Chicago Still Disappoints

I got suckered in again.

We were at the grocery, and I saw something I had never seen before: frozen Pizzeria Uno Chicago-style cheese pizza. Like a fool who never learns, having tried Lou Malnati’s acceptable frozen pizza and my own unimpressive homemade jobs, I bought one.

It’s not good.

The crust is hard pie crust with a tiny bit of air in it, and it’s not good pie crust. The shortening tastes old. The cheese is on the grainy side. The sauce is okay, but it can’t save everything else.

I just realized what the crust is like. You know those stale flat noodles they serve in bad Chinese restaurants as snacks? Imagine one of those big enough to put a pizza in.

The Malnati’s cheese pie I bought was pretty good. The shortening tasted less old, and the cheese was fine. But a decent Pizza Hut pan pizza is better. The sausage pie I tried was not good at all because the sausage sat under the sauce and got boiled.

As things stand now, I have to stand by my previous conclusion, which is that Chicago-style can be “worth making.” But let’s be honest. You could say that about oatmeal.

A good Sicilian is the best food possible. This is according to my rankings, which are, of course, correct. Top food on Earth: my own Sicilian. Number two: a good thin pizza. The style is not that important. It just has to be good. After that, prime rib. After that, my own cheesecake.

I think Chicago-style should probably be put in a second-rate pizza category along with frozen pizza, although I’m not sure Chicago-style can be as good as the best frozen pies. I do enjoy those Stouffer’s French bread pizzas.

Chicagoans themselves are not big fans of Chicago-style. They prefer the other Chicago-style, which is thin tavern pizza. How good can their deep dish be if the people who can get it whenever they want usually order something else?

My two Chicago-area-raised cousins love Malnati’s, but they seem to be out of sync with other people up there. I should try making Chicago tavern-style.

I threw out one slice of the Uno pie. I ate three because I was hungry. Very sad. Potential wasted for no good reason.

Why do people who cook for a living make bad food? That’s a perplexing question. If the food has to be cheap, or it has to have a 10-year shelf life, or it has some other weird condition to meet, like being vegan, sure, it may be impossible to make it taste good. But most food isn’t like that.

Let’s talk about kung pao chicken and fried pork dumplings. It costs the same amount of money to make bad Chinese food as good Chinese food, so why not do it right? Same amount of work. If you have a Chinese restaurant, and you’re Chinese, you can’t lie and pretend you can’t tell your food is bad. You should fix it. It’s 2024, and excellent recipes and videos are available to anyone. Why make bad food, then?

Still, most Chinese restaurants are very bad. No wonder the children of Chinese restaurateurs become plastic surgeons and cardiologists. They can’t take the shame.

The people who make this Uno mess know it’s no good. They’ve surely tried it. Surely no one would invest in a big business without trying the product.

I suppose that’s wrong. Maybe they haven’t tried it. Maybe some guy who runs a company that makes garbage frozen food for other businesses told them everything would be fine, and they believed it.

The web says Uno went public and was then taken private again, so now it’s owned by people who probably know nothing about pizza. That would explain a lot. I was thinking it might belong to heirs to were too busy doing coke and wrecking speedboats to watch the business.

Myron Mixon is supposed to be the world’s greatest BBQ pitmaster, but when he opened a restaurant in Miami, it served hog slop and closed with 3 Google stars. This, after he talked all sorts of smack about showing everyone what real BBQ was like. Humiliating. He blamed the people who actually owned and ran the restaurant. He claimed they wouldn’t meet standards. A name isn’t enough to make food taste good.

He shouldn’t have talked smack if he wasn’t going to be on the premises to maintain standards. Ridiculous error for a chef. Every cook knows that as soon as the guy who knows what he’s doing leaves the kitchen to use the can, everything goes crazy. A kitchen is lucky if it has one person who can actually make it work. The rest are all hourly NPC’s.

Uno frozen pizza is nasty, so if you try it after reading this, you have only yourself to blame.

Hunker Down with Peyton and Hayden

I got some comments on the post I wrote about getting homeowner’s insurance. I was trying to decide whether I should get insurance with or without wind coverage, which is often extremely expensive. Based on last year’s huge premium, along with the large deductibles and the low likelihood of serious damage, I figured it was best to skip wind coverage.

No one can explain how insurance companies work. Some people defend them, claiming we are not smart enough to understand their math. They think it all makes sense somehow. That isn’t true. If it were true, similar coverage from different companies would cost about the same amount, but it doesn’t.

I had GEICO for my cars. They wanted $5,000. Suddenly. I could not believe it. I called around, and I got just about the same coverage from State Farm for about half as much. It’s still ridiculous, but it’s not $5,000.

When I was looking for medical insurance for this year, my old company wanted the moon and stars. Another outfit gave me the same policy, more or less, for a much lower price. I forget the disparity. Maybe a third less.

The insurance seems to work, although once I ended up screaming at a woman in India.

If insurance companies were rational, they would make similar decisions about covering various areas. Some companies have left Florida, however, while many continue to insure homes here.

Last year, I was told my home insurance, hurricanes included because of my rotten trees, was going from about $3,400 to $6,000, and then they ended up increasing it to $8,000. I called–literally–every company I could find on the web. I couldn’t find a single one that would write a policy at any price. Because of hurricanes? No. Because of cattle. I have cattle on my farm to kill property taxes.

I knew hurricanes were causing disturbances in the insurance force, but the cow thing took me by surprise. I had no idea. The weirdest thing about it is that they didn’t care about horses. Hello? Christopher Reeve? People fall off horses. Horses kick people. What do cattle do? Eat, sleep, and poop.

Have rogue herds been escaping from farms and taking over towns? I have not heard about it.

Please don’t tell me you know a company that would have insured me, because you don’t. You may think you do, but you’re wrong. Don’t tell me Farmers Insurance would have insured me. They refused. Don’t tell me State Farm would have done it. They refused. Having “Farm” and “Farmer” in their names didn’t mean anything.

I went to a cattle forum for advice, I said no one would insure me, and some cranky old guy who worked in insurance told me not to tell me his job. He assured me a certain company would cover me. They wouldn’t. He looked pretty stupid.

So now I can’t get insurance because I have cattle, right? Wrong. This year, they don’t care about cattle. I got several quotes. No problem with the cattle. No explanation.

This time, I ended up getting pretty much the same policy I bought last year, for around $3,000. So it went $3,400, $8,000, $3,000. It’s like they used one of those lottery ping pong ball machines. I got the $3,000 policy from a real company people know about, not the obscure insurer that covered me last time. Ramon’s of Hialeah.

I have no idea what’s going on.

I was truthful with the agent I talked to. He knows about the cattle. He knew a tropical storm was coming. Didn’t care. He offered an insanely low price for insurance without wind coverage, and then he told me I could add wind coverage and pay only $3,000.

I still think wind coverage is stupid for people in my county, but my wife was nervous about it, and the price was right, so I took it.

That’s my insurance story. Try and explain it if you want.

Here is what I would do if I ran an insurance company: I would charge the snot out of people near the coast, and I would give huge breaks to people inland. I would not spread the risk around, alienating a huge number of low-risk people who were unlikely to file claims. I would make those people my target demographic. I would treat the coast like the coast, and I would treat the interior like Missouri.

Insurers make money in Missouri, selling only to people who are safe from hurricanes, charging modest prices. If that is true, they should be able to make money in the interior of Florida. Getting rid of high-risk clients who refuse to pay high prices shouldn’t matter, and getting huge premiums from high-risk clients who are willing to pay should work out just fine.

As far as the storm goes, they have named it Debby, which is odd, because everyone else spells that name “Debbie.” It will not be a problem here. There are reasons.

1. Prayer.

2. It doesn’t have the potential to strengthen much.

3. It’s going to make landfall in the panhandle, far away.

4. The projected track keeps moving farther west, away from me.

5. I spent $7,500 cutting all the trees that threatened my buildings.

The way storm tracking works is interesting.

I always look at the “static cone” pictures from the National Hurricane Center. The pointy part of the cone is the storm’s location. The fat end is where it will probably be hours and days later. The cones are not all that unreliable these days. If they say a storm will land in Miami, it’s not going to land in New Orleans. Storms usually go within maybe a couple of hundred miles of the places cones say they will, as long as we’re talking about cones drawn within a couple of days of landfall.

That brings up the second point.

A cone itself will show whether a storm is drifting in a certain compass direction, but you can also look at a succession of cones. The NHC’s site doesn’t offer the option of looking at cones over several days, but you can always save cone images on your PC and look at them later.

Cones are updated every three hours. If you look at a succession of cones over a couple of days, you will see the cones themselves generally drift. Weather guys may start out saying a certain storm is expected to hit Fort Myers, and then 36 hours later, they may say it’s headed for Destin. Destin may be completely outside of the cone the weather guys were using when they said the storm would hit Fort Myers.

If you watch the way the cones themselves drift, you get a better picture of what’s really going to happen. A cone predicts where a storm will go, based on knowledge obtained over a short period of time. A succession of cones where future cones will go, based on observations over a longer period. I think smart people look at successions of cones.

Weather guys often get overexcited by early cones that seem to indicate landfalls in highly-populated areas. “IT’S BARRELING DOWN ON PALM BEACH!!!” Everybody in Palm Beach tunes in. The weather guys get better ratings, so their employers can charge more for ads in the future. Then the storm goes to Titusville.

They LOVE “barreling down.” They say it constantly. Well, when they’re not saying “hurtling toward.” They say Beryl BARRELED DOWN on Texas.

It’s a weird expression. I have never seen a barrel hit anything.

I sincerely believe the weather guys don’t care. I think they and their bosses are only interested in money. They don’t care if they freak people out for nothing. Or maybe they’re just not smart enough to understand cone drift. A lot of meteorologists are physics majors, though. That’s odd, because I didn’t notice a lot of gays when I was studying physics.

The latest cone is centered around a tiny town called St. Marks, directly south of Tallahassee. But the cones keep drifting westward, so I think Apalachicola is a more likely landfall.

In any case, it looks like it’s going to land where there are almost no people. Sorry, Apalachicolans. You know it’s true. Remember how excited you were when you thought you were going to get your own Arby’s? Sorry that didn’t pan out.

Mmm. Beef ‘N Cheddar. I was telling my wife about them just the other day.

I don’t care if it’s not real meat.

Don’t fret, panhandlers. It looks like you’re getting a Category 1, so as long as you tie your boats up right, it shouldn’t be too bad. Moderate storm surge and some wind.

I hope people up there have cut problem trees.

Whoever gets hit wants to be west of the eye, because on that side, there will be no storm surge. The wind will be blowing the water away from shore. If the eye is to the east of Apalachicola, things should go well.

A lot of the panhandle is nearly-empty swamp. It’s amazing how few people live on a huge stretch of land right on the water. The government owns a ton of it. Maybe they’re doing Area 51 stuff to kidnapped Florida Men. It would explain a lot.

“Okay, Jayden and Brayden. Try not to chew on the straps, and in no time at all, you’ll be back in your bass boat. No, you can’t tell Ashlee and McKayla where you are.”

It’s actually kind of funny that people in Manhattan think Florida Men are the crazy ones. Someone should erect a giant mirror along the Hudson.

Within two days, it would be covered by a gay BLM mural.

Well, that’s it. I got insurance. Spent too much so the wife would be happy. Feel like I wasted a lot of money.

Maybe the Grass Really is Greener

Reader Tiomoid of Angle left a comment referring to a Youtube called Nomad Capitalist. The comment says, “Go Where You’re Treated Best.”

That’s really interesting.

I know nothing about the channel. I sort of skimmed the “Videos” page, and it looks like it’s a guy who tells people about countries where they might be better off than where they are. Maybe it’s aimed at Americans.

I’m writing to relax, so I have no plans to do unpleasant research that resembles work.

What I perceive, perhaps incorrectly, to be the thesis of the channel is interesting. Why stay where you’re not wanted? Why stay and be treated the way a lamprey treats a bass?

Today I had a revelation, which I posted here. The brief, generalized version is this: bad people want to stay close to good people, but good people want to get away from bad people.

To understand why this is true, you only have to refer back to the lamprey/bass simile. A bass would be way better off if every lamprey died right now, but lampreys would shrivel and die without fish to eat alive.

This is the kind of interaction Scott Adams had in mind when he made the remarks that changed his life.

He says he’s not a racist. He says he was being “hyperbolic.” I don’t know what’s true. I do know that people with a ghetto mindset are parasites, and the people who support them are hosts. This is also true of spoiled Antifa kids and most Palestinians.

He said people should stay the hell away from blacks. That’s ridiculous, but if he had said we should stay away from racist blacks who prey on everyone else, he would have been correct, and he should have extended the notion to other parasitic groups. For example, no honest person can say it’s smart to live near gypsies.

America the nation is parasitic now. I mean the government and cultural establishment. As policy, it torments, libels, censors, imprisons, beats, and robs people who are its biggest assets, in order to feed vicious common trash who happen to be of voting age. So why not leave?

Is it really that big a deal to be an American citizen? What do you really get?

1. Stability. Well, that is off the table now that civil war is approaching. And having a continuous line of government doesn’t mean individuals have stability. The USSR was around for a long time, and people there lived in terror and never knew when they might be whisked off to camps or places of execution. And lots of countries are stable.

2. Wealth. That sounds fine, but the fact that your country is wealthy doesn’t mean you are, and the fact that it’s poor doesn’t mean you’re poor. You can be wealthy anywhere, and it’s best to be wealthy in a place where half of the population isn’t trying to take what you have, claiming falsely that you stole it. One in six Swiss citizens are millionaires by American standards. That’s not bad. There are several countries where it is easier to get rich than it is in America. And maybe you’re already rich, so all you need is a country that won’t rob you.

3. Quality of life. This is a slippery quantity, because the people whose efforts to define it are generally not conservative, but still, the US is not at the top of most lists. Here’s an important part of quality of life: not having racist, anti-Christian, antisemitic, murderous terrorism-lovers constantly threatening to take what you have and turn you into a voiceless slave.

The weather in most of America is bad for a big part of the year. The food is not very good except for prime beef. The people in most areas are rude. We have a couple of large demographics, plus some small ones, that run around shooting, robbing, and raping everyone else plus each other. This is not paradise.

What if you travel and a foreign country locks you up or otherwise mistreats you? Uncle Sam will save you! No, he won’t. I mean, he might, but don’t count on it. Foreign prisons are full of American citizens. If you’re a famous lesbian who willfully committed a stupid crime with a severe penalty, you might get help, but in the process, a far better person might be left imprisoned in the foreign country for political reasons. Not that this has happened recently.

Is it heresy to criticize our food? No. Go to Europe or the Far East some day and look at the produce. We breed plants that taste bad but generate higher profits. They breed plants that taste fantastic, and often, they also look better than ours.

