No Room for Manspreading on the Group W Bench

Matt Lauer is out! That was fast!

Without wasting time repeating the scant details of the story, I will go right into a discussion of the thought Lauer’s ejection brings to mind: news organizations are in trouble because they’re hypocritical. The hypocrites in the news attack everyone else ruthlessly (and, let’s admit it, joyfully), but they don’t report on themselves, and they work hard to cover up for employees who act up.

“Wait!”, you’re saying, “News organizations reported on O’Reilly and Rose when they fell!” Yes. Organizations O’Reilly and Rose didn’t work for! That doesn’t count. Venal, ambitious people love it when their competitors get in trouble, so naturally, news people report on scandals at competing companies. The don’t talk a whole lot about their own scandals, until they have no choice.

Sexual abusers and other bullies almost always have long histories. A normal guy generally won’t go nuts, put his hand up one secretary’s skirt, and then never do it again. Bullies are egotists who lack compassion, and they are driven by powerful urges they can’t or won’t resist. They become bullies at early ages, and their behavior persists for their entire lives. Over time, they develop long lists of victims, as well as long lists of silent witnesses. When a sex bully works for a company for a long time, people find out what he does, and they keep it quiet.

If Lauer was a sex bully, a lot of people at NBC knew it. They knew for decades. They worked for a news organization, so they knew what was happening was legitimate, important news. They chose not to report on it, just as Fox, CBS, and PBS chose not to report on O’Reilly and Rose. As a result, the perpetrators had free run of the hen houses, long after their proclivities were known.

There is no way to justify treating outsiders harshly while coddling and shielding guilty insiders. News is news, no matter where it occurs. If journalists knew anything about ethics, they would realize this, and we would hear about abusers from their own companies first.

If Matt Lauer had come up with a cure for cancer, NBC would have reported on it first. No doubt about it. News companies are happy to report positive news about insiders. They should report the negative things, too. They should be completely neutral and open as to the professional affiliations of the people they report on.

One of the things they teach lawyers is that we should present our clients’ negative information before the opposition gets a chance to do it (unless we can get courts to suppress it). When you get in front of your client’s faults and misdeeds and tell them to a finder of fact, you get the first shot at shaping the story. You get to present excuses and explanations. You make yourself and your client look honest. When you wait for the opposition to bring out the dirt, they get to twist things in the minds of the fact-finder, poisoning them against you and giving you a wall of disapproval you have to dismantle. And they make you look dishonest.

Scientists are taught that no one is objective. We are taught that experimental results have to be reproducible, so we don’t end up believing results that only occur in the laboratories of experimenters who want them to occur. We are taught to use double-blind studies.

As a lawyer and former scientist, I acknowledge the importance of fairness and objectivity, even if I am not particularly good at maintaining either. Journalists don’t care. They publish things that advance their preconceived agendas, not so they can inform, but so they can manipulate the public.

Journalists don’t care about ethics. Supposedly, journalistic ethics are codified, and journalists who go to journalism school study the subject, but in reality, that stuff is a joke. In practice, almost anything goes. If journalists had ethics, we wouldn’t have a left-wing news establishment that lies to us and covers up stories like the Menendez trial as a matter of policy. It could not happen. It has happened, so there is no need to explore the subject further. No reasonable person can look at the news and conclude that journalists try to be fair.

If journalists weren’t hypocrites, there would be no conservative or liberal news channels. MSNBC wouldn’t be liberal, and Fox wouldn’t be conservative. All channels would be neutral.

If journalists had ethics, the news would be very boring. Journalists would simply tell us what has happened. They wouldn’t sneer and smirk. They wouldn’t jab each other on Twitter. They wouldn’t scream and yell on TV panels. The news would be what NPR news pretends to be and isn’t. No one would watch or read it. Publishing news takes money, and that means an audience has to be attracted to look at ads. For that reason, among others, the news is a circus, and it attracts people who are entertaining, not people who are honest or intelligent. It attracts partisan squabblers. It’s also the reason most national-level female news people are exceptionally good-looking. Attractive news anchors who are borderline stupid tend to succeed in spite of their lack of brains.

There are a lot of female news anchors who couldn’t finish a crossword puzzle if the price of failure was death. Yet somehow we allow them to present and even interpret the news. Crazy.

Everyone who worked with Matt Lauer knew he was a problem, and everyone covered up. And in the aftermath, no one with any power or audience will say the networks need to start reporting on themselves. It will never happen. It would be Jerry Maguire behavior. Anyone who had reported on Lauer at NBC would have been congratulated, like Jerry Maguire in the memo scene, and then they would have been slowly eased out onto the sidewalk. Anyone who pushes self-examination now will get a warm clap on the back and a slow spiral into obscurity.

A while back, God told me this: “The concealment of a sin is worse than the sin itself.” That’s true. God forgives sin all the time. Heaven is packed with sinners. What he does not forgive is sin that has knowingly, persistently been denied. That principle works on earth as well as in God’s court. If Lauer and O’Reilly had come clean privately twenty years ago, they would still have their jobs today. Something would have been worked out. Instead, they denied and pretended, and the infection kept growing. Nobody squeezed the pustules. They just applied Clearasil until they exploded on prom night.

It amazes me that O’Reilly claims he executed settlements to protect his kids from scandal. Wouldn’t trials that exonerated him have protected them better? Of course they would. No one believes him. Trials would have confirmed many of the accusations. When he uses his kids as human shields, he’s just looking out for himself, badly.

Lauer must be huddled up with a whole platoon of handlers right now. They must be sweating bullets, trying to craft a statement. Al Franken and Kevin Spacey tried to make themselves look good in their responses to exposure, and they ended up buried under hails of contemptuous tweets from people whose intelligence had been insulted. Lauer and his team must be wondering what he can say that won’t backfire. I very much doubt he’s cloistered with his wife and a clergyman, confessing his heart out, repenting, and trying sincerely to find a path to redemption.

I really hope he doesn’t go the rehab route. Trying to convince people that sexual bullying is a disease that requires treatment is annoying, and apart from that, it’s trite. Harvey Weinstein and a slew of others wore that excuse out. Sexual predation isn’t opioid addiction. It just means you’re a jerk who enjoys humiliating other people and treating them like toilets. Sexual predation isn’t just sex. It’s driven by cruelty. Even when the acts themselves are not cruel, the victim mistreatment that follows exposure usually is. Ask Hillary Clinton.

I think about the guilty people who haven’t been outed, who will have to report on Lauer. I wonder if it will be possible to see the fear in their faces. They will be wondering if video of their reporting and commentary will be replayed when their turns come.

The iceberg is still there. Lauer is part of the tip. He’s not the train’s caboose. There is a nearly inexhaustible supply of candidates for exposure, like oil reserves sitting in the ground. It will take a very, very long time to go through our reserves.

I am ashamed of my own sexual sins. I hope they never end up in the public eye. I’m glad my sins aren’t worse. I hope God will continue helping me. I hope he will keep changing my heart so I indulge less in all types of sin.

Get ready to see more icons fall. I wonder what kind of people will replace them.

Approach the Throne With Awe and Bacon

This is easily the greatest day of my life. I am still not in Miami, and I have a new recliner.

My new house has a big upstairs room which I have turned into my command post. I started out with two plastic Adirondack chairs from Home Depot; perhaps this is appropriate, since I graduated from the Adirondack-Florida School for boys. Anyway, for almost three months, I sat on those chairs, and then I got a couch, which was fantastic yet lacking in foot support. Now I have a proper recliner, with a motor in it to make sure I don’t get PTSD from turning a lever.

This is magnificent. I don’t know why I haven’t had recliners all my life. I have always loved them.

Two days from now I will have a real TV stand, so I’ll be able to get the TV off the floor. I’m not worthy. I’m not worthy.

I even have a lamp now. I stole one of my dad’s end tables from the living room, and I commandeered the elbow LED lamp I used to use for my garage electronics station. I was going blind from relying on the overhead lights. This is bliss. This is paradise.

I am never getting out of this chair. I’m going to be like one of those obese people you read about, who end up welded to their chairs. I’ll find an enabler to bring me root beer and donuts.

Well. I guess I won’t.

I’m not sure what else to do with this room. I have been considering putting my electronics stuff here, with a dedicated desk, but it would be 50 yards from the rest of my tools. Inconvenient if I needed regular tools while working on electronics, or electronics tools while working on regular stuff. I could duplicate a few things to reduce the walking. Maybe I could put my electronics tools in a new box I could move to the workshop when needed.

I have considered putting my CNC lathe up here. It’s small, so it’s suited to an indoor location, and it would be good to have it near the big TV for CAD purposes. I don’t know if I can carry 110 pounds of awkward metal up the stairs, though. Actually, carrying it back down would be worse.

I picked a Barcalounger Vintage recliner. The Vintage line is supposedly better than the basement-grade recliners they sell for $300. I hope so. I read a lot of recliner reviews while shopping, and they were generally discouraging. China this. China that. I decided I would have to quit nitpicking and worrying and buy something.

The recliner I picked is a little funny-looking, but it was discounted heavily, and it has cloth cushions. For some reason, that spoke to me. I love leather furniture, but recliners are about comfort, and when it comes to comfort, cloth is king. When you look at this recliner, it says, “I don’t care what I look like. I just want to embrace you and make you fall asleep watching Forged in Fire.”

But enough about my plans for the week.

Oh, this is great. This is magnificent. You don’t know how great real furniture is until you sit on a plastic chair for three months.

Sorry if you’re annoyed that I wrote about a chair. I had to share my joy. I will try to show restraint when the ottoman that matches the couch arrives.

No promises.

Press Corps Journalist Wages Fact-Free Pie Jihad

Is it funny when deranged leftists attack the president’s press secretary because they think she took credit for someone else’s pie?

I suppose it is, but it also highlights a disturbing trend: Satan is teaching Americans the truth doesn’t matter.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders baked a pie. She put a photo on Twitter. The URL for the photo has the letters “pbs” in it, but the photo has nothing to do with public broadcasting. The “pbs” is just a string that occurs in the URL of a Twitter server. The pie was a chocolate pecan pie made with what appears to be a store-bought crust. Such pies are extremely easy to make. You mix the ingredients, dump them in the crust, add pecans from a bag, and bake.

This is all the background you need.

A leftist journalist (but I repeat myself) named April Ryan accused Sanders of lying. She did not believe Sanders herself baked the pie.

It is not clear why Ryan thinks Sanders didn’t bake the pie. One guess: Ryan can’t cook. A person who can’t cook might think baking a pecan pie is a big deal. Ryan probably gets most of her food from delis, vending machines, grocery story freezers, and big plastic bags marked “Lays.”

