We Yearn to Breathe Free

My wife and I had a good day yesterday, not that this is unusual.

We had an anniversary recently, and we had problems finding her a good gift, so I decided we needed to go to the big city. We succeeded in getting the gift, and she also got to eat at the Cheesecake Factory, where she would happily take up residence if they would let her.

We also visited an African grocery run by Nigerians. I thought maybe they would have a lot of interesting food I would want to try, but it was pretty bad. The store did not smell good, it was run-down, and they sold things I didn’t know were edible. Potato leaves, for example.

The web suggests “potato leaves” are really sweet potato leaves. That would make more sense. The potato is a member of the nightshade family, and you’re not supposed to eat nightshade leaves.

I was glad we managed to get her things she liked. I thought about her good fortune. She used to bathe in a bucket, and here she was, buying nice things at upscale malls and living in a big house will all sorts of appliances, not to mention air conditioning and a power grid that almost never fails (sorry, California).

I asked her if she was glad she was in America, and she surprised me by saying she wasn’t. She said she only preferred America to Zambia because I was here.

In Zambia, she lived with two other women in a cheap apartment. She had to wash her clothes by hand. She had no car because an ex-boyfriend had taken hers. The power went on and off constantly. She had to buy used goods from China. But she prefers Zambia to America. Why?

One reason is that she was raised in Zambia. The other reason, however, is that America is insane.

In Zambia, men in dresses aren’t holding antisemitic protests outside Jewish businesses. Perversion flags are rare. Homosexual marriage is not legal. Zambians don’t riot. Wokeism isn’t a threat. Political censorship is not much of a problem. Christianity is in their constitution.

Here, we are preparing for a civil war because leftists have become cruel and oppressive. That’s not happening in Zambia.

Her preference actually makes some sense.

Zambia has other problems. Drunkenness is out of control. Paganism does great harm. Corruption is severe. The economy is always disastrous. According to my wife, Zambians are lazy, so things are not likely to improve. Still, apocalyptic violence will probably be much less severe there than it will be (is) here.

Zambians don’t hate each other the way Americans do.

Am I saying I would consider moving to Zambia? Sure. If things got bad enough here, and Zambia looked better. I want to survive like everyone else. I don’t want to spend my days shooting and burying black-clad trespassers who want to punish my family for the crime of existing.

I really, really don’t want to move to Africa, but what if we have no choice?

To leftists, the existence of everyone else is a capital offense. We have seen them try to cleanse the world with rifles. They did it in places like China and Cambodia, to name two examples. Many here have praised Trump’s failed assassin. They’re always waiting to be released on better people so they can destroy them and take what they have. After they get what they have, they destroy that, too, because leftist traits, not social inequities, are what made poor leftists poor.

Alan Dershowitz just did a podcast in which he expressed dismay over an anti-Jewishness protest.

Dershowitz loves admiration and being associated with celebrities, so he lives in Martha’s Vineyard. As we all know, Martha’s Vineyard is a rich leftist enclave where wealthy socialist hypocrites pat each other on the back all day.

Unbelievably, Martha’s Vineyard has a Chabad branch. Chabad is an ultra-Orthodox Jewish organization. Maybe they’re in the Vineyard so they can milk guilt-ridden Jewish celebrities for cash. I very much doubt a significant percentage of Martha’s Vineyard Jewish residents have any interest in giving up sin and pepperoni pizza.

Chabad is not affiliated with Israel or the IDF.

Chabad held a sort of festival of Jewish culture. Music, food, and so on. Dershowitz says antisemitic Democrats showed up in a mob and protested. As he noted, they were protesting Jewishness itself. The organization and the event had nothing to do with the war in Gaza.

Democrats showed up to accuse Jews of the crime of being Jewish.

If your crime is being Jewish, what is the appropriate punishment? Let me be more obvious: what is the final solution?

What is your defense? There isn’t one. You can become a kapo, though. You can join those who persecute your people and postpone your own destruction. Many Jews are doing this. Many did it under the Greeks and Romans.

You don’t know about the protest because you don’t watch his Youtube channel. It should have been on the national news, but as a Babylon Bee character has said, hating Jews is cool now. That is literally true. Our press is about 90% leftist, and leftists crave admiration. To get excited about the problem of antisemitism is to break with the cool kids. Coverage could also bring disrepute on the Democratic Party, and no one in the press wants that to happen.

The thing that puts a knot in one’s stomach is knowing Dershowitz will complain and admonish and then vote for Kamala Harris anyway. American Jews will continue assisting their persecutors and persecuting their friends.

Americans in general are starting to behave the same way. Notice how we give privilege to hostile military-age immigrants from Muslim countries, China, and Latin American nations that are not friendly.

I keep wondering if I’ve given Dershowitz too much credit. He’s supposed to be brilliant, but I haven’t seen him say anything really clever, and I’ve seen him say things that would appear to indicate that he is not brilliant, even for a lawyer. His analysis of the Baldwin manslaughter case was very poor.

Law is not that hard. Law professors are smarter than most professors, but not a whole lot smarter. They are not in the same lofty stratum as STEM people. You can be a Supreme Court justice and be substantially less bright than a state college professor of electrical engineering.

America is turning into something resembling Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, so I understand why my wife would want to live somewhere else. You wouldn’t think a poverty-stricken African nation would tempt anyone, but these are strange times.

I wonder if Christian countries in Africa would accept Jewish and Christian refugees from America. Maybe they would. They need money and educated people with skills.

I used to think I might be called upon to shelter Jews. I now think that would be impossible, because you can’t hide anything in modern America. I no longer consider it a serious possibility.

Now I think a foreign country may have to shelter me.

Here is a funny fact no one ever talks about: good people want to get away from bad people, but bad people want to be with good people.

When you judge two parties that don’t get along, the one that wants nothing to do with the other is usually right, and the one that wants to force the other to stay close is usually evil.

The other day, I was thinking about my health, and I wondered if something I experienced could be a symptom of cancer. My reflexive response was to think, “Maybe I can get out of this place!”, meaning the world. That was the very first thing I thought of. Remarkable. This is not new. Whenever I read that a person has died, I can’t help thinking, “Good for him!”

Then I thought about my family and regretted it, because I would be abandoning them. I also thought about the suffering cancer patients go through. Then I thought about cancer patients who didn’t suffer all that badly. A year or so on painkillers, a sudden downturn, and then off they go. Worse than growing old and feeble and being tormented by leftists? No. That’s a chilling realization. Millions of people leftists have abused, both dead and living, would have preferred cancer and death.

I actually had these thoughts. As much as I enjoy life, I can’t feel enthusiastic about a future in this sick, twisted country.

Get Used to Hearing That Cackle

What a disappointing day. Joe Biden finally got his wife’s permission to drop out of the presidential race. As of now, Dr. Jill Biden, First Lady, is no more.

Welcome back, Mrs. Joe Biden.

You know, Joe and Kamala are both doctors. They hold Juris Doctor degrees. Unlike an Ed.D., which is what Jill Biden and Bill Cosby have, a Juris Doctor requires slightly above average intelligence. It’s not a Ph.D., but it’s better than an Ed.D. Still, no one ever says “Dr. Joe” or “Dr. Kamala.” No one ever said “Dr. Michelle.”

Just putting it out there.

As of today, people are scratching Mrs. Joe Biden’s name off invitation lists. Some, I would guess, with sighs of relief. There may even be giddiness.

This is pretty much what I expected. Demented, arrogant, stubborn, and angry, Joe held out until they nearly had to give him roofies and have a ventriloquist withdraw for him.

Now we face Kamala. Joe has endorsed her, but not until after he withdrew, signaling a certain reluctance. My impression is that he doesn’t like her very much. It could be that he remembers her calling him a racist in a 2020 debate, or it could be her persistent refusal to do anything whatsoever, or put her name on anything, as vice president.

I was afraid Hillary Clinton might get into the race, but she has endorsed Harris, so we can breathe a sigh of relief. Hillary might have beaten Trump.

Her health is no good, and I doubt she could manage to campaign without collapsing a few times. We all remember the video of her handlers practically rolling her into her special black lift van. They got her to the open door on her own two feet, more or less, but when it opened, she dropped like ImClone stock after Martha Stewart sold it.

They literally propped her up against a bollard to make it look like she was okay.

When you talk about today’s Democrats, you have to say “literally” a lot. That was not always true.

She may not be up to the stress, either. Insiders say she threw a drunken, screaming fit the night she lost the 2016 election. That was 8 years ago, and she has not gotten any younger.

Newsom says he’s not running, which is good. I don’t want to see endless uncensored videos of piles of excrement on California sidewalks. Whitmer won’t run, either. It would be hard to sell the sane states on a tyrant who literally put the population of Michigan under house arrest for months.

I guess it’s Kamala, and that’s about as much as we could hope for. Biden is not very bright, yet, remarkably, she is conspicuously less so. She says bizarre, patently unintelligent things and cackles ingratiatingly, looking around for support which usually doesn’t come. “ACK ACK ACK ACK ACK ACK ACK ACK.” A lot of voters will get tired of hearing that before the election.

Kamala’s initial failure to pass the California bar exam will surely come up repeatedly. That will help.

It’s a big deal when a lawyer fails a state bar exam with no extenuating circumstances. The California test is hard as bar exams go, but a lot of people who are not very smart have passed it on the first try.

I remember taking the Florida exam. I didn’t prepare all that well for it, and when I left the test room on the last day, I wondered if I had failed. Then I found out I had done exceptionally well. That should give you an idea how hard a typical bar exam is, and while the California test is harder, it’s not the Physics GRE.

God may be giving us a big break here. I certainly hope so. The thought of having Kamala Harris as our president is too painful to dwell on. And who would she choose to run with her? Maybe someone even worse. What if she picks Elizabeth Warren?

Biden’s presidency has been disastrous, but I would take him over Harris all day every day.

My thinking is that Biden held out for three reasons.

1. He is arrogant and demented.
2. His wife really, really wants to remain First Lady instead of being relegated to going to charity luncheons in moldy, starless Wilmington ballrooms three times a year.
3. Somebody has to pardon the Bidens. Federal crimes have a 5-year statute of limitations, and a lot of skulduggery has taken place among the Bidens relatively recently.

I think powerful people sat Biden down this weekend, just like Obama and Hillary sat him down in 2015, and told him it was time to sing his 10 o’clock song.

Remember that? Biden assumed he would be the nominee back then, but in those days, people still remembered him as a perennial butt of jokes from both sides of the aisle. He took his job and himself seriously, but no one else in the White House did. They sat him down and made him accept the truth: he was not a real vice president. He was just a harmless-looking running mate intended to make people feel better about Obama.

People forget, but it was remarkable to see an 8-year vice president get the foot in the face from people he worked with every day. As we all know, it’s just assumed that a vice president will get the nod when his boss’s last term is up. When it doesn’t happen, it means only one thing: a lack of confidence from party insiders.

He won in 2020 mainly because Hillary was too feeble and a lot of spoiled brats were angry at Trump for no reason at all. People like me said Biden was demented, but in those days, he was somewhat more coherent than he is now. Democrats decided they could prop him up like Strom Thurmond, and the public accepted it.

Obama and Hillary put him through something resembling the Total Perspective Vortex; the fictional machine that crushed Zaphod Beeblebrox’s deranged self-admiration and made him understand how insignificant and unimpressive he was.

I guess they kept the Vortex oiled and calibrated in case Biden needed to be deflated.

So how did they convince Biden to quit?

They could not fix his dementia or arrogance, so that wasn’t a factor. They could not promise Mrs. Joe Biden she would continue to pal around with the Clooneys and the Hankses. She will definitely be exiled to Wilmington, where she risks becoming the state’s Miss Havisham without the clout. Here’s one thing they could offer: relief from federal prosecution for the whole Biden clan.

It may be that if a Democrat wins, we will see a suppression of Biden-related criminal investigations and prosecutions, and we could possibly see a series of pardons and/or commutations. This may be what they promised Joe to get him to quit.

Will Biden have the sand to pardon Hunter before he leaves office? That’s a great question. He won’t do it before the election. That’s for sure. Not unless he is forced to resign before we vote. But after? What does he have to lose? If the election is in the bag, and he is about to be trundled off to Wilmington to die, maybe he will want to save his son more than his legacy. It would be hard for anyone to resist that temptation. Even a decent person.

I think Jill and Hunter had to be shouted down, and the Biden bros and the Biden sis must be nervous right now.

These are my guesses.

I wish Biden had continued his campaign, but Kamala is about the best second choice we could hope for. She will probably lose, and if she wins, she will make an insufferable ass of herself every day, resulting in an extremely weak presidency that helps Republican officeholders of every imaginable level. The damage done to the federal judiciary will be severe, but it won’t be any worse than what Biden would have done.

Kamala’s insufferability tour starts now.

Will Biden resign the presidency now that he has as much as admitted he can’t do the job? No. Mrs. Joe Biden can only be pushed so far.

Introducing the Olbermann Index

I keep saying evil spirits are loose on the earth, corrupting people’s minds. They fill us with delusions. That’s why people keep saying so many nutty things these days. It explains a lot of the Democratic Party’s platform. It explains the flat Earth insanity. It explains the people who think the pandemic, not just the virus, was created deliberately. It explains the folks who insist men are women.

Today it occurred to me that there may be a person we can use as our barometer/coal mine canary. Keith Olbermann.

