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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another Day Free of Furious Pansies

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

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

The nerve of some people.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looks like someone is hungry. I’m out.

Critical Race Theory Could have Prevented This

I saw some interesting stuff today, related to the California fires that are destroying the homes of entertainment people and other wealthy individuals. It looks like I was right to think leftism is the fundamental cause of the destruction.

Prager University posted a very interesting video. They say California has forced one of its big power companies to waste a huge amount of money on “renewable” boondoggle projects while failing to improve existing infrastructure. According to the video, failing power lines cause a lot of the fires, and one of the worst fires was caused by a power line built in 1921. So around 104 years ago.

I’ll embed the video, and you can judge for yourself.

Adam Carolla, The Man Show’s Art Garfunkel, has a podcast, and he said some very interesting things. He says rich people who lose houses in the fire will not be able to rebuild them for years because of Los Angeles County’s hostility to construction. He also says some will not be able to rebuild at all. He’s talking about three-year waits between the beginning of the permit process and the arrival of the first construction materials.

I’ll embed his video here.

Can this really be true? It sounds about right. He says the late Suzanne Somers had to move because it was not possible for her to replace her burned home.

According to Carolla, the real mission of the county employees in charge of permits is to get people out of certain areas. They do not want people to rebuild. If this is true, they must be glad certain homes are burning.

Imagine that. You pay $10 million for a house, you can’t get insurance because insurance companies aren’t stupid, the house burns down, and you end up with a permanently-vacant lot worth, what, $500,000 as a neighbor buffer? Maybe less.

My neighbor owns an 85-foot-wide strip of land that runs the length of my property. It’s a county requirement in case he needs to build a driveway. He will never need a driveway because we have a private road.

He is not allowed to sell the strip. As a result, it will never be cleared, and I will always have 85 feet of woods between me and the weird guy on the other side who put Biden signs on his fences.

It’s great for me. I don’t want to see or be seen. It costs me nothing. My neighbor has to pay taxes on it. This is presumably the kind of thing people in Los Angeles will see in the years after the fires.

Carolla also predicts a red wave. He says people who got “burned” by Democrats will vote for conservatives in the future. That won’t happen. Not to any serious degree. Leftism is a religion, not a set of opinions based on reason.

My wife and I were talking about the displaced entertainment people last night. We felt bad for them. Losing a home has to be extremely unpleasant, and losing large numbers of possessions that are irreplaceable or attached to memories must be almost like losing a loved one. On the other hand, these are destructive people whose industry leads our children to hell. They help Satan’s candidates get elected. They lie and propagandize in their ridiculous shows, movies, and concerts. What is happening to them is not nearly as bad as what they do to the rest of us.

It’s ironic that photos and videos of the fires show scenes that literally look like they could be from hell. Flames. Bright orange skies. Smoke and flying embers.

I saw Gavin Newsom criticizing Trump with the hellscape behind him. He pretended to be emotional and outraged. Trump has been lambasting Newsom and his kind for causing the fires. Newsom’s oily spin: how could Trump be insensitive enough to play politics with a major disaster?

Blaming politicians for the consequences of their dishonesty and incompetence is not “playing politics,” but shaming people for exposing you is disgraceful.

L.A. is one of a number of big American cities that chose masculine black women as mayors. L.A.’s not-straight-looking single Mayor Karen Bass is under fire, pun not intended, for taking off for Ghana just as fire warnings were popping up. And she cut about $17 million from the firefighting budget. Where did it go? Something related to DEI, I would guess.

Reigning as a leftist is theater. It’s about virtue-signaling. Competence is not a factor. Competence doesn’t get you votes. Enabling voters so they can persist in their delusions does.

It’s frustrating to watch Californians burn their own properties, but it’s pointless to get upset, because they will never stop, any more than movie stars will stop forcing their little boys to wear dresses.

I suppose Satan destroys some people, but mainly, he gets people to destroy themselves. Fighting is hard. Lying is easy. It’s smart. your enemies do themselves in, and you sit back and watch. They do all the work for you.

I guess the flames will go out soon. There can’t be that much left to burn.

At least they don’t have to worry about looters. You can’t loot ashes.

Here’s something interesting. Megyn Kelly says Kristin Crowley, L.A.’s female fire chief, has been working on DEI instead of preventing fires. James Woods, who just lost a house, agrees.

ANNNNNNNND she’s a lesbian.

Perfect.

Maybe we’ll find out if the criticisms are true before long.

Thank Goodness the Weeds are Okay

Los Angeles is burning again.

What a mess. Houses are coming down. Roads are blocked. People are getting out of their cars, leaving them in the street, and taking the keys with them so bulldozers have to move them.

Some Christians are saying God is showing the world what he thinks of Hollywood, but is that true? Los Angeles is like a giant boil Satan created to pump infectious pus out over the world. Great evil is done there. On the other hand, floods wiped out a lot of homes in Appalachia not long ago, and there are a lot of Christians there.

Here’s what I find interesting: there are two schools of thought as to why California keeps burning. One theory is that there is nothing anyone can do about it. The other is that the blue-state population and the officials it elects refuse to cut the brush that burns over and over, because every weed is sacred and a child of Mother Gaia, as important as an Californian and definitely more important than anyone wearing a red hat.

Today I read a web post from a guy claiming to be a firefighter. He is on the hopelessness side. He said the fires approach at 60 mph.

Sorry, but I can’t believe these fires move that fast. If they did, the fires would have gone out in a day, because they would have burned all the way to the ocean in a few hours. By now, we would be used to seeing gee-whiz Youtube videos of fires moving at freeway speeds. They don’t exist. There is no way Youtubers would miss out on catching a wall of fire moving over a brushy area at freeway speeds.

