Dental Work or Dental Work Plus New Furniture; Your Choice

I wrote about my wife’s dental issues and the likelihood that we would visit Cancun to get them fixed. Here’s some news: we made the trip, and we returned yesterday. My friend Mike was going because he had a freshly-shattered tooth, so we tagged along.

Things went very well, depending on what “well” means to you.

We took the cheapest flight we could find, which was not cheap at all. We went during the spring break rush, so we paid about twice what we would ordinarily have paid. We flew Spirit Airlines, which is famous for thin seats that don’t recline.

Spirit looked like a pretty good deal up front because the fare was relatively low, but they did a good job of catching up to real airlines. The fees were beyond belief. I paid over $80 each for our carry-on and suitcase. We also took a $100 hit, more or less, to be seated in the same row. Then Spirit tried to sell us wifi and bigger seats.

Here is what Spirit doesn’t know: my wife and I have made 5 other overseas trips since the start of 2021, and after multiple ordeals lasting more than 30 hours, neither one of us is impressed by problems that last two. I could stand in the aisle for two hours. It would mean nothing to me.

I should also add that while the seats were fixed in place, they seemed to lean back more than ordinary airline seats do before reclining. For two hours, they were not all that bad.

Spirit is a somewhat annoying airline to use, but it seems to work well for people who know what they’re doing and don’t need help.

Cancun hotels can be both affordable and reasonably pleasant. It looks like the key is to avoid the main tourist area. Our first room was included with our flight bundle, so it’s not possible to say what it cost, but Expedia listed it for $84 per day, so figure $100 after all the hidden stuff is added in. Again, spring break prices. We had a guard gate as well as a card that got us into and out of the hotel and the adjoining mall, so we felt pretty safe.

The hotel could have been cleaner. I saw the maid “washing” our used glasses and cups, and all she did was rinse them with hot water from the bathroom sink. Disturbing. The towels didn’t smell all that fresh, possibly because the hotel used some kind of greenie washing machines that harbor mildew.

At first, we stayed in a simple room. It was a little smaller than a typical Holiday Inn room, but it had a big balcony with a hot tub we didn’t use. We had access to a weird LG washing machine with no English instructions, and it didn’t work very well.

Later on, we moved to a suite for maybe $150 more, total. We had to extend our stay, so we moved in order to get more room and our own washer.

The staff was very nice. They weren’t always able to give us what we needed, but they did try.

One thing that surprised me was the wind noise at the hotel. There are times of year when the wind blows constantly in Cancun, and where we were, it made loud whistling noises as it hit our windows and balconies. You really need ear plugs and a white noise machine when it’s windy.

The noise from bars full of drunks was also bad. Nothing happens in Cancun until the afternoon. Before that, it’s like the whole place has a “Do not disturb” sign on it. I think all the tourists are drunk, hungover, and/or nauseous in the mornings. At night, horrible dance music starts blasting from every bar, at levels which definitely damages people’s hearing. It goes on until at least 4 a.m. Thankfully, while our hotel was not built to kill wind noise effectively, the sound from bars was blocked pretty well.

If you decide to get dental or medical treatment in Cancun, I would suggest using a hotel attached to a mall. The mall was a huge help. There was a big, clean store similar to a Walmart, and there were food options that weren’t too bad. Of course, the fast food was cheaper than it is in America, because Mexico never had the insane minimum wage revolution that resulted in hordes of American burger-flippers being fired and replaced by electronic kiosks.

The dental clinic provided “free” shuttles for trips among the airport, the hotel, and the clinic itself, so that saved us a lot of money and aggravation. We tipped the drivers something like $2.50 per trip anyway. They didn’t expect it. Other Americans jumped out of the shuttles and took off without looking back.

Digression: twice, we shared shuttles with an entire family that was there for dental work. There was a son who looked to be around 14. Very pale and thin, with long, twig-like arms. He had short hair, cut with clippers. He had tattoos, now that I think about it. Strange thing to do to a child.

The second time we saw this family, the son spoke. He had a wispy, high-pitched, feminine voice. I’m pretty sure he was a girl. I looked at her arms, and they hadn’t yet been skinned to make an artificial penis. I hope these people come to their senses before having their child mutilated beyond repair.

The clinic itself was slightly run-down, but at the same time, it had equipment worthy of NASA. They had machines I had never seen before. They had my wife put her head in a machine, and it created 3-D x-rays. That was amazing to me. My American dentist has nice x-ray machines, but he can’t take 3D models of my teeth and rotate and magnify them on a screen.

On the first day, we got her examined and x-rayed, and they gave us a plan. It all happened very quickly. I had been hoping for a single $1500 implant, but she needed an implant, at least two crowns, extractions for three impacted wisdom teeth (muelas del juicio), and a bunch of fillings. I’m not sure, but I think that during her childhood in Africa, she brushed her teeth mainly with grape soda.

She also needed a sinus lift. This is a procedure where they stick material in the floor of a sinus in order to build up the bone for an implant.

In the US, an implant alone is about $5000, and a sinus lift will run you at least $1500, so $6500 at best. A crown will cost $1500 or more. Pulling the wisdom teeth would have cost nearly $2000. Overall, treatment in the US would probably have cost us $15000. They told us we were on the hook for $5850, and I jumped at it.

Sadly, we had to extend our trip. We were hoping to be there for under three days, but because of the unexpected issues, including an infection that had to be killed with antibiotics before the sinus lift, we had to stay nearly a whole week. At first we were in a room, but we spent our last three days in a suite with two bedrooms.

I will be honest. I think the people who worked on my wife are much more able than every dentist I’ve seen in America. They have more experience. They do major procedures all day, 6 days a week. No one goes to Cancun for a cleaning; they go because they have big problems. The Mexicans have oral surgeons in their clinics, full time. How many implants does your dentist do? Maybe three a week? How much oral surgery does he do? Probably not much, and maybe none. Practice makes perfect, and the dentists and oral surgeon we saw get tons of practice.

They did a fantastic job with medication. When I got my wisdom teeth pulled in Miami, they sent me home with a prescription for Vicodin and wished me luck. In Cancun, they prescribed tramadol and ketolorac for pain, dexamethasone for inflammation and swelling, azithromycin for infection, nasal spray for congestion, and a special mouth rinse to prevent problems after the procedures. They gave us detailed, printed instructions to guide my wife during the recovery process.

My wife had no real pain during her visits, and the drugs kept her happy back at the hotel.

Mexican pharmacies are really interesting. They will give you nearly anything without a prescription, and the medicines are real, made by reputable companies. On top of all this, they don’t keep prescription slips, so if you want, you can fill your prescription more than once. This would be very, very useful if you lived in a place like America, where doctors treat all people in pain like criminals, and you wanted to keep painkillers on hand for future emergencies. You could get a prescription filled more than once, use the pills you needed, and take the rest home to save for a bad day. Of course, I would never do anything like that. But you could.

You probably don’t need a prescription for ketolorac or tramadol in Mexico, though.

They will also sell you steroids. In fact, they will try to get you to buy them even if you don’t want them. Steroids and Viagra. Steroids and Viagra. Step right up. Buy all you want. I considered getting some deca durabolin in case I needed to have the wife move some downed trees.

We didn’t buy anything the dentists didn’t prescribe, but I might get some stuff next time. Efudex is a good thing to have if you live in Florida. I already have some tubes Mike brought me from Cancun. If you get a bump you think could be a precancer, you slap Efudex on it, and it goes away, even if it’s already cancerous. You can’t use it for melanoma, but it kills the other types of skin cancer. Much better than being sliced up for nothing.

The food in Cancun was acceptable. That’s all I can say. We went to a seafood place on the beach between appointments, and I had some tacos featuring tempura-style fish that tasted sharky. We also hit some American fast food places in the mall, along with some Mexican food court joints. We ate at an Italian restaurant and a place that served Mexican food to locals.

Some of the food was downright bad. Most was okay. The Mexican place, Flor de Lis, served authentic food, which is a little different from American-style Mexican. The flavors were more subdued, but everything was good. I would go again.

We found an Indian place that was very good. Not the best we’ve ever had, but well worth visiting again. The name is Patravali.

I learned a lot of Spanish in the few days I spent in Cancun. More than I learned in decades in Miami, to be honest, perhaps because I had a natural desire to be a good guest. In Miami, I always felt, correctly, that Americans should never feel obligated to learn Spanish in order to live in America among ungrateful and thoughtless immigrants. In Mexico, a lot of sentences surprised me by emerging from my mouth. My wife thought I spoke Spanish.

Immersion really works. This is something leftist can’t learn. They waste billions of tax dollars enabling Latins who don’t want to learn English. They could be helping them learn by cutting off the coddling.

I never enjoyed trying to speak Spanish in the past, and I never had any real enthusiasm for it, but while I was in Mexico, it was more appealing to me.

Leave me there for a month, and I’ll be a Spanish speaker. I won’t be ready to teach Spanish in a university, but my Spanish will be adequate. I will do what many immigrants in the US are too sorry to do.

Mexicans themselves were helpful and polite, and that includes the ones who weren’t getting our money. Strangers helped us all the time. They translated for us. They gave us information. Everyone said the Spanish versions of “thank you” and “excuse me.” They were much, much nicer than people are in most of America. That doesn’t include the county where I live.

On the down side, three American girls were held prisoner and robbed at gunpoint by Mexican cops while we were there, so even though people were polite, Cancun is still Mexico.

Three young women were on the beach. They were approached by several men, some of whom were wearing police uniforms and holding machine guns. They told the girls they were trespassing and demanded $300 to let them go. One girl was released to go to their hotel for the money. Once the bribe was in hand, the girls were allowed to leave.

The news said the thieves were dressed like police. Um…no. They were police. No one in his right mind would dress as a cop in Cancun and wander around in the open with a machine gun. The real cops are also there, carrying machine guns.

The Mexicans we saw really hustled. At their jobs, they never stopped moving. They accosted people outside of restaurants and handed them menus. When our drivers got out to open doors for us and get our luggage, they practically ran.

It was sort of the opposite of the Bahamas, where it’s hard to get people to take your money or do anything. I remember pulling up to a fuel dock in Bimini, in my dad’s boat. We needed about 700 gallons of diesel, so my dad was going to spend a lot of money. There was a light sprinkling of rain. The attendant refused to come out of his enclosure until he was sure it was over. That was not an unusual experience.

Overall, Cancun was a lot like America, except where America deserves B-pluses, Cancun generally deserves C’s. The mall was okay, but not quite up to par. The taxis were okay, but they were tiny, cramped, and old. The rooms we rented were okay, but the hygiene was off, the washers were puzzles, and little things were lacking. We had an oven, but it didn’t work, and there were no oven pans. We had a dishwasher, but there was no dishwashing powder. We had towels but no washcloths. We had split AC units, but big chunks of ice fell out of one of them.

My wife said Mexico was like an America that had gone to a bad public school.

The clinics themselves didn’t look great. We only went inside one, but we saw the others from outside, and they looked worse. The cabinets and furniture looked like they were 20 years old. Some of the equipment didn’t look all that new. Still, the personnel made great impressions on us, and nothing looked like it would cause problems. And they had all that tech stuff American dentists don’t have. They put the money where it mattered.

Would I go back for dental or medical care? Most assuredly. I wouldn’t let them give me a heart transplant, but I would let them do dermatology or a root canal. Most medical and dental work is simple and routine, and it’s not like American doctors and dentists have made a great impression on me. Also, based on my own experiences, I believe foreign doctors are much less likely to overtreat. An American urologist once told me to get a $5000 CAT scan for a simple kidney stone that only needed oxycodone and lots of water, and he never told me about potassium citrate, which prevents kidney stones.

Would I go to Cancun as a tourist? Only if I had some reason to hide away for a while in a fairly cheap place where I would not be disturbed. Even then, the Bahamas would be better.

