Trash is Diverse

I see people on the web promoting a badly-chosen and destructive phrase: “black fatigue.”

It is attached to stories of ghetto blacks doing ghetto things, like calling for white people to be killed, beating up restaurant employees, and being forcibly removed from airports.

It’s a phrase that has an appeal to anyone who has witnessed, or been a victim of, ghetto behavior by blacks. I have had some issues, myself. I had a black woman come up to me on the street and tell me white people were nasty and that she couldn’t stand us. A black kid tried to take a fishing pole away from me and ride off on his bicycle. A young black man called me “bitch and “honky” at church. A black man moved to my side of a crosswalk to spit at my feet. I’ve been called “white boy” by racist black kids. I understand the weariness.

It’s a stupid phrase, though. What people really have is trash fatigue.

My grandfather was a circuit judge in Eastern Kentucky. A black woman who should have been warned moved to one of the counties where he worked. This is a very trashy county. It’s a place where people go out in public with bed hair. Where illegitimate kids and welfare scammers are all over. A place where people shoot each other over the kinds of arguments children have.

When I was young, I assumed my grandfather was kind of racist, because nearly everyone around him was, but maybe he wasn’t. He mentored this lady and supported her efforts to establish a practice.

Some moron or morons burned down her house.

That’s exactly the kind of thing “black fatigue” victims complain about, but the perpetrators were white.

Do I know they were white? No. I know the black population there amounts to less than half a percent, though, and I have heard people from that county and and nearby counties share their negative views of “niggers” with no shame and every expectation of approval.

Okay; American black culture is a mess, black people commit much more crime per capita than whites, and racism against other groups is accepted in most black areas. These things are true. We see a very disproportionate number of American blacks causing trouble. But the same things are true of other groups, like Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Salvadorans. They’re also true of white trash.

Trash comes in all colors, because it’s DIVERSE.

When you use the term “black fatigue,” you make it sound like trashiness is exclusive to blacks, and other groups are above it. You push people in the direction of plain old racism. You motivate them to treat all blacks like dangerous, parasitic losers. That is evil.

I can never know for sure, but there are probably at least a million black people in America who are much finer human beings than I am. Not the highest bar to clear, I admit. On the other hand, there was my dad’s wealthy white law partner, who once asked a South African boat handyman, “Can I go to your country and shoot niggers?”

This was a guy who was second in command of a prestigious firm in Coral Gables. After he and his wife forced my dad out, he was the top dog. He represented prominent clients like Florida Power & Light, Anheuser-Busch, NASA contractors, American Express, PPG, and Nabisco. He’s dead now. His wife is still there.

Trashiness, social standing, and financial status are three different things.

I managed to find his death page at Legacy.com, and no one, not even his wife and son, has left a message. There is no obituary. Not a surprise. He was completely selfish and without morals. I never knew anyone who liked or respected him. I certainly didn’t. Not after I was maybe 10 years old.

There is a fluff biography on the firm’s website. It’s pretty cold. I don’t think his wife wrote it. I wrote my parents’ obituaries. When your own family doesn’t write an obituary for you, it’s not a good sign.

He used to run around with a couple of guys named Robinson and Hicks. They drank and fished in the Bahamas. My dad’s partner and Robinson owned a yacht in which my dad held an interest for a time. No fond messages from Robinson or Hicks at the Legacy page. Nothing from their wives. The firm’s page says my dad’s partner was a mentor. None of the “mentored” wrote anything. Nothing from his brother.

Robinson was disagreeable person and not very bright. He was included in the partnership to save my dad’s partner money. Hicks was a little odd. I was told he had notebooks full of nude photos. I never saw them. Miami has a disgusting annual event called the Columbus Day Regatta, during which boaters raft up, cavort naked, and have sex in plain view. My dad claimed Hicks had a telephoto lens he broke out every Columbus Day.

When my dad’s partner wanted to buy something for the boat, my dad asked him how he would get Robinson to agree, and the partner said Robinson would do what he told him. He said Robinson was stupid.

His own dog didn’t like him. He had a German Shepherd named Yancy, and Yancy used to walk around his house with one side against the wall, trying to get as far away from him as he could. I guess he got some beatings.

He got what he wanted by sacrificing better people, so when he died, he had money, but no people. Must have been a bright day for ambitious associates at the firm.

Actually, he may not have had that much money as he should have, so he may not have gotten what he sold himself for.

My dad invested and denied himself, so he had a solid net worth. His partner’s wife was also a partner, so they had two incomes, but they led a more self-indulgent lifestyle. My dad said they blew their money. Ski trips and so on.

In 2015, the partner upgraded his 1978 yacht to a 1999 model which probably cost him $400,000. It’s listed right now for $349,000.

In terms of spending power, $400,000 is close to the value of the 1978 boat back in the 1980’s when the partnership bought it, and the new boat is only 4 feet longer. In 2015, the partner would have been about 69, his son was out of the house, he was qualified for full Medicare and Social Security benefits, and he and his wife were working, so he shouldn’t have been nervous about the future. Given all the cutthroat things he did to enrich himself, he should have been able to drop a million on a boat without flinching. And he did like big status symbols. He was always talking about how nice other people’s bigger boats were.

Either he was watching his money, which was uncharacteristic, or he wasn’t doing well enough to buy something more expensive. Or maybe Robinson was out, and he had to pay for it by himself. Still, if my dad had been in his shoes, almost 70 with a double income and no dependents, $400,000 wouldn’t have been the best he could do in 2015. When you’re 70, the years during which you might have to support yourself without working are not likely to exceed 25.

If you’re 25, spending a given percentage of your net worth is a lot riskier than spending it at 70.

Singlehandedly, my dad paid almost the same amount for a boat, corrected for inflation, in 1988, and it was not a problem.

To return from my digression within a digression, it’s amazing, how the partner vanished without any evidence that he meant anything to anyone.

I think God just gave me some revelation. Psalm 37 says this:

I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a green bay tree.

Yet he passed away, and, lo, he was not: yea, I sought him, but he could not be found.

I used to think this meant God would eventually take the wicked out, but maybe that’s not the whole story. Maybe it means everyone is relieved when the wicked die, because they are tired of them and glad they’re gone. Maybe it means people move on without them as quickly as they can, treating them as though they never existed, except in cases where circumstances force them to keep praising them.

My dad’s partner is gone, and I don’t think anyone misses him. He was rude. He was dishonest. He was ruthless. He told my father he would swear lies against my mother in their divorce. I doubt he had a single friend.

I don’t think his wife was crazy about him. Their relationship started when she was an associate at the firm and he was married to someone else. Marrying a partner certainly advanced her career. She became a partner and was able to combine her firm voting power with her husband’s. That’s how they got rid of my dad.

In the Nineties, he took up with a flashy receptionist named Donna, and he and his wife separated. He told my dad he was dissatisfied with his wife because she had stopped working out, if you can imagine such a thing. They got back together, however, and my dad’s understanding was that the reason was that he wanted to maintain his lifestyle.

I never heard of him doing anything for anyone else. I mean not one single thing. I never heard anyone say anything nice about him. They laughed about him, because he was often unintentionally funny, but no one admired him at all.

Anyway, I think “black fatigue” will become a popular phrase, and it will be destructive to an already-polarized nation.

As I always say, I recognize two “races”: the children of God, and everyone else. Those are the only races anyone should care about. Identifying with whites or blacks or Americans or anything other than the children of God is immature and counterproductive.

My white status is temporary, like my American status. There are no races in heaven, and there are no Americans there. Citizenship ends at death. My status as a son of God, if I hold onto it until I die, will last forever.

I hope to be in heaven eventually, and if I make it, I will be with former blacks, Asians, and every other type of person. I want to be with people who are like myself and share all my beliefs and desires, and those things do not correlate with biological race.

Liberals Triggered

One benefit, if you can call it that, of the apocalypse is that the news is very interesting these days. Today, I read that certain types of machine guns are now legal throughout the US under federal, but not necessarily state, law. No approval process or federal tax stamp required. There’s an entertaining morning read.

The general rule is that the feds will not let you have a gun that left the factory capable of shooting full auto unless you pay for an enhanced background check, hand over $200 as an infringing discouragement tax, and agree to have your name on a federal list forever. This also applies to certain gun parts. In addition, your gun or part has to have been made before a certain date in 1986. This is more or less how it works, but it’s not a rigorous explanation.

There has been a lot of squabbling over certain gun parts made after the 1986 cutoff. One example is the bump stock. Another is the lightning link, which is a little piece of steel you put in an AR-platform gun to turn it into a machine gun. A guy is currently rotting in prison for selling a steel card featuring a picture of a lightning link that requires the user to cut it out and install it.

Another example: the forced-reset trigger or “FRT.” I don’t know exactly how these work because I DO NOT HAVE ONE, MR. ATF BLOG READER. I have seen people shooting them on Youtube, however, and it seems fair to me to say they turn AR’s into machine guns. They work very well, unlike bump stocks, which wobble around.

While they turn guns into machine guns for practical purposes, guns with FRT’s aren’t “machine guns” according to federal law’s definition. That’s what Pam Bondi now says, according to a federal lawsuit that was resolved yesterday.

A company called Rare Breed started making FRT’s, and the ATF got all pouty about it and went after them. They started telling customers IT WOULD BE A REALLY GOOD IDEA to give them their triggers because YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT MIGHT HAPPEN IF YOU DON’T COMPLY.

Far as I know, nobody has ever been charged with a crime for owning an FRT. Maybe some felons have. In any case, there are no news stories about FRT owners being charged en masse.

The ATF went after Rare Breed, but now that Bondi is in charge, we’re all friends, so you can keep your FRT and even order new ones.

I have always wanted a device like this, mainly because the ATF doesn’t want me to have it. Being told you can’t have something makes you crave it. I would love to have hand grenades and dynamite, even though I would be afraid to use them and even to have them in the house. If I had some, and Florida suddenly dropped its permitting laws and so on, I would lose interest in them right away.

Also, the bans seem unconstitutional to me.

Do I have a practical use for a machine gun? I don’t think I ever will. Some people obviously do. Some people live in Detroit, for example. I don’t think I’ll ever need one, but it would be neat just to have one.

If I had one, I would probably shoot it once and then put it away. It would be hard to watch money shooting out of my rifle barrel at that speed, and accurate shooting is way more interesting to me than just blowing stuff apart.

Is it legal for me to have an FRT now? Not in my opinion.

The federal FRT ban is now dead, but the most logical reading of Florida’s hysterical post-Stephen-Paddock anti-bump-stock statute is that FRT’s and all other devices that could make guns fire faster are illegal. If that is true, then such devices are even more illegal than the guns people pay an extra $200 to own, because you can’t pay $200 and receive an FRT permit. There is no such thing.

The maximum fire-enhancement-part penalties under Florida law are a $5000 fine and 5 years in the pen. Oddly, the state-imposed penalties for owning factory-made machine guns without ATF approval are much worse.

A bill undoing the restrictions has been introduced in the Florida legislature, but it’s not going anywhere right now.

So what impact will the new DOJ settlement have on the nation? Put simply, a whole lot of citizens are now legally entitled to own machine guns without paying huge sums of money or joining a federal registry that can be used later for purposes of targeting and confiscation.

You can say these guns aren’t machine guns if you want. You can cite federal law. The truth and the law are often in conflict.

To me, this seems like a tiny, malformed step toward enforcing the Constitution. It is enforcement of the spirit, not the letter.

When the Second Amendment was drafted, it used the term “militia.” While it did not state that militia membership was required in order to qualify people for 2A protection, it did imply that 2A applied to arms suitable for military use. In 2025, that means full auto. You don’t fight a war with semi-automatic rifles. A militia with semi-automatics would be a joke.

If we followed the Constitution, people would be allowed to buy machine guns without obstruction, as they were until 1934. Whether it’s a good idea for ordinary people to own machine guns is a separate issue, and in any case, that genie appears to be out of the bottle.

The playing field has changed a lot. Every little idiot in our ghettos now has a stolen Glock pistol with an extended magazine and an illegal switch that converts it to full auto. These switches are very easy to get. I could print one today. They’re not going to disappear from our streets. Good citizens, however, are still stuck with whatever the feds and their states allow. It’s an asymmetrical situation, and in areas that don’t permit FRT’s, it will probably get worse. In areas where they are allowed, FRT’s could do a lot to balance the scales and discourage criminals.

An FRT could be a lifesaver for a person who has a ranch by the Mexican border. Mexican criminals of the most worthless sort trespass on border ranches carrying machine guns.

FRT’s might also chill federal tyranny to some degree. James Madison made it clear that this was a vital purpose of the Second Amendment.

My guess is that a huge number of people who don’t already have FRT’s and were afraid to get them are about to buy them, as fast as they can be delivered.

What a country we have. Almost completely polarized. The right wing demonized by the left to the point where a big percentage of leftists would be murdering us in groups in the streets if they thought they could get away with it. To top it all off, we are now no longer able to control the proliferation of automatic weapons. Any kid in Compton can get a Glock switch for a few dollars, many, many good conservative people know how to modify semiautomatic rifles in an afternoon, and forced-reset triggers are now available to millions of people who were afraid to buy them last week. People are storing more ammunition than ever because of the Obama and covid shortages. The powder is dry. We’re just waiting for someone to light a match.

I support our right to own and carry guns, including machine guns, because I hate bullies. I hate those who torment the innocent, and I am not fond of their enablers in government. On the other hand, I am distressed to know that I live in a world where guns are needed because there is so much hate.

