Like UV Light on a Hotel Bedspread

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

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

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

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

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

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

Imagine if normal people were threatening to kill them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What kind of world are we living in now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Published a day late.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Definitely the latter.

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

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

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

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

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

I thought of Paul.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are Jews making of this, I wonder?

Actually, I know. I can guess.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ll bet Messianics are moving.

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

The Customer is Always Wrong

I had a sad experience with pride today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My complaints:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few easy changes could fix everything in a month.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check out this review from “Arimas 03”:

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

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

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

Another encomium for “sweet,” welcoming owners!

Here’s one for a “facial spa”:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Human beings make me want to puke.

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

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

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

Carnivorous Baby

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

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

Try two tablespoons. I could not believe it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to the Fryers’ Club

Back in December, I got us a Bayou Classic 4-gallon deep fryer, and we have made a few things in it. It has been a fantastic experience. It’s a tremendous labor-saver compared to a pot on the stove, it fries a lot of food at once, it fries food better than the stove, and it doesn’t grease up the kitchen walls. Also, it’s not feeble and useless like an indoor fryer that plugs into the wall.

The oil lasts forever. I just added new oil after over 6 months. I don’t use the fryer all that often, so I would guess that other home fry cooks need to change their oil more often than I do.

I think it would have lasted a lot longer if I had tried to push it. It was fine the last time I used it.

One reason I decided to change it was that I did not have a proper cover for the fryer. I used a plastic bag and a bungee cord to hold the bag against the fryer. This kept bugs out. The other day I left the bag off overnight, and it made me a little nervous the next day. What if a bunch of roaches had gone for a moonlight swim? I think a bug would float in oil, but I may be wrong. I would hate to drain the oil later, after using it several more times, and see dead roaches shooting out of the hose.

I got a real cover this week, so things are looking up.

I use peanut oil, which is highly regarded. It has a high smoke point, and they say it resists taking on food flavors. It’s not cheap. If I get a good deal, it costs $55 to fill the fryer.

I would like to try beef tallow. I see it selling for $120 for 50 pounds. At that price, I could fill the fryer for about $80. Not out of the question, considering how many meals I could get out of the tallow. Dinner for two at a barbecue joint can easily cost $50 these days, to put it in perspective.

I dreaded cleaning the fryer as I prepared to change the oil. It turned out to be very easy. You put maybe half a gallon of water in the bottom, add a lot of Dawn detergent, and scrub it with a sponge. The crud comes right off. Then you rinse it with the drain hose open. It was no problem at all.

Tonight I used the fryer to make a dish I really love but find intimidating: Cuban pork lumps. The Spanish name is masitas de puerco, which means “little pork lumps.” I believe that’s right. “Masa” is “mass,” so “masita” must be “little mass,” i.e. “lump.”

It’s a very simple dish. You marinate in bitter orange juice (or plain old orange juice soured up with lime or lemon juice), pressure-cook it until it’s tender, and then fry it to make the outside tasty. It comes out tendery and juicy. I like to pile lots of garlic fried in oil on top, along with fried onions and lime juice.

It’s a pain to make on the stove, but a pressure cooker and deep fryer take the suffering out of it.

I used an Instant Pot pressure cooker today, and the food came out great. I’ll post the recipe.

INGREDIENTS

3 pounds pork shoulder chunks with the really thick fat trimmed down
24 ounces orange juice
8 ounces lime or lemon juice
4 cloves garlic, crushed
salt

You want cubes maybe 1.5″ on a side. The size is not critical. Put them in a bowl and salt them down. Brining would probably be even better. It would add juiciness.

Let them sit until the salt goes into the meat. Then pour the citrus juice (also salted) and garlic over them, and let them soak. Half an hour should be fine.

I learned that marinating doesn’t really work, because no matter what you put on meat, salt is the only thing that actually goes in deeper than a couple of millimeters. That’s why I don’t marinate for a long time.

Dump everything in your Instant Pot and set it for 14 minutes. You have to be careful, because meat softens fast in a pressure cooker, so if you’re a couple of minutes over, you could end up with a mushy texture.

Now you fry the meat in a deep fryer until it’s nicely browned.

I made some stuff to go on top of it.

INGREDIENTS
4 large onions
8 ounces olive oil
10 ounces peeled garlic cloves
salt

Slice the onions and fry them until they’re dark. Remove them from the oil and drain them. Puree the garlic in a small processor. Fry it in the oil, but don’t brown it unless you like it that way. If you add some oil to the processor, the pureeing step will be quicker.

Serve the onions and the garlic sauce separately. Apply both very liberally at the table.

That’s all there is to it. It worked. My wife was practically beside herself.

I also fried some ripe plaintains. You just slice them and deep-fry them.

I put lime wedges on the table to squeeze over the pork and plaintains.

This is a marvelous feast, and black beans and rice go great with it. In Miami, they use white rice, but New York Cubans use yellow rice, and it’s very good. You can probably find prepackaged yellow rice near you.

Making your own black bean soup is a huge job. Goya’s version is pretty good, so I used that tonight.

The fryer’s baskets break down and go in the dishwasher, so no problems there.

I still hate Miami more every day than the day before, but my PMSD (figure it out) has abated to the point where I can stand to eat Cuban food. Cubans are great at making delicious peasant food for underpaid workers. There is no such thing as gourmet Cuban food, but if you want a fine dinner made with meat that costs $2.00 per pound, Cuban is a good choice.

RE Cubans and fancy stuff, there used to be a running joke about it in Miami. A Cuban guy goes into a bar and orders Chivas and Coke. Actually, that’s most of the joke.

Now that I think about it, it seems like most cuisines lack a high end.

France has…French food. Their middle-tier food is on our high end.

America has fine steaks and lobster.

Japan has extreme sushi and wagyu.

That’s about all I can think of.

But a lot of countries have good middle-class food, and Cuba doesn’t. It’s all peasant food. The recipes are all written like they’re trying to save money. “Braise a leathery piece of eye round.” “Boil a piece of flank steak.” “Hammer a cheap piece of sirloin until it’s edible.”

Pork shoulder is about as cheap as meat gets.

Its weird how things work out. For example, there are great Scotches and some excellent bourbons, but there is no really good Irish whiskey. I would know if there were. I like Black Bush, which is just Bushmill’s that has been aged a little, but you can’t set it on a bar next to Pinch or Lagavulin. Aged Irish whiskey is smooth and pleasant, but it has zero complexity.

I don’t think there is any such thing as a really good rum or tequila. I used to drink 5-star Barbancourt, which is about as good as rum gets, and you couldn’t compare it to a good Cognac. I’m pretty sure all tequila is paint thinner.

There are truly great beers, and I know, because I make a couple of them right here. No great rums or tequilas, though, as far as I know.

Bacardi was Cuba’s best, but I think of it as a flavoring agent for Saturday-night vomit, or a good fuel for setting your beard on fire like Dan Haggerty. None of it is good. I would as soon drink Everclear as Bacardi 151.

If you want a good cheap rum, try Flor de Cana, from Nicaragua. Very smooth, inoffensive, and not expensive. The Jim Beam of rums.

Whatever you do, avoid Myers’s dark rum, from Jamaica. Jamaicans I knew told me they don’t drink it. It’s poison for tourists. It’s the only thing I’ve ever drunk that made me throw up the next day. They should call it Old Dry Heaves.

I don’t know of any other liquor that causes dry heaves.

Before I became the fine, flawless Christian I now am, I drank myself sick a number of times. Normal booze makes you feed the bushes a couple of times the same day you drink it. Myers’s dark rum will make you wish you were dead a day later, for hours and hours. And you don’t have to get drunk to get sick on it. It nearly killed me after a few Mai Tais.

I knew a couple of Bacardis. One, for some reason, was a Bermudan, but he hung around Miami. Very nice guy. Came close to marrying a friend of mine, also Cuban but not Bermudan. It didn’t work out. He was very pleasant, and he was loaded, so he satisfied one of my friend’s family’s hard requirements–the main requirement, really–but they felt he was lacking upstairs. They weren’t all geniuses, themselves, but anyway, that was their complaint.

Another Bacardi I knew went to private school in Massachusetts and learned to play hockey. He was a Bosch. There were some Bosches related to the Bacardis by marriage back in Cuba, and one of them did big things for the company.

He enrolled at my prep school and joined the ice skating club, and he zipped up and down the ice on his own sharp hockey skates, while we, a bunch of warm-weather Miami kids, slid around injuring ourselves on dull rentals. He thought very highly of himself, but my French teacher, who ran the club and mentored me through high school, thought he was an oaf.

The guy who did most of the work on my dad’s fishing yacht also worked on the Bacardi family’s boats, which were in the same marina. His name was Juan. Sometimes we couldn’t get him. He would tell us by phone that the Bacardis had flown him to the Bahamas for this or that problem.

Juan said the old Bacardis were pretty crude, but I won’t go into detail. “Old school Cubans,” I think he said. And he was Cuban, himself.

Juan could be critical of other Cubans. Bertram was the big Miami yacht builder, but Juan didn’t like working on their boats. He thought they were second-tier. He said, “built BY Cubans FOR Cubans.” He liked Hatteras yachts, built in North Carolina. My dad had a Hatteras. They really were better.

I don’t recall what kind of boats the Bacardis had. Probably Hatteras or some kind of custom jobs.

I knew a Bertram, too, now that I think about it. He went to my school. We weren’t friends. I just knew who he was.

His parents got so tired of him playing Devo albums, they removed the disks and would only let him sit and look at the covers. In his senior photo, he posed by a sign on Devon Road with his hand over the “N.”

Wow, it looks like he became a “reiki healer.” It’s on the web. That is really too bad. Someone to pray for.

Wikipedia says his dad had 10 kids, so maybe he has had to fend for himself.

Based on what other students said about him, he seemed to be abandond. At my school, we had a lot of abandoned kids. Their dads gave their lives to Mammon and became rich. Their mothers were depressing socialites with nothing ostensible to live for. They gave their children everything except God and themselves. The kids took drugs.

I guess I have digressed enough. Enjoy the pork.

How Well do You Know Your Neighbors?

Did we have leftist rage shootings before, say, 2015? I guess there must have been a few, but I can’t recall any offhand, and I certainly don’t recall a wave of them. Looks like that has changed.

We have had a whole slew of transvestite killers over the last few years. In December, Luigi Mangione murdered a health insurance executive and won widespread praise for it. Two Democrat nuts tried to kill President Trump, and one shot him. That’s two more nuts than tried to kill Biden and Obama in 12 years. In 2017, a Democrat walked onto a baseball field and started shooting at Republican congressmen, hitting Steve Scalise. Social media has filled up with people threatening to kill those who object to allowing male perverts to expose themselves in women’s locker rooms, and some of the offenders have displayed guns.

