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

The crown prince keeps surprising us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes You’re Smarter Than you Think

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wasn’t sure what to think.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You Can’t Stop the Signal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KUBOTA ZD326 STARTING CIRCUITRY

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

OVERVIEW

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

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

PURPOSE OF ECM

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

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

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

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

A bad ground or other connection can simulate ECM failure.

The ECM has 9 connections.

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

RELATIONSHIP OF IGNITION SWITCH TO ECM

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

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

NORMAL START PROCEDURE

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

BYPASSING SWITCHES

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

HOW IGNITION SWITCH WORKS IN GLOW PLUG POSITION

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

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

IMPORTANCE OF TERMINAL AC AND RY WIRE TO STARTING

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

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

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

HOW IGNITION SWITCH WORKS IN START POSITION

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

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

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

STARTER RELAY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TESTING RELAYS

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

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

REMOVING IGNITION SWITCH

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

DISASSEMBLING IGNITION SWITCH

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

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

WIRE COLOR CODES

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

That Little White Thing Behind the Grass is my House

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

Clearly, this means I have to discuss Richard Feynman.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Rapture Starts Within You

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Through John, he said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Victory Delayed is Sweet When it Arrives

Time for an update on the used mower I bought. It’s a 25-horsepower Kubota ZD326 diesel zero-turn.

I should begin with the mower’s age. I sent what I thought was the serial number to Kubota, and they said it was made in 2015. I thought that was great, because it suggested the mower had well below 1,000 hours. Someone has burst my bubble, however. I have been informed that the number I found is the number for the part it was attached to: the ROPS (Roll Over Protection System). A ROPS is a roll bar.

Kubota likes to put serial numbers all over the place. My deck has one, the mower itself has one, and they even put one on the ROPS.

The ACTUAL serial number is a little more than twice the ROPS number, so this is probably a pre-2010 mower. I have not checked yet.

If this mower was in use for 15 years instead of 10, in serious residential use, it should still come in at under 1,000 hours. Maybe less than 500. But I would rather have a 2015 mower than a 2009 mower.

The first time I tried to start the mower, I failed. I found it would start if I fiddled with things and tried starting it a few times. I was able to mow the yard the first time I tried. On Saturday, three days ago, fiddling didn’t work. I couldn’t mow. Fiddling hasn’t worked since.

I thought the mower wouldn’t start because I had failed to put the PTO lever in the right position. The PTO lever has a safety switch on it so the mower blades don’t start turning when you start the engine. I found out this was not the problem. I’m not sure what the issue is, but I have bought some parts, and I am going through the starting system bit by bit.

I replaced the safety switch on the parking brake, and that didn’t help. I have ordered other safety switches so I can replace them. There are switches on the levers you use to steer the machine.

I eventually learned how to hotwire the mower, so I am able to mow while I go through the process of fixing it.

When I hotwired the mower today in order to mow, I thought things were going great, but then it stalled when I moved the control levers. Through trial and error, I found out that I had to bypass the brake switch in order to keep the motor running. As soon as I moved the levers with the switch installed, the motor died. I don’t know what this means yet, but the mower runs with the switch unplugged, so I will be able to mow until I figure things out.

It looks like I installed the wrong part. The safety switches on this think look alike. Some are open by default, and some are closed. Not a big deal, since the old switch tests fine and can be put back in.

I could remove the switch permanently. I don’t need a parking brake switch. My mower isn’t going to roll across Florida while I try to start it. If I lived in Colorado, maybe I would want to keep the switch. This particular switch is not needed in order to make the mower run. If you remove it, the mower starts and runs fine.

Getting to the PTO safety switch is not easy. The mower’s control panel is on the right fender, and a bunch of things go through the panel. Wiring for the idiot lights. Two levers. A big, stiff knob that controls the cutting height. In order to change the switch, you have to remove the panel, and to get the panel off, you have to remove the knob.

The problem with removing the knob is that it is held onto a thick shaft by friction, and it does not want to come off. I tried doing it as gently as I could, and I broke one side of the knob. I believe the right way to get the knob off is to remove a cotter pin from the shaft, down under the fender, but getting to the cotter pin is hard because…the control panel is in the way. I think it can be done with the right long-nose pliers, which I probably have.

I had to order an $11 knob and the decal that goes on the knob and lists the cutting heights.

