Genocide Should be Harder Than This

Right now I’m thinking about Samantha Woll, the synagogue president who was murdered by an angry Muslim last week.

The police have no suspect, so why do I say a Muslim killed her?

1. Jewish victim
2. Killing occured while Muslims were calling for violence against Jews, after one of the filthiest attacks on Jews in history
3. Killed in Detroit, which has an enormous concentration of Muslims

It’s conceivable someone else did it. Maybe she has an ex-husband who thought this would be a good opportunity to kill her and blame Muslims. Probably not, though.

She was a leftist. Why do I say that?

1. Jewish
2. Female
3. Blue city
4. Blue state
5. Bigwig in a synagogue, though female. Not likely in a synagogue full of conservatives.

Also, I checked. She was a leftist activist. She used to be an aide for leftist Representative Elissa Slotkin. Go look at Slotkin’s website. It looks like Chuck Schumer programmed her.

Her synagogue is the last synagogue left in the city of Detroit, for good reason. I can see why other Jews fled. It’s basically kaput. It doesn’t even have sabbath meetings. The rabbi is a woman.

As blue as Michigan is these days, partly because Democrats and Muslims have realized they share so many progressive values, Michigan has some pretty good firearm laws. Better than Florida in some ways. Michigan allows open carry by default, and it’s a shall-issue state, so you don’t have to be a celebrity or prove you donate heavily to Democrat PAC’s in order to get a gun.

Somehow this lady was killed in her yard, with a knife.

A knife shouldn’t be underestimated. It can do a lot of gross things a gun can’t. Guns typically win in real-life encounters, though. They scare criminals, the noise attracts attention, they can do harm from greater distances, and so on.

Muslim terrorists overwhelmingly agree: women, the disabled, children, the elderly, and the weak are the best adversaries. Their principles bar them from attacking anyone who can fight back.

The odds this lady was armed are vanishingly small. Liberal Jews believe in waiting for the police. Criminals, on the other hand, believe in doing harm as quickly as possible and taking off while the police are still leaving the doughnut shop. It’s a good system.

She wasn’t armed. Her friends generally aren’t armed. American Jews are still crusading for unilateral disarmament. It’s an Islamist paradise. A stocked pond full of soft targets. The guy who killed her has no incentive to stop, and his pals have lots of incentive to follow his lead.

Here’s a question no one seems to be asking: given that most Jews will continue to support unilateral disarmament, what, exactly, are they proposing as a solution?

I haven’t seen a solution mentioned. Have you? I mean, sure…”Be vigilant.” Yeah, that will fix it. Because no one who is vigilant is ever attacked by terrorists. “Drop that axe! I can see you!”

I want to know what practical, effective solutions have been proposed. Because there aren’t any, other than buying guns. This is literally the only way for a targeted group to protect itself.

Community Center tae kwon do won’t do it. No martial art will do it. With my 10mm carry piece, I’d take on a young Mike Tyson, Conor McGregor, a Gracie to be named later, and the Butter Bean on PCP rather than join their side and give the gun to one of them.

I haven’t seen any police officials offering good advice to Jews, because they haven’t. What are they supposed to say? “Threaten to sue”?

Yesterday 150,000 people protested in London. They protested brutality and war crimes. They protested genocide. Perpetrated by…Israel. No joke.

That’s a big crowd. It proves a couple of things. 1. Letting Muslims immigrate by the hundreds of thousands is a really bad idea, and 2. people are much more antisemitic than is widely understood.

It is probably true that antisemitism has increased over the last 25 years, but here’s something that is definitely true: it was always here, and antisemites have been restrained only by the sense that they would face consequences for behaving badly.

Here is how a vicious crowd works. They will circle a victim and say mean things. Someone might throw an empty water bottle. Eventually, one of them finds a spine and throws a punch. The others look around, thinking, “Do I have permisssion now? Do I have numbers on my side?” Then everybody jumps in. The number or unfriendlies doesn’t increase after the punch is thrown. They were there already, waiting for permission from their peers.

If you can get 150,000 idiots to support genocide against Jews in the capital of London, how many idiots do you think we have here?

American blacks make up over an eighth of our population, and a huge percentage of them believe antisemitic conspiracy theories. These theories include the notion that blacks are the true Jews, and that Jews stole their inheritance. Many think Jews “ran” the slave trade.

Hispanics have always had rocky relations with Jews. There is also a small subset of ordinary white Americans who are also antisemitic. That subset is growing because young Americans are overwhelmingly leftist, and hatred of Israel is chic on the left. A lot of young Americans refuse to identify as liberal, but then their standards are so skewed, they can be pretty far out on the left and think they’re centrists.

It’s like America is a horse track, and the horses are held back only by the gate. When the gate opens, they will run.

I can’t imagine going to Detroit for any reason, but living there, being Jewish, being in charge of a synagogue, and not carrying a weapon…that borders on psychosis.

Most American Jews don’t feel they should take serious measures to protect themselves, but they have plenty of energy for gun control and disempowering their best friends: conservative Christians.

I don’t know what they’re going to do. Their old strategies won’t work here. They can’t give away land in America. No demon-possessed Muslim killer is going to agree to walk away if you give him your front yard.

I wonder how many English people were at the London protest. I mean ethnic English. Fact which is little-known in America: many ethnic British really hate Yeshua these days. It seems to be the majority attitude. They attack street preachers. The police arrest street preachers. The people curse them the way sane people curse pedophiles.

The further you get from Yeshua and the Holy Spirit, the more you will come to hate Jews and Christians.

The common English have really changed. Their language is foul, all the time. Their manners are beneath atrocious. When I was a kid, Americans thought of them as restrained people with good manners and refined speech. Not any more.

If there are 150,000 Londoners who are willing to march and be filmed, exposing themselves as haters of Israel, there must be millions of kindred souls in the UK who will come out of the woodwork when things get hot.

You know what they say about roaches. If you see one in the kitchen, there are dozens in the walls.

My prediction: Jews in the US will do very little to protect themselves, and they will pay the price. It’s already happening. Dumb political opinions are harder to cure than cancer.

What should people like me do? Should I put a couple of mobile homes on my property in case Jews need a refuge next year? If I did, admittance would be limited to those willing to carry guns. I wouldn’t put out bait for killers and then agree to try to protect myself and my wife without help from my guests.

Now Front Page has come out with a poll of American Muslims, and the conclusion is that 57% either strongly or somewhat approve of the Hamas butchery. I wonder what wonderful news tomorrow will bring.

Let’s Sit Down and Talk This Over

A reader suggested checking out Citizen Free Press, so I did. I used to read Drudge, but it turned into a bizarre anti-Trump site which seems to be run by RINO’s or cautious leftists who don’t want people to know Drudge retired.

Citizen Free Press comes up with a lot of useful information, as Drudge once did. Today it links to a story about American Jews who have decided to buy guns. The Holocaust never really ended, and Jews seem to be aware of it, but somehow most of them have no interest in protecting themselves, so it’s big news when they start buying guns.

Who, exactly, did they think would look out for them? Governments? Aren’t governments the entities that killed so many of them in the past? Perhaps I am ignorant of history, but as far as I know, relying on governments has done the Jews about as much good as it has American Indians. The damage done by private citizens throughout history is miniscule by comparison.

Pharaohs, Babylonians, Achaemenids, Greeks, Romans, Spaniards, the Portuguese…one government after another persecuted them. Haman was a government official who had the king’s support.

When the Nazis really got going, German war heroes protested. Jewish German war heroes. Loyal German citizens. I guess they could not believe serving in Germany’s wars didn’t entitle them to live. Their government gassed them anyway. There wasn’t much they could do to fight back.

Jews were instrumental in spreading socialism, but the USSR persecuted them just the same, even as they spread the worship of Karl Marx, an ethnic Jew.

The story quotes Simon, a 35-year-old Israeli-American:

Unfortunately for us Jews around the world, our security situation has worsened. Now is the time to arm myself and protect my family. So, I’ve decided to purchase my first firearm and undergo firearm, general situational awareness, and home defense training.

What?

“Now” is the time for him to arm himself and protect his family? Weren’t they worth protecting last year?

He’s buying his first firearm? So up until now, he chose helplessness. Why? What was he afraid of? Did he think owning a gun would cause him to join a gang and rob liquor stores? What, exactly, was the down side of owning a gun? There is none.

I wonder what percentage of Muslims who support Hamas have been reluctant to buy guns. It must be an agonizing decision for them.

I guess I shouldn’t talk. If memory serves, I bought my first pistol in 1991. I bought it in case I had to kill my sister’s junkie friends. She said she would send them to “take care of” me because I had helped my mother get her into rehab.

I already had a .22 rifle, and I had access to my parent’s guns, but I should have done better. I didn’t buy a real defensive rifle until maybe 2008, and it was set up for varminting, not home defense. It was an LR-308. Not the greatest choice in a home invasion.

On the other hand, I’m not a Jew, so no one is trying to exterminate me and my kind. Not yet.

I should have gotten an AK-47 as soon as I could own one legally. Pistols are second-rate defense guns. I should have gotten a carry license sooner instead of leaving my gun in my car.

I would think the events of the last century would have sufficed to convince Jewish people that owning, carrying, and hiding guns and ammunition were good ideas. I’ve known a lot of Jews, and I know that even though they are generally statists, they also see the government and their neighbors as potential enemies. That’s smart. If you know how things stand, why not govern yourself accordingly?

A Jewish friend of mine lost his dad to leukemia in about 1986, and he inherited hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash which had been sealed up in drywall in his living room. His dad didn’t do that because he sincerely trusted Uncle Sam. He wanted money no one could get at in a crisis.

Unfortunately, according to my friend, his brother and his dad’s lawyer stole the money. Interesting story. One day it was there, and the next, his brother and the lawyer claimed there had never been any money.

He filed a bar complaint against the lawyer, a man named Kaufman. I still remember. He said Kaufman called him when he found out, crying and begging him to withdraw the complaint. A little late.

There are really only two reasons to avoid having a gun close by. One is that you don’t trust everyone in your house to behave, and the other is that you’re afraid kids will manage to get at it. These dangers barely exist for responsible people. They can be negated. There comes a time when you have to admit the danger presented by your enemies is greater than the small risk someone in your household will misuse a gun.

The insanity and viciousness of the left are really fruiting now. Americans of Arab descent are protesting openly, cheering the terrorists on and making fun of Jewish tears. There is no helping most of these people. They are in the grip of spirits. Very few of them will ever come out of delusion and get to know the God who made Esau and Ishmael. Only the Holy Spirit saves people from delusion.

Don’t do Your Enemy’s Job for Him

If you want to read about a confusing news story, you came to the right place. I just saw a Politico article about Israeli terrorism victims who blame Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for what happened to them and their neighbors during the Hamas atrocity. They were attacked on Nahal Oz, a kibbutz near the semi-fictional nation of Gaza.

Here is an excerpt:

“He [Netanyahu] needs to say: ‘I’m sorry, I failed you. It’s because of me and my pride, you were almost murdered,’” said Cherry, a 45-year-old Belgian-Israeli health economist.

Poterman and Cherry described how they shut themselves in safe rooms on the morning of the attack, and hunkered down for 12 hours, waiting for the Israel Defense Force to come to their rescue. Over those excruciating hours, rockets flew overhead and Hamas raided homes across the kibbutz shouting “Allahu Akbar” [God is greatest] and “Massacre the Jews.”

Poterman, who until last week worked as an after-school teacher, sent what he believed would be his last Facebook post from the safe room: “Half an hour, we are locked up with terrorists at home, no one comes.”

The 40-year-old said he sent the message as he stood next to the safe room door holding an ax, while his wife Maria held their seven-month-old baby girl in one hand and a knife in the other. Neither of them expected to survive, but a latch installed on the inside of the door by a previous tenant prevented the terrorists from bursting in.

In a separate safe room, Cherry, her husband Oren and their three children barricaded the door as best they could with a cupboard and chair.

The man who sent the message boxed himself up in a laughable “safe room” or “mammad.” This is a ridiculous structure intended to protect Jews from danger. Every new building in Israel has to have a mammad on every floor. It worked for this man and his family, but mammads failed for many others because breaking into a room isn’t that hard. Getting someone to open a mammad isn’t hard when you have hostages outside.

There is a lot of hype about mammads having thick concrete walls and steel doors. Sounds great, but not a problem for a terrorist with explosives. Also, older mammads don’t always have oxygen supplies, and incredibly, they have not all been retrofitted.

Bottom line: people in mammads died during the invasion. Some from suffocation. Some by being dragged out and killed.

