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.

Stay Close to Your Commanding Officer

I have written about the revelation God gave me about being close to him and treasuring the experience as though he were a loved one who just returned from the dead. He is a loved one who returned from the dead, so this makes sense.

I had a little bird that loved me, and he died suddenly from an infection. Afterward, I had a few dreams in which he came back to visit. In the first dream, he glowed like a light bulb, and he was overjoyed to see me. I held him and kissed him, and it gave me closure. I pressed him to my face and savored the feeling of his nearness.

Eventually, God helped me to feel similarly about him. When God helps me to feel close to him, it’s like pressing myself into a clean, soft mattress after three days without sleep. It’s like drinking from a big jug of water after spending a day digging ditches in the desert.

People who will read this will have lost loved ones. They will be able to imagine how tightly they would hold them if they came back. In a situation like that, you don’t need to speak. You just need to hold on and receive relief and new life.

Today God helped me to rest in him for quite a while. This was right after I woke up. After a certain amount of time, I took a look at my phone to see what was happening in the world.

Talk about contrast.

I saw a “news” story featuring a list of tales from people who had bad dating experiences. These days, “news” often means lists of regurgitated text messages, tweets, and Reddit posts about obscure individuals.

A woman went on one date and then texted the man to ask if he would pay for her health insurance. When he refused, she told him he was ugly and gay. A man texted a woman he barely knew over and over and called her a whore when she wasn’t interested.

I saw another piece featuring lists of bad experiences people had had with human resources employees. They cut off health insurance for a full-time employee. They backed up a boss who expected an hourly employee to be on call around the clock.

I saw a piece by a woman who must be a leftist. She said her elderly father had lost weight he could not afford to lose because of a lung disease. He had no appetite. His life was in danger.

He and her mother had always been dietary extremists (vegetarians), but while he was sick, her father felt a sudden desire to eat McDonald’s food. He started eating it several times a week, and he started putting weight back on.

His wife and the lady who wrote the piece were upset. The wife ate meals with him while “tight-lipped” and “predictably disgusted.” The daughter said, ” I have to admit, their Big Breakfast tastes surprisingly good on a Sunday morning.”

Like McDonald’s serves dog food no sane person enjoys. Why would anyone “have to admit” the food tastes good? Is eating McDonald’s food something to be ashamed of?

In what universe is McDonald’s “predictably” disgusting or disgusting at all?

McDonald’s describes the Big Breakfast as, “a warm biscuit, fluffy scrambled eggs, savory McDonald’s sausage and crispy golden Hash Browns.”

Biscuits contain flour, fat, and milk, with a couple of other minor ingredients. Sounds like the same stuff that goes into any roux made by a French chef. Eggs contain eggs, which are featured prominently in dishes served by Michelin-starred restaurants. Sausage is pork and a couple of seasonings. Pork has won Iron Chef contests. McDonald’s makes the best hash browns in the business.

The Big Breakfast is not a plate of popsicles covered with marshmallow Fluf and crumbled Pop Tarts.

Leftists bash McDonald’s all the time, as if Hitler owned the chain. Why?

I once saw a magazine story in which leftist Candice Bergen bragged that she had never eaten a McDonald’s hamburger. Who is that supposed to impress? She thought she was making people admire her, but she looked like an idiot.

Now McDonald’s is associated in the leftist spleen, not mind, with Trump, which must make things worse.

I also saw a story about a woman who gave up her daughter for adoption. The story said the daughter had sent a two-word text which was unexpected. I thought maybe she had said something uplifting. It turned out the text said, “I’m trans.”

I read about a lady who took her kid to Disney World, where bearded perverts abuse little boys by selling them princess costumes. She complained about the prices and said the best experiences were a cheap ride and seeing her daughter chase lizards outside the hotel. She said people took on debt to take their kids to Disney World. She said Disney World put on a Mickey-Mouse-themed Halloween party and charged $180 per head.

Disney used to be relatively innocent. I went a couple of times as a kid, and it was fairly harmless, and ordinary families could afford it. Now it’s like paying for heart transplant surgery, and the corporation is all about anti-white racism, alternative religions, leftism, and sexual perversion.

Mouse ears cost $35 now. They could probably be sold profitably for $5.

I read a lot of depressing things in a few minutes, and I thought about how much I hated this world. I talked to God, and I said the people here were like foreigners to me. They were so miserable. They were heartless. Their pursuits were worthy of pigs.

They were so busy trying to be their own gods and providers, they had no time for the Lord, and they didn’t receive his blessings. They missed out on the best experience there is: being with the one who loves them most and who will do the most for them. They were making up moral codes that led to disaster.

I started to tell God they were like dogs, but I stopped, because dogs are loyal and altruistic to a fault. People are not much like dogs at all. They are more like rats or monkeys. They are selfish and treacherous. An animal can’t be treacherous. Animals can’t understand the concept of betrayal.

I said people were trashy. They had no class. And God told me that classy people make sacrifices. That is the essence of class. Being nice to your neighbors who throw loud parties and steal your apples. Choosing not to correct snotty strangers in front of their kids. Holding doors for people you know will walk past you without even looking your way.

God is classy. The privilege of class is being better to other people than they are to you and not being infected by them.

I thought about my son. I realized he might have to spend a hundred years here. I felt as though I had pronounced a sentence on him.

I ran back to God and got back into his presence, and suddenly, warmth came back into me. I felt cheerful and optimistic. I wanted to forget everything I had just seen on the web.

I realized how blessed Christians who spend time with God are. We live in a different world that occupies the same space as the rat world. We don’t have to strive as much. We don’t have to play by the same rules. We can have the vexatious people removed from our lives and live in peace.

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were better off in the flames with Yeshua than the men who threw them into the furnace and stayed outside. The men who threw them in were burned to death, but God’s favorites weren’t touched by fire at all.

The most important thing I will teach my son will not be to live by religious rules, and it certainly won’t be how to get ahead by playing the world’s game. It will be to love God and hold onto him like a big down pillow. If he does that, and he listens, everything else will take care of itself. A thousand will fall at his side, and ten thousand at his right hand, but it will not come near him. Even if he does everything wrong by rat standards.

I really, really hate this place. I feel like I live in a comfortable little cottage on the grounds of a hospital for the criminally insane. No matter how pleasant my life is, I will never let myself think the world is anything but a catastrophe.

There but for the Grace of God Waddles You

Why are mediocre skinny people so self-righteous?

Opray Winfrey was some sort of bigwig at Weight Watchers, which is odd, given her lifetime of disastrous failure to control her weight. I often remark on the absurdity of making Oprah Winfrey a diet guru. It’s like asking Amber Heard how to be a great wife.

I have received hundreds of emails advertising OPRAH’S WEIGHT LOSS SECRETS, but I have never received a single email selling weight loss secrets from people like Steve Buscemi or Kate Moss. Why is that?

Oprah started taking drugs to lose weight, and while this was working, she lied and denied using drugs. Then she got caught, and she was out at Weight Watchers, an organization which relies on bad diet food and willpower. Two things that don’t work very well for the vast majority of people. If you’re fat at 20, you will almost certainly be fat at 60, unless you’re one of those people who get fat not because of cravings but because you stuff yourself in spite of not having them.

Those people exist. They’re the ones who drop 70 pounds in mid-life and then say, “I just quit eating so much.”

You can use heroin regularly and never become an addict, if you’re a certain type of person. Some people drink like crazy and retain the ability to quit and never look back. We are not all the same.

I took Ritalin for ADD, and I developed an incredible tolerance. A typical dose is 10 milligrams per day, and I sometimes took 120, not for fun, but to compensate for the tolerance. A lot of Ritalin users become addicted, but I never did. When my doctor switched me to something else, I didn’t have withdrawal symptoms, and I didn’t care whether I ever saw Ritalin again. When I was in college, I drank in a manner I would call “competitive,” but I have never, ever thought, “Man, I need a drink right now.” I have never had the DT’s. I’ve never panicked because I couldn’t get a drink. There have been plenty of periods in my life during which I went over a month without a single drink, just because I didn’t feel the desire.

I have taken all sorts of opioids for pain. When they ran out, they ran out. It meant nothing to me.

I’ve never had any kind of withdrawal symptom from giving up anything.

People are different.

Oprah failed at Weight Watchers, just like many people defeat bariatric surgery. She will probably fail at Ozempic eventually. It comes with problems.

Now she’s in trouble for making some incredible, truthful remarks. Incredible in that they reveal astonishing obtuseness. She is elderly, and she says she has only recently realized thin people are thin because they don’t have intrusive thoughts about food. She sincerely believed they were better people with more character.

She’s right. This is why most thin people are thin, although others can credit cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, and disorders. It’s amazing that she didn’t realize this until she was so old.

There are definitely some people out there who have food cravings and stay thin anyway, because people are different, but let’s be honest. Most thin people are thin because they just don’t find food that interesting.

Thin people who think they like food as much as fat people are like women who think they like sex just as much as men. They’re lying to themselves and everyone else.

I’m a normal man. I can be physically attracted to someone I hate or feel contempt for. I could have extremely satisfying relations with such a person. I am instinctively tempted to be nice to unsuitable people, even though I know I will never let myself be involved with them. I can even be attracted to a cartoon or a photo of a woman who died 50 years ago! Going an hour without a sexual thought is not a possibility. Very few women are like that, but women love to lecture men as though self-control explained the differences in our behavior and thoughts.

Homosexual men commonly have over a thousand partners per year. Lesbian couples often have sexless relationships. Think about that.

