Conventional Wisdom can get you Killed

Let’s vandalize some toxic icons.

I wrote about the great news concerning pistol braces. These things are used as rifle buttstocks, to allow shooters to use rifle-caliber pistols just like rifles, held at the shoulder. The rule banning them was just stayed by a federal judge, and it will remain unenforceable for the next few years, barring a miracle no one who can determine his own gender without professional help wants to see. The courts will be very slow to do anything about it, and they will probably leave the injunction in place and do away with the ban.

I wanted to get one of these things for a Ruger 10-22 pistol as well as an AK-47 pistol. The Ruger is for tooling around the farm in my utility cart. The AK would be for protection while on the road. In a small space, it’s a little easier to swing than a full-length AK. Also, with a short AK, you only lose about 10% of your muzzle velocity, so it’s a good trade.

Ed Bonderenka commented:

That’s good news, but my AR pistol is accurate from the hip with the green laser attached. I mean chew up the bullseye accurate.
For me a brace would just make it bulkier.
But is is a big move because of the constitutional issues, particularly standing against the administrative state.
I might buy one just because.

No argument here.

The web is full of people who parrot gun myths as though they came from Jesus himself, and one of the myths says you can’t shoot a powerful gun accurately unless you shoulder it. Total nonsense. They also say lasers are toys that don’t really work. The US military disagrees, but whatever.

I remember writing some stuff about intending to shoot a 12-gauge from the hip, using a laser. A blogger who used to write a lot about guns said he couldn’t control such a gun with his “gorilla” arms, making the obvious implication about my arms and chances.

I bought a Saiga-12 shotgun. I bought a cheap Chinese laser. I went to a gun range. I put a target up at 50 feet. I put shots in a circle the size of a tennis ball, more or less, from the hip. No problem. Child’s play. With my non-gorilla arms.

Maybe my squirrel monkey arms have something his gorilla arms don’t, but I doubt it. If he had tried what I tried, he would have said something completely different. Maybe he didn’t have lasers in mind. I can’t remember.

Interesting fact: a 12-gauge has more recoil than a .30-06, an AK has much less, and an AR is even further down the list. I’m trying to say that a 12-gauge has all sorts of recoil. Worse than most deer guns.

Another interesting fact: when you use a laser, recoil doesn’t matter much.

“Blasphemy! Blasphemy!”, I hear the gun Sadducees shrieking. They are always the last to accept the obvious truth.

Why does recoil matter when you’re defending yourself? A couple of reasons. It may teach you to flinch, and it will also knock your gun off-target, so you have to find the target in your sights again.

When you have a laser, flinching doesn’t mean much. Where is the dot when you pull the trigger? That’s where the bullet will go. It’s that simple. Try it some time. People say it doesn’t really work. It does. It’s impossible for it not to work. Flinch all you want. As long as the dot is on the mark when the trigger is pulled, you win.

When you have a laser, finding the target again, instantly, is no problem. You have a big, giant beam in front of you. Shoot. Put the beam back on the target. Done. Shoot again. Squinting at black iron sights is a lot harder. Reacquiring your target through a scope is also hard, and in many cases, it will be impossible because you won’t have enough light to see through the scope.

People are taught to obsess on iron sights and scopes. You need to be able to use these things. No doubt about it. But teaching people to rely on them is really, really stupid. Why? Because MOST VIOLENT CRIMES OCCUR AT NIGHT.

YOW. Ouch. That stings, if you’re a gun Sadducee. Make a comment and tell us I’m wrong. Tell us your secret method for using iron sights or a red dot in a dark bedroom. I can’t wait to hear.

It’s not just hard. It can’t be done. So people who advise us to rely on iron sights and scopes aren’t just shooing us away from the best optics; they’re teaching us to be totally helpless IN MOST SELF-DEFENSE SITUATIONS.

That’s pretty bad.

When I get up in the morning, I turn the burglar alarm off. Why? Because nobody is going to break in while I’m here and the sun is out. That’s just a fact. They might break in at night even though they can tell I’m here, because darkness and surprise work to their advantage. They’re not going to show up in the daytime, when the police and I can see them clearly.

It’s true that most burglaries take place in the daytime, but the primary purpose of a firearm isn’t to stop burglaries, which most commonly happen when people are at work. It’s to stop home invasions, which are burglaries that take place in occupied houses.

If you ever have to defend yourself from a criminal in your home, chances are, it will be dark out, and your house may be dark, too. Good luck trying to aim at a burglar when you can’t see your sights. You’re going to spray and pray, just like everyone else who took the bad advice.

My carry pistol has a laser that turns on by itself when I pick the gun up. Wake me up, and I can have it in my hand in one second. That’s pretty good. In one second, I can be well-armed while I pick up a rifle and turn its laser on. After that, my house is a really bad place for a burglar to be.

Burglars don’t use good optics. They don’t even learn how to shoot. They generally use polymer pistols they steal from their neighbors, with whatever ammunition was in them when they were stolen. If I have a rifle with a bright green laser, and my guest has a Taurus pistol he got by breaking into a car, who do you think will get shot the soonest and the most?

How much time do you think I’ll spend making sure I have a good sight picture or just the right grip?

“Hold on, Mr. Burglar! I have to make sure my isosceles stance is just right!” “I have to put on my tactical socks and call Massad Ayoob!” I don’t think so.

If you like spending money, you can do even better. You can get night vision plus an infrared laser criminals can’t see. You’ll see the criminal and the big dot of light, and he will not even know where you are.

That brings me to another creaky talking point: “A laser will tell the criminal where you are!”

He’s almost certainly going to know where you are anyway. I admit, it’s great if he doesn’t, but he probably will. And if you use a laser, by the time you light him up, he will not have enough time to do anything about it. He’ll have a pretty good idea where you are, as you shoot him repeatedly.

And you won’t be helpless because you’re trying to find your tiny black sights in the dark.

You don’t have to walk around with your laser on, lighting up the neighborhood like Rudolph the Green-Nosed Reindeer. You can switch it on right before you shoot.

The Sadduccees love to say lasers make you dependent on gimmicks. Isn’t that better than being dependent on sights you can’t use because it’s dark? Either way, you’re going to be dependent on something.

So to sum up, you can shoot a powerful gun perfectly well from the hip with a laser. It will not be the best answer for killing people at long distances, but if you’re shooting people far away, you’re probably what the law calls “a murderer.” If a criminal is so far away you can’t hit him using a laser, he is probably too far away to pose a threat a jury will confirm.

If lasers are so great, why consider a shouldered weapon? Lasers are pretty bad outdoors in bright conditions. Also, they can malfunction. You may be in a situation where you need to be able to use the sights.

A folding weapon with a laser, to me, appears to be the best option for defense outside the home. When it’s folded, you will be able to maneuver it in the car. The laser will be helpful most of the time. If you have to get out of the car for some reason, you can unfold the stock and use the sights.

You can also stick a red dot on a folding gun along with the laser. A red dot is fantastic for shooting a gun you can’t shoulder. You can nail anyone within a hundred feet without too much trouble.

Maybe I should listen to Ed and forget the brace. If I get a braced pistol, I can fool with it and decide for myself.

Missing Links

Want to feel old? Think about all the blogs that have died.

On very rare occasions, I go through my blogroll to find out if there is any point in keeping links. My standard is a little vague. Basically, if you haven’t posted in a year, your link is probably going to fall. Of course, I have not applied this standard to Acidman’s blog, Gut Rumbles, which is still maintained by his family, 17 years after his death. I also kept Lost in the Cheese Aisle, the blog of the late Steve Krodman, AKA Ellison. He was doing fine, and then one day he was diagnosed with ALS, and he was gone in something like a year.

Seventeen! If Acidman had had a son the day he died, the son would be getting ready to go to college.

No one reading this has any idea who Acidman was, I suppose.

I got rid of Sondra K. today. She used to be huge. Then something happened, and it seemed like the only person who continued posting was Doug M., who is not an adequate substitute. While I was doing my culling, I learned that Sondra’s blog has been replaced by something called Sondra’s Gulch or whatever, and when I looked at it, everything was written by Doug M.

I dumped Smoke on the Water, written by Jim Seigler. He hasn’t published in eternity. He visited the compound a few years back, though.

I got rid of Aaron’s CC, a blog written by my old college buddy. When you try to visit, you get a weird window asking you to download a php file. Maybe that’s a bomb for the folks who put a fatwa on him. In any case, there is no content now. I don’t think I should be sending innocent people to a site that appears to be a booby trap.

Is blogging finally over? Maybe it is. Let’s see if IMAO and The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler still exist.

The Rott is still up, but not much is happening. IMAO is running, but I don’t see “Frank” anywhere in the text.

Russ Emerson, AKA Tacjammer, has not updated since 2018, so he’s gone. I hope he’s okay. He developed hydrocephalus all of a sudden, and before they put in a shunt, he already had damage to his nervous system.

I wonder if conservative bloggers still think they’re doing something important. Are they still fighting for the cause? I dropped all that years ago.

If you’re still coming by, and I deleted your link, I apologize, but you weren’t using your blog anyway, so you probably don’t care.

Some Things are Worse Than Being Locked Down with Netflix

I don’t read blogs any more. Not even if they’re blogs belonging to people I like. I have no idea what’s happening in the Blogosphere or whether it still exists.

For some reason, I took a look at Chris Byrne’s blog the other day. If you read blogs, you know him as the Anarchangel. Big, strong guy with stronger opinions. Anyway, I was surprised to learn that things were not going well at all. Chris has gone through a pretty miserable experience with recurring cancer, and it has apparently had devastating impacts on his career and marriage.

He wrote a post in February in which he actually celebrated being able to use a Bowflex. That would have seemed impossible in, say, 2005.

I thought I would mention him today in case anyone wanted to get involved in any way. He has a Paypal button, and he is surely in need of considerable prayer.