I wouldn’t go to Cancun for the beaches, the ocean, the food, the culture, or the scenery. Cancun is too seedy, the tourist culture revolves mainly around fornication and throwing up in hotel toilets, and I’m not willing to spend 12 hours on the road, traveling in a run-down minivan, to see a couple of dumpy pyramids where demon-worshipers cut the hearts out of living children. If I want to visit places where children are mutilated and killed, I can go to almost any big American city and visit an abortion mill or a hospital that does gender surgery.

It will take around 6 months for my wife’s bones to be ready for the completion of her implant, so we will be returning to Cancun at least once. We will pay a lot less for our flight because spring break will be in the past. We’ll know where to stay and what to eat. I’ll have my 75 Spanish sentences to get us by. After that, it should be many years before either of us need any more major dental procedures.

Now I have to face my American dentist and tell him we went to Cancun. He’ll probably understand. He’s a very nice guy. If not, we’ll go to the dentist next door.

Business is business, or as I like to say, “Negocios son negocios.“

Great Work on Reducing Medical Costs, Uncle Sam

Looks like the wife and I will be going abroad again this year, but not for fun. She is missing a molar, and we are going to fly to Mexico for an implant.

I have never wanted to visit Mexico. I have spent many years in Miami, and Latin culture has worn me down. The emotionalism. The celebration of immaturity. The tedious machismo. The horrific corruption. It’s a lot like my own culture, with which I am equally tired.

Miami culture is mainly Cuban, and however tiresome it is, it’s easier to deal with than Central American culture. You don’t have to be afraid of Cubans. Their neighborhoods aren’t dangerous. They don’t have much interest in gangs. They tend to be successful. They prefer tax evasion and violating environmental laws to stealing children and holding them for ransom.

Right now, a law school friend of mine is in the process of being taken apart for alleged corruption. She’s a government lawyer, and her husband is in real estate. They are accused of snapping up properties belonging to abandoned old people, getting accumulated government fines removed, and reselling them for big profits. They were supposed to be looking after helpless people who had no one to take care of them.

I hate to say it, but it really looks like they’re guilty.

I would never have expected this to happen to her. I knew her as a sweet, kind person. She was Iron Arrow in law school. Iron Arrow is an honorary society somehow related to the Miccosukee tribe, which now runs profitable casinos in South Florida. If you’re inducted, Miccosukees show up at the University of Miami and give you a multicolored jacket assembled from many pieces of cloth. You get Iron Arrow for being committed to public service and having upstanding character.

I’m sure the character stuff involved with Iron Arrow is complete BS, like most character endorsements in legal circles, but it does show she was involved in matters of public interest, and I doubt any of us thought she had character issues at the time.

I have read about her problems, and it’s hard to see any way she and her husband could have ended up in this pickle without doing what they’re accused of. Very sad. I hope there are factors I don’t know about.

To get back to Mexico, I don’t like hot weather or beaches. I don’t care if I never go fishing again. I haven’t been in a bar since…I don’t remember the last time I was in a bar. Maybe 2010? I don’t speak Spanish. I have no interest in learning. I don’t like visiting places where kidnapping is a major industry and the police are criminals.

Mexico, however, has a remarkable feature: excellent, inexpensive healthcare for people who can pay.

My buddy Mike has terrible teeth. They started to fall apart when he was in his fifties. He needed at least one implant. When he found out that implants ran $4500 and up in the US, he looked for options, and he discovered Cancun. In Cancun, a basic implant costs $1500, start to finish.

He found a very fancy clinic with US-trained dentists. He raves about it. He has been there several times. They have a magnificent website. They have incredible reps who correspond with potential customers via email, in flawless English. They pick you up at the airport for nothing, saving you $200. They can give you appointments with less than a week’s notice.

He says the clinic is wonderful. He loves his doctor. He’s friends with the other employees. He knows them by their first names.

I checked this place out, and I was extremely impressed. At first I was interested mainly in saving a ton of money, because my wife’s problems will cost at least $5000 to fix here. After I researched the place, I wanted to take her there mainly because the clinic seemed vastly superior to anything I had ever seen in the US. If the cost were the same, I would still want to take her there. If I ever have real dental problems, I want to go there myself.

We are not the first people Mike has recommended the clinic to. He knew a lady who had a $27,000 bid from an American dentist. She went to Cancun and paid $6,300, and she may have gotten superior work.

I don’t know how you damage your teeth to the tune of $27,000, but apparently it can be done.

The only down side to using the clinic is that you have to go to Mexico.

Apart from the diversions I mentioned above, the only attractions Cancun has are some heathen pyramids. Maybe I’m wrong, but this is what I’ve been told. Mike said he saw them. He said it was an all-day affair, and it wasn’t that great.

I asked my wife about the pyramids, and she does not want to see them. She would rather spend an entire day in our hotel room, praying and sitting around. I wholeheartedly agree.

When I go abroad, I use Viator to book tours and so forth. If you look at Viator’s Cancun offerings, you will see how pathetic they are. Pyramids. Zip-lining.

Zip-lining may be the biggest tourism hoax in history. It doesn’t matter what the location is. Let’s say you’re in a dump like St. Louis. You find two trees, put up a wire, and advertise on Viator. Instant attraction. Ridiculous.

Why ruin a foreign trip, in a place where your medical insurance is no good, with a silly activity you can do 5 miles from your house?

If you don’t insist on a hotel on a beach, you can get a decent room in Cancun for $30 per night. I insist on hotels that are NOT on beaches, so this works out great for me. We wouldn’t go for a $30 room, but an $85 luxury room would be perfect.

Mike recommended hotels in a shopping area. He knows where the good food is. You get your teeth fixed, get a free ride back to the hotel, and then walk to get good food and good prices. Perfect.

I don’t know what kind of shape my wife’s teeth are in. Dentistry is a real mess in Zambia. We tried to get her top-notch treatment there, but it turned out it wasn’t available. She needs one implant, and she has one tooth she knows is in trouble. It seems crazy to go to my American dentist and risk getting a $15,000 estimate before we know what’s what.

My only–ONLY–concern is that my American dentist will be offended and drop us. I really like him. He’s very pleasant, and he has never tried to do anything except x-ray and clean my teeth, so he must be truthful. I would love to use him for all our work, but let’s be honest; this is business. A friendly business relationship with a very nice dentist is not worth $10,000 to me. This county is full of dentists. If there is a tearful breakup, we can find a new one.

I wouldn’t buy a Home Depot refrigerator for $9,000 if I could get one in Mexico for $1,000, even if the employees had been inviting me to their company barbecues and sending me pictures of their kids.

I liked my dentist in Coral Gables. I think he filled tiny cavities that didn’t need filling, though. When the tooth I used for opening beer bottles gave out, I looked at the web at the time and saw that a crown typically cost $600, so I let him fix it. I got a bill for $1750.

Today this guy would probably charge $2500. In Cancun I would pay $450. Add $600 for a flight and hotel, and I’m still over a grand ahead, and I get to get out of the house for a few days. How can you beat that?

I liked my dentist in Coral Gables. We used to have conversations about politics and tools. He was setting up a shop. He had a great hygienist who didn’t beat me up. I would have dumped him for Cancun, though, had I known about it. He didn’t have any reluctance to overcharge and possibly overtreat me. He didn’t worry about my emotions. Why should I have worried about his?

Business is business. You never make friends with a business contact, and you never do business with a social contact. Americans violate these rules all the time. I do not. I have done it in the past, and it has cost me dearly. I am done.

My closest neighbor seems like a great guy, and he has a bunch of land-clearing machines on his property. He uses them to make a living. I need some work. There is no way in hell I would hire him. What if I had to sue him? There he’d be, in my face, a few hundred yards away, year after year, fuming. What if we needed to cooperate because of a storm or something? No, no, no. If I get the work done, I’ll hire someone else.

Some time this year, we will accompany Mike to Cancun for a few days. Then I will deal with my dentist. Maybe he won’t care.

People who vacation in Cancun anyway should use the clinic. They should make their dentally-challenged kids visit while on spring break. It’s strange they’re not already doing this.

It’s best to avoid Cancun during spring break. Fares drop by a third or more, and while you’re there, you are less likely to step in vomit.

While in Cancun, you can also load up on cheap prescription drugs. You can just walk into pharmacies and buy them. I got fluororacil this way, via Mike. It’s the real thing, and it’s excellent for little spots you think might eventually turn into skin cancer.

It’s illegal to bring prescription drugs into the US this way, but the government doesn’t really care, as long as you’re not opening a business. They’ll let you bring it.

I hope the tamales are good in Cancun.

Bad Advice as Common as Horse Manure

It’s so hard to know whom to trust in this world. Dunning and Kruger have done great damage.

I own a gas-powered EZGO dump cart. I refuse to spell “E-Z-GO” correctly because it’s a pain. It has a 350-cc Subaru Robin motor. The cart is a 2000 model. I got it over 6 years ago, when I moved to this house. I’m not sure what I paid for it, because I got the cart and two tractors for a combined sum. I know I got a deal, because if I had only gotten the bigger of the two tractors for the same amount, I would still have been getting a tremendous bargain.

I first used the cart before I moved here. My dad and I were looking at properties, and we visited this one. The owner told the realtor to turn us loose with the cart so we could see everything.

I drove all over the farm. Slowly. The cart had no pickup, and it moved at a walking pace.

After I bought the cart, it continued to disappoint. I fiddled with it and got it to go somewhat faster, but it was slow to start, it didn’t always make good speed, and sometimes it died after it got hot. I found out it used a lot of oil. One day I checked the dipstick, and the crankcase was nearly dry.

I was afraid I had ruined the piston rings. I also wondered if the previous owner had ruined them and kept it to himself.

The cart produced blue smoke. I can’t say for sure whether it started doing this before or after I ran it with low oil, but I thought maybe I had run it long enough to cause damage.

I went to a forum and asked for help, and I got some good advice and a lot of really bad advice.

A guy who was regarded as a major guru on the forum told me the only way to be sure what was wrong was to tear the motor down. People said I should rebuild it myself. You can do this with a $400 Chinese kit or an EZGO kit that costs way more and can only be bought at a dealership.

Rebuilding requires removing a 100-pound engine and lifting it onto some kind of workbench. Then, of course, you have to reinstall it. The space it goes into is cramped and low to the ground.

While all this was going on, I tried to fix the OEM carb, assuming it, like every other OEM small engine carb on Earth, couldn’t handle low-grade gas with ethanol. I also stopped putting ethanol in the cart. I bought ethanol-free gas. I treated my gas with Biobor EB, which is supposedly the best additive for gas that sits around.

While I was playing with the carb, I broke a little pot metal post that held the pin that held the float. Having nothing to lose, I used JB Weld to put it back together, and it lasted over a year. Finally, I bought a Chinese carb. The forum people said it would never work, and it wasn’t perfect, until I put the jet from the old carb in it. After that, the carb was not an issue.

The cart has been very useful to me. Over the years, in spite of a lot of down time, I’ve done a great deal with it. It’s great for collecting and dumping weeds. I load saws in it and cut up problem trees. I use it to spray the yard. If it had been more dependable, I would have gotten a lot more done with it.

At some point, the cart became useless. I could not trust it to get me around the yard, let alone the farm. I had to find out what was wrong and make a decision: rebuild or repower.

I found a Youtube video by a young black man. He said it was rare for these engines to put out blue smoke because of bad rings. He said the cause was nearly always bad valve seals.

Valve seals are little ring-shaped things that sit on top of cylinder heads. The valve shafts go through them. As the valves to up and down, the seals keep oil from going into the cylinders around the shafts. They wipe the oil off. The seals should be tight.