The produce in Singapore (where there is virtually no farmland) and Hong Kong (also almost no farmland) is magnificent. Wonder why we can’t do that.

Consider the Red Delicious apple. I loved them when I was a kid. Now they’re disgusting. I can’t understand why stores sell them. They bred the flavor out of them and made the texture sort of like a mixture of sand and wet styrofoam. They apparently ship quite well, however.

Our Granny Smith apples are like sour croquet balls. Can’t remember the last time I saw a ripe one. They’re great for constipation.

We have the Second Amendment! True, but then we need it more than many countries. I don’t think the Czechs and South Koreans worry too much about carjackings and home invasions.

One of the videos on Capitalist Nomad’s channel is titled “You Don’t Owe Your Country Anything.” Wow. In America, that’s blasphemy. But is it true? In many cases, yes.

I obey the law. Mostly. I cost the taxpayer virtually nothing. The police don’t come to my house three times a week to make me stop beating the putative mother of some of my illegitimate children. My kids aren’t in “the system” because I abandoned them. I don’t get affirmative action. I paid full tuition when I was in college. I don’t get student loans and then force better people to pay them off. The amount of tax I pay is really extraordinary because of the nature of my business. It’s fair to say I work for the government. When my grandfather died, my country confiscated enough wealth from his heirs, who had done nothing wrong, to make a person rich. When they brought the Selective Service back, I signed up, agreeing to give my life if they ordered me to. I wasn’t called to serve, but I would have. That’s not a small thing to offer.

Help me understand why I would think I owed America anything. I think our military people have done more for me than anyone except my parents and my mother’s parents, but is our military “America”? Most people have never served.

I do a lot for other people through taxes, but people don’t do anything for me unless I pay them. If I pay them, how can anyone say I owe them for what they’ve done for me?

I benefit from the taxes a certain percentage of Americans pay, but they benefit from mine, too. We use the same roads. I would say the rich benefit me more than anyone, because they pay way more than I do. Thank you, billionaires. Someone appreciates you.

Thank you for infrastructure. Thank you for hospitals and universities. Thank you for aircraft carriers. Thank you for all the things disgraceful politicians bought us with your confiscated money. Thank you for all the corporations that provide great stuff. Thank you for taking risks I won’t take and working harder than I want to.

I’m surrounded by people who cheat the rest of us every day as a matter of routine. Welfare scammers run into the tens of millions, at least. I live in a country where people with no conscience use EBT cards to buy liquor and cigarettes while better people buy their own ramen noodles.

There are whole neighborhoods that are nothing but wealth sinks. The government raises their kids. In prisons, it houses a huge fraction of the adult males and quite a lot of the females. It hands out food, medicine, phones, apartments and all sorts of other things. It pays for programs that help almost no one because almost no one wants to be helped.

Some people owe this country. I am not one of them. If I move somewhere else, America will be worse off, I will be better off, and the country I move to will be improved.

I’m assuming I can move to a decent location. That is still possible.

I don’t often hear people saying they don’t owe America anything, but it’s true for many of us.

I can understand immigrants saying it, provided they didn’t come here from places like Luxembourg or Japan.

Funny thing: I don’t even owe God. That sounds bizarre, but it’s true. He paid the debt I owed him. I don’t owe him for anything in the past, but I definitely have a son’s duty to serve him in the future. And I want to serve him. He’s wonderful, and serving him is a joy. Every good thing in my life came from him, and he gave it all in spite of my revolting attitude and slimy deeds.

I don’t claim America owes me, except that it has a duty to do what our stupid, cruel, clumsy government has promised in return for being a good and loyal citizen. I have done a lot for the citizenry, but I was forced to do most of it, and I don’t consider anyone to be indebted to me for it.

Saying I don’t owe America isn’t the same as saying I don’t love America. I do. Or, rather, I love what America was. I love what little vanishing bits of it still are. I can’t love the whole country. No one in his right mind can love Chicago or Newark. It would be like loving kidney stones.

I suppose I’ve written enough. I have unwound. I don’t know whether I have guessed correctly about Capitalist Nomad’s content. Maybe tomorrow I’ll actually watch a video.

We Yearn to Breathe Free

My wife and I had a good day yesterday, not that this is unusual.

We had an anniversary recently, and we had problems finding her a good gift, so I decided we needed to go to the big city. We succeeded in getting the gift, and she also got to eat at the Cheesecake Factory, where she would happily take up residence if they would let her.

We also visited an African grocery run by Nigerians. I thought maybe they would have a lot of interesting food I would want to try, but it was pretty bad. The store did not smell good, it was run-down, and they sold things I didn’t know were edible. Potato leaves, for example.

The web suggests “potato leaves” are really sweet potato leaves. That would make more sense. The potato is a member of the nightshade family, and you’re not supposed to eat nightshade leaves.

I was glad we managed to get her things she liked. I thought about her good fortune. She used to bathe in a bucket, and here she was, buying nice things at upscale malls and living in a big house will all sorts of appliances, not to mention air conditioning and a power grid that almost never fails (sorry, California).

I asked her if she was glad she was in America, and she surprised me by saying she wasn’t. She said she only preferred America to Zambia because I was here.

In Zambia, she lived with two other women in a cheap apartment. She had to wash her clothes by hand. She had no car because an ex-boyfriend had taken hers. The power went on and off constantly. She had to buy used goods from China. But she prefers Zambia to America. Why?

One reason is that she was raised in Zambia. The other reason, however, is that America is insane.

In Zambia, men in dresses aren’t holding antisemitic protests outside Jewish businesses. Perversion flags are rare. Homosexual marriage is not legal. Zambians don’t riot. Wokeism isn’t a threat. Political censorship is not much of a problem. Christianity is in their constitution.

Here, we are preparing for a civil war because leftists have become cruel and oppressive. That’s not happening in Zambia.

Her preference actually makes some sense.

Zambia has other problems. Drunkenness is out of control. Paganism does great harm. Corruption is severe. The economy is always disastrous. According to my wife, Zambians are lazy, so things are not likely to improve. Still, apocalyptic violence will probably be much less severe there than it will be (is) here.

Zambians don’t hate each other the way Americans do.

Am I saying I would consider moving to Zambia? Sure. If things got bad enough here, and Zambia looked better. I want to survive like everyone else. I don’t want to spend my days shooting and burying black-clad trespassers who want to punish my family for the crime of existing.

I really, really don’t want to move to Africa, but what if we have no choice?

To leftists, the existence of everyone else is a capital offense. We have seen them try to cleanse the world with rifles. They did it in places like China and Cambodia, to name two examples. Many here have praised Trump’s failed assassin. They’re always waiting to be released on better people so they can destroy them and take what they have. After they get what they have, they destroy that, too, because leftist traits, not social inequities, are what made poor leftists poor.

Alan Dershowitz just did a podcast in which he expressed dismay over an anti-Jewishness protest.

Dershowitz loves admiration and being associated with celebrities, so he lives in Martha’s Vineyard. As we all know, Martha’s Vineyard is a rich leftist enclave where wealthy socialist hypocrites pat each other on the back all day.

Unbelievably, Martha’s Vineyard has a Chabad branch. Chabad is an ultra-Orthodox Jewish organization. Maybe they’re in the Vineyard so they can milk guilt-ridden Jewish celebrities for cash. I very much doubt a significant percentage of Martha’s Vineyard Jewish residents have any interest in giving up sin and pepperoni pizza.

Chabad is not affiliated with Israel or the IDF.

Chabad held a sort of festival of Jewish culture. Music, food, and so on. Dershowitz says antisemitic Democrats showed up in a mob and protested. As he noted, they were protesting Jewishness itself. The organization and the event had nothing to do with the war in Gaza.

Democrats showed up to accuse Jews of the crime of being Jewish.

If your crime is being Jewish, what is the appropriate punishment? Let me be more obvious: what is the final solution?

What is your defense? There isn’t one. You can become a kapo, though. You can join those who persecute your people and postpone your own destruction. Many Jews are doing this. Many did it under the Greeks and Romans.

You don’t know about the protest because you don’t watch his Youtube channel. It should have been on the national news, but as a Babylon Bee character has said, hating Jews is cool now. That is literally true. Our press is about 90% leftist, and leftists crave admiration. To get excited about the problem of antisemitism is to break with the cool kids. Coverage could also bring disrepute on the Democratic Party, and no one in the press wants that to happen.

The thing that puts a knot in one’s stomach is knowing Dershowitz will complain and admonish and then vote for Kamala Harris anyway. American Jews will continue assisting their persecutors and persecuting their friends.

Americans in general are starting to behave the same way. Notice how we give privilege to hostile military-age immigrants from Muslim countries, China, and Latin American nations that are not friendly.

I keep wondering if I’ve given Dershowitz too much credit. He’s supposed to be brilliant, but I haven’t seen him say anything really clever, and I’ve seen him say things that would appear to indicate that he is not brilliant, even for a lawyer. His analysis of the Baldwin manslaughter case was very poor.

Law is not that hard. Law professors are smarter than most professors, but not a whole lot smarter. They are not in the same lofty stratum as STEM people. You can be a Supreme Court justice and be substantially less bright than a state college professor of electrical engineering.

America is turning into something resembling Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, so I understand why my wife would want to live somewhere else. You wouldn’t think a poverty-stricken African nation would tempt anyone, but these are strange times.

I wonder if Christian countries in Africa would accept Jewish and Christian refugees from America. Maybe they would. They need money and educated people with skills.

I used to think I might be called upon to shelter Jews. I now think that would be impossible, because you can’t hide anything in modern America. I no longer consider it a serious possibility.

Now I think a foreign country may have to shelter me.

Here is a funny fact no one ever talks about: good people want to get away from bad people, but bad people want to be with good people.

When you judge two parties that don’t get along, the one that wants nothing to do with the other is usually right, and the one that wants to force the other to stay close is usually evil.

The other day, I was thinking about my health, and I wondered if something I experienced could be a symptom of cancer. My reflexive response was to think, “Maybe I can get out of this place!”, meaning the world. That was the very first thing I thought of. Remarkable. This is not new. Whenever I read that a person has died, I can’t help thinking, “Good for him!”

Then I thought about my family and regretted it, because I would be abandoning them. I also thought about the suffering cancer patients go through. Then I thought about cancer patients who didn’t suffer all that badly. A year or so on painkillers, a sudden downturn, and then off they go. Worse than growing old and feeble and being tormented by leftists? No. That’s a chilling realization. Millions of people leftists have abused, both dead and living, would have preferred cancer and death.

I actually had these thoughts. As much as I enjoy life, I can’t feel enthusiastic about a future in this sick, twisted country.

Get Ready for Your Last Stand

For some reason, I started reading about stand mixers. While I was doing that, I decided to see which one is currently considered the ultimate. I could be missing out.

When I say “ultimate,” I don’t include commercial mixers. I’m talking about mixers that sell for less than a grand.

What do people always say when you say “mixer”? “KITCHENAID!” Sadly, they have been fooled.

Kitchenaid makes great-looking mixers based on the old Hobart Kitchenaid commercial mixers. Not the real Hobart commercial mixers with bowls big enough to bathe a golden retriever. The little-bitty ones with 5-quart bowls.

Hobart is a commercial appliance maker, and they started the Kitchenaid company in 1919 to make mixers. Hobart doesn’t make Kitchenaids any more. They make real commercial mixers starting at over $4,000.

The old Hobarts looked like modern Kitchenaids, but they were simpler and tougher. They had strong gears that lasted decades. Modern Kitchenaids look like Hobarts on the outside, with added levers and buttons and lots of pretty colors designed to fool women, but they have plastic gears, and they fall apart.

Even Kitchenaid’s “Pro Line” mixers come with a warning. You’re not supposed to knead dough for more than two minutes because your motor might burn up. I guess this protects the plastic gears.

I think this is Kitchenaid’s (Whirlpool’s) way of voiding warranties. They sell you a tool to do a job, knowing it’s not fit for the purpose. You try to use it, and they say you abused it.

You buy, you keep. So sorry. CCP keep you money.

It’s strange that Kitchenaid mixers came from Hobart, and Kitchenaid now pretends it has a “pro” line. Hobart’s Kitchenaid was the real Kitchenaid pro line. CCP-adjacent Kitchenaid doesn’t make commercial-grade products.

When I decided to look at current reviews, I went to America’s Test Kitchen. They have done a fantastic job in the past. Before they fired Christopher Kimball. They do tons of testing. Before they will give you a cookie recipe, they’ll make hundreds of cookies. I thought they would know about mixers.

Guess what they recommended? “KITCHENAID!”

In the review itself, they said the mixers might burn up when kneading past the two-minute mark. So they recommended mixers…you can’t actually use. Many, many doughs go way past the two-minute mark.

Those kids can’t be trusted without daddy in the house. Everything went to pot when Christopher Kimball left.

What else do they like? Ankarsrum. Named for a town in Sweden, or maybe Norway, like there’s a difference. Ankarsrum mixers are supposed to be lifetime appliances, and they do a great job. For the low price of $750. Caveats: they’re hard to use, so you might ruin things you’re trying to cook. But they’re great. Really.

I don’t see the logic. If there were nothing else available, I would understand. But what if there is something else?

They didn’t test the something else. They didn’t test Bosch or Nutrimill. These companies offer more or less the same thing. Bosch calls it the Universal Plus mixer. The Bosch version has a side thing on it you can use to attach other implements. You can grind meat and shove it into sausage casings with it. You can grate big blocks of cheese.

I’ve had one of these for maybe 15 years. I got it when I was making pizzas for a church run by con artists. They already had a tiny Hobart, and it would make a few portions of dough. The Bosch will make 14 one-pound loaves of bread in one shot. Yes, you read that correctly. It’s crazy. That’s enough dough for 14 16″ pizzas.

The Bosch is light. It’s quiet. It’s easy to clean. It lasts forever. It does a very good or great job with everything. You can get a new Nutramill without the Bosch side tower for $300, so less than half the price of an Ankarsrum.

Years ago, I had a complaint with the Bosch. It has a plastic pillar sticking up in the middle of the bowl, and when I made cheesecake, batter would stick to the pillar. It didn’t get mixed in. Now they have a scrapey thing you attach to the pillar, and it shoves unmixed material back where it will get mixed. Problem solved.

I have no idea why ATK didn’t review the Bosch. They should know about it. It’s famous among home chefs and pizza makers. It’s the number-one mixer for serious pizza at a consumer-mixer price.

The Universal Plus has suction cups on the bottom to keep it from jogging around your counters. ATK says it doesn’t like suction cups, because they don’t stick when flour gets on them. Hmm. How could that be fixed? Let’s start a second Los Alamos project. Maybe you could stop setting the mixer down on counters covered with flour.