We’ve also had many physical attacks on Trump supporters and people suspected of being Trump supporters. It’s pretty unusual for conservatives to attack leftists, however. They have definitely been involved in physical scuffles, but they are almost never the instigators.

Now a leftist has murdered two Messianic Jews who worked for the Israeli Embassy. Their names are Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim. They were engaged to be married. He shot them in the street, firing 21 rounds. He is proud of it. His explanation? “I did it for Gaza.”

If he explained how shooting two embassy employees 6,000 miles away from Israel helped Gaza, I have not seen it.

If his name were Achmed Aziz, the story wouldn’t be so disturbing, since Palestinians are trained to murder Jews before they are able to read, but the Embassy killer’s name is Elias Rodriguez. He’s Hispanic. Probably Puerto Rican.

The killer’s ethnicity matters, because it indicates metastasis. If terror-grade antisemitism among Muslims is the seminal tumor, the same degree of antisemitism among people belonging to groups having no close connection to Islam, Israel, or Palestine is metastasis. It shows the cancer has spread.

Muslims never had a monopoly on antisemitism, but they used to be the primary purveyors of anti-Israel violence. Nowadays, as a character in a Babylon Bee sketch has said, hating Jews is cool. It’s for everybody. That’s why it’s so much more dangerous than it was a couple of decades back. Jews have fewer friends and more potential murderers.

There are more of them, and the ones who already existed are not as afraid to out themselves as they once were. When darkness falls, out the roaches come.

When it becomes cool to hate Jews, conversely, it becomes embarrassing to stand up for them. Satan’s sheep are expected to be ashamed of opposing the abuse of Jews. Persecuting Jews is like sexual perversion. It used to be something people were ashamed of. Now we’re supposed to be ashamed of being against it.

God has shown me that the inability to feel shame is one of the left’s most powerful weapons. If you can’t make someone ashamed of what he is, you lose an effective tool for discouraging him and saving him (and his victims) from himself. If you can make someone proud of being disgusting, it’s also powerful. His regard for other people’s delusional opinions will drive him to continue.

Just as many men are now proud to prance around in makeup and wigs, Elias Rodriguez and his kind are proud of hurting Jews. It’s as though his innocent victims were armed pedophiles, and he shot them as they entered an orphanage window. He fully expects to be venerated as a martyr by the left, and he will be. He is already.

Of course, Muslims are celebrating. You can find the story online. Hooray! A coward just like us killed two innocent, defenseless people whose deaths are actually detrimental to our asinine cause!

In the past, terrorist antisemitic killings in the US were generally performed by likely suspects. Muslims and white supremacists. Black “Hebrew Israelites.” Now the potential killers are college kids from all backgrounds. Urban blacks and Hispanics whose mainstream cultures have deep antisemitic roots. Young Jews seeking acceptance and glory from left-wing gentiles. Liberal millennials who don’t want to be left out of a nifty movement.

Jews are the problem. Real Christians (not leftists who go to leftist churches that teach perversion and the “many ways to God”) are the problem. Conservatives are the problem. White people are the problem. Men are the problem. Capitalists are the problem. Americans are the problem.

This is how we are perceived.

The former director of our internal intelligence agency just got in trouble for posting a photo of the number 8647, which stands for, “Get rid of President Donald Trump.” Trump can’t be removed from office by any means except incapacitation. He can’t be impeached and convicted. He can’t be voted out. He has to be proven incompetent, sidelined by a physical problem, or assassinated.

Comey wasn’t advocating a competency hearing, an impeachment, or voting for a new president, so what was he saying? Maybe he wasn’t thinking about assassination. He claims he wasn’t. But he should have been smart enough to know reasonable (and more importantly, unreasonable) people would think he was.

This guy ran the FBI. Think about that.

And of course, the left, which used to demonize him for torpedoing Hillary in 2016, has flocked to his side. Terminal TDS patient Stephen Colbert took the bizarre and tone-deaf step of inviting him for a fluff interview on his hard-left comedy show.

Imagine. Being invited to a talk show as an honored guest after being questioned by the Secret Service for making an incendiary social media post that was likely to be interpreted as a call for assassination. What kind of message has Colbert sent?

If Colbert had simply opined that the Secret Service had overreacted, it would be different. But he treated Hillary-sacker James Comey like a hero.

I wonder what Colbert said on his show about Comey back in 2016. Did he invite him as a guest, slap him on the back, and chuckle about him suggesting Clinton had committed felonies?

Bet not.

This country is not the America of the 20th century or even 2005. Things are different now. America is like a junior high school where the kids have access to guns and Molotov cocktails. Immaturity and emotionalism rule us. We say whatever we have to in order to justify our malice and dishonesty. Conservative words are violence. Leftist violence is expression. Tolerating–sparing–anyone who isn’t on the left is unsafe and immoral. End results matter. Ethics and compassion don’t.

If you want to hate Jews properly, “with receipts,” you can. You can find justification. You can go online and look for arguments other people have cobbled together, and you can adopt them as your own. You don’t have to reason. Thinking would be an impediment. Just repeat other people’s sophistry. Or bypass argument altogether and simply adopt their conclusions. That’s what most leftists do.

Whoopi says it. Rachel says it. AOC says it. Bruce says it. Rashida says it. I’ll say it, too. I’ll have more friends. I’ll get likes. I’ll have clout.

It’s on a T-shirt. It must be true.

It is astonishing to me that Columbia and Harvard are now dangerous for Jews. That wasn’t true back before antisemitism went out of style and our colleges were open about rejecting Jews. As bad as things were, admissions committees simply turned people down. Students and college employees didn’t merge with random guest assailants, corner Jews in the street, and spit on them and threaten them. They didn’t shoot them. Aren’t we supposed to be more enlightened now than we were then?

These and other top-tier schools filled up with smart Jewish students and instructors as the barriers fell. They were havens for Jews. Columbia was jammed with New York and New Jersey Jews whose parents didn’t want them to go to college far away.

During my freshman year at CU, my dorm floor held 61 residents, if I recall correctly. There were 15 two-room suites that held 4 students each, and there was one floor counselor. Maybe one or two of the suites held less than 4 people.

I can remember 12 Jews that lived there, off the top of my head. There may have been a couple more. So that’s around 20%, minimum, or about 8 times the national average. The president of the university was a Jew. The president of the parasitic, less-selective girls’ college across the road was a Jew. The mayor was a Jew.

The Jews on my floor were just guys. When we socialized, no one ever called them “the Jewish guys” or thought anything about them having special status.

Now Jews have to be very vigilant when they walk around campus. They are verbally abused and threatened.

What happened?

I admit, a couple of people on that floor may have been antisemitic, and one was my friend. Sorry about that. His name was not Jake Schaefer, so I will call him that. Brilliant at math, or at least at scoring well on the math SAT. He seemed very smart, and with an 800 math score, he should have been, but nobody thought of him as a genius or expected him to amount to anything special. He didn’t accomplish anything in school before he had a mental collapse and left.

He used to call Jews “yehudis” and make jokes about being an Aryan. He didn’t generally seem angry at Jews, though.

I had an unhealthy friendship with Jake, based largely on the two of us drinking and insulting each other. I didn’t approve of his antisemitic remarks, and I didn’t join in, but I didn’t take them seriously. Jake was just a person to drink with. We made each other laugh. I can’t really say I liked him, exactly, but I did enjoy spending time with him.

He was a jerk, to be honest. Not well-liked. I was also a jerk, but Jake had no grace, and I had a little.

Let’s see if I can describe the kind of grace I’m talking about.

If you make a self-deprecating joke to a person who is not without grace, he will laugh along with you or try to correct you, but he won’t use it as a chance to piggyback on it and drive the knife deeper. A person without grace will. A person without grace expects you to back him up in conversation when he sticks his neck out, but when you do the same thing, he leaves you hanging. He’s always looking for a way to get a leg up on you, even in trivial interactions.

Jake usually exhibited no grace.

I last saw him in around 1980, and I have never missed him or felt any urge to contact him. He didn’t have any real friends at Columbia. No one ever said they missed him or felt bad about what happened to him. I would be surprised if he has ever seen any of our acquaintances since his final appearance. I have never heard anyone say they had any contact with him after college.

I just Googled him, expecting to find nothing, and I managed to find a webpage that belongs to him. It’s surprising, because the writing is fourth-grade level. Like a kid wrote it. Lots of errors. At first I thought it was a kid, perhaps his son, with the same name.

It makes me wonder if he had an accident or an illness that damaged his brain. But maybe he was just great at taking tests. Some people are, and it can make them seem smarter than they are.

I never saw anything he wrote while we were in school. Maybe he was always like this.

It turns out he has a site, not just a page. It’s extremely primitive, so a person can be forgiven for seeing one page and thinking he only controls that page. I think he went into coding, and it looks like he is retired from whatever he did. He wrote something about making websites.

Geez. He didn’t break a sweat making this one.

Maybe nearly all of his aptitude is in one side of his brain, so he can master code without being able to write English at a level commensurate with his STEM skills. Maybe he is brilliant with STEM and nothing else. A common problem. Much more common than having two exceptional hemispheres of equal power.

I have Googled him a few times in the past, like maybe 4 times since our class graduated, without finding anything. I thought he might have committed suicide before the web became a big thing. He had mental issues including depression and alcoholism. He had to leave school because he thought his problems were so bad he had to take action. He joined AA, if memory serves. I was not in school at the time, so I didn’t see his breakdown.

This website must be a recent creation.

Looks like he’s way out on the left. A social justice warrior. Man, is that ever not the guy I knew. It’s like Keith Richards ended up running a Christian bookstore.

He says something about going somewhere with Code Pink! He criticizes Trump’s immigration policies and related actions with the kind of understanding of legal issues you would expect from a gum-cracking professional dog-walker with rainbow hair, vocal fry, and a boyfriend who weeps when someone serves him tabouli that isn’t sourced locally.

I really thought he was smarter than this. This is shocking. There are clever leftists. There are clever bigots. People who use their intelligence skillfully to defend their wrong opinions. This guy is just run-of-the-mill.

He sides with Gaza. He admires an anti-Israel propagandist named Omar El Akkad. Oh, well. I think that answers the antisemitism question. It’s possible to disagree with Israel’s actions without being an antisemite, but siding with Hamas and calling a defensive war genocide are pretty much impossible unless you have a problem with Jews.

