If You Don’t Want Roaches, Take the Trash Out

Derek Prince was an extraordinary preacher. He died in 2003, and I still learn things from him.

Yesterday, I saw one of his videos, and I learned that Yeshua never called Satan “the god of this world.” I didn’t learn that directly from the video. In the video, Prince said Paul (not Yeshua) had called Satan the god of this age, not the god of this world.

People like me believe that God has broken history into distinct ages. I don’t claim to belong to any particular recognized brand of Christianity, but I would say I could be considered a dispensationalist. It appears that the history of humanity, prior to the return of Yeshua, is like a week of thousand-year “days.”

Abraham existed around 4,000 years ago, and it looks like that was the start of the age of the Jews. They were God’s main representatives on Earth. Then came Yeshua, and that began the age of the Gentiles. After this age ends, we get a thousand-year Messianic Age, during which Yeshua is present on the earth in the flesh and rules as king.

God likes the number 7, and it appears to be associated with completeness. Seven days per week. Seven millennia for humanity. Seven Spirits of God. The seventh millennium will be a long sabbath, like the seventh day of every week.

Eight seems to be associated with new beginnings. Jewish boys are circumcised on the eighth day. God saved 8 people during the flood to repopulate the world.

In 2 Corinthians 4:3-4, the King James Version says:

But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost:

In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.

This is not correct. The Greek calls Satan “the god of this age.”

Yeshua himself called Satan “the prince of this world,” not the god.

There is some debate as to whether “god of this age” refers to Satan or Yeshua, but I think it’s safe to say it has to be Satan, because Yeshua is the God of all ages. It would be odd to call him the god of a particular age.

The Greek version of 2 Corinthians 4:4 makes more sense than the English translation. Satan won’t be in power forever. He’s an upstart, and he has to be slapped down eventually.

I believe the two millennia since the crucifixion have been the Age of the Gentiles. During this time, God revealed himself to billions of Gentiles through Christianity. Most Jews were expelled from Israel, the temple was destroyed, the Jews were dispersed, and mainstream Jews haven’t accomplished much of anything in the way of spreading the knowledge of God since before Yeshua. Meanwhile, the handful of Jews who accepted Yeshua and the baptism with the Holy Spirit evangelized millions, and Gentiles who believed them evangelized the world.

I complain to God a lot about this age. Humanity has become like a rotting trash heap. We give power and praise to astoundingly filthy people. This, in formerly Christian countries. We think abomination is good. All fornication is abomination, not just homosexual acts. Cross-dressing, idolatry and witchcraft are abomination. Pride and swindling are abomination. So is oppressing the poor. We are now solidly in favor of most of these things.

Increasingly, we are convinced we can solve all our own problems. We are like the college kids who keep telling us socialism will work if we just do it right. We never learn. We want all the blessings life has to offer, but we want them on our own terms, not God’s. We want sexual sin and pride. We want idolatry and drugs. We want to make up our own rules.

I believe the principle of rapturing doesn’t just apply to the rapture. It’s really just holiness. “But know that the Lord hath set apart him that is godly for himself,” as Psalm 4 says. When God lifts the people who love him off the earth and leaves the rest behind, he will be pulling that which is holy away from that which belongs to Satan.

When God tells you to give up secular entertainment, rapturing you away from it, he is making you holy. When he helps you to hate pride and love humility, he is making you holy. When he helps you spend hours praying in tongues, he is making you holy. He is preparing you for the big jump.

This process also brings you blessings and protection. It puts you inside God’s hedge with him. The word says, “Whosoever breaks a hedge, a serpent shall bite him.”

There is a wall or hedge around you right now. You’re inside with God and humility or Satan and pride. If you’re with Satan, through rebellion and pride, more bad things will happen to you, and you will miss out on blessings. Things that may seem harmless, like listening to secular music or watching movies, can put you inside the wrong hedge.

I think clinging to worldly culture causes things like cancer, dementia, poverty, miscarriage, birth defects, accidents, attacks from criminals, and just about every other type of misfortune. We tend to think bad things should only happen to those who do things like murder, rape, and theft, but there is no Biblical basis for that idea. I think showing your kids Disney videos or watching filthy Hollywood shows and movies will suffice to attract harm.

When Job wondered why his family had been killed and his body had been disabled by disease, he named all the harmful things he had not done. He included looking at young women. Sounds harmless to us, but Job apparently understood that it was dangerous. Try and sit through a week of TV without seeing a woman dressed like a whore.

Job wasn’t ignorant. He lived for hundreds of years. He knew things we don’t know. If staring at young women was dangerous, what about all the other things we consider normal?

At my last two churches, they played secular music to convince the kids Yeshua and church were cool. I wonder how much damage they did. I remember seeing the old fool Steve Munsey dance to Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” on the stage at Trinity Church in Miami. That song is about a woman who had sex with a man in order to get him to marry her. It’s about abomination. Nobody in the Trinity hierarchy heard from the Holy Spirit, so they saw nothing wrong with Munsey’s antics.

This is normal in 2025.

I have found that the more God renews my heart and helps me feel love and empathy, the more I hate this age. I hate the suffering and failure. It makes me wonder how God, who is love itself, can stand it.

We harden ourselves and make ourselves get used to the suffering of those around us. I don’t think God wanted us to do that, but it’s a normal survival skill. We laugh at things that would have brought our grandparents to tears. I’m a huge offender. I made a deliberate effort to cultivate that type of sense of humor. I didn’t think it mattered to God.

I often pray for God to show my family evil. For example, I ask him to show us the worthless people around us, and I ask him to rid us of them permanently. It seems like he has come through. Lately, I have been asking him to show us the Spirit-led people around us, so all the exposure to the others won’t destroy our morale.

People in formerly-Christian nations are pursuing curses now, like never before. We get more and more loathsome. I find it oppressive now. I keep asking God to come now and rule.

John, who was closer to Yeshua than anyone, said this at the end of the Bible: “He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.”

He was talking about the end of this age, which the Revelation describes. It’s about the decline of man, the rapture, the tribulation, the millennium, the battle at the end, and the New Jerusalem. He was telling us Yeshua had said surely, he was coming quickly. Just like me, John said, “So be it. Even so [quickly], come Lord Jesus.” John was sick of this place, too.

I have about had it with this place. I want the rapture to happen now. Today. This minute. Barring that, I have to stay as close to God as possible, because that is the only way to have the blessings, protection, and strength to tolerate this place. It’s like living in a big building with adults who run around smearing poop on the walls and furniture. Enough.

Marvin has had some ups and downs with his medical situation. He got worse a day or two ago, so I had to drive him to a hospital in Orlando. His condition has been a very unpleasant ordeal for me. It has gone on for two weeks.

I prayed on the road in both directions. I was thinking about how miserable this world is and how I still had to stay here for a while. I was trying to have faith for Marvin’s recovery.

I got stuck in a traffic jam on I-75, and I found myself behind a semi. In the dirt on the back of the trailer, someone had written, “Bee [sic] the good. You are ENOUGH! Don’t quit. Pray for my Aunts Susan + Shelly. It’s gonna be okay Love God.”

Cars and trucks were shifting positions, but this truck kept ending up directly in front of me. I had to sit behind it.

It made me think of Belshazzar’s feast. Belshazzar and his pagan buddies were in Babylon, getting drunk using the sacred vessels of God’s temple, and a finger appeared and wrote, “You have been weighed and found lacking.” As my wife put it the other day, “not enough.”

The writing on the truck used the same word. “You are enough.” I took it to mean that though I was not very good, I was doing well enough to get God’s help and make it in the rapture.

I found that and the assurance that things were going to be okay very comforting. I prayed for Aunt Shelly and Aunt Susan, and my wife and I prayed for them again last night.

What Belshazzar went through was like the rapture and tribulation. God’s protection left him suddenly, and he was destroyed.

Today Marv is doing better. I got a call this morning. He’s on a better antibiotic, and he has capable people looking after him. I am planning to move him to UF as soon as he seems strong.

I don’t know when the rapture will come, but the way the walls are closing in, it can’t come fast enough to suit me.

Curb Your White Knight Privilege

It has been a trying month, but things have gotten a lot better.

It looks like I accidentally poisoned Marv, my African grey. He appeared to be at death’s door twice. He spent two nights in the hospital. Over the last week or so, he has consistently gotten stronger and feistier, however.

Yesterday, I heard him fall off the perch. This is not all that unusual for greys even when they are well. They get overly ambitious when they climb. Marv became very weak and wobbly after he was poisoned, however, and it is wearing off slowly. I think this made him fall.

It’s not a big deal when a parrot falls off a perch. Because volume and weight increase with the cube of linear measurements, and strength increases with the square, small animals weigh a lot less for their size than animals with greater linear dimensions. For example, a horse that is two times the size of a pony will weigh eight times as much. Weight is most of what determines how dangerous a fall is, so small animals can fall from great heights without harm. You can throw a mouse off a tall building without hurting it, and a man can survive a fall that would kill a horse. A short fall won’t usually mean much to a parrot.

Still, a parrot can get banged up in a fall if he does it just right. I have seen Marv with little bruises and even black eyes over the years.

During the afternoon, I saw a bulge on Marv’s neck, and I had no idea what it was. I Googled, and my best guess was that it was an air sac rupture. Air sacs are weird cavities in birds’ bodies that connect to their lungs. An air sac rupture is not always a serious injury, and they usually heal on their own, but web sources suggested it was worth a vet visit, so we left the house at about 7:30 p.m. and got back at about 2:30.

Bottom line: it’s probably no big deal. They gave us an anti-inflammatory which I don’t plan to give Marv because it’s dangerous, and they sent us home.

Of course, the vet who saw him didn’t know much about birds. This is the big problem with parrot medical issues. Generally, if you have an emergency, you will end up with someone who isn’t trained to fix the problem. She was able to call other vets, though, so I think we are okay.

Interesting thing: the standard remedy for a ruptured air sac has changed. A rupture causes air to be released under the skin, so your bird blows up in the area of the injury. A small hole in the skin will deflate the bubble. They used to tell bird owners to poke their birds carefully with needles, but now they say to leave the bubble alone, because if you pop it, air continues to come out through the rupture, interfering with healing.

Marv already looks better, but he is still wobbly. He will be seeing a real vet later this week. Best I could do.

I lay hands on him and declare his healing, and I praise God, who said that if we lay hands on the sick, the SHALL recover. Not “might.” God is true to his word, because he is his word, and he is the truth.

I have also been slaving away, fixing the used mower I bought. As noted earlier, the deck has 4 one-inch pipes that hold anti-scalp wheels, and all of these pipes galled to the parts inside them. The seller or the old guy who originally owned the mower used heat to get the stuck parts out of the forward pipes, but it came to me with the rear wheel shafts lodged firmly. I found out when I tried to adjust them.

I tried everything anyone could possibly suggest, other than cutting the pipes off the mower and mounting them in my hydraulic press. That is coming.

Kubota’s design is really, really stupid. There is no room between the shafts and the bores, and everything is made from carbon steel. In a humid climate with temperature swings, water condenses on metal over and over during the year, and on a vertical shaft, it’s going to run downward. That puts it inside the pipe holding the shaft, where even a thin film of rust will unite the parts as though they were welded.

At first, I thought an air hammer would be overkill. I used a sledge, heat, and cold, and then I tried the air hammer, which did nothing. I tried a three-foot pipe wrench. Of course, this was after letting penetrating oil soak in for days.

I ended up drilling the left shaft out, killing my cordless drill in the process. I was using about a 1″ bit.

The drill left me with a pipe inside a pipe. I used a carbide burr, hacksaw, and sawzall to cut the pipe from inside. I ended up putting a punch between the inner and outer pipes, and I hammered to peel the inner one off. Eventually, I heard a clanging noise and saw something brown on the ground. It took me a second to realize it was the shaft. I was so used to feeling like it would never come out, it was hard for me to accept what had happened.

The miserable thing was barely rusted. Just enough to turn the shaft brown. It felt smooth. That was enough to lock it into the mower. It was covered with oil, showing that penetrating oil doesn’t do any good in some circumstances. Most, I would say.

This process involved work done over several days in the blazing sun. I strained my back in the process.

I was hoping to avoid cutting the other pipe support off the mower, but now I am committed to it. I can slice it off, put the whole business on the press, mash the shaft out, and weld the support back on in a day. That looked like a lot of work before I tackled the first one. Not any more.

I have lots of tools, and I can do lots of things, but sometimes it’s hard to take the leap and do what I can do. I know I can cut this part off my mower and put it back, better than before. It still feels wrong, somehow, but I have to do it. Sometimes I tell myself, “If you’re not willing to use your tools, sell them.”

The seller seemed like a very earnest guy, but it looks like he committed fraud. People are disappointing.

The final (!) parts for the mower arrive tomorrow, so there is hope I’ll have it together for the weekend. I hope so. I really do not want to revive the old John Deere.

People on forums are angry with me for saying Kubota’s anti-scalp-wheel engineering is stupid. It’s amazing how people white knight for big companies that don’t care about them, while persecuting fellow consumers they abuse or let down.

Brand loyalty is like a mental illness. If I say Kubota’s engineering is stupid, and you have a good counterargument, it’s fine to present it. Getting angry with me because you love Kubota makes no sense. Kubota isn’t your mother. It’s not Jesus Christ. It’s a faceless company that has no feelings. It doesn’t care about you or anyone else.

I tend to think inappropriate emotional investment in businesses is a sign of both immaturity and low intelligence. You won’t see many septuagenarian mathematicians getting in fistfights in bars because one roots for the Gators (a business) and the other roots for the ‘Noles. It’s the kind of guys who drive lowered pickups with tinted windows, loud pipes, and everything blacked out. The kind of guys who let their rottweilers run loose and get tattoos advertising Harley-Davidson.

That last thing has to be difficult to bear now that Harley-Davidson has become a major promoter of sodomy and cross-dressing.

Here’s something I find weird: people get in fights over the college teams they root for, even though no one in their families has gone to college. I have two University of Miami degrees, and I see a lot of people who clearly didn’t go to college, displaying UM paraphernalia. I have no interest in that stuff, so why should they? I have never been to a UM game, except once when I was in high school. My ultimate Frisbee team played theirs, and they killed us, although they were smoking weed on the field.

UM is a private school, which makes it even weirder. You can say you root for UF because it’s your state’s school and your tax dollars support it, and this would almost make sense to some people, but why root for a private university that doesn’t represent a city, county, state, or nation?

If you bleed green and orange, drive down to UM and ask for free season’s tickets. See how UM feels about you.

If you refuse to talk to your brother-in-law because he drives an F250, there is something wrong with you. You failed to develop to full adulthood. If it makes you mad when someone says Dodge diesel pickups have weak transmissions, you have a lot of growing up to do, but it probably won’t happen.

Getting angry at companies is perfectly reasonable. It’s normal to get angry at anyone who mistreats you. It makes me angry when companies let bad engineering a child can correct slide, causing it to fall on my head. There is no excuse. It also bothers me when a product flaw causes many people suffering and expense, and the company lies and says it’s not a known issue.

