18 Hours of Electricity

This must be what the rapture feels like.

What is the rapture? A sudden translation to a place where your problems are instantly ended.

Last night I slept on clean sheets in an air-conditioned room, after a long, hot shower, and today I got up and ate eggs fried in butter, two big slices of toast made from homemade bread, and three slabs of Tennessee Pride sausage. And not I’m sitting in a leather recliner, thinking about how great I feel.

This is much better than yesterday. I almost had to bathe in the freezing 70-degree pool. I had to work on our generator with no running water to wash my hands. We had no air conditioning. Most restaurants were closed. There was no gas.

What a difference.

When I was young, I took things like electricity and cars for granted. I am not like that any more. Sometimes when I’m driving down the road, I tell God how amazed I am. I’m doing 70 miles per hour. It’s 95 degrees outside, and the inside of the car is at 69 degrees. I’m in the shade. I’m sitting on leather upholstery. If I want, I can have the great musical artists of the last hundred years sing and play for me.

That’s pretty wild if you think about it. Three generations back, the only way to travel faster than 7 miles per hour was to board a train. Nobody had air conditioning. There were almost no recordings.

I thank God constantly for dishwashers, clothes washers, and dryers. You shove your stuff in and walk away, and your electric slave does the work for you, better than you could.

My grandmother was an educated woman with a wealthy husband, and she had to wash 6 people’s dishes and dirty underwear. When I was little, she had a washing machine with a wringer on it. Imagine standing on your porch running your family’s used underwear through one of those with your bare hands.

I’ll be honest. She had a lady who came in and helped, but I doubt that took care of all the laundry. Granny did make my mom and her sisters do chores, though.

Anyway, somebody was washing other people’s dirty underwear.

My grandmother had washboards. She had one in her house when she died in 2003.

In Zambia, my wife used to bathe in a bucket a lot of the time. The Zambian power grid is not great.

I always ask God not to take wonderful things away from us.

I eat homemade bread because my wife hates American bread. I can’t say I blame her. The white stuff has no taste, and the brown stuff is like eating a welcome mat. I showed my wife how to make my white bread recipe, and now she’s happy.

Bread probably costs us $1.50 a loaf, and I have never had anything that compares with it, anywhere. It’s so good, I have considered making it worse so I don’t eat so much of it.

I was only without power for a day, but today I feel like royalty. Appreciate what you have while you have it.

The comedian W.C. Fields was on his own when he was a kid. He left home at 11. He found himself a hole in the ground and put a cover on it. For a while, that was where he slept. When he was old, he still got excited about beds and clean sheets. He described the feeling of settling down in a clean bed. He said, “God____, that’s a sensation!”
And he was rich.

I think about that every time I go to bed.

When I was a kid, and I didn’t have something someone similarly situated had, I thought God was unjust. I don’t feel that way now. I feel pampered, because I am. I don’t care if the guy across the street has a hundred times what I do. My life is great.

The natural thing is to become spoiled when God gives you things. That’s a choice you make. You can choose to become more grateful. The Bible shows that God punishes the spoiled.

If you have good health, a clean, safe, quiet, pleasant home, good food, good clothing, people who love you, and God, you are rich. It’s true. It’s not just something to put on a greeting card.

This is all true and wonderful, but now I have to fix the tractor and move the downed trees and branches from my yard.

Well. A lot of people don’t have a tractor or a yard.

November Can’t Come Soon Enough

Here we are at about Milton minus 13 hours.

Before I write about how good things look, of course, I have to mention the fact that many other people are not so fortunately situated.

Anyway, here is the news, as I understand it.

This morning, I found a Jacksonville station with a meteorologist who, I sense, may be fed up with the hysteria. He provided what seemed to be a calm, factual forecast. That’s a rarity. I assume he’ll be disciplined. He is an insult to the Anderson Cooper stand-in-a-flooded-ditch school of hurricane coverage.

He said the hurricane part of the hurricane was only 30 miles wide. People don’t understand how big Florida is. The driving distance from Key West to Pensacola is about 830 miles. This means hurricane-force winds will only hit something like 4% of the state’s coast.

California is shorter than Florida.

They expect the storm’s center to hit Sarasota. That’s 140 miles from here. That means the hurricane-force field will end something like 125 miles from me, and at the edge, it will be Category 1, not Category 4. A hurricane’s strongest area is the eye wall, pretty close to the center of rotation. The winds drop quickly as you get away from it.

