Typical

I have been thinking about leadership.

The universe is not a big partnership. It’s a patriarchal hierarchy with our male God at the top and Satan at the very bottom. Everyone except God submits to someone. I suppose the reason God doesn’t have to submit is that he submits to his own perfect nature. There is no point in submitting to a ruler when everything you do is perfect.

A proper marriage is not a partnership. The husband and father is the leader, and everyone else is supposed to submit to him; they owe him support and obedience. It’s for their good more than his.

It’s very sad that feminism has been mainstreamed in the church. There are many preachers that acknowledge the Holy Spirit yet claim husbands and wives are equals. As my wife put it, they “apologize” for Ephesians 5:23:

For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.

Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing.

There is no ambiguity there. You can’t “clarify” this by looking to other verses for reference. It stands on its own, impossible to contradict with other scripture. The husband is the boss, not an anarchist who takes turns running things. Not a slave who is forced to provide and protect without having a voice.

If you’re a wife, you are supposed to be subject to your husband in all things.

Feminist Christians love to point to 5:21, which describes Christians as submitting to each other, but that is in a different passage about a different subject. It’s about Christian life outside of marriage. It means we shouldn’t be pushy self-promoters; the kind of insufferable people who start running for office in the first grade. In our interactions with Christians outside the home, we should not force our decisions on others or appoint ourselves to positions of power; we should be humble and wait for promotion.

The word doesn’t say every woman has to submit to every man, and Ephesians 5:23 isn’t intended to be a rigid law. It’s a principle. It doesn’t mean you should obey your husband if he asks you to help him build a bomb to blow up a school. It means that if your husband is led by the Holy Spirit, you should submit to him.

“What if he’s not led by the Holy Spirit”? Then you married the wrong person, so you have no one but yourself to blame if your husband is a heathen. You’re going to have to build up your own relationship with the Holy Spirit and do your best, accepting the fact that you’re in a hole you dug for yourself.

It is hard to give advice to people who are stuck in very bad situations they created. It’s obvious that I should advise single people to avoid marrying heathens, but once the marriage is in place, there are no simple answers.

It’s important to note that disagreement with you isn’t proof your husband isn’t listening to the Holy Spirit, so you shouldn’t tell yourself that lie in order to excuse your family-killing rebellion.

Another important thing: submitting only when your husband agrees with you is not submission. I had to tell my wife that several times.

Say you want to paint your kitchen green, and your husband wants yellow. Badgering him until he agrees and then “submitting” to him is a farce. A wife is supposed to be a helper, but telling yourself you are helping your husband by helping him realize you’re right about everything is sin and a lie.

Sometimes even a good husband will be wrong. So what? Submit anyway, unless submission will be catastrophic. Maybe the kitchen should be green. Help him paint it yellow anyway, for the sake of the hierarchy, which is necessary and therefore more important than your kitchen.

It’s better to make trivial bad choices from time to time than it is to destroy the authority structure that keeps your family from destruction. As a mother, you will make mistakes all the time. Do you think your children are entitled to stop obeying you because of this? What will happen to them if they stop? Do you think they will have good lives?

As for men, maleness is not an achievement. You don’t get a prize for it. God doesn’t put you in charge so you can remain a selfish teenager all your life, staring at sports and playing video games, or obsessing on work, while you tell everyone else to kowtow and obey for your convenience. So you can be a frat boy when you’re 97.

A leader’s purpose is sacrificial, not selfish. Every real leader knows this. Strangely, Jews don’t know it. They worship a hard, imaginary God who doesn’t sacrifice himself for people or, in any real sense, regard them as his babies.

It makes perfect sense that God would allow himself to be crucified to save us, because even many earthly parents would do that for their children. A God who sits on a throne in the distance, invulnerable, ageless, and healthy, who never suffers for the ones he created, is not a leader. He’s more like someone who keeps tropical fish.

Every earthly parent understands the necessity of sacrifice as part of leadership, but somehow, Orthodox Jews think God’s principles of leadership are divorced from obvious principles we have seen here on Earth since man was created.

Yeshua, who was not captured, turned himself in to the Jewish authorities so he could be crucified, because he loved us so much he could not stand to see us get what we deserved. He endured rejection and slander. In his time here, he didn’t get much of a reward for all his efforts to help us. That’s how real leadership is. It’s asymmetrical in favor of those who are led.

This is what proper fatherhood is like. You may work all day. You pay the bills. You are the first one to face danger in a bad situation. In return, the people you help grumble. They say things about you that aren’t true. They disobey you and then blame you for the problems their disobedience causes. They make your job harder. They ostracize you to at least some extent. They never come close to repaying you. This is what God goes through, and if you’re a father on Earth, you’re supposed to go through it, too. It’s an honor and a privilege, even if it often feels like a curse.

I don’t know how anyone can respect a “god” who never suffers for the people he created. Earthly leaders suffer for the people they command, which is a good thing for them to do, but somehow God is not as good as they are? It’s absurd.

A proper patriarch does not expect his family to repay him fully. He expects to be shortchanged. He shouldn’t complain about his place, because it is more blessed to give than to receive. He shouldn’t sit around watching sports and playing video games all day, barking out selfish orders and leaving his family to guide themselves, as though a Y chromosome and a paycheck made him Queen for a Day.

A patriarch submits to God through the Holy Spirit. He does not grumble. He does not falsely accuse God of cheating him or not blessing him enough. He does not claim he submits when he only obeys the commands that comport with his own desires. He consistently asks God for correction when he has problems.

He doesn’t add up the ways in which his family has shortchanged him and present them with bills.

A patriarch spends time with his wife and children. He does not pat himself on the back for it, as though he gave a stranger a kidney. It’s what he owes them. He doesn’t say, “I’ve done this and that for my family, so now I’m free to do what I really want.” The time he spends with his family is not a tax or a permit fee. It’s a blessing for all concerned.

In order for a patriarch to succeed, the wife and kids have to support him instead of doing what they often do: joining outsiders in trying to bring him down. A leader has to have consent and support. Yeshua is the perfect leader, but humanity is still a failure, because most of us did not consent or support. A leader can’t force success on anyone.

I can give a great example of the way women kneecap their men. It amazes me that there are women who vote Democrat, knowing that their husbands vote Republican. This is the very picture of pathological rebellion. When two people vote the same way, they have power. When they vote contrarily, they have no power at all. It’s as though neither voted. Voting is an exercise of power, and casting opposing votes nullifies a household’s power. As Yeshua says, a house divided against itself cannot stand.

Opposition is supposed to be directed outward, not inward. Obvious? The world is against your husband. It’s sick and disgusting for you to be against him as well, especially when you still expect him to fight for you.

It’s pretty simple: one plus one equal two, which is something, and one minus one equals zero, which is nothing. When your votes agree, they have impact. When you vote against each other, you make your house a nothing.

Your husband considers the welfare of his family and his nation and decides to vote a certain way, and you decide you know better, destroying his power. Well, if you think your husband is too stupid to lead your family, what, exactly, did you want a husband for?

I know. Money, status, and babies. I don’t have to be told.

When I was a kid, I thought The Caine Mutiny was about a bad captain; nutty old Captain Queeg, and the smart officers who had to make a hard decision in order to save the crew from him. Of course, that’s not the message of the movie. It’s about immature, arrogant officers who destroyed their own leader instead of building him up. It’s a great picture of the way we destroy leaders who are put in place to benefit us.

The officers in the movie never tried to help Queeg do better. From the very start, they ridiculed him and worked against him. He was a flawed captain, but even a perfect captain would have failed with such officers. All fathers and husbands are flawed. What chance do we have without support? We can save ourselves, at best.

Queeg asked the officers for help, and in the book, he said this:

“Now, I’m the first to admit that I’m not perfect. I’ve made mistakes. I’ve had a lot on my mind. But a command is a lonely job. You men have no idea how lonely.

What I’m looking for is a little help. I don’t mean ‘Yes-man’ help. I mean the kind of loyalty that sees a captain through his mistakes for the sake of the ship. We’re all in this together. If we could just… well, start over. A clean slate. What do you say?”

Instead of helping, they refused to speak and waited for him to leave, rejected.

In the book, the snickering, whispering, mumbling coward who persuaded his friends to sabotage Queeg ended up captaining the ship, and he abandoned his crew in a battle, just as he abandoned his friends when they were charged with mutiny. The movie cheated the public.

All over the world, families are destroying the patriarchs who built the platforms they live on. No wonder young America men are shunning marriage now. In a world where young men are (correctly) moving to the right, and young women have swung hard left into sluttiness, rage, and arrogance, it is inevitable that men will avoid marriage. It’s like being asked to teach high school in the Bronx.

As for myself, I feel I need to give more time to God and my family and less to other things. Since my wife got pregnant, I have neglected things like shooting, tools, and yard maintenance. My pool is green. My hedges are a mess. I haven’t finished fixing the mower I bought last year.

I have felt I had to sink into the comfort of a love cocoon with God, my wife, and later, my son, to the detriment of my other responsibilities.

On the up side, I don’t regret it. I have had an experience very few fathers have had, and my wife is also privileged. These days many women treat their babies like purses or other accessories; like toys that bring them status. They hand them off to illegal aliens to raise while they give their golden, indescribably precious years of motherhood to jobs, serving alongside people who will forget them the week after they quit. My wife has been with her baby son every single day, as much as she wanted, and I have been with both of them.

On the down side, I know I still gave too much of myself to worthless things. The Internet. Even photography, which has been very useful in celebrating this family’s love. I haven’t given enough time to God and my wife and son, so I am turning the computer off multiple times every day instead of leaving it on, and I am trying to drop things that would ordinarily turn into time sinks.

If I give less time to worthless activities, I can give more to God and my family, and I can also do better with earthly responsibilities.

God is a patriarch. I am a patriarch. As a patriarch, I have power, but I also have responsibilities. My purpose is to pour myself out, not to be the king of the living room. This is all consistent with scripture and the Holy Spirit.

I’m very glad I’m not obsessed with video games or sports. These fixations are disgraceful; they keep men boys. Try and imagine yourself in heaven, with God asking you about your high video game scores or how much you could deadlift or how many games your teams won on Earth? Imagine the humiliation of even thinking about these things in his presence. But most American men think sports are more important than God, and many Christians even insist, childishly and in ignorance, that competitive sports teach Christian values. They teach the opposite. As for video games, it’s hard to imagine anything emptier.

There are many men out there who spend 10% of more of their income on watching sports yet don’t give yearly gifts to investment accounts for their kids. In fact, a man who does the opposite is an anomaly. A weirdo.

Sports insiders won’t say it, but the sports industry is, and always was, driven by gambling (another sin). Team valuations are largely based on gambling integration. Much of the money men spend on sports vanishes in lost bets. But it’s all about Christian values, supposedly.

A cheap (really bad) Super Bowl ticket costs $3500. To see a bunch of strangers who don’t know you exist do something unimportant and very silly. Think about that.

You can get your wife a dynamite gold chain for that amount. Or how about a weekend in Paris?

Feminism is a disgusting poison, and so is leftism. Spiritually, feminism is leftism. Satan was the first leftist. Leftism is about creatures coveting and wrongly taking that which belongs to those who are placed above them. It’s about taking shortcuts to get what you want.

A selfish patriarch is a rebel, too, so he is also a leftist. Leftists create leftist families with leftist problems.

I’m sorry for defaming God in my heart and exalting myself. I am trying to cooperate with the Holy Spirit to save whatever is left of my life and to be a blessing to my family. I don’t care what deluded, murderous people think of me, and I certainly don’t care about the arguments of loser spirits that want us to be losers just like them.

The Very Simple Truth About Full-Frame Versus APS-C

I was afraid photography wasn’t confusing enough, but luckily, today, a video came along and made it worse.

I have been studying a lot over the last couple of months, and I have learned a lot. A lot of the facts I have learned contradict other facts I have learned, so clearly, the fact status of some facts has to be called into question. Also, I may have simply misunderstood some things.

Here is one thing I thought I understood: full-frame cameras can be used in lower light than APS-C cameras, because they gather more light. I wasn’t sure why this was true, but whatever. I’m not here to argue with settled knowledge. I just assumed it was true.

Today I saw a video in which an expert showed that if you have an APS-C camera and a full-frame camera side by side, taking the same picture in the same light, they use the same settings. You don’t have to change the exposure.

As he showed, the smaller lens is…smaller…but so is the sensor, so it gets just as much light per unit of sensor area.

If this is true, then how can big cameras do better in low light?

I did what I always do when human beings explain things badly and say things that can’t be true. I asked AI. AI was also confusing and misleading, but as I kept picking at AI’s statements, I finally saw what the issue was. I thought I would publish my conclusion here in case anyone out there is as confused as I was.

Big cameras do not produce better pictures in low light. They just produce bigger pictures of exactly the same quality. When you try to magnify an APS-C image to the same size, you get a grainier result because you are spreading the same finite signal out over a larger area.

Why don’t people just say that?

When you take a picture, your lens projects light onto your sensor. Your sensor collects data and turns it into a raw file. That’s all you get, and you can’t get any more, ever. That is your digital “negative.” If your negative is smaller, and you blow prints up to the same size as prints from a bigger negative, the prints will be grainier.

People like to say full-frame is something like 1.5 stops better in low light, and that is wrong. It makes it sound like you can open the aperture on an APS-C camera up a couple of stops and fix the grain. That does not work. It will overexpose or otherwise change the photo unless you change something else, so it’s a different photo.

In reality, you can’t catch up. If you use APS-C, you will always have more noise for photos that are the same size as full-frame photos. You shouldn’t care, however. You can still get great photos, because noise below a certain threshold is not noticeable, and because noise-reduction software can often kill enough noise to make your grainier shots look about as good as a full-frame shot can look.

So:

1. Small sensors produce photos that are just as nice as full-frame photos, but they are smaller.

2. If you want them to be just as big as full-frame photos, you will always have to blow them up, increasing noise.

3. Noise doesn’t matter if a) it’s slight or b) your software can fix your photos so well no one will ever be able to tell the noise was there.

On the whole, if I had to give up full-frame or APS-C, I would give up full-frame, because the equipment is heavy and expensive, and APS-C equipment produces excellent results. If I thought I always had to have as little noise as humanly possible, which would be a mental illness instead of a smart conclusion, I would buy a medium format camera with a giant sensor, and it would be nearly useless because it would have very few features. I don’t think anyone uses medium format unless there is no choice, and I think full-frame is usually less practical than APS-C.

This stuff shouldn’t concern most of us much. Right now, I have a phone photo above my TV, and the photo is around 26″ wide. It’s a picture of my wife and me in Hong Kong, on Victoria Peak, with the city below us in the background. It looks fantastic. Us, the buildings…everything. You can’t count our eyelashes, but why would you need to?

You don’t stare at big photos from half an inch away. You have to stand back, so whatever pixel-level problems there are will be hard or impossible to see. If I can get a beautiful 26″ print out of a phone, you can do just fine with APS-C. If you plan to keep your prints and displays small, you shouldn’t even be thinking about the full-frame edge.

