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.

Biden and his Weimar Scrip

What is happening to the dollar? Is there some explanation I don’t know of, or are we just reaping the harvest Bush and Obama sowed when they started pumping currency out of the Federal Reserve like it was Monopoly money? Sooner or later, something had to happen.

I have a warehouse. If memory serves, in 2017, it rented for about $1770 per month, tax included. Florida collects sales tax on commercial rentals, which is probably one reason there is no income tax.

The warehouse needs a new tenant. The lady who helps me with tenants just sent me comparable rentals. They average out to about $3888/month. I don’t know whether that includes tax yet. She is getting back to me.

Assuming tax is included, the increase is about 120%, over 6 years. The INCREASE, not the total. I’m going to charge more than twice what I did 6 years ago.

Where is the money supposed to come from? I know I’ll get it, because people have no choice, but where are tenants finding money to pay their rent now? Is their income 220% of what it was in 2017? I’m pretty sure only burger-flippers are doing that well. They can write their own ticket in Biden’s America, although they are rapidly being replaced by apps and electronic kiosks. I’ve probably been to McDonald’s 15 times in the last year, and I only ordered from a human being once, to add something I forgot to tell the app about.

Last year, a tenant called me about a rent increase. He was almost in years. He literally begged me to help him out. He’s a great tenant. Never a hint of trouble. Pays his rent. I didn’t want to raise his rent at all. But I’m not running a charity. I pay taxes, which go up. I support myself and my wife using tiny, shrinking Biden dollars.

What am I supposed to tell him at the end of his current lease? I’ll probably have to tack over a thousand dollars onto his monthly rent.

I have to do it. I assume he’ll leave. I have no reason to think his business will generate an additional $12000 next year. Who will replace him? I know someone will, but where are these willing tenants coming from? Dubai? Palm Beach? Beverly Hills?

I’ve had people try to sell me on long-term leases. “I’ll pay what you ask, but you have to let me stay x years.” I never go for it. Why would I? I have zero incentive. If you don’t accept my terms, someone else will jump in later the same week, and I won’t have to worry about being underpaid after a year or two of inflation.

No one has ever refused to rent from me because I wouldn’t accept a long-term lease. Not once.

They tell us inflation is at something like 8%. How can that be true when so many things have doubled in price? Are they cooking the numbers or what?

I watch a Youtuber named Louis Rossmann. He’s a New Yorker. Well…he USED to be. Not long ago, he took off from Manhattan and put his computer repair shop in San Antonio. He’s a big right-to-repair activist. He also criticizes the government, which is an easy thing to do in a giant pile of reeking excrement like New York City.

He criticizes landlords, too. He goes around filming vacant businesses in Manhattan. They’re everywhere. When coronavirus hit, a lot of people just went home, and instead of helping them, the government made things worse. They’re not going to return, but somehow, landlords are charging more than ever. He showed tiny spaces smaller than a Miami warehouse, going for numbers like $75000 per month. Per MONTH. Not for jewelry stores or Apple shops. For ordinary businesses.

Granted, some of the increases are necessary because of inflation, but in view of the fact that the vacancy rate is huge, one would expect things to balance out at a lower average price per square foot.

By the way, he mentioned something interesting. He said people who lease real estate in New York are allowed to lie about the square footage. Say you have a unit with about 1500 square feet of space. You can tell renters it’s 2500, and you can’t be sued. You can say you adjusted it to include the benefit of common spaces like the lobby or whatever. They call the additional pretend square footage “loss factor,” so they have an established, accepted term for lying to people. If you tried that in Florida, I think they would put you in prison.

If people don’t want to rent, how can landlords charge so much? Aren’t they destroying their own businesses? I could ask for a million dollars per month, but no one would bite, and if other people around me asked too much, eventually, the whole area would decline and turn into a slum. It could end up like Detroit, where you can buy a two-story house for a thousand dollars. Aren’t New York landlords concerned about this?