Is he saying bits of flaming material move on 60-mph winds? That is surely true, but there is a big difference between having sparks fly by you and being IN a fire.

The real speed is probably more like a mile per day. If I’m mistaken, maybe someone will show me a video of a fire moving a mile a minute.

I set my pasture on fire once. Embarrassing. The grass was very dry. A spark landed maybe 60 yards from a burn pile, and the grass started burning. I would say the actual fire moved at about 50 yards per hour. Even slower than I do while carrying a hose. Thank God. I guess it would have been faster had the wind been stronger, but it spread slower than the wind at the time. A 60-mph wind would not have spread the fire at 60 mph.

I have seen hopelessness promoters saying it’s stupid to tell people to cut brush, because it would take a billion lifetimes or something to cut the brush covering the whole state. Well, that’s stupid. You don’t have to denude the whole state. You have to manage brush around buildings and roads. And even if you can’t fix the entire problem this way, you can do a great deal of good.

If cutting brush doesn’t help, why does the Getty Museum spend a king’s ransom cutting brush on its property? I doubt they just enjoy wasting money on projects they know are pointless.

People love to say things don’t work or can’t exist even when they do work and do exist. I’ve seen numerous Christians tell people miracles don’t happen any more, because apparently God has retired while Satan has kept his miracle business open. I’ve experienced miracles, personally. You can see other people experience them on Youtube.

People also like to argue that things happen when they really don’t.

Remember the ivermectin-overdose-tsunami lie? Rolling Stone published a completely false article saying people couldn’t get into emergency rooms because poor ignorant Trumpers were overdosing on ivermectin and tying up the staffs. Never happened. Good luck finding even one example of a death caused by ivermectin. They’re about as common as deaths caused by lima beans. The myth persists, however.

The other day, some guy trying to justify buying $500 kitchen knives told me putting knives in the dishwashwer would beat them up. This is true of fragile Japanese knives, but I have been putting my cheap commercial knives in the dishwasher for maybe 15 years, and nothing has ever happened to one. He loved his theory, and all I had were proven facts.

I think clearing brush works, because it has worked all over the globe since the dawn of history, and I think the fires we see in California would be much, much smaller, if they existed at all, if everyone there were conservative.

We now live in a world where a person who catches a fish and puts a photo on the web is treated like Heinrich Himmler, celebrating the ash output of a new crematorium. People worship nature and animals with astonishing intensity, and they turn their hatred, which is literally murderous, on human beings. They say there are too many of us, like we’re lionfish, decimating snapper and grouper on American coral reefs. Like we’re kudzu, not the highest-ranking life on the world God created for us.

To me, it is completely plausible that Californians have decided flammable scrub is somehow important even though it flames up, destroys homes, and kills people. Even though it burns on its own all the time, as part of the natural process, and never amounts to anything.

Here’s what I always tell my wife: the environment can drop dead.

By that, I mean the world was put here for human beings, we are the only thing that give it importance, and it is our right and obligation to do reasonable damage to nature when our interests are sufficient.

I don’t really mean I want all life on Earth to cease. I mean we need to use common sense. But “common sense” is an oxymoron.

We need dams. We need to cut wood. We need oil. We need to kill a lot of creatures that make trouble for us. We and the rest of the biome or whatever they call it now would be better off if certain species were rendered extinct. That is especially true of microbes. The world doesn’t actually need anthrax, covid, syphilis, fleas, lice, or ticks.

Leftists love to tell us every obnoxious species is vital and that the world will collapse if we lose even one. Hmm. In 1900, the US was covered with gigantic chestnut trees. They dominated forests and provided wood, food for animals and people, and places for animals to live. They’re gone now. If the chestnut can disappear and leave us with thriving forests, why do we need every subspecies of cockroach and slug?

We lost the passenger pigeon, which used to darken the sky with its numbers. We lost most of the bison. We killed off the mammoths and mastodons. The ecosystem has not collapsed. Shouldn’t we be okay if we cut a few weeds?

I think Californians could do better. This has to be true, because people who cut brush, even in California, get better outcomes.

Maybe they love standing on their flammable decks with the inevitable white wine in hand, admiring the natural desert weeds. I could understand that, but I destroyed something like 15 big, irreplaceable oaks that made my property look nice. I didn’t want them falling on my house and shop in storms. Houses surrounded by big oaks definitely look better, but they also get crushed. When the storms come, I sleep soundly.

I could have left them up. I could have said, “When the roof is crushed and hundreds of gallons of water pour in and ruin the walls and our expensive belongings, I’ll just put my wife and infant son in the car and move to a Hampton Inn for 6 months, and when my son is older, I’ll tell him how we did the right thing for Mother Gaia.”

People love to say it’s okay if you have losses when you have home insurance. No, it’s not! You’ll always lose more than the insurance companies will pay you, they won’t give you a dime for the many hours of hard work you’ll have to do when you set your house back up, they won’t be able to replace unique items, and you will have to start over on all the things you worked hard to get just right. Not everything comes out of a box just the way you want it. And who wants to live in a hotel room?

As for who God is punishing, he hasn’t informed me. But I have some thoughts.

My wife and I pray for the destruction of the entertainment industry, including sports, every day. We pray for the filthy people and spirits involved in it to be exposed around the clock. When bad things happen that impact the industry adversely, and when celebrities are exposed as filthy criminals who hurt the innocent, it certainly comports with our requests. I’m sure other Christians pray for the same things. Hollywood leads our children to hell.

