Thank you for Making a Hard Decision Easy

As I work to become capable of producing photos that aren’t appalling, I go to Internet sources and learn from self-proclaimed experts. One of the problems with this is that they contradict each other, and some of them give advice which is just plain bad. As a beginner, I am not competent to detect bad information right off the bat. It takes me considerable time, research, and shooting. I think some of the good info is starting to solidify.

White balance has always confused me. I didn’t know what the term meant, and of course, I didn’t bother looking it up or trying to understand it. I was content with being annoyed about it. I think I understand it fairly well now.

Let’s start with the fact that it’s a stupid term. It sounds like you’re trying to do something that somehow balances white areas of your photos. In reality, it’s just light temperature, measured in Kelvins. They should just call it light temperature. When you buy a TV or light bulb, they call it temperature, so why not do the same thing in camera terminology? If they had called it temperature in the first place, I would have understood.

So what is light temperature?

Physicists have noticed that every solid substance radiates the same type of light when heated to a given temperature. When something is red hot, it gives off light concentrated in the red and orange area. When it’s white hot, the light is shifted toward the blue. This is true of iron, rocks, lead, or whatever you choose. It’s a universal thing.

Men who smelt metals developed a tool called a pyrometer. It measures the temperature of molten metal visually. They look at metal through these tools, and the tools show them colors to compare the metal colors with. Those colors match known temperatures. Easier than sticking a thermometer in there. I don’t know if pyrometers are still used, but it demonstrates the principle.

One weird thing about light temperature is that cold temperatures look warm, and hot temperatures look cold. An old incandescent bulb in your house gives off a nice, cozy glow that evokes warm emotions, but the light temperature is low, providing more yellow and so on. Direct sunlight has a high temperature, but it makes photos look cold.

On top of that, there is no relationship between light temperature and air temperature, so you can be freezing while you sit in high-temperature light.

How does light temperature affect photos? Simple. It makes them look warmer or colder, more or less. Too much warmth, and the sensation is stuffy and cloying. Overly feminine. Too little warmth, and people look like cadavers under fluorescent lights.

In making a photo look too cold or warm, a bad temperature choice can mess up the colors. It may make white look blue or pink, for example.

It is possible to use a card to adjust your camera for a given situation so the colors look right. It’s an annoying process. I bought a grey card which is not merely grey but a very precisely measured grey. To change my camera’s white balance, I have to hold it in front of the lens and push various buttons. If I do this, the camera should do a good job of getting a “correct” temperature for the lighting in which I find myself.

The big problem with this, apart from the fact that I will miss all sorts of shots because I’m playing with the camera, is that the setting does not last. Say I’m under a tent. I take a shot inside the tent, and then I turn and shoot so part of the scene is outside in the sun. The white balance setting for inside the tent will be completely wrong for the second shot. If you move around while taking photos, like nearly every human being on Earth, you will have to set your white balance over and over to keep it in the ballpark.

Nonetheless, I was told this was very important. It’s not. Spoiler, I guess. It’s a stupid idea.

Cameras generate two kinds of files: raw and JPG. A raw file contains just about all the information the sensor can get. A JPG is a smaller file your camera creates by guessing how you want a photo to look. If that sounds crazy to you, because you know a camera’s software is inferior to whatever you can install on your PC for editing photos, you’re onto something. Camera-generated JPG’s are like TV dinners. They’re supposed to be good enough for the masses; for people who aren’t capable of editing photos and getting the most out of them. People who think Jack Daniel’s is good whiskey.

When you see a photo on the back of your camera, even if you’re shooting in raw so your camera doesn’t store separate JPG’s, you’re looking at a JPG. If you judge your camera by that junk, you will never have any idea what it’s really capable of. It’s like buying a Ferrari and only using the valet key.

Many professional photographers shoot in JPG, but here are some key things to remember: 1) most photographers are not trying to produce great images, and 2) most photographers aren’t very good anyway.

I have learned that professional photographers are generally not interested in generating photos that affect people deeply or which are of top optical quality. They’re grinding out B-minus shots by the hundreds in order to feed their kids. They take the same family photos over and over, using the same lights, in the same room. They go to weddings and shoot hundreds of photos per event, just to document what happened. They want to work fast, get jobs over with, and move on to other jobs.

When my son was born, a photographer who had a deal with the hospital showed up in my wife’s room and shot a bunch of photos. Precious shots, to be sure, but not very good. She sold us a zip file of JPG’s and went on her way. She has been doing this for a long time, but I take much, much better shots of my son, even with my phone.

I’m not a professional. I’m an enthusiast. There is a difference. When people see photos I’ve taken of my family, and which I have edited carefully, I want their hearts to break. I want them to feel the love I felt when I was shooting. I want the composition to be stunning. I want the lighting to be just right.

I have set my cameras to quit storing JPG’s, and I found out how to make my phone shoot raw. I’m all done with Budweiser. I’ve moved on to homebrew.

Are JPG’s useless? No. CAMERA-GENERATED JPG’s are useless. When you edit raw photos, you will generally create JPG’s from them, and those finished files are fantastic, because they were processed by your skilled eye, not by engineers in Tokyo who will never see them.

If you shoot raw, you will keep information that will allow you do fix almost any white balance issues. This is why I’m going on about raw and JPG. If you shoot JPG’s, your ability to change the white balance in finished photos will be very limited, and you may be unable to do it. You will also have problems fixing lots of other things. Just shoot raw.

So to recap the situation so far, white balance is color temperature, you don’t have to set it every time you take a shot, you should shoot in raw if you want really good photos, you should not waste space storing camera-created JPG’s, and you should edit your photos on a PC like a man.

What are you supposed to do about white balance, then? Use the auto setting. It will work for almost every photo.

If you’re a wedding photographer, forget all this.

There are some situations in which using AWB (automatic white balance) can screw up a raw photo so much it will have to be altered by AI or discarded, but those situations are rare, and you should be able to figure out what they are and set your white balance manually when you encounter them.

Most professional photographers shoot in AWB nearly all the time. Consider that.

It can be important to set your white balance if you’re doing certain types of work that have to be standardized in various ways, but you’re not going to do those kinds of work unless you join the grind-and-dump industry.

A touchy old guy on a photo forum looked at a photo I had shot and told me the white balance was clearly off, and this sent me off on a rabbit trail, trying to figure out how he could see that just from a photo. It turned out he had no idea what he was talking about. Other photographers (much better ones) told me there was no way he could tell just from the photo, which I showed them. By then I had wasted $14 on a grey card, and I had spent a session shooting bad photos while adjusting my white balance incorrectly. If I had relied on AWB, I could have bypassed all that.

I believe this is all correct. Tell me if I’m wrong.

Key points:

1. White balance is color temperature, which affects the perceived warmth of photos.

2. White balance can almost always be corrected to your liking in post if you shoot raw, so shoot raw.

3. Automatic white balance works nearly all the time, so use it nearly all the time, or else you will miss shots while you’re trying to set it.

4. Never listen to advice for wedding photographers.

5. Never listen to bad photographers.

Number 5 is of interest, since I’m a bad photographer, and I am trying to give advice, but I’ll ignore that.

In other news, I canceled an Adobe subscription Adobe signed me up for dishonestly, and I uninstalled both Lightroom and Photoshop.

I thought these programs might be worth the insane $720 three-year cost, so I signed up for a 7-day free trial. Of course, a week is not long enough to learn much of anything about either program. I opened Photoshop once. I used Lightroom a few times, and I liked it for certain things, but my impression is that it is mainly for professional grind-and-dumpers. “Smooth out those wrinkles and send Mrs. Garfinkel her portrait!” It seems to have a lot of prepackaged, gimmicky settings to make it easy to churn out polished, if cheesy, images. But I may be wrong.

I will never find out if I’m wrong, because Adobe is so unpleasant to deal with, I canceled my subscription.

When I signed up, I was offered two options: $19.99 per month or $239.99 per year. I picked the monthly option, thinking that if I couldn’t make up my mind in a week, I would pay for a month and accept the loss. It seemed like a good move to me, and I didn’t see any reason why Adobe wouldn’t sell people these products by the month.

Yesterday, I tried to cancel on the Adobe site. I was weighing several options. First, I could see if they would offer me a discount, and if so, I might go ahead and buy a year. Second, if no discount, I would pay for another month and then make a firm decision. Third, if I was feeling generous, I might just pay full price and buy a year.

The site asked me if I really wanted to cancel, of course. It said I still had a day left. I decided to leave it until today.

When I went to the site today, I was blocked from managing my account. This is something Adobe does to prevent people from ending free trials. I saw a little blurb saying I would be able to manage my account soon, with an explanation mark, as though this was great news. Adobe also said I had been charged, after telling me I had a day to go.

So Adobe had dropped a surprise charge on me while simultaneously blocking my ability to question it, presumably until the trial period was so long gone so they could say it was not reasonable to ask for a cancellation and refund.

I resorted to chat, and I got some guy with a name like Joreet. His English communication skills were abominable, and I think he tried to swindle me. Because he was so inept at communicating (perhaps intentionally), it is impossible to know exactly what he was trying to do. He told me they would give me two free months.

Naturally, I had questions. If they were giving me two free months, and I was on a monthly plan, what would happen if I canceled after those two free months?

There was no way to get him to explain this. I could not get him to tell me whether I had an annual or monthly commitment. I could not get a clear explanation of what would happen if I canceled. My impression is that like the website where I signed up initially, Joreet or Poreet or whomever was trying to make me think I was getting something I was not.

I finally got him to admit that my 7-day trial came with a yearly, not monthly, commitment, so if my subscription renewed, I would be on the hook for the rest of a year.

I couldn’t make him tell me what I had been charged. I never got that information out of him. When I asked him when the block on the site would be removed, so I could cancel through the site, he kept telling me everything was fine and that he could do it all for me.

He never told me when the block would be gone. I told him what I thought of his work, as nicely as I could, and I insisted he tell me how to cancel using the site. He gave me a link to the blocked page. He seemed mad at that point. I think they get in trouble if you don’t let them run you. I think Adobe coaches them and says it’s a major failure if customers stand up to them and don’t go along with their scamming.

Just guesses.

My patience ran out abruptly, and I told him to cancel and give me a full refund. By that point, he was out of jolly, comforting canned responses intended to keep me in the fold, so he canceled my subscription instantly.

I would probably have been willing to pay them full price for a year, but dealing with Adobe was so unbearable, I got to the point where I no longer cared about their software. It’s not the best, and some superior programs are cheaper. I discovered some helpful features in Lightroom, but man, it’s not worth tolerating the disrespect and lies. They can keep it.

I think the folks at Adobe are scammers who operate just inside the law, and I want their company out of my life because I am afraid they will keep trying to find ways to stick it to me. I just uninstalled Photoshop, Lightroom, and their Creative Cloud app (which I never wanted) because I am afraid that if I click on something accidentally, they will send me a bill and say I reactivated my subscription.

I have Photoshop Elements 2024, which has never been useful to me and is no good for editing raw photos and can’t create full-color images. I think I’ll uninstall it, too. For all I know, it has spyware in it.

In case anyone else Googles, “Is an Adobe free Photoshop and Lightroom trial a good idea?”, I’ll give my opinion.

1. Adobe dishonestly hooks people by making it look like they can pay for a month at a time, when they are really committing for a year. UPDATE: I will take this back, partially. They do this in chat, but their website does point out the difference. I was apparently careless about this when I signed up, and that is my fault, although they tout their trial in a way that is intended to encourage people to sign up hastily. It was dishonest of them to block me from canceling on their site, and it was dishonest of them to try to sign me up and charge me while I was blocked.

2. Adobe rigs its site so canceling is very difficult. This is normal behavior for tech nerds.

3. Adobe’s reps are inept and probably crooked, and a CR chat which should take three minutes will take 20, at the end of which you will be expected to take whatever bum deal they shove down your throat, even though they have consistently refused to tell you what you’re paying or what you get.

4. If you’re not a grind-and-dumper, you probably don’t need or want Photoshop or Lightroom.

I actually enjoy being forthright and unwilling to bend with people who pressure me and try to cheat me, so Adobe’s trashy approach might as well have been designed to make me quit. I flat-out told the rep his answers were useless and so on. I recognized all the patented gimmicks intended to make me throw up my hands, give up in exhaustion, and pay Adobe. I hate sleazy, disrespectful sales tactics so much, a boiler-room-mentality company like Adobe would have a hard time selling me five-dollar bills for 50 cents.

So that’s the news. I am going to put all my cameras on AWB, keep on using Photolab, and see how things go. I know Adobe will be happy to take my money if I ever change my mind.

There is Nothing Like an Equal Yoking

Last week, a church buddy from way back remarried. I don’t know who is happier; him or his friends.

He was married to his first wife for something like two decades, and they had 4 children together. The kids are wonderful. He is an extremely dedicated husband and father, he pursues God through the Holy Spirit, and the results show it. The ex is another story.

She blamed him for a lifestyle she found unsatisfactory. She hounded him constantly, persuading him to move several times and change careers. She used to threaten to divorce him and take the children away. He suffered so much, he wanted to die.

