Fries WILL be Great Again

RFK Jr. is about to become the head of the Department of Health and Human Services, a department which sounds leftist when you say its name. What conservative would use the phrase “human services”? It’s idiotic. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s too broad. I’m a human. When I hire someone to look at my AC system, it must be a human service. But HHS doesn’t send out air conditioner repairmen.

We had better department names when we had fewer departments. The Department of Defense was the Department of War. No apologies. Truthful. Trumpish.

Let’s Google.

HHS, which is called “HHS,” even though the DOJ is called “the DOJ,” was put together in 1939. Already, it makes sense to me. A socialist put it together.

It was originally called the Federal Security Agency, which is a pretty good piece of leftist PR for its day. “We just want you to be secure and know there are no monsters under your bed.” It was supposed to be in charge of Social Security, health, and education. They must have rejected “the Department of Intrusiveness.”

The guy who ran the department was a man named McNutt. That’s too easy. Before leading the Department of Buttinskyism, he was the governor of Indiana and burdened the citizens with the state’s first income tax.

Perfect.

Eventually, the government felt that the jobs of using Social Security and centrally-planned education were so important, they should be given to separate organizations with independent armies of stooges, so we ended up with the Social Security Administation and the Department of Indoctrination. I mean Education.

HHS includes the CDC, NIH, and FDA.

That’s all I need to know. Let’s disband it.

Okay, okay. We do need someone to keep really awful drugs off the market. I mean, if we didn’t have a government agency doing that, some company might put out untested vaccines that cause blood clots and myocarditis, leading to an epidemic of excess deaths among young people, which the government’s unofficial department, the MSM, would have to tell us did not exist.

All right. All right. We do need the FDA. I think. Even though it keeps Americans from receiving excellent medications used everywhere else in the world. Look up Rowachol. I got covid recently, and the pharmacist in Rome gave me two well-regarded drugs, neither of which had I ever heard of. Thanks to the FDA.

Anyway, the FDA is out of control. It lets lobbyists tell us what to eat. It gave us the Food Pyramid, which was originally known as the Iowa/Nebraska Joint Pro-Diabetes Pyramid. The Pyramid told us to stuff ourselves with all sorts of carbohydrates which rotted our teeth, strangled our pancreases, filled our arteries with placques, gave us high blood pressure, and made us one of the fattest nations outside of Polynesia.

Carbohydrates are the single biggest killer in the US. Think about that.

Here is the Pyramid.

It says to eat 6-11 servings of carbohydrates per day. I overeat, I love food, and I can’t manage that. I can’t even picture the people who do. They must make Jabba the Hutt look like Olive Oyl. All by itself, their gas must have raised sea levels an inch.

Rice and pasta, it says. Bread. Know what you’re eating when you eat those things? Glucose. A sugar so bad for you it’s used as the standard for the glycemic index, a metric which tells you how much damage your food is doing to your body. You chew your bread, mixing it with an enzyme in spit that converts starch into glucose, and before long, excess glucose is pouring into your veins, threatening your eyesight, your circulatory system, your brain, your nerves, and your chances of marrying anyone remotely attractive.

The weird thing about this is that you don’t need carbohydrates at all. We all love them, but you can go your entire life and be extremely healthy without carbs in your diet. Can’t do that with fat and protein.

The Pyramid discourages consumption of meat. I guess the pork and beef lobbyists had a lower budget for hookers and trips.

Meat is harmless. It’s great for you. Plant-based foods cause diabetes, tooth decay, obesity, and high blood pressure. It’s pretty much impossible to have those things without eating plants, and the fewer carbs you eat, the less likely you are to have these issues. Meat simply can’t cause them.

The FDA used to tell us to get 25 grams of fiber every day. Have you ever tried to do that? That’s 6 bowls of raisin bran. You would literally wear out your toilet seat. You would go through life clearing elevators and subway cars.

The government has no business managing our diets. The government is corrupt and stupid. It tells us what lobbyists and leftist freaks tell us to. And nutrition is not properly part of the government’s business. What’s next? Compulsory calisthenics?

Guard the borders. Fight our enemies. Protect business. Run the courts and prisons. The government should do these things. Where does it get off telling us what to put on our dinner tables?

All this being said, RFK is kind of a nut. He seems like he would be a great guy to hang around with, but come on. He eats roadkill. He thinks vaccines cause autism, a theory which is right up there with Pizzagate.

Not taking vaccines causes things like polio, diphtheria, smallpox, and rubella. This is proven.

I don’t know whether he’ll be good or bad for us, but it would be nice to hear less propaganda from HHS, and it would be good if Americans could buy the same drugs that save lives in Europe.

He hates seed oils. I don’t know whether he’s right or not. He loves animal fat, and there, I am with him.

He said something wonderful. He reminded America that McDonald’s used to fry potatoes in beef tallow. They quit in the Nineties. Bad research and the FDA convinced American women animal fat and eggs were bad, which they are not, and women have strong voices when it comes to food purchasing. All sorts of companies started cutting out animal fat. Oreos abandoned delicious lard. We even have skinny pigs now. You can’t make much gravy from a country ham these days.

Women are much more gluttonous than men, and they drive the chip and ice cream industries, but they do more than anyone to deprive the rest of us.

Beef-fat fries are magnificent. I’ve made them. They smell like prime rib. A beef-fat fry is Jane Russell. A canola fry is Elizabeth Warren.

I wonder if he’ll be able to bring beef-fat fries back in some major restaurants. Maybe he can make them trendy. That would be a dream come true.

Potatoes are practically poisonous, but there is no denying their impact on cuisine. They taste wonderful. Fried. Mashed. Baked. Boiled. You name it. Beef fat makes ingesting an inherently unhealthy vegetable worth it.

People say potatoes are actually healthy. They have vitamin C! They’re low in fat! Whatever. Try one without salt and added fat and then return to the discussion. Worthless. Prison food.

I always feel bad after eating potatoes, but they’re too good to give up.

Even if the FDA were right about everything, I would still want it to shut up about our diets. It’s outside the government’s lane.

Getting back to RFK, I don’t think vaccines cause autism. Demons cause autism, and if autism has increased, it’s because America has turned into Sodom. We invite demons to rule us now. They cause disease, mental illness, and other misfortunes. Unfortunately, the FDA will never admit demons exist.

Regardless of what Roadkill Robert says, I plan to take every well-tested vaccine I can get, except for those made with mRNA. That stuff is horrifying. My son is going to be vaccinated, and he will live under the same policy. I don’t want him dying needlessly of some ridiculous 1900’s disease like tetanus or whooping cough.

My son will never be vaccinated for covid.

Covid vaccine : young person :: birth control pills : Caitlyn Jenner.

Trump needs to put a libertarian in charge of the Department of Education. A real Ron Swanson, unlike cookie-cutter kneejerk liberal Nick Offerman, who played him. We need someone who will destroy the department from the inside. The suggestion that states can’t run schools is asinine and insulting. I could run a school. Nearly any educated adult could.

The business of education requires a very low level of competence. You know it’s true. Remember your teachers?

