POTUS, not POU

What is more amazing? Seeing an American president and vice president stand up to a parasitic foreigner in the Oval Office, telling it like it is, or seeing half of America condemn them for doing the very thing they are supposed to do?

Ukraine–more accurately, Ukraine’s current government–is not important to American interests, yet it has sucked up something like $350 billion in various forms of aid, depending on whom you believe. Ukraine wants more. Russia, on the other hand, is a necessary partner for the US because of China’s exploding influence. We have done nearly everything we could to anger and disrespect Russia (not just Putin), and we have driven Russia into China’s eager arms.

I keep saying I have never seen anyone explain why we need to put ourselves out for Ukraine. This is still true. I check occasionally, and I have never seen Ukraine supporters provide a good rationale.

I will discuss some arguments I have seen.

1. Helping Ukraine weakens Russia’s war machine.

First of all, why do we need to weaken Russia’s war machine, and why do we call it a war machine? We don’t call the UK’s military a war machine.

Russia has no plans to retake Europe. It has disputes over little bits of territory, but that’s about it. It would have settled for small pieces of Ukraine had it been able to get concessions from Zelenskyy, and I’m sure Putin knows he will never get the entire country, which brings me to my second point.

Russia’s military doesn’t really need to be weakened. We have seen how it performs, and it’s a big relief. Barring the use of nuclear weapons, Russia is a feeble opponent. And if we had made Russia an ally, we would want it to be strong, not weak.

2. A huge percentage of the aid for Ukraine stayed in the US because it went to build arms here.

This one is really stupid. The arms left the country, so wealth left the country. Experts say the arms drain has left us vulnerable. It will take years to replace the stuff we’ve sent, and in the meantime, China is trying to find the best time to go after Taiwan.

No matter how you slice it, we have spent a ton of money that could have been saved or spent on our own citizens, who are the ones who have to work to pay our debt.

3. We need Ukraine’s minerals and helium and so on.

We can buy things from Ukraine regardless of who rules it. If Putin takes over, we ought to be able to outbid the Chinese. He’s not going to refuse to sell to us. Zelenskyy is refusing to give us access without ridiculous concessions that will further destabilize the region and alienate Russia, so it’s not like things are going great under his rule.

It seems to me that cutting Ukraine off would be very helpful in more than one way.

It would teach the warlike Europeans they need to learn how to get along, pay their own bills, and solve their own conflicts. It would save us money. It could save American lives.

We had no business entering World War I. A big inbred family ran Europe, and they had an internal squabble. They fought for childish reasons, and we shouldn’t have enabled them. We had to fight World War II, but that doesn’t mean we need to send men to bleed and die, or that we have to empty our treasury, every time far-off foreigners take the saber-rattling too far.

Germany is rich. Norway is rich. Switzerland is rich. Other European countries are doing well. The Cold War threat is long gone. Still, we send men and money to defend these brat countries which are perfectly capable of looking after themselves. We are increasing our debt in order to balance their budgets. That’s moronic and unfair. Think of all the hours you work every year. How many hours do you work for Germany? France? Italy? How many hours do you think their citizens work for you? Virtually none, in case you’re wondering. The USA receives nearly no aid, and this is considered fair.

We used to pay Europeans to side with us against Russia and China. We had to. Now the USSR and its dream of global domination are dead, and while China is a problem, it’s not planning on ruling the world. Why are we paying these people? They insult and libel America constantly for failing to solve the problems they create, and they don’t even like Americans on a personal level. They’re just not into us, so we need to stop dating. Maybe they’ll appreciate us after we turn off the breast pump.

Europe isn’t Africa. It’s not India. It’s not the pre-Columbian Americas. Europe created civilization, science, and engineering. It’s not populated by people whose grandparents were illiterate savages with a 50% infant mortality rate. It’s reasonable to expect them to look after themselves.

If Russia took Ukraine today, nothing bad would happen to America. In fact, we would be a lot better off. So what is Zelenskyy thinking, going to our White House dressed for a night at Hooters, failing to show any courtesy or gratitude, and lecturing our elected leaders for not doing enough for him?

He’s whining about being excluded from peace talks. Well, he has a point. Ukraine shouldn’t have excluded itself. That’s what happened. Ukraine was so lacking in good faith, Trump had to talk to the Russians ex parte. If you want to sit at the adults’ table, sit up straight and quit throwing food and chewing with your mouth open.

It would be great if the country that excluded Ukraine, which is Ukraine, had behaved better. I think we can all agree on that.

I’ll tell a story about my sister the addict.

After years of abusing my parents, and after secretly getting my dad to fund several deliberately-aborted rehab stints she could easily afford, and after ruining the house he bought her and forcing him to pay the property taxes, and after calling the police to his house and amusing them by claiming she was scared of a man in his mid-80’s, one day she barged into his living room and gave him an ultimatum.

I was there at the time. I was not visible to her, but I heard everything. I stayed hidden because it gave me an edge.

I heard the door open and slam shut. A woman’s heels banged across the hardwood floor. An angry voice yelled, “I’m going to give you ONE more chance!”

Then I heard two sets of footsteps moving in the opposite direction, and I heard her objecting to whatever he was doing. I heard the door open and shut, and then there was quiet. Precious, priceless quiet.

He had taken her by the arm and deposited her on the porch.

At the time, she had a splint on her arm. She had passed out in her kitchen and fallen, landing on a glass that broke in the process. The arm clearly was not broken, although she claimed otherwise, because it bore a simple splint held on with an elastic bandage.

Right away, I got a Bluetooth call from her filthy BMW 335i. She was going to call the Florida Bar and have his license taken. She was sending the police to have him arrested. He had re-broken her arm. She was in terrible pain. She wasn’t going to stand for it.

She had a habit of keeping a McDonald’s Coke in her hand as much of the time as possible. This is what cost her most of her teeth. She used to buy Cokes at the drive-through. She said other Cokes weren’t as good.

While she was yammering, I heard her order a Coke and pay for it. Through the window of her car and a McDonald’s window. After driving herself there.

Some broken arm.

I let her rant so I could gather information, and then she ended the call.

I told my dad she had threatened to send the police, and he said, “They’ll never take me alive.” We had a good chuckle.

My dad disinherited my sister in 2004 and again not long before he died, and she knew he had done it. She could have been reinstated. She just had to smooth things over and show him due respect. She never did it, so I got absolutely everything.

I stayed out of it. My mother threatened to disinherit her in 1997, and I talked her out of it. Biggest mistake of my life. I like money, but it wasn’t the issue. The problem was that the shared inheritance tied my sister to me after my mother’s death and made me miserable. When my dad surprised me by cutting my sister off, I told God I had learned my lesson, and I kept my mouth shut. Not my problem. Not my responsibility.

It has been fantastic, being free of her. I can’t describe the relief and gratitude I feel every day.

Zelenskyy is like my sister. He has no idea how negotiation works, while Donald Trump is the single most famous negotiator in the history of the world. Trump keeps telling him he has no cards, but Zelenskyy keeps treating him as though we need Ukraine.

I would guess he is in contact with a lot of deluded Democrats, and he probably watches left-leaning news shows. He may be under the grossly mistaken impression that Americans are going to rise up in arms if Trump doesn’t do as he’s told. Most of us won’t do it, and if we did, Trump wouldn’t care.

We need to cut Zelenskyy off so he can’t continue to drain us, encourage other countries to abuse us, and expose us to the risk of a needless third world war.

It is remarkable that there are Americans who don’t understand that our president is not supposed to represent the interests of foreigners against us. Imagine running a company that way. What if Ford, or for that matter, Burger King, kept sending employees to Chrysler, demanding subsidies?

Here’s something else I don’t get: Ukrainian “refugees” in other countries, including ours, whining on TV about how Trump is a jerk. If you care about Ukraine, why did you run away? Why aren’t you holding a rifle or sitting in a tank? Ukraine can’t find enough new soldiers. Why are you working at a Buffalo Wild Wings in Atlanta?

I include the women. You can’t be in the infantry? Boo hoo. You can work at a military hospital. You can pump gas into planes and vehicles. You can cook. You can clean. Get your entitled butt back over there. If your heart is still in Ukraine, we need to reunite it with your rear end.

The web says “refugees” are leaving Ukraine to avoid danger and poverty. How is that different from draft-dodging? Can someone explain it to me? If you want to send the kids, the aged, and the disabled out, fine, but why should anyone who can work run off and let others face the danger?

And if you’re an immigrant (which means a person who has abandoned another country in favor of America, not an invader who wasn’t happy with his country’s low-trust economy), you should be on TV pushing Trump to do what’s best for the US, not Ukraine.