I talked to her once about his suffering, and she didn’t understand. She didn’t see the problem. She said, “I was just trying to motivate him.” That was how she felt about driving someone to consider suicide. There was no remorse. No repentance. Just an explanation of behavior she thought was reasonable.

One day he sent me a picture of a list she had made. She went to the Internet and researched poisons, and she created a long handwritten list, complete with details about how much he would suffer and how long it would take him to die.

She alienated his friends. He raised her illegitimate daughter along with his own kids, and the wife turned her against him.

She believes her emotions are correct. If she goes into a rage and hits someone or verbally abuses them, she has no regrets. If she’s angry, she must be right. The person she abuses is to blame.

Naturally, she’s a leftist. Leftists are known for believing their irrational rages are correct and give them license to abuse and even kill. Back before the 2016 election, she decorated her purse with conspicuous anti-Trump material so the whole world had to see how eccentric she was. She was ignorant, and it didn’t bother her. She once told me she was against Republicans because they took prayer out of school.

One day, she beat herself up. Literally. She attacked herself to make it look as though he had been beating her. She did it in front of the children, which is beyond stupid. She called the police, and of course, the kids told them what she had done. She was eventually convicted of various crimes, and a court forced her to avoid contact with the family.

After all this, she and her Christian-rapper new boyfriend broke into my friends’ home, stole the kids’ official papers, took his passport, and even stole his grandmother’s ashes.

We prayed for her for years, and you can see the good it did. You can pray for anyone and have the faith of Yeshua himself, and if they aren’t interested in repentance, nothing will happen. You can pray for Satan if you want, and you can say “in the name of Jesus,” and you can believe as hard as you like. Don’t expect results.

He found himself a nice lady who works at the hospital where he works. They hit it off. Now they’re married. They went to Orlando for the weekend, and on their way down and the way up, we spent time with them.

She is humble. She is gentle. She loves him passionately. She is properly submissive. I won’t say he is happy for the first time in his adult life. It goes beyond that. For the first time in his life, he is not completely miserable.

Last night, we had some of my Christmas ale, and we talked in my kitchen. They played with the baby. We talked about the changes in my friend’s life.

Eventually, we got around to sharing testimony and revelation. We took communion. We repented. We talked about what God was doing for us. Everyone was receptive.

I really enjoyed this. Every day, we pray God will bring us together with people who receive revelation from the Holy Spirit and who appreciate it when other people receive and share revelation. We are both tired of being persecuted by Christians who won’t listen and who try to correct us with nonsense they’ve heard from preachers who have never known God. You have to spend a certain amount of time with such people if you want to be around Christians at all, but you need to recharge with an inner circle that supports and understands you.

The other day, I was on the web complaining about the way Internet forum members treat people. I mentioned certain types of forums that are much worse than average. I mentioned Christian forums.

I will not belong to a Christian forum. They’re horrible. They’re full of self-righteous, ignorant, untransformed people who believe gossip from preachers and denominations instead of revelation they have received (should have received) from the Holy Spirit. They don’t examine themselves, because they think they’ve made it. They join forums so they can “correct” people in order to look holy to strangers. No matter what you say on a Christian forum, someone is likely to find imaginary fault and start condescending and belittling.

It’s persecution. People don’t realize this, because they have no idea what persecution is. Anyone who speaks against Holy Spirit revelation is a persecutor. For that matter, anyone who is against Yahweh or Yeshua is a persecutor. When Yeshua blinded Paul and knocked him off his donkey, he accused Paul of persecuting him. Paul was fighting proper beliefs in Yeshua and the Holy Spirit.

Churches have done a big percentage of the persecution Christians have experienced. They have a long history of torturing, imprisoning, and burning people who heard from the Holy Spirit. This is because Satan runs nearly all churches. He sets up denominations so they allow you to get a little closer to God, but not close enough.

Speaking against the fruit and gifts of the Holy Spirit is persecution. It is also standard procedure in churches all over the world.

Preachers repeat garbage long-dead men who didn’t have revelation made up. Adherents absorb it, and then, with their flesh under the influence of demons, they persecute people who speak the truth. This is the main reason I don’t go to church. God made me understand it was a poor use of my time.

Some people quit going to church because Christians have hurt their feelings. I suppose there are people who think that happened to me. Not true. Other Christians have been nasty to me, but I left because God told me to and because I was wasting my time in church. I was tired. When I spoke revelation, which has turned out to be right and which I live by to this day, people who didn’t pray in tongues tried to correct me. Some were downright snotty. This was especially true of the prosperity people and sycophants who were close to pastors.

Weirdly, people who were not nearly as blessed as I was tried to correct me. I mean people who had serious problems that were very clearly not in God’s will and which were caused by problems with their walk with him.

You can’t always say a person is closer to God than someone else because his life is easier, but when a person’s life is a mess and he never has any revelation or testimony, the problem is unmistakable.

I have called these people boneheads, which I supposed is insulting, but the point was to describe their condition. Their heads are like blocks of solid bone. There is no way for revelation to penetrate. Revelation comes by the Holy Spirit, and he can’t get into a bonehead. It took him quite a while to get anywhere with my own thick skull.

If you can’t receive revelation, you can’t recognize it when others relate it. Talking to stubborn boneheads who live in the flesh is like talking to a dog or a rock.

As God himself told us, it is not possible to please him in the flesh, but nearly all Christians are determined to do it. He told us we should worship him in Spirit and in truth, but almost no one spends real time with the Holy Spirit, and that includes most people who claim to be Spirit-filled.

I quit going to church and hanging around with incorrigible boneheads. Suddenly, there were fewer vexatious people in my life. I quit tithing, which, I was told, would bring me prosperity. Then God made me wealthy without work. God got me out of the hellhole known as Miami. He gave me a wonderful home. He brought me a wife who loves revelation and responds to it by nodding and quoting confirming scriptures. He brought me the cutest, most charismatic baby son imaginable.

I received miracle healings when I was a churchgoer (never through preachers). I received all sorts of wonderful correction straight from God; revelation kept pouring in. And I couldn’t share it with much of anyone. My buddy who just got married was one of the few, and even he had some rough spells.

Fred Stone, the father of tarnished evangelist Perry Stone, was a real man of God, and he told an interesting story.

When Fred Stone was young, he ran around with an older man named Rufus Dunford. Mr. Dunford was apparently an apostle. He worked miracles and so on.

One day Fred Stone was driving him around, and Mr. Dunford asked him to pull over so he could go into a cobbler’s shop that belonged to a German. They went in, and Mr. Dunford started speaking to the cobbler in German. Mr. Dunford did not know German, but God poured it through him.

Mr. Dunford told him he needed to be saved. The cobbler asked him if he was a Catholic priest. When Mr. Dunford said he was not, the cobbler said something like, “You must be one of those [expletive] holy-rollers,” and he picked up a hammer. He was very angry. Mr. Dunford left without further effort.

When he got back in the car, he told Fred Stone the cobbler was “a spiritual swine.” He was referring to a principle Yeshua taught when he said, “Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.”

Mr. Dunford said the cobbler was going to die soon, and God had sent him into the shop to give him a final warning. He never went back to try again.

We are God’s pearls. People don’t understand that. Yeshua told us what pearls are in the story of the pearl of great price. He said the pearl of great price was the kingdom of God. He told us the kingdom of God was in his followers.

Yeshua was telling us we shouldn’t chase swine, which is a much harsher term than “bonehead.” We have to live in this world, and we have to warn people, but we aren’t supposed to waste our lives relentlessly pursuing people who will never listen and who will persecute us and even gladly do us harm.

The swine principle applies to evangelism and teaching, meaning we shouldn’t try to force them on swine, but it also applies to subjecting ourselves to their presence.

I believe this explains why so few people who get revelation are allowed to appear before churches. Yeshua is protecting his pearls by refusing to cast them before swine. What would be the point, apart from creating evidence to be used to judge the swine later?

God wants to save sinners, but on the other hand, he loves his children, and he doesn’t want to submit them to unlimited persecution and temptation. When you hang around with people who will not listen, they will try to turn you away from the truth, and they may mistreat you.

They can also be extremely condescending and pompous. “I drove the church bus for 25 years, little lost sheep. I did 15 mission trips to Africa. I have every single Joyce Meyer DVD. You are clearly listening to demons instead of the Holy Spirit, and you are lucky a man as holy as I am is here to rebuke you and clear all this up.”

I always try to avoid condescension when I talk to people. I try to be humble. Unfortunately, to proud people (including those who don’t know they’re proud), humility is an invitation to condescension and misguided rebuke. It’s like blood to a shark. They jump at the bait, and then you wish you had kept your mouth shut. When they’ve done it a certain number of times, you stop talking to them. They condition you to give up on them, just as God gives up on people.

I avoid debate. Yeshua didn’t tell us to debate people. It doesn’t work. He didn’t do it. He said his peace and moved on.

I should add that I’m really good at debating. I have an extremely high IQ, I’m familiar with the Bible, and of course, I’m a lawyer. The reason I avoid debating isn’t that I can’t beat you at it. I avoid it because I don’t want to fall into the trap you’re in. When I refuse to engage, it’s not because you scored a stunning point or delivered a sweet burn. I can respond just fine. I choose not to, for the same reason I wouldn’t put a nickel in a rigged slot machine.

In the Bible, you can see a pattern that shows that people who were close to God were not very gregarious. True prophets didn’t hang out at the temple or kings’ palaces. John the Baptist was a priest by birth, but he lived in the wilderness. Yeshua spent a lot of time away from people. Moses spent a lot of time alone with God. Immersing yourself excessively in the company of hard-headed people will not make you more productive.

Paul’s story is interesting. He knew all about organized religion and doctrine. He was a student of the great rabbi Gamaliel. He read out his earthly resume in his letters. After Yeshua gave him his own personal tribulation, he repented of flesh-based persecution and became a believer. He knew about the church, but he avoided it. Why?

He said he went into Arabia for three years and then he spent another 14 years away from Israel and the new church. He spent time with God, learning from the Holy Spirit. Go read it yourself. Then he returned and became the most effective apostle. He even corrected Peter.

No man taught him, but he had so much revelation, he wrote around a quarter of the New Testament.

I tell people they need to learn from the Holy Spirit, not preachers, and they argue with me. Why don’t they argue with Paul? He didn’t volunteer to wash a preacher’s car and carry his briefcase. He didn’t become a deacon or an usher. He spent time alone with God, and he came back filled with the truth.

I tell people they need to spend a lot of time praying in tongues, because it will fill them with revelation. They argue with me. Richie Wilkerson, the guy who married Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, went to the trouble of preaching against my revelation in front of a full church. Most Christians struggle with a basic and axiomatic truth.

The word says that if you pray in tongues you edify yourself. If that is true, it is not possible for praying in tongues a lot not to be helpful. This should be obvious, but people fight it.

I tell people they need to learn from the Holy Spirit instead of corrupt denominations that teach useless error. They argue with that. Yeshua said it. John said it. Paul confirmed it. Somehow when I say it, I’m wrong?

Why am I wrong? Because no one points TV cameras at me? Because I don’t have a jet? If TV cameras, fame, and wealth were signs of God’s authority, wouldn’t Whoopi Goldberg be an apostle? Jim Bakker had TV cameras. So did Jimmy Swaggart.

John and Yeshua said the Holy Spirit would teach us all things. ALL. Were they confused? If I’m wrong to say the same thing, prove them wrong.

A preacher’s role is to be a matchmaker and a sort of daycare worker. You tell people about Christianity. You get them baptized with water and the Holy Spirit. You show them how to spend time with God. You share your testimony. You try to provide guidance until they get their legs under them. You do NOT tell them you are their “covering” or their “father” or that they have to continue in your church and your teaching. You do NOT tell them to obey you. But these are things most clergymen do.

They say God is our father, and then they expect us to live lives in which we don’t ever meet with him. Is that how fatherhood works? Maybe in the ghetto.

If you don’t know your father, expect to think, feel, and behave like the fatherless.

Talking with someone is dialogue. Talking about what someone said is often just gossip. You’re supposed to talk with the Holy Spirit instead of relying on what some dodgy dead person may or may not have heard from him tens or hundreds of years ago. The vast majority of preachers are just gossips. They repeat slanders and speculation. We are supposed to be witnesses. A witness knows what he says is true. I talk about things I have personally experienced, and I relate revelation I personally received after time with God.

My last pastor, the pedophile rapist, made us give him–not the church, but him–cash offerings on his birthdays. You’re not supposed to give an offering to a person, but okay. He scolded us when we didn’t give him enough. He told us we were supposed to give his smirking, obnoxious, drug-dealing, atheist son money and honor him because he was the son of the pastor.

At Miami’s Trinity Church, Rich Wilkerson and his wife Robin told us, “Grow where you’re planted,” meaning, “Don’t go to the church across the street and give them your money. Stay here on the plantation and pick that cotton.” He told us God would make us wealthy if we gave him money. More money, I should say, since he already had a mansion in Golden Beach with a yacht moored behind it.