Olbermann is, without exaggeration, deranged. He has both feet planted firmly in police welfare-check territory, not far at all from the threshold of involuntary commitment. He says things so kooky they would embarrass Whoopi Goldberg.

Today, President Trump’s former physician, Representative Ronny Jackson, M.D., described Trump’s ear injury, which he has examined. He says it’s a 2-centimeter-wide wound which is healing normally.

Olbermann made two astonishingly unhinged remarks.

1. “In brief: Ronny Jackson isn’t a doctor. Which is perfect, because Trump wasn’t hit by a bullet.”

2. “Dear @abcnews: Jackson doesn’t have a license. You might as well have cited Doc Martens or Doc Gooden”

He directed the second raving at the X account of ABC News, that noted distributor of pro-Trump conspiracy theories.

Of course, everyone knows Dr. Jackson is…Dr. Jackson. Former White House physician. His license is active. It is not clear where Olbermann got the idea it was not.

Everyone also knows this: an experienced medical doctor who loses his license (unlike Dr. Jackson) will not instantly lose his ability to treat and describe wounds. It’s not like medical school is uploaded to a flash drive, and when they jerk your license, they pull the flash drive out of a port on the side of your head.

I wonder if it would be useful to keep tabs on Olbermann, because maybe the day he runs down a busy street in his underwear, shrieking that J.D. Vance put Tesla nanobots in his Paxil, could be the day before the rapture.

More seriously, if he starts posting demands that his fans go out and start killing Republicans, it may signal a pivot from a mild derangement pandemic to full-on mass hysteria that may require people to avoid going out in public until the Lord calls his children.

This guy is lost. I don’t see any hope of a return to sanity, if he ever was sane.

He is far from alone. One third of Democrats say the assassination attempt was staged. They think it’s possible for a kid 130 yards from a man to deliberately nick his ear, 1/4″ from his skull, while the man’s head is moving, with a crummy AR-15 and a box of rounds he just bought at a local store. No shooter on Earth, with any equipment, could do that.

They’re worse than the liberals who think the police can shoot criminals in the leg whenever they want.

The numbers are staggering. One third. There are supposedly 48 million registered Democrats, so up to 16 million people may have become so detached from reality they should be considered a danger to themselves and others.

Anyway, I will be looking for significant incremental jumps in the lunacy. Maybe it will be enlightening.

Shredded Tweets

I am once again not on Twitter.

I tried Twitter for a few days because I thought Elon Musk might be serious about making it a Youtube alternative, but he is not serious, and Twitter was a bad experience. Video sites have to be set up a certain way, and Musk has not yet chosen to set Twitter up correctly. Also, the content on Twitter was largely infantile, not to mention plagiaristic.

I think God showed me a few things.

If you want to use Twitter, first of all, you should pray first. You probably should not be on Twitter.

Once you’re on Twitter, you have to be proactive, not reactive.

Based on what I saw, Twitter is designed–I mean intentionally–to be irritating. It forced me to pick people and things to show up in my feed, and then, instead, it fed me content which was almost certainly selected to provoke me. Biden’s account. Harris’s. Chris Hayes. Jon Favreau.

I saw nearly nothing of the topics I had selected.

For a while, I thought this was all I would ever get. I muted and muted and muted, and the same garbage kept popping up. Eventually, I found that if I scrolled down about a mile, Twitter ran out of anger clickbait and started showing me better things. It still was not great, though.

If you look at the trash Twitter puts at the top of your feed, after a few minutes, you’re angry. You feel like posting rebuttals to the libels and lies.

I had good intentions when I signed up. I thought I could post helpful things, including revelation. I got absorbed in a reactive mindset, however. I felt myself getting pulled into the undignified squabbling. Fortunately, I didn’t get into any arguments. I was not there long enough, and Twitter didn’t promote my posts.

Yes, Twitter does have censorship. If you pay them, they promote the things you say. How is that censorship? Simple. If you promote one group without promoting others, you’re censoring the people you don’t promote. You’re not silencing them, but you might as well be, because nearly no one will see what they write.

Twitter should not accept money to promote posts, except for obvious ads that don’t advance a point of view. It’s fine to promote a post for a brand of breakfast cereal, but they shouldn’t promote argumentative ads.

Back in the 1950’s, radio hosts were imprisoned for accepting secret bribes to play some records more than others. Elon Musk and his team should think about this when they accept secret bribes to promote Twitter accounts. Bribery is still wrong, especially when it pays for censorship.

If you think you have something to say on Twitter, don’t read other people’s posts much. There is not much of anything worth reading. You really have to search to find anything remotely helpful. Just write whatever you want and let it sink or swim.

It’s best not to argue with stupid and biased people. When you do that, you become like them, as Proverbs warns. You can’t change their minds, but you can damage yourself.

“But it’s wrong to refuse to defend what you say!” No, it’s not. Where is that written? “It’s wrong to refuse to consider other people’s views!” Not always. Twitter is full of patent idiocy, and besides, by the time you’re an adult, you should have a considerable number of unshakeable beliefs. If you stay open-minded about absolutely everything your entire life, it doesn’t make you mature and reasonable. It makes you lost and unreliable. You will never be sure of anything, and no one will be able to trust you.

So if you take the approach I’m outlining, who are you like? Yeshua.

If you read the gospels, you will see that Yeshua did not let other people run conversations. He said whatever he wanted. He did not respond to every question people posed. Often, when they tried to corner him with questions, he said things that were not responsive. He spoke of other things that were more useful.

Boxers call this fighting your own fight. You don’t let your opponent decide what kind of fight you will have. You tailor your actions to your best advantage. You do what you’re good at.

If Yeshua were on Twitter today, leftist trolls would treat him the way they treat everyone else. “SOURCE? SOURCE?” They’d make digressive accusations hoping to change the subjects. They’d deliberately misconstrue what he said in order to make him look bad.

A long time ago, God told me I was not in the least bit responsible for the way other people took things I said. If I offended people with the truth, it was their fault, not mine. If I gave them information that could save them from hell, and I didn’t do it in a soothing, unctuous way, I wasn’t responsible if hell was where they ended up.

I don’t have an obligation to get tied down in arguments with stupid people, letting them lie, accuse, misconstrue, and repeat themselves, responding to every idiotic thing they say. I have an obligation to speak the truth, but after a reasonable effort, I can do whatever I want.

If you are usually reactive and not proactive, what are you? A follower. Yeshua created us to be leaders, like him. It’s funny that a person who subscribes to other people’s Twitter posts is called a follower. It’s Biblically accurate.

If you really hear the Holy Spirit, you will get a lot of revelation, and revelation is true. It’s not something to “toss out there for discussion.” Other people’s opinions aren’t helpful. They are degenerate and harmful. The Talmud is full of opinions, like the opinion that Yeshua is in hell, boiling in excrement and semen. Catholics are of the opinion that it’s good to pray to dead people.

There are no opinions in heaven. There is only the truth. This is one of the most excellent things about heaven. When you get there, there will be no protestors and no lies to debunk.

Yeshua is the Prince of Peace. You can’t have peace without agreement.

If I say the Hulk is better than Superman, that’s an opinion, and it’s no better than your opinion. If God tells Jonah the Ninevites need to repent or be destroyed, it’s not suitable matter for discussion. It’s the truth. No one has the right to argue.

I think New York style pizza is better than Chicago style. Reasonable minds may differ. I can’t say I have authority. If I say you need to pray in tongues every day, I speak by revelation, so your contrary opinion has no value, and I have no obligation to listen to it or publish it in a comment.

If I were to go back to Twitter, I would avoid following people.

Once you get revelation, you will be wary of spending too much time with other Christians, because only a small fraction of them will be able to receive what you tell them. This is why Yeshua died with 11 disciples, after teaching thousands. It’s why he had to get away from the disciples frequently. They were better than most, but they were not on his level. He had to be with the Father in order to be refreshed and empowered.

The Christians I saw on Twitter were generally horrible. A lot of accounts are just click farms, trying to make money. Other people fight and call names. I learned two names: “dispy” and “Calvy.” A dispy believes time is divided into eras, or “dispensations,” in which God deals with the human race differently. They believe in the Messianic Age, for example. A Calvy is a Calvinist. I have some vague ideas about what Calvinists believe, but I don’t care enough to look it up so I can explain it here.

Apparently, Calvies and dispies don’t get along.

I saw people in various factions, fighting about doctrine, ridiculing their opponents. They referred to scholars and preachers to give their opinions authority. It was tiresome.

We are all supposed to hear from the Holy Spirit, not from John MacArthur, the Pope, and Joyce Meyer. If, after a year of salvation, you are still depending on Kenneth Copeland’s books, or Augustine’s, for information about God, you are missing out and filling your mind with damaging lies.

Apparently the Schofield reference Bible is controversial. I barely know what it is. People get really heated up discussing it.

Yeshua was uneducated, and so were the 11 disciples. Somehow, we still give Hellenist scholars like Thomas Aquinas, as well as other arrogant academics who never healed or prophesied, more respect than we give our neighbors who listen to the Holy Spirit.

It seems to me that engaging with Twitter Christians is a big waste of my time. They already know everything, but nearly all of them are wrong.

More and more, as a resident of Earth, I have the feeling that I’m watching people brawl, through bulletproof glass in a nuthouse. I just don’t know what I can do for them.

I can always intercede and give, and I try to put useful things on my blog, but that’s about it.

The Republican convention has not been encouraging. We’ve had a whore, a pagan who prays to unclean spirits and has nominal Christians join her, a socialist union official, and Hulk Hogan, a professional geek who made his money in a televised sideshow.

A geek is a person who does revolting or sensational things on a carnival midway. That’s professional wrestling. Profane, juvenile, lowbrow entertainment that corrupts kids and fuels the steroid industry.

Hogan isn’t even respected by other geeks. He is hated by many of his peers because he ratted them out to Vince McMahon when they tried to organize and negotiate with the WWE. He pretended to be their friend while he was doing this. He has a reputation as a backstabber. He took steroids all of his adult life and lied about it. When he was investigated, he snitched on Vince McMahon.

Part of his fame comes from a nude video in which he had sex with a friend’s wife. His birth name isn’t even Hogan, and he plagiarized “Hulk” from a comic book. His birth name is Terry Bollea. What does he have to do with conservatism? They could have had Curtis Sliwa or Nick Sandmann. Somebody respectable.

I understand that not every speaker will be a war hero or a missionary, but they could do better. I guess this is the Trump family influence.

Anyway, I’m off Twitter.

Twitter Still Stuck in 5th Grade

Youtube is memory-holing a lot of firearm channels this summer.

The term “memory hole” comes from 1984. The protagonist, Winston, worked for a censorship and revisionism agency called the Ministry of Truth. In his job, he had to get rid of documents the government did not like, and in order to destroy them, he dropped them into the memory hole, which was a tube that led to an incinerator.

Like the ministry, it had an ironic name, because it was really the forgetfulness hole. Things went into it to be forgotten, not remembered.

Interestingly, one of the worst punishments of days gone by was the oubliette. The name comes from oublier, the French word for “forget.” An oubliette was a cavity with one small opening. An oppressor would lower someone he didn’t like through the opening and then forget him. I don’t know how they got food and water in and feces and urine out.

Oubliettes are also called dungeons.

According to Wikipedia, which has to be right sometimes, it is believed that some structures now called oubliettes are actually old cisterns which have been mislabeled in an effort to wow tourists. That’s interesting, because the word says Jeremiah was thrown into a cistern. It makes more sense to me now.

The practice of putting things and people into holes in order to erase their memory explains hell, which is literally a hole where God puts people the rest of us will eventually forget. One of the worst curses in Judaism is to have your name and memory forgotten. Orthodox Jews call Yeshua “YESHU” because it’s an initialism for “May his name and memory be blotted out forever” in Hebrew.

A friend of my wife’s just had a dream. He was in Israel, a place he has never visited. He was in a golden city. Other people were arriving. They knew they were being prepared for a wonderful event. Everyone was happy. They were walking around looking at all the beautiful objects. A Muslim family showed up, and they were highly distressed because they had to leave. The friend worries about his mother and sister, who are not good Christians. In the dream, they were not with him, and he could not remember them.

He’s Zambian, but is family comes from India, from Hindu stock. His mother and sister are not real Christians. His mother likes keeping Hindu artefacts around,, thinking they will benefit the family. That’s idolatry.

The dream was consistent with beliefs about heaven and the rapture. In the rapture, people are called away to heaven, and the event they are summoned for is the wedding of Yeshua.

The left belongs to Satan, and it is working hard, not just to punish its enemies, but to silence them and erase their memory from the world. And Youtube’s channel-deletion campaign is part of it.

Get used to it. It will get worse.

Youtube has gone after a popular gun channel in which an old man from Tennessee shoots various guns in his backyard. He’s popular, so various businesses supply him with ammunition and guns, and he recommends them. Somehow, this violates Youtube’s new policies, retroactively.

One of the neat things about modern leftists is that you can’t save yourself by obeying them in the present and future. They make new rules and apply them ex post facto so you become guilty in the present even if you were in originally in compliance or you repented before the rules were made. Repenting after the rules are made is generally pointless. There is no forgiveness.

Youtube is controlled by arrogant, deluded, willfully stupid, cruel young socialists and pagans who have no principles and no empathy, so Youtube keeps getting worse. The noose tightens more and more.

