They Should Make a Cargo Drone

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

She really said that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What if you can’t start the saw?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can’t hurt.

Guess I better get out there and cut things.

Burning Stuff Shouldn’t be This Hard

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

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

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

Now what do I do with the day?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She grinned. She thought her remark was funny.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s not going to get better.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Look at this scripture from 1 Kings 9:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is There Anything it Can’t do?

The last couple of days have been pretty good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I can also practice law.

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

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

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

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

Two new plugs are on the way from Amazon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good knives are fun. Concealed carry is fun.

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

I feel like buying another rifle.

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

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

Is Florida the New California?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is what the commenter said:

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

I will respond.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

18 Hours of Electricity

This must be what the rapture feels like.

What is the rapture? A sudden translation to a place where your problems are instantly ended.

Last night I slept on clean sheets in an air-conditioned room, after a long, hot shower, and today I got up and ate eggs fried in butter, two big slices of toast made from homemade bread, and three slabs of Tennessee Pride sausage. And not I’m sitting in a leather recliner, thinking about how great I feel.

This is much better than yesterday. I almost had to bathe in the freezing 70-degree pool. I had to work on our generator with no running water to wash my hands. We had no air conditioning. Most restaurants were closed. There was no gas.

What a difference.

When I was young, I took things like electricity and cars for granted. I am not like that any more. Sometimes when I’m driving down the road, I tell God how amazed I am. I’m doing 70 miles per hour. It’s 95 degrees outside, and the inside of the car is at 69 degrees. I’m in the shade. I’m sitting on leather upholstery. If I want, I can have the great musical artists of the last hundred years sing and play for me.

That’s pretty wild if you think about it. Three generations back, the only way to travel faster than 7 miles per hour was to board a train. Nobody had air conditioning. There were almost no recordings.

I thank God constantly for dishwashers, clothes washers, and dryers. You shove your stuff in and walk away, and your electric slave does the work for you, better than you could.

My grandmother was an educated woman with a wealthy husband, and she had to wash 6 people’s dishes and dirty underwear. When I was little, she had a washing machine with a wringer on it. Imagine standing on your porch running your family’s used underwear through one of those with your bare hands.

I’ll be honest. She had a lady who came in and helped, but I doubt that took care of all the laundry. Granny did make my mom and her sisters do chores, though.

Anyway, somebody was washing other people’s dirty underwear.

My grandmother had washboards. She had one in her house when she died in 2003.

In Zambia, my wife used to bathe in a bucket a lot of the time. The Zambian power grid is not great.

I always ask God not to take wonderful things away from us.

I eat homemade bread because my wife hates American bread. I can’t say I blame her. The white stuff has no taste, and the brown stuff is like eating a welcome mat. I showed my wife how to make my white bread recipe, and now she’s happy.

Bread probably costs us $1.50 a loaf, and I have never had anything that compares with it, anywhere. It’s so good, I have considered making it worse so I don’t eat so much of it.

I was only without power for a day, but today I feel like royalty. Appreciate what you have while you have it.

The comedian W.C. Fields was on his own when he was a kid. He left home at 11. He found himself a hole in the ground and put a cover on it. For a while, that was where he slept. When he was old, he still got excited about beds and clean sheets. He described the feeling of settling down in a clean bed. He said, “God____, that’s a sensation!”
And he was rich.

I think about that every time I go to bed.

When I was a kid, and I didn’t have something someone similarly situated had, I thought God was unjust. I don’t feel that way now. I feel pampered, because I am. I don’t care if the guy across the street has a hundred times what I do. My life is great.

The natural thing is to become spoiled when God gives you things. That’s a choice you make. You can choose to become more grateful. The Bible shows that God punishes the spoiled.

If you have good health, a clean, safe, quiet, pleasant home, good food, good clothing, people who love you, and God, you are rich. It’s true. It’s not just something to put on a greeting card.

This is all true and wonderful, but now I have to fix the tractor and move the downed trees and branches from my yard.

Well. A lot of people don’t have a tractor or a yard.

HOT WATER!

We just spent almost 24 hours without electricity. It was harrowing. Imagine a whole day without a power recliner.

No one is wondering, but anyway, I’ll give a sitrep. Things are okay here. The storm actually nearly almost lived up to its potential until maybe 5 a.m., and then it disappeared.

This is not what they predicted. We were supposed to have winds of 28 or 34 mph right now, depending on which Chicken Little gave the forecast.

I hate doing without power, but I am too cheap to buy a real generator big enough to run the house. We have had two short outages in 7 years, so figure $2500 per outage to keep the power on. It’s a lot of money to pay to avoid two or three baths in the pool and throwing out some freezer-burned meat.

While I was out and about today, I saw quite a few wires on the ground, some under trees, so I started to wonder if we were going to get power back this week. I went to WaWa and bought about 6 gallons of no-ethanol gas for my generator. I was lucky to get the gas. I just drove about 40 miles looking for more, and it was nowhere to be found.

I hadn’t been planning to use the generator, but we both wanted to take showers, and the water heater and pump need electricity.

I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get the generator going. I did all the right things when I put it away, but small engines are cursed.

Sure enough, when I put a quart of gas in it to test it, it would not run. I took the pull cord assembly off and cranked it with a drill, and it still would not run.

I started going through the procedures. I decided to check the fuel valve, and I found that no fuel was going through it. I started trying to take it off, and it turned out to be really obstinate. I started to wonder if I was wasting my time. Maybe the gas wasn’t deep enough in the tank.

I thought that, and then I thought, “It has to be deep enough. I can see the drain below the surface of the gas.” But I tilted the generator anyway, and gas ran out of the valve.

I could not believe it. The generator will not run unless it has maybe a gallon of gas in it OR you tilt it.

China.

I must have spent two hours trying to make it run, and there was nothing wrong with it.

I had to cannibalize two cords from my tools to make a cord to hook the generator up to the house. I have a bunch of 50-amp welding sockets in my shop, so I made what I call a San Francisco cord. It’s male on both ends. One 50-amp plug goes into my 50-to-30 adaptor, which came with a welder, and the other goes to an extension cord, which goes to a wall socket. Worked perfectly, but I had to order two new plugs.

I got the generator going for one reason: I knew that two things were true.

If fix generator, power come back on right away.

If not fix generator, power come back on in a week.

This is how the universe works. I fixed the generator, and two or three hours later, we had power.

The generator is small; 5500 watts. As I recall, it was the only one I could get before Hurricane Irma went by us. Until today, I had never used it to power the house. I used it to run welders before I installed new wiring in the shop.

Today we learned it will run one water heater, the pump, the lights, and the refrigerators and freezers. It seemed unhappy when my wife took a shower, but it didn’t quit.

Should I get a bigger one? I can get one with about twice the capacity from Harbor Freight, and it will have electric start. I could spring for a real generator that runs on propane and powers both air conditioners, but I don’t think I will.

Bigger generator. Not bigger wife.

I live in what may be the greatest neighborhood on Earth.

When Irma came through, and I was going crazy with looking after my dad and moving from Miami with no help, a tree fell across our driveway in the same place where one fell last night. We had to drive around it while I tried to find a saw. It was almost impossible to get one, even online.

A day or two after the storm, someone cut and moved the tree, inside our gate. They trespassed to do us a favor. People we had never met.

This morning, I walked outside–frankly, I was looking for a place to answer nature’s call, because I didn’t want to carry a Home Depot bucket to the bathroom to flush the toilet–and I saw a grapple tractor in my gate.

My neighbor was driving it, and he started asking where he should cut it and move it. Like it was his job.

I talked to him for a minute and said I would get dressed and come back to help. He said he would probably be done before I got back. Sure enough, he was.

Today I told my wife that if a neighbor came onto my property in Miami after a hurricane, it would be to steal my generator. My neighbors here practice what I call reverse vandalism.

This was a $1000 job, minimum, and he did it for nothing. I could have done it myself with my compact tractor, and I will have to finish it myself, but it was a very nice thing to do.

I don’t know what’s going on down south. I know it’s bad, but I haven’t been able to watch the news today, so I am out of the loop. I spent a lot of time praying last night because I couldn’t sleep. I hope it helped.

Milton exceeded my expectations. It maintained hurricane-force winds all the way to the east coast. On the other hand, the storm surge was wildly overestimated.

I wish we lived in the kind of country where the president would lead us in prayer before natural disasters, using the name of Jesus. We would see great results.

At least we have DeSantis.

I’m really excited. I’m going to take a hot shower. What a luxury. Right now I smell like Antifa.

Never think you don’t have it good. If you have a pleasant home, a car, air conditioning, a dishwasher, laundry machines, and hot running water, you have luxuries that would have astonished people throughout most of man’s history.

November Can’t Come Soon Enough

Here we are at about Milton minus 13 hours.

Before I write about how good things look, of course, I have to mention the fact that many other people are not so fortunately situated.

Anyway, here is the news, as I understand it.

This morning, I found a Jacksonville station with a meteorologist who, I sense, may be fed up with the hysteria. He provided what seemed to be a calm, factual forecast. That’s a rarity. I assume he’ll be disciplined. He is an insult to the Anderson Cooper stand-in-a-flooded-ditch school of hurricane coverage.

He said the hurricane part of the hurricane was only 30 miles wide. People don’t understand how big Florida is. The driving distance from Key West to Pensacola is about 830 miles. This means hurricane-force winds will only hit something like 4% of the state’s coast.

California is shorter than Florida.

They expect the storm’s center to hit Sarasota. That’s 140 miles from here. That means the hurricane-force field will end something like 125 miles from me, and at the edge, it will be Category 1, not Category 4. A hurricane’s strongest area is the eye wall, pretty close to the center of rotation. The winds drop quickly as you get away from it.

