When Can we go Home?

A while back, I noted that demonic–meaning “caused by demons”–insanity had afflicted many people on Earth, and I said that in order to keep track of the progress of increasing insanity, it could be useful to watch Keith Olbermann, fired ESPN and MSNBC personality and dispenser of absurd theories that conflict with commonly-known facts. Not long ago, he claimed no one should believe Representative Dr. Ronny Jackson, MD, the former White House physician who is now Donald Trump’s primary care provider. Jackson described Trump’s bullet wound, and Olbermann made up two weird claims. He said Jackson was not a medical doctor, and then he said he had no license. Both libels originated either in hell or in Olbermann’s own disrupted psyche.

Olbermann has proven to be a pretty good barometer of lunacy. Recently, some baseball players mimicked Trump’s “Fight! Fight! Fight!” shooting response, and Olbermann said they should be banned from baseball and their stadium should be razed. He also said the franchise should be confiscated.

Nothing crazy there. Nope. And definitely nothing that would inspire arson or murder.

Leftists love confiscation. It’s like a fetish with them. Money. Guns. Land. You name it.

Today, I was looking at the Gospel of Luke, and I saw something that corroborated my beliefs about Satan sending spirits of lunacy to manipulate the enemies of good.

As predicted by the Psalms and the prophet Isaiah, Yeshua was rejected by most Jews of his time. In particular, he was rejected by the illegitimate priesthood which had been installed by Roman conquerors.

Somewhat appropriately, if you think about it, he was murdered (sacrificed) by priests. And they used a sort of syncretism as their tool. They partnered with heathens against almighty God. Sounds like Joel Osteen.

At one point, he encountered a man with a withered right hand. This took place in a synagogue, on the sabbath. He asked the religious bigwigs this:

I will ask you one thing; Is it lawful on the sabbath days to do good, or to do evil? to save life, or to destroy it?

Then he restored the man’s hand with a miracle.

Luke said something interesting. He said that after Yeshua performed the miracle, the prominent and powerful Jews who were against him were filled with insanity. Some Bibles say they were filled with “rage,” but the Greek word is anoia, which Strong’s equates to “folly” and “madness.” Those words mean insanity.

The Bible says they then began conspiring against Yeshua, to decide what they should do to him. Psychotic rage came first. Then a willingness to do him harm. Eventually, they beat and murdered him.

This was not a rational disagreement over doctrine. It wasn’t based on Tanakh-based objections to Yeshua’s Messiah status. It was plain old insanity, caused by demons. The priests and scribes didn’t know the Holy Spirit. He didn’t live in them. As a result, they were open to other spirits who made them their homes.

They had the same madness leftists and Islamists have today.

I just had a comment deleted at Yahoo News. I have probably posted three comments there this year. It’s rare that I risk getting sucked into the playpen.

There was a story about the FBI. It said the FBI was doing forensics to try to determine what hit Trump during the assassination attempt. Some cranks are claiming he was hit by a piece of a shattered teleprompter, or that he was not injured at all. Hard to explain the blood if he wasn’t injured, isn’t it?

This, too, is madness.

They say reasonable minds may differ, but sometimes it takes an unreasonable mind.

There is no evidence before us–zero–that any teleprompters were damaged. At least one witness says they were not damaged. At the time of the shooting, no one claimed they were damaged.

The doctors who treated Trump after the shooting called his injury a bullet wound. His personal physician described it as a gunshot wound.

Better yet, there is a photo showing a bullet passing by the right side of Trump’s head. We’ve all seen it.

A .223 round fired from 130 yards away from a chronograph will pass it at close to 3000 feet per second. The shot of Trump and the bullet trail shows the trail in an area about two feet long, behind Trump. It had to be there to show it had gone by his ear. The picture wouldn’t mean as much if the trail had appeared in front of him.

That means the bullet was there for about 1/1500th of a second. A photographer who had taken photos even 1/100th of a second too early or too soon would have missed the shot. Say what you will; God arranged that extraordinary and unprecedented photo because he knew Satan’s children would lie about Trump being shot.

Do I have to bring up Occam’s razor? Bullets were fired. There was nothing between Donald Trump and the muzzle of the gun. A bullet trail was photographed behind his ear, and it’s obvious the bullet was moving in a straight line, the way bullets move when they haven’t fragmented or hit any objects. The teleprompters were not damaged.

Why make up a story about fragments or shrapnel?

Am I sitting in a recliner typing a blog entry in my living room? Maybe I’m in a simulation. Maybe I’ve been in a coma for 50 years, and I make up dreams about blogging to stave off boredom. Maybe I’ve been drugged, and I’m just imagining the recliner and the living room. Or maybe the simplest explanation is correct.

God knows leftists are horrible liars, like their father. They can’t always get things to go their way, but they can almost always lie afterward and try to convince people things really did go their way. They work constantly to erase the truth and replace it with their version of reality. They tell us the Hebrews never wandered in the desert. They say Yeshua never existed. James Cameron claimed to have photos of the box where his bones were deposited. They used to claim David never existed. They say the Holocaust didn’t happen.

I posted a comment about the wound, the photo and the dishonesty of leftists, and after I sat down to write this blog post, it vanished.

It was not offensive. It was based in verifiable truth. Leftist liars had already responded. Doesn’t matter. It’s gone. Yahoo wants the world to think it never happened, and, if possible, that I never existed.

I’ll describe the feeling I have these days.

Have you ever dealt with people who absolutely cannot listen to good advice? Brats come to mind. Determined conspiracy theorists. People whose absurd religious beliefs are based in emotion, not reality. Flat Earthers. Everyone involved in the racist, misandrous, anti-Christian, antisemitic myths of DEI.

After a while, you go silent. You fold your hands, sit back, and observe, with no interest in speaking further. You realize you have lost all desire to interact with the people you tried to help.

That’s what’s going on in my heart. This world is hopelessly lost. Nearly no one can be helped.

I would like to make the usual preparations for my family’s future. Should we move to a better property for kids? Should we come up with plans for raising them correctly? Should there be trust funds? Should I buy more real estate? Should I buy more stocks? Should I get serious about exercise and nutrition so I don’t die while my kids are in elementary school?

I don’t care any more. I don’t see any way to have a future here.

I am not depressed. My life is so easy, it’s hard to believe. My wife is wonderful. I love my farm. Very few demands are placed on me. It’s almost idyllic. But I wonder why we are still here on Earth, given that there is no possibility of living among sane people for the rest of our lives.

If we live out our normal lifespans here, we face decades of humoring and placating dangerous psychotics in order to get by.

I keep eating too much. I spend too much on restaurants. I don’t look after my business as well as I should.

Sometimes I’ll think, “We just went out to eat yesterday.” Then I’ll think, “What difference does it make?”

I don’t care. I don’t care. Will we be here to worry about it if we diminish our wealth too much? I can’t make myself believe it.

Yeshua was rejected in Nazareth, the town where he grew up. Friends and neighbors who had known him and his parents for about 30 years tried to murder him because he said he was the Messiah and told them heathens were more open than they were.

Nazareth is on high ground, and it’s possible to shove people off so they fall a long way onto rocks. I know because I had to run an errand there once. To buy hot dogs and charcoal.

Yeshua stood up in a synagogue there and read a bit from Isaiah which proclaimed the Messiah. He said he was the one Isaiah was talking about. By this time, he had been doing great things in other places, and the Jews in the synagogue asked him about them. He told them a prophet was not without honor except among his own, and he pointed out that Elijah had to perform a miracle on a heathen widow.

At this point, the people who knew him became infuriated–insane–and they tried to throw him off a cliff. God hid him from them, as he hid Lot’s door from the murdering pervert rapists of Sodom, and he just walked away.

How can normal people try to murder an exemplary neighbor after a few minutes of hearing things they don’t like? Insanity is the only explanation. They were like the orderly, responsible, law-abiding Germans and Austrians who lost their minds over a couple of decades and started beating Jews in the streets. No natural cause can explain such things.

Yeshua walked away. Atlas shrugged, if you prefer. He didn’t project a Marvel-style force field around them, hold them in place, and make them listen while he begged, cajoled, and worked miracles. He knew they could not be reached because of their willful insanity.

When do we get to walk away?

In general, I am no longer concerned about people any more. Some individuals, yes, but as a whole, no. My lifelong habit has been to give up caring about things I can’t fix, no matter how bad they are. Is it a fault? You tell me. Perhaps I lack empathy. Or maybe it’s a healthy response that prevents me from harming myself needlessly.

I don’t care if America is destroyed and people suffer like never before, because I can’t stop it. My attitude shocks me.

I would not enjoy seeing it happen. I’m not enjoying seeing the beginnings of it. I feel grief sometimes. But I will never lie awake and soak my pillow with tears over it. It’s not my nature.

I just want to be somewhere else, with the people who can be saved, when things get really bad. THAT, I should be able to manage. If I stay close to God and listen, I’ll get what I want. Because it’s within my capability, I am concerned about it, and I try to make it happen.

People talk a lot about liminal spaces now. The word “liminal” is new to me. A liminal space is a place where people go on their way to another place. An airport. A hallway. A waiting room.

For several years, I have had dreams of airports. Almost always, it’s DFW, which I have probably only visited once. In dreams, I have walked through DFW so many times, I feel like I’ve been there. I got sick of DFW dreams. When I remember the dreams, I have to remind myself they weren’t real. I confuse them with memories of real places. Dream DFW seems just as real in my memory as the real New York City or any other place I’ve lived.

I have asked God to help me not to have airport dreams, because I was so tired of them.

Are my dreams of airports about God? This world is unquestionably a liminal space. No one stays here. It’s a place where we are processed for a short time before going elsewhere.

In jokes, I like to remind my wife that Florida is known as God’s waiting room because of all the old people. Maybe there is more to the joke than I realized. Am I walking toward the gate so I can be flown to the wedding of the lamb? That would sure be nice.

Sometimes I dream I’ve just realized I’m in school, and I haven’t studied or gone to class. I get worried about exams. Then I realize I’m out of school, and I don’t have to do anything. The stress pours out of me. I feel so free. I can depart and leave the other students, who are miserable, behind me. Is God showing me I’m out of Satan’s unproductive rat race? Is it time for me to go my way and leave the rats to it?

In its way, a school is a liminal space. Isn’t the world a school, with a fateful final exam?

Guess I should quit. I can’t sit here and type all night.

Maybe the Grass Really is Greener

Reader Tiomoid of Angle left a comment referring to a Youtube called Nomad Capitalist. The comment says, “Go Where You’re Treated Best.”

That’s really interesting.

I know nothing about the channel. I sort of skimmed the “Videos” page, and it looks like it’s a guy who tells people about countries where they might be better off than where they are. Maybe it’s aimed at Americans.

I’m writing to relax, so I have no plans to do unpleasant research that resembles work.

What I perceive, perhaps incorrectly, to be the thesis of the channel is interesting. Why stay where you’re not wanted? Why stay and be treated the way a lamprey treats a bass?

Today I had a revelation, which I posted here. The brief, generalized version is this: bad people want to stay close to good people, but good people want to get away from bad people.

To understand why this is true, you only have to refer back to the lamprey/bass simile. A bass would be way better off if every lamprey died right now, but lampreys would shrivel and die without fish to eat alive.

This is the kind of interaction Scott Adams had in mind when he made the remarks that changed his life.

He says he’s not a racist. He says he was being “hyperbolic.” I don’t know what’s true. I do know that people with a ghetto mindset are parasites, and the people who support them are hosts. This is also true of spoiled Antifa kids and most Palestinians.

He said people should stay the hell away from blacks. That’s ridiculous, but if he had said we should stay away from racist blacks who prey on everyone else, he would have been correct, and he should have extended the notion to other parasitic groups. For example, no honest person can say it’s smart to live near gypsies.

America the nation is parasitic now. I mean the government and cultural establishment. As policy, it torments, libels, censors, imprisons, beats, and robs people who are its biggest assets, in order to feed vicious common trash who happen to be of voting age. So why not leave?

Is it really that big a deal to be an American citizen? What do you really get?

1. Stability. Well, that is off the table now that civil war is approaching. And having a continuous line of government doesn’t mean individuals have stability. The USSR was around for a long time, and people there lived in terror and never knew when they might be whisked off to camps or places of execution. And lots of countries are stable.

2. Wealth. That sounds fine, but the fact that your country is wealthy doesn’t mean you are, and the fact that it’s poor doesn’t mean you’re poor. You can be wealthy anywhere, and it’s best to be wealthy in a place where half of the population isn’t trying to take what you have, claiming falsely that you stole it. One in six Swiss citizens are millionaires by American standards. That’s not bad. There are several countries where it is easier to get rich than it is in America. And maybe you’re already rich, so all you need is a country that won’t rob you.

3. Quality of life. This is a slippery quantity, because the people whose efforts to define it are generally not conservative, but still, the US is not at the top of most lists. Here’s an important part of quality of life: not having racist, anti-Christian, antisemitic, murderous terrorism-lovers constantly threatening to take what you have and turn you into a voiceless slave.

The weather in most of America is bad for a big part of the year. The food is not very good except for prime beef. The people in most areas are rude. We have a couple of large demographics, plus some small ones, that run around shooting, robbing, and raping everyone else plus each other. This is not paradise.

What if you travel and a foreign country locks you up or otherwise mistreats you? Uncle Sam will save you! No, he won’t. I mean, he might, but don’t count on it. Foreign prisons are full of American citizens. If you’re a famous lesbian who willfully committed a stupid crime with a severe penalty, you might get help, but in the process, a far better person might be left imprisoned in the foreign country for political reasons. Not that this has happened recently.

