Wanted: a Machine That Sews Ralph Lauren Horses on Baby Clothes

The crown prince keeps surprising us.

My son is now in his 6th month, which means he is not yet 6 months old (for those who didn’t pay attention in math class). A couple of weeks back, he started imitating us.

He was already smiling back at us. I don’t know if that’s imitation or not. His new thing is imitating hand movements.

When he was maybe a month old, I decided infancy was no excuse for laziness, so I started doing what I call “the math game.” I made a circle with my hand and said “zero.” I showed him one finger and said “one.” You can probably guess the rest. If not, send me an email.

This is one of his favorite things on earth. He glows with a kind of ecstasy when his parents play the math game. He grabs our fingers like he is touching something miraculous and awe-inspiring.

I don’t know why I call it a game, since all he has to do is lie there.

A couple of weeks back, if memory serves, his mother told me he was trying to make numbers with his own hands. I thought she could be giving him too much credit, but I was open to the possibility.

Today I was making red chicken curry, and the boy was watching from his swing. I kept talking to him and acknowledging him because I know he craves my attention and feels rejected if I do something like walking through a room without talking to him.

I looked over, and he was trying to get my attention by holding his left hand out and extending various fingers at me. He was not able to do numbers, but he was varying the fingers he showed me and looking at my eyes to see how I reacted.

I have no idea whether this is normal, but it surprised me. He can’t talk. He can’t walk. He doesn’t seem to know his face is like my face, because the only expression he repeats back to me is a smile. But he knows his hands are like his parents’ hands. I guess this is easier to figure out that facial expressions, because he can see his hands, but he can’t see his face.

He is also sitting up, sort of. If you sit him down on a flat surface, he will eventually flop over and give up, but if you sit him against something, particulary in a corner with good support, he is happy to remain in a sitting position and play.

Still no crawling. I don’t think he’s trying. He climbs up his mother’s side in bed just fine, but I don’t think he has motivation to try to crawl over any kind of distance, because he never has to.

He seems to have passed out of the phase where he stuck his tongue out at everything. It made for some great pictures. He is now in the phase where he screams at the top of his lungs just to hear himself. He loves it. It sounds like someone being tortured, but he does it when he’s very happy.

He scratches himself. Particularly his crotch. I hope he quits doing that soon. When the diaper comes off, the scratching starts.

The other day, he tried to make his mother shut up. At least we think he did. We were doing something we are not supposed to do. We disagreed about something in front of him, and his mother was getting a little loud. He reached up and tried to shut her mouth, more than once. Or at least it looked that way.

Solid food is going okay. He has reacted to at least one food by turning red. Hives. His digestion seemed to bother him yesterday, so we decided to give him most of a day with nothing but milk and formula.

I hate formula, but keeping up with this kid is not easy. He keeps growing, and he is taking in more calories than ever. The other day, I grabbed one of his hands, and I realized it wasn’t the tiny baby hand I had gotten used to loving. It was like a big, thick pork chop. His weight has more than doubled, and he has grown over an inch per month.

Lugging him around in parking lots and businesses is getting difficult. Between him and the hefty car seat, it’s like carrying a big suitcase. His mom uses carriers a lot now; those sling things that wrap around the mother’s body. We are going to have to get real and start taking the stroller with us.

His personality is wonderful. He loves us intensely. He stares at us. When I sleep, he stares at me and smiles because when I snore, he thinks I’m talking to him.

He likes people. He smiles at them and finds them fascinating. The other day we ate at a restaurant, and he sat facing another table. A couple was seated there. When I picked him up to leave, the husband told us they were not okay with him leaving. They had been having a pantomime conversation with him while we ate.

He still cries a lot. I think he hates being away from his mother. When he has something to do, he forgets about her, but that lasts 40 minutes, tops. Then he wants what he probably sees as the rest of him back.

She spends a huge amount of time with him. Too much, I think. I find her lying in the bed in the middle of the day, flying him around over her like an airplane. We have a recliner for nursing in the corner of the bedroom, and she must be spending 8 hours a day there with my son sitting on her. I have been making her get dressed and leave the room, and he usually leaves with her.

He is crazy about his mother, and the feeling is mutual. She sings him songs she made up. “Changing Baby’s Diaper.” That’s a major hit. The other day I found a $500 American Express charge for Ralph Lauren baby clothes. We had to have a chat. She loves dressing him up.

