Current Events are Shocking

I think we should be grateful for the bizarre, outrageous wave of attacks on Tesla vehicles, businesses, and owners. They are showing us the true state of the world, and by that, I mean they are showing everyone, not just Christians who already knew, that leftists are now just like prewar Nazis in Austria and Germany, literally ready to kill decent people as soon as they get permission. They are showing us demonic control in action on a broad scale.

I still remember when Teslas were for Birkenstock-wearing, vegan, baby-killing leftists who wanted to put an end to fossil fuels and just about every other good thing in the world. That was what? Five years ago? Now leftists kooks have decided anyone who owns a Tesla is a Nazi, so they’re vandalizing vehicles, bombing dealerships, and burning charging stations.

It’s so weird. How can you be against fossil fuel and against Tesla? MOST EV’s on the American road are Teslas, and even now, new Teslas make up about 44% of new EV’s. If you’re a real soy-eating, mRNA-sucking, Caucasian-baiting leftist, and you hate petroleum products, how can you be against the people who drive most of the cars you’re trying to force on humanity?

Needless to say, a lot of leftists are now committing crimes against other leftists. More liberals than conservatives own Teslas, and it’s not like every Tesla-owning leftist in the US had his car crushed on January 20. They’re still driving them. Buying a new car is expensive. You can’t expect your fellow leftists to switch instantly.

Some prominent leftists are bragging that they sold their Teslas. How does that help their cause?

Let’s assume that selling your Tesla somehow harms Elon Musk, which it does not, but let’s assume. Someone else is going to drive it! It will still be on the road! The person who buys it will still have to pay Musk for support, repairs, and parts. All you’ve done is protect yourself from other kooks in your own camp.

If it’s wrong to drive a Tesla, it’s wrong to sell one. Just saying.

If you really want to make a statement, have your Tesla crushed. Why should you make money selling someone a car, the very existence of which is somehow evil? You should be willing to lose tens of thousands of dollars to reduce the amount of evil in the world. Isn’t selling a Tesla just like selling an assault rifle? It won’t get rid of it.

Oops…what about the environmental damage crushing a Tesla would do? Some things would be recycled. Steel, for example. But since other cars would surely replace all the crushed Teslas, all sorts of energy and other resources would go into making them and putting them on the road. All things held equal, keeping an old car running is better for Mother Gaia than making a new one.

I wonder how many leftists who drive Teslas vandalize Teslas. Given the extreme, shameless hypocrisy of the left, I’m sure they’re out there.

A nut forced a woman to pull over, reached into her window, and beat her. Another nut hit a guy in the face and knocked his MAGA hat off because he went to a Tesla protest and stood on a sidewalk. It’s not enough to damage cars. People are now in the crosshairs.

One of the strangest things about Tesla vandals is that they are too stupid to realize Teslas bristle with cameras, so the criminals end up recording themselves for the police. To me, this makes sense, because if they were informed individuals, they would not be leftists. If you get your political beliefs and history from Tiktok, and you end up knowing virtually nothing a person with a high school education should know, nobody should be surprised when you vandalize a car with 9 cameras, after dozens of other people have been exposed on the Internet in Tesla videos.

Politicians–the people we elect to maintain order–are pushing the Tesla Takedown movement, without specifying what “take down” means. That’s astonishing. They are telling the masses to “take down” Elon Musk as well. Elon Musk. A person. Telling the public to take down an individual is essentially the same thing as telling them to beat him up or worse.

How would you like to be one of Musk’s many children right now? They’re targets, and I’m sure they know it. How would you like to be a child and be afraid to go outside without armed guards? How would you like to be a child and know that innumerable faceless cowards wanted to kill your dad?

This is the red horseman of the apocalypse in action. He is revving the left up like a dragster’s engine, getting them ready to commit battery, murder, theft, rape, and arson all over the world.

When you take part in a drag race, you don’t sit at idle and then hit the gas when the light turns green. You rev the motor up and drop the clutch so the tires start turning immediately. That’s what Satan is doing to his minions.

Most people on the conservative side don’t understand the mindset of their foaming-at-the-mouth adversaries. They don’t understand that many leftists are completely filled with blind rage that can’t be reasoned away. They don’t understand that these people are subject to vile impulses they can’t control. They have led lives of perversion and other sins, and over the years, demons have trained them to obey. When they have opportunities to hurt conservatives, whites, and Christians, demons dig the spurs in, and often, leftists can’t hold back.

Years ago, God told me, “The hate is already here.” He meant that the Kristallnacht-style fury that would eventually drive leftists and Muslims and perverts to commit unspeakable acts of cruelty was already in place. The only thing left is for the restraints to be loosed.

Blood is going to run in the streets. It’s going to be horrible.

These people will not be able to control themselves. Conservatives don’t understand that. The best of them are borderline insane, the rest are legitimately unhinged, and there is no limit to what emotional impulses that come from demons will drive them to do.

There was a Nazi officer who threw live Jewish babies into a pit full of burning bodies and wood. Hamas terrorists beheaded and burned babies, and one group mutilated a woman while they one of them was actively raping her. Cruelty driven by demons is restrained only by imagination and the laws of physics.

Before too long, the whole world will look like October 7, and the people doing the damage will be proud, just like the Muslims who sent their friends and relatives videos showing what they had done to innocent Jews.

Even Mormons Can do This

I just watched an interesting video from a Youtube channel called “SO BE IT!” It’s a Messianic channel from Israel. The people who run it go around trying to convince Jews to accept Yeshua. It’s a nice channel, but I have not seen them win anyone over.

Their low rate of success is not surprising to me, because they rely on a natural tool, not supernatural ones. They rely on debate.

Debate does not bring people to Yeshua unless it is accompanied by action from the Holy Spirit. We know from the Bible that our faith in God is a supernatural gift. The Bible also says no man can please God in the flesh. You can’t decide to be a Christian your own and pull it off without supernatural help. To be an actual Christian, you have to receive faith and revelation from the Holy Spirit.

Yeshua said something interesting about the Jews of his time, and it applies to Gentiles as well. He told the story of a beggar named Lazarus, who lived outside a rich man’s house. Both men died. Lazarus went to be with Abraham in the underworld to wait for Yeshua to free them, and the rich man went to be tormented. The rich man asked Abraham to send Lazarus to talk to his brothers to keep them out of hell, and Abraham said, that if they didn’t believe Moses and the prophets, they wouldn’t be convinced if a man came back from the dead.

Abraham was talking about Yeshua and another man named Lazarus, not to mention the people who rose from the grave in Jerusalem on the day of the crucifixion. Yeshua raised the second Lazarus from the dead (John 11), and the religious Jews plotted to kill Lazarus, even though Yeshua was the one who raised him, and he pretty clearly did it by God’s power. Yeshua himself was raised from the dead later. Most Jews didn’t believe either of them, and the people who arrested and beat the Messiah and had him tortured to death were Jews. As Yeshua said, they were like their fathers, who murdered the prophets.

Yeshua worked all sorts of miracles, prophesied, and proved religious leaders woefully (literally woefully, because woe followed) wrong about doctrine, but most Jews didn’t listen, because they did not receive supernatural illumination. They let their natural minds and emotions–the flesh–rule them, and the flesh isn’t equipped to believe in Yeshua. It is, however, equipped to believe in rules that turn religion into a game where the goal is to score the most points.

In the video I saw, a Messianic was talking to a chassid about Yeshua, and it started to be obvious that the chassid followed the Lubavitcher Rebbe, a famous rabbi who died a long time ago and was believed by many to be a “candidate” (odd term) for Messiah. The Messianic asked the chassid if he was part of Chabad, the Rebbe’s organization, and he said he was.

Chabad is interesting, because part of its mission is to prevent Jews from accepting Yeshua. They have a sort of script they follow, composed of arguments “proving” he can’t be the one. It’s all argument, not divine revelation and not miracles or prophecy, so it’s very much like the things the video’s creators say to Jews they want to reach. Flesh against flesh.

The Rebbe was mythologized while he lived. There were a lot of stories about his genius. Some people who have looked into it claim he was just a very smart guy, not the Einstein-level intellect some would say he was.

He was a civil engineer, and skeptics say he didn’t accomplish anything out of the ordinary before he quit to become a rabbi. Civil engineers design parking lots and overpasses. They’re not Tesla-grade engineers whose accomplishments rival those of great scientists. How brilliant can an overpass be?

When I was in school, electrical engineers were at the top of the engineering heap in terms of brains, but maybe that has changed as computer science has evolved. Anyway, you’re never going to see a civil engineer win a Fields Medal or Nobel in any field.

Christianity doesn’t tout Yeshua’s secular accomplishments, because there probably weren’t any. We believe he was a handyman, or tekton. Amos was a vinedresser. David was a shepherd. You don’t have to be Isaac Newton to be a great man of God.

The Rebbe was Chabad’s Great Jewish Hope RE Messiahhood, but he died, and his body rotted. This should have ended his candidacy, because Jews are very firm in their believe that the Messiah can’t die before he fulfills his mission. They also say the Messiah can’t be divine, because that would be idolatry. Mainstream Orthodox Jews say Yeshua can’t be the Messiah and that anyone who accepts him is a “Christian of Jewish birth.” No longer Jewish. “Canceled.”

A big problem arose when some Chabadniks started worshiping the dead Rebbe, davening at his burial site. Some said he was going to be resurrected, but that didn’t happen. Now, some Chabadniks are claiming he’s not in the tomb. They say he is alive, and his father-in-law is buried there. So he is about to turn 123, presumably in good health. And for some reason, he is hiding himself like Howard Hughes.

In any case, a little Googling suggests that a big percentage of Chabadniks now think Schneerson is the Messiah. And some believe this even though they also admit he’s dead. They think he will come back to life to resume his mission, bringing about the Messianic Age.

This is all problematic for religious Jews who insist Yeshua is not the Messiah because he died without completing his mission. If this rules out Yeshua, it rules Schneerson out, too.

What about praying to a dead man? Catholics do that, and it’s clearly idolatry. It attributes divinity to human beings other than the Messiah. Isn’t praying to Schneerson a confession of his divinity? If so, isn’t it idolatry by accepted Jewish beliefs? See Saul and Samuel.

If Schneerson can come back, why can’t Yeshua?

I’m sure defensive arguments have been constructed since Schneerson’s deification. I know that much about human nature. I promise you, they exist. I don’t know what they are.

So now, for some people, the argument isn’t over whether the Messiah is divine or has died or can be resurrected; it’s over which divine, deceased Messiah can be resurrected to fulfill his mission. Very strange.

The book of Daniel appears to predict that the Messiah will come before the destruction of the Second Temple, which was wiped out by the Romans quite a while before Schneerson was born in 1902. I’m sure there is an argument to the contrary.

Yeshua worked a lot more miracles than Schneerson is claimed to have worked. Yes, they say Schneerson worked and is working miracles. People say he appears to them. Like Mary among the Catholics. Mary isn’t the Messiah or co-Messiah or God. She sinned. She had sex. The Bible shows she had at least 5 children, because Yeshua had at least two brothers and at least two sisters. People aren’t supposed to worship her or listen to spirits that appear and pretend to be her. A spirit appeared to Mohammed, and look how that worked out.

A claim that Schneerson appeared and did something miraculous certainly seems like a claim of divinity.

Anyway, I’m a lot more impressed by the miracles of Yeshua. He created enough wine for several people to bathe in. He healed every kind of illness, openly before crowds. The apostles healed lots of people in public, and some still do.

It’s all pretty interesting, but no one will pay any attention to what I say unless the Holy Spirit comes to them and opens their eyes. God could kill me, raise me from the dead, and have me tap dance in their living rooms, and it wouldn’t matter.

Often I have wondered why preachers and other Christians prevented me from getting anywhere when I tried to be helpful in churches, and I have wondered why God didn’t clear a path for me to reach people after giving me so much to tell them. Today it occurred to me that there comes a time when God’s big priority is saving the people he has instead of adding to their numbers.

I thought of the ark. God didn’t give Noah a powerful ministry and send hundreds of thousands of people to hear him and be converted. He told Noah to save his family while he drowned everyone else. Methuselah and Lamech died the year the flood came, so they didn’t drown. It was as if God waited until they were gone.

In any case, Noah probably could not have had a great ministry, because the people of his time were like today’s people. Arrogant, cruel, idolatrous, greedy, libidinous, and so forth. There was no way to reach them. Had their been, the flood would have been canceled.

People are very angry and cruel now, and that leads to provocation. Provocation is a form of temptation, and the Bible calls the tribulation (not the entire apocalypse) the hour of temptation that will come on the whole world. Surely God will take his people out of here before we are pushed so hard we become as vindictive and cruel as the people around us. We are already considerably more like them than we used to be.

Corn Flakes Won’t Pour from Barbie Boxes

Today I saw an exciting video in which a preacher said inflation was a punishment found in the Bible.

I had never thought of it that way, but of course, he is right. While I was watching, God told me inflation is a form of famine, and we all know famine is a punishment for disobedience.

And there was a great famine in Samaria: and, behold, they besieged it, until an ass’s head was sold for fourscore pieces of silver, and the fourth part of a cab of dove’s dung for five pieces of silver.

I don’t call famine “famine” when I pray. I call it “lack,” because that’s the fundamental issue. You can lack without having a famine or drought.

If you want to see inflation and lack in action, buy some cereal. The boxes are so thin, the cereal won’t come out. The sides of the boxes press against it and hold it in.

Today I measured a box. They used to be about 3″ thick. The box I measured was 1-3/4″ thick. That’s a huge difference.

When I left the disgusting open-air septic tank known as Miami, and all of its trashy, hateful people, a choice rib eye cost $10 per pound. Now I regularly see them on sale for $16. On sale, not the regular price.

The egg situation is beyond belief. I paid $13.49 for 18 extra-large eggs a while back. My wife threw them in the cart without looking at the price. Who expects eggs to cost so much you have to look at prices? But that’s where we are now. Thankfully, they’re under $10 this week.

Lack is an apocalyptic curse. It comes with death and violence.