Unlike a quality engine, the Subaru Robin uses cheap seals that wear out fast. The openings enlarge and can become egg-shaped. Then oil goes into the cylinders and out into the muffler. It can actually accumulate in the muffler so you get burning oil every time the exhaust heats up. I have read it can block the muffler, but I wonder if that’s really true.

In the video, the mechanic said you rotate your cam until the pistons are at top dead center. This holds the pistons up against the valves so the valves can’t fall into the cylinder. Then you take off the valve cover, remove the cam, remove the valve springs (he uses a trick involving a 3/4″ wrench), pull out the seals, put new ones in, and do everything in reverse.

You also have to loosen a couple of covers on the sides of the engine to do all this. It’s a pain, but it’s way easier than removing the engine, which others say is the right way to do it.

I did all these things. I also did some stupid things that didn’t work, but I’ll focus on the things I did right.

The forum guys said to jam rope into the cylinders to keep the valves from falling. I saw someone providing a ridiculously difficult method to get the valve springs out.

When I put the valve train back together, I had to adjust the valve clearance. If your valve clearance is too small, your valves will never close all the way. I didn’t know that, but I knew the clearance had to be adjusted. Ordinarily, you measure the clearance with a feeler gauge.

I found another Youtube guy, and he said to forget the feeler gauge. He said to bottom out the valves and the back off a quarter of a turn.

Screws can be used to make very precise adjustments, so it sounded reasonable. I tried his method.

While this was going on, I received a compression gauge I had ordered. I checked my compression and got 35 psi. You want at least 130. I figured the engine was done, so I started gathering information about repowering.

The best option I found was an Amazon Duromax 440-cc engine with a kit from a company called Vegas Carts. Total cost around $1600.

I thought this was better than buying a rebuilt engine of mysterious origin for over $800. The original engine, at its best, is underpowered, and with no factory support, it’s not easy to keep them running.

You can get a 670-cc V-twin from Honda or Harbor Freight, and it will give you 22 horsepower and a dangerous top speed, but it’s way more than the cart needs, and it’s expensive. A 440-cc engine will spin the rear wheels in dirt.

I learned about repowering before I got the compression gauge. I mentioned the bad result on the forum, and someone said I should make sure my valve clearance was right. This was the first time I became aware that valve clearance could affect compression.

I had already used the quarter-turn folk wisdom method to ajust the valves, but I figured I should do it right, so that’s what I did. I put the gauge on a cylinder, expecting 35 psi, and I got 150.

Leaving the bad old gas in the tank, I got in the driver’s seat and tried to start the cart. It fired right up. I took it out and drove it all over the farm. I gave it plenty of time to heat up. No blue smoke. It didn’t stall. It was still wimpy off the line, but that was normal.

My cart was fixed.

I didn’t have to remove the motor. I didn’t have to shove rope in the cylinders. No rebuild. No new engine. If I had fixed the seals in 2017, I would never have thought I needed a new carb.

Finally, I have a cart that actually works.

With the compression I’m getting and the amount of time I put in driving the cart, I should be able to go 20 years without any more problems.

So how did the forum gurus turn out to be so wrong? How did they manage to be outsmarted completely by a young man with an obscure Youtube video? He knows more about the cart’s problems than they do, even though some of them have worked on many, many carts. He knows how to repair them better than they do.

There must have been a million EZGO carts made over the years. A lot of them must have had Robin engines. My engine hit the market at least 30 years ago. How can it be that people who should know how to fix them still give incredibly bad advice?

I used to treat the cart with indifference, because I thought it wasn’t worth much, and it seemed to be in bad shape. Now I feel like sprucing it up and spending money on it. As it sits, it may be worth $5000. It’s hard to find good information about the value. The forum people say the value doubles when the original engine is included. I would like LED lighting to replace the feeble headlights, and I could use some kind of hooks to hold my pole saw.

I wonder how many engines have been discarded or rebuilt needlessly because of bad advice from mechanics and people on forums.

It’s amazing how little a person’s reputation means. So often, people with lofty reputations turn out to be useless and chronically wrong.

I appreciate the effort to help. I truly do. I don’t want to be an ingrate. But I am still puzzled by the difficulty I had, getting the right information.

If you have a Robin engine that doesn’t work right, change your seals before you do anything else.

Baldwin Defenses Soon to be Tested

I am reading about Alec Baldwin, who is soon to be tried for manslaughter in the shooting death of Halyna Hutchins, whom he shot on a film set along with a hapless director.

I have written about this before. It seemed to me that he had no conceivable defense, and the defenses he was blathering on the web were more harmful than helpful. I guess his ego could not accept the notion that his lawyer might know more than he when he advised Baldwin to stay silent. I’m sure his lawyer gave him that advice, because only an idiot would not.

Baldwin had a firearm in his hand. Not a fake gun. A real revolver suitable for use as a self-defense weapon. The revolver had at least one real round of ammunition in it. Baldwin pointed the gun at two people, and the gun fired. Baldwin says 1) he never pulled the trigger, and 2) he relied on employees to make sure the gun was safe before he handled it.

Assertion 1 is a lie, so there is not much point in elaborating. The gun was designed so it could not be fired without pulling the trigger. This information is in the manual, which you can find online.

Assertion 2 is more complicated.

Baldwin is accused of negligent homicide. In legal terms, “negligence” means 1) you owed someone else a duty of care, and 2) you failed to exercise care.

To determine whether Baldwin owed his victims (he hit two people) a duty of care, you have to come up with a standard. What is the standard of care for a person holding a revolver?

You have to start with the standard of care every responsible gun owner knows. There are four rules.

1. Treat all guns as though they were loaded.

2. Always keep your firearm pointed in a safe direction.

3. Keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to shoot.

4. Be sure of your target and what’s beyond it.

There are different versions of these rules, but they all mean the same things.

There is another rule: when you handle a gun, ALWAYS check to see if it’s loaded. Doesn’t matter if your best beer buddy swears he just checked it. You have to check for yourself.

Are there times when you can’t obey these rules? Maybe, if you’re an actor. Actors sometimes have to point props that look like guns at themselves or others. But these days, prop providers have all sorts of props that look exactly like guns on film, yet are obviously not guns in the minds of the people who hold them. There are prop guns that are made entirely of things like rubber and plastic. There are prop guns that have no moving parts.

There must have been many scenes in which actors have pointed clearly-fake props at people. On the other hand, it appears there have been many times when actors have pointed real guns at other people. I’ve seen scenes where actors pulled the triggers on revolvers that were aimed at other people, and the triggers, cylinders, and hammers moved.

Baldwin knew his gun was real, and he still pointed it at another actor. He said he would never do that, but obviously, he did, because if he hadn’t, he would have missed his victims.

Baldwin didn’t treat the gun as though it were loaded, he aimed at a person deliberately or carelessly, and he put his finger on the trigger when he didn’t intend to shoot anyone. He broke three of the basic safety rules. The fourth didn’t apply to him because he didn’t have a target. He didn’t intend to shoot.

What I wonder is whether he can be held responsible for breaking the other rule.

Ordinarily, you have to check to see if a gun is loaded as soon as you take possession. But would that have made sense for Baldwin? What if the gun were ordinarily loaded with dummy bullets that looked like the real thing? If that’s how it worked, maybe it would be unfair to expect Baldwin to check all over again. Maybe as an ignorant actor who knows little about guns, he isn’t qualified to decide whether a round is real or fake.

If that’s the case, then it would make sense to hold the armorer responsible for checking the gun.

So maybe it’s wrong to say Baldwin should have examined the gun before picking it up. Maybe it would have looked the same regardless of the type of ammunition it contained.

Still, though, he broke three of the other 4 rules. You only have to break one rule to be negligent. I’m sure Baldwin’s lawyers will try to make the jury forget that.

If he hadn’t put his finger on the trigger, he wouldn’t have fired. If he had treated the gun as though it had been loaded, he wouldn’t have fired. If he had pointed the gun in a safe direction, he wouldn’t have hit anyone.

His lawyers are going to attack a couple of ways.

They will say the gun could have fired without Baldwin pulling the trigger, and that the state can’t prove otherwise because the FBI damaged the gun while testing it. They will also say Baldwin’s standard of care should be the standard of care movies stars usually employ on movie sets. They’ll say the famous rules everyone else obeys don’t apply to actors because movies hire armorers to make sure guns are used safely.

The argument about the trigger is somewhat ridiculous. I don’t expect it to go anywhere. The gun’s parts still exist. The gun has been repaired. It should be possible to use the damaged parts to show that before they were damaged, the gun would only fire when the trigger was pulled. It will definitely work that way in the repaired state.

It’s an argument designed to appeal to dumb jurors and biased jurors. If Baldwin’s lawyers pick the right jury, maybe they’ll get somewhere, but it doesn’t look good.

As for claiming movie stars live by different rules, it’s a bad argument that should fail. The fact that you’re making a movie doesn’t mean you have the right to loosen good rules that save lives and which everyone else has to obey.

A real firearm on a movie set is just like a real firearm anywhere else. People on a movie set are just people. It may make sense to abandon the rule saying Baldwin had to check the gun, because it may have been impractical and an expert had been hired to do it for him, but the other four rules are personal to the shooter.

He still seems guilty to me. I see no way to raise reasonable doubt. His best hope is a stupid jury or a jury containing a few fans. He needs a jury like the one full of black women who refused to convict O.J. Simpson. Simpson could have set his ex-wife on fire at a nationally-televised press conference, and those emotional, racist women would have sent him home.

My best guess is that he’ll be convicted. He has refused a plea, and it has been withdrawn. Was that his idea, because he can’t believe the minor god Alec Baldwin could be convicted, or did it come from his lawyers? Do they reasonably think they can win? Are they bad lawyers who give bad advice? No way to know, but that plea may look really good to Baldwin in a few months.

The armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, was convicted by 7 women and 5 men after only three hours of deliberation. Not a good sign.

I’m assuming Baldwin gets tried on the merits. Guilty people get their cases dismissed all the time, based on government errors and malfeasance. If the state dropped the ball somewhere down the line, the facts and the law surrounding the shooting won’t matter.

Illegal Aliens Always Come First

The Italian Embassy in Zambia’s capital is pretty bad. Europe discriminates against honorable African tourist-visa applicants while, bizarrely, allowing itself to be overrun by undesirable African illegal immigrants who stay and commit crimes. Italy is totally on board with the mindless discrimination.

It’s a little weird when an African drug dealer or terrorist can travel to Italy without permission and be welcomed, while respectable people are barred. This is exactly what happens, however.

Back when my wife lived in Zambia, we wanted to visit Europe, and the lady in charge of visas told her she could not apply for a tourist visa until she had bought, not merely chosen, a flight to Italy. She also told her she would be granted a visa if she did this.

We bought tickets and submitted an application. Nothing happened. Long after the usual amount of time required for a decision had passed, she went to the embassy. The lady didn’t even meet with her. She yelled at her through a doorway and told her she was rejected. She was very rude, and she denied that she had ever promised us a visa.

We lost hundreds of dollars on my wife’s ticket, which had to be cashed in. United Airlines gave me a credit for mine. I still have not used it. It’s time to use it or lose it, because the deadline is three weeks off.

Now we have to choose: do we go to Mexico and get my wife some dental care, or do we go to Greece or Switzerland, where we would actually enjoy ourselves?

Mexico is a hot destination for Americans who need pricey dental work. My friend Mike has been there several times. There is an extraordinary clinic staffed with American-trained dentists, and they charge so much less that American dentists, you can pay for a trip and still come out far ahead.

It’s not a run-down place with prostitutes lingering outside the front door. Patients rave about it. It’s a seamless, professional operation. Having investigated it, I would rather have my teeth fixed there than here in Florida. I don’t have any real dental problems, so I’ll keep going to my local dentist, but if I did, I’d be on a plane.