I complained to some female friends, and they backed my wife up. I should have seen that coming.

I didn’t know there were five hundred dollars’ worth of baby clothes on Earth. My wife is now on a spending moratorium that goes well into next month.

He wakes me up. He can’t wait for me to wake on my own. He gazes at me and waits. I hear his noises, and I look over and see that radiant, overjoyed face staring at me, like I’m the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I grab him and play with him, and he thinks it’s fantastic until he abruptly gets hungry and starts crying for his mother.

He is trying to talk, but it’s all gibberish so far. I suppose we will hear a real word very shortly. It should make me happy, but I’ll be sad because he’s such a wonderful baby. I want him to grow up to be a man, but I also want to keep the little guy we have right now.

He has been chewing his toes for quite a while. Ever since he could get at them. I don’t know if he knows they’re his.

He’s in a crib now. He got too tall for the bassinet. We shoved the crib up beside the bed where the bassinet had been, and now we have to think about the day he will move to the nursery and we won’t have him with us all night.

Every time he does something new, I feel a mixture of joy and sadness. I wonder if parents look forward to having second children because they miss the baby experience.

I have said I didn’t know what I did to deserve such a wonderful baby, but the truth is, I know I didn’t do anything. I didn’t get what I deserved. I got an extraordinary gift in spite of all the evil I had done.

We are involving him in prayer now, so we expect him to consider this normal, and we believe he will know God personally early on. We pray he will be saved and baptized with the Holy Spirit early on. We can’t guarantee that he will be a man of God, but I believe he will. He’s getting help we never got.

Sometimes You’re Smarter Than you Think

I bought my Kubota diesel mower because I just plain felt like it. I like diesels. I like diesel everything.

But I my heart felt like it because my brain, not to mention my hands and sore back, had dealt with all sorts of problems with engines running on ethanol gas in my unusual climate. It rusts parts. It clogs carburetors unless you watch it carefully and fool with the machines no less often than once a month. It goes bad and makes engines run poorly. Electric ignition is also a likely source of aggravation. A diesel has no spark plugs.

I have suffered and spent a lot because of gas problems. I can’t count the number of times I have been unable to do an important, urgent job until I did something about an engine crippled by gasoline. I gladly paid a hundred dollars for a single gallon of gas treatment. I have probably spent $2,000 on electric yard tools in order to have options in time of need. That should show how miserable gas made me.

My brain also knew diesels lasted longer. Diesel pickup engines often go 600,000 miles before being rebuilt, and then you start the clock over.

My heart didn’t like the fact that gas engines had to run hard in order to get anything done. It just felt like an inferior way to do things. A gas mower runs at about 3,600, and a diesel runs at around 3,000. I thought the difference was bigger, but in any case, a gas engine has to spin faster to generate torque.

When I was mower shopping, I was offered a very good commercial gas mower, new, with a 35-horsepower motor, for around $13,000. I almost bought it. But I kept thinking. If a used diesel mower costs thousands less and will run the rest of my life without big problems, and it won’t have the gasoline curse, why should I buy gas?

I wasn’t sure what to think.

One of the reasons I was perplexed was that I knew professional landscapers bought a lot of gas mowers. And people on the web throw this up as proof that diesels aren’t better and don’t save money. I wondered why pros used gas when it seemed undeniable that diesel had to be better.

And if diesel wasn’t better, how did any company ever manage to sell a diesel mower, given the big cost difference?

One day in the recent past, a thought came to me. Maybe the reason pros used gas machines wasn’t because they made economic sense. Maybe they used them, and I am sorry to put it this way, because the kind of people who end up mowing yards for a living are not all clever about money.

If you’re good with money, you could very well end up in the yard business. You could end up owning 50 mowers and commanding 25 crews while you sit behind a desk in a comfortable office drinking XO brandy, but you’re not likely to end up owning one or two mowers and a trailer and doing a big part of the work yourself. And this is what most landscaping companies look like. In fact, I can’t think of a single landscaping company that has a fleet. I can’t recall hearing of any.

The issue kept bouncing around in my head, and I checked around. It turns out I was right.

Most yard guys either can’t or won’t put up $20,000 for a diesel mower when they can get similar speed and cut quality from a gas mower for $13,000. They also tend to trade mowers in, which is a bad economic move, at 1,000 or 1,500 hours.