People think the red horseman represents war. That’s wrong. It’s not what the Bible says. It says, “power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword.” That isn’t limited to war between nations. It includes putting on black pajamas and attacking conservatives who hold prayer meetings. It includes hitting Tesla drivers. It includes threatening Jewish businesses in America because Jews in another country are fighting against genocide.

The horseman of death–the pale or green horseman–comes with fatal diseases, among other things. Biological plagues. Not all plagues are biological, because the word “plague” doesn’t mean “disease.” It means any widespread ill that overtakes a nation. The Egyptians suffered 10 plagues, but only one was a disease.

Lack is the black horseman, and the green horseman helps him along, or at least biological plagues do. I suppose a disease that hits plants or animals is not really in the green horseman’s lane, since it appears he is sent to kill human beings. Anyway, we are experiencing lack partly because of diseases.

Until today, I was the only person I had ever known to remind others that invasion by illegal aliens was a curse. The preacher spoke about it. It’s not just the illegals that cause problems. Legal immigrants cause trouble, too. Look at Europe, which is continually tormented and largely controlled by a 7th-century religion concocted by a filthy savage. Look at this passage from Deuteronomy 28:

The stranger that is within thee shall get up above thee very high; and thou shalt come down very low.

He shall lend to thee, and thou shalt not lend to him: he shall be the head, and thou shalt be the tail.

Maybe I should just repost all of the chapter.

And it shall come to pass, if thou shalt hearken diligently unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe and to do all his commandments which I command thee this day, that the Lord thy God will set thee on high above all nations of the earth:

2 And all these blessings shall come on thee, and overtake thee, if thou shalt hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God.

3 Blessed shalt thou be in the city, and blessed shalt thou be in the field.

4 Blessed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy ground, and the fruit of thy cattle, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep.

5 Blessed shall be thy basket and thy store.

6 Blessed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and blessed shalt thou be when thou goest out.

7 The Lord shall cause thine enemies that rise up against thee to be smitten before thy face: they shall come out against thee one way, and flee before thee seven ways.

8 The Lord shall command the blessing upon thee in thy storehouses, and in all that thou settest thine hand unto; and he shall bless thee in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.

9 The Lord shall establish thee an holy people unto himself, as he hath sworn unto thee, if thou shalt keep the commandments of the Lord thy God, and walk in his ways.

10 And all people of the earth shall see that thou art called by the name of the Lord; and they shall be afraid of thee.

11 And the Lord shall make thee plenteous in goods, in the fruit of thy body, and in the fruit of thy cattle, and in the fruit of thy ground, in the land which the Lord sware unto thy fathers to give thee.

12 The Lord shall open unto thee his good treasure, the heaven to give the rain unto thy land in his season, and to bless all the work of thine hand: and thou shalt lend unto many nations, and thou shalt not borrow.

13 And the Lord shall make thee the head, and not the tail; and thou shalt be above only, and thou shalt not be beneath; if that thou hearken unto the commandments of the Lord thy God, which I command thee this day, to observe and to do them:

14 And thou shalt not go aside from any of the words which I command thee this day, to the right hand, or to the left, to go after other gods to serve them.

15 But it shall come to pass, if thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe to do all his commandments and his statutes which I command thee this day; that all these curses shall come upon thee, and overtake thee:

16 Cursed shalt thou be in the city, and cursed shalt thou be in the field.

17 Cursed shall be thy basket and thy store.

18 Cursed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy land, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep.

19 Cursed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and cursed shalt thou be when thou goest out.

20 The Lord shall send upon thee cursing, vexation, and rebuke, in all that thou settest thine hand unto for to do, until thou be destroyed, and until thou perish quickly; because of the wickedness of thy doings, whereby thou hast forsaken me.

21 The Lord shall make the pestilence cleave unto thee, until he have consumed thee from off the land, whither thou goest to possess it.

22 The Lord shall smite thee with a consumption, and with a fever, and with an inflammation, and with an extreme burning, and with the sword, and with blasting, and with mildew; and they shall pursue thee until thou perish.

23 And thy heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under thee shall be iron.

24 The Lord shall make the rain of thy land powder and dust: from heaven shall it come down upon thee, until thou be destroyed.

25 The Lord shall cause thee to be smitten before thine enemies: thou shalt go out one way against them, and flee seven ways before them: and shalt be removed into all the kingdoms of the earth.

26 And thy carcase shall be meat unto all fowls of the air, and unto the beasts of the earth, and no man shall fray them away.

27 The Lord will smite thee with the botch of Egypt, and with the emerods, and with the scab, and with the itch, whereof thou canst not be healed.

28 The Lord shall smite thee with madness, and blindness, and astonishment of heart:

29 And thou shalt grope at noonday, as the blind gropeth in darkness, and thou shalt not prosper in thy ways: and thou shalt be only oppressed and spoiled evermore, and no man shall save thee.

30 Thou shalt betroth a wife, and another man shall lie with her: thou shalt build an house, and thou shalt not dwell therein: thou shalt plant a vineyard, and shalt not gather the grapes thereof.

31 Thine ox shall be slain before thine eyes, and thou shalt not eat thereof: thine ass shall be violently taken away from before thy face, and shall not be restored to thee: thy sheep shall be given unto thine enemies, and thou shalt have none to rescue them.

32 Thy sons and thy daughters shall be given unto another people, and thine eyes shall look, and fail with longing for them all the day long; and there shall be no might in thine hand.

33 The fruit of thy land, and all thy labours, shall a nation which thou knowest not eat up; and thou shalt be only oppressed and crushed alway:

34 So that thou shalt be mad for the sight of thine eyes which thou shalt see.

35 The Lord shall smite thee in the knees, and in the legs, with a sore botch that cannot be healed, from the sole of thy foot unto the top of thy head.

36 The Lord shall bring thee, and thy king which thou shalt set over thee, unto a nation which neither thou nor thy fathers have known; and there shalt thou serve other gods, wood and stone.

37 And thou shalt become an astonishment, a proverb, and a byword, among all nations whither the Lord shall lead thee.

38 Thou shalt carry much seed out into the field, and shalt gather but little in; for the locust shall consume it.

39 Thou shalt plant vineyards, and dress them, but shalt neither drink of the wine, nor gather the grapes; for the worms shall eat them.

40 Thou shalt have olive trees throughout all thy coasts, but thou shalt not anoint thyself with the oil; for thine olive shall cast his fruit.

41 Thou shalt beget sons and daughters, but thou shalt not enjoy them; for they shall go into captivity.

42 All thy trees and fruit of thy land shall the locust consume.

43 The stranger that is within thee shall get up above thee very high; and thou shalt come down very low.

44 He shall lend to thee, and thou shalt not lend to him: he shall be the head, and thou shalt be the tail.

45 Moreover all these curses shall come upon thee, and shall pursue thee, and overtake thee, till thou be destroyed; because thou hearkenedst not unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to keep his commandments and his statutes which he commanded thee:

46 And they shall be upon thee for a sign and for a wonder, and upon thy seed for ever.

47 Because thou servedst not the Lord thy God with joyfulness, and with gladness of heart, for the abundance of all things;

48 Therefore shalt thou serve thine enemies which the Lord shall send against thee, in hunger, and in thirst, and in nakedness, and in want of all things: and he shall put a yoke of iron upon thy neck, until he have destroyed thee.

49 The Lord shall bring a nation against thee from far, from the end of the earth, as swift as the eagle flieth; a nation whose tongue thou shalt not understand;

50 A nation of fierce countenance, which shall not regard the person of the old, nor shew favour to the young:

51 And he shall eat the fruit of thy cattle, and the fruit of thy land, until thou be destroyed: which also shall not leave thee either corn, wine, or oil, or the increase of thy kine, or flocks of thy sheep, until he have destroyed thee.

52 And he shall besiege thee in all thy gates, until thy high and fenced walls come down, wherein thou trustedst, throughout all thy land: and he shall besiege thee in all thy gates throughout all thy land, which the Lord thy God hath given thee.

53 And thou shalt eat the fruit of thine own body, the flesh of thy sons and of thy daughters, which the Lord thy God hath given thee, in the siege, and in the straitness, wherewith thine enemies shall distress thee:

54 So that the man that is tender among you, and very delicate, his eye shall be evil toward his brother, and toward the wife of his bosom, and toward the remnant of his children which he shall leave:

55 So that he will not give to any of them of the flesh of his children whom he shall eat: because he hath nothing left him in the siege, and in the straitness, wherewith thine enemies shall distress thee in all thy gates.

56 The tender and delicate woman among you, which would not adventure to set the sole of her foot upon the ground for delicateness and tenderness, her eye shall be evil toward the husband of her bosom, and toward her son, and toward her daughter,

57 And toward her young one that cometh out from between her feet, and toward her children which she shall bear: for she shall eat them for want of all things secretly in the siege and straitness, wherewith thine enemy shall distress thee in thy gates.

58 If thou wilt not observe to do all the words of this law that are written in this book, that thou mayest fear this glorious and fearful name, The Lord Thy God;

59 Then the Lord will make thy plagues wonderful, and the plagues of thy seed, even great plagues, and of long continuance, and sore sicknesses, and of long continuance.

60 Moreover he will bring upon thee all the diseases of Egypt, which thou wast afraid of; and they shall cleave unto thee.

61 Also every sickness, and every plague, which is not written in the book of this law, them will the Lord bring upon thee, until thou be destroyed.

62 And ye shall be left few in number, whereas ye were as the stars of heaven for multitude; because thou wouldest not obey the voice of the Lord thy God.

63 And it shall come to pass, that as the Lord rejoiced over you to do you good, and to multiply you; so the Lord will rejoice over you to destroy you, and to bring you to nought; and ye shall be plucked from off the land whither thou goest to possess it.

64 And the Lord shall scatter thee among all people, from the one end of the earth even unto the other; and there thou shalt serve other gods, which neither thou nor thy fathers have known, even wood and stone.

65 And among these nations shalt thou find no ease, neither shall the sole of thy foot have rest: but the Lord shall give thee there a trembling heart, and failing of eyes, and sorrow of mind:

66 And thy life shall hang in doubt before thee; and thou shalt fear day and night, and shalt have none assurance of thy life:

67 In the morning thou shalt say, Would God it were even! and at even thou shalt say, Would God it were morning! for the fear of thine heart wherewith thou shalt fear, and for the sight of thine eyes which thou shalt see.

68 And the Lord shall bring thee into Egypt again with ships, by the way whereof I spake unto thee, Thou shalt see it no more again: and there ye shall be sold unto your enemies for bondmen and bondwomen, and no man shall buy you.

Christians from old blind churches seem convinced we are supposed to be poor and defeated, as though failure were some kind of blessing. That’s not true. We are supposed to face persecution, but all that means is that we will be ostracized and sometimes attacked. It means we will not be the ones society honors and showers with money. You know. Like George Soros, Kim Kardashian, Hugh Hefner, George Clooney…the servants of Satan who can’t squeeze a lemon without diamonds pouring out of it.

It doesn’t mean we’re supposed to expect a lifestyle of poverty and abuse from enemies we can’t escape or defeat. Why would God curse the obedient like that?

Adulation from the public is actually a curse. Yeshua himself said it. “Woe unto you when men speak well of you.” Gaining riches without being corrected is a curse. Look at famous whores like Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B. Would any sane person trade places with them? They’re the same people they were when they were 9 years old. How will they ever escape hell with the constant reinforcement of unearned cash? That’s a pretty small needle to push a camel through.

You can be persecuted and still have a very nice life. Maybe you will never have anyone pay you a million dollars for a single Instagram post featuring you wearing their brand of underwear, and maybe you’ll never sell out a concert venue or get an Academy Award (bronze with a thin layer of plate), but you can be affluent and healthy and have a beautiful family.

If you’re a Christian, you have been listening to the Holy Spirit, you give generously to the poor when he commands you, and you keep working on repentance, you should do fine in this life. When you have a problem you can’t solve, you should always humble yourself and ask what you’re doing wrong, because you are probably being chastised.

I have learned that there are signs people are cursed because they are not aligned with God. Here are some:

1. Being dominated by abusive people they can’t get free of. This includes living in nasty cities full of leftist thugs.

2. Physical problems that make the miserable and can’t be fixed by doctors.

3. Constant financial setbacks when they’re doing things right.

4. Debt they can’t get rid of.

5. Inability to marry and start a family.

6. Not owning a home or any real estate.

7. Worry.

I’ve been through all those problems, and it was my fault.

The Bible promises us all sorts of blessings in both testaments, so how can it be that our lives should be miserable? God doesn’t say anything he doesn’t mean.

When the housing market crashed, God told me, “This recession is not for you,” and it wasn’t. I never lacked for anything. Yeshua is our Passover, according to the Bible itself. That means curses are supposed to pass over us, as they passed over the houses of obedient Jews in Egypt.

Trump is doing some nice things, but he isn’t Yeshua. He’s like the Jewish kings who abolished some parts of idolatry but left the places of worship intact. He’s not going to save us, and some curses on America will persist. Some things will get better temporarily, but his talk of a golden age is just talk.

Trump tolerates perversion. He puts perverts in high places. The GOP exalts a pervert and credits him with putting Pennsylvania in the red column. He supports a two-state solution, which sounds eerily similar to “Final Solution.” Any nation that divides Israel is cursed.

Joram was the son of Ahab and Jezebel, and he was king during the Samarian famine when people were eating donkeys’ heads. Joram was a lot like Trump. He didn’t worship Baal, and he took down a pillar dedicated to Baal, but he was still an idolater whom God set on the throne because the people were idolaters. He was better than Ahab, but he did not solve his country’s problems.

Your wellbeing depends on you, not Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping. Not on Hezbollah or Hamas or ISIS. At the height of a famine, Elijah ate meat and drank water he didn’t earn while everyone else suffered hunger and thirst. On the other hand, you can starve in a rich country if you don’t have God’s favor. God persecutes, just like man.

If you’re obedient to the Holy Spirit, things will keep getting better for you. You might be martyred eventually, but you should be okay until that happens. John was okay even as Domitian fried him in oil. You can’t get more persecuted than that. John was victorious while being fried by his enemies, but his enemies have been frying since about 100 A.D., and they are not okay.

This is my Mom, Consuelo Similac

It’s Sunday morning in the House of Love, the primary structure of the Heavily Armed Gated North Florida Compound.