As for heavily-Christian areas that receive disasters, I think most Christianity is very weak. We don’t teach people to repent. We don’t teach them to pray in tongues. We push the fake prosperity gospel on them, and it separates them from God. We don’t teach people they need to know God supernaturally and spend time with him in order to be protected. I don’t think it should be a big surprise if bad things happen in an area where the church itself cuts people off from God while pretending to bring them closer.

Receiving prophets brings blessings. Receiving false prophets brings curses.

Lots of bad things happened to me when I was an uninformed and disinformed Christian, but as God has corrected me, things have gotten better and better.

God promises us things like healing, protection, and prosperity. If we don’t receive them, how can we not be doing something wrong? He can’t lie.

Read the Old Testament and see how he treated the Jews when they behaved well.

God has a special love for the Jews, but the destruction of Israel and the Holocaust happened anyway. They rejected their Messiah and the Holy Spirit, so they weren’t as protected as they should have been. Surely the same things happen to Christians.

Yeshua said he wanted to protect Jerusalem, holding the people under his wings like a mother hen. The false doctrine of the Jews of that time prevented him.

It is amazing that rich areas in a rich state in the world’s richest country in 2025 could have a crisis like this; the kind of crisis you would expect to see in Africa or India. But then it’s also amazing they can’t keep their electricity on or get the poop off their sidewalks.

In Los Angeles and San Francisco, it’s a crime to fail to clean up your dog’s poop in public places. Think about that for a second.

Imagine walking your Chihuahua in San Francisco. You might have to pick up his ounce of poop while leaving a two-pound pile of human poop right next to it.

You know what they should do? They should pass a law saying that if your dog poops, you have to leave it and fill a bag with human poop.

Or used needles.

Digression: I wondered why Canada gave Trudeau the boot. I knew it had nothing to do with “common sense,” because if Canadians had that, Canada would be a lot different. My wife is more aware of international news than I am, because I’m an American. She filled me in. One reason is that Canadians are sick of Trudeau letting illegals in from India. There is now a big street-pooping problem in Canada.

If you search the web, you’ll see two kinds of websites. The ones where credible public officials and citizens complain about Indians pooping in public, and the ones that swear it has never happened even once.

There are 1.5 billion Indians in India, and every single one wants to move to North America. The ones in Canada all want to move to the United States.

Canadians are concerned because in some places, Canadian culture, which is unimportant, is being replaced by wonderful, vibrant, pagan Indian culture, which is extremely important because it’s not European or Christian.

It would be wonderful if Canadian culture were completed replaced, because then Canada would be as wonderful as India. Indians have all the answers.

It’s going to be interesting, following the California story. It will be interesting to see homes belonging to billionaires and people with hundreds of millions collapsing in flames, seemingly unnecessarily, simply because weeds are more important than human beings.

It’s a shame to see so much wasted.

You Know too Many People

I had an interesting dream.

My wife and I were here at the heavily armed, fenced Northern Florida compound (my homey, welcoming name for it), and I was standing by the front door when I saw a big truck in my driveway. I had not let it in.

Right away, I reached for my illegally-modified full-auto AR-15 with the Punisher Trump skull laser engravings on the grips and opened up while quoting Bible verses I misinterpreted in order to justify violence.

Oops. Sorry. For a second there, I thought I was one of the guys who thinks we can shoot our way back to the Fifties.

I don’t have any illegally-modified full-auto firearms. I don’t even have Trump Punisher skulls. Sorry, BATF. I’m not interested in spending a grand every time I shoot steel for 15 minutes. I think one of my neighbors might have something, though. Based on the sounds I hear occasionally.

You should start by investigating the lady across the fence who complained that my shooting disturbed her snowflake horses. I’m pretty sure it’s her. Go no-knock on this one, guys. The earlier in the morning, the better. Just keep your fingers off the trigger, because I could be wrong. It’s actually okay for feds to withhold fire until there is a real problem.

I don’t mean any of that. I don’t wish her problems, but she should respect borders.

I don’t have any guns like that, but it takes like 45 minutes to make one with a Dremel and an Internet printout. When things finally go totally nuts, the number of automatic weapons in the US will skyrocket by a factor of 20 in about a day. Except in the ghettos, where everyone already has a Glock switch and kids fight white supremacy and institutional black genocide by shooting at other black people.

That switch has probably done great things for Glock sales. To the people the guns are stolen from, I mean. They have to replace them, after all.

Forget “Glock perfection.” The new slogan should be, “Glock. Make the switch.”

Pardon the jocularity. I am in a jolly mood this morning. Because I’m not drunk and in pain, unlike most Americans. It’s bowl season, and today many people are hugging one.

I shouldn’t joke about the BATF. They just ransacked a black man’s home for no clear reason, threw bombs into rooms occupied by innocent people, held children at gunpoint, threatened to blow up his gun safe, and left without arresting anyone. They destroyed floors and windows. Their dogs pooped on the victim’s daughter’s bed.

Apparently the training issues in federal law enforcement have spread to the canine agents.

The victims cleaned up the poop themselves. That was unnecessary work. They could have called the FBI crime lab and told them it was important evidence. The FBI would have collected it and lost it.

Not that there is any justification for thinking the feds are high-handed or anything, but, shockingly, if you’re the kind of person who believes CNN is fair, the BATF has not responded to inquiries from the press. I get it. If Uncle Joe doesn’t have to talk to the press, neither do they. I plan to keep checking dictionary sites to see if the leftist editors have gotten around to changing the definition of “transparent.”

The man’s name is Mark Manley. He has a Go Fund Me page.