These guys made doctrine up, and they related doctrine other fools had made up. The pope does the same things. Most preachers do. On the other hand, the Holy Spirit always tells the truth.

I hope I get to spend more time with my friend, because a lot of people I know are draining. That includes people I love and want to keep in my life if possible.

Christians are the new Jews. We are just as hard to talk to and persuade.

I know it’s hard to give up on ideas you have held close to your heart for years. On the other hand, the truth is the truth, you need it, you won’t succeed without it, and all the wishing in the world will not make your cherished gossip the truth.

No Wonder God Laughs

Am I the only one mystified by the AI boom? What is the purpose of making AI available to everyone who has a computer, free of charge? Why are they giving it to us for nothing? Where is the money coming from?

Google provides very annoying AI blurbs to every person who uses the search engine, without being asked. Many people look for ways to make this stop. The “feature” is called “AI Overview,” as you surely know. In addition to facts, it delivers erroneous woke lectures no one asked for. It is programmed to shame people who are correct.

It is clearly an effort to indoctrinate and pull people away from capitalism, common sense, and Christianity. We all know the Google kids are far-left social engineers who are against Yeshua; that is not news. But when did they become so militant they were willing to invest billions in a brainwashing feature that doesn’t seem to bring in money?

Why did it even occur to them to include lectures on morals and behavior? It’s very obvious that a person searching for a dry cleaner or a good hotel doesn’t want lectures written by fringe kooks.

Imagine if encyclopedias had done this. Your curious child looks up spider monkeys and gets an article shaming everyone who ever bought a product that came from a rain forest. No one would have bought them, and a set would have weighed 300 pounds.

AI is extremely expensive to produce. You probably know that “data centers” are popping up all over the US. I don’t know about the rest of the world. These are huge facilities full of computers hooked to the web. They consume gigantic amounts of electricity, and I have read they also need a lot of water. Who pays?

I’m not paying. I use Grok, ChatGPT, and Google AI (the one you actually request), and I have never paid a cent. The money must be coming from somewhere.

I suppose I should ask AI.

After a lot of babbling, Grok says:

In short, you’re not paying because companies prioritize growth over immediate per-user revenue, subsidizing free tiers through investors and high-value customers. If you exceed limits or need advanced features, that’s when payment kicks in. This model has fueled AI’s rapid spread but raises questions about long-term sustainability amid rising energy demands.

Grok also says businesses will pay for AI, subsidizing the rest of us. It says that for now, the money comes mainly from existing tech companies and investors.

By the way, you can fix your browser so you don’t see AI Overview. It’s like physically ejecting an angry, demented hippie from your living room.

Interesting fact: Google just reduced the frequency of AI Overview intrusions due to consumer annoyance. People don’t like being scolded. Wow. Who could have foreseen that?

The data centers I’ve seen in photos look like enormous, out-of-place warts on the landscape. They remind me of the machine-built structures we saw in the Matrix movies. They also remind me of hostile spaceships I’ve seen in movies about alien invasions. They seem threatening. Their presence announces the arrival of their age and proclaims that they will eventually cover a lot of the earth’s surface.

Basically, they tell me humanity’s ludicrous, pathological efforts to create shared omniscience will increase and become extremely oppressive.

I believe I’ve received revelation about technology.

To begin with, Satan has no Holy Spirit. Unlike God, he is neither omniscient nor omnipresent. Through the Holy Spirit, God can broadcast all sorts of things to all Christians. He fills us with information. He debunks disinformation. He gives us the gifts and fruit of the Spirit: wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, miracles, prophecy, discerning of spirits, tongues, interpretation, love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, goodness, humility, and self-control.

Most people who call themselves Christian don’t get much of this. Most churches reject the Holy Spirit. It’s all available, though. God hasn’t changed.

If Satan wants to copy the Holy Spirit for evil, he has to rely on agents that are sent. Little spirits and people. He can also use things like the printed word, video, and audio.

Through technology, Satan has been building his counterfeit Holy Spirit. He uses phones and the web to indoctrinate, slander, curse, tempt, instigate, and so on. Electronic connectivity has been very helpful to Satan in his efforts to corrupt us and harm us.

Consumer-level AI is a big leap forward in Satan’s efforts to control our minds and emotions. It can disseminate Satan’s wokeness around the clock, even to people who have no interest in it. It can generate the illusion of a reasoned consensus that is actually a tapestry of lies and distortions intended to make people reject holiness and God and rely on machinery and other people’s apish conceits.

We copy the Internet slavishly. We get our slang, which is a powerful indicator of whom we follow, from the Internet. We follow disgusting people just because other people follow them. We buy things people recommend on the web. We migrate to and away from Internet platforms along with the herd. As AI does its work, our beliefs will become more and more homogeneous. The Internet will play the tune, and the world will dance, like Orwell’s Proles, exercising in front of their telescreens.

Technology helps fill us with demons. We can get porn free of charge around the clock now, and it gives demons the power to enter us. We get types of porn other than sexual porn. We get cruelty porn. Violence porn. Pride porn. Covetousness porn. We get secular entertainment which seems harmless yet fills us with demons. Even the news helps them get in.

Smith Wigglesworth said this about newspapers: “If I read the newspaper I come out dirtier than I went in. If I read my Bible, I come out cleaner than I went in, and I like being clean!”

That is still true today. Think of all the lies we’ve been told.

Reagan didn’t do anything for AIDS sufferers. AIDS is a big problem for heterosexuals. Tawana Brawley was raped by white cops. George W. Bush, not local politicians, was the reason for Louisiana’s poor response to Katrina. George W. Bush invaded Iraq to take the oil. There were never any weapons of mass destruction. Iraq never had enough uranium ore to create weapons. Polar bears (aquatic) are drowning because the ice is melting. Oil is running out. Ethanol is good for the environment. Paper bags are better for the environment than plastic. Obamacare will save you money. George Zimmerman is a murderer. Michael Brown was a good boy who didn’t attack the police. Antifa doesn’t exist. Donald Trump is in cahoots with Russia. Donald Trump defrauded banks. Kyle Rittenhouse is a murderer. Donald Trump is an antisemite. Joe Biden isn’t demented. Joe Biden is sharper than ever. Donald Trump is demented. Joe Biden never discussed his son’s business or met his contacts. Voter fraud is rare. Homosexuals don’t prey on teenaged boys. Transvestites are women. There is a famine in Gaza. Israel, not Hamas looting, is the reason some people can’t get food. Gazans are innocent victims of Hamas. Israel targets hospitals.

The Holy Spirit tells everyone the exact same things. There are no opinions in heaven. There is only the truth. God has no opinions. Through the Holy Spirit, he fills his people with truth. He is against the ridiculous notion of “healthy debate.” Where there is debate, someone is wrong. God is righteous, which simply means he is always right. Because he wants us to be righteous (in one accord with him and each other), he tells us the same things.

Satan is somewhat different. He doesn’t always tell people the same things. He creates Christian denominations that disagree, along with other religions. He tells some people to be atheists. He gives people differing and conflicting believes and urges. At bottom, though, he is consistent in that he always tells people things that bring disunity and pull them away from the Holy Spirit.

AI has started behaving like a god you can talk to. I think everyone has thought about talking to God and getting answers on demand. This is something we crave. We love seeing people do it in movies. With AI, now you can get answers to all sorts of questions, very quickly.

Yesterday, I asked a question about a brewing machine I bought, and AI gave me a brilliant, long, detailed answer that could have been written by an expert brewer. It read as though a human being with a personality had written it. It took a few seconds.

AI generates wrong answers all the time, but it also generates excellent answers that would take human beings hours or days to create.

It is trying to simulate omniscience.

By simulating omniscience and a global consensus, AI is applying the main tool of the spirit of antichrist: peer pressure. Satan works through the voice of the crowd. We are supposed to look up for guidance, not to the side. By preaching wokeness to billions simultaneously, Satan is creating an astroturf consensus that will drag people into its wake. We are herd creatures, and Satan uses that to destroy us.

To belong to God, you have to be willing to be unpopular on Earth. This isn’t my opinion. It’s God’s truth. He said it himself.

AI is being used to take people who don’t know the Holy Spirit and merge them into a shoddy replica of a global consciousness. Like Star Trek’s Borg. The data centers are like big nerve clusters that generate and disseminate the thoughts, emotions, and desires new generations are generally going to adopt.

I don’t know if you will own nothing and eat bugs in the future, but thanks to technology, you are very likely to be even more of a conformist than you are now. People who will read this will generally be against God, and such people will be obsessed with fitting in and being popular.

If you think human beings can fix the world, you disagree with God.

I don’t understand people who crave popularity, but apparently, it is one of humanity’s strongest drives. I saw an old video of high school students a day or two back, and when they asked kids what they were most afraid of, they mentioned not fitting in. That amazed me. How can that be anyone’s biggest fear? It’s sick.

If you have to be afraid, be afraid of God. Failing that, pandemics. Nuclear war. Car wrecks. Death. Disease. Poverty. Heights. Clowns. Being afraid you won’t be popular is evil, and it says there is something badly wrong with you. You have no moral anchor.

Everyone has a certain amount of desire to be accepted, but it shouldn’t be the center of your being. I don’t want to know people like that. They are disgusting, not to mention dangerous. They will always side with the crowd against its victims. They turn on people they claim to love. They are born liars and traitors. They’re like the kids who turned their parents in to Hitler, Stalin, and Castro.

I suppose this explains the “likes” craze. People will do things for worthless likes which they would not do for their own children.

Leftists are promoting the creation of a huge communal human organism. We are all supposed to be part of it, sharing the same beliefs and drives, working together to achieve left-wing goals created through central planning. It’s inexcusably naive. It’s practically psychotic.

I don’t want to be part of the communal organism. You can’t be part of the communal organism and also be part of God’s family. The communal organism will always pit you against Yeshua, and you owe him complete loyalty.

It will be interesting to see what happens as the data center plague covers more and more of the earth. Human individuality appears to be on the way out.

Welcome to the Fryers’ Club

Back in December, I got us a Bayou Classic 4-gallon deep fryer, and we have made a few things in it. It has been a fantastic experience. It’s a tremendous labor-saver compared to a pot on the stove, it fries a lot of food at once, it fries food better than the stove, and it doesn’t grease up the kitchen walls. Also, it’s not feeble and useless like an indoor fryer that plugs into the wall.

The oil lasts forever. I just added new oil after over 6 months. I don’t use the fryer all that often, so I would guess that other home fry cooks need to change their oil more often than I do.

I think it would have lasted a lot longer if I had tried to push it. It was fine the last time I used it.

One reason I decided to change it was that I did not have a proper cover for the fryer. I used a plastic bag and a bungee cord to hold the bag against the fryer. This kept bugs out. The other day I left the bag off overnight, and it made me a little nervous the next day. What if a bunch of roaches had gone for a moonlight swim? I think a bug would float in oil, but I may be wrong. I would hate to drain the oil later, after using it several more times, and see dead roaches shooting out of the hose.

I got a real cover this week, so things are looking up.

I use peanut oil, which is highly regarded. It has a high smoke point, and they say it resists taking on food flavors. It’s not cheap. If I get a good deal, it costs $55 to fill the fryer.

I would like to try beef tallow. I see it selling for $120 for 50 pounds. At that price, I could fill the fryer for about $80. Not out of the question, considering how many meals I could get out of the tallow. Dinner for two at a barbecue joint can easily cost $50 these days, to put it in perspective.

I dreaded cleaning the fryer as I prepared to change the oil. It turned out to be very easy. You put maybe half a gallon of water in the bottom, add a lot of Dawn detergent, and scrub it with a sponge. The crud comes right off. Then you rinse it with the drain hose open. It was no problem at all.

Tonight I used the fryer to make a dish I really love but find intimidating: Cuban pork lumps. The Spanish name is masitas de puerco, which means “little pork lumps.” I believe that’s right. “Masa” is “mass,” so “masita” must be “little mass,” i.e. “lump.”

It’s a very simple dish. You marinate in bitter orange juice (or plain old orange juice soured up with lime or lemon juice), pressure-cook it until it’s tender, and then fry it to make the outside tasty. It comes out tendery and juicy. I like to pile lots of garlic fried in oil on top, along with fried onions and lime juice.

It’s a pain to make on the stove, but a pressure cooker and deep fryer take the suffering out of it.

I used an Instant Pot pressure cooker today, and the food came out great. I’ll post the recipe.

INGREDIENTS

3 pounds pork shoulder chunks with the really thick fat trimmed down
24 ounces orange juice
8 ounces lime or lemon juice
4 cloves garlic, crushed
salt

You want cubes maybe 1.5″ on a side. The size is not critical. Put them in a bowl and salt them down. Brining would probably be even better. It would add juiciness.

Let them sit until the salt goes into the meat. Then pour the citrus juice (also salted) and garlic over them, and let them soak. Half an hour should be fine.

I learned that marinating doesn’t really work, because no matter what you put on meat, salt is the only thing that actually goes in deeper than a couple of millimeters. That’s why I don’t marinate for a long time.

