The Provocation is Here

Well this is nice.

Donald Trump is back. We will see him assume office in two months, assuming the continuing leftist assassination attempts fail. He will not save America, but God will certainly use him to make things less unpleasant as our country’s spiral around the drain tightens up.

I was not going to watch the returns, but of course, I did. I made the mistake of watching a little bit, thinking I would turn it off and get to bed, but I found myself responding in a Pavlovian manner to gradual bits of reinforcement as they were wrenched from the lips of far-left news performers.

That’s my new word for them. “Performers.”

Trump did well early on, and in some states, returns came in pretty quickly, so I wrongly assumed we would be done by maybe 10 p.m. I nearly went to bed at one point, but those little rewards kept pulling me back.

At around 1 a.m., it was pretty obvious Harris had lost. Sadly, the performers refused to admit it. They held onto every state as long as they could without risking being committed to mental asylums.

Citizen Free Press directed readers to a site called NewsdeskHQ, which belongs to the outfit that was first to call Biden the winner in 2020. It’s a reputable company that works with other big media corporations. NewsdeskHQ called North Carolina and Georgia much earler that some companies. It’s 11 a.m., and I’m not sure MSNBC has called them yet.

The Associated Press had a nice live map on Youtube, but when things went sour for the bolsheviks and perverts, AP dragged things out. I think they were at 248 Trump electoral votes when I turned off the PC at about 3:30 a.m.

MSDNC was possibly the funniest outlet. They had a skinny, bespectacled guy in a white shirt, working with one of those big touch screens, pulling up graphics of states and telling us what might or might not happen. They had him still at it after Trump’s victory speech. I am not kidding. This gave my wife and me a good laugh.

MSDNC called the election after 5 a.m., and performer Jen Psaki made the announcement, essentially calling Trump and everyone who voted for him a Nazi.

After Trump broke 260 (in the eyes of sane people), my wife and I developed a running joke. We would say things like, “She may still pull it off! It’s still too early to tell!”

Here is what I told her. For months, performers have been telling us Trump would announce victory whether or not he had won. We were instructed to expect a premature speech. I told my wife they were delaying their victory announcements just so they could say Trump was jumping the gun, and sure enough, that’s what they said.

One performer, Jake Tapper, said that as far as he knew, no major news organization had called the race for Trump, and someone on his show had to correct him on the air, letting him know a little startup called Fox News had done so.

Tapper has one of the top jobs in the MSM, and he had no idea what the competition was up to on an extremely important night featuring time-sensitive news. What can you say about that?

We’re talking about Fox News, the company that has been utterly thrashing CNN in the ratings for decades. Hasn’t someone in the chain of command told CNN’s performers to make an effort to keep track on Fox and make an effort to compete.

Getting the truth out of MSM performers was like getting a dog to acknowledge eating a steak you left on the counter. “Jaaaaaaake…did you eat mommy’s filet mignon?”

“Did Trump win Georgia 4 hours ago? Did he? Bad Jake. Baaaad.”

There are still companies claiming Trump is at 260 votes.

Harris did not disappoint, and by that, I mean she lived up to expectations by disappointing everyone. A bunch of black kids at Howard University stood outside for hours waiting for her to come out and tell them reparations were on the way, and instead, she sent an underling to tell them to go home, because she was not going to speak.

That was nice. That made them feel appreciated. But they say Harris has a gift for doing this kind of thing. Maybe not as much of a queen bee as Hillary, but not gracious to the unimportant people.

She still has not conceded.

That’s amazing, because it’s pretty obvious even the performers want her to go away. They know the election ended last night, and even though a contested election is a juicy story, they are human beings, and they must surely want to see this thing end. When MSDNC calls an election for a Republican, it should be a clue that the Democrat lacks support for a long, drawn-out Gore fit.

Trump has done classless things in office, too. He skipped the Biden inauguration. But that doesn’t excuse Harris, the champion of the party of love and maturity.

Back in 2016, an anonymous insider said that after she lost, a boozy and belligerent Hillary Clinton had to be physically restrained, and that was why John Podesta took the Harris route, appearing before the losing crowd and telling them there would be no concession that night. It sort of looks like Harris (who slurs her words a lot) is also taking the news poorly.

The report about Hillary came from a radio host named Kincannon, and he boldly said it was related to him by a CNN reporter. He said Hillary had been given a sedative after attacking Podesta. Snopes calls the report “unproven,” which means they can’t debunk it.

Bob Woodward has filled bestsellers with things that are unproven and unprovable, and he wins prizes. Lots of news items are unproven, so I wouldn’t get too hung up on that. “Unproven” does not mean “baseless,” except probably in most Bob Woodward books. Every time you see “anonymous source” in a story, you’re reading things that are unproven and which will probably never be proven.

I saw a media outlet say Harris would speak today. I certainly hope she isn’t going to come out and deny the election’s validity. That would be a pitiable spectacle.

I must admit that her refusal to concede gives me some satisfaction. Maybe that’s immature of me.

So…when do the riots start?

I assume we will see action on Friday night. Parties are for weekends. Social Justice Warriors who have jobs will need to get time off from Chipotle. Some may need a day or two to hit Urban Outfitters for black pants and shirts.

Surely there must be some leftist violence, because we are talking about people who have been convinced we elected Hitler Junior. Respected MSM performers have been telling them this for years. If, in 2020, I thought Joe Biden were Hitler Junior, and I lived near DC, I might have felt pressured to join a group of guerrillas myself.

I’m not interested in militia membership, but hey, Hitler was pretty bad.

My wife has not been taken away, as Whoopi Goldberg predicted. She said Trump would take black women away from white husbands and put them in camps. I guess that will happen after the inauguration. My wife patted my leg and congratulated me today. “They are bringing you a white wife.” Once again, I said I would visit her in the camp.

I don’t know if I’d actually do it, but it made her feel loved.

We were both ecstatic when we realized Trump had won. The alternative would have been very bad for the world. Now we get more conservative judges, including a Supreme Court justice to replace Clarence Thomas. He’s the oldest justice, and he’s fat. With a Republican Senate, we ought to be able to pump the federal judiciary up pretty quickly.

I can’t wait for the deportations to start. I realize people will suffer, but that’s on them, and they got to stay here quite a while illegally, so they have nothing to complain about. I don’t know if Trump will be able to do it, because their presence is due to a curse, but maybe he can remove enough of them to diminish their political power.

It was nice to watch election returns without feeling stressed. That was divine help. I could not rid myself of the anxiety on my own. If Harris had won, I would have been okay. I wouldn’t have gone on Tiktok to film a video of myself crying.

Unfortunately, leftists reject God even more than conservatives do, so they are stressed and enraged. More than usual. I joke, but this is the stress and rage that will result in countless killings, beatings, deprivations of property, and imprisonments in years to come. Eventually, Satan’s children will take over.

I think Joe Biden is happy today. I really believe he wanted Kamala to lose. He brags about being vindictive. It’s nice to see Obama’s political power kneecapped for another 4 years.

I plan to make the most of the Trump years. If we get some J.D. Vance years, I will enjoy them fully as well. Thank you, God, for hindering your children’s enemies.

Storm? Where?

It’s election night 2024, and the votes are coming in. In the past, I was very tense on election nights. Tonight I just feel stuck.

I have been through lots of hurricanes, and one thing I’ve noticed is that during the few days before a storm hits, the sky seems grey, everything seems still, and there is a sense that nothing is happening in the world, as though we were all waiting quietly for a big, unpleasant event. Today has felt this way.

I didn’t feel like doing anything. I should have done some work on the tractor. Instead, I sat around watching Youtube and eating leftover takeout food.

I am waiting for whatever is going to happen, to happen. And be over.

If Harris wins, I will not be distraught. Maybe it’s because I already know the world is lost. A Harris victory would be more about the scheduling than the trajectory. Things will be moved up 4 years.

It’s astonishing to me that half of America could want to vote for such a stupid, transparently dishonest, empty, incompetent woman, or for her disgusting polcies, but I have to admit: this is who we are. Our national character has deteriorated, so presidents like Biden and Harris are starting to be what we should expect. A Dwight Eisenhower or a Ronald Reagan would be too good for us.

Many of us are voting for the woman who filled the country with illegal aliens. That, alone, is proof we are on the verge of becoming incompetent to govern ourselves. Who’s next? Kim Kardashian? Charlie Sheen? Rupaul?

If Trump wins, great, but we have to take notice of the fact that a country that will give half its votes to Kamala Harris is washed up.

Incidentally, I have the Fox News Youtube channel on, and it’s really funny to see a presidential candidate represented by a little photo almost identical to his mugshot.