Is it heresy to criticize our food? No. Go to Europe or the Far East some day and look at the produce. We breed plants that taste bad but generate higher profits. They breed plants that taste fantastic, and often, they also look better than ours.

The produce in Singapore (where there is virtually no farmland) and Hong Kong (also almost no farmland) is magnificent. Wonder why we can’t do that.

Consider the Red Delicious apple. I loved them when I was a kid. Now they’re disgusting. I can’t understand why stores sell them. They bred the flavor out of them and made the texture sort of like a mixture of sand and wet styrofoam. They apparently ship quite well, however.

Our Granny Smith apples are like sour croquet balls. Can’t remember the last time I saw a ripe one. They’re great for constipation.

We have the Second Amendment! True, but then we need it more than many countries. I don’t think the Czechs and South Koreans worry too much about carjackings and home invasions.

One of the videos on Capitalist Nomad’s channel is titled “You Don’t Owe Your Country Anything.” Wow. In America, that’s blasphemy. But is it true? In many cases, yes.

I obey the law. Mostly. I cost the taxpayer virtually nothing. The police don’t come to my house three times a week to make me stop beating the putative mother of some of my illegitimate children. My kids aren’t in “the system” because I abandoned them. I don’t get affirmative action. I paid full tuition when I was in college. I don’t get student loans and then force better people to pay them off. The amount of tax I pay is really extraordinary because of the nature of my business. It’s fair to say I work for the government. When my grandfather died, my country confiscated enough wealth from his heirs, who had done nothing wrong, to make a person rich. When they brought the Selective Service back, I signed up, agreeing to give my life if they ordered me to. I wasn’t called to serve, but I would have. That’s not a small thing to offer.

Help me understand why I would think I owed America anything. I think our military people have done more for me than anyone except my parents and my mother’s parents, but is our military “America”? Most people have never served.

I do a lot for other people through taxes, but people don’t do anything for me unless I pay them. If I pay them, how can anyone say I owe them for what they’ve done for me?

I benefit from the taxes a certain percentage of Americans pay, but they benefit from mine, too. We use the same roads. I would say the rich benefit me more than anyone, because they pay way more than I do. Thank you, billionaires. Someone appreciates you.

Thank you for infrastructure. Thank you for hospitals and universities. Thank you for aircraft carriers. Thank you for all the things disgraceful politicians bought us with your confiscated money. Thank you for all the corporations that provide great stuff. Thank you for taking risks I won’t take and working harder than I want to.

I’m surrounded by people who cheat the rest of us every day as a matter of routine. Welfare scammers run into the tens of millions, at least. I live in a country where people with no conscience use EBT cards to buy liquor and cigarettes while better people buy their own ramen noodles.

There are whole neighborhoods that are nothing but wealth sinks. The government raises their kids. In prisons, it houses a huge fraction of the adult males and quite a lot of the females. It hands out food, medicine, phones, apartments and all sorts of other things. It pays for programs that help almost no one because almost no one wants to be helped.

Some people owe this country. I am not one of them. If I move somewhere else, America will be worse off, I will be better off, and the country I move to will be improved.

I’m assuming I can move to a decent location. That is still possible.

I don’t often hear people saying they don’t owe America anything, but it’s true for many of us.

I can understand immigrants saying it, provided they didn’t come here from places like Luxembourg or Japan.

Funny thing: I don’t even owe God. That sounds bizarre, but it’s true. He paid the debt I owed him. I don’t owe him for anything in the past, but I definitely have a son’s duty to serve him in the future. And I want to serve him. He’s wonderful, and serving him is a joy. Every good thing in my life came from him, and he gave it all in spite of my revolting attitude and slimy deeds.

I don’t claim America owes me, except that it has a duty to do what our stupid, cruel, clumsy government has promised in return for being a good and loyal citizen. I have done a lot for the citizenry, but I was forced to do most of it, and I don’t consider anyone to be indebted to me for it.

Saying I don’t owe America isn’t the same as saying I don’t love America. I do. Or, rather, I love what America was. I love what little vanishing bits of it still are. I can’t love the whole country. No one in his right mind can love Chicago or Newark. It would be like loving kidney stones.

I suppose I’ve written enough. I have unwound. I don’t know whether I have guessed correctly about Capitalist Nomad’s content. Maybe tomorrow I’ll actually watch a video.

We Yearn to Breathe Free

My wife and I had a good day yesterday, not that this is unusual.

We had an anniversary recently, and we had problems finding her a good gift, so I decided we needed to go to the big city. We succeeded in getting the gift, and she also got to eat at the Cheesecake Factory, where she would happily take up residence if they would let her.

We also visited an African grocery run by Nigerians. I thought maybe they would have a lot of interesting food I would want to try, but it was pretty bad. The store did not smell good, it was run-down, and they sold things I didn’t know were edible. Potato leaves, for example.

The web suggests “potato leaves” are really sweet potato leaves. That would make more sense. The potato is a member of the nightshade family, and you’re not supposed to eat nightshade leaves.

I was glad we managed to get her things she liked. I thought about her good fortune. She used to bathe in a bucket, and here she was, buying nice things at upscale malls and living in a big house will all sorts of appliances, not to mention air conditioning and a power grid that almost never fails (sorry, California).

I asked her if she was glad she was in America, and she surprised me by saying she wasn’t. She said she only preferred America to Zambia because I was here.

In Zambia, she lived with two other women in a cheap apartment. She had to wash her clothes by hand. She had no car because an ex-boyfriend had taken hers. The power went on and off constantly. She had to buy used goods from China. But she prefers Zambia to America. Why?

One reason is that she was raised in Zambia. The other reason, however, is that America is insane.

In Zambia, men in dresses aren’t holding antisemitic protests outside Jewish businesses. Perversion flags are rare. Homosexual marriage is not legal. Zambians don’t riot. Wokeism isn’t a threat. Political censorship is not much of a problem. Christianity is in their constitution.

Here, we are preparing for a civil war because leftists have become cruel and oppressive. That’s not happening in Zambia.

Her preference actually makes some sense.

Zambia has other problems. Drunkenness is out of control. Paganism does great harm. Corruption is severe. The economy is always disastrous. According to my wife, Zambians are lazy, so things are not likely to improve. Still, apocalyptic violence will probably be much less severe there than it will be (is) here.

Zambians don’t hate each other the way Americans do.

Am I saying I would consider moving to Zambia? Sure. If things got bad enough here, and Zambia looked better. I want to survive like everyone else. I don’t want to spend my days shooting and burying black-clad trespassers who want to punish my family for the crime of existing.

I really, really don’t want to move to Africa, but what if we have no choice?

To leftists, the existence of everyone else is a capital offense. We have seen them try to cleanse the world with rifles. They did it in places like China and Cambodia, to name two examples. Many here have praised Trump’s failed assassin. They’re always waiting to be released on better people so they can destroy them and take what they have. After they get what they have, they destroy that, too, because leftist traits, not social inequities, are what made poor leftists poor.

Alan Dershowitz just did a podcast in which he expressed dismay over an anti-Jewishness protest.

Dershowitz loves admiration and being associated with celebrities, so he lives in Martha’s Vineyard. As we all know, Martha’s Vineyard is a rich leftist enclave where wealthy socialist hypocrites pat each other on the back all day.

Unbelievably, Martha’s Vineyard has a Chabad branch. Chabad is an ultra-Orthodox Jewish organization. Maybe they’re in the Vineyard so they can milk guilt-ridden Jewish celebrities for cash. I very much doubt a significant percentage of Martha’s Vineyard Jewish residents have any interest in giving up sin and pepperoni pizza.

Chabad is not affiliated with Israel or the IDF.

Chabad held a sort of festival of Jewish culture. Music, food, and so on. Dershowitz says antisemitic Democrats showed up in a mob and protested. As he noted, they were protesting Jewishness itself. The organization and the event had nothing to do with the war in Gaza.

Democrats showed up to accuse Jews of the crime of being Jewish.

If your crime is being Jewish, what is the appropriate punishment? Let me be more obvious: what is the final solution?

What is your defense? There isn’t one. You can become a kapo, though. You can join those who persecute your people and postpone your own destruction. Many Jews are doing this. Many did it under the Greeks and Romans.

You don’t know about the protest because you don’t watch his Youtube channel. It should have been on the national news, but as a Babylon Bee character has said, hating Jews is cool now. That is literally true. Our press is about 90% leftist, and leftists crave admiration. To get excited about the problem of antisemitism is to break with the cool kids. Coverage could also bring disrepute on the Democratic Party, and no one in the press wants that to happen.

The thing that puts a knot in one’s stomach is knowing Dershowitz will complain and admonish and then vote for Kamala Harris anyway. American Jews will continue assisting their persecutors and persecuting their friends.

Americans in general are starting to behave the same way. Notice how we give privilege to hostile military-age immigrants from Muslim countries, China, and Latin American nations that are not friendly.

I keep wondering if I’ve given Dershowitz too much credit. He’s supposed to be brilliant, but I haven’t seen him say anything really clever, and I’ve seen him say things that would appear to indicate that he is not brilliant, even for a lawyer. His analysis of the Baldwin manslaughter case was very poor.

Law is not that hard. Law professors are smarter than most professors, but not a whole lot smarter. They are not in the same lofty stratum as STEM people. You can be a Supreme Court justice and be substantially less bright than a state college professor of electrical engineering.

America is turning into something resembling Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, so I understand why my wife would want to live somewhere else. You wouldn’t think a poverty-stricken African nation would tempt anyone, but these are strange times.

I wonder if Christian countries in Africa would accept Jewish and Christian refugees from America. Maybe they would. They need money and educated people with skills.

I used to think I might be called upon to shelter Jews. I now think that would be impossible, because you can’t hide anything in modern America. I no longer consider it a serious possibility.

Now I think a foreign country may have to shelter me.

Here is a funny fact no one ever talks about: good people want to get away from bad people, but bad people want to be with good people.

When you judge two parties that don’t get along, the one that wants nothing to do with the other is usually right, and the one that wants to force the other to stay close is usually evil.

The other day, I was thinking about my health, and I wondered if something I experienced could be a symptom of cancer. My reflexive response was to think, “Maybe I can get out of this place!”, meaning the world. That was the very first thing I thought of. Remarkable. This is not new. Whenever I read that a person has died, I can’t help thinking, “Good for him!”

Then I thought about my family and regretted it, because I would be abandoning them. I also thought about the suffering cancer patients go through. Then I thought about cancer patients who didn’t suffer all that badly. A year or so on painkillers, a sudden downturn, and then off they go. Worse than growing old and feeble and being tormented by leftists? No. That’s a chilling realization. Millions of people leftists have abused, both dead and living, would have preferred cancer and death.

I actually had these thoughts. As much as I enjoy life, I can’t feel enthusiastic about a future in this sick, twisted country.

Get Used to Hearing That Cackle

What a disappointing day. Joe Biden finally got his wife’s permission to drop out of the presidential race. As of now, Dr. Jill Biden, First Lady, is no more.

Welcome back, Mrs. Joe Biden.

You know, Joe and Kamala are both doctors. They hold Juris Doctor degrees. Unlike an Ed.D., which is what Jill Biden and Bill Cosby have, a Juris Doctor requires slightly above average intelligence. It’s not a Ph.D., but it’s better than an Ed.D. Still, no one ever says “Dr. Joe” or “Dr. Kamala.” No one ever said “Dr. Michelle.”

Just putting it out there.

As of today, people are scratching Mrs. Joe Biden’s name off invitation lists. Some, I would guess, with sighs of relief. There may even be giddiness.

This is pretty much what I expected. Demented, arrogant, stubborn, and angry, Joe held out until they nearly had to give him roofies and have a ventriloquist withdraw for him.

Now we face Kamala. Joe has endorsed her, but not until after he withdrew, signaling a certain reluctance. My impression is that he doesn’t like her very much. It could be that he remembers her calling him a racist in a 2020 debate, or it could be her persistent refusal to do anything whatsoever, or put her name on anything, as vice president.

I was afraid Hillary Clinton might get into the race, but she has endorsed Harris, so we can breathe a sigh of relief. Hillary might have beaten Trump.

Her health is no good, and I doubt she could manage to campaign without collapsing a few times. We all remember the video of her handlers practically rolling her into her special black lift van. They got her to the open door on her own two feet, more or less, but when it opened, she dropped like ImClone stock after Martha Stewart sold it.

They literally propped her up against a bollard to make it look like she was okay.

When you talk about today’s Democrats, you have to say “literally” a lot. That was not always true.

She may not be up to the stress, either. Insiders say she threw a drunken, screaming fit the night she lost the 2016 election. That was 8 years ago, and she has not gotten any younger.

Newsom says he’s not running, which is good. I don’t want to see endless uncensored videos of piles of excrement on California sidewalks. Whitmer won’t run, either. It would be hard to sell the sane states on a tyrant who literally put the population of Michigan under house arrest for months.

I guess it’s Kamala, and that’s about as much as we could hope for. Biden is not very bright, yet, remarkably, she is conspicuously less so. She says bizarre, patently unintelligent things and cackles ingratiatingly, looking around for support which usually doesn’t come. “ACK ACK ACK ACK ACK ACK ACK ACK.” A lot of voters will get tired of hearing that before the election.

Kamala’s initial failure to pass the California bar exam will surely come up repeatedly. That will help.

It’s a big deal when a lawyer fails a state bar exam with no extenuating circumstances. The California test is hard as bar exams go, but a lot of people who are not very smart have passed it on the first try.

