Pairs Nicely with Word Salad

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

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

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

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

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

Your kids probably know it by heart.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like UV Light on a Hotel Bedspread

Sometimes I find myself failing to pray as much as I want to, and it’s a big problem. Life stops running as smoothly as it should, and I miss God. I start to worry that I’m planting bad things in my future by failing to pray.

My son was a big distraction when he arrived. Constant demands were placed on my wife and me. She became absorbed with his care, and she often pulled me away from prayer. I have had to fight this ever since he was born.

Lately, things have gotten a lot better for me. I have been praying for God to give both of us grace to spend time with him so we won’t be destroyed. I ended up telling my wife I was done getting up in the morning and feeding our son, because that time was reserved for God. She stopped waking me up and asking me to feed him, and things have improved.

Unfortunately, there is a down side to spending time with the Holy Spirit. He makes you realize how filthy your world is.

I was praying in tongues earlier, and I kept thinking about the corruption of this world. Look what a bizarre situation I live in. I am surrounded by powerful sexual perverts. These people used to be a tiny fringe element.

Not only are they not ashamed (as they should be), they have parades during which they prance about completely naked, in front of kids. They get people fired from their jobs for refusing to endorse their disgusting ways. They make Internet videos in which they threaten to kill normal, decent people for trying to prevent them from exposing their genitals to women and little girls in private areas. The police don’t go after them.

Imagine if normal people were threatening to kill them.

Human beings who are sufficiently high-functioning to read and write, bathe and clothe themselves, and even, in some cases, to have jobs are telling us they belong to the opposite sex, or to nutty “genders” that weren’t invented until about 2022. “I am a tree-sexual.” “My gender is cat.” And mainstream leftists defend them!

When I was born, which wasn’t that long ago in man’s history, things were completely different. Sexual deviants were still being arrested. Better that than the scenario in which we now find ourselves.

People who openly worship Satan are now able to force us to let them lead prayers before government meetings. Satan! The greatest idiot and malefactor who has ever existed!

In the United States, which was once a Christian country, witches routinely gather to curse conservatives and Christians, and we can’t do anything about it.

Our last president invited illegal aliens to come in. Invited them! And half of the population thinks he was right!

As I prayed, I was lying in bed recovering from a man-made plague. Man-made! How could that happen? What species other than man could be stupid enough to give itself a plague?

Every year or so until I die, I can expect to get a disease that didn’t even exist until some fools in China created it. Say what you want about earlier generations; they weren’t dumb enough to make their own epidemics.

Entire sectors of humanity have been weaponized by Satan. They have become, literally, insane. Delusion is now mainstream.

This is especially true of mainstream American blacks. The things they believe are too ridiculous for farce. White people cause all of the world’s problems. There was no slavery until white people created it. Math is racist. Blacks can’t be racist, even if they hate whites openly. Absurdities.

Blacks started a movement to cripple law enforcement over a tiny number of illegitimate killings by police, but they ignored the fact that most murders are committed by blacks, and most of the victims are black.

After decades of idiotic affirmative action, which punished the innocent and rewarded people who caused their own problems, we are still being told that “reparations” have to be provided. You would think that receiving millions of jobs and college admissions other people earned would be considered reparations.

Hordes of confused, godless leftists in the US now feel entitled to physically abuse conservatives, whites, and Christians wherever they find us. A bunch of them just attacked a Christian gathering in Seattle, and the mayor blamed the Christians. Just like Nero.

America is no longer safe for Jews. Not just America, but long-established sanctuaries like New York City and our universities. A group of Jews were just set on fire by an illegal alien–a Muslim terrorist–on an American street.

Our leftists, including many Jews, are kissing up to Muslims and siding against Jews. Sexual deviants are loudly marching in solidarity with Muslims who murder homosexuals as a matter of course. Feminists are siding with Muslims whose religion supports wife-beating, the punishment of rape victims, and barring women from driving.

Anyone who tries to speak a word of helpful correction in this crazy world is punished and silenced. People are too proud to be helped.

Somehow I’m supposed to raise a son in this place. A place where every kid is supposed to have a smartphone, and they routinely send each other pornography they have made.

I can’t send him to school because schools are like pools of infected pus, waiting to fill him with the mental and spiritual diseases of our time. I can’t take him to church because churches persecute the Holy Spirit and fill people’s minds with trash. I can’t let him watch TV unless I want him to be lectured about the glories of homosexuality and socialism. I can’t take him to Disney World unless I want him to see perverted employees selling princess costumes to boys. The movies are out. Secular music is out. I’ll have to cut off most kids who want to be his friends.

What kind of world are we living in now?

If I send him to college, they’ll do their best to convince him Christianity is just a plagiarizing myth structure based on earlier religions. They’ll teach him to fornicate; with other men if possible. They’ll give him bad grades for telling the truth about socialism, slavery, racism, and perversion. I guess business is the only option for him. And he’ll have to operate his business in a very red area unless he wants trouble.

I really hate this place. I can’t say it enough. And when I consider what it should have been, it makes me feel worse. There shouldn’t be any countries; we should all be united as brothers and sisters with Yeshua as our king. There shouldn’t be diseases and wars. Even animals should get along with each other. We should have abundance. We shouldn’t have worries.

After Yeshua returns, the world is going to be like a big petting zoo. Animals won’t kill each other any more. It will be safe to put a baby down next to an asp. We will soak in God’s presence all the time. We will find joy in helping each other. That’s what the world was supposed to be like from the beginning, but instead we have Miley Cyrus and P Diddy. Harvey Weinstein and Lena Dunham. Kim Jong Un and Barack Obama. The Bidens and Kim Kardashian.

Sit down for a few minutes and make a serious effort to imagine a world of love and agreement. Then consider the world you live in.

The sooner the rapture comes, the happier I will be. I don’t know how people who are closer to God than I am stand this place. It’s bad enough for people like me.

The only answer is to go deeper into God’s presence. Turning back isn’t an option. There is nothing behind me I can go back to!

I can’t wait until this is over. This place needs to be incinerated and rebuilt from nothing.

Banning Real AR-15’s in Colorado is Working out Great

Published a day late.

Life has all sorts of filters in it, and the Holy Spirit is the best one. He lets useless people pass through and disappear, but he catches the ones who belong to him and keeps them in your life.

Yeshua told Peter Satan wanted to sift him. That’s filtration.

I started blogging in 2001, if memory serves. I got to know tons of people, and nearly all of them have disappeared from my life. I still hear from Baldilocks (Juliette Ochieng) from time to time, though. We are texting right now. Like me, she tries to get cleaned up and transformed by the Holy Spirit.

She sent a text saying, more or less, that it was a good thing that my son had parents who were full of the Holy Spirit. No doubt about that! It sounds like a compliment to my wife and me, but it’s really not. It’s praise to God. I replied and said it was a testimony against me that I was so useless at the age when most men have kids.

I wondered if this explained Abraham’s advanced age at the time Isaac was born. Abraham was a swell guy, but when he was young, he worshiped demons and fallen angels, just like everyone else in Ur.

Sometimes I get full of myself and laugh at people who seem to be behind me in the race. I am especially critical of people who are being destroyed by belief in the prosperity gospel. But I got caught up in it myself. I believed it even though it was facially absurd. I would not have been a good parent in 1987.

What will be more embarrassing if all my deeds are shown to humanity at the end of the world? Seeing me watching porn, or seeing me send money to Robert Tilton?

Definitely the latter.

Looks like Dad has covid. I woke up yesterday feeling like I had snored a lot and irritated my throat, but it went away. Later on, I got chills, and my nose started filling up. And I had one of the gross digestive covid symptoms.

Covid is like global warming. No matter what the symptom is, it fits.

I think I got the remedial steps in the right order: 1. prayer, and 2. ivermectin. And I shot some spray into one of my nostrils. One open nostril is all you need, and if you alternate nights, you can extend the time it takes for you to become addicted to the spray.

I woke up feeling nearly well, except for some crud in my throat. In fact, my nose dried up before I fell asleep. Both nostrils. That was shocking.

When I treated myself with prayer, I thought of famous people who had turned to solutions other than God. For example, Asa turned to Egypt for help before getting with the priests and prophets, and he and his country got some curses for it.

I thought of Paul.

We are taught to believe that apostles and disciples never made mistakes, with the obvious exception of Judas. That’s wrong, though. We know they sometimes argued with each other. The Holy Spirit tells everyone the same things, so if two Christians disagree, at least one of them is listening to a source other than God. Paul argued with Peter, and he had a big dust-up with Barnabas.

I think Paul made a number of mistakes. When he was in trouble in Jerusalem, he appealed to Caesar for help. As a result, he was whisked off to Rome and deprived of his liberty. I don’t think God was behind that. God showed Paul, Peter, and Silas that he was perfectly willing to work miracles to free them.

I have tried to form the habit of going to God before looking for secular help. I think it’s very important, and it’s a manifestation of faith and humility, which God likes.

In my chat with Juliette, I asked where the preachers were, who were supposed to teach us these things during the last century.

They were trying to make poor people feel guilty for not buying them nicer mansions and jets.