By the way, his opinion of the global response, including commonly accepted casualty figures, is not all that different from mine.

I don’t plan to resume reading blogs.

My Coronavirus Ordeal Intensifies

The coronavirus epidemic just got real to me. McDonald’s has stopped making all-day breakfast.

Prior to this, I was telling everyone the epidemic was a great misfortune but not a catastrophe. Now I must agree with the toilet paper hoarders. Suffering has begun in earnest.

Today I did my best to adapt. I was determined to be strong. I made myself a big slice of country ham and several bacon-grease biscuits with red eye gravy. I’m no longer sobbing now. I think I can handle this.

Yesterday I learned that two counties not far away have put lockdowns into effect. That was disturbing. It made me wonder if my county was next. I live in the most conservative county (i.e. “sane”) county in the state, so I have good reason to hope for relatively intelligent leadership.

I checked the local paper’s site, and it says they’re not locking us down. They closed Internet cafes, though. Not sure what that’s all about.

Honestly, if I’m locked down, I plan to go out anyway. They don’t have enough cops to prevent it, and there will be enough “essential” businesses open to let me blend it with law-abiders. In truth, I will probably end up obeying the law, because the businesses I frequent are generally on the essential list. Grocery stores. Hardware stores. Places that sell firearms.

I assume this county wouldn’t be crazy enough to close gun stores. Many liberal-dominated cities are shutting them down. It’s obvious that gun stores are essential. The right to self-defense is extremely important. Liberals don’t see it that way, however, and they are always looking for underhanded, back-door methods of taking away our civil rights.

If the disease becomes widespread here, I’ll probably be more careful, but right now, getting this disease is like winning the lottery. It’s not common at all when compared to colds and the flu.

I’m disappointed to see that the government plans to hand out over a trillion dollars in totally unnecessary vote-buying tax money. Our economic problems are being caused by panic, not a relatively minor epidemic. We will have higher taxes because of the handout. We should just get out of the way of progress and let capitalism do its thing.

Here’s something funny: leftist Sweden isn’t imprisoning its citizens. They’re taking a relaxed approach, because, hello…it’s the correct thing to do. Evidently someone over there is capable of understanding simple math. You have to wonder how America’s leftists will take this.

Sweden won’t have a catastrophe. Even Italy didn’t have a catastrophe. No country will.

Here’s something that will raise your spirits or give you heartburn, depending on how you look at it: the lady in charge of the White House response says the initial coronavirus predictions may have been WILDLY (my word, not hers) exaggerated. Welcome to Club Reason!

I’ll embed a video of her appearance. If you don’t want to watch it, I’ll mention a key point. Initial death toll prediction for the UK: 500,000. Current prediction: 20,000.

So they were only off by 96%. No biggie.

Extrapolate to the US, and you get around 80,000. Terrible? Well…it’s the same number of people the CDC says we lost to the seasonal flu last year. Did you mourn all last year? Were there mass cremations? Did we shut down stores and tell grown people they were grounded? Don’t think so.

Here’s a screaming uninentional admission from the video: there is no antibody test. Hello? Remember me writing about the Chinese researchers who said the false-positive rate was 40-80%? Am I a genius because I read a news story and told other people about it?

If you don’t have an antibody test, you’re guessing. They’re judging people by symptoms, and coronavirus isn’t the only bug that causes respiratory failure.

It looks like we’re going to find out we misdiagnosed a huge number of flu patients. The epidemic’s numbers may collapse inward. For this, we deprived each other of toilet paper.

Should we have locked the country down just to be safe? Of course not. We already knew, from looking at the numbers available to us, that this disease was not going to spread that widely. It would have been inexplicable had it come to the US and hit a large percentage of the population. That would have been totally inconsistent with the way it worked in other countries.

We should have sheltered fat people and old people from the disease. I’ll bet we could do a lot of that with a trillion dollars of tax money. Think about this: even if you spend a trillion dollars, if you let people work while you spend it, you have earnings to mitigate the loss.

Not that I think we need to spend a trillion dollars to help “bubble people.” I’m just using the figure we’re actually spending. We could do it for nearly nothing.

It’s scary being part of an unthinking herd. Even if you know they’re wrong, you can still get swept over the cliff with the lemmings. Thank God I’m in the country and among conservatives.

In other news, I watched a Hickok45 video this morning. He’s the old guy in Tennessee who shoots steel in his backyard. He reviewed a Glock 20, which is a full-size 10mm pistol. I was glad to see this, because I ordered a Glock 20. I already have a Glock 29, which is the compact version, but I thought it would be nice to have a bigger one with a bigger magazine, to wear in my yard. I don’t want a heavy pistol bogging me down in the grocery store, and I want to keep my out-and-about gun in a pocket, but it’s okay to have a big carry pistol displayed openly at home.

Should I be content with a compact in the car. I don’t know, but I can legally put an AK47 in the backseat, so it doesn’t matter. I used to keep a similar rifle under the seat of my truck. I’ll tell you what. In a traffic dispute with a carload of bullies, nothing gets you respect like a rifle with a 30-round magazine.

When I saw that ammo hoarding was starting up, I ordered myself some 10mm bullets, primers, brass, and powder. I did not hoard. To hoard is to buy more than is reasonable. Anything up to 1,000 rounds, in a particular caliber and load, is reasonable. Back during the Obama panic, people were buying pallets of ammunition, and a lot of them were flipping them on Gunbroker. That’s hoarding.

Anyone who says a thousand rounds is a hoard is not a good shooter, because that person doesn’t practice. If you practice, you know you can shoot a thousand rounds in a week.

I have another Youtube favorite: Paul Harrell. He’s a true expert. He has won prizes in tons of shooting competitions, and he has been through a bunch of military schools. He was a military instructor. He even killed a guy with a deer rifle. The man was attacking Harrell and his wife, who were on foot, in a pickup truck. Harrell put two rounds through him and got charged with manslaughter, but he was acquitted.

Harrell is a remarkable person. He’s generally a class act, although he has given people the finger in a couple of videos. He’s very smart and very patient. He would have made an exceptional attorney. He thinks his videos through very carefully, and he’s extremely thorough.

About 20% of gun lovers are absolute jerks who ought to be muzzled. Harrell knows this. He knows that no matter how carefully he words his videos, some couch commando will pop up in a comment and “correct” him. Watching him speak is like watching George W. Bush deliver the carefully constructed messages his team crafted in anticipation of leftist distortions.

Recently, Harrell was attacked by a much less popular creator: Caleb Giddings. Giddings was on a “reality” show featuring people who shot well. It was actually a multi-episode game show. He got weeded out and lost, but he still has an ego that won’t quit.

Harrell posted a video about shooting revolvers, and this set Giddings, a competition revolver shooter and former insurance agent, off. Giddings posted a response in which he accused Harrell of ignorance.

I’ll embed the video, but I don’t recommend watching it.

Giddings used the AH word to describe Harrell, and in comments, he made very arrogant remarks about his own shooting ability, compared to Harrell’s. He said something about Harrell’s championships lacking certification from recognized bodies.

Giddings drank Scotch all through is own video, which kind of looks bad given that it was a gun video. Guns and liquor aren’t supposed to be seen together. In Florida, alcoholics and potheads are legally barred from concealed carry, and this is probably true elsewhere. The federal NICS form lists drug and alcohol abuse as things that will prevent a transfer.

I have to admit, I’ve had more than a couple of beers while carrying. This was a long time ago. I wasn’t thinking. It’s a big deal, however. I rarely have more than one drink now, so it won’t be an issue ever again.

Harrell got fed up and responded to Giddings with a one-hour spanking that has to rank as one of Youtube’s all-time harshest rebuttals. He proved that Giddings said a lot of things that weren’t even close to true, and then he crushed what was left of his reputation by displaying a table full of awards. He took a plastic bin full of medals and dumped it on the table.

I don’t know who is the better shooter, but it would take at least two people to carry Harrell’s awards, and he even wins tomahawk-throwing matches, which is a little ridiculous, to be honest. Giddings has his credits listed on various gun-related sites on the web, but they don’t provide long lists of marksmanship championships, and knowing this guy, if there was such a list, it would be on every site he’s involved with.

My guess is that he would fare badly against Harrell.

A bunch of Harrell’s half-million fans went to Giddings’ video and left uncomplimentary comments. The dislike/like ratio was very high.

What did Giddings do? Did he admit fault? Actually, he turned the comments off and hid the likes and dislikes. This is not helping him. It makes him look cowardly and even more dishonest, and on top of that, he can’t get rid of the comments on Harrell’s video, which has a much bigger audience. Giddings only has about 50,000 subscribers, and he will probably have considerably fewer tomorrow.

His personality is very unpleasant. He drips venom. He seems very insecure. He doesn’t honor other people at all. He contemns them, and he does it from a pretty unimpressive position. He’s like a movie character who makes you long for the moment when he finally gets punched in the face. He is not someone you would want to know, unless you’re also a jerk.

Giddings is currently in the Air Force, so I guess he didn’t make it as a professional shooter or insurance salesman. If he had the kind of talent he thinks he does, he would be making a living shooting, like Jerry Miculek. If Miculek acted the way Giddings does, people might understand, but it looks awful coming from a semi-pro with a day job.

It’s very interesting. It reminds me of the days when blogs were actually blogs and not corporate pseudopods. Giddings trolled Harrell, who had done nothing to provoke him, and he got bitten very deeply in the rear end. The Youtube crowd wasn’t having his nonsense.

The whole kerfuffle makes me think of things I’ve done and said in the past. God is love, and his children should also be love. Men should be men, not boys. Not arrogant punks who have no appreciation for anything. I’m glad I’m finally improving.

It’s too bad there are so many insecure macho men in the gun crowd. They ruin things for everyone. I quit using The High Road because there were so many jewels filling the board with poison. I joined another board, and I make liberal use of their “ignore” feature. When someone says something nasty, I try not to respond at all. If I do respond, I try to say something mature but clear. The ignore list is wonderful.