Christians know Yeshua will come for us, and we will be transported to his wedding, which will take 7 years while the people who remain on Earth slaughter each other and die from other causes. Then we will return, and there will be a millennium of peace, abundance, longevity, and good health. I doubt anyone will want a rifle during the millennium. I wish that were true now.

This world is disgusting. It is full of pain and unnecessary malevolence. My life is easy and pleasant, but I am still sick of this place because of the suffering and malice I see around me.

The other day I saw a story about a baby elephant that was killed by a vehicle. The mother was so heartbroken, she refused to leave the road for hours. For some reason, that disturbed me very deeply. I thought about the nature of a diseased planet where things like that happened.

A few days back, I went to Walgreen’s. I got out of my car and locked the door. Unexpectedly, this made me think about the way human beings treat each other. I was just going to a store to buy protein shakes to help my wife breastfeed my baby son, and I had to take miscreants into account on the way to the door. I live in a world where strangers are looking to hurt me all the time, for no reason.

I recently saw a video. Two young men, probably in their mid-teens, went to a modest house carrying guns. They opened a door from the patio. Someone inside screamed. There was shooting. One young man dropped like a stone, and his “friend” ran off while trying to pull a gun from his own pocket. The dead criminal was shot just after he turned to run.

Generally, you can’t shoot a criminal who is running away, but this one was ostensibly still armed, as was his companion, and there was no guarantee they wouldn’t turn and fire, so I have no sympathy for the one who was killed.

On the patio, there was a little plastic swing on a rope. A baby swing. There was a little plastic Jeep for a toddler to drive. These creatures saw those things and still chose to go in with weapons so they could steal…what? A wedding ring worth $75 on the street? A couple of 10-karat bracelets from Walmart?

I got so angry, I left a comment that was over the top. I said, “That little bastard got what he deserved.” I shouldn’t have called him a bastard, but other than that, I stand by what I said. He was despicable. He was worthless, by choice. A man can make himself worthless by choosing to be irredeemable. The Bible calls human beings worthless more than once. How can there be a world where young men can enter houses with guns and go after babies, tiny children, and women?

I hate this place. This world. I always say leading a peaceful Christian life here is like taking a luxury vacation in a miserable, revolting place like Mexico and being unable to return home. No matter how good things are for me and my family, there is devastation and failure all around us, and we can’t avoid witnessing it.

While I am here, I intend to go armed, and I fully support other peoples’ rights to fight off bullies. I support the death penalty, as God does. I support long prison sentences for cruel criminals.

If you need an automatic weapon because of your particular situation, I’m glad you can get it. I would rather see 50 vicious punks put in their graves than one innocent person become a victim.

That Big Head Must be Good for Something

I thought I would keep a private diary about my baby son, and I failed utterly, so here I am again, keeping track of him on the web.

I started moving web material about him to the private diary, so I guess this is good enough.

He is past three months now. We are told he is supposed to double in size between the day of his birth and the four-month mark, and he is on track. He can’t fall short by much because he is so close already.

He is fat. He now has two baby rings on each arm. His head, which was not small to begin with, seems to be as wide as it is high.

He is developing very quickly. He is remarkably strong. I used to think babies were like rag dolls full of suet, but he feels like there is spring steel under the fat.

Every morning, I lift him up by his hands. I saw a doctor do this, and he said my son had four-month strength at one month, so I figured I should keep doing it to keep him strong. I lift him almost to a sitting position, and then I lower him again, and I push his arms back down against his chest so he gets resistance on the down stroke.

His arms used to straighten as I did this because it was hard work for him, but now he’s so strong, he doesn’t notice the strain at all. He keeps his arms mostly folded on the way up, effortlessly, for 10 repetitions. I find it a little shocking.

He loves being lifted by his ankles. The wife said to lift by his calves so I wouldn’t hurt his ankle joints, so that’s what I do now. It gives him a thrill.

I use this to distract him sometimes. When he’s whiny, I lift him up and let him hang upside down, and he giggles with joy.

He can’t get enough of math class. By “math class,” I mean I hold my hand out in front of him and show him numbers while saying their names. I’ve mentioned it before. I make a circle for zero, I extend a finger for one, and so on, up to 5. This way, he gets exposure to 6 numbers, which is the best I can do with human hands.

When I started doing it, I wondered if it would make an impression on him. It certainly has. He stares at my hand and grins, entranced. It consumes him. Truthfully, it can get tiresome. I can go for pretty long sessions with no decrease in his interest. I didn’t realize a baby could focus attention on anything for 10 minutes or more.

I also show him the numbers in random order. Seems like a good idea. My wife gives him math class, too.

We got him some plastic letters and numbers, and we will be showing them to him in a day or two.

Sometimes he looks so mature it’s hard to believe. When I hold him to feed him, he looks like a smart, dignified, attentive little boy. Like he has shown up to join me for an important job for which he is well prepared.

He has started to hold his bottle now. Sometimes he holds it for quite a while. He often needs help, though.

Pooping is less traumatic for him than ever. Sometimes he still cries, but generally, he just growls and shoves it out. Unfortunately, he likes doing this while feeding or, worse, while sitting by the table in his swing while we feed.

He is now interested in solid food. He stares at it while we eat. If web sources are right, he might take some at the beginning of his fourth month. That will be a bittersweet milestone. Bitter, because solid food will make his poop stink and take all the humor out of dealing with diapers.

It has gotten harder to take candid pictures of him because he is interested in phones. Sometimes he’ll start grinning and giggling in a way that would make for a great picture, but when I take the phone out, he turns serious instantly, staring with great intensity.

He still has a lot of blowouts. The other day, he blew out before I got up. I showered and changed him. I fed him as soon as I changed him. He had a blowout while I was feeding him.

He liked lying on his belly when he was younger, but my wife got the idea that it would hurt him, so she quit laying him on his stomach. This appears to have set him back. We started doing it again, and for several weeks he screamed like he was on a hot stove, and he was no longer able to hold himself up well. Now we make him deal with it, and he is holding his head up very well and complaining much less. I put him on a firm surface when he’s on his belly so he can get traction to work on crawling.

The back of his head is flat, and it worried his mother, but the back of my head is flat, too, and I slept on my stomach a lot. I think most people’s heads are flat in the back. I’m not deformed or anything. My head is about like other people’s, only bigger. My wife thinks he has a flat area on one side, but the web says these things correct themselves fairly well eventually. And like I told her, we can always buy him a hat.

I think he has a great personality. He may be a little high-strung, which is what every parent who has a brat says, but he seems to try to behave. He soothes himself by sucking his fingers. As I have noted before, he very clearly tries not to cry. I think he prefers to be happy, which is definitely not true of everyone. We all know a lot of people who aren’t happy unless they’re upset and sharing their misery.

Crying is a way to manipulate others, so many people would much rather cry than calm down. They know that if they stop screeching, people will be less motivated to do what they want. I think it’s wonderful that my son doesn’t enjoy crying.

Interacting with him gets more rewarding all the time. It’s a blast. Sometimes he seems noticeably more advanced than he was the day before. He recognizes us from across rooms. He knows what a smile is, and he reciprocates. My wife says he can tell what kind of mood she’s in. I guess she would be more sensitive to that, since I’m nearly always in the same mood.

He’s very jolly when I play with him. He loves being rolled and tossed around. He loves playing with my fingers. He even likes having his cheeks pinched gently. He lights up when I’m with him, so now I miss him more when he’s not in the room. Back when he spent most of his time screaming, there was somewhat more duty and somewhat less enthusiasm in my heart when I went to spend time with him. Now I live having him around just for the fun.

As I told my wife, the peaceful, productive intervals between crying fits, diaper changing, and feeding are getting longer and longer.

He still gets very, very excited when we’re playing. This is something I can’t explain. There is some quality I have that allows me to connect with other creatures and get into their bubbles, like we have everything in common. They get excited. It’s like we’re caught up in a strange, private celebration.

It happens with animals. It happens with people. Now it’s happening with my son.

I don’t do it all the time, and it doesn’t work universally, but it’s real. My wife has seen it many times. I do it with her, now that I think about it.

Maybe it’s rooted in the way I have been rejected. I have an instinctive desire to show other creatures they’re accepted and understood.

It doesn’t mean I’m nice all the time or to everyone, as anyone who reads this blog knows.

I have certainly rejected a lot of people.

He is still very pink. I don’t know what kind of white genes I have, but they must be super strong white privilege genes, because he is not nearly as dark as most biracial kids. His hair is a very dark brown with no curls. His eyes are a strange color between brown and blue. He isn’t as dark as most Cubans.

I don’t know what’s happening with the hair. My hair is not far from straight, but when I was his age, it was curly. His mom’s hair is obviously kinky. Where did his straight hair come from?

His palms and the soles of his feet are considerably brighter than the rest of him, so his mom’s genes didn’t just roll over and play dead.

We are starting to look into ways to seat him at the kitchen table. High chairs are standard, but some people prefer portable boosters that can be attached to dining chairs. We are also going to have to get him a playpen, because he will be ambulatory to one degree or other very soon.

I wonder what his capabilities will be. I have long wondered if “genius” just meant “smart kid whose parents started developing his brain and talents on time instead of waiting until it was too late.” Is it true? Can’t say. I know I’m not going to wait until my son’s potential is mostly gone to get him started on learning. Whether he turns out to be a genius or not, there is no reason why he shouldn’t speak 4 languages and sight-read at the piano when he’s 6, and he should be able to do calculus at 12. He should have his potential tapped, unlike the vast majority of American kids.

It’s clear to me that we teach high school sophomores things we should teach 4-year-olds.

I really, truly hated school. It was indescribably boring, and while I didn’t dislike other kids, I found it frustrating that a lot of the other children couldn’t understand things I understood. Classes were necessarily retarded to the point where the least-capable students could keep up, so nothing ever challenged me except the climbing rope in phys. ed. class. My mom taught me to read when I was three, but other than that, my parents taught me nearly nothing. They thought teachers would do it. All I learned was to look forward to weekends and summers.

Cramming should not work. If a class really requires three months, it should not be possible to master it in three days prior to an exam. Because cramming works for smart people, it is clear that we are teaching many kids way too slowly.

Cramming worked for me in law school, which is supposed to be difficult. I always say I learned I could work hard all semester and usually get an A, or I could work really hard for three days and get a B. I chose to drink a lot, I had a great time, I graduated cum laude, and my average was 3.something. I knew summas, and I was smarter.

A physics student can’t do nothing for 11 weeks and then study hard and get a B on a test. Physics is hard, and less-gifted students aren’t around to slow everyone else down, the way they are in liberal arts and law classrooms. By the time you get to second-semester university physics, everyone around you is at least pretty smart.

Here’s a horror story. Someone taught me multiplication when I was in kindergarten. Not well, but I knew what it was, and I could have memorized my times tables. I can’t remember who taught me. It was in a classroom.

I was ready to do 4th-grade math, but no one cared. It was 4 years before my school taught me the times tables. During that time, should have been moving into algebra. I did as close to nothing as possible without getting in trouble, but when I took a test in the 6th grade, my ability level was still grade 11.5, so obviously, I could have been learning more during those dead years. The only kid who beat me was David Sedaka, the Jewish kid whose responsible parents made him study. He made 12.4. And he shouldn’t have been in retarded classes, either. There was no algebra at my elementary school, so I guess he was stuck. Maybe he had other classes at Hebrew school.

He’s probably a neurosurgeon now. And sight-reads.

It’s amazing that we raise kids who don’t speak at least 4 languages. A human being who isn’t smart can learn 10 languages and never be confused, and we pick languages up very, very fast when we’re small.

My son will not have his potential poured down the toilet like mine was, so while he may not be the next William Sidis, he will be much more capable than kids with the same potential and ineffective parents. He won’t say “liberry” and “I could care less.”

He’s going to read the Bible, and we will explain it to him. We will tell him about the Holy Spirit, and unless his free will prevents it, we will baptize him with the Spirit and teach him to speak in tongues. He will know he has to have at least two sessions with God every day. He will be taught that God is a person who knows him and loves him, and he will be shown how to spend time with God. Every revelation God has given us will be passed on to him. If he blows it, it will not be because his parents failed at their most important job.

I don’t know if I want him to be a genius, but I want him to be fully developed. I will be the first parent in my family since my great-grandparents, at least, who will make a responsible effort.

We Have no Friends

For American leftists, Kristallnacht is every day, but now, they’re not just after Jews. They’re after everyone who disagrees with their filthy, vicious, cruel, stupid, self-contradicting beliefs.

Here is how Wikipedia describes the original Kristallnacht, perpetrated in 1938 by the spiritual ancestors of modern American leftists:

Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass, also called the November pogrom(s) was a pogrom against Jews carried out by the Nazi Party’s Sturmabteilung (SA) and Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary forces along with some participation from the Hitler Youth and German civilians throughout Nazi Germany on 9–10 November 1938. The German authorities looked on without intervening.

Here is part of the Washington state statute governing disorderly conduct:

Disorderly conduct.
(1) A person is guilty of disorderly conduct if the person:
(a) Uses abusive language and thereby intentionally creates a risk of assault;
(b) Intentionally disrupts any lawful assembly or meeting of persons without lawful authority

Here is part of the Washington state statute governing stalking:

Stalking.
(1)(a) A person commits the crime of stalking if, without lawful authority the person:
(i) Intentionally and repeatedly harasses another person;
(ii) Intentionally and repeatedly follows another person;
(iii) Intentionally contacts, follows, tracks, or monitors, or attempts to contact, follow, track, or monitor another person after being given actual notice that the person does not want to be contacted, followed, tracked, or monitored

Today I took a look at Citizen Free Press, which is a lot like the old Drudge Report. I suspect Matt Drudge got a liberal girlfriend or sold his business, because his site, which used to be the go-to resource for people looking for stories the MSM hid, is now dedicated to defaming Trump and everyone real conservative everywhere.