When you trade something in to a dealer, you’re giving it to someone who has to make a profit. He will never give you full retail value because he can’t. He can’t swap mowers even. He would go out of business.

You never trade anything in unless you have no choice or you’re so rich you don’t care. You sell.

A commercial gas mower is pretty nearly the same thing as a commercial diesel mower, except for the engine and maybe different pulleys to accommodate higher engine speeds. A good gas mower will be just as sturdy, apart from the motor.

When your gas mower starts acting up at 1,500 hours, it has to be because it has a gas engine, not because the other parts are worn. If the engine lasted as long as a diesel, you would probably be able to run the mower for 3,000 hours without risking breakdowns and shop time that would hurt your business.

I think pros who get rid of low-hour gas mowers (low for the bodies, not the engines) do it because they don’t want their machines to die suddenly on the job and require new motors. This is highly likely after 1,000 hours. If your gas mower croaks when you need it, and you decide to put a new engine on it, you will be out of business until it’s fixed, and that will take days. You will lose income. You could lose customers.

On the other hand, a pro who buys diesel in the first place should be very confident until at least 3,000 hours, and at that point, he should be able to get over $5,000 for it. A retired $1,000-hour gas mower will bring around $3,000 in a private sale (less if traded), and the landscaper will miss out on 2,000 valuable hours of use he would have gotten from a diesel.

On top of that, diesels save their owners on fuel because they burn less. And they have to be filled up less often.

Most yard men are not in a position to buy mowers with cash. It’s a lot easier to finance a $13,000 mower than a $20,000 mower. Even if it costs more in the long run, you can only buy as much mower as your cash or credit will allow.

I think gas mowers are much worse investments for professionals, but I believe they buy them anyway because they generally lack judgment and/or capital. I think a lot of them are buying things like bass boats, cruise and Disney World tickets, bar drinks, restaurant meals, and other lifestyle items they really can’t afford, and this makes the capital problem worse.

This is normal for working Americans in jobs that draw people who haven’t done much to train themselves for good careers. I think most of them have big debt loads, and a big percentage have negative net worths.

My mother taught me that the rich pay less for everything, and as a generalization, it’s true. The rich don’t rent-to-own $400 couches and end up paying $800 after interest and fees. The rich buy stuff that costs more up front but ends up costing less. The rich don’t live on credit card debt. They don’t get student loans. They can pay cash for things and get cash discounts.

They don’t buy cigarettes one at a time outside Korean groceries.

My mother was a realtor, and she told me Jewish parents with kids at the University of Miami got their kids free housing. They were buying their kids condos instead of paying rent. The condos appreciated, and they could, of course, rent rooms to roommates. After college, they had accumulated wealth while everyone else had paid rent, paying off their landlords’ mortgages and increasing their wealth. Free housing, plus equity other people paid for.

Back in law school, I knew a student who paid his tuition with American Express. It didn’t cost him any more than using cash, and he got a lot of points at $11,000 per semester. I do the same thing with my medical insurance. They don’t give cash discounts, so American Express is better.

I pay my bill in full every month, so I don’t pay interest. There are people out there paying 18% annually to credit card companies on top of their premiums because they have no choice.

I knew another student who bought a convertible Camaro with student loan money. His friends called it “the Ferrari,” because they figured it would end up costing him as much as one. I remember hearing students talk about loans. They would say it was a bad idea to order pizza, because it would end up costing $40.

The main lawyer I clerked for in law school owned his office because he could pay for it. He rented it to himself, and this reduced his taxes, in addition to making him richer through appreciation. This is what my dad planned to do back when we had hopes of having a firm in our own building. I knew other lawyers who paid rent and didn’t get anything but tax deductions. My boss died with a net worth somewhere north of $10 million (after a divorce) that he admitted to, and knowing him, he probably hid a lot. He had a huge motorsailer and a twin-engine plane, he drove a Jag, and he did not deprive himself of much of anything.

My grandfather owned a huge amount of real estate because people knew he had money, and they went to him when they needed to sell property in a hurry. He was able to give them cash and get good prices, and they were happy to do business with him. If he had been in a worse position, he would not have been able to buy distressed properties fast.

When I had nothing, I bought a car at 11% interest. That’s how poor people get things. At 11% per year, the interest alone was 55% of the principal. To a person with a net worth, it was a $13,000 car. To a person with nothing, a car like that could cost over $20,000, depending on how much was financed.