Similarly, I quit watching Gordon Ramsay again. Earlier in the week, Youtube started suggesting his videos again. I don’t know why. I watched several, and then I quit and deleted them from my history. If you keep something bad in your history, Youtube will recommend similar things. Ramsay is a mess. He spreads hate everywhere he goes. I don’t care if it’s an act (it’s not). I don’t need that circulating in my blood.

Every day, when I look at Youtube, I tell it to stop recommending certain channels. The Mormons. News stations. Political vloggers. Movie-related channels. Keep that mess. It makes my stomach hurt.

I guess I’ll try to finish my steel target array today. Then I’ll do a lie-packed video about Jerry Miculek and see if I can get some attention!

Raconteur, Bon Vivant, Lover of Whale Bacon

I made a little joke yesterday, and it did not work out well.

I was writing about the way deaths seem to surround me right now. My dad is dying a little bit at a time. I just learned of the deaths of my second cousin and his mother. To make things worse, I found out a guy I knew from an Internet forum had died. I wrote this: “If most people I know could just remain alive through the end of this week, I would consider it a big favor.”

A comment then appeared, informing me that Steve Krodman, AKA Elisson, had died. It happened on January 11.

I think that’s sufficient for now. I will be just fine if I don’t get any more news of death during the coming week.

Elisson had several blogs. One was called Blog d’Elisson. Another was called Lost in the Cheese Aisle. He wrote well. He was funny. He was a very likable guy.

Back when I had an Internet radio show, Elisson appeared as a guest. He told me about the time he ate whale bacon. He was visiting Japan, and he found out they made bacon from whale meat, so he tried it. That was classic Elisson. It’s hard to think of another blogger who would come up with that story.

I looked at Lost in the Cheese Aisle (are there really stores with cheese aisles?), and I learned that Elisson had ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. It was a fast-acting variant. In his last entry (dictated), dated December 31, 2018, he said he got his diagnosis in March of last year, so he only lasted something like 9 months. He said he was unable to walk. He spent his time in a wheelchair and in bed, and he required oxygen.

I am not on his blogroll now. I don’t know if that means anything. I don’t recall any flaps between us. Of course, I have become a big proponent of Spirit-led Christianity, and he was Jewish, so maybe he felt I had gone off the deep end. It doesn’t matter to me; I thought he was a great guy. I can certainly understand how my new outlook on life would turn people off. I expect it.

I see he quoted me in his sidebar, with a link. Maybe he had not given up on me.

I wish I could say I think he’s in a happier place, but I can’t. I am very disturbed when I think about it.

I feel like I should hang a sign, like those workplace accident signs. “Nobody I know has died in __ days.”

Life gets serious after you get deep into middle age. When you’re young, you count on people in your age group being around if you want to contact them. Once you hit 50, every time you look someone up, you know you might get an unpleasant surprise.

I have a friend in Miami who is a little older than I am. Smokes like a stove. Smoking doesn’t just cause cancer. It causes COPD, heart attacks, and strokes. It can cause dementia. When I think about him, I get a little concerned. He is determined not to quit, though.

I know of three people from my law school who have died already, and there are probably more. Most people I went to school with were younger than I am.

Death is real, and it’s not far off at all. It’s always waiting to dash out and retrieve, like a ball boy at a tennis match. Or a turkey buzzard beside a busy highway.

When I think about mortality, it helps me adjust to giving my life to Jesus. I’m not giving him much. Barring a surprising outcome, I am much closer to death than I am to my high school graduation, which seems recent in my mind. The persecution I put up with here won’t last long, even if it starts in earnest today. People who are against God can attack me while I live, but they can’t keep me alive past my appointed date. Science has not reached the point where we can put death off indefinitely in order to torment people.

Hell is different, however. The people who end up there will be tormented forever because they won’t be able to die.

On a related note, I think we are working way too hard to extend life. The more I visit my dad in memory care, the more convinced I am. The place is full of people who simply lived too long. Pumping people full of statins, blood thinners, and insulin after their brains stop working is not a kindness. It’s like embalming the living so we can have viewings that last decades.

If we had real confidence in the afterlife and salvation, we would not claw and scratch to stay in this disappointing, unfulfilling world.

These days my dad talks a lot about how nice it will be to be with my mother again.

Steve Krodman was only 66. I wish he had been able to remain here considerably longer, and of course, I wish he had managed to get to know his Messiah. I wish I had known what was going on. At least I could have prayed for him.

Educated American Chooses Witch Doctor Over Pastors

I just got a very strange email.

Back when I thought I was going to be a humorist (i.e. a person who refuses to grow up and uses his shortcomings to amuse others for money), I was part of a group of Internet writers who got books published. If you don’t remember any of that, good for you. It was a silly time. Publishers got the mistaken idea that the ability to generate web traffic correlated strongly with the ability to sell books, and generally, it wasn’t true. They published books by people like Wonkette (Ana Marie Cox), Maddox (no idea what his real name is), Tucker Max, and Glenn Reynolds. A publisher cranked out three of my own books.

As far as I know, the only one of us who made any real money from books was Tucker. He wrote a book about his adventures as a drunken lothario. It was called I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. It made him look like a real jerk, but I communicated with him a little, and it seemed to me that he was not really the character in his book. He was always polite and helpful. Same goes for Maddox.

Hmm…the Wikipedia entry on Tucker Max says Maddox’s real name is George Ouzounian.

Tucker wrote several more books. I didn’t keep up with him, because while he was succeeding at a game I no longer wanted to play, I was trying to reform and get right with God. I was added to his email list, however, so from time to time, I received news of his adventures.

Today I got a mass email from Tucker, and it was about a surprising subject. He is trying to repair himself using MDMA. He provided a link to his website, where I read an account of his experiences taking MDMA under the supervision of a Peruvian who claims to be a shaman.

MDMA, also known as ecstasy and molly, is related to a drug known as MDA. When I was in college, people said MDA was like LSD, only stronger and more dangerous. I wouldn’t know. I used a number of drugs when I was in college, but I never went near LSD or MDA. I knew people who used LSD had bad trips, and they had a tendency to jump out of windows. One of my freshman roommates used it. Music was playing, and he said he wanted to go outside, via an 8th-floor window, and grab the notes and bring them back inside.

MDMA is supposed to be warmer and fuzzier than MDA. Don’t ask me. I have never tried either, and I haven’t touched an illegal drug in over 34 years. The legal ones are bad enough.

What’s the Christian description of Tucker’s new adventure? “Witchcraft.” That’s what we would call it. In the Bible, the Greek word translated “witchcraft” is “pharmakeia,” which is the word from which we get “pharmaceutical.” It refers to the use of drugs.

If you want more proof that what he’s doing is witchcraft, consider the fact that a self-described witch (“shaman”) is overseeing the process.

That pretty much clinches it.

Tucker’s description of one of his MDMA experiences says that while the drug was working, he became love. That has to be a moving experience for a guy who has tried hard to convince the world he’s a jerk.

It makes me think of the times Jesus visited me. I didn’t become love. Wish I had, because I want to be like God, and God is love. I did feel love, however. I felt it physically, as though love were heat and Jesus were a heat lamp. Jesus radiates love, joy, peace, and protection. This is what we thirst for. We were created to crave it. When drugs give us a phony sensation that feels like God’s love, we think we’re really onto something.

We use drugs and alcohol to simulate the presence and help of God. If you’re a drug user, or you’re mentally ill and you find your prescriptions unsatisfying, the presence of God is what you really want. Drugs make empty promises, but God delivers, and there is no charge on the back end.

When you get into God’s presence, there is no crash. When he departs, you don’t crawl around looking at the rug, hoping to find another crumb you can snort.

Tucker is experiencing the presence of a counterfeit god, and he will have problems because of it. Satan is letting him swallow the tasty bait. The hook will come later. There is always a balloon payment.

Demons will give you nearly anything in order to convince you you’re on the right track. They’re like drug pushers. They do nice things to get you addicted and dependent.

One man who claims he visited hell said he saw cubicles which were made up to resemble heaven. According to him, you can go to one of these boxes during a near-death experience and be surrounded by fake peace and love. You won’t realize you’re in a small box. You’ll think you’re outdoors, in a beautiful place full of trees and flowers. Spirits that look like dead relatives will come up and hug you, and then when you return to earth, you’ll tell people Jesus doesn’t matter. You’ll say love is all that counts and that everyone will go to heaven.

The next time you die, you go to hell for good, and you find out what’s really in the box.

Satan gave Tucker a platform, and now he’s using it to promote witchcraft. It’s really something. It started out as a flippant effort to have fun and avoid growing up, and now suddenly, it’s a very serious place where people are supposed to go for supernatural assistance. How weird is that? It’s as if Pee Wee Herman or Andy Dick opened a church.

I think Tucker wants to help humanity; I don’t think he’s rubbing his hands together like the Wicked Witch of the West over her crystal ball. He’s trying to help people escape inner torment. Unfortunately, he looked for help in the wrong place.

God is love, but not everything that seems like love is God.

Here’s an obvious question: how badly have we failed, to cause intelligent people raised in a Christian country to turn to witch doctors instead of Christians when they need help? If we were doing a good job, wouldn’t most people come to us first and receive deliverance? We don’t have a good reputation, and that’s partly because we let people down.

Who has the biggest platform for spreading the word about God? Televangelists. What do you hear when you tune them in? Intelligence-insulting lies about God’s plans to make you rich for sending in money. Here and there, you’ll hear a useful word about salvation or sanctification, but it’s all buried in fetid, watery, moldy feces. It’s as if preachers had hatched a plan to drive intelligent people away from God.

The righteousness of the church has failed, so Satan is offering people his alternative righteousness, which is actually rebellion. Don’t be a Christian; just be really nice. Unfortunately, being nice won’t keep you out of hell. It’s full of nice people. It’s full of charity workers, philanthropists, foster parents, and kidney donors. No matter how nice you are, you can’t get in without the blood of Jesus.