I had one who told us there were 52 states.

I hope RFK succeeds in doing good things and is restrained when he tries to implement ideas he heard from Alex Jones. All in all, I prefer him to anyone Harris would have appointed, sight unseen.

Leading Democrats Express Concern

Was I wrong about the left’s response to the second Trump election? I was sure the usual spindly, stoned, spoiled white kids would be out in the streets burning buildings and attacking the cops by now, but it has not happened.

What’s going on? They have gone berserk so many times. Why not now?

I wonder if it’s because even leftists are tired of them. I saw that Oregon’s governor, a lefty wackjob (I didn’t actually check, but I am willing to guess) threatened to meet Antifa with the National Guard. Are Antifers intimidated because they think blue-state officials might actually do their jobs this time?

Maybe leftists are tired of Antifa because it was a fad. BLM seems to be drying up. Maybe kids no longer think it’s cool to post selfies and videos from riots, not because they have grown up, but simply because it has been done already, and other kids are not as impressed as they once were.

I just saw a video from Seattle, where a group of about two dozen black-clad punks with a combined chest measurement of 35 inches tried to buffalo a few bike cops. It went nowhere. They ended up wandering off, chanting some nonsense questioning the cops’ parentage.

Aren’t we supposed to refrain from shaming the unfathered?

Is the rain killing their drive? Leftist nut riots generally occur in decent weather. American leftists are soft. They may dress like the Viet Cong, but they cry when the cops intercept their Grubhub orders. Literally. Maybe they’re afraid rain will wash the food coloring out of their hair.

Riot-prone punks are generally drug users. Has the dope gotten so good, it destroys their motivation to leave the basement? We all know weed kills motivation, except for the motivation to eat Frito-Lay products.

Could it be they’re planning action for later, on the assumption it will surprise THE MAN, who was counting on post-election chaos?

I don’t think so. I don’t think they plan that far ahead. I think they are bad at thinking about the future. After all, Jew-hating leftists at Harvard showed their faces while expecting to receive legal internships in New York City. That’s like showing up for a job interview with an ankle bracelet.

Maybe they’re waiting for a spark. Someone has to go first and make protesting cool again. Someone has to get a whole bunch of likes for fighting the police naked or something.

Herd creatures don’t like to be the one who goes first.

Tiktok gals are telling other gals to poison men. Is that the new leftist intifada? The police can beat you up, and felony arrests can keep you out of cushy jobs, so perhaps it makes sense that crazy, unfulfilled women whose cats aren’t getting the job done would go on Tiktok with their faces uncovered and tell other women to poison husbands and boyfriends they will never actually have.

The poison girls practically worship a long-dead Italian lady who (probably not true) sold poison to women with abusive husbands. The poison is called aqua Tofana, and it contains lead, arsenic, and belladonna.

It’s not like we know these women had abusive husbands. It’s not like there were trials. Maybe their wealthy husbands abused them by not dying soon enough.

By the way, as long as we’re revealing top secret information, McDonald’s special sauce is thousand island dressing. I know you had no idea. Nearly every secret sauce is ketchup plus mayonnaise with or without pickle relish.

The Tiktok assassin wannabes tell other girls aqua Tofana is undetectable after the fact. And that is true. If it’s 1650 A.D.

Lead, arsenic, and belladonna can be detected with no problem, and this has probably been true for over a century.

Girls really are bad at science. I’m sorry.

I don’t know why anyone would think lead was a good poison. Pretty sure cigarettes are faster.

When I was young, I did not understand that lead was bad for us, and I liked the taste of it. Sometimes I chewed on lead split-shot fishing sinkers. You’re supposed to close split shots with pliers, but I used my teeth, and I noticed that lead was kind of tasty.

Maybe this explains a lot of things about me now. Anyway, I did not die or even get sick.

Opponents of the aqua Tofana movement have speculated that very few of these women have access to men on a regular basis, for reasons that are obvious when you watch their videos. But, as an Internet denizen said, going to Starbucks could be scary. And I’m not talking about the prices.

Where are these girls going to get arsenic? Amazon? Let me see. Let me search and put myself on yet another secret list.

Amazon lists a homeopathic medicine made from arsenic trioxide. It’s called arsenicum album, which probably means “white arsenic.” Given that it’s sold openly as a medicine, and the fact that it’s homeopathic, i.e. ineffective, this stuff can’t contain enough arsenic to change election outcomes.

“Homeopathic” is a funny way to spell “placebo.”

Well, this is something. I just found a 100-gram bottle of pure arsenic metal on Amazon for $380. God bless the Internet. I should have expected it.

I just checked, and I can buy a cobra online for $1,000. Not at Amazon, so forget free shipping.

Never doubt the power of online commerce. I can use Paypal. I can’t use Paypal to buy a box of .22 shorts, because Paypal thinks selling gun-related items is harmful to society. But I can get a highly venomous snake that will breed just fine in my yard.

I can buy an inland taipan. Look this thing up. It’s worse than 10 cobras. These things will chase you and bite you over and over until they’re dry.

They’re like long, skinny scorned women.

I don’t like gun control, but shouldn’t we have cobra control? Isn’t that obvious? A gun just sits around until someone uses it, and it can’t reproduce. It can’t eradicate or displace native species, either. We should be controlling dangerous animals like cobras, pit-type dogs, and Will Smith.

If the kooky aqua Tofana girls get serious, maybe some witch with the prerequisite nose hog ring, who works at a university chemistry lab, will start filching arsenic and mailing it around to girls who will end up poisoning themselves and their cats accidentally. Or maybe some girl who doesn’t know Amazon keeps records of sales will just order some.

I can already see the cop videos in my mind. Girls in cuffs, screaming “THEY SAID IT WAS UNDETECTABLE! Oh, and I CAN’T BREATHE!”

I don’t know why America hasn’t erupted in violence, but I am confident it will happen, because you can’t say we’ve changed just because Republicans won elections by small margins.

Maybe the riot-prone are avoiding important dates like the ones like January 6 and January 20. Maybe they’ll flip out and go berserk over minor provocations, when we don’t expect it. Maybe they’ll hear there will be no Barbie sequel.

Farewell to the Wizard of America’s Id

I created another Twitter account so I could survey the situation following the election. When I have created Twitter accounts in the past, I have not been able to stand it very long. I thought this time might be different. I could stay in the background, not get too much dirt on me, and have the ability to look at other people’s pages in chronological order, which is something Twitter took away from non-members.

I lasted 4 days.

I was swamped with fake and/or bot accounts. I don’t know what purpose these accounts serve. They must be making money somehow. Most of them featured posts sort of like this: “I have had it with Mike Pompeo! If you agree, say ‘YES’!”

A lot of them had ridiculous names like “PresOfficialDonaldTrump.” They were labeled “Parody,” not always in a conspicuous way. They contributed nothing at all to the discourse, and they pushed real accounts out.

I had to keep muting these accounts. Muting means you can’t see their posts, but they can see yours. It seemed like it didn’t work. I kept seeing the same trash. Maybe they were posting on multiple accounts with very similar names. I tried blocking. I blocked and blocked and blocked.