In a pre-move video, Rossmann said he was trying to think of things to tell his employees in order to get them to move to Texas. He said they would earn the same pay and spend way less for everything. He said he might help them move. Why wouldn’t they? I know there are psychotics out there who think Manhattan is paradise, and they wouldn’t move if the alternative was death, but why would any reasonable person choose Manhattan and living in a shoebox over San Antonio and having a house?

I still don’t understand how Americans are surviving. I’ve wondered about it for a couple of years. Where are they getting the money to pay their bills, with so many closed businesses? I know Trump and Biden gave us a few bucks off our income taxes, but it wasn’t much. I know we spent a few trillion on relief. Was it so much it kept America going? I don’t know. I’m not familiar with the figures.

Doesn’t the house of cards have to fall sooner or later? Have the basic laws of economics suddenly changed for no reason?

I bought big cans of pizza sauce a year or two back. About $7 per can, which was a big increase over $4 per can, which I had paid a couple of years earlier. This week, they cost $9.70 per can. This isn’t frou-frou stuff at Whole Foods. It’s grocery supply food, for business that think about profit and loss. The vendors can’t just mark it up because it’s chic. They have to try to keep prices down. What happened?

We all saw what happened to cereal boxes. General Mills and Kellogg’s made the boxes really thin while keeping the height and width the same. The boxes are so thin, they look like plaques.

It’s hard to pour cereal now because the boxes are so thin, the cereal can’t get out. You get a couple of bowls from a box, and you’re done. I’ve seen cereal for over $7 per box. This is sugary, low-production-cost garbage food people used to buy for $2.50. It’s not luxury food. It’s like Twinkies.

When things don’t make sense, there is a supernatural reason. That’s how the universe works. Economics no longer make sense because the apocalypse is here, and we are playing by the apocalypse’s rules. Prices go up and down. Shortages begin and end. None of it can be predicted, because spirits are pulling the strings.

I think we may see deflation soon. I know that sounds insane. It happens, though. It happened in 2007. I remember buying prime beef for $7.00 per pound. It seems to happen when reality sets in and people realize they can’t buy anything. Stuff sits on shelves, and prices drop. Maybe that will happen soon. People have loaded their credit cards to the breaking point because Americans have no common sense. Sooner or later, surely, they will have to stop.

Or will they? Maybe Biden will open the currency tap up like a fire hydrant in August, the value of money will go to nothing, and we’ll all be paper billionaires. It’s back door socialism. I save my money and pay my bills, and you sit around sucking up welfare and playing Grand Theft Auto. The government prints money and gives it to you so you will vote for candidates who give things away. My money is now worth less, the value went to you, and the government didn’t have to confiscate or tax anything.

I don’t know what to think. I am going to maintain my prayer life and not worry about myself or my wife. Other people, however, are a concern. What percentage of the world’s population is close enough to God to be safe? Perhaps one percent?

I keep asking God to end the world NOW. Just remove us. I don’t want to see any more fat, ugly old men dancing in thong panties for children. I don’t want to be here when President Harris giggles her way through the oath of office. I don’t want to see the next pandemic, which is 100% certain to come. We’ll get things that make coronavirus look like chickenpox.

I can understand why God is going to be so brutal during the tribulation. The truth is that there are a lot of people who really need to be killed. They are beyond redemption because of pride. They would stand in front of Jesus himself, with the gates of hell open behind them, and spit in his face instead of admitting fault and receiving his love. As Jesus said about Jews who rejected him, if people won’t listen to Moses and the prophets, they won’t listen to one who has returned from the dead. The Old Testament is all about Jesus, often very clearly.

Jesus isn’t the only person who has returned from the dead. It has happened to many people, and most people who hear their stories sneer and wave them off. What Jesus said is proven true every day.

I don’t want any part of the punishment of the proud. I want to be gone, along with everyone I love.

In other news, while I wait for the bus to heaven, I have been fiddling with cameras.

Years ago, in maybe 2006, I decided I wanted to learn to take better pictures, so I got me a Canon Rebel XT 350D and a couple of Sigma lenses. I took photos for a year or two and then tapered off. I don’t remember exactly what happened. Eventually, smartphones got to the point where I could take relatively nice photos, and when I used mine, I tried to do a good job.