Being nice won’t free you from demons. It may rearrange them. It may bring you different demons that pump up your pride and make you feel you’ve done the right thing. It won’t set you free.

I’m sorry to see this happen. It’s a deflection. A man tried to move toward righteousness and love, and spirits shunted him off to the side, onto a different path that leads to destruction. It’s a very common thing. I’ll use this as an opportunity to pray. I hope no one listens to the preaching and decides to use MDMA. Drugs open the doors to demons, and getting rid of them is harder than letting them in.

Kiss the Ring, Lest I Crush Your Online Empire

It looks like my blog may be doing better than I thought.

Or maybe it isn’t. I can’t really tell. You know what Mark Twain said about statistics.

If I understand web stats correctly, about 1900 different visitors come to this site every day. This is up from around 700 in 2010, which is as far back as I can check. I went all Jesus freak in about 2008, so that would be when the big plunge took effect. I used to reach thousands of people every day, and then the smell of Christianity drove off most of them.

The traffic collapse was not a big deal to me. I used to have hopes of blogging for a living and using the blog to drive books, but I got over that, and now I don’t care much whether anyone shows up. I should be glad I’m not in the numbers-for-money game, because the bloggers I respect the least are the ones who whored out 100% for traffic. Any idiot can get traffic if he plays the game. Suck up to Glenn Reynolds (or whoever the new traffic-driver is), put pictures of women on your site, link to everyone imaginable, have contests, give things away, and network, network, network. Above all, never EVER go against the party line. Do these things, and you’ll have 5,000 visits per day within a year. You won’t have a soul, and you will be an imbecile no one with any brains respects, however.

I have deliberately avoided capitalizing on my traffic for a long time. I have two reasons. First, for years, there wasn’t enough traffic to capitalize on. Second, if you make money on a blog, you open yourself up to lawsuits in other jurisdictions. It’s a bad idea unless you have huge traffic and income. Nobody wants to open himself up to lawsuits in Guam in exchange for fifty bucks a month. Millions of bloggers are doing exactly that.

You can probably avoid liability by incorporating, if you’re determined to monetize.

In the distant past, I made some change by blogging. I had a few ads. I covered my hosting fees and probably had enough left over for a few cheeseburgers. I got rid of the ads. This blog is a hobby enterprise which costs me money, and that makes me harder to get at, should some slimy, sleazy, louse-festooned demi-person decide to attack me in court.

I used to think only “unique visits” counted when I looked at blog stats, but it appears that this is wrong. People on the web say “visits” are what matter. If what I have read is correct, a person who shows up twice in a day only racks up one visit, so each visit is access by a unique computer. My stats say I’m at about 1900 visits per day. My guess is that maybe 1200 are actual human beings who can read English. Blogs attract all sorts of stat-inflating bots.

If over a thousand people are reading what I say every day, shouldn’t I clean up my act?

When you think you’re reaching a couple of hundred bored individuals per day, and no one is paying you, you tend to feel pretty independent. You don’t like what I write? Get lost. I’m paying for your access to this blog, so what do I care if you leave? That’s the attitude. And you tend to feel that what you write doesn’t matter, so if you’re a slightly bad influence, it’s okay.

I suppose it’s not okay, especially in view of the true volume this site does. I think I will continue to not care if anyone shows up, but maybe I should be more careful about what I write.

In my heart, I always see myself as an obscure, nearly invisible person no one cares about, and I like it that way. I know there are many individuals who share this opinion of me, because over the years, they have come here and left comments to this effect. But I think my perception is exaggerated and not entirely realistic.

Perhaps my view of my impact in the world is colored by my childhood in an abusive environment. I was made to understand that I was powerless, annoying, unattractive, disgraceful, and incapable of holding an opinion worthy of consideration, and I internalized the perceptions of my abusers. You don’t actually have to believe things like that with your mind in order to internalize them. They bypass the mind and get into your flesh, like tapeworms or something. Thinking these feelings away is like trying to think away the flu.

I think I’m better off than a person raised by doting enablers. If you’re going to have delusions about yourself, it’s better to shoot low than high. Proud people do a huge amount of damage to others.

When I write, I don’t think I’m changing the world or turning people’s lives around. I write because I like to write. I have a certain amount of hope that I’ll reach a few people with my testimony, but this is not my main motivation for writing. Should it be? Maybe it should. In the long run, nothing else I write about will be considered anything but afterbirth.

I used to have some hope of impacting the political scene, but I am nearly over that. I have little relapses, but I am out of the loop. I don’t know who the big conservative bloggers are right now. Is Misha still out there? Dan Goldstein? No, it’s Jeff, not Dan. I’m having a hard time remembering who my old allies were. I should look at my blogroll, which is a time capsule dating back to the Bush years.

Pajamas Media and fake corporate blogs really killed conservative blogging! Was I right about that, or what? Conservatives did really well in the blogosphere for a few years, and then Roger Simon bit the head off the golden goose in order to get the eggs. Introducing money and the guild structure into blogging cut the roots of the whole enterprise.

I really caught it for criticizing PJM, too. I correctly diagnosed their problems and predicted their future, and I got reamed out for it all the time. My opinion got the amount of respect it has typically gotten all of my life, from limited thinkers who were not merely wrong but obviously wrong.

I was a traitor! My little blog, not the poisonous, wrongheaded, greedy dreams of the traffic merchants, was the problem. If it weren’t for me, Simon and his pals would be blogging from yachts in Monaco. I took all that away from them!

Too funny.

I rejected PJM and refused to join them, and they returned the favor, in spades. Because it was never about getting the conservative message out, which was something I helped do. It was about making money for the PJ’s.

I was never one of the cool kids, in spite of very good traffic. I started blogging in 2002, I have received tons and tons of links, and Glenn Reynolds has linked to me only once or twice. One of the funniest things that happened during my previous incarnation was receiving an Instalink when Ann Althouse guest-blogged for Reynolds. I wonder how he felt when he saw it. I kind of wonder if she did it to needle him.

It’s strange that I didn’t see that the incurable, terminal pajama blight was inevitable. Maybe I did. I don’t remember. Build a house, and eventually, roaches, rats, and termites will show up. The scent of money was in the air, and eventually hyenas had to smell it.

Where is PJM today? Nowhere. Where is Roger Simon? Is he still alive? He’s not on Fox. He’s not at Breitbart.com. Does he even get to contribute at Hot Air? Somewhere in the dry deserts of Cyberia, there should be a fragment of a statue with “PJMandias” carved into it. All that stuff turned to crap. Total disaster. Simon is more obscure than ever, Bill Whittle is an absolute, complete, utter nobody, Glenn Reynolds is a nobody outside the blogosphere, Michelle Malkin ought to be on a milk carton, and Pam Geller only makes the headlines when someone tries to shoot her. She should be paying jihadis to follow her around.

Where is the PJM cable channel? Where is the PJM satellite? What’s the address of the PJM skyscraper in Manhattan? Where are the revered, gravitas-stuffed PJ pundits we were supposed to see on CNN and the networks?

Where is the mighty PJ media machine which could not help but prevent Obama from being elected twice? It must be around here somewhere.

Wikipedia says PJTV, the rarely viewed PJ video site, went under in 2016. BAH HA HA HA HA. It was all me! I did it! And I’m glad! Do you hear me? GLAD! For my next trick, maybe I’ll generate an earthquake.

When I Googled to find connections (like endorsements and interviews) between Donald Trump’s campaign and PJ Media, excluding results on the PJ site, I got nothing, basically. But I did find PJM’s Youtube channel, which is a testimony to the failure of PJTV, and I also found a story about PJTV’s disintegration. Trump busily covered all the media bases, and he even let little Internet players into the White House press room, but the mighty PJM monolith appears to have escaped his notice.

Look at the damage I did, with my observations. Singlehanded, I destroyed the dreams of millions of conservatives. I killed a brilliant idea that couldn’t fail. I’m amazing. Why hasn’t Soros sent me a check?

I should make cancer go away, too. I’ll start criticizing it.

It occurs to me that a lot of people reading this may not know what PJM is. It failed so completely, most people probably haven’t heard of it.

Ask your barber what he thinks of Instapundit and Pajamas Media for me and tell me what he says. Caveat: not a fair test, if your barber is a former conservative blogger who has to cut hair for a living.

I don’t know if having more traffic than I thought will influence me much. Sitting around analyzing what I write would destroy the pleasure of blogging. I’ll make a little effort, but I doubt there will be a substantial change. I think I will always feel like I’m blogging for 10 or 15 people.

And Now Some Archaeology

I couldn’t resist. I Googled some more.

I remember when Kevin Aylward was a somewhat sheepish noob asking for links on Internet chat. His site, Wizbang, became a right-wing powerhouse. I was not a Wizbang-staff favorite. I felt they were soulless Kool-Aid drinkers who would swallow live snakes for traffic. Anyway, I just checked, and Wizbang is barely breathing.

I happened to see Mary Katharine Ham on the contributor list. You may not remember her. She was a conservative pundit who became famous at about the age of 9 (I exaggerate) based on the following qualifications: she was very attractive, she had a brilliant smile, and she was a woman. I never got the Ham craze. She seemed like a nice kid, but she never said anything remotely insightful or important. As a commentator, she was a nullity. Her success was mystifying, unless you accept the unthinkable proposition that looks matter more than talent. You could go to a random diner in a red state and find 5 uglier people who could do what she did. She has only written one book, with a co-author. Generally, a co-author is a person who writes a book FOR a more-famous person.

Fox dropped her as a commentator. Now she’s a few paragraphs on Wikipedia.

When you’ve been a regular on Fox, the last thing you want is a credit on the front page of Wizbang. It’s like a former Sports Illustrated bikini model working a car show.

