I Know How Don Quixote’s Windmills Felt

In the past, I wondered how it was possible for the Nazis to brainwash the Austrians and Germans and convince them of things that were untrue and even absurd. Now I’m seeing the same thing happening here in America. Leftists are in a state of delusional euphoria over Robert Mueller’s “proof” that Donald Trump colluded illegally with the Russian government in order to get elected. There is no evidence of that, whatsoever, but leftists are all over the web saying idiotic things like “smoking gun” and “treason.”

Paul Manafort has been indicted for activities that had nothing to do with the presidential election. Apparently he violated some relatively obscure laws regarding registering as a foreign agent, and he may be guilty of some sort of highly technical tax violations which may have been inadvertent. According to Alan Dershowitz, who is only a former Harvard law professor, the general policy of the United States government is to refrain from investigating and prosecuting such offenses, if they are offenses, but Mueller is exercising his discretion to single Manafort out in order to pressure him and other Trump associates to sing.

Look at it this way. I have bought a lot of Cuban cigars. That’s illegal. No one has ever bothered me about it. No one ever will. When the government finds out a box of Cuban cigars is on its way to your house, they confiscate it and send you a letter, and that’s it. They don’t subpoena American Express to find out if you ordered them. They don’t sift through your emails in order to find evidence that you knew you were buying illegal cigars. There is no indictment. There is no fine. They don’t care. It’s trivial, and the embargo was an embarrassing joke to them. But what if Robert Mueller had been after someone I practiced law with? If he had found out about the cigars, and the statute of limitations hadn’t run, he would have done his best to indict me. It’s the closest thing to torture a prosecutor can do, so he would have done it.

It wouldn’t mean I was a bad person or that my associate was guilty of anything.

The government doesn’t care about the things Manafort did, and he probably won’t be convicted of anything, but by ruining his life and forcing him to bankrupt himself paying lawyers, Mueller may be able to coerce him into incriminating other people. Mueller may get some scared people to tell the truth or even to tell useful lies which would enable him to issue subpoenas and go fishing in ponds that would otherwise be off limits to him.

When I was in law school, they taught me that a prosecutor has a responsibility to a defendant. He is obligated to protect the defendant’s rights and make sure the defendant is not treated unfairly. I don’t know if Mueller cares about that. Ginning up Rube Goldberg charges to destroy the reputations and livelihoods of law-abiding people doesn’t seem consistent with a desire to protect the rights of the innocent.

Anyway, Manafort’s “crimes” are unrelated to the election, but liberals don’t care. I saw one genius on the Internet claim that Manafort had been charged with “conspiracy against the United States” because he was working with the Russians to get Trump elected. No, bright boy. No. “Conspiracy against the United States” relates to the obscure “violations” involving his taxes and foreign agent status. It has no connection to the election.

As for Papadapoulos, whom I never heard of until this week, he is charged with lying to the FBI. This is something prosecutors love. You find an innocent person, you scare the crap out of him, you ask him questions, and while he’s under pressure, he tells a self-serving lie he thinks you can’t disprove. Then you disprove it. Now it doesn’t matter that he was innocent before you went after him. Now he is truly a criminal. That’s how they got Scooter Libby. It comes close to entrapment. It turns people who would otherwise have gone their entire lives without being charged with anything into bona fide lawbreakers who can be destroyed by criminal courts.

The pundits say Papadapoulos is guilty. Maybe he is, but lying to the FBI is not illegal collusion with the Russians. Liberals don’t care. It proves Trump must be impeached!

Papadapoulos hasn’t committed any other crimes. Had he done so, you can be sure he would have been charged.

It’s scary how little leftists care about the truth. One day we will not have a conservative president and congress, along with a conservative-dominated Supreme Court. When that day comes, the garbage we’re hearing from people of limited power will be coming from people who run the country. It’s like the line from Schindler’s List: “That’s not just good old-fashioned Jew-hating talk. It’s policy now.”

When the Nazis ran Germany and Austria, idiots and losers who had been marginalized before Hitler suddenly had nice uniforms and unlimited power. You had to take them seriously. You had to bow and scrape. If they felt like carting your kids away for medical experiments, you had to stand by and watch. We may laugh at our idiots and losers now, but in a few years, they’ll be riding around in black limos and SUV’s, and Americans will be terrified of them.

In a hostile interview with non-lawyer George Stephanopoulos, Jay Sekulow had to point out something obvious: there is no crime called “collusion.” If it turned out Trump ate blintzes with Putin every morning, and they plotted Hillary’s downfall, it would not be a criminal offense. It wouldn’t even ground impeachment. Liberals don’t care. Treason! Impeachment! Execution!

Think what our lives would be like right now if these nuts ran things. Man. And that’s our future! If I weren’t a Christian, I’d advise people to buy cyanide capsules.

I don’t recall other special prosecutors acting this way. Did they? I can’t say I’m an authority. I don’t recall Ken Starr or Archibald Cox charging people with obscure demi-crimes in order to torture them into playing ball. Maybe they did, but I can’t help thinking I would remember it.

Some pundit–maybe it was Dershowitz–claims that special prosecutors go after lame indictments like these in order to justify their appointments and their budgets. That would not surprise me. Egotists are capable of anything. How many prosecutors are humble and honest enough to say, “We spent a few million dollars, and I didn’t find any problems”? People in law enforcement tend to measure their success in terms of arrests and prosecutions, which is stupid, because proving a suspect is innocent is much more important than proving one is guilty. That’s not just my opinion. That’s a fundamental principal on which our criminal justice system is based. Convicting the guilty is not as important as refraining from tormenting the innocent.

It may be that Dershowitz is wrong about the nature of Manafort’s offenses. It may be that a renowned Harvard law professor made no effort whatsoever to research the law before giving an opinion, and maybe he doesn’t care if law students and hack lawyers all over the US make him look like a fool this week. My guess is that this is not the case. I think he did his homework.

Trump will not be impeached. Liberals need to quit whipping that horse. The only way he will be impeached is if he, like Papadapoulos, does something stupid in response to being investigated over nothing.

Compared to what’s coming, these are the salad days. Enjoy them if you can.

Oh, the Irony

I am procrastinating. Shame on me. I should be doing bookkeeping or moving downed trees, but today I made myself pancakes with grade B syrup and several “bacon steaks” from the meat lab at the University of Florida, and I am still enjoying the afterglow too much to work.

The Ocala assimilation process continues to flow seamlessly. Yesterday I received some new duds I ordered, and my wardrobe is coming together. I got some Wrangler chambray work shirts, a Carhartt belt, and two more pairs of Carhartt jeans. Today I’m wearing the jeans and belt with Keen work boots and Wigwam El-pine wool socks, and I wonder why people aren’t born wearing these things.

I’m not sure, but I think my last two belts were from Old Navy, which means they were made from Chinese dogs. They were okay for Miami, but up here I wear heavier pants that exert more pull. Cheap belts stretch and deform. The Carhartt belt is very hard and tough, so it ought to last longer and work better. I got a 34, and I have a few empty notches on it, so if I lose more weight, I should still be able to wear it.

It will look better than a cheap belt. A belt which is stretched and distorted looks sloppy.

As for the jeans, I’m not sure why anyone wears anything but Carhartt. They have triple seams and six (not four) belt loops, and the waistband is at the waist, not just above the crotch. Very comfortable.

I like the Keen boots. I think Danners are a little better. My Danners are some comfortable I hate to take them off. But the Keens have a cut-resistant toe cap thing on them, which is good when you’re cutting trees.

I have not ironed the Wrangler shirts yet. I never wear a shirt until I’ve washed it. Brand new clothes smell funny and make me itch. I don’t know if I’ll like the snaps, but it was hard to find a simple chambray work shirt, and Wrangler makes them, so I’m trying them.

My second Carhartt jacket should be here tomorrow. I don’t know if I really needed it. The one I have seems to be comfortable in 60-degree weather. It’s not too warm when I’m sitting around. But I’m afraid it will be too hot in mild weather if I exert myself in it.

I wore a fleece jacket the other day. I don’t like it. Not for outdoor work. Things catch on it, and it won’t stand up to abrasion. It will also tear easily, and it absorbs water very quickly. Fleece is overrated.

Well-made work clothes are vastly superior to crap from Old Navy, Timberland, and The Gap, and the cost is roughly the same. I should have started wearing this stuff 30 years ago.

A tree guy came by today to look at the giant, unstable branches I need to have removed. He wasn’t a jerk about it. He only wants $300 per tree. He won’t be back for two weeks, so let’s hope no one dies in the meantime.

I keep learning about poison ivy. It appears likely that one of my troublesome trees has a poison ivy vine on it. I always thought poison ivy was a small plant, but it turns out it can grow into huge, woody vines so thick you can swing on them. The tipoff is tiny hairlike roots growing out of the sides of the vine. Even if you can’t see the leaves, those hairs prove you’re looking at poison ivy. I can deal with little plants I can kill with spray, but how do you kill a giant vine without contaminating your tools? A chainsaw won’t work. The sap will get into the chain.

I’m thinking I should use a hoe to scrape the vines open. Then I can spray Roundup into the cuts. Bark protects plants from Roundup, but if you can get it past the bark, the plants will die. A hoe blade is easy to wash.

I see the Hollywood sex mess is spreading. One of the good things about it is that it’s causing people to expose their complicity inadvertently. George Clooney and Matt Damon issued ridiculous, self-praising statements condemning Weinstein, and people jumped on them, saying they obviously knew what was going on and did nothing. Now Clooney and Damon are lying low and cancelling public appearances. Rosie O’Donnell attacked Kevin Spacey, saying “we all knew.” Intelligent people are pointing out that this means she helped Spacey commit more offenses. If she had said something, maybe he would have been stopped.