When I was a kid, I lived in Israel for 4 months. I was a kibbutz volunteer. The volunteer program started because Israelis were busy fighting a war, and they needed people to pick fruit and shovel chicken manure while the Israelis fought. Americans and Europeans flocked to Israel, exposing themself to the perils of war. Why are Ukrainians fleeing their own country when it needs them the most?

Right now, Zelenskyy appears to face two likely alternatives: surrendering on very bad terms after losing hundreds of thousands more lives or accepting a generous, if not totally satisfactory, peace package from a nation that would be within its rights to cut all aid tomorrow. It’s not our fault he doesn’t want to eat his vegetables. We are doing more than enough. Probably too much.

Biden’s Banana Republic Comes to a Fitting End

Joe Biden has done the predictable again, proving how petty and vindictive he is. He has pardoned General Mark Milley, the J6 committee members, and Anthony Fauci, the man who lied to us about a pandemic.

This was to be expected. It’s what you would expect in a banana republic run by a born second banana.

Biden torpedoed Pelosi and Obama, who forced him to abandon his bid to reenter the White House with a clear case of dementia, by loudly endorsing Kamala Harris instead of allowing them to install their candidate. He then torpedoed Harris, whom he dislikes, with lukewarm support of her campaign, linking her to his disastrous policies, wearing a Trump hat at an appearance, and permitting his wife to wear red–the GOP’s color–while voting in the presidential election.

Having torpedoed everyone on his own side of the spectrum, he has now moved on to conservative and centrist targets, pardoning people who screwed up our withdrawal from Afghanistan, created a tribunal to torment political adversaries guilty of minor crimes, and worked to put America under house arrest.

What’s next? Maybe during the inauguration, Biden will preemptively pardon anyone who tries to kill Trump and J.D. Vance.

Biden is a mean little man, and his wife appears to be right there with him. This is not how presidents should behave. He pardoned his many-times-guilty son in an astonishing act of self-serving corruption, and now he has shielded people with whom the United States has legitimate, important beefs.

Or has he?

All of these people just lost their 5th Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination. The Republican-controlled House can subpoena them over and over as long as the GOP is in charge, and they will have to give full answers under penalty of contempt and perjury charges. They will have to implicate others they would like to protect. They will have to open their records.

Trump’s FBI can still interrogate anyone it wants to, and we know how the FBI likes to indict people for giving wrong answers, even unintentionally and even with regard to trivial questions.

Did Biden remember to pardon Fauci’s staff and all those who worked with Milley and the J6 witch hunters? If not, they’re still fair game.

Did Biden remember to pardon his other relatives? If not, Hunter can be forced to testify against all of them.

The people Biden pardoned today were not in much danger of indictment. They were just in danger of being put on display and forced to answer for themselves. Now that danger is worse, because their right to hide the truth has been greatly diminished.

No one expected the J6 committee to be indicted. No one expected Fauci or Milley to be indicted. No one except fringe nuts.

My buddy Mike says Biden is an infallible source of advice. Got a problem? Find out what Biden thinks you should do. Then do the opposite. It looks like this maxim may apply to today’s pardons.

Biden helped ruin his remaining son. Hunter is going to end up dead, in prison, or in a mental hospital. How do I know? I know because I have a relative who is an unrepentant, world-blaming addict. While trying to help her, I learned a lot of things about addicts. Things I didn’t know. Experts told me about the three places where addicts who don’t accept responsibility go.

Enablers like Biden speed addicts on their journey to destruction. The pardon is a great example. He should have cut Hunter off decades ago and publicly disavowed him. Maybe then Hunter would have had a chance. Instead of suffering and repentance, the most unpleasant thing that has happened to him is losing one of his mansions in the Democrat-caused California fires.

A lot of his artworks burned up. I wonder if that includes the ones he made from his own feces. I certainly hope so. The health hazard they posed greatly outweighed their artistic merit.

Thank goodness Michelangelo chose marble.

Biden sought to torment his political enemies and save his son, but he helped cement his son’s damnation.

The heart of pettiness is a willingness to suffer a great loss in exchange for a worthless and fleeting victory that may consist solely of harming someone else. For some people, the loss is the destruction of their own character. In the case of Biden, who has no character, it’s the loss of a second son. And his own legacy smells worse than his son’s art.

In about half an hour, we’ll have a real president again. I hope we get 4 years of better government.

MORE

Well, he outdid himself. Or maybe the thirtyish, gender-denying kids who actually run the country did. In the minutes leading up to Biden’s dismissal, he pardoned just about his entire family.

Now there’s a man who understands legacy.

I would guess that if there was any possibility they would not be investigated, it’s gone now, because Biden has piled corruption on top of corruption, to the extent where the bear he is poking has to do something.

This is now, officially, the slimiest administration of the last hundred years. Nixon will take a distant backseat to the man who pardoned his trashy family for extremely serious crimes America has a strong interest in punishing.

Surely, even leftists will be turned off by this. Some of them.

Write That Check, Pal

Bill Gates supposedly got a perfect score on the SAT, before it was dumbed down. May be a lie, like the story John Kennedy made up about reading 2000 words per minute. If it’s true, he’s a bona fide genius.

If he’s a genius, why did he just say that if he had written the tax laws, he would be billions poorer?

That’s really stupid, even for an average person.

Bill…you can give the treasury as much as you want.

I think he’s just lying.

Famous liberals love to say they pay too little, but they never back up their virtue-signaling with checks.

I Think I Hear Trees Crying

In an earlier post, I wrote about my victory over my stubborn Echo CS-590 60cc chainsaw. I got it in 2017, and although I made a pretty good effort to get information and find competent mechanics, I was rarely able to use it. It kept clogging up from ethanol, and I also did some stupid things like revving it with the brake on. I couldn’t find anyone around here who could fix it. It was the kind of saw you usually couldn’t start, and when you could, you were afraid to shut it down, because you knew that usually meant you were done cutting for the day. Probably for the week.

I finally got some good information. I did a half-rebuild on the carb, which is bigger than the one the saw came with. I installed two performance-enhancing parts: a flywheel key to advance the timing, and a less-restrictive exhaust deflector. I learned the right way (or at least an adequate way) to tune the carb, I found out how to make the saw start and stop (slightly different from the manual procedures), and I made the saw run.

From the factory, it was supposed to do about 12,000 RPM. With the new parts and tuning, I am now a little over 13,000, and chainsaw gurus insist it won’t hurt the saw. I think I could go higher if I twiddle with the carb a little more.

Sadly, although my saw was running like never before, I didn’t have a chance to try it on actual wood. I had a lot of stuff to do, and the few times I had time to cut wood, I dealt with things a little small for the Echo.

Today I got my chance. Last week, a crew came through and wiped out a bunch of dangerous oaks near my buildings, and they left a few things, including a big downed trunk. I could have used my cordless Makita, but I really wanted to see what the Echo would do.

It’s still starting reliably. Cold, it takes about three pulls with the choke on and one to three with it off. Takes right off. It idles nice and fast so it won’t stall, but the chain doesn’t move. Hot, it starts with one or two pulls. I’m not afraid to shut it down.

When I started cutting, I felt like I was in chainsaw heaven. The reborn saw ripped through everything. It sounded enraged. Granted, semi-rotten oak isn’t the best test, but I cut enough solid wood to know the saw was doing great. I’m pretty sure it’s better than it was new, which it should be, given that it’s a different saw.

The fork I built for the tractor is doing great, too. I picked up most of a medium-sized tree with no problem. I used the fork to hold it up so I could cut it without getting the saw bar close to the dirt, and everything went smoothly. A breeze.

I look forward to using the Echo now, which makes me wonder if I was smart to blow money on my new 24″ Husky. I was, though. Either saw could have a problem I can’t fix quickly, and repairs, even with the new shop I found, take over two weeks.

If I had known anything about saws back in ’17, and if the entire nationwide inventory of decent new and used saws had not evaporated right when I needed a saw, I could have saved a lot of money. I could have snapped up some lightly-used saws belonging to people who didn’t know how to fix them, and I could have turned them into reliable tree-eaters.

Even though I’m getting better at this, I dumped my Echo pole saw and 16″ Jonsered at the shop. They’re ready to pick up now. I feel a strong temptation to modify the muffler on the Jonsered. I’m even itching to put a new cylinder on it.

The Jonsered is the same saw as the Husky 435, which is identical to the 440, except for the cylinder. The 440 makes almost 10% more horsepower. How can I live without that 10%? It’s embarrassing.

No idea why Husqvarna would make two saws that are identical except for one part, just to squeeze $30 more out of customers for better performance. Seems like bad marketing.

Anyway, it’s great to see the Echo come back to life, improved. Maybe now that I can tune a saw, I can avoid repair shops altogether.

Well. Unless something awful happens.

Illegal Aliens Always Come First

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VFS is a company that processes visas.

