There but for the Grace of God Waddles You

Why are mediocre skinny people so self-righteous?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

People are different.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taking the Gas Out of Gaslighters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sako is Finnish, so yay for supporting US jobs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

100% Failure Rate Does not Inspire

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

Today I’m learning about gestational diabetes.

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

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

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

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

The list is actually longer than that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Appliance no Home is Complete Without

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

INGREDIENTS

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

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

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

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

I used Martha White corn meal mix.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rome wasn’t Built in a Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what happened with the food?

The chicken was pretty bad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unfortunately, the recipe was no good.

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

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

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

I’ll jot down my plans.

INGREDIENTS

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

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

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

The New Hotness has Arrived

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Normal Life

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

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

Her first question: “How did you sleep?”

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

Here, only the rodents are squirrely.

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

Taste 9; Aerodynamics 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not sure what the wife will drink.

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

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

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

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

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

Didn’t hurt RKF. All that much.

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

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

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

This is Exactly What’s Supposed to Happen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Symmetry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Appeasers always get false peace, and it never lasts.

Yeshua said this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I Thought Your Son was a Lady

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ll post a helpful video.

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

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

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

Hoping for the best.

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The bagels are cooling.

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

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

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

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I tried a bagel.

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

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

2. The crust should be harder and chewier.

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

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

The plan:

1. Reduce the temperature to 400 next time.

2. Double the malt powder in the dough.

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

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

5. Decrease the rise time.

This ought to get me closer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what about the great reviews on the site?

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

You can’t listen to professional cooks, either.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Better the smack than the food.

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

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

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

Fries WILL be Great Again

RFK Jr. is about to become the head of the Department of Health and Human Services, a department which sounds leftist when you say its name. What conservative would use the phrase “human services”? It’s idiotic. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s too broad. I’m a human. When I hire someone to look at my AC system, it must be a human service. But HHS doesn’t send out air conditioner repairmen.

We had better department names when we had fewer departments. The Department of Defense was the Department of War. No apologies. Truthful. Trumpish.

Let’s Google.

HHS, which is called “HHS,” even though the DOJ is called “the DOJ,” was put together in 1939. Already, it makes sense to me. A socialist put it together.

It was originally called the Federal Security Agency, which is a pretty good piece of leftist PR for its day. “We just want you to be secure and know there are no monsters under your bed.” It was supposed to be in charge of Social Security, health, and education. They must have rejected “the Department of Intrusiveness.”

The guy who ran the department was a man named McNutt. That’s too easy. Before leading the Department of Buttinskyism, he was the governor of Indiana and burdened the citizens with the state’s first income tax.

Perfect.

Eventually, the government felt that the jobs of using Social Security and centrally-planned education were so important, they should be given to separate organizations with independent armies of stooges, so we ended up with the Social Security Administation and the Department of Indoctrination. I mean Education.

HHS includes the CDC, NIH, and FDA.

That’s all I need to know. Let’s disband it.

Okay, okay. We do need someone to keep really awful drugs off the market. I mean, if we didn’t have a government agency doing that, some company might put out untested vaccines that cause blood clots and myocarditis, leading to an epidemic of excess deaths among young people, which the government’s unofficial department, the MSM, would have to tell us did not exist.

All right. All right. We do need the FDA. I think. Even though it keeps Americans from receiving excellent medications used everywhere else in the world. Look up Rowachol. I got covid recently, and the pharmacist in Rome gave me two well-regarded drugs, neither of which had I ever heard of. Thanks to the FDA.

Anyway, the FDA is out of control. It lets lobbyists tell us what to eat. It gave us the Food Pyramid, which was originally known as the Iowa/Nebraska Joint Pro-Diabetes Pyramid. The Pyramid told us to stuff ourselves with all sorts of carbohydrates which rotted our teeth, strangled our pancreases, filled our arteries with placques, gave us high blood pressure, and made us one of the fattest nations outside of Polynesia.

Carbohydrates are the single biggest killer in the US. Think about that.

Here is the Pyramid.

It says to eat 6-11 servings of carbohydrates per day. I overeat, I love food, and I can’t manage that. I can’t even picture the people who do. They must make Jabba the Hutt look like Olive Oyl. All by itself, their gas must have raised sea levels an inch.