A mammad is better than nothing, sometimes, and they protect people from missile shrapnel, which is what they’re really designed for. Having a mammad sounds like a great idea for people anticipating missile strikes. But against armed assailants, rifles are way better.

The man quoted in the article obviously knew disarmament was a big mistake, because he made a pathetic effort to gather arms. He tried to protect his family from machine guns with a knife and an axe. Words fail me.

If you’re all for arming yourself when people come to kill you, and you have proven you are, why were you against it before they showed up? You knew they were coming eventually.

The mindset of the victims is extremely disheartening. “The government was supposed to come save us.” They are Europeans by birth, and of course, they are Jewish, so small wonder they thought the god-state was their salvation.

Here in America, we have a saying: “When seconds count, the police are just minutes away.” It’s not unnuanced flyover populist tripe. It’s indisputable wisdom. The underlying truth is that the government is not able to respond to threats sufficiently quickly to protect people. It’s not even required to, under the law. Typically, the cops show up when the party is over, like roadies cleaning up a stage after a Grateful Dead concert.

It’s nothing less than astounding that there are adult human beings who can’t figure this out. And how can such people exist, in a country where terrorist attacks and surprise wars are certain to occur?

Israelis died because they trusted their government to do things only a god could do, and because their tragic biases led them to vote for laws that made them sheep for the slaughter.

Safe rooms. Really? Even if they worked reliably, how do they help when criminals are closer to them than their victims? How well do they work for people with wheelchairs and walkers? What good is your safe room when you’re on a bus or a tractor?

What percentage of the day does a typical Israeli spend very close to the door of a safe room?

Here’s what will happen if I think criminals are on my property. First, grab a high-capacity rifle and at least two magazines. I will already have a pistol with a laser in my pocket. If I have time, I will call the police, primarily because they might arrive on time to shoot, protecting me from liability. Next, I’ll pick the best defensive location I can, and I’ll wait as long as I can before doing my best to send my guests’ guts, skull fragments, and brain tissue flying onto the walls and floor.

All but the most determined or high attackers will be cowardly and lightly armed, so the odds they’ll run off are overwhelming. If they don’t, I’ll probably be much better armed than they are, and I’ll be able to rain lead on them for quite a while. If I manage to grab additional ammo, which is likely, I’ll still have hundreds of rounds handy when they’re down to one or two.

I will not lock myself in a ludicrous room and hope the criminals don’t have time to use an angle grinder or burn me out.

Who would you rather attack? Me, or an unarmed leftist kibbutznik?

As for attacks outside the home, I can put an AK-47 and a hundred pounds of cartridges in my car if I feel like it. Not in the trunk. Not unloaded. Beside me in the passenger seat in a bag I can open with one hand. And then there’s my carry pistol. I can take it nearly everywhere. Even banks.

It is astonishing that Israeli homes and business are soft targets. Who thought that was a smart idea? Was there a meeting where a bunch of Jewish politicians trying to come up with a homeland defense plan put “gun control” on a list on a whiteboard?

The victim named Poterman says he waited 12 hours for messiah government to come save him. Think what he and his friends could have done in one hour with rifles. You can Google and find out what other armed victims managed to do. Arabs are not known for their prowess as warriors. Much the opposite. They do poorly against resistance.

Israelis should be armed, and they should carry. They should be required to carry, like off-duty policemen in America. They should also be encouraged to keep automatic rifles and lots of cartridges. The government should allot money to buying them night vision gear. They should be building pillboxes, like the Nazis who defended the French coast and the Japanese who slaughtered Allied marines.

Go on the web and watch self-defense shootings. You’ll see that successful defenders sometimes produce and fire weapons in under two seconds. It is not unusual for a person to need to shoot in an extremely short time. A person who carries a gun has the ability to respond extremely quickly to danger, and he can do it wherever he is. Think how different the music festival would have been had the paragliding baboons descended into a crowd with hundreds of pistols, with rifles in their vehicles. A lot of the attackers would have died in the air.

The government may have failed to do things it should have done in order to detect or prevent this attack. Fine. Maybe Netanyahu needs to do better. But the people also failed themselves. They need to realize the government is never going to be able to prevent every attack or respond adequately. This should be obvious.

If you want to be safe from murderers, you should do your best. Disarming yourself is not your best. When you disarm yourself, you’re doing the first thing your enemies would put on their dream list of goals.

Israelis haven’t learned from their own history. In the book of Nehemiah, the Jews were surrounded by the ancestors of people who are trying to exterminate them now. As the Jews rebuilt the temple, the people who carried materials were required to hold the materials in one hand and a weapon in the other. The ones doing the buiding had to wear swords on their hips. Open carry was the rule in the past, but today a select few get a crummy 9mm pistol and 50 rounds of weak ammunition, and the rest get nothing.

Hamas was not afraid at all of Israeli civilians, but their cowardly assassins would never dream of attacking rural Florida or Tennessee. Terrorist bodies would fill dumpsters. Shouldn’t they be more afraid of Israelis than anyone?

Leftism is a luxury delusion that comes at a very high price. I don’t know what it will take to get Israelis to let go of it. I doubt they’ll do what they have to do. I think that if sane gun policies were in Israel’s future, Zechariah 14, which is certain to happen, would look very different.

My Phone is Now Antisemitic

Written on October 19.

I have an Android phone, and I do not use the browser it came with. I have never used it until today. I didn’t actually use it; it sent me some garbage I never asked for. It decided to put an AP story in a notification I never agreed to permit.

I’ll post a screen capture.

This is outrageous. Why am I receiving anti-Israel filth I never told anyone to send me? I’m not supposed to receive ANY notifications. I didn’t even know they existed, and I’ve had this phone for months.

Someone in the tech/government complex signed me up. Someone with a hair color not found in nature.

The headlines deliver a pretty clear message: “You should sympathize with supporters of terrorists because Israel is bombing their ‘country’ in order to kill terrorists the people help hide. Israel is dishonest because it bombs areas it previously called ‘safe’.”

This is not journalism. It’s propaganda. Propaganda spam, from a company I bought a product from. What kind of morons is Samsung hiring?

Here’s a lesson for people who are truly so stupid they don’t understand how war works.

1. Collateral damage: what happens when you do your best to strike a legitimate military target while sparing noncombatants, and you harm noncombatants accidentally.

2. Atrocity: walking into a baby’s nursery and slicing his head off with a sheath knife while he screams and thrashes.

There is zero moral equivalence here, and you know it. If you hate Jews, just admit it. Don’t be a liar as well as a genocidal bigot.

The terrorists carried torture manuals with them when they invaded Israel.

Ordinarily, torture is intended to advance a political or military goal. Waterboarding, for example, was done by desperate, fearful nations in order to prevent nuclear, chemical, and biological attacks by Muslims. In the case of the Hamas raids, the purpose of the torture was recreational. Terrorists who were busy were not supposed to take time to torture people. Those who had more time were encouraged to torture Jews prior to killing them, and Hamas gave them a book to help them do it well. The purpose was to make the invasion more fun for the baboons who perpetrated it.

Israel does wrong from time to time because its enemies place it in very difficult situations with constant, unnecessary existential threats, but Hamas is in the terrorism and atrocity business, full time.

As for pitying the Palestinians, what is the rationale? When I see videos of feral teenagers destroying stores and hurting people in blue cities, I have no sympathy whatsoever, because the people in those cities voted for their own destruction over and over. They got what they fought for. I don’t care if Chicago or San Francisco is a pile of ashes this time next year, because it’s unhealthy to torment yourself over the self-inflicted problems of incorrigible people. I can’t fix it. I didn’t cause it. I’m not going to give myself stress over it.

If I can’t pity leftists in American cities, how can I pity Palestinians who gave terrorists a mandate?

Hamas got 57% of the vote in the last election in Gaza. It’s not like a minority regime took control by force. Palestinians knew exactly what they were voting for, and they got a majority the likes of which we generally do not see in our own presidential elections. They’re getting exactly what they voted for. They knew Hamas would stage large-scale terrorist attacks on Israel, and unless they’re stupid, they knew bombs would then fall on Gaza. They knew they were placing the Israelis in a position where they had to choose between extremely harsh military action and permitting and encouraging further atrocities against their own people. As people like to say on the web these days, the Palestinians found out. That’s on them. On the civilians.

As always, however, to the press, Israel is the problem. Just like Israel is the problem when terrorists blow up their own hospital.

The spirit of antichrist is becoming more transparent, to use a word Biden used insincerely about his administration. The spirit of antichrist has a body of people it uses against Jews and real Christians, and it’s helping its slaves come out of the closet. Not just Palestinians. The Antichrist has drones everywhere, especially among American leftists.

If you read the news, you must know that two male college professors who think they’re women have just drawn attention for going after Israel on social media. One called Israelis “irredeemable excrement” and “pigs,” and the other man said they should fear “us,” and he put up emojis of a cleaver, an axe, and drops of blood. So far, no outrage from the universities’ administrations.

Donald Trump is being tried because his efforts to stop a riot didn’t satisfy leftists. The idea is that an insufficient response is the same thing as incitement. If that’s true, what about a professor who encourages the slaughter of Jews with edged weapons in front of the entire world? Is that kind of speech legal?

Federal case law says speech can be censored when it incites violence. The Supreme Court failed to add something, though. They failed to point out that this only applies to conservatives. Al Sharpton and Maxine Waters incited a murder and riots and got in no trouble whatsoever.

You can disagree with Israel on certain points without being antisemitic. You can’t call all Israelis “irredeemable excrement” or threaten them with cleavers and axes unless you have a problem with Jews per se.

Antisemitism is cool now. That’s amazing.

The spirit of antichrist uses the flesh’s herd instinct against human beings. Only a few people out of a thousand do what they think is right. The rest look to the right and left to see what the imbeciles around them are doing, and they follow suit. This is how you get orderly, civilized Germans and Austrians to herd people into gas chambers.

“Cool” is a word that became popular about 60 years ago. Whatever you may think it means, it really means, “tending to evoke admiration and approval from others.” Coolness is sick. It’s pathological. Most people can be manipulated into doing nearly anything by the admiration and approval of others.

One of the most socially debilitating problems you can have is to be declared uncool. You become an object of ridicule. Nothing you say is taken seriously, simply because you’re the one who said it. You lose friends. You can lose your family. Cancellation.

Thanks to the Internet and things like Tiktok, we now have a world in which the promise of approval or disapproval is more strongly motivating than ever before. A complete pinhead with a million followers can get people to do things a monkey is too smart to do. Kids all over America have deliberately eaten laundry detergent in order to be admired.

This is one of the tools the spirit of antichrist is using to move the apocalypse along. “Agree, or live under a blanket of contempt and rejection.” People are being herded like pigs or sheep. They don’t think. They listen to their base drives to be admired and accepted. Because they don’t think, they do things that are clearly stupid and evil.

License. They have license from the mob, and it was handed down initially from the mob’s leader. The false shepherd. Satan.

Coolness belongs to the left. You can’t become cool by having a successful show on Fox News. Who are the coolest people? The biggest fools on the planet. Whore rappers. Spoiled athletes. Drug-addict actors who can’t work a crossword puzzle. By and large, leftists.

The antichrist’s zombies are freed from the heavy burden of reason. From the bonds of righteousness. “Righteous” simply means “correct.” “Righteousness” literally means “rightness.” People who don’t reason are unrighteous, because correctness comes from reasoning, and the righteous are their natural enemies.

Virtually no one on Earth has any idea what the spirit of antichrist is or how it works. I’ve never seen anyone but myself describe the way it uses approval and admiration to herd idiots to persecute their betters and destroy themselves.

The ignorance is amazing, and it is destroying billions. As God said once, his people were destroyed for lack of knowledge. It still happens.

Knowledge comes only from the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and you have to spend time with him, praying in tongues and so on. No Holy Spirit, no revealed knowledge. No revealed knowledge, no protection from destruction. If you are ignorant, you will be destroyed, and you will do most of the destruction.

Virtually everything I saw coming years ago is coming true now, and I predicted it would get worse, so you can expect that to come true, too.

It amazes me that my phone is being used to send me blatant antichrist propaganda without my prior consent. I wonder what’s next. Gradually, or not so gradually, we will have to cede more and more of our will, our privacy, and our dignity in order to be tolerated. Already, people have been fired for refusing to call male perverts women. Preachers in Western nations have been arrested for committing the crime of criticizing perversion. We’re being told we have to pay “reparations” to people we never harmed. Kids who want to play sports are ostracized for refusing to kneel and endorse a racist, Marxist, pro-perversion, anti-Christian, city-burning terrorist organization founded by three witches.

The mark is just one more straw on the camel’s back. When it comes, you’ll have to beg or grow your own food. You won’t be able to use stores or buy things online. Cancellation will be perfected.

