Bush-Era Zero-Turn Actually Made Under Obama

I am stuck waiting for very leisurely breastfeeding to be over so my wife and I can run errands. May as well kill time here.

I got new information on the Kubota mower I bought. Kubota says it was made in 2015. This is about 7 years later than I thought, so it’s good news. It has an analog hour meter, not a digital with an LED screen, so I figured it had to come from the early years, which started in 2007. Because it was made in 2015, the old guy who owned it could not have had it for more than 10 years.

Assuming even pretty heavy residential use, the manufacture year puts this mower somewhere under 1,000 hours. The mower doesn’t show a lot of wear, so I don’t think it was ever used commercially. There are appearance issues, but nothing suggesting high hours. I think the owner kept it under a roof where the sun got to vulnerable parts. There is no rain damage, but the plastic armrests are eaten up, and the lever grips are bleached. That’s the most significant damage, apart from a place on the deck skirt where some metal got torn.

Figuring he had it for 9 to 10 years, and that he was able to use it the whole time, and given our growing season, he would have been doing about 30 sessions per yard per year. I believe I can mow my large yard in 90 minutes. Probably 60 once I get used to the mower. The granddaughter’s husband, who sold me the mower, told me the owner’s parcel was not all that big. If that is true, he would not have mown more than I do, so assuming 1.5 hours times 30, I get 45 hours per year. That comes out to 450 hours. I have no reason to think he mowed more than one yard.

A figure of 1,000 is only conceivable if he mowed other people’s yards or something.

I don’t know if he used it the whole 10 years, because he died not long ago, and his granddaughter’s husband looks to be 50. He must have been very old, and he may not have been well during his last year.

I know the meter’s figure of 229 hours is wrong because the meter doesn’t move. It could be that it locked up after the first owner quit using the mower, but that’s very optimistic. So 229 is not plausible, and nothing over 1,000 is likely.

A 1,000-hour 60-inch diesel mower for what I paid would be a dream come true, because it should hit 3,000 with no real problems, and 4,000 would not be much less likely. I figure that even if I clear a lot of scrub so my mowing area grows, I will never break 75 hours per year, and over 20 years, that would keep me in the nice area below 3,000. That would probably get me deep into old age with no more mower buys or major repairs. Then, assuming parts were available, I could rebuild the mower and get myself well into the too-old-to-care years.

My big problem now is that I am itching to kill the bargain by adding appearance upgrades. The sun-ravaged arm rests are costing me a hundred bucks. The bleached lever grips will run me a few dollars. Seat covers are available, and that would mean $300-plus. The seat covers are intact, but new ones would look pretty spiffy. I don’t need any of these things, but they tempt me.

My mulching blades arrived, so I’ll be testing out the built-in deck jack to install them. Based on the way the stock blades chewed everything up, I don’t think I need new ones, but the new ones weren’t expensive, and better is better than good.

It’s always nice to have extra blades in case you hit a rock.

I hope I don’t get any bad surprises, but if I do, I can always bite the bullet and have the mower fixed. Saturday is my next mowing day, so that’s the next opportunity to put it to the test.

Kubota-San Bring Honor to Humble Yard

I managed to half-mow with my newly-acquired Kubota zero-turn today. It was glorious, until the rain shut me down.

I wrote about buying the mower yesterday, so I’ll just link to that instead of doing my usual recap. Maybe readers will be happy to bypass the tedium.

I got advice on some forums. The people on one forum were generally congratulatory, except for one sourpuss who somewhat rudely claimed the mower was probably stolen. His evidence was that the seller and I could not find a serial number on it.

I think the sourpuss may have been bummed out because somebody else seemed to have gotten a pretty good deal.

As it turns out, the mower does have a serial number. I found it today. Grok seems to think this mower was made in the late 2000’s. I haven’t been energetic enough to narrow it down.

If the seller were a thief, I would have to give him a D. He advertised the mower on Facebook under his own name, sold it from his own house, delivered it using his own truck, and signed an affirmation that it belonged to him in a bank with lots of cameras.

The more I look at the mower, the more I think I did all right.

I know what wear looks like on power equipment, and I also know what rain and sun damage look like. I don’t see much wear on this mower. I don’t see any rain damage. I do see sun damage. The total package is consistent with a storage method typical of Northern Florida. A lot of people here put tractors and other machines in pole barns with no walls. The sun comes in sideways, but the rain is blocked.

The mower has a few parts that are clearly sun-damaged. The plastic grips on the levers are bleached, and so is the seat belt. The plastic armrests are eaten up. That’s about it. Parts that would rust if exposed to a lot of rain are not rusted.

The first mow went really well. I did take out a couple of shrubs and part of a piece of ground cover, but I’ll get the hang of it. I had to quit because it rained.

Before I could mow, I had to dump a lot of fluid. The seller overfilled the transmission. I had to use an oil sucker. I found out I am no good with a siphon. On the up side, the fluid doesn’t taste that bad.

I would estimate he was off by half a gallon. It hurt to dump that expensive SUDT2 (~$35/gallon last I checked) on a bothersome stump, but I was not able to catch it all in a clean container.

I have trouble getting the mower to crank. At first, I had the PTO engaged and didn’t know it; the relevant decal is gone, so decals are on my shopping list. The second time I had trouble, the mower started when I reduced the throttle. I don’t know if there is a cutout for a high throttle setting or what. I also fiddled with the seat a little. This mower’s lawyer switch (stops the engine every time you get off) is cut, so it could be that something in there is shorting. I would have cut it myself, so I am happy the switch is dead.

