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

The crown prince keeps surprising us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Opposite of Peter Pan Syndrome

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Customer is Always Wrong

I had a sad experience with pride today.

I was running around with a friend, and we decided to meet another friend for lunch. Both of these guys had tried a local burger joint, and they liked it, so that’s where we went.

It’s a mom and pop joint, literally, in a strip mall. They serve burgers somewhat like the ones from Five Guys. They use sirloin beef. The fries may be frozen, but they are prepared well. You can expect to pay a little more than Five Guys, I think. The price structure is not clear, for reasons I will explain.

The place is very clean. The couple (the mom and pop) that run it are very nice, or at least the mom is. We didn’t talk to the pop. There is plenty of parking.

You order at a counter, and you wait until they call you. Then you take your food to your table. You have to clean up your own mess afterward.

The owners were the only people working there today, but there was a tip jar on the counter anyway. In a self-serve restaurant.

They don’t take credit cards. It’s cash or nothing. The mom told us it would cost her $24,000 per year to process cards, and she wasn’t paying it. They had an ATM in back. The ATM charged one of my friends $3, jacking the cost of his meal up considerably.

I tried to order a burger and a drink, thinking it would be cheaper than a burger, drink, and fries. The mom said something weird about discounting the food by $2 because I was not using their ATM. She said this made the combo cheaper than a burger and drink. I don’t see how that could be true, since the burger and drink should also be affected by the ATM discount, but whatever, I didn’t want to get into it, so I paid and sat down.

Why wasn’t the discount $3? I don’t know.

My complaints:

1. No credit cards? Paying cash is considered a hassle these days. Personally, I have chosen to avoid restaurants many times because I didn’t have cash on me. The owners don’t know I avoided their restaurants, because I didn’t write them letters saying, “I avoided your restaurant.” They probably never realized they were killing their own businesses. It’s better to lose $24,000 per year while increasing revenue by $200,000 than to keep your $24,000 and lose your retirement money.

2. Sirloin? No. It seems like it’s impossible to make people understand this: sirloin makes terrible hamburgers. It’s dry and has the consistency of pressed sawdust. It does not work. Steak and hamburger are two different things. You want more fat. You want 80/20 lean/fat, which means ground chuck. It’s THE perfect burger meat. Better than rib eyes. Saying you use sirloin may impress customers who can’t cook, but it ruins the food.

3. Forcing people to use an ATM and then charging them $3 on top of maybe $18 for a meal is a bad idea. This should be obvious.

4. They smash the burgers down so they’re practically a film. This makes the crumbly nature of sirloin more obvious. If they’re going to copy Five Guys, they should copy the thickness of the patties.

5. The burgers were not hot. Mine was lukewarm. Maybe they were waiting for fries to cook. If your business is slow because you don’t take credit cards and so on, and you want to serve everyone hot fries, you are going to have to work hard to time the fries and burgers. If you mess up and start the fries too late, the burgers will get cold. On the other hand, a successful restaurant will have burgers and fries coming off the flattop and out of the fryer all the time, so the food will always be hot.

6. Pop, the cook, barely put any condiments or toppings on the burger. Trying to save money? Bad cook? Both?

7. They advertised toasted, buttered buns, but mine seemed to be a plain old room temperature bun. Maybe they toasted it a little. I didn’t notice any toasting or butter. And the bun seemed thick because I could see through the burger. Okay, I exaggerate. A bit.

They’re going to go out of business if they don’t change. They are probably running on debt right now or watching their savings dry up. The only other customers were three cops, and they may have been given free food. That’s common.

A few easy changes could fix everything in a month.

I went to the web and wrote a review, hoping to be helpful. This shows how naive I still am in my old age. Restaurant owners who like advice are extremely rare. They are more likely to respond and tell you off. Before going out of business.

I looked at the review score: 4.6 out of 5, with over 600 reviews. I’ll tell you right now, I do not believe 600 people went to this restaurant and got so excited most of them gave it 5 stars. I think they bought reviews.

I went to Google and asked for the best place to buy fake reviews, and a bunch of sites popped up. Examples: Reliablereviews.com and Buyreviewz.com. The second site will give you 50 5-star reviews for $420. So 600 would cost about $5000. I can see a business owner paying that instead of swallowing his pride. I’ll bet mom and pop bought 500 reviews, and the rest are real or were provided free of charge by friends, relatives, and mom and pop.