I don’t want to go to Mexico. I think it’s a destination that appeals to the shallow. Most visitors go to beaches. I have never understood why beaches appeal to people. You fry in the sun, doing absolutely nothing, bored out of your skull. You can fish if you want. Afterward, you go to bars and get drunk on Corona and tequila, one of the lowest forms of alcoholic beverage. You’re constantly in danger of being robbed or worse. The police are just organized criminals, and government officials are pretty much the same thing. The cultural scene is awful. You can go see a couple of pyramids where they used to tear people’s hearts out, and that’s about it.

Contrast this with Paris. Paris has the Louvre, the Beaubourg, fantastic food, spectacular European weather, Versailles, the Eiffel Tower, what’s left of Notre Dame after restorers burned it down, walks by the Seine, Montmartre…I could spend all day writing about it. Sure, there are ghettos full of vicious Muslim thugs who are extremely dangerous and beyond the control of the police, but you don’t have to go to those places.

That’s just Paris. All over the world, there are other great destinations that beat Mexico to death.

Mexico is only appealing because it’s cheap. No one ever said, “I have more money than I know what to do with, and instead of Florence, I’m going to Mexico this year.”

Mexico is not a place I have ever wanted to visit, but my wife has a missing tooth. We can get that replaced for $1500 in Mexico. It would cost at least twice that here, and we wouldn’t even be able to say we saw a pyramid.

Why am I mentioning Paris and Greece as places to go? Because European nations make it very hard for green card holders to get visas. They seriously expect them to apply in person. Here are lists of countries and the places where they expect you to apply:

Austria – VFS Houston, Miami, DC
Czechia – DC
Denmark – VFS DC
Finland – DC
Germany – VFS Miami
Italy – VFS Miami
Luxembourg – DC
Netherlands – VFS Miami
Norway – VFS DC
Poland – DC
Sweden – VFS DC

Belgium – Atlanta
England – VFS Atlanta
France – VFS Atlanta
Greece – Tampa
Switzerland – Atlanta

VFS is a company that processes visas.

I broke this into two lists because there is zero possibility we will ever apply at the locations in the first list.

I would not go to Miami again unless Yeshua himself told me to meet him there. I literally–not figuratively–feel a little sick just thinking about it. I don’t like driving to Orlando and Tampa because when I do, I keep seeing signs showing I’m getting closer to el infierno pequeño.

Forget it, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands.

Washington D.C. is not even worth talking about. I’m not going to take a $1500 trip just to find out if the Europeans there are as bigoted as the ones in Africa.

Atlanta is doable. It’s about a 6-hour drive. The countries that operate out of Atlanta are good destinations, although Belgium is only good because if you’re in Belgium, it’s a short train ride to somewhere else.

Greece makes more sense than any other country, because Tampa is not far away, and once you’re in Greece, you can go anywhere you like in the Schengen area.

England is probably a good destination. Great history. For me, the appeal is weak because the British have changed. Seems like every third word out of their mouths is something filthy, and the problem extends to educated people. Americans used to admire their manners. The way things are now, forget that. I’m afraid that if we go over there, we will be subjected to a constant torrent of sex-related and scatological slang.

I rarely hear profanity from human beings (not screens) where I am. Generally, I hear it when I drop something or injure myself.

When I was a kibbutz volunteer, I arrived shortly after the departure of a bunch of British kids. Relations between kibbutzniks and volunteers were very bad. I don’t know what the problem was, but the British kids had shaved their heads to remind the Jews of the death camps, and one of them attacked the old man who managed the volunteers, beating him over the head with a soccer cleat. That memory makes me less inclined to visit England. Guy Ritchie movies don’t help.

We’ve been to Ireland, which is a lot like England. The cities were dumpy and something of a downer. The food was bad. Even the Irish food was bad. The people were great, except for the scary gypsies who lurked on O’Connell Street and attacked tourists. I have this feeling that England will be similar, except that the people in the cities will probably be less nice.

My take on Ireland, as I have said before, is that it looks like a nice place to live, but I wouldn’t want to visit.

If you live in Ireland, you can cook for yourself. Tourists are not so blessed.

I think the best thing to do is to forget Mexico and see what Greece will do for us. The food is great there. The history is unexcelled. The people were very nice when I visited. And we could leave after a few days and go to countries that won’t let us visit directly.

I’ll contact Greeks and see if they will do the right thing instead of putting on a virtue-signaling show and then turning us down without actually reviewing our application.

Satan’s Children Project as Well as he Does

Sometimes when I make predictions, I am proven wrong, or it turns out the bad things I predict are not as bad as I thought. For example, I was convinced that when Bush and Obama printed money with no basis in real wealth, our economy would quickly experience a disastrous crash. It didn’t happen, although it looks like we are experiencing monstrous inflation as a delayed effect. And young people can’t buy homes or survive as one-income couples, the way couples supported by factory jobs did when my dad was young.

Generally, I turn out to be right, and the weird thing is that it always shocks me. It amazes me that what I expected has happened.

Unfortunately, the things I’ve predicted about antisemitism are coming true, faster than I expected.

Antisemitism is now acceptable and considered virtuous by perhaps 60% of the population. And the change has been like the changes we saw regarding acceptance of homosexual pseudomarriage and the sudden decision that a Confederate flag was no different from a swastika. It’s not taking a decade. It’s happening in a much shorter period. This indicates a supernatural cause. Entire populations can’t change their minds that fast without help from spirits.

People are talking about the “Flour Massacre” now. Hamas, an organization made up of lying, raping savages, says the IDF fired into a crowd rushing a truck delivering food, and of course, they say there was no provocation.

1. “Flour Massacre” will stick. You watch and see. Even when Israel’s defenders talk about the event, they will call it the Flour Massacre. Hamas always wins the PR battles, no matter how obvious the truth is.

Satan really does rule the mainstream media, and it controls the thoughts and opinions of most people. That will not change. Only the Holy Spirit can fix this problem. Most churches teach rejection of the Holy Spirit, and only a tiny percentage of people hear him.

2. The IDF says troops were helping with food distribution, as they had on several preceding nights. They say there was a panic and stampede, and many people were trampled to death by fellow Gazans. They say a few menaced the IDF and had to be shot as the IDF retreated. This explanation is being characterized as military propaganda from a guilty state.

3. Why would anyone believe Hamas over the IDF? How many lies does Hamas have to tell before people stop listening? Hiding a terrorist facility in a school, mosque, or hospital is a lie. Calling a dead terrorist in civilian clothes a civilian is a lie. Calling for a ceasefire you know you will violate shortly is a lie. Blaming the IDF for the deaths of civilians you hold as human shields is a lie. Calling Israel an apartheid state when Muslims can be generals, cops, judges, and Prime Ministers is a lie.

Known, proven savages are lying. The Jews, who have a great reputation for struggling not to hurt civilians, are correcting the lies. And people are listening to the savages.

Someone needs to explain why the IDF would help with food distribution for several consecutive nights and then suddenly perform a massacre the next night. It’s not credible.

Here’s an important point: if you are presented with two stories, one from the IDF and one from Hamas, and you choose to believe Hamas, knowing what Hamas is, how do you explain your decision if you’re not antisemitic? Can you point to a long history of Hamas telling the truth and Israel lying? Do you think the incessant stream of lies that has characterized the public pronouncements of Palestinians for almost 80 years should be ignored for some reason? What reason is that?

The explanation is that you don’t like Jews. An opportunity came up, and you were given the choice between believing Jews and believing filthy, raping, burning, looting, mutilating, torturing, lying savages, and you decided, without evidence, to believe the savages. You are an antisemite.

People are claiming they disagree with Israel but are not antisemitic. They say disagreeing with Israel is not antisemitism. There are serious problems with these claims.

Israel does wrong sometimes. Every nation, even if generally guided by good intentions, does wrong. Israel is a nation generally guided by good intentions. It is exemplary in this regard.

It’s fine to say you think this or that action by the Israeli government is wrong, if you have good reason. It’s not fine to blurt out your accusation without evidence or any effort to learn the truth. Going to nutty leftist websites is not a credible effort to learn the truth.

It’s okay to say Israel needs to make something right. It is NOT okay to say Israel should be abolished because of its government’s actions. Saying Israel should be abolished is always antisemitism. Always.

Israel was reestablished fairly. The events of the last century (and the last year) prove the Jews are not safe without a homeland. There is no other piece of land available for them. Without Israel, Jews will be abused and murdered wherever they go in exile. Real genocide, not the absurd imaginary genocide claimed by uncountable Muslims, will happen.

It’s also wrong to attack random Jews because you disagree with Israel.

In many places around the world, Jews are now being attacked because of the Gaza war, which Gaza started for no reason. Not Israeli officials. Not IDF officers. Business owners. Random pedestrians. College students who have to cower behind locked doors while pro-Gaza animals try to get in to beat them. Jews who are against Zionism and support Hamas.

That’s antisemitism. Hatred of Jews for being Jewish. It’s everywhere now.

If you’re not against Jews for being Jews, and you are only against Zionism and the Israeli government, why would you attack individual Jews who don’t appear to have any connection with the government of Israel and whose positions you don’t know?

I feel safe in making more predictions. Things will get much worse for Jews, very quickly. It will be worse for Jews than Christians because Jews are fewer in number and have generally rejected their Messiah.

Many leftists and Muslims, along with phony Christians who reject the Holy Spirit, have been looking to the left and right, at other people, trying to find out what kind of antisemitic language and behavior are tolerated and encouraged. They’ve been quiet because they’re cowards and herd creatures, and until recently, the herd wasn’t telling them it would protect them and join with them. Now the herd is changing direction. As soon as these people think they’re in a safe majority, they will spring out and go after Jews very openly.

We are not supposed to look to the left and right to find out what is correct and moral. Other people are evil, and they have no authority. We are supposed to look up to God and do what he tells us. But very few people do this.

We will see mainstream Jews, not just a few early birds, openly looking for options. We will probably see a big increase in things like gated communities. Maybe there will be a wave of people moving to Israel, figuring it has to be safer than any country full of treacherous gentiles.

We are already seeing changes in Jewish attitudes. Some are buying guns. Some are abandoning leftism and the fashionable two-state solution. These changes are coming too late, so they won’t do much good. The time to buy guns, move to Israel, partner with conservative Christians, and drop leftist fantasies came maybe 20 years ago. Jews are changing too slowly, as they did in Europe, so a new shoah will start. They will not be ready.

One strange thing about all this is that religious Jews like Islam better than Christianity, the religion of the Jewish God. They say Christianity is polytheistic and Islam is monotheistic. They think Allah is Yahweh. They say a Jew who becomes a Muslim and kills Jews is still Jewish, but a Jew who accepts Yeshua and serves quietly in the IDF is a gentile.

The world is a big lunatic asylum now. Everyone believing a thousand impossible things before breakfast.

Is there anything Christians can do to help Jews? Can we shelter them? I have always hoped so, but it didn’t work well in Europe, and how do you hide people in the age of the Internet?

Israel is winning a war of bullets and bombs, but it has already lost the more-important PR war. Israelis are smart and tough, but they are few in number, and unless God himself protects them, they can’t survive without help from other nations. Israel is entering permanent pariah/scapegoat status.

Israel is getting what Hamas deserves.

It looks like Zechariah 14 is starting. If that is true, the remarkable protection Israel has experienced since 1948 is going to end quickly, and we will soon start to see scenes from Israel resembling the destruction in Gaza.

There is nearly nothing I can do about any of this. All I can do is observe and tell the truth. I can pray and donate, and maybe I can help a few individuals, but prophecy can’t be changed, so the overall picture is very bad.

The Constitution Never Promised You the Rose Garden

We now live in a country where there really, truly are political prisoners and one famous political defendant. No reasonable person can look at what has happened to Donald Trump, the Trump periphery, and the J6 people and not conclude that there have been many, many unconstitutional selective prosecutions based on people’s political leanings.