Rice and pasta, it says. Bread. Know what you’re eating when you eat those things? Glucose. A sugar so bad for you it’s used as the standard for the glycemic index, a metric which tells you how much damage your food is doing to your body. You chew your bread, mixing it with an enzyme in spit that converts starch into glucose, and before long, excess glucose is pouring into your veins, threatening your eyesight, your circulatory system, your brain, your nerves, and your chances of marrying anyone remotely attractive.

The weird thing about this is that you don’t need carbohydrates at all. We all love them, but you can go your entire life and be extremely healthy without carbs in your diet. Can’t do that with fat and protein.

The Pyramid discourages consumption of meat. I guess the pork and beef lobbyists had a lower budget for hookers and trips.

Meat is harmless. It’s great for you. Plant-based foods cause diabetes, tooth decay, obesity, and high blood pressure. It’s pretty much impossible to have those things without eating plants, and the fewer carbs you eat, the less likely you are to have these issues. Meat simply can’t cause them.

The FDA used to tell us to get 25 grams of fiber every day. Have you ever tried to do that? That’s 6 bowls of raisin bran. You would literally wear out your toilet seat. You would go through life clearing elevators and subway cars.

The government has no business managing our diets. The government is corrupt and stupid. It tells us what lobbyists and leftist freaks tell us to. And nutrition is not properly part of the government’s business. What’s next? Compulsory calisthenics?

Guard the borders. Fight our enemies. Protect business. Run the courts and prisons. The government should do these things. Where does it get off telling us what to put on our dinner tables?

All this being said, RFK is kind of a nut. He seems like he would be a great guy to hang around with, but come on. He eats roadkill. He thinks vaccines cause autism, a theory which is right up there with Pizzagate.

Not taking vaccines causes things like polio, diphtheria, smallpox, and rubella. This is proven.

I don’t know whether he’ll be good or bad for us, but it would be nice to hear less propaganda from HHS, and it would be good if Americans could buy the same drugs that save lives in Europe.

He hates seed oils. I don’t know whether he’s right or not. He loves animal fat, and there, I am with him.

He said something wonderful. He reminded America that McDonald’s used to fry potatoes in beef tallow. They quit in the Nineties. Bad research and the FDA convinced American women animal fat and eggs were bad, which they are not, and women have strong voices when it comes to food purchasing. All sorts of companies started cutting out animal fat. Oreos abandoned delicious lard. We even have skinny pigs now. You can’t make much gravy from a country ham these days.

Women are much more gluttonous than men, and they drive the chip and ice cream industries, but they do more than anyone to deprive the rest of us.

Beef-fat fries are magnificent. I’ve made them. They smell like prime rib. A beef-fat fry is Jane Russell. A canola fry is Elizabeth Warren.

I wonder if he’ll be able to bring beef-fat fries back in some major restaurants. Maybe he can make them trendy. That would be a dream come true.

Potatoes are practically poisonous, but there is no denying their impact on cuisine. They taste wonderful. Fried. Mashed. Baked. Boiled. You name it. Beef fat makes ingesting an inherently unhealthy vegetable worth it.

People say potatoes are actually healthy. They have vitamin C! They’re low in fat! Whatever. Try one without salt and added fat and then return to the discussion. Worthless. Prison food.

I always feel bad after eating potatoes, but they’re too good to give up.

Even if the FDA were right about everything, I would still want it to shut up about our diets. It’s outside the government’s lane.

Getting back to RFK, I don’t think vaccines cause autism. Demons cause autism, and if autism has increased, it’s because America has turned into Sodom. We invite demons to rule us now. They cause disease, mental illness, and other misfortunes. Unfortunately, the FDA will never admit demons exist.

Regardless of what Roadkill Robert says, I plan to take every well-tested vaccine I can get, except for those made with mRNA. That stuff is horrifying. My son is going to be vaccinated, and he will live under the same policy. I don’t want him dying needlessly of some ridiculous 1900’s disease like tetanus or whooping cough.

My son will never be vaccinated for covid.

Covid vaccine : young person :: birth control pills : Caitlyn Jenner.

