Kubota-San Bring Honor to Humble Yard

I managed to half-mow with my newly-acquired Kubota zero-turn today. It was glorious, until the rain shut me down.

I wrote about buying the mower yesterday, so I’ll just link to that instead of doing my usual recap. Maybe readers will be happy to bypass the tedium.

I got advice on some forums. The people on one forum were generally congratulatory, except for one sourpuss who somewhat rudely claimed the mower was probably stolen. His evidence was that the seller and I could not find a serial number on it.

I think the sourpuss may have been bummed out because somebody else seemed to have gotten a pretty good deal.

As it turns out, the mower does have a serial number. I found it today. Grok seems to think this mower was made in the late 2000’s. I haven’t been energetic enough to narrow it down.

If the seller were a thief, I would have to give him a D. He advertised the mower on Facebook under his own name, sold it from his own house, delivered it using his own truck, and signed an affirmation that it belonged to him in a bank with lots of cameras.

The more I look at the mower, the more I think I did all right.

I know what wear looks like on power equipment, and I also know what rain and sun damage look like. I don’t see much wear on this mower. I don’t see any rain damage. I do see sun damage. The total package is consistent with a storage method typical of Northern Florida. A lot of people here put tractors and other machines in pole barns with no walls. The sun comes in sideways, but the rain is blocked.

The mower has a few parts that are clearly sun-damaged. The plastic grips on the levers are bleached, and so is the seat belt. The plastic armrests are eaten up. That’s about it. Parts that would rust if exposed to a lot of rain are not rusted.

The first mow went really well. I did take out a couple of shrubs and part of a piece of ground cover, but I’ll get the hang of it. I had to quit because it rained.

Before I could mow, I had to dump a lot of fluid. The seller overfilled the transmission. I had to use an oil sucker. I found out I am no good with a siphon. On the up side, the fluid doesn’t taste that bad.

I would estimate he was off by half a gallon. It hurt to dump that expensive SUDT2 (~$35/gallon last I checked) on a bothersome stump, but I was not able to catch it all in a clean container.

I have trouble getting the mower to crank. At first, I had the PTO engaged and didn’t know it; the relevant decal is gone, so decals are on my shopping list. The second time I had trouble, the mower started when I reduced the throttle. I don’t know if there is a cutout for a high throttle setting or what. I also fiddled with the seat a little. This mower’s lawyer switch (stops the engine every time you get off) is cut, so it could be that something in there is shorting. I would have cut it myself, so I am happy the switch is dead.

People say these things don’t give the best quality of cut, but I guess those guys are pros. I am just trying to hold the jungle back and shred the oak leaves. The cut I got looks fantastic to me. No windrows, no clumps. Nice and flat. I don’t think I need the missing scalping assemblies I mentioned yesterday. I didn’t hit any concrete. I think the first owner removed them deliberately.

I cut my backyard and side yard before the rain came. The deck really blasted cut material out. I am planning to cover the chute to improve mulching, but I haven’t done it yet, so I flung clippings way out into right field. Based on what I saw, I think mulching blades and a chute cover will handle my leaf-mulching just fine. For that matter, as it is, it may be good enough. I have ordered mulching blades, though, and I plan to use them.

The speed was wonderful. Seemed like it took half as long as the John Deere. It would be faster if I knew how to use a zero-turn. I kept slowing it down to keep from hitting things.

The seat suspension is nothing to write home about, but I don’t sit on it all day, so I’ll get over it.

I see why the first owner threw out the deck’s pulley covers. This thing is a bear to clean after mowing, compared to the John Deere. The deck was buried in grass, leaves, and dirt, and it went in under the floorboard. I opened the floorboard hatch and spent a lot of time blowing crud out with a small leaf blower. Cleaning stuff out from under pulley covers would have made the job worse.

I thought the ROPS might be bent because the clamp knobs were mangled, but I got them off with a strap wrench, and the ROPS is fine. I plan to keep it folded most of the time because I have to mow under trees. I don’t know why the first owner kept those twisted, broken knobs. They made it look like he had done something awful to his bar.

I have not opened up the control panel to see if the hour meter wiring is okay, but since the idiot lights use the same wires, I would guess that it is. I suppose I’ll have to get a new electronic meter. The one I have is mechanical.

My online parts cart is filling up. I would go buy this stuff locally, but two big companies have taken over the Kubota business here, and they can’t be bothered to create a decent website. I can go hunch over a counter with a guy who has no idea which parts I need, or I can figure it out myself while sitting in my recliner.

I wish I knew how many hours the mower has, but it is clearly in good shape, and because all of the damaged parts are cheap and inconsequential, I should be able to put it right for under $400. Or I could leave it as-is and get the same performance.

You wouldn’t think a lawnmower would be this big a deal to a man, but I am heavily traumatized by the needless suffering I put myself through with the John Deere. Now I plan to see if I can find a collector to snap it up. I will take his money while holding my hand over my heart and speaking in low, reverent tones. Yessssss, what a wonderful piece of old American iron. Yessssss, it deserves to be restored to its former glory. Yessssss, $2500 is a small price to pay for a piece of history. Get it out of here.

Now I have to decide whether I’m man enough to find a big Kubota tractor to replace the one I have. And I keep dreaming of a 6-ton excavator.

Finally Getting Off the John

The big day may finally be here. I may be getting a “new” used diesel mower to replace the old John Deere 430. I can’t contain my joy. I found a deal I like on the web.

I say “may” because I’m used to getting bitten in the butt with respect to Internet deals. As well as everything else. You know how it is. People buy stuff out from under you. The things you think are good deals turn out to be junk. I will say “may” until the mower is in my driveway.

I still marvel that people love the John Deere 430 so much. Say anything bad about it on a landscaping or farming forum, and you may be challenged to a duel. “They run forever.” “They’re bulletproof.” People routinely pay $3,000 for 430’s in reasonably good shape, in spite of the fact that the newest ones are well over 30 years old. Mine is 34.

I have a lot of bad things to say about my mower, although I can’t complain at all about the smoking deal I got on it.

First, the deck weighs about 350 pounds, and it has to be removed in order to change the blades or the oil. You can jack the mower up if you dare. Personally, I don’t want to climb under a 1500-pound mower with a short wheelbase when it’s reared up at 45 degrees.

Removing the deck is a horrible chore. It’s supposed to be quick and convenient, which it probably was in John Deere showrooms with new mowers that had no corrosion and which had been carefully prepared by mechanics. To get the deck off, I have to remove one deck wheel, turn two other wheels sideways, remove some pins that don’t like to come out, turn a lever that doesn’t like to turn, jack up the front of the mower, probably do some other things I forgot, and drag the deck out by brute force.

Putting the deck back on is just as difficult.

Having moaned about that, I would now like to moan about the unavailability of new parts, which have always been way overpriced. A few years back, Deere started discontinuing commonly-replaced parts the mower really needs in order to function. First, it was the grille. Eventually, they got around to replacing their proprietary, non-repairable hydraulic cylinders. Now the muffler ($450, if memory serves) is off the menu. The deck is also unavailable.

With that behind me, I will now complain about the difficulty of working on the mower. Everything is cramped. Things that should be easy to replace are hard to replace. To add hydraulic fluid, you have to pour it into a tube with an inner diameter of maybe 3/8″. That is simply amazing.

One belt runs the water pump and alternator, and changing it is like doing a heart transplant through a dirty keyhole. While lying on your back. Everything is hard to get to, you can’t swing a wrench, and none of the bolts want to turn. And you have to take the tractor’s whole seat-and-fender pan off.

Finally, I hate the throttly thing. This mower has a hydrostatic transmission, which means you use one control to change the speed and direction. It’s a shift lever on the dash. When mowing in a yard like mine, you need to change speed and direction a lot, and modern mowers use things like pedals and control bars to make it easy.

I guess zero-radius-turn or “zero-turn” mowers got their name from the fact that they use the drive wheels to do all the turning and traveling. They’re like wheelchairs. To turn, you make one wheel go faster than the other. To rotate in place, you reverse one wheel and make the other go forward. You don’t have to move to turn around.

Going from forward to reverse or changing speed with the Deere is jerky and generally no fun. It’s not easy to control, and you have to take one hand off the wheel.

I’ve had to repair the Deere a lot. I have suffered repeatedly. It has broken down in annoying and unexpected ways, it has done it repeatedly, and working on it is on par with laboring in a salt mine. I want to let it go.

UPDATE

I made a deal on the “new” mower, and it’s in my driveway. It’s a used Kubota ZD326S with a nice diesel engine and a 60″ deck. A zero-turn. As my buddy Mike says, a MOWER, not a TRACTOR.

The ad said 229 hours at a very low price, so I got excited. I went out to see the seller today, and of course, when I ran the engine, the hour meter did not move. And while the mower looked very good, it was pretty clearly not a 229-hour mower. The seat had some wear, the seat belts were somewhat bleached, and so on.

The seller was a very nice guy. He said the mower had belonged to his wife’s grandfather, who had died not long ago. He said grandpa used it to mow a couple of acres at his home.

He kept telling me he didn’t know much about the mower, so I looked it over fairly well. I had him jack up the deck, I looked in the hatches, and I had him to through all the functions with the engine running. It sounded perfect, and nothing exploded.

He had just put new tires on the mower, plus fluids and deck belts, so he wasted a lot of money before deciding to sell it. The tires cost over $300 for a pair. Insane.

He said he didn’t know anything about the hours. Judging by my own Kubota tractor, which I bought at 1100 hours, I would say the mower is between 500 and 1000, so it should have another 2000 in it, given good care. If anything goes seriously wrong when it gets old, it’s not a complex machine, so most things that are likely to go bad can be fixed.

It was lacking two front scalping wheels, along with the little shafts that hold them. I can get the parts for $210. He says the dealer told him he didn’t need them.

When he jacked the mower up in his driveway, oil dripped from the bottom of the crankcase, and I thought it was time for me to go home. It turned out he had overfilled it and forgotten to clean it off, so when he jacked it, oil ran off the top of the engine. This explained why it ran for several minutes with no drips before the front end was raised.

The underside of the deck looked very good. Still some traces of paint.

He spontaneously offered to knock a grand off the price, and I decided to take it. I got it for around $3000 less than the market price for a mower with a working hour meter and documentation, so unless something is horribly wrong with it, I can’t get burned. I really need a good mower that will last decades, I have been looking for months, and this was no time to let the perfect be the enemy of the very good. Mowing season is here, and I can’t face another session with the John Deere.

If this mower could be had new, it would cost about $18,000. A new really good gas mower like a Scag Tiger Cat II would cost $13,000 or so, the motor would probably fail by 750 hours, it would have to be refilled very often, and I would have to deal with the pitfalls of ethanol.

My best guess is that this thing is a peach, well worth sprucing up. There are a couple of dinged-up parts I can replace. I can touch up the paint here and there.