It doesn’t help that the pie had a near-perfect crust, or that the background of the photo was pure white, as you might expect in a shot by a professional photographer.

Sanders baked the pie. Her relatives confirm it. She has a long history of baking pecan pies for gatherings. No rational person seriously thinks she stole a pie photo. It’s possible to upload a photo to Google and search to see where it appears on the Internet, and when you do that with the Sanders photo, nothing comes up. Also, there are 170 million people in the United States who would love to embarrass Sanders, and none of them has come up with the original source of the photo. No photographer. No one who runs a stock photo service. No one.

Sanders…baked…the…pie.

Nonetheless, even now, if you look at Twitter, you’ll see Ryan and the flying monkeys high-fiving each other, as though they had “TAKEN DOWN” or “SHUT DOWN” (trendy, annoying leftist Internet cliches) the press secretary. And they think it’s important.

We should be taking their infantile, tone-deaf antics seriously, because they show how America has changed. Even during the Bush Derangement Syndrome years, it would have been very unusual for a professional journalist from the White House press pool to gin up a blood libel like this, about a matter completely unrelated to a press secretary’s job, on a holiday when we are supposed to be unified in reverence, peace, and gratitude. It would not have been necessary for conservatives to complain. Even liberals would have ridiculed the journalist.

Today liberals who seem to agree that Ryan was mistaken are attacking Sanders for provoking Ryan. By working for Trump. As always, conservatives must be put on the defensive. If your nutty leftist neighbor attacks you from behind and breaks six of your ribs, it’s your fault for not letting him tell you how to landscape.

In 2017 America, childishness and dishonesty are acceptable for leftist journalists. No one notices the lack of dignity and professionalism.

The left is in a state of frenzy. It’s a sort of cold riot. George Orwell, who predicted a lot of what we are currently experiencing, coined the term “cold war” to describe a state in which nations live in great tension, under the threat of war, while not engaging in full-blown combat. What we have now are hundreds of millions of disgruntled, pouting leftists who are not (always) out in the streets burning cars, yet who fester with rage and look for every opportunity to direct harassing fire at conservatives and Christians.

Ms. Ryan can’t march up to Mrs. Sanders’ podium, shove a spear through her heart, and announce that Antifa and BLM are now in charge. We haven’t reached that stage yet. But she can use Twitter to launch a ridiculous and very personal attack on Mrs. Sanders’ credibility and then stir up and encourage the idiots who buy into it. It’s the Internet equivalent of slashing tires and egging houses. And it’s bullying.

I don’t know if Mrs. Sanders lies or not. It doesn’t matter. If she lied constantly, it would not justify perpetrating a fanciful and sophomoric canard, and the ensuing campaign of ridicule and persecution, based on the origin of a pie. And what about failing to admit fault when the pie attacks were proven wrong? It will never happen. It will be like the Dan Rather forgery case. “We lied, but we did it for a good reason, so it’s okay.”

Rioters don’t think. They show up believing they’re right and that everything they do is justified. They are like kindling waiting for a match. They don’t question themselves. They see their victims as the aggressors. That’s why they’re able to beat people to death and set fire to buildings. Self-examination and accountability aren’t on the table. Neither is truth.

We should not be surprised. Reason tends to debunk leftism, so decades ago, many leftists adopted the position that logic itself was a Eurocentric, male-imposed construct intended to disempower women and minorities. Look it up. I’m not making it up. Robert Bork wrote about it.

It you can’t allow yourself to be proven wrong, you can’t change. This is why the left’s abandonment of reason is so dangerous. A person who can’t be corrected is depraved, and the depraved are beyond redemption. Depravity is why hell exists. The Bible refers to this condition as a seared conscience. Nothing penetrates. There are some beings who can’t be fixed, so they have to be confined eternally in order to protect the redeemed from their presence.

Satan is bringing hell up through its ceiling, onto our streets. He is bringing hell’s culture up onto the earth’s surface. It’s a marvel.

No wonder the Bible says God will return to purge the earth. The infection has won. Gangrene has taken over. There is nothing we can do to fix it. Only God himself can set things straight, and he will have to do it by binding and eliminating his enemies. He will have to use force. They have made themselves too stupid to change.

I feel bad for the Trumps. They will never have peace on this earth. Trump will leave office in 2021 0r 2025, and he and his family will still have to live on this planet. They will be under attack until they die, and the people who are out to destroy them will never relent, because they can’t be reasoned with. Barron Trump’s grandchildren, if he has any, will have to have their own professional security people. No President has ever been hated this much.

The leftists will eventually win, and when they do, they’ll bring out their lists. They will remember everyone who offended them, and they will punish. Remember the Cambodian killing fields? That same hatred exists here. I hope Trump dies of old age before they get their hands on him. I don’t even like to think about the imaginative torments they would impose. It would be worse than what happened to Mussolini and Khaddafi.

Totalitarianism is on the way. There aren’t enough Americans who serve God to prevent it. Most American Christians have no roots in the Holy Spirit. They will do whatever Satan tells them to do. He is already getting them conditioned.

I don’t think there is anywhere we can go. America is the last big country that’s safe for Christians and Jews. Europe is out. Asia is out. Africa is out. A last stand is inevitable.

I hope I’m not here to see it. I would rather die this year than live under unfettered leftists. I’m not alone. There is a reason why Cubans put their families on rafts. There is a reason why a man would let himself be shot several times, running away from North Korea.

April Ryan is a fool, but she has a lot of power behind her. We can laugh at her right now, but we should take the spirits that empower her very seriously.

CNC Lathe Next

My friend Amanda has a son who has some cognitive issues. Oddly, in some cases, people with his problem turn out to be unusually well suited to the trade of CNC machining. Mental characteristics that cause problems in many areas of life can be assets in machining. There’s a dude in California who runs a school that trains such people.

I learned about this from a TV show called Titans of CNC. A man named Titan Gilroy was convicted of a violent crime, and when he got out of prison, he learned CNC and started a big, successful shop. Now he teaches inmates at San Quentin. He has a son with Asperger’s, and he discovered that his son was very good at CNC. Now he works with the guy who runs the school.

I mentioned this to Amanda a few weeks back, and I said I had some interest in CNC and robotics. We showed her son some Youtubes, and he seemed interested. That’s good, but it’s also a problem. I have only one CNC tool, and it’s a home-built adaptation which I haven’t perfected. Not counting my vacuum cleaner, I have only one robot, and when I bought it and assembled it, I was not able to make it work.

Since showing her son the videos, I have retrieved my CNC lathe from Miami, and I am ready to see if I can make it work. Last night, I took the robot out of the box I had tossed it in, and after an hour or so of reprogramming and researching, I figured out what was wrong with it. Now it’s working.

The robot is a B-robot, from a company called JJ Robots. It’s a two-wheeled balancing robot a little bigger than a box of Pop Tarts. It’s based on an Arduino Leonardo board.

Here’s how it works. It has a tiny board containing circuitry that measures the robot’s vertical orientation. This shouldn’t amaze anyone. Cell phones have circuits that tell them whether they’re level or not. The robot checks the board’s output, and then it accelerates in the direction of the tilt, bringing it back to vertical again. In other words, when the robot starts to fall in a certain direction, it takes off in that direction, bringing itself back under its top. It can do this so often it appears nearly stable.

I found I had installed the orientation board sideways, so the robot was sensing angular deviation along the wrong axis. The robot can’t fall from side to side, so the board’s input was useless. I reinstalled it according to the directions.

The robot still refused to stand. I took a look at what it was doing. It was accelerating away from the direction of fall, making the fall worse. I then turned the board 180 degrees, and everything worked.

Now I have a self-balancing robot.

I had some other problems with it, and they’re even more boring, so I don’t want to get into them too much. I found I could not upload programming to the Arduino. Somewhere on the web, someone said I had to press the board’s reset button immediately before uploading. Not exciting, unless you’re a nerd.

The robot has wi-fi. When you turn it on, you connect your phone to the robot’s network, and then you use an app to steer the robot. Obviously, it needs an onboard camera, like a drone, so you can see what the robot sees as it moves. Maybe I can figure that out some day.

Anyway, next time Amanda brings her son around, I can show him the robot and see if he has any interest. Maybe in a week or two, I can get the lathe working better.

It’s a little strange that I decided to buy and assemble a robot, but the whole exercise has turned out to have a purpose I could not have anticipated. That’s God for you.

Robotics and CNC are not the same thing, but it’s basically the same skill set, applied in different ways. Programming, boards, and servos or steppers. My guess is that a person who has CNC aptitude also has robotics aptitude. The question is which one he will like well enough to stick with.

Her other two sons are interested in music, but the instruction opportunities are limited. I suggested Adventus Piano software for one and Justinguitar.com for the other. Justinguitar.com is a teaching site run by, as you might guess, a guitarist named Justin. It has lots of exercises and videos. It’s not a teacher, but it’s a whole lot better than nothing.

The hard thing will be to get them to learn to sight-read. This is much more important than learning to play. Any idiot can learn to play songs by memorizing them. Ask me how I know. A real musician can read music, and he must also understand theory. A singer who can sight-sing and who understands theory is a better musician than an untrained pianist who plays extremely well.

Math, languages, and music. You have to learn while you’re young. After you’re seven or eight years old, your aptitude drops off, and as far as I know, you can’t get it back.

It’s hard to tell when you’ve scored a point with her kids. Other kids get excited. Hers just sit and think, and sometimes they want to know how soon you’ll be finished so they can do something else. She says it’s working, though.

Sooner or later, if they want to get anywhere with music, they’ll have to find people they can play with.

The robot is interesting to me because the concept doesn’t have to be limited to a tiny machine. The stuff that tells it what to do could be installed on a robot the size of a building. I could yank the guts out of it, find a way to make it run bigger steppers, and make a robot big enough to run around the yard. Jam a lithium battery in there, and it could run for an hour. Not sure what accessories I could add to it to make it useful. Anyway, it doesn’t have to be a small toy. Could it ever be useful for anything? That’s a hard question. I would have to come up with a function for it.

I wish I could make it paint the fence or kill squirrels.

Now that the major crises of moving are abating, I feel like I’m getting my life back. I had time to work on the robot. I’m anxious to get my machine tools up here. Next year, life should be less hectic, and I should be able to get more done. Maybe I’ll be able to make some knives. Right now I can’t run my big grinder without a gas generator and an adaptor (which I don’t have), so knife-making is not possible.

I’m giving up on tree removal. The trees that cause problems will be moved. The rest will be ignored until it’s convenient to do something. It’s just too much work. Surrendering will give me more free time.

Guess I’ll go check out robot accessories. If I can find one a kid could use to drive his brothers nuts, I think it will be a hit.