People say these things don’t give the best quality of cut, but I guess those guys are pros. I am just trying to hold the jungle back and shred the oak leaves. The cut I got looks fantastic to me. No windrows, no clumps. Nice and flat. I don’t think I need the missing scalping assemblies I mentioned yesterday. I didn’t hit any concrete. I think the first owner removed them deliberately.

I cut my backyard and side yard before the rain came. The deck really blasted cut material out. I am planning to cover the chute to improve mulching, but I haven’t done it yet, so I flung clippings way out into right field. Based on what I saw, I think mulching blades and a chute cover will handle my leaf-mulching just fine. For that matter, as it is, it may be good enough. I have ordered mulching blades, though, and I plan to use them.

The speed was wonderful. Seemed like it took half as long as the John Deere. It would be faster if I knew how to use a zero-turn. I kept slowing it down to keep from hitting things.

The seat suspension is nothing to write home about, but I don’t sit on it all day, so I’ll get over it.

I see why the first owner threw out the deck’s pulley covers. This thing is a bear to clean after mowing, compared to the John Deere. The deck was buried in grass, leaves, and dirt, and it went in under the floorboard. I opened the floorboard hatch and spent a lot of time blowing crud out with a small leaf blower. Cleaning stuff out from under pulley covers would have made the job worse.

I thought the ROPS might be bent because the clamp knobs were mangled, but I got them off with a strap wrench, and the ROPS is fine. I plan to keep it folded most of the time because I have to mow under trees. I don’t know why the first owner kept those twisted, broken knobs. They made it look like he had done something awful to his bar.

I have not opened up the control panel to see if the hour meter wiring is okay, but since the idiot lights use the same wires, I would guess that it is. I suppose I’ll have to get a new electronic meter. The one I have is mechanical.

My online parts cart is filling up. I would go buy this stuff locally, but two big companies have taken over the Kubota business here, and they can’t be bothered to create a decent website. I can go hunch over a counter with a guy who has no idea which parts I need, or I can figure it out myself while sitting in my recliner.

I wish I knew how many hours the mower has, but it is clearly in good shape, and because all of the damaged parts are cheap and inconsequential, I should be able to put it right for under $400. Or I could leave it as-is and get the same performance.

You wouldn’t think a lawnmower would be this big a deal to a man, but I am heavily traumatized by the needless suffering I put myself through with the John Deere. Now I plan to see if I can find a collector to snap it up. I will take his money while holding my hand over my heart and speaking in low, reverent tones. Yessssss, what a wonderful piece of old American iron. Yessssss, it deserves to be restored to its former glory. Yessssss, $2500 is a small price to pay for a piece of history. Get it out of here.

Now I have to decide whether I’m man enough to find a big Kubota tractor to replace the one I have. And I keep dreaming of a 6-ton excavator.

Finally Getting Off the John

The big day may finally be here. I may be getting a “new” used diesel mower to replace the old John Deere 430. I can’t contain my joy. I found a deal I like on the web.

I say “may” because I’m used to getting bitten in the butt with respect to Internet deals. As well as everything else. You know how it is. People buy stuff out from under you. The things you think are good deals turn out to be junk. I will say “may” until the mower is in my driveway.

I still marvel that people love the John Deere 430 so much. Say anything bad about it on a landscaping or farming forum, and you may be challenged to a duel. “They run forever.” “They’re bulletproof.” People routinely pay $3,000 for 430’s in reasonably good shape, in spite of the fact that the newest ones are well over 30 years old. Mine is 34.

I have a lot of bad things to say about my mower, although I can’t complain at all about the smoking deal I got on it.

First, the deck weighs about 350 pounds, and it has to be removed in order to change the blades or the oil. You can jack the mower up if you dare. Personally, I don’t want to climb under a 1500-pound mower with a short wheelbase when it’s reared up at 45 degrees.

Removing the deck is a horrible chore. It’s supposed to be quick and convenient, which it probably was in John Deere showrooms with new mowers that had no corrosion and which had been carefully prepared by mechanics. To get the deck off, I have to remove one deck wheel, turn two other wheels sideways, remove some pins that don’t like to come out, turn a lever that doesn’t like to turn, jack up the front of the mower, probably do some other things I forgot, and drag the deck out by brute force.

Putting the deck back on is just as difficult.

Having moaned about that, I would now like to moan about the unavailability of new parts, which have always been way overpriced. A few years back, Deere started discontinuing commonly-replaced parts the mower really needs in order to function. First, it was the grille. Eventually, they got around to replacing their proprietary, non-repairable hydraulic cylinders. Now the muffler ($450, if memory serves) is off the menu. The deck is also unavailable.

With that behind me, I will now complain about the difficulty of working on the mower. Everything is cramped. Things that should be easy to replace are hard to replace. To add hydraulic fluid, you have to pour it into a tube with an inner diameter of maybe 3/8″. That is simply amazing.

One belt runs the water pump and alternator, and changing it is like doing a heart transplant through a dirty keyhole. While lying on your back. Everything is hard to get to, you can’t swing a wrench, and none of the bolts want to turn. And you have to take the tractor’s whole seat-and-fender pan off.

Finally, I hate the throttly thing. This mower has a hydrostatic transmission, which means you use one control to change the speed and direction. It’s a shift lever on the dash. When mowing in a yard like mine, you need to change speed and direction a lot, and modern mowers use things like pedals and control bars to make it easy.

I guess zero-radius-turn or “zero-turn” mowers got their name from the fact that they use the drive wheels to do all the turning and traveling. They’re like wheelchairs. To turn, you make one wheel go faster than the other. To rotate in place, you reverse one wheel and make the other go forward. You don’t have to move to turn around.

