One More Shot at the Lost Continent

Before too long, my wife and I will find out whether Europe’s racist visa policies apply to African green card holders as well as Africans still in Africa.

We have traveled a lot since we found each other. Egypt, Turkey, Singapore, Ireland…destinations that were pleasant enough, yet which were all compromises. We have never been able to get to Europe.

I mean the real Europe, not Ireland. The place with the alps and the great food. Going to Ireland is like going to Boston, only the people are much nicer.

Well, they would have to be, though, wouldn’t they? Okay, they were nicer than most Americans, not just the interesting residents of urban Massachusetts.

Ireland seems like a pleasant place to live. The climate is gentle. It’s green, just like you would expect. The countryside is pretty. It’s fairly prosperous. It could conceivably be possible to hole up in the sticks and hide from the national psychosis of leftism. But the cities are kind of dumpy, the food is worse than it is here, the sweaters are thin and cheap, and when you’re there, you feel like actual Irish people are a tiny minority.

The Irish have abandoned Ireland. Why is that? They’re all here now. Not completely true, really. They’re all over the world, and they didn’t quit leaving after the potatoes came back. Is Ireland really that bad? Seemed fine to me.

I would not go back to Ireland, simply because it’s dull. There is really nothing there except the cliffs of Moher. Other European countries are different. Those alps. The fjords. Renaissance art. Medieval architecture. Magnificent food.

I wouldn’t go to England, either, and I suspect Ireland is just England without the sights.

Most of my ancestors are supposedly from England and Scotland, but I have no interest in seeing those places. I don’t understand people who want to “visit the old country” and who get all weepy about places maybe 3% of their ancestors came from. Let’s face it; if you have a name identified with a European country, and your people have been in the US over a hundred years, your genetic connection to its people is like a gram of coke that has been stepped on 10 times. If genes were paint, the country’s genes were white, and other countries’ genes were black, you would be charcoal gray.

My parents were under the impression we were mostly Scottish. I don’t think this is true, but anyway, they went to Scotland and looked up my dad’s ancestors, who are dead and were not able to receive him. They enjoyed bad food and mediocre scenery. On a rare and prized, not to mention expensive, foreign trip.

Forget that. Give me someone else’s ancestral homeland. Give me Switzerland, Austria, Italy, France, Germany, and possibly the Netherlands. Give me a place with great sights and wonderful food. Give me excellent weather and hotels that aren’t full of mold.

My parents could have had Paris. Back when it was safe, I mean.

England is full of furious Muslims now. That’s not for me. If I want to go to a country full of furious Muslims, I’ll visit Michigan. With a side hajj to Minneapolis.

London has worse crime than New York now, and like New York, it prevents decent people from carrying weapons. Should I take my wife to a place like that? How would I explain that decision to her in a London emergency room?

It’s true that England has great food now. It’s called curry. No one goes there to find the best spotted dick and toad in the hole.

I would have to rank Egypt at the bottom of our destinations. I would never go again unless I had a sudden desire to do another Nile cruise. The people were very nice everywhere, and sometimes the food was good. The cruise was relaxing and interesting. But Cairo is a slum, straight out. A real mess. And Egyptians throw their garbage everywhere.

The best restaurant we visited had dozens of dead flies decorating the windowsills.

Singapore was the real sleeper. I didn’t want to go at all, but now we have gone twice. We have a bizarre sensation of being at home there. Inexplicable.

We enjoyed Turkey, and the people were wonderful. Now Turkey is threatening to annihilate the Jews, so that takes some of the shine off of it. Ireland is antisemitic, but at least they’re not planning genocidal military action.

I don’t know if they can. Do they have an army? A real one, not the kind that blows up department stores?

We are giving Switzerland another shot because its nearest consulate is on the way to Tennessee. Before too terribly long, we intend to visit the Volunteer State to see if we should move there. Switzerland has a consulate in Atlanta. I figure we can get in and out of Atlanta fast enough to avoid being soiled too much.

Other countries would have required us to go to places like DC, New York, and Miami. If you see me in Miami, alert the police, because I have been kidnapped. Miserable, stinking hole. Thank you again, God, for getting me out.

We were going to shoot for a short trip to Switzerland, but given that this may be our last real trip for years, I decided to tack on some time in Italy. Rome, to be exact. I have been to Florence a couple of times, and it’s wonderful, but I think a person who has never been to Italy should probably pick Rome.

We don’t jam lots of destinations into short intervals. We are not the kind of people who would do three days in Florence and 4 days in Rome. If you haven’t been to a place for a reasonably long spell, you haven’t really been there. If you spend a day in Rome and then say you’ve seen it, you might as well say the same thing after walking through the airport between flights.

It has to be Rome or Florence. Not both.

We are planning to cut Switzerland up a little, but I think that’s different, because as beautiful as it is, you can’t stare at the mountains all that long without wanting to do something else. We expect to do a few days in Lucerne and a few in Wengen. Go up some mountains. Eat some plates of potatoes and cheese. Move on.

Will they let us in? No idea. The visa picture is supposed to be better for green card holders than Africans in Africa who are married to Americans, but we have been lied to before. Every time, now that I think of it. We don’t know what’s true and what isn’t.

I’m starting not to care. We liked Hong Kong and Singapore. We got a Taiwan visa quickly and easily. We haven’t seen America together. We don’t actually have to go to continental Europe. There are other places to go.

I want her to see the nice parts of Appalachia and maybe the Rockies. Utah is breathtaking. We can skip the entire Northeast, all major cities, and anything south of Orlando. No wacked-out West Coast destinations. Sliding around on other people’s feces is not for us.

Traveling with one or more kids is a future concern. I don’t know how people do it. I don’t know how they deal with kids on short trips to the grocery store. My wife doesn’t think overseas trips with children can be done. Not well. Maybe she’s right.

So where do you go in Tennessee? Gatlinburg, of course. Good old touristy Gatlinburg. I went there many times as a child. I saw people feed the bears through car windows. We walked up Clingman’s Dome. We went to Cherokee, and my mother took a picture of me with a bunch of guys who claimed to be Indians. Did braves really wear Chuck Taylors?

It’s touristy, but on the other hand, it has the best hotels, there is real food, and it’s a good base for exploration. And we are, in fact, tourists.

I haven’t seen Gatlinburg since the early 2000’s, I think. My family got together. A cabin was rented. Two aunts, my dad, my sister, me, and some cousins. My sister tortured the rest of us with her nasty unhousetrained Maltese and her constant unprovoked attacks on me. I think things will be better this time. In the recipe for an excellent vacation, or any other pleasant or even bearable experience, the secret can’t-miss ingredient is her absence.

Some people have a gift; the gift of making every occasion better by being elsewhere. This explains the rapture, the tribulation, heaven, and hell.

We are gearing up for all this stuff now. We hope to travel during the coming month.

If the Swiss let us down, I guess it will be the Far East and rural America for the foreseeable future. We have to do something for recreation until Yeshua gets us out of this world.

Maybe the Grass Really is Greener

Reader Tiomoid of Angle left a comment referring to a Youtube called Nomad Capitalist. The comment says, “Go Where You’re Treated Best.”

That’s really interesting.

I know nothing about the channel. I sort of skimmed the “Videos” page, and it looks like it’s a guy who tells people about countries where they might be better off than where they are. Maybe it’s aimed at Americans.

I’m writing to relax, so I have no plans to do unpleasant research that resembles work.

What I perceive, perhaps incorrectly, to be the thesis of the channel is interesting. Why stay where you’re not wanted? Why stay and be treated the way a lamprey treats a bass?

Today I had a revelation, which I posted here. The brief, generalized version is this: bad people want to stay close to good people, but good people want to get away from bad people.

To understand why this is true, you only have to refer back to the lamprey/bass simile. A bass would be way better off if every lamprey died right now, but lampreys would shrivel and die without fish to eat alive.

This is the kind of interaction Scott Adams had in mind when he made the remarks that changed his life.

He says he’s not a racist. He says he was being “hyperbolic.” I don’t know what’s true. I do know that people with a ghetto mindset are parasites, and the people who support them are hosts. This is also true of spoiled Antifa kids and most Palestinians.

He said people should stay the hell away from blacks. That’s ridiculous, but if he had said we should stay away from racist blacks who prey on everyone else, he would have been correct, and he should have extended the notion to other parasitic groups. For example, no honest person can say it’s smart to live near gypsies.

America the nation is parasitic now. I mean the government and cultural establishment. As policy, it torments, libels, censors, imprisons, beats, and robs people who are its biggest assets, in order to feed vicious common trash who happen to be of voting age. So why not leave?

Is it really that big a deal to be an American citizen? What do you really get?

1. Stability. Well, that is off the table now that civil war is approaching. And having a continuous line of government doesn’t mean individuals have stability. The USSR was around for a long time, and people there lived in terror and never knew when they might be whisked off to camps or places of execution. And lots of countries are stable.

2. Wealth. That sounds fine, but the fact that your country is wealthy doesn’t mean you are, and the fact that it’s poor doesn’t mean you’re poor. You can be wealthy anywhere, and it’s best to be wealthy in a place where half of the population isn’t trying to take what you have, claiming falsely that you stole it. One in six Swiss citizens are millionaires by American standards. That’s not bad. There are several countries where it is easier to get rich than it is in America. And maybe you’re already rich, so all you need is a country that won’t rob you.