I remember taking the Florida exam. I didn’t prepare all that well for it, and when I left the test room on the last day, I wondered if I had failed. Then I found out I had done exceptionally well. That should give you an idea how hard a typical bar exam is, and while the California test is harder, it’s not the Physics GRE.

God may be giving us a big break here. I certainly hope so. The thought of having Kamala Harris as our president is too painful to dwell on. And who would she choose to run with her? Maybe someone even worse. What if she picks Elizabeth Warren?

Biden’s presidency has been disastrous, but I would take him over Harris all day every day.

My thinking is that Biden held out for three reasons.

1. He is arrogant and demented.
2. His wife really, really wants to remain First Lady instead of being relegated to going to charity luncheons in moldy, starless Wilmington ballrooms three times a year.
3. Somebody has to pardon the Bidens. Federal crimes have a 5-year statute of limitations, and a lot of skulduggery has taken place among the Bidens relatively recently.

I think powerful people sat Biden down this weekend, just like Obama and Hillary sat him down in 2015, and told him it was time to sing his 10 o’clock song.

Remember that? Biden assumed he would be the nominee back then, but in those days, people still remembered him as a perennial butt of jokes from both sides of the aisle. He took his job and himself seriously, but no one else in the White House did. They sat him down and made him accept the truth: he was not a real vice president. He was just a harmless-looking running mate intended to make people feel better about Obama.

People forget, but it was remarkable to see an 8-year vice president get the foot in the face from people he worked with every day. As we all know, it’s just assumed that a vice president will get the nod when his boss’s last term is up. When it doesn’t happen, it means only one thing: a lack of confidence from party insiders.

He won in 2020 mainly because Hillary was too feeble and a lot of spoiled brats were angry at Trump for no reason at all. People like me said Biden was demented, but in those days, he was somewhat more coherent than he is now. Democrats decided they could prop him up like Strom Thurmond, and the public accepted it.

Obama and Hillary put him through something resembling the Total Perspective Vortex; the fictional machine that crushed Zaphod Beeblebrox’s deranged self-admiration and made him understand how insignificant and unimpressive he was.

I guess they kept the Vortex oiled and calibrated in case Biden needed to be deflated.

So how did they convince Biden to quit?

They could not fix his dementia or arrogance, so that wasn’t a factor. They could not promise Mrs. Joe Biden she would continue to pal around with the Clooneys and the Hankses. She will definitely be exiled to Wilmington, where she risks becoming the state’s Miss Havisham without the clout. Here’s one thing they could offer: relief from federal prosecution for the whole Biden clan.

It may be that if a Democrat wins, we will see a suppression of Biden-related criminal investigations and prosecutions, and we could possibly see a series of pardons and/or commutations. This may be what they promised Joe to get him to quit.

Will Biden have the sand to pardon Hunter before he leaves office? That’s a great question. He won’t do it before the election. That’s for sure. Not unless he is forced to resign before we vote. But after? What does he have to lose? If the election is in the bag, and he is about to be trundled off to Wilmington to die, maybe he will want to save his son more than his legacy. It would be hard for anyone to resist that temptation. Even a decent person.

I think Jill and Hunter had to be shouted down, and the Biden bros and the Biden sis must be nervous right now.

These are my guesses.

I wish Biden had continued his campaign, but Kamala is about the best second choice we could hope for. She will probably lose, and if she wins, she will make an insufferable ass of herself every day, resulting in an extremely weak presidency that helps Republican officeholders of every imaginable level. The damage done to the federal judiciary will be severe, but it won’t be any worse than what Biden would have done.

Kamala’s insufferability tour starts now.

Will Biden resign the presidency now that he has as much as admitted he can’t do the job? No. Mrs. Joe Biden can only be pushed so far.

Introducing the Olbermann Index

I keep saying evil spirits are loose on the earth, corrupting people’s minds. They fill us with delusions. That’s why people keep saying so many nutty things these days. It explains a lot of the Democratic Party’s platform. It explains the flat Earth insanity. It explains the people who think the pandemic, not just the virus, was created deliberately. It explains the folks who insist men are women.

Today it occurred to me that there may be a person we can use as our barometer/coal mine canary. Keith Olbermann.

Olbermann is, without exaggeration, deranged. He has both feet planted firmly in police welfare-check territory, not far at all from the threshold of involuntary commitment. He says things so kooky they would embarrass Whoopi Goldberg.

Today, President Trump’s former physician, Representative Ronny Jackson, M.D., described Trump’s ear injury, which he has examined. He says it’s a 2-centimeter-wide wound which is healing normally.

Olbermann made two astonishingly unhinged remarks.

1. “In brief: Ronny Jackson isn’t a doctor. Which is perfect, because Trump wasn’t hit by a bullet.”

2. “Dear @abcnews: Jackson doesn’t have a license. You might as well have cited Doc Martens or Doc Gooden”

He directed the second raving at the X account of ABC News, that noted distributor of pro-Trump conspiracy theories.

Of course, everyone knows Dr. Jackson is…Dr. Jackson. Former White House physician. His license is active. It is not clear where Olbermann got the idea it was not.

Everyone also knows this: an experienced medical doctor who loses his license (unlike Dr. Jackson) will not instantly lose his ability to treat and describe wounds. It’s not like medical school is uploaded to a flash drive, and when they jerk your license, they pull the flash drive out of a port on the side of your head.

I wonder if it would be useful to keep tabs on Olbermann, because maybe the day he runs down a busy street in his underwear, shrieking that J.D. Vance put Tesla nanobots in his Paxil, could be the day before the rapture.

More seriously, if he starts posting demands that his fans go out and start killing Republicans, it may signal a pivot from a mild derangement pandemic to full-on mass hysteria that may require people to avoid going out in public until the Lord calls his children.

This guy is lost. I don’t see any hope of a return to sanity, if he ever was sane.

He is far from alone. One third of Democrats say the assassination attempt was staged. They think it’s possible for a kid 130 yards from a man to deliberately nick his ear, 1/4″ from his skull, while the man’s head is moving, with a crummy AR-15 and a box of rounds he just bought at a local store. No shooter on Earth, with any equipment, could do that.

They’re worse than the liberals who think the police can shoot criminals in the leg whenever they want.

The numbers are staggering. One third. There are supposedly 48 million registered Democrats, so up to 16 million people may have become so detached from reality they should be considered a danger to themselves and others.

Anyway, I will be looking for significant incremental jumps in the lunacy. Maybe it will be enlightening.

Get Ready for Your Last Stand

For some reason, I started reading about stand mixers. While I was doing that, I decided to see which one is currently considered the ultimate. I could be missing out.

When I say “ultimate,” I don’t include commercial mixers. I’m talking about mixers that sell for less than a grand.

What do people always say when you say “mixer”? “KITCHENAID!” Sadly, they have been fooled.

Kitchenaid makes great-looking mixers based on the old Hobart Kitchenaid commercial mixers. Not the real Hobart commercial mixers with bowls big enough to bathe a golden retriever. The little-bitty ones with 5-quart bowls.

Hobart is a commercial appliance maker, and they started the Kitchenaid company in 1919 to make mixers. Hobart doesn’t make Kitchenaids any more. They make real commercial mixers starting at over $4,000.

The old Hobarts looked like modern Kitchenaids, but they were simpler and tougher. They had strong gears that lasted decades. Modern Kitchenaids look like Hobarts on the outside, with added levers and buttons and lots of pretty colors designed to fool women, but they have plastic gears, and they fall apart.

Even Kitchenaid’s “Pro Line” mixers come with a warning. You’re not supposed to knead dough for more than two minutes because your motor might burn up. I guess this protects the plastic gears.

I think this is Kitchenaid’s (Whirlpool’s) way of voiding warranties. They sell you a tool to do a job, knowing it’s not fit for the purpose. You try to use it, and they say you abused it.

You buy, you keep. So sorry. CCP keep you money.

It’s strange that Kitchenaid mixers came from Hobart, and Kitchenaid now pretends it has a “pro” line. Hobart’s Kitchenaid was the real Kitchenaid pro line. CCP-adjacent Kitchenaid doesn’t make commercial-grade products.

When I decided to look at current reviews, I went to America’s Test Kitchen. They have done a fantastic job in the past. Before they fired Christopher Kimball. They do tons of testing. Before they will give you a cookie recipe, they’ll make hundreds of cookies. I thought they would know about mixers.

Guess what they recommended? “KITCHENAID!”

In the review itself, they said the mixers might burn up when kneading past the two-minute mark. So they recommended mixers…you can’t actually use. Many, many doughs go way past the two-minute mark.

Those kids can’t be trusted without daddy in the house. Everything went to pot when Christopher Kimball left.

What else do they like? Ankarsrum. Named for a town in Sweden, or maybe Norway, like there’s a difference. Ankarsrum mixers are supposed to be lifetime appliances, and they do a great job. For the low price of $750. Caveats: they’re hard to use, so you might ruin things you’re trying to cook. But they’re great. Really.

I don’t see the logic. If there were nothing else available, I would understand. But what if there is something else?

They didn’t test the something else. They didn’t test Bosch or Nutrimill. These companies offer more or less the same thing. Bosch calls it the Universal Plus mixer. The Bosch version has a side thing on it you can use to attach other implements. You can grind meat and shove it into sausage casings with it. You can grate big blocks of cheese.

I’ve had one of these for maybe 15 years. I got it when I was making pizzas for a church run by con artists. They already had a tiny Hobart, and it would make a few portions of dough. The Bosch will make 14 one-pound loaves of bread in one shot. Yes, you read that correctly. It’s crazy. That’s enough dough for 14 16″ pizzas.

The Bosch is light. It’s quiet. It’s easy to clean. It lasts forever. It does a very good or great job with everything. You can get a new Nutramill without the Bosch side tower for $300, so less than half the price of an Ankarsrum.

Years ago, I had a complaint with the Bosch. It has a plastic pillar sticking up in the middle of the bowl, and when I made cheesecake, batter would stick to the pillar. It didn’t get mixed in. Now they have a scrapey thing you attach to the pillar, and it shoves unmixed material back where it will get mixed. Problem solved.

I have no idea why ATK didn’t review the Bosch. They should know about it. It’s famous among home chefs and pizza makers. It’s the number-one mixer for serious pizza at a consumer-mixer price.

The Universal Plus has suction cups on the bottom to keep it from jogging around your counters. ATK says it doesn’t like suction cups, because they don’t stick when flour gets on them. Hmm. How could that be fixed? Let’s start a second Los Alamos project. Maybe you could stop setting the mixer down on counters covered with flour.

Maybe ATK isn’t that great now. They also jacked up their prices. Here’s a tip. If you subscribe, and they send you an email with the new Biden-level price, turn them down. They’ll email you again and give you over 50% off.

I would rather have a 12-pound mixer with suction cups than a heavier mixer that relies on mass I have to lift. Not that the Ankarsrum is all that heavy at 18 pounds.

I also have a 7-quart Cuisinart SM-70 stand mixer. It used to get good reviews, but they seem to have vanished. It’s the same mixer Kenwood makes or made. It has been fantastic for me (used very rarely), but you literally need hearing protection to use it. No exaggeration. Cuisinart makes a different mixer now.

The Cuisinart supposedly has 1000 watts of power, and it has done everything I asked it to. It also has a timer with a digital display. Cuisinart is kind of a hinky company, though, so I now avoid buying their products unless there are no substitutes.

Since I bought the Cuisinart, a lot of people have said some pretty nasty things about the reliability, so maybe it’s not so great. Because I have a hand mixer and the Bosch, the Cuisinart has had a very easy life. It has not been tested. It has coasted along like Hunter Biden.

I went for big mixers because no one wants to spend maybe $400 on a kitchen tool and then have an event where it won’t get the job done.

I believe I got the Cuisinart because I was tired of scraping cheesecake batter off the center pillar of the Bosch bowl. I kept the Bosch because it was so wonderful otherwise, and then Bosch fixed the pillar problem.

If you have a Kitchenaid, you’re probably pretty upset right now. I don’t blame you. I understand why you bought it. They look great. And ATK recommends them highly.

It looks like Ankarsrum mixers are only for people who bake every day. I say go with Bosch or Nutrimill. Nobody likes a learning curve that has to be ascended over and over and provides no real benefit.

I still need a good hand mixer. I bought a little Cuisinart 7-speed, but it was annoying because it always started at top speed. It starts in first gear, but for the first half-second, it goes much faster. Then it slows down. By then, it has thrown your ingredients on the wall. I bought a new Cuisinart 9-speed with slow start, which it does not actually have. It literally does exactly what the cheaper one did. I emailed them, and they told me to return it to Amazon, because they didn’t care. The return date was long past.

When I finally get a decent hand mixer, I’ll be like $150 into it at the start because of the Cuisinarts that went to Goodwill.

That’s it, I guess. Avoid Kitchenaid and Cuisinart. Bosch is good. Ankarsrum is probably good if you like a pointless challenge. ATK is suspect.

Good luck with your pizza and cookies.

Shredded Tweets

I am once again not on Twitter.

I tried Twitter for a few days because I thought Elon Musk might be serious about making it a Youtube alternative, but he is not serious, and Twitter was a bad experience. Video sites have to be set up a certain way, and Musk has not yet chosen to set Twitter up correctly. Also, the content on Twitter was largely infantile, not to mention plagiaristic.

I think God showed me a few things.

If you want to use Twitter, first of all, you should pray first. You probably should not be on Twitter.

Once you’re on Twitter, you have to be proactive, not reactive.