Going from forward to reverse or changing speed with the Deere is jerky and generally no fun. It’s not easy to control, and you have to take one hand off the wheel.

I’ve had to repair the Deere a lot. I have suffered repeatedly. It has broken down in annoying and unexpected ways, it has done it repeatedly, and working on it is on par with laboring in a salt mine. I want to let it go.

UPDATE

I made a deal on the “new” mower, and it’s in my driveway. It’s a used Kubota ZD326S with a nice diesel engine and a 60″ deck. A zero-turn. As my buddy Mike says, a MOWER, not a TRACTOR.

The ad said 229 hours at a very low price, so I got excited. I went out to see the seller today, and of course, when I ran the engine, the hour meter did not move. And while the mower looked very good, it was pretty clearly not a 229-hour mower. The seat had some wear, the seat belts were somewhat bleached, and so on.

The seller was a very nice guy. He said the mower had belonged to his wife’s grandfather, who had died not long ago. He said grandpa used it to mow a couple of acres at his home.

He kept telling me he didn’t know much about the mower, so I looked it over fairly well. I had him jack up the deck, I looked in the hatches, and I had him to through all the functions with the engine running. It sounded perfect, and nothing exploded.

He had just put new tires on the mower, plus fluids and deck belts, so he wasted a lot of money before deciding to sell it. The tires cost over $300 for a pair. Insane.

He said he didn’t know anything about the hours. Judging by my own Kubota tractor, which I bought at 1100 hours, I would say the mower is between 500 and 1000, so it should have another 2000 in it, given good care. If anything goes seriously wrong when it gets old, it’s not a complex machine, so most things that are likely to go bad can be fixed.

It was lacking two front scalping wheels, along with the little shafts that hold them. I can get the parts for $210. He says the dealer told him he didn’t need them.

When he jacked the mower up in his driveway, oil dripped from the bottom of the crankcase, and I thought it was time for me to go home. It turned out he had overfilled it and forgotten to clean it off, so when he jacked it, oil ran off the top of the engine. This explained why it ran for several minutes with no drips before the front end was raised.

The underside of the deck looked very good. Still some traces of paint.

He spontaneously offered to knock a grand off the price, and I decided to take it. I got it for around $3000 less than the market price for a mower with a working hour meter and documentation, so unless something is horribly wrong with it, I can’t get burned. I really need a good mower that will last decades, I have been looking for months, and this was no time to let the perfect be the enemy of the very good. Mowing season is here, and I can’t face another session with the John Deere.

If this mower could be had new, it would cost about $18,000. A new really good gas mower like a Scag Tiger Cat II would cost $13,000 or so, the motor would probably fail by 750 hours, it would have to be refilled very often, and I would have to deal with the pitfalls of ethanol.

My best guess is that this thing is a peach, well worth sprucing up. There are a couple of dinged-up parts I can replace. I can touch up the paint here and there.

Because it was raining today, I was not able to run the mower much. I mowed a few yards and then put it out of the rain. I was flabbergasted. The old JD has a 20-horsepower engine, and the Kubota is rated at 25, but it feels more like 20 and 40. The engine ran perfectly smoothly, unlike the Deere’s Yanmar, which shakes the tractor. It seemed to run at a much higher speed. When I cut grass, it blasted out the chute in a shower of startled clippings. The cut it left was flat and smooth, unlike the Deere’s wake of ridges and lumps.

I had thought my lawn’s irregular appearance was mostly due to the nature of the awful grass, but it looks like the mower was the problem. Maybe it was running too slowly to really KO the grass, and I need to take better care of the air filter, or maybe the JD just doesn’t turn its spindles as fast as a Kubota.

Grok thinks the Kubota’s blades turn faster, but it isn’t sure.

The Kubota did all this while moving much faster than the Deere. I should be able to halve my time in the roasting sun.

I’m going to get a set of mulching blades and close off the Kubota’s chute to see if I get respectable leaf-pulverization. If I do, I am set for life. Oak leaves are the bane of my existence.

Kubota makes a mulching kit for the ZD326, but it gets complaints. It isolates each blade in a separate compartment, and this confines the clippings a little too well and makes the mower bog down in heavy grass. I was hoping to get a kit and modify it to make it breathe a little better, but when I looked under the mower today, it looked like it was already set up the way I wanted it. It had curved steel panels that surrounded but didn’t completely isolate the blades. That might work.

I’m getting Gator G6 mulching blades for it and hoping for the best.

If it’s reasonably dry tomorrow, I’ll take the Kubota out for a spin and see how she does. As long as it does what it did today, I will consider myself a satisfied customer.

I have felt wonderful ever since I got the mower home. Relaxed, knowing my old mower will no longer be a source of uncertainty and torment.

Sometimes I wonder if I spend too much, and other times I wonder if God thinks there is something wrong with me for not spending more of what he has given me to improve our lives. The John Deere was a bargain, and it functioned, but it also made me suffer over and over with breakdowns and repairs and maintenance that were extremely unpleasant. Maybe I should have bought a Kubota 5 years ago.

I discussed it with my wife. She thinks I should spend to make things easy for myself. I told her to remember she said that if she ended up getting a job at 60, but she said that would never happen, because God always provided for us.

I think I was pretty frugal, buying a used diesel. I couldn’t touch a new one without coming close to $20,000. Home Depot’s best mower is a gas Cub Cadet that costs $3,000 more than I paid and has a cheesy Kohler engine. Not even a Honda. Its deck is 10 gauge. Mine is 7 gauge. The John Deere’s looks like 10, gauge for that matter. The Cub Cadet is likely to be scrap at 1,000 hours, but I’ll have at least that many more to go.

