniform looks like a Youtuber in a military uniform, not a 6-year-old walking to your bedroom to ask for a glass of water.

I have a thermal optic. I got it for hunting squirrels and such, which I quit doing when covid ruined everything. When you look at a warm-blooded critter through it, it’s pretty obvious what it is.

I do not want to shoot people 200 yards away. I do not want to join a militia or defend America from the Illuminati or BLM or the Trilateral Commission or MSNBC. I just want to be good at incapacitating random idiots, perhaps up to 50 yards away, mostly within 50 feet.

I asked my wife if I should upgrade our defensive capabilities because of the false police report, and she said, “Please do.” Not, “Oh, honey. Stop with the toxic masculinity.”

Let’s see. If you have armed people approaching from your dark rural yard at night, some kind of night optic is good. It will help you identify and shoot them without doing much to light you up so they can shoot back. There is no legal issue with killing a trespasser 50 or 75 yards away on your property if you can tell he is armed and have reason to think he’s hostile. This is doubly true in my county. You don’t have to wait until he comes through the door.

Even if there were a legitimate legal issue, I would not care about it if my family were in danger. The threat of prison means nothing at all compared to the threat of losing your family. Prison is bearable.

Will an optic help you distinguish outdoor assailants from friendlies? I think that’s a stupid question. Why would friendlies be in your yard in the middle of the night with guns?

Your shots will produce muzzle flash, so once you start shooting, they will figure out where you are unless they’re deceased, messed up, or running away while hypocritically and ineffectively calling on Jesus. But they should be extremely demoralized or dead by then, unless you’re dealing with professionals, which isn’t going to happen. You would be dealing with morons.

There aren’t many “professionals,” except in movies and the Mossad. I don’t think someone with real skill would do a home invasion. He’d do something sneaky that would be safe for him and very hard for you to survive.

Even if your hypothetical yard thugs locate you, the optic is still helpful, because without it, you would just see a dark yard. You wouldn’t know where they were. Your assailants, on the other hand, would know you were confined in the house, so your location would be narrowed down.

A night vision scope would have an advantage over a thermal, because thermals don’t work through glass. With a thermal, you would have to open a door or window.

What if you’re indoors, and they come in?

I still like it. You would be able to spot and shoot them in the dark. They would probably try to creep up in the darkness instead of using lights. They would hope to surprise you. With a night optic, you could do the surprising.

I just saw a forum post where good old Massad Ayoob approved of the idea of yelling to ask if intruders were friends or foes. I can’t believe that guy. How often do you show up in your friends’ houses at three a.m.? He was talking about situations where you have the advantage, which makes some sense, but it still sounds weird.

Friends call before showing up. They come when it’s convenient for you. They come to the front door. When the lights are on. Am I wrong?

Now I’m picturing a nervous guy opening up on his friends and family at a surprise birthday party.

I think night vision makes some sense for dealing with outdoor undocumented guests. You can’t run around opening windows and removing screens in a crisis.

I hate to say this, but a lot of the people who claim to be self-defense gurus are not smart. They say things that aren’t smart. You have to have the humility to listen to good advice, coupled with reasonable respect for your own intellect.

I think maybe I should upgrade my night vision capabilities. I may also upgrade my new surveillance system so it wakes me up when people are in the yard.

18 Hours of Electricity

This must be what the rapture feels like.

What is the rapture? A sudden translation to a place where your problems are instantly ended.

Last night I slept on clean sheets in an air-conditioned room, after a long, hot shower, and today I got up and ate eggs fried in butter, two big slices of toast made from homemade bread, and three slabs of Tennessee Pride sausage. And not I’m sitting in a leather recliner, thinking about how great I feel.

This is much better than yesterday. I almost had to bathe in the freezing 70-degree pool. I had to work on our generator with no running water to wash my hands. We had no air conditioning. Most restaurants were closed. There was no gas.

What a difference.

When I was young, I took things like electricity and cars for granted. I am not like that any more. Sometimes when I’m driving down the road, I tell God how amazed I am. I’m doing 70 miles per hour. It’s 95 degrees outside, and the inside of the car is at 69 degrees. I’m in the shade. I’m sitting on leather upholstery. If I want, I can have the great musical artists of the last hundred years sing and play for me.

That’s pretty wild if you think about it. Three generations back, the only way to travel faster than 7 miles per hour was to board a train. Nobody had air conditioning. There were almost no recordings.

I thank God constantly for dishwashers, clothes washers, and dryers. You shove your stuff in and walk away, and your electric slave does the work for you, better than you could.

My grandmother was an educated woman with a wealthy husband, and she had to wash 6 people’s dishes and dirty underwear. When I was little, she had a washing machine with a wringer on it. Imagine standing on your porch running your family’s used underwear through one of those with your bare hands.

I’ll be honest. She had a lady who came in and helped, but I doubt that took care of all the laundry. Granny did make my mom and her sisters do chores, though.

Anyway, somebody was washing other people’s dirty underwear.

My grandmother had washboards. She had one in her house when she died in 2003.

In Zambia, my wife used to bathe in a bucket a lot of the time. The Zambian power grid is not great.

I always ask God not to take wonderful things away from us.

I eat homemade bread because my wife hates American bread. I can’t say I blame her. The white stuff has no taste, and the brown stuff is like eating a welcome mat. I showed my wife how to make my white bread recipe, and now she’s happy.

Bread probably costs us $1.50 a loaf, and I have never had anything that compares with it, anywhere. It’s so good, I have considered making it worse so I don’t eat so much of it.

I was only without power for a day, but today I feel like royalty. Appreciate what you have while you have it.

The comedian W.C. Fields was on his own when he was a kid. He left home at 11. He found himself a hole in the ground and put a cover on it. For a while, that was where he slept. When he was old, he still got excited about beds and clean sheets. He described the feeling of settling down in a clean bed. He said, “God____, that’s a sensation!”
And he was rich.

I think about that every time I go to bed.

When I was a kid, and I didn’t have something someone similarly situated had, I thought God was unjust. I don’t feel that way now. I feel pampered, because I am. I don’t care if the guy across the street has a hundred times what I do. My life is great.

The natural thing is to become spoiled when God gives you things. That’s a choice you make. You can choose to become more grateful. The Bible shows that God punishes the spoiled.

If you have good health, a clean, safe, quiet, pleasant home, good food, good clothing, people who love you, and God, you are rich. It’s true. It’s not just something to put on a greeting card.

This is all true and wonderful, but now I have to fix the tractor and move the downed trees and branches from my yard.

Well. A lot of people don’t have a tractor or a yard.

HOT WATER!

We just spent almost 24 hours without electricity. It was harrowing. Imagine a whole day without a power recliner.

No one is wondering, but anyway, I’ll give a sitrep. Things are okay here. The storm actually nearly almost lived up to its potential until maybe 5 a.m., and then it disappeared.

This is not what they predicted. We were supposed to have winds of 28 or 34 mph right now, depending on which Chicken Little gave the forecast.

I hate doing without power, but I am too cheap to buy a real generator big enough to run the house. We have had two short outages in 7 years, so figure $2500 per outage to keep the power on. It’s a lot of money to pay to avoid two or three baths in the pool and throwing out some freezer-burned meat.

While I was out and about today, I saw quite a few wires on the ground, some under trees, so I started to wonder if we were going to get power back this week. I went to WaWa and bought about 6 gallons of no-ethanol gas for my generator. I was lucky to get the gas. I just drove about 40 miles looking for more, and it was nowhere to be found.

I hadn’t been planning to use the generator, but we both wanted to take showers, and the water heater and pump need electricity.

I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get the generator going. I did all the right things when I put it away, but small engines are cursed.

Sure enough, when I put a quart of gas in it to test it, it would not run. I took the pull cord assembly off and cranked it with a drill, and it still would not run.

I started going through the procedures. I decided to check the fuel valve, and I found that no fuel was going through it. I started trying to take it off, and it turned out to be really obstinate. I started to wonder if I was wasting my time. Maybe the gas wasn’t deep enough in the tank.

I thought that, and then I thought, “It has to be deep enough. I can see the drain below the surface of the gas.” But I tilted the generator anyway, and gas ran out of the valve.

I could not believe it. The generator will not run unless it has maybe a gallon of gas in it OR you tilt it.

China.

I must have spent two hours trying to make it run, and there was nothing wrong with it.

I had to cannibalize two cords from my tools to make a cord to hook the generator up to the house. I have a bunch of 50-amp welding sockets in my shop, so I made what I call a San Francisco cord. It’s male on both ends. One 50-amp plug goes into my 50-to-30 adaptor, which came with a welder, and the other goes to an extension cord, which goes to a wall socket. Worked perfectly, but I had to order two new plugs.

I got the generator going for one reason: I knew that two things were true.

If fix generator, power come back on right away.

If not fix generator, power come back on in a week.

This is how the universe works. I fixed the generator, and two or three hours later, we had power.

The generator is small; 5500 watts. As I recall, it was the only one I could get before Hurricane Irma went by us. Until today, I had never used it to power the house. I used it to run welders before I installed new wiring in the shop.

Today we learned it will run one water heater, the pump, the lights, and the refrigerators and freezers. It seemed unhappy when my wife took a shower, but it didn’t quit.

Should I get a bigger one? I can get one with about twice the capacity from Harbor Freight, and it will have electric start. I could spring for a real generator that runs on propane and powers both air conditioners, but I don’t think I will.

Bigger generator. Not bigger wife.

