I Got This on Lox

I made plain bagels again today, and I cut samples for my wife and me to try. We compared them to an Einstein Bros. bagel. The verdict: my bagels are better than Einstein Bros., which are not bad, so while it may be possible to make small improvements, there is no longer any point in buying plain bagels at the store.

In the photos below, my bagel is on the left, and an Einstein bagel is on the right.

Weight: 138 grams (mine) to 110 grams (theirs).

Aroma and taste: mine smelled and tasted more like bagels. The smell and flavor were more intense.

Crust: mine were a little chewier and slightly crisp on the outside. Einstein Bros. bagels don’t have a crisp outside. My bagels were slightly lumpy, but I don’t see any point in working hard to change it. It may be possible to change the fermentation process a little, but it won’t improve the experience of eating the bagels.

Crumb: my bagels are slightly less regular. For the most part, the air holes are tiny, just like Einstein Bros., but there are some air holes as big as 3/16″. This makes no difference when eating them. It’s not perceptible.

The hydration is 57%, which may be a little higher than some bakeries. It could explain the slightly looser crumb, or maybe my fermentation was a little longer than needed.

I am told the New York bagel mafia vandalizes businesses that compete without permission. I wonder if this is why it’s so hard to find a good recipe. But then pizzerias don’t commit crimes to hold onto their business secrets, and it’s even harder to find a good pizza recipe.

I don’t belong to a food guild, so I will post my recipe in its entirety. If you can find a way to make the bagels smoother, good for you.

They’re easy to make. Not a lot of work. Very cheap. No wonder the bagel mafia is so nervous and protective.

DOUGH INGREDIENTS

385 g high-gluten flour
1.25 tsp. salt
1.5 tbsp. sugar
219 g warm water
3/8 tsp. yeast

BOIL INGREDIENTS

1 qt. water
2 tbsp. brown sugar
1/2 tsp. salt

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Make dough. Put dry ingredients in food processor with default chopping blade. Process to combine. Then add the warm water while processing. If anything sticks to the sides of the bowl, push it down into the mix with a silicone spatula. Go at least 60 seconds after the water mixes in. You might want to go longer. See what happens. Processing heats dough, so be careful not to kill the yeast.

2. Cut into 4 balls. They should be about 154 grams each. Dividing the dough can tear it up. I fixed this by kneading the balls, pushing the outer edges into the center and in, rolling the dough inward and up. This stretches the dough and, in other baked goods, gives better oven spring. You end up with a concave surface on the bottom. I pressed the edges into the center and forced them to merge with each other. Then I put the balls down with the merged sides down. It works.

3. Let them rise two hours under plastic or something. When they float in water, they are ready to turn into bagels.

4. Form bagels. Just flatten the balls and stretch so they have 1″ holes in them. You want them about 9/16″ tall. It’s okay if the holes close up a little. This is not the traditional way to form bagels, but it’s quick, it works, and you are less likely to end up with deformed bagels.

5. Boil them two minutes per side. Vigorous boil.

7. Bake at 400°. Make sure they are not resting on a hot, oiled surface. I used an air-bake pan. Use nonstick foil or parchment paper if you’re worried about sticking. Bake for 25 minutes. Do not turn.

Ovens vary, so start checking them at 20 minutes.

Cool on a wire rack so the bottoms don’t get soggy. Don’t take them off until they’re at room temperature unless you want to eat warm bagels right away.

You should consider this your default recipe, and if you want to modify it, keep it on your computer so you can go back to it if your modifications don’t work out.

They’re real bagels. They may not be exactly what you want, but they are as good as most bakery bagels made by skilled bakers. They are a thousand times better than bagged bagels from factories. Far better than Lender’s frozen bagels, which are gross.

I have had many, many real bagels. I lived in Miami. I lived in New York City. You can believe me when I say these are real bagels. I’m not saying no one can make better bagels, but these are very good.

Open the Locks and Let me in

My area is magnificent. It’s wonderful. It’s bliss. The people are conservative Christians. We don’t have a ghetto or street crime. Traffic is light. You don’t have to speak Spanish to live here. Beautiful.

But it’s a bagel desert. I feel like ranting.

Not long after I moved here, my dad and I visited the only bagel joint. I was used to having a nova bagel breakfast with him once a week, at a real deli. I figured Ocala had Jews, so there had to be nova bagels.

The place we tried is named Bagelicious. Had to be a good place for a nova bagel.

No. They had strawberry bagels and blueberry bagels and raisin bagels. Lots of sweet spreads. No nova.

It was disgusting. The bagels themselves were fine, but I never went back.

Today I checked the situation again, and there is a new place here: Jeff’s Bagel Run. A chain.

Surely a big chain would be hip, I thought.

I have looked at their online menu. No nova. No lox.

What is with this place? How can you serve bagels but not smoked salmon? It’s idiocy.

It reminds me of Austin, Texas. When I lived there, I found a place called something like The New York Deli. I thought I was in for a treat. I drove there, walked up to the counter to order, and asked the girl if they had lox. She said, “Locks? What are they?”

I drove home.

All those Jews teaching STEM courses at the University, a place calling itself a New York Deli, and no smoked salmon. Beyond insane.

What do I have to do? Move to Tel Aviv?

I better get back to work on my recipe. I don’t see myself getting a restaurant bagel any time soon.

Passover Chametz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The bagels are done.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lord of the Dough Rings

Today I got up, toasted the bagels I made last night, and slapped salmon, cream cheese, and onion slices on them. My verdict: in need of minor adjustments, but already better than all the bagels I can get nearby, except for a little bit of unwanted flavor.

Also, too small.

I decided to check Wikipedia today, and I learned a few things that could possibly be true in spite of being in Wikipedia.

First of all, no one knows where bagels come from. Something sort of similar to a bagel appears in a Syrian cookbook from the 1200’s, and bagels were brought to the US in their more-or-less current form by Polish Jews. No one knows where the word bagel comes from. There are a lot of theories, and that proves no one knows.

Now the important stuff. Wikipedia says that in 2003, New York bagels sold from carts had an average weight of 170 grams, so my plan to shoot for 125 many need to be changed. Also, some bakers use sugar in the bagel dough instead of barley malt, and the ingredients in the boil water vary.

Knowing human nature as I do, I think it’s pretty likely that a lot of bakers are using sugar in their bagels. It’s cheap. I also think they are using it in their water. This would explain the lack of malt flavor in authentic bagels I’ve eaten in New York and Miami. I don’t think they’re using baking soda in the water, either, because it has a distinctive taste, and I have never noticed it in a factory bagel.

I have read that baking soda has been used in boil water to make the water alkaline so bagels brown better, but as a pizza guy, I am well aware that any dough containing a lot of sugar will brown well. I don’t see why anyone would need baking soda in a sugared dough that is going to brown no matter what you boil it in.

I’m thinking I’ll use a 50/50 mix of sugar and malt in the dough, so I’ll get a little malt flavor, but not a whole lot. And I’ll boil in water that contains only sugar and salt. I’ll increase the dough recipe until it comes in at a multiple of 150 grams, and that will be the pre-baked weight of my bagels.

Yes. I see it all so clearly now.

Wikipedia says New Yorkers claim New York water is essential to making a good bagel. New Yorkers say a lot of incredibly stupid things. They say you can’t make a good pizza without New York water. The pizza in New Haven has a better reputation than New York pizza, so I guess someone built a pipeline. Not. My water will make perfectly good bagels.

My pizza is far better than anything I’ve had in New York. Not “better.” FAR better. My cheesecake is also FAR better than Junior’s.

Incidentally, you can make any kind of water you want. Brewers know this. You can take distilled water and add minerals and whatever you like. All over America and Australia, fat guys who like good beer do this in their garages. You can buy the additives online. If you want New York water, you can make it.

That New York ego is really something.

I wondered why the bagel recipe hadn’t been nailed down and published everywhere, and I may have part of the answer: socialism. New York Jews and socialism have a long history of romantic entwinement, going back at least to the days when the socialist newspaper Forverts was founded. At some point, the bagel masters in New York City created a union to prevent anyone else from making bagels and spreading bagel knowledge. The union was called Bagel Bakers Local 338, and the damage it did to mankind is incalculable.

It’s hard to understand why Jews, who are extremely capable, love socialism, which was created to cripple the capable and divert undeserved money to the incompetent. But then it’s hard to understand why they chose a king over priests and prophets who spoke for the God who did everything for them.

You don’t see the Japanese and the Singaporeans pushing their governments to impoverish them and give their wealth to the lazy and the slow.

Just saying.

A while back, I said I was going to quit working to come up with new recipes, because food is not a healthy obsession, but this is different. I absolutely need bagels with salmon in my diet, and I have to have a reliable supply. If I could drive a mile and buy bagels, I wouldn’t be doing this. I also learned how to make fried Chinese dumplings and Kung Pao chicken. Same reason.

This is like America’s new retaliatory tariffs. I am the victim here, responding to an unfair deprivation. I had bagels, and they were taken from me. I am just restoring order to the universe.

I’m also going to keep working on the proportions. Salmon, cheese, onions. I disagree with the losers and deplorables who only put a little cheese on their bagels. I think you need a nice thick layer. And too much salmon can be distracting. It can drown everything else out.

I have come to prefer Bermuda onions on bagels, and the older I get, the thicker the slices have to be.

I will figure plain bagels out. I will figure garlic bagels out. Then I’ll be done. I can go long periods without blueberry bagels and cinnamon raisin bagels, and they always linger on store shelves, so they’re always available. I am content to pay for them.

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I just yanked 4 bagels out of the oven. Things are looking good.

The size is right. The appearance is right, although more of a B+ than an A. The weight is right. The crusts are shiny and hard. The color is correct.

These started at roughly 155 grams. I waffled around and settled on this weight.

I can smell malt, and it’s a little stronger than I want, but that may be because the boil water is still on the stove.

I’m cooling them on a rack so the bottoms won’t get soggy. This may just work.

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They are pretty cool, so I tried one. The texture is fine. I would say I’m tasting too much salt and malt, though. My wife loves these bagels, but she has some pretty interesting ideas on how to eat Western food.

I’m going to try again tomorrow. I will cut the salt in the dough to 2%, and I will halve the malt and leave the white sugar as it is. I will also halve the salt in the boil and replace all the malt with sugar.

As it is, I have bagels more than adequate for my next round of open-faced smoked fish sammiches.

Oy

I may have cracked the bagel code.

I can’t figure out why I can’t just go to Google, type “bagel recipe,” and get an obvious answer millions of bakers should already know. But I can’t. It’s like Googling Mormon secret handshakes, only harder, because you can actually find Mormon secret handshakes pretty easily online. Here they are.

I knew high-hydration recipes were stupid, because anyone who has ever eaten a bagel knows they are dense and a bit dry. The King Arthur company recommends 63%, which is nearly wet enough for pizza. The longer I live, the more certain I am that no one at that company knows anything about actual cooking. Recommending 63% hydration in a bagel is like recommending cottage cheese in cheesecake.