CFP linked to this Twitter video: link.

If the video doesn’t appear, don’t worry. I can summarize it reasonably well.

A woman who appears to be between 65 and 70 is walking to her car. She has a cane and walks with great effort.

She has attended a Turning Point USA event in Seattle, Washington. Cowardly, masked, black-clad leftist terrorists are all around her, following her and calling her filthy names. They tell her to die. They say they hope she dies. They call her a bitch. They say something revealing: one says the world would be “so much better” without her.

One leftist is a bowlegged lesbian who would pretty clearly be very unattractive without her mask. Another is a huge stoop-shouldered sissy with a lisp.

A couple of Seattle cops walk with her, along with a single brave conservative male. The cops, the male escort, and the victim are not wearing masks. They show their faces.

The circus continues until the victim gets in her car, when the she is told the fat sissy hopes she dies behind the wheel.

The party of joy. Spreading love once again.

What do the cops do? Nothing at all, apart from preventing the fat sissy from touching the victim.

What would the criminals have done had the cops not been there? Worse, I am sure.

Regardless of what the law in Seattle says, in actual application, it now permits the abuse and intimidation of elderly people in the presence of the police.

The police could have made arrests, and they should have, even if they had doubts the criminals would be prosecuted. They could have protected the victim by hauling the criminals away.

The victim suffered real harm. She is likely to have problems with severe anxiety for at least a month. If she is particularly sensitive, it could last much longer. It will definitely make her think twice before getting in her car and going anywhere in the western part of her state or Oregon.

The fat sissy said the world would be better without the victim, and that shows that demons are involved.

As I have often pointed out, God showed me that genocide is at the root of all conflict on Earth. God and Satan are working to remove each other’s children, along with their names and memories. Satan doesn’t really have children, but in the spiritual sense, people who give themselves to him and follow him are considered his children. They attach themselves to him, so God treats them as though Satan begat them.

Demons know how it all works. They give Satan’s children the idea of erasing God’s children as well as every Jew. They don’t just talk in terms of defeating them. They talk in terms of annihilation.

“Palestine must be free.” The cancel culture. The Final Solution. Taking away our voices in all forms of media. Tearing down posters. Holocaust denial. Resurrection denial. They want a world in which no one knows we existed.

This is why God won’t let Jews cremate their dead. Satan wants his children to be able to say the Jews never existed, and bones and tombstones make that difficult. Jews like to sponsor buildings and put their names on them. Why? God is behind it. It’s a way of confirming the existence of the Jews.

The Germans and Austrians burned Jews to offend God and rid the world of evidence they were ever here.

When you hear language of annihilation, including censorship, you should know evil spirits are behind it.

Of course, the world would not be a better place with only leftists and other servants of Satan in it. They would turn on each other.

Satan hates them. He kills them and does them other types of harm every day, and he gets God to sweep them into hell. Calling them his children doesn’t change that. He wants to get rid of Jews and the people who love God first, but he wants to wipe out the rest later. He hates every human being. He probably hates every spirit on his side, too. He is without value.

If Satan loved his children, he wouldn’t be convincing them to sodomize each other and get horrible diseases. He wouldn’t be convincing them to castrate themselves or to skin themselves and have their stripped hides turned into artifician penises that don’t work. He wouldn’t be driving them to have double mastectomies to make them look less like women.

It’s great that Trump was reelected, but it doesn’t mean America is going to recover. It’s a speed bump for Satan. Things will keep deteriorating. Satan will keep working with leftists, and when conservatives do well, he will use conservatives who don’t belong to him. They will work just as well.

Seattle shows us our future. Get ready for it to come to your town.

I Got This on Lox

I made plain bagels again today, and I cut samples for my wife and me to try. We compared them to an Einstein Bros. bagel. The verdict: my bagels are better than Einstein Bros., which are not bad, so while it may be possible to make small improvements, there is no longer any point in buying plain bagels at the store.

In the photos below, my bagel is on the left, and an Einstein bagel is on the right.

Weight: 138 grams (mine) to 110 grams (theirs).

Aroma and taste: mine smelled and tasted more like bagels. The smell and flavor were more intense.

Crust: mine were a little chewier and slightly crisp on the outside. Einstein Bros. bagels don’t have a crisp outside. My bagels were slightly lumpy, but I don’t see any point in working hard to change it. It may be possible to change the fermentation process a little, but it won’t improve the experience of eating the bagels.

Crumb: my bagels are slightly less regular. For the most part, the air holes are tiny, just like Einstein Bros., but there are some air holes as big as 3/16″. This makes no difference when eating them. It’s not perceptible.

The hydration is 57%, which may be a little higher than some bakeries. It could explain the slightly looser crumb, or maybe my fermentation was a little longer than needed.

I am told the New York bagel mafia vandalizes businesses that compete without permission. I wonder if this is why it’s so hard to find a good recipe. But then pizzerias don’t commit crimes to hold onto their business secrets, and it’s even harder to find a good pizza recipe.

I don’t belong to a food guild, so I will post my recipe in its entirety. If you can find a way to make the bagels smoother, good for you.

They’re easy to make. Not a lot of work. Very cheap. No wonder the bagel mafia is so nervous and protective.

DOUGH INGREDIENTS

385 g high-gluten flour
1.25 tsp. salt
1.5 tbsp. sugar
219 g warm water
3/8 tsp. yeast

BOIL INGREDIENTS

1 qt. water
2 tbsp. brown sugar
1/2 tsp. salt

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Make dough. Put dry ingredients in food processor with default chopping blade. Process to combine. Then add the warm water while processing. If anything sticks to the sides of the bowl, push it down into the mix with a silicone spatula. Go at least 60 seconds after the water mixes in. You might want to go longer. See what happens. Processing heats dough, so be careful not to kill the yeast.

2. Cut into 4 balls. They should be about 154 grams each. Dividing the dough can tear it up. I fixed this by kneading the balls, pushing the outer edges into the center and in, rolling the dough inward and up. This stretches the dough and, in other baked goods, gives better oven spring. You end up with a concave surface on the bottom. I pressed the edges into the center and forced them to merge with each other. Then I put the balls down with the merged sides down. It works.

3. Let them rise two hours under plastic or something. When they float in water, they are ready to turn into bagels.

4. Form bagels. Just flatten the balls and stretch so they have 1″ holes in them. You want them about 9/16″ tall. It’s okay if the holes close up a little. This is not the traditional way to form bagels, but it’s quick, it works, and you are less likely to end up with deformed bagels.

5. Boil them two minutes per side. Vigorous boil.

7. Bake at 400°. Make sure they are not resting on a hot, oiled surface. I used an air-bake pan. Use nonstick foil or parchment paper if you’re worried about sticking. Bake for 25 minutes. Do not turn.

Ovens vary, so start checking them at 20 minutes.

Cool on a wire rack so the bottoms don’t get soggy. Don’t take them off until they’re at room temperature unless you want to eat warm bagels right away.

You should consider this your default recipe, and if you want to modify it, keep it on your computer so you can go back to it if your modifications don’t work out.

They’re real bagels. They may not be exactly what you want, but they are as good as most bakery bagels made by skilled bakers. They are a thousand times better than bagged bagels from factories. Far better than Lender’s frozen bagels, which are gross.

I have had many, many real bagels. I lived in Miami. I lived in New York City. You can believe me when I say these are real bagels. I’m not saying no one can make better bagels, but these are very good.

Open the Locks and Let me in

My area is magnificent. It’s wonderful. It’s bliss. The people are conservative Christians. We don’t have a ghetto or street crime. Traffic is light. You don’t have to speak Spanish to live here. Beautiful.

But it’s a bagel desert. I feel like ranting.

Not long after I moved here, my dad and I visited the only bagel joint. I was used to having a nova bagel breakfast with him once a week, at a real deli. I figured Ocala had Jews, so there had to be nova bagels.

The place we tried is named Bagelicious. Had to be a good place for a nova bagel.

No. They had strawberry bagels and blueberry bagels and raisin bagels. Lots of sweet spreads. No nova.

It was disgusting. The bagels themselves were fine, but I never went back.

Today I checked the situation again, and there is a new place here: Jeff’s Bagel Run. A chain.

Surely a big chain would be hip, I thought.

I have looked at their online menu. No nova. No lox.

What is with this place? How can you serve bagels but not smoked salmon? It’s idiocy.

It reminds me of Austin, Texas. When I lived there, I found a place called something like The New York Deli. I thought I was in for a treat. I drove there, walked up to the counter to order, and asked the girl if they had lox. She said, “Locks? What are they?”

I drove home.

All those Jews teaching STEM courses at the University, a place calling itself a New York Deli, and no smoked salmon. Beyond insane.

What do I have to do? Move to Tel Aviv?

I better get back to work on my recipe. I don’t see myself getting a restaurant bagel any time soon.

Immortality’s Secret Curse: Continuous Annoyance

I have a story other tool users can relate to, and maybe they will enjoy pounding their heads against a wall along with me.

I wanted rear remotes for my tractor so I could run a flail mower. Here is what I wrote last week:

The remote kit I ordered is supposed to be easy to install. HA. I reserve judgment due to painful experience with such claims.

Smart guy.

Now I will digress and write about George Bush 2.

In the 2000 debates, Bush 2 and his opponent Al the oil millionaire with the giant house that consumes as much energy as a medium-sized city were arguing about something, and Gore said something really stupid which was intended to appeal to airhead voters who think with their ovaries. That includes the men.

I don’t recall what it was, but the basic theme of his debate performance was that the world should be soaked with estrogen and everyone should love one another, stand in the sun all day singing and holding hands, and pet gay undocumented unicorns. Fantasy twaddle no rational person could accept.

Bush 2 looked weary as he started his answer. He said, “I know how the world works.” Then he went on to explain how irrational Gore’s demagoguery was. After that, he lost the popular vote.

I can relate. I know how the world works. The older I get, the better I anticipate unnecessary problems caused by typical human faults. If the contractor says your project will cost $20,000, it will cost at least $40,000. If he says it will be done in a month, give it 9 months. If the government says a tax will be small and temporary, it will become huge and permanent. If your fiancee says she has been with three men, round it up to 30. The warranty on your product will not be honored. Your insurance claim will be denied. You will use your timeshare twice and then spend the rest of your life trying to get rid of it.

The racial slurs that were painted on the college dorm you read about were actually painted by the minority member and/or deviant who complained about them. The infuriating story you just read about Donald Trump’s insensitivity and cruelty will turn out to be totally untrue. Global warming will turn out to be mild and caused by nature, not progress, and it will improve crop yields and reduce hunger.

Greta Thunberg will never marry unless she marries a woman.

If we are going to get real here, I should just say it: I am getting better at prejudice.

But is it really prejudice? “Prejudice” means judging before knowing the facts. My prejudices are based partly on common sense and partly on innumerable past experiences endured by myself and others. That means I have facts to back me up. Can it be prejudice if you already know something about a situation because you’ve seen the same basic scenario in the past?

Also, you can’t be prejudiced unless you’ve made a firm decision. Judgment has to have occurred. Suspicion and resultant behavior intended to guard against anticipated problems aren’t really prejudice. If I’m willing to have my mind changed, I’m not prejudiced. I’m just a smart person who has a well-founded opinion.

If a swarthy guy with a pickup truck, whose appearance is consistent with gypsy blood, comes to my door and offers to blacktop my driveway with a few buckets of coating he has left over from another job, I’m going to a) tell him to get lost and b) look around to see if he has stolen anything. That’s not prejudice. That’s intelligence and wisdom.

When people used to try to reach my elderly father so they could offer him investments, I intercepted the calls and told them off. Sometimes, and this is not to my credit, I said unbelievably gross things about their mothers and their sexual activities. I did that to make sure I offended them so badly they never came around any more. I knew what they were trying to do. Didn’t I? Well, maybe not. It’s completely possible the investments they were selling really were amazing opportunities that were going fast, and maybe they really did pay off 10,000-fold. Even though they were so hard to sell, rude guys in boiler rooms had to spend long hours making cold calls to gullible old people in order to unload them.

I didn’t know for a fact that they weren’t actually going to make investors rich, and if I buy a Powerball ticket, I don’t know for a fact that I’m going to lose. Am I a bad guy if I behave as though I knew? How much evidence do I need? Aren’t two-billion-to-one odds enough?

I was thinking I would buy a flail mower last week or this week, contingent on getting my remote kit installed. I have a mower picked out. Did I buy the mower? No. Like Bush 2, I know how the world works. I wanted to make sure the kit worked for me.

These kits are simple to install. The company that makes them says every kit is customized to fit the tractor models their customers own. An easy 30-minute job!

Right.

The kit came. The instructions were not detailed. There are almost no pictures. One picture showed parts installed in a manner that would have been physically impossible unless M.C. Escher installed them.

Go look up M.C. Esher. I’m not explaining.

There as a correct way to install the impossible parts, and I found it. Then I was supposed to remove two hoses from my tractor and install two new hoses.

The first hose I had to remove was on the “power beyond” port. I think I know what that means, but I didn’t check, because I didn’t care. If it worked, I didn’t need to know what it meant. In a photo in the directions, the PB port was off by itself on the side of my tractor’s loader valve.

In reality, the port was jammed up against another port, and the coupling on the other port was large. It was so close to the PB port, I could not get a wrench on it.