I live in what may be the greatest neighborhood on Earth.

When Irma came through, and I was going crazy with looking after my dad and moving from Miami with no help, a tree fell across our driveway in the same place where one fell last night. We had to drive around it while I tried to find a saw. It was almost impossible to get one, even online.

A day or two after the storm, someone cut and moved the tree, inside our gate. They trespassed to do us a favor. People we had never met.

This morning, I walked outside–frankly, I was looking for a place to answer nature’s call, because I didn’t want to carry a Home Depot bucket to the bathroom to flush the toilet–and I saw a grapple tractor in my gate.

My neighbor was driving it, and he started asking where he should cut it and move it. Like it was his job.

I talked to him for a minute and said I would get dressed and come back to help. He said he would probably be done before I got back. Sure enough, he was.

Today I told my wife that if a neighbor came onto my property in Miami after a hurricane, it would be to steal my generator. My neighbors here practice what I call reverse vandalism.

This was a $1000 job, minimum, and he did it for nothing. I could have done it myself with my compact tractor, and I will have to finish it myself, but it was a very nice thing to do.

I don’t know what’s going on down south. I know it’s bad, but I haven’t been able to watch the news today, so I am out of the loop. I spent a lot of time praying last night because I couldn’t sleep. I hope it helped.

Milton exceeded my expectations. It maintained hurricane-force winds all the way to the east coast. On the other hand, the storm surge was wildly overestimated.

I wish we lived in the kind of country where the president would lead us in prayer before natural disasters, using the name of Jesus. We would see great results.

At least we have DeSantis.

I’m really excited. I’m going to take a hot shower. What a luxury. Right now I smell like Antifa.

Never think you don’t have it good. If you have a pleasant home, a car, air conditioning, a dishwasher, laundry machines, and hot running water, you have luxuries that would have astonished people throughout most of man’s history.

November Can’t Come Soon Enough

Here we are at about Milton minus 13 hours.

Before I write about how good things look, of course, I have to mention the fact that many other people are not so fortunately situated.

Anyway, here is the news, as I understand it.

This morning, I found a Jacksonville station with a meteorologist who, I sense, may be fed up with the hysteria. He provided what seemed to be a calm, factual forecast. That’s a rarity. I assume he’ll be disciplined. He is an insult to the Anderson Cooper stand-in-a-flooded-ditch school of hurricane coverage.

He said the hurricane part of the hurricane was only 30 miles wide. People don’t understand how big Florida is. The driving distance from Key West to Pensacola is about 830 miles. This means hurricane-force winds will only hit something like 4% of the state’s coast.

California is shorter than Florida.

They expect the storm’s center to hit Sarasota. That’s 140 miles from here. That means the hurricane-force field will end something like 125 miles from me, and at the edge, it will be Category 1, not Category 4. A hurricane’s strongest area is the eye wall, pretty close to the center of rotation. The winds drop quickly as you get away from it.

They think the maximum sustained winds will be about 125 mph, so that’s the eye wall. At the edge of the storm’s windy part, how strong will the winds be? Simple. About 74 mph. That’s the figure used to define hurricane-force winds. If the hurricane-force area has an outer edge, the winds there must be doing about 74, and they will be lower just past it.

So 125 miles from me, sustained winds will be at about 74 mph, and they will drop off over the 125-mile distance between the edge and me. Also, the winds will have to cross about 70 miles of wooded land with hills to get to me.

The threat of tropical storm winds is iffy here as of the moment. That means we may not get sustained winds of 39 mph. They are predicting 28. That’s at tree-top level. On the ground, it will be lower.

I don’t care too much about gusts. A good gust can do damage, but it can’t compare to a nasty sustained wind that slowly pulls roofs off.

Hysterical forecasters love conflating sustained winds with gusts. They’re saying we may get winds of 60 mph. Well, sure. We get those during thunderstorms sometimes. For a few seconds. No one cares about those. Sustained winds define a storm.

They keep saying we’ll get TROPICAL-STORM-FORCE WINDS because we are sure to get brief gusts. That appears to be a lie; a deliberate prevarication intended to get people excited. You can’t have a tropical-storm-force gust. It would be like having a year-long decade. If the wind isn’t sustained for at least 60 seconds, it’s not a tropical-storm-force wind, no matter how strong it is. It’s a gust.

Meteorologists, even the ones hired for their looks, know the difference between a gust and a tropical storm. They shouldn’t lie.

I’ve never seen anyone but me call them on this huge and obvious lie.

Based on what I see now, we are headed for something like Helene, which means I could lose a few trees. The ground is wetter this time, so more trees could fall. Nothing bad is likely to happen near the buildings. I might lose power, but the odds are with me. The power company has been really aggressive about trimming trees since Irma, and a guy who works for them lives on my street, so we get priority.

I have several trees that have to go, so if Milton pushes them over, I’ll be thrilled. It will save me the work of felling them. Bucking trees is easier and safer than felling them. It takes no skill.

The pool got a bit gross due to our recent trip, but I have been fixing it up in case we have to bathe in it or use the water to flush toilets. Other than that, a power outage shouldn’t be too bad. I guess I should run to Walmart and get some ice for the cooler.

I haven’t bothered with the generator. I guess I should have. It could keep a ceiling fan, the refrigerators, and a water heater going. But I would have to get up every 6 hours to feed it. It may be ready to run, because I cleaned it up after the last time I used it, but I know better than to assume a small engine will work just because I take care of it. Gas is just too screwed up these days.

I learned that the only way to keep small engines going in a situation where there are long layoffs is to put oil in the gas tanks and run it through the carbs. I haven’t done that with the generator.

This is not a typical storm. Yesterday, the sun was bright and there was almost no rain. It was like a normal day. Ordinarily, the two days before a hurricane are gloomy, with an ominous feel. Today is more typical. It’s overcast and drizzly, and there is a light breeze.

They think we will get the worst of it after midnight. The nice thing there is that if the power goes out while we sleep, we may sleep the whole night. If the power went off earlier, the house would heat up and make sleep difficult. Heat makes it hard to fall asleep, but it’s not likely to wake a person up.

I just looked at the 11 a.m. cone, and while the overall wind field seems to be spreading, the hurricane area looks smaller, and the winds are dropping, as expected. The landfall area seems to have shifted south a little, which is good for me if true.

The storm is speeding up, which is great. It’s moving at 17 mph. The faster it moves, the less damage it will do, and the sooner life will resume.

It will be a bad couple of weeks for the people south of Tampa. I keep praying God will push the storm farther south to areas where there aren’t many people.

If you want to see some really stupid, uninformed, dangerous reporting, go look at the site of the British “newspaper,” The Guardian. It’s a left-wing rag, so no surprise. They say Milton has been called “the storm of the century.” Yes, by The Guardian.

They say there will be “up to” 15-foot storm surge in Tampa. No, there won’t. Where did they hear that? Tampa is outside the maximum surge area.

They’re making it sound like Milton is still a 160-mph storm. Off by 15, Fleet Street.

Publix and Winn-Dixie are closed today. The Postal Service is still delivering. Walmart is open. It will be open tomorrow, too, along with everything else. It’s not the end of the world.

This morning I learned that DeSantis was within a couple of miles of me yesterday.

North of me, about 5 minutes away, there is a facility called the Florida Horse Park. I don’t know much about it. It probably covers a hundred acres. For weeks, it has been covered with things like generators and powered lifts. It looks like there are hundreds of them. I thought somebody had rented the park, and they were selling these things.

Turns out it’s a staging area for hurricane relief. The tools at the park will be dispatched to help people. It’s amazing.

It’s very nice to be so close to it. They can have machinery here in less time than it takes to make toast over a can of Sterno.

DeSantis made a speech there yesterday. I wish I had known. We would have been there. We drove right by it. It’s a few hundred yards from the dump.

Speaking of dumps, DeSantis ordered them to stay open around the clock, and some local goofballs tried to close one. This was in Pinellas County, which, for practical purposes, is greater Tampa. It’s full of stuff that needs to be disposed of, partly to prevent it from going airborne tomorrow. They locked the gate used by public vehicles to dump storm debris. In response, a state trooper used a truck to destroy the gate, with the governor’s approval. Man, I love this guy.

Pinellas officials are lying, saying the facility was open, but news outlets clearly say the dump was not accepting storm debris, in an area recently pounded by two storms. Yesterday, even after the gates were opened, the line to dump debris was three hours long.

Our local dump isn’t supposed to be open on Tuesday, but Big Ron made it happen, so we dropped some trash.

In an amusing side note, Biden says DeSantis has been great with hurricane efforts, thus preemptively kneecapping any efforts Kamala Harris and Tim Walz hoped to make, to libel DeSantis and Republicans in general. There is speculation Biden is trying to kill the Harris campaign.

He doesn’t like Harris–who does?–and he deeply resents being kicked off the ticket. I don’t think he cares about our country. I believe he’s completely self-centered, so even if he really thinks leftism is best for America, he might be willing to torpedo the Democrat who replaced him and put Donald Trump in office.

Stories imply Harris has been trying to work with DeSantis as though she were president, and some say DeSantis has not been receptive. That’s understandable. He wants her to lose, and Joe Biden is the president. Biden may be senile, but he is still managing relief and preparation efforts, so why give Harris a chance to grandstand and virtue-signal?

“This was a middle-class hurricane, and LGBTQQIP2SAA BIPOC’s were disproportionately affected…”

Biden just told the world he and Kamala have worked together on all of his decisions as president, so now she can’t distance herself from his stench. That had to be a deliberate jab. Biden knew she was conning the world, pretending she would have done a better job.