Tonight I went back to the recipe I started on a few months ago. The hydration is 55%. I reduced the yeast. Other than that, no changes. I made the dough in a Cuisinart, let it rise for about three hours, rolled out 4 bagels, tested them for proofing by seeing if they floated in water, boiled them for two minutes per side in a special solution, and baked them at 400°.

They were not exactly like New York bagels. They were smaller, for one thing. My bagels started out at around 92 grams, and I plan to move up to 125. They also tasted a little different on the outside. They had kind of a baking soda taste in addition to malt and sweetness.

They were not precisely on target, but they were better than the bagels I get at the store even though the store bagels are pretty much exactly what a New York bagel is supposed to be. The odd flavor from the solution made the bagels taste different, in a good way. My wife likes them better than store bagels. Nonetheless, I plan to move back toward the original taste next time. Here is what I plan to do:

INGREDIENTS

240 grams high-gluten flour (not bread flour)
132 grams warm water
1 tsp. salt
1 tbsp. diastatic malt powder
132 g warm water
1/4 tsp. instant yeast

Water Bath

1 qt. water
4 tbsp. dried malt extract (not diastatic)
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. baking soda

I will cut the baking soda from 1 teaspoon to 1/2 because I could taste the soda in the bagels I ate. That seems like overkill. The baking soda is supposed to improve the crust, so I will see if I really need a whole teaspoon.

I made 4 dough balls and put them under a glass bowl to rise. I mashed them into disks and put holes in them and let them rise some more. I dumped one into cool water to see if it had risen enough. It floated, so I assumed all was well.

I didn’t make the bagels the old-fashioned way, rolling dough into strips, wrapping them around my hands, and rolling them forward and back until they made rings. That’s a pain. I just poked holes in my circles and stretched them. The result is more uniform and less likely to produce faulty bagels. It’s better.

The holes closed up more than I wanted, but it worked out, because when bagels have big holes, food falls through them.

At this stage, you boil your bagels two minutes per side. I drained mine on paper towels, figuring baking them sitting in water was a bad idea. I baked them at 400° on an air bake sheet with a piece of nonstick foil on it.

At 20 minutes, they were dark, but not too dark.

They are crusty and chewy. The texture seems fine to me. Even if I never get the exact flavor New York bagels have, these will be very nice with smoked salmon and cream cheese. As good or better than classic bagels.

Once I’m content with the recipe, I’ll figure out how to make garlic bagels, which are THE correct bagels to eat with salmon, regardless of what a lot of unimportant people think.

This is great. I no longer have to rush to Publix early in the day, hoping retirees with names like Morty, Sol, and Moishe haven’t snapped up all the plain bagels. And soon I’ll be able to get garlic bagels, which are better.

See you at breakfast.

Shot but no Beer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If You Eat at Chili’s, You are not a Person

If you don’t yet think leftists are completely in the tank for demons, I have some more proof.

Morgan Wallen, a country singer, appeared on Saturday Night Live, a show noted for bad writing, performers who last one season and go back home to live with their parents, and extreme behind-the-scenes cruelty to writers and actors. He left before the credits ended, and he posted a photo of his private jet, along with the message, “Get me to God’s country.” He flew home to Nashville.

Leftists went nuts, as though he had entered God’s throne room and relieved himself on the floor. One Internet commenter said there was “a special place in hell” for him because he didn’t wait for the credits. I’m not making that up. A special place in hell? Did that come from drugs?

Now Buzzfeed has posted a collection of “God’s country” memes its staff things are hilarious. They all have the same caption, which, of course, is, “Get me to God’s country.”

One is a map showing an area containing a Cracker Barrel, a Chili’s, a Red Lobster, and similar restaurants. Another shows a WaWa. Another shows an empty IMAX theater. Another shows the side of a Popeyes.

How is this funny?

Buzzfeed presented these pictures as though they needed no explanation. Like enjoying a Cracker Barrel breakfast is inherently funny and a sign of mental inferiority.

I have no idea why they thought WaWa belonged in the article. WaWa started in Philadelphia, where every leftist dream has come true. A friend of mine who lived nearby said it was New York with none of the good parts.

They also showed a picture of a couple of Barbie houses. The Barbie movie is a left-wing instrument full of open misandry and woman-worship, so whoever chose it was not clear on which side is which.

Google Maps shows big concentrations of IMAX theaters around New York City and L.A., so darn those coastal yokels.

Cracker Barrel serves excellent breakfasts. Chili’s has great burgers and nachos. I have had two meals at Red Lobster. One was fantastic. The other was gross, but it was after everyone quit because of the man-made covid virus liberals said came from a grocery selling pangolins.

The only bad thing about Popeye’s is the management. When the staff actually shows up, orders ingredients, and cooks, the chicken is excellent. It would be hard to choose between a Chick-fil-A sandwich and a Popeye’s sandwich made on a good day.

Some of the people who think these memes are funny live in places where they have to step around bum poop and discarded needles. They think that’s God’s country.

If this were 1933, and the Internet existed, Buzzfeed would be posting “funny” pictures of synagogues and Jewish stores, and the same kind of people–Satan’s children–would be agreeing that the photos were sweet burns.

It is disturbing that the Buzzfeed staff thought these humorless memes needed no explanation and that many people who saw them agreed in comments. It’s just assumed that only stupid people eat at Cracker Barrel. It is just assumed that leftists are higher beings, like Aryans compared to Jews in Austria and Germany. It’s not just good old-fashioned rube-hating talk. These days, it’s policy.

In leftists’ minds, normal, decent people are almost completely dehumanized now. We should know what comes next, if the left can pull it off. We know what happened to people the Nazis didn’t like once they were put in the “subhuman” category.

“We’re right. We don’t have to explain. If you ask us to explain, you’re one of the wrong. Responding to you is beneath us. We’re right because we’re right.”

“Saying we’re wrong is violence.”

It’s important to understand the hatred and arrogance and to get in touch with the Holy Spirit so he can keep you safe. He moved me to a red county in a red state. I’m 5 minutes from Cracker Barrel. My governor abolished DEI in government jobs. We have no domestic terrorists here, so no “murals” or riots. No one marches into people’s yards and threatens them over their political beliefs. God can put you in a place like this, but if you’re determined to stay where you are, you can always take the route Lot’s sons-in-law took.

The big difference between Christians and leftists is that leftists want to go where we are and kill us, while we just want to get away from them and live in peace. We are going to have to move to smaller and smaller enclaves until God mercifully raptures us. Assembling in militias and shooting these people will only make us just as they are, except that we would be a lot better at it. I don’t want to be a Christian militia member in hell. Martyrdom is better than becoming a child of Satan.

Corn Flakes Won’t Pour from Barbie Boxes

Today I saw an exciting video in which a preacher said inflation was a punishment found in the Bible.

I had never thought of it that way, but of course, he is right. While I was watching, God told me inflation is a form of famine, and we all know famine is a punishment for disobedience.

And there was a great famine in Samaria: and, behold, they besieged it, until an ass’s head was sold for fourscore pieces of silver, and the fourth part of a cab of dove’s dung for five pieces of silver.

I don’t call famine “famine” when I pray. I call it “lack,” because that’s the fundamental issue. You can lack without having a famine or drought.

If you want to see inflation and lack in action, buy some cereal. The boxes are so thin, the cereal won’t come out. The sides of the boxes press against it and hold it in.

Today I measured a box. They used to be about 3″ thick. The box I measured was 1-3/4″ thick. That’s a huge difference.

When I left the disgusting open-air septic tank known as Miami, and all of its trashy, hateful people, a choice rib eye cost $10 per pound. Now I regularly see them on sale for $16. On sale, not the regular price.

The egg situation is beyond belief. I paid $13.49 for 18 extra-large eggs a while back. My wife threw them in the cart without looking at the price. Who expects eggs to cost so much you have to look at prices? But that’s where we are now. Thankfully, they’re under $10 this week.

Lack is an apocalyptic curse. It comes with death and violence.

People think the red horseman represents war. That’s wrong. It’s not what the Bible says. It says, “power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword.” That isn’t limited to war between nations. It includes putting on black pajamas and attacking conservatives who hold prayer meetings. It includes hitting Tesla drivers. It includes threatening Jewish businesses in America because Jews in another country are fighting against genocide.

The horseman of death–the pale or green horseman–comes with fatal diseases, among other things. Biological plagues. Not all plagues are biological, because the word “plague” doesn’t mean “disease.” It means any widespread ill that overtakes a nation. The Egyptians suffered 10 plagues, but only one was a disease.

Lack is the black horseman, and the green horseman helps him along, or at least biological plagues do. I suppose a disease that hits plants or animals is not really in the green horseman’s lane, since it appears he is sent to kill human beings. Anyway, we are experiencing lack partly because of diseases.

Until today, I was the only person I had ever known to remind others that invasion by illegal aliens was a curse. The preacher spoke about it. It’s not just the illegals that cause problems. Legal immigrants cause trouble, too. Look at Europe, which is continually tormented and largely controlled by a 7th-century religion concocted by a filthy savage. Look at this passage from Deuteronomy 28:

The stranger that is within thee shall get up above thee very high; and thou shalt come down very low.

He shall lend to thee, and thou shalt not lend to him: he shall be the head, and thou shalt be the tail.

Maybe I should just repost all of the chapter.

And it shall come to pass, if thou shalt hearken diligently unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe and to do all his commandments which I command thee this day, that the Lord thy God will set thee on high above all nations of the earth:

2 And all these blessings shall come on thee, and overtake thee, if thou shalt hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God.

3 Blessed shalt thou be in the city, and blessed shalt thou be in the field.

4 Blessed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy ground, and the fruit of thy cattle, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep.

5 Blessed shall be thy basket and thy store.

6 Blessed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and blessed shalt thou be when thou goest out.

7 The Lord shall cause thine enemies that rise up against thee to be smitten before thy face: they shall come out against thee one way, and flee before thee seven ways.

8 The Lord shall command the blessing upon thee in thy storehouses, and in all that thou settest thine hand unto; and he shall bless thee in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.

9 The Lord shall establish thee an holy people unto himself, as he hath sworn unto thee, if thou shalt keep the commandments of the Lord thy God, and walk in his ways.

10 And all people of the earth shall see that thou art called by the name of the Lord; and they shall be afraid of thee.

11 And the Lord shall make thee plenteous in goods, in the fruit of thy body, and in the fruit of thy cattle, and in the fruit of thy ground, in the land which the Lord sware unto thy fathers to give thee.

12 The Lord shall open unto thee his good treasure, the heaven to give the rain unto thy land in his season, and to bless all the work of thine hand: and thou shalt lend unto many nations, and thou shalt not borrow.

13 And the Lord shall make thee the head, and not the tail; and thou shalt be above only, and thou shalt not be beneath; if that thou hearken unto the commandments of the Lord thy God, which I command thee this day, to observe and to do them:

14 And thou shalt not go aside from any of the words which I command thee this day, to the right hand, or to the left, to go after other gods to serve them.