Praising companies doesn’t do much good at all, but criticizing them makes them better. They’re not like people, who draw strength from encouragement. Praising companies breeds an entitlement mindset and causes them to take consumers for granted.

People have tried to tell me a consumer should follow the manual and grease the rear shafts on my mower’s deck. Wrong. It’s not in the manual or the shop manual.

They’ve tried to tell me it’s just common sense to grease the shafts, so a person who doesn’t figure it out on his own is to blame when his mower locks up. That is SEVERELY wrong. The engineer is to blame.

1. Good engineers foresee obvious problems and take reasonable steps to prevent them from arising. Kubota didn’t do this. They made their shafts too tight. Other mower companies don’t do this, and their decks last for decades. A tight fit isn’t necessary or helpful.

2. Grease isn’t intended to prevent corrosion. It’s for lubricating moving parts. Anti-seize is the correct thing for galling prevention.

The rear shafts on my deck aren’t moving parts. For lubrication purposes, a part that moves rarely is not a moving part. The shafts have no zerks or journals. If you put grease on one, it would have to be coated by hand, end to end. Grease doesn’t distribute itself on stationary parts.

The shafts only move when you need to change the height of your deck, which could be once a year or never. The shafts lock in place after an amount of corrosion that could easily take place in one off-season.

Some guy claimed a mower would cost $40,000 if Kubota did the things I suggested. I asked him how much it would cost to change a few lines of code on a CNC machine to make the shafts slightly thinner.

He came back with an appeal to authority; his own. I didn’t understand how industry worked, but he did because he had seen it, so I had no right to speak. Removing 0.050″ from the diameter of one part would call for meetings and all sorts of other corporate turmoil. It would cost Kubota hundreds of thousands.

I told him Kubota had designed and built an entire new model after mine, full of changes much bigger than making a shaft thinner, and I asked him why it didn’t cost $40,000.

He got mad and insulted me. I’m not the one who made him walk into a door.

Imagine if the world of industry worked the way he claimed it did. “We’re thinking of replacing the 2026 Dodge Ram with a 2027 model.” “NOOOO! We’ll have to charge $200,000!” Somehow car companies manage to make changes every year. Bigger changes than thinning down one shaft.

My mower’s model comes in two versions. One before a certain serial number, and one after. The price of the mower didn’t change.

People argue with me, not because I’m wrong or rude, but because I gored their sacred ox. Kubota good, therefore anyone who criticize it very bad enemy. Must take down. Sing Kubota company song over dead body.

Another guy got mad at me, saying I was bashing all engineers. I got him to admit he was an engineer.

Engineers are wonderful. Bad engineers and bad engineering are not. I wish I had gotten an ME and an EE instead of a physics degree. I love what engineers do. I admire their accomplishments, but because I said they often did stupid things, which is so obviously true it’s almost a tautology, he felt threatened.

I took my mower’s starting system, which causes many people horrible problems, and I did and published what is probably the only thorough analysis on the web. Thanks to me, people with bad control modules can Google and make their motors run in 10 minutes. I revealed the simple answer to the deck’s galling problem, which other people have dealt with. I found a cheap source for the nylon push rivets Kubota dealers charge $2.60 for, and I revealed it on a forum. Cost: $.03 each. But I’m the bad guy because I won’t run into battle behind the Kubota flag with my chest painted orange.

I don’t care if Kubota goes bankrupt. I just want good machinery for everyone. Kubota can make it, or a company that destroys Kubota with better products can make it. I am not Kubota’s keeper.

I love Kubota products. I should stress that. My tractor is great. My zero-turn is utterly superior to my John Deere garden tractor. But nearly every complex product has flaws, and in many cases, they are stupid flaws, even when the companies that make the products are generally exemplary.

The flail mower I ordered has arrived, and it’s sitting in the driveway. Tomorrow I have to put it together and try it out. I look forward to seeing it run, because the bush hog is crude and difficult to work with.

Meanwhile, the house is a mess. I took the kitchen apart in order to paint, and then Marv got worse, so I stopped. I was in the process of fixing the pool, but I found myself driving back and forth to the animal hospital. The mower problem took up my time. The weather was unbearable for a couple of weeks. I am really hoping I can come back to life now.

Does God Consider This Charity?

I had an interesting experience this morning. I realized a guy I thought of as big-hearted and kind of a salt-of-the-earth person had treated me very badly. I already knew what he had done, but somehow it didn’t affect my feelings about him until today.

His name was Don. He died 5 years ago. He was my dad’s partner. His wife’s name was Claudine. She died a decade earlier. I did a considerable amount of legal work for Don.

Don was eccentric. When I worked for him, he and my dad had separate offices. He worked out of a high rise condo on Miami Beach. A residential apartment. I used to drive there and use a converted bedroom for an office.

Claudine was his office manager. A former IRS attorney, she did not practice. She spent a lot of her time dealing with projects that arose from the death of their son, who was raped, murdered, and dismembered by an illegal alien. She knew John Walsh. She helped police departments get bloodhounds to track criminals.

Claudine was also eccentric.

Don snagged a beautiful client. It was part of a huge European corporation. I think it was Parmalat, but I don’t recall. It’s now part of UBS. The subsidiary that hired Don invested in several expensive high rise condo units, but construction was never finished.

The man who represented the client in America was named Giancarlo. He was a short, wiry Italian guy. Whenever I asked him how he was doing, he would thrust his fist in the air and say, “Like a LION!”

To hear Don tell it, Giancarlo had essentially handed a Miami Beach shyster a 7-figure check based on a handshake, and his employer wanted the money back.

There were boxes of badly-prepared documents. Duplicates. Irrelevant material. Don told me only a lawyer could fix it, so he told me to sift out the junk, dump it, and present him with the rest.

This took days. I sat in that bedroom for hours going through this stuff.

Don and Claudine were both disorganized. I’ll give you a Don story so you will understand.

Don took a trip for a client back in the Seventies. Being Don, he parked his c. 1970 Toronado in a short-term garage at Miami International. When he came home, he did not use his car to leave the airport. I don’t recall the reason. Maybe it wouldn’t start, or maybe his then-wife picked him up.

He kept procrastinating, and eventually, the bill became enormous. MIA kept pestering him. He decided to abandon the car.

MIA would not let him abandon the car. Eventually, he had to pay them a visit, give them a big check, and take his car.

When I worked with Don, he and my dad were no longer part of the first firm my dad led. Don got fired by that firm.

My dad really liked Don, but he eventually had to go along with the rest of the partners when they fired him. Don didn’t record his hours, so they couldn’t bill clients. Don told them he was so good, his value as a resource somehow made him worth keeping anyway. My dad had to explain that nobody was worth keeping if they didn’t generate income.

Because Claudine was lazy and disorganized, she put off checking my hours. When she and Don finally look at them, I had spent a number of full days on the boxes, unsupervised.

Don got upset. He looked panicked. He said he could never get the client, which had extremely deep pockets (especially compared to mine) to pay so much. His solution was to tell them I had spent much less time on the boxes, and I was underpaid accordingly.

Had I been a partner, there could have been some colorable argument that Don wasn’t on the hook, but though I worked as a partner with my dad, I was an associate as far as Don was concerned, so he owed me for every hour I spent.

As an associate, I was an employee. A subcontractor, really, because I was paid by the hour and had no expectation of severance pay if I was canned. If you hire a subcontractor, you pay him, whether you get paid or not. Let’s say you have an AirBnB. You pay someone to paint it because you think a rapper is going to rent it for 6 months. Then the rapper goes to prison for multiple counts of statutory rape. You still owe the painter.

For some reason, I let it go and didn’t hold it against Don and Claudine, and I kept working with him.

On another occasion, a man who owned delivery trucks asked us to write contracts for his drivers. He was a subcontractor for Fedex. Don told me to get to work, but he failed to get a retainer. When I was finished, the client refused to pay, and I got stiffed for 4 figures. Don, not the client, owed me the money, but I got what I got.

I don’t know why I continued working with Don and Claudine or why things remained cordial among us. I will never be able to explain that. I liked Don. I thought of Don as a very good person. I always looked forward to seeing him.

I got stiffed by other employers, and afterward, I didn’t think of them as good people. Why were they different?

My first boss in the legal world was the late Jack E. Dominik, a brilliant but nutty patent attorney. He had a domineering secretary he feared and obeyed. I worked for him as a law student.

One day, Jack told me and another student he would hire us after we graduated, and we would receive $50 per hour for our work, which was very good at the time. We worked assiduously, and I thought I had a good job waiting for me. Then I got an unexpected call from Jack.

He told me my services would no longer be required, blah, blah, blah, best of luck with my career.

I later learned that his secretary had told him to fire me. I was always courteous with her, but she must have seen me as a threat to her domain, so out I went. I learned this from his paralegal, a brilliant Swiss polyglot who understood Jack’s work better than he did. She is one of the most amazing human beings I have ever known. The secretary was just a blob.

The paralegal got an important job at Motorola. She probably runs the company from her desk. It will probably collapse if she quits.

Anyway, Jack owed me money.

We had a system. Our computers were networked. I kept a file in mine. In the file, I recorded my hours. The office manager, a friend of Jack’s daughter, was to go into my computer every so often, collect my information, pay me, and bill clients. The office manager called herself Jenae. It was not her real name. She just thought it was cool.

Jenae did not collect my information. Instead, she spent tens of thousands of dollars on Beanie Babies. Jack’s dollars. I think this was her retirement plan.

The plan did not pan out. Jenai was finally caught when Jack decided to look at his books, and she went to prison. I don’t know who got custody of the Beanie Babies.

When I asked Jack for my money, which was nothing like the cost of the Beanie Babies, he got very upset. He wrote me an emotional letter saying that writing my check made him “sick.” Jack liked money a lot, so this was true. He said there was no way his clients would pay him. Probably not true. Jack was not all that honest, and I suspect he managed to find a way to add my $2,200 to his own hours, which would have been fair, if not quite kosher.

After Jack sent me the money, he softened up and became more cordial. He told the paralegal he should never have fired me, and he said I would make a fine litigator. Well, thanks, I guess.

I didn’t think highly of Jack after this. I thought he was an untrustworthy jerk.

The other law student, Larry, left, too. I think Jack was just too wacky and erratic for him. He ended up working for a big firm farther up the coast.

While working for Jack, I met another lawyer who stiffed me. I did 30 hours of work for his client, I was owed $1500, and I never saw a dime. The other lawyer kept telling me the client was a standup guy who would pay up eventually, but it never happened. The problem was not the client, however, because I never contracted with the client. My agreement was with the lawyer, and he owed me the money regardless of what the client did.

I’m not naming this guy. His law practice is dead, and he may be, too, but for all I know, he’s sitting in a one-room apartment, Googling himself furiously in hopes of suing someone so he can pay his rent.

I don’t think of this lawyer as the salt of the earth. He’s a deadbeat who took advantage of a young lawyer who trusted him and did good work for his clients. He could have paid me.

Diane, Jack’s secretary, made a huge blunder. I was a good attorney, and Jack was about 77 when Diane had me fired for no reason. He quit about 5 years later, I believe. That’s when he stopped filing reports with the Department of State.

He had a disabling stroke in 2005 or 2006, and he ended up dying in California in 2009. I guess one of his kids put him in a facility. He was estranged from his son. Maybe it was his daughter.

I used to know the details, but I forgot.

Diane’s job ended with the stroke. Had she stayed out of my way, I would have kept the firm going, and I would have kept her on as long as she did her job. She had a cushy position in a very comfortable and spacious law office, there were tons of clients, and she could have ridden it into old age instead of setting fire to her own bed.

She should have done everything she could to help Larry and me succeed, but instead, she sacrificed her future for some petty reason Jack did not have the courage to articulate. She probably ended up with a menial job.

It’s interesting that I could have such low opinions of two lawyers who cheated me while continuing to think highly of Don, who underpaid me by much larger amounts, twice.

I forgive Don, Claudine, Jack, Diane, Jenae, and the guy who stiffed me for $1500. They did what they did, though.

If You Care, be the Bad Guy

My friend Marvin the parrot got sick because I made the mistake of using bifenthrin spray on a loveseat that had carpet beetles in it. We bought the loveseat from a place called Koontz Furniture and Design. My wife liked a bigger couch that matched it, and they showed us the loveseat, which was a like-new return.

They said they had taken it back after 6 months. I asked why. They said the customer didn’t like it. I thought that was odd, but their explanation was that the boss was a really nice guy who wanted people to be happy. I was suspicious, but then people here are very nice.

The loveseat was discounted heavily, and it looked unused, so we bought it. Weeks or months later, we started seeing little black balls on the floor around it. I thought maybe a roach was wandering around in the living room, and the balls were roach poops.

I knew nothing about carpet beetles. Eventually, I dug up the truth on the Internet. Carpet beetles are tiny, round, black bugs about the size of roach poops.

I tried imidacloprid on the loveseat and couch, and things got a lot better, but the loveseat appeared to continue to produce some bugs. This is why I tried bifenthrin, a “safe” chemical that leaves a dry residue that kills for months. I have used it in the house for years with no apparent problems.

A lot of spray got into the air, and Marv got sick the same day. Seizures and weakness. Short of watching your baby son die in your arms, nothing could be worse. But God was gracious, as always, and Marv did not die.

He spent two nights at the small animal hospital at the university, and he improved a great deal, so we brought him home.

Then I very stupidly let my wife push me into painting the kitchen. Most of the interior of the house looks fantastic, but the kitchen and two stairwells need paint.

I have told my wife not to nag me. Nagging is evil, and doctors believe it actually shortens husbands’ lives by ruining their cardiovascular health. My wife’s response was to cite the story Yeshua told about the widow who kept bothering the wicked judge until he granted her wish.

That’s not a good analogy. The judge was not her husband, so he was not the king and priest of her house, to whom God expected her to submit. Also, the judge was not subject to nagging all day, like a husband. Finally, she had been wronged, and she was asking for justice. My wife was not wronged.

I told her to knock it off, but I decided to start on the kitchen all the same. The pressure had an effect.

The day after I started painting the kitchen, Marv took sick again. The obvious reason: paint fumes. Birds have very sensitive lungs, which is why canaries used to be used to let miners know about gas accumulations. Marvin was getting better, but his lungs were still unusually sensitive, and he is a bird.

I felt like an idiot, because that’s what I was. I should never have let my wife goad me into doing something dumb. If I had not let her rush me, I would have thought more carefully, and common sense would have told me not to paint the kitchen until Marv was fully well.

Here’s something you really need to know about God: he can’t be rushed, and he does not want his children to be rushed. When someone rushes you, it’s nearly always for an evil reason. If you’re in a burning building and someone tells you to get out fast, that’s fine, but what if you’re at a car dealership and the salesman tells you a deal is only good for 24 hours? Walk. He’s not looking after you. He’s trying to get you to make a decision that will harm you.

A long time ago, I heard God say this while I was with him: “I will not be rushed.” I said it in the first person, but it referred to both of us. He will not be rushed, and he wants me to refuse to be rushed, too. I should have thought about this when my wife was in error, pushing me to do something dumb.