I don’t know what to do today and tomorrow, apart from intercession for the people on the west coast. Guess I’ll be eating the inevitable Pop Tarts and hoping the air conditioning keeps working.

Yes, Mr. Reeves, You Are

Is it hubris for a guy who never served in the military, worked in law enforcement, or became a firearms instructor to second-guess semi-famous gun gurus? Because I do it.

It’s not hubris. You don’t have to be a genius to know when someone is obviously wrong.

Here’s another interesting thing: you can be a cop (even SWAT) or a Navy SEAL with two tours in miserable Islamic strongholds or an NRA-certified instructor and still be full of opinions that conflict with reality. Also, there is a reason why people don’t get promoted in the military or law enforcement. You don’t want to put much stock in what people who ended their careers near the bottom say, unless they have other credits that prove their expertise in the areas in which they profess to be expert.

I worked as an armorbearer in a big church, and we walked around with firearms under our shirts. It was probably stupid of me to join. Our leaders were two ex-military guys: Army and Air Force. The Army guy said he had been a miltary narc for 4 years, and the Air Force guy helped maintain planes, if I recall correctly, and also did air traffic control.

I was not working under Douglas MacArthur and Curtis LeMay. I was working under two guys I liked a lot, who had never gotten to do heavy thinking or command a lot of people.

Eventually, I noticed they made bad decisions pretty often, and there were important, fundamental concepts they did not seem to understand. I had an epiphany: these guys were enlisted men. They were not officers. They had never been in any danger of becoming officers. They were great guys, but truthfully, their role in the service was to execute orders given by other people. When things got more difficult than that, they were in over their heads.

There are a lot of self-styled gun and tactics experts on the web who never made it past sergeant. How much can they really know, if their superiors didn’t think they had the makings of decision-makers and policy creators?

As for NRA training, maybe I should look it up now.

Here is what the site says:

Candidates must have completed the basic course in the discipline they wish to be certified to teach, e.g. NRA Basics of Pistol Shooting (Instructor Led Only), NRA Basic Rifle Shooting, etc.

Candidates must possess and demonstrate a solid background in firearm safety and shooting skills acquired through previous firearm training and/or previous shooting experience. Instructor candidates must be intimately familiar with each action type in the discipline for which they wish to be certified.

Candidates will be required to demonstrate solid and safe firearm handling skills required to be successful during an instructor training course by completing pre-course questionnaires and qualification exercises administered by the NRA Certified Training Counselor.

Candidates must satisfactorily complete an NRA Instructor Training Course in the discipline they wish to teach (e.g., NRA Basic Pistol Course), and receive the endorsement of the NRA Training Counselor conducting that training.

Okay, so, not to denigrate the program, but I think I could do this in a month. I think the lady who served me today at Sonny’s BBQ could do it. Maybe she has. This is red Florida.

I was going to say “a month or two in my spare time,” but all my time is spare.

I had two instructors I think were fantastic. I took a precision rifle course, and the instructors were former military snipers. They had probably killed dozens of people. I think they really knew what they were talking about, as far as hitting things with bullets, and I’ll bet they were great at the things snipers need to be good at. Not being shot. Picking places to shoot from. Planning escape routes. Fooling the enemy. Whatever. They had gone to war, engaged with people who were trying really hard to kill them, killed them instead, and come home intact. I would listen to anything they had to say about the topics mentioned above.

Beyond that, I would feel free to question their opinions. If they got out of their lanes when giving advice, I would take their backgrounds into consideration when weighing it.

The other day, I saw a Youtube guy telling people how to take a pistol away from an armed assailant. He said he was a former CIA officer. That’s his big credit.

Man. The CIA doesn’t teach most of its people much about self-defense or the martial arts. A lot of them do things like writing book reports.

Lanes are important. Don’t try to disarm a person with a pistol. Sometimes it’s best to comply.

Is it obvious I’m going to express my disappointment with a gun guru today? I guess it should be. Actually, I am disappointed in two.

I wrote about one the other day. James Reeves. Not the country singer.

He works at The Firearm Blog, and he seems to be focused mainly on tricked-out AR-15’s and plastic pistols. I think he shoots a lot of steel in hobby competitions. He’s supposedly a lawyer, but I haven’t seen any evidence that he has a substantial practice, and he has said things about the law that don’t seem very smart to me. His bio says he is an NRA/Louisiana State Police certified concealed weapons instructor.

My guess is that Reeves makes most of his money being a professional gun celebrity.

I took my course from a certified concealed weapons instructor in South Miami. I stood at the counter in his gun shop for 45 minutes, and he told me things like how it was bad to shoot people more than 7 yards away unless they were “big niggers.” Maybe things are different in Louisiana, but I’m not impressed with concealed weapons instructors.

I’m not sure why the cops would be any good at teaching people to carry concealed weapons. They don’t carry them. Am I right? Except for backup guns, they carry everything on their huge belts, right out where you can see it.

I hate to praise Massad Ayoob, who has no idea where his lane ends and everyone else’s begins, but I would listen to him before I would listen to a real cop. Concealed carry is his thing, and even though he worked as a part-time cop doing nearly nothing, he is what I would call a civilian, so he can see things from a civilian’s perspective. Just don’t listen to his legal advice.

I found a Reeves bio that lists some credits. He was named a “Rising Star” and “Top Insurance Lawyer” somewhere.

Oh, boy.

Let me tell you now cheesy lawyer credits work. One day you open your email, and there is spam from America’s Most Amazing and Incredible Trial Lawyers. Guess what? You’ve been nominated to be on the list! You’ll be in their deluxe, bonded-leather-bound directory! Or you can upgrade to top-grain leather! You’ll get a gorgeous faux wood plaque to display in your office!

Just send in $150.

Lawyers who lack mental horsepower use bought titles like this to impress rubes. They join organizations. They give presentations. If you can’t win cases, you have to do what you can to make people think you’re a big deal.

I probably still get these things. I haven’t seen my email in a while. Top Lawyer! Master Litigator! If you think credits like this mean anything, you deserve a lawyer who has paid for the whole set.

“Top Insurance Lawyer” is not something I would put in my bio, if I had one. It’s like “Fastest Plow Mule in Arkansas.”

Insurance companies don’t hire good lawyers. My grandfather got rich in a crack between two hills in Eastern Kentucky, beating insurance lawyers. Consider John Edwards. He’s an idiot, but he got rich beating insurance lawyers. Think of all the tort lawyers on billboards that cost a ton of money to buy. That money came from insurance companies that settled or lost cases.

Settling is losing.

My dad told me this: insurance companies don’t hire the best lawyers, and they don’t hire the worst. Their actuaries think hiring the mediocre pays off best in the end. It averages out. The mediocre are cheaper than the best.

Reeves could still be a great lawyer, though, right? A great lawyer could be on these lists.

Doubtful. Too many things he says seem to me to be things that could not come out of the mouth of a great lawyer. But maybe he’s just not trying hard.

Lawyers who are really good don’t have to pump up their credits. They just win and win and win. My grandfather never had an ad. My dad never had an ad. His firm never had an ad. My dad used to get angry when he saw lawyers’ fat faces grinning oilily from billboards.

Reeves says nutty things about guns. He did a video in which he laughed at people who replace the guide rods in Glocks, even though this is a part which is both essential and known to fail frequently. Then he advised people to take their tiny, concealable guns and bolt a bunch of stuff on them, making them as easy to conceal as refrigerators. Quite honestly, I think he is one of the worst gun celebrities on the web to take advice from. What he says seems nonsensical to me.

He seems to be prominent in the cult of AR bros. If you do competitions on the weekend and paid more than $900 for your BCG, you probably love him.

The other person who disappoints me is Clint Smith. If Colonel Jeff Cooper is like Jesus to gun lovers, Clint Smith must be the Apostle Peter, because he learned at Cooper’s feet and taught under Cooper at Gunsite.

Reeves did a video, and he asked Clint Smith what was the best “urban rifle.” Whatever that means. It sounds like something a white supremacist uses to shoot up a ghetto because he’s fed up with rap.

In the end, the answer provided by the video turned out to be…you’ll never guess…an AR-15. Pimped out to the tune of $3000. That figure was part of the theme of the video. Best “urban rifle”…for $3000.

I have more than one AR-15. People love to say guns are not toys. My AR-15’s are toys. I have one I have not even shot yet. I do not have any plans to go near these guns in self-defense situations. The platform is not nearly as reliable as other platforms, and the caliber is not even close to the best for self-defense.

I would guess I have $1600 in the most expensive AR-15, and it would be more like $1200, except I went nuts and used a White Oak Armory upper. I don’t even know where you would put $3000 in an AR-15 unless you had some kind of nutty optics, or maybe you had the handguard covered with Cerakote Punisher Pokemons to match your neck tattoos.

You could use a $200 trigger, which is a total waste of money unless you want accuracy far exceeding anything you might need for self-defense, at the expense of safety. You could have a $1200 upper, which would serve no purpose at all in a defense rifle.

To Reeves, $3000 is apparently cheap, because he also has a $6,000 video. You can buy almost 4 Ruger Precision Rifles for $6,000. Why on Earth would you blow $6,000 on a gun notorious for getting its owners killed?

When you put all this money into a gun, you make yourself look like someone who really hopes he gets to shoot somebody with it.

What is an “urban rifle”? That’s where Smith comes in.