Since I found my wife, I’ve had to think more about photography. On our first four trips, we got by with phones and cheesy action cameras, but we had some problems, and before our latest trip, I got a Sony mirrorless vlogging camera. This thing will shoot still photos or video, and it has a built-in zoom lens. It has some shortcomings, but it was worth the money because I got some priceless footage.

Right before the trip, I dug out the Rebel to see if I should take it with us. I thought it might be better for still shots than phones or the Sony. I didn’t have much time to make a decision, so I left the Rebel behind. Today I shot some photos with both cameras, and it seems pretty obvious that a dedicated still camera with lenses I can change is a worthwhile investment.

The Sony is nearly useless for really close up shots, and it’s very easy to make mistakes with it because it’s tiny, with tiny, complex controls. And I’m stuck with one lens which is intended for people who are very concerned with convenience and less concerned with image quality.

Why not use the Rebel? It still works. I certainly can. It produces beautiful pictures. The colors are not as nice as the ones that come out of the Sony, but that can be adjusted quickly with Photoshop Express.

Newer models, however, are better. More resolution for cropping, for example. Lighter. Better integration with new tech. And a new camera would shoot video, which the Rebel will not do.

I’m wondering whether I should get a newer Rebel body. I can keep my lenses.

If we start lugging a big DSLR around on our trips, we will pretty much have to start dividing the cargo business. As it is, I generally carry a backpack, and Rhodah flits around unburdened. This is one reason I lose weight on trips while she…doesn’t exactly do that. Creme brulee is another reason.

I talked to her about it today, and she thinks carrying a backpack would be a good move for her.

I didn’t make a strong effort to take good pictures today, since the purpose of my experiment was to test camera capabilities. Nonetheless, I took a couple of shots I really, really like. I edited them to make them more striking. You can see them below, 700 pixels wide. They look somewhat better with more pixels.

The second one is a lot better than the first, but it’s pretty good for something I shot in a few seconds to test a camera.

These are just quick photos I took in the yard, so I should be able to do very nice things with more effort, or with family photos.

That second flower is a terrible weed. The Spanish needle. Guess what its Linnaean classification is. “Bidens alba.” Funny. It products sharp, hard, needle-like sees that stick to your clothes like parasites. Interesting parallel.

It’s weird how a camera can make ugly things beautiful. I would not be ashamed to blow that second picture up and put it on the wall.

I may go for it. Life is short, and pictures are important. There are probably fewer than 25 pictures of me from my childhood, and there is zero video. My dad bought a Brownie movie camera and shot some film, but he didn’t take care of any of it, and it vanished. Can you believe that? Could we be any more dysfunctional? I don’t want my wife and kids to end up in the same situation. Actually, she already has. She was kind of a Cinderella as a child, so not many pictures.

Thinking it over. I may order a new body. In the meantime, I think I’ll take some more shots around the farm. Maybe I can eventually do some wildlife and non-wildlife (cow) photos.

Orwell and Santayana

Today I saw a neat video about Nazi Germany and the way it looted the wealth of the Jews. By “neat,” I mean interesting. I don’t think looting is neat, and my personal opinion, like that of God himself as well as many American legislators, is that burglars caught in the act should be shot without consequences. It’s too bad Jews couldn’t shoot the Germans who stole their stuff.

I say “Germans,” meaning Germans and Austrians in general, not just Nazis. After the anschluss, Austrians were considered Germans, if memory serves, and not all of the looters were Nazis. Some were just there for the fun and the free stuff. And not all of them were German or inside Germany. A lot of Europeans of other nationalities got in on the action.

I’ll embed the video here. It came from Yad Vashem, the Holocaust-remembrance organization.

So what’s so interesting?

The apocalypse has started, and we see new signs of it every day. One sign: increased crime. Another sign: increased persecution of Christians (both real and nominal) and Jews. When I write about this, I usually mention something God revealed to me: the spirit behind all this is the spirit of antichrist.