I love diesels. I wish everything had a diesel engine.

For the first time in maybe 5 years, I am looking forward to mowing the yard.

The Opposite of Peter Pan Syndrome

My buddy Mike sent me a link to a video about Jackson Laux, and I was very impressed.

The web says Jackson, or maybe I should call him Mr. Laux because he is so grown up, is 9 years old. He is Internet-famous for his love of tractors, especially John Deere. He has appeared in lots of videos. He has a spic-and-span shop. He has multiple tractors. He can talk all day about them. Their strengths and weaknesses and so on. He really enjoys what he’s doing.

As a Christian, I find Mr. Laux interesting, because he helps me understand what most parents do wrong.

When I was a kid, my dad made very good money. I should know, because I have all the money he never spent. So we went on vacations to Europe to broaden our minds, right? We had music instruction, tutors, and all sorts of help with interests that could be lucrative and fulfilling later in life, right? Well, no. My dad was cheap. We had furniture from discount outlets in the Carolinas. We had cars we got at cost from my mother’s father’s dealership. My sister and I didn’t have much in the way of toys. Another kid down the block gave me hand-me-down toys and clothes. When we traveled, we went to see my mom’s family in Kentucky or we went to the Keys, which were a short drive away.

My hobby was TV. My dad’s hobby, which consumed hours of his life every day. I sat in front of TV sets and ate ice cream.

I had interests, but it never occurred to me to ask my parents to support them. To them, every non-necessity they bought for me was either a toy or a gift. Frivolous. The only exceptions were books, which they didn’t mind paying for, and two banjos. They would never have bought me tools, a tractor, a welder…no way. They would never have put $10,000 in an investment account and taught me what to do with it. They would never have bought me a rental property and helped me manage it.

You go to school. You get B’s or better. You become a lawyer or maybe a doctor. That’s what you do. This was their limited understanding.

My mother didn’t have much in the way of vision, and neither did my dad, but he was worse, because he didn’t care. He didn’t spend time with his kids. He had no idea who our teachers were or what subjects we were taking. He forgot our birthdays. Once, he came home drunk, with no idea it was my birthday. I was using a music stand my mother had bought for $8.00. When he realized what day it was, he asked me how I liked my gift, and he didn’t buy me anything else.

My mother made some effort to interest me in science. I’ll give her that. She enrolled me in a mail-order program that sent me little science kits. She tried to interest me in coin collecting, which was dull, given that there was almost nothing available to spend.

Here I am, an adult with a thousand interests. Writing. Music. Machining. Welding. Cooking. Science. Engineering. Maintaining my land. Building things. Photography. And my parents never managed to set me up with a single activity. Not one! Yes, I got banjo lessons, but the banjo is a dead-end instrument, and music lessons are nothing if you don’t learn to read and write music.

Photography is actually a very profitable profession if you have the gift, and by now I know I have it. I have taken a lot of excellent pictures. I could have made money with cameras.

My parents failed. Now let’s look at my buddy Mike.

He has two sons, and they started life near where I live. Mike spoke to one of their teachers. According to Mike, regarding his son, the teacher said, “He be real smart.”

When he saw the pickle his sons were in, Mike moved to New Hampshire, where they have better public schools. When one of his sons turned out to be a gifted football player, he moved to the DC area and put him in a famous sports high school. When the time came to think about college, Mike’s son was connected with scouts. He didn’t become a pro in the usual sense of the word, but he did receive a free college education, and he is a happy, very successful adult.

Mike lived across the street from me, and his parents didn’t do much to start him off in life. His mother died when he was about 16, and his dad’s involvement with him dried up. His parents can’t take credit for the way he raised his sons, and neither can his wife, who gave him custody during their divorce and then ran off to pursue her career. Mike’s sons are doing better than he did. Mike had to learn to hustle when he was their age, taking whatever job was available or creating his own jobs.

Mr. Laux did not get a job at age three and save and invest and buy tractors and a shop. No one has told me this. I know it because I’m not an idiot. No little kid does that. Even Mozart had an aggressive manager. Mr. Laux’ parents encouraged him in his dream and also financed it heavily. They paid for everything. They knew the difference between spoiling a kid with toys and investing in his future.

As a result, barring unforeseen problems, Mr. Laux will be self-supporting when most kids are rotting their brains with video games and dope, and he will not have to waste 4 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars at a university where he will be pushed to become an antisemitic, God-hating, emasculated, demon-worshiping, drug-using, socialist pervert, given a useless degree in English or History, and then relegated to a cubicle farm.

I will have my son’s back with regard to any wise pursuit that interests him. That doesn’t include getting an English degree or starting a band. He can study STEM fields. He can start a business. He can learn to invest. I’ll help him learn instruments and languages. I will never tell him things I buy that are related to his wise pursuits are frivolous or that he should think I’m generous for buying them. That would be like telling him I’m generous for paying his pediatrician.

I wish I could go back in time about 50 years and give my autopilot parents a good talking-to. It might have given my mother ideas. My dad wouldn’t have paid any attention, because he didn’t care. I wish I could go back and talk to my young self, but I was underdeveloped and hardheaded thanks to my parents, so I don’t know if I would have listened.

I might have listened. I remember a few times in my past when appalled strangers who knew my parents were blowing it told me things that stuck.

My parents didn’t know God. They never heard from the Holy Spirit. We didn’t pray together. I rarely saw the inside of a church. They imparted virtually no wisdom to me. They didn’t cultivate a single useful habit in me. I didn’t have the natural character to raise myself properly. It’s a wonder I’m not living in a refrigerator box.