15 But it shall come to pass, if thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe to do all his commandments and his statutes which I command thee this day; that all these curses shall come upon thee, and overtake thee:

16 Cursed shalt thou be in the city, and cursed shalt thou be in the field.

17 Cursed shall be thy basket and thy store.

18 Cursed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy land, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep.

19 Cursed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and cursed shalt thou be when thou goest out.

20 The Lord shall send upon thee cursing, vexation, and rebuke, in all that thou settest thine hand unto for to do, until thou be destroyed, and until thou perish quickly; because of the wickedness of thy doings, whereby thou hast forsaken me.

21 The Lord shall make the pestilence cleave unto thee, until he have consumed thee from off the land, whither thou goest to possess it.

22 The Lord shall smite thee with a consumption, and with a fever, and with an inflammation, and with an extreme burning, and with the sword, and with blasting, and with mildew; and they shall pursue thee until thou perish.

23 And thy heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under thee shall be iron.

24 The Lord shall make the rain of thy land powder and dust: from heaven shall it come down upon thee, until thou be destroyed.

25 The Lord shall cause thee to be smitten before thine enemies: thou shalt go out one way against them, and flee seven ways before them: and shalt be removed into all the kingdoms of the earth.

26 And thy carcase shall be meat unto all fowls of the air, and unto the beasts of the earth, and no man shall fray them away.

27 The Lord will smite thee with the botch of Egypt, and with the emerods, and with the scab, and with the itch, whereof thou canst not be healed.

28 The Lord shall smite thee with madness, and blindness, and astonishment of heart:

29 And thou shalt grope at noonday, as the blind gropeth in darkness, and thou shalt not prosper in thy ways: and thou shalt be only oppressed and spoiled evermore, and no man shall save thee.

30 Thou shalt betroth a wife, and another man shall lie with her: thou shalt build an house, and thou shalt not dwell therein: thou shalt plant a vineyard, and shalt not gather the grapes thereof.

31 Thine ox shall be slain before thine eyes, and thou shalt not eat thereof: thine ass shall be violently taken away from before thy face, and shall not be restored to thee: thy sheep shall be given unto thine enemies, and thou shalt have none to rescue them.

32 Thy sons and thy daughters shall be given unto another people, and thine eyes shall look, and fail with longing for them all the day long; and there shall be no might in thine hand.

33 The fruit of thy land, and all thy labours, shall a nation which thou knowest not eat up; and thou shalt be only oppressed and crushed alway:

34 So that thou shalt be mad for the sight of thine eyes which thou shalt see.

35 The Lord shall smite thee in the knees, and in the legs, with a sore botch that cannot be healed, from the sole of thy foot unto the top of thy head.

36 The Lord shall bring thee, and thy king which thou shalt set over thee, unto a nation which neither thou nor thy fathers have known; and there shalt thou serve other gods, wood and stone.

37 And thou shalt become an astonishment, a proverb, and a byword, among all nations whither the Lord shall lead thee.

38 Thou shalt carry much seed out into the field, and shalt gather but little in; for the locust shall consume it.

39 Thou shalt plant vineyards, and dress them, but shalt neither drink of the wine, nor gather the grapes; for the worms shall eat them.

40 Thou shalt have olive trees throughout all thy coasts, but thou shalt not anoint thyself with the oil; for thine olive shall cast his fruit.

41 Thou shalt beget sons and daughters, but thou shalt not enjoy them; for they shall go into captivity.

42 All thy trees and fruit of thy land shall the locust consume.

43 The stranger that is within thee shall get up above thee very high; and thou shalt come down very low.

44 He shall lend to thee, and thou shalt not lend to him: he shall be the head, and thou shalt be the tail.

45 Moreover all these curses shall come upon thee, and shall pursue thee, and overtake thee, till thou be destroyed; because thou hearkenedst not unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to keep his commandments and his statutes which he commanded thee:

46 And they shall be upon thee for a sign and for a wonder, and upon thy seed for ever.

47 Because thou servedst not the Lord thy God with joyfulness, and with gladness of heart, for the abundance of all things;

48 Therefore shalt thou serve thine enemies which the Lord shall send against thee, in hunger, and in thirst, and in nakedness, and in want of all things: and he shall put a yoke of iron upon thy neck, until he have destroyed thee.

49 The Lord shall bring a nation against thee from far, from the end of the earth, as swift as the eagle flieth; a nation whose tongue thou shalt not understand;

50 A nation of fierce countenance, which shall not regard the person of the old, nor shew favour to the young:

51 And he shall eat the fruit of thy cattle, and the fruit of thy land, until thou be destroyed: which also shall not leave thee either corn, wine, or oil, or the increase of thy kine, or flocks of thy sheep, until he have destroyed thee.

52 And he shall besiege thee in all thy gates, until thy high and fenced walls come down, wherein thou trustedst, throughout all thy land: and he shall besiege thee in all thy gates throughout all thy land, which the Lord thy God hath given thee.

53 And thou shalt eat the fruit of thine own body, the flesh of thy sons and of thy daughters, which the Lord thy God hath given thee, in the siege, and in the straitness, wherewith thine enemies shall distress thee:

54 So that the man that is tender among you, and very delicate, his eye shall be evil toward his brother, and toward the wife of his bosom, and toward the remnant of his children which he shall leave:

55 So that he will not give to any of them of the flesh of his children whom he shall eat: because he hath nothing left him in the siege, and in the straitness, wherewith thine enemies shall distress thee in all thy gates.

56 The tender and delicate woman among you, which would not adventure to set the sole of her foot upon the ground for delicateness and tenderness, her eye shall be evil toward the husband of her bosom, and toward her son, and toward her daughter,

57 And toward her young one that cometh out from between her feet, and toward her children which she shall bear: for she shall eat them for want of all things secretly in the siege and straitness, wherewith thine enemy shall distress thee in thy gates.

58 If thou wilt not observe to do all the words of this law that are written in this book, that thou mayest fear this glorious and fearful name, The Lord Thy God;

59 Then the Lord will make thy plagues wonderful, and the plagues of thy seed, even great plagues, and of long continuance, and sore sicknesses, and of long continuance.

60 Moreover he will bring upon thee all the diseases of Egypt, which thou wast afraid of; and they shall cleave unto thee.

61 Also every sickness, and every plague, which is not written in the book of this law, them will the Lord bring upon thee, until thou be destroyed.

62 And ye shall be left few in number, whereas ye were as the stars of heaven for multitude; because thou wouldest not obey the voice of the Lord thy God.

63 And it shall come to pass, that as the Lord rejoiced over you to do you good, and to multiply you; so the Lord will rejoice over you to destroy you, and to bring you to nought; and ye shall be plucked from off the land whither thou goest to possess it.

64 And the Lord shall scatter thee among all people, from the one end of the earth even unto the other; and there thou shalt serve other gods, which neither thou nor thy fathers have known, even wood and stone.

65 And among these nations shalt thou find no ease, neither shall the sole of thy foot have rest: but the Lord shall give thee there a trembling heart, and failing of eyes, and sorrow of mind:

66 And thy life shall hang in doubt before thee; and thou shalt fear day and night, and shalt have none assurance of thy life:

67 In the morning thou shalt say, Would God it were even! and at even thou shalt say, Would God it were morning! for the fear of thine heart wherewith thou shalt fear, and for the sight of thine eyes which thou shalt see.

68 And the Lord shall bring thee into Egypt again with ships, by the way whereof I spake unto thee, Thou shalt see it no more again: and there ye shall be sold unto your enemies for bondmen and bondwomen, and no man shall buy you.

Christians from old blind churches seem convinced we are supposed to be poor and defeated, as though failure were some kind of blessing. That’s not true. We are supposed to face persecution, but all that means is that we will be ostracized and sometimes attacked. It means we will not be the ones society honors and showers with money. You know. Like George Soros, Kim Kardashian, Hugh Hefner, George Clooney…the servants of Satan who can’t squeeze a lemon without diamonds pouring out of it.

It doesn’t mean we’re supposed to expect a lifestyle of poverty and abuse from enemies we can’t escape or defeat. Why would God curse the obedient like that?

Adulation from the public is actually a curse. Yeshua himself said it. “Woe unto you when men speak well of you.” Gaining riches without being corrected is a curse. Look at famous whores like Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B. Would any sane person trade places with them? They’re the same people they were when they were 9 years old. How will they ever escape hell with the constant reinforcement of unearned cash? That’s a pretty small needle to push a camel through.

You can be persecuted and still have a very nice life. Maybe you will never have anyone pay you a million dollars for a single Instagram post featuring you wearing their brand of underwear, and maybe you’ll never sell out a concert venue or get an Academy Award (bronze with a thin layer of plate), but you can be affluent and healthy and have a beautiful family.

If you’re a Christian, you have been listening to the Holy Spirit, you give generously to the poor when he commands you, and you keep working on repentance, you should do fine in this life. When you have a problem you can’t solve, you should always humble yourself and ask what you’re doing wrong, because you are probably being chastised.

I have learned that there are signs people are cursed because they are not aligned with God. Here are some:

1. Being dominated by abusive people they can’t get free of. This includes living in nasty cities full of leftist thugs.

2. Physical problems that make the miserable and can’t be fixed by doctors.

3. Constant financial setbacks when they’re doing things right.

4. Debt they can’t get rid of.

5. Inability to marry and start a family.

6. Not owning a home or any real estate.

7. Worry.

I’ve been through all those problems, and it was my fault.

The Bible promises us all sorts of blessings in both testaments, so how can it be that our lives should be miserable? God doesn’t say anything he doesn’t mean.

When the housing market crashed, God told me, “This recession is not for you,” and it wasn’t. I never lacked for anything. Yeshua is our Passover, according to the Bible itself. That means curses are supposed to pass over us, as they passed over the houses of obedient Jews in Egypt.

Trump is doing some nice things, but he isn’t Yeshua. He’s like the Jewish kings who abolished some parts of idolatry but left the places of worship intact. He’s not going to save us, and some curses on America will persist. Some things will get better temporarily, but his talk of a golden age is just talk.

Trump tolerates perversion. He puts perverts in high places. The GOP exalts a pervert and credits him with putting Pennsylvania in the red column. He supports a two-state solution, which sounds eerily similar to “Final Solution.” Any nation that divides Israel is cursed.

Joram was the son of Ahab and Jezebel, and he was king during the Samarian famine when people were eating donkeys’ heads. Joram was a lot like Trump. He didn’t worship Baal, and he took down a pillar dedicated to Baal, but he was still an idolater whom God set on the throne because the people were idolaters. He was better than Ahab, but he did not solve his country’s problems.

Your wellbeing depends on you, not Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping. Not on Hezbollah or Hamas or ISIS. At the height of a famine, Elijah ate meat and drank water he didn’t earn while everyone else suffered hunger and thirst. On the other hand, you can starve in a rich country if you don’t have God’s favor. God persecutes, just like man.