Believe it or not, I’m making all this sound a lot easier than it was, and I’m leaving a lot of suffering out.

Oh…hey…I just found out the cotter pin is really a clevis pin. That makes things a lot easier. I don’t have to bend a clevis pin closed in order to pull it out or insert it.

I’ve also had to deal with fluids. The guy who sold me the mower put too much fluid in the hydraulic system, so I had to remove and throw out half a gallon of expensive Kubota SUDT2. He also put maybe 12 ounces more oil in the engine than was needed, so I had to drain it into a pan. I don’t know whether he changed the fluid in the deck gearbox, so I’ll be doing that shortly. It’s not hard, so it will be fast. IF ALL GOES WELL. Always add that.

Today I got the mower going, and I mowed quite a bit. Then the mower started slowing down, as though it were going to die. I thought this might be because I had run one of the tanks dry on the previous outing. This mower has two tanks (don’t ask me why), and you have to switch from one tank to the other when your first tank is empty.

When a diesel goes dry, and you start it up again after restoring the fuel flow, you may find there is air in the system somewhere, and depending on the diesel, it will clear the air out on its own, or you will have to do it yourself via a process which may be horrible. When my mower started stumbling, I hoped it would push the air out without help.

The mower slowed down more than once, and it kept speeding up again, so I thought the air was being eliminated. Eventually, though, I had to switch tanks. Then the mower ran well…until it didn’t. When things got bad, I started heading for the house, and the mower died in the driveway, blocking my car in the garage.

I figured it had to be the fuel filter. I looked it up, and a bad fuel filter can make a diesel with a governor slow down temporarily. It will increase the throttle to try to compensate for the reduced fuel flow, but if the flow gets bad enough, the motor will die anyway.

Does my motor even have a governor? No idea. There must be something in there that keeps the maximum RPM’s down, because this mower is supposed to mow at full tilt boogie.

I read and read, and eventually, I started to wonder if I was the problem. Maybe I had simply run out of diesel on the last tank, AFTER having air problems with the first.

I have looked at the owner’s and workshop manual a lot, but I never bothered to read about the fuel gauge. I figured I was smart enough to read one on my own. That may have been a fateful bit of hybris.

This mower has a fuel gauge on the control panel. It also has a yellow idiot light with “RH TANK” printed beside it. I didn’t really think about what this meant. I didn’t look at it much at all. I figured the fuel gauge measured the fuel in whichever tank I was using, and that if the idiot light went on, I was on the right-hand tank.

It turns out the fuel gauge is only for the port, or secondary, tank. You’re supposed to run on the starboard tank until the idiot light comes on. It means that tank is low. Then you switch to the left tank, and the gauge tells you how much fuel you have left until you’re stranded.

I now think I had air in the lines, switched to the right tank, and then ran it dry while assuming it had plenty of fuel in it. The gauge read full.

The mower sat in the driveway for maybe two hours while I tried to figure things out. I put some fuel in each tank, started the mower, and took off. It did slow down briefly, but it kept going.

The diesel in the tanks looks pure. I don’t think the fuel filters are clogged. I ordered a couple anyway because new diesel filters are always a good idea. Kubota put them in a funny place, so changing them will take at least 30 minutes. IF ALL GOES WELL. I am learning.

Tomorrow a lot of parts arrive, so I will be changing switches, the armrests, and a few other things. I plan to dump the oil but keep the filter, since it’s new. I think the seller used 40w, which is probably okay in this climate, but I want to put synthetic 15w-40 in it, as the manual suggests. The small amount of 40w, if that’s what it is, in the filter won’t be enough to mess up the properties of the 15w-40.

I’m going to check the ignition switch. I don’t see why I need one, so if it’s hinky, I may replace it with a momentary switch I already have.

Everyone who likes stealing mowers knows how to hotwire one in 10 seconds, so it appears the only person the ignition switch prevents from running the mower is me. And a mower with a momentary switch where the ignition switch used to be would be a lot easier to identify for the police. Not that they ever make any effort whatsoever to recover stolen goods.

I was only able to mow about 60% of my yard today. The parts I mowed looked fantastic. The John Deere never saw the day it could cut this well. Or maybe it did, but I didn’t know how to make it do it. The cut is flat and pretty, and I can actually tell where I’ve already mowed. With the John Deere, I had to guess.