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

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

Forget it, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teflon Don Slips Away Again

I watched a little bit of Fani Willis’s hysterical, implausible testimony today, at an evidentiary hearing to determine whether she should be removed from Donald Trump’s Georgia election case due to a conflict of interest. The hearing will continue tomorrow.

Let me save you some time. She will be forced off the case. She is likely to have serious problems with the Georgia Bar. She could also be tried for perjury.

I would say that she won’t be disqualified because she’s a leftist, but the judge hearing the evidence was the vice president of his law school’s chapter of the Federalist Society, so it’s not like one lawyer with an entitled ghetto mindset is looking after another.

Fani Willis did not grow up in a ghetto. Her dad was an attorney. But she has the entitled, emotionalist, race-card-playing ghetto outlook just the same. She has an ego the size of Ayers Rock, and she flies off the handle when challenged.

You don’t have to prove a prosecutor is an ax murderer to get him booted off a case. You just have to show an actual conflict of interest exists. Willis has one.

Willis has a sexual relationship with lawyer Nathan Wade. She paid him a lot of money to work on the Trump case, even though he’s not a prosecutor. He’s a tort lawyer. Wade took her on expensive vacations, for which he paid. Money in, vacations out. Conflict of interest.

Has this all been proven? No, but her defenses are ridiculous.

She admits she had a sexual relationship with Wade, but she claims it started in 2022, after he started working with her. Sadly for her, a friend of hers swears she saw them kissing and hugging in 2019. Whom will the judge believe? A combative, arrogant prosecutor who has to be admonished on the stand repeatedly about professionalism, or a disinterested party?

Sorry if I’m harsh, but Willis is a fat, ugly older woman with a nasty personality, and Wade is the most desirable type of male in America: a tall, straight, reasonably good-looking black man in a profession. It makes sense that she would demand that he escort her on trips as payback for improper and excessive fees for services he was not well-equipped to provide. It would be odd for what is now known as a “high-value man” to run off to exotic locations with an old woman who is unattractive and incapable of having children. Nathan Wade can crook his finger and have all sorts of beautiful, compliant young black women trample each other to be with him. Black women compete furiously for males who have money, degrees, and clean rap sheets.

Willis and Wade claim she repaid him for the vacations in cash. No adult who isn’t on drugs will buy that, and the judge isn’t on drugs. She claims she keeps up to $15000 in cash in her house. Very few people do things that stupid, and a single woman who has put a lot of vicious criminals in jail would be the last person to do it. It has to be a lie. Her denials may force the involvement of a forensic accountant, and then she and Wade may find out that lying about large financial transactions is not as simple as they thought. If you say your dog ate your homework, a forensic accountant will stick his finger down the dog’s throat.

You can say you paid cash, but you eventually have to show where it came from in a case like this. An accountant can look at all your accounts and recorded transactions. He can look at your financial past. If Willis was making big cash withdrawals, it will show. If not, where did the money come from? If Wade doesn’t have big deposits to show, why not? They’ll have to explain or take the Fifth. If they take the Fifth, they’ll be abandoning their defense to a large degree, and it will also draw the interest of the bar, possibly spurring criminal investigations.

In a criminal context, a finder of fact is not allowed to infer anything when a witness invokes the Fifth Amendment. In a civil context, at least in federal court, an inference may be drawn if there is other evidence of criminality. I don’t know if that applies here. I don’t know if this hearing, though contained within a criminal trial, is a civil matter. I assume it is, since Willis and Wade are not defendants. Anyway, in any context, invoking the Fifth can spur the bar or law enforcement to follow up and investigate. They are not finders of fact.

Women are afraid of being robbed. They are afraid of making big withdrawals. Many women will not use an ATM card because they don’t like to carry cash. It’s common for women to delay other customers in checkout lines by writing checks for things like one tube of toothpaste. A female prosecutor would be more wary than most. Not less.

Maybe Trump can’t prove Willis didn’t pay Wade in cash, but there is zero evidence she paid, and I guarantee you, the evidence will be consistent with her not paying. The judge can take notice of that.

The standard of proof in Trump’s trial is reasonable doubt, and that’s a tough standard to meet. The evidentiary hearing is not a criminal trial, however. As far as I can tell by Googling, the standard is somewhat lower. I think Wade and Willis are lying, because the alternative is absurd, and I think Judge McAfee knows it and may be willing to allow further investigation to expose their dishonesty.

As for trouble with the bar, a lawyer can’t lie to a tribunal. In Georgia, you can be suspended or disbarred for this. The Trump case has an extremely high profile, and bar associations are all about public relations. They are all about convincing the public lawyers can be relied upon to police themselves. They struggle to make us look honest. I think Willis will get a suspension at the very least, and if that happens, she can forget about working as a public-sector attorney. This may not happen, though, if the bar is sufficiently packed with DEI hires and appointees. That race card is some card.

As for perjury, I looked at the Georgia law, and it appears Willis and Wade are guilty. Here are the elements:

1. Knowingly and willfully making a false statement,
2. Material to the issue or point in question,
3. While under oath in a judicial proceeding.

An evidentiary hearing is a judicial proceeding. Lies about reimbursement and the timing of the relationship are material to the issue of conflict. Willis and Wade swore under oath, and they certainly knew what was true and what was not.

I say she will be forced off the case, but I admit, that depends on the judge and Trump’s lawyers. If he is not determined to learn the facts, the judge will wrap the hearing up and say, “He said, she said,” and give up. If he takes the conflict and dishonesty issues seriously, he will let things continue until the truth is known.

Trump has a history of hiring stupid, crooked, and/or senile lawyers, so I don’t know if his current representation is smart enough to investigate Willis and Wade correctly.

I assume the burden of investigation is on Trump, since the court itself is not after Willis and Wade, the bar is not involved, and Willis and Wade are not being prosecuted yet.

My strong bet: Willis will be out on Monday. If the judge thinks either of these characters lied to him under oath, he will refer them to the Georgia Bar and possibly the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

I have read that if she is disqualified, her whole office is disqualified. If that’s so, who continues the case? Maybe someone who is less deranged and determined. Someone who didn’t campaign using an unethical promise to destroy one private citizen, before she had any evidence of wrongdoing. Good news for Trump.

This is my semi-baked, one-hour analysis, which is all you get unless you pay me. Let’s see what happens.

Robert Hur; Defense Attorney and Prosecutor All in One

It amazes me how often Alan Dershowitz agrees with me.

Dershowitz is lauded as a true legal genius, if it’s possible for works of genius to exist in a field where true brilliance is unnecessary and not helpful. People talk about him as though he were the law’s Johnny von Neumann.

I didn’t say “Einstein,” because von Neumann was smarter than Einstein.

What about me? Well, I got a lot of B’s at my second-tier law school. A law school B is like an undergrad A, but still. I rarely visited the library. I did very little except right before exams. I drank a lot. I had a girlfriend. I was never invited to join the law review. I graduated cum laude, but that’s like being employee of the month at Arby’s. Summa is somewhat impressive, but magna and cum are not.

Graduate from college summa cum laude in physics, and you will really impress me. In law, all it means is that you’re pretty smart and you love to study. It also means you didn’t write anything in your exams that offended your deranged Stalinist professors, and it may also mean you’re black, Latin, or homosexual.

I don’t know if Dershowitz is an actual genius, but he’s very smart, and he’s fair. Functionally, fair people are more intelligent than unfair people, because unfair people reject things their reason tells them are true. Dershowitz is smart, and he knows more about law than I ever will. He’s like a student who never stopped cramming for the bar exam.

I mean a student who PASSED and never stopped cramming. Not someone who crams because they fail repeatedly. I know some of those.

Dershowitz just came out with criticism of the report special counsel Robert Hur just filed about Joe Biden’s criminal possession and distribution of multiple classified documents, which occurred over several decades and involved a dirty, messy garage which was open to his drug addict son, who is rumored to have had sex with a Chinese spy.

What does Dershowitz say? He says pretty much what I said. Basically, Dershowitz’s position is that Hur says Biden is guilty, but he refuses to prosecute anyway, and the reason is that he is afraid Biden will win a jury’s sympathy by selling himself as a well-intended elderly man with a bad memory.

Unlike me, Dershowitz goes on to talk about how improper this is. I don’t know a whole lot about criminal law. I do know that prosecutors and even police make unfair decisions every day, deciding whom to release and whom to nail to the wall, and courts have no problem with it even though it violates the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.

Prosecutorial discretion is a fact of life, and it will never go away, so I don’t think about it all that much. The justice system is not just. It never was. Like my dad said, its purpose is to end conflicts, not to bring justice. You say you got cheated in your divorce settlement? I believe you. That’s because the court’s real function was to put an end to your squabbling with your ex-wife. The judge probably made some effort to do the right thing, but maybe he didn’t. Tough. The best way to get justice is to avoid letting things make it to court.