It’s seems odd that people with less pay more, but it does make sense.

I am not good with money because I don’t study it, and I have wasted a lot, but I’m not completely hopeless. I can tell the difference between a $6,000 lifetime lawnmower and a $13,000 lawnmower that loses over $1,500 in value as it leaves the dealership and may end up costing $19,000 because it has a motor that won’t last.

I don’t know why I didn’t pay attention to my own common sense. In this world, it’s very important not to assume other people know what they’re talking about.

Like I always say, Oprah Winfrey gives people dieting, marriage, and parenting advice. Enough said.

The Rapture Starts Within You

Today is an unusual day. The alarm baby failed to go off. I had to wake up on my own.

Usually, at least an hour before I want to wake up, I hear burbling and cooing sounds behind me, and I roll over to see a little head about 6 inches away from my face, with two happy little eyes staring right at me, like I’m the sky and it’s the Fourth of July. It’s the heir apparent, who has yet again conned his way out of the bassinet and onto the bed.

After this comes a certain amount of squeezing and poking the baby, who literally screams with joy at the top of his lungs. Both of his parents have loud voices, and our genes have done their stuff.

The message is clear: this guy does not yet fully understand the rottenness of the planet he came to.

Having a son has taught me all sorts of things. One thing it has taught me is that adults understand how filthy and cruel this world is, even if we deny it to ourselves every day. You can see this in the products we create for babies and the advice we give each other.

Just about everything sold for babies is covered with comforting images. Puppies and kittens. Lion cubs sitting on clouds. Flowers. Little frogs who look overjoyed to see us. Pastel colors are the norm.

We are obsessed with helping babies relax. Products say “soothing” on their labels. Experts create videos telling us how to relax babies and make them feel safe.

The songs we sing to babies are delusional. Mr. Raccoon took a walk to the meadow to dance with all his bunny friends. Stuff like that.

Why do we do this? Because we know this world is vile and that we are in grave danger every second of our lives. When we tell kids to relax because everything will be okay, we’re lying to them to keep them from understanding the world until they’re strong enough to stand living here.

We don’t put unicorns and happy bunnies on our own things (most of us), because it would be pointless, but we dedicate a tremendous amount of effort to relaxation. We go to spas to relax. Catholics go on retreats. Pagans meditate. Lots of people get drunk, smoke weed, and use narcotics. Christians pray. We create products that are supposed to relax us.

Why do we do these things? There is a need; thats why. If the world weren’t a terrible place, we’d be relaxed already.

It’s amazing how often we make ourselves stop looking at the ugliness of the world. All through the day, we are confronted with murder, war, disease, accidents, crime, and so on, and, realizing there is nothing we can do and that we will not be able to function if we keep focusing on danger and evil, we choose to think of other things. This isn’t the way a healthy world works.

God has told us what a world that functions correctly looks like. Here is what he said through Isaiah:

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.

And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice’ den.

They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.

Through John, he said:

And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.

And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.

And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.

This is what the world will look like after the tribulation, when Yeshua rules here in person.

Religious Jews claim Yeshua can’t be the Messiah because these things haven’t happened yet. They believe the Messiah will not be killed and then return, but that’s wrong. The Bible clearly says he will be cut off. Jewish scholars have made up a lot of spurious interpretations of prophecy to justify their bad decisions and to absolve their forebears of the sin of killing Yeshua as they killed other prophets.

Modern Christians would hate Yeshua if he returned, and Christians persecute people who hear from the Holy Spirit, so it makes no sense to single Jews out, especially given that no Jew who took part in the crucifixion is alive now.

It’s strange that we don’t persecute Italians, when Romans were the ones who scourged Yeshua and nailed him to the cross.

Imagine a world where you don’t have to lock your doors, create passwords, take vaccines, support armies, carry a gun, or buy insurance. Imagine walking through Harlem at 3 a.m. and being greeted by friendly people instead of being sent to the hospital or the morgue. Imagine a world without Muslim terror or Islam. The world we have now is repulsive.

I hate this place more every day. It reminds me of moving out of Miami. Miami got to where every day there was oppressive and distasteful, and then one day I drove away and put it behind me. And I never missed it. I hate Miami more now than when I left, and I haven’t been there since 2020. If a friend of mine gets married or has a funeral in Miami, I will send flowers and stay here.