My Doctor is Better Than Yours

I have a new testimony. I guess no one will be surprised to read that.

I got some neat healings after moving to Ocala. I burned myself twice, and twice I attacked the problems supernaturally. In both cases, the blisters went away and didn’t come back. I can’t tell you how happy I was. What’s worse than a painful burn on a finger? Every time you do anything, you apply pressure to it, and pain shoots through you. I was spared that.

Last week I injured myself in a brand new way. I always make fun of the warnings on Q-Tip boxes, because Q-Tips are useless if you can’t stick them in your ears. And what kind of idiot hurts himself by shoving a Q-Tip in too far? That was what I asked myself. Now I know the answer. I poked myself in the left ear, and it started to bleed. I had to remove dried blood from my ear canal.

Over the next few days, I started feeling more pain, not less. And I continued finding blood in my ear.

Last night, I woke up, and there was pain in my ear and my left jaw. It was pretty bad. Like a serious earache. I was not happy. I wondered if I was going to have to go to the doctor with a problem caused by ineptitude. And what if the Q-Tip wasn’t the problem? What if I had a giant tumor or something in there, and the Q-Tip simply brought it to light?

Of course, I thought of the burns, and I got to work, after taking some ibuprofen. I asked God to heal me, and over and over, I thanked him in the name of Jesus and gave him the glory, saying I was healed.

I would say I kept doing this for an hour. I had nothing else to do. Then I fell asleep. The pain had abated considerably. Was it the ibuprofen? I didn’t know. Generally, I have found that OTC painkillers don’t do a whole lot. Aspirin is completely useless, and comparing ibuprofen to opioid painkillers that actually work is like comparing a cup of tea to two lines of cocaine.

The best thing about this approach is that when I do it, I start to feel God’s presence, and I am able to remain in it. That’s better than the healing. God’s presence is beautiful, and besides, it brings you authority as well as peace.

In the morning, I had almost no pain at all. I can find the pain if I look for it and move my jaw the right (i.e. wrong) way, but most of the time, it’s not there. I still have some congestion in the ear, but I don’t need a doctor any more. I plan to sit down from time to time and have more sessions with God to complete the healing.

Many of us believe in healing but wrongly assume that if it isn’t instantaneous, it’s not coming. That’s not correct. Even Jesus took several tries to heal a man. Healing may be instantaneous, but it can also be a process, like toasting a piece of bread. You don’t pull your toast out after ten seconds and claim the toaster doesn’t work.

Here’s another thing to think about. When you get natural healing, you don’t expect it to be instantaneous. No one takes an antibiotic and then complains because he’s still sick five minutes later. When a doctor puts a new hip joint in you, you don’t get up off the table and try to dance. God took a week to create the world, and when he ended the drought for Elijah, the miracle started with one tiny cloud, but we expect him to heal us in the blink of an eye.

I hate going to doctors, because I love God’s healing. When a doctor fixes you, God gets no glory, and it does nothing to help you grow spiritually. Also, doctors charge a lot, they do procedures which are painful and humiliating, they make a lot of mistakes, and they can only fix a small percentage of our problems. When they do fix us, much of the time, the fixes are limited, temporary, or accompanied by new problems.

My sister got lung cancer. She was treated with radiation and chemotherapy. The cancer went into remission, but now her brain is fried. She has a head start on dementia. Personally, I would have chosen death. Set me up in a comfy bed, give me Dilaudid on demand, and come get me when I stop breathing. My aunt also lost her mind from cancer treatment. A radiation technician burned my mother’s esophagus so badly she starved. My dad’s dementia may have been caused by his atrial fibrillation and/or blood pressure medications, and you don’t want to know what he went through after he was diagnosed with prostate cancer.

Bobby Riggs got prostate cancer. His doctors castrated him, and he died anyway. That’s what I call defeat. Pain, impotence, incontinence, death…and public humiliation.

I could sit here and list medical failures all day, but God’s healing never fails. He heals correctly, without side effects. He doesn’t make you take insulin every day for the rest of your life. He doesn’t make you sit down for dialysis several times a week. He doesn’t make you take poisonous drugs to keep you from rejecting your new heart.

Medical science is a lot better than nothing, but it can’t come close to the success of the real thing. I prefer to stay away from doctors unless I have no choice. God’s healing is something we should be pursuing, but most people don’t believe it exists, and most of the people who do believe do it wrong, so we’re discouraged. We don’t try very hard to get it.

I can’t promise you my ear problem won’t flare up and send me to the ER, but I got a healing last night, so I’m reporting it. I have no reason to doubt that I will continue to receive healing. I’ll be honest if I have to get treatment.

The last time I got burned and healed, I was worried that I might have to come here and retract my testimony, but it didn’t happen.

I believe the approach I took works for everything, not just healing. I’m trying to use it to get things that are more important. I have been asking God to increase my love and faith. These are things that would be highly useful to me. More useful than a healed blister. I feel that I should ask for things that will build my roots, not just my leaves. If the roots are strong, the leaves and fruit will take care of themselves. When you ask God for a car or an acquittal or some other superficial benefit, you don’t address the foundational issues that put you in a position where you had problems in the superficial realm. Why were you poor to begin with? Why were you on trial? The more screwed up your roots are, the more problems you will have.

God approved of Solomon because Solomon asked him for wisdom, not money or power. Wisdom is better than money or power. Similarly, love and faith are better than many of the other things I want. If I have love and faith, my life will go better, and I will fall into fewer traps and dilemmas.

I remember the comedian Marsha Warfield describing her main activity in church as “asking for stuff.” She was right on the money. “Give me this. Give me that.” We should be asking for inner change first.

I will keep you informed about my ear problem. I hope what I wrote will help you get God’s power flowing in you.

Turkey Vanquished; Lit. Hum. Defeated

Thanksgiving dinner has come and gone. Could have been worse. My friend Amanda came by with her kids, and we shared the load. The turkey came out great, and Amanda supplied pies.

I nearly got a hall pass this year. This morning, a huge blob of thunderstorms went through my area, and I lost electricity. You don’t want to be without power on Thanksgiving morning. I couldn’t cook, bathe, or even wash my hands. Possible down side: highly screwed-up Thanksgiving for two families. Possible up side: no cooking.

The juice returned after maybe 90 minutes, leaving me still obligated yet behind schedule. I did the best I could, and we ended up eating later than I had hoped.

I learned something new this year. Cracker Barrel stays open on Thanksgiving. I called them, told them my power was out, and asked if they were open. The lady told me to come on down and not to worry. I love the people here. She really felt bad about my power outage.

While I waited for the power to come back on, I killed time reading the last of Lord of the Flies. This is the last book on my version of the Columbia College Literature Humanties reading list. I have finally done all the reading. I should look my old professor up and tell him. I really annoyed him. If I went to his office today and told him I had finished my reading, he would probably punch me in the face. He would still remember me; the king of wasted potential.

My conclusion, after putting myself through this ordeal: books that were great for their time are not always great books. Some are very bad. Crime and Punishment comes to mind. Also, Columbia College includes a number of overrated writers in their curriculum for the sake of political correctness, and they don’t mind sacrificing their students’ time or their students’ parents’ money on the altar of diversity.

When you consider what Columbia charges parents, the only reasonable position to take is that every single word a student reads should be important. Jamming Alice Walker down someone’s throat in a course that costs $4000 should be illegal.

Academics are quite possibly the single most likely group to see the emperor’s clothes when they’re not there. Academics are herd creatures, and they are incapable of independent thought. If an academic thinks other academics think Virginia Woolf’s wretched, inept To the Lighthouse is a great book, that academic is certain to agree. Students are forced to read a lot of overrated crap, simply because college professors are incapable of dissent.

It makes sense that professors are afraid to have dissenting opinions. Generally, they are mediocre intellects. They are fungible. Fire one, and you can find a dozen to replace him the next day. When your product is a commodity, not a franchise, you have to be very careful not to make anyone mad, because you are expendable. On the other hand, if, say, a top-flight professional athlete feels like saying what’s on his mind, people will put up with it, because such athletes are hard to replace.

When I was at Columbia, a baseball player named Chris got the idea that someone was after his ex-girlfriend, Carolyn. Chris was maybe 6’5″ tall. Strong guy. He walked up behind the other man, who was much smaller and wearing glasses, and he attacked from the rear, giving him a severe beating. Nothing of significance happened to Chris. He was hard to replace. If a random history professor had done that, he would have been fired.

Carolyn was a babe, incidentally. Really beautiful. She took me aside at a party one night and started talking to me. Good thing I had no game whatsoever, or I could have ended up with a concussion.

I just Googled her, out of curiosity. She died suddenly in 2010. Sad.

Not really interested in what happened to Chris. I hope the guy he beat doesn’t have dementia from it.

Some of the Lit. Hum. books I read were bad, yet important historically or advanced for their times. Virginia Woolf was just bad. For any era. Awful.

Vogon-poetry awful.

I’m glad I did the reading. I learned a few things. I got a clearer understanding of the development of western literature and culture. Nonetheless, I suffered considerably.

As for Lord of the Flies, I read it in a few days, whereas other Lit. Hum. books took weeks. The reason is this: it wasn’t as painful to read. It had a plot. It had action. The characters, though shallow and unappealing, had distinct personalities. Some did, anyway. It was nice to get into a book without dreading the battle to get back out.

If you haven’t read the book, stop reading, because there will be spoilers.

I’ll tell you how the book goes. There is a war. We are told almost nothing about it. A bunch of kids are put on a plane. The point seems to be to get them out of danger, but it’s not very clear. The plane crashes on a tropical island, and the adults on the plane die. The kids have to fend for themselves. They end up electing a leader. A violent rival takes the kids away from him. The rival’s new gang murders two kids and tries to kill a third (the first leader), but before they can get him, a boat shows up, and the kids are rescued by the British navy. Suddenly the scary gang that tried to kill the former leader looks like what it is: a bunch of little kids with pointed sticks.

The book has weaknesses. For one thing, Golding can’t describe anything. If he tried to describe a square cardboard box to you, you might think he was talking about a crystal chandelier. He tries to describe the island and other things, but you never get a clear idea what any of it looks like. You have to give up and not worry about it. You can’t even tell how many boys there are. Also, the characters are very thinly drawn. They don’t have interesting characteristics that make them stand out from each other.

Golding tried to describe coconuts, and he said they looked like skulls. The only coconuts that look like skulls are husked coconuts. With the husks still on, as they would be found on an uninhabited island, they look nothing like skulls. It’s like Golding only saw coconuts on Gilligan’s Island, where they fell pre-husked.