Already, unreasonable demands have been placed on me. I was expelled from my warm bed at 8:30, which is practically before dawn, so I could put a new diaper on the compound’s quality control inspector, and then I had to feed him.

He is definitely the quality control inspector, and we nearly always fail. The bassinet? Fail. The pacifier? Fail. The type of Vaseline we apply to his protesting butt? Fail. Nothing is quite up to his exacting standards, and we suspect he has been searching the Internet trying to find our replacements.

I dumped about 6 ounces of milk into him after exercising the privilege of cleaning his nether regions, and he promptly passed out. He lay in my lap with his eyes closed and his hands extended as though he had something important to say, but nothing came out except snores.

I hope.

Once he was out, I renditioned him to the bedroom, where his mother will be very happy to hear from him when he wakes up and fills the air with skull-splitting shrieks that could mean almost anything.

We can’t figure out where all the milk is going. I mean…we KNOW where it goes, because we’re the ones who collect and dispose of it when he’s done processing it. But we don’t understand why he drinks so much.

We think he should be getting about a quart a day, but I would say he’s way over that. I think he would be content to suck continuously through a hose.

He is getting less crabby all the time, so we frequently have the pleasure of interacting with a small human being instead of some sort of furious rodent in a baby suit. Last night, he smiled all the way through a diaper change. I don’t think his mother drugged him, so the explanation must be maturation. His, not mine.

Cranking up the intensity of my Bad Cop Dad routine is really paying off. I don’t like standing up to his mother or listening to him scream because I’m not giving him what he wants, but it turns out that if I do my job, everyone gets more peace. Mom sees that my ideas work, to her utter amazement, so she’s happy. The heir apparent behaves better and seems happier, too.

He got spoiled because he slept in our bed, so he screamed when we tried to put him in the bassinet. I told his mother to put him in the bassinet and let him cry himself to sleep, and the problem went away. He also became much more pleasant during the day. Then Mom started letting him sleep with her during the day after breastfeeding, and the screaming resumed.

I told her we had been inconsistent. He doesn’t know the difference between sleeping in bed at night and sleeping in bed after breastfeeding. Both have the same effect. I told her to let him cry last night to readjust him. He yelled for about 20 minutes and then conked out peacefully. He has been a happier baby ever since.

Mom kept wanting to pick him up and make his world perfect (from the baby standpoint), but I told her to wait. I thought she was likely to get angry with me. When he shut up and went to sleep, she was the opposite of angry. It made her night. I think it also helped her realize her husband wasn’t a total idiot.

I am part of a brainwashed generation. Dads and moms are supposed to be equal partners! Patriarchy is bad! When a woman is offended, it means her husband is way out of line! All that stuff is excrement. Wives look for leadership, just like children. If you supply it with confidence, take unpopular positions, and tough it out, they end up rewarding you with gratitude and respect. If not, you become the Tim Walz of dads. A panderer everyone laughs at and walks on.

I would say it’s the Reagan/Trump philosophy of leadership. Be confident that you’re right, stick to your guns, and even people you disagree with will feel compelled to follow you.

Pleasing the crowd is not leadership. It’s submission. Tim Walz pleases crowds of sick, unhappy, fatherless people by telling them their pathological ethos is right in every respect, and he makes them worse by submitting to them. Trump tells crowds how things are and what’s going to happen, so he improves them.

If I submit to God with humility, and I’m thankful for my place under his authority instead of resenting it, my wife and children will be more likely to submit to me. That’s how it works.

The older I get, the more God shows me about the state of the world. He keeps showing me how correct our old ideas were and how sick the post-Sixties generations are. He tells me to stop being ashamed of what I believe. He tells me I’m right. He tells me he told me these things.

Life is going beautifully for us. This is the best time of my life so far. But we do have problems, and the biggest challenge is getting breastfeeding right. I look for information all the time.

I joined a forum, even though I didn’t want to. I know forums tend to turn toxic after I’ve been involved for a while, because spirits turn people against me. This is especially true of forums that involve topics popular with women. When a traditional male who belongs to God shows up, the venomous, rebellious whore spirits send irrational fury into the modern-minded ladies. Even the ones who don’t have male genitalia.

I got a tiny bit of helpful advice, but before long, dozens of women were giving my posts the old thumbs-down, and not because I had done anything wrong or violated terms of service. They were violating TOS by voting against me simply because they disagreed with me.

Here is the main thing that made them angry: I said I wanted my son to keep breastfeeding instead of taking any kind of sustenance from a bottle, because I believed it would give him a strong bond with his mother (obvious) and that men who had strong bonds with their mothers in childhood treated women less like objects as adults. I also criticized our lame pediatrician because he handed out free formula and refused to discuss breastfeeding problems with us or refer us to a consultant.

They went after me like the bacchantes on Orpheus. When I said formula contained corn syrup, palm oil, and whey, someone accused me of promoting myths. Go read labels and tell me I lied.

As background, I’ll tell you about our soon-to-be-former pediatrician.

The first time we went to his office, the girls there asked us what kind of formula we used so they could give us more. I didn’t understand this. Who was paying for the formula? Not the insurance company. Not us. Not the doctor. So who? I thought it was odd. They weren’t offering my wife and me groceries, so why feed the baby?

When we told them what we had, they said it was better than what they had, so they didn’t give us anything. Fine with me, since I wasn’t expecting anything, and we were trying to get off formula.

My wife and I talked in the parking lot, trying to figure this out. I said formula companies must have been giving the doctor their products in order to get mothers and babies hooked.

Turns out I was right.

I can’t tell you exactly what happens in our doctor’s office, but I have learned that formula companies give away a lot of formula. They give it to hospitals and doctors. I’m sure they give it to organizations. Maybe food banks. They tell hospitals that if they give formula to families that don’t need it, the hospitals will receive free formula for unusual children who can’t get nutrition any other way.

They also bribe doctors to take formula. They give them checks. They send them to conferences and arrange speaking engagements for them.

I don’t know about medical conferences, but in other fields, conferences work like this: they send you to a known center of earthly knowledge, like Vegas or Nassau, they get you drunk at their expense, they buy you great dinners, and often, miraculously, local women who don’t seem to have jobs show up out of nowhere and ask to spend the night with you.

I’m not saying women like that are whores.

I’m not SAYING it.

I don’t know whether our doctor is being paid or whether he risks STD’s at conferences in Jamaica. Maybe he’s a philanthropist, he really believes in formula, and he loves spending thousands of dollars a year, giving things away to people he ordinarily bills. Call me cynical, but I think he’s being paid.

The purpose of giving formula to care providers is not subject to reasonable debate. Reasonable minds may not differ. The purpose is to discourage breastfeeding and convince mothers to buy formula. Then they get hooked, they don’t learn to give their babies proper nutrition, their breasts dry up, their babies come to love the plastic nipple and overfeeding, and they have to keep paying the formula pushers.

As for breastfeeding, I don’t want to get into a lengthy lecture about well-settled medical science, but I will say that the CONSENSUS (that lovely word liberals love) is that breast milk is much better for babies than formula, and breast milk straight from the mother is much better than breast milk from a bottle. I’m not willing to argue about these things with breastfeeding flat-Earthers. What I say is true, and it’s common knowledge.

Anyone who says it’s okay to use formula except as a last resort is either lying or ignorant. I can prove that by citing one fact, all by itself: breast milk contains antibodies. Withholding antibodies leads to disease, and disease kills babies. Therefore, unquestionably, formula kills children.

The majority of formula-fed babies will not die from unnecessary infections. That’s true. But the ones in the minority do. And have. You wouldn’t say it’s okay to withhold whooping cough shots from babies because most babies that get the disease live, now would you? Most people who spent their lives driving cars without safety belts or airbags were never seriously hurt in accidents. Would you buy a car like that to carry your kids to school?

There are other serious problems with formula, but as I said, I’m not going to waste a lot of time defending obvious, established truths.

Do babies that breastfeed have better bonds with their mothers? Of course. Come on. Getting off work at Goldman Sachs at 8 p.m., rushing home to the Upper East Side, and grabbing your bewildered, formula-fed son out of the arms of Consuelo the poorly-vetted illegal immigrant every weekday for 8 years makes you the gringo aunt and Consuelo the mother.

Do men who had good relationships with their mothers treat women better? I don’t know, but I know it worked for me. It’s a reasonable guess, and anyway, why wouldn’t you want to have a tight relationship with your baby?

My son is a mama’s baby, and I consider that a huge blessing. It amazes me that there are parents who are jealous because their babies love their husbands and wives.

So anyway, women became enraged at me for saying what I said, giving me zero credit for the best possible intentions toward babies and women. Why?

The answer is feminism, which was designed by Satan. Eve was the first feminist in the Bible, and look who put her up to it. When Adam was cursed, the first thing God convicted him of was not eating a fruit but listening to the voice of his wife. Look it up. Adam was supposed to rule and make unpopular decisions like his father, but he let his wife treat him like her baby son and persuade him to try a drug. This explains why corrupt old churches love to portray Mary as God and Yeshua as a helpless baby who can’t even talk. Satan likes tiny little men and big, blustery women, preferably with really short hair.

One of the main reasons formula exists is to permit women to abandon their children and become breadwinners. It helps dethrone men and, in doing so, dethrone God, who rules families through men. Formula is practically sacred to feminists. Until recently, I didn’t know how furious feminists got when people criticized formula. They become even more unhinged than usual, because to them, an attack on formula is an attack on their ability to usurp male roles. It’s almost as bad as saying fathers are important.

I used to have the idea that feminists loved breastfeeding, but I didn’t understand the whole picture. They love exhibitionism, because it gives women power over weak, lustful men, so they want slutty women to be able to display their nipples in churches and restaurants. This is why they push to force the rest of us to endure bare-breasted feeding when they could just as easily toss cloths over themselves. It’s not about taking care of babies. It’s about being ruled by daddy-issue demons. “Daddy said you had to wear a bra to school. Show him what you can really do!”

God’s ways are completely internally consistent, because Yeshua is the Prince of Peace, and peace is almost literally synonymous with order. Satan’s ways, including feminism, are internally inconsistent. This is why feminists yap about their right to parade around naked and force people to watch them breastfeed while also working hard to discourage breastfeeding and push formula.

I guess the formula brigade must be getting even more militant now that demonized men think they’re becoming mothers and sick girls are having their healthy breasts amputated.

No man has ever breastfed, although my understanding is that some grotesque creatures have forced helpless babies to suck hormone-induced secretions from their nipples. If formula is bad, then the whole transsexual ethos has a glaring flaw normal people can exploit when they try to correct others. If you’re a real man, you can’t ever breastfeed, and if you’re a woman who had her breasts cut out so she could pretend to be a man, you can’t breastfeed, either. You have to use formula or find breast milk somewhere.

Now you know why you get bad and inconsistent advice about feeding babies. It’s feminist buffoonery. Many people are not concerned at all about the welfare of babies yet push formula as hard as they can because it’s a tool to pick at patriarchy.

Patriarchy is a holy idea. It is correct. God is completely male. Yeshua is completely male. God is our father, not our mother. The people who symbolized God in the Bible were uniformly male.

Patriarchy is essential to humanity’s success, but we have rejected it, so we have failed. You and your family can succeed, but humanity is dying.

I thought I understood how hostile humanity was to maleness, but I was wrong. It’s much worse than I thought, and the attacks have contaminated just about all of us internally. God has changed me a great deal, but I find I still have to remind myself to spit on old habits of feminist thinking and grind them under my feet. I have to push myself to be a proper king and priest in my house.

I really hate this place. This world. I don’t know what I’m doing here. My life is easy and pleasant, but there is no place for me among humanity.

The earth’s filthiness and worthlessness become more apparent to me every day. This place is so unfair to God and his people, it defies understanding. Human beings are so impervious to love and reason, they have made themselves garbage and excrement, incapable of being saved and repaired.

The more God changes me, the more I have to endure what he endures. He is perfect. He is helpful. He has the best intentions and all the answers. But he is hated and rejected. To whatever extent I am like him, I am also hated and rejected. Only the evil inside me is embraced by the world. I can’t help people much at all. When I try, I get pushed away, and the people who pushed me away most effectively were preachers and church volunteers.

If I can’t help anyone, why should I be here?

Abraham prayed for Sodom and Gomorrah, and God agreed to spare these cities if 10 righteous men could be found. God only found one, and we know what happened. I suppose there are still enough people or Earth who can be saved to keep the rapture from happening this week.

I Can’t Just Say “It’s Seven O’Clock Somewhere”

Today I woke up–the last time I woke up, I mean–at about 12:20 p.m. I guess you could say my leadership in the area of getting the household on a workable schedule is not what it could be.

The heir apparent is resisting sleeping in the bassinet again. Pretty sure this is his mother’s fault. She let him sleep in the bed for several days without telling me, and he got spoiled immediately. He would yell like crazy when she put him in the bassinet. I fixed this problem. I told her to let him cry, and it changed his disposition for the better in one day. I think he is reverting because she is getting around the no-sleeping-in-bed rule by letting him fall asleep with her in bed during the day.

There are two layers of resistance I have to deal with. His and hers.

He will sleep if she fills him up with milk and lets him pass out. She takes his unconscious form and moves it to the bassinet, and he keeps sleeping. But it just so happens we run out of milk between 10 p.m. and midnight, so guess when he finally fills up? The wee, wee hours.

Now it sounds like I’m talking about a different subject.

I have realized that I, a male, have to take over the feeding plan. I started buying protein shakes and bars, and we have a big can of pure protein powder on the way. If the web is giving me the straight poop, we need to try to get something like 100 grams of protein into the wife every day in order to keep the baby fed, and to put that in perspective, a large egg has 6 grams, so 100 grams would run, what, seventy-five dollars?

I am also pushing her to drink water. She forgets.

We have to build up a reserve so we can knock him out–I mean feed him responsibly–regardless of the hour.

It’s not that easy getting food and drink into my wife. If you told me I needed to drink half a gallon of water, I’d drink one half-liter bottle in 15 seconds, a second within the next minute, and the rest would be drunk within no more than 45 minutes. Wouldn’t mean a thing to me. For some reason, my wife is different. It takes her several minutes to drink one bottle.