It is exciting that my son has two parents who know the Holy Spirit and who will not be completely useless to him. On the other hand, it would have been more exciting if I had been a fit parent a long time ago, my son were in his forties, and I were playing with my grandchildren.

Looking outside my own little bubble, I see Satan’s children are burning Jews again.

I read about the Egyptian illegal alien who made himself a flamethrower and used it on pro-Israel marchers in Colorado. I keep saying God has shown me that pogroms are coming back and that Jews will not be safe anywhere. Well, here they are. If setting Jews and their friends on fire on a street in the United States isn’t sufficient evidence, what is?

What are Jews making of this, I wonder?

Actually, I know. I can guess.

1. Some Jews who worship the government and think the Tanakh is fiction–the mainstream–are concerned about the future of their nation, and they are supporting Israel.

2. Others in that group are thinking they need to appease harder. And a lot of them are helping the antisemites and marching with them.

3. The Orthodox are trying to come up with explanations that don’t involve mistakes on their part, as though remaining dispersed in strange lands and having no prophets or miracles are evidence they are on the right track.

4. Jews who know their Messiah and the Holy Spirit are thinking, “Well, this is it. We knew this would happen. Time to get closer to God and our Holy-Spirit-led Christian brothers and sisters.”

A flamethrower! What a punch in the face for people who think the problem is over-hyped and soon to pass. What a punch in the face for Coloradans who are working to nullify the Second Amendment. As the flaming gasoline is flying through the air toward you, just call the police, and they’ll arrive by magic and turn it into confetti before it lands.

Far-left politically-fungible Jewish liberal actor Michael Rapaport seems to be waking up, probably too slowly. He now says “the cavalry” isn’t coming to save the Jews. Of course it isn’t. Not unless the cavalry is Christians who are determined to protect however many Jews they can. We won’t be enough.

In the past, Jews have not gotten along well with cavalry. Consider the Cossacks.

When the state turns against you, the cavalry becomes your enemy.

If I were a Jew with a family, I would be looking at homes in places like South Dakota and Tennessee. Places where it’s okay to be armed. So there are no kosher butchers in these places. So there are no shuls. Big deal. Start migrating, and the butchers and rabbis will follow.

How many rabbis were there in Manhattan and Brooklyn when Jews starting settling there? Didn’t stop anyone.

Eat salad for a while. Have frozen meat shipped in. I guarantee you, there are companies supplying Jews with kosher products via UPS.

I’ll bet Messianics are moving.

Actually, Jews should stop stalling and move to Israel. It DOES belong to them, after all, and we know that God wants them there. God doesn’t expect them to live among treacherous Gentiles forever. He didn’t give Isaac the Promised Land so he could move to Colorado and be attacked with a flamethrower. The diaspora is a curse. It’s not normal, and it’s not a blessing.

A Baby’s Butt Should Only Have One Crack

Now that I am an expert on all things baby, I have decided to formulate my own proprietary baby butt grease.

Baby maintenance is mysterious to me, because while the human race has been around a very long time, we are convinced we have to have a fair number of recently-invented products in order to keep babies from disintegrating. If they’re necessary, how did we survive so long without them?

One possible answer is that we didn’t survive. Historians don’t seem to be very good at their jobs, and no one knows for sure, but they think somewhere between 20 and 50 percent of medieval babies never got to see that first birthday cake.

The population of the world grew extremely slowly in the past, proving that lots of people didn’t get old enough to reproduce.

The grease thing seems particularly odd. Secular people keep telling us we’re animals, but is there any other animal that refines lubricants and applies them to its young? Probably not.

Human beings aren’t stupid, so we have probably been greasing babies with things like animal fat and olive oil for thousands of years.

It’s odd that they need it. What happened to evolution? It was supposed to handle things like this.

My wife started our son out with Vaseline, which Zambians apply to their entire bodies. She tries to get me to do this to myself. It makes my skin crawl. The thought of sticking to my clothes and leaving stains on furniture and sheets is too much for me. Anyway, they use special Blue Seal Vaseline over there. It’s thicker than the stuff we get here. You can find it on Amazon here, but of course, it’s crazy expensive.

Vaseline gave the boy pimples, so now she limits it to his diaper area.

Incidentally, you can get super-thick petroleum jelly very cheaply if you order a dozen containers, which is a reasonable move if you have a baby. The brand name is Dynarex, and hospitals use it.

We also tried Aquaphor’s special diaper rash healing ointment, but like Vaseline, it’s not the kind of thing you want all over your baby.

I had an idea. I was familiar with lanolin. I had used a lanolin and ethanol solution to lubricate shell casings, and I had also used a lanolin and mineral spirits solution to prevent rust on tools. I knew lanolin was amazing. It gets into your hide and forms a barrier that is hard to wash out, and it really keeps the moisture in.

Know what you’re buying when you buy skin lotion? Something someone developed as a lanolin substitute. Lanolin is THE skin moisturizer. The gold standard every other moisturizer tries to imitate.

I started mixing lanolin into a diaper cream Zambians use, and it works very well. But I don’t want to pay for African diaper cream, because obviously, there are things here that will work just as well. Also, the diaper cream has perfume in it.

Someone help me understand why manufacturers put perfume in baby products. Generally, they smell fine without perfume, and the rest of the time, they smell like poop and urine, so perfume isn’t going to help. When a baby smells like a full diaper, it’s time to clean him up.

Perfumes are irritating. They can make adults’ noses run and irritate their eyes, and babies are more sensitive than we are.

Johnson & Johnson sells baby shampoo with perfume in it. It’s not supposed to sting babies’ eyes. Well, I’ve gotten it into my own eyes, and it stung just fine, so my belief is that babies do not need weird industrial fragrances in products that come close to them.

Johnson & Johnson also makes baby oil, which is perfumed mineral oil. It smells very nice on women, but on babies, it’s a waste of money. It’s at least twice as expensive as pure mineral oil, which won’t make your baby sneeze.

I got the bright idea of combining pure mineral oil with lanolin. Lanolin is thick and sticky, like honey, so you need to cut it with something thin in order to get it to spread easily.

I read that beeswax was a popular ingredient in baby greases, so I ordered some of that, too. It’s supposed to form a strong barrier and fight bacteria.

I picked up mineral oil locally, and my beeswax has been here for over a week, but the solid lanolin I ordered is still not here. It went to Jacksonville, then Denver, then North Carolina, and then Georgia. Who says government workers are incompetent? Not me. That’s for sure.

I’m going to fiddle with these ingredients until I get a thin, spreadable lube that goes on easily and still does the job. He won’t sneeze. His eyes won’t water. He’ll also be getting the very best ingredients, which is not true of most factory products.

The Aquaphor stuff costs over a dollar per ounce, which is ridiculous. You would think I was greasing Jeff Bezos.

I have around $50 invested. I will probably have to invest another $20 over the next year, and that should give us 12 months of excellent results. That sure beats between $50 and $100 per month, which is what we have been paying. For inferior stuff.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to convince the wife to give up the Aquaphor. She really likes it for fixing irritated skin on his crotch. I’ll bet I can convince her, once she sees the results.

Another skin-saving tip: do NOT buy Aveeno baby wash and shampoo. Not unless you want to tan your baby’s hide and get a product suitable for making baseball gloves.

My wife bought this stuff because it came from a trusted brand, and it had “baby” on the label. Then our son’s skin dried up so it resembled the seat of a Cadillac that had been baking in the sun since 1975.

You can grease your baby to restore his skin’s oils after Aveeno rips them off, but putting moisture back into skin is never as effective as leaving it in.

I was going to throw the Aveeno out, but it’s so strong, it knocks tractor grease right off my hands. Not kidding. It cuts right through anything oily and removes it. Like pure Castile soap. Which may be what it is.

I keep it by the utility sink to clean my hands after I get dirty grease on them. I have to follow it up with lanolin, though. My skin is very tough, but if a soap is extremely strong, it can make it crack eventually.

Aveeno makes at least two varieties of this soap. One says it has shea butter in it. That’s not the one we got. We got the one that’s more like brake cleaner.

I will never understand why they made this product.

What do I use instead? Walmart liquid hand soap. Their house brand; Equate. This is more or less the same as every other brand of liquid hand soap. In fact, it comes in nearly the same bottle as the Publix brand. The label claims it moisturizes, which must be true, because I wash my hands 3,000 times a day with no problems. It also says it’s antibacterial. Whether this is true or not, the bacteria presumably get rinsed off with the soap, so I don’t care.

I give our son a lot of his utility sink showers, so I am pretty familiar with the Equate soap. I put him in his little shower throne thing, I hose him down with warm water, and I wash him with about 7 pumps of soap. That’s it.

It does a good job of dissolving filth, and his skin looks better and better all the time.

My hands also look and feel great.

Guess what it costs. Guess. I’ll tell you. It costs 5.9 cents per ounce. Not a typo.

When I hoist him from the sink, I put him on his belly, grease the rear of his body, flop him over, grease the front, let him sit a minute to soak up the excess, dab him with a towel, and jam him into a fresh diaper and romper. Done.

Now you know how to clean and grease a baby extremely well, while saving a ton of money on products that don’t really work.