They think the maximum sustained winds will be about 125 mph, so that’s the eye wall. At the edge of the storm’s windy part, how strong will the winds be? Simple. About 74 mph. That’s the figure used to define hurricane-force winds. If the hurricane-force area has an outer edge, the winds there must be doing about 74, and they will be lower just past it.

So 125 miles from me, sustained winds will be at about 74 mph, and they will drop off over the 125-mile distance between the edge and me. Also, the winds will have to cross about 70 miles of wooded land with hills to get to me.

The threat of tropical storm winds is iffy here as of the moment. That means we may not get sustained winds of 39 mph. They are predicting 28. That’s at tree-top level. On the ground, it will be lower.

I don’t care too much about gusts. A good gust can do damage, but it can’t compare to a nasty sustained wind that slowly pulls roofs off.

Hysterical forecasters love conflating sustained winds with gusts. They’re saying we may get winds of 60 mph. Well, sure. We get those during thunderstorms sometimes. For a few seconds. No one cares about those. Sustained winds define a storm.

They keep saying we’ll get TROPICAL-STORM-FORCE WINDS because we are sure to get brief gusts. That appears to be a lie; a deliberate prevarication intended to get people excited. You can’t have a tropical-storm-force gust. It would be like having a year-long decade. If the wind isn’t sustained for at least 60 seconds, it’s not a tropical-storm-force wind, no matter how strong it is. It’s a gust.

Meteorologists, even the ones hired for their looks, know the difference between a gust and a tropical storm. They shouldn’t lie.

I’ve never seen anyone but me call them on this huge and obvious lie.

Based on what I see now, we are headed for something like Helene, which means I could lose a few trees. The ground is wetter this time, so more trees could fall. Nothing bad is likely to happen near the buildings. I might lose power, but the odds are with me. The power company has been really aggressive about trimming trees since Irma, and a guy who works for them lives on my street, so we get priority.

I have several trees that have to go, so if Milton pushes them over, I’ll be thrilled. It will save me the work of felling them. Bucking trees is easier and safer than felling them. It takes no skill.

The pool got a bit gross due to our recent trip, but I have been fixing it up in case we have to bathe in it or use the water to flush toilets. Other than that, a power outage shouldn’t be too bad. I guess I should run to Walmart and get some ice for the cooler.

I haven’t bothered with the generator. I guess I should have. It could keep a ceiling fan, the refrigerators, and a water heater going. But I would have to get up every 6 hours to feed it. It may be ready to run, because I cleaned it up after the last time I used it, but I know better than to assume a small engine will work just because I take care of it. Gas is just too screwed up these days.

I learned that the only way to keep small engines going in a situation where there are long layoffs is to put oil in the gas tanks and run it through the carbs. I haven’t done that with the generator.

This is not a typical storm. Yesterday, the sun was bright and there was almost no rain. It was like a normal day. Ordinarily, the two days before a hurricane are gloomy, with an ominous feel. Today is more typical. It’s overcast and drizzly, and there is a light breeze.

They think we will get the worst of it after midnight. The nice thing there is that if the power goes out while we sleep, we may sleep the whole night. If the power went off earlier, the house would heat up and make sleep difficult. Heat makes it hard to fall asleep, but it’s not likely to wake a person up.

I just looked at the 11 a.m. cone, and while the overall wind field seems to be spreading, the hurricane area looks smaller, and the winds are dropping, as expected. The landfall area seems to have shifted south a little, which is good for me if true.

The storm is speeding up, which is great. It’s moving at 17 mph. The faster it moves, the less damage it will do, and the sooner life will resume.

It will be a bad couple of weeks for the people south of Tampa. I keep praying God will push the storm farther south to areas where there aren’t many people.

If you want to see some really stupid, uninformed, dangerous reporting, go look at the site of the British “newspaper,” The Guardian. It’s a left-wing rag, so no surprise. They say Milton has been called “the storm of the century.” Yes, by The Guardian.

They say there will be “up to” 15-foot storm surge in Tampa. No, there won’t. Where did they hear that? Tampa is outside the maximum surge area.

They’re making it sound like Milton is still a 160-mph storm. Off by 15, Fleet Street.

Publix and Winn-Dixie are closed today. The Postal Service is still delivering. Walmart is open. It will be open tomorrow, too, along with everything else. It’s not the end of the world.

This morning I learned that DeSantis was within a couple of miles of me yesterday.

North of me, about 5 minutes away, there is a facility called the Florida Horse Park. I don’t know much about it. It probably covers a hundred acres. For weeks, it has been covered with things like generators and powered lifts. It looks like there are hundreds of them. I thought somebody had rented the park, and they were selling these things.

Turns out it’s a staging area for hurricane relief. The tools at the park will be dispatched to help people. It’s amazing.

It’s very nice to be so close to it. They can have machinery here in less time than it takes to make toast over a can of Sterno.

DeSantis made a speech there yesterday. I wish I had known. We would have been there. We drove right by it. It’s a few hundred yards from the dump.

Speaking of dumps, DeSantis ordered them to stay open around the clock, and some local goofballs tried to close one. This was in Pinellas County, which, for practical purposes, is greater Tampa. It’s full of stuff that needs to be disposed of, partly to prevent it from going airborne tomorrow. They locked the gate used by public vehicles to dump storm debris. In response, a state trooper used a truck to destroy the gate, with the governor’s approval. Man, I love this guy.

Pinellas officials are lying, saying the facility was open, but news outlets clearly say the dump was not accepting storm debris, in an area recently pounded by two storms. Yesterday, even after the gates were opened, the line to dump debris was three hours long.

Our local dump isn’t supposed to be open on Tuesday, but Big Ron made it happen, so we dropped some trash.

In an amusing side note, Biden says DeSantis has been great with hurricane efforts, thus preemptively kneecapping any efforts Kamala Harris and Tim Walz hoped to make, to libel DeSantis and Republicans in general. There is speculation Biden is trying to kill the Harris campaign.

He doesn’t like Harris–who does?–and he deeply resents being kicked off the ticket. I don’t think he cares about our country. I believe he’s completely self-centered, so even if he really thinks leftism is best for America, he might be willing to torpedo the Democrat who replaced him and put Donald Trump in office.

Stories imply Harris has been trying to work with DeSantis as though she were president, and some say DeSantis has not been receptive. That’s understandable. He wants her to lose, and Joe Biden is the president. Biden may be senile, but he is still managing relief and preparation efforts, so why give Harris a chance to grandstand and virtue-signal?

“This was a middle-class hurricane, and LGBTQQIP2SAA BIPOC’s were disproportionately affected…”

Biden just told the world he and Kamala have worked together on all of his decisions as president, so now she can’t distance herself from his stench. That had to be a deliberate jab. Biden knew she was conning the world, pretending she would have done a better job.

I don’t know what to do today and tomorrow, apart from intercession for the people on the west coast. Guess I’ll be eating the inevitable Pop Tarts and hoping the air conditioning keeps working.

Yes, Mr. Reeves, You Are

Is it hubris for a guy who never served in the military, worked in law enforcement, or became a firearms instructor to second-guess semi-famous gun gurus? Because I do it.

It’s not hubris. You don’t have to be a genius to know when someone is obviously wrong.

Here’s another interesting thing: you can be a cop (even SWAT) or a Navy SEAL with two tours in miserable Islamic strongholds or an NRA-certified instructor and still be full of opinions that conflict with reality. Also, there is a reason why people don’t get promoted in the military or law enforcement. You don’t want to put much stock in what people who ended their careers near the bottom say, unless they have other credits that prove their expertise in the areas in which they profess to be expert.

I worked as an armorbearer in a big church, and we walked around with firearms under our shirts. It was probably stupid of me to join. Our leaders were two ex-military guys: Army and Air Force. The Army guy said he had been a miltary narc for 4 years, and the Air Force guy helped maintain planes, if I recall correctly, and also did air traffic control.

I was not working under Douglas MacArthur and Curtis LeMay. I was working under two guys I liked a lot, who had never gotten to do heavy thinking or command a lot of people.

Eventually, I noticed they made bad decisions pretty often, and there were important, fundamental concepts they did not seem to understand. I had an epiphany: these guys were enlisted men. They were not officers. They had never been in any danger of becoming officers. They were great guys, but truthfully, their role in the service was to execute orders given by other people. When things got more difficult than that, they were in over their heads.

There are a lot of self-styled gun and tactics experts on the web who never made it past sergeant. How much can they really know, if their superiors didn’t think they had the makings of decision-makers and policy creators?

As for NRA training, maybe I should look it up now.

Here is what the site says:

Candidates must have completed the basic course in the discipline they wish to be certified to teach, e.g. NRA Basics of Pistol Shooting (Instructor Led Only), NRA Basic Rifle Shooting, etc.

Candidates must possess and demonstrate a solid background in firearm safety and shooting skills acquired through previous firearm training and/or previous shooting experience. Instructor candidates must be intimately familiar with each action type in the discipline for which they wish to be certified.

Candidates will be required to demonstrate solid and safe firearm handling skills required to be successful during an instructor training course by completing pre-course questionnaires and qualification exercises administered by the NRA Certified Training Counselor.

Candidates must satisfactorily complete an NRA Instructor Training Course in the discipline they wish to teach (e.g., NRA Basic Pistol Course), and receive the endorsement of the NRA Training Counselor conducting that training.

Okay, so, not to denigrate the program, but I think I could do this in a month. I think the lady who served me today at Sonny’s BBQ could do it. Maybe she has. This is red Florida.

I was going to say “a month or two in my spare time,” but all my time is spare.

I had two instructors I think were fantastic. I took a precision rifle course, and the instructors were former military snipers. They had probably killed dozens of people. I think they really knew what they were talking about, as far as hitting things with bullets, and I’ll bet they were great at the things snipers need to be good at. Not being shot. Picking places to shoot from. Planning escape routes. Fooling the enemy. Whatever. They had gone to war, engaged with people who were trying really hard to kill them, killed them instead, and come home intact. I would listen to anything they had to say about the topics mentioned above.