What I Think Works…as of This Evening

I keep working on my photo skills as well as my gear. I am strongly aware that my baby son’s first year will never happen again, so I am doing what I can to produce quality photos and edit them well.

I’ve learned a lot of things since 2023, when I finally bit the bullet and started buying new equipment and learning to use it.

When I found my wife in 2021, I had a 2006 Canon 350D, a Samsung Galaxy S8, a Yi action camera, and a Gopro Hero 8 Black. The 350D was a decent amateur DSLR for its day. It had an 8-megapixel APS-C sensor, meaning it was smaller than a full-frame sensor, which would be about the same size as a rectangle of 35 mm film. In 2006, putting 8 megapixels on an amateur-level camera was fairly impressive.

We started traveling in order to see each other in 2021. We made three overseas trips with phones and action cameras. The 350D stayed home, covered with the cockatoo dust it had accumulated after years of hanging near a bird cage. I don’t recall why I didn’t take it with me. Weight, maybe.

We got acceptable photos and a little video that year, although I screwed up more than once and ruined videos. I found the Yi to be difficult to work with. I have a video about 10 seconds long which I accidentally shot so it would be sped up upon viewing. I would guess it was supposed run more like 5 minutes. All that’s missing is the Benny Hill music.

In 2023, instead of taking the 350D on trips, I bought a used 200D. This is a more advanced camera from about 2017. I was under the delusion that my 2006 zoom lens needed to be saved, so I stuck with Canon. The lens fits the 200D. This was a bad idea, since I turned right around and bought a better zoom. I should have gone with Sony or maybe an Olympus.

I also bought a Sony A7IV and a Sony ZV1-M2. The A7IV was my no-holds-barred (few, anyway) quality-gear splurge. It’s a full-frame camera. I thought I should have the gear to do a truly top-notch job of capturing things. The ZV is a compact camera made to appeal to vloggers. It has a built-in zoom lens, and it’s very handy. Much better photos than a late model Samsung Galaxy, too.

I have never taken the A7IV anywhere. It’s heavy and expensive. I don’t want to carry it on trips, and I don’t want to have it stolen. It’s great when air travel is not in the plan, however.

When we went to the Far East for the second time, I took the ZV and the 200D. I was not ecstatic about the shots I got with the 200D. It was like I had forgotten everything I knew about composition, and I didn’t think they were sharp enough. The video was also extremely amateurish. I don’t know how I managed to perform so badly. The ZV gave me good video, but the stills were not always great. I relied mostly on my phone for stills.

I learned something interesting: the ZV1-M2 quits in hot weather. My wife and I were on a food tour in Singapore, and I noticed the camera’s monitor would go dark during video shooting. At first I thought it was saving energy, but in reality, it was turning itself off, without so much as a warning beep. It was overheating. Black camera that absorbed heat. Hot equatorial sun. I later learned that the ZV is just about useless for video in hot, sunny weather. Oddly, Sony does not trumpet this fact in ads. You find out after your videos of your priceless trip are ruined.

In retrospect, I find it amazing that anyone recommends this camera. It’s like buying a car you can only drive 10 miles at a time. Its primary purpose is video, and that is the only purpose at which it fails.

It is helpful if you remove the battery from your ZV and power it using a cable. The battery contributes a lot to the heat. But it’s still a very poor video camera for anyone who shoots videos in hot weather, unless they’re very short. If you have this camera, it’s fine for short indoor videos. Other than that, stay away. And it’s not cheap. I think they still cost about $900.

Since I began to buy better stuff, I have drawn a few conclusions, which may very well be wrong. And they overlap.

1. The most important thing is equipment that works, not equipment that works perfectly.
2. A handy camera you use is better than a heavy, complex camera you dread taking out of the bag.
3. Useful lenses are more important than buying the best camera.
4. Unless you want to spend a lot, don’t buy a few pricey lenses with top optical quality. Buy lenses that shoot well in low light.
5. For video, and maybe photos, you want some kind of stabilization.
6. A very good camera phone will do everything 95% of the population wants.
7. You absolutely must use wireless external mikes.
8. Good photography is almost completely about choices.

I guess I’ll start with 1.

Consider 2015. Ten years ago. They made pretty nice cameras. Twenty megapixels and more. Good connectivity. Good features. Excellent accessories. You can spend maybe $600 and get a very good, lightly-used camera from 2015, with a nice low-light prime lens that will be useful in lots of situations. On the other hand, if you buy a very, very good newer camera with a truly excellent low-light lens and a big sensor, think more like $4,000. Will the photos be 4,000/600 as good? No.

If you want to take photos that are optically very good, and you aren’t a perfectionist, buy a very good camera and lenses. If you want to take photos that are technically superior, spend 6 or 7 times as much for superior equipment. But consider the fact that many of the world’s great photographers used cameras and lenses that were, objectively, bad by today’s standards. Most of photography is about content and exposure, not corner-to-corner sharpness or minimal chromatic aberration.

2. I would guess my A7IV weighs over three pounds with the big zoom attached. There is no way to have a normal day with that hanging on you from breakfast to bedtime. You’re not going to drag it around with you unless you take pictures for a living. The a6400 weighs much less. It’s doable. The 200D also weighs less. All the other cameras weigh less. Then there is the phone, which is pretty good. Figure out what you are willing to lug around and use, and concentrate on whatever that is for day-to-day photography. If you insist on heavy cameras, you are going to end up using your phone nearly all the time.

3. Any 20-megapixel camera made can shoot excellent photos, but not without the right lenses. A $10,000 camera with one crummy zoom is less useful than a used $200 camera with several good lenses.

4. You can spend $15,000 on one amazing lens, but when people look at your photos, almost no one will be able to tell the difference between the photos it takes and the ones you can take with a $500 lens. You’re better off with several okay lenses than one lens that makes photo nerds cry when they see it on your camera. If you can afford it, get very good lenses, but if not, get lenses that will take okay photos with the exposures you want. It is EXTREMELY important to have lenses that shoot well in low light. You will find this out when you try to use your $1,500 f/3.5-5.6 lens to shoot a once-in-a-lifetime event in a dim restaurant. Go for 1.4 primes, at the highest.

5. Shaky video is annoying to watch. You can buy a thing called a gimbal, and it’s a big, cumbersome device that holds your camera and moves it up and down to cancel out your shaking, but it’s a royal pain to use. There are cameras that stabilize, and there are lenses that stabilize. Stabilized is better. My understanding is that a stabilized system will also let you shoot images in lower light (if it stabilizes images as well as video), because you will not move as much, and you can use a lower shutter speed without getting blurring.

6. If you don’t want the hassle and expense of getting camera gear, get a phone that does a very good job. Some phones are much better than others.

7. Buy external mikes, like Rode or DJI. My wife has the speech volume of a turbine-powered helicopter at home, but getting her to speak up on videos while traveling is nearly impossible. I have videos where you can see her lips move, but that’s about it. You, too, will find that ordinary situation noise kills speech, so buy external mikes. You can even use them with phones and selfie sticks. And use dead cats (wind noise suppressors) unless you like listening to wind instead of people.

8. Choice, not gear, is what makes photography an art.

I came up with my own system for categorizing photos. There are two kinds in the system: documentary, and artistic. A documentary photo’s main purpose it to show that something happened. “Wayne Newton kissed me at his show.” “This is really my driver’s license.” An artistic photo is, well, art. A documentary photo doesn’t have to have artistic merit, and it doesn’t have to be done well. An artistic photo has merit, and generally, although not always, it should be technically good.

A lot of people think photography is not an art, because you don’t have to draw or paint something in order to take a picture of it. They think it’s like having a sprained finger x-rayed or Xeroxing your behind at the office Christmas party. Of course, this is not true. An artistic photo evokes emotions. It usually seems to tell a story. It may tell a story that has nothing to do with what was actually happening in front of the camera. For example, a photo of two strangers at a bus stop, who don’t even know each other, may seem to be about dramatic events taking place between two people who have some kind of relationship. The mind and heart of the beholder fill out artistic photos with backstories that may be completely imaginary.

You choose your subject. You choose your camera. You choose a focal length, f-stop, ISO, and shutter speed. You choose the angle. You may be able to choose the lighting. You may shoot a number of shots and then choose the only one that says what want to say.

This is what makes photography a legitimate art.

If you want to take artistic photos, which is what I want to do (even when shooting my family), if you master the art of making choices, you will not be blocked by your equipment’s limits. You may not perform as well as you want to, but it’s better to have the right choices and the wrong equipment than the wrong choices and the right equipment. Bottom line: you should use whatever equipment you can get, today, instead of moaning about being unable to take pictures because you don’t have the gear you want.

I say all this stuff, but I keep buying gear. I got myself a couple of f/1.4 lenses for my a6400, and they have made a huge difference in my life. I can take shots now in light that used to produce noisy photos that looked awful. I also replaced the Sony ZV1M2 with a Canon Powershot V1. It’s bigger and heavier, but it will do everything the Sony will do and more, and it has a built-in fan.

I like the small size of the Sony, and it’s a little annoying to put the Canon in my pocket, AND I just wrote that handy is better than not-handy, but I’m willing to put up with a little more bulk in this case, given the enormous advantages the Canon offers. It shoots better in low light, it’s not going to overheat as fast, and it has image stabilization for still shots.

It’s too bad I don’t put photos of my son on the web, because he is extremely cute and possibly the most photogenic person in history. I’m not just saying that as his dad. He is really something. And I don’t consider “photogenic” to be a compliment anyway. Many ugly people are photogenic.

If I could post some of the shots I’ve taken lately, I think people would see how helpful the 1.4 lenses have been, not to mention how much better the ZV1M2 and the Powershot are than my phone.

I’m continuing to work on my editing. I just got a new PC. I bought a gaming computer because it happened to have a lot of parts that were excellent for editing photos and video. I am learning Affinity 2 and Topaz AI. I have Photoshop Elements, but I find it annoying and not noticeably better.

Editing photos is shockingly relaxing and satisfying. I don’t know why. I honestly think it’s one of those things that will improve your health if you do it regularly, like spending time outdoors.

I am going to put two very large hard drives in the new PC to store photos and video. One will back up the other, and my hope is that no catastrophe will wipe both out at once. I am hoping 10 TB will keep me going for a few years. It would be nice to have two huge, fast SDD’s, but that would run around $1600, and I don’t think I really need them.

I don’t like the idea of cloud storage. I don’t trust it, and I have an irrational (I hope) fear of having hostile people root through my files in order to harm me or my family. I also think it would take a decade to upload a single terabyte.

Now you know my current stance, valuable as it may or may not be, on the subject of photography.

Let the Light In

I take a lot of photos of my son using my phone. I also shoot video. It’s very convenient. It’s quick. My phone is always in a handy pocket on the side of my leg. It’s not heavy. It’s not in the way. It takes around 4 seconds to get it out and get the camera function working.

The photo quality is amazing I don’t mean it’s good. I just mean it’s amazing. The phone is around 1/4″ thick, the lenses are smaller than Cheerios, optical zoom is a mechanical impossibility, and yet somehow, I get photos that are more than good enough to blow up to three feet wide and hang on my walls.

Does that mean they’re “good”? Well, no. Not if you judge them by camera standards.

The other day, I shot some photos of my son, using a Sony ZV1-M2. This is a camera that cost me around $900. If you’re not a photo buff, you may not know it, but $900 is not anything close to what new professional-grade cameras cost, so I’m saying it’s not the best camera there is.

It has a built-in mechanical zoom lens. It has an APS-C sensor, meaning it’s smaller than a full-frame sensor. It has an articulated touch screen on the back. It has two microphones. You can also plug external mikes into it. It has a hot shoe.

It’s aimed at the video-blog market. It will give you better videos than a phone. It’s not intended to be the world’s best still camera, but of course, you can use it for stills.

I bought it for travel. I found it to be good for video, albeit cumbersome with all the audio stuff and the mini-tripod or gimbal attached. It overheats quickly in the sun, however, and the Rube Goldberg nature of adding mikes led to me making a number of videos without sound. Unintentional silent movies. The stills were okay, but I also took a DSLR to see if I could do better.

When I put the shots of my son up on the 65″ TV I use as a monitor, I saw that I had been missing out. Even though I was using a compact vlogging camera with numerous limitations, the photos were clearly superior to anything my phone could produce. Better subject separation. Better sharpness. He just plain looked better.

Last night, I wanted shots of my son at Thanksgiving dinner. I grabbed a Sony a6400, figuring it would be better than the ZV1-M2. Problem: I didn’t have any lenses that combined a suitable focal length with acceptable light-gathering. In other words, I wanted a wide-angle lens that would give noise-free shots in my kitchen at night, and my only option was 9mm, which is over the top. I gave up and grabbed the ZV1-M2, which can shoot as wide as f1.8. The shots are probably pretty good. I have not seen them.

This experience made me realize, once again, that I had been looking for, and buying, the wrong lenses.

Photo gurus really push handy zoom lenses for travel, as well as sharp primes that don’t do well indoors. I listened to them, so now I can’t use my expensive cameras to shoot family photos without additional lighting.

Seriously, am I going to run and get a complicated lighting contraption and set it up every time I want to take a candid shot of my wife and son? Am I going to fiddle with my complex on-camera flash and hope I don’t end up with what looks like a bad amateur wedding reception photo? No. I’m going to grab the phone or the compact.

As fate would have it, things aren’t all that bad. Help was on the way before I realized I had the wrong lenses. Before Thanksgiving, I ordered a 23 mm Sigma f1.4 prime lens for the a6400. This would have been perfect for last night. It’s very sharp, it’s not terribly expensive, and the focal length is just right for most indoor people shots.

Before I bought it, I took my 18-135 mm zoom and took shots inside the house. I simulated 23 mm and 35 mm shots. The 35 mm shots were claustrophobic. They left things out. This is how I landed on 23 mm.

By the way, I put a space between numerals and “mm” for a reason. The convention of putting them next to each other is stupid and anomalous, and it causes all sorts of problems for search engines. It needs to stop.

Sigma makes a family of low-priced, good-quality f1.4 lenses, and that’s why I had to take the test shots. I could have gone wider or narrower.

The lens arrives today, and I expect it to revolutionize my a6400 game. I should be able to keep the camera sitting out where I can grab it, and I should be able to get a lot of very nice shots with it.

I also found a useful video about low-light shooting. Finally.

Why didn’t I know what I needed sooner? Well, I did study up. Quite a bit. But there is a lot of bad advice out there, from people who claim to know what they’re doing.

There are a bunch of camera courses on Youtube, and they must be pretty good, because people say nice things about them, and some of them used to cost a lot of money. I picked one, and I started watching it.

I have not seen the whole thing, so maybe the host will eventually get around to really useful information, but so far, he has not done all that well. He has spent considerable time talking about the Rule of Thirds, a maxim (not a hard rule) which seems useful when you first hear about it and then turns out to be disappointing.

It works like this. You divide your frame into 9 boxes. When you frame subjects, you try to arrange things so each third (bottom to top) contains something different. For example, ocean at the bottom, blue sky in the middle, clouds at the top. If you have an important object in the frame, put it near a corner of the middle box; the Paul Lynde box.