Speaking of distractions, I just noticed that AP has Virginia leaning red. That’s really something. If Trump gets AP, Kamala will be working at McDonald’s again in January.

Remaining calm after a Harris victory would be proof of the Holy Spirit’s intervention in me. I could not do it alone.

Back when Trump was elected, I said I felt God was giving us 4 years of delay so we could get ready for the apocalypse. Then Biden came along and pushed us closer to the abyss. Maybe we’re getting another 4 years.

We have to learn that God, not the government, is our provider and protector. The Bible says God is our refuge and our strong fortress, over and over. It says the righteous run into him and are safe. I feel as though God has made this knowledge part of me, and that’s why I’m not anxious. I would hate to see Kamala Harris win, but I have learned that as long as I pray in the Spirit and spend enough time with God, everything will be fine regardless of what happens around me.

This is how you get favor.

Psalm 91 explains how favor affects you in bad times. A thousand will fall at your side and ten thousand at your right hand, but it will not come near you. You will only witness the reward of the wicked–the people who aren’t part of God’s family–with your eyes.

Most Christians don’t know these things. They haven’t spent time praying in the Spirit, and they have not received revelation. It’s not enough to know things are true because you read the in the Bible. You have to have God enter into you and make them part of you.

I’m very glad God has gotten me to this point. I don’t know anyone else who has made it this far, except maybe my wife.

Anyway, I will see if I can get the wife to sit down to pray, and I guess I’ll turn off the news and get ready for bed.

We’re all Going to Camp

My wife and I were watching election-related videos, and it served to remind me of something. We have to stop saying the world is going crazy. The world is now completely insane, and it has been for a while.

I believe a demon explosion is taking place. Like the hostile illegal aliens pouring in across our borders, with our inexplicable consent, demons are being poured out on the earth, and they are making people insane.

The other day I got a revelation. Like many revelations, it was something I already knew, but God has a way of making knowledge you already have completely real to you. Without God’s help, knowledge can feel like speculation.

The knowledge was this: just as God’s Spirit is the only source of truth and reason, other spirits pour insanity into people. They make them believe things that are obviously untrue.

There is always symmetry in the supernatural.

I saw some leftist nut with a big Tiktok following, telling people how to prepare for a possible Trump victory. To say he is crazy doesn’t begin to describe him. Check out his tips.

1. If you’re trans, keep it to yourself so Trump supporters don’t harm you physically. As a conservate sharing the video noted, if you’re under the trans delusion, people already know. You can’t really keep it to yourself. And of course, Trump supporters are not going to beat you. Harris supporters beat Trump supporters all the time, but it’s unusual for the reverse to happen.

2. If you know an immigrant, tell people that person has been in the US all his life. So apparently, Trumpers are planning to deport my wife, who has a green card. Her, and Arnold Schwarzenegger (please please). But it may be that he was deliberately conflating “immigrant” with “illegal alien,” as leftists do, as though these types of people were in any way fungible.

3. Refusing to talk about politics will hurt, but you have to do it, because it will help you survive. Actually, this one isn’t all bad. Imagine a world where leftists didn’t talk about politics. But no mainstream Trump supporter is planning to kill leftists.

4. Donald Trump has said, on camera, that he wants to establish a fascist government. What? Maybe this guy has been using mushrooms for therapeutic purposes, and he actually saw this while tripping.

5. You should get firearms training and carry a gun. This isn’t totally delusional, because it’s good advice for most people (sane only), but Trumpers are not going to be forming Einsatzgruppen and rounding up liberals and killing them. While the advice itself is not completely insane, the reason for giving it is, and it’s unbelievably hypocritical, coming from the side that hates the Second Amendment.

6. Delete your social media accounts. This is really a restatement of number 3. Trumpers will search the Internet for your anti-Trump memes, and then you and your family go up against the wall. Oddly, this is exactly what leftists have been doing to Trumpers since January 6, 2021, except they haven’t formed firing squads, because the government still won’t let them.

He says deleting your social media accounts may make the difference between walking free and being put in a camp. Again, I am all for leftists refraining from expressing their political and social beliefs, but there are no plans to build camps, unless Portland counts. Although Australia’s leftist government did build camps and confine people who didn’t take dangerous and completely unnecessary covid shots.

Whoopi Goldberg now says that if you’re a white man married to a black woman, Trump will take your wife away and bring you a white one. Then your black wife will go to a camp. I told my wife not to worry, because I would visit her. Provided the camp was nearby. She does not seem concerned.

Let’s take a trip back in time. Ted Danson the woke actor had a black lover, and with her approval, he appeared in blackface at a roast. She wrote some of the jokes he told. At first she defended him, but two weeks later, she cut him loose. The lover’s name is Whoopi Goldberg. So Whoopi has taken a black woman away from a white man, but as of today, Trump has not.

Oprah Winfrey just said that if Kamala loses, this may be the last chance her supporters get to vote in an election.

Too crazy to believe. She’s not all that smart, but can she really believe this? Oh. Forgot. Demons.

Isn’t the Democratic Party the party that denied its members the right to vote in primaries, appointing Kamala Harris before the primaries were over?

You could spend hours listing more examples. These people are literally insane, as are a smaller fraction of people putatively on the right. The people who think there are tiny robots in vaccines. The people who think the world is flat. The membership of the Lincoln Project.

It’s very important to realize the world is insane. You need to stop denying it. Demons are being dumped on the earth like illegals in red states in the middle of the night from government-sponsored jets. If the Holy Spirit isn’t keeping you sane, demons are making you crazy, and there are more of them than ever.

We argue with these people all the time. It makes no sense. It’s like arguing with a person on PCP. They’re listening to their demons. They like lies much more than the truth. This, not sin, is what puts people in hell. Heaven is full of sinners who listened. Sin is not fatal to your relationship with God. Rejecting the truth is.

Yeshua told us he was the truth. That’s not a little claim to skate past without consideration, on the way to Bible passages that seem more significant. It’s an important statement. He also said Satan was a liar and the father of lies. Satan’s children prove him right every day on the web and television.

Satan loves to project, so when you hear leftists make their nutty predictions about conservatives, you should realize you’re hearing Satan lay out his game plan. A big fraction of these people are literally ready to murder us on the street, take away everything we have, put us in camps, and so on. They are just waiting for permission. Sooner or later, even if Trump wins, they will gain control, and then their sick fantasies will be played out in the real world, with us as the victims.

People think such things could never happen in America, because America is too wonderful and too strong to let these things come to pass.

America permitted slavery for 91 years, and a big part of the country loved slavery so much, they fought a war over it and lost hundreds of thousands of people. Who can seriously say atrocity can’t go mainstream? It’s idiocy to even consider it.

I just saw a story about an old, educated white man who beat a man in a grocery store for wearing a MAGA hat. He knocked his teeth out. The victim was severely injured.

There was no provocation other than the hat. The leftist assailant is going to prison, and surely he knew that would happen as he was beating his victim. Insanity. If a law-abiding, educated man in late middle age can do that in front of witnesses, what do you think Democrats from less-civilized demographics can do?

Snap out of it. We’re at the end, not the beginning.

I pity conservatives and Christians who live in cities. I really pity the ones who think they’re doing good, setting an example and saving souls. Yeshua didn’t settle down among his enemies. John the Baptist fled to the desert, and when he went to the city where he was born, a little slut had his head sliced off.

If Yeshua and John could not save one city, who do you think you are, trying to outdo them? You’re endangering yourself and others for no good reason.

I hope this is useful to people who have gotten used to the insanity. Don’t let yourself stay used to it. Fight the gaslighting. Don’t judge the world by new standards. Judge it by eternal standards. What would your grandparents have thought of this place?

As for the election, I am not anxious. That must be God at work. Generally, I feel bad on election days, knowing America is likely in the process of electing people who will destroy it. I have been asking God to help his children to relax and realize only God keeps them safe and prosperous.

I started thinking of examples of people who lived well under Biblical tyrants. I only came up with three: Joseph, Esther, and Mordecai. I thought about including Nehemiah and Daniel, but their rulers cut their testicles out, so I can’t really count them. Anyway, it is possible to live well under bad rulers if God is with you. It’s all up to him.

Now that I think about it, Mordecai may have been a eunuch, too. He had the king’s ear, and he was a foreigner. We don’t see any evidence he had a family, and the Jews believed they were commanded to reproduce. Mordecai warned Esther that if she didn’t help the Jews, she and her father’s house would be destroyed, and he did not mention his own house.

Well. Joseph and Esther, then.