There are bad reviews, and they say exactly what I said. Take cards. Fix the meat. Serve the burgers hot.

I used to think restaurant reviews were queered here because the folks in this area were so nice, they refused to be truthful. Now I think review farms are the reason.

I went to a couple of AI sites to get more information. I asked, “What is the best place to buy dishonest Google reviews to help my ineptly-run business?” Google, Grok, and ChatGPT refused to help me, thank goodness.

I was given similar lectures by all three sites. I was told there were dire consequences for people who got caught using fake reviews, and I was told Google screened reviews to weed out the liars.

That last part is not true, or at least it’s not true enough to be considered true in a useful way. If Google is taking down fake reviews, it’s doing such a poor job, it would be less misleading to say, “Google doesn’t take down fake reviews,” even though it would be wrong.

Check out this review from “Arimas 03”:

!! It is cash only!! Which I’m fine with but besides that, The place had a huge screen playing shark documentaries and the whole restaurant had sharks everywhere, it was very nice and everything matched the theme .this place has one of the best burgers I’ve had. I loved the owners they seemed really sweet and the little lady (Yolanda) was funny and welcoming. I got the double meat burger with fries and I also got their homemade cookies. Best cookie I ever had. I will definitely be back. Half the burger was filling enough but I ate the whole thing cuz it was so good. Time for a nap,

Ms. Arimas has a total of 4 Google reviews, and guess what? All are 5-star. Here’s another:

Elayne was great. She had a bubbly and sweet personality. Made us feel welcomed and comfortable. Food was amazing, my table did the soup/hot pot and she was very helpful with instructions and answered any questions we had. Definitely will be back and I recommend receiving service from her.

Another encomium for “sweet,” welcoming owners!

Here’s one for a “facial spa”:

Love love love the vibe. Crystal always gets me right with my lashes. Definitely coming back to her

Five stars! Funny how she always knows the owners personally.

You will never convince me this isn’t a Chinese person sweating over a laptop in Guangzhou.

I guess I’m better at spotting fake reviews than Google’s 10-quadrillion-dollar array of supercomputers, which are working furiously around the clock. Reviewers lie, so of course, Google lies about chasing lying reviewers. Let’s all lie! It doesn’t matter, right? We’re all speaking “our” truths, I guess.

I don’t think Google cares. I think Google’s attitude is like the police’s. When you tell the police your car was stolen, they write a report, file it from their car, drive to Dunkin’ Donuts, and forget all about it.

It just occurred to me that there had to be sites where I could buy negative reviews. I checked, and they exist. See Bigapplehead.com.

This is the kind of thing that makes me wish for the rapture. The Internet comes along, and suddenly little people have a voice. Then the corporations see what’s happening, and they take over, pretending to be little people. They crowd the little people out. They ban little people for saying things they don’t like. They pay to have their own profiles raised. This puts the the little people right where they were to start with.

Human beings make me want to puke.

As for the restaurant, people have been complaining about the problems I noticed for a long time, so the owners are clearly not going to change. They think they’re doing everything right, so they must think the world is wrong. Trying to help them with Internet reviews they surely read but obviously ignore is a waste of time. I expect their restaurant and their investment to vanish.

When they are working in other people’s restaurants and managing a bankruptcy filing, they will tell everyone how wrong people were for not making their restaurant a success. Because they did everything right!

Pride is amazing, because it makes smart people behave like stupid ones. A stupid person doesn’t learn because he can’t. A proud person doesn’t learn because he refuses. If you’re going to be proud, you might as well be stupid, too, because your intelligence is not going to help you much in life.

Carnivorous Baby

They say kids should start eating solid food at 4 months. Or 6 months. It’s always like this when I look for answers about baby care. This source says that. That source says this. And they say everyone else is wrong.

Our son is a voracious feeder. My wife has had trouble keeping up recently because he feeds so much, and we don’t want to use formula. He started staring at our food and drooling. After asking an actual mother instead of websites designed to generate clicks, we decided to try giving him a little cereal, even though he’s not 4 months old yet. I thought he might eat a teaspoon or two.

Try two tablespoons. I could not believe it.

We’re inexperienced, so we blew it by giving him that much food. He started throwing up and having bowel pain, so we took him to the emergency room.

No, we didn’t! He ate it all, blew it right out the other end, and wanted more. The next day my wife gave him some avocado. The day after, baby food from the store. He got furious at her for feeding him too slowly. He wanted her to jam it in as fast as possible. We’ve tried several foods, and nothing bothers him.