If you’re obedient to the Holy Spirit, things will keep getting better for you. You might be martyred eventually, but you should be okay until that happens. John was okay even as Domitian fried him in oil. You can’t get more persecuted than that. John was victorious while being fried by his enemies, but his enemies have been frying since about 100 A.D., and they are not okay.

This is my Mom, Consuelo Similac

It’s Sunday morning in the House of Love, the primary structure of the Heavily Armed Gated North Florida Compound.

Already, unreasonable demands have been placed on me. I was expelled from my warm bed at 8:30, which is practically before dawn, so I could put a new diaper on the compound’s quality control inspector, and then I had to feed him.

He is definitely the quality control inspector, and we nearly always fail. The bassinet? Fail. The pacifier? Fail. The type of Vaseline we apply to his protesting butt? Fail. Nothing is quite up to his exacting standards, and we suspect he has been searching the Internet trying to find our replacements.

I dumped about 6 ounces of milk into him after exercising the privilege of cleaning his nether regions, and he promptly passed out. He lay in my lap with his eyes closed and his hands extended as though he had something important to say, but nothing came out except snores.

I hope.

Once he was out, I renditioned him to the bedroom, where his mother will be very happy to hear from him when he wakes up and fills the air with skull-splitting shrieks that could mean almost anything.

We can’t figure out where all the milk is going. I mean…we KNOW where it goes, because we’re the ones who collect and dispose of it when he’s done processing it. But we don’t understand why he drinks so much.

We think he should be getting about a quart a day, but I would say he’s way over that. I think he would be content to suck continuously through a hose.

He is getting less crabby all the time, so we frequently have the pleasure of interacting with a small human being instead of some sort of furious rodent in a baby suit. Last night, he smiled all the way through a diaper change. I don’t think his mother drugged him, so the explanation must be maturation. His, not mine.

Cranking up the intensity of my Bad Cop Dad routine is really paying off. I don’t like standing up to his mother or listening to him scream because I’m not giving him what he wants, but it turns out that if I do my job, everyone gets more peace. Mom sees that my ideas work, to her utter amazement, so she’s happy. The heir apparent behaves better and seems happier, too.

He got spoiled because he slept in our bed, so he screamed when we tried to put him in the bassinet. I told his mother to put him in the bassinet and let him cry himself to sleep, and the problem went away. He also became much more pleasant during the day. Then Mom started letting him sleep with her during the day after breastfeeding, and the screaming resumed.

I told her we had been inconsistent. He doesn’t know the difference between sleeping in bed at night and sleeping in bed after breastfeeding. Both have the same effect. I told her to let him cry last night to readjust him. He yelled for about 20 minutes and then conked out peacefully. He has been a happier baby ever since.

Mom kept wanting to pick him up and make his world perfect (from the baby standpoint), but I told her to wait. I thought she was likely to get angry with me. When he shut up and went to sleep, she was the opposite of angry. It made her night. I think it also helped her realize her husband wasn’t a total idiot.

I am part of a brainwashed generation. Dads and moms are supposed to be equal partners! Patriarchy is bad! When a woman is offended, it means her husband is way out of line! All that stuff is excrement. Wives look for leadership, just like children. If you supply it with confidence, take unpopular positions, and tough it out, they end up rewarding you with gratitude and respect. If not, you become the Tim Walz of dads. A panderer everyone laughs at and walks on.

I would say it’s the Reagan/Trump philosophy of leadership. Be confident that you’re right, stick to your guns, and even people you disagree with will feel compelled to follow you.

Pleasing the crowd is not leadership. It’s submission. Tim Walz pleases crowds of sick, unhappy, fatherless people by telling them their pathological ethos is right in every respect, and he makes them worse by submitting to them. Trump tells crowds how things are and what’s going to happen, so he improves them.

If I submit to God with humility, and I’m thankful for my place under his authority instead of resenting it, my wife and children will be more likely to submit to me. That’s how it works.

The older I get, the more God shows me about the state of the world. He keeps showing me how correct our old ideas were and how sick the post-Sixties generations are. He tells me to stop being ashamed of what I believe. He tells me I’m right. He tells me he told me these things.

Life is going beautifully for us. This is the best time of my life so far. But we do have problems, and the biggest challenge is getting breastfeeding right. I look for information all the time.

I joined a forum, even though I didn’t want to. I know forums tend to turn toxic after I’ve been involved for a while, because spirits turn people against me. This is especially true of forums that involve topics popular with women. When a traditional male who belongs to God shows up, the venomous, rebellious whore spirits send irrational fury into the modern-minded ladies. Even the ones who don’t have male genitalia.

I got a tiny bit of helpful advice, but before long, dozens of women were giving my posts the old thumbs-down, and not because I had done anything wrong or violated terms of service. They were violating TOS by voting against me simply because they disagreed with me.

Here is the main thing that made them angry: I said I wanted my son to keep breastfeeding instead of taking any kind of sustenance from a bottle, because I believed it would give him a strong bond with his mother (obvious) and that men who had strong bonds with their mothers in childhood treated women less like objects as adults. I also criticized our lame pediatrician because he handed out free formula and refused to discuss breastfeeding problems with us or refer us to a consultant.

They went after me like the bacchantes on Orpheus. When I said formula contained corn syrup, palm oil, and whey, someone accused me of promoting myths. Go read labels and tell me I lied.

As background, I’ll tell you about our soon-to-be-former pediatrician.

The first time we went to his office, the girls there asked us what kind of formula we used so they could give us more. I didn’t understand this. Who was paying for the formula? Not the insurance company. Not us. Not the doctor. So who? I thought it was odd. They weren’t offering my wife and me groceries, so why feed the baby?

When we told them what we had, they said it was better than what they had, so they didn’t give us anything. Fine with me, since I wasn’t expecting anything, and we were trying to get off formula.

My wife and I talked in the parking lot, trying to figure this out. I said formula companies must have been giving the doctor their products in order to get mothers and babies hooked.

Turns out I was right.

I can’t tell you exactly what happens in our doctor’s office, but I have learned that formula companies give away a lot of formula. They give it to hospitals and doctors. I’m sure they give it to organizations. Maybe food banks. They tell hospitals that if they give formula to families that don’t need it, the hospitals will receive free formula for unusual children who can’t get nutrition any other way.

They also bribe doctors to take formula. They give them checks. They send them to conferences and arrange speaking engagements for them.

I don’t know about medical conferences, but in other fields, conferences work like this: they send you to a known center of earthly knowledge, like Vegas or Nassau, they get you drunk at their expense, they buy you great dinners, and often, miraculously, local women who don’t seem to have jobs show up out of nowhere and ask to spend the night with you.

I’m not saying women like that are whores.

I’m not SAYING it.

I don’t know whether our doctor is being paid or whether he risks STD’s at conferences in Jamaica. Maybe he’s a philanthropist, he really believes in formula, and he loves spending thousands of dollars a year, giving things away to people he ordinarily bills. Call me cynical, but I think he’s being paid.

The purpose of giving formula to care providers is not subject to reasonable debate. Reasonable minds may not differ. The purpose is to discourage breastfeeding and convince mothers to buy formula. Then they get hooked, they don’t learn to give their babies proper nutrition, their breasts dry up, their babies come to love the plastic nipple and overfeeding, and they have to keep paying the formula pushers.

As for breastfeeding, I don’t want to get into a lengthy lecture about well-settled medical science, but I will say that the CONSENSUS (that lovely word liberals love) is that breast milk is much better for babies than formula, and breast milk straight from the mother is much better than breast milk from a bottle. I’m not willing to argue about these things with breastfeeding flat-Earthers. What I say is true, and it’s common knowledge.

Anyone who says it’s okay to use formula except as a last resort is either lying or ignorant. I can prove that by citing one fact, all by itself: breast milk contains antibodies. Withholding antibodies leads to disease, and disease kills babies. Therefore, unquestionably, formula kills children.

The majority of formula-fed babies will not die from unnecessary infections. That’s true. But the ones in the minority do. And have. You wouldn’t say it’s okay to withhold whooping cough shots from babies because most babies that get the disease live, now would you? Most people who spent their lives driving cars without safety belts or airbags were never seriously hurt in accidents. Would you buy a car like that to carry your kids to school?

There are other serious problems with formula, but as I said, I’m not going to waste a lot of time defending obvious, established truths.

Do babies that breastfeed have better bonds with their mothers? Of course. Come on. Getting off work at Goldman Sachs at 8 p.m., rushing home to the Upper East Side, and grabbing your bewildered, formula-fed son out of the arms of Consuelo the poorly-vetted illegal immigrant every weekday for 8 years makes you the gringo aunt and Consuelo the mother.

Do men who had good relationships with their mothers treat women better? I don’t know, but I know it worked for me. It’s a reasonable guess, and anyway, why wouldn’t you want to have a tight relationship with your baby?

My son is a mama’s baby, and I consider that a huge blessing. It amazes me that there are parents who are jealous because their babies love their husbands and wives.

So anyway, women became enraged at me for saying what I said, giving me zero credit for the best possible intentions toward babies and women. Why?

The answer is feminism, which was designed by Satan. Eve was the first feminist in the Bible, and look who put her up to it. When Adam was cursed, the first thing God convicted him of was not eating a fruit but listening to the voice of his wife. Look it up. Adam was supposed to rule and make unpopular decisions like his father, but he let his wife treat him like her baby son and persuade him to try a drug. This explains why corrupt old churches love to portray Mary as God and Yeshua as a helpless baby who can’t even talk. Satan likes tiny little men and big, blustery women, preferably with really short hair.

One of the main reasons formula exists is to permit women to abandon their children and become breadwinners. It helps dethrone men and, in doing so, dethrone God, who rules families through men. Formula is practically sacred to feminists. Until recently, I didn’t know how furious feminists got when people criticized formula. They become even more unhinged than usual, because to them, an attack on formula is an attack on their ability to usurp male roles. It’s almost as bad as saying fathers are important.

I used to have the idea that feminists loved breastfeeding, but I didn’t understand the whole picture. They love exhibitionism, because it gives women power over weak, lustful men, so they want slutty women to be able to display their nipples in churches and restaurants. This is why they push to force the rest of us to endure bare-breasted feeding when they could just as easily toss cloths over themselves. It’s not about taking care of babies. It’s about being ruled by daddy-issue demons. “Daddy said you had to wear a bra to school. Show him what you can really do!”

God’s ways are completely internally consistent, because Yeshua is the Prince of Peace, and peace is almost literally synonymous with order. Satan’s ways, including feminism, are internally inconsistent. This is why feminists yap about their right to parade around naked and force people to watch them breastfeed while also working hard to discourage breastfeeding and push formula.

I guess the formula brigade must be getting even more militant now that demonized men think they’re becoming mothers and sick girls are having their healthy breasts amputated.

