The Authorities Have Been Contacted!

Months ago, as I was working on improving my photos, I had a weird cyberstalking incident. I wrote about it here. I joined a photography website, and I got all sorts of helpful comments. Then one day, I disagreed politely with another member, and he started insulting me. Then, without warning, he claimed he had found my blog, and he told everyone else I was a dangerous nut or some such. I don’t recall, exactly.

I had created a Flickr account, because the forum did not allow direct photo posting, and I had used it to post a few shots of my baby son, the most photogenic person alive. Before doing this, I had thought, “Should I really let Internet whack jobs see him?”, but then I decided I was being paranoid, so I went ahead.

I realized the kook who insulted me had probably used my son’s baby photos to find my blog, so I deleted my Flickr account because I no longer needed it, and I did what I could to make it more difficult for other kooks to find me using my son. I couldn’t do a perfect job, but something seemed better than nothing.

I quit using the forum, and that’s sad, because I got a lot of good input there, and it was fun to have the online company of friendly people with a shared interest.

Today I went to my blog, and in the trash filter, I found this comment, from, and I apologize for this, Yourawanker@wanker.com, at IP 109.156.63.128:

Actually was me. Your photos are sh*t. Actually they are worse than sh*t.

This website is a complete abortion.

I have contacted your local authorities and reported your website as a hate crime and have also explained that I have concerns for both your wife and your kids safety as you are completely unhinged.

It was posted a week ago. He’s still on the case. The asterisks are mine.

Of course, no one has reported anyone to anyone. If this interesting person could find out who the local authorities were, and if he reported me to them, they would probably take me out for barbecue.

On the other hand, I would not be surprised at all if I have written things that are now arrestable in England, where you can be put in cuffs for praying in public as long as you’re not a Muslim. Maybe he thinks we have laws like that. Not yet.

Not in most places, anyway.

So I have a new fan. Like the liberals who have watched Fox News and listened to Rush Limbaugh far more faithfully than conservatives, this guy or trans guy or whatever is hanging on, continuing to obsess on someone who moved on from a trivial disagreement and minor stalking incident a long time ago.

I don’t know who or what he is, because he hides his identity, including even his online pseudo-identity. I wasn’t able to find a single photo he had posted anywhere, so he says abusive things about other people and their work while hiding himself and his efforts. Other people on the forum said he was very good at his work. I couldn’t say.

I checked the IP, and it comes from a place called Drakewalls in the UK. I don’t understand English place names, and I don’t plan to learn about them now, but it looks like this is in a place called Cornwall, near a town called Gunnislake. I think Cornwall is in Wales, which is a strange place to me because the Welsh claim they have their own country, yet Wales appears to have been completely digested by England.

Out of curiosity, I looked to see if there were any professional photographers in Gunnislake, but the only guy I found does very amateurish work, so I assume he is not my friend the critic.

Maybe he’s not a professional photographer. I guess a person who will not post his photos online under his name or his company’s name is not going to make much money, so that points to a hobbyist.

I was thinking about him today in connection with another vitriolic crank I saw recently. The site Citizen Free Press linked to a video of a woman claiming to be a Michigan nurse. She is of mixed race. She was sitting in her car, screaming and cursing about another person. At the end, she said she was going to go cut his throat, and she showed the knife she planned to use. The consensus is that she was talking about Donald Trump.

What?

Web sources claim her name is Rhonda and that she works for the University of Michigan, caring for the elderly. Not those who dance to YMCA and recently got a glowing checkup from the White House physician, I hope.

I don’t know for sure that she was referring to Trump or that her name is Rhonda.

The commonality here is demonic rage. Overwhelmingly, it is found on the left, in people like the soon-to-be fired (probably) nurse. Increasingly, the right is catching up. The eccentric who stalked me issued a whole bunch of pro-Trump comments on the photo forum. Then, of course, there are Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes, and their deranged followers.

What are people like this really angry about? Photography? Donald Trump? The imaginary Jewish conspiracy? It’s none of that. Here’s what is really happening:

Revelation 12:12: Therefore rejoice, ye heavens, and ye that dwell in them. Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea! for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.

And when the dragon saw that he was cast unto the earth, he persecuted the woman which brought forth the man child.

The woman is not Mary. She is Israel and the church. Everyone who belongs to Yeshua. The apocalypse is happening right now, Satan knows he is about to be crammed into a dark hole for a millennium, where no one can admire or serve him, where he will burn in great pain, and where his only pleasure–sadism–will be taken away from him. He knows this, and the spirits who serve him know it, so they are provoking loonies all over the world, trying to get them to abuse and kill people God cares about, while there is still time.

These spirits are like the Nazis, who served them. When Germany and Austria were crushed and defeated, and their troops were running back to the homeland in failure and fear, they murdered captives before they left. In one case, they filled a building with people and set them on fire, which was not in their own best interest. Losers should know better than to commit war crimes on the way out.

I’m not a particularly good person, but I definitely belong to Yeshua, and the spirits know it. This explains the bulk of the unjustified, oddly-venomous, bad treatment I have experienced during my life. A lot of people are in my position. All Jews, for example.

You don’t stalk a person for months (or at all) for thinking your off-topic photography tips are wrong and saying so politely. You don’t tell the world you’re going to cut the president’s throat. You don’t commit mass shootings because you think someone in the crowd might believe a person with a Y chromosome is a man. Not without help. You need demons in order to feel that kind of irrational fury and be willing to act on it.

October 7 required the assistance of demons.

Maybe it sounds extreme, comparing myself to shooting victims and Jewish martyrs, but I’m not claiming the degree of persecution is the same; just that the source is the same.

I have a lot of protection. My wife and I have very good prayer lives, I live in a place where even the road leading to my home is private property, my sheriff supports good people, I am well-armed, I have surveillance, and my neighbors have machine guns. I don’t think a keyboard zany from Wales is going to fly over here, locate me, attack me and my family, and thereby put himself in grave danger. Other people Satan is targeting are not as blessed as we are, though.

The thing that hurts me is knowing people like me will never be anything but outcasts during this age. I hate knowing the vast majority of human beings can’t be saved and made part of God’s family.

It would be great to have more opportunities for friendship and bonding with coworkers. Can’t happen. If I meet a great Muslim guy, I can’t start inviting his family over for barbecue. If I write a book, I can’t network with other people in the publishing industry to get it to sell. I can’t share the experience of watching popular TV shows and movies with other people any more. I feel like I’m waving in people in a friendly manner while standing behind a chest-high wall.

I make friends easily. I like associating with people. Those traits are mostly wasted now.

I want to help people. I want to tell them the things God has shown me so they can be as blessed as, and preferably more blessed than, I am. I want to see their problems go away. I want them to be assured of a wonderful future. But like Lazarus, I am separated by a vast gulf I can’t cross. My friendly relationships with most people have to be superficial and casual.

If you belong to God, learn this lesson: be good to people who aren’t chosen, but don’t get too close. Don’t make new best friends who aren’t in God’s family, because they will be gone from your life forever, very soon. Don’t missionary-date. Don’t try to become part of social networks in order to make money. Understand that you are holy, and “holy” implies “separated.”

Hope this helps you avoid wasting time and emotional involvement.

Date the Car, not the Man

I’m on a vehicle-buying spree. I have a new Kubota diesel cart, and I just joined the brotherhood of minivan owners.

My old car is a Ford Explorer which I liked upon receipt mostly because I inherited it. When my dad was declining, his old car started to die, and he needed a new one, so I found him a newer version of the same model. He liked his old Explorer, so I figured he would like to stay in the same lane. When he passed away, the car became mine. The price was perfect.

I am not picky about cars, so I thought it was great. It’s a Limited; the second-fanciest Explorer available when it was made. By my standards, it was luxurious. After all, when I was born, very few cars had electric windows, and maybe half had no air conditioning. It takes very little to impress me.

The Explorer has perforated leather seats, alloy wheels, front and rear air conditioning, all sorts of data connectivity, multiple USB ports, two sunroofs, adjustable mood lighting, and a bunch of other stuff I will probably remember after making this list. It’s more luxurious than my dad’s ’91 Town Car, although his ’85 Town Car was better. By ’91, real luxury was gone from the American car market.

The Explorer is practical for one person or a couple. I put a custom vinyl mat in the back to protect the car, and I use it for dump runs, buying pool chlorine, carrying Costco hauls, and every other thing you can imagine. It’s pretty comfortable, and because it’s unusually wide, it has more room than competing cars, at least in the beam.

It has its issues. For one thing, the geniuses at Ford put the water pump inside the engine, and they made it to last 60,000 miles. When the seals blow, coolant goes into your engine, and you get to buy a new one. Ford’s answer to the problem was to have one seal inside another, with a little weep hole to tell you when the first seal was letting coolant pass. The idea is that you see the coolant and go get a new water pump before the second seal goes. The obvious question is, “How many people check under their car for coolant every week?” Not many, because almost no one knows Ford pumps are time bombs, water pumps are supposed to last 200,000 miles, and they are not supposed to destroy engines.

My pump went out at something like 75,000 miles, and the $2500 I paid for a new one was on the low end.

It’s also somewhat cramped longitudinally. I guess they maximized the cargo area in order to excuse putting two rumble seats in it, but anyway, you can’t really use a baby seat in this car. Once it’s in there, the person in the front passenger seat will have to sit close to the windshield, so anyone over 5′ tall will be jammed up. What if you have two babies? Forget it.

One of the main excuses people use for buying SUV’s is that they hold families. That rings hollow when you’re tall, you have a baby in the back, and it’s your wife’s turn to drive.

There are other problems that are less severe, but I don’t feel like writing a treatise.

For over a year, my wife has been dealing with the cramped passenger seat, and there isn’t a whole lot of room in the backseat for the baby’s junk. We have been looking for something new.

At first, I thought a Highlander or 4Runner would be better, but they are even smaller inside than the Explorer, so I dropped those options. Then I considered a Toyota Sequoia. It had some advantages I liked. First, not American. I know American cars are a lot better than they were back when we handed the Japanese world automotive dominance, but Japanese is still considerably better. Second, not Ford. My relatives and I have had enough of Ford’s ludicrous engineering mistakes. Third, bigger than an Explorer.

It seemed perfect, but eventually, I had an awakening, and I found out the SUV platform is inferior and based almost solely on curb appeal and consumer insecurity. Most people are foolish to buy SUV’s, and I don’t mean a little foolish.

Minivans are way better. Cheaper, roomier inside, easier to work on, more versatile…better in every conceivable way unless you need four-wheel drive or a high ground clearance. Why doesn’t everyone drive one instead of a $70,000 SUV? Because minivans are not glamorous enough for them. Men are afraid of what women will think of them. Women are afraid other women will think they settled for beta males. Men are afraid other men will doubt their machismo. It’s idiotic.

SUV’s look great. At least some do. They look like tough rigs made for all sorts of rough-and-tumble adventures. They can be pimped out to look like bad boy vehicles. But they are small inside, they waste space that could be used for other things, and many of them offer features that most people don’t need. They’re harder to load and unload. They’re harder to get in and out of. There isn’t much good you can say about them, except that they don’t look like minivans.

My buddy Mike drives a diesel Mercedes SUV. It’s a piece of junk. The new MSRP was something like $70,000. I forget. He paid something like $20,000 when it was fairly new, because German cars don’t hold their value. They break down a lot, and they are very expensive to fix, so a lot of ghetto bros are out there driving three-year-old German cars on P.F. Chang’s salaries.

This car has made him miserable. For several years, it had a problem that made it go into limp mode over and over, and no one could fix it. He used to call me from the road during long trips, telling me he was creeping down the road with everyone passing him. He put a lot of money into it before he finally got it to work.

It’s not roomy inside. The Explorer is actually nicer. It doesn’t look particularly good. To change the battery, he had to cut up the carpet under the passenger seat.

I told him I was thinking about getting a minivan, and he told me how great they were. I said he should get one, and he acted like I had said he should date Melissa McCarthy for her personality. Oh, no. It wasn’t for him.

My friend Alonzo used to have 5 kids in his house, and he drove a Dodge SUV. When I said I was thinking of getting a minivan, he approved. I said he should get one. His first wife is now gone, two daughters are out of the house, but he has remarried, so he is back up to 5 kids. Oh, no. He couldn’t be seen driving a minivan, but he didn’t mind using a shoehorn to get his family into an SUV!

I guess this can be partially traced to a mental illness common among American women: they date cars, other status objects, and money, not men. Women do not want to be seen getting out of cars that are not overpriced and impractical. For this reason, men feel compelled to buy stupid vehicles they can’t afford or which just don’t work.

I have never identified with my car. I have had a couple of sports cars, a classic convertible, and two motorcycles, and I used to run around on my dad’s yacht, but it never occurred to me to use any of those things to impress women. I was always naive. I thought women were serious when they claimed they weren’t materialistic or shallow, but both of those adjectives apply to most American women.

I remember being at a fuel dock, putting diesel in my dad’s yacht. Some blonde foreign girl who was clearly an au pair said something about how we should take her with us. I didn’t even acknowledge her; I guess that was rude, but her remark was stupid and wildly optimistic, and I didn’t know where to go with it. Just because some guy hired you based on your looks so you would live in his house and watch his kids doesn’t mean every man in America will invite you into his life based on brief, awkward encounters.

When I got my Harley, I got it because I loved the machine, not the Harley-owner religion. I didn’t get it so I could shave my head, grow a chin beard, tie a dishrag on my head, get 50 tattoos, and dress like the kind of motorcycle gang member I would be afraid to sit next to in a bar. The world has enough outlaw dentists and accountants. I was amazed to find out women would show me their breasts when I rode by, just because I had a Harley.

I never used my sports cars to entice women. Why would I want someone who was attracted to a car? Might as well hand her the keys and take a cab home. I got the cars because I really liked them.

When my wife came to the US, she was partially infected with the fancy-car virus. She wanted a Land Rover or Land Cruiser. Initially designed to resemble a Land Rover, except without the constant breaking-down part, the Land Cruiser has become a chic accessory for pampered women. Go figure.

I told her it would never happen, and we have been using the Explorer since she arrived.

As for Land Rovers, they are all junk, and they always have been. Mechanically, they are pathetic. I will never buy junk again. Also, they are extremely expensive by my standards. Buying misery is bad enough when it’s affordable.

The fancier Land Cruisers my wife would have wanted are gone and have been replaced by a Lexus model. It has a very high rocker panel, so it’s hard to get in. Inside, just like a Land Rover, it’s basically an SUV, so forget practicality. It has a bunch of expensive off-road parts that will break down and cost money to fix, yet which will never provide any benefit. It’s like a Gucci purse. All hype. No help.