Because it was raining today, I was not able to run the mower much. I mowed a few yards and then put it out of the rain. I was flabbergasted. The old JD has a 20-horsepower engine, and the Kubota is rated at 25, but it feels more like 20 and 40. The engine ran perfectly smoothly, unlike the Deere’s Yanmar, which shakes the tractor. It seemed to run at a much higher speed. When I cut grass, it blasted out the chute in a shower of startled clippings. The cut it left was flat and smooth, unlike the Deere’s wake of ridges and lumps.

I had thought my lawn’s irregular appearance was mostly due to the nature of the awful grass, but it looks like the mower was the problem. Maybe it was running too slowly to really KO the grass, and I need to take better care of the air filter, or maybe the JD just doesn’t turn its spindles as fast as a Kubota.

Grok thinks the Kubota’s blades turn faster, but it isn’t sure.

The Kubota did all this while moving much faster than the Deere. I should be able to halve my time in the roasting sun.

I’m going to get a set of mulching blades and close off the Kubota’s chute to see if I get respectable leaf-pulverization. If I do, I am set for life. Oak leaves are the bane of my existence.

Kubota makes a mulching kit for the ZD326, but it gets complaints. It isolates each blade in a separate compartment, and this confines the clippings a little too well and makes the mower bog down in heavy grass. I was hoping to get a kit and modify it to make it breathe a little better, but when I looked under the mower today, it looked like it was already set up the way I wanted it. It had curved steel panels that surrounded but didn’t completely isolate the blades. That might work.

I’m getting Gator G6 mulching blades for it and hoping for the best.

If it’s reasonably dry tomorrow, I’ll take the Kubota out for a spin and see how she does. As long as it does what it did today, I will consider myself a satisfied customer.

I have felt wonderful ever since I got the mower home. Relaxed, knowing my old mower will no longer be a source of uncertainty and torment.

Sometimes I wonder if I spend too much, and other times I wonder if God thinks there is something wrong with me for not spending more of what he has given me to improve our lives. The John Deere was a bargain, and it functioned, but it also made me suffer over and over with breakdowns and repairs and maintenance that were extremely unpleasant. Maybe I should have bought a Kubota 5 years ago.

I discussed it with my wife. She thinks I should spend to make things easy for myself. I told her to remember she said that if she ended up getting a job at 60, but she said that would never happen, because God always provided for us.

I think I was pretty frugal, buying a used diesel. I couldn’t touch a new one without coming close to $20,000. Home Depot’s best mower is a gas Cub Cadet that costs $3,000 more than I paid and has a cheesy Kohler engine. Not even a Honda. Its deck is 10 gauge. Mine is 7 gauge. The John Deere’s looks like 10, gauge for that matter. The Cub Cadet is likely to be scrap at 1,000 hours, but I’ll have at least that many more to go.

I love diesels. I wish everything had a diesel engine.

For the first time in maybe 5 years, I am looking forward to mowing the yard.

The Opposite of Peter Pan Syndrome

My buddy Mike sent me a link to a video about Jackson Laux, and I was very impressed.

The web says Jackson, or maybe I should call him Mr. Laux because he is so grown up, is 9 years old. He is Internet-famous for his love of tractors, especially John Deere. He has appeared in lots of videos. He has a spic-and-span shop. He has multiple tractors. He can talk all day about them. Their strengths and weaknesses and so on. He really enjoys what he’s doing.

As a Christian, I find Mr. Laux interesting, because he helps me understand what most parents do wrong.

When I was a kid, my dad made very good money. I should know, because I have all the money he never spent. So we went on vacations to Europe to broaden our minds, right? We had music instruction, tutors, and all sorts of help with interests that could be lucrative and fulfilling later in life, right? Well, no. My dad was cheap. We had furniture from discount outlets in the Carolinas. We had cars we got at cost from my mother’s father’s dealership. My sister and I didn’t have much in the way of toys. Another kid down the block gave me hand-me-down toys and clothes. When we traveled, we went to see my mom’s family in Kentucky or we went to the Keys, which were a short drive away.

My hobby was TV. My dad’s hobby, which consumed hours of his life every day. I sat in front of TV sets and ate ice cream.

I had interests, but it never occurred to me to ask my parents to support them. To them, every non-necessity they bought for me was either a toy or a gift. Frivolous. The only exceptions were books, which they didn’t mind paying for, and two banjos. They would never have bought me tools, a tractor, a welder…no way. They would never have put $10,000 in an investment account and taught me what to do with it. They would never have bought me a rental property and helped me manage it.

You go to school. You get B’s or better. You become a lawyer or maybe a doctor. That’s what you do. This was their limited understanding.

My mother didn’t have much in the way of vision, and neither did my dad, but he was worse, because he didn’t care. He didn’t spend time with his kids. He had no idea who our teachers were or what subjects we were taking. He forgot our birthdays. Once, he came home drunk, with no idea it was my birthday. I was using a music stand my mother had bought for $8.00. When he realized what day it was, he asked me how I liked my gift, and he didn’t buy me anything else.

My mother made some effort to interest me in science. I’ll give her that. She enrolled me in a mail-order program that sent me little science kits. She tried to interest me in coin collecting, which was dull, given that there was almost nothing available to spend.

Here I am, an adult with a thousand interests. Writing. Music. Machining. Welding. Cooking. Science. Engineering. Maintaining my land. Building things. Photography. And my parents never managed to set me up with a single activity. Not one! Yes, I got banjo lessons, but the banjo is a dead-end instrument, and music lessons are nothing if you don’t learn to read and write music.

Photography is actually a very profitable profession if you have the gift, and by now I know I have it. I have taken a lot of excellent pictures. I could have made money with cameras.

My parents failed. Now let’s look at my buddy Mike.

He has two sons, and they started life near where I live. Mike spoke to one of their teachers. According to Mike, regarding his son, the teacher said, “He be real smart.”

When he saw the pickle his sons were in, Mike moved to New Hampshire, where they have better public schools. When one of his sons turned out to be a gifted football player, he moved to the DC area and put him in a famous sports high school. When the time came to think about college, Mike’s son was connected with scouts. He didn’t become a pro in the usual sense of the word, but he did receive a free college education, and he is a happy, very successful adult.

Mike lived across the street from me, and his parents didn’t do much to start him off in life. His mother died when he was about 16, and his dad’s involvement with him dried up. His parents can’t take credit for the way he raised his sons, and neither can his wife, who gave him custody during their divorce and then ran off to pursue her career. Mike’s sons are doing better than he did. Mike had to learn to hustle when he was their age, taking whatever job was available or creating his own jobs.

Mr. Laux did not get a job at age three and save and invest and buy tractors and a shop. No one has told me this. I know it because I’m not an idiot. No little kid does that. Even Mozart had an aggressive manager. Mr. Laux’ parents encouraged him in his dream and also financed it heavily. They paid for everything. They knew the difference between spoiling a kid with toys and investing in his future.

As a result, barring unforeseen problems, Mr. Laux will be self-supporting when most kids are rotting their brains with video games and dope, and he will not have to waste 4 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars at a university where he will be pushed to become an antisemitic, God-hating, emasculated, demon-worshiping, drug-using, socialist pervert, given a useless degree in English or History, and then relegated to a cubicle farm.

I will have my son’s back with regard to any wise pursuit that interests him. That doesn’t include getting an English degree or starting a band. He can study STEM fields. He can start a business. He can learn to invest. I’ll help him learn instruments and languages. I will never tell him things I buy that are related to his wise pursuits are frivolous or that he should think I’m generous for buying them. That would be like telling him I’m generous for paying his pediatrician.

I wish I could go back in time about 50 years and give my autopilot parents a good talking-to. It might have given my mother ideas. My dad wouldn’t have paid any attention, because he didn’t care. I wish I could go back and talk to my young self, but I was underdeveloped and hardheaded thanks to my parents, so I don’t know if I would have listened.

I might have listened. I remember a few times in my past when appalled strangers who knew my parents were blowing it told me things that stuck.

My parents didn’t know God. They never heard from the Holy Spirit. We didn’t pray together. I rarely saw the inside of a church. They imparted virtually no wisdom to me. They didn’t cultivate a single useful habit in me. I didn’t have the natural character to raise myself properly. It’s a wonder I’m not living in a refrigerator box.

Abraham Lincoln, or Rudolf Diesel?

I have put around three hours on my tiny Chinese excavator, but I have to report I haven’t made it to China yet.

I wonder if millennials will get that. “What does digging have to do with China?” “I don’t know. Should we be offended or just go somewhere quiet and invent a new gender?”

I put $5,000 into this new machine, figuring it would be very handy around the farm. As of today, I think it will be useful enough to justify keeping it, although it has some problems.

As I noted in another post, and as may or may not be true, these machines have gas engines that run very fast, and they are said to be based on diesel machines with engines that run slowly. The actual figures are 3600 and 2050 RPM. The scuttlebutt is that the Chinese did not change the hydraulics to cope with the higher RPM’s, so these excavators pump fluid too fast, resulting in jerky movements that take a lot of skill to control.

Whatever the reason, the jerkiness is there for sure.

The controls allow you to lower and raise the blade, move each track independently, curl and uncurl the arm and bucket, raise the arm, spin the excavator on its tracks, and use the hydraulic thumb.

The jumpy nature of the machine is fairly manageable except when you use the tracks. There is one stick for each track. Moving it forward makes the track go forward, and pulling it back gives you reverse. Moving the sticks in different directions makes the excavator turn.

One of the big problems is that if you try to go forward or back without great care, the excavator may jump. This jerks your body in the direction opposite to the machine’s progress, and that makes you pull the sticks in the direction that makes it stop or go the other way. Then you naturally push to resist the jerking, so you start it moving again. The result is that you bounce. Forward-stop-forward-stop-forward-stop. It’s like riding a mechanical bull.

I’ve looked into solutions.

One is to replace the hydraulic pump with a slower one. The pump puts out around 0.37 cubic inches per revolution at 3600 RPM’s, so moving to something like 0.20 would make it more like a diesel machine running at 2050. But the tracks would be unbearably slow. As it is, it’s almost motionless at full speed.

The pumps are cheap and easy to replace. I should be able to do it for under $150. But if I want to use the excavator at the other end of the farm, it could take an hour to get there.

It would be great to find a little diesel engine that would work, but I think that’s a pipe dream.

I do not like gas engines, and I am sure this excavator’s carburetor will cause me problems eventually, but the price was very good, and I don’t expect to need the excavator often enough or in a big enough hurry to make occasional failures intolerable. Hope I’m right.

As for capability, the excavator is pretty weak. A Youtuber says these machines can lift something like 550 pounds, which is very little. The bucket’s curling cylinder isn’t strong enough to make it dig into dirt unless it’s pretty loose. You have to rely on the arm.