Fortunately, the Bible says it won’t come until the beast is revealed. That happens in the middle of the tribulation, which hasn’t started.

You probably don’t realize how bad things are, because you’ve gotten used to it. I wish I could go back to 2000, bring my then-self to the present, and show him what’s happening. I would love to see what he said.

Hamas Should Send The Knesset a Fruit Basket

I have been reading about the Israeli government’s sorry response to the problem of unarmed citizens being murdered by imbeciles from Gaza.

I lived in Israel for 4 months, and back then, guns were everywhere, mainly in the hands of the omnipresent soldiers. I saw soldiers with M16’s on buses and city streets. I also knew a kibbutznik who had a rifle for hunting, and I was with him when he took it to an almond grove. I can’t find information on the history of Israel’s gun laws, but I know that prior to the Gaza ambush, it was very hard for Israelis to get guns. At best, you could get one pistol (pathetic) and 50 rounds of ammunition (enough to last a few minutes at best).

This, in a country where nearly everyone is forced to join the military for two years. It is no exaggeration to say Israel chooses not to trust millions of trained, patriotic soldiers with guns.

Now government officials are saying Israel must arm its citizens. It’s making some piddling, ineffective corrections that come too late and do way too little.

Israeli Jews are not the type of people who use guns to commit crime. The risk of a gun-fueled crime wave is not small; it’s imaginary.

I admit, there was a time when thousands of Jews committed very serious gun crimes in Israel. They gathered and stored illegal firearms under the British, and when independence came, and the Arabs made their predictable effort to exterminate Jews, the guns and other weapons came in pretty handy.

The predecessors of the government of Israel thought it was smart for Jews to hoard guns in their homes, in case of Arab attacks. When did they decide helplessness was better?

Did Israel turn its citizens into Hamas practice targets because it was afraid of ordinary crime, or was the government trying to prevent extremist nuts from mounting insurrections? I don’t know. I haven’t been able to find out by Googling. I do know a huge segment of Israel’s population is made up of Jews from Europe and America, and Western Jews love leftism and gun control. Jews always commit political suicide whenever possible. Give them enough rope, and they will give it to their enemies.

If Israel wanted to prevent deaths from gun crimes, it has failed catastrophically. More people just died from gun crimes committed by Arabs than would have died had every law-abiding adult Israeli been allowed to carry a loaded M16 this year. And Israel encouraged the murderers to attack by disarming the victims. Would Hamas have attacked an armed populace? It’s a valid question.

It looks like the leftist tech establishment is suppressing stories about Israelis who fought off terrorists, but they are out there. And you can find videos of the police slaughtering terrorists with pistols, which is remarkable. It shows how little good a rifle does an untrained coward.

It would be tough for an enemy like Hamas to invade rural America, at least in the areas where Trump got a lot of votes. Not only are rifles everywhere, including in vehicles, but there are many, many people who are trained to kill animals and/or people a long way off. Over the last decade or so, precision rifle shooting has taken off. I’m part of it. I went to a facility where I hit a man-sized target well over half a mile away. Thermal scopes are also popular, so a lot of men in America have the ability to kill underarmed assailants in the dead of night from hundreds of yards away. What works on wild hogs works on terrorists.

It’s bizarre that I, a fairly unskilled person who has never been a policeman or soldier, have the ability to kill more terrorists than the entire population of a typical kibbutz full of soldiers. If you’re a terrorist, you are literally better off attacking 2000 trained Israelis than you are approaching my house.

As for a Biblical perspective, the rapes and the murders of children and babies made me think of prophecy. I thought these things were predicted by Isaiah, but it turned out Zechariah was the prophet who spoke about what is happening now:

Behold, the day of the Lord cometh, and thy spoil shall be divided in the midst of thee.

For I will gather all nations against Jerusalem to battle; and the city shall be taken, and the houses rifled, and the women ravished; and half of the city shall go forth into captivity, and the residue of the people shall not be cut off from the city.

Then shall the Lord go forth, and fight against those nations, as when he fought in the day of battle.

Hosea also spoke about the fruit of rebellion:

Samaria shall become desolate; for she hath rebelled against her God: they shall fall by the sword: their infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their women with child shall be ripped up.

I am not going to study the word all day to figure out whether Hosea was talking about the present day, but it’s pretty obvious Zechariah was, because he said his predictions would come to pass at the end. Hosea serves to point out the kinds of things that happen when Israel is detached from God and connected to idols, including the idol of self-confidence. Infants dismembered. People killed.

What Zechariah said about all nations being gathered against Jerusalem is clearly coming true. All over the world, Muslims and leftists have formed a bizarre coalition, and thousands, not dozens, of people are protesting Israel, the victim. It shows that antisemitism has increased greatly. There are millions of people out there who are just waiting to be allowed to do what they want to the Jews. A lot of them are in Jewish sanctuaries like New York.

Why did America ever start allowing Muslims to become residents? It’s amazing how stupid this country was. We now have entire communities where people who support Israel aren’t safe. And the rest of us are on the same list.

In Sydney, Australia, Jews have been warned to stay indoors in order to be safe from Muslims. Not in Syria or Iran, but Australia!

In the US, BLM has come out against Israel, exposing some of the all-too-common antisemitism among American blacks. We don’t call minorities out on their wickedness; just Caucasians. It’s too bad, because America is full of blacks who literally believe they are the real Jews. They think the Jews stole their inheritance. Hispanics also have issues with Jews. Small wonder. Look what their ancestors did.

I saw addled leftist Jake Tapper expressing surprise to see how many leftists were raging against Israel and the Jews. What a fool! For at least a quarter of a century, it has been obvious to anyone who can see that conservative Christians are the only American friends Jews have. The antisemitism of the left has been on display for ages, as has the support of the right, but people like Tapper are somehow unable to summon the honesty and integrity to acknowledge what has been right in front of them since before the turn of the century!

If American conservatives stopped supporting Israel tomorrow, the Muslim world would descend on Israel a month later. Leftists would celebrate, and only God himself could defeat the invaders.

God has done miraculous things to rebuild Israel, but as long as most Jews reject their true Messiah and the Holy Spirit, they will have much less protection than they need. Zechariah says God will eventually fight the nations that are against Israel, but only after a lot of damage has been done.

Some Jews are saying this feels like the Holocaust. Yes, it is like the Holocaust. It is the Holocaust. The Holocaust never ended.

The Old Testament is full of proof that Israel is on top when it pleases God and on the bottom when it doesn’t. Israel is surviving, but it’s still not on top, so even Jewish sages who hate Yeshua should be wondering what’s wrong.

My wife and I pray for Israel and the Jews every day. We don’t just ask God to open the eyes of the Jews. We pray for protection and abundance. Lately we have been cursing their enemies. We pray for their arms to malfunction. We ask God to cause the weapons to harm the enemy, not the Jews. We ask him to make Israel’s enemies fight each other, and we don’t limit it to those in the Middle East. We call on him to expose their filthiness.

We also pray for God to rescue Israel’s enemies from Islam.

Apart from prayer and blessing and cursing, though, we are just spectators. It’s too bad we can’t do more. We can’t go over and fight. We’re already buying weapons through our tax dollars. I vote for candidates who support the Jews.

There are ministries that help Jews. Jewish Voice is one.

If you’re a Jew, get yourself some rifles while you still can. You should really try to get in touch with Yeshua, because he’s much better than a rifle, especially in the afterlife. But rifles are better than nothing in the short term.

If you’re in a state where you can’t have semiautomatic weapons with large detachable magazines, get out, and take your children. If you can’t help your family when the murderers come for you, and you had a way out, how will you be able to excuse yourself?

This is How You Get Your 72 Virgins

So Israel is at war again, and as always, it was the other side’s idea. The idiots of Hamas say they have fired 5,000 rockets into Israel, and they crossed in, killed people, and took hostages, including small children. Of course, they fired at non-military targets because attacking actual soldiers or anyone who might fight back would be a violation of policy.

As one would expect, there are slimy, ignorant, bigoted people on the left, claiming Israel deserves it. We have a vile Congresswoman named Tlaib, an Arab Muslim, who refuses to comment. Based on her past, it’s pretty obvious she sides with the terrorists.

Here is a screen shot of Orthodox Jews celebrating victory over a Palestinian combatant.

Oh, wait. Sorry. That’s a shot of Arab terrorists celebrating shooting an unarmed civilian woman in the head. They removed her outer clothing, because it was obviously necessary, and drove the body around, and other Arab Muslims spat on it. The video shows these proud Muslim warrior men playing with the body.

It looks like they snapped her knee to get her into their vehicle.

If you watch the video, you may breathe a sigh of relief, thinking Muslim culture is not lost, because the crowd is so appalled by the spectacle.

NO. You will see that everyone there is thrilled with what’s happening. Could this happen in a Jewish city if the tables were turned? Don’t even ask. Palestinians are not just regular people with a set of gripes. Compared to people in most countries, they are savages.

To anyone who is dumb or dishonest enough to equate Israel’s defense efforts to the habitual cowardice and cruelty of Arab Muslim soldiers and terrorists, I have to say this: when have Jews ever done anything like this? Arabs do it all the time. It’s nothing like the civilial collateral damage Israel sometimes inflicts unintentionally. It’s policy. Arab Muslims PLAN to do this, just as Israeli soldiers plan legitimate attacks on military and terrorist targets.

Imagine watching a video of US Army recruits in boot camp, training to go into houses, capture women and children, commit rape, kill some of the victims, and haul the rest off for imprisonment and torture. It’s unthinkable. But if Hamas and many other Arab organizations trained recruits for their actual missions, this is what it would look like.

This is the difference between human beings and talking baboons. Anyone who supports this kind of behavior is a baboon, not a person.

I guess people who read the news know the lady in the photo is a gentile, not a Jew. She was a German tourist. I’m sure she told the terrorists before they executed her. They shot her anyway. Imagine Israelis invading an enemy city and shooting foreign tourists in the head. It could never happen.

This kind of behavior is unusual even in battles between corrupt nations like Russian and Ukraine. It’s comparable to things the Japanese did in the last century.

This must be a consequence of Islam. The Koran is full of barbarism. Mohammed was a murderer, pedophile, and rapist who taught Muslims to form gangs of thieves and pillage their neighbors’ cities. This is his legacy.

Anyway, yes, Israel is better than its enemies.

Better.

There are people calling for Israel to cease hostilities, as though this were a normal war instead of a response to terrorism. I disagree. Go in there and level enough of Gaza to put the fear of God into them. Make life so miserable, the people will resent the terrorists and fight them from within. Make the terrorists so afraid they will think twice before doing this again. They’re cowards who only know how to fight unarmed civilians, so it shouldn’t be hard to scare them.

As for the government of Israel, fine job on gun control. Do you really trust your Jewish citizens less than you fear your sociopath neighbors? I’m a nice, law-abiding American, but if I saw terrorists coming across my property, I could fill my yard with bodies for hours, and I’m sure my neighbors could do the same. There is a reason it’s taking so long for leftist mob terrorism to move from blue cities to red counties.

In Israel, a citizen can have one pistol and 50 cartridges. First, he needs a license, and he has to show a special need. Isn’t being Jewish in a tiny Jewish state surrounding by terrorists a special need?

It’s amazing rifles aren’t allowed. They should be required. In the real world, a typical person will be lucky to hit an attacker once if he empties two pistol magazines. It’s very, very hard to aim pistols in actual attacks. A rifle is very different. Rifleman Kyle Rittenhouse hit everyone he aimed at, and part of the time, he was on the ground being beaten by a lynch mob. Also, a rifle round will do much more damage, as the maimed criminal who surived the shooting could tell you. He only has one bicep.

Any law-abiding Israeli should be allowed to have a semiautomatic rifle and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, and many, if not all, should be allowed to have automatic weapons. As it is, Israel just waits for people to be murdered and then responds after the fact.

I’ve driven to church and back with a rifle and more than 50 cartridges on hand, but an Israeli on an isolated kibbutz has to depend on a pistol and one box of 9mm ammo, if he can get a gun at all. Do they stockpile illegal weapons under their own government, as they did under the British? Yes, if they’re smart.

I wonder what kind of gun and ammo restrictions the terrorists put on their teams.

Jews aren’t going to use guns to rob people. They’re not going to form gangs. They’re extremely unlikely to use guns in domestic abuse episodes. They have zero interest in overthrowing their government. I think gun control in Israel simply stems from suicidal Jewish leftism. American and European Jews make up over a third of the population, and these groups are hopelessly mired in leftism.