I use Youtube because you can still get away with a lot there; you can say a lot of controversial things that are true without being banned or having your videos deleted. This is especially true if their shadowbanning has minimized your viewer base. They go after big Youtubers first. I’ve had videos deleted, but not many. I’m a tiny fish there.

When I saw that they were going to delete 2,700 of the gun guy’s videos going back about a decade and a half, I thought about X. Elon Musk claims he wants to make it competitive with Youtube.

Every so often, I check X out to see if I should use it. I delete my account over and over, so you would think I would be done with it, but with Musk’s video aspirations in mind, I decided to check it out one more time.

Nothing has changed. The interface is nothing like Youtube’s. It’s not useful for finding videos. It’s cluttered with people screaming vitriol at each other on a 5th-grade level. It’s full of opportunists trying to get rich by accumulating followers. It’s jammed up with people saying exactly the same things over and over without attribution. It’s junior high with no teacher present to slam a ruler on his desk.

If they want video, they are going to have to replicate Youtube, just like Rumble did, only better, because Rumble is clumsy.

I guess I’ll delete my account again.

A lot of people “there” are losing their minds over Amber Rose and Harmeet Dhillon.

Rose is a slut who became famous by having sex with rappers and producing pornography. She sells pornography right now. She says she’s an atheist. She’s a founder of the slutwalk movement. She has no place in the GOP. But the RNC invited her anyway under the big tent theory. The idea is to keep lowering standards until just about everyone on Earth can be considered conservative. The obvious down side is that when you accept your enemies into your midst, you become like them.

This is obvious to intelligent people, but not to a big percentage of Republicans. The ones who want tight borders and low taxes but don’t care about God.

People are saying the kind of stupid things you would expect. They’re comparing Rose to Mary Magdalene, whom tradition says was a whore. They’re saying we should not judge people based on their past mistakes. Obviously (so tired of needing that word), any whore who ran around with Yeshua was a repentant whore whose mistakes were in her past, not her present. Amber Rose is still at it, hammer and tongs.

Other people are squawking over Harmeet Dhillon, a Sikh who prayed to an unclean spirit on the convention stage.

One side says, correctly, that pagans should not be leading prayers before a party that tries to connect itself to Christianity. The big tent side says we shouldn’t care about religion or, more ridiculously, that Dhillon’s false god is our God.

Obviously (he wrote, sighing), her false god is not our God. Calling someone “god” doesn’t make him the true God of Christianity. In order to be a Christian, you have to acknowledge that Yeshua is God. If Yeshua is not in there, you worship spirits other than God, and ultimately, Satan is your deity. You must accept the belief that you are filthy and unable to save yourself, and that Yeshua saved you by allowing himself to be tortured to death for you.

I don’t feel I should have to shoulder the burden of explaining this because it is so…wait for it…obvious. Read the Bible. Yeshua was (and is) the most intolerant man who ever lived. Not only did he have no tolerance for heathen religions; he called Jews who claimed to worship Yahweh, yet who refused to acknowledge him as well, sons of Satan.

Genesis says Yahweh is a jealous God. You can’t have Buddha and Yahweh. You can’t have Ra or Zeus and Yahweh. You can’t have yoga and Yahweh. You have to have Yahweh alone, and he manifests in the father, Yeshua, and the Holy Spirit. Yeshua made it plain that anyone who rejects him rejects Yahweh.

Dhillon honored a filthy spirit that hates God, and thousands of Christians bowed their ignorant heads and agreed with her in idolatry and blasphemy. In doing so, they invited curses on their party.

Conservatives and Christians aren’t the only ones having a spat. Hindus and Sikhs are now going at each other in tweets.

People say Dhillon has done great things for the GOP. Yes, that’s called infiltration. You infiltrate, you make yourself seem indispensable, and then you destroy. Homosexuals start churches for the same reason, whether they realize it or not. Satan uses them to sow discord among believers and bring acceptance of abomination into God’s living room.

Yoga is good for your back. It’s still idolatry. It’s unacceptable. Doing things for the GOP doesn’t make you a viable religious leader in a Christian environment.

The GOP spat at God by letting this heathen represent it.

Does this mean she shouldn’t be allowed to be in the party? No, because the party is not a religious organization. The sad fact is that man chose politicians over God a long time ago, so our political factions don’t belong to God. But when the GOP invited Dhillon to spread her filth at its convention, it entered the realm of religion. It should have stuck with Christians or had no prayer at all.

Is it fair to let Christians lead prayer while excluding others? I don’t care. What’s fair to man is filth and provocation to God.

There is no way to reconcile the secular mindset with the holy mindset. They can’t work together neatly. Secular people intrude on religion, and people who know God intrude on secular rule. I will always come down on the side of God. I don’t care if I offend people. Their false god is offended already. I offend and infuriate Satan just by existing. I can’t make things any worse.

If I don’t offend Satan, I offend God. That’s disastrous and evil.

I never wanted Vivek Ramaswamy in the White House, because he’s a Hindu. I would have picked him over a nominal Christian who is worse for the church, but he could never be my first choice among nominal Christians who are equally friendly to God’s children and Israel.

People claim Dhillon’s deity, Waheguru, is the same as Yahweh. No, he is not. If you don’t accept Yeshua, you have rejected Yahweh. Any god that is not the father of Yeshua is no god at all. The world is full of people who pray to “God” all the time yet hate Yeshua and work against his children.

Waheguru is genderless. God is male, from one end to the other. Yeshua is male. The Holy Spirit is male. Hindus call on Waheguru when they practice yoga.

There is no way to turn Waheguru into the God of Christians. Calling God genderless is a huge blasphemy, and expecting him to show up while you worship demons in a yoga studio is beyond absurd. Failing to acknowledge the crucifixion separates you from Yahweh.

By having this heathen pray to Satan before the convention, the GOP signaled a willingness to break with Yeshua. No surprise. The GOP is a carnal enterprise. It’s not a church.

I consider this yet another sign of the apocalypse. I will vote for Trump over Biden, but I am not gullible enough to think I belong to the party of God. There is no such party on Earth. I will cast my earthly vote for Caesar and my supernatural votes for Yeshua.

Twitter is a reminder of what the world has become. I don’t see my place in it. Maybe I will change my mind if Musk turns it into a workable video platform, but I don’t think I will.

Chicago Crust Leaves me Unimpressed

I decided to try my hand at Chicago style pizza again last night. The results were mixed.

There is a guy who has a site called Real Deep Dish Pizza, and he publishes a recipe he calls the Holy Grail. He says he updates the recipe sometimes. You can download it as a PDF. There is no point in linking to the site. You’ll find it fast if you want.

Internet pizza people respect this guy, so I thought his recipe ought to be a good starting point.

I tried mail-order pizza from Lou Malnati’s over the last few days. The cheese pizza was pretty good, although the crust was harder than I thought it should have been. The sausage pizza was not good because the sausage boiled in the sauce. The sauce in Chicago style pizza goes above the cheese, and the toppings to in between, so they boil. There was no browning at all.

I liked one thing about the style. Putting the sauce on top makes it possible to use nearly any cheese. Only a few cheeses will work on top of a pizza. Radiant heat makes cheese behave badly, and if your cheese is in the 98% that don’t work, you will get brown cheese, tough cheese, greasy cheese, wet cheese, or some other disastrous result.

I decided to use Holy Grail crust and my own sauce and cheese. I thought that if I tried plain old grocery mozzarella, and it worked, I would have a secret weapon for those times when I didn’t feel like paying for overpriced cheese locally or driving to get restaurant cheese. I decided to use brick whole milk mozzarella. Not even low moisture. This was risky, because cheese that isn’t low moisture can release a lot of water. I thought it wouldn’t matter, because the cheese was going to be sitting in sauce. The water would go into the sauce, where it couldn’t hurt anything.

I don’t have a 12″ pizza pan, which is what the crust recipe was supposed to fit. I do have cast iron skillets, but I didn’t want to fool with them. I got myself a 9″ by 13″ steel nonstick pan at my local grocery. I did some math and decided I needed to scale the circular recipe up by a factor of 1.1.

Making the dough was no problem. I dumped everything but the oil in the Cuisinart, beat it up, let it rest 5 minutes so the water got into the flour, and blended the corn oil in. I used a lot of yeast, which is generally a bad idea, but I was in a rush. The dough rose fine, and it was easier to handle than ordinary dough. The oil made a difference.

I used a pound of Galbani mozzarella in thick slices. I used a pint of sauce made from Cento crushed tomatoes and a little Stanislaus Saporito sauce, which is tomato paste and basil. I added garlic, oregano, and a little sugar. I used both powdered and fresh garlic because they complement each other.

I baked at 450° for maybe 40 minutes. The pie baked up fine, but I had to put foil over it to prevent the exposed parts of the crust from burning.

The cheese worked. That was a big relief. It was just like the cheese you would find in fried mozzarella in a mid-tier restaurant. The sauce was good, but next time I’ll reduce the Saporito, because it made it a little ketchupy.

The crust was not thrilling. The texture was about like the frozen pies, only better, but the flavor was bland. The crusts on the frozen pies had a corn flavor. There was no cornmeal in them, so it must have come from the oil Malnati’s used. Some people recommend butter-flavored Crisco, which sounds gross.

The crust was too thick, so my guess is that the guy who wrote the recipe for a 12″ pie used too much stuff. It was half an inch thick on the bottom, which is almost twice as thick as the crusts on the frozen pies.

I don’t know if I’ll keep trying, because Sicilian and Detroit style (thinner Sicilian, more or less) are fantastic, and I don’t think Chicago style can measure up, even at its best. I think you have to be raised on it to love it. If I do try, I’ll look for a different oil or shortening. I will definitely use less yeast.

Think about this. New York style is the most popular pizza in North America. It started way over on the East Coast, and they now sell it in Alaska and Hawaii. Neapolitan style has caught on, too. You can find it in every big American city. In 8 decades, Chicago style has gone almost nowhere. There are very, very few places outside of Illinois that sell it. If it’s so great, why doesn’t anyone want it?

You can claim it’s because it takes 45 minutes to get a pizza, but I think that if it were as good as other pizzas, people would wait.

Many Chicagoans say it’s for tourists. Thin-crust Chicago tavern-style pizza seems to get more respect locally.

Tourists. Why would anyone go to Chicago as a tourist. What is there to see? The weather is bad. The land is flat and boring. The people have gone insane. You’re literally safer in a military unit in a war than you are in a Chicago ghetto on a holiday.

Although the Chicago deep-dish style is not that good, I got very useful information from the attempt. From now on, when I don’t have restaurant supply cheese and I don’t feel like paying $11 per pound for deli cheese, I’ll use grocery cheese and put the sauce on top. It won’t work with toppings, because who likes boiled toppings? But it will be great for cheese pizza, which I love.

Now that my pizza adventure has been chronicled, I’ll move on to the convention.

I’m glad J.D. Vance was chosen to run with Trump. He was my choice. He’s conservative, and he’s very smart. I don’t know whether he is popular enough to help Trump win, though. I haven’t studied the issue. Maybe I’m wrong to think he would be a good choice for president. I admit, I’m winging it.

It was interesting to see him get the spot because I have so much in common with him.

Vance’s parents are from Jackson, Kentucky, in Breathitt County. My grandfather was the circuit judge there. As you move eastward in Kentucky, the people get more ghetto. Breathitt is the farthest east of the counties where my grandfather held court.

To be quite honest, the people of Breathitt are a mess. They used to call it “bloody Breathitt” because the people were so violent. My mother used to tell two stories about Breathitt. One was that the Army recruited doctors from Breathitt during wars because they were so used to treating bullet wounds. That’s probably a myth. America has always had plenty of doctors who knew how to treat bullet wounds, and I doubt Breathitt ever had more than two doctors until maybe 1970. The second story was that they never had to draft anyone in Breathitt, because the men were so anxious to enlist and kill people. That, I could believe.

My dad always said there were a lot of people in Breathitt whose eyes were too close together.

There is a lot of white trash there, if you want the truth. The counties to the west of Breathitt are not great, but Breathitt is on a lower level.

Vance is famous for writing a book, Hillbilly Elegy, that became a movie. Ron Howard, that great expert on Appalachia, directed. Hey, he grew up in Mayberry, didn’t he?

Like a lot of people trying to escape the downward pull of Eastern Kentucky, Vance’s parents moved from Jackson to Ohio, and evidently, it was not much of a step up. My understanding is that his parents weren’t much, and they continued dragging him down. He had a grandmother who pushed him to succeed.

I have not read Vance’s book, and I don’t plan to. I have never seen the movie. I saw a clip. It was pretty ridiculous.

On the one hand, Glenn Close, as the grandmother, looked the part. She has a big bony Celt head, just like many of my female relatives. As far as appearance goes, she nailed it. Set her down among my female second cousins, and she would fit right in. The dialogue, however, was way off. No one cursed. No one waved a burning cigarette while talking. No one used any of the colloquialisms I remember from my youth.

Maybe they should have had Cameron Crowe direct it. His grandfather came from Stanton, another county seat where my grandfather served as judge. Crowe’s ear might have been better.

My story is quite different. For one thing, I have never achieved much of anything, nor have I ever had any ambition. For another, my parents were both Mensa material, and both were educated. They never completely overcame their roots. My mother had terrible taste, and my dad held onto his coal-camp manners. But they were very smart. They were well-read.

My dad was the best lawyer I ever knew, and that includes every area of practice, from the library to the courtroom.