They think the maximum sustained winds will be about 125 mph, so that’s the eye wall. At the edge of the storm’s windy part, how strong will the winds be? Simple. About 74 mph. That’s the figure used to define hurricane-force winds. If the hurricane-force area has an outer edge, the winds there must be doing about 74, and they will be lower just past it.

So 125 miles from me, sustained winds will be at about 74 mph, and they will drop off over the 125-mile distance between the edge and me. Also, the winds will have to cross about 70 miles of wooded land with hills to get to me.

The threat of tropical storm winds is iffy here as of the moment. That means we may not get sustained winds of 39 mph. They are predicting 28. That’s at tree-top level. On the ground, it will be lower.

I don’t care too much about gusts. A good gust can do damage, but it can’t compare to a nasty sustained wind that slowly pulls roofs off.

Hysterical forecasters love conflating sustained winds with gusts. They’re saying we may get winds of 60 mph. Well, sure. We get those during thunderstorms sometimes. For a few seconds. No one cares about those. Sustained winds define a storm.

They keep saying we’ll get TROPICAL-STORM-FORCE WINDS because we are sure to get brief gusts. That appears to be a lie; a deliberate prevarication intended to get people excited. You can’t have a tropical-storm-force gust. It would be like having a year-long decade. If the wind isn’t sustained for at least 60 seconds, it’s not a tropical-storm-force wind, no matter how strong it is. It’s a gust.

Meteorologists, even the ones hired for their looks, know the difference between a gust and a tropical storm. They shouldn’t lie.

I’ve never seen anyone but me call them on this huge and obvious lie.

Based on what I see now, we are headed for something like Helene, which means I could lose a few trees. The ground is wetter this time, so more trees could fall. Nothing bad is likely to happen near the buildings. I might lose power, but the odds are with me. The power company has been really aggressive about trimming trees since Irma, and a guy who works for them lives on my street, so we get priority.

I have several trees that have to go, so if Milton pushes them over, I’ll be thrilled. It will save me the work of felling them. Bucking trees is easier and safer than felling them. It takes no skill.

The pool got a bit gross due to our recent trip, but I have been fixing it up in case we have to bathe in it or use the water to flush toilets. Other than that, a power outage shouldn’t be too bad. I guess I should run to Walmart and get some ice for the cooler.

I haven’t bothered with the generator. I guess I should have. It could keep a ceiling fan, the refrigerators, and a water heater going. But I would have to get up every 6 hours to feed it. It may be ready to run, because I cleaned it up after the last time I used it, but I know better than to assume a small engine will work just because I take care of it. Gas is just too screwed up these days.

I learned that the only way to keep small engines going in a situation where there are long layoffs is to put oil in the gas tanks and run it through the carbs. I haven’t done that with the generator.

This is not a typical storm. Yesterday, the sun was bright and there was almost no rain. It was like a normal day. Ordinarily, the two days before a hurricane are gloomy, with an ominous feel. Today is more typical. It’s overcast and drizzly, and there is a light breeze.

They think we will get the worst of it after midnight. The nice thing there is that if the power goes out while we sleep, we may sleep the whole night. If the power went off earlier, the house would heat up and make sleep difficult. Heat makes it hard to fall asleep, but it’s not likely to wake a person up.

I just looked at the 11 a.m. cone, and while the overall wind field seems to be spreading, the hurricane area looks smaller, and the winds are dropping, as expected. The landfall area seems to have shifted south a little, which is good for me if true.

The storm is speeding up, which is great. It’s moving at 17 mph. The faster it moves, the less damage it will do, and the sooner life will resume.

It will be a bad couple of weeks for the people south of Tampa. I keep praying God will push the storm farther south to areas where there aren’t many people.

If you want to see some really stupid, uninformed, dangerous reporting, go look at the site of the British “newspaper,” The Guardian. It’s a left-wing rag, so no surprise. They say Milton has been called “the storm of the century.” Yes, by The Guardian.

They say there will be “up to” 15-foot storm surge in Tampa. No, there won’t. Where did they hear that? Tampa is outside the maximum surge area.

They’re making it sound like Milton is still a 160-mph storm. Off by 15, Fleet Street.