Trump needs to put a libertarian in charge of the Department of Education. A real Ron Swanson, unlike cookie-cutter kneejerk liberal Nick Offerman, who played him. We need someone who will destroy the department from the inside. The suggestion that states can’t run schools is asinine and insulting. I could run a school. Nearly any educated adult could.

The business of education requires a very low level of competence. You know it’s true. Remember your teachers?

I had one who told us there were 52 states.

I hope RFK succeeds in doing good things and is restrained when he tries to implement ideas he heard from Alex Jones. All in all, I prefer him to anyone Harris would have appointed, sight unseen.

Burning Stuff Shouldn’t be This Hard

I got up today with the intention of getting myself a burn permit. I must have 20 tons of tree parts already in piles.

Figured I was prepared. I had my customer number for the forestry people. I knew I had to call before noon. The weather was okay.

Called with plenty of time left. I thought. They told me I had to call by 10 a.m.

Now what do I do with the day?

It seems like they used to give permits more easily. I used to call in the morning and sail right through. Then they said I had to call by noon. They said I had to take a class and get a special status in order to be able to burn under certain conditions. Now I have to call by 10 a.m.

I miss the days before I knew about permits. I went outside, set the pile on fire, and that was that. I never got caught, even when I accidentally set my pasture on fire.

It’s too bad downed oaks are worthless, because God has blessed me with thousands of oaks. They’re useless for lumber and furniture. They make fine firewood and smoker fuel, but the supply is so great, no one wants them.

The types of oak I have rot pretty fast outdoors, so even though they would make very strong posts and boards, they wouldn’t last. Indoors, furniture made from them wouldn’t look very good, and they’re so hard, they’re tough on tools.

I also have a fair number of sweet gums. It’s a second-tier furniture wood, and Asians like to make chopsticks from it. No one wants it, though. It’s supposed to be terrible for smoking. Some people claim it’s toxic.

My latest chainsaw is on the way. I thought I might get out and cut some more wood this weekend, but the saw won’t be here until Monday, and if I use my old saw now, I won’t get to use the new one for much. Also, the burn piles are immense, so I would like to stop adding to them until at least one is clear.

I guess this will be a good day to remove the remaining bits of trash that could obstruct the mower. Then I can replace the mower’s exhaust pipe. Tomorrow, I could mow. My yard looks like a jungle.

I’m looking forward to having the election over with. Biden is basically a retiree, the country is on autopilot, Harris and Walz keep making fools of themselves, and it’s starting to look like Trump will win. If he does, I expect a lot of violence from leftists, who are much more hateful and immature than conservatives. I would like to see that behind us.

Today I saw Kamala say something truthful. That makes it a special day for me.

Christians showed up at a Harris rally. They were protesting the murder of the unborn. Harris was speaking, and a man shouted, “JESUS IS LORD!”, which is true. And Jesus hates abortion.

Harris was talking about walking Trump’s progress backward and making it easier to turn women’s uteruses into murder scenes. The man shouted during a pause, when the room was quiet. He could be heard clearly.

Harris said, “Oh, you guys are at the wrong rally.” She said she thought they had meant to go to a Trump rally close by, which she described as “smaller.” Of course, Trump was in another state so he could go to the Al Smith dinner, which she skipped, perhaps out of the same cowardice that keeps her from doing interviews.

She grinned. She thought her remark was funny.

She was correct about the protestors, though. A Harris rally is no place for Christians. The Democrats openly opposed God and Israel in a voice vote at their convention years ago, they elected Obama, who was very hard on Israel and promoted perversion, and they treat the unborn like unwanted warts.

No Christian has a good excuse to be a Democrat. They have excuses. Just not good ones.

If you vote for Kamala, you’re voting for perversion, the murder of unborn children, antisemitism, racism, rioting, shoplifting, and the persecution of Christians. Those are major issues. Fake Christians who refuse to vote for Trump complain about his personality and his sexual history. That’s ridiculous. Yeshua himself is not running for president. We don’t have an ideal candidate. We have to avoid the worst choice we have, and that choice is Harris.