As much as I love the county where I live, I hate the world, and I feel like I’m holding my breath until the rapture comes.

Now I have a wife and a baby son, and I have to look after them in this nasty place. My son is innocent. He is full of joy. He loves his parents. Worse, he trusts us, even though we can’t save him from all suffering. My heart aches to protect him. Having a family makes the world seem even more foul.

I have quit looking at the news and secular entertainment again. I tell people to avoid secular entertainment because it brings curses and evil spirits into homes, but I was looking at Youtube clips of movies, and I realized this was hypocritical. The farther I get from my connection to filth, the more God restores proper perspective, and the better I understand the depravity of the world.

When I think of human depravity, I always think of a story I saw on Yahoo News. The Kardashian sisters had a contest. Two of them were arguing over whose genitalia smelled worse. They provide samples, and the third sister was the judge. And a national news outlet covered it, just like it would have covered groundbreaking for a skyscraper 70 years ago. As if it were normal and acceptable to put such “news” in front of the public.

Mind you, the Kardashians made the press cover it. Journalists didn’t magically realize they were sniffing each other. An insider had to tell them. The Kardashians had someone call around and tell the press they were smelling each other’s crotches. That’s the kind of people they are.

The public didn’t rise up in arms. No one protested outside Yahoo headquarters. No one marched to have the filthy Kardashian show canceled. No one called for fasting and prayer. These things would have happened in a healthy nation. If these revolting sluts had had their contest in 1950, the ensuing scandal would still be famous today.

Now, female entertainers rap about the wonders of their infected private parts and those of their many partners, and their garbage becomes major hits parents let their kids listen to. Kids have smartphones, and they send each other homemade child porn all day. Parents pay deranged doctors to castrate their sons, and about half of Americans get furious when anyone says it’s wrong.

The generations that understood decency are mostly dead now. My generation is depraved, and the ones that came after are much worse.

I’ve noticed something about environments with a high turnover rate, like schools. Consider an elementary school with a fiery 6th-grade president who promises change. Do the teachers worry? No, they sit back, smile, and wait. They know the problem student will leave, and the students who follow will have no idea he ever existed.

Satan works the same way. He comes between generations. He convinces stupid kids they’re smarter than their elders. He cuts young generations off from the accumulated wisdom of earlier generations. The world has had many reformers. Abraham, Moses, Samson, Josiah, the prophets, Yeshua…their reforms generally get undone after they go. The people who remember how things are supposed to be die.

This may be hard to believe, but Americans didn’t always avoid and make fun of older people. The phenomenon of hating our elders and repudiating their teaching is so new, they popularized a term for it in the 1960’s: the Generation Gap. I used to hear this term all the time, but I’ll bet there are very few 40-year-olds who have heard it. Now, we accept the fact that young people consider “boomers” stupid and backward, and we assume earlier generations felt the same way about their elders. It’s true that people have always complained of differences between generations, but the hostility and contempt we consider normal now are aberrations.

Satan had to have the Generation Gap in order to convince Cher’s mentally-ill daughter to have her healthy breasts amputated. The extreme and accelerated moral deterioration we see now couldn’t have happened so quickly without a change in the way we saw older people. Satan had to get us to defecate on everything valuable and embrace everything that is full of pus and poison.

I don’t think today’s young adults can possibly comprehend how young people were worshiped during the 1960’s. People a few years older than I was lectured and scolded their elders. Showbiz pea-brains marveled at the genius of youth, because there was good money in juvenile rebellion. People who should have had better sense treated conceited twentyish simpletons as though they knew all the answers. College kids celebrated terrorists and communists, but we thought the children would lead us to the Age of Aquarius and everyone would get peace, love, and free dope.

Many older people got involved. It was pathetic. Actors and singers from earlier years saw their fan bases vanishing. They realized they were becoming figures of ridicule. They put on idiotic Sixties clothes, tried to sing rock songs, and imitated the spastic, forced jerking that passed for dancing among children and college kids. Cary Grant started taking LSD and telling people it would solve their problems.

Young people are supposed to sit at the feet of the old and absorb everything good that they know, so they live in victory and don’t repeat the devastating mistakes of their predecessors. In the Sixties, university presidents groveled before screaming, vicious, spoiled morons in bell-bottom pants and tie-dyed shirts, apologizing for the accomplishments and virtues of two thousand years of Christian culture.

Now the same basic thing is happening again, and the people groveling learned their behavior from the Sixties.