Publix and Winn-Dixie are closed today. The Postal Service is still delivering. Walmart is open. It will be open tomorrow, too, along with everything else. It’s not the end of the world.

This morning I learned that DeSantis was within a couple of miles of me yesterday.

North of me, about 5 minutes away, there is a facility called the Florida Horse Park. I don’t know much about it. It probably covers a hundred acres. For weeks, it has been covered with things like generators and powered lifts. It looks like there are hundreds of them. I thought somebody had rented the park, and they were selling these things.

Turns out it’s a staging area for hurricane relief. The tools at the park will be dispatched to help people. It’s amazing.

It’s very nice to be so close to it. They can have machinery here in less time than it takes to make toast over a can of Sterno.

DeSantis made a speech there yesterday. I wish I had known. We would have been there. We drove right by it. It’s a few hundred yards from the dump.

Speaking of dumps, DeSantis ordered them to stay open around the clock, and some local goofballs tried to close one. This was in Pinellas County, which, for practical purposes, is greater Tampa. It’s full of stuff that needs to be disposed of, partly to prevent it from going airborne tomorrow. They locked the gate used by public vehicles to dump storm debris. In response, a state trooper used a truck to destroy the gate, with the governor’s approval. Man, I love this guy.

Pinellas officials are lying, saying the facility was open, but news outlets clearly say the dump was not accepting storm debris, in an area recently pounded by two storms. Yesterday, even after the gates were opened, the line to dump debris was three hours long.

Our local dump isn’t supposed to be open on Tuesday, but Big Ron made it happen, so we dropped some trash.

In an amusing side note, Biden says DeSantis has been great with hurricane efforts, thus preemptively kneecapping any efforts Kamala Harris and Tim Walz hoped to make, to libel DeSantis and Republicans in general. There is speculation Biden is trying to kill the Harris campaign.

He doesn’t like Harris–who does?–and he deeply resents being kicked off the ticket. I don’t think he cares about our country. I believe he’s completely self-centered, so even if he really thinks leftism is best for America, he might be willing to torpedo the Democrat who replaced him and put Donald Trump in office.

Stories imply Harris has been trying to work with DeSantis as though she were president, and some say DeSantis has not been receptive. That’s understandable. He wants her to lose, and Joe Biden is the president. Biden may be senile, but he is still managing relief and preparation efforts, so why give Harris a chance to grandstand and virtue-signal?

“This was a middle-class hurricane, and LGBTQQIP2SAA BIPOC’s were disproportionately affected…”

Biden just told the world he and Kamala have worked together on all of his decisions as president, so now she can’t distance herself from his stench. That had to be a deliberate jab. Biden knew she was conning the world, pretending she would have done a better job.

I don’t know what to do today and tomorrow, apart from intercession for the people on the west coast. Guess I’ll be eating the inevitable Pop Tarts and hoping the air conditioning keeps working.

What is Left to Accomplish?

Based on weather forecasts, I made plans to do nothing today, and I am sticking to my plans. But I think I made a mistake.

Hurricane Helene’s weak outer winds were supposed to produce sustained speeds of about 40 mph here. Far as I know, it never happened. I would say the situation this county ended up with is 10% worse than the aftermath of Debby, which left a few downed trees here and there. We got nearly no rain during the Helene crisis, so that’s a plus.

I have some cleaning up to do. Yesterday I checked the forecast to see when it would dry up, because nothing is worse than doing heavy yard work on a 90-degree day when the air is full of steam. The forecast pretty much said it was going to rain until next Friday. The probability figure for today is 88%.

Of course, it’s dry and breezy without much sun. The temperature is about 82 degrees, or 8 degrees lower than recent days. This would have been a good day to clean up.

I don’t understand precipitation probability, and it turns out neither do meteorologists.

At some point in the distant past, I looked it up, and I read that a certain chance of rain meant that there was that much likelihood rain would fall somewhere in the area the chance applied to. So if you were in an area with a 25% chance of rain, the chance that it would rain somewhere in that area was 25%. How much rain? Whatever I read didn’t say. I assumed it had to be a significant amount, because if not, the figure was useless.

I just checked again. A British site says a figure of x percent means x percent of sources have concluded it will rain in the area. How much? Doesn’t say. An American site says it means x percent of the area will get measurable rain.

Either meteorologists have no idea what their own metric means, or they are letting uninformed people try to explain it to us.