It’s like Israelis have forgotten what happened to unarmed Jews in Europe. And the harm wasn’t just done by their own governments and Nazi invaders. Their neighbors joined in. When the Nazis rolled into countries, antisemites saw it as a license to do what they had always wanted. For example, in the death camps, Ukrainian guards were feared much more than the Germans. I knew an Austrian Jew who had to hide in France as a girl, and she told me the French were much worse than the Austrians. The other kids held her down and pushed a thumbtack into her forehead to see if a Jew could bleed.

Pistols. Why does anyone rely on them? Too many movies, I guess. Some socialist Hollywood clown in lifted cowboy boots shoots a nickel out of the air at a hundred yards with a crude 1800’s revolver, with help from special effects, and people think that’s what pistol shooting is really like. They’re like the people who think coconuts are small and round because they watched Gilligan’s Island.

I carry a knife because it’s legally safer to draw a knife than a pistol, and also because everyone needs a knife. There are special penalties for brandishing a gun. I carry a pistol because a knife won’t always deter an attacker. Ideally, I’d go everywhere with a rifle in a sling. Maybe DeSantis will make it possible some day. I guarantee you, if it were legal, there would be several people in every local grocery with rifles right now, and shoplifters would be very nervous.

A pistol drills small, narrow tunnels in people. A rifle will tear them up and even blow out large chunks of them. When the criminal who ran up to Kyle Rittenhouse with an illegal pistol was shot, a large percentage of his bicep ended up scattered on the pavement. It wasn’t like TV, where a 5.56 round hits Magnum in the shoulder, he makes a bandage from a strip of his shirt, and then he uses the arm to punch out the villain and hug the girl.

I don’t understand why Hamas attacked, although they were probably encouraged by the huge cash gift Joe Biden gave their sponsor, Iran. They know they’re going to be crushed. Then the leftist gaslighters will chime in as Israel sends in bulldozers to build up the necessary buffer zone.

I don’t know why I write about this. No one who hates Jews will read this and come around.

Shouldn’t we Run TOWARD the Light?

Seems like I am constantly reminded that I can’t trust anyone who claims to represent God.

Years ago, when I was an armorbearer at Miami’s Trinity Church, inadvertently helping “pastor” Rich Wilkerson and his son, Rich Wilkerson Junior, in their efforts to con the poor out of what little money they had, a man named Bill Wiese came to speak at the church.

Wiese wrote the book 23 minutes in Hell. He says God took his conscousness out of his body and put it in hell so he would be able to come back and warn other people.

Wiese was a pleasant, soft-spoken, sincere-sounding guest. He didn’t clamor for money or promise people God would make them rich if they gave him offerings instead of paying their electric bills. In this respect, he was unlike the Wilkersons.

I read his book, and the story seemed plausible to me. It appeared to be consistent with scripture as well as the things God had revealed to me. I figured the story was probably true.

He has a Youtube channel, and he has put up a lot of material my wife and I have concluded was helpful. I subscribe to his channel.

A while back, though, after he refused to answer a question I asked him, I started to wonder about him. Yes, he seems sincere, but then he’s a professional salesman. Before he wrote the book, he sold real estate for a living, and I believe he still does. The best salesmen are the ones who can convince you they’re pure and meek, regardless of what’s going on inside them. I’m not Jesus. I can be fooled. The fact that a man seems innocent and guileless to me doesn’t mean much. Wiese seems earnest and humble, but who knows what’s really in his heart?

He does not respond to comments on his Youtube channel, but he encourages people to submit them on his website. I had a question, so I submitted it.

In his book, he says hell is filled with the sound of screaming and crying. That makes sense to me. He also says there is so little air in hell, you have to gasp for every breath.

It occurred to me that it would be hard to scream continuously if I couldn’t breathe, so I submitted the obvious question.

I wasn’t trying to catch him in a lie. I thought maybe he had some kind of explanation. I can think of one myself, but I’m not going to mention it here and give people ideas.

Months have passed, and neither Wiese nor his wife have responded.

It’s a very reasonable question, and if he’s a truthful person, he should be eager to answer it. I would if I had been to hell. I would thank the person who asked it, because I would realize other people might doubt my true story if I didn’t explain.

So that looks bad.

He’s not Ryan Reynolds or Taylor Swift. He’s not a big celebrity. He doesn’t have a huge following, so I know he’s not inundated with questions. He or his team saw my question, and they chose to ignore it. Either that, or they ask for questions but don’t look at them.

He recently put up a video asking people what their lives say about them. In the video, he criticized people who criticize preachers, suggesting it’s a bad thing to do.

Naturally, I had to comment.

If you took the New Testament and removed the parts where the writers and Jesus criticized religious authorities, you would end up with a pamphlet. I exaggerate, but Jesus went after them many, many times. So did Paul, naming names. Jude went after them. I’m sure other authors laid into them, but I can’t remember the entire New Testament in order to name passages.

What about the Old Testament?

The prophets criticized priests, prophets, and kings, in addition to other people. This is why the Jews killed so many of the prophets. Eli was the high priest, and his sons were priests, and God sent a prophet to tell Eli God was going to cause them to die.

What would Bill Wiese have thought of that prophet? Would he have shamed him in a Youtube video?

The idea that it’s bad to criticize preachers is not found in the Bible anywhere. In fact, it’s extremely important to vet them. We are taught to test the spirits.

It’s extremely important to rip dishonest preachers PUBLICLY, before as many people as possible. Lying is different from other sins. You don’t have to expose a murderer or a burglar who did bad deeds in the past, but a liar has to be exposed, because if he isn’t, his lies will continue to hurt people.

In my comment, I named prosperity preachers who destroyed countless lives, and I gave my testimony. I said I had criticized them openly by name on the web and, instead of being cursed, I received lots of money I didn’t work for, a wife, a wonderful farm, and good Christian friends. I don’t have to work.

If you read my blog, you’ve read the story already. Preachers turned on me. People told me I was going to get it for touching God’s anointed. Meanwhile, my blessings did nothing but increase. And my last pastor, Alberto Lee Santiago, who denounced me and told people to shun me, went to prison for molesting a little girl, beginning when she was 6. While he was awaiting sentencing, his abusive wife, who also hated me, died from a brain tumor. His church vanished. His son is a job-allergic atheist who promotes drugs and posts blasphemy on the web.

Rich Wilkerson has artificial knees, terrible back problems, kidney stones that require lithotripsy, some kind of weird stones that grow in his chest, a rare blood disorder that requires regular draining, and diabetes. His church is going nowhere. He has had a problem with the young men in his inner circle running through the local girls. His megachurch pals rake in the dough and write bestsellers, but his Youtube videos never seem to break 300 views, his church can’t pay its mortgage, and no one knows who he is.

If what happened to me is punishment, perhaps I need to look the word up. If the “anointed” ones who denounced me are blessed, I need to look that word up, too.

Today my wife tried to look up my comment, and she could not see it. Wiese or his wife, or someone on their team, had muted it.

Muting is a sneaky tactic. You fix a person’s comment so he can still see it, but no one else can. It’s dishonest. It’s like the social media dirty trick known as shadow banning. You think you still have a voice, but it goes nowhere.

It’s a slimy thing for a preacher to do, especially to a person who is giving his honest testimony.

So, if Bill Wiese would do this, what other dishonest things has he done? Did he make up his hell story?

The web says he sold a million copies of his book, so that means he made at least hundreds of thousands of dollars. He speaks at big churches that take offerings. He speaks at prosperity churches, and they commonly make deals with speakers, dividing up the spoils of collection. Is Wiese bringing home bundles of tax-free cash? Could be. He may have made himself rich with his story.

I don’t know the answer. Maybe he pays his own expenses when he speaks, and he doesn’t accept offerings. I do know that muzzling other Christians who provide honest testimony is not something you would expect an honest person to do. It’s disgraceful. My wife thought it seemed crooked, just as I did.

I won’t accuse anyone of lying without proof, but he did mute my comment. That’s a fact, and it’s hard to imagine a good excuse for it. It’s hard to imagine a legitimate reason, but other possible reasons are obvious.

Christians should not run from the light. You know who runs from the light? Cockroaches. It’s not a good sign, and when people see you doing it, they suspect the worst.

I hope he has some kind of explanation, but I don’t think I’ll ever find out. I am presenting my story here so other people can pray and judge. It would be great to find out there is some explanation that absolves him.

So Much for European Enlightenment

Got some pretty interesting news this week.

First of all, my wife’s final embassy interview was postponed 10 days. No explanation given. We got the news earlier this week. Today, the embassy’s Facebook page (which, incredibly, exists) said 10 embassy employees had been fired for corruption.

Postponement explained.

My hope, of course, is that they fired people who were likely to DELAY issuance of visas. I hope they kept the ones who rubber-stamp everything.

The second bit of news is that the Europeans have denied her a visa again.

We were trying the Czech Republic. They respond to requests pretty quickly, and they seemed to have a relatively positive attitude toward Africans. For example, the Czechs have a scholarship program that brings Zambians to Czechia to study. We told them we would go to Prague and then Rome.

We weren’t all that excited about visiting Eastern Europe in November, but we knew a Schengen visa would get us into Italy as well as Czechia, so we were willing to take the bad with the good. Actually, I was hoping to change our travel plans after we arrived and cut our Czech time to three days. Once you’re in Europe, they can’t do anything to make you go where you said you would. Nobody needs to spend a whole week in the Czech Republic.

Today we found out we were rejected. They had a ton of documentation proving my wife was not going to stay there illegally and clean toilets for a living, but they didn’t care. We showed them she was about to be cleared to move to the US. We proved assets way beyond what was needed to pay for the trip. We showed them we had already paid for accommodations and tours. We gave them our original marriage certificate, which, bizarrely, they required. Didn’t matter.

So what’s the explanation? Prejudice is the only plausible answer. They just don’t want Africans. They don’t trust them. Maybe they let a few students in, to take study positions where they can be closely monitored, but forget visiting as a tourist. They don’t care how obvious it is that you won’t be a problem. They don’t want to look at the facts.

They put her application in a pile or threw it out, and they waited for her to come back for an answer. Then, without looking her documents over, they told her to take a hike.

The good news is that I’m glad, because this means she will be her sooner, and we will avoid spending a huge amount of money on a trip to a third-rate destination in bad weather. They did me a big favor. Now I don’t have to go to Prague.

I’m sure Czechia is nice, and Prague may be the most beautiful large city on Earth, but it’s a historical and cultural backwater compared to places like Paris and Rome, and these days, it is jam-packed with tourists, even in winter. Tourists are thicker than TBN preachers in hell.

Also, the food looks unbelievably bad. There is a reason we never see Czech restaurants in malls. Remember the dinner scene in Top Secret?

The farther north and east you go in Europe, the more off-putting and strange the food gets. Spain, Italy, France, Greece…excellent. Germany…passable. Scandinavia, England, and Russia…like prison food.

Based on Youtube videos I’ve watched, it appears Russians are swarming Prague. I don’t know how well they mix with tourists from NATO countries. I am not all that eager to mingle with Russian tourists. I suspect they are like British tourists. Drunken, loud, and likely to vomit at any second. Dublin sidewalks are always decorated in British vomit.

Russians sound like the kind of people I would have wanted to hang around with in college.

Americans used to be the problem tourists on this planet. As other countries have accumulated wealth and started to travel more, that distinction seems to have become harder to award. The mainland Chinese do unspeakably rude things, for example. Communism makes people coarse. The Taiwanese are probably great guests.

To get back to Prague, it looks a lot like Disney World. Throngs of tourists everywhere, even in the slow season. Tons of businesses designed for tourists. Lots of scams.

If it’s bad in cold weather, imagine the summer.

Rome sounds better, but my research suggests it’s not what it once was. It’s hard to book activities in November. The crowds are legendary. Also, tourism forums warn about the omnipresent pickpockets, who have formed a de facto industry.

I wasn’t excited about this trip. Wrong season. Lackluster primary destination.

Now that Europe has once again shown us its true, hypocritical nature, my wife should be able to arrive here a week earlier, which is fantastic. We lose 10 days because Zambia is crazy, but we gain days we would have spent traveling. There is absolutely no reason to expect anything but a quick visa issuance. America isn’t Europe. We actually let people in. Boy, do we let people in.

We feel cheated because we didn’t get a second trip this year, but hey, America is huge, and my wife hasn’t seen it. Maybe we can see the Smokies before the leaves fall off. Meanwhile, we can apply for a visa to visit Israel, which is a better destination than any European country.

European visas are not that hard to get once you have a green card. I think the Europeans don’t want to make Uncle Sam mad, and besides, they realize nearly no one wants to leave the US and move to Europe. Half of them are trying to move here.