I’ve also gotten the excavator stuck on sandy ground. The tracks flat quit turning. I have read that this may be caused by a bypass valve that protects everything when the excavator is held in place by dirt pressing against the underside, but it’s hard to believe that happened in the relatively flat place where I was digging.

Breaking through roots is not possible if they’re over maybe an inch in diameter. That surprised me.

As I probably said before, it’s like having two men with shovels. It’s not going to move the stump of a hundred-year-old oak, but it will dig a hole in cooperative ground about as fast as two men, and all I have to do is sit and work the controls.

I can’t smooth things out when I’m finished. It’s way too jerky for that, and the bucket is small anyway. I would have to go back over everything with the tractor bucket and probably a shovel.

The earth-moving ability of two men with shovels is good enough, believe it or not. I have been out there with a shovel, myself, and it was not pleasant in 95-degree weather with blazing sunshine, high humidity, and no breeze. The excavator is not as great as I thought it would be, but it is great.

As for other machinery, I tried to buy a used 60″ diesel zero-turn today, but the place advertising it lent it to a customer, so I could not see it. I left contact information, but they have not gotten back to me yet. I wanted a Kubota, and this machine is a Gravely with a Kubota motor. I like Kubotas because they have built-in jacks for changing the blades, but they are hard to find at good prices, and I am tired of waiting. Gravely supposedly makes tougher bodies, and I can always use my floor jack.

I feel better about buying machines because I used Grok and ChatGPT to do financial analyses of the cost and return. Grok said continuing to use a mower would eventually save me $75,000 in landscaping payments, which could actually be true.

I should be able to keep a diesel mower going until I die, and I would guess that would save me $6,000 2025 dollars per year. Call it $150 per week and something like 40 weeks per season. That’s $6,000 per year in labor costs saved, so over 20 years, $120,000. If I live longer, I can always get an apartment.

I could get a used gas mower, which would be much cheaper. Then I’d have the giant hassle of ethanol problems, and I would have to buy and install a new engine every 750 hours, so at 80 hours per year, starting with a used mower, I would have to buy and install at least two engines, at a cost of something like $4,000 2025 simoleons. A used diesel engine should outlive me with no major overhauls.

A used gas mower would be maybe $2,000 cheaper, but it would cost me $4,000 to replace the engine, so an eventual net loss of $6,000, and it would be a horrible product I would hate, compared to a diesel. And it would burn a lot more fuel.

New gas mowers cost more than used diesels, which makes me wonder why anyone buys them. I don’t even understand why professionals buy them. Of course, I can’t assume every man who cuts grass for a living knows a lot about smart investing.

I know this is the kind of thing people say in order to rationalize impulse buys, but here it is anyway: AI helped me realize I would be throwing money away if I did not buy a diesel mower. Of course, I could keep the one I have running for maybe 5 more years, but I just can’t face doing the maintenance, and this mower is very slow. Changing the oil and sharpening the blades are torture, and a new mower should be able to shave off over a third of my mowing time.

This mower may die for good unexpectedly. The hour meter was frozen when I bought it (Surprise!), so for all I know, it has 4,000 hours on it. Important parts are rapidly being discontinued, it has already broken down three times, and I could find myself presented very suddenly with fast-growing grass and the need to buy a mower quickly.

Given how hard it is to find a mower at my leisure, I know that would be unpleasant.

I looked into mowers a few years ago, and I decided to be smart and keep my old mower going. Guess what happened? Prices of new mowers went up maybe 30%, and the value of my old mower dropped by around $2000. And I got to continue suffering needlessly. All that time, I could have been riding a better mower.

AI also thinks a real excavator, like 11,000 pounds, would pay for itself. I could do a lot of beautification and repair, and I would get a tax deduction. And it would be fun.

I could get something pretty good for maybe $25,000. It’s not that hard to make $25,000 worth of improvements on a farm with an excavator.

The final idea AI liked was getting a bigger tractor and a flail mower, but I didn’t point out that I already had a tractor which is adequate. My tractor will do most of what a bigger one will do, but it will do it a lot slower, and I will have to help it by getting off and doing more manual labor.

People like to say a small tractor will do anything a big tractor will do, slower. Not actually true.

You know who says that? Guys with small tractors. Especially guys who couldn’t afford, or were too cheap, to get bigger ones. The 50 million guys in the US who bought 25-horse John Deeres and Kubotas. Some made the right decision, because some properties don’t require big machines. Others doomed themselves to unnecessary misery and failure.

I can wait instead and make the most of what I have. And of course, the cost of a new tractor will go up, and the value of my old tractor will go down.

I’ve also realized that machinery expenditures are not lost. A good used machine is an investment. You can sell it if you have to. It’s not like a trip to Singapore or a year’s worth of restaurant meals. It’s not like a new machine, which depreciates off a cliff the second you buy it (12-25% for machines with top resale value). A used machine may depreciate, although the way things are going, it may not. Many appreciated during the Bidencaust.

It probably won’t increase in value like a piece of real estate or shares of stock, but it should beat rapidly-shrinking cash by a wide margin.

I believe that if I pick up a couple of useful machines that will enable me to keep my property up without dying of heat exhaustion, in the end, I should be way better off than if I had paid tradesmen or spent thousands on rentals. My property will look a lot better and possibly be worth more. My own suffering will be greatly reduced. It sounds pretty good.

I’m glad I bought the small excavator. It is already proving useful, even if it’s rough around the edges. If it turns out I’ve overestimated its usefulness, I’ll be able to get every penny I paid back out of it. Not bad.

Pinch Yourself

I belong to a shooting forum, and understandably, there are a lot of conservatives there. Conservatism is the dominant culture on the forum.

Yesterday, I saw something there that reminded me that antisemitism is a supernatural, not political, disease. Conservatism doesn’t prevent it. Only the Holy Spirit prevents it. Antisemitism is the preferred stance of the left, to the extent that leftists nearly own it, but there are also a fair number of nutjobs on the right who have it in for the Jews.

Here is what someone on the forum posted:

It’s a great deal like the Nazi propaganda posters of the last century; here’s one telling people to vote for Nazism:

This person considers himself conservative, so he’s not an Antifa terrorist or other type of leftist kook who happens to love guns.

On a side note, one of the sad things about belonging to gun forums is that in addition to people who love hunting, enjoy firearms and shooting, care about their civil rights, and want information on self-defense, there are always a fair number of dangerous, hateful idiots who look forward to the day they get to shoot someone. Gun forums are packed with rude, conceited, hostile people, just like fishing forums, Christian forums, leftist forums, food forums, and fitness forums.

I don’t know why fitness and bodybuilding (different things) people are so obnoxious and arrogant. Wow, you’ve been exercising and dieting for a while, and maybe drugs have made you look like a comic book character. That’s wonderful. See if you still feel superior in 5 years when you’ve quit going to the gym, your doctor has scared you off the drugs, and Reese’s cups are back on the menu.

The condition of your body has no bearing on the respect or disrespect other people should give you. If you’re in great physical shape, good for you, but I don’t respect you for it, especially if you’re malicious and you have so little self-awareness you think people should admire you for something trivial,self-serving, and fleeting.

Leftists are openly calling for wiping out all Jews in Israel. That’s what the “river to the sea” chant means. Many of them are rooting for Iran in comments on videos. And we all know about Queers for Palestine, which is sort of comparable to Antifa Rioters for Pepper Balls. Conservatives generally support Israel, and we don’t do antisemitic marches, rallies, or riots. But then there are the freaks who think Hitler was conservative and Nazism didn’t get a fair chance.

Sadly, the baboon who made this meme has tried to claim all right-thinking conservatives as his allies. He has used the revered “Chad” cartoon to voice his Satanic view, suggesting the rest of us agree.

In the thread where this meme was posted, this idiot or some other like “mind” claimed Jews wanted to run the world and so on. That canard is one of the most obvious proofs that demons cause antisemitism and that it’s a form of insanity.

Let’s recap. Let’s start with the premise that Jews are immensely powerful as a people and the rest of us are their puppets. Okay, they’ve had around 4,000 years to run their global empire. During that time, they had no homeland for 2,000 years because they were forced out by weak, inferior gentiles. They were abused and tormented by many of the countries where they sought shelter. During the last century, around a third of them were murdered by gentiles. They were so widely persecuted, the rest of the world had to give them a homeland in order to prevent them from being annihilated, and they got a tiny sliver of then-worthless desert with no oil, surrounded by hostile Muslims who attempted to exterminate them as soon as they could. The Muslims got a huge chunk of the world’s oil reserves, so they have lots of money to fund antisemitic genocide. Which they have never stopped doing.

If the Jews are running the world for their own benefit, they’re doing a very poor job. They have made some very bad choices.

Me, I would take Europe. Hands down. America is nice, but the climate is terrible over most of the country, and we can’t match Europe’s natural beauty. I would also take as much of the world’s oil as possible, along with a big fraction of the best farmland. I wouldn’t have let gentiles have atomic weapons. That’s for sure. I’d corner the market on those. And I’d own all the stuff Musk and Bezos have.

I might also take over some pleasant vacation spots in the tropics.

I would definitely impoverish the Muslims.

Jews haven’t done any of this, so how can they be running the world?

Antisemitism keeps getting worse. If it’s this bad now, I have to wonder what next year will be like.

Israel is not Ukraine

I remember the week Tucker Carlson was chosen to replace disgraced pundit Bill O’Reilly on Fox News. I was hoping for someone intelligent, like Laura Ingraham. I marveled that Fox chose Carlson, who had a long string of failures behind him, no big successes, an unwinning personality, no evidence of wit, and a clear record of work indicating a less-than-stellar intellect. They had so many other choices. It’s still a mystery to me. It’s the kind of hire that makes you wonder if blackmail is in play.

Carlson went on to be a big success in O’Reilly’s time slot, just as a test pattern would have. There was no way to fail. First time anyone could say that about Carlson, who had failed so splendidly in the past.

As a result of his tee-ball positioning, Carlson became popular, and undiscerning conservatives decided he was the next O’Reilly, which was not true. O’Reilly has his faults, but he is a major media talent, and he built the 8 p.m. time slot for Fox, as well as his own Internet and bestseller empire. Carlson was more like the Kevin Federline or Chet Hanks of Fox, but for his bulletproof time slot.

After being booted for Fox for hypocrisy, saying bizarre things in private communications, and generally being a coarse, nasty person behind the scenes, Carlson was adopted by sugar daddy Elon Musk, and conservatives lacking in critical skills made him an X success. I guess QAnon nuts who only read headlines have to have a hero.

Now Carlson is confirming my expectations by criticizing America’s support for Israel’s attack on Iran’s tyrannical minority regime leaders as well as the nuclear program Clinton and Obama gave it. And he is proving his lack of brains by saying he can’t figure out how the attack benefits America.

