The World is Full of Nothings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Professional Nice Guy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In other news, my son is changing fast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t know where my son fits in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Side Effects Looking a Lot Like Main Effects

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To sum up, no coronavirus shots for my boy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Passover Chametz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The bagels are done.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Rage, Your Choice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First Evaluation Goes Poorly

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

★ 1 (1 review)

Baby X. said

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

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

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

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

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

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

The thing that gets me the most is the insubordination.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lord of the Dough Rings

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

Also, too small.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes. I see it all so clearly now.

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

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

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

That New York ego is really something.

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

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

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

Just saying.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oy

I may have cracked the bagel code.

I can’t figure out why I can’t just go to Google, type “bagel recipe,” and get an obvious answer millions of bakers should already know. But I can’t. It’s like Googling Mormon secret handshakes, only harder, because you can actually find Mormon secret handshakes pretty easily online. Here they are.

I knew high-hydration recipes were stupid, because anyone who has ever eaten a bagel knows they are dense and a bit dry. The King Arthur company recommends 63%, which is nearly wet enough for pizza. The longer I live, the more certain I am that no one at that company knows anything about actual cooking. Recommending 63% hydration in a bagel is like recommending cottage cheese in cheesecake.

Tonight I went back to the recipe I started on a few months ago. The hydration is 55%. I reduced the yeast. Other than that, no changes. I made the dough in a Cuisinart, let it rise for about three hours, rolled out 4 bagels, tested them for proofing by seeing if they floated in water, boiled them for two minutes per side in a special solution, and baked them at 400°.

They were not exactly like New York bagels. They were smaller, for one thing. My bagels started out at around 92 grams, and I plan to move up to 125. They also tasted a little different on the outside. They had kind of a baking soda taste in addition to malt and sweetness.

They were not precisely on target, but they were better than the bagels I get at the store even though the store bagels are pretty much exactly what a New York bagel is supposed to be. The odd flavor from the solution made the bagels taste different, in a good way. My wife likes them better than store bagels. Nonetheless, I plan to move back toward the original taste next time. Here is what I plan to do:

INGREDIENTS

240 grams high-gluten flour (not bread flour)
132 grams warm water
1 tsp. salt
1 tbsp. diastatic malt powder
132 g warm water
1/4 tsp. instant yeast

Water Bath

1 qt. water
4 tbsp. dried malt extract (not diastatic)
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. baking soda

I will cut the baking soda from 1 teaspoon to 1/2 because I could taste the soda in the bagels I ate. That seems like overkill. The baking soda is supposed to improve the crust, so I will see if I really need a whole teaspoon.

I made 4 dough balls and put them under a glass bowl to rise. I mashed them into disks and put holes in them and let them rise some more. I dumped one into cool water to see if it had risen enough. It floated, so I assumed all was well.

I didn’t make the bagels the old-fashioned way, rolling dough into strips, wrapping them around my hands, and rolling them forward and back until they made rings. That’s a pain. I just poked holes in my circles and stretched them. The result is more uniform and less likely to produce faulty bagels. It’s better.

The holes closed up more than I wanted, but it worked out, because when bagels have big holes, food falls through them.

At this stage, you boil your bagels two minutes per side. I drained mine on paper towels, figuring baking them sitting in water was a bad idea. I baked them at 400° on an air bake sheet with a piece of nonstick foil on it.

At 20 minutes, they were dark, but not too dark.

They are crusty and chewy. The texture seems fine to me. Even if I never get the exact flavor New York bagels have, these will be very nice with smoked salmon and cream cheese. As good or better than classic bagels.

Once I’m content with the recipe, I’ll figure out how to make garlic bagels, which are THE correct bagels to eat with salmon, regardless of what a lot of unimportant people think.

This is great. I no longer have to rush to Publix early in the day, hoping retirees with names like Morty, Sol, and Moishe haven’t snapped up all the plain bagels. And soon I’ll be able to get garlic bagels, which are better.

See you at breakfast.

Shot but no Beer

I don’t plan to put my son’s name on the blog, but I keep violating my resolution not to blog about him, so I’ll have to call him something. For now, I think I’ll go with “Herr Mozart” because these days we are supposed to turn all babies into Mozarts.

So today Mozart went to the pediatric surgeon to see if he had an oral issue that made him slow breastfeeder. He is not a slow bottle feeder. Much the opposite.

Bottles come with nipples made to move milk at different speeds. A 1 is a very slow nipple, and a 3 is a fast nipple. You don’t want to drown your newborn with a 3.

One problem people have with bottles is that the move milk faster than women’s bodies, so babies drink too fast. They end up overeating, so to speak, they may throw up more milk than is normal, and they may get really spoiled. Who wouldn’t prefer a #3 nipple to a #1 mom?

Experts teach mothers to do paced bottle-feeding. Essentially, this means you hold the bottle horizontally so the milk comes halfway up the nipple. This prevents gravity from pumping milk into a baby that has to drink it to avoid drowning, and it is also supposed to make babies drink more slowly.

Not Mozart. We got him slow nipples, I do as the experts say, and milk flows into him like foreign bribes into a Biden. I don’t know how he does it.

With Mom, he latches on and takes a nap. Every so often, he takes a little milk. Then he conks out again. He lies there, blissfully snoring and breaking wind, as long as she permits it. He doesn’t fill up.