Abraham Lincoln, or Rudolf Diesel?

I have put around three hours on my tiny Chinese excavator, but I have to report I haven’t made it to China yet.

I wonder if millennials will get that. “What does digging have to do with China?” “I don’t know. Should we be offended or just go somewhere quiet and invent a new gender?”

I put $5,000 into this new machine, figuring it would be very handy around the farm. As of today, I think it will be useful enough to justify keeping it, although it has some problems.

As I noted in another post, and as may or may not be true, these machines have gas engines that run very fast, and they are said to be based on diesel machines with engines that run slowly. The actual figures are 3600 and 2050 RPM. The scuttlebutt is that the Chinese did not change the hydraulics to cope with the higher RPM’s, so these excavators pump fluid too fast, resulting in jerky movements that take a lot of skill to control.

Whatever the reason, the jerkiness is there for sure.

The controls allow you to lower and raise the blade, move each track independently, curl and uncurl the arm and bucket, raise the arm, spin the excavator on its tracks, and use the hydraulic thumb.

The jumpy nature of the machine is fairly manageable except when you use the tracks. There is one stick for each track. Moving it forward makes the track go forward, and pulling it back gives you reverse. Moving the sticks in different directions makes the excavator turn.

One of the big problems is that if you try to go forward or back without great care, the excavator may jump. This jerks your body in the direction opposite to the machine’s progress, and that makes you pull the sticks in the direction that makes it stop or go the other way. Then you naturally push to resist the jerking, so you start it moving again. The result is that you bounce. Forward-stop-forward-stop-forward-stop. It’s like riding a mechanical bull.

I’ve looked into solutions.

One is to replace the hydraulic pump with a slower one. The pump puts out around 0.37 cubic inches per revolution at 3600 RPM’s, so moving to something like 0.20 would make it more like a diesel machine running at 2050. But the tracks would be unbearably slow. As it is, it’s almost motionless at full speed.

The pumps are cheap and easy to replace. I should be able to do it for under $150. But if I want to use the excavator at the other end of the farm, it could take an hour to get there.

It would be great to find a little diesel engine that would work, but I think that’s a pipe dream.

I do not like gas engines, and I am sure this excavator’s carburetor will cause me problems eventually, but the price was very good, and I don’t expect to need the excavator often enough or in a big enough hurry to make occasional failures intolerable. Hope I’m right.

As for capability, the excavator is pretty weak. A Youtuber says these machines can lift something like 550 pounds, which is very little. The bucket’s curling cylinder isn’t strong enough to make it dig into dirt unless it’s pretty loose. You have to rely on the arm.

I’ve also gotten the excavator stuck on sandy ground. The tracks flat quit turning. I have read that this may be caused by a bypass valve that protects everything when the excavator is held in place by dirt pressing against the underside, but it’s hard to believe that happened in the relatively flat place where I was digging.

Breaking through roots is not possible if they’re over maybe an inch in diameter. That surprised me.

As I probably said before, it’s like having two men with shovels. It’s not going to move the stump of a hundred-year-old oak, but it will dig a hole in cooperative ground about as fast as two men, and all I have to do is sit and work the controls.

I can’t smooth things out when I’m finished. It’s way too jerky for that, and the bucket is small anyway. I would have to go back over everything with the tractor bucket and probably a shovel.

The earth-moving ability of two men with shovels is good enough, believe it or not. I have been out there with a shovel, myself, and it was not pleasant in 95-degree weather with blazing sunshine, high humidity, and no breeze. The excavator is not as great as I thought it would be, but it is great.

As for other machinery, I tried to buy a used 60″ diesel zero-turn today, but the place advertising it lent it to a customer, so I could not see it. I left contact information, but they have not gotten back to me yet. I wanted a Kubota, and this machine is a Gravely with a Kubota motor. I like Kubotas because they have built-in jacks for changing the blades, but they are hard to find at good prices, and I am tired of waiting. Gravely supposedly makes tougher bodies, and I can always use my floor jack.

I feel better about buying machines because I used Grok and ChatGPT to do financial analyses of the cost and return. Grok said continuing to use a mower would eventually save me $75,000 in landscaping payments, which could actually be true.

I should be able to keep a diesel mower going until I die, and I would guess that would save me $6,000 2025 dollars per year. Call it $150 per week and something like 40 weeks per season. That’s $6,000 per year in labor costs saved, so over 20 years, $120,000. If I live longer, I can always get an apartment.

I could get a used gas mower, which would be much cheaper. Then I’d have the giant hassle of ethanol problems, and I would have to buy and install a new engine every 750 hours, so at 80 hours per year, starting with a used mower, I would have to buy and install at least two engines, at a cost of something like $4,000 2025 simoleons. A used diesel engine should outlive me with no major overhauls.

A used gas mower would be maybe $2,000 cheaper, but it would cost me $4,000 to replace the engine, so an eventual net loss of $6,000, and it would be a horrible product I would hate, compared to a diesel. And it would burn a lot more fuel.

New gas mowers cost more than used diesels, which makes me wonder why anyone buys them. I don’t even understand why professionals buy them. Of course, I can’t assume every man who cuts grass for a living knows a lot about smart investing.

I know this is the kind of thing people say in order to rationalize impulse buys, but here it is anyway: AI helped me realize I would be throwing money away if I did not buy a diesel mower. Of course, I could keep the one I have running for maybe 5 more years, but I just can’t face doing the maintenance, and this mower is very slow. Changing the oil and sharpening the blades are torture, and a new mower should be able to shave off over a third of my mowing time.