Unlike me, Vance has no accent at all. That’s weird. And he seems to have assimilated completely, book and movie notwithstanding.

I have an aunt who gets excited when anyone from Eastern Kentucky does well. She seems determined to convince people Eastern Kentucky is an incubator of unrecognized genius. Any acquaintance of hers who can stand upright and write his name is an unsung renaissance man. She has bragged to me about Woody Stephens and Cameron Crowe. It’s her way of vindicating her strange prejudices about the region.

My aunt told me about J.D. Vance a few years ago. I had no idea who he was, and I did not feel compelled to learn. She thinks he’s fantastic. On the other hand, she holds herself out as a liberal, so I have to wonder how she is dealing with his nomination. She is in no way liberal except in that she pretends to be one and makes excuses for her undeserving demographic, but she has painted herself into a corner as far as Vance is concerned. If she brags about him, she can’t really reconcile it with the reputation she has tried to cultivate. She will offend people she has tried to impress.

She doesn’t think he’s fantastic because he’s conservative or good presidential timber. She thinks he’s fantastic because he’s famous and he came from Eastern Kentucky. That’s all it takes.

Anyway, it’s interesting to see a person with whom I have so much in common, running for the office of vice president. I don’t think his Appalachian background is an asset. It’s just a handicap he overcame.

I was sorry to see that the GOP had a slut speak. I mean Amber Rose. She is a big part of the slut walk movement. She poses for nude photos. She promotes homosexuality. Disgusting.

How desperate are we? This is where razor-thin election margins have put us. Simping for women who sleep with rappers.

I was also sorry to see them let Harmeet Dhillon, a pagan, deliver a prayer. I don’t know anything about her except that she is a Sikh. Sikhism rejects Yeshua’s teachings, so it comes from Satan and leads people to hell, in addition to corrupting their lives here on Earth.

God–Yeshua–isn’t looking down and approving of the GOP for being open-minded. He knows he has been disrespected, and that has consequences.

I’m a monarchist and a theocrat. I obey our laws, and I’m not planning to overthrow the government, but from now on, I will do my best to vote for whoever brings us closer to a Christian theocracy based in charismatic doctrine. I don’t care whom I offend. I don’t care about our idiotic obsession with separating church and state. I don’t care about making people of other faiths comfortable. Yeshua made people extremely uncomfortable. People of other faiths worship demons and go to hell. I don’t support those things.

Religious inclusivity is the most un-Christian policy imaginable.

I assume they will also have prayers from a Muslim and a Jew who thinks Yeshua was a magician and a fraud and who follows sages who made their living teaching blasphemy.

I’m with the GOP because it’s the closest thing we have to a Christian party. The more we strive to be popular, bringing in disgusting people and people who are badly misled, the less salt we have in ourselves and the less motivation God has to help conservatives. When we become just like leftists, God will have no reason to help us.

I can’t vote for a proper party, so I vote for the least-vile party. It’s getting to the point where I have no one to stand with.

I wore my old MAGA hat today, figuring I should honor a man who just got shot for me, along with the others who were shot. I don’t know if I should wear it again. I love Trump, but he’s no messiah, and he and his family put Amber Rose on the stage.

I hope Trump wins, but America is lost either way.

They Pull a Pizza, You Pull a Casserole

I hope it is not tasteless to say it, in view of the suffering that has taken place over the last couple of days, but Donald Trump is riding a sudden wave of success right now. An innocent man died with his arms around his wife and daughter, two other people were seriously wounded, our former president was shot, families were put through an emotional wringer, and the whole crowd was traumatized. Nonetheless, Trump’s campaign is experiencing a huge boost.

The assassination attempt will turn out to be one of the best things that ever happened to Trump, with respect to his political career. On top of that, Judge Aileen Cannon has dismissed the unfairly-brought classified document case that was taking place in Florida. She dismissed without prejudice, based on the conclusion that Jack Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional.

As always, people on the left are reacting in a very nuance-deaf way, saying Cannon is in the tank for Trump and that the 11th Circuit will respond by throwing her off the case, if not the bench. It’s like listening to children. Maybe I can come across more like an adult.

The ruling is interesting for more than one reason.

To begin, Cannon did not reach the immunity question, which was also before her. When judges have multiple issues before them, it’s common for them to rule on one and ignore the rest. Judges say they do this to make courts more efficient, but they are human, so I’m sure they also do it for other reasons.

Cannon says Smith’s appointment violates the Appointments Clause of the Constitution. She opined that the government might be able to fix the problem later, but for now the remedy is dismissal without prejudice. This leaves the door open for a government effort to revive the case.

Does this mean Smith can appeal, get the decision reversed, and have Cannon exiled to Siberia? Of course not. He may be able to get the decision reversed, but guess who gets to look at the motions after that happens? Judge Cannon. The 11th Circuit is not going to rule on the other dismissal claims, so Cannon will be free to do so. She can dismiss the case all over again based on the immunity question. Then the appeal process starts all over again.

Don’t ask me whether the Supreme Court’s recent immunity decision will affect this or Trump’s other cases. I’m not going to sit here and do extensive research for nothing. Maybe it will. Maybe it will kill the Fani Willis case, the Alvin Bragg case, and both Jack Smith cases. It won’t help him in the case brought by unethical New York AG Letitia James, but that case should die on appeal, possibly even before it leaves the state.

Smith is also running the extremely phony January 6 incitement case before Tanya Chutkan. That case has been severely weakened by the immunity decision. Does Cannon’s decision about Smith’s appointment affect the January 6 case? I don’t think so. I think that’s up to Chutkan. Cannon and Chutkan are both at the lowest level of the federal judiciary, which is the district court level. District courts often have conflicts. A district court can strike a law down nationwide, but it can’t force its decisions on other district courts.

I don’t think any of these cases will survive appeal, but I’m talking as an outsider who hasn’t studied them as much as the insiders. They will not be decided before the election or inauguration, so we may end up in a situation where a newly-inaugurated Trump, even if convicted, can pardon himself and throw the courts into a brand-new briar patch. They will have to resolve the issue of whether the pardon is legal, and that will take time. Then if his self-pardon is undone, his successor will pardon him.

As for Trump, today the Milwaukee (Why?) convention starts, and he is on a roll. He has a freshly-bandaged ear for the cameras, which no liberal network can avoid showing the nation. He has that amazing Evan Vucci photo of himself pumping his fist beneath the American flag. He has a fresh dismissal. He still has the debate. He also has the vile behavior of prominent leftists, who have made extraordinarily cruel and sick remarks about him since the shooting. Bet we see them on video at the convention.

Leftists are so crazy–so hardened by demons–they can’t hide it any more. Joe Scarborough’s network took him off the air temporarily, and they openly admit it was because they were afraid his leftist-nut guests would say tacky things about the shooting. They are admitting 1) leftists really do have TDS, and 2) they want to help Biden win the presidency by keeping new ammunition away from conservatives.

That’s really something. The lunatics are policing the asylum, with unwitting transparency.

In other news, I finally tried a real Chicago style pizza. Unfortunately, it was a frozen pizza, because no one around here makes them fresh.

Chicago style pizza is interesting. To begin with, “Chicago style” is a misnomer for two reasons.

First, there are three styles of pizza associated with Chicago. One is stuffed. Another has a thin crust. The third is the one people refer to as “Chicago style.”

Second, it was probably invented by a black woman from Mississippi. I can’t help deriving some childish pleasure from this knowledge, because Chicagoans often go over the top when they praise their pizza.

From here on out, I will use the term “Chicago style” the way most people use it. It refers to a deep-dish pizza with the cheese on the bottom, against the crust. Toppings go on top of the cheese, and then everything is buried in tomato sauce. The crust is on the biscuity side. If I understand it correctly, it’s more crunchy than chewy.

One of the most famous Chicago style joints is named Pizzeria Uno, and if you go there, you will see a plaque claiming the style was invented by co-owner Ike Sewell, a Texan, and first served at Uno in 1943. The story Uno promotes says Sewell’s partner, Ric Riccardo, was dissatisfied with his pizza, so he traveled to Italy to study. Then he came back to Chicago and started serving it. How this is consistent with the plaque’s claim that Sewell invented the pizza is a mystery.

A food historian has pointed out a funny clue: what was happening in 1943? Think hard. Something involving Italy. There is no way an American could have gone to Italy during World War Two to study pizza.

The historian says a black woman named Alice Mae Redmond worked in several Chicago pizzerias, and she’s the one who invented Chicago deep-dish. Because she worked at more than one place, no Chicagoan and no Italian can take credit.

If you have friends from Chicago who love to brag about their pizza and ruin every pizza meal with their moaning, now you have an ace up your sleeve.

One of the best-known deep dish pizzerias is named Lou Malnati’s, and they have such a following, they sell their pizzas over the web. They ship them in styrofoam boxes with dry ice. I have two cousins who grew up near Chicago, and I am told one of them thinks Chicago style is the best pizza there is. His sister says he orders Malnati’s pizza and has it shipped to him in Texas.

I heard about this a long time ago, but I never bothered ordering pizza. I wasn’t that excited about it. The other day I was discussing it with my wife, and we decided to give it a shot. I spent the massive sum of $76.99 for two 10″ pies: one cheese, one sausage. I have tried both.

The pizzas come in disposable round aluminum pans that look like someone sat on them at the factory. You take the pies out, oil the pans, bake at 425° for 35-40 minutes (really more like 50), and you’re ready to go.

The crusts looked hand-formed, and bits of both had broken off in transit. I would say the crust is somewhere between a biscuit and pie crust. It has a corn taste, leading many people to claim it has cornmeal in it. Not true. It does have a lot of oil in it, though, and corn oil is the standard. Yes, corn oil. That Italian staple.

I found the crusts almost too hard. Not like hardtack, but not like biscuits, either. Maybe if you tried to make a biscuit with half of the milk replaced with water, you’d have it. There was very little air in the crusts. They were dense.

The cheese was just melted mozzarella. If you like melted mozzarella, you will like the cheese in a Malnati’s frozen pizza. Nothing there to criticize.

The sauce is tomato puree, water, and maybe a few seasonings. Very nice. Not too sour. Not too sweet.

I’m sure fresh pizzas would be a little better.

The cheese pie was very good, although I would make it with a crust that’s a little less dense. One nice thing about the crust is that it’s strong enough to allow you to use your hands to hold slices that are about an inch thick. Maybe that’s why they make it so hard. Many people eat Chicago pizza with a fork, which is why Jon Stewart called it a casserole.

The sausage pie–the standard Chicago style pie–was not good. There was less mozzarella, and the sausage was boiled. Not kidding. There was a layer of Italian sausage between the cheese and sauce, and when the pie was baked, it wasn’t roasted the way it should have been. It was just plain boiled, in cheese and sauce. It tasted like boiled sausage.

Huge mistake. I don’t know how people can stand it. It’s better than no pizza at all, but a Stouffer’s French bread pizza blows it away. The difference between the cheese pizza and the sausage pizza was huge.

Is there a fix? Yes. Brown the sausage superficially before putting it in the pie. But Malnati’s doesn’t do that.

My conclusion is that a Chicago pie with nothing but cheese and sauce is great, but apart from that, you’re going to be eating gross boiled toppings. This is probably one of those foods you have to be raised on if you want to enjoy it, like my mother’s spaghetti sauce with chili powder and green peppers. My recommendation: avoid. It’s just not good.

My wife likes eating giant maggots called mopane worms. That’s Africa for you. Deep dish pizza with the toppings in the wrong place is Chicago’s bowl of giant maggots.

It’s like Hershey’s, the worst chocolate on Earth. The guy who invented it used a process that creates butyric acid, which is the chemical that gives vomit its characteristic smell. Foreigners who try Hershey’s say it tastes like vomit, and they are right, but if you were raised on it, it seems okay.

What do I take away from this, as a person who likes making pizza?

First of all, my own Sicilian is still the very best pizza I have ever eaten. Nothing else comes close. Not in New York. Not nowhere.

Second, Chicago style could be very good and worth making, in two variations I can think of off the top of my head. 1. Cheese pizza, and 2. topped pizza with the toppings in the right place. Maybe I could go crust-cheese-sauce-cheese-toppings. They say the bottom layer of cheese is crucial to a proper crust, and if I just threw toppings onto sauce, the toppings would boil, so I would have to have another layer of cheese.

I think the second version above is a waste of time. Cheese seems to be the answer.

I discovered a tremendous benefit of the Chicago method. You can use bad cheese and get away with it.

When you make conventional pizza, finding cheese that works is extremely important, and most grocery stores don’t have anything that fits the bill. I go to restaurant supply houses, and I also get away with using grocery deli cheese which costs $11 per pound.

The problem with most cheese is that it reacts badly to radiant heat. Some cheese burns too fast because it doesn’t contain the right amount of fat. Some develops a tough film on top. The film resembles vinyl. Some cheese gives off way too much water or fat.

When you boil cheese, you shouldn’t have these problems. The radiant heat never hits the cheese. It should be possible to use any grocery mozzarella that works in things like lasagna.

I think you could use plain old bricks of whole milk mozzarella, like Polly-O or Galbani and do just fine. They don’t work on top of pizzas.

Some people claim the only real Sicilian pizza has the sauce on top. I think they’re nuts, but it should hide cheese problems well. In a desperate situation, putting the sauce on top could save a pizza, and it may change the crust in a nice way.