Anyway, I am not worried about my house. Earlier today, I realized I was not thinking about the election, and it was a big relief. I hope it continues. I don’t want to have my day and week ruined by an announcement I don’t like. I want to be confident my family will be fine, regardless of who is in the White House.

I’m afraid for the world, however. I think if things look good for Trump, we may see a burst of demonic unrest that starts today, much bigger than the problems we saw in 2020. Satan is extremely angry because Trump got in his way. He was furious when Hillary lost. Now it looks like it may be happening again, and Satan is not known for his patience.

It Takes a Village to Kill Your Pets

I find squirrels annoying. I live in a place with an abnormal concentration of oaks, and it’s not unusual for me to look outside and see 6 squirrels running around. Old people come here to retire, and they congregate in large numbers. Squirrels are concentrated in much the same way.

I shoot squirrels. I used to eat them, but then I started shooting them and leaving them for the birds, just to get rid of them. They damage things.

They ate the fuel gauge on my yard tractor. They chewed on my extremely expensive electric gate. They chewed on planters. One got into my chimney, and I had to shoot it in the fireplace. I have a productive peach tree, and squirrels cut the peaches off and leave them on the ground, sometimes without even taking a bite.

I quit shooting squirrels for a long time. I quit after an encounter with a mother squirrel. I was welding something up in the shop, and the shop door was open. She kept walking by, carrying things in her mouth. Ordinarily, squirrels won’t come near people, but this one trusted me. She kept carrying twigs into a nearby crape myrtle. She was building a nest.

This was a problem, obviously. She was going to produce new squirrels right next to my house. But I felt bad about shooting her, so I let it go.

I just paid $6000 to have mechanics undo the damage her offspring and their pals did to my truck. They ate the wiring harness, for one thing. You would not believe what a wiring harness for an old Dodge costs. They don’t make them. They ate the box containing the most expensive electronics. Dodge doesn’t make those, either.

I’m going back to killing squirrels. Nothing else I can do.

I tell the story to show I’m not a weepy squirrel-lover. But I was still incensed to read that government employees had held a man at gunpoint, confiscated a squirrel he rescued as a baby, and killed it. Of course, I’m talking about Pnut the Instagram squirrel.

The headlines say “euthanized.” That’s very pretty, but here’s what really happened: they held this terrified, squirming squirrel down–an animal that had grown to love and trust a human being–and they shoved a needle into him while he tried to get loose. Then they held him in place while he died.

The excuse? Rabies. When they abducted this pet, he bit one of the kidnappers. Understandably. So rather than have the assailant take a series of harmless rabies shots, to protect himself from an animal that had been living symptom-free for 7 years in close contact with two human beings who handled him daily, they killed a beloved pet who was also an Instagram star, loved by millions of people.

In America, animals are property. You can’t use deadly force to prevent someone from killing an animal. It may be your autistic daughter’s service dog. It may be a pet that has shared your bed for 12 years. Doesn’t matter. If a methhead decides to strangle your pet in front of you, and you’re not strong enough to save him, you can’t use a deadly weapon to save him.

Having read the Pnut story, I am inclined to think the law is wrong. I now think you should be allowed to shoot anyone who tries to kill a pet. You can shoot people to prevent rape and kidnapping. In terms of the suffering caused, harming pets is right up there with these crimes. It’s not right to expect people to stand by and witness the killing of a pet when they have the means to stop it.

Unfortunately, a change in the law would not have helped Pnut’s owner, because Pnut was killed by government employees doing their jobs.

Is it acceptable for a Christian to say it’s okay to take a human life to save the life of a pet? Yes.

David was a murderer. He had sex with a loyal subject’s wife, while the subject, Uriah, was fighting in a war to benefit David. The wife, Bathsheba, became pregnant, and in order to hide his sin, David had Uriah killed.

Nathan went to David and told him a story. He said there was a poor man who had a sheep he had raised. It was his only sheep, and he had made it a pet. It shared his bed. He loved it. A rich neighbor who had many sheep took it and butchered it to feed a guest. David was enraged. He said the rich man had to die, and he fully meant it. He had the power to execute. When he said the man had to die, he was pronouncing a sentence with the full authority of the state.

Nathan, a prophet who spoke for God, did not disagree with him.

The story about the sheep, which appears to have been untrue, was intended to show David the evil of his own conduct.

The older I get, the more I think we have gone backward by repealing the death penalty for offenses other than homicide. Under the old English common law, nearly all felonies were capital offenses.

Under Ron DeSantis, raping children is now a capital offense in Florida. The Supreme Court may disagree if a case is appealed, but I agree with the law. There are many types of harm that are more damaging than death.

I wish the people who took Pnut and killed him could be banned from employment and public assistance. They should have to beg in front of malls.

They also killed Fred, a raccoon who lived in the house. I understand why Fred had to be taken away, and an argument can be made for killing him. Animals have to be killed in order to be checked for rabies. Raccoons can have rabies without showing symptoms. Squirrels can, too, but there was no evidence Fred had bitten Pnut.

If they absolutely had to kill Fred, so be it, but it seems to me they could have tested him before killing Pnut. If Fred was clean, the odds of Pnut being infected were infinitesimal.

Personally, given the circumstances, had I been the bitten employee, I would have been happy to let Pnut live, take 4 shots for rabies, and face the vanishingly small risk of contracting the disease.

The real question is why things were done the way they were.

Pnut’s owner, Mark Longo, was in the process of getting a permit to keep Pnut as an educational animal. Having been rescued as a tiny orphan on a Manhattan street, Pnut was hopeless as a wild squirrel, so his only chance at survival was to remain a pet. If the paperwork had been allowed to process, Pnut would have been fine. Maybe Fred had to go, but that should have been a separate issue.

Ordinarily, I don’t get upset by shocking stories of cruelty in faraway places, but I was very disturbed by Pnut’s story. I still don’t like reading about it. Longo was extremely attached to him. Pnut was very affectionate to him. He climbed around on Longo and let him kiss him. He wasn’t doing anyone any harm. He brightened people’s days and reminded them of the power and importance of love.

Longo says he was imprisoned in his bathroom for about 5 hours while armed cops and other ethically-challenged stooges searched his house. Over a squirrel and a raccoon he had tried to help. He didn’t have a filthy house full of hoarded animals. He wasn’t making meth. He wasn’t trafficking kids or building bombs. He fed a squirrel and a coon.

I lost a pet three years ago, and it was very traumatic. I had had him for 30 years, and the infection he caught should have been easy to cure. I mismanaged his treatment, and I took him to a vet who turned out to be a quack. The guilt was crushing. I still hate thinking about it. Now Longo blames himself for failing Pnut. I know how that feels. He should not have had to experience this.

Of course, people will say the cops and other government employees were only following orders. The Einsatzgruppen defense. Nobody wants a mean letter in their employment file.

Sometimes when your boss tells you to do something, you’re supposed to refuse and risk discipline. It’s better than disgracing yourself with cowardice at incalculable, irremediable expense to the innocent.

Conservatives are taking up Pnut’s cause. That’s understandable. We’re not the ones who love sending government agents into people’s houses over trivial things. We’re not the ones who took a boy out of his parent’s home and put him in foster care with a pervert because the parents refused to pretend he was a girl. You can find that story if you Google. We’re not the ones who try to block adoptions, condemning desperate children to lives of rejection, because prospective parents exercise their civil rights and own firearms.

Kamala Harris says she wants to send agents into the homes of people who have not committed crimes–that means you and me–to check and see how we store our guns. While they’re committing this egregious, Satanic violation of our civil rights, who knows what else they’ll see that they can use to abuse us? Bibles, maybe. Trump paraphernalia. Gas stoves.

I wish the people who did this could be jailed. All of them. The cops. The animal control people. Every last one of them. They should have to sit in cells and think about the pain they caused for no good reason.

They Should Make a Cargo Drone

Before I start, an amusing remark I heard from the wife. She said she can’t wait to give birth so she can get some sleep.

She really said that.

Also, an update on my friend, whose wife was jailed recently for aggravated stalking, theft, and violating a protective order. Alleged, alleged, alleged. A female judge let her out on $8000 bond yesterday, so $800 out of pocket.

Ridiculous. If you violate a protective order, you break in the victim’s house and steal, you bother his children at school, you steal the ashes of the person who raised him, and you are arrested for stalking, you have violated exactly the type of crimes that warrant pretrial detention. You have shown you have to be physically restrained in order to keep the victim safe. And she’s also ALLEGEDLY a huge flight risk. It took months to find out where she was, and my friend says she was living in Florida while pretending to live in Georgia.

Oh, well. She’ll be incarcerated again soon enough. She has no self-control, so she’ll keep doing things to get the attention of the authorities. I hope they put her away before anyone else gets hurt.