3. Quality of life. This is a slippery quantity, because the people whose efforts to define it are generally not conservative, but still, the US is not at the top of most lists. Here’s an important part of quality of life: not having racist, anti-Christian, antisemitic, murderous terrorism-lovers constantly threatening to take what you have and turn you into a voiceless slave.

The weather in most of America is bad for a big part of the year. The food is not very good except for prime beef. The people in most areas are rude. We have a couple of large demographics, plus some small ones, that run around shooting, robbing, and raping everyone else plus each other. This is not paradise.

What if you travel and a foreign country locks you up or otherwise mistreats you? Uncle Sam will save you! No, he won’t. I mean, he might, but don’t count on it. Foreign prisons are full of American citizens. If you’re a famous lesbian who willfully committed a stupid crime with a severe penalty, you might get help, but in the process, a far better person might be left imprisoned in the foreign country for political reasons. Not that this has happened recently.

Is it heresy to criticize our food? No. Go to Europe or the Far East some day and look at the produce. We breed plants that taste bad but generate higher profits. They breed plants that taste fantastic, and often, they also look better than ours.

The produce in Singapore (where there is virtually no farmland) and Hong Kong (also almost no farmland) is magnificent. Wonder why we can’t do that.

Consider the Red Delicious apple. I loved them when I was a kid. Now they’re disgusting. I can’t understand why stores sell them. They bred the flavor out of them and made the texture sort of like a mixture of sand and wet styrofoam. They apparently ship quite well, however.

Our Granny Smith apples are like sour croquet balls. Can’t remember the last time I saw a ripe one. They’re great for constipation.

We have the Second Amendment! True, but then we need it more than many countries. I don’t think the Czechs and South Koreans worry too much about carjackings and home invasions.

One of the videos on Capitalist Nomad’s channel is titled “You Don’t Owe Your Country Anything.” Wow. In America, that’s blasphemy. But is it true? In many cases, yes.

I obey the law. Mostly. I cost the taxpayer virtually nothing. The police don’t come to my house three times a week to make me stop beating the putative mother of some of my illegitimate children. My kids aren’t in “the system” because I abandoned them. I don’t get affirmative action. I paid full tuition when I was in college. I don’t get student loans and then force better people to pay them off. The amount of tax I pay is really extraordinary because of the nature of my business. It’s fair to say I work for the government. When my grandfather died, my country confiscated enough wealth from his heirs, who had done nothing wrong, to make a person rich. When they brought the Selective Service back, I signed up, agreeing to give my life if they ordered me to. I wasn’t called to serve, but I would have. That’s not a small thing to offer.

Help me understand why I would think I owed America anything. I think our military people have done more for me than anyone except my parents and my mother’s parents, but is our military “America”? Most people have never served.

I do a lot for other people through taxes, but people don’t do anything for me unless I pay them. If I pay them, how can anyone say I owe them for what they’ve done for me?

I benefit from the taxes a certain percentage of Americans pay, but they benefit from mine, too. We use the same roads. I would say the rich benefit me more than anyone, because they pay way more than I do. Thank you, billionaires. Someone appreciates you.

Thank you for infrastructure. Thank you for hospitals and universities. Thank you for aircraft carriers. Thank you for all the things disgraceful politicians bought us with your confiscated money. Thank you for all the corporations that provide great stuff. Thank you for taking risks I won’t take and working harder than I want to.

I’m surrounded by people who cheat the rest of us every day as a matter of routine. Welfare scammers run into the tens of millions, at least. I live in a country where people with no conscience use EBT cards to buy liquor and cigarettes while better people buy their own ramen noodles.

There are whole neighborhoods that are nothing but wealth sinks. The government raises their kids. In prisons, it houses a huge fraction of the adult males and quite a lot of the females. It hands out food, medicine, phones, apartments and all sorts of other things. It pays for programs that help almost no one because almost no one wants to be helped.

Some people owe this country. I am not one of them. If I move somewhere else, America will be worse off, I will be better off, and the country I move to will be improved.

I’m assuming I can move to a decent location. That is still possible.

I don’t often hear people saying they don’t owe America anything, but it’s true for many of us.

I can understand immigrants saying it, provided they didn’t come here from places like Luxembourg or Japan.

Funny thing: I don’t even owe God. That sounds bizarre, but it’s true. He paid the debt I owed him. I don’t owe him for anything in the past, but I definitely have a son’s duty to serve him in the future. And I want to serve him. He’s wonderful, and serving him is a joy. Every good thing in my life came from him, and he gave it all in spite of my revolting attitude and slimy deeds.

I don’t claim America owes me, except that it has a duty to do what our stupid, cruel, clumsy government has promised in return for being a good and loyal citizen. I have done a lot for the citizenry, but I was forced to do most of it, and I don’t consider anyone to be indebted to me for it.

Saying I don’t owe America isn’t the same as saying I don’t love America. I do. Or, rather, I love what America was. I love what little vanishing bits of it still are. I can’t love the whole country. No one in his right mind can love Chicago or Newark. It would be like loving kidney stones.

I suppose I’ve written enough. I have unwound. I don’t know whether I have guessed correctly about Capitalist Nomad’s content. Maybe tomorrow I’ll actually watch a video.

We Yearn to Breathe Free

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her preference actually makes some sense.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chabad is not affiliated with Israel or the IDF.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Has Anyone Seen my 56 Million?

The other day, I was confused about some things somewhat-conservative actor Tom Selleck said, and I wrote about it. He lives on a 63-acre avocado farm in California, and at the age of 79, after a very successful acting career (for a conservative), he says he may have to sell his farm in order to finance a pleasant old age.

Thomas Magnum, the eighties pinup man, is 79. About as old as Biden. Can you believe it? He’s not in the same boat, though. Biden looks like his father or even grandfather. I wonder how old Higgins is. I’ll check. The actor who played him would be 91 today. Zeus and Apollo have been dead since no later than 1995.

I looked up his taxes, and I found out he pays about a thousand dollars per acre per year, which is bad, but not shocking. My dad’s home near Miami had a tax bill not far from half that high one year, and it’s a merely somewhat above average home on half an acre. Thank God that place is gone. What a horrible area. Living in that miserable place is bad enough, but then they force you to pay an amount equal to a living wage in exchange for the privilege of suffering. I can’t understand the people who bought that house.

I wondered how Selleck could be worried about his finances given the money he has made, the value of his property (about $12 million), and the fact that he will almost certainly die within 15 years. His kids are grown. Even a reverse mortgage should keep him up in fine style, and surely he has assets other than his home.

Well, someone in Hollywood got mad at Selleck and criticized him for complaining. This person says he was paid $56 million over the last 14 years for his work on a CBS series. Maybe I’m easily impressed, but that seems like a lot of money to me.

Unless he has a drug addiction or a gambling problem, he should have been able to pocket over $20 million, even in California, even after paying his agent. That’s just the last 14 years. Doesn’t include Magnum, P.I., his movies, or his ad work.

I don’t know, man. I’m starting to wonder about this guy.

Maybe he doesn’t realize he will be dead by 2040. He has already exceeded the average American life expectancy, and he is about 7″ above average height. Tall people don’t live as long as short people. If he can support himself for 15 years, he’s okay.

I remember telling my dad he needed to get professional help with his weight, and he would always say his grandfather lived to be 100. That was true, but his grandfather didn’t drink and weighed about 140 pounds. My dad started to lose it noticeably at about 82, and he died in assisted living when he was not far into his 88th year, at the age of 87. His older sister had the same grandfather, and she died at 84. She was huge.

My mother’s father didn’t think realistically about age, either. He rented a farm to a 68-year-old man with the provision that the man could stay as long as he lived. When he was questioned about this, he said, “That old man can’t live long.” My grandfather was 72.

I think I’m pretty realistic about being old. When I think about taking up a new pastime, I think, “I’ll be dead before I get anywhere with it.” I have thought about planting trees here, but barring the rapture, they will still be small and useless when I die. When I work in the yard and I get tired, I go in the house, leaving branches and leaves and whatever on the ground if I have to. I’m not going to die for yard work. Heat exhaustion is something old people can’t play with.

When I put heavy things on high shelves, I wonder if I’ll be strong enough to take them down if I ever need them. I take that into account.

Regarding Selleck, maybe he has spent a lot of money enjoying life. Maybe he has put millions in trust for his two grown kids, where he and his wife can’t get it. I certainly hope he has arranged for his kids to be rich without work. That’s what you’re supposed to do. You’re not supposed to stuff yourself like a turkey and then die poor.

If every generation in a family has to start with nothing, it’s a stupid family. Inheritance is supposed to help people not to have to have the same problems their ancestors did.

We don’t force new generations to come up with their own languages, writing, and science. We don’t burn all the books every 20 years. We treasure and protect these things and do our best to pass them on. No one ever says, proudly, “No one gave me electrical engineering and medicine. I figured it out for myself!” But fools love to say, “I’m a self-made man!” Like it’s great that their parents and ancestors were also fools.

Money is no different from other good things. It should be passed along, and so should the ability to make and handle money.

Inheritance is one of the big differences between advanced cultures and backward cultures that amounted to nothing. Africans and American Indians didn’t preserve knowledge through writing. They didn’t build things that lasted so their descendants could use them. They didn’t amass wealth and pass it on. They managed to go millennia without developing technology. As a result, they ended up living like cave men while people in other places had running water and calculus. They died from diseases that can be prevented by wearing shoes and boiling water. When advanced people showed up where they were, they were running around just about naked, and they didn’t have things like chairs. They were worse than children.