To sum up my tentative conclusions, if you’re from Chicago, your style is not that great, it was invented by a black Southern lady, no Chicago restaurant can be pinpointed as the birthplace, and New York still dominates. But Chicago style is worth making if certain very limiting rules are observed.

Will I order more frozen pizzas at a cost of about $40 each? Never. Unless someone sends me a check for, say, 50 million dollars, and money no longer means anything to me.

Oddly, the price tag is not all that far from the cost of a restaurant pie made locally. Call it $30 including tip but not gas. The actual cost of a Malnati’s pie is $37.495, so for about 7 bucks, you can avoid doing dishes. Not a great deal, but not the worst.

If you order 6 pies, they come at $23 each, so not unreasonable at all. Not as good as making your own, better, for maybe $7.

I will probably look into crust recipes.

In closing, I’ll tell you how to sound like your from Chicago. It’s really easy. Say, “My dog is in there,” only say it this way: “My dag is in dere.” People may mistake you for Jim Belushi.

My dag is in dere. It works.

Yeshua is the Only Good Financial Advisor

For some reason, Youtube is sending me Dave Ramsey videos. This is the Christian financial guru. I am not sure he’s always a good source of advice.

Someone emailed and said they had debt. They used credit cards. They applied the points to trips. They paid their balances monthly. I guess their debts were not credit card debts.

He went off on a rant against credit cards, telling these people they should not use credit cards even if they paid their balances off every month, completely negating the interest problem. He said people who liked points thought getting $200 back on $10,000 was a big score.

Man, is that wrong.

He said these people should not eat out or go on vacation. That’s pretty harsh. They should cut way back, but eating at home every day and never going anywhere? That’s a pretty bleak lifestyle, and it’s not a great way to raise kids. Kids should travel. It’s a very important part of their education. Some debt is acceptable.

He seems to think there are people out there making credit card buys they would not have made otherwise, just to get points. I suppose there are people that stupid, but I doubt there are many.

I will lay out my philosophy about credit cards.

First of all, asceticism is not the answer. Be frugal; sure. But don’t live in a refrigerator box and never leave home. Human beings are not made of stone. We need a little recreation. We need a little treat occasionally. Telling people to live like solitary confinement prisoners is unrealistic, and no one who is not mentally ill can pull it off. I paid $1500 for stereo speakers and $900 for a parrot using student loans, and I am still very glad I did.

Second, credit cards are great when used properly. Some people can’t handle them, but then some people can’t be trusted with butter knives. You shouldn’t turn down a great thing because Dave Ramsey issued a blanket prohibition.

1. Credit cards help you get jobs and insurance. What? Yes, it’s true. If you don’t have loans and credit cards, you don’t have a credit rating. When you apply for a job, the employer will probably look up your credit rating. If there is nothing to see, you have a problem. If you apply for insurance, a good credit rating will make it more likely you will be accepted, and you will pay less. Good luck establishing a credit rating without credit cards.

2. Cards allow you to get things that are pretty hard to get otherwise. If I want to buy a part for a machine directly from Austria, I can get it with a credit card. I can pay for a hotel in Vietnam. Not so easy with wires and checks.

3. Cards put the power of big institutions behind you. I once paid a now-dead swindler named Joe Bergamo at a site called Plaza Machinery over $2000 to send me a lathe because other people trusted him. He demanded money orders or cashier’s checks. When he cheated me, there was nothing I could do. American Express and Paypal would have taught him manners. Remember this: any vendor who won’t take credit cards or Paypal is a swindler. This is the whole reason for insisting on checks and transfers.

4. When you use an ATM card to pay for things online, you risk giving a stranger access to your entire bank account. What if you have a million dollars in it? When you pay using a card, he gets access to nothing except maybe a number he can get in big trouble for misusing.

5. Points are fantastic. No two ways about it. I use Amex points to get Home Depot cards. This way, I get 1 to 1.25% back, depending on the current deal. I spend a ton on Home Depot items because I own rentals and live on a farm. I paid a guy $7500 to cut trees. He wouldn’t give me a discount for cash, so I got $75 back. A guy I knew used to pay his $22,000 law school tuition with Amex. He got hundreds of dollars’ worth of points every year. Why would he not do that? I pay for health insurance using a card. They won’t give me a cash discount, so I would have to be stupid to pay by ACH.

When I exchange points for stuff, I look for the best deal. That’s why I get Home Depot cards. Other companies give you less money per point. Why get 50 cents from Applebee’s or United Airlines when Home Depot will give you a dollar?

I have an Amazon card. I get 5% off plus free shipping. “They jack up the price to cover shipping.” Still cheaper than buying locally, and I get a better selection plus easy returns. To buy a box of screws locally, I have to spend at least $1.50 on gas. Usually more like $4. If I have to go to a real city, call it $40 or so. Tolls and gas.

I’ll bet I spent $45,000 on travel when my wife and I were waiting for her visa. That was not a luxury. Seeing your spouse is a necessity. I got back tons of points, and when we had to cancel things, we had big institutions behind us to make sure everyone stayed honest.

I also bought her wedding ring with a card. What’s better? A wedding ring, or a wedding ring plus a new pair of work boots?

6. Cards make doing your taxes easier. You have a nice record of everything you buy. No stuffing receipts in bags and trying to organize them later. You can have a card for business, making it even simpler. And vendors who take credit cards usually include sales tax so you don’t have to pay it to your state using a horrible website.

How does Dave Ramsey pay for things online with cash? If he’s using a debit card, he’s risking disaster. Is he sending checks to Amazon and Ebay? Welcome to the world of one-month delivery. Is he driving every time he needs a roll of tape? That’s not cost-effective.

If you pay your balances every month, employers, insurers, and potential creditors will love you, and you won’t pay a cent in interest. What’s not to love?

Ramsey also pushes conspiracy theories to make you think credit card companies are so much smarter than you, you can never get a fair shake. He says credit card companies give you special representatives when you call. He says they check your location using your phone number, and they set you up with people who sound like you.

No, they really don’t. He claims that if you’re in the South, they’ll give you a person with a “syrupy Southern accent.” That doesn’t actually happen. I would know. I have actually asked people where they were. Brokerages don’t do it either. I called a brokerage and got a deep-voiced Northerner who said his name was Isabel.

Big Brother is pretty bad, but he isn’t a god. It’s not responsible to call yourself a financial advisor and make things up. People will end up stuffing their mattresses with cash.

You need credit cards. You should have American Express and Visa or Mastercard. Face it. If you live in a Unabomber cabin with no electricity and eat potatoes you grow in your own excrement, maybe you’re an exception, but the rest of us have lives.

I’m sure Ramsey is way,way better with money than I am, because I do a lot of stupid things, and he will probably die sitting on 9 or more figures, but telling people not to use credit cards is nuts in 2024.

I don’t like his advice on credit cards, and I think he needs to work on his manners. He sneers at people unnecessarily. He is condescending. He seems haughty, and the word says haughtiness is abomination, just like sodomy. It’s something I am trying to correct in myself, because I have been guilty too many times to count.

If you’re going to hold yourself out as a Christian celebrity, you should exhibit patience, humility, and love. And no, “tough love” is not an excuse for popping off on people who have been nice to you and who build your business by consulting you.

Yeshua was often very rude, but 1. he was God and knew what he was doing, and 2. he was going after liars who dragged people down to hell with them. He was not tormenting poor people who wanted to use Mastercard to go to Five Guys once a month. There is a difference. If Ramsey wants to be mean to active pimps and child molesters, fine, but he shouldn’t vent on the people who make his fame and fortune possible.

The word says a haughty spirit goes before a fall, and if Ramsey is really worth 9 figures, he has a long way to drop. He should be more careful.

I don’t see him pushing charity as a way of becoming financially blessed. Maybe it’s in his work somewhere. It’s very clearly Biblical. I can’t recall ever seeing a professional Christian promoting this teaching. I can’t recall anyone but me teaching it, now that I think about it. The word says God repays those who give to the poor, and it says those who give will be blessed right here on Earth and that they will not be delivered to the will of their enemies.

Look at this:

There is that scattereth, and yet increaseth; and there is that withholdeth more than is meet, but it tendeth to poverty.

The liberal soul shall be made fat: and he that watereth shall be watered also himself.

He that withholdeth corn, the people shall curse him: but blessing shall be upon the head of him that selleth it.

I try to remember these things because I am naturally stingy and afraid of poverty. Either these things are true, or God is a liar.

I have had concerns about keeping too much, but the other day, I read about Lazarus, whom Yeshua raised from the dead. His sister Mary poured something like $30,000 of perfume on Yeshua’s feet, and Judas the thief practically had kittens. Judas acted like a model “good steward” by modern Christian standards.

Ask yourself this: what kind of person has $30,000 worth of ANYTHING in their house? And perfume is a luxury. This wasn’t a car or a cache of merchandise used to support a business. Lots of people have expensive items they use for work, but not everyone can put down a year’s pay for perfume.

I think Lazarus and his sisters were doing fine.

Cornelius was the first gentile to receive salvation and the Holy Spirit, and he was a wealthy Roman who gave to the poor and supported a synagogue. The Bible doesn’t say he gave until he was poor himself, and it never says God had any problems with his wealth.

What was God going to do? Make him poor so the poor and the synagogue did without?

I think charity is much more important for building wealth than financial planning will ever be. If you depend on your own work and planning, you will spend a lot of time doing things you hate, and the wealth you gain is very likely to be a curse to you and your family. If God gives you wealth for being generous according to the orders of the Holy Spirit, your wealth will be a blessing to you, and you won’t have to sit at a desk for 200 hours a month, drinking Mylanta and wondering if your investments are going to tank.

I believe these things. I do not believe Yeshua wants me to sit around counting my money, being so frugal I make my wife miserable and worrying that I’m not a good steward if I don’t know where every cent is. When Yeshua needed money, he pulled it out of a fish’s mouth.

Yeshua told us to take no thought for our earthly needs. Where did he tell us to listen to Dave Ramsey and pour over the S&P for hours a day? I can’t find any advice resembling that, but he talked about giving frequently. You only have so much time per day. Does he really want us to spend that time ignoring people so we can grind out more dollars? It makes no sense.

I think you should have credit cards and use them with common sense and no worries. Seems to work for me.

Obvious Things Pundits Have not Figured Out

In case anyone is wondering what’s happening with the Bidens, I can tell you, just from being old and very familiar with the baseness of human beings.

Bill O’Reilly published a big scoop right after the debate. He said Biden had decided to get out of the race, and the administration was delaying while deciding how to announce it.

I looked at that story and wondered why anyone with a hot tip would talk to Bill O’Reilly in 2024. He was a huge player before the scandal, but now he’s limited to Youtube and a personal website where he charges people to find out what he thinks. Like me, he is his own publisher. That’s fine for me, because I am obscure and not respected, but for the former king of news, it’s proof he is no longer an apex predator. These days, it makes no sense for an insider with good information to go to him. Why would you call Bill O’Reilly with red-hot news when you can call Jesse Watters or Sean Hannity?

Maybe bigger personalities got the same call before O’Reilly and turned it down because they considered it unreliable. Maybe O’Reilly took the bait because he can’t be as picky as he used to. People selling news stories often have to shop them around to find the right customers.

Shortly after O’Reilly published his scoop and promised more to follow, The Washington Post published the actual scoop: the Bidens were not giving up. They were holed up at Camp David, and Jill and Hunter were the loudest voices in the crew of what I would call abusers of the elderly. They were pushing Biden to keep going.

O’Reilly then offered a different story and admitted he was guessing.

My personal theory was that Biden would never quit, because his ego defies measurement and he has dementia. Stubborn, arrogant people with sound minds get worse, not better, when they become demented.

So what is on the minds of the Bidens? My theories:

1. Joe is humiliated and shocked. He knew he was slipping, but his handlers protected him from the full impact, as current stories show. They babied him and humored him, like managers of overrated champion prizefighters who haven’t faced any real opponents. oe is flustered, but that monster ego likes what his wife and son are feeding it, so he will keep going until enough powerful left-wingers pile on him to break his will.

Here is a sad video–no sarcasm–which may help people understand what Joe Biden has faced this week. Has it been unbearable for him, or has his staggering array of self-excusing mechanisms managed to keep his pride intact?

2. Like most women, Jill Biden really likes attention, even though First Lady is a position you can get merely by having a heartbeat. She does not want the attention to stop. Vogue just put her on the cover. Because Biden is going to lose the presidency, that will never happen again, but she thinks there is still hope, so she is doing everything she can to avoid becoming an elderly Wilmington housewife who no longer gets invited to national events.

3. Hunter Biden knows he is going to prison eventually, if only for a short time. He won’t go over the gun charge, but after that, he will face other convictions. With his father the bullying president out of the way, even some Democrats may want to investigate the Biden family in order to save face, so we could see charges extending far beyond guns and taxes. It is very unlikely anyone but Biden will pardon Hunter or commute his sentences, and no one but Biden can pressure the executive branch to go easy on him, so Hunter really, really wants Biden to win. Also, Hunter’s only immense source of income is influence-peddling, and he will never be allowed to practice law again, so once Biden is gone, Hunter has no job. No one will buy his paintings, either. At least not for $400,000 each.

4. The rest of the Bidens…see item 3. They are in the same boat as Hunter. Possible investigations and convictions. Abrupt end to influence-peddling.