According to Thunder Ranch’s site, their urban rifle course is about using a rifle to defend yourself at handgun distance.

Either that’s BS, and Thunder Ranch is really teaching people how to mow leftists down at long distances as part of a militia, or somebody doesn’t understand “handgun distance.” You don’t need an AR-15 with a long barrel to defend yourself at handgun distances.

What does handgun distance have to do with “urban”? Don’t Smith’s techniques work on farms?

Here is what I think, as a very good but not top-level pistol shot. To me, “handgun distance” means 50 yards or less. If you get within 50 yards of me, and you scare me, and I have a pistol, I can kill you pretty easily unless you move around a lot or really rattle me. Anything beyond that, to a person on my level, is rifle distance. But to be really clear, I wouldn’t want to defend myself with a pistol at any distance. It’s a weapon of last resort, vastly inferior to any long gun.

A pistol is the Denny’s of guns. No one ever says, “I plan to eat at Denny’s soon.” They drive around, see that everything else is closed, and “end up” at Denny’s, as one comedian put it. When you can’t put your hands on a real gun, you end up with a pistol. Col. Cooper, PBUH, believed this.

I’ll be generous and assume Thunder Ranch’s typical students can hit people with pistols most of the time at 50 yards. This probably isn’t true, but still. If it is true, why teach a pistol-distance course and push an unreliable platform made to shoot up to 600 yards?

AK-47 or variant. Vz58. Tavor. VEPR. Saiga-12. Aren’t any of these more trustworthy and lethal than an AR-15?

If you’re 600 yards away, running is better than all of them. Or just jog in a circle. It’s really hard to hit people that far away.

Let me talk about investing. Something I don’t do much, but I do know one thing: I know what’s most important for an investor. High returns? No. NOT LOSING YOUR CAPITAL. If you don’t have capital, you are all done investing, and you have to get a job.

How does this relate to self-defense shooting? Simple. The big priority to an intelligent person isn’t to have the lightest trigger, the cutest nitrided barrel, the most expensive lower, or the greatest accuracy. The big priority is to NOT GET SHOT.

In a violent engagement, winning is not as important as not losing. That’s why it’s called self-defense, not adversary-offense.

Any rifle or shotgun will hit a burglar very easily within legitimate self-defense distances. A pellet gun will do it. You don’t need a $6,000 Daniel Defense gun with your girlfriend’s picture engraved on it. You want a gun that goes off every time and packs a punch. Period. In other words, not an AR-15. It fails on both scores.

While you’re jacking around with your $6,000 underpowered range toy you bought on credit to impress the other guys, trying to make it chamber or eject a round, a burglar with a stolen .22 revolver and mismatched rounds he found in a drawer will perforate your organs multiple times.

I don’t know if Clint Smith really thinks you should use a $3,000 AR to protect your family. Maybe that’s all James Reeves. But I know he recommends the AR over guns like the AK-47. That’s nuts. I don’t care if Smith taught Jason Bourne everything he knows. I don’t care if he served 50 tours in Vietnam. Don’t care. Don’t care about his SWAT credentials. The AR should be nobody’s first choice.

What are Clint Smith’s credentials? He says he did two tours in Vietnam. This was the war where lots and lots of American soldiers died holding jammed full-auto AR-15’s. Yes, I know they called it an M16, but an M16 is an AR-15.

He was on a SWAT team. Where? Indiana. Where in Indiana? A big city like Indianapolis where a SWAT team might actually do something, or a small town where there were only three team members and they rode around in a minivan? Can’t see it on the web.

He was a Marine. Well, a lot of Marines were shot and killed by barely-trained Viet Cong guerrillas with crusty AK-47’s.

Was he an officer? Was he an enlisted man? Did he work in an armory? Did he see combat in Vietnam, or did he pass out uniforms and boots? Don’t know.

Clint Smith is not shy about tooting his own horn. If he’s out there telling people he’s a two-tour Vietnam veteran and a former SWAT team member, he’s fine with self-promotion. He’s not modest. If he had been a captain or higher in the Marines, wouldn’t he say so?

If he left the service as an enlisted man, how much does he really have on the ball?

I guess a sharp person could stop me here and ask me why I doubt Clint Smith but admire Paul Harrell, who may well have been an enlisted man. Harrell served in the Army and Marines, and he was a firearms instructor. He was a combat veteran, but no one seems to know his rank.

Here’s the difference: Paul Harrell was a genius who stayed in his lane. He had an incredible mind. He was able to do complicated 20-minute monologues from memory with no pauses or stumbles. He always admitted his limitations. He considered every angle. He was nothing short of amazing. He was also an astonishing, dominant competitor with every firearm known to man, and he could even throw an ax accurately. He was Jack Reacher.

Clint Smith is no Paul Harrell.

Most enlisted men are not terribly smart, but sometimes one slips through. We will never see the equal of Paul Harrel again.

What if Smith loves the AR-15 not because it’s a good weapon, but because it reminds him of his days in the field and makes him feel like a Marine again? What if he’s emotionally attached to it? It’s a real possibility.

I would fight a burglar with a sling made from Dylan Mulvaney’s pink jockstrap, with Che Guevara’s face stenciled on it, if I knew it was the best weapon for the job. I picked Glocks for carry even though they’re ugly and depressing to look at because I knew they were reliable. Then I switched calibers. I may switch to something better and get rid of the Glocks. I don’t care about them.

It doesn’t bother me that AK variants have killed a lot of Americans. Using an AK doesn’t make me a communist or a terrorist. Our soldiers have picked up and used them. Using an AR doesn’t make me a patriot, either.

The Israelis still use the AR. Maybe someone will say this. Know why they use it? It’s cheaper than better guns. They prefer the Tavor and the Galil, but Israel has limited funds. If they had the money, I’m sure they’d be all-IMI.

Maybe buying Colts helps keep Big Bro America happy.

All this being said, I’ll bet Clint Smith and Thunder Ranch can teach you great things about how to use your badly-chosen AR-15. They must be among the very best at that, not that it’s rocket science. I guess you could take your training with an AR in order to make them happy, and then you could go home and get a better rifle for actual use.

They probably do a wonderful job, but there are probably people within an hour of my house that would do just as well. This stuff is very, very common knowledge. There are no secrets, and there isn’t that much to it.

The average IQ of military inductees is just below 100, and they learn this stuff just fine in a few weeks.

I should get a new soapbox before this one wears out.

This is my take on James Reeves, TFB, Clint Smith, Gunsite, insurance lawyers, Paul Harrell, the AR-15, other guns that actually work, and enlisted men. It’s worth at least twice what you paid to read it.

And now let’s spend a few minutes with the other Jim Reeves.

Life Resumes on Friday

Time for a nice hurricane update.

The good news: Milton is much weaker than it was last night.

The bad news: Milton is expected to double in size.

The good news, at least for me: the track is holding steady with the cone centered south of Tampa.

The bad news: people in that area got blasted by storm surge twice this year.

The good news: I bought Pop Tarts.

The bad news: Walmart was out of cherry frosted.

This pretty much sums it up. I don’t know if I need to write anything else.

DeSantis continues to be the greatest governor imaginable. He issued an order forbidding the guy in charge of the state’s disaster response to restrict the sale of guns and ammunition. I don’t think it means anything, however, because DeSantis appointed him, and he never tried to pull anything before.

The police chief of Okeechobee, Florida, is another story. He signed an order banning the sale of guns and ammunition in his town. Think that’s bad? It also banned gun possession in public areas. I am pretty sure no state in the union has tried to do that. I believe his order put Okeechobee, Florida behind Hawaii and Massachusetts.

The order was supposed to cover the period during which Hurricane Helene would pass through.

Hagan now says he enacted the order by mistake, and that he canceled it immediately. That looks like a huge lie. You can see the order all over the web. It’s very simple. It’s short. His signature is at the bottom. Unless he signs things while blindfolded or at a party at P Diddy’s house, he appears to be a tremendous liar.

Maybe he means he mistakenly thought the law made him an emperor because he didn’t read it correctly. That is plausible. There is a law on the books allowing the governor to ban gun and ammunition sales plus possession in public if:

there is reason to believe that there exists a clear and present danger of a riot or other general public disorder, widespread disobedience of the law, and substantial injury to persons or to property, all of which constitute an imminent threat to public peace or order and to the general welfare of the jurisdiction affected or a part or parts thereof.

A police chief is not a governor.

This is not the kind of “mistake” that would excuse him, because it would still mean he wanted to take away people’s civil rights. And the conditions mentioned in the law did not exist when he issued his illegal order.

Maybe he did it because Okeechobee County has a big minority population. Most crimes are committed by minorities.

I think this is a stupid law, because in application, it would do more harm than it would prevent. I must not be alone in thinking this. All of these conditions were met after Hurricane Andrew, and flaky Democrat Governor Lawton Chiles didn’t activate the law.

Another Democrat might.

After Andrew, ghetto types roamed Dade County looting houses and businesses. The National Guard swarmed the ghettos. People put signs in their yards reading, “You loot we shoot.” They sat in their yards with pistols and rifles on display. They probably patrolled neighborhoods. The cops were overwhelmed. People really needed guns, and they didn’t just need them in their yards. They needed them while on the move.

You can say we shouldn’t let people have guns when order has broken down. Well, they already have them. And of course, criminals won’t obey an emergency order. Better to let the citizenry protect itself. This is the philosophy behind the Second Amendment, after all.