I started getting slut posts. One of the first was some sleazy little trollop dropping the top of her bar-grade minidress. Then I got flooded with Cardi B fan posts. “Cardi be CRUSHIN’ it in this dress!” I would guess I muted and blocked over 30 accounts like this, but they kept coming. Cardi B is a slut, she is unintelligent, and she is also homely.

I received similar posts from other rap sluts. I got one from Sexxy Red, another homely pop star. She was bending over in a short dress, facing away from the phone. She looks like a budget prostitute of the sort favored by economically-minded military personnel.

I use harsh terms, I know, but so does the Bible.

There was also a ton of disinformation from the right and the left. The guy who debunked Pizzagate raped a bunch of kids! No, he was caught with child pornography. Doug Emhoff’s daughter had to be committed to a mental asylum after the election! No, that did not happen. RFK murdered 83 kids in Samoa! Really? Read up on that.

Twitter now has “community notes,” meaning you can post a note correcting disinformation. I saw very few of these.

There were a bunch of sick women, telling the world how they hated their friends and relatives who voted for Trump. TDS is not imaginary. It’s real, and it’s everywhere.

Many people were gloating over the Democrats. This is a practice I battle within myself. Here is what the Bible says:

Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth, and let not thine heart be glad when he stumbleth:

Lest the Lord see it, and it displease him, and he turn away his wrath from him.

I don’t want the Lord to stop defeating these people and the filthy spirits they serve.

I saw a lot of people bragging about a Trump landslide. That was annoying. There was no landslide. Ronald Reagan was elected twice, and in the process, he got over 1,000 electoral votes. Those were landslides. Trump got 312 votes. Why can’t we be honest? He did pretty well. That’s all.

Trump got 304 votes in 2016, and no one called it a landslide.

People were talking as though the Democrats were finished. A lot of people think we own the country now. No. We do not. We won in a squeaker. We had a feeble loser opponent who repelled people, and we still ended up with tiny majorities in the House and Senate. America still loves Satan’s values, and the left will eventually overtake the right. Get ready for it. You will not save America, but you can save yourself by getting to know God.

We will probably lose one house of Congress in the midterm election, so get ready for it.

I don’t know how you’re supposed to get anything good out of Twitter. There are a lot of citizen journalists there, but think of the sewage you have to wade through to get to them.

The big conservative brains on Twitter are disappointing. For example, people say James Woods got a 1600 on the SAT and went to MIT, but his posts are pretty ordinary. Some are immature. He’s not “owning” people right and left. I tend to doubt what people say about his intelligence. It’s true he went to MIT for 7 semesters, but not everyone there is Niels Bohr.

On top of all this, Twitter is a time sink. You sit down to check it briefly, and then suddenly, 90 minutes are gone, and you have nothing to show for it.

I’m out. I’m done. I think Twitter is important, because you can say things all the other social sites delete, but I can’t find a way to make it work for me. Maybe I’ll start another account if something big happens and I want to keep track of it, but I am on the sidelines for now.

My Personal Trainer’s Name is Milton

Life here is going extremely well, although I have some concerns about my wife because she holds her belly and sings to it. I am pretty old, I have seen lots of pregnant women, and they have all seemed pretty miserable. My wife isn’t getting the message.

I’m having fun moving hurricane trees. A real whopper flopped in my woods, over the dirt road that goes down the middle of the lot. I would say it’s 80 feet tall, or, more accurately, long. It’s about two feet thick at what used to be waist level. It fell so the crown got stuck in some other trash oaks.

Some of the upper branches hit the ground, and others were caught in the other trees. In a situation like that, it can be impossible to predict what the tree wants to do. Is it firmly stuck at the top end, or is the root ball holding it up? If you cut it, will it do nothing, fall straight down, or fall while rotating? Which end will fall when you cut? Will the tree’s canopy drop, ripping limbs off the other trees? Will the stump end come toward you? Will it go up or down?

Making things worse, this is a V-shaped tree. It has one big trunk and one small one. It fell in the direction of the small trunk, pinning the smaller part of the tree to the ground. The V-shaped base of the tree held the big trunk up so the lowest good place to cut was at waist height. When you cut a nearly-horizontal tree which is three feet off the ground, the part that falls can fall…three feet. With you close at hand.

I have two new chainsaws. I got frustrated with my Echo Timberwolf and the little Jonsered CS2240 I bought in 2017, because I had trouble keeping them running. This year, I bought a Husqvarna 562XP with a 24″ bar, and I just picked up a 50-cc Echo CS-501P with a 16″ bar. The CS-501P usually comes with a longer bar, but I wanted a light, overpowered short saw for bucking. My new saws are commercial saws. The old Echo came with commercial innards for the most part, but it also had some residential-grade stuff, some of which I have replaced.

As you can see, this is a scary tree to cut. If you cut the top end, it could come loose and crush you without warning. If you cut the bottom end, you can’t tell which way it will go. It was surrounded with vines and other trip hazards, making it even more fun.

I will call the big part of the tree “Tree 1” and the small part “Tree 2.” I decided I should try to get most of Tree 2 out from under Tree 1 so Tree 1 would not fall on it and then roll toward me. Using my knowledge of tree behavior, accumulated over 7 years, I cut Tree 2 a couple of yards from the root ball, confident I could keep it from pinching the saw. Which it did, almost immediately.

I had to go back to the house and get the cordless Makita to get it loose. I could not get a wedge into the wood to open it up, so I had to make a second cut close by, while standing nearly under the trunk of Tree 1.

I can’t say enough about the cordless Makita. If you have a lot of trees, you can’t really get by without a gas saw unless you want to buy maybe 8 expensive batteries, but for most jobs, the Makita is fantastic. It has incredible torque, it cuts really fast, it makes no noise, it always starts, and Makita engineered it so it’s very easy to use. You don’t need a scrench to install or adjust chains.

Makita makes top-quality gas saws under the Dolmar name, but they don’t have much of a presence in the US.

If I only had a few chainsaw jobs to do every year, I’d be happy with the Makita and a cordless pole saw.

Well, that’s not true. I’d also want a small gas saw to free the Makita if it got pinched. Which it would.

I got a fair amount of Tree 2 out of there. Tree 1 did not move. I figured the next thing was to cut Tree 1 by the root ball.

I have bucked a lot of fallen trees, and the root balls have pretty much always stayed put. Not so this time.

Guessing that the root ball wasn’t applying any torque to the trunk, I figured the top of the trunk was in compression and the bottom was being pulled. After praying not to die, I cut into the top and made a slot deep enough for a wedge and a chainsaw bar. I pounded a wedge in to keep the cut from closing. Then I bored into the side of the trunk and cut up to the slot I had made. Then I noticed that the wedge was moving deeper into the wood.

The cut was opening, not closing as I had expected. The canopy of the tree was trying to fall.

I ended up going back to the house and leaving the tree alone. I planned to get back on it the next day. The cut was gradually widening, so I didn’t think it was a good idea to poke at it.