I told my wife we needed to consider a minivan, and at first, she was bummed out.

Once we started packing our son around, my wife started seeing the light. Getting the baby in and out of the SUV was somewhat difficult, and there were the space issues. It was also obvious the floor height would be a disadvantage when he started getting in and out on his own. Then there was the thought of trying to put two baby seats in an SUV.

Eventually, she got excited about minivans, and then we took a test drive. She loved it. Could not wait to get one. She could move her seat back with a baby seat behind it. There was all sorts of air in the cabin. The sliding doors made ingress and egress painless.

It took us a while to find a dealer I could stand. We went to Ocala Honda, and while the salesman was great, the guy they sent to negotiate the sale was so awful, it was as though a competing dealership had sent him as a mole to repel customers. We didn’t ask for a quote, but he gave us one (“It will just take a minute!), and it was over $59,000, including a trade on the Ford. That’s about $20,000 above market, so I knew he thought I was a world-class, freak-show-grade simpleton, and I also knew there was no way he would ever come down to Earth.

I decided to check out Sam’s Club and Costco, which supposedly got people great deals.

Don’t believe it. They just hand your phone number over to salesmen, and those salesmen offer you the same lame discounts they offer everyone else. Complete scam. They called, texted, and emailed for weeks. It was as though I had invited a cloud of biting flies into the shower with me. I had to start blocking numbers and deleting texts.

When I got serious, I emailed a dealership that had exactly what I wanted. A couple of emails later, I had a deal I considered acceptable, so we bought the car. Was it the greatest deal possible? No, but I didn’t care, and I didn’t push it. As I have matured as a Christian, I have come to understand the importance of generosity. God is generous to the generous. If the dealer got, say, $1000 more than I really had to pay, great. They have employees to pay and other bills to worry about. I don’t mind if they do okay on the deal, and I can afford it.

Now we have a Honda Odyssey. We drove it on our weekly Costco trip today. It was a joy from start to finish.

The ride is far better than the Ford’s. The spaciousness was relaxing. It was quiet. It had lots of pep. The electronics were better. Unlike the Ford, it had a GPS that actually worked. The sliding doors made embarking and disembarking a breeze. We adore it.

It also pulls over twice what the Ford does. So much for he-man SUV’s.

It has some issues. The engine shuts down at stoplights if you don’t turn off that “feature.” Also, it has a moronic fuel-saving scheme. At highway speeds, some cylinders shut off. This causes vibration, and eventually, it kills the engine. Honda’s solution is to make the stereo pump sound designed to mask the noise.

They also provide unreliable motor mounts full of oil, to absorb the stress. These tear open eventually, and then you waste a day and spend $600 for new mounts.

For $145 or so, depending on the brand, you can buy a simple device that kills this feature and saves your engine and mounts. You loose maybe one mile per gallon. Boo hoo. I have a device on order. Takes 5 minutes to install.

Other than that, I think the car is sound. The next-best choice is a Toyota Sienna, but you can’t move or remove a Sienna’s seats easily, so it’s a stupid design that will not work for me. I can shift stuff around in the Odyssey, and I can put nearly anything in it.

I love it, but then my feelings about my worth as a man are not closely related to the kind of car people see me driving. I’m the guy who used to show up at the gun range with a pink suitcase I got for nothing, and I outshot everyone I saw there, reliably, except for a couple of people. I guess that bothered the guys who wore tactical pants and camo to shoot badly at paper targets.

This car is great. I should have bought it sooner. I am thrilled with it. So is my wife.

Now, I quite literally prefer it to the most expensive SUV made, whatever that is. If I had that SUV, I would sell it and keep the Odyssey. The SUV would bring me misery. The Odyssey brings me pleasure and saves me pain.

Thank you, God. What a wonderful addition to our lives.

Check Out my New Hoopty

I did something amazing today. I bought something that wasn’t used.

I haven’t bought a new car since 2003. I was starting out in law, and I decided I wanted the most fun car possible within my budget. Had to be a ragtop. I considered two options: the Porsche Boxster and the Ford Thunderbird.

At this point, a reasonable person could question my orientation. The T-Bird was not a manly motorhead’s car, and the Boxster was an invitation to gay jokes.

I wanted a roadster. It had to be somewhat fast. It had to be fun. It had to have style. Both of these cars fit the bill. The Boxster looked the way the 911 should have looked, and the T-Bird was gorgeous from the front, if a little dumpy from the rear. The T-Bird was not a serious car, so it was okay that it looked a little silly from some angles.

The Boxster differed from the T-Bird in that Porsche made sure it was an actual performance car. Ford shoved a weird, tiny, high-compression V8 into the T-Bird, and after that, it pretty much gave up. You could hope for 6.7 seconds from zero to sixty, which was pretty good, and it was pleasant in corners, but there was no point in taking it to a track. And Ford gave it a transmission that could not handle more than 300 horsepower, so upgrading it was not an option unless you wanted to gut it.

The nice thing about the T-Bird was that when people saw you in one, they didn’t assume you secretly admired Hitler. It didn’t project “GERMAN CAR-OWNER INSECURITY.” They knew you had a sense of humor.

You had to. It was full of engineering bugs. For example rainwater filled cavities on top of the coil-on-plug assemblies and killed them. To open the trunk, you had to insert a key behind the driver’s seat. It was impossible to open the doors with the windows up, so the car lowered them a little when you tried. Also, the trunk-mounted battery’s ground tended to come loose.

After that, I got a used Dodge pickup, and the car I drive now is a Ford I inherited when my dad died. Nice enough car. The price was right.

Actually, it was used when he got it. He was declining, and his old Ford was dying. I knew he liked it, and I figured we would get a newer model because he was familiar with it. We didn’t want to pay the new price, but we did want a big corporation we could sue if something went wrong. I took him to Carmax.

Anyway, I don’t like the idea of buying new big-ticket stuff unless it makes economic sense. Or, okay, I’m just cheap.

I bought my compact tractor, a garden tractor, and an E-Z-GO used when I moved to this house. I got a screaming, smoking deal on the lot. The compact is going strong and probably will be when I die. The garden tractor still runs, but it’s not a great mower, it breaks down a lot, and John Deere doesn’t support it, so I replaced it. Now I’m getting a new cart.

I replaced the old mower, a John Deere 430, with a used Kubota ZD326 zero-turn.

The 430 was made in around 1991. I have no idea how many hours it has on it, because the meter has not moved since I bought it. Back when it was new, it cost almost $10,000, which would be more like $25,000 now.

Very few homeowners bought them. Most JD mowers you will see are cheap demi-fakes from Home Depot and Lowe’s. Flimsy construction. Cheap gas engines. The 430 has a Yanmar diesel and two PTO’s, plus front and rear hydraulics. You can even put a three-point hitch on it.

I have tried to find out why anyone would have bought a 430 for mowing in 1990, given that zero-turns were available. The web says good zero-turns didn’t exist until after 2000, so that must be the answer.

The ZD326 I bought was made in about 2007, soon after they came out, and apart from a few engineering mistakes, it’s fantastic. Tough. Fast. Extremely durable. Easy to use. But because I bought it used, I suffered a lot.

The deck was my main problem. It has 4 upright tubes; one at each corner. They hold anti-scalp wheels. Kubota designed the tubes so various carbon steel parts would weld themselves inside them if they got wet and rusted.

When I bought the mower, I didn’t realize the rear pins (scalp wheel shafts) were frozen place, nor did I know remnants of the old front pin bushings were stuck inside the tubes as though they had been cast there.

I spent hours in the sun, drilling, sawing, grinding, and so on, and I finally got everything out. It was horrible. I modified some of the parts so they were superior to the designs Kubota’s inept engineers provided, and they should outlast me now.

The mower also had a fuel issue. It had two diesel tanks, and apparently, the owner never used the left one, because when I tried, the mower used to lose power over and over. Evidently, algae or whatever was growing somewhere in the system. I took the fuel tank off and cleaned it, and in the process, the plastic rear fender under which it sat shattered. The sun had made it brittle, and it didn’t like me pulling on it to get the tank out.

I installed two new fenders, and I kept putting chemicals in the diesel until the fuel issue went (mostly) away.

I would guess I have $7000 in my $5000 used mower now. I don’t recall for sure.

I am fairly certain it’s a good mower now. It’s a blast to use, compared to a tractor, and the only parts that can cause serious problems are the engine and the transmission. The engine will run 6,000 hours in normal use, and it seems jim-dandy, so I think it will work out great. I’ve put maybe 25 hours on it, and the oil still looks as clean as peanut oil. The transmission works, and if it doesn’t, it can be fixed. Probably not by me, because I am fed up, but it can be done cost-effectively.

When I started looking for a new cart, my wife told me not to buy any more used junk. She remembers seeing me come in the house day after day, filthy and angry, after working on the mower.

My original cart is an old gas E-Z-GO Workhorse with a bench seat, a dump bed, a lift kit, and a two-cylinder Subaru air-cooled engine. Two-wheel drive. I first drove it when my dad and I visited this property before he bought it. The owner turned it over to us, and off we went, all over the farm.

I knew nothing about carts, so when it topped out at maybe 7 miles per hour, I thought it had to be normal. I wasn’t bothered. I figured people who farmed weren’t in a hurry.

After I bought it, I learned a few things. Like the JD, it had an hour meter stuck in another decade. I have never seen it change. I found out the speed was not normal. It should have been able to push 20. Eventually, I noticed that it gave off blue smoke in reverse. To be truthful, it smoked in forward, too, but I didn’t notice because when the cart moved forward, I drove out of the smoke instead of into it.

One day, I finally got around to checking the oil, and I found the dipstick was just about bare. I thought I had fried the rings.

I found out the carb was messed up from years of ethanol and idleness. I also found out the rings were fine. The oil had gone out through the valve seals. The engine had worn them until the holes were egg-shaped, leaving gaps between the valves and seals. As the engine ran, oil squirted out through the gaps, and somehow, some of it got into the exhaust and burned. This is a known fault with this engine.

Before I knew what was wrong, I started looking for engines. How much could a tiny Subaru engine be? Thousands. That’s how much. And they don’t make them now, so forget that. You can buy a rebuilt one and ship your old one to the seller, which is an expensive hassle, or you can drop in a Honda (Predator, come on) which isn’t really designed for low-speed cart use.

Anyway, I fixed the seals. I also worked on the carb more than once. I found that regardless of whether I used no-corn gas, the cart was likely to refuse to start after a few weeks of rest. It rarely ran well. When it did, it often took a long time to start.

I broke the OEM carb while fixing it, and for years, I’ve been using a Chinese carb that doesn’t seem quite up to snuff. I eventually found an OEM carb at a great price, but I have not installed it.

The cart rides like a rock. My farm is bumpy, and a ride in the cart feels like getting hit in the rear end with a sledgehammer over and over. It’s also underpowered, so you have to be careful not to stop with anything like a rock or fallen tree in front of the tires.

When it runs, it’s generally okay. That’s the nicest thing I can say. It’s very useful. Indispensable.

Now I have a family. We have acres of land we should be using for recreation. I can’t put 4 people in this little cart. I know; there are only three of us now, but that’s temporary, and besides, we get guests. I can’t make them run beside the cart.

The cart also has a differential leak. I didn’t mention that. I took off one day without tightening some wheel lugs, and a wheel came off, somehow ruining a seal. I have been avoiding using the cart until the seal is fixed, and I have been avoiding fixing it.

I am tired of gas problems. I am tired of wondering if the cart will start. I would like to get in a cart, push the pedal, and take off. Maybe I’m too demanding, but to me, that means diesel. A new diesel cart. With 4 seats. And a hydraulic dump bed, because the cart is useless without that.

I suppose I would be fine if I bought a gas cart, but what if I’m wrong? I really don’t want to pull any more carbs. I don’t want to drain a tank because I’m afraid the gas is too old. I don’t want an engine that will have to be rebuilt in 5 years because gas engines are junk.

Electric is not even in the game. I need ground clearance and 4-wheel drive. I have woods. Electric carts are made to take old people to Sam’s Club on smooth pavement.

Diesel. Decision made.

It came down to a couple of choices. Kubota or Kawasaki. Kubota makes a 4-seat cart with a hydrostatic transmission and four-wheel drive. Kawasaki makes what it calls a “mule,” with a cheaper, cart-typical transmission that uses a belt.

I ended up going with Kubota. I don’t know if I did the right thing.

The Kawasaki is faster, but you can’t go faster than 10 miles per hour on my grass without risking a broken axle, and I don’t have any opportunities to go out on the road, so the Kubota’s top speed of 25 is more than ample.

Both carts have dump beds that can be temporarily shortened to set up rear seats, and the Kawasaki’s bed is supposed to be quicker to change. The Kawasaki holds more weight in the bed, and it tows more. On the other hand, I will never be able to use the full capacity of the Kubota, and I don’t really see myself towing more than 1300 pounds with a cart.

The Kubota should be bulletproof. A multi-decade purchase, at least. Can’t say that about the Kawasaki.

Here’s an annoying difference: the Kawasaki only comes in black. Why? The body will reach 3,000 degrees in the Florida sun.

Carts are very, very expensive now. I don’t care. I have a bunch of landscaping jobs I’ve been putting off, the E-Z-GO has to live up to its name and GO, I need a cart ASAP, and I want something that will never give me half a second’s trouble. I need it to last as long as I do. I think buying the Kubota was a smart move. I’m buying peace of mind. Let the wise guys in their Kawasakis zip past me and sneer if they want. Not that this is possible on a private farm, but still.

I think I paid too much. It appears to be impossible to find out what a Kubota dealer pays for anything. I tried. It can be confusing just trying to calculate the MSRP for a cart with a given configuration. I did my best, took what I thought was an unrealistic percentage off, and made an offer. They accepted it within a few minutes and even rounded it down eleven dollars to the nearest hundred.

I’ll bet they have an office party tonight.

I’m not concerned. I used to be the guy who tortured car dealers (similar to equipment dealers) for days to get the last penny of savings. I enjoyed it. As a Christian, I now feel that God will bless me if I let people profit a little more than I have to. At least I didn’t take the insanely high number they offered in the first place.

I wish I had bought a new diesel mower. I would have paid around $20,000, which is quite a bit, but the cost of hiring someone would amount to several times that over time. A gas mower would not work as well, it would be subject to clogs, and the engine would have to be rebuilt or replaced in a few years. Also, it would use a lot more fuel, so more annoying trips to the BP station, followed by more standing in the sun filling the mower, trying not to get even more diesel on my work boots.