Also, during a crisis, a gun shop would still have to do background checks and observe waiting periods. The only people who would be able to get guns quickly in Florida would be permit holders, and we already have guns.

Florida has preemption, which means no one but the legislature can regulate firearms. This is why there are backyard gun ranges near Miami and Palm Beach. The county can’t do anything about it. Old Jewish ladies who moved here from New York can ring the cops’ phones off the wall, and nothing will happen. The cops are bound by preemption.

A police chief can’t appoint himself Supreme Commander and take people’s guns.

It doesn’t matter to me. First of all, I would violate the law egregiously and continuously before endangering my family, second, I have no police chief, and third, my sheriff is more likely to order people to carry guns than to ban them.

Florida may be about to get open carry. Insanely, this is one of only 4 states that ban it. Gun Owners of America and a citizen have sued St. Lucie County Keith Pearson and State Attorney Thomas Bakkedahl in an attempt to get rid of Florida’s anomalous ban. Attorney General Ashley Moody, who hopes to be governor, has refused to help the defendants.

The leftists at Politico are saying she’s a hypocrite because she has complained about officials refusing to enforce laws, but of course, they’re weaseling. Florida does enforce the carry ban, every day. Refusing to defend it in court is another thing entirely, and it’s a completely legitimate move by an attorney general who may disagree with the law.

If there is a state or federal law requiring attorneys general to defend lawsuits seeking to get laws repealed, I am unaware of it.

St. Lucie County has an enormous minority population, and Democrats outnumber sane people there. The State Attorney named in the case is a career prosecutor, so he could be conservative. Sheriff Keith Pearson is a lame duck Republican. He lost a recent primary.

How do I feel about open carry? I’m 100% for it. I don’t plan to do it, and I think concealed carry is usually better, but anything that makes it harder for the government to jail people for obeying the spirit of the Second Amendment is okay by me.

“Florida will be like the wild West! There will be duels in the streets!” Yes, it will be a war zone just like New Hampshire, Vermont, Iowa…don’t make me list them all.

Open carry will help people get over their gun phobias, it will help insure good manners in public places, it will help the cops to know who is and is not armed, and it will get rid of a lot of hassle. “Is my shirt long enough?” “Can people figure out what that bulge is?” None of that nonsense will matter any more. It should also make it permissible to carry rifles in public, and that will be helpful to a lot of people.

It might put an end to late-night brawls at Denny’s and Waffle House, although probably not, because those things still happen in states with open carry.

For a second, I had hope.

I don’t have any idea what will happen in the case. Even if the defendants default, you never know what a judge will do. He might be married to an old Jewish lady who moved here from New York.

Let’s see. It’s a federal case, and the judge’s name is Jose E. Martinez. Uh oh. If he’s Cuban, we could be okay. If he’s Mexican or Puerto Rican, the case is as good as dismissed.

He’s 83 years old. He’s…DOMINICAN. What? I have no idea how they vote.

He was appointed by George W. Bush, a nominal conservative. Maybe there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Looks like he was a JAG officer for a long time. I hope he can handle the truth.

I am going to relax and not worry about the storm. My plan is to rest in God’s presence and let him take care of us.

Wednesday is now Landfallday

I can’t believe Florida is about to be hit by a storm named Milton. If we’re going to go down, give me a storm named Delilah or Jezebel, or name it after a hellcat I used to date. Or how about Hillary? As a friend of mine says, Milton sounds like a storm that has a pocket protector.

Things looked pretty good for my area yesterday, and they didn’t look off-the-scale disastrous for the rest of the state. Now my area is iffy, and everyone near the coast from Tarpon Springs south should just leave.

It was not that long ago that they were telling us Milton was likely to be Category Two upon landfall. Then it went to Category Five in about 10 minutes. That’s not normal. The projected path is also changing, moving closer to my part of the state. How could it get worse? Well, they could tell us Milton has gotten wider and that it’s bringing more rain than expected.

It is still a very small storm, thank God. If it goes right where they say it will, things should not go very badly here. Wish I could say the same for Tampa.

As of a couple of hours ago, they expected it to whack the Yucatan Peninsula. Bad for Mexico, but good for everyone else. Storms lose power as they approach land, and they lose it even faster when they get there. A brush with Mexico could make Milton much less of a threat later on.

If Google Maps can be relied on, the area of Mexico that will be hit doesn’t contain a lot of people, so that’s good.

So now that the storm is a little more likely to cause trouble here, what should I prepare?

I know. I’ll buy batteries and water, and then I’ll build a giant steel dome over my farm. There isn’t much I can do that hasn’t been done.

If you want to be ready for a hurricane, and you live near a coast, you can’t rely on batteries, water, and a $400 Chinese generator. You need special doors and windows, a metal roof, concrete walls, a yard free of anything that can blow over and cause problems, a huge whole-house generator that comes on automatically, and some firearms. If your house is close to sea level, you also need stilts. If you don’t have these things, you’re not ready. You’re just playing the odds.

I guess coastals learned some bad lessons back when houses cost $75,000. Back then, it seemed nutty to spend $50,000 on a roof. Putting your home on pillars also seemed expensive. Isn’t it different when your house is worth $800,000? The cost of houses has gone up much faster than the cost of improvements.

People are saying this will kill Florida real estate. Really? I can understand why it would harm the value of houses built to fall apart? in storms, but why would it be a problem for the rest of us? Seems to me that if storms highlight the value of good construction and wise home placement, houses that stand up to storms should become more valuable, not less.

This is still Florida. Warm. Relatively free. No income tax. Full of fun stuff for old people to do. Easy on arthritic joints. They can’t build another Florida. This is the only one we’ll ever have. They can’t install a new ocean or a new gulf in an imaginary place where there are no hurricanes.

I guess Arizona provides some competition. Who wants to live in a desert? I hate deserts.

My take is that Florida is a great place to live, for people who can afford to build properly. Surely such people exist. Are there enough of them to replace the houses that need to go? I don’t know.

If I were 70, I had a place on the water, and it got wiped out, I would be looking for a stronger house or a place farther inland. I wouldn’t even think of moving back to New Jersey so I could go back to scraping my windshield with my gnarled, aching digits every morning.

In a few minutes, NOAA will update the cone. I’m on pins and needles.

I really do not want to have trees fall on my fences or my electric gate. I don’t want to lose power and have to bathe in the pool again. Other than that, I can cope with Milton. Unless it spins off a tornado, I should not have major issues.

I don’t know what to say about the coastal people south of Tampa. This is a horror for them. I wish I could do something. We are praying. DeSantis should call for a day of prayer.

Oh, great. The new cone is here. It says 175 mph. Is this real? Hurricanes don’t get much faster than that. Wikipedia says the record is 190.

It’s a tiny bit lower as it crosses Florida.

The models show it pooping out fast when it hits the coast, and they don’t show major winds where I live. NOAA predicts tropical storm force winds here, but they are always wildly pessimistic. I don’t think they’ve been right since Irma.

The storm looks to be the same size as Andrew, which was confined to parts of Dade and Monroe Counties. They got some wind 30 miles north of Miami, but nothing like the winds where I was.

They think it will be Category Three when it hits, so 129 mph, tops. But will it spread out before it arrives? If it stays small, fantastic.

I think I would have to be within 60 miles of Milton’s center to have serious problems with power and downed trees. I don’t think that will happen, but who knows?

Guess I’m off to Walmart. Candles, chlorine, and my wife’s order: grapes. I can tell she is taking this seriously.

The News from Home is not Good

A few years back, I watched a Derek Prince video in which he claimed a Spirit-baptized person should have the ability to prophesy at will. The idea seemed to be that it was like speaking in tongues, but you do it in English.

I gave it a try, and it seemed to work. It still seems to work.

Unfortunately, these days, I hear very bad things when I do it. I keep hearing that God will remove my enemies and their seed from the earth. He will destroy them. I hear he is angry over the way they’ve treated me and the rest of his children, and his patience is at an end. I hear these things over and over.

I have asked myself if I was projecting some sort of deep-seated resentment on God. Maybe I was saying things I wished would happen to people who wronged me. But that isn’t the case. I’m not the kind of person who sits and stews about somebody blackballing me from the chess team 50 years ago. I am not happy about the mistreatment I’ve received in life, but I like to think about the present and the future. Truthfully, they are just more interesting. They’re also much more pleasant.

I think being male helps. Women seem to be very bad at letting things go. Many times, during conversations with women, I’ve been startled to hear them bring up their continuing resentment over trivial things that happened decades ago. Things no one else cares about.

Women are more manipulative than men, and unforgiveness is a tool of manipulation. You can keep presenting the same bill over and over, no matter how many times it has been paid. Even if it’s imaginary.

Men use their own tools to get what they want. Women are more likely to use people.

I also hear myself saying something else, but it doesn’t come from God. I keep saying, “I hate this place.” It happens right after I think about some horrible aspect of life. Maybe I’ll see a crippled person at the grocery store, or someone who is falling apart from old age. I’ll think, “I hate this place. Look what happens to people here.” Or I’ll see irredeemable, incorrigible punks online, libeling Christians or Jews or white people or conservatives. Punks who can’t possibly be saved because they love lies and can’t be forced to admit the truth. “I hate this place. Look who is taking over.” I think about the things they’re going to do when they have a free hand. I think about the pointlessness of engaging them.

I’ll think, “I hate this place,” and then I’ll tell God, “You were right about everything.” All the horrors of this world come from our rejection of Yeshua and the Holy Spirit. They come from our hatred of correction. If we had done things right, the world would be a peaceful place full of healthy, prosperous people.