It may sound weird to say the spirit of antichrist would go after the Jews, who are widely perceived as detractors (to put it mildly) of Yeshua. It’s not weird at all. In the Bible, the Jewish people are often conflated with Yeshua. There is at least one passage in which the word calls Yeshua “Israel.” The Jews were intended to be the body of Yeshua on Earth, and in the beginning, all believers in Yeshua were Jews, as was Yeshua himself.

Antisemitic Christians forget that Christianity is a sort of extension of Judaism. Even if it is not quite Judaism, it is the newest phase of the process that resulted in Judaism, created exclusively through Jews and headed by a manifestation of God who is, himself, a Jew. If you’re a Christian, you worship a Jew.

I think most Jews would not want to hear it, but the Jews are responsible for the existence of Christianity. If it hadn’t been for a small group of Jewish men who spread the good news 2000 years ago, facing brutal persecution that included murder and other types of physical abuse, there would be no Christianity. A lot of Jews have been treated badly by Christians, and they have a right to complain, but their ancestors established the faith they don’t like. Without Jews, it would never have started. It has nothing to do with any other religion.

As far as we know, Jews wrote the entire New Testament. It is, without possibility of contradiction, a Jewish work.

Regardless of the current state of relations between God and Jews, they are still special to him, and they play an important part in the future. Many will recognize their messiah and serve him, and Yeshua will be glorified. Satan doesn’t want that. When Satan gets idiots to pick on the Jews, he is trying to thwart God’s plans to establish the kingdom of Yeshua on Earth. He is trying to put an end to God’s plans so he can replace God’s scheme with his alternative. “Anti” means “instead of.”

The Bible is full of repetitive patterns. The universe is governed by certain supernatural principles, so when man behaves this way or that way, regardless of the era, similar things happen. We are now seeing events that are reminiscent of the fall of Sodom and Gomorrah as well as the ascent of Hitler.

If you watched the video, you saw the speaker talk about the way looting worked in Germany. He said Germans were taught that Jews had great wealth and that it had been stolen from Germans, so when Germans stole from Jews, they were really recovering their own stolen property.

Does this sound familiar at all?

How many times, during the last 10 years, have you seen American leftists say white people live on stolen land? Even blacks are saying it, which is weird, because blacks never had a claim to anything in the New World. If our real estate is stolen, so is theirs, but this is a point leftists don’t seem inclined to address.

What is happening in retail businesses across America? Looting. Where else have we seen this? If Jewish lore is to be believed, it happened in Sodom and Gomorrah. A merchant would arrive, and locals would descend as a mob, each taking one small item. The merchant’s wealth would be stolen in its entirety, but no one could be punished because each crime was so small.

In America, mobs of mostly-black people are swarming stores, cleaning out shelves, and store owners and the police are doing virtually nothing. In many areas, you can now walk into Home Depot or Nordstrom, fill your arms with expensive loot, and walk out. And what happens if you’re arrested? Bail “reform” may put you back on the street within hours, so you can resume stealing. After that, the charges are likely to be dismissed. Like the sodomites, we have effectively made theft legal.

In the video, you will see photos of the destruction Germans inflicted on Jewish property. They did exactly the same thing our modern mobs are doing. People who were raised to be law-abiding suddenly forgot their objections to stealing, and they cleaned out stores and other buildings, including homes.

In another video from Yad Vashem, the actions of German businesses are discussed. According to the video, at first, German companies were not all that interested in harming the Jews. Eventually, though, the government started trumping up charges and threatening businesses with prosecution. Things went better for business that purged Jewish employees. Also, business owners who saw that other business owners were looting Jewish property got in on it not out of a desire to harm Jews but out of fear they would miss out on an economic windfall that helped their less-scrupulous competitors.

Does any of this sound familiar? Consider all the conservatives who have been indicted and prosecuted for things they didn’t do, or for things for which Democrats are not prosecuted. Tom DeLay. Newt Gingrich. Trump. Paul Manafort. Michael Flynn. Roger Stone. Sarah Palin was sued out of office, and she did nothing wrong. Trump’s lawyer went to prison. His associates are being charged now. A bunch of overexcited protesters who participated in a minor riot at the Capitol are now getting sentences as high as 18 years, while the criminals who tried to murder Kyle Rittenhouse on camera have never been charged. In fact, the state treated them like victims.