This mower may die for good unexpectedly. The hour meter was frozen when I bought it (Surprise!), so for all I know, it has 4,000 hours on it. Important parts are rapidly being discontinued, it has already broken down three times, and I could find myself presented very suddenly with fast-growing grass and the need to buy a mower quickly.

Given how hard it is to find a mower at my leisure, I know that would be unpleasant.

I looked into mowers a few years ago, and I decided to be smart and keep my old mower going. Guess what happened? Prices of new mowers went up maybe 30%, and the value of my old mower dropped by around $2000. And I got to continue suffering needlessly. All that time, I could have been riding a better mower.

AI also thinks a real excavator, like 11,000 pounds, would pay for itself. I could do a lot of beautification and repair, and I would get a tax deduction. And it would be fun.

I could get something pretty good for maybe $25,000. It’s not that hard to make $25,000 worth of improvements on a farm with an excavator.

The final idea AI liked was getting a bigger tractor and a flail mower, but I didn’t point out that I already had a tractor which is adequate. My tractor will do most of what a bigger one will do, but it will do it a lot slower, and I will have to help it by getting off and doing more manual labor.

People like to say a small tractor will do anything a big tractor will do, slower. Not actually true.

You know who says that? Guys with small tractors. Especially guys who couldn’t afford, or were too cheap, to get bigger ones. The 50 million guys in the US who bought 25-horse John Deeres and Kubotas. Some made the right decision, because some properties don’t require big machines. Others doomed themselves to unnecessary misery and failure.

I can wait instead and make the most of what I have. And of course, the cost of a new tractor will go up, and the value of my old tractor will go down.

I’ve also realized that machinery expenditures are not lost. A good used machine is an investment. You can sell it if you have to. It’s not like a trip to Singapore or a year’s worth of restaurant meals. It’s not like a new machine, which depreciates off a cliff the second you buy it (12-25% for machines with top resale value). A used machine may depreciate, although the way things are going, it may not. Many appreciated during the Bidencaust.

It probably won’t increase in value like a piece of real estate or shares of stock, but it should beat rapidly-shrinking cash by a wide margin.

I believe that if I pick up a couple of useful machines that will enable me to keep my property up without dying of heat exhaustion, in the end, I should be way better off than if I had paid tradesmen or spent thousands on rentals. My property will look a lot better and possibly be worth more. My own suffering will be greatly reduced. It sounds pretty good.

I’m glad I bought the small excavator. It is already proving useful, even if it’s rough around the edges. If it turns out I’ve overestimated its usefulness, I’ll be able to get every penny I paid back out of it. Not bad.

Pinch Yourself

I belong to a shooting forum, and understandably, there are a lot of conservatives there. Conservatism is the dominant culture on the forum.

Yesterday, I saw something there that reminded me that antisemitism is a supernatural, not political, disease. Conservatism doesn’t prevent it. Only the Holy Spirit prevents it. Antisemitism is the preferred stance of the left, to the extent that leftists nearly own it, but there are also a fair number of nutjobs on the right who have it in for the Jews.

Here is what someone on the forum posted:

It’s a great deal like the Nazi propaganda posters of the last century; here’s one telling people to vote for Nazism:

This person considers himself conservative, so he’s not an Antifa terrorist or other type of leftist kook who happens to love guns.

On a side note, one of the sad things about belonging to gun forums is that in addition to people who love hunting, enjoy firearms and shooting, care about their civil rights, and want information on self-defense, there are always a fair number of dangerous, hateful idiots who look forward to the day they get to shoot someone. Gun forums are packed with rude, conceited, hostile people, just like fishing forums, Christian forums, leftist forums, food forums, and fitness forums.

I don’t know why fitness and bodybuilding (different things) people are so obnoxious and arrogant. Wow, you’ve been exercising and dieting for a while, and maybe drugs have made you look like a comic book character. That’s wonderful. See if you still feel superior in 5 years when you’ve quit going to the gym, your doctor has scared you off the drugs, and Reese’s cups are back on the menu.

The condition of your body has no bearing on the respect or disrespect other people should give you. If you’re in great physical shape, good for you, but I don’t respect you for it, especially if you’re malicious and you have so little self-awareness you think people should admire you for something trivial,self-serving, and fleeting.

Leftists are openly calling for wiping out all Jews in Israel. That’s what the “river to the sea” chant means. Many of them are rooting for Iran in comments on videos. And we all know about Queers for Palestine, which is sort of comparable to Antifa Rioters for Pepper Balls. Conservatives generally support Israel, and we don’t do antisemitic marches, rallies, or riots. But then there are the freaks who think Hitler was conservative and Nazism didn’t get a fair chance.

Sadly, the baboon who made this meme has tried to claim all right-thinking conservatives as his allies. He has used the revered “Chad” cartoon to voice his Satanic view, suggesting the rest of us agree.

In the thread where this meme was posted, this idiot or some other like “mind” claimed Jews wanted to run the world and so on. That canard is one of the most obvious proofs that demons cause antisemitism and that it’s a form of insanity.

Let’s recap. Let’s start with the premise that Jews are immensely powerful as a people and the rest of us are their puppets. Okay, they’ve had around 4,000 years to run their global empire. During that time, they had no homeland for 2,000 years because they were forced out by weak, inferior gentiles. They were abused and tormented by many of the countries where they sought shelter. During the last century, around a third of them were murdered by gentiles. They were so widely persecuted, the rest of the world had to give them a homeland in order to prevent them from being annihilated, and they got a tiny sliver of then-worthless desert with no oil, surrounded by hostile Muslims who attempted to exterminate them as soon as they could. The Muslims got a huge chunk of the world’s oil reserves, so they have lots of money to fund antisemitic genocide. Which they have never stopped doing.