It’s not just Harris. It’s the flood of demonized Harris appointees that will follow, including EVERY FEDERAL JUDGE. She will appoint judges that support the castration and skinning of confused minors going through phases. They will support abortion up to and possibly past the point of birth. They will persecute Christians. They will empower Muslim terrorists.

Both parties serve Satan to a large degree, but the problem is much, much worse on the Democrat side.

Even though I hope Trump is reelected, I still believe America is finished. Evangelism is pretty much dead here. The perverts have won; even Fox uses incorrect pronouns. Young people are awful, and they are the ones who will take our places. In the future, unless the rapture comes, the vast majority of Americans will be arrogant, cruel, Yeshua-hating, antisemitic, witchcraft-loving, feminized, dishonest, shallow, useless people.

Privacy is a thing of the past. With the advances in surveillance and artificial intelligence, free will is disappearing. Immigrants from horrible places are piling in and having huge families. Nearly all churches where the Holy Spirit is acknowledged are run by greedy, heartless pimps and whores who enslave people with the prosperity gospel. The other churches promote anal sex but not holiness.

It’s not going to get better.

Christians are going to be marginalized more and more. We will be impoverished and silenced. Attacks on Jews will be tolerated and encouraged.

We chose all this. The people who came before us chose Satan over Yeshua, they raised us in their stupidity and immaturity, we are worse than they were, and the nation has continued to deteriorate.

These days, I spend a lot of time resting in God’s presence. I don’t do it just because I want him to do good things for me. I do it because I want to take breaks from this stinking, corrupted world. It’s like cracking the door to heaven and sticking your nose in. I keep begging God to bring the rapture and tribulation and put an end to this culture.

I hope it happens quickly, because otherwise, my children have no future on their own planet. They’ll live in little Christian bubbles smaller than mine.

America was wonderful. We didn’t understand what we had. The lack of persecution was extraordinary, and it was combined with extreme wealth, power, and safety. Those things are disappearing. Living here will be like living in two-tier England, where Christianity is broadly hated and Christians are seen as troublemakers and parasites.

When America is gone, there will be no big, rich, Christian country to run to. Every single large nation will belong to Satan.

The world has two big continents: the Americas and Africa/Europe/Asia. Then there is Australia, which is lost. There is no fourth land mass we can run to in order to establish a Christian society.

The filth of the coming world is disturbing to think about. The whole world will be like the most degenerate cultures we now have.

Consider “Palestine.” They hack suspected Israel-sympathizers to death and leave their body parts on display in the marketplaces. They have children’s shows where they tell kids to murder Jews. The filthiest kinds of terrorists have called their parents during massacres to show off the blood on their hands, and the parents have been transported with joy and pride.

Think of Afghanistan, where the rape of boys is considered normal. It’s a country so savage, it’s not worth trying to save. They murder the people who try to help them, just like the Somalis.

Consider Nigeria, where Muslims are so dangerous, you need multiple armed escorts in order to get around. Think of North Korea, where intelligent, hard-working people drop dead on the streets and rot, starved and full of worms.

Then there’s Central America, where drug dealers skin people alive, and the people support them.

Left to themselves, human beings are almost as bad as demons, and the majority of us have decided to be left to ourselves. There is no limit to the depravity we can embrace.

The other day, I read about government employees in Maryland, removing a young man from his parents home, permanently, because they refused to support his “trans” delusion. The parents are Christians. I was so discouraged, I prayed for God to kill the government employees.

Thousands of times, I have prayed for God to reach vile, cruel people and correct them. When I read about this kid, and I thought about him being castrated and pumped full of drugs by people full of demons, I couldn’t find the patience to ask God to turn them around. Just kill them. They can’t be reached with persuasion. They will do too much harm if they are allowed to live, and what they are doing is an atrocity.

What will I do when the demonized run Florida, my son goes through a feminine phase, and clown-haired stooges with unlimited authority drag him off to have his penis sliced down the middle, hollowed out, and turned into a fake clitoris in a stinking, never-healing hole that grows fungus and bacteria? Shooting them won’t help. I’ll go to prison, and they’ll send more stooges. Suing won’t help. The judges will be on their side. If it happens, I’ll just sit and pray and wish God would take both of us.