No man has ever breastfed, although my understanding is that some grotesque creatures have forced helpless babies to suck hormone-induced secretions from their nipples. If formula is bad, then the whole transsexual ethos has a glaring flaw normal people can exploit when they try to correct others. If you’re a real man, you can’t ever breastfeed, and if you’re a woman who had her breasts cut out so she could pretend to be a man, you can’t breastfeed, either. You have to use formula or find breast milk somewhere.

Now you know why you get bad and inconsistent advice about feeding babies. It’s feminist buffoonery. Many people are not concerned at all about the welfare of babies yet push formula as hard as they can because it’s a tool to pick at patriarchy.

Patriarchy is a holy idea. It is correct. God is completely male. Yeshua is completely male. God is our father, not our mother. The people who symbolized God in the Bible were uniformly male.

Patriarchy is essential to humanity’s success, but we have rejected it, so we have failed. You and your family can succeed, but humanity is dying.

I thought I understood how hostile humanity was to maleness, but I was wrong. It’s much worse than I thought, and the attacks have contaminated just about all of us internally. God has changed me a great deal, but I find I still have to remind myself to spit on old habits of feminist thinking and grind them under my feet. I have to push myself to be a proper king and priest in my house.

I really hate this place. This world. I don’t know what I’m doing here. My life is easy and pleasant, but there is no place for me among humanity.

The earth’s filthiness and worthlessness become more apparent to me every day. This place is so unfair to God and his people, it defies understanding. Human beings are so impervious to love and reason, they have made themselves garbage and excrement, incapable of being saved and repaired.

The more God changes me, the more I have to endure what he endures. He is perfect. He is helpful. He has the best intentions and all the answers. But he is hated and rejected. To whatever extent I am like him, I am also hated and rejected. Only the evil inside me is embraced by the world. I can’t help people much at all. When I try, I get pushed away, and the people who pushed me away most effectively were preachers and church volunteers.

If I can’t help anyone, why should I be here?

Abraham prayed for Sodom and Gomorrah, and God agreed to spare these cities if 10 righteous men could be found. God only found one, and we know what happened. I suppose there are still enough people or Earth who can be saved to keep the rapture from happening this week.

I Can’t Just Say “It’s Seven O’Clock Somewhere”

Today I woke up–the last time I woke up, I mean–at about 12:20 p.m. I guess you could say my leadership in the area of getting the household on a workable schedule is not what it could be.

The heir apparent is resisting sleeping in the bassinet again. Pretty sure this is his mother’s fault. She let him sleep in the bed for several days without telling me, and he got spoiled immediately. He would yell like crazy when she put him in the bassinet. I fixed this problem. I told her to let him cry, and it changed his disposition for the better in one day. I think he is reverting because she is getting around the no-sleeping-in-bed rule by letting him fall asleep with her in bed during the day.

There are two layers of resistance I have to deal with. His and hers.

He will sleep if she fills him up with milk and lets him pass out. She takes his unconscious form and moves it to the bassinet, and he keeps sleeping. But it just so happens we run out of milk between 10 p.m. and midnight, so guess when he finally fills up? The wee, wee hours.

Now it sounds like I’m talking about a different subject.

I have realized that I, a male, have to take over the feeding plan. I started buying protein shakes and bars, and we have a big can of pure protein powder on the way. If the web is giving me the straight poop, we need to try to get something like 100 grams of protein into the wife every day in order to keep the baby fed, and to put that in perspective, a large egg has 6 grams, so 100 grams would run, what, seventy-five dollars?

I am also pushing her to drink water. She forgets.

We have to build up a reserve so we can knock him out–I mean feed him responsibly–regardless of the hour.

It’s not that easy getting food and drink into my wife. If you told me I needed to drink half a gallon of water, I’d drink one half-liter bottle in 15 seconds, a second within the next minute, and the rest would be drunk within no more than 45 minutes. Wouldn’t mean a thing to me. For some reason, my wife is different. It takes her several minutes to drink one bottle.

The baby appears to take after me, to put it mildly. She says he drank 7 ounces of milk in one feeding yesterday.

She has a hard time with pills, too. I have no problem swallowing a half-dozen huge supplements at once, but she has trouble getting one large capsule down.

I don’t know if my wife has an accurate picture of the lifestyle she signed on for. The web says women should pump milk 8-12 times per day. In other words, normal sleep isn’t even something they should consider. The goal shouldn’t be to have a pleasant life during the first three months of a baby’s life. It should be to get the job done and accept a schedule most Chinese factory slaves wouldn’t trade for.

Sometimes she expresses shock or dismay when she finds out what she has to do. My response? “You decided to have a baby.” I tell her I know she is suffering, but it serves no purpose to discuss it as though there were a way around it. There isn’t, so discussion just promotes an escapist mindset and delays getting down to necessary tasks. The only productive thing is to do what you have to do.

I take jobs off of her. I tell her I understand this is a tough time for her. I try to make sure I’m not pushing too hard. But I am not going to stop, because if I do, there will be chaos.

After another month, things will get much easier. We just have to get there.

I have learned that when I know I absolutely have to do something unpleasant, I will get up and do it. If I think there is a way around it, however, I will waste a lot of time pitying myself and trying to craft an escape. This is why I tell my wife there is no way to avoid her tasks. It’s why I remind her she chose this challenge. In the end, it makes things easier on her. When she resigns herself to what she has to do, the peace it brings her is obvious, and it ends contention between us.

She needs me to reinforce her. She almost always knows what has to be done, but temptation creeps in, and she dithers. If I reinforce her, she stops dithering and bucks up.

I plan to take this approach with the boy, too. Unless he’s an exceptional kid, he will try to find ways to weasel out of things. My mother used to enable me when I shirked, and it did my character a lot of harm. It made me mushy and lazy. My son will pick up his toys and put them in a box. He will sit down and do his homework. He will take whatever shots I tell him to take. If he tries to get his mother on his side and divide us, he will wish he hadn’t.

This is what husbands and fathers are supposed to do. When my dad was stern with me, often it was for selfish reasons. He wasn’t a completely worthless father, but a lot of his parenting–perhaps most–was based on a desire to get out of parenting and get back to the TV. Often, he was also motivated by anger. He was often tough about the wrong things. When I’m tough, it’s not because I’m angry or I want to be excused from doing my job. I take stands because I know how things will deteriorate if I don’t. I don’t enjoy it. I don’t do it for myself.

A long time ago, my dad and I anchored his boat in Honeymoon Harbor south of Bimini. We had guests. In the evening, I checked some bearings, and it looked like our anchor was dragging. We seemed to be headed toward the shoals to our south.

I told my dad, and he didn’t want to deal with it. Getting a big boat off of sand would have been very difficult, and it would probably have cost a lot of money, but he wanted to sleep. I said I couldn’t go to bed until we knew things were okay. He said there was no point in both of us staying awake, so he turned in for the night.

A father can’t act like that. He has to be the person who takes the most responsibility, stands up, and does the hard, thankless jobs.

A while back, a tropical storm came close to us, and we got a lot of rain. I realized one of our roof gutters was overflowing. I had cleaned it out recently, but I had underestimated the amount of leaves that had fallen since. They had clogged things up.

I climbed out a window in the rain and sat on the roof scooping leaves into a bucket so I could dump them on the grass below. I fired up a leaf blower and shot air up the downspouts to blow leaves out. I got a ladder out and used it to scoop up leaves I couldn’t reach from the roof.

I told my wife to call the EMT’s if I fell.

It was no fun at all, but it absolutely had to be done in order to avoid a huge water intrusion that could have cost thousands in the end. Nobody else was available to help. Waiting wasn’t an option. There was no way around the job. It’s an example of the type of challenge that requires you to shut up immediately and get to work.

I just talked to the wife, and I told her no more breastfeeding in bed. She agrees. She wants to sleep, so she is open to ideas. She is more amenable to being led when her approach is causing her trouble.

Now it’s time to get up, attack the protein problem, attack the scheduling problem, and fix it so we don’t get up in the afternoon again tomorrow. I failed this week, but with God’s help, I should be able to get us back on track quickly.

The System Works

Interesting experience today.

As noted in an earlier post, my wife and I have had trouble getting our son to breastfeed. When he was born, my wife was not thinking clearly. She was exhausted and full of overprotection hormones, and I let her start the boy on formula. The nurses and I discouraged it, but we gave in too easily, and one nurse said formula was fine, which it definitely is not.

My son decided plastic nipples were the only real nipples. They are easier for babies to suck, and the bottle people put big holes in them so they pass milk and formula much faster than real breasts. Babies get spoiled. Moms get spoiled because they finish in 10 minutes instead of 45 to 60. Spoiled babies raise hell until they get what they want, and moms give in because they are spoiled and also worn down. Dads don’t put their feet down because we live in a castrated society in which Satan has shamed fathers into failing to look after their families correctly.

A reader asked if my area had a La Leche chapter or whatever it’s called. It does not. It does have a breastfeeding office at the Health Department. It’s mainly for poor women on a program called WICS, but they’re not jerks about it. They gave us time. A few weeks back, we got some coaching from a lady named Debbie, and today we showed up without an appointment, and she saw us again.

As luck would have it, our soon-to-be-ex-pediatrician’s office is across the street from the building where Debbie works. We had to see the doctor today for a routine visit. We were asked about our concerns, and we brought up the breastfeeding issue. We couldn’t get the baby to latch properly. There was pain and bleeding. Feedings weren’t successful.

Our doctor, an old Nigerian guy, dismissed our concerns.

This doctor gives people free formula. We should have known this was a red flag. Formula is nearly poison. Nobody should push it on women who may be able to breastfeed. Formula causes diabetes, obesity, allergies, and a bunch of other problems.

We suspect formula companies are giving him free merchandise in order to hook low-income and low-information mothers. Somebody has to be paying for it, and I doubt our third-rate United Healthcare insurance is the source.

He said breast milk from a bottle was just as good as breast milk from a person. Well, I’m no doctor, but I can read. What I have read is that the breastfeeding process itself carries very important benefits for mothers and babies. It helps women’s uteruses shrink. It delays restoration of fertility. It relaxes babies. Today we were told it makes breast cancer less likely. These are just some of the benefits we have been told about.

Isn’t breast cancer a serious problem? Isn’t it worth trying to prevent?

I don’t think the many professionals who say breastfeeding is beneficial are imagining things or lying, but I do think there are doctors who lie to help companies promote medical products. Actually, I know it.

When we left, I told me wife she should call the health people and see if we could arrange an appointment with Debbie. We got an endless hold, so we decided to drive over and walk in. Before long, somebody found Debbie, and we were in her office getting priceless advice.

It turned out my wife was leaning forward, and she wasn’t waiting for the baby to open his mouth wide enough to get everything into it. Debbie told us something amazing. A baby can open its mouth 140°. So basically about like a blacksnake or a great white shark. Ladies, it does not matter how wide your equipment is. A baby can handle it. You could probably put your fist in there.

Debbie got the process started, and before we knew it, my son was totally absorbed. In maybe half an hour, he pumped himself full to bursting, and then he showed his approval by losing consciousness. Perfect.