American winter destinations are generally pretty bad. There are the beaches, which neither of us wants to see. The beautiful non-beach areas will be cold, there will be no leaves on the trees, and many locations will be rainy and muddy. Most of our big tourism cities have turned into mental asylums. Neither of us ski or plan to learn, so forget the western mountains.

Maybe we’ll never see Prague. That’s okay with me. I’ve never wanted to visit. It makes me think of Franz Kafka. Prague will never see my dollars, so it’s a two-edged sword.

When I got the news about the visa, I went online and canceled a whole lot of engagements. Around $3000 for hotels and an Airbnb. Another grand or so for activities. Thank God I didn’t buy airline tickets. There may be some long faces in Czechia and Italy today. Nothing I can do.

I feel God has blessed us once again.

It’s Good if You Think it’s Good

It’s a milestone day. Last night, ghetto kids, and probably many people who were not kids, sacked an area of downtown Philadelphia like Nazis raiding Jewish stores. They fought the police, of course. At about the same time, Target announced it was closing a whole bunch of stores, including locations in Harlem, Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco. Hmm. What do those locations have in common? The amazing thing is that Target came out and admitted crime was the reason. Not just crippling theft, but violence which exposed the company to lawsuits from employees, customers, and their families.

Target snitched on its urban customer base. The gloves are off.

What were the stores most prominently mentioned in the Philadelphia story? Apple (phones treasured by ghetto kids), Foot Locker (expensive athletic shoes), and Lululemon (major vendor of trashy twerking pants). Is it a dog whistle if a news organization mentions the companies?

WGN, a big Chicago news station, just ran a story about a Democrat mayor (El Paso) busing illegal aliens to a “sanctuary” city (Chicago) with a black mayor. Two things to take away once you’ve seen the video: Democrat mayor doing what DeSantis and Abbott did, which was supposedly cruel when they did it, and the WGN team sympathizing with him and making it clear the invasion is a problem.

When a major news organization in Chicago starts repeating conservative talking points about illegal aliens, it’s a day of note.

The world really is ending. It’s amazing, watching videos about our sudden plunge into chaos. I feel like I’ve been sucked into the TV screen during a disaster movie. You know how they create fake news shows. “Godzilla just used San Francisco’s South of Market area as a litterbox, and he’s headed for Palo Alto!” “The asteroid has hit, and here’s a live feed of a tsunami swallowing Leonardo Dicaprio’s house!” It’s all happening now, but it’s real.

I predicted this years ago, and even though I believed what I was saying, it’s still hard to fully accept as reality. Vote for whomever you want. Buy a solar roof. Learn to grow potatoes. It won’t help.

Sit back and enjoy the ride. I don’t know what else to say. Sooner or later, the wave will make it to your area.

Every big city in America is becoming Detroit.

Businesses are boarded up all over America. Crime and covid ended them. Covid drove people to remote work, which they really like, because it’s easier to get away with doing very little at home. Now they don’t want to go to cities and support stores, restaurants, and landlords. BLM and Antifa taught people crime was a human right, so even if people wanted to return, many are afraid to. Commercial property values are tanking. Maybe next year you’ll be able to buy the Chrysler Building for a thousand dollars.

A long time ago, I saw Detroit described as a doughnut. The suburbs were the ring, and the center, which was destroyed by the people of Detroit, was the hole. I guess we’re going to see a lot of doughnuts in the near future. A lot of worthless toilets that used to be centers of commerce where decent people could live decent lives.

In other news, I saw a great video about photography. It was about photographer Vivian Maier, sort of. Really, it was about the importance of taking pictures primarily to please yourself.

Maier worked in Chicago, and she left hundreds of thousands of negatives behind. She did not exhibit her work. Somehow, she was discovered after she died. Her photos are excellent. Truly exceptional.

Was she a great photographer, or will anyone who takes half a million pictures produce extraordinary work inadvertently? Is it a million-monkeys thing? I think the explanation has to be talent. There are millions of monkeys out there taking hundreds of thousands of pictures each, and most of them don’t produce much of value.

The gist of the video seems to be that you shouldn’t feel you have to post everything you shoot on the web in order to justify what you do. If it’s satisfying to you, that’s enough, and it’s more validating than likes from people who think Kim Kardashian and Joe Biden are saving the world.

I have been caught up in the mechanics of taking photos. F stops. Lenses. Figuring out endless camera menus. I should be thinking more about whether I like the pictures, and I should not be eager to discard pictures I think are flawed. Sometimes a picture that is over- or underexposed or blurry can be very satisfying.

I should know this better than anyone, because I write and cook primarily to suit my own tastes. I can’t say I would write as much if I knew no one would read it, but know NEARLY no one reads, and I still sit down and type.

As noted in my last post, I decided to get a used Canon SL2 to replace my 350D. I couldn’t make myself sell my lenses, which are nearly worthless, and the camera is worth so little, I would have to either throw it out or let it sit in a closet until my heirs threw it out. I felt like dropping $300 on a new body would make me happier. It arrives today.

I think it was a smart move. I’ll be more willing to risk damaging or losing it than the big new Sony, and the photos should be just as good, albeit a little smaller.

I got a flash for the Sony. I am getting nowhere with it. It works in either TTL (through the lens) or manual mode. My understanding is that TTL is for idiots. The flash receives data from the camera, as though looking through your lens, and it decides what kind of light to give you. The lens tells the camera your F stop and focal length, and your camera relays the information to the flash.

I tried idiot mode yesterday, and I got idiot photos. I turned the light in my dining room down to restaurant levels, and I tried to shoot as though I were taking travel photos in a restaurant. I got very grainy, poorly focused pictures. Because I was using a 15mm lens (I surmise), I also got something resembling vignetting. There were shadows around the photo’s center. I think the flash was not prepared for the wide field of view. The lens I used doesn’t tell the flash anything. It’s a manual lens.

I also tried a longer lens that was not manual, and things were little better, although turning the flash upward and back for indirect light killed the vignetting.

I kept getting really slow shutter speeds, and when I used automatic ISO, it went way up. This increases noise.

As a photo ignoramus, I just assumed a good flash would let you take decent pictures in a restaurant. I didn’t think the shutter would slow down to nothing. I didn’t expect the ISO to skyrocket. I thought the whole purpose of a flash was to fix those problems.

I have not tried using the flash’s manual mode yet. It seems to me that if idiot mode is too hard, manual, which requires knowledge, is still a ways off.

Of course, now that I have a good APS-C camera on the way, to save money, sort of, I am starting to want a new APS-C lens. As was said of King Lear, “He hath ever but slenderly known himself.” I should have seen this coming.

APS-C is good for travel because the camera and lenses are smaller and cheaper, and travel is upcoming.

My wife’s arrival here appears to be very close. The other day I was cleaning up the kitchen, and I considered giving away the T-Fal deep fryer. I find it useless and unpleasant to handle and clean, and it takes up room. She said I should keep it until she gets here, and they we can decide. Her expected arrival is so close, it actually made sense to say that.

If she gets the go-ahead, and we also get a European visa we applied for, we will visit Prague and Rome, so plenty to photograph and film.

My macro efforts are going badly. Part of it is getting use to the new lens and camera, but I’m also having a hard time finding critters to shoot. I had an idea: spray some plants with sugar water. It won’t show on film, and it will draw bees and flies. I may try it.

The guy who did the video I posted did another video about exercises to help photographers make the most of their surroundings. They are intended to help you see potential in things you would usually walk by. I may try them.

Having seen the videos, I feel like I need to amend my photography philosophy. I have been dividing photos into two types: documentary (Louanne and I were at the world’s largest ball of string) and artistic (Check out the amazing bokeh on this tiny orchid). Now I think I have to create subcategories: photos that obey the rules, and those that don’t. People keep telling photographers to make everything sharp and look for textbook composition and lighting, but sometimes a photo is better because it breaks those rules. I think I have to start throwing photos out because they’re bad, not because they would get me bad grades in a community college course. I should hold onto strange photos that are still pleasing.

I like photos that tell a story, but today I realized I also like photos that suggest there is a story no one is telling you. Sometimes a photo is telling you a story, just like a Normal Rockwell painting. “These boys got caught skinny-dipping.” Other pictures suggest something is going on, but you can’t figure out what it is. “This man is grinning, and the woman is furious, but why?”

Lots of things to think about when you take a photo. There are lots of things that can give a photo merit in one way when it appears worthless in other ways.

None of this philosophizing will do me any good until I learn how to work the equipment. I’ll get back to it today.

How Low Can the Bar Go?

People like to joke that the movie Idiocracy was prophetic, but it’s not a very good joke, because it’s really happening.

We now have a brain-damaged senator who either will not or cannot wear grown-up clothes on the floor of the Senate, and instead of reprimanding him, the Senate has changed the rules to allow him to wear gym shorts and hoodies. Of course, it true leftist elite fashion, the Senate’s leaders did not apply the rule change to the little people. Everyone except senators has to show up dressed properly. Now it is quite literally possible for a senator to show up wearing only a jockstrap, while his underlings have to wear business clothes.

Remember Idiocracy’s President Camacho? Well, we now have a Senator Camacho, and his name is John Fetterman.

Fetterman actually showed up to meet the leader of another country in his bum attire. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s Fetterman, showed up in a sweatshirt to address the Senate, and Fetterman wore his usual gear. Bros!

Fetterman is pretty clearly crippled, intellectually. He has to use a captioning machine to understand people, and he can’t speak coherently. It may well be that his caregivers can’t put a suit on him in the morning because he throws tantrums or has some stroke-related mental issue that makes him unwilling to do what the other 99 Senators do.

Someone wrote a joke for Fetterman, and he has used it twice to criticize mature people who talked about him treating OUR Senate chamber like L.A. Fitness.

Nate Silver is a celebrity who makes money predicting outcomes in the political world. He made a joke suggesting he thought people were overreacting to Fetterman’s wardrobe choices, and Fetterman responded, “I dress like you predict.” He apparently lacks the mental capacity to tell critics from friends.

Later the same day, apparently pleased with himself, Fetterman responded to criticism from Governer Ron DeSantis, saying, “I dress like he campaigns.”

Maybe he has been using this line all week. “I dress like you made this Happy Meal.” “I dress like you answer my email for me.”

Later on, Fetterman blessed us all with an announcement that he would put on a suit when the House stopped trying to shut the government down and fully supported Ukraine. He referred to his colleagues in the legislature using slang describing males addicted to masturbation.

No mention of women. Sexism?

It’s reasonable to say that fictional President Camacho is more dignified than a real US Senator.

This isn’t normal. Most people have an extremely strong herd instinct, and they think whatever people around them are doing is fine, regardless of how different it is from what they were doing a short time ago. My herd instinct is not strong, and I have the Holy Spirit to tell me what’s normal. I remember what normal times were like. They were not like this.

Fetterman is disgracing himself these days by attacking people who comment on his disability, calling it “bullying.” He started crying about it yesterday. Shameless, dishonest self-pity. Just what you don’t want in a person in leadership.

If you’re disabled to the point where you can’t serve, you should resign. If you’re in the Senate, or if you’re any kind of man, you don’t cry when people criticize you. Imagine how he would cry as president, when confronted with a major disaster or a military attack. Democrat Harry Truman said, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.” Trump has been indicted falsely dozens of times, he’s facing the possibility of prison time, and he shakes it off like it never happened.

To make the picture even worse, yesterday Joe Biden proved, beyond any dispute, that he is demented. He’s still able to walk around and handle a lot of his daily tasks, but dementia has ruined his memory.

The commander-in-chief of the United States military should have a functioning memory. Is this a controversial statement?

He was speaking in Manhattan, and he told a false story about the well-known rally in Charlottesville. Then he moved on. Then he told the story again, in a way that proved he had no idea he had just told it. He repeated it nearly verbatim.

Repetition is part of dementia. My dad repeated things all the time, especially questions. At first, I thought he was doing it to be pushy, because he was that kind of person. Eventually, I realized he couldn’t help it. If he asked me the same thing twice in one minute, it wasn’t because he wanted to get on my back. He was just forgetful.

Anyone who has dealt with dementia patients can tell you how this works. It’s standard behavior.

He also walked into a flag yesterday while walking to a podium to appear with the president of Brazil, and then he walked off the stage without shaking his hand. His Brazilian counterpart made an angry gesture and walked off.

On top of all this, he spoke to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and told them how glad he was to be speaking to the Congressional Black Caucus. And they were sitting right in front of him, being mostly not black.

There is no longer any way for leftists to deny that Joe Biden is senile. Old people who are still smart enough to be president don’t tell the same stories twice a few minutes apart.

In English, Biden repeated a false story about a rally. The Chinese communists ran it through a translating device, and the output said, “INVADE TAIWAN NOW.”