I sprayed the couch because of her impatience. She was pressing me to call Koontz and demand they take the loveseat back. When I finally called them, they said the sale was as-is, but they offered to send a bug guy.

What happened to the nice guy who took furniture back just because customers didn’t like it? He must have retired. Or maybe they took the couch back because the customer found bugs in it, they sprayed it until they didn’t see any bugs, and then they dumped it on me.

Oh, well. A $9,000 mistake and a lesson learned.

I sprayed the couch myself because I was concerned the bug guy might use something that would harm Marvin or my son, and I picked the wrong spray.

If you’re a husband, and you don’t want curses to fall on your house, you have to learn two things. You have to learn that you’re the leader, not a partner. You also have to learn to be willing to be unpopular in your own house. When your wife or child goes against God, you have to stick with God. This is one of your main purposes. It sounds odd, but battling your own wife and children for their own good is one of your primary functions. You should expect it and try to be grateful for it.

I put Marv in our son’s nursery, closed off the air conditioning vent, opened the windows, put towels under the doors, and gave him food and water by hand. My son rarely sees the nursery, so it didn’t matter to him. Of course, I humbled myself before God and used all my supernatural tools and weapons. After two nights of misery (for me), Marvin has perked up and started eating and playing in his water. It looks like he’s okay. I will be babying him for at least a month.

I told my wife to go ahead and put the kitchen back in order, because there was no way I was going to resume painting it until it was safe. I didn’t ask her if this was okay with her. I said this was how it was going to be, end of story, and she was fine with it. She feels very guilty.

Women resist leadership, but they like decisiveness. A woman who will fight a polite suggestion will be completely content to comply with a stern command. The same thing goes for men when they deal with their superiors. No one trusts a leader who cajoles and waffles. It encourages argument and plants doubt.

The truth is that I let my wife down by trying to please her, just as Adam, Abraham, and Moses let their wives down. I let her down, and I definitely let Marvin down. I know God forgives me, but I will never forget what I put Marvin through with my 20th-century feminist brainwashing. The things I saw and heard will live with me for the rest of my life, as they should. I deserve that.

It is inevitable that wives will rebel, but it wasn’t necessary for me to fail to lead properly, so who is more to blame?

I intend to be more forceful from now on. My family is depending on me, and so is Marvin.

Democracy Eats its Children

I sometimes watch Alan Dershowitz on Youtube. For anyone who doesn’t know who he is, he was a law professor at Harvard, and unlike many professors, he has practiced law. He has defended some unpopular people, including Claus von Bulow, Jeffrey Epstein, and O.J. Simpson. People think he’s a bona fide genius. I haven’t seen any evidence of that, but he is at least very sharp.

Dershowitz, as should be obvious from his last name, profession, and accomplishments, is Jewish, and he is an ardent supporter of Israel. That last part is just common sense. Israel is every Jew’s lifeboat.

He has been a liberal all his life, and he claims he’s a liberal now, but he’s fooling himself. He refuses to use fake pronouns. He uses the term “woke” derisively. He criticizes “leftists” constantly, as though there were a credible distinction between “liberal” and “leftist.” I guess he’s saying he’s one of the “good ones.”

He has taken a step a lot of people have taken on their way to admitting they’re conservative: he has left the Democratic Party.

Dershowitz is 86, so he does not have the problem a big percentage of our population has. He knows America has not always been what we see now. He has witnessed an enormous change, and it dismays him. Unfortunately, young people are very uninformed these days. If no one says it on Tiktok, they don’t know it. I recall shocking a millennial by telling him Caitlyn Jenner was a male Olympic Decathlon winner whose picture used to be on Wheaties boxes.

Dershowitz is not happy about the antisemitism tsunami that has inundated the world. He is not happy that our academic institutions, which were havens for Jews for a few decades, are now hotbeds of Haman’s mental illness. He isn’t pleased that so many people attended an anti-Israel protest in Sydney, they covered the bridge that spans the harbor. He is disturbed to see the press repeat Hamas propaganda, uninvestigated, as though it were truth handed down from God.

I would guess that the thing that upsets him most is seeing the Democratic Party turn antisemitic. This was obvious to many people a couple of decades ago. Dershowitz has only noticed it recently, and that after having his nose rubbed in it repeatedly.

I don’t think anyone who saw the famous voice vote at the 2012 Democratic National Convention has an excuse for not realizing the Democrats were against Jews as well as God himself. Far-left eccentric Antonio Villaraigosa led the vote, and the purpose was to have “God” and “Jerusalem” included in the platform.

Villaraigosa and his masters and mistresses expected the vote to be a formality. They thought they would get an overwhelming “yes,” and that’s why they permitted the vote to be televised instead of doing it in private.

The crowed voted “no” very clearly, three times, and boos filled the venue. Villaraigosa understood what had happened, and he was caught flatfooted. He looked around to see if his handlers had any orders for him, to get him out of an awkward position. Then he lied, declaring the ayes had won.

You can’t be for God and also support tearing apart living babies. You can’t be for God and support fornication and perversion. You can’t be for God and hate Jews. This is all pretty simple.

Right now, Dershowitz is complaining because Senate Democrats, including Jewish Bernie Sanders, are calling for America to rethink its support of Israel. They just tried to block sales of arms to Israel.

Sanders used a very telling phrase: “the tide is turning.”

Here is part of his official statement, in which he speaks for the majority of Senate Democrats:

By a vote of 27-17, the members of the Senate Democratic caucus voted to stop sending arms shipments to a Netanyahu government which has waged a horrific, immoral, and illegal war against the Palestinian people.

The tide is turning. The American people do not want to spend billions to starve children in Gaza.

Gazans are not actually starving, as many videos show, and whatever lack they are experiencing is the fault of Hamas, which continues to maintain an immoral, unjustifiable war instead of surrendering for the good of Palestinians. Hamas also loots aid shipments and keeps ordinary Palestinians from benefiting.

What is the significance of the expression “the tide is turning”? It describes the process by which a mob turns against someone. It describes the effects of mindless peer pressure, uncontaminated by information and reason.

In the Bible, bodies of water represent large numbers of voices. Human beings. The Sea of Galilee symbolizes the world. The fish the disciples caught symbolize the saved. When Peter sand into the Sea of Galilee, the purpose was to show that without direct support from Yeshua, it was not possible for a Christian to avoid sinking back into the world and living under its sway.

The Dead Sea represents hell.

There is a flood washing over the world, submerging it deeper and deeper into Satan’s kingdom. It’s a tide, just as Bernie Sanders said.

The spirit of antichrist works through crowds. Crowds are not supposed to rule, but they have a long history of seizing power anyway.

If you have read the Bible, you know God is against democracy. Yeshua is the king of kings, not the president of presidents. He’s not a committee with members selected using quotas to make sure there are enough lesbians and illegal aliens. No one elected him. He was appointed by Yahweh, and the motion was seconded by the Holy Spirit.

Biblical crowds usually did the wrong thing. Two crowds of perverted homosexuals tried to rape men in the streets of Sodom and Gibeah, and the Gibeah mob raped an innocent woman to death. Dathan stirred crowds up against Moses. A crowd made and worshiped the golden calf and danced naked around it. A crowd made the decision to have Israel ruled by a secular king instead of accepting God’s priests and prophets. A crowd voted to have Yeshua tortured to death, after Pilate found him innocent. A crowd stoned Stephen to death. Crowds beat the apostles.

Generally, the good things people did in the Bible were done by individuals, often with resistance from mobs.

Exodus 23 says this:

Do not follow the crowd when it does what is wrong; and don’t allow the popular view to sway you into offering testimony for any cause if the effect will be to pervert justice.

That’s The Complete Jewish Bible’s translation.

Democracy is mob rule. In order to have a voice in the running of a country, all you have to do is be born. You can be a worthless, malicious person. You can be mentally retarded. You can be psychotic. You can be a Satanist. As long as you’re breathing and you haven’t been convicted of a felony in the recent past, you get to rule.

When Bernie Sanders talks about the tide, he is invoking the authority of a great unseen crowd. “Everyone says.” “Everyone is doing it.” “The consensus is.”

That’s the language of Satan, who is the spirit of antichrist; the god of mobs. When you can’t get something evil done on your own, you motivate the crowd, and then it gets done. This explains things like riots, gang rapes, and Kristallnacht.

Drawing authority from the crowd absolves you from blame, and it frees you to act on your ape-like urges. “I looted Louis Vuitton, but everyone was doing it.”

As to the tide of antisemitism, it is going global, and the crowd will win. Like my wife says, “Satan always gets the popular vote.” As a comedian said in a Babylon Bee video, hating Jews is cool now, so antisemites who have been hiding in the shadows are outing themselves.

Whenever you hear the word “cool,” you should be aware it was coined by the spirit of antichrist. It’s a helpful term that assists people in accepting and rejecting things without a serious rationale. Being uncool is scary to most people.

UK Prime Minister Keir “Two-Tier Keir” Starmer says the UK is going to recognize Palestine as a real nation unless Israel lets him dictate its actions in the Hamas war. As dominoes go, that’s a big one, but it should surprise no one. By and large, the British are against Christianity and Christians. Christianity is the main reason there are still any Gentiles who support Israel.

Most UN members recognize Palestine. About 75%. The UK will still be an important victory for Satan.

Dershowitz is fighting antisemitism, and while he claims he’s religious, he’s using the wrong tools: secular opposition. He writes books. He does videos. He makes speeches.

He should be looking for his Messiah, getting to know him, and trying to get supernatural enlightenment and protection for his family and any other Jews who will listen. The secular approach won’t work here any more than it worked in Austria and Germany.

Even the divine approach won’t work. Not because it’s ineffective; it’s the most effective approach there is. It won’t work, at least for Israel and Jews as a whole, because God has already foreseen that it won’t.

Zechariah plainly said all the nations of the world (not just Middle Eastern powers like Persia or Babylon) would turn against Jerusalem. That means Dershowitz is going to lose his war. He also said the women would be raped and half of the city would go into captivity.

Zechariah said that after the future sacking of Jerusalem, which is a larger picture of what happened on October 7, the Messiah would come and fight for Israel, personally. He said the enemies of Israel would receive terrible punishments. Their flesh would consume away as they stood, and their eyes would consume away in their sockets.

Zechariah also said the Jews would then recognize their Messiah, whom they had pierced, and mourn. After that, the Messianic Age comes.

Israel is not going to come around in time to prevent destruction, but there is no reason why Alan Dershowitz can’t accept Yeshua, get to know the Holy Spirit, clean up his ways, and get protection.

Yeshua spoke of this time, saying Jerusalem would be “trodden down of the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled.” That has already happened.

The Greek word translated as “times” is kairos, which means a proper time, like a correct season. It is used to describe times of harvest, and that makes sense, because Yeshua will return when the Gentiles are no longer giving him a big enough harvest of saved souls to justify continuing the age. He will harvest whoever is ripe, and the age will end.

It’s interesting. The Jews enjoyed about 2,000 years as the spiritual leaders of the world. Abraham’s time was around 4,000 years ago, and the crucifixion took place about 2,000 years ago. Since Christianity began, the Gentiles have turned against the real gospel and accepted various Satanic decoy gospels.

To me, it looks like the Jews had their “times,” and now we have had ours.

They blew it. We blew it. But most of us still look down on the Jews and express amazement because they made a mistake similar in magnitude to the one we make every day in rejecting the Holy Spirit. We’re so smart; not like those slow-witted Jews. With all their Nobel Prizes.

It’s about time for Yeshua to return and put things in order. The Messianic Age has to come, and if the past is any guide, it should come after 6,000 years of Biblical history. Right about now, in other words.

When the rapture comes, I hope Alan Dershowitz isn’t still off course, making another useless podcast or writing another unhelpful book.

Weeds and Woes

Times have been challenging of late here at the Armed Northern Florida Compound.

I accidentally poisoned Marvin and had to drive back and forth to a veterinary hospital in Gainesville several times. The zero-turn mower I thought was a bargain turned out to have a couple of problems that will require a lot of work. The temperature has approached or hit the hundred-degree mark nearly every day. And my wife is pushing to get the kitchen painted.

Marvin is fine. He gets stronger every day. What a relief. But the stress took its toll on yours truly. I went out to do outdoor work a couple of times during the last week, and I had to come back in. I felt weak. I was drained.

It made me think of my grandfather. My aunt died in May of 1994; the first of his children to go. My grandfather died in June, after losing his temper at a trashy tenant farmer and running after some cattle that got out. The night after the incident with the cattle, he had a heart attack, and he was gone after a few days. The cardiologist told me her belief was that the stress of losing my aunt caused a lesion of some sort to develop in a coronary artery, and the fracas with the tenant farmer caused it to come loose from the wall and block circulation.

Marvin is just a bird, but I really love him, and he has been with me since 1996. Over the years, I have had nightmares about bad things happening to my birds, and when Maynard died in 2021, one of the things that made it hard to bear was the fact that it was something I had dreaded–irrationally, I had thought–for a long time.

It was like having intrusive thoughts about a big shark behind you while swimming in your backyard pool, and then being bitten.

It’s possible to be hurt more by the death of a pet than the death of a person. It doesn’t mean there is something wrong with you. Different factors determine how any death affects you. I felt very bad when my mother died, but I knew it was coming, my mother was at peace with her fate, there was nothing I could do about it, she had accepted responsibility for all the cigarettes, I had a long time to get ready, and it was not my fault. It wasn’t as painful as Maynard’s death, which was sudden and preventable.

When Marvin started having seizures the other night, it was Maynard all over again, only worse, because I thought he might die in my hands, without even making it to the vet.

I have told my wife about my grandfather, and I told her to go easy on me for a while. I don’t want to push myself too hard too early.

Her prayer life is subpar these days, and it affects my welfare. The baby is an extremely powerful distraction. I am working with her to get her back up to speed. I know I am getting the short end of the stick at the moment, but this is actually normal for husbands. In a healthy, godly family, the husband and father is the one who makes the most sacrifices. Women love denying this and claiming the title of martyr, but men give more than women, unless they are substandard men.

It’s not something to resent. With authority comes added obligation. A marriage in which the woman has to do everything for the man, as though he were another child, is a sick marriage.

The mower has two anti-scalp wheels on the rear corners of the deck. They looked fine when I bought the mower, but I have learned they are stuck in place, and it is obvious the seller knew about it. They are held on two shafts that go down through little pieces of heavy pipe welded vertically to the deck. The ID of the pipe is about 1″. For some reason, Kubota practically made the clearance between the shafts and the pipes an interference fit. Then it made the shafts and pipes from steel, guaranteeing galling in wet or even humid weather. This was very bad engineering. In order to prevent galling with a fit like this, you really have to take the shafts out occasionally and put anti-seize or something on them.

An interference fit is what you have when you have to shove something in order to get it to go into something else. It means the OD of the inner thing is actually bigger than the ID of the outer thing.

Kubota didn’t even put grease fittings on these pipes. The wheels aren’t supposed to turn right or left, so I guess Kubota saw no need to call for grease. It might have prevented the galling.