Like most Lit. Hum. books, Lord of the Flies does not contain a single laugh. I’m not sure how anyone can write two hundred pages without saying anything funny or clever, but Homer did it, Virgil did it, Woolf did it, Dostoevsky did it…it’s remarkable, how many Lit. Hum. authors were not even slightly witty or inclined to humor. It’s like they shared a bizarre mental illness.

Cervantes made jokes, but they were cruel and stupid. Here’s the kind of thing Cervantes would have found amusing: a man tries to hit his servant in the face with a club, but he misses, falls, and knocks all of his front teeth out on a fence post.

Lord of the Flies has a plot, which is a nice thing for a book to have, but it’s not intricate, original, or clever. There are no brilliant twists or turns. Kids get marooned. Kids form violent factions. Kids kill other kids. Kids are rescued. I don’t think the plot is what makes the book.

One important character is a dead person. I’m referring to the Beast. Some of the kids think there is a big, hairy creature on the island, and that it may eventually kill them. They make expeditions to find it and kill it. Meanwhile, an aerial battle takes place above the island. A man parachutes out of a plane. His dead body lands on a mountain in a sitting position, with his parachute still attached. When the wind blows, he raises his head as though he’s looking at people. One of the kids sees him one night, and he decides he’s the Beast.

To flesh out the character of the Beast, a kid named Simon has a psychotic episode. A boy named Jack leads a group that kills a pig, and they leave the pig’s head on a stick as a sacrifice to the Beast. Simon looks at the head one day, and it starts speaking to him, saying it’s the Beast and that he’s not wanted on the island. Simon is the first boy the gang murders.

The Beast device taps into some pretty weird, primal notions, or at least it seems that way to me, a religious nut.

The Bible tells us a Christ-hating upstart called the Beast will rise up to try to take God’s place. Most eschatologists think the Beast will be a ruler; a man. My own suspicion is that the Beast is just the spirit that rules the carnal masses. Beasts are ruled by their flesh. Destructive, ignorant people are ruled by their flesh. The word “carnal” means “ruled by the flesh.” Maybe there will be a single man who personifies the Beast, but I think the Beast will be the masses. Think Antifa. Think BLM. Think Pol Pot.

In Lord of the Rings, a boy with common sense tries to lead the group. His name is Ralph. He’s a builder. He gets himself elected chief. He tries to make rules. He tries to make the kids keep a signal fire going. His enemy is Jack, and Jack is neither a builder nor a thinker. He’s a looter and destroyer. Jack leads a troop called the hunters. They kill pigs for everyone to eat. Jack is too dumb to think about signal fires. He is a populist. He appeals to the basest drives of his friends. He tells them they’ll hunt all day and “have fun.” He offers to do away with rules.

Ralph’s consiglieri is a fat kid nicknamed Piggy. In a violent book about kids, you don’t have to be told what will happen to Piggy. Piggy is very smart, and he gives excellent advice, but he is prime bully bait, so he can never be the chief. Piggy can barely see. He wears glasses. Jack attacks him, breaking one lens of his glasses, leaving Piggy half blind. Later in the book, he takes the glasses with the remaining lens, leaving Piggy to be led around like Homer.

Piggy is like a prophet. In the Bible, prophets were sighted, but in other traditions, they had vision problems. Tiresias was blind. The cyclopes gave up binocular vision for limited clairvoyance; they were able to see their own deaths. I’m too lazy to look up other blind prophets.

Like a prophet, Piggy sees the truth, and he is attacked and eventually killed for it. Weird.

The dead aviator is a good choice for the image of the Beast, because he’s all flesh, with the mind and spirit gone. He rots. Carnal people rot, figuratively. It takes effort and gumption to make people rise above hogs and monkeys, just as it takes energy for the body of a living person to fight off disease and decomposition. What do you see when you look at Antifa and BLM? Rot. Human beings acting like animals. New generations becoming less intelligent and less powerful than their predecessors.

The aviator has no power of his own. He moves, literally, with the wind. A beastly (carnal) leader is like that. They don’t really lead. They follow. The voice of the crowd blows them this way and that. Remember Obama? Interesting.

The word “spirit” literally means “breath,” which is a type of wind. We live because the breath of God is in us. The Beast of the Apocalypse will have the spirit of Satan in him, animating and empowering him like a wind in a parachute.

Simon is killed by Jack’s mob as he tries to tell them the Beast is a dead body. They don’t pay attention to anything he says. They’re in the grip of a bizarre, tribal bloodlust, like backward natives jumping up and down in Africa. After they kill him, a wind fills the aviator’s chute, lifts him off the mountain, and drags him over the site where Simon is killed. The aviator then plunges into the sea.

In the Bible, seas symbolize masses of beings. More specifically, they symbolize their combined voices. When a lot of people speak against you, it’s like sinking into a sea. When Peter looked only at Jesus, he was raised above the sea, and it became the platform that supported him. God promised Jesus he would make his enemies his footstool. When Peter stood on the sea, it was a picture of God’s children resting their feet on hostile humanity.

A leader who rose from a sea of carnal voices deserves to sink into a sea. Isn’t that Satan’s future? When he is exposed as a powerless manipulator, the beings he fooled will want some payback, and presumably, he will sink into their midst and be tormented without mercy.

The boys’ adventure made me think about fatherlessness. This is a fatherless world, because we reject the Father and his messengers. Wisdom and knowledge are treasures, and we are supposed to pass them on to new generations, but we reject God, throwing these treasures away. As a result, every generation has to start from scratch, and we never reach the heights we were designed for. The boys in the book had no fathers. They were alone. One adult could have provided them sufficient wisdom to bring them order and peace, but lacking an adult, they listened to Jack instead. They were like modern Americans. We don’t know God, so we listen to doomed imbeciles like Kanye West and the Kardashians. With every generation, we get weaker, not stronger.

When the naval officer showed up at the end of the book, he was like Jesus, returning to order the world. When he showed up, with true authority on his side, Jack suddenly looked very small and powerless. His power instantly vanished, and Ralph’s power reappeared. The Bible says people will marvel when Satan, who scared us so much, is revealed. We will be amazed at how puny he is.

I found these ideas interesting as I read the book. Lord of the Flies was the only Lit. Hum. book that stirred me on a spiritual level. It wasn’t illuminating, but it made me think about things I already believed.

My guess is that William Golding never considered any of these things. I would also guess that my take on the book is nothing like the interpretation promoted by the sheep of academia.

It was pleasant to read a book that wasn’t excruciatingly tedious and which gave me things to think about.

Should I go ahead and read the books on Columbia’s Contemporary Civilization list? I don’t know. They’re horrible. Hobbes. Locke. Macchiavelli. Plato. Yech. Besides, I probably did the reading for that course when I was at Columbia.

I never did Art Humanities (another core course). I believe I started and then dropped it. I don’t know how I would go about recreating that course on my own. It wasn’t just readings. There were a ton of slides. I love slide courses. Sit around in the dark, look at slides, write some BS on the exam, and get at least a B.

If I decide to do any more studying, you will read about it here, if you can stand it.

Hope I didn’t spoil the book for you, but if I did, it’s your own fault, because I warned you.

Happy Thanksgiving. Don’t mention Christmas to me.

Plus Fascinating Shoe Information

Today is a busy day for me, so I am procrastinating. I should be out buying an upholstery needle and a spare folding table, but instead I will tell you about the stump I cut yesterday.

The huge oak that fell on my chicken house is long gone, but the stump lingered until yesterday. It was intimidating. I didn’t think my tractor could pick it up, and it was thicker than my 20″ chainsaw is long. Also, it was down on the ground were cutting it would be difficult. Yesterday I decided to give it a shot.

I had to cut from both sides, and cutting from the bottom was not possible, so there was no way to fix it so it would not split at the bottom. I cut for around 10 minutes, and finally, the free part dropped.

I took my handy-dandy timberjack, and with a lot of effort, I managed to start the log moving away from the rest of the stump. This is when I discovered the split. The log had split at the bottom, and there was still a strap of wood attaching it to the stump. I opened the kerf up so I could get at the strap, and I cut it with the tip of the saw.

Once the log was free, I moved it a couple of feet so the tractor forks could get at it, and I put the tines on the ground beside it. I used the timberjack to roll it onto the forks. Not easy, which told me the log was really heavy.

When I got it onto the forks, I hopped on the tractor and cranked the tines upward. The log moved, much to my relief. It rolled back toward the tractor. I then lifted the forks, and the log was free of the ground.

It’s a big relief to know I can move things this heavy, because I have a lot of them.

I took the tractor down to the gate by the highway, and I drove through the gate. Cars were whizzing by at maybe 70. I had planned to drive down the right-of-way and dump the log maybe 50 yards from the gate, but I would have been driving into traffic, and it made me nervous. There isn’t a lot of traffic here, but I picked the busiest time of the day, and such traffic as we have really moves.

I settled for dumping the log by the driveway. In the photo, it’s at the base of the pile by the road.

The county has given people until November 27 to get everything to the side of the road. It’s not looking good. Let me rephrase: it’s impossible. But I can move a few really annoying things into their lap, and it will be worth the effort.

When I was done, I tried something crazy. I put the front end loader down on the dirt above the stump, and I pushed. The stump rocked back. That surprised me. I was trying to rock it back into its hole. I didn’t succeed, but I made a big difference.

Now that I have put in some hours in two different pairs of work boots, I have drawn a conclusion. I like Danners better than Keens. My Keens give great protection, and unlike the Danners, they came with toe caps that prevent cuts to the leather, but the factory insoles are like concrete. They felt better when I bought them, but I suppose I have compacted them. I looked into aftermarket insoles, but Keen’s site says the Braddock boot is not compatible with them. I don’t know how that can be true. Keen makes insoles, though. I sent Keen a message asking whether their own insoles would work.

I am sorely tempted to get a shorter version of the Danners I bought. These boots are wonderful. The toes are vulnerable to cuts, but I solved the problem by applying KG Toe Guard to them. The Danners are selling for a little over a hundred bucks right now, which is crazy. Maybe the toe issue offended other consumers, and Danner is trying to unload the boots and discontinue them.

My Keens are American. My Danners are from somewhere else. Wild guess: China. People say to avoid foreign Danners, but my experience with them has been great, and at a hundred bucks, it’s hard to go wrong. If they last half as long, so what? They cost half as much.

When I’m rolling heavy logs, I’m very grateful for safety toes. Yesterday I imagined that severed stump rolling back on my toe. It weighs hundreds of pounds. It would not have done my toes any good. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it would have pressed my foot into the ground and then broken my leg.

Logging is not for the stupid. You have to think of all the physical possibilities in advance. Otherwise, you learn about them on the fly, very suddenly.