The wealthy people who didn’t have to work to get wealth make up a tiny percentage of Americans. That’s disgraceful. The grandchildren of most wealthy people have to build their own wealth, and many of them have nothing. If your grandchildren end up worse off than you, what was the purpose of making yourself rich? Was it just to make your own life better?

Americans are hypocrites. They really hate heirs, but nearly all of them want their children to be heirs. We love making fun of wealthy people who have problems, but we all want to be wealthy.

Wealth is good. It is completely good. It has no bad qualities. Christians have given it a bad name, and that’s ridiculous. Saying wealth is bad is like saying health is bad. Good looks are bad. Nice weather is bad. It’s idiotic. God himself says wealth is good. In the Bible, he promises it to people who please him. Would he reward people he likes with a curse? Of course not. Wealth is only a curse when you make it a curse. Your nature is the problem.

Giving heirs things is very good. Spoiling them is not. Two different things. Wealth can’t spoil anyone. We all know or know of rich heirs who are not spoiled, and prisons and poor ghettos are full of the most spoiled people in America.

I certainly hope the Sellecks have set their kids up.

What if he gave most of his earnings to charity, and he hasn’t said anything? That would be better than wasting it on yachting vacations, Hermes, and Balenciaga.

Looking around, I see the web says Selleck has had other homes. In 2016, he was featured in Architectural Digest, a magazine devoted to showcasing homes owned by extremely self-indulgent people with sick fringe values. The article says he had an 1800-square-foot apartment in Los Angeles, and he covered the walls with expensive paneling. He and his wife brought in very, very expensive professionals to fix the place up. They spared no expense.

They will never get that money back. Most of it is not an investment. Spending tons of money decorating a house generally will not pay off. The furniture will be removed, and the kind of people who buy fancy homes will want to remove a lot of what was done and replace it.

I fixed up a house and sold it, and it was a terrible idea. If I had sold it as-is, I would be a lot better off today. I sold another one with problems, and it was a much smarter decision. House flippers only make good money when they get good renovation work, cheap. Most of us aren’t in their shoes. Contractors generally treat their clients badly, costing them huge sums of money and wasting valuable months. If you want to live in a torn-up house and be your own general contractor, it’s different, but Tom Selleck wouldn’t do that.

In the article, he speaks lovingly of a table in the apartment, saying it used to be used for slaughtering pigs. If your grandfather made a table, I can understand why you would love it, but the pig story sounds exactly like what a designer would say in order to get you to make a sucker purchase.

“In this very chair, Vin Diesel read the script for Fast & Furious 6.”

Selleck lived in Hawaii for a long time. That’s expensive. Everything except pineapples and sand has to be brought in on boats or planes. I don’t know how many homes he had there, but one is pretty nice. The address is 4161 Akulikuli Terrace, in Honolulu. You can see a video of it below.

Does he still have the L.A. place? If so, he is paying the state serious money.

Even if, by some unforeseen fluke, I become extremely wealthy, I will never have a home in Architectural Digest, nor will I ever pay a decorator. I made a decision. I decided my home would be usable. We expect to have kids. We will have guests. I have a parrot. We can’t have really, really nice things, and I don’t want them anyway. Things have to serve me. I can’t stand serving things. If I can’t sit on a couch without taking a shower first, I don’t want it.

We will have pretty good furniture. We will make a pretty good effort to make the downstairs look pretty good. Upstairs, I have a fairly cheap couch and a recliner no woman would own, and only one of the beds has a headboard.

I have a Ford and a Dodge. Both were bought used. The newest one is 9 years old. I may replace the Ford with a Toyota because the Ford I have has a reputation for turning into a money pit after a certain number of miles, but if I buy a Toyota, it will be at least a year old.

I think we will continue to live very well by global standards, even without Selleck’s earning potential, and I don’t think we will have to move. If you have a nice house, good food, good medical care, and somewhat nice stuff, you are rich as far as I’m concerned.

It looks like Tom Selleck has spending problems, not money problems.

My grandfather may have been worth what Selleck is now, in terms of buying power, and he lived in a nice, comfortable house that was kept up perfectly. He drove Buicks from his car dealership, bought at cost. He wore his pickup trucks out. He got his clothes from department stores in Lexington, Kentucky. He didn’t have a wine cellar or a tennis court. I would guess he never flew first class in his life.

He didn’t worry that he might have to move out of his house. When his television went out, my grandmother told the people at the store to bring another one, dismissing their concerns about her ability to pay, saying, “We’ve got enough money to burn a wet mule.”

He was generous with other people. He helped his children when they didn’t deserve it or show him gratitude. He didn’t spend his money on decorators so he wouldn’t feel bad when shallow rich people showed up for expensive parties he never threw. He left some money and land behind when he died, and so did his wife.

I think he handled his money very well. He was probably the only person in Eastern Kentucky who subscribed to The Value Line, and read and understood it, in the 1950’s.

My dad bought a lot of real estate, and he did some investing. He could not match my grandfather, but he wasn’t like some of his partners, who had to spend every dime they got before they got it. He never talked about having to move out of his house, and he eventually became very concerned about making sure what he had went to me smoothly. He could have had a new Mercedes every year, but he chose to fund his future, and that of his descendants, instead.

Any couple that can’t find a way to live well until they die, on what must amount to at least $30 million, is doing something wrong. With that kind of wealth, you can take two very expensive vacations per year, wear excellent clothing, drive very nice cars, and live on an avocado farm. You should be able to get excellent help when you become feeble. I’m sure of it. Maybe you can’t have three or four mansions, and you might have to shop at normal malls sometimes, but lots of movie stars shop at malls that don’t have Neiman-Marcus or Bulgari.

Selleck will be dead by 2040. His wife will be dead by 2055, tops. They’ll both be fine if they show even below-average restraint.

Ostentation is sinful. Spending to be accepted by trashy rich people is wrong. It stirs up resentment among people who have less. It makes you think you’re better than you are. It lands you among empty, disgusting people. It sucks money away from better causes. You can have an incredibly cushy life without making a spectacle of yourself and spending in order to obey your insecurity.

Ostentation is partly aggression. It’s a way of insulting others. The Bible says that if you mock the poor, you insult God himself.

I just happened to run into an article about Antonio Brown, who was apparently an NFL player. The article says his career earnings were about $80 million. Wikipedia says he signed contracts amounting to well over $100 million, and that doesn’t include earnings off the field. Now his net worth is negative, and his earning potential is not much better.

He’s not a smart guy, so he can’t run out and get another high-paying job. Football was all he could do, at least for more than $20 an hour. It’s a horrific story. Imagine making $80 million in about 12 years, losing all of it, and then having to think about how long it would take to make that much money with your other abilities. In his case, it’s about 2000 years. That is the actual figure.

He’s a friend of Kanye West. West has a very shaky sports agency firm called Donda Sports, and Brown is the nominal president. Brown appears to be nearly illiterate, though, so it’s not clear whether he can actually perform any duties. Maybe West will pay him a lot anyway. But if he does, Brown will lose it. It won’t help.

I understand the desire to spend money on fun things, and I have certainly wasted money, but you have to have some sense of proportion. If your net worth is two million dollars, and the Lamborghini you want costs $1.5 million, it doesn’t mean you can afford it.

I can waste money, but I don’t understand insane spending.

Give me a billion dollars, and I’ll get my pickup truck fixed up really well, I’ll move to a nice rural property in Tennessee, and I’ll probably get some better heavy equipment, used. A bigger tractor and an excavator. I’ll have trouble-free appliances. If I travel long distances, I’ll definitely go business class, because long flights in coach are very unpleasant. I’ll get survival supplies and a generator. Nice stuff for the wife, but not too nice. Can’t think of much else.

Prime steaks more often. I would do that. Beef is a luxury in Biden’s world. I would probably get a lawn service. I would want an air-conditioned workshop for sure. That’s like $45,000. I’d quit buying all forms of insurance not required by law.

I really like the shoes and shorts I wear. I like Hanes T-shirts for about $3 each. I could see getting a good horsehide jacket not designed for motorcycling.

No boats. Been there. No planes. No vacation homes. Absolutely no club memberships. No jewelry for me. Jewelry on men is effeminate. No servants except maybe a maid to come in weekly. No ridiculous assistants to stand between me and commoners. No bodyguards. No entourage. No public giving of any kind. It’s ostentation.

I’ll tell you what. A comfortable home in Tennessee, all my bills paid, good food, good vehicles, zero concerns when buying things like tires and refrigerators…what else could you want?

Then I could invite Architectural Digest in to photograph my synthetic area rug from Lowe’s and the good downstairs recliner.

I’m not great with money, but I don’t see myself auctioning off private planes and gold chains to pay my creditors. I should be able to avoid getting a real job. I hope so. If I ever have to sell this farm, it will most likely be because I am too old to maintain it personally.

I hope I continue to improve, increasing my income and net worth while having the privilege of giving effectively to people who need help.

It’s Working

Here’s to traditional marriage. I think my wife will agree.

Today I decided to make a big step on making this property my own. Sometimes I’m intimidated because I can’t help thinking the original owners knew what they were doing when they made bad landscaping decisions. I am getting over that. Today I killed a magnolia and two bottlebrush trees.