What if thorough investigations fail to uncover trialworthy evidence of crimes? Hmm. That didn’t help Trump, did it? He committed no fraud, he was found guilty of sexual assault on evidence flimsier than Elvis sightings, he did nothing wrong on January 6, and look where he is. Same things can happen to a Biden who is no longer related to a president, and being tried and winning often bankrupts people.

It’s important to note that Biden never said he would not commute Hunter’s sentence. He never said he wouldn’t pardon him or commute his sentences in other matters. He never said he would go easy on the rest of the family. And he’s a horrible, shameless liar, so it doesn’t matter what he said. He may pardon Hunter on the gun charge.

I believe this is what’s happening.

I think Joe, as a man of influence, will fade quickly after he loses. He is fading now.

People keep saying he’s a decent man and that they like him. Those things are not true. Everyone over the age of 50 (most powerful people) knows Biden. He has been obnoxious all his life, even by politician standards. More recently, in 2022, he said, “No one f___s with a Biden!” Only a bully filled with bad intentions would say a thing like that, threatening people indiscriminately from the office of the presidency (or anywhere else). It’s something a drug kingpin would say.

People do not like Biden, and that includes Democrats. A lot of people, including administration insiders, will be glad to see him exiled to obscurity to have his fangs pulled. I don’t think we’ve had a president this disagreeable since Johnson. Nixon was crooked and vindictive, but he was way smoother about it. He wasn’t a shanty Irish hothead, and he didn’t extend his vengefulness to petty slights involving his family.

Nixon was never accused of influence peddling or funneling money to his worthless relations. He was never accused of going after their detractors. He and his family were not accused of receiving foreign funds in exchange for helping America’s adversaries. His daughter was never paid the price of a home by a Nixon ally for a painting. He was not unpleasant, personally. In these ways, he differs from Biden.

People will still talk to Bush and Obama because they are not senile and can be reasoned with. If you want to deal with them, it is not necessary to confine your conversations to the hours between eleven a.m. and four p.m. It is probably possible to get reasonable access to them instead of wading through layers of Howard-Hughes-style keepers who really run the free world.

Nobody of any significance is going to go through the ordeal of gaining access to an irksome, bullying, incoherent dementia patient who will never hold public office again and may be investigated for treason and bribery.

When nice people become demented, their families hire live-in help and keep them in their houses. People come to their birthday parties. Everyone looks for chances to hug them. When bullies who made people walk on eggs their whole lives fail, they get shunted off to isolation, and everyone breathes a sigh of relief. “When it goeth well with the righteous, the city rejoiceth: and when the wicked perish, there is shouting.”

Maybe I’m wrong, but I have been right sometimes.

I don’t think Democrats can push Biden out of the election. Seems like more than half of them are trying, but the rest are doubling down. It will be a contest of wills. I doubt they can get a behind-the-scenes supermajority.

I believe Hunter and Jill are squeezing Biden like a nearly-empty tube of toothpaste. I’ve seen it before. My sister tried it with both parents. “He’ll be dead soon. We have to go on living. Let’s get what we can.”

I don’t doubt that they love him, but not all love is pure, and rationalization is a hell of a drug.

I hope he stays in the race, because I think there is no way he can win, and if I’m wrong, Harris, who would take over soon, would be a great second choice. She is so unintelligent, she will be unable to function and dominate as president. She will be extremely weak, she will bring shame to her party, and she will cripple downstream Democrat candidates.

They say the other options are Whitmer and Newsom.

Whitmer put an entire state under house arrest. She is a sick, heartless tyrant. She is about as popular as norovirus. I don’t think she will be the candidate, because so many people hate her.

Newsom is slick and oily, and he lies to cameras without a trace of doubt or regret. He was one of the few people with a combination of dishonesty and boldness sufficient to permit him to say Biden won the debate. Most Americans are easy to fool, so ordinarily, he would be a great candidate. His problem is California. Streets full of human manure. Rolling blackouts worthy of a place like Namibia. Junkies turning sidewalks into tent neighborhoods. San Francisco retailers fleeing and leaving upscale shopping neighborhoods vacant. I think it will be hard to get him elected, because his opponents will just have to go to any city in California and shoot honest videos.

If Singapore annexed California, in a month, they would have to start importing canes.

As unpalatable as Whitmer and Newsom are, I would rather see Harris run, because everyone on Earth knows she’s weak and mentally slow. She has been babied all her life, failing upwards all the while. She can’t handle any kind of opposition. She runs. And she is also unable to self-monitor, so she thinks she’s smart. She talks to people much smarter than she is as though she were teaching retarded kids.

To sum up, I believe the Bidens would rather see Joe die than quit. I think Trump will win. I think everyone will start ignoring Joe in mid-November. I believe Hunter will be imprisoned.

Nonetheless, I am confident America and the rest of the world are finished.

1. Roll up Their Windows 2. Lock Their Doors

Very interesting story in the news. Fox and The New York Post have it. So do some other outlets. A dozen people claim they saw something they thought was a spaceship, hovering near a place called Red Rocks in Colorado, near Golden. Red Rocks is an outdoor amphitheatre which is relatively well known.

It was hovering somewhere above the trees. It was disk-shaped. It had three rows of what appeared to be windows, one above the other. It was hundreds of feet long. This is what they claim.

They say that when the stared at it, it appeared to react. It “tipped at an angle,” started to move, and then dissolved into invisibility.

Is it a reliable report? Probably not. It’s almost certainly a hoax. But a couple of big news organizations are taking it seriously, as of three days ago.

It’s certainly as credible as the leftist press’s Russian conspiracy nonsense and their false debunking of the Hunter Biden laptop and the Ashley Biden diary.

The report appeared on June 11, on a site called NUFORC. That stands for National UFO Reporting Center. “National” appears to mean nothing, since anyone can call their website “national” this or that. Here’s some language from the site: “The National UFO Reporting Center was founded in 1974 by noted UFO investigator Robert J. Gribble.”

Any relation to Dale Gribble from King of the Hill? He was a big conspiracy enthusiast. The pages I looked at did not say.

We now know that our government admits there have been sightings, some caught on video, that it can’t explain. Is it time to conclude there truly are real objects up there that violate the laws of physics as understood by human beings?

A while back, a family in Las Vegas told cops they saw huge bipedal beings wandering around in a backyard. At least one cop thought these people were serious. To make the story more convincing, a meteor lit up the sky during the event. Thing is, the meteor was seen in Las Vegas, but it was actually hundreds of miles away, so there is no reason to think it was related to the sighting. Except that it provided a good opportunity to make up a story.

It’s hard to believe a bunch of people saw aliens up close and didn’t take cell phone videos. We put photographs of all our meals on Facebook, but no one thought it was important to shoot creatures from outer space.

A kid who claims to be one of the Las Vegas witnesses has gotten 1.1 million views on Youtube, telling his story.

Why didn’t the people in Colorado take pictures? It takes about 5 seconds to get a phone out and start shooting. Time yourself and see.

The thing that interests me about the description of the UFO is that it reacted to observation and did so slowly. I saw this happen in my dad’s house, in 1987. I was sitting on the couch in the middle of the day, and while I did not see a spaceship, I saw a creature clinging to the wall in the upper corner of a room.

The creature was oval in shape, around 4 inches long. It was clear and colorless, like glass. Its only features were a border going around it and a line that cut across it at the northern end, toward the corner. It divided the creature into what seemed to be a body and a head. The body was about three times as long as the head.

It looked like a long theta with the bar closer to one end.

I could tell it was not in this physical universe. It was somewhere behind this universe, like a mouse under a rug in an old Tom and Jerry cartoon, except it was in a three-dimensional space that was somehow under the physical space we live in.

Like the spaceship in the Colorado story, it realized I could see it. At first, it was motionless, but after I turned and stared, it reacted. It drifted slowly off the wall, about a foot and a half into the room. It rotated counterclockwise so the head was pointing up. A line appeared down the middle of the body, like the line between a beetle’s wings.

Two wings peeled up from the body, started to spin around it, and spun so fast they appeared to be a motionless glass disk. The body that was revealed when the wings opened was sort of funnel-shaped.

The being started to rise. It didn’t rise straight up. It moved a little bit this way and a little bit that way. Maybe three inches off course in either direction, zig-zagging lazily. It started out maybe 10″ from the ceiling, and when it got to the ceiling, it passed through it.

It didn’t vanish like the ship in the story, but it did react when spotted and start to flee. It went through the ceiling, indicating it was not limited by the physics we know of. Human beings can’t make anything go through anything. Not one thing.

Why would it stick to a wall if it could pass through things? I don’t know. It could not have been held up by a physical wall, since it was able to go through them, unless it had some way of making the wall seem solid to itself.

You and I can’t lean on rays of light or feel the edges of shadows, but this thing seemed to be able to rest on a wall when it wanted to.

So what’s happening?

I don’t think there are aliens from other planets. The Fermi Paradox is too strong. There should be trillions of advanced civilizations out there right now if life develops randomly and Earth is not special. Trillions of others should have come and gone by now, leaving traces such as radio signals. We have never seen any indication that anyone is out there. But we have seen indications that other beings are here on Earth.

If the laws of physics permit intelligent beings to overcome the speed of light, which they probably do when they are understood well enough, then trillions of civilizations should be sending ships all over the place. Various intelligent species should have met by now.

If we are seeing real signs in the heavens now, I would say we must be seeing sights produced by angels and demons. We know they exist. They are not from other planets in the physical universe. They live in the space behind our space, without physical bodies.

So are we seeing the heavenly signs Yeshua told us would be omens of the apocalypse? I don’t see why not, given that the apocalypse has started. It would be strange if we were not seeing them.

It would be great to find out the end is here. I can’t wait to leave. I don’t want to be here for cataract surgery and incontinence, especially with a medical establishment that has moved to the extreme left. I don’t want to live in a world that is even more crowded than today’s. There are twice as many people here as I feel comfortable with. The newfound ability of Chinese people to become international tourists has shown me exactly how crowded the world is. They overrun places I used to love, ruining them for everyone else. I guess Indians will be next, although they are much more pleasant. The Chinese are amazing. They spit on the floor in restaurants and defecate in the flowerbeds at Disneyland Shanghai. There are signs there, in Chinese only, telling people not to drop a deuce in the bushes.

I dream of the day I hear the horn blow.

I was talking to my wife. She was telling me about her feelings about giving up on law and dropping out of her bar-study courses. This was back in Zambia. At first, she felt it was irresponsible. Friends told her it was a mistake. But when she did it, she felt the weight of the world fall of her shoulders, and she never missed what she left behind. Later on, God told her that if she had made a disastrous mistake, he would have told her.

Hearing her story made me think of my own situation. I have lost enthusiasm for practical things. I hate dealing with business, for example. There are home repairs I dread making. Often I feel like I’m going to regret not working harder. But now I ask myself: am I just feeling the end of my relationship with the unsaved world? My wife says God raptured me away from it. Is God just preparing us to get out?

Do I dare even think it? If I’m wrong…what a letdown. Worse than anything except the realization one has been condemned to hell. Hell is the worst, and Earth is number two. Thinking you’re about to be raptured and finding out you have 30 more years to go would be like thinking you’re being sent home from a bloody war and then being sent back to the front.

I know my attitude toward this place is right. Yeshua said, “He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.” People like Joe Biden and Madonna are sick. For me, death will be a release from prison. For them, it’s a horrifying end to having their own way, having brainless people treat them like gods, and treating other people like props in a play.

On the one hand, my life and my wife’s life are very pleasant. On the other, I want out. I want to go home, to be among people who are like-minded. I am sick of death, suffering, temptation, and fighting. I feel like I’m going to be extremely traumatized the next time someone close to me dies. I am fed up with death.

Why do people want to live forever on Earth? The thought is horrible. More people and animals to love and then lose. More atrocities to witness. Less room as we multiply. The same types of unpleasant events, over and over, endured by one generation after another. The same experiences, millions of times. Imagine the boredom. Do you really think you would still be able to enjoy movies if you were 200 years old? You would have seen every possible story line 50 times.

I don’t want to be stuck here with disgraceful, infantile people who fight over garbage and excrement. The company would be unbearable. Like sharing an island with angry pigs, spewing dung on everything. It would be like moving back to Miami or New York.

I hope the stories are true. If I have to witness one more idiotic presidential election after 2024, I don’t know what I’ll do.

Senile Biden Proves Dementia-Denying Leftist Press, Politicians Have to Go

Ordinarily, I don’t watch presidential debates. They are held on a 5th-grade level, the dishonest leftist moderators always do their best to destroy conservatives, there is zero possibility I will vote for anyone other than a Republican, I acknowledge God, not politicians, as our only savior, and the whole business makes my stomach hurt.

My wife, however, feels differently, so last night I heard some of the presidential debate as she listened on her phone, and we ended up watching most of it. We would have been better off having a prayer session.

We all know what happened. Joe Biden was proven senile, beyond any conceivable effort to deny it. CNN, which disgraced itself even more than usual by agreeing to conditions which essentially held Trump down so Biden could kick him, posted this headline: “‘We are f***ed’: Democrats despair over Biden debate performance.”

Publishing that was trashy, and I’m sorry I repeat it here, but this is the world we live in now.

Biden unraveled. He was terrible. He lost like no other candidate has ever lost. Sometimes it was painful to watch. That being said, he did better than I expected. I’m still amazed he got through his first year.