When I got back the next day, the trunk was nearly separated from the stump. There was a strap of intact wood under it, holding things together. The stump had rotated upward, and the stump of Tree 2 had inconveniently positioned itself under Tree 1. Tree 1 was resting on it, preventing the trunk of Tree 1 from falling and ripping the strap apart.

I had to get a pole saw and cut the strap. I was not going to be near the tree when it gave up. When the situation resolved, the canopy of the tree fell straight down, so it was no longer hung in other trees. Anyone trying to work under it, thinking it was hung securely, would have been squooshed.

Now I have to start nibbling the tree and moving the bits away from the road. I can keep nibbling until I get close to the stump, and then I’ll get the lowest segment of the trunk off the stump and onto the ground.

I used to burn everything I cut, but I eventually realized it didn’t matter if there was debris in the woods. It goes away in three years, and while it’s there, it doesn’t bother anyone. I plan to put this year’s junk in piles and leave it.

Burning piles of trees is kind of fun, and it makes you feel like you’re doing a good job keeping your land neat, but it’s also a pain. You have to be around to make sure nothing gets out of hand. You have to get permits. You have to put your piles out before a certain time of day, which is not always possible. Sometimes a pile will smolder for several days, and I just count on the condition of the surrounding grass and trees to prevent problems. It’s very hard to start a wildfire in unfavorable conditions. Impossible, really.

I don’t like going to bed knowing something out there is still burning, but it’s either that or stay up all night with the hose and tractor. It’s not unsafe to let things burn, but I can’t help thinking about worst-case scenarios that can’t actually happen.

Since I learned burn permits aren’t needed for piles smaller than 8 feet across, I am making an effort to cut trees in smaller pieces.

I am going to hop up the new CS-501P. I didn’t have a great need to buy it, but my other two small saws have some limitations, and I thought it would be fun to have a better one and increase the power. The Makita is limited by battery life, and the Jonsered is very unpleasant to work on.

I bought a new exhaust deflector. This won’t increase the power much, but it may help heat escape. It’s aluminum. Heat is what kills chainsaws, and their greenie exhaust systems hold it in. Arborists really hate environmentalists. It’s amazing how conservative they are. I can see why, when I think about all the ways environmentalists hinder their work and cost them money.

The saw has a strange removable tube in the muffler, and that’s coming out. This should make a noticeable difference. I think Echo made it removable for this reason. I may also drill some holes in the muffler.

I got myself a decent-quality tachometer. I already had a tach, but I learned the model I got was not considered accurate. Hard to believe, at the high price of $7. When the new saw has gone through a couple of tanks of fuel, and the exhaust stuff is installed, I’ll use the tachometer to check the top speed when the saw is tuned orrectly. When that is done, the saw should be making substantially more power. The dyno guy, referenced below, got something like 15% this way.

I don’t really need to check the top speed. It turns out a tachometer is not really needed to tune a saw. You do it by ear. I didn’t completely understand things when I bought the tachometer. But it should help when checking modifications to see if I’m getting improvement.

I might even open up the cylinder’s ports. I could take this little saw up to 5 horsepower, which would be an increase of about a third. My 60-cc Echo Timberwolf has a bigger engine and only put out 4 horsepower before I changed the carb and timing. My Husqvarna 562XP only produces 4.7, and it pulls a 24″ bar very well.

Does it make sense to soup up a saw when I’m planning to use a 16″ bar? Maybe not. I don’t care.

Actually, it does make sense. Most of the time, I’ll be cutting things under 4″ thick, but it would be convenient to have a light saw that really rips through things a foot across. I would be able to leave the bigger saws in my shop more often.

Adding a couple of pounds to a saw’s weight makes a surprising difference over the course of a job. A little extra weight makes the saw wear you down.

Chainsaw people are nuts. They love modifying their saws. There is a guy on Youtube who built his own chainsaw dynamometer, and he hooked it to a computer. He does modifications and tests the saws before and after. He gets saws to put out 50% or more power than they did from the factory. This stuff is not shade-tree-mechanic ignorance.

The weird thing is that modified pro saws don’t lose reliability or endurance. Reasonable modifications actually make them last longer and make them harder to damage. This is what the professional mechanics say, anyway. They also say homeowner-grade saws are different because they have plastic cases that may not like increased power. A pro saw will always have a metal case.

I will lose my warranty if I modify, but I don’t care about that. Echo is notorious for horrible customer service and weaseling out of warranty obligations, and anyway, I don’t want to leave my saw with a mechanic for 6 weeks. I went a whole summer with a saw in the hands of bad mechanics.

I should be able to fix anything at all that goes wrong. I don’t know if I will ever be able to fix complicated saws with electronics issues, but I can deal with the mechanical things.

I really enjoy cutting wood. I have never been one of those people who look forward to working out, but for a few years, I’ve felt like there was a ball of excess energy inside me. I have gone out and bucked trees just for the sensation of cutting, lifting, and hurling. It’s very odd.

I was cutting yesterday, and I was breathing a little hard. I kept going. I wanted to feel that way.

I started wondering. Was I really experiencing physical strength and energy, or was it all mental and spiritual? What if I was putting my body in danger because it wasn’t as strong as I felt?

Here’s something weird: I don’t get sore after doing this kind of work. I get dehydrated and tired eventually, but the day after I work, I feel great. I am not working out these days, and I’m old. I don’t take medicine to keep me alive. I eat a lot of ice cream. I’m not preparing myself in order to avoid soreness. I don’t know what’s going on.

I hope it lasts.

This type of work makes me lose weight. When I do a lot of wood removal, I can’t keep weight on. May that happen this time as it has in the past. The Ben & Jerry’s weight has to go.

Burning Stuff Shouldn’t be This Hard

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

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

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

Now what do I do with the day?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She grinned. She thought her remark was funny.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s not going to get better.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Look at this scripture from 1 Kings 9:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Florida the New California?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is what the commenter said:

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

I will respond.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

November Can’t Come Soon Enough

Here we are at about Milton minus 13 hours.

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

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

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

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

California is shorter than Florida.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wednesday is now Landfallday

I can’t believe Florida is about to be hit by a storm named Milton. If we’re going to go down, give me a storm named Delilah or Jezebel, or name it after a hellcat I used to date. Or how about Hillary? As a friend of mine says, Milton sounds like a storm that has a pocket protector.

Things looked pretty good for my area yesterday, and they didn’t look off-the-scale disastrous for the rest of the state. Now my area is iffy, and everyone near the coast from Tarpon Springs south should just leave.

It was not that long ago that they were telling us Milton was likely to be Category Two upon landfall. Then it went to Category Five in about 10 minutes. That’s not normal. The projected path is also changing, moving closer to my part of the state. How could it get worse? Well, they could tell us Milton has gotten wider and that it’s bringing more rain than expected.

It is still a very small storm, thank God. If it goes right where they say it will, things should not go very badly here. Wish I could say the same for Tampa.