The shafts have to move up and down in the pipes for adjustment purposes, but they are essentially welded in place. I tried a three-foot pipe wrench, penetrating oil, an air hammer, and a plain old big hammer, and nothing has moved the shafts at all.

I started drilling one of the shafts out. I ended up frying a nice Makita cordless drill after I got to what I believe is a 7/8″ bit. I now have a crude pipe I made myself, inside the deck pipe. I would guess I put 6 hours of work in, in the ruthless sun, bent over most of the time. Not smart.

I can now get a die grinder burr and a sawzall blade in there, so when I feel better, I plan to use both to weaken the remaining shell of the shaft until I can grab it with pliers, bend it, and pull it out.

Then I have to work on the other side.

I also broke one of the mower’s plastic fenders.

The mower came with a fuel problem. When I ran it on the left tank, it choked periodically. To fix this, I had to take the tank off and clean it out. The tank sits under a fender, and the fender is a bear to take off. I found I could loosen the fender and wiggle the tank out, but as I was doing this, the fender split.

I was wiggling it gently, but it looks like the sun had made the fender extremely brittle. The $200 fender, that is.

Now I have two new fenders coming. I could have glued the old fender together, but it would have looked awful, and the plastic would still be brittle. I should have everything put in order in about 10 days. Until then, I have to decide whether to run the mower with one fender and a bunch of stuff missing or fall back on the John Deere.

I have a flail mower on the way. I bit the bullet and bought one. I was concerned about the China tariff deal, not to mention inflation. Every time I have put off a big buy like this, the price has gone up before I gave in.

I need to be able to deal with my weeds, and the bush hog is not the right tool. It’s huge, it’s extremely dangerous, it cuts very crudely, and I just plain don’t like it. A flail mower should cut anything up to 1.5″ woody stems, and it should do it safely, leaving pretty fine clippings, closer to the ground than a bush hog.

The mower I got is a ditch mower. That means I can use hydraulics to extend it to the right of my tractor, and I can also tilt it up 90° for hedges or down quite a bit for ditches. The main thing I like about tilting it up is that it will give me access to the underside so I can work on it without lying on my back or something.

I keep thinking about buying a John Deere 4520 or 4720 tractor from the pre-emissions days. These are supposed to be very good machines, and they have considerably more grunt than my Kubota without being much larger. Maybe next year. Or maybe this year if inflation keeps hammering us.

Used tractor prices have plummeted because no one cares about the pandemic any more. People are going to work and making things and selling them, so getting a new tractor is easy, and that makes used ones less desirable.

I detest John Deere because of the way it treats customers, but I don’t have a lot of options unless I want a Buck Rogers post-emissions tractor. Which I don’t. JD should keep making parts for the 4520 and 4720 for at least another 15 years.

In around a week, I should have my flail mower, and by the end of the ensuing week, my zero-turn should be back together. Then I’ll have a couple of months of mowing before the grass and weeds go dormant, and then I can rest, during the months when the weather is cool and working on a lawnmower would actually be bearable.

Recovery Underway

God has been gracious to me, as always, and my little friend Marvin has come home from the hospital. He is in the piano room eating peanuts and french fries.

I did a lot of research while he was away. The vets could not figure out what the problem was. Offgassing from Teflon pans? Atherosclerosis? Nothing really fit.

He had a huge battery of tests. Everything but a CAT scan, and they still want to give him one in a couple of weeks. They didn’t find out what was making him ill, but we got a ton of good news, because all the tests looked great.

At some point in the process, I decided to look at bifenthrin, a “safe” pesticide I use in the house. It’s a synthetic pyrethroid. I believe the first pyrethroid was pyrethrum, a natural pesticide found in chrystanthemum blossoms. Google and correct me.

Bifenthrin is supposedly safe for pets and people, it kills a wide variety of tough bugs, and it has a residual effect that lasts for weeks or months. Sounds great. But some sources say it’s not all that safe. For example, if you spill it on your skin, it can cause numbness, which is a clear sign that it’s doing something significant. If you inhale sprayed bifenthrin, it acts as a respiratory irritant. It can cause tremors. It is a suspected human carcinogen. It kills mice and fish.

In birds, it can cause anorexia, lethargy, vomiting, and seizures. Exactly what Marvin had.

On the day Marv took sick, I sprayed a couch with bifenthrin to kill carpet beetles. I have sprayed bifenthrin in the house many times, but ordinarily, I just squirt around the baseboards. When I sprayed the couch, I had to shoot a good deal under each cushion and on the underside of the couch, so a lot evaporated into the air.

Bifenthrin is supposedly completely safe to birds when dry, although that isn’t true if they manage to lick something you’ve sprayed.

I also sprayed an insect growth inhibitor called hydroprene, but I couldn’t find any online source saying it was harmful to birds. The SDS says the inactive ingredient in the can is petroleum distillate, so, more or less, WD-40 or mineral spirits. The SDS says not to inhale it, but I think it means not to huff it. I’ve never heard anyone say it was necessary to be careful around petroleum distillates. Just the usual “well-ventilated area” language.

The remedy for inhalation is to give the victim fresh air and put him in a position that makes for comfortable breathing. It says to get medical help if he has difficulty breathing. If. Nothing about medical help otherwise. The manufacturer clearly is not very worried about the effects of incidental inhalation.

During these past few days, I have dreaded hearing from the animal hospital. I got mad at my wife because she used her phone to call me from across the house at a time when I was afraid the vet would call with bad news. I was very disturbed when I heard it ring. By God’s grace, today’s call from the vet was very encouraging. Marv looked as well as he had the day before when we left the hospital, and that meant he looked miles better than he did when we first took him to the ER. On the first day, I don’t think anyone there was optimistic about his survival. I think they expected the worst.

She was very concerned about Marv, as though he belonged to her. She said it would be great if we could drive up to see him, because he did better when we were around. To me, that showed she had a good attitude. She seemed to feel we were doing her a personal favor when we tried to help Marv. Of course, I was extremely concerned about him and eager to do whatever I could.

We made the trip to Gainesville, and before I saw Marv, I picked up an order of beef tallow fries at Steak ‘n’ Shake. I stole a couple, and they were delicious. Canola should be illegal. Anyway, the plan was to get Marv to eat and drink, and I knew fries were very close to a sure thing.

They brought him out, and he looked much better than he had the day before. There was a big difference. He was alert. The previous day, he started to fall asleep several times during our visit.

He was standing. He reacted to us. He groomed himself and performed parrot behaviors consistent with pleasant excitement.

He started peeling and eating fries. He drank a lot of water. He had to receive fluids intravenously during his stay, so drinking water was a sign of great improvement. To me, he seemed to be at about 75%. The day before, I would have said 40%.

His right leg has been weak since he got sick, but today he balanced on it and ate fries he held with his left foot.

Without prompting, he climbed out of his little travel cage and stood on top. That could never have happened two days ago.

The hospital people did something extremely considerate. They gave him a beautiful platter of goodies. Cheese, mashed potatoes, bird pellets, bird seed, zucchini, blueberries, broken cheese-and-peanut-butter crackers, apples, and oranges. Everything cut in little pieces. I was very touched. Marv, however, only ate fries. Takes after me, I guess.

He talked a lot. He received a lot of petting and poking.

They decided to send him home with us, so now he’s here recovering. We put his cage in the nursery because it’s the only convenient room that can be shut off from the area where the bug-spray couch sits.

He has been shelling and eating his own peanuts. He wouldn’t do that at the hospital. I couldn’t even get him to finish a shelled peanut.

There is no reason to think the bug spray will harm him now, since it has been dry for several days, but the vets recommended keeping him away from the couch, and if I do what they say, I will sleep better. I am considering buying camicide, a pesticide people who raise birds use. Upstairs, bifenthrin should still be fine.

To be honest, I don’t think the vets helped him a lot with their knowledge and skill. I believe the main benefit was getting him hydration and an incubator. It may have helped to get him away from the house and the pesticide fumes, but I think they were long gone by the time he got sick. It looks like God provided the answer through me, not the vets.

I prayed and blessed a lot while Marv was away. I relied on a Bible verse that says those who believe will lay hands on the sick and they shall recover. For some reason, I thought Peter said this, but it was Yeshua himself, and he said “shall,” not “may.” And he didn’t say anything about limiting the sick to people.

I thought about the parable of the man who killed another man’s pet lamb. When David heard about it, he said the man deserved to be put to death, and if there had actually been such a man, David, who was a man after God’s own heart, would have had him killed. Clearly, God loves our pets, so there is no reason why he wouldn’t heal them.

From now on, Marv will be getting sun a few times a week. I will try to improve his diet. I’ll hang out with him more.

I don’t know if anyone who reads this blog prayed, but if you did, I truly appreciate it. God alone healed Marvin and brought him home to me.

VIP Service. Make that “VVIP”

Today my wife and I drove to Gainesville to take food to Marvin, my parrot friend who has been ill since night before last.

This morning, I got a bad report. The vet said Marv seemed somewhat worse off than the day before. I discussed the situation with her. We talked about ways to stimulate Marv’s appetite.

I asked what they had been feeding Marv, and she mentioned seeds, carrots, tomatoes, and greens.

Very discouraging. I had to tell her Marv would turn down those vegetables regardless of his condition. I expected this, however, because the vet is a lady, she works at a university, and women and university employees lean left. Leftists are very self-righteous about food, and they project their own beliefs onto others, sometimes including animals.

I mentioned the possibility of trying meat, which Marv loves. Unsurprisingly, the vet made a wild claim, saying African greys were essentially “vegan.”

This is an old wives’ tale. Parrots are omnivores. African greys mainly eat seeds in the wild, along with other plant parts, but they also eat bugs and carcasses. They have been seen swarming on dead animals.

I said Marv liked yogurt, but she said parrots were not set up to eat dairy foods. Other vets have specifically recommended yogurt for birds, but okay.

I made rice with butter and salt, and I stirred a couple of eggs into it. I shelled some roasted peanuts and put them in a bowl. Off we went to visit Marv.

I was praying and commanding healing and so on most of the way up.

I appreciate everything they’re trying to do for Marv, but I am concerned that their prejudices may harm him.

They put us in an exam room. While we waited for them to bring Marv out to us, I was tense. Yesterday morning, he was in a bad way, and they had said he was worse today. When he came out, he looked a lot better than he had the previous morning. He was standing. He was alert. He talked. He wasn’t throwing up or seizing. He didn’t have poop stuck to his feathers.

They left us with him, and I took a spoon and fed him a tablespoon or so of the rice mixture. He wasn’t voracious, but he ate willingly. I got him to eat a tiny bit of a peanut. They brought some peanut butter on a spoon, and he ate a small amount.

I got to rub him and pet him and tell him what a great bird he was and how he had been a blessing to me all of his life.

When they came in to check on us, they were surprised to hear him talking. I guess he had been quiet since we left yesterday. He asked for food, saying, “Here you go, Marv.” He thanked me with his thank you noise. He said “bird toy” a few times. I think this is his new name for me.

I had to pick him up because I needed to smell him. When birds get fungus in their crops, they smell sour. He smelled like a hamburger. When I put him back in the cage, he surprised me by climbing on top of it. He could not have done that yesterday morning.

I didn’t want to pick him up, because he was somewhat weak and wanted rest, but I thought it was important.

I anointed Marv’s beak with oil and laid hands on him. We prayed for his healing, and I told God I believed his promise. He has said that if we lay hands on the sick, they will recover.

We got a call maybe 90 minutes after we left, and the vet said he was still relatively energetic. He didn’t crash from exhaustion when we left.

I keep saying “he.” Marvin laid a surprise egg two years ago.

That’s the situation. We had lunch at PF Chang’s. The Gainesville location is excellent. Now we’re at home, and Marv is still receiving care.

They didn’t look at Marv’s poop until today. I persuaded them to do it. Ordinarily, it’s the first thing a vet does. We are waiting for results.

They shot an antibiotic into him yesterday or today. I can’t recall. I think they should have done that at the start, because it was unlikely to do harm and could have turned out to be a quick cure. But I’m not a vet, so I am guessing.

From the natural standpoint, things are bad, but not clearly dire. I am approaching the situation from the supernatural direction as much as possible.

They now think he could have been poisoned by fumes from nonstick cookware. The old wisdom was that it was safe around birds unless it burned, but now there is suspicion that it can do cumulative harm even if you use it correctly. I find it hard to believe it’s the problem. I wouldn’t expect this issue to come on suddenly, over a few short hours.

When you smoke every day for 60 years, you don’t wake up one day with COPD or a huge tumor. When you drink too much, you don’t develop cirrhosis in a day. The vet says Teflon causes lung burns. Well, surely if Marvin had large lung burns, we would have seen some kind of evidence earlier. Generally, when you hear about birds being killed by Teflon, it happens over a few minutes because someone left a pan on the stove.

We didn’t do anything extraordinary with Teflon the day Marv got sick.

As far as I know, a burn is an acute injury, so it doesn’t sound like it fits Marv.

They’re shooting in the dark, to be honest. They are checking every angle, hoping something pays off. I think Marv has some kind of infection or ate a ball of rat poison or something. We recently had a mouse intrusion, and the mice stole rat poison and moved it around the house. I believe we kept Marv away from it, but I could be wrong.

I sprayed a piece of furniture with a bug product, and although Marv was never close to it, I suppose it could have affected him. The active ingredient is harmless to birds, but the carrier may not be.

I hope my little pal comes home tomorrow, and that we are able to give him at least 20 more years of improved care. God is kind and forbearing, and if he loves me, surely he loves Marvin. I remember how angry he got at the man in the parable who killed a pet sheep.

If you prayed for Marv, thank you and may God bless you.

One More Chance, Please God

This is a tough day.

Marvin, my sweet little feathered buddy of 28 years, had some seizures last night. I had to hold him and consider the possibility that he was dying in my hands. Seizures can be caused by things that are reversible, like low calcium levels, but they can also be caused by worse things.

I did what I could for him last night, and he pepped up and started playing with his toys, but in the morning, he was weak, so I took him to the animal hospital at the University of Florida in Gainesville. That is where he is now, having tests and receiving care. I have been praying and commanding the illness to go. I have been speaking blessings over Marvin.

My county is extremely conservative and full of Christians. Gainesville is different. A typical university town, it is a hotbed of white-hot socialism, Trump Derangement Syndrome, DeSantis Derangment Syndrom, imperialist feminism, perversion, wicca, and, presumably, antisemitism.

My wife and I got into the car with Marv, and of course, our son had to go, too. The people at the hospital took a long history and started work quickly. They were very nice to us.

I was highly distraught last night, and I was only a little less upset this morning. Having harm come to one of my pets has always been one of my worst fears. I lost my cockatoo, Maynard, 4 years ago, and it was very, very painful. Now Marv is having problems.

It’s terrible when something you have feared and fought to prevent for decades comes to pass.

I speak blessing over Marvin twice a day, and we include him in our daily prayers. I try not to do anything to open myself or my family to dangerous spirits. I think this is the best a human being can do.