Eventually, if there is any common sense in the world at all, the public will come to realize that the majority of Hollywood performers and behind-the-scenes professionals who are not newcomers are fully aware that the system tolerates abuse, and the public will hold them accountable for shielding the predators with silence. It’s very simple. People in Hollywood are terrified of losing their coveted jobs, so they kept quiet about perverts and bullies. There is no other plausible explanation for the systematic abuse.

Hollywood is a funny place. They’re very gung-ho about the pro-homosexuality “anti-bullying” message, but they suck up to bullies who commit sexual crimes. Kevin Spacey is a bully. James Toback is a bully. The fact that sex was involved doesn’t turn bullying into something else. Will the anti-bullying people acknowledge this?

Abusers don’t just mistreat others. They force intimacy on them. Abusers are often exhibitionists. They touch people without permission. They don’t respect boundaries. It’s very natural that many of them should express themselves through sexual acts. Maybe they don’t respect boundaries because they don’t see other people as fully real. They don’t realize we feel and think. They’re too self-absorbed. It makes sense that bullies grope and rape, because bullying is very much like rape. It’s a violation.

We should all be examining ourselves and repenting, in the hope that God will judge us privately instead of hitting us over the head with public disgrace. But in Hollywood, that’s not an option, because Hollywood people hate God.

I wonder if the inquisition will extend into the past. CBS journalist Mike Wallace had a reputation for gross, arrogant, boundary-shattering behavior with female employees. Will he be outed? Bob Hope used to make crude remarks about Doris Day. Shirley Temple was abused. There are rumors that Kirk Douglas raped Natalie Wood. Will the bodies be exhumed, or will the crusaders be content to bring down the living? If Thomas Jefferson and George Washington aren’t safe, I guess Mike Wallace is fair game.

I’m glad I’m not famous and that my sins aren’t worse than they are.

I better fire up the golf cart and cut some wood. Those pancakes were great.

Hollywood Polarization in Our Future?

It’s shaping up to be a very weird day in Hollywood. Conspicuously weird. Not the usual weirdness.

Yesterday Kevin Spacey was accused of attacking a minor. The boy was 14. Spacey was 26. Spacey put him on a bed and lay down on top of him, against the boy’s will. The boy squirmed free. Since the accusation was made, Spacey has apologized. He does not deny that it happened.

What’s interesting here is Spacey’s defense. He says: a) he doesn’t remember the attack, b) he was very drunk when he did it, and c) he is a homosexual.

I think c is pretty obvious. When you lie down on top of another male for sexual purposes, you are clearly a homosexual.

In a court of law, a and b would not get him any traction. Drunkenness is not a defense in a criminal case, nor is amnesia. I think Spacey is trying to convince us that he wouldn’t do anything bad if he were sober, but the other side of the coin is that instead of appearing to be a gay predator rapist, he may be portrayed as a drunken gay predator rapist, which sounds worse.

Personally, I have more sympathy for people who do strange things when drunk, as long as those things are truly out of character. But I’m not a jury.

By the way, gay-friendly, celebrity-loving journalists are calling what Spacey did “harassment.” No, “harassment” means telling your secretary how much you love her behind. What Spacey did was battery. It may have been attempted rape.

Spacey appears to think that his sexual problem excuses the attack, and other homosexuals are not having it. Lesbian comedian Wanda Sykes says Spacey isn’t allowed to “hide under the rainbow,” and anti-Christian teen-abuse merchant Dan Savage took time off from insulting Christian high school students to tell Spacey his membership in the “gay community” is revoked.

Savage’s remarks are illuminating. They are examples of the gay conspiracy to disown all hostile homosexuals. Gays want us to think they’re all like Harvey Fierstein and the Fab Five. Cute, funny, harmless people. They tell us a man who rapes other men in prison isn’t gay. They say clergymen who assault teenage boys aren’t gay. Sorry, but that’s a crock. If anything, Spacey’s behavior secures and validates his membership. Gay rape is not rare at all, nor are gay efforts to have sexual relations with underage men.

Homosexual men have always preyed on young men. They do it so much, there is a very old name for a gay man who sodomizes teens: “chickenhawk.” And there is a huge gay teen prostitution business. A heterosexual john will gladly pay to play with a 40-year-old woman, but homosexuals like teens. Gay murderer Vester Flanagan was motivated partly by the rejection he experienced when he lost the bloom of youth. He was very bitter about it. He said it was “awful,” losing the ability to use his appearance to command the erotic attention of other men.

It’s hard to understand how anyone could take pleasure in the knowledge that other men wanted to sodomize him whenever they saw him enter a room, but that’s how he felt.

Without realizing it, Spacey has confessed more than he knows. He has confessed that homosexuality causes men to be attracted to boys who aren’t fully grown. It’s not pedophilia. A pedophile won’t touch anyone who has been through puberty. It’s just a powerful attraction to teens. Maybe it’s not universal, but it’s common.

Savage could not be more wrong. Gays are just as hostile as everyone else. They rape. They murder. When I was a kid, a gay man who lived across the street from me tied up his lover, castrated him, and killed him. He did not stop being gay when he did that, any more than Jeffrey Dahmer stopped being gay when he cut bodies up so he could use the parts as 3-D pornography.

One of the interesting things about leftists (my catch-all term for people in American who are against God) is that they don’t get along. Their beliefs and motivations are inconsistent. They have conflicts. When the Holy Spirit guides people, they agree, but Satan is a mutineer, and internal conflict is a hallmark of mutiny. The apocryphal text The Ascension of Isaiah says the spirits that follow Satan fight because they envy each other. I find that completely credible. Cut off the head, and the parts of the body have no unifying authority. Satan is not a proper head. He’s not strong enough or smart enough to keep his crew harmonized. It’s very natural that leftists would fight.

Now we have a situation in which the man-haters will be pitted against gays. Whatever else they may be, gays are still men. Like other men, they are sexually aggressive. They are sexually receptive all the time, not just during certain phases of a menstrual cycle. They are better able than women to have sex without emotional connection (or financial reward). Feminists are enjoying a period of attention and dominance right now. Everyone is afraid of them. Attacking men is in fashion. Now that the dam has burst, will gays be safe just because they’re not typical men?

The comment from Wanda Sykes makes me think they won’t be. There has always been tension between gays and lesbians, and anything that is put in tension is likely to snap. Their lifestyles are very different. Gays are about sex and drugs. Lesbians are about moving in together and creating little testosterone-free bubbles where they perceive themselves to be protected from the evil of masculinity, even while some of them mimic it to the point of absurdity. Gays envy women. Lesbians envy men. Hostility is one part of envy. The ingredients for large-scale friction are in place.

If you search the web, you will find discussions in which gays and lesbians acknowledge the fact that they don’t get along. I didn’t make it up.

My guess: new Spacey stories will come out, and then there will be stories about other gay entertainment figures. Maybe Bryan Singer will fall. Gays and lesbians will realize their disunity is a problem, and there will be turmoil as they try to cope without requiring feminists to put down the axe.

What will happen if show business becomes afraid of women? What will entertainment look like? Women in show business are as hypocritical as human beings can be. They behave like sluts, and at the same time, they demand respect and persecute men who treat them as sex objects. How can the post-2000 proud Hollywood slut coexist with post-Weinstein Hollywood misandry and self-righteousness? How can a rich, powerful slut who used her body to reach all of her goals be self-righteous about sex?

Somehow the leftist mind will make it work, at least temporarily. These are the same people who think homosexuality and so-called sexual transitioning are natural and heterosexuality is an artificial construct forced on us by society.

If masculinity is bad and forced, how can butch lesbians be normal and healthy? How can hyper-masculine “bear” gays be healthy? If masculinity is just an unhealthy pose, and we should abolish it for men, should we make Chaz Bono get breast implants and confront “his” feminine side?

I wonder about Hollywood’s future, but I don’t care what happens to show business. I don’t care if the industry collapses and people lose money. Show business is foolishness and waste, and it enables poisonous people and puts huge sums of money in their bloodstained hands.

Time to sit back and watch the drama unfold. Cue Corey Feldman.

Bull Backfire

Rosie O’Donnell has jumped into the Twitter Spacey frenzy. She says, “we all knew.”

Here is the problem with that: you all knew, but you kept your traps shut while people were hurt. O’Donnell is trying to preach and seem morally superior, but she is implicitly confessing that she helped Spacey do evil.

What excuse does she have? She’s rich. Spacey can’t say a few words and put her in the poorhouse. Unsuccessful entertainers are vulnerable, but O’Donnell is not. What’s the explanation?

Look for the liberal press to not call her on her hypocrisy. She is a woman, and these days, that means she wears Teflon.

Thousands of people in Hollywood knew about the widespread sexual exploitation, but people kept quiet and fed the beast. Isn’t that the real scandal?

Toxic Femininity on the Rise

What an interesting night.

Drudge is linking to a story in which Kevin Spacey is accused of molesting a 14-year-old boy.

Why do I find that interesting? Because I have a friend who says he knows of two boys who supposedly received inappropriate attention from Spacey. My friend thinks Spacey is a pedophile. He mentioned these things to me, and I wondered whether there were rumors about Spacey and children on the web. I forgot all about it and forgot to look. I knew there was a story about Spacey getting caught in a British park, doing something that seemed like a Larry Craig impression.