Dump everything in your Instant Pot and set it for 14 minutes. You have to be careful, because meat softens fast in a pressure cooker, so if you’re a couple of minutes over, you could end up with a mushy texture.

Now you fry the meat in a deep fryer until it’s nicely browned.

I made some stuff to go on top of it.

INGREDIENTS
4 large onions
8 ounces olive oil
10 ounces peeled garlic cloves
salt

Slice the onions and fry them until they’re dark. Remove them from the oil and drain them. Puree the garlic in a small processor. Fry it in the oil, but don’t brown it unless you like it that way. If you add some oil to the processor, the pureeing step will be quicker.

Serve the onions and the garlic sauce separately. Apply both very liberally at the table.

That’s all there is to it. It worked. My wife was practically beside herself.

I also fried some ripe plaintains. You just slice them and deep-fry them.

I put lime wedges on the table to squeeze over the pork and plaintains.

This is a marvelous feast, and black beans and rice go great with it. In Miami, they use white rice, but New York Cubans use yellow rice, and it’s very good. You can probably find prepackaged yellow rice near you.

Making your own black bean soup is a huge job. Goya’s version is pretty good, so I used that tonight.

The fryer’s baskets break down and go in the dishwasher, so no problems there.

I still hate Miami more every day than the day before, but my PMSD (figure it out) has abated to the point where I can stand to eat Cuban food. Cubans are great at making delicious peasant food for underpaid workers. There is no such thing as gourmet Cuban food, but if you want a fine dinner made with meat that costs $2.00 per pound, Cuban is a good choice.

RE Cubans and fancy stuff, there used to be a running joke about it in Miami. A Cuban guy goes into a bar and orders Chivas and Coke. Actually, that’s most of the joke.

Now that I think about it, it seems like most cuisines lack a high end.

France has…French food. Their middle-tier food is on our high end.

America has fine steaks and lobster.

Japan has extreme sushi and wagyu.

That’s about all I can think of.

But a lot of countries have good middle-class food, and Cuba doesn’t. It’s all peasant food. The recipes are all written like they’re trying to save money. “Braise a leathery piece of eye round.” “Boil a piece of flank steak.” “Hammer a cheap piece of sirloin until it’s edible.”

Pork shoulder is about as cheap as meat gets.

Its weird how things work out. For example, there are great Scotches and some excellent bourbons, but there is no really good Irish whiskey. I would know if there were. I like Black Bush, which is just Bushmill’s that has been aged a little, but you can’t set it on a bar next to Pinch or Lagavulin. Aged Irish whiskey is smooth and pleasant, but it has zero complexity.

I don’t think there is any such thing as a really good rum or tequila. I used to drink 5-star Barbancourt, which is about as good as rum gets, and you couldn’t compare it to a good Cognac. I’m pretty sure all tequila is paint thinner.

There are truly great beers, and I know, because I make a couple of them right here. No great rums or tequilas, though, as far as I know.

Bacardi was Cuba’s best, but I think of it as a flavoring agent for Saturday-night vomit, or a good fuel for setting your beard on fire like Dan Haggerty. None of it is good. I would as soon drink Everclear as Bacardi 151.

If you want a good cheap rum, try Flor de Cana, from Nicaragua. Very smooth, inoffensive, and not expensive. The Jim Beam of rums.

Whatever you do, avoid Myers’s dark rum, from Jamaica. Jamaicans I knew told me they don’t drink it. It’s poison for tourists. It’s the only thing I’ve ever drunk that made me throw up the next day. They should call it Old Dry Heaves.

I don’t know of any other liquor that causes dry heaves.

Before I became the fine, flawless Christian I now am, I drank myself sick a number of times. Normal booze makes you feed the bushes a couple of times the same day you drink it. Myers’s dark rum will make you wish you were dead a day later, for hours and hours. And you don’t have to get drunk to get sick on it. It nearly killed me after a few Mai Tais.

I knew a couple of Bacardis. One, for some reason, was a Bermudan, but he hung around Miami. Very nice guy. Came close to marrying a friend of mine, also Cuban but not Bermudan. It didn’t work out. He was very pleasant, and he was loaded, so he satisfied one of my friend’s family’s hard requirements–the main requirement, really–but they felt he was lacking upstairs. They weren’t all geniuses, themselves, but anyway, that was their complaint.

Another Bacardi I knew went to private school in Massachusetts and learned to play hockey. He was a Bosch. There were some Bosches related to the Bacardis by marriage back in Cuba, and one of them did big things for the company.

He enrolled at my prep school and joined the ice skating club, and he zipped up and down the ice on his own sharp hockey skates, while we, a bunch of warm-weather Miami kids, slid around injuring ourselves on dull rentals. He thought very highly of himself, but my French teacher, who ran the club and mentored me through high school, thought he was an oaf.

The guy who did most of the work on my dad’s fishing yacht also worked on the Bacardi family’s boats, which were in the same marina. His name was Juan. Sometimes we couldn’t get him. He would tell us by phone that the Bacardis had flown him to the Bahamas for this or that problem.

Juan said the old Bacardis were pretty crude, but I won’t go into detail. “Old school Cubans,” I think he said. And he was Cuban, himself.

Juan could be critical of other Cubans. Bertram was the big Miami yacht builder, but Juan didn’t like working on their boats. He thought they were second-tier. He said, “built BY Cubans FOR Cubans.” He liked Hatteras yachts, built in North Carolina. My dad had a Hatteras. They really were better.

I don’t recall what kind of boats the Bacardis had. Probably Hatteras or some kind of custom jobs.

I knew a Bertram, too, now that I think about it. He went to my school. We weren’t friends. I just knew who he was.

His parents got so tired of him playing Devo albums, they removed the disks and would only let him sit and look at the covers. In his senior photo, he posed by a sign on Devon Road with his hand over the “N.”

Wow, it looks like he became a “reiki healer.” It’s on the web. That is really too bad. Someone to pray for.

Wikipedia says his dad had 10 kids, so maybe he has had to fend for himself.

Based on what other students said about him, he seemed to be abandond. At my school, we had a lot of abandoned kids. Their dads gave their lives to Mammon and became rich. Their mothers were depressing socialites with nothing ostensible to live for. They gave their children everything except God and themselves. The kids took drugs.

I guess I have digressed enough. Enjoy the pork.

Shot but no Beer

I don’t plan to put my son’s name on the blog, but I keep violating my resolution not to blog about him, so I’ll have to call him something. For now, I think I’ll go with “Herr Mozart” because these days we are supposed to turn all babies into Mozarts.

So today Mozart went to the pediatric surgeon to see if he had an oral issue that made him slow breastfeeder. He is not a slow bottle feeder. Much the opposite.

Bottles come with nipples made to move milk at different speeds. A 1 is a very slow nipple, and a 3 is a fast nipple. You don’t want to drown your newborn with a 3.

One problem people have with bottles is that the move milk faster than women’s bodies, so babies drink too fast. They end up overeating, so to speak, they may throw up more milk than is normal, and they may get really spoiled. Who wouldn’t prefer a #3 nipple to a #1 mom?

Experts teach mothers to do paced bottle-feeding. Essentially, this means you hold the bottle horizontally so the milk comes halfway up the nipple. This prevents gravity from pumping milk into a baby that has to drink it to avoid drowning, and it is also supposed to make babies drink more slowly.

Not Mozart. We got him slow nipples, I do as the experts say, and milk flows into him like foreign bribes into a Biden. I don’t know how he does it.

With Mom, he latches on and takes a nap. Every so often, he takes a little milk. Then he conks out again. He lies there, blissfully snoring and breaking wind, as long as she permits it. He doesn’t fill up.

Mom was convinced he had a lip tie or a tongue tie. These are little strips of flesh we all have, connecting our lips and tongues to our bodies. If they are not made just right, they can prevent babies from opening wide enough to feed well.

The pediatric surgeon said he didn’t see anything that needed to be corrected, so now instead of being trapped in the “Mom wants to know for sure” vortex, we can move forward.

I knew he did not have a problem, because he has breastfed well in the past, and because when he uses a bottle, he opens like a python swallowing a stray dog.

A friend of ours has fed two kids successfully, and she called it. She said Herr Mozart was lazy. The surgeon said the same thing today. Our friend said he liked sleeping on mom. She told us to take off his clothes and make him uncomfortable so he would stay awake and get feedings over with. A warm, comfortable baby is an unmotivated baby.

Mom’s cooperation has been spotty, because, well, she’s Mom. The enabler.

Now, with confirmation from the surgeon, we have agreed to stick with my friend’s approach. Assuming Mom behaves.

He’s doing okay. He’s a little behind on height, but he is way ahead on fat. It looks like he gained over a pound in under two weeks, and he grew half an inch.

We also took him to the health department for shots. Don’t ask me why, but his not-great pediatrician told us to do this instead of giving him shots himself. That guy has to go.

We got him fixed up for several common diseases, and we will get two more shots next week. I didn’t want his body to have to deal with side effects from like 52 different vaccines at once.

The health department is a good resource. They have been very helpful with breastfeeding. But it seems odd to go to the county instead of doctors. I am old, and until this year, I had never been inside a county health department building. This county has a lot of low-income people, so I think standards are different here. Pediatricians ask for your Medicaid number without even asking if you have real insurance, and they pimp formula without asking whether you would rather give your baby actual milk. Formula is for poor uninformed people and for feminists who want illegal aliens to raise their babies.

Everyone we saw today thought he was wonderful. He is still very cute. That hasn’t worn off. It’s still paying dividends. When pediatricians who see 50 babies a day see your baby and gush over how cute he is, you know he’s unusual.

I was very happy to get the vaccinations and lip business over with, so I came home and treated myself to a nice toasted bagel with Sam’s Club smoked salmon. I found out that Sam’s sells very good salmon for half as much as supermarkets, so I no longer feel bad about eating it, and I plan to keep it up. That means I have to get back to making bagels.

The only decent bagels I can buy here without driving 25 minutes come from Publix. They’re made by the Einstein Bros. chain. Every Publix has a little cabinet containing Einstein bagels. Unfortunately, old Jews or maybe fat gentile girls get in there early every day and clean out the plain bagels. By the time I get there, they are usually gone, and nobody really wants a sesame-seed or asiago bagel with salmon on it. They usually have “everything” bagels. These are like bagels rolled in coarse dirt. Incomprehensible.

So now I have to get back to working on my own bagel recipe. And I have to figure out how to make garlic bagels.

It’s amazing how bad the Internet’s bagel information is. The recipe ought to be everywhere, but the web is full of bad recipes and wild guesses. Pages with recipes contain phrases like, “These are pretty good…”

I made some bagels back in November, and they were real bagels, but they were not inspiring. I have to resume.

It appears I need to try a hydration rate of 55%. Some recipes go as high as 64%, which is idiotic. That’s Wonder Bread territory. A bagel has to be dense, and that means low hydration.

I’m going to crack a Schneider Weisse, do some figuring, and get to work. I am never going to beat old retired Jews to that Einstein Bros. box.

We are Goldstein

Let’s compare two sitreps.

Me:

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

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

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

Unidentified Mainstream West Coast Leftist:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Couldn’t have happened.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Flag Down for Bringing a Walker on the Field

Someone on the web created a thread asking for unpopular opinions. When I saw it, I knew it was destiny. This is what I was made for.

I did quite a bit of writing. For one thing, I pointed out that pizza doesn’t go with beer. That must have made heads explode.

Pizza is acidic and a little sweet. It often contains oregano, a bitter herb. Obviously, you don’t pair that with a bitter beverage. Soft drinks and red wine go with pizza. Tea is acceptable. Beer? Insane.

I think people who drink beer with pizza are generally low-end beer drinkers who drink to get drunk. I think they must be people who drink really bad beer, chilled to the freezing point to kill the awful taste. People who drink stuff like Bud and Coors always drink it as cold as possible, and the reason is that when it warms up even a little, it tastes like seltzer with soap and a little sugar.

I think these people are likely to eat bad pizza from Papa John’s or Domino’s, and they just want something to wash it down and give them a buzz.

Beer goes with steak and rib roasts. It goes with Mexican food and seafood. It works with cheeseburgers and fries. Forcing it to get along with pizza is ill-advised at best. And nothing is worse than smelling other people’s beer-and-pizza burps while trying to eat.

If you think beer goes with everything, go eat an apple and chase it with a beer. It’s right up there with toothpaste and orange juice.

I also said Elvis was a lousy singer. It’s true. Elvis became famous because he caused girls with weak fathers to become sexually aroused. His early performances were basically riots, with little bacchantes fighting the ushers, tearing off their own underwear, and throwing it on the stage. People forget that. Today we make fun of people who call rock and roll the devil’s music, but it’s true. Any music that makes you throw your dirty underwear at people has some connection to hell.

Women still throw their dirty underwear at entertainers. It’s gross. They throw it at Justin Timberlake, for example. They throw it at the kind of guys who look like they take it home and put it on.