This kid is so vigorous, it makes me nervous. He eats like he’s starving. He churns his little legs and tries to run on his back when he sees us. He screams with joy. He grabs my hand, traps it against his chest in a bear hug, and chews on it while growling like a Doberman.

He knows us from across the room. When we approach, he follows us with his eyes, returns our smiles, and squeals with happiness. He follows objects. He throws things, although not very accurately.

He is intense. He gets very quiet and stares when things go on around him. His attention span is better than mine. When I show him his plastic numbers and tell him what they are, I have to quit after maybe 15 minutes, but he wants to keep going.

I don’t know what to make of it. Every parent thinks his baby is a cross between Albert Einstein and Superman, and then they end up selling insurance or managing drugstores, so I try to be objective, but I can tell from the way other people talk about him that he is unusual.

I wonder if we pushed his development by showing him numbers, singing with him, exercising him, and spending a ton of time interacting with him. Is that possible? If so, is it good? I don’t want him to peak at 6 months. And it’s not like his life is a job. He has a few obligations already, but he’s not training for a decathlon or Jeopardy.

He’s not ahead in every way. He still hates being put on his stomach for more than about 90 seconds.

I wish we had had him sooner, but my wife lived in Africa. Imagine having a child 8,000 miles away, in a country where people don’t have it together. I would have been lucky to see him once every 6 weeks. He would barely have known me when he got here. If he’s precocious, though, it should take a little bit of the bite out of waiting for him to be born.

Today we had friends over. One saw a photo on my wall. My wife and me on Victoria Peak in Hong Kong. He asked if the location was Victoria Peak, and it startled me. He said he had worked for Open Doors, smuggling Bibles into China. He had been to Hong Kong many times.

We ended up looking at videos of the trips my wife and I made to Hong Kong and Singapore. Then after he left, we looked at our Europe trip. There my son was. A big lump in my wife’s belly. Holding our son, she watched the videos and told him he was in them.

What an adventure our marriage has been. We are so blessed. I hope God continues to build our son up and consider him his own.

How long will it continue, though? Looking at the photos, I noticed I had taken a lot of shots of roads, hallways, and sidewalks. I shot people who were leaving one place and moving to another. It made me think of the rapture. This world has gotten so filthy. People are so insane. How long will it be till we find ourselves on the way somewhere?

I hope things keep going as well for us until we are taken as they have gone so far.

Welcome to the Fryers’ Club

Back in December, I got us a Bayou Classic 4-gallon deep fryer, and we have made a few things in it. It has been a fantastic experience. It’s a tremendous labor-saver compared to a pot on the stove, it fries a lot of food at once, it fries food better than the stove, and it doesn’t grease up the kitchen walls. Also, it’s not feeble and useless like an indoor fryer that plugs into the wall.

The oil lasts forever. I just added new oil after over 6 months. I don’t use the fryer all that often, so I would guess that other home fry cooks need to change their oil more often than I do.

I think it would have lasted a lot longer if I had tried to push it. It was fine the last time I used it.

One reason I decided to change it was that I did not have a proper cover for the fryer. I used a plastic bag and a bungee cord to hold the bag against the fryer. This kept bugs out. The other day I left the bag off overnight, and it made me a little nervous the next day. What if a bunch of roaches had gone for a moonlight swim? I think a bug would float in oil, but I may be wrong. I would hate to drain the oil later, after using it several more times, and see dead roaches shooting out of the hose.

I got a real cover this week, so things are looking up.

I use peanut oil, which is highly regarded. It has a high smoke point, and they say it resists taking on food flavors. It’s not cheap. If I get a good deal, it costs $55 to fill the fryer.

I would like to try beef tallow. I see it selling for $120 for 50 pounds. At that price, I could fill the fryer for about $80. Not out of the question, considering how many meals I could get out of the tallow. Dinner for two at a barbecue joint can easily cost $50 these days, to put it in perspective.

I dreaded cleaning the fryer as I prepared to change the oil. It turned out to be very easy. You put maybe half a gallon of water in the bottom, add a lot of Dawn detergent, and scrub it with a sponge. The crud comes right off. Then you rinse it with the drain hose open. It was no problem at all.

Tonight I used the fryer to make a dish I really love but find intimidating: Cuban pork lumps. The Spanish name is masitas de puerco, which means “little pork lumps.” I believe that’s right. “Masa” is “mass,” so “masita” must be “little mass,” i.e. “lump.”