He’s talking about a regime that has tried to assassinate our president twice, mind you. Can’t figure it out. The regime that funds Hezbollah. A regime that leads huge crowds of idiots in chanting “Death to America!”

Iran is very open about its hopes of exterminating every Jew in Israel and putting an end to our single most important ally in the Middle East. For a long time, Iran has been trying to put together nuclear weapons to use on Israel. Here’s some obvious information for Carlson and his fans: a nuclear bomb that can kill Jews in Israel can also kill Americans in America and Europeans in Europe.

If the Iranian government were a person, we wouldn’t trust it with matches or pointed scissors. It’s the political equivalent of Charles Manson. How can the United States, one of Iran’s two dream targets, not have a clear interest in keeping Iran from getting weapons that can kill 200,000 people at once?

Here’s something smart, i.e. unlike things Carlson says, which Trump posted on the web today: “AMERICA FIRST means many GREAT things, including the fact that, IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON.” Whatever support he is giving Israel is necessary in order to protect our future. It may help Israel, too, but he is doing it for us.

Carlson has a beef with Jewish political donors, so maybe he thinks they’re the reason Trump backs Israel. Here is the truth: even if Jewish donors influenced Trump, which may or may not be true, he is still doing the right thing.

Iran has already killed hundreds of Americans through terrorist attacks, and it would gladly bomb London or Paris, but Tucker Carlson is just too stupid to see why we would want Israel to prevent it from getting nuclear weapons.

Or is the problem something else? Carlson has never shown any evidence of exceptional intelligence, but can he really be so stupid he can’t understand that Iran is a threat to the US and other Western nations? I don’t like to accuse people of racism or antisemitism lightly. I would like to think Carlson is not antisemitic. But I have learned that while it’s fine to criticize Israel objectively when you have a colorable argument, a person who goes after Israel with patently idiotic, disprovable remarks is either dumb, uninformed, misinformed, or antisemitic.

On a side note, it’s sad that we have so few truly bright pundits. Thomas Sowell is the only really bright light I can think of offhand.

Sometimes I hate being right about people. I really hate it when I’m proven right and other people I’m trying to wake up refuse to admit it.

Dumping your undeserving heroes is a necessary part of growing up.

Anyway, No, Mr. Carlson, Trump is not hypocritically leading us into a war while posing as the peace president. It is unlikely the Iran mess will turn into a large-scale war, because nearly every nation hates the government of Iran. Even if the war did turn into a major armed conflict, our president never said he would not get us into just wars, because that would be stupid, and it’s much better to bomb weak, ineptly-led Iran now with conventional bombs than to get into a nuclear exchange with immature, inbred psychopaths stuck in the 7th century.

If I ran Fox, I wouldn’t have hired this guy to run a coffee machine. It’s astonishing how fools can fail upward in this fallen world.

The Best Gift Came Months Ago

This is my first Father’s Day as a father.

Why do they call it “Father’s Day”? That always bugs me. Like there is just one father. It should be “Fathers’ Day.” Oh, well.

Now that I am on the other side of the holiday, I think it’s strange that we honor men because God has blessed them. You would think the blessing was honor enough.

My son adores me. When I enter a room, his whole face lights up. The other day I walked by him without saying anything, thinking he was occupied, and he started to cry. When I rub his chest, he grabs my hand and presses it to him tightly while chewing on it and growling with passion. He screams with joy when I play with him.

He’s handsome. He has a very sweet nature. He’s more fun than I can describe. It looks like he’s going to be smart. He behaves well for a baby. But somehow people should treat me like I’m a hero because God gave him to me after I wasted most of my life?

It’s extremely important to honor fathers. I know that. But it should be an everyday thing. If my son honors me throughout the year, Father’s Day will be just another day. We should honor God every day for giving us children.

The Bible makes it clear that a child is a blessing. Consider Abraham, Sara, Rachel, Hannah, and the Shunammite woman. Psalm 127 says, “Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord: and the fruit of the womb is his reward.”

In Genesis, God told Abraham and Hagar he would make their sons great nations. These were blessings.

It’s nice to be appreciated, but I already felt blessed.

I was going to put up a photo of my son climbing over his mom to give me a big sloppy smile, but I have decided against it.

No Kings, but Plenty of Jokers

The children of the Antichrist have come to my red Christian area, hoping to drum up support for the wholesale violation of our immigration laws. In reality, they will just push Democrats into the Trump camp.

The “No Kings” anarchists claim they will be in the town square until noon. They were supposed to start at 10:30. I’m sure they will be annoying, because that’s their stated goal and their nature, but I doubt there will be significant lawbreaking, because they will be few in number, and our governor and our sheriff are not on the side of rioters. The police here are itching to make arrests, and the politicians are not going to discourage them. Here is Sheriff Wayne Ivey to tell you more:

He could be considered the father of the No Jokers movement.

They probably bused in a large percentage of whoever is out there right now trying to intimidate us. I doubt they have the resources to bring in enough criminals to overwhelm the state, county, and city police. The Soros machine has a lot of money, but it has spread itself out over a very large area today. The entire continental US, to be specific. I doubt they will be able to get much done here, in terms of the usual domestic terrorism they are known for.

As the anti-Newsom, and by that I mean as the incredibly competent, proactive governor he is, DeSantis has probably made all sorts of preparations. I would guess the National Guard has been told to get ready to deploy in a hurry.

The preparations DeSantis made for last year’s hurricanes were so good and so smart, I was shocked. You would have to live here to understand. Acres of response machinery, all over the state, waiting to be unleashed. In a state that has a budget surplus, I might add.

Democrats think money fixes everything, but the more you give them, the worse their states perform.

It’s sad to see these paid propagandists pollute my county with their presence, but I am extremely grateful for politicians and cops who are forcing them to bend the knee and obey the law. I would hate to be in a blue city right now.

Well. When would I not?

Associated Press Openly Advises Terrorists on Defeating the Cops

A Florida sheriff has made the news by stating that his department plans to enforce the law. Leftists are outraged. Predictably.

If you haven’t seen the video yet, you will. Wayne Ivey is the sheriff of Brevard County, which is where Cape Canaveral is located. He has caused leftist skulls to pop by going on TV and warning potential rioters about the likely consequences of committing crime in his county. First, he said his department welcomed peaceful protests. Then he said cops would hit back, and he said that if they put officers’ lives or bodies in serious danger, they would be killed “graveyard dead.”

Of course, leftists are saying he threatened to kill people for protesting. The people he explicitly welcomed. A lot of misspelled Internet comments are foaming over with words like “fascism” and “murder.” Internet lawyers who haven’t completed their GED’s are saying Sheriff Ivey should be put in prison for threatening to murder people, and they are claiming that if the police kill anyone in Brevard, his press conference appearance will prove he is guilty of murder.

As always, leftists are cribbing from their father, Satan. The father of every leftist. Satan and his imps want us to think God is unfair for condemning them forever while giving human sinners eternal life in paradise. They love playing victim. Similarly, all the leftist creeps who have been salivating over the prospect of rioting in Florida are now portraying our sheriffs as bullies so they can say that whatever crimes they commit in retaliation are justified.

In a move reminiscent of Kristallnacht, leftists are planning 1800 protests for tomorrow, as part of the 50501 movement. That number means “50 protests, 50 states, 1 movement.” This organization claims to be a genuine grassroots operation, but there is no way that can be true. It started with a Reddit post in January, and organized protests were underway in less than a month. And we have all see the semi trucks dropping off supplies for rioters. Someone is paying for all that.

Prior to Sheriff Ivey’s conference, in which he was surrounded by other law enforcement professionals in agreement, spindly-limbed black-clad putative males who had been busy filling backpacks with weapons were in a position cowards like to occupy: they expected little resistance. Now he has struck fear into their hearts, ruining the fun. Naturally, they’re upset. Each one of them is like a bride who just found out her caterer’s truck lost a wheel on the way to the banquet hall.

I was heartened to see Sheriff Ivey speak his intentions. I’m very tired of having the government hold me down so my enemies can punch me. It’s very heartening to see officials in one state standing up for the innocent against sadistic bullies.

My sheriff is just like Ivey. It comforts me to know that someone in power is willing to work to force malefactors to leave my family alone.

Tomorrow’s planned riots have a collective name: “No Kings.” The idea is that no one should have the kind of power Donald Trump had. Mind you, these are the same lily-livered characters who were so afraid of coronavirus, they stood up for Gretchen Whitmer when she had people arrested for not wearing ineffective masks while mowing their yards.

They didn’t seem upset when Obama went crazy appointing unelected “czars,” and they didn’t mind Andrew Cuomo forcing old people into nursing homes so they could infect each other with covid. They didn’t complain when the IRS tried to hire 89,000 new agents or when it started providing them with guns. It didn’t bother them when Mark Zuckerberg and Google censored half of the country, but they were infuriated when Elon Musk gave our voices back.

They were thrilled when Biden and governors tried to force all of us to take shots that were unnecessary and even deadly. Shots the manufacturers themselves admit were not properly tested.

They’re just fine with fascists, as long as they’re leftist fascists.

It’s a shame so many people think “fascist” is a term that only applies to the right wing. Not true. It’s a very neutral term that can be applied to Stalin just as easily as Mussolini. Look it up. Rioters don’t read dictionaries. These are the people who will loot every sneaker store, Best Buy, liquor store, and Apple bar in a city and leave every bookstore untouched.

Ivey is right to threaten to kill violent rioters who endanger others. This is exactly what the law calls for, and people planning to hurt the innocent need to be put in fear.

He also pointed out that blocking traffic is not peaceful, meaning it’s not Constitutionally protected expression. He said people who tried to swarm cars were likely to be run over, as they should be. Ron DeSantis agrees. It is the state’s official policy not to prosecute innocent drivers who drive through mobs that surround their cars and put them in fear.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone. It is consistent with self-defense common law going back to ancient England. If someone puts you in fear of serious injury or death, you can respond with deadly force, and having a crowd of worthless people hammer on your windows and prevent you from leaving certainly qualifies as putting you in fear.

In Florida, carjackers can be shot dead without consequences, as can arsonists and kidnappers. That has been the law for years. If one person trying to enter your car unlawfully is carjacking and kidnapping, you surely have the right to use your car to flee when two hundred people surround your car.

Unfortunately, the press is doing its best to demonize decent people and praise 50501. The shamefully-biased Associated Press calls 50501 a “grassroots movement” of “everyday people.” Those are the phrases it uses. Only the wicked would fight a grassroots movement and fight back against everyday people!

Rioters aren’t “everyday people.” In fact, “everyday person” has no definition. It must be one of those new terms leftists made up to distort reality. I guess it’s a contrived response, created and propagated via conspiracy, to the fact that conservatives have been exposing professional rioters. It must mean “ordinary local person not paid or trained to riot or bussed in by Alex Soros and Christine Walton, who just happened to show up at a riot with 500 other people at the same time, wearing the same face mask.”