So we have Dwayne Camacho in the Senate and Grampa Simpson in the Oval Office. Idiocracy is here. It has started, and it’s going to get worse.

We are told Rome was invaded and sacked by ignorant barbarians. America is worse. We’re becoming the barbarians.

In the background, behind the nutty political news, there are countless fathers watching helplessly while perverts with medical degrees and judge’s robes prepare their sons for castration and their daughters to have their vaginas sewn shut and their breasts sliced off and discarded.

It’s always the fathers. Sexual perversion generally enters a society with the fierce support of women.

The other day I read about a man in a blue state who is trying to prevent medical perverts from giving his daughter drugs to prevent her from becoming a woman. He is already under a court order forcing him to call his daughter by a boy’s name and pretend she’s male. How must that feel; being told what to call your daughter in your own house, when you know it’s factually wrong?

Imagine his frustration, sorrow, and anger. How must it feel to have strangers collude with your crazy ex-wife to drug, deform, and mutilate the child you held as a baby? What is it like to imagine your hopes for your baby’s future, resting in a cold, bloody, stainless steel pan?

This morning, I prayed for God to send spirits to evaluate the world the way they evaluated Sodom. I begged him to come for us before things get worse. This place is disgusting. It’s already intolerable for those Christians who are not fortunate enough to live in relatively safe zones like the one where I am. Even here, it’s going to get so bad, no decent person will be able to stand it.

Evil has a way of moving from cities to the country. I’ve seen it.

When I was a kid, men started wearing long hair in cities, and people in the country made fun of them. They said they looked like girls. A decade or so later, rural Appalachia, where I spent my summers, was full of men who groomed themselves like Phil Robertson and his sons. So was the rest of the South. Robertson wore his hair short in the Sixties, but he eventually went along with the crowd. The same kind of thing is happening with perversion. Count on it.

I’m not saying long hair is evil. I’m saying the long hair trend of the Sixties, which was spawned by an evil culture, spread to resistant areas quickly. If the Beatles had worn orange shirts, and people in the country had started wearing them, it wouldn’t make orange shirts evil, but it would show how influential evil people are.

It’s too bad we can’t go back in spaceships, abduct people from the Fifties, bring them here, put them in focus groups, and make them look at the news. I’d give anything to watch them react.

This planet is washed up. I can’t wait for this to end. I just want to be among my own kind.

I Think I See Waldo Behind a Tree

My efforts to become an award-winning photographer are going poorly at the moment.

I took some okay photos with my old Canon 350D and my new Sony ZV1M2, and I got all excited and bought a Sony A7IV, which is sort of a low-end pro camera. I got myself a 24-70mm lens and started shooting.

First problem: macro is not really an option.

I had been doing macro photos with the Canon, and I was extremely pleased with them. My farm is a good place for macro photos. I guess any place is good for macro photos, because you’re shooting things the size of a quarter. Shrinking the size of your subjects increases the number of potential subjects per unit of area. You can spend all day shooting macro in your house.

The new lens does not like macro. You can’t get close enough to little things to really fill the screen, so you end up with longer shots you have to crop, and even with this camera’s huge sensor, you can only crop so much. Also, I’m not very good at using the camera.

In addition to these problems, I have a lot of mosquitoes right now, and I need to get on the tractor and bush hog a lot of the farm. Thorny, unproductive blackberry bushes are taking over, and there is also some kind of stinging weed that sets your ankles on fire. The farm is not the most pleasant studio at the moment.

Giving up on macro puts me in a position where I have to find bigger things to shoot, so now I have many fewer subjects to choose from. I am struggling to find subjects, and it is not going all that well.

I ordered a real macro lens, and while I wait, I’m shooting bigger stuff, including landscapes.

I think my farm is beautiful. I treasure it. God used it to save me from Miami. But let’s get real. The land is flat by landscape photo standards, there are no creeks or rivers, there is no lake, there aren’t many big flowers…it’s not like the same size parcel in Switzerland or Norway.

Yesterday I walked all over, trying to find things to shoot. My understanding was that it was best to shoot when the sun was low, so I went out in the afternoon. The sun was still blazing like a thermonuclear blast, which, I guess, it was. The grass looked bleached. I didn’t know how to cope with the light.

I shot a bunch of garbage anyway, because I knew it would help me learn. Trying to find subjects is good practice even when you fail, and I was also getting familiar with the camera.

The landscape shots, apart from being shot in kind of a boring area, seem like subjectless photos. Photoshop people into them, and they would be fine. As it is, they’re like big empty frames.

I’m starting to wonder: are there places where you just can’t take a lot of wide shots, even if you’re good? I’m not saying I’m good, but I have taken some decent pictures.

I think a lot of people would say a good photographer can take great photos anywhere. I’m guessing, because that sounds like the kind of thing people would say, because they say things like that. But I have to point out that when Ansel Adams wanted to take great photos, he went to Yosemite. He didn’t hole up in his house, shooting dust bunnies and refrigerator magnets.

I Googled his photos, and I don’t see any shots of his toaster or recliner.

The macro lens will arrive tomorrow, and I expect it to save my life. You can never run out of macro subjects.

So, getting back to things like landscapes and street photos, I’m wondering if I’m going to have to start getting in the car and wandering around in public. Also, am I going to live for traveling with my wife? When you travel, you run into good stuff all the time.

I think I should get a wide angle lens for the future. I mean like 12mm or so. Not a fisheye, either. One that leaves straight lines straight. A really wide lens will give me stuff which is very different from my current minimum focal length of 24mm. It will also let me shoot in very small places without losing everything except someone’s elbow or a napkin dispenser.

I have looked at photos from different wide angle lenses, and I feel like a person’s first wide lens should be very, very wide. When you spend a lot on a lens, you want it to do something very different from what your old lenses do. If all you have is a 24-70mm, you don’t want to buy a 20mm lens.

I like the dramatic feel of wide angle photos, and it’s neat, the way they can make the observer seem isolated from the subject matter. When a lens pushes people away, it lets you know you’re not part of the action. You’re like John Cusack, in the portal, watching a lesbian live his intended life with his ex-girlfriend.

In Singapore’s airport, I used my phone to take a wide shot I really liked. It helped motivate me to think about wide lenses. I tried to find out what sort of lens the phone had. I figured that if I could find this out, I could get a lens just like it.

It turned out the center lens on my phone was (allegedly) a 24mm. I have that already, in my zoom.

If I lived in Singapore, I could go to the airport and take the same shot with my zoom, to see if the 24mm measurement is really correct. Can’t do it from here, though.

The web says my phone’s sensor has 50 megapixels. Can that be true? That’s insane. I think the Hubble only has 40. You get 50 with the center lens, 10 with the long lens, and 12 with the telephoto. On one $750 camera. Which is supposed to be a telephone.

The world has gone nuts.

The wide lens on this phone is said to be 13mm. If I had started thinking about still photography before the trip, I could have done more wide shots.

Is 13mm on the phone the same as 13mm on a full-frame camera? You tell me.

Really good wide lenses, like nearly all really good lenses, are really expensive. I found one that could be a bargain, though. A company named Laowa makes a 9mm job which features zero distortion. It’s affordable, it’s very small, and it’s light. It gets good reviews. The only problem is that it does not do autofocus.

Do you really have to have autofocus all the time, especially when you’re doing crazy-wide shots? I don’t really see myself suddenly developing an urge to shoot moving subjects at 9mm. Also, the depth of field is always large with this thing.

It’s difficult to make equipment decisions when you know as little about photography as I do. I am seeking advice on the web. Maybe trial and error are inevitable.

When the macro lens gets here tomorrow, I should be able to produce some acceptable shots. It should keep me supplied with subjects for, well, ever. Meanwhile, I’ll keep looking for ways to get good material out of the zoom. I might pick up the Laowa.

At ISO 2000, I Don’t Mind the Grey Skies

My new camera arrived today. I decided I can now call myself a photographer. I have decent equipment that will allow me to create really excellent photos. Can you call yourself a photographer when you’re not highly trained? Yes, if you are capable of doing acceptable work. This is my ruling, based on the fact that there are innumerable experienced professionals out there, making a living, who couldn’t take a decent passport photo on the best days of their lives.

Maybe someone else out there is trying to decide which mid-range mirrorless camera to get for travel, so I will issue a couple of conclusions.

I was torn between two models: the Sony A7IV, which is full-size, and the AC7II, which is nearly the same camera in a compact package. I fretted a lot about this. I am a pretty experienced world traveler, and I know what it’s like to lug heavy stuff around while walking several miles per day.

Get the bigger camera. The difference between the compact and full-size jobs is nearly nothing, and once you put a huge lens on your camera, you will realize how stupid you were to worry about it.

I bought a 24-70mm zoom, and it’s as big as a can of corn. It’s bigger than the 17-17mm EF lens I had on the old Canon 350D. Attaching it to a camera that weighs 4 ounces less and is about 1/4″ shorter across the front is going to make no difference at all, and bigger stuff works better because there are fewer internal compromises. Big stuff overheats less. It has more features. It’s what you want.

This camera has a much better viewfinder than the small one, and it’s in the center, the correct place. It’s also shaded, unlike the one on the AC7II. You don’t want to fight with the sun when you look through a camera with old creaky eyeballs.

If all I had was a pancake (stubby non-zoom) lens, maybe I could bring myself to care about the difference in camera body size, but with this mechanical whale hanging off the front, the body doesn’t make much difference.

One disappointment: no charger tray. There is a charger, but you can’t attach it to the battery. You have to plug it into the camera itself, so if you have multiple batteries, you can’t charge one while using another. Amazon has a fantastic charger tray for $19. It takes two batteries, and it accepts USB-C and that other connector which is shaped like a “D.” It will charge two batteries at once, and it will give you a use for your old USB cables.

The bag B&H included with the camera at no charge is great. It’s a high-quality bag, just like the Lowepros I’ve had. The free memory card is a $120 Sony. The free second battery is a somewhat questionable brand, but they are all somewhat questionable, and this brand, Watson, is the least questionable. It costs something like $60 by itself, so no complaints here. A new Sony battery runs $80, so if this one is any good at all, I will be very pleased.

Sony sent its own battery empty. Bummer. I stuck the Watson in the camera, and it said it was at 58%. I’m charging it while I type this, and I’ll have to survive the weekend using the camera as a tray. Then the new one will arrive. This camera will supposedly take nearly 600 shots on one Sony-battery charge, so I should be okay. It will do two hours of 4K video, which I never plan to shoot. I’m a 1080p guy until someone changes my mind.

The Sony strap is not great. It’s thin, so it will cut into my neck. I’ll have to find a replacement.

I’m going to take the camera outside and see what I can shoot. I hope it’s less annoying than the 350D. The 350D is a fine camera, but it does some irritating things, like shutting off the internal display right before you take a picture.

I might conceivably read the new camera’s manual, but I doubt it. That would be cheating.

The lens looks perfectly fine to me. I’m not much of a photographer, and I try not to be a cork-sniffer. I know serious pros can criticize any lens. I’m going to shoot some regular shots and some extreme closeups and then render a premature, poorly-informed verdict. My bet is that if this lens has any real issues, it will be at least 6 months before I realize it.

I don’t look forward to lugging this thing around, and I hate looking like a Japanese tourist, but I should be rewarded abundantly for the effort.

I’m really happy about this. I did the right thing. I didn’t worry too much about saving my pennies, the way I did when I got the Canon and the small mirrorless Sony. I got something that will get the job done for a good long while. There will be fewer times when I can’t do something well because the camera won’t let me, and years from now, if the rapture is that far off, my family will have a lot of wonderful imagery to help us relive shared history.

I’ll tell you something weird about doing little bits of nature photography. It relaxes me to look at my own work. I don’t know why. When I take a shot I like, and I put it on the TV and stare at it, my blood pressure plummets. All my worries vanish. It makes me wonder if putting a few framed photos up in the house will improve my health and mental state.

I did not see this coming.

I generally don’t feel this way when I look at other people’s photos.

I supposed it makes sense that looking at God’s work is a little bit like being with God, who radiates peace in all directions.

Guess I should order a strap and then put the camera to the test. It will be a big relief, taking the ISO above 200.

MORE

I fired the new camera up and wandered around looking for things to shoot.

First thing I realized: this is not an ideal macro lens. You can get some good shots with it, but it’s not all that easy, and when you shoot things that are really small, you have to crop a lot.

Here are a couple of things I shot. I don’t think the first shot is great, but it’s acceptable for today’s purpose, which is to get the camera to work. It’s a bunch of leaves on a tree in the side yard.