It’s a very simple dish. You marinate in bitter orange juice (or plain old orange juice soured up with lime or lemon juice), pressure-cook it until it’s tender, and then fry it to make the outside tasty. It comes out tendery and juicy. I like to pile lots of garlic fried in oil on top, along with fried onions and lime juice.

It’s a pain to make on the stove, but a pressure cooker and deep fryer take the suffering out of it.

I used an Instant Pot pressure cooker today, and the food came out great. I’ll post the recipe.

INGREDIENTS

3 pounds pork shoulder chunks with the really thick fat trimmed down
24 ounces orange juice
8 ounces lime or lemon juice
4 cloves garlic, crushed
salt

You want cubes maybe 1.5″ on a side. The size is not critical. Put them in a bowl and salt them down. Brining would probably be even better. It would add juiciness.

Let them sit until the salt goes into the meat. Then pour the citrus juice (also salted) and garlic over them, and let them soak. Half an hour should be fine.

I learned that marinating doesn’t really work, because no matter what you put on meat, salt is the only thing that actually goes in deeper than a couple of millimeters. That’s why I don’t marinate for a long time.

Dump everything in your Instant Pot and set it for 14 minutes. You have to be careful, because meat softens fast in a pressure cooker, so if you’re a couple of minutes over, you could end up with a mushy texture.

Now you fry the meat in a deep fryer until it’s nicely browned.

I made some stuff to go on top of it.

INGREDIENTS
4 large onions
8 ounces olive oil
10 ounces peeled garlic cloves
salt

Slice the onions and fry them until they’re dark. Remove them from the oil and drain them. Puree the garlic in a small processor. Fry it in the oil, but don’t brown it unless you like it that way. If you add some oil to the processor, the pureeing step will be quicker.

Serve the onions and the garlic sauce separately. Apply both very liberally at the table.

That’s all there is to it. It worked. My wife was practically beside herself.

I also fried some ripe plaintains. You just slice them and deep-fry them.

I put lime wedges on the table to squeeze over the pork and plaintains.

This is a marvelous feast, and black beans and rice go great with it. In Miami, they use white rice, but New York Cubans use yellow rice, and it’s very good. You can probably find prepackaged yellow rice near you.

Making your own black bean soup is a huge job. Goya’s version is pretty good, so I used that tonight.

The fryer’s baskets break down and go in the dishwasher, so no problems there.

I still hate Miami more every day than the day before, but my PMSD (figure it out) has abated to the point where I can stand to eat Cuban food. Cubans are great at making delicious peasant food for underpaid workers. There is no such thing as gourmet Cuban food, but if you want a fine dinner made with meat that costs $2.00 per pound, Cuban is a good choice.

RE Cubans and fancy stuff, there used to be a running joke about it in Miami. A Cuban guy goes into a bar and orders Chivas and Coke. Actually, that’s most of the joke.

Now that I think about it, it seems like most cuisines lack a high end.

France has…French food. Their middle-tier food is on our high end.

America has fine steaks and lobster.

Japan has extreme sushi and wagyu.

That’s about all I can think of.

But a lot of countries have good middle-class food, and Cuba doesn’t. It’s all peasant food. The recipes are all written like they’re trying to save money. “Braise a leathery piece of eye round.” “Boil a piece of flank steak.” “Hammer a cheap piece of sirloin until it’s edible.”

Pork shoulder is about as cheap as meat gets.

Its weird how things work out. For example, there are great Scotches and some excellent bourbons, but there is no really good Irish whiskey. I would know if there were. I like Black Bush, which is just Bushmill’s that has been aged a little, but you can’t set it on a bar next to Pinch or Lagavulin. Aged Irish whiskey is smooth and pleasant, but it has zero complexity.

I don’t think there is any such thing as a really good rum or tequila. I used to drink 5-star Barbancourt, which is about as good as rum gets, and you couldn’t compare it to a good Cognac. I’m pretty sure all tequila is paint thinner.

There are truly great beers, and I know, because I make a couple of them right here. No great rums or tequilas, though, as far as I know.

Bacardi was Cuba’s best, but I think of it as a flavoring agent for Saturday-night vomit, or a good fuel for setting your beard on fire like Dan Haggerty. None of it is good. I would as soon drink Everclear as Bacardi 151.