It’s sad that companies prey on mothers. Most mothers want good stuff for their babies, and because companies know that, they jack up their prices and make dishonest claims. If it costs more, it must be better. Conversely, products that are less expensive must be harmful and even dangerous. You’re a bad mother if you endanger your baby with Equate soap! There must be a reason why everyone recommends the pricey soap.

Well, there is a reason. They’re wrong. That’s the reason.

Unlike me, most people have kids when they’re young and going through a phase of their lives when they aren’t as affluent as they will be later. In view of that, targeting them with overpriced baby products is pretty offensive.

I give the diaper companies credit. They seem to put out really good products at very fair prices.

While I’m saving the babies and mothers of the world, I’ll add that you should not buy a baby tub. Not if you have a utility sink or bathtub.

Baby tubs can cost over $50 with all the cute matching accessories. They work reasonably well. They’re useful if you don’t want to wash poopy butts in your kitchen sink.

On the other hand, a baby in a tub stews in its own poo because a tub doesn’t give bathwater anywhere to go. Also, a baby tub is a pain to set up and use.

We got a plastic sink chair thing and a faucet attachment with a sprayer and hose. The baby sits on the chair, and I hose him with the sprayer. It’s fantastic. The soap/poo solution goes down the drain, and he loves being sprayed. Because he’s down in a sink, he has never been able to pee high enough to hit me or anything in the laundry room. It’s a beautiful thing.

Actually, he managed it when his mom was bathing him. I have asked other dads, and apparently, mothers just don’t have the pee-management gene. They get nailed all the time, but dads learn to avoid it.

When he’s not in the sink, the support gadget can be lifted out and set aside. It’s perfect. We haven’t used the tub in weeks.

I expect the lanolin to arrive tomorrow, and after that, my son’s butt should experience a golden age of smoothness and softness. If I come up with any more amazing butt innovations, I will be sure to tell the world.

Liberals Triggered

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also, the bans seem unconstitutional to me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That Big Head Must be Good for Something

I thought I would keep a private diary about my baby son, and I failed utterly, so here I am again, keeping track of him on the web.

I started moving web material about him to the private diary, so I guess this is good enough.

He is past three months now. We are told he is supposed to double in size between the day of his birth and the four-month mark, and he is on track. He can’t fall short by much because he is so close already.

He is fat. He now has two baby rings on each arm. His head, which was not small to begin with, seems to be as wide as it is high.

He is developing very quickly. He is remarkably strong. I used to think babies were like rag dolls full of suet, but he feels like there is spring steel under the fat.

Every morning, I lift him up by his hands. I saw a doctor do this, and he said my son had four-month strength at one month, so I figured I should keep doing it to keep him strong. I lift him almost to a sitting position, and then I lower him again, and I push his arms back down against his chest so he gets resistance on the down stroke.

His arms used to straighten as I did this because it was hard work for him, but now he’s so strong, he doesn’t notice the strain at all. He keeps his arms mostly folded on the way up, effortlessly, for 10 repetitions. I find it a little shocking.

He loves being lifted by his ankles. The wife said to lift by his calves so I wouldn’t hurt his ankle joints, so that’s what I do now. It gives him a thrill.

I use this to distract him sometimes. When he’s whiny, I lift him up and let him hang upside down, and he giggles with joy.

He can’t get enough of math class. By “math class,” I mean I hold my hand out in front of him and show him numbers while saying their names. I’ve mentioned it before. I make a circle for zero, I extend a finger for one, and so on, up to 5. This way, he gets exposure to 6 numbers, which is the best I can do with human hands.

When I started doing it, I wondered if it would make an impression on him. It certainly has. He stares at my hand and grins, entranced. It consumes him. Truthfully, it can get tiresome. I can go for pretty long sessions with no decrease in his interest. I didn’t realize a baby could focus attention on anything for 10 minutes or more.

I also show him the numbers in random order. Seems like a good idea. My wife gives him math class, too.

We got him some plastic letters and numbers, and we will be showing them to him in a day or two.

Sometimes he looks so mature it’s hard to believe. When I hold him to feed him, he looks like a smart, dignified, attentive little boy. Like he has shown up to join me for an important job for which he is well prepared.

He has started to hold his bottle now. Sometimes he holds it for quite a while. He often needs help, though.

Pooping is less traumatic for him than ever. Sometimes he still cries, but generally, he just growls and shoves it out. Unfortunately, he likes doing this while feeding or, worse, while sitting by the table in his swing while we feed.

He is now interested in solid food. He stares at it while we eat. If web sources are right, he might take some at the beginning of his fourth month. That will be a bittersweet milestone. Bitter, because solid food will make his poop stink and take all the humor out of dealing with diapers.

It has gotten harder to take candid pictures of him because he is interested in phones. Sometimes he’ll start grinning and giggling in a way that would make for a great picture, but when I take the phone out, he turns serious instantly, staring with great intensity.

He still has a lot of blowouts. The other day, he blew out before I got up. I showered and changed him. I fed him as soon as I changed him. He had a blowout while I was feeding him.

He liked lying on his belly when he was younger, but my wife got the idea that it would hurt him, so she quit laying him on his stomach. This appears to have set him back. We started doing it again, and for several weeks he screamed like he was on a hot stove, and he was no longer able to hold himself up well. Now we make him deal with it, and he is holding his head up very well and complaining much less. I put him on a firm surface when he’s on his belly so he can get traction to work on crawling.

The back of his head is flat, and it worried his mother, but the back of my head is flat, too, and I slept on my stomach a lot. I think most people’s heads are flat in the back. I’m not deformed or anything. My head is about like other people’s, only bigger. My wife thinks he has a flat area on one side, but the web says these things correct themselves fairly well eventually. And like I told her, we can always buy him a hat.

I think he has a great personality. He may be a little high-strung, which is what every parent who has a brat says, but he seems to try to behave. He soothes himself by sucking his fingers. As I have noted before, he very clearly tries not to cry. I think he prefers to be happy, which is definitely not true of everyone. We all know a lot of people who aren’t happy unless they’re upset and sharing their misery.

Crying is a way to manipulate others, so many people would much rather cry than calm down. They know that if they stop screeching, people will be less motivated to do what they want. I think it’s wonderful that my son doesn’t enjoy crying.

Interacting with him gets more rewarding all the time. It’s a blast. Sometimes he seems noticeably more advanced than he was the day before. He recognizes us from across rooms. He knows what a smile is, and he reciprocates. My wife says he can tell what kind of mood she’s in. I guess she would be more sensitive to that, since I’m nearly always in the same mood.

He’s very jolly when I play with him. He loves being rolled and tossed around. He loves playing with my fingers. He even likes having his cheeks pinched gently. He lights up when I’m with him, so now I miss him more when he’s not in the room. Back when he spent most of his time screaming, there was somewhat more duty and somewhat less enthusiasm in my heart when I went to spend time with him. Now I live having him around just for the fun.

As I told my wife, the peaceful, productive intervals between crying fits, diaper changing, and feeding are getting longer and longer.

He still gets very, very excited when we’re playing. This is something I can’t explain. There is some quality I have that allows me to connect with other creatures and get into their bubbles, like we have everything in common. They get excited. It’s like we’re caught up in a strange, private celebration.

It happens with animals. It happens with people. Now it’s happening with my son.

I don’t do it all the time, and it doesn’t work universally, but it’s real. My wife has seen it many times. I do it with her, now that I think about it.

Maybe it’s rooted in the way I have been rejected. I have an instinctive desire to show other creatures they’re accepted and understood.

It doesn’t mean I’m nice all the time or to everyone, as anyone who reads this blog knows.

I have certainly rejected a lot of people.

He is still very pink. I don’t know what kind of white genes I have, but they must be super strong white privilege genes, because he is not nearly as dark as most biracial kids. His hair is a very dark brown with no curls. His eyes are a strange color between brown and blue. He isn’t as dark as most Cubans.

I don’t know what’s happening with the hair. My hair is not far from straight, but when I was his age, it was curly. His mom’s hair is obviously kinky. Where did his straight hair come from?

His palms and the soles of his feet are considerably brighter than the rest of him, so his mom’s genes didn’t just roll over and play dead.

We are starting to look into ways to seat him at the kitchen table. High chairs are standard, but some people prefer portable boosters that can be attached to dining chairs. We are also going to have to get him a playpen, because he will be ambulatory to one degree or other very soon.

I wonder what his capabilities will be. I have long wondered if “genius” just meant “smart kid whose parents started developing his brain and talents on time instead of waiting until it was too late.” Is it true? Can’t say. I know I’m not going to wait until my son’s potential is mostly gone to get him started on learning. Whether he turns out to be a genius or not, there is no reason why he shouldn’t speak 4 languages and sight-read at the piano when he’s 6, and he should be able to do calculus at 12. He should have his potential tapped, unlike the vast majority of American kids.

It’s clear to me that we teach high school sophomores things we should teach 4-year-olds.

I really, truly hated school. It was indescribably boring, and while I didn’t dislike other kids, I found it frustrating that a lot of the other children couldn’t understand things I understood. Classes were necessarily retarded to the point where the least-capable students could keep up, so nothing ever challenged me except the climbing rope in phys. ed. class. My mom taught me to read when I was three, but other than that, my parents taught me nearly nothing. They thought teachers would do it. All I learned was to look forward to weekends and summers.