It’s a shame young people can’t see how their grandparents behaved in 1968. They can’t see how stupid and silly they were. If they could, they might have less respect for fashionable idiocy and more respect for wisdom that stood the test of centuries.

It’s impossible to make people understand the profundity and breadth of modern depravity if you can’t make them understand America as it once was. They think, “Okay, Boomer,” and they continue wallowing joyfully in disgraceful, ungrateful, unteachable ignorance.

Deep in their hearts, they know their ways are wrong, and they know the world is a mess, but as long as they can smother the truth and prevent it from filling their thoughts, they will keep doing what they do.

Kids think boomers ruined the world by preventing what kids call progress. That’s wrong. We ruined it by promoting it. We just seem like we’re against it when we are contrasted with the nuts and brats of today.

Sometimes I feel like I should do nothing but pray for the rapture and tribulation all day.

Grieve Bad Company Instead of the Holy Spirit

This morning, I prayed for more internal rapturing.

I believe there will be a rapture. I believe God will literally remove his children from the world when he decides the abuse they put up with is no longer acceptable when juxtaposed with the number of new salvations they produce. After that, the tribulation will come. The harshest period of evangelism in the history of the world. People will be tormented so badly, those who can still be saved will drop their pride and pretense and go on to be with God. The rest will prove themselves incapable of changing, and they’ll go on to burn.

Those who belong to God will get some relief. Being around useless people is vexatious.

I also believe people who will be taken in the rapture will be ready because God will have worked inside them to cut their ties to this world. They will be eager to get out. They won’t be popular. They will be disgusted and wearied by the world’s culture. They will love God as a person, and they will love being near him. They won’t just obey rules and hope for the best. To me, this is internal rapturing.

A lot of Christians seem to think God will reach into the seats at porn theaters and filthy rap performances and pull people out just because they participated in altar calls in years past. They think he’ll grab people who support abortion, disgusting perversions, pride, and socialism. They believe he’ll take lukewarm people who are full of earthly ambition. All of that is wrong.

One of the great things about my life is that God has separated me from society. He got me out of Miami, which is a disgusting, sinful, coarse, lowbrow city, and he moved me to the reddest, most Christian county in Florida. He gave me income without work, so I don’t have to network with other lawyers and keep my Christianity stifled in order to avoid trouble. He gave me a wife who knows him. He helped me shed horrible friends who weren’t friends at all, and he replaced them with people who know him.

When I prophesy, I keep hearing him say he is destroying the world’s ways in me. I’m all for it. I can’t change myself, but I do want to be changed. I want more internal rapturing.

Today I prayed about it, and later on, while I was thinking of other things, I started deleting electronic contacts.

My wife and I have a WhatsApp group I created so our friends could keep track of her delivery. We kept the group going, and people like seeing updates on my son’s progress.

I think of WhatsApp as a texting app, and I always say I don’t have social media accounts, but to some degree, WhatApp is a form of social media. It allows you to post “status” updates that vanish after 24 hours. This never appealed to me until recently, but my wife posts statuses, and sometimes my friends do.

I started posting a few things. Then I saw that someone I knew from my last church was looking at my statuses, and she posted a few of her own.

We were friends. She said all sorts of things that made her seem passionate about God. But she was also sexually provocative, and she posted odd things on Facebook. For example, she called her brother her “side piece.”

She and her husband had marital issues, and afterward, she started putting up Instagram photos of herself in bathing suits and exercise clothes. I don’t know if her kids saw them.

I guess things are going badly for them again, because she just put up some statuses of herself, and they didn’t look promising. In one, she was doing a sexually suggestive dance with her teenage son. In another, she was in her car in a bikini and cutoffs, with the zipper of the cutoffs pulled down and spread. She was shaking her breasts. She had a big tattoo on her belly, and it continued under her bathing suit, so it’s a crotch tattoo.

She is looking for a husband. I posted a status consisting of a photo of my son. Later, I blocked my view of her statuses.

Today I thought about her, and that’s why I started deleting contacts. I have known this lady for 15 years, and I deleted her. She is not going anywhere with God soon, and I don’t need to see her lewd videos.

I’m not angry with her, but what am I supposed to do with a friend like that?

In law school, I had a friend who was very seductive. She told me about her bedroom adventures with multiple people. She loved the perversion series Queer as Folk, and she got me to watch it. I thought it was gross, because it was. She said I was homophobic.