AP is supposed to be an organization that reports only facts, but we all know better. It’s a disgrace to see them using “grassroots” and “everyday” just like the hordes of externally-coordinated leftist talking-points artists all over cable and the web.

If you’ve been reading my blog for years, you remember me correctly telling everyone that real blogging was dead. Corporations took over and produced sites like The Daily Kos and Pajamas Media that only pretended to be blogs. Well, now rioting has gone corporate. Same thing.

The Associated Press is now HELPING people riot and defeat the police. Check out this item from a “protest” checklist AP provided:

Face mask or bandanna, hat and sunglasses: Useful for helping to shield your eyes from pepper spray or tear gas, can also protect you from identification by law enforcement or online doxxing if that’s a concern.

Can you believe that? They’re telling people how to avoid identification by law enforcement. Here’s another:

Many organizations advise protesters to leave their phones at home to protect their privacy as they can easily be tracked. If you must take your phone, keep it turned off until you need it and, before you go, disable Face ID or fingerprint security and stick with the 6-digit passcode instead. You may also consider buying a cheap secondary phone to use.

I wonder why this isn’t a big story. It should be. One of our major news organizations–one which claims not to provide opinion pieces–has openly advised rioters in order to help them escape justice.

Ivey had to point some obvious things out. Burning cars isn’t peaceful. Blocking roads isn’t peaceful. It’s amazing that leftists need to be told these things. They seem to think that unless they’re shooting people in the face, everything they do is protected expression. Most of what we see them do these days is not protected by the Constitution, as well as illegal under federal and state laws.

What we now call “civil disobedience” has another name: crime. It’s also a tool for destroying democracy. We are supposed to use the polls to decide what happens here. Taking over buildings and blocking roads are not legitimate ways of agitating for policy change. If the democratically-elected government disagrees with you, it means you lost, fair and square, and you have a legal obligation to comply. You don’t have a God-given right to burn a store or throw pee at the police just because things didn’t go your way. You get one vote in the booth, not one in the booth and another one running up and down the aisles at Louis Vuitton with your arms full of stolen purses.

When crowds of semi-literate buffoons and enemy aliens get to run the country, democracy will be dead. Your vote will be worth as much as an Obama promise about your healthcare.

Civil disobedience has always been a stupid idea, except for cases in which the government is completely out of hand. Arresting illegal aliens in accordance with federal law does not meet that standard or come anywhere close to it.

For a long time, I have been predicting that idiot mobs would take over, using the web as their nervous system to help them gather and attack. I hope this weekend isn’t the time when it starts in earnest. Sooner or later, these morons will realize the police alone can’t handle them, and that will give them confidence to take over. When that happens, the only group large enough to take them on will be ordinary citizens with rifles. So civil war of a sort.

The black pajama kids, the enemy aliens, and the ghetto looters can handle the police, because they have overwhelming numbers. They will not be able to handle ordinary civilians. There are millions and millions of armed civilians in the US, many with police and military training, many with very sophisticated long-distance weapons, and they are not bound by the same rules of engagement the police follow. If the domestic terrorists get cocky and start playing guerrilla, they may die by the thousands before they realize their poor grasp of math and the law have made them fish in a very tight barrel.

They really need to go home and go back to civilized means of promoting their agendas before something terrible happens. They don’t understand whom they risk provoking. It’s appalling that leftist politicians, journalists, and entertainers are encouraging them to walk into a meat grinder. No one on the left has thought this through. They’re too busy virtue-signaling and committing shameful acts of racist and political sadism to think.

I am extremely grateful to live where I do. When the water starts to rise, it’s better to be on high ground than down in a swamp. Whatever happens, at least people in my area will get more time to deal with it, and this county will not be an early target because domestic terrorists, in addition to being stupid, are very lazy and always start their tantrums in their own cities.

Think I’ll Paint Winnie the Pooh on it for Nose Art

With some trepidation, I am making a third effort to write this blog post. The first time, I started and then drove to Walmart, and when I got home, the Notepad window I was using had disappeared. Ironically, I have gotten used to using Notepad because my power used to blink while I was using a browser and WordPress. Notepad saved a number of essays. But it only does that when you save your work manually from time to time, and I quit doing that a long time ago, probably because I developed some faith in my backup power supply.

The second time I tried to write this post, my wife knocked the cord out of the back of my PC with a mop after I wrote maybe 500 words. I’ll bet they were great.

One more time, from the top:

I am pleased to say that I now have an excavator of my very own.

I have wanted an excavator for years. My farm has a lot of problems excavators are the best tools for fixing. Tree stumps. Not-quite-buried rocks that dent my mower blades. Holes that need to be dug. Trees that should be pushed over instead of being felled with saws.

An excavator is an amazing thing. You can use one to make beautiful, very deep holes with clean vertical sides and flat bottoms. You can dig long trenches with them, and you can fill the trenches in very quickly. You can tear unwanted trees up. You can dig up and lift boulders.

For digging, an excavator is like a number of sturdy potential deportees armed with shovels, fresh from the parking lot at Home Depot, except it won’t case your house and come back later to steal your jewelry and oriental rugs. And it won’t try to vote in your elections.

Why didn’t I buy an excavator sooner? Because I am cheap. I would rather watch my property deteriorate than part with a sum I wouldn’t really miss.

That sum is around $25,000. That’s about as little as you can hope to pay for a 6-ton excavator that isn’t ready for the scrapyard. You can go cheaper, but you should expect to have a lot of down time and repairs.

I didn’t spend $25,000. I spent $5,000. For a brand-new excavator. How did I pull that off? Well, I compromised. A little. I shaved a little bit off the desired tonnage. About 80%, give or take. And I went Chinese.

For some time, the Chinese have been making little-bitty excavators weighing as little as 1500 pounds. Real manufacturers make small excavators, too, but theirs are fancy and have diesel engines. The Chinese go bare-bones, and they use the sort of engines Briggs & Stratton makes. Like big lawnmower engines. Gas-powered.

I used to see tiny excavators going up and down the road on trailers, and I thought they were silly. I couldn’t believe they were worth buying. I was sure a 1-ton excavator couldn’t pull a tree over, for one thing.

Recently, I saw a video that changed my mind. A huge Youtube star bought a used Chinese excavator for $3,000, and he loved it. This is a guy who owns huge track loaders, dump trucks, bulldozers, skid steers, and diesel excavators. He knows all about the real thing, but he enjoyed a Chinese toy.

He did things with it that surprised me. He lifted a tree that had to be 40 feet long, and he drove off with it.

I thought that was pretty neat. I started thinking I had made the perfect the enemy of the good. So what if I ended up with an excavator that couldn’t take a tree down? It would still be great for little stumps and digging out rocks. It would work for digging holes, like the one I need to dig to fix my gate’s car sensor.

I looked around, and I found out Chinese baby excavators started at around $6,000 for the bare minimum. But then I got lucky. I saw an ad for a brand-new excavator with 15 horsepower and a hydraulic thumb. Price: $5,000. The manufacturer charges $8500, including shipping.

How was I supposed to say no to that? The excavator in the video had 12 horsepower and a stationary thumb, and it was still wonderful. The one in the ad was a lot better, and because it was new, it probably wouldn’t fall apart for at least a year and a half.

Incidentally, these machines used to cost more. For some reason, the market is flooded with them. I don’t know if Trump scared the importers into dumping them or what.

A Kubota the same size retails for about $29,000. A Kubota is a WEE bit better, and by “WEE bit,” I mean “a lot,” but it’s not $24,000 better.

Today I drove out and looked at it, and a couple of hours later, it was in my yard. Here’s a photo.

It’s a monster, isn’t it?

It really works. It’s not quite as strong as I had hoped, and it doesn’t break through roots the way it needs to in order to dig fast in Northern Florida, but on the other hand, it digs much faster and better than I can, and while it digs, I don’t get dirty or sweaty. I don’t get sore. I don’t strain my back. I can dig all day. In the past, I used to go a couple of hours and then quit and expect to feel sore the next day.

This machine can go down 65 inches. That’s really something. I believe the deepest hole I ever dug in my life was about 30 inches, and it was a horrible experience.

I have a couple of partially-buried rocks I really want to get rid of. The tractor couldn’t do anything, even when I used a subsoiler to go around it. I am planning to use the excavator to go down 65 inches, and if that isn’t enough to loosen them up and allow me to pull them out with the tractor, I’m going to rebury them and paint the tops bright pink so I quit running over them.

Actually, I might use the rotary hammer and wedges to break the tops off of them. That would be good enough.

It’s not fun to use. Yet.

The controls are not intuitive. It appears it will take me a day of practice to get to the point where I’m not doing things like lowering the bulldozer blade when I think I’m curling the bucket. Also, the machine’s movements are very jerky. You push the levers carefully, trying to ease into motion gradually, and at first, nothing happens. Then the excavator leaps into action. It’s like riding a mechanical bull. Hard to predict. You can actually throw yourself out of the machine if you aren’t careful.

I have read that these little excavators use the same pumps diesel excavators use. Gas engines run at higher RPM’s, so supposedly, this results in too much fluid pressure. I don’t know if it’s true.

A guy who claims he sells these machines says the problem is that the manufacturers don’t adjust the pressure well at the factories. He says you can fix it with a simple gauge and an Allen wrench.

I’m going to improve my skills and see if that fixes the problem, and if it doesn’t work, I’ll look into pump adjustment.

Some people think cheap Chinese hydraulic fluid makes the machines jerkier than they should be, and they also say it should be changed right away anyhow, because it’s no good and may also have bits of metal in it after the machines have run a few hours. I plan to hit Tractor Supply tomorrow and buy real fluid.

I don’t know if this excavator will be of any use with my big stumps. Maybe if I’m patient. But I have a bunch of little ones, and I also have a lot of shrubs I want to rip out. It will be great for those jobs.

Just about all the parts that may go bad are available on Amazon, and they are cheap. I don’t have a warranty, but at this price, and given the simplicity of the machine and the cost of parts, I don’t care.

If I decide I don’t like it, I can probably get most of my money back out of it, so there is not much of a down side. I might lose two grand, but I’m sure I can do more than two grand’s worth of work before I do.

Today I realized I needed to think more about machinery that does work for me. If I’m going to continue living in the country, I mean. I’m strong now, but old age is just about here, and people don’t stay strong forever. And my time has some value, even if it isn’t much. There is a lot to be said for turning a hard two-week job into a one-day job you can do sitting down, especially when you have a wife waiting for you to finish and move on to the next chore.

I could just pay people to do things. I would hate to feel helpless, though, and paying people isn’t always cheaper than buying equipment. For example, I can buy a used diesel mower for $9,000 and use it until I die, with only only routine maintenance. I can’t find anyone who will charge me $9,000 to mow my grass for that same period. I would go through that in a couple of years.