They should have men in Tyvek suits gather it and put it in medical waste bags. Someone could catch something.

Sinatra also mesmerized young tramps, but he was also an excellent singer whose style was innovative and unique. Jerry Lee Lewis was a much better singer than Elvis. Sam Cooke was far better. There were a lot of excellent male singers back in Elvis’s heyday. Nat King Cole. Eddie Arnold. Jim Reeves. Ray Price. Johnny Mathis. Ray Charles.

You can go into restaurants and bars today and still hear Sinatra recordings. Elvis? Not so much. It was never about the sound. It was about the pelvis.

I complained about sports worship. I said that if I wanted to watch overpaid illiterates work, I’d turn on The View.

I said I didn’t like it when people assumed I watched sports. People come up to me and try to make small talk about men I’ve never heard of, playing games I didn’t watch. “How about that Mahomes?” Who?

I pulled that name out of the air just now because I’ve seen it in headlines. I don’t know who he plays for or what his position is.

What if I went up to random men and said, “How about that Carl Friedrich Gauss? Is he the GOAT, or what?” He’s a fascinating guy. How can they not find him interesting? We wouldn’t have electronics or, well, any kind of serious technology without his discoveries.

Some guy responded and said I must have been rooting for Taylor Swift and the Chiefs.

How thick can a person’s head be?

Me: I never watch football. It would be great if the stadium where the Super Bowl was played was obliterated by a meteor and replaced with a Buc-Ee’s.

Him: You must have been rooting for Taylor Swift and the Chiefs.

What?

This is completely typical of my experiences with sports fans. “Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.” They can’t believe a man who doesn’t watch sports can exist. It’s like they’re under a spell. And they are. Demons are filling their minds with absurdities.

It also bugs me when men with hurt feelings try to tell me how empty my life must be because I don’t watch sports. What possible reason could you have to be angry at me for not sharing all of your hobbies? Do I get mad at you for not knowing how to weld?

I look down on you, sure. But I don’t get angry.

Kidding.

Yeah, my life is empty. I love my wife, and I spend a lot of time having fun with her. I don’t turn the TV on as soon as I get on and ignore her while I fill the house with obnoxious crowd noises and pray I don’t lose my ill-informed, emotion-driven bets, which I didn’t tell her about. Oh, the emptiness.

I have all sorts of time for my interests, like prayer, cooking, shooting, writing, and using tools. I get to spend time with my pet. I get to sit in the recliner with my son on my chest and relax in an atmosphere of pure love.

Empty, empty, empty. It would be so much better to be outside a stadium, trying to dodge as kids try to spit on me on my way in. I’d really rather be paying $11 each for cups of extremely bad beer and then standing in a quarter-inch of other people’s urine in packed men’s rooms. I long to get caught up in post-game brawls where people fight to defend the reputations of spoiled young athletes who pay armed men to keep fans away from them.

If only I could spend 4 hours fighting traffic, trying to get home from a stadium after my team lost, avoiding eye contact with drunk road-ragers and praying I don’t get stopped at a DUI checkpoint.

To get average seats for my three-person family, I’d have to shell out almost $500. I would happily pay $100 to be allowed to stay home.

But I must have been rooting for Taylor Swift and the Chiefs.

For $500, I can get my son a brand-new CZ 457 Scout in .22LR, and he can hand it down to his son. But no, I’d rather watch grown men play a game created to amuse children. When are the duck-duck-goose playoffs?

On a related note, I said Bill Burr was an idiot. A lot of men think he’s a genius and the world’s last straight shooter. A regular guy with a platform. Hello? It’s an act, and he’s an entertainer. If he were telling the truth, they wouldn’t call it an act.

Rock Hudson made romantic comedies with women. Just saying.

He’s not smart, and he’s not one of us. Normal men, I mean. He’s just another showbiz liberal, kissing the rings on the hands that feed him.

He has crippling TDS. Right after dozens of people died in the unnecessary LA fires, he appeared with another fool, Jimmy Kimmel, and made jokes about people who criticized California’s fire preparation and response. He ridiculed them. He stupidly asserted it wasn’t possible to put fires out with ocean water. He didn’t even think about the insensitivity of doing all this while bodies were literally still warm.

California and LA officials themselves have admitted they blew it. They admitted it in Donald Trump’s presence soon after Burr made an ass of himself. Talk about jokes aging badly.

Burr says he–“HE”–doesn’t get tired of winning football games. He supports the Patriots, and he uses the words “I” and “we” when he talks about them. “I don’t get tired of winning.” “We won.”

If Bill Burr is still capable of running 40 yards, he would probably do it in a minute and a half. On the field, he would move like Joe Biden trying to find his way off a stage. You could measure his vertical leap with a feeler gauge. His most likely tool for stopping an NFL pass is his forehead. Who is “we”?

You know those videos of drunken fans rushing onto football fields, careening around at 6 mph, and then having angry players turn them into Tex-Avery-style murals? That’s what a Bill Burr NFL cameo would look like, except maybe he would keep his shirt on. They would peel him off the turf like a fruit roll-up and bury him in a map tube.

If Bill Burr played in a game, he wouldn’t sit on the bench. They’d bring in a hospital bed and a bag with a zipper on it.

Bill Burr has never “won” a game. The people who win are paid to be there. If you have to pay, you’re not part of “we.”

Ticket Taker: Ticket, please.

Bill Burr: Ticket? I have to get in! We’re playing today!

Ticket Taker: Okay, pops. Ticket and DNR.

Burr says he feels bad for days when “WE” lose. Seriously? I don’t mean to be insensitive, but if the plane carrying the New England Patriots flew into a bus carrying the Kansas City Chiefs, I would be fine. I would be very sorry to see it happen, I would feel bad for everyone who knew them, and I would probably pray for their loved ones, but 15 minutes later, I’d probably be watching Paul Harrell videos on Youtube.

If your emotional wellbeing depends on how well a bunch of total strangers play a game you stink at, you need an intervention, because your life is devoid of meaningful pursuits. Burr felt jolly and sassy after dozens of people died in fires caused by incompetence, so maybe something in his head needs to be adjusted.

Some people got annoyed with me, but that just proved I was doing it right. If they wanted me to make them happy, they should have posted a popular opinion thread.

Taking the Gas Out of Gaslighters

My buddy Mike sent me some interesting photos on December 31. His son works in Manhattan, and while his son was at work, a man showed up on a balcony below his office and set up a sniper rifle. Here it is.

At first, I thought the photo was more interesting than it later turned out to be. I thought Mike’s son’s building was locked down due to a terrorist situation. Then I realized the rifle belonged to a cop. Mike sent me a video, and it featured a burly guy in black clothing with big white letters on the back.

If you were dancing, getting drunk, and doing drugs in Times Square when the ball came down, you were surrounded by guys with precision rifles.

I thought this was interesting, so I went to a community of shooters and asked if they could identify the gun. I have a precision rifle, so it was natural for me to be interested. You could call my gun a sniper rifle if you wanted. Professional snipers use precision rifles, just like shooting hobbyists. Military snipers didn’t always use them. They used to use deer rifles that were nicely set up to maximize accuracy.

I don’t know if it’s correct to say our military still uses deer rifles. The Marines use a modified .308 rifle based on the Remington 700–a deer rifle–and you can buy a heavy-barreled 700 in .308 for $690. The Marine designation for its rifle is M40A5.

A company called Georgia Precision sells the M40A5 for about $6500 without a scope. Do Marine rifles come from Georgia Precision, or are there a bunch of companies selling different M40A5’s? Not sure. I saw an Internet forum post which suggests the Marines build their own rifles.

The McMillan stock they use runs about $1400, and the aftermarket barrel probably costs something similar, including customization.

Do you need to spend that kind of money to get a super-accurate .308? No. But not every custom part is intended to improve accuracy, and the military can afford frills.

How much of the money is, basically, wasted? No idea. I’ll bet a lot of it is.

The Marines use a barrel made by a company named Schneider. So Schneider must make unbelievably accurate rifles on one else can match? No.

I don’t know why the Marines use .308. It’s an obsolescent (not obsolete) cartridge that loses velocity quickly. It drops below supersonic speed at around 800 yards, and when that happens, the bullet jiggles in flight, and it degrades accuracy. A 6.5 Creedmoor round is supersonic to about 1400 yards. It’s a more modern cartridge, designed with better technology.

When I took my precision rifle course, an instructor said my .308 had a trajectory like a mortar. The bullet goes up, slows down, and comes down, creating a path that looks like the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.

All rifle bullets do this, but a .308’s arch is a lot shorter and steeper than a 6.5 Creedmoor’s arch.

A bullet that slows down and drops fast is a pain to shoot accurately a long way out. When you do precision shooting, you have to know how much your bullet will drop over distance so you will know exactly how high it will be when it gets to your target. A short arch means the bullet’s path will be more nearly vertical far away. That means it will drop a lot more over a given distance out there. You have to have a good accurate range figure, because the round is less forgiving than a flat-shooting round.

The .308 delivers somewhat more energy to a person or deer at 200 yards than 6.5 Creedmoor, but farther out, the 6.5 delivers more energy because it’s moving faster. Because it wasn’t designed during the Truman administration.

I don’t know why any sniper would use a .308. Tradition, maybe? I don’t know any Marine armorers, so maybe I’ll never know. Maybe they have a great reason. It can’t be the increased energy at short ranges. A 6.5 Creedmoor will kill a moose just fine, so there is no reason to think a .308 is needed to kill a person. And there are a bunch of other cartridges that are better than 6.5 Creedmoor.

It’s not because a .308 rifle can use spare ammo from machine guns when things get bad. You can’t hit anything with machine gun ammo. I have tried.

If the .308 didn’t exist today, no one would invent it, because the technology is so backward. It would be like inventing a black and white TV with 13 channels.

The .308 was invented 73 years ago. Penicillin was about 11 years old. The transistor was just being made available to the public. The only intelligent life that had been to space was a few perverted beings that liked to abduct guys out of bass boats in Mississippi and probe their unmentionable parts. There were no satellites.

I guarantee you, you can get a Remington 700 that is just as accurate as the Marine version for way, way less than $6500. Maybe it will weigh more or not have wifi or something, but it will shoot fine, and given the short useful range of the .308, it will never need to shoot better than maybe 0.75 MOA. One MOA is 10.5″ at 1000 yards. How wide is a person?

Remington rifle: $650. Timney trigger: $250. New barrel: $500. Precision chassis (stock): $400. Bipod: $100-$250. Ballpark figures. Under $2000. Good scope (Vortex Viper): $1000. Rings: $150.

You don’t actually need the precision chassis, but it looks neat.

What are we at? $3050? Have my 3,000 university math credits paid off?

I think I have something like $2700 in my precision rifle, and I can promise you it will shoot 0.5 MOA with the right ammo and shooter, because I shoot close to that with crap off the shelf, and I am not a great shot.

You know what? Boys like their toys. It’s a blast, customizing, well, nearly anything and getting it just the way you want it. The Marines are boys, just like the rest of us.

As King Lear said when his daughter tried to tell him she couldn’t keep his drunken entourage in her palace, “O, reason not the need!”

To get back to the sniper photo, I asked some forum people if they knew what it was. It turns out the NYPD bought (or was given for publicity) Sako Trg M10 sniper rifles, which sell for about $12,000 without accessories. This is a 14.6-pound gun, and apparently, the NYPD went for .308.

Sako is Finnish, so yay for supporting US jobs.

I asked if anyone knew why the NYPD used this gun when Chris Kyle managed to get by with a TAC-338 which you can buy for $6500.

The TAC-338 uses a real sniper round which stays supersonic out to maybe 1500 yards and can be useful farther out.

The best answers I got involved politics. Basically, the NYPD does not care what it spends, and if it fails to spend whatever it gets in a given year, it gets less the next year, so it tries to spend up to its allotment.

I believe this is the correct explanation, because it comports with my understanding of human nature and blue states.

Anyway, I got a few unbelievably stupid answers. One guy called me a Fudd, which is a nasty name for a person who thinks the Second Amendment only applies to things like hunting shotguns. His answer contained zero useful information. He wanted to know how I had been on the forum for 4 years without knowing exactly why the NYPD needed a $12,000 rifle.

The answer was dumb for multiple reasons. First of all, they do not need the rifle. They could do the same job with an RPR from Bass Pro. Second, since they do not need the rifle, it is not possible for the justification for the rifle to appear anywhere on the forum. Third, who sits and memorizes every post on an Internet forum for 4 years? Fourth, his answer was rude, and he was a bully. I put him in his place and left him there.

Another guy said I had posted a dumbass thread. Another bully. I trimmed him down to size as well. A whole bunch of other users–knowledgeable people including former snipers–had responded with useful posts full of great information. A bunch of them agreed with me. I asked him if they were dumbasses.

I was called a whiner, by someone who has no idea what whining is. Whining means exaggerated, useless complaining. I didn’t complain. I pointed out problems with the arguments supporting the Sako purchase. That makes me a hater, not a whiner, right?