He was quiet all the way home. He has been quiet almost all evening. He has fed a second time. Our problems are solved.

Now we can put the breast pump away. We can put away all but a couple of bottles, which we will use on rare occasions when normal breastfeeding isn’t practical. My wife isn’t in pain any more. I’m going to throw out what’s left of the formula.

Formula is hard to digest, and a bottle baby can’t regulate its intake even if it receives milk, so now we know our boy’s digestion will be optimized. He won’t have to digest palm oil and cow proteins, and his innards won’t be hammered by inappropriately large feedings that are hard to process.

Maybe he won’t scream before he poops now. I hope so.

My wife is over the moon, and so am I. We have had to do a huge amount of work in order to keep the bottles coming, and the irregular nature of bottle feedings ruined our schedule. It will be hard enough when our son is feeding normally. We don’t need bottle problems making things worse.

She told me she had felt despair. She had resigned herself to months of misery. She thought it was normal. Now she realizes things are going to be much easier, and her relief is immeasurable.

She is very happy I started getting patriarchal and controlling instead of sinking into the modern American wuss-dad mold. She sees that it saved us. I think it has increased her confidence in me. It will make things more harmonious. Leaders who don’t lead cause chaos and confusion.

I was afraid I was being too dominant, but I wasn’t being dominant enough. I’ll bet 90% of American husbands are not dominant enough.

I should have done better from the start. I will do better from now on. I will spend more time with God, increasing my submission to him. That will give me authority to rule my family, and it will help them submit to him and me.

The pediatrician has a couple more things to do for us, so we will wait a while to hand him the mitten, as P.G. Wodehouse put it. We will quit talking to him about feeding.

I am wondering if we can go back to our original pediatrician. He’s not covered by our insurance, but I am willing to pay. The issue is whether our insurer will let him refer us to in-network specialists when needed. If so, we will go back to him in a heartbeat.

We should have taken breastfeeding classes before our son was born, but as a man, I could not have guessed that sucking a nipple was complicated. In retrospect, I think delivery classes would have been worthless compared to breastfeeding classes. During the delivery, I never had a challenging decision. It was all simple and intuitive. Easy to figure out on the fly.

If you’re planning to have a baby, learn from our mistakes. Don’t even consider using formula unless you literally have no choice. Don’t use bottles except on rare occasions. Don’t give up on yourself or your baby. Find the right people, and they will get you hooked up. It can be done. Don’t listen to anyone who says breastfeeding is merely a nice option for affluent women and disgraceful women who choose to betray the memory of Susan B. Anthony by raising their own children. It’s the proper and normal way to feed children, and if it were not, none of us would be here.

Fake Milk is Feminist Poison

My wife and I have three big problems as new parents.

1. We are new parents.

2. We don’t have any relatives to tell us what to do with babies.

3. The healthcare industry is full of flakes who provide bad information about baby care.

Things are working out nearly perfectly, except when it comes to one major issue: breastfeeding. We were able to figure everything else out.

When we were at the hospital, my wife flipped out because she thought our son was starving. She was loaded up with hormones that made her a little delusional and pretty assertive, and she felt way too protective. It was hard to tell her anything, even though she knew nearly nothing about babies and she was surrounded by women who cared for them for a living.

She insisted on starting the boy on formula, and this was a gigantic mistake which is causing us problems weeks later. Major problems. It is a threat to our son’s future health and even his life expectancy.

The hospital ladies pushed my wife to wait for nature to take its course and forget about bottles, but they didn’t push very hard. One of them said something stupid. Concerning formula, she said something like, “It’s perfectly all right.”

It’s not perfectly all right. Formula is garbage, and it’s very harmful to babies. I’m sure there are lots of feminists out there who would disagree, because feminists are idiots, and formula makes it easy for them to hand their nearly-estranged babies off to illegals and have Enfamil pumped into them so they can go to work and end up with children as crazy as they are, but formula is to breast milk as Skittles and Hot Pockets are to real food.

By the way, I’m not just trying to seem based when I link fake milk to feminism. Look it up. Feminists really have been behind the baby-malnutrition revolution. There are articles on the web intended to de-shame formula feeding. Sensible people have mounted a backlash against the feminist nutwads, and now there is a defensive backlash to the backlash.

I wish I had known feminism and formula were linked. Things would have gone down differently. Feminism came from Satan, and Satan is not the guy to go to for parenting advice. Eve was the first feminist and the source of the curse on women. Every time a woman screams during delivery, she can thank the mother of feminism.

Formula is for two kinds of mothers: those who can’t provide breast milk by any means and those who don’t care about their kids. I keep reading that you shouldn’t feel like a bad mom if you use formula. Yes, you should, because you are a bad mom. Unless you had no choice. I’m writing this as a warning, because some day, some dad or mom who is getting terrible advice from post-feminist nurses may Google for help, and that person will need a sane voice to cut through the toxic nonsense.

The website of a well-known hospital says this: “Deciding to feed your baby breast milk or formula is a personal matter.” No, it is not a personal matter, unless we should repeal laws protecting children from neglect.

It involves two people. It may involve a selfish, immature woman who is willing to harm her baby’s health. The other party is defenseless. Mothers should be told that formula is a last resort for the utterly desperate.

I trusted the hospital ladies, and I didn’t want to be an XY ogre about the whole thing, so I let them give us formula. If I could turn back time, I would put on a patriarchal show for them and make them leave the room while I set my wife straight.

She was exhausted. She was in pain. She was in no position to make important decisions. I should have stepped up to the plate, played bad cop dad, and looked after her and my son. If they try to give our next child palm oil and corn syrup, they will not be able to do it unless they can get the police to remove me from the building.

They were very nice. They meant well. But they were completely incompetent to give anyone advice about feeding babies.

I have been researching and making notes, and I have learned that lack of breast milk is extremely bad for babies. Not “less than optimal.” Extremely bad.

Check out this excerpt from my notes:

1. Breastfeeding protects your baby against common childhood illnesses such as ear infections and lower respiratory tract infections. Over the long term, breastfeeding lowers the risk of obesity, diabetes, asthma and much more. Breastfed babies have fewer allergies. Studies also link breastfeeding with higher IQ scores.

2. Breastfeeding helps with postpartum weight loss, delays fertility, increases a mother’s self-confidence and promotes bonding.

3. Breast milk is different from formula because it changes to meet the nutritional needs of your child as he grows.

You could stop at “ear infections,” and you wouldn’t need to say anything else to sell me. We tend to think baby ear infections are no big deal, but they are. They’re very painful. They can cause deafness. They tend to recur. They are often treated with surgery. The fact that a problem doesn’t kill a child doesn’t mean it’s not a major problem.

Deafness can make a person much less intelligent. Most people don’t know that. A psychologist who worked with people with learning disabilities told me. Many deaf people can’t read. The deaf have lower IQ’s. I mean retarded lower.

I have a first cousin whose son is asthmatic, and he had to take allergy shots every week when he was a kid. His asthma used to put him in the hospital. Of course, mom kept right on smoking in the house. He’s also obese. I don’t know if she gave him formula, but knowing what a selfish person she is and how backward our Appalachian culture is, I’ll bet she did.

If we don’t cut out formula, and our son grows up to be a fat diabetic with asthma, severe allergies, a hearing aid and an IQ of 90, we won’t know for sure that we caused the problems. On the other hand, we will know we might have.

Fake milk is harder to digest. It is harder to tell when a bottle-fed baby has had enough. Babies are more likely to vomit formula. Parents like to say “spit up,” like it’s not as bad, but the correct word is “vomit.” If your food made you vomit several times a week, would you keep eating it?

Formula doesn’t contain anything that gives a baby immunity. Breast milk does. How is this stuff even legal? Did immunity suddenly become unimportant just because Germaine Greer decided women should be ambitious sluts?

How many babies have died because their immune systems were stunted by formula?

“We’re doing fine because we use breast milk in bottles.” Sorry, people. You’re not doing fine. You’re giving substandard care. It’s not just the formula that matters. It’s the breast.

Breastfeeding makes a woman’s uterus contract so her body returns to normal. Why didn’t the nurses tell us that? How many women have had problems because they didn’t know this? It’s not a minor concern. It’s important.

Breastfeeding stimulates lactation. Skin-to-skin contact fights postpartum depression. It regulates the baby’s temperature. It makes babies feel safe and loved.

Yesterday my buddy Mike, who raised two sons, told me something very wise: he said my wife and I will be inconvenienced from now on.

You may think you can give your baby a bottle most of the time and then cram a quick breastfeeding session in when it’s convenient, but it doesn’t work like that. Breastfeeding is supposed to happen around the clock. It’s supposed to be very inconvenient. If what you’re doing is convenient, you’re doing it all wrong. You’re supposed to accept the fact that a feeding session can take 45 minutes. You’re supposed to accept getting up in the night, over and over. You had a baby. You obligated yourself. Your convenience is not a factor to be considered.

I’m going to quit helping feed the baby so much. It’s the cute modern thing to do, but it’s bad for everyone concerned. I don’t think it’s bad for me to give him a bottle of breast milk once a day, but he needs the real thing over and over every day of his life. Consistently. Feeding sessions with me should be cameos.

I don’t care about changing diapers or doing laundry. No one ever got asthma because his dad did laundry. Giving milk to babies is a woman’s job. Period.

FYI, bottles are designed badly. I know it’s 2025, and human beings know absolutely everything now. Sure. But baby bottles let milk flow too fast. They spoil babies and also tired mothers who don’t want to spend 6 or more hours a day nursing. I think they’re designed to addict, not to nourish. The people who make them know perfectly well that they flow too fast.

I can get 120 milliliters of liquid into my son in about 10 minutes. That is not an acceptable rate. When he goes to his mother, he may take 5 times that long to fill up. Which will he and his mother naturally prefer? Obviously, the bottle.

We are using the slowest-flowing fake nipples there are, and they are still way too fast. My wife wanted to move to faster ones, but I told her we needed to keep him on the slow ones until he got fed up with them.

If you’re a future Googler, let me spell it out for you. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you formula and relying on bottles are okay. The enablers won’t be around to pick up the pieces in 40 years when your daughter is whale-fat, single, and childless, rides around the grocery store in an electric cart, and has to have bariatric surgery. They won’t appear by magic and heal your baby when he is screaming from ear pain at 3 a.m.

If you can’t provide your own breast milk, buy it. Find a relative who is lactating. Do what you have to do. Don’t go down without a fight.

My son has gas like a water buffalo. He has prolonged periods of discomfort because of it. I’m not sure his immunity is up to snuff. He is starting to look fat. I am getting him off palm oil and corn syrup. That’s that.

The recovery process is a little bumpy, but I took charge and explained things to my wife, and now she is on board. She feels terrible guilt about using formula. That’s appropriate. It’s not a problem to be fixed. I feel guilt about letting it happen. I should feel guilt. It’s the correct way to feel. I let my son down.

It’s going to work. The key is not to listen to my wife when the hormones tell her our son is starving. We put him on a scale occasionally. We can see that he has energy. We know the conversion will be successful.