I am considering upgrading my tractor for $30,000 minus whatever I get for the old one. That would include buying a flail mower that could probably replace my garden tractor for lawn work. A bigger tractor would make things go much, much faster and easier. If I had to pay people to come out and cut and move trees instead of using a tractor, I would probably end up spending more over time. I was quoted $800 for felling one tree and then walking away.

I like the idea of showing my son how to do manly stuff. I once competed in a fishing tournament on my dad’s boat, and his partner hooked a sailfish. The drag was loose, and he needed to turn the drag knob to tighten it. It was a spinning reel with a knob that had a right-hand thread. I told him to tighten it, and he had to ask me which way to turn it.

My son will never have to shame the family like that. Imagine a grown man not knowing which way a screw turns. Willy Loman said it best, to another character who marveled that Willy had put up a ceiling: “A man who can’t handle tools is not a man. You’re disgusting.”

My son’s dad will be able to teach him welding, machining, basic electronics, painting, forestry, how to run and fix a tractor, how to run a diesel yacht, fishing, shooting, reloading, how to run woodworking machines, how to make a real pizza, and how to run a tiny Chinese excavator. Maybe a bigger excavator some day. I’ll be able to teach him basic car repair, so he won’t have to pay people to change his oil or do his brakes.

I keep hoping my son forgets about college and starts a business that begins with a trade and ends with a fleet of trucks or machines and a stable of employees.

My wife gets annoyed with me sometimes because I don’t like to pay people, but I can’t believe what some tradesmen charge. Home Depot wanted $200 to install two blinds. That’s 4 holes and 4 screws. A chimney guy charged me almost $400 to go up on the roof and give me an estimate.

She practically begged me to hire painters, but when we did our own painting, she had to admit our work was better than the pros’ who came before us, and it was free. We probably saved $3,000, and we still have to do two stairwells, two baths, and the kitchen. Imagine what that would cost.

I can’t believe what painters charge. I used to paint entire apartments for $300 plus materials, and I did good work.

I started working on one of my buried rocks today. Tomorrow I’ll get back to it. I’ll be disappointed if I don’t get it out; for all I know, I’m digging around a tiny projection on a rock that lies under the whole neighborhood, like a wart on a whale’s butt. But at least I’ll be able to say I found out and didn’t chicken out like a soy-eater and pay a big strong man to do it for me.

Pairs Nicely with Word Salad

I guess it’s time for another “boiling frog” post. Once again, I am struck by mankind’s general failure to comprehend the level of evil in the world.

Man’s most impressive quality, to me, is our seemingly-unlimited ability to get used to things and be content with situations that are objectively very bad. There are happy quadruple amputees. There were surely moderately happy prisoners in the Nazi death camps. This is just how people are. As things get worse for us, many of us establish new baselines.

You start out thinking happiness is a huge income, a beautiful family, good health, and a fine house. If you go broke unexpectedly, it changes: happiness is a beautiful family and good health. If you get a horrible disease, happiness is a beautiful family. If things get bad enough, happiness is getting to trade the wet, soggy refrigerator box you sleep in, alone, while waiting to die, for a dry one.

There was a time not that long ago when women weren’t supposed to show their ankles in public. There was a time when a bikini was considered scandalous. Now you can walk around naked in major US cities, and the police will back you up.

“On a Slow Boat to China” was once considered too risque to be used in a movie, but now children repeat a song a famous and likely illiterate slut wrote about her vagina, and a public high school held an assembly to let an even worse slut speak. The latter slut can’t complain about being called a slut, because she appears in a video for a song called “Slut me Out.”

Your kids probably know it by heart.

We have also become used to childish pettiness and sadism, even from people in positions of great political power.

Los Angeles is being torn up by the usual suspects right now. Our federal government is obeying the law, rounding up and deporting illegal aliens, and Californians as well as hostile foreigners are rioting. They have tried to kill feds and random individuals by slinging concrete through car windows. They have burned cars. They entered a federal building and destroyed vehicles. What is the press calling this dangerous, ominous uprising? “Peaceful.” Even Fox said it.

What does “peaceful” mean now? How many car-burnings, attempted murders, and government-building invasions does a public gathering have to have before we admit it’s not peaceful?

The governor of California, a failed presidential candidate, and a US representative are blaming the victims. Imagine this happening in 1980 or 2000.

Gavin Newsom claims Donald Trump is at fault, saying he is intentionally fomenting disorder. Like a battered wife who burns her husband’s English muffin, I guess. Kamala Harris also blames the government, of which she nearly gained control. A representative named Norma Torres told the feds, “Go the F___ home!” on the Internet!

American law enforcement officers should “go home,” but hostile foreigners in the process of committing felonies in our country should stay here?

We should be astonished by the state of our country, but we’re not. We have escalation fatigue. We’re used to things being bad, and we’re used to them getting worse.

The icing on the cake is that Kamala Harris nearly won the presidency. It shows that America is in terrible shape. She is the dumbest, most transparently dishonest, least charming candidate the Democrats have fielded in my lifetime, and she nearly beat the man who gave us the glorious years of 2017 through 2021, during which our nation at least had the illusion of recovery.

Since Trump won, conservatives have been strutting around like Mick Jagger doing his chicken dance, proclaiming the end of leftism and the permanent ascendancy of the right, but the truth is, we are still losing. Trump squeaked by; there was no landslide. We have tiny, fragile margins in Congress. Americans are becoming more cruel and childish. Yeshua is becoming even less popular. The truth is held in even more contempt than it was in 2020.

Christians are being pushed into smaller and smaller safe zones. It seems like we are headed for a scenario in which we have no books to read, no shows and movies to watch, and no music to listen to, in addition to all our other limitations.

In 2021, I started watching the TV show Clarkson’s Farm, in which British comedian Jeremy Clarkson tries to make a profit running a thousand-acre crop and livestock operation. I mean he tries to make a profit other than the pallets of cash Amazon provides for his efforts.

It’s an extremely funny show, and I can relate to some of it, having worked on my grandfather’s farms and now living on a sort of farm of my own.

The other day, I was watching, and Clarkson called Yeshua “JFC,” and by that I mean he used a course term for copulation as thought it were God’s middle name. I was disturbed. My wife, who was walking through the living room holding our son, was disturbed, although she didn’t mention it until later.

I sat there thinking, “Should I turn this off, or should I just accept this as a momentary bit of unpleasantness of a sort which is unavoidable in the world in which I now live? Will I be held accountable?”

Clarkson is very smart and very funny, but he’s also one of Earth’s most conspicuous and perversely proud fools. He has no interest in God, and he doesn’t know he and his family are cursed because of his choices. He is not a good role model for people who want to lead blessed lives and avoid hell. People who are successful from the long perspective.

My wife brought the JFC outburst up last night, and we talked about it, wondering what we should do. It’s not just about Clarkson. It’s about the culture of the entire world. Are we supposed to remain enganged, let ourselves be subjected to commonplace filth and blasphemy, and get over it? Are we supposed to get rid of Starlink, hole up like lepers, and have groceries passed over our front gate?

This must be what Israel was like during the periods when the Jews served Baal and other evil spirits, or when the Tribe of Benjamin was busy raping men in the street.

People say lots of vile things these days, as a matter of course. They say “holy s___.” You probably say it. You definitely associate with people who do. Have you ever thought about what it means? You’re saying feces are like God. Do you think he likes that? Do you think it will never affect your future?

Nonetheless, it’s considered acceptable. I have probably heard it said 50,000 times, and I have probably said it myself, although maybe not, since it always sounded stupid to me. I’ve heard Christians say it.

I’m glad “oh, my f___ing God” isn’t as popular. That one always makes me cringe.

Last night I asked my wife where we were supposed to go once America became too disgusting for us. This was the big sanctuary country for Christians. The place where persecution was mildest. It’s crumbling fast, so where do we go? Africa? There is poverty and boredom, but least African countries fight perversion and put Yeshua in their constitutions.

I don’t want to move to Africa, but it would really be something, walking around and going about our business in a country where anyone who persecutes Christians or criticizes prayer gets ripped into by the general public. It would be fantastic to live in a country where a perversion parade would be grounds for mass arrests, and where witches, though common, have to hide.

When I prophesy, God keeps saying he is ridding me of the ways of Satan. That is excellent news, but when God clears you of the customs and beliefs of Satan’s world, you necessarily become increasingly disgusted with Earth and more aware of what mankind is missing by insisting on doing things its own way. No matter how nice your life is here, you feel a stronger drive to go home. You crave God’s presence. You want the tribulation to start so reform can begin.

The earth is a toilet that hasn’t been flushed in a very long time.

I love the county where I live. I love it 10 times as much as I hate Miami, which is saying a great deal. I wish the whole country were like this place. I love Tennessee. I love Singapore. I love Switzerland. Why? Because I love places where people at least superficially resemble Christians.

The Swiss are conceited leftists who have no interest in God, but they are polite, responsible, accomplished people who treat each other well and refrain from violent crime. The most popular religion in Singapore is Buddhism, which came from Satan, but again, the people act a lot like Christians. Tennessee is full of actual Christians. Parts of it, anyway. Definitely not Memphis.

My feelings about these places stem from my desire to get away from America’s deteriorating ghetto/junior high culture. I want to live in a place of peace and prosperity, where people aren’t constantly putting their filthy ways before my face.

Even though I know Singapore and Switzerland aren’t Christian countries, I can’t help loving them irrationally, just because of their peoples’ outward resemblance to Christians.

I don’t know what kinds of adjustments we will have to make regarding things we expose our family to, but whatever they are, our resulting situation will not be an adequate substitute for the Messianic Age or heaven. In order to come as close as possible to feeling as though we have been moved to a better place, I think the best thing we can do is to soak in God’s presence as much as we can while we are stuck here among the children and savages.

Like UV Light on a Hotel Bedspread

Sometimes I find myself failing to pray as much as I want to, and it’s a big problem. Life stops running as smoothly as it should, and I miss God. I start to worry that I’m planting bad things in my future by failing to pray.

My son was a big distraction when he arrived. Constant demands were placed on my wife and me. She became absorbed with his care, and she often pulled me away from prayer. I have had to fight this ever since he was born.

Lately, things have gotten a lot better for me. I have been praying for God to give both of us grace to spend time with him so we won’t be destroyed. I ended up telling my wife I was done getting up in the morning and feeding our son, because that time was reserved for God. She stopped waking me up and asking me to feed him, and things have improved.

Unfortunately, there is a down side to spending time with the Holy Spirit. He makes you realize how filthy your world is.

I was praying in tongues earlier, and I kept thinking about the corruption of this world. Look what a bizarre situation I live in. I am surrounded by powerful sexual perverts. These people used to be a tiny fringe element.