It seems like I fix just about everything these days. My tractor’s poorly-situated steering cylinder started gushing oil, so I took it out, modified the frame (drilled and painted a big hole) to make it easier to remove next time, and took it to a hydraulic place for a rebuild. I would have rebuilt it myself, but there were problems identifying the parts. Now I have the numbers, because they were on the receipt.

I managed to bust the engine’s front cover while putting the cylinder back in, necessitating an expensive visit to the dealer, but at least I know how to deal with the cylinder in the future. And I painted up the new cover I bought, so it looks a lot better than the old one.

The house’s original owner had some horrible brush tines that were held on with chains and chunks of wood. I cut them in pieces and turned them into a quick-attach fork which is a thousand times as good. Welding, cutting, painting. Got it all done without help. No one else has a fork like this one. It’s fantastic.

I put a Pat’s quick attach set on my 3-point hitch, and it made it easy to switch attachments. Totally superior to the heavy, overpriced adaptors other people still, for unknown reasons, buy. I stuck a ballast box on the hitch, so now I have a compact ballast and a great brush fork to work together.

Today I went out and ripped my bottlebrush trees out because they were sick and planted two feet from my workshop. You never plant anything two feet from a building. Not even shrubs. The trees threatened to beat up the eaves during storms, and if they had been big trees, their roots would have threatened the foundation. They were in the way. Planting them was a bad choice. I pulled one out pretty easily with a chain and strap. The other one took more work, but now it’s on the burn pile. I plan to replace them with this: dirt. Or maybe two small shrubs with roots at least three feet out.

The magnolia was maybe 15 feet from the workshop and 10 feet from a water oak. It had to go. It had no future. It could have fallen on the shop. Every tree that poses a falling hazard is on the way out.

I am terrible at felling trees because I rarely have to do it. To gain practice, I tried to lean the magnolia away from the shop. When it started to move, I ran away like Sir Robin facing the Mad Chicken of Bristol, and the tree decided to stop falling. I decided brute force was the answer, as it so often is, so I chained it to the tractor and pulled it over.

I cut it in pieces and got rid of it, and now the cattle are snacking on magnolia leaves. I put glyphosate concentrate on the stumps.

When I came back in the house for breaks and to shower, my wife stared at me. I think she was starting to appreciate what I do around here. I was soaked in sweat. I had a mashed fingernail from a farm jack. I had a stick in my hair.

I had done maybe $1000 worth of work in around 3 hours. I base that on absurd quotes I’ve received for tree work. It was definitely work, but I enjoyed it. I have good tools, and my skills are adequate.

When I started taking off my work clothes, I was going to put them in the laundry room, but she told me to leave them where they were and let her know when I wanted food.

I showered, drew myself a Yard Boss Lager, put on my new glasses, sat in my new recliner, and relaxed.

My wife doesn’t know how to weld, cut metal, paint, fix chainsaws, cut trees, take a tractor apart, or operate tractor hydraulics. She can’t cut a tree. She has no idea who to call for a burn permit. She doesn’t know what one is. These things are not her problems. On the other hand, I don’t do laundry any more. I don’t wash dishes. I open drawers, and my ironed clothes are there. I open cupboards and see clean dishes.

It’s a pretty good system. God knew what he was doing when he designed it.

I got up yesterday, prayed, ate, dealt with a business lease for a rental property, fixed a cabinet door my wife had leaned on…I did all sorts of stuff. I can handle things that would leave metrosexual modern husbands in tears. I can drive a manual transmission. I can shoot, and it doesn’t bother me to kill cute animals that cause problems. I can make ammunition. I own taps and dies.

In return, my wife looks after wife stuff. She doesn’t compete with me and try to find an edge every day. She leaves the toilet seat up.

Satan has turned modern marriage into an endless competition. A series of selfish negotiations. It was never supposed to be like that. We were supposed to know and love our roles.

When you drive a car, the engine doesn’t decide it wants to be an air conditioner. The battery doesn’t decide it wants to be a transmission. The parts of a family should work together the same way.

Interestingly, in news related to old guys with rural properties, I have read that Tom Selleck is afraid he will have to sell his farm.

Tom Selleck must surely have a lot of money. He was in a very successful TV series 40 years ago, and he made a number of okay movies. He did a bunch of Hallmark movies. He has been in a CBS series for the last 14 years.

He lives on an avocado farm in Ventura County, California. Reports about the size of the farm vary, but it’s around 60 acres. He says he may have to sell if his series is cancelled, in order to have a good lifestyle until he dies.

How can that be true?

I looked it up. You can find the address on the web. He pays about $65,000 per year in property taxes. He may live another 15 years, so let’s say $1.5 million yet to pay, with numerical increases for inflation. Shouldn’t he be able to pay that?

His home is an avocado farm. Aren’t avocados expensive? Shouldn’t there be at least six figures of net income from that?

I decided to find out what John Travolta pays in my county. It’s about $27,000 per year. He has a smaller property, but on the other hand, the improvements are nuts. An incredible mansion that connects to a system of runways. He has carports with jets in them, at his house! One jet is a commercial airliner QANTAS used to own.

Travolta pays no state income tax, unless he has property in other states. He pays no county or city income tax. His property tax, during the same period during which Selleck will pay $1.5 million plus increases, will be about $400,000 with increases.

He can have all the guns he wants. He can keep an AK-47 in his car. If he shoots a criminal, our sheriff, Billy Woods, will probably take him to Dairy Queen.

He doesn’t have rolling blackouts. The power is always on.

I wonder what Tom Selleck is paying California, his county, and his municipality. And why is he there? He’s supposed to be conservative. My guess is that his wife won’t let him move. Or maybe he’s a RINO.

He could be in Tennessee or Florida right now. Or Idaho. Or Wyoming.

Zillow says his property is worth about $12 million, and Zillow is usually pretty accurate. Zillow thinks Travolta’s house is worth $3.5 million, which is very modest considering his wealth. The acreage is about a third of Selleck’s, which is still pretty good for a non-agricultural property.

If you don’t need runways, I guarantee you, you can get 60 acres here for what Travolta’s house is worth. With an agricultural exemption, your taxes will be around $16,000 per year.

You can have horses, cattle, goats, sheep, ostriches, emus, donkeys, or just about anything else you want. What you can’t have is California.

Selleck should not have a mortgage right now. Unless something is wrong, his home is paid for. He should be able to sell his ranch, pocket maybe $9,000,000 after capital gains, move to a better state, buy a better farm, and have well over $5,000,000 in additional retirement funds. He should have something saved up from his work. He should have the maximum Social Security benefit.

Maybe he just spends too much. When you’re 79, and you’re worried about your future, you ought to be able to rein in your spending and survive on a net worth of over $12 million. Even if all he has is a reverse mortgage, he should be able to fly business class to nice places every year and eat anything he wants.

If he moves in next door, I’ll be happy to help him and his wife find the best local barbecue.

God Hates Displays of Wealth

It’s impossible to trust the government (shocking) when it comes to reports about the prosperity of the American people. For example, it’s possible to have a low official unemployment number when an unusually large number of people are unemployed.

A few years ago, I came up with the Baldor Bench Grinder Index. You go to Ebay and search for used Baldor bench grinders.

When times are hard, people sell their tools. Back during the Clinton forced-minority loan housing crisis, I got a barely-used 19″ Shop Fox band saw for way less than it ordinarily cost. I got a Powermatic 66 table saw with a big extension, Biesemeyer fence, and a punch of pricey blades for $500. Both tools came from cabinetry shops.

When things improve, you don’t see a lot of used Baldor bench grinders on Ebay.

Yesterday, I drove by an auction site. They sell trucks and heavy equipment. I visited a couple of years ago, and the lot was full of junk no intelligent person would buy. Yesterday, there was a lot more stuff. I saw two very nice-looking track loaders (similar to skid steers) right out front.

Today I checked the Baldor Bench Grinder Index. There are a lot of grinders on the market. Maybe 60% more than there were a couple of years ago.

Is the index reliable? I don’t know. The business of selling things online has changed. Craigslist punched Ebay in the gut, and Facebook Marketplace is stomping Craigslist. Seems to me that even if the grinder index had a somewhat low number, it would mean things were not going well. The other sites are taking sales away from Ebay.

Today I saw Charlie Kirk say that 4 years ago, a person needed an income of $59000 to buy a house, and now it’s $106000, meaning you might be excluded even if you have a high-paying profession, such as working at Burger King for $25 per hour.

He said big companies are swallowing up houses and renting them out, driving the purchase prices up. He said lowering interest rates makes things worse by making it easier for corporations to buy homes, decreasing the supply and jacking up prices. I don’t know if that makes any sense, because it also makes it easier for the rest of us to buy homes. Anyway, a lot of young people think they will never own homes.

The difficulty of buying homes and food under Biden, which is indisputable, is a phenomenon we used to call “poverty.” If you had a hard time buying things, we said you were “poor.” Affluence is becoming less common, and poverty is on the rise.

Americans are becoming poor. That’s the short version.

When I was a kid, I heard the term “rich Americans” all the time. When my family visited Europe, the people seemed poor and also short and spindly. Now Americans are descending the ladder of wealth, in terms of net worth. We passed Switzerland, which is number one, per capita. Our GDP per capita is far below Ireland’s, if you can believe it.