We have a Constitutional right to Equal Protection, and while judges and lawyers don’t like to talk about it, it can, and should, be used to bar selective prosecution. Corruption is the reason why this defense is rarely used. The people who run the system want to be able to let people they favor go. This starts with cops and runs through prosecutors all the way up through the levels of the judicial system.

“He’s a good student who got a little rowdy, and she was a slut anyway.” “He comes from a good family.” “Our university’s football team really needs him.” “His dad was the Vice President.” “We are prosecuting too many black men.”

“Trump committed more crimes than he did.”

I’m not making this defense up. I discovered it while doing legal research on a case here in Florida.

If we started focusing on Equal Protection in the courts, the system would explode. A lot of rich white kids would go to prison. So would a lot of minority defendants from blue cities. A lot of cops would go to prison for beating their wives.

Male athletes…forget it. The NFL and NBA would be full of Jews and Asians, and people in hell would be wearing mittens.

Abuse of discretion is not going away, because the people who run the system like it. It gives them power they were never intended to have. For this reason, Equal Protection will continue to be denied.

Given that this is true, I am thinking about the pain leftists will probably have to endure over the coming year. They have extremely low pain thresholds, losing their composure and having full-blown fits over minor and even fictional suffering, so when a year of real misery caused by multiple collisions with reality starts to unfold, the perpetually pampered class may give us a spectacle future generations will find hard to believe actually happened.

I’ll explain my thoughts.

Biden is just about certain to lose. He is almost certain to be the Democrat candidate. He is too powerful to be pushed out of the race, and he is too crazy, mean, and conceited to bow out willingly.

If Biden loses, obviously, Trump will win, and Trump will bring a Vice President who has agreed in advance to pardon him.

If Trump is inaugurated, he will pardon himself when needed. If he is not able to pardon himself, his VP will pardon him. These things are given.

If Trump self-pardons, there will be a battle to determine whether his action is legal.

If the courts say he can do it, he will remain in office without problems. If the courts disagree, his Vice President will take over and pardon him.

Here’s the question no one is asking: if Trump’s Vice President pardons Trump, can Trump resume office? Is it possible a Vice President would have to step down after pardoning Trump?

The Constitution hasn’t given us the best guidance.

It’s pretty clear a president can’t pardon himself if he is convicted by the Senate after an impeachment, because it would serve no purpose for the Constitution to provide for impeachment and trial if the president could just pardon himself. It’s not clear that he can’t pardon himself if he is convicted by a court.

Can he be impeached after a pardon, because he has been convicted of a crime? I assume so. If that’s true, Trump could be run out of office regardless of a preexisting pardon. That would require a different House and Senate, though.

Congress is not part of the court system. It would be odd if Congress were barred from impeaching a person the president had pardoned, simply because of the pardon.

Double jeopardy wouldn’t be a problem. The Double Jeopardy Clause only applies to cases where a person can be subjected to certain punishments, and being thrown out of office is not one of them.

Impeachment and Senate trial were conceived with second prosecutions in mind.

I believe a Biden victory is the only hope of preventing hundreds of millions of leftists from foaming at the mouth and rolling on the ground in public. They clearly agree, whether they have thought about it or not, because on news networks and websites, they are constantly reacting to a potential Trump win as though it were a requirement that they all be boiled in oil.

Another question: how do leftists expect to prevent Trump from assuming office in the first place? They can’t keep him off the ballot. I may be wrong, but I believe all that leaves is impeachment and Senate trial. I don’t see any way for leftists to prevent Trump from being inaugurated. I don’t even know if it’s possible to impeach a president-elect.

The Bragg case is garbage and will not succeed on appeal. Same for the James case. The Georgia case is looking bad for the prosecution. The Florida document case is a great example of selective prosecution, but it may result in some kind of conviction, and it will definitely have to go through a long appeal process.

I think they’ll have to let him assume office.

Sooner or later, a big percentage of leftists will realize Biden is going to put Trump in office. He is repeating the selfish choices of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who turned out to be a savior of the much-hated unborn. What will they do? I’m sure they will react with maturity and great respect for the legal and democratic processes. As always.

Obvious humor aside, it seems likely they may go after Biden with their usual infantile shenanigans. Raising hell at his rare, scripted appearances. Lying down in front of his motorcade. Picketing his beach house. Maybe a few will set themselves on fire outside the White House.

When I was a kid, my poisonous leftist teachers taught me that Henry David Thoreau provided us with justification for civil disobedience. That was stupid. Civil disobedience made sense in Tianenmen Square, but here in the USA, we have things called voting booths, and we should be extremely, extremely reluctant to sidestep the process we all pretend to revere.

Civil disobedience is not noble or admirable. It’s disgraceful and very dangerous. Civil disobedience is the voting booth of the unprincipled brat who doesn’t respect anyone else’s rights. Naturally, leftists are addicted to it. Their addiction has caused a lot of riots, deaths, and arson during the last few years.

They are conditioned to rage and pout, and their conniptions vary in proportion to their always-hyperbolic outrage, so if they go after Biden, we should expect some remarkable and groundbreaking menacing of a sitting president and his family.

This world is a barrel of gunpowder waiting for a spark. It’s too bad there is no reasoning with leftists. Instead we will just have to hope they don’t turn our entire national landscape into one big teen takeover.

Not Today, World

I was going to write about a crazy woman who says she considered suing a veterinarian for refusing to treat her deluded, entitled, ruined son, who say he’s a cat. I have decided not to, because I don’t think it would do any good. I don’t feel like engaging because I expect no reward for my efforts.

“Cat” is a gender now, according to certain leftists. It is not clear whether they realize cats come in two sexes or whether it matters to them, but it is very clear there is no point in asking them.

I was feeling worried about the future earlier in the week, for no good reason. I knew what the problem was. When I pray in tongues a great deal, I feel good, and things go well. When I don’t, I get jittery and problems pile up. I start to feel overwhelmed, which makes sense, because people who don’t pray in tongues are trying to shoulder their own problems, which is disobedient to God.

Over the last couple of days, I have managed to put a lot of time in. I have prayed in tongues quite a bit. I didn’t leave the bedroom today until around 11 a.m. I feel much better. On the other hand, I feel more distanced from our insane, demon-controlled world.

I have made a little effort to watch the Fani Willis scandal unfold, and today I decided to Google Ashleigh Merchant, the lawyer who threw Willis in the fire. As expected, Ms. Merchant is not a Trump attorney. She represents a codefendant.

Trump seems to hire his attorneys on the golf course and perhaps at barbecues peripheral to CPAC instead of making an intelligent effort to find competent people, so he hires a lot of nuts and nincompoops. He hired Rudy Giuliani after he became senile. Of course Trump’s own high-priced lawyers failed to notice Willis’s ethical problems. It would be bizarre if a Trump lawyer did anything intelligent.

I’m not worried about Giuliani suing me for calling him senile, because he can’t afford to pay the fees for filing the case and serving process. And he is, in fact, senile.

For a while, my opinion has been that Giuliani would have done a better job in his youth, because he was a great prosecutor and mayor, but now that I think about it, you don’t have to be a genius to be a prosecutor who puts disgusting mobsters in prison. Maybe Giuliani was always a bad lawyer, but he had easy cases.

Let’s see. He was cum laude at NYU, a very good law school. He was on the law review. He had to be reasonably competent.

He’s senile.

I was looking at information about Ashleigh Merchant, and I saw the usual stuff we hear about lawyers. Her commitments to the profession. The community. Truth, justice, and the American Way. It makes me wince to think about it.

When I was in law school, they pushed that kind of nonsense on us. I didn’t want to be there, but most students did, and most came from non-legal families. Many were extremely proud of their status. Professors and speakers filled their itching ears with spin about the nobility of the profession and our duty to the public. They described lawyers like they were saints and martyrs, but the truth is that nearly all of us were there to line our pockets. I certainly was. I wasn’t out to do anything immoral, but my only reason for attending was to provide for myself.

Lawyers are like movie stars. In front of the public, we virtue-signal like crazy, but behind the scenes, it’s all cynicism and self-promotion.

So far, I have personally witnessed two lawyers–students, actually–talking about our civic duty when they weren’t being paid to do it. One was sincere, and the other was making a stomach-churning, clumsy, fumbling, phony, woke speech in order to get another law student to have sex with him. She appeared to be eating it up, although that doesn’t mean she believed a word of it.

Women like marrying lawyers. This is especially true of women in law school. My mother went to law school for the purpose of getting married.

I will digress.

My grandfather was a big man in Kentucky. He had no sons. He wanted my mother to be a lawyer. She wanted to have fun at school and spend his money.

She was an undergrad at the University of Kentucky, and he told her he would buy her a car if she went to law school. She jumped on the deal. But she had no degree.

She was given an appointment with the law school dean. As a favor, he signed a paper waiving the degree requirement for her. As he did so, he said, “Go on over there and get married.” And she did. I think she quit after one year. If she knew anything about law, it was never apparent to me.

She eventually wrecked the car near Middlefork, an unincorporated area in Powell County, Kentucky, on a curve on Highway 15. She had a bunch of friends in the car. When my grandfather sued the Greyhound company, he claimed their bus crossed the center line. It may even have been true.

I have no idea what kind of person Ms. Merchant is, and I’m not criticizing her personally. I’m just reacting to seeing the “noble profession” stuff repeated one more time. It’s almost always BS, and it’s a plate of BS I have been served many times in the past.

While I was Googling, I saw something about people having a duty to take certain jobs in order to save the world. Boy, do I reject that. If you’re drafted to protect your country, you should serve, but other than that, no. I reject the notion that everyone who has an ability is obligated to use it to do this or that for society. No one will ever be able to make me feel bad about quitting law or failing to pursue medicine and sew up little cleft palates in Haiti. The world is too crazy for me.

Truthfully, I believe I do more by minding my own business, interceding, and giving than I ever could have done taking some kind of service-motivated job. And I am not constantly embroiled in the psychosis that has taken over the world.

Kid says he’s a cat. He really says that. Mom agrees. The right blue-state jury would agree.

Garfield v. Reality. Affirmed, per curiam. Costs and fees to the plaintiff.

My sister had a mental (demonic) break once and decided she was a frog. She jumped into my dad’s pool and wouldn’t come out. My parents didn’t bring her a plate of flies.

To get anywhere in service-motivated jobs that use your talents, you have to jump into the mosh pit and curry favor with the people who run Satan’s world. You have to network and socialize with people you neither like nor respect. You have to deny your beliefs. These days, you have to proactively extol our new Satanic morals. It’s not for me. The world will have to go on without me.

I have to wonder what would happen if I took a pro bono case and refused to call a perverted judge or attorney “she.” Thank God I will never find out. Good luck, little pro bono clients. You’re on your own. Someone else will have to help you get your uncontested divorces, undeserved green cards, and DV restraining orders.

I looked at Rachel Levine today; the fat old Jewish guy who wears a dress and serves as Assistant Secretary of Health. His picture should be on the American flag. Get rid of the old flag, which is clearly performative and transphobic. Give the new flag a pink field. Put Rachel’s picture in the middle, and make sure he’s wearing rainbow body paint and nothing else. That’s America. Everyone salute.

Trump may win. Great. A few things may change for the better, temporarily. America will still be lost and no longer worthy of my misguided secular participation.

Yeshua has been rejected. The Holy Spirit has been rejected. Everyone who belongs to them, including me, has been rejected. I’m not going to keep trying to join Satan’s club. If new cheerleader tryouts are held, I will not attend.