Experience has taught me this: if a forecast says the chance of rain will be 60% or more, expect a nasty, rainy day, nearly every time. That’s more useful than the weird things I’m seeing on the web. Anything over 20% is reason to avoid outdoor activities as far as I’m concerned.

I am sitting here doing nothing. I still feel some covid fatigue, and I’m not sure I can start the tractor, so I am in no rush.

I’m not sure what to do with my life these days. We are done traveling. I doubt we’ll go anywhere until far into next year, and we will not be able to go any place exciting because of the baby. We still need to fix the house up a little, but that’s about it. What should we be doing with ourselves?

The world has turned into an immense toilet. Americans have proven they really are stupid enough to put Kamala Harris in the Oval Office. Wokeness is getting worse, not better. We are giving birth to generations of soft, useless, cruel, incompetent, spoiled, godless perverts who will make the last decade look like the Messianic Age.

I don’t know what we’re supposed to do here. I am spending more and more time in prayer. We think about things like good food, medical appointments, and managing our practical affairs. That’s about it.

Lately I have noticed I am sometimes bored. That’s a problem I thought I had left behind decades ago. It’s strange to see it creeping up on me again. I find myself thinking, “I remember this!”

I think I had started believing I was immune to it. I took not being bored for granted for maybe 35 years.

I have zero enthusiasm about America’s future. I don’t want to live here. I don’t know how I’ll defend myself when my son asks me why we put him here, to face seventy-plus years of hiding out in a world gone insane. I can tell him God wants people to have children. Best I can do.

While we are here, we will have to devote a lot of energy to sheltering him from godless friends, Satanic entertainment, exposure to perverts, and so on. We will really have to have God’s help, because we can’t generate our own safe Christian bubble.

I don’t have any projects in mind. There is nothing I want to do here. I don’t want to start big things in a world which has no future.

I try not to imagine a future under Kamala Harris. Obama was an arrogant homosexual atheist who was hard on the church, the unborn, and Israel. Biden was dumb and without conscience, and he appointed godless nutcases to rule over us. Harris would make us miss Biden. She is a complete zero as a human being.

She’s a wonderful exhibit to use in order to prove democracy doesn’t work. When Biden gave her affirmative action and made her his running mate, she was extremely unpopular even among Democrats. That didn’t change during her time in office. Now she may get a legitimate majority in a presidential election. The people didn’t get to vote for alternatives. She was simply installed, and Democrats could either vote for her or let Trump win.

Imagine the kind of pigs she will appoint to abuse and control us if she wins. The worst choices imaginable. Disgusting, vile, incompetent, corrupt, and stupid.

It seems like there should be something to do other than praying and waiting for Yeshua, but if there is, I can’t see it.

Maybe I should prepare a rapture-ready will. Will it matter? Will the wills of raptured people be triggered when they leave? Will they be respected? Will whatever I could leave people be helpful to them in a world where demons and fallen angels are running amok?

I assume people will run around killing each other, squatting in each other’s houses, and stealing each other’s money, so I don’t think a will would be helpful.

There must be something useful for us to do right now. I just need to be told what it is.

What if the rapture doesn’t come, and I have to age and die in Satan’s America? Terrible thought. But I know from experience that if I pray in the Spirit enough, things will work out for me. I can’t do all that much for others, so it’s a limited blessing.

I can’t wait for this place to be wiped clean and remodeled. I don’t know what it is to live in a world that works. I’ve seen better times than the present, but I have always been surrounded by death, disease, injury, deformity, murder, accidents, poverty, and every type of emotional pain. I have always lived in a world ruled by Satan’s children.

My patience with suffering is gone. A couple of years ago, it didn’t discourage me as much. Now, every time I see someone with a terrible physical problem, or I hear about a terrorist attack or a natural disaster or some other cause of suffering, I think, “I have HAD it with this. Please get us OUT.” Enough. I have seen enough.

A few people can be helped, but almost everyone will continue to suffer and fail. Most of the people we try to help will turn our help into curses. They won’t turn to God. Not really. They won’t pray in tongues. They won’t repent. They won’t be accountable. Things won’t get any better for them.

The blessed will stay blessed, and the people who hold onto them like Titanic survivors holding onto floating planks will continue to hold on. Nearly everyone who leads a cursed life will continue to be cursed.