Beyond that, I would feel free to question their opinions. If they got out of their lanes when giving advice, I would take their backgrounds into consideration when weighing it.

The other day, I saw a Youtube guy telling people how to take a pistol away from an armed assailant. He said he was a former CIA officer. That’s his big credit.

Man. The CIA doesn’t teach most of its people much about self-defense or the martial arts. A lot of them do things like writing book reports.

Lanes are important. Don’t try to disarm a person with a pistol. Sometimes it’s best to comply.

Is it obvious I’m going to express my disappointment with a gun guru today? I guess it should be. Actually, I am disappointed in two.

I wrote about one the other day. James Reeves. Not the country singer.

He works at The Firearm Blog, and he seems to be focused mainly on tricked-out AR-15’s and plastic pistols. I think he shoots a lot of steel in hobby competitions. He’s supposedly a lawyer, but I haven’t seen any evidence that he has a substantial practice, and he has said things about the law that don’t seem very smart to me. His bio says he is an NRA/Louisiana State Police certified concealed weapons instructor.

My guess is that Reeves makes most of his money being a professional gun celebrity.

I took my course from a certified concealed weapons instructor in South Miami. I stood at the counter in his gun shop for 45 minutes, and he told me things like how it was bad to shoot people more than 7 yards away unless they were “big niggers.” Maybe things are different in Louisiana, but I’m not impressed with concealed weapons instructors.

I’m not sure why the cops would be any good at teaching people to carry concealed weapons. They don’t carry them. Am I right? Except for backup guns, they carry everything on their huge belts, right out where you can see it.

I hate to praise Massad Ayoob, who has no idea where his lane ends and everyone else’s begins, but I would listen to him before I would listen to a real cop. Concealed carry is his thing, and even though he worked as a part-time cop doing nearly nothing, he is what I would call a civilian, so he can see things from a civilian’s perspective. Just don’t listen to his legal advice.

I found a Reeves bio that lists some credits. He was named a “Rising Star” and “Top Insurance Lawyer” somewhere.

Oh, boy.

Let me tell you now cheesy lawyer credits work. One day you open your email, and there is spam from America’s Most Amazing and Incredible Trial Lawyers. Guess what? You’ve been nominated to be on the list! You’ll be in their deluxe, bonded-leather-bound directory! Or you can upgrade to top-grain leather! You’ll get a gorgeous faux wood plaque to display in your office!

Just send in $150.

Lawyers who lack mental horsepower use bought titles like this to impress rubes. They join organizations. They give presentations. If you can’t win cases, you have to do what you can to make people think you’re a big deal.

I probably still get these things. I haven’t seen my email in a while. Top Lawyer! Master Litigator! If you think credits like this mean anything, you deserve a lawyer who has paid for the whole set.

“Top Insurance Lawyer” is not something I would put in my bio, if I had one. It’s like “Fastest Plow Mule in Arkansas.”

Insurance companies don’t hire good lawyers. My grandfather got rich in a crack between two hills in Eastern Kentucky, beating insurance lawyers. Consider John Edwards. He’s an idiot, but he got rich beating insurance lawyers. Think of all the tort lawyers on billboards that cost a ton of money to buy. That money came from insurance companies that settled or lost cases.

Settling is losing.

My dad told me this: insurance companies don’t hire the best lawyers, and they don’t hire the worst. Their actuaries think hiring the mediocre pays off best in the end. It averages out. The mediocre are cheaper than the best.

Reeves could still be a great lawyer, though, right? A great lawyer could be on these lists.

Doubtful. Too many things he says seem to me to be things that could not come out of the mouth of a great lawyer. But maybe he’s just not trying hard.

Lawyers who are really good don’t have to pump up their credits. They just win and win and win. My grandfather never had an ad. My dad never had an ad. His firm never had an ad. My dad used to get angry when he saw lawyers’ fat faces grinning oilily from billboards.

Reeves says nutty things about guns. He did a video in which he laughed at people who replace the guide rods in Glocks, even though this is a part which is both essential and known to fail frequently. Then he advised people to take their tiny, concealable guns and bolt a bunch of stuff on them, making them as easy to conceal as refrigerators. Quite honestly, I think he is one of the worst gun celebrities on the web to take advice from. What he says seems nonsensical to me.

He seems to be prominent in the cult of AR bros. If you do competitions on the weekend and paid more than $900 for your BCG, you probably love him.

The other person who disappoints me is Clint Smith. If Colonel Jeff Cooper is like Jesus to gun lovers, Clint Smith must be the Apostle Peter, because he learned at Cooper’s feet and taught under Cooper at Gunsite.

Reeves did a video, and he asked Clint Smith what was the best “urban rifle.” Whatever that means. It sounds like something a white supremacist uses to shoot up a ghetto because he’s fed up with rap.

In the end, the answer provided by the video turned out to be…you’ll never guess…an AR-15. Pimped out to the tune of $3000. That figure was part of the theme of the video. Best “urban rifle”…for $3000.

I have more than one AR-15. People love to say guns are not toys. My AR-15’s are toys. I have one I have not even shot yet. I do not have any plans to go near these guns in self-defense situations. The platform is not nearly as reliable as other platforms, and the caliber is not even close to the best for self-defense.

I would guess I have $1600 in the most expensive AR-15, and it would be more like $1200, except I went nuts and used a White Oak Armory upper. I don’t even know where you would put $3000 in an AR-15 unless you had some kind of nutty optics, or maybe you had the handguard covered with Cerakote Punisher Pokemons to match your neck tattoos.

You could use a $200 trigger, which is a total waste of money unless you want accuracy far exceeding anything you might need for self-defense, at the expense of safety. You could have a $1200 upper, which would serve no purpose at all in a defense rifle.

To Reeves, $3000 is apparently cheap, because he also has a $6,000 video. You can buy almost 4 Ruger Precision Rifles for $6,000. Why on Earth would you blow $6,000 on a gun notorious for getting its owners killed?

When you put all this money into a gun, you make yourself look like someone who really hopes he gets to shoot somebody with it.

What is an “urban rifle”? That’s where Smith comes in.

According to Thunder Ranch’s site, their urban rifle course is about using a rifle to defend yourself at handgun distance.

Either that’s BS, and Thunder Ranch is really teaching people how to mow leftists down at long distances as part of a militia, or somebody doesn’t understand “handgun distance.” You don’t need an AR-15 with a long barrel to defend yourself at handgun distances.

What does handgun distance have to do with “urban”? Don’t Smith’s techniques work on farms?

Here is what I think, as a very good but not top-level pistol shot. To me, “handgun distance” means 50 yards or less. If you get within 50 yards of me, and you scare me, and I have a pistol, I can kill you pretty easily unless you move around a lot or really rattle me. Anything beyond that, to a person on my level, is rifle distance. But to be really clear, I wouldn’t want to defend myself with a pistol at any distance. It’s a weapon of last resort, vastly inferior to any long gun.

A pistol is the Denny’s of guns. No one ever says, “I plan to eat at Denny’s soon.” They drive around, see that everything else is closed, and “end up” at Denny’s, as one comedian put it. When you can’t put your hands on a real gun, you end up with a pistol. Col. Cooper, PBUH, believed this.

I’ll be generous and assume Thunder Ranch’s typical students can hit people with pistols most of the time at 50 yards. This probably isn’t true, but still. If it is true, why teach a pistol-distance course and push an unreliable platform made to shoot up to 600 yards?

AK-47 or variant. Vz58. Tavor. VEPR. Saiga-12. Aren’t any of these more trustworthy and lethal than an AR-15?

If you’re 600 yards away, running is better than all of them. Or just jog in a circle. It’s really hard to hit people that far away.

Let me talk about investing. Something I don’t do much, but I do know one thing: I know what’s most important for an investor. High returns? No. NOT LOSING YOUR CAPITAL. If you don’t have capital, you are all done investing, and you have to get a job.

How does this relate to self-defense shooting? Simple. The big priority to an intelligent person isn’t to have the lightest trigger, the cutest nitrided barrel, the most expensive lower, or the greatest accuracy. The big priority is to NOT GET SHOT.

In a violent engagement, winning is not as important as not losing. That’s why it’s called self-defense, not adversary-offense.

Any rifle or shotgun will hit a burglar very easily within legitimate self-defense distances. A pellet gun will do it. You don’t need a $6,000 Daniel Defense gun with your girlfriend’s picture engraved on it. You want a gun that goes off every time and packs a punch. Period. In other words, not an AR-15. It fails on both scores.

While you’re jacking around with your $6,000 underpowered range toy you bought on credit to impress the other guys, trying to make it chamber or eject a round, a burglar with a stolen .22 revolver and mismatched rounds he found in a drawer will perforate your organs multiple times.

I don’t know if Clint Smith really thinks you should use a $3,000 AR to protect your family. Maybe that’s all James Reeves. But I know he recommends the AR over guns like the AK-47. That’s nuts. I don’t care if Smith taught Jason Bourne everything he knows. I don’t care if he served 50 tours in Vietnam. Don’t care. Don’t care about his SWAT credentials. The AR should be nobody’s first choice.

What are Clint Smith’s credentials? He says he did two tours in Vietnam. This was the war where lots and lots of American soldiers died holding jammed full-auto AR-15’s. Yes, I know they called it an M16, but an M16 is an AR-15.

He was on a SWAT team. Where? Indiana. Where in Indiana? A big city like Indianapolis where a SWAT team might actually do something, or a small town where there were only three team members and they rode around in a minivan? Can’t see it on the web.

He was a Marine. Well, a lot of Marines were shot and killed by barely-trained Viet Cong guerrillas with crusty AK-47’s.