My mother didn’t care whether she ate or not. She told me so. She often forgot to eat. Her weight got up to around 110 once, and she was disturbed. I never heard her say something like, “Cheesecake would really hit the spot right now.” She never got in the car to go get her favorite food. She rarely touched desserts. She never went into a kitchen and asked, “When is the food going to be ready?”

Her dad was the same way. He was almost 6’3″, and he was vain about his weight. Whenever he started to pass 180, he just ate less until his weight went back down.

Neither of them were highly disciplined people. My mother was killed by an addiction, which proves she didn’t have the kind of willpower a person like Oprah would need to stay thin.

My dad’s sister was highly disciplined. She ran her house like a Marine barracks. She was a teacher. She was busy all the time with things busy wives do. She was accomplished. She was as big as a whale.

Consider all the thin idiots we know of. Not post-Ozempic thin. Famous people who were thin throughout most of the last century. Charlie Sheen is thin whether or not he’s on drugs. Tom Sizemore wasn’t fat. Andy Dick is skinny. Think of all the thin musicians who can’t stay out of rehab and who keep people waiting in studios for 5 or 6 hours because they have so little character they can’t get out of bed.

I have used cocaine. I thought it was wonderful, but I still didn’t become addicted. Other people become addicted in a day. If cocaine (more accurately, the sensation of cocaine wearing off) made me feel the way it makes those people feel, I would be an addict right now. Same goes for alcohol and other drugs. I would guess I have 40th-percentile willpower. Not enough to save me.

Oprah calls the intrusive thoughts “food noise.” They exist for some people but not others. They are probably the voices of demons. Compulsive behavior comes from demons.

Self-righteous thin people who only maintain discipline in the area of food are criticizing Oprah now because she told the truth. They want to be admired for something they never earned. They’re telling the rest of humanity that people who overeat just aren’t trying. That’s a load. There are people who commit suicide because they want to be thin so badly. People get dangerous surgery that doesn’t work. They go to fat-control resorts. The idea that fat people are not willing to make sacrifices is a canard.

My mother smoked two packs a day and made fun of my dad for eating compulsively, but she died at 61, and he made it to 87. Her problem was much worse than his. He smoked when he was young, and he quit in 8 minutes. He saw a headline about the discovery that smoking caused cancer, he took one cigarette out of a full pack, he smoked it, he threw the pack away, and that was it. Not one cigarette for the remaining half-century of his life.

She tried hypnosis. She tried accupuncture. She took horrible scare classes where they showed people slides of cancerous lungs. She still couldn’t beat nicotine.

There are fat people out there who maintain perfect exercise routines. They keep their houses perfectly. They work hard. Their bills and taxes are always in order. They never drink or take drugs. They never, ever procrastinate. They have exceptional character. They’re still fat, because they face temptation weak-willed thin people don’t face and could never handle.

Look at a photo of men in prison yards. Most are not obese. These are among the weakest-willed people in society, and they have are given starchy, sugary food. Their exercise time is limited. Why aren’t they all obese? Oprah’s critics have an answer, but it makes no sense.

It’s very interesting to see how poorly human beings understand themselves in 2025, after thousands of years of trying. Centuries after the scientific method came into being. We can put a hundred billion (b, not m) transistors on a chip you can lose in your pocket, but we still have no idea how we, ourselves work.

Oprah is an unhappy and unfulfilled person. She has fame and billions, but her personal life is nothing, her career has been selfish and destructive to society, she hasn’t grown up, she doesn’t know God (in fact, she fights Yeshua), and she can’t defeat the most humiliating challenge of her existence. Now when she is finally right about something and has a revelation she should have had when she was 20, people are punishing her for it.

Do you often think about foods you miss? Do you have a hard time putting the fork down? Do you get excited when you go to your favorite restaurant? If not, you can’t put yourself in Oprah’s shoes. And you probably can’t afford them anyway.

Taking the Gas Out of Gaslighters

My buddy Mike sent me some interesting photos on December 31. His son works in Manhattan, and while his son was at work, a man showed up on a balcony below his office and set up a sniper rifle. Here it is.

At first, I thought the photo was more interesting than it later turned out to be. I thought Mike’s son’s building was locked down due to a terrorist situation. Then I realized the rifle belonged to a cop. Mike sent me a video, and it featured a burly guy in black clothing with big white letters on the back.

If you were dancing, getting drunk, and doing drugs in Times Square when the ball came down, you were surrounded by guys with precision rifles.

I thought this was interesting, so I went to a community of shooters and asked if they could identify the gun. I have a precision rifle, so it was natural for me to be interested. You could call my gun a sniper rifle if you wanted. Professional snipers use precision rifles, just like shooting hobbyists. Military snipers didn’t always use them. They used to use deer rifles that were nicely set up to maximize accuracy.

I don’t know if it’s correct to say our military still uses deer rifles. The Marines use a modified .308 rifle based on the Remington 700–a deer rifle–and you can buy a heavy-barreled 700 in .308 for $690. The Marine designation for its rifle is M40A5.

A company called Georgia Precision sells the M40A5 for about $6500 without a scope. Do Marine rifles come from Georgia Precision, or are there a bunch of companies selling different M40A5’s? Not sure. I saw an Internet forum post which suggests the Marines build their own rifles.

The McMillan stock they use runs about $1400, and the aftermarket barrel probably costs something similar, including customization.

Do you need to spend that kind of money to get a super-accurate .308? No. But not every custom part is intended to improve accuracy, and the military can afford frills.

How much of the money is, basically, wasted? No idea. I’ll bet a lot of it is.

The Marines use a barrel made by a company named Schneider. So Schneider must make unbelievably accurate rifles on one else can match? No.

I don’t know why the Marines use .308. It’s an obsolescent (not obsolete) cartridge that loses velocity quickly. It drops below supersonic speed at around 800 yards, and when that happens, the bullet jiggles in flight, and it degrades accuracy. A 6.5 Creedmoor round is supersonic to about 1400 yards. It’s a more modern cartridge, designed with better technology.

When I took my precision rifle course, an instructor said my .308 had a trajectory like a mortar. The bullet goes up, slows down, and comes down, creating a path that looks like the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.

All rifle bullets do this, but a .308’s arch is a lot shorter and steeper than a 6.5 Creedmoor’s arch.

A bullet that slows down and drops fast is a pain to shoot accurately a long way out. When you do precision shooting, you have to know how much your bullet will drop over distance so you will know exactly how high it will be when it gets to your target. A short arch means the bullet’s path will be more nearly vertical far away. That means it will drop a lot more over a given distance out there. You have to have a good accurate range figure, because the round is less forgiving than a flat-shooting round.

The .308 delivers somewhat more energy to a person or deer at 200 yards than 6.5 Creedmoor, but farther out, the 6.5 delivers more energy because it’s moving faster. Because it wasn’t designed during the Truman administration.

I don’t know why any sniper would use a .308. Tradition, maybe? I don’t know any Marine armorers, so maybe I’ll never know. Maybe they have a great reason. It can’t be the increased energy at short ranges. A 6.5 Creedmoor will kill a moose just fine, so there is no reason to think a .308 is needed to kill a person. And there are a bunch of other cartridges that are better than 6.5 Creedmoor.

It’s not because a .308 rifle can use spare ammo from machine guns when things get bad. You can’t hit anything with machine gun ammo. I have tried.

If the .308 didn’t exist today, no one would invent it, because the technology is so backward. It would be like inventing a black and white TV with 13 channels.

The .308 was invented 73 years ago. Penicillin was about 11 years old. The transistor was just being made available to the public. The only intelligent life that had been to space was a few perverted beings that liked to abduct guys out of bass boats in Mississippi and probe their unmentionable parts. There were no satellites.

I guarantee you, you can get a Remington 700 that is just as accurate as the Marine version for way, way less than $6500. Maybe it will weigh more or not have wifi or something, but it will shoot fine, and given the short useful range of the .308, it will never need to shoot better than maybe 0.75 MOA. One MOA is 10.5″ at 1000 yards. How wide is a person?

Remington rifle: $650. Timney trigger: $250. New barrel: $500. Precision chassis (stock): $400. Bipod: $100-$250. Ballpark figures. Under $2000. Good scope (Vortex Viper): $1000. Rings: $150.

You don’t actually need the precision chassis, but it looks neat.

What are we at? $3050? Have my 3,000 university math credits paid off?

I think I have something like $2700 in my precision rifle, and I can promise you it will shoot 0.5 MOA with the right ammo and shooter, because I shoot close to that with crap off the shelf, and I am not a great shot.

You know what? Boys like their toys. It’s a blast, customizing, well, nearly anything and getting it just the way you want it. The Marines are boys, just like the rest of us.

As King Lear said when his daughter tried to tell him she couldn’t keep his drunken entourage in her palace, “O, reason not the need!”

To get back to the sniper photo, I asked some forum people if they knew what it was. It turns out the NYPD bought (or was given for publicity) Sako Trg M10 sniper rifles, which sell for about $12,000 without accessories. This is a 14.6-pound gun, and apparently, the NYPD went for .308.

Sako is Finnish, so yay for supporting US jobs.

I asked if anyone knew why the NYPD used this gun when Chris Kyle managed to get by with a TAC-338 which you can buy for $6500.

The TAC-338 uses a real sniper round which stays supersonic out to maybe 1500 yards and can be useful farther out.

The best answers I got involved politics. Basically, the NYPD does not care what it spends, and if it fails to spend whatever it gets in a given year, it gets less the next year, so it tries to spend up to its allotment.

I believe this is the correct explanation, because it comports with my understanding of human nature and blue states.