Wood seems to rot very quickly here. Maybe my problems aren’t as bad as they seem. Maybe my fallen trees will disappear in a couple of years if I get them on the ground and kill them with diesel. When I visited this place in the summer, there was a fallen log that looked fairly solid, and it’s disintegrating now.

I have to order some blackberry briars, and I have to make some decisions about new hedges. The sellers installed maybe six different kinds of hedge. Too busy. I need one bulletproof hedge species. A number of the existing hedges are looking crappy; I suppose hedge plants don’t last forever. It’s time to remove a section and plant something new. I figure I can do this about four times a year, and by next winter, the house will look a lot better.

The sellers put some truly worthless plants by the workshop. The shop has a porch with pillars, and each pillar has its own disappointing ornamental plant. I think I should do blackberries on each end and leave the middle pillar alone. Or maybe it would be best to do some kind of ground cover all the way across.

Blueberries do very well here, so I’ll need those, too. I can also grow kiwifruit and raspberries.

If you want ten or twenty tons of free firewood, and you want to cut it yourself, let me know. I’m the guy to see. Otherwise, I’ll just sit here and root for the termites.

Hurry up, Friday

Thanksgiving is nearly here.

Yay. Whee.

My attitude toward holiday cooking is not good at all. I rarely cook these days. If you don’t count the soup I make and freeze in portions for breakfast, I have cooked less than once a week for quite some time, and when I do cook, it’s usually for myself. I quit cooking for my dad. The work was just too much.

I used to cook for everyone I knew. Eventually, I got tired of it. Guests wore me out. They didn’t help much with shopping or cooking. Some guests showed up late or not at all. Some left early, as soon as they were full. Very few helped clean up. And how often did they invite me over for food? Not very.

One day, I heard the obvious notion rattling around in my mind: it is not normal for a single man to bust his hump cooking for 8 people in his own house. Entertaining is for married people. I quit cooking, except for rare occasions. Unfortunately, Thanksgiving is mandatory, so I can’t get out of it. We could go to a restaurant, but that would be so depressing, it would be worse than cooking at home. If I were alone, I could skip it entirely and think nothing of it, but I’m not alone.

Thanksgiving is a major undertaking for one person. Even a modest meal takes two days to prepare, unless you serve instant mashed potatoes and a canned ham. You have to do a lot of shopping. You have to store the food for several days before you prepare it. Then you have to clean the house and set the table, and afterward, you have to clean the kitchen and table area. It’s a nightmare.

If you’re married, you can divide tasks with the wife. If you have kids, you may be able to enslave them to some degree. If you have a big family, you may have parents, sisters, and brothers who will help. My mother is dead. My grandparents are all dead. My relatives in Kentucky don’t invite me or my dad to holiday meals. I don’t know if they’re afraid my sister will show up, or if they have some mysterious problem with me. My sister made them suffer a lot, but I have always dealt honestly with them.

Meals with my dad are not that great. His table manners are a problem. You have to look at your plate while you eat unless you want to see what he’s chewing. He stuffs himself, which is off-putting. You have to watch him to keep him from putting his fork or his dirty hands in common dishes, rendering them offensive to everyone else. He spills food on himself. He says, “lotta food,” maybe five times per meal. Because of dementia, he asks the same questions over and over, trying to start a conversation. If I bring up a better topic, he is likely to dismiss it immediately, as if I were stupid to bring it up. He gets upset because we don’t talk, but he makes it very difficult.

He likes to nag me about getting married and giving him grandchildren. He tells me how old I am. Sometimes he starts reminiscing about old times, which is very disturbing. I forgive him for the negative contributions he made to my childhood, and I never bring them up, but I won’t sit still while he talks about how happy I was. I correct him. I say things like, “My childhood was horrible, and I hate talking about it. Every day I thank God I’m an adult.” Then he gets angry with me.

When he’s done eating, there is food spilled on the table and floor, and I have to take care of it. And he likes to put spit on his finger and rub tables and counters with it, to remove smudges and so on. Often, the smudges are really flecks in the granite. He thinks they’re bits of food. He leaves a film of dried spit on things, and I have to go behind him with counter cleaner and alcohol.

His manners upset guests. They work together with me to contain the damage. “You don’t have to serve yourself; let me get that for you. Move so I can wipe that up. Let me get you more napkins.”

Thanksgiving should be a time to relax and enjoy life with people whose company you enjoy, but to me, it’s a huge chore I can’t wait to get behind me.

Another problem: the nice people next door invited us to eat with them. I had to weasel out of that. I don’t want to seem unfriendly (although I am), but I don’t like involving my dad in new relationships. When I’m with him, I’m uncomfortable and very restrained. I’m on duty, as a caretaker. My personality is muted. And he offends people. He told my friend Mike he looked like a fruit in his pink shirt, and he also looked over and announced, “You’re losing all your hair.” He said some troubling things to my friend Amanda when she cared for him over a weekend. It’s not a dementia thing, either. He was always like that.

My dad likes to talk about how serious I am, and he criticizes me for not talking. He says these things in front of people, and they probably believe it. If you come from a sick, dysfunctional family, it’s always best to minimize your family’s exposure to your friends and love interests. You need to be around people who will let you grow, not people who will try to keep you deformed and small.

He has made some effort to improve over the last few years, but dementia patients can’t alter their behavior all that well. He is stuck with his bad habits and flaws because he waited too long to admit they existed.

Amanda has no one to help her with Thanksgiving, so I invited her to come and bring her kids and her dysfunctional mom. We will take work off of each other, and both of us will benefit from the presence of a non-gaslighting, helpful adult. When Amanda’s mom puts her down, I’ll be around to remind Amanda how ridiculous and pathetic her mom’s perceptions are. If my dad empties his nose on the porch in front of everyone, Amanda will be there to step around the mucus and sympathize with me.

The presence of Amanda and her kids will make the ordeal considerably easier to bear, and it may be that my presence will cramp her mom’s style and put her on her best behavior.

When you look after a dementia patient, you have to limit your exposure. You can’t sit in the room with the patient all day, listening to them say the same things over and over. That’s especially true when the patient makes a point of saying annoying things which he knows are annoying, or when the patient keeps arguing about the same things, no matter how obvious it is that he’s wrong.

You can’t cruficy yourself because the patient isn’t entertained 24/7. You have to say, “Sometimes people plan their lives poorly, and when they do, a certain amount of suffering is unavoidable and just and not to be blamed on others.” It’s okay if a difficult patient experiences some boredom and loneliness. People who are not demented experience those things, and no one gets upset about it. It’s part of life. There is no law that says you’re entitled to constant entertainment simply because you’re demented.

I get bored occasionally. Sometimes, for a few minutes, I’m lonely. No one makes a federal case out of it. No one comes running to wipe my nose, and I’m fine. I know my dad would be happier if I sat beside him all day stepping and fetching and making balloon animals or whatever. I would be happier, too, if someone else gave up his or her life to keep me entertained and do my bidding. Doesn’t make it a good idea.

My approach is to ration the time I spend with my dad. I make sure we go out to eat three or four times a week. I check on him. I also make sure I have adequate time alone, to wind down. After bagging ten pounds of wet, reeking diapers and taking them to the dump, you really need time to wash carefully, sit down alone or with friends, and decompress. That’s especially true when the person who wears the diapers has broken through the Diaper Genie bag and has continued pushing filthy diapers into the Diaper Genie anyway.

You have to look after your parents when they need help, unless they’re absolutely unbearable. You don’t have to be a martyr or an enabler.

The stage of dementia my dad is in right now is said to last up to two years, and he is maybe six months into it. The next stage is much worse. Vascular dementia patients typically live about 5 years after they manifest symptoms, and things started going bad for him in about 2015. If my dad lives long enough, the following things will happen to him: we will get an attendant to come here and help him for a few hours a day, and then in the next stage, he will forget who I am and how to get dressed. He will have to go to a facility. At that point, he will have maybe two more years of life left. I want him to be happy while he’s here and reasonably lucid, but it won’t be long until I have to put other people in charge. At that point, I’ll have to get used to the fact that I have nearly no ability to provide him with company or amusement. I’ll have to trust strangers and be at peace with it.

I remember visiting his mother with him, after she moved to a nursing home. The whole place smelled like feces, even though it was clean. You can only do so much to reduce the smell of diapers. An old woman with a blank look on her face was using her feet to pull herself around in a wheelchair. She made unintelligible sounds. My dad leaned over and whispered, “If I ever have to go to a place like this, just kill me.”

I think about that sometimes. Unless he passes unexpectedly, he’s going to have to go to just such a place. Will he hate it as much as he thought? People’s desires and priorities change with their circumstances. No one is going to kill him, so he may have to face a move to a home. I shouldn’t assume too much; nurses and other healthcare providers kill people all the time to get them out of the way, so maybe one day when my back is turned, someone will play God.

The other day he asked me if he was losing his mind. He’s in denial almost all the time, so that surprised me. I didn’t say yes, which would have been true, but I was honest. I told him the condition he has gets worse, not better. I didn’t know what else to say. Pills are available, but his doctor recommended not using them, and he doesn’t want them.

Tomorrow I plan to bone the turkey and prepare cornbread for stuffing. I may cook yams so they’ll be ready to finish preparing on Thursday. I still don’t have a real dining table, so I need to get a second plastic folding table.

The food will be incredible, and Amanda and I will enjoy the kind of bonding friends from dysfunctional families are famous for. Hopefully her kids will be insulated from the holiday misery their father’s wretched behavior has the potential to cause. It will be at least seven years until he is allowed to see them again. That time needs to be dedicated to healing.

When the meal is done, I plan to make Amanda take as much of the leftovers as possible. My dad will complain, but Thanksgiving leftovers make for a big mess during the following week, and my dad tends to keep them until they are rotten. Also, they’re fattening.

If you are lucky enough to have quality Thanksgiving gatherings, enjoy them while you can. I enjoyed a lot of great holidays in Kentucky when I was a kid. I’m glad I have those times to remember. In the meantime, I will grit my teeth and deal with this obligation.

Plus Retro Joy

It looks like Charlie Rose is all done. A Drudge-linked story says he is accused of serial groping.

I was reading about it and Googling around, and somehow I landed on Charles Kuralt. Remember him? He was a CBS reporter who got tired of covering hard news. He got the network to give him an RV, and he drove around America’s back roads for decades, doing human interest stories.

Charles Kuralt, who died before he could be accused of fondling anyone, is a lot more interesting than Charlie Rose. I’m glad I got sidetracked.

As soon as I started reading about Kuralt, I asked the obvious question: are there DVD’s? Yes, there are. There are at least three DVD compendiums of “On the Road” segments.