Here is another weed blossom. The depth of field is too shallow, but I love the dark green background. It’s less grainy at the original resolution. Still too grainy to blow up.

Here’s one more weed blossom, cropped two different ways.

Finally, a shot of the goat shed. Here, I was learning how to avoid lying in the manure by using the flip screen. I extended the screen and looked at it while I lowered the camera.

I am able to take shots that were out of reach for the Canon 350D, and I have a lot more room to crop, so all is well.

Your Kids Can be Just as Crazy as You

I can’t believe the world I live in.

In California, it is now possible for the state to punish parents who refuse to pay for the castration of their children.

Where did I wake up today? Is this Mars? Am I on life support, receiving a feed of AI-generated fiction while they get ready to pull the plug?

Pull it! Pull it!

The number of the relevant bill is AB-957, and the legislature just passed it. All it lacks is the signature of Gavin Newsom, which it will, of course, get.

Conservatives are oversimplifying the law, making it sound as though parents who refuse to support child mutilation or perversion will automatically lose custody. Leftist nuts are doing a poor job of defending the law, saying it only requires judges hearing custody cases to consider failure to support mutilation or perversion.

No matter how much lipstick you put on it, it allows judges to take custody away from parents who are terrified of seeing their children cut up and sterilized.

So what do you do now, if you’re a California father (it’s always the father), and you are terrified that a savage with a scalpel is going to slice your son’s penis open, scrape out the insides, and turn it inside out? What do you do to prevent your daughter’s breasts from being sliced off and discarded, her arm or leg skinned, and the skin being turned into a grotesque false penis?

This is what “bottom surgery” really means. Go Google pictures.

Talk about feeling powerless. Imagine having to stand in your house, looking out the window, as cops and social workers take your confused son off to have his testicles removed and incinerated.

This is enough. This age has lasted long enough. It’s time for Jesus to put an end to it. That’s my take, anyway. I don’t tell Jesus what to do, and maybe God has reasons for extending this ordeal, but if it were up to me, I’d remove Christians from the world today. I think we’re accomplishing nearly nothing here.

My wife should become a permanent resident in a few weeks. Then we will try to have kids. What planet are we supposed to raise them on? Assume one is born a year from today, which is about the best possible scenario. If things are this insane now, what will they be like when our child turns 18? I can’t even imagine it.

Are we supposed to live in a cave? Will we have to move to Africa and live in a country where sodomy is a crime and Christianity is in the constitution?

Right now, I have a great governor who shelters us, and there is a huge influx of sane, decent people, pumping up the conservative voter base. That won’t last forever. Sooner or later, Florida will go full-throttle pervert.

It’s bad even with DeSantis in charge. I listened to a legal “education” video the other day, and the participants were people who dealt with runaways and so on. These were people who are part of the system. Powerful people in low places. When you have a problem with your kids, you don’t get to deal with Ron DeSantis. You deal with these lunatics.

They insist–INSIST–that lawyers call runaways “absent from care.” The term “runaway” is somehow harmful, though completely accurate. If the cops rescue a child prostitute from captivity, you can’t use the word “rescue,” because–not kidding here–it implies all of the problems are solved. Of course, it implies nothing of the sort, but this is leftist insanity for you.

You can’t use the terms “prostitute” and “prostitution.” You can’t tell older kids who take drugs and turn tricks they are in any way accountable for what they do, even though they are. You have to tell them they’re victims, so they never take accountability and take control of their lives.

The whole thing made me want to puke.

These wackjobs come from the same milieu as the ones who come to take your kids when they think you’re misbehaving. I’m sure they would be forcing parents to support child mutilation if they could.

The Deep State isn’t just a federal thing. Every state has a deep state, and they are overwhelmingly leftist, i.e. psychotic and tyrannical. Government worshipers. People who gave their lives to the Beast without even believing he existed.

If you want to understand the level of religious freedom, and freedom to use common sense, that I now have, ask yourself what would have happened if I had objected to what the people in the video were saying. “I want to practice family law, but I insist on using terms like ‘prostitution’ and ‘runaway.'” Would I be allowed to practice? Would I receive a public reprimand?

Reproduction is important to God. It’s the reason he made the universe. We are supposed to generate his children through our bodies. I used to think I wasn’t obligated, but now I believe I am, so I plan to go through with it. I feel like I’m going to be holding drills on a destroyer while torpedoes close in on it.

There is no natural answer. You can’t fix it by voting. You can’t fix it with resistance or violence. It’s a supernatural thing, and repentance, prayer, and submission are the only way out, but Americans aren’t going to do those things in sufficient numbers to fix this country. We’re too busy thinking about red baseball caps and 3wning the libs on social media.

Man, I can’t wait to get out of this place. I don’t want to spend my few remaining years moving from refuge to refuge, ceding more and more of myself and my family to the deranged mob.

People I think of as Christians will turn. Same thing will happen in your life. Suddenly, they’ll be infected with wonderful rationalizations to justify siding with Satan’s herd, and they will come to your house and shame you for not seeing the truth. They’ll say, “If we don’t go along, what are we supposed to do?”, like it’s your responsibility to take God’s role and make things easy for them. I’ve seen this a zillion times. “If I do wrong, and you don’t give me another option, I’m innocent, and you’re guilty.”

The remnant of people who haven’t been corrupted will get smaller and smaller, like Gideon’s army. You’ll have to watch while people fall away and destroy themselves.

My children will want explanations. You know how kids are. If they’re not caught up in the derangement, they’ll want to know what I was thinking when I decided to bring them into this world. The answer is obvious: it was God’s will, so I had to do it. But I won’t be able to tell them things will get anything but worse, or that they have any hope of living in a decent world.

If there was a rocket to heaven standing in my yard right now, I would walk out and get in. Well…I’d do it if my wife had a rocket, too. I couldn’t abandon her here.

In brighter news, I ordered a camera. I was going to get a compact full-frame mirrorless camera, but I decided it would be better to deal with the added bulk and weight and get a real camera. Compact cameras have weird viewfinders and fewer features.

I ordered a lens somewhat like the one I use now. I ordered a Sigma 24-70mm zoom lens. It’s better than the equivalent Sony, and the better Sony that replaced the Sony costs over twice as much. I would have felt bad buying it, given my unending beginner status.

The 24-70mm will be great for almost all my shots, but I think I should still get a prime lens for things like street scenes and shooting in small spaces with dubious lighting. My plan is to use the 24-70mm until I have a clue and then pick out a prime.

A lot of people like the Sony 28mm f/2.8 lens. Seems like the zoom will duplicate its function, though. My understanding is that the zoom’s clarity and sharpness are not as good. Maybe I should go for a shorter lens. I should know in a few days.

I used B&H Photo. Amazon offers my camera at the same price, but you don’t get anything with it. B&H gives you a $100+ memory card, an expensive bag, and an extra battery. You can’t get the camera itself at a lower price by giving up the extras.

I think I know how this works. Sony tells B&H, “We’ll cut you off if you discount our cameras,” but it doesn’t tell them they can’t give things away with them, so B&H undercuts Amazon by giving you a lot of stuff.

I wanted the card and the battery. The bag is just a bonus. I’m sure I’ll find it useful, though.

So why buy a camera to preserve memories for the future, when I think there is no future? That’s a great question. I think the rapture is coming very soon, but God hasn’t sent out a printed bulletin with a date. What if it’s 20 years off? Besides, even if we only get a year of enjoying videos and photos, it will be worth it. I enjoy them now.

What do I do with my old Canon 350D? It’s not worth selling. It would bring about $20. I might be able to get a couple of hundred dollars for my lenses. I would rather just keep everything. A spare camera never hurt anyone. Maybe my wife could learn a few things with it. I would like her to develop basic competence with a camera. We may be in Rome this year.

I went pretty crazy ordering the camera body. I got a Sony A7IV. This is a very good camera when viewed in juxtaposition with my status as a total photo hack. It’s not a pro camera, but pros use it. It will do video and stills very well. It should have a useful life as a primary camera for a decade. It’s not as small or light as some models. I’ll just have to deal with it.

I didn’t choose Canon even though I’ve had two. This business with refusing to license their lens mount is not acceptable. It makes them sound like Apple. There are a zillion lenses for the Sony, and I mean lenses that are made for the Sony mount. No clumsy adaptors.

I should be up and shooting tomorrow. I will try the camera in places where the light was too low for my 350D. I hope it will get me shots I could not get before.

You are a Termite

I am still trying to get a grip on photography and equipment choices.

So I did a macro photo of a tiny weed blossom, and it was so beautiful, I wanted to blow it up, print it, and put it on the wall. I went to the true photography experts: Walgreen’s.

Okay, Ansel Adams wouldn’t have used them, but there is a Walgreen’s near me, and I can submit photos online for printing. And their candy aisle is outstanding.

I uploaded the photo, and the website told me it was too grainy to be printed at 16″x 20″. The photo is nearly square, but I figured I would print it in a rectangular size, cut off the blank parts, and put it in a frame made to hold it.

Now I have to decide whether to put up with the graininess or print a smaller photo. Sad, because every photo is unique. I can’t go out and redo it.

This problem showed me a couple of things.

First, I really do need a better camera. My camera has an 8-megapixel sensor, so you don’t get a lot of pixels. It’s fine if you’re not doing too much cropping, and you’re not printing big pictures, but otherwise, it’s a huge problem. Until yesterday, I was going along with the people who told me it’s the photographer, not the equipment, that matters. Turns out they’re totally wrong. You can take great pictures with a bad camera, but you can’t take EVERY great picture. A camera’s limitations can limit what you can do, very dramatically.

Second, when taking macro shots, you need to get as close as you can and fill up the viewfinder. That way, you get as many pixels as possible, and when you crop later, you get the best resolution possible.

A few days ago, I was wondering if I should blow $400 on a cheap DSLR body that would make better use of my old lenses. Now I’m thinking I should spend a few thousand dollars and get it over with. I have a wife. I may have a child sometime next year. I can’t keep letting bad equipment cost me opportunities to do good photography.

I also have to get out and shoot several times a week, because lack of skill and lack of familiarity with the equipment also ruin opportunities. I don’t want to be the old guy who finds himself cursing at his camera and millennials and electric vehicles and soy while his son takes his first steps.

I don’t know too much, but it’s starting to look like I need to put at least two grand into a camera, along with a big sum for a very good zoom. The zoom I have is 17-70mm, and it starts out at f2.8, so it’s unusual to have to take it off the camera for anything. I have a prime lens I never use.

I don’t want to find myself on a trip with two annoying cameras, plus lenses, to lug around, so whatever I get has to be very good for both video and stills. That means I need a flip screen so I can see myself and/or others when I’m in the picture. There are still a lot of cameras without flip screens, and they’re not going to work for me.

I don’t want a DSLR because they’re extinct already, and they are completely inferior to mirrorless cameras with far better electronics. They miss shots. They focus on the wrong things.

It sort of looks like the camera I want isn’t available yet. I looked at a bunch of products, and it seems like the Sony A7CII is the answer, given what I am willing to spend. It does great stills. It’s pretty good for video. It’s water-resistant, unlike most cameras under two grand. It has a flip screen. It’s intended to be a smaller version of an existing Sony people like, so it saves weight and space. It won’t be available until later this month.

Sony mirrorless cameras supposedly take an extremely vast array of lenses, unlike Canons, which are limited by a greedy refusal to license. What if I want to do telephoto stuff a year from now? Do I want to be confined to a few overpriced lenses that may or may not be what I want?

It turns out cameras are like rifles. I can buy a phenomenal rifle for under a grand, but glass to make it work right will likely cost more than the gun.

Today I’m doing continuing legal “education” again. Right now, I’m playing a video about attorneys who use artificial intelligence. It’s really depressing.

Most people are not overly bright or perceptive, so most of us don’t really understand what AI is going to do to us. We have ideas about computers creating big machines that go around exterminating us, and surely that could happen after enough technological progress, but the real threat, which would come to pass much sooner, is that we will become startlingly stupid people who do almost nothing except serve as receptionists and mechanics for computers who do our actual work.

Apparently, a huge number of people are using AI to do things they should do for themselves. Kids make it do their homework. Students have found ways to make it take exams for them. Lawyers are making it do research and writing.

The speaker in the video talked about using AI for things like doing writing tasks lawyers don’t feel like doing or are, frankly, too dumb to do. She talked about using AI to beat writer’s block.

I don’t get writer’s block. If you tell me you need me to write 500 words, I can sit down in front of you and get it done in 15 minutes. I once wrote a very good legal brief, 48 pages long, in a day. It’s not a problem for me. Some people can dunk a basketball. Some people can write symphonies at the age of 7. I can write legal documents quickly, well, and without help.