As of a couple of hours ago, they expected it to whack the Yucatan Peninsula. Bad for Mexico, but good for everyone else. Storms lose power as they approach land, and they lose it even faster when they get there. A brush with Mexico could make Milton much less of a threat later on.

If Google Maps can be relied on, the area of Mexico that will be hit doesn’t contain a lot of people, so that’s good.

So now that the storm is a little more likely to cause trouble here, what should I prepare?

I know. I’ll buy batteries and water, and then I’ll build a giant steel dome over my farm. There isn’t much I can do that hasn’t been done.

If you want to be ready for a hurricane, and you live near a coast, you can’t rely on batteries, water, and a $400 Chinese generator. You need special doors and windows, a metal roof, concrete walls, a yard free of anything that can blow over and cause problems, a huge whole-house generator that comes on automatically, and some firearms. If your house is close to sea level, you also need stilts. If you don’t have these things, you’re not ready. You’re just playing the odds.

I guess coastals learned some bad lessons back when houses cost $75,000. Back then, it seemed nutty to spend $50,000 on a roof. Putting your home on pillars also seemed expensive. Isn’t it different when your house is worth $800,000? The cost of houses has gone up much faster than the cost of improvements.

People are saying this will kill Florida real estate. Really? I can understand why it would harm the value of houses built to fall apart? in storms, but why would it be a problem for the rest of us? Seems to me that if storms highlight the value of good construction and wise home placement, houses that stand up to storms should become more valuable, not less.

This is still Florida. Warm. Relatively free. No income tax. Full of fun stuff for old people to do. Easy on arthritic joints. They can’t build another Florida. This is the only one we’ll ever have. They can’t install a new ocean or a new gulf in an imaginary place where there are no hurricanes.

I guess Arizona provides some competition. Who wants to live in a desert? I hate deserts.

My take is that Florida is a great place to live, for people who can afford to build properly. Surely such people exist. Are there enough of them to replace the houses that need to go? I don’t know.

If I were 70, I had a place on the water, and it got wiped out, I would be looking for a stronger house or a place farther inland. I wouldn’t even think of moving back to New Jersey so I could go back to scraping my windshield with my gnarled, aching digits every morning.

In a few minutes, NOAA will update the cone. I’m on pins and needles.

I really do not want to have trees fall on my fences or my electric gate. I don’t want to lose power and have to bathe in the pool again. Other than that, I can cope with Milton. Unless it spins off a tornado, I should not have major issues.

I don’t know what to say about the coastal people south of Tampa. This is a horror for them. I wish I could do something. We are praying. DeSantis should call for a day of prayer.

Oh, great. The new cone is here. It says 175 mph. Is this real? Hurricanes don’t get much faster than that. Wikipedia says the record is 190.

It’s a tiny bit lower as it crosses Florida.

The models show it pooping out fast when it hits the coast, and they don’t show major winds where I live. NOAA predicts tropical storm force winds here, but they are always wildly pessimistic. I don’t think they’ve been right since Irma.

The storm looks to be the same size as Andrew, which was confined to parts of Dade and Monroe Counties. They got some wind 30 miles north of Miami, but nothing like the winds where I was.

They think it will be Category Three when it hits, so 129 mph, tops. But will it spread out before it arrives? If it stays small, fantastic.

I think I would have to be within 60 miles of Milton’s center to have serious problems with power and downed trees. I don’t think that will happen, but who knows?

Guess I’m off to Walmart. Candles, chlorine, and my wife’s order: grapes. I can tell she is taking this seriously.

#3

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

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

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

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

So I’m doomed, right? No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time to OD on Dangerous Veterinary-Grade Livestock Remedy

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

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

I am not sure when I got this latest case.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think I can do some outdoor work today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tennessee Looks Better and Better

Things are looking good, post-Helene. God took care of us. A tree fell over in my side yard, maybe 80 yards from the house. A smaller tree snapped about halfway up near the workshop, but it didn’t hit the building. We have a lot of leaves down.

There may be some trees down farther from the house. I haven’t checked yet. the lights went out for about 30 seconds, but they came back on. People here got very serious about tree-trimming after Irma, so power outages are not as common as they once were. I checked the power company’s site last night, and I saw a total of 14 outages on their map. That’s impressive.

My wife had a doctor’s appointment set for today, and they called and said they had no power. That was a surprise.

My big complaint is the upcoming weather. We expect a nasty, rainy week, so I’m not planning to do much about the debris right away. The general rule is that the weather gets noticeably better in October. Can’t wait.

The coast is a wreck. Not the entire west coast; just the areas where the surge was bad. It looks like the 20-foot surge that was predicted failed to materialize, to no one’s surprise, but I did see video of small houses floating around. I saw a lot of structures that are just plain ruined. I don’t know where people will go.

Sooner or later, coastal people will have to get serious about building for hurricanes. The people who own concrete houses on stilts don’t have much to be upset about today, but owners and occupants of frame houses situated on the ground have lost everything.

Everyone hates insurance companies, but insurance is a business, and it’s not realistic to expect insurers to offer good rates to people who know their homes will sustain catastrophic damage every 25 years or so.

I don’t know why coastal people got in the habit of building structures that weren’t ready for hurricanes. It’s bizarre. Everyone knows storms will come. Everyone knows how to build for them.

Another interesting phenomenon: rescuers were pulling people out of flooded areas late last night. Why were they still there? Two days ago, everyone knew these places would flood. Shelters were ready.

I saw a video of an airboat that had been removing people from an area where there was a Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. I don’t understand ghetto people. They did the same thing in Louisiana when Katrina hit. Stayed right where they were.

Ghetto people have a culture of helplessness. Can’t work. Can’t get through high school. Can’t take care of their kids. Can’t stay out of prison. Can’t evacuate before storms. Can’t recover after storms.

Helping the poor is hard mainly because they respond so badly to help. They turn every blessing into a problem. They are used to being rewarded for failure, so they put their energy into failing.

My aunt was a principal in Eastern Kentucky. They used to test the kids for ADD. She found out parents were telling their kids to fail on purpose so they could get aid money. I wonder how those kids are doing today. Well, I don’t have to wonder. Everyone who could add two and two left, and now the place is full of drug addicts and professional thieves.

The failure culture is found everywhere people have gotten used to government handouts.

I don’t understand the people who left their cars in flood areas. It’s not that hard to drive a mile inland. Now they’re pedestrians, and if they replace their cars, they’ll have to pay the deductibles.

Coastals need to learn not to move into homes that can’t withstand storms. Even if you’re insured, you have to move out and throw out lots of your belongings. You probably won’t be compensated for everything, because you won’t have an inventory, and you won’t be paid replacement cost. Even if they overpay you, replacing your stuff will not be a simple matter. It will take a very long time, and many things won’t be available. While you’re living somewhere else, there’s a good chance looters will come in. It’s better to start off in a home that won’t flood or disintegrate.

Insurance isn’t God. It can make things better, but it’s no substitute for prevention.