This is considered aesthetically pleasing, and it definitely works in many circumstances, or nobody would teach it. On the other hand, the vast majority of photos I enjoy violate it pretty vigorously.

I like watching Youtubes featuring the works of great photographers, and when I watched a few after learning about the Rule of Thirds, it seemed more like the artists were obeying the Rule of Avoiding Thirds. Makes you wonder if they ever heard of the rule. Go look at some great photos, and you will see I’m right.

I’ve watched other advice and instruction videos as well.

My impression is that most instruction videos are useful but not terribly so, and they can push you into formulaic approaches that obscure whatever talent you may possess. Photography is an art, so talent is the main thing.

I listened to Youtubers when I chose lenses, and they talked a great deal about things that aren’t nearly as important as getting the shot in the first place. Vignetting. Barrel distortion. Sharpness. Focus breathing, which, I believe, only applies to video.

The sharpness obsession got me excited, so I bought sharp lenses. I think they’re just swell, but I also realize I got too caught up in sharpness. Even as I was shopping, I thought I was probably focusing, if you will, too much on the wrong thing.

If you want to see how right I was about being wrong, go look at photos from Vivian Maier.

Maier was a nobody when she lived. She was a professional nanny. She owned an expensive Rolleiflex twin-lens camera that shot square photos. Guess how many photo lenses she had. “Two,” you’re thinking, because I just called it a twin-lens camera. Wrong. It had one. The other lens was just for feeding the viewfinder to set up pictures. The images it passed never touched film.

Guess how sharp the shooting lens was. I’ll tell you. Not very.

Maier had a one-lens, one-focal-length, unsharp camera that shot square photos, and her work was magnificent.

She used to shoot photos on her days off. The families that hired her traveled, so she shot in exotic locations as well as around New York and Chicago, where she lived. She left 150,000 negatives behind, that I know about. Maybe there are more. She was discovered posthumously in 2007, when a guy looking for useful old photos of Chicago bought a box of her negatives for $380. It had been left in an abandoned storage unit.

I will take the liberty of posting a photo or two. I don’t think I can be accused of infringement, since this is pretty clearly fair use, and it’s not like anyone can blow up a grainy resized photo from a blog and sell prints to the public or charge money to see them. There are a bunch of photos on the site named for her, and they advertise books you can buy on Amazon. My understanding is that the site is legitimate, and the profits go to people who are entitled to them.

It seems obvious that most photographers default to cameras that shoot 3:2 frames these days, and maybe Maier would have done so if she had had access to the variety of quality cameras we have today. In fact, she moved to 3:2 later in life. But she did just fine with square photos. It didn’t matter what shape the photos were as long as she was behind the camera.

Also, she didn’t seem to care about the Rule of Thirds. Maybe she didn’t know what it was.

The low-light video I found was made by a guy named Jason Vong, and he provided some simple rules I had never heard of before. He said there was one set of rules for handheld photos and another set for tripod use.

He says using the “auto” function on a camera will give you poor-quality low-light shots. You’ll preserve your precious memories, but they won’t look very good. I think it’s a waste of money and potential to use a good camera in “auto” when you don’t have to. It’s like driving a Ferrari with the valet key.

Handheld: set your aperture, your speed, and your ISO, in that order. “A-S-I.” Use the lowest f-stop you can. Use a shutter speed that matches your focal length for full-frame, and double the focal length for APS-C (example: 60 mm and 1/120 second). Use an ISO no higher than 3200 (APS-C) or 6400 (full-frame), and try to stay below 800 APS-C or 1600 full-frame. If you have to go higher than 800 or 1600, but you stay below the upper limits, software should give you an acceptably clean photo.

Tripod: S-I-A. You can set your shutter speed to be very low because the camera won’t shake.

Is Vong right? Probably. I haven’t tried his suggestions yet, but he is talking about basic theory, and he does photography for a living. I will find out.

Most instructors give vague advice. “This is what aperture does.” “This is what shutter speed does.” They don’t present information about exposure in a systematic way, as Vong has.

Maybe the longer video I haven’t finished watching will eventually cover the same points.

So what do I take away from all this?

Learn the Rule of Thirds, but remember that it’s just a suggestion. Learn what composition is, and get good at it. Then you can forget the Rule of Thirds. Don’t let a rule ruin your photos.

If you want to take candid photos instead of having people line up unnaturally and give creepy smiles in unison to produce bad flash photos where everyone has red pupils, you should get a couple of low-light lenses. I think this is probably a good conclusion.

I think you are better off with a bad camera and a good low-light lens than you are with a fantastic camera and a lens that quits at f3.5. When I started upgrading in 2023, I had a 2005 or 2006 Canon 350D with an 8-megapixel sensor. I thought moving to a 200D with way more resolution was the best move, and for $200 or so, it was a good buy, but now I believe faster lenses would have had more impact for indoor work.

I took some surprisingly excellent photos with the 350D back when it was young, and in the 80’s, I took some great shots with a Yashica FX-2 that only had one lens.

If you have to choose between optical perfection and low-light performance (or whatever other kind of performance you need), go with performance. People will care more about the quality of your photos than they will about “softness in the corners” or whatever other flaws they may have, and you will miss far fewer shots.

I think these are sound conclusions, but I am still fairly uninformed as photographers go, so anyone who knows more is welcome to chime in.

Here’s a great suggestion: don’t take advice from bad photographers unless you’re sure their badness is unrelated to the advice. I keep seeing videos and articles from successful photographers, accompanied by images I would delete instantly. It looks like there is, quite literally, no substitute for talent. No amount of experience, training, or equipment can help someone who is just not wired to take a good photo.

I am planning to work with the 23 mm lens to see what it can do, and after that, I will consider other low-light primes.

By the way, that little ZV1-M2 is not bad at all for travel stills. If you can’t stand the weight and size of a more serious camera, you can put it in your pocket or purse, and it will definitely outdo your phone.

Spending More Money is Always the Answer

I plan to try to take more macro photos today. I am determined to figure it out. I have learned that if you want extremely beautiful, compelling, or interesting subjects, macro wins hands down. There are more small things than big things. You should be able to find excellent subjects in your own house, if you are satisfied with very small objects.

I have decided to upgrade my backup camera, and I don’t mean the camera on the rear of my car. I think I was stupid to try to make do with an old DSLR instead of getting a decent mirrorless during my last upgrade. Now I am correcting that mistake.

I don’t have to ask my wife if she thinks it’s a good idea. She always tells me not to worry about what I spend. I say I don’t want her to end up working at IHOP. She says God will take care of her.

Two years ago, when I decided to get a real camera for family photo purposes, I already had an ancient Canon 350D with 8 megapixels. It was not a bad camera, but I couldn’t get really sharp photos with it, and it was generally not as good as 2023 or even 2015 cameras. The screen was bad. It needed a lot more light. It was a 2005 camera.

I got a Sony A7IV, which, to me, is a Bentley of a camera. To a pro, it’s more like a Jetta, but I considered it a splurge. It’s full-frame. It has zillions of features. The lens selection is crazy. It’s easy to get great photos and videos with it.

My wife and I were still traveling a lot, and when I packed for trips, I learned that you have to be a very serious guy to take an A7IV with you on vacation. It is heavy. They lenses are big. If it’s stolen, it’s a big hit.

I had a Sony vlogging camera, but it’s not great. I don’t get fantastic stills with it. The lens can’t be changed. It overheats and turns off without warning while shooting video (that cost us dearly). I’m not sure I should ever use it again. It’s very convenient, but it doesn’t do much a phone will not do just as well.

My Canon had a lens I liked. I thought it would be smart to buy a newer but still old Canon that would take the lens. I bought a 200D, which was made in around 2017. It had lots of helpful features. It had zillions of megapixels.

Then I did something that blew my whole “bargain” theory out of the water. I got two new lenses for the 200D. One replaced the old Sigma lens that had made me think buying the 200D was smart. DOH!

We took the 200D on trips, and it was okay. It was lighter than the big Sony; so much lighter I actually used it. I got nice photos and videos. On the other hand, I now had two ecosystems, so I had to speak both Sony and Canon. I had to remember which camera could or could not do certain things, because the 200D was DSLR, not mirrorless. The 200D could not be zoomed during video shooting with a remote. Learning that was a real bummer.

I have been immersed in baby-related activities for over a year, and I have spent very little time with the A7IV and 200D. We are stabilizing now, so I got my gear out, arranged and sorted it, and started shooting macro. I found I had to use new features on both cameras. I had to use two flashes. There were useful features the 200D lacked.

I decided to do what Porsche should have done in the early Sixties instead of doubling down on stupid and continuing to make troublesome rear-heavy cars: I admitted fault. I gave up on the 200D and also on Canon. I’m getting a Sony a6400, which is a mirrorless camera which is lighter than the A7IV. Of course, I have to get a few lenses, and that adds to the pain. I can try to work with adaptors, but life is short, and I have already cheaped myself out of enough good photographic experiences.

I thought the a6400 was a good compromise between frugality and getting features that would be satisfactory for the next decade or so.

I looked at used cameras, but the discounts weren’t great, and the a6400 comes bundled with a lens I want, plus some other good stuff, at a nice price. I bought new.

While I was working on picking out a camera and two lenses, I read other people’s reviews. In particular, I looked at reviews of Laowa Venus lenses. Laowa is one of those Chinese optical companies that have been giving companies like Sigma and Tamron fits by making pretty darned good lenses for bad-lens prices. Not always the best, but often too good to turn down.

While I was checking out macro lenses, I had a realization: there a lot of very experienced, highly trained, bad photographers out there. It made me feel I had been selling myself short.

I have seen all sorts of shots on the web recently, and most were posted by people who thought they had gotten great results. Maybe 80% of the time, they were shots I would either delete or keep to myself. Bad composition was the biggest sin. After that, I noticed photos that were too bland and uniform; not enough color or brightness variation. I also noticed that most people were happy with photos that weren’t very sharp at all. Also, people took shots that either had boring subjects or seemed to have no subjects at all. Are we supposed to look at the island way off in the middle of the lake or the little crooked tree on the island?

Some people were posting sublime, eye-popping shots that made me feel I was destined to lead a life of utter inferiority, and I was glad to see those, because they showed me I should improve. The others were the kind of shots that make you try to think of polite things to say. “Everything in the shot is kind of orange, isn’t it? That’s certainly…interesting.”

So how much can you tell about a piece of equipment if people who use it post bad shots? A bad lens can make bad photos, but it’s not easy to create really good shots with an objectively bad lens. If a person’s photos are good, you know the lens must be okay, but if they’re awful, you don’t learn much about it at all.

Here is how I feel about photos: if a shot is good, you know it almost instantly. It grabs you. To me, this quality is more important than focus or obeying rules.

When I’m editing shots, I move selector buttons back and forth, and when a photo is right, I suddenly feel it and stop moving them. I don’t have any rules. When the photo looks right, it sort of yells at me and tells me to stop.

So…the people who take very bad photos with very good equipment and think they’re wonderful…are they just too proud to look for instruction, or is it an incurable lack of innate talent? I guess sometimes it’s both, and sometimes it’s just a talent void.

I know I can take very good photos. Can I create great photos? When I ask that, I mean great photos that aren’t lucky shots. Anyone can get lucky.

I know nearly nothing about photography, even after all these years. I haven’t worked at it. I make almost no use of filters because I don’t know how. I don’t know how to work with white balance. Someone told me about stacking software. Don’t know anything. I don’t know how to use fill flash. The list is almost endless. I can’t do a whole lot of the things a real photographer can do, but I can do good work within that limitation, and I should be able to improve somewhat.

I wish I understood editing software. Seems like every program has 5,000 functions, and I understand 4.

I wonder if I could find a useful course. Maybe there are online courses for people who are beyond being told what an f-stop is but not capable of anything advanced.

Now, of course, I’ll sell the Canon stuff and try to mitigate the pounding I took when buying the new Sony.

Yeah, right. I know me. I’ll find a reason to keep it.

I’ll post another macro from yesterday. The depth of field could be better, the subject matter is okay but not great, and I felt there was a limit to what I could do to improve the composition.

MORE

I got a few shots today.

I tried to keep the f-stop at 18, and I kept the speed at 1/160.

I believe my biggest issue today was focus. I used the A7IV’s focus peaking, and it really failed me.

First, a peach blossom I shot. I believe I need to jack up the ISO, because things come out a bit dark, and the color is bleached out. Nonetheless, I like this better than the results I got yesterday.

It looks a little better at full size, but it is not perfect.

Second, a fly on a magnolia leaf. These guys were all over the leaves. I am considering smearing the leaves with a piece of tuna or something to leave a smell that will draw more bugs.

This is a very small bug, like 3/16″ long.

As you can see, the focus is poor. This is true even though the focus peaking lit up all over this guy. I got a bunch of shots like this, and they’re all useless. I don’t know if I need to use the feature that blows things up for focusing, or what. The person I watched in order to learn macro says not to do that.

A tripod won’t work unless the bugs sit still, and that won’t happen.

I got a lot of bad shots of some blossoms, so I deleted them.

It’s difficult to press the camera’s button without ruining composition and moving the lens off to the side or up or down.

Anyway, I made some progress.

You’re Building on the Wrong Rock

I just got the most interesting revelation, and like all revelation, it seemed obvious after I got it.

Christians love dragging “backslidden” Christians to church. By “backslidden,” I mean any Christian who doesn’t belong to a church or hand a lot of money over to a pastor or priest. They think anyone who is not a church member is “out of fellowship,” they see us as “lost sheep,” and they think we are deluded by pride and demons.

Here is a great question: why was there no big church building in Ephesus?

Don’t bother Googling. I did it for you. There was no big church building there until long after the apostles were dead.

I’ve been to Ephesus. It is decorated with symbols resembling 8-slice pizzas. Circles with several lines across them.

This type of symbol is called an ichthys, which is a word English stole from Greek. It means “fish.” Most of us are more familiar with the icthys we see on car trunks, but the pizza symbol is also an ichthys.

The symbol is supposed to stand for “Yeshua Moshiach, Son of God, Savior.” The lines represent letters.

When you walk through Ephesus, you see pizzas here and there, scratched into public structures. Why?

Ephesian Christians were afraid; that’s why.

The Ephesians of First Century Asia Minor were unpopular, like all true Christians. Christianity was new. Pagans hated Christians. Jews who rejected Yeshua hated Christians. It was dangerous to get together to celebrate Yeshua. As a result, Christians used pizza symbols to announce their presence, and they met in each other’s houses.

BOOM. God drops the mic again. Thank you, Lord.

Scroll forward to 2025, and somehow a Christian who worships Yeshua in his house is illegitimate! The people who are more like the Christians Yeshua decided to call a church in the Revelation are scallywags and truants.

Yes, Yeshua chose to mention cities with house churches, but he didn’t say anything about…Rome. Or Jerusalem, for that matter.

None of the seven cities had big church buildings. Look it up if you want to waste your time.