Ah…I found it. He uses the G-word.

Maybe he has found pseudo-intellectual justification for unjust attitudes he was raised with. That is normal for human beings.

He was not a liberal guy when I knew him, and he had special names for blacks and immigrants. Groids and immos.

He seems crazy now, but then he seemed crazy in college. He had a weird sour smell to him. Very strong. I often wondered if there was something wrong with his internal chemistry that affected his brain. I have never smelled that smell anywhere else or on any other person.

He kind of reminds me of my junior high’s resident genius. A guy named Danton. He left before I enrolled. Other students thought he would turn out to be a famous scientist or mathematician like Einstein or von Neumann, but I am told he ended up deciding the CIA had installed listening devices in his teeth. Lives a fringe life, as I understand it. No career.

Wow. I just Googled, and Danton has a Geocities page where he advertises his services as a model. It must be from the old days of Geocities. It looks like he’s 35 years younger than he would be today. He is posing shirtless in a pugilistic stance, in long training pants for athletes. He looks like a young Bill Nye. Not runway material. Crazy as a tree full of coons.

I guess I have some new people to pray for. He is in a desperate situation, and Jake is no better off.

I’m embarrassed because I associated with Jake and other people I later came to find repellent. I think I know why I have willingly spent time with so many corrosive people in my life, tainting myself by association. I think I was so used to people around me being disappointing, I figured there was no way to have any size social circle if I expected a lot.

Now that I think about it, the vast majority of the people I used to associate with were spotted with red flags. I think this is normal. Having a wholesome circle is not. It’s a gift from God.

If you are fed food with roaches in it every day, you reach a point where you just push the bugs off every plate and dig in, making the most of the parts that aren’t roaches. It was after I turned back to God that my tolerance dropped off and I started dumping people in earnest. I just could not stand being close to Satan’s children any more. God was giving me better people.

I feel that giving your time and affection to Satan’s children is a waste of time. I am conscious of the fact that they are temporary. After they or I die, I will never see any of them again. In this life, they pull me away from God. They try to involve me in things that don’t interest me.

I feel as though they are not fully real. They seem like life-size cardboard cutouts. My sense is that if I and another Christian were in the room with one of them, we would walk around him and talk past him as though he were not there, because he would not seem real. You wouldn’t talk to a cardboard cutout.

I have this feeling that nothing that isn’t eternal is real or worth bothering with unnecessarily. I’ve had it for years.

I like things that are permanent, like God himself. This is why I am looking for a new diesel mower instead of gas. A diesel will last the rest of my life. I like friends I expect to be with forever, not people God will remove from my presence and my memory, as though they never existed. I want to be with people with whom I can savor ancient memories.

The stupid things I did with Satan’s children will be forgotten forever, as though they never happened. Why should I spend one more second with people like that? I’m just excising valuable minutes and weeks from my life and dropping them into God’s shredder.

Another guy who lived on our floor, Dave, also made some Aryan jokes, but I’m not sure whether they were rooted in actual hostility or dark humor. His family came from Austria, however. We were not pals.

I don’t recall meeting any other antisemites or likely antisemites there. Of course, I didn’t run in the same circles as Barack Obama.

In any event, Columbia wasn’t what it is today. By that I mean it wasn’t a hive of antisemitism. It seemed like a place Jews in trouble would have run to, not away from.

It was definitely a leftist madhouse. Apart from the Jew-hatred, it was not all that different from what it is now. Ahead of its time, in the worst way possible.

The changes we are seeing is important. I guarantee you, many, many future victims in Europe saw the atmosphere changing the way it is in America today and thought it would amount to nothing.

Hitler was silly. He would never be elected. Okay, he was elected, but he wouldn’t deprive good citizens of their rights because they belonged to groups he didn’t like. Okay, he did that, but he wasn’t going to deport them to prison camps in other countries. Okay, okay, he did that, but he wouldn’t gas them in groups and incinerate their remains.

We are in the beginning of the Nuremberg-law phase. Jews will be among the first victims, and the rest of the people Satan hates will come later. First, the canaries, and then the miners.

A Baby’s Butt Should Only Have One Crack

Now that I am an expert on all things baby, I have decided to formulate my own proprietary baby butt grease.

Baby maintenance is mysterious to me, because while the human race has been around a very long time, we are convinced we have to have a fair number of recently-invented products in order to keep babies from disintegrating. If they’re necessary, how did we survive so long without them?

One possible answer is that we didn’t survive. Historians don’t seem to be very good at their jobs, and no one knows for sure, but they think somewhere between 20 and 50 percent of medieval babies never got to see that first birthday cake.

The population of the world grew extremely slowly in the past, proving that lots of people didn’t get old enough to reproduce.

The grease thing seems particularly odd. Secular people keep telling us we’re animals, but is there any other animal that refines lubricants and applies them to its young? Probably not.

Human beings aren’t stupid, so we have probably been greasing babies with things like animal fat and olive oil for thousands of years.

It’s odd that they need it. What happened to evolution? It was supposed to handle things like this.

My wife started our son out with Vaseline, which Zambians apply to their entire bodies. She tries to get me to do this to myself. It makes my skin crawl. The thought of sticking to my clothes and leaving stains on furniture and sheets is too much for me. Anyway, they use special Blue Seal Vaseline over there. It’s thicker than the stuff we get here. You can find it on Amazon here, but of course, it’s crazy expensive.

Vaseline gave the boy pimples, so now she limits it to his diaper area.

Incidentally, you can get super-thick petroleum jelly very cheaply if you order a dozen containers, which is a reasonable move if you have a baby. The brand name is Dynarex, and hospitals use it.

We also tried Aquaphor’s special diaper rash healing ointment, but like Vaseline, it’s not the kind of thing you want all over your baby.

I had an idea. I was familiar with lanolin. I had used a lanolin and ethanol solution to lubricate shell casings, and I had also used a lanolin and mineral spirits solution to prevent rust on tools. I knew lanolin was amazing. It gets into your hide and forms a barrier that is hard to wash out, and it really keeps the moisture in.

Know what you’re buying when you buy skin lotion? Something someone developed as a lanolin substitute. Lanolin is THE skin moisturizer. The gold standard every other moisturizer tries to imitate.

I started mixing lanolin into a diaper cream Zambians use, and it works very well. But I don’t want to pay for African diaper cream, because obviously, there are things here that will work just as well. Also, the diaper cream has perfume in it.

Someone help me understand why manufacturers put perfume in baby products. Generally, they smell fine without perfume, and the rest of the time, they smell like poop and urine, so perfume isn’t going to help. When a baby smells like a full diaper, it’s time to clean him up.

Perfumes are irritating. They can make adults’ noses run and irritate their eyes, and babies are more sensitive than we are.

Johnson & Johnson sells baby shampoo with perfume in it. It’s not supposed to sting babies’ eyes. Well, I’ve gotten it into my own eyes, and it stung just fine, so my belief is that babies do not need weird industrial fragrances in products that come close to them.

Johnson & Johnson also makes baby oil, which is perfumed mineral oil. It smells very nice on women, but on babies, it’s a waste of money. It’s at least twice as expensive as pure mineral oil, which won’t make your baby sneeze.

I got the bright idea of combining pure mineral oil with lanolin. Lanolin is thick and sticky, like honey, so you need to cut it with something thin in order to get it to spread easily.

I read that beeswax was a popular ingredient in baby greases, so I ordered some of that, too. It’s supposed to form a strong barrier and fight bacteria.

I picked up mineral oil locally, and my beeswax has been here for over a week, but the solid lanolin I ordered is still not here. It went to Jacksonville, then Denver, then North Carolina, and then Georgia. Who says government workers are incompetent? Not me. That’s for sure.

I’m going to fiddle with these ingredients until I get a thin, spreadable lube that goes on easily and still does the job. He won’t sneeze. His eyes won’t water. He’ll also be getting the very best ingredients, which is not true of most factory products.

The Aquaphor stuff costs over a dollar per ounce, which is ridiculous. You would think I was greasing Jeff Bezos.

I have around $50 invested. I will probably have to invest another $20 over the next year, and that should give us 12 months of excellent results. That sure beats between $50 and $100 per month, which is what we have been paying. For inferior stuff.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to convince the wife to give up the Aquaphor. She really likes it for fixing irritated skin on his crotch. I’ll bet I can convince her, once she sees the results.

Another skin-saving tip: do NOT buy Aveeno baby wash and shampoo. Not unless you want to tan your baby’s hide and get a product suitable for making baseball gloves.

My wife bought this stuff because it came from a trusted brand, and it had “baby” on the label. Then our son’s skin dried up so it resembled the seat of a Cadillac that had been baking in the sun since 1975.

You can grease your baby to restore his skin’s oils after Aveeno rips them off, but putting moisture back into skin is never as effective as leaving it in.

I was going to throw the Aveeno out, but it’s so strong, it knocks tractor grease right off my hands. Not kidding. It cuts right through anything oily and removes it. Like pure Castile soap. Which may be what it is.

I keep it by the utility sink to clean my hands after I get dirty grease on them. I have to follow it up with lanolin, though. My skin is very tough, but if a soap is extremely strong, it can make it crack eventually.

Aveeno makes at least two varieties of this soap. One says it has shea butter in it. That’s not the one we got. We got the one that’s more like brake cleaner.

I will never understand why they made this product.

What do I use instead? Walmart liquid hand soap. Their house brand; Equate. This is more or less the same as every other brand of liquid hand soap. In fact, it comes in nearly the same bottle as the Publix brand. The label claims it moisturizes, which must be true, because I wash my hands 3,000 times a day with no problems. It also says it’s antibacterial. Whether this is true or not, the bacteria presumably get rinsed off with the soap, so I don’t care.

I give our son a lot of his utility sink showers, so I am pretty familiar with the Equate soap. I put him in his little shower throne thing, I hose him down with warm water, and I wash him with about 7 pumps of soap. That’s it.

It does a good job of dissolving filth, and his skin looks better and better all the time.

My hands also look and feel great.

Guess what it costs. Guess. I’ll tell you. It costs 5.9 cents per ounce. Not a typo.

When I hoist him from the sink, I put him on his belly, grease the rear of his body, flop him over, grease the front, let him sit a minute to soak up the excess, dab him with a towel, and jam him into a fresh diaper and romper. Done.

Now you know how to clean and grease a baby extremely well, while saving a ton of money on products that don’t really work.