Mom was convinced he had a lip tie or a tongue tie. These are little strips of flesh we all have, connecting our lips and tongues to our bodies. If they are not made just right, they can prevent babies from opening wide enough to feed well.

The pediatric surgeon said he didn’t see anything that needed to be corrected, so now instead of being trapped in the “Mom wants to know for sure” vortex, we can move forward.

I knew he did not have a problem, because he has breastfed well in the past, and because when he uses a bottle, he opens like a python swallowing a stray dog.

A friend of ours has fed two kids successfully, and she called it. She said Herr Mozart was lazy. The surgeon said the same thing today. Our friend said he liked sleeping on mom. She told us to take off his clothes and make him uncomfortable so he would stay awake and get feedings over with. A warm, comfortable baby is an unmotivated baby.

Mom’s cooperation has been spotty, because, well, she’s Mom. The enabler.

Now, with confirmation from the surgeon, we have agreed to stick with my friend’s approach. Assuming Mom behaves.

He’s doing okay. He’s a little behind on height, but he is way ahead on fat. It looks like he gained over a pound in under two weeks, and he grew half an inch.

We also took him to the health department for shots. Don’t ask me why, but his not-great pediatrician told us to do this instead of giving him shots himself. That guy has to go.

We got him fixed up for several common diseases, and we will get two more shots next week. I didn’t want his body to have to deal with side effects from like 52 different vaccines at once.

The health department is a good resource. They have been very helpful with breastfeeding. But it seems odd to go to the county instead of doctors. I am old, and until this year, I had never been inside a county health department building. This county has a lot of low-income people, so I think standards are different here. Pediatricians ask for your Medicaid number without even asking if you have real insurance, and they pimp formula without asking whether you would rather give your baby actual milk. Formula is for poor uninformed people and for feminists who want illegal aliens to raise their babies.

Everyone we saw today thought he was wonderful. He is still very cute. That hasn’t worn off. It’s still paying dividends. When pediatricians who see 50 babies a day see your baby and gush over how cute he is, you know he’s unusual.

I was very happy to get the vaccinations and lip business over with, so I came home and treated myself to a nice toasted bagel with Sam’s Club smoked salmon. I found out that Sam’s sells very good salmon for half as much as supermarkets, so I no longer feel bad about eating it, and I plan to keep it up. That means I have to get back to making bagels.

The only decent bagels I can buy here without driving 25 minutes come from Publix. They’re made by the Einstein Bros. chain. Every Publix has a little cabinet containing Einstein bagels. Unfortunately, old Jews or maybe fat gentile girls get in there early every day and clean out the plain bagels. By the time I get there, they are usually gone, and nobody really wants a sesame-seed or asiago bagel with salmon on it. They usually have “everything” bagels. These are like bagels rolled in coarse dirt. Incomprehensible.

So now I have to get back to working on my own bagel recipe. And I have to figure out how to make garlic bagels.

It’s amazing how bad the Internet’s bagel information is. The recipe ought to be everywhere, but the web is full of bad recipes and wild guesses. Pages with recipes contain phrases like, “These are pretty good…”

I made some bagels back in November, and they were real bagels, but they were not inspiring. I have to resume.

It appears I need to try a hydration rate of 55%. Some recipes go as high as 64%, which is idiotic. That’s Wonder Bread territory. A bagel has to be dense, and that means low hydration.

I’m going to crack a Schneider Weisse, do some figuring, and get to work. I am never going to beat old retired Jews to that Einstein Bros. box.

We are Goldstein

Let’s compare two sitreps.

Me:

Woke up in my nice Sam’s Club memory foam bed. Prayed in tongues and prophesied for 90 minutes. Grabbed my beautiful son, who was in prime morning-baby mood, and messed with him while he burbled with joy. Noticed that he had pooped on his romper during the night. Took him to the laundry room, put him in the special seat in the utility sink, and rubbed him all over with a hot, soapy washcloth while he grinned and tried to eat water drops that got close to his mouth.

Diapered the baby, put the poo items in the washer, threw out the carefully-wrapped diaper, and handed the heir apparent over to mom, who was thrilled to have him back.

Went to the living room and ate a gorgeous toasted bagel with cream cheese, slices of Bermuda onion, smoked salmon also from Sam’s Club, and decaf with too much cream and sugar. Watched a Top Gear clip and made fun of the British.

Unidentified Mainstream West Coast Leftist:

Went on Tiktok wearing a Dodgers jersey. Small confused dog also wearing Dodgers jersey. Screamed in torment about the L.A. Dodgers visiting the White House. Called two talented baseball players DEI hires. Ripped jersey off self. Tore dog’s jersey off so roughly she should be cited for animal cruelty. Announced her plans to burn her jerseys, sparing one that belonged to a player who missed the White House visit because he hurt his ankle. Complained that things should be different, because this is the Age of Aquarius. The demons she worships are letting her down. Imagine that.

Two people. Same world. Same country. Same week.

Leftists are the people who have planted their perversion-celebrating antisemitic flag on joy and love. The people who supposedly do life right. The rest of us–the Gomers and Goobers–are supposedly the miserable potato eaters who don’t know what we’re missing because we’re too stupid and too busy committing incest.