I bought mulching blades, but I think I might send them back. I’ve only used this mower 1.6 times, with standard blades, and it has minced my oak leaves. I feel like dropping to my knees and thanking God. The JD simply could not do this. Don’t ask me why.

Those leaves were a source of what seemed as if it would be eternal torment. Gathering and burning them was a job for Sisyphus plus Hercules. Nearly undoable. My John Deere mulching kit made a big difference when the mower actually ran, but not like the Kubota. I am now confident I can end my leaf problem permanently just by riding around on a lawnmower. I’m almost afraid to believe it.

The leaf debris is still with me, but it seems like 80% of it has disappeared. I don’t know where it went. I used to have thick carpets of dead leaves, and the leaf fragments I now have seem to have maybe 20% of the volume.

No one but me could ever understand why having the Kubota disintegrate my leaves is such a big deal to me. You would have to have been there when I bought a $600 leaf blower and tried making piles which I raked and put into a wagon or utility cart and hauled off and burned. You would have to have been beside me when I went to a mower store and nearly let a guy convince me a used 48″ gas mower would do it. I brought a landscaper out here for an interview. I nearly bought a $1,500 towed leaf vacuum.

Nobody ever told me, “Get a big-ass commercial diesel zero-turn, and your leaves will disappear.” This, in a county where you can hardly toss a dwarf without hitting a zero-turn on a trailer. It seems like every third vehicle on the road is a pickup pulling landscaping tools. Why couldn’t anyone give me the answer? Didn’t they know?

The Kubota moves twice as fast as a tractor like the John Deere. That makes a big difference. It makes a 60″ deck mow like 120″. And it turns in place, so you don’t have to sworp out in wasted loops every time you turn around. You just stop at the end of a strip you’ve mowed, turn where you are, and mow a strip next to it. I thought a zero-turn might mow twice as fast as a tractor. No; it’s faster than that. You move faster, and you travel a much shorter distance.

The mower puts a lot of filth in the air, and about half of it lands on me, but this was also true of the John Deere. Nothing can be done. I take my boots off in the garage, and I take my clothes off in the laundry room, which has a tile floor which is easy to clean.

I bought myself a fancy dirt biking mask to keep everything out of my eyes. The manufacturer is a company called Wolfsnout. They also make foam dust masks. I ordered one of those, too. They say you can breathe freely with this mask. Not true. When I put it on, I breathed like Heavy D on the slopes of Everest, and my nose ran into the foam. I can’t make it work. But a stretchy neck gaiter works well with the mask. My eyes use to be a mess the night after a mow. Not any more.

Tomorrow may be the first day I use the mower without major annoyances. I may have to hotwire it again, but I have reasonable hopes it will finish up the yard without dying.

If this thing turns out to have severe hidden issues that make it a horror to deal with, I might actually snap and spend $19,000 on a new one. Life is short, and I can only take so much. I realize I can pay a crew for over three years for that kind of money, but I am utterly fed up with mowing struggles, and I am going to see an end to them no matter what it takes. This is the single most annoying problem I have as a homeowner.

I could get a new gas mower that would do the same thing for $13,000 but I am ALL DONE WITH GAS. When I say I’m not going back, I feel like one of those guys who rushes the police, with two shots left in a rusty .22 pistol he stole from his grandmother, screaming he’s not going back to prison. I understand them. I’m not buying another big gas carb I have to rebuild every year. I’m not dealing with another rusted gas tank. I don’t want to buy any more ethanol-busting additive than I already have.

I’m old. I don’t need this. My son doesn’t need an inheritance. He’s good-looking. He can be a model.

Next Progressive Move: Replace “York” with “Nuremberg”

Years ago, God showed me that when human behavior makes no sense, it means there is a supernatural reason. We think our natural intelligence guides our decisions, but in reality, we are surrounded by demons that push us all the time, and only people who are led by the Holy Spirit are safe. This is why we have seen insane behaviors like the massacre of the Jews by two of the world’s civilized and advanced countries.

Jewish people are generally atheists, and very few know their Messiah or the Holy Spirit. They are also high-priority targets for Satan because God has a special place in his heart for them. As a result, they are under heavy demonic influence, and they exhibit bizarre self-hating and self-destructive behavior. This is particularly true in politics, where they have helped their enemies a great deal. For example, they supported the communist revolution in Russia, and then Jews in the USSR endured decades of persecution.