It’s sad that companies prey on mothers. Most mothers want good stuff for their babies, and because companies know that, they jack up their prices and make dishonest claims. If it costs more, it must be better. Conversely, products that are less expensive must be harmful and even dangerous. You’re a bad mother if you endanger your baby with Equate soap! There must be a reason why everyone recommends the pricey soap.

Well, there is a reason. They’re wrong. That’s the reason.

Unlike me, most people have kids when they’re young and going through a phase of their lives when they aren’t as affluent as they will be later. In view of that, targeting them with overpriced baby products is pretty offensive.

I give the diaper companies credit. They seem to put out really good products at very fair prices.

While I’m saving the babies and mothers of the world, I’ll add that you should not buy a baby tub. Not if you have a utility sink or bathtub.

Baby tubs can cost over $50 with all the cute matching accessories. They work reasonably well. They’re useful if you don’t want to wash poopy butts in your kitchen sink.

On the other hand, a baby in a tub stews in its own poo because a tub doesn’t give bathwater anywhere to go. Also, a baby tub is a pain to set up and use.

We got a plastic sink chair thing and a faucet attachment with a sprayer and hose. The baby sits on the chair, and I hose him with the sprayer. It’s fantastic. The soap/poo solution goes down the drain, and he loves being sprayed. Because he’s down in a sink, he has never been able to pee high enough to hit me or anything in the laundry room. It’s a beautiful thing.

Actually, he managed it when his mom was bathing him. I have asked other dads, and apparently, mothers just don’t have the pee-management gene. They get nailed all the time, but dads learn to avoid it.

When he’s not in the sink, the support gadget can be lifted out and set aside. It’s perfect. We haven’t used the tub in weeks.

I expect the lanolin to arrive tomorrow, and after that, my son’s butt should experience a golden age of smoothness and softness. If I come up with any more amazing butt innovations, I will be sure to tell the world.

There Should be a Pill for What Tapper has

It is difficult to relate to people who live at mental extremes. It is hard or impossible to put yourself in the shoes of a schizophrenic, for example. It’s hard to understand a Palestinian who legitimately believes he should cut Jews up and send his proud parents videos of himself covered with blood. There are many such Palestinians, though. I can’t imagine myself in the mind of a person who thinks he is entitled to shoplift. It’s hard to identify with people who are so arrogant and dishonest they behave as though they suffer from delusions.

When you are care about others and you are pretty rational, it takes a lot of energy to maintain the understanding of how bad or crazy other people are.

Example: my sister is going to be a junkie until she dies. She doesn’t want to change. Her motivation is to keep finding ways to manipulate other people so they will help her remain a junkie.

She was cruel to me when I was young. She was cruel to her mother and her grandmother. She has no conscience. She victimizes other people, not just remorselessly, but with zeal and satisfaction. The truth means absolutely nothing to her. When she makes innocent people suffer badly, it doesn’t bother her, and in many cases, it brings her pleasure.

I have had problems with relatives and others who either could not make themselves grasp the magnitude of her depravity or who could grasp it but were only able to hold onto the conception temporarily. A relative who fully understood how worthless she was on a certain date might soften for no reason and have a different view of her a few months later. Because this is how people are, she has been able to victimize the same people repeatedly.

Naturally, this brings me to the subject of Jake Tapper. Not just Tapper, but the entire leftist apparatus, from rainbow-haired kids who think they have a right to punch people in red hats to journalists who call it “retaliation” when China increases tariffs in response to our retaliation for decades of abusing us.

Jake Tapper is, and always has been, in the tank for the left, and his bias has led him into blatant buffoonery many times. We saw a great example last year. On election night, it was obvious by 1 a.m. that people who were tired of having to be nice to Harris were breathing a sigh of relief, because she was not going to be president, and there would no longer be any point in kissing up to her or pretending she wasn’t an incompetent, soulless dingbat.

When the election was finally called, Tapper stubbornly insisted that no major outlet had said Trump was the winner. Then someone told him, on camera, that a little outfit called Fox had done so. Tapper looked like Chris Hansen had just told him to have a seat.

I assume he had heard of Fox. The most widely-watched network in the free world, as contrasted with CNN, a struggling network whose former viewers were one of the main reasons Fox was doing so well.

You can’t blame Tapper for not knowing Fox had called the election. That’s the kind of closely-held information only a professional journalist covering the election for a major media organization would know. You can’t expect Tapper to be tipped off to private communications quietly disclosed via cable to hundreds of millions of people.

It’s just about impossible to find video of Tapper making a fool of himself that night. CNN is not promoting it. It used to be available on Youtube, but maybe Tapper got CNN to push Youtube to remove it with dubious copyright complaints.

Tapper is part of the leftist cabal that denied that Biden was becoming senile. In a now-widely-promoted video, he can be seen angrily scolding Lara Trump for bringing it up. In a transparent effort to turn the victim into the aggressor, he accused her of making fun of Biden’s stutter and asked her how little stuttering kids felt about that.

All those adorable stuttering tots, sitting around watching CNN. As they do.

Like this is an issue Jake Tapper cares about. I’m sure he cries big wet tears about it and funds a charity stuttering rehab clinic. I should search old CNN videos and check for his emotion-laden stories about the plight of tiny stammerers.

He knew exactly what he was doing. He knew Biden was senile. Everyone who watched and read the news knew it. He slandered Lara Biden, clumsily and transparently, for providing extremely important information to voters.

Biden’s “stuttering problem” was about as important as an election issue can get. You don’t put a dotard in charge of the US military. Now they’re telling us Hunter Biden, a whoremongering crackhead, may have made many of Joe’s decisions. A crackhead!

Pardon me. A godlike ARYAN crackhead.

Now Tapper has written a ridiculous book in which be breaks an amazing story: Biden was senile, and the press covered it up!

What can you say about that? How can there be a world where a person can be paid millions every year to disseminate truth and have him exalt himself by excoriating others for doing exactly what he did? Not only is he exalting himself; he’s doing it before hundreds of millions of people who, he has to realize, know he’s lying.

This is like Bernie Madoff pimping a muckraking expose of crooked investment advisors and excluding himself.

CNN has been pushing this book harder than Anthony Fauci pushed dangerous vaccines and fables about bats. Tapper has been holding it up over and over and promoting it like Billy Mays selling Mighty Putty. It makes his CNN appearances look more like ads than journalism. And his pals at the network have been doing the same thing!

How did he get CNN to make them do that? Which executive is in the naked pictures in his laptop? Surely his bosses had some clue his book was going to disgrace him and his network. Didn’t they?

That brings me back to where I started. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe they’re so crazy, they could not see this coming. How is that possible? I can’t picture myself in that mental state. How do you get there from sanity?

At least one leftist avoided the stain. Jon Stewart. He has been completely rational in his criticism of CNN and Tapper.

Or has he?

Stewart just did a vitriolic segment, abusing CNN and Mr. Tapper for their crimes against journalism, and he said they were selling people a story they should have broken a year ago, for nothing.

You go, Jon! Way to speak truth to power!

Wait…a YEAR ago?

I was writing about Biden’s obvious dementia in 2019, and so were many, many other people. Was that a year ago? Maybe to Joe Biden, but to the rest of us, no.

Stewart is a tremendous phony. He’s the guy who ripped Trump for fraud for overestimating the values of his real estate, but he did the same thing Trump did. Trump was accused of telling banks his properties were worth more than their assessed values. Every property in the United States is worth more than its assessed value. If you don’t know that, you shouldn’t talk about real estate. Meanwhile Stewart charged a buyer $17 million for a condo with an assessed value below $500,000.

Stewart holds himself out as a courageous, impartial whistleblower. If he were, he would have expressed concern about Biden’s dementia in 2019. He sat on the issue like everyone else, and now he lies and says the story was new 5 years later!

But at least the story got him one more opportunity to virtue-signal and watch his uncritical fans lap it up like gravy. Who needs the truth when you can have unearned glory from a studio full of smugnorant New York liberals?

I don’t know of any big-name leftist who is clean. Maybe there is some left-wing pundit or politician out there somewhere who stood up in 2019 and said Biden didn’t seem right in the head, but if there is, I haven’t heard of him.

God has told me two extremely useful things.

1. When the actions of human beings make no sense, look for a supernatural reason.

2. The truth has gotten lost.

In the minds and hearts of Americans, especially leftists, Demons are exerting a degree of control that is unprecedented in my lifetime. It has gotten to the point where many Americans can believe anything.

People who consider themselves dedicated model parents have become convinced their daughters are men, and they have paid to have their breasts cut out, their limbs skinned, and nonfunctional Frankenpenises stitched onto them. They are proudly displaying their castrated sons.

We are told criminals who come here illegally are “migrants” who have to be protected from, hello, our federal statutes, which were written by democratically-elected legislators to protect us.

Many of us believe a beautiful, innocent, full-term baby is a baby once it pops out of the womb, but if you leave his head inside after his body emerges, he’s more like an undesirable growth, and it’s okay to sever his little spine with scissors while he squirms, shudders, and dies.

When you pull him out afterward, is he a dead baby or still a growth?

Is there any point in even mentioning the way a people that defends itself from systematic efforts to extinguish it is now accused of genocide? And what about the fact that many Jews are joining in the slander? What could be less rational than that? Jews didn’t run around in 1939 yelling, “Free Austria and Germany!”

I hope.

God doesn’t just tell the truth. He is the truth. When he doesn’t live in you, you can believe any lie, no matter how patently absurd it is. God lives in fewer and fewer Americans every year, so we are quite literally becoming more insane. More delusional.

Leftists are the worst, but conservatives have the same problem. It’s an epidemic among the “socially liberal but fiscally conservative.” They think Yeshua isn’t God, they like drugs and sexual sin, but they really hate high taxes.

If it weren’t for demons and the abandonment of the Holy Spirit, Vivek Ramaswamy the Hindu would never have gotten close to the presidency, and conservatives would have more reservations about Elon Musk, a heathen who uses psychedelic drugs and carries a Hindu charm around to bring him demonic help.

Looking at the human race as it is makes me feel ineffective. I talk and talk, I make sense, and no one changes his mind. The demons won. When we talk to other people, much of the time, we’re really debating their demons.

It makes me wonder why I’m here. Did God feel this way when he sentenced humanity to extermination in the time of Noah? He must have felt somewhat like this.

I Don’t Believe in Instant Cancer

Joe Biden has terminal prostate cancer, and it has entered his bones. Ordinarily, I would be reluctant to call anyone’s cancer “terminal,” because as a Christian, I don’t like to deny the possibility of divine healing. In Biden’s case, though, I think terminal is the right description. I prayed for him, and my feeling is that he is not going to be healed.