If you’re a leftist, you can literally set a cop on fire with a Molotov cocktail and go home and sleep in your own bed, but if you’re conservative and you fail to register as a foreign agent, which is a trivial, obscure, and highly technical violation of laws most foreign agents ignore, you can be put in federal prison.

Alec Baldwin killed a woman and shot another person in front of witnesses, negligently, and at the moment, he is free, and criminal charges against him have been dismissed. Could that happen to Jon Voight or Gary Sinise?

I guess there are people who think I’m nuts for comparing the systematic, deliberate persecution of conservatives to the Nuremberg laws and Kristallnacht, but to an unbiased eye, the parallels are undeniable and strong.

I have given up on the world. I keep praying for God to send Jesus ASAP. I’m sorry people will have to go through the tribulation, but they’re doomed to go through it whether Christians are here or not, and I don’t want God’s children to have to put up with the hyenas and piranha any longer. I don’t think it’s worth it. We are accomplishing nearly nothing, and persecution is ramping up very quickly. It is no longer possible for a real Christian to live a normal life and raise children in the West. I have no idea how my wife and I are supposed to have a family here.

I never thought I’d see a day when decent people in the United States would have to run from purple-haired freaks who mutilate their bodies and worship demons. That day is here, and it arrived some time ago. People who think it hasn’t are in a state of deep delusion.

I suppose the Jews are in for more abuse and suffering than anyone, because the vast majority of them will not be prepared for the rapture, which is for the body of Yeshua and those who have not made an informed decision to reject him. Once Christians are gone, leftists will be able to focus their attention on Jews, and God has already shown he is willing to allow terrible things to happen to people who reject the messiah. He didn’t stop the Nazis, so there is no reason to think he will stop their spiritual descendants.

The nutty thing about Yad Vashem’s videos is that they feature commentators who are almost certainly leftist. I saw one video that featured a far-left American academic known for his fiercely anti-Israel blather. How stupid can you be, to lose something like a third of your people, strive to establish a safe homeland surrounded by murderous enemies, and then try to support your goals by giving voices to those who seek your destruction?

The Jews have a new religion: leftism. Their new God treats them very badly, but they keep washing his feet with their tears and drying them with their hair. I doubt the guy in the video about looting has any idea he’s describing not just Nazis, but modern leftists he probably supports. Jews worry about antisemitism from conservatives, when we’re actually the only powerful friends they have. Meanwhile, they promote leftists who are actively trying to destroy their homeland! They are the most politically-suicidal people in history.

Spared

In case anyone cares, Hurricane Idalia came and went and did nearly nothing in my county. God was kind.

It was an interesting few days.

Even though I am in an area which has never experienced a true hurricane, we do get winds high enough to make a real mess. They don’t push houses over or throw cars around, but they can down enough trees to result in a cleanup effort that lasts months. Also, because I lived and owned houses in Miami, where hurricanes hit with their full force, I am conditioned to stress myself while observing the progress of storms. I know what it is to go days without running water and weeks without power.

If you own commercial property, or you own a home that’s part of a bigger common structure, hurricanes aren’t much of a problem for you. It’s hard for winds to damage warehouses and condos. A house is another story. Houses are built and landscaped stupidly, as though daring hurricanes to come through and ruin people’s lives.

It wasn’t until surprisingly recently that Florida had quasi-intelligent building codes for houses, and it still hasn’t caught up with regard to landscaping. You can build a house with 100-foot-tall trees 5 feet from the eaves, and no one will bat an eye.

Should the government be involved in telling you what kind of trees you can have, at your own risk? No, but people should be using common sense without the government’s involvement.

The house I live in now had a 40-foot maple tree about 15 feet from the garage when I moved in. Lightning killed it soon after I arrived, but I probably would have left it in place had it not been destroyed by nature. I should have planned to get rid of it as soon as I saw it.