People who lead cursed lives generally don’t want to know God. They want money. They think money will fix everything and they won’t have to repent. It’s frustrating, because continued abundance comes from a relationship with God. You tell them how to fix their lives, they pretend to agree, and they don’t change.

When someone listens, it’s like you’ve found a big gold nugget in a manure pile the size of an apartment building.

We don’t have enough money or time to buy better lives for the people who won’t repent. We have to watch nearly everyone sink. Elon Musk couldn’t fix them. Look at his son, the pervert.

I like to prophesy, but I keep hearing about how God is going to destroy people who are against his children. That means the vast majority of human beings. I would love to hear about revival and miracles.

The human race is just too crooked to help. We have always been that way. God is always ready to bless, but almost no one is interested.

Guess I’ll go pray and then think about dinner.

Trading Alligators for Bears

My wife and I did something extraordinary last week. We went on a trip inside the United States.

We went to a bunch of weird countries while we were separated by the State Department, which was busy letting illegals into the US and watching daytime TV because employees were at home waiting for covid to go away. Until this month, however, we never visited another state.

We went to Gatlinburg, Tennessee. A place I loved as a child.

For those who don’t know, Gatlinburg is in the Smokies. The physical location is beautiful. It’s in a valley surrounded by mountains. To get to Gatlinburg, you have to travel scenic two-lane roads. The area is very nice. Appalachia isn’t as staggeringly beautiful as places like Switzerland and Utah, but it certainly beats the rest of the Eastern United States.

I don’t know when Gatlinburg became a tourist town. It happened before I was born. By the time my family started traveling between Florida and Kentucky to see relatives, everything was already established.

When I was a kid, it was considerably less tacky. It had a bunch of fun souvenir shops, including one called the Rebel Corner, which was decorated with huge Confederate flags. There was a place that made and sold candy. There were some okay restaurants. There were hotels built over the Little Pigeon River, which is really just a rocky creek. You could sit on your balcony or by your open window and listen to the soothing sound of the water.

There were trails and sights. I remember walking up Clingman’s Dome, a mountain nearly 7,000 feet high. My grandfather, the guy who taught me tact, was with us on the paved tourist path. He saw a man who looked like he checked in at about 350 shambling up the path with his own family, and he said, “It’s a good thing you’re not big and fat!”

Sometimes we saw bears. Back then, tourists did brilliant things like feeding them by hand through open car windows.

In those days, I enjoyed Gatlinburg and the nearby town of Cherokee, North Carolina, because to me, they were part of the experience of visiting Kentucky, which I wrongly thought was heaven on Earth.

Gatlinburg has gotten seedier with time. It’s a little trashy now. They used to have a tiny Ripley’s Believe it or Not museum, and now there is an array of Ripley’s attractions. They have a big saltwater aquarium where you can see sharks and sawfish. They’ve built a big concrete parking garage.

Watch the video below to see what Gatlinburg has turned into.

There are weird little attractions that don’t seem to make sense. One features a robotic horse in a dress, sitting out front to attract customers. We didn’t see the appeal.

Even though Gatlinburg is a somewhat downscale tourist town, we enjoyed ourselves. We walked in the woods. We had big breakfasts.

We didn’t go to Dollywood, Dolly Parton’s creepy amusement park. It’s in nearby Pigeon Forge.

I don’t like Dolly Parton. I thought she was perfectly okay when I was a kid, but over the years she and her park have worked hard to promote abomination, and all the time, she has pretended to be a Christian. She’s a complete hypocrite, but lots of stubborn, rebellious Southern women, and I don’t just mean lesbians, think she’s almost a co-savior, like the false Catholic version of Mary. Like a white Oprah.

I don’t know if her attitude has something to do with her unmarried brother who died young from an undisclosed disease or what, but I don’t want any part of her act. I never liked her music, either. She is no Patsy Cline.

The main reason we stayed in a tourist spot was to have a base from which we could look at the area. We have both had thoughts of moving to Eastern Tennessee, and if you stay in Gatlinburg, you can have good food and a nice hotel while you look around. Appalachia is not known for quality food and lodging, so to me, finding these things was a blessing.

We looked around Sevier and Blount counties. The geography and the trees and plants made a big impression, as did the sub-95 temperatures.