I think we are hiding the pain through denial and credit. I sometimes go to fast food joints, where I can expect to pay $13-$25 for a low-quality meal, and I often see a lot of cars in front of them. My county is not wealthy, and I know the people who keep spending on fast food generally can’t afford it. They must be pumping up their credit card balances because they can’t make themselves accept the lower standard of living their incomes now support.

I checked, and credit card debt is now at an all-time high. Adjusted for inflation, the only higher figure was reached in 2008, and we all remember what that was like. Deflation. Prime beef for $7 per pound, because no one could afford it. Shuttered businesses.

I am terrified of debt, so I stay away from it. If I die tomorrow, some credit card companies get a few grand, and that’s it. I don’t know how people can stand lying in bed at night thinking about debt mountains that will kill their estates and leave their heirs with nothing.

On rare occasions, my wife thinks I’m cheap because I won’t pay for something I think is ridiculous, like a Vuitton purse. She always comes to her senses later. She has visited 6 countries with me over 4 years. I don’t expect her to get a job. I try to supply her with more than she needs. She knows this. She has moments when she loses perspective, but she snaps out of it fast.

Lately, God has been teaching me about the evils of ostentation. I believe it’s sinful. I think it turns God against people.

Since purses have already been mentioned, I’ll use them to illustrate the point. A good, durable, classic purse that will last 20 years starts at maybe $300. A $500 purse can be a very good investment. A $2000 purse with little Vuitton symbols all over it is different. It won’t last any longer, and the only thing the extra $1500 gets you is the ability to impress shallow people and hurt the feelings of the poor, who are already humiliated enough.

When I buy boots, I don’t buy $65 Chinese disposables from Rural King. They will hurt my feet, let water in, and fail in less than a year. On the other hand, I don’t spend $1500 on custom-made boots from Oregon. I don’t need them, and I don’t get a good return on the investment. I’ll spend $140-$250 to get something that will last years and do a great job. Very often, $250 boots sell for over a hundred dollars less on Amazon. I have boots I bought over 20 years ago.

Often, buying good, expensive things ends up costing less than buying cheap things. I understand that. And trying to save money has caused me a huge amount of unnecessary pain. But you will never see me in a $500 Gucci baseball cap unless someone puts it on my corpse.

A friend of mine has a diesel Mercedes SUV. I thought he got it because he liked diesels, but now I think he drives it partly for status.

The car has been a nightmare to own. I hate it. It had a persistent limp mode problem for maybe two years. To replace the battery, you have to cut the carpeting or remove the passenger seat. It has cheaply-made engine parts that fail routinely, and they are very expensive to buy. Working on it is pure hell.

I have a Ford and a Dodge. I think they’re both fantastic. Reliable, comfortable, and common, so everyone knows how to fix them, and parts are everywhere. I never asked myself whether my wife would be impressed when she saw it. She was supposed to be impressed with me and the way I treated her, not a machine. But a big percentage of American women–this is incomprehensible to me–are put off by great men in ordinary cars. Incredibly, there are millions of women in American who will have sex with you just because you have a high-end car. That’s worse than being a whore. A whore gets paid.

My friend has an Iphone, which he hates. I asked him why he got it. He said he got it because women like them. I can’t figure out how it feels to think that way. If women started saying they were insanely excited by men in a certain $3 shirt from Tractor Supply, I wouldn’t buy one.

My wife likes Land Rovers. She will never have one if I have to pay for it. They’re unreliable. They cost a fortune. The insurance is high. They only exist to impress people who don’t matter.

My car is now 9 years old. It has fewer than 75,000 miles on it. It has no rust. The interior is good. I may drive it until I die. It has antilock brakes, a bunch of airbags, climate control, and comfortable seats. It was made before spy technology made it possible for the government to shut cars down and helped insurance companies find out how people drove.

What else do I need?

I’m building up her jewelry collection. A woman has to have jewelry. I get her tasteful pieces that look great, but I will never jeopardize our future by buying a ruby the size of a lima bean. Apart from the cost, over-the-top jewelry makes women look shallow. A lot of it makes them look ghetto.

God has given us extraordinary blessings. We have a nice house in a secluded area far from the Satanic lefist and Islamist mobs. Away from the constant parade of murderous, entitled sexual perverts. We have enough wealth. We have good food and clothing. We don’t have to go to work and bend the knee to a system designed to crush Christians.

He didn’t give us these things because we were good people who deserved it. He let himself be tortured to death so he could show his love by giving us all this in spite of the fact that we are failures. If we show off and make other people feel bad, and if we want them to admire us for receiving charity in return for our histories of vileness, then we are provoking God to take it all away and give us what we deserve.

There are tens of millions of Americans out there spending money they have not earned, along with crippling interest, in order to make other people (sincere Kardashian fans and influence-worshipers) think they’re bigger deals than they are. These are the same people who go on Facebook and post photos of their cars and dream vacations. They are the same people who post glowing remarks about their perfect families while they are having screaming fights in front of their kids or losing children to homosexuality and drugs.

I don’t understand the social media liars. Everyone who knows them knows about their failures, and they talk.

I used to go to church with a deacon named Manny. He called himself an architect, and he called his business and architecture and engineering firm. He has never been to college. He’s committing crimes by pretending to be a licensed professional. If he ever tries to design anything, he could get someone killed.

His wife used to post family photos and say how wonderful their lives were. Meanwhile, she texted a friend of mine and said her life was a living hell and she had to get away from Manny.

My wife knows a model from Zambia. She lives in the USA. She posts photos of her expensive things, like $30,000 purses. This is a common thing in Africa, as it is among ghetto people here. Bragging is considered acceptable, and people who do it also make fun of the poor people who comment.

My wife says she just found out this woman is a whore. Are the purses real? Well, she lied about herself, so she’ll lie about a purse. What about the cars? Anyone can stand next to someone else’s car in a picture. Ghetto people do it all the time. Same people who get a hundred singles and one hundred-dollar bill, put the big bill on the top, and fan the whole stack out in pictures so it looks like they have $10,000.

I don’t think it’s evil to drive a nice mid-priced car through a slum. It’s not evil to have a big house as long as it’s not a nouveau-riche status symbol tarted up with things like a helipad. I think it’s fine to go on vacation and use a good camera to take pictures in a poor country. But God surely hates showing off, which is gratuitous. You have to watch it.

I hope that if we really are looking at a permanently lowered American standard of living, God spares his children and helps us to be generous and quiet. With all the other spirits, nations, and people out there trying to destroy our prosperity, the last thing we need is to join them.

I’m going to make a special effort to toe the line and get my wife to do the same.

“How Dare You Try to Shore up Our Faltering Economies?”

The wife and I won’t be going to Europe any time soon.

As noted in many earlier posts, the Europeans do not like it when Africans try to visit. Admittedly, Africans have a bad history as tourists, because people from West Africa tend to stay in Europe hiding from the law until they die, but Europeans respond to the threat in pretty stupid ways. Instead of looking at each case individually, they accept applications, throw them in the trash as soon as the applicants leave their offices, wait a few days or weeks while only pretending to look at the applications, and then tell the applicants they were rejected for this or that unfounded reason.

How do I know this? Funny you should ask.

My wife has made several applications for visas for the Schengen Area, which covers most of the EU. Every application was rejected. This includes the visa the lying Italians assured her we would get if she paid for tickets in advance.

Every single time she applied, they took her fingerprints as part of the pretend-examination farce.

Schengen countries are required by law to hold onto all biometric information supplied by visa applicants for 59 months, regardless of whether the applications are accepted or rejected. As noted above, she was forced to supply fingerprints at least 5 times. This can’t happen if the applications are actually entered into the system, to which all Schengen countries are hooked up.

They didn’t enter her biometric information in their system, so it was definitely discarded, so they didn’t actually examine her applications. But they pretended to. Italy, Sweden, Germany, Czechia, Austria…they all lied.

If they lied to my wife, they lie to just about everyone. They make exceptions for celebrities, politicians, some scholars who are invited, and probably some very rich people. Everyone else presumably gets the fraudulent process, and all the countries collect fees for doing nothing and lying to people, most of whom are of modest means.

All of her rejected efforts were filed while she lived in Africa, before she had a green card, so we figured things would get easier once she got here. Turns out there are still problems. It may be that the Schengen countries are more likely to accept permanent residents. I don’t know. Even if a green card helps, these people do such a bad job of providing information, it’s still very hard to get an application filed.

We decided to try applying to Greece, which has an consulate less than a light year away, unlike the other European countries a person might actually want to visit (i.e. not Latvia, Estonia, Albania…). It was important to us to use a consulate that was not far off, because they seriously require people to show up for interviews. They haven’t heard of Zoom.

The Greeks have a website full of information which, if relied on by applicants, is sure to get their applications rejected. If you email them with questions, they tell you nothing. We did get a call from some nice lady who worked there, and that was wonderful, but it was a one-time thing, and it was not enough.

They require a bunch of things. Travel medical insurance in excess of $30,000. Flight and hotel information. The original passport. A passport photo. Proof of financial ability to cover the trip. Three bank statements. An itinerary.

Our application was in trouble from the time we left the house, because my wife failed to check and make sure she brought her passport. That’s on us. Her, I mean. I could not believe it. But we had no chance anyway, because they required things the website did not mention.