Here in the US, Jews commit gradual mass suicide in polling booths every year. For a long time, it has been very clear that American leftists have become enemies of Jews, and it is equally obvious that the only powerful friends Jews have in the world are American conservative Christians, yet Jews continue to perceive conservative Christians as closet Nazis, and they hold onto the perverse belief that leftist politicians are their saviors.

The Jews are the smartest people there are. Testing has proven it over and over. Their accomplishments prove it. Natural intelligence hasn’t helped them figure out politics. They are blinded by demons because they can’t hear the Holy Spirit, and many religious Jews think their Messiah, who has made it plain he wants to save Israel, is a sorcerer who boils in feces and semen in hell.

Now it looks like they are going to assure the election of a New York mayoral candidate who hates Israel, supports a movement that drives the beating of Jews by the general public around the world, believes the Twelfth Imam will rise and take over the world for Islam, and intends to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu for some reason or other if he ever visits the city.

New York is a giant leftist bedpan where Democrats have a 6-to-1 advantage, so there is no possibility a conservative will win the race. That makes it a contest among leftists, and Zohran Mamdani has already won the Democrat primary, decisively. Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams plan to run as independents, but if they had any chance of winning, they would probably have beaten Mamdani in the primary.

Jewish voters make up about 13% of the electorate in New York City, so there is no way Mamdani won without widespread support among Jews. This should not surprise anyone. Jews are prominent in the pro-Hamas movement in America, so no one should be shocked that many of them voted for someone who advocates for pogroms.

Mamdani endorses the slogan, “Make the intifada global.” For millennials who don’t know anything, I’ll point out that “intifada” is a term that was used in past decades to describe the practice of attacking, beating, and killing random Jews in Israel.

Deceitful apologists, many Jews among them, claim it describes peaceful resistance, but I was alive back when the term was first popularized, so I remember what really happened. While there was peaceful resistance, there were also riots, murders, beatings, and many acts of terrorism against innocent Jews. This is what people my age recall when they hear the word. This is what we saw on the news.

Calling the intifada peaceful is like using the phrase “mostly peaceful” to describe domestic-terror riots perpetrated by BLM and Antifa. Every riot is mostly peaceful. World War Two at its height was mostly peaceful. When violent conflicts occur, the actual violence is generally concentrated to small areas; 9/11 was mostly peaceful. Calling the intifada peaceful is like having a single huge cancerous tumor and saying you are mostly well.

In Europe, the word “pogrom” is used to describe activities consistent with the intifada. A pogrom is a violent attack on Jews and/or their property. During the rise of Hitler and World War Two, and even afterward, Europeans in Germany, Austria, and even some non-Axis nations popularized pogroms.

This is what Mamdani supports, openly. It wasn’t leaked by a witness to private conversations. It doesn’t come from a “hot mike” moment. He is happy to stand in front of cameras and say it.

He also endorses the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” This is literally a call for ending Israel and ridding it of all Jews. Israel stretches from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, and Palestine does not.

Antisemites like to claim they oppose Israel’s actions, not Jews as a people. That’s a lie. Intifada isn’t limited to Israel, Israelis, or the Israeli military. It’s aimed at all Jewish people. Random pedestrians in traditional Jewish garb. Anyone who wears a yarmulke.

It’s like the “pro-Palestinian” movement in the US, which has manifested in protesting Jewish (not Israeli) businesses and terrorism against Jewish (not Israeli) individuals in America.

I think Mamdani will win, and it will be a lot like the moment at the 2012 Democrat Convention when, in a voice vote, attendees voted overwhelmingly against including the terms “God” and “Jerusalem” in the DNC platform. Antonio Villaraigosa presided over the vote, and when the crowd voted, he knew what it had voted for. He looked around for help from his superiors, and then he lied and claimed the vote had gone the other way.

To honest observers, this was a pivotal moment, because it put the Democratic Party’s blossoming hatred of God and Israel on full display. When Mamdani takes office, leftist Jews will have their noses rubbed in the antisemitism of the political faction they support as though it were God.

New York should be a shocking spectacle after Mamdani takes over. Battles between ICE and the police. Mobs at tax-funded grocery stores. Real groceries shutting down. Perverts ruling the city even more than they do now. Jews afraid to go outside. White people concerned that they’re next, as they pay taxes expressly aimed at them in violation of federal law. But most Jews will continue voting for Democrats. Of that, you can be assured. Short of building crematoriums, there is nothing the DNC can do to alienate them.