Anyway, I got a few unbelievably stupid answers. One guy called me a Fudd, which is a nasty name for a person who thinks the Second Amendment only applies to things like hunting shotguns. His answer contained zero useful information. He wanted to know how I had been on the forum for 4 years without knowing exactly why the NYPD needed a $12,000 rifle.

The answer was dumb for multiple reasons. First of all, they do not need the rifle. They could do the same job with an RPR from Bass Pro. Second, since they do not need the rifle, it is not possible for the justification for the rifle to appear anywhere on the forum. Third, who sits and memorizes every post on an Internet forum for 4 years? Fourth, his answer was rude, and he was a bully. I put him in his place and left him there.

Another guy said I had posted a dumbass thread. Another bully. I trimmed him down to size as well. A whole bunch of other users–knowledgeable people including former snipers–had responded with useful posts full of great information. A bunch of them agreed with me. I asked him if they were dumbasses.

I was called a whiner, by someone who has no idea what whining is. Whining means exaggerated, useless complaining. I didn’t complain. I pointed out problems with the arguments supporting the Sako purchase. That makes me a hater, not a whiner, right?

The Internet is a big playpen for jerks and bullies, and forums can be really trying. And certain interests draw unusually snotty people. Firearms. Bodybuilding. Christianity. Fishing. Electronics. Professional machinists are so rude they’re barely human. Hobby machinists are in the middle along with homebrewers. Welders are really nice. Foodies are Nazis. Not regular guys who like barbecue and pizza; they’re okay. I mean people who call themselves foodies and worship Food Network windbags who can’t really cook. Photography people are okay.

It’s funny, but bodybuilding draws bullies, but bodybuilders can’t actually fight. Fighting is a skill. It also requires cardio fitness, which many bodybuilders don’t have because they’re on drugs and don’t do cardio. There are bodybuilders who get tired climbing stairs. A lot of guys pump up show muscles in order to push other guys around, but actual martial artists who could pummel them easily are less obnoxious.

Bodybuilders aren’t even that strong. The kind of lifting they do produces big muscles that don’t do as much as smaller powerlifter muscles.

There is a skinny guy on Youtube who goes to gyms and humiliates drugged-up bodybuilders, tossing their weights around and saying how light they are.

Nineteenth-century-pistol guru Massad Ayoob is a forum guy, and he’s pretty obnoxious. Goes into panic/attack mode when anyone shows him up, which is not hard to do, or, more accurately, hard not to do. He has set himself up so many times. He got me banned from The High Road for disagreeing with him in a thread he was not even part of. Must have sent a note to his pals the mods: “I HAVE BEEN BLASPHEMED!”

Christian forums are awful. The Catholic forums are full of Catholics telling each other all Protestants go to hell. Protestant forums are full of people telling each other they’ll pray God helps them with their errors, when they really mean they hope they go to hell.

You literally have to treat electronics people like mental patients who could have full-blown slobbering-and-head-banging crises if you say the wrong thing. You can’t think of them as human beings. You have to act like you’re trying to extract data from bombs without setting them off. Like you’re playing Operation, with no funny bone.

Reddit is swarming with moderators who have no interest in moderating. They live to delete useful posts and lecture people. “Stand in awe of my deletion powers, mortal! Nanna, get me more Hot Pockets! And shove more Funyuns in them!”

In any case, I think I know why New York City spent a king’s ransom on rifles that work no better than Bass Pro merchandise.

People should be nice to each other. We should be patient. It makes life so much better. If you’re going to be hostile to someone, you should have a very good reason.

When people are nice to you, it gives you a lift. Sometimes I remember nice things people said to me decades ago, and the memories still give me strength. I remember nasty things people said and did, and I realize they still drag me down. It’s funny that I attached so much weight to remarks made by inferior people who were little better than chimps and who failed at life.

When you’re nice, you form attachments to people, and you go on to be helpful to each other in life. Snotty people push others away and end up fending for themselves unless they can control others.

God put us here to help each other. It would be wonderful if more people realized that instead of seeing humanity as a muy thai bag to use to vent their baseless cruelty.

Guess it’s time to take my new rifle out and see what it will do.

100% Failure Rate Does not Inspire

I don’t plan to become a family blogger, because my wife and whatever kids I will have never made the decision to be on the web, and I don’t believe I should subject them to much exposure. Nonetheless, I supposed it’s inevitable that I will mention them from time to time

Today I’m learning about gestational diabetes.

Pregnancy is a horror. I don’t care who gets mad when I say it. It’s true. God cursed women in Genesis 3, and he laid it on pretty good. If I had to be the one to bear the children, we would have to adopt, because there is no way I would consent to go through it.

Childbirth is a horror. It’s disgusting. If you’re a man, and you don’t know much about the subject, go read. Watch videos and look at photos if you have the stomach for it. Men love to say it’s beautiful and natural and all that, just like they love telling gullible girls they’re all about saving the whales or the Palestinians or going vegan when all they really care about is virtue-signaling their way into the sack. Men who lie to make women happy make truthful men look like the bad guys, but of course, that’s their plan. “I’m not like the others. And I’ve had a vasectomy, honest.”

About half of women take a dump during childbirth. Is that beautiful? I could go on.

When you get pregnant, you can look forward to vomiting, having food you love taste bad, all sorts of joint pains, muscle cramps that wake you up in tremendous pain, fatigue, headaches, uncontrollable mood swings, irrational thoughts, constipation, gas, hemorrhoids, and diabetes. You may not get all of these things, but you’ll get some.

The list is actually longer than that.

At the end, you have to push a huge object out through your genitalia, and rips and tears are common. Then you may go crazy from post-partum depression.

Nobody ever says the thing men’s bodies do to conceive a child is beautiful. Why? Because men don’t have to be flattered in order to get them into bed. It’s not beautiful. It’s gross. It makes a mess.

Like most women, my wife picked up a lot of weight after marriage. This set her up for gestational diabetes, and when she became pregnant, her own body betrayed her by changing its hormones to cripple her response to insulin. She failed a glucose test, so now we have a glucose monitor and a bunch of wokeness-corrupted dietary suggestions.

I say “wokeness-corrupted” because the advice always seems to begin with a push toward wokey food. Whole grains and fruit. Grain and fruit made her diabetic in the first place, but the medical establishment has a sick bias against meat and fat, which, had she eaten them exclusively, would have kept her thin and healthy.

A woman with diabetes does not need medical enablers telling her it’s okay to stuff herself with whole grains. Food cravings are her problem, which means she has the same problem an addict has. Her mind makes her look for justification to continue with destructive behavior. “I can’t eat a pound of African corn meal mush every day, but I can load up on brown rice and any bread that isn’t white.” No, she can’t. And she should not be encouraged to.

When you eat a big pile of brown rice, you’re going to raise your blood sugar more slowly than you would with white rice, which is almost a poison, but you will still raise it more than you would with a healthy meal with a moderate level of carbs.

My wife’s problem is partly due to whole grain. She eats nshima, which is boiled corn meal. It’s as whole as grains get.

As for fruit, it’s just a sugar solution with a little fiber added. It’s not a healthy food unless you eat it sparingly. When you eat a lot of fruit at one sitting, you get a headache. Why? Because you just pummeled your system with sugar. And it’s not “healthy sugar,” either. It’s fructose and glucose. Glucose is worse for you than table sugar.

They should be telling her to focus on meat, fat, and non-starchy vegetables with some carbs thrown in for balance.

My wife is expected to cut herself 4 times a day and check her glucose levels.

I started reading about these things because I know she will want help with monitoring. Now I feel so bad for diabetics, I can hardly stand to think about it. They’re all over the web talking about their problems. “Can I eat this?” “Can I eat that?” Discussing their level of this or that.

How do they stand it? They get things like terrible foot pain, headaches, blindness, amputations, impotence…

I’m not sure I realize how blessed I am.

Yesterday, I saw a video in which two web comedians made fun of Arnold Schwarzenegger. They were commenting on a video of an old white-haired man shuffling up a street and struggling to climb two or three stairs to get into an RV. He was breathing through his mouth. The man was Arnold.

The video came from a movie set, so I don’t know if the hair is his, but the rest is real. He looks bad. His feet barely leave the ground, which is a sign of dementia. His posture is terrible. His spine seems crooked.

Schwarzenegger is 77, and Donald Trump is 78. Donald Trump swings his arms and legs when he walks. He hits a golf ball a mile. He doesn’t breathe through his mouth when he walks on level ground. He dances at his appearances. I think Schwarzenegger would fall over.

My health is not perfect, and I am considerably younger than Arnold Schwarzenegger, but I am doing extremely well compared to many people my age. I can run up a flight of stairs. I work outside, carrying big branches, and I never feel sore the next day. I walk fast. My young wife asks me to slow down.

I make beer, so I have to lift a 10-gallon pot nearly full of grain and water. No problem. I have to lift 55-pound kegs about 40″ to get them into my freezers. Easy.

Sometimes I get an urge to go out and work hard with my chainsaws, not just to get things cleaned up, but to feel myself moving, like a horse that runs and jumps for no reason.

I park a long way from stores so I can burn off energy walking and so I can leave the other spaces for the “old people,” many of whom are younger than I am. When we went to Switzerland recently, the day after we arrived, I left the hotel alone on very little sleep and walked all over town. I went to a bar by the river and had a few beers and shot video. I loved it. My wife was at the hotel, flat on her back.

Why has God been so good to me, of all people? It’s a little scary. I don’t want to do anything to ruin it. And should I tell other people about it, or will I make them feel bad needlessly?