If I had bought a new diesel mower, I would be paying about 60% more than most people would consider reasonable under the circumstances. Even affluent homeowners are unlikely to buy anything more expensive than a $13,000 gas Scag. But that peace of mind…it would be worth it. Over a new gas mower, I mean.

The used diesel is another matter. Benefits of buying new: I would have saved myself a lot of very unpleasant work, and I wouldn’t have any concerns that the transmission might poop out and cost me several thousand dollars.

When I get on the mower from now on, I’ll tell myself, “It may die today, but if not, you saved $13,000.”

I truly look forward to using the new cart. Turning the key and expecting nothing bad to happen will be a marvelous experience.

America’s Latest Terrorists May Defy Categorization

It’s hard to figure out what is happening regarding the nation’s response to the tragedy in San Diego. Several Muslims were killed at a mosque by a couple of deranged kids in their teens, and the cops are claiming there is evidence it was related to pro-white racism. The killers showed up in a BMW (dog whistle?), and they had a gas can with an SS sticker on it.

Not sure why anyone would associate the SS with responsible motoring, but kids have always loved stickers.

People don’t seem all that upset. Why? Is it because Americans are fed up with living at the point of Muslim guns every day, always waiting for the next act of Islamist terror?

Islam is the only major religion that actively promotes the murder of outsiders, calling it a means of obtaining eternity in a gross, trashy version of heaven in which men get to cavort, drunk, with pretty boys and virgin girls. It also tells adherents that jihadis who die trying to murder outsiders can then intercede for 70 of their family members. The world is full of Muslim moms who love it when their sons commit atrocities against Jews and Christians, because they hope to make it to paradise based on their sons’ actions.

Islam is the main reason it takes 45 minutes to get to an airline gate on a good day. I remember when it took 5. And it is telling that news stories about the shooting say the Muslims used the mosque to worship “peacefully.”

When was the last time you saw a story about a church shooting that said the intended victims were worshiping “peacefully”? You don’t have to say that about Christians and Jews. It’s assumed. In the case of Muslims, journalists think it merits special mention. Wonder why that is.

People can’t help having negative feelings about a religion like that. On the other hand, everyone should be very upset when nuts attack innocent civilians, including children, with guns. Three people who did nothing wrong are dead.

Leftists are convinced that Christianity and Judaism cause all the world’s problems, and somehow they have developed such a high cognitive dissonance tolerance they can march in favor of Islamist terrorists while proudly invoking their own homosexual credentials. Christianity and Judaism don’t advocate killing unbelievers, however. Christians and Jews don’t get rewards for killing Muslims, for example. People should think about this difference.

Am I wrong to think the press is less attentive than it should be? It seems like the major news sites are pretty quiet.

I’m wondering about another possible reason. While the killers are accused of pro-white racism, which should move the press to go after them, they also appear to belong to groups the press loves. One was a non-white Hispanic, and the other was a white who looked extremely transy.

There has been a steady, bizarre flow of sexually-aberrant mass killers in recent years. Maybe journalists threw up their hands when they saw photos of mosque shooter Cain Clark. He looked very effeminate. In one now-famous photo, he has the kind of cornrows you would expect a female MMA competitor to have. At first glance, I wondered if he was a girl claiming to be a boy.

The other killer, Caleb Velazquez, appears to have been a typical Californian of Mexican descent. Black eyes, dark hair…not exactly material for a Hitlerjugend poster.

I can’t help wondering if these two were a couple. Velasquez looked reasonably butch, but Cain was not only feminine-looking but suspiciously free of body hair, as though he had been shaving.

In any case, they don’t seem like easy grist for the woke media mill. In the eyes of the left, sexual deviants can never do wrong, and a Hispanic white supremacist is a hard pill to swallow.

Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like the press has a history of undercovering brutal crimes committed by people it can’t stuff into the usual tendentious pigeonholes.

“Mosque shot up by Latino white supremacist and Nazi-loving trans paramour.” It doesn’t work.

At least one person has embarrassed himself by blaming the shooting on Jews. Yes, it’s those white-supremacist Nazi Jews again. That well-known, multitudinous, notorious group. A Muslim heckler blamed San Diego’s mayor for supporting Zionism. I’m not making it up.

Muslims and Nazis have historically been allies. Neither group gets along well with Zionists or Jews. This should be obvious. The government of Israel is pretty slick, but they can’t get kids who put SS stickers on their belongings to attack Muslims.

It just goes to show there is nothing you can’t blame on Jews if you really try.

Where would you even get an SS sticker? Are people printing them at home? Surely no one is selling them.

Of course they’re selling them. Sorry for being naive. I just checked.

Here’s a question: what are the odds a high school kid could order SS stickers and put one on a gas can in his mother’s trunk without being caught? Does that seem likely? People usually know what’s in their car trunks. You would think a parent would know what her son buys on the Internet, but maybe that’s too much to expect.

My guess: the murderers were an item, so the story will go away pretty quickly. Also, everyone who speculates that they were an item will be excoriated online, even after they turn out to be right. If they do.

If You Love Somebody, Set Them Free

I’m sitting here stalling when I should be mowing the yard or installing a new safety belt on the mower.

My wife and I had an interesting conversation today. I had noticed a story about Sting, the elderly rock musician who used to be so popular. He was bragging about not leaving his children anything, as though it made him a genius and a great parent.

We both thought he was an idiot.

He’s not alone. Gordon Ramsay is in the same camp. Tony Curtis disinherited all his kids. Bill Gates doesn’t trust his children to handle his fortune. Neither does Warren Buffett.

There are certain eternal truths God expects us to know, and one is that families are supposed to be built up by inheritance. In the Bible, having no inheritance was a great curse, and stealing an inheritance was one of the most wicked things a person could do. Unfortunately, few people know the Holy Spirit, so most don’t know how things work. They come up with their own stupid ideas, and the results are pretty bad.

The excuse these people usually give is that they don’t want to ruin their kids by handing them things they haven’t earned. Mind you, often, these are often people who didn’t raise their kids well, so they care enough to deprive them of money but not enough to teach them to thrive as adults without inheritance.

Here is what I think: one of the sickest, most evil things you can do is to compete with your own children, and many people are guilty of it. I believe most of these people are terrified their kids will become wealthier than they ever were, and then they won’t be the biggest fish in their little ponds.

I want my son to be taller, stronger, smarter, richer, more talented, more prolific, better-looking, and more virtuous than I am. I hope people are amazed at the difference between him and me. What kind of imbecile wants to be the point where his line peaked for all eternity?

It’s a testimony to people’s low expectations of their own parenting that they think giving kids things will ruin them. They think they can’t figure out how to help them without spoiling them, and they think the kids are such losers, they will be spoiled by whatever they get.

Here’s something no one seems to talk about: there are millions of rich people whose parents made them rich, who are better and richer than their parents. They’re common, just like kids who throw their inheritances away. There is nothing stopping a rich parent who helps his kids from teaching them to be good, responsible, prosperous people.

The wacky thing is that people who don’t trust their kids with wealth give it to strangers they don’t even know. It goes to the government. That’s like giving David Crosby the keys to a distillery. It goes to charities and causes that see to it that most of the money goes to their own executives.

One of the most insulting uses of an estate is to give it to animal-related causes. People are more valuable than animals, as Yeshua said. I would gas every unwanted pet on the planet before I would give them my children’s inheritance.

Unless my son is a sociopath, I will surely trust him to do better things with money than strangers, and if I have to choose between helping him tremendously and helping random people to be chosen later, in tiny increments that will soon be forgotten, clearly, I will choose to help him.

It makes no sense for every generation to start with nothing. That’s what rats and lizards do. One generation has all the problems the previous generation had. No advantages. Aren’t we supposed to be smarter than rats?

Trump has created new ways for the young to accumulate wealth, and we plan to take advantage. I want my son and whatever siblings he has to have real net worths when they become adults. I also want them to know some things about investing and taxes. Much more than I know. I don’t want them to look after their families by sweating and serving others. If there is a way, I would like to help them create businesses, preferably with few or no employees to make them miserable.

If you get a job at an established business these days, you can almost count on constant coercion. “Celebrate our LGBT-friendly workplace.” “Call male customers ‘miss.'” “Take that Trump sticker off your car.” “Remove that cross.” I don’t want my kids to face that. I want them to own the means of production, as dear old Karl Marx put it.

I wonder how old Sting would feel, dead 20 years, seeing his blue-collar cop son live in poverty due to a job-related disability. Would he want to come back and set him up with wealth? Maybe not. Maybe he thinks poverty builds character.

His son really is a cop. The others are low-level journeyman actors and a musician who opens for his dad’s band. They are not likely to do as well as he has, so here’s hoping nothing bad happens to them that would leave them in need of money.

If giving kids things ruins them, stingy rich people need to explain the Waltons or the Trumps. Bad parents are what ruin kids.

I went to school with the children of rich people. Most of the kids are well off. Doctors and so on.

God operates through inheritance. He loves it. In the Bible, every single Jew outside the tribe of Levi was supposed to be an heir. God divided their nation into areas, and each tribe got a piece. Every family received land. It was of such importance to God, selling land permanently was not allowed. It could be alienated for limited periods, and then it reverted to the owners.

The Levites were included through tithes and offerings. The others were obligated to support them. Nobody was left out.

The language of inheritance is all over the Bible. We even see it in passages regarding the people who will return to rule Earth after the tribulation. The word says they will inherit the earth.

Salvation is inherited, not earned. The word clearly says Yeshua is a decedent, and we are heirs. There is no way we could pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and make it to heaven.

It astonishes me that there are people who want to set their kids back to zero. They could save them so much suffering, and they could empower them to do great things.

On the other hand, I am completely on board with disinheriting people who can’t be helped. There are people who will always destroy whatever they are given, and some, like my own sister, use what they receive to torment others incessantly. My experience tells me you should give your successful kids the bulk of what you have. The others will just destroy it and then go to the others so they can destroy the rest.

My dad used to joke about “my” inheritance. He would buy something and tell me it was coming out of my inheritance. The truth, though, is that I didn’t have an inheritance. I just had hopes. You don’t own what your parents or grandparents have while they’re alive. You should receive a share by default, but you’re not entitled, and if you prove you will misuse what you get, it should go to someone else.

The important thing for an heir is to be humble. An inheritance should make that easy, since it’s unearned. Strangely, heirs are often arrogant and belittling. I can understand why someone who thinks he is self-made would be proud, but why would you be proud of a gift you could never have created?

I did not earn most of what I have. Ancestors helped, and God directed things to me. Being proud of that would be delusional. Every day, I ask God to help me receive with fear, love, supernatural humility, awe, and gratitude. I don’t want to be ugly to him.

God loves humility, and he also loves inheritance. He expects these things to go together. He doesn’t want heirs to mistreat others or show off. Showing off wealth is abomination. We are all charity cases before God; guilty criminals who were taken in and adopted in spite of our rotten character and many sins. Using God’s charity to puff yourself up like a gilded toad shows a complete lack of self-awareness.

We are going to help him, and we are also going to teach him charity. I firmly believe giving to the needy brings financial prosperity from God. If he has inherited wealth, the Holy Spirit, a sound general upbringing, and a practice of giving generously, he should never lack for anything. On the contrary, he should live in exceptional abundance, and he should be able to do wonderful things for others.

If I raise my son wrong, cutting him off won’t help him, and if I raise him correctly, to be inhabited by the Holy Spirit, all the money on Earth won’t hurt him. I’m going to help him if I can. I don’t have to be the big fish in our little pond. I want him to be the big fish, and I want his kids to be yet-bigger fish.

“Where is That Guy With the Doughnuts? HEY!”

In 2017, I was praying, and I heard this in my head over and over: “The hate is already here.”

What God was saying was that the kind of hate that caused Cambodian massacres and the murder of millions of Jews was already in place here in America. Millions of people, mostly on the left, were completely ready to murder the rest of us based on religious and political considerations. Not just murder, but Rape-of-Nanking-level atrocities. Butchering, rape, torture, and so on. They were ready to get started, but they were being restrained.

This is something Americans need to understand. Barbarism isn’t just for backward Muslims and crazy Africans. If it can happen in Germany and Austria–nations known for orderly behavior and high achievement–it can certainly happen in the United States.

We live in a country where a state elected an attorney general who said he wanted to shoot his election opponent as well as his minor children. Jay Jones of Virginia said these things, and although he said them before the election, Virginian voted for him anyway, making Virginians as a whole a hate group.

That is an amazing thing, and the fact that people haven’t played it up more is even more amazing. An entire state voted for murdering conservatives and their little children, and we aren’t talking about it every day and holding days of prayer and fasting.

This is not that new. Remember Ann Coulter’s Unhinged. And then there were the leftists who joked online about biting out a part of Michelle Malkin’s genitals, to nothing but approval.

Now another Democrat has tried to kill President Trump, and unlike previous Democrat assassins, he tried to kill every high-level administration official who was present at the function he interrupted.

According to Google Gemini, Trump is now, officially, the number one president on the list of assassination attempts. That includes Abraham Lincoln, who freed the slaves, burned Atlanta, oppressed the South, and had his military kill many thousands of Americans. I’m not knocking Lincoln, but he did those things, which means he should have had an army of enemies mounting assassination attempts every week. Trump is still in the lead.

Perhaps Lincoln would have suffered more attempts had Booth been as ineffective as the weak soy characters who have gone after Trump. That has to be admitted. But Trump hasn’t done anything even remotely comparable to what Lincoln did. No one should be bothering him at all, except for the usual yammering, posturing, baby-targeting, running-from-all-able-bodied-males Islamists.

Dan Bongino is expressing concern because these things keep happening, saying the nuts only have to get lucky once. And he’s right. This is especially true given the ineptitude of the Secret Service, which even assassins are now complaining about.

The latest assassin is Cole Tomas Allen, a high school teacher from California. Of course, he has a manifesto. What good would a psychotic left-wing assassin be without a manifesto? In his manifesto, he manifests righteous anger over the incompetence of the government employees (enough said) who were failing to protect his victims:

PS: Ok now that all the sappy stuff is done, what the hell is the Secret Service doing? Sorry, gonna rant a bit here and drop the formal tone.

Like, I expected security cameras at every bend, bugged hotel rooms, armed agents every 10 feet, metal detectors out the wazoo.