Maybe ATK isn’t that great now. They also jacked up their prices. Here’s a tip. If you subscribe, and they send you an email with the new Biden-level price, turn them down. They’ll email you again and give you over 50% off.

I would rather have a 12-pound mixer with suction cups than a heavier mixer that relies on mass I have to lift. Not that the Ankarsrum is all that heavy at 18 pounds.

I also have a 7-quart Cuisinart SM-70 stand mixer. It used to get good reviews, but they seem to have vanished. It’s the same mixer Kenwood makes or made. It has been fantastic for me (used very rarely), but you literally need hearing protection to use it. No exaggeration. Cuisinart makes a different mixer now.

The Cuisinart supposedly has 1000 watts of power, and it has done everything I asked it to. It also has a timer with a digital display. Cuisinart is kind of a hinky company, though, so I now avoid buying their products unless there are no substitutes.

Since I bought the Cuisinart, a lot of people have said some pretty nasty things about the reliability, so maybe it’s not so great. Because I have a hand mixer and the Bosch, the Cuisinart has had a very easy life. It has not been tested. It has coasted along like Hunter Biden.

I went for big mixers because no one wants to spend maybe $400 on a kitchen tool and then have an event where it won’t get the job done.

I believe I got the Cuisinart because I was tired of scraping cheesecake batter off the center pillar of the Bosch bowl. I kept the Bosch because it was so wonderful otherwise, and then Bosch fixed the pillar problem.

If you have a Kitchenaid, you’re probably pretty upset right now. I don’t blame you. I understand why you bought it. They look great. And ATK recommends them highly.

It looks like Ankarsrum mixers are only for people who bake every day. I say go with Bosch or Nutrimill. Nobody likes a learning curve that has to be ascended over and over and provides no real benefit.

I still need a good hand mixer. I bought a little Cuisinart 7-speed, but it was annoying because it always started at top speed. It starts in first gear, but for the first half-second, it goes much faster. Then it slows down. By then, it has thrown your ingredients on the wall. I bought a new Cuisinart 9-speed with slow start, which it does not actually have. It literally does exactly what the cheaper one did. I emailed them, and they told me to return it to Amazon, because they didn’t care. The return date was long past.

When I finally get a decent hand mixer, I’ll be like $150 into it at the start because of the Cuisinarts that went to Goodwill.

That’s it, I guess. Avoid Kitchenaid and Cuisinart. Bosch is good. Ankarsrum is probably good if you like a pointless challenge. ATK is suspect.

Good luck with your pizza and cookies.

Shredded Tweets

I am once again not on Twitter.

I tried Twitter for a few days because I thought Elon Musk might be serious about making it a Youtube alternative, but he is not serious, and Twitter was a bad experience. Video sites have to be set up a certain way, and Musk has not yet chosen to set Twitter up correctly. Also, the content on Twitter was largely infantile, not to mention plagiaristic.

I think God showed me a few things.

If you want to use Twitter, first of all, you should pray first. You probably should not be on Twitter.

Once you’re on Twitter, you have to be proactive, not reactive.

Based on what I saw, Twitter is designed–I mean intentionally–to be irritating. It forced me to pick people and things to show up in my feed, and then, instead, it fed me content which was almost certainly selected to provoke me. Biden’s account. Harris’s. Chris Hayes. Jon Favreau.

I saw nearly nothing of the topics I had selected.

For a while, I thought this was all I would ever get. I muted and muted and muted, and the same garbage kept popping up. Eventually, I found that if I scrolled down about a mile, Twitter ran out of anger clickbait and started showing me better things. It still was not great, though.

If you look at the trash Twitter puts at the top of your feed, after a few minutes, you’re angry. You feel like posting rebuttals to the libels and lies.

I had good intentions when I signed up. I thought I could post helpful things, including revelation. I got absorbed in a reactive mindset, however. I felt myself getting pulled into the undignified squabbling. Fortunately, I didn’t get into any arguments. I was not there long enough, and Twitter didn’t promote my posts.

Yes, Twitter does have censorship. If you pay them, they promote the things you say. How is that censorship? Simple. If you promote one group without promoting others, you’re censoring the people you don’t promote. You’re not silencing them, but you might as well be, because nearly no one will see what they write.

Twitter should not accept money to promote posts, except for obvious ads that don’t advance a point of view. It’s fine to promote a post for a brand of breakfast cereal, but they shouldn’t promote argumentative ads.

Back in the 1950’s, radio hosts were imprisoned for accepting secret bribes to play some records more than others. Elon Musk and his team should think about this when they accept secret bribes to promote Twitter accounts. Bribery is still wrong, especially when it pays for censorship.

If you think you have something to say on Twitter, don’t read other people’s posts much. There is not much of anything worth reading. You really have to search to find anything remotely helpful. Just write whatever you want and let it sink or swim.

It’s best not to argue with stupid and biased people. When you do that, you become like them, as Proverbs warns. You can’t change their minds, but you can damage yourself.

“But it’s wrong to refuse to defend what you say!” No, it’s not. Where is that written? “It’s wrong to refuse to consider other people’s views!” Not always. Twitter is full of patent idiocy, and besides, by the time you’re an adult, you should have a considerable number of unshakeable beliefs. If you stay open-minded about absolutely everything your entire life, it doesn’t make you mature and reasonable. It makes you lost and unreliable. You will never be sure of anything, and no one will be able to trust you.

So if you take the approach I’m outlining, who are you like? Yeshua.

If you read the gospels, you will see that Yeshua did not let other people run conversations. He said whatever he wanted. He did not respond to every question people posed. Often, when they tried to corner him with questions, he said things that were not responsive. He spoke of other things that were more useful.

Boxers call this fighting your own fight. You don’t let your opponent decide what kind of fight you will have. You tailor your actions to your best advantage. You do what you’re good at.

If Yeshua were on Twitter today, leftist trolls would treat him the way they treat everyone else. “SOURCE? SOURCE?” They’d make digressive accusations hoping to change the subjects. They’d deliberately misconstrue what he said in order to make him look bad.

A long time ago, God told me I was not in the least bit responsible for the way other people took things I said. If I offended people with the truth, it was their fault, not mine. If I gave them information that could save them from hell, and I didn’t do it in a soothing, unctuous way, I wasn’t responsible if hell was where they ended up.

I don’t have an obligation to get tied down in arguments with stupid people, letting them lie, accuse, misconstrue, and repeat themselves, responding to every idiotic thing they say. I have an obligation to speak the truth, but after a reasonable effort, I can do whatever I want.

If you are usually reactive and not proactive, what are you? A follower. Yeshua created us to be leaders, like him. It’s funny that a person who subscribes to other people’s Twitter posts is called a follower. It’s Biblically accurate.

If you really hear the Holy Spirit, you will get a lot of revelation, and revelation is true. It’s not something to “toss out there for discussion.” Other people’s opinions aren’t helpful. They are degenerate and harmful. The Talmud is full of opinions, like the opinion that Yeshua is in hell, boiling in excrement and semen. Catholics are of the opinion that it’s good to pray to dead people.

There are no opinions in heaven. There is only the truth. This is one of the most excellent things about heaven. When you get there, there will be no protestors and no lies to debunk.

Yeshua is the Prince of Peace. You can’t have peace without agreement.

If I say the Hulk is better than Superman, that’s an opinion, and it’s no better than your opinion. If God tells Jonah the Ninevites need to repent or be destroyed, it’s not suitable matter for discussion. It’s the truth. No one has the right to argue.

I think New York style pizza is better than Chicago style. Reasonable minds may differ. I can’t say I have authority. If I say you need to pray in tongues every day, I speak by revelation, so your contrary opinion has no value, and I have no obligation to listen to it or publish it in a comment.

If I were to go back to Twitter, I would avoid following people.

Once you get revelation, you will be wary of spending too much time with other Christians, because only a small fraction of them will be able to receive what you tell them. This is why Yeshua died with 11 disciples, after teaching thousands. It’s why he had to get away from the disciples frequently. They were better than most, but they were not on his level. He had to be with the Father in order to be refreshed and empowered.

The Christians I saw on Twitter were generally horrible. A lot of accounts are just click farms, trying to make money. Other people fight and call names. I learned two names: “dispy” and “Calvy.” A dispy believes time is divided into eras, or “dispensations,” in which God deals with the human race differently. They believe in the Messianic Age, for example. A Calvy is a Calvinist. I have some vague ideas about what Calvinists believe, but I don’t care enough to look it up so I can explain it here.

Apparently, Calvies and dispies don’t get along.

I saw people in various factions, fighting about doctrine, ridiculing their opponents. They referred to scholars and preachers to give their opinions authority. It was tiresome.

We are all supposed to hear from the Holy Spirit, not from John MacArthur, the Pope, and Joyce Meyer. If, after a year of salvation, you are still depending on Kenneth Copeland’s books, or Augustine’s, for information about God, you are missing out and filling your mind with damaging lies.

Apparently the Schofield reference Bible is controversial. I barely know what it is. People get really heated up discussing it.

Yeshua was uneducated, and so were the 11 disciples. Somehow, we still give Hellenist scholars like Thomas Aquinas, as well as other arrogant academics who never healed or prophesied, more respect than we give our neighbors who listen to the Holy Spirit.

It seems to me that engaging with Twitter Christians is a big waste of my time. They already know everything, but nearly all of them are wrong.

More and more, as a resident of Earth, I have the feeling that I’m watching people brawl, through bulletproof glass in a nuthouse. I just don’t know what I can do for them.

I can always intercede and give, and I try to put useful things on my blog, but that’s about it.

The Republican convention has not been encouraging. We’ve had a whore, a pagan who prays to unclean spirits and has nominal Christians join her, a socialist union official, and Hulk Hogan, a professional geek who made his money in a televised sideshow.

A geek is a person who does revolting or sensational things on a carnival midway. That’s professional wrestling. Profane, juvenile, lowbrow entertainment that corrupts kids and fuels the steroid industry.

Hogan isn’t even respected by other geeks. He is hated by many of his peers because he ratted them out to Vince McMahon when they tried to organize and negotiate with the WWE. He pretended to be their friend while he was doing this. He has a reputation as a backstabber. He took steroids all of his adult life and lied about it. When he was investigated, he snitched on Vince McMahon.

Part of his fame comes from a nude video in which he had sex with a friend’s wife. His birth name isn’t even Hogan, and he plagiarized “Hulk” from a comic book. His birth name is Terry Bollea. What does he have to do with conservatism? They could have had Curtis Sliwa or Nick Sandmann. Somebody respectable.

I understand that not every speaker will be a war hero or a missionary, but they could do better. I guess this is the Trump family influence.

Anyway, I’m off Twitter.

Chicago Crust Leaves me Unimpressed

I decided to try my hand at Chicago style pizza again last night. The results were mixed.

There is a guy who has a site called Real Deep Dish Pizza, and he publishes a recipe he calls the Holy Grail. He says he updates the recipe sometimes. You can download it as a PDF. There is no point in linking to the site. You’ll find it fast if you want.

Internet pizza people respect this guy, so I thought his recipe ought to be a good starting point.

I tried mail-order pizza from Lou Malnati’s over the last few days. The cheese pizza was pretty good, although the crust was harder than I thought it should have been. The sausage pizza was not good because the sausage boiled in the sauce. The sauce in Chicago style pizza goes above the cheese, and the toppings to in between, so they boil. There was no browning at all.

I liked one thing about the style. Putting the sauce on top makes it possible to use nearly any cheese. Only a few cheeses will work on top of a pizza. Radiant heat makes cheese behave badly, and if your cheese is in the 98% that don’t work, you will get brown cheese, tough cheese, greasy cheese, wet cheese, or some other disastrous result.

I decided to use Holy Grail crust and my own sauce and cheese. I thought that if I tried plain old grocery mozzarella, and it worked, I would have a secret weapon for those times when I didn’t feel like paying for overpriced cheese locally or driving to get restaurant cheese. I decided to use brick whole milk mozzarella. Not even low moisture. This was risky, because cheese that isn’t low moisture can release a lot of water. I thought it wouldn’t matter, because the cheese was going to be sitting in sauce. The water would go into the sauce, where it couldn’t hurt anything.

I don’t have a 12″ pizza pan, which is what the crust recipe was supposed to fit. I do have cast iron skillets, but I didn’t want to fool with them. I got myself a 9″ by 13″ steel nonstick pan at my local grocery. I did some math and decided I needed to scale the circular recipe up by a factor of 1.1.

Making the dough was no problem. I dumped everything but the oil in the Cuisinart, beat it up, let it rest 5 minutes so the water got into the flour, and blended the corn oil in. I used a lot of yeast, which is generally a bad idea, but I was in a rush. The dough rose fine, and it was easier to handle than ordinary dough. The oil made a difference.

I used a pound of Galbani mozzarella in thick slices. I used a pint of sauce made from Cento crushed tomatoes and a little Stanislaus Saporito sauce, which is tomato paste and basil. I added garlic, oregano, and a little sugar. I used both powdered and fresh garlic because they complement each other.

I baked at 450° for maybe 40 minutes. The pie baked up fine, but I had to put foil over it to prevent the exposed parts of the crust from burning.

The cheese worked. That was a big relief. It was just like the cheese you would find in fried mozzarella in a mid-tier restaurant. The sauce was good, but next time I’ll reduce the Saporito, because it made it a little ketchupy.

The crust was not thrilling. The texture was about like the frozen pies, only better, but the flavor was bland. The crusts on the frozen pies had a corn flavor. There was no cornmeal in them, so it must have come from the oil Malnati’s used. Some people recommend butter-flavored Crisco, which sounds gross.

The crust was too thick, so my guess is that the guy who wrote the recipe for a 12″ pie used too much stuff. It was half an inch thick on the bottom, which is almost twice as thick as the crusts on the frozen pies.

I don’t know if I’ll keep trying, because Sicilian and Detroit style (thinner Sicilian, more or less) are fantastic, and I don’t think Chicago style can measure up, even at its best. I think you have to be raised on it to love it. If I do try, I’ll look for a different oil or shortening. I will definitely use less yeast.

Think about this. New York style is the most popular pizza in North America. It started way over on the East Coast, and they now sell it in Alaska and Hawaii. Neapolitan style has caught on, too. You can find it in every big American city. In 8 decades, Chicago style has gone almost nowhere. There are very, very few places outside of Illinois that sell it. If it’s so great, why doesn’t anyone want it?

You can claim it’s because it takes 45 minutes to get a pizza, but I think that if it were as good as other pizzas, people would wait.

Many Chicagoans say it’s for tourists. Thin-crust Chicago tavern-style pizza seems to get more respect locally.

Tourists. Why would anyone go to Chicago as a tourist. What is there to see? The weather is bad. The land is flat and boring. The people have gone insane. You’re literally safer in a military unit in a war than you are in a Chicago ghetto on a holiday.