When we left the hospital, my wife asked me if I had noticed something. She saw several women who helped us, including a veterinarian, and every single one had a huge septum ring hanging out of her nose.

She didn’t see the receptionist, who was an older woman. I believe she didn’t have a ring.

Anyway, it was very disturbing to be told that 80% of the women who helped us had these off-putting ornaments. They looked like they belonged to a cult. It really bothered me. I felt like I had just discovered that I was living in a horror movie.

A septum ring is supposed to be a way of expressing your individuality and your contempt for conformity, but in reality, nothing says you’re a conformist like a septum ring.

My son, true to form, blew out in his car seat, so my wife had to use the “family” restroom to clean him up. There was a women’s room and an everything room, but there was no men’s room. I suppose that was a deliberate insult.

My wife was hungry when we left, so we went to a nearby pizza place. It was a dirty little place with good reviews.

We had to stand to order, and then we filled our own drinks and waited for the food. When I got our drinks, I couldn’t find the straws. The lids had weird openings in them, much larger than would be needed for a straw. I realized the obvious, but hoping against hope, I asked where the straws were, and a young black man behind the counter told me they weren’t allowed to put them out where people could see them. He said, “It’s kind of weird.” I nodded and told him I understood.

While we were waiting for our food, a couple of big young ladies in long dresses came in and sat near us. The dresses were very similar. The kind of thing you would imagine Auntie Em and her friends to wear back in Kansas. I think they may be called prairie dresses.

The women were not good-looking, and they had big feet. They didn’t appear to be wearing brassieres. They had fairly large breasts that needed, but lacked, support. One of them was wearing what I would call gladiator sandals. They had no makeup on. One of them had sideburns, which I failed to notice at first. I thought she had just combed her hair down in front of her ears.

They looked bizarre, dressed so oddly and so similarly. Like they had just escaped from a Mormon commune.

Soon after they came in, my wife let me know they were both men.

This shocked me. Ordinarily, trans-whatevers are obvious. I wasn’t in the mood to be observant, and I guess the sagging breasts fooled me.

The smaller guy had a great big septum ring. I believe the other guy had one, too, but I’m not sure.

A feeling came over me. It said, “This world is lost.” I realized my family lived in a precious bubble. There are children of darkness where we live, but the Christian population is very large, and the wicked haven’t been able to take over. It’s an unusual place. Gainesville is more typical of America. Although it’s small, the university’s presence gives it a culture like a big city. Most Americans live in and around cities, and almost all cities are lost.

No men’s room. No straws unless you ask for them. A hog ring in almost every nose. Men proudly wafting around in frumpy cotton dresses with little or nothing underneath. This is my country now.

Importantly, such people control the university; a type of portal just about every American is required to pass through if he ever expects to be successful and accepted. Going to college has become like joining the Freemasons. It’s like becoming a Mormon in Utah. You don’t have to do it, but expect to be blackballed if you don’t.

American kids think they have to go to college, even if they’re going to become cops or Burger King managers, and nearly every college is controlled by perverts, socialists, witches, minority members who hate whites, antisemites, militant atheists, man-haters, America-slanderers, backers of Islamist terror, and every conceivable type of pagan. “You want your child to be a success? You have to give him to US first.”

It’s like putting your baby through the fire to Moloch, except the baby comes out alive with a diploma that entitles him to a fair shot at employment as a fungible cubicle occupant.

America is done. It is absolutely finished. It’s nice that Trump won, but it doesn’t mean the climate or the trend has changed. If the Democrats hadn’t put two vegetables in a row up against him, we would be looking at a fourth Obama term. America will probably elect a Democrat in 2028.

I told my wife we have no place in this world.

I had this feeling that our situation was like living in America while we were at war with Japan, supposedly in the Pacific, and suddenly noticing that people around us here were Japanese and looking forward to taking over.

I told her about the plot of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

People have decided they don’t need God in order to have pleasant lives. Worse, they have decided God is an obstacle. They have decided he is evil and that the world will progress and suddenly make a great leap forward (to borrow a phrase) when the world is rid of Christians as well as Jews.

Somehow Muslims aren’t considered problematic, in spite of mutilating girls’ genitals with kitchen knives, beating women for going outside with their faces uncovered, and murdering and hypocritically raping homosexual men.

I don’t know why the people we saw bought septum rings, apart from conformism. Maybe one or two of them think they’re close to God, and adopting a signature adornment of the children of darkness was just error. But seeing so many of them made me feel as though I were in a horror movie, waiting for someone to send an attack signal through the rings and yank the wearers into battle by their noses. A huge swarm of nose-ringed Agent Smiths.

To say I felt left out was an understatement.

It’s normal for younger people to make the mistake of altering their dress and appearance to upset older people, but it is very strange to see so many of them choose exactly the same ornament, as though they were threatened with prison time if they didn’t comply. Back in the Sixties, young people made all kinds of ill-conceived fashion and grooming choices, but there was way more variety. There was no single accessory nearly everyone felt compelled to wear.

While I thought about these things, I thought about the way my prayers have changed. These days I keep saying, “Yeshua, please come back and rule the world.” I want to cavalry to come save us. The waters are rising around us, and I don’t know how we are supposed to carve out futures for ourselves here. I don’t want us to become like Christians in Rome under Nero and Domitian.

As I was thinking about these things, I started to feel great peace about Marvin. I want Marvin to come back home and spend more years with us, but on the other hand, this world is a very bad place, and if God has decided Marvin should not have to be here when things get worse, then that’s how it is. Even a bird should not have to suffer here more than is necessary.

In somewhat-related news, I heard from my aunt the other day. The one who has been so abusive, and whom I believe uses the stubborn unsold remains of my grandparent’s estates to enrich herself and her family. She called about selling an inconsequential piece of land.

She couldn’t have been nicer. She behaved as though she had never attacked and insulted me, and she clearly expected me to act as though it had never happened.

I was polite.

She wanted to know if I still had my wife, which was a jarring question.

Now that I think about it, I guess it makes sense. I think her has been married three times. I have met three wives. There may have been others for all I know. Adultery and divorce are like musical chairs in her area. In most places, you ask a man how his wife is doing. In Eastern Kentucky, you ask if he’s still married to her.

My wife will have to sign things in order for the lot to be sold. Ostensibly, this is how she came into the conversation. My aunt asked if she were here with me. In America, I think she meant.

She asked about children, and I told her we had a son. She asked for photos, so I sent a couple, and she said he was “the cutest baby,” which is actually true. She asked if she could forward the pictures to her daughter, which was fine by me.

Before she hung up, she said it was good talking to me.

That could be the Parkinson’s talking for all I know. She has admitted she has some dementia because of it, and maybe she doesn’t remember insulting me and telling me she was going to do whatever she wanted with my inheritance regardless of my wishes. Strange thing for a fiduciary to say.

She likes bragging about her family; people whose relationships with me she helped end permanently. She told me she had an enormous grandson who was being recruited by Harvard for football as a high school sophomore. Harvard actually does that, although Ivy League schools don’t offer athletic scholarships.

My aunt’s family has had the misfortune to fall under the spell of Catholicism, the quasi-pagan and dominant branch of nominal Christianity. Her daughter married a Catholic, and my aunt converted. The city where my cousin lives has several prominent Catholic high schools dedicated to producing pro athletes, which is an extremely perverse goal for a Christian organization.

I don’t believe or disbelieve her. I don’t know what the truth is. This is the same aunt who said her daughter was likely to become Miss Kentucky, which wasn’t anywhere near true. She also said her son had been accepted by the University of Michigan’s prestigious law school when it was actually the University of WEST Michigan, which is the single worst law school in America. He ended up going to the second-worst.

Maybe the boy really is being courted by Harvard. This is not a school known for good football teams, so it wouldn’t be that remarkable if a big, smart kid who was playing pretty well in the 10th grade seemed like a fine prospect. They can’t get really good athletes because they all go elsewhere.

My understanding is that his dad is an accomplished individual and a good family man.

It amazes me that any Christian allows his son to play high school or college football, and no Christian should be in the NFL. Football takes a toll on the body, it causes brain damage, most players don’t get rich, most who get rich lose their money, it develops negative character traits like aggression, competitiveness, materialism, and pride, and it subjects players to armies of aggressive sluts. Combine all this with the fact that college and NFL football only exist because of gambling, and it’s a very unwholesome picture.

I thought about the horrible atmosphere at Harvard. I would not be happy if Harvard wanted my son. I want him to have a business and investments, and I want him to have a wonderful Christian wife and Spirit-led friends. I don’t want him to be tormented and assimilated by sick, vicious freaks for three years and eight months at my great expense.

She said another grandson was getting degrees in anthrolopogy and archaeology. I said, “I guess he’ll be a professor.” I thought that sounded positive.

Try and imagine a field more worthless and anti-Christian than anthropology. And archaeology sounds like employer repellent to me.

I had to take anthropology as an elective while I was getting a physics major and a math minor, and I found the whole business contemptible. The professor taught us made-up, implausible, unclever theories from a thin paperback text, and my studies for the entire semester took up less than one day. The final was a multiple-choice test. I got an A for breathing. Physics took about that much work every week. Physics was so hard, math seemed like a gut major in comparison. I spent about 4 hours a week doing homework for multiple advanced math courses, and I put in several times that much work for physics.

These things I say are literally true. Even good physics students are often unable to finish their homework, and my math courses, while hard by college standards, at least generated homework people could reasonably be expected to complete in a few hours a week.

With math homework, you quit when you know the problems are solved. With physics, you quit so you can get three hours of sleep before showering and going to class. You hope everyone else did as badly as you did, and usually, they did.

At the University of Texas, as a grad student, I asked my quantum professor about a particularly hard problem he had given us. I found it so hard to finish the math, which, I believe, was a long string of vector operations that would be easy to fumble, I bought a program called Mathematica and made my computer do it. I didn’t know if the result was right. I felt panicked.

He told me he hadn’t been able to do the problem. He asked me what I had come up with. True story.

His CV says he got his master’s at Cambridge with first class honors. Cambridge is where Newton and Hawking worked. Couldn’t do the homework he assigned.

His name is Fitzgerald. He’s still there. I should fly out there and egg his house.

Anthropology is just gossip, like the Talmud or the theories aborigines made up around campfires to explain their universe to their children. Giving your life to it is an appalling waste. It’s an insult to God, like playing golf. It says you have no idea how valuable your time here is.

It’s like going to college to become a phrenologist.

It also challenges the creation story, which is factual.

I’ll give you an example of anthropological science. You can Google to find out the actual details so you can repeat them in a comment as though you’re smarter than I am, although I’m actually just too lazy to check. A theory named after someone who may be named Hanson or Hansen says that people close to the equator have dark skin and long limbs, while the opposite is true in colder regions. Well…Eskimos. Mongolians. Thais. Indonesians. Slavs. Scandinavians. Amazon Basin Indians. See if you can see how they violate the theory. That’s some great science, that is.

Archaeology is a legitimate field of study. My main problem with it is that every time shaky research tends to discredit the Bible, it is lauded as proof, and then years later, the research is always discredited, after the damage is done. And academics who have been shown up don’t make any effort to inform the public. People keep quoting their nonsense decades later as though it were fact.

By its very nature, archaeology is incomplete. We have only dug up a tiny fraction of what’s out there. But archaeologists love to draw firm conclusions based on fragmented evidence.

These fields are bad choices. You shouldn’t pay for your kids to throw away years of their lives so they can become Uber drivers or do data entry, which is where liberal arts people often end up unless they become academics and try to join the opposite sex. Or they go to law school.

My mother got a degree in social work, so she had to become a realtor. You know those people you end up talking to when you call Mastercard about a charge you don’t recognize? Liberal arts majors.

If you want to have a revealing conversation, get together with a bunch of college graduates at least 35 years old and ask them what their majors were and what they do for a living. See how many of those history majors became historians. See how many of those philosophy majors became professional philosophers.

I don’t know this grandson. His name was not familiar to me because my family’s interest in including me in anything dried up and fell off years ago.

The family I loved and treasured lives only in my memories. He must be my aunt’s son’s son. I don’t know his siblings’ names or how many of them there are. I couldn’t pick him out of a lineup. I hope he finds a career that pays well. We prayed for my aunt’s whole family last night.

College should serve some purpose, but I would estimate that for most kids, it does not. I think most college kids major in fecklessly-chosen dead-end fields. The lofty notion that learning for its own sake justifies college rings a little hollow when the learning can cost half a million dollars and leave you years older, penniless and in uncancellable debt, filling out applications at Marshall’s and Walmart.

Liberal arts degrees made little sense even before the Internet, but now you can stuff your head with all sorts of knowledge all day for nearly nothing, so why would you pay someone thousands to tell you what Huckleberry Finn and Pride and Prejudice were about? And then end up not reading them and cramming from Cliff’s Notes.

Before I gave up secular entertainment, I saw some clips from a movie called The Company Men. It’s about a company that built ships. The white collar employees weren’t brilliant naval architects and engineers. They were unremarkable people who did work anyone could do. Negotiation. Sales. Submitting TPS reports.

Future AI targets.

America’s manufacturing base collapsed. Nobody wanted to build ships in America. The company cut lots and lots and lots of jobs.

Ben Affleck played a young executive who made 6 figures, had a nice house the bank owned, drove a Boxster the bank owned, and belonged to a country club. He was cocky. He thought he was important and too valuable and just plain wonderful to fire. Then they canned him without warning, and after being rejected by a long list of potential employers, he ended up getting a pity job from his brother-in-law, a carpenter.

I watched this movie and thought, “What do you expect to happen when you get paid a ton of money to do a job anyone else can do? What do you expect to happen when you’re not remarkable, you got a liberal arts degree, and you never developed any actual skills or learned anything useful?”

If this were a real company, the people who had important skills and knowledge that couldn’t be picked up in a month by a random Circle K clerk would have kept their jobs to the bitter end. If the company had gone under, other companies would have gone after them. They wouldn’t have chased the sociology or art history majors.

A doctor can always find work. An accountant can always find work. A guy who writes conjecture-filled papers about Sumerian poetry is not so blessed.

To circle back around to the point, I don’t see how anthropology and mainstream archaeology could have any importance to a Christian. They promote all sorts of faulty anti-Christian notions, and to make it in these fields, you pretty much have to buddy up to people who hate your religion. I don’t think an informed Spirit-led Christian could want anything to do with these fields.

My cousin the lawyer is not Spirit-led. That is obvious. The most reasonable guess is that his son is far from God and never had a chance to get to know him. I have a feeling law school is in his future.

I feel extremely distant from my family. They live in a different universe. Nearly all of them are in real trouble, but they don’t know it. I wish I could help them.

When my dad died, I took his ashes to Kentucky to be buried. He had an astonishing testimony of conversion and reconciliation with God. At the sparsely-attended viewing, I told the whole story to my cousin the lawyer as well as his wife and another male cousin. Didn’t make a dent. My aunt wasn’t there, but I’m sure I told her the story by phone, and she only got worse after that. One cousin visited me for Christmas the following year, and I baptized her in my pool, so I have hope for her.