When you live in Northern Florida, you get used to living on sand that won’t support anything you really want to grow. You can’t grow apples, real peaches, blackberries, cherries, tomatoes, corn, or anything else without a lot of struggle. The grass is something called bahia. It’s thin, and when you walk across it a few times, you leave obvious damage. It’s full of stinging bugs, and nettles are a problem. Lying down in your own yard is not possible.

Once you get far enough north, you get into real soil. You can have apple trees and grow tomatoes. You can have a lawn.

I have been concerned that if we moved, the people might be backward on racial issues. I’m from Eastern Kentucky, and I’ve also spent a lot of time in Western North Carolina, and I know there are parts of Appalachia where you can have problems if you’re in an interracial marriage or even if you’re just black.

My grandfather was a circuit judge over Breathitt County, Kentucky, and during his time, a black woman moved there and tried to practice law. I never thought of him as an enlightened person with regard to race, but he supported her. The people of Jackson, Kentucky eventually burned her house down. And it wasn’t that long ago. He died in the mid-90’s.

On this visit, I was shocked. In Gatlinburg, we saw one interracial family after another. What a relief. And they were definitely Southerners. I also saw many clones of myself. Men in cargo or work shorts, T-shirts, and baseball caps. It was like they were pumping us out of a factory.

We saw two black families in rented Rzrs. A Rzr is a factory dune buggy made by Polaris. It has no windows. Apparently renting them is popular in Gatlinburg.

Maybe things have improved.

Southerners are very, very big on powersports and unnecessary vehicles. If you’re a Southerner, and you don’t have a golf cart, an ATV, a dune buggy, a dirt bike, or a Jeep, there must be something wrong with you. I use a gas-powered EZGO to get my mail.

The people were very nice. I was concerned that if we left our area, the people would not be as pleasant. There are a lot of childish, rude, stingy people in Eastern Kentucky. In Tennessee, just about everyone was great. And there were signs of Christianity everywhere. There were signs advertising help for women who were considering abortions. There were signs telling people Jesus was coming back. I loved it.

I have had the feeling God wanted me to move to Tennessee, as have many other Christians. I don’t know if we’ll do it, but now I am less concerned about the possibility of making a bad decision.

During our trip, we applied for a Schengen visa so we could finally visit Europe. The real Europe, not Ireland or Turkey. Incredibly, they granted our request, so now we have to decide whether we should go. My wife is going through some medical treatment right now–nothing bad or permanent–so we’re thinking it over.

We only saw one bear in Tennessee, but it was a whopper. We were walking down the main drag of Gatlinburg, and we saw a bunch of people staring at the area behind a hotel. I looked and saw a black shape not much smaller than a cow. This thing was enormous. It must have been checking out the bear-resistant dumpsters.

When I think of black bears, I think of animals about the size of a hog. Maybe 150-200 pounds. They sometimes hit 600 however, making them as big as medium-sized grizzlies. The record is over 900. I don’t know what this bear weighed, but it looked a lot more like 600 than 200.

It took my wife a while to spot it, which is bizarre. She finally saw it walking up some stairs.

I knew we might see some bears. I expected typical disappointing bears about my own size. Not this time. This baby could have fed a small town for a day. It would make a beautiful rug.

I enjoyed seeing real trees instead of one water oak after another. We saw hickories, walnuts, sycamores, maples, black oaks, chestnut oaks…serious trees that have practical uses other than fueling smokers. They made me think of the times I had spent with my grandparents in the woods. They seemed to know every plant’s name and purpose.

We saw a lot of people who were obese or had leg problems. Diabetes, maybe. We saw people who clearly weren’t on top of the financial ladder. We saw a lot of tattoos and cigarettes.

I thought about Gatlinburg’s status as a second-tier tourist town, and I felt like God showed me some things. We were there as people who did not have to work. We were able to stay at a very nice hotel. We weren’t going into debt to do anything. Both of us knew God very well and never felt that we were alone or that we might have to handle life’s problems on our own. Our health was good. We were surrounded by unhealthy people who were loading themselves with debt.

Many of the others would have to go home shortly and work at jobs they didn’t like, in order to pay for things they had already received. When you borrow, you get your reward up front, and then while you’re working to pay for it later on, you have no reward to look forward to, and you can’t quit.

It reminded me to keep humility, gratitude, and fear of God in mind. We earned very little of what we have. God gave it to us in spite of our evil natures and deeds. Every good thing we have is part of an inheritance from God. We should never feel superior to anyone. What is uglier than an arrogant heir who has no empathy? I have been that person.