I don’t know anyone in entertainment. I’m just an obscure person. Strange that I heard these things recently and then saw this story.

I’m not accusing Spacey of anything. Maybe it’s all innuendo and lies.

I suppose every male performer will be accused of something perverted before the year is out. It’s all the rage now.

I was thinking about this over the weekend. Here’s my guess: Satan used to protect sexual abusers. Now he has decided to remove that protection in order to advance his war on men.

Sexual harassment is very real, and it’s not a trivial thing. Being sexually abused makes you feel powerless and dirty. It’s as if someone has kicked your front door down and used your living room floor for a toilet while you sit and watch, unable to stop it. When I practiced employment law, I heard story after story about abusers. One male employee thought it was funny to tell a woman he had a check in his front pocket, and that she would have to fish for it. Things like that. Extremely common. It surprised me, because feminists have a victim mentality, and they love attention. They are extremely self-righteous, and they make things up. I was shocked to find out that there were so many true stories of abuse out there.

I was actively looking for racial discrimination cases during this time, and I never saw a single one, but sexual harassment was everywhere.

Anyway, how did abusers (I won’t say “men,” because women do it, too) get away with it for so long? Even powerful women kept quiet. Remember this: when something happens, and it doesn’t make any sense, there is a supernatural cause.

I believe Satan stifled victims so they could be abused. That served his purpose at the time. Now it’s more important for him to fight masculinity, because men are supposed to be Christian leaders who help others fight him. He wants to tear men down and give power to shrill, emasculating, attention-loving, man-hating harpies like Gloria Allred. If would be good if abuse were exposed and the toleration stopped, but we won’t stop there. The pendulum will swing too far, in the direction of persecution of men.

When women get power, they are often more cruel and ruthless than men. Strange thing, but it’s true. Women are very bad at forgiving, and they are very vindictive. I wonder what’s in our future.

In other news, Adam Sandler is being crucified for putting his hand on a woman’s knee on a talk show. All over the web, women are basically calling him a rapist and saying the “victim,” an actress named Claire Foy, was “obviously” upset. Foy, on the other hand, says she wasn’t offended at all. No matter. When toxic femininity is provoked, it shows no mercy until blood is shed, and then, if possible, it would reanimate its dead enemy and kill him again and again. Angry feminists are worse than MS-13.

My bet: Spacey is in real trouble, and it will not go away. And feminists will be after him, even though the alleged victim is male, because Spacey is a man. We’re all bad. We are the enemy. We are Goldstein.

Suddenly I feel glad I have been so unsuccessful with women. Success might have been fatal.

Strange Visitor from the Planet Diesel

I feel like I got nothing at all done today, but when I list my achievements, they sound pretty good. I applied Roundup to every plant I could find that resembled poison oak or poison ivy. I used it to kill a young magnolia and a bunch of small live oaks. I also took a bag of Amdro fire ant granules and nuked our mounds. I bush-hogged a big percentage of the big pasture. I also cleared a lot more oak branches away and put them on the burn pile, which was still smoldering from yesterday. I put several gallons of water on the pile to keep it from flaring up again. I ordered a new garbage disposal for a tenant. I ordered myself another Carhartt jacket, in a lighter weight than the one I already have. I need something I can work in, when the weather is between 40 and 60 degrees. On top of all that, I took my dad to Tractor Supply and made sure he had a good lightweight jacket of his own. It’s going to be 39 degrees here tonight.

I’m not sure if we have poison oak and poison ivy or not, but I found a bunch of plants that look a whole lot like the pictures on the Internet. I had to stop clearing hurricane debris because of them. I read up on poison ivy to make sure I didn’t expose myself to it.

I read something reassuring: you don’t get poison ivy just from touching it lightly. The contact has to be sufficient to get urushiol, the poisonous compound in poison ivy, on you. The best way to get it is to break something so the juice comes out.

Anyway, I am being very judicious about what I touch when I move debris, and I use the tractor’s forks by themselves when I can. In the areas where I sprayed Roundup, I plan to leave things alone. Maybe I can go back in when the plants have had time to die and rot. You can’t burn them, and you can’t handle them when they’re dead, because the urushiol takes years to break down. I figure rot is the easiest solution.

The Internet says one of the best ways to get a rash is to get urushiol on your tools or gloves and then touch them later, so I am trying very hard to keep my gloves away from my eyes and nose.

I don’t know how strongly I react to poison ivy, but I am not in a hurry to find out. Mangoes contain urushiol, and some people can’t go near them. Supposedly, there is urushiol in mango skin. I’ve skinned a zillion mangoes, and they never bothered me. But I am not anxious to be my own guinea pig in an experiment that causes a horrible rash that lasts two weeks.

I suppose I got enough done today.

My big problem these days isn’t getting things done. It’s getting to bed on time. I hate to go to bed. I enjoy the things I do so much, I don’t want to quit. When I know it’s time to quit, I linger and procrastinate. I wish I could go out and cut some downed trees right now.

The lifestyle here suits me perfectly. I love the work clothes; Carhartt and Danner should pay me to endorse them. I have come to feel nervous when I’m not wearing a ball cap; if I find myself leaving the house without my Tractor Supply cap, I go back in and look for it. I love the tools. Everyone should have a tractor with a front end loader. I didn’t realize how incomplete I was without one. A man with a good-sized tractor is a superhero. Lift a compressor? No problem. Pull a tree down? Hold my beer and watch.

My parents should never have left Kentucky. Being a Southerner is what it’s all about. It’s just better. Period. No wonder so many people want Confederate flags. What we have is great, and what other symbol do we have to celebrate it? Maybe a flag with Colonel Sanders’ face on it. Or the flag of Jesusland.

It may sound weird that I enjoy life this much when I’m so solitary, but it doesn’t bother me at all.

It’s late. Time to knock off.

I’ll try to take more photos in the future. It’s inconvenient to take my gloves off, but I’ll work on it.

Sawing Away at Life’s Problems

Today I got to work on my tree situation. Areas of the farm that used to be inaccessible because of standing water and mosquitoes are open for business, so I took my pole saw and tractor and made some excursions.

Two oaks by the highway to my east were giving me problems. They both snapped about 25 feet from the ground.

One tree had several major branches, and only one branch snapped. That left a tree maybe fifty feet tall, with a torn place halfway up. The part of the tree above the place where the branch tore out appears to be resting in a crotch between two branches of a taller tree. I think the place where the branch tore out is too weak to hold the remaining branch up for long. If it comes out, it could conceivably fall on the highway, which could be very bad. The broken part was lying on my fence, threatening to break it.

The other tree only had one main trunk, and that trunk snapped. It didn’t detach at the break. It was hanging down onto my fence. I would guess the broken part was 25 feet long and weighed several hundred pounds. It was not in danger of hitting the highway, but I wanted it off my fence before it ruined it.

I considered calling a tree service to cut both trees. Tree surgeons call objects that threaten to fall when you cut trees “widowmakers,” and I was dealing with three of them: the snapped-off branches plus the branch with the weakened support. I was afraid that if I tried to cut them, they would find ways to swing toward me and kill me, which was not the outcome I wanted. I thought I had finally found tree problems I could not fix.

I decided to see what I could do. I took the tractor and backed it up to the broken tree that only had one trunk. I cut off as much of the ground side of the broken bit as I could. I put a tow strap on the end of it and took off with the tractor. The broken part came loose at the top and slid down quite a bit, and I was able to cut it up with the pole saw, until nothing was left on my side of the fence except for cut-up wood. I still had maybe 12 feet of trunk outside the fence, but it’s not going to hurt anything. No one walks out there in the weeds. I can take my time dealing with it.

I was able to nibble away at the fallen part of the other tree until nothing big remained inside the fence. When I cut it free from the fence, it swung toward the road, but it wasn’t long enough to go anywhere near it, so it ended up leaning on the tree’s trunk. Now I can put a strap on it, yank it down so it lies on its side, and either cut it up or just leave it for the county.

The top of that tree is something I can’t handle. It’s way up there. The tree people may need a bucket that goes up 40 feet to get to the parts they need to cut. I know when to quit. But I think I did myself a big favor by getting the broken part off the fence. Instead of telling them to deal with the whole tree, I can have them cut off the scary part way above the ground. That’s a smaller job, and it should be cheaper.

I would rather pay $500 than $2000. It’s worth it to reduce the work I leave to paid help.

I also have a widowmaker in my front yard. It appeared as though by magic a few days ago. I would say the break is about 40 feet up. It’s the main trunk of a tall, straight tree. The broken part is maybe 15 feet long, and it’s heavy. It’s just hanging there. I keep hoping it will fall by itself. If I could get a rope on the low end, I could pull it down with the tractor, but it’s way up in the air. That distance may end up costing me hundreds of dollars. If I could get the broken part down, I could handle the rest of the job and not pay a dime. There ought to be a safe way to do it. Surely someone has invented some kind of grappling hook for grabbing trees. If it cost me a hundred bucks, it would be a bargain.

I need something I can attach while standing to the side of the tree. If I’m under it, and I accidentally bring the widowmaker down early, I’ll be in trouble.

Tomorrow I will have to call the tree people and see what they can do for me. I can’t just sit around and see where these things fall. The one by the highway has to be fixed ASAP. I can wait longer to deal with the one in the yard, but it would be awkward if someone were crushed to death before I arrived at a solution.