Based on what I saw, Twitter is designed–I mean intentionally–to be irritating. It forced me to pick people and things to show up in my feed, and then, instead, it fed me content which was almost certainly selected to provoke me. Biden’s account. Harris’s. Chris Hayes. Jon Favreau.

I saw nearly nothing of the topics I had selected.

For a while, I thought this was all I would ever get. I muted and muted and muted, and the same garbage kept popping up. Eventually, I found that if I scrolled down about a mile, Twitter ran out of anger clickbait and started showing me better things. It still was not great, though.

If you look at the trash Twitter puts at the top of your feed, after a few minutes, you’re angry. You feel like posting rebuttals to the libels and lies.

I had good intentions when I signed up. I thought I could post helpful things, including revelation. I got absorbed in a reactive mindset, however. I felt myself getting pulled into the undignified squabbling. Fortunately, I didn’t get into any arguments. I was not there long enough, and Twitter didn’t promote my posts.

Yes, Twitter does have censorship. If you pay them, they promote the things you say. How is that censorship? Simple. If you promote one group without promoting others, you’re censoring the people you don’t promote. You’re not silencing them, but you might as well be, because nearly no one will see what they write.

Twitter should not accept money to promote posts, except for obvious ads that don’t advance a point of view. It’s fine to promote a post for a brand of breakfast cereal, but they shouldn’t promote argumentative ads.

Back in the 1950’s, radio hosts were imprisoned for accepting secret bribes to play some records more than others. Elon Musk and his team should think about this when they accept secret bribes to promote Twitter accounts. Bribery is still wrong, especially when it pays for censorship.

If you think you have something to say on Twitter, don’t read other people’s posts much. There is not much of anything worth reading. You really have to search to find anything remotely helpful. Just write whatever you want and let it sink or swim.

It’s best not to argue with stupid and biased people. When you do that, you become like them, as Proverbs warns. You can’t change their minds, but you can damage yourself.

“But it’s wrong to refuse to defend what you say!” No, it’s not. Where is that written? “It’s wrong to refuse to consider other people’s views!” Not always. Twitter is full of patent idiocy, and besides, by the time you’re an adult, you should have a considerable number of unshakeable beliefs. If you stay open-minded about absolutely everything your entire life, it doesn’t make you mature and reasonable. It makes you lost and unreliable. You will never be sure of anything, and no one will be able to trust you.

So if you take the approach I’m outlining, who are you like? Yeshua.

If you read the gospels, you will see that Yeshua did not let other people run conversations. He said whatever he wanted. He did not respond to every question people posed. Often, when they tried to corner him with questions, he said things that were not responsive. He spoke of other things that were more useful.

Boxers call this fighting your own fight. You don’t let your opponent decide what kind of fight you will have. You tailor your actions to your best advantage. You do what you’re good at.

If Yeshua were on Twitter today, leftist trolls would treat him the way they treat everyone else. “SOURCE? SOURCE?” They’d make digressive accusations hoping to change the subjects. They’d deliberately misconstrue what he said in order to make him look bad.

A long time ago, God told me I was not in the least bit responsible for the way other people took things I said. If I offended people with the truth, it was their fault, not mine. If I gave them information that could save them from hell, and I didn’t do it in a soothing, unctuous way, I wasn’t responsible if hell was where they ended up.

I don’t have an obligation to get tied down in arguments with stupid people, letting them lie, accuse, misconstrue, and repeat themselves, responding to every idiotic thing they say. I have an obligation to speak the truth, but after a reasonable effort, I can do whatever I want.

If you are usually reactive and not proactive, what are you? A follower. Yeshua created us to be leaders, like him. It’s funny that a person who subscribes to other people’s Twitter posts is called a follower. It’s Biblically accurate.

If you really hear the Holy Spirit, you will get a lot of revelation, and revelation is true. It’s not something to “toss out there for discussion.” Other people’s opinions aren’t helpful. They are degenerate and harmful. The Talmud is full of opinions, like the opinion that Yeshua is in hell, boiling in excrement and semen. Catholics are of the opinion that it’s good to pray to dead people.

There are no opinions in heaven. There is only the truth. This is one of the most excellent things about heaven. When you get there, there will be no protestors and no lies to debunk.

Yeshua is the Prince of Peace. You can’t have peace without agreement.

If I say the Hulk is better than Superman, that’s an opinion, and it’s no better than your opinion. If God tells Jonah the Ninevites need to repent or be destroyed, it’s not suitable matter for discussion. It’s the truth. No one has the right to argue.

I think New York style pizza is better than Chicago style. Reasonable minds may differ. I can’t say I have authority. If I say you need to pray in tongues every day, I speak by revelation, so your contrary opinion has no value, and I have no obligation to listen to it or publish it in a comment.

If I were to go back to Twitter, I would avoid following people.

Once you get revelation, you will be wary of spending too much time with other Christians, because only a small fraction of them will be able to receive what you tell them. This is why Yeshua died with 11 disciples, after teaching thousands. It’s why he had to get away from the disciples frequently. They were better than most, but they were not on his level. He had to be with the Father in order to be refreshed and empowered.

The Christians I saw on Twitter were generally horrible. A lot of accounts are just click farms, trying to make money. Other people fight and call names. I learned two names: “dispy” and “Calvy.” A dispy believes time is divided into eras, or “dispensations,” in which God deals with the human race differently. They believe in the Messianic Age, for example. A Calvy is a Calvinist. I have some vague ideas about what Calvinists believe, but I don’t care enough to look it up so I can explain it here.

Apparently, Calvies and dispies don’t get along.

I saw people in various factions, fighting about doctrine, ridiculing their opponents. They referred to scholars and preachers to give their opinions authority. It was tiresome.

We are all supposed to hear from the Holy Spirit, not from John MacArthur, the Pope, and Joyce Meyer. If, after a year of salvation, you are still depending on Kenneth Copeland’s books, or Augustine’s, for information about God, you are missing out and filling your mind with damaging lies.

Apparently the Schofield reference Bible is controversial. I barely know what it is. People get really heated up discussing it.

Yeshua was uneducated, and so were the 11 disciples. Somehow, we still give Hellenist scholars like Thomas Aquinas, as well as other arrogant academics who never healed or prophesied, more respect than we give our neighbors who listen to the Holy Spirit.

It seems to me that engaging with Twitter Christians is a big waste of my time. They already know everything, but nearly all of them are wrong.

More and more, as a resident of Earth, I have the feeling that I’m watching people brawl, through bulletproof glass in a nuthouse. I just don’t know what I can do for them.

I can always intercede and give, and I try to put useful things on my blog, but that’s about it.

The Republican convention has not been encouraging. We’ve had a whore, a pagan who prays to unclean spirits and has nominal Christians join her, a socialist union official, and Hulk Hogan, a professional geek who made his money in a televised sideshow.

A geek is a person who does revolting or sensational things on a carnival midway. That’s professional wrestling. Profane, juvenile, lowbrow entertainment that corrupts kids and fuels the steroid industry.

Hogan isn’t even respected by other geeks. He is hated by many of his peers because he ratted them out to Vince McMahon when they tried to organize and negotiate with the WWE. He pretended to be their friend while he was doing this. He has a reputation as a backstabber. He took steroids all of his adult life and lied about it. When he was investigated, he snitched on Vince McMahon.

Part of his fame comes from a nude video in which he had sex with a friend’s wife. His birth name isn’t even Hogan, and he plagiarized “Hulk” from a comic book. His birth name is Terry Bollea. What does he have to do with conservatism? They could have had Curtis Sliwa or Nick Sandmann. Somebody respectable.

I understand that not every speaker will be a war hero or a missionary, but they could do better. I guess this is the Trump family influence.

Anyway, I’m off Twitter.

Twitter Still Stuck in 5th Grade

Youtube is memory-holing a lot of firearm channels this summer.

The term “memory hole” comes from 1984. The protagonist, Winston, worked for a censorship and revisionism agency called the Ministry of Truth. In his job, he had to get rid of documents the government did not like, and in order to destroy them, he dropped them into the memory hole, which was a tube that led to an incinerator.

Like the ministry, it had an ironic name, because it was really the forgetfulness hole. Things went into it to be forgotten, not remembered.

Interestingly, one of the worst punishments of days gone by was the oubliette. The name comes from oublier, the French word for “forget.” An oubliette was a cavity with one small opening. An oppressor would lower someone he didn’t like through the opening and then forget him. I don’t know how they got food and water in and feces and urine out.

Oubliettes are also called dungeons.

According to Wikipedia, which has to be right sometimes, it is believed that some structures now called oubliettes are actually old cisterns which have been mislabeled in an effort to wow tourists. That’s interesting, because the word says Jeremiah was thrown into a cistern. It makes more sense to me now.

The practice of putting things and people into holes in order to erase their memory explains hell, which is literally a hole where God puts people the rest of us will eventually forget. One of the worst curses in Judaism is to have your name and memory forgotten. Orthodox Jews call Yeshua “YESHU” because it’s an initialism for “May his name and memory be blotted out forever” in Hebrew.

A friend of my wife’s just had a dream. He was in Israel, a place he has never visited. He was in a golden city. Other people were arriving. They knew they were being prepared for a wonderful event. Everyone was happy. They were walking around looking at all the beautiful objects. A Muslim family showed up, and they were highly distressed because they had to leave. The friend worries about his mother and sister, who are not good Christians. In the dream, they were not with him, and he could not remember them.

He’s Zambian, but is family comes from India, from Hindu stock. His mother and sister are not real Christians. His mother likes keeping Hindu artefacts around,, thinking they will benefit the family. That’s idolatry.

The dream was consistent with beliefs about heaven and the rapture. In the rapture, people are called away to heaven, and the event they are summoned for is the wedding of Yeshua.

The left belongs to Satan, and it is working hard, not just to punish its enemies, but to silence them and erase their memory from the world. And Youtube’s channel-deletion campaign is part of it.

Get used to it. It will get worse.

Youtube has gone after a popular gun channel in which an old man from Tennessee shoots various guns in his backyard. He’s popular, so various businesses supply him with ammunition and guns, and he recommends them. Somehow, this violates Youtube’s new policies, retroactively.

One of the neat things about modern leftists is that you can’t save yourself by obeying them in the present and future. They make new rules and apply them ex post facto so you become guilty in the present even if you were in originally in compliance or you repented before the rules were made. Repenting after the rules are made is generally pointless. There is no forgiveness.

Youtube is controlled by arrogant, deluded, willfully stupid, cruel young socialists and pagans who have no principles and no empathy, so Youtube keeps getting worse. The noose tightens more and more.

I use Youtube because you can still get away with a lot there; you can say a lot of controversial things that are true without being banned or having your videos deleted. This is especially true if their shadowbanning has minimized your viewer base. They go after big Youtubers first. I’ve had videos deleted, but not many. I’m a tiny fish there.

When I saw that they were going to delete 2,700 of the gun guy’s videos going back about a decade and a half, I thought about X. Elon Musk claims he wants to make it competitive with Youtube.

Every so often, I check X out to see if I should use it. I delete my account over and over, so you would think I would be done with it, but with Musk’s video aspirations in mind, I decided to check it out one more time.

Nothing has changed. The interface is nothing like Youtube’s. It’s not useful for finding videos. It’s cluttered with people screaming vitriol at each other on a 5th-grade level. It’s full of opportunists trying to get rich by accumulating followers. It’s jammed up with people saying exactly the same things over and over without attribution. It’s junior high with no teacher present to slam a ruler on his desk.

If they want video, they are going to have to replicate Youtube, just like Rumble did, only better, because Rumble is clumsy.

I guess I’ll delete my account again.

A lot of people “there” are losing their minds over Amber Rose and Harmeet Dhillon.

Rose is a slut who became famous by having sex with rappers and producing pornography. She sells pornography right now. She says she’s an atheist. She’s a founder of the slutwalk movement. She has no place in the GOP. But the RNC invited her anyway under the big tent theory. The idea is to keep lowering standards until just about everyone on Earth can be considered conservative. The obvious down side is that when you accept your enemies into your midst, you become like them.

This is obvious to intelligent people, but not to a big percentage of Republicans. The ones who want tight borders and low taxes but don’t care about God.

People are saying the kind of stupid things you would expect. They’re comparing Rose to Mary Magdalene, whom tradition says was a whore. They’re saying we should not judge people based on their past mistakes. Obviously (so tired of needing that word), any whore who ran around with Yeshua was a repentant whore whose mistakes were in her past, not her present. Amber Rose is still at it, hammer and tongs.

Other people are squawking over Harmeet Dhillon, a Sikh who prayed to an unclean spirit on the convention stage.

One side says, correctly, that pagans should not be leading prayers before a party that tries to connect itself to Christianity. The big tent side says we shouldn’t care about religion or, more ridiculously, that Dhillon’s false god is our God.

Obviously (he wrote, sighing), her false god is not our God. Calling someone “god” doesn’t make him the true God of Christianity. In order to be a Christian, you have to acknowledge that Yeshua is God. If Yeshua is not in there, you worship spirits other than God, and ultimately, Satan is your deity. You must accept the belief that you are filthy and unable to save yourself, and that Yeshua saved you by allowing himself to be tortured to death for you.

I don’t feel I should have to shoulder the burden of explaining this because it is so…wait for it…obvious. Read the Bible. Yeshua was (and is) the most intolerant man who ever lived. Not only did he have no tolerance for heathen religions; he called Jews who claimed to worship Yahweh, yet who refused to acknowledge him as well, sons of Satan.