If you want a good cheap rum, try Flor de Cana, from Nicaragua. Very smooth, inoffensive, and not expensive. The Jim Beam of rums.

Whatever you do, avoid Myers’s dark rum, from Jamaica. Jamaicans I knew told me they don’t drink it. It’s poison for tourists. It’s the only thing I’ve ever drunk that made me throw up the next day. They should call it Old Dry Heaves.

I don’t know of any other liquor that causes dry heaves.

Before I became the fine, flawless Christian I now am, I drank myself sick a number of times. Normal booze makes you feed the bushes a couple of times the same day you drink it. Myers’s dark rum will make you wish you were dead a day later, for hours and hours. And you don’t have to get drunk to get sick on it. It nearly killed me after a few Mai Tais.

I knew a couple of Bacardis. One, for some reason, was a Bermudan, but he hung around Miami. Very nice guy. Came close to marrying a friend of mine, also Cuban but not Bermudan. It didn’t work out. He was very pleasant, and he was loaded, so he satisfied one of my friend’s family’s hard requirements–the main requirement, really–but they felt he was lacking upstairs. They weren’t all geniuses, themselves, but anyway, that was their complaint.

Another Bacardi I knew went to private school in Massachusetts and learned to play hockey. He was a Bosch. There were some Bosches related to the Bacardis by marriage back in Cuba, and one of them did big things for the company.

He enrolled at my prep school and joined the ice skating club, and he zipped up and down the ice on his own sharp hockey skates, while we, a bunch of warm-weather Miami kids, slid around injuring ourselves on dull rentals. He thought very highly of himself, but my French teacher, who ran the club and mentored me through high school, thought he was an oaf.

The guy who did most of the work on my dad’s fishing yacht also worked on the Bacardi family’s boats, which were in the same marina. His name was Juan. Sometimes we couldn’t get him. He would tell us by phone that the Bacardis had flown him to the Bahamas for this or that problem.

Juan said the old Bacardis were pretty crude, but I won’t go into detail. “Old school Cubans,” I think he said. And he was Cuban, himself.

Juan could be critical of other Cubans. Bertram was the big Miami yacht builder, but Juan didn’t like working on their boats. He thought they were second-tier. He said, “built BY Cubans FOR Cubans.” He liked Hatteras yachts, built in North Carolina. My dad had a Hatteras. They really were better.

I don’t recall what kind of boats the Bacardis had. Probably Hatteras or some kind of custom jobs.

I knew a Bertram, too, now that I think about it. He went to my school. We weren’t friends. I just knew who he was.

His parents got so tired of him playing Devo albums, they removed the disks and would only let him sit and look at the covers. In his senior photo, he posed by a sign on Devon Road with his hand over the “N.”

Wow, it looks like he became a “reiki healer.” It’s on the web. That is really too bad. Someone to pray for.

Wikipedia says his dad had 10 kids, so maybe he has had to fend for himself.

Based on what other students said about him, he seemed to be abandond. At my school, we had a lot of abandoned kids. Their dads gave their lives to Mammon and became rich. Their mothers were depressing socialites with nothing ostensible to live for. They gave their children everything except God and themselves. The kids took drugs.

I guess I have digressed enough. Enjoy the pork.

I Got This on Lox

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DOUGH INGREDIENTS

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

BOIL INGREDIENTS

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

INSTRUCTIONS

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ovens vary, so start checking them at 20 minutes.

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

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

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

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

Open the Locks and Let me in

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Surely a big chain would be hip, I thought.

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

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

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

I drove home.

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

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

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

Passover Chametz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The bagels are done.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lord of the Dough Rings

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

Also, too small.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes. I see it all so clearly now.

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

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

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

That New York ego is really something.

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

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

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

Just saying.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oy

I may have cracked the bagel code.

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

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

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

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

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

INGREDIENTS

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

Water Bath

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See you at breakfast.

Shot but no Beer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How is this funny?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Saying we’re wrong is violence.”

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

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

Corn Flakes Won’t Pour from Barbie Boxes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe I should just repost all of the chapter.

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

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

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

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

5 Blessed shall be thy basket and thy store.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

17 Cursed shall be thy basket and thy store.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Debt they can’t get rid of.

5. Inability to marry and start a family.

6. Not owning a home or any real estate.

7. Worry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is my Mom, Consuelo Similac

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

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

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

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

I hope.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turns out I was right.

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

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

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

I’m not saying women like that are whores.

I’m not SAYING it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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