I did offer to bring the passport the following morning, which was a reasonable offer they should have taken.

They wanted proof of my income, in the form of W-2’s. I don’t have a job, thankyouJesusthankyouJesusthankyouJesus. Okay, they wanted proof I received Social Security. I’m not that old yet. Okay, they wanted my last three tax returns. This was not on their site. They just dropped it on us when we got there. Of course, I just pulled two returns out of one ear and the remaining one out of a top hat I had brought with me. Yeah.

I actually had to ask them whether they needed entire returns. They were not going to tell me. I didn’t want to bring in a stack of papers. Oh, no, they said. Just the first two pages. It’s beyond belief I had to ask.

They also said assets don’t matter. So if you put 10 billion dollars in your travel checking account, it doesn’t prove you can pay for a trip to Greece and back. But if you earn $2000 per month at Walmart, you’re clearly wealthy enough to travel.

They want bank statements, but they say they don’t help. What are they for?

I’m not going to tell the world what I have, but I can show a consulate I have way more in terms of liquid assets than anyone would need to finance three weeks in the second world. If I didn’t, I could not be paying for foreign trips.

Does not matter.

Incidentally, this means you can’t go to Europe during a given year until you file your taxes. If you file an extension, you can’t get a visa until the return is filed. If you think you’re going to go to Europe, make sure you file before you apply, or get an appointment before April 15.

The amazing thing about all this is that you can put whatever you want on a tax return and give it to the consulate. You can take Turbotax and create a bogus return in an hour. Creating fake bank and brokerage statements is way harder.

I doubt you can get in trouble here in the US for falsifying an application for a foreign visa. The US doesn’t care about other countries’ immigration laws, and I don’t think the elements of criminal fraud would be satisfied due to the lack of monetary damages. Also, tax returns are confidential, so foreigners should be unable to verify their contents. I should claim to be a famous rapper and submit returns saying I made half a billion every year.

Floyd Mayweather supposedly took a $27 million check from a fight and put it in his checking account. Supposedly, he does not invest, so he has no regular income. If he were a green card holder from Kenya, he could never go to Europe. But if he were a green card holder from Kenya with $5000 in his checking account and a job managing a Papa John’s, he would have a shot.

Regarding our air travel plans, they said I could not just show up with something I had written, to prove we had flights. That was confusing, because I had supplied them with printouts from Orbitz, proving we had paid in advance for flights to and from Europe. These tickets cost something like a grand more than nonrefundable tickets, but I knew what I was up against when I bought them, so I spent the extra money.

Before the process started, they warned us not to actually buy tickets in advance. They said they just needed reservations. That mystified me, because reservations are things that have not existed for maybe 40 years. You either buy a ticket, or you have nothing.

In the past, other Schengeners have accepted “dummy tickets,” which are worthless tickets fabricated by travel agents. I thought actual tickets would be better than dummy tickets, which are clearly fraudulent by their very nature.

I paid for our hotels and rental units in advance, too. I thought that would impress them. Paid for, not just reserved.

I could not understand the consulate lady’s objections, so I kept questioning her in hopes of doing things right the next time. Finally, she gave me an explanation I understood, and which could possibly be correct, although I’ll bet it’s not.

She said the problem was with our INTERNAL flights. I had not booked flights between countries in Europe, thinking that PAID hotel bills would make it pretty clear we would be in various places at certain times. She said they needed to see the flights in order to show how long we would be in each country.

When she said I had just written down whatever I wanted, she was referring to the itinerary I drafted. Her objection made no sense at all. Our paid flights were documented by Orbitz receipts, and in the itinerary, I made no claims at all. I said we hadn’t chosen flights yet, assuming it was obvious we did not intend to walk across Europe in a couple of hours.

You can see how crazy the concern about internal flights is. If I have a hotel room booked in Greece on the morning of the 23rd, and I have another hotel room booked in Germany on the night of the 23rd, obviously, I will be in Greece in the morning and Germany in the evening, because I don’t want to lose hundreds and hundreds of dollars. Obvious, obvious, obvious. Whether I choose to use a train, a plane, a hot air balloon, or a camel to make the move doesn’t matter.

Well, it mattered to her.

A hotel booking is much stronger than a plane ticket. I can buy a ticket from Athens to Zurich any time I want. They’re abundant. I can cancel. I can rebook. No problem. Hotels don’t work like that. The supply of good hotels dries up fast, so once you get one you like, you do whatever you can to hold onto your booking. You are married to it. But try and tell the Europeans–the professionals who evaluate visa applications for a living–that.

I bought us medical insurance from American Express. I thought this company’s reputation was unimpeachable. The consulate told us it was no good because it did not expressly say “valid throughout the Schengen Area” on the documentation I gave them.

That blew my mind. How many visas has Greece processed? Millions. And they want tourist money, because their economy can’t survive without it. They should know a lot by now. We are not the first people who have used American Express. It should be very, very obvious that if American Express provides TRAVEL insurance to an AMERICAN and his PERMANENT RESIDENT wife, it covers them while they TRAVEL. Where do most Americans go when they travel overseas? EUROPE. They should know this by now.

I get it; they’re not Americans. But they live and work here, they know what American Express is, and as experienced consulate workers, they ought to know what American Express travel insurance is. If not, they should let you use your phone to print out additional information at the consulate instead of sending you home to try again in 6 months, by which time you will have given up or gone somewhere much nicer than Greece.

If I had bought bogus insurance through a fringe company like Heymondo, it would have cost much less, the documents would have assured that it covered us everywhere in Europe, and if we had ever presented a claim, it would have been denied, because Heymondo doesn’t pay claims. But Greece would have taken it. Other countries have. Worthless insurance costing $11 would have worked, but $41 insurance from the most respected travel company in the history of the universe was presumed ineffective.

I should not have to struggle to get a visa for my wife. We are well off. We have clean records. She has a green card. We live on a wonderful property in a wonderful county, so we don’t want to live in a depressing apartment in Athens or Rome. We have been to 6 foreign countries, and we returned home on time in every case. We did our best to follow the rules, and I’m a lawyer. If I can’t get it right, what chance do most people have?

We brought information they didn’t ask for on the website. I thought I was displaying exemplary caution. Our international driving permits. My passport. My driver’s license. My wife’s Zambian ID card and driver’s license. Our Global Entry cards.

When they saw my wife’s superfluous stuff, they told us they didn’t want it. They seemed to think we brought it because we were stupid or didn’t understand English, but we were just trying to be prepared. Then they started asking me for things they didn’t ask for in advance!

The people at the consulate really tried to be helpful, as far as I could tell. But their website is horrible, and they didn’t explain things well in person, either. I’m still not positive we could get to Greece, or even get an application accepted, this year if we decided to try again.

I have canceled all our tickets and reservations. Greece can kiss thousands and thousands of my dollars goodbye, during a relatively slow time when they could use the money. I wanted to give it to them. I wanted to see Greece again. I looked forward to the people. I remember the Greeks as very pleasant, with the exception of one creepy guy who used a braless girl in a tight dress to try to get me to go to his bar.

Tough self-made luck for Greece. I can’t go through this again for a second-tier destination. They will probably find other reasons to reject us, because they can’t get it together well enough to help us give them what they want.

If I’m going to suffer like this and risk losing months of travel opportunities every time, I’m going to shoot for the best destination there is: Switzerland. Forget Greece, which is good, but not great. Forget all the other nice-but-not-that-nice Schengens. Forget Sweden. Forget Belgium. Forget Poland and Hungary. Forget England, which I have never wanted to visit anyway. I don’t have time to waste. We’ll drive six hours to Atlanta, where the nearest consulate is, we’ll stay in a hotel, and we’ll file a visa application there. Then we’ll visit Tennessee, because my wife wants to see it.

I really like the Greeks, but let’s face it: the Swiss are on another level. If there is a way to do things right, the Swiss will do it. They make Germans look like Mexicans.

Ouch. That was harsh of me.

They won’t tell us to buy tickets and then turn out to be lying, like the Italians. They won’t give us incomplete and incomprehensible information, like the Greeks. Their explanations will be easily comprehended by two intelligent people with 4 college degrees, including two law degrees.

They’ll probably even file my wife’s application instead of throwing it out immediately.

I told my wife I would never have to divorce her. If I get tired of her, all I have to do is drive to the airport and fly to Europe, Japan, Israel, or just about anywhere else people actually want to go, without a visa. There is no way she’ll be able to follow me, ever. I’ll be able to take the kids. They’ll be Americans.

Applying for visas for Africans is like asking strangers if you can mail them your poop.

Maybe we can make it in the fall, by which time the wife could be pregnant and the size of a house. Great for hiking in the alps.

Oh, well. There’s always Yellowstone Park.

In case anyone else wants to try getting a Greek visa, let me point out a hazard. People on the web say they give you an approval or disapproval at the appointment. Not true, at least for my wife (African…hmm). They told us they needed two weeks.

We knew it could take 15 days for the visa to arrive, but we thought we would know the answer right away. Not even close to true. If we had scheduled the trip later, just when the hordes of drunken, spoiled, rude Chinese and American tourists will start to pour in, we would have had a chance, but these days, you don’t go to Europe in the summer unless you have no choice. Europe is overrun in the summer.

If I could stand crowds, we’d live within two hundred yards of our neighbors.