Polls from left-leaning organizations say people on my side are happier, better-looking, and even less mentally ill than the snowflakes, even though they make more money and tend to be more educated. Even the polls are deluded!

Red life is wonderful. The South is the most-fun place there is. I’m missing out on so much hatred and fear.

A young guy bought the house across the private drive a few years back. He bought it from a great older couple, Russ and Sally. Russ played basketball at LSU. As Southern as they come. Heavy accent. He was an ignorant incest-committer who could not read. No, actually, he was a very smart guy with a math degree. He made his money selling medical stuff because the job market for mathematicians isn’t all that great.

The young guy has a land-clearing business. I just wrote a letter for him, telling some authority or other to let him park his diesel grapple, truck, and equipment trailer on his lot. He has a wife and three kids. The kids zip around the property on a quad. We get along great. He came over here and moved problem trees for me without being asked or paid. In fact, he asked permission.

So far, neither of us has left the private non-HOA subdivision wearing black PJ’s from Urban Outfitters and carrying bottles of pee to hurl at the cops. None of the residents of these two properties key Teslas. We haven’t screamed at the sky.

I hang out with my wife and baby son. We pray. We occasionally host overnight visitors. I shoot in the yard. I like running around in the utility cart and working with the chainsaws and the tractor. My lot is so big I have to use a cart to get around, and I have to use the phone to communicate from one end to the other. I write on my blog. I brew beer.

We must be doing something wrong. We could be living it up in Times Square or any neighborhood in Seattle, pooping on the sides of police cars, setting fire to ourselves over Ukraine, calling for the murder of all Jews in Israel, and telling our son he’s a girl.

The other day I told my son I had assigned the male gender to him. I’ve told other people. It gives me a laugh. I tell him not to be a fruit or a leftist when he grows up.

If we’re doing so many things wrong, why is life so good?

My buddy Mike has a son who married a leftist. Their marriage is an equal partnership, so it’s really a matriarchy. They are not interested in our white, European-looking, colonialist God.

Mom is a fake vegan who sometimes eats things like cheese. Dad plays along when he’s in the house. They have two small girls. The last one came in seriously underweight at birth. That’s what happens when you don’t eat meat. Vegetarianism is very, very bad for the unborn and for children. Even our left-leaning medical establishment says so. Know what you’re supposed to eat while breastfeeding? Protein. Look it up.

Guess what breast milk is, by vegan standards? An animal product. We’re not really animals, but leftists think we are. Anyway, they think breast milk is okay for babies, but as soon as they’re weaned, it’s time for sickly white fluids concocted from things like oats and soybeans. Soybeans are toxic until they’re cooked, and they’re full of female hormones, but okay.

Mom and Dad bought their first baby a lesbian costume. A grey sweatshirt with a rainbow on it and a pair of masculine-looking jeans. I would rather have God strike me dead than let me put homo clothes or girls’ clothes on my boy. It astonishes me that there are parents pushing their kids to adopt abomination. A baby is literally better off dying in the crib than going to hell. There is no purpose in having children to fill up hell.

They used to get mad at Mike for using words like “she,” “her,” and “girl.” Like the first baby’s sex was a secret she wasn’t supposed to know. Now they find themselves using these words themselves. I wonder if they cudgel themselves later and sleep in hair shirts made from fake hair. They have even put dresses on the baby.

When the son found out my wife and I were having a baby, he told Mike he wanted to know what we were planning to do to help him cope with life under white supremacy. No joke. My plan is to make sure my son knows there are only two races: God’s family, and everyone else.

They worry all the time. They live in fear. They have little free time. They are unhappy. They are angry at good people.

Life here gets more peaceful all the time. We don’t worry about the future, because someone is planning it for us. I call our house the House of Love, because it’s true.

Here on the blog, I express a lot of annoyance, but that’s not reflective of the atmosphere here or my general attitude. I don’t go around in real life fuming about the world, and I do not hope conservatives start shooting our persecutors. I would like to be raptured. I want to be elsewhere when people on my side look for payback.

Mike’s son and his wife are normal. More typical of this age than my family. That’s terrible.

The centrifuging of society has progressed to an extreme degree, and Satan’s smug children are getting heavily concentrated at the bottoms of the tubes. Their contempt for God’s children is deep and impenetrable. Their hatred is hotter than ever. The spring of future violence is compressed almost to its limit.

Today I read about a poll. About 55% of Democrats said assassinating the president was at least somewhat justified. Elon Musk? A paltry 48%. We’re talking about cold-blooded murder, if it can ever be correct to say leftists have cold blood. It boils all the time.

Democrats are now showing up at hate events wearing hats like that of Luigi, a video game character. They symbolize agreement with Luigi Mangione, the cowardly liberal nutwad who murdered an innocent insurance executive on the street.

Imagine this happening during the last century. What if this were 1964, and Republicans were wearing T-shirts bearing the image of Oswald the rabbit, showing how happy they were that John Kennedy’s brain had been splattered all over his wife’s dress and expressing their hope that more murders would follow?

Couldn’t have happened.

Here’s irony: Luigi hats feature a big “L” on the forehead. What is that the universal symbol for?

Couldn’t be more appropriate. Satan is THE biggest loser in existence, and his children are losers. I mean that literally. Satan is incapable of being blessed, but he is a curse magnet. A black hole for curses. They can fall in, but they can’t get out. His kids are the same way, but curses can’t stick to real Christians.