She ended up moving to LA and becoming an entry-level employee at a big talent agency. She borrowed money from me while she was getting established, and I never saw it again. Women don’t repay loans. I visited her there once, and her friends were off-putting. Snippy gays. Shallow people. The kind of LA people who often wake up on other people’s couches and chairs.

She visited South Florida once and took me to lunch, and I told her how I had changed. I told her about my new life as a reformed Christian. She said she could see I had peace, and she was glad for me. She clearly was not interested in making a change in her own life.

On one occasion, she called me and said she was pregnant. She talked about how a child would derail her career. She wanted advice. I told her I couldn’t go along with abortion. When she asked why, which surprised me, I said I was a Christian. That made her angry. She said, “So am I!” She had her baby killed.

She ended up working as a minor network executive. I just looked, and it appears that after that, she became a freelance TV producer. That sounds like gig work. She is credited with 4 shows between 2016 and 2021, for a total of 44 episodes. At present, she is the president of a production company that has been around since 2019 and hasn’t gotten much of anywhere. It was started by a B-list movie star.

She wanted to be a big player. It seems like she sold herself out for a pretty small payout.

I’ve known her for 31 years. I like her. We got along well. We had a lot of fun. I deleted the contact today. It’s final. It would be very hard for her to locate me if she wanted to reestablish contact, and I won’t be looking for her, so she’s gone.

I deleted other nominal Christians. Our relationships had no future, so why not? I won’t see them again here on Earth, and I probably won’t see any of them in the afterlife. There is no point in continuing to invest myself in them.

While I was deleting contacts, I thought about the prayer I had prayed a little earlier. God was granting my request. I was being raptured internally.

The world has gotten so old; so polarized. I can’t believe God will let is wait much longer. There seems to be so little left here for his children.

The Opposite of Peter Pan Syndrome

My buddy Mike sent me a link to a video about Jackson Laux, and I was very impressed.

The web says Jackson, or maybe I should call him Mr. Laux because he is so grown up, is 9 years old. He is Internet-famous for his love of tractors, especially John Deere. He has appeared in lots of videos. He has a spic-and-span shop. He has multiple tractors. He can talk all day about them. Their strengths and weaknesses and so on. He really enjoys what he’s doing.

As a Christian, I find Mr. Laux interesting, because he helps me understand what most parents do wrong.

When I was a kid, my dad made very good money. I should know, because I have all the money he never spent. So we went on vacations to Europe to broaden our minds, right? We had music instruction, tutors, and all sorts of help with interests that could be lucrative and fulfilling later in life, right? Well, no. My dad was cheap. We had furniture from discount outlets in the Carolinas. We had cars we got at cost from my mother’s father’s dealership. My sister and I didn’t have much in the way of toys. Another kid down the block gave me hand-me-down toys and clothes. When we traveled, we went to see my mom’s family in Kentucky or we went to the Keys, which were a short drive away.

My hobby was TV. My dad’s hobby, which consumed hours of his life every day. I sat in front of TV sets and ate ice cream.

I had interests, but it never occurred to me to ask my parents to support them. To them, every non-necessity they bought for me was either a toy or a gift. Frivolous. The only exceptions were books, which they didn’t mind paying for, and two banjos. They would never have bought me tools, a tractor, a welder…no way. They would never have put $10,000 in an investment account and taught me what to do with it. They would never have bought me a rental property and helped me manage it.

You go to school. You get B’s or better. You become a lawyer or maybe a doctor. That’s what you do. This was their limited understanding.

My mother didn’t have much in the way of vision, and neither did my dad, but he was worse, because he didn’t care. He didn’t spend time with his kids. He had no idea who our teachers were or what subjects we were taking. He forgot our birthdays. Once, he came home drunk, with no idea it was my birthday. I was using a music stand my mother had bought for $8.00. When he realized what day it was, he asked me how I liked my gift, and he didn’t buy me anything else.

My mother made some effort to interest me in science. I’ll give her that. She enrolled me in a mail-order program that sent me little science kits. She tried to interest me in coin collecting, which was dull, given that there was almost nothing available to spend.

Here I am, an adult with a thousand interests. Writing. Music. Machining. Welding. Cooking. Science. Engineering. Maintaining my land. Building things. Photography. And my parents never managed to set me up with a single activity. Not one! Yes, I got banjo lessons, but the banjo is a dead-end instrument, and music lessons are nothing if you don’t learn to read and write music.