I have a friend who is two years younger than I am, and he has an artificial hip, artificial lenses, an amputated big toe, and diabetes. I’m afraid he’ll die soon. I would miss him.

This diabetes thing is giving me a new appreciation for other people’s physical problems. Before this happened, I was thinking about these things and praying about them a lot, but reading about diabetes really brought it home to me.

I hate this place. This planet is just hell light. There is so much suffering. Age, deformities, diseases, and injuries are extremely ugly and humiliating, and we can’t get away from them. Even if I’m doing well, I have to see others I can’t do anything to help, all day.

I’m not even discussing mental deficiencies and disorders. That’s a big subject all by itself.

Schwarzenegger is a wretched person in my opinion. If he has ever done anything for anyone else, I am not aware of it. He pumped himself up with drugs and climbed over other people in order to become famous. He was a bully, and he had sex with all sorts of women, including at least one session involving a whole group of male bodybuilders in the same room. He smoked weed. He entered into an extremely suspicious marriage with a person who just happened to be a Kennedy, and then he spat on marriage by knocking up a homely servant in his wife’s house. He served as Bush I’s Chairman of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports when he didn’t actually know anything about fitness or sports and he was prancing around with drug muscles.

Bodybuilders aren’t actually fit. They use routines that build muscles that are very large but not all that strong. Skinny powerlifters put them to shame. A lot of bodybuilders have a hard time walking up stairs because they have no cardiovascular fitness and no energy reserves. Their endocrine systems are constantly in crisis. They get cancer. Their guts and hearts grow and fill their chest cavities because they use growth hormone. They grow breasts and have to have them cut out. That happened to Dwayne Johnson, another person I don’t admire.

Schwarzenegger was supposed to inspire young people, and he did. He inspired them to take illegal drugs and ruin their bodies. There are a lot more steroid users out there now than there would have been without Arnold’s mass mentorship.

Now Johnson is using drugs while appearing in movies aimed at kids. He’s 52, and he has much bigger muscles than he did when he played football at the University of Miami. They had a fantastic strength coach, and they probably gave the players drugs, but old Johnson makes young Johnson look like Don Knotts.

I know a former UM player a few years younger than Johnson, and he was a monster when he played. He beat up a top-10 boxer outside a club, and he had muscles on top of muscles. I saw him a few years later, and he didn’t even look athletic. Skinny arms and legs. Don’t tell me he wasn’t on drugs.

Schwarzenegger weakened the GOP after it helped him get a governorship. He took a naturalization oath in which he swore to protect the Constitution, and then he tried to curtail our civil rights with gun control. He even said, “Screw your freedom,” because he was so terrified of coronavirus.

I am perplexed by people who admire him. Yesterday, I told my wife he had sold his soul to the devil, and I wasn’t sure the devil got a good deal.

Now the earthly life he sold his soul to enjoy is wrapping up. Everything is being taken away except for the money. No worthwhile person respects him. They see through him. His movies were fun, but they were shallow and cartoonish. He never made a Casablanca or Lawrence of Arabia. Even Jean Claude Van Damme has made more mature fare. Van Damme is able to examine himself with some honesty.

Last night my wife and I prayed for Schwarzenegger, but there isn’t much hope for people who get everything they want while remaining children.

I wish I could do something for people whose bodies are messed up. It will be nice to live in a place where such help is never needed.

The Appliance no Home is Complete Without

I used my new deep fryer again today. I made the same things I made poorly two days ago: fried chicken and hush puppies. I also made slaw using Robert Irvine’s recipe, but of course, I changed it slightly. I’ll post my version, but his is available online.

INGREDIENTS
1 bag Publix coleslaw mix
1 cup mayonnaise
1/4 cup cider vinegar
1-1/2 teaspoons celery seed
1/4 cup sugar
Salt and pepper if desired

This works great, but the amount of sauce is a little excessive for one bag of slaw, so it would be best to hold some back and add more later if needed.

This time, everything came out very well. My wife liked the chicken better than I did. She asked how we were supposed to enjoy fried chicken from restaurants after tonight. She said it was the best fried chicken she had had in the US.

In case anyone wants to try the recipe, I’ll post it, but I am still improving it, so I wouldn’t be in a rush to put it to the test. I felt it was too salty, and I think it still needs more heat.

BREADING INGREDIENTS:
1 cup flour
1-1/2 teaspoons salt
1/2 teaspoon sage
1/2 teaspoon chipotle
1 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon baking powder

This will get you through a 4-pound chicken, but just barely.

WASH INGREDIENTS:
2 eggs
3-4 teaspoons Frank’s Red Hot sauce or something similar
1 tablespoon beer
salt

I managed to find a 4-1/2-pound chicken, which is a midget by local standards. I am going to keep looking for 3-pound chickens. I was not able to find small chickens already cut up, and big chicken pieces are hard to fry well. I ended up cutting the breasts up because they were huge. Ideally, every piece of chicken should be the same size so everything cooks at the same speed and likes the same temperature.

I don’t cut chickens up well. I’ll keep working on it.

I did not listen to the insanity about frying at 350°. Maybe that works if you can find small chickens. I tried to stay below 330°, and the chicken cooked very nicely. No dark areas. No undercooked meat. The breading stayed on the chicken. The crust was similar to KFC extra crispy in texture and appearance.

I think I would do even better at 300°. Maybe lower, once the crust is set. My grandmother made good chicken, and she used to fry it on relatively high heat for 5 minutes and then cook it on lower heat for 20.

I used a Thermapen to check the internal temperature of each piece. They varied tremendously, so I think this was necessary.

I have always found that chicken fried at 350° burns on the outside before it cooks inside. As I have said before, I believe recipes that recommend 350° are intended for small cooking vessels. The people who write the recipes know that when you add chicken to a small pan, the temperature drops fast, so you end up cooking between 300° and 330°. When you have 4 gallons of hot oil and a propane burner, your oil temperature is not going to drop.

I dumped the raw chicken in a bowl. I salted it pretty generously and poured in a lot of Frank’s. I stirred everything up and left the chicken in the fridge while I worked on other things.

In retrospect, I think I should use a hotter sauce than Frank’s, because fried chicken somehow loses heat during the preparation and cooking processes.

I beat the eggs with a little beer. I didn’t taste beer in the final product, but I think eggs alone are too thick.

I dipped each piece in the eggs and then rolled it in flour. I lowered each piece into the hot oil individually to avoid having them hit the bottoms of the baskets while still raw. I was afraid they would stick if I did that. It happened last time.

I did not crowd the pieces. I believe I never had more than 4 pieces in a basket. I tried to group large and small pieces as well as I could, hoping all the pieces in each basket would be done at the same time. It didn’t work, but at least I didn’t mix wings and breasts. Having pieces of similar sizes made some difference, even if it wasn’t a perfect solution.

I cut the propane off at least twice. This machine will burn chicken very easily because it has a lot of power. You have to watch it.

In the past, I have double-breaded chicken, but this time I decided not to push it. It worked. One application of wash and flour worked great.

Day before yesterday, I used a Southern Living hush puppy recipe, and it was no good. The hush puppies had too much flour in them. They were doughy, like biscuits. They didn’t have enough onion flavor. They lacked salt and sweetness. They weren’t dark enough. The batter was too loose.

Today, I used much less flour, more onions, and more salt. I added a little beer to the buttermilk just for fun. The hush puppies were nearly perfect. Next time, more sugar, less salt, and stiffer batter. I plan to add the liquids a little bit at a time until I get what I want, instead of relying on a fixed amount called for by a recipe.

I don’t know why the people at Southern Living can’t make hush puppies. Maybe they’re like other magazines. Maybe they hire a lot of gay urban writers who only pretend to know their subjects.

INGREDIENTS

3/4 cup cornmeal mix (self-rising)
1/4 cup self-rising flour
1 tsp. salt
1 large egg
1/2 cup buttermilk
1-1/4 cups finely-chopped onion
1/2 tbsp. sugar

As noted above, I added a little beer to the buttermilk. I didn’t use the entire half-cup of liquid, but the batter was still looser than I liked. I ended up adding almost three tablespoons of meal.

I didn’t have self-rising flour, so I added 1/4 teaspoon of baking powder.

If you try this recipe, reduce the salt to 3/4 tsp. and increase the sugar to 2 teaspoons or so.

I used Martha White corn meal mix.

Do not use sweet onions. You never cook a Vidalia.

Even with too much salt and not enough sugar, these were dynamite. They tasted exactly like the taste you taste in your mind when you hear the phrase “hush puppies.” They browned better than the first batch because of the sugar.

I think they would be even better if I omitted the flour completely. Martha White mix already has some wheat flour in it.

I turned the heat up for the hush puppies. Small food needs more heat than big food, and hush puppies need to be darker than chicken. The fryer requires a certain amount of technique. You can’t just dump things in it without planning or watching and expect the best results. It’s not like making the same batch of fries 10,000 times at McDonald’s.

My conclusion is that the fryer is a winner. Everyone should have one. But frying is still a lot of work. I don’t have to wash a frying pot or filter and move oil, but I have to wash the baskets. Fried chicken involves a cutting board, a knife, a big bowl to hold the pieces before frying, a bowl for flour, and a bowl for egg wash. You also need tongs and a few other things. It’s not like a deep fryer is a toaster and you just pop your chicken pieces into it.

My wife wants to make fries in it. That should be nice. She makes them Zambian-style. Very thin and wide. They’re wonderful. Surprised me.

So that’s it. I can make good fried chicken now. My chicken will get better and better in the future. I have mastered hush puppies. On to the next challenge.