When you deal with a Schengen country, you have to have lots of stuff booked in advance. Here is something consulates do not understand: hotels give you a certain amount of time to cancel each booking and get a refund, and unless you plan a trip a very (unrealistically) long time in advance, the time to cancel will pass not long after your visa appointment.

If you have a problem at the appointment, you may not get your visa before you have to pay for your bookings or cancel them. If you cancel them, the Schengeners will reject your application because you canceled. They’ll find out, because they pull weasel tricks like that. If you don’t cancel, you’re betting thousands of dollars on getting a positive outcome from known flakes, which no one but an imbecile would do.

They don’t care if you lose a million dollars. Means nothing to them. They will cancel you without warning, and they will not help you make it right in time to fix the problem.

The Greeks said they could put us on a waitlist for a canceled appointment, and there was some chance we could still make it. No way. We had cut it close already. It was nice of them to make the effort.

If I were to try to plan the same trip again, it would have to be for this fall. It would take me a week of staring at the computer. I would have to spend maybe $10,000 on bookings. I’d get an appointment in June or early July. Then they would say no by early- or mid-July, and I’d have to start over, meaning we couldn’t go to Europe until the following May, unless we wanted to freeze under skies the color of mud. I’d have to go through the miserable process of making sure all my money was refunded, and the hotels and airline would take their sweet time.

It just doesn’t work. Not for a place like Athens. I can risk it for Lucerne, though.

If you do what I’m doing, you get two chances per year. You can try to travel in late spring, or you can try to go in the fall. After you blow those chances, you are done. If you want to go in spring, realistically, you should ask for your appointment in November, and you will get an appointment in February. If you want to go in the fall, ask no later than May, and they will see you some time in July.

The Schengeners make things too hard.

Maybe it’s time to try Japan and Taiwan. Those are good possibilities. There is literally nowhere I want to go in this hemisphere, outside of the US. I don’t want to be bombarded with even more Spanish, see cultural and historical sights of near-zero merit, eat second-rate amoeba-laden food from peasant cuisines, drink water that gives me diarrhea and rectal bleeding, and have poor Indians try to sell me crude, tasteless blankets I wouldn’t use to cover vomit stains on the backseat of a ’74 Pinto.

My wife and I were a car ride away from Chichen Itza, and neither of us were willing to go. Not only was I unwilling to pay to go; I would have paid at least a hundred dollars for each of us to be excused from going.

If it were across the street, sure, but wasting a whole day to sweat in the jungle and see where savages cut children’s hearts out? No, thanks. I’ll see it on Youtube, or, more likely, I won’t. It ain’t Versailles, kids. Nothing beats Europe, and that includes what we have here in the US.

I think I’ll look into Taiwan and Japan tomorrow. Can’t hurt.

Spend Big, Pack Big

My wife and I are not planning to travel right away, but I am still obsessed with planning a trip that could materialize later this year. Today’s gut-wrenching decision: carry-on or checked bag?

When we went to Mexico, expecting to stay two days, we took a big checked bag and one small backpack. The low-budget airline we took charged about the same amount for checked bags and carry-ons, and we figured they could manage not to lose our luggage on a nonstop flight, so this is the strategy we chose. It worked.

Other than that, we have always taken at least one big bag each, one backpack for electronics and valuables, and maybe some other small bags. It has worked well for us most of the time.

The only times we had problems, we were part of the chains of failure.

On a trip back from somewhere or other, I failed to collect my checked bag at JFK and take it through customs. I thought it was checked all the way through. The airline brought it to me a day or two later. No big deal.

On a trip back from the mediocre destination known as Ireland, Air France and Aer Lingus stole my wife’s checked bag. They and Heymondo, our crooked insurer, refused to pay. The bag turned up months later, missing several hundred dollars’ worth of possessions, which we had to replace at our own expense. The bag itself was ruined, because, you know, it’s impossible to store a sturdy hard-sided bag on a shelf for several months without ripping it apart. Bags I leave in my closets fly apart all the time.

We checked the bag at a kiosk in Dublin. She had an Aer Lingus flight to France, an Air France flight to Johannesburg, and an Airlink flight to Lusaka. The kiosk printed us a bag tag for Paris. As a result, the airlines took the bag to Paris and left it there.

Not running airlines personally, we didn’t know the airline had made an error. We had this idea that they had huge global computer networks that routed bags to their correct destinations based on passenger names, originating flights, confirmation numbers, and common sense. We didn’t know the final destination had to appear on the tag.

The airlines do this so often, there is a name for it: “short-tagging.”

The airlines screwed up, but if we had been more seasoned and more adept at catching their disgraceful, inexcusable mistakes, we would have gotten the tag fixed in Dublin.

The part where they and the insurer all lied to us for months was not our fault at all and not foreseeable. That’s on them.

Having had these experiences, we have been considering learning to cram all our stuff into carry-ons. Carry-on bags are positively chic now. If you check a big bag, people make fun of you, as though you’re some kind of rube because you don’t want to wear the same pants 8 days in a row.

Pro-carry-on arguments sounded so smart to me, I ordered a really nice carry-on, and it arrived today. I think I’m going to send it back without opening it. This very week, I wrote a piece listing my reasons for wanting a smaller bag. Since then, some things have occurred to me. I’m not saying I was WRONG about anything, because that could never happen. Merely that I may not have been totally 100% correct.

I told MY truth.

1. The rate of truly lost bags is somewhere below 1 in 200. The vast majority of “lost” bags are merely delayed a day or two.

2. You don’t actually have to fill a checked bag with things you can’t stand to lose, and you can put clean underwear and socks in your pockets when you fly, enabling you to survive until your bag arrives.

3. If you take a big bag, you have a place to put things you buy while traveling. If you take a carry-on, you’re going to sit on it and put it in a hydraulic press and do whatever else you have to do to get as much junk as possible into it before you leave. You will not be able to jam souvenirs into it.

4. If you check a big bag, you never have the common problem of suffering with small luggage and also having to check your tiny bag at the last minute because the airline didn’t plan.

5. With a big bag, you can go a week or more without doing laundry. Laundry is expensive, and doing laundry in a bathtub is no fun. People who use small bags often wear things over and over, which is gross.

6. People complain about the time it takes to collect a checked bag. This is silly. If losing 30 minutes is that big a deal, your vacation is too short, and you will lose your mind when you get to customs and immigration, not to mention the lines at places like the Vatican and the Acropolis. Disney World will make you wish for death.

7. Travel is about memories, and if there are no pictures or videos, it never happened. Good camera gear is a lot better than your Iphone. If you have a checked bag, you have more options for carrying things like extra lenses and remote mike sets. These things take up room, and you won’t want to check them. The more junk goes in your checked bag, the more camera gear can go in your backpack or an extra carry-on. If you don’t have a remote mike set, and there is any wind at all when you shoot, and the camera is over a foot away from whoever you’re shooting, no one will be able to hear anything you or your companions say, and you may say very important things. “WHUMP WHUFF WHUMP WHUFF WHUFF love you WHUMP WHUFF WHUMP live without you WHUMP WHUMP WHUMP marry me and make me the happiest WHUFF WHUFF WHUFFITY WHUMP.” Is that what you want to hear 50 years later?

8. I saw a guy complain about moving around with big bags. I have traveled with a huge rollaboard and a backpack that weighed around 20 pounds. No problem. You only have to move your own luggage when you’re between vehicles. Cars have trunks. Buses and trains have racks. Moving your own bags is good for you, and it will help you gain less weight on your trips. Lifting an inadequate 25-pound bag is not much easier than lifting a 35-pound bag that fills all your needs.

9. If you have a big bag, you can dress more appropriately. You can bring two pairs of shoes. You can bring real pants and a jacket. You won’t find yourself at a Michelin-starred restaurant in cargo shorts.

The main problem with a checked bag is that a disgusting pervert who is also a high official in the Biden administration may steal it so he can wear your clothes, but this only happens if you’re female or think you’re female. There haven’t been any cases of confused XX Biden appointees stealing gender-correct clothing from actual men.

I’m starting to think that carry-ons are for short trips to third-rate destinations like Cancun and Miami. You land on Friday night, drunk. You lie on the beach drunk until Sunday afternoon. You fly home drunk Sunday night, thinking about RU-486 and/or penicillin. If you’re flying home from Miami, maybe you’re concerned about a fresh bullet wound. For a situation like that, a carry-on is perfect. For multi-week trips to nice places, a big bag seems to make more sense.

I think I should return this thing. This is what I get for listening to millennials who wear mildew-smelling knee-length basketball shorts everywhere they go.

Feast, my Darlings

Are Italians really as Italian as people think they are?

My wife and I went to Mexico, a place known for emotionalism, tardiness, poverty, dishonesty, and laziness. Our hotel was not perfect, but it was pretty clean, the staff was helpful and efficient, and the security was good. Now we are looking at Florence and Rome. I wasn’t able to find a single hotel that didn’t have scary reviews, so we are shooting for Airbnb instead.

Italians suffer from the same basic stereotypes as Mexicans, except that you are less likely to be kidnapped by the police in Italy. Are the stereotypes justified?

I have traveled a lot over the last three years, and I rely on reviews, for whatever they’re worth. One thing I know is this: if a business has 3,000 reviews and a near-perfect rating, you ignore the good reviews and read the bad ones. Read the ones that start with phrases like, “I can’t understand all the good reviews.” This is what I did while looking for Italian hotels.