When God told me the age of the big church was over, he wasn’t talking about a church in decline. Not exactly. He was telling me about a new, better church that would meet in houses and locations of opportunity. It won’t take over the world, because Satan always gets the popular vote, but it is less corrupt by an order of magnitude.

If you meet in a house, you can exclude the people who need to be excluded. The glory hounds. The control freaks. The hypocrites. The denomination-worshipers. The pastor-worshipers. They ruin churches.

People think it’s about building a big tent. It’s not. Exclusion is important. Mindless inclusion is what destroyed the big churches. Go read about Gideon.

I love this. I love getting confirmation that I heard from God when people are trying to correct what he told me. It happens over and over and over.

If You Find This Post Distressing, Blame the Jews

If the rapture doesn’t come soon, I don’t know how Christians will be able to stand living in this world.

Conservatives and Christians are now spewing lies about the Charlie Kirk assassination. Nominal Christians, anyway. No one who listens to the Holy Spirit is fooled by kooky conspiracy theories.

The thing about this that irks me the most is seeing people praise the liars while claiming God’s authority. God didn’t tell you to agree with demonized nuts who say Israel, the FBI, Charlie Kirk’s bodyguards, or anyone other than a Mormon homosexual named Tyler Robinson shot Charlie Kirk.

The chaos is amazing. How are you going to know who to point your AR-15 with Punisher skulls on the magazine at if you can’t even agree on a scapegoat? Are you going to shoot Netanyahu? Are you going to shoot Kash Patel? Figure it out. You’re bringing shame on nutcases everywhere.

I just saw a video by a conservative gun enthusiast. The kind of person who, one would guess, thinks he and his militia buddies are going to fix America for Christ. He and his followers are suggesting the assassination was an inside job because–get this–it looks like some of the bodyguards were wearing AI glasses.

Well. If that’s not proof, I don’t know what is.

They’re saying the people around Kirk were laughing after he got shot. One says Kirk was waving his arm, trying to run things. Another says nobody put pressure on the wound.

Charlie Kirk was shot with a .30-06. The cowardly liberal pervert who shot him used a rifle his grandfather used on deer. The .30-06 is a very powerful round. It’s supposed to blow flesh apart permanently on its way through bodies, causing so much blood loss or other damage the victim is incapacitated as soon as possible.

A hunting round from a .30-06 doesn’t just pass through flesh, leaving a long, thin hole. It tears things up. Hunting rounds are made to expand and/or break up. They’re made to be destructive.

Kirk was shot in the neck, which contains things like the spinal column, spinal cord, jugular veins, trachea, and carotid arteries. These are things we need in order to remain alive and conscious. When the bullet hit him, the flesh around it blew outward around the axis of travel, ripping things up and sending hydrostatic shock into every part of his neck.

He was almost certainly dead as soon as he was struck. They rushed him to a hospital because that’s what you do when someone is shot. They didn’t think he was going to make it. He wasn’t conscious and giving them guidance.

If they didn’t put pressure on the wound, which probably is not true, it would likely indicate they could see he was dead. I’ve seen the footage that supposedly proves there was no pressure, and it is completely impossible to tell whether pressure was applied.

I can’t figure out why anyone would think AI glasses were somehow evidence that Kirk’s team wanted him dead. I’m also amazed that anyone over the age of three seriously thinks these people would have him shot from over a hundred yards, with a cheap surplus rifle with a badly-mounted scope.

The shooter nearly missed. He wasn’t shooting for the side of Kirk’s neck. He was shooting at the center of his chest. No serious assassin takes a risky shot when he can take an easier one. Lying in a prone position, which is the best way to shoot, with plenty of time, Tyler Robinson hit Kirk about 10″ from his most likely point of aim.

The gun used was a poverty gun. Military surplus, made by unmotivated Russian Communists. The scope was mounted badly. It belonged to the killer’s grandfather, who probably paid under a hundred dollars for it before adding a scope and synthetic stock. It was probably something like a 7-MOA gun, meaning it could be counted on to shoot groups about 7″ wide at 100 yards, so more like 10″ at the range at which Kirk was shot. It was not a skilled assassin’s weapon of choice. A $500 AR-15 would have been a lot better.

Check out the deranged comments.

They wanted Charlie dead. He was reaching the youth. He changed people’s hearts and minds. He was a threat to the shadow government!

At this point it is completely obvious that this wasn’t just an assassination, but a professional hit job.

This whole situation smells like a CIA hit. I think the kid who supposedly shot Charlie was a scape goat.

I think he is still alive. It was a setup. Nothing is adding up.

Clear as day they weren’t helping Charlie; but they were tampering with evidence!

The fact that a head of a certain country made 2 videos, within 72 hours, denouncing any knowledge or responsibility in the situation is pretty much the biggest red flag ever!

The guys are smiling because they are activating a secret trapdoor that was under his chair. That blood looked like it was a movie prop burst. I have had a suspicion that he’s alive and that was a dummy that was switched when the security is over him. They handed off a key to that door. Why else are they pouring concrete all around the spot? Israel wanted him dead and so he had to die before they actually killed him.

I rebuke these lies and bind these people to come out with the whole truth.

This assassination is one of the clearest-cut cases of leftist-pervert gun-barrel activism in history. The killer confessed to more than one person. He confessed in writing. His own parents turned him in. He was captured by multiple security cameras. We have the gun. We have the bullet. His dress-wearing XY girlfriend is cooperating with the police.

Even if he had walked up to Kirk in front of the crowd and killed him with a hatchet to the forehead, the demon whisperers would still be spouting their theories.

I want OUT of this place. It was bad enough when everyone on the left was insane. Now the friendlies are wigging out, and they can’t even form a consensus, so I assume they’ll be turning on each other as well as the innocent.

My own relatives have gone nuts.

I remember realizing how unhinged my aunt had become. I was in Singapore at the airport, after a fantastic vacation with my wife, waiting for a flight home. It was after midnight. My aunt called to talk about a property we own in common. I told her it wasn’t a good time because of the circumstances.

She went off on me, demanding to know who goes on vacation in November. She was furious. I couldn’t believe it.

Called me another time about family business, and I told her she needed to start selling things instead of trying to maintain a decaying real estate memorial to my long-forgotten grandparents. She had no idea I was married. Started telling me she had more stuff than I did, as though that excused incompetence. She said I had nothing but “maybe a sorry dog.”

She has apparently forgotten losing her composure and saying nutty, hostile things to me, because the other day, she sent me a text asking if I thought democracy was going to survive. As though we were on cordial terms. I politely declined to discuss it.

I don’t want her in my life as social or even business contact. She is too far gone. I don’t hold onto abusers any more. Blood isn’t really thicker than water. I dream of the day when the last bit of real estate will be sold.

Now she goes on Facebook and posts wacky memes comparing Trump to Hitler and so on.

Hitler sent special trucks around to force Jews to breathe carbon monoxide. He invaded neighboring countries and stole their treasures. He had doctors investigate the cheapest ways to castrate Jewish men and men with mental issues.

Trump is a little different. He’s working to get rid of illegal aliens, bring peace to the world, restore free speech, and make federal laws and regulations sensible. The Hitler analogy is just a bit over the top, except to crazy people who listen to demons all day.

We used to have a great relationship. We laughed and talked together. She was a junior high principal, entrusted with looking after people’s children. Then the apocalypse virus destroyed her sanity.

I have a second cousin about my aunt’s age. Nicest lady you would ever want to meet. At least in the past. Now she’s right in there with my aunt. Check out this masterpiece of delusion she posted on Facebook.

My mother loved her. My other aunts loved her. What happened to her personality? Wait. I know. The Israelis stole her brain and replaced it.

I’ve had it. I want the rapture to come before it gets worse. Maybe you know what I always say: if it’s this crazy now, what will it be like in 6 months?

Last night my wife and I were talking in our big, comfortable bed. Our beautiful, charming, intelligent baby son was lying between us. I started talking about our lives. I started asking if she could even understand how blessed we were. It is something that continually amazes me. God has been so good to us, and I am not good.

We marveled at our situation. Paired up by the Holy Spirit. In strong agreement about nearly everything. Set aside in a peaceful area dominated by conservative Christians who are patient, kind, and full of love, unlike people in Miami or the white ghetto known as Eastern Kentucky. Healthy. Blissfully unemployed. Close to God. Constantly receiving astonishing, helpful Holy Spirit revelation.

On the other hand, all over America, people are going so crazy it’s a wonder they don’t need diapers and spit masks. They are furious at each other over nothing. Leftists are so mad they are quite willing to murder us and our children in the streets, and some conservatives are no better. People live with overwhelming anger and worry, but we are insulated in our cozy little cocoon.

It’s like we’re riding a monorail through Jurassic Park at feeding time!

I don’t know how I would live if I had to be on a quarter of an acre in a blue suburb, or if I were a Jew. Jews need to wake up and move to Israel or far-right counties before it’s too late. Jew-hatred is now treated like a legitimate, acceptable political point of view. It has been mainstreamed.

Candace Owens is getting rich from Youtube, Twitter, and Instagram checks. Youtube and Instagram are run by liberals, and the guy who started Facebook, which owns Instagram, is a Jew! How weird is that?

Anyway, Charlie Kirk was murdered by a lone sodomite, so try not to get worked up by conspiracy theorists.

Depends on Which Pole You’re On

I had a spectacular day.

I was going to go outside and remove the nasty old rocks around an unwanted flowerbed, but instead, I ordered country ham over the web and took the family to Costco for pizza. We actually like having dinner at Costco, and it runs us about 10 dollars.

I love country ham, but it has to be good. My grandmother used to cure her own hams back in Kentucky, and she aged them a couple of years, so they were magnificent. They were also fatter than today’s hams, so there was no lack of grease for gravy. If you go into a grocery store that sells country hams, you’re likely to end up with Smithfield or Clifty Farms, which are aged very little and lacking in flavor. Also, Smithfield ham smells a little bit like manure.

One of the pleasures of having a foreign wife is introducing her to American food. My wife loves barbecue, Ruth’s Chris, Lee’s Famous Fried Chicken, Dr. Pepper, and a number of other things, but she has been a little slow to embrace country ham.

A country ham is supposed to be fermented. The aroma is supposed to have a little funk to it, and when you slice the ham, you should have to scrape some mold off of it. It’s also supposed to be very, very salty. It’s supposed to contain enough salt to prevent harmful bacteria from growing. After all, country ham was invented in order to help people preserve pork so they had meat during the winter. People made it as a survival tool.

When my wife tried country ham, she did not think much of it, but I fried a piece yesterday, and she liked it. She keeps telling me she is becoming Americanized. She has quit eating the flavorless corn mush Zambians call nshima, for example.

A few years back, I ordered samples from several ham companies so I could compare them. Sadly, I failed to record the results of this important research, so I was forced to repeat it.

I used to order hams from a company called Gatton Farms, but they went out of business. After that, I uses Scott’s hams, but they tanked, too. This is why I needed to find a new source.

My second cousin Wade, who is now gone, liked Colonel Newsom’s hams, made in Princeton, Kentucky. He once told me walking into Newsom’s was like entering a shrine.

I’m sure he knew what he was talking about. Everyone from the hills knows a good ham when he tastes one, and it seems like no one else does. My grandparents and all of their daughters knew what a good ham tasted like. I know. But people on food websites make deplorable recommendations.

Newsom’s doesn’t use curing salt. Just table salt, brown sugar, and hickory smoke. My understanding is that curing salt speeds up the cure process. Personally, I have nothing against it, as long as the ham gets plenty of aging time in spite of it.

I have never had a Newsom’s ham. They are extremely expensive, and Gatton Farms and Scott’s made top-notch products for way less. I used to get a whole ham, sliced, bagged and shipped, for under $70. I couldn’t persuade myself to spend more for Newsom’s.

Yesterday I decided to make sure I wasn’t missing out. I ordered a whole Newsom’s ham. Life is short. When my wife saw me looking at the website, she increased my joy by suggesting I order sausage, too. She used to refuse American sausage. She’s coming around!

It wasn’t a cheap purchase, but it will be nice to find out whether these hams are as good as some people think they are.

I also ordered slices from Broadbent’s and Benton’s; two other famous ham companies. My hope is that they will turn out to be as good or better than Newsom’s. If so, I won’t have to pay Newsom prices in the future.

The important thing will be to record the results of the experiment. If I could remember what I thought of Broadbent’s and Benton’s the last time I compared them, I wouldn’t need to spend more money.

My wife was also critical of Southern-style collards, which I love. I boil them forever with ham hocks or neckbones or whatever other smoked pork products are available, and they are heavenly.

Zambians are like yankees. They barely cook their greens. Sure, they look nice, and they have a less-wilted texture some people like, but that slow-cooked flavor is not there. It’s a giant waste of potential.

Yankees always say Southerners turn vegetables into mush. They don’t know what slow-cooked vegetables are supposed to taste like, so they don’t know what they’re missing.

Now my wife says she loves Southern-style collards. We have been going to a place called Fat Boys BBQ, and they serve collards. They won her over.

Sadly, Newsom’s doesn’t slice hams, so I will have to do it myself or find a butcher who has a machine. I can vacuum-seal the slices, but the tedious job of slicing is mine. Another reason to root for the other two contenders.

I ordered the Newsom’s ham yesterday, and I ordered samples from Broadbent’s and Benton’s today. Feeling satisfied with my accomplishments, I forgot all about moving the rocks and told my wife we were going to Costco for dinner.

We drove down to Sumter County, to the Villages. This is an enormous retirement community. It’s as close to heaven as an old person can get without dying. There are all sorts of stores, restaurants, and golf courses, and the old people zip around the community in golf carts.

There is no Costco in our county. I belonged when I lived in Miami, but I had to quit when I moved here. Last month, the Costco in the Villages opened, so I renewed my membership.

The drive is very pleasant. It was relaxing. Lots of little farms. Oaks arching over the roads. You would never know you were in the same state as Florida Man or Miami’s aggressive hordes.

It was very different from our recent visit to Gainesville for P.F. Chang’s.

To get to Gainesville, you have to use I-75, which is crowded and full of pushy drivers. Florida’s population keeps growing, and the main roads have not kept up. The pushy drivers are from South Florida, along with some from Georgia. People here don’t act like that.

We visited Trader Joe’s, P.F. Chang’s, and Bass Pro, in that order.

Gainesville is in Alachua County. It’s where the University of Florida is located, so it’s full of miserable people. College students from other places. Angry, cynical leftist academics. On a visit prior to our last one, we saw two young men in prairie dresses and work boots. We ate at a restaurant where they gave us paper straws. What more do I have to tell you? But I will tell you more anyway.

Trader Joe’s was packed with leftists. Young college students; not the kind of people who build Charlie Kirk memorials. Old ones who looked like worn-out communists. Freaks by choice.

In the parking lot, people were driving aggressively to get as close to the door as they could. That never happens here.

The atmosphere was cold and unfriendly. I would even call it tense. People seemed rushed. I asked my wife what she thought of the people, and she told me she would tell me when we got outside.

When we take our baby out in our county, people always want to see him. They tell us how cute he is. They say they want to take him home. At Trader Joe’s, precisely one lady noticed him.