Maybe I’ll add a food photo later. I have a couple. They don’t look great, but they show that the food was fried nicely.

Rome wasn’t Built in a Day

My first effort at deep frying in a propane cooker is behind me.

My wife likes wings, so we had them on hand. I also bought legs and thighs. I decided to make hush puppies as well, simply because I could.

First off, the Bayou Classic fryer works perfectly. It’s easy to use. It heats fairly quickly. It holds a temperature when you dump two pounds of chicken into it. The built-in thermometer is pretty accurate when checked against a candy thermometer.

This fryer has a weird pipe that goes through the oil, and burning propane goes through the pipe. There is a sort of chimney in the back, and the burned gases go out. They exit at around waist height and go straight up.

Believe it or not, the hot gases are not a problem. I would not want to hold my face over the chimney, but you can wave your hand over it while the flames are at peak ferocity without getting burned. The pipe must do a great job of transmitting heat to the oil.

I thought I would have to move the fryer a long way from the wall of my house, but I would say 18″ would be more than enough.

The instructions say to keep the fryer far from your house. Well, of course they do. This fryer does not have a thermostat, and if you walk away and leave it running, which could happen if you drink while you barbecue, the oil can get so hot it bursts into flame, and then your house burns down.

I am not going to keep the fryer away from the house. It’s too heavy to move when it’s full. Also, what if my guests bring their kids? Kids do a lot of dumb things around pools, and running into a hot fryer at top speed is exactly the kind of thing you would expect one to do. If the fryer is close to the house where adults can guard it, kids are less likely to spill hot oil all over themselves or put their hands on the fryer because you told them not to.

When only adults are present, there is no reason to think the fryer will flame up or fall over. You have to make sure you don’t fry if you have guests with common sense issues, but that’s something you can control.

Does it hold its temperature? Yes. Almost too well.

Fried chicken recipes commonly say to fry at 350°, but if you do that, you’re probably going to get chicken that’s too brown on the outside. Chicken should be fried at 300-330°. Recipes say to fry at 350° because the people who write recipes expect you to use inferior equipment that has neither the mass nor the power to hold a temperature when food is added. They figure you’ll drop your food in at 350° and the oil will immediately go down to the correct temperature.

When I put my chicken in the fryer, the temperature didn’t budge. I had to keep turning the heat down. I even turned it off for a while. My take: a high flame is for heating the oil, but you need a very low flame for cooking.

Is it hard to control the temperature? Yes, if, like me, you overshoot it in the first place. I expected the temperature to drop, and it didn’t. It took a very long time to get it to go down. You need to make sure you’re at the right temperature when the food goes in, because you can increase it later, but you won’t be able to reduce it fast enough to compensate for overheating your oil.

The baskets work fine, but it’s easy to hang them incorrectly when you take them out of the oil to drain, and if you do, they will swing down suddenly until the handles hit the front edge of the fryer. This is pretty scary, as if standing in front of 4 gallons of bubbling oil weren’t scary already.

So what happened with the food?

The chicken was pretty bad.

I used a recipe I wrote in 2005, and the recipe says it was better than Popeyes. I’m sure that was true when I used a pan to fry the chicken, but it was not true today.

I salted the chicken, applied a lot of Frank’s Red Hot, and let it sit for a while. Then I added orange juice to add acidity, and I let it sit some more. I breaded the chicken with a mixture of starch, flour, and some seasoninges. Then I dipped it in a seasoned egg and buttermilk wash, plus more Frank’s, and breaded it again.

The chicken’s skin turned dark brown. Not the breading, although that was dark, too. The skin itself. Darker than the breading. I think the sugar in the orange juice caramelized. It never did that when I used it for pan-frying. I’ll have to give it up.

The chicken had chipotle powder in the breading, plus the Frank’s I applied earlier. I also added pepper. I couldn’t taste any heat at all. I guess I need to revisit the recipe.

The chicken stuck to the fryer baskets. I have seen people lower full baskets into oil on the web, but it looks like it won’t work for me. I’ll have to lower each piece into the baskets, one at a time.

The chicken was too well-done on the outside, as I mentioned. I think this was partly because of the oil temperature, but also, the pieces were too big. Frying big things is a mistake. I was not able to find small chicken pieces at the store, and I didn’t want to cut up a small chicken because I’m not good at it.

The wings may have been better, but I didn’t try them.

The pieces cooked at different speeds, so in the future, I will know to put small pieces in one basket and big pieces in the other.

The hush puppies fried up perfectly. They even turned themselves. When I dropped them in, they blew up with CO2 and floated. As they cooked, the sides in the oil became dryer and lighter, so the hush puppies rotated so the heavy raw sides were down. That was neat.

Unfortunately, the recipe was no good.

I got it from Southern Living. I figured they would have a clue. The recipe said to use equal parts corn meal and flour. I thought that was a bad idea, but I gave it a try. The hush puppies were big flour balls. They were half biscuit and half cornbread. They lacked flavor. The recipe didn’t contain enough onions, either. It lacked salt, and the hush puppies weren’t sweet enough or dark enough.

I’m going with my instincts next time. I’ll go 3:1, meal to flour. I’ll use more onions. I’ll add sugar so the hush puppies are sweet and they brown better. I’ll double the salt.

The hush puppies weren’t bad. I ate a bunch. But they weren’t what they were supposed to be.

I’ll jot down my plans.

INGREDIENTS

3/4 cup cornmeal mix (self-rising)
1/4 cup self-rising flour
1 tsp. salt
1 large egg
1/2 cup buttermilk
1-1/4 cups finely-chopped onion
1/2 tbsp. sugar

That will be better. If I don’t have self-rising flour, I’ll add half a teaspoon of baking powder.

This machine will be a huge improvement to our arsenal. I look forward to firing it up again and applying the things I learned today.

The New Hotness has Arrived

Finally, I can live like a civilized human being and a bona fide Southerner. I just came home from Ace with a 4-gallon Bayou Classic deep fryer.

A hardware store had a 4-gallon propane fryer? Of course it did. This is the South. They had a whole bunch of Blackstone griddles, too, as well as the full line of Big Green Eggs.

The guys at Ace were telling he how great it was as they put it in the car. One of them said his dad had the same fryer. Of course he does. This is the South.

Frying has always been the weak spot in my culinary skills. It’s very hard to do well, it makes a huge mess, and it leaves you with a lot of fat to either throw out or store with difficulty.

When you fry in a flat-bottomed vessel, as most people do, crumbs fall off the food, hit the bottom, and burn. The bottom is the hottest part of the vessel, so anything that lands there turns black. These crumbs can ruin your food by making the oil taste burnt. If your food comes out okay, and you don’t want to lose the oil, you have to pour it through a filter to get the crumbs out before you store it.

A big gas fryer has heating tubes above the bottom of the vessel. That means crumbs can fall down under the tubes where the oil is at about 120°. Too cool to burn. They sit there doing no harm until you change the oil, which should last 20 sessions. The fryer I got has a V-shaped bottom so the crumbs are concentrated for easy removal via a drain tube.

Removing oil from a fryer and storing it between uses are horrible experiences. You have to have a jug or something set aside, and you have to lift a big pot and pour it in with a shaky funnel. You’ll get oil on yourself and the jug. Expect it. You’ll have to clean everything off before you quit. And you can’t store the oil until it cools down unless you pour it into a metal container. You have to sit and wait for the oil to cool.

With a dedicated deep fryer, you seal the machine up against bugs and let the oil wait for you, right where it is.

Frying indoors makes oil droplets condense on your walls, stove hood, and whatever else is near the fryer.

When I fry stuff, it’s hard for me to get even cooking. For example, chicken tends to end up darker where it touches the bottom of the fryer, and that’s no good. Shallow frying is really just a poor imitation of deep frying, which is the proper way to do it. Deep fryers cook things evenly.

Another issue: you need a lot of fat unless you’re frying tiny things. Making fried chicken in a small pot or pan takes a long time, because if you put enough food for a family in the oil, it cools down immediately, and the breading falls off. The breading that stays on the meat soaks up oil. It’s a bad situation. A big deep fryer is better because the fat has a lot of thermal mass to resist cooling, and if you have a propane fryer, you have many times the heating power any stove provides. The fryer I bought has a 90,000-BTU burner, and that’s around 26,000 watts according to the web. No 110-volt fryer can give you more than about 1750 watts. A nice electric stove tops out at around 26,000 BTU, so a propane fryer produces about 3.4 times as much frying power.

I’m sure a better cook could do better with frying than I do, but he would still have to make tiny batches and do a lot of annoying work. And he could forget about making chicken and hush puppies at the same time.

I bought a T-Fal countertop fryer a few years back. The folks at America’s Test Kitchen said it was great. It was a fun experiment, but it didn’t work out. If the fryer were really as good as ATK and T-Fal claimed, I would still be using it, but it has sat idle for at least two years. That proves it’s not very good.

The food gets darker near the heating element. It fries miniscule portions because it lacks the power to stay hot when you add a decent amount of food. Cleaning it is a real chore, regardless of what deluded reviewers say. You have to put several big parts in the dishwasher. And it clutters the kitchen.

I believed the ad copy when it said the T-Fal would cook 2.65 pounds of food in one batch, but I found it to be untrue in real life. I would say one pound is about the limit. Maybe it depends on the type of food.

With propane and 4 gallons of oil, I should be able to feed a table full of people quickly without a lot of effort.

Peanut oil just happens to be on sale at Publix right now, so that’s good. I just read that peanut oil does not absorb flavors from food, so I suppose it’s the best choice for a fryer that will have to cook different things.