The baby appears to take after me, to put it mildly. She says he drank 7 ounces of milk in one feeding yesterday.

She has a hard time with pills, too. I have no problem swallowing a half-dozen huge supplements at once, but she has trouble getting one large capsule down.

I don’t know if my wife has an accurate picture of the lifestyle she signed on for. The web says women should pump milk 8-12 times per day. In other words, normal sleep isn’t even something they should consider. The goal shouldn’t be to have a pleasant life during the first three months of a baby’s life. It should be to get the job done and accept a schedule most Chinese factory slaves wouldn’t trade for.

Sometimes she expresses shock or dismay when she finds out what she has to do. My response? “You decided to have a baby.” I tell her I know she is suffering, but it serves no purpose to discuss it as though there were a way around it. There isn’t, so discussion just promotes an escapist mindset and delays getting down to necessary tasks. The only productive thing is to do what you have to do.

I take jobs off of her. I tell her I understand this is a tough time for her. I try to make sure I’m not pushing too hard. But I am not going to stop, because if I do, there will be chaos.

After another month, things will get much easier. We just have to get there.

I have learned that when I know I absolutely have to do something unpleasant, I will get up and do it. If I think there is a way around it, however, I will waste a lot of time pitying myself and trying to craft an escape. This is why I tell my wife there is no way to avoid her tasks. It’s why I remind her she chose this challenge. In the end, it makes things easier on her. When she resigns herself to what she has to do, the peace it brings her is obvious, and it ends contention between us.

She needs me to reinforce her. She almost always knows what has to be done, but temptation creeps in, and she dithers. If I reinforce her, she stops dithering and bucks up.

I plan to take this approach with the boy, too. Unless he’s an exceptional kid, he will try to find ways to weasel out of things. My mother used to enable me when I shirked, and it did my character a lot of harm. It made me mushy and lazy. My son will pick up his toys and put them in a box. He will sit down and do his homework. He will take whatever shots I tell him to take. If he tries to get his mother on his side and divide us, he will wish he hadn’t.

This is what husbands and fathers are supposed to do. When my dad was stern with me, often it was for selfish reasons. He wasn’t a completely worthless father, but a lot of his parenting–perhaps most–was based on a desire to get out of parenting and get back to the TV. Often, he was also motivated by anger. He was often tough about the wrong things. When I’m tough, it’s not because I’m angry or I want to be excused from doing my job. I take stands because I know how things will deteriorate if I don’t. I don’t enjoy it. I don’t do it for myself.

A long time ago, my dad and I anchored his boat in Honeymoon Harbor south of Bimini. We had guests. In the evening, I checked some bearings, and it looked like our anchor was dragging. We seemed to be headed toward the shoals to our south.

I told my dad, and he didn’t want to deal with it. Getting a big boat off of sand would have been very difficult, and it would probably have cost a lot of money, but he wanted to sleep. I said I couldn’t go to bed until we knew things were okay. He said there was no point in both of us staying awake, so he turned in for the night.

A father can’t act like that. He has to be the person who takes the most responsibility, stands up, and does the hard, thankless jobs.

A while back, a tropical storm came close to us, and we got a lot of rain. I realized one of our roof gutters was overflowing. I had cleaned it out recently, but I had underestimated the amount of leaves that had fallen since. They had clogged things up.

I climbed out a window in the rain and sat on the roof scooping leaves into a bucket so I could dump them on the grass below. I fired up a leaf blower and shot air up the downspouts to blow leaves out. I got a ladder out and used it to scoop up leaves I couldn’t reach from the roof.

I told my wife to call the EMT’s if I fell.

It was no fun at all, but it absolutely had to be done in order to avoid a huge water intrusion that could have cost thousands in the end. Nobody else was available to help. Waiting wasn’t an option. There was no way around the job. It’s an example of the type of challenge that requires you to shut up immediately and get to work.

I just talked to the wife, and I told her no more breastfeeding in bed. She agrees. She wants to sleep, so she is open to ideas. She is more amenable to being led when her approach is causing her trouble.

Now it’s time to get up, attack the protein problem, attack the scheduling problem, and fix it so we don’t get up in the afternoon again tomorrow. I failed this week, but with God’s help, I should be able to get us back on track quickly.

Come Get Some, You Bucktoothed Punks

I managed to get some shooting time in yesterday. First real effort since the baby showed up and took over.

I am trying to put together two very nice .22 rifles: bolt and semi-auto. I got myself a Tikka T1x MT-something-or-other and a 16″ 10/22. Both short. Both threaded. I got a silencer to use on both.

I used to think the .22 was hopeless for accuracy, but things aren’t as bad as I thought. You can get pretty good results if you spend enough money on the gun and glass and you also test a whole bunch of ammunition to see which type the gun likes. I should be able to pop squirrels in the head, fatally, pretty consistently at 35 yards, possibly out to 50 with practice.

Two long months ago, I tested three cartridges in the Tikka: Eley Benchrest Outlaw, CCI Sub-Sonic 40-grain, and cheap CCI Blazer 40-grain, not to be confused with 36-grain, which everyone hates.

I posted photos here. I shot 4 10-shot groups of each ammo at 35 yards. They all did pretty well, but the CCI Sub-Sonic ammo gave me a flyer I didn’t think was my fault, and the groups were just…ugly. The average size would have been 0.515″ without the flyer, but I doubt the ammunition’s consistency. I don’t want flyers maiming squirrels.

The Outlaws gave me three very good groups and one very bad one, so again, consistency concerns.

The Blazers shocked me, coming in at 0.555″ with beautiful groups and no flyers. I don’t know why a particular load would produce larger but more beautiful groups than another load.

Of the three types, I liked Blazers best. Good enough accuracy for squirrel heads, plus high velocity for more damage.

Yesterday I tried Eley Match, Wolf Match, and Eley Subsonic. Eley is probably the top name in match .22 ammo.

People think Wolf is a Russian ammo company. I have seen people claiming this is not true. They say Wolf buys ammo from all over the world and puts its name on it. I have seen claims that Wolf Match is really made by a well-known company that makes high-grade stuff for matches. At least one vendor claims Eley makes it. The idea is that somehow or other, the QC is lowered for the Wolf product, so it costs less. I don’t know if it’s true.

Long story short: Eley Match 0.429″ with a flyer I may have caused, Wolf Match 0.520″ with a flyer I probably didn’t cause, and Eley Subsonic 0.429″ with ugly, stringy groups.

Sadly, I forgot I was supposed to shoot 10-round groups, so I shot 5 rounds at each bullseye. That means I have to do it all over again.

Also, the measurements are not totally reliable. With these targets, I found it difficult to be sure where the centers of the bullet holes were.

So far, Eley Match looks like it may be the most accurate thing I’ve tried, but Ammoseek’s cheapest price is 31 cents per round. I think I paid 5.5 cents for Blazers, and they were faster and nearly as good, and they have hollow points. I will repost the Blazer target.

It’s important for me to remember that if a group size is x, it means the bullets landed within something like 0.5x of a theoretical point where perfect shots would have landed. If my test group size is 0.6″, then I should generally be within maybe 0.4″, not 0.6″, of the theoretical point. If I can figure out where that theoretical point is with a given gun and load, and I can rest my gun and take quality shots, I should be able to nail squirrels within something like a third of an inch of my points of aim. That is very good accuracy for the purpose.

I dithered around a lot regarding the Ruger’s scope. The Tikka has a very expensive (for squirrels) Athlon Helos on it. I also have rimfire scopes that cost under $100, and most people go cheap. I figured I should get a real scope because the rifle was pricey and I wanted very good performance. I wanted tactical turrets and reticle illumination.

I ended up ordering an Athlon Argos for the Ruger. It has capped turrets, but that’s okay for a hunting rifle which is very unlikely to see serious target shooting. The Helos has better glass. The Argos is lighter than the Helos, and I thought that would be nice while lugging the Ruger around.

The Ruger’s scope is not here yet. Once it gets here, I will have to go through the ammo tests again.

I may be able to get out and try to kill some squirrels this week. I sure hope so. I don’t know if I can reduce their numbers near the house, but if I can’t, at least I can say I got revenge.

Back when it was starting to get really hard to buy ammo, I loaded up on .22 rounds. This was before I made any effort to check accuracy. I ended up with a billion rounds of so-so ammunition. That’s okay. I have pistols, after all. Mini-mags will do just fine for pistols. I think I should load up on Blazers once the accuracy tests are done. That will probably be next week.

Mini-mags and my other non-stellar ammunition will work just fine on coons and other annoyances bigger than squirrels, so it’s not like they are only good for paper.

Still Richer Than You

I was wrong about something, sort of.

I predicted that leftists would rise up and turn American into one big riot zone when Trump took office for the second time, but it didn’t happen. I don’t know why. Perhaps it was because everyone expected it, responses were prepared, and leftist terrorists are cowards. They don’t like committing their crimes when they think arrest and prosecution are serious possibilities. Nobody wants to be fired from Starbucks over an arson rap.

If they weren’t cowards, they wouldn’t wear masks.

While I was wrong to think a sudden conflagration of stupidity would arise, I believe I was right to think leftists would go nuts eventually. Look at what they’re doing to Teslas, chargers, and dealerships. Keying and burning cars and chargers. Trying to burn dealerships. Road-raging at innocent drivers, many of whom surely agree with their politics. Historically, the Tesla has been a badge of left-wing envirokooks.

Now some wackjob has created a website doxxing every Tesla owner and encouraging crimes against them. This is historic. We have seen leftists dox and torment people in the past, but this is a new low. It is the mainstreaming of Democrat terrorism.

A failed vice presidential candidate, Tim Walz, gloated in public about the damage the vandals are doing, saying he got a boost from watching Tesla stock drop. Never mind that the state he governs holds a huge amount of Tesla stock in order to support state-employee pensions. Even as recently as 2000, you could not have convinced me that a major political figure would pop up on the web celebrating the results of domestic terrorism.

Instead of a quick kneejerk response, we seem to be seeing something more gradual; more like what happens as a baby becomes aware its diaper is dirty. The smiles fade. A frown appears. Groans begin. Soon, the mouth is screaming and the arms are flailing. It’s diaper Defcon 1.

With regard to “liberals” (not worthy of the name, without quotation marks), we are probably at Defcon 3, approaching 2. The military says Defcon 3 is “a readiness posture that requires certain portions of the assigned forces to assume an increased readiness posture above that of normal readiness.”

Leftists have forced our president and AG to make policy changes to combat Tesla-related crimes. I would call that “increased readiness.”

They seem to think they can break Elon Musk financially by making people afraid to buy Teslas and become their victims. That’s a very unsound theory.

I checked, and Musk’s stake in Tesla comes in at around 100 billion dollars. That’s something like 25% of his worth. If the terrorists manage to hurt Tesla really badly, say to the tune of 50%, Musk’s share will go down to around 50 billion. That will leave him with a paltry fortune amounting to an insignificant $350 billion.

Perhaps these figures are a little off, but the principle is correct.

So you terrorize innocent people, you subject yourself to prosecution, you ruin your employment prospects (could matter to some leftists), you destroy your reputation, and the net result is that the guy you hate only has two million times the median net worth.

Two MILLION.

Trying to destroy Elon Musk’s wealth by keying Teslas is like trying to tear down the Taj Mahal with a sharpened popsicle stick.

I can’t imagine what it would be like to have even one billion dollars. What would I do with it? Sometimes I ask myself, and invariably, one thing comes to mind: I would get my truck painted. I used to think I would start flying my wife and myself around in first class, but now we have a baby, so it may be a decade before either of us sees the inside of a jet again. Anyway, a billionaire is an extremely rich person. Musk could lose around 99.75% of his worth and still be freakishly rich.

It is amazing that any leftist is stupid enough to get excited because Tesla stock drops a few points. Math isn’t for everyone, though.

Here’s what would really sting leftists if they knew it: they may not have hurt Tesla at all. Sure, the stock is way down from its peak, but that peak occurred before Trump took office, and the stock started declining in December. Also, Tesla has problems unrelated to Donald Trump.

Tesla stock has always been volatile. Tesla makes trendy gadgetry that doesn’t appeal to everyone. Its popularity waxes and wanes. I doubt Tesla stock would have continued shooting up this winter had Musk not joined DOGE, and I don’t think the vandals will be able to depress the price forever.

Personally, I am not a Tesla fan. I don’t care what anyone says; the cars are not ready for most Americans. The solar roofs are ridiculous. I was quoted something like $200,000, the roof would have been very ugly, and I would still have had to pay for electricity. Going “off-grid” is illegal in Florida. My feelings don’t matter, though, because enough people love Tesla to insure its long-term survival.

For the most part, the Tesla terrorists will hurt themselves more than anyone else, but they are still interesting because they are part of an increase in lawlessness, and lawlessness is a feature of the end times. Childishness and disorder will increase. Satan loves rebels, and he is doing a great job of turning human beings against order and legitimate authority. After all, he was the first leftist. Heaven’s failed revolutionary, exiled to the roof of hell.

We now have a political party largely dedicated to lawlessness. Lawless prosecutors have been appointed in major cities. Lawless mayors and state governments defy federal immigration authorities, even when it clearly benefits child rapists and murderers. Lawless judges are making patently absurd and even unethical decisions in order to harm a president they don’t like. And Trump himself is fomenting lawlessness to some extent. He rails against judges who disagree with him and says they should be impeached, which isn’t always true. A president should not do that. He strives to find ways to flout judicial authority. He quoted Napoleon, who said, “He who saves his country violates no law.” Apart from being facially absurd, this is a dangerous philosophy, and leftists are throwing it back in Trump’s face to justify their unending crimes.

I love President Trump, and I support him, but he is not Yeshua. He is a friend of Christians, but he is no man of God. He is not Spirit-led, and he sometimes does things that advance the agenda of the Antichrist, just as all leftists do.

I have always been disturbed by Christians who say Trump is the solution to our problems. Trump is a lot better than the alternatives, but he is still a secular figure.

I wonder about the Tesla-scratchers. Are they a temporary problem that will subside, or are they the seed of a larger revolutionary army of violent morons who will finally bring about a civil war?