After I did what I could with these two trees, I took the pole saw deeper into the property and started working on some other trees. In about an hour, I did an amazing amount of work. The pole saw allowed me to cut dangerous branches and trunks up to nine inches thick, without risking my life. It’s one of the best tools I’ve ever seen. I felled a rotten oak with it and bucked it so I could move it off a dirt road. I cut major limbs off a fairly large downed oak and fixed it so it was no longer applying pressure to the trunk of a young maple I want to keep. I had another oak that had snapped maybe 15 feet up, and the place where it had snapped was still hung up. I cut away at the grounded end until the part that was suspended crashed down to the ground. Now I can buck it and move it.

I also slaughtered every small live oak I could see. I hate those things. I will not let them reach maturity. I’m making room for maples and pecans to fill. From now on, I plan to kill every oak sapling I see, unless I can think of a good reason to let it live.

The pole saw is actually more useful than my 20″ chainsaw.

I am growing disenchanted with the raw woods I loved at first. Woods down here are buggy. They’re weedy. They’re full of spider webs with 3-inch spiders suspended at face level. They contain a lot of undesirable species, like live oaks. Now that Irma has knocked over a lot of my big trees, I’m thinking I should give up on the idea of having a wilderness area and try to create some tamed woods. I can get rid of the bad trees and weeds and plant some better ones. Instead of having thick woods that look beaten up, I can have thinner woods that have been put in some kind of order, with more grassy areas. I can put bamboo around the perimeter to restore my privacy.

If I can get a bamboo wall to work, I can live without the woods. The main purpose of the woods is to provide seclusion. A 20-foot-high wall of bamboo with no breaks will do a better job of providing seclusion than a bunch of stringy oaks that fall over every time it rains. It would actually be really neat. And if a tree falls on a bamboo hedge, no problem. Bamboo grows back very quickly.

A lot of people have thick, ugly hedges here to shut out the world. They look pretty bad. Bamboo is pretty. It looks elegant. Remember Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? I have to find out how hardy it is, though. If bugs eat it, there is no point in trying.

I don’t know what I’m doing, but I feel like I’m headed toward a solution.

I’ll try to post more photos. This stuff can be pretty dull when it’s all text.

Long Pants Now an Option

I finally got the treat I was waiting for: WINTER!

“It’s fall,” you’re saying. But it was 57 degrees here this morning, and I came here from Miami, where 57 degrees means winter.

Why would anyone want winter? Because I’m sick of having 85-degree days and 80-degree nights…in December. I’m sick of having long-sleeved clothes I can’t wear. I’m sick of not being able to ride my motorcycles because the protective gear is too hot.

In Miami, the air always smells like warm, dirty laundry because of the heat and humidity, and you can’t enjoy yourself outdoors if you’re doing anything strenuous, because after five minutes, sweat soaks through your clothes and runs into your eyes.

Up here I spend a lot of time cutting trees and moving the wood with my tractor. Try that in 90-degree weather. No fun whatsoever. You take your shirt off at the end of the day, you drop it on the bathroom floor, and it goes, “PLOP.” Nasty. And the mosquitoes love hot, wet weather.

It’s after 10 a.m., and it’s still only 62 degrees. I look forward to not sweating or feeling miserable out there.

When you work in hot weather, you feel much more tired. Your body makes you feel tired, artificially, to prevent you from exerting yourself enough to overheat. When the weather cools down, you feel more physically fit even though you’re not. Your endurance and strength increase. You need that when you’re moving trees.

Most people don’t realize heat makes you tired. I figured it out during a summer move in the 1990’s. I had a box of Otter Pops in the freezer (similar to Kool Pops), and I noticed that my energy surged whenever I ate one. After that, I learned to take crushed ice with me to the gym. You eat it during cardiovascular workouts, and it lets you work much harder.

Ice is very hard to melt. It takes one calorie to heat one gram of water one degree Celsius. It takes 80 calories to melt one gram of ice. When you swallow ice at the gym, your body has to pump a huge amount of heat into it. That heat comes from your blood, and the heat in your blood comes from your muscles. Try it and see how much better you feel.

Anyway, I was suffering before the weather changed. Now I should be much more efficient, and the bugs should be dying off, as they deserve.

In other news, I am watching the Hollywood sex-abuse holocaust expand. It just moved to Washington. Some minor actress says Bush I groped her from his wheelchair, and he doesn’t deny it. She says a guy who was working security told her she shouldn’t have stood next to him. Can you imagine that? He’s so crazed with lust, it’s not safe to get within arm’s reach of his chair. Apparently, he’s like the crazy old priest from Father Ted. I never would have guessed.

It’s kind of funny, because the Bushes aren’t very conservative. For decades, people have whispered that the Bushes are liberals who run as conservatives because that’s the easiest way for them to get elected. Bush I is a big homosexuality supporter, and so is Bush II. Back in the 90’s, it was rumored that Bush I was pro-abortion and Bill Clinton was pro-life, but that they ignored their personal convictions in order to please the people who kept them in power. In any case, a Bush I scandal is more of a bruise to liberals than conservatives.

The Hollywood branch of the scandal is blossoming. About 200 women have accused a director named Toback of sexual crimes, and some guy who directed George Clooney is accused of sexual abuse, verbal abuse, and beating people. Supposedly, Clooney challenged him physically over picking on underlings, and they got in a tussle on a set. Guess who else is piping up? Surprise! Corey Feldman. Who didn’t see that coming. He says he’s going to shake the pedophile tree until everyone falls out.

The big problem with Feldman is credibility. He kissed up to Charlie Sheen during the tiger’s blood mess, and no one in his right mind thinks Charlie Sheen is innocent of, well, anything. One gets the impression that Feldman’s remarks about abuse have a lot to do with advancing his own career and very little to do with justice. Sheen was a big player, and Feldman rolled over and showed him his belly, at the worst possible time.

Maybe he really believes Sheen has been maligned, but I don’t trust Feldman, so I won’t believe anything he says unless there is some corroboration or the story seems sound on its own feet.

We haven’t heard much about pedophilia during these last few weeks, yet we all know it’s a big problem in Hollywood. Why are the abusers still protected? Maybe stage parents are hushing their kids up. Maybe older people who were abused as kids are ashamed to talk. Also, a lot of the rumored perpetrators are still very powerful. Consider Bryan Singer. He’s powerful AND homosexual, so God help anyone who says a word against him. He is more sacred than the Virgin Mary.

Hollywood will be a very interesting place if power shifts from lust-crazed, sociopathic men to shrill, attention-craving, narcissistic women with raging victim complexes. Imagine the horrible movies we’ll be subjected to. It will be an endless series of sorry spectacles in the vein of Fried Green Tomatoes, Steel Magnolias, The Turning Point, Terms of Endearment, and The Handmaid’s Tale. If that happens, you will need a skid steer to get men into a movie theater.

Maybe God is helping Christians by weakening the moneyed allies of the leftist political establishment, to slow down the encroachment of leftist totalitarianism. That would be nice, because one day this country will go full-throttle socialist, and not long after that, we’ll see the labor camps and killing fields, and it will be a very bad time to be white. Maybe God will bless me, and I’ll be dead when that happens. That would be great.

Some people think we can fight the left with guns and rallies, but those are natural tools, and our problems are supernatural. We aren’t humble. We love sin. We don’t pray. We have cut America’s ties to God’s protection. All the AK-47’s in the world can’t protect what God has exposed, and personally, I would rather go ahead and die than sit in my yard all day with a rifle. When it comes to that, there will be nothing worth fighting over. I’m not sure there is anything worth fighting over right now.

Take it, socialists. Take it all. Kill us off and send us to a better place, and enjoy the worthless, depreciating trinkets you stole from us as you age, wither, and die. You’ll wish you hadn’t, but that’s not our problem.

We would all be in heaven, and we would never have to hear the word “Antifa” or the phrase “global warming” again. We would never have to see another Gloria Allred press conference or read a news story about Kathy Griffin. No more toxic femininity, in our faces 24/7. That’s a win.

I don’t know what to think of the men who are being exposed. I’ve committed my share of sexual sins, and I don’t know how I would cope with seeing them exposed on major websites and on the TV news. I can’t help pitying people who are under the gun right now. On the other hand, sociopaths don’t feel shame, so their pain is nothing like what I would feel. They’re just upset over the loss of money, power, and admiration. Maybe there isn’t much suffering to pity.

To take one example, unless Harvey Weinstein goes to prison, the worst thing he’ll have to deal with is dying rich without a major role in the entertainment industry. That’s not much of a punishment. He won’t even have to give up fornication. He’ll just have to quit fornicating with actresses, and he’ll have to get consent.

Now that I think about it, conservatives have one major iron in the fire: Bill O’Reilly. At least he used to be major. Bill doesn’t need liberal enemies. He is destroying his legacy all by himself. He got Fox to pay Lis Wiehl $32 million for just one of his many harassment claims, and he still says the whole sex thing is a leftist smear. Worse, he invokes his kids, who are probably very humiliated. He says he made Fox pay in order to spare his kids embarrassment. That’s pretty clearly a lie. He also invoked Eric Bolling’s dead son, much to Mr. Bolling’s ire and disgust. The odds that Bill isn’t pretty much what his detractors say he is are just about nil, but he continues to blame the world, and he has even blamed God. He said, “You know, am I mad at God? Yeah, I’m mad at him. I wish I had more protection. I wish this stuff didn’t happen. I can’t explain it to you. Yeah, I’m mad at him.”

Not encouraging. God is not wrong, Bill. You are attacking the only person who can help you.