New York City has the second-largest population of Jews, after Israel. If this can happen in New York, how can anyone be safe in our other cities?

Bush-Era Zero-Turn Actually Made Under Obama

I am stuck waiting for very leisurely breastfeeding to be over so my wife and I can run errands. May as well kill time here.

I got new information on the Kubota mower I bought. Kubota says it was made in 2015. This is about 7 years later than I thought, so it’s good news. It has an analog hour meter, not a digital with an LED screen, so I figured it had to come from the early years, which started in 2007. Because it was made in 2015, the old guy who owned it could not have had it for more than 10 years.

Assuming even pretty heavy residential use, the manufacture year puts this mower somewhere under 1,000 hours. The mower doesn’t show a lot of wear, so I don’t think it was ever used commercially. There are appearance issues, but nothing suggesting high hours. I think the owner kept it under a roof where the sun got to vulnerable parts. There is no rain damage, but the plastic armrests are eaten up, and the lever grips are bleached. That’s the most significant damage, apart from a place on the deck skirt where some metal got torn.

Figuring he had it for 9 to 10 years, and that he was able to use it the whole time, and given our growing season, he would have been doing about 30 sessions per yard per year. I believe I can mow my large yard in 90 minutes. Probably 60 once I get used to the mower. The granddaughter’s husband, who sold me the mower, told me the owner’s parcel was not all that big. If that is true, he would not have mown more than I do, so assuming 1.5 hours times 30, I get 45 hours per year. That comes out to 450 hours. I have no reason to think he mowed more than one yard.

A figure of 1,000 is only conceivable if he mowed other people’s yards or something.

I don’t know if he used it the whole 10 years, because he died not long ago, and his granddaughter’s husband looks to be 50. He must have been very old, and he may not have been well during his last year.

I know the meter’s figure of 229 hours is wrong because the meter doesn’t move. It could be that it locked up after the first owner quit using the mower, but that’s very optimistic. So 229 is not plausible, and nothing over 1,000 is likely.

A 1,000-hour 60-inch diesel mower for what I paid would be a dream come true, because it should hit 3,000 with no real problems, and 4,000 would not be much less likely. I figure that even if I clear a lot of scrub so my mowing area grows, I will never break 75 hours per year, and over 20 years, that would keep me in the nice area below 3,000. That would probably get me deep into old age with no more mower buys or major repairs. Then, assuming parts were available, I could rebuild the mower and get myself well into the too-old-to-care years.

My big problem now is that I am itching to kill the bargain by adding appearance upgrades. The sun-ravaged arm rests are costing me a hundred bucks. The bleached lever grips will run me a few dollars. Seat covers are available, and that would mean $300-plus. The seat covers are intact, but new ones would look pretty spiffy. I don’t need any of these things, but they tempt me.

My mulching blades arrived, so I’ll be testing out the built-in deck jack to install them. Based on the way the stock blades chewed everything up, I don’t think I need new ones, but the new ones weren’t expensive, and better is better than good.

It’s always nice to have extra blades in case you hit a rock.

I hope I don’t get any bad surprises, but if I do, I can always bite the bullet and have the mower fixed. Saturday is my next mowing day, so that’s the next opportunity to put it to the test.

Grieve Bad Company Instead of the Holy Spirit

This morning, I prayed for more internal rapturing.

I believe there will be a rapture. I believe God will literally remove his children from the world when he decides the abuse they put up with is no longer acceptable when juxtaposed with the number of new salvations they produce. After that, the tribulation will come. The harshest period of evangelism in the history of the world. People will be tormented so badly, those who can still be saved will drop their pride and pretense and go on to be with God. The rest will prove themselves incapable of changing, and they’ll go on to burn.

Those who belong to God will get some relief. Being around useless people is vexatious.

I also believe people who will be taken in the rapture will be ready because God will have worked inside them to cut their ties to this world. They will be eager to get out. They won’t be popular. They will be disgusted and wearied by the world’s culture. They will love God as a person, and they will love being near him. They won’t just obey rules and hope for the best. To me, this is internal rapturing.