At Bass Pro, the atmosphere was completely different. It was peaceful. We felt calm. Everyone was friendly. We took our baby to see the aquarium, and he loved it. Other families were showing their little ones the fish.

Today, before we went into Costco, we checked out Fresh Market, an upscale grocery my wife hadn’t seen yet. The people were wonderful. Everyone wanted to see my son. They talked about how cute he was. The employees loved him. They spent a lot of time telling us about the store and ways to get deals.

At Costco, my wife occupied a table, and I went to pick up pizza and a chocolate sundae. While I was gone, the old man behind my wife turned around to talk to her about the baby. He noticed how aware he was of his surroundings.

We only bought three things, so we weren’t there long, but a number of people wanted to see the baby.

He smiled at people. He loves meeting them.

The drive home was just like the first drive. No hurry. The golden light of late afternoon. A baby full of ice cream.

We could be living among sour, furious University of Florida professors who frown to the point of injuring their faces over the existence of Christian and conservate students and their beloved president. We could be in Miami, being insulted and scammed by aggressive, rude illegal aliens. We are extremely blessed to be where we are, surrounded by warm, loving people. We are blessed to have had our priorities changed so we aren’t still mud-wrestling with people whose only pleasures in life are being unhappy and making others unhappy.

This morning, we watched videos about Singapore. We both said we wished we were there instead of in the US. As much as we love our area, Singapore has some big advantages. No one is killing Christians, or anyone else, there. The air isn’t filled with hatred.

We saw a video about the huge underground developments in Singapore. They are building a vast network of tunnels attached to their clean, safe, comfortable train system. I told my wife that if anyone tried to build something like that in the US, enraged hippies would glue themselves to the pavement and scream bloody murder.

I noted the difference between videos about Singapore’s trains and videos about American subways. American videos are about terrorism and other crimes. Black people shoving whites and Asians onto the tracks. Turnstile-jumpers. Ghetto kids terrorizing passengers, doing stupid dances and demanding to be paid. Gropers. Daniel Penney being prosecuted for saving strangers from a disgusting bully.

We loved the trains in Singapore, and also in Hong Kong, for that matter. So clean, safe, and pleasant. I went to college in New York, and I can’t tell you how strange it seems to me to go down into a subway system and not be immersed in the intense aroma of fermented pee.

I told my wife Singapore reminded me of the New Jerusalem, in the Revelation. A perfect city full of peaceful, well-intended, like-minded people. Maybe that’s why it appeals to us. In our spirits, we know we are supposed to live in a place like the New Jerusalem.

We have been to Egypt, Turkey, Ireland, Singapore, Hong Kong, Mexico, Switzerland, and Italy. After Israel, we both agree that we would rather go to Singapore a third time than revisit any of the other places.

Egypt is dirty and crazy. Ireland is pleasant but boring, and the food is not good. Turkey is nice, but not nice enough to make you dream of going back soon. Rome was one giant tourist trap, and it was full of pushy illegal aliens who had no manners. Switzerland is gorgeous, but they have jacked prices up to the point where tourists feel insulted, and it’s also filling up with Indian and Chinese tourists who are not always fun to be around. Staying in Cancun is like sleeping in a college bar.

I never thought I would say this, but I am not interested in seeing Switzerland again. I used to love it, but that has changed. You only have to charge me $7.50 for tap water once to make me understand that I’m unwelcome.

My wife doesn’t want to go back to Rome, ever. The illegals really got to her. She says she would make an exception so our children could see it. I liked Rome a little better, and I like Italians (real Italians in Europe), but I’m not hot to go back.

Singapore feels like home. When we arrived for our second visit, we felt like we were home again. It’s the strangest thing.

Singaporeans do everything well. They shame Americans every day.

To get back to the day I just had, I don’t know what I did to deserve a life this good. Actually, I know I didn’t do anything. I was rotten and immature. I deserve evil, and the Lord gave me the good he deserves.

I look forward to a bright future. The millennium. The New Jerusalem. Seeing God face to face. And maybe before the rapture or the day my body gives out, I’ll get to see Singapore a few more times.

It Means You’re Doing Well

Not long ago, I was praying and prophesying, and I got this sentence: “The world hates me.”

I already knew that. The world hates everyone who might possibly be favored by God. The world hates people who really are close to God, and it hates people it thinks could be close to God now or in the future. It hates people preemptively, just in case they get close to God.

You can see this in action in the press coverage of Israel, a perennial victim of actual, openly confessed, state-sponsored, Muslim-sponsored genocide. The press tells us Israel is committing genocide when, in reality, the Jews are simply responding to a state of siege that has existed ever since Jacob’s time.

Jewish religious authorities missed the Messiah and think they please God when they make turning people away from him their life’s work, so you might say they’re not close to God, but he has not forgotten them. He has said a woman can forget a baby she breastfed, but he can’t forget Zion:

But Zion said, The Lord hath forsaken me, and my Lord hath forgotten me.

Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee.

Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands; thy walls are continually before me.

If God has not forgotten you, Satan and his children will remember you, too.

When God reminded me that the world hates me, it was helpful, because every so often, while I’m getting along with Satan’s children, one of them lets me know they can turn on me at any time.

I belong to a forum, and people were discussing Popular Mechanics. This used to be a wonderful magazine full of information about tool projects and methods. People were criticizing Pop Mech because, well, it stinks. It’s a horrible, boring magazine of little use to anyone.

As a former subscriber, I mentioned a couple of things I didn’t like about it.

Pop Mech has a relationship with Glenn Reynolds. This makes no sense at all. He has never shown any signs of knowing anything about tools or technology. He teaches law and posts links to things other people wrote on his blog. Far as I know, that’s about it. You might as well hire Tucker Carlson or Rachel Maddow to tell people about tools.

They should have been able to find someone, in the entire United States, who was familiar with tools and could also write.

Who will he write for next? The Lancet?

I didn’t like the articles I saw, either. In the old days, they might tell you how to run a water pipe under a concrete walk or build a meter for testing resistance. When my magazines started rolling in, they were full of useless junk.

First, the articles about tools were lame. “Find Out Which Inadequate Chinese Sustainable Organic Plastic-Handled Toolkit is Best to Keep in Your Frunk.” Stuff like that. And they published articles about “great tools” that were pretty clearly paid placement.

Second, the projects were awful. Simple plans for ugly furniture made of plywood, for example. It was like they had realized American men had stopped producing testosterone decades ago and were no longer capable of operating real tools with any degree of skill, so they pandered to men they assumed were afraid to use tools for fear of scratching their nail polish.

Maybe they dumbed down the projects in a futile effort to fan the flames of women’s nonexistent interest in tools. Women are different from men. They will always be in the minority in STEM fields and anything involving tools. There will probably always be 8 employed male engineers for every female, mainly because women are not interested in engineering. These truths don’t penetrate the skulls of people who are determined to convince the world nurture is everything.

Third, there was a lot of political fluff that was clearly intended to be social engineering. “Meet 10 CEO’s Under 30 who Made it in Spite of Being Gay/Asian/Black/Female/Crippled/Whatever.” Articles like that are a waste of paper. Put them in Mother Jones or something. Nobody opens Popular Mechanics hoping to find out a lesbian illegal alien is running a successful CNC shop that makes can openers from recycled cans.

Girls can use tools, too! Talk about the soft sexism of low expectations. Wow; a woman operated a drill press. Next, they’ll be walking on their hind feet and using iPads to ask for banana slices.

The magazine was boring and of no use whatsoever, so I did not renew my subscription.

Here is a link to the kind of article I never saw when I subscribed: How to do a Complete Brake System Checkout.

Does Glenn Reynolds do his own brakes? Doubtful. I do. Google “Glenn Reynolds” and “wrench” or “tools” and see what comes up. Nothing.

Doing your own brakes is near the very bottom of the list of things you should be able to do if you want to be tool-literate. It’s down there with changing your oil and cleaning a dryer vent. It’s something millions of American men do all the time. Saying I do my own brakes is not much of a boast.

So anyway, I voiced the above concerns on the forum, and my post was deleted. I was accused of “thinly-veiled racism” and “personal attacks.”

This is where we are now. Complaining about worthless and off-topic material in a magazine that spent roughly a century telling people about tools and things that could be done with them is racism and personal attacks.

They didn’t say who I attacked. I think they just threw that in because their feelings were hurt.

I doubt they were talking about Reynolds, because all I said was that he didn’t know anything about tools. Which is true. Ordinarily, when you get in trouble for making personal attacks on a forum, it has something to do with other forum members, but I didn’t say anything critical about members.

Apparently, using the terms “minorities” and “illegal alien” is racism per se now. But what I said was true, of course. Pop Mech praised minority members and women for being successful in spite of being minority members and women. I don’t know if any of the people I saw the magazine promote were illegals. I just threw that in because it was the kind of thing I thought the editors would do. Poetic license.

By the way, “thinly-veiled racism” usually isn’t racism. The hackneyed phrase “thinly-veiled” is a verbal booster seat. It was created so leftists could accuse people of racism when they weren’t. It’s an evil tool designed to put innocent people on the defensive.

The person who deleted my comment was wrong and unfair, and maybe not very bright, but it’s not my place to tell people how to run their Internet forums. They are allowed to be wrong, unfair, and self-righteous, all day, every day.

So what is the connection between God and being slandered on a forum about tools?

The connection is that I have been treated unfairly all my life, in every area of life. Things I earned were given to others. Positions. Titles. Jobs. Money. I have been slandered so much, I can’t begin to recall the instances. When the world hates you because you might be important to God, it doesn’t treat you well in matters not involving religion and then jump in to attack when religion is relevant; it abuses you all the time.

It’s important to realize this, because otherwise you come to trust the world. You think, “If I do what everyone else does, I’ll get what everyone else gets.” It doesn’t work that way.

Look at Israel. The only civilized nation in the Middle East. A nation what works very, very hard to protect enemy noncombatants. A nation that is among the first to offer aid when bitter enemies have earthquakes and so on. But Satan’s children are busy every day, comparing Israel to Nazi Germany and praising its abusers as martyrs and victims.

Look at the way Christians are portrayed on TV and in the movies. They come in two varieties. The first type is a man who seems kind of gay and gains admiration for standing up to people who criticize sin. The other is a vicious, abusive, controlling ogre–often racist–who needs to be exposed and taken down.

How often have you seen real Christians portrayed favorably on screen? Nearly never. Satan owns Hollywood, and real Christians are a threat to his empire.

If Satan thinks you look like someone God might be planning to save and put to work, you are going to be abused. Satan will send people to destroy you. Backstabbing coworkers. Bosses who promote everyone but you. Whorish women. Friends who work to make you fail. Abusive parents and teachers. Prosecutors. The police. Random criminals. Homeless demoniacs.

People who belong to fraternities and secret organizations will blackball your business. Exciting business opportunities that look like they will be your big breaks will disappear after you put in a lot of time and work.

If you expect it, you can avoid that feeling you get when your trust is betrayed. That sensation of having your legs sliced off at the knees or taking a cannonball to the stomach. You can also avoid big losses. Satan likes getting people to invest heavily in schemes that look good but disintegrate like mirages when they think they’re getting close.

If you know the world hates you, you can take such good things as the world offers you, without great risk. You can accept the little bribes and baits without sticking your neck out and going all in.

Satan wants you to keep jumping back on the treadmill. He wants you to think persistence is the key. It’s not. You’ll never be his favorite. You’ll never get the blue ribbon or the gold medal. Your tech startup will never make you a billionaire. Other people will get things you think you deserve. If you know you were not created to be honored and promoted by the world, you will learn to be happy with very good things God provides instead of the outrageous gifts Satan gives the Elon Musks, Jeff Bezoses, Barack Obamas, and Jay Z’s.

Eventually you will learn that the things you thought you wanted were not as good as the things you got.

In 2003, God gave me this: “Our preachers are antichrists.” I learned that by trying to serve preachers, but God reminded me after I quit.

When I belonged to churches, I was frustrated, because I wanted to do so much for people, but worthless preachers and hypocritical, conceited volunteers always shot me down and kept me on the bottom.

Sometimes I wished I could talk to people from the stage, so I could tell them what God had shown me. Things that had been extremely helpful.

At my last church, they let me speak for a few minutes. This was a place where a false prophet could hold the mike and yell all day with the pastor’s encouragement. When they handed me the mike, a horrible stench hit me. They never cleaned it! Perhaps a decade of dried and fresh spit belonging to dozens of people was in the sponge cover. The smell was like the worst bad breath you’ve ever smelled, because that’s what it was: a huge colony of pulsing, multiplying bad breath germs.

Being me, I said something like, “Wow, this thing really stinks!” I probably said they needed to clean it. They wanted me to hold it close to my mouth, but I wouldn’t do it. It was disgusting and probably dangerous. I’m sure I offended people, but they had it coming.

It’s astonishing to me that no one else ever said anything about the smell of a microphone. In my entire life, I have never seen anyone else mention it. Maybe it’s hard to criticize something you love and crave.

I know everyone who used that church’s mikes smelled that stench.

To me, this is a picture of getting something you think is good and then realizing it’s not.

I have been on stage a few times in my life, playing music, speaking, and acting. I don’t like it much. I’m not afraid of it. I have no fear at all of speaking; I don’t understand people who are scared of it. I just don’t like being on a stage. Talking to, or making music with, a few people you know is different. Being on a stage is a job. And if there are lights, you can barely see the people you’re talking to. It’s like you’re performing for the lights.

Making music on a stage is not much fun. The sound is too loud. There are cords everywhere.

I think that when I smelled that microphone, God was telling me I was more blessed than the people who had to hold mikes to their mouths for hours in order to make a living. I could talk to individuals without dealing with microphones, lights, and so on. I could choose the people I talked to instead of spraying throngs of hypocrites with information they had no interest in.

John the Baptist didn’t get a microphone. His father was a temple priest, so he was entitled to be a priest, too, but he ended up in the wilderness eating bugs and talking to people who were willing to walk out and listen to him. On the other hand, the honored religious officials who murdered Yeshua worked in the temple and had riches and glory.

What I have found is that God will look after me financially and otherwise, regardless of the demon-inspired hatred human beings feel for me. I didn’t get many of the prizes and honors I earned in life, but I live in a nice house in a wonderful county. I have no debts. I don’t work. My wife stays here and takes care of our baby, and if you tried to give her a career, she might punch you in the face. I have been able to make a bunch of overseas trips since 2020. My wife and I aren’t afraid to eat in restaurants from time to time.

I consider that abundance. I can feel that I’m well off even if I know someone else has thousands of times as much as I have, or that I don’t have as much as I could have had if I had done things differently.

I didn’t have to wreck my life or sell my soul to get here. God looked after me.

I have very few friends, but then most people who have a lot of friends actually have NO friends. I doubt Oprah has a single friend; she will never know unless she loses her fortune. I have a small number of quality friends. That’s very good. When I was a kid, my mother told me most people are lucky to have one real friend.