As usual, things are even worse than I thought they were. How can this be sustainable? If a very comfortable majority of Democrats admit they think it would be good to see the president murdered, and it’s okay to wear a hat celebrating the killing of a husband and father who was no threat to anyone, how long can it be before Democrats start traveling in armed mobs, shooting everyone they think MIGHT be a Trump supporter, true Christian, Zionist, or Jew?

I see that we are lucky leftists hate guns, because it hinders their progress. If conservatives wanted to put death squads on the street, we could do it today, but angry liberal men tend to be weak, soft individuals who don’t know guns work. When you see them running around in their conformist black pajamas (because black is the color of love and joy), you can’t help noticing that their necks and their wrists are often about the same size. They are taking a long time to prepare.

I think Democrats are becoming like Muslims and the Irish-Americans who funded the IRA. Some are willing to become terrorists. The others are not, but many of those who are not are willing to support terror in private.

Let me digress. I learned something interesting the other day from a secular historian. In the early days of Christianity, people dressed normally at funerals. They wore cheerful colors. They knew they were celebrating people’s entry into heaven. They started wearing black because the Catholics and the Orthodox, who ran pagan organizations pretending to be churches, adopted pagan funeral customs. For pagans, death was terrifying.

Now it’s like every leftist event is a funeral. A funeral for civilization and love. They even root for the end of humanity. They think human beings are an infestation, and the world is like a house that needs to be tented for termites.

We are what gives the world purpose. Without us, it would be better to destroy it and save animals suffering.

It’s important to maintain perspective. If you don’t check leftists out once in a while, and your own life is easy and peaceful, it’s not hard to forget that the ship is sinking.

Next We’ll Cross Cockroaches with Rattlesnakes

Today I saw an article that looked like BS, so I Googled, and yes, it’s BS. A company called Colossal is trying to bring the dire wolf back, and they claimed they had produced three pups.

What is a dire wolf? The name should be a clue. It’s a horror creature. It’s pretty much like a grey wolf, only way bigger than typical grey wolves. The average weight of the males, according to Wikipedia (which is never, ever wrong) was 150 pounds. The biggest grey wolf subspecies measures around 125. To make things even more fun, the dire wolf had bigger teeth and could bite a lot harder. They ate buffalo.

This is just what we need running around the American wilderness. Like it wasn’t stupid enough to bring regular wolves back after our ancestors had the common sense to wipe them out.

It’s not fashionable to say it, but killing off big predators is a good thing. The ecosystem does not actually need them, regardless of what the Chicken Littles say. It has survived the loss of all sorts of key species like the European lion, the cave bear, mammoths, mastodons, the carrier pigeon, and the American chestnut without even stumbling. If any species were really super important, all life would have ceased a long time ago.

Big predators aren’t necessary, but they do a lot of harm. They kill pets, livestock, and, occasionally, people (yes they do). Those things matter.

Colossal flat-out said it had produced dire wolves. Then it backtracked when actual scientists called it out.

They took some cruddy old DNA from a couple of fossils, and they worked a few bits of it into grey wolf embryos. That’s all they did. So now what we have is a huge man-made mutant which is in no way a dire wolf and which probably has almost zero genetic diversity.

I’m no geneticist, but I know what inbreeding is, and it’s bad. It can reinforce the best and worst traits in a population. Look at the royals and the House of Lords. Would you want your kid to look like that?

Inbreeding can cause viciousness and mental illness. Just what you want in an animal that can take your hand off.

Colossus claims the end goal is to restore lost species to the wild. How can you do that when you’re not actually recreating lost species? It’s like trying to palm a third-generation Dodge Challenger off as a Sixties muscle car, except the new Challenger would be full of unpredictable genetic surprises.

The dire wolf was not a big grey wolf. It was in a completely different genus. You can’t make a dire wolf from a grey wolf. It’s like trying to make a gorilla from chimp parts.

I tried to find out why the dire wolf disappeared, but no one knows. I know ancient people killed them on sight, though. They did that to all big predators, because they had more common sense than we do.

Colossal’s claim that it will release these abominations in order to restore a species is a hoax, but they could get loose and start filling female wolves with DNA that would make grey wolves bigger and more annoying. Wouldn’t that be great?

If you want to do something useful with wolf DNA, trying making them smaller, weaker, terrified of people, livestock and pets, and prone to sterility and impotence. Afflict them with homosexuality. Those would be useful modifications. Shrink their teeth. Turn them into grass-eaters. Ranchers who raise animals that are actually beneficial would thank you.

It seems as though the apocalypse is associated with an increase in creativity. People are doing weird new body modifications. Fake genders are literally so numerous it is not possible to figure them out. There must be 30 varieties of Coca-Cola. All kinds of strange things happen at businesses. It’s like they’re being run by teenagers. Instead of asking, “Is this sound business practice?”, they ask, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we did this?”

I believe God wants us to operate in channels. I think creativity has to have bounds set, or else it becomes destructive and confusing.

Some people who say they’ve seen demons have given descriptions that remind me of body-modifiers and dinosaurs. Strange skin coloring. Long fangs. Excessive size. Asymmetry. I know it sounds strange, but sometimes I wonder if the dinosaurs were created by evil spirits. I wonder if they were some of the giants mentioned in the Bible.