We aren’t sure what we’ll do. Sometimes I think we should go to Utah instead of Europe. It’s a lot less complicated, and it’s a shame for Americans not to see their own enormous country.

In any case, my wife is now in the Schengen visa system, so if we decide to travel in the future, it should be easier.

One More Shot at the Lost Continent

Before too long, my wife and I will find out whether Europe’s racist visa policies apply to African green card holders as well as Africans still in Africa.

We have traveled a lot since we found each other. Egypt, Turkey, Singapore, Ireland…destinations that were pleasant enough, yet which were all compromises. We have never been able to get to Europe.

I mean the real Europe, not Ireland. The place with the alps and the great food. Going to Ireland is like going to Boston, only the people are much nicer.

Well, they would have to be, though, wouldn’t they? Okay, they were nicer than most Americans, not just the interesting residents of urban Massachusetts.

Ireland seems like a pleasant place to live. The climate is gentle. It’s green, just like you would expect. The countryside is pretty. It’s fairly prosperous. It could conceivably be possible to hole up in the sticks and hide from the national psychosis of leftism. But the cities are kind of dumpy, the food is worse than it is here, the sweaters are thin and cheap, and when you’re there, you feel like actual Irish people are a tiny minority.

The Irish have abandoned Ireland. Why is that? They’re all here now. Not completely true, really. They’re all over the world, and they didn’t quit leaving after the potatoes came back. Is Ireland really that bad? Seemed fine to me.

I would not go back to Ireland, simply because it’s dull. There is really nothing there except the cliffs of Moher. Other European countries are different. Those alps. The fjords. Renaissance art. Medieval architecture. Magnificent food.

I wouldn’t go to England, either, and I suspect Ireland is just England without the sights.

Most of my ancestors are supposedly from England and Scotland, but I have no interest in seeing those places. I don’t understand people who want to “visit the old country” and who get all weepy about places maybe 3% of their ancestors came from. Let’s face it; if you have a name identified with a European country, and your people have been in the US over a hundred years, your genetic connection to its people is like a gram of coke that has been stepped on 10 times. If genes were paint, the country’s genes were white, and other countries’ genes were black, you would be charcoal gray.

My parents were under the impression we were mostly Scottish. I don’t think this is true, but anyway, they went to Scotland and looked up my dad’s ancestors, who are dead and were not able to receive him. They enjoyed bad food and mediocre scenery. On a rare and prized, not to mention expensive, foreign trip.

Forget that. Give me someone else’s ancestral homeland. Give me Switzerland, Austria, Italy, France, Germany, and possibly the Netherlands. Give me a place with great sights and wonderful food. Give me excellent weather and hotels that aren’t full of mold.

My parents could have had Paris. Back when it was safe, I mean.

England is full of furious Muslims now. That’s not for me. If I want to go to a country full of furious Muslims, I’ll visit Michigan. With a side hajj to Minneapolis.

London has worse crime than New York now, and like New York, it prevents decent people from carrying weapons. Should I take my wife to a place like that? How would I explain that decision to her in a London emergency room?

It’s true that England has great food now. It’s called curry. No one goes there to find the best spotted dick and toad in the hole.

I would have to rank Egypt at the bottom of our destinations. I would never go again unless I had a sudden desire to do another Nile cruise. The people were very nice everywhere, and sometimes the food was good. The cruise was relaxing and interesting. But Cairo is a slum, straight out. A real mess. And Egyptians throw their garbage everywhere.

The best restaurant we visited had dozens of dead flies decorating the windowsills.

Singapore was the real sleeper. I didn’t want to go at all, but now we have gone twice. We have a bizarre sensation of being at home there. Inexplicable.

We enjoyed Turkey, and the people were wonderful. Now Turkey is threatening to annihilate the Jews, so that takes some of the shine off of it. Ireland is antisemitic, but at least they’re not planning genocidal military action.

I don’t know if they can. Do they have an army? A real one, not the kind that blows up department stores?

We are giving Switzerland another shot because its nearest consulate is on the way to Tennessee. Before too terribly long, we intend to visit the Volunteer State to see if we should move there. Switzerland has a consulate in Atlanta. I figure we can get in and out of Atlanta fast enough to avoid being soiled too much.