“Trump’s case was worse! He did things Biden didn’t do!” Maybe, although it’s risky to say things like that without seeing all the evidence. Doesn’t matter ONE BIT. A felony is a felony. We don’t prosecute bad, bad felonies and leave bad felonies alone. Go commit a silly felony, like driving over 100 miles per hour in the wrong state, and see if the judge lets you go because it’s a bad felony but not a bad, bad felony.

If you’re guilty of one felony, no matter how little harm you’ve done, they’re supposed to indict, arrest, and prosecute you. You could go through all these things and then get a plea bargain and avoid a felony conviction if you pucker up and kiss whatever has to be kissed. You’re not supposed to get a lollipop and be sent home with a clean record, without even being booked. You should be indicted, arrested, and prosecuted. None of those things will happen to Biden, who unquestionably committed multiple serious felonies over decades.

“Your honor, my client murdered three children, but his cousin murdered three children and was also a habitual litterbug, so while I agree that the cousin should go to the death chamber, it’s clear that my client’s charges should be dismissed with prejudice.”

No.

Hur’s weird, shockingly honest reason for not prosecuting felon Joe Biden is that he’s afraid he’ll lose the case. Was he drunk when he wrote his report? What a great example of “I said the quiet part out loud.”

“I can’t indict, because I’m trying to get in bed with a sexy court reporter who voted for Biden.” “I can’t indict, because the other students in my hot yoga class will stop talking to me.” “I can’t indict because I like hanging out on Rehoboth Beach.” No difference. A prosecutor doesn’t let trivial personal interests deter him from doing what he swore to do.

It’s a shockingly stupid reason. He’s more worried about a tiny professional embarrassment than he is about prosecuting MULTIPLE FELONIES. Every prosecutor loses cases. Hur has lost many cases. It’s all in a day’s work. Imagine your doctor refusing to treat you because you might die.

Every day, prosecutors go easy on defendants they don’t think they can convict, but they’re not supposed to roll over and show their bellies PRIOR TO ARREST. They should indict anyway. If you think you’re likely to lose, you offer a plea after indictment. You don’t say, “I would rather see you get away with a crime than look bad in one of the thousands of cases I will handle during my life.”

Now people who are too stupid to understand the law are running around saying Trump is guilty but Biden isn’t. They’re saying Hur said Biden was not guilty. No; he said he was definitely guilty. He just decided not to do his job.

He thinks a jury will love cuddly, befuddled Uncle Joe. Hello? That’s what jury selection is for. Every competent lawyer strives to get the most biased jury conceivable without violating the law or the canons of ethics. Hur apparently knows he is incapable of making an effective attempt to get a good jury. Who admits that in a publicized report?

The best lawyers do not work for the government, unless you count a few scholarly judges who don’t represent anyone.

Once again, the gander gets sauce, but the goose gets a pat on the head and a juicy reprieve. Conservatives are blatantly abused and oppressed every day, by the government their confiscated tax dollars supports. And when civil war breaks out, leftists will say they have no idea what conservatives are mad about.

Welcome, Friends

If you’re old and moderately good at math, and you know the Holy Spirit, you often know the answers to simple questions other people, oddly, find difficult.

This week, someone asked me if I thought Chinese spies were entering the US under our no-borders policy. I didn’t say I thought they were entering. I said they were, in fact, entering.

Imagine you’re a Chinese official. You want to have many spies in the US. That is not a statement a reasonable person can dispute. You have a choice between working hard to get them in legally, with lots of documentation the US government can rely on to track them, taking a great deal of time, or you can tell them to walk in from Mexico.

What would you do?

I’m sure many Chinese moles are coming in legally. There must be advantages to legal entry in many cases. But the Chinese would have to be morons to refrain from sending people in illegally.

Yesterday, I saw a news item saying Denver police had arrested 50 Al Qaeda members in two months. I can’t promise you it’s true. It comes from a popular Twitter channel. The proprietor says he got the info from a Denver cop who could not allow himself to be identified.

For a moment, let’s forget the question of whether this story is true. Let’s ask ourselves an easier question. Have a lot of Islamist terrorists, from numerous organizations including Al Qaeda, entered the US since we decided borders were racist and promoted global warming and transphobia?

Yes. Of course they have.

There are hundreds of millions of Muslims who want to destroy the US and Israel. There are millions who are willing to get involved personally. They have a long history of violating our immigration laws to enter our country and commit acts of terror.

Why would they choose not to take advantage of an open door policed by a lying dotard who cares a lot about himself and his degenerate children, but very little about his country? There is no plausible scenario in which that happens.

It doesn’t matter whether the Denver story is true, because Islamist savages are definitely coming in. It’s like asking whether fat women will show up if Cinnabon gives away rolls.

If Muslim terror countries let people cross their borders with no vetting, we would be sending people in to undermine them. Why would they behave differently? It’s common sense.

How many terrorists were on the hijacking teams on 9/11? Nineteen. By now, the number of terrorists Biden has let in must be thousands of times that number. If 19 killed over 3000 people in a few hours, what will thousands do?

“DHS will stop them. We have all sorts of top people, using brilliant strategies and great surveillance tools.”

Wrong. That’s not how the government works. That’s how Google and Facebook work, to deprive us of our rights.

We have surveillance and tracking tools that are easy to get around, and they are administered by…government employees and contractors. Chelsea Manning was a government employee. Edward Snowden was a government contractor. They guy who leaked Donald Trump’s tax returns was a contractor. Do I have to go on?

Joe Biden is a government employee surrounded by Secret Service agents, and he threw boxes of classified boxes into his garage and left them there.

It would be so neat if Secret Service agents were like Frank Farmer in The Bodyguard. They’re not. They’re not master martial artists. If a real agent got in a fight with a guy the size of Frank Starr, he would probably get squashed. They can’t shoot a fly out of the air at a hundred yards. They’re not particularly smart. Look at Dan Bongino. Reasonably bright. Not a genius.

Very smart people rarely become law enforcement officers of any kind. That kind of work grinds smart people down.

How many incredibly stupid things has the government done since you were born? Things you, personally, with zero training, would have prevented had you been in charge?

Think about January 6. Eighteen years after 9/11, a bunch of beered-up, unarmed, untrained, disorganized rally attendees walked right into Congress. They could have killed all sorts of legislators had they desired to. That tells you everything you need to know about the security our government provides.

If I were an ayatollah, I would have slapped my forehead on that day. “We plotted and struggled. We shot down complicated plans because we didn’t think they were sure things. We waited and waited, hoping for an answer. We could have just WALKED IN.”

If you think 15 Islamists with AK-47’s couldn’t jump the White House fence and kill the president in 10 minutes, you are way more charitable than I am.

They’re here. Don’t be stupid.

Reagan was surrounded by Secret Service agents, and he still took a .22 to the chest. A mental case with a Saturday night special shot him and two other people before the professionals managed to do anything. I doubt things are much better today.

We rely very heavily on the power of intimidation. We create the false appearance of competence and formidability, instead of taking realistic measures that work. And our enemies consistently fall for it, until they don’t.

You know who we should hire? Casino owners. They’re better at security then the government will ever be. They know when a grandmother from Des Moines is counting cards, and they ban her right away, sending her photos to every casino in America. We let the same deportees come in over and over until somebody gets raped or murdered. The only tools we have that stop illegals are prison and the death penalty, and they’re in the hands of the judicial system and the corrections system, not the State Department or our intelligence or security agencies, which fail every hour of every day.

Well, we have one other tool that works wonders. The Second Amendment.

Illegals swarming the borders remind me of vampires in movies, who have to ask permission to enter houses. If you let them in, it’s on you. It’s our responsibility to keep them out, and we could do it if we wanted. Easily. We have too many DEI concerns to do it right.

The stupidity we are witnessing comes from spirits. We have rejected God so we can have pride and so men can get at each other’s filthy anuses without legal or social impediment. It’s astonishing. It makes no sense. It is literally mental illness. It’s what happens when you get away from the Holy Spirit. You can believe anything, no matter how absurd, and you can think it’s righteous to murder those who tell the truth.

I wish God would end this age and get his children out of here. I feel like I live on the grounds of a mental asylum. No wonder they’re called “asylum seekers.”

The Forgotten Treasures of People who Died Intestate

The thing which I greatly feared is come upon me. I am domestic.

Before my wife moved in, things were pretty sweet. I had a plastic Home Depot folding table in the kitchen, surrounded by molded chairs that ran around $12 each. I had my mother’s terrible bedroom furniture, plus an $80 Chinese headboard from Amazon. I had two workbenches plus a lot of tools in the former dining room, along with an ammo press and a great deal of ammunition and components.