I am considering buying a set, but I’m afraid to. I’m afraid it will make me too sad to live. Also, I feel like if I watch Kuralt zip through the decades, as soon as I finish, the world will come to an end. Somehow I feel that the earth will plunge instantly into violence and chaos, demons will be set free on every continent, the clouds will part, and Charles Kuralt and Charles Schulz will appear in the heavens, beckoning me upward out of this tiresome mess.

Kuralt was a class act. Makes me wish I had an RV.

New Franken Accuser

We have seen the last of Al Franken. Probably.

The thing serial gropers/rapists/molesters never seem to think about is the folks who invariably follow up on the first abuse account. Most men never abuse anyone, but those who do are generally repeat offenders. If there is something so incredibly wrong with you that you think you have the right to put your hands on women, you will do it over and over until something (like a tweet and creepy photo) changes your mind.

Franken posed for a horrendous photo, in which he gleefully, proudly cupped his hands over the breasts of a sleeping Leeann Tweeden. Then he apologized (not really) and refused to resign. He went off and hid in Minnesota, using the imminent holiday for cover, just as Bill Clinton used weekends to kill negative news stories about himself. Unfortunately for Franken, before he managed to scurry into the shade, another accuser popped up. A married woman says he squeezed her buttock while posing for a photo with her in 2010.

The Tweeden photo stirred up a certain amount of throat-clearing among liberals. The far-left comedy show Saturday Night Live went after Franken (gently) this weekend, saying, “Sure, this was taken before Franken ran for public office, but it was also taken after he was a sophomore in high school.” The writer of the Weekend Update item noted Franken’s age at the time of the offense: 55. They were trying to acknowledge Franken without really hurting his chances of staying in the Senate (as evinced by their immediate deflection to criticism of Donald Trump, who groped women consensually). Nonetheless, their jabs leave marks.

Franken is a disagreeable, aggressive, egotistical person of limited talent, and now it has become obvious that he has a serious maturity problem, as well as a surprising wealth of hostility toward women.

I think I understand him. He is a pillar of the black humor community. I was part of that trend, myself. I’ve made all sorts of disgusting, offensive jokes during my life. Under the influence of idiots like Franken, I worked diligently to soil my own heart, and it worked. I became jaded and cruel. Franken is probably fairly dead inside, as a result of giving himself over to black humor. His thought life must be a lot like “The Aristocrats.” My own thought life was ghastly until a few years back. I knew of no reason to limit it.

The Franken story is not uplifting, but at least we won’t have to worry about another Franken term or a Franken presidency. Thank God for that.

Is it must me, or are most of the famous abusers men who would have a hard time getting women without fame and power?

When I look at people like Brett Ratner, James Toback, Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K., and Al Franken, the impression I get is that they were not babe magnets in high school. That, combined with excessively powerful sex drives, could explain their cruelty to women. “You wouldn’t go near me back then, but now you will submit or else.” That’s my guess. I think they’re punishing all women, to get even with the girls who refused to have sex with them in high school.

We’re not hearing a whole lot of abuse stories that revolve around handsome men.

It makes you wonder what dark fantasies bubble beneath the surface in high school chess clubs all across America.

Al Franken is 5’6″ tall. He was a math nerd and wrestler in high school. He wears thick glasses. He looks the way he looks. He succeeded late in life. Girls weren’t threatening to set themselves on fire if he didn’t take them to the prom.

Franken will probably try to rebound from the second accusation, like a weighted inflatable boxing toy coming back for another whack, but it is likely that he will be met on the way up with another fist to the face. That’s how these things work. Think of Kevin Spacey. He got accused. He put out a self-praising statement intended to put him on the side of the offended. Then, “BANG! BANG! BANG!,” the new accusers piled on. His career is dead, and he may end up in prison. I doubt Franken will take as many hits, but it would be odd if he didn’t take enough to keep him on the canvas.

If conservatives are conspiring against Franken (why wouldn’t they?), they may have their follow-up punch cued up already. Smart oppo merchants think like terrorist bombers, who follow bombs up with other bombs that target rescuers. First you hit Franken, and then when he thinks he’s clear, you hit him and his supporters again.

Look at James O’Keefe. He puts out a video. The left responds with a stack of hopeful lies. Then he puts out another video, to make them look even worse.

Liberals are slut-shaming Leeann Tweeden now. They found a photo of her with her hand on a man’s behind, and they found another shot of her with one leg wrapped around a man. Tweeden is not a classy woman. She appeared in Playboy Magazine. But isn’t it revealing, watching liberals resort to a practice they condemn? They invented the ridiculous term “slut-shaming.” It infuriates them when other people criticize slutty women, but look at them go.

Isn’t this what they call “putting the victim on trial”?

Maybe they need to criticize the rest of us for “perv-shaming.” Instead of “Slut Walks,” which figure prominently among the signs of the Apocalypse, they can have “Perv Walks.” We’ll all dress up in C.K. beards and Cosby sweaters and walk up and down major traffic arteries, offering women Quaaludes. Then everyone will be immune to zombie harassment eruptions.

Franken will be gone in a week, or he will not go at all. Let’s see if he can hold on.

Enemies are More Powerful Than Friends

I had the funniest revelation today. I realized I think more about the people I cut out of my life than the people I miss. The satisfaction I get from the absence of jerks greatly outweighs the suffering I feel when I think about people I care for, who are not around.

I guess that makes sense. Pain tends to be sharper and more intense than pleasure. The drive to eliminate pain is much stronger than the drive to obtain pleasure. When an idiot makes you suffer all the time, it’s hard to stop thinking about it. When someone is good to you and brings you happiness, it’s easy to think about other things.

Weird.

I cut the entire population of Dade County loose when I moved, and I feel great about it. I never think, “Wow, it would be great to visit South Beach/go fishing off Miami/have a Cuban sandwich/whatever.” It has been 15 years since I deliberately interacted with anyone I went to high school with. The longer I stay here, the more I hate Miami, and the more I wish I had left sooner! I wish I had never lived there at all. Miami was a curse to me. I’m going to have to go back more than once, and I hate the very thought of it.

There’s a Cuban restaurant near me, and I feel a pain in my stomach every time I see it.

I’m not saying there is no one there I would like to see, but I can count them on the fingers of one hand.

I do not miss my sister. She made me suffer all the time, even when she was not around, and I thank God often for her absence. I pray it continues. She made my dad miserable, and he made his unhappiness my problem, so good riddance.

I don’t miss the pastors of my former churches. They were cult leaders. They thought of me as a rebellious slave. They were not the brightest people on earth. They had no humility. They could not take advice. They wrecked marriages and friendships in order to keep their cults safe from dissent. I hope I never see any of them again.

Many of the people I went to church with were hopeless hypocrites. They were way out on the left. Jesus was the farthest thing from liberal. He hated jealousy, which is the foundation of leftism. He hated sexual sin. He hated homosexuality and abortion. I knew dozens of people who were under the spell of morons like Jesse Jackson and Maxine Waters. They will never grow, and trying to educate them was like trying to forge horseshoes with my face. I have warm feelings for them, but I can do without the frustration.

I had some very disappointing law school friends. To them, I say, “ta ta.” There are a couple of people I would not mind visiting, but I’m thrilled to know I will never see the users again. I cut off a couple of my closest college friends. Dead weight. Buh-bye.

People have limited potential to increase your happiness, but their potential to make you want to die knows no bounds. If you don’t believe that, marry a crazy vindictive woman who is great in bed. Having friends is much less important than getting rid of your enemies. That’s very sad, but it’s a fact.

Jesus spent a lot of time casting out demons and telling people to separate themselves from the world, but we don’t see him arranging marriages or putting friends together.

I’m always disappointed when I learn a person has lots of friends. It tells me they’re in denial. They’re gullible. No one has more than a few friends. If you think the 4000 people who call you “friend” on Facebook love you, you are hopelessly naive. If you have one friend, you’re luckier than most people. If you have five, you’re rich.

I’ll be disappointed if God doesn’t bring more nice people in my life, but what would really hurt would be if he stopped straining out the jerks. May they forget my name and lose my number.

If This is Consciousness, Knock me Out

I just finished Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. This is the second-to-last book in my painful slog through the Columbia College Literature Humanities Syllabus (as modified by yours truly).

I should have finished this book in ten days, but it took weeks. The reason is clear. I got so bored with Lit. Hum. books, I got to the point where I only read them in one room of the house, if you get my drift. It’s not a place where I spend a lot of time, so my pace was glacial.

I’m sure you don’t want to read Virginia Woolf, but just in case you’re insane, let me point out that this blog post contains spoilers. Not that it’s possible to spoil this book. That would be like ruining the intestinal flu.

There is a philosopher (i.e. person who has decided to waste his existence) named Ramsay. He has a wife named…I forgot her name. They have 8 kids. The wife is incredibly beautiful, even though the book starts when she is 50 and presumably fairly well stretched out and saggy in all respects (8 kids). They have a house on an island. For some reason, practically everyone they know hangs out at the house. It is not clear whether they help pay for groceries.

Ramsay is very selfish. He feels bad about his life, as he should, so from time to time he interrupts what his wife is doing so he can share his self-pity with her and get some sympathy. He says snotty things to people for no clear reason. Everyone always has to do what he wants to do.

Mrs. Ramsay is stupid. She spends her time pondering about things like the lengths of socks. She does not know what a square root is.

Mrs. Ramsay dies, and the house falls apart. Then Mr. Ramsay has it fixed. Some of the remaining members of the family (2 kids have died at this point, perhaps to avoid appearing in the second half of the book) go back to the house with their dad and some of the entourage. Mr. Ramsay and two of his kids make some peasants row them across the bay to a lighthouse.

The end.

I just saved you 8 dollars.

There is no plot. There are no characters. Everyone is pretty much the same. No one ever says anything funny or interesting. There are ZERO laughs in the book. There are no clever lines you will want to memorize or underline.

Why? Why does this book exist?

It astounds me that anyone could enjoy this book or think it worthy of publication, especially after reading good books. Think of 1984, Catch-22, or even The Catcher in the Rye. Read one of those, and then try to force your way through To the Lighthouse. The difference is day and night.

Is it affirmative action at work? “Come on, guys, we have to find a woman to publish. People are starting to talk.” Surely not. There are some decent female writers out there. Surely female talent is not so rare that the publication of Virginia Woolf’s meanderings is in any way justified.

I’m a smart guy. I’m not the problem here. If this book was good, I would have seen something in it. It’s just not. It’s horrendous.