If the Jews are running the world for their own benefit, they’re doing a very poor job. They have made some very bad choices.

Me, I would take Europe. Hands down. America is nice, but the climate is terrible over most of the country, and we can’t match Europe’s natural beauty. I would also take as much of the world’s oil as possible, along with a big fraction of the best farmland. I wouldn’t have let gentiles have atomic weapons. That’s for sure. I’d corner the market on those. And I’d own all the stuff Musk and Bezos have.

I might also take over some pleasant vacation spots in the tropics.

I would definitely impoverish the Muslims.

Jews haven’t done any of this, so how can they be running the world?

Antisemitism keeps getting worse. If it’s this bad now, I have to wonder what next year will be like.

Think I’ll Paint Winnie the Pooh on it for Nose Art

With some trepidation, I am making a third effort to write this blog post. The first time, I started and then drove to Walmart, and when I got home, the Notepad window I was using had disappeared. Ironically, I have gotten used to using Notepad because my power used to blink while I was using a browser and WordPress. Notepad saved a number of essays. But it only does that when you save your work manually from time to time, and I quit doing that a long time ago, probably because I developed some faith in my backup power supply.

The second time I tried to write this post, my wife knocked the cord out of the back of my PC with a mop after I wrote maybe 500 words. I’ll bet they were great.

One more time, from the top:

I am pleased to say that I now have an excavator of my very own.

I have wanted an excavator for years. My farm has a lot of problems excavators are the best tools for fixing. Tree stumps. Not-quite-buried rocks that dent my mower blades. Holes that need to be dug. Trees that should be pushed over instead of being felled with saws.

An excavator is an amazing thing. You can use one to make beautiful, very deep holes with clean vertical sides and flat bottoms. You can dig long trenches with them, and you can fill the trenches in very quickly. You can tear unwanted trees up. You can dig up and lift boulders.

For digging, an excavator is like a number of sturdy potential deportees armed with shovels, fresh from the parking lot at Home Depot, except it won’t case your house and come back later to steal your jewelry and oriental rugs. And it won’t try to vote in your elections.

Why didn’t I buy an excavator sooner? Because I am cheap. I would rather watch my property deteriorate than part with a sum I wouldn’t really miss.

That sum is around $25,000. That’s about as little as you can hope to pay for a 6-ton excavator that isn’t ready for the scrapyard. You can go cheaper, but you should expect to have a lot of down time and repairs.

I didn’t spend $25,000. I spent $5,000. For a brand-new excavator. How did I pull that off? Well, I compromised. A little. I shaved a little bit off the desired tonnage. About 80%, give or take. And I went Chinese.

For some time, the Chinese have been making little-bitty excavators weighing as little as 1500 pounds. Real manufacturers make small excavators, too, but theirs are fancy and have diesel engines. The Chinese go bare-bones, and they use the sort of engines Briggs & Stratton makes. Like big lawnmower engines. Gas-powered.

I used to see tiny excavators going up and down the road on trailers, and I thought they were silly. I couldn’t believe they were worth buying. I was sure a 1-ton excavator couldn’t pull a tree over, for one thing.

Recently, I saw a video that changed my mind. A huge Youtube star bought a used Chinese excavator for $3,000, and he loved it. This is a guy who owns huge track loaders, dump trucks, bulldozers, skid steers, and diesel excavators. He knows all about the real thing, but he enjoyed a Chinese toy.

He did things with it that surprised me. He lifted a tree that had to be 40 feet long, and he drove off with it.

I thought that was pretty neat. I started thinking I had made the perfect the enemy of the good. So what if I ended up with an excavator that couldn’t take a tree down? It would still be great for little stumps and digging out rocks. It would work for digging holes, like the one I need to dig to fix my gate’s car sensor.

I looked around, and I found out Chinese baby excavators started at around $6,000 for the bare minimum. But then I got lucky. I saw an ad for a brand-new excavator with 15 horsepower and a hydraulic thumb. Price: $5,000. The manufacturer charges $8500, including shipping.

How was I supposed to say no to that? The excavator in the video had 12 horsepower and a stationary thumb, and it was still wonderful. The one in the ad was a lot better, and because it was new, it probably wouldn’t fall apart for at least a year and a half.

Incidentally, these machines used to cost more. For some reason, the market is flooded with them. I don’t know if Trump scared the importers into dumping them or what.

A Kubota the same size retails for about $29,000. A Kubota is a WEE bit better, and by “WEE bit,” I mean “a lot,” but it’s not $24,000 better.

Today I drove out and looked at it, and a couple of hours later, it was in my yard. Here’s a photo.

It’s a monster, isn’t it?

It really works. It’s not quite as strong as I had hoped, and it doesn’t break through roots the way it needs to in order to dig fast in Northern Florida, but on the other hand, it digs much faster and better than I can, and while it digs, I don’t get dirty or sweaty. I don’t get sore. I don’t strain my back. I can dig all day. In the past, I used to go a couple of hours and then quit and expect to feel sore the next day.

This machine can go down 65 inches. That’s really something. I believe the deepest hole I ever dug in my life was about 30 inches, and it was a horrible experience.

I have a couple of partially-buried rocks I really want to get rid of. The tractor couldn’t do anything, even when I used a subsoiler to go around it. I am planning to use the excavator to go down 65 inches, and if that isn’t enough to loosen them up and allow me to pull them out with the tractor, I’m going to rebury them and paint the tops bright pink so I quit running over them.