We hate terrorists who use kids as shields, and Bill knows that, but look what he’s doing. In his panic and what appears to be self-worshiping rage, he has lost all sense of decency. He has no idea how he looks to other people when he uses these contemptible defenses. When news of his defense tactics came out, champagne corks must have popped all over Manhattan.

I’ve seen two of Bill’s alleged victims, and maybe I should not say this, but I’m surprised by his taste in women. He went to work every day with Lauren Green, Kiran Chetry, Shannon Bream, and a host of other beauties, but look who got him in trouble: Andrea Mackris and Lis Wiehl.

I have to think about cool-weather work clothes, so I better quit procrastinating and get out there. I hope your day is as pleasant as mine.

John Deere Manuals are Full of Little Jokes

Yesterday I really screwed up. I tried to do the responsible thing, reading a machinery manual instead of doing things however seemed right at the time. I should have known better!

I have a John Deere 430 garden tractor with a mower deck. I don’t know why it’s called a deck. It’s a big flat attachment that connects to the underside of the tractor. You can’t stand on it, like a ship’s deck or the deck behind your house. In any case, it probably weighs over 200 pounds, and it has three blades on it. Once in a while, the blades have to be sharpened.

My yard is bahia grass. This is a somewhat disappointing, very tall grass which a friend of mine has compared to leather. It’s very tough. When I first arrived here, I started using the mower, and it seemed like it was pushing the grass over on its side and tearing some of it. It did not appear to be cutting very well. I read somewhere that bahia grass requires very sharp blades, so I resolved to figure out how to sharpen mine. Also, I hit a stump or an exposed rock the first time I mowed, and I felt like I needed to see what it had done to the deck. A big spark shot across the yard when I hit the obstruction, and I assumed that was a bad thing.

The previous owner said he used ramps to lift the mower so he could work on it. That seemed like a bad idea, so I looked at the manual. I was aware that farm machinery manuals tend to be highly optimistic (i.e. full of it) concerning the difficulty of servicing equipment, but I decided to take a chance. The manual said you pull some pins, turn a lever, disconnect the PTO driveshaft, turn the wheels, remove one wheel and slide the deck out. Child’s play!

Yeah.

My first bad move was to put the tractor on grass. I was going to have to flip the deck over once I got it out, and I did not want to do that on concrete. I did not consider the immense difficulty of moving a heavy item on three smallish wheels on soft dirt. But before I get to that, I will talk about the other problems.

First, there is a bizarre assembly with two arms on it, attached to the front of the tractor. The arms attach to the deck from the front. You have to push a pin and pull a lever to make the front of the attachment drop out. No problem! I tried to push the pin. It was frozen. I banged on it with a punch. When I finally got it moving, it bounced. It was a spring-loaded pin with a detent you have to activate to hold it in the out position, and the detent doesn’t work, so it keeps popping back into the hole, preventing the lever from turning.

When I mastered that, I found that the lever did not want to turn. The lever turns a rod with two circular flanges on it, and the flanges fit between two flat plates. The engineers in Japan apparently decided it was important to have tremendous friction between the plates and the outsides of the flanges, so they made them with an interference fit. Picture an axle with two wheels (the flanges), turned by a lever on the hub of one wheel. Then picture two brick walls, pressed up against the wheels from outside.

Turning the lever was impossible, until I got out my 3-foot pipe wrench. What about a breaker bar? Well, the lever points downward when you get it rotated, so a breaker bar would be pointed toward the center of the earth. In order to avoid obstruction, the bar would have to be about an inch and a half long, defeating the purpose of increasing leverage.

I got the attachment to fall, and then I pried out the spring-loaded J-pins that held the arms onto the deck. They’re supposed to move freely. Ha.

I got all the other pins out, and then I had to remove the driveshaft from the PTO. The driveshaft telescopes “freely” (again, ha), and there is a collar on the front end that compresses some ball detents to keep it in place. The collar moves…freely. Unless it’s impacted with thick, black, greasy dust from mowing. I had to work it and work it. I pulled the deck backward and forward by hand. I moved the tractor up and back. Finally, the coupling fell off the PTO.

When I had everything loose, I pulled the deck sideways in the soft dirt, which was not easy at all, and then the little gearbox in the middle of the deck hit the inside of the frame of the tractor.

To get this stupid thing out, you have to jack the tractor up maybe two inches. This is not in the manual. John Deere’s little joke.

No problem. I had a farm jack.

I put the farm jack on the right front axle and started raising the tractor. As I raised it, the jack leaned closer and closer to the cowling. Great. It was going to gouge the crap out of it. I found a towel and shoved it in there and continued jacking.

Eventually, I got the deck to slide out, and then I decided to lower the tractor for safety reasons. It would not budge. It was perfectly happy to go up. Down was not an option.

I went to the shop PC and got on the web. Guess what? Farm jacks freeze up so they can only be raised. There are two sprung pins in the mechanism, and whenever you use your farm jack, you’re supposed to lube the snot out of them before you start. Otherwise, you can end up with a heavy load suspended in the air, with no way to get it down.

I used WD-40 and lithium grease (because WD-40 evaporates), and I got the jack to work.

I have a policy of never lifting anything heavy. First of all, lifting is work. Apart from that, it’s a great way to ruin your old age. One lift can screw up up for life. Unfortunately, I had no help, so I picked up the front of the deck and rolled it on its back. I will not be doing that next time. If it had been fifteen pounds heavier, I don’t know if I could have done it.

The blades were held on by three huge hex bolts. I tried a wrench, but they were on there pretty good, and it was just about impossible to hold the blades still. When I turned one bolt, all three blades moved. I got out my impact wrench and fired up the small compressor, and thanks be to God, the bolts came right out.

The blades didn’t look bad at all. I saw a John Deere manual online, and it said the cutting edge was supposed to be a flat surface 0.4 mm wide. In other words, much duller than a butter knife. I have no idea why that would be desirable. I would guess that the unsharpened blades were considerably sharper than that when I took them off. I wasn’t having it. I went to my small belt grinder and created edges that were sharp enough to slice bologna. It’s not easy to put a really good edge on steel that thick. I was satisfied. I went through the horror of disassembling and detaching the deck, backward, and after maybe 3 hours of work, total, I had a tractor ready to mow.

Supposedly, you should use a torque wrench to put mower blades back on. Yeah, sure. Thanks for that great tip. I’m all over it.

I used the impact wrench.

I still have a lot of sticks and twigs in my enormous yard because of Hurricane Irma. I asked some forum people if I needed a landscape rake, and one said I should just run over the twigs with the mower. I decided to take his advice. Now I know how to fix blades, so I don’t care what happens to them. I ran right over everything I saw, up to 3/4″ in thickness. Whatever the blades hit, they dealt with. Good enough.

Hmm…the Internet says this deck weighs 300 pounds. Yeah, that feels about right.

There was one bright spot in my ordeal. The smiley spider from my front door showed up to help. I am told his name is Larry. Not sure how helpful he was, but it was good to know he was in my corner.

Larry says I should get a smiley tattoo to match his own, but for the moment I have decided to pass.

Here, Even the Bugs Smile

Today is a great day. I got the road to the south gate cleared, so now I can start moving wood to the side of the highway.

But first, a picture of the coolest spider I’ve ever seen.

I asked friends if this was a spider or a transformer. One says it’s a decepticon. My question: does it know it has a big smile painted on its butt? Is this normal, or is it a spider holiday? Maybe it’s spider Mardi Gras or Carnaval, and this spider is drunk.

To get back to the road, two big oaks fell across it, and to make matters worse, one was on top of the other. The other day I got them mostly subdued, and then my chainsaw ran out of gas. I left one trunk lying across the road, with two plastic wedges stuck in it. Today I went back and finished cutting that trunk, leaving me with a piece maybe eight feet long, lying directly on the road. I used the timberjack to cut that in three pieces, I rolled them out of the way, and the biggest obstacle on the road was tamed. After that I moved down the road and moved a few small trees that were in the way.

This is sweet. Next time I fire the tractor up, I should be able to use it to move big logs out to the highway, and once they’re there, they’re the county’s problem.

I’ll still have to burn a lot of crap, but burning two-foot-thick logs will no longer be part of the job.

In other news, my second pair of work boots arrived. I was considering getting a shorter pair of Danner Vicious boots, but curiosity overcame me, and I decided to try some American-made Keen Braddock boots. Keen is famous for its weight-saving asymmetrical steel toe, which puts more metal over the bigger toes.

The boots seem fine, but I think Danners are more comfortable. We’ll see what happens. People say disparaging things about the Chinese Keens, but these are American, so I have hope.

I needed shorter boots. The tall ones are heavy. They’re great with shorts, because they cover my ankles, but long boots aren’t necessary with jeans.

These boots have a true steel toe, unlike the Danners, which have some sort of hard plastic or something. A chainsaw ought to bounce off steel pretty good.

I came close to rolling a huge log onto my foot today, so I feel smug about choosing not to wear my plain-toe boots.

That’s it for today. Hope you’re enjoying life as much as I am.

Tree Removal Continues

Today we had another day of fall-like weather. It was in the mid-70’s, with little sun. I was pretty happy about that, because I have about 5 years’ worth of tree removal work ahead of me, and doing it in 90-degree heat is not much fun.

I have two big oaks that fell as one. They are pointing in the same direction, and one is (was) on top of the other. Cutting them up is an intimidating job. The trunk of the upper oak was above shoulder height, so that ruled out a typical chainsaw cut. You don’t use a chainsaw for cuts that high, because if it swings down, it will have a lot of momentum, and it can hit your legs. Worse, you could Jennerize yourself.