Aylward is not mentioned on the front page. Maybe he’s selling real estate or managing a Motel 6 somewhere. If he was smart, he sold Wizbang when it was worth something.

John Cole at Balloon Juice was a big PJ, and in his utter wrongness, he got angry at me for stating the obvious. His site appears to be stumbling on. Somewhere on the web, it says his politics have changed. That’s not unusual. Political people sometimes have epiphanies when they realize their existing political stances don’t generate much attention and/or cash. I don’t know John’s story; maybe he’s sincere, or maybe it embarrasses him to side with people who drive pickup trucks and go to church. I was never a reader of his blog. I didn’t think it was all that good. Anyway, PJM did not propel him to stardom.

The Protein Wisdom blog is dead. I don’t know when that happened. I guess JEFF Goldstein (not Dan) got tired of having his children threatened by leftists nuts. I knew Jeff fairly well by blogger standards; I just forgot his first name. I ran a defunct humor blog called Huffington’s Toast, and Jeff contributed. Anyway, he was PJM. Jeff was a very, very unhappy person, and I would guess that the vitriol he was exposed to through blogging wore on him eventually.

Hot Air is not doing great. They sold out to a corporation. Wikipedia says Michelle Malkin, whose preexisting celebrity jump-started the site, wrote very little of its material. Allahpundit, one of the most talented blog personalities, appears to have remained there, grinding out essays. I hope they are giving him a decent salary. If not, he ought to move on, because blogging isn’t going to get more lucrative in the future.

Malkin herself has not published a book since 2015, and that book had a co-writer. Real writers do their own lifting and do not use co-writers. Her Fox TV presence is reduced now. She founded Twitchy.com, a disheartening site where angry people gather to criticize political tweets. It looks like her star has settled near the horizon, but she probably has a nice income.

Roger Simon is out at PJM. He left in 2013. He is the “CEO Emeritus,” and for those of you who don’t know it, “emeritus” is Latin for “not any more.”

Instapundit is still up, but it’s hosted by PJM, which makes you wonder if the traffic is paying the bills. Reynolds (assuming it’s him) seems to be writing more than he used to. A typical 2005 entry looked like this: “Pie a symbol of capitalist oppression? Ann Althouse has more.” Now I am seeing complete sentences and a few paragraphs. Notable fact: PJM has been in existence since 2004, and Reynolds is still not famous. His recognition factor is probably halfway between those of Ed Morrissey and Mark Steyn. I believe it has peaked. Fortunately he has a lucrative position as a law professor.

John Milner continued drag racing and was eventually killed by a drunk driver. Steve married Laurie, never went east to college, and became an insurance agent in Modesto. Terry “the Toad” Fields was killed in action in Vietnam. Curt went east in spite of all his reservations. He never found the girl in the white T-Bird.

Plus Guns

Today, for the second time since 2002, I had the annoying experience of having a website hacked. Someone left a stupid tag at the top of my home page. I had to drop everything and change every conceivable password, and I exported the entire content of my WordPress blog so I could republish it if the blog vanished.

I suspect there is a hole in WordPress, because my password was a huge jumble of nonsense characters which would have taken a very, very long time to guess. I’m not a computer expert, but I doubt a nerd in Turkey with a 5-year-old laptop has the ability to crack a password as long as a finger, composed of random ASCII. Maybe I’m wrong.

I contacted my hosting company, and their online chat took forever. I tried calling. The phone number took me to an outsourced security company. The guy who picked up the phone told me (this is my interpretation) that my host company’s security is worthless. He said his company would scan my site for $15 per month, which doesn’t sound bad, but then I asked the obvious question. Yes, it’s a yearly deal. So $180.

I tried the support number again, and I got a phone maze that went nowhere at all. That was surprising. Then I got the chat guy (Kumar, no lie), and after much poor communication, he finally assured me that as long as my passwords were fresh, no one but me should be able to get into my email accounts or Cpanel (if you don’t know what that is, forget it).

This killed maybe an hour.

I don’t use lame passwords for my hosted stuff. If you want to get into my business, you will have to find some other way. I assume WordPress provided it, and if that is true, the site may be hacked again, because WordPress has not updated in a while. If this happens, I will probably reinstall the site. It depends on the then-current state of security the host can provide. If I’m going to be reinstalling once per week, I will let it go. There is always Blogger.

I was concerned about my emails, but then I realized there isn’t much for hackers to steal. When you have your own server, the emails are removed as soon as you check them, so there is no giant backlog of sensitive material waiting to be stolen. Unless the host company is stupidly putting deleted emails somewhere where hackers can find them.

This scare made me think about something I expect to happen before long. Eventually, Christians and conservatives will be banned from the web. When we are not banned entirely, we will be hobbled by Nuremberg-style laws that will limit us to very basic participation, free of political and religious content. The big Internet players are not bound by the Constitution, so they will have a good legal opening when they decide to muffle us once and for all.

I assume whoever hacked me is just bored, but it could be someone who has an agenda. It’s not a Christian or a conservative. Actually, some conservatives hate me, but I’m not in the political blogging game now, so I doubt these stunted souls feel motivated to bother me.

While I was fixing my security to the best of my ability, I learned something surprising. I am getting nearly 2 thousand unique visits per day. I figured I was getting more like 80. I had a stat counter that gave me depressing results, but I knew it wasn’t working very well. I guess it was working worse than I thought. My host company’s internal stat stuff told me the truth.

What can I say about this? I thought I was yelling into a bucket, but it appears that I have some readers. They don’t comment much. Maybe most are bots. Years ago, “unique visit” meant a human being had probably come to your blog. Now? Search me.

I don’t think ~2000 people are showing up every day, but maybe it’s ~1000.

Maybe I am reaching some people with my testimony. I will have to think more about what I write, now that I know someone may actually read it.

In other news, I solved my long-range (longish) shooting problem. I was shooting a 17 HMR rifle at 100 yards, and I was getting a lot of dispersion. I was frustrated. Then I learned that a slight wind will blow a 17 HMR all over the place. Also, a gun forum guy told me to get my left hand off the gun. Today I went out with my friend Mike, and we shot a while. There was no wind. I switched to shooting with my left hand down, and here is what I got:

That’s 5 rounds on the left, plus an extraneous round Mike fired just to make my target look bad. What a punk move. Can you believe that? Anyway, that’s a wee bit over 1 MOA, probably. It may be 1 MOA. It’s very close, measuring from the outsides of the farthest-separated holes.

I figure if I practice a little, I will be 3/4 MOA with that gun, and I will be consistent. I won’t have to shoot 50 rounds to get a single 3/4 MOA group I can put on the Internet. This makes me extremely happy.

That gun is a laser. It’s crappy rimfire ammunition, which you can get for 10 bucks per box, and look how accurate it is. IF the wind isn’t blowing. I am reading some surprising distance figures. I thought the gun was useless past 150 yards, but apparently that’s not true unless you want to kill things. People are claiming they shoot targets at nearly 300 yards. If that’s true, this is the practice gun for me. I just need to choose days when there isn’t much wind.

That’s exciting. I can find 300 yards of safe shooting space here, no problem. I could conceivably learn to shoot real distances.

We also shot some grapefruit and ponderosa lemons. I hit one and blew half of it about 15 feet away from the rest. Fun.

It’s really nice to be shooting a rifle well. It was a long time coming. And since I’m not using the best stuff or practicing a lot, I should expect considerable improvement in the future. Too bad they don’t sell a license for shooting hackers.

If the blog disappears, don’t blame me. I’ll make a reasonable effort to keep it alive.

Secular Conservatives: Your Money is on the Dresser

I see Milo Yiannopoulos is in trouble.

Let’s see if I understand this right. He is gay. He is conservative. He is loved because he is aggressive and angry, and probably because conservatives like to point to him and say, “See? We’re all about the gay.”

Isn’t that about right?

To me, he’s just Ann Coulter or Ted Nugent with gay mixed in. I’m not suggesting he’s as smart as Ann Coulter or even Ted Nugent, but he seems like someone conservatives love simply because he makes their adversaries suffer. I never thought he was good for the GOP.

It seems like conservatives are divided. There are those who admit that the GOP is the party of Jesus and those who think we’re just the party of stinginess. Yiannopoulos appealed to the latter group.

When I say we’re the part of Jesus, I just mean Christianity is the primary thing that binds us, and it’s the primary reason people hate us. I’m not suggesting the Republican party is a religious organization or that we’re as morally superior as we like to think we are.

People are accusing Yiannopoulos of endorsing pedophilia. I don’t know if that’s correct, but based on my reading of his remarks, it seems pretty close to the truth.

Most of us don’t distinguish between pedophilia, which is the abuse of prepubescent children, and the abuse of teenagers for whom puberty has at least begun. Yiannopoulos seems to be in favor of the latter. It’s not pedophilia, exactly, but it’s still bad, so the difference may not be very important here.

He talked about lusting after older men and having sex with them at the age of 13 or 14. He described himself as the aggressor. He also said positive things about relationships in which older homosexuals serve as emotional anchors for “boys” with whom they have sex.

It seems fair to say that Yiannopoulos supports sexual relationships between teenage boys and grown men. Isn’t that exactly what homosexuals are always telling us doesn’t really happen (in spite of the fact that our cities are full of teenage male prostitutes)?

Does that make him sufficiently immoral to justify the things CPAC, his publisher, and (allegedly) Breitbart are doing to him, to distance themselves from the smell of his scandal? I think so. The mistake was embracing him to begin with. His moral positions put him too far outside the camp, and apart from that, do we really need someone who makes us appear more mean-spirited? Aren’t we trying to fight that baseless image?

It’s always hard to decide whom to align oneself with. President Trump is an adulterer who owns casinos where people go to get drunk and gamble. On the other hand, he is helping Christians, Israel, and the unborn, and we had no better alternative. If we’re to be criticized for backing him, it should be for backing him in the primaries, not the general election. In the general election, the alternative was a bona fide horror.