I have heard from the animal hospital, and at the time of the call, Marv was perking up. They had run a number of tests. Marv had eaten a little. They seem to expect him to make it through the night.

What a privilege it has been, owning that sweet little bird. I have been a miserable excuse for a caretaker. I hope God sends Marv home to me so I can do better and better every day.

Stop Touching That!

The crown prince keeps making advances faster than we expect. Every new step brings a mixture of joy and pain. We want him to develop and grow to be a man, but I am going to miss this baby a great deal. Once he’s gone, he is gone for good.

Today I awakened, rolled over, and saw a big toothless smile about 6 inches in front of me. My son was as happy as a groupie watching Mick Jagger step out of a limo. And he was lying on his side!

My wife was reluctant to push him to roll over and lie on his stomach, so he has not been quick to develop in this area. He did not learn to roll quickly. She finally admitted her mistake and relented. He yelled and thrashed a lot, but he eventually decided to man up and learn.

This morning, he outdid himself. He lay on his back between us, and when he wanted attention from one of us, he would roll in the appropriate direction. He kept going back and forth. It was a great thing to see.

His mom says he plays with her now. He pokes and grabs her and waits to see her reaction, as if she were the baby.

We just got him a sippy cup, and he sometimes takes a little water. He has started choosing what he wants. Sometimes he insists on feeding from his mother. Sometimes he wants milk or formula from a bottle. Now he is also trying to get water. He seems to demand solid food instead of liquid from time to time.

He pushes things away when he doesn’t want them.

We have to watch him around baby wipes. Our practice has been to drop one over his crotch during diaper changes to block surprise attacks, but now he likes to grab them and chew on them to get the liquid out. He can also tear them. My wife found a piece of one in his mouth a day or two back. I hope that was the only piece he managed to cram in there, because it was all we found.

He looks like an adult sometimes. He gets quiet and looks very serious while he does things, as if he is thinking hard. He seems oddly mature until it passes and he starts screaming over nothing.

Last night, he only woke up once. His mother was very pleased. She now has hopes she will be able to sleep so her memory starts working again. I am tired of closing the refrigerator door for her.

I am cautious about making biased-parent predictions, but I think he is going to be very, very smart. These days, medical science and other fields related to childrearing are shaped largely by political concerns, not evidence, so it is fashionable to say kids who develop early aren’t necessarily smart. You’re also not supposed to say a baby’s intelligence is related to the size of his head. But if you dig into the subject, you learn that babies who develop quickly are likely to be smarter as adults, and there is a relationship between head size and intelligence. My son keeps passing milestones fast, and he has an enormous melon on him.

He seems to have high social intelligence. That’s good. Nobody wants a math nerd who repels women, moves to a cabin, and mails people bombs.

When I was a baby, my mother was in a drugstore in Tampa, and I was with her. An old Jewish man looked at me and said, “He’s going to be brilliant. He has a big head.” I love that story. A blessing combined with a staggering lack of tact. Maybe he was just trying to make her feel good about my appearance.

My son inherited a big head, and I hope the God of the Jews will put something good in it.

Wanted: a Machine That Sews Ralph Lauren Horses on Baby Clothes

The crown prince keeps surprising us.

My son is now in his 6th month, which means he is not yet 6 months old (for those who didn’t pay attention in math class). A couple of weeks back, he started imitating us.

He was already smiling back at us. I don’t know if that’s imitation or not. His new thing is imitating hand movements.

When he was maybe a month old, I decided infancy was no excuse for laziness, so I started doing what I call “the math game.” I made a circle with my hand and said “zero.” I showed him one finger and said “one.” You can probably guess the rest. If not, send me an email.

This is one of his favorite things on earth. He glows with a kind of ecstasy when his parents play the math game. He grabs our fingers like he is touching something miraculous and awe-inspiring.

I don’t know why I call it a game, since all he has to do is lie there.

A couple of weeks back, if memory serves, his mother told me he was trying to make numbers with his own hands. I thought she could be giving him too much credit, but I was open to the possibility.

Today I was making red chicken curry, and the boy was watching from his swing. I kept talking to him and acknowledging him because I know he craves my attention and feels rejected if I do something like walking through a room without talking to him.

I looked over, and he was trying to get my attention by holding his left hand out and extending various fingers at me. He was not able to do numbers, but he was varying the fingers he showed me and looking at my eyes to see how I reacted.

I have no idea whether this is normal, but it surprised me. He can’t talk. He can’t walk. He doesn’t seem to know his face is like my face, because the only expression he repeats back to me is a smile. But he knows his hands are like his parents’ hands. I guess this is easier to figure out that facial expressions, because he can see his hands, but he can’t see his face.

He is also sitting up, sort of. If you sit him down on a flat surface, he will eventually flop over and give up, but if you sit him against something, particulary in a corner with good support, he is happy to remain in a sitting position and play.

Still no crawling. I don’t think he’s trying. He climbs up his mother’s side in bed just fine, but I don’t think he has motivation to try to crawl over any kind of distance, because he never has to.

He seems to have passed out of the phase where he stuck his tongue out at everything. It made for some great pictures. He is now in the phase where he screams at the top of his lungs just to hear himself. He loves it. It sounds like someone being tortured, but he does it when he’s very happy.

He scratches himself. Particularly his crotch. I hope he quits doing that soon. When the diaper comes off, the scratching starts.

The other day, he tried to make his mother shut up. At least we think he did. We were doing something we are not supposed to do. We disagreed about something in front of him, and his mother was getting a little loud. He reached up and tried to shut her mouth, more than once. Or at least it looked that way.

Solid food is going okay. He has reacted to at least one food by turning red. Hives. His digestion seemed to bother him yesterday, so we decided to give him most of a day with nothing but milk and formula.

I hate formula, but keeping up with this kid is not easy. He keeps growing, and he is taking in more calories than ever. The other day, I grabbed one of his hands, and I realized it wasn’t the tiny baby hand I had gotten used to loving. It was like a big, thick pork chop. His weight has more than doubled, and he has grown over an inch per month.

Lugging him around in parking lots and businesses is getting difficult. Between him and the hefty car seat, it’s like carrying a big suitcase. His mom uses carriers a lot now; those sling things that wrap around the mother’s body. We are going to have to get real and start taking the stroller with us.

His personality is wonderful. He loves us intensely. He stares at us. When I sleep, he stares at me and smiles because when I snore, he thinks I’m talking to him.

He likes people. He smiles at them and finds them fascinating. The other day we ate at a restaurant, and he sat facing another table. A couple was seated there. When I picked him up to leave, the husband told us they were not okay with him leaving. They had been having a pantomime conversation with him while we ate.

He still cries a lot. I think he hates being away from his mother. When he has something to do, he forgets about her, but that lasts 40 minutes, tops. Then he wants what he probably sees as the rest of him back.

She spends a huge amount of time with him. Too much, I think. I find her lying in the bed in the middle of the day, flying him around over her like an airplane. We have a recliner for nursing in the corner of the bedroom, and she must be spending 8 hours a day there with my son sitting on her. I have been making her get dressed and leave the room, and he usually leaves with her.

He is crazy about his mother, and the feeling is mutual. She sings him songs she made up. “Changing Baby’s Diaper.” That’s a major hit. The other day I found a $500 American Express charge for Ralph Lauren baby clothes. We had to have a chat. She loves dressing him up.

I complained to some female friends, and they backed my wife up. I should have seen that coming.

I didn’t know there were five hundred dollars’ worth of baby clothes on Earth. My wife is now on a spending moratorium that goes well into next month.

He wakes me up. He can’t wait for me to wake on my own. He gazes at me and waits. I hear his noises, and I look over and see that radiant, overjoyed face staring at me, like I’m the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I grab him and play with him, and he thinks it’s fantastic until he abruptly gets hungry and starts crying for his mother.

He is trying to talk, but it’s all gibberish so far. I suppose we will hear a real word very shortly. It should make me happy, but I’ll be sad because he’s such a wonderful baby. I want him to grow up to be a man, but I also want to keep the little guy we have right now.

He has been chewing his toes for quite a while. Ever since he could get at them. I don’t know if he knows they’re his.

He’s in a crib now. He got too tall for the bassinet. We shoved the crib up beside the bed where the bassinet had been, and now we have to think about the day he will move to the nursery and we won’t have him with us all night.

Every time he does something new, I feel a mixture of joy and sadness. I wonder if parents look forward to having second children because they miss the baby experience.

I have said I didn’t know what I did to deserve such a wonderful baby, but the truth is, I know I didn’t do anything. I didn’t get what I deserved. I got an extraordinary gift in spite of all the evil I had done.

We are involving him in prayer now, so we expect him to consider this normal, and we believe he will know God personally early on. We pray he will be saved and baptized with the Holy Spirit early on. We can’t guarantee that he will be a man of God, but I believe he will. He’s getting help we never got.

Sometimes You’re Smarter Than you Think

I bought my Kubota diesel mower because I just plain felt like it. I like diesels. I like diesel everything.

But I my heart felt like it because my brain, not to mention my hands and sore back, had dealt with all sorts of problems with engines running on ethanol gas in my unusual climate. It rusts parts. It clogs carburetors unless you watch it carefully and fool with the machines no less often than once a month. It goes bad and makes engines run poorly. Electric ignition is also a likely source of aggravation. A diesel has no spark plugs.

I have suffered and spent a lot because of gas problems. I can’t count the number of times I have been unable to do an important, urgent job until I did something about an engine crippled by gasoline. I gladly paid a hundred dollars for a single gallon of gas treatment. I have probably spent $2,000 on electric yard tools in order to have options in time of need. That should show how miserable gas made me.

My brain also knew diesels lasted longer. Diesel pickup engines often go 600,000 miles before being rebuilt, and then you start the clock over.

My heart didn’t like the fact that gas engines had to run hard in order to get anything done. It just felt like an inferior way to do things. A gas mower runs at about 3,600, and a diesel runs at around 3,000. I thought the difference was bigger, but in any case, a gas engine has to spin faster to generate torque.

When I was mower shopping, I was offered a very good commercial gas mower, new, with a 35-horsepower motor, for around $13,000. I almost bought it. But I kept thinking. If a used diesel mower costs thousands less and will run the rest of my life without big problems, and it won’t have the gasoline curse, why should I buy gas?

I wasn’t sure what to think.

One of the reasons I was perplexed was that I knew professional landscapers bought a lot of gas mowers. And people on the web throw this up as proof that diesels aren’t better and don’t save money. I wondered why pros used gas when it seemed undeniable that diesel had to be better.

And if diesel wasn’t better, how did any company ever manage to sell a diesel mower, given the big cost difference?

One day in the recent past, a thought came to me. Maybe the reason pros used gas machines wasn’t because they made economic sense. Maybe they used them, and I am sorry to put it this way, because the kind of people who end up mowing yards for a living are not all clever about money.

If you’re good with money, you could very well end up in the yard business. You could end up owning 50 mowers and commanding 25 crews while you sit behind a desk in a comfortable office drinking XO brandy, but you’re not likely to end up owning one or two mowers and a trailer and doing a big part of the work yourself. And this is what most landscaping companies look like. In fact, I can’t think of a single landscaping company that has a fleet. I can’t recall hearing of any.

The issue kept bouncing around in my head, and I checked around. It turns out I was right.

Most yard guys either can’t or won’t put up $20,000 for a diesel mower when they can get similar speed and cut quality from a gas mower for $13,000. They also tend to trade mowers in, which is a bad economic move, at 1,000 or 1,500 hours.

When you trade something in to a dealer, you’re giving it to someone who has to make a profit. He will never give you full retail value because he can’t. He can’t swap mowers even. He would go out of business.

You never trade anything in unless you have no choice or you’re so rich you don’t care. You sell.

A commercial gas mower is pretty nearly the same thing as a commercial diesel mower, except for the engine and maybe different pulleys to accommodate higher engine speeds. A good gas mower will be just as sturdy, apart from the motor.

When your gas mower starts acting up at 1,500 hours, it has to be because it has a gas engine, not because the other parts are worn. If the engine lasted as long as a diesel, you would probably be able to run the mower for 3,000 hours without risking breakdowns and shop time that would hurt your business.

I think pros who get rid of low-hour gas mowers (low for the bodies, not the engines) do it because they don’t want their machines to die suddenly on the job and require new motors. This is highly likely after 1,000 hours. If your gas mower croaks when you need it, and you decide to put a new engine on it, you will be out of business until it’s fixed, and that will take days. You will lose income. You could lose customers.

On the other hand, a pro who buys diesel in the first place should be very confident until at least 3,000 hours, and at that point, he should be able to get over $5,000 for it. A retired $1,000-hour gas mower will bring around $3,000 in a private sale (less if traded), and the landscaper will miss out on 2,000 valuable hours of use he would have gotten from a diesel.

On top of that, diesels save their owners on fuel because they burn less. And they have to be filled up less often.

Most yard men are not in a position to buy mowers with cash. It’s a lot easier to finance a $13,000 mower than a $20,000 mower. Even if it costs more in the long run, you can only buy as much mower as your cash or credit will allow.

I think gas mowers are much worse investments for professionals, but I believe they buy them anyway because they generally lack judgment and/or capital. I think a lot of them are buying things like bass boats, cruise and Disney World tickets, bar drinks, restaurant meals, and other lifestyle items they really can’t afford, and this makes the capital problem worse.

This is normal for working Americans in jobs that draw people who haven’t done much to train themselves for good careers. I think most of them have big debt loads, and a big percentage have negative net worths.

My mother taught me that the rich pay less for everything, and as a generalization, it’s true. The rich don’t rent-to-own $400 couches and end up paying $800 after interest and fees. The rich buy stuff that costs more up front but ends up costing less. The rich don’t live on credit card debt. They don’t get student loans. They can pay cash for things and get cash discounts.

They don’t buy cigarettes one at a time outside Korean groceries.

My mother was a realtor, and she told me Jewish parents with kids at the University of Miami got their kids free housing. They were buying their kids condos instead of paying rent. The condos appreciated, and they could, of course, rent rooms to roommates. After college, they had accumulated wealth while everyone else had paid rent, paying off their landlords’ mortgages and increasing their wealth. Free housing, plus equity other people paid for.

Back in law school, I knew a student who paid his tuition with American Express. It didn’t cost him any more than using cash, and he got a lot of points at $11,000 per semester. I do the same thing with my medical insurance. They don’t give cash discounts, so American Express is better.

I pay my bill in full every month, so I don’t pay interest. There are people out there paying 18% annually to credit card companies on top of their premiums because they have no choice.

I knew another student who bought a convertible Camaro with student loan money. His friends called it “the Ferrari,” because they figured it would end up costing him as much as one. I remember hearing students talk about loans. They would say it was a bad idea to order pizza, because it would end up costing $40.

The main lawyer I clerked for in law school owned his office because he could pay for it. He rented it to himself, and this reduced his taxes, in addition to making him richer through appreciation. This is what my dad planned to do back when we had hopes of having a firm in our own building. I knew other lawyers who paid rent and didn’t get anything but tax deductions. My boss died with a net worth somewhere north of $10 million (after a divorce) that he admitted to, and knowing him, he probably hid a lot. He had a huge motorsailer and a twin-engine plane, he drove a Jag, and he did not deprive himself of much of anything.