Another problem: cutting the upper trunk near the base would cause it to fall on the lower trunk, and from there, who knows where it would bounce?

I solved the problem using my fun new technique: the bore cut. You shove the chainsaw through the middle of the tree, leaving “straps” above and below the tunnel. I didn’t have to lift the saw that high to do this.

When you cut a tree, you end up with one side in tension and one side in compression. For example, imagine a horizontal log. The weight pulls on the top fibers and tries to push the bottom ones together. If you cut too far on the compression side, the tree will close on your saw, and then you get to have fun trying to extract it. This has happened to me several times in spite of my efforts to avoid it. Sometimes trees surprise you.

I kept cutting the upper tree until the trunk was suspended in space. That put tension on the top and compression on the bottom, down by the base. I cut up into the tree from the bottom, making a kerf maybe five inches deep. Then I pounded two plastic wedges into it. Wedges hold kerfs open while you work. You don’t want metal wedges for this purpose. You use plastic, because every so often, you’re going to hit a wedge with your saw.

I made a bore cut through the tree, above the kerf with the wedges, separated from the kerf by material intended to form a hinge. I left a little strap up at the top to hold the tree up while I switched saws. I got my pole saw, stood at a relatively safe distance, and cut into the strap. The trunk fell straight down, and I was in business.

This method, with variations, works on all sorts of stressed trees.

I’ve been studying the crap out of tree-cutting methods on Youtube, because I don’t want to be crushed or mutilated any more than is necessary. If you’re using a chainsaw, and you haven’t studied, well, people like you make a lot of money for hospitals.

I’m not the perfect example of chainsaw safety. I don’t have chaps, and I don’t wear a face shield. But I’m considerably better off than a guy who thinks testosterone is a good substitute for brains.

The timberjack I bought is a huge help. I can take a log that weighs hundreds of pounds and flip it over with one end suspended in the air, without exerting myself at all. Green live oak is extremely heavy. It’s so heavy, one piece I cut came close to straining the tractor’s front end loader. With the timberjack, I can cut everything in small pieces I can move.

I have to get these two oaks moved, because they have been blocking the dirt road to my east gate. I need to use that gate to move logs to the swale by the highway, where the county will pick them up for nothing. Today I got to the point where both oaks were cut in pieces. My big saw ran out of gas while I was finishing up the lower log, so I left my wedges in the log and called it a day.

Thanks to the weather, I can wear long pants while I work. My legs aren’t getting cut any more. I’m not bleeding at all. That’s a nice change.

I got myself two probationary pairs of Carhartt jeans, because the local stores had a crappy selection of overalls (my first choice). The jeans are great. I have Carhartt work pants, but they’re too nice for cutting trees, and they have to be ironed. Jeans are more practical. I have a pair of overalls on the way via Amazon, and if they work out, I’ll get more.

Overalls should be ideal for this kind of work. Coveralls would be better if the weather were cooler. Bark scrapes bare arms up pretty good. But overalls will do. I need something that permits freedom of movement and has lots of pockets. Naturally, I ordered Carhartt. Their other products are so good, the overalls must be good, too.

I have owned many pairs of Levi’s in my life, but now I look down on them. They have a number of problems. First, the cotton is cheap and weak. It’s not made to last. It’s made to wear out early so little girls will have cute rips that expose their knees. Second, Levi’s don’t sit at the waist. They sit below the waist. Your waist is about at the level of your belly button. Every time you bend, Levi’s cut into you because of the unfortunate location of the belt line. Final thing, Levi’s don’t have a lot of pockets.

Carhartt stuff is not made to look good on little girls. It’s made to last. If it doesn’t last, the company goes bust. The quality is much better than Levi’s, and the price is lower. That’s how I see it.

I decided to order a second pair of boots. I can’t stop myself. My Danner Vicious boots are wonderful, but when I’m wearing long pants, I don’t need 8″ boots. I can get by with shorter ones, which are lighter. I decided to try a pair of Keens. Some Keen boots are made in China, and it looks like they aren’t the ones you should get. I ordered some American jobs. We’ll see how they work out.

I never buy Timberlands. I’ve had two pairs of Timberland boots, and they were both disappointing. They’re fine for rappers, I guess. If all you do is rap and stand in police lineups, you don’t need comfortable boots that last.

The Danners and the Keens are waterproof and have crushproof toes. If I roll a 400-pound log onto my foot, I want something other than leather between me and the wood.

I can’t wait to start dumping logs by the road. Burning them is helpful, but it will take me the rest of my life to burn all the wood I’m discarding.

I think the farm is in good enough shape to resume cattle raising. I have to come up with some kind of agricultural operation unless I want to pay serious property tax, and this place is already set up for cattle. I don’t have a lot of interest in raising cattle, but you go with what works. I am told I can get a tax reduction with two tiny dwarf Brahmas. That should be easy.

Question: do people eat dwarf cattle? I could actually see the appeal in little rib eyes. A rib eye is no good at all unless it’s at least 1-1/2″ thick, but a steak like that weighs 2 pounds, which is a lot. Maybe a dwarf rib eye would be more practical.

I believe that customarily, people here put useless animals on their land and do nothing worthwhile with them. It would be perfectly okay to buy two tiny steers and let them live here until they die of old age. But it seems weird.

Amanda keeps telling me goats are the livestock from hell, but it would be very nice to have a couple to eat weeds.

I’ll try to put up some photos. I’m pretty pooped. Even though it was cool today, I drank about 72 ounces of beverages when I was done working (within a period of a few minutes), and I have yet to see the customary evidence of overcoming dehydration.

I hate Miami more than I can say, and I pity everyone who lives there, although I would rather see most of them live there than here. This place is wonderful.

I will work on the photos now. If you see a tiny orange dot on top of the lower trunk in the first photo, that’s my big 60-cc saw. Tells you how big the tree is.

Gloating is Dangerous

This morning I found myself thinking about the Harvey Weinstein conflagration, which is spreading far and wide in the liberal entertainment-politics establishment.

No one with any common sense believes men like George Clooney, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, or Colin Firth when they say they didn’t know about Weinstein. Seth MacFarlane joked about his predation at the Oscars four years ago. That proves that everyone knew about Weinstein. They can say they didn’t know he raped anyone, but they can’t say they didn’t know he used his position to pressure women into sex. They can’t say it credibly, I mean. It would be possible for an exceptionally isolated or gullible person in Hollywood to be unaware, but I doubt there are any major stars who didn’t know.

Hollywood runs on connections and gossip. People make it their business to know things about other people. My best guess is that all of these men knew what was going on, and Weinstein surely had dozens or hundreds of female enablers, too.

It’s astonishing how many people have been touched by the spray from the burst pimple. It even reached Hillary Clinton. Now it’s reaching her aides, who are publicly attacking the boyfriend of an actress who claims Weinstein raped her. I can’t think of anyone except Jane Fonda who has admitted guilt or expressed shame.

While I was thinking about Weinstein, I thought about the expression “thin ice.” When a person is on thin ice, it means things are fine now, but he’s in danger of an abrupt fall into a very bad situation. Then I thought about it some more, and the image that came into my mind was Weinstein dancing on a thin scab over a deep abscess.

Through sin, we undermine the ground we walk on. We set traps for ourselves, and then we walk into them. We create and feed enemies who lurk just beneath the horizon, and eventually, if we don’t repent, they leap out unexpectedly and consume us. That’s what happened to Weinstein. He begged for this disaster all his life, and then when it hit, he was utterly amazed.

Christians don’t talk a lot about repentance these days. We talk about how we are required to endorse homosexuality regardless of what the Bible says. We talk about money. We like to talk about unity and spout nonsense about all religions being different paths to the same God. We don’t talk a lot about the importance of confessing our sins to God and begging for help before the fruit of our disobedience falls on our heads.

Years ago, God told me something. He said, “Anything you bury, you also plant.” When you become a Christian and go to a feel-good church and start claiming God is going to do a lot of things for you, and you don’t repent and confess, you’re planting the seeds of disaster and defeat, and they keep growing until you change your ways or you receive the nasty harvest for which you sowed.

A Christian who doesn’t repent is like a deep sore full of stinking pus, covered with a scab as thin as a playing card. While you’re talking about positive thinking, the prosperity gospel, the supposed nonexistence of hell, and the importance of endorsing sexual sin, the infection festers and grows more powerful. The power your enemies have over you grows. Eventually, if Satan’s plan works, a moment comes when you’re exposed. All your hopes shatter, along with your reputation.

In September, Weinstein was rich, and he was feared. It seemed like he had nothing to worry about. Virtually no one was willing to even discuss his faults. It’s October, and he is looking at the possibilty of multiple sexual battery charges. He has no job. No one wants to be near him.

He made a crazy remark after he was exposed. He said he was going to take advantage of his newfound leisure time to go after the NRA. He said he would “channel” his “anger” at them. What? Should he even be discussing anger? How about shame? And how is the NRA supposed to be afraid of an enemy who has no power? No one will take Weinstein’s phone calls, but somehow he’s going to use his connections to bring down the NRA.

Scientists say snakes don’t die immediately when you cut their heads off. They remain aware and capable of movement. That’s what Weinstein’s remark makes me think of. The head doesn’t know the body is gone.

I was thinking about all this, and I thought about the things I’ve planted. These days I try very hard to confess everything in my prayers. I do not want my enemies and problems to grow. I want God to show me mercy and get rid of them. Some day, I suppose, every disgusting word and act for which I am responsible will be known. I will never be able to say they didn’t happen, or that “that wasn’t who I was.” At best, I’ll be able to say God helped me confess, overcome, and cease.