Whatever the answer is, in addition to sinning and ruining their own lives, they are failing to harm the man and the ideology they hate. It is a pathetic spectacle of infantile self-destruction. Like leftism itself.

There’s a Person in There

It has only been 4 days since my last report on my son, but he seems to have changed a lot during that time.

When we brought him home, he was a jiggly ball of flesh that pooped and yelled. There was a little more to him than that, but not a whole lot more. He wasn’t totally incapable of thinking. He was smart enough to decide he liked bottles better than his mother. He did have a very limited number of modes, though. Angry mode. Hungry mode.

Actually, I think that covers it.

This month, everything changed. At first, we got glimmers of smiles. Now, he has periods of obvious, overwhelming happiness. This is nice, because in the beginning, he didn’t seem to have much in the way of positive emotions. He has also developed a very strong attachment to his mom.

I guess it makes sense that newborns aren’t the most positive people on Earth. It doesn’t do a newborn a great deal of good to tell the world he’s happy, but if he’s upset, everyone around him will try to fix his problem.

His negativity was a test of our patience. You want to be upbeat with your newborn, but it can be trying when you’re getting somewhere between zero and 4 hours of sleep a night and every time you interact with him, he screams as loud as he can, sometimes for quite a while. When the positivity starts to show up, you feel weight dropping off your shoulders. You realize how hard you were working, contributing virtually everything to the relationship and absorbing the very real pain of loud crying.

He screamed when he was hungry. He screamed when we changed him. He screamed when we bathed him. He screamed while he tried to poop. He screamed for other reasons we never figured out.

When a baby is screaming, you feel pressed to fix him, but often, you don’t succeed. Repeated failure leads to a feeling of powerlessness, like the feeling you get when you try to contact an airline for customer support. It’s discouraging, but you can’t quit.

At least with a baby, you know the problem isn’t that an entire industry is designed to cheat you.

Here’s an interesting thing I never thought about until this week: adults lose their voices, but babies don’t. They keep right on going. If I screamed as much as a baby, I’d lose my voice in an hour. How do they do it?

Earlier this week, we noticed that he was smiling a lot more than he had the week before. Yesterday and the day before, things really ramped up. Now he lights up with joy. His whole face shines with it. And we are finding out how to make it happen.

His favorite thing is the diaper game. You flop him onto the changing pad, and while he’s lying there, you take a new diaper and put it over his face. Then you pull it away. Then you put it back. Then you pull it away. He thinks this is the greatest activity there is. You put the diaper on a face that looks moderately happy, and when you pull it away, the smile is wide, the eyes are shining, and he is wiggling in ecstasy.

It also works with other objects, but right now, the diaper is king.

Yesterday, he started whacking his hanging toys in a much more vigorous, prolonged, and determined way. He must have gone half an hour the last time.

He has started trying to talk. It’s not impressive. He’s not ready to give elocution lessons. But it’s definitely an effort to speak. No words, obviously, but he is trying to express himself.

He thinks his mom is the greatest. She started spending more time with him in order to deal with some feeding issues, so they ended up lying in bed together a lot. He can’t get enough.

His new thing is the mom alarm. He sleeps next to her with one hand against her side to make sure she’s always there. If she breaks contact, he wakes up and and lets her know how he feels about it.

Their closeness has caused a problem. He wants to sleep with her all the time. I don’t always know what’s happening at night, because I conk out and sleep with a recently-developed dogged determination. I learned she has been letting him lie next to her all night.

Babies are not supposed to sleep in their parents’ beds. This is a new rule. New by my standards. They sometimes get crushed and suffocated. Also, adult beds are softer than baby beds, and it is believed the lack of support can cause crib death by making it harder for babies to breathe.

You’re not supposed to let babies sleep on their stomachs. You can’t even let them sleep on their sides. Because our son has been sleeping with Mom, he has gotten used to sleeping on his side. He also rolls onto his stomach to sleep.

I didn’t know this was happening, or I would have done something.

Now he hollers when we put him in the bassinet, and regardless of where he is, he may try to roll over. His mother wants to let him be, because moms spoil their kids. I have to be bad cop parent and put everything right. Now Mom is the parent who makes life cushy and cozy, and Dad is the guy who shows up to ruin everything.

We have to put him in the bassinet from now on, except when everyone is awake, and he is going to yell until he realizes he’s not going to get his way. Mom thinks it’s bad to let him yell. Dad knows it’s important for him to learn that yelling won’t always get him what he wants. He has to learn he can’t have everything his way all the time. Otherwise, he will sleep however he wants, and we could wake up childless one morning.

Mushy thinkers believe babies this young can’t be spoiled, but it’s very obvious they can, so I pay no attention to them. My son can’t be allowed to run the house. He can’t be encouraged in manipulating us.

When my sister was tiny, she used to tell adults off. She would put her hands on her hips and lay into them. The family thought it was funny, and they encouraged her. She became a hopeless brat and manipulator.

She always have to have her way. If you don’t do what she asks, she makes you miserable until you do, even if it’s something unimportant. No one can stand her. She has no real friends. Both of her parents said God should take her if she wasn’t going to change. She lost her law license, and she will never get it back. She has a felony conviction, as well as some felonies that were hushed up. She was disinherited more than once. That’s what can happen when you let your soft heart put your child in charge.

When a baby is very, very young, it’s important to get up and act when there is trouble, and sometimes its cries indicate real problems. This conditions you to get up and bounce around the house like a frantic pinball every time the baby isn’t happy. That mindset has to be recognized and destroyed. It’s not appropriate after the first few weeks. Eventually, your child has to get up and bounce around when YOU make noise. Your child has to fear you.

The “milestone” guidelines are not always helpful. They say a baby should not sleep on his back until he’s a year old. They say he should not sleep on his back until he’s at least 7 months old. They also say he should not sleep on his back until he can roll onto his stomach and back onto his back by himself. Who is right?

I think this kid will be rolling over both ways, at will, within a month. He is extremely strong and vigorous. His neck is like a steel spring. He kicks like a mule. The only thing preventing him from walking is his inability to balance.

He keeps exceeding expectations. I don’t know whether this is normal. I didn’t know it could happen. It must be a big blessing, but here we are, first-child parents, tabula rasa, and it’s one more challenge we have to figure out without much help.

What do we do when he is fully able to decide how he wants to sleep? We can’t stand next to the bassinet from dusk till dawn, turning him over repeatedly. Is it okay to tie his hands? No idea. If he can roll over, and he’s only 4 months old, should we let him do what he wants?

We have to find out.

Personally, I have doubts about the whole crib death approach. My best guess is that demons cause it, and medical science will never admit that. I have seen demons, Yeshua has visited me, and I have received miracles, so my outlook is different.

It’s very common for demons to attack people in their sleep. For some reason, demons love to stand beside beds or at the foot or head. It’s common for people to wake up and see them. I’ve seen a lot of them. My mother saw one. You probably know people who have seen them.

One thing they love is to shut off your air and paralyze you. When they do this, you may not be able to move, speak, or breathe. I have never been unable to breathe during these events, but I have had a very hard time speaking. Sometimes when these attacks occur, you will see demons in your dreams.

Many years ago, in a dream, I saw a beautiful young woman. I asked her who she was, and she said, “I’m a demon.” She pointed her right hand at me, and I could barely speak. I don’t remember how I worked it out. At least she told the truth.

I’ve told about the funniest demon visit I received. It happened here in this house. I woke up and saw a strange shape over the bed. I can’t recall exactly how it looked, and it wasn’t clearly defined, but I could tell it was feminine. It arched over the bed like a crane.

Demons don’t scare me at all, but I really hate them. When I saw this thing, I was furious. Not fully aware of what I was doing, I said, “Get out, BITCH.”

I doubt Yeshua ever said that to a demon.

I think crib death is caused by spirits that overcome weak and/or unprotected babies. I don’t think it could happen here. Since my wife and I have been together physically, spirits have not come to the bed.

This boy is developing fast, so I have to get on top of things. I thought I had a long time to prepare the house. Maybe I don’t. Kitchen knives, chemicals, tools…what if he starts getting into stuff next month?

It’s nice to see his systems come online, even if we’re not ready for all of it. He smiles when we change him. He likes his baths. He can see us and follow motion at least a couple of yards off. We’re getting a much-needed return on our investment. It will be great when everything is operational.

I just heard some squawking. Looks like someone is up and ready to give orders and present demands. Maybe if I stay in here just a little longer and stay really quiet, Mom will change him before I go check on him.

Another Day Free of Furious Pansies

Those heartless, selfish, entitled conservatives. I don’t know how much more I can stand.

Today my conservative neighbor really outdid himself. He texted me out of the blue and asked if he could send a wheel loader over to pull a stump out of my yard and move it to my burn pile.

The nerve of some people.

This is the same MAGA creep who showed up the morning after a tropical storm came through, cut a downed tree in two places, and moved it off my driveway.

How I miss Miami, where people showed up to do thoughtful things like parking their cars in the yard for parties and destroying the grass, stealing Xenon headlights and oriental rugs, and yelling at me for leaving my truck in the street for 30 seconds.

I miss the kids who egged my car and shot a ball bearing through the rear windshield of my truck. I miss the great neighbors who carried their trash across the street to put it in my pile.

I really miss the salsa fans who had loud parties in spite of noise ordinances, keeping me awake through closed windows until past 2 a.m. on weekend nights. It was great how they never cleared this with their neighbors or invited us. Being taken by surprise made it extra special and showed us how important we were to them. Those thoughtful, altruistic Hispanic customs always make for tranquil neighborhoods.

Is it racist to say it seems like everyone wants to live among white people? I guess it is, because they also want to live among people from Japan, Korea, and China. Leaving East Asians out must be racist.

Hispanic and black NEIGHBORS can be fantastic. Hispanic and black neighborHOODS, not so much. No one ever starts to worry when whites, Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese move in next door.

I think the biggest problem with white neighbors is our tendency to form HOA’s. It shows why white people were the ones who invented Nazism.

It wouldn’t really make sense to count me as white when it comes to HOA’s. I’m a Southerner, and as far as I know, every last one of us hates HOA’s. But many of us can’t tell the difference between a front yard and a junkyard.

My current neighbor has a land-clearing business, so big machinery goes in and out from time to time. He put a couple of pole barns up, and he parks things under them. I could not care less. Anyone stupid enough to complain about a friendly neighbor who has a wheel loader and a backhoe should be barred from owning real estate.

We had a long conversation today. Due to my misanthrope status, he knows the other neighbors better than I do, and he gave me the lowdown on them. I already knew the people to the north were mentally ill because they had Biden signs, but he says they are hard core. The guy across the road from them is a jerk who flipped out because the land-clearing guy trimmed trees that hung over his property. He also trespassed to see what the land-clearing guy was doing on his own land. I believe he also had the Biden virus.

The wheel loader guy wants to park a big truck on his land at night. Ask me if I care. I thought he was already doing it. He is going to have to appear before some kind of county board or other. He wanted to know if I would write a letter. Of course I will. If he wanted to have a steady flow of big trucks up and down our road, I would not be happy, but going in and out once a day? Who cares?

We discussed the subdivision that borders us on the south. They are giving him hell because he sort of trespasses. The subdivision consists of little hobby horse farms, and there is a clear area that goes around it like a moat. It’s a bridle path. For many years, a family in the subdivision has been letting his family cross the path to enter their property to visit and swim.

He also drove small vehicles onto the path and went around looking for debris he could move for them, free of charge. He sometimes dumped the debris on his own property.

Now they’re mad, and they expect him to drive a mile and go around a bunch of properties to visit his friends. I think this is stupid. You never turn down free debris disposal. They should sign a paper saying he doesn’t have an easement, and they should let him continue to go over there as long as he owns his house. As things stand, he is not planning to move debris any more.

Has an HOA ever done anything good? They certainly do stupid things. The other day, I saw a story about an HOA that forces everyone to keep their garage doors raised. So no tools, I guess? No belongings allowed in garages?

The HOA president is a reasonable guy who always wants to make peace, but it seems some of the blue-state transplants who live there have not figured out that this isn’t Massachusetts.

While we were talking, I found out the loader guy is raising pigs. I had no idea. I told him we had deed restrictions that barred raising pigs. First time he had heard of it.

He said he kept them on mulch to kill the stink. It must work, because I’ve never smelled anything. I told him I didn’t care if he raised elephants as long as they didn’t smell. I also said he shouldn’t tell the other neighbors.

I was actually glad to know he had pigs, because if times get hard, pigs will be necessary. They are the cheapest source of four-legged protein. If they can be raised here on the QT, it could keep my family fed some day. Although I suppose deed restrictions won’t mean much if things get that bad.

He has three kids. He told me they don’t get to use screens. No video games. Brilliant. They’ll develop their brains instead of just their thumbs.

I invited my neighbor to come use the shooting berm whenever he wants, and I am probably going to hire him to remove some stumps. I should take them some brownies to show gratitude for the help.

What are people in blue cities doing today? Trying not to make eye contact with perpetually-enraged pansies looking for reasons to bully them. Waiting for oil protesters to have their hands unglued from the roads they use to get to work. Being arrested for defending themselves. Sitting in lawyers’ offices, trying to find ways to prevent their kids from being taken away and pumped full of wrong-sex hormones.

I don’t know if I will ever fully appreciate how blessed we are.

Clearly a Form of Squatting

I guess I should provide a report on our parenting experience.

My son is making his way through his second month on Earth. He is healthy and about as well-adjusted as a baby can be. Even the good ones scream a lot. He has put weight on faster than expected. This morning, we had to retire a romper that was supposed to last him several more weeks.

He has a funny toe that will need to be looked at, but he has no other problems, and he has never been sick. That’s a good thing, because his mother will surely flip out the first time mucus starts running out of that little nose.

He is still very strong for his age. He was the product of an induced labor because of his weight and his gigantic head, so he should be behind other babies, but handling him is like wrestling an alligator. From the time he was two or three weeks old, he has been able to lie on his stomach, push himself up with his arms, and hold his head up. He has never complained about being placed on his stomach, although his mother is afraid that if he goes more than 5 minutes, we’ll have to make a new baby.