Genesis says Yahweh is a jealous God. You can’t have Buddha and Yahweh. You can’t have Ra or Zeus and Yahweh. You can’t have yoga and Yahweh. You have to have Yahweh alone, and he manifests in the father, Yeshua, and the Holy Spirit. Yeshua made it plain that anyone who rejects him rejects Yahweh.

Dhillon honored a filthy spirit that hates God, and thousands of Christians bowed their ignorant heads and agreed with her in idolatry and blasphemy. In doing so, they invited curses on their party.

Conservatives and Christians aren’t the only ones having a spat. Hindus and Sikhs are now going at each other in tweets.

People say Dhillon has done great things for the GOP. Yes, that’s called infiltration. You infiltrate, you make yourself seem indispensable, and then you destroy. Homosexuals start churches for the same reason, whether they realize it or not. Satan uses them to sow discord among believers and bring acceptance of abomination into God’s living room.

Yoga is good for your back. It’s still idolatry. It’s unacceptable. Doing things for the GOP doesn’t make you a viable religious leader in a Christian environment.

The GOP spat at God by letting this heathen represent it.

Does this mean she shouldn’t be allowed to be in the party? No, because the party is not a religious organization. The sad fact is that man chose politicians over God a long time ago, so our political factions don’t belong to God. But when the GOP invited Dhillon to spread her filth at its convention, it entered the realm of religion. It should have stuck with Christians or had no prayer at all.

Is it fair to let Christians lead prayer while excluding others? I don’t care. What’s fair to man is filth and provocation to God.

There is no way to reconcile the secular mindset with the holy mindset. They can’t work together neatly. Secular people intrude on religion, and people who know God intrude on secular rule. I will always come down on the side of God. I don’t care if I offend people. Their false god is offended already. I offend and infuriate Satan just by existing. I can’t make things any worse.

If I don’t offend Satan, I offend God. That’s disastrous and evil.

I never wanted Vivek Ramaswamy in the White House, because he’s a Hindu. I would have picked him over a nominal Christian who is worse for the church, but he could never be my first choice among nominal Christians who are equally friendly to God’s children and Israel.

People claim Dhillon’s deity, Waheguru, is the same as Yahweh. No, he is not. If you don’t accept Yeshua, you have rejected Yahweh. Any god that is not the father of Yeshua is no god at all. The world is full of people who pray to “God” all the time yet hate Yeshua and work against his children.

Waheguru is genderless. God is male, from one end to the other. Yeshua is male. The Holy Spirit is male. Hindus call on Waheguru when they practice yoga.

There is no way to turn Waheguru into the God of Christians. Calling God genderless is a huge blasphemy, and expecting him to show up while you worship demons in a yoga studio is beyond absurd. Failing to acknowledge the crucifixion separates you from Yahweh.

By having this heathen pray to Satan before the convention, the GOP signaled a willingness to break with Yeshua. No surprise. The GOP is a carnal enterprise. It’s not a church.

I consider this yet another sign of the apocalypse. I will vote for Trump over Biden, but I am not gullible enough to think I belong to the party of God. There is no such party on Earth. I will cast my earthly vote for Caesar and my supernatural votes for Yeshua.

Twitter is a reminder of what the world has become. I don’t see my place in it. Maybe I will change my mind if Musk turns it into a workable video platform, but I don’t think I will.

Chicago Crust Leaves me Unimpressed

I decided to try my hand at Chicago style pizza again last night. The results were mixed.

There is a guy who has a site called Real Deep Dish Pizza, and he publishes a recipe he calls the Holy Grail. He says he updates the recipe sometimes. You can download it as a PDF. There is no point in linking to the site. You’ll find it fast if you want.

Internet pizza people respect this guy, so I thought his recipe ought to be a good starting point.

I tried mail-order pizza from Lou Malnati’s over the last few days. The cheese pizza was pretty good, although the crust was harder than I thought it should have been. The sausage pizza was not good because the sausage boiled in the sauce. The sauce in Chicago style pizza goes above the cheese, and the toppings to in between, so they boil. There was no browning at all.

I liked one thing about the style. Putting the sauce on top makes it possible to use nearly any cheese. Only a few cheeses will work on top of a pizza. Radiant heat makes cheese behave badly, and if your cheese is in the 98% that don’t work, you will get brown cheese, tough cheese, greasy cheese, wet cheese, or some other disastrous result.

I decided to use Holy Grail crust and my own sauce and cheese. I thought that if I tried plain old grocery mozzarella, and it worked, I would have a secret weapon for those times when I didn’t feel like paying for overpriced cheese locally or driving to get restaurant cheese. I decided to use brick whole milk mozzarella. Not even low moisture. This was risky, because cheese that isn’t low moisture can release a lot of water. I thought it wouldn’t matter, because the cheese was going to be sitting in sauce. The water would go into the sauce, where it couldn’t hurt anything.

I don’t have a 12″ pizza pan, which is what the crust recipe was supposed to fit. I do have cast iron skillets, but I didn’t want to fool with them. I got myself a 9″ by 13″ steel nonstick pan at my local grocery. I did some math and decided I needed to scale the circular recipe up by a factor of 1.1.

Making the dough was no problem. I dumped everything but the oil in the Cuisinart, beat it up, let it rest 5 minutes so the water got into the flour, and blended the corn oil in. I used a lot of yeast, which is generally a bad idea, but I was in a rush. The dough rose fine, and it was easier to handle than ordinary dough. The oil made a difference.

I used a pound of Galbani mozzarella in thick slices. I used a pint of sauce made from Cento crushed tomatoes and a little Stanislaus Saporito sauce, which is tomato paste and basil. I added garlic, oregano, and a little sugar. I used both powdered and fresh garlic because they complement each other.

I baked at 450° for maybe 40 minutes. The pie baked up fine, but I had to put foil over it to prevent the exposed parts of the crust from burning.

The cheese worked. That was a big relief. It was just like the cheese you would find in fried mozzarella in a mid-tier restaurant. The sauce was good, but next time I’ll reduce the Saporito, because it made it a little ketchupy.

The crust was not thrilling. The texture was about like the frozen pies, only better, but the flavor was bland. The crusts on the frozen pies had a corn flavor. There was no cornmeal in them, so it must have come from the oil Malnati’s used. Some people recommend butter-flavored Crisco, which sounds gross.

The crust was too thick, so my guess is that the guy who wrote the recipe for a 12″ pie used too much stuff. It was half an inch thick on the bottom, which is almost twice as thick as the crusts on the frozen pies.

I don’t know if I’ll keep trying, because Sicilian and Detroit style (thinner Sicilian, more or less) are fantastic, and I don’t think Chicago style can measure up, even at its best. I think you have to be raised on it to love it. If I do try, I’ll look for a different oil or shortening. I will definitely use less yeast.

Think about this. New York style is the most popular pizza in North America. It started way over on the East Coast, and they now sell it in Alaska and Hawaii. Neapolitan style has caught on, too. You can find it in every big American city. In 8 decades, Chicago style has gone almost nowhere. There are very, very few places outside of Illinois that sell it. If it’s so great, why doesn’t anyone want it?

You can claim it’s because it takes 45 minutes to get a pizza, but I think that if it were as good as other pizzas, people would wait.

Many Chicagoans say it’s for tourists. Thin-crust Chicago tavern-style pizza seems to get more respect locally.

Tourists. Why would anyone go to Chicago as a tourist. What is there to see? The weather is bad. The land is flat and boring. The people have gone insane. You’re literally safer in a military unit in a war than you are in a Chicago ghetto on a holiday.

Although the Chicago deep-dish style is not that good, I got very useful information from the attempt. From now on, when I don’t have restaurant supply cheese and I don’t feel like paying $11 per pound for deli cheese, I’ll use grocery cheese and put the sauce on top. It won’t work with toppings, because who likes boiled toppings? But it will be great for cheese pizza, which I love.

Now that my pizza adventure has been chronicled, I’ll move on to the convention.

I’m glad J.D. Vance was chosen to run with Trump. He was my choice. He’s conservative, and he’s very smart. I don’t know whether he is popular enough to help Trump win, though. I haven’t studied the issue. Maybe I’m wrong to think he would be a good choice for president. I admit, I’m winging it.

It was interesting to see him get the spot because I have so much in common with him.

Vance’s parents are from Jackson, Kentucky, in Breathitt County. My grandfather was the circuit judge there. As you move eastward in Kentucky, the people get more ghetto. Breathitt is the farthest east of the counties where my grandfather held court.

To be quite honest, the people of Breathitt are a mess. They used to call it “bloody Breathitt” because the people were so violent. My mother used to tell two stories about Breathitt. One was that the Army recruited doctors from Breathitt during wars because they were so used to treating bullet wounds. That’s probably a myth. America has always had plenty of doctors who knew how to treat bullet wounds, and I doubt Breathitt ever had more than two doctors until maybe 1970. The second story was that they never had to draft anyone in Breathitt, because the men were so anxious to enlist and kill people. That, I could believe.

My dad always said there were a lot of people in Breathitt whose eyes were too close together.

There is a lot of white trash there, if you want the truth. The counties to the west of Breathitt are not great, but Breathitt is on a lower level.

Vance is famous for writing a book, Hillbilly Elegy, that became a movie. Ron Howard, that great expert on Appalachia, directed. Hey, he grew up in Mayberry, didn’t he?

Like a lot of people trying to escape the downward pull of Eastern Kentucky, Vance’s parents moved from Jackson to Ohio, and evidently, it was not much of a step up. My understanding is that his parents weren’t much, and they continued dragging him down. He had a grandmother who pushed him to succeed.

I have not read Vance’s book, and I don’t plan to. I have never seen the movie. I saw a clip. It was pretty ridiculous.

On the one hand, Glenn Close, as the grandmother, looked the part. She has a big bony Celt head, just like many of my female relatives. As far as appearance goes, she nailed it. Set her down among my female second cousins, and she would fit right in. The dialogue, however, was way off. No one cursed. No one waved a burning cigarette while talking. No one used any of the colloquialisms I remember from my youth.

Maybe they should have had Cameron Crowe direct it. His grandfather came from Stanton, another county seat where my grandfather served as judge. Crowe’s ear might have been better.

My story is quite different. For one thing, I have never achieved much of anything, nor have I ever had any ambition. For another, my parents were both Mensa material, and both were educated. They never completely overcame their roots. My mother had terrible taste, and my dad held onto his coal-camp manners. But they were very smart. They were well-read.

My dad was the best lawyer I ever knew, and that includes every area of practice, from the library to the courtroom.

Unlike me, Vance has no accent at all. That’s weird. And he seems to have assimilated completely, book and movie notwithstanding.

I have an aunt who gets excited when anyone from Eastern Kentucky does well. She seems determined to convince people Eastern Kentucky is an incubator of unrecognized genius. Any acquaintance of hers who can stand upright and write his name is an unsung renaissance man. She has bragged to me about Woody Stephens and Cameron Crowe. It’s her way of vindicating her strange prejudices about the region.

My aunt told me about J.D. Vance a few years ago. I had no idea who he was, and I did not feel compelled to learn. She thinks he’s fantastic. On the other hand, she holds herself out as a liberal, so I have to wonder how she is dealing with his nomination. She is in no way liberal except in that she pretends to be one and makes excuses for her undeserving demographic, but she has painted herself into a corner as far as Vance is concerned. If she brags about him, she can’t really reconcile it with the reputation she has tried to cultivate. She will offend people she has tried to impress.

She doesn’t think he’s fantastic because he’s conservative or good presidential timber. She thinks he’s fantastic because he’s famous and he came from Eastern Kentucky. That’s all it takes.

Anyway, it’s interesting to see a person with whom I have so much in common, running for the office of vice president. I don’t think his Appalachian background is an asset. It’s just a handicap he overcame.

I was sorry to see that the GOP had a slut speak. I mean Amber Rose. She is a big part of the slut walk movement. She poses for nude photos. She promotes homosexuality. Disgusting.

How desperate are we? This is where razor-thin election margins have put us. Simping for women who sleep with rappers.

I was also sorry to see them let Harmeet Dhillon, a pagan, deliver a prayer. I don’t know anything about her except that she is a Sikh. Sikhism rejects Yeshua’s teachings, so it comes from Satan and leads people to hell, in addition to corrupting their lives here on Earth.

God–Yeshua–isn’t looking down and approving of the GOP for being open-minded. He knows he has been disrespected, and that has consequences.

I’m a monarchist and a theocrat. I obey our laws, and I’m not planning to overthrow the government, but from now on, I will do my best to vote for whoever brings us closer to a Christian theocracy based in charismatic doctrine. I don’t care whom I offend. I don’t care about our idiotic obsession with separating church and state. I don’t care about making people of other faiths comfortable. Yeshua made people extremely uncomfortable. People of other faiths worship demons and go to hell. I don’t support those things.

Religious inclusivity is the most un-Christian policy imaginable.

I assume they will also have prayers from a Muslim and a Jew who thinks Yeshua was a magician and a fraud and who follows sages who made their living teaching blasphemy.

I’m with the GOP because it’s the closest thing we have to a Christian party. The more we strive to be popular, bringing in disgusting people and people who are badly misled, the less salt we have in ourselves and the less motivation God has to help conservatives. When we become just like leftists, God will have no reason to help us.

I can’t vote for a proper party, so I vote for the least-vile party. It’s getting to the point where I have no one to stand with.

I wore my old MAGA hat today, figuring I should honor a man who just got shot for me, along with the others who were shot. I don’t know if I should wear it again. I love Trump, but he’s no messiah, and he and his family put Amber Rose on the stage.