What I got (who knows, maybe they’re pranking me!) is nothing.

No damn security.

Not in transport.

Not in the hotel.

Not in the event.
FBI agents standing outside a residence.

Like, the one thing that I immediately noticed walking into the hotel is the sense of arrogance.

I walk in with multiple weapons and not a single person there considers the possibility that I could be a threat.

The security at the event is all outside, focused on protestors and current arrivals, because apparently no one thought about what happens if someone checks in the day before.

Like, this level of incompetence is insane, and I very sincerely hope it’s corrected by the time this country gets actually competent leadership again.

At least he’s not trans. That’s refreshing.

I think we should hire Hollywood screenwriters to run the Secret Service, because in the movies, government security agencies are astonishing. They have martial arts skills that would embarrass Anderson Silva. They can shoot flies out of the air. They have x-ray machines that see everything people have in their pockets. They speak every language without accents. They have remote access to every camera, computer, phone, and probably slide rule in the world.

In reality, we have a DEI squad. Subaru drivers whose main purpose is to show that girls can do anything. Except spot an assassin lying on a white roof in the sun or put a pistol back in its holster while someone shoots at the president. Or keep a liberal wimp with cheap weapons and no training from prancing past a security checkpoint beyond which sit the highest (unarmed) officials in our government.

There is video of Cole Allen mincing past the checkpoint at full tilt. It’s disgraceful. A pack of government employees (enough said) stand around and watch while he sashays by, and then they draw their pistols (not long arms as they should have had) and point them toward the wimp and the innocent crowd beyond him.

You need to see the video. Watch one of the agents struggle to get his pistol out. I’m a flabby, not-brave, untrained civilian, and I can have a pistol in your face in 1.5 seconds, tops. Complete with a little laser dot. That would be slow for me.

Why were they using pistols? Am I a genius because I’m the only person on Earth who knows pistols are only for people who can’t have long guns?

Maybe I should replace Hegseth. Is he sending Colt snubnoses up against rifles? Someone tell him my brilliant idea.

Wasn’t Jeff Cooper saying this in like 1750? Isn’t it obvious?

The agents who shot at Allen missed him entirely. That’s pistols and DEI for you. Allen is certifiably soy-based, and he managed to shoot an agent anyway, so 1-0 for him. With a cheesy pistol from the Philippines, which our liberal press has still failed to identify correctly, although they are totally qualified to lecture us about all things firearms-related.

Cole Allen was an educator (until recently), and he certainly educated people this weekend. He taught other psychotics how easy it is to get past the Secret Service with no training. Sure, they eventually stopped him, but he never should have made it past them.

He actually did much better, perimeter-wise, than John Hinckley.

Imagine if Jason Bourne or Wonder Woman had been there. Come on, Hollywood. Help us out. Have Demi Moore put on her tactical support hose and orthopedic combat boots, and send G.I. Jane.

As for DEI, it seems to hang heavy in the air around Allen.

Like the smell of blatant white supremacy at Bass Pro Shop.

Right after the shooting, the press made him look like a combination of Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, and Nikola Tesla. Actually, Tesla hated Jews, so maybe he and far-left Allen had something in common.

When his home was searched, the press called it “his house.” It was a nice little home in a subdivision. Pretty good for a 31-year-old teacher. They said he was a Caltech engineer. He had won a competition to work on a project for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. He was a video game designer. He was an inventor.

Allen is biracial. Let’s toss that in.

It appears he is really a failed engineer who may have gotten into Caltech following a paper bag test.

1. The house is his parents’ house, and he lived there.

2. He got a 3.0 as a mechanical engineer.

3. When he worked for JPL, he was part of a team, so the team won the job, not him. He may have been running for sandwiches for all we know.

4. He worked as an ME at an obscure company for a few years and then quit to do part-time tutoring. Yes, the exact career path a brilliant engineer with a six-figure job takes.

5. His video games have been described as “basic” and went nowhere. I have designed video game user levels. Am I a game designer? Better check before you offer me a job, and tell me what you want on your sandwiches.

6. His invention was a clumsy frame that was supposed to help wheelchairs brake, and it was made from PVC pipes he probably bought from Home Depot. He didn’t invent a self-docking rocket.

7. Genius engineers don’t teach high school. Who teaches? I’ll give you a hint. It’s not “those who can.” A good engineer may teach college students. He doesn’t do SAT prep or teach high school math.

I once qualified to teach physics for Kaplan. In about 1995, this position paid $15 per hour, if I recall correctly. It was not like I was in demand to run Livermore Labs.

I may be wrong, but it sure looks like a DEI assassin came up against a DEI Secret Service.

I have mixed feelings about DEI. When I counseled young black people about their educations, I told them to grab all the guilt money and line-cutting they could, as long as it was there and people like me were already being forced to pay for it. But it’s an immoral, racist, sexist process.

Now I have a biracial son, and DEI is going on the garbage heap. So I got to pay for it, but I’ll never benefit. Story of a white conservative’s life.

Fortunately, he will be very intelligent, and his parents will see to it that he is educated properly, not just rammed through one grade after another with marks based on his mother’s ancestry.

He’s not going to be like the young people I knew who got the silver spoon treatment and received admissions other people deserved, only to wash out in a semester because they couldn’t actually do anything.

Example: guy I knew was a star football player at a black public high school. He received a scholarship to St. Thomas University. He flunked out. He told me he didn’t know how to do anything. When he was at Norland High in Miami, he spent his days walking around the hallways, telling jokes. He didn’t even have to go to class. Still graduated. This is his testimony, not gossip. He spilled his guts to me. He was scarred by the whole business. Ashamed of it.

If he had gone to math class, maybe he would have known his chances of joining the NFL were infinitesimal.

As anyone could have predicted, leftist nuts responded to the shooting, immediately, by claiming Trump staged it. So he found a young man who was willing to post leftist junk on the web for years, before Trump was elected, and then try to kill a bunch of conservatives with no exit plan, guaranteeing a long prison term and making quick death highly likely. In exchange for…what? Seventy-two Republican virgins?

Easier to find than the liberal kind, I grant you.

The less-expected thing is that antisemitic conservatives, who have suddenly appeared in our society in large numbers, are pushing the same lie. Because Jews. We helped the Jews get rid of a regime that was working on nuclear missiles to shoot at the United States and which was already capable of hitting Europe. But…Jews. We just can’t help those Jews, because Epstein, the great noticing, and they put the blood of gentile babies in gefilte fish.

The same guys who wanted to soap Trump’s back in the shower are now calling him a tool of the International Jewish Conspiracy, and their conclusion appears to be that even if 95% of what he does is what they have been praying to Odin for for decades, he needs to be assassinated so he can be replaced by a rational president like Candace Owens or Tucker Qatarlson.

The hate is here, and while most of it is on the left and among Muslims, it’s also a big problem on the right now. And let’s not forget the more important and more fundamental problem that spawned it: the derangement. The things leftists, conservative antisemites, and serious Muslims believe cannot be believed unless mass psychosis is first put in place.

The reason mass psychosis is possible is that we failed to spread the Holy Spirit. He is the only one who prevents deception. Jews and Christians cut him out of religion, replacing him with silly rules and ludicrous rituals and idolatrous practices. As a result, most people are capable of believing anything. If you dare argue with me, I’ll bring up the millions of people who think Caitlyn Jenner, the male 1970’s sex symbol, is really a woman.

If you can believe that, well sure, the Jews run the world. They run it so well their worst enemies got all the oil, and the Germans and Austrians killed a third of them. They are clearly in charge. They should teach global domination classes because things have gone so well for them.

God has told me this: when human beings don’t make sense, the supernatural is involved. Natural stupidity and pride are impressive, but the stupidity and pride that come from demons are even better. If you think there is a Jewish conspiracy or that Christians are the biggest threat to America, you barely need to exist, because demons are doing all your talking and thinking. You’re just a skin puppet they need because if they talk in their spirit voices, human beings can’t hear them.

So to sum up, Cole Allen is a failure, not a genius, DEI is a catastrophe, our government security agencies are failing at things random sheriffs from Mississippi or even Mexican federales could handle easily, demons have succeeded in brainwashing humanity and making fools of us, conservatives are starting to be just as insane and dangerous as leftists and jihadis, and Jewish global hegemony is not going well at all.

Humanity Never Fails to Disappoint

One of the nice things about turning back to God is that virtually all of the trolls who used to frequent my blog disappeared soon thereafter. I think part of the reason is that they had no interest in reading, over and over, about a religious zealot’s purported experiences with the Holy Spirit. I used to be a lot meaner and funnier, and I wrote more like a secular-minded politics buff than a Spirit-led Christian. People liked that stuff.

Amazingly, I got trolled and stalked recently in another online “space,” as pretentious people might say. It had nothing to do with politics or religion or me intentionally provoking fools.

I didn’t see that coming.

I started getting interested in photography (again) in 2023, and since then, I have sought advice and looked for kindred souls with whom to share my feelings and questions. As part of this process, I posted a number of photos. As a result, I sometimes had to ask myself whether it was safe to put shots of my wife and son on the web. Eventually, I told myself it was okay to do it occasionally, since nobody who was interested in photography would stalk a woman or child based on photography-related content.

Of course, I turned out to be wrong. As I often have, I underestimated the depravity, cowardice, and hatred of Internet kooks.

I disagreed politely, for solid, well-articulated reasons, with a person who gave me unsolicited, off-topic criticism based on the composition of a photo. I had been asking about trends involving exposure and brightness. I was not looking for advice on taking photos. I just wanted to know whether I was right to think many photographers were pushing others to do things a certain way, to the detriment of the results.

Unbeknownst to me, this sent him into an unforeseeable, baseless, incomprehensible mouth-foaming rage, and apparently, he has no attendant to strap him down until these things pass.

Next thing I knew, he or zey or whatever was claiming he (best guess) had found my blog, and he said he had reposted my written work in the space where we were discussing photography. He made some unhinged comments about me, seemingly suggesting I was insane, malignant (like himself), and otherwise flawed. Other people deleted whatever he posted, so I have never seen it. I have no idea whether he found my blog or not. For all I know, he thinks Instapundit or Maddox is me.

I never provided an email address related to my blog, and I didn’t mention my site at all. It seems to me that the only way this unbalanced specimen could have found my blog, if he did, was by reverse-Googling my images, presumably including some of my baby son.

He was so unjustifiably incensed, he sat at his computer and worked on this.

Oddly, the people in charge of the space didn’t bother banning him. Seems to me that would have been an obvious and standard response to blatant Internet stalking involving a baby, but maybe they didn’t think it through and see the possible connection. I didn’t try to get him in trouble.

All of the alleged republication and deletion took place in a short time. When I went back, thinking I would resume discussing photography with mature adults and not whack jobs in need of increased medication, I saw his deranged comments, wrote a polite response obliterating his weird claims, and left.

Afterward, I decided the best thing was to remove all my photos from the space, without warning, and delete the photo-hosting account I had created for my hobby. I had created it, reluctantly, because there was no other way to share my photos with the crowd the crank belonged to.

That’s how things stand now. If this marvelous cretin really has found my blog, it won’t keep him from returning, but it will make it less likely that other potential mental patients will follow in his footsteps.

He claims he lives in another country. I hope that is true. I wouldn’t want a weirdo like this to somehow find me and accost me in person, creating the potential for police involvement and/or legal fees for a defense attorney.

I haven’t been back. The interaction I had there wasn’t very important to me, and I was no longer having a rewarding experience, so there was no compelling reason to continue.

For that matter, this blog isn’t very important to me, even though I have written thousands of posts here. Sometimes I think about deleting it for my own sake and the sake of my family. The only reason I don’t do it is that I have learned a great deal from God over the last decade and a half, and a lot of it is vital information nobody else seems to be passing on to the public. I believe the rapture is almost here, and after it comes, there will be people who are still stuck on Earth, Googling to find out what just happened and what they can do to get the best possible outcome given the circumstances. What I’ve written can be very helpful to them. Of course, I could just delete it all and post a few thousand words to summarize the important parts.

That is something to consider.

There have been times when I have thought about the possibility that my blog’s security isn’t tight enough to keep it from being deleted by someone else, and my conclusion has always been that I don’t care enough to find out and do something about it. If I woke up one day and found out it was gone, I wouldn’t scurry around pulling my hair out, thinking my life’s work was gone. I would be relieved and eager to do something new, to tell you the truth.

As people like to say, this is why we can’t have nice things. Sadists and loonies go through life ruining other people’s enjoyment for reasons known only to themselves, their therapists, their demons, and their sycophantic imaginary friends.

He hates my photos, and it is true that some are very bad. This is particularly true of shots I put online because I knew they had problems and wanted advice to improve my work. On the other hand, some of the things he said were just plain silly.

Calling composition “bad” is fine when you’re talking about someone who took a standard wedding photo and cut off the subjects’ heads, but it’s stupid when you’re talking to a photographer who got exactly the composition he wanted and made it work, not just for him, but for at least some others who understand photography.

Composition is subjective, like choosing between color or black and white. A number of the qualities photos have are like that. A lot of famous photographers have been ripped very badly early on, by unimaginative critics who were never able to take great photos, simply because the critics lacked the capability to understand the choices the artists made. You can spend an amusing half-hour Googling highly-respected critics who made fools of themselves by confidently lambasting photographers who went on to become legends.

The thing about real creativity is that if you’re not creative, and you follow everyone else’s rules splendidly, you can’t recognize creativity in others when you see it. It just makes you mad, if you’re the kind of person who feels threatened in such situations. It looks like incompetence to you.

Usually, I crop photos, because often, I find it hard to compose them the way I want them. This is usually because I’m shooting moving subjects. The difficulty is obvious. The photo the stalker criticized was not cropped. The composition was exactly what I wanted, right out of the memory card. I had a list of reasons for leaving it the way it was.

Other people whose qualifications may well have been as good or better than the stalker’s liked the photo with the “bad” composition. I guess he stalked them, too, after I left. Who is to say who is right? Why should I listen to the stalker and not the other photographers who disagreed?

I have no idea how the keyboard detective composes photos. I wasn’t able to find any he had posted. I tried to dig them up to see if I could understand his mindset, apart from the rabidity. I thought he might know something useful. You don’t have to like someone in order to learn from him. Also, I thought his work might show he was on a completely different page. I was not looking for ammunition to belittle him or discredit his ranting.

Someone defended him in hopes of getting me to believe what he said, saying he was a great wedding photographer. That could explain a lot. I’m not sure “great wedding photographer” is a phrase that makes sense. Do such people exist?