Virginia Woolf was mentally ill, so maybe that explains the book’s badness. She put rocks in her pockets and walked out into a river to die. The book is packed with internal monologues, and it was written by a tortured individual who was borderline insane. Maybe it’s bad because people with Ms. Woolf’s type of mental illness have boring, chaotic inner narratives. Virginia Woolf may have assumed the rest of us thought the same way she did. A writer can’t connect unless he has something in common with the reader, and apart from breathing oxygen, I have nothing at all in common with Ms. Woolf. I have a sense of humor. I am smart. I like books with plots and characters. I like books that have themes. I could go on.

It’s sad that people encouraged her.

Am I wrong? Are most human beings this boring, inside? My inner monologues are highly entertaining and full of relatively intelligent notions. If I had Mrs. Ramsay’s inner voice, I’d have to smoke meth to stay awake.

James Joyce was also a stream-of-consciousness perpetrator who wrote inner monologues, and his were as boring as Woolf’s. Maybe this is how most people think. I don’t know. I’ve never been in anyone else’s head. Why would you write the boring thoughts of a boring person, especially if the person were fictitious? Wouldn’t it make more sense to write interesting thoughts? Just my take on the matter. But then I always wonder why manufacturers design ugly cars, when good-looking cars cost the same to produce.

The book isn’t all bad. It has the shining virtue of being shorter than other bad books Columbia has inflicted on its students. I took that into consideration when I chose to include it in my list. The Lit. Hum. syllabus varies from year to year, so I felt entitled to make changes.

I am finally free to move on to Lord of the Flies, which should be entertaining, if only because of the violence. Sad that it comes down to that. I doubt the book will teach me much about life. My understanding is that it’s about kids who commit atrocities on each other in the absence of adults. I know about that. I have an older sister.

I used to enjoy literature, but then I chose books that sounded good to me, not pretentious crap recommended by grey-souled academics who live in denial. The Lit. Hum. experience is almost enough to turn me off literature entirely. I do like Shakespeare, though, and there are a few other things I would like to re-read. St. Exupery. Dumas. Orwell, the secular prophet. I might even go through Ayn Rand’s comic-book novels again before I die. Virginia Woolf…no. It is a complete waste of effort.

If you’re buying presents for friends who like to read, scratch Ms. Woolf off the list. Her work is too appallingly dull even for regifting.

Shock Humor has Shocking Consequences

Frankengate is not going away, and Bill Clinton may be dragged down in its wake.

Al Franken, a married man, posed for a photo of himself groping (or pretending to grope, like there’s a big difference) a sleeping woman, and the photographer made the cruel photo part of a souvenir CD. Liberals have had a day to decide whether Al Franken goes under the bus, and it looks like he’s going. Valerie Jarrett, one of the most unpleasant far-left bigwigs alive, went after Franken on the web. If Jarrett is willing to do that, people who are more moderate are sure to follow.

Is it principle? Probably not. Democrats want the Senate seat Roy Moore is trying to land. If they excuse Franken, they help Moore. If they torpedo Franken, they get to look righteous, and the worst thing that can happen is that they will get a new Democrat Senator for Minnesota. Democrats tend to jump at the short-end money. Franken can be replaced, Clinton is retired, Clinton’s wife is a drag on the party, and the Alabama Senate seat means a lot to them. They’re not thinking about the many Democrats who will be eaten by sex scandals in the near future. They are happily burning their ships on the beach, with no thought of the future need for redemption.

How do I know those soon-to-be-eaten Democrats exist? Because I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck. There is a huge backlog of undiscovered harassment and rape cases out there. Count on it.

The Senate is going to have an ethics investigation. I would love to see Al Franken lose his seat, but I have to ask: does it make sense to investigate a member of Congress for actions performed before he took office? Murders, sure. But workplace harassment from a professional comedian and known jerk? I’m not sure. Minnesotans knew they were electing someone immature and inclined toward indecency, so I don’t know if they would want Franken removed.

Franken is part of the SNL/National Lampoon/Harvard Lampoon/Second City black humor movement. He rose to moderate fame among people who used the crutch of shock humor to become successful. You know them. Franken, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, John Belushi, John Hughes, Doug Kenney, Brian Doyle-Murray, John Landis, and the rest of the crew. You can’t expect such a person to respect time-honored morals. He made his living tearing them down.

I was heavily influenced by the black humor movement. I was a sensitive, inoffensive kid, and the world abused me, so my brilliant response was to become like my abusers. I fell under the spell of black humor.

In 1978, the misguided misanthropes at The National Lampoon changed the face of movie comedy. They created a film called Animal House. It’s about a fraternity full of losers, criminals, drug abusers, sex fiends, and sadists. If you haven’t seen it, good for you, but you must live in a burrow. The “heroes” of animal house made everyone else on campus miserable. They were as offensive as possible, and they punished a college for offering them an opportunity to better themselves and become affluent. Somehow, we were supposed to sympathize. And we did. That’s the incredible thing.

I had no common sense at all in 1977. I was the product of an abusive, dysfunctional family. I was a star underachiever. The world rejected me, probably for good reason. Naturally, I thought Animal House was extremely clever. I admired the staff of The National Lampoon.

Somehow, I got admitted to an Ivy League college, and like a lot of the idiots around me, I thought the purpose of my existence was to emulate John Belushi and Tim Matheson. I thought they were great role models. I spent a whole lot of time drunk. I performed a lot of pranks. I had no respect for most instructors. I thought the school’s administrators, who were simply trying to keep the place running smoothly, were just flying monkeys. Things went about as well as you would expect. When I was caught firing rockets out of a dorm window in the middle of the night, the deans decided I needed some time off.

I don’t know if I would have made it in the absence of bad role models. My family was poisonous. They made me miserable. They raised me very badly and did not prepare me to succeed at anything. But the black humor movement certainly did not help.

I failed. The movement succeeded. Stripes, Ghostbusters, Porky’s, Neighbors, Modern Problems, Caddyshack…movie humor changed permanently. Unlike me, Al Franken survived without repenting. His star waxed. It’s remarkable that he made it to Congress without anyone important saying, “Do we really want a shock comedian in Congress?”

Anyhow, he made it, and now, somehow, we’re surprised to see that a problem in his past brought him down.

I loved the Hornblower TV series, and I remember a powerful line uttered by the protagonist: “Each of us has a maggot in our past which will happily devour our future.” Franken finally met his maggot. Millions of other men are waiting to meet theirs. Zombie crises are waiting to pop out of the grave and pull people in.

Franken’s story is scary. If I had succeeded as a humorist, I might be right where he is today. I would think of myself as a crusader for righteousness, while propagating evil. Posing for a photo like the one Franken posed for would seem hilarious to me. I would be too jaded to see the problem.

Franken probably thinks he’s a fine human being. When you succeed, you are less likely to question yourself. He probably thinks he’s the victim of a right-wing operation, and maybe he is, but he should be blaming himself, not the enemies who threw his own filth back at him.

I don’t want to go out like that. I keep praying for God to judge and correct me privately so I don’t have to be humiliated publicly. I haven’t raped anyone or exposed myself to a coworker, but I am not in a position to cast the first stone.

Churches don’t talk much about repentance or accepting blame. They talk a lot about money. Some talk about “social justice.” Some are obsessed with getting us to condone sexual perversion. They don’t think about the primary purpose of life: we are supposed to become like God in our hearts. Accepting blame is the key. Until you admit fault, the door to freedom will remain locked, and you will continue to beat your head against it to no constructive end.

When did Jesus come? After John came and preached repentance. What does that tell you?

This stuff is important. God won’t necessarily chase you down and tell you what to do. You need to go after him, and if no one is teaching you, how will you know what to do?

I know a kid who is being bullied in school. It makes me think of my own childhood. Bad people defeated me all the time, and I had no idea what to do. I accepted it as my lot. God did not come to me and help.

You can’t tell your kids God will look after them, unless you have some reason to believe it. If the groundwork isn’t there, God may do little or nothing for them.

When I was a kid, I was tormented by demons all the time. They gave me nightmares, including nightmares that continued when I was awake. I felt their presence. I saw one. I had no one to defend me. Foul spirits visited me all the time, but I never heard from God. He didn’t come into my room to comfort me. He never spoke to me in an audible voice, saying, “Your parents let you down. They haven’t taught you. But I love you, so here I am to do their job.” I never got a visit from God until I was 24 years old! I could have died before that. I could have gone to prison. All sorts of bad things could have happened.

Am I criticizing God? Of course not. I’m pointing out that God doesn’t help everyone automatically. You have to look for him. He will let you suffer and die if you don’t make a move, and it will be your fault, not his.

This ruined world is very, very far from heaven. It is not God’s main concern. This world is one level above hell, and hell’s stink has soaked through the ceiling, into our midst. God is far away, in a clean and orderly place, surrounded by righteous beings. We can’t expect him to spend all his time here, in a place that stinks, any more than we can expect free people to spend their lives in filthy prisons. God is rejected here. He is contemned and insulted. He is under no obligation to live here. The crucifixion was a gift. He didn’t owe us anything.

God will let your children be abused, unless you get to know him. He will not prevent them from being raped or killed. We chose to ruin this world, and now we and our children have to live with the consequences. If you want things to work, you have to get with God’s program. There is a limit to what he will do for you when you’re out of his will. He already came to this disgusting placed and let us torture him to death. What more should we expect?

I don’t like this planet. I hate Miami because it’s a sleazy place full of vile people, and I’m very glad I’m in Ocala now, but it’s still part of the earth. The more I learn about God, the more I dislike the earth, and the more eager I am to leave. If a being as evil as I am hates this place, imagine how God feels.

Satan didn’t create hell. God did. Satan doesn’t put people in hell. God does. God is love, but he is also justice. You have to keep that in mind. There is a lot at stake, and you may not get help unless you apply.

God’s justice is no joke. It is the hardest rock in existence.

American values are revolting and toxic. We sin so much, we can’t recognize sin when we see it. We have no idea what righteousness looks like. All this is true, but we still have the brass to say things like, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” Who are these good people? I don’t know any. The earth is a ghetto full of fatherless ignoramuses. No one has taught us how to live, so we flounder in failure and foolishness.

When you call yourself good, you tell God, “Stop helping me,” and he obeys. You’re taking the cake out of the oven before it’s done.

I don’t want to provoke God by rejoicing in the downfall of people like Franken and Harvey Weinstein. Their problems are not gifts to me. They are warnings regarding my own faults.

My advice is to deemphasize asking God for favors. Start asking him to help you confess to him and repent. Remember that your primary obligation is to be changed. God created us in order to reproduce. Pride is like thalidomide. It keeps us stunted.

When we change, we’re not doing God a favor. He doesn’t need anything from us. He doesn’t need us, period. It’s all for us. It’s all selfish. You will never make him owe you.

I guess I’ll sit back and see who falls next. I hope it’s not me.

Killing Stuart Smalley

Al Franken. Why am I not surprised?