We were having him checked out, and the doctor started hollering, “This is four months!” I had no idea what he meant. He’s Nigerian. It turned out he was talking about my son’s strength. He had lifted my son by his arms, and my son held his head up. The doctor was amazed. My son was a month old, and the doctor said he shouldn’t have been able to hold his head up until he hit four months. Which makes you wonder why the doctor did the test.

His legs are very strong. He has no problem holding himself and even jumping as long as I provide balance. When I hold him across my lap in a recliner, I have to make sure he doesn’t push against the arm with his feet and leap out onto the floor.

I don’t think he knows what his hands are, but he grabs things with them all the time.

We had to take the newborn pads out of his car seat, and he has been in second-stage diapers for a while now.

Mom says he gives off masculine energy. No argument there. You could look at this kid from a quarter mile and know he was a boy. He is rambunctious and vigorous. His voice sounds masculine. He thrashes around and punches and kicks his parents. He doesn’t cry when he gets hit in the head with a phone or banged against the inside of the utility sink. I don’t think the mental illnesses of homosexuality and gender confusion will be issues. Like my mother would have said, he’s as rough as a cob.

He has started smiling for the right reasons. We think. Experts say early smiles are based on gas or other disappointing causes, but he is coming up on the age when babies smile because they’re happy, and as usual, he is a little bit ahead. He likes to whine and holler when I change his diaper, so I play with him and bug him until he smiles, just to ruin the fun of being in a bad mood.

He has giggled occasionally for a week or two. That’s a relief. You get tired of a baby who has three modes: angry, hungry, and sleepy. When he engages, it makes you feel like you’re dealing with a person, not just an object that requires constant maintenance.

I don’t know how the parents of autistic kids survive without reinforcement from their children. Now that we’re getting some real feedback from our son, we realize how draining it was to do without it.

We’re learning how to cope with him. At first, every cry seemed important and was taken as an urgent call for help, and we didn’t know which cry meant what. Now we realize some of the crying is just plain stupid, so we’re not always supposed to jump up to help him. We are also better at figuring out whether he’s hungry or trying to poop. Those are the two main reasons he cries.

When he starts the poop cry, you don’t grab him and change his diaper. If you do that, he finishes pooping right after you put the new diaper on him, or maybe while you’re trying to stuff him into it. You let him wait until he shuts up. Then there’s a pretty good chance he’s finished.

Experts say babies aren’t suffering when they do the poop cry. Apparently it’s a way of building up pressure behind the poop to push it out. When he does the poop cry, as soon as the poop moves, he goes back to being cheerful and oblivious. Instantly. If he were in pain, he wouldn’t do that.

We haven’t figured out how to identify the tired cry, but then we’re not sure he ever gets tired. He routinely keeps us up until past 1 a.m. Right now, he is feeding as often as once an hour, so we don’t get a lot of windows during which we can put him to bed.

We found out that babies get a growth spurt at about 6 weeks, and when this happens, they may want to feed just about all the time. Of course, he got there a week or so early, and we didn’t know what was happening.

The hungry cry is pretty easy to spot, because he balls up his fists.

Boredom is something knew we’re going to have to figure out. I’m afraid this kid may be very, very smart. It could happen. His grandparents on my side were past the Mensa cutoff, I’m smarter than they were, and his mother is smart. I don’t know anything about my wife’s parents because they died young.

Leftism-tainted science tries to tell us any baby will be smart if given the right treatment, but it’s a huge lie. Genetics determine the child’s range of abilities, and you can’t move the high side by making him listen to Mozart. As for the low side, you could drop him on his head or raise him on a vegan diet that stunts brain growth.

People who aren’t smart very rarely have smart kids. I’m sure you can make a kid somewhat smarter or less smart by raising him in certain ways, but if Dad is a theoretical physicist and Mom is making advances in quantum computing, there is just about no possibility that Junior will not be very sharp, and if the parents are average, they aren’t likely to raise the next Archimedes.

If he’s really bright, it would explain some of the mystifying crying we’ve seen. I thought he was kind of like a potato with eyes, but I have learned that even at this age, babies want mental stimulation, and if he’s smart, he needs more of it.

I am not one of those parents whose mission is to create the next Leibniz. Those people are really misguided, perhaps because they’re not all that bright, themselves. They don’t know what it’s like to be truly, exceptionally bright, so they think intelligence is the answer to all of life’s problems. It’s not. A human being needs a relationship with the Holy Spirit, good habits, and a good personality in order to be a success, and by “success,” I mean a person who is saved and has a peaceful life of victory, love, and abundance.

I don’t mean a miserable, antisocial nerd who makes millions in tech, hangs out with incels and has no empathy. I certainly don’t mean a driven, spoiled athlete who throws up before every competition and can’t make himself believe Daddy loves him unless he wins trophies.

My wife wants our son to be a genius. Genius is lonely. It’s also not necessary. You can be a great surgeon or a good engineer without qualifying for Mensa. You can run an extremely profitable business you love without breaking into the top half of your high school class.

I would rather see my son go into business than a profession. College is the gateway to hell these days.

Genius makes it hard for you to find a mate. If you’re male and your IQ is 170, you’re going to be miserable with a 125 wife, and if you’re female, you’re going to need a 175+ husband unless you want to feel like your husband is your child.

Women need their husbands to be more intelligent than they are. They have a hard time dealing with men who can’t lead. They resent them. We’re not supposed to say this, but it’s true.

Math is merciless. If you’re in the 95th percentile, there aren’t many people in your dating pool.

If our son turns out to be really smart, I’ll teach him to cope with it. I’ll teach him he doesn’t always have to correct people. I’ll try to help him not to be snotty. I’ll tell him to be patient with others. I’ll keep telling him God will be distant from him unless he’s humble.

I’ll make sure he understands that brains and talents don’t make him more valuable than other people.

Anyway, we are doing a very poor job of occupying his mind, so I am going to work on it. He has a weird “baby gym” consisting of a colorful mat with hanging toys, a mirror, and an annoying keyboard he can play with his feet or his forehead, but he isn’t on it enough. I have been getting some other things. I am going to try to find things I can do with him, now that he is emerging from the potato stage. Eventually, we will find pursuits that will reduce his boredom.

He will start languages as early as possible, because they’re really easy for toddlers and babies. He will start music as soon as he is willing. Three isn’t too early. He will start reading at three or earlier. He will be introduced to math early. The other stuff…no one cares. You can learn history and so on when you’re 75. The abilities to learn languages, music, reading, and math drop off fast during childhood.

Here’s a great tip for coping with crying: get a set of Bluetooth earmuffs for shooting and connect them to your PC or TV. When the wife and baby make a racket, you will still be able to hear important things like The Lego Movie.

It works on wives whether you have kids or not, but you didn’t read that here.

Hygiene is getting easier. I insisted on getting a mesh seat and a sprayer for our utility sink, and they really help. At first, Mom was horrified by the idea of putting him in a utility sink, but now that she has changed about 3,000 poopy plastic burritos, she is all for it.

He got a little diaper rash, and she thought it was because I was scraping him with wipes. I learned that wipes don’t hurt babies, and I also learned you really need to dig in there and get everything out.

Poop bacteria turn pee into ammonia. Also, poo contains protease and lipase, two enzymes that eat flesh. Put it all together, and you get diaper rash. Scraping with wipes doesn’t cause rash. It prevents it.

A forceful stream of warm water is better than wipes. It cleans better, and it surely must feel better on irritated skin.

Our new policy is to hose him off late in the day so he will be cleaner during his longest time between changes. He likes the sprayer, so everyone is happy.

We have found that Vaseline is number one for the butt. We tried some expensive stuff, and he got worse. Now, I put on a glove, scoop out a generous portion of Vaseline, and pack it in there. Thank God for gloves.

I read that baking soda reduces the activity of ammonia and the enzymes. I don’t know if it’s true.

He no longer shrieks every time we change him, so we must be doing something right.

We got him a motorized swing. Everyone suggested it. These things move babies around and relax them. We got it for ourselves; let’s be honest. Anything that shuts him up is a blessing.

We stuck him in it, and he loved it. Went right to sleep. Then, of course, the world burst our bubble.

My wife read that you can’t let a baby sleep in a swing. What’s the purpose, then? I would really like to know. She also read that if he’s in a swing too long, he’ll get a flat spot on his head.

After listening to enough screaming, you start to ask yourself how much flatness is acceptable.

We could let him grow his hair long. Tell him he was born that way.

I have come to understand what’s wrong with baby swings. They’re too small. They need to make them big enough for parents. Put the baby in a broom closet and swing your way to relief.

An idea for a more enlightened age.

That’s about it. I guess talking will be the next major event. My mother said my sister spoke sentences at 6 months, so when I was merely very early, she thought I might be retarded. I don’t know what to expect from this one.

He better say nice things about his parents. We don’t have a broom closet, but I could build one.

Here’s a photo from earlier this month:

If you want good family photos, don’t pay a professional, learn about things like composition, and never EVER warn your wife or daughters before you shoot. Women ruin photos with their poses and preparation. Women have a range of about 5 trite poses you see over and over on the web, and unless you want your memories to look like Instagram, you need to shoot first and ask permission later.

Our son is unbelievably funny. We both enjoy him tremendously. I suppose things will be even better when he starts interacting more.

The Earth is a Garden, not a Factory

I learned something interesting today. Preachers tell us the Bible says were are to “die to self,” but that phrase and variants of it are not in the Bible at all. I don’t know who made it up or how long preachers have been saying it.

Yesterday, I heard Derek Prince mention dying to self, and I got what I thought was a revelation. When I learned that “die to self” was not in the Bible, I wondered if the revelation was real.

I have always had the feeling that if I “died to self,” it would mean I became a sort of doormat vagrant, living in poverty and letting people treat me however they wanted. I thought it meant ascetism. I thought I would have to give up everything I liked. I knew there was no way I could do it.

Yesterday, I thought about something I have been doing over the last year or two. I find myself thinking too much, trying to solve my own problems using my own limited mind. When I realize I’m doing this, I start speaking in tongues and prophesying, and I tell God I have no interest in my own thoughts. They come from a very limited and corrupt mind, compared to God’s mind, and they cause trouble.

Psalm 37 says, “Cease from anger and abandon anger. Don’t worry yourself; it only causes harm.” When I have a problem, my natural tendency, like that of every other intelligent creature, is to chew on it and toss it like a dog playing with a bone or a kid licking a loose tooth. It’s stupid, because it leads to stress, and I come up with bad ideas that make things worse or, at least, don’t give me better solutions God has in mind.

This is how the Talmud was written, not to mention a huge percentage of denominational doctrine. It’s how Catholics ended up worshiping statues and coins and writing about the brilliance of ancient Greek perverts like Aristotle.

I spend a lot of time conceiving ideas and trying to make sense of life. A natural person would think these activities were smart, but through them, I wasted most of a human lifespan and came to believe a lot of harmful notions that were not true. This was related to pride. I should never have thought I could figure life out.

When I work to allow the Holy Spirit to flow through me and flush out my own garbage thoughts, emotions, and desires, life goes smoothly, and God gives me real revelation that benefits me and others. Prolonged prayer in tongues is the main way I do this. It’s necessary, and it’s for every Christian.

Yesterday, it occurred to me that maybe this is the real death to self. Not putting on a hair shirt, living in a park, eating from dumpsters, and relieving yourself behind bushes while disturbing pedestrians with loud exclamations about the end of days.

Prince quoted a verse I can’t remember. It may have been Matthew 12:35: “A good man out of the good treasure of the heart bringeth forth good things: and an evil man out of the evil treasure bringeth forth evil things.” I think he used the word “storehouse” instead of “treasure.” The Greek word in the text means a place where you store precious things.

The Bible says that through the Holy Spirit, God writes his laws on the tablets of our hearts. Not the written law of Moses and the blind scholars who followed him; the law of God’s own heart. If you’re a real Christian, you should have the Holy Spirit inside you, filling you up with good things and washing out the bad.

This is another reminder that Christianity is supernatural, just like voodoo and wicca. Cessationists throw out God’s supernatural power, which was demonstrated throughout the Bible, and tell us to leave supernatural power in the hands of our enemies. They say it isn’t for us. They’re no different from the people who said Yeshua had a demon because he was able to cast demons out. They’re like the generations of blind Jews who have said Yeshua was a magician.

It’s odd that any Christian could think God would allow witches and diviners to have supernatural power while denying it to his children.

A lack of supernatural power is a terrible evil. To the Jews, the absence of supernatural help was a huge curse. Because they were proud and could not benefit from hearing God speak, he cut prophecy off from them for 400 years, and afterward, it only came to those who accepted their Messiah. Jews who reject Yeshua haven’t had a prophet since Malachi, but ordinary Spirit-filled Christians prophesy a lot.

Satan is behind the church’s rejection of the supernatural. He created cessationism, and he uses people who swallow it to disarm the rest of us and open our gates to the enemy.

We are supposed to wear the armor of God. As used in the Bible, “armor” includes actual armor, shields, and weapons.

In Mark 16:17-20, God said this:

And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues;

They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.

Every last one of those acts is supernatural. The natural isn’t even mentioned.

He didn’t say, “They will make a huge, impressive hat and put it on an elderly male virgin who has never raised a child, and he will tell people what to do.” He didn’t say, “They will go to church three times a week and do 20 hours of volunteer work every month.” He didn’t say, “They will fly to Mexico and India and badger heathens into building churches out of plywood and tarpaper.” He mentioned supernatural things.

The idea of dying to self is intimidating, because we look at it from the standpoint of the flesh. The flesh knows it can’t be good, and here, it agrees with God, who said no man can please God in the flesh. But if God’s own heart is growing in you, you won’t have to transform your own personality overnight and turn yourself into a new Yeshua. Instead, your thoughts and inclinations will change, filling your storehouse with new things. Then you will be a better person not because you have perfect human willpower, but because you are doing the things your new heart wants to do.

With all this in mind, I believe “dying to self” is a Christian concept, but I don’t think it means what people think it means.