Dinosaurs appear to have had characteristics that make more sense as creative adornments–the result of pride and a desire for attention–than functioning body parts. For example, no one has been able to explain the tiny arms on tyrannosaurus rex. No one really knows why some dinosaurs had dorsal sails. Scientists haven’t figured out the bizarre vertical plates on the back of the stegosaurus. Other dinosaurs have grotesque projections on their skulls that can’t be explained.

Sometimes I think evil spirits designed these things just to express themselves. They put crazy-looking appurtenances and tattoos on modern kids for the same reason. The Holy Spirit drives Christians to conform to God’s image, and by the symmetry of the supernatural, demons drive the damned to conform to their images. What else could convince a boy to have his testicles cut out and the inside of his penis scraped out and discarded?

People who say they’ve seen angels generally say they look like human beings. No spikes. No forked tongues. No feathers. No unusual colors or horns.

A guy named Shawn Weed tells a fascinating story of a death experience. You can see it on Youtube. He died, and an enormous creature somewhat like the character Darkness from the old Tom Cruise movie Legend grabbed him and carried him off.

The creature had red-and-black skin. It had long horns and the hooves of a goat. It was 13 feet tall. It was so strong, Weed might as well have been a doll made from toilet paper.

The angel that rescued him was only 9 feet tall. It looked like a human being. Still, it defeated the evil spirit easily.

Science says the dinosaurs were gone long before human beings arrived, but scientists and historians are wrong a lot. They weren’t actually here to see what happened in prehistoric times, and anyway, in a world where the supernatural trumps the natural, we don’t know what miraculous events may have gone on before recorded history. For example, we can’t say nothing happened that would make radioactive dating inaccurate.

I suspect that if the rapture doesn’t come first, we will see all kinds of genetically-engineered abominations, including engineered humans and part-humans. I have expected it for a long time. The temptation to overcome the physical limitations of existing species has been around forever, and we are not good at resisting temptation.

Whether we admit it or not, our Christian heritage is the main thing that restrains us from creating abominations. People who don’t fear God would be making part-human monsters right now if it weren’t for Christianity. Somewhere, someone is surely doing it already.

God destroys humanity when we start behaving like little gods and take too much power, and creating major alterations in species is godlike behavior.

I don’t know where Colossal is going with its twisted experiments, but I expect the worst from humanity. History tells me to.

“Colossal” means “giant.” That’s interesting.

Let’s Boot the World Off Welfare

I see a lot of people, including RINO’s, criticizing Trump for increasing tariffs on foreign goods. The ignorance is amazing.

No one can answer this simple question for me: if tariffs are bad for an economy, how come they’ve been so good for the economies of the countries that put unfair tariffs on our exports?

How can it be that a practice that benefits all of our economic enemies can harm us when we do it to a lesser degree?

Another question: since Trump’s tariffs are tied directly to the tariffs and barriers imposed by other countries, if we want to get rid of them, why don’t we pressure the other countries instead of attacking our president? They can lower OUR tariffs in an hour by lowering their own.

I don’t know how well Trump’s tariff fight will work out, but I can’t see any reason at all why it shouldn’t be a whopping success. Sure, it’s hard on the stock market. Temporarily. Real investors know that the success of a market is measured in decades, not days. This is probably a great time to buy depressed stocks sold off by people with weak hands. “Weak hands” is the term career investors use to ridicule those who sell their stocks every time they dip. The people who buy high and sell low.

The US has the largest internal market in the world, meaning we have the big stick to beat everyone else with. Liars say the EU is the biggest, but that’s propaganda. The US is the biggest in terms of money spent, and that’s all that counts. The EU’s market is about half the size of ours. If you want to sell stuff to foreigners, you want to sell in the US. When the US blocks you, you’re like a diaper manufacturer who can’t sell to Walmart. You’re done.

Let’s see how we’re doing in 6 months.

Life is Easy for the Cute

My son is still alive, so apparently letting me take care of him for up to two hours at a time is not as dangerous as his mom thinks. I am not a tiger. I do not eat my young.

Things are going very well. He is ahead on every obsessive-mom metric I can think of except for height, and he has over 20 years to work on that. He is fatter, stronger, and smarter than most kids his age.

We are changing pediatricians, as I have probably written before. The old Nigerian guy we picked has such a thick accent even my wife has no idea what he’s saying. He is completely dismissive of breastfeeding, and he appears to be receiving bribes from formula companies, because somehow free formula mysteriously appears in his office, and he gives it away.

My cousin told me the doctor should be giving us height and weight percentiles at every visit, but he doesn’t. I pushed him to do it, thinking it was a simple thing he knew how to do, but he had to go to his computer and find the same website I would have used.

The last time we went, a well-dressed white lady was at the clerical window having a too-long conversation with the clericals. I thought it was odd that someone with nice clothes and clean shoes–and no children–would be in a pediatrician’s office in Ocala, and I soon learned that my suspicions were well-founded.

That happens more and more as I get old.

She was some kind of industry shill, and she was arranging something with the practice. Maybe she was a formula shill, or maybe she gets paid to put doctors together to make mutual referrals. Maybe she was pushing Ozempic for fat babies. I don’t know, because they never mentioned a product.

I should have gone outside to see which series BMW she drove.