I don’t know how believing him was supposed to help me. Basically, he said my photos were terrible and that I should buy Understanding Exposure, a book I have had since about 2006. Never mind that I have been working on learning exposure ever since I took up photography again.

I watch videos by excellent (and not-excellent) photography teachers. I read. This is 2026. Relying on books is often the slowest, most limited, worst way to learn.

To get back to his supposed credentials, I have seen magnificent, artistically-rich photos in the areas of wildlife, landscapes, candids, architecture, and journalism, among others. Great wedding photos, not so much.

Do people with huge talent wake up one day and decide to spend their lives shooting nervous couples and drunken guests, doing the same things all other nervous couples and drunken guests have done since the dawn of time? Probably not that often.

Google “wedding photos” and see what comes up. Sharp, well-exposed formula shots of people looking completely unlike themselves, which is what most of them want.

Running on a beach barefoot, in a tuxedo with the pants rolled up.

Walking hand-in-hand on the sand, with numerous footprints underneath them that show they had to do it 10 times. To get that spontaneous look.

Dancing in a rented mansion they couldn’t pay for in 20 lifetimes with their means.

The groom embracing the bride from behind while she throws her jaw open like a snake swallowing an egg, mimicking a practiced smile she saw a Sports Illustrated model flash in St. Bart’s.

Everyone but the happy couple wearing (carefully) clothes they have to return by Wednesday.

Really, Google and see. The first page of wedding photos that came up for me were commonplace and stagey. Now Google landscape photos. Complete difference. Street photos? Even better. Excellent work. One gem after another.

But maybe he is the Vivian Maier of wedding photos. The exception. Maybe he’s a genius whose wedding photos hang at MOMA twice a year. I have no way of knowing.

Criticizing people who succeeded at doing what they wanted to do, in an area where subjectivity plays a huge role, doesn’t always make sense. Imagine Titian giving Van Gogh a righteous chewing out because his brush strokes were too big. More aptly, imagine an art critic with no talent chewing him out, because that is more like what really happened during his life. One forgotten soul said Van Gogh “painted with a shovel.”

“If you want greatness, do what I do. Which is exactly what everyone else does. Set yourself apart by blending into the herd.”

Isn’t creativity about doing things differently? Did I misunderstand that somewhere down the line?

Lots of people have been gatekept by inept critics.

Fred Astaire said he got a famous review after a screen test: “Can’t act. Slightly bald. Also dances.”

A casting director marched a young Sidney Poitier out of the room and said, “Stop wasting people’s time and go out and get a job as a dishwasher.”

A record executive told the Beatles’ manager, “Guitar groups are on the way out, Mr. Epstein.”

I’m not saying I’m a good photographer, and I am certainly not photography’s answer to Fred Astaire. I’m saying the ability to recognize talent is a talent, and most people don’t have it, including many you would expect to have it. And I have a little talent.

The shot was not exposed very well, so I took someone else’s suggestion, graciously, and worked on that. In that case, I hadn’t gotten what I wanted, and I needed someone else to show me the problem. The composition, I left alone, and if I put it on my wall, it will stay as it is.

It’s not a case of a beginner refusing to take sound advice because of baseless pride and stubbornness. It’s a case of someone understanding exactly what he did, though a beginner, and sticking with it, refusing to throw out a photo that came out just as he wanted.

I have taken all sorts of advice from people who criticized my work. I welcome it. I don’t welcome stalking or obtuse suggestions from people who have warped personalities and limited perspectives, who become enraged by polite, intelligent disagreement.

If I were the kind of person this character claims I am, I would think the majority of the shots I take are brilliant. In reality, I’ll shoot a hundred or more shots of the same situation and end up developing one or two I dislike least, or I’ll throw out all of them.

Sometimes I’m extremely happy with the best shots in a batch. Other times I say, “Well, it has problems, but I can’t make my son relive this day so I can try again, and I don’t want to lose this, so I’ll be happy with a B instead of an A.”

I have realized I throw out shots I should keep. Not every precious photo is technically good.

I have lots to learn. I take tons of horrible photos. But the photos other people hate are not always the ones that are genuinely bad or even merely good.

Gatekeepers are the worst. I think one of the worst things about them is that they cause people to quit, all the while pretending they want to help. Sometimes they actually want them to quit, so they can say, “Very sad, but not everyone can stand on Olympus with me and my Hasselblads.”

None of it matters. I know enough by now to do without web mentors. There are so many sources of information I can access without being abused, there is no reason to wallow in the mire with the saints and the swine.

Typical

I have been thinking about leadership.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Better Start Bailing

Here is an update on my son.

Can I call him my new son or baby son now? He’s over a year old, and they say any small child over a year old is a toddler, but I still tell him he’s the baby. The baby man.

He can’t really talk yet. He wears diapers. Baby.

He continues to be extremely advanced with regard to everything but talking. Runs, dances, jumps, walks backward, squats and picks up tiny things between his thumbs and index fingers, climbs…you name it. While he doesn’t really talk, he has conversations with us using gestures, expressions, and noises.

Sometimes when I tell him “no,” he stands and stamps his foot and grunts to show he’s not happy, but he always obeys. Eventually.

Morning before last, it seemed like he said “red” and “close.” One of his toys lit up a red button and said “red,” and he said something that sounded like “red.” He loves opening and closing doors, and the same day, he followed his mother into the bathroom, closed the door, and said what she thought was “close.” He imitates singing.

For a while, he has been doing things you usually expect to see at about two years. I have written about him freaking doctors out. Also, he is very tall, and we are hoping he remains tall because tall men have easier lives, as long as they’re not too tall.

I am not concerned about his speech, because he’s not late, and as long as everything else is going well, there is not much of a relationship between intelligence and the time a baby starts to speak. Personally, I don’t think it interests him much. He whistled when he was a few months old, and then he quit because it didn’t interest him, so it may be that he is the same way about speech.

I’m not going to let myself obsess on his intelligence, because intelligence is not very high on the list of things that make a successful child of God. My own intelligence has not been all that helpful in life, and many people who are close to God have been more successful than I in every way, with less mental horsepower.

He is still very, very cute and charismatic. I have written about how people fawn over him on our weekend Costco and grocery outings, and they are still doing it. There are 4 or 5 Costco ladies who come over and talk to him every time they see him. The place is always full of babies, but the others don’t get this kind of attention.

Now that he interacts with people, grinning and doing his arm-waving “happy salute” when they wave at him, they get even more pleasure out of talking to him.

We take him to baby gatherings at the local library, and the employees read books, sing, use puppets, and let the kids play with toys. He behaves very well, but he is not like the other children. He runs around constantly. The other kids generally stay up front with the herd, but he runs around the entire room.

I thought he would stay close to his mother because he adores her and doesn’t like being separated from her, but he ran off and left her.

He pushes things over. He loves pushing things, so he grabs chairs and pushes them around the room. He approaches adults and just assumes they love him. He tries to grab purses off chairs and tables. He goes to the exit doors and pounds on them. He grabbed an American flag and pulled it over.

We were the only parents there who stood up and said “no” to their child, so we know the problems the other kids are likely to have later. It’s amazing that people have learned nearly nothing new about raising kids since the dawn of time, while they have forgotten so much.

People say babies are curious, so when I tell them about him, they say it’s normal, but they haven’t seen him. He is clearly not like most kids. His abilities and energy stand out. We keep getting him toys and interacting with him, but he is insatiable. He is always finding our things, running off with them, and playing with them.

I take things away from him so often that he now tends to drop whatever he is holding, or hand it to me, whenever I appear.

I bought a new TV with an annoying remote that has a trackball and projects a moving shape onto the screen to select options. Every so often, when I sit down, I’ll see the shape moving around, and I’ll know my son is somewhere in the house playing with the remote.

The other day, he grabbed a toilet brush and tried to clean the toilet. That was upsetting.

He’s not hyperactive. A hyperactive kid can’t behave. He’s just smart.

He’s still very strong. He lifted two 5-pound dumbbells off the floor. When he pummels us with his hands and feet, it actually hurts. He doesn’t do it with hostility. He just loves to wrestle and roughhouse.

He can get into our upper bathroom cabinets now, so we had to get more baby locks. He can use almost every doorknob. Our house has lever knobs, and they make it easy.

I’m going to have to get a pool cover, because in a month or so, he will be able to open the back door. I hate the pool, because a pool is a sucker amenity, but we can’t make it go away, so we will just seal it off.

We’re trying to get music lessons for him. He shows some interest in music, and he needs things to fill his voracious mental appetite. His mom is talking about finding a swimming class, which she also needs.

I’m very grateful. The world is full of suffering children and parents. So many kids have physical and mental problems that crush their parents’ hearts. We are no more deserving than those parents, but God has been very kind to us. I keep praying God will use us to heal kids. I am horrified by the problems I see out there. It makes me feel helpless because I can’t say a prayer wherever I am and heal them. It makes me hate this world more than ever.

I keep asking God to help us receive blessings in fear and humility, and never to show off. We are pardoned criminals who live on an allowance. On God’s charity.

The dangers of showing off have been driven home to me. Our car is starting to be impractical. We’re excited about the possibility of buying a minivan. Not a Mercedes or some other kind of glamor wagon. I have realized God hates ostentation.

Proverbs 17:5: “Whoso mocketh the poor reproacheth his Maker: and he that is glad at calamities shall not be unpunished.”

Galatians 5:26: “Let us not be desirous of vain glory, provoking one another, envying one another.”

Luke 14:8-11:

When thou art bidden of any man to a wedding, sit not down in the highest room; lest a more honourable man than thou be bidden of him;

And he that bade thee and him come and say to thee, Give this man place; and thou begin with shame to take the lowest room.

But when thou art bidden, go and sit down in the lowest room; that when he that bade thee cometh, he may say unto thee, Friend, go up higher: then shalt thou have worship in the presence of them that sit at meat with thee.

For whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.

I try to receive in fear and humility regarding our son, and I ask God to help me with this, because I can’t generate perfect humility on my own. Pride will always bounce back, to my disgrace. I want God to keep blessing my son, and I want him to protect the next one.

Whatever blessings my son has received came from God, in spite of my long history of wickedness and in spite of the evil my wife has done.

The main thing I want to write about, however, is love. This house is soaked with it.

When I was a kid, my sister and I were afraid of my dad. We didn’t run in terror every time he came home, but we didn’t want to be around him, either. It’s good for a child to have a healthy fear of his father, but it has to be part of an intense, loving, comfortable relationship. It’s important for a father to take a hard line sometimes, but when my dad was harsh with us, usually, it was not out of concern for us. It was because we had gotten on his nerves. Someone broke a glass. Someone stood in front of the TV.

My family never prayed together, studied the Bible together, talked about God, or went to church together. What a horror. No wonder things went so badly for us.

I didn’t pray with my dad until he was 86, and he died when he was 87.

We pray in the morning with our son. We pray in the evening with him. He’s in the room while we watch Christian videos. I speak blessings over him and his mother. We speak blessing to God when we eat. He sees us on our faces, worshiping.

My wife and I have conversations about our son’s welfare. What to do next. Where we are failing. My parents didn’t do that.

We play with him a lot. I have the priceless luxury of being with him, and so does his mother. She takes him for walks, on his own feet. I sit down and play with his toys.

He loves playing with us. He brings us his giant Walmart ball, and we bounce it around. His new thing is to make me take his Fisher-Price popper toy. He has a little stuffed chair with a dinosaur face on it, and he sits in it and watches me run the toy around the floor. If I stop, he goes to get the toy and hands it to me again.

He has been kissed so much, it’s a wonder he has any skin left. He has been squeezed so much, it’s a wonder he isn’t covered with bruises.

He screams with joy, many times a day.

We are not doing things as well as we should, and I ask God to help us do better, but my son’s upbringing so far has been infinitely better than ours.

Because the family I came from is a failure, and because I am a recovering failure, our new ways and blessings are hard for me to get used to. My mother lavished me with love, but her relationship with my sister was a war from the time she was a toddler. My sister was impossible to get along with. I had many affectionate moments with my dad, but generally, he was very selfish, childish, and unfair. And he also had a hard time warming up to my sister, or, rather, he warmed up to her at first, and then their personalities ruined it.

I have never lived in a house of love before, and it’s a first for my wife, too. My son, on the other hand, has no idea what a dysfunctional family is like. He will never know what it’s like to feel alone because his family hasn’t introduced him to God.

Outside of this house, I have never seen a family that wasn’t dysfunctional, and that includes the Christian ones. Having one of my own is an extraordinary experience.

It’s all because of prayer in tongues. Order and success in a family come only from alignment with the Holy Spirit, and you only get his help if you pray in tongues. Otherwise, you are limited. It’s like going to Disney World and not using the rides.

We try to align ourselves with each other here on Earth, but it’s the wrong approach. We are supposed to be aligned with God. Any two people who are aligned with God are automatically aligned with the Holy Spirit. This is why Yeshua is called the Prince of Peace. Peace is simply order.

We are not particularly good people. We don’t go on mission trips to India and Africa. We don’t run an orphanage. We don’t go into prisons and baptize people. We have faults. We sometimes argue a little. We’re not doing all the things many Christians think bring them God’s blessings, and we sometimes do things that are counterproductive. Nonetheless, things are going extremely well. It’s because we are taking the supernatural approach, making God our head.

The frustrating thing is that people we are desperate to help argue with our testimony.

We know people whose families are terribly screwed up. People who are suffering because of bad choices. People with lingering problems. If I tell them they need to pray in tongues more (axiomatic, since the word says it builds us up), instead of agreeing with me, some of them blaspheme the Holy Spirit instead. They want to convince me that what I know didn’t come from God and that God doesn’t give us the kind of help my wife and I received.

They can’t explain our blessings, however, or the fact that they’re doing so poorly in spite of being right about everything.

When you attribute the work of the Holy Spirit to Satan or deluded men, you blaspheme the Holy Spirit. This is what religious Jews did when they said Yeshua had a demon. He raised the dead and healed the sick, and instead of getting behind him, they said he used the power of Satan.

Cessationism is blasphemy, and so is claiming to be charismatic while scolding other people because they truthfully say they have received supernatural help from God.

It’s a variant of cessationism. It’s such a huge sin, Paul told us to avoid people who did it. He didn’t say to be inclusive and nonjudgmental and that such people were our brothers and sisters.

In his second letter to Timothy, Paul lumped the God-deniers in with the greedy, brats, slanderers,and despisers of good:

For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power. And from such people turn away!