I still have some big, feeble trees within falling distance of my house and shop. I’m considering hiring a company to come in and knock them all over so I can move them. They’re going to fall on their own sooner or later, with or without hurricanes, so I might as well get ahead of them. For $4500, I can get a whole day of work from a crew with some pretty impressive machinery.

The guy who built this house did some surprisingly stupid things. I guess the trees I have to get rid of now looked neat when they were smaller and stronger, and his wife probably insisted on leaving them where they were.

I’ve learned some things about tree removal. First, never pay a tree service. Tree services use wimpy tools to peck at large problems. A couple of outdoorsy-looking ladies who run a local service tried to charge me $800 to fell one oak without bucking or removing it. This would have been a 10-minute job. If I had to pay them to fell the other trees I don’t like, I suppose I would be looking at a $10,000 bill. That’s ridiculous. For $4500, I can get 8 hours of tree destruction, along with all sorts of trimming, ground grooming, and rock removal.

The $800 tree ended up costing me $0 to move. It was a tall oak that had broken about 30 feet up. The top part of of it got caught in another tree, so the top was resting horizontally on the other tree, waiting to fall on me if I cut the trunk.

I took a fishing pole and cast a weight over the horizontal part. I used the line to pull a heavier line over the tree. Eventually, I had a tow strap and a chain attached to the tree, and I attached it to the tractor and yanked the tree down. Zero risk of injury and equipment damage. I used a chainsaw to get rid of the stump and waste wood, and that was that.

I like paying other people to do certain types of jobs, but if you’re going to yank my chain with an $800 bid for a job that will take you 10 minutes, I’m going to get creative and send you home with nothing. If these ladies had offered to do it for $250, they would have gotten my business, and I would have called them for all my future work. As it is, they will have to find comfort in the hollow victory of refusing to get realistic with their rosy pricing schedule.

I’m considering buying an excavator. I can get a decent one for $30,000. I wouldn’t buy a new one, because buying new equipment is stupid for amateurs and most professionals. An excavator would allow me to push most problem trees over, and I could also move trunks with it. I could remove all the annoying boulders in the yard and sell them for landscaping. I could pull stumps out quickly and easily. I could fix problems with soil distribution. I could build and repair berms and do light grading.

Biden and BRICS are probably going to destroy the dollar, so putting $30,000 into a machine that depreciates at a glacial pace is smarter than keeping the money in the bank. And who knows? I might even be able to make some money with an excavator if I had to.

I’ve pretty much decided that small landowners who don’t grow crops need two machines: a track loader, often misgendered as a skid steer, and a small excavator. A skid steer is a track loader with wheels. It’s not as good. It tears up the ground, for one thing.

A track loader can do everything a tractor can do except for farming, which I don’t do, and it does everything much, much better. It can lift at least twice as much for the same size machine. It can run bigger attachments. It can rip out stumps a tractor can’t budge. It can lift huge loads when rigged with a fork.

A track loader comes with a cage that protects the operator. A tractor will let things fall on you and kill you.

Track loaders cost more than tractors, but you get what you pay for.

I don’t need a track loader nearly as much as I need an excavator. The tractor, for all its shortcomings, does a whole lot of things reasonably well, and I improved it a lot by modifying it. If I can move soil, tear out stumps and rocks, and remove most trees with an excavator, it will be worth its weight in gold.

I’m always thinking of adding a building to hold stuff I don’t want to park in the rain. Problem: trees and rocks are in the way. With an excavator, I could clear the land myself, pretty easily.

As for Idalia, it made a big mess up the coast. I looked at videos of buildings besieged by storm surge, and it was disheartening.

The brutal truth is that most people who got flooded asked for it. It’s possible to build things on concrete stilts or raised mounds of fill, and people don’t do it, even though the cost of flooding is much greater than the cost of building correctly.

News stations always try to terrify us with claims that 12-foot storm surges are on the way. They’re not telling the whole truth.

First of all, the first three or four feet of surge only get the water up to the level of the ground in most of Florida, so those feet don’t count. Second, the worst storm surge I ever heard of in real life occurred during Andrew, and it was around 8 feet. This is a big deal if you’re right by the water and you built stupidly, but if you’re inland or you built correctly, it’s not a major problem.