Although the Chicago deep-dish style is not that good, I got very useful information from the attempt. From now on, when I don’t have restaurant supply cheese and I don’t feel like paying $11 per pound for deli cheese, I’ll use grocery cheese and put the sauce on top. It won’t work with toppings, because who likes boiled toppings? But it will be great for cheese pizza, which I love.

Now that my pizza adventure has been chronicled, I’ll move on to the convention.

I’m glad J.D. Vance was chosen to run with Trump. He was my choice. He’s conservative, and he’s very smart. I don’t know whether he is popular enough to help Trump win, though. I haven’t studied the issue. Maybe I’m wrong to think he would be a good choice for president. I admit, I’m winging it.

It was interesting to see him get the spot because I have so much in common with him.

Vance’s parents are from Jackson, Kentucky, in Breathitt County. My grandfather was the circuit judge there. As you move eastward in Kentucky, the people get more ghetto. Breathitt is the farthest east of the counties where my grandfather held court.

To be quite honest, the people of Breathitt are a mess. They used to call it “bloody Breathitt” because the people were so violent. My mother used to tell two stories about Breathitt. One was that the Army recruited doctors from Breathitt during wars because they were so used to treating bullet wounds. That’s probably a myth. America has always had plenty of doctors who knew how to treat bullet wounds, and I doubt Breathitt ever had more than two doctors until maybe 1970. The second story was that they never had to draft anyone in Breathitt, because the men were so anxious to enlist and kill people. That, I could believe.

My dad always said there were a lot of people in Breathitt whose eyes were too close together.

There is a lot of white trash there, if you want the truth. The counties to the west of Breathitt are not great, but Breathitt is on a lower level.

Vance is famous for writing a book, Hillbilly Elegy, that became a movie. Ron Howard, that great expert on Appalachia, directed. Hey, he grew up in Mayberry, didn’t he?

Like a lot of people trying to escape the downward pull of Eastern Kentucky, Vance’s parents moved from Jackson to Ohio, and evidently, it was not much of a step up. My understanding is that his parents weren’t much, and they continued dragging him down. He had a grandmother who pushed him to succeed.

I have not read Vance’s book, and I don’t plan to. I have never seen the movie. I saw a clip. It was pretty ridiculous.

On the one hand, Glenn Close, as the grandmother, looked the part. She has a big bony Celt head, just like many of my female relatives. As far as appearance goes, she nailed it. Set her down among my female second cousins, and she would fit right in. The dialogue, however, was way off. No one cursed. No one waved a burning cigarette while talking. No one used any of the colloquialisms I remember from my youth.

Maybe they should have had Cameron Crowe direct it. His grandfather came from Stanton, another county seat where my grandfather served as judge. Crowe’s ear might have been better.

My story is quite different. For one thing, I have never achieved much of anything, nor have I ever had any ambition. For another, my parents were both Mensa material, and both were educated. They never completely overcame their roots. My mother had terrible taste, and my dad held onto his coal-camp manners. But they were very smart. They were well-read.

My dad was the best lawyer I ever knew, and that includes every area of practice, from the library to the courtroom.

Unlike me, Vance has no accent at all. That’s weird. And he seems to have assimilated completely, book and movie notwithstanding.

I have an aunt who gets excited when anyone from Eastern Kentucky does well. She seems determined to convince people Eastern Kentucky is an incubator of unrecognized genius. Any acquaintance of hers who can stand upright and write his name is an unsung renaissance man. She has bragged to me about Woody Stephens and Cameron Crowe. It’s her way of vindicating her strange prejudices about the region.

My aunt told me about J.D. Vance a few years ago. I had no idea who he was, and I did not feel compelled to learn. She thinks he’s fantastic. On the other hand, she holds herself out as a liberal, so I have to wonder how she is dealing with his nomination. She is in no way liberal except in that she pretends to be one and makes excuses for her undeserving demographic, but she has painted herself into a corner as far as Vance is concerned. If she brags about him, she can’t really reconcile it with the reputation she has tried to cultivate. She will offend people she has tried to impress.

She doesn’t think he’s fantastic because he’s conservative or good presidential timber. She thinks he’s fantastic because he’s famous and he came from Eastern Kentucky. That’s all it takes.

Anyway, it’s interesting to see a person with whom I have so much in common, running for the office of vice president. I don’t think his Appalachian background is an asset. It’s just a handicap he overcame.

I was sorry to see that the GOP had a slut speak. I mean Amber Rose. She is a big part of the slut walk movement. She poses for nude photos. She promotes homosexuality. Disgusting.

How desperate are we? This is where razor-thin election margins have put us. Simping for women who sleep with rappers.

I was also sorry to see them let Harmeet Dhillon, a pagan, deliver a prayer. I don’t know anything about her except that she is a Sikh. Sikhism rejects Yeshua’s teachings, so it comes from Satan and leads people to hell, in addition to corrupting their lives here on Earth.

God–Yeshua–isn’t looking down and approving of the GOP for being open-minded. He knows he has been disrespected, and that has consequences.

I’m a monarchist and a theocrat. I obey our laws, and I’m not planning to overthrow the government, but from now on, I will do my best to vote for whoever brings us closer to a Christian theocracy based in charismatic doctrine. I don’t care whom I offend. I don’t care about our idiotic obsession with separating church and state. I don’t care about making people of other faiths comfortable. Yeshua made people extremely uncomfortable. People of other faiths worship demons and go to hell. I don’t support those things.

Religious inclusivity is the most un-Christian policy imaginable.

I assume they will also have prayers from a Muslim and a Jew who thinks Yeshua was a magician and a fraud and who follows sages who made their living teaching blasphemy.

I’m with the GOP because it’s the closest thing we have to a Christian party. The more we strive to be popular, bringing in disgusting people and people who are badly misled, the less salt we have in ourselves and the less motivation God has to help conservatives. When we become just like leftists, God will have no reason to help us.

I can’t vote for a proper party, so I vote for the least-vile party. It’s getting to the point where I have no one to stand with.

I wore my old MAGA hat today, figuring I should honor a man who just got shot for me, along with the others who were shot. I don’t know if I should wear it again. I love Trump, but he’s no messiah, and he and his family put Amber Rose on the stage.

I hope Trump wins, but America is lost either way.

They Pull a Pizza, You Pull a Casserole

I hope it is not tasteless to say it, in view of the suffering that has taken place over the last couple of days, but Donald Trump is riding a sudden wave of success right now. An innocent man died with his arms around his wife and daughter, two other people were seriously wounded, our former president was shot, families were put through an emotional wringer, and the whole crowd was traumatized. Nonetheless, Trump’s campaign is experiencing a huge boost.

The assassination attempt will turn out to be one of the best things that ever happened to Trump, with respect to his political career. On top of that, Judge Aileen Cannon has dismissed the unfairly-brought classified document case that was taking place in Florida. She dismissed without prejudice, based on the conclusion that Jack Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional.

As always, people on the left are reacting in a very nuance-deaf way, saying Cannon is in the tank for Trump and that the 11th Circuit will respond by throwing her off the case, if not the bench. It’s like listening to children. Maybe I can come across more like an adult.

The ruling is interesting for more than one reason.

To begin, Cannon did not reach the immunity question, which was also before her. When judges have multiple issues before them, it’s common for them to rule on one and ignore the rest. Judges say they do this to make courts more efficient, but they are human, so I’m sure they also do it for other reasons.

Cannon says Smith’s appointment violates the Appointments Clause of the Constitution. She opined that the government might be able to fix the problem later, but for now the remedy is dismissal without prejudice. This leaves the door open for a government effort to revive the case.

Does this mean Smith can appeal, get the decision reversed, and have Cannon exiled to Siberia? Of course not. He may be able to get the decision reversed, but guess who gets to look at the motions after that happens? Judge Cannon. The 11th Circuit is not going to rule on the other dismissal claims, so Cannon will be free to do so. She can dismiss the case all over again based on the immunity question. Then the appeal process starts all over again.

Don’t ask me whether the Supreme Court’s recent immunity decision will affect this or Trump’s other cases. I’m not going to sit here and do extensive research for nothing. Maybe it will. Maybe it will kill the Fani Willis case, the Alvin Bragg case, and both Jack Smith cases. It won’t help him in the case brought by unethical New York AG Letitia James, but that case should die on appeal, possibly even before it leaves the state.

Smith is also running the extremely phony January 6 incitement case before Tanya Chutkan. That case has been severely weakened by the immunity decision. Does Cannon’s decision about Smith’s appointment affect the January 6 case? I don’t think so. I think that’s up to Chutkan. Cannon and Chutkan are both at the lowest level of the federal judiciary, which is the district court level. District courts often have conflicts. A district court can strike a law down nationwide, but it can’t force its decisions on other district courts.

I don’t think any of these cases will survive appeal, but I’m talking as an outsider who hasn’t studied them as much as the insiders. They will not be decided before the election or inauguration, so we may end up in a situation where a newly-inaugurated Trump, even if convicted, can pardon himself and throw the courts into a brand-new briar patch. They will have to resolve the issue of whether the pardon is legal, and that will take time. Then if his self-pardon is undone, his successor will pardon him.

As for Trump, today the Milwaukee (Why?) convention starts, and he is on a roll. He has a freshly-bandaged ear for the cameras, which no liberal network can avoid showing the nation. He has that amazing Evan Vucci photo of himself pumping his fist beneath the American flag. He has a fresh dismissal. He still has the debate. He also has the vile behavior of prominent leftists, who have made extraordinarily cruel and sick remarks about him since the shooting. Bet we see them on video at the convention.

Leftists are so crazy–so hardened by demons–they can’t hide it any more. Joe Scarborough’s network took him off the air temporarily, and they openly admit it was because they were afraid his leftist-nut guests would say tacky things about the shooting. They are admitting 1) leftists really do have TDS, and 2) they want to help Biden win the presidency by keeping new ammunition away from conservatives.

That’s really something. The lunatics are policing the asylum, with unwitting transparency.

In other news, I finally tried a real Chicago style pizza. Unfortunately, it was a frozen pizza, because no one around here makes them fresh.

Chicago style pizza is interesting. To begin with, “Chicago style” is a misnomer for two reasons.

First, there are three styles of pizza associated with Chicago. One is stuffed. Another has a thin crust. The third is the one people refer to as “Chicago style.”

Second, it was probably invented by a black woman from Mississippi. I can’t help deriving some childish pleasure from this knowledge, because Chicagoans often go over the top when they praise their pizza.

From here on out, I will use the term “Chicago style” the way most people use it. It refers to a deep-dish pizza with the cheese on the bottom, against the crust. Toppings go on top of the cheese, and then everything is buried in tomato sauce. The crust is on the biscuity side. If I understand it correctly, it’s more crunchy than chewy.

One of the most famous Chicago style joints is named Pizzeria Uno, and if you go there, you will see a plaque claiming the style was invented by co-owner Ike Sewell, a Texan, and first served at Uno in 1943. The story Uno promotes says Sewell’s partner, Ric Riccardo, was dissatisfied with his pizza, so he traveled to Italy to study. Then he came back to Chicago and started serving it. How this is consistent with the plaque’s claim that Sewell invented the pizza is a mystery.

A food historian has pointed out a funny clue: what was happening in 1943? Think hard. Something involving Italy. There is no way an American could have gone to Italy during World War Two to study pizza.

The historian says a black woman named Alice Mae Redmond worked in several Chicago pizzerias, and she’s the one who invented Chicago deep-dish. Because she worked at more than one place, no Chicagoan and no Italian can take credit.

If you have friends from Chicago who love to brag about their pizza and ruin every pizza meal with their moaning, now you have an ace up your sleeve.

One of the best-known deep dish pizzerias is named Lou Malnati’s, and they have such a following, they sell their pizzas over the web. They ship them in styrofoam boxes with dry ice. I have two cousins who grew up near Chicago, and I am told one of them thinks Chicago style is the best pizza there is. His sister says he orders Malnati’s pizza and has it shipped to him in Texas.

I heard about this a long time ago, but I never bothered ordering pizza. I wasn’t that excited about it. The other day I was discussing it with my wife, and we decided to give it a shot. I spent the massive sum of $76.99 for two 10″ pies: one cheese, one sausage. I have tried both.

The pizzas come in disposable round aluminum pans that look like someone sat on them at the factory. You take the pies out, oil the pans, bake at 425° for 35-40 minutes (really more like 50), and you’re ready to go.

The crusts looked hand-formed, and bits of both had broken off in transit. I would say the crust is somewhere between a biscuit and pie crust. It has a corn taste, leading many people to claim it has cornmeal in it. Not true. It does have a lot of oil in it, though, and corn oil is the standard. Yes, corn oil. That Italian staple.

I found the crusts almost too hard. Not like hardtack, but not like biscuits, either. Maybe if you tried to make a biscuit with half of the milk replaced with water, you’d have it. There was very little air in the crusts. They were dense.

The cheese was just melted mozzarella. If you like melted mozzarella, you will like the cheese in a Malnati’s frozen pizza. Nothing there to criticize.

The sauce is tomato puree, water, and maybe a few seasonings. Very nice. Not too sour. Not too sweet.

I’m sure fresh pizzas would be a little better.

The cheese pie was very good, although I would make it with a crust that’s a little less dense. One nice thing about the crust is that it’s strong enough to allow you to use your hands to hold slices that are about an inch thick. Maybe that’s why they make it so hard. Many people eat Chicago pizza with a fork, which is why Jon Stewart called it a casserole.

The sausage pie–the standard Chicago style pie–was not good. There was less mozzarella, and the sausage was boiled. Not kidding. There was a layer of Italian sausage between the cheese and sauce, and when the pie was baked, it wasn’t roasted the way it should have been. It was just plain boiled, in cheese and sauce. It tasted like boiled sausage.

Huge mistake. I don’t know how people can stand it. It’s better than no pizza at all, but a Stouffer’s French bread pizza blows it away. The difference between the cheese pizza and the sausage pizza was huge.

Is there a fix? Yes. Brown the sausage superficially before putting it in the pie. But Malnati’s doesn’t do that.

My conclusion is that a Chicago pie with nothing but cheese and sauce is great, but apart from that, you’re going to be eating gross boiled toppings. This is probably one of those foods you have to be raised on if you want to enjoy it, like my mother’s spaghetti sauce with chili powder and green peppers. My recommendation: avoid. It’s just not good.

My wife likes eating giant maggots called mopane worms. That’s Africa for you. Deep dish pizza with the toppings in the wrong place is Chicago’s bowl of giant maggots.

It’s like Hershey’s, the worst chocolate on Earth. The guy who invented it used a process that creates butyric acid, which is the chemical that gives vomit its characteristic smell. Foreigners who try Hershey’s say it tastes like vomit, and they are right, but if you were raised on it, it seems okay.

What do I take away from this, as a person who likes making pizza?