I understand why Yeshua, the God who is love itself, is going to return and massacre people. The Bible says his robe will be wet with their blood. I get it. Enough is enough. It’s better than letting this mess deteriorate to the point where life is utterly pointless. Saving new souls is important, but the reality is that human beings have limited value. A person is worth more than many sparrows, but it’s better that people die and go to hell than to have them remain alive and torment the people God loves without significant resistance.

God has killed millions of people, so no Christian should be upset when someone says he will do it again. He told us he’s going to do it.

He created hell and the lake of fire. Satan didn’t do these things. He couldn’t, and besides, the lake of fire is his future home for eternity.

One of the main purposes of these places is to keep the irredeemable away from the rest of us. Heaven can’t be heaven if they aren’t confined and forgotten, and the Messianic Age can’t take place unless fallen angels and demons are removed.

Regarding the apocalypse, I don’t want to see people suffer. I just want evil people to be defeated and kept away from God’s children. I have very little energy left to deal with them. Unfortunately, death and hell are the only permanent solutions. We can’t get permanent relief unless a lot of people die and go to hell. They will not change.

There is a blessing in knowing and being close to a totally worthless, hateful, destructive person who brings misery to everyone around her and makes it impossible for them to relax and thrive. It teaches you that God was right to create hell and the lake of fire. It makes you realize people eventually have to have relief, regardless of what the worthless have to suffer.

Most Christians never learn this lesson. They learn that Yeshua wants us to pray for our enemies, but they don’t pay much attention to the scriptures about turning people over to Satan or refusing to eat with them.

Yeshua never chased anyone. Have you noticed that? He showed up and invited people. He showed them God’s goodness and power by supernatural means. That’s it. When they turned him down, he left without hesitation.

He left most of the Jewish people behind at about 33, knowing hell would swallow them by the millions. He knew Jerusalem would be sacked, the temple would be destroyed, and the people would be dispersed for 2,000 years.

He could have stayed until he was as old as Methuselah, begging and cajoling. The priests had no power to arrest him. He turned himself over to them and chose to be crucified.

Would he have let a worthless son live in his house for 50 years and abuse him? Would he have enabled a junkie or a gambler? Would he have sold his house to pay the son’s creditors or bookies? Of course not. God can’t be manipulated. This is the real meaning of, “Thou shalt not put the Lord thy God to the test.”

I curse the Harris campaign, literally, as often as I remember to do it, but a Trump victory would be like giving a terminal cancer patient Tylenol. Better than nothing, but no solution.

Incidentally, I learned something interesting about the diaspora. Solomon caused it.

Solomon was a failure and a disgrace. He was also a hypocrite. People talk about him as though he were nearly a god, and he wrote part of the Bible, but he was a curse to Israel.

God told Solomon that if he or his people turned away, the people would be driven out of the promised land. A lot of people think the Jews were driven out because the people turned on God, but according to scripture, Solomon’s rebellion, by itself, was sufficient to invoke the curse.

Look at this scripture from 1 Kings 9:

But if ye shall at all turn from following me, ye or your children, and will not keep my commandments and my statutes which I have set before you, but go and serve other gods, and worship them:

Then will I cut off Israel out of the land which I have given them; and this house, which I have hallowed for my name, will I cast out of my sight; and Israel shall be a proverb and a byword among all people:

And at this house, which is high, every one that passeth by it shall be astonished, and shall hiss; and they shall say, Why hath the Lord done thus unto this land, and to this house?

And they shall answer, Because they forsook the Lord their God, who brought forth their fathers out of the land of Egypt, and have taken hold upon other gods, and have worshipped them, and served them: therefore hath the Lord brought upon them all this evil.

That’s really interesting. I wonder why no one teaches it.

Solomon praised God before the people, but all the while, he was sacrificing to fallen angels who literally stink. It looks like he, singlehandedly, assured that the Jews would lose Israel.

Look at the people we elect. And somehow many of us think we will never lose America.

Is There Anything it Can’t do?

The last couple of days have been pretty good.

Milton came through, we spent a day without power, it came back on, and since then I’ve been cleaning up the yard.

My tractor has been out of commission for a long time due to a problem that prevented it from starting. I researched it for months. I asked for advice from all sorts of people who know tractors. I got conflicting information. Nothing worked.