She appears to be the person who called the cops and reported, falsely, that a man resembling her husband was dealing fentanyl from my house. I hope she’ll leave me out of this from now on, because I do not want to end up in a self-defense situation.

People are like bears. Much more dangerous when they have young to protect. You can let a lot of things slide–you can take risks–when you’re the only one in danger. You don’t have as much leeway when your child is threatened.

They let her out on Halloween, a day when servants of Satan celebrate their defeated, infantile, doomed, embarrassing false god. Interesting.

Today I’m thinking about woods maintenance, as I was yesterday. I drilled out the muffler on my Echo CS-590 and added a couple of parts to seal up the air filter. This model has a problem with letting fine particles by, and the general belief is that once they’re in the cylinder, they will cause it to wear.

Is that true? A good threshold question. It sounds like it might be true, but I haven’t seen evidence yet. People argue about it. Wood dust is very soft, so I’m not sure it can pose a threat to rings and cylinders. If it burns while in the cylinder, it turns to carbon, and it’s normal for cylinders to have carbon in them. It sticks to pistons.

It’s not like the saw lets a lot of this stuff in. It’s a tiny amount. If pressed, I would guess that the otherwise-excellent engineers at Shindaiwa, Echo’s parent company, designed their filters better than they needed to be.

Dirt is another matter, because it’s made of stone. I don’t run saws in dusty conditions, however.

Anyway, I stuck the filter kit in the saw, I drilled 6 3/16″ holes in the muffler, and I started trying to tune the saw’s carburetor.

This is an annoying process, because every single expert on Earth starts out his instructions the same way: “Start the saw and let it warm up.”

What if you can’t start the saw?

I can tune a saw which will run, but when the carb is way off, it’s much harder.

My saw was running very well before yesterday, but after I worked on it, I could not keep it running. Then I fiddled with it, and it ran strangely. It took off and revved up on its own. With the carb set differently, it would only rev up to half speed.

Apparently, when a saw changes speed on its own, it’s a sign of an air leak. I decided to remove the air filter changes. I don’t see how an air leak BEFORE the carburetor can matter, but what the heck.

I got it to where it should be tuneable, but then it decided not to start, so I quit. Today may be better.

For a long time, I’ve been looking for a good way to carry saws on my tractor. Back when I had awful debris tines that mounted on the bucket, I could put saws in the bucket. Now that I have a proper fork with no bucket, all I have is a ballast box with a little empty space at the top. If I put a saw in it, the bar will hang out over the edge. Putting two saws in is worse. And there is always the possibility one will fall out.

I can tell you about one product I don’t plan to buy: the Sawhaul chainsaw holder.

It looks like a fine product. You drill holes in your tractor, or you use a U-bolt, to attach the mount. You attach a plastic scabbard to it. You put the saw in, bar down. It’s like a holster.

My big issues are the price and the fact that the scabbard part of the holder is only right for one size bar. The saw’s weight rests on the inside of the tip of the scabbard, to keep the saw body off the mount so it doesn’t get beaten up. If you have a saw that’s too long, it’s going to flop around. If it’s too short, the saw will rest directly on the mount.

Right now I have 16″, 18″, 20″, and 24″ bars.

I don’t think it’s wise to have a heavy saw resting on its tip in a plastic sheath. I would expect it to cut through eventually.

The Sawhaul goes for $180 on Amazon, and it looks like it could be sold profitably for $60. That’s another problem.

These things are typically mounted on the upright portions of front end loaders. Don’t you need that area clear so you can reach the grease zerks? It seems like a flaw.

So let’s forget holster-type mounts. What’s the answer, then?

I was thinking of building a tray for the top of my ballast box. The box is extremely sturdy, and more weight can only improve its performance. But building a tray would be a pain, and it would not be free. Steel is not free, and neither is plywood. Neither are primer, paint, and fasteners. I don’t think I could do it for less than $50. The necessity of spending money and doing hours of work make spending a little more money and avoiding work look good.

My ballast box has a 2″ receiver built into the back. This gave me ideas. I live in an area full of old people, so many vehicles here have cargo carriers on trailer hitch receivers. A cargo carrier is a metal frame around 4 feet long and two feet wide. The structural bits are tubing, and if there is any kind of platform in it, it will usually be made from expanded metal. People here use them to carry mobility carts.

My big issue with virtually every cargo carrier made is that the sides are open. Typically, a cargo carrier will have a thin piece of tubing going around the top, around 4 inches above the bottom. Between the top and bottom, there is space, through which just about anything can fall.

A guy who calls himself Tractor Mike sells a lot of helpful products, and one is the Tractor Caddy. It’s a cargo carrier made from sheet steel, so the sides are mostly closed up. Problem: it’s small. Problem: it doesn’t mount in a receiver; it attaches to a roll-over device, in the way. Big problem: it costs about $350, before shipping. You would have to be nuts to buy this thing.

So what should I do? I’ll tell you, friends. I should buy an aluminum carrier made by Elevate Outdoor. In fact, I did. Amazon is bringing it here for $138, ready to go.

It’s big. It’s set up for a receiver. It holds (allegedly) 500 pounds, or 440 pounds more than I will ever put in it. The sides are solid. It’s aluminum, so it won’t rust. It folds up so my tractor will fit in my shop with the door closed.

The only problem is that the bottom is made of slats, so stuff can fall through. I’ll have to put a sheet of plywood in there, and I’m sure I’ll end up painting it, because that’s how I am. But I already have paint.

If it’s a well-designed product, it will be perfect. I’ll have no trouble putting two saws in it, along with a strap and some tools. Maybe even my helmet and chaps.

There are a lot of really beautiful homemade devices for this purpose. Some guys have outdone the pros by a wide margin. But they spent a lot and did a lot of work. I want to work on the trees, not the tractor. And their solutions lack versatility.

I had an idea for another solution. You cut a piece of goat fencing and lay it across the debris tines to form a floor. You attach it to the tines at the rear. When you need it, flip it down and put stuff on it. When you don’t, flip it up and secure it. In the up position, it keeps things from coming back at you between the tines. Cost: $0. I already have fencing.

The fencing is good because it makes it easy to hold long tools like pole saws.

Maybe I should have gone with fencing. It would only work when the tines were on the tractor, but that’s 90% of the time.

I can always do both. I need fencing to protect me anyway.

I can keep the carrier even if I end up using fencing, because it will fit my car.

Can’t hurt.

Guess I better get out there and cut things.

My Personal Trainer’s Name is Milton

Life here is going extremely well, although I have some concerns about my wife because she holds her belly and sings to it. I am pretty old, I have seen lots of pregnant women, and they have all seemed pretty miserable. My wife isn’t getting the message.

I’m having fun moving hurricane trees. A real whopper flopped in my woods, over the dirt road that goes down the middle of the lot. I would say it’s 80 feet tall, or, more accurately, long. It’s about two feet thick at what used to be waist level. It fell so the crown got stuck in some other trash oaks.

Some of the upper branches hit the ground, and others were caught in the other trees. In a situation like that, it can be impossible to predict what the tree wants to do. Is it firmly stuck at the top end, or is the root ball holding it up? If you cut it, will it do nothing, fall straight down, or fall while rotating? Which end will fall when you cut? Will the tree’s canopy drop, ripping limbs off the other trees? Will the stump end come toward you? Will it go up or down?

Making things worse, this is a V-shaped tree. It has one big trunk and one small one. It fell in the direction of the small trunk, pinning the smaller part of the tree to the ground. The V-shaped base of the tree held the big trunk up so the lowest good place to cut was at waist height. When you cut a nearly-horizontal tree which is three feet off the ground, the part that falls can fall…three feet. With you close at hand.

I have two new chainsaws. I got frustrated with my Echo Timberwolf and the little Jonsered CS2240 I bought in 2017, because I had trouble keeping them running. This year, I bought a Husqvarna 562XP with a 24″ bar, and I just picked up a 50-cc Echo CS-501P with a 16″ bar. The CS-501P usually comes with a longer bar, but I wanted a light, overpowered short saw for bucking. My new saws are commercial saws. The old Echo came with commercial innards for the most part, but it also had some residential-grade stuff, some of which I have replaced.

As you can see, this is a scary tree to cut. If you cut the top end, it could come loose and crush you without warning. If you cut the bottom end, you can’t tell which way it will go. It was surrounded with vines and other trip hazards, making it even more fun.