By the way, I saw an ATK video where they fried chicken, and they messed it up. They presented it as though they had done a great job, but the chicken was overly browned in places. If ATK can’t do it, it’s hard.

I tried coming up with a fried chicken recipe in ’21, and it never made me really happy. Tonight I decided to do the obvious thing. I dug through my files and found a 2005 recipe which, at the time, seemed much, much better than Popeyes. I’m going to give it another shot.

I am hoping to fry some chicken tomorrow. Maybe some hush puppies. It’s not an experiment. I know it will work, because I’m doing it with the right equipment. Every stovetop frying setup is a desperate compromise and an imitation. A deep fryer is the real thing.

My Normal Life

My wife and I have to sleep in separate rooms due to her pregnancy and a painting project.

This morning she woke up and came and found me in the master bedroom, wearing earmuffs and fluffy shearling slippers, staring out through the sliding glass doors, holding a loaded semiautomatic rifle with a scope.

Her first question: “How did you sleep?”

This is the difference between red state marriage and blue state marriage.

Here, only the rodents are squirrely.

I am very seriously considering buying a propane deep fryer for the back porch.

Taste 9; Aerodynamics 1

Hope everyone is having a great Thanksgiving. God has been kinder to us than I can say.

Our Thanksgiving has been marred by my wife’s admission that she is not crazy about boneless turkey. We had a talk about it, and I said I would make turkey the regular inferior way, and I even offered to make prime rib, but she wants to go boneless again, so that’s what we’re doing.

I told her turkey is mandatory on Thanksgiving, even for people who don’t like it. This is one of the rules of living in America. It’s like America’s Passover lamb. But I wanted her to enjoy what she ate.

I asked what Zambians ate on Christmas, and she said chicken with rice. I told her she should go ahead and fix it this year. She was not interested at all. Prime rib, baby. Flavor wins out over nostalgia.

Most people who don’t like turkey have eaten turkey by people who don’t cook well. Regarding my own creations, I will not lie. My turkeys are generally spectacular. They’re tender and juicy, and they are packed full of cornbread stuffing laced with champagne.

We got lucky and found a small turkey this time. Misguided turkey fryers usually snap them up, and everyone else ends up with a bird weighing at least 15 pounds. They’re harder to prepare. They take ages to thaw and cook. Only a big family can finish one before it goes bad.

Remember all those times when your mom or wife said, “It’s not done yet. Maybe another hour”, and you ended up eating at 8 p.m.? That’s because Americans buy turkeys that are too big.

Our bird was 11 pounds before I removed its bones. Nice.

I made the usual cornbread-and-sausage stuffing. I am not making extra to go on the side. It’s all in the bird.

We’re taking it easy this year. No pumpkin pie. It’s a loser desert. Nothing green. Turkey, stuffing, potatoes, yams, fresh rolls, cranberry relish, and pecan pie with a little bourbon in it. Korbel brut, remaining from preparing the turkey, stuffing, and gravy. Good enough.

Not sure what the wife will drink.

I used Woodford Reserve bourbon in the pie. It’s pricey. I got it a few years ago because I was told that if I liked Knob Creek, I would like Woodford Reserve.

I found Woodford Reserve harsh. I don’t like it at all. When you buy expensive booze, you’re paying for complexity and smoothness. Without the smoothness, it might as well be Old Crow.

Maybe it’s better if you put water in it. Anyway, I use it for flavoring food now. Usually, I use Jack Daniel’s, which is also harsh, but I need to get rid of the Woodford Reserve.

I used raspberry Jell-O in the relish. Really nice. I hope it comes out nice and firm. It was too loose last year. This time, I omitted half of the water from the Jell-O.

I’m cooking the turkey at 250° so it will be tender and juicy. I plan to yank it when the stuffing hits 157°. The USDA recommends 165°, but they’re also way off the mark with steak and pork. Fricking lawyers. Any parasite that can survive 145° in a pork roast has earned the right to give me trichinosis.

Didn’t hurt RKF. All that much.

The web says the USDA now recommends 145° for pork. I believe that’s new. I’m pretty sure they used to recommend 155° or 165°, which are temperatures guaranteed to kill the flavor.

I see sources recommending 140° for turkey, so I may go lower than 157°. I saw a chart that lists temperatures and the times it takes salmonella to die. At 145°, salmonella dies in 13.8 minutes. I can pretty much guarantee that if my turkey hits 145°, there will be no way to get it to the table before 13.8 minutes pass. More like 25, I would think.

Have a wonderful dinner, and be sure to lock out the relatives who ruin it every year. I sincerely hope everyone who shows up at your table either loves Trump or is willing to shut up for a few hours.

This is Exactly What’s Supposed to Happen

So why are so many Democrats telling other Democrats to abandon and avoid their conservative and Christian friends and relatives? Many Americans seem to think this is a bad thing, but it’s not. Not for Christians, at least.

It’s a very interesting thing from a supernatural standpoint. It’s part of Satan’s counterfeiting operation.

There is always symmetry in the supernatural. Every good thing has a dark reflection. And Satan is not smart enough or powerful enough to come up with anything original. He copies God, and you know what they say about the sincerest form of flattery.

In aping God, he glorifies him. There is no way to avoid it.

A long time ago, God showed me that the fundamental activity taking place on Earth and in the heavens is a genocidal war. There are factions, and they want to annihilate each other.

There are people who belong to God, and then there are people who belong to Satan. They make up an overwhelming majority of human beings. They always have.

God is in the reproduction business. He created the world so he could have children and increase the size of his loving family. It sounds like a platitude, but love really is the best thing there is, and it’s the reason we and everything around us exist. God created humanity so we could come to know him and go to be with him in a perfect environment of love and peace. Without human beings, the world serves no purpose. Satan, on the other hand, wants to get rid of everyone who knows God.

You can see the genocidal spirit at work in Genesis. Adam and Eve had two sons. One was holy, and the other was worthless. The worthless one murdered the holy one, not just because he was angry, but because he wanted to prevent his descendants–his nation–from existing.

In Genesis 4:10, God told Cain, “The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.” Even leftist Google AI admits that the Hebrew word translated “blood” is plural, indicating God was not just referring to Abel, but also the descendants he would have had if Cain had not murdered him. Cain committed genocide.

When God flooded the world, he committed genocide. Of course, what he did was completely correct. He’s God. Genocide itself is not evil. It depends on the motivation.

Haman tried to commit genocide. So did the powerful Jews who imprisoned and murdered Messianic Jews after the crucifixion. Paul committed genocide before he repented and accepted Yeshua as God.

What is the purpose of all this? Ultimately, it’s separation. God has prepared places for his children in heaven, and we will go there eventually. Everything will be perfect. There will be no Antifa and BLM riots. There will be no pogroms. There will be no Islam. There will be no pride marches or sexual perversion. Crime and hatred won’t exist.

It isn’t possible for God’s children to live in a realm of pure blessing while Satan’s children are among them. They have to be taken away from us permanently. It’s not enough for them to be subdued. Just being around them would ruin heaven for us.

Just being around them is rough on us right here on Earth. They torment and tempt us. Their women parade around in lewd outfits, and they fill the world with lewd entertainment. They say filthy things which do harm when we hear them. They insult God.

They also murder us all the time, although the press ignores it. They steal what God gives us. They imprison us. They keep us from getting jobs. But even if they didn’t do those things, we are harmed just by seeing and hearing them. We are like Lot, who was vexed continually by the behavior of the cruel, arrogant perverts around him.

One of the worst curses in the Bible is to have your name and memory forgotten. This is the curse Orthodox Jews speak to Yeshua every day. They call him “Yeshu,” which is an initialism for, “May his name and memory be blotted out.”

As Abel represented his nation, Yeshua represents us. To blot out the name and memory of Yeshua, our enemies will have to blot out our names and memories, too. Genocide.

I’m not saying Orthodox Jews sit around plotting to kill off gentiles. That isn’t true. But the ones who curse Yeshua are also cursing us, even if they don’t realize it. You can’t curse a man with erasure without cursing his children. Satan put them up to it, because he fully understands what the curse means.

He also wants to kill the Jews off. This is why Muslims are constantly trying to remove every Jew from the earth.

My wife and I pray every day, and one of the things we pray for is that God would show us the worthless people and spirits around us and remove them from our lives permanently. We know we need to have our exposure to them limited. It’s bad for us. It will be bad for our son. It makes life unpleasant. It puts us in danger.

This prayer comes from God. It’s correct. It’s necessary. But if you look at it objectively, you can’t help but realize we are doing something very much like what Satan’s children are doing.

“Don’t have Thanksgiving dinner with your conservative relatives.” “Cut them off.” “Don’t talk to them.” The separation movement on the leftist side comes from Satan. It’s a dark reflection of the prayers God’s children pray, asking God to remove the wicked from among them.

Symmetry.

Satan hates leftists even though they do his work for him, and like God, he wants to take his own children to be with him, but unlike God, he wants to take them to a place where they will exist in perfect, eternal torment. Our very presence hinders him, just as the presence of the godless harms us.

The people on Tiktok and Twitter who order other people to cut off conservatives are doing something like prophecy. In prophecy, the Holy Spirit speaks through people who yield to him. The people telling others to cut conservatives off are yielding to dirty, stinking spirits who speak through them.

What about censorship? It’s the same basic thing. If you’re Satan, you are completely right when you say the words of people who belong to God are harmful to your movement. Our words pull people away. They expose the plan. They show how right and how good God is. Our words threaten Satan’s kingdom, so our existence threatens it.

This is why leftists keep saying our words are violence, while claiming burning cities and rioting are expression.