I guess if you read my blog, you probably saw the story already. I attract conservatives, and the story was mentioned on The Drudge Report, a conservative site. If you haven’t seen it, I’ll bring you up to speed. Former glamour model Leeann Tweeden produced a photo of a leering Al Franken, mugging for the camera as he gropes her chest. To make things worse, Tweeden is asleep in the photo. It was taken during a USO tour.

Franken posed with his hands over Tweeden’s breasts. It’s not clear whether he is making contact (it appears that his right hand did not), but what he is doing, were the victim conscious, would fully qualify as assault in a criminal court. Assault does not require physical contact. Whether it would be a misdemeanor or a felony, I can’t say. I would guess that in many jurisdictions, the sexual nature of the assault would move it into the felony category.

Tweeden also says Franken grabbed her and forced his lips against hers and pushed his tongue into her mouth. That’s battery.

Were Franken a Republican, I would say he was all washed up. No Republican could recover from this. But Democrats get away with things. Even now, I’m sure excuses are being manufactured. Tweeden is being accused. Maybe Whoopi Goldberg is telling someone, “It wasn’t a GROPE grope.”

I’m checking Internet comments, and yes, liberals are saying what Franken did was fine. They say his hands aren’t touching Tweeden’s breasts in the photo. Funny, they don’t mention the tongue attack. And how would they feel if Franken held his hands over their mothers’ breasts? Would it still be okay?

Not to pile on with those who blame Tweeden, but I have to say that this photo tells me I didn’t think about one aspect of the sexual harassment hysteria. It didn’t occur to me that past offenses would be dredged up and weaponized for political purposes. It looks like that’s what’s happening here.

I should have anticipated it, and I should have made the connection after reading about Roy Moore, but Moore’s story, like those surrounding Clinton, seems like it would have come out eventually, even without the help of political operatives. The Moore litany seems very legitimate, even if Democrats are taking advantage of it, and even if the liberal journalists propagating the tales chose their timing deliberately in order to take the Senate away from Republicans. Tweeden’s story, though valid, seems more calculated and opportunistic. One gets the impression that someone called her and said, “Hey, remember that story you told me about Al Franken? Do you have the photo?” I don’t think we’d be hearing about it but for the current “me too” frenzy.

I’m just guessing, and regardless of the reason Tweeden spoke up, she has every right to toss Franken in the frying pan.

One of the sleaziest things about the picture is that Tweeden was not aware that it had been taken, until she received a souvenir CD of the USO trip. She found out about the picture when she looked at the CD. Nice. Imagine how that feels. And where were the other men on the plane when this happened? Did Franken drug them and put them in the lavatory? Why didn’t someone do something?

The CD was given to her by the photographer. Where was his brain when he took the photo, decided to include it in the album, and then decided to send it to the victim? Photographers have to worry about ethics. It’s an important part of the job. Looks like someone didn’t get the memo.

Photographers tend to be a little creepy. When I was in high school we had a photography buff named Lloyd. When we had pep rallies in the assembly hall, Lloyd would get down on his knees in front of the stage, and when the girls jumped up in their short skirts and spread their legs, Lloyd would point the camera upward and shoot photos. For some reason, no one ever stopped him. He must have had a huge collection of pictures. He probably still has them. If you carry a camera and you like women, you can get away with a lot. Photography attracts freaks.

The feminist excuses will be a real spectacle. Right now, all over the US, women who claim to stand up for their sisters are sitting around tables coming up with rationalizations to help Franken, and they are looking for excuses to crucify Tweeden.

They can’t call her a slut, referring to her Playboy appearance. These days, “slut” is a compliment. Thanks to feminists. So much for saying she asked for it.

Who will suffer most in the purge? Democrats or Republicans? Democrats behave somewhat worse, but the press covers up for them, so maybe Republicans will take the most heat.

It’s remarkable how Satan works. He ramped up sexual temptation over the last half-century. He taught women to be entitled, brainless temptresses who shame anyone who tries to correct them. He made sexually provocative photos more widely available than ever before. Then he sprang the trap, and now the people who are caught in it–mostly men–are being removed from positions of leadership.

The sex drive is just about impossible to control completely. Even the angels are susceptible. The Bible tells us angels fell because they lusted after women. What hope is there for Al Franken or Jimmy Swaggart if an angel can’t resist temptation?

Things will get worse. Instead of helping, women will become more provocative. Men and boys will continue to fall. The world needs male leaders, but they can’t lead if they’re constantly taken down by a force they can’t overcome.

Guess I’ll look at the Internet later and see what Al has to say. I suspect it will be an attack on Tweeden instead of an apology.

Facing my Tractor Fears

Today I overcame one of my big fears. I drove the tractor on the right-of-way by my farm, parallel to the road, leaning over, with a big log on the front end loader. And I did not roll the tractor and die.

Marion County and FEMA are sending trucks to carry off Irma debris, and it’s a huge gift to citizens. I can’t even guess what it would cost to pay a tree service to haul tons of wood off my land. Free is preferable. The problem is that it’s not easy to get trees cut and moved. I’m alone, I didn’t have the right tools or access to the whole farm until some time after the storm, and the only place where I can put the trees and count on having them picked up is along a scary ditch.

The free pickups will not last forever, and I am way behind.

My property consists of two adjoining lots that abut a highway. One lot is at the top of a hill. When cars approach that lot, they are approaching a high place. They can’t see past it. The area by the road is fairly flat, and it would be a great place to put wood, but I would have to drive the tractor right beside the road in a place where drivers doing 70 would be very surprised to see me.

The other lot is easy for approaching drivers to see, but it has a lot of growth on the right-of-way, and the ditch is not as flat. This is the safest place to put things, but I was putting it off because of the ditch’s slope.

Somebody in the government surprised me by coming by with some kind of machine (which I never saw) and cutting back the brush by the road. That’s a huge help. Now I can go up and down the lot with the tractor well off the road. The trees and shrubs don’t obstruct my path. With the obstructions gone, the only things preventing me from dumping trees were cowardice and laziness.

Today I drove the Kubota down to the end of the lot and moved a few big logs down the ditch and dumped them. It wasn’t bad at all. I kept the bucket low so the tractor’s center of gravity would be down by the ground, and I moved carefully. Everything worked out well.

If I really work at it, I may be able to get rid of a third of my big logs before the government bails on me. A third is better than nothing.

After I moved the logs, I went back to the area by the house and picked up a 12-foot-long trunk. I wanted to see if the Kubota could lift it. No problem. I took it to the gate between the house and the burn pile, and I raised it so I could get through the gate. Then I lowered it again and took it out by the pile. My friend Mike was here over the weekend, and he played with the tractor. He dumped a lot of wood not far from the pile. I decided to add the trunk.

I lifted the trunk, because you have to have the loader up high in order to lower the forks and drop things. Then I dropped the trunk. The rear wheels of the tractor either left the ground or tried to, and the tractor tilted to the left. This all happened very quickly, and then the trunk fell clear and the tractor righted itself.

This was not quite what I was hoping to see.

For a fraction of a second, I wondered whether I was in the process of rolling the tractor over. On myself. My new lesson: avoid dropping heavy objects quickly. I don’t think I’ll need to repeat the lesson. It made a pretty deep impression on me.

Maybe I should start using the safety belt. I don’t want to overreact, but it’s just possible that I need to start buckling it.

The weather here is very nice now. Working outdoors is much easier than it was a month ago. Sadly, there is more dust, because the ground is dry. But I’ll take dust over mosquitoes, sweat, and heat stroke.

I can’t burn anything in this weather. The other day I was near the burn pile, and I used my plumber’s torch to light the grass by my feet. It did not go out. The fire started spreading. Once I was sure it was not going to die down on its own, I stamped it out. My experiment told me what I needed to know. No burning until it starts raining again. Everthing I can’t put by the road will have to sit and molder.

I’m getting better at taking care of this place. I may conceivably develop the necessary skills before the farm disintegrates from neglect. I have chain saws, two leaf blowers, a string trimmer, and a lithium-ion hedge trimmer that has to be seen to be believed. I’ve learned how to kill unwanted plants with diesel. I’m starting to understand how badly the previous owners chose ornamental plants, and what I need to do to fix it. I’ve even boned up on good choices for tree planting. I’m thinking chestnuts, black walnuts, peaches, and maybe a persimmon.

I feel nervous about killing and burning a bunch of plants and trees the sellers clearly worked hard to put here, but it has to be done. I have like eight different types of shrubs around the house. I need to cut back to one or two. I have the ugliest, most oddly situated magnolia trees on earth. They need to be cut down. I have 70-foot live oaks 50 feet from my house, killing the grass and threatening to fall on me. They have to go.

I have three citrus trees, and I’m pretty sure every one has citrus greening. The fruit are disgusting. And what fruit they are. Navel oranges! The Ford Granada of oranges. No juice, no flavor, and hard to peel. Tiny grapefruit. Ponderosa lemons.

A ponderosa lemon is a ridiculous lemon-like fruit which is nearly as big as a grapefruit. People call them lemons, but they have no taste other than tasting sour. In Miami, damaged citrus trees are famous for dying back to trunks which sprout ponderosas. I guess they’re used for root stock. Anyway, it’s a pathetic fruit. I suppose you could use them to add acidity to food.

There are a lot of great citrus fruits to choose from. Best of all, hands down: the tangelo, also known as the minneola or honeybell. It’s like a giant orange that tastes a hundred times better, and you can peel them with your fingers. Another winner: the tangerine. But if you have tangelos, tangerines are somewhat superfluous. Pummelos are great. A pummelo is a gigantic, dry-fleshed grapefruit which is very sweet. Persian limes are good. If you’ve never had a lime grown in a backyard, you have no idea how good Persian limes are supposed to be. Key limes are good for cooking. Kaffir limes produce leaves you can cook with. Ruby red grapefruit are great for juice or eating with a spoon.

Why anyone would pick the trees currently dying in my side yard is a mystery.

I need to have a county agent come out and confirm that they’re sick. Then down they come. Sad, but citrus is being eradicated all over the world, and it’s best to get it over with and plant something else.

There is a new greening-resistant fruit called a Sugar Belle. It’s sort of like a tangelo, but I think it’s more acidic. I may see if I can get a couple of trees. They’re patented, so you probably can’t pick one up at Home Depot.

If you didn’t know citrus was being wiped out by a plague, sorry to break it to you. Enjoy it while you can. The plague is global, so eventually citrus will be hard to find.

I plan to cut some of the hopeless shrubs around this place and put in blackberries and raspberries. I should get on that immediately.

Years from now, right before I die, this should be a very nicely landscaped farm.

I’ll try to post photos next time. Hopefully no gore.