I will call the big part of the tree “Tree 1” and the small part “Tree 2.” I decided I should try to get most of Tree 2 out from under Tree 1 so Tree 1 would not fall on it and then roll toward me. Using my knowledge of tree behavior, accumulated over 7 years, I cut Tree 2 a couple of yards from the root ball, confident I could keep it from pinching the saw. Which it did, almost immediately.

I had to go back to the house and get the cordless Makita to get it loose. I could not get a wedge into the wood to open it up, so I had to make a second cut close by, while standing nearly under the trunk of Tree 1.

I can’t say enough about the cordless Makita. If you have a lot of trees, you can’t really get by without a gas saw unless you want to buy maybe 8 expensive batteries, but for most jobs, the Makita is fantastic. It has incredible torque, it cuts really fast, it makes no noise, it always starts, and Makita engineered it so it’s very easy to use. You don’t need a scrench to install or adjust chains.

Makita makes top-quality gas saws under the Dolmar name, but they don’t have much of a presence in the US.

If I only had a few chainsaw jobs to do every year, I’d be happy with the Makita and a cordless pole saw.

Well, that’s not true. I’d also want a small gas saw to free the Makita if it got pinched. Which it would.

I got a fair amount of Tree 2 out of there. Tree 1 did not move. I figured the next thing was to cut Tree 1 by the root ball.

I have bucked a lot of fallen trees, and the root balls have pretty much always stayed put. Not so this time.

Guessing that the root ball wasn’t applying any torque to the trunk, I figured the top of the trunk was in compression and the bottom was being pulled. After praying not to die, I cut into the top and made a slot deep enough for a wedge and a chainsaw bar. I pounded a wedge in to keep the cut from closing. Then I bored into the side of the trunk and cut up to the slot I had made. Then I noticed that the wedge was moving deeper into the wood.

The cut was opening, not closing as I had expected. The canopy of the tree was trying to fall.

I ended up going back to the house and leaving the tree alone. I planned to get back on it the next day. The cut was gradually widening, so I didn’t think it was a good idea to poke at it.

When I got back the next day, the trunk was nearly separated from the stump. There was a strap of intact wood under it, holding things together. The stump had rotated upward, and the stump of Tree 2 had inconveniently positioned itself under Tree 1. Tree 1 was resting on it, preventing the trunk of Tree 1 from falling and ripping the strap apart.

I had to get a pole saw and cut the strap. I was not going to be near the tree when it gave up. When the situation resolved, the canopy of the tree fell straight down, so it was no longer hung in other trees. Anyone trying to work under it, thinking it was hung securely, would have been squooshed.

Now I have to start nibbling the tree and moving the bits away from the road. I can keep nibbling until I get close to the stump, and then I’ll get the lowest segment of the trunk off the stump and onto the ground.

I used to burn everything I cut, but I eventually realized it didn’t matter if there was debris in the woods. It goes away in three years, and while it’s there, it doesn’t bother anyone. I plan to put this year’s junk in piles and leave it.

Burning piles of trees is kind of fun, and it makes you feel like you’re doing a good job keeping your land neat, but it’s also a pain. You have to be around to make sure nothing gets out of hand. You have to get permits. You have to put your piles out before a certain time of day, which is not always possible. Sometimes a pile will smolder for several days, and I just count on the condition of the surrounding grass and trees to prevent problems. It’s very hard to start a wildfire in unfavorable conditions. Impossible, really.

I don’t like going to bed knowing something out there is still burning, but it’s either that or stay up all night with the hose and tractor. It’s not unsafe to let things burn, but I can’t help thinking about worst-case scenarios that can’t actually happen.

Since I learned burn permits aren’t needed for piles smaller than 8 feet across, I am making an effort to cut trees in smaller pieces.

I am going to hop up the new CS-501P. I didn’t have a great need to buy it, but my other two small saws have some limitations, and I thought it would be fun to have a better one and increase the power. The Makita is limited by battery life, and the Jonsered is very unpleasant to work on.

I bought a new exhaust deflector. This won’t increase the power much, but it may help heat escape. It’s aluminum. Heat is what kills chainsaws, and their greenie exhaust systems hold it in. Arborists really hate environmentalists. It’s amazing how conservative they are. I can see why, when I think about all the ways environmentalists hinder their work and cost them money.

The saw has a strange removable tube in the muffler, and that’s coming out. This should make a noticeable difference. I think Echo made it removable for this reason. I may also drill some holes in the muffler.

I got myself a decent-quality tachometer. I already had a tach, but I learned the model I got was not considered accurate. Hard to believe, at the high price of $7. When the new saw has gone through a couple of tanks of fuel, and the exhaust stuff is installed, I’ll use the tachometer to check the top speed when the saw is tuned orrectly. When that is done, the saw should be making substantially more power. The dyno guy, referenced below, got something like 15% this way.

I don’t really need to check the top speed. It turns out a tachometer is not really needed to tune a saw. You do it by ear. I didn’t completely understand things when I bought the tachometer. But it should help when checking modifications to see if I’m getting improvement.

I might even open up the cylinder’s ports. I could take this little saw up to 5 horsepower, which would be an increase of about a third. My 60-cc Echo Timberwolf has a bigger engine and only put out 4 horsepower before I changed the carb and timing. My Husqvarna 562XP only produces 4.7, and it pulls a 24″ bar very well.

Does it make sense to soup up a saw when I’m planning to use a 16″ bar? Maybe not. I don’t care.

Actually, it does make sense. Most of the time, I’ll be cutting things under 4″ thick, but it would be convenient to have a light saw that really rips through things a foot across. I would be able to leave the bigger saws in my shop more often.

Adding a couple of pounds to a saw’s weight makes a surprising difference over the course of a job. A little extra weight makes the saw wear you down.

Chainsaw people are nuts. They love modifying their saws. There is a guy on Youtube who built his own chainsaw dynamometer, and he hooked it to a computer. He does modifications and tests the saws before and after. He gets saws to put out 50% or more power than they did from the factory. This stuff is not shade-tree-mechanic ignorance.

The weird thing is that modified pro saws don’t lose reliability or endurance. Reasonable modifications actually make them last longer and make them harder to damage. This is what the professional mechanics say, anyway. They also say homeowner-grade saws are different because they have plastic cases that may not like increased power. A pro saw will always have a metal case.

I will lose my warranty if I modify, but I don’t care about that. Echo is notorious for horrible customer service and weaseling out of warranty obligations, and anyway, I don’t want to leave my saw with a mechanic for 6 weeks. I went a whole summer with a saw in the hands of bad mechanics.

I should be able to fix anything at all that goes wrong. I don’t know if I will ever be able to fix complicated saws with electronics issues, but I can deal with the mechanical things.

I really enjoy cutting wood. I have never been one of those people who look forward to working out, but for a few years, I’ve felt like there was a ball of excess energy inside me. I have gone out and bucked trees just for the sensation of cutting, lifting, and hurling. It’s very odd.

I was cutting yesterday, and I was breathing a little hard. I kept going. I wanted to feel that way.

I started wondering. Was I really experiencing physical strength and energy, or was it all mental and spiritual? What if I was putting my body in danger because it wasn’t as strong as I felt?

Here’s something weird: I don’t get sore after doing this kind of work. I get dehydrated and tired eventually, but the day after I work, I feel great. I am not working out these days, and I’m old. I don’t take medicine to keep me alive. I eat a lot of ice cream. I’m not preparing myself in order to avoid soreness. I don’t know what’s going on.

I hope it lasts.

This type of work makes me lose weight. When I do a lot of wood removal, I can’t keep weight on. May that happen this time as it has in the past. The Ben & Jerry’s weight has to go.

Sometimes the Law Works

A short time ago, I wrote about a friend of mine whose wife is a handful. Today she did him and me a big favor by showing up for a hearing and getting arrested and put away without bond.

I have known my friend for about 16 years. We met in church, where we served on the security team. I am the godfather of his youngest daughter.

His wife has always been an interesting lady. She is extremely emotional, and she seems to think her emotions are the truth and all the justification she needs for doing whatever they tell her to do.

She has offended a lot of people, and I think she has driven people away from her husband.

It looks like she decided she didn’t want him any more. He showed me a handwritten list of poisons and their effects, and he said it was her handwriting. He says she put fentanyl in his closet and called the cops on him. He says she beat herself up in front of their children, called the police, and tried to get him arrested. He says the kids ratted her out, and she got a DV beef and a protective order.

He says she got herself a Christian rapper boyfriend, and the two of them went to my friend’s house and burglarized it, stealing important papers and my friend’s grandmother’s cremated remains. His grandmother raised him, and he adored her.

The burglary took place while the protective order was in place, and he says she also went to their children’s school and bothered them. He says she failed a diversion program that was intended to keep her out of jail. He tells me she lives near me but she tells the courts she lives in Georgia.