Was he an officer? Was he an enlisted man? Did he work in an armory? Did he see combat in Vietnam, or did he pass out uniforms and boots? Don’t know.

Clint Smith is not shy about tooting his own horn. If he’s out there telling people he’s a two-tour Vietnam veteran and a former SWAT team member, he’s fine with self-promotion. He’s not modest. If he had been a captain or higher in the Marines, wouldn’t he say so?

If he left the service as an enlisted man, how much does he really have on the ball?

I guess a sharp person could stop me here and ask me why I doubt Clint Smith but admire Paul Harrell, who may well have been an enlisted man. Harrell served in the Army and Marines, and he was a firearms instructor. He was a combat veteran, but no one seems to know his rank.

Here’s the difference: Paul Harrell was a genius who stayed in his lane. He had an incredible mind. He was able to do complicated 20-minute monologues from memory with no pauses or stumbles. He always admitted his limitations. He considered every angle. He was nothing short of amazing. He was also an astonishing, dominant competitor with every firearm known to man, and he could even throw an ax accurately. He was Jack Reacher.

Clint Smith is no Paul Harrell.

Most enlisted men are not terribly smart, but sometimes one slips through. We will never see the equal of Paul Harrel again.

What if Smith loves the AR-15 not because it’s a good weapon, but because it reminds him of his days in the field and makes him feel like a Marine again? What if he’s emotionally attached to it? It’s a real possibility.

I would fight a burglar with a sling made from Dylan Mulvaney’s pink jockstrap, with Che Guevara’s face stenciled on it, if I knew it was the best weapon for the job. I picked Glocks for carry even though they’re ugly and depressing to look at because I knew they were reliable. Then I switched calibers. I may switch to something better and get rid of the Glocks. I don’t care about them.

It doesn’t bother me that AK variants have killed a lot of Americans. Using an AK doesn’t make me a communist or a terrorist. Our soldiers have picked up and used them. Using an AR doesn’t make me a patriot, either.

The Israelis still use the AR. Maybe someone will say this. Know why they use it? It’s cheaper than better guns. They prefer the Tavor and the Galil, but Israel has limited funds. If they had the money, I’m sure they’d be all-IMI.

Maybe buying Colts helps keep Big Bro America happy.

All this being said, I’ll bet Clint Smith and Thunder Ranch can teach you great things about how to use your badly-chosen AR-15. They must be among the very best at that, not that it’s rocket science. I guess you could take your training with an AR in order to make them happy, and then you could go home and get a better rifle for actual use.

They probably do a wonderful job, but there are probably people within an hour of my house that would do just as well. This stuff is very, very common knowledge. There are no secrets, and there isn’t that much to it.

The average IQ of military inductees is just below 100, and they learn this stuff just fine in a few weeks.

I should get a new soapbox before this one wears out.

This is my take on James Reeves, TFB, Clint Smith, Gunsite, insurance lawyers, Paul Harrell, the AR-15, other guns that actually work, and enlisted men. It’s worth at least twice what you paid to read it.

And now let’s spend a few minutes with the other Jim Reeves.

Life Resumes on Friday

Time for a nice hurricane update.

The good news: Milton is much weaker than it was last night.

The bad news: Milton is expected to double in size.

The good news, at least for me: the track is holding steady with the cone centered south of Tampa.

The bad news: people in that area got blasted by storm surge twice this year.

The good news: I bought Pop Tarts.

The bad news: Walmart was out of cherry frosted.

This pretty much sums it up. I don’t know if I need to write anything else.

DeSantis continues to be the greatest governor imaginable. He issued an order forbidding the guy in charge of the state’s disaster response to restrict the sale of guns and ammunition. I don’t think it means anything, however, because DeSantis appointed him, and he never tried to pull anything before.

The police chief of Okeechobee, Florida, is another story. He signed an order banning the sale of guns and ammunition in his town. Think that’s bad? It also banned gun possession in public areas. I am pretty sure no state in the union has tried to do that. I believe his order put Okeechobee, Florida behind Hawaii and Massachusetts.

The order was supposed to cover the period during which Hurricane Helene would pass through.

Hagan now says he enacted the order by mistake, and that he canceled it immediately. That looks like a huge lie. You can see the order all over the web. It’s very simple. It’s short. His signature is at the bottom. Unless he signs things while blindfolded or at a party at P Diddy’s house, he appears to be a tremendous liar.

Maybe he means he mistakenly thought the law made him an emperor because he didn’t read it correctly. That is plausible. There is a law on the books allowing the governor to ban gun and ammunition sales plus possession in public if:

there is reason to believe that there exists a clear and present danger of a riot or other general public disorder, widespread disobedience of the law, and substantial injury to persons or to property, all of which constitute an imminent threat to public peace or order and to the general welfare of the jurisdiction affected or a part or parts thereof.

A police chief is not a governor.

This is not the kind of “mistake” that would excuse him, because it would still mean he wanted to take away people’s civil rights. And the conditions mentioned in the law did not exist when he issued his illegal order.

Maybe he did it because Okeechobee County has a big minority population. Most crimes are committed by minorities.

I think this is a stupid law, because in application, it would do more harm than it would prevent. I must not be alone in thinking this. All of these conditions were met after Hurricane Andrew, and flaky Democrat Governor Lawton Chiles didn’t activate the law.

Another Democrat might.

After Andrew, ghetto types roamed Dade County looting houses and businesses. The National Guard swarmed the ghettos. People put signs in their yards reading, “You loot we shoot.” They sat in their yards with pistols and rifles on display. They probably patrolled neighborhoods. The cops were overwhelmed. People really needed guns, and they didn’t just need them in their yards. They needed them while on the move.

You can say we shouldn’t let people have guns when order has broken down. Well, they already have them. And of course, criminals won’t obey an emergency order. Better to let the citizenry protect itself. This is the philosophy behind the Second Amendment, after all.

Also, during a crisis, a gun shop would still have to do background checks and observe waiting periods. The only people who would be able to get guns quickly in Florida would be permit holders, and we already have guns.

Florida has preemption, which means no one but the legislature can regulate firearms. This is why there are backyard gun ranges near Miami and Palm Beach. The county can’t do anything about it. Old Jewish ladies who moved here from New York can ring the cops’ phones off the wall, and nothing will happen. The cops are bound by preemption.

A police chief can’t appoint himself Supreme Commander and take people’s guns.

It doesn’t matter to me. First of all, I would violate the law egregiously and continuously before endangering my family, second, I have no police chief, and third, my sheriff is more likely to order people to carry guns than to ban them.

Florida may be about to get open carry. Insanely, this is one of only 4 states that ban it. Gun Owners of America and a citizen have sued St. Lucie County Keith Pearson and State Attorney Thomas Bakkedahl in an attempt to get rid of Florida’s anomalous ban. Attorney General Ashley Moody, who hopes to be governor, has refused to help the defendants.

The leftists at Politico are saying she’s a hypocrite because she has complained about officials refusing to enforce laws, but of course, they’re weaseling. Florida does enforce the carry ban, every day. Refusing to defend it in court is another thing entirely, and it’s a completely legitimate move by an attorney general who may disagree with the law.

If there is a state or federal law requiring attorneys general to defend lawsuits seeking to get laws repealed, I am unaware of it.

St. Lucie County has an enormous minority population, and Democrats outnumber sane people there. The State Attorney named in the case is a career prosecutor, so he could be conservative. Sheriff Keith Pearson is a lame duck Republican. He lost a recent primary.

How do I feel about open carry? I’m 100% for it. I don’t plan to do it, and I think concealed carry is usually better, but anything that makes it harder for the government to jail people for obeying the spirit of the Second Amendment is okay by me.

“Florida will be like the wild West! There will be duels in the streets!” Yes, it will be a war zone just like New Hampshire, Vermont, Iowa…don’t make me list them all.

Open carry will help people get over their gun phobias, it will help insure good manners in public places, it will help the cops to know who is and is not armed, and it will get rid of a lot of hassle. “Is my shirt long enough?” “Can people figure out what that bulge is?” None of that nonsense will matter any more. It should also make it permissible to carry rifles in public, and that will be helpful to a lot of people.

It might put an end to late-night brawls at Denny’s and Waffle House, although probably not, because those things still happen in states with open carry.

For a second, I had hope.

I don’t have any idea what will happen in the case. Even if the defendants default, you never know what a judge will do. He might be married to an old Jewish lady who moved here from New York.

Let’s see. It’s a federal case, and the judge’s name is Jose E. Martinez. Uh oh. If he’s Cuban, we could be okay. If he’s Mexican or Puerto Rican, the case is as good as dismissed.

He’s 83 years old. He’s…DOMINICAN. What? I have no idea how they vote.

He was appointed by George W. Bush, a nominal conservative. Maybe there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Looks like he was a JAG officer for a long time. I hope he can handle the truth.

I am going to relax and not worry about the storm. My plan is to rest in God’s presence and let him take care of us.

The News from Home is not Good

A few years back, I watched a Derek Prince video in which he claimed a Spirit-baptized person should have the ability to prophesy at will. The idea seemed to be that it was like speaking in tongues, but you do it in English.

I gave it a try, and it seemed to work. It still seems to work.

Unfortunately, these days, I hear very bad things when I do it. I keep hearing that God will remove my enemies and their seed from the earth. He will destroy them. I hear he is angry over the way they’ve treated me and the rest of his children, and his patience is at an end. I hear these things over and over.

I have asked myself if I was projecting some sort of deep-seated resentment on God. Maybe I was saying things I wished would happen to people who wronged me. But that isn’t the case. I’m not the kind of person who sits and stews about somebody blackballing me from the chess team 50 years ago. I am not happy about the mistreatment I’ve received in life, but I like to think about the present and the future. Truthfully, they are just more interesting. They’re also much more pleasant.