My grandfather owned a huge amount of real estate because people knew he had money, and they went to him when they needed to sell property in a hurry. He was able to give them cash and get good prices, and they were happy to do business with him. If he had been in a worse position, he would not have been able to buy distressed properties fast.

When I had nothing, I bought a car at 11% interest. That’s how poor people get things. At 11% per year, the interest alone was 55% of the principal. To a person with a net worth, it was a $13,000 car. To a person with nothing, a car like that could cost over $20,000, depending on how much was financed.

It’s seems odd that people with less pay more, but it does make sense.

I am not good with money because I don’t study it, and I have wasted a lot, but I’m not completely hopeless. I can tell the difference between a $6,000 lifetime lawnmower and a $13,000 lawnmower that loses over $1,500 in value as it leaves the dealership and may end up costing $19,000 because it has a motor that won’t last.

I don’t know why I didn’t pay attention to my own common sense. In this world, it’s very important not to assume other people know what they’re talking about.

Like I always say, Oprah Winfrey gives people dieting, marriage, and parenting advice. Enough said.

You Can’t Stop the Signal

The clouds have parted. Today I got my Kubota mower to start and run normally. Sort of.

When I bought the mower, the seller had no trouble starting it and putting it on his trailer. Then it started acting up on me, and then it quit starting altogether.

For reasons I consider stupid, this mower has a very complicated starting system. I can’t imagine how much worse it would be if it ran on gas.

You can’t just say, “It won’t crank, so it’s part A.” A given problem could be caused by any of several bad parts. I decided to start out by looking at fixes that were easy and/or cheap and/or highly likely to work. When that didn’t work out, I got systematic. I studied and worked with AI, and I came up with 5 possible problems. There are others, but these were highest on the Occam’s Razor list.

I wrote out a list of problems and the ways I should approach them. Then things got worse and worse. I would work on one problem and find out it didn’t help. Then I would work on another one and get the same result. All this time, the list was dwindling, I was suffering, and I was getting closer and closer to the most expensive problem on the list: the mowers $330 electronic control module (“ECM” or “controller”).

Everything has to be computerized these days. My toaster is computerized. It’s not clear WHY everything has to be computerized, but it’s definitely true. Don’t question it.

Cars are full of computers now, and the disease has spread to small ag and landscaping machines. As you probably know, these computers cost a lot, losing one is a crippling blow, and manufacturers stop making them after a while, so you could end up with a useless machine simply because the computer is no good.

Somehow tractors and mowers used to run without computers, but trust me; they can’t run without them now. Just believe. Don’t think.

Originally, I thought my controller was important. I thought Kubota would not put it in a machine unless it did important things. It turns out I was totally wrong about that.

I thought the controller managed everything. Engine speed. Gauges. The transmission. Whatever. Because who would have an expensive, proprietary controller made if it didn’t do important things?

Last night, I went deeper into the starting mystery. I got out the schematic for the system. I wrote up my own analysis. You can read my analysis and understand everything about the starting system.

What I learned was annoying. The controller serves only two purposes. It prevents the mower from starting if the lawyer switches aren’t just right, and it also tells the mower to shut down when you turn the key to the off position.

I’m not kidding. It’s totally unnecessary. You can make the switches and the shut-off solenoid do their thing with analog parts of the kind Radio Shack used to sell.

CORRECTION: I forgot to mention the third function of the controller. It runs a horn that goes off when the mower overheats. You can rely on this to protect your investment. Or you could just look at the temperature gauge once in a while.

The key tries to send a signal to a relay. If it succeeds, the relay relays the signal to the starter, and the mower starts. The controller butts in and decides whether the relay is allowed to send the signal. If even one of the 5 safety switches is in the wrong position, your mower goes nowhere.

A relay contains an internal switch. The controller operates the switch, and the switch sends the signal to the starter. If you short the switch terminals, you cut the controller out of the game. It has no say. It’s like an enraged Karen, screeching at you from behind foot-thick glass. The mower starts and runs.

Shorting is exactly what I decided to do. I need to mow my yard regularly without long breaks due to starting problems. The weather is like the weather in an air fryer. I don’t feel like spending another week or two covered in mower grease, removing and installing parts and finding out it doesn’t help.

Because I always have wire and spade connectors around, like a normal person, I made a short wire with a spade on each end, and I shoved it into the receptacle the relay ordinarily goes into. The mower started and ran like a champ.

The safety switches did not work, so I had to be careful not to do obviously-stupid things. I didn’t start the mower with the transmission or blades engaged. I didn’t jump off the mower while it was moving and lie down in front of it. Things like that. It was challenging.

When I was done, I had to get off and push a little lever on the engine to shut it down. Whew. That was hard. The lever is always exposed, and it’s easy to reach.

Will I ever get around to putting the safety switches and key shut-off in order? Maybe. It should be very simple with cheap components.

If the controller is no good, I don’t think I should replace it, because it costs a lot and could go bad again, and I would rather not depend on Kubota to keep making them. Parts prices keep skyrocketing, and that’s another factor. If the mower can be made to work without a controller, I should fix it so it doesn’t need one.

I don’t want the parking brake switch because I can’t understand why it exists. Why do you need the brake to be on when you start the engine? With the brake off, the mower could roll downhill, but then it could do that whether you start it or not, and if it’s going to roll downhill, you should notice this before starting it, because the mower will be…rolling downhill.

The other switches make some sense. You don’t want the mower starting in gear or has the blades engaged, because it’s bad for the mower and makes you feel stupid. I don’t think that little starter will successfully crank the engine when the transmission or PTO is engaged, though. That would be some starter.

Because you sit on the front of the mower, the seat switch is a good thing to have. It is possible to fall off and land in front of the mower, and without the switch, it could keep on going, and then you would be julienned. The seat has a belt, though, so it’s not like the switch is necessary.

My John Deere’s seat switch shuts the motor off when you dismount, no matter what. That’s horrible. The Kubota only shuts the motor down when the blades are engaged. That’s fine. That’s how it should be done. The mower shouldn’t quit every time you have to get off to move a stick. You should be able to stop the PTO and leave the motor running.

I can make a circuit to shut off the fuel with the key. It’s more complicated than jumping the starter relay, but it’s not hard, either. Or I could just install a shopmade cable that allows me to pull the shutdown lever from the seat.

Bypassing the controller will never, ever cost me any useful function, but it will save me the horror of trying to test it, as well as the horror of paying for a new one if the old one is bad.

Why did Kubota make the controller? They must have had some reason for making an expensive, unrepairable part that does things cheap, easily-repaired parts can do.

Figuring out whether the controller is no good is not easy. Wire connections inside the plug and receptacle can fail. The ground can fail. Relay problems and ignition switch problems may look like controller problems. Kubota’s workshop manual doesn’t list any ways to test a controller, so their mechanics don’t know how to do anything with them.

I guess you can turn your ignition key and see if the controller sends a signal to the starter relay, but it could fail to do that because of a well-hidden problem in the wiring harness. That happened to one guy who wrote about it on the web.

In order to be sure the controller is bad, you really have to buy a new controller, plug it in, and see what happens. If the mower runs, the controller was bad. If not, you learn nothing at all, you still have a puzzle to solve, and you have a dirty part the dealer won’t take back.

The controller is dumb. That’s what it boils down to. It protects Kubota’s lawyers and does nothing a simpler set of components can’t do.

One great thing about learning that the controller is idiotic is that it tells me my fuel-delivery problems have nothing to do with the controller. The mower was slowing down and almost stopping, randomly. I looked this up, and a bad source told me it could be caused by a bad controller. This is not true. It might be true in a car or some other machine with a real computer, but it’s not true in the case of Kubota’s rinky-dink lawyer toy. The controller can’t affect the fuel supply unless it cues the shut-off solenoid at the wrong time, and if it did that, the mower would stop, not slow down.

I thought I needed new fuel filters, so I ordered some. On a recommendation, I also put Clear-Diesel in both tanks. Today, the right tank ran like a Tesla on cruise control, but on the left tank, the mower slowed down. That tells me the fuel in the left tank is probably bad. If the filters were bad, the mower would run badly on both tanks.

I don’t know if Clear-Diesel will help the left tank. If not, I can always dump the diesel in the woods. I mean in a proper receptacle.

I ordered new relays because one of mine tested bad. I later learned the reason it tested bad is that the manual is wrong. It told me to expect an impossible resistance across two terminals. I think the Japanese guy who wrote the Japanese manual also wrote the English manual, and I think he was drunk the whole time.

In case anyone else out there has a ZD326 or ZD331 that won’t start, I’ll paste what I wrote about the starting system. You can find the workshop manual online in PDF form. I don’t promise what I wrote is correct, but I promise it’s a lot better than your wild guesses.

KUBOTA ZD326 STARTING CIRCUITRY

Some of this material is repetitious because it makes it easier to understand. Wire color codes follow at the end.

OVERVIEW

The starting system’s main parts of interest are the ignition switch, ECM (controller), starter relay, starter (includes solenoid), two NO motion lever safety switches, one NO seat safety switch, one NO PTO lever safety switch, and one NC brake safety switch.

N=normally. O=open. C=closed. “Normal” means the mower will not start.

PURPOSE OF ECM

The ECM’s only purposes relevant to starting and running are 1) to monitor the safety switches and either agree or refuse to tell the starter relay to start, and 2) to power the relay that shuts down the mower. When the key is turned to the stop position, the ECM closes the shut-off relay for about 10 seconds, cutting off fuel.

The ECM also makes the horn blow when the mower overheats, but there is an independent temperature gauge on the control panel.

The ECM does not do anything essential, like making the engine run correctly. It can be bypassed completely if necessary. The ECM is not likely to fail, but if everything else has been checked, and the symptoms are consistent with ECM failure, it has to be replaced. It can’t be repaired without extraordinary effort.

A failed ECM can cause the mower to refuse to crank or stop. A failed shut-off solenoid can prevent the mower from starting and stopping, but it can’t prevent it from cranking.

A bad ground or other connection can simulate ECM failure.

The ECM has 9 connections.

OR = positive from PTO switch
BR = positive to starter relay coil
GB = positive from left motion control lever switch
WL = power to shut-off solenoid.
B = ground
YR = positive from seat switch
RY = positive from ignition switch terminal AC
WB = positive from brake switch
RW = positive to shut-off relay coil

RELATIONSHIP OF IGNITION SWITCH TO ECM

The ignition switch has a rotating conductor (terminal B) which is turned by the key and always hot. It is always connected to the R positive wire. When turned to any position other than off (glow plug, start), it is in contact with terminal AC, which can be considered the ignition’s ECM terminal.

Terminal AC is connected to the ECM (controller) and all safety switches (motion lever, seat, PTO, brake). The motion lever switches are in series, so 13 (right) is connected to RY and AC, and 14 (left) is connected to the ECM, providing positive input. The path goes AC-RY-left switch-right switch-ECM.

NORMAL START PROCEDURE

To start, close every switch except the brake switch (levers at rest, PTO off, operator in seat), and open the brake switch by applying the brake. Turn the key partially, letting the glow plug heat if needed. Then turn to the start position and hold until the engine starts.

BYPASSING SWITCHES

The brake safety switch is normally closed (NC). All others are NO. Because it’s NC, the brake switch can be bypassed by pulling the connector and covering it. To bypass the other switches, you have to jump them.

HOW IGNITION SWITCH WORKS IN GLOW PLUG POSITION

When the ignition switch is turned partially, it first connects hot terminal B to both terminal AC and terminal 19. Terminal AC feeds the ECM via the RY wire, and terminal 19 runs the glow plug lamp and glow plug.

Terminal 19 is not significant for starting, running, or stopping the mower. Current goes through terminal 19, the lamp and plug, and then to ground. The mower should start and run fine when 19 is out of commission unless the glow plug is needed.

IMPORTANCE OF TERMINAL AC AND RY WIRE TO STARTING

The RY wire that goes from terminal AC to the ECM sends signal through all safety switches along the way. The safety switches all get positive from RY.

IF TERMINAL AC IS BAD OR WIRE RY ISN’T LIVE, THE MOWER WILL NOT START BECAUSE IT WILL ASSUME A MOTION LEVER SWITCH OR THE PTO SWITCH IS IN THE WRONG POSITION.

THE ECM HAS A SINGLE GROUND, AND IF IT FAILS, THE ECM WILL NOT WORK, CAUSING STARTING AND STOPPING PROBLEMS.

HOW IGNITION SWITCH WORKS IN START POSITION

When the ignition switch is turned past the glow plug position, it disconnects 19 and connects hot B to AC and terminal 50 (BY). Terminal 50 feeds voltage through the BY wire to the starter relay. If the relay is closed, the voltage goes out through the BW wire to the starter solenoid. This is the voltage that tells the starter solenoid to turn.

The starter relay is closed by the ECM (not the ignition switch) through the BR wire. The current exits through the relay coil to the B wire (ground). Don’t confuse the B (black) wire with the ignition switch B terminal.

To start the mower, the ECM needs to see safety switch positive at YR (seat), OR (PTO), and GB (left motion lever in series with right). It needs to see RY positive next to the brake switch WB input. If it sees positive at the input from the brake switch (WB), the mower will not start. WB should be neither positive nor negative when the mower starts. No input.

STARTER RELAY

The starter relay is #6 in the manual’s diagram. It connects to BR (ECM), BY (ignition positive, terminal 50), BW (positive signal to starter), and B (ground) wires. It has 5 connections, one of which is not used. It switches between two poles; off (87A, dead) and on (87, BW). In the rest state, the switch connects the dead pole. Terminal 87 is the BW wire which goes to the starter solenoid.

Terminals 85 (BR) and 86 (B) send ECM juice through the coil. They are connected to the BR (ECM hot output) and B (ground) wires. The B wire is not important for analysis, since it never changes. A positive input has to be connected to BR in order for the relay to close, and the ECM does this. BR exits the ECM next to OR, if the schematic is any indication.

When the relay closes, it connects the relay switch’s BY wire (positive input from terminal 50) to the BW wire that feed the starter solenoid. This starts the mower.

On the schematic, from top to bottom, the starter relay connections are:
1. ECM – BR
2. Ignition switch – BY
3. Starter – BW
4. Ground – B

Jumping BY and BW should bypass the ECM and start the mower without harming anything. UPDATE: I tested this, and it works just fine.

The shut-off solenoid can also be set up this way, but you have to put in a timer or a momentary switch, because if the solenoid is always trying to shut off when the key is in the stop position, the battery will drain.

The manual shut-off lever is easily reached at the right rear of the mower.

TESTING RELAYS

All three relays on the mower are the same. You can test resistances to see if they are working. The manual’s test resistances are wrong.