The Internet is a big playpen for jerks and bullies, and forums can be really trying. And certain interests draw unusually snotty people. Firearms. Bodybuilding. Christianity. Fishing. Electronics. Professional machinists are so rude they’re barely human. Hobby machinists are in the middle along with homebrewers. Welders are really nice. Foodies are Nazis. Not regular guys who like barbecue and pizza; they’re okay. I mean people who call themselves foodies and worship Food Network windbags who can’t really cook. Photography people are okay.

It’s funny, but bodybuilding draws bullies, but bodybuilders can’t actually fight. Fighting is a skill. It also requires cardio fitness, which many bodybuilders don’t have because they’re on drugs and don’t do cardio. There are bodybuilders who get tired climbing stairs. A lot of guys pump up show muscles in order to push other guys around, but actual martial artists who could pummel them easily are less obnoxious.

Bodybuilders aren’t even that strong. The kind of lifting they do produces big muscles that don’t do as much as smaller powerlifter muscles.

There is a skinny guy on Youtube who goes to gyms and humiliates drugged-up bodybuilders, tossing their weights around and saying how light they are.

Nineteenth-century-pistol guru Massad Ayoob is a forum guy, and he’s pretty obnoxious. Goes into panic/attack mode when anyone shows him up, which is not hard to do, or, more accurately, hard not to do. He has set himself up so many times. He got me banned from The High Road for disagreeing with him in a thread he was not even part of. Must have sent a note to his pals the mods: “I HAVE BEEN BLASPHEMED!”

Christian forums are awful. The Catholic forums are full of Catholics telling each other all Protestants go to hell. Protestant forums are full of people telling each other they’ll pray God helps them with their errors, when they really mean they hope they go to hell.

You literally have to treat electronics people like mental patients who could have full-blown slobbering-and-head-banging crises if you say the wrong thing. You can’t think of them as human beings. You have to act like you’re trying to extract data from bombs without setting them off. Like you’re playing Operation, with no funny bone.

Reddit is swarming with moderators who have no interest in moderating. They live to delete useful posts and lecture people. “Stand in awe of my deletion powers, mortal! Nanna, get me more Hot Pockets! And shove more Funyuns in them!”

In any case, I think I know why New York City spent a king’s ransom on rifles that work no better than Bass Pro merchandise.

People should be nice to each other. We should be patient. It makes life so much better. If you’re going to be hostile to someone, you should have a very good reason.

When people are nice to you, it gives you a lift. Sometimes I remember nice things people said to me decades ago, and the memories still give me strength. I remember nasty things people said and did, and I realize they still drag me down. It’s funny that I attached so much weight to remarks made by inferior people who were little better than chimps and who failed at life.

When you’re nice, you form attachments to people, and you go on to be helpful to each other in life. Snotty people push others away and end up fending for themselves unless they can control others.

God put us here to help each other. It would be wonderful if more people realized that instead of seeing humanity as a muy thai bag to use to vent their baseless cruelty.

Guess it’s time to take my new rifle out and see what it will do.

The Christmas Beverage Situation is Well in Hand

Google’s search now features AI, which I define as “artificial idiot.” I Googled “Christmas Ale,” and Mr. AI decided to give me his unwanted opinion.

He said it was a dark ale, often flavored with spices, hopped with things like Centennial and Amarillo. The usual Northwestern culprits.

There is a body called the BJCP that defines beer styles. I don’t think they have recognized Christmas Ale as one of them. But I could be wrong.

Well, guess what. I checked. They have a category called “Christmas/Winter Specialty Beer.” “A stronger, spiced beer that often has a rich body and warming finish suggesting a good accompaniment for the cold winter season.”

I don’t put spices in my beers. You can get a dizzying array of flavors from different yeasts, hops, and grains. I think people who jump straight to spices are trying to compensate for an inability to work with the basics.

My own (first) Christmas ale, extremely loosely based on heavy ales made by fat drunken monks in Belgium, is now ready to drink. I brewed on November 15, and today is December 19. It’s a very young beer, especially for a strong ale, but it’s ready to go.

I could have started drinking this earlier. It fermented in something like three days, and it tasted fine from the start.

I put it in my garage keezer and chilled it to 35°. I pumped it up to 3.3 volumes of CO2, which is very fizzy. When I say 3.3 volumes, I mean that if you forced all the CO2 out of one unit of beer, you would get 3.3 units of gas. Liters or whatever. I have no idea what temperature this applies to.

Tonight I made the huge mistake of using a normal-sized glass to hold my first finished serving. This beer has around 12.75% alcohol by volume, which is a little stronger than average. For wine.

It’s truly wonderful. A little dark fruit flavor, like a fruitcake. Some coconut, banana, and pineapple from the yeast and hops I chose. Sweet, but the sweetness is balanced by the CO2 and hop bitterness. Nice and bubbly. The head is beautiful and takes a while to go away.

The alcohol content may seem high, but in the winter, people like a little alcohol. It adds some heat to the beer. You feel it after you drink it.

I thought this beer would be way too sweet, but it isn’t. It has settled into a nice groove now that it’s cold and full of gas.

Going forward, it will be important for me to remember to use small glasses when I serve this beer. At the moment, I can’t feel my hands all that well.

For me, the purpose of brewing is not to get drunk. It’s to make very pleasant beverages that suit my taste better than what I can buy in stores. I think next time, I’ll use a 9-ounce nonic glass.

My second Christmas ale, which I brewed because I had no confidence in this one, is taking a while to ferment. I should be able to drink it in about 4 days if all goes well.

After this, it’s time to go back to replenishing my everyday beers. I can’t drink this heavy stuff all the time. I’ll end up on a transplant list.

Want to see a Reindeer Stagger?

I felt like I needed to brew a special ale for Christmas, so I started with my Happy Halfwit wheat ale and added things to make it darker and give it some raisiny flavor, like a liquid fruitcake. It fermented in about three days, and my brew software thinks it’s 12.8% alcohol, which is kind of a lot. Most wines are a little weaker.

I wanted a high ABV, because this was intended to be a one-serving beer, but this is more than I bargained for.

I tried samples during fermentation, and I was disappointed. It was too sweet, and the Sabro hops and Abbaye yeast made it taste like a pina colada. It tasted good, but it was not what I was after. I thought I would have to throw it out, but I chilled and gassed it anyway, just to find out.

Yesterday, I brewed a new version which has more bitterness, different hops, and less alcohol. I had the old one sitting at 35° and 3.3 volumes of gas. Today I tried a sample. A small one.

It’s magnificent. It’s still sweet, but the added gas and chilling add balance. CO2 adds carbonic acid to beer, and carbonic acid must have a sharp, acidic taste, because that’s the difference between seltzer and water.

Now I’m stuck with two batches of ale and only one Christmas. But it should last until next year. Really strong beers benefit from aging.

The newer beer should be fermented out by…let’s see…Thursday. That’s how fast it is. I guess the wheat kicks the yeast into high gear. Wheat beers ferment quickly.

This is not a session beer. Obviously. One pint, and you are done for the evening, unless you actually want to make a fool of yourself. I don’t think I’ll ever pour an entire pint for myself.

I need to quit making heavy beers for a while. There is no reason for a sane person to have three of them on tap, and that’s the number I currently have. I’ll get back to the old favorites.

I wonder why most strong beers are bad, given that any amateur can brew a good one. When I was in high school and even less mature than I am now, I got excited about Carlsberg Elephant, because people claimed the alcohol level was 10%. In reality, it was 7.2%, but it was still pretty strong.

It’s nasty. It gets good reviews from consumers, but I think that must be frat boys who think it’s good because it’s strong and doesn’t taste so bad they can’t gag it down. It barely tastes like beer. It has no balance. It has a musky smell. Maybe it arrives in the US skunked because of the green bottles.

How come Carlsberg brews a gross 7.2% beer, but I brew fantastic beers that are much stronger? They need to send their people to Belgium to try some strong beers that actually taste good.

I’ll think about all this while I sit on the couch and wait to feel ready to drive.

The Appliance no Home is Complete Without

I used my new deep fryer again today. I made the same things I made poorly two days ago: fried chicken and hush puppies. I also made slaw using Robert Irvine’s recipe, but of course, I changed it slightly. I’ll post my version, but his is available online.

INGREDIENTS
1 bag Publix coleslaw mix
1 cup mayonnaise
1/4 cup cider vinegar
1-1/2 teaspoons celery seed
1/4 cup sugar
Salt and pepper if desired

This works great, but the amount of sauce is a little excessive for one bag of slaw, so it would be best to hold some back and add more later if needed.

This time, everything came out very well. My wife liked the chicken better than I did. She asked how we were supposed to enjoy fried chicken from restaurants after tonight. She said it was the best fried chicken she had had in the US.

In case anyone wants to try the recipe, I’ll post it, but I am still improving it, so I wouldn’t be in a rush to put it to the test. I felt it was too salty, and I think it still needs more heat.

BREADING INGREDIENTS:
1 cup flour
1-1/2 teaspoons salt
1/2 teaspoon sage
1/2 teaspoon chipotle
1 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon baking powder

This will get you through a 4-pound chicken, but just barely.

WASH INGREDIENTS:
2 eggs
3-4 teaspoons Frank’s Red Hot sauce or something similar
1 tablespoon beer
salt

I managed to find a 4-1/2-pound chicken, which is a midget by local standards. I am going to keep looking for 3-pound chickens. I was not able to find small chickens already cut up, and big chicken pieces are hard to fry well. I ended up cutting the breasts up because they were huge. Ideally, every piece of chicken should be the same size so everything cooks at the same speed and likes the same temperature.

I don’t cut chickens up well. I’ll keep working on it.

I did not listen to the insanity about frying at 350°. Maybe that works if you can find small chickens. I tried to stay below 330°, and the chicken cooked very nicely. No dark areas. No undercooked meat. The breading stayed on the chicken. The crust was similar to KFC extra crispy in texture and appearance.

I think I would do even better at 300°. Maybe lower, once the crust is set. My grandmother made good chicken, and she used to fry it on relatively high heat for 5 minutes and then cook it on lower heat for 20.

I used a Thermapen to check the internal temperature of each piece. They varied tremendously, so I think this was necessary.

I have always found that chicken fried at 350° burns on the outside before it cooks inside. As I have said before, I believe recipes that recommend 350° are intended for small cooking vessels. The people who write the recipes know that when you add chicken to a small pan, the temperature drops fast, so you end up cooking between 300° and 330°. When you have 4 gallons of hot oil and a propane burner, your oil temperature is not going to drop.

I dumped the raw chicken in a bowl. I salted it pretty generously and poured in a lot of Frank’s. I stirred everything up and left the chicken in the fridge while I worked on other things.

In retrospect, I think I should use a hotter sauce than Frank’s, because fried chicken somehow loses heat during the preparation and cooking processes.

I beat the eggs with a little beer. I didn’t taste beer in the final product, but I think eggs alone are too thick.

I dipped each piece in the eggs and then rolled it in flour. I lowered each piece into the hot oil individually to avoid having them hit the bottoms of the baskets while still raw. I was afraid they would stick if I did that. It happened last time.

I did not crowd the pieces. I believe I never had more than 4 pieces in a basket. I tried to group large and small pieces as well as I could, hoping all the pieces in each basket would be done at the same time. It didn’t work, but at least I didn’t mix wings and breasts. Having pieces of similar sizes made some difference, even if it wasn’t a perfect solution.

I cut the propane off at least twice. This machine will burn chicken very easily because it has a lot of power. You have to watch it.

In the past, I have double-breaded chicken, but this time I decided not to push it. It worked. One application of wash and flour worked great.

Day before yesterday, I used a Southern Living hush puppy recipe, and it was no good. The hush puppies had too much flour in them. They were doughy, like biscuits. They didn’t have enough onion flavor. They lacked salt and sweetness. They weren’t dark enough. The batter was too loose.

Today, I used much less flour, more onions, and more salt. I added a little beer to the buttermilk just for fun. The hush puppies were nearly perfect. Next time, more sugar, less salt, and stiffer batter. I plan to add the liquids a little bit at a time until I get what I want, instead of relying on a fixed amount called for by a recipe.

I don’t know why the people at Southern Living can’t make hush puppies. Maybe they’re like other magazines. Maybe they hire a lot of gay urban writers who only pretend to know their subjects.

INGREDIENTS

3/4 cup cornmeal mix (self-rising)
1/4 cup self-rising flour
1 tsp. salt
1 large egg
1/2 cup buttermilk
1-1/4 cups finely-chopped onion
1/2 tbsp. sugar

As noted above, I added a little beer to the buttermilk. I didn’t use the entire half-cup of liquid, but the batter was still looser than I liked. I ended up adding almost three tablespoons of meal.

I didn’t have self-rising flour, so I added 1/4 teaspoon of baking powder.

If you try this recipe, reduce the salt to 3/4 tsp. and increase the sugar to 2 teaspoons or so.

I used Martha White corn meal mix.

Do not use sweet onions. You never cook a Vidalia.