Photography is actually a very profitable profession if you have the gift, and by now I know I have it. I have taken a lot of excellent pictures. I could have made money with cameras.

My parents failed. Now let’s look at my buddy Mike.

He has two sons, and they started life near where I live. Mike spoke to one of their teachers. According to Mike, regarding his son, the teacher said, “He be real smart.”

When he saw the pickle his sons were in, Mike moved to New Hampshire, where they have better public schools. When one of his sons turned out to be a gifted football player, he moved to the DC area and put him in a famous sports high school. When the time came to think about college, Mike’s son was connected with scouts. He didn’t become a pro in the usual sense of the word, but he did receive a free college education, and he is a happy, very successful adult.

Mike lived across the street from me, and his parents didn’t do much to start him off in life. His mother died when he was about 16, and his dad’s involvement with him dried up. His parents can’t take credit for the way he raised his sons, and neither can his wife, who gave him custody during their divorce and then ran off to pursue her career. Mike’s sons are doing better than he did. Mike had to learn to hustle when he was their age, taking whatever job was available or creating his own jobs.

Mr. Laux did not get a job at age three and save and invest and buy tractors and a shop. No one has told me this. I know it because I’m not an idiot. No little kid does that. Even Mozart had an aggressive manager. Mr. Laux’ parents encouraged him in his dream and also financed it heavily. They paid for everything. They knew the difference between spoiling a kid with toys and investing in his future.

As a result, barring unforeseen problems, Mr. Laux will be self-supporting when most kids are rotting their brains with video games and dope, and he will not have to waste 4 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars at a university where he will be pushed to become an antisemitic, God-hating, emasculated, demon-worshiping, drug-using, socialist pervert, given a useless degree in English or History, and then relegated to a cubicle farm.

I will have my son’s back with regard to any wise pursuit that interests him. That doesn’t include getting an English degree or starting a band. He can study STEM fields. He can start a business. He can learn to invest. I’ll help him learn instruments and languages. I will never tell him things I buy that are related to his wise pursuits are frivolous or that he should think I’m generous for buying them. That would be like telling him I’m generous for paying his pediatrician.

I wish I could go back in time about 50 years and give my autopilot parents a good talking-to. It might have given my mother ideas. My dad wouldn’t have paid any attention, because he didn’t care. I wish I could go back and talk to my young self, but I was underdeveloped and hardheaded thanks to my parents, so I don’t know if I would have listened.

I might have listened. I remember a few times in my past when appalled strangers who knew my parents were blowing it told me things that stuck.

My parents didn’t know God. They never heard from the Holy Spirit. We didn’t pray together. I rarely saw the inside of a church. They imparted virtually no wisdom to me. They didn’t cultivate a single useful habit in me. I didn’t have the natural character to raise myself properly. It’s a wonder I’m not living in a refrigerator box.

The Best Gift Came Months Ago

This is my first Father’s Day as a father.

Why do they call it “Father’s Day”? That always bugs me. Like there is just one father. It should be “Fathers’ Day.” Oh, well.

Now that I am on the other side of the holiday, I think it’s strange that we honor men because God has blessed them. You would think the blessing was honor enough.

My son adores me. When I enter a room, his whole face lights up. The other day I walked by him without saying anything, thinking he was occupied, and he started to cry. When I rub his chest, he grabs my hand and presses it to him tightly while chewing on it and growling with passion. He screams with joy when I play with him.

He’s handsome. He has a very sweet nature. He’s more fun than I can describe. It looks like he’s going to be smart. He behaves well for a baby. But somehow people should treat me like I’m a hero because God gave him to me after I wasted most of my life?

It’s extremely important to honor fathers. I know that. But it should be an everyday thing. If my son honors me throughout the year, Father’s Day will be just another day. We should honor God every day for giving us children.

The Bible makes it clear that a child is a blessing. Consider Abraham, Sara, Rachel, Hannah, and the Shunammite woman. Psalm 127 says, “Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord: and the fruit of the womb is his reward.”

In Genesis, God told Abraham and Hagar he would make their sons great nations. These were blessings.

It’s nice to be appreciated, but I already felt blessed.

I was going to put up a photo of my son climbing over his mom to give me a big sloppy smile, but I have decided against it.

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.