Solutions that offend God are bad, regardless of which political party resorts to them. I shouldn’t say “resorts” with regard to the Democrats, because they don’t have to be coerced to oppose God. They voted against him four times, by voice, on TV, at their own convention. They oppose God in their hearts, so they jump at any chance they get to offend him with their actions and policies. Anyway, Yiannopoulos was a stealth dumpster fire from the time he first gained prominence. We shouldn’t have expected anything good to come from promoting him.

We will reject him now, in all likelihood, and you know what Shakespeare said: “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” He’s not a woman, but given his temperament, he is likely to react like one. He may become the ex-girlfriend from hell. Remember David Brock?

You have to wonder what feckless conservatives have told him in confidence. Will he disappear quietly, or will some outfit like Huffpo (founded by a scorned traitor) seduce him and use him against us?

I just remembered…Breitbart himself…Saint Andrew…helped start Huffpo. What funny heroes we have.

I didn’t develop my opinion of Breitbart from watching the news or reading his site. I developed it from behind-the-scenes knowledge, starting before his site existed. When I see the T-shirts with his face on them, I don’t get the same feeling other conservatives get.

Politics is interesting, but religion is what makes or breaks a nation. I may comment on political stories because they’re intriguing, but I am not a participant in the political game. Not even on a blogging level. I never link to anyone any more. I rejected PJ Media when they asked about writing for them. I don’t contribute to campaigns. I will never go to a Trump rally. That stuff doesn’t work.

It will be interesting to see what happens.

Comments Stolen by WordPress Quirk

For some reason, this site trashed a few comments without asking my permission. If you wondered why your comment did not appear, now you know. I have restored the deleted comments.

Rachel Marsden Must Have Turned Fox Down

I’ve been saying Megyn Kelly’s departure from Fox News would be good for the network, provided they chose her replacement well. It’s very easy to do what she does. There are millions of people who could do it if given a chance.

This morning I saw that they had given the job to Tucker Carlson. I now see Kelly’s departure as a disaster.

This is exactly the kind of move I used to complain about when I was trying to achieve some level of fame as a conservative blogger: conservatives have an inner circle of mediocre people they protect and promote, and if you’re outside the circle, it doesn’t matter if you’re Albert Einstein crossed with Winston Churchill crossed with P.J. O’Rourke. You are not going to get a chance.

Tucker Carlson seems like a nice boy, but he has almost no talent. He’s bad at what he does. He’s not unusually smart. He’s not witty or funny. He’s not perceptive. He has never said anything quotable, and that’s a real problem for a would-be pundit. He’s like Mary Katharine Ham in a suit.

I wonder if the Fox brass bothered to check Carlson’s resume. He has failed twice, and he has never succeeded. His show Crossfire was cancelled, and he had an MSNBC show which failed. Why would you hire someone who already had two swings at the ball? Investing is all about momentum. You don’t invest in something that isn’t succeeding already. Carlson, who is approaching 50, has a very long track record which proves people don’t want to watch him. Didn’t anyone notice?

I guess they really wanted to save 25 million dollars.

The sad thing is that he’s not bad enough to kill a program, so he’ll probably last on Fox, like the orange car at a dealership no one wants to buy. Too good to fire; too weak to succeed. Greta van Susteren was not very good at what she did, but she was good enough to survive, so her time spot remained clogged and wasted for years. Carlson will end up in the same boat.

I’m trying to think of an insider they could have promoted. Greg Gutfeld is smart and talented, but he’s immature and gets on people’s nerves. He doesn’t have gravitas. People can’t respect him.

Now I’m stuck. I can’t think of anyone but Gutfeld.

They need someone with Ann Coulter’s intelligence and Bill O’Reilly’s ability to handle guests. There is probably a blogger or Youtuber out there who could do it, but we will never get to see that person, because if anything happens to Carlson, Fox will go through its entire Christmas party invitation list before talking to anyone new.

Laura Ingraham is smart, but people don’t like her.

I had a weird experience this week, and it dovetails nicely with this subject. I watched a far-left Youtube vlogger, and I enjoyed it. I don’t know how that happened. His name is Jimmy Dore. He’s a comedian who appeared with a group of vloggers who call themselves the Young Turks. Their vlog is as boring as death, but he’s entertaining and smart. I don’t know how he ended up on the left. Childhood trauma, I guess. He’s Irish. Maybe he’s another casualty of cruel Catholic school nuns.

He has been hammering liberals for buying and promoting the “Russians hacked the election” story with no proof. It’s very pleasant to watch. Anyway, he’s really good, and like Conan O’Brien, he shows there is untapped talent out there, if you’re willing to look outside of your ten best friends.

Remember how O’Brien got his job? Everyone said NBC was nuts, hiring a writer who had never worked on-camera. Look how that panned out. If O’Brien had worked for Fox, he would still be in the mailroom, waiting for his gold watch. “Conan…Mr. Carlson says you forgot to use soy milk in his cappuccino! We won’t be needing you in the studio any more. Here’s your old toilet brush.”

The left has people like Colbert and Stewart–real talents–and the right gets Tucker Carlson. And we had plenty of alternatives. It’s a self-inflicted wound. Thank God Neil Cavuto doesn’t have a bipolar son who needs a job, or we wouldn’t even have Carlson.

I checked to see who’s on CNN at 9 p.m., and it’s Anderson Cooper. He starts at 8 p.m. I don’t know how anyone can stand two hours of that, but it’s true. I wonder how Carlson will do against him. I don’t know how Megyn Kelly has done. Well. I know she has done well. I just don’t know how well. I am too lazy to look. My guess is that O’Reilly will feed Carlson enough viewers to keep him on the air.

I don’t care much about this story, but I do find it interesting. I don’t watch Fox or any other TV news station. I see little bits of the news from time to time. Just enough to be disappointed!

Yeah, I’m being not a team player again. Once again, my tiny blog will be responsible for a Fox failure. They should send someone to assassinate me. If they had done that a few years ago, their comedy show would have been a huge hit. Because quality isn’t the problem. The problem is people like me, pointing out the obvious. My power is intoxicating. Behold my blog and tremble!

On the up side, Bill O’Reilly must be the happiest man alive today. Whatever he was worth to Fox last week, it has doubled now.

Maybe they’ll fire him and hire Jiminy Glick.

More

Here’s a great question. If they absolutely had to hire from within, why didn’t they consider Andy Levy? He’s as good as Gutfeld, plus he has the ability to be taken seriously.

Is he dead? I don’t keep up.

Good Books Can be Produced Without TPS Reports

A reader sent me a link to a story in which one writer “Fisks” another. If you’re not familiar with Fisking, it means tearing someone’s work apart, line by line. The Fiskee is one Laurie Gough, who has been published somewhere or other and takes the position that self-publishers are losers and hacks. The Fisker is the host of Monsterhunternation.com. I do not know anything about this person. It’s probably not Laurie Gough’s boyfriend.

The Fisking itself is very, very long, so I didn’t read the whole thing, but I did read a lot of it, and I read Gough’s entire piece. I have to agree with the Fisker. There is nothing wrong with self-publishing, and a self-publisher imprint doesn’t mean a book is bad. On the other hand, it’s likely that most self-published work is even worse than most publisher-published work, simply because there is no one to hold the bad stuff back.

Not all self-publishers are inept. I think Ms. Gough forgets that there was a time when all authors were self-published. Moses didn’t have to deal with rejection slips. Neither did Homer. Many of the greatest works in history never went through the publication process during their author’s lives. Obviously, a publisher is not an absolute necessity when you want to create a work of real merit.

I don’t know for a fact, but I would be willing to bet a large pizza (cooked by someone else, because that phase of my life is over) that once the publishing industry was established, many of the authors we now revere got in the door by paying publishers.

She also forgets that we have modern authors who started out in post-Internet-creation self-publishing. I don’t know too much about The Martian, but it’s my understanding that it started out on the Internet. The movie version was very good. The author is stinking, filthy, reeking rich. The book and movie would not exist had he waited for a publisher to notice him.

We also have modern authors who did wonderful work without intending to be published at all. Anne Frank comes to mind. Highly reliable Internet rumors say that when her diary was submitted for publication after her death, it was rejected many times by editors. They almost protected us from that hack, Anne Frank!

I can’t agree with the snobby, elitist notion that self-publishing is only for losers. It’s not just wrong; it’s facially absurd. It’s like standing in an orange grove and denying the existence of fruit. It almost sounds like Ms. Hough is trying to set herself apart as a member of a distinct and superior class, simply because she has a publisher. That’s certainly easier than producing quality work and letting it speak for itself.

That being said, there is one very bad thing about self-publishing, and here it is: it’s harder to promote a self-published book. If you want your book to make money, you will almost certainly have to do radio and TV interviews, and to get those interviews, you want to be able to say you have a real publisher.

There are very, very good things about self-publishing. For one thing, if you self-publish, your book will exist. Existence is one of the main qualities a book needs. The book no one can buy anywhere is not a successful book in any meaningful way.

Another nice thing is that you can force your book into existence without help. You have control. You don’t have to beg anyone. You want to have a published book? Fine. Upload it now. Done.

If all you care about is expressing yourself, self-publishing is a great idea. You can write and publish fifty books a year if you’re up to it. The public won’t have to wait through a year-long process before each book appears. You can say anything you want. You won’t have to worry about editors killing your jokes by rewriting them or cutting out the parts of your work that are most important to you. Really, the only solid reason to insist on having a conventional publisher is a desire to make money.

The commenter said he would buy my work if I self-published again, but I think I’m self-publishing right now, so save your money! Anything made available to the public is published.

It’s very ugly for a person who got in the door to lob poop-bombs at all the people who haven’t made it yet, and given that Ms. Hough is not a highly admired author, it also creates opportunities for people to knock her off her high horse. If you really have to insult someone else’s work, you should be able to come up with names and specifics instead of issuing a mindless blanket condemnation of an entire class of writers.