I think being male helps. Women seem to be very bad at letting things go. Many times, during conversations with women, I’ve been startled to hear them bring up their continuing resentment over trivial things that happened decades ago. Things no one else cares about.

Women are more manipulative than men, and unforgiveness is a tool of manipulation. You can keep presenting the same bill over and over, no matter how many times it has been paid. Even if it’s imaginary.

Men use their own tools to get what they want. Women are more likely to use people.

I also hear myself saying something else, but it doesn’t come from God. I keep saying, “I hate this place.” It happens right after I think about some horrible aspect of life. Maybe I’ll see a crippled person at the grocery store, or someone who is falling apart from old age. I’ll think, “I hate this place. Look what happens to people here.” Or I’ll see irredeemable, incorrigible punks online, libeling Christians or Jews or white people or conservatives. Punks who can’t possibly be saved because they love lies and can’t be forced to admit the truth. “I hate this place. Look who is taking over.” I think about the things they’re going to do when they have a free hand. I think about the pointlessness of engaging them.

I’ll think, “I hate this place,” and then I’ll tell God, “You were right about everything.” All the horrors of this world come from our rejection of Yeshua and the Holy Spirit. They come from our hatred of correction. If we had done things right, the world would be a peaceful place full of healthy, prosperous people.

I hate this place even though my life and my wife’s life are wonderful. We pray all the time. We know God. We live among fantastic people. We are healthy. We have a son on the way. We get along. We don’t have to work. It’s not that our lives are hard. It’s just that this place is disgusting and beyond fixing. I always say it’s like we went to Mexico for a vacation and got stuck there.

Today I asked God if he was displeased because I say I hate this world, and instantly, I thought of Lot. Look at 2 Peter:

And delivered just Lot, vexed with the filthy conversation of the wicked:

(For that righteous man dwelling among them, in seeing and hearing, vexed his righteous soul from day to day with their unlawful deeds;)

Lot was wealthy, and he had a family, but he was vexed anyway, because he lived in the San Francisco of the Middle East. Lot did not fit in. People like to live among their own kind.

That’s not totally true. Good people like to live among good people, and so do rotten people. Good people try to get away from rotten people, and rotten people pursue them and stay close to them so they can prey on them.

This explains a lot of the tension we have with immigrants. It explains socialism. What good is a tick without a dog?

I think God is pleased when we hate this place and look forward to growing up and moving on. Jesus said, “He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.”

Holding onto this life is sick. Fearing death is sick. Who feels that way? Terrible people. Look at Hollywood. A lot of people there would eat live babies in order to get 5 more years. We now have sick billionaires funding life extension research to save themselves. So they can be wrinkly and weak forever, getting coronavirus over and over.

What if they stop aging and then go broke? They don’t think about that. Being Jeff Bezos on a huge yacht is all right. Being centenarian Jeff Bezos working at Five Guys is not. How about being poor, paralyzed Jeff Bezos in a motorized wheelchair because he took a fall on his yacht? How about being weak, old Jeff Bezos with a crooked younger wife who has a power of attorney?

If Bezos is around when the kids with the multicolored hair take over, he will not be rich for long. Has he thought about that?

One of the great things about death is that you get to leave this place. Why would you throw that away? It’s like being 40 and preferring diapers to the toilet.

After praying, I read a Buzzfeed article. It was a collection of things people had written about events that made them realize their families were messed up. It was long, but I couldn’t stop until I read the whole thing

One person wrote about telling her friends a funny story about how her dad hit himself while trying to beat her with a belt. They didn’t get it. Another said it was weird to go to the homes of kids whose parents weren’t hoarders. One wrote about being surprised to find that other people’s parents helped them with school and homework and so on.

It really took me back. It made me realize what bad parents I had.

I hate saying that, because my mother loved me more than she loved herself, and my dad changed completely during his last months on Earth. But it’s true. You can love your child and still be a terrible parent.

Looking back, I wonder what our neighbors thought of the times the cops came to our house and had long conversations with my dad, who was standing in the front doorway in his underwear, drunk. They would try to get him to come out so they could arrest him, but he knew they couldn’t touch him in his house. My sister used to call them when he hit my mother. Eventually, we quit calling.

I also remember the little trips we took with my mother. She would put us in the car and take us to motels in places like St. Petersburg or Key Biscayne. She didn’t tell us why. She took me all the way to Kentucky once.

One day we got home from a trip to the Thunderbird Motel in St. Petersburg, and I ran into the living room to tell my dad all about it. He was sleeping face-down on the couch with no shirt. He opened one eye and stared at me in silence. When my mother came in, he got up and choked her in front of us. Here I was, expecting him to want to hear about our trip.

We lived in several neighborhoods while I was growing up, and while we had plenty of dysfunctional neighbors, none of the other men hit their wives.

I remember going to jail with my mother to pick my dad up. This was in Tampa when I was about 5 years old. I don’t know what he had done. The walls were white. We sat on a wooden bench and waited until they released him.

An elderly black man sat next to us. He started talking to me. He took out a nickel and gave it to me. I guess he felt sorry for me. I tried to give it back, and he said, “That’s your nickel.”

He must have been waiting for someone, too.

I never felt right taking things from people when I was a kid. I always
tried to give them back.

I went to the Coke machine and got myself a drink.

We did almost nothing together as a family. My dad would come home from work, take off his pants, get a drink, and lie on the couch watching TV until he went to bed. I don’t really remember what my mother did. I think she was idle when she wasn’t cooking or cleaning.

On the weekends, my dad went to the golf course.

My mother took some interest in my education. She endured all-night abuse sessions to get my dad to put me in private school so I wouldn’t be a victim of racist violence at our local public schools, and she spoke to a couple of my teachers, but that was it.

My dad never knew my teachers. He did show up for a school play, though. That was strange.

My friends told me their fathers gave them money for good grades. My dad never did anything like that. When I got a bad grade, I heard about it. I never worked to get good grades. I just tried to avoid failing.

I used to give my dad a partial pass on this, because I thought his dad had been trashy. I had heard about his dad getting drunk and beating my grandmother. I figured my dad never got any encouragement when he was young, because his dad was Eastern Kentucky white trash. When my dad was past 80, he told me his dad gave him money for every A he received. There went that excuse.

My dad and his sisters had music lessons. He played high school football. His sisters went to college. I don’t know why my dad didn’t raise his kids. his father died when he was young, but it looks like he taught him some things he didn’t pass on.

I got a degree in physics, and decades later, my dad was still calling me an engineer.

My mother definitely loved me, but she ignored me a lot of the time. She told me to shut up so many times, I started to feel self-concious about joining conversations. She wasn’t a violent person, but I got a fair number of slaps I didn’t see coming, over trivial things.

Here’s something odd: I got slapped when I broke things. If I dropped a plate or a dish, I was likely to be slapped. That never made any sense. My parents could break whatever they wanted, and it was understood that it was no one’s fault. Accidents were unavoidable. At some point in my teens, the standards changed. Somehow, breaking a dish was no longer a slapping offense.

I rarely got spanked. I can remember two spankings. But my dad kicked me in the stomach once, and he used to punch me in the back when he thought I wasn’t walking fast enough.

I would have been a lot better off if I had had defined rules and received a few predictable spankings. It would have given me self-discipline.

My wife’s life was worse. Her parents died when she was young. She was raised by her dad’s family, and they mistreated her. She had relatives who cast spells on her to destroy her. This is a popular pastime in Zambia. Everyone was poor.

Thinking about these things, and how they were caused unnecessarily by other human beings, I started to understand why God would be fed up with our enemies. My own parents, and my wife’s relatives, did us a great deal of damage they didn’t have to do.

I started thinking about how I had inherited my dad’s entire estate. On two separate occasions, he had wills drawn up to cut my sister out, and she did nothing at all to try to get back into his good graces. She got nothing whatsoever, even though she had spent time in shelters.

Recalling my dad’s behavior, and all the abuse my mother and I got from my sister, I realized something: my inheritance was no gift. Unlike most heirs, I was owed every cent. I didn’t work for it, but I was mistreated. What I received was compensation. There was a debt. And the payment was insufficient. It can never make me whole. Any intelligent person would choose a good upbringing over an inheritance.

I have a son on the way, and my biggest concern is for his safety. I am afraid I’ll love him too much. I’m afraid I’ll be overprotective. I’m concerned about all the creatures that will try to destroy him. Spirits, people, and every other type of hostile creation. I’m concerned I won’t do a good job of equipping him.

Now that I have to think about my son’s welfare, I can’t figure out what was going on in my parents’ heads. Where was their dedication? Where was their plan? How could they not feel this way? Isn’t this normal and natural? Even cats teach their young.

I can’t imagine raising a child and not teaching him every day. I can’t imagine not praying with him. How can a parent skip that? Why not just kill your child and get it over with?

How can a parent have no involvement with a child’s education? If you don’t care about your child’s future, you shouldn’t have him. I’m already planning to do homeschooling. I’m not letting the state teach my son it’s wrong to be male or that he should support perversion and hate God. If my son ever has a teacher with rainbow hair and a rainbow flag in the classroom, it will mean I’m dead.

Aside from not introducing me to God, my parents taught me nearly nothing. Did they have something better to do?

I had Jewish friends. Their parents taught them constantly. Take this course. Apply to this college. Save money. Invest. Don’t trust the government. Hide cash.

I was in a carpool with some Jewish kids, and one day while we were on our way to school, the dad who was driving us turned the radio down. He had been listening to the news, and he had heard something he thought was important. He gave us a lecture about the importance of the two-party system. I thought that was crazy. My parents never did anything like that.

Granted, one of his kids grew up to be a real mess, but at least he tried.

I should check. Well, the web says he’s a partner at a law firm in Cleveland. Hope things worked out for him.