Cramming should not work. If a class really requires three months, it should not be possible to master it in three days prior to an exam. Because cramming works for smart people, it is clear that we are teaching many kids way too slowly.

Cramming worked for me in law school, which is supposed to be difficult. I always say I learned I could work hard all semester and usually get an A, or I could work really hard for three days and get a B. I chose to drink a lot, I had a great time, I graduated cum laude, and my average was 3.something. I knew summas, and I was smarter.

A physics student can’t do nothing for 11 weeks and then study hard and get a B on a test. Physics is hard, and less-gifted students aren’t around to slow everyone else down, the way they are in liberal arts and law classrooms. By the time you get to second-semester university physics, everyone around you is at least pretty smart.

Here’s a horror story. Someone taught me multiplication when I was in kindergarten. Not well, but I knew what it was, and I could have memorized my times tables. I can’t remember who taught me. It was in a classroom.

I was ready to do 4th-grade math, but no one cared. It was 4 years before my school taught me the times tables. During that time, should have been moving into algebra. I did as close to nothing as possible without getting in trouble, but when I took a test in the 6th grade, my ability level was still grade 11.5, so obviously, I could have been learning more during those dead years. The only kid who beat me was David Sedaka, the Jewish kid whose responsible parents made him study. He made 12.4. And he shouldn’t have been in retarded classes, either. There was no algebra at my elementary school, so I guess he was stuck. Maybe he had other classes at Hebrew school.

He’s probably a neurosurgeon now. And sight-reads.

It’s amazing that we raise kids who don’t speak at least 4 languages. A human being who isn’t smart can learn 10 languages and never be confused, and we pick languages up very, very fast when we’re small.

My son will not have his potential poured down the toilet like mine was, so while he may not be the next William Sidis, he will be much more capable than kids with the same potential and ineffective parents. He won’t say “liberry” and “I could care less.”

He’s going to read the Bible, and we will explain it to him. We will tell him about the Holy Spirit, and unless his free will prevents it, we will baptize him with the Spirit and teach him to speak in tongues. He will know he has to have at least two sessions with God every day. He will be taught that God is a person who knows him and loves him, and he will be shown how to spend time with God. Every revelation God has given us will be passed on to him. If he blows it, it will not be because his parents failed at their most important job.

I don’t know if I want him to be a genius, but I want him to be fully developed. I will be the first parent in my family since my great-grandparents, at least, who will make a responsible effort.

Cleaning up Baby’s Inheritance by Spending It

Today’s exciting news, apart from learning that babies like being lifted by their ankles, is that I am getting a flail mower for the farm.

Just about every farm has weeds, saplings, and grass that need to be cut. The traditional tool for crude cutting is the bush hog, more properly known as a rotary cutter or brush hog. “Bush Hog” is actually a brand, but it has fallen into common use to describe a type of implement.

I have a bush hog. It’s like a lawnmower with a blade nearly 6 feet long. I drag it behind my tractor. The ends of the blades are hinged so they can swing out of the way if I hit a stump or a rock.

I don’t like it.

The cut is very rough. It tears things instead of really cutting them. It can’t be adusted below something like 10″. It’s huge and bulky. It makes the tractor hard to move around. It’s hard to attach and detach.

It’s very unsafe. If it hits a loose object, it can launch it so fast it flies a hundred yards or more. The sheet metal on the sides of the bush hog are very thick, but there is a torn escape hole from an object the previous owner hit. You can put your fist through it. I wonder where it landed.

You can’t use this machine safely within maybe 150 yards of your house or anything or anyone else you don’t want to hit with a missile.

Enter the flail mower.

These became popular in Europe before the US. A flail mower uses a horizontal drum that has hinged hammers attached to it. They are shaped sort of like tiny hoes. Some people say they’re shaped like duck feet. The drum spins at very high speed, and the hammers annihilate everything they hit.

Depending on the type of hammers used, a flail mower is supposedly capable of cutting grass nicely enough to maintain a golf course. I assume that means the fairways, not the greens. Depending on the size of the mower, it will also take out trees up to 4″ thick. Mowers for small tractors are typically rated for 1″ stems, but a lot of people go slowly and cut bigger stuff.

A flail mower will not fling supersonic missiles. It’s small and easy to maneuver. As a bonus, with some added hydraulics, it can mow at an angle all the way up to 90°, so you could actually trim the side of a hedge with one.

In the US, flail mowers originally caught on for tough jobs, so people with tractors under 100 horsepower continued using other implements. They were commonly bought by municipalities, counties, and states to maintain rights-of-way and so on. Over the last couple of decades, small mowers have become popular with people like me.

I would like to have a flail mower to wipe out stubborn stands of blackberries and other weeds in my pasture and woods. I would also like to use one to mow the majority of my yard. Perhaps all of it.

My yard is made up of bahia grass, a very hardy yet ugly and thin type of ground cover. It’s not a real lawn at all. Like nearly all houses out here, mine has only rudimentary irrigation. That means I can’t have a thick, soft lawn a person could actually sit on or walk in barefoot.

I suppose people around here choose bahia because it’s the only thing that won’t die during dry spells.

My grass is so ugly, when I mow it, often I can’t tell where the mower has or hasn’t been. A flail mower ought to be more than adequate for mowing this mess.

I can get a cheapish flail mower that always sits right behind my tractor. I don’t want one. I want to be able to move the mower out so it can go under hedges and so on. I can get a flail mower that can be shifted horizontally by hand, but I don’t want that, either. The implement world is full of tools that can be adjusted “quickly and easily” by hand, and they are scams. I’m sure some of them work, but the rest are very difficult to operate. I have a “quickly and easily” removable deck on my lawn tractor, and it takes up to 90 minutes to get it off, using a bunch of tools.

I could get a hydraulic “side shift” mower I can move to the side with hydraulics, but to get a good quality product at a price I’m willing to pay, I’d have to get something smaller than I want. And I wouldn’t be able to tilt it downward to deal with ditches and so on.

Add it all up, and I pretty well have to get what is known as a ditch mower. This is the one that tilts vertically as well as moving out to the side. The really good ones are Italian and cost $8000. Forget that. The best thing I am willing to spring for is a job offered by a company that sells imports that are better than the general run of Chinese stuff but much cheaper than Italian products.

In order to do this, I will have to put additional hydraulic outlets on my tractor. These are called “rear remotes.” It doesn’t have any rear hydraulics apart from the hitch. I will have to add two more controls. I ordered a kit, and it will be here tomorrow.

Here’s some advice: if you’re buying a little farm, find yourself a TYM or RK tractor. “RK” stands for “Rural King,” the farm store chain. TYM is a Korean company that makes excellent tractors at very good prices, and they make RK tractors.

My tractor is a Kubota, and something like it would probably cost about $35,000 new. It has 38 horsepower, and the loader only lifts 1500 pounds. It’s very limited. You can get a much more powerful TYM or RK for less, with a loader that lifts something like twice as much. And it will come with rear remotes.

Is a Kubota better than a TYM? I don’t think so. People who have TYM’s say great things about them, and they are frequently seen selling with high hours, which suggests they last a long time. I think the expensive brands are ripoffs, pure and simple. You don’t get much of anything for the extra money, and it’s not a little money. It’s a great deal.

Kubotas are made in Japan. TYM’s are Korean. Massey-Fergusons are made in India. So are Mahindras. John Deeres are made all over the world. America doesn’t make any tractors under 100 horsepower, and it hasn’t in a very long time. Decades. You can’t get an American tractor, and there isn’t much point in insisting on Japanese. All the big tractor exporters except China make good stuff.

I don’t know why backward countries make good tractors. Maybe it’s because food is extremely important.

I like TYM because of the powerful loaders. I have had to leave things behind and go back for them many times because of my Kubota’s weak loader.

If I were starting from zero, I’d get at least 50 horsepower. Once you get into that area, you can run just about anything you will need on a small farm. You won’t have to search and read attachment specs as much.

A 55-horse tractor is roughly the same size as mine as far as footprint goes. It would be just as easy to deal with.

My Kubota cost me $11,000, and it came with a John Deere diesel yard tractor and an EZ-GO gas cart, so it was a deal. It also came with the bush hog and a hay spike, plus some really bad bucket forks. It has been great. But I could have done more work faster and more easily with 55 horses.

I have what I have, and I don’t want to spend $33,000 on a new TYM, so I guess I’ll be getting a small flail mower.

I should have done this a long time ago. I was pretty cheap, and I was always afraid the world would collapse and I would end up eating bugs and grass. I didn’t want to spend anything. I guess investing in a really good mower would be better than cash and securities in an apocalyptic situation, but anyway, this is where I am.

The remote kit I ordered is supposed to be easy to install. HA. I reserve judgment due to painful experience with such claims. I have already located a mower locally, so once the remotes are in, I should be able to mow by next week. This will make the pasture more useful for both the cattle and me, and if it turns out I can mow the yard, too, even better. I have been trying to find a deal on a used diesel zero-turn, but it hasn’t been easy.

In unrelated news, my son is doing well. He is somewhat above average in height and weight, so he probably won’t grow up to be a jockey. He has discovered his hands, and he grabs things and moves them around on purpose.