I was going to send the tractor to the dealership, but then we had the Europe trip, and we had three storms go by. And we both got covid.

A day or two back, I found I could get the tractor to start with some effort. It’s a pain, but it will run. Since then I’ve been moving trees and limbs.

Last year, I finally learned how to make chainsaws run reliably. I may be the only person on Earth who knows how. I spent years listening to bad advice from people who were supposed to know the truth, and it did not help much.

I have a bunch of gas saws, and I have run three in the last couple of days. All started and ran, on treated no-ethanol gas 5 months old. I have this thing licked.

My lead saw was an Echo CS-590, which is a homeowner-grade saw you can get at Home Depot. I paid $400, which is maybe half what a pro saw would have cost. I kept screwing it up because I got so much bad information. Last year, I invested in a Husqvarna 562XP, which is a real pro saw. It has electronics in it that supposedly reduce or eliminate carb adjustments.

I got good information on maintaining saws at about the same time I got the Husqvarna. I modified the Echo to make it run like a pro saw. It’s a monster now. But I’m glad I got the Husqvarna, because anyone who has a farm needs two big saws. One could need repairs. Also, the Husqvarna has a 25″ bar, which is 5″ longer than the Echo’s bar. On this property, you need a 25″ bar, but there are times when 20″ is more convenient, so now I’m all set.

I wonder how many other people in this entire county know how to maintain and use saws correctly. I would guess nearly all are arborists. I took the Echo to an authorized repair guy who didn’t know.

Milton dropped a large oak across my driveway. I would say this tree was around 20″ thick at chest height, and it may have been 80 feet tall. As noted in an earlier post, my neighbor showed up after the storm, cut the tree in two places, and moved it out of the driveway with a forestry grapple. That still left me with two big collections of debris to disentangle, cut to sizes a tractor could carry, and move. A tree service would probably have charged over $1500.

I took a little homeowner-grade Jonsered/Husqvarna with a 16″ bar and did a lot of cutting. I moved a lot of distracting junk to my pasture. Today I used the Husqvarna to cut the tree’s trunk in sections. I also cut up a 16″-thick oak Hurricane Helene left caught in some other trees.

When I went back in the house, bleeding and covered with grease and sawdust, I told my wife it was a good thing she hadn’t married a Democrat. She said, “Don’t even say that.”

I didn’t mean a Teamster or an ironworker. I meant the kind of Democrat whose pores weep estrogen. Like the pansy in the old pajamas-and-cocoa Obamacare ad. Like the skinny-jeans-wearing waifs who get pummeled when disrupting other people’s rallies.

Compared to men from the World War Two generation, I’m practically a girl, but I can fabricate, machine, shoot, run a tractor, buck trees, make ammunition, shoot sub-MOA, smoke ribs, make beer, and do lots of car, mower, and tractor repairs.

I’m very good at interior painting. I don’t mind killing annoying animals. I have stomped on mice instead of taking them to therapy and trying to rehome them. I’ve shot a bunch of squirrels from inside my home. I know how to fish for everything from snapper to marlin. I can run a yacht or open fisherman 200 miles to Eleuthera with no help, and I’ve done both. I can keep a marine diesel running. I have a basic knowledge of electronics, and I have built a bunch of electronic devices.

I can also practice law.

If my wife had married a boy-band-looking liberal, they would be equally helpless. She would be able to do all the woman stuff, but he wouldn’t be able to do man stuff or woman stuff. Hot yoga and sitting in a cubicle. That would be all he could do.

I had to make a 50-amp San Francisco adaptor for my generator on Thursday. A San Francisco adaptor is male-to-male. I went to Lowe’s and asked for 6/3 cord. The Lowe’s guy and I started having a conversation. Maybe they didn’t have 6/3. Would 8/3 be okay? Well, I wasn’t sure my generator could break 30 amps, so 8/3 was fine. I didn’t have to ask him what kind of cord a generator uses. I didn’t have to ask what 8/3 was.

He didn’t explain anything to me. He seemed to know there was no reason to. Men in this area can do things, except for some of the snowbirds.