Here’s something interesting I just realized: I have never heard anyone in my family talk about our obligations to society. No one ever told me to run for first grade class president or become a hall monitor. My grandfather was a circuit judge, as was his less-gifted son-in-law, and neither of them ever talked about public service. My dad’s first cousin was a circuit judge. My cousin is a prosecutor. His sister got a degree in psychology. My sister was a prosecutor. I never heard any of them talk about our duty to improve society.

My mother got a degree in social work, so there’s that. While doing practical work as a student, she found out that poor black people could be ungrateful and dangerous. One huge crazy guy forced her to run her hands over his face and tell her she and he were the same. Maybe that’s why she quit. She liked helping the individuals who didn’t terrify her, but to get to them, she had to be around the others.

Anyway, I don’t feel like writing about the cat guy in any depth. I might as well go outside and make mud pies, for all the good it would do.

I’m a Qwitter

I joined Twitter around a week ago, and I just deleted my account. I could not take it any more.

Twitter is full of people shrieking at each other and spreading lies, just like Facebook and Instagram. The big difference is that conservatives and Christians are not completely marginalized. Other than that, it seems about the same.

Here’s what happens when you join Twitter. First, no one reads anything you say. Second, two kinds of Twitter users start following you: whores and people who are trying to sell things. The whores are easy to spot because they look like whores and say whorish things. The salesmen are easy to spot because they promote things you can buy, like Bitcoin and get-rich-quick courses. Generally, these people are not verified, and the whores have few or no posts.

It’s just like joining a church.

On the first or second visit, the pastor comes over and tells you how he and his wife love you. They pray for you. Then you never see them again except from your seat, and they spend a lot of their time prying money out of you and discouraging you from having anything to do with other churches.

My dad was an atheist for most of his life, and he really hated preachers. I think my opinion of them may actually be lower than his.

Whores on Twitter. Whores in the pulpit.

Whores, whores, whores. I like saying and writing that word a lot, because this blog is the only place where I’m allowed to say it.

I was allowed to say it on Twitter, and that was good, because whores are a huge problem now, and we need to talk about them a lot. We have whores who are at or close to billionaire status, and they influence many millions of foolish people. They need to be exposed. The privilege of discussing whores was not worth the misery, however.

While I was on Twitter, I was reminded that just about everyone is distant from God and concerned about the kinds of things rats would be concerned about if they were as smart as we are. Admiration. Fame. Money. Vanity. Inflicting pain on other rats. Getting other rats to serve them.

Elon Musk owns Twitter and Tesla, and I kept getting posts about his ridiculous exploding cars. Some were from Tesla, but a lot were from shill accounts. Regular guys who just happened to post about the wonder of Tesla cars 50 times a day. I suppose this means Musk is one of the salesmen who came after me on Twitter, although he didn’t follow me.

I saw numerous vitriolic posts about genocide. Unfortunately, most were supporting genocide and claiming self-defense, by Israel, was genocide. That got tiresome. “Devil” means “slanderer,” and the devil has lots of children.

I saw a lot of posts supporting our dangerous, wrongheaded involvement in Ukraine. We are squandering munitions that will take several years to replace, and China is probably going to invade Taiwan this year while we still have a senile president. I don’t think we should defend Taiwan, but when we decide not to, it shouldn’t be because a demented president and a bunch of Hollywood warmongers made us too weak to make any other decision.

There were a lot of posts from Christians trying to make money. “If you think Jesis is the king of kings, say YES!” Disgusting. I also saw nuts from cults posting garbage blessings over and over. I saw a kook from Bethel–one Coy Barker–doing this many times a day. I don’t know why he doesn’t just go and sell timeshares. “God is going to give you a FINANCIAL MIRACLE this week!” It would be a financial miracle if this guy received a dime from me.

God once said this to me: “I will walk with you through the deep waters.” Spiritually, waters are the voices and words of many beings. Twitter is like a deep lake full of sewage, and when you’re logged in and taking part, it’s like you’re swimming under the surface with your mouth open.

Twitter is like a little model of our filthy world.

Having had my Twitter experience, I now hate this world more than ever. I want to leave, just like I wanted to leave Miami. This is literally the roof of hell. The closer I get to God, the fewer people I can communicate with. I feel like I just landed on another planet. I know there are other people who know God here, but in my life, there are very, very few.

I looked at Zechariah 14 today. Here’s how it starts:

Behold, the day of the Lord cometh, and thy spoil shall be divided in the midst of thee.

For I will gather all nations against Jerusalem to battle; and the city shall be taken, and the houses rifled, and the women ravished; and half of the city shall go forth into captivity, and the residue of the people shall not be cut off from the city.

Then shall the Lord go forth, and fight against those nations, as when he fought in the day of battle.

He’s talking about Israel, and these things have not happened yet, so they are about the future. They’re about things that happen to a nation that blasphemes and rejects its Messiah. Rabbis literally make a living from blasphemy. They could write “Blasphemer” on their tax returns.

Israel is not as safe as it should be, so bad things that did not have to happen will happen. October 7 was just the beginning.

Look at what Zechariah described. Houses rifled, women raped, and people being held hostage. That has started. Hamas also rapes and castrates Jewish men and boys, but mercifully, the Bible doesn’t mention that.

God says he will gather all nations against Israel. We are just about there. America is Israel’s biggest ally, and under Democrats, we are joining the other side. Biden hates Netanyahu and calls him obscene names in private, and he is pushing the Jews to call another suicidal ceasefire Hamas can violate a few days later.

Can it be said that we are already against Jerusalem because we would deny the Jews the right to self-defense? I don’t know, but we’re close.

The timing is not clearly explained.

The day of the Lord is the millennium. I have said it was the tribulation, but that’s not quite right. With the Lord, a day is as a thousand years, and the tribulation only lasts 7. I suppose the day of the Lord starts with the marriage of Yeshua, which takes place when the favored are raptured to be God’s guests. For people who reject Yeshua, there will be 7 years of tribulation, but for those who are sufficiently blessed to be raptured, there will be 7 years of celebration at the wedding.

Yeshua will return at the end of the tribulation, to appear publicly and take over the world. This is what is known as the second coming.

So will Jerusalem be besieged right away, before the tribulation, or will it happen during the tribulation? It looks like it will start shortly, meaning Israel will go through another holocaust that lasts at least 7 years.

That makes sense to me, because the Antichrist will appear midway through the tribulation, and he will hate Jews. He will surely be a new Haman. He will probably confirm all the nutty theories about Jews ruining the world and mobilize everyone else to bring a solution to the Jewish Question.

Jews will probably help bring him to power, because he will be an enemy of Christianity and a proponent of secular salvation, which they love. Jews are always looking for a way to fix the world without God, and they constantly vote for their enemies.

It’s surprising they didn’t learn anything from the USSR, which they helped establish. The existence of the phrase “Soviet Jewry” should have made them wonder if they were doing anything wrong. I remember when everyone was concerned about the plight of Soviet Jewry. Israel is full of Jews who left the socialist utopia they helped create, because it abused them.

God has given Israel a great deal of protection since 1948, but it looks like he will remove most of the hedge before long, and America won’t be there for Israel to run to. We’ll be on the other team.

There is prophetic significance to the use of tunnels to attack Israel. When we displease God continually, our enemies and problems grow in places where we can’t see them. Then they pop out suddenly and lay us low. It happened to Belshazzar. It happened to the Philistines; they let Samson grow his hair back.

I would rather see all this come sooner than later. If you have a painful condition that will never heal, it’s better to get the treatment over with instead of prolonging the misery.

The sooner everything blows up, the sooner Yeshua will rule, and we will have a thousand years of peace and love. We will be much happier under a divine dictator who is always right than the fools we elect in our blindness.

You Will Dwell in a Land of Walmarts and Chick-fil-A’s

Life here continues to amaze.

My wife and I have been painting the inside of our house. Today we did some other things. We ordered bedroom furniture and had a fantastic Italian meal at a local restaurant run and staffed by Mexicans.

As we were walking into the furniture store to place our order, I told my wife furniture stores would look a whole lot different if there were no women. Mattresses, recliners and maybe some breakfast tables. That’s all we need.

We went with Amish furniture. This is a type of furniture which is popular these days. It looks very good without actually being made of quality wood. They use alder, a second-tier wood, and put wonderful finishes on it. Are the builders really Amish? Well, they clearly use a lot of power tools, so no.

I mean, they could be Amish. They could be like the Orthodox Jews who spend most of their time trying to figure out how to disobey God. “You can’t turn the heat on on the Sabbath!” “Okay, we’ll hire gentiles to do it!” “We can’t carry stuff on the Sabbath outside our homes!” “Okay, we’ll put a tiny wire around our area and pretend it’s an enclosure, which we’ll pretend is a home!”

Oh, boy. Why can’t they figure out a way to justify bacon?

Maybe the Amish have figured out how to run power tools while pretending they’re not running power tools.

Anyway, we are getting Amish furniture. Good wood is too expensive. I’m not blowing $10,000 on a bedroom.

We looked for used stuff, but there are some problems with that. My wife insists on a king size bed, and they were not popular back when ordinary people owned real furniture. Also, when things turn up, they tend to be huge and ostentatious. Like Oskar Schindler’s stolen bed in the movie.

It’s sad, because you can get quality used furniture for much less than you would pay for new “Amish” furniture.

I don’t know why we can’t get good wood. Russia and China are giant reservoirs of hardwoods. I think. Maybe it’s just Russia.

Our bed will be made of dozens of tiny alder planks glued up into panels. The big trees are gone.

Without getting into TMI material, I will say we need a big bed because a certain person thrashes around all night and throws elbows.

We need a couple of couches. Looks like we’ll be paying at least $5K for those. I want reclining couches. I’ve thought it over. We will never have a hoity-toity Architectural Digest home because I refuse to be afraid of my own furnishings. I refuse to have furniture I’m afraid to sit on all day, with or without pizza and beverages. And we expect to have kids. I’m not stupid enough to put a kid on a $7000 couch.

Reclining couches are not all that chic, and they will clash with the traditional style of the house. Tough. We’re getting them.

I found out most reclining chairs and couches are built to fail in 5 years. The industry couch-stuffing standard is something called 1.8-pound foam. If you want a couch to last, you need 2.5-pound foam. We can pay $2500 for couches the manufacturer fully expects to be junk in 2029, or we can pay considerably more for couches that will make it to 2034.

If you buy a La-Z-Boy reclining couch, you have two options. The reasonably-priced one La-Z-Boy knows will collapse in a hurry, or the one that costs $500 more and lasts twice as long. La-Z-Boy isn’t very honest about it, but they do let people know they can “upgrade” their couches.

Their policy is a problem, because retailers other than La-Z-Boy appear to be unwilling to add the optional padding. Other retailers sell La-Z-Boy cheaper than La-Z-Boy, so if you want the padding, you probably have to go to a La-Z-Boy showroom and pay full retail, on top of shelling out for the foam they should give you by default.

Is La-Z-Boy a good brand? Not really, but there really aren’t many good brands. Companies that were great 5 years ago now sell Chinese junk. Oddly, there is now a Chinese company that sells excellent recliners. It’s called Hydeline. American companies ruined their reputations by selling Chinese garbage, and the Chinese themselves fixed the problem. Really nice.

Hooker. Bradington Young. Go ahead and tell me about the great company that made your recliner, thinking I don’t know about it. I’ve looked them all up. The wonderful chair you bought in 2015 is probably not available now. Best you can do is a copy full of flimsy foam.

I don’t really like Hydeline couches. They don’t look great, and they don’t come in fabric. I may give up and go with La-Z-Boy.

Fabric is actually better than leather. It costs less. It breathes. It’s more comfortable. It’s less likely to be destroyed by spills.

In the far past, leather was for peasants and fabric was for patricians. If you bought an expensive limousine, the driver sat on leather, out in the weather, and you sat inside on fabric. Look it up. Things have changed, and modern people have no idea they’re paying extra for servant trappings.