Resistances: 85-86: ~90 ohms (coil)
87-87A: infinite
87-30: infinite
30-87A: 0 ohms

REMOVING IGNITION SWITCH

Use a pin spanner to turn the outer switch cover to unscrew it. Remove the cover over the motion lever arm switch. Remove all screws from the control panel so it is loose. Push the ignition switch down under the panel, pull it out between the panel and fender, depress the tab on the connector, and remove the switch.

DISASSEMBLING IGNITION SWITCH

There are two tabs on the sides of the switch housing. Pull them outward while pushing up on the key cylinder (keyhole). It helps to put a small object in a vise and rest the key cylinder on it while you pull the tabs and push the switch down.

By comparing the ignition wire colors to the switch’s terminals, you can figure out which terminal does what and how to check resistances to see if the switch is good. Removing oxidation from the copper contacts can reduce excess resistance.

WIRE COLOR CODES

B black
BR black/red
BW black/white
BY black/yellow
G green
GB green/black
L blue
LW blue/white
OR orange
ORL orange/blue
P pink
R red
RB red/black
RG red/green
RL red/blue
RW red/white
RY red/yellow
V violet
W white
WB white/black
WG white/green
WL white/blue
Y yellow
YL yellow/blue
YR yellow/red
YW yellow/white

That Little White Thing Behind the Grass is my House

The Kubota mower saga continues. The mower which was supposed to be my deliverer has become my captor, forcing me to spend hours and hours working on it. Yesterday I had to come up with a new strategy to fix it.

Clearly, this means I have to discuss Richard Feynman.

Being smart is a good thing, obviously, but it has its drawbacks. It can actually cause you to behave stupidly in practice. If you go through life figuring things out effortlessly or having answers just come to you, you can find yourself floundering when a puzzle is actually challenging, because you haven’t done what less-intelligent people do when confronted with hard questions. You haven’t come up with logical strategies to solving problems. As a result, you may find yourself struggling with problems people with less brains cope with more easily. You sit there waiting for answers to come, cycling through ideas that have already failed, like a bear pawing at a combination lock.

Richard Feynman claimed his IQ was 125. And Oprah claimed she lost like 150 pounds in about a month without drugs. Feynman had an impish sense of humor, so I guess this was one of his little jokes, intended to upset less-intelligent people who knew their IQ’s were up in the 180 range and make them wonder how Mr. 125 had left them in the dust.

I don’t think his IQ was 125, but I think that if it had been, he would have punched above his weight because of his approach to thinking.

I read a story he wrote about ants. He saw ants marching around in a dorm room, and he started asking himself why they did certain things. Using bait and some other handy objects, he was able to do several experiments and uncover some pretty remarkable facts about ants. He was systematic. He developed logical approaches. He didn’t sit back and think, “I’m a genius, so I’ll know the answer in a minute regardless of what I do.”

I thought about that story yesterday after a most miserable day working on my new mower in the heat and roasting sun. It was starting intermittently when I got it, and then it just plain quit, and I had to start hot-wiring it.

When I looked for answers, I decided the smart thing was to take care of the easiest and/or most likely and/or cheapest fixes instead of getting into a lot of diagnostic drudgery. If they worked, great. If not, I would have new parts in my mower which couldn’t hurt anything and might help it stay running longer without problems.

This kind of approach only works when you get lucky, which usually happens for me, but in this case, didn’t.

Having suffered considerably in the process of replacing two safety switches that were likely to have failed but actually hadn’t, I decided to change course and take the Feynman approach. I went to AI sites, I looked at the workshop manual, and I tried to make deductions and formulate a plan.

I came up with 5 problems that could prevent a mower from cranking. The seat switch had been bypassed, and the crude, bubbastic bypass connection could be failing. A safety switch on the brake, the PTO lever, or one of the mower control levers could be bad. The starter or solenoid (one indivisible package) could be bad. The starter relay could need replacing. Finally, the ignition switch could be no good.

It was also possible the mower’s electronic controller needed replacing, but that was too unlikely to consider at this point.

By the time I made the list, the switches on the PTO lever and brake had already been replaced needlessly, and I knew the starter and solenoid were fine, so I moved on. I tried to come up with a smart sequence of things to look at.

The seat switch splice had to be my first stop because it could get me going in 5 minutes. It seemed likely to be the problem because the mower had started once after I moved the seat. It was also an extremely simple fix. Find the splice and redo it with a wire nut. Tools not required.

Number two: the starter relay. This was not as likely to be the culprit as the safety switches, but checking it with an ohmmeter was a 10-minute job requiring the ohmmeter, a wrench, and a screwdriver.

Number three: the safety switches. The remaining switches were not nearly as hard to replace as the ones I had already worked on, but they were harder to deal with than the relay, so I would leave them for later. Testing them would be simple. They had to be open for the mower to run, so I can just disconnect them.

Number four: the ignition switch. Kubota didn’t make a point of creating handy test points for people with bad ignition switches, and getting the switch out to test it is unpleasant. I could test it by opening a connector on the wiring harness to expose a couple of conductors. That would be more pleasant than removing the switch, but still unpleasant. The switch worked fine in every position except the start position, so I figured it was probably okay.

Today I identified the starter solenoid by the colors of the wires going into it, and it took me two minutes or so to get it out. The manual lists the proper resistances between the terminals, and the relay failed one test. I went to Ebay and ordered three new relays (the mower uses the same kind of relay for three things), and they are on the way. They’re $10 each, and if one has failed, the others could be on the way out.

Will the new relay get my mower running? No idea, but it should. I can test my theory by moving one of the other relays to the starter position. One relay only controls a horn that goes off when the mower overheats, so I can do without that for a few days.

I should have switched the relays after testing the bad one, but what can I tell you? It’s hot outside. Feynman would be ashamed of me.

If the relays don’t help me, I have to test the safety and ignition switches, and after that, I have to consider the possibility that a $332 controller has bitten the dust. I think I tested the relay correctly, though, and the mower can’t start if it’s bad, so I have every reason to think I will not need a controller.

I caused myself a lot of very unpleasant and unnecessary work by guessing at the mower’s ailment. If Feynman were here, he would have gotten where I am in two days. Nobody could do it faster except someone who is familiar with Kubotas. Two days is how long it would take to understand the starting system, including an hour or two to come up with a plan.

I should try to take the Feynman approach to problems from now on, during what little remains of my life. Prayer first. Then research and logic. I can’t get back all the hours I’ve spent nullifying my intelligence by hoping answers fall out of the sky, but I should be able to benefit to some limited degree.

The Rapture Starts Within You

Today is an unusual day. The alarm baby failed to go off. I had to wake up on my own.

Usually, at least an hour before I want to wake up, I hear burbling and cooing sounds behind me, and I roll over to see a little head about 6 inches away from my face, with two happy little eyes staring right at me, like I’m the sky and it’s the Fourth of July. It’s the heir apparent, who has yet again conned his way out of the bassinet and onto the bed.

After this comes a certain amount of squeezing and poking the baby, who literally screams with joy at the top of his lungs. Both of his parents have loud voices, and our genes have done their stuff.

The message is clear: this guy does not yet fully understand the rottenness of the planet he came to.

Having a son has taught me all sorts of things. One thing it has taught me is that adults understand how filthy and cruel this world is, even if we deny it to ourselves every day. You can see this in the products we create for babies and the advice we give each other.

Just about everything sold for babies is covered with comforting images. Puppies and kittens. Lion cubs sitting on clouds. Flowers. Little frogs who look overjoyed to see us. Pastel colors are the norm.

We are obsessed with helping babies relax. Products say “soothing” on their labels. Experts create videos telling us how to relax babies and make them feel safe.

The songs we sing to babies are delusional. Mr. Raccoon took a walk to the meadow to dance with all his bunny friends. Stuff like that.

Why do we do this? Because we know this world is vile and that we are in grave danger every second of our lives. When we tell kids to relax because everything will be okay, we’re lying to them to keep them from understanding the world until they’re strong enough to stand living here.

We don’t put unicorns and happy bunnies on our own things (most of us), because it would be pointless, but we dedicate a tremendous amount of effort to relaxation. We go to spas to relax. Catholics go on retreats. Pagans meditate. Lots of people get drunk, smoke weed, and use narcotics. Christians pray. We create products that are supposed to relax us.

Why do we do these things? There is a need; thats why. If the world weren’t a terrible place, we’d be relaxed already.

It’s amazing how often we make ourselves stop looking at the ugliness of the world. All through the day, we are confronted with murder, war, disease, accidents, crime, and so on, and, realizing there is nothing we can do and that we will not be able to function if we keep focusing on danger and evil, we choose to think of other things. This isn’t the way a healthy world works.

God has told us what a world that functions correctly looks like. Here is what he said through Isaiah:

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.

And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice’ den.

They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.

Through John, he said:

And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.

And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.

And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.

This is what the world will look like after the tribulation, when Yeshua rules here in person.

Religious Jews claim Yeshua can’t be the Messiah because these things haven’t happened yet. They believe the Messiah will not be killed and then return, but that’s wrong. The Bible clearly says he will be cut off. Jewish scholars have made up a lot of spurious interpretations of prophecy to justify their bad decisions and to absolve their forebears of the sin of killing Yeshua as they killed other prophets.

Modern Christians would hate Yeshua if he returned, and Christians persecute people who hear from the Holy Spirit, so it makes no sense to single Jews out, especially given that no Jew who took part in the crucifixion is alive now.

It’s strange that we don’t persecute Italians, when Romans were the ones who scourged Yeshua and nailed him to the cross.

Imagine a world where you don’t have to lock your doors, create passwords, take vaccines, support armies, carry a gun, or buy insurance. Imagine walking through Harlem at 3 a.m. and being greeted by friendly people instead of being sent to the hospital or the morgue. Imagine a world without Muslim terror or Islam. The world we have now is repulsive.

I hate this place more every day. It reminds me of moving out of Miami. Miami got to where every day there was oppressive and distasteful, and then one day I drove away and put it behind me. And I never missed it. I hate Miami more now than when I left, and I haven’t been there since 2020. If a friend of mine gets married or has a funeral in Miami, I will send flowers and stay here.

As much as I love the county where I live, I hate the world, and I feel like I’m holding my breath until the rapture comes.

Now I have a wife and a baby son, and I have to look after them in this nasty place. My son is innocent. He is full of joy. He loves his parents. Worse, he trusts us, even though we can’t save him from all suffering. My heart aches to protect him. Having a family makes the world seem even more foul.

I have quit looking at the news and secular entertainment again. I tell people to avoid secular entertainment because it brings curses and evil spirits into homes, but I was looking at Youtube clips of movies, and I realized this was hypocritical. The farther I get from my connection to filth, the more God restores proper perspective, and the better I understand the depravity of the world.

When I think of human depravity, I always think of a story I saw on Yahoo News. The Kardashian sisters had a contest. Two of them were arguing over whose genitalia smelled worse. They provide samples, and the third sister was the judge. And a national news outlet covered it, just like it would have covered groundbreaking for a skyscraper 70 years ago. As if it were normal and acceptable to put such “news” in front of the public.

Mind you, the Kardashians made the press cover it. Journalists didn’t magically realize they were sniffing each other. An insider had to tell them. The Kardashians had someone call around and tell the press they were smelling each other’s crotches. That’s the kind of people they are.

The public didn’t rise up in arms. No one protested outside Yahoo headquarters. No one marched to have the filthy Kardashian show canceled. No one called for fasting and prayer. These things would have happened in a healthy nation. If these revolting sluts had had their contest in 1950, the ensuing scandal would still be famous today.

Now, female entertainers rap about the wonders of their infected private parts and those of their many partners, and their garbage becomes major hits parents let their kids listen to. Kids have smartphones, and they send each other homemade child porn all day. Parents pay deranged doctors to castrate their sons, and about half of Americans get furious when anyone says it’s wrong.

The generations that understood decency are mostly dead now. My generation is depraved, and the ones that came after are much worse.

I’ve noticed something about environments with a high turnover rate, like schools. Consider an elementary school with a fiery 6th-grade president who promises change. Do the teachers worry? No, they sit back, smile, and wait. They know the problem student will leave, and the students who follow will have no idea he ever existed.

Satan works the same way. He comes between generations. He convinces stupid kids they’re smarter than their elders. He cuts young generations off from the accumulated wisdom of earlier generations. The world has had many reformers. Abraham, Moses, Samson, Josiah, the prophets, Yeshua…their reforms generally get undone after they go. The people who remember how things are supposed to be die.

This may be hard to believe, but Americans didn’t always avoid and make fun of older people. The phenomenon of hating our elders and repudiating their teaching is so new, they popularized a term for it in the 1960’s: the Generation Gap. I used to hear this term all the time, but I’ll bet there are very few 40-year-olds who have heard it. Now, we accept the fact that young people consider “boomers” stupid and backward, and we assume earlier generations felt the same way about their elders. It’s true that people have always complained of differences between generations, but the hostility and contempt we consider normal now are aberrations.

Satan had to have the Generation Gap in order to convince Cher’s mentally-ill daughter to have her healthy breasts amputated. The extreme and accelerated moral deterioration we see now couldn’t have happened so quickly without a change in the way we saw older people. Satan had to get us to defecate on everything valuable and embrace everything that is full of pus and poison.

I don’t think today’s young adults can possibly comprehend how young people were worshiped during the 1960’s. People a few years older than I was lectured and scolded their elders. Showbiz pea-brains marveled at the genius of youth, because there was good money in juvenile rebellion. People who should have had better sense treated conceited twentyish simpletons as though they knew all the answers. College kids celebrated terrorists and communists, but we thought the children would lead us to the Age of Aquarius and everyone would get peace, love, and free dope.

Many older people got involved. It was pathetic. Actors and singers from earlier years saw their fan bases vanishing. They realized they were becoming figures of ridicule. They put on idiotic Sixties clothes, tried to sing rock songs, and imitated the spastic, forced jerking that passed for dancing among children and college kids. Cary Grant started taking LSD and telling people it would solve their problems.

Young people are supposed to sit at the feet of the old and absorb everything good that they know, so they live in victory and don’t repeat the devastating mistakes of their predecessors. In the Sixties, university presidents groveled before screaming, vicious, spoiled morons in bell-bottom pants and tie-dyed shirts, apologizing for the accomplishments and virtues of two thousand years of Christian culture.

Now the same basic thing is happening again, and the people groveling learned their behavior from the Sixties.

It’s a shame young people can’t see how their grandparents behaved in 1968. They can’t see how stupid and silly they were. If they could, they might have less respect for fashionable idiocy and more respect for wisdom that stood the test of centuries.

It’s impossible to make people understand the profundity and breadth of modern depravity if you can’t make them understand America as it once was. They think, “Okay, Boomer,” and they continue wallowing joyfully in disgraceful, ungrateful, unteachable ignorance.

Deep in their hearts, they know their ways are wrong, and they know the world is a mess, but as long as they can smother the truth and prevent it from filling their thoughts, they will keep doing what they do.

Kids think boomers ruined the world by preventing what kids call progress. That’s wrong. We ruined it by promoting it. We just seem like we’re against it when we are contrasted with the nuts and brats of today.

Sometimes I feel like I should do nothing but pray for the rapture and tribulation all day.