The baby is fine, but there is constant tension between the mom way of doing things and the proper, correct dad way. Mom wants him to lie on his back and have paid servants massage his extremities and feed him milk from a 24-karat bottle. Dad wants him to begin SEAL training.

He has had feeding problems because Mom taught him to sleep in her bed and to breastfeed while covered in multiple layers of clothing. He decided she was a pacifier to help him sleep, so he didn’t make much effort to take anything in. He just lay there snoring with one hand on Mom to make sure she didn’t try to escape. The Mom alarm. The ankle monitor of baby moves.

Last night, I got Mom to talk to a friend of mine who breastfed two kids, and the friend set her straight. She said he needed structure. He needed to be in bed at night, ignored except for necessary feeding and changing. She said the lights needed to be out at night, and the baby needed to be uncomfortable so he would not fall asleep at the nipple. She said to take the romper off so he would be a little cold.

My wife is convinced that our son will die if we expose him to 75-degree air without two or more layers of clothing, but as I have repeatedly told her, crib death is caused by heat, not cold. My friend backed me up, saying her kids sleep best at 69 degrees. It looks like a lot of mothers have killed their children by wrapping them up like little moon astronauts.

I don’t think my wife fully understands that in America and Europe, “room temperature” generally means 68 degrees. Florida has given her a skewed perspective.

He is trying to talk now, although it would be a pretty big stretch to say he has formed words. When he says something that sounds like a word, I repeat it back several times, thinking there might be a chance. And there might. Who knows? It has happened to others. My mother said my sister spoke sentences at 6 months. Strange that I turned out to be so much smarter than she did.

My sister, I mean.

Between my sister and me, it is not a close race.

We have an appointment to have our son’s mouth looked at, to make sure he doesn’t have either of the common deformities that make it hard to latch onto nipples. I’m sure he’s fine. He has opened his mouth plenty wide in the past, and today while he was in a good mood, I pried him open to check, and I couldn’t find any issues.

Once the appointment is behind us, it will probably be clear that we, not a deformity, are the problem.

I should not complain about my wife being overprotective. There are a lot of moms out there sitting in bars while their mothers or strangers look after their kids. Then there was Barack Obama’s mom. Enough said about her.

We have had a number of diaper blowouts. We have used bottles to get more milk into him, and apparently, it works. He has developed a gut.

My wife hated my idea of bathing him in our laundry sink, but when he started having blowouts, I started tossing him in there, because it was the best way to confine the mess and get rid of it. We got him a mesh seat that just fits in the sink. I added a spray nozzle to the faucet. Now my wife loves it and prefers it to the plastic whale-shaped tub she bought him.

I think the tub is no good because it just dilutes the filth without getting rid of it. You put the dirty baby in, the filth sloughs off into the water, and then you dry him off, leaving filth residue all over him. The spray nozzle sends filth down the drain.

We dump him in the seat and go through an elaborate procedure to get his clothing removed and into the washer and his romper removed and into the trash. The poo never touches anything important.

The whole business was my idea. The sink. The spray nozzle. The procedure. Everything. I’m a Southerner. We hate poop.

The baby loves doing it my way. He can’t get enough of the sink. He loves being hosed with warm water.

My wife saw me washing him, and she was amazed that his leg didn’t come off when I grabbed it and used it to lift him so I could spray his back and butt. His expression didn’t change at all. She had been overdoing the gentleness, like parts were in danger of coming loose.

I lift him and blast him right on his Mongolian blue spot. Mom didn’t know these spots existed. Pretty much everyone who isn’t white has them at birth, and on some people they’re permanent. Our son has a big blue area all across his vast rear end. My wife didn’t know Africans had these spots, but of course, they are harder to see on Africans.

I feel pretty smug about the sink. Experience has vindicated my ideas several times, and it’s always sweet.

He has gotten way better at pooping. He used to scream like crazy every time he had to go, but it’s much less tumultuous now. Apparently, he had something called dyschezia. It means you’re pushing hard from above while clamping shut from below. It’s a coordination problem. Now he just growls like a Rottweiler during each push, and everything moves along as it should. It’s like, “GRRRRRRRRRRRR!! GRRRRRRRR!! Ooh! OOOH!”, and then a big smile. He goes through this a number of times during any given poo, so I try to wait until he looks happy. That suggests he has finished and he is ready to hand everything off to me.

Mom thinks he should be changed while he’s still growling or screaming, because she thinks poo stings his rear end. I think that’s wrong, because he has no diaper rash and no broken skin, and he sleeps just fine after pooping without cluing us in.

I just made him wait for a change, and he calmed down. He was grinning and cooing with joy while I fixed him up. I call that another score for Dad.

This week he is falling out of love with the pacifier. His hands are taking its place, which is convenient for us. We don’t have to run for a nice, sanitized pacifier. He can just ram his nasty, filthy fingers in his mouth for long intervals of free amusement that also build up his immune system.

He’s much more fun now that he laughs and smiles and tries to have conversations with us.

I did not have much use for kids before he came along, and I thought babies were gross (which is actually true). I knew some people believed that people who didn’t care for kids shouldn’t have them, but I figured I would love one if he was mine, and of course, that is what happened. No problems at all.