Score one for prejudice.

I would just take the coupler off, switch the hoses, and put the coupler back on. No problem.

Oops. Problem. The genius who designed the coupling put two flat faces on it for a wrench to grab. Not the usual 6, which would have cost another 60 cents to machine. I had to find the right wrench and turn the coupling about half a degree at a time until I could get it loose enough to remove by hand.

The old hose on the PB port had an elbow that wasn’t in the photo, allowing the hose to go around the corner of my tractor’s deck. The new hose would not go around it, so I had to work to put it on so it contacted the deck as lightly as possible.

I attached the new hose LOOSELY. I did not put the coupler back in.

I know how the world works.

The directions said to put the second hose on a T fitting the old PB hose attached to. They said to run it from there to the new valve, which was mounted to my tractor’s roll bar. The new hose was about 43″ long.

I couldn’t help noticing that the distance from the T to the valve, taking necessary curves into account, was more like 78″. There was no way to make it work without threading the hose through other dimensions and making it come out through a wormhole.

No problem. I would go to Tractor Supply and buy a new hose.

Tractor supply had hoses long enough, but every last one had a male NPT fitting on the ends. I needed female JIC.

No problem. I would buy adaptors.

They didn’t have adaptors.

No problem. I would go online and find them elsewhere.

They weren’t in stock anywhere close.

No problem. Someone told me to go to a car parts store and have a hose made. I called around. The Tractor Supply hose cost about $27, so a custom hose would be maybe $45, right?

Two places quoted me about $130.

I ended up contacting the kit’s manufacturer, and they were very nice. They said they couldn’t actually measure every model they sold for, so they relied on outside information that wasn’t always correct.

Oddly, this was not mentioned prominently or otherwise on their website. They claim to sell premeasured custom kits, not wild guess kits.

They said they were shipping a new custom hose.

That was Friday, the day after I was supposed to be able to install the kit in 30 minutes. This is Monday. I haven’t received any notice that the part has shipped.

I’m thinking I’ll get it by Thursday, because they say they ship stuff by two-day air, and PREJUDICE tells me they didn’t ship it Friday and won’t ship it today. They already have my money, so what’s the hurry?

This kind of thing has happened to me too many times to remember.

I think about things like this in connection with movies and TV shows about characters who are immortal. I don’t think, “Wow, that must be great.” I think, “How would they stand seeing the same bad things happen over and over?” “How would they stand seeing human beings lower themselves to meet expectations thousands upon thousands of times?” “How would they be able to keep themselves from slapping people who told them the same transparent lies they had been hearing several dozen times a year since mastodons roamed the earth?”

I think an immortal would be a lot like a veteran cop. Imagine what a cop’s mind is like after 25 years. “I didn’t do nothing.” “That’s not my dope.” “I was going to bring his car back.” “I didn’t hit her, but I may have touched her.” “I.D.? Not on me.” “I’m going to sue!” “I’ll have your badge!”

“She provoked me. She was wearing a MAGA hat.”

Being an immortal would be like living among three-year-olds. “It was already like that!” “I didn’t touch it!” “Fluffy ate the doughnuts!” Over and over and over. And every time, the person trying to lie to you would think he had come up with a new and original tale you had never heard before.

Imagine how weary Yeshua must have been after three decades here.

If everything goes well, I should be using a new flail mower by Friday, so let’s call it the Friday after that.

It’s amazing how long 30 minutes can be.

Cleaning up Baby’s Inheritance by Spending It

Today’s exciting news, apart from learning that babies like being lifted by their ankles, is that I am getting a flail mower for the farm.

Just about every farm has weeds, saplings, and grass that need to be cut. The traditional tool for crude cutting is the bush hog, more properly known as a rotary cutter or brush hog. “Bush Hog” is actually a brand, but it has fallen into common use to describe a type of implement.

I have a bush hog. It’s like a lawnmower with a blade nearly 6 feet long. I drag it behind my tractor. The ends of the blades are hinged so they can swing out of the way if I hit a stump or a rock.

I don’t like it.

The cut is very rough. It tears things instead of really cutting them. It can’t be adusted below something like 10″. It’s huge and bulky. It makes the tractor hard to move around. It’s hard to attach and detach.

It’s very unsafe. If it hits a loose object, it can launch it so fast it flies a hundred yards or more. The sheet metal on the sides of the bush hog are very thick, but there is a torn escape hole from an object the previous owner hit. You can put your fist through it. I wonder where it landed.

You can’t use this machine safely within maybe 150 yards of your house or anything or anyone else you don’t want to hit with a missile.

Enter the flail mower.

These became popular in Europe before the US. A flail mower uses a horizontal drum that has hinged hammers attached to it. They are shaped sort of like tiny hoes. Some people say they’re shaped like duck feet. The drum spins at very high speed, and the hammers annihilate everything they hit.

Depending on the type of hammers used, a flail mower is supposedly capable of cutting grass nicely enough to maintain a golf course. I assume that means the fairways, not the greens. Depending on the size of the mower, it will also take out trees up to 4″ thick. Mowers for small tractors are typically rated for 1″ stems, but a lot of people go slowly and cut bigger stuff.

A flail mower will not fling supersonic missiles. It’s small and easy to maneuver. As a bonus, with some added hydraulics, it can mow at an angle all the way up to 90°, so you could actually trim the side of a hedge with one.

In the US, flail mowers originally caught on for tough jobs, so people with tractors under 100 horsepower continued using other implements. They were commonly bought by municipalities, counties, and states to maintain rights-of-way and so on. Over the last couple of decades, small mowers have become popular with people like me.

I would like to have a flail mower to wipe out stubborn stands of blackberries and other weeds in my pasture and woods. I would also like to use one to mow the majority of my yard. Perhaps all of it.

My yard is made up of bahia grass, a very hardy yet ugly and thin type of ground cover. It’s not a real lawn at all. Like nearly all houses out here, mine has only rudimentary irrigation. That means I can’t have a thick, soft lawn a person could actually sit on or walk in barefoot.

I suppose people around here choose bahia because it’s the only thing that won’t die during dry spells.

My grass is so ugly, when I mow it, often I can’t tell where the mower has or hasn’t been. A flail mower ought to be more than adequate for mowing this mess.

I can get a cheapish flail mower that always sits right behind my tractor. I don’t want one. I want to be able to move the mower out so it can go under hedges and so on. I can get a flail mower that can be shifted horizontally by hand, but I don’t want that, either. The implement world is full of tools that can be adjusted “quickly and easily” by hand, and they are scams. I’m sure some of them work, but the rest are very difficult to operate. I have a “quickly and easily” removable deck on my lawn tractor, and it takes up to 90 minutes to get it off, using a bunch of tools.

I could get a hydraulic “side shift” mower I can move to the side with hydraulics, but to get a good quality product at a price I’m willing to pay, I’d have to get something smaller than I want. And I wouldn’t be able to tilt it downward to deal with ditches and so on.

Add it all up, and I pretty well have to get what is known as a ditch mower. This is the one that tilts vertically as well as moving out to the side. The really good ones are Italian and cost $8000. Forget that. The best thing I am willing to spring for is a job offered by a company that sells imports that are better than the general run of Chinese stuff but much cheaper than Italian products.

In order to do this, I will have to put additional hydraulic outlets on my tractor. These are called “rear remotes.” It doesn’t have any rear hydraulics apart from the hitch. I will have to add two more controls. I ordered a kit, and it will be here tomorrow.

Here’s some advice: if you’re buying a little farm, find yourself a TYM or RK tractor. “RK” stands for “Rural King,” the farm store chain. TYM is a Korean company that makes excellent tractors at very good prices, and they make RK tractors.

My tractor is a Kubota, and something like it would probably cost about $35,000 new. It has 38 horsepower, and the loader only lifts 1500 pounds. It’s very limited. You can get a much more powerful TYM or RK for less, with a loader that lifts something like twice as much. And it will come with rear remotes.

Is a Kubota better than a TYM? I don’t think so. People who have TYM’s say great things about them, and they are frequently seen selling with high hours, which suggests they last a long time. I think the expensive brands are ripoffs, pure and simple. You don’t get much of anything for the extra money, and it’s not a little money. It’s a great deal.

Kubotas are made in Japan. TYM’s are Korean. Massey-Fergusons are made in India. So are Mahindras. John Deeres are made all over the world. America doesn’t make any tractors under 100 horsepower, and it hasn’t in a very long time. Decades. You can’t get an American tractor, and there isn’t much point in insisting on Japanese. All the big tractor exporters except China make good stuff.

I don’t know why backward countries make good tractors. Maybe it’s because food is extremely important.

I like TYM because of the powerful loaders. I have had to leave things behind and go back for them many times because of my Kubota’s weak loader.

If I were starting from zero, I’d get at least 50 horsepower. Once you get into that area, you can run just about anything you will need on a small farm. You won’t have to search and read attachment specs as much.

A 55-horse tractor is roughly the same size as mine as far as footprint goes. It would be just as easy to deal with.

My Kubota cost me $11,000, and it came with a John Deere diesel yard tractor and an EZ-GO gas cart, so it was a deal. It also came with the bush hog and a hay spike, plus some really bad bucket forks. It has been great. But I could have done more work faster and more easily with 55 horses.

I have what I have, and I don’t want to spend $33,000 on a new TYM, so I guess I’ll be getting a small flail mower.

I should have done this a long time ago. I was pretty cheap, and I was always afraid the world would collapse and I would end up eating bugs and grass. I didn’t want to spend anything. I guess investing in a really good mower would be better than cash and securities in an apocalyptic situation, but anyway, this is where I am.

The remote kit I ordered is supposed to be easy to install. HA. I reserve judgment due to painful experience with such claims. I have already located a mower locally, so once the remotes are in, I should be able to mow by next week. This will make the pasture more useful for both the cattle and me, and if it turns out I can mow the yard, too, even better. I have been trying to find a deal on a used diesel zero-turn, but it hasn’t been easy.

In unrelated news, my son is doing well. He is somewhat above average in height and weight, so he probably won’t grow up to be a jockey. He has discovered his hands, and he grabs things and moves them around on purpose.

The down side of discovering his hands is that he uses them to slap his mother. He gets very angry with the milk runs out, so he swats his mom like an angry teenager kicking a Coke machine that ate his dollar. We have been told he isn’t smart enough to be angry yet, but I don’t believe that.

Overall, he is a lot more cheerful than he use to be. I almost never wear earmuffs when changing his diaper now. He has also learned to poop without screaming.

Babies have to learn how to poop correctly. I have written about this before. Unfortunately, when babies are very small, about 75% of discussion about them has to involve poop.

Some babies push from above while clenching down below, creating an obvious conflict. Nothing comes out, so they get frustrated and scream. In our case, the screaming lasted up to half an hour, so we are glad he’s not doing it now. He just growls.

The screaming is ending, but now he poops gigantic poops that overflow onto everything around him. He has had up to three blowouts in one day. I thought we weren’t changing him often enough, and I argued with my wife about it, but she turned out to be right. That had to happen eventually. She said his poops were too big. I changed him one morning, and a very short time later, he let out a batch that was so big, it came out through a leg opening. Starting from nothing.

We tried different diapers. Bigger diapers. Checking to make sure we put diapers on perfectly. Doesn’t help. If he’s going to go Vesuvius, there is nothing we can do to contain it. Hopefully, it’s just a phase.

He “eats” a great deal. Like sometimes 9 ounces at once. I would say we don’t know where it all goes, but from the paragraphs above, it’s pretty clear that we do. He is gaining weight in a hurry.

At night, he goes nuts and feeds maybe once an hour. This may be what experts refer to as “cluster feeding.” Whatever it is, we are happy about it, because we think he didn’t get enough nourishment during the first month.

He seems to know who we are now. He has defined our roles.

Mom is the comfort parent. She feeds him directly. She coddles him. She lets him nap with her. He spends more time with her than with Dad. When he gets tired of Dad, he wants Mom, fast.

Dad is the fun parent, the tough parent, and also the celebrity parent.

Dad wrestles with him, lifts him by the ankles, jiggles him around to make him laugh, makes faces at him, and generally amuses him. Dad burps him using musical rhythms in order to make him understand music. Dad exercises him, which makes him laugh. Dad is a carnival ride. Dad is very exciting. So exciting, after a few minutes with him, it is sometimes necessary to throw up.

Dad is also the one who insists it won’t kill our son if the sun hits him in the face for two minutes. Dad made him lie in his bassinet and cry when he was getting spoiled. Dad made Mom turn the AC down in the bedroom because cold baby hands are better than crib death. Dad makes him do “tummy time” even though he shrieks like he’s dying. Dad does not care.

Dad is the celebrity because he spends less time with the baby. My son will actually sit on his mother’s lap and stare at me like a teenage girl watching Taylor Swift walk into Walmart. He lights up and flops around. He becomes joy. At this point, Mom becomes a supporting player. Furniture.

He can see us across a room now, and he watches us. He also likes certain objects. It’s hard to get good phone photos of him because when the phone comes out, he stops smiling and stares at it. My friend Mike said he does this because he sees us looking at phones all the time and he wants in on it.

He’s more fun than ever, because he is more proactive now. The other day, I put my hand on his belly while I was changing him, and he grinned, wrapped both hands around my hand and wrist, and held on like I was his special blanket.

He also tries not to cry, which is a huge blessing. It’s important for men to learn not to make other people miserable with whining. Men who cry all the time are sissy losers. We were right about this in the Fifties. Men who cry expect everyone else to solve their problems. You can cry if you feel sorry for someone. You can cry tears of joy and love. Crying because you got fired or dented your car makes you a pansy.