Actually, I might use the rotary hammer and wedges to break the tops off of them. That would be good enough.

It’s not fun to use. Yet.

The controls are not intuitive. It appears it will take me a day of practice to get to the point where I’m not doing things like lowering the bulldozer blade when I think I’m curling the bucket. Also, the machine’s movements are very jerky. You push the levers carefully, trying to ease into motion gradually, and at first, nothing happens. Then the excavator leaps into action. It’s like riding a mechanical bull. Hard to predict. You can actually throw yourself out of the machine if you aren’t careful.

I have read that these little excavators use the same pumps diesel excavators use. Gas engines run at higher RPM’s, so supposedly, this results in too much fluid pressure. I don’t know if it’s true.

A guy who claims he sells these machines says the problem is that the manufacturers don’t adjust the pressure well at the factories. He says you can fix it with a simple gauge and an Allen wrench.

I’m going to improve my skills and see if that fixes the problem, and if it doesn’t work, I’ll look into pump adjustment.

Some people think cheap Chinese hydraulic fluid makes the machines jerkier than they should be, and they also say it should be changed right away anyhow, because it’s no good and may also have bits of metal in it after the machines have run a few hours. I plan to hit Tractor Supply tomorrow and buy real fluid.

I don’t know if this excavator will be of any use with my big stumps. Maybe if I’m patient. But I have a bunch of little ones, and I also have a lot of shrubs I want to rip out. It will be great for those jobs.

Just about all the parts that may go bad are available on Amazon, and they are cheap. I don’t have a warranty, but at this price, and given the simplicity of the machine and the cost of parts, I don’t care.

If I decide I don’t like it, I can probably get most of my money back out of it, so there is not much of a down side. I might lose two grand, but I’m sure I can do more than two grand’s worth of work before I do.

Today I realized I needed to think more about machinery that does work for me. If I’m going to continue living in the country, I mean. I’m strong now, but old age is just about here, and people don’t stay strong forever. And my time has some value, even if it isn’t much. There is a lot to be said for turning a hard two-week job into a one-day job you can do sitting down, especially when you have a wife waiting for you to finish and move on to the next chore.

I could just pay people to do things. I would hate to feel helpless, though, and paying people isn’t always cheaper than buying equipment. For example, I can buy a used diesel mower for $9,000 and use it until I die, with only only routine maintenance. I can’t find anyone who will charge me $9,000 to mow my grass for that same period. I would go through that in a couple of years.

I am considering upgrading my tractor for $30,000 minus whatever I get for the old one. That would include buying a flail mower that could probably replace my garden tractor for lawn work. A bigger tractor would make things go much, much faster and easier. If I had to pay people to come out and cut and move trees instead of using a tractor, I would probably end up spending more over time. I was quoted $800 for felling one tree and then walking away.

I like the idea of showing my son how to do manly stuff. I once competed in a fishing tournament on my dad’s boat, and his partner hooked a sailfish. The drag was loose, and he needed to turn the drag knob to tighten it. It was a spinning reel with a knob that had a right-hand thread. I told him to tighten it, and he had to ask me which way to turn it.

My son will never have to shame the family like that. Imagine a grown man not knowing which way a screw turns. Willy Loman said it best, to another character who marveled that Willy had put up a ceiling: “A man who can’t handle tools is not a man. You’re disgusting.”

My son’s dad will be able to teach him welding, machining, basic electronics, painting, forestry, how to run and fix a tractor, how to run a diesel yacht, fishing, shooting, reloading, how to run woodworking machines, how to make a real pizza, and how to run a tiny Chinese excavator. Maybe a bigger excavator some day. I’ll be able to teach him basic car repair, so he won’t have to pay people to change his oil or do his brakes.

I keep hoping my son forgets about college and starts a business that begins with a trade and ends with a fleet of trucks or machines and a stable of employees.

My wife gets annoyed with me sometimes because I don’t like to pay people, but I can’t believe what some tradesmen charge. Home Depot wanted $200 to install two blinds. That’s 4 holes and 4 screws. A chimney guy charged me almost $400 to go up on the roof and give me an estimate.

She practically begged me to hire painters, but when we did our own painting, she had to admit our work was better than the pros’ who came before us, and it was free. We probably saved $3,000, and we still have to do two stairwells, two baths, and the kitchen. Imagine what that would cost.

I can’t believe what painters charge. I used to paint entire apartments for $300 plus materials, and I did good work.

I started working on one of my buried rocks today. Tomorrow I’ll get back to it. I’ll be disappointed if I don’t get it out; for all I know, I’m digging around a tiny projection on a rock that lies under the whole neighborhood, like a wart on a whale’s butt. But at least I’ll be able to say I found out and didn’t chicken out like a soy-eater and pay a big strong man to do it for me.

Immortality’s Secret Curse: Continuous Annoyance

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

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

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

Smart guy.

Now I will digress and write about George Bush 2.

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

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

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

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

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

Greta Thunberg will never marry unless she marries a woman.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right.

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

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

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

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

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

Score one for prejudice.

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

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

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

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

I know how the world works.

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

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

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

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

No problem. I would buy adaptors.

They didn’t have adaptors.

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

They weren’t in stock anywhere close.

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

Two places quoted me about $130.

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

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

They said they were shipping a new custom hose.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s amazing how long 30 minutes can be.

Cleaning up Baby’s Inheritance by Spending It

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

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

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

I don’t like it.

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

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

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

Enter the flail mower.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are Goldstein

Let’s compare two sitreps.

Me:

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

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

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

Unidentified Mainstream West Coast Leftist:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Couldn’t have happened.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.