If you look at the web, you’ll see people promoting the notion that hurricane-proof homes require magical new technology, or that they cost too much. Not true. My dad’s house down south was built in 1951, and it took about 170 mph without significant damage. There are concrete stilt houses all over the Keys, and they don’t all belong to tech billionaires. I put hurricane doors and windows in a house for under $20,000, which is not much compared to decades of insurance premiums.

Houses built for hurricanes cost more, but not that much more, and they save a fortune. It’s not unusual for a modest home to cost $700,000 today. Adding $50,000 to make it safe from storms is a reasonable expenditure.

Why don’t schools in coastal states teach kids these things? Too busy telling them Heather has two mommies and that chromosomes don’t matter.

My house is hurricane-proof, by local standards. It wouldn’t work in Cedar Key a hundred yards from the Gulf, but it will take anything a hurricane can dish out in my area. It would take a tornado to take it out. I felt pretty good when I heard a storm was coming, because I knew the odds of a serious problem were extremely low.

If I had just moved in without thinking, I could be in a flood plain right now.

Later on, I’ll look around and see if any other trees need to be cleaned up. I already know I won’t have to file any claims.

The Actual Truth Would be a Blessing

It’s about 11 a.m., and Hurricane Helene is maybe 350 miles away. Accuweather.com says the current wind speed is 39 mph, and we are under a hurricane warning.

In fact, the air is nearly still, and even the worst wind speed predictions are nowhere close to 75 mph, which is where hurricane winds begin.

You can see why I don’t trust forecasts. I think lawyers write them. Either them or advertising executives. “Come on! We have to sell those corn flakes!”

“Watch” means something is a possibility. “Warning” means it’s expected. If we’re in a hurricane warning area, it means SUSTAINED winds of at least 74 mph are EXPECTED. We should be surprised if we don’t get them. But is that correct?

The maximum forecast sustained wind speed is 54 mph, and we are supposed to see it at 3 p.m. It has been a long time since first grade, but I’m pretty sure 54 is lower than 74.

The site that predicts 54 is the same site that now says the wind speed is 39.

It looks like the eye of the storm is expected to be about 160 miles away at its nearest approach. Assuming the wind field remains the same size, that would put us inside the area where tropical storm winds (at least 39 mph) exist. Problem: to get to me, the winds will have to cross about 90 miles of land. They’ll becoming from the south, and there is a lot of land south of me. If the winds come ashore at, say, 50 mph. it’s not reasonable to expect them to be nearly as high when they arrive here.

NOAA has painted a huge portion of Georgia red. That means “tropical storm warning.” Is there any conceivable way that makes sense? Wind and rain, sure, but sustained winds of at least 39 mph, as far north as Macon? Macon is over 300 miles from the water.

During the last hour, I saw a TV station graphic that showed the red area going around me, meaning they don’t expect sustained tropical storm winds here. How can that be, if Georgia is under a warning?

I think they should tell people the truth. They exaggerate all the time, and people get used to it. Then, surely, people start assuming they’re always exaggerating, so they stay home when they should leave.

They’re now saying there could be 20 feet of storm surge to the west of me. So if you normally step sideways to get on your docked boat at high tide, some time today, the step will be 20 feet high. That’s amazing. I was in Andrew, and at something like 170 mph coming directly from the bay, we only saw about 8 feet.

Are they exaggerating again, or will the surge really be 20 feet high? Who can say?

They’re saying there will be flash flooding in the mountains. Well, maybe so, but right here in Florida, we’re expecting 2″ or less of rain, which won’t flood anything. All the flooding will come from the storm surge. So how can the mountains flood?

A dry storm like this one is a big blessing, because wet storms loosen tree roots. The dryer a storm is, the fewer trees fall.

Helene will be horrible for people on the coast between, maybe, Cedar Key and Apalachicola, just because of the surge. It doesn’t have to hit 20 feet to cause serious problems. Other than that, I don’t think it will be a big deal. Thankfully, it will be hammering an area with very few people in it.

People are saying Tallahassee is doomed, but Tallahassee is about 30 miles inland.

I don’t think we will have serious problems where I am. I think the coastal areas with storm surge will be a mess. I think Tallahassee will be fine. I think Georgia and the mountains will be fine. These are my guesses.

I’ll be bold and say I don’t expect to lose electricity. But if I do, we can get in the car and go to Daytona or some other place for two days so we can continue to have warm showers.

People are being advised to stuff their houses with supplies. I don’t do that. Stores will be open tomorrow. Wait and see. Restaurants will be open. I’m not going to fill my house with Pop Tarts and Doritos any more.

By three p.m., I should know what we are facing. Meanwhile, we will take some time to pray for people who will get hit much worse.

SITREP

It’s about 3:20. Sometimes the trees are bouncing a little. There is no rain. We had sunny skies for a while.

This is when they said we would get peak winds, so I guess that was wrong. Other sources say they’re around 7 hours away.

West coast live cameras show some wind and rough seas, but people are still driving across Tampa Bay. If we were seeing catastrophic surge, the road would be underwater.

Helene is not going to get much closer to Tampa, so I don’t see how things can get a lot worse. I think it’s peaking.

I found out why they’re predicting flooding in the mountains. It’s because it already happened. A weather system that looks to be unrelated to Helene is already causing flooding. I don’t think it’s quite fair to pin this on the storm.

We are still expecting under 2″ of rain, so is it really possible it will be worse up north? We are under the clouds they claim will flood the mountains, and it’s not happening here. Where are the clouds supposed to pick up more water? They’re going to be over land.

You Can’t Sell Shamwows and Mighty Putty with Logic and Restraint

Another day, another Cone of Certain Death. The TV liars are brushing off their hyperbole and practicing pretending it’s hard to stand in 20-mph breezes. Anderson Cooper has a team out, looking for a deceptively-deep ditch for him to stand in.

Tropical Storm Helene is on its way up the Gulf, and it’s supposed to make its closest approach to me late Thursday night. So far, it’s not looking bad. The cone’s projected center is about 180 miles off at that time, and it would take a pretty horrendous storm to generate serious winds here from that distance.

Having butchered every big oak close to my house and shop, and currently living in what resembles a lunar landscape, I think I have little to fear. The juice could go off for a couple of days, and we could lose some trees far from the house, but the odds of anything big hitting anything important are vanishingly small.

My yard is not what it used to be. I obliterated a lot of the shade. But I had no choice. The trees were too close to the house, and they were also dying because they were worthless types of oaks that rot standing up. They looked nice and provided shade while the original owners’ kids were growing up here, but by the time I arrived, they were over the hill and could not be permitted to remain in place.

We went to Europe, which killed about three weeks. I’m still a little lightheaded from coronavirus, so I don’t feel like working in the heat just yet. A storm will be here shortly. All these things add up to an October start on fixing the yard, at the earliest.

This is about what I planned on anyway. I decided I wanted to rent an excavator for about a week and yank all the oak stumps, but I didn’t want to work in the summer heat.

If the storm knocks stuff over in my county, I may be delayed yet longer, because renting an excavator will become impossible. Everyone will want one.

Nothing can be done. You do what you can, and you relax. If I have to wait for November or December, the world will keep turning.