Old men get prostate cancer all the time. It’s so common, some cancer cells are pretty much expected once a man gets old enough. So why is this story interesting? Because it happened to an ex-president, because there has almost certainly been a years-long coverup by that president and his family, and because it may explain why he lost his mind while controlling the most powerful military the world has ever known.

Maybe it seems insensitive to write about this now, but we are talking about a public servant who signed on for public discussion of his private life, and we are talking about a man and an administration that have lied to us over and over about extremely important things. The truth is more important than good manners. We need to try to prevent an administration like Biden’s from ever existing again.

When you lie to the public constantly, you lose the right to complain about the insensitivity of people who try to figure out the truth.

I’m no medical expert, but I can read, and I have looked at things experts are saying.

1. The type of cancer Biden has is very easily caught early, before it metastasizes, through blood tests.

2. These blood tests are routine for older men, and as a high-ranking politician, he had almost-free and then free healthcare for years, so he was given the tests unless he declined them.

3. It takes years for this type of cancer to reach “Gleason 9,” which is the advanced stage where Biden finds himself.

4. Treatment for this type of cancer often includes chemotherapy.

5. The best-known drug used for treating this cancer causes symptoms identical to those of dementia. Cancer patients call this condition “chemo brain.”

Add it all up, and you get this conclusion: Biden knew he had aggressive prostate cancer while he was president and probably earlier, and he didn’t tell us until 6 months after he lost his bid for reelection. On top of that, he was experiencing dementia which may have been caused by chemotherapy. If he was having mental issues due to chemotherapy, he definitely knew it. He would have been warned about it.

That he ran for president at least once while aware he had terminal cancer seems undeniable. That’s bad.

It also reflects on the crooked journalists and politicians who lied constantly about his obvious mental decline. If they had been honest, his condition would have been acknowledged, there would probably have been a public investigation, and we might not have had to suffer through a Biden presidency with all its disastrous consequences and corruption.

We had a right to know. Ordinarily, your medical problems are your own business. Not true when you’re the president or vice president and you hold yourself out as the picture of health in order to get yourself elected.

He knew he was dying, but he ran for president anyway. This is the “decent” “honorable” man they keep telling us about. I believe the only things he cared about were being worshiped by the public and enriching his family through corruption.

The treatment options are pretty awful. His cancer is “hormone-sensitive,” which means hormones produced by the gonads make it grow. The treatment involves blocking or getting rid of those hormones. There are two ways to do this: injections and castration.

Either way, losing your male hormones is not good. They don’t just make you big and strong. They make you the kind of person you are. Without them, you lose a lot of the qualities that make a personality not just masculine, but healthy and functional. You may become indecisive. You may lose confidence. You may be unhappy. Testosterone makes men happy in addition to its other effects. It also reduces anxiety.

On average, women are more anxious, less confident, less decisive, and less happy than men. There is a reason. If you’ve ever stood beside your wife in a mall while she took 45 minutes to choose among several pairs of shoes that all looked fine to you, you may have been witnessing the consequences of hormonal differences. Every typical husband knows he has to make decisions for his wife from time to time unless he wants the family to freeze up like Han Solo in carbonite. Women know it, too, which is why they constantly ask us to make decisions for them.

Back when he was young, Biden was widely and correctly considered a fool, but he was supremely confident. His ego knew no restraint. He was aggressive. He was decisive while making his bad decisions. He was filled with baseless certainty. He was energetic. His memory was fine; what little he knew, he had no difficulty recalling.

We saw someone different starting in about 2018. No need to explain what I mean by that.

Is that when they started blocking his hormones? The Joe Biden of 1980 would never have submitted to handlers or his wife.

Chemical castration has other effects that are pretty bad, but I spare you.

A lot of people are saying Biden had to know he had cancer years ago, but so far, I haven’t seen anyone but me asking if it explained his dementia. Maybe they’ll get around to it tomorrow.

The Bidens remind me of the Kennedys. A cursed Irish political family. The obvious difference is that the Kennedys were a lot more capable.

The Bidens have had all sorts of problems. Joe lost his wife and child in a car wreck. They cut his head open twice to fix aneurysms. He was very credibly accused of rape. His better son died from cancer. His daughter is a failure, and Hunter is a failure among failures.

What other presidential son has been seen in photos smoking crack? We don’t have naked pictures of any other presidential offspring, except for one eccentric who posed for a porn magazine. None of the others have inadvertently blessed us with nude videos of themselves with whores.

He and his wife and son brought shame on themselves by pointedly abandoning and ignoring Biden’s innocent seventh grandchild.

His presidency was a mess that left us will all sorts of unnecessary problems. Even without Hunter, his family’s reputation is horrible because they made millions from influence-peddling (legal or otherwise). He developed dementia just as all of his self-aggrandizing dreams were coming true. He was forced to drop his reelection campaign. He disgraced himself by pardoning his relatives. Now he has an emasculating form of terminal cancer.

It’s like the Kennedy saga repeated itself with a less-able cast of characters.

I don’t know what else could happen to the Bidens at this point, short of being eliminated by a meteor at a family gathering. They have really been through it.

Has God had it with the Bidens? Is he out of patience because they supported the murder of the unborn and facilitated the persecution of Christians and Jews? Is he weary of them because they supported perversion and tied aid in poor Christian countries to the endorsement of sodomy, which God absolutely hates?

Obama was probably worse, but his children are well, and he doesn’t have cancer.

The Bidens are out of the dynasty business. Joe’s dreams of being remembered as the new FDR or Lincoln or whatever are done. He will be lumped in with LBJ and Jimmy Carter. His better son–his family’s hope–is no more. His remaining son will end up in prison, an institution, or the graveyard, because that’s what happens to unrepentant addicts who are never held accountable and have money thrown at them.

Biden should have taken his law degree and gone into an undemanding field he could handle, like criminal defense or divorce. Maybe things would have turned out better for his family.

Trash is Diverse

I see people on the web promoting a badly-chosen and destructive phrase: “black fatigue.”

It is attached to stories of ghetto blacks doing ghetto things, like calling for white people to be killed, beating up restaurant employees, and being forcibly removed from airports.

It’s a phrase that has an appeal to anyone who has witnessed, or been a victim of, ghetto behavior by blacks. I have had some issues, myself. I had a black woman come up to me on the street and tell me white people were nasty and that she couldn’t stand us. A black kid tried to take a fishing pole away from me and ride off on his bicycle. A young black man called me “bitch and “honky” at church. A black man moved to my side of a crosswalk to spit at my feet. I’ve been called “white boy” by racist black kids. I understand the weariness.

It’s a stupid phrase, though. What people really have is trash fatigue.

My grandfather was a circuit judge in Eastern Kentucky. A black woman who should have been warned moved to one of the counties where he worked. This is a very trashy county. It’s a place where people go out in public with bed hair. Where illegitimate kids and welfare scammers are all over. A place where people shoot each other over the kinds of arguments children have.

When I was young, I assumed my grandfather was kind of racist, because nearly everyone around him was, but maybe he wasn’t. He mentored this lady and supported her efforts to establish a practice.

Some moron or morons burned down her house.

That’s exactly the kind of thing “black fatigue” victims complain about, but the perpetrators were white.

Do I know they were white? No. I know the black population there amounts to less than half a percent, though, and I have heard people from that county and and nearby counties share their negative views of “niggers” with no shame and every expectation of approval.

Okay; American black culture is a mess, black people commit much more crime per capita than whites, and racism against other groups is accepted in most black areas. These things are true. We see a very disproportionate number of American blacks causing trouble. But the same things are true of other groups, like Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Salvadorans. They’re also true of white trash.

Trash comes in all colors, because it’s DIVERSE.

When you use the term “black fatigue,” you make it sound like trashiness is exclusive to blacks, and other groups are above it. You push people in the direction of plain old racism. You motivate them to treat all blacks like dangerous, parasitic losers. That is evil.

I can never know for sure, but there are probably at least a million black people in America who are much finer human beings than I am. Not the highest bar to clear, I admit. On the other hand, there was my dad’s wealthy white law partner, who once asked a South African boat handyman, “Can I go to your country and shoot niggers?”

This was a guy who was second in command of a prestigious firm in Coral Gables. After he and his wife forced my dad out, he was the top dog. He represented prominent clients like Florida Power & Light, Anheuser-Busch, NASA contractors, American Express, PPG, and Nabisco. He’s dead now. His wife is still there.

Trashiness, social standing, and financial status are three different things.

I managed to find his death page at Legacy.com, and no one, not even his wife and son, has left a message. There is no obituary. Not a surprise. He was completely selfish and without morals. I never knew anyone who liked or respected him. I certainly didn’t. Not after I was maybe 10 years old.

There is a fluff biography on the firm’s website. It’s pretty cold. I don’t think his wife wrote it. I wrote my parents’ obituaries. When your own family doesn’t write an obituary for you, it’s not a good sign.

He used to run around with a couple of guys named Robinson and Hicks. They drank and fished in the Bahamas. My dad’s partner and Robinson owned a yacht in which my dad held an interest for a time. No fond messages from Robinson or Hicks at the Legacy page. Nothing from their wives. The firm’s page says my dad’s partner was a mentor. None of the “mentored” wrote anything. Nothing from his brother.

Robinson was disagreeable person and not very bright. He was included in the partnership to save my dad’s partner money. Hicks was a little odd. I was told he had notebooks full of nude photos. I never saw them. Miami has a disgusting annual event called the Columbus Day Regatta, during which boaters raft up, cavort naked, and have sex in plain view. My dad claimed Hicks had a telephoto lens he broke out every Columbus Day.

When my dad’s partner wanted to buy something for the boat, my dad asked him how he would get Robinson to agree, and the partner said Robinson would do what he told him. He said Robinson was stupid.

His own dog didn’t like him. He had a German Shepherd named Yancy, and Yancy used to walk around his house with one side against the wall, trying to get as far away from him as he could. I guess he got some beatings.

He got what he wanted by sacrificing better people, so when he died, he had money, but no people. Must have been a bright day for ambitious associates at the firm.

Actually, he may not have had that much money as he should have, so he may not have gotten what he sold himself for.

My dad invested and denied himself, so he had a solid net worth. His partner’s wife was also a partner, so they had two incomes, but they led a more self-indulgent lifestyle. My dad said they blew their money. Ski trips and so on.

In 2015, the partner upgraded his 1978 yacht to a 1999 model which probably cost him $400,000. It’s listed right now for $349,000.