Came home, took apart two cords I had made for 220-volt tools, put the plugs on the 8/3 cord, and we were in business.

Two new plugs are on the way from Amazon.

I am sure leftists will eventually start swarming homes all over America, killing and looting. They’ve done that in every revolution. But should we all be scared of them?

In percentage terms, there aren’t many tough leftists. There are a lot of leftists who can throw bottles of pee at the police, and many of them can rob and kill unarmed people with stolen plastic 9mm pistols, but how many can deal with a conservative who can shoot and has multiple weapons, modified to suit his needs, for various uses?

Even gang members don’t train, and they are generally stupid.

Kyle Rittenhouse was a chubby, out-of-shape high school kid with a cheap AR-15, and he obliterated three leftists as they and a big crowd tried to lynch him. He killed a child molester (raped 5 boys) who had been in prison and gotten a reputation for fighting. He blew the bicep off a criminal who charged him, committing assault, with an illegal pistol in hand. He killed some idiot criminal who tried to bash his skull in with a skateboard. He scared the rest of the lynch mob off. Rittenhouse was extremely effective, and his two armed assailants, as well as the unidentified person who shot at him early in the incident, were incompetent and useless.

I just don’t think you can sit around smoking dope all day and apologizing for your maleness and expect to be a real factor in physical confrontations with armed people.

If my wife had married a vegan yoga boy, they would have to live in an apartment or on a very small lot. They would have to live somewhere where there was little for men to do.

Man stuff is fun. Burning things and blowing things up are fun. Steel-toed boots are fun. Shooting is fun. Catching fish and cutting them up is fun. Welding, machining, running heavy equipment, and bucking trees are fun. How could anyone prefer wearing a man bun, carrying a murse, and spending his time going from one moronic activist meeting to another?

Good knives are fun. Concealed carry is fun.

God is masculine, and he was right to make men masculine. The sex roles he created work. People who accept them enthusiastically are fulfilled.

I feel like buying another rifle.

Tomorrow I have to finish moving trees and limbs. Then I have to replace my diesel yard tractor’s exhaust pipe, cut off the muffler I made for the old one, and weld it onto the new one.

I’m glad God didn’t let me become a sissy.

You Will Eat the Entire Thing

People are asking for my white bread recipe. It’s not health food. It has no fiber. It has no quinoa, steel-cut oats, or kale in it. It’s a decadent white bread for people who do not fear death.

Here is the recipe.

I recommend using a big food processor with a standard chopping blade to mix the dry ingredients. If you use a short dough blade, it won’t stir them well. Once the dry ingredients are mixed, you move to the short blade. A standard blade may be too hard for the processor to turn.

You can also do all this by hand, or you can use a mixer.

This is for a big nonstick bread pan.

INGREDIENTS
520 g bread flour
1.5 tsp. salt
1 tsp. instant yeast
2.5 tbsp. sugar
4 tbsp. butter
300 g warm water

You can use half as much yeast and let the dough rise longer. Ordinarily, bread tastes better when it takes a long time to rise.

Blend the dry things first in the food processor. Then blend in the water until the dough is well mixed. Maybe 20 seconds. Wait 5 minutes. Blend in butter (softening it first will speed this up). Butter a bread pan, and be sure to add extra salt to the butter.

Form a loaf and put it in the pan. Butter it with more salted butter. Let it rise in a humid place. Score it a few times with a razor to let it expand in the oven. Bake about 35 minutes at 375°. You want the bread to sound hollow when tapped. You can shoot for 195° if you have a probe thermometer.

The top will burn if you’re not careful. I bake for 20 minutes at 375° and then drop a sheet of foil over the bread.

Smaller loaf for 1.5-pound pan:

350 g bread flour
1 tsp. salt
2 tsp. yeast
4 teaspoons sugar
2.5 tbsp. butter
210 g water

The smaller the loaf is, the higher the crust-to-innards ratio. A small loaf gives you more of the hot crunchy stuff. You can also roll this dough into balls, put them in a round cake pan, and make rolls.

I recommend letting the bread cool before storing it. Otherwise, steam comes out and makes the crust soggy.

This stuff is best right out of the oven, and the heels are worth fighting for.