If you go watch surge videos, you’ll generally see water coming up one to two feet on the sides of buildings very close to the water. Very bad, but not what the news nuts predicted. To listen to them, you would think houses were going to sink in up to their eaves. Real castastrophic, house-high storm surge is pretty unusual. You can find videos of it hitting places like the Bahamas, and it’s totally different from typical mainland Florida storm surge.

What they want you to think storm surge is like:

What it’s really like most of the time:

If you go on the web, you will see ridiculous stories claiming Katrina produced 28 feet of storm surge. Actual highest recorded value: 11.4 feet. Momentary waves aren’t storm surge. Flash floods from rain aren’t storm surge. Storm surge is standing water with a height that changes gradually. If 28 feet of water had gone across Mobile, it would no longer exist.

To Florida people, hurricanes are a lot like skin cancer. Except for melanoma, skin cancers are about as dangerous as hangnails, and you can cure them yourself with a can of computer dust spray and a Q-tip, in about two minutes. Floridians don’t get upset about them, but Yankees who get tiny basal cell carcinomas cut out have the gall to call themselves cancer survivors. As for storm surge, people who aren’t from Florida wave their arms and become incontinent when it’s mentioned, but most of the time, for at least 99% of the state, it’s not that bad.

I’m about 90 feet above sea level, I’m not in a flood plain (I checked before buying), and I’m in a place hurricane-force winds can’t reach. If I get my trees fixed up, hurricanes will mean nearly nothing to me. They don’t mean a whole lot now.

It’s terrible to see that people in Florida’s internal corner got surge flooding, but this is something you have to expect when you build a certain way. It’s not merely possible; it’s certain to happen sooner or later. It doesn’t make any sense to complain as though you had been hit by a meteor. You knew it was coming when you decided not to elevate your building.

I’m glad the storm is over, because I didn’t need any more stress after a 30-hour-long trip from Singapore. The flights alone accounted for about 24 hours, and the seats were like bricks situated under vises. The bricks pulverized my tailbone, and the armrests squeezed my arms against me. I made the mistake of buying exit row seats, and apparently, the seat bottoms are even less forgiving than the ones in the other coach seats. I was in real pain a lot of the time. A seat you can live with for three hours may seem a lot different after 10.

I think I also had coronavirus, which added to the suffering. I didn’t have a fever, a runny nose, a sore throat, or loss of my sense of smell, but I had a generally crummy feeling accompanied by the speedy and continuous accumulation of disturbing things in my nostrils. My wife had congestion and some throat problems, so I think I probably caught some of it, too. I wouldn’t have suspected anything had she not been sick.

Watching a storm approach is always draining, and combined with my other problems, it made for several unpleasant days during which I could not fully let go and recover from the trip. It was a little perfect storm that was reluctant to let go. Now I’m finally unwinding.

I Definitely Picked the Wrong Week to Stop Sniffing Glue

The Cone of Certain Death is once again upon me.

Before I went to Hong Kong and Singapore, I prayed repeatedly that God would keep hurricanes away from my house while I was gone. He came through. Now, three days after my return home, we are getting the usual pre-storm hype. MAJOR Hurricane Idalia is BARRELING DOWN on me, and doom is assured.

I never pay any attention to the Panic…I mean “Weather” Channel. I don’t listen to the TV nuts. I watch the NHC site and keep track of changes in the forecast paths and the expected width of the storms. Right now, things are looking good. I am completely outside the area where the eye of the storm is expected to go, by maybe 75 miles, and the path updates are trending westward, away from me.

When Irma hit in 2017, the remains of storm went pretty much right over my house, and a lot of trees went down. This time, the storm is going to be very far away. My best guess is that I won’t get much wind at all.

The wind forecasts over at Accuweather are disturbing but probably wrong by a wide margin. They’re calling for sustained winds of 55 mph at some point. I think that’s way off, based on about 30 years of observing storms and forecasts. Last year, a storm passed by, and I noticed a breeze of maybe 10 mph at the exact time the forecasters were claiming 50. It was amazing to watch. How can you keep a 50-mph forecast on your site when you know perfectly well you’re 40 mph off?