The Buzzfeed article brought something home to me in a new and powerful way: not everything is my fault. I try to take responsibility for all the bad things that happen to me so I can have power over them, but the truth is that I have received a great deal of mistreatment in this world. Parents, my sibling, my friends, institutions, teachers, employers, strangers…they have done a lot of rotten things to me. People who should have been helpful were detrimental. Satan worked in them to give me disfavor in order to destroy me, and because I didn’t know God, I was defenseless.

When I got to know God, everything started turning around. I began living a victorious life. I received correction. I was cleaned up. These things are still happening. God keeps improving me. When I prophesy, I hear that he is helping me partly in order to torment my enemies.

Nonetheless, the world is still against me. As Yeshua predicted, it hates my wife and me. Hates us. Wants us to fail. And it also wants us to think it’s fair to us. It wants us to keep trying, playing by its rules, like gambling addicts playing rigged games. That jackpot could come on the next pull of the handle.

I’m right to hate this place and to maintain my distance from the herd. Most of them will be obliterated in the tribulation, and most will burn in hell. God can use me to pull a few aside, but that’s about it. Humanity is not going to change.

What if Kamala Harris gets elected? In that case, Christians can forget about help from their country. Our country will do its best to destroy us. America will be better for us than Indonesia or England, but it will be very hostile.

What if you’re not prepared? What if you don’t pray in tongues and you don’t have God’s full protection? You’ll be in real trouble. Just being a Christian is not enough. A whole lot of Christians just died in floods.

We need to be close to God so he, and not this twisted nation, is our protection and our provider. If you’re with him, you’re in the ark. It doesn’t matter what governments do. He is stronger than governments, and he knows more than they do.

I think God really is about to destroy the enemies of those who are close to him. I don’t think I imagined it.

#3

Incredibly, Florida has a new hurricane cone. Debby landed on August 5, Helene landed on September 27, and Milton is expected to pay a visit on October 9. Next year may be a great time to snap up a west coast home, or what remains of it, cheap.

Debby landed near Steinhatchee, which is nearly nowhere unless you live there. Helene landed near Perry. These areas are around 35 miles apart, so it’s reasonable to say the storms landed in the same place. Close enough for government work.

Right now, Milton’s projected path’s landfall area is centered just south of Tampa, so if the cone turns out to be solid, the storm will land around 150 miles away from the area where Debby and Helene landed.

They do a pretty good job with the cones these days. They blow it when it comes to storm surge and wind.

So I’m doomed, right? No.

You have to think about three things when a storm is coming. Wind, surge, and diameter. Diameter is a big deal. Storms vary tremendously in size. Andrew was a horrible storm, but it was small, so while Dade County was wiped out, Broward County, just north, didn’t really have a crisis. Businesses were open the next day.

Helene was enormous. Milton will be much smaller in comparison. If Milton goes right up the middle of the cone, the center it will land near Venice. That’s maybe 140 miles from me. That’s a long way, considering the size of the storm. The winds here will be from the east when it lands, meaning they will have to come across half of Florida before they get to me. That will weaken them.

In short, at the moment, things look pretty good here. But then this area has never had hurricane winds, storm surge can’t happen here, and flooding is nearly impossible where I am.

On the other hand, people in some coastal areas must be wondering if this is the tribulation. The area where Milton is headed is said to have experienced “up to” 7 feet of storm surge during Helene, so apply the exaggeration factor and call it 5, which is still not good. Based on my observations over many years in Florida, I would guess there are a lot of coastal structures less than 5 feet above the normal high tide line. I lived in a house close to Biscayne Bay, and I would say the yard was around 5 feet above high tide, so the floor was around 7 feet above the line.

It’s hard to get solid information, but it looks like the water inside some buildings where Milton is headed was nearly a foot deep as Helene passed. If your floor was under several inches of water on September 27, you will not be ready for a second storm on October 9.

Storms spin counterclockwise, so storm surge hits to the south of a storm’s center when the storm approaches from the west. If Milton’s cone holds up, the surge should end up in areas with low population densities compared to Tampa and St. Petersburg. That’s a plus, unless you live in those areas.

At least they don’t expect heavy surge up the coast, where Helene’s waters rose at least as high as 6 feet in some buildings.

I don’t even know what happened in North Carolina and Tennessee. I kind of tuned it out. I thought I was getting disinformation and that I would never really get the facts. I know the flooding was catastrophic, and that’s about all. My wife and I have prayed for the people, but I haven’t been reading much about the situation.

Before the storm, TV people were saying there was already flooding up there. The storm was around 700 miles away from North Carolina, and at least one source said the flooding came from another system. There was a big dry gap between the mess over North Carolina and Tennessee and the mess from Helene. It was obvious on maps.

I don’t know how a dryish hurricane 700 miles away can flood anything. It didn’t flood anything here, and I was maybe 150 miles away from the eye. We didn’t get much rain. Under two inches.

Leftists control the news, and they always exaggerate the impact of hurricanes. They always claim every storm was caused by global warming. If the flooding in the hills came from another system, we will never be told.

It’s important to be honest about what causes things like this, because good information helps people understand and prepare for hurricanes. If people in North Carolina and Tennessee get the idea that it’s normal for a huge storm to wash their houses away from 700 miles off, they’re going to make a lot of stupid decisions in the future.

Ordinarily, when a hurricane floods these places, it happens only after the storm dissipates and moves over them. I’ve never seen a storm flood Appalachia from two states away while leaving Florida nearly dry.

Not to make light of other people’s terrible suffering, but our preparation has been light. Today we bought 18 eggs and some Tennessee Pride sausage. In the past, I bought a lot of Pop Tarts, lunchmeat, bread, and unnatural foods in bags, but I can’t get motivated any more, and I don’t want to constipate myself terminally with 10 pounds of white flour and cheap corn meal. If we lose power and water, we’ll go to a hotel with Marvin and eat all our meals at Chick-fil-A for a day or two.

One likes to think we won’t get any more storms before the end of the season, which is three weeks away.

In other news, another homosexual has set himself on fire for Palestine.

Is this a trend? I read somewhere that 5 people have done this. Were they all gay?

The best-known gay self-immolater was Aaron Bushnell, a military contractor. A guy named Matt Nelson burned himself to death later. Not sure if he was gay. Now a man named Samuel Mena has set fire to his left shirt sleeve, saying he was giving Palestine his left arm.

How do I know he’s gay? I don’t, but he screamed, “I’M A JOURNALITHT!”

There must be straight men out there who support Hamas and have heavy, heavy lisps. Maybe. But effeminacy, including lisping, is a pretty strong indicator of homosexuality.

Here’s what gets me: they’re doing to themselves the kind of thing Hamas would do to them if they outed themselves in Gaza and the West Bank.

Hamas pigs raped Jewish men and boys on October 7. They have a history of gang-raping homosexuals. Wonder how that fits in with the gay agenda.

I saw a neat video in which an Israeli asked random Palestinians whether they supported the sexual deviants who claimed to be their allies, and I didn’t see a single one who didn’t say no. I stopped watching after a while, so maybe I missed one or two, but the video made it pretty obvious Hamas supporters–a term synonymous with “Palestinians”–were not at all in favor of warm relations with the deviant community.

Deviants want a world in which Christians and others who embrace ancient faiths that clearly disapprove of sexual perversion do not exist. They literally want us to be gone. But now many of them are trying to hand Israel to heartless Muslim fanatics who throw deviants off tall buildings.

How much weirder will it get? Haredi for Jihad? Lesbians for Female Genital Mutilation? Well, we already have that one, but it’s called bottom surgery. Girls are skinning and castrating themselves all over the US.

That’s it for today. Hope the power holds out until Milton is gone.

Time to OD on Dangerous Veterinary-Grade Livestock Remedy

Is anyone else tired of coronavirus? I certainly am. My wife and I have traveled a lot during the last three years, and on most of our trips, at least one of us has gotten covid.

It’s never really bad. A cold is worse. But it’s a drag.

I am not sure when I got this latest case.

I divide covid symptoms into three categories: perceptible, annoying, and serious.

Perceptible symptoms aren’t trustworthy. You might feel a slight raspiness in your throat, for example. Covid, or dry winter air? Maybe it’s pollen. Impossible to be sure. If it goes away, it may have been something else, or it may have been a very mild case of coronavirus.

Annoying symptoms are things like chills, bone aches, sore throats, headaches, nausea, mild fever, and congestion. When you have annoying symptoms, you know you’re sick, but you don’t care, because you know it’s no big deal.

A serious symptom is anything that results in you having a tube down your throat.

I have had perceptible symptoms many times. Sometimes they were followed by annoying symptoms. Sometimes they went away quickly. That has happened more than once after taking ivermectin.

I’ve had annoying symptoms several times. They were just bothersome enough to make me angry. They sometimes made it harder for me to enjoy life.

I’ve never had serious symptoms. I have never had a case of coronavirus I did not prefer to the flu, norovirus, a cold, food poisoning, dysentery, or a bad day following the ingestion of Myers’s Rum, which should be classified as a poison.

It’s impossible to tell whether my wife or I got sick first this time. She had annoying symptoms before I did, after we arrived in Rome. We got there on the 12th. A day or two earlier, my voice was a little raspy, but I felt good. I was in Switzerland, and the weather was a big change for me. Sometimes it was cool and rainy, and sometimes the air was dry enough to make Carmex a good idea. A healthy person’s throat could be affected by changes in weather.

On the 13th, we took a food tour. We had to walk on cobblestones a lot. The soles of my feet started hurting.

I thought it was the new shoes I had bought in Switzerland; my old ones gave out unexpectedly. But maybe I was having bone aches and noticing them in my feet first.

We’ve been home almost two weeks, and I am still getting little reminders that I had coronavirus. Sometimes I feel like I have a baseball sitting in my stomach. Yesterday, the joints in my hands were sore for no obvious reason. Some days I have more energy than others.

At least the crud in my lungs is gone. I was wheezing and waking myself up.