Now I have a vintage rocking chair and an oak kitchen table, and I am buying homey junk that will irreversibly remove the aroma of testosterone from my home. I spend my days on the web and in furniture stores, looking for the kind of things I would already have, had my relatives not looted my dad’s home and my grandparents’ homes.

Trivets. I have trivets on the way. My mother had cast iron trivets that probably came from her grandmother’s home. They vanished into the vortex known as my sister, never to be seen again, along with her display cabinets, my great-great-grandfather’s violin, art from my grandparents’ house, a lot of books she never read but did display, and, well, many things I no longer remember because I have not seen them in so long.

I remembered what my mom’s trivets looked like, and I knew a little bit about cast iron from buying skillets, so I found myself a couple of replacements made by the Griswold company. Griswold is my favorite cast iron manufacturer. My mom probably had some kind of knockoffs. Her #6 skillet, which I have, has no brand stamped into it. I have large-logo Griswolds and matching cornstick pans.

I also got a trivet just for the wall. While I was shopping, I remembered a little plaque my mother’s mother kept in her kitchen. It had a prayer on it, written by a lady named Klara Munkres. I could not find the exact plaque, but I did find a trivet with a tile on it inscribed with the prayer. A nice reminder of my grandmother, from whom I inherited virtually no objects.

We have kitchen wall space we need to fill, so I picked up some old copper Jell-O molds in the shape of various creatures. I don’t know if anyone has ever made gelatin or anything else in molds like this, but they are popular as wall art.

We saw a grandfather clock in a consignment store, very like the one in my grandmother’s living room. My aunt got that one. She deserved it. When my grandparents died, the family did her about like they did me.

Looking at the clock, I thought it might be nice to have it. I went home and Googled it. They wanted $395, but new ones sell for 10 times that. I thought I had the bargain of the century, and then I learned grandfather clocks have no resale value. If we decide we want one, we can get one better than the one my grandmother had for $150 or less. Many people put ads up asking strangers to haul them off for nothing.

Never buy a new grandfather clock. I’m not sure why people keep doing it.

My grandparents had a weather station. This is a carved wooden board with a thermometer, a barometer, and a humidity gauge on it. They were popular before the world turned into a giant computer. I plan to get one. They’re neat.

I’m getting stuff considerably nicer than the things my relations got. My grandparents had some nice stuff, and they also had some things aimed at the undiscerning. If I had inherited them, I would have to say, “It’s not great, but it belonged to my grandparents.” As things are, I say, “It may not have belonged to my grandparents, but when my kids inherit it, they won’t have to say, ‘It’s not great, but…'”

My belief is that old used furniture is the way to go. We just paid about $750 for an oak kitchen table and chairs, and the cost for Vietnamese junk literally made from rubber trees and soaked with pesticide is around $1600. The rocker we got is either oak or ash, and it was made by an American company called Bent Brothers. A Chinese rocker from Cracker Barrel costs $140, and we paid $65. I got a product called Restor-A-Finish to touch up the worn bits, and now the chair looks magnificent.

I draw the line at old cushions. When you buy a cushion that’s 70 years old, you have no idea how much dried pee is inside it. I won’t buy anything upholstered unless I think I can get it redone economically.

One thing that’s hard to get: bookshelves. I finally realized why there were so few. It’s because most Americans do not read books. TV cabinets…no problem. They’re everywhere. During the last century, many people spent a thousand or more dollars on a TV cabinet with a TV hole about 30″ wide, thinking no one would ever need anything bigger. Now these cabinets clutter Craigslist and Goodwill stores. They’re useless curiosities. Like film cameras and Biden ’24 hats.

On a whim, I decided to look for art prints by a woman named Nellie Meadows, the pride of Clay City, Kentucky. She’s dead, so I can be honest. She was a pretty bad artist. Appalachia is known for a near-total lack of artistic talent, however, so her work attained some popularity in Eastern Kentucky.

I don’t want to move back to Eastern Kentucky, and I distance myself from the worst parts of the backward culture, but it would be nice to have some decor touches that remind me of home, so I have looked around for Nellie Meadows prints. Turns out they are sold online occasionally, for princely sums occasionally bumping up against the three-figure mark. If I can find one of the ones my grandparents had, I’ll pick it up.

There was also a local artist named Al Cornett. Much better than Nellie Meadows but not likely to make anyone forget Thomas Eakins. I remember one of his paintings, so I may snap up a print if it becomes available.

He may still be alive. Hope he never sees my blog.

I recall throwing out some mold-covered prints from the house my sister wrecked, but I can’t recall whether they were by Nellie Meadows or Al Cornett.

Nellie was part of the Meadows family that built the Meadows Golf Course in Clay City, Kentucky. The guy that ran the place was named Forest, and he had a swing about like Charles Barkley’s. He made a couple of short fakes and then hit the ball. It was something to see.

I may buy a butter churn to put on the hearth, and I have a couple of my grandmother’s kerosene lamps for the mantel.

We found a neat old rolltop secretary desk to put in a dead space by the kitchen, but while we were thinking it over, they jacked the price from $125 to $395. I was planning to offer $80, and I thought that was too much. My grandmother had a secretary desk with a hinged lid outside her kitchen. A good place to throw mail and later forget about it.

I’m considering a braided wool rug for the living room. Another idea from my grandmother, who had astonishingly good taste for a woman born in 1910 in a place called Holly Creek. I think it was Holly Creek. Not sure. Somehow my mother’s taste was not nearly as good.

Three of the four girls had questionable taste. I would say the youngest led the pack.

Today we are planning to go to the local flea market, if my wife ever gets out of the shower. It occurred to me that while the flea market is nearly useless for buying things one might actually use, it’s good for the kind of junk you might see on the ceiling and walls at Cracker Barrel. Maybe we can find some old kitchen stuff.

Can I work all this Appalachian stuff in and still get a reclining couch? Don’t know yet, but I think it would be better to have clashing decor than a couch that won’t recline.

I better go in there and make sure she’s awake.

It’s Actually a First-Strike Weapon

I never thought I’d sink this low. Today I’m on the web looking at purses.

I have some money coming in, and my wife still needs to put a foundation under her wardrobe. She has some Michael Kors bags, but my unqualified guess as a straight (i.e. normal) male is that every American woman should have one big classic purse that isn’t a billboard for giant designer logos. I think it’s okay to have an old-style Vuitton bag with little V’s and L’s on it, but other than that, you should not be paying high prices to look like some greedy foreigner’s wind dancer.

My mother did not have the greatest taste. I have come to terms with this in my old age. I thought she had good taste, because it was something she talked about a lot, but she didn’t. Eastern Kentucky left its mark. She had a king size bed with a cast-iron headboard, painted gold, with a 6-foot-wide artificially antiqued mirror.

Oddly, her mother, who was an adult before she had a bathtub and didn’t cut her hair until her father died, had very good taste. I never realized what good taste my grandmother had until I got real about my mother’s taste. My grandmother got a new house in 1965, and apart from the couch my grandfather slept on for about 6 hours a day, it was decorated very well. She had a comfortable family room plus an elegant living room and dining room. She had silver and china. Her colors were subdued. Two of the four bedrooms were full of antiques. Not bad at all.

My mother had three wedding rings. The first was a simple band she lost while gardening. She got my friends and me to search for it, but it never turned up. My dad got her a pretty atrocious Lucien Piccard gold watch, plus a matching ring, in around 1968, and eventually he got her a bland and inoffensive ring set. When my mother died, my sister took the set, which is ridiculous, because when it comes to single people, only a lesbian needs a wedding ring. You leave your wedding ring to your son, period.

She also had a gold Rolex with a bright green Malachite face and diamonds around the bezel. Which my sister eventually pawned. A Rolex doesn’t need diamonds around the face. The green face was a little over the top, but not too bad for a woman.

She had lots of very heavy gold chains. I never thought about it while she was alive, but once I started buying gold for my wife, I realized a) how excessive the chains were, and b) how much my sister wasted when she took them and ended up pawning them. A pretty small gold chain will run you $1200 or more these days.

I’m not saying my mother looked like Mr. T at his peak, but she definitely overdid it. I don’t know if she wore the chains all at once, like my sister did. When I started buying stuff for my wife, I felt I should use my mother’s possessions as guides, but thankfully, I now understand that it’s not necessary to get a woman jewelry that will give her a backache.

Here’s a tip about women: when they’re single, they dress partly to get men and partly for another reason. When they’re married, they dress solely for the other reason, and that reason is to make other women feel bad and wish they were dead. Men don’t realize this, but women look at each others clothing, shoes, and jewelry and rank themselves accordingly. If a woman’s outfit doesn’t make other women want to shrink into the floor and cut themselves, it’s a failure.

This is really true, even if it sounds funny. It’s kind of sick. It’s one of those things women don’t tell men about, like how your car really does matter.