So now people like me are going to compete with numbskulls who struggled to get through law school, who pick up their phones, log into AI sites, and tell them to do what I do. When the product spews out a few seconds later, their only job will be to review it and correct it, and if what I’m hearing is true, a lot of the numbskulls aren’t even doing these things. They are getting caught submitting things AI messed up.

If I practice law again, I may spend 20 hours putting a brief together for you, but opposing counsel, with an IQ of 95, may bark some commands into his phone in a strip club toilet instead. Then I’ll bill you $10,000, and he’ll bill his client $10,000, but I’ll be doing about 20 times the work he does.

If this is how it works, aren’t we going to end up with generations of utter morons who are not able to practice law when they aren’t plugged in? Even many of the smart ones will stop learning the second they pass their bar exams.

Also, what will happen to fees? How long will $500 per hour seem reasonable when machines that cost little to use are puking the work out almost instantly?

It will only be a few years before reviewing AI work will not be necessary, because AI will be much better at the work than we are. The tables will turn, and if we actually write anything, AI will review it for US.

Remember I, Robot? Will Smith had a self-driving car. He got in it with Bridget Moynahan. She started shrieking about how unsafe it was to drive a car for yourself.

Won’t there come a time when doing your own legal work will be considered negligent? Computers will be so much better at it, it will be foolhardy to let humans do it. What happens to lawyers then?

It will happen, and it’s going to happen very soon. Within 5 years, probably.

Judges, quite frankly, are already stupid, without the help of AI, and they are also biased and dishonest. Not all of them have these faults to problematic degrees, but many, many do. Should we have AI judges? Maybe they’ll miss some things human judges would catch. At first. But what if the down side is grossly outweighed by the up side?

When I practiced patent law, the country’s only appellate patent court was reversing 54% of the cases it heard. Federal district judges were just too stupid to do the job. There are other areas of law that are also too hard for many federal judges, who tend to be stooges with political appointments. Should we continue letting these people ruin lives and mishandle cases when we have computers that will do a better job?

What if the reversal rate for human judges is 54%, and the reversal rate for AI judges is 35%? Could we ignore this?

Is there a way to team humans up with AI judges to balance the disadvantages out? I doubt it would work well. Human judges have a limitless capacity to screw things up.

What about medicine? Let’s be honest. There is no way a human being can consistently diagnose physical problems, or prescribe treatment, as well as a really good machine. A machine will know the symptoms of every problem known to medical science, no matter how obscure. It will know every cause. Every treatment. What the outcomes are. Most medicine boils down to following flow charts. Human beings can’t do that as well as machines. In the future, doctors will probably be limited to examination and data entry.

For a long time, we’ve had robots helping doctors rip out prostate glands. How long will it be before machines do many procedures from beginning to end, with doctors standing by mainly to collect fees?

I would rather have a machine than a doctor most of the time. Doctors have misdiagnosed me and given me the wrong treatments many times. I have stumped them many times, which should not happen. They have tried to con me into undertaking unnecessary courses of supervised treatment, so they could make more money. Give me a machine any day.

What about an AI president? Sometimes I wonder if the Antichrist will be a machine or a huge leftist mob wired together with a central machine.

The millennials who teach CLE courses think AI is wonderful. They can’t wait to see it do more. They may feel different when they’re collecting aluminum cans for a living.

Another disturbing CLE taught about social media and the law. Boy, are you in for a surprise if you’re a social media addict and you find yourself in court. They will go after your entire history. Tiktok, Instagram, Facebook…even Myspace. You name it.

You should probably delete every account once a year. If you really have to, you can start new ones with less dangerous data stored in them.

They’ll also go after every email address you have. Probably every forum you’ve ever joined. I have no idea how many I’ve joined. I’ve been on the web since about 1992.

If you lie about your whereabouts, or you just make a mistake, they’ll dig up things you’ve put up on the web, along with times and locations, to prove you’re wrong. Can you imagine anything more invasive?

On top of that, there will be forgeries, and lawyers will have to hire expensive experts to validate or invalidate things attorneys want to introduce into evidence. This is how it works right now, so expect it if you get dragged into court.

What a nightmare. You’ll be sitting in court looking at subpoenaed copies of your neighbors’ Ring videos.

I don’t want to live in the world that’s coming. Take me now. The Borg is real. It’s already here. Our lives are suddenly losing all purpose. We are losing our value as individuals. We are like ants in a farm. Bees in a hive. Gather the nectar, make the honey, and then die.

Oh, well. Back to CLE. When Jesus comes, I’ll be able to say I finished this cycle.

Today I Learned how to Breathe

It’s CLE time again, so I am here to rant.

“CLE” stands for “Continuing Legal Education.” It should be “CCS,” or “Continuing Consumer Scam.” The purported purpose is to keep lawyers up to date on new developments that affect their jobs. The real purpose is to fool the public into thinking lawyers are staying up to date on new developments that affect their jobs, when they may or may not be doing it.

Lawyers have a bad reputation. I hate to say anything shocking, but it’s true. America is full of scum-sucking parasite lawyers who file frivolous tort claims that ruin life for everyone else and make things more expensive. Remember diving boards? Can’t have one now because of lawyers. Remember pool slides? Trampolines? Pools that didn’t have tiny, annoying fences 18″ from their borders? Tort lawyers, stand up on your mucus-oozing hind appendages, and take a bow. You took it all away.

Because everyone justifiably hates lawyers, we are continually making insincere efforts to seem like redeemable human beings. For one thing, they push us to do pro bono work. Some idiot sues McDonald’s for making hot coffee, so the Florida Bar tells me to make things better by donating $30,000 worth of work to some tattooed lady who wants custody of her sexually undefinable kids.

When I was practicing, I didn’t do pro bono. It’s all risk and work and no reward. I’m still on the hook for malpractice regardless of what I charge. I’m still on the hook for bar discipline if I screw up. I still have to pay my expenses, including any sanctions I incur. I end up burdened with lifelong loyalty to a stranger who didn’t pay me, along with his, her, or its confidential information. It’s quite a bit different from pro bono medical work, where you fix a cleft palate in Borneo and the happy patient vanishes from your life forever.

I think I’ll start Lawyers Without Borders. We’ll go to foreign countries and sue grocery stores when people fall down in the aisles.

People cheer when Doctors Without Borders show up. Imagine how they will run when my crowd lands.

“Doctors Without Borders is here! Roll out the red carpet and bring out the dancing girls!”

“Look! A plane full of lawyers! RELEASE THE DRONES!”

CLE is supposed to perform the same function as pro bono work. If the public thinks we’re working to stay current, they’ll have more confidence in us. Supposedly. In reality, the way to make people believe in you is to win cases.

As I have often said, every competent lawyer does CLE on his own, continuously. When you get a case, you do legal research. You find out the current state of the law. You find out whether procedure has changed. You adapt on the fly. This is business as usual. You have to do it in order to avoid screwing up. You bill clients for it. It’s part of every case that isn’t incredibly routine.

Forcing lawyers to take stupid courses and report to the bar is totally unnecessary for good lawyers, and it won’t help bad ones. And isn’t it possible that a farcical, insincere effort to keep lawyers informed will cause the public’s confidence in us to go down instead of up? Doesn’t it reinforce the notion that lawyers are always trying to fool people? Because with CLE, we are?

Then there is the dirty secret no one but me discusses: there are lawyers who sign up for CLE and then claim they did it when they really did not.

I worked for a patent attorney named Jack Dominik. He’s dead, so I’ll just name him. This man was a really excellent attorney. Extraordinary. Before I met him. By the time I showed up, he was in his late seventies, and he was making ethical mistakes, but other than that, he was very impressive. He used to buy CLE tapes and play them on a machine in my office, where he could not hear them.

My dad practiced for over half a century, and he was the best lawyer I ever knew. He bought tapes, put them in a drawer, and told the bar he listened to them. But he was extremely meticulous about preparing for cases properly. He was always ahead of the game.

I’m not sure any lawyer I’ve ever known has actually done CLE for real, when there was any kind of a choice. I think I may be the only one who does it.

Last time around, I downloaded some free CLE stuff, which brings me to the third purpose of CLE. It allows lawyers and companies to promote themselves and their products. You get to tell people about what you do or what your product can do, and you can provide web links and so on. A lot of the stuff I found last time was created for promotional purposes. Infomercials. A software company named Rocket Matters did a lot of it. This time, it’s a company named…I’ve already forgotten.

Anyway, I downloaded this junk and put it on a flash drive. Then I listened to it whenever I drove anywhere. I also used an Ipod, I think. Maybe it was my phone. I used 3M Worktunes Bluetooth earmuffs while I was riding the tractor and mower and when I was using loud tools.

While I was doing all this, it occurred to me that I could speed this stuff up. The time requirement was over 30 hours, but what’s time to a lawyer? We routinely charge people for three hours of work when we’ve actually done half an hour. Believe it or not, there are times when this is considered ethical. So I thought, “Why should I spend an hour listening to something when I can do it in 40 minutes?”

I’m not saying I ever did this, or that it makes no difference at all in the effectiveness of the teaching, because the material is often simple, and many CLE instructors talk way too slowly. But I will say the thought occurred to me.

I will admit that I looked, and do look, for courses with exaggerated time credit. Sometimes the bar will give an hour’s credit for a “course” lasting under 40 minutes, and sometimes a “course” will run almost 70 minutes, so which one would you choose?

I have wondered about the ethics of speeding up CLE audio, but yesterday, I saw something really funny that answered my question. On a CLE site belonging to the bar itself, I saw an audio player with a speed control.

The speed control isn’t small. It’s not hidden. It’s right out there where you can see it. Click a plus button or a minus button, and you can listen at whatever speed suits you.

Guess we know how concerned the bar is about speeding up the sound.

Who clicks the minus button? Who wants to turn 33 hours into 66? I want to meet that person. Is it some kind of exotic masochistic fetish? Anything is possible. Some people get off on watching fat women smoke.

The plus button would be a huge help to me (if I were using it). My mind works a lot faster than most people’s. When an audio presentation goes up to 1.5x or more, suddenly, I can stand to listen to it. Listening to accelerated audio, which I’m not saying I would ever do with crucial, case-saving CLE materials, helps me understand how great it would be if everyone in the world thought as fast as I do. I must have spent a hundred thousand hours, finishing people’s sentences in my mind.

“Hurry up. Hurry up. Hurry up. I know what you’re going to say. Spit it out. I can’t stand this. Get it over with. Self: concentrate. Concentrate. It’s really not that boring if you focus.”

“Should I make lasagna tonight? I don’t think I have ricotta. I need to clean out my dryer duct. What would happen if I made pizza dough with club soda? What’s so interesting about fat women smoking?”

I get really tired of the wokeness in the videos, even here in Florida. I also feel alienated by the mental health videos.

Back when life made sense, CLE was about practicing law. How to do discovery. How to identify unfair labor practices. Stuff like that. Now we get stuff about meditation and yoga breathing. No lie.

Mental health and wellness CLE’s help fulfill our professionalism requirement, so I listen to them even though my mental health is so amazing, it should be studied for the good of mankind. I’m totally normal. No problems at all here.

Okay, maybe not everyone believes that.

Anyway, yesterday I heard two videos about coping with stress. One said stress was good for us and helped us live longer lives. It really did. It was made by a lady who said she had had strokes and surgery because of stress. The obvious question: “Is this woman the best possible choice to teach about reducing stress?” How about some videos from people in their nineties with low blood pressure and clear arteries? Just a thought.

The second video was from a guy who said it was impossible to be stressed and happy at the same time. The lady who made the first video needs to watch the second video.

When he started talking about meditation, I skipped it. I have religious objections to weird mental exercises that come from Satanic religions, so, sorry. Not listening. I feel I should still get credit. You wouldn’t get mad if an Orthodox Jew took a break while a speaker put up pornographic slides. To me, advice about taking up paganism is worse than porn. Merely hearing it is harmful.

As I listened to these people, I realized how different I was from them and their target audience. I was riding around on a diesel mower, in my tranquil, gated, heavily-armed, rural Florida compound, without a care in the world. They were talking about using alcohol, drugs, and heathen religion to cope with the huge anxiety loads their listeners dealt with every day. I realized how blessed I was and how miserable people can be when they get shackled to Satan’s hamster wheel.

I wasn’t miserable or stressed when I practiced law, but I think most lawyers are.

I don’t know why I maintain my license. I never want to go back to the law. No one who leaves it does. When lawyers get together and one says he found a way out, everyone says the same thing. “Lucky you! I wish I could do that.”

I better fire up some videos before the compliance deadline passes. I hope my diligence gives you confidence in the competence of legal professionals everywhere.