In terms of spending power, $400,000 is close to the value of the 1978 boat back in the 1980’s when the partnership bought it, and the new boat is only 4 feet longer. In 2015, the partner would have been about 69, his son was out of the house, he was qualified for full Medicare and Social Security benefits, and he and his wife were working, so he shouldn’t have been nervous about the future. Given all the cutthroat things he did to enrich himself, he should have been able to drop a million on a boat without flinching. And he did like big status symbols. He was always talking about how nice other people’s bigger boats were.

Either he was watching his money, which was uncharacteristic, or he wasn’t doing well enough to buy something more expensive. Or maybe Robinson was out, and he had to pay for it by himself. Still, if my dad had been in his shoes, almost 70 with a double income and no dependents, $400,000 wouldn’t have been the best he could do in 2015. When you’re 70, the years during which you might have to support yourself without working are not likely to exceed 25.

If you’re 25, spending a given percentage of your net worth is a lot riskier than spending it at 70.

Singlehandedly, my dad paid almost the same amount for a boat, corrected for inflation, in 1988, and it was not a problem.

To return from my digression within a digression, it’s amazing, how the partner vanished without any evidence that he meant anything to anyone.

I think God just gave me some revelation. Psalm 37 says this:

I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a green bay tree.

Yet he passed away, and, lo, he was not: yea, I sought him, but he could not be found.

I used to think this meant God would eventually take the wicked out, but maybe that’s not the whole story. Maybe it means everyone is relieved when the wicked die, because they are tired of them and glad they’re gone. Maybe it means people move on without them as quickly as they can, treating them as though they never existed, except in cases where circumstances force them to keep praising them.

My dad’s partner is gone, and I don’t think anyone misses him. He was rude. He was dishonest. He was ruthless. He told my father he would swear lies against my mother in their divorce. I doubt he had a single friend.

I don’t think his wife was crazy about him. Their relationship started when she was an associate at the firm and he was married to someone else. Marrying a partner certainly advanced her career. She became a partner and was able to combine her firm voting power with her husband’s. That’s how they got rid of my dad.

In the Nineties, he took up with a flashy receptionist named Donna, and he and his wife separated. He told my dad he was dissatisfied with his wife because she had stopped working out, if you can imagine such a thing. They got back together, however, and my dad’s understanding was that the reason was that he wanted to maintain his lifestyle.

I never heard of him doing anything for anyone else. I mean not one single thing. I never heard anyone say anything nice about him. They laughed about him, because he was often unintentionally funny, but no one admired him at all.

Anyway, I think “black fatigue” will become a popular phrase, and it will be destructive to an already-polarized nation.

As I always say, I recognize two “races”: the children of God, and everyone else. Those are the only races anyone should care about. Identifying with whites or blacks or Americans or anything other than the children of God is immature and counterproductive.

My white status is temporary, like my American status. There are no races in heaven, and there are no Americans there. Citizenship ends at death. My status as a son of God, if I hold onto it until I die, will last forever.

I hope to be in heaven eventually, and if I make it, I will be with former blacks, Asians, and every other type of person. I want to be with people who are like myself and share all my beliefs and desires, and those things do not correlate with biological race.

Liberals Triggered

One benefit, if you can call it that, of the apocalypse is that the news is very interesting these days. Today, I read that certain types of machine guns are now legal throughout the US under federal, but not necessarily state, law. No approval process or federal tax stamp required. There’s an entertaining morning read.

The general rule is that the feds will not let you have a gun that left the factory capable of shooting full auto unless you pay for an enhanced background check, hand over $200 as an infringing discouragement tax, and agree to have your name on a federal list forever. This also applies to certain gun parts. In addition, your gun or part has to have been made before a certain date in 1986. This is more or less how it works, but it’s not a rigorous explanation.

There has been a lot of squabbling over certain gun parts made after the 1986 cutoff. One example is the bump stock. Another is the lightning link, which is a little piece of steel you put in an AR-platform gun to turn it into a machine gun. A guy is currently rotting in prison for selling a steel card featuring a picture of a lightning link that requires the user to cut it out and install it.

Another example: the forced-reset trigger or “FRT.” I don’t know exactly how these work because I DO NOT HAVE ONE, MR. ATF BLOG READER. I have seen people shooting them on Youtube, however, and it seems fair to me to say they turn AR’s into machine guns. They work very well, unlike bump stocks, which wobble around.

While they turn guns into machine guns for practical purposes, guns with FRT’s aren’t “machine guns” according to federal law’s definition. That’s what Pam Bondi now says, according to a federal lawsuit that was resolved yesterday.

A company called Rare Breed started making FRT’s, and the ATF got all pouty about it and went after them. They started telling customers IT WOULD BE A REALLY GOOD IDEA to give them their triggers because YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT MIGHT HAPPEN IF YOU DON’T COMPLY.

Far as I know, nobody has ever been charged with a crime for owning an FRT. Maybe some felons have. In any case, there are no news stories about FRT owners being charged en masse.

The ATF went after Rare Breed, but now that Bondi is in charge, we’re all friends, so you can keep your FRT and even order new ones.

I have always wanted a device like this, mainly because the ATF doesn’t want me to have it. Being told you can’t have something makes you crave it. I would love to have hand grenades and dynamite, even though I would be afraid to use them and even to have them in the house. If I had some, and Florida suddenly dropped its permitting laws and so on, I would lose interest in them right away.

Also, the bans seem unconstitutional to me.

Do I have a practical use for a machine gun? I don’t think I ever will. Some people obviously do. Some people live in Detroit, for example. I don’t think I’ll ever need one, but it would be neat just to have one.

If I had one, I would probably shoot it once and then put it away. It would be hard to watch money shooting out of my rifle barrel at that speed, and accurate shooting is way more interesting to me than just blowing stuff apart.

Is it legal for me to have an FRT now? Not in my opinion.

The federal FRT ban is now dead, but the most logical reading of Florida’s hysterical post-Stephen-Paddock anti-bump-stock statute is that FRT’s and all other devices that could make guns fire faster are illegal. If that is true, then such devices are even more illegal than the guns people pay an extra $200 to own, because you can’t pay $200 and receive an FRT permit. There is no such thing.

The maximum fire-enhancement-part penalties under Florida law are a $5000 fine and 5 years in the pen. Oddly, the state-imposed penalties for owning factory-made machine guns without ATF approval are much worse.

A bill undoing the restrictions has been introduced in the Florida legislature, but it’s not going anywhere right now.

So what impact will the new DOJ settlement have on the nation? Put simply, a whole lot of citizens are now legally entitled to own machine guns without paying huge sums of money or joining a federal registry that can be used later for purposes of targeting and confiscation.

You can say these guns aren’t machine guns if you want. You can cite federal law. The truth and the law are often in conflict.

To me, this seems like a tiny, malformed step toward enforcing the Constitution. It is enforcement of the spirit, not the letter.

When the Second Amendment was drafted, it used the term “militia.” While it did not state that militia membership was required in order to qualify people for 2A protection, it did imply that 2A applied to arms suitable for military use. In 2025, that means full auto. You don’t fight a war with semi-automatic rifles. A militia with semi-automatics would be a joke.

If we followed the Constitution, people would be allowed to buy machine guns without obstruction, as they were until 1934. Whether it’s a good idea for ordinary people to own machine guns is a separate issue, and in any case, that genie appears to be out of the bottle.

The playing field has changed a lot. Every little idiot in our ghettos now has a stolen Glock pistol with an extended magazine and an illegal switch that converts it to full auto. These switches are very easy to get. I could print one today. They’re not going to disappear from our streets. Good citizens, however, are still stuck with whatever the feds and their states allow. It’s an asymmetrical situation, and in areas that don’t permit FRT’s, it will probably get worse. In areas where they are allowed, FRT’s could do a lot to balance the scales and discourage criminals.

An FRT could be a lifesaver for a person who has a ranch by the Mexican border. Mexican criminals of the most worthless sort trespass on border ranches carrying machine guns.

FRT’s might also chill federal tyranny to some degree. James Madison made it clear that this was a vital purpose of the Second Amendment.

My guess is that a huge number of people who don’t already have FRT’s and were afraid to get them are about to buy them, as fast as they can be delivered.

What a country we have. Almost completely polarized. The right wing demonized by the left to the point where a big percentage of leftists would be murdering us in groups in the streets if they thought they could get away with it. To top it all off, we are now no longer able to control the proliferation of automatic weapons. Any kid in Compton can get a Glock switch for a few dollars, many, many good conservative people know how to modify semiautomatic rifles in an afternoon, and forced-reset triggers are now available to millions of people who were afraid to buy them last week. People are storing more ammunition than ever because of the Obama and covid shortages. The powder is dry. We’re just waiting for someone to light a match.

I support our right to own and carry guns, including machine guns, because I hate bullies. I hate those who torment the innocent, and I am not fond of their enablers in government. On the other hand, I am distressed to know that I live in a world where guns are needed because there is so much hate.

Christians know Yeshua will come for us, and we will be transported to his wedding, which will take 7 years while the people who remain on Earth slaughter each other and die from other causes. Then we will return, and there will be a millennium of peace, abundance, longevity, and good health. I doubt anyone will want a rifle during the millennium. I wish that were true now.

This world is disgusting. It is full of pain and unnecessary malevolence. My life is easy and pleasant, but I am still sick of this place because of the suffering and malice I see around me.

The other day I saw a story about a baby elephant that was killed by a vehicle. The mother was so heartbroken, she refused to leave the road for hours. For some reason, that disturbed me very deeply. I thought about the nature of a diseased planet where things like that happened.

A few days back, I went to Walgreen’s. I got out of my car and locked the door. Unexpectedly, this made me think about the way human beings treat each other. I was just going to a store to buy protein shakes to help my wife breastfeed my baby son, and I had to take miscreants into account on the way to the door. I live in a world where strangers are looking to hurt me all the time, for no reason.

I recently saw a video. Two young men, probably in their mid-teens, went to a modest house carrying guns. They opened a door from the patio. Someone inside screamed. There was shooting. One young man dropped like a stone, and his “friend” ran off while trying to pull a gun from his own pocket. The dead criminal was shot just after he turned to run.

Generally, you can’t shoot a criminal who is running away, but this one was ostensibly still armed, as was his companion, and there was no guarantee they wouldn’t turn and fire, so I have no sympathy for the one who was killed.

On the patio, there was a little plastic swing on a rope. A baby swing. There was a little plastic Jeep for a toddler to drive. These creatures saw those things and still chose to go in with weapons so they could steal…what? A wedding ring worth $75 on the street? A couple of 10-karat bracelets from Walmart?