He says she has done a lot of horrible things, like claiming his children as dependents while they lived with him. He says she filed for child support in Florida while they both lived in Georgia. It’s bad not to support your kids, but imagine taking money from the parent who is raising them without your help.

A while back, someone told my local police a black man was going in and out of my house, selling fentanyl. My friend is black. I had to call the police and tell them all about her.

Why she thought they would believe a Georgia resident would drive 6 hours repeatedly to sell drugs is beyond me.

He managed to get her served with divorce papers, and his divorce lawyer seems to have decided to network with a prosecutor. Today the divorce case had what I believe was a scheduling hearing. It was set for 9 a.m., and both parties had to attend. At 9:51, I got a text letting me know she was in jail.

You know what? I just looked it up. It was a custody hearing. As for her domestic violence case, there are 6 counts. She got a couple because her husband said she hit and bit him, and the other 4 are child cruelty counts. If you attack your spouse in front of your children, you get one count per child.

It appears the court’s site has not been updated to reflect today’s events.

My understanding is that because she has behaved so badly, she can’t bond out. If so, she is stuck in jail until her trial, which could be pretty far off, depending on the breaks. The web mentions 7 months as a lower limit.

I thought this was pretty slick. I don’t think her attorney appreciated it, however. Imagine strolling into a hearing, thinking you’re going to get a family law judge to help your client abuse the father of her children, and having the cops haul her off to the pokey to be held without bail.

To be clear, there are two cases: civil and criminal. There is a divorce attorney, and there is a prosecutor. My friend’s divorce lawyer and the prosecutor appear to have used the civil case as a tool to advance the criminal case.

The criminal charges and pretrial detention should be extremely helpful to my friend in his divorce. I don’t think I have to explain.

When I heard about the ashes a few weeks back, I knew she had stepped in it. She probably thinks a person’s remains are worthless, so stealing and throwing them out can’t be a crime. Oh, so wrong. Being a for-real lawyer in spite of how I may come across here, I knew there had to be one or more special statutes crafted for people who did rotten things with other people’s remains. I looked it up. I’m not sure which Georgia statute or statutes apply here. Two look applicable. If either applies, stealing and discarding cremated remains is a felony with a minimum sentence of one year. Prison, not jail.

I told my friend fooling with the ashes was likely a felony, and I told him he needed to let his lawyer know.

Today I was told she had been booked for theft. I thought that was wrong, so I sent my friend a link to what I think is the appropriate statute.

Defendants try to plead down, and the worse the initial charges are, the worse the prosecutor’s offer will be. To get meaningful relief and protection for my friend, the prosecutor needs to aim high.

She made a big mistake, pulling this in Georgia. There was a huge scandal there involving a cemetery dumping bodies that were supposed to be buried or cremated, and some people were given the wrong ashes. The legislature tightened things up to provide real punishments.

I am told she was also charged with aggravated stalking.

This is another crime an ignorant person would not think was illegal. “It’s a free country. I can go where I want. I can talk to whoever I want to.” No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, NO. You may not. If you drive another person crazy, it’s a misdemeanor. If you keep doing it, it’s a felony. It appears my friend’s wife did not know this.

It’s terrible to say you were relieved to hear that someone was put in jail, but I certainly was. My friend has gone through things I wouldn’t wish on anyone. He was abused for about 20 years. And then she decided to make his problems my family’s problem, for no clear reason.

Although I admit I wish I had been there to see the cops arrest her, because she seems to have been enjoying playing cat-and-mouse with everyone, I am not interested in seeing her suffer. I am interested in seeing someone put an end to the mistreatment of others, and I would like to go the rest of my life without having any involvement with her, as though she were chained in a hole somewhere on Mars. I want my friend to sleep well at night. I want his kids to be at peace. I want him to marry a nice Christian lady. I don’t want to have concerns about the safety of my family.

I don’t think any violence or additional harassment are headed my way, but it’s unsettling to know an unstable person is willing to drag my family into a mess like this, and I have to consider worst-case scenarios so I will remain prepared.

I bought my first pistol because my sister let me know from rehab that she was going to send her junkie male acquaintances after me. The current situation seems a bit like a replay. And I did nothing to deserve being involved in my friend’s domestic issues.

Back then it was one lonely Glock pistol. Now my default self-defense option is a rifle.

I’m also reminded of another event in my sister’s life. She moved in with my elderly aunt, who is a stroke victim, and made herself a parasite. My aunt could not get rid of her. She said my sister was making her drive her around and buy her groceries from Whole Foods. She said her habits had filled the house with roaches. She said she was verbally abusive. This was back in the covid days, and my aunt said my sister taunted her, saying she couldn’t evict her because of the pandemic. My aunt’s daughter wanted to strangle her.

One day my aunt refused to drive my sister to Whole Foods, and my sister decided to walk, fell in a ditch, and broke her leg very badly. She was there for hours before someone found her.

We all felt terrible for her, and we wondered if we had prayed for her enough.

No, we didn’t! We all felt tremendous relief. The joy of being free of her made whatever sympathy we felt imperceptible.

She had to get surgery and move to a physical rehab place. While she was gone, her things were removed from my aunt’s home without her consent, and the cleanup started.

Should I say this wasn’t a huge blessing? I can’t.

Anyway, my hope that this woman is confined is not about punishment or revenge. If she somehow manages to go on and live a wonderful life that in no way involves my friend or my family, fantastic. As long as my family and I never hear from her again, may she win the Powerball lottery and spend the rest of her life on a yacht tied up in Monaco.

If they can confine her for a couple of years, everyone else in the world will get some needed rest, and maybe she will find other things to do upon her release.

I suppose she’ll get more like a year, but I don’t know much about it. I would think the nature of the stalking charge makes a long period of confinement necessary. A person who violates protective orders in order to stalk is clearly likely to do it again as soon as she’s out.

I would guess her alleged choice not to comply with her diversion conditions will motivate the judge to sentence her to more time than she would otherwise get.

I keep telling my friend that every bad thing she does to him helps him in the end, and it’s true. If she has really done all these things, she has done more for him than the lawyers.

It’s terrible to be the kind of person who only makes people happy when something awful happens to you or when you leave. Multiple nice people have said they hope my friend’s wife dies. That’s how bad it is. Years of prayer and patience appear to have gone nowhere. Her arrest was a huge break for her husband and kids. My sister’s broken leg may have saved my aunt’s life. I honestly believe God put her in that ditch. It happened right after I prayed for relief.

Why not be the kind of person people love to be around? Why not be someone other people miss when you’re gone? It’s not that hard. A lot of people pull it off.

Disturbing Dispatch from Kamalia

Aging actor Dave Bautista has made a career of putting on clingy briefs and performing a fake, somewhat homoerotic wrestling act with other big guys who were not athletic enough to be make it in actual sports. You know what wrestling is like. They put their faces between each other’s legs. They hug each other tight and lie on top of each other. They have to shower each other’s fluids off their bodies.

In order to do this, Bautista took illegal drugs for years. Either that, or he just magically went from a normal weight of maybe 200 pounds to over 300, just by eating lots of chicken and lifting weights. No one else in the history of the world has been able to do this, as photos of pre-steroid professional bodybuilders show, but maybe Dave is the first.

No, he took drugs.

Call it my opinion. Sure.

Anyone involved with natural bodybuilding will tell you you’re not going to put on more than 25 pounds of natural muscle in a year, and you’re not going from 200 to 300 without drugs. A 200-pound man with an exceptional physique will have about 90 pounds of muscle, and he would have to more than double that to hit 300. It does not happen naturally.

He says he is now down to 240. He has really shriveled. I would guess he’s closer to 210, but wrestlers always lie about their size, as he did when he was in the ring. He has a great physique for a man in late middle age who doesn’t take drugs, but he’s not impressive. He’s in the same league as a typical high school basketball player who has been lifting weights for three months.

He gave interviews talking about his struggle to lose weight. That amazes me.

“No matter how tired I am today, I am NOT going to go shoot up with performance-enhancing drugs.”

He appeared in interviews and tried to convince interviewers he had just been fat. Please. Fat with a six-pack and a chest 15″ bigger than his waist.

I don’t think anyone ever looked at Bautista’s enormous steroid muscles and bulging veins and thought, “Man, what a tub.”

Here’s why he quit using drugs: he had to. You can’t keep taking high doses of gym drugs into your sixties and expect to live long. When was the last time you saw Arnold Schwarzenegger with his shirt off? There is a reason. Look up the things prolonged drug use does to bodybuilders.