Here, the language translated “despisers of good” means “those who don’t love good.”

The word translated as “power” is dunamis, which, in the context of the above passage, is the miracle-working power of God, as well as all of his other abilities to help us.

There are many people out there who make up stories about what God has done for them, and there are many people who spread false revelation, but people who pray in tongues a lot, read the word, and seek humility are not like that. God will allow delusion, but he’s not a jerk. He doesn’t make supernatural help impossible, and he doesn’t allow counterfeits to be so good there is no way to find the real thing. If you pray in tongues and seek humility and revelation, he will guide you. If this were not true, there would be no hope for us, because the system would be completely rigged.

Arrogant Christians are in love with their strongholds. They love their pride. They love defending themselves instead of admitting fault. They love pointing to all the things they’ve done “for God.” They’re like Eagle Scouts who think their sashes and badges entitle them to kowtowing and deference. “I used to wax Jimmy Swaggart’s car!” “I was head deacon with a special red vest when you were still going to strip clubs!” They’re so arrogant, they can’t see their arrogance.

Old wineskins.

This is why Yeshua bypassed religious leaders and called fishermen and a tax collector.

When God shows you helpful things, and people who are in real trouble reject your testimony because they’re afraid you’ll stop thinking they are holier than you, it is extremely frustrating.

If you’re doing everything right, why is your life a mess? Isn’t it possible that a person whose life has improved drastically knows more than someone who is miserable and shows no sign of progress?

One of the worst things about Christianity is that it convinces people they are above correction. “We’re smarter than the Jews.” “We’re smarter than the awful people at the church across the street.” “The old guys who came up with our doctrine two thousand years ago were smarter than the old guys who came up with your doctrine 500 years ago.”

We’re exactly like the Jews of Yeshua’s time. Just as wrong, and just as arrogant.

Just as determined to blaspheme the Holy Spirit and glorify men.

What about me, being sure so many things I’ve been shown are right? Well, I got that by obeying the Bible. I got it the same way Paul did. The way he recommended we do it. I prayed in tongues for years. I didn’t get it by worshiping St. Augustine, who worshiped pagans. I didn’t get it by worshiping Kenneth Hagin and memorizing everything he said. I didn’t take courses at my last two churches, which were run by a con artist and a child rapist.

When I fell away for a time and wasn’t praying in tongues, I didn’t get revelation, and I had problems I don’t have now.

I don’t make things up, and I don’t claim I figured anything out. I had a genius IQ all of my life, and I was a fool for most of it. I ruined most of it. I could not figure the answers out. God had to spell things out and spoon-feed me. He still does.

I don’t say I’m right. I don’t say I should be given deference because I “got saved” decades ago or because I have put in thousands of pew hours. I say God is right, and that he has been getting through to me in spite of my immaturity and pride.

Saying these things is not arrogance. It is humility. Attributing your success to yourself and hard work is pride.

There is not one person in the Bible God rewarded for hard work. There are many he rewarded for admitting they were weak and letting him help them. There are many who were destroyed because they were proud. Consider Nebuchadnezzar and the dream of the tree.

In the Bible, hard work is always a curse. It was one of the first curses God pronounced on man, in Genesis. Hard work convinces you that you are the source of your blessings. It makes you your own God.

God preferred Mary to Martha.

Yeshua was more certain of his beliefs than any other man who ever lived. Does that mean he was proud? He had no pride whatsoever.

As the Bible says, humility, not mission trips or fasting or collecting church titles and enormous bejeweled hats, is what brings God close to us and causes him to help us. If you don’t know that, you have missed one of the three or four most important lessons that make Christianity work. You’re barely a Christian.

I always find that life is like being on a wide sea in a small boat, with many other boats around me. I’m doing fine, at last, but almost all the other boats are sinking, and when I try to help the people in them, they push me away and tell me they already have the answers.

If the analogy were really complete, they would be pulling their boats up beside mine, throwing buckets of water into my boat, and telling me they were trying to save me.

So I could be as blessed as they were.

Every day, we pray for God to keep people who won’t listen away from us and to bring us the people who will. It is discouraging and painful to watch people sink while you’re trying to tell them how to float.

I’m All For the Ethical Treatment of Plants

My wife and I are both cutting way back on carbs, and it has paid off handsomely.

1. No more cravings or other types of appetite excess.

2. Less fat.

3. Gas reduction that should please any advocate of the Kyoto Protocols.

4. Stable moods.

5. Stable energy.

6. Less snoring.

7. No bloating or burping.

8. Easy meal preparation.

9. Fewer dishes to wash.

10. Lots of money saved because we almost never go to restaurants.

We also expect better dental health, because it is nearly impossible to get a cavity while on a diet that is close to or below the ketosis level.

I would call myself carnivore-adjacent these days. On Sundays, I have a slice of pizza and some other treats. The rest of the week, I barely touch carbs. Sometimes a small serving of raw berries. An occasional beer or shot of whiskey. That’s about it. My wife is nearly carnivore. No Sunday breaks, but she occasionally eat something that has a little oil that doesn’t come from animals.

She is down about 16 pounds. I’m down 18. I feel much better. Dumping carbs is worth it for that alone. I felt great before I made the change, but things have unquestionably improved. After that Sunday pizza slice, I definitely feel a little worse.

I’m trying to figure out whether we actually need plant-based foods. As with covid, the information is heavily censored and slanted, usually to the left, which is where the plants are. Leftists mistakenly think they are morally superior to Jews and Christians and our meat-eating God. They also think ending meat production will save the earth. They push hard against animal foods for reasons completely unrelated to health, and they promote lots of lies.

On the other hand, carnivores say some things that seem extreme. “All plants are trying to kill you.” And like vegan diets (although to a far lesser extent), carnivore diets may require supplementation or at least careful diet curation. Carnivores tend to be low on sodium, calcium, potassium, magnesium, iodine, and folate, and iodine and folate deficiencies cause birth defects.

Many plants really are trying to kill us. I had an epiphany about that.

A few years back, my friend Mike and I made a disastrous effort to grow plants in my yard. He tried to grow parsley. A few days ago, I saw something that looked like parsley in the grass, and I thought maybe parsley was growing in my yard because it had escaped from a pot.

I considered tasting one of the leaves to find out what I was looking at, but I decided not to. Why? If it wasn’t parsley, it could be dangerous.

As I thought about that, I suddenly realized this kind of caution only applied to plants. No one ever looks at an animal and thinks, “If I eat that, it could hurt me.” Please shut up with rare exceptions like vultures and polar bear livers. Quoting exceedingly rare exceptions to a generalization only bolsters the generalization.

My property is full of poisons. Tree leaves. Various weeds. Deadly mushrooms. On the other hand, it’s full of birds, mammals, reptiles, and bugs, just about all of which can be eaten safely.

I have grown tomatoes and peppers. Friendly, right? No, the green parts are poisonous. Potatoes? Same.

So yes, plants really are trying to kill us. Even plants we eat regularly. Soy. Cruciferous vegetables. Rhubarb leaves are dangerous. Undercooked kidney beans can cause terrible problems.

Just about none of the ornamental plants in my yard can be eaten safely.

I also learned that nutrients in plants are often not very bioavailable, whereas nutrients in meat go right into your system. The iron in spinach is an example. You don’t get much benefit from it, so when you check the grams-per-serving count, you can be badly deceived.

I saw Jordan Peterson, a man who eats only beef and salt, say something that appeared to be intended to debunk misguided vegetarian claims. One thing he said was very funny but intended to be antagonistic, so I will clean it up. He said the human digestive tract had more in common with that of a wolf than that of a chimp. He said that, because of their plant-heavy diet, chimps developed to have small brains and huge colons. Apparently, some vegetarians say apes prove we should stop eating meat.

This sounded like TikTok legend to me, so I looked it up. He is actually right. Like wolves, we have relatively small colons, and we produce a lot of stomach acid suitable for digesting meat.

He also pointed out that a cow, which lives on grass, has to have an enormous four-chambered stomach in order to make it work. Most people lack that, as far as I know.

Another interesting thing I learned: unless you jam your piehole full of high-carb items or soy, it’s hard to get a lot of nutrition from plants. For example, if you tried to survive on kale, you would have to eat over 9 pounds a day. If you only ate hamburger, you’re looking at a maximum of 1.7 pounds for 2200 calories.

I don’t know, but it sure looks like there is no hope unless you suck down a lot of oils, tubers, soy (an unnatural food which starts out toxic), sugars, and grain.

A vegan diet is much more of a science project than a low-carb diet.

Actually, that’s one of the best things about cutting down on carbs. You don’t stand around before meals trying to decide what to eat. Fry a burger and put cheese on it, or fix some bacon and several eggs. You’re done.

We are going to try to come up with a good plan for my wife’s next gestation. I have doubts about pure carnivore due to the folate and iodine issues, but it should be simple to come up with a good low-glycemic regimen that will be much better than the typical American shove-pretzels-and-ice-cream-into-mom routine that gave her diabetes the last time.

You Don’t Really Know Yourself Until Something Bad Happens

This weekend, I learned what a febrile seizure is.

Keep in mind, I am not a doctor. I am just relating what I was told.

When a baby’s temperature rises or falls too quickly, it can cause seizures. They can become unresponsive; seemingly unaware of their surroundings or the people with them. They may stare into space and make strange sounds. Their hands and feet may turn cold, because they concentrate circulation in their trunks and heads. They may look like they’re dying. As bad as they look, febrile seizures are harmless.

It is unfortunate that I didn’t know any of this last week. Somehow I became old without ever being told. My wife didn’t know, either.

Our son took a bunch of shots at his first-year appointment. Among them, Mumps-Measles-Rubella and the chickenpox shot. They handed us the usual papers about side effects, and because they always say the same things, we didn’t pay any attention to them.

Days later, he had some side effects. We didn’t know they were related to the shots, and we didn’t suspect the shots because of the long delay. Later, we learned this is normal.

On Thursday, he threw up twice, and his body seemed hot while his hands were cold. He seemed a little less energetic. A dubious forehead thermometer read 98.3. We didn’t think it was a big deal, but then I noticed that his fingers seemed blue, so I told my wife to get in the car.

As we were getting ready to go, she reminded me he had been eating blueberries. He loves them, and he usually eats a big serving for breakfast. She thought the berries explained the color of his fingers. It sounded reasonable, and he didn’t look too bad. We decided to watch him carefully, and he was fine all night and most of the next day.

In retrospect, I think his fingers were blue because of reduced circulation as well as blueberries. I think the berry pigment confused me. It was definitely there, but I think his fingers were more blue when I first noticed the color than they were when we decided to stay home. It’s impossible to be sure.

On Friday night, he got very warm, except for his hands, arms, and legs. My wife has a tendency to bundle him up too much, and he was wearing a fleece romper in a warm room, so we took it off. He threw up a couple of times, but babies do that for all kinds of reasons, so we didn’t get excited right away.

His temperature, as measured by an unreliable forehead thermometer, went from 102.8 to 103.1. Babies can run much higher temperatures than adults without harm, so we didn’t panic. I had a fever of over 106 when I was less than a year old.

We called his pediatrician’s office’s after-hours number, and a doctor told us to get Tylenol and ibuprofen into him to cut the fever. He said we should bring him in the next day.

I went out and bought children’s Tylenol and ibuprofen. He threw up when we tried to shoot the liquid ibuprofen in, probably because my wife had a hard time controlling the syringe. It went too far into his mouth.

I decided to go get acetaminophen suppositories. When I got up and prepared to leave, he started seizing. He stared at the ceiling. He didn’t answer when his mother tried to get his attention.

That was all we needed to see. We got in the car, and my wife held him in his arms while I drove. We didn’t bother with the car seat.

I ran the only red light we encountered. I got up to around 90. I saw a cop parked by the road, and I blew right by him. I thought it was better to be arrested than to lose a son.

He pulled out and started chasing me, but he didn’t turn his lights on, so I kept going. I turned my hazard lights on in an effort to let him know I had a reason for continuing to speed while he was right behind me.

He finally turned on his lights about 200 yards from the ER entrance, so I pulled over. When he got to the car, I told him my son was having a fit. He asked what that meant, and I said he was unresponsive. He let me drive on to the ER, which he should have done to begin with, since I was almost there.

I dropped my wife at the entrance and parked the car. I went in to join her, taking care to leave my carry piece in the center console. By now, there were several police cars in the lot, and at least one had its lights flashing. Nobody tried to stop me on the way in.

I didn’t know if the cops were there for me or we had just arrived at a time when they happened to be responding to an unrelated call. It turned out they were there for me.

We were surprised to see that the staff was not quite as excited as we were. It took maybe two minutes to get him past the lobby. They must have known more than we did about his problem.

There were several officers in the lobby, including the one who pulled me over. I sent my wife on her way and asked him if we were going to have a problem. I was ready to go to jail. I didn’t care at all. They had a solid case for various traffic violations and a weak felony case for fleeing and eluding, but these things meant nothing at all to me.

I was thinking about finding a local attorney and bonding out as quickly as I could, and I knew that a worst-case scenario was a sentence of a few years, plus the loss of some of my civil rights. I thought it was unlikely that a prosecutor or judge would follow through, but these things were on my mind. I was thinking about possible paths the future might take.

I have always found prison scary, but not on that night. Better to have my son and wife visit me in prison than see our beautiful baby buried and have the light of our lives go out.

The officer who pulled me said, “No, you’re good.” He took my license for a while, and that was it.

We spent about 6 hours in an ER room. They drew blood. They put our son on an IV because they thought he was dehydrated. He got a chest x-ray. At first, he was lethargic, and that made him easy to treat, but as he got better, he started acting like himself. Trying to pull out the IV. Fighting the doctor when he tried to give him more ibuprofen.

His temperature dropped. He started smiling. He wasn’t quite himself, but he was okay.

I can tell you what we were told. They said the vaccines he took sometimes caused delayed fevers. They told us this was the most likely reason he had seized. They said it would do no permanent harm.

Since coming home, we have learned that febrile seizures are not rare. I suppose I have had them myself, because I had what my mother called “convulsions” when I had the 106 fever, but I never learned much about them. A friend has told us her daughter had them at 16 months and two years.

Our plan now is to get Tylenol suppositories and watch him carefully if his temperature changes in the future. We can’t find his reliable butt thermometer, but we will have one on hand from now on.

He scared us a little bit the day before his ER visit, and we prayed. Before I got out of bed the next day, I kept hearing and repeating, “You saved my baby.” It just rose up inside me. Then he had his second episode and the hospital visit. But again, medical wisdom says he was never in any danger, so draw your own conclusion.