First of all, my own Sicilian is still the very best pizza I have ever eaten. Nothing else comes close. Not in New York. Not nowhere.

Second, Chicago style could be very good and worth making, in two variations I can think of off the top of my head. 1. Cheese pizza, and 2. topped pizza with the toppings in the right place. Maybe I could go crust-cheese-sauce-cheese-toppings. They say the bottom layer of cheese is crucial to a proper crust, and if I just threw toppings onto sauce, the toppings would boil, so I would have to have another layer of cheese.

I think the second version above is a waste of time. Cheese seems to be the answer.

I discovered a tremendous benefit of the Chicago method. You can use bad cheese and get away with it.

When you make conventional pizza, finding cheese that works is extremely important, and most grocery stores don’t have anything that fits the bill. I go to restaurant supply houses, and I also get away with using grocery deli cheese which costs $11 per pound.

The problem with most cheese is that it reacts badly to radiant heat. Some cheese burns too fast because it doesn’t contain the right amount of fat. Some develops a tough film on top. The film resembles vinyl. Some cheese gives off way too much water or fat.

When you boil cheese, you shouldn’t have these problems. The radiant heat never hits the cheese. It should be possible to use any grocery mozzarella that works in things like lasagna.

I think you could use plain old bricks of whole milk mozzarella, like Polly-O or Galbani and do just fine. They don’t work on top of pizzas.

Some people claim the only real Sicilian pizza has the sauce on top. I think they’re nuts, but it should hide cheese problems well. In a desperate situation, putting the sauce on top could save a pizza, and it may change the crust in a nice way.

To sum up my tentative conclusions, if you’re from Chicago, your style is not that great, it was invented by a black Southern lady, no Chicago restaurant can be pinpointed as the birthplace, and New York still dominates. But Chicago style is worth making if certain very limiting rules are observed.

Will I order more frozen pizzas at a cost of about $40 each? Never. Unless someone sends me a check for, say, 50 million dollars, and money no longer means anything to me.

Oddly, the price tag is not all that far from the cost of a restaurant pie made locally. Call it $30 including tip but not gas. The actual cost of a Malnati’s pie is $37.495, so for about 7 bucks, you can avoid doing dishes. Not a great deal, but not the worst.

If you order 6 pies, they come at $23 each, so not unreasonable at all. Not as good as making your own, better, for maybe $7.

I will probably look into crust recipes.

In closing, I’ll tell you how to sound like your from Chicago. It’s really easy. Say, “My dog is in there,” only say it this way: “My dag is in dere.” People may mistake you for Jim Belushi.

My dag is in dere. It works.

Who Was That Guy I Was?

Yesterday I dug up some things I wrote about 18 years ago. At that time I thought I was a Christian, but the things I wrote were awful. Cruel and full of R-rated language and subjects. Impossible to distinguish from things an unbeliever would write. Immature.

It was a good experience, because it helped me with pride. When you’re a Christian, it’s easy to feel as though you were born holy. You can forget what you were before you surrendered. You can find yourself being too hard on people who are actually doing better at their ages than you were.

Today I got some revelation about it. I realized that if God kept improving me, in 18 years, I would look back on the person I am today and be disturbed. That’s not flattering, but the up side is that it means God can keep blessing me with improvement. Being made better is good. Obviously.

Last week, I had some dangerous trees removed from around my buildings. I thought after that happened, I would find myself outside more, cleaning up the damage and getting the pool and yard in shape. That didn’t happen.

There is less shade than there used to be, and we are in a period of really unpleasant weather. It feels like clouds have gone away for good. The second half of May was very hot. My car’s external thermometer hit 100 one day, and that was while I was driving, not while the car was sitting in the sun.

Since the tree-cutting stopped, I have been sitting in the house doing nearly nothing. The unjust and absurd Trump verdict came in on the day the tree service left, and I felt like it was strong confirmation that normal American life had ended permanently. The viciousness of Satan’s children is blossoming like never before in my life, and worse, they now have unprecedented favor from their father. And Christians are becoming like them, so our own favor has shriveled. Satan’s children are dominant, like Muslims in Hamtramck or homosexuals in San Francisco. We are the counterculture, and we are on the decline. We’re not going to rebound.

I have been discouraged by two climates: physical and supernatural. The physical climate will recover when the heat wave passes, but the supernatural weather is going to keep getting worse.

There is a real climate change, all right, but it has nothing to do with the temperature.

I have been reading the book of Enoch. It’s an interesting book. The idea is that Enoch and his great-grandson Noah had prophetic experiences and wrote them down. Jews don’t consider the book to be scripture. Some say it’s because of the clear references to Yeshua as Messiah and God. The book was written before Yeshua was born, so these references would be problematic to the post-Malachi version of Judaism that continues to the present day.

Here is some material that very clearly refers to Yeshua:

And there I saw One who had a head of days,
And His head was white like wool,
And with Him was another being whose countenance had the appearance of a man,
And his face was full of graciousness, like one of the holy angels.

And I asked the angel who went with me and showed me all the hidden things, concerning that

Son of Man, who he was, and whence he was, (and) why he went with the Head of Days? And he answered and said unto me:
This is the son of Man who hath righteousness,
With whom dwelleth righteousness,
And who revealeth all the treasures of that which is hidden,
Because the Lord of Spirits hath chosen him,
And whose lot hath the pre-eminence before the Lord of Spirits in uprightness for ever.

And this Son of Man whom thou hast seen
Shall raise up the kings and the mighty from their seats,
[And the strong from their thrones]
And shall loosen the reins of the strong,
And break the teeth of the sinners.
[And he shall put down the kings from their thrones and kingdoms]
Because they do not extol and praise Him,
Nor humbly acknowledge whence the kingdom was bestowed upon them.
And he shall put down the countenance of the strong,
And shall fill them with shame.

And darkness shall be their dwelling,
And worms shall be their bed,
And they shall have no hope of rising from their beds,
Because they do not extol the name of the Lord of Spirits.
[And raise their hands against the Most High],
And tread upon the earth and dwell upon it.
And all their deeds manifest unrighteousness,
And their power rests upon their riches,
And their faith is in the gods which they have made with their hands,
And they deny the name of the Lord of Spirits,

And they persecute the houses of His congregations,
And the faithful who hang upon the name of the Lord of Spirits.

Whether the book of Enoch is scripture is not for me to say, but Jude quoted it in the New Testament as an authoritative reference, so at least part of it is correct. There are a few other New Testament passages that some believe to be references to Enoch.

Enoch confirms some things God has been telling me: he really hates punks, and those who belong to him praise and honor him. Read it yourself and see. Enoch predicted destruction for those who didn’t praise the name of God. If you refuse to praise Yeshua, you’re refusing to praise the name of God, because Yeshua and Yahweh are one. Bowing down before Allah or Yahweh while blaspheming Yeshua is not helpful. Rabbis and Imams aren’t men of God. They make a living blaspheming God. You can’t have the father if you reject the son.

Look at this:

And the wisdom of the Lord of Spirits hath revealed him to the holy and righteous;
For he hath preserved the lot of the righteous,
Because they have hated and despised this world of unrighteousness,
And have hated all its works and ways in the name of the Lord of Spirits:
For in his name they are saved,
And according to his good pleasure hath it been in regard to their life.

That could not be more Christian, but it was written before the Christ was born. Just like Isaiah 53, Psalms 2 and 22, and Proverbs 30:4.

The above passage from Enoch is consistent with what God has been telling me and doing in me. I say we have to distance ourselves from the world. The culture of this world is sick and leads to damnation. Popular Christians, like the Hollywood stars who acknowledge Yeshua weakly while advancing a filthy system dedicated to sin, are failures. Christians who want to be everybody’s friend are barely Christians, if at all.

Enoch tells of a time when the wicked will be removed from the world and it will be turned over to God’s children. That’s consistent with the Revelation and with things Yeshua said. It’s what he was talking about when he said the meek would inherit the earth.

Enoch mentions God’s anger at the people and spirits who have prevented God’s children from succeeding and getting the blessings that were intended for them. Satan’s children are like their father: squatters, murderers, and thieves.

It is disturbing to see the things God shows me confirmed. It would be nice to think I could have a pleasant life in America, like people in the 1950’s, surrounded by people who had some understanding of kindness, decency, and humility. Instead, we are led by famous whores and pimps. Not just whores and pimps, but unusually gross and stupid whores and pimps. Public discourse is as revolting as the discourse of sailors 70 years ago. Economic opportunities are shriveling, and to get them, you have to bend the knee to the most disgusting sorts of perverts, racists, witches, and liars.

The world has always been bad, but not like this. Not in America. We literally have perversions the Sodomites were not able to come up with in their time. At least sexually, we have outdone the filthiest people in the Bible.

It’s sad that so many people claim Sodom was only destroyed for selfishness. Not true. The Bible makes it clear that sexual sin was a big factor.

Jude said:

Even as Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.

A guy who seems to be a prophet just spoke a word in which God said he was sending famine and confusion. He said they would not touch his own children. I hope the second part of the prophecy was genuine. I don’t want to find myself eating squirrels because I have to, not just because I want to. I don’t want my wife to go from African poverty to global poverty, just when she thought she had escaped.

I don’t want to be swept up in the confusion. I can tell men from women, so I think I’m okay.

Actually, I can’t always tell men from women. Sometimes it takes a little study. That’s new. But I know that a hairy, bearded fool in a dress is not a woman. Many Americans can’t say that, and the government is on the side of the fools.

This stuff is really happening. Confirmation keeps coming. The question that obsesses me is how long it will be before we can get out of here. I am ready to go today. My wife and I keep praying God will call his children soon, and that he will do whatever it takes to help the two of us make it.

Does any intelligent person want to be here after this year’s presidential election? No matter who wins, there will be pandemonium, and I choose the word deliberately, since it means, “all demons.” I think Trump will win, and if he does, the left will erupt, as it has been trained to do. If Biden wins, who knows what the right, the military, and our police will do? Trump supporters will say the election was stolen, and this time, they will indisputably be right. The unfair things that are being done to Trump and his supporters will not be forgotten.

When I think of the post-election turmoil, I can’t help thinking of it as entertaining, like a disaster movie. I think that’s because I’ve spent my life watching shows and movies made by an industry that teaches people to be jaded. I’ve seen so many people pretend to suffer and die, I have to pause and remind myself that real people really suffer.

The post-election fighting will be an engrossing spectacle. No doubt about that. But it won’t be like watching chaos on a screen. The pain, hunger, poverty, and horror will be real.

I feel as though the world were standing still while Yeshua prepares his entrance. I feel as though I could hear the trumpet at any second. I wish it would sound. I heard it in a dream, and it made me feel like weight was falling from my shoulders.

Has Anyone Seen my 56 Million?

The other day, I was confused about some things somewhat-conservative actor Tom Selleck said, and I wrote about it. He lives on a 63-acre avocado farm in California, and at the age of 79, after a very successful acting career (for a conservative), he says he may have to sell his farm in order to finance a pleasant old age.

Thomas Magnum, the eighties pinup man, is 79. About as old as Biden. Can you believe it? He’s not in the same boat, though. Biden looks like his father or even grandfather. I wonder how old Higgins is. I’ll check. The actor who played him would be 91 today. Zeus and Apollo have been dead since no later than 1995.

I looked up his taxes, and I found out he pays about a thousand dollars per acre per year, which is bad, but not shocking. My dad’s home near Miami had a tax bill not far from half that high one year, and it’s a merely somewhat above average home on half an acre. Thank God that place is gone. What a horrible area. Living in that miserable place is bad enough, but then they force you to pay an amount equal to a living wage in exchange for the privilege of suffering. I can’t understand the people who bought that house.

I wondered how Selleck could be worried about his finances given the money he has made, the value of his property (about $12 million), and the fact that he will almost certainly die within 15 years. His kids are grown. Even a reverse mortgage should keep him up in fine style, and surely he has assets other than his home.

Well, someone in Hollywood got mad at Selleck and criticized him for complaining. This person says he was paid $56 million over the last 14 years for his work on a CBS series. Maybe I’m easily impressed, but that seems like a lot of money to me.

Unless he has a drug addiction or a gambling problem, he should have been able to pocket over $20 million, even in California, even after paying his agent. That’s just the last 14 years. Doesn’t include Magnum, P.I., his movies, or his ad work.

I don’t know, man. I’m starting to wonder about this guy.

Maybe he doesn’t realize he will be dead by 2040. He has already exceeded the average American life expectancy, and he is about 7″ above average height. Tall people don’t live as long as short people. If he can support himself for 15 years, he’s okay.

I remember telling my dad he needed to get professional help with his weight, and he would always say his grandfather lived to be 100. That was true, but his grandfather didn’t drink and weighed about 140 pounds. My dad started to lose it noticeably at about 82, and he died in assisted living when he was not far into his 88th year, at the age of 87. His older sister had the same grandfather, and she died at 84. She was huge.

My mother’s father didn’t think realistically about age, either. He rented a farm to a 68-year-old man with the provision that the man could stay as long as he lived. When he was questioned about this, he said, “That old man can’t live long.” My grandfather was 72.

I think I’m pretty realistic about being old. When I think about taking up a new pastime, I think, “I’ll be dead before I get anywhere with it.” I have thought about planting trees here, but barring the rapture, they will still be small and useless when I die. When I work in the yard and I get tired, I go in the house, leaving branches and leaves and whatever on the ground if I have to. I’m not going to die for yard work. Heat exhaustion is something old people can’t play with.

When I put heavy things on high shelves, I wonder if I’ll be strong enough to take them down if I ever need them. I take that into account.

Regarding Selleck, maybe he has spent a lot of money enjoying life. Maybe he has put millions in trust for his two grown kids, where he and his wife can’t get it. I certainly hope he has arranged for his kids to be rich without work. That’s what you’re supposed to do. You’re not supposed to stuff yourself like a turkey and then die poor.

If every generation in a family has to start with nothing, it’s a stupid family. Inheritance is supposed to help people not to have to have the same problems their ancestors did.

We don’t force new generations to come up with their own languages, writing, and science. We don’t burn all the books every 20 years. We treasure and protect these things and do our best to pass them on. No one ever says, proudly, “No one gave me electrical engineering and medicine. I figured it out for myself!” But fools love to say, “I’m a self-made man!” Like it’s great that their parents and ancestors were also fools.

Money is no different from other good things. It should be passed along, and so should the ability to make and handle money.

Inheritance is one of the big differences between advanced cultures and backward cultures that amounted to nothing. Africans and American Indians didn’t preserve knowledge through writing. They didn’t build things that lasted so their descendants could use them. They didn’t amass wealth and pass it on. They managed to go millennia without developing technology. As a result, they ended up living like cave men while people in other places had running water and calculus. They died from diseases that can be prevented by wearing shoes and boiling water. When advanced people showed up where they were, they were running around just about naked, and they didn’t have things like chairs. They were worse than children.