A lot of Christians seem to think God will reach into the seats at porn theaters and filthy rap performances and pull people out just because they participated in altar calls in years past. They think he’ll grab people who support abortion, disgusting perversions, pride, and socialism. They believe he’ll take lukewarm people who are full of earthly ambition. All of that is wrong.

One of the great things about my life is that God has separated me from society. He got me out of Miami, which is a disgusting, sinful, coarse, lowbrow city, and he moved me to the reddest, most Christian county in Florida. He gave me income without work, so I don’t have to network with other lawyers and keep my Christianity stifled in order to avoid trouble. He gave me a wife who knows him. He helped me shed horrible friends who weren’t friends at all, and he replaced them with people who know him.

When I prophesy, I keep hearing him say he is destroying the world’s ways in me. I’m all for it. I can’t change myself, but I do want to be changed. I want more internal rapturing.

Today I prayed about it, and later on, while I was thinking of other things, I started deleting electronic contacts.

My wife and I have a WhatsApp group I created so our friends could keep track of her delivery. We kept the group going, and people like seeing updates on my son’s progress.

I think of WhatsApp as a texting app, and I always say I don’t have social media accounts, but to some degree, WhatApp is a form of social media. It allows you to post “status” updates that vanish after 24 hours. This never appealed to me until recently, but my wife posts statuses, and sometimes my friends do.

I started posting a few things. Then I saw that someone I knew from my last church was looking at my statuses, and she posted a few of her own.

We were friends. She said all sorts of things that made her seem passionate about God. But she was also sexually provocative, and she posted odd things on Facebook. For example, she called her brother her “side piece.”

She and her husband had marital issues, and afterward, she started putting up Instagram photos of herself in bathing suits and exercise clothes. I don’t know if her kids saw them.

I guess things are going badly for them again, because she just put up some statuses of herself, and they didn’t look promising. In one, she was doing a sexually suggestive dance with her teenage son. In another, she was in her car in a bikini and cutoffs, with the zipper of the cutoffs pulled down and spread. She was shaking her breasts. She had a big tattoo on her belly, and it continued under her bathing suit, so it’s a crotch tattoo.

She is looking for a husband. I posted a status consisting of a photo of my son. Later, I blocked my view of her statuses.

Today I thought about her, and that’s why I started deleting contacts. I have known this lady for 15 years, and I deleted her. She is not going anywhere with God soon, and I don’t need to see her lewd videos.

I’m not angry with her, but what am I supposed to do with a friend like that?

In law school, I had a friend who was very seductive. She told me about her bedroom adventures with multiple people. She loved the perversion series Queer as Folk, and she got me to watch it. I thought it was gross, because it was. She said I was homophobic.

She ended up moving to LA and becoming an entry-level employee at a big talent agency. She borrowed money from me while she was getting established, and I never saw it again. Women don’t repay loans. I visited her there once, and her friends were off-putting. Snippy gays. Shallow people. The kind of LA people who often wake up on other people’s couches and chairs.

She visited South Florida once and took me to lunch, and I told her how I had changed. I told her about my new life as a reformed Christian. She said she could see I had peace, and she was glad for me. She clearly was not interested in making a change in her own life.

On one occasion, she called me and said she was pregnant. She talked about how a child would derail her career. She wanted advice. I told her I couldn’t go along with abortion. When she asked why, which surprised me, I said I was a Christian. That made her angry. She said, “So am I!” She had her baby killed.

She ended up working as a minor network executive. I just looked, and it appears that after that, she became a freelance TV producer. That sounds like gig work. She is credited with 4 shows between 2016 and 2021, for a total of 44 episodes. At present, she is the president of a production company that has been around since 2019 and hasn’t gotten much of anywhere. It was started by a B-list movie star.

She wanted to be a big player. It seems like she sold herself out for a pretty small payout.

I’ve known her for 31 years. I like her. We got along well. We had a lot of fun. I deleted the contact today. It’s final. It would be very hard for her to locate me if she wanted to reestablish contact, and I won’t be looking for her, so she’s gone.

I deleted other nominal Christians. Our relationships had no future, so why not? I won’t see them again here on Earth, and I probably won’t see any of them in the afterlife. There is no point in continuing to invest myself in them.

While I was deleting contacts, I thought about the prayer I had prayed a little earlier. God was granting my request. I was being raptured internally.

The world has gotten so old; so polarized. I can’t believe God will let is wait much longer. There seems to be so little left here for his children.

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.