Women also dress their husbands to hurt other women. Go figure. Remember all those times your wife tried you to get Bruno Maglis when you were totally happy with running shoes? Now you know what was on her mind.

Maybe my mother really liked big chains, but my suspicion is that she just wanted to compete in the arms race and also store up portable wealth.

My mother had one power item that was actually a good idea: a big Vuitton bag with a shoulder strap. The little letters weren’t obtrusive, and it lasted and lasted. My sister probably wears it today, wherever she is, unless there is a market for pawned Vuitton bags.

So anyway, here I am, looking for something for the wife, and I haven’t found it yet. I think my mom’s bag was a Vuitton Boulogne, but I’m not sure. The one I saw online doesn’t seem the same.

Maybe I won’t be able to find one. That would be fantastic, because there are big-name companies that make quality stuff for way less. You can have like 5 Dooney & Bourkes for one Vuitton. She needs something classic, timeless, and very sturdy. It doesn’t have to be super-expensive. A few bags fitting this description would make up as good a gift as one Vuitton.

My wife actually likes it when I choose stuff for her, because I have proven I’m good at it. Like I always say, I have very good taste; I just choose not to use it. I walk around in Rural King T-shirts, hiking shoes, Carhartt shorts, and lovely wool socks. My appearance could ground a competency hearing.

I never wear anything fancy these days. I wore a tie for my Zoom wedding. Prior to that, my last dress-up episode was in 2019, when my dad died.

I’m not even sure I dressed up for that.

I have to stop looking at this stuff. I sat through two legal education videos this morning. That’s enough suffering for anyone.

Jack a Little too Nimble?

I skimmed the latest Trump indictment, and I was surprised.

I look at things like this as fairly as I can, and there is no doubt that Trump has done at least a few things that could justify some kind of legal response. He’s a bull in a china shop. He says and does what he wants. He’s very careless. He said the prosecutor working on his case looked like a crackhead. That being said, this latest thing looks even weaker than the New York case, which appears to be a complete scam.

Basically, it boils down to this, as I see it: Trump said he really won the election, and he made interference claims that were not true. Somehow this amounts to inciting insurrection. I would be astounded if this case went anywhere. After appeal, I mean. Juries are stupid and dishonest, and if you find the right area of the country, you can convict a conservative of anything.

What if we held leftists to similar standards? Al Sharpton encouraged rioting, and it resulted in the murder of an Orthodox Jew. Maxine Waters encouraged rioting. Celebrities have said stupid things like, “Rioting works.” Our country has been torn apart by riots based on lies that have been thoroughly debunked many times.

Far as I know, Trump always told his supporters to protest peacefully. If a few simpletons got carried away and listened to the beer instead of their common sense, and if they let undercover feds talk them into rioting, that’s not Trump’s fault.

Sometimes I think we could end the rioting problem simply by making the FBI stay home.

The theory behind the FBI agent-provocateur talk goes like this: people protest peacefully and legally, and it irks powerful politicians or swamp denizens because they can’t do anything about it. They send feds to The Gap to buy a bunch of matching outfits, they add masks, and then they merge with protesters and pretend to be on their side. Then they urge the protesters to do stupid things. When the protesters listen, they say, “This is an illegal riot, and we now have the power to arrest people,” and they put people in handcuffs and disperse the crowd.

First Amendment? No longer a problem.

Does it happen? Probably. Is it as widespread as people think? I would be surprised if it were. How can I know? I have no way of finding out.

We know the feds and local law enforcement have been very cruel and unfair to conservatives and Christians. So have corrections officers, who are part of the same organism. I don’t know how low they will stoop.

It’s unquestionably true that many government types hate the Bill of Rights. You can see them slobbering and raving on Youtube. You can read about their backroom discussions. The Bill of Rights means nothing at all to many Americans. Perhaps most. Law enforcement and other types of government work draw bullies and sadists; they always have. Even John the Baptist had to tell soldiers not to terrorize people. No one should doubt the government’s willingness to cheat or the eagerness of many government employees to do great harm to the innocent.

Encouraging people to riot is entrapment, and an entrapped person can’t be convicted or even arrested. Unfortunately, entrapment works, and it can be very hard to prove.

Seeing the shifty and cruel ways of today’s government makes it clear that one of the main purposes of the Second Amendment was to make our keepers afraid of us. They’re supposed to be part of us, but they go native. This country was founded by people who were fighting their own government, and they wanted people who came after them to be better able to do the same thing.

I think Trump will be cleared of nearly every charge once the process has played out. Then whoever is in office will have to decide whether to pardon him of any charges that stuck.

This is a time for Joe Biden to sit down and think about his future. It’s pretty obvious he took bribes and helped his family get rich by selling influence. If he isn’t impeached, it will be a miracle. He could also face criminal charges.

What happens then, if he has lost the election but refused to pardon Trump? What if a Republican is in the Oval Office? If Trump gets convicted of anything before the election, and he’s still polling well, Biden would be smart to give him a break.

I was thinking today that we might conceivably end up in a situation where two presidents who are bitter rivals have to pardon each other in order to save themselves. Biden pardons Trump, who wins the election, and then Trump pardons Biden. That would be funny.

Biden is somewhat stupid, and he is also senile and stubborn, so he may not be able to think clearly enough to consider the consequences of letting Trump convictions stand.

When the Jack Smith stuff started, I figured Smith was just a serious prosecutor who wanted to be thorough. Now he’s starting to look like a corrupt nut. But I could be wrong. Maybe when the evidence will come out, there will be some as-yet-unknown facts that justify blaming Trump for January 6. My bet: it won’t happen.

Hunter Biden Does it Again

So what will have to happen before the leftist press admits there is a problem with the Bidens?

Yesterday’s hilarious revelation: Hunter Biden referred to himself and his friends as “Aryan godlike men.”

“Aryan.”

Try to imagine the array of instruments of torture that would be in preparation right now, had any member of the Trump family so much as said the word “Aryan.”

Here is an excerpt from a Hunter Biden email:

Your question — why does Super Chair love me so much? — is easily answered. It has nothing to do with me and everything to do with my last name (and I bring along very handsome Aryan godlike men wherever I go)

I don’t really know what an Aryan is, and I am too lazy to check, but my understanding is that the term is related to “Iranian,” and I believe it has nothing to do with blonde Europeans from countries where humor is believed to be a symptom of mental illness.

Okay, I’ll look.

Wikipedia says it applied to Indo-Iranian people, whatever they were. They are remarkable for not having a noun associated with their place of origin. There are Indo-Iranians, but there is no Indo-Iran.

You know, it’s amazing how smart the Nazis were to settle on that term. Whenever I see video of Indians wandering around in Mumbai or Iranians burning American flags, right away, I wonder if I’m looking at Germany or Austria. It’s nearly impossible to tell Germans, Indians, and Iranians apart. Those square jaws. That fair skin. Those piercing blue eyes.

Shameless liars are trying to get Hunter off the hook by attributing the remark to a Chinese guy. It was Biden that wrote the email, and he doesn’t say he was quoting. There is no reason at all to think anyone but Biden chose the word “Aryan.”

Does it sound like something a serious business contact would say, or does it sound like a snotty, sarcastic, elitist, racist paraphrase from a spoiled rich kid whose life is one continuous toga party?

The words came from Hunter, not a Chinese contact. It’s clear.

As we all know, the Nazis had this idea that there was a race of Aryans who were innately superior to everyone else and destined to rule over other races. To the Nazis, “Aryan” pretty much meant white people from Europe. Officially, it even included swarthy Italians. In modern usage, we all know what it means. It means people who look like Chris Hemsworth and Uma Thurman, except they’re supposed to be intelligent and talented, not actors.

When you use the word “Aryan” in a positive way, to describe the people in your tightly-knit, exclusive work circle, it’s very likely you are something of a white supremacist. A real white supremacist, not the kind leftists keep moaning about.

The term “white supremacist” is thrown around very irresponsibly these days, almost always in a libelous, baseless way, but there truly are wealthy white men out there who think their kind is the acme of creation.

It sounds like Hunter Biden is way too excited about his whiteness, which is funny, because he’s supposed to be part of the political party that has turned whiteness into a bad thing. Democrats are constantly jousting at white supremacist windmills, imagining wrongs that haven’t taken place, in order to get power over innocent people and abuse them, but here is the son of a Democrat president, using the absolute worst kind of white supremacist language–pseudoscientific Nazi jargon–to describe himself and his buddies.

I thought Hunter’s choice of words was interesting, because it reminded me of the privileged Northeastern frat boys I knew when I was in college. Columbia didn’t have much of a frat system because it was dysfunctional. It had frats that were even more embarrassing and silly than real frats at normal schools.

Columbia had a frat which was officially named Delta Psi. It was commonly known by another name, and it was packed with Northeastern kids who looked like Brooks Brothers mannequins. People who went on to join the wealthy elite and glide above the unwashed herd of random riff raff with undistinguished DNA.