My theory is that they lie deliberately in order to cover their butts and increase ratings. Scared people keep their TV’s on.

It’s dismaying to live in a state with tropical weather problems and to know that the people I rely on to inform me are very nearly worthless.

People who don’t live in Florida like to tell me I live in a hurricane zone. Insurance people like it more than anyone. Thing is, hurricane winds have never been recorded where I live. I looked it up. You can’t say you’ve been in a hurricane unless there was at least one minute during which the wind never dropped below 74 mph. That does not happen here.

We barely get tropical storm winds, which start at 39 mph.

Forecasters deliberately conflate gusts with sustained winds. You can have hurricane-speed gusts without clearing the hurricane bar. It’s normal to have brief blasts of high winds when you’re not really experiencing a hurricane. Still, forecasters love to talk about the gusts and play down the low sustained winds, which are what actually count.

They are predicting tropical storm winds from around 7 a.m. to about 1 p.m. I will be amazed if we get them at all.

Accuweather is reporting a hurricane warning for my area. A watch is when you MAY get a hurricane. A warning is when you WILL get a hurricane. The warning here started yesterday at 5 p.m. and ends tonight at 1:15. Someone explain that to me. How can they be sure a hurricane will hit, when they, themselves, say it won’t? Why did the warning start a day and a half before the high winds were expected?

The storm won’t even be here by 1:15, so how can the warning end then? Whatever arrives will get here tomorrow morning at about 7.

I need to check the definitions. Here they are, from the NHC:

Hurricane Watch
A Hurricane Watch is issued when sustained winds of 74 mph or higher are POSSIBLE within the specified area of the Watch. Because hurricane preparedness activities become difficult once winds reach tropical storm force, the Watch is issued 48 hours in advance of the onset of tropical storm force winds.

Hurricane Warning
A Hurricane Warning is issued when sustained winds of 74 mph or higher are EXPECTED somewhere within the specified area of the Warning. Because hurricane preparedness activities become difficult once winds reach tropical storm force, the Warning is issued 36 hours in advance of the onset of tropical storm force winds.

Let’s see. A hurricane warning is issued 36 hours in advance of the onset of tropical storm force winds. So, if hurricane winds had been expected, that would have been 7 p.m. yesterday, which is later than 5 p.m. So 34 hours, not 36? Why? And hurricane winds were never expected, so why post the warning at all?

Am I wrong, or are they ignoring their own rules?

Okay, here is what’s certain: there will be no hurricane here. Period. Count on it. It just does not happen.

Here is what is extremely likely: we will not get a tropical storm here. We might, but we probably will not. If we do, it almost certainly won’t last long, because hurricanes are more or less circular, and circles are small far from their centers. I will be far from the center. The region of high winds that passes over me will be small, if it exists at all. Because it will be small, it will pass over quickly.

There is a small possibility we will get worse winds than I expect, along with a bunch of downed trees. That looks like the worst case, unless tornadoes count. You have to be really cursed to get hit by a tornado. They are not common during hurricanes.

It’s good that I’m on the east side of the storm, with a coast between me and the eye. The only possible high winds will be from the south and west, and they will have to go over land to get here. On the down side, I have some big trees to the south of my workshop.

I haven’t prepared at all except to get some water. I can bathe in the pool and use the water to flush the toilets. I can drive to get food if the power goes out. Not much can be done.

I have ingredients for pizza.

I prayed about the storm, and I cursed it and so on. I think God told me there was no reason to get involved in preparation, so I’m relaxing. Tomorrow we’ll find out if I’m hearing from God or just lazy and prone to believing what I want.

As for the rest of the state, things look good. Forecasters are certain it will hit land north of me and east of the panhandle. In other words, it will strike an area where very few people live. Not comforting to the inhabitants, but it’s better than seeing Fort Lauderdale slammed.

Here’s some idiocy from The Drudge Report’s leftist owners:

Honestly, it’s like they sleep on rubber sheets.