I told her something. I said her son was going to put her to the test for the rest of his time with her. There would be one test of wills after another. I said he had to know from the start that his parents would stand together and not let him run the family. Once he knows that, he will be at peace. He will quit pushing and accept his place. As long as he sees chinks in the armor, he will instinctively try to pry them open and pit us against each other, and that will bring chaos and misery.

He may cry because he misses the bottle. To that, I say what I say when he cries during diaper changes: “No one cares.” I say that to him all the time. “No one cares, buddy. Holler all you want.” If he had his way, I’d give in and let him lie in poop.

When he is all grown up, he will be very glad we didn’t turn him into Jaden Smith. He will never resent us for standing firm when he had stupid ideas to sell us.

I am to submit to God. My wife is to submit to God and me. My son is to submit to God, me, and my wife. That’s the system. If I have to be the bad guy sometimes, so be it. I have seen the monsters enlightened feminist dads raise.

Any Room Where you do Anything is a Workshop

We cheaped out on nursery furniture. We went Chinese. It looks okay, and it works, but it’s not Thomasville or Ethan Allen. My wife figured we would get rid of it in a few years, and she has seen that selling used furniture is a waste of time, so she thought we should save some money.

I agreed. Contain your astonishment. This was after she bought him designer socks, 450 burp rags, an electric wipe warmer, winter coats that won’t fit him until next year, and his own vacation home in St. Bart’s. Hard as it may believe, I, too, felt it would be okay to economize on a bed and dresser.

And a motorized nursing recliner. Because our other three recliners were just wrong. Sigh.

We have been using a changing pad instead of a changing table. My wife insists on changing our son in the bedroom suite instead of the nursery, because walking the extra 15 steps is just too much. Meanwhile, her elderly husband has no problem making the trip at 3 a.m.

She wanted to keep the changing pad on top of the bathroom counter between our sinks, but I put an end to that after finding a poopy wipe in the sink where I brush my teeth. Unlike moms, dads don’t suffer from poop blindness.

We have been putting the pad on the Chinese dresser and changing him there. It works fine, but he is getting stronger and more rambunctious, and we have realized we can no longer rationalize running out of the room to get things we’ve forgotten and leaving him on top of a dresser with no straps or Velcro or chains or anything to hold him in place. We have to get some kind of dedicated table that will restrain him, and it has to fit in our bathroom.

We could get a table made for the purpose of changing babies, but they are not all sturdy, and a lot of them take up a huge amount of room. I want to be able to get in and out of the shower without turning sideways. I found a product which is clearly a lot better: a US General service cart from Harbor Freight.

The cost is not that much higher than that of a crummy Chinese table that will fall apart if the baby breaks wind forcefully. The cart will outlast all of us, the top tray holds 350 pounds, the cart has a ball-bearing drawer that holds 75 pounds, and you can get magnetic attachments to hold paper towel rolls and boxes of nitrile gloves.

I don’t go near his butt without gloves. Make fun of me if you want. Doctors and nurses use gloves to keep baby poo, and for that matter all poo, off their hands, and I see no reason why I should do things any differently. Somehow the fact that he’s my baby is supposed to make me love his poo and think it’s delightful when I get it in my hair or, God forbid, my mouth. Maybe if I took enough estrogen, this would make sense to me, and I would also no longer be able to parallel park. Poo is always poo. I don’t care whose it is.

When the diaper (his) comes off, I have my PPE in place. Electronic shooting earmuffs and poo-proof gloves. Every time. I have considered using my grinding face shield as well.

It’s true I can’t hear my wife’s helpful suggestions when I’m wearing the muffs. But enough about the perks.

My wife is getting much more fatigued with his squawling than I am, and she goes in without ear protection, so obviously, I am right. Once again.

Hope she doesn’t read that.

The nursery furniture is (still) white, and the bathroom tile is blue. The local Harbor Freight doesn’t have any white carts, but blue is in stock, so I think we’re all set.

Our brains are still not right. I am probably up to 5 hours of sleep per night, but I still make mistakes like calling the pacifier a passport or even “the Passover,” and I can’t remember any number longer than three digits. My wife leaves things on a hot stove and only remembers to flush the toilet about 80% of the time.

This morning while talking to my wife, I expressed my newfound admiration for Donald Trump. He’s about 80 years old, he sleeps even less than we do, he’s been doing it for decades, and he runs a real estate empire, a social media empire, a crypto empire, and the most powerful nation on Earth. Is Diet Coke the answer? Maybe we should buy a few cases.

He tweets ingenious, convoluted tweets at 3 a.m., combining regime-boosting assertions with triggering criticisms of his enemies that provoke them to get out of bed and do Google research so they can post their ineffective replies. If I tweeted at 3 a.m., it would probably look like this:

Dr. Merkwerdichliebe837691 · Feb 21 @ PlzKidnapMe · 3hr

Someone tell m3 how to get this baby to quit spitting o7t the Passover

Joe Biden sleeps 18 hours a day, some of it with his eyes closed, and in a presidential debate, he told the world he finally “beat Medicare.”

What does that even mean?

Maybe it will make sense to me in a few more days, when the little elephants on the baby’s pajamas start dancing and winking at me.

The wife has been reluctant to let me use man solutions to baby problems. She eventually agreed to let me use brewery sanitizer to kill germs on things like bottles and nipples. Big win for me. That stuff is fantastic. It’s called Star San, and you just spray it on and let it dry. Costs about $25 for a year’s supply.

I think Star San got her ready for the tool cart, because she liked the cart right away.

Her helicopter mom inclinations are slowly drying up. The baby is beating them out of her. In response to his noise, she has started telling him he is just going to have to cry for a few minutes. This, instead of hurtling into the living room, sweeping him up in her arms, and wrapping him in the baby sling she bought from Amazon while I wasn’t looking.

We looked at the web to find out whether we should pick him up the instant he starts crying, and of course, just about every source said yes. But this is the web, and these are people who spend their lives writing about babies. They are almost certainly left-wing flakes who think meat is murder and 11-year-old tomboy mastectomies are health care. They claim there is no point in letting a newborn cry and that a newborn can’t be spoiled, because newborns can’t learn anything.

Yeah, okay. Our newborn learned to insist on plastic nipples in about 15 minutes, and it took about a day of excessive mothering to teach him screaming for half an hour would get him a ride on Mom’s belly. He can learn just fine. Maybe leftist newborns can’t learn. That would make sense. It’s consistent with their behavior as adults. “Socialism will work if we just do it RIGHT this time!”

Leftists insist grabbing kids the instant they start to whine won’t ruin them. They say things like, “We picked up little Bodhisattva every time zhey cried, and zhey came out just fine.” No, zhey’s not fine. Not if he has blue hair and nipple rings, wears ladies’ undergarments, and posts proud tweets about his upcoming elective man-parts amputation. If he buys bras that match his bright green beard, he’s not okay. You have to say no to kids sometimes.

Two words for anyone who disagrees: Jaden Smith.

My aunt used to pick her second son up every time he cried, and he turned into a real-life Chuckie. Broke everything he touched. Used to run through the house naked, screaming, every time she told him to take a bath. He used to hide under the bed, and she would get a broom and jab him. When he was about 6, she smacked him because he was making everyone miserable, and he reached up and slapped her face. I thought the world had come to an end, because I couldn’t believe God would permit it to go on after that. The other adults used to fantasize together about beating him.

He was the only kid my grandfather ever beat, and that includes my sister the felon, so no, I am not in favor of scooping babies up the instant the noise starts. Doors were invented for a reason.

Speaking of hormonal quirks, my wife can’t taste salt very well. My understanding is that this is caused by the same hormones that make her clinically insane. I mean, “highly concerned about the welfare of her baby.” Before she moved here, during the Biden famine panic, I bought about 6 cartons of salt to get me through the next few years. After she got pregnant, they started to vanish. One day she told me to buy salt, and I said to get one of the cartons out, and she said they were gone.

I used to go through about 1.5 cartons a year. I would guess she now goes through 8 all by herself. I have a dredge I use to shower large items with salt, and I used to refill it maybe once a year. It seems like it’s empty all the time. Maybe when the hormones subside, I’ll be able to find salt when I need it instead of refilling the shaker every time.

Anyway, she seems to be returning to her old stable self.

Well, here is good news. I have just been informed that our son the genius has finally learned how breastfeeding works. I better get up and battle the wife so she doesn’t send her family pictures of him in action.

Flag Down for Bringing a Walker on the Field

Someone on the web created a thread asking for unpopular opinions. When I saw it, I knew it was destiny. This is what I was made for.

I did quite a bit of writing. For one thing, I pointed out that pizza doesn’t go with beer. That must have made heads explode.

Pizza is acidic and a little sweet. It often contains oregano, a bitter herb. Obviously, you don’t pair that with a bitter beverage. Soft drinks and red wine go with pizza. Tea is acceptable. Beer? Insane.

I think people who drink beer with pizza are generally low-end beer drinkers who drink to get drunk. I think they must be people who drink really bad beer, chilled to the freezing point to kill the awful taste. People who drink stuff like Bud and Coors always drink it as cold as possible, and the reason is that when it warms up even a little, it tastes like seltzer with soap and a little sugar.

I think these people are likely to eat bad pizza from Papa John’s or Domino’s, and they just want something to wash it down and give them a buzz.

Beer goes with steak and rib roasts. It goes with Mexican food and seafood. It works with cheeseburgers and fries. Forcing it to get along with pizza is ill-advised at best. And nothing is worse than smelling other people’s beer-and-pizza burps while trying to eat.

If you think beer goes with everything, go eat an apple and chase it with a beer. It’s right up there with toothpaste and orange juice.

I also said Elvis was a lousy singer. It’s true. Elvis became famous because he caused girls with weak fathers to become sexually aroused. His early performances were basically riots, with little bacchantes fighting the ushers, tearing off their own underwear, and throwing it on the stage. People forget that. Today we make fun of people who call rock and roll the devil’s music, but it’s true. Any music that makes you throw your dirty underwear at people has some connection to hell.

Women still throw their dirty underwear at entertainers. It’s gross. They throw it at Justin Timberlake, for example. They throw it at the kind of guys who look like they take it home and put it on.

They should have men in Tyvek suits gather it and put it in medical waste bags. Someone could catch something.

Sinatra also mesmerized young tramps, but he was also an excellent singer whose style was innovative and unique. Jerry Lee Lewis was a much better singer than Elvis. Sam Cooke was far better. There were a lot of excellent male singers back in Elvis’s heyday. Nat King Cole. Eddie Arnold. Jim Reeves. Ray Price. Johnny Mathis. Ray Charles.

You can go into restaurants and bars today and still hear Sinatra recordings. Elvis? Not so much. It was never about the sound. It was about the pelvis.

I complained about sports worship. I said that if I wanted to watch overpaid illiterates work, I’d turn on The View.