Now Bautista has made a campaign ad. It was styled as a comedy sketch, but it’s clearly an ad. Leftist men are generally less masculine than conservative men, and it’s something leftist women complain about a lot. It’s not something that can be disputed.

Until pretty recently, I thought that, while effeminate men are definitely more likely to be leftists, the “soy boy” thing was exaggerated. But the more I see, the more I think it’s not that far from the truth.

When you look at Antifa assault videos, it’s hard not to notice all the long, spindly limbs and 34″ chests. There are a lot of them.

Kamala Harris is unpopular with men, and that even extends to black men, whom you would expect to give her blind support. So Bautista made an ad in which he does weird exercises, including hitting a tire with a hammer, while using the popular term for women’s private parts to describe Donald Trump. The idea appears to be that a guy who used to get overly intimate with other men for money, while wearing briefs and flexing drug muscles, is more manly than Donald Trump.

Just to compare:

1. Bautista pretended to fight other men in fake, choreographed matches with predetermined outcomes while using drugs because his natural muscles were too small to get him the job, and claiming to be at least two inches taller than he really was, and

2. Donald Trump got shot in the ear with an AR-15, and when the Secret Service tried to remove him from the stage, and he had blood running down his face, and there was no way to know whether more shots were coming, he refused to leave, forced his face out into the open, pumped his fist, and yelled, “FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!”

Meanwhile, a man near Trump had his brains blown all over his family by another round, and three other men were shot and survived.

Which one proved he was a real man?

Here are a couple of photos so you can decide which person you think is more of a man:

There’s Trump, shot, bloody, and insisting on exposing himself to more fire so he can encourage and comfort his base. And there is Bautista, crossdressing in a pantsuit, a low-cut top, and pearls. Without his steroid muscles. He will probably continue to shrink. Drug muscles don’t vanish entirely overnight.

A cruel Internet commenter said, “He looks like if Jeff goldblum and RuPaul had a 60-year-old baby.” Another said he looked like a gay realtor.

Bautista made the video with the help of Jimmy Kimmel, one of worst TDS sufferers on television. Kimmel has decided to be the voice of outraged decency, which is pretty strange, given his history as second banana on The Man Show, which featured a segment called “Girls on Trampolines” and skits in which Kimmel appeared in blackface as basketball player Karl Malone.

In the trampoline segments, women wearing things like bathing suits and just plain underwear jumped high in the air and spread their legs at the cameras.

The Malone skits mocked Malone as an ignorant black ghetto figure with a subnormal IQ. Not that there could have been any racist intent.

Here is Kimmel doing the kind of thing the liberal press has been helping him to bury for the last 21 years:

That’s about 50 times worse than the act that got Al Franken kicked out of the Senate. I think Franken should have gotten off with an apology, but what Kimmel did may amount to a sex offense.

What would you do if you caught him doing that to your mother?

Where is the outraged decency? Where are the tears and remorse? Aren’t liberal celebrities supposed to vanish into rehab after doing things like this? Shouldn’t he have come back and said, “This is not who I am”?

He drank a lot of beer on the show, so maybe he doesn’t remember doing this. Surely the explanation isn’t hypocrisy.

Kamala herself made an ad that featured the kind of men leftists think are masculine. She wants to prove real men support her.

I’m sure you’ve seen it. A morbidly obese guy feeding chickens and saying he eats carburetors. A scrawny old homeless-looking person with his sleeves torn off, standing near someone else’s motorcycle and tool cart for XY cred. A man who is pretty clearly gay but seated on the tailgate of a pickup truck, proving he loves the ladies.

Actually, the carburetor guy also seems gay. He has a strong lisp, which is something you don’t see a lot in straights.

Two of the guys say they drink single-barrel bourbon, neat. I don’t get that at all. There are probably 500,000 homosexual men in America who lisp and prance, can’t throw a ball or lift a suitcase, and drink over a fifth of hard liquor a day. When I was a kid, the old Irish lady who lived next door to me used to turn up tumblers of pure vodka and empty them.

She could throw a ball, though. Even when drunk.

Why would Democrats equate manliness with drinking hard liquor? Are they in the eighth grade or what? They remind me of my friends and me, in high school, counting the beers we drank between classes. We were not manly. We were little idiots.

Maybe Kamala is manly. She slurs her words all the time. My personal opinion is that they’re covering up a serious drinking problem. If not, maybe she has a neurological disease.

The stuff about motorcycles and carburetors seems like the sort of thing Democrats usually call sexist. Can’t women fix carburetors and motorcycles?

Today my wife and I saw two huge lesbians on Harleys, blasting up Highway 475 in matching T-shirts. Really loud pipes. I guess they’re manly enough to vote for Kamala.

I notice the Kamalians didn’t bring guns into the mix. Some shrill lady on the diverse writing team with no straight white males must have vetoed that.

Anyway, Bautista is nuts, and I suspect he it will not be long before he outs himself. He has married twice and had kids, but you can’t wear an outfit like that unless something is amiss. Or someone is a miss.

Burning Stuff Shouldn’t be This Hard

I got up today with the intention of getting myself a burn permit. I must have 20 tons of tree parts already in piles.

Figured I was prepared. I had my customer number for the forestry people. I knew I had to call before noon. The weather was okay.

Called with plenty of time left. I thought. They told me I had to call by 10 a.m.

Now what do I do with the day?

It seems like they used to give permits more easily. I used to call in the morning and sail right through. Then they said I had to call by noon. They said I had to take a class and get a special status in order to be able to burn under certain conditions. Now I have to call by 10 a.m.

I miss the days before I knew about permits. I went outside, set the pile on fire, and that was that. I never got caught, even when I accidentally set my pasture on fire.

It’s too bad downed oaks are worthless, because God has blessed me with thousands of oaks. They’re useless for lumber and furniture. They make fine firewood and smoker fuel, but the supply is so great, no one wants them.

The types of oak I have rot pretty fast outdoors, so even though they would make very strong posts and boards, they wouldn’t last. Indoors, furniture made from them wouldn’t look very good, and they’re so hard, they’re tough on tools.

I also have a fair number of sweet gums. It’s a second-tier furniture wood, and Asians like to make chopsticks from it. No one wants it, though. It’s supposed to be terrible for smoking. Some people claim it’s toxic.

My latest chainsaw is on the way. I thought I might get out and cut some more wood this weekend, but the saw won’t be here until Monday, and if I use my old saw now, I won’t get to use the new one for much. Also, the burn piles are immense, so I would like to stop adding to them until at least one is clear.

I guess this will be a good day to remove the remaining bits of trash that could obstruct the mower. Then I can replace the mower’s exhaust pipe. Tomorrow, I could mow. My yard looks like a jungle.

I’m looking forward to having the election over with. Biden is basically a retiree, the country is on autopilot, Harris and Walz keep making fools of themselves, and it’s starting to look like Trump will win. If he does, I expect a lot of violence from leftists, who are much more hateful and immature than conservatives. I would like to see that behind us.

Today I saw Kamala say something truthful. That makes it a special day for me.

Christians showed up at a Harris rally. They were protesting the murder of the unborn. Harris was speaking, and a man shouted, “JESUS IS LORD!”, which is true. And Jesus hates abortion.

Harris was talking about walking Trump’s progress backward and making it easier to turn women’s uteruses into murder scenes. The man shouted during a pause, when the room was quiet. He could be heard clearly.

Harris said, “Oh, you guys are at the wrong rally.” She said she thought they had meant to go to a Trump rally close by, which she described as “smaller.” Of course, Trump was in another state so he could go to the Al Smith dinner, which she skipped, perhaps out of the same cowardice that keeps her from doing interviews.

She grinned. She thought her remark was funny.

She was correct about the protestors, though. A Harris rally is no place for Christians. The Democrats openly opposed God and Israel in a voice vote at their convention years ago, they elected Obama, who was very hard on Israel and promoted perversion, and they treat the unborn like unwanted warts.

No Christian has a good excuse to be a Democrat. They have excuses. Just not good ones.

If you vote for Kamala, you’re voting for perversion, the murder of unborn children, antisemitism, racism, rioting, shoplifting, and the persecution of Christians. Those are major issues. Fake Christians who refuse to vote for Trump complain about his personality and his sexual history. That’s ridiculous. Yeshua himself is not running for president. We don’t have an ideal candidate. We have to avoid the worst choice we have, and that choice is Harris.

It’s not just Harris. It’s the flood of demonized Harris appointees that will follow, including EVERY FEDERAL JUDGE. She will appoint judges that support the castration and skinning of confused minors going through phases. They will support abortion up to and possibly past the point of birth. They will persecute Christians. They will empower Muslim terrorists.