I hate this place even though my life and my wife’s life are wonderful. We pray all the time. We know God. We live among fantastic people. We are healthy. We have a son on the way. We get along. We don’t have to work. It’s not that our lives are hard. It’s just that this place is disgusting and beyond fixing. I always say it’s like we went to Mexico for a vacation and got stuck there.

Today I asked God if he was displeased because I say I hate this world, and instantly, I thought of Lot. Look at 2 Peter:

And delivered just Lot, vexed with the filthy conversation of the wicked:

(For that righteous man dwelling among them, in seeing and hearing, vexed his righteous soul from day to day with their unlawful deeds;)

Lot was wealthy, and he had a family, but he was vexed anyway, because he lived in the San Francisco of the Middle East. Lot did not fit in. People like to live among their own kind.

That’s not totally true. Good people like to live among good people, and so do rotten people. Good people try to get away from rotten people, and rotten people pursue them and stay close to them so they can prey on them.

This explains a lot of the tension we have with immigrants. It explains socialism. What good is a tick without a dog?

I think God is pleased when we hate this place and look forward to growing up and moving on. Jesus said, “He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.”

Holding onto this life is sick. Fearing death is sick. Who feels that way? Terrible people. Look at Hollywood. A lot of people there would eat live babies in order to get 5 more years. We now have sick billionaires funding life extension research to save themselves. So they can be wrinkly and weak forever, getting coronavirus over and over.

What if they stop aging and then go broke? They don’t think about that. Being Jeff Bezos on a huge yacht is all right. Being centenarian Jeff Bezos working at Five Guys is not. How about being poor, paralyzed Jeff Bezos in a motorized wheelchair because he took a fall on his yacht? How about being weak, old Jeff Bezos with a crooked younger wife who has a power of attorney?

If Bezos is around when the kids with the multicolored hair take over, he will not be rich for long. Has he thought about that?

One of the great things about death is that you get to leave this place. Why would you throw that away? It’s like being 40 and preferring diapers to the toilet.

After praying, I read a Buzzfeed article. It was a collection of things people had written about events that made them realize their families were messed up. It was long, but I couldn’t stop until I read the whole thing

One person wrote about telling her friends a funny story about how her dad hit himself while trying to beat her with a belt. They didn’t get it. Another said it was weird to go to the homes of kids whose parents weren’t hoarders. One wrote about being surprised to find that other people’s parents helped them with school and homework and so on.

It really took me back. It made me realize what bad parents I had.

I hate saying that, because my mother loved me more than she loved herself, and my dad changed completely during his last months on Earth. But it’s true. You can love your child and still be a terrible parent.

Looking back, I wonder what our neighbors thought of the times the cops came to our house and had long conversations with my dad, who was standing in the front doorway in his underwear, drunk. They would try to get him to come out so they could arrest him, but he knew they couldn’t touch him in his house. My sister used to call them when he hit my mother. Eventually, we quit calling.

I also remember the little trips we took with my mother. She would put us in the car and take us to motels in places like St. Petersburg or Key Biscayne. She didn’t tell us why. She took me all the way to Kentucky once.

One day we got home from a trip to the Thunderbird Motel in St. Petersburg, and I ran into the living room to tell my dad all about it. He was sleeping face-down on the couch with no shirt. He opened one eye and stared at me in silence. When my mother came in, he got up and choked her in front of us. Here I was, expecting him to want to hear about our trip.

We lived in several neighborhoods while I was growing up, and while we had plenty of dysfunctional neighbors, none of the other men hit their wives.

I remember going to jail with my mother to pick my dad up. This was in Tampa when I was about 5 years old. I don’t know what he had done. The walls were white. We sat on a wooden bench and waited until they released him.

An elderly black man sat next to us. He started talking to me. He took out a nickel and gave it to me. I guess he felt sorry for me. I tried to give it back, and he said, “That’s your nickel.”

He must have been waiting for someone, too.

I never felt right taking things from people when I was a kid. I always
tried to give them back.

I went to the Coke machine and got myself a drink.

We did almost nothing together as a family. My dad would come home from work, take off his pants, get a drink, and lie on the couch watching TV until he went to bed. I don’t really remember what my mother did. I think she was idle when she wasn’t cooking or cleaning.

On the weekends, my dad went to the golf course.

My mother took some interest in my education. She endured all-night abuse sessions to get my dad to put me in private school so I wouldn’t be a victim of racist violence at our local public schools, and she spoke to a couple of my teachers, but that was it.

My dad never knew my teachers. He did show up for a school play, though. That was strange.

My friends told me their fathers gave them money for good grades. My dad never did anything like that. When I got a bad grade, I heard about it. I never worked to get good grades. I just tried to avoid failing.

I used to give my dad a partial pass on this, because I thought his dad had been trashy. I had heard about his dad getting drunk and beating my grandmother. I figured my dad never got any encouragement when he was young, because his dad was Eastern Kentucky white trash. When my dad was past 80, he told me his dad gave him money for every A he received. There went that excuse.

My dad and his sisters had music lessons. He played high school football. His sisters went to college. I don’t know why my dad didn’t raise his kids. his father died when he was young, but it looks like he taught him some things he didn’t pass on.

I got a degree in physics, and decades later, my dad was still calling me an engineer.

My mother definitely loved me, but she ignored me a lot of the time. She told me to shut up so many times, I started to feel self-concious about joining conversations. She wasn’t a violent person, but I got a fair number of slaps I didn’t see coming, over trivial things.

Here’s something odd: I got slapped when I broke things. If I dropped a plate or a dish, I was likely to be slapped. That never made any sense. My parents could break whatever they wanted, and it was understood that it was no one’s fault. Accidents were unavoidable. At some point in my teens, the standards changed. Somehow, breaking a dish was no longer a slapping offense.

I rarely got spanked. I can remember two spankings. But my dad kicked me in the stomach once, and he used to punch me in the back when he thought I wasn’t walking fast enough.

I would have been a lot better off if I had had defined rules and received a few predictable spankings. It would have given me self-discipline.

My wife’s life was worse. Her parents died when she was young. She was raised by her dad’s family, and they mistreated her. She had relatives who cast spells on her to destroy her. This is a popular pastime in Zambia. Everyone was poor.

Thinking about these things, and how they were caused unnecessarily by other human beings, I started to understand why God would be fed up with our enemies. My own parents, and my wife’s relatives, did us a great deal of damage they didn’t have to do.

I started thinking about how I had inherited my dad’s entire estate. On two separate occasions, he had wills drawn up to cut my sister out, and she did nothing at all to try to get back into his good graces. She got nothing whatsoever, even though she had spent time in shelters.

Recalling my dad’s behavior, and all the abuse my mother and I got from my sister, I realized something: my inheritance was no gift. Unlike most heirs, I was owed every cent. I didn’t work for it, but I was mistreated. What I received was compensation. There was a debt. And the payment was insufficient. It can never make me whole. Any intelligent person would choose a good upbringing over an inheritance.

I have a son on the way, and my biggest concern is for his safety. I am afraid I’ll love him too much. I’m afraid I’ll be overprotective. I’m concerned about all the creatures that will try to destroy him. Spirits, people, and every other type of hostile creation. I’m concerned I won’t do a good job of equipping him.

Now that I have to think about my son’s welfare, I can’t figure out what was going on in my parents’ heads. Where was their dedication? Where was their plan? How could they not feel this way? Isn’t this normal and natural? Even cats teach their young.

I can’t imagine raising a child and not teaching him every day. I can’t imagine not praying with him. How can a parent skip that? Why not just kill your child and get it over with?

How can a parent have no involvement with a child’s education? If you don’t care about your child’s future, you shouldn’t have him. I’m already planning to do homeschooling. I’m not letting the state teach my son it’s wrong to be male or that he should support perversion and hate God. If my son ever has a teacher with rainbow hair and a rainbow flag in the classroom, it will mean I’m dead.

Aside from not introducing me to God, my parents taught me nearly nothing. Did they have something better to do?

I had Jewish friends. Their parents taught them constantly. Take this course. Apply to this college. Save money. Invest. Don’t trust the government. Hide cash.

I was in a carpool with some Jewish kids, and one day while we were on our way to school, the dad who was driving us turned the radio down. He had been listening to the news, and he had heard something he thought was important. He gave us a lecture about the importance of the two-party system. I thought that was crazy. My parents never did anything like that.

Granted, one of his kids grew up to be a real mess, but at least he tried.

I should check. Well, the web says he’s a partner at a law firm in Cleveland. Hope things worked out for him.

The Buzzfeed article brought something home to me in a new and powerful way: not everything is my fault. I try to take responsibility for all the bad things that happen to me so I can have power over them, but the truth is that I have received a great deal of mistreatment in this world. Parents, my sibling, my friends, institutions, teachers, employers, strangers…they have done a lot of rotten things to me. People who should have been helpful were detrimental. Satan worked in them to give me disfavor in order to destroy me, and because I didn’t know God, I was defenseless.

When I got to know God, everything started turning around. I began living a victorious life. I received correction. I was cleaned up. These things are still happening. God keeps improving me. When I prophesy, I hear that he is helping me partly in order to torment my enemies.

Nonetheless, the world is still against me. As Yeshua predicted, it hates my wife and me. Hates us. Wants us to fail. And it also wants us to think it’s fair to us. It wants us to keep trying, playing by its rules, like gambling addicts playing rigged games. That jackpot could come on the next pull of the handle.