Not only are they not ashamed (as they should be), they have parades during which they prance about completely naked, in front of kids. They get people fired from their jobs for refusing to endorse their disgusting ways. They make Internet videos in which they threaten to kill normal, decent people for trying to prevent them from exposing their genitals to women and little girls in private areas. The police don’t go after them.

Imagine if normal people were threatening to kill them.

Human beings who are sufficiently high-functioning to read and write, bathe and clothe themselves, and even, in some cases, to have jobs are telling us they belong to the opposite sex, or to nutty “genders” that weren’t invented until about 2022. “I am a tree-sexual.” “My gender is cat.” And mainstream leftists defend them!

When I was born, which wasn’t that long ago in man’s history, things were completely different. Sexual deviants were still being arrested. Better that than the scenario in which we now find ourselves.

People who openly worship Satan are now able to force us to let them lead prayers before government meetings. Satan! The greatest idiot and malefactor who has ever existed!

In the United States, which was once a Christian country, witches routinely gather to curse conservatives and Christians, and we can’t do anything about it.

Our last president invited illegal aliens to come in. Invited them! And half of the population thinks he was right!

As I prayed, I was lying in bed recovering from a man-made plague. Man-made! How could that happen? What species other than man could be stupid enough to give itself a plague?

Every year or so until I die, I can expect to get a disease that didn’t even exist until some fools in China created it. Say what you want about earlier generations; they weren’t dumb enough to make their own epidemics.

Entire sectors of humanity have been weaponized by Satan. They have become, literally, insane. Delusion is now mainstream.

This is especially true of mainstream American blacks. The things they believe are too ridiculous for farce. White people cause all of the world’s problems. There was no slavery until white people created it. Math is racist. Blacks can’t be racist, even if they hate whites openly. Absurdities.

Blacks started a movement to cripple law enforcement over a tiny number of illegitimate killings by police, but they ignored the fact that most murders are committed by blacks, and most of the victims are black.

After decades of idiotic affirmative action, which punished the innocent and rewarded people who caused their own problems, we are still being told that “reparations” have to be provided. You would think that receiving millions of jobs and college admissions other people earned would be considered reparations.

Hordes of confused, godless leftists in the US now feel entitled to physically abuse conservatives, whites, and Christians wherever they find us. A bunch of them just attacked a Christian gathering in Seattle, and the mayor blamed the Christians. Just like Nero.

America is no longer safe for Jews. Not just America, but long-established sanctuaries like New York City and our universities. A group of Jews were just set on fire by an illegal alien–a Muslim terrorist–on an American street.

Our leftists, including many Jews, are kissing up to Muslims and siding against Jews. Sexual deviants are loudly marching in solidarity with Muslims who murder homosexuals as a matter of course. Feminists are siding with Muslims whose religion supports wife-beating, the punishment of rape victims, and barring women from driving.

Anyone who tries to speak a word of helpful correction in this crazy world is punished and silenced. People are too proud to be helped.

Somehow I’m supposed to raise a son in this place. A place where every kid is supposed to have a smartphone, and they routinely send each other pornography they have made.

I can’t send him to school because schools are like pools of infected pus, waiting to fill him with the mental and spiritual diseases of our time. I can’t take him to church because churches persecute the Holy Spirit and fill people’s minds with trash. I can’t let him watch TV unless I want him to be lectured about the glories of homosexuality and socialism. I can’t take him to Disney World unless I want him to see perverted employees selling princess costumes to boys. The movies are out. Secular music is out. I’ll have to cut off most kids who want to be his friends.

What kind of world are we living in now?

If I send him to college, they’ll do their best to convince him Christianity is just a plagiarizing myth structure based on earlier religions. They’ll teach him to fornicate; with other men if possible. They’ll give him bad grades for telling the truth about socialism, slavery, racism, and perversion. I guess business is the only option for him. And he’ll have to operate his business in a very red area unless he wants trouble.

I really hate this place. I can’t say it enough. And when I consider what it should have been, it makes me feel worse. There shouldn’t be any countries; we should all be united as brothers and sisters with Yeshua as our king. There shouldn’t be diseases and wars. Even animals should get along with each other. We should have abundance. We shouldn’t have worries.

After Yeshua returns, the world is going to be like a big petting zoo. Animals won’t kill each other any more. It will be safe to put a baby down next to an asp. We will soak in God’s presence all the time. We will find joy in helping each other. That’s what the world was supposed to be like from the beginning, but instead we have Miley Cyrus and P Diddy. Harvey Weinstein and Lena Dunham. Kim Jong Un and Barack Obama. The Bidens and Kim Kardashian.

Sit down for a few minutes and make a serious effort to imagine a world of love and agreement. Then consider the world you live in.

The sooner the rapture comes, the happier I will be. I don’t know how people who are closer to God than I am stand this place. It’s bad enough for people like me.

The only answer is to go deeper into God’s presence. Turning back isn’t an option. There is nothing behind me I can go back to!

I can’t wait until this is over. This place needs to be incinerated and rebuilt from nothing.

Banning Real AR-15’s in Colorado is Working out Great

Published a day late.

Life has all sorts of filters in it, and the Holy Spirit is the best one. He lets useless people pass through and disappear, but he catches the ones who belong to him and keeps them in your life.

Yeshua told Peter Satan wanted to sift him. That’s filtration.

I started blogging in 2001, if memory serves. I got to know tons of people, and nearly all of them have disappeared from my life. I still hear from Baldilocks (Juliette Ochieng) from time to time, though. We are texting right now. Like me, she tries to get cleaned up and transformed by the Holy Spirit.

She sent a text saying, more or less, that it was a good thing that my son had parents who were full of the Holy Spirit. No doubt about that! It sounds like a compliment to my wife and me, but it’s really not. It’s praise to God. I replied and said it was a testimony against me that I was so useless at the age when most men have kids.

I wondered if this explained Abraham’s advanced age at the time Isaac was born. Abraham was a swell guy, but when he was young, he worshiped demons and fallen angels, just like everyone else in Ur.

Sometimes I get full of myself and laugh at people who seem to be behind me in the race. I am especially critical of people who are being destroyed by belief in the prosperity gospel. But I got caught up in it myself. I believed it even though it was facially absurd. I would not have been a good parent in 1987.

What will be more embarrassing if all my deeds are shown to humanity at the end of the world? Seeing me watching porn, or seeing me send money to Robert Tilton?

Definitely the latter.

Looks like Dad has covid. I woke up yesterday feeling like I had snored a lot and irritated my throat, but it went away. Later on, I got chills, and my nose started filling up. And I had one of the gross digestive covid symptoms.

Covid is like global warming. No matter what the symptom is, it fits.

I think I got the remedial steps in the right order: 1. prayer, and 2. ivermectin. And I shot some spray into one of my nostrils. One open nostril is all you need, and if you alternate nights, you can extend the time it takes for you to become addicted to the spray.

I woke up feeling nearly well, except for some crud in my throat. In fact, my nose dried up before I fell asleep. Both nostrils. That was shocking.

When I treated myself with prayer, I thought of famous people who had turned to solutions other than God. For example, Asa turned to Egypt for help before getting with the priests and prophets, and he and his country got some curses for it.

I thought of Paul.

We are taught to believe that apostles and disciples never made mistakes, with the obvious exception of Judas. That’s wrong, though. We know they sometimes argued with each other. The Holy Spirit tells everyone the same things, so if two Christians disagree, at least one of them is listening to a source other than God. Paul argued with Peter, and he had a big dust-up with Barnabas.

I think Paul made a number of mistakes. When he was in trouble in Jerusalem, he appealed to Caesar for help. As a result, he was whisked off to Rome and deprived of his liberty. I don’t think God was behind that. God showed Paul, Peter, and Silas that he was perfectly willing to work miracles to free them.

I have tried to form the habit of going to God before looking for secular help. I think it’s very important, and it’s a manifestation of faith and humility, which God likes.

In my chat with Juliette, I asked where the preachers were, who were supposed to teach us these things during the last century.

They were trying to make poor people feel guilty for not buying them nicer mansions and jets.

It is exciting that my son has two parents who know the Holy Spirit and who will not be completely useless to him. On the other hand, it would have been more exciting if I had been a fit parent a long time ago, my son were in his forties, and I were playing with my grandchildren.

Looking outside my own little bubble, I see Satan’s children are burning Jews again.

I read about the Egyptian illegal alien who made himself a flamethrower and used it on pro-Israel marchers in Colorado. I keep saying God has shown me that pogroms are coming back and that Jews will not be safe anywhere. Well, here they are. If setting Jews and their friends on fire on a street in the United States isn’t sufficient evidence, what is?

What are Jews making of this, I wonder?

Actually, I know. I can guess.

1. Some Jews who worship the government and think the Tanakh is fiction–the mainstream–are concerned about the future of their nation, and they are supporting Israel.

2. Others in that group are thinking they need to appease harder. And a lot of them are helping the antisemites and marching with them.

3. The Orthodox are trying to come up with explanations that don’t involve mistakes on their part, as though remaining dispersed in strange lands and having no prophets or miracles are evidence they are on the right track.

4. Jews who know their Messiah and the Holy Spirit are thinking, “Well, this is it. We knew this would happen. Time to get closer to God and our Holy-Spirit-led Christian brothers and sisters.”

A flamethrower! What a punch in the face for people who think the problem is over-hyped and soon to pass. What a punch in the face for Coloradans who are working to nullify the Second Amendment. As the flaming gasoline is flying through the air toward you, just call the police, and they’ll arrive by magic and turn it into confetti before it lands.

Far-left politically-fungible Jewish liberal actor Michael Rapaport seems to be waking up, probably too slowly. He now says “the cavalry” isn’t coming to save the Jews. Of course it isn’t. Not unless the cavalry is Christians who are determined to protect however many Jews they can. We won’t be enough.

In the past, Jews have not gotten along well with cavalry. Consider the Cossacks.

When the state turns against you, the cavalry becomes your enemy.

If I were a Jew with a family, I would be looking at homes in places like South Dakota and Tennessee. Places where it’s okay to be armed. So there are no kosher butchers in these places. So there are no shuls. Big deal. Start migrating, and the butchers and rabbis will follow.

How many rabbis were there in Manhattan and Brooklyn when Jews starting settling there? Didn’t stop anyone.

Eat salad for a while. Have frozen meat shipped in. I guarantee you, there are companies supplying Jews with kosher products via UPS.

I’ll bet Messianics are moving.

Actually, Jews should stop stalling and move to Israel. It DOES belong to them, after all, and we know that God wants them there. God doesn’t expect them to live among treacherous Gentiles forever. He didn’t give Isaac the Promised Land so he could move to Colorado and be attacked with a flamethrower. The diaspora is a curse. It’s not normal, and it’s not a blessing.

The Customer is Always Wrong

I had a sad experience with pride today.