Our words probably cause evil spirits a great deal of pain and fear. I sure hope so.

There is nothing wrong with separating yourself from useless people. It’s the correct thing to do. Yeshua did it. He showed up, demonstrated God’s power and goodness, accepted whoever listened, and left the rest behind. Quickly. He didn’t allow himself to be manipulated into becoming an enabler. He didn’t spend his life begging and bribing and compromising.

A Christian is required to be the head and not the tail. When you show God to people and offer to help them get to know him, you’re leading. When you start compromising to get them to pretend to convert, you are a follower.

Yeshua sat among drunks. He didn’t do shots or play drinking games with them. He showed them a way out, and then he moved on. This is how we should behave. Instead we have churches telling everyone sodomy is wonderful and excoriating people who quote God’s word to them.

“It’s worth it if just one person is saved.” This is a lie. If you don’t repent, you’re not saved. We don’t have the authority to lower God’s standards.

People are getting so crazy now, they’re like hollowed-out puppets. Demons come in, and at first they persuade and push. Eventually, there isn’t much left of the person they targeted, and he becomes a skin full of demons. When you watch the nuts screaming and shrieking about their terror of Trump and conservatives, you’re listening to demons, not people. You’re listening to projection. The demons are describing the torment they want to inflict on Christians and Jews.

We should expect things to get worse. Separation will increase. Violence against us will increase. People who talk of healing and unity are virtue-signaling for Satan. “How can you be against peace and unity?”

Satan loves to do this. He positions himself as the god of love, and if you respond in righteousness, he tells people you’re a heartless Nazi. You’re the problem.

The accusers are full of hate, not love, and they promote a false peace.

Appeasers always get false peace, and it never lasts.

Yeshua said this:

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.

For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.

And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.

He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.

And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me.

He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.

He that receiveth you receiveth me, and he that receiveth me receiveth him that sent me.

If you read that and then watch the Tiktok mental cases, you will understand what Satan is doing through them.

To some extent, I agree with them. If you have to decorate your house with condoms and paint your turkey pink to mollify your enraged and deranged son, have Thanksgiving dinner without him. If your vegan daughter tells you the sight of a turkey will make her vomit, tell her to eat with friends. Don’t make a fake turkey from tofu. Don’t be a follower. You are supposed to be the light of the world, for others to follow.

Satan rules his children, and he also rules Christians who let his children manipulate them. Do you want to serve Satan? Eventually, you will give up so much territory, you won’t have any left.

Yeshua says he will replace the people we lose to Satan because of him. No one wants to lose a loved one, but it’s not your place, and it’s not within your power, to decide who will be saved.

I will consider it a major defeat if I ever deal with my sister again. I have dropped a lot of people without warning. I wish we could all live in harmony, but they chose the wrong way, and I chose the right way. I can’t abandon that which is right in order to coddle and humor people who do harm to my family and me.

Now you know why the holidays will be so chaotic this year and why silly, embarrassing celebrities are, for the first time, backing up their boasts and leaving America. I wish they would all go. I pray for the destruction of their industries every day.

Rob Reiner just checked into a mental hospital. His demons can’t stand seeing Satan lose a presidential election.

The other day God told me bad people pursue and insist on living with good people, but good people flee from bad people. Something to keep in mind. If God delivers you from a vexatious person, and you decide you know better, and you take him back, don’t expect God to save you a second time.

I Thought Your Son was a Lady

I am now trying to make bagels for the second time. I started out with the King Arthur Baking recipe, and it had obvious flaws, like using at least 6 times as much yeast as any experienced baker would put in bread. It also had a hydration of 63%, which is far from the 55-58% recommended by other references. At 63%, you’re close to pizza territory, and pizza is nothing like a bagel. Pizza is softer and has big air holes.

I am now working with a 55% dough. I added more malt, I think. I was interrupted by a phone call, but I’m pretty sure I increased the malt by a third.

The dough is pretty hard. It’s so dry, it doesn’t stick to my fingers at all.

I decided to look at some videos featuring people who, unlike the King Arthur company, make bagels for a living. I was suspicious of King Arthur’s rising, resting, and shaping instructions.

King Arthur says to knead, proof for an hour and a half, cut in pieces, form bagel-weight balls, and let them rise for another 30 minutes. It says you then stick your finger in each ball and twirl the ball until you get a 1-1/2″ hole.

If you do this, you’re handling the dough a lot, beating it up, and you’re making it hard to get a nice shape.

The first rise will make the dough lumpy and soft, and when you try to form a ball, you get a ball that wants to bounce back and be lumpy again. If you try to twirl it later, it will stretch irregularly, give you a bagel which is thicker in some places than others. It seems like a stupid idea.

I decided to forget all that work. I took the dough from the Cuisinart and made three balls. I’m letting them rise for around an hour and 50 minutes. Then I plan to put holes in them and stretch them out. I may take one ball, roll it into a stick, and fasten the ends together to make a ring.

The professionals I watched didn’t do a lot of crazy steps. It generally goes like this: knead, rest a short time, cut and form into bagels.

Youtube shows New York bakers taking long strips of dough, wrapping them around their hands so the ends overlap, and rolling them until the ends merge, forming rings. There are also machines that turn dough into rings, though.

Baking is full of superstition and witchcraft. Face west when you add the yeast. Stand on one foot when you knead the dough. Use kosher salt, which is exactly the same thing as gentile salt. The problem is that most bakers will not challenge the useless fake wisdom. If a step worked for their grandparents, it must be necessary.

I like to weed out the nonsense. For example, I don’t really knead dough. I throw it in a Cuisinart with a chopping blade, and in 30-60 seconds, it’s perfect. There are still people out there claiming you have to break your back kneading dough for 10 minutes with your hands. It makes it taste like love! No, it doesn’t. You can’t taste love.

Most bakery bread is baked by illegal aliens who just got off the boat. Do you think they’re thinking about love when they do as they’re told? No, they’re thinking about ICE and vans with no windows.

I’m not sure 55% will work. I may move up to 58% next time. I’m sure 63% will not work, because it doesn’t work for me, and it looks like no one but King Arthur recommends it.

My first bagel batch was full of lumps and tears. I believe this next batch will be smooth and regular, like real bagels.

I’m using baking soda and salt in the water bath, and I’m not going to boil the bagels for three minutes this time.

I’m using high-gluten flour. Seems like an obvious choice.

The web says King Arthur makes a high-gluten flour called Sir Lancelot. You mix it with your other ingredients, turn your mixer on, swing on a chandelier, and kick the bride in the chest.

I don’t know why King Arthur didn’t recommend Sir Lancelot in its recipes, but this could go back to my theory that the people who write their recipes are not very good. They should call their bagels “bitter yeast rings.”

I don’t know if these new bagels will be better than the previous ones, but they can’t be much worse.

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The dough rose nicely, and it is surprisingly soft for 55% hydration. It was very relaxed when I took it out of the oven, where it was rising.

I was going to try to shape the bagels the easy way, poking holes in the balls of dough and opening the holes up. But I decided to try doing what the pros do. I rolled the bagels by hand. It turned out to be much easier than I expected.

You take a doughball, mash it into a flat, long shape, like a rectangle, and then you roll the dough up, starting at one short side. Then you use your hands to roll and stretch it into a stick around 10″ long. After that, you put the ends in your palm, overlapping. You roll the dough back and forward to mash the ends together. You will get a fairly uniform ring of dough around your fingers. It will look a lot like a real bagel that was not made by a machine.

I’ll post a helpful video.

I’m letting the bagels relax a bit before I boil them.

They seem a little small. They weigh around 126 grams each, which should make fairly big bagels.

I believe the rolling is important because it will get rid of the big holes inside the dough. A bagel is supposed to be dense. I didn’t try to make them too perfect, because real bagels don’t look like perfect little O-rings.

Hoping for the best.

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The bagels are cooling.

They look pretty much like bagels, although I did not do an adequate job of joining the ends on one stick of dough.

They’re too dark, at least for me. I should not have listened to people who said to bake at 450 or 500. I started these at 450, and within about 8 minutes, they were dark enough to take out. I had to leave them in so the insides cooked. I dropped the temperature to 400, and they still cooked too fast, so I went down to 350.

Apparently, there are a lot of people who like dark bagels, because a lot of recipes specify high temperatures. Next time, I’m going to try 400.

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I tried a bagel.

It looks like a bagel, and it has a pretty good crust on it. Problems:

1. The crust is too dark. The baking instructions I found on the web can’t be right. The temperature is wrong.

2. The crust should be harder and chewier.

3. The crust doesn’t have the sweet taste bagel crusts should have. It’s more like a baguette. The recipes I looked up must not use enough malt powder for boiling.

4. The holes in the crumb are way too big, like a pizza. I believe I let the dough rise too long and this caused the problem, even though I used much less yeast than King Arthur’s bakers recommend. If I had used the amount they suggest, the bagels would look like balloons.

The plan:

1. Reduce the temperature to 400 next time.

2. Double the malt powder in the dough.

3. Add enough malt powder to the boil to make it a lot sweeter.

4. Boil the bagels for two minutes per side, not one.

5. Decrease the rise time.

This ought to get me closer.

“King Arthur Baking” or “King Arthur Faking”?

Back in ’09, I complained about a recipe for doughnuts. I was on the mailing list for the King Arthur flour company, and they sent a recipe for no-fry doughnuts. I wrote a post saying how mortified I was. Not the most serious post ever.

Of course, you can probably make a decent doughnut without frying it, but I don’t know why you would, since fried doughnuts are the stuff of legend. Krispy Kreme fries. What else do you need to know?