A book is a book; published, not published, published by a publishing house, self-published…whatever. It doesn’t have to be publisher-published to be as legitimate as anything Ms. Hough will ever write. If you print one copy of your book and hide it under your bed, it’s still a real book, and its quality doesn’t depend on the opinions of publishers. Catch-22 was still a monumental achievement before Joseph Heller submitted it to publishers, and it was a monumental achievement while it was winning nothing but rejection slips.

If you feel like writing, write. If you feel like publishing, but you don’t care about fame and money, self-publish. What the hell. No one cares. Enjoy yourself.

Thiel Ushers in a New Age of Republican Surrender

I did not watch the Republican convention. Not that interested, and I have a lot of things I prefer doing. But I did read some of Peter Thiel’s remarks. He is a homosexual businessman, and he founded Paypal. He is also the man who killed Gawker and bankrupted Nick Denton. He helped Hulk Hogan sue Gawker into the dirt.

Among other things, he said this: “I don’t pretend to agree with every plank in our party’s platform. But fake culture wars only distract us from our economic decline, and nobody in this race is being honest about it except Donald Trump.”

“Fake”?

Here’s another gem of deceit:

“When I was a kid, the great debate was about how to defeat the Soviet Union. And we won. Now we are told that the great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom. This is a distraction from our real problems. Who cares?”

A lot of people care, and Peter Thiel knows it. Girls and women in locker rooms care. Parents care. Christians care.

This is another example of Republicans trying to own gay and vigorously deny God. And it’s another example of our unfortunate determination to insulate ourselves from God’s protection.

It reminds me of George W. Bush’s naive, self-destructive efforts to convince Democrats he wasn’t divisive. He talked about “crossing the aisle.” He extended his hand across the aisle on many occasions, and he got it bitten off. The Democrats didn’t see him as moderate or inclusive. They saw him as weak, and they treated his overtures the way a boxer treats his opponent’s defense flaws.

RNC leaders don’t have faith in God. They are cynical, secular, realpolitik-oriented materialists. When they have setbacks, they don’t fast and pray. They hold strategy meetings, and they look for secular solutions. A big percentage of Republican voters are believers; people like Priebus and Norquist see us as starry-eyed suckers, to be herded and manipulated. They would love to see us give up God completely so they could make the platform changes they really want to make.

They’re not that interested in policy. They’re interested in getting rich and holding onto power. When you develop the habit of assuming, by default, that people are motivated primarily by the desire to get money and hold onto power, you will find that the world makes a lot more sense. As the Bible says, “The love of money is a root of many evils.”

I went to law school with Reince. I barely knew him, but I knew his crowd well. He was just another ordinary, ambitious guy who ran for silly class offices. No one admired him for his principles. No one I knew looked up to him. When I see him on TV, I don’t see anything new.

If the RNC bigwigs thought they could get more votes by putting support for partial-birth abortion in the platform, they’d do it in five seconds. When it comes to homosexuality, they did a little math, estimated the numbers of votes they might lose or gain, and gave Thiel a call. It’s that simple. Principle was never a consideration.

Christians have some power in the party, but it’s disappearing. Soon the Republicans will lose their status as the unofficial party of Jesus. They’ll be the party of business and law enforcement. They’ll be like the people who say, “I’m fiscally conservative but socially liberal,” which is code for, “immoral and stingy.”

No one cares about God. No one really believes he won’t be mocked. We take him about as seriously as Catholics take the Pope.

It’s a sad spectacle. Thank God watching it develop from the sidelines won’t kill us.

I don’t know how we’re supposed to prepare for the sex-centric, perversion-embracing world of the near future. Does God want us to stay home all the time, to avoid the visual pollution? I can’t figure out how he’ll handle it. Sex with younger and younger people will be accepted. Sex with animals will be accepted. Stranger and stranger practices will be commonplace. It will be very hard to turn on a TV or walk down a city street without being smeared with filth.

One of the wonderful things about using sexual corruption to hurt human beings is that it hurts them from without. You don’t have to take part in it to be a casualty. You just have to see it. Even if you see it against your will, you are fouled by it. The devil made a great choice when he chose to use sex against us. It literally makes the world intolerable for us, unless we live in bomb shelters.

A sexually immoral person has the advantage in a corrupted society. He or she can go anywhere and do anything. You don’t have to worry about catching corruption when you already have it. The rest of us will have to find ways to avoid exposure to corrupted people. Not easy.

When perverts take over a beach, they say, “If you don’t like it, don’t go to the beach” (he beach funded by your taxes). If they take over the sidewalk, they say, “Don’t walk on the sidewalk.” Your territory shrinks and shrinks, until it becomes impractical or illegal for you to exist anywhere.

I wonder if other countries are having this problem. Do the British allow naked people to walk the streets, the way New Yorkers and San Franciscans do? Is it legal for two men to marry in France? Are large numbers of Germans piercing and mutilating their genitals?

The press always tells us we’re behind the sin curve. Whenever they want us to do something stupid, they say Europeans are doing it already, and that they make fun of us for not doing it. And Americans are just like kids who can’t resist peer pressure. If France jumped off the Empire State Building, we would be likely to follow.

You can’t find out what’s going on by relying on the press.

Now that we’ve given up on sexual morality, it’s reasonable to expect us to give up on other moral positions. Maybe abortion will be next. People think different types of sin aren’t connected, but they are. The spirits that drive them work together. The spirits of homosexuality serve as anchor-baby spirits in the Republican party. They’ll help the others get in.

Trump would love that analogy, except…he supports homosexuality. Fine; I’ll vote for him. Sometimes you have to eat from a filthy bowl. Sometimes you have to eat at Pharaoh’s table.

It seems like the more clarity I get, the crazier people around me get. It’s like it’s leaving me and going into them.

Here’s what I want from Trump: temporary protection and a little time to improve and do whatever God wants me to do. With any luck, I will have been struck by lightning by the time he leaves office. I don’t want to be elderly in Sodom.

I have no interest in changing humanity. I will be used to help a few individuals, but I accept the fact that America is going to self-destruct. I’m grateful for that. There are a lot of nuts out there who think they have to fight all the time. Islamist terrorists are great examples. So is the guy in Norway who shot all those kids. I don’t have to fight, because the battle to change America has already been lost. I just want a comfy couch and a fridge full of food, as far as possible from the lunacy.

I used to fight via blogging. That was dumb. Blogging is a carnal tool. There is no strength behind it.

I remember being part of the conservative Blogosphere. We linked to each other frantically. We loved our little victories; we thought they were so important. We exposed Dan Rather. Yay. Now we have other people doing the same things he did.

We were angry all the time. We never had peace. We exchanged angry emails. We posted angry Photoshops. A total waste of time. And anyway, Pajamas Media killed it with greed, elitism, and a very poor understanding of the way the Internet works. I predicted it. I thought predicting it was important. It probably wasn’t. It certainly didn’t make a difference.

I wonder if people I know are still immersed in vitriol and squabbling. I know the gutted, hamstrung conservative Blogosphere is nothing like it was, but I don’t monitor things. I looked at a well-known (formerly well-known) blog the other day, and I could almost smell the anger, cruelty, filth, and atheism rising from my monitor. Before that, the last time I looked at a conservative blog was months earlier. I don’t even know what they’re talking about.

A long time ago, I took a psychology course, and the instructor taught us something interesting. If you put rats in a cage and shock them, they attack each other. The lesson was this: frustration causes anger, and it will make you look for a villain to punish. If you can’t find the guilty, you will go after the innocent, or at least the relatively innocent.

That’s what fighting about politics is: a bunch of rats attacking each other because they can’t see the individuals who are shocking them. We blame people. We ignore the spirits who pull the strings. People are certainly responsible, but they aren’t the prime movers.

It’s weird to see Americans give up so completely and quickly. It’s weird to see us move from one viewpoint to its opposite in a short time, with no admission of hypocrisy. It shows how useless and weak people are without the Holy Spirit. No wonder Peter denied Jesus. If the Romans had pressed him, he would have driven the nails. So would I, without God’s help.

My advice to everyone: lower your expectations of America. Expect it to rot and die. Focus on getting yourself fixed. Choose the only battle you have a chance of winning. It’s worth it.

Better to be on an ark surrounded by bloated, drowned bodies than to be outside being eaten by birds and crabs.

Gagging of Conservatives Continues on Social Media

Today I see that leftists are celebrating censorship again. This time the victim is Milo Ya…I’m not even going to try to spell it. It’s a gay conservative who works for Breitbart.com.

If I’m ignorant about the dispute that led up to the censorship, it’s not completely my fault. Milo was banned from Twitter, and whatever he said that upset people is now deleted. I Googled around, assuming every far-left Internet nut on the planet had screenshotted his offenses, but I can’t find any of it. Makes you wonder if he actually did anything wrong.

I don’t care about Milo’s work. I don’t know anything about it. I tried to read a movie review he wrote (the new Ghostbusters, and in all honestly, it was not very good. It verged on unreadable. There was no organization, and he didn’t produce many facts. It seemed that the article was a series of nearly unrelated paragraphs, in which he restated his dislike of the movie.

I know a tiny–and I do mean tiny–bit about Milo himself. He is gay, and he is provocative. He does things to upset people. Conservatives are giving him a ton of promotion. My educated guess? They want to say, “We’re gay, too. You don’t own gay.”

It won’t work. In America, conservatism is inextricably bound up with Christianity, and God does not have a rainbow sticker on the gates of heaven. It may be helpful to Christians if larger numbers of gays vote for conservative candidates, but if the conservative movement abandons God completely, we lose much of our incentive for supporting it. I would vote for a Christian-friendly Democrat before I would vote for a God-hating Republican. That choice doesn’t seem to come up, though.