The down side of discovering his hands is that he uses them to slap his mother. He gets very angry with the milk runs out, so he swats his mom like an angry teenager kicking a Coke machine that ate his dollar. We have been told he isn’t smart enough to be angry yet, but I don’t believe that.

Overall, he is a lot more cheerful than he use to be. I almost never wear earmuffs when changing his diaper now. He has also learned to poop without screaming.

Babies have to learn how to poop correctly. I have written about this before. Unfortunately, when babies are very small, about 75% of discussion about them has to involve poop.

Some babies push from above while clenching down below, creating an obvious conflict. Nothing comes out, so they get frustrated and scream. In our case, the screaming lasted up to half an hour, so we are glad he’s not doing it now. He just growls.

The screaming is ending, but now he poops gigantic poops that overflow onto everything around him. He has had up to three blowouts in one day. I thought we weren’t changing him often enough, and I argued with my wife about it, but she turned out to be right. That had to happen eventually. She said his poops were too big. I changed him one morning, and a very short time later, he let out a batch that was so big, it came out through a leg opening. Starting from nothing.

We tried different diapers. Bigger diapers. Checking to make sure we put diapers on perfectly. Doesn’t help. If he’s going to go Vesuvius, there is nothing we can do to contain it. Hopefully, it’s just a phase.

He “eats” a great deal. Like sometimes 9 ounces at once. I would say we don’t know where it all goes, but from the paragraphs above, it’s pretty clear that we do. He is gaining weight in a hurry.

At night, he goes nuts and feeds maybe once an hour. This may be what experts refer to as “cluster feeding.” Whatever it is, we are happy about it, because we think he didn’t get enough nourishment during the first month.

He seems to know who we are now. He has defined our roles.

Mom is the comfort parent. She feeds him directly. She coddles him. She lets him nap with her. He spends more time with her than with Dad. When he gets tired of Dad, he wants Mom, fast.

Dad is the fun parent, the tough parent, and also the celebrity parent.

Dad wrestles with him, lifts him by the ankles, jiggles him around to make him laugh, makes faces at him, and generally amuses him. Dad burps him using musical rhythms in order to make him understand music. Dad exercises him, which makes him laugh. Dad is a carnival ride. Dad is very exciting. So exciting, after a few minutes with him, it is sometimes necessary to throw up.

Dad is also the one who insists it won’t kill our son if the sun hits him in the face for two minutes. Dad made him lie in his bassinet and cry when he was getting spoiled. Dad made Mom turn the AC down in the bedroom because cold baby hands are better than crib death. Dad makes him do “tummy time” even though he shrieks like he’s dying. Dad does not care.

Dad is the celebrity because he spends less time with the baby. My son will actually sit on his mother’s lap and stare at me like a teenage girl watching Taylor Swift walk into Walmart. He lights up and flops around. He becomes joy. At this point, Mom becomes a supporting player. Furniture.

He can see us across a room now, and he watches us. He also likes certain objects. It’s hard to get good phone photos of him because when the phone comes out, he stops smiling and stares at it. My friend Mike said he does this because he sees us looking at phones all the time and he wants in on it.

He’s more fun than ever, because he is more proactive now. The other day, I put my hand on his belly while I was changing him, and he grinned, wrapped both hands around my hand and wrist, and held on like I was his special blanket.

He also tries not to cry, which is a huge blessing. It’s important for men to learn not to make other people miserable with whining. Men who cry all the time are sissy losers. We were right about this in the Fifties. Men who cry expect everyone else to solve their problems. You can cry if you feel sorry for someone. You can cry tears of joy and love. Crying because you got fired or dented your car makes you a pansy.

Men are supposed to be defenders and problem solvers, shouldering burdens for the weak. We’re not supposed to BE the weak. What are the women and children supposed to do when Dad is a fragile fruit who weeps when his soy latte is too cold?

My son soothes himself now when he’s upset. He jams several fingers in his mouth and sucks. He loves the fingers. He won’t accept a pacifier any more. That is fantastic.

He can’t talk, obviously, but he tries all the time. He thinks he’s talking. When he says things that sound like words, I repeat the actual words to him. He says things that sound like “okay,” “hi,” and “hello.” I repeat those a lot.

When I feed him, I use my free hand to teach him numbers. I make a circle with my thumb and fingers and say “zero.” Then I go through the other numbers, straightening one finger at a time. Some day, he’ll catch on.

It’s stupid to teach your kid numbers without mentioning zero. Zero is important.

It can be hard to show him numbers when he feeds, because sometimes he grabs one of my fingers and squeezes it until he’s done.

As he gets smarter, dealing with his boredom becomes more challenging. We are going to get him a playpen. I can’t wait till he gets really interested in toys. It will be wonderful when he can crawl, so he’s not just lying on his back waiting to be entertained.

I bless him in Yeshua’s name all the time. Never forget Isaac and his sons. I curse the people and spirits that are against him.

We have to get to work on his younger sibling. We don’t want them to be too far apart. It will be interesting going through this a second time.

That’s our situation. We love the life we have. God has been extremely indulgent.

The World is Full of Nothings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Professional Nice Guy

Happy Passover. I don’t call it “Easter” because Easter is a filthy, evil, damned spirit worshiped by pagans. I don’t call this day Resurrection Day unless it doesn’t fall during Passover. My understanding is that today will be Passover until sundown. Correct me if I’m wrong.

Speaking of correction, I saw conflicting dates on different Jewish sites. A Reform site says Passover ended yesterday, but Chabad says it ends today.

“Reform” is a funny word in this context, because it means “to correct.” The Reform movement started because somebody decided to correct God.

“Correct” is a synonym for “righteous,” so “Reform Judaism” means “Judaism made righteous.” The self-imputed righteousness came from Reform Jews, so they must be, literally, self-righteous. Like nearly all Christian denominations. The Catholics have given God all sorts of corrections. They pray to dead popes and baptize babies who have no idea who Yeshua is.

Indulgences are still a problem. The Catholic Church says it has never sold indulgences, but the catechism says you can get one by sending money to support pilgrimages, and the difference is not all that clear to me. This is much like Walmart’s policy, which says I can receive a barbecue grill by sending money. Granted, Walmart isn’t in the pilgrimage business, but money is fungible, so if I give an arm of the Catholic Church money for pilgrimages, it means it loosens up money they can use for other things. Not that they need it, with their gigantic real estate empire.

They say they don’t worship saints. They say they venerate them. And dictionaries define “worship” as “venerate.” That’s interesting.

Reform Jews can eat pork and practice homosexuality, so they are pretty liberal with their corrections. Messianic Jews can also eat pork if they want, but it’s not quite the same thing, since they believe God himself permits it. They can’t be sodomites, though.

Speaking of the self-righteous, I saw an interesting article today. Dwayne Johnson, who calls himself “the Rock” for reasons never made clear, has told the world he is sad because of the sick and dying fans he has communicated with. He never gets tired of positioning himself as the nice musclehead everyone is obligated to love.

Yeshua says the actual rock is the rock of Holy Spirit revelation, as demonstrated by Peter when he said Yeshua was the son of the living God. Professional wrestling and action movies are not mentioned in the Bible as means of salvation.

The identity of the rock is another thing Catholics got wrong. They think Yeshua meant Peter was the rock, meaning he was supposed to be the first pope. Popes are supposed to be infallible in matters of doctrine, however, and Paul corrected Peter’s doctrine publicly. In reality, popes are far from infallible, and the early church didn’t have one.

If Johnson is trying to cheer up sick people out of love for humanity, that’s very good. But overall, it’s not an inspiring story.

First of all, how do celebrity puff pieces get published? How is it that a journalist might find out Johnson was sitting in his house looking at correspondence from sick people? Did the journalist stake out his mansion and use a telephoto lens? Did he hack Johnson’s phone?

No. Johnson put a video of himself on Instagram. He wanted the world to know what he was doing. Yeshua told us not to act like that. The fleeting admiration of human beings is all you get. Okay, you might also make some money. There is no further reward.

So how did this turn into a news story that almost literally glows?

Here’s a fact everyone should be aware of: news outlets are prodded and often paid to publish puff pieces. It’s not just puff pieces. The press gets a great deal of its material and personnel through networking. I’ve written about this sort of thing before.

My sister was a “legal analyst” for Fox and CNN. She appeared on panels as a “former prosecutor.” She liked to brag about this, as though Bill O’Reilly and Dan Abrams had crawled to her home on their knees, seeking her out because of her great reputation.

In reality, she paid a publicist named Terry to call network connections and get her gigs. And she was never vetted. Right now, if you called enough news outlets, you could almost certainly find yourself some gigs as a former prosecutor or even a judge. They won’t check. Tell them you’re an astronaut. See what happens. Say you’re the king of France. It might work.

My sister was not an exemplary prosecutor, and she parted with her employers less than amicably. She ended up suing them.

If you’ve ever gotten the impression that news show panelists were unremarkable and lean on competence, you were onto something. Their main appeal to the networks is their availability. People who are good at their jobs are too busy to do free work on demand.

Back when my sister and I were on good terms, I helped her research for some appearances. I helped in the sense that I actually did the research. She couldn’t speak competently on cases without cramming. And if you listened to her, you were really listening to me.