It’s easy to gloat over the left while their fleet burns, but I decided I should pray for the people caught up in this mess. I prayed for God to try to reach them, help them repent, cut off the people and spirits that encourage them in sin, and help them to achieve salvation and become Spirit-led. I don’t want God turning his attention from them to me and saying, “While I’m at it…”

I will continue to be glad the left is being weakened. That’s always a blessing. But the humiliation and turmoil people will face while this scandal runs it course are things that should fill me with fear, not just relief, and certainly not glee.

It can’t be fun being exposed as contemptible. That is especially true for people who are almost literally worshiped, and it’s especially true for people who don’t have God to run to for help and comfort.

If we judge ourselves, maybe we can persuade God not to do it, and to prevent men from doing it.

Lust is an extremely powerful weapon in Satan’s war on masculinity. We have been taught that it’s good. We build it up in ourselves. We even buy pills to increase it, as if that were anything but a curse. Women have learned to be slutty and provocative, not just behind closed doors, but in public and at their jobs. Lust makes us puppets, and it destroys very powerful men who are nearly invulnerable apart from sexual sin.

Women don’t care, because they’re ignorant, and because they’re busy using sex to compete for our attention.

Men are not leaders now. If we were leaders, we would be trying to get women to help us to fight lust. Instead, we encourage them to tempt us. Satan leads them, and they lead us. It worked on Adam, and nothing has changed.

We have chosen to follow, not lead. Women have refused to follow. Instead, they lead, and they take us to defeat and helplessness, not victory and power.

I have done plenty of following and very little leading.

I think very, very few people in Hollywood will change because of our prayers, but no one is disposable, so if anyone changes, it’s worth the effort. And we are obligated to pray for our enemies, whether or not it works.

Satan knows it’s smarter to make your enemies your servants than to destroy them entirely. God knows that, too, but you wouldn’t know it, the way we treat unbelievers.

I do hope the scandal saps the power of the left. Satan’s children are eventually going to have complete control in America, so any delay is a blessing.

There is a Cure for Miami

I am enjoying Ocala to the point where I almost wonder if something is wrong with me.

When I moved here, the movers screwed up badly. My dad insisted on going for a drive and got lost on the day of the move. My dad overdosed on pills he was supposed to let me measure out for him, and he ended up in the hospital for several days. Hurricane Irma hit me with tropical storm winds and knocked over lots of big trees on the farm. The power went out. I had to bathe in buckets of pool water. The main AC unit in the house died, and we had to fork out $6800. A tenant broke a lease in Miami, and we had to pay $5000 to fix the apartment. Hurricane Irma messed up a yacht I really needed to sell.

Plus it was ungodly hot during the day, and the mosquitoes were so big and numerous they practically lifted me off the ground when I went outside.

It was a bad start.

Now I have a lot of my stuff here. I made a trip to Miami, and a friend also went down and brought things back. The boat sold for more than I expected. I have three chain saws, and I’ve learned how to move a lot of wood in a hurry. The air is drying up, and the weather is cooler. The bugs are going away.

Finally I can enjoy this place.

When you join a moronic street gang, they “jump you in” and “jump you out.” That means they give you a beating when you join, and if you leave, you get another beating. Satan seems to work the same way. Simply moving back to Miami in 1997 was a beating. This year I left again, and the God of Losers came at me again. That’s how I see it.

Whatever. The suffering I endured doesn’t really compare to the eternal roasting my enemy is going to get.

Today I went out to the shop to start my day of hurricane mess recovery, and I felt the cool breeze hit me as I stood on the porch (My shop has a porch!) and opened the door. A crazy wave of pleasure hit me. I was overcome. It’s gross and trite to compare everyday pleasures to sex, but that’s what I thought of. Something went through me and left me a little dizzy.

Today I lit up the burn pile again. I also sharpened the pole saw and made my way into the middle of my woods. I have a bunch of big downed trees in there. I’ve been reluctant to take them on because of the bugs, heat, and standing water. Today was the right day.

I found out a neighbor had cleared away 90% of a big oak that had fallen on a fence. That was nice. I don’t have access to the DMZ between our fences, so I was dreading looking him up and asking how I could get in. Evidently he did not consider me accountable for my tree’s behavior. All I have to deal with is the stump.

I found several trees which fell near each other. Some were on top of each other. I took out the pole saw and got to work. I put in around 3 hours. I murdered those trees. Because the pole saw is so safe to use, and because it can reach things several feet away and things that are over my head, I had access to all sorts of branches that would have been a problem for a chain saw. I cut the crap out of the trees and made a giant pile of limbs and logs.

I had my trusty timberjack with me. What a great tool. It makes short work of heavy logs I could not have dealt with a week ago. They used to be a real pain. Now they’re a joke.

Within a week or two, I should have a clear path to the gate on the highway. Once that happens, I’ll be able to use the tractor to take wood out through the gate and dump it for the county to pick up. I won’t have to burn it!

I’m sad that I lost trees, but just about all of them were worthless oaks. I can plant pecans or something.

Maybe I should do something with that lot. I don’t know how many desirable trees are on it. I like the woods, but maybe I should consider a plan with fewer trees and more grass. Maybe there are pecans and other trees there that I could assist by cutting oaks, and then I could thin out the brush and put in grass.

I do not like seeing the neighbors. I’ve read that bamboo will grow up and form a thick hedge in a year or two. Maybe I should plant a couple hundred feet along the fence line. Bamboo looks really nice, and on top of that, the canes are useful for certain things.

While I was hacking away at a tree, I hit something and knocked the chain off the pole saw bar. It was time to quit anyway, so I headed back to the shop. I had two bottles of cold water from the Rockstar fridge, a Pellegrino orange soda, and an egg cream. It’s amazing how much water you sweat out while using the saws. I sat in one of the shop’s entrances in a plastic Adirondack chair, facing the woods, enjoying my beverages. The breeze blew through the shop and kept me cool. Too much. I loved it.

I goofed off. I texted and called friends. The only thing missing was a smoker with a few ribs in it.

I was so right about this place. That tells me the idea came from God. When I have my trees cleaned up and my bamboo installed, I’ll be the big daddy king of all eccentric hermits.

Some day this will be a place for prayer meetings and God knows what else. Until then I’ll enjoy myself getting it ready.

I just can’t hate Miami enough.

Sorry for not taking photos. I was too engrossed. Maybe next time.

Maybe Miami was Just a Bad Dream

Ocala is just too much.

Today I finished looking after my dad’s business, and I put my boots on and headed for the workshop. I sharpened up Big Bad Mama, the 20″ Echo chainsaw, and I put it in the E-Z-GO along with my new Woodchuck timberjack. I cruised over to the big live oak that tried to crush my chicken house, and I went to work sawing it up.

Before I got to the oak, I went off my property and grabbed a gigantic ball of live oak limbs and Spanish moss from my neighbor’s swale and carted it to my burn pile. Good neighbors don’t leave hurricane junk on each other’s swales. I scooped it up with the tractor forks and dumped it on the pile.

I cut little limbs and moved them until I had access to the bigger bits of the tree, and then I went at it. I cut the tree into manageable pieces, and then I used the tractor and a strap to yank it around into a position where I could buck the last big branch.

The timberjack is wonderful. You can grab a hundred-pound limb with it and yank it into cutting position with about as much effort as it takes to flip a pancake. I had no problem cutting big limbs up with it.

The tree had one huge limb which could be considered the trunk. Hard to say. After I moved things around with the tractor, that limb was off the ground. Using my brain, I put the tractor forks under it and then cut it off. It fell on the forks. I didn’t have to roll it onto them. I ran it over to the burn pile and dumped it on.

Because I use the right tools, I got a whole lot of work done in a short time. It was a pleasure. Tomorrow or the next day, I’ll go out and hit the pile with my plumber’s torch, and it will go up like Mt. Saint Helens.

When I was done, I moved everything back to the shop, got a chair, and drank several beverages, ending with a lovely Sierra Nevada Torpedo. Occasionally I drink beer to blow out kidney stones.

The air was cool. The bugs were not biting. It was quiet. No one was yammering at me in a foreign language. Exquisite.

This place gets better and better. Why didn’t I move 20 years ago? Oh, right. I was out of God’s will. I would not have fit in.

I’m in the workshop now. A nice breeze is blowing through. I hate to leave.

I’ll post a few photos.

Man, I hate Miami.

FYI, my dad’s boat is sold, and the money is in the checking account. A major headache, GONE!

I think I’ll buy some pie.

Sensitive Hollywood Hunks and Their Gigantic Blind Spot

Yesterday I learned something surprising. There is an epidemic of blindness and deafness in Hollywood, and it has been raging since at least the 90’s. Harvey Weinstein apparently molested or tried to molest nearly every woman he ever met, and not one male star noticed!

Three big names have taken torpedo hits: Russell Crowe, Matt Damon, and Ben Affleck. Crowe is hardly worth mentioning, because he has a reputation for being a jerk, but Damon and Affleck promote themselves as warm, fuzzy, feminist idols. It doesn’t look good for them.

Crowe and Damon are accused of helping kill a story about a man who worked for The Weinstein Co. in Italy. Supposedly he was nothing but a procurer. Damon’s response, in a nutshell, sounds a lot like, “I wasn’t paying attention, and I know nothing.” He says he made a very short phone call in which he simply vouched for the employee’s authenticity. We have not heard from Crowe yet.