For a long time, I’ve referred to frats as “affirmative action for mediocre white men,” and I stick by what I said. The purpose of a fraternity is to promote people who don’t deserve opportunities, over those who have merit but lack connections. Blackball and boost. Shoot the innocent from cover, and promote the undeserving. This is the entire purpose of fraternities. If they didn’t help weak-minded members defeat abler competition, no one would join or pay dues.

My impression is that Hunter and his pals belong to the same social stratus as the Bushes and Romneys. The secret handshake club. The people who belong to country clubs you can’t join. It makes sense to me that they would see ethnicity as one of their unifying and empowering traits.

Donald Trump, in bizarre contrast, the supposed patron of elites and racists, is the son and grandson of immigrants. He’s still kind of an upstart. An outsider who has to be tolerated.

I don’t think the Illuminati exist, and I know the Jewish conspiracy is a myth, but there really is a powerful, secretive guild of wealthy elitist Americans, and Hunter Biden’s remarks seem to confirm that he has made it his business to be part of it.

So, what happens now? I’ll tell you. It will turn out to be perfectly okay for the son of the president to use Nazi terminology, which was a basis for genocide and conquest, in an admiring way, to cast himself and his pals in a favorable light. No problem.

CNN won’t even notice. A royal got in trouble for wearing a Nazi uniform in jest, but Hunter Biden will not be punished for proving he believes handsome “Aryan” men are godlike.

American Jews will stand with Hunter, because they always commit political suicide. They always side with their enemies in American politics. Maybe some Orthodox Jews will get upset, but nobody pays attention to them.

I kind of wonder what Netanyahu will be thinking the next time he has to show up to kiss Joe Biden’s ring.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the human race won’t disappoint me quite as much as it usually does. Maybe someone on the left will start a stampede and hold the Bidens accountable.

I guess it’s a bad sign when you’ve known someone all your life, and you’re still disappointed when they do what they’ve always done. Says something about your ability to embrace reality.

Carlson Harder to Find than El Chapo

I keep feeling like I woke up in a reboot of The Twilight Zone.

Today I came across something about Tucker Carlson, and I decided to see what was going on with his career. When he got booted from Fox for some pretty uninspiring behavior, I predicted he would fade away.

I don’t think he’s very good at what he does, as I said back when they made the mistake of giving O’Reilly’s golden spot to a person who had been failing at other jobs for years. I think the time slot is what makes 8 p.m. Fox hosts great.

He’s gone. Not just from Fox. Gone, period. The web says he started a Twitter show called Tucker on Twitter, which sounds like a confused man trying on bathing suits. I can’t find it. I can’t find his Twitter page, which is supposed to be at Twitter etc. TuckerCarlson.

What happened?

I know Fox sent him a cease-and-desist. The idea is that Carlson is still under contract to Fox until December of next year. The month after the next presidential election, I should note. That will sting, if Fox gets its way. “It’s me, Tucker, back with a bottle of Ensure and my take on the election I missed.”

I can’t find any stories explaining why Carlson is gone. My guess is that he and/or Elon Musk took his account down in order to minimize their exposure until the dispute is resolved one way or the other.

Why not tell the world what’s happening? It’s a bad idea to comment on potential lawsuits, but you can at least say there’s a potential lawsuit and that you are exercising caution.

I can’t find anyone talking about Carlson’s disappearance. That’s even weirder than the disappearance itself. Hasn’t anyone noticed?

We don’t even know what’s in Carlson’s contract. There must be some kind of non-compete clause or some other language granting Fox exclusive rights to his content. There are little snippets out there, but I haven’t seen anything really helpful.

I learned a little bit about non-compete clauses in law school. Courts do not like them. They stifle competition. They keep prices high. They starve people. In order to make one work, an employer has to make sure it’s reasonable. The duration and geographic scope have to be reasonable, for example. You can’t tell a barber who worked for you in Alaska that he can’t set up shop in Florida for 300 years.

The only kind of non-compete clause I know about kicks in when an employee leaves. Carlson, however, seems to be a current Fox employee. They’re claiming his contract has over a year left to run, so maybe Fox is still paying him, and he has no post-employment non-compete obligation. In that case, it seems reasonable to require him not to work anywhere else.

Another possibility is that the press has things wrong, as usual. Maybe when they say he’s “under contract,” they really mean he IS fired, he’s NOT getting paid, and he has a normal noncompete agreement and maybe a severance package.

I don’t know what’s happening. I can guarantee you Carlson’s lawyers are trying to fix it, or maybe Musk’s are, or both, or maybe Carlson and Musk are fighting over who has to hire lawyers and pay the bill.

I don’t think Twitter is liable for anything, but Musk and Twitter have lots of money, so that makes them seem liable to opportunistic attorneys willing to roll the dice.

I think what’s happening is very bad for Carlson, because as people get used to not watching him, they may start to realize he’s not very good and not particularly smart. They may even start to think rationally about his bad behavior (alleged alleged alleged infinity no tags back) at Fox.

While he’s gone, Jesse Watters is filling the Fox Spot. Another great Fox move, right up there with The Half-Hour News Hour and hiring Rachel Marsden. Watters is smug and annoying. He also lacks O’Reilly’s gift for showmanship. He seems to share Carlson’s maturity issues. Will viewers want to watch him smirk every night for a whole hour?

Maybe they will. That time slot is really something.

I still think Carlson is headed for platform miniaturization, like Bill O’Reilly. O’Reilly now airs his views on Youtube. His videos are getting numbers like 7,000, 20,000, and 169,000. I watch a random guy who does things like covering steaks with Kraft macaroni and cheese sauce and cooking them, and he gets something like 10 times O’Reilly’s traffic. He just flew himself and his wife to Japan first class, at $25,000 per ticket. Of course, I’m assuming he paid. The airline may have given him tickets to get him to do a video.

I don’t think anyone will ever pay O’Reilly $50,000 to review a product. My bet is that he pays for everything now and has to wait in line at restaurants.

Are you still wondering who Rachel Marsden is? Should I have not mentioned her? You probably don’t remember.

Her career pretty much ended over a decade and a half ago. To me, she was a conservative cross between Mary Katharine Ham and the Glenn Close character in Fatal Attraction.

I think people have been watching Carlson on Twitter just to feed the delusion that they’re punishing Fox. I believe they have the same kind of enthusiasm you had the last time you started a diet on January 3rd. February will probably be a very cold month in Carlsonland.

Well, it already is, since Carlson is deplatformed. But I think it will continue to go badly for him.

I pushed the metaphor too far.

Maybe Carlson should pay Dylan Mulvaney to say he hates him. Mulvaney has incredible power to shape consumer behavior, and the Mulvaney Effect seems to have a very long half-life.

Maybe there never was anyone named Tucker Carlson. Maybe there was, in a different reality, but Joe Biden put on a shiny brass gauntlet, snapped his fingers or had someone snap them for him, and made Carlson vanish from the past, along with his memory. Carlson’s memory, I mean. And I was shielded from the effects by my backyard rifle berm.

Now it’s my fate to roam the world with a shaggy beard and long toenails, insisting Tucker Carlson existed.

He’s in the Phantom Zone, with Rachel Marsden and Brent Spicer. Sean Spicer, I mean. See?

When Carlson got the boot, conservatives put up all sorts of gloating memes. Carlson got tons of traffic on Twitter, so people concluded that he had totally 3wned Fox. Talk about celebrating early. Will people want those memes online a year from now?

I don’t care too much who does what at Fox, since I rarely see Fox material, but it would be neat if they gave the golden spot to someone smart and reasonably mature.

Frisky Persecutors Undeterred

I guess anyone who reads what I write about The Last Reformation will think I’m a hard core supporter who thinks Torben Sondergaard has all the answers mankind has been seeking. That isn’t true. I have never belonged to The Last Reformation, and I disagree with them on minor points of doctrine. I have some concerns that it could become a cult over time, and I think they may be making things too systematic. On the whole, though, I support them, and I know they do wonderful work.

All that being said, I am at it again.

Recently, TLR put up two videos about Torben, who is still in jail or prison or something. “Detention,” I think they call it. Makes incarcerating people who haven’t been found guilty of anything sound better. TLR is trying to set the record straight. I’m going to embed the videos here.

My only complaint with the videos is that comments are disabled. That’s a bad move. It makes TLR look like it’s afraid something will be exposed.

It’s fascinating how things unfolded. The videos contain new information. It turns out Danish TV, which belongs to the government, sent two spies to TLR’s facility, and they both told huge lies on camera.

The spies pretended to be Christians, and they asked to be baptized. They even went so far as to give false testimonies later to be used in videos.