Men are supposed to be defenders and problem solvers, shouldering burdens for the weak. We’re not supposed to BE the weak. What are the women and children supposed to do when Dad is a fragile fruit who weeps when his soy latte is too cold?

My son soothes himself now when he’s upset. He jams several fingers in his mouth and sucks. He loves the fingers. He won’t accept a pacifier any more. That is fantastic.

He can’t talk, obviously, but he tries all the time. He thinks he’s talking. When he says things that sound like words, I repeat the actual words to him. He says things that sound like “okay,” “hi,” and “hello.” I repeat those a lot.

When I feed him, I use my free hand to teach him numbers. I make a circle with my thumb and fingers and say “zero.” Then I go through the other numbers, straightening one finger at a time. Some day, he’ll catch on.

It’s stupid to teach your kid numbers without mentioning zero. Zero is important.

It can be hard to show him numbers when he feeds, because sometimes he grabs one of my fingers and squeezes it until he’s done.

As he gets smarter, dealing with his boredom becomes more challenging. We are going to get him a playpen. I can’t wait till he gets really interested in toys. It will be wonderful when he can crawl, so he’s not just lying on his back waiting to be entertained.

I bless him in Yeshua’s name all the time. Never forget Isaac and his sons. I curse the people and spirits that are against him.

We have to get to work on his younger sibling. We don’t want them to be too far apart. It will be interesting going through this a second time.

That’s our situation. We love the life we have. God has been extremely indulgent.

The World is Full of Nothings

For some reason, two things are on my mind today. They seem related.

I am wondering what was wrong with my dad’s mother, to make her utterly indifferent to my sister and me. I do not understand how that could happen. I am also marveling at the people who think convenience abortion is anything but barbaric. In particular, I am amazed that anyone could sever the neck of a living baby or let a living baby die from cold, thirst, and hunger on a table in a hospital.

Before you raise children, you have a certain amount of concern for them, unless there is something seriously wrong with you. You want them to be protected and raised well. You want the people who raise them to introduce them to God so their entire lives are not preludes to abandonment and damnation. After you’ve had a child, your heartfelt concerns for children become stronger, because your personal stake in the welfare of that child is greater than your stake in your own welfare.

I am a selfish person by nature, but before my son was born, I saw to it he got excellent prenatal care. I took his mother to all sorts of expensive appointments. There were a lot of tests that probably were not necessary. We prayed for him, asking God to protect him from defects and stillbirth. I prayed for his mother. I spoke blessings over both of them. My biggest concern during this period was that something bad would happen to either of them.

Now that he’s here, we are always thinking about minimizing risks. Will he suffocate if he lies on his side? Is the temperature right to protect him from crib death? Is it safe to take into a store? An endless list of pitfalls to avoid.

When he sleeps on my lap, I poke him occasionally to make sure he’s alive.

With all that in mind, I can’t understand the inner workings of a heartless ape who could participate in cutting a baby’s spine or letting him die slowly while crying for his mother. It is beyond what I can comprehend.

I say “ape” because such people are apes. They are less than human. Perhaps I’m being unfair, though, because actual apes love their babies. These people are less than apes.

I’m not the most empathetic person alive, but if I had to witness the things these sub-apes do to babies, I would have lasting psychological damage, but they do their atrocities every day, just like cashiers go to Home Depot and ring up sales. It’s a job, like fixing plumbing or cutting trees. It means nothing to them.

Kermit Gosnell, the famous baby-murderer who went to prison because the murders he performed were so gruesome they stood out from a nationwide background of routine abortion-clinic atrocities, joked about his kills. He said one child whose spine he cut was so big, he could walk Gosnell to the bus stop.

I don’t get it. And I understand the people who shoot abortionists and bomb clinics. I wouldn’t do things like that, but if I were on a jury, I would not permit someone who did to be convicted.

There was a time when civilized countries executed baby-murderers in public. It’s too bad we stopped doing that. It shows how depraved and disconnected from God our world is. We should go back to hanging them in town squares, and we should confiscate their wealth and give it to people who adopt.

As for my dad’s mother, I am equally nonplussed.

When my older sister was born, no one from my dad’s family could be bothered to drive a few hours and visit. They didn’t want to see the baby. They didn’t want to help out. He had two married sisters as well as a mother, and they just weren’t interested.

Over the course of my life, I recall seeing exactly two gifts from my grandmother. One for my sister, and one for me. I don’t remember the year, but it would have been when I was between 6 and 8 years old. After that, zip. She never asked for pictures, either. She never called.

I would guess I saw her fewer than 10 times in my life, and both of us were fine with that. To me, she was a stranger. Why would a child want to visit a stranger? To her, I was nothing at all.

I just found out my grandmother died in 1991. I had forgotten. Ask me when my other dead relatives passed. Of course, I know.

When my wife and I see our son, we get emotional. We pick him up. We play with him. We make him smile. We speak blessings over him. We look forward to seeing him during brief separations. We take picture after picture. He sleeps on us. He burbles with joy while we give him showers.

How can you not want in on that when your son has a baby? It would be bizarre for a grandfather to be indifferent, but women enjoy babies much more than men, so how could a grandmother want nothing to do with a grandchild?

I have male friends who pester me for baby updates and photos. They’re not even relatives. They can’t wait to see my son. One wants to babysit and change his diapers. As for female friends, generally, these things go without saying. But my grandmother had no desire to see me or make any type of contribution to my upbringing.

I just realized something. There was never any discussion of staying at her place. How can that be? If you added up all the days I spent at my mother’s parents’ house, it would probably amount to over two years. It was assumed I would spend Christmas breaks and much of my summers there. As an adult, I could walk in whenever I wanted, take a bedroom, open the fridge, make myself food…didn’t need to ask. But I never stayed with my dad’s mother, and she never asked.

I guess some people are just incomplete. They are missing parts. My grandmother was not a complete person. She was just a shell.

One thing about heaven I look forward to is the absence of people who have no hearts. Everyone in heaven loves everyone else. No one is rejected or ignored.

I have no reason to think my dad’s parents, his sisters, or his dead brother-in-law will be there.

I believe God is helping us to be a better family. We have been blessed so much already, and we are rapidly making memories to make us forget the past. I believe God told me, “I am restoring the years the locust ate.” It certainly seems to be true.

I think I’ll put up some of our travel photos, without posting anything that shows our faces clearly. That rules out most of the best shots.

In one photo, you can see that our son came along.

Some people who have let us down just didn’t think much about us. Others have betrayed us because they couldn’t stand to see us have pleasant lives, and they wanted to take infantile comfort in the hope that other people would envy and admire them more than us. The plans of people who wanted the worst for us have turned out poorly.

People say living well is the best revenge, because it gives one’s enemies just as much pain as direct attacks. When we do well, it’s not revenge, because we don’t sit around thinking of ways to diminish other people. It’s just us, enjoying the good things God gives us.

Professional Nice Guy

Happy Passover. I don’t call it “Easter” because Easter is a filthy, evil, damned spirit worshiped by pagans. I don’t call this day Resurrection Day unless it doesn’t fall during Passover. My understanding is that today will be Passover until sundown. Correct me if I’m wrong.

Speaking of correction, I saw conflicting dates on different Jewish sites. A Reform site says Passover ended yesterday, but Chabad says it ends today.

“Reform” is a funny word in this context, because it means “to correct.” The Reform movement started because somebody decided to correct God.

“Correct” is a synonym for “righteous,” so “Reform Judaism” means “Judaism made righteous.” The self-imputed righteousness came from Reform Jews, so they must be, literally, self-righteous. Like nearly all Christian denominations. The Catholics have given God all sorts of corrections. They pray to dead popes and baptize babies who have no idea who Yeshua is.

Indulgences are still a problem. The Catholic Church says it has never sold indulgences, but the catechism says you can get one by sending money to support pilgrimages, and the difference is not all that clear to me. This is much like Walmart’s policy, which says I can receive a barbecue grill by sending money. Granted, Walmart isn’t in the pilgrimage business, but money is fungible, so if I give an arm of the Catholic Church money for pilgrimages, it means it loosens up money they can use for other things. Not that they need it, with their gigantic real estate empire.

They say they don’t worship saints. They say they venerate them. And dictionaries define “worship” as “venerate.” That’s interesting.

Reform Jews can eat pork and practice homosexuality, so they are pretty liberal with their corrections. Messianic Jews can also eat pork if they want, but it’s not quite the same thing, since they believe God himself permits it. They can’t be sodomites, though.

Speaking of the self-righteous, I saw an interesting article today. Dwayne Johnson, who calls himself “the Rock” for reasons never made clear, has told the world he is sad because of the sick and dying fans he has communicated with. He never gets tired of positioning himself as the nice musclehead everyone is obligated to love.

Yeshua says the actual rock is the rock of Holy Spirit revelation, as demonstrated by Peter when he said Yeshua was the son of the living God. Professional wrestling and action movies are not mentioned in the Bible as means of salvation.

The identity of the rock is another thing Catholics got wrong. They think Yeshua meant Peter was the rock, meaning he was supposed to be the first pope. Popes are supposed to be infallible in matters of doctrine, however, and Paul corrected Peter’s doctrine publicly. In reality, popes are far from infallible, and the early church didn’t have one.

If Johnson is trying to cheer up sick people out of love for humanity, that’s very good. But overall, it’s not an inspiring story.

First of all, how do celebrity puff pieces get published? How is it that a journalist might find out Johnson was sitting in his house looking at correspondence from sick people? Did the journalist stake out his mansion and use a telephoto lens? Did he hack Johnson’s phone?

No. Johnson put a video of himself on Instagram. He wanted the world to know what he was doing. Yeshua told us not to act like that. The fleeting admiration of human beings is all you get. Okay, you might also make some money. There is no further reward.

So how did this turn into a news story that almost literally glows?

Here’s a fact everyone should be aware of: news outlets are prodded and often paid to publish puff pieces. It’s not just puff pieces. The press gets a great deal of its material and personnel through networking. I’ve written about this sort of thing before.

My sister was a “legal analyst” for Fox and CNN. She appeared on panels as a “former prosecutor.” She liked to brag about this, as though Bill O’Reilly and Dan Abrams had crawled to her home on their knees, seeking her out because of her great reputation.

In reality, she paid a publicist named Terry to call network connections and get her gigs. And she was never vetted. Right now, if you called enough news outlets, you could almost certainly find yourself some gigs as a former prosecutor or even a judge. They won’t check. Tell them you’re an astronaut. See what happens. Say you’re the king of France. It might work.

My sister was not an exemplary prosecutor, and she parted with her employers less than amicably. She ended up suing them.

If you’ve ever gotten the impression that news show panelists were unremarkable and lean on competence, you were onto something. Their main appeal to the networks is their availability. People who are good at their jobs are too busy to do free work on demand.

Back when my sister and I were on good terms, I helped her research for some appearances. I helped in the sense that I actually did the research. She couldn’t speak competently on cases without cramming. And if you listened to her, you were really listening to me.

You don’t get chosen for network panels because you’re successful. You become successful because your network appearances get you business. My sister got all sorts of calls because she was on TV.

Now we have a pretty good idea why Johnson’s Instagram was picked up by the press. He put it out there himself, and he probably had his publicist send some emails. The whole thing was probably the publicist’s idea.

Why criticize someone who cheers up sick people? I think there’s a good reason.

This is an old man on bodybuilding drugs. Don’t question it. When he was a football player at the University of Miami, he had a full-time strength coach, and the man he was then looked like the little sister of the man he is now. Smaller muscles and no definition.

He was smaller when he was a pro wrestler than he is now, and the WWE ran on steroids.

I know a little bit about the strength program at UM, because I was a UM student. I knew a player who looked like a Marvel hero. Muscles bulging all over him. I saw him a few years later, and he was somewhere between Chris Rock and the pre-Ali Will Smith. All the bulk and definition had vanished, along with the tone. You would never have guessed he was even a high school player, let alone college. He didn’t look athletic. The strength coaches at UM surely did an excellent job with Johnson, who was young and full of a young man’s testosterone (if not other things), but he is much bigger now.

Dwayne Johnson is using dangerous drugs to make himself big, and he is also holding himself out as exactly the kind of nice guy kids should look up to. So what are kids going to do when they want to be like the Rock and they find out no amount of clean lifting will get them anywhere close? A lot of them are going to take drugs. Just like their idol.

Very few of them will have riches similar to Johnson’s, so they won’t have capable doctors to oversee their drug regimens. They’ll shoot up in gym locker rooms and hope for the best.

I guarantee you, there are thousands of boys and men who admire Johnson and have taken drugs so they could look like him.

Johnson admits he grew breasts and had them cut out by a surgeon. Why? A condition called gynecomastia, which means “woman breasts.” It’s caused by estrogen, and it happens because people use drugs.

When you use steroids to bulk up, and you shoot up too much, your body may convert the extra testosterone to estrogen. Then you grow breasts. It’s a common problem with drug lifters. They have a crude name for it. I don’t know what they do to fight it now, but they used to take something called tribulus terrestris, thinking it would block estrogen and keep them from growing breasts.

Johnson didn’t have breasts as a college player, so where did they come from?

Other bodybuilding drugs also cause serious problems. Like, for example, death.

It should bother people that an old man who uses drugs to make money and make people think he’s something he is not is promoted as a positive role model.

Anyone whose kids think Johnson is great needs to sit them down and talk to them about drugs, pride, honesty, and the filthiness of professional sports and other types of show business. Yes, sports is show business. That’s why stadiums have all those seats.