The wealthy people who didn’t have to work to get wealth make up a tiny percentage of Americans. That’s disgraceful. The grandchildren of most wealthy people have to build their own wealth, and many of them have nothing. If your grandchildren end up worse off than you, what was the purpose of making yourself rich? Was it just to make your own life better?

Americans are hypocrites. They really hate heirs, but nearly all of them want their children to be heirs. We love making fun of wealthy people who have problems, but we all want to be wealthy.

Wealth is good. It is completely good. It has no bad qualities. Christians have given it a bad name, and that’s ridiculous. Saying wealth is bad is like saying health is bad. Good looks are bad. Nice weather is bad. It’s idiotic. God himself says wealth is good. In the Bible, he promises it to people who please him. Would he reward people he likes with a curse? Of course not. Wealth is only a curse when you make it a curse. Your nature is the problem.

Giving heirs things is very good. Spoiling them is not. Two different things. Wealth can’t spoil anyone. We all know or know of rich heirs who are not spoiled, and prisons and poor ghettos are full of the most spoiled people in America.

I certainly hope the Sellecks have set their kids up.

What if he gave most of his earnings to charity, and he hasn’t said anything? That would be better than wasting it on yachting vacations, Hermes, and Balenciaga.

Looking around, I see the web says Selleck has had other homes. In 2016, he was featured in Architectural Digest, a magazine devoted to showcasing homes owned by extremely self-indulgent people with sick fringe values. The article says he had an 1800-square-foot apartment in Los Angeles, and he covered the walls with expensive paneling. He and his wife brought in very, very expensive professionals to fix the place up. They spared no expense.

They will never get that money back. Most of it is not an investment. Spending tons of money decorating a house generally will not pay off. The furniture will be removed, and the kind of people who buy fancy homes will want to remove a lot of what was done and replace it.

I fixed up a house and sold it, and it was a terrible idea. If I had sold it as-is, I would be a lot better off today. I sold another one with problems, and it was a much smarter decision. House flippers only make good money when they get good renovation work, cheap. Most of us aren’t in their shoes. Contractors generally treat their clients badly, costing them huge sums of money and wasting valuable months. If you want to live in a torn-up house and be your own general contractor, it’s different, but Tom Selleck wouldn’t do that.

In the article, he speaks lovingly of a table in the apartment, saying it used to be used for slaughtering pigs. If your grandfather made a table, I can understand why you would love it, but the pig story sounds exactly like what a designer would say in order to get you to make a sucker purchase.

“In this very chair, Vin Diesel read the script for Fast & Furious 6.”

Selleck lived in Hawaii for a long time. That’s expensive. Everything except pineapples and sand has to be brought in on boats or planes. I don’t know how many homes he had there, but one is pretty nice. The address is 4161 Akulikuli Terrace, in Honolulu. You can see a video of it below.

Does he still have the L.A. place? If so, he is paying the state serious money.

Even if, by some unforeseen fluke, I become extremely wealthy, I will never have a home in Architectural Digest, nor will I ever pay a decorator. I made a decision. I decided my home would be usable. We expect to have kids. We will have guests. I have a parrot. We can’t have really, really nice things, and I don’t want them anyway. Things have to serve me. I can’t stand serving things. If I can’t sit on a couch without taking a shower first, I don’t want it.

We will have pretty good furniture. We will make a pretty good effort to make the downstairs look pretty good. Upstairs, I have a fairly cheap couch and a recliner no woman would own, and only one of the beds has a headboard.

I have a Ford and a Dodge. Both were bought used. The newest one is 9 years old. I may replace the Ford with a Toyota because the Ford I have has a reputation for turning into a money pit after a certain number of miles, but if I buy a Toyota, it will be at least a year old.

I think we will continue to live very well by global standards, even without Selleck’s earning potential, and I don’t think we will have to move. If you have a nice house, good food, good medical care, and somewhat nice stuff, you are rich as far as I’m concerned.

It looks like Tom Selleck has spending problems, not money problems.

My grandfather may have been worth what Selleck is now, in terms of buying power, and he lived in a nice, comfortable house that was kept up perfectly. He drove Buicks from his car dealership, bought at cost. He wore his pickup trucks out. He got his clothes from department stores in Lexington, Kentucky. He didn’t have a wine cellar or a tennis court. I would guess he never flew first class in his life.

He didn’t worry that he might have to move out of his house. When his television went out, my grandmother told the people at the store to bring another one, dismissing their concerns about her ability to pay, saying, “We’ve got enough money to burn a wet mule.”

He was generous with other people. He helped his children when they didn’t deserve it or show him gratitude. He didn’t spend his money on decorators so he wouldn’t feel bad when shallow rich people showed up for expensive parties he never threw. He left some money and land behind when he died, and so did his wife.

I think he handled his money very well. He was probably the only person in Eastern Kentucky who subscribed to The Value Line, and read and understood it, in the 1950’s.

My dad bought a lot of real estate, and he did some investing. He could not match my grandfather, but he wasn’t like some of his partners, who had to spend every dime they got before they got it. He never talked about having to move out of his house, and he eventually became very concerned about making sure what he had went to me smoothly. He could have had a new Mercedes every year, but he chose to fund his future, and that of his descendants, instead.

Any couple that can’t find a way to live well until they die, on what must amount to at least $30 million, is doing something wrong. With that kind of wealth, you can take two very expensive vacations per year, wear excellent clothing, drive very nice cars, and live on an avocado farm. You should be able to get excellent help when you become feeble. I’m sure of it. Maybe you can’t have three or four mansions, and you might have to shop at normal malls sometimes, but lots of movie stars shop at malls that don’t have Neiman-Marcus or Bulgari.

Selleck will be dead by 2040. His wife will be dead by 2055, tops. They’ll both be fine if they show even below-average restraint.

Ostentation is sinful. Spending to be accepted by trashy rich people is wrong. It stirs up resentment among people who have less. It makes you think you’re better than you are. It lands you among empty, disgusting people. It sucks money away from better causes. You can have an incredibly cushy life without making a spectacle of yourself and spending in order to obey your insecurity.

Ostentation is partly aggression. It’s a way of insulting others. The Bible says that if you mock the poor, you insult God himself.

I just happened to run into an article about Antonio Brown, who was apparently an NFL player. The article says his career earnings were about $80 million. Wikipedia says he signed contracts amounting to well over $100 million, and that doesn’t include earnings off the field. Now his net worth is negative, and his earning potential is not much better.

He’s not a smart guy, so he can’t run out and get another high-paying job. Football was all he could do, at least for more than $20 an hour. It’s a horrific story. Imagine making $80 million in about 12 years, losing all of it, and then having to think about how long it would take to make that much money with your other abilities. In his case, it’s about 2000 years. That is the actual figure.

He’s a friend of Kanye West. West has a very shaky sports agency firm called Donda Sports, and Brown is the nominal president. Brown appears to be nearly illiterate, though, so it’s not clear whether he can actually perform any duties. Maybe West will pay him a lot anyway. But if he does, Brown will lose it. It won’t help.

I understand the desire to spend money on fun things, and I have certainly wasted money, but you have to have some sense of proportion. If your net worth is two million dollars, and the Lamborghini you want costs $1.5 million, it doesn’t mean you can afford it.

I can waste money, but I don’t understand insane spending.

Give me a billion dollars, and I’ll get my pickup truck fixed up really well, I’ll move to a nice rural property in Tennessee, and I’ll probably get some better heavy equipment, used. A bigger tractor and an excavator. I’ll have trouble-free appliances. If I travel long distances, I’ll definitely go business class, because long flights in coach are very unpleasant. I’ll get survival supplies and a generator. Nice stuff for the wife, but not too nice. Can’t think of much else.

Prime steaks more often. I would do that. Beef is a luxury in Biden’s world. I would probably get a lawn service. I would want an air-conditioned workshop for sure. That’s like $45,000. I’d quit buying all forms of insurance not required by law.

I really like the shoes and shorts I wear. I like Hanes T-shirts for about $3 each. I could see getting a good horsehide jacket not designed for motorcycling.

No boats. Been there. No planes. No vacation homes. Absolutely no club memberships. No jewelry for me. Jewelry on men is effeminate. No servants except maybe a maid to come in weekly. No ridiculous assistants to stand between me and commoners. No bodyguards. No entourage. No public giving of any kind. It’s ostentation.

I’ll tell you what. A comfortable home in Tennessee, all my bills paid, good food, good vehicles, zero concerns when buying things like tires and refrigerators…what else could you want?

Then I could invite Architectural Digest in to photograph my synthetic area rug from Lowe’s and the good downstairs recliner.

I’m not great with money, but I don’t see myself auctioning off private planes and gold chains to pay my creditors. I should be able to avoid getting a real job. I hope so. If I ever have to sell this farm, it will most likely be because I am too old to maintain it personally.

I hope I continue to improve, increasing my income and net worth while having the privilege of giving effectively to people who need help.

Feast, my Darlings

Are Italians really as Italian as people think they are?

My wife and I went to Mexico, a place known for emotionalism, tardiness, poverty, dishonesty, and laziness. Our hotel was not perfect, but it was pretty clean, the staff was helpful and efficient, and the security was good. Now we are looking at Florence and Rome. I wasn’t able to find a single hotel that didn’t have scary reviews, so we are shooting for Airbnb instead.

Italians suffer from the same basic stereotypes as Mexicans, except that you are less likely to be kidnapped by the police in Italy. Are the stereotypes justified?

I have traveled a lot over the last three years, and I rely on reviews, for whatever they’re worth. One thing I know is this: if a business has 3,000 reviews and a near-perfect rating, you ignore the good reviews and read the bad ones. Read the ones that start with phrases like, “I can’t understand all the good reviews.” This is what I did while looking for Italian hotels.

I looked at hotels under a certain price. Repeatedly, I saw complaints about bad smells, nonfunctional air conditioning, noise, rude staff, violent staff, dirty rooms, bedbugs, bait and switch games, and elevators that didn’t exist or only went part of the way to rooms. I figured I was being too cheap. I looked for rooms that cost more. Same hotels with the same reviews. I could not find anything that looked acceptable, and I was willing to pay $400 per night.

Here’s the worst thing I saw: hotel proprietors routinely insulted and argued with guests who left bad reviews. Some apologized and said they would try to do better, but many, many reacted like, well, like Italians.

If you’re going to insult and belittle your customers and accuse them of lying on the Internet, where the world can see it, what will you do in private when new guests arrive?

When you look at bad reviews for Swiss hotels, you see a different picture. The clerk didn’t want to provide extra towels. The room was small. The hotel was too far from the train station. No one complains about stained sheets, reservations canceled without notice, or sewage smells.

We went to Egypt and picked a hotel and a cruise ship off the web. The hotel was clean and spacious. The bathrooms were fantastic. They had bidets. The food was pretty good. The staff was nice. There was no noise. The ship was clean. The staff was wonderful. The food was better than the hotel food.

We went to Turkey. The hotel could not have been much better. Everything was spotless. The beds were huge and comfortable. The bathrooms were worthy of the nation that invented the Turkish bath.

Egypt and Turkey. These are not blue ribbon destinations. Egypt is a second world country, and if Turkey is first world, it’s not high on the list. Italy is held out to be a real country, like Germany. How come they can’t run decent hotels?

I considered giving up on Italy, but…it’s Italy. You can’t take the Ponte Vecchio and the Coliseum and move them to a nation where the hotels are clean. Italy was the hub of Renaissance art. The art is still there. If you want to see it, you have to risk sleeping with the bedbugs.

If we go, we will use Airbnb. We’ve had good experiences with apartments in the past. You get to sit at a dinner table. You get to do laundry. You get a real refrigerator. You don’t get drunks screaming right outside your door all night or banging on it by mistake, trying to get inside for sex.

The general, but not ironclad, rule about stereotypes is that they don’t develop in a vacuum. No one complains about the Japanese being overemotional or dishonest. No one crosses the street upon seeing a big male Norwegian approach. The people complaining about Italian hotels surely have good reason for their critiques. Italians are fun people, and they live in a fun country, but if Egypt and Mexico are beating them, they need to shape up.

I did some research and learned that Rome has some excellent pizza shops, so I hope to hit at least one of them if we go.

In a few weeks, we will know if we have a visa.

Illegal Aliens Always Come First

The Italian Embassy in Zambia’s capital is pretty bad. Europe discriminates against honorable African tourist-visa applicants while, bizarrely, allowing itself to be overrun by undesirable African illegal immigrants who stay and commit crimes. Italy is totally on board with the mindless discrimination.

It’s a little weird when an African drug dealer or terrorist can travel to Italy without permission and be welcomed, while respectable people are barred. This is exactly what happens, however.

Back when my wife lived in Zambia, we wanted to visit Europe, and the lady in charge of visas told her she could not apply for a tourist visa until she had bought, not merely chosen, a flight to Italy. She also told her she would be granted a visa if she did this.

We bought tickets and submitted an application. Nothing happened. Long after the usual amount of time required for a decision had passed, she went to the embassy. The lady didn’t even meet with her. She yelled at her through a doorway and told her she was rejected. She was very rude, and she denied that she had ever promised us a visa.

We lost hundreds of dollars on my wife’s ticket, which had to be cashed in. United Airlines gave me a credit for mine. I still have not used it. It’s time to use it or lose it, because the deadline is three weeks off.

Now we have to choose: do we go to Mexico and get my wife some dental care, or do we go to Greece or Switzerland, where we would actually enjoy ourselves?

Mexico is a hot destination for Americans who need pricey dental work. My friend Mike has been there several times. There is an extraordinary clinic staffed with American-trained dentists, and they charge so much less that American dentists, you can pay for a trip and still come out far ahead.

It’s not a run-down place with prostitutes lingering outside the front door. Patients rave about it. It’s a seamless, professional operation. Having investigated it, I would rather have my teeth fixed there than here in Florida. I don’t have any real dental problems, so I’ll keep going to my local dentist, but if I did, I’d be on a plane.

I don’t want to go to Mexico. I think it’s a destination that appeals to the shallow. Most visitors go to beaches. I have never understood why beaches appeal to people. You fry in the sun, doing absolutely nothing, bored out of your skull. You can fish if you want. Afterward, you go to bars and get drunk on Corona and tequila, one of the lowest forms of alcoholic beverage. You’re constantly in danger of being robbed or worse. The police are just organized criminals, and government officials are pretty much the same thing. The cultural scene is awful. You can go see a couple of pyramids where they used to tear people’s hearts out, and that’s about it.

Contrast this with Paris. Paris has the Louvre, the Beaubourg, fantastic food, spectacular European weather, Versailles, the Eiffel Tower, what’s left of Notre Dame after restorers burned it down, walks by the Seine, Montmartre…I could spend all day writing about it. Sure, there are ghettos full of vicious Muslim thugs who are extremely dangerous and beyond the control of the police, but you don’t have to go to those places.