Joe Biden will surely pardon the agents later in the day, as soon as his wife wakes him up and tells him to. Or maybe someone else has already done it. The thirtyish West Wing transvestites who have actually been running the country since January 20, 2020. “Hold his hand steady. Make the loop on the ‘J’ bigger.”

Is it possible Jeff Dunham is the president?

The victims kind of asked for it. They live in Baltimore. It’s like being in jail and asking to bunk with P Diddy. “Come on, warden. I’m a huge fan. It’s okay if he works on his music. I’m a very heavy sleeper.”

Maybe they’ll join the flood of political refugees and move to my county. Like traffic isn’t bad enough already. I was used to seeing a lot of yankees and other blue state survivors here before 2020, but they were really old. Now it’s entire families. Still in their reproductive years. And Republicans let their babies live. Once an invasive species starts breeding in Florida, you can’t get rid of it.

I hope they’ll open pizzerias. That would soften the pain.

I don’t know why I’m in such a good mood. I need to stop.

So the truck turned out to be a big hurricane-debris truck. We have had two messy storms here since my arrival. The county gives us time to dump trees by the road, and they send huge trucks to pick them up. They have cranes on them to lift the debris and drop it into their beds.

Dumping in beds. BATF. Stop it, self. Let it go.

The truck was inside my gate, which made me feel somewhat territorial, but I let it go, because they started going all over the compound, gathering up the dead wood. They picked up entire burn piles that predated the last storm. I was thrilled.

I suspect the dream had supernatural significance.

In the Bible, trees represent people. A dead tree is an unproductive tree, fit only to be discarded and burned.

In dreams, government employees are usually spirits. The police and the feds are demons. Military people are angels. Government employees who are helpful and pose no threat are on God’s side, and they usually will not talk to you. They already have their orders. They seem happy, and they’re pleasant, but they ignore your efforts to communicate, and they go on with what they’re doing.

Demons are chatty. They like attention. And they rely on the power of lies and threats. They need to talk in order to lie.

I think the county guys in the dream were angels sent to remove useless, destructive people from my life and my wife’s life. The few people who still treat us badly. If so, it’s not a good sign for people I am still entangled with financially. I knew it would not be long before old age got the most difficult ones, but the dream makes me wonder if the time of our disconnection is close.

It’s extremely important to get free of useless people whose only contributions to your life are negative. Sometimes you can’t cut them loose. You can’t put a wife in a dumpster, and you can’t abandon your kids. But most people can be dismissed at will, and you should get rid of the ones who consistently reward you with good for evil.

My dad was a net negative for most of his life, and one day, God told me he had cut him off, meaning his patience was used up.

I knew he had become forgetful, but he was still able to handle his affairs. I had prayed a lot for God to restore him, but after God told me he had been cut off, I quit.

The same year, my dad had to quit practicing law because dementia set in. I was put in charge. We ended up leaving Miami, finally, after years of delay which he caused.

After a while here, his dementia got very bad. At some point around the beginning of 2019, I started feeling that God was saying my dad would be gone before April 1. That was not his medical prognosis, however. His doctors didn’t think his situation was deteriorating all that fast.

When I finally had to put him in a nearby facility, I started to feel bad because I wasn’t praying for his recovery. One day as I drove to see him, I asked God if I could pray for recovery again. I felt it was allowed, so I prayed.

When I saw him the next day, he was much sharper than he had been the day before. He was fighting with the employees. He called his roommate a filthy name in his presence. He had been opening up to God, and he had asked for salvation, but on this day, he told me it was all insincere. He said he had done it to make me happy, which wasn’t true. He disavowed Christianity. He said the Bible was a story book. He radiated his characteristic arrogance.

The dad I had known all my life was back.

I prayed for help, and I got an idea.

I asked my dad if I could pray that God would do whatever had to be done to assure him a good afterlife, and he agreed to let me do it.

The next day, he had slipped backward. The clarity was gone. He was pleasant again. The negative talk about Christianity was gone. I realized God was showing me that some people shouldn’t be healed, because they turn healing into a curse.

Wherefore if thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life halt or maimed, rather than having two hands or two feet to be cast into everlasting fire.

This is true of all blessings. Some people can’t be given husbands or wives. Some people can’t be given financial abundance. There are people whose problems are necessary in order for them to remain saved. This is particularly true of the proud. It’s true of people who repent, get what they want, and then forget their repentance.

My dad died three weeks later, in peace, with me at his side and Derek Prince speaking from a laptop. He had recovered his salvation. All the hateful talk about Christianity had been replaced with reverence, gratitude, and enthusiasm.

This was late March. He didn’t make it to April 1.

If he had continued to recover from dementia, he would have died in torment and then gone to hell. He would be burning in humiliation right now, instead of waiting for me and his grandson to join him for eternal life in a place of perfect love.

My dad was a mixed bag. When his mind went and he started to love God, I was thrilled. I loved praying with him and talking to him about God. But the situation couldn’t last. I was alone, and he kept me too busy to progress in my own life. I could have continued visiting him over and over for years, but that wasn’t what God wanted for me.

I keep asking God to change me without chastisement and suffering. I want supernatural change. I want him to be able to give me good things without losing me.

As for the dead trees in my dream, I can understand why God would free me from them.

They don’t disrupt my life the way my dad did, and my situation is absolutely fantastic. I have a wonderful wife. I’m having a child. I’m healthy. We have abundance without working. We live on a dream property in a dream county. We get closer to God all the time, and things continually improve. He keeps correcting us. But while these people can’t keep us from having beautiful lives, they are treacherous and out of place in our circle of acquaintances. We should be big assets to each other, but while I am good to them, they abuse me and my wife, and they have no intention of changing.