Even with too much salt and not enough sugar, these were dynamite. They tasted exactly like the taste you taste in your mind when you hear the phrase “hush puppies.” They browned better than the first batch because of the sugar.

I think they would be even better if I omitted the flour completely. Martha White mix already has some wheat flour in it.

I turned the heat up for the hush puppies. Small food needs more heat than big food, and hush puppies need to be darker than chicken. The fryer requires a certain amount of technique. You can’t just dump things in it without planning or watching and expect the best results. It’s not like making the same batch of fries 10,000 times at McDonald’s.

My conclusion is that the fryer is a winner. Everyone should have one. But frying is still a lot of work. I don’t have to wash a frying pot or filter and move oil, but I have to wash the baskets. Fried chicken involves a cutting board, a knife, a big bowl to hold the pieces before frying, a bowl for flour, and a bowl for egg wash. You also need tongs and a few other things. It’s not like a deep fryer is a toaster and you just pop your chicken pieces into it.

My wife wants to make fries in it. That should be nice. She makes them Zambian-style. Very thin and wide. They’re wonderful. Surprised me.

So that’s it. I can make good fried chicken now. My chicken will get better and better in the future. I have mastered hush puppies. On to the next challenge.

Maybe I’ll add a food photo later. I have a couple. They don’t look great, but they show that the food was fried nicely.

DC Struck by Sudden Shortage of Crack, Cheap Wine

The unthinkable has happened. Well, that’s wrong. It was definitely thinkable. A lot of us expected it. Joe Biden has pardoned his son, one-man crime wave Hunter Biden.

It’s very interesting from a political standpoint as well as a legal standpoint.

Let’s see. What crimes has Little Biden committed?

1. He appears to have been second-in-command in a Biden family bribery operation, selling his dad’s favors. It appears other relations, such as his aunt and at least one uncle, are involved. Little Biden was under investigation for lots of related stuff, including his alleged lobbying for Ukrainian firm Burisma, a company he began working for in April of 2014.

2. He lied on an FBI background check when buying a gun. That’s a felony. A jury convicted him.

3. He evaded federal income taxes.

4. He ignored a subpoena and refused to testify before Congress. Ordinarily, I would not take that seriously, but two Trump associates went to prison for the same thing. Of course, they were prosecuted under a different tier of the injustice system.

Am I missing anything? I hope I haven’t. It’s a very complicated story.

There is no point in going through the long list of Big Biden denials. They’re all over the web right now. Even leftists are posting them. They are shocked. Just as shocked as they were when they suddenly realized Big Biden was senile, after 4 years of falling down, shaking hands with imaginary people, and forgetting where he was.

Big Biden repeatedly, indisputably asserted that he would not pardon Little Biden, and his press flak did the same thing from the White House podium. I can’t wait to see her tell the White House Press Corps Biden never said he wouldn’t pardon Hunter.

Where is this woman going to get a job next year? At least Jen Psaki was reasonably bright. It’s hard to believe any media organization would hire this other one, but on the other hand…Don Lemon. The right complexion, sexual fetish, and political stance can outweigh cognitive and moral deficits.

Big Biden lied. Incredible! No one saw a thing like that coming! Because he has always been so honest in the past.

I saw a hilarious 20th-century video of Biden saying he was knocked out of the race for the presidency because he lied. He called himself a liar. He didn’t say he misspoke or whatever. If you haven’t seen it, it’s because the 21st-century press kept it quiet. Even Big Biden has admitted Big Biden lies.

He said it very casually. He seemed to think it was funny. It was like he was admitting he cut in line at Chipotle.

The scope of the pardon is enormous. It spans a decade, up to the day when Big Biden issued it. If we find out Little Biden robbed a bank or sold 10-year-old prostitutes to depraved oligarchs, he can’t be charged unless there is a way to turn his crimes into violations of state law.

Maybe Alvin Bragg could help us there. He’s exactly the kind of unethical prosecutor we would need.

I’m sure it’s a coincidence that Big Biden’s pardon goes into effect retroactively just before Little Biden dove into Burisma.

The diary isn’t real, but we’ll imprison the lady who stole it anyway. The laptop isn’t real, but we’ll go after the people who publicized it anyway. The Burisma scandal isn’t real, but let’s pardon Hunter anyway.

It’s totally reasonable to pardon people who are clearly innocent. In Biden World.

So what’s happening here?

Little Biden had a sweetheart deal that would have spared him prison time, ending prosecution on the tax and gun charges, but the judge blew it up because she felt it was unfair and would have had the effect of a blanket pardon for unrelated future prosecutions. On the surface, it looks like a) the prosecutors were in cahoots with his defense team or b) the prosecutors were stupid and the defense team fooled them into writing Biden a lifetime pardon. Option b is completely plausible. The best and brightest generally do not go into government work.

Little Biden did not try to restructure the plea. Instead, he pleaded guilty. Why?

Let’s go ahead and be cynical.

By pleading guilty, he saved a ton of money in attorneys’ fees. Biden has very expensive representation. A second trial and two appeals would have cost him millions, in all likelihood. I don’t know why high-profile defendants hire such overpriced lawyers, but they do. Dealing with a sentencing should be much less work than a trial. Little or no research. No witness prep. No expert witnesses with huge fees. The list goes on.

Once he pleaded (not “pled”) guilty, all he had to do was sit back and wait to be pardoned.

Did he know he would be pardoned? Of course. He and the Big Guy had a deal. Otherwise, why plead guilty? It saved him money, but barring a pardon, it also assured he would go to prison.

Big Biden is one of the most notorious and shameless liars ever to stink up the Oval Office. Of course he lied, repeatedly, when he said he would not pardon Little Biden.

Trump would almost certainly have pardoned Little Biden. He is going to pardon a bunch of J6 martyrs, and he wants to be able to say he was as good to a political enemy’s son as he was to them. Even if they didn’t exist, he would still want to pardon Little Biden in order to appear magnanimous and get a distraction out of the way while putting his regime in place.

What about Kamala?

That’s a tough one.

I’m sure she originally planned to pardon Little Biden. She probably discussed it with Big Biden before he shuffled out of the race and used her to gut Barack Obama. It was probably a condition for his agreement to, for all practical purposes, appoint her as the Democratic candidate.

It appears that Biden sabotaged her repeatedly, however. I believe he appointed Kamala in order to prevent Barack Obama, who was in the process of knocking him out of the candidate spot for a second time, from installing his own protege, Chris Coons, who will now join Admiral Stockdale and Tim Kaine on the list of forgotten could-have-beens.

If Kamala had won, it would have been in spite of Big Biden. Maybe she would have backed out on a promise to pardon Little Biden. I doubt Big Biden was willing to take a chance.

I think Kamala was not a sure thing, and Biden did not want to give Trump a PR victory. I believe this is why he relieved himself all over his already-tainted legacy.

Is Hunter out of the woods now? Not yet.

There is some chance Trump’s DOJ will start to take the Biden family bribery operation seriously. If that happens, Hunter can be forced to testify. Thanks to Big Biden, he will not be able to refuse to answer questions. He can’t assert his Fifth Amendment rights because he can’t incriminate himself. He can, however, be imprisoned indefinitely for contempt of court for refusing to testify. He can also be imprisoned for perjury or lying to the FBI.

Sometimes prosecutors get people to testify against their accomplices by threatening them with prosecution. That won’t work on Hunter now. Another tool is immunity. They can give people immunity in order to strip them of Fifth Amendment protection. Big Biden just did that for future prosecutors.

What will the Bidens do now?

If Big Biden wants to kill the scandal permanently, he will have to pardon himself and every other individual involved in the family’s crimes. Alleged. He could also pardon everyone but himself, counting on the GOP to be unwilling to prosecute a former president.

Whatever Biden’s many faults are, he is very protective of his children. His DOJ got a woman imprisoned for the petty theft of his daughter’s diary. I don’t know whether his passion for nepotism extends sufficiently to other relatives to motivate him to pardon them.

It’s wild, seeing leftists scream about the pardon. They are very angry at Joe, but, predictably and incredibly, they have managed to turn Trump into the problem. Now Trump will pardon all the J6 defendants! The dangerous revolutionaries who pretty much took over the entire country by getting buzzed on cheap beer and throwing a halfhearted, weaponless, planless riot that lasted a couple of hours and resulted in no deaths except for the murder of an unarmed woman who tried to climb through a window.

If Batista had faced this kind of coup, Castro would have died in prison. This is the kind of revolution deposed tyrants wish they could have faced.

If the J6 defendants, and not Barack Obama, had staged a coup against Biden’s presidential campaign, he would have been on the ballot through November 5.

Trump was going to pardon the nonviolent J6 scapegoats anyway. No one should spend years or decades in prison for walking through the Capitol during a riot. Some of the J6 people are in prison for doing much less.

Is Joe Biden crazy and corrupt enough to pardon himself and his family? I guess he is. If he is willing to abandon all pretense of honesty and respect for the law in order to save Hunter from a year or two at a Club Fed, he is probably willing to go all the way.

I don’t care about Little Biden skating on the gun and tax charges, because rapists and murderers are acquitted every day, but the bribery thing is important. It needs to be fully exposed and investigated, regardless of whether he can be charged.

I don’t know whether Trump has the stomach for it. Guess we’ll find out.

Thank You, Drunk Monks

I am brewing again.

I took some time off for some reason I no longer remember. I’m not sure there was a reason. Laziness may have been involved.

Early this year, I stocked up on grain, hops, and yeast, but I let things slide. My house is full of brewing supplies. I had to get back at it.

I am out of wheat ale, and my amber/orange lager, Last Trump Lager (may be changed to Final Trump Lager) is definitely stale. My supply of Emergency Management Ale is dangerously low. My first imperial stout needs to be drunk and replaced with a recipe I like better.

Today I brewed my first batch of Happy Halfwit Christmas Ale.

My first heavy beer is called Happy Halfwit because it has a lot of wheat in it. It’s sort of like a Belgian ale. Belgians call their wheat beers witbiers. My beer’s grain bill is around 1/3 wheat, so I decided to call it Halfwit. Poetic license. No one would think Thirdwit was…witty.

About two years ago, when I started getting back into brewing, I bought a bunch of store beers to sharpen up my palate. I bought St. Bernardus Christmas Ale, from Belgium. I believe it’s a quadrupel, or what the BJCP calls a Strong Dark Belgian Ale.

When I first got the beer, I was not crazy about it. It had a coarseness to it. Too much funk, as I have said in an earlier post. I bought a 4-pack, and until today, I had two in the fridge.

It improved a great deal while I was debating throwing it out. The funkiness went away, and it became like Belgian beer Kool-Aid. Very easy to drink, but still complex.

Today I made something like a Belgian Dark Strong Ale, but I used a lot of wheat, while Belgian Dark Strong Ales are made with barley alone. Stunts like this make other homebrewers think I’m weird, but I really like the beers I make. They are my favorites.

It seems like all the great Belgian beers are made by monks. It’s like they spent the Dark Ages and the Renaissance doing nothing but lying around drunk. They didn’t stop with beer. They also invented a lot of well-known hard liquors. Supposedly, the European wine industry was developed by monks.

Why were they drunk all the time? Was life really that dull?

My brewing method is pretty slick now. I have it dialed in. I mash and boil in a 10-gallon pot straddling two stove burners. A mesh bag goes in the kettle to hold the grain. I strain the results and pour them into a 6-gallon stubby Torpedo keg, using a big saucepan. I put the keg in the pool so the wort chills fast. Then I pitch the yeast, add a valve to control the building CO2, and put the keg in a freezer with a Chinese temperature controller on it.

It’s really simple.

When I got back into brewing, I assumed other people had made a lot of progress with tools and methods, and I foolishly bought a computerized German machine that takes grain and turns it into wort. It was a stupid thing to do. I blew about a thousand dollars on something that should cost three hundred, and it was a pain to take apart and clean.

Now it’s just me, the kettle, and the bag. I spend about a third as much time cleaning and putting stuff away. And the beer is just as good.

I guess I shouldn’t make it sound like there has been no progress, because the kettle-and-bag method is relatively new. It’s called brew in a bag, or BIAB. But while it’s progress, it involves a setup more primitive than the one I started using in 2001.

There are guys out there using HERMS equipment. I’m not going to Google to find out what HERMS stands for, but it involves several huge stainless containers and at least one pump. I would quit brewing if I had to wash all that.

Here is the thing: men love gadgets. If we didn’t, women would be living in burrows and behind bushes. We love tinkering and engineering. When you get started brewing, it’s easy to fall in love with unnecessary machinery. You begin with the idea you’re going to make really good beer, and you end up trying to become a really good mechanic instead.

There are guys out there with big, shiny, three-vessel systems that take up their entire garages, and they could be using 1) a pot, and 2) a bag.

It’s not like BIAB is a compromise. BIAB people win prizes all the time.

I’ll just say it. You have to be stupid to buy a fancy brewing system. I know, because I bought one. I should sell it.

To a stupid person.

Okay, “stupid” is not the right word. But a person with knowledge and common sense would buy something else.