My mother loved Farm Store cake doughnuts, and I thought they were okay, too, but come on. Fried is FRIED.

Maybe they were fried, now that I think about it. I just assumed they were baked.

A guy claiming to work for King Arthur Baking somehow found my blog and wrote this in a comment:

“Dumbest junk email” – WOW, far as I know we’ve never been characterized that way before. A first! Thanks, Steve. As for baked doughnuts – to each his own, huh? Not my favorite, but actually many, many customers love them, so, what the heck? To each his own. Thanks for the mention. You know what they say, even bad PR is PR… PJ _____, King Arthur Flour baker/blogger

For me, this was one of the weirder moments in a long history of blogging.

It just occurred to me: maybe he wrote the doughnut recipe.

I don’t know if King Arthur still has his Internet knights out there Googling and defending the realm, but if he does, I will probably hear from them again. Here goes.

It is not easy to get good bagels where I live. The best grocery here is Publix. Their bakery’s bagels are acceptable, which means good enough to be considered bagels and eaten when nothing else is on hand. Every store has a little box full of bagels from the Einstein Bros. chain, and they’re fine, but as I said, the box is little, and if you don’t get there early, you can forget about getting a plain bagel, which is the only kind of bagel Publix stocks that works with cream cheese and Nova.

I think the old Jews who live around here rush to the stores every morning and clean them out.

It’s a good theory. They keep leaving the blueberry and raisin bagels. The sweet ones. Old Jews get diabetes.

There is a bagel joint in town, and they serve real bagels. It’s a long drive, though. By the way, they don’t serve smoked fish. Bagels, but no lox. No Nova. I’m serious. What is wrong with them? Salmon is the reason bagels were invented. Or it should be.

Yesterday I got fed up and decided to find out how hard it was to make a bagel. I remembered something about having to boil them, and it sounded like a hassle, but I had been pushed to the brink of sanity.

I made the mistake of going to the King Arthur site, because its recipe came up in search results.

King Arthur makes hugely-hyped flour. Is it really better than everyone else’s flour? Take a deep breath. Ready? I don’t think so. I buy their bread flour often, but the truth is that it doesn’t seem to be anything special. Sometimes I buy Pillsbury or Gold Medal or whatever that brand is that’s above King Arthur and the left at my local Publix stores. Everything comes out fine.

Back when I was making large numbers of pizzas and garlic rolls for a church that enjoyed using my free labor, I tried just about every flour you can name. Caputo 00. Bouncer. Golden Tiger. Gordon Food Service Primo Gusto. All Trumps. I can’t recall them all. I tried King Arthur bread flour, known affectionately to pizzaiolos as “KABF.”

My favorite flour was Primo Gusto, a cheap store brand. Naturally, the last time I went to Gordon Food Service, they didn’t have it. Maybe they discontinued it. This happens every time I find a product I like. It even happens with vaccines. I took the Johnson & Johnson clot shot, and now it’s restricted.

Actifed? Gone. Sudafed? Gone, unless I want to sign a government list when I buy it. My favorite tennis shoes? Gone. Wait…there must be some other things…

Okay, maybe not everything gets discontinued, but sometimes it feels like it.

Primo Gusto is a high-gluten flour, and KABF is, of course, bread flour. Whether one has more or less gluten than the other, I can’t say without Googling, and I am too lazy, but high-gluten flours, as a group, are supposed to be a bit more gluteny than bread flours.

Gluten makes bread chewy and crusty. I like high-gluten flour in pizza. Primo Gusto is a high-gluten flour.

To get back to the point, I never got results that made me think King Arthur was a big deal.

I remember trying a pizza dough recipe they suggested. It had baking powder in it for extra oven spring. It did not impress.

Later I learned that you don’t put baking powder in pizza dough to make it rise higher in the oven. You use the proper hydration (67% will work), you use the right temperature, and when you set your dough out to proof, you stretch the ball and fold it inward a few times to make the outer surface taut. This works.

Why didn’t the people at King Arthur know this? Amateurs on a pizza forum did.

I tried their bagel recipe, using their flour, and the bagels sort of flattened out in the oven. Inside, they were maybe 20% more like bagels than, say, Kaiser rolls. To me, they were not bagels.

Before their web knights errant show up to challenge me to jousts, let me say that I lived in Miami and New York, so yes, I know what a bagel should be.

King Arthur’s site is full of good reviews. Their bagel recipe has a 4.5-star rating and 343 reviews. A mystery.

Guess where I went to find out what was wrong? A pizza forum. The guys on the forum may not be paid professionals (for the most part), but they are very serious, they put in the oven time, and they post their results. One of them went on to open a blockbuster pizzeria in Atlanta.

Some of these guys have huge pro ovens in their homes.

I did not go to Serious Eats to see what Kenji Lopez-Alt had to say. He went to the pizza forum to find out how to make pizza, and he still got it wrong. His restaurant gets middling reviews. I got a good Caesar dressing recipe from his site, and I think there is some good stuff there, but I trust the pizza guys more.

A bagel isn’t a pizza, but a person who will make dozens of pizzas every year to get his recipe just right will also put in the effort to get bagels right.

Here’s my tentative conclusion: King Arthur got the hydration wrong, along with some other things.

First, I think they use the wrong flour. Maybe they don’t make a high-gluten flour. That might explain it. The purpose of their site is not to help you make good food. They don’t care about that. The site’s purpose is to sell flour. I believe any crusty, tough bread should be made with high-gluten flour.

Second, they call for 63% hydration. NOBODY puts that much water in a bagel. Water makes bread soft. Obviously.

I have read that factories that make really bad bagels (Thomas’, Lender’s, et alia) use high hydration. I forget why. Maybe to prevent old customers from losing their dentures in front of other people and suing them. Lawyers ruin everything.

I seem to recall reading that it’s because proper bagel dough is hard for factories to work with. It’s stiff.

Third, the bagels don’t taste like bagels, so I think the dough and water bath ingredients are wrong.

A guy on the pizza forum has a recipe that gets high marks, so I am changing the King Arthur recipe to be closer to it. He puts baking soda and salt in his water bath. That seems smart to me, because the outside of a bagel should taste a little different from the inside.

King Arthur says to put white sugar in the water bath along with malt syrup. I think this is wrong. The forum guy doesn’t use sugar, and why would he? It would reduce the malt flavor.

Fourth, and this is insane, King Arthur calls for a TABLESPOON of yeast in 400 grams of flour. That’s three teaspoons. If you listen to them, all you will taste will be bitter yeast. NOBODY puts that much yeast in dough. I have a recipe that uses about 400 grams of flour, and it calls for ONE SIXTH of a tablespoon. Less would be better, but I don’t want to wait a year for dough to rise.

The yeast thing is a rookie mistake. It’s not a matter of preference. It’s not a case of “Reasonable minds may differ.” It’s like putting pepper on Cap’n Crunch.

I will admit that I did not pay any attention to this recommendation when I made “bagels.” I knew it was crazy. I thought maybe it was a typo.

So what about the great reviews on the site?

Here’s something I have to keep telling myself over and over: most people have no idea what good food tastes like. They can tell what other people say tastes good, and they get in line and agree, but only a small percentage of people can tell good food from mediocre or bad food. That does not prevent them from putting in their less-than-two-cents’ worth.

You can’t listen to professional cooks, either.

As I have said before, even most trained cooks…can’t. How many bad restaurant meals have you had? Hundreds or thousands. How many were made by cooking school graduates? A big percentage.

Back when I was a churchgoer, I knew three trained chefs and one Jamaican guy who was self-taught. The trained chefs were what I would call “airline-grade” cooks, but the Jamaican guy’s food was dazzling. The trained chefs asked me for tips, and I have no training at all.

Back in Miami, there is a guy who calls himself Zak the Baker. He started supplying baked goods for Whole Foods, which used to have very, very nice stuff. They sold excellent croissants, pain au chocolate, Danish rolls, and so on. Whole Foods publicized Zak’s name to impress people.

I strolled in after Zak came along, thinking he had to be wonderful if Whole Foods was telling people he made their food, and that was the last time I ever bought their baked goods. They were baked no-goods. Worthless. Flavorless.

Zak promotes himself. He uses his first name as a trademark. When it’s mentioned, it’s supposed to impress. Whatever. The food was not good, and I quit buying it.

You can’t trust a cook’s reputation, especially when he’s a self-promoter.

I went to two Mario Batali restaurants: Lupa and Mozza. Both were awful. I went to Marco Pierre White’s restaurant in Dublin. The food was borderline gross. Incompetently prepared. Stale.

I’ll bet White can’t cook. Michelin stars? Don’t care. Things can be bought. Corruption is real. And maybe Michelin critics aren’t that good at what they do.

How much does a Michelin spy get paid? How much does money does a chef make from a star? Things to think about.

I went to Pride and Joy, a barbecue restaurant that belonged to Myron Mixon, reality TV’s barbecue king. It was just plain bad. He himself ended up distancing himself from it, after laying down a line of smack he later had to eat.

Better the smack than the food.

I don’t understand Zak. If you have time to build a huge business and promote your name, don’t you have time to learn how to cook?

Today I’m making some bagels with 55% hydration, along with some other changes, and whether they’re good or not, they will surely be better than King Arthur’s unholy toroids.

I will eventually get this right, just like I got white bread right. I taught my wife how to make white bread, and now we always have the finest white bread on God’s green Earth, for maybe a dollar a loaf. This bread makes the angels jealous. One day soon, we will have delicious bagels to set beside it.