You don’t get chosen for network panels because you’re successful. You become successful because your network appearances get you business. My sister got all sorts of calls because she was on TV.

Now we have a pretty good idea why Johnson’s Instagram was picked up by the press. He put it out there himself, and he probably had his publicist send some emails. The whole thing was probably the publicist’s idea.

Why criticize someone who cheers up sick people? I think there’s a good reason.

This is an old man on bodybuilding drugs. Don’t question it. When he was a football player at the University of Miami, he had a full-time strength coach, and the man he was then looked like the little sister of the man he is now. Smaller muscles and no definition.

He was smaller when he was a pro wrestler than he is now, and the WWE ran on steroids.

I know a little bit about the strength program at UM, because I was a UM student. I knew a player who looked like a Marvel hero. Muscles bulging all over him. I saw him a few years later, and he was somewhere between Chris Rock and the pre-Ali Will Smith. All the bulk and definition had vanished, along with the tone. You would never have guessed he was even a high school player, let alone college. He didn’t look athletic. The strength coaches at UM surely did an excellent job with Johnson, who was young and full of a young man’s testosterone (if not other things), but he is much bigger now.

Dwayne Johnson is using dangerous drugs to make himself big, and he is also holding himself out as exactly the kind of nice guy kids should look up to. So what are kids going to do when they want to be like the Rock and they find out no amount of clean lifting will get them anywhere close? A lot of them are going to take drugs. Just like their idol.

Very few of them will have riches similar to Johnson’s, so they won’t have capable doctors to oversee their drug regimens. They’ll shoot up in gym locker rooms and hope for the best.

I guarantee you, there are thousands of boys and men who admire Johnson and have taken drugs so they could look like him.

Johnson admits he grew breasts and had them cut out by a surgeon. Why? A condition called gynecomastia, which means “woman breasts.” It’s caused by estrogen, and it happens because people use drugs.

When you use steroids to bulk up, and you shoot up too much, your body may convert the extra testosterone to estrogen. Then you grow breasts. It’s a common problem with drug lifters. They have a crude name for it. I don’t know what they do to fight it now, but they used to take something called tribulus terrestris, thinking it would block estrogen and keep them from growing breasts.

Johnson didn’t have breasts as a college player, so where did they come from?

Other bodybuilding drugs also cause serious problems. Like, for example, death.

It should bother people that an old man who uses drugs to make money and make people think he’s something he is not is promoted as a positive role model.

Anyone whose kids think Johnson is great needs to sit them down and talk to them about drugs, pride, honesty, and the filthiness of professional sports and other types of show business. Yes, sports is show business. That’s why stadiums have all those seats.

Johnson isn’t going to look the way he does his whole life, unless he dies pretty soon. I wonder how he’ll explain the change.

He wouldn’t be the only celebrity to shrink. Arnold Schwarzenegger took enough hormones to power an army of Charlie Sheens, and when he had to quit, I was able to tell people, completely honestly, that my body was better than Arnold Schwarzenegger’s.

Celebrity chef Robert Irvine also appears to be off the juice. On his TV show, he had a huge upper body. Now he’s skinny. He’s so thin, it makes his head look enormous. What happened?

He says he hurt his arm and had to change his routine temporarily. So he shrunk all over? It doesn’t work that way. And his injury was several years ago, so why is he still skinny?

I think his doctor or common sense told him he couldn’t stay on the juice, so he quit.

He says he ruptured his triceps. He probably ruptured a triceps tendon. Steroids build your muscles better than they build connective tissue, so tendon ruptures are common.

He seems to have lost a lot of his swagger. He used to bust up old restaurants with a sledge. I’m not sure he could pick it up now. He used to come across like a nightclub bouncer, ready to get in people’s faces and intimidate. Now he scans more like a high school drama teacher.

He moves differently now. He used to swing his arms around as he talked, as if he wanted everyone to see his arm and torso muscles. Now he holds them close to his sides as though he is holding a gold bar under each arm and doesn’t want it to fall. He seems to want to hide himself.

Muscle drugs are like pride. They pump you up and make you look more impressive than you are.

Johnson said something about not knowing what to say to his sick fans. A Christian filled with the Holy Spirit would know. A Christian could introduce them to Yeshua and put them on a path to supernatural visitations. A Christian might be able to help them get supernatural healing, which is very common. A Christian could help them lose their fear of death.

Celebrities are very poor substitutes for God. They’re like baby bottles full of Kool-Aid.

In other news, my son is changing fast.

When he first popped out, my son was like a potato that cried and pooped. As days passed, he improved. We got some giggles out of him. He started grinning. He cried less. Now he appreciates music.

I have been determined to develop my boy’s potential. Not to make him a genius I can show off but to improve him as a person and prevent major regrets, like the ones I have because my parents taught me so little. I only learned one foreign language. I can’t sight-read while playing an instrument. I was in my thirties when I mastered calculus and became a physicist. My son WILL learn to sight read and play. He WILL be able to write tunes out in proper notation. I may make him learn to sight sing. These skills should be considered basic in a civilized world.

People say you can’t make your kid learn music. Those people are stupid. We make kids learn all sorts of things.

Yesterday, he was crabby about something. One of the hard parts of raising a baby is figuring out what’s wrong with him. Tired? Hungry? Dirty? In pain? Eventually, you have to add “bored” to the list. Last night he was bored. He was grousing and squirming, so I put him on his electronic educational mat so he could bang the toys and kick the music keys. He got engrossed, but that only lasted a while.

It occurred to me that his mat played terrible music, so I decided to find something better. I have a Christian music playlist on Youtube, so I turned it on, picked him up, and made him listen. I bounced him around in time with the beat, and I sang to him.

He lit up like a pinball machine. He smiled with his entire head. He was overjoyed. He couldn’t get enough of it.

We had played music for him before, and my wife had sung to him, but we hadn’t sung to him while listening to good songs, and we hadn’t connected him to the beat. When I put everything together, it worked.

Now I’m going to have to do this with him every day, unless I can make his mother do it sometimes. I’m going to have to find more songs. When he’s far enough along, I will have to do the unthinkable. I’ll have to get him a drum.

My old guitar teacher told me rhythm was the real heart of music. He said the wrong note at the right time was the right note, but the right note at the wrong time was the wrong note. I believe a rhythm instrument is the path to sight reading, because the hardest part of sight reading is reading the rhythm.

I felt very emotional during our session. Some of the songs were very moving, and it was moving to share the experience with him and see his breakthrough. Sometimes I found it hard to sing.

Now I have to ask myself if I should try to play music again, for his sake. If you haven’t made music with other people, you haven’t gotten the full experience. Do I try piano again? Should I break out the guitar and banjo?

One song we listened to was Alison Krauss’s version of “I’ll Fly Away.” Krauss is from the area my parents came from. My aunt knows one of her musicians. “I’ll Fly Away” is an important gospel song in Appalachia. Krauss’s rendition uses bluegrass instruments.

As I listened, I thought about how my bridge to my own people had been burned. I didn’t burn it. They did.

Eastern Kentucky culture is too flawed to take part in. Childishness, racism, drunkenness, drugs, adultery, violence, corruption…I could never go back. But it’s not just my heritage. It’s my son’s heritage. He’s not black. He’s biracial.

My wife gets angry when light-skinned American blacks call themselves black. She says, “I’m black. They’re mixed.” We have to check “black” on forms for my son, and she does not like it. It’s a denial of the most important part of his heritage. He is never going to live in Zambia.

I can’t really connect my son to Appalachia, unless we move to an area where the people have grown up. If he’s not a Kentuckian, what is he? A cultureless person. His only culture will be Christian culture. I suppose that’s for the best, but it’s sad that I can’t introduce my son to the place I used to love.

My mom and dad were real Kentuckians. They were born at home, between hills. They ate the food. They lived the lifestyle. I’m more like Dwight Yoakam, who were raised in another state by parents from Kentucky. I can reach either way.

I don’t know where my son fits in.

There will be no reason for him to see Kentucky. A lot of my family’s surviving members chose money, land, and possessions over me. My sister lives there, but she’s Satan incarnate. All the nice properties in which I owned an interest in are gone.

If I went to Kentucky, I would only tell one cousin and aunt. Other relatives, whom I used to love visiting, come to Florida and don’t tell me. They get most of the family together for holidays, and they haven’t invited me, ever. I have never done them wrong. Not even once. But they have certainly done me wrong.

I never stole anything from my grandparents’ estates. I never tried to charge for doing work on the estates. I never swindled any of my relatives. They’ve done those things to my aunt and me.

Oddly, they made soulless sacrifices, but I’m the one who ended up well off and joyously unemployed. I’m well enough off to never miss the loss of what they took from me. The misery of hiring a lawyer and battling them would be much greater than the pleasure of being repaid. My standard of living would not improve.

What they took isn’t enough to put any of them in my position. Apart from one aunt, the ones who are doing well had to get almost all of it elsewhere. If you’re going to sell yourself, you should at least get a good price.

I would have to become like them in order to scrap with them. That is not a price I am willing to pay, because I understand something they never will.