I would like to move on with life. I still haven’t done anything about the debris that fell in the yard when Helene passed. Sometimes I have felt slightly faint, so I haven’t wanted to toss branches around in the heat.

Because my fingers were sore yesterday, I decided to take more ivermectin, and of course, I feel much better today. The improvement is not subtle at all. My energy is improved. My wife can’t take drugs right now, and she is still not quite as strong as she usually is.

I think I can do some outdoor work today.

I’m wondering if I should increase my ivermectin intake. When people ask me how much I take, I say, “Half an inch.” I use horse paste, and it comes in syringes that measure doses by length. A whole tube will deworm a horse. My math says half an inch will be plenty for a person my size.

A tube contains enough ivermectin to provide 200 ug/kg for a 1250-pound animal. Divide it by 5 to get down close to a human dose, and you get about half an inch. The syringes are actually marked so you can go by an animal’s weight.

I have been pretty cautious. A study says it’s safe to take 400 ug/kg per day for three days. Half an inch of horse paste is roughly 250 ug/kg for a person my size. It’s not necessary to be precise. Your body isn’t going to go haywire over the difference between 200 and 250. Medication doses are almost always approximate. I’ve been taking around 250 ug/kg once a month.

Interesting fact leftists haven’t exactly trumpeted: ivermectin may work against dengue, which we now have in Florida. It’s not like ivermectin specificially targets this or that virus. Its antiviral effects are believed to affect numerous bugs, including the flu and West Nile.

Makes you wonder if there is any reason not to take it when you have a cold, the flu, norovirus, or any other viral disease. Like I always say, it can’t hurt, and you definitely won’t have worms.

It has landed some people in the ER, but they were bad at math, and nearly every one of them got better. You can kill yourself with Tylenol if you’re bad at math, and many people have done it.

Two Extra Strength Tylenols contain 1000 mg of acetaminophen, which is the maximum safe dose. If you take two pills more than 4 times per day, you can kill yourself. No one is running around calling for Tylenol to be taken away from Trump voters.

There is an interesting story leftists are using to prove ivermectin is evil. A guy named Danny Lemoi took it for Lyme Disease, and stories on the web say he died from a side effect of ivermectin.

It all looks like BS to me. He started taking ivermectin in 2012, he died 11 years later, and he had a serious bacterial disease. He also had an enlarged heart, which is what supposedly killed him. Far as I can tell, that is not an ivermectin side effect. For example, it’s not on the Mayo Clinic’s long list of side effects. But it is a symptom of Lyme Disease.

Here’s something interesting about causes of death: when a pathologist cuts a person open, he doesn’t find a sheet of paper with the cause of death listed on it in big black letters. He has to look at the body, do tests, and figure it out. If he finds an obvious immediate cause of death, he may still have to do tests to find out what caused the immediate cause. For example, if blood clots killed the patient, were they caused by the Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine or some other agent?

If Danny Lemoi had obviously been killed by ivermectin, we would know it, because the articles about him would say it and back up their conclusion. And they would also explain why it took 11 years for him to die, during which time his health seemed to improve.

Let’s say ivermectin is the evil poison Harris voters think it is. If that’s true, here is what will happen if you overdose habitually: you will get sick, exhibit known symptoms of ivermectin poisoning, and die, all within a short period of time. What you won’t do is improve for 11 years and then die suddenly from something that kills all sorts of people your age, which is not known to be an ivermectin side effect.

Leftists without medical degrees, who hate ivermectin, are the only “authorities” who have concluded Lemoi died from using ivermectin.

He’s their poster patient, and that’s really sad, because if ivermection was dangerous, they wouldn’t have to cling to a guy who took 11 years to die from an unclear cause. There would be hundreds of thousands of dead people who were indisputably killed, quickly, by ivermectin. They do not exist.

It looks like he abused ivermectin pretty badly, although it’s not clear, because none of his leftist accusers has taken the time to publish the dosage. Even if he took huge doses, it still took forever for him to expire, from an uncertain cause.

MSM outlets called his ivermectin “veterinary grade.” There is no such thing. Pharmaceutical companies don’t make bad drugs on purpose! Isn’t that obvious? They don’t put clean, pure ivermectin in tablets for people and dirty, diluted, counterfeit ivermectin in paste for horses. It’s the same thing, from the same facilities.

Hello? Pet and livestock owners aren’t potted plants. They don’t sit around and do nothing after pharmaceutical companies kill their animals. They sue. They contact the FDA. Manufacturers aren’t run by imbeciles who think it doesn’t matter if their products kill animals.

If companies were deliberately making bad drugs for animals, people would be in prison. It is amazing to me that there are morons who are paid to do journalism and think otherwise. How stupid can a person be?

When you take your cat to the vet, do you tell him to be sure to give him the human stuff and not the deadly, inferior cat medicine?

Many, many people have definitely been killed by coronavirus vaccines. That is indisputable. It is proven. It is documented. The vaccine I took is now restricted because it killed so many people. Finding people who have been killed or even harmed by ivermectin is still very, very hard.

People will read this and say I claim ivermectin cures coronavirus. Never. I have never said that. All I’ve said is that I have gotten good results with it repeatedly, I think it probably works, and I, along with virtually 100% of trained physicians, believe it’s very safe.

In any case, to get back to my point, I am tired of coronavirus, and it’s disturbing to realize most of us will probably continue to get sick at least once a year until we die. Even if it’s not serious, it’s a problem I could have done without. I can’t thank our government enough for taking my taxes and paying the Chinese to create and release this irritating virus (as the Department of Energy says). Thanks for killing so many people with your hubris.

Michael Jackson was an Amateur

The news is getting so weird.

Sean Combs is in jail right now, and he will be there until he is tried for a whole bunch of sex felonies. We all know that. But now a mid-tier celebrity is saying things that make it look like he could be the next to fall.

One of the annoying things about celebrities is that they never stop lying to us. One example: they plant stories about themselves. When you see a celebrity appearing in a torrent of stories, you can usually assume their publicity people are paying to have them placed.

Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen endless Yahoo stories about Liz Hurley posing in bikinis in spite of her advanced age. Yahoo didn’t ask for those stories. It’s not like an editor popped out of his office and yelled, “The public is begging to see an old woman in a bathing suit! Get me pictures!” No; Hurley paid somebody, and the people she paid called around and got the stories placed. Not that it helped her career, because the truth is that people don’t want to see aging women in bikinis.

Halle Berry has been doing the same thing. Over two decades ago, she got an inexplicable, undeserved Oscar for a dirty movie, and after that, her career failed to continue its upward trajectory. The placed stories and pictures seem like desperate attempts to keep her viable as a sex object and female lead while she continues to seek redeeming roles.

I don’t know anything about the country star Carrie Underwood, but for the last few years, Fox has carried endless stories about her. What she eats for breakfast. The secret to her slim, trim thighs. Her secret heartbreaks. What she likes to do with kale. Somebody was paid to place these stories. There is no way anyone at Fox discovered them and thought they were interesting.

Now Ashton Kutcher is suddenly in the news. We are told he is “terrified” Sean Combs will make up stories about him to divert attention from Combs’ own crimes.

Come on. No one believes that.

Kutcher has had a lot of bad PR in the last few years. His buddy Danny Masterson was convicted of two rapes, and Kutcher and his wife Mila Kunis got roasted for choosing to be Masterson’s character witnesses.

I don’t know if Masterson is guilty or not, because as far as I can tell, there was no physical evidence of coercion, a prior trial failed to produce convictions, and the rapes were reported long after they supposedly occurred. But Kutcher and Kunis apologized and said they didn’t question the verdicts.

Kutcher is trying to recover from the Masterson business, and now another friend has been charged with too many sex crimes and related crimes to list. Kutcher is one of the many celebrities accused to going to parties where sex crimes occurred.

I don’t think he’s afraid Combs will make up anything. Whatever Combs is guilty of, he isn’t known for making up stories in order to frame acquaintances and deflect attention from his own misdeeds. And there is no reason to think gossiping about Kutcher will help Combs in any way. What are prosecutors going to say? “Combs facilitated 300 rapes, but Kutcher went to a couple of parties and watched, so I guess we should let Combs go”?

The most likely explanation is that Kutcher did some ugly things at Combs’ parties (which may or may not have been crimes), he fully expects to be exposed, and he wants to poison the well. He wants to get in front of the scandal so when the stories come out, he can say, “See? I told you he would make up stories.”

Actually, he won’t be able to say he told us anything, because he’s having other people, who are nameless, accuse Combs. No accountability for Kutcher. He can say he had nothing to do with planting the story about Combs framing him.

Its seems childish to me, like the pathetic attempts Alec Baldwin made to defend himself and hang his friends after killing Halyna Hutchins. It seems like a strategy that would seem smart to an actor or an agent but silly to an attorney or federal agent.

I doubt Kutcher would personally violate anybody, but what if he watched approvingly while other people committed rape? People have lapses in judgment, especially when under the influence and surrounded by idiots. Kutcher used to use strong drugs.

When people hear the word “rape,” they think of illegals and homeless people dragging women into the bushes. Consensual sex with a drunk person can be rape. There are a lot of ways to rape consenting adults. At a Combs party, it would’t be hard to become an accomplice to rape, before or after the fact, while thinking you’re in the clear.

I think the big story here is that going to sex parties is not smart, even if you don’t care about sin. And it’s also interesting to see how depraved celebrities are. I’m one of those people who believed Scotty Bowers, Hollywood’s famous gay pimp, when he said just about everyone in show business back in his day was a pervert. I think showbiz has always been like this, and in the Middle Ages, people were right to drive actors out of towns.

Think about all the famous actresses who worked for Miramax and haven’t had anything negative to say about Harvey Weinstein. They’re vocal about everything else, from water bottles to global warming. Hmm.