I don’t have a jet collection. I don’t have a Bentley or a Bugatti. I don’t own a villa on Laga di Como. Beautiful girls don’t run in and out of my home; they don’t have sex with me so I’ll cast them in movies. I’m not in charge of any armies. I don’t own a crown. I don’t have the stuff Satan gives his temporary favorites. But I wouldn’t know what to do with his gifts if I had them. They would be big, smelly microphones to me.

Get used to being cheated, but on the other hand, get used to being blessed behind the scenes and having a better life than any of the people who hate you. That’s what it all boils down to.

Pairs Nicely with Word Salad

I guess it’s time for another “boiling frog” post. Once again, I am struck by mankind’s general failure to comprehend the level of evil in the world.

Man’s most impressive quality, to me, is our seemingly-unlimited ability to get used to things and be content with situations that are objectively very bad. There are happy quadruple amputees. There were surely moderately happy prisoners in the Nazi death camps. This is just how people are. As things get worse for us, many of us establish new baselines.

You start out thinking happiness is a huge income, a beautiful family, good health, and a fine house. If you go broke unexpectedly, it changes: happiness is a beautiful family and good health. If you get a horrible disease, happiness is a beautiful family. If things get bad enough, happiness is getting to trade the wet, soggy refrigerator box you sleep in, alone, while waiting to die, for a dry one.

There was a time not that long ago when women weren’t supposed to show their ankles in public. There was a time when a bikini was considered scandalous. Now you can walk around naked in major US cities, and the police will back you up.

“On a Slow Boat to China” was once considered too risque to be used in a movie, but now children repeat a song a famous and likely illiterate slut wrote about her vagina, and a public high school held an assembly to let an even worse slut speak. The latter slut can’t complain about being called a slut, because she appears in a video for a song called “Slut me Out.”

Your kids probably know it by heart.

We have also become used to childish pettiness and sadism, even from people in positions of great political power.

Los Angeles is being torn up by the usual suspects right now. Our federal government is obeying the law, rounding up and deporting illegal aliens, and Californians as well as hostile foreigners are rioting. They have tried to kill feds and random individuals by slinging concrete through car windows. They have burned cars. They entered a federal building and destroyed vehicles. What is the press calling this dangerous, ominous uprising? “Peaceful.” Even Fox said it.

What does “peaceful” mean now? How many car-burnings, attempted murders, and government-building invasions does a public gathering have to have before we admit it’s not peaceful?

The governor of California, a failed presidential candidate, and a US representative are blaming the victims. Imagine this happening in 1980 or 2000.

Gavin Newsom claims Donald Trump is at fault, saying he is intentionally fomenting disorder. Like a battered wife who burns her husband’s English muffin, I guess. Kamala Harris also blames the government, of which she nearly gained control. A representative named Norma Torres told the feds, “Go the F___ home!” on the Internet!

American law enforcement officers should “go home,” but hostile foreigners in the process of committing felonies in our country should stay here?

We should be astonished by the state of our country, but we’re not. We have escalation fatigue. We’re used to things being bad, and we’re used to them getting worse.

The icing on the cake is that Kamala Harris nearly won the presidency. It shows that America is in terrible shape. She is the dumbest, most transparently dishonest, least charming candidate the Democrats have fielded in my lifetime, and she nearly beat the man who gave us the glorious years of 2017 through 2021, during which our nation at least had the illusion of recovery.

Since Trump won, conservatives have been strutting around like Mick Jagger doing his chicken dance, proclaiming the end of leftism and the permanent ascendancy of the right, but the truth is, we are still losing. Trump squeaked by; there was no landslide. We have tiny, fragile margins in Congress. Americans are becoming more cruel and childish. Yeshua is becoming even less popular. The truth is held in even more contempt than it was in 2020.

Christians are being pushed into smaller and smaller safe zones. It seems like we are headed for a scenario in which we have no books to read, no shows and movies to watch, and no music to listen to, in addition to all our other limitations.

In 2021, I started watching the TV show Clarkson’s Farm, in which British comedian Jeremy Clarkson tries to make a profit running a thousand-acre crop and livestock operation. I mean he tries to make a profit other than the pallets of cash Amazon provides for his efforts.

It’s an extremely funny show, and I can relate to some of it, having worked on my grandfather’s farms and now living on a sort of farm of my own.

The other day, I was watching, and Clarkson called Yeshua “JFC,” and by that I mean he used a course term for copulation as thought it were God’s middle name. I was disturbed. My wife, who was walking through the living room holding our son, was disturbed, although she didn’t mention it until later.

I sat there thinking, “Should I turn this off, or should I just accept this as a momentary bit of unpleasantness of a sort which is unavoidable in the world in which I now live? Will I be held accountable?”

Clarkson is very smart and very funny, but he’s also one of Earth’s most conspicuous and perversely proud fools. He has no interest in God, and he doesn’t know he and his family are cursed because of his choices. He is not a good role model for people who want to lead blessed lives and avoid hell. People who are successful from the long perspective.

My wife brought the JFC outburst up last night, and we talked about it, wondering what we should do. It’s not just about Clarkson. It’s about the culture of the entire world. Are we supposed to remain enganged, let ourselves be subjected to commonplace filth and blasphemy, and get over it? Are we supposed to get rid of Starlink, hole up like lepers, and have groceries passed over our front gate?

This must be what Israel was like during the periods when the Jews served Baal and other evil spirits, or when the Tribe of Benjamin was busy raping men in the street.

People say lots of vile things these days, as a matter of course. They say “holy s___.” You probably say it. You definitely associate with people who do. Have you ever thought about what it means? You’re saying feces are like God. Do you think he likes that? Do you think it will never affect your future?

Nonetheless, it’s considered acceptable. I have probably heard it said 50,000 times, and I have probably said it myself, although maybe not, since it always sounded stupid to me. I’ve heard Christians say it.

I’m glad “oh, my f___ing God” isn’t as popular. That one always makes me cringe.

Last night I asked my wife where we were supposed to go once America became too disgusting for us. This was the big sanctuary country for Christians. The place where persecution was mildest. It’s crumbling fast, so where do we go? Africa? There is poverty and boredom, but least African countries fight perversion and put Yeshua in their constitutions.

I don’t want to move to Africa, but it would really be something, walking around and going about our business in a country where anyone who persecutes Christians or criticizes prayer gets ripped into by the general public. It would be fantastic to live in a country where a perversion parade would be grounds for mass arrests, and where witches, though common, have to hide.

When I prophesy, God keeps saying he is ridding me of the ways of Satan. That is excellent news, but when God clears you of the customs and beliefs of Satan’s world, you necessarily become increasingly disgusted with Earth and more aware of what mankind is missing by insisting on doing things its own way. No matter how nice your life is here, you feel a stronger drive to go home. You crave God’s presence. You want the tribulation to start so reform can begin.

The earth is a toilet that hasn’t been flushed in a very long time.

I love the county where I live. I love it 10 times as much as I hate Miami, which is saying a great deal. I wish the whole country were like this place. I love Tennessee. I love Singapore. I love Switzerland. Why? Because I love places where people at least superficially resemble Christians.

The Swiss are conceited leftists who have no interest in God, but they are polite, responsible, accomplished people who treat each other well and refrain from violent crime. The most popular religion in Singapore is Buddhism, which came from Satan, but again, the people act a lot like Christians. Tennessee is full of actual Christians. Parts of it, anyway. Definitely not Memphis.

My feelings about these places stem from my desire to get away from America’s deteriorating ghetto/junior high culture. I want to live in a place of peace and prosperity, where people aren’t constantly putting their filthy ways before my face.

Even though I know Singapore and Switzerland aren’t Christian countries, I can’t help loving them irrationally, just because of their peoples’ outward resemblance to Christians.

I don’t know what kinds of adjustments we will have to make regarding things we expose our family to, but whatever they are, our resulting situation will not be an adequate substitute for the Messianic Age or heaven. In order to come as close as possible to feeling as though we have been moved to a better place, I think the best thing we can do is to soak in God’s presence as much as we can while we are stuck here among the children and savages.

Carnivorous Baby

They say kids should start eating solid food at 4 months. Or 6 months. It’s always like this when I look for answers about baby care. This source says that. That source says this. And they say everyone else is wrong.

Our son is a voracious feeder. My wife has had trouble keeping up recently because he feeds so much, and we don’t want to use formula. He started staring at our food and drooling. After asking an actual mother instead of websites designed to generate clicks, we decided to try giving him a little cereal, even though he’s not 4 months old yet. I thought he might eat a teaspoon or two.

Try two tablespoons. I could not believe it.

We’re inexperienced, so we blew it by giving him that much food. He started throwing up and having bowel pain, so we took him to the emergency room.

No, we didn’t! He ate it all, blew it right out the other end, and wanted more. The next day my wife gave him some avocado. The day after, baby food from the store. He got furious at her for feeding him too slowly. He wanted her to jam it in as fast as possible. We’ve tried several foods, and nothing bothers him.

This kid is so vigorous, it makes me nervous. He eats like he’s starving. He churns his little legs and tries to run on his back when he sees us. He screams with joy. He grabs my hand, traps it against his chest in a bear hug, and chews on it while growling like a Doberman.

He knows us from across the room. When we approach, he follows us with his eyes, returns our smiles, and squeals with happiness. He follows objects. He throws things, although not very accurately.

He is intense. He gets very quiet and stares when things go on around him. His attention span is better than mine. When I show him his plastic numbers and tell him what they are, I have to quit after maybe 15 minutes, but he wants to keep going.

I don’t know what to make of it. Every parent thinks his baby is a cross between Albert Einstein and Superman, and then they end up selling insurance or managing drugstores, so I try to be objective, but I can tell from the way other people talk about him that he is unusual.

I wonder if we pushed his development by showing him numbers, singing with him, exercising him, and spending a ton of time interacting with him. Is that possible? If so, is it good? I don’t want him to peak at 6 months. And it’s not like his life is a job. He has a few obligations already, but he’s not training for a decathlon or Jeopardy.

He’s not ahead in every way. He still hates being put on his stomach for more than about 90 seconds.

I wish we had had him sooner, but my wife lived in Africa. Imagine having a child 8,000 miles away, in a country where people don’t have it together. I would have been lucky to see him once every 6 weeks. He would barely have known me when he got here. If he’s precocious, though, it should take a little bit of the bite out of waiting for him to be born.

Today we had friends over. One saw a photo on my wall. My wife and me on Victoria Peak in Hong Kong. He asked if the location was Victoria Peak, and it startled me. He said he had worked for Open Doors, smuggling Bibles into China. He had been to Hong Kong many times.

We ended up looking at videos of the trips my wife and I made to Hong Kong and Singapore. Then after he left, we looked at our Europe trip. There my son was. A big lump in my wife’s belly. Holding our son, she watched the videos and told him he was in them.

What an adventure our marriage has been. We are so blessed. I hope God continues to build our son up and consider him his own.

How long will it continue, though? Looking at the photos, I noticed I had taken a lot of shots of roads, hallways, and sidewalks. I shot people who were leaving one place and moving to another. It made me think of the rapture. This world has gotten so filthy. People are so insane. How long will it be till we find ourselves on the way somewhere?

I hope things keep going as well for us until we are taken as they have gone so far.

Liberals Triggered

One benefit, if you can call it that, of the apocalypse is that the news is very interesting these days. Today, I read that certain types of machine guns are now legal throughout the US under federal, but not necessarily state, law. No approval process or federal tax stamp required. There’s an entertaining morning read.

The general rule is that the feds will not let you have a gun that left the factory capable of shooting full auto unless you pay for an enhanced background check, hand over $200 as an infringing discouragement tax, and agree to have your name on a federal list forever. This also applies to certain gun parts. In addition, your gun or part has to have been made before a certain date in 1986. This is more or less how it works, but it’s not a rigorous explanation.

There has been a lot of squabbling over certain gun parts made after the 1986 cutoff. One example is the bump stock. Another is the lightning link, which is a little piece of steel you put in an AR-platform gun to turn it into a machine gun. A guy is currently rotting in prison for selling a steel card featuring a picture of a lightning link that requires the user to cut it out and install it.

Another example: the forced-reset trigger or “FRT.” I don’t know exactly how these work because I DO NOT HAVE ONE, MR. ATF BLOG READER. I have seen people shooting them on Youtube, however, and it seems fair to me to say they turn AR’s into machine guns. They work very well, unlike bump stocks, which wobble around.

While they turn guns into machine guns for practical purposes, guns with FRT’s aren’t “machine guns” according to federal law’s definition. That’s what Pam Bondi now says, according to a federal lawsuit that was resolved yesterday.

A company called Rare Breed started making FRT’s, and the ATF got all pouty about it and went after them. They started telling customers IT WOULD BE A REALLY GOOD IDEA to give them their triggers because YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT MIGHT HAPPEN IF YOU DON’T COMPLY.

Far as I know, nobody has ever been charged with a crime for owning an FRT. Maybe some felons have. In any case, there are no news stories about FRT owners being charged en masse.

The ATF went after Rare Breed, but now that Bondi is in charge, we’re all friends, so you can keep your FRT and even order new ones.

I have always wanted a device like this, mainly because the ATF doesn’t want me to have it. Being told you can’t have something makes you crave it. I would love to have hand grenades and dynamite, even though I would be afraid to use them and even to have them in the house. If I had some, and Florida suddenly dropped its permitting laws and so on, I would lose interest in them right away.

Also, the bans seem unconstitutional to me.

Do I have a practical use for a machine gun? I don’t think I ever will. Some people obviously do. Some people live in Detroit, for example. I don’t think I’ll ever need one, but it would be neat just to have one.

If I had one, I would probably shoot it once and then put it away. It would be hard to watch money shooting out of my rifle barrel at that speed, and accurate shooting is way more interesting to me than just blowing stuff apart.

Is it legal for me to have an FRT now? Not in my opinion.

The federal FRT ban is now dead, but the most logical reading of Florida’s hysterical post-Stephen-Paddock anti-bump-stock statute is that FRT’s and all other devices that could make guns fire faster are illegal. If that is true, then such devices are even more illegal than the guns people pay an extra $200 to own, because you can’t pay $200 and receive an FRT permit. There is no such thing.

The maximum fire-enhancement-part penalties under Florida law are a $5000 fine and 5 years in the pen. Oddly, the state-imposed penalties for owning factory-made machine guns without ATF approval are much worse.

A bill undoing the restrictions has been introduced in the Florida legislature, but it’s not going anywhere right now.

So what impact will the new DOJ settlement have on the nation? Put simply, a whole lot of citizens are now legally entitled to own machine guns without paying huge sums of money or joining a federal registry that can be used later for purposes of targeting and confiscation.

You can say these guns aren’t machine guns if you want. You can cite federal law. The truth and the law are often in conflict.

To me, this seems like a tiny, malformed step toward enforcing the Constitution. It is enforcement of the spirit, not the letter.

When the Second Amendment was drafted, it used the term “militia.” While it did not state that militia membership was required in order to qualify people for 2A protection, it did imply that 2A applied to arms suitable for military use. In 2025, that means full auto. You don’t fight a war with semi-automatic rifles. A militia with semi-automatics would be a joke.