I hope Trump wins, but America is lost either way.

“I Can See WaWa from up Here!”

Just thought of a question our excuse-making DEI Secret Service failed to answer while justifying its abysmal failure to look after Donald Trump and the people attending his rally. They claim they didn’t know the assassin was on a roof close to Donald Trump.

The assassin was around 150 yards away from Trump, and the Secret Service snipers were also on a roof close to Trump. Could they see the assassin? Yes, if they tried. We know this because they shot him a few seconds after the first shot was fired.

One of their disgraceful excuses is that it’s not their job to sweep buildings outside of restricted areas (areas where security is tightened by the Secret Service for the protection of assassination targets).

So they didn’t sweep the building before the event. Well, why didn’t they scan surrounding roofs DURING the event?

What were they doing up there? Giving each other back rubs?

Right now, I’m looking out the window at a fence more than 150 yards away. My vision is no longer good, and if a squirrel moved on that fence, I would know it instantly.

I completely understand why the stocky DEI girls looked so bad while failing to shield Trump and fumbling with their belongings. They didn’t have to meet real standards in order to get their jobs. The snipers are white men who had to clear a higher bar to get hired. What’s their excuse?

They Pull a Pizza, You Pull a Casserole

I hope it is not tasteless to say it, in view of the suffering that has taken place over the last couple of days, but Donald Trump is riding a sudden wave of success right now. An innocent man died with his arms around his wife and daughter, two other people were seriously wounded, our former president was shot, families were put through an emotional wringer, and the whole crowd was traumatized. Nonetheless, Trump’s campaign is experiencing a huge boost.

The assassination attempt will turn out to be one of the best things that ever happened to Trump, with respect to his political career. On top of that, Judge Aileen Cannon has dismissed the unfairly-brought classified document case that was taking place in Florida. She dismissed without prejudice, based on the conclusion that Jack Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional.

As always, people on the left are reacting in a very nuance-deaf way, saying Cannon is in the tank for Trump and that the 11th Circuit will respond by throwing her off the case, if not the bench. It’s like listening to children. Maybe I can come across more like an adult.

The ruling is interesting for more than one reason.

To begin, Cannon did not reach the immunity question, which was also before her. When judges have multiple issues before them, it’s common for them to rule on one and ignore the rest. Judges say they do this to make courts more efficient, but they are human, so I’m sure they also do it for other reasons.

Cannon says Smith’s appointment violates the Appointments Clause of the Constitution. She opined that the government might be able to fix the problem later, but for now the remedy is dismissal without prejudice. This leaves the door open for a government effort to revive the case.

Does this mean Smith can appeal, get the decision reversed, and have Cannon exiled to Siberia? Of course not. He may be able to get the decision reversed, but guess who gets to look at the motions after that happens? Judge Cannon. The 11th Circuit is not going to rule on the other dismissal claims, so Cannon will be free to do so. She can dismiss the case all over again based on the immunity question. Then the appeal process starts all over again.

Don’t ask me whether the Supreme Court’s recent immunity decision will affect this or Trump’s other cases. I’m not going to sit here and do extensive research for nothing. Maybe it will. Maybe it will kill the Fani Willis case, the Alvin Bragg case, and both Jack Smith cases. It won’t help him in the case brought by unethical New York AG Letitia James, but that case should die on appeal, possibly even before it leaves the state.

Smith is also running the extremely phony January 6 incitement case before Tanya Chutkan. That case has been severely weakened by the immunity decision. Does Cannon’s decision about Smith’s appointment affect the January 6 case? I don’t think so. I think that’s up to Chutkan. Cannon and Chutkan are both at the lowest level of the federal judiciary, which is the district court level. District courts often have conflicts. A district court can strike a law down nationwide, but it can’t force its decisions on other district courts.

I don’t think any of these cases will survive appeal, but I’m talking as an outsider who hasn’t studied them as much as the insiders. They will not be decided before the election or inauguration, so we may end up in a situation where a newly-inaugurated Trump, even if convicted, can pardon himself and throw the courts into a brand-new briar patch. They will have to resolve the issue of whether the pardon is legal, and that will take time. Then if his self-pardon is undone, his successor will pardon him.

As for Trump, today the Milwaukee (Why?) convention starts, and he is on a roll. He has a freshly-bandaged ear for the cameras, which no liberal network can avoid showing the nation. He has that amazing Evan Vucci photo of himself pumping his fist beneath the American flag. He has a fresh dismissal. He still has the debate. He also has the vile behavior of prominent leftists, who have made extraordinarily cruel and sick remarks about him since the shooting. Bet we see them on video at the convention.

Leftists are so crazy–so hardened by demons–they can’t hide it any more. Joe Scarborough’s network took him off the air temporarily, and they openly admit it was because they were afraid his leftist-nut guests would say tacky things about the shooting. They are admitting 1) leftists really do have TDS, and 2) they want to help Biden win the presidency by keeping new ammunition away from conservatives.

That’s really something. The lunatics are policing the asylum, with unwitting transparency.

In other news, I finally tried a real Chicago style pizza. Unfortunately, it was a frozen pizza, because no one around here makes them fresh.

Chicago style pizza is interesting. To begin with, “Chicago style” is a misnomer for two reasons.

First, there are three styles of pizza associated with Chicago. One is stuffed. Another has a thin crust. The third is the one people refer to as “Chicago style.”

Second, it was probably invented by a black woman from Mississippi. I can’t help deriving some childish pleasure from this knowledge, because Chicagoans often go over the top when they praise their pizza.

From here on out, I will use the term “Chicago style” the way most people use it. It refers to a deep-dish pizza with the cheese on the bottom, against the crust. Toppings go on top of the cheese, and then everything is buried in tomato sauce. The crust is on the biscuity side. If I understand it correctly, it’s more crunchy than chewy.

One of the most famous Chicago style joints is named Pizzeria Uno, and if you go there, you will see a plaque claiming the style was invented by co-owner Ike Sewell, a Texan, and first served at Uno in 1943. The story Uno promotes says Sewell’s partner, Ric Riccardo, was dissatisfied with his pizza, so he traveled to Italy to study. Then he came back to Chicago and started serving it. How this is consistent with the plaque’s claim that Sewell invented the pizza is a mystery.

A food historian has pointed out a funny clue: what was happening in 1943? Think hard. Something involving Italy. There is no way an American could have gone to Italy during World War Two to study pizza.

The historian says a black woman named Alice Mae Redmond worked in several Chicago pizzerias, and she’s the one who invented Chicago deep-dish. Because she worked at more than one place, no Chicagoan and no Italian can take credit.

If you have friends from Chicago who love to brag about their pizza and ruin every pizza meal with their moaning, now you have an ace up your sleeve.

One of the best-known deep dish pizzerias is named Lou Malnati’s, and they have such a following, they sell their pizzas over the web. They ship them in styrofoam boxes with dry ice. I have two cousins who grew up near Chicago, and I am told one of them thinks Chicago style is the best pizza there is. His sister says he orders Malnati’s pizza and has it shipped to him in Texas.

I heard about this a long time ago, but I never bothered ordering pizza. I wasn’t that excited about it. The other day I was discussing it with my wife, and we decided to give it a shot. I spent the massive sum of $76.99 for two 10″ pies: one cheese, one sausage. I have tried both.

The pizzas come in disposable round aluminum pans that look like someone sat on them at the factory. You take the pies out, oil the pans, bake at 425° for 35-40 minutes (really more like 50), and you’re ready to go.

The crusts looked hand-formed, and bits of both had broken off in transit. I would say the crust is somewhere between a biscuit and pie crust. It has a corn taste, leading many people to claim it has cornmeal in it. Not true. It does have a lot of oil in it, though, and corn oil is the standard. Yes, corn oil. That Italian staple.

I found the crusts almost too hard. Not like hardtack, but not like biscuits, either. Maybe if you tried to make a biscuit with half of the milk replaced with water, you’d have it. There was very little air in the crusts. They were dense.

The cheese was just melted mozzarella. If you like melted mozzarella, you will like the cheese in a Malnati’s frozen pizza. Nothing there to criticize.

The sauce is tomato puree, water, and maybe a few seasonings. Very nice. Not too sour. Not too sweet.

I’m sure fresh pizzas would be a little better.

The cheese pie was very good, although I would make it with a crust that’s a little less dense. One nice thing about the crust is that it’s strong enough to allow you to use your hands to hold slices that are about an inch thick. Maybe that’s why they make it so hard. Many people eat Chicago pizza with a fork, which is why Jon Stewart called it a casserole.

The sausage pie–the standard Chicago style pie–was not good. There was less mozzarella, and the sausage was boiled. Not kidding. There was a layer of Italian sausage between the cheese and sauce, and when the pie was baked, it wasn’t roasted the way it should have been. It was just plain boiled, in cheese and sauce. It tasted like boiled sausage.

Huge mistake. I don’t know how people can stand it. It’s better than no pizza at all, but a Stouffer’s French bread pizza blows it away. The difference between the cheese pizza and the sausage pizza was huge.

Is there a fix? Yes. Brown the sausage superficially before putting it in the pie. But Malnati’s doesn’t do that.

My conclusion is that a Chicago pie with nothing but cheese and sauce is great, but apart from that, you’re going to be eating gross boiled toppings. This is probably one of those foods you have to be raised on if you want to enjoy it, like my mother’s spaghetti sauce with chili powder and green peppers. My recommendation: avoid. It’s just not good.

My wife likes eating giant maggots called mopane worms. That’s Africa for you. Deep dish pizza with the toppings in the wrong place is Chicago’s bowl of giant maggots.

It’s like Hershey’s, the worst chocolate on Earth. The guy who invented it used a process that creates butyric acid, which is the chemical that gives vomit its characteristic smell. Foreigners who try Hershey’s say it tastes like vomit, and they are right, but if you were raised on it, it seems okay.

What do I take away from this, as a person who likes making pizza?

First of all, my own Sicilian is still the very best pizza I have ever eaten. Nothing else comes close. Not in New York. Not nowhere.

Second, Chicago style could be very good and worth making, in two variations I can think of off the top of my head. 1. Cheese pizza, and 2. topped pizza with the toppings in the right place. Maybe I could go crust-cheese-sauce-cheese-toppings. They say the bottom layer of cheese is crucial to a proper crust, and if I just threw toppings onto sauce, the toppings would boil, so I would have to have another layer of cheese.

I think the second version above is a waste of time. Cheese seems to be the answer.

I discovered a tremendous benefit of the Chicago method. You can use bad cheese and get away with it.

When you make conventional pizza, finding cheese that works is extremely important, and most grocery stores don’t have anything that fits the bill. I go to restaurant supply houses, and I also get away with using grocery deli cheese which costs $11 per pound.

The problem with most cheese is that it reacts badly to radiant heat. Some cheese burns too fast because it doesn’t contain the right amount of fat. Some develops a tough film on top. The film resembles vinyl. Some cheese gives off way too much water or fat.

When you boil cheese, you shouldn’t have these problems. The radiant heat never hits the cheese. It should be possible to use any grocery mozzarella that works in things like lasagna.

I think you could use plain old bricks of whole milk mozzarella, like Polly-O or Galbani and do just fine. They don’t work on top of pizzas.

Some people claim the only real Sicilian pizza has the sauce on top. I think they’re nuts, but it should hide cheese problems well. In a desperate situation, putting the sauce on top could save a pizza, and it may change the crust in a nice way.

To sum up my tentative conclusions, if you’re from Chicago, your style is not that great, it was invented by a black Southern lady, no Chicago restaurant can be pinpointed as the birthplace, and New York still dominates. But Chicago style is worth making if certain very limiting rules are observed.

Will I order more frozen pizzas at a cost of about $40 each? Never. Unless someone sends me a check for, say, 50 million dollars, and money no longer means anything to me.

Oddly, the price tag is not all that far from the cost of a restaurant pie made locally. Call it $30 including tip but not gas. The actual cost of a Malnati’s pie is $37.495, so for about 7 bucks, you can avoid doing dishes. Not a great deal, but not the worst.

If you order 6 pies, they come at $23 each, so not unreasonable at all. Not as good as making your own, better, for maybe $7.

I will probably look into crust recipes.

In closing, I’ll tell you how to sound like your from Chicago. It’s really easy. Say, “My dog is in there,” only say it this way: “My dag is in dere.” People may mistake you for Jim Belushi.

My dag is in dere. It works.

Losers

I already wrote about the Secret Service’s astonishing failure to protect Donald Trump. There is no conceivable way to excuse it. Heads must roll, and the people involved must not be “allowed to resign.” The executive branch must announce that they were fired for incompetence so their dismissals are as humiliating as possible. Otherwise, our enemies will know nothing has changed.

These things almost surely will not happen with a dementia patient in the White House, unless he realizes the danger a weak Secret Service poses to himself, his wife, and his dysfunctional children.

So what has the Secret Service said about this? They blame the local police. Check out this Fox link. They say the cops knew there was a shooter but could not find him in time to stop him.

It’s time to fire as many Secret Service people as humanly possible and hire a bunch of MEN, white heterosexuals if necessary, who are very, very good at their jobs. Delta Force. Whatever. Fire the women or keep them in roles where their weakness isn’t an issue. Fire the affirmative action people who didn’t have to meet real standards. The director should have been fired last night.

Why was she even hired? She must be a lesbian.

The problems with the excuses the Secret Service is making are obvious.

1. The local police failed (supposedly) because they knew an assassin was present and did not tell the Secret Service or Trump.

2. If 1 is wrong, and they did tell the Secret Service, the Secret Service failed because they allowed Trump to speak and did not make any effort to warn him or the crowd.