Choosing to cut the trees was a pretty mature decision, because the shade was really nice, and they made the property look better. I could have left them alone for a couple more years. But I would have been sweating every time a storm went by.

Yes, I have insurance, but that doesn’t mean letting trees fall on my house would be intelligent. I have a deductible, it takes time to fix things even when someone else pays, contractors are the lowest form of life not known to wear suicide vests, and some things can’t be replaced.

The sensation of NOT worrying about an approaching hurricane is hard to get used to. Florida residents get used to sweating bullets every year, over and over.

Other people are not as blessed as I. As I saw a meteorologist point out today, late-season storms tend to be wider, so this one could bring high winds and a lot of storm surge to a long stretch of coast.

Once again, homeowners will be playing developer roulette. “Did my developer care enough to put my house above the storm surge”? “Is the drainage up to par?” “Will my roof fly off?”

After the last storm, we saw a familiar site. Devastated neighborhoods right next to neighborhoods where things weren’t too bad. Some developers put homes on raised lots. Some didn’t. Some homes were built better than others. Many homebuyers didn’t do their homework. They didn’t check to see if they were in floodplains. They didn’t think about storm surge or construction quality. We saw videos of houses where the water was a couple of feet deep in the living rooms.

My house is around a hundred feet above sea level, in a place that has never seen hurricane winds, on a lot the government says can’t flood. Before my dad bought it, I made sure it was not in a floodplain. It’s also a couple feet above the the lot itself.

It’s surprising how few people make any effort to vet Florida homes for hurricane safety before buying them. It doesn’t take much time, and it saves people from disaster, literally. If it looks pretty and the price seems right, they jump in, and realtors and sellers smile quietly and take their money. It’s not fraud. You’re supposed to look after yourself and do your due diligence.

It’s sad. You can throw away your life savings so easily, and it’s not necessary.

I always expect life to bite me in the rear end, because it does, so I was very careful. I did my best.

Not many people would defoliate half of their beautiful yards like I did. I feel like a beautiful actress who got a prophylactic mastectomy.

I’m used to being concerned about myself and my dad. I’m sorry to say I didn’t think that much about people in other areas in the past. I was too disturbed by the thought of what could happen to me. Now I am making an effort to think about others and pray for them. This storm will probably be a horror for a lot of people who didn’t prepare.

If you decide to move to Florida, think first. You can avoid nearly all storm problems by staying off the coasts. Apartments are nothing like as problematic as houses. Trees near houses look nice, but they fall over. Concrete is better than wood. You can check and avoid floodplains. You can check and make sure your house is built well and not too low to the ground. You need a roof that will stay on; steel is the way to go. A whole-house generator is a big blessing. Find out about insurance costs before you buy, not after.

Do things right, and you will be at peace while your neighbors are living in hotels at night and guarding against looters during the day.

If you don’t look out for yourself, do the rest of us a favor, and don’t blame the government like the folks in the video below. Believe it or not, the government can’t control hurricanes.

Here Goes Literally Nothing

Today we have to run a medical errand, and both my wife and I almost certainly have covid, so yesterday, I had her call to find out if we should cancel or wear masks or have ourselves encased in carbonite or what. They told us to wear masks, but first they asked if we had any, which says a lot about current attitudes.

There may be one under my car seat.

As I have written, we just got back from Switzerland and Italy, where we were around all sorts of sick people. We flew home sick because there was nothing we could do to protect anyone, and staying in Europe would have been a huge and pointless hardship. The air was full of bugs everywhere, isolation has gone out the window, and our contribution to the airborn virus supply simply was not meaningful.

Yesterday I looked at the current covid stats, and today I’m looking again. According to WHO, the number of known active cases in Europe is about 70 times the number in the Americas. Not the United States. The Americas.

In the past, the case numbers were almost certainly overreported in America because we paid hospitals huge money to claim people had covid, without testing them. Now, the numbers are probably underreported. But is there any reason to think the ratio is affected significantly? I don’t know of one, except that it makes no sense for Europeans to have 70 times our rate.

Even if the data is wrong, it’s probably right enough for a person to safely conclude that coronavirus is extremely common in Europe right now.

There are so many sick people over there, doing nothing at all to isolate themselves, that removing us from the scene would have had no effect whatsoever.

Out of curiosity, I Googled to see if our overlords still want Americans to get tested. Of course they do. Why? So we can get treatment to protect ourselves from severe covid and so we can buy what are now referred to as “quality” masks.

Forgive me for chuckling. They never give up.

There is no treatment. I mean, okay, there are some things that seem to help a fraction of the people who are on death’s door, but for you and me, the mildly ill, no, there is no treatment. Except ivermectin, which does seem to help, especially when taken at the first sign of symptoms. Your GP won’t give it to you, however. You have to go to Tractor Supply. He isn’t going to pump you full of secret drugs developed for Jeff Bezos and Joe Biden just because you have the sniffles. Those drugs probably don’t exist.

If you have severe symptoms, what do you need the test for? Go to the hospital. You already know you’re sick, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s covid. Just go. If you have a fever of 104° but it’s not covid, are you going to stay home and die?

As for the masks, well, they do not work, and people who are at risk of severe covid should not be out in public where you can cough on them.

Look, if I absolutely had to be around someone who was likely to die if infected, I would get super-duper masks and make the best possible use of them. Mainly, I would avoid the person as much as I could, because that’s the only thing that really works, but, yes, in a pinch, I would wear a mask. But this is not the situation I face. I don’t know anyone like that, and if there are strangers in my area who need protection, they should be at home, because even if I put my head in a hermetically-sealed jar, other people will still expose them.

Science now tells us that the best masks made, worn 100% correctly all the time, have some impact, so there are scenarios in which I might use them, but come on. I’m not wearing one to Lee’s Famous Fried Chicken.

So why are Europeans all full of coronavirus while we are not? How can that be? There is plenty of travel both ways. It’s just about impossible to get covid on a plane, but people land eventually and move around.

It seems to defy physics.

Maybe Europeans are getting tested and we are not.

Not much has happened to us. My wife got sick first. She had a mild fever and a sore throat, plus skeletal aches.

My voice got raspy. Then days later, I had a night of chills and skeletal aches. Not bad. My butt really hurt. I never had a sore throat or much of a fever. I had another night of greatly reduced chills. I developed chest congestion, and when I tried to sleep, my breathing sounded like someone sitting on an accordion. My nose ran slightly. On the second leg of our flight home, my left ear got stopped up and would not let go, and it took a couple of days to drain. My appetite was affected, and it’s still not great. Sweet things still don’t taste quite as sweet as they are. I have been going to sleep very early, but that could be jet lag.

That’s about it.

We were able to walk around Rome and keep up with the crowds.

I think I wasted a lot of money on shoes. My Keen hiking shoes developed a leak in Switzerland the night before we left, and I had to do something, so on the morning before we took our train to Italy, I went to an incredibly overpriced sports store in Wengen and bought new hiking shoes. I believe they charged me 229 Euros for Scarpa shoes that can’t hold a light to Keens.