People are saying Trump did well. He didn’t. He just looked great because he was debating a corpse. He exaggerated. He probably said things that could be lies or could be mistakes caused by lack of preparation. I didn’t catch any lies except the ones Biden told. He missed opportunities. He obviously didn’t prepare the way a good attorney would prepare for oral argument. Along with his opponent, he descended into childishess. But he won the debate because Biden was effectively his teammate. I guess he could have won without Joe’s help, but Joe made it effortless.

On the big picture, Trump was perfect. He keeps making it clear leftists are ruining America. That’s the big picture. Inescapably true. And he did a good job of reminding black people, repeatedly, that leftists had brought in millions of foreign lawbreakers to take their jobs. Unfortunately, most black people don’t watch debates. They get their news from gossip, Facebook, Tiktok, and black celebrities.

There is no point in going over the debate and dissecting it moment by moment. Everyone knows what happened. Go ahead and try to debunk it. The deeper you dig, the more you will realize you’re making it worse. There is no hope whatsoever of spinning this.

Most people think the big story is that Biden showed himself to be senile. It’s sad that they missed the real story, which is this: the people who control us–politicians and journalists–have been lying to us systematically since 2020, and many of them, this very morning, are repeating the same lies.

“Biden is strong and sharp behind the scenes.” “He only looks bad in videos because Republicans edit them and use AI to make them.” “The claim that his handlers limit his appearances to prevent people from seeing that he’s senile is a conspiracy theory.” The dumbest lie: “Trump is the one who is really senile.”

Trump is running a multibillion-dollar empire while running for president and beating the incumbent, while dealing with bogus felony trials ginned up by prosecutors who should be imprisoned. He gives unscripted speeches two hours long, over and over. He travels constantly, on a plane with adult-sized stairs, which, unlike Biden, he does not negotiate tentatively in special sneakers colored black so people will think they’re dress shoes. He sleeps 4 hours a night. He is most definitely not senile.

The truth means nothing to the dementia deniers. NOTHING. As long as they get socialism and perversion, they are willing to tell us absolutely any lie they think we will swallow.

In 2020, it was obvious Biden was demented. You can prove it to yourself right now. You can look at him in 2018 and 2020 videos and see the enormous change. Didn’t matter to the left. They lied and lied and lied. Now he can’t even find his way off a stage, and they are still lying. His wife had to help him off the debate stage last night.

They lie about Trump. They lie about coronavirus. They lie about illegals. They lie about perverts. They lie about inflation. You name it; they lie about it.

A while back, God told me this: “The truth has been lost.”

That’s not a small thing. It’s catastrophic. People who don’t know it’s catastrophic are ignorant. They don’t know the Bible.

Who is the truth? Yeshua. He is the way, the truth, and the life. If you abandon the truth, you abandon Yeshua. You can’t have him unless you love the truth.

I complain about homosexual behavior, pointing out that it is abomination. Guess what else is abomination? A lying tongue. A person who lies habitually is an abomination, just like a homosexual who lies back in a dark bathhouse with his legs open for strangers. Sodomy isn’t the only abomination. Check a concordance.

To have salvation, you have to have humility. A person who is proud can’t admit fault. If you can’t admit fault, you can’t repent. If you can’t repent, you can’t ask for forgiveness. Not sincerely. You can’t be improved. You will continue to rot, adding iniquity to iniquity.

This is why Yeshua says he’s the truth.

Journalists and politicians didn’t see anything new last night. They knew Biden was demented in 2020, but here they are today, pretending they just realized it.

And who saw it coming? I did. I said that if Biden didn’t collapse in office, leftists would suddenly “realize” he had dementia and try to coerce him to resign. Now you see it happening. It started last night before the debate was over.

They knew he was demented. They just assumed that with enough cheating, he would get through the debate. Now that the cheating–the conditions, venue, and, most likely, drugs–didn’t work, they are doing what I said they would do. They are pretending they just realized he has a problem.

They’re saying very stupid things. They’re saying they doubt he has the ability to make it another 4 years. Hello? He has been like this for 3-1/2 years already, in charge of our military, including nuclear weapons. He has gotten us into wars during that time. He will be president until January, unless they drag him out in a straitjacket. What is their excuse for subjecting us to this? They knew what they were doing.

I also said I didn’t think Biden would agree to withdraw. They love telling us he’s a warm, friendly, humble man. As though nobody were alive to see him during the last century. He was one of Washington’s most notorious and abrasive buffoons and liars. He had to abandon a presidential campaign because, as he admitted, he lied too much. He made a fool of himself in Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

He is vindictive. He is petty. His arrogance and self-worship are immeasurable. He raised traumatized, failed children because of his ambition. He’s not going to quit unless they find a very big crowbar. He worships at the altar of himself. He has no capacity whatsoever to admit fault.

They’ll have to threaten him with something in private. That’s the only way.

Problem is, the biggest threat is Donald Trump, who will pursue investigations into the Biden family’s obvious influence-peddling. If Biden isn’t president, who will protect the Bidens?

Dementia makes the arrogant and stubborn worse. Believe me, as the son of a dementia sufferer, I know. Arrogant people don’t admit they’re demented. They revile and even physically attack people who tell them the truth. These things are normal.

Enormous loads of lies are being piled on our heads by the left, all day, every day, and the right isn’t a whole lot better. Ordinary Americans are just as bad as their celebrity keepers. This is why the rapture has to come. The only effective vaccine that has come out during the last decade is the one that makes people immune to truth.

We’re not just a banana republic. We’re something worse. A banana republic that thinks it’s a great nation of laws and principles.

I try not to get absorbed in politics, but it’s difficult, because leftism is driven by hatred of God, and because of it, I live in a doomed, cursed country where I am persecuted. I’ll say this: I manage not to think of politicians as our deliverers.

I’m a theocrat and a monarchist. I go along with the current system because I have to. I won’t make a fool of myself by taking part in an armed insurrection, but give me a chance to vote for a religious monarchy, and I’ll do it.

I saw that Oklahoma is forcing schools to tell kids about the Bible and the Ten Commandments. I have no problem with it. If Florida had a referendum on a law banning mosques, I would vote for it. I don’t care about religious freedom, really. I care about freedom to practice Christianity and Messianic Judaism. I will vote against pagan religions every single time I get the chance, and I will always vote for people who promote Christianity.

There is a huge, ugly Hindu temple near me. I would love to see it bulldozed. I speak a curse to it when I drive by. When my wife and I went to Egypt, we saw idols ancient Christians had defaced. We thought it was great. We should finish the job. We should destroy every image, turn every temple into rubble, and build urinals on the remains. God used to do this to pagan sites.

Revile me. Say I’m against democracy. You’re right. Democracy is degenerate. Yeshua was murdered through voting. Jewish majorities killed the Jewish prophets. A majority rejected Moses. A majority rejected theocracy and chose mad king Saul. Give me my perfect king. Now.

A fallible king who promotes Christianity is much better than democracy. The one perfect king, who is also God, is best.

Last night we found out we have no real president and no hope of having one until January. Biden is playing roller derby on one skate, and Kamala Harris is, truly, quite stupid. Our republic is decapitated. Now our enemies have had it shoved in their faces by CNN. What will Putin, Kim Jong Un, Xi Jinping, and the Muslims do, now that they are certain we have no leader, and they face the prospect of fighting a real man in February? I’m sure they are chattering, trying to make quick decisions.

Whatever they do, the press and our leftists will help them with lies, executive action, crooked judges, and toxic legislation. Corrupted nations always fight their friends and assist their conquerors.

I hope Trump wins, but this world is still finished.

I guess now I’ll go read the articles that are popping up, calling Trump a liar and grossly exaggerating the problems with his performance. I will definitely see them as soon as I leave this site.

You don’t always have to be a prophet to predict the future.

How Much Longer?

God keeps giving me revelation, and I will share it. I wish I could say it was good news for the world, but it’s not.

It’s hard to relate this stuff in a linear, easily-understood way, so I’ll just write and hope for the best.

I lived in Miami. As I grew closer to God, I grew to hate it. Miami is a city of pigs. People there are shallow, coarse, rude, and selfish. Racism is a big problem there. Cubans hate blacks and look down on all other Hispanics. American blacks hate non-blacks. Haitians can’t get jobs because Cubans won’t hire them. Most of Miami is a ghetto where you have to keep driving if you’re in an accident, because if you don’t, a black mob may beat you to death.

The traffic is terrible. It’s a homosexual haven. The best-known beach has been taken over by topless tramps.

When I moved up north, I found I still hated Miami. In fact, my hatred of Miami life increased every day. It still does. I never think, “It wasn’t so bad; I should go back for a visit.” I never miss anyone from Miami enough to think about visiting. I always want to kiss the ground here. I thank God over and over. I look out the windshield of my car at the trees and farms, and it’s hard for me to believe I’m really here. All this, after nearly 7 years.

God will rapture real Christians away to him during the 7 years of tribulation, and I have been raptured away from Miami for almost 7 years.

My county is a sanctuary. I love it. The people are mostly conservative Christians. Joe Biden couldn’t get a job as a school crossing guard here. People are warm and kind. They’re extremely patient. No one honks. There are interracial families everywhere. When I meet black people here, it’s not like it was in Miami. There is no sensation of uneasy detente.

Still, I hate living in this world. My county is a little oasis. It’s an aberration. The rest of America is a pile of festering excrement full of maggots. Living in my little haven is like huddling in an airlock, waiting for the mothership. My life is easy, but America is not my home. The country that produced me hates me and loves my enemies.

I have realized my feelings about this world are like my feelings about Miami. The closer I get to God, the more I will hate being stuck here. It’s not abnormal. It’s not a problem that needs to be fixed. It’s what happens when your eyes are opened to the goodness of God and the comparative filthiness of humanity and evil spirits.

God isn’t just God. He generates heaven. His presence is heaven. Wherever he goes, heaven goes with him. The more time you spend with him, the more painful it will be every time you have to go back to earthly concerns.

Most human beings bring you closer to hell. They’re full of demons, and Satan is using demons to bring hell to the surface of the earth. Miami is more like hell than most areas of the US.

There is no future for any decent person in this world. If I raise my children here, they will have no idea what a decent life in a decent country is like. They will face temptation my grandparents could never have imagined. They may know kids whose mothers have Onlyfans ads on their car windows. They will know girls who send boys nude pictures. If they go to school they will be taught that anyone who believes abomination is bad is a Nazi.

They will be under attack every day, just as I am, simply because God loves them and their parents are Christians. The government will be on the side of their enemies, and so will most people.

The government may even try to take them from me because I side with the supreme being who loves me.

I had inadequate parents. They didn’t introduce me to God. My dad ridiculed God and Christians. My mother took my sister and me to church about twice a year. She didn’t know the Holy Spirit. She had no revelation.

My parents didn’t teach us much of anything. The other day I realized something: when I needed guidance, I didn’t think to go to my parents, because they never fulfilled their obligation to guide me and help me overcome. Also, while they were smart, they were not wise.

I grew up thinking for myself, with results that should have been predictable. Failure and misery. I was a loser, meaning spirits and people who were against me won, and I lost.

The other day God gave me a revelation about his nature as a father and the attitude I should take to him.

God knows my name. He knows everything about me. He loved me before I was created. I am very important. He wants me to be victorious and happy. He wants me to come to him all through the day with my problems. When I don’t know what to do, I should do what normal kids who have normal parents do.

Now I go to him and call him “dad.” I tell him I’m his son, and I need my father to show me what to do, because I don’t want to try to figure things out on my own. That’s what got me in trouble and wasted decades of my life.

It’s one thing to know God is your father, but when he tells you this by revelation, it becomes part of your heart. It’s not the same.

Yesterday, I read a story about Portland, Maine, handing out kits to people who like shooting drugs up their rear ends. The kits come with syringes and instructions. The instructions don’t just tell them how to get it done. They give suggestions to help people get the fastest, strongest highs.

With the story came revelation. We have given up. God expounded on the revelation today.

America used to be a Christian country. People deny it, citing the Constitution, as though it really controlled us. This was a Christian country. Laws and court decisions reflected this until we turned away from God.

We passed laws about things like sodomy, adultery, and fornication. We banned drugs, gambling, pornography, and prostitution. All those things are practiced freely now, all over the US.

Why did we stop trying to fight sin? We gave up. We decided we knew better than God. We didn’t like being told what to do. We didn’t like shouldering the burden of leadership. We were only rarely able to get God’s supernatural help.

Now we promote sin. We force better countries to let us fly sodomy flags over our embassies, and we tie humanitarian aid to the promotion of abomination. We encourage doctors to make it impossible for confused kids to become real men and women who can reproduce. We encourage them to castrate adults and give them unnecessary mastectomies. Casinos are all over. We are not merely legalizing drugs; we are helping addicts get hooked and stay hooked.

We now treat people who are against sin the way we should treat people who fight it. We call evil good and good evil.

We have given up not just on God, but on each other. We are supposed to help the lost find God. Instead, we help them destroy themselves, because it’s more convenient for us.

I always say the rapture will come when we give up on God and he realizes there is no longer any point in continuing with the present evangelism model. God has shown me there is more to it. He will give up on the world when we give up on each other, and that’s what we’ve done.

Conservatives have deteriorated. Many tell us to be fiscally conservative and socially liberal. Be selfish and try to cut your taxes, but let perverts rule the country. Let them take over our government and even the church.

It’s not going to get better. If you are attached to this place, and you think real Christians who criticize our culture are self-righteous kooks you should fight, you will stay here with the demons when the rapture comes, and there will be no children of God to pray for your protection.