Johnson isn’t going to look the way he does his whole life, unless he dies pretty soon. I wonder how he’ll explain the change.

He wouldn’t be the only celebrity to shrink. Arnold Schwarzenegger took enough hormones to power an army of Charlie Sheens, and when he had to quit, I was able to tell people, completely honestly, that my body was better than Arnold Schwarzenegger’s.

Celebrity chef Robert Irvine also appears to be off the juice. On his TV show, he had a huge upper body. Now he’s skinny. He’s so thin, it makes his head look enormous. What happened?

He says he hurt his arm and had to change his routine temporarily. So he shrunk all over? It doesn’t work that way. And his injury was several years ago, so why is he still skinny?

I think his doctor or common sense told him he couldn’t stay on the juice, so he quit.

He says he ruptured his triceps. He probably ruptured a triceps tendon. Steroids build your muscles better than they build connective tissue, so tendon ruptures are common.

He seems to have lost a lot of his swagger. He used to bust up old restaurants with a sledge. I’m not sure he could pick it up now. He used to come across like a nightclub bouncer, ready to get in people’s faces and intimidate. Now he scans more like a high school drama teacher.

He moves differently now. He used to swing his arms around as he talked, as if he wanted everyone to see his arm and torso muscles. Now he holds them close to his sides as though he is holding a gold bar under each arm and doesn’t want it to fall. He seems to want to hide himself.

Muscle drugs are like pride. They pump you up and make you look more impressive than you are.

Johnson said something about not knowing what to say to his sick fans. A Christian filled with the Holy Spirit would know. A Christian could introduce them to Yeshua and put them on a path to supernatural visitations. A Christian might be able to help them get supernatural healing, which is very common. A Christian could help them lose their fear of death.

Celebrities are very poor substitutes for God. They’re like baby bottles full of Kool-Aid.

In other news, my son is changing fast.

When he first popped out, my son was like a potato that cried and pooped. As days passed, he improved. We got some giggles out of him. He started grinning. He cried less. Now he appreciates music.

I have been determined to develop my boy’s potential. Not to make him a genius I can show off but to improve him as a person and prevent major regrets, like the ones I have because my parents taught me so little. I only learned one foreign language. I can’t sight-read while playing an instrument. I was in my thirties when I mastered calculus and became a physicist. My son WILL learn to sight read and play. He WILL be able to write tunes out in proper notation. I may make him learn to sight sing. These skills should be considered basic in a civilized world.

People say you can’t make your kid learn music. Those people are stupid. We make kids learn all sorts of things.

Yesterday, he was crabby about something. One of the hard parts of raising a baby is figuring out what’s wrong with him. Tired? Hungry? Dirty? In pain? Eventually, you have to add “bored” to the list. Last night he was bored. He was grousing and squirming, so I put him on his electronic educational mat so he could bang the toys and kick the music keys. He got engrossed, but that only lasted a while.

It occurred to me that his mat played terrible music, so I decided to find something better. I have a Christian music playlist on Youtube, so I turned it on, picked him up, and made him listen. I bounced him around in time with the beat, and I sang to him.

He lit up like a pinball machine. He smiled with his entire head. He was overjoyed. He couldn’t get enough of it.

We had played music for him before, and my wife had sung to him, but we hadn’t sung to him while listening to good songs, and we hadn’t connected him to the beat. When I put everything together, it worked.

Now I’m going to have to do this with him every day, unless I can make his mother do it sometimes. I’m going to have to find more songs. When he’s far enough along, I will have to do the unthinkable. I’ll have to get him a drum.

My old guitar teacher told me rhythm was the real heart of music. He said the wrong note at the right time was the right note, but the right note at the wrong time was the wrong note. I believe a rhythm instrument is the path to sight reading, because the hardest part of sight reading is reading the rhythm.

I felt very emotional during our session. Some of the songs were very moving, and it was moving to share the experience with him and see his breakthrough. Sometimes I found it hard to sing.

Now I have to ask myself if I should try to play music again, for his sake. If you haven’t made music with other people, you haven’t gotten the full experience. Do I try piano again? Should I break out the guitar and banjo?

One song we listened to was Alison Krauss’s version of “I’ll Fly Away.” Krauss is from the area my parents came from. My aunt knows one of her musicians. “I’ll Fly Away” is an important gospel song in Appalachia. Krauss’s rendition uses bluegrass instruments.

As I listened, I thought about how my bridge to my own people had been burned. I didn’t burn it. They did.

Eastern Kentucky culture is too flawed to take part in. Childishness, racism, drunkenness, drugs, adultery, violence, corruption…I could never go back. But it’s not just my heritage. It’s my son’s heritage. He’s not black. He’s biracial.

My wife gets angry when light-skinned American blacks call themselves black. She says, “I’m black. They’re mixed.” We have to check “black” on forms for my son, and she does not like it. It’s a denial of the most important part of his heritage. He is never going to live in Zambia.

I can’t really connect my son to Appalachia, unless we move to an area where the people have grown up. If he’s not a Kentuckian, what is he? A cultureless person. His only culture will be Christian culture. I suppose that’s for the best, but it’s sad that I can’t introduce my son to the place I used to love.

My mom and dad were real Kentuckians. They were born at home, between hills. They ate the food. They lived the lifestyle. I’m more like Dwight Yoakam, who were raised in another state by parents from Kentucky. I can reach either way.

I don’t know where my son fits in.

There will be no reason for him to see Kentucky. A lot of my family’s surviving members chose money, land, and possessions over me. My sister lives there, but she’s Satan incarnate. All the nice properties in which I owned an interest in are gone.

If I went to Kentucky, I would only tell one cousin and aunt. Other relatives, whom I used to love visiting, come to Florida and don’t tell me. They get most of the family together for holidays, and they haven’t invited me, ever. I have never done them wrong. Not even once. But they have certainly done me wrong.

I never stole anything from my grandparents’ estates. I never tried to charge for doing work on the estates. I never swindled any of my relatives. They’ve done those things to my aunt and me.

Oddly, they made soulless sacrifices, but I’m the one who ended up well off and joyously unemployed. I’m well enough off to never miss the loss of what they took from me. The misery of hiring a lawyer and battling them would be much greater than the pleasure of being repaid. My standard of living would not improve.

What they took isn’t enough to put any of them in my position. Apart from one aunt, the ones who are doing well had to get almost all of it elsewhere. If you’re going to sell yourself, you should at least get a good price.

I would have to become like them in order to scrap with them. That is not a price I am willing to pay, because I understand something they never will.

I knew my mother’s and father’s cousins. I knew my great aunts and uncles. My son can forget all that. My wife’s family is in Zambia, she’s an orphan, most of the relatives I knew are dead, and almost all of the rest will never be close to me again.

When relatives died in the past, it went without saying that I would go to their funerals. Now? It might be awkward.

When my dad died in 2019, the aunt that has turned on me declined to go to his funeral. She had known him for over 60 years. She was in her vacation condo in Naples, and she said she had an appointment to have it measured for blinds.

We were on good terms then. But she needed those blinds.

I flew to her husband’s funeral. I flew to her son-in-law’s funeral. Things used to be very different.

You wouldn’t think listening to one song with a baby would bring all this to mind.

I can’t fix other people. We live lives of joy and love here, all by ourselves, and I have Christian friends who fill the places my relatives used to occupy. That will be more than enough.

Side Effects Looking a Lot Like Main Effects

I am not an anti-vaxxer. When Trump rushed vaccines to market in a demonstration of his extraordinary competence, I took one as soon as I could, not knowing it would later be banned because it caused fatal blood clots. I took 5 vaccines last year, for things like tetanus and the flu. I think vaccines are generally good. I only have concerns about vaccines reputable experts are concerned about. Like every single covid vaccine, for example.

My son has had something like 8 vaccines. I forget. I’m doing what is recommended, and I only apply three rules of my own: no covid shots, no mRNA, and no pincushion days in which he gets an extreme number of shots. I spread the shots out somewhat. The establishment claims there is no benefit to spreading vaccinations out, but it also says you should wear a mask on an airplane, where your chance of catching something is one in half a million. There is definitely no down side, and this is my son, not Anthony Fauci’s.

My covid rule is sound. I’m not sure any healthy person should ever have had a covid shot, but these days, I know that no one outside of high-risk groups should be injected. That excludes the young.

The vaccines unquestionably kill a certain number of people, young people are dying suddenly and inexplicably in unprecedented numbers, people who have decent credentials are concerned that the shots may cause cancer in some individuals, and we have learned that the mRNA shots were tainted from the start. On the other hand, low-risk people are extremely unlikely to have serious problems with covid. There is no good reason for them not to wait till the vaccine problems are eliminated beyond any dispute.

It appears the disease has become very mild. No one talks about it any more; we’re no longer scared, leftists nuts excluded. It also appears to be much less common than it once was, even though people have quit taking shots. I got it several times back when it was the hot new plague, but it has probably been two years since I’ve had any type of illness at all. Maybe longer. No covid. No colds. No flu. No nothing. I can’t remember the last time I was sick.

I just recalled something. About 16 months ago, beer started tasting off to me, and I thought I might have covid. But I didn’t get sick.

Covid is so unsensational these days, you can get covid and die from a gunshot wound, and they won’t even lie and call you a covid fatality. Like they would have a couple of years ago.

It seems pretty clear to me that many millions of people who contracted the flu and colds and so on were deliberately misdiagnosed as covid cases. I consider it a fact, because to believe otherwise would be to make unreasonable leaps of unsupported faith.

The flu ordinarily hits hundreds of millions of people per year, but the medical establishment would have us believe it nearly vanished during the covid years. The last sentence is not a conspiracy canard. Medical institutions that are hostile to conservatism publicly discuss the “mysterious” disappearance of influenza. You can see it on charts compiled by the government.

When covid was hot, the government made the mistake of publishing a PDF listing its diagnostic criteria. I downloaded it. Early on, there were no tests, and later, tests were very hard to come by, so guess what? Doctors were told that if patients had certain symptoms, they could be filed under covid. No tests required. The symptoms were consistent with the flu and other common respiratory disease.

For a long time, the vast majority of people were diagnosed without tests.

After tests became available, they were very unreliable. My wife and I traveled all over the world, and both of us caught covid on trips. We had to be tested before boarding planes. We always passed our tests and flew home sick. There was virtually no possibility anyone would be infected by us, staying abroad would have been extremely expensive, and I had an expensive, unoccupied home and two pets to look after.

When hundreds of millions of people were being tested over and over, and the tests were highly likely to result in false positives, of course there had to be many millions of false positives. Meanwhile, who was being tested for the flu? RSV? Pneumonia? Nobody. They almost never test for those things. Who gets a flu test? They just guess based on symptoms. So there was no real counterweight to offset false covid positives The false negatives could be offset to some degree by doctors who trusted symptoms enough to overrule test results.

If we gave two billion people tests for syphilis right now, and the tests gave false positives 20% of the time, we would have 400 million false positives. Coronavirus tests in the US alone have run into the billions.

Hospitals were paid a king’s ransom for every covid diagnosis. The payoffs could exceed a hundred grand for one patient. Covid diagnoses also bolstered the left’s hysterical covid propaganda, and the medical establishment unquestionably leans far to the left. They bolstered the power of leftist politicians who went so far as to put millions under house arrest. Politicians will support anything that gives them power. Finally, medical people were terrified of covid, just as people were terrified of AIDS before we found out it was just about impossible to get without sodomy or shooting up. There were powerful incentives to lie and boost the figures, and there were no negative consequences. In fact, society leaped on dissidents and whistleblowers and tore them apart.

The cowardly, intolerant, dishonest, greedy, selfish, cruel behavior of the human race during the pandemic stands out as one of the most disgraceful global phenomena ever to be recorded. We learned that ours is not a species with which you want to share a lifeboat.

Doctors admit there is no way, within the bounds of science, to explain the sudden disappearance of the flu. But there is a very plausible political explanation, and then there is Occam’s razor.

People who died from non-covid problems while suffering mild covid were called covid deaths. A local guy here was killed in a motorcycle crash, and his family got mad because he was labeled a covid death. Another man died from a heart attack and got listed. I’m sure many people who died from the flu, RSV, severe colds, pneumonia, bronchitis, strokes, all sorts of cardiac events, old age, and even car wrecks and muggings ended up on the covid list.

Yes, you can die from a cold, if you’re frail enough. It happens.

Having mild covid and dying from an unrelated cause used to be like dying in Chicago and then voting for Democrats. You were gone, you couldn’t fight back, but your name was still useful to the leftist machine. I’m surprised they didn’t claim Kobe Bryant for the covid list.

Maybe they did. How would we know? Maybe they sat down and entered numbers without bothering to provide identities and data.

To sum up, no coronavirus shots for my boy.

He had several shots last week, and yesterday, we made the mistake of having him vaccinated for rotavirus. This is a bug that causes something like norovirus, and it has killed babies through fever and dehydration.

I shouldn’t say we made a mistake, but we are experiencing consequences we did not expect, and we were not informed well in advance. The nice lady who dribbled the vaccine into our baby’s mouth said he might have diarrhea for a day or two. Given the usual state of his bowels, I’m not sure how we would tell the difference.

He was up most of last night. He had abdominal cramping. Got him up this morning, and he had a huge diaper blowout. Then more cramping. He spat up more than usual, so getting liquid into him was a chore.

“No big deal,” I thought, “How long can it last?” I checked. The answer: 7 days. Unless it lasts longer. In other words, no idea, except that it usually subsides in under a week.

Now my wife’s eyes are red. She hasn’t slept much at all. We are wondering how long this will last.