They are tiresome, and it would be best if they were replaced by better people who are the opposite of tiresome. Even if they’re not replaced, their absence from my life would be a welcome relief. I’m ready for it. I can’t change their choices, I am in no way responsible for the way they treat me, and I will not be troubled about problems they make for themselves.

As for us, we are planning to fry chicken today. The deep fryer beckons. I’m going to try making twice-fried fries in it for the first time. We can’t find small chickens at Publix, but the local Winn-Dixie had a 4.5-pounder, so I think we’re all set. I’m also making hush puppies because they’re wonderful.

Later on, I may do some shooting out back. When you live in a place like this, every day you fail to shoot is a disgraceful waste.

Maybe God will smile on us in 2025, and his children won’t have to be here on this date in 2026. One can only hope.

Why Does it Taste Like a Dodge Wiring Harness?

I decided to try a Tikka T1x bolt-action .22. It can be my son’s first rifle when he is ready. I’m concerned I may have trouble getting him to pay attention to shooting instruction during the first few weeks of his life. He’ll just have to man up.

As for shooting opportunities here at the compound, targets and things like water bottles and golf balls will always abound, and he will be permitted to kill any animal he sees that isn’t wearing a collar or a saddle.

He won’t be allowed to shoot inside the house, of course, but shooting FROM inside the house will be encouraged, since I do it myself.

Exceptions will be made for home invaders, or as I call them, undocumented guests, and also for those rare times when game finds its way into the living room. It has already happened once.

I chose the T1x because it has a top-notch reputation for accuracy. The other alternative was a Bergara, but the Bergara’s barrel was a little longer than I would have liked. The CZ 457 was also tempting, but in order to get the options I wanted, I would have to accept a 12″ length of pull designed for a 12-year-old. It would have been good for my son, but since I will be the exclusive user of the rifle for, I am estimating, at least two months, he will once again have to man up and deal.

I need a scope now, so I am thinking. It’s not a simple subject.

I was thinking I might go for high magnification because I like seeing what I’m doing at 100 yards, but let’s be honest: there is no reason to shoot targets with a .22 at 100 yards. That far off, it will probably shoot 3 MOA at best, and you learn nothing at all from that kind of spread. I think I will shoot targets at 50 yards and leave it at that.

I do want to be able to see which part of a squirrel I’m aiming at, and I think 12x is about right for that, up to a realistic 50-yard-limit. I am hoping to be able to stay within a one-inch circle at that range without a serious rest. Shooting squirrels is inhumane when you can’t shoot at least that well. I want to be able to tell where my crosshairs are so I can be sure the squirrel will drop even if I’m half an inch off either way.

I’m going to take some of my optics outside and fiddle around at known distances so I can firm up a decision.

To hit things like coons and possums, I should be fine with something in the area of 5x.

Like I always say, nearly all of my grandfather’s good guns mysteriously vanished when my grandmother died, so I didn’t inherit a single one from her, even though I shot with him a lot and the other grandsons did not. My compensation is to get better guns and shoot them better. His .22 rifle was a crusty Remington 550-1, and I have considered getting one, but I was not able to resist buying rifles that were superior in every possible way. The T1x will be the best so far. Comparing it to a 550-1 is like comparing a new Lexus to a Crown Vic at a police auction.

I asked for scope recommendations at a forum for sharpshooters, and naturally they came in with things starting at around $500. I don’t think that’s necessary for this gun. I have some very good glass, and I understand the need for it in some applications, but I’m never going to shoot a thousand yards at twilight with a .22. Or anything else, now that I think about it.

Their recommendations were great, apart from the cost. They know what they’re doing. This country is full of men who can hit a man-sized target over half a mile away, and they are really common in rural areas. There are people shooting .338 Lapua, which is useful at ranges longer than a mile. There are people with night vision headgear, night vision scopes, and thermal scopes.

It makes me want to stay indoors, just writing about it.

The leftists who are most prone to putting on black pajamas and attacking innocent people in cowardly mobs are generally women or men who are a lot like women. Spindly, effeminate, spoiled, and not inclined to masculine pursuits. The country is no place for their fatherless unemployed behavior. A diet of soft urban targets doesn’t prepare them to take on men and women who decorate their homes with other creatures’ heads.

When I bought my first AR-15 here in my rural county, I picked it up at the company’s headquarters. They had a Ma Deuce set up among the displays. That’s legal. And they’re military guys, so it’s not just an ornament. Talk about feeling safe.

It wasn’t like visiting a Target in California and having to step aside while people punch clerks, break glass, and run off with boxes of Prilosec to sell on the sidewalk out front.

If I worked in a building near that place, I know where I’d run if I saw vans full of narcissistic sadists headed my way. I’d only slow down at the register to buy earplugs.

I don’t want to kill anything, but the squirrels have to go. One truck wiring harness is enough. It would be neat if we could be friends, but we tried that, and it didn’t work. At least the crows will feast.

If I hit anything.

I hope I get improved accuracy out of this gun. I’ll feel pretty stupid if it shoots no better than my semiautos.

On the subject of fathers’ gifts to sons, I had a wonderful revelation. A usual, it was something obvious which I already knew, yet which somehow had not made itself part of me. We can’t see the obvious without God’s help.

I realized I should not talk about God and his blessings, as though blessings and God were different things.

We always say we want to do this or that to get God’s blessings. Pray to get God’s blessings. Stay close to him to get his blessings. The truth is that he, personally, is the blessing. The other things are just the natural consequences of being near him.