As TLR’s second video says, these are people who have no fear of God. No one who believes in a just God would ask to be baptized while lying to the people doing the baptizing, and certainly, no real Christian would lie later in a video testimony.

The name of one of the spies is Sebastian Svensson. This man is accused of doing something so low, it’s hard to believe. The story: in private, he told Torben he had inherited a lot of money, and he said he wanted to give it to Torben. When Torben told him he could donate via the TLR website, he refused. He said he wanted Torben, not the ministry, to have it. Torben never took the money.

In America, this tactic is considered so unfair, law enforcement can’t use it. It’s called entrapment. Black’s Law Dictionary defines it this way: “a law-enforcement officer’s or government agent’s inducement of a person to commit a crime, by means of fraud or undue persuasion, in an attempt to later bring a criminal prosecution against that person.”

More simply, the cops aren’t allowed to go up to a person who has no plans to commit a crime and entice or pressure him until he commits one.

Svensson is a journalist, not a cop, and statutes barring entrapment don’t apply, but the principle underlying the prohibition still applies. Entrapment is a slimy thing to do. In some courts, a private party who entraps someone is considered guilty of the crime of aiding and abetting.

I don’t bring these legal points up to suggest Svensson broke the law. I’m just using them to highlight the vileness of the things TLR says he did.

Is entrapment considered ethical by journalists? If so, then a journalist’s job isn’t just to cover crime but to make it happen. Bribing a preacher with no record of dishonesty is like Woodward and Bernstein telling Nixon he should have people break into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.

When I was going to Trinity Church in Miami, a member tried to give the church a car, and Pastor Rich Wilkerson jumped right up and snagged it for himself. The church got nothing. Too bad Svennson wasn’t there.

Another journalist, Amalie Borup, filmed a private discussion with Torben and then published parts of it. According to TLR, she took things out of context and tried to make it seem that Torben had told her to stop taking a prescription.

TLR says he never does this, and I believe it. He’s not a moron. Obviously, telling people to abandon medical treatment can lead to legal problems, and aside from that, every Christian who knows anything about healing and deliverance knows that problems may return.

You can watch the second TLR video and see these schemers go under the water, wasting people’s time, and then testify about how it changed them.

Why believe TLR about the prescription story? Well, the journalists are proven liars, for one thing, and I have never seen anyone at TLR get caught in a lie.

The video also tells about random Internet warriers who put out rumors claiming Torben makes a lot of money from TLR and only cares about getting rich.

Is this true?

TLR is transparent, and no one has ever published a story saying he or she looked at the books and found wrongdoing. But apart from that, they don’t behave like greedy preachers.

I have been to several TLR events, I have received lots of their group emails, and of course, I have seen their website and videos. Here are my observations.

1. If they have asked for money, apart from taking quiet, unpressured collections at meetings, I am unaware of it.

2. I have no recollection of ever seeing a TLR person draw a connection between giving TLR money and receiving financial prosperity from God.

3. Torben and his family look like they dress from Kohl’s and Marshall’s.

4. Torben criticizes the prosperity gospel.

TLR also complains about people who call it a cult. The big problem with the proposition that TLR is that so far, no one has produced any evidence.

What are some things cults do? They control people. They isolate them from other people. They don’t permit dissent, so there is no accountability. They may expect people to turn over assets. Cults are often led by individuals who are considered infallible.

Now that I think about it, this describes the Catholic Church, back in the days when they still burned people alive.

It is true that TLR has enforced some annoying rules at some of its live-in retreats. For example, they have required people who live close by to sleep in dormitories and be in bed by a certain hour. These things did not sit well with me. I have enough problems sleeping at home, and I’m not excited about using a community shower or toilet. On the other hand, if you go to a TLR meeting, you will notice the following things:

1. You don’t have to pay a dime. You may be required to give a refundable deposit in order to reserve a spot, but they do this because people who hate them used to take up all the spots in order to kill attendance and leave them holding the bag when paid venues expected payment.

2. You can come and go as you wish. They don’t even notice. If you only want to see the second day of a three-day event, and you want to show up two hours late, that’s fine.

3. No one pushes you to join. They tell you how to do it, and they leave it at that.

4. People in attendance run around healing, praying, and casting demons out without direct supervision. If you want to cast a demon out of someone, you can walk into a TLR meeting from the street, find a person, and go to work. No one will question you. I’ve seen people ministering spontaneously, and I’ve done it, so I know what I’m talking about.

5. Torben is not the only one doing things, as #4 suggests. In fact, the other people there will correct you if you think you have to deal with Torben directly. You may, if you want, but they make it clear he’s not God’s unique emissary. A guy who prayed with me somehow got the idea that I thought Torben had to do it, and he gave me a little lecture. It is true that a lot of misguided people put him on a pedestal, but that’s their own fault. He doesn’t attend every event. Especially now, while he’s in jail.

6. TLR gives things away. They give away water, snacks, DVD’s, and books.

7. They have never told me who to associate with, although the Bible itself makes it clear we need to cut certain types of people off.

If this is a cult, it’s the sorriest cult in human history. They’re doing everything wrong. In comparison, Orthodox Judaism, the Masons, and even the Boy Scouts look like the Branch Davidians.

I have tried to find eyewitness testimony proving TLR is a cult, but I can’t come up with anything. I keep seeing Google results that look promising, but when I click on them, it’s usually some fringe kook claiming TLR is a cult because it disagrees with him about doctrine. Cessationists really love to call TLR a cult. It infuriates them when anyone claims to have received a healing, and talking about tongues is like jabbing them with a pointed stick. Some atheists also hate TLR, but what preacher don’t they hate?

A ridiculous site ironically labeled Rationalwiki says TLR is a cult, but all it publishes is innuendo. “Professionals” have criticized TLR! Professional what? Ballroom dancers? Drywall installers?

A former member says TLR is heretical! What? By whose standards? Jesus was labeled a heretic. Protestants consider Catholics heretics. Again, disagreement over doctrine does not form a basis for labeling TLR a cult.

Irrationalwiki says TLR “abused” a handicapped woman who developed psychosis caused by the abuse. It says she had to receive 24-hour care for years. Who defines “abuse”? Not Rationalwiki. What was the abuse? What were the symptoms of psychosis? Who made the diagnosis? Who says it was caused by TLR? Rationalwiki does, and that’s good enough for you. It provides a link to a Facebook post to prove it. If you don’t have Facebook, too bad.

The psychosis claim comes from an entity called InsideOut. This outfit claims Torben performs “violent” exorcisms. Excuse me; I’ve been there. The only thing resembling violence comes from the people being delivered. They often thrash and yell. There is no violence. The people around them comfort them and help them not to injure themselves.

Try to find information on InsideOut. You’ll find it’s extremely obscure. TLR-bashers call it “a Danish anti-cult corporation.” People love using words like corporation and coalition to describe a nut with a Wix website. The leader of InsideOut is named Camilla Johnson. Try to find her on the web. Good luck, because I got nowhere.

My bet is that InsideOut’s headquarters is her apartment.

A number of the powerful arguments Rationalwiki confidently presents are simply references to people who think Torben is wrong to believe basic Christian tenets. In other words, atheists. To most atheists, I guess every religion is a cult.

Here is a quotation Rationalwiki presents, approvingly, on its page about Jesus:

“Jesus was no perfect man, no meek or wise messiah: in fact his philosophies were and are largely immoral, often violent, as well as shallow and irrational.”

“Rational”…wiki.

You should always look out when a person claims to be rational. It’s funny, but people who claim to prefer logic and science to religion never seem to notice that science has proven that human beings can’t be rational. Look up “Clever Hans.” Look up “double blind.”

Too often, “rational” really means, “motivated by an irrational hatred of religion.”

Persecution is amazing. It doesn’t have to have a single grain of truth in it to motivate people.

I have a relative who is convinced TLR is a cult. Strangest thing. She doesn’t actually know much about it. She thinks its leader is a criminal, and she hasn’t even heard about the immigration thing. She doesn’t know TLR’s name. The other day, I heard she was concerned I was running around with “NRA.” I wish she would read up and find out how mistaken she is.

Maybe some preacher she likes, who sees Torben as a threat, said some bad things about him. Torben is definitely a threat to big, profitable churches.

I have wondered why Torben ended up in jail, given that you would expect God to look after him. I wonder if it has to do with putting his trust in carnal people and the United States government. It’s just my impression. Maybe he would have been jailed no matter what.

His US asylum case has been rejected, and many people think it’s unfair. I have no idea whether that’s true or not. I don’t know the law surrounding asylum. Maybe his case is completely normal, and he doesn’t meet the criteria for asylum. I know it’s a big mistake for laymen, and lawyers who are not familiar with a case, to draw conclusions.

TLR is no cult, so don’t be nervous about visiting their meetings. The rumors about leather straps and electrodes are grossly exaggerated.