I got so angry, I left a comment that was over the top. I said, “That little bastard got what he deserved.” I shouldn’t have called him a bastard, but other than that, I stand by what I said. He was despicable. He was worthless, by choice. A man can make himself worthless by choosing to be irredeemable. The Bible calls human beings worthless more than once. How can there be a world where young men can enter houses with guns and go after babies, tiny children, and women?

I hate this place. This world. I always say leading a peaceful Christian life here is like taking a luxury vacation in a miserable, revolting place like Mexico and being unable to return home. No matter how good things are for me and my family, there is devastation and failure all around us, and we can’t avoid witnessing it.

While I am here, I intend to go armed, and I fully support other peoples’ rights to fight off bullies. I support the death penalty, as God does. I support long prison sentences for cruel criminals.

If you need an automatic weapon because of your particular situation, I’m glad you can get it. I would rather see 50 vicious punks put in their graves than one innocent person become a victim.

That Big Head Must be Good for Something

I thought I would keep a private diary about my baby son, and I failed utterly, so here I am again, keeping track of him on the web.

I started moving web material about him to the private diary, so I guess this is good enough.

He is past three months now. We are told he is supposed to double in size between the day of his birth and the four-month mark, and he is on track. He can’t fall short by much because he is so close already.

He is fat. He now has two baby rings on each arm. His head, which was not small to begin with, seems to be as wide as it is high.

He is developing very quickly. He is remarkably strong. I used to think babies were like rag dolls full of suet, but he feels like there is spring steel under the fat.

Every morning, I lift him up by his hands. I saw a doctor do this, and he said my son had four-month strength at one month, so I figured I should keep doing it to keep him strong. I lift him almost to a sitting position, and then I lower him again, and I push his arms back down against his chest so he gets resistance on the down stroke.

His arms used to straighten as I did this because it was hard work for him, but now he’s so strong, he doesn’t notice the strain at all. He keeps his arms mostly folded on the way up, effortlessly, for 10 repetitions. I find it a little shocking.

He loves being lifted by his ankles. The wife said to lift by his calves so I wouldn’t hurt his ankle joints, so that’s what I do now. It gives him a thrill.

I use this to distract him sometimes. When he’s whiny, I lift him up and let him hang upside down, and he giggles with joy.

He can’t get enough of math class. By “math class,” I mean I hold my hand out in front of him and show him numbers while saying their names. I’ve mentioned it before. I make a circle for zero, I extend a finger for one, and so on, up to 5. This way, he gets exposure to 6 numbers, which is the best I can do with human hands.

When I started doing it, I wondered if it would make an impression on him. It certainly has. He stares at my hand and grins, entranced. It consumes him. Truthfully, it can get tiresome. I can go for pretty long sessions with no decrease in his interest. I didn’t realize a baby could focus attention on anything for 10 minutes or more.

I also show him the numbers in random order. Seems like a good idea. My wife gives him math class, too.

We got him some plastic letters and numbers, and we will be showing them to him in a day or two.

Sometimes he looks so mature it’s hard to believe. When I hold him to feed him, he looks like a smart, dignified, attentive little boy. Like he has shown up to join me for an important job for which he is well prepared.

He has started to hold his bottle now. Sometimes he holds it for quite a while. He often needs help, though.

Pooping is less traumatic for him than ever. Sometimes he still cries, but generally, he just growls and shoves it out. Unfortunately, he likes doing this while feeding or, worse, while sitting by the table in his swing while we feed.

He is now interested in solid food. He stares at it while we eat. If web sources are right, he might take some at the beginning of his fourth month. That will be a bittersweet milestone. Bitter, because solid food will make his poop stink and take all the humor out of dealing with diapers.

It has gotten harder to take candid pictures of him because he is interested in phones. Sometimes he’ll start grinning and giggling in a way that would make for a great picture, but when I take the phone out, he turns serious instantly, staring with great intensity.

He still has a lot of blowouts. The other day, he blew out before I got up. I showered and changed him. I fed him as soon as I changed him. He had a blowout while I was feeding him.

He liked lying on his belly when he was younger, but my wife got the idea that it would hurt him, so she quit laying him on his stomach. This appears to have set him back. We started doing it again, and for several weeks he screamed like he was on a hot stove, and he was no longer able to hold himself up well. Now we make him deal with it, and he is holding his head up very well and complaining much less. I put him on a firm surface when he’s on his belly so he can get traction to work on crawling.

The back of his head is flat, and it worried his mother, but the back of my head is flat, too, and I slept on my stomach a lot. I think most people’s heads are flat in the back. I’m not deformed or anything. My head is about like other people’s, only bigger. My wife thinks he has a flat area on one side, but the web says these things correct themselves fairly well eventually. And like I told her, we can always buy him a hat.

I think he has a great personality. He may be a little high-strung, which is what every parent who has a brat says, but he seems to try to behave. He soothes himself by sucking his fingers. As I have noted before, he very clearly tries not to cry. I think he prefers to be happy, which is definitely not true of everyone. We all know a lot of people who aren’t happy unless they’re upset and sharing their misery.

Crying is a way to manipulate others, so many people would much rather cry than calm down. They know that if they stop screeching, people will be less motivated to do what they want. I think it’s wonderful that my son doesn’t enjoy crying.

Interacting with him gets more rewarding all the time. It’s a blast. Sometimes he seems noticeably more advanced than he was the day before. He recognizes us from across rooms. He knows what a smile is, and he reciprocates. My wife says he can tell what kind of mood she’s in. I guess she would be more sensitive to that, since I’m nearly always in the same mood.

He’s very jolly when I play with him. He loves being rolled and tossed around. He loves playing with my fingers. He even likes having his cheeks pinched gently. He lights up when I’m with him, so now I miss him more when he’s not in the room. Back when he spent most of his time screaming, there was somewhat more duty and somewhat less enthusiasm in my heart when I went to spend time with him. Now I live having him around just for the fun.

As I told my wife, the peaceful, productive intervals between crying fits, diaper changing, and feeding are getting longer and longer.

He still gets very, very excited when we’re playing. This is something I can’t explain. There is some quality I have that allows me to connect with other creatures and get into their bubbles, like we have everything in common. They get excited. It’s like we’re caught up in a strange, private celebration.

It happens with animals. It happens with people. Now it’s happening with my son.

I don’t do it all the time, and it doesn’t work universally, but it’s real. My wife has seen it many times. I do it with her, now that I think about it.

Maybe it’s rooted in the way I have been rejected. I have an instinctive desire to show other creatures they’re accepted and understood.

It doesn’t mean I’m nice all the time or to everyone, as anyone who reads this blog knows.

I have certainly rejected a lot of people.

He is still very pink. I don’t know what kind of white genes I have, but they must be super strong white privilege genes, because he is not nearly as dark as most biracial kids. His hair is a very dark brown with no curls. His eyes are a strange color between brown and blue. He isn’t as dark as most Cubans.

I don’t know what’s happening with the hair. My hair is not far from straight, but when I was his age, it was curly. His mom’s hair is obviously kinky. Where did his straight hair come from?

His palms and the soles of his feet are considerably brighter than the rest of him, so his mom’s genes didn’t just roll over and play dead.

We are starting to look into ways to seat him at the kitchen table. High chairs are standard, but some people prefer portable boosters that can be attached to dining chairs. We are also going to have to get him a playpen, because he will be ambulatory to one degree or other very soon.

I wonder what his capabilities will be. I have long wondered if “genius” just meant “smart kid whose parents started developing his brain and talents on time instead of waiting until it was too late.” Is it true? Can’t say. I know I’m not going to wait until my son’s potential is mostly gone to get him started on learning. Whether he turns out to be a genius or not, there is no reason why he shouldn’t speak 4 languages and sight-read at the piano when he’s 6, and he should be able to do calculus at 12. He should have his potential tapped, unlike the vast majority of American kids.

It’s clear to me that we teach high school sophomores things we should teach 4-year-olds.

I really, truly hated school. It was indescribably boring, and while I didn’t dislike other kids, I found it frustrating that a lot of the other children couldn’t understand things I understood. Classes were necessarily retarded to the point where the least-capable students could keep up, so nothing ever challenged me except the climbing rope in phys. ed. class. My mom taught me to read when I was three, but other than that, my parents taught me nearly nothing. They thought teachers would do it. All I learned was to look forward to weekends and summers.

Cramming should not work. If a class really requires three months, it should not be possible to master it in three days prior to an exam. Because cramming works for smart people, it is clear that we are teaching many kids way too slowly.

Cramming worked for me in law school, which is supposed to be difficult. I always say I learned I could work hard all semester and usually get an A, or I could work really hard for three days and get a B. I chose to drink a lot, I had a great time, I graduated cum laude, and my average was 3.something. I knew summas, and I was smarter.

A physics student can’t do nothing for 11 weeks and then study hard and get a B on a test. Physics is hard, and less-gifted students aren’t around to slow everyone else down, the way they are in liberal arts and law classrooms. By the time you get to second-semester university physics, everyone around you is at least pretty smart.

Here’s a horror story. Someone taught me multiplication when I was in kindergarten. Not well, but I knew what it was, and I could have memorized my times tables. I can’t remember who taught me. It was in a classroom.

I was ready to do 4th-grade math, but no one cared. It was 4 years before my school taught me the times tables. During that time, should have been moving into algebra. I did as close to nothing as possible without getting in trouble, but when I took a test in the 6th grade, my ability level was still grade 11.5, so obviously, I could have been learning more during those dead years. The only kid who beat me was David Sedaka, the Jewish kid whose responsible parents made him study. He made 12.4. And he shouldn’t have been in retarded classes, either. There was no algebra at my elementary school, so I guess he was stuck. Maybe he had other classes at Hebrew school.

He’s probably a neurosurgeon now. And sight-reads.

It’s amazing that we raise kids who don’t speak at least 4 languages. A human being who isn’t smart can learn 10 languages and never be confused, and we pick languages up very, very fast when we’re small.

My son will not have his potential poured down the toilet like mine was, so while he may not be the next William Sidis, he will be much more capable than kids with the same potential and ineffective parents. He won’t say “liberry” and “I could care less.”

He’s going to read the Bible, and we will explain it to him. We will tell him about the Holy Spirit, and unless his free will prevents it, we will baptize him with the Spirit and teach him to speak in tongues. He will know he has to have at least two sessions with God every day. He will be taught that God is a person who knows him and loves him, and he will be shown how to spend time with God. Every revelation God has given us will be passed on to him. If he blows it, it will not be because his parents failed at their most important job.