Both parties serve Satan to a large degree, but the problem is much, much worse on the Democrat side.

Even though I hope Trump is reelected, I still believe America is finished. Evangelism is pretty much dead here. The perverts have won; even Fox uses incorrect pronouns. Young people are awful, and they are the ones who will take our places. In the future, unless the rapture comes, the vast majority of Americans will be arrogant, cruel, Yeshua-hating, antisemitic, witchcraft-loving, feminized, dishonest, shallow, useless people.

Privacy is a thing of the past. With the advances in surveillance and artificial intelligence, free will is disappearing. Immigrants from horrible places are piling in and having huge families. Nearly all churches where the Holy Spirit is acknowledged are run by greedy, heartless pimps and whores who enslave people with the prosperity gospel. The other churches promote anal sex but not holiness.

It’s not going to get better.

Christians are going to be marginalized more and more. We will be impoverished and silenced. Attacks on Jews will be tolerated and encouraged.

We chose all this. The people who came before us chose Satan over Yeshua, they raised us in their stupidity and immaturity, we are worse than they were, and the nation has continued to deteriorate.

These days, I spend a lot of time resting in God’s presence. I don’t do it just because I want him to do good things for me. I do it because I want to take breaks from this stinking, corrupted world. It’s like cracking the door to heaven and sticking your nose in. I keep begging God to bring the rapture and tribulation and put an end to this culture.

I hope it happens quickly, because otherwise, my children have no future on their own planet. They’ll live in little Christian bubbles smaller than mine.

America was wonderful. We didn’t understand what we had. The lack of persecution was extraordinary, and it was combined with extreme wealth, power, and safety. Those things are disappearing. Living here will be like living in two-tier England, where Christianity is broadly hated and Christians are seen as troublemakers and parasites.

When America is gone, there will be no big, rich, Christian country to run to. Every single large nation will belong to Satan.

The world has two big continents: the Americas and Africa/Europe/Asia. Then there is Australia, which is lost. There is no fourth land mass we can run to in order to establish a Christian society.

The filth of the coming world is disturbing to think about. The whole world will be like the most degenerate cultures we now have.

Consider “Palestine.” They hack suspected Israel-sympathizers to death and leave their body parts on display in the marketplaces. They have children’s shows where they tell kids to murder Jews. The filthiest kinds of terrorists have called their parents during massacres to show off the blood on their hands, and the parents have been transported with joy and pride.

Think of Afghanistan, where the rape of boys is considered normal. It’s a country so savage, it’s not worth trying to save. They murder the people who try to help them, just like the Somalis.

Consider Nigeria, where Muslims are so dangerous, you need multiple armed escorts in order to get around. Think of North Korea, where intelligent, hard-working people drop dead on the streets and rot, starved and full of worms.

Then there’s Central America, where drug dealers skin people alive, and the people support them.

Left to themselves, human beings are almost as bad as demons, and the majority of us have decided to be left to ourselves. There is no limit to the depravity we can embrace.

The other day, I read about government employees in Maryland, removing a young man from his parents home, permanently, because they refused to support his “trans” delusion. The parents are Christians. I was so discouraged, I prayed for God to kill the government employees.

Thousands of times, I have prayed for God to reach vile, cruel people and correct them. When I read about this kid, and I thought about him being castrated and pumped full of drugs by people full of demons, I couldn’t find the patience to ask God to turn them around. Just kill them. They can’t be reached with persuasion. They will do too much harm if they are allowed to live, and what they are doing is an atrocity.

What will I do when the demonized run Florida, my son goes through a feminine phase, and clown-haired stooges with unlimited authority drag him off to have his penis sliced down the middle, hollowed out, and turned into a fake clitoris in a stinking, never-healing hole that grows fungus and bacteria? Shooting them won’t help. I’ll go to prison, and they’ll send more stooges. Suing won’t help. The judges will be on their side. If it happens, I’ll just sit and pray and wish God would take both of us.

I understand why Yeshua, the God who is love itself, is going to return and massacre people. The Bible says his robe will be wet with their blood. I get it. Enough is enough. It’s better than letting this mess deteriorate to the point where life is utterly pointless. Saving new souls is important, but the reality is that human beings have limited value. A person is worth more than many sparrows, but it’s better that people die and go to hell than to have them remain alive and torment the people God loves without significant resistance.

God has killed millions of people, so no Christian should be upset when someone says he will do it again. He told us he’s going to do it.

He created hell and the lake of fire. Satan didn’t do these things. He couldn’t, and besides, the lake of fire is his future home for eternity.

One of the main purposes of these places is to keep the irredeemable away from the rest of us. Heaven can’t be heaven if they aren’t confined and forgotten, and the Messianic Age can’t take place unless fallen angels and demons are removed.

Regarding the apocalypse, I don’t want to see people suffer. I just want evil people to be defeated and kept away from God’s children. I have very little energy left to deal with them. Unfortunately, death and hell are the only permanent solutions. We can’t get permanent relief unless a lot of people die and go to hell. They will not change.

There is a blessing in knowing and being close to a totally worthless, hateful, destructive person who brings misery to everyone around her and makes it impossible for them to relax and thrive. It teaches you that God was right to create hell and the lake of fire. It makes you realize people eventually have to have relief, regardless of what the worthless have to suffer.

Most Christians never learn this lesson. They learn that Yeshua wants us to pray for our enemies, but they don’t pay much attention to the scriptures about turning people over to Satan or refusing to eat with them.

Yeshua never chased anyone. Have you noticed that? He showed up and invited people. He showed them God’s goodness and power by supernatural means. That’s it. When they turned him down, he left without hesitation.

He left most of the Jewish people behind at about 33, knowing hell would swallow them by the millions. He knew Jerusalem would be sacked, the temple would be destroyed, and the people would be dispersed for 2,000 years.

He could have stayed until he was as old as Methuselah, begging and cajoling. The priests had no power to arrest him. He turned himself over to them and chose to be crucified.

Would he have let a worthless son live in his house for 50 years and abuse him? Would he have enabled a junkie or a gambler? Would he have sold his house to pay the son’s creditors or bookies? Of course not. God can’t be manipulated. This is the real meaning of, “Thou shalt not put the Lord thy God to the test.”

I curse the Harris campaign, literally, as often as I remember to do it, but a Trump victory would be like giving a terminal cancer patient Tylenol. Better than nothing, but no solution.

Incidentally, I learned something interesting about the diaspora. Solomon caused it.

Solomon was a failure and a disgrace. He was also a hypocrite. People talk about him as though he were nearly a god, and he wrote part of the Bible, but he was a curse to Israel.

God told Solomon that if he or his people turned away, the people would be driven out of the promised land. A lot of people think the Jews were driven out because the people turned on God, but according to scripture, Solomon’s rebellion, by itself, was sufficient to invoke the curse.

Look at this scripture from 1 Kings 9:

But if ye shall at all turn from following me, ye or your children, and will not keep my commandments and my statutes which I have set before you, but go and serve other gods, and worship them:

Then will I cut off Israel out of the land which I have given them; and this house, which I have hallowed for my name, will I cast out of my sight; and Israel shall be a proverb and a byword among all people:

And at this house, which is high, every one that passeth by it shall be astonished, and shall hiss; and they shall say, Why hath the Lord done thus unto this land, and to this house?

And they shall answer, Because they forsook the Lord their God, who brought forth their fathers out of the land of Egypt, and have taken hold upon other gods, and have worshipped them, and served them: therefore hath the Lord brought upon them all this evil.

That’s really interesting. I wonder why no one teaches it.

Solomon praised God before the people, but all the while, he was sacrificing to fallen angels who literally stink. It looks like he, singlehandedly, assured that the Jews would lose Israel.

Look at the people we elect. And somehow many of us think we will never lose America.

Hobbies Look so Different When You’re Old

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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They upgraded me to 2nd-day air, no charge! Wow.

Should I feel guilty? I can do my yard-clearing without this saw. I hope I didn’t prevent someone in the Big Bend or the west coast from getting it.

Is There Anything it Can’t do?

The last couple of days have been pretty good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I can also practice law.

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

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

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

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

Two new plugs are on the way from Amazon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good knives are fun. Concealed carry is fun.

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

I feel like buying another rifle.

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

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

Some of You May be Guilty of Felonies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can find his video if you look.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You Will Eat the Entire Thing

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

Here is the recipe.

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

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

This is for a big nonstick bread pan.

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

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

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

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

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

Smaller loaf for 1.5-pound pan:

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

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

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

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

Is Florida the New California?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is what the commenter said:

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

I will respond.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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