I’m right to hate this place and to maintain my distance from the herd. Most of them will be obliterated in the tribulation, and most will burn in hell. God can use me to pull a few aside, but that’s about it. Humanity is not going to change.

What if Kamala Harris gets elected? In that case, Christians can forget about help from their country. Our country will do its best to destroy us. America will be better for us than Indonesia or England, but it will be very hostile.

What if you’re not prepared? What if you don’t pray in tongues and you don’t have God’s full protection? You’ll be in real trouble. Just being a Christian is not enough. A whole lot of Christians just died in floods.

We need to be close to God so he, and not this twisted nation, is our protection and our provider. If you’re with him, you’re in the ark. It doesn’t matter what governments do. He is stronger than governments, and he knows more than they do.

I think God really is about to destroy the enemies of those who are close to him. I don’t think I imagined it.

#3

Incredibly, Florida has a new hurricane cone. Debby landed on August 5, Helene landed on September 27, and Milton is expected to pay a visit on October 9. Next year may be a great time to snap up a west coast home, or what remains of it, cheap.

Debby landed near Steinhatchee, which is nearly nowhere unless you live there. Helene landed near Perry. These areas are around 35 miles apart, so it’s reasonable to say the storms landed in the same place. Close enough for government work.

Right now, Milton’s projected path’s landfall area is centered just south of Tampa, so if the cone turns out to be solid, the storm will land around 150 miles away from the area where Debby and Helene landed.

They do a pretty good job with the cones these days. They blow it when it comes to storm surge and wind.

So I’m doomed, right? No.

You have to think about three things when a storm is coming. Wind, surge, and diameter. Diameter is a big deal. Storms vary tremendously in size. Andrew was a horrible storm, but it was small, so while Dade County was wiped out, Broward County, just north, didn’t really have a crisis. Businesses were open the next day.

Helene was enormous. Milton will be much smaller in comparison. If Milton goes right up the middle of the cone, the center it will land near Venice. That’s maybe 140 miles from me. That’s a long way, considering the size of the storm. The winds here will be from the east when it lands, meaning they will have to come across half of Florida before they get to me. That will weaken them.

In short, at the moment, things look pretty good here. But then this area has never had hurricane winds, storm surge can’t happen here, and flooding is nearly impossible where I am.

On the other hand, people in some coastal areas must be wondering if this is the tribulation. The area where Milton is headed is said to have experienced “up to” 7 feet of storm surge during Helene, so apply the exaggeration factor and call it 5, which is still not good. Based on my observations over many years in Florida, I would guess there are a lot of coastal structures less than 5 feet above the normal high tide line. I lived in a house close to Biscayne Bay, and I would say the yard was around 5 feet above high tide, so the floor was around 7 feet above the line.

It’s hard to get solid information, but it looks like the water inside some buildings where Milton is headed was nearly a foot deep as Helene passed. If your floor was under several inches of water on September 27, you will not be ready for a second storm on October 9.

Storms spin counterclockwise, so storm surge hits to the south of a storm’s center when the storm approaches from the west. If Milton’s cone holds up, the surge should end up in areas with low population densities compared to Tampa and St. Petersburg. That’s a plus, unless you live in those areas.

At least they don’t expect heavy surge up the coast, where Helene’s waters rose at least as high as 6 feet in some buildings.

I don’t even know what happened in North Carolina and Tennessee. I kind of tuned it out. I thought I was getting disinformation and that I would never really get the facts. I know the flooding was catastrophic, and that’s about all. My wife and I have prayed for the people, but I haven’t been reading much about the situation.

Before the storm, TV people were saying there was already flooding up there. The storm was around 700 miles away from North Carolina, and at least one source said the flooding came from another system. There was a big dry gap between the mess over North Carolina and Tennessee and the mess from Helene. It was obvious on maps.

I don’t know how a dryish hurricane 700 miles away can flood anything. It didn’t flood anything here, and I was maybe 150 miles away from the eye. We didn’t get much rain. Under two inches.

Leftists control the news, and they always exaggerate the impact of hurricanes. They always claim every storm was caused by global warming. If the flooding in the hills came from another system, we will never be told.

It’s important to be honest about what causes things like this, because good information helps people understand and prepare for hurricanes. If people in North Carolina and Tennessee get the idea that it’s normal for a huge storm to wash their houses away from 700 miles off, they’re going to make a lot of stupid decisions in the future.

Ordinarily, when a hurricane floods these places, it happens only after the storm dissipates and moves over them. I’ve never seen a storm flood Appalachia from two states away while leaving Florida nearly dry.

Not to make light of other people’s terrible suffering, but our preparation has been light. Today we bought 18 eggs and some Tennessee Pride sausage. In the past, I bought a lot of Pop Tarts, lunchmeat, bread, and unnatural foods in bags, but I can’t get motivated any more, and I don’t want to constipate myself terminally with 10 pounds of white flour and cheap corn meal. If we lose power and water, we’ll go to a hotel with Marvin and eat all our meals at Chick-fil-A for a day or two.

One likes to think we won’t get any more storms before the end of the season, which is three weeks away.

In other news, another homosexual has set himself on fire for Palestine.

Is this a trend? I read somewhere that 5 people have done this. Were they all gay?

The best-known gay self-immolater was Aaron Bushnell, a military contractor. A guy named Matt Nelson burned himself to death later. Not sure if he was gay. Now a man named Samuel Mena has set fire to his left shirt sleeve, saying he was giving Palestine his left arm.

How do I know he’s gay? I don’t, but he screamed, “I’M A JOURNALITHT!”

There must be straight men out there who support Hamas and have heavy, heavy lisps. Maybe. But effeminacy, including lisping, is a pretty strong indicator of homosexuality.

Here’s what gets me: they’re doing to themselves the kind of thing Hamas would do to them if they outed themselves in Gaza and the West Bank.

Hamas pigs raped Jewish men and boys on October 7. They have a history of gang-raping homosexuals. Wonder how that fits in with the gay agenda.

I saw a neat video in which an Israeli asked random Palestinians whether they supported the sexual deviants who claimed to be their allies, and I didn’t see a single one who didn’t say no. I stopped watching after a while, so maybe I missed one or two, but the video made it pretty obvious Hamas supporters–a term synonymous with “Palestinians”–were not at all in favor of warm relations with the deviant community.

Deviants want a world in which Christians and others who embrace ancient faiths that clearly disapprove of sexual perversion do not exist. They literally want us to be gone. But now many of them are trying to hand Israel to heartless Muslim fanatics who throw deviants off tall buildings.

How much weirder will it get? Haredi for Jihad? Lesbians for Female Genital Mutilation? Well, we already have that one, but it’s called bottom surgery. Girls are skinning and castrating themselves all over the US.

That’s it for today. Hope the power holds out until Milton is gone.

Stretching the Definition of Self-Defense

The Menendez brothers are back. New evidence could get them released from prison.

Rosie O’Donnell supports them, so I’m sure if we look at the facts, we’ll see they deserve to stay where they are.

Let’s see.

In 1989, Erik and Lyle Menendez were big, strong, athletic men over 18 years of age. They lived with their dad and mom, Jose and Kitty, who were wealthy.

It appears likely that Jose molested both sons and at least one other boy. There is good evidence he was a serial homosexual pedophile.

The brothers say they had a conversation with their parents in their parents’ home, concerning the molestation. They say their mother sided with their dad, and they feared their parents would kill them to cover up their dad’s perversion. They grabbed two shotguns and shot both parents repeatedly. One of them shot their mother in the face.

They said they killed in self-defense because they were afraid of their parents.

Here is my take.

1. When you’re a big, strong man, and your dad is molesting you, you move out of his house, tell the police, and consider filing a civil suit. If you really feel strongly, you can give him a beating on the way out, and no one will blame you.

2. When you’re afraid someone will kill you days or weeks in the future, and, again, you’re a big, strong man, you tell the police and everyone else you know. You don’t shoot anyone. Ordinarily, you can’t just shoot someone because you think they might kill you in a few weeks.

3. The claim that a fat middle-aged woman was a serious threat to two big, strong sons is not credible, but a claim that they shot her because she let their dad molest them for years, and because she witnessed his murder, is very credible.

4. You don’t shoot your mother in the face because you’re afraid of her. It sounds more like a crime of rage.

I think Jose Menendez was scum, and I don’t feel sorry for him at all. I think someone should have shot him repeatedly with a shotgun long before his sons did. Before he molested them. But often, giving people what they deserve is a crime. I believe it was a crime in this case. Doesn’t seem like a close call.

I think Kitty Menendez was a weak parent who deserved to be confronted and exposed. It is possible she was an accomplice, in which case she should have been locked up. I don’t think there was any legal ground for shooting her.

Some people say the brothers should be released but not exonerated. They think the sentences (two life sentences each, it appears) should be reduced in view of the evidence that Jose Menendez was a gay rapist.

Maybe that’s reasonable. They’ve been in prison for around three decades.

Mark Geragos says that if the Menendezes were women, they would never have been tried. I doubt that. There are many female murderers in prison. Truthfully, I think homosexual rape, especially by a father, would upset jurors more than heterosexual rape.

It’s heresy to say it, but as bad as heterosexual rape is, homosexual rape is worse. It’s more damaging.