The rotavirus vaccines are interesting because they are not vaccines in the sense of the word the general public understands. When I think of vaccines, I think of shots that provide dead viruses or bits of virus DNA to stimulate the immune system to produce antibodies. Rotavirus vaccines are full of live viruses, so when you take the vaccine, you’re actually getting the disease. It’s milder than the form you would get if you sucked on a dirty ball at daycare, and it builds immunity, so it’s supposed to be worth it.

The viruses in the vaccine are weakened. I have no idea how you weaken a virus without killing it.

There is even better news: after your kid takes the vaccine, you can get rotavirus from him. It comes out in poop and spit. The vaccine lady told us not to kiss him on the mouth or we might get diarrhea. Neither of us comes from the kind of family where people kiss each other on the mouth or play spin the bottle with each other, so we figured we were safe. Not so. We have to be careful and wash our hands a lot.

Our son isn’t doing too bad. He seems a little tired from increased pooping. He is generally in good spirits.

It’s nice to see how he improves with age. As late as a week ago, he thought every inconvenience had to be met with top-volume screaming. I started to wonder if he was going to be that kid. The one no one but his parents can stand. Now things are getting better. I can tell he is trying not to cry.

He was having an unpleasant bowel movement this morning, and he restrained his cries. He even smiled at us while this was going on. I thought this was fantastic.

We live in a world where many adults live in a constant state of tantrum or tantrum readiness. It’s disgusting. They go off over nothing, and they can’t be placated because they don’t want to. They prefer the tantrum experience to normal life. They relish the screaming, vandalism, and violence. They look for reasons to start, and they reject efforts to calm them down. Calming down spoils their fun.

This is what happens when you enjoy tantrums more than getting along with people; when you look forward to having tantrums and you want them to last.

Emotional cultures produce this type of person. American blacks and Hispanics are notable for short tempers and tantrums in adults. It’s also a problem with many Southerners, although not as commonly. It’s worse among white trash; the type of people who steal each other’s yard tools. Italians also like screaming and yelling. They think being emotional is something to be proud of, when it’s really a major disgrace.

Containing your emotions is like using a toilet instead of filling your pants. If you can’t do it as an adult, you should be deeply ashamed. It doesn’t mean you have a big heart. It doesn’t mean you’re a free spirit. It means you’re a little closer to a monkey than everyone else.

Ding my door in a parking lot, and I will politely ask you to take responsibility. Ding the door of a person who thinks his emotions are always right, and he may have to be pulled off of you.

My son is developing a preference for self-restraint. What a relief. He won’t grow up like a family member of mine who thinks every slight is justification for taking cowardly revenge later. He won’t go through life like an ex-girlfriend who thinks she has to ruin your existence instead of moving on with life because you got smart and dumped her instead of fulfilling her shallow marital fantasies. He won’t want to join Antifa.

He won’t have to be handcuffed at an airport or Walmart because he has to hit everyone who won’t give him his way.

My sister the felon ran from a traffic stop and hit the cop who was talking to her because she has to have her way every second of her life. She can’t self-monitor or exercise any kind of restraint. My son is not headed that way.

I was concerned for him because he cried a lot, and it was partly because of my family history. My dad was somewhat sociopathic, and my sister is the full package. Both very abusive. Extremely selfish. Destructive to the people around them, not to mention themselves. My dad’s grandmother was a grudge-holding hellcat who ruled her husband’s house. My dad’s sister was a sociopath who beat her stepdaughter all the time for no reason. I thought there was some risk my son would inherit their problems.

Some people think nurture is everything and nature is nothing. They don’t think personality traits, talents, or intelligence run in families. Yeah, okay. Niels Bohr and his son both won Nobel Prizes, but okay. The Bernoulli family just happened to produce multiple great physicists and mathematicians. It was something in the water. Tall people have tall kids, but we’re not allowed to say low intelligence, anger problems, or poor impulse control run in families.

We are surrounded by demons we can’t see, and based on experience, many Christians believe some demons stick with families and spread and continue characteristic family curses like abnormal sexual desires, addictions, and even poverty. We know this is possible, because there were cursed families in the Bible.

I believe it’s true. I have often wondered if evil spirits are able to change the DNA of cursed families. They probably can. They are definitely able to affect the natural world. They cause diseases, so why shouldn’t they be able to code DNA for narcissism and malice? Why not perversion? Odd as it sounds, doctors say homosexuality, a curse that works against reproduction, runs in families.

We bless our son, out loud. I curse the spirits that want him. I tell him God will fill him with supernatural love, faith, peace, joy, revelation, and humility. I tell him he will be full of the Holy Spirit. I don’t want him to be like relatives who led destructive lives and harmed themselves and the people they should have loved and built up. I don’t want him to go to hell like my aunt.

As he changes and improves, our bond grows. As he screams less and gives us more positive feedback, we find we can spend more time interacting with him and less time trying to clean him and calm him down.

I started teaching him out of his crinkle books. These are washable fabric books full of pictures, and they make crinkly noises when babies play with them. We have one about farm animals. I told him we don’t like squirrels and we must shoot them on sight. I informed him that the pig was the king of animals, and I listed some of its many blessings. Ribs. Bacon. Pork rinds. Country ham. I told him horses make great jackets.

I don’t know how much of it he absorbed, but he followed right along as though he understood.

I hope the vaccine’s side effects vanish quickly. We were getting enough diaper blowouts before the vaccine. We don’t need any more. I want my son to be able to sleep. I don’t want him to be tormented by stomach cramps.

In two months, we get more vaccines. Before we do, I am going to do my own research. This time, we relied on the professionals, and we were caught flat-footed.

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This is glorious. Can it be real? Donald Trump has torn down Joe Biden’s covid page, which falsely claimed coronavirus came from a natural source. It has been replaced with a page containing the most up-to-date, scientifically-sound theory, which is that the virus was man-made and accidentally released by incompetent CCP scientists in Wuhan, China.

I know the world is crumbling, but it’s nice to get an occasional glimpse of what it would be if it were really turning around.

Passover Chametz

Things are great here. God is helping me rebuild my prayer life, my wife and the baby are fine, and we are starting to see the end of the huge medical bills. They have trickled down to us slowly since my son was born.

I would guess we put around $20,000 into this kid. I don’t have it added up. This is a healthy, normal child with a mother whose only issue was mild gestational diabetes. The delivery was normal. Her recovery has been normal.

The bill for the delivery—just the delivery—came in with a sticker price of over $51,000. After discounts and insurance, we were at about $9,000. More upsells and add-ons were applied, so we are paying those now.

My wife had a battery of postpartum tests to check for infections, and they want $1300. A swab and 10 cultures. The hospital failed to check to see if the lab they used accepted our insurance. Oops. Sorry. We’ll do better next time. Just pay that $1300 like it’s nothing, okay?

People say the problem is that we don’t have government insurance in the US. Well, the government is known for expenditures like $500 for a hammer. That’s even worse than the cost of a baby under private insurance. Nothing ever gets cheaper when the government or insurance pays for it. Just more expensive and less efficient.

At least with insurance, there is some tiny measure of market forces at work. Maybe prices would be higher if not for that.

We have United Healthcare. At the end of the year, we’ll get something else. Our deductible is pretty much used up, so if we switch now, we’ll lose that. UHC is awful. They gave us a list of 13 pediatricians to choose from, and none are American. None get decent ratings.

When I chose this insurance, I was buying it for myself, in case of castastrophic illnesses. I didn’t check to see which pediatricians were available. If I had, I would have chosen a plan with a network that included people who didn’t go to medical school in China and Nigeria.

What if we had government insurance? Foreigners love to taunt us with their stories of free heart surgery and hip replacements. Well, consider this. The EU has about 75 million more people than us, and its internal market is about half the size of ours. Their 450 million people spend half as much as we do. How much of that difference is due to high taxes that pay for “free” care?

We pay for their defense, so I suppose we are also paying for their healthcare. Defense is extremely expensive, and every tax dollar they don’t put toward it, they can put toward free appendectomies.

If we were to copy anything about the EU, it should be the actual cost of the care. America seems to be the only place where doctors and other care providers expect to get rich.

The midwife for our delivery charged about $8,000. This is a person of modest education who spent about 5 hours working with us. The highest hourly rate I ever charged anyone as a lawyer was $300, and that was pretty darned high for my state. That was in Miami. Here, it would have been maybe $125.

After my dad and I moved here, we hired a lawyer to redo his will and set up an LLC. We paid about $1200. The lawyer should go to midwife school.

Providers should have to put menus on their walls, listing the cost of every service and product. That would certainly help. As it is, you usually walk in with no idea whether your visit will cost $150 or $15,000.

Reform isn’t coming. The medical lobby is too rich and too strong.

We can afford to have a baby, but I don’t know how people of ordinary means survive. I guess employer plans are helpful. I wonder if people know how much higher their wages and salaries would be if their employers weren’t buying insurance. I’m sure no one discloses that.

In other news, I may have solved the bagel puzzle.

I have been trying to make plain bagels at home because good ones are hard to find here. I worked up a recipe using the classic ingredients, and it’s fine, but the bagels do not taste exactly like the ones you would get in New York or on Miami Beach.

The classic recipe uses barley malt and baking soda. You put malt in the dough, and you boil the bagels in salt, baking soda, and more malt. The malt makes the bagels sweet and adds flavor.

When I tried my bagels, I thought they had too much flavor, and it wasn’t quite like a bakery bagel. I started thinking.

One of the down sides of getting old is that you really get a handle on human nature. When something bad happens, you see past the BS explanations, and you pinpoint the human failing that actually caused the problem.

I began to ask myself whether factory bakers really used malt, which is more expensive than similar substances like white and brown sugar. Could the difference in taste be due to greed?

Of course it could. This morning it occurred to me that Einstein Bros. had to be posting its ingredients on the web, so I checked.

They don’t use white sugar. I was unfair to them. Sorry. It turns out they use CORN SYRUP.

Shame on me, huh? They can’t even shell out for the cheapest form of sugar most home cooks buy. They had to sink even lower and use corn syrup.

Molasses is also listed among their ingredients, far behind corn syrup. It’s behind yeast, so it seems likely they’re using it in the boil. There would be no point in adding a tenth of a gram to molasses to the dough in each bagel, but if bagels were boiled in water containing a little molasses, it would flavor the crust slightly.

It looks like I’m making real bagels, but Einstein Bros. and the New York bakers are not. So because I’ve been raised on corn syrup bagels, I like them better than the real thing.

Baking soda is not among the ingredients, so forget that.

Now it’s time to make up a new recipe with some substitutions.

I may also jack the hydration up from 55% to 57%. I think the bagels may be a little more dense than they should be. And I’m going to boil for 90 seconds on a side instead of 120. I think the crust could be a little less chewy.

If you make bagels at home, and you like the ones they sell in New York, you might want to look up the Einstein Bros. recipe, as I did. Maybe it will help you.

Human beings remind me of the actor Errol Flynn. David Niven supposedly said, “You can count on Errol Flynn. He’ll always let you down.”

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The bagels are done.

I boiled them with salt and molasses. I used sugar in the dough with no other sweeteners. I didn’t use the traditional hand-inside-the-hole method of rolling them out. I made balls, let them rise, poked holes through them, and stretched them to my liking.

Below, you will see raw bagels, boiled bagels, and finally, baked bagels.

These are real bagels. The insides are perfect. You could quibble about the crust. I would say I used more molasses than necessary in the boil, so the outsides are a little dark, like egg bread, but they taste and smell very close to Einstein bagels. Bagels made by professionals aren’t all identical, so I would say I’m within the normal range. Einstein bagels aren’t any more correct than mine.

As I’ve noted before, professionals don’t always use traditional ingredients, so their products can’t be used as firm references.

The crust could be harder. I believe I took the bagels out of the oven earlier than I should have, and this could be one reason. Because the molasses made the bagels look dark, I thought they were more done than they were.

I also boiled them for 1.5 minutes per side instead of two minutes, and that had to make a difference.

At this point, the dough is perfect. The baking method is perfect, except for the time. The crust is slightly bumpy, but it’s not something I would notice and find disappointing in a bakery bagel.

Next time I’ll boil longer, bake longer, and use half as much molasses. I think I would get results just as good with brown sugar. I don’t like wasting my gourmet Kentucky sorghum.

Malt has no place in bagel dough or boil water. Not in my universe. I can now pretty confidently say that these ingredients are out of place in typical New York bagels, even if obfuscators say otherwise. Malt has a weird flavor I’ve never noticed in a bakery bagel. Same for baking soda. Maybe they used these ingredients back in Poland, but I’m not trying to make 1875 Polish bagels.

I was at a grocery today, and they had Thomas’ bagged “bagels.” I pinched one. It was about like a hamburger bun with a hole in it. I don’t think they boil them to set the crust. They’re not bagels at all. They’re tough bread rings. I’ll never have to suffer with those again.

It’s amazing they have the gall to sell those things.

I’m down to small strokes now, so I’ll get started on garlic and cinnamon-raisin bagels. Those should be simple. I believe I should be able to make 4-bagel batches with a mixture of types.

When I produce a bagel which is absolutely true to my vision, I’ll post the recipe.

My Rage, Your Choice

The wife and I are hanging out in the nice house God gave us, on the nice farm it sits in, in a nice county in the nice state of Florida. It’s beautiful outside. The sun is shining. The baby is happy. Everything is peaceful.

I spent a long time praying this morning, and that’s why things are going well. God told me, “Prayer in tongues is the replacement for worry.”