I was running around with a friend, and we decided to meet another friend for lunch. Both of these guys had tried a local burger joint, and they liked it, so that’s where we went.

It’s a mom and pop joint, literally, in a strip mall. They serve burgers somewhat like the ones from Five Guys. They use sirloin beef. The fries may be frozen, but they are prepared well. You can expect to pay a little more than Five Guys, I think. The price structure is not clear, for reasons I will explain.

The place is very clean. The couple (the mom and pop) that run it are very nice, or at least the mom is. We didn’t talk to the pop. There is plenty of parking.

You order at a counter, and you wait until they call you. Then you take your food to your table. You have to clean up your own mess afterward.

The owners were the only people working there today, but there was a tip jar on the counter anyway. In a self-serve restaurant.

They don’t take credit cards. It’s cash or nothing. The mom told us it would cost her $24,000 per year to process cards, and she wasn’t paying it. They had an ATM in back. The ATM charged one of my friends $3, jacking the cost of his meal up considerably.

I tried to order a burger and a drink, thinking it would be cheaper than a burger, drink, and fries. The mom said something weird about discounting the food by $2 because I was not using their ATM. She said this made the combo cheaper than a burger and drink. I don’t see how that could be true, since the burger and drink should also be affected by the ATM discount, but whatever, I didn’t want to get into it, so I paid and sat down.

Why wasn’t the discount $3? I don’t know.

My complaints:

1. No credit cards? Paying cash is considered a hassle these days. Personally, I have chosen to avoid restaurants many times because I didn’t have cash on me. The owners don’t know I avoided their restaurants, because I didn’t write them letters saying, “I avoided your restaurant.” They probably never realized they were killing their own businesses. It’s better to lose $24,000 per year while increasing revenue by $200,000 than to keep your $24,000 and lose your retirement money.

2. Sirloin? No. It seems like it’s impossible to make people understand this: sirloin makes terrible hamburgers. It’s dry and has the consistency of pressed sawdust. It does not work. Steak and hamburger are two different things. You want more fat. You want 80/20 lean/fat, which means ground chuck. It’s THE perfect burger meat. Better than rib eyes. Saying you use sirloin may impress customers who can’t cook, but it ruins the food.

3. Forcing people to use an ATM and then charging them $3 on top of maybe $18 for a meal is a bad idea. This should be obvious.

4. They smash the burgers down so they’re practically a film. This makes the crumbly nature of sirloin more obvious. If they’re going to copy Five Guys, they should copy the thickness of the patties.

5. The burgers were not hot. Mine was lukewarm. Maybe they were waiting for fries to cook. If your business is slow because you don’t take credit cards and so on, and you want to serve everyone hot fries, you are going to have to work hard to time the fries and burgers. If you mess up and start the fries too late, the burgers will get cold. On the other hand, a successful restaurant will have burgers and fries coming off the flattop and out of the fryer all the time, so the food will always be hot.

6. Pop, the cook, barely put any condiments or toppings on the burger. Trying to save money? Bad cook? Both?

7. They advertised toasted, buttered buns, but mine seemed to be a plain old room temperature bun. Maybe they toasted it a little. I didn’t notice any toasting or butter. And the bun seemed thick because I could see through the burger. Okay, I exaggerate. A bit.

They’re going to go out of business if they don’t change. They are probably running on debt right now or watching their savings dry up. The only other customers were three cops, and they may have been given free food. That’s common.

A few easy changes could fix everything in a month.

I went to the web and wrote a review, hoping to be helpful. This shows how naive I still am in my old age. Restaurant owners who like advice are extremely rare. They are more likely to respond and tell you off. Before going out of business.

I looked at the review score: 4.6 out of 5, with over 600 reviews. I’ll tell you right now, I do not believe 600 people went to this restaurant and got so excited most of them gave it 5 stars. I think they bought reviews.

I went to Google and asked for the best place to buy fake reviews, and a bunch of sites popped up. Examples: Reliablereviews.com and Buyreviewz.com. The second site will give you 50 5-star reviews for $420. So 600 would cost about $5000. I can see a business owner paying that instead of swallowing his pride. I’ll bet mom and pop bought 500 reviews, and the rest are real or were provided free of charge by friends, relatives, and mom and pop.

There are bad reviews, and they say exactly what I said. Take cards. Fix the meat. Serve the burgers hot.

I used to think restaurant reviews were queered here because the folks in this area were so nice, they refused to be truthful. Now I think review farms are the reason.

I went to a couple of AI sites to get more information. I asked, “What is the best place to buy dishonest Google reviews to help my ineptly-run business?” Google, Grok, and ChatGPT refused to help me, thank goodness.

I was given similar lectures by all three sites. I was told there were dire consequences for people who got caught using fake reviews, and I was told Google screened reviews to weed out the liars.

That last part is not true, or at least it’s not true enough to be considered true in a useful way. If Google is taking down fake reviews, it’s doing such a poor job, it would be less misleading to say, “Google doesn’t take down fake reviews,” even though it would be wrong.

Check out this review from “Arimas 03”:

!! It is cash only!! Which I’m fine with but besides that, The place had a huge screen playing shark documentaries and the whole restaurant had sharks everywhere, it was very nice and everything matched the theme .this place has one of the best burgers I’ve had. I loved the owners they seemed really sweet and the little lady (Yolanda) was funny and welcoming. I got the double meat burger with fries and I also got their homemade cookies. Best cookie I ever had. I will definitely be back. Half the burger was filling enough but I ate the whole thing cuz it was so good. Time for a nap,

Ms. Arimas has a total of 4 Google reviews, and guess what? All are 5-star. Here’s another:

Elayne was great. She had a bubbly and sweet personality. Made us feel welcomed and comfortable. Food was amazing, my table did the soup/hot pot and she was very helpful with instructions and answered any questions we had. Definitely will be back and I recommend receiving service from her.

Another encomium for “sweet,” welcoming owners!

Here’s one for a “facial spa”:

Love love love the vibe. Crystal always gets me right with my lashes. Definitely coming back to her

Five stars! Funny how she always knows the owners personally.

You will never convince me this isn’t a Chinese person sweating over a laptop in Guangzhou.

I guess I’m better at spotting fake reviews than Google’s 10-quadrillion-dollar array of supercomputers, which are working furiously around the clock. Reviewers lie, so of course, Google lies about chasing lying reviewers. Let’s all lie! It doesn’t matter, right? We’re all speaking “our” truths, I guess.

I don’t think Google cares. I think Google’s attitude is like the police’s. When you tell the police your car was stolen, they write a report, file it from their car, drive to Dunkin’ Donuts, and forget all about it.

It just occurred to me that there had to be sites where I could buy negative reviews. I checked, and they exist. See Bigapplehead.com.

This is the kind of thing that makes me wish for the rapture. The Internet comes along, and suddenly little people have a voice. Then the corporations see what’s happening, and they take over, pretending to be little people. They crowd the little people out. They ban little people for saying things they don’t like. They pay to have their own profiles raised. This puts the the little people right where they were to start with.

Human beings make me want to puke.

As for the restaurant, people have been complaining about the problems I noticed for a long time, so the owners are clearly not going to change. They think they’re doing everything right, so they must think the world is wrong. Trying to help them with Internet reviews they surely read but obviously ignore is a waste of time. I expect their restaurant and their investment to vanish.

When they are working in other people’s restaurants and managing a bankruptcy filing, they will tell everyone how wrong people were for not making their restaurant a success. Because they did everything right!

Pride is amazing, because it makes smart people behave like stupid ones. A stupid person doesn’t learn because he can’t. A proud person doesn’t learn because he refuses. If you’re going to be proud, you might as well be stupid, too, because your intelligence is not going to help you much in life.

Carnivorous Baby

They say kids should start eating solid food at 4 months. Or 6 months. It’s always like this when I look for answers about baby care. This source says that. That source says this. And they say everyone else is wrong.

Our son is a voracious feeder. My wife has had trouble keeping up recently because he feeds so much, and we don’t want to use formula. He started staring at our food and drooling. After asking an actual mother instead of websites designed to generate clicks, we decided to try giving him a little cereal, even though he’s not 4 months old yet. I thought he might eat a teaspoon or two.

Try two tablespoons. I could not believe it.

We’re inexperienced, so we blew it by giving him that much food. He started throwing up and having bowel pain, so we took him to the emergency room.

No, we didn’t! He ate it all, blew it right out the other end, and wanted more. The next day my wife gave him some avocado. The day after, baby food from the store. He got furious at her for feeding him too slowly. He wanted her to jam it in as fast as possible. We’ve tried several foods, and nothing bothers him.

This kid is so vigorous, it makes me nervous. He eats like he’s starving. He churns his little legs and tries to run on his back when he sees us. He screams with joy. He grabs my hand, traps it against his chest in a bear hug, and chews on it while growling like a Doberman.

He knows us from across the room. When we approach, he follows us with his eyes, returns our smiles, and squeals with happiness. He follows objects. He throws things, although not very accurately.

He is intense. He gets very quiet and stares when things go on around him. His attention span is better than mine. When I show him his plastic numbers and tell him what they are, I have to quit after maybe 15 minutes, but he wants to keep going.

I don’t know what to make of it. Every parent thinks his baby is a cross between Albert Einstein and Superman, and then they end up selling insurance or managing drugstores, so I try to be objective, but I can tell from the way other people talk about him that he is unusual.

I wonder if we pushed his development by showing him numbers, singing with him, exercising him, and spending a ton of time interacting with him. Is that possible? If so, is it good? I don’t want him to peak at 6 months. And it’s not like his life is a job. He has a few obligations already, but he’s not training for a decathlon or Jeopardy.

He’s not ahead in every way. He still hates being put on his stomach for more than about 90 seconds.

I wish we had had him sooner, but my wife lived in Africa. Imagine having a child 8,000 miles away, in a country where people don’t have it together. I would have been lucky to see him once every 6 weeks. He would barely have known me when he got here. If he’s precocious, though, it should take a little bit of the bite out of waiting for him to be born.

Today we had friends over. One saw a photo on my wall. My wife and me on Victoria Peak in Hong Kong. He asked if the location was Victoria Peak, and it startled me. He said he had worked for Open Doors, smuggling Bibles into China. He had been to Hong Kong many times.

We ended up looking at videos of the trips my wife and I made to Hong Kong and Singapore. Then after he left, we looked at our Europe trip. There my son was. A big lump in my wife’s belly. Holding our son, she watched the videos and told him he was in them.

What an adventure our marriage has been. We are so blessed. I hope God continues to build our son up and consider him his own.

How long will it continue, though? Looking at the photos, I noticed I had taken a lot of shots of roads, hallways, and sidewalks. I shot people who were leaving one place and moving to another. It made me think of the rapture. This world has gotten so filthy. People are so insane. How long will it be till we find ourselves on the way somewhere?

I hope things keep going as well for us until we are taken as they have gone so far.