I also worried that I would love my children too much, and that is still a concern. Sooner or later, you have to let them walk outside and face the world by themselves. I have been thinking he will eventually need to go to day care from time to time just to learn how to socialize, and that will be tough for me. Will there be bullies? What about all the sick kids with snot and vomit all over them? Will I be able to trust the attendants?

One thing is for sure. I will never let him spend time in a facility where a man works. It is not normal for a man to want to be around tiny children that belong to other people. I don’t want homosexual pedophiles anywhere around my son. If we ever walk into a place and see a fruit wearing foundation and glitter, we will turn around and walk out.

Pedophilia appears to be much more common in men, and I don’t think that’s because statistics are flawed.

Now that my son reacts to me more, I enjoy interacting with him more. Before everything started to come online, I liked being with him, but after a session got to a certain point, it had more to do with duty than enthusiasm. I wanted his brain to develop. I wanted him to know he was loved. I wanted him to have physical activity so his coordination would progress.

I still haven’t gotten him to shoulder a rifle yet. Give me a month. I am working on it.

Fellow Untermenschen, I Salute You

Yesterday I saw something chilling. An untalented, female, black comedian hired under racist DEI policies lost a juicy gig. Amber Ruffin, an obscure lady whose appearances seem to be limited almost exclusively to her own Youtube channel and one dogged late night show, was told she would not be speaking at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

The talk show host who has thrown her numerous lifelines is Seth Meyer…whoops…Meyers (didn’t know). Her Youtube channel is sponsored by NBC. Hmm…I just checked, and Seth Meyer’s show is on NBC. So NBC is paying for Youtube views in order to make her look like a legitimate talent, and Meyers is being forced to put her on his show, or he has independently chosen to push a DEI comedian for personal reasons.

I realize none of this is chilling. I haven’t gotten to that part yet. The chilling thing is that she says conservatives aren’t human beings and don’t deserve equal treatment in her unpopular act. She also says we are “kind of murderers.” No idea what she is referring to.

She says she was fired for refusing to joke about both leftists and people with sane beliefs. It goes without saying that the WHCA was fine with her leaning way left and being unfair, but it looks like they didn’t want her to go so far she blew their cover and wrecked plausible deniability.

Here’s a video in which you can see her practically slobber about conservatives.

You can see that she is holding back extraordinary rage. She twists her neck back and forth and looks in all directions. She wants to let it out. It’s really something.

It’s like she’s a bag, and her demons are snakes trying to get out.

I watched some of her act, and it’s awful. She just lectures the crowd, which isn’t funny at all, and NBC gave her a laugh track. You can hear it in the background, but it’s clear there is no audience. If she could get an audience, she wouldn’t need NBC.

Laugh tracks were developed 80 years ago, to make audiences think things they were listening to on radio were funnier than they actually were. A funny show doesn’t need a laugh track.

Creators and performers have been resisting laugh tracks ever since they were invented, and these days, a laugh track is considered to be a tool used by people who lack confidence in their work. NBC knows Ruffin isn’t talented, either as a writer or a deliverer of jokes, so along with paying to have Youtube promote her show, they insert recordings of dead people laughing to convince others that if they don’t laugh, they’re not getting the humor.

Human beings are herd creatures. It’s one of our most pathetic qualities, and it’s our most dangerous one. Most people would laugh hysterically at funerals if paid shills entered and started chortling.

Ruffin has been trapped on a manufactured plateau since her Internet show started 4 years ago. She is going nowhere. Look at her Wikipedia page. I just did. It is a study in denial and mediocrity. She couldn’t get hired as an SNL cast member. This is the show that hired Charles Rocket and Jan Hooks.

It also says she has been a writer for Seth Meyers since 2014, which is a lot like Howard Stern supporting Robin Givens. It must explain the stubborn effort to astroturf her career.

Not surprisingly, it looks like Meyers’ show is dead last, or close to it, in the late night race. I’ve never watched his show. I saw a few seconds of him speaking on Youtube not long ago, so now I know what he looks like. He made a joke, it was embarrassingly weak in spite of his self-unaware “gotcha” smirk, and I moved on.

Why did the White House Correspondents’ Association hire her in the first place? Maybe Seth Meyers talked to someone. And after all, she is black, female, far to the left, angry, topped with an Angela-Davis-style afro, and, as of 2023, a lesbian.

So, to get back to the story, we are now subhumans. I wrote about this yesterday. I wrote about a creepy Buzzfeed article which posted anti-conservative memes Buzzfeed thought were side-splittingly funny. One example was an uncaptioned picture of a Popeyes restaurant. Enough said! Popeyes! Where the potato-eaters buy their unrefined GMO slop. Tell Van Gogh to put some Bactine on his ear and get out his brushes.

Popeyes pushes its food as traditional mixed-race cuisine, but let’s not get into that. No intelligent person expects liberals to be consistent. We live in a world where perverted antisemitic pro-Hamas protestors get in nasty squabbles with fossil fuel protestors who block their paths. And stars fly around in private jets to fight carbon emissions.

I said the article showed that Buzzfeed’s rainbow-haired, meat-averse staffers considered us subhuman, just as the Nazis considered their victims subhuman. This is a step on the traditional path toward genocide, and we’re the “gen.”