Paul said it was impossible to obey the law. He said that sin increased under the law. It was possible to obey in the sense that if you sinned, you could get forgiveness through sacrifices, but it was not possible to avoid sinning all the time. The written law was of limited assistance in changing men’s hearts and minds. It was completely possible to live under the law and remain greedy, cruel, and corrupt, like the religious leaders who arrested and beat Yeshua and got the Romans to torture him to death.

If you let the Holy Spirit remodel your core, you don’t just follow rules; you become the rules. God’s righteousness grows in you, and behaving correctly becomes natural instead of burdensome.

I believe things are going better for me than I thought. I really am dying to self. It’s happening. I am still pretty corrupt, but I’m on the right course, and that’s what matters.

Christianity has never been a destination. It’s a compass course. Yeshua was better off while he was briefly in hell than Satan was when he lived in heaven. Yeshua was headed for glory, and Satan was headed for destruction. Their courses were what distinguished success from catastrophe.

I believe that if people can grasp these ideas and put them to work, they can save themselves a lot of discouragement, and it could prevent them from falling away. You may be in prison or a mental institution or a rehab facility, and you may be a rotten person, but as long as you are walking toward Yeshua with the help of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you, you are doing fine.

Rodents Will Fall Like Rain

Baby maintenance continues to be challenging, but the difficulty decreases incrementally day by day, helped along by a decrease in the mother’s conviction that I am too stupid to keep a baby alive for more than 15 minutes. Things are going well. The breastfeeding picture keeps improving, I finally got Mom to let our son go for a stroller ride today, and I’m getting way better at making up plausible reasons why I can’t change the diapers.

I’m starting to experience moments during which I think about interests other than the care and welfare of the heir apparent. Today I thought about shooting.

I got myself a Tikka T1x bolt-action .22 with a too-expensive Athlon scope, and I love it. I decided I wanted to have, finally, a very nice semi-auto as well, and I thought I would be able to make one from my Savage A22. I learned some bad things about Savage, and I eventually ordered a Ruger 10/22. My first in rifle length.

The new 10/22 has a plastic stock, a short barrel, muzzle threading, and a built-in scope rail. It’s perfect for my plans to shoot squirrels with a silencer.

I shouldn’t say “plastic.” It’s like calling a G.I. Joe or Han Solo “action figure” a doll, which it is. Okay. Polymer. The 10/22 has a polymer stock. Hope everyone feels better.

What are polymers? Plastic. Moving on…

I bought a very fancy Kidd trigger assembly for the Ruger, so now all I need is a scope. The gun has no iron sights.

I went overboard on the Tikka, blowing over $400 on a first-focal-plane Athlon Helos 2-12 something or other with a mildot reticle and internal illumination. The scope is perfect for what I plan to do with it: short-range squirrel sniping, and targets up to 100 yards.

For the Ruger, I want a cheaper scope, which will have the virtue of being cheaper and also costing less, not to mention being more economical.

I don’t plan to shoot the Ruger at 100 yards, because I would expect that to be depressing due to the low quality of rimfire ammo and the high likelihood that the Ruger will never match the Tikka. I decided I needed 9x at the top end.

I already have a very nice scope that would work. A UTG Bug Buster that cost me something like $70. This scope is ordinarily associated with airguns, but it will work on a .22. It’s illuminated. The glass quality is fine for under 100 yards. It has parallax adjustment. It can focus on things as close as 10 feet away, hence the name “Bug Buster.”

So I bought one for the 10/22.

No, I didn’t. And I didn’t move the old one to the 10/22 from my Marlin Model 60, because then the Marlin would have no scope.

The Bug Buster now runs about $160, so it’s not the bargain it used to be. It’s right up there close to scopes made by real companies. I am no longer tempted to take a chance on it. When it was $70, I could say, “Well of course they cut corners. It was cheap.” Now if I find a problem, I’ll have to say, “This thing is nearly as expensive as a real scope, and look at it.”

I am thinking of an Athlon Talos 3-12x40mm. It’s made by a real company, but it’s only around 50% more expensive than the Bug Buster. It’s illuminated. It focuses down to 45 feet, which is good enough for squirrels. It has parallax adjustment.

What is parallax? It’s complicated to explain, but basically, if a scope’s parallax setting is off, and your pupil isn’t perfectly coaxial with the scope, your round will not hit the point of aim. The error may be small, but I am planning to shoot through squirrel brains, so small is way too big.

Parallax is distance-dependent. Many scopes have fixed parallax settings. That’s fine if you’re shooting a big honking deer Ray Charles couldn’t miss, but when you’re shooting at a tiny squirrel brain, it means you can only count on hitting it when the squirrel is at the distance for which the scope’s parallax is set.

No self-respecting squirrel would make it that easy.

I was studying up on scopes, and I kept wondering why so many had no parallax adjustments, and I realized it was because deer were so big.

It was surprisingly hard to find what I wanted. A lot of scopes had everything I wanted except parallax adjustment. A lot lacked illumination. The Athlon alone had it all.

I should probably get a second Bug Buster, but I can’t make myself believe a scope that sold for $70 during Trump’s first term can suddenly be worth $160 during his second term. Maybe it is, though. Maybe it was wildly underpriced back then.

I like mildot scopes, but Athlon only puts illumination in the MOA version of the Talos I want, so I guess that’s what I’ll get. It doesn’t really matter for squirrels. If I can’t guesstimate how big an inch or half an inch on a squirrel is without subtensions, I am not likely to hit him with the finest mildot scope on Earth. I should be able to say, “The dot is on his head, at this range the POI will be half an inch low, so I put the dot a Jujube’s width above his skull.”

Guessing at holdovers should be easy, but shooting with the wrong parallax setting would cause problems.

I think.

If I can get away from the house, Walmart, Target, and the pediatrician’s office long enough, I will try the Ruger with the spare Vortex Diamondback I put on it, and I will probably order the Talos. When it arrives, maybe I can start checking various brands of ammo in the Ruger and the Tikka. Then I can spray squirrel brains all over the farm, and I will be content at last.

It doesn’t take much to make me happy. Just the simple things.

Ask me Anything about Milk Ducts

Baby showers are not for men. I cannot repeat this often enough. It’s not proper etiquette to invite men, but people now do it anyway.

I have been invited to these things, but I don’t like it. I would rather send gifts and stay home. The novel practice of dragging men to baby showers seems to be part of the left’s effort to turn men into women, and besides, what could be more boring for a normal man than to watch a woman pull things like onesies and wipe warmers out of boxes?

Yes, it’s boring. I’ll repeat it. Heterosexual men, meaning normal men without demonic mental conditions that make them effeminate and cause them to envy women, will sit and nod with approval while a huge lady shows the guests the stuffed toys and bibs she just received, but most of us would much rather be somewhere else receiving thank you’s by text message.

In the old days, meaning, say, 15 years ago when there were only two genders, men were excluded from baby showers just as we are excluded from bachelorette parties. Everyone understood that we didn’t want to go and that we would spoil the atmosphere. Then came feminism, and suddenly, men were obligated to attend.

I don’t like baby showers. Trump needs to ban men from baby showers by executive order. But I have been to two lactation consultations as well as a meeting for breastfeeding mothers, and these things were my idea. I went to these things out of necessity, not because I wanted to be a cool chestfeeding dad who shares his wife’s underwear drawer.

Breastfeeding turned out to be incredibly complicated, and my wife and I are orphans with no female relatives anywhere near us. We lacked the usual advice sources. We needed people who were actually paid to study breastfeeding, and we also needed to talk to women who had been through it.

Thank God no trannies showed up at the meeting. Thank God our consultant and the women running the meeting aren’t drag queens. I don’t have to Google; I can assure you without checking that there are homosexual men teaching breastfeeding and forcing everyone involved to use terms like “lactating person” and “chestfeeder.”

My area doesn’t have much appeal for sexual deviants other than lesbians and gays who are drawn to horses. We don’t have perversion parades, and public sodomy involving people wearing only body paint and glitter is not something we have to deal with. Christians predominate here. I guess that’s why it has been our good fortune to be spared involvement with weirdos during the pregnancy and postpartum experience. We only had one male nurse, and he seemed normal.

The meeting was small, and I was the only man there. Most men of breeding age have to work on weekdays, and it’s not exactly unheard of for men who have free time to abandon the women they inseminate, even in our Christian area.

One young lady at the meeting was still pregnant. Smart girl. Smart for the most part, anyway. She was alone, and from the language she used, it was obvious she was not married to the sperm donor. Nonetheless, she mentioned Ocala’s biggest megachurch. She’s a megachurch member who lives in sin and who would presumably go to hell instantly if she died during childbirth. Imagine carrying your child to term and then going to hell before you ever saw him.

I have been to the church she mentioned. The pastor is an idiot; a motivational speaker who is a stranger to the Holy Spirit. I took my dad to the church, thinking there might be someone there who could help him, but the pastor, whose apt last name is Gilligan, preached a sermon on pagan meditation, calling it “mindfulness.”

This girl is trying to do the right thing, but the man who is supposed to lead her to Yeshua and the Holy Spirit is teaching nonsense and lining his pockets. He profits from keeping her condemned. He’s like a barrier contraceptive that prevents people from reaching God. Satan’s last line of defense against salvation.

Out in the non-Christian world, there are drug dealers, entertainers, liberal teachers, government employees and others who fight Christianity, and people have to deal with them all the time. Then they enter churches looking for relief, and they and run into goalkeepers posing as pastors.

We would be better off if God killed preachers who keep people from being saved.

They’re like Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses. They claim they’re giving you the God of the Bible, but they’re really building up walls of kooky doctrine within you, to make it harder for him to enter.

Anyway, I have never had any desire to learn about breastfeeding, but now I feel like I could write a book. I envy dads who have not had the problems I’ve had. The normal thing is to pay the bills, hold the baby, make things easy for the mother, and let her deal with every aspect of feeding. It should not be necessary for a man to study breastfeeding or go to consultations. Unfortunately, we didn’t think to send my wife to classes when she was pregnant, and we got some bad advice that left us with problems that were hard to fix. I don’t think they would have been fixed had I not jumped in.

Now I have to jump out. I have to resume doing my job. I have to look after our business and property. Our son had to be weaned off formula, and my wife has to be weaned off excessive help. Sooner or later, she will have to drive to buy diapers without me. She will have to go days without handing me a bottle. I have enjoyed taking her and our son to doctors’ appointments, but she’ll have to get used to handling these things on her own the majority of the time.

Over the last month, I have been trained to be with my family constantly and to be involved in everything. Newborns are extremely demanding, and my wife didn’t have a sister or mother to stay with us and help. But he’s not going to need 8 feedings per day forever, and eventually, a diaper will last half a day instead of 5 minutes to three hours.

I don’t have much of anyone to advise me, so I am working to figure it out. How much of this stuff should I be doing this month? How about the month after that?

My wife hasn’t been inside a store since she gave birth. She barely goes outside. I do all the shopping. I get gas. This has been fine up till now, but no normal mother in America lives this way after the first month. She hasn’t had her hair fixed in about 6 weeks.

She was a mess after delivery, but that was weeks ago, and now she has no problem doing laundry or mopping the floor. She does these things without being asked. I’m not badgering an injured woman to do chores. She doesn’t need to be housebound any more. She can drive now.

I have realized I need to adjust my role as time passes and the baby grows.

I’m always going to be involved. I won’t be like my own father, who left the delivery waiting room to play pinball with his friends. I will know the names of my son’s teachers (probably my wife and me). I will hang out with him instead of leaving the house on weekends before he gets up so I can play golf. I will talk to him a lot and pass wisdom on. I will teach him how to do things. I will pray over him and speak blessings over him. But I’m not going to be his other mom.

Our roles are already different. Mom said he couldn’t be allowed to cry alone; I said he would get over it. Mom treats him like a delicate porcelain figurine; I stick my fingers in his ears, jiggle him around, and let him wrestle with my hands. Mom puts him in his special baby tub when he’s a mess; I use the utility sink.

She goes a little too far. I go a little too far. Together, we find the right course.

When he’s whiny and he cries for no reason, Mom reassures him. I tell him, “No one cares. No one is listening. Holler more. Your foot is still going in the romper.” I know he doesn’t understand, but it helps me with my attitude, and eventually, he will learn English, and I will have to say the same things from time to time.

Mom makes him feel safe, and we both make him feel loved, but I also challenge him. I put demands on him. Not big ones. I make him lie on his stomach for 5 minutes at a time. I leave him on his activity mat for half an hour instead of treating him like a growth on my belly that can’t be removed. I won’t let him have fast nipples on his bottles because he has to prefer his mother to a piece of plastic.

I’m not just his drill instructor. I’m also the one who pushes for skin-to-skin time and breastfeeding; things he loves. When I see my wife with a bottle in her hand, I make her explain and defend her decision. I remind her that being tired is not a good reason to use a bottle. I’m tired, too, but if he needs two diapers in 15 minutes, and it’s my turn, he gets them. If he needs something from the store, and I just got back from there, I get in the car and go.

She doesn’t resent me when I push her in the right direction. She keeps telling me how right I was to tell her to do this or that. She didn’t want to have the second breastfeeding consultation, but she was very, very happy on the way home, because the consultation made a huge difference. She didn’t want to go to the meeting, but she loved it, and she learned a lot. On the other hand, she feels terrible guilt for not listening to me about formula.

This is how leadership is. You’re unpopular at first, and then when you turn out to be right, everyone thanks you, and unless you’re lucky, they try to take the credit. You have to get used to ignoring the resistance, because it almost always turns into gratitude. It’s not pleasant to have someone fight you and even shame you when you’re trying to help them, but you have to remember, during the times of resistance, that the payoff will make it all worth it.

The more you cave in, the more you will be resented and contemned later. The same person who gave you a hard time when you were doing the right thing will blame you for quitting and doing exactly what they wanted.

This is a big problem in matriarchal cultures. I don’t know how Jewish men survive. So many of them are bulldozed by their wives.

A man is supposed to rule his house. Anyone who tells you different is your enemy and the enemy of God. And you can’t rule unless you spend a lot of time with God and let him rule you. All authority comes from time spent in the presence of God. A man who doesn’t submit to God makes decisions without God’s authority backing him up. He’s not a captain. He’s a mutineer. Mutineers get taken down by the same people they lead in mutiny.