That’s just Paris. All over the world, there are other great destinations that beat Mexico to death.

Mexico is only appealing because it’s cheap. No one ever said, “I have more money than I know what to do with, and instead of Florence, I’m going to Mexico this year.”

Mexico is not a place I have ever wanted to visit, but my wife has a missing tooth. We can get that replaced for $1500 in Mexico. It would cost at least twice that here, and we wouldn’t even be able to say we saw a pyramid.

Why am I mentioning Paris and Greece as places to go? Because European nations make it very hard for green card holders to get visas. They seriously expect them to apply in person. Here are lists of countries and the places where they expect you to apply:

Austria – VFS Houston, Miami, DC
Czechia – DC
Denmark – VFS DC
Finland – DC
Germany – VFS Miami
Italy – VFS Miami
Luxembourg – DC
Netherlands – VFS Miami
Norway – VFS DC
Poland – DC
Sweden – VFS DC

Belgium – Atlanta
England – VFS Atlanta
France – VFS Atlanta
Greece – Tampa
Switzerland – Atlanta

VFS is a company that processes visas.

I broke this into two lists because there is zero possibility we will ever apply at the locations in the first list.

I would not go to Miami again unless Yeshua himself told me to meet him there. I literally–not figuratively–feel a little sick just thinking about it. I don’t like driving to Orlando and Tampa because when I do, I keep seeing signs showing I’m getting closer to el infierno pequeño.

Forget it, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands.

Washington D.C. is not even worth talking about. I’m not going to take a $1500 trip just to find out if the Europeans there are as bigoted as the ones in Africa.

Atlanta is doable. It’s about a 6-hour drive. The countries that operate out of Atlanta are good destinations, although Belgium is only good because if you’re in Belgium, it’s a short train ride to somewhere else.

Greece makes more sense than any other country, because Tampa is not far away, and once you’re in Greece, you can go anywhere you like in the Schengen area.

England is probably a good destination. Great history. For me, the appeal is weak because the British have changed. Seems like every third word out of their mouths is something filthy, and the problem extends to educated people. Americans used to admire their manners. The way things are now, forget that. I’m afraid that if we go over there, we will be subjected to a constant torrent of sex-related and scatological slang.

I rarely hear profanity from human beings (not screens) where I am. Generally, I hear it when I drop something or injure myself.

When I was a kibbutz volunteer, I arrived shortly after the departure of a bunch of British kids. Relations between kibbutzniks and volunteers were very bad. I don’t know what the problem was, but the British kids had shaved their heads to remind the Jews of the death camps, and one of them attacked the old man who managed the volunteers, beating him over the head with a soccer cleat. That memory makes me less inclined to visit England. Guy Ritchie movies don’t help.

We’ve been to Ireland, which is a lot like England. The cities were dumpy and something of a downer. The food was bad. Even the Irish food was bad. The people were great, except for the scary gypsies who lurked on O’Connell Street and attacked tourists. I have this feeling that England will be similar, except that the people in the cities will probably be less nice.

My take on Ireland, as I have said before, is that it looks like a nice place to live, but I wouldn’t want to visit.

If you live in Ireland, you can cook for yourself. Tourists are not so blessed.

I think the best thing to do is to forget Mexico and see what Greece will do for us. The food is great there. The history is unexcelled. The people were very nice when I visited. And we could leave after a few days and go to countries that won’t let us visit directly.

I’ll contact Greeks and see if they will do the right thing instead of putting on a virtue-signaling show and then turning us down without actually reviewing our application.

You Will Dwell in a Land of Walmarts and Chick-fil-A’s

Life here continues to amaze.

My wife and I have been painting the inside of our house. Today we did some other things. We ordered bedroom furniture and had a fantastic Italian meal at a local restaurant run and staffed by Mexicans.

As we were walking into the furniture store to place our order, I told my wife furniture stores would look a whole lot different if there were no women. Mattresses, recliners and maybe some breakfast tables. That’s all we need.

We went with Amish furniture. This is a type of furniture which is popular these days. It looks very good without actually being made of quality wood. They use alder, a second-tier wood, and put wonderful finishes on it. Are the builders really Amish? Well, they clearly use a lot of power tools, so no.

I mean, they could be Amish. They could be like the Orthodox Jews who spend most of their time trying to figure out how to disobey God. “You can’t turn the heat on on the Sabbath!” “Okay, we’ll hire gentiles to do it!” “We can’t carry stuff on the Sabbath outside our homes!” “Okay, we’ll put a tiny wire around our area and pretend it’s an enclosure, which we’ll pretend is a home!”

Oh, boy. Why can’t they figure out a way to justify bacon?

Maybe the Amish have figured out how to run power tools while pretending they’re not running power tools.

Anyway, we are getting Amish furniture. Good wood is too expensive. I’m not blowing $10,000 on a bedroom.

We looked for used stuff, but there are some problems with that. My wife insists on a king size bed, and they were not popular back when ordinary people owned real furniture. Also, when things turn up, they tend to be huge and ostentatious. Like Oskar Schindler’s stolen bed in the movie.

It’s sad, because you can get quality used furniture for much less than you would pay for new “Amish” furniture.

I don’t know why we can’t get good wood. Russia and China are giant reservoirs of hardwoods. I think. Maybe it’s just Russia.

Our bed will be made of dozens of tiny alder planks glued up into panels. The big trees are gone.

Without getting into TMI material, I will say we need a big bed because a certain person thrashes around all night and throws elbows.

We need a couple of couches. Looks like we’ll be paying at least $5K for those. I want reclining couches. I’ve thought it over. We will never have a hoity-toity Architectural Digest home because I refuse to be afraid of my own furnishings. I refuse to have furniture I’m afraid to sit on all day, with or without pizza and beverages. And we expect to have kids. I’m not stupid enough to put a kid on a $7000 couch.

Reclining couches are not all that chic, and they will clash with the traditional style of the house. Tough. We’re getting them.

I found out most reclining chairs and couches are built to fail in 5 years. The industry couch-stuffing standard is something called 1.8-pound foam. If you want a couch to last, you need 2.5-pound foam. We can pay $2500 for couches the manufacturer fully expects to be junk in 2029, or we can pay considerably more for couches that will make it to 2034.

If you buy a La-Z-Boy reclining couch, you have two options. The reasonably-priced one La-Z-Boy knows will collapse in a hurry, or the one that costs $500 more and lasts twice as long. La-Z-Boy isn’t very honest about it, but they do let people know they can “upgrade” their couches.

Their policy is a problem, because retailers other than La-Z-Boy appear to be unwilling to add the optional padding. Other retailers sell La-Z-Boy cheaper than La-Z-Boy, so if you want the padding, you probably have to go to a La-Z-Boy showroom and pay full retail, on top of shelling out for the foam they should give you by default.

Is La-Z-Boy a good brand? Not really, but there really aren’t many good brands. Companies that were great 5 years ago now sell Chinese junk. Oddly, there is now a Chinese company that sells excellent recliners. It’s called Hydeline. American companies ruined their reputations by selling Chinese garbage, and the Chinese themselves fixed the problem. Really nice.

Hooker. Bradington Young. Go ahead and tell me about the great company that made your recliner, thinking I don’t know about it. I’ve looked them all up. The wonderful chair you bought in 2015 is probably not available now. Best you can do is a copy full of flimsy foam.

I don’t really like Hydeline couches. They don’t look great, and they don’t come in fabric. I may give up and go with La-Z-Boy.

Fabric is actually better than leather. It costs less. It breathes. It’s more comfortable. It’s less likely to be destroyed by spills.

In the far past, leather was for peasants and fabric was for patricians. If you bought an expensive limousine, the driver sat on leather, out in the weather, and you sat inside on fabric. Look it up. Things have changed, and modern people have no idea they’re paying extra for servant trappings.

I’d like to have a leather chair and two fabric couches. Maybe we’ll find what we want.

I love our mattress. It’s a Novaform I got at Costco for my dad. When he died, I cleaned it to surgical standards, and now we use it. I want another foam mattress. They are fantastic. I would never have another pre-2000-technology mattress.

Foam mattresses don’t need box springs. I’m not actually sure why any mattress needs one, but anyway, I want a mattress that sits right on a wooden platform. Foam gives perfect support. It’s cool, which is nice in Florida. It comes with a cover you can take off and submerge in cleaning solution if something bad happens. And it’s cheap.

My mattress cost $500, and it’s still not too far from that. It has a 20-year warranty. I want one as much like it as possible.

At one time, I somehow ended up sleeping on a conventional Sealy mattress my mother had paid over $2000 for. I threw it out. It was like a concrete sidewalk. Never again. If I can get something better for about $500, and it will last 20 years, I’m all over it. If it doesn’t work out, and I can’t return it, I can buy a different $500 mattress the following year and not worry about it.

I like a nice mushy mattress. I don’t know how people sleep on hard ones. What I really like is a somewhat firm mattress with a layer of mushy stuff on top.

Today we went to Sam’s Club to look at their signature foam mattress. I figured we could lie on one so my wife could put it up against her princess genes to prevent her from finding problems with it after purchase. No such luck. Sam’s Club sells mattresses they won’t let you try. But they guarantee them. They must have a huge markup, like conventional mattresses. If they’re willing to pay you to take a nearly-new mattress to the dump and pay you for it, instead of letting you try it in the store, they can’t have paid more than 50 bucks for it.

We left without a mattress. We also went to TJ Maxx so my wife could look at 4,000 pairs of cheap shoes.

So that’s what we did today.

We drove home in the twilight on I-75. It was beautiful out. The temperature was 68 degrees. The sky was kind of a dark lavender above, with darker purple near the horizon. The trailers on the big trucks seemed to shine like silver tea services. The taillights gleamed like backlit rubies. Very odd. I commented on this to my wife, and she agreed.

I told her I had the feeling this area was like a farm where God raised people like livestock. Everything was provided for us. Life was easy. Lots of stores. Not much traffic. Enough good restaurants for a reasonable person. Great people.

She agreed. We are very sheltered.

We talked about our marriage. People told us things would get worse when we were together day after day, but the opposite happened. We had a little friction on a couple of our trips, but here, things go smoother and smoother with the passage of time. We enjoy each other more. We’re not just mates. We’re buddies.

We went home, and I looked at X and saw lunatics making death threats toward conservatives. I saw men trying to breastfeed. It was like spying on a planet where a virus had made everyone insane. I felt like Gulliver checking out the Yahoos.

People are hopeless and angry now. Their lives are falling apart. They’re waiting for civil war. Some look forward to it. They go home and watch violent movies and listen to ghetto whores singing about their vaginas. They go to work and get pushed around by perverts who insist they lie about their genders or get written up.

It’s different with us.

Prayer in tongues is what makes the difference. The more you do it, the more you will be aligned with God and others who pray in tongues. I wake up at night and hear my wife praying and singing in the master closet. I wake up in the morning and pray in tongues silently while she sleeps next to me. It works. God has graciously given us the ability to make ourselves do it.

I believe God moves people away from Yahoos as they draw closer to him. I believe he pushes people into lower circumstances as they move away. I think prisons are full of people who are far from God. They are moving toward hell, and prisons are about as close to hell as you can get while you’re alive.

I think God moves Spirit-filled, cooperative people to places like the county where I live. Maybe there is a nicer county we’ll be moved to if we keep cooperating. Eventually, we will be raptured to an even better place, or we will die and go to heaven. That’s how it looks to me.

I don’t believe people who are really close to God and highly informed live in defeat. The Bible says such people are blessed and victorious. How can you be victorious if you live in defeat?

I hear singing right now.

I’m not claiming we’re good people. There are no good people. We are rewarded for listening and cooperating, not for perfection.

Time to have a beer and see what the wife is up to. I hope God sees fit to keep us separated from the insanity.

Seems Like no One Knows the Truth About Anything

I was praying with my wife yesterday morning, and I got off on the topic of the concealment of the truth. When I pray, I don’t just ask for stuff. I make statements. I was asking God to tell us what to do about something, which means I was asking to know the truth, and I started talking about the way the world now swims in lies.

One of the biggest areas of deception and concealment is that of coronavirus. We don’t know much of the truth at all.

1. Do the vaccines work? At first, people like Joe Biden and Rachel Maddow told us they were 100% effective. Then we heard figures like 90%. Then we heard that every person on Earth could expect to get infected, vaccinated or not. When the vaccines started looking bad, they told us that while they might not prevent infection, they would absolutely, definitely prevent every recipient from getting very sick and dying, and then they told us countless vaccinated people had died or at least become terribly ill.

2. Do the masks work? No; not at all. That’s what they said at first. Then they said they worked very well. Now they say this: no; not at all. Nearly.

3. Do vaccines hurt people? No; not at all. Almost never, they said. Then young people started dropping dead in such numbers it significantly affected official excess death figures. They said this had nothing to do with coronavirus vaccines. It had to be related to all those other giant health crises that occurred right after the end of 2019. A lot of journalists and officials still deny that vaccines do harm, but simultaneously, the CDC says this:

[E]vidence from multiple vaccine safety monitoring systems in the United States and around the globe supports a causal association between mRNA COVID-19 vaccines (i.e., Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech) and myocarditis and pericarditis.

Oooooooookay.

The other day, I read that a vaccinated baby’s risk of heart problems from covid vaccination is about 2.2%. The risk of symptomatic coronavirus infection is almost too low to measure. It is essentially zero. But people gave their babies shots anyway.

A rate of 2.2% is not small. It’s astronomical. Imagine this: you see a table covered with hundred-dollar bills on a city street, and a sign over it says, “Over one in fifty people who take a hundred-dollar bill will get myocarditis.” Would you take the money? Would you drive if getting in your car carried a 2.2% chance of myocarditis?

People can be really stupid about probability. We tend to think a low risk is the same thing as complete safety.

How many babies have had mRNA shots? Let’s say it’s a million, which is not unreasonable and could be low. That’s 22,000 babies with heart problems.

How many babies have had serious problems with coronavirus? Virtually none. And doctors knew coronavirus was not a serious threat to babies before they shot a bunch of them full of experimental vaccines which HAVE given many of then heart problems.

Pretending the 22,000 figure is correct, did we kill or seriously harm 22,000 babies in order to save a couple of dozen freak babies who somehow managed to get severe covid?

Right now, leftists are busy trying to put out the sudden-death fire, and maybe they will succeed, because they distort and control information, just like their spiritual siblings in North Korea and China. When stories come out, they say dumb things like, “Anecdotal! Anecdotal!” Our knowledge of the plagues that ravaged Europe is mostly anecdotal. No one took statistics or set diagnostic standards. Was the plague imaginary?