I looked at hotels under a certain price. Repeatedly, I saw complaints about bad smells, nonfunctional air conditioning, noise, rude staff, violent staff, dirty rooms, bedbugs, bait and switch games, and elevators that didn’t exist or only went part of the way to rooms. I figured I was being too cheap. I looked for rooms that cost more. Same hotels with the same reviews. I could not find anything that looked acceptable, and I was willing to pay $400 per night.

Here’s the worst thing I saw: hotel proprietors routinely insulted and argued with guests who left bad reviews. Some apologized and said they would try to do better, but many, many reacted like, well, like Italians.

If you’re going to insult and belittle your customers and accuse them of lying on the Internet, where the world can see it, what will you do in private when new guests arrive?

When you look at bad reviews for Swiss hotels, you see a different picture. The clerk didn’t want to provide extra towels. The room was small. The hotel was too far from the train station. No one complains about stained sheets, reservations canceled without notice, or sewage smells.

We went to Egypt and picked a hotel and a cruise ship off the web. The hotel was clean and spacious. The bathrooms were fantastic. They had bidets. The food was pretty good. The staff was nice. There was no noise. The ship was clean. The staff was wonderful. The food was better than the hotel food.

We went to Turkey. The hotel could not have been much better. Everything was spotless. The beds were huge and comfortable. The bathrooms were worthy of the nation that invented the Turkish bath.

Egypt and Turkey. These are not blue ribbon destinations. Egypt is a second world country, and if Turkey is first world, it’s not high on the list. Italy is held out to be a real country, like Germany. How come they can’t run decent hotels?

I considered giving up on Italy, but…it’s Italy. You can’t take the Ponte Vecchio and the Coliseum and move them to a nation where the hotels are clean. Italy was the hub of Renaissance art. The art is still there. If you want to see it, you have to risk sleeping with the bedbugs.

If we go, we will use Airbnb. We’ve had good experiences with apartments in the past. You get to sit at a dinner table. You get to do laundry. You get a real refrigerator. You don’t get drunks screaming right outside your door all night or banging on it by mistake, trying to get inside for sex.

The general, but not ironclad, rule about stereotypes is that they don’t develop in a vacuum. No one complains about the Japanese being overemotional or dishonest. No one crosses the street upon seeing a big male Norwegian approach. The people complaining about Italian hotels surely have good reason for their critiques. Italians are fun people, and they live in a fun country, but if Egypt and Mexico are beating them, they need to shape up.

I did some research and learned that Rome has some excellent pizza shops, so I hope to hit at least one of them if we go.

In a few weeks, we will know if we have a visa.

Visa Attempt Number 42

Having survived Cancun, the wife and I are now making another effort to get to Europe. Like Charlie Brown, running up to kick that elusive pigskin, we are setting ourselves up for disappointment yet again.

A Greek consulate is not far off, so before long, we will be heading there so my wife can be put under a microscope and possibly allowed into Europe.

The Europeans we dealt with in past efforts refused to give us a chance. They thought a woman who had traveled to several countries with her relatively affluent husband, and who had returned from said countries without setting off any bombs or overstaying her visa and becoming a petty criminal, was sure to remain behind and start a human trafficking ring or something. Now we have a green card to bolster our wild claim that my wife wants to return to the US and her big house after our next trip. We hope it will get us some traction.

The Greeks at the embassy seem very nice. They actually called me and talked to me. That was a first. With other countries, I had a better chance of getting a return call from J.D. Salinger, and he’s dead.

We constantly get better at applying and traveling.

The Greeks want us to show them an airline reservation before they will give us a visa. There is no such thing as an airline reservation. I don’t know exactly when airlines stopped taking reservations, but it was probably in the eighties. When we were trying to get my wife visas in Zambia, we got travel agencies to produce ridiculous fake itineraries, which the embassies knew were fake. Somehow, this worked with several countries.

I finally figured out how you deal with the reservation requirement. You buy refundable tickets, which are insanely expensive. You go through the embassy process. If you get a visa, you return your tickets and buy new nonrefundable tickets which are much cheaper.

It’s all a big scam. It seems unfair to the airlines. On the other hand, airlines behave really badly all the time, so it’s hard to feel much sympathy. Air France and Aer Lingus literally stole my wife’s luggage, returned it months later, destroyed, and missing hundreds of dollars’ worth of stuff, and refused to pay us a dime. Airlines steal and break things all day, every day. Since 2001, their waiters and waitresses have gotten really full of themselves. They love throwing people off planes now.

We spent $3700 on tickets we have no intention of using. If we get a visa, we’ll only use our tickets if we can’t get cheaper ones. If we don’t get a visa, we’ll take all of our money back.

I don’t understand how having tickets makes you a better visa candidate. Osama bin Laden could have bought airline tickets legally. I can understand how they would want you to have a return ticket before flying, but that’s completely different. They could approve you before you buy the ticket and then require you to produce it at the gate before your inbound flight.

It would be nice to see Greece again. It’s one of the world’s top travel destinations. It’s not like Cancun, our last destination, where American kids go to practice regurgitation. We have booked a tour of the Acropolis and one for Corinth. We’re also planning to do a food tour.

You can keep the islands, except for Crete.

We’re shooting for Switzerland for the second part of the trip. Aim high when you expect to be rejected, I always say. I want to see Lucerne again. We want to visit the tops of some alps and take boat rides on the lake. We also want to see the Interlaken area. We hope to stay in Wengen, which is what God created while he was working on ideas for heaven.

Switzerland is the most beautiful country. Yeah, yeah, it’s subjective, yada yada yada, whatever. Switzerland is the most beautiful country. It’s more beautiful than any mountainous area anywhere else. North America, South America, the Himalayas…no competition.

There are other places that look good in photos. Go there, get out of the plane, and what do you get? Mosquitoes. Blistering heat. Stifling humidity. Europe is the air conditioned continent. In Western Europe, even the bad days are great by American standards.

The alps have natural beauty plus a population that appreciates it and creates houses and buildings that complement it. Other mountainous areas look like slums in comparison.

Georgia has one of the two highest mountains in Europe. The nearest town looks like mud daubers built it.

Of course, not all of the beauty of the alps is in Switzerland, and Norway has some stunning scenery, but overall, Switzerland IS the most beautiful country. So we are going to try to go there and stuff ourselves with dishes full of potatoes and fried cheese.

The Swiss also have it more together than anyone else. I would put Singapore in second place. The Swiss are rich, they have very little crime, and they seem to do everything they do as well as it can be done. I suppose most of them are godless leftists, but they are extremely capable godless leftists.

If they won’t take us, I guess we’ll have to vacation in Tennessee.

I’m trying to improve my touristing skills. I have always traveled with a huge old bag because I had to bring my wife things. On the way over, the bag would weigh 45 pounds, and on the way back, it would weigh 20. I always had to go through the bag claim. I never knew whether the airlines were going to steal my things. Now I’m trying to work it out so I can take a carry-on.

You would think it would be simple, but it isn’t. Different airlines have different carry-on size requirements. It’s really stupid. I’m trying to find the biggest carry-on around that will make nearly every airline happy. So far, it’s looking like the Travelpro Platinum Elite Rollaboard.

A rollaboard is a bag with two wheels. A spinner is a bag with four wheels. I don’t know why they call them spinners. Maybe because you can spin them on their wheels. It’s a stupid name.

Rollaboards are better than spinners. They’re sturdier. Spinner wheels tend to snap off. Rollaboards also hold more stuff, because the rolling hardware takes up less room.

Some Youtube travel nerd recommends a backpack with no wheels. Sorry; no. My backpack is my personal item. Also, if I have a second backpack on my back, how will I carry the first one? You want one bag on your back and another one on wheels.

When we travel, I take a PC and some camera stuff. That means I have to carry my backpack everywhere. I can’t leave expensive stuff in a $40 hotel room safe, and I can’t travel without a computer and camera.

The alternative is to keep using my giant bag, continue to avoid putting valuable things in it, and hope the airline and TSA employees don’t steal too much.

If I do that, I risk finding myself in a foreign country with no clean clothes. That actually happened to me when I was a kid. My mother had to take me to stores in Luxembourg and buy me tight clothes for European kids with little stick arms and legs.

I am practicing filling my wife’s carry-on with my stuff. If we can work it out so we still have a fair amount of junk with us when we travel, maybe I’ll get a smaller bag for myself.

I want to go to Europe this year because this may be the last time we get to travel without a baby or a heavily-pregnant woman. It amazes me that people manage to travel with babies. I can’t see us doing it in another country. Maybe in the US. It sounds unbelievably difficult and expensive, and no baby is going to benefit from foreign travel. He or she would just make things worse for us. I don’t think travel does anything for kids until they’re at least 8.

Make that 10.

It’s hard enough, slowing down for my wife. We take forever to leave our hotel rooms in the morning. She can’t walk up hills like I can. She has to sit down a lot. Imagine adding two tiny wives that aren’t potty-trained, can’t walk, and can’t read.

I see how being orphans is going to impact our future. If we had parents or even useful brothers or sisters, we could leave kids with them.

Both of us should have Global Entry by the time we try to travel, so there’s that. On the way home from Mexico, I had to wait in the long line with my wife and the suspicious peasants.

It’s all up to the Greeks. Either we’re going to Greece, or it’s, “Hello, Gatlinburg.”