I knew my mother’s and father’s cousins. I knew my great aunts and uncles. My son can forget all that. My wife’s family is in Zambia, she’s an orphan, most of the relatives I knew are dead, and almost all of the rest will never be close to me again.

When relatives died in the past, it went without saying that I would go to their funerals. Now? It might be awkward.

When my dad died in 2019, the aunt that has turned on me declined to go to his funeral. She had known him for over 60 years. She was in her vacation condo in Naples, and she said she had an appointment to have it measured for blinds.

We were on good terms then. But she needed those blinds.

I flew to her husband’s funeral. I flew to her son-in-law’s funeral. Things used to be very different.

You wouldn’t think listening to one song with a baby would bring all this to mind.

I can’t fix other people. We live lives of joy and love here, all by ourselves, and I have Christian friends who fill the places my relatives used to occupy. That will be more than enough.

Side Effects Looking a Lot Like Main Effects

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To sum up, no coronavirus shots for my boy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MORE

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

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

Passover Chametz

Things are great here. God is helping me rebuild my prayer life, my wife and the baby are fine, and we are starting to see the end of the huge medical bills. They have trickled down to us slowly since my son was born.

I would guess we put around $20,000 into this kid. I don’t have it added up. This is a healthy, normal child with a mother whose only issue was mild gestational diabetes. The delivery was normal. Her recovery has been normal.

The bill for the delivery—just the delivery—came in with a sticker price of over $51,000. After discounts and insurance, we were at about $9,000. More upsells and add-ons were applied, so we are paying those now.

My wife had a battery of postpartum tests to check for infections, and they want $1300. A swab and 10 cultures. The hospital failed to check to see if the lab they used accepted our insurance. Oops. Sorry. We’ll do better next time. Just pay that $1300 like it’s nothing, okay?

People say the problem is that we don’t have government insurance in the US. Well, the government is known for expenditures like $500 for a hammer. That’s even worse than the cost of a baby under private insurance. Nothing ever gets cheaper when the government or insurance pays for it. Just more expensive and less efficient.

At least with insurance, there is some tiny measure of market forces at work. Maybe prices would be higher if not for that.

We have United Healthcare. At the end of the year, we’ll get something else. Our deductible is pretty much used up, so if we switch now, we’ll lose that. UHC is awful. They gave us a list of 13 pediatricians to choose from, and none are American. None get decent ratings.

When I chose this insurance, I was buying it for myself, in case of castastrophic illnesses. I didn’t check to see which pediatricians were available. If I had, I would have chosen a plan with a network that included people who didn’t go to medical school in China and Nigeria.

What if we had government insurance? Foreigners love to taunt us with their stories of free heart surgery and hip replacements. Well, consider this. The EU has about 75 million more people than us, and its internal market is about half the size of ours. Their 450 million people spend half as much as we do. How much of that difference is due to high taxes that pay for “free” care?

We pay for their defense, so I suppose we are also paying for their healthcare. Defense is extremely expensive, and every tax dollar they don’t put toward it, they can put toward free appendectomies.

If we were to copy anything about the EU, it should be the actual cost of the care. America seems to be the only place where doctors and other care providers expect to get rich.

The midwife for our delivery charged about $8,000. This is a person of modest education who spent about 5 hours working with us. The highest hourly rate I ever charged anyone as a lawyer was $300, and that was pretty darned high for my state. That was in Miami. Here, it would have been maybe $125.

After my dad and I moved here, we hired a lawyer to redo his will and set up an LLC. We paid about $1200. The lawyer should go to midwife school.

Providers should have to put menus on their walls, listing the cost of every service and product. That would certainly help. As it is, you usually walk in with no idea whether your visit will cost $150 or $15,000.

Reform isn’t coming. The medical lobby is too rich and too strong.

We can afford to have a baby, but I don’t know how people of ordinary means survive. I guess employer plans are helpful. I wonder if people know how much higher their wages and salaries would be if their employers weren’t buying insurance. I’m sure no one discloses that.

In other news, I may have solved the bagel puzzle.

I have been trying to make plain bagels at home because good ones are hard to find here. I worked up a recipe using the classic ingredients, and it’s fine, but the bagels do not taste exactly like the ones you would get in New York or on Miami Beach.

The classic recipe uses barley malt and baking soda. You put malt in the dough, and you boil the bagels in salt, baking soda, and more malt. The malt makes the bagels sweet and adds flavor.

When I tried my bagels, I thought they had too much flavor, and it wasn’t quite like a bakery bagel. I started thinking.

One of the down sides of getting old is that you really get a handle on human nature. When something bad happens, you see past the BS explanations, and you pinpoint the human failing that actually caused the problem.

I began to ask myself whether factory bakers really used malt, which is more expensive than similar substances like white and brown sugar. Could the difference in taste be due to greed?

Of course it could. This morning it occurred to me that Einstein Bros. had to be posting its ingredients on the web, so I checked.

They don’t use white sugar. I was unfair to them. Sorry. It turns out they use CORN SYRUP.

Shame on me, huh? They can’t even shell out for the cheapest form of sugar most home cooks buy. They had to sink even lower and use corn syrup.

Molasses is also listed among their ingredients, far behind corn syrup. It’s behind yeast, so it seems likely they’re using it in the boil. There would be no point in adding a tenth of a gram to molasses to the dough in each bagel, but if bagels were boiled in water containing a little molasses, it would flavor the crust slightly.

It looks like I’m making real bagels, but Einstein Bros. and the New York bakers are not. So because I’ve been raised on corn syrup bagels, I like them better than the real thing.

Baking soda is not among the ingredients, so forget that.

Now it’s time to make up a new recipe with some substitutions.

I may also jack the hydration up from 55% to 57%. I think the bagels may be a little more dense than they should be. And I’m going to boil for 90 seconds on a side instead of 120. I think the crust could be a little less chewy.

If you make bagels at home, and you like the ones they sell in New York, you might want to look up the Einstein Bros. recipe, as I did. Maybe it will help you.

Human beings remind me of the actor Errol Flynn. David Niven supposedly said, “You can count on Errol Flynn. He’ll always let you down.”

MORE

The bagels are done.

I boiled them with salt and molasses. I used sugar in the dough with no other sweeteners. I didn’t use the traditional hand-inside-the-hole method of rolling them out. I made balls, let them rise, poked holes through them, and stretched them to my liking.

Below, you will see raw bagels, boiled bagels, and finally, baked bagels.

These are real bagels. The insides are perfect. You could quibble about the crust. I would say I used more molasses than necessary in the boil, so the outsides are a little dark, like egg bread, but they taste and smell very close to Einstein bagels. Bagels made by professionals aren’t all identical, so I would say I’m within the normal range. Einstein bagels aren’t any more correct than mine.

As I’ve noted before, professionals don’t always use traditional ingredients, so their products can’t be used as firm references.

The crust could be harder. I believe I took the bagels out of the oven earlier than I should have, and this could be one reason. Because the molasses made the bagels look dark, I thought they were more done than they were.

I also boiled them for 1.5 minutes per side instead of two minutes, and that had to make a difference.

At this point, the dough is perfect. The baking method is perfect, except for the time. The crust is slightly bumpy, but it’s not something I would notice and find disappointing in a bakery bagel.

Next time I’ll boil longer, bake longer, and use half as much molasses. I think I would get results just as good with brown sugar. I don’t like wasting my gourmet Kentucky sorghum.

Malt has no place in bagel dough or boil water. Not in my universe. I can now pretty confidently say that these ingredients are out of place in typical New York bagels, even if obfuscators say otherwise. Malt has a weird flavor I’ve never noticed in a bakery bagel. Same for baking soda. Maybe they used these ingredients back in Poland, but I’m not trying to make 1875 Polish bagels.

I was at a grocery today, and they had Thomas’ bagged “bagels.” I pinched one. It was about like a hamburger bun with a hole in it. I don’t think they boil them to set the crust. They’re not bagels at all. They’re tough bread rings. I’ll never have to suffer with those again.

It’s amazing they have the gall to sell those things.

I’m down to small strokes now, so I’ll get started on garlic and cinnamon-raisin bagels. Those should be simple. I believe I should be able to make 4-bagel batches with a mixture of types.

When I produce a bagel which is absolutely true to my vision, I’ll post the recipe.

First Evaluation Goes Poorly

I found this on Yelp today. Really disappointing. I didn’t even know he had an account.

★ 1 (1 review)

Baby X. said

“These are the worst parents on Earth. I regret giving them my business. I wish I could give them zero stars. Not sure what stars are.

The one that gives milk is not too bad. She generally does what I tell her. But sometimes I have to scream for over 20 seconds before the milk arrives. Unacceptable. She also stuck a thermometer up my rear end to make me poop. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but this just seems rude. And what’s the rush?

She sings stupid songs about changing my diaper and giving me baths. No one wants to hear that, lady. Just do your job. If you’re going to sing, can’t you learn a real song instead of singing things like, ‘Changing baby’s diaper! Baby, baby, baby!,’ 300 times?

The other parent is useless. When I cry to get my way, he says awful things like, ‘No one cares. No one is listening.’ Then he actually laughs. He tells me to get over it. I banged my head on the laundry sink, and he told me to rub dirt on it. Sometimes when he walks by, he points his finger at me and says, ‘Shut it.’ He doesn’t even slow down.