3. Regardless of 1 and 2, the Secret Service failed because they didn’t bother keeping people off the roof of a building from which a very easy rifle shot could kill the president and other attendees.

I looked at an aerial photo of the venue. The roof the assassin lay on is perfect for the job. It’s like someone put the building there for assassins. If I were a conspiracy nut, I would say Trump was deliberately set up by the police and Secret Service.

MORE

Now they’re saying the police sent a guy up on the roof to confront the assassin, and the cop ran away because the assassin pointed his rifle at him.

This is even worse than the situation I pictured. Some idiot on the local force decided to approach the shooter instead of simply shooting him or having the Secret Service do it, the Secret Service either was not informed or was informed and did nothing, the cop ran from the shooter instead of firing, and the shooter had time to shoot at Trump.

And no one bothered to warn or hide Trump, a man with a wife and 5 children.

They have to go.

MORE

Now they’re saying the Secret Service could not deal with the assassin before he fired at President Trump because their rules of engagement say they can’t shoot until someone fires at him.

Something is amiss there. A man was on a roof in a prone shooting position with a rifle that had been seen by numerous witnesses. The former president was a few yards away. The man was facing the former president. There is no way anyone in the government can convince me any law enforcement officer, Secret Service or not, is not clear to shoot under those circumstances.

A civilian would have been entitled to shoot. You or I. It’s standard defense law, going back hundreds of years. Whether you work for the government or not, you are always entitled to kill a person whom you reasonably fear is about to kill someone else. You don’t have to wait for the suspect to act.

Furthermore, the Secret Service and the police have no excuse whatsoever for allowing the assassin to get on the roof. Once the police knew he was or even MIGHT be on the roof, someone should have kept Trump off the stage.

If I go to an elementary school with anything that looks like a gun in my hand, they will shut the entire school down and call SWAT. Every door will be locked. Somehow, the people in charge of security at the rally couldn’t give the crowd and the former president the same protection.

They’re also saying the cop who confronted the assassin was not in a position to shoot at him when the assassin pointed his rifle at him. So I should not have said the cop ran away. I didn’t realize he was unable to fire. But if the cop was on the roof, and witnesses had told the cops the assassin was up there with a rifle, then the cops knew innocent people might be in grave danger, and somehow the Secret Service did not hide Trump or warn the crowd. The cops should have told the Secret Service what was happening before they checked the roof. Trump should have been hidden before the officer climbed on the roof. This is obvious.

I don’t see any scenario in which this was not a colossal and inexcusable failure that has to be punished. If I’m wrong, let me know.

In 2017, God said this to me: “The hatred is already here.” He meant that while human beings hadn’t yet resorted to murdering each other in the streets in large groups, they were already primed to do so. They were being restrained. All the talk about healing division sounds wonderful, but people don’t want healing. They want to fight. They would rather take sadistic pleasure in hurting and killing people they don’t value than change their hearts and live in peace.

Peace comes from alignment with the Holy Spirit. It’s not possible for peace to be maintained when one side has no interest in the Holy Spirit, and in today’s world, most people on both sides are disconnected from him. That includes Christians. Leftists and heathens are much worse, but there are also a lot of people on our side who are looking forward to settling things with weapons.

I think war often begins inside people. By the time physical weapons come into play, the war has been going on for quite a while in people’s hearts and minds. I believe that within ourselves, we passed the point of no return a long time ago.

As for Trump, it’s pretty clear he needs to hire real security. There is no point in wasting time with an agency or local police departments that can’t or won’t get the job done.

Fire Them All

I guess everyone is talking about the same thing today. Trump was finally shot.

I’m amazed it didn’t happen sooner. He has more enemies than John Wick.

I found out a few minutes after it happened. I saw that there had been some kind of problem at a rally, and I watched the video. He reached up to his right ear and grimaced in pain, and then he ducked. It was obvious something had struck him.

The left-wing coverage was appalling from the start. An early CNN headline said Trump fell. They must have been high-fiving in the room where that deliberate libel was written. “Finally, we can say the other guy fell.” Trump burst onto the scene as a candidate nearly a decade ago, and he has not fallen once. When will they quit with the false equivalence?

They knew he didn’t fall. They didn’t care. They had a chance to tell a lie, so they took it, not thinking about the way it would age during the next century or even over the next hour. Other liars in the MSM took the same low road. They don’t even try these days.

We now know a bullet went through his right ear. It was fired by a nut named Thomas Matthew Crooks. He was a registered Republican who also donated money to Act Blue, a far-left organization. The MSM played up the “registered Republican” thing, exactly the same way they never play up the “black male” thing when street crimes are committed by black males.

Leftists often register as Republicans so they can cheat and queer (sorry) our primaries.

Let’s look at the evidence in totality, as we now know it. Republican. Donated to Act Blue. Tried to kill a Republican president at a Republican rally. Also killed a person attending the rally and wounded at least two others. Yeah, the two seconds he spent checking the “R” box when indicating his affiliation really outweigh the other stuff.

Photos show a man with a woman’s hairstyle and geeky feminine eyeglass frames no normal conservative would wear.

Another thing: he couldn’t shoot. He shot from a prone position at 150 yards, using a rifle resembling an AR-15. That would be a 4-MOA rifle at worst, unless it was a complete piece of junk, and prone shooting is the easiest way to get precision. At 150 yards, 1 MOA is about 1.6″, so 4 MOA is 6.4″. How wide is Trump? Maybe 18″ when facing you at an angle? Crooks missed the center of mass by about that much, the only time he hit Trump. The other shots hit other people, so they were even worse.

A conservative would be less likely to be a terrible shot. Let me shoot at another person from 150 yards from the prone position, with a good gun I practice with, and he has nearly no chance of being missed. And I’m not all that good.

Crooks shot from a roof, meaning he was higher than his victims. Shooting downward is easier than making level shots because it reduces the bullet drop.

Crooks was wearing a T-shirt from the popular Youtube gun channel Demolition Ranch. I’m familiar with it. A rich veterinarian runs it. He does silly things like deliberately putting the wrong ammunition in guns and then firing them. I’m sure his fans are mostly conservative, but I don’t think the shirt makes Crooks conservative. It seems more likely he wore it to embarrass us. More than Demolition Ranch does.

Maybe Crooks really was conservative, and he was just mentally ill. So far, it appears unlikely. If he really is conservative, we’ll just have to admit it.

My best guess is that he is either on the trans spectrum, sympathetic to Hamas, or both.

I haven’t gotten to the real story yet. The real story is this: the Secret Service and the police organizations that worked the event are incompetent.

Sixty years ago, Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK and John Connally from an elevated position. He used a mail-order military surplus rifle, and he still got impact with two out of three shots. Clearly, the Secret Service has learned absolutely nothing since then. They let a man climb onto a white roof in broad daylight, carrying a rifle, and shoot a former president a couple of Frisbee throws away.

If I wanted to shoot Joe Biden, I wouldn’t try. I have–well…had–an inflated sense of the competency of the Secret Service. Before the Trump shooting, I would have expected to have to deal with drones, facial recognition, and only God knows what other clever tools designed to protect presidents. It would never have occurred to me that they might let me climb onto a building a few yards away, unmolested, and fire at will.

A single drone flying around the event would have picked up the sniper. Agents on foot with binoculars would have spotted him. There must be a number of computerized surveillance systems that would have picked him up, had they been used. The Secret Service and the police didn’t think of these things, but I, an old untrained guy in a recliner, did.

The government loves to say, “See something? Say something.” There was no system in place to help people say things to the Secret Service. Witnesses saw the sniper as he took several minutes to climb onto the roof and get settled. They waved their arms at the Secret Service and yelled at the police. There was no hotline they could use. The Secret Service and police ignored them. They allowed Trump to walk into an ambush dozens of people already knew about.

People are saying the Secret Service saved Trump. Never happened. Bad aim saved Trump. A round hit his ear, he heard it and felt pain, and he ducked behind the podium, which–please tell me this is true–must have been reinforced to resist gunfire. The Secret Service let him get shot, and then they reacted when he was already safe.

If Donald Trump gave a talk in my pasture, and I had to protect him myself on a thousand-dollar budget, you better believe I would find a way to reinforce his podium.

Anyone who says the Secret Service saved people is forgetting Corey Comperatore, the man whose brains were splattered by the assassin as he shielded his wife and daughter. They’re forgetting the two (at least) other people who were shot.

The Secret Service is a disgrace, not because it failed, but because it made an effort Barney Fife would have been ashamed of. It did not provide basic protection from a known threat. If you do a good job and fail, you have nothing to be ashamed of. Letting people with rifles climb onto roofs near a Trump rally is something completely different.

We and Trump’s family nearly got stuck with everlasting video of Trump’s brain and skull spraying all over about 30 rally attendees. We were spared not by an inch but by half an inch. That could have happened. Today, we could be watching one blurred video after another. We could be seeing photos of people with Trump’s blood and brains on their shirts and faces. Leftists would have made animated GIF’s to make each other laugh. Far worse than the Zapruder film. The Secret Service put us in this position.

I don’t know if it’s possible for the victims and their families to sue the Secret Service. I wish it were. The Secret Service deserves an embarrassing series of televised trials, and it deserves a bunch of firings.

People are saying the Secret Service is too busy with DEI to do a good job. I wouldn’t doubt it. A woman runs the show. A woman who has never been physically capable of doing everything an agent should be able to do. You have to wonder how many tee-ball hires they have.

Another person who deserves public shaming: Representative Bernie Thompson, an black Democrat who sponsored a deplorable bill that would strip convicted felons sentenced to prison of Secret Service protection. I’ll bet he’d want agents around his sorry butt if he had to mingle with the general population in a penitentiary. He wouldn’t want to depend on corrections officers. Ask Jeffrey Dahmer and Whitey Bulger.

As of this moment, the Secret Service is a loser agency and a laughingstock. Someone needs to go through it like Hercules went through the Augean stables before Biden gets his head blown off while trying to find his way off a stage. Wouldn’t that be a fine thing to add to America’s history?

As for Trump, I am very impressed. When you’re shot and wounded badly, you may not know it right away. Many people in Trump’s situation would have panicked and even cried. Many would have refused to stand back up. Trump got up, faced the cameras with blood on his cheek and the side of his head, insisted on getting his shoes, and then pumped his fist three times and yelled, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” That was great. He turned being shot into his greatest campaign triumph.

AP photographer Evan Vucci, who will be famous by mid-week, got a picture of Trump gesturing defiantly with our flag waving above his head in front of a deep blue sky. That picture will live forever. I promise you, it’s on T-shirts right now. I want one, even though I’m not as excited about Trump as many Republicans.

That photo is Trump’s Marines-on-Iwo-Jima shot. I feel like blowing it up and putting it on my living room wall.

I knew Trump was impervious to stress, but I had no idea how deep it ran. He is a marvel.

The Secret Service needs to be fixed, as does its reputation. Today, tens of thousands of nutjobs who used to be afraid of the Secret Service are suddenly wondering if they gave it too much credit. We need to make criminals afraid of the Secret Service again, fast.

I look forward to seeing a bunch of Secret Service and police officials roasted alive for this debacle. Their organizations need some tough love. If the Secret Service isn’t reformed, no one they allegedly protect will be safe. I hope a lot of useless people are humiliated and forced into retirement by September.

Is Dershowitz Crafty or Just Out of It?

Alec Baldwin is being tried this week. Interesting stuff. Alan Dershowitz posted an analysis video, and he predicted acquittal. Thing is, he didn’t really do an analysis. It was very disappointing. Dershowitz is held out to be a genius, but he spoke more like a layman than an attorney trying to get at the truth. For the most part, he criticized the law under which Baldwin is being tried.

Proper legal analysis always follows the same simple pattern. Determine the facts, or at least the allegations. Figure out what the applicable law is in order to see if there are legal issues, and write out articulated rules. Apply the rules to the facts. Derive conclusions.

Now you know how to practice law. Just fill in the blanks.

It’s not quite that easy, but that’s how it works.

Dershowitz didn’t follow any logical pattern in his video. He didn’t state the issues. He didn’t get into the facts except in a very superficial way, much as Joy Behar or Don Lemon might. He didn’t determine what sort of standards applied to Baldwin’s actions.

He did what my dad used to call “hip-shooting.” Real lawyering requires the meticulous, plodding construction of arguments. You don’t just show up in court and say you don’t like the law your client is charged with violating. You should be as certain as possible you’re on solid ground with regard to the law and the facts, because if you’re not, the judge or opposing counsel will show you where you screwed up, very quickly. Hip-shooting is negligence, and it leads to malpractice settlements.

Dershowitz does not like the New Mexico manslaughter statute, which is very simple. Basically, it says that if you kill someone else, and you do it without exercising due care, you are guilty of involuntary manslaughter. I could cut and paste it here, but it wouldn’t improve your understanding, because the law is just that simple.

This law is consistent with statutes in many, if not all states, as well as English common law, from which our system derives. There is nothing odd about it.

The trial court is not going to shoot down a statute consistent with hundreds of years of jurisprudence in many, many jurisdictions. That will never happen. Why did Dershowitz bring it up, then? No one goes into court and says, “I think you should acquit me because attempted murder isn’t a real crime,” or, “You should acquit me because conspiracy is protected under the First Amendment.” You try to get acquitted under the law. You don’t put the law on trial. Not a law as solid as this one.

Dershowitz correctly stated that Baldwin was accused of negligence, but then he made the strange assertion that negligence is a civil, not criminal matter. He said the remedy was to sue for monetary damages.