Today, we have excess-death statistics compiled by scientists, and leftists are still saying evidence for vaccine-induced sudden deaths is anecdotal.

How do you make it NOT anecdotal? How do you prove myocarditis and pericarditis are NOT caused by covid? Is that even possible? Does the body of a 14-year-old killed by vaccine myocarditis look different from the body of one whose cardiac arrest was caused by some other problem? Journalists and people in the medical/pharmaceutical/government complex should tell us instead of presenting us with their self-serving conclusions.

What if 10 million people died from heart inflammation next month? Would they keep telling us not to connect the dots?

How do we know the risk to babies is 2.2%? That’s a hell of a question. Aren’t most cases undiagnosed? It’s pretty obvious that vaccine heart damage sometimes has no symptoms until victims drop dead. If it always came with symptoms, the deaths wouldn’t happen on basketball courts. They’d happen in hospitals, where victims would go after feeling ill.

There is no way we’re detecting all of them. What if the rate is 10%, and 2.2% represents the number we have proven to exist? I haven’t seen anyone address this, possibly because journalists are generally too stupid to deal with math and science.

Disease cases are like cockroaches. If you see one, there may be lots of others you can’t see.

When I brought up the concealment of the truth in prayer, I wasn’t thinking mainly about coronavirus. I was thinking about low-carb diets. I was asking God to tell us whether we should try them.

My wife got here two months ago, and we have been exploring American food opportunities pretty thoroughly. She is concerned about her weight, and I am not all that happy about mine. Somehow, I came across a video of Jordan Peterson telling the world he only ate beef.

I had no idea there was an all-meat diet. It sounds like a leftist caricature of the Atkins diet.

When I was a kid, a bunch of lobbyists created what we called the Food Pyramid. It told us what to eat. We were to eat a lot of the stuff on the bottom level, and progressively less as the levels got smaller.

Nobody told us food industry lobbyists shaped the pyramid, but it’s true. One would think doctors would have had a say, but our government listened to people who grew grain. As a result, with no evidence whatsoever, people in authority started telling us to pump ourselves up with grain, like beef cattle. And doctors went along with it, which is very weird.

They also told us to go easy on meat. I have no idea why, since meat also had lobbyists. I guess the grain lobbyists spent more money.

Doc Atkins popped up and told the world this was all wrong, and he was right. He said we needed to limit carbs and eat all the meat, eggs, and cheese we wanted.

He was called a quack, and the medical establishment reviled him. Darn those lobbyists.

He told us excess carbohydrates made us insulin resistant, so we craved carbs and stored fat. Other doctors hooted like contemptuous baboons.

Now, mainstream doctors tell us about the dangers of insulin resistance. But they still push carb-heavy diets. They love vegetarianism, a bizarre and unnatural practice that didn’t exist until relatively recently in man’s history.

Doctors still tell us fat is bad, even though the science that condemned it has been debunked or at least stripped of most of its luster.

Doctors literally told us how to get fat and die sooner, but they claimed they were really telling us how to get slim and healthy. Now we’re supposed to believe them when they can’t agree on their stories.

Jordan Peterson says he eats only beef. Not “meat.” Beef. That’s how far-out he is. He says he has gone from 212 pounds to 165. He says his eye floaters and gum problems vanished. He says his lifelong depression went away. He builds muscle easily. He says he sleeps better and thinks more clearly now.

Is it true? I think so. He looks like an obsessive runner, even though he isn’t. His skin looks great. His mind is sharp. He has no reason to lie. No one is paying him.

I listened to him, and I looked around the web. I started thinking my wife and I ought to go zero-carb for a few days to detox from all the pizza and cookies and bread we’ve been eating. I don’t think we should go carnivore, because even if it works, I am not willing to make the sacrifice.

When I was in law school, I went a very long time eating almost no carbs. I lost something like 25 pounds, eating as much as I wanted. I was strong. I maxed out most of the machines where I worked out. People said I would have no endurance, but I used to ride an exercise bike for 45 minutes with my heart rate at 168. I know low-carbing works for me, but I’m not going all the way. Sometimes I have to have a pizza.

Today I got up and ate 6 fried eggs with 6 slices of bacon and 3 slices of American cheese. I feel very, very good. I don’t know why, but when I skip carbs, I always feel peaceful.

I think I’ll go two more days, and then we may start eating meat and non-starchy vegetables 6 days per week, with a break on Saturday to keep us from going insane.

The annoying thing is that people are so dishonest and agenda-driven, I can’t get good information about low-carb diets. And oddly, the lines seem to be drawn between leftists, who reject God, and people who accept him. You don’t really see many left-wing low-carbers. In fact, it’s much more common to see leftists who are enraged by low-carbing. That’s bizarre, but it’s true.

There seems to be a connection between hatred of God and love of vegetarianism. Hitler was a vegetarian. A lot of really annoying godless Hollywood performers are vegetarians. PETA nuts hate Christianity, and look at their diets.

Abel pleased God. He raised and slaughtered sheep. He presented God with the blood of innocent creatures whose throats he had cut, and God was happy with him. Cain raised plants, and he had the gall to present God with produce. When God corrected him, instead of taking the hint, he murdered Abel, and he was cursed for it.

God has always been a proponent of killing animals and meat eating. He had Abraham cut animals up for the covenant of the pieces. He let Abraham cook a goat for him, and he ate it. He had Elijah set out a dead steer for him, and he sent fire to devour it. He forced the Jews to eat meat once a year on Passover. Vegetarianism was a sin to the Jews. He established a sacrificial system that essentially turned the temple into a barbecue factory.

If you could go back in time to the temple, the first thing you would notice would be the delicious smell of meat being roasted. It was there all the time, because sacrifices took place every day. A lot of sacrifices. Birds. Goats. Sheep. Cattle. The Bible says God loves the sweet smell of burning meat.

Jesus ate meat. He told his disciples to eat his flesh and drink his blood. He was called the lamb of God.

God told Peter to kill unclean animals and eat.

It’s pretty clear that God has no interest in veganism. God eats meat, and so should we.

I wish we lived in a world where people told the truth, so I could get good dietary advice everyone agrees on, but that is not possible. Human beings are too crooked. You can’t believe anything they say.

I don’t believe the people who say you should never eat plants, and I definitely don’t believe the creepy, self-righteous zealots who get angry at people who eat meat. I will continue eating meat, and I doubt I’ll ever go carnivore.

Maybe You Should Move

Sometimes I think about the people I went to high school with, and I wonder how different their lifestyles are from mine. A lot of them are surgeons and other types of doctors. Some are lawyers. Some are professional heirs, like the kids who inherited the Lennar fortune and the Mexican guy whose father was a real estate tycoon.

One blew his brains out at 25, after getting his MD. Another died while diving drunk. Another wandered off from a climbing team, fell into a crevasse in the Himalayas, and was left there. One former friend jumped off a bridge in San Diego because he was upset about his own homosexuality.

I’m sure many are driving leased foreign cars they turn in every year or two. They live in high-priced homes in Miami or around other big cities. They must have a lot of expensive jewelry. The women must have bags that cost four figures. I’m sure most of them hate Donald Trump and have low opinions of people who live in rural areas and vote for people who support Israel and the church.

A lot of them vacation in places like Vail, New York, and Paris. Surely.

I went to the best prep school in Florida, and our student body was around 50% Jewish. People don’t like to hear it, but Jews really are smarter than the rest of us. It was normal for about 10% of a graduating class to be Merit Scholars. A lot of people, like me, went off to Ivy League schools. People who ended up at places like the University of Miami were pitied.

I ended up getting two degrees from UM, so I slid into the loser demographic.

I live on a farm. I do nothing. I wear T-shirts and Carhartt pants every single day. I wear wool socks even in summer. I wear hiking shoes or work boots all the time.

I have a Ford and a Dodge Cummins. I shoot high-powered rifles in my backyard. I think DeSantis is the greatest governor who ever lived. I smoke ribs and brew beer. I have a very smart wife with two degrees who does all my housekeeping. She has no career. The thought of getting a job disturbs her. She loves her situation.

We go to restaurants like Sonny’s BBQ and an incredible Italian place run by Mexicans. They put it in a Pizza Hut that went out of business. You can tell it used to be a chain restaurant.

My wife buys clothes at Walmart and on Amazon. I wonder how many of my classmates would would wear Walmart clothes. One of these days we’ll go to Orlando and hit some of the nicer stores, but we have not done it yet.

She wears dresses. I think she is the only wife in America who wears dresses. When we go out, she looks like royalty compared to the other girls. American women have given up. When we walk around in the grocery store, it looks like the lady who inherited it has shown up to check up on her employees.

Single ladies, if you want to impress men, wear dresses. And I don’t mean short cocktail dresses that make you look like escorts.

I know not all of my classmates are successful, but many are, and they are generally leftists. One ran Planned Parenthood in Miami. I think most would find my lifestyle ridiculous.

Meanwhile, the wife and I are having a wonderful time, and we don’t worry about the kinds of things they worry about. Marital problems that come from marrying without God’s help, for shallow reasons. Debt from trying to impress other people. Job stress. Stress from dealing with coarse, selfish, malicious blue-city types. Boys who want to be castrated. Girls who have themselves skinned in order to make ridiculous fake penises.

We love the area we live in. I love it more than my wife, because I have lived in blue cities, and I know they are hellholes of damnation and rage.

The people here could not be nicer. I have been here almost 7 glorious years, and they still surprise me.

This is a county full of tradesmen and farmers. There are not a lot of educated people here. You wouldn’t want to go to the barber shop and toss off a reference to T.S. Eliot. There are a lot of tattoos. People drink bad beer. I don’t care. They’re fantastic. It’s a privilege to live among them.

I used to think people were like this in Eastern Kentucky, where my parents were born. They’re not. Not all Southerners are the same. In Eastern Kentucky, people are selfish. Stingy. They don’t tip. They are racist. They are very angry. They treat adultery as though it were a competitive sport. They shoot each other over nothing. They neglect and degrade their kids. They drink like crazy. They love drugs. They have very short tempers. They love ignorance. Childish people.

They’re nice on the surface, but the nice layer is very thin and fragile.

Of course, I’m generalizing. I’m not God. I can’t tell you what every person there is like, and if I could, you wouldn’t be able to absorb it. Human beings are limited. We have to generalize, and it’s a good thing. It works.

I had to go to Kentucky for my dad’s funeral, and my second cousin, who is a very nice, proper lady, told me she had told her kids to get out. She said there was nothing for them there.

My aunt says I’m ashamed of my people. Well, I’m definitely ashamed of her, if that counts. I have good reason. I’m ashamed of her son, too. He has done disgraceful things.

She boosts Eastern Kentucky like it was Wakanda. She’s like a black ghetto matriarch who insists her people are brilliant, virtuous victims whose problems are caused by predatory outsiders. No; sorry. They’re trashy. They bring it all on themselves. A lifestyle of drunkenness, adultery, divorce, invertebrate-level parenting, racism, willful ignorance, and persecution of people who better themselves is always going to lead to poverty.

Eastern Kentucky’s poverty is right and normal. It’s what’s supposed to happen to people who act the way they do. Everything is going as it should, under the circumstances.

Leftists up there love to say people like Carnegie came in and stole the coal, keeping the area poor. No; the people who owned it were ignorant and weak, and that was their own fault. If they had been better people, they would have kept the coal and the profits.

Look at Texas and oil. BAM. What’s their answer to that?

Texas is full of rich people whose ancestors were poor landowners. Kentucky is full of coal truck drivers whose ancestors sold their coal to people who went to school.

I guess it’s silly to talk about coal as though it were still important. Democrats killed it, and people in Eastern Kentucky voted for them because they love government handouts more than prosperity. I don’t know what coal truck drivers do for a living now. Maybe they’re all growing dope. They’re definitely not going to work in all those profitable businesses Eastern Kentuckians never built.

You could make a pretty long list of oil billionaires from Texas. Forbes says there are 45. Here’s a complete list of all the Eastern Kentucky coal billionaires who ever lived:

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BAM.

I was flim-flammed when I was a kid. I thought Kentucky was paradise, and I thought the people were better than Miami people, who are unbearable. It’s actually a wash, or maybe I’d give the edge to Miami.

I feel like apologizing to God for being fooled.

Anyway, I started writing today to tell about a restaurant I discovered recently. I’ve known about it for a long time, and I got takeout once a few years ago, but I never went inside until a few days back. They didn’t accept credit cards when I moved here, so I formed a habit of driving past. They changed their policy, so now I’m not discouraged from going in.

It’s a pizza place. Plain old red-and-white Italian food. Spaghetti, ziti, and lasagna.

I went in with my buddy Mike, and I was very impressed.

It’s probably the cleanest restaurant I’ve ever seen. I was not able to see a speck of debris anywhere. It looked like it had been gone over by a professional crew the day before. Restaurants here tend to have dirty floors and greasy menus, but this one was like an operating room. I marveled at it, and that is not an exaggeration.

The staff was very nice, and they were sharp. They got things done.

The food was okay. That’s all I can say about it. They need to get better cheese, and they should look into Stanislaus tomato products. But it’s okay. It’s reasonably good, and it’s close and cheap.

They had blinds on all the windows, and they were all pulled down. I couldn’t see out. I felt like I was in a spaceship on the way to heaven.

I’ve eaten there twice in the last week.

The last time we visited, Mike and I spent a lot of time talking about God, and while we were talking, I heard a waitress talking behind him. She was standing in the aisle with her hand on a customer’s shoulder. He was telling her something. A testimony. Something good had happened. I didn’t hear what.

She started saying, “Thank you, JESUS. Thank you, JESUS.” Everyone in the place heard it. She didn’t seem to think about that at all. No one looked up. No dirty looks. It was business as usual.

Wonderful. No wonder the restaurant is in such good order. They acknowledge God.

Not everyone here is like that, and there are a lot of dirty, disappointing restaurants, but there are lots of very serious Christians here. They even play Christian music over the speakers in chain stores and restaurants.

God has been so good to my wife and me. It is confusing.

The presence of God and Christians is something you can’t appreciate or miss until you have experienced it. You have to live in a place like this and a place like New York before you understand how much better Christian areas are. God was right. All the things he told us in the Bible were right. His ways work, and the filthy leftist ways that predominate in America are like AIDS and syphilis, rotting people as they stand.

Never doubt it. Never let them gaslight you. Never take advice from losers.

Experiences like this make me hate this world even more. In my prayers, I beg God to bring the rapture soon. Imagine living in a place where everyone agrees about everything. Everyone is bathed in love, continuously. In heaven, you won’t need guns, locks, passwords, cops, antivirus programs, medicines, surgeries…it won’t be like the earth, where trillions of creatures are out to get you every second of your life. On Earth during the millennium, there will still be some evil, but it will be a place of rest and peace and love.