They felt wonderful during our train trip to Rome, but the next day, during a food tour, my feet started to hurt. Very unpleasant. I’m not used to having foot pain, so I was not happy.

They also filled up with water when rain caught us near the Pantheon, but that could have been because I got caught in the rain while wearing shorts. The water may have run down my legs and into the shoes. They were supposed to be waterproof. I always wear waterproof shoes when I can.

The next day, I went out and bought yet more shoes. Again, Scarpa. All I could find. They were much better. Only 199 Euros.

In retrospect, I wonder whether then first new pair was really a problem. Maybe I was having skeletal pain, and it made my feet hurt. Maybe the shoes are okay.

I’m afraid to try them on now. I’m out about $500.

The lesson: always check your shoes before traveling abroad. I thought my Keens were relatively new, but when I checked, Amazon said I had ordered them over two years ago.

Also, don’t wear shorts on cold, rainy days unless you like water in your shoes.

My Keens can be had for right around $100, and you can bet I’ll be getting new ones. I have no idea what to do with my Euro shoes.

I hope we don’t kill anyone at the doctors’ office.

Go Ahead and Fly With Covid

Yesterday, I was reminded of the vast coronivarus-information gulf between conservatives and leftists. Leftists are irrational and hysterical, always advising ridiculous, harmful overreactions, and conservatives are always patiently refuting their hysteria with facts. Then we are accused of ignorance and selfishness, as always.

I just got back from Europe. My wife and I got covid on our trip, as we often do when traveling. Somewhere on the web, I mentioned it, and I said I was glad we were able to fly home sick. In the past, we were often in danger of forced and extremely expensive quarantine.

Some character responded and said I had been “very considerate of” my fellow passengers.

Right away, I had questions about his brainpower. We are considerate TO others, not OF them.

I don’t know if leftists will ever catch up. These are the people who, when polled, said they thought an infected person’s chance of requiring hospitalization was about 40%. The world would have ended. I’m pretty sure the black death is down around 30%.

My wife and I were probably infected in Switzerland, because my voice sounded a little raspy before we left. By the time we left Italy, where we heard sick people coughing all around us, we were getting better. Neither of us is completely well, but we’re fine.

What’s the standard these days when it comes to covid and travel?

In practical terms, there is no standard. Do what you want. There are no tests or travel bans. As recently as ’22, it was easy to find entrepreneurs to do PCR tests on tourists. Now the industry has collapsed, because no one cares.

I have Googled, and while I have seen random sites that have no authority telling people to stay home, actual government sites say it’s best not to fly until you start to feel better, and that’s about it. They don’t say to hide out until you’re completely well.

Why are they saying it’s okay to fly as long as you’re getting better? My guess: no scientific reason at all. They just need to say something in order to look like they’re doing something. It’s like the 6-foot rule, which we now know had no basis in science.

The web says covid is contagious for 8 to 10 days after symptoms start, and if that’s true, then you can be contagious after you start feeling better. So the rule is horse manure.

The travel bans had no basis in science, either, nor did the mask laws. America kept travelers out while half the population was sick, as though flying a few thousand more in would make an important difference. The masks only worked when they were expensive masks, worn properly, changed several times per day. No one did any of that outside of hospitals. Even then, they worked poorly.

Whatever. We were getting better when we flew, so we are good little do-bees.

People can be really thick. Imagine how things would have gone had we decided to stay in Rome.

1. No food. The hotel had no room service. If food delivery is a serious industry in Rome, we saw no sign of it.

2. No laundry. The hotel didn’t do laundry.

3. No hotel room. Our booking would have run out. Where would we have gone? Maybe we could have found a room nearby, but hotels in Rome were really jammed. How would we have moved without exposing lots of people? Two “dangerous” sick persons, dragging luggage up the road and having it thrown into and out of a cab. All the way around, it’s a stupid idea.

4. No tickets. We would have been charged huge change fees. And who knows when we could have gotten flights? We would have had to wait until covid decided to test negative. A week? Ten days? If we had tested negative on a given day, who is to say we could have flown home the next day? Our flights were crammed. This isn’t the month for flying home from Rome on the day of your choice without advance notice.

5. No one to look after our house and business.

6. No place to store Marvin, my parrot. He was staying at a boarding place, and it was busy. He could have been thrown out. What then? Maybe I could have gotten the boarding people to hook me up with some stranger. That would have been irresponsible.

7. No health insurance. Our health insurance, like yours, only works in the US. We had travel insurance, and it would have expired while we were quarantining.

We would have had to go out for meals and laundry. No way around it. We would have exposed people every day.

What about flying home?

Science preexisting the hysteria clearly says the chance of catching covid on a jet, while seated next to a sick person, is about one in half a million. Jets are really good at keeping air clean. So we exposed some people in Italy, then we got on jets where we were no threat to anyone, and since then, we have exposed a few people at a hotel, one restaurant, and a grocery store.

The people we exposed in Italy were already being exposed every day. I’m sure the same is true of the people we encountered here.

Here’s what I told the person who thought I was inconsiderate: if you’re a bubble boy, stay in your bubble. You can’t put a bubble around the world.

On the web, you can find left-wing writers saying that if you fly with covid, you may kill people. No. They may kill themselves. If they’re going out in public, knowing they may be exposed, failing to protect themselves, it’s on them, not me.

My presence doesn’t change anything in a world full of people wandering around with covid. Remove me, and people still get exposed.

They never complain about asymptomatic people–a huge demographic–killing people. They never complain about people with false negatives killing people. They’re not bright enough to understand.

Covid is no big deal to me right now. Maybe that will change as I age. If it does, you better believe I’m not going to put on my Karen hat and run around trying to get other people to wrap themselves in Saran Wrap.

Many sick people don’t know they’re sick. The ones who know they’re sick are not willing to quarantine; no one does that. If I become unable to fight covid, the world will continue to spray me with viruses every time I appear in public. This is an absolute certainty. My only hope, if I start needing help, will be to stay home. Maybe I could get some really good masks and observe mask protocols rigorously while doing necessary shopping, but that’s about it.

I will probably never be in any danger from covid. Age is a risk factor, but there are plenty of old people who never get very sick, and covid has already given me its best shot several times without harming me much. If it isn’t hurting me now, it probably will not hurt me when I’m 90.

Leftists love using their real or imagined health problems to control others. I saw an article the other day about a kook who tried to get everyone on a plane to give up peanuts because her daughter was allergic. No; the world does not work like that. You don’t drag other people down to the lowest common health denominator because you’re hysterical and love attention.

Nut allergies are not triggered by the mere presence of nuts, by the way. I could eat nuts next to an allergic person all day without doing any harm.

Imagine what the news would look like if nut allergies were triggered through the air. “Today’s nut death toll: 300,000! When will we have sensible nut control?”

Time to wrap up. I need food, and there is none here. I’m about to get in the car and take my viruses shopping. If you live near me and you’re a bubble boy, better stay home for a while and play Trivial Pursuit.