If you are in God’s presence, you are already blessed. You are wrapped up in love. Because of his love and power, things are going in the right direction for you. Things may not be perfect, but they are headed toward perfection, and they will continue as long as you’re with God.

Knowing him and being with him are what matter.

These things don’t apply if you’re proud. First of all, a proud person can’t be in God’s presence except briefly. He stays far from proud people. Second, when you’re in God’s presence, he gives you revelation, and proud people can’t accept revelation. They can’t learn.

If Satan were in God’s presence, it would be a bad experience for Satan. A human being with air in his lungs and blood in his veins is different. We can surrender and receive help. Forgiveness is available.

God showed me that I have already won. If I stay with him, I’m not just winning. I’ve already won. I’m just watching the victory unfold, one step at a time.

God’s presence should be your top priority, and in order to get it, you have to humble yourself continually. When you get into pride, you push him away and bring demons near, making them your gods and demonized people your masters.

Prayer in unknown tongues is a manifestation of humility. When you do it, you’re admitting you’re too stupid and evil to pray well on your own. You are abandoning your own inner monologue and letting him replace it with his.

I hate being busy. I used to like it. I liked going to work and getting things done. I liked being busy with recreation. Now I feel resentful when I’m busy. It distracts me from God. I miss prayer sessions and receive worthless and harmful things in exchange.

It disturbs me when Christians brag about hard work and long hours. It is bragging. If you’re working 12 hours a day, you can’t possibly be close to God, unless you’re doing simple manual labor and occupying your mind with prayer. If you absolutely have to brag, you shouldn’t brag about being self-destructive and failing your family.

I like getting things done around the compound, but frequently, when I’m done, I realize I’ve overdone it. I should have quit earlier. God isn’t going to reward me for doing a perfect job, clearing limbs out of the yard or spraying weeds. He doesn’t care about things like that. He rewards me for being with him. I was with him a few weeks back, and while speaking by the Holy Spirit, I heard myself say, “Being with you is my purpose.”

My yard needs work, and the nursery isn’t done, but it’s better to fail at earthly jobs than my relationship with the one who loves me and solves every problem. God never rewarded anyone in the Bible for hard work. Not one person.

I have to continue trying to stay with God. The path is already prepared. The enemies are beaten. The corrections I need are in progress. I have to be careful not to try too hard to save myself.

The Best Present Fills a House

Merry Christmas, all!

On a somewhat-related note, a strange thing happened two days ago. Dave Portnoy, the Jewish founder of a website that caters to people who place illegal bets on sporting events that came to us via pagans, did something unexpected.

I don’t want a job. The thought horrifies me. But if I had to have a job, I would want Portnoy’s secondary career. He goes around the country reviewing pizza joints for his Youtube channel, One Bite Pizza Reviews. If he likes your shop’s pizza, his viewers mob it, and you make a lot of money.

On Monday, he visited Tinybrickoven, a closet-sized pizza place in Baltimore. He was in a hurry, so he couldn’t wait to have a pizza made. He asked them to reheat one.

This probably means he knew what he was up to when he showed up, but let’s ignore that.

The proprietor sold him a pizza and said he was getting ready to close. Portnoy asked what he meant, and he said the shop was closing for good. It wasn’t making money. The proprietor said the problem was that the authorities had refused to give him a liquor license.

Dave gave the pizza a 7.9, which is a very good score. Anything above 7 is worth a visit.

He asked the owner, “How much money do you need to stay open for like a year?” He had a hard time getting an answer, so he said, “Well, if there was somebody super rich right in front of your face who’s in the pizza business, and by serendipity, he’s like, ‘What do you need to stay open for a year?”, you got to give him some figure, because then he’s going to walk away.” Finally, the man said he thought $60,000 would get him a liquor license and allow him to stay open.

Then Dave gave him the money. He told him he was giving him a grant.

That was a nice thing to see. Portnoy gets a lot of criticism. He’s brash, he says harsh things about pretentious leftists, and women have accused him of treating them badly, but he started a foundation that has given tens of millions of dollars to small businesses. Whatever is going on inside of him, it’s not all bad.

What he did was a nice reminder that Christmas is a holiday we owe to Jews who helped gentiles. We celebrate a Jew who died for us and saved us from hell, and his Jewish friends told our ancestors the good news.

It’s best to do charity anonymously, but it’s still a nice story. It reminds us that Christmas is about love, not secular homosexual parades and gifts we buy on credit.

Not much is happening here. My wife’s gift has not arrived from Africa. She’s not in a position to get me anything. She has no job, apart from giving me someone to look after. We haven’t decorated.

Still, I am very happy, because God has answered my prayers.

Before my wife met me, she had a vision. She saw a big white house from a distance. Yeshua came out and walked toward her to welcome her. As she got close to the house, kids came out and hugged her, and she felt overwhelmed with love. I know she had this vision, because she texted a friend about it at the time.

Before I met her, I prayed for God to give me a house of love. Now we have it.

My family is a mess. My dad’s father drank and beat his wife, and then he died young from drinking bad moonshine. My dad’s elder sister was a sick, cold sociopath. My dad hated Christianity, and he grew up to be a drinker and wife-beater who neglected his kids and committed adultery. My mother’s dad was a much better person, but he had no interest in God, and my mother did a very poor job of showing God to my sister and me. My sister was a sociopath who hated me, in the manner of her aunt, who hated my dad.

I don’t really know my cousins on my dad’s side. My mother has one living sister I get along with, but she is tormented. The other has turned out to be very dishonest, and she is verbally abusive to me for no reason. My cousins generally don’t know God, and I haven’t been invited to a family gathering since maybe 1998.