I don’t know if I want him to be a genius, but I want him to be fully developed. I will be the first parent in my family since my great-grandparents, at least, who will make a responsible effort.

We Have no Friends

For American leftists, Kristallnacht is every day, but now, they’re not just after Jews. They’re after everyone who disagrees with their filthy, vicious, cruel, stupid, self-contradicting beliefs.

Here is how Wikipedia describes the original Kristallnacht, perpetrated in 1938 by the spiritual ancestors of modern American leftists:

Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass, also called the November pogrom(s) was a pogrom against Jews carried out by the Nazi Party’s Sturmabteilung (SA) and Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary forces along with some participation from the Hitler Youth and German civilians throughout Nazi Germany on 9–10 November 1938. The German authorities looked on without intervening.

Here is part of the Washington state statute governing disorderly conduct:

Disorderly conduct.
(1) A person is guilty of disorderly conduct if the person:
(a) Uses abusive language and thereby intentionally creates a risk of assault;
(b) Intentionally disrupts any lawful assembly or meeting of persons without lawful authority

Here is part of the Washington state statute governing stalking:

Stalking.
(1)(a) A person commits the crime of stalking if, without lawful authority the person:
(i) Intentionally and repeatedly harasses another person;
(ii) Intentionally and repeatedly follows another person;
(iii) Intentionally contacts, follows, tracks, or monitors, or attempts to contact, follow, track, or monitor another person after being given actual notice that the person does not want to be contacted, followed, tracked, or monitored

Today I took a look at Citizen Free Press, which is a lot like the old Drudge Report. I suspect Matt Drudge got a liberal girlfriend or sold his business, because his site, which used to be the go-to resource for people looking for stories the MSM hid, is now dedicated to defaming Trump and everyone real conservative everywhere.

CFP linked to this Twitter video: link.

If the video doesn’t appear, don’t worry. I can summarize it reasonably well.

A woman who appears to be between 65 and 70 is walking to her car. She has a cane and walks with great effort.

She has attended a Turning Point USA event in Seattle, Washington. Cowardly, masked, black-clad leftist terrorists are all around her, following her and calling her filthy names. They tell her to die. They say they hope she dies. They call her a bitch. They say something revealing: one says the world would be “so much better” without her.

One leftist is a bowlegged lesbian who would pretty clearly be very unattractive without her mask. Another is a huge stoop-shouldered sissy with a lisp.

A couple of Seattle cops walk with her, along with a single brave conservative male. The cops, the male escort, and the victim are not wearing masks. They show their faces.

The circus continues until the victim gets in her car, when the she is told the fat sissy hopes she dies behind the wheel.

The party of joy. Spreading love once again.

What do the cops do? Nothing at all, apart from preventing the fat sissy from touching the victim.

What would the criminals have done had the cops not been there? Worse, I am sure.

Regardless of what the law in Seattle says, in actual application, it now permits the abuse and intimidation of elderly people in the presence of the police.

The police could have made arrests, and they should have, even if they had doubts the criminals would be prosecuted. They could have protected the victim by hauling the criminals away.

The victim suffered real harm. She is likely to have problems with severe anxiety for at least a month. If she is particularly sensitive, it could last much longer. It will definitely make her think twice before getting in her car and going anywhere in the western part of her state or Oregon.

The fat sissy said the world would be better without the victim, and that shows that demons are involved.

As I have often pointed out, God showed me that genocide is at the root of all conflict on Earth. God and Satan are working to remove each other’s children, along with their names and memories. Satan doesn’t really have children, but in the spiritual sense, people who give themselves to him and follow him are considered his children. They attach themselves to him, so God treats them as though Satan begat them.

Demons know how it all works. They give Satan’s children the idea of erasing God’s children as well as every Jew. They don’t just talk in terms of defeating them. They talk in terms of annihilation.

“Palestine must be free.” The cancel culture. The Final Solution. Taking away our voices in all forms of media. Tearing down posters. Holocaust denial. Resurrection denial. They want a world in which no one knows we existed.

This is why God won’t let Jews cremate their dead. Satan wants his children to be able to say the Jews never existed, and bones and tombstones make that difficult. Jews like to sponsor buildings and put their names on them. Why? God is behind it. It’s a way of confirming the existence of the Jews.

The Germans and Austrians burned Jews to offend God and rid the world of evidence they were ever here.

When you hear language of annihilation, including censorship, you should know evil spirits are behind it.

Of course, the world would not be a better place with only leftists and other servants of Satan in it. They would turn on each other.

Satan hates them. He kills them and does them other types of harm every day, and he gets God to sweep them into hell. Calling them his children doesn’t change that. He wants to get rid of Jews and the people who love God first, but he wants to wipe out the rest later. He hates every human being. He probably hates every spirit on his side, too. He is without value.

If Satan loved his children, he wouldn’t be convincing them to sodomize each other and get horrible diseases. He wouldn’t be convincing them to castrate themselves or to skin themselves and have their stripped hides turned into artifician penises that don’t work. He wouldn’t be driving them to have double mastectomies to make them look less like women.

It’s great that Trump was reelected, but it doesn’t mean America is going to recover. It’s a speed bump for Satan. Things will keep deteriorating. Satan will keep working with leftists, and when conservatives do well, he will use conservatives who don’t belong to him. They will work just as well.

Seattle shows us our future. Get ready for it to come to your town.

I Got This on Lox

I made plain bagels again today, and I cut samples for my wife and me to try. We compared them to an Einstein Bros. bagel. The verdict: my bagels are better than Einstein Bros., which are not bad, so while it may be possible to make small improvements, there is no longer any point in buying plain bagels at the store.

In the photos below, my bagel is on the left, and an Einstein bagel is on the right.

Weight: 138 grams (mine) to 110 grams (theirs).

Aroma and taste: mine smelled and tasted more like bagels. The smell and flavor were more intense.

Crust: mine were a little chewier and slightly crisp on the outside. Einstein Bros. bagels don’t have a crisp outside. My bagels were slightly lumpy, but I don’t see any point in working hard to change it. It may be possible to change the fermentation process a little, but it won’t improve the experience of eating the bagels.

Crumb: my bagels are slightly less regular. For the most part, the air holes are tiny, just like Einstein Bros., but there are some air holes as big as 3/16″. This makes no difference when eating them. It’s not perceptible.

The hydration is 57%, which may be a little higher than some bakeries. It could explain the slightly looser crumb, or maybe my fermentation was a little longer than needed.

I am told the New York bagel mafia vandalizes businesses that compete without permission. I wonder if this is why it’s so hard to find a good recipe. But then pizzerias don’t commit crimes to hold onto their business secrets, and it’s even harder to find a good pizza recipe.

I don’t belong to a food guild, so I will post my recipe in its entirety. If you can find a way to make the bagels smoother, good for you.

They’re easy to make. Not a lot of work. Very cheap. No wonder the bagel mafia is so nervous and protective.

DOUGH INGREDIENTS

385 g high-gluten flour
1.25 tsp. salt
1.5 tbsp. sugar
219 g warm water
3/8 tsp. yeast

BOIL INGREDIENTS

1 qt. water
2 tbsp. brown sugar
1/2 tsp. salt

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Make dough. Put dry ingredients in food processor with default chopping blade. Process to combine. Then add the warm water while processing. If anything sticks to the sides of the bowl, push it down into the mix with a silicone spatula. Go at least 60 seconds after the water mixes in. You might want to go longer. See what happens. Processing heats dough, so be careful not to kill the yeast.

2. Cut into 4 balls. They should be about 154 grams each. Dividing the dough can tear it up. I fixed this by kneading the balls, pushing the outer edges into the center and in, rolling the dough inward and up. This stretches the dough and, in other baked goods, gives better oven spring. You end up with a concave surface on the bottom. I pressed the edges into the center and forced them to merge with each other. Then I put the balls down with the merged sides down. It works.

3. Let them rise two hours under plastic or something. When they float in water, they are ready to turn into bagels.

4. Form bagels. Just flatten the balls and stretch so they have 1″ holes in them. You want them about 9/16″ tall. It’s okay if the holes close up a little. This is not the traditional way to form bagels, but it’s quick, it works, and you are less likely to end up with deformed bagels.

5. Boil them two minutes per side. Vigorous boil.

7. Bake at 400°. Make sure they are not resting on a hot, oiled surface. I used an air-bake pan. Use nonstick foil or parchment paper if you’re worried about sticking. Bake for 25 minutes. Do not turn.

Ovens vary, so start checking them at 20 minutes.

Cool on a wire rack so the bottoms don’t get soggy. Don’t take them off until they’re at room temperature unless you want to eat warm bagels right away.

You should consider this your default recipe, and if you want to modify it, keep it on your computer so you can go back to it if your modifications don’t work out.

They’re real bagels. They may not be exactly what you want, but they are as good as most bakery bagels made by skilled bakers. They are a thousand times better than bagged bagels from factories. Far better than Lender’s frozen bagels, which are gross.

I have had many, many real bagels. I lived in Miami. I lived in New York City. You can believe me when I say these are real bagels. I’m not saying no one can make better bagels, but these are very good.

Open the Locks and Let me in

My area is magnificent. It’s wonderful. It’s bliss. The people are conservative Christians. We don’t have a ghetto or street crime. Traffic is light. You don’t have to speak Spanish to live here. Beautiful.

But it’s a bagel desert. I feel like ranting.

Not long after I moved here, my dad and I visited the only bagel joint. I was used to having a nova bagel breakfast with him once a week, at a real deli. I figured Ocala had Jews, so there had to be nova bagels.

The place we tried is named Bagelicious. Had to be a good place for a nova bagel.

No. They had strawberry bagels and blueberry bagels and raisin bagels. Lots of sweet spreads. No nova.

It was disgusting. The bagels themselves were fine, but I never went back.

Today I checked the situation again, and there is a new place here: Jeff’s Bagel Run. A chain.

Surely a big chain would be hip, I thought.

I have looked at their online menu. No nova. No lox.

What is with this place? How can you serve bagels but not smoked salmon? It’s idiocy.

It reminds me of Austin, Texas. When I lived there, I found a place called something like The New York Deli. I thought I was in for a treat. I drove there, walked up to the counter to order, and asked the girl if they had lox. She said, “Locks? What are they?”

I drove home.

All those Jews teaching STEM courses at the University, a place calling itself a New York Deli, and no smoked salmon. Beyond insane.

What do I have to do? Move to Tel Aviv?

I better get back to work on my recipe. I don’t see myself getting a restaurant bagel any time soon.