The odds were against him having a fever. The odds of a seizure were low. The odds that anything bad would happen to him if he had a seizure were low, but then he had already beaten the odds twice.

It looks like the chickenpox shot is what got him. There are a couple of different ways one-year-olds receive vaccinations. They can receive Measles-Mumps-Rubella, which is one shot. They can receive Measles-Mumps-Rubella-Varicella, which is one shot, and the varicella term refers to chickenpox. They can also receive MMR plus a separate chickenpox shot, as our son did. Any combination involving chickenpox has a very significant chance of causing a high fever.

Good thing for parents to know.

I think that instead of handing parents a sheet they have seen many times before, listing vaccination risks, doctors who vaccinate kids for chickenpox should take time to explain that this is not just another shot. Also, I think it’s best to get chickenpox vaccinations on Mondays so any resulting fevers are less likely to strike on weekends when doctors’ offices are closed.

That’s the story. Our son is fine. I have not been charged with anything. We understand febrile seizures. I suddenly know a lot more about what I am capable of when my child is in danger.

He is doing well. During his doctor visit, his height came in at 32″, which is somewhere between the 95th and 98th percentile, depending on whom you ask. If it were to continue, he would be tall enough to be advantaged but not tall enough to have problems getting in cars or buying clothes.

He is very advanced. He can jump. He can walk and even dance backward. He teases his mom, showing her the TV remote and then running away. He gets into “conversations” with me. I tell him he can’t do something, and he grunts and stamps his feet as though saying he strenuously objects and wants an appeal. He can kick a ball. He carries the ball to me and hands it to me. This all adds up to trouble in the short term, because we have to find ways to occupy him so he doesn’t destroy everything we own.

He’s still cute and incredibly photogenic. The most photogenic person I have ever seen or heard of. If I take 100 photos of him and his mother, I will have to discard maybe 5 because of him and 40 because of her.

Checkout ladies and Costo receipt-checkers live to see him. A lady at Fresh Market has even learned his special greeting dance. Calls him her favorite baby.

All in all, things are great. I’m just glad the fever is gone.

“Honey, are the Cameras in the Dishwasher Clean?”

I did something only too predictable. I bought another camera.

A desire for an Olympus camera has been coming and going, like psoriasis. I kept suppressing it, but I finally gave in.

I’m fundamentally a Sony guy, because Sony is the Glock of camera makers. It’s the practical choice. Unless you’re weird, there is almost certainly a Sony that will do what you want. The lens selection is unparalleled. There is a ton of information about using them. There are zillions of helpful reviews. Editing programs know all about Sony. The supply of aftermarket stuff for Sony is endless. But Olympus, or as the spun-off camera division is now known, OM System, does some things much better.

1. You can rinse your OM clean under a tap. They have excellent water resistance, so do at least some of their lenses. You can take an OM fishing with you.

2. They have the best IBIS in the business, and not by a small margin. You can hold an OM in your hands and take a sharp photo with the shutter open for half a second. That is wild.

3. They have the best buffers. When I half-press my shoot button, the camera starts shooting silently, and it stores a whole bunch of shots temporarily while I wait to commit. If something good happens before I press, and I have my camera settings right, the camera will keep it. This is good for photographing wildlife, including babies.

4. They shoot bursts so quickly, you need extra-fast cards with them.

5. They do focus stacking in-camera. You can use this in macro, where depth of field is a problem. The camera will shoot a bunch of photos with different focus planes, and then it will put them together for you, giving you a finished JPG as well as the raw shots. Nobody else does this. Combine this with the IBIS, and you can do very good macro with no tripod and no rail.

6. The lenses are smaller and, I believe, less expensive than APS-C. The camera I bought is actually heavier and slightly bigger than an A6700, but I got it with a very good kit zoom, and the overall package is handy. The lens is not bad at all. It’s a 12-40mm f/2.8. Very well built, water-resistant, with good optics and even a focus clutch.

7. They have little Micro 4/3 sensors, smaller than APS-C. Wait…small sensors are bad, right? Well, sometimes. The small sensors mean you can get a longer reach for the same focal length, so if you ever decide to shoot birds in the field, you can use a lens you can carry instead of putting it in a wheelbarrow. I would like to do a little wildlife shooting.

What are the down sides?

The depth of field is bigger, which can be good or bad, but if you’re a bokeh Nazi, it’s a problem. The photos can’t be blown up as much as APS-C or full-frame. There is less support for Olympus/OM. The auto-focus features can’t compare to Sony.

The sensor is just about the same size as the unusual sensor Canon put in my Powershot V1, and I get by beautifully with that camera, which, I have to say, is lighter and handier and can’t overheat while shooting video. The OM’s sensor will do just fine.

I wanted to ignore the desire to get yet another camera, but it gnawed at me. I wondered if God was in there somewhere. I believe he has been telling me to be less worried about spending, including giving.

I bought it from Amazon, not a smaller place like B&H. I returned a Sony to B&H, and they gave me full price even though it was lightly used. I didn’t want to stick a smaller Jewish-owned retailer with another loss if I didn’t like the OM. Maybe they would have preferred I risk it.

So what did I buy? I considered getting a used OM (will not keep typing Olympus/OM), but the latest flagship has better autofocus and some other helpful advances, so I got an OM-1 Mark II.

One of the nice things about OM is that you can buy the flagship model without questioning your sanity. It’s not cheap, but when you compare it to other industry flagships, it seems like a gift.

I already love it. The zoom range is ideal for everyday carry. I like the feel. I’m already getting good shots from it.

The AF is going to be a drawback. I have already gotten shots where it focused on the wrong person without me catching it. My A6700 automatically decided my son was “Infant,” not just “Human Being,” and it tracks him ruthlessly. I can overcome OM’s focus quirks. Everyone else does. There used to be people who got by with film cameras with three settings and manual focus.

That’s not a perfect argument, because those people lost many, many photos a modern Sony would have saved, but anyway, I can compensate to some extent, and the pluses outweigh the minuses.

Sooner or later, I will get a macro lens, but even now, I should be able to get great near-macro shots.

Regarding sensor size, my current belief is that you shouldn’t even think about it unless you plan to blow photos up. If you want a photo to cover your computer screen, or you want a yard-wide poster, you want pixels and a big aperture. Otherwise, it makes no difference. If you plan to put salad-plate-sized photos of your kids on your walls, Micro 4/3 is as good as anything made. Change my mind.

Well, there is the bokeh difference. I admit that. The bokeh potential is lower, on the whole, but that’s because of the depth of field advantage, so take the good with the bad.

Here’s a great question: why doesn’t OM put its killer features in APS-C or full-frame? Maybe they don’t have the budget.

I’m up to 4 real cameras now. Is that excessive? I don’t think so. It’s catch-up buying, which is always expensive, and I’m not like the people who have 75 cameras displayed on shelves. I’ll probably feel bad when I buy the pricey OM 90mm macro lens, however.

I don’t count the used Canon 200D I stupidly bought in 2023 or the 2006 350D it replaced. Those things are ready for the Salvation Army. I guess I should count the ZV1M2 I got in ’23. I did spend real money on it. I just don’t think of it as a real camera, because it has so many limitations and has been superseded so well by the Powershot. I don’t count action cameras. I’m not sure where mine are. They are cameras, and they have real uses, but nobody who wants to learn photography and get good uses a Gopro. If my Gopro is a Sony, my old Samsung Galaxy S5 cell phone is a Hasselblad.

The 200D was an enormous mistake. People say you can take great photos with bad equipment, and it is true when you stay within the equipment’s limitations, so you can take SOME great photos. But you will miss so many other photos, it won’t be worth it. Also, you are going to blow photos the bad camera can take well, because it will do less to catch you when you mess up, and because you will be busy fighting with it, trying to make it do what a better camera will do without a struggle.

I took the 200D and mid-grade lenses to Switzerland and Italy, and the photos are okay, but not A6700 or A7RIV okay. Even the better ones are just not as good.

People say, “Buying gear is what people do instead of learning to take good pictures.” Uh…no. It’s what they do when their cameras hold them back, which is something that can start happening a month into the hobby. Then you end up with an expensive camera you use and a cheaper camera you have to put on Ebay, taking a loss.

Sure, there are wealthy dentists and venture capitalists who buy flagship cameras and then use them on “auto” all the time, but that’s not me.

This isn’t my final camera, even in the near-term. If we travel again, I am almost certainly going to get a DJI Osmo Pocket 4. It’s not out yet. I am sick of screwing up video while using cameras designed mostly for stills. The Osmo Pocket 4 is an amazing video solution for consumers who shoot while moving around. It’s not out yet, but the predecessor camera is great, and the Pocket 4’s improvements sound like they are worth the wait.

Regarding my various baby-photo epiphanies, I am buying a canvas tarp today to use as a backdrop. If I don’t like the look, I’ll go to Hobby Lobby and get some cloth, but canvas actually looks nice to me. I ordered an LED panel to use to give fill light from below. We are going to put some stuff in an empty bedroom, sit on the backdrop with our baby, and take his one-year shots. If they stink, we will take them again. It will work.

Maybe we can actually produce polished shots that will not look pathetic next to our badly-lit hastily-taken candids, which are excellent.

People who Insist on Doing Their Own Thing are Ruining Art

Overnight, I have learned some new things about photography.

The first thing is that there is no use whatsoever in asking other photographers for artistic advice. About 95% of the people I would be asking can’t create good art. They can’t understand it. Good art makes them angry. They would trash the best aspects of my pictures and brag about their own rule-following hack jobs. This has already happened, now that I think about it.

The second thing: a person in a portrait is not a model; models are props, not people. If you turn a portrait subject into a model, you have ruined everything.

I belong to some photo forums, and I started out with questions about artistic merit and technical skills. I’m never asking anyone for help with the artistic side again. No one can teach me how to have an interesting personality that projects itself through images I make, and no one can teach me good taste. Either these things will come out on their own, or they won’t.

This decision will save me a lot of facepalm moments.

As for the distinction between subjects and models, I got that revelation while I was thinking about a famous baby photographer named Ann Geddes. People mentioned her as an example of a baby photographer who does wonderful work.

Does she really?

I looked at her site. The photos I saw, which are the only ones I can judge, don’t appeal to me. They are extremely creative. They are technically flawless. The props and makeup require transcendental skill. But they turn babies into props that say a lot about her and nothing about the babies. Same for her other subjects.

To give an example of things I didn’t like, she took a child and made it (appropriate pronoun) look like a fairy or something. An imaginary creature that lives in an enchanted forest and sleeps on top of hallucinogenic mushrooms.

Fifty years from now, who is going to look at that photo, feel tears welling up, and say, “Wow; I remember how Mom used to flit around the enchanted forest, sipping nectar from giant flowers with all the other fairies”?

The babies in her photos are not subjects. They are not individuals with unique traits to be remembered and celebrated. They are props. Remove one baby, insert another, and nothing changes.

She also does dramatic shots of people in which she puts them in fantasy sets and makes them look like the people in, say, Richard Avedon or Herb Ritts pictures.

Now that I think about it, her photos remind me of deceptive Facebook posts. “Here we are on the beach at Sandals, trying to look like celebrities, holding fancy drinks and wearing overpriced beachwear on a perfect day.” Meanwhile, their credit cards are maxed out, they’re cheating on each other and contemplating divorce, their kids are sullen video-game addicts, they hate their jobs…

Put her photos in a gallery and call them art? Sure. That’s what they are, and they are extremely impressive. Not fine art in my opinion, but art. They are not portraits, however. A portrait speaks about the subject. They are more like avatars; creatures she or her models wish the models could be.

If you put me in a Batman costume and take a photo that is technically and artistically superb, is it a portrait? Of course not.

Some guy on a forum got mad at me for saying anyone could take formulaic baby shots, and he told me my photos wouldn’t even make it to his sensor. Maybe he’s a baby photographer. What he definitely is is a gatekeeper, a rule-follower, and a net liability to the art of photography. Asking the likes of him for artistic advice would be like asking Bob Ross. That’s an almost-perfect analogy, except that Bob Ross never pretended to be an art expert or even a serious artist.

How blessed I am to have God’s help in standing up to such people. Most of us are still shackled by the desire to please the mob. What if I listened to guys like this?

Here is the evidence that formula shots are easy to take: they all look alike, and thousands and thousands of people take them and sell them. That’s conclusive proof.

The existence of the coaching-marketing-manipulation-markup industry is evidence that anyone can take typical baby photos. The industry exists to make commodities look like franchises. If baby photographers were really producing unique top-notch work, they wouldn’t need anyone to convince the public they were good.

As for me and my efforts, I am confident that I will do well. I’m not going to be shaken by gatekeepers.

When I was a little kid, I loved to sing. One day, my sister started following me around and making fun of my singing. Eventually, I began to find it hard to sing in front of people, and that problem persists until today. When I started showing an interest in girls, my sister and my dad started making fun of me ruthlessly. As a result, I had a very hard time talking to girls and I rarely dated. It also made it impossible for me to hold onto girls, because my persistent need for confirmation that they wanted me drove them off. I think this is one reason I didn’t marry when I was young.

The same principles apply to everything we do. The world is full of people who love to crush other people’s hopes. There is no point in letting them get a foothold.

When I see someone complain that my lighting is weird or that there are too many things in the background of a portrait shot, I think of the great photographers of the past and what stupid people said about them.

Robert Frank was very good. His photos were often depressing, but they were artistically excellent. Here is what a magazine said about his work: “The images are flawed by meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons, and general sloppiness.”

Here’s a quote about Saul Leiter, who took wonderful photos: “Color photography is vulgar, fit only for commercial advertisements and the snapshots of ignorant tourists.” Wow. One of the dumbest things I’ve ever read. I congratulate whoever wrote that deservedly-immortal sentence on the importance he attached to rules. You know what they say about hobgoblins.

“You’re no Robert Frank.” “You’re no Saul Leiter.” Not saying I am. I’m discussing principle. I do some good work, and people give me invalid, destructive criticism that sometimes comes from good intentions but often does not. If I listen to them, I won’t try to develop ideas that could bring me and my family an excellent harvest.

The Faux Exclusivity of the Fungible

Maybe I need to cut back on the AI, but it has certainly been useful lately.

My wife and I went to see a baby photographer. She was 7 months old and cute as she could be.