Anyone who thinks actors aren’t low-lifes should read Errol Flynn’s autobiography. Read about Tallulah Bankhead, Mae West, Rock Hudson, and Marlene Dietrich.

MORE

Now a lawyer is accusing Combs of having a 15-year-old boy perform oral sex on him, based on the promise Combs would make him a star.

The attorney says the list of victims includes names “we all know,” so it’s reasonable to expect the list of criminals to contain familiar names, too.

Where is the bottom of the rabbit hole? Maybe it doesn’t have one.

Pick a Side

Last night I slept like a dead person. I woke up at 9:30. I had a long, weird dream.

I was in the little Eastern Kentucky town where my grandparents lived. The official population sign there read 165. Not a big place.

I went to the courthouse, which also functioned as the town hall. There were Muslims all over the place. Not American Muslims. Sullen foreigners in weird clothes. Like Afghans. I didn’t see any obvious pedophiles, though, so maybe they were not Afghans.

I was in a little vehicle, and I drove it into the courthouse. I drove by a line of men. Half of the men were Muslims. They looked like jihadis. They were silent, and they looked angry. The second half of the line was all Israeli soldiers in uniform. They were smiling. Friendly. I glared at the jihadis as I drove by, but when I passed the Israelis, I said, “Shalom!”

The Israelis and jihadis were not fighting. They were waiting for something, right next to each other.

I found myself out behind the courthouse with my dad. We were in a little miniature train with no glass in the windows. It stopped, and a grim-looking lady I took to be Indian walked up and gave me some papers. One looked like it had been written with brushes, in colored ink.

I resented the fact that she was handing me a bizarre document in a foreign language, as though she were somehow entitled. I dumped it on the ground. She had no authority.

As we left the town, I saw blocks of red brick apartment buildings in ruins. No windows, roofs, or inner walls. They looked like they had been empty for a hundred years or more, like Roman ruins.

I didn’t know why they were there. They looked like they had been built for 10,000 people.

My wife thinks it’s an end-time dream. She said the Jews were God’s army.

Makes sense to me. When the end comes, evil spirits will be unleashed on the world in huge numbers, and spirits that serve God will rescue people who are raptured. Maybe the jihadis and Jews in the dream were not fighting because their missions didn’t conflict. God will allow evil spirits to do what they like to people who aren’t raptured, because they rejected his help, but he will send spirits to pull certain people out while the rest are tormented.

The Bible says God seals his servants on their foreheads so they will be set apart. Maybe the obnoxious lady with the documents was trying to get a person who had been sealed to give up and submit. I thought she was a contemptible idiot.

These days I don’t feel like doing anything but eating, sleeping, and praying. I’m forcing myself to look after the house and so on. That’s about it.

My belief about dreams is that the police usually represent demons, while soldiers represent God’s angels. In your homeland, soldiers are almost always your friends, but the police are dangerous. The police fight citizens, not foreign troops, and they are often corrupt and brutal. It is often necessary to remind them of our rights in order to avoid being abused. We have to remind demons, too.

The police generally go after people who have opened doors through wrongdoing, just like demons. Soldiers don’t bother citizens. They are almost always helpful.

I support the police, but I also believe in avoiding and placating them. I believe in treating them like dangerous mental patients who need to be soothed. I’m white, and my family lived in upscale suburbs, but my mother told me a lot of cops were crazy and that I should never give them an excuse to go off. That is true. There are a lot of black people who think the police are slaves to white people, but the police hurt white people more than any other group.

I am grateful for the 90% or so of police who can always be trusted, but I can’t distinguish them from the others until something goes wrong, so I treat all police like potential assailants. I’m also aware that every policeman is insulted, slandered, and threatened throughout his career, so when I interact with them, I want them to know I’m not an entitlement case with a chip on my shoulder.

I don’t worry about soldiers. They’re not interested in me, and they have no authority over me.

I don’t know if my dream means anything, but I’m passing it along just in case.

We are Riff Raff

A reader has once again recommended an interesting resource: Nomad Capitalist. This is a company that helps people with assets and income move abroad. Its motto is “Go where you’re treated best.” They help people move to places like Singapore and Malaysia, where successful individuals are not yet considered enemies of humanity.

I can’t resist fantasizing about Singapore. Today I looked at some Nomad Capitalist videos. I was just playing around, but when my wife saw me watching, she said she would not hesitate to move to Singapore.

Why would anyone move from a peaceful red state to a tiny island between two dangerous Muslim nations? Does it sound crazy?

Here is what she said: in Singapore, you can let your child ride the subway alone.

Wow. Imagine doing that in New York, Philadelphia, or any other American city. Unthinkable.

We’ve been to Singapore a couple of times. On one visit, they held some kind of outdoor celebration that featured a planned walk among illuminated works of art. Even though we were in the middle of a big city, the park where the event was held was very dark apart from the exhibits themselves.

Families were everywhere. No worries.

Consider Central Park, the 880-acre oasis in the middle of New York City, created by Frederick Law Olmsted. Would you visit at night? It would be more convenient to invite the rapists and muggers to your apartment and get it over with.

America has a huge population of mostly-minority repeat offenders, and they do whatever they want. A couple of days ago, I saw a sheriff on Youtube saying a recent arrestee had a rap sheet with 102 felonies on it. In Florida, where we are supposedly tough on crime. When you hit a hundred felonies, execution, or at least life without parole, should be on the table.

I live in the reddest county imaginable, but you never see kids here riding bikes by themselves, as I did when I was young. You can’t let your kids walk to school as I did.

My dad’s partner had a young son who was stolen from a school bus stop a short walk from his house. He was raped repeatedly, shot in the back, cut in three pieces, and buried in concrete. You could practically hit his school from his house with a rock.

If your kids survive the violent perverts here, they still have to suffer with the tenured perverts in our public schools. The people who tell them Yeshua is a myth and that their parents are basically Nazis.

What about internal strife? Well, Singapore has had riots. The last one was small, in 2013, and before that, you have to go back to 1969. And no one is putting on black pajamas and attacking conservative groups for praying in public.

What about medical care? I’m no fan of nationalized medicine, but Singapore’s universal system is something I could live with. They force you to have your own medical savings account, an idea Democrats assure us would lead to the end of the world. In the US, medical problems are probably the biggest threat to people who prefer to die with substantial estates. At my age, with a family to think about, I am open to the notion that protecting our assets is more important than getting the doctor I want, when I want him. If we had Singapore protecting our assets, we would be better able to pay for private care on the rare occasions when it was needed.

My belief is that the better a country’s inhabitants are, the easier it is to have government programs that work. Singaporeans are better than Americans. We have huge, entrenched demographics that do nothing but bleed the taxpayer, commit crime, and vote for Democrats. When we try to help them, they take advantage and ruin everything. An entitlement attitude, not entitlements themselves, is the major reason our programs are disasters.

What about drugs? Singaporeans kill drug dealers. It works for them. There are no ghettos in Singapore, and when you walk the streets, you don’t see poop, tents, or used needles. You can park your car without assuming, as you would in many American cities, that a junkie will steal everything in it. Street crime, which is driven by drug use in the US, is extremely rare in Singapore.

What about housing? It’s small and expensive. Rent is sky-high compared to a few years ago. But is small housing a bad thing, in and of itself?

I hate being close to people, so I like big properties, but then I live in the United States. Americans are not the best neighbors. They steal. They’re loud. They form abusive HOA’s. They let their dogs terrorize neighborhoods. I don’t think living close to Singaporeans would be the same, because Singaporeans love boredom. They like peace and quiet. I may be wrong, but I’ll bet they get along better with their neighbors than we do.

Eventually I’m not going to feel like cutting trees and mowing large areas, so maybe a little house among nice people would be acceptable.

What about the Second Amendment? The need for self-defense is not likely to arise in a place like Singapore, and the people are at peace with their government, so I think guns would be less important. Let me think. How many Americans do I know who have been robbed at gunpoint? Three, off the top of my head. How many shooting victims have I known? Two. How many of my relatives have shot or shot at people? Two.

The more I think about it, the more I realize something: Americans are bad people. We really are. Not all of us, but enough of us to make America different from peaceful countries. We’re not Somalis or Brazilians, but we’re not the Swiss, either.

When we decided to visit Singapore the first time around, I thought I would hate it because I hate cities. I also thought Singapore was likely to have a culture of selfishness and callousness, because most Singaporeans are Chinese, and China is horrible. Instead, I liked it a lot. The people were nice. It was safe. It was very prosperous. The food was pretty good. Everything was orderly. They even had wonderful public landscaping. I think socialism is what made the mainland Chinese what they are.

After my wife and I came home, we both had the strange feeling that somehow, part of us belonged to Singapore. It felt like home, and I can’t explain that. I guess it was just nicer than America and Zambia.

What about religion? Surprisingly, Christianity, including charismatic Christianity, is on a dramatic upswing in Singapore, having risen from about 10% to about 20%. That’s bizarre. Shocking.

Isn’t Singapore boring and distant? I don’t care if it’s boring, because I’m boring, too. My wife and I live in a boring place, and we love it. As for distance, well, there are jets. We could travel from time to time. I don’t know how soon we would get around to visiting the US, given what it is.

I like dreaming about leaving the US for a better place. I don’t think Singapore is in our future, though. You can’t just walk in and ask for residency.

They have something called the Global Investor Programme. The idea is that if you have a lot of money to invest, you can put it into a Singapore enterprise, and they may give you permanent residency. It’s very hard to understand the criteria, though. I think you need to invest S$10 million inside Singapore. Let’s see. Did I leave my S$10 million in my other pants today? Must have.

A couple of years ago, the price was S$2.5 million. Singapore has decided to keep the riff raff out, though.

My understanding is that you can move to Singapore if you have a job there. “Job.” The word makes my skin crawl. Never again, I hope.