I’d like to have a leather chair and two fabric couches. Maybe we’ll find what we want.

I love our mattress. It’s a Novaform I got at Costco for my dad. When he died, I cleaned it to surgical standards, and now we use it. I want another foam mattress. They are fantastic. I would never have another pre-2000-technology mattress.

Foam mattresses don’t need box springs. I’m not actually sure why any mattress needs one, but anyway, I want a mattress that sits right on a wooden platform. Foam gives perfect support. It’s cool, which is nice in Florida. It comes with a cover you can take off and submerge in cleaning solution if something bad happens. And it’s cheap.

My mattress cost $500, and it’s still not too far from that. It has a 20-year warranty. I want one as much like it as possible.

At one time, I somehow ended up sleeping on a conventional Sealy mattress my mother had paid over $2000 for. I threw it out. It was like a concrete sidewalk. Never again. If I can get something better for about $500, and it will last 20 years, I’m all over it. If it doesn’t work out, and I can’t return it, I can buy a different $500 mattress the following year and not worry about it.

I like a nice mushy mattress. I don’t know how people sleep on hard ones. What I really like is a somewhat firm mattress with a layer of mushy stuff on top.

Today we went to Sam’s Club to look at their signature foam mattress. I figured we could lie on one so my wife could put it up against her princess genes to prevent her from finding problems with it after purchase. No such luck. Sam’s Club sells mattresses they won’t let you try. But they guarantee them. They must have a huge markup, like conventional mattresses. If they’re willing to pay you to take a nearly-new mattress to the dump and pay you for it, instead of letting you try it in the store, they can’t have paid more than 50 bucks for it.

We left without a mattress. We also went to TJ Maxx so my wife could look at 4,000 pairs of cheap shoes.

So that’s what we did today.

We drove home in the twilight on I-75. It was beautiful out. The temperature was 68 degrees. The sky was kind of a dark lavender above, with darker purple near the horizon. The trailers on the big trucks seemed to shine like silver tea services. The taillights gleamed like backlit rubies. Very odd. I commented on this to my wife, and she agreed.

I told her I had the feeling this area was like a farm where God raised people like livestock. Everything was provided for us. Life was easy. Lots of stores. Not much traffic. Enough good restaurants for a reasonable person. Great people.

She agreed. We are very sheltered.

We talked about our marriage. People told us things would get worse when we were together day after day, but the opposite happened. We had a little friction on a couple of our trips, but here, things go smoother and smoother with the passage of time. We enjoy each other more. We’re not just mates. We’re buddies.

We went home, and I looked at X and saw lunatics making death threats toward conservatives. I saw men trying to breastfeed. It was like spying on a planet where a virus had made everyone insane. I felt like Gulliver checking out the Yahoos.

People are hopeless and angry now. Their lives are falling apart. They’re waiting for civil war. Some look forward to it. They go home and watch violent movies and listen to ghetto whores singing about their vaginas. They go to work and get pushed around by perverts who insist they lie about their genders or get written up.

It’s different with us.

Prayer in tongues is what makes the difference. The more you do it, the more you will be aligned with God and others who pray in tongues. I wake up at night and hear my wife praying and singing in the master closet. I wake up in the morning and pray in tongues silently while she sleeps next to me. It works. God has graciously given us the ability to make ourselves do it.

I believe God moves people away from Yahoos as they draw closer to him. I believe he pushes people into lower circumstances as they move away. I think prisons are full of people who are far from God. They are moving toward hell, and prisons are about as close to hell as you can get while you’re alive.

I think God moves Spirit-filled, cooperative people to places like the county where I live. Maybe there is a nicer county we’ll be moved to if we keep cooperating. Eventually, we will be raptured to an even better place, or we will die and go to heaven. That’s how it looks to me.

I don’t believe people who are really close to God and highly informed live in defeat. The Bible says such people are blessed and victorious. How can you be victorious if you live in defeat?

I hear singing right now.

I’m not claiming we’re good people. There are no good people. We are rewarded for listening and cooperating, not for perfection.

Time to have a beer and see what the wife is up to. I hope God sees fit to keep us separated from the insanity.

Back to the Twitterbox

I decided to create a Twitter account (again) to see what it was like to be on social media, say things that were obviously true, and not see them deleted right away or receive a ban or suspension. I also wanted to receive news that was concealed by the MSM, other social sites, and our government. I wanted information to counter the constant flow of lies. I also wanted to post things God had told me.

It has been interesting. It’s really something to be able to post words like “whore” and “Nazi” again. It’s amazing to be able to write about ivermectin on a social site. When I first signed up, I felt intoxicated by the freedom everyone in America had until maybe 15 years ago. That’s sad and telling. Look what leftists have done to us.

I said I felt like an old circus bear in Azerbaijan, cautiously sniffing the grass as activists tried to release me from a steel box. Since then, however, X has worn on me.

I feel like I’m visiting New York or Miami. I feel tired and alienated. I’m tired of swimming in the hostility of modern culture, and I am reminded that I can’t really be part of the world. I feel frustrated because I see people doing and saying so many stupid things I can’t help them stop doing and saying. They’re so proud, it’s like they’re deaf. Grown people, showing off their mud pies.

I wonder if Yeshua feels this way. He sits on the outside, watching determinedly trashy damned people he can’t do anything to help.

I see a lot of conservatives who are no better off than the leftists they zing over and over. They think Trump and other politicians can solve our problems. They don’t even mention Yeshua. They’re “big tent” people. Bring the atheists in. Bring Jews and Hindus and Muslims in. We’re all brother conservatives.

Conservatism is correct, and God is conservative, but conservatism won’t save us. Holiness is what saves nations, and you don’t get it by compromising and letting people who hate Yeshua lead. Conservatism without Yeshua is just another Satanic cult. It’s like Mormonism.

I see a lot of conservative lies. The problem can’t compare to the problem of leftist lies. Leftism is built on a foundation of lies, and leftists endorse lying. But it’s still bad. People are posting debunked theories and bad syllogisms and comparisons. Lies don’t help anyone, and they ruin the credibility of the people who think they’re trying to fix America.

Without credibility, there is no power.

I’ve also seen a lot of blatant racism from conservatives. Blacks, people say, are “low IQ people” who can’t control their impulses. We are told they still belong in the jungle.

You’re supposed to “follow” a few people on Twitter, so I followed Scott Adams. I wanted to see what he was really like. He was canceled after an angry rant about black Americans.

He is still angry, and he is very tiresome. He floods the web with posts conveying his anger. I haven’t seen him say anything helpful or pleasant yet, although he does say a lot of intelligent things.

I find his Israel/Gaza position confusing. He has said a lot of supportive, i.e. correct, things about Israel, but one of his posts seemed to excoriate Israel for going too far. Maybe I misunderstood.

Let’s talk about felony murder.

Let’s say I take over a WaWa and hold people hostage. The police shoot at me to save the hostages. A hostage is killed.

Who gets tried for murder? The police, of course!

NO. I get tried for murder, even though I didn’t kill anyone. It’s called “felony murder,” and the idea is that I am responsible for contributing to the killing of others when my crimes lead to the killing.

I can be tried for murder if the police kill my accomplice, which is more like what’s happening in Gaza.

Hamas is holding the entire population of Gaza hostage. They can’t leave. Hamas puts weapons and various terrorist facilities in hospitals, mosques, and schools and requires civilians to continue using them. Israel absolutely must continue the war to prevent more Hamas murders, rapes of women and girls, and sodomy of Jewish men and boys. Israel strives to avoid killing civilians, to the point where many Jewish lives are being lost, but it can only do so much.

In Florida, Hamas would be guilty of felony murder. In Gaza, the same principle applies.

The principle is stronger in Gaza because Gazans are accomplices. Very few of them failed to vote for Hamas, and they knew exactly what Hamas would do to Jews. Very few of them do not support Hamas right now, even though they are all hostages. “Civilians” caused this problem and cheered the actions of the subhuman pigs who left their pen and attacked innocent unarmed Jews. They are getting justice, not unprovoked genocide.

Hamas has always had the power to surrender and end this situation, just as an armed nut in a WaWa would have the power to lie down and accept arrest. The guilt is ALL on Hamas and Gazans.

Scott Adams is very smart, so I would expect him to agree with this, but I don’t know. I unfollowed him because being bombarded with his depressing posts was a downer with little up side.

I have been followed by three accounts: all women. One had a profile photo displaying her grotesquely-enhanced buttocks in yoga pants. This is what happens when you join X. Fake accounts show up and follow you, and their creators hope you will follow them back in order to see more buttocks or whatever. This seems to work really well. Any moderately-attractive woman who is willing to display body parts can be a quick success on the web.

I haven’t reciprocated.

I feel like dumping X again. The feed is like a prison. It’s like being trapped in a tiny cell in hell with Libs of Tiktok and Lara Logan. It’s not that the people in my feed are so bad; it’s that I can’t seem to break out of it.

As of today, I have subscribed for $3 per month. I wanted to be able to publish longer posts. Oddly, now that I’ve subscribed, the content seems more varied. Is that how it works? Guess I’ll find out.

It may seem odd to subscribe when I’m thinking about quitting, but I want to know what I’m giving up before I check out.

Here’s something funny: X will not let you use Paypal to subscribe. Elon Musk, the X-Man himself, started Paypal. I guess his affection has withered since the breakup.

If I quit, I’ll be losing my whole three-dollar investment. Life is full of risk.

I’ll probably write about this again if I quit.

Trump Go Fund Me Established to Vex Sadistic ‘Flakes

I have been saying someone should open a website to collect money to pay Donald Trump’s bills. I don’t mean his legal fees. I mean the verdicts themselves.

He has a PAC called Save America, and it has paid toward his fees, but I see no indication that it will help with the actual verdicts. It doesn’t do him much good to avoid paying his lawyers if he’s still on the hook for $400 million.

A lady in Miami has started a Go Fund Me to pay off the verdicts, and it’s up to about $450K. If everyone who voted for Trump sent 10 dollars, Trump would be in the black by nine figures, even after gift tax. I have no problem with this. It’s legal to give strangers money.

The bulk of the verdicts will go to New York City, which will lose it paying off illegal aliens, so I don’t care about that. Some will go to the lady who seriously claimed it was possible to rape someone at Bergdorf Goodman during business hours. Oh, well. She’s cursed no matter what she gets, so I can live with knowing I sent her money.

The Bible says we should not give to the rich, but this is a special case. This guy is our friend, and he was victimized because of it.

Leftist-controlled Go Fund Me has not taken the page down yet. Maybe they’re afraid to do that. If you’re interested, here is the link the MSM will never publish: LINK.

The verdicts will probably be slashed on appeal. I don’t care. Go buy yourself another jet, Mr. President. Enjoy life.

They Will Definitely Work, and Not Kill Too Many People, if we Just Give Them One More Chance

I thought covid was over, but then I live in a pretty sane county in a pretty sane state (if you don’t count the blue areas).

I just saw some not-bright MSM journalists talking about the importance of the new boosters as well as news concerning the isolation period.

1. I feel sure the new boosters are just as effective, harmless, and necessary as the old ones.

2. “Isolation period”?

When the vaccines came out, I rejected the mRNA shots because people who seemed to know what they were talking about said they might be dangerous, and they were also new, as medical technology went. Turned out I was right. Otherwise-healthy people are dying left and right from cardiac arrest caused by mRNA shots, and the CDC admits it.

I was eager to take the conventional shots because I figured we knew how to make conventional vaccines, and I believed the people who said they would work. Wrong on both counts. They have been banned because they cause blood clots. Better than dropping dead, I guess.

The vaccines turned out to be ineffective at preventing covid, and when I got covid before getting a shot, it was mild, so I was never at risk of serious problems, unless you count the ones the shots cause. When I get covid now, I only know it for one reason: beer tastes bad for a few days. That’s the terrifying disease I risked my life and my wife’s life to prevent.