If we followed the Constitution, people would be allowed to buy machine guns without obstruction, as they were until 1934. Whether it’s a good idea for ordinary people to own machine guns is a separate issue, and in any case, that genie appears to be out of the bottle.

The playing field has changed a lot. Every little idiot in our ghettos now has a stolen Glock pistol with an extended magazine and an illegal switch that converts it to full auto. These switches are very easy to get. I could print one today. They’re not going to disappear from our streets. Good citizens, however, are still stuck with whatever the feds and their states allow. It’s an asymmetrical situation, and in areas that don’t permit FRT’s, it will probably get worse. In areas where they are allowed, FRT’s could do a lot to balance the scales and discourage criminals.

An FRT could be a lifesaver for a person who has a ranch by the Mexican border. Mexican criminals of the most worthless sort trespass on border ranches carrying machine guns.

FRT’s might also chill federal tyranny to some degree. James Madison made it clear that this was a vital purpose of the Second Amendment.

My guess is that a huge number of people who don’t already have FRT’s and were afraid to get them are about to buy them, as fast as they can be delivered.

What a country we have. Almost completely polarized. The right wing demonized by the left to the point where a big percentage of leftists would be murdering us in groups in the streets if they thought they could get away with it. To top it all off, we are now no longer able to control the proliferation of automatic weapons. Any kid in Compton can get a Glock switch for a few dollars, many, many good conservative people know how to modify semiautomatic rifles in an afternoon, and forced-reset triggers are now available to millions of people who were afraid to buy them last week. People are storing more ammunition than ever because of the Obama and covid shortages. The powder is dry. We’re just waiting for someone to light a match.

I support our right to own and carry guns, including machine guns, because I hate bullies. I hate those who torment the innocent, and I am not fond of their enablers in government. On the other hand, I am distressed to know that I live in a world where guns are needed because there is so much hate.

Christians know Yeshua will come for us, and we will be transported to his wedding, which will take 7 years while the people who remain on Earth slaughter each other and die from other causes. Then we will return, and there will be a millennium of peace, abundance, longevity, and good health. I doubt anyone will want a rifle during the millennium. I wish that were true now.

This world is disgusting. It is full of pain and unnecessary malevolence. My life is easy and pleasant, but I am still sick of this place because of the suffering and malice I see around me.

The other day I saw a story about a baby elephant that was killed by a vehicle. The mother was so heartbroken, she refused to leave the road for hours. For some reason, that disturbed me very deeply. I thought about the nature of a diseased planet where things like that happened.

A few days back, I went to Walgreen’s. I got out of my car and locked the door. Unexpectedly, this made me think about the way human beings treat each other. I was just going to a store to buy protein shakes to help my wife breastfeed my baby son, and I had to take miscreants into account on the way to the door. I live in a world where strangers are looking to hurt me all the time, for no reason.

I recently saw a video. Two young men, probably in their mid-teens, went to a modest house carrying guns. They opened a door from the patio. Someone inside screamed. There was shooting. One young man dropped like a stone, and his “friend” ran off while trying to pull a gun from his own pocket. The dead criminal was shot just after he turned to run.

Generally, you can’t shoot a criminal who is running away, but this one was ostensibly still armed, as was his companion, and there was no guarantee they wouldn’t turn and fire, so I have no sympathy for the one who was killed.

On the patio, there was a little plastic swing on a rope. A baby swing. There was a little plastic Jeep for a toddler to drive. These creatures saw those things and still chose to go in with weapons so they could steal…what? A wedding ring worth $75 on the street? A couple of 10-karat bracelets from Walmart?

I got so angry, I left a comment that was over the top. I said, “That little bastard got what he deserved.” I shouldn’t have called him a bastard, but other than that, I stand by what I said. He was despicable. He was worthless, by choice. A man can make himself worthless by choosing to be irredeemable. The Bible calls human beings worthless more than once. How can there be a world where young men can enter houses with guns and go after babies, tiny children, and women?

I hate this place. This world. I always say leading a peaceful Christian life here is like taking a luxury vacation in a miserable, revolting place like Mexico and being unable to return home. No matter how good things are for me and my family, there is devastation and failure all around us, and we can’t avoid witnessing it.

While I am here, I intend to go armed, and I fully support other peoples’ rights to fight off bullies. I support the death penalty, as God does. I support long prison sentences for cruel criminals.

If you need an automatic weapon because of your particular situation, I’m glad you can get it. I would rather see 50 vicious punks put in their graves than one innocent person become a victim.

The World is Full of Nothings

For some reason, two things are on my mind today. They seem related.

I am wondering what was wrong with my dad’s mother, to make her utterly indifferent to my sister and me. I do not understand how that could happen. I am also marveling at the people who think convenience abortion is anything but barbaric. In particular, I am amazed that anyone could sever the neck of a living baby or let a living baby die from cold, thirst, and hunger on a table in a hospital.

Before you raise children, you have a certain amount of concern for them, unless there is something seriously wrong with you. You want them to be protected and raised well. You want the people who raise them to introduce them to God so their entire lives are not preludes to abandonment and damnation. After you’ve had a child, your heartfelt concerns for children become stronger, because your personal stake in the welfare of that child is greater than your stake in your own welfare.

I am a selfish person by nature, but before my son was born, I saw to it he got excellent prenatal care. I took his mother to all sorts of expensive appointments. There were a lot of tests that probably were not necessary. We prayed for him, asking God to protect him from defects and stillbirth. I prayed for his mother. I spoke blessings over both of them. My biggest concern during this period was that something bad would happen to either of them.

Now that he’s here, we are always thinking about minimizing risks. Will he suffocate if he lies on his side? Is the temperature right to protect him from crib death? Is it safe to take into a store? An endless list of pitfalls to avoid.

When he sleeps on my lap, I poke him occasionally to make sure he’s alive.

With all that in mind, I can’t understand the inner workings of a heartless ape who could participate in cutting a baby’s spine or letting him die slowly while crying for his mother. It is beyond what I can comprehend.

I say “ape” because such people are apes. They are less than human. Perhaps I’m being unfair, though, because actual apes love their babies. These people are less than apes.

I’m not the most empathetic person alive, but if I had to witness the things these sub-apes do to babies, I would have lasting psychological damage, but they do their atrocities every day, just like cashiers go to Home Depot and ring up sales. It’s a job, like fixing plumbing or cutting trees. It means nothing to them.

Kermit Gosnell, the famous baby-murderer who went to prison because the murders he performed were so gruesome they stood out from a nationwide background of routine abortion-clinic atrocities, joked about his kills. He said one child whose spine he cut was so big, he could walk Gosnell to the bus stop.

I don’t get it. And I understand the people who shoot abortionists and bomb clinics. I wouldn’t do things like that, but if I were on a jury, I would not permit someone who did to be convicted.

There was a time when civilized countries executed baby-murderers in public. It’s too bad we stopped doing that. It shows how depraved and disconnected from God our world is. We should go back to hanging them in town squares, and we should confiscate their wealth and give it to people who adopt.

As for my dad’s mother, I am equally nonplussed.

When my older sister was born, no one from my dad’s family could be bothered to drive a few hours and visit. They didn’t want to see the baby. They didn’t want to help out. He had two married sisters as well as a mother, and they just weren’t interested.

Over the course of my life, I recall seeing exactly two gifts from my grandmother. One for my sister, and one for me. I don’t remember the year, but it would have been when I was between 6 and 8 years old. After that, zip. She never asked for pictures, either. She never called.

I would guess I saw her fewer than 10 times in my life, and both of us were fine with that. To me, she was a stranger. Why would a child want to visit a stranger? To her, I was nothing at all.

I just found out my grandmother died in 1991. I had forgotten. Ask me when my other dead relatives passed. Of course, I know.

When my wife and I see our son, we get emotional. We pick him up. We play with him. We make him smile. We speak blessings over him. We look forward to seeing him during brief separations. We take picture after picture. He sleeps on us. He burbles with joy while we give him showers.

How can you not want in on that when your son has a baby? It would be bizarre for a grandfather to be indifferent, but women enjoy babies much more than men, so how could a grandmother want nothing to do with a grandchild?

I have male friends who pester me for baby updates and photos. They’re not even relatives. They can’t wait to see my son. One wants to babysit and change his diapers. As for female friends, generally, these things go without saying. But my grandmother had no desire to see me or make any type of contribution to my upbringing.

I just realized something. There was never any discussion of staying at her place. How can that be? If you added up all the days I spent at my mother’s parents’ house, it would probably amount to over two years. It was assumed I would spend Christmas breaks and much of my summers there. As an adult, I could walk in whenever I wanted, take a bedroom, open the fridge, make myself food…didn’t need to ask. But I never stayed with my dad’s mother, and she never asked.

I guess some people are just incomplete. They are missing parts. My grandmother was not a complete person. She was just a shell.

One thing about heaven I look forward to is the absence of people who have no hearts. Everyone in heaven loves everyone else. No one is rejected or ignored.

I have no reason to think my dad’s parents, his sisters, or his dead brother-in-law will be there.

I believe God is helping us to be a better family. We have been blessed so much already, and we are rapidly making memories to make us forget the past. I believe God told me, “I am restoring the years the locust ate.” It certainly seems to be true.

I think I’ll put up some of our travel photos, without posting anything that shows our faces clearly. That rules out most of the best shots.

In one photo, you can see that our son came along.

Some people who have let us down just didn’t think much about us. Others have betrayed us because they couldn’t stand to see us have pleasant lives, and they wanted to take infantile comfort in the hope that other people would envy and admire them more than us. The plans of people who wanted the worst for us have turned out poorly.

People say living well is the best revenge, because it gives one’s enemies just as much pain as direct attacks. When we do well, it’s not revenge, because we don’t sit around thinking of ways to diminish other people. It’s just us, enjoying the good things God gives us.

Side Effects Looking a Lot Like Main Effects

I am not an anti-vaxxer. When Trump rushed vaccines to market in a demonstration of his extraordinary competence, I took one as soon as I could, not knowing it would later be banned because it caused fatal blood clots. I took 5 vaccines last year, for things like tetanus and the flu. I think vaccines are generally good. I only have concerns about vaccines reputable experts are concerned about. Like every single covid vaccine, for example.

My son has had something like 8 vaccines. I forget. I’m doing what is recommended, and I only apply three rules of my own: no covid shots, no mRNA, and no pincushion days in which he gets an extreme number of shots. I spread the shots out somewhat. The establishment claims there is no benefit to spreading vaccinations out, but it also says you should wear a mask on an airplane, where your chance of catching something is one in half a million. There is definitely no down side, and this is my son, not Anthony Fauci’s.

My covid rule is sound. I’m not sure any healthy person should ever have had a covid shot, but these days, I know that no one outside of high-risk groups should be injected. That excludes the young.

The vaccines unquestionably kill a certain number of people, young people are dying suddenly and inexplicably in unprecedented numbers, people who have decent credentials are concerned that the shots may cause cancer in some individuals, and we have learned that the mRNA shots were tainted from the start. On the other hand, low-risk people are extremely unlikely to have serious problems with covid. There is no good reason for them not to wait till the vaccine problems are eliminated beyond any dispute.

It appears the disease has become very mild. No one talks about it any more; we’re no longer scared, leftists nuts excluded. It also appears to be much less common than it once was, even though people have quit taking shots. I got it several times back when it was the hot new plague, but it has probably been two years since I’ve had any type of illness at all. Maybe longer. No covid. No colds. No flu. No nothing. I can’t remember the last time I was sick.

I just recalled something. About 16 months ago, beer started tasting off to me, and I thought I might have covid. But I didn’t get sick.

Covid is so unsensational these days, you can get covid and die from a gunshot wound, and they won’t even lie and call you a covid fatality. Like they would have a couple of years ago.

It seems pretty clear to me that many millions of people who contracted the flu and colds and so on were deliberately misdiagnosed as covid cases. I consider it a fact, because to believe otherwise would be to make unreasonable leaps of unsupported faith.

The flu ordinarily hits hundreds of millions of people per year, but the medical establishment would have us believe it nearly vanished during the covid years. The last sentence is not a conspiracy canard. Medical institutions that are hostile to conservatism publicly discuss the “mysterious” disappearance of influenza. You can see it on charts compiled by the government.

When covid was hot, the government made the mistake of publishing a PDF listing its diagnostic criteria. I downloaded it. Early on, there were no tests, and later, tests were very hard to come by, so guess what? Doctors were told that if patients had certain symptoms, they could be filed under covid. No tests required. The symptoms were consistent with the flu and other common respiratory disease.

For a long time, the vast majority of people were diagnosed without tests.

After tests became available, they were very unreliable. My wife and I traveled all over the world, and both of us caught covid on trips. We had to be tested before boarding planes. We always passed our tests and flew home sick. There was virtually no possibility anyone would be infected by us, staying abroad would have been extremely expensive, and I had an expensive, unoccupied home and two pets to look after.

When hundreds of millions of people were being tested over and over, and the tests were highly likely to result in false positives, of course there had to be many millions of false positives. Meanwhile, who was being tested for the flu? RSV? Pneumonia? Nobody. They almost never test for those things. Who gets a flu test? They just guess based on symptoms. So there was no real counterweight to offset false covid positives The false negatives could be offset to some degree by doctors who trusted symptoms enough to overrule test results.

If we gave two billion people tests for syphilis right now, and the tests gave false positives 20% of the time, we would have 400 million false positives. Coronavirus tests in the US alone have run into the billions.

Hospitals were paid a king’s ransom for every covid diagnosis. The payoffs could exceed a hundred grand for one patient. Covid diagnoses also bolstered the left’s hysterical covid propaganda, and the medical establishment unquestionably leans far to the left. They bolstered the power of leftist politicians who went so far as to put millions under house arrest. Politicians will support anything that gives them power. Finally, medical people were terrified of covid, just as people were terrified of AIDS before we found out it was just about impossible to get without sodomy or shooting up. There were powerful incentives to lie and boost the figures, and there were no negative consequences. In fact, society leaped on dissidents and whistleblowers and tore them apart.

The cowardly, intolerant, dishonest, greedy, selfish, cruel behavior of the human race during the pandemic stands out as one of the most disgraceful global phenomena ever to be recorded. We learned that ours is not a species with which you want to share a lifeboat.

Doctors admit there is no way, within the bounds of science, to explain the sudden disappearance of the flu. But there is a very plausible political explanation, and then there is Occam’s razor.

People who died from non-covid problems while suffering mild covid were called covid deaths. A local guy here was killed in a motorcycle crash, and his family got mad because he was labeled a covid death. Another man died from a heart attack and got listed. I’m sure many people who died from the flu, RSV, severe colds, pneumonia, bronchitis, strokes, all sorts of cardiac events, old age, and even car wrecks and muggings ended up on the covid list.

Yes, you can die from a cold, if you’re frail enough. It happens.

Having mild covid and dying from an unrelated cause used to be like dying in Chicago and then voting for Democrats. You were gone, you couldn’t fight back, but your name was still useful to the leftist machine. I’m surprised they didn’t claim Kobe Bryant for the covid list.

Maybe they did. How would we know? Maybe they sat down and entered numbers without bothering to provide identities and data.