A fourth star made the mistake of speaking up: George Clooney. He could have weathered this out quietly in his palace in Italy, but (contain your surprise) he decided to reinforce his feminist credentials publicly. “Harvey WHO? Sexual misbehavior in HOLLYWOOD? I am SHOCKED!”

He hasn’t gotten significant blowback yet, but I think he will. George is 56 years old, and he seriously wants us to believe he had no idea what his good friend Harvey has been doing since before he met George. This means George is either stupid, utterly uninformed, or lying. Or some combination of those three alternatives.

I know the names of the professors who misbehaved sexually in my law school. I know the name of the girl who snorted coke off a male student’s privates. I know the guy and girl who performed two sex acts in an order so gross I can’t provide further description here. But George Clooney had no idea Harvey Weinstein, his personal friend, with whom he did business many times, was running around–for decades–like a moose in rut.

You can get away with nearly anything if you’re a leftist. Lots of people knew Bill Cosby was a rapist, but nothing was done. The women who have credibly accused him would literally fill a bus. As Hannibal Burress said before the scandal went nova, you could find out about it by Googling. Lots of people knew. But nothing happened to Bill until he started telling men to pull their pants up.

Here’s a surprising figure in the war against harassment: Jimmy Kimmel. Donald Trump, Jr., called him out for ignoring Weinstein, who was worse than ten Bill O’Reillys plus two. Kimmel’s weak response: a repost of the famous Donald Trump Billy Bush video.

Why is Kimmel so quiet? Here’s three words that might be relevant: Girls on Trampolines.

Kimmel became famous co-hosting The Man Show, with Adam Carolla. The Man Show featured a troop of models called the Juggies. “Jug” means “breast,” in case you didn’t know. The show featured videos of these women jumping on a trampoline in their underwear. Spreading their legs in slow motion.

Kimmel can’t wade into this cesspool too deeply because he knows that if he does, someone will eventually remember The Man Show.

I wonder how far this kerfuffle will spread. Celebrities are very insecure and self-righteous, so they will want to get on the PC side of this thing as soon as possible, but for many, that won’t be possible. Consider this: virtually no prominent male musicians or athletes can get involved, because most of them fornicate like crazed rabbits. A rock star or NBA player can have sex with twenty new women per week if his body can stand it, and they do their best to put themselves to the test. How are they going to come forward, after defiling so many daughters, sisters, and wives?

Actors aren’t quite as bad, because they don’t perform regularly in big arenas full of slutty women, but they’re on the next level down.

I think this will be a big opportunity for attention-loving female celebrities to go full Nurse Ratched on their male colleagues, and the men will be way too scared to resist. They’ll fall all over themselves trying to get approval. Many of the ones who have screwed up the worst will suddenly see the light. Maybe they’ll do rehab. Weinstein is already checking in.

It’s very bad that men in Hollywood are predatory perverts, and it would be good to address the issue, but I’m sure Hollywood will handle it the wrong way, because Satan runs Hollywood. Satan doesn’t fix things. He just gives you new problems that look like solutions. Maybe the PC atmosphere in Hollywood will get even more intense than it is now, until whatever fun still exists in entertainment is completely gone. Maybe all new scripts will have to get by a panel composed of Lena Dunham, Sinead O’Connor, and Gloria Allred.

This will be turned into a front in the war on masculinity. Feminists don’t distinguish between predators and ordinary men with ordinary desires. We’re all bad. Like Nora Dunn said, “Women good, men bad.”

Weinstein will go away and come back. He will be a totally changed man. No, really. Damon and Affleck will look bad for a while. Damon will probably be allowed to stay famous, but Affleck has misbehaved a lot, so he may have a few lean years. Clooney will look like a lying idiot to people with common sense, but there aren’t many people like that, so I think he’ll be okay.

People will get even more nervous. Hollywood predation will continue, regardless.

These are my best guesses.

Should I even discuss Hillary Clinton’s bizarre, delated statement regarding the Weinstein matter? It was predictable. “I harbored a predator, defended him, and paid operatives to destroy his victims, but I still want to be seen as a champion of women and a protector of their dignity.” That’s what she’s really saying. Why is she still here? Why are people still pointing microphones and cameras at her? She is killing the appeal and credibility of her party, bit by bit. I suppose many people are still afraid of her and her husband. They’re afraid to go near the snakes until they stop twitching.

This flap makes me think about my own history. It would be great to say I’ve never said or done anything gross or repugnant in a sexual context, but that is not true. The best I can hope for is to continue being improved by God, to the point where, if my history comes to light, I can honestly say, “God changed me, and I behave a lot better now.” That’s better than denying the truth and thereby provoking the release of more evidence.

Hollywood has to choose between two favorite choices: the burning desire to hide evil in order to make money, and the burning desire to appear righteous and be admired by millions of dupes. I don’t think the industry can handle the tension. There will be chaos for a time, and we already know something about the outcome: reform will be meaningless, superficial, and fleeting.

Thank You Again, God

They say the two happiest days in a boat owner’s life are the day he buys and the day he sells. That’s misleading. Selling is WAY better.

The sale of my dad’s boat closed today. That means it’s not my responsibility any more. I will never have to pay for another repair. I will never have to worry about it sinking. It’s gone! Gone! Gone!

The boat was fun. We cruised to Bimini, Eleuthera, Chub Cay, and Key West, among other places. It’s a real privilege to putt by the tourists on a huge cruise ship in Nassau Harbor and watch them wave at you and know they all wish they were you. It’s fun to catch dolphin in the Tongue of the Ocean and tuna off Harbour Island. But my dad is 85 and has no business on a dock, let alone a boat, and there was no possibility that we would use it again.

Boat culture is kind of sleazy anyway. It’s all about getting drunk and fornicating, to be quite honest. You take your boat to the Bahamas, you get a slip, you fish your heart out all day, and then you go to the bar, get drunk, and hope you get lucky. Yacht people are as shallow as ice trays, and nothing they talk about or think about has any real importance. None of it has any relationship to the kingdom of God. If you want to watch fat, drunk lawyers make fools of themselves in Bahamian bars, get a boat.

I don’t recall seeing a lot of doctors over there. But then doctors are not interested in fun. Just money.

What I take away from the boat is that I know how to run one and maintain one. If I ever have to jump on a 60-foot diesel yacht and go to Jamaica, I won’t need any instructions. Just GPS and lots of bottled water, Gatorade, and peanut butter M&M’s.

My dad’s boat was not 60 feet long. It was a 46-footer. But it’s the same thing.

I was starting to think I’d never get rid of that boat. Now I can put it behind me and start thinking I’ll never get rid of my dad’s rental house or the condo we want to dump.

I got rid of the boat, and I also renewed my concealed carry permit. If you’re a Florida person, I learned things that may help you. If you renew your permit by mail, it takes 8-10 weeks. They send you the application about 150 days before the time is up, but if you’re like me, you forget. This weekend I learned you can get your permit renewed at your county’s tax collector office, and they give the new card to you immediately.

I drove to the government building complex. It’s hilarious. Perfect for Ocala. It’s a bunch of brick buildings spread out over maybe 30 acres. It almost looks like a summer camp. I went in the biggest building and saw a gigantic line. I could not complain. I deserved it. But I asked the official greeter, and she said I had to follow some signs and go to another part of the building.

After some twists and turns, I came to a long row of windows and a line consisting of…ONE person. I was at a window in about a minute and a half. The lady who took my photo and did the paperwork could not have been nicer. How can that be? This is the same place where you get your driver’s license. They’re supposed to be rude and condescending, as if everyone admires and looks up to people who do repetitive government jobs.

It was a beautiful experience. I’m sure it’s not as much fun in Miami, though. Down there the tag agencies are staffed by huge, surly women in tights, who barely speak English.

When I finished my other jobs, I decided to look into fixing the bush hog. It didn’t cut too well. Someone on a website said bush hog blades don’t have to be sharp. The idea was that they moved so fast, sheer speed made the blades cut. That turned out to be a fantasy. You have to sharpen bush hog blades, or they just push the grass over.

My bush hog has blades held on by 1-5/8″ nuts. I do not have a 1-5/8″ socket. What to do? I saw someone on Youtube sharpening blades that were still attached, using an angle grinder. Couldn’t hurt to try!

I propped the end of the machine on a jackstand, and I got under there and sharpened the blades. Then I mowed. It’s considerably better. If I got them truly sharp, it would mow like crazy. I think the answer is to get the correct socket and use my bench grinder.

While I was mowing, a gigantic wasp smacked into the bill of my hat. At least I thought it was a wasp. A fraction of a second later I realized it was a spider. It was so big, it felt like someone hit me with a crabapple. Luckily it was not any happier about the situation than I was, and it scrambled off of me before I could have a complete mental breakdown.

I also got my hair cut. I love my barber. His shop has about five American flags out front, along with a big yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flag in the center. I don’t even care how my hair looks. That’s where I’m going from now on.

On top of all that, I managed to shift my schedule so I’m getting up at 6:30. This is very important, because I pray a lot. By moving back to 6:30, I make it possible for me to be fed and showered by 9:00. I don’t lose as much of the morning. Nice.

Things are getting better.

Ocala still rocks. Miami is still a humongous butt boil. Every day, I’m happier about the move.

Tomorrow I’m thinking I might sharpen my chainsaws. Can life get any better than that? I may follow up with some target shooting.

I’ll try to post more photos. I’m too busy having fun to stop and take the phone out.