The beer I made today will probably ferment out in 4 days. I know this because ale I used as my starting point fermented out in three. This new one is a little heavier. I should be drinking it in 10 days or less.

So that’s nice.

In other news, our wonderful Lord has given me more revelation, and I should put it on the blog.

There is always symmetry in the supernatural. That’s the starting point. Look for symmetry, and you will save yourself a lot of time in the school of hard knocks. You will learn more quickly.

Pride is horrible. I have written about this. It goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit goes before a fall. Self-confidence is poison.

I have also said that God showed me that pride is a fence we build to protect our iniquities. We don’t like to listen or change, so we make excuses and dig our heels in. We protect our bad habits and delusions as though they were our children, because we think we know better than everyone else.

Pride is also a fence we build to keep God away. The Bible makes this clear. It says he is close to the humble but far from the proud.

If we build a fence to keep correction out, and it keeps God away, who is it bringing near? Evil spirits. Symmetry.

Here is revelation: by the symmetry of the supernatural, humility is a fence we build to keep destruction and evil spirits away. It’s a fence that surrounds God and ourselves, keeping him close to us.

Humility is actually power and victory. No one ever teaches this. They don’t know. They’re too busy telling us to work hard, grin while we are abused and defeated, and give them money to buy more jets.

If you’re humble, God will be close to you, so he will keep evil spirits far off, and he will bless you in every way.

Think of this: in the Old Testament, who saw God? One person, as far as we know. Maybe Adam saw him before the fall, but Moses is the only person we can say saw him, for sure.

What quality did Moses have?

No one was more humble than Moses. Look it up. The Bible says it.

I didn’t see the connection until God showed it to me yesterday.

Moses was close to God. Moses was given so much power and authority, he was able to stroll up to the ruler of Egypt and tell him off.

The one thing that Moses did that got him in trouble with God was an act of pride. God told him to speak to a rock and make water come out, and Moses struck the rock instead, making it look like human strength solved the problem. For this, Moses was kept out of Israel.

We tend to think of humility as something that makes us weak. We think it empowers others to abuse us. But it’s actually the entrance to the strong fortress the Bible keeps telling us about. It’s safety and power.

I wish I had known this a long time ago.

I hope this is useful to you. Now I’ll finish this beer and go to bed.

Home Brewery Roars Back to Life

This was written on November 25.

It’s brew day minus one. I’m making Happy Halfwit Christmas Ale tomorrow.

I make a heavy ale called Happy Halfwit, and it’s magnificent. It contains a huge amount of wheat, which is weird for a heavy ale. I use Abbaye yeast, which was supposedly derived from Chimay dregs. This ale is sweet and very strong. Absolutely perfect. And it gets better with time. I made my last batch in January, and it’s at least as good as it ever was.

Almost two years ago, I got myself some St. Bernardus Christmas Ale, from Belgium. It’s dark and pretty heavy. It’s considered a quadrupel (spelled “quadrupel”), which means it’s what Americans call a “Strong Dark Belgian Ale.” It comes in at 10% alcohol, according to the Sint Bernardus (spelled “Sint Bernardus”) brewery.

I like this ale, but it has some funk to it. Belgians do weird things with beer, and sometimes their beer has smells and flavors people have compared to horse sweat and manure. I tried a Belgian-inspired ale made in America, and it made me think of Carnation Milk that had been in the can for 30 years, multiplied by 5.

I am trying to make a dark ale with little or no funk. If it has some banana overtones, which Abbaye sometimes produces, that’s fine, as long as they’re not overwhelming.

I’m using Special B malt as an ingredient. People tell me I’m using too much, but then they also claim I’m crazy to use Sabro hops, which are known to make beer taste a little bit like a pina colada. They say the malt will make the beer taste like prune juice. They may be right, but I already have the grain, and I can’t separate the Special B out. I’m going to go with it and change it next time if I need to.

I’m making a yeast starter. That means I’m taking a little packet of expensive yeast, mixing it with a malt extract solution, and letting the yeast multiply overnight. The idea is to overwhelm the beer and any microbes that might survive the brewing process. A starter is supposed to guarantee fermentation will go all the way, and it reduces the likelihood of infection by stray germs.

I am shooting for an original (prefermentation) specific gravity of 1.092, which is very heavy. Specific gravity is a ratio. It’s the density of the beer compared to the density of water. A lot of beers come in at around 1.040. Mine are generally around 1.055. A figure of 1.092 means there will be a lot of work for the yeast to do.

Sometimes, for reasons only yeast knows, yeast gives up, and then you’re stuck with beer that isn’t quite beer. I want to avoid that.

My new ale should come in at about 10% alcohol, which is perfect for cold nights by the fire. Not that I get much in the way of cold nights, but still.

I should be able to finish brewing tomorrow. Then I’ll stick the beer in a dedicated fridge at a fixed temperature. After that, I plan to make some of my favorite amber ale, and I need to replace my Last Trump lager, which is getting old.

I’ve been drinking my Steppe Brother Imperial Stout. I made it a long time ago, and I found it too sweet. I increased the carbonation level, and that added carbonic acid to the beer. Carbonic acid gives club soda its sharp flavor.

Here’s a photo of this beer in a miniature pint glass.

I like the beer now, and I’ve realized it’s not a failure. It’s a fantastic beer. It’s just sweeter than I intended when I wrote the recipe. I have grain for a new version, so I’ll be making that soon.

Other people who really like sweet beer would love this stout. If you can stand milk stout, which contains no milk but is full of unfermentable lactose, this beer will seem dry to you.

Imperial stout is a style the British exported to Russia. It was made very strong and dark. The intention was to make a beer that could survive an ocean crossing, supposedly. If you want to taste a perfect Imperial Stout, by a 4-pack of Old Rasputin, by North Coast Brewing.

After making my own imperial, I contacted North Coast, and they suggested I crank up the bitterness in my beer, so I’ll be doing that, going up to 76 IBU’s with Citra hops. As you might guess, they have a citrusy flavor.

My first batch of Steppe Brother fermented out in three days, which is crazy. I used a psycho yeast called Kveik Lutra. Kveik yeasts come from Norway or Sweden or something, and they are turbocharged. I got good results the first time around, so I’ll be using Lutra again.

Hoping to have a nice festive beverage available by Christmas.

Disturbing Dispatch from Kamalia

Aging actor Dave Bautista has made a career of putting on clingy briefs and performing a fake, somewhat homoerotic wrestling act with other big guys who were not athletic enough to be make it in actual sports. You know what wrestling is like. They put their faces between each other’s legs. They hug each other tight and lie on top of each other. They have to shower each other’s fluids off their bodies.

In order to do this, Bautista took illegal drugs for years. Either that, or he just magically went from a normal weight of maybe 200 pounds to over 300, just by eating lots of chicken and lifting weights. No one else in the history of the world has been able to do this, as photos of pre-steroid professional bodybuilders show, but maybe Dave is the first.

No, he took drugs.

Call it my opinion. Sure.

Anyone involved with natural bodybuilding will tell you you’re not going to put on more than 25 pounds of natural muscle in a year, and you’re not going from 200 to 300 without drugs. A 200-pound man with an exceptional physique will have about 90 pounds of muscle, and he would have to more than double that to hit 300. It does not happen naturally.

He says he is now down to 240. He has really shriveled. I would guess he’s closer to 210, but wrestlers always lie about their size, as he did when he was in the ring. He has a great physique for a man in late middle age who doesn’t take drugs, but he’s not impressive. He’s in the same league as a typical high school basketball player who has been lifting weights for three months.

He gave interviews talking about his struggle to lose weight. That amazes me.

“No matter how tired I am today, I am NOT going to go shoot up with performance-enhancing drugs.”

He appeared in interviews and tried to convince interviewers he had just been fat. Please. Fat with a six-pack and a chest 15″ bigger than his waist.

I don’t think anyone ever looked at Bautista’s enormous steroid muscles and bulging veins and thought, “Man, what a tub.”

Here’s why he quit using drugs: he had to. You can’t keep taking high doses of gym drugs into your sixties and expect to live long. When was the last time you saw Arnold Schwarzenegger with his shirt off? There is a reason. Look up the things prolonged drug use does to bodybuilders.

Now Bautista has made a campaign ad. It was styled as a comedy sketch, but it’s clearly an ad. Leftist men are generally less masculine than conservative men, and it’s something leftist women complain about a lot. It’s not something that can be disputed.

Until pretty recently, I thought that, while effeminate men are definitely more likely to be leftists, the “soy boy” thing was exaggerated. But the more I see, the more I think it’s not that far from the truth.

When you look at Antifa assault videos, it’s hard not to notice all the long, spindly limbs and 34″ chests. There are a lot of them.

Kamala Harris is unpopular with men, and that even extends to black men, whom you would expect to give her blind support. So Bautista made an ad in which he does weird exercises, including hitting a tire with a hammer, while using the popular term for women’s private parts to describe Donald Trump. The idea appears to be that a guy who used to get overly intimate with other men for money, while wearing briefs and flexing drug muscles, is more manly than Donald Trump.

Just to compare:

1. Bautista pretended to fight other men in fake, choreographed matches with predetermined outcomes while using drugs because his natural muscles were too small to get him the job, and claiming to be at least two inches taller than he really was, and

2. Donald Trump got shot in the ear with an AR-15, and when the Secret Service tried to remove him from the stage, and he had blood running down his face, and there was no way to know whether more shots were coming, he refused to leave, forced his face out into the open, pumped his fist, and yelled, “FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!”

Meanwhile, a man near Trump had his brains blown all over his family by another round, and three other men were shot and survived.

Which one proved he was a real man?

Here are a couple of photos so you can decide which person you think is more of a man:

There’s Trump, shot, bloody, and insisting on exposing himself to more fire so he can encourage and comfort his base. And there is Bautista, crossdressing in a pantsuit, a low-cut top, and pearls. Without his steroid muscles. He will probably continue to shrink. Drug muscles don’t vanish entirely overnight.

A cruel Internet commenter said, “He looks like if Jeff goldblum and RuPaul had a 60-year-old baby.” Another said he looked like a gay realtor.

Bautista made the video with the help of Jimmy Kimmel, one of worst TDS sufferers on television. Kimmel has decided to be the voice of outraged decency, which is pretty strange, given his history as second banana on The Man Show, which featured a segment called “Girls on Trampolines” and skits in which Kimmel appeared in blackface as basketball player Karl Malone.

In the trampoline segments, women wearing things like bathing suits and just plain underwear jumped high in the air and spread their legs at the cameras.

The Malone skits mocked Malone as an ignorant black ghetto figure with a subnormal IQ. Not that there could have been any racist intent.

Here is Kimmel doing the kind of thing the liberal press has been helping him to bury for the last 21 years:

That’s about 50 times worse than the act that got Al Franken kicked out of the Senate. I think Franken should have gotten off with an apology, but what Kimmel did may amount to a sex offense.

What would you do if you caught him doing that to your mother?

Where is the outraged decency? Where are the tears and remorse? Aren’t liberal celebrities supposed to vanish into rehab after doing things like this? Shouldn’t he have come back and said, “This is not who I am”?

He drank a lot of beer on the show, so maybe he doesn’t remember doing this. Surely the explanation isn’t hypocrisy.

Kamala herself made an ad that featured the kind of men leftists think are masculine. She wants to prove real men support her.

I’m sure you’ve seen it. A morbidly obese guy feeding chickens and saying he eats carburetors. A scrawny old homeless-looking person with his sleeves torn off, standing near someone else’s motorcycle and tool cart for XY cred. A man who is pretty clearly gay but seated on the tailgate of a pickup truck, proving he loves the ladies.

Actually, the carburetor guy also seems gay. He has a strong lisp, which is something you don’t see a lot in straights.

Two of the guys say they drink single-barrel bourbon, neat. I don’t get that at all. There are probably 500,000 homosexual men in America who lisp and prance, can’t throw a ball or lift a suitcase, and drink over a fifth of hard liquor a day. When I was a kid, the old Irish lady who lived next door to me used to turn up tumblers of pure vodka and empty them.

She could throw a ball, though. Even when drunk.

Why would Democrats equate manliness with drinking hard liquor? Are they in the eighth grade or what? They remind me of my friends and me, in high school, counting the beers we drank between classes. We were not manly. We were little idiots.

Maybe Kamala is manly. She slurs her words all the time. My personal opinion is that they’re covering up a serious drinking problem. If not, maybe she has a neurological disease.

The stuff about motorcycles and carburetors seems like the sort of thing Democrats usually call sexist. Can’t women fix carburetors and motorcycles?

Today my wife and I saw two huge lesbians on Harleys, blasting up Highway 475 in matching T-shirts. Really loud pipes. I guess they’re manly enough to vote for Kamala.

I notice the Kamalians didn’t bring guns into the mix. Some shrill lady on the diverse writing team with no straight white males must have vetoed that.

Anyway, Bautista is nuts, and I suspect he it will not be long before he outs himself. He has married twice and had kids, but you can’t wear an outfit like that unless something is amiss. Or someone is a miss.