I said I didn’t like it when people assumed I watched sports. People come up to me and try to make small talk about men I’ve never heard of, playing games I didn’t watch. “How about that Mahomes?” Who?

I pulled that name out of the air just now because I’ve seen it in headlines. I don’t know who he plays for or what his position is.

What if I went up to random men and said, “How about that Carl Friedrich Gauss? Is he the GOAT, or what?” He’s a fascinating guy. How can they not find him interesting? We wouldn’t have electronics or, well, any kind of serious technology without his discoveries.

Some guy responded and said I must have been rooting for Taylor Swift and the Chiefs.

How thick can a person’s head be?

Me: I never watch football. It would be great if the stadium where the Super Bowl was played was obliterated by a meteor and replaced with a Buc-Ee’s.

Him: You must have been rooting for Taylor Swift and the Chiefs.

What?

This is completely typical of my experiences with sports fans. “Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.” They can’t believe a man who doesn’t watch sports can exist. It’s like they’re under a spell. And they are. Demons are filling their minds with absurdities.

It also bugs me when men with hurt feelings try to tell me how empty my life must be because I don’t watch sports. What possible reason could you have to be angry at me for not sharing all of your hobbies? Do I get mad at you for not knowing how to weld?

I look down on you, sure. But I don’t get angry.

Kidding.

Yeah, my life is empty. I love my wife, and I spend a lot of time having fun with her. I don’t turn the TV on as soon as I get on and ignore her while I fill the house with obnoxious crowd noises and pray I don’t lose my ill-informed, emotion-driven bets, which I didn’t tell her about. Oh, the emptiness.

I have all sorts of time for my interests, like prayer, cooking, shooting, writing, and using tools. I get to spend time with my pet. I get to sit in the recliner with my son on my chest and relax in an atmosphere of pure love.

Empty, empty, empty. It would be so much better to be outside a stadium, trying to dodge as kids try to spit on me on my way in. I’d really rather be paying $11 each for cups of extremely bad beer and then standing in a quarter-inch of other people’s urine in packed men’s rooms. I long to get caught up in post-game brawls where people fight to defend the reputations of spoiled young athletes who pay armed men to keep fans away from them.

If only I could spend 4 hours fighting traffic, trying to get home from a stadium after my team lost, avoiding eye contact with drunk road-ragers and praying I don’t get stopped at a DUI checkpoint.

To get average seats for my three-person family, I’d have to shell out almost $500. I would happily pay $100 to be allowed to stay home.

But I must have been rooting for Taylor Swift and the Chiefs.

For $500, I can get my son a brand-new CZ 457 Scout in .22LR, and he can hand it down to his son. But no, I’d rather watch grown men play a game created to amuse children. When are the duck-duck-goose playoffs?

On a related note, I said Bill Burr was an idiot. A lot of men think he’s a genius and the world’s last straight shooter. A regular guy with a platform. Hello? It’s an act, and he’s an entertainer. If he were telling the truth, they wouldn’t call it an act.

Rock Hudson made romantic comedies with women. Just saying.

He’s not smart, and he’s not one of us. Normal men, I mean. He’s just another showbiz liberal, kissing the rings on the hands that feed him.

He has crippling TDS. Right after dozens of people died in the unnecessary LA fires, he appeared with another fool, Jimmy Kimmel, and made jokes about people who criticized California’s fire preparation and response. He ridiculed them. He stupidly asserted it wasn’t possible to put fires out with ocean water. He didn’t even think about the insensitivity of doing all this while bodies were literally still warm.

California and LA officials themselves have admitted they blew it. They admitted it in Donald Trump’s presence soon after Burr made an ass of himself. Talk about jokes aging badly.

Burr says he–“HE”–doesn’t get tired of winning football games. He supports the Patriots, and he uses the words “I” and “we” when he talks about them. “I don’t get tired of winning.” “We won.”

If Bill Burr is still capable of running 40 yards, he would probably do it in a minute and a half. On the field, he would move like Joe Biden trying to find his way off a stage. You could measure his vertical leap with a feeler gauge. His most likely tool for stopping an NFL pass is his forehead. Who is “we”?

You know those videos of drunken fans rushing onto football fields, careening around at 6 mph, and then having angry players turn them into Tex-Avery-style murals? That’s what a Bill Burr NFL cameo would look like, except maybe he would keep his shirt on. They would peel him off the turf like a fruit roll-up and bury him in a map tube.

If Bill Burr played in a game, he wouldn’t sit on the bench. They’d bring in a hospital bed and a bag with a zipper on it.

Bill Burr has never “won” a game. The people who win are paid to be there. If you have to pay, you’re not part of “we.”

Ticket Taker: Ticket, please.

Bill Burr: Ticket? I have to get in! We’re playing today!

Ticket Taker: Okay, pops. Ticket and DNR.

Burr says he feels bad for days when “WE” lose. Seriously? I don’t mean to be insensitive, but if the plane carrying the New England Patriots flew into a bus carrying the Kansas City Chiefs, I would be fine. I would be very sorry to see it happen, I would feel bad for everyone who knew them, and I would probably pray for their loved ones, but 15 minutes later, I’d probably be watching Paul Harrell videos on Youtube.

If your emotional wellbeing depends on how well a bunch of total strangers play a game you stink at, you need an intervention, because your life is devoid of meaningful pursuits. Burr felt jolly and sassy after dozens of people died in fires caused by incompetence, so maybe something in his head needs to be adjusted.

Some people got annoyed with me, but that just proved I was doing it right. If they wanted me to make them happy, they should have posted a popular opinion thread.

It’s a Boy, not a Soy

I don’t plan to become a family blogger because my wife and son never signed on for that, and I don’t think the world needs to know everything about them. I think I should occasionally write a few things, though.

Our son will be here shortly. Everything is arranged. My wife is ready to unload and have her body to herself. She has enjoyed being pregnant, but she will also enjoy being able to put her son down, and she really misses sleeping on her back.

She is ecstatic about the whole business because female hormones have numbed her to rational concerns about pain, sleeplessness, diaper changes, and being tethered to another person for the rest of her life. She is literally high on hormones. This is how God helps us reproduce. We would never be able to get it done if women weren’t high. They would run off and hide when their husbands offered to get them pregnant.

Women are controlled by hormones and instincts to a much greater degree than men, and this is one reason why women have historically been viewed as less rational. They actually are less rational. They have powerful, ever-changing drives that have nothing to do with reason.

Feminists deny this, to everyone’s disadvantage. The only time feminists admit women are less rational is when a woman kills her husband and claims PMS made her do it. You can’t say you won’t vote for a female president because you’re afraid PMS will drive her to launch a nuclear attack, but it’s okay to say a murderer should go free because she was bloated and irritable and nobody gave her chocolate.

If the human race went back to admitting women are less stable, things would be better for everyone. Women would have more realistic expectations of themselves, and so would men. And men would be taught how to deal with female instability and keep things harmonious. This is one of our most important jobs, but feminists get furious at the mention of it.

No wonder feminists are such happy people.

When a woman is not pregnant, her attitudes and behaviors go through changes every month. When she is pregnant, things can go completely crazy. Some women cry for no reason. Many get extremely emotional and hard to live with.

If a man knows these things are coming, because he lives in a reality-based society in which young men are taught the truth, he can help his wife stay anchored and at peace. If he has been brainwashed by feminism, he will be just as crazy as his wife. He will get caught up in her irrational swings and take them seriously. And of course, he will blame himself, because man bad, woman good.

God is more stable than men, and men are supposed to spend time with God in order to be anchored and at peace. This help is supposed to flow downhill from men into women. In a feminist society, the opposite occurs. Women’s hormones and instincts drive them crazy, and their husbands absorb and encourage the craziness.

This is how men end up wearing pink knitted hats.

God has blessed me with a very stable wife, and that is a huge blessing. I don’t wonder who I’ll be waking up next to every morning. But she is experiencing one drive which is very typical: the nesting drive.

I didn’t learn about this until I was 35, because our feminized society conceals it the way our fake news outlets conceal Trump successes and man-made-virus lab leaks. Sometimes women get very excited about cleaning up their homes in order to create pleasant “nests” for their children.

Not so much for their husbands. Oh, well.

Right now, my wife is very gung-ho about cleaning and order. She can’t put the broom down. She moves things and cleans behind them. She fills bags with trash I didn’t know we had. She bugs me about the nursery.

If I were a disgusting soy boy enabler, I would be running around like an estrogen-crazed chicken with its head cut off. “YES, HONEY! YES, HONEY! WHAT SHOULD I DO NEXT?” And I would resent her for nagging, because I would not realize she was being pushed by a biological urge she can’t suppress. Because I am an actual man who loves being with God, eats dead animals, and doesn’t pretend recycling works, I know she is in the grip of something very strong.

I don’t resent her. I go along with her drive to a reasonable degree, but I also remind her that she needs to step outside herself and realize she’s a little extreme right now. I keep reminding her that everything is being taken care of. Everything is going to be fine. This helps both of us.

As for me, I spend a lot of time soaking in God’s presence, because I am not as stable as he is. He helps me relax even though I’m about to be saddled with the responsibility for the welfare of a tiny fragile, human being who has to have everything done for him.

My best friend has a dominant daughter-in-law who is about as far out on the left as a person can get, and her husband goes along with her weird ideas. He exacerbates them, pouring gasoline on a fire that needs to be put out. What she really wants is for him to stand up and take charge, but she will never admit it to herself or him, so the storm will continue.

Thanks to God and the way he is parenting me, I’m not going to let that happen in this house. If I had had children 30 years ago, before I realized how sick our society is and how God orders families, who knows what kind of mess I would have made of things?

I’m going to be an old parent, and that’s sad, but I’m not going to be a wife’s first child, like a lot of men. God has managed to set me straight about a lot of things, so there are some problems this family will never have.

I am getting confirmation through tips people give me about the delivery process. I was told not to show my emotions, for example. A woman told me that, based on her own experience, so I don’t want to hear about my patriarchal insensitivity. She made it clear my wife needs someone to be strong during the delivery. She also predicted some nutty behaviors, and she told me things I could not have anticipated. For example, I shouldn’t bring food into the room because some women can’t stand to smell food during delivery.

Not a rational thing, but one that has to be accommodated anyway.

Imagine a feminist woman telling a man not to show emotion during delivery. It could never happen. Feminists think men are supposed to cry all the time.

Maybe that’s because men who marry feminists cry a lot.

For obvious reasons.

I am here to guide and sacrifice. I’m not the center of attention. I’m not the patient. I’m not the bride. How I feel doesn’t matter. My comfort doesn’t matter. What I spend doesn’t matter. I am here to get my family through this and get everyone back home safely.

I suspect a lot of delivery rooms contain two brides: one female, and one male.

May God utterly destroy feminism and humiliate every toxic person who teaches it until they shut up. The toll it takes is beyond calculation.

Here is a meme for anyone who plans to lecture me in comments.

I won’t be posting pictures, and I don’t think I’ll write anything about the birth. Prayers would be appreciated, though, since they’re the only things that really help.