He even imitates my crying. Frankly, he doesn’t have the pipes for it.

He made the milk parent leave me in the bassinet to cry just because it was two a.m. and she hadn’t slept in a day. Then he wouldn’t let her respond to my commands. Okay, yes, an hour of 500-dB shrieking later, I fell asleep, but I still feel violated.

The thing that gets me the most is the insubordination.

When he changes my diapers, he wears earmuffs and gloves. I find this insulting. He also covers me so I can’t pee on him. I pee on the other one like 10 times a day. She’s always wide open, like she’s in the end zone and it’s 4th down. She never learns. Anyway, what’s the big deal? How else am I supposed to amuse myself? It’s not like I have a lot of options.

He keeps telling me my head is big. Dude. Have you looked in a mirror? Do you have one wide enough? Body-shaming isn’t cool any more.

This is why I throw up on you more than the other one.

What I really hate is the way he makes me laugh when I’m enjoying a good sulk. He pokes my cheeks and plays peekaboo. He tickles my ears. First thing you know, I’m grinning and flopping around like a total sellout.

It’s not fair playing peekaboo. It’s the funniest game on Earth. It would break anyone.

I wanted to put an ad on Facebook, hoping to hire new parents, but at this point I am totally illiterate.

My advice: be born to different parents. If at all possible, be born to Will Smith and his wife. They really know what they’re doing.”

Just wait, kid. One day you’ll ask for a car.

Shot but no Beer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are Goldstein

Let’s compare two sitreps.

Me:

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

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

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

Unidentified Mainstream West Coast Leftist:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Couldn’t have happened.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life is Easy for the Cute

My son is still alive, so apparently letting me take care of him for up to two hours at a time is not as dangerous as his mom thinks. I am not a tiger. I do not eat my young.

Things are going very well. He is ahead on every obsessive-mom metric I can think of except for height, and he has over 20 years to work on that. He is fatter, stronger, and smarter than most kids his age.

We are changing pediatricians, as I have probably written before. The old Nigerian guy we picked has such a thick accent even my wife has no idea what he’s saying. He is completely dismissive of breastfeeding, and he appears to be receiving bribes from formula companies, because somehow free formula mysteriously appears in his office, and he gives it away.

My cousin told me the doctor should be giving us height and weight percentiles at every visit, but he doesn’t. I pushed him to do it, thinking it was a simple thing he knew how to do, but he had to go to his computer and find the same website I would have used.

The last time we went, a well-dressed white lady was at the clerical window having a too-long conversation with the clericals. I thought it was odd that someone with nice clothes and clean shoes–and no children–would be in a pediatrician’s office in Ocala, and I soon learned that my suspicions were well-founded.

That happens more and more as I get old.

She was some kind of industry shill, and she was arranging something with the practice. Maybe she was a formula shill, or maybe she gets paid to put doctors together to make mutual referrals. Maybe she was pushing Ozempic for fat babies. I don’t know, because they never mentioned a product.

I should have gone outside to see which series BMW she drove.

The baby is fine, but there is constant tension between the mom way of doing things and the proper, correct dad way. Mom wants him to lie on his back and have paid servants massage his extremities and feed him milk from a 24-karat bottle. Dad wants him to begin SEAL training.

He has had feeding problems because Mom taught him to sleep in her bed and to breastfeed while covered in multiple layers of clothing. He decided she was a pacifier to help him sleep, so he didn’t make much effort to take anything in. He just lay there snoring with one hand on Mom to make sure she didn’t try to escape. The Mom alarm. The ankle monitor of baby moves.

Last night, I got Mom to talk to a friend of mine who breastfed two kids, and the friend set her straight. She said he needed structure. He needed to be in bed at night, ignored except for necessary feeding and changing. She said the lights needed to be out at night, and the baby needed to be uncomfortable so he would not fall asleep at the nipple. She said to take the romper off so he would be a little cold.

My wife is convinced that our son will die if we expose him to 75-degree air without two or more layers of clothing, but as I have repeatedly told her, crib death is caused by heat, not cold. My friend backed me up, saying her kids sleep best at 69 degrees. It looks like a lot of mothers have killed their children by wrapping them up like little moon astronauts.

I don’t think my wife fully understands that in America and Europe, “room temperature” generally means 68 degrees. Florida has given her a skewed perspective.

He is trying to talk now, although it would be a pretty big stretch to say he has formed words. When he says something that sounds like a word, I repeat it back several times, thinking there might be a chance. And there might. Who knows? It has happened to others. My mother said my sister spoke sentences at 6 months. Strange that I turned out to be so much smarter than she did.

My sister, I mean.

Between my sister and me, it is not a close race.

We have an appointment to have our son’s mouth looked at, to make sure he doesn’t have either of the common deformities that make it hard to latch onto nipples. I’m sure he’s fine. He has opened his mouth plenty wide in the past, and today while he was in a good mood, I pried him open to check, and I couldn’t find any issues.

Once the appointment is behind us, it will probably be clear that we, not a deformity, are the problem.

I should not complain about my wife being overprotective. There are a lot of moms out there sitting in bars while their mothers or strangers look after their kids. Then there was Barack Obama’s mom. Enough said about her.

We have had a number of diaper blowouts. We have used bottles to get more milk into him, and apparently, it works. He has developed a gut.

My wife hated my idea of bathing him in our laundry sink, but when he started having blowouts, I started tossing him in there, because it was the best way to confine the mess and get rid of it. We got him a mesh seat that just fits in the sink. I added a spray nozzle to the faucet. Now my wife loves it and prefers it to the plastic whale-shaped tub she bought him.

I think the tub is no good because it just dilutes the filth without getting rid of it. You put the dirty baby in, the filth sloughs off into the water, and then you dry him off, leaving filth residue all over him. The spray nozzle sends filth down the drain.

We dump him in the seat and go through an elaborate procedure to get his clothing removed and into the washer and his romper removed and into the trash. The poo never touches anything important.

The whole business was my idea. The sink. The spray nozzle. The procedure. Everything. I’m a Southerner. We hate poop.

The baby loves doing it my way. He can’t get enough of the sink. He loves being hosed with warm water.

My wife saw me washing him, and she was amazed that his leg didn’t come off when I grabbed it and used it to lift him so I could spray his back and butt. His expression didn’t change at all. She had been overdoing the gentleness, like parts were in danger of coming loose.

I lift him and blast him right on his Mongolian blue spot. Mom didn’t know these spots existed. Pretty much everyone who isn’t white has them at birth, and on some people they’re permanent. Our son has a big blue area all across his vast rear end. My wife didn’t know Africans had these spots, but of course, they are harder to see on Africans.

I feel pretty smug about the sink. Experience has vindicated my ideas several times, and it’s always sweet.

He has gotten way better at pooping. He used to scream like crazy every time he had to go, but it’s much less tumultuous now. Apparently, he had something called dyschezia. It means you’re pushing hard from above while clamping shut from below. It’s a coordination problem. Now he just growls like a Rottweiler during each push, and everything moves along as it should. It’s like, “GRRRRRRRRRRRR!! GRRRRRRRR!! Ooh! OOOH!”, and then a big smile. He goes through this a number of times during any given poo, so I try to wait until he looks happy. That suggests he has finished and he is ready to hand everything off to me.

Mom thinks he should be changed while he’s still growling or screaming, because she thinks poo stings his rear end. I think that’s wrong, because he has no diaper rash and no broken skin, and he sleeps just fine after pooping without cluing us in.

I just made him wait for a change, and he calmed down. He was grinning and cooing with joy while I fixed him up. I call that another score for Dad.

This week he is falling out of love with the pacifier. His hands are taking its place, which is convenient for us. We don’t have to run for a nice, sanitized pacifier. He can just ram his nasty, filthy fingers in his mouth for long intervals of free amusement that also build up his immune system.

He’s much more fun now that he laughs and smiles and tries to have conversations with us.

I did not have much use for kids before he came along, and I thought babies were gross (which is actually true). I knew some people believed that people who didn’t care for kids shouldn’t have them, but I figured I would love one if he was mine, and of course, that is what happened. No problems at all.

I also worried that I would love my children too much, and that is still a concern. Sooner or later, you have to let them walk outside and face the world by themselves. I have been thinking he will eventually need to go to day care from time to time just to learn how to socialize, and that will be tough for me. Will there be bullies? What about all the sick kids with snot and vomit all over them? Will I be able to trust the attendants?

One thing is for sure. I will never let him spend time in a facility where a man works. It is not normal for a man to want to be around tiny children that belong to other people. I don’t want homosexual pedophiles anywhere around my son. If we ever walk into a place and see a fruit wearing foundation and glitter, we will turn around and walk out.

Pedophilia appears to be much more common in men, and I don’t think that’s because statistics are flawed.

Now that my son reacts to me more, I enjoy interacting with him more. Before everything started to come online, I liked being with him, but after a session got to a certain point, it had more to do with duty than enthusiasm. I wanted his brain to develop. I wanted him to know he was loved. I wanted him to have physical activity so his coordination would progress.

I still haven’t gotten him to shoulder a rifle yet. Give me a month. I am working on it.