The mutiny analogy is interesting. British captains could have men flogged and hanged. A sailor who defied and escaped his captain would be chased down by the crown and punished, because the sailor had defied the crown’s agent.

Sailors were terrified of their captains, even if their captains were short and frail. To them, the captain was the crown and the cat o’ nine tails and the gallows.

Mutineers were different. The leader of a mutiny had no one to back him up, so the other mutineers didn’t fear him much. If they slit his throat, they wouldn’t be hanged. They would be rewarded with his position.

God will back up a patriarch who submits to him, but if you live in a state of mutiny, you should expect to be defied and emasculated in your own house. You can’t submit to God unless you spend time in his presence. A book is not enough. Rules are not enough. The one who wrote the book is available. Naval officers don’t get their orders and their authority from books of regulations. Higher officers contact them and tell them what to do.

The baby was too warm, so I just took him to the changing table and put him in a onesie (with a picture of his face on it) and his first pair of pants. It’s not like I watched him get married, but it was a threshold. You can only wear pants for the first time once. Will every little change be reason for emotion? I wonder.

I guess you get over it eventually. Otherwise, it will be, “It’s his first bite of solid food!”; “It’s his first trip to the grocery store!”; “It’s his first trip to the other grocery store!”; “It’s the first time he’s gone to the grocery store in this onesie!”

Don’t ask for the car keys yet, kid. You have a ways to go.

My Son Will Thank me When he Realizes Why He’s not a Whiner

Sometimes when you get an answer that seems crazy, it’s because you asked the wrong question.

We are continuing to undo the damage we did by letting our son use a bottle during his first week of life. We are getting breastfeeding coaching, and things are improving. But today we learned something disturbing: breastfeeding experts don’t like pacifiers. We were advised to stop giving them to our son.

This is more than an inconvenience. It’s a direct threat to our sanity.

When we were at the hospital after delivery, the nurses let us use pacifiers, and it was very helpful, because it temporarily shut down one of the most horrible noises known to humanity. Since then, we have relied on our little rubber friends with great enthusiasm. I have probably shoved pacifiers in my son’s mouth at least 25 times a day. That’s just me, not the wife.

I should get more of them and shove them in my ears.

Sometimes he will be quiet for hours. Other times, a pacifier will only buy maybe 20 seconds of relief. My son is like a slot machine. You put the pacifier in, and you see what you get. Even if the silence is short, it’s worth the effort, because crying babies are worse than leaf blowers.

My wife claims the noise doesn’t bother her, but when my son is loud and close to me, I literally feel like my brain is shaking inside my skull, like a crystal goblet about to shatter from an opera singer’s high note. It even makes my eyeballs hurt. And he can scream loud enough to damage hearing permanently. It makes me wonder why babies don’t all go deaf their first year.

I don’t think my wife is totally honest with herself about the crying, because every so often, she admits she has had it. So if it doesn’t bother her, why is she tired of it?

It’s unfashionable to admit your baby is annoying, just like it’s unfashionable to say you wear nitrile gloves when changing his diapers. You’re supposed to enjoy your baby’s howls, and you’re supposed to think their poop is just like peanut butter.

I don’t know why we persist in lying to ourselves about these things, but we do. It’s like the lies people tell about childbirth being beautiful. If childbirth is beautiful, watching a surgeon do a liver transplant on a conscious patient must be gorgeous.

No one actually thinks childbirth is beautiful. It’s disgusting, degrading beyond description, dirty, and unbelievably painful. If we could somehow make terrorists give birth on command, we would have used it instead of waterboarding.

Actually, we wouldn’t, because childbirth kills people and waterboarding doesn’t.

Our method of childbirth is a curse. It’s not supposed to be beautiful. It’s an extreme form of punishment. See Genesis 3. It’s okay to be honest about it. God didn’t tell Eve that because she had listened to Satan, he was going to give her something beautiful. He gave her a small opening and babies with enormous heads, unlike any creatures in the animal kingdom. He gave her monthly torments that modern women go through 13 times a year for over 40 years. It’s not beautiful. Stop conning yourself.

If childbirth is so beautiful, why is it that women pay other women to have their babies, but no woman has ever paid to have another woman’s baby?

So anyway, I am now faced with a future without pacifiers, and it is illegal to put a baby in a soundproof bag. Things look bleak. He is very peaceful when he’s full of milk directly from the source, but it may be a few days before he is getting it that way all the time.

It’s worse for my wife, because she still feels a compulsion to pick our son up when he squawls. When she’s tired enough, she lets him wail, but she gets mad when she sees me in a comfy chair and my son a few feet away on the floor hollering bloody murder. When she’s alone with him, she carries or holds him in a chair for hours.

I have been getting into arguments about the crying issue. I keep saying babies get spoiled when you pick them up as soon as they start crying, and my opponents tell me I’m heartless and that my son will not love me when he grows up. Okay, only one person actually said that.

I have been Googling about crying babies, and to my dismay, I keep seeing “experts” saying you can’t spoil a baby by holding it too much. Today, I realized I was seeing this wrongheaded tripe because I was asking the wrong question. The correct question is, “Will it harm a baby to let it cry?”

The same self-anointed gurus generally admit that letting a baby cry won’t hurt it. They probably hate admitting this, but I can see why they tell the truth. They depend on having people ask them for advice, and if they kept telling people there was no way to get relief from months of constant screeching, no one would look at their websites or buy their books, and they might occasionally be beaten by haggard parents with blisters on their eardrums.

You can definitely spoil a very young baby. I know this because we spoiled our newborn son in about a day by teaching him that artificial nipples were better than real ones. If a newborn can learn one thing, he can learn others. That’s just common sense.

“If scream, then hold,” is not quantum mechanics. Most lizards could learn it.

Even if you could not spoil a small baby, however, it would still be okay to put them down and let them howl sometimes, because it does them no harm, and it may prevent parents from jumping out of windows.

Let’s pretend you can’t teach a baby to cry constantly by picking it up too quickly. Even if that were true, it wouldn’t mean jumping up and grabbing crying babies in milliseconds was a good idea. They don’t actually need to be grabbed as soon as they start crying, and parents are human beings with limits. Parents have to have a certain amount of care. We have to eat, sleep, and rest. You can’t do any of those things if you’re carrying a baby 18 hours a day.

A baby needs parents who aren’t on the verge of collapsing, but it doesn’t need to be protected from an occasional solo screaming session in a bassinet behind a closed door.

Here’s another important thing to remember: babies cry for bad reasons.

Helicopter parents think that if a baby is crying, something must be wrong, and it needs to be addressed. That’s a fantasy. Babies cry when things are going perfectly. The diaper is dry, the belly is full, there has been plenty of sleep, the baby has been held and loved, the temperature is fine, the baby is not sick, but the hole is still open and the noise is still coming out. It doesn’t mean anything. Nothing needs to be fixed, and if you shut the baby up anyway, you’ll probably have to do something detrimental in order to make it happen. You’ll have to overfeed him, cater to him too much, go without sleep, or do something else which is equally bad.

If you know the baby is fine, shut the door and go sit down for a while. This has worked ever since humanity has existed, and it will work now.

Right now, the heir to the throne is on a play mat about 6 feet away from me, yammering away like I shot his dog. There are no hunger signs. His diaper is very recent. His clothes are clean. Mom has probably held him for 10 of the last 18 hours. He has been breastfed for much of that time. Best guess: he is trying to poop.

I have read that some people solve the pooping-skills problem by shoving stuff up their kids’ rear ends. Supposedly this causes them to release and get relief.

Web sources say this is just a pacifier for the butt. It teaches babies to hold their poo until someone violates their no-fly zone(so to speak) with a hard object, and that’s a very bad habit.

I’m not doing it. I want to be able to look my son in the eye when he’s grown.

Mom just chickened out and held him for a few minutes, and of course, he shut up, although nothing else had changed. He got what he wanted. She’s getting better, though. She let him cry quite a while.

He is really cute, and we are crazy about him. I understand why it’s so hard for her to let him yell.

I asked her to add up all the hours she had spent holding him today, and she said, “Practically the whole day.” Not sustainable. Even if I had held him half the time, it would be too much for both of us, and I’m his dad, so I can’t give him the kind of time she can. I have other things to do.

We will win this battle eventually, if only because my wife will be physically unable to continue on two hours of sleep per night. I am not worried. We will get him off the pacifier and the bottle. He will not cry for hours on end, and we will not carry him constantly like an insulin pump.

He will become more independent, and we will be able to do things like mopping the floors and mowing the yard.

Looks like someone is hungry. I’m out.

The System Works

Interesting experience today.

As noted in an earlier post, my wife and I have had trouble getting our son to breastfeed. When he was born, my wife was not thinking clearly. She was exhausted and full of overprotection hormones, and I let her start the boy on formula. The nurses and I discouraged it, but we gave in too easily, and one nurse said formula was fine, which it definitely is not.

My son decided plastic nipples were the only real nipples. They are easier for babies to suck, and the bottle people put big holes in them so they pass milk and formula much faster than real breasts. Babies get spoiled. Moms get spoiled because they finish in 10 minutes instead of 45 to 60. Spoiled babies raise hell until they get what they want, and moms give in because they are spoiled and also worn down. Dads don’t put their feet down because we live in a castrated society in which Satan has shamed fathers into failing to look after their families correctly.

A reader asked if my area had a La Leche chapter or whatever it’s called. It does not. It does have a breastfeeding office at the Health Department. It’s mainly for poor women on a program called WICS, but they’re not jerks about it. They gave us time. A few weeks back, we got some coaching from a lady named Debbie, and today we showed up without an appointment, and she saw us again.

As luck would have it, our soon-to-be-ex-pediatrician’s office is across the street from the building where Debbie works. We had to see the doctor today for a routine visit. We were asked about our concerns, and we brought up the breastfeeding issue. We couldn’t get the baby to latch properly. There was pain and bleeding. Feedings weren’t successful.

Our doctor, an old Nigerian guy, dismissed our concerns.

This doctor gives people free formula. We should have known this was a red flag. Formula is nearly poison. Nobody should push it on women who may be able to breastfeed. Formula causes diabetes, obesity, allergies, and a bunch of other problems.

We suspect formula companies are giving him free merchandise in order to hook low-income and low-information mothers. Somebody has to be paying for it, and I doubt our third-rate United Healthcare insurance is the source.

He said breast milk from a bottle was just as good as breast milk from a person. Well, I’m no doctor, but I can read. What I have read is that the breastfeeding process itself carries very important benefits for mothers and babies. It helps women’s uteruses shrink. It delays restoration of fertility. It relaxes babies. Today we were told it makes breast cancer less likely. These are just some of the benefits we have been told about.

Isn’t breast cancer a serious problem? Isn’t it worth trying to prevent?

I don’t think the many professionals who say breastfeeding is beneficial are imagining things or lying, but I do think there are doctors who lie to help companies promote medical products. Actually, I know it.

When we left, I told me wife she should call the health people and see if we could arrange an appointment with Debbie. We got an endless hold, so we decided to drive over and walk in. Before long, somebody found Debbie, and we were in her office getting priceless advice.

It turned out my wife was leaning forward, and she wasn’t waiting for the baby to open his mouth wide enough to get everything into it. Debbie told us something amazing. A baby can open its mouth 140°. So basically about like a blacksnake or a great white shark. Ladies, it does not matter how wide your equipment is. A baby can handle it. You could probably put your fist in there.

Debbie got the process started, and before we knew it, my son was totally absorbed. In maybe half an hour, he pumped himself full to bursting, and then he showed his approval by losing consciousness. Perfect.

He was quiet all the way home. He has been quiet almost all evening. He has fed a second time. Our problems are solved.

Now we can put the breast pump away. We can put away all but a couple of bottles, which we will use on rare occasions when normal breastfeeding isn’t practical. My wife isn’t in pain any more. I’m going to throw out what’s left of the formula.

Formula is hard to digest, and a bottle baby can’t regulate its intake even if it receives milk, so now we know our boy’s digestion will be optimized. He won’t have to digest palm oil and cow proteins, and his innards won’t be hammered by inappropriately large feedings that are hard to process.

Maybe he won’t scream before he poops now. I hope so.

My wife is over the moon, and so am I. We have had to do a huge amount of work in order to keep the bottles coming, and the irregular nature of bottle feedings ruined our schedule. It will be hard enough when our son is feeding normally. We don’t need bottle problems making things worse.

She told me she had felt despair. She had resigned herself to months of misery. She thought it was normal. Now she realizes things are going to be much easier, and her relief is immeasurable.

She is very happy I started getting patriarchal and controlling instead of sinking into the modern American wuss-dad mold. She sees that it saved us. I think it has increased her confidence in me. It will make things more harmonious. Leaders who don’t lead cause chaos and confusion.

I was afraid I was being too dominant, but I wasn’t being dominant enough. I’ll bet 90% of American husbands are not dominant enough.

I should have done better from the start. I will do better from now on. I will spend more time with God, increasing my submission to him. That will give me authority to rule my family, and it will help them submit to him and me.

The pediatrician has a couple more things to do for us, so we will wait a while to hand him the mitten, as P.G. Wodehouse put it. We will quit talking to him about feeding.

I am wondering if we can go back to our original pediatrician. He’s not covered by our insurance, but I am willing to pay. The issue is whether our insurer will let him refer us to in-network specialists when needed. If so, we will go back to him in a heartbeat.

We should have taken breastfeeding classes before our son was born, but as a man, I could not have guessed that sucking a nipple was complicated. In retrospect, I think delivery classes would have been worthless compared to breastfeeding classes. During the delivery, I never had a challenging decision. It was all simple and intuitive. Easy to figure out on the fly.

If you’re planning to have a baby, learn from our mistakes. Don’t even consider using formula unless you literally have no choice. Don’t use bottles except on rare occasions. Don’t give up on yourself or your baby. Find the right people, and they will get you hooked up. It can be done. Don’t listen to anyone who says breastfeeding is merely a nice option for affluent women and disgraceful women who choose to betray the memory of Susan B. Anthony by raising their own children. It’s the proper and normal way to feed children, and if it were not, none of us would be here.