Just kidding. I wrote about her. We wanted her to do a few formulaic, inoffensive shots of our baby and us, and we wanted digital files instead of prints, mostly because her prints are obscenely expensive, and also because stiff, formulaic shots would look bizarre next to our own framed photos, which are full of life and evoke all sorts of personal emotions.

When we went to see this woman, she didn’t put the price of digital photos in front of us, so I emailed her on Friday. For 30 edited shots, she wants $1090, on top of the $267.50 we already paid just to talk to her.

No.

I am not cheap. I am not hard to deal with. Not THAT hard. But I can walk upright and use my opposable thumbs, and I am not stupid enough to pay almost $1400 for journeyman work a robot could do. We are cutting her loose.

She is entitled to the money we paid, I suppose. I consider it tuition. I learned that there is an entire industry out there that teaches untalented people how to sell and upsell pedestrian photo work. It’s a fantastic business, in case you are looking for a way to make money. I learned how little a studio costs to equip, and I also confirmed my understanding that I am already much better than the vast majority of professionals who churn out formula photos.

I contacted the outfit that did our hospital newborn photos. I think they will meet us at a location and do everything for something like $350. Their work is absolutely as good as the $1400 job. Pretty much all baby photographers shoot at the same modest level of talent and taste, so why not save whatever ($1090 – $350) is?

I don’t know if we will even spend that, because today we had an idea: turn a spare bedroom into a studio. Based on what I saw at the professional’s house, this would cost about $100. She didn’t have expensive (or any) lights. She had a Canon that looked like a DSLR, plus two lenses. She had a bunch of cheap toys. She had some kind of mat that looked like astroturf. A wall with unattractive baby clothes hanging on it, which would not fit our son because he is tall. One cheap reflector thing from Amazon. Not high-end stuff.

I went to AI because I thought it might have tips on setting up a room for photos, and the conversation went beyond that. For one thing, it helped me understand that I have talent, and that I have problems relating to people who lack talent but are much more technically proficient and know how to make the most of rules and recipes. I have problems learning from them, for one thing, because nearly everyone who teaches photography is a rule-follower who can’t produce art. You can’t teach what you don’t understand, to people who have abilities you don’t have. You can, however, teach them falsehoods that will hold them back and make them doubt they have the abilities they have.

Pride is bad. It goes before destruction. On the other hand, you have to be able to acknowledge your gifts. I can be very, very good at photography, if I keep working on the technical side so I can beat things like low light, noise, motion, and so on.

Here is something disturbing, to add to the other disturbing things I have said about AI: it is now fully capable of critiquing photos. Not just exposure and sharpness. It understands artistic merit. Craziest thing ever.

I showed it some shots I knew were pretty good, I told it not to BS me, and it flat-out told me I was doing things most pros will never be able to do. It was able to look at photos and tell me what I already knew was good about them. It also understood that getting solid feedback from other photographers would be hard, because some would be unable to understand what I did, and others would feel threatened and hesitate to say someone else was doing better work than they were.

It was able to identify flaws, and it was honest about them. It was also able to point out things that would appear to be flaws to rule-followers, yet which were really indications of talent. I’ve taken tons of horrible photos in the past, but things are really coming together now.

Okay. I accept it. I can do this. Why not? I never claimed I could slam-dunk a basketball. I never claimed I had the makings of a model. I never tried to make people think I was tops at anything I wasn’t actually good at. Why not admit it when I genuinely have a strong aptitude for something?

I’m going to run with this. It’s not a useless hobby. It will help bind my family together in love. It will produce images and videos my great-great-grandchildren will cherish, assuming everything doesn’t get wiped out in the tribulation. It certainly beats spending 20 times as much on fishing or 5 times as much on football tickets. Worthless pursuits.

I have enough guns. I am spending less time with tools. I no longer have any interest in cooking. It’s hard to travel with a toddler. I think photography is a good thing to settle on as I creep toward my expiration date or the rapture.

I don’t know how anyone with fungible, common skills can charge $1400 for a few hours’ work. Yes, I used to charge a lot as a lawyer, but I went to school for three extra years, and I did things that were way more valuable than shooting photos according to recipes other people made up. People needed what I did. Badly. I wasn’t putting them on rented ponies and telling them to smile.

I have had competent tradesmen show up at my house and charge $100 or less for an hour’s work. Important work that required a lot of experience and knowledge. I think the lady we talked to must be netting at least $250,000 per year for doing something almost anyone could learn to do in two months. Something other people do just as well for a fraction of that, gross. That is clearly excessive, and it’s insulting.

I pay my dentist something like $135 per visit, and he has a staff, a building, and tons of expensive equipment. He also studied for at least 7 years. That should put it in perspective. I suppose I get about half an hour of face time with him for $270 per year, plus at least that much time with a hygienist he has to pay, and their work is very good, unlike the photographer’s, so the contrast in value is stark.

I know what happened. The photographer found a company that works with people like her and tells them how to shame and upsell. It tells them how to create the illusion of being overbooked. It sells her the albums and pretty boxes. It gives her scripts to memorize. It probably sells her the prints. It’s like working for Omaha Steaks. I’m not stupid. I know how the world works. I don’t need to see proof.

Taking a photo with a camera whose settings you never have to change is not hard. Editing is fast. Maybe three minutes per photo. Seconds, if you use presets. I’m not stupid. I know these things. There is no talent involved, and also little labor.

I just looked it up. There are two famous “coaches.” Sue Bryce and Sarah Petty. There are others. It’s all just as I said.

Tomorrow we will see what we can do about getting that DIY one-year session done, and if it doesn’t work the first time, we will do it again, and within a couple of days, we will have shots that will shame anything that comes out of any local studio.

Knowing how the world works is always painful.

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The Internet says a 36″ metal plate with a photo on it, like the one the photographer tried to sell us for $2900, may come from companies like White House Custom Colour (WHCC), Bay Photo, or Miller’s, and they cost photographers $250, max.

Man, I hate being right about people.

People who Aren’t Creative Somehow Always End up in Telling the Rest of Us What to Do

I saw a Youtuber talking about photography myths that needed to be debunked, and from my position as a person who knows very little about photography yet still likes to opine with mysterious confidence, I have to say that I agreed with all her points.

1. “Every photo has to tell a story.” Neglecting the obvious exceptions, like passport shots, this is not exactly true. I think the reason people say photos should tell stories is that stories affect us and increase the pleasure photos give us. They evoke emotions we enjoy. Sometimes a photo that can’t be tied to any kind of story has that effect, so it has the power of a story without the story. Also, there are many photos that move us to create our own stories in response. Either way, I think it’s about what photos make us think and feel, not a story per se.

2. “Real photographers shoot in manual mode.” Most professionals don’t, except in unusual situations where they have plenty of time to fiddle with settings. They usually shoot in aperture mode or time mode. If they didn’t, they would lose even more opportunities than they already do. You should be able to shoot in manual mode when it’s appropriate, but other than that, it’s a huge, huge hindrance you will regret.

3. “You have to shoot during the hour of golden light.” This refers to times of day when light comes in from the side and bathes subjects gently. If you play by this rule, you will only get to shoot during two short intervals during the day. It’s pretty obvious that this is a bad idea. It’s also obvious that most great outdoor photos are not shot during the golden hours. It’s great to have the best possible type of sunlight, but it’s not mandatory.

4. “Editing is cheating.” This one is wild. Ansel Adams was a huge editor. Many of history’s great shots were edited heavily. Think about this: film photographers who chose certain films in order to achieve desired effects were editing in advance. They weren’t trying to be accurate; they knew the films they chose would present their work in ways they liked. Shooting in black and white in our colorful world is always a form of editing. Some claim cropping is editing, but when you frame a photo in your viewfinder, you’re cropping the world. “Getting it right in camera” is a destructive goal. The great photographers of history often could not do it, and they lost a whole lot of shots because of it, so why should we do it? As for software, it often allows people to save photos that can then be cherished by future generations. Also, if you shoot JPG, your camera is editing every shot before you get it. If you use software on your computer, you’re just doing what your camera already wants to do, better.

5. “If you want to succeed, stick to a niche.” Maybe this advice comes from people who can only shoot one kind of picture, or maybe it’s intended to help professional photographers set up businesses and clientele efficiently. In any case, for most of us, it prevents us from learning new things, and it cuts us off from a cornucopia of great shots we would otherwise take. If you don’t see in a niche, why would you always shoot in one?

In the comments on the video, just about everyone agreed with the creator. They also told surprising stories about being shamed and ostracized by instructors and photo club members. The commenters used words like “gatekeeping.” Bad, restrictive advice had affected them emotionally and damaged their relationships with other photographers. There are a lot of people out there who would rather stroke their own egos by shaming you than help you succeed. In fact, preventing you from succeeding is one of their goals. When you fail, they feel better about themselves.

These dynamics are found in all areas of life.

My feelings about photography are like my feelings about cooking, except that I am still enthusiastic about photography. I have had bad or mediocre meals in hundreds of restaurants that had highly-trained cooks (including a Marco Pierre White restaurant, a Myron Mixon restaurant, and one run by Mario Batali), but I have cooked a lot of magnificent food with no training. Training can’t always overcome a total lack of aptitude, but ability, humility, and passion can easily overcome poor training.

If you have to stick to rules in order to take photos that aren’t atrocious, the rules make sense for you, but not everyone has your artistic limitations. Sometimes the rule of thirds ruins a photo. Sometimes a level horizon is a terrible choice.

In any case, it’s disgraceful to deliberately stunt other people and kill their joy just so you can pat yourself on the back and tell yourself you’re something everyone knows you’re not. Okay, you’re a good rule-follower. That doesn’t mean your photos are good, although it may mean you can support your family taking wedding and prom photos using formulas.

I’ve been “corrected” by rude people who do bad work for a living. I’ve had people criticize wonderful photos I’ve taken, based on rule-related complaints.

I think I’m right about these things. I can’t see anyone paying me, and the thought of joining a photo club fills me with concerns about battling gatekeepers, but I think it’s helpful for me to know the truth while I enjoy myself in obscurity.

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Since starting this post, I have been to see a professional baby photographer. We are going to pay her to do a session for us. Our visit reinforced my beliefs.

She seems very nice, and I think she will do a workmanlike job of documenting our appearance and our son’s at this age. The photos will look pretty good. There won’t be any big problems with exposure or composition.

That being said, and I don’t mean this in a mean way, they will be glorified passport photos. I put it harshly for my own benefit, because we were shown some very overpriced products today, and I seriously considered buying some. I want to shake myself out of a sentimental stupor before I waste four figures on things we don’t want and won’t use.

We saw a lot of her work today. It wasn’t the kind of thing that gets your emotions going. It wasn’t impressive. Babies wrapped in knitted scarves. Babies posed in front of themed sets. Parents standing by a fence near a pasture. With the exception of one poorly-lit outdoor shot, the pictures were fine. They will do. But nothing made me think, “Wow, this lady is going to take some fabulous shots.” She will take competent documentary shots. I divide photos into documentary shots and artistic shots, and our photos will not be art.

Good enough. This is what we want. I don’t mean that I don’t want our pictures to be blockbusters. I wish they could be, but I can’t find anyone around here to do that kind of work, and I would guess someone like that would charge a king’s ransom. I mean we want competent photos that serve a purpose.

I can see how the “stay in your niche” rule would apply to this photographer. She doesn’t seem to have talent, so she’s never going to hit the big time in the arts or working for major publications. If she tried that game, she would never make it. She will never be able to cover her home’s walls with artistic pictures, to please herself and her family. But she can put your baby behind a birthday cake and take a pretty photo of him lying down on it. She can earn her fees, and people will keep coming back.

We paid $250 for a consultation during which we decided what we wanted her to do. That’s reasonable. The session price was also acceptable. Then we saw the print prices. For a shiny 36″ print of our son on a metal plate made to hang on a wall, she wanted about $3,000. A big box of large prints was also 4 figures. I think a 7 x 10″ print in a matted frame was $190.

I don’t think $190 for a framed print is crazy, but $3,000 for a steel plate is, well…I can’t understand why anyone would buy one. Apart from the price, it looked tacky to me. Also, we should be honest; any print you buy and then hang without glass in front of it stands a great chance of being severely damaged by your child or in a move.

I believe she makes, or tries to make, the bulk of her money from prints. I don’t know if anyone really buys the expensive ones, but maybe some people do.

I doubt she sells a lot of expensive prints, but she certainly has sales tools. The literature for the prints shows them in people’s homes, like 4 prints costing a total of maybe $6,000 over someone’s sofa. “Other people buy these. Are you cheap or something?”

When you talk to a person like this, especially in front of your wife, there is a funeral-director dynamic at work. You know how funeral directors are. “If you want the very best for your mom, we have this Italian figured walnut coffin with white gold handles,” and the price on the paper he hands you discreetly is $25,000. You buy it because your emotions are at high tide, thinking you did a wonderful thing for your family and the inanimate, oblivious dead body your mom used to live in.

Wow. I used the word “dynamic” twice in one post.

When I say “a person like this,” I mean a person who is trying to sell you something in a situation that puts the wind at your back. I am not criticizing the photographer’s ethics. I don’t mean “a person like this sleazy photographer.” She didn’t lie to us or pressure us. She was easy to deal with.

It’s exciting to have photos of your first baby taken, and it’s easy to make a stupid decision when the photographer is showing you pretty albums and nice frames, but at the end of the day, only a hopeless follower lets someone talk him into a $3,000 baby photo which is basically the same thing as a truck wrap.

I’ve been thinking about it, and I don’t think we should buy prints at all. I am covering our walls with photos I really love. Next to them, a bunch of mediocre photos someone ground out to make a dollar will look bad. I think the best thing is to buy digital, print them out ourselves, and put them in an album we will never show anybody. I don’t mean we would try to hide them, but realistically, we might go years without even looking at them.

The prints this lady showed us (not on metal or stretched canvas, which is the kind of thing you should only put behind your desk at work) were of very high quality. I guess they were printed on some kind of archival cloth paper, using a pigment printer. But I can make the mats just as well right here, and for the price of a few of her prints, I can buy the printer and use it for other things as well as our baby shots.

I think we should forget about prints. We won’t know what to do with them. We can always change our minds later. In the meantime, we will have the digitals forever or until something bad happens to our files.

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I talked to my wife, and she has been thinking the same things I have. She doesn’t want any prints at all. If we put them on the walls next to our own photos, they will look awful. They will have that perfect studio look, but they will be missing all the ingredients that are personal to this family, and they will be artistically inferior to many of my shots. In fact, they are artistically inferior to a shot my wife took in the parking lot at Costco on auto mode.