In case you’re wondering, I’m not the problem. People like me, believe it or not. I’m easy to get along with. I’m nice to people. I make them laugh. I try to be helpful. I make friends very easily. I keep my circle small, but that’s a choice. I had all sorts of friends in college and law school. And in church.

I was popular in high school, although not quarterback-popular. I was voted funniest in class. At least two cheerleaders were interested in me. One made overtures after college. So was another one of my class’s top-tier girls. She actually wrote me a two-page letter after she got married.

I didn’t have to worry about where I sat at lunch.

I’m not the person you don’t invite to Thanksgiving or Christmas because he will get drunk and surly and make everyone wish he would leave, or because he’ll start a fight over some slight that happened in 1982. My sister always took the role of holiday-destroyer.

I made no friends when I was in grad school, but I was studying physics, surrounded by physics students, so that was completely normal. You would have to know physics people to understand.

The family gets together without me. It may be because I’m not supposed to see heirlooms they didn’t come by the way they should have.

I have one cousin who has a serious mental illness, and he practices yoga, which invites demons to destroy him. He has been rejected all his life, and I don’t think he has any hope that this will change. I think he feels unloved. I wish he hadn’t been ignored so much. His brother is not right, either, and he is extremely angry at the world. We used to be very close, but that’s over. Another cousin lives in Texas and has almost nothing to do with the rest of us, which I can understand.

Generally, they are unhappy people. Resentful. Not much interested in the welfare of others or the kingdom of God.

I used to love being with them. I loved all three of my aunts. I loved my cousins. I looked forward to Christmas and summer vacations. Now it’s almost like they’re dead.

I know they don’t care a lot about each other. They’re together because of habit. None of them has ever told me how wonderful any of the others were, except for moms bragging about their kids. One of the moms makes things like that up, so it’s for her, not them.

I have seen almost no affection being displayed.

This house is different. It’s full of love. My wife and I love being together. We go everywhere together. We go to each other’s doctor appointments. We pray together twice a day. We are very affectionate. We compliment each other.

I am not ambitious, so I don’t neglect her for my career. I have no interest in drunkenness, other women, TV sports, or selfish pursuits that ruin weekends and prevent me from being a real husband and father.

My wife has no interest in the things that ruin wives. She is not interested in status symbols or social-climbing. She likes working to create a warm, comfortable home. She is excited about having a baby. She sings to her belly all day.

We don’t belong to a dead Catholic or Baptist church where they tell you Christianity is a game where you try to rack up points while God does absolutely nothing for you. We don’t belong to a prosperity gospel church where the pastors spend their days thinking up ways to con people out of their savings and houses. We don’t hang out with church volunteers who snipe at us and revel in abusing their meager authority.

We pray for God to transform us and inhabit us. We ask him to separate us from useless people and spirits. We ask for humility, love, and revelation. We don’t get on our knees, ask God to give us more money than our neighbors, and get up and go about the business of the flesh. God helps us to pray for the important things.

I speak blessings over my wife and child. I speak blessings over my parrot, Marvin. I use the name of Yeshua. We want our family to be different from our parent’s families and our cousins’ families, and it is.

The yard is a mess. We need to fix the landscaping. The house needs a lot of painting. We are less than halfway done with the furnishings. Doesn’t matter at all. It’s nothing. My wife doesn’t lie in bed and pray for God to change me and make me a Christian husband who treats her well. I don’t go off by myself and ask God to make my wife love me and stop using me. We’re not looking around to see if someone better can rescue us. The important things are in place, regardless of whether the hedges need trimming.

God is extremely, extremely good to us. I’m sorry so many people from our past are doing so badly. I wish everyone lived in a house of love. I can’t do anything about it, though. They don’t listen. God is ready when they are, but they prefer shallow lives devoted to bringing themselves the things they think will make them happy.

We don’t have a Christmas tree or matching Christmas pajamas. We don’t put up Facebook photos that are carefully engineered to create a false impression of an idyllic existence exemplifying the American dream and to hide things like domestic abuse, perverted children, debt, adultery, alcoholism, and despair.

Many Americans post photos like that. I don’t understand it. No one is going to try to rescue you from despair if they don’t know you have a problem.

Our house is decorated by love and God’s presence. We don’t need to publish a newsletter about how little Tommy is the tallest boy in the first grade and little Becky is the captain of the pep squad.

Happiness and peace are priceless. The appearance of happiness is worthless without more.

Things are working because I gave up. I was inept at running my own life. I had no idea what I was doing. I corrupted myself and turned myself into a disgrace. When I gave up, everything turned around, and over time, I was brought to this place. I have nothing to be proud of, and I am afraid of pride. God did it all. I don’t want him to stop.

You can have a life of peace and love if you want it, but you have to give up and admit defeat. You have to let God run things. You need to be baptized with the Holy Spirit, pray in tongues, and receive revelation. You have to embrace humility and benefit from its power. Otherwise, you’ll just be putting flashy bandages on infected wounds until you die.

I never lived in a house of love until my wife moved here, when I was already nearly elderly. I loved people, but I was alone with two birds. They were the only creatures I could share love with every day. Living in a house of love is still very new and strange to me.

Thank you, God, for all you’ve done. Please help us not to ruin it.

Tune Your Saw with Contrarianism

Do you have an Echo CS-590 chainsaw you modified? Did you advance the timing and open up the muffler? Do you have a carb from a more-powerful saw on it?

Are you totally unable to start and tune it now that you’ve worked on it?

Take heart, friend. I may have the answer.