Minority Republicans get a certain amount of promotion, too, and surely part of the reason is to remind minorities that you can be non-white and be accepted among our ranks. That’s somewhat more legitimate than promoting gays. Race doesn’t have to be a mental state; you can be black or purple or orange and be 100% on board with the conservative ethos. Non-whites do not change us. Homosexuality is different. When homosexuals enter the group, automatically, we have to change our positions in order to accommodate them.

Here is what people love to call “the narrative” in post-2000 America: Milo got into a Twitter fight with a Ghostbusters actress named Leslie Jones, and she is black. He bullied and tormented her on Twitter, he posted racist tweets (is “tweet” capitalized now?), and he reposted the racist tweets of others. She complained, and Twitter gave him a lifetime ban.

I can’t find his racist tweets. Someone dug up a 2015 racist tweet from Leslie Jones, but that’s all I’ve seen. I have seen some abusive tweets from people who took his side. Welcome to the web. Michelle Malkin gets worse treatment every day of her life, and has for years. I will never forget the comment from the loon who threatened to mutilate her genitals with his or her teeth.

Maybe Milo is a bad guy. On the other hand, there are some truly vile accounts that never get in trouble. Spike Lee sent black racists after the parents of George Zimmerman, and they had to leave their house. It’s my understanding that it’s okay to root for terrorists on Twitter, too.

A lifetime ban is going to be hard on a guy who is billed as a major website’s “tech” editor. It’s like telling a motivational speaker he’s banned from hotel ballrooms. I have a feeling it won’t stick, but maybe it will.

It’s an interesting story.

When the Founding Fathers wrote the First Amendment, they did not intend to protect porn merchants, in spite of what you may think, given the way it has been used. They had ONE major goal in mind: to enable people to speak about political matters. When you strike at political speech, you strike at the heart of the First Amendment.

The First Amendment was motivated by the behavior of British kings, who had been known to publicly castrate and disembowel people who said things they didn’t like. If you had tried to blog in England in 1776, they would have castrated and disemboweled you in front of a jeering crowd, and before you died, they would have fried your genitals and internal organs in front of you. Simply for saying the king was wrong.

There was no Twitter when the Constitution was written. You could publish a newspaper, or you could write a book or simply stand up in your local bar and mouth off. It was very much like life in the 1980’s. No one depended on the Internet to make his voice effective. There was no danger that half of the population (the left half) would have a tremendous communication advantage over the other half, because of access to a medium provided by corporations. That has changed.

In 2016, merely being allowed to speak to your neighbor or wear a T-shirt does not put you on an equal footing with others. You need Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, blogs, and whatever else is out there. With social media, Milo was able to make a noise comparable to the noise someone like Lena Dunham can make. Without it, he may as well go home and yell into the toilet.

It’s not easy for leftists to violate the First Amemdment, which protects people from government censorship. It’s very easy for them to violate the spirit of the First Amendment and nullify it through private censorship. It’s a beautiful thing. If you like censorship.

For a long time, I’ve been saying that conservatives would eventually be driven off the web. The liberals who run companies like Facebook and Twitter are immune to First Amendment challenges. Blogspot belongs to a liberal-run company; blogs are not safe, either. Milo’s case shows how easy it is to silence us.

Things were different a few years back. Blogs were big. Remember blogs? I don’t mean corporate websites pretending to be blogs. I don’t mean The Huffington Toast or Wonkette. I mean sites like this one. Most blogs were run by individuals who had no corporate affiliation, and many of the top blogs were operated out of studies and bedrooms. That ended some time back. The big blogs are fake. They’re run by companies that pay for promotion. Many of them pay writers. We were allowed to sit at the big boys’ table for a while, and then they came and kicked us out. Predictable. I know, because I predicted it.

Real blogs are not very important now. We have become addicted to “free” social media sites. Does it really make sense to call any site that tracks you and feeds you ads “free”? Anyway, we loved the convenience and the instant audiences. So we gave up our autonomy.

Now we broadcast our opinions at the pleasure of leftists. They can unplug the machine whenever they like, and there is nothing we can do. If we sue, they can say, “We don’t have to obey the First Amendment. We are not the government.”

Can we complain? I don’t mean, “Are we able to complain?” It looks like we are losing that ability. I mean, “Do we have a right to complain?” I don’t think so. We put our own heads in the noose. Did we really think atheist tech nerds were going to give us a fair shake? Besides, people like me warned everyone.

If you can only speak in private, the First Amendment is useless. That’s the future we face. We will be pushed out of liberal-run forums. Then they’ll find a way to come after blogs, which are, after all, hosted by corporations.

Interesting times.

It reminds me of the problems people have when they lose their driver’s licenses. The courts always remind us, “It’s a privilege; not a right.” You don’t have a Constitutional right to drive. But if you can’t drive, you might as well be crippled. In most parts of the country, pedestrian status will make it impossible for you to compete in the job market. You don’t have a right to Tweet, either, and if you depend on Twitter to make money, you better kiss the ring.

What if the conservative movement can be persuaded to divorce Jesus? In that case, everything changes. Conservatives will persecute Christians right beside liberals, and presumably, Christians and Jews will be the only ones who are ostracized. Any way you slice it, Christians will be pushed aside.

What can you do? Nothing. So I don’t get upset about it. I just blog my observations and wait for them to be proven right. I am thrilled to be disconnected from social media, and I have no plans to fight anyone about social media abuses. I don’t care about things that are doomed to fail. It’s a waste of the space in my heart.

Thinking About Resistance is a Crime

As part of my continuing efforts to document the decline of Western civilization, I would like to say that today I looked briefly at a Miami Herald story and saw several lust-based clickbait items.

When a major newspaper (a phrase soon to be an oxymoron) tries to make money by tempting readers to click on photos of women in their underwear, they can’t credibly say things like, “We are experiencing momentary difficulties finding equilibrium in the new Internet-based media paradigm.” It’s more accurate to say, “We are a bunch of desperate rats, looking for a dock line we can climb to safety.” Or maybe, “We will happily eat our own babies in order to save our jobs.”

I guess the English reached this point a long time ago, with topless women in popular newspapers. I should be surprised it took longer for it to spread to the Internet and the rest of the world.

In a few years, we will probably have to drive past billboards featuring full-frontal nudity on the way to work. After that, we’ll have animated porn billboards. Then we’ll get too jaded to see even that, and advertisers will have to resort to snuff films.

What happened to the world? I miss it.

I’ve learned to avoid The Daily Mail’s site. It’s virtually impossible to go there without seeing some inappropriate part of Kim Kardashian’s worn-out, boring anatomy.

I don’t know what’s going on with the Internet, but I assume the problem is that no relatively reputable media outlet has figured out how to make actual money with it. If the Internet worked economically, there would be no need to post clickbait offering peeks at upskirts and wardrobe malfunctions.

I remember making fun of Arianna Huffington, because I said her site would never make money. Oddly, I was correct, but she got rich anyway. I didn’t understand the way corporate accounting worked. She created an unsuccessful site, paid herself from money taken from investors, kept the salary, and then sold the project to a company with deep pockets. Now they pay her for her invaluable consulting services. That’s my understanding of it.

Your Internet project does not have to work to make you rich. It just has to attract investor money, which you then take in the form of nonrefundable payments. When the company craps out, you don’t have to pay back your salary or bonuses. You say, “Sorry about that, but my $50 million salary from a nonfunctional enterprise was justified. I did show up four hours a day.”

I wonder if St. Andrew Breitbart understood this when he helped start The Huffington Post. I don’t think saving the universe was his main priority. And yes, he worked for her AFTER she had her Road to Damascus moment and instantaneously became a Marxist. Don’t make excuses for him based on her earlier incarnation as a pretend conservative.

What worked for Arianna won’t work for everyone. Sooner or later, someone has to be the final owner of every website. Someone has to be the one who is holding the hot potato at the end of the game. The trick is to be the one who starts the game. The Miami Herald and The Daily Mail can’t sell their crappy sites to new people; the sites are inextricably unified with the Herald and the Mail. You can have The Huffington Post with Arianna as a paid consultant who isn’t exposed to financial risk. You can’t have The Miami Herald’s site with The Miami Herald insulated from debt.

Maybe what I’m saying sounds crazy, but think about this: Amazon didn’t make a profit until recently; it took about twenty years. Jeff Bezos is one of the richest men on earth, and for most of his company’s history, his corporation was losing money. People kept propping Amazon up because they thought it would turn a profit in the future. It’s starting to look like that’s true; unfortunately, people are also propping up a lot of sites that will never do well.

You don’t have to succeed to get rich. You can be a huge failure and be rich. You just have to find people stupid enough to invest in a project that will give you payments you don’t have to refund.

The Wilkerson family–the people who run Trinity Church here in Miami–are great examples of the art of failing successfully. The church always has money problems, but the head pastor has a very expensive house in Miami’s ritzy Golden Beach neighborhood, and his son managed to wangle a reality TV engagement. The people who attend the church stay poor, and the church is a mess with a huge mortgage, but the Wilkersons are doing fine, as far as anyone can tell.

Most–well, many–people would refuse to start a business they intended to bleed and abandon, and people like that don’t get to ride on the parasitic gravy train. Others don’t mind at all. They think anyone who believes success is an essential ingredient of success is a sucker.

Making money is always easier for people who have no conscience.

To get back to the irritating proliferation of filth on the web, it forces me to consider the high probability that I will have to disconnect myself entirely in a few years.

Will the government allow us to do that? No. Not when the statists finally crush our resistance. You’ll have to have a Facebook account, and you’ll have to have an electronic device with GPS with you all the time. If you cover the camera lens or disable the microphone, Mommy Uncle Sam will call in a trice to scold you and “offer” to help you fix it.

Wait and see.

You’ll have to be plugged in all the time, “for your own good,” and you’ll have to expose yourself to a certain amount of content, some of which will be other people exposing THEMselves.

Oh well.

I guess I better stop ranting. I just heard a text come in.