The left has embarked on a surreal quest to promote unfunny female comedians, perhaps because men often point out, correctly, that women are not as funny as men. You could fill an encyclopedia with the names of history’s funny men, but women’s names wouldn’t suffice to fill a foreword. Nearly every man I know is funny, but the funny women in my history are like Antifa protestors with necks bigger than 13 inches.

Male ones.

If you take the time to look, you will find other unfunny women whose careers have been heavily subsidized. Start with Hannah Gadsby. As funny as being audited.

It’s counterproductive. Struggling to locate and promote funny women doesn’t disprove the fact that there aren’t many of them, especially when you promote women who aren’t actually funny. It actually serves to prove the point.

There is no affirmative action for male comedians. Why? Obvious.

It is now okay to call us subhumans. About half of all Americans. The by-far correct half, no less. No one with any power in the press, academia, or the entertainment industry has a problem with it. Get us fired. Key our cars. Take our children away by force and put them in foster homes run by transvestites who assist in their castration and mastectomies. Prevent us from expressing ourselves on the web, in the press, in schools, in books, and in entertainment. No one will punish you. Instead, you will get Didn’t Earn It wealth and acclaim.

You have to wonder how different things would be if the world was fair to conservatives and Christians. Think of all the brilliant, talented people out there who have been cheated of success and kept out of the public eye. How many great minds who could have benefited humanity have ended up selling real estate or running CNC shops?

There must be a whole lot of Robert Borks out there. The world doesn’t deserve them. It deserves Amber Ruffins.

If You Eat at Chili’s, You are not a Person

If you don’t yet think leftists are completely in the tank for demons, I have some more proof.

Morgan Wallen, a country singer, appeared on Saturday Night Live, a show noted for bad writing, performers who last one season and go back home to live with their parents, and extreme behind-the-scenes cruelty to writers and actors. He left before the credits ended, and he posted a photo of his private jet, along with the message, “Get me to God’s country.” He flew home to Nashville.

Leftists went nuts, as though he had entered God’s throne room and relieved himself on the floor. One Internet commenter said there was “a special place in hell” for him because he didn’t wait for the credits. I’m not making that up. A special place in hell? Did that come from drugs?

Now Buzzfeed has posted a collection of “God’s country” memes its staff things are hilarious. They all have the same caption, which, of course, is, “Get me to God’s country.”

One is a map showing an area containing a Cracker Barrel, a Chili’s, a Red Lobster, and similar restaurants. Another shows a WaWa. Another shows an empty IMAX theater. Another shows the side of a Popeyes.

How is this funny?

Buzzfeed presented these pictures as though they needed no explanation. Like enjoying a Cracker Barrel breakfast is inherently funny and a sign of mental inferiority.

I have no idea why they thought WaWa belonged in the article. WaWa started in Philadelphia, where every leftist dream has come true. A friend of mine who lived nearby said it was New York with none of the good parts.

They also showed a picture of a couple of Barbie houses. The Barbie movie is a left-wing instrument full of open misandry and woman-worship, so whoever chose it was not clear on which side is which.

Google Maps shows big concentrations of IMAX theaters around New York City and L.A., so darn those coastal yokels.

Cracker Barrel serves excellent breakfasts. Chili’s has great burgers and nachos. I have had two meals at Red Lobster. One was fantastic. The other was gross, but it was after everyone quit because of the man-made covid virus liberals said came from a grocery selling pangolins.

The only bad thing about Popeye’s is the management. When the staff actually shows up, orders ingredients, and cooks, the chicken is excellent. It would be hard to choose between a Chick-fil-A sandwich and a Popeye’s sandwich made on a good day.

Some of the people who think these memes are funny live in places where they have to step around bum poop and discarded needles. They think that’s God’s country.

If this were 1933, and the Internet existed, Buzzfeed would be posting “funny” pictures of synagogues and Jewish stores, and the same kind of people–Satan’s children–would be agreeing that the photos were sweet burns.

It is disturbing that the Buzzfeed staff thought these humorless memes needed no explanation and that many people who saw them agreed in comments. It’s just assumed that only stupid people eat at Cracker Barrel. It is just assumed that leftists are higher beings, like Aryans compared to Jews in Austria and Germany. It’s not just good old-fashioned rube-hating talk. These days, it’s policy.

In leftists’ minds, normal, decent people are almost completely dehumanized now. We should know what comes next, if the left can pull it off. We know what happened to people the Nazis didn’t like once they were put in the “subhuman” category.

“We’re right. We don’t have to explain. If you ask us to explain, you’re one of the wrong. Responding to you is beneath us. We’re right because we’re right.”

“Saying we’re wrong is violence.”

It’s important to understand the hatred and arrogance and to get in touch with the Holy Spirit so he can keep you safe. He moved me to a red county in a red state. I’m 5 minutes from Cracker Barrel. My governor abolished DEI in government jobs. We have no domestic terrorists here, so no “murals” or riots. No one marches into people’s yards and threatens them over their political beliefs. God can put you in a place like this, but if you’re determined to stay where you are, you can always take the route Lot’s sons-in-law took.

The big difference between Christians and leftists is that leftists want to go where we are and kill us, while we just want to get away from them and live in peace. We are going to have to move to smaller and smaller enclaves until God mercifully raptures us. Assembling in militias and shooting these people will only make us just as they are, except that we would be a lot better at it. I don’t want to be a Christian militia member in hell. Martyrdom is better than becoming a child of Satan.