I put a new key on the shaft of my saw’s flywheel a while back, advancing the timing, and it seemed to run considerably stronger. I stuck a new, more open deflector on the muffler, too. Everything was fine. But my motto is, “If it ain’t broke, fix it,” so I got back to work.

I removed my muffler’s deflector and drilled 6 3/16″ holes in the muffler, around the factory opening that shoots gas out of the saw. This reduced back pressure and should end up giving me considerably more power.

The carb I have on it comes from a CS-620P, which is a professional-grade saw. It’s more powerful than a stock CS-590, so the carb has a slightly higher capacity. Unfortunately, it comes with a main jet/check valve that has a little hole in it that always lets some fuel go through, even when you close the H and L screws.

This hole is there to save Echo aggravation. It’s just like the little plastic things my saw used to have, to prevent people from turning the screws too far. The purpose of both is to keep people from leaning their saws out until they blow up. Echo knows people will do this and then expect warranty repairs.

The main jet has a check valve to keep air from being sucked backward into the system.

If you modify your saw, you will need to readjust your carb, so the limiter caps on the screws have to go, along with the hole in the check valve. If you have a hole in your valve, you may not be able to lean your saw out enough to make it run well after modifications. A saw the factory wants to max out at 12,000 RPM may run well at 15,000 after modifications, requiring a different mix, so you don’t want a check valve ruining your day.

I installed a new check valve with no hole, and then I tried to tune the saw. It drove me crazy for several days.

It wouldn’t start. Then it would start, but it wouldn’t idle. Then it would idle, but it died when I goosed the throttle.

A guy who sells modification parts did a video, and he said that if you change your check valve, you should open up the H screw to richen the mixture. Other people on the web seemed to agree that saws with muffler mods needed more fuel. Believing this tripe, I tried starting my saw with the screws out a little past the OEM settings, and I tried the OEM settings. Finally, I tried starting the L screw at one turn out from zero, and the saw ran.

So if you have modified your CS-590, and you’re losing your mind trying to make it work, try leaning out the L feed.

I should add that sometimes tightening a screw will actually make the mixture richer at wide-open throttle, but let’s not go there. I don’t think it applies to the L screw. All I know is, I needed to tighten mine.

I got the saw to run smoothly last night, but I ran out of blood for the mosquitoes, so I didn’t finish the job.

Before fooling with the muffler and valve, the saw was doing something like 13,500, I think. Maybe it was 13,300. This is wide open, with no load. Last night, all I could get was 12,500, which is within wimpy factory specs. Disgraceful.

Today I set the idle at 3,000, pretty much in the middle of the range. I tuned the L screw by ear. Then I opened up the H screw, and BANG, I was at 13,300 with an occasional burp.

It was like, “WAAAAAAAAAAAAA bip WAAAAAAAAAAA bip WAAAAAAAAAAA bip.”

In case you want to know how to tune a saw’s H needle, I have found out, so I’ll tell you.

It’s the last thing you adjust.

You want it to “four-stroke.” This is a misnomer used by chainsaw dudes. A chainsaw has a 2-stroke motor, and it can’t do what a 4-stroke does. It can SOUND a little like a 4-stroke, however. It sounds that way because it’s missing.

You want to make the H feed so rich, the saw misses a little when wide open with no load. Just a little. This means it’s getting more fuel than it can burn. When you put it in the wood, that fuel will be burned to provide more power, and the saw will run smoothly.

My saw has a limited ignition coil. The limit is 13,500.

People say you can’t tune a saw with a limited coil, because when it hits the limit, if starts missing, and it sounds like the saw is tuned correctly. I don’t think I’m having that problem, because I’m not hitting 13,500 and the saw is missing, but I will keep testing it.

The big take-away here is this: if you have been modifying your CS-590, and you’re pulling your hair out because it won’t let you tune it, and you think you broke it, set the L screw at one turn out, or whatever is 1/4 turn in from the OEM setting for your carb. It may be the answer.

Now I have 4 pretty decent gas saws for wood clearing. I have a homeowner-grade 40cc rebadged Husqvarna 435, a modified CS-590 which is maybe 90% professional-grade, an Echo CS-510P, which is a 50-cc pro saw, and a Husqvarna 562XP, which is a 4.9-horsepower 60-cc saw with a 24″ bar.

I only need one big saw and one small saw to work, so with two in each size, it’s pretty likely I’ll always have a set of two gas saws that function. And I have a cordless Makita that will save me if both of my small saws die on me.

I have no idea how much power the CS-590 makes now, but it should be significantly more than the 4 horsepower it was born with.

I’m keeping my chains sharp, so that also helps. Sharpening your chain is like adding one or more horsepower. I also use grown-up chains, not the safety chains lawyers put on saws places like Home Depot sells. Those safety chains are amazing. You buy a 4-horsepower saw, to pick a number, and the chain, sharpened to its peak, makes it cut like 3 horsepower.

They Should Make a Cargo Drone

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

She really said that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What if you can’t start the saw?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can’t hurt.

Guess I better get out there and cut things.

My Personal Trainer’s Name is Milton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hope it lasts.

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

Burning Stuff Shouldn’t be This Hard

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

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

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

Now what do I do with the day?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She grinned. She thought her remark was funny.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s not going to get better.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Look at this scripture from 1 Kings 9:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hobbies Look so Different When You’re Old

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is There Anything it Can’t do?

The last couple of days have been pretty good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I can also practice law.

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

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

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

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

Two new plugs are on the way from Amazon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good knives are fun. Concealed carry is fun.

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

I feel like buying another rifle.

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

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

Is Florida the New California?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is what the commenter said:

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

I will respond.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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