Meanwhile, in less-blessed areas, members of the Party of Joy are continuing their campaign of hate.

How ironic. The Democrats, trying to lay an exclusive claim on joy. It’s like Muslim spin artists responding to 9/11 by styling their cult as the Religion of Peace.

“Stay out of downtown! A bomb just blew up at a busy intersection!” “Who did it?” “The Religion of Peace!”

Sometimes when I express myself on the web, leftists tell me I’m spreading hate. They tell me my wife is my sister, they tell me I’m stupid, and they say I live in a trailer. Yesterday I got weak and told one he would cry if he saw my wife and my house. I should not have said that. It’s wrong to try to shame other people with your blessings, and besides, he was already crying. It was his default mode.

Of course, he said I was a liar. The evidence? I was a Trump supporter, and I said my life was good, which it is.

It’s odd that a member of the workers’ party–a champion of the downtrodden–would be so quick to insult people who live in trailers. Actually, it’s not, because the Democrats are the party of snobbery and elitism. You can’t favor centralized government unless you have contempt for the masses. For example, you have to think people in Florida and Texas are too stupid to run elementary schools. Let’s not discuss how test scores have fared under the Department of Education in blue states.

I was commenting on a libelous story that said Trump supporters were going nuts over the new tariffs. Of course, that isn’t true. There are probably 120 million Trump supporters in the US with 60 million children, and surely some are upset about tariffs, but there is no broad-based repudiation of the president. If you looked around, you could find Trump supporters who insist Caitlyn Gender is a man. It wouldn’t constitute a wide acceptance of the demonic trans delusion.

The people who own joy are screaming at the sky, vandalizing electric cars, and telling pollsters there is some justification for assassinating the president. If this is joy, I don’t want it. Democrats need to talk to Inigo Montoya.

I live in a house of love. I have never screamed at the sky. I have never vandalized a car. Unlike 55% of polled Democrats, I never thought there was a good reason for killing a president I didn’t like.

I’ve had plenty of crabby moments, but that’s all they were. Healthy people wind down.

My peaceful, fulfilling lifestyle is not unusual here. Maybe all this incest has selected for just the right genes.

I started writing this blog entry because of another news story. A lady who owns a business bought a Cybertruck and had it wrapped to advertise her services. Right away, a liberal called her and told her he was going to kill her. Others followed. The usual gauntlet of self-made subhumans. People who started out human and turned themselves into apes. The lady who owned the truck hired an instructor to teach her employees how to defend themselves.

I haven’t gotten to the really disturbing part. What I’ve described so far is normal Democrat behavior.

What really disturbed me was the comments. I scrolled down quite a ways, and every…single…comment was an attack on the victim. Not one person had anything critical to say about the criminals who went after a woman who owned her own business. Aren’t leftists supposed to support woman-owned businesses?

She had no business buying the truck, they said. She asked for it. She was wrong to support Elon Musk.

This is not normal. This is prewar Germany behavior. The MAJORITY of Democrats are now convinced they are victims, just as the Nazis were. This means they see every cruel thing they do as justified. Retaliation. Balancing the scales. Not enough, but a start. Always more to be done.

The best way to turn people into cruel victimizers who get deep satisfaction from causing great suffering for the innocent is to convince them that they are the victims. The Democratic Party has succeeded at this, just as the National Socialists did.

The things I said would happen are happening. Things I talked about years ago, before we had the terrorist organizations BLM and Antifa. That all came to me from God’s lips.

There is supernatural peace here on the farm. Is that the symmetry of the supernatural at work? As the blind become more cursed and enraged, it makes sense that people who submit to God would get more peace. Of course, that would be yet another trigger for the body of Satan. The cruelest thing you can do to them is to have a good life they have to witness.

I learned a new leftist term this month. “Rage bait.” The first time I saw it, it was in a discussion of formula feeding, which is something feminists promote even though it unquestionably results in the deaths of babies. I didn’t know what it meant, but I have seen it a few more times, and now I know. It means saying anything that makes a leftist angry.

Oops. I just fell for the gaslighting. Let me change that.

It means saying anything a leftist CHOOSES to be angry about. I don’t make people angry. They choose to be angry at me. Let’s own our choices. Whenever I say something makes me mad, I stop and correct myself. I am responsible for what I choose to feel.

Rage bait doesn’t have to be rude, insulting, unfair…none of that. Polite disagreement is more than adequate to provoke a tantrum. The phrase “rage bait” is a wonderful tool Satan came up with to legitimize leftist fury and abuse. “I’m the victim. I burned your car because you rage-baited me.”

When my dad was young, he beat my mother. He would keep her up all night, slapping her and throwing water in her face because she had mismatched his socks. He blamed her for what he did. She had provoked him, after all. He didn’t have the phrase “rage bait” to toss at her, but clearly, putting mismatched socks together was rage bait.

I have an acquaintance who has a bad temper. He punches walls. He breaks things on purpose. He goes off over things the rest of us would take in stride. When someone offends him, he takes sneaky revenge later, which is cowardly. When he gets angry, he says, “I’M STARTING TO GET PISSED!” Sorry for the language. He says it to other people, as though his feelings are their fault. Like they’re supposed to do something. It comes across as a warning.

He’s the problem. He’s 100% responsible. He should accept the blame and calm himself, but he puts that burden on other people. This has done him great harm socially. Acting that way costs people relationships, jobs, opportunities, success, children…all sorts of good things. No one wants to live or work with a human landmine.

It’s a terrible shame, because he has so many good qualities. A colossal waste. Really sad.

Most people won’t say, “I ended our relationship because you blew up all the time,” or, “We let you go because you kick your desk.” They’ll just move on without you, and you won’t know why. Explaining could set off the landmine.

This is what happens when Satan tells you other people are responsible for your faults. It’s exactly what’s happening on the political left.

Leftists want normal people to obey them and to think and feel as they do. They believe we are obligated, and they think it’s obvious. We should share their delusions and participate in their self-destructive behavior. When we choose to be responsible, kind, sane people instead, it’s rage bait. So to them, we are to blame when they damage our cars, threaten us, dox us, hit us, and kill us.

That’s all I have to say. Just documenting what is happening at this time in history.

First Evaluation Goes Poorly

I found this on Yelp today. Really disappointing. I didn’t even know he had an account.

★ 1 (1 review)

Baby X. said

“These are the worst parents on Earth. I regret giving them my business. I wish I could give them zero stars. Not sure what stars are.

The one that gives milk is not too bad. She generally does what I tell her. But sometimes I have to scream for over 20 seconds before the milk arrives. Unacceptable. She also stuck a thermometer up my rear end to make me poop. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but this just seems rude. And what’s the rush?

She sings stupid songs about changing my diaper and giving me baths. No one wants to hear that, lady. Just do your job. If you’re going to sing, can’t you learn a real song instead of singing things like, ‘Changing baby’s diaper! Baby, baby, baby!,’ 300 times?

The other parent is useless. When I cry to get my way, he says awful things like, ‘No one cares. No one is listening.’ Then he actually laughs. He tells me to get over it. I banged my head on the laundry sink, and he told me to rub dirt on it. Sometimes when he walks by, he points his finger at me and says, ‘Shut it.’ He doesn’t even slow down.

He even imitates my crying. Frankly, he doesn’t have the pipes for it.

He made the milk parent leave me in the bassinet to cry just because it was two a.m. and she hadn’t slept in a day. Then he wouldn’t let her respond to my commands. Okay, yes, an hour of 500-dB shrieking later, I fell asleep, but I still feel violated.

The thing that gets me the most is the insubordination.

When he changes my diapers, he wears earmuffs and gloves. I find this insulting. He also covers me so I can’t pee on him. I pee on the other one like 10 times a day. She’s always wide open, like she’s in the end zone and it’s 4th down. She never learns. Anyway, what’s the big deal? How else am I supposed to amuse myself? It’s not like I have a lot of options.

He keeps telling me my head is big. Dude. Have you looked in a mirror? Do you have one wide enough? Body-shaming isn’t cool any more.

This is why I throw up on you more than the other one.

What I really hate is the way he makes me laugh when I’m enjoying a good sulk. He pokes my cheeks and plays peekaboo. He tickles my ears. First thing you know, I’m grinning and flopping around like a total sellout.

It’s not fair playing peekaboo. It’s the funniest game on Earth. It would break anyone.

I wanted to put an ad on Facebook, hoping to hire new parents, but at this point I am totally illiterate.

My advice: be born to different parents. If at all possible, be born to Will Smith and his wife. They really know what they’re doing.”

Just wait, kid. One day you’ll ask for a car.

Lord of the Dough Rings

Today I got up, toasted the bagels I made last night, and slapped salmon, cream cheese, and onion slices on them. My verdict: in need of minor adjustments, but already better than all the bagels I can get nearby, except for a little bit of unwanted flavor.

Also, too small.

I decided to check Wikipedia today, and I learned a few things that could possibly be true in spite of being in Wikipedia.

First of all, no one knows where bagels come from. Something sort of similar to a bagel appears in a Syrian cookbook from the 1200’s, and bagels were brought to the US in their more-or-less current form by Polish Jews. No one knows where the word bagel comes from. There are a lot of theories, and that proves no one knows.

Now the important stuff. Wikipedia says that in 2003, New York bagels sold from carts had an average weight of 170 grams, so my plan to shoot for 125 many need to be changed. Also, some bakers use sugar in the bagel dough instead of barley malt, and the ingredients in the boil water vary.

Knowing human nature as I do, I think it’s pretty likely that a lot of bakers are using sugar in their bagels. It’s cheap. I also think they are using it in their water. This would explain the lack of malt flavor in authentic bagels I’ve eaten in New York and Miami. I don’t think they’re using baking soda in the water, either, because it has a distinctive taste, and I have never noticed it in a factory bagel.

I have read that baking soda has been used in boil water to make the water alkaline so bagels brown better, but as a pizza guy, I am well aware that any dough containing a lot of sugar will brown well. I don’t see why anyone would need baking soda in a sugared dough that is going to brown no matter what you boil it in.

I’m thinking I’ll use a 50/50 mix of sugar and malt in the dough, so I’ll get a little malt flavor, but not a whole lot. And I’ll boil in water that contains only sugar and salt. I’ll increase the dough recipe until it comes in at a multiple of 150 grams, and that will be the pre-baked weight of my bagels.

Yes. I see it all so clearly now.

Wikipedia says New Yorkers claim New York water is essential to making a good bagel. New Yorkers say a lot of incredibly stupid things. They say you can’t make a good pizza without New York water. The pizza in New Haven has a better reputation than New York pizza, so I guess someone built a pipeline. Not. My water will make perfectly good bagels.

My pizza is far better than anything I’ve had in New York. Not “better.” FAR better. My cheesecake is also FAR better than Junior’s.

Incidentally, you can make any kind of water you want. Brewers know this. You can take distilled water and add minerals and whatever you like. All over America and Australia, fat guys who like good beer do this in their garages. You can buy the additives online. If you want New York water, you can make it.

That New York ego is really something.

I wondered why the bagel recipe hadn’t been nailed down and published everywhere, and I may have part of the answer: socialism. New York Jews and socialism have a long history of romantic entwinement, going back at least to the days when the socialist newspaper Forverts was founded. At some point, the bagel masters in New York City created a union to prevent anyone else from making bagels and spreading bagel knowledge. The union was called Bagel Bakers Local 338, and the damage it did to mankind is incalculable.

It’s hard to understand why Jews, who are extremely capable, love socialism, which was created to cripple the capable and divert undeserved money to the incompetent. But then it’s hard to understand why they chose a king over priests and prophets who spoke for the God who did everything for them.

You don’t see the Japanese and the Singaporeans pushing their governments to impoverish them and give their wealth to the lazy and the slow.

Just saying.

A while back, I said I was going to quit working to come up with new recipes, because food is not a healthy obsession, but this is different. I absolutely need bagels with salmon in my diet, and I have to have a reliable supply. If I could drive a mile and buy bagels, I wouldn’t be doing this. I also learned how to make fried Chinese dumplings and Kung Pao chicken. Same reason.

This is like America’s new retaliatory tariffs. I am the victim here, responding to an unfair deprivation. I had bagels, and they were taken from me. I am just restoring order to the universe.

I’m also going to keep working on the proportions. Salmon, cheese, onions. I disagree with the losers and deplorables who only put a little cheese on their bagels. I think you need a nice thick layer. And too much salmon can be distracting. It can drown everything else out.

I have come to prefer Bermuda onions on bagels, and the older I get, the thicker the slices have to be.

I will figure plain bagels out. I will figure garlic bagels out. Then I’ll be done. I can go long periods without blueberry bagels and cinnamon raisin bagels, and they always linger on store shelves, so they’re always available. I am content to pay for them.

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I just yanked 4 bagels out of the oven. Things are looking good.

The size is right. The appearance is right, although more of a B+ than an A. The weight is right. The crusts are shiny and hard. The color is correct.

These started at roughly 155 grams. I waffled around and settled on this weight.

I can smell malt, and it’s a little stronger than I want, but that may be because the boil water is still on the stove.

I’m cooling them on a rack so the bottoms won’t get soggy. This may just work.

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They are pretty cool, so I tried one. The texture is fine. I would say I’m tasting too much salt and malt, though. My wife loves these bagels, but she has some pretty interesting ideas on how to eat Western food.

I’m going to try again tomorrow. I will cut the salt in the dough to 2%, and I will halve the malt and leave the white sugar as it is. I will also halve the salt in the boil and replace all the malt with sugar.

As it is, I have bagels more than adequate for my next round of open-faced smoked fish sammiches.