It’s going to keep getting worse. Go ahead and vote for Trump. I know I will. But he’s one little hemostat on a severed leg. He can’t fix things. He’s no messiah, and the real Messiah himself can’t fix things, because he has to have our consent, which he will never get during this age.

Satan always wins the popular vote. My wife said it, and it’s true. Every time humanity gets a break from God, we descend into depravity again. Eden. The Flood. Abraham’s descendants, plunging into centuries of demon worship. The rejection and murder of Yeshua, by a coalition of Romans and Jews who claimed to represent Yahweh. The church’s rejection of the Holy Spirit. We do it every time.

The rapture won’t fix the world, even if God takes us in a spectacular way and everyone else sees it. The facts don’t matter to liars. They would come up with lies to explain it away. God showed up in pillars of fire and cloud, he showered the earth with manna and quail, and most Jews still turned on him. They turned on him again while he stood before them working miracles. As they were arresting him to murder him, he worked miracles, including raising thousands of dead people and knocking the priests and temple guards to the ground with supernatural power. They still murdered him, knowing who and what he was. After the crucifixion, the church experienced many great miracles and signs, and look how it turned out in 2024.

A spectacular rapture will only move people who choose to be moved. You choose what you believe, whether you admit it or not.

Most people would ridicule a spectacular rapture and double down on blasphemy.

So when is God going to come for us? It can’t happen soon enough. I don’t want to raise kids in this world until the ungodly are removed and Yeshua is here on a physical throne. How much worse will things get before that happens? How many martyrs will there be? Is there any kind of humiliation we will be spared?

I always pray for God to help me fear him. He is listening. I fear him now. I can’t stand this place. I don’t want to be left here with people who hate me, separated from God.

Living on Earth in 2024 is like taking care of a retarded person who smears excrement on the walls and furniture and urinates in the refrigerator. It doesn’t matter whether you love that person. It doesn’t matter how fancy the house is or whether you have some clean rooms you can hide in. The situation is unsustainable.

It amazes me to see how blessed my wife and I are. We don’t have to interact much with people. We are physically isolated. We have abundance. We get to have long prayer sessions when other people are working in offices where they can be abused and fired for speaking the truth. Our lives in our little cocoon of cleanliness are great. But we still need to go home.

I really hope I’m not stuck here waiting until I die.

Why, Exactly, did we Imprison El Chapo?

Don’t ever try to tell me the world we knew isn’t finished.

Portland, Maine, is providing kits to drug users so they can shoot opioids up their anuses.

Their anuses. No joke. Fentanyl and heroin. Meth. Anuses, people.

I’m talking about a local government. A local part of the same big system that, right now, is holding drug dealers in prisons across the country. Some for smuggling heroin…you know where.

The Onion and The Babylon Bee could never have published something like this. It’s too bizarre to make good satire.

Picture this on TV in the 1960’s. On a show about local government. Say The Andy Griffith Show. Barney goes to release Otis from the drunk tank but turns away. In horror. Should have searched him the night before.

The kits come with lubricants, and Portland provides advice as to how to get the most powerful high. That’s certainly helpful. Coming from THE GOVERNMENT.

I feel like going out in the yard, looking up, and trying to spot Yeshua. Blow, Gabriel. Please blow.

You Don’t Have to be Jewish to Want to Disempower Dangerous Loonies

Why was I too blind to see this? Apparently, the Global Jewish Conspiracy is stealing elections from liberals now.

Isn’t this the same Global Jewish Conspiracy that makes about 90% of American Jews vote for liberals? It sounds like someone forgot the mission statement.

I keep saying black Americans have a huge antisemitism problem, and no one believes me in spite of how obvious it is, because that’s how my life goes. No one ever believes anything I say. Look around the web, and find out for yourself. See what mainstream blacks say about Jews. A huge number of them claim they’re the real Jews. They think actual Jews are Russians and Cossacks. Popular entertainers who do business with Jews say it, proudly.

Calling a Jew a Cossack is like calling Aztecs conquistadors.

Black soon-to-be-former Representative Jamaal Bowman lost his primary election. He is a “squad” member and a close pal of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He is about as nutty and truth-immune a leftist you will ever see. Who are liberals blaming? Him and his genocidal insanity? No. They blame AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. As we all know, this is a lobbying group committed to helping Israel.

They say Bowman’s enemies are “buying” elections. Hmm…who could buy elections? Rich people who like to pull strings from behind the scenes. Which group has been accused of that the most. Let me think.

It’s a dog whistle Helen Keller could hear.

AIPAC claims it’s nonpartisan. Yeah, and it’s a total coincidence that Supreme Court justices tend to vote along with the parties of the presidents who nominated them. AIPAC is in the business of sending money from CONSERVATIVE donors to Democrat candidates who are farther to the right than their competitors. It also supports Republican candidates. AIPAC is a conservative organization no matter how much they shuck and jive.

They pretend they’re nonpartisan because Jews are political kamikazes. They attack their allies and help their enemies. Conservative Americans are pretty much the only significant allies Israel has, but most American Jews think conservatives are the ones who are out to get them. Most American Jews are more afraid of Christian conservatives, without whom they can’t survive, than they are of Muslim terrorists who admit they want every Jew dead.

If AIPAC came out and admitted it was basically conservative, many Jews would quit donating.

For conservatives and Christians, helping Jews is like feeding an injured wild animal and trying to keep the human scent off the food so it won’t reject it. But they gobble every bait the left puts out.

Okay; AIPAC is pro-Israel. But that doesn’t mean “the Jews” shot Bowman down. It means a number of conservative Christians, as well as some Jews, shot him down.

In any case, left-wing nuts are now blaming the Jews, using not-clever veiled terms to describe Jews, so they can unpersuasively deny their antisemitism. Someone should make a list of these terms. “Zionists.” “Bankers.” I wonder if “New World Order” is code for “Jews.” One Jewish organization thinks so.

Bowman has done some things in support of Israel in the past, perhaps as a nod to the necessity of wooing New York Jewish voters, but he is now an October 7 denier and says Israel is committing genocide, which is somewhat like saying European Jews committed genocide in the 1930’s and ’40’s.

The more time passes, the closer we get to the day when leftists stirring up hate in front of cameras stop saying “Zionism” and “Israel” and start saying “the Jews.” Some are already doing it.

Jews will never be popular. Never. Antisemitism is a permanent feature of human interactions, because Satan hates Jews even more than he hates most people. Most people listen to Satan. Jews keep trying to appease. It’s a pointless strategy; feeding a wolf your fingers, hoping he won’t take your arm.

The things I thought God told me many years ago are coming true. I believed they came from God, but it still amazes me to see myself proven right.

No one listens. Well, a majority put Jeremiah in a cistern for telling the truth. Nothing changes.

Now I have to go check Venmo for my payment from the Elders of Zion.

My Continuing Search for a Solution to a Problem God Already Solved

The mower saga drags on.

My old John Deere 430 tractor/mower is an end-of-life product, and it breaks down over and over. I need to put an end to my mowing problems.

I am torn because I love resisting impulsive purchases. I was a real spendthrift when I was a child, and I can’t help thinking of myself as one now. I like the idea of fixing things over and over and beating the repair-phobic system. It makes me feel righteous. On the other hand, I want to have faith in God’s provision. I don’t want to be cheap when I have more than enough money to spend fairly liberally.

I definitely want to give, because God has made it obvious that prosperity is connected to the generosity we show other human beings. By using the term “human beings,” I exclude greedy preachers. I think they’re another species.

Things that are rolling around in my head:

1. I can fix the JD forever if I want. I’m a machinist, so even though JD has discontinued some essential parts, I could make them when I need them. There is a guy who built his own 1935 Bugatti Aerolithe automobile from scratch. Fixing the JD repeatedly would cost very little.

2. Fixing the JD repeatedly would be a lot of hard work, and it would still mow slower than a new zero-turn mower and be a pain to maintain.

3. God does not want us to work hard. I don’t care what other Christians say. Hard work is very clearly a curse. When you have to work too hard, it means something is wrong with your walk with God. If you don’t think hard work is a curse, you should really read the Bible some day. God literally says it’s a curse. It was part of the first curse he pronounced on man.

I say “man” in order to stand up to the pronoun nuts. I will never say “humankind” except derisively.

4. If God gives you abundance, and you refuse to use it, why should he continue to send it? I can buy the nicest diesel mower on Earth without affecting our lifestyle. I don’t think I should, because it would be excessive, and it would not fit through our gates. But I could. It would be like buying a modest new car, and I can certainly afford that. The other day I was tormenting myself with mower thoughts, and I realized God had already solved the problem. I was just prolonging things by overanalyzing it, as though it really mattered whether I bought new or fixed old.

5. Ostentation is a sin. I never thought it was good, but recently God showed me it’s actually a sin. This is bad news for women, because their main goal when they get dressed is to show off clothes, shoes, and jewels in order to put other women in their places. Men are not quite as bad about ostentation. Anyway, I shouldn’t spend twice as much on a mower as I should, if people who come here will be bummed out about their own mowers if they see it.

Trying to impress people with a mower would be somewhat pathetic.

6. I don’t care too much about “waste.” I don’t think God cares. What we call waste is built into the nature of the physical universe. It’s written in the laws of thermodynamics. Unavoidable. God built it into our bodies. A man produces about 300,000,000 sperm cells every day, for example. I wonder who counted them. Even Elon Musk doesn’t have 300,000,000 kids. If an oak tree produces a hundred million acorns over its life, in all likelihood, none of them will become trees. The disciples caught a huge number of valuable fish when Yeshua showed them where to cast their nets, and then they walked off and left them to rot. God approved. Fish that could have fed the poor.

God approved when a grateful woman put maybe $30,000 worth of perfume on his feet. Judas the thief, on the other hand, practically had kittens.

God loves human beings, but he keeps creating people he knows will go to hell. Most people go to hell. It seems clear he considers it worth it in order to produce a smaller number of children he can enjoy forever.

I think destroying things for no reason is bad, and the word supports that, but I don’t think God is concerned about me throwing out uneaten food or mistakenly buying more mower than I need.

Worrying too much about economy can cause you to waste something really important and irreplaceable: your time.

7. If God doesn’t want me to work hard, why shouldn’t I hire someone to mow? That’s a good question I ask myself. I could do it, but I would feel helpless, which is something I buy tools in order to avoid. Also, it seems better to spend on something you can touch and maybe sell later than on someone else’s labor. When you pay a worker, the money goes away forever. All of it.

8. I think I blew it by not buying a new mower several years ago. Prices have gone up by thousands of dollars, for the same equipment. It’s natural to think delaying a purchase will save you money, but there are $19,000 mowers out there that seemed expensive to me when they were selling for $15,000. If I had bought one, I could have been enjoying it since maybe 2019. Do I want to have to say the same thing to myself when mowers go up another 30 or so percent?

9. I want to avoid buying too little machine, but what if I’m overcompensating because I’m not familiar with zero-turn lineups? What if I spend x and then find out 0.5x would have worked out just as well?

Sooner or later, I’ll have to reconcile all these things.

I thought I should go ahead and get a gas mower. I hate gas equipment, because it’s just plain inferior, and I have this stubborn notion that used gas engines are much less trustworthy. That’s probably true. Diesels are built for professionals, so they are built to run longer without problems. My Kubota tractor has 1,200 hours on it, and it shouldn’t need much of anything until 4,000. A low-end gas mower may start pooping out at 500, and a good one is doing well if it doesn’t need serious repairs before 1500.

I thought I should get a gas mower anyway, because they cost WAY less, and I’ll probably be all done with mowing, forever, before 1500 hours. But I hate gas. I hate it. Less torque. An ignition system full of parts that can go sour. Problems with leftist corn fuel.

A used diesel is probably better than a new gas mower, and they can be had for less. A good zero-turn can last 6,000 hours, apart from the engine, so as far as the body is concerned, it doesn’t matter much whether you buy new or used. If you buy a used diesel with several hundred hours, you still have a body which will last 20 years, and your engine is likely to last just as long in residential use, whereas a gas engine may have to be replaced, to the tune of maybe $3,500.

I was afraid of buying a used diesel because the JD was a used diesel when I got it, and it has been a spoiled, useless, sickly princess. But it was 27 years old when I got it, and in my opinion, the design was unusually stupid. JD made it hard to maintain and work on. Zero-turns are very simple, and in recent years, at least, they have been designed to be easy to deal with.

The JD has two PTO’s and front and rear hydraulics. You don’t need that junk to build a mower. The JD’s extra parts are jammed into the frame like JD was being charged by the cubic inch. A mower has more room for everything.

I’ll just reveal a figure. I looked at a $12,500 gas mower. That may not seem expensive to you, but it’s hard for me to believe a figure that high is possible. I can get a Kubota diesel with under 600 hours for a lot less. That’s a mower that runs $19,000 new. The gas mower would probably give me 1,500 more hours without real trouble. The Kubota would probably give me maybe 3,500, and then I could sell it and get more back than a gas mower with a dying engine would bring. I can save a lot by tempering my justified fear of used machinery with reason.

The local Kubota dealer is not great for repairs, but they do get the work done, and I probably would not need any work for 10 years.

I found a Kubota near me for a very good price, but the deck is 72″ wide. I wanted a 60″ deck like the one I have. I have to go out in the yard with a tape measure.

I have to have some blades spinning this week. That much is certain.