The shots do not work well. They are not very good at preventing severe symptoms or death. They do kill a certain number of people, and it really is true that most people who die from covid are vaccinated. Why are they still pushing them?

If it’s for the vulnerable, fine. For me, they serve no purpose, and they may do great harm.

As for the isolation period, I truly had no idea there was one. I remember that stuff from 2020, but I thought it was over with.

Here’s a huge problem with the isolation approach: while it may restrain a certain number of people who have obvious symptoms, it does nothing to discourage people who have no idea they’re sick, and at this point, that probably means a billion people at any given time.

I had covid last week. I had no idea until the beer tasted bad. I wandered around at will, spewing viruses willy-nilly. My wife’s sense of smell dropped off a few days back, and she had no other symptoms. She spread gigantic numbers of angry viruses before she had any idea what was going on. There are probably billions of people who get sick and never know it. How will keeping a few people home make a real difference in transmission rates?

“If it saves even one life, it’s worth it.” No, it isn’t. If that argument made sense, we would never build another bridge. On average, really big construction projects take more than one life each. Should we go live in ditches covered with sheets of cardboard?

About 10 people died during the construction of the Burj Khalifa. The number is considered so unremarkable, they haven’t even figured out and published the precise figure. Who would want to visit Dubai if there were nothing but sand dunes and camel poop? Imagine how many families live on income generated by the existence of the Burj Khalifa.

Here’s what I said when covid popped up: let’s keep the fat, sick, and old at home and leave everyone else alone to face the tiny, tiny risk of serious illness. That advice looks really good right now, because the fat, sick, and old are out there in Walmarts and restaurants, sitting next to asymptomatic people who have no idea they are spraying viruses in every direction.

When you have a bubble boy, you put the bubble around the boy, not the world.

I never cease to be shocked and disturbed by the poor mental faculties of journalists.

They’re like mynah birds. Or actors. They mimic intelligent beings beautifully, but it’s nothing more than mimicry.

Obvious limitations notwithstanding, they generally manage to be smug and condescending anyway.

Anyway, beer tastes good again, so I have that going for me.

Here I Am, Stuck in the Middle With Jesus

Teh crazy lies thickly upon us like a fog composed of atomized PCP.

The left is corrupt and insane. Far more corrupt and insane than the political right. But we are not helping ourselves by failing to acknowledge the nutwads among us.

Today I started reading an article about the unconstitutional ways Aunt Sam (don’t judge) surveils us these days, and the article said this:

Last August, an FBI squad gunned down Craig Robertson, a 75-year-old woodworker, for things he had allegedly posted online. The killing was reportedly under review by the FBI’s Inspection Division, but as of this writing there has been no investigation by Congress. As members may have noted, the FBI now operates along partisan lines.

Sounds bad. Like Ruby Ridge and Waco. I looked it up to learn more about the FBI’s egregious misdeeds.

Turns out this guy was as crazy as a tree full of coons. He was “they-worthy.”

He threatened to murder Joe Biden and Alvin Bragg, and he said he was headed for New York to carry out his plans for Bragg. He went to Truth Social and posted this:

Heading to New York to fulfill my dream of iradicating [sic] another of George Soros two-but [sic] political hach [sic] DAs. I’ll be waiting in the courthouse parking garage with my suppressed Smith & Wesson M&P 9mm to smoke a radical fool prosecutor that should never have been elected. I want to stand over Bragg and put a nice hole in his forehead with my 9mm and watch him twitch as a drop of blood oozes from the hole as his life ebbs away to hell!!

BYE, BYE, TO ANOTHER CORRUPT BASTARD!!!

The FBI got a warrant. They showed up at his house with lots of equipment, which was good for him, because the more protection they had, the more likely they were to be able to take him alive and get him the drugs or padded walls he needed.

He cursed the FBI and refused to come out. Shots rang out. They shot him. They tried to revive him. He died at the scene.

Where is the problem here? For once, the FBI did everything right.

This guy had no business owning guns. He needed to be confined. There was a need to figure out whether he needed psychiatric treatment or a prison cell. No doubt about it. The FBI had an obligation to throw a net over him, bring him in, and lock up his weapons.

He’s not much like the kids the bumbling idiot Janet Reno killed needlessly in Waco.

Conservatives choose too many of the wrong battles.

This all serves to illustrate a point: though God is indisputably conservative, conservatism is not holiness, and conservatives–even those who nominal or true Christians–are not immune to the delusions that come from the spirit of antichrist.

You can be a true Christian and not know the Holy Spirit. If that’s you, you are vulnerable to Satanic delusion. If you’re not praying in tongues, you’re not hearing from God, but you are hearing from people and spirits that lie all day. You have no help. You have no source of information strong enough to outweigh the garbage that goes into your head all day.

Robertson was a pagan. Specifically, he was a Mormon. Mormons are not Christians. They believe Jesus is God, but they don’t believe in salvation by faith, and they don’t know the Holy Spirit. They have all sorts of sick, demonic practices. For all we know, Robertson was communing with the white salamander or the demon Moroni or the ghost of George Romney. It wasn’t the Holy Spirit who told him to shoot an admittedly twisted, bigoted prosecutor.

When we start seeing armed battles between trannies, homosexuals, Antifers, and Muslims on one side, and Christian militia nuts on the other, it won’t be because God told the militia nuts to mobilize. It will be because Satan is commanding both sides.

The truth has gotten lost, and while the right has more of the remnants of the truth than the left, there is no shortage of nutty, dangerous conservatives who don’t know God.

But Vivek Ramaswamy is a topic for another day.

Teflon Don Slips Away Again

I watched a little bit of Fani Willis’s hysterical, implausible testimony today, at an evidentiary hearing to determine whether she should be removed from Donald Trump’s Georgia election case due to a conflict of interest. The hearing will continue tomorrow.

Let me save you some time. She will be forced off the case. She is likely to have serious problems with the Georgia Bar. She could also be tried for perjury.

I would say that she won’t be disqualified because she’s a leftist, but the judge hearing the evidence was the vice president of his law school’s chapter of the Federalist Society, so it’s not like one lawyer with an entitled ghetto mindset is looking after another.

Fani Willis did not grow up in a ghetto. Her dad was an attorney. But she has the entitled, emotionalist, race-card-playing ghetto outlook just the same. She has an ego the size of Ayers Rock, and she flies off the handle when challenged.

You don’t have to prove a prosecutor is an ax murderer to get him booted off a case. You just have to show an actual conflict of interest exists. Willis has one.

Willis has a sexual relationship with lawyer Nathan Wade. She paid him a lot of money to work on the Trump case, even though he’s not a prosecutor. He’s a tort lawyer. Wade took her on expensive vacations, for which he paid. Money in, vacations out. Conflict of interest.

Has this all been proven? No, but her defenses are ridiculous.

She admits she had a sexual relationship with Wade, but she claims it started in 2022, after he started working with her. Sadly for her, a friend of hers swears she saw them kissing and hugging in 2019. Whom will the judge believe? A combative, arrogant prosecutor who has to be admonished on the stand repeatedly about professionalism, or a disinterested party?

Sorry if I’m harsh, but Willis is a fat, ugly older woman with a nasty personality, and Wade is the most desirable type of male in America: a tall, straight, reasonably good-looking black man in a profession. It makes sense that she would demand that he escort her on trips as payback for improper and excessive fees for services he was not well-equipped to provide. It would be odd for what is now known as a “high-value man” to run off to exotic locations with an old woman who is unattractive and incapable of having children. Nathan Wade can crook his finger and have all sorts of beautiful, compliant young black women trample each other to be with him. Black women compete furiously for males who have money, degrees, and clean rap sheets.

Willis and Wade claim she repaid him for the vacations in cash. No adult who isn’t on drugs will buy that, and the judge isn’t on drugs. She claims she keeps up to $15000 in cash in her house. Very few people do things that stupid, and a single woman who has put a lot of vicious criminals in jail would be the last person to do it. It has to be a lie. Her denials may force the involvement of a forensic accountant, and then she and Wade may find out that lying about large financial transactions is not as simple as they thought. If you say your dog ate your homework, a forensic accountant will stick his finger down the dog’s throat.

You can say you paid cash, but you eventually have to show where it came from in a case like this. An accountant can look at all your accounts and recorded transactions. He can look at your financial past. If Willis was making big cash withdrawals, it will show. If not, where did the money come from? If Wade doesn’t have big deposits to show, why not? They’ll have to explain or take the Fifth. If they take the Fifth, they’ll be abandoning their defense to a large degree, and it will also draw the interest of the bar, possibly spurring criminal investigations.

In a criminal context, a finder of fact is not allowed to infer anything when a witness invokes the Fifth Amendment. In a civil context, at least in federal court, an inference may be drawn if there is other evidence of criminality. I don’t know if that applies here. I don’t know if this hearing, though contained within a criminal trial, is a civil matter. I assume it is, since Willis and Wade are not defendants. Anyway, in any context, invoking the Fifth can spur the bar or law enforcement to follow up and investigate. They are not finders of fact.

Women are afraid of being robbed. They are afraid of making big withdrawals. Many women will not use an ATM card because they don’t like to carry cash. It’s common for women to delay other customers in checkout lines by writing checks for things like one tube of toothpaste. A female prosecutor would be more wary than most. Not less.

Maybe Trump can’t prove Willis didn’t pay Wade in cash, but there is zero evidence she paid, and I guarantee you, the evidence will be consistent with her not paying. The judge can take notice of that.

The standard of proof in Trump’s trial is reasonable doubt, and that’s a tough standard to meet. The evidentiary hearing is not a criminal trial, however. As far as I can tell by Googling, the standard is somewhat lower. I think Wade and Willis are lying, because the alternative is absurd, and I think Judge McAfee knows it and may be willing to allow further investigation to expose their dishonesty.

As for trouble with the bar, a lawyer can’t lie to a tribunal. In Georgia, you can be suspended or disbarred for this. The Trump case has an extremely high profile, and bar associations are all about public relations. They are all about convincing the public lawyers can be relied upon to police themselves. They struggle to make us look honest. I think Willis will get a suspension at the very least, and if that happens, she can forget about working as a public-sector attorney. This may not happen, though, if the bar is sufficiently packed with DEI hires and appointees. That race card is some card.

As for perjury, I looked at the Georgia law, and it appears Willis and Wade are guilty. Here are the elements:

1. Knowingly and willfully making a false statement,
2. Material to the issue or point in question,
3. While under oath in a judicial proceeding.

An evidentiary hearing is a judicial proceeding. Lies about reimbursement and the timing of the relationship are material to the issue of conflict. Willis and Wade swore under oath, and they certainly knew what was true and what was not.

I say she will be forced off the case, but I admit, that depends on the judge and Trump’s lawyers. If he is not determined to learn the facts, the judge will wrap the hearing up and say, “He said, she said,” and give up. If he takes the conflict and dishonesty issues seriously, he will let things continue until the truth is known.

Trump has a history of hiring stupid, crooked, and/or senile lawyers, so I don’t know if his current representation is smart enough to investigate Willis and Wade correctly.

I assume the burden of investigation is on Trump, since the court itself is not after Willis and Wade, the bar is not involved, and Willis and Wade are not being prosecuted yet.

My strong bet: Willis will be out on Monday. If the judge thinks either of these characters lied to him under oath, he will refer them to the Georgia Bar and possibly the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

I have read that if she is disqualified, her whole office is disqualified. If that’s so, who continues the case? Maybe someone who is less deranged and determined. Someone who didn’t campaign using an unethical promise to destroy one private citizen, before she had any evidence of wrongdoing. Good news for Trump.

This is my semi-baked, one-hour analysis, which is all you get unless you pay me. Let’s see what happens.