To sum up, no coronavirus shots for my boy.

He had several shots last week, and yesterday, we made the mistake of having him vaccinated for rotavirus. This is a bug that causes something like norovirus, and it has killed babies through fever and dehydration.

I shouldn’t say we made a mistake, but we are experiencing consequences we did not expect, and we were not informed well in advance. The nice lady who dribbled the vaccine into our baby’s mouth said he might have diarrhea for a day or two. Given the usual state of his bowels, I’m not sure how we would tell the difference.

He was up most of last night. He had abdominal cramping. Got him up this morning, and he had a huge diaper blowout. Then more cramping. He spat up more than usual, so getting liquid into him was a chore.

“No big deal,” I thought, “How long can it last?” I checked. The answer: 7 days. Unless it lasts longer. In other words, no idea, except that it usually subsides in under a week.

Now my wife’s eyes are red. She hasn’t slept much at all. We are wondering how long this will last.

The rotavirus vaccines are interesting because they are not vaccines in the sense of the word the general public understands. When I think of vaccines, I think of shots that provide dead viruses or bits of virus DNA to stimulate the immune system to produce antibodies. Rotavirus vaccines are full of live viruses, so when you take the vaccine, you’re actually getting the disease. It’s milder than the form you would get if you sucked on a dirty ball at daycare, and it builds immunity, so it’s supposed to be worth it.

The viruses in the vaccine are weakened. I have no idea how you weaken a virus without killing it.

There is even better news: after your kid takes the vaccine, you can get rotavirus from him. It comes out in poop and spit. The vaccine lady told us not to kiss him on the mouth or we might get diarrhea. Neither of us comes from the kind of family where people kiss each other on the mouth or play spin the bottle with each other, so we figured we were safe. Not so. We have to be careful and wash our hands a lot.

Our son isn’t doing too bad. He seems a little tired from increased pooping. He is generally in good spirits.

It’s nice to see how he improves with age. As late as a week ago, he thought every inconvenience had to be met with top-volume screaming. I started to wonder if he was going to be that kid. The one no one but his parents can stand. Now things are getting better. I can tell he is trying not to cry.

He was having an unpleasant bowel movement this morning, and he restrained his cries. He even smiled at us while this was going on. I thought this was fantastic.

We live in a world where many adults live in a constant state of tantrum or tantrum readiness. It’s disgusting. They go off over nothing, and they can’t be placated because they don’t want to. They prefer the tantrum experience to normal life. They relish the screaming, vandalism, and violence. They look for reasons to start, and they reject efforts to calm them down. Calming down spoils their fun.

This is what happens when you enjoy tantrums more than getting along with people; when you look forward to having tantrums and you want them to last.

Emotional cultures produce this type of person. American blacks and Hispanics are notable for short tempers and tantrums in adults. It’s also a problem with many Southerners, although not as commonly. It’s worse among white trash; the type of people who steal each other’s yard tools. Italians also like screaming and yelling. They think being emotional is something to be proud of, when it’s really a major disgrace.

Containing your emotions is like using a toilet instead of filling your pants. If you can’t do it as an adult, you should be deeply ashamed. It doesn’t mean you have a big heart. It doesn’t mean you’re a free spirit. It means you’re a little closer to a monkey than everyone else.

Ding my door in a parking lot, and I will politely ask you to take responsibility. Ding the door of a person who thinks his emotions are always right, and he may have to be pulled off of you.

My son is developing a preference for self-restraint. What a relief. He won’t grow up like a family member of mine who thinks every slight is justification for taking cowardly revenge later. He won’t go through life like an ex-girlfriend who thinks she has to ruin your existence instead of moving on with life because you got smart and dumped her instead of fulfilling her shallow marital fantasies. He won’t want to join Antifa.

He won’t have to be handcuffed at an airport or Walmart because he has to hit everyone who won’t give him his way.

My sister the felon ran from a traffic stop and hit the cop who was talking to her because she has to have her way every second of her life. She can’t self-monitor or exercise any kind of restraint. My son is not headed that way.

I was concerned for him because he cried a lot, and it was partly because of my family history. My dad was somewhat sociopathic, and my sister is the full package. Both very abusive. Extremely selfish. Destructive to the people around them, not to mention themselves. My dad’s grandmother was a grudge-holding hellcat who ruled her husband’s house. My dad’s sister was a sociopath who beat her stepdaughter all the time for no reason. I thought there was some risk my son would inherit their problems.

Some people think nurture is everything and nature is nothing. They don’t think personality traits, talents, or intelligence run in families. Yeah, okay. Niels Bohr and his son both won Nobel Prizes, but okay. The Bernoulli family just happened to produce multiple great physicists and mathematicians. It was something in the water. Tall people have tall kids, but we’re not allowed to say low intelligence, anger problems, or poor impulse control run in families.

We are surrounded by demons we can’t see, and based on experience, many Christians believe some demons stick with families and spread and continue characteristic family curses like abnormal sexual desires, addictions, and even poverty. We know this is possible, because there were cursed families in the Bible.

I believe it’s true. I have often wondered if evil spirits are able to change the DNA of cursed families. They probably can. They are definitely able to affect the natural world. They cause diseases, so why shouldn’t they be able to code DNA for narcissism and malice? Why not perversion? Odd as it sounds, doctors say homosexuality, a curse that works against reproduction, runs in families.

We bless our son, out loud. I curse the spirits that want him. I tell him God will fill him with supernatural love, faith, peace, joy, revelation, and humility. I tell him he will be full of the Holy Spirit. I don’t want him to be like relatives who led destructive lives and harmed themselves and the people they should have loved and built up. I don’t want him to go to hell like my aunt.

As he changes and improves, our bond grows. As he screams less and gives us more positive feedback, we find we can spend more time interacting with him and less time trying to clean him and calm him down.

I started teaching him out of his crinkle books. These are washable fabric books full of pictures, and they make crinkly noises when babies play with them. We have one about farm animals. I told him we don’t like squirrels and we must shoot them on sight. I informed him that the pig was the king of animals, and I listed some of its many blessings. Ribs. Bacon. Pork rinds. Country ham. I told him horses make great jackets.

I don’t know how much of it he absorbed, but he followed right along as though he understood.

I hope the vaccine’s side effects vanish quickly. We were getting enough diaper blowouts before the vaccine. We don’t need any more. I want my son to be able to sleep. I don’t want him to be tormented by stomach cramps.

In two months, we get more vaccines. Before we do, I am going to do my own research. This time, we relied on the professionals, and we were caught flat-footed.

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This is glorious. Can it be real? Donald Trump has torn down Joe Biden’s covid page, which falsely claimed coronavirus came from a natural source. It has been replaced with a page containing the most up-to-date, scientifically-sound theory, which is that the virus was man-made and accidentally released by incompetent CCP scientists in Wuhan, China.

I know the world is crumbling, but it’s nice to get an occasional glimpse of what it would be if it were really turning around.

There’s a Person in There

It has only been 4 days since my last report on my son, but he seems to have changed a lot during that time.

When we brought him home, he was a jiggly ball of flesh that pooped and yelled. There was a little more to him than that, but not a whole lot more. He wasn’t totally incapable of thinking. He was smart enough to decide he liked bottles better than his mother. He did have a very limited number of modes, though. Angry mode. Hungry mode.

Actually, I think that covers it.

This month, everything changed. At first, we got glimmers of smiles. Now, he has periods of obvious, overwhelming happiness. This is nice, because in the beginning, he didn’t seem to have much in the way of positive emotions. He has also developed a very strong attachment to his mom.

I guess it makes sense that newborns aren’t the most positive people on Earth. It doesn’t do a newborn a great deal of good to tell the world he’s happy, but if he’s upset, everyone around him will try to fix his problem.

His negativity was a test of our patience. You want to be upbeat with your newborn, but it can be trying when you’re getting somewhere between zero and 4 hours of sleep a night and every time you interact with him, he screams as loud as he can, sometimes for quite a while. When the positivity starts to show up, you feel weight dropping off your shoulders. You realize how hard you were working, contributing virtually everything to the relationship and absorbing the very real pain of loud crying.

He screamed when he was hungry. He screamed when we changed him. He screamed when we bathed him. He screamed while he tried to poop. He screamed for other reasons we never figured out.

When a baby is screaming, you feel pressed to fix him, but often, you don’t succeed. Repeated failure leads to a feeling of powerlessness, like the feeling you get when you try to contact an airline for customer support. It’s discouraging, but you can’t quit.

At least with a baby, you know the problem isn’t that an entire industry is designed to cheat you.

Here’s an interesting thing I never thought about until this week: adults lose their voices, but babies don’t. They keep right on going. If I screamed as much as a baby, I’d lose my voice in an hour. How do they do it?

Earlier this week, we noticed that he was smiling a lot more than he had the week before. Yesterday and the day before, things really ramped up. Now he lights up with joy. His whole face shines with it. And we are finding out how to make it happen.

His favorite thing is the diaper game. You flop him onto the changing pad, and while he’s lying there, you take a new diaper and put it over his face. Then you pull it away. Then you put it back. Then you pull it away. He thinks this is the greatest activity there is. You put the diaper on a face that looks moderately happy, and when you pull it away, the smile is wide, the eyes are shining, and he is wiggling in ecstasy.

It also works with other objects, but right now, the diaper is king.

Yesterday, he started whacking his hanging toys in a much more vigorous, prolonged, and determined way. He must have gone half an hour the last time.

He has started trying to talk. It’s not impressive. He’s not ready to give elocution lessons. But it’s definitely an effort to speak. No words, obviously, but he is trying to express himself.

He thinks his mom is the greatest. She started spending more time with him in order to deal with some feeding issues, so they ended up lying in bed together a lot. He can’t get enough.

His new thing is the mom alarm. He sleeps next to her with one hand against her side to make sure she’s always there. If she breaks contact, he wakes up and and lets her know how he feels about it.

Their closeness has caused a problem. He wants to sleep with her all the time. I don’t always know what’s happening at night, because I conk out and sleep with a recently-developed dogged determination. I learned she has been letting him lie next to her all night.

Babies are not supposed to sleep in their parents’ beds. This is a new rule. New by my standards. They sometimes get crushed and suffocated. Also, adult beds are softer than baby beds, and it is believed the lack of support can cause crib death by making it harder for babies to breathe.

You’re not supposed to let babies sleep on their stomachs. You can’t even let them sleep on their sides. Because our son has been sleeping with Mom, he has gotten used to sleeping on his side. He also rolls onto his stomach to sleep.

I didn’t know this was happening, or I would have done something.

Now he hollers when we put him in the bassinet, and regardless of where he is, he may try to roll over. His mother wants to let him be, because moms spoil their kids. I have to be bad cop parent and put everything right. Now Mom is the parent who makes life cushy and cozy, and Dad is the guy who shows up to ruin everything.

We have to put him in the bassinet from now on, except when everyone is awake, and he is going to yell until he realizes he’s not going to get his way. Mom thinks it’s bad to let him yell. Dad knows it’s important for him to learn that yelling won’t always get him what he wants. He has to learn he can’t have everything his way all the time. Otherwise, he will sleep however he wants, and we could wake up childless one morning.

Mushy thinkers believe babies this young can’t be spoiled, but it’s very obvious they can, so I pay no attention to them. My son can’t be allowed to run the house. He can’t be encouraged in manipulating us.

When my sister was tiny, she used to tell adults off. She would put her hands on her hips and lay into them. The family thought it was funny, and they encouraged her. She became a hopeless brat and manipulator.

She always have to have her way. If you don’t do what she asks, she makes you miserable until you do, even if it’s something unimportant. No one can stand her. She has no real friends. Both of her parents said God should take her if she wasn’t going to change. She lost her law license, and she will never get it back. She has a felony conviction, as well as some felonies that were hushed up. She was disinherited more than once. That’s what can happen when you let your soft heart put your child in charge.

When a baby is very, very young, it’s important to get up and act when there is trouble, and sometimes its cries indicate real problems. This conditions you to get up and bounce around the house like a frantic pinball every time the baby isn’t happy. That mindset has to be recognized and destroyed. It’s not appropriate after the first few weeks. Eventually, your child has to get up and bounce around when YOU make noise. Your child has to fear you.

The “milestone” guidelines are not always helpful. They say a baby should not sleep on his back until he’s a year old. They say he should not sleep on his back until he’s at least 7 months old. They also say he should not sleep on his back until he can roll onto his stomach and back onto his back by himself. Who is right?

I think this kid will be rolling over both ways, at will, within a month. He is extremely strong and vigorous. His neck is like a steel spring. He kicks like a mule. The only thing preventing him from walking is his inability to balance.

He keeps exceeding expectations. I don’t know whether this is normal. I didn’t know it could happen. It must be a big blessing, but here we are, first-child parents, tabula rasa, and it’s one more challenge we have to figure out without much help.

What do we do when he is fully able to decide how he wants to sleep? We can’t stand next to the bassinet from dusk till dawn, turning him over repeatedly. Is it okay to tie his hands? No idea. If he can roll over, and he’s only 4 months old, should we let him do what he wants?

We have to find out.

Personally, I have doubts about the whole crib death approach. My best guess is that demons cause it, and medical science will never admit that. I have seen demons, Yeshua has visited me, and I have received miracles, so my outlook is different.

It’s very common for demons to attack people in their sleep. For some reason, demons love to stand beside beds or at the foot or head. It’s common for people to wake up and see them. I’ve seen a lot of them. My mother saw one. You probably know people who have seen them.

One thing they love is to shut off your air and paralyze you. When they do this, you may not be able to move, speak, or breathe. I have never been unable to breathe during these events, but I have had a very hard time speaking. Sometimes when these attacks occur, you will see demons in your dreams.

Many years ago, in a dream, I saw a beautiful young woman. I asked her who she was, and she said, “I’m a demon.” She pointed her right hand at me, and I could barely speak. I don’t remember how I worked it out. At least she told the truth.

I’ve told about the funniest demon visit I received. It happened here in this house. I woke up and saw a strange shape over the bed. I can’t recall exactly how it looked, and it wasn’t clearly defined, but I could tell it was feminine. It arched over the bed like a crane.

Demons don’t scare me at all, but I really hate them. When I saw this thing, I was furious. Not fully aware of what I was doing, I said, “Get out, BITCH.”

I doubt Yeshua ever said that to a demon.

I think crib death is caused by spirits that overcome weak and/or unprotected babies. I don’t think it could happen here. Since my wife and I have been together physically, spirits have not come to the bed.

This boy is developing fast, so I have to get on top of things. I thought I had a long time to prepare the house. Maybe I don’t. Kitchen knives, chemicals, tools…what if he starts getting into stuff next month?

It’s nice to see his systems come online, even if we’re not ready for all of it. He smiles when we change him. He likes his baths. He can see us and follow motion at least a couple of yards off. We’re getting a much-needed return on our investment. It will be great when everything is operational.

I just heard some squawking. Looks like someone is up and ready to give orders and present demands. Maybe if I stay in here just a little longer and stay really quiet, Mom will change him before I go check on him.