Other countries would have required us to go to places like DC, New York, and Miami. If you see me in Miami, alert the police, because I have been kidnapped. Miserable, stinking hole. Thank you again, God, for getting me out.

We were going to shoot for a short trip to Switzerland, but given that this may be our last real trip for years, I decided to tack on some time in Italy. Rome, to be exact. I have been to Florence a couple of times, and it’s wonderful, but I think a person who has never been to Italy should probably pick Rome.

We don’t jam lots of destinations into short intervals. We are not the kind of people who would do three days in Florence and 4 days in Rome. If you haven’t been to a place for a reasonably long spell, you haven’t really been there. If you spend a day in Rome and then say you’ve seen it, you might as well say the same thing after walking through the airport between flights.

It has to be Rome or Florence. Not both.

We are planning to cut Switzerland up a little, but I think that’s different, because as beautiful as it is, you can’t stare at the mountains all that long without wanting to do something else. We expect to do a few days in Lucerne and a few in Wengen. Go up some mountains. Eat some plates of potatoes and cheese. Move on.

Will they let us in? No idea. The visa picture is supposed to be better for green card holders than Africans in Africa who are married to Americans, but we have been lied to before. Every time, now that I think of it. We don’t know what’s true and what isn’t.

I’m starting not to care. We liked Hong Kong and Singapore. We got a Taiwan visa quickly and easily. We haven’t seen America together. We don’t actually have to go to continental Europe. There are other places to go.

I want her to see the nice parts of Appalachia and maybe the Rockies. Utah is breathtaking. We can skip the entire Northeast, all major cities, and anything south of Orlando. No wacked-out West Coast destinations. Sliding around on other people’s feces is not for us.

Traveling with one or more kids is a future concern. I don’t know how people do it. I don’t know how they deal with kids on short trips to the grocery store. My wife doesn’t think overseas trips with children can be done. Not well. Maybe she’s right.

So where do you go in Tennessee? Gatlinburg, of course. Good old touristy Gatlinburg. I went there many times as a child. I saw people feed the bears through car windows. We walked up Clingman’s Dome. We went to Cherokee, and my mother took a picture of me with a bunch of guys who claimed to be Indians. Did braves really wear Chuck Taylors?

It’s touristy, but on the other hand, it has the best hotels, there is real food, and it’s a good base for exploration. And we are, in fact, tourists.

I haven’t seen Gatlinburg since the early 2000’s, I think. My family got together. A cabin was rented. Two aunts, my dad, my sister, me, and some cousins. My sister tortured the rest of us with her nasty unhousetrained Maltese and her constant unprovoked attacks on me. I think things will be better this time. In the recipe for an excellent vacation, or any other pleasant or even bearable experience, the secret can’t-miss ingredient is her absence.

Some people have a gift; the gift of making every occasion better by being elsewhere. This explains the rapture, the tribulation, heaven, and hell.

We are gearing up for all this stuff now. We hope to travel during the coming month.

If the Swiss let us down, I guess it will be the Far East and rural America for the foreseeable future. We have to do something for recreation until Yeshua gets us out of this world.

Chicago Still Disappoints

I got suckered in again.

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

It’s not good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hunker Down with Peyton and Hayden

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have no idea what’s going on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Prayer.

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

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

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

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

The way storm tracking works is interesting.

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

That brings up the second point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t care if it’s not real meat.

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

I hope people up there have cut problem trees.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe the Grass Really is Greener

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

That’s really interesting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We Yearn to Breathe Free

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her preference actually makes some sense.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chabad is not affiliated with Israel or the IDF.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get Ready for Your Last Stand

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guess what they recommended? “KITCHENAID!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good luck with your pizza and cookies.

Shredded Tweets

I am once again not on Twitter.

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

I think God showed me a few things.

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

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

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

I saw nearly nothing of the topics I had selected.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Apparently, Calvies and dispies don’t get along.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, I’m off Twitter.

Chicago Crust Leaves me Unimpressed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Religious inclusivity is the most un-Christian policy imaginable.

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

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

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

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

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

They Pull a Pizza, You Pull a Casserole

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

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

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

The ruling is interesting for more than one reason.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I will probably look into crust recipes.

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

My dag is in dere. It works.

Who Was That Guy I Was?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is some material that very clearly refers to Yeshua:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Look at this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jude said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Has Anyone Seen my 56 Million?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I certainly hope the Sellecks have set their kids up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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