Law aside, I would like to see them released simply as a gesture of contempt for their father. And even though I think they’re murderers, if I had been a juror, and I had been told their dad raped them, I would have held out for acquittal. They weren’t going to kill anyone else. Their dad begged for what he got. Their mother let him do what he did, over and over. It’s not like acquitting some illegal who drags a coed behind a convenience store and rapes and kills her.

It doesn’t bother me that they got a lot of money. They apparently earned it with their suffering. And I think it’s gone, anyway.

So that’s my opinion. Wonder what will happen.

I’m putting off fixing the mower, so I’m writing about trivial things.

Today I saw a video by James Reeves. This is the guy from The Firearm Blog. He’s a popular Youtuber. He is also an attorney, although I can’t say whether he practices. He gives opinions about guns and the law, but I have never heard him refer to a case he was involved in. I’ve seen him say things I thought were not smart. For example, he thinks having a Punisher skull on your grips will land you in prison, but he can’t actually cite a case.

Don’t put a Punisher skull on your gun, though, seriously. Grow up. You could be the first guy to go down for it.

He hangs around with Clint Smith, a crusty old Marine who teaches people how to shoot. Smith is practically worshiped, like Massad Ayoob, but unlike Ayoob, he has actually done something other than write magazine articles and write parking tickets. I’m not a big fan, however. Profanity pours out of him like overrated cars out of Bavaria, which tells me he’s immature. He seems to know a lot, though.

Reeves likes Glocks, and he carries a 43X. This is a single-stack 9mm compact that holds 10 rounds in the magazine and one in the pipe. Seems like a great gun.

In his video, he lists the only three Glock accessories you NEED. I think the video is useless.

Right off the bat, he says you don’t need “a titanium guide rod.” WRONG. What a bad start. It’s like he knows nothing at all about Glocks.

A Glock has a plastic guide rod you can probably break with your teeth. I have had two fail on me, and I’ll bet I have put fewer than 5000 rounds through Glocks. The rod’s ends come off. Sometimes it happens when the guns are holstered. It’s a major flaw. When the rod fails, the gun becomes completely useless until you replace it, and that takes maybe 30 seconds, which is a long time when you need to shoot somebody.

I buy Wolff products to replace my Glock rods and springs. They’re made of an amazing new invention called metal.

Glocks are famous for reliability, but the guide rods are just no good, so why wouldn’t you replace yours? I’ll tell you what; I was really shocked the first time one failed on me. I was at the range, the gun stopped firing, and the rod was hanging out of the front end. I thought I had misassembled the pistol. That gun was done for the day. It was done until I got new parts.

In the video, Reeves doesn’t recommend replacing the guide rod, but he suggests replacing a part that is absolutely wonderful just as it comes from the factory: the trigger. Glock has come up with a new Gucci trigger with a lighter pull.

A gun you actually use for defense does not need a lighter pull you can defeat accidentally because your hands are shaking. It needs a reasonably light, consistent pull which is, above all, reliable.

If a factory Glock trigger has ever failed anywhere, I have never heard about it.

Reeves went to Austria to try the new trigger. No conflict there. I’m sure they made him pay for his trip, and I’m positive he flew coach.

They put him in a range and had him shoot a 9mm at 33 feet. He fired maybe once every 1.5 seconds, so he had some time to aim.

His shots were all over the place. Two shots were off the paper. Every shot was to the left of center. Ignoring the worst shot, I would say his group was around 9″ across. I would expect 2″ here at the farm, and I would never tell anyone I could compete with a real pro.

A nine-inch group is cop-level shooting. If you ever go to a range and see cops shoot, this is probably what you will see. They’re usually not very good, and I think it’s because of their egos. A lot of men would rather shoot badly than ask for lessons.

His shooting was poor, and it looks much worse if you think about what he does for a living. He can deduct the cost of guns and ammunition on his taxes. He should be shooting at least a thousand rounds a week.

If I shot a thousand rounds of my caliber, 10mm, every week, with a factory-trigger compact Glock and Rural King ammo, I’d almost never be outside of 1.5″ at 33 feet.

Still, he shot more than well enough to kill a burglar in a hallway.

They gave him the new trigger, which I’m sure he paid for, and, neglecting the worst flyer, his group shrunk to about 4″. He stopped pulling everything to the left, too. That’s very good, but it’s not great. No one will ever stand behind you at a range and say, “Wow! Four-inch group!”

He said he was going to put the new trigger in all his Glocks.

So now he has a bunch of Glocks with very light triggers, and he still can’t shoot as well as he should. How is that helpful? He failed to improve his skills, and he equipped himself with guns that are less safe.

A self-defense pistol is not for winning medals. It’s for emergency use in places like stores and parking lots, where assailants a foot and a half wide will generally have to be within 20 feet before you can shoot them and claim you had no choice. You need a trigger that will fire every time, only when you want it to, with sufficient accuracy to put a criminal down. That’s a factory Glock trigger.

Now he has an excuse for never learning to shoot.

Why would a gun expert not learn how to shoot? That’s bizarre. It’s what he does for a living. It’s not that hard. Anyone can do it. It doesn’t require superpowers. Just humility and practice.

In the video, he used a gun with some kind of huge laser/flashlight on it. Please explain this to me.

He carries a tiny Glock with a limited capacity. If that’s your choice, it has to be because you want a small gun you can conceal easily. There is, literally, no other explanation, because apart from easy concealment, a small gun is inferior in every way.

So you buy your 43X, and then you screw on a light the size of a C battery. Now you have something the size of a Glock 17, with much less capacity and a short sight radius.

You can’t put it in your pocket unless you’re Captain Kangaroo. Put it on your belt, and it will make you look like a camel. What good is it?

He didn’t get into the topic of lasers much, but I will. I have a Crimson Trace on my carry pistol. It takes up nearly no room. It lights up automatically when I pick up the gun. It’s bright enough to see indoors 50 feet away. The bullet WILL go where the dot is, regardless of how bad my form is.

I can put the gun in my pocket, and no one will know it’s there. I carry it that way every day. I walk right by the cops. It takes less than a second to draw. The gun is still compact.

Once the gun is out, is a Crimson Trace as good as Reeves’s 737-landing flashlight? Not in certain situations I am extremely unlikely to encounter. Only in the other 95%.

I don’t get it. Is the video aimed at militia nuts who play FPS games all day and think they can clear Hezbollah hideouts with pistols? Is he trying to make a little Glock do an AK-47’s job?

A pistol is for emergencies that happen in places where you can’t carry a rifle. Period. If you can get to a rifle, you put the pistol away, unless you’re stupid. If you find yourself clearing a house with a pistol, you have probably already done about 20 things wrong.

You should have called the cops. You should have hidden yourself. You should have grabbed a rifle.

In the video, he also pushes red dot sights for carry pieces.

I am not kidding.

Imagine yourself at Publix with your James Reeves special. You have 11 rounds of puny 9mm because you went small. You have a huge spotlight hanging off the front. You have a hair trigger. But wait! There’s more! You also have an enormous unnecessary sight that looks like the hood scoop on an old Mustang, preventing you from removing your gun from concealment. Except it’s not concealed, because everyone sees the hump in your shirt.

Some people would say you don’t need a red dot if you already have a laser, but let’s go with it.

What is a red dot for? It’s for shooting people a long way off, in a hurry. Why are you doing that? The prosecutor will want to know. It’s usually murder.

It’s helpful if multiple assailants enter your yard. No doubt about it. In that situation, why aren’t you holding a rifle? Even if you hit a criminal 6 times with 9mm, he may keep coming. An AK or a shotgun will tear his organs to pieces, and you won’t need a red dot to hit him. Plus you’ll be able to shoot him through cinderblocks.

Here’s what I say, although I am not a guru and could be wrong:

1. You may not want a Glock, because just about everyone now makes a plastic gun which is as good or better, like the M&P Shield with the built-in laser, but get yourself some kind of nice plastic pistol.

2. Keep it small. Do not mount a spotlight, a red dot, a huge extended magazine, a compensator, a blender, a toaster, or anything else on it that sticks out and gets in the way.

3. Buy a Crimson Trace laser and zero it. Keep the batteries fresh.

4. Keep the stock Glock barrel, because it loves garbage ammo.

5. Use good ammunition, and don’t worry about the idiots who say you’ll get the chair for using hollowpoints. It doesn’t happen in real life, and it’s better to be alive in the defendant’s chair than dead in front of T.G.I. Friday’s.

6. Keep the stock trigger and learn to shoot. You don’t need special talent. You just have to listen.

7. Get night sights. Probably won’t help, but won’t hurt.

8. Keep your gun in your front pocket, using a pocket holster. It can be very hard to get a gun into or out of a belt holster. Ask the big girls who failed to protect Donald Trump.

9. Do not ever, ever, ever use a pistol when you can get to a rifle. I don’t care if the cops do it. It’s stupid. You will miss. If you don’t miss, the perp will probably keep coming. Get…a…real…gun.

10. Always call the cops and hide if you can. Let them face the physical and legal risk. No one ever got arrested because he was in the closet while a cop shot a burglar. You can even come out of the closet and dance around the body in your Punisher jammies, yelling, “THAT’S WHAT YOU GET!”

You should also carry the biggest gun you’re comfortable with. I’m not dedicated enough to carry a full-size Glock in town. Maybe you are.

If you can make yourself carry extra magazines, do it. No one in a gunfight ever said, “I wish I didn’t have all this ammo.”

I doubt anyone will ever put me in a self-defense situation. I sure hope it doesn’t happen. But it’s an interesting subject, and I enjoy shooting, so I think about it a lot.