Can it be he is playing the part of defense attorney, not law professor? A defense attorney whose client is clearly guilty under the law will distract instead of sticking to law and facts. Maybe he thinks saying the law is unfair will inflame the hearts of the jurors. Maybe he thinks Baldwin’s attorneys will watch his video, and he is hoping they will repeat what he’s saying.

Doubtful, given that Baldwin must have extremely competent attorneys who have no interest in what law professors say on Youtube.

Maybe he’s not really brilliant and never was. Or perhaps age has dulled his wits, just like Rudy Giuliani’s.

Let’s talk about negligence.

The word “negligence” can apply to more than one concept. It can refer to the tort of negligence. It can also refer to a failure to exercise due care. Such a failure is one element of the tort of negligence.

Elements are things you have to prove in order to make a case. For example, in order to prove a charge of fraud, you have to prove someone made a misrepresentation. You also have to prove some other elements have been established. If one element is missing, no case. Your opposition only has to knock one leg out from under the table.

Depending on who you ask, the tort of negligence has 4 or 5 elements. I was taught it had 4. You have to show that the defendant owed the plaintiff a duty of care. You have to show he breached that duty in a negligent (not necessarily deliberate) manner. You have to show that the plaintiff was harmed. You have to show that the breach was the proximate cause of the harm.

Torts are generally civil matters. You can’t go to prison for losing a civil tort case.

The problem for Dershowitz is that there is such a thing as criminal negligence, as you will see if you Google the phrase “criminal negligence.” Build a bridge and fail to make sure the structure is sound, and you may find out what criminal negligence is.

Every lawyer, and probably most laymen, knows about criminal negligence. So why would Dershowitz suggest there is no such thing? Bizarre. Baldwin was already sued for negligence, and he settled, meaning he knew he would lose. The money has been paid. The civil remedy has been provided. Doesn’t mean he’s off the hook with regard to criminal conviction.

Dershowitz said Baldwin was being prosecuted because someone was harmed. He said no one would have been charged if the bullet had missed.

I don’t know what to make of that. It’s so wrong, it’s impossible to figure out why Dershowitz said it.

First of all, two people were hurt. Not only did Baldwin not miss; he pulled an Oswald, killing one person and injuring another with a single shot. Second, people get charged with criminal negligence all the time, in situations where no one was harmed. For example, you can be convicted of a crime if you store dynamite incorrectly, even if nothing happens.

Try taking a bag containing a gun through airport security. Doesn’t matter if you thought your wife checked the bag when she packed it.

It is true that Baldwin would have been guilty of a lesser offense had he missed, but he could still have been charged. Because Dershowitz did no research whatsoever, he doesn’t know what I know: New Mexico has a statute criminalizing negligent use of a firearm, and it does not require that harm be done in order to be triggered.

Here is some text from the statute: “endangering the safety of another by handling or using a firearm or other deadly weapon in a negligent manner.”

Bad lawyering, Dershowitz. Not just not-brilliant lawyering. Bad. Negligent.

I’ll be the lawyer now. Maybe I’m asking to be smacked down, in my long-retired state, but I’ll go ahead. No one reads this blog anyway.

Baldwin harmed someone, and he harmed her by pointing a loaded gun at her and pulling the trigger. The nonsense about the gun going off by itself is a ridiculous lie, and the damage done by the FBI test won’t mean anything to a jury that isn’t utterly stupid.

He was negligent. One element. He harmed someone, and his negligence was the proximate cause. Three elements. The only way he can get off is to go after the remaining element. He has to show he did not owe the deceased a duty of care. Someone owed her a duty of care, so he’ll have to find a patsy. Put simply, he will have to do what he has done all along: throw his friends under the bus.

Jury selection is a huge part of success at trial. Juries are often stupid, and they are always full of biased jurors. Baldwin paid a screaming fortune to hire at least one person who does nothing but choose jurors. I haven’t read that anywhere, but I know it’s true, because if his lawyers didn’t hire someone like that, they may have committed malpractice. They have huge financial resources, a lot is on the line, and every attorney knows you do whatever you can to get the best jury.

Maybe Baldwin has a jury so dumb or so far in the tank for him he will skate regardless of the law, but if he doesn’t, he will have a tough time convincing them it was okay to point a gun at another person and pull the trigger even if someone else was supposed to make it safe.

There was no need to point the gun at the victim. He could have pointed it in another direction. He could have used a rubber prop gun. He could have used his finger. He was just rehearsing.

There are 4 well-known rules of gun safety, and Baldwin violated every single one. I doubt Dershowitz knows these rules. He’s an elderly Jewish liberal who loves gun control. Does that excuse him? Let me ask you this: would a judge let it slide if Dershowitz handled the case and didn’t know the standard of care? Of course not. He would wonder where Dershowitz got his diploma.

When I say Dershowitz may be playing defense attorney, I’m trying to find a way to make sense of his poor analysis, based on the premise that he really is brilliant. I think I’m giving him too much credit. In his video, he admitted he doesn’t know much about guns. That means he was sloppy. A sharp lawyer playing defense, deliberately muddying the water with irrelevant remarks and outright misstatements, would still prepare.

I practiced with my dad, and he was an absolutely top notch attorney. They don’t get any better. He taught me to dot every i and cross every t. He would never have shown up in court without going over the applicable laws and standards letter by letter. He would never let himself be caught flatfooted because of laziness. I know how a sound legal analysis is done, and Dershowitz didn’t do one.

If there is no evidence I don’t know about, Baldwin doesn’t get a tee-ball jury, and the prosecutor does a halfway-decent job, Baldwin goes down. If there is blockbuster exculpatory evidence I don’t know about, it could be different. If the jury is in the tank, he walks. If the prosecutor blows it like Marcia Clarke blew it, he may walk. That sums up the likely outcomes and explanations.

I’m not predicting a conviction. Juries and judges are too crazy for anyone to predict. I’m just trying to explain the outcome, whatever it is, in advance.

Right now, Baldwin’s team is trying for a dismissal, claiming the prosecution withheld important evidence. The prosecution says it doesn’t matter because the evidence isn’t exculpatory. If it’s exculpatory (which it almost certainly is not), Baldwin could get a mistrial, and my understanding is that mistrials, although not dismissals, generally hurt the prosecution. I don’t see why Baldwin should get a dismissal, since the case can be retried and the evidence will be in the defense’s hands next time.

If there is a mistrial, it falls under the heading of the prosecution not doing a halfway-decent job. Baldwin’s team will probably do a fantastic job, because, sorry, they are not low-paid prosecutors of limited ability. A team of seriously skilled lawyers should catch every opportunity to help Baldwin, and undistinguished state employees can’t be blamed if they can’t keep up.

Failures to provide exculpatory evidence generally become issues on appeal, because when evidence is not timely provided at trial, defense attorneys usually don’t know about it until the fat lady has sung. In Baldwin’s case, the defense claims they found out about it at trial, later than they should have. A person not involved with the trial came forward.

In some cases, defendants have their convictions reversed because of withheld evidence. In others, the evidence isn’t important enough to help them. Baldwin can’t get a reversal because he hasn’t been convicted yet, and I assume he can’t get a dismissal, either, because the problem can be fixed during this trial, or, if a mistrial is declared, at the next trial.

Looks like the defense team is just throwing armloads of pasta at the fridge, roaring with fake indignation and exaggerated claims of irreparable harm, and seeing what sticks.

Whatever happens, I am very disappointed in Dershowitz. He seems to be an unusually fair man, but based on his video, I am starting to doubt his mental horsepower. I have read things written by truly brilliant people, and I have heard them speak, and he is not measuring up.

MORE

Well, what do you know? Baldwin is off the hook, permanently.

His attorneys filed a motion to dismiss, claiming not only that the prosecution had withheld some seemingly-unimportant (to me) rounds of ammunition from the defense, but that they had done it deliberately.

The judge said, “The state’s willful withholding of this information was intentional and deliberate. If this conduct does not rise to the level of bad faith, it certainly comes so near to bad faith as to show signs of scorching prejudice.”

She also said there was no way for the court to make it right.

I have to wonder if that is true, considering the fact that a mistrial could have been declared. The judge could be a Baldwin fan or a former public defender. Maybe the judge is not a fan of the prosecutor.

Whatever. There is no possibility he will be tried again, so this is the end.

I read Baldwin’s motion to dismiss, and the ammunition did not seem to have the potential to help him, but the judge saw it differently. I don’t see how any ammunition could assist him, given that he shot someone needlessly while violating every rule of gun safety. He was trying to use it to prove someone else was to blame for the loaded gun, but he still had several more levels of negligence he could not get past. He didn’t check the gun. He didn’t think about where he pointed it. He pulled the trigger while it was pointed at a person.

I suppose the judge must have felt that the defense should have been allowed to provide every available argument and let the jury sift through the smoke and mirrors.

It may be that the judge, a woman, has no idea what the basic rules of gun safety are. A man might have seen it differently.

I suspect it will turn out this outcome has more to do with the quality of the lawyers than with Baldwin’s guilt, which seems obvious. He was not proven innocent. He simply proved, in the eyes of the judge, that his rights had been violated so substantially there was no hope of a fair trial. If Baldwin’s lawyers had been prosecuting, I doubt they would have let this happen. They wouldn’t have risked keeping anything away from the defense.

I have mixed feelings. I didn’t want to see him go to prison, but I thought he should have shown some sign that the ordeal changed him. A conviction might have helped him learn humility, even if he won on appeal and never served a day. As it is, he may be encouraged to continue in pride and bullying.

Interestingly, Alan Dershowitz didn’t get into the question of Brady violations (withholding exculpatory evidence). I suppose you had to be close to the trial to see this coming.

Yeshua is the Only Good Financial Advisor

For some reason, Youtube is sending me Dave Ramsey videos. This is the Christian financial guru. I am not sure he’s always a good source of advice.

Someone emailed and said they had debt. They used credit cards. They applied the points to trips. They paid their balances monthly. I guess their debts were not credit card debts.

He went off on a rant against credit cards, telling these people they should not use credit cards even if they paid their balances off every month, completely negating the interest problem. He said people who liked points thought getting $200 back on $10,000 was a big score.

Man, is that wrong.

He said these people should not eat out or go on vacation. That’s pretty harsh. They should cut way back, but eating at home every day and never going anywhere? That’s a pretty bleak lifestyle, and it’s not a great way to raise kids. Kids should travel. It’s a very important part of their education. Some debt is acceptable.

He seems to think there are people out there making credit card buys they would not have made otherwise, just to get points. I suppose there are people that stupid, but I doubt there are many.

I will lay out my philosophy about credit cards.

First of all, asceticism is not the answer. Be frugal; sure. But don’t live in a refrigerator box and never leave home. Human beings are not made of stone. We need a little recreation. We need a little treat occasionally. Telling people to live like solitary confinement prisoners is unrealistic, and no one who is not mentally ill can pull it off. I paid $1500 for stereo speakers and $900 for a parrot using student loans, and I am still very glad I did.

Second, credit cards are great when used properly. Some people can’t handle them, but then some people can’t be trusted with butter knives. You shouldn’t turn down a great thing because Dave Ramsey issued a blanket prohibition.

1. Credit cards help you get jobs and insurance. What? Yes, it’s true. If you don’t have loans and credit cards, you don’t have a credit rating. When you apply for a job, the employer will probably look up your credit rating. If there is nothing to see, you have a problem. If you apply for insurance, a good credit rating will make it more likely you will be accepted, and you will pay less. Good luck establishing a credit rating without credit cards.

2. Cards allow you to get things that are pretty hard to get otherwise. If I want to buy a part for a machine directly from Austria, I can get it with a credit card. I can pay for a hotel in Vietnam. Not so easy with wires and checks.

3. Cards put the power of big institutions behind you. I once paid a now-dead swindler named Joe Bergamo at a site called Plaza Machinery over $2000 to send me a lathe because other people trusted him. He demanded money orders or cashier’s checks. When he cheated me, there was nothing I could do. American Express and Paypal would have taught him manners. Remember this: any vendor who won’t take credit cards or Paypal is a swindler. This is the whole reason for insisting on checks and transfers.

4. When you use an ATM card to pay for things online, you risk giving a stranger access to your entire bank account. What if you have a million dollars in it? When you pay using a card, he gets access to nothing except maybe a number he can get in big trouble for misusing.

5. Points are fantastic. No two ways about it. I use Amex points to get Home Depot cards. This way, I get 1 to 1.25% back, depending on the current deal. I spend a ton on Home Depot items because I own rentals and live on a farm. I paid a guy $7500 to cut trees. He wouldn’t give me a discount for cash, so I got $75 back. A guy I knew used to pay his $22,000 law school tuition with Amex. He got hundreds of dollars’ worth of points every year. Why would he not do that? I pay for health insurance using a card. They won’t give me a cash discount, so I would have to be stupid to pay by ACH.

When I exchange points for stuff, I look for the best deal. That’s why I get Home Depot cards. Other companies give you less money per point. Why get 50 cents from Applebee’s or United Airlines when Home Depot will give you a dollar?

I have an Amazon card. I get 5% off plus free shipping. “They jack up the price to cover shipping.” Still cheaper than buying locally, and I get a better selection plus easy returns. To buy a box of screws locally, I have to spend at least $1.50 on gas. Usually more like $4. If I have to go to a real city, call it $40 or so. Tolls and gas.

I’ll bet I spent $45,000 on travel when my wife and I were waiting for her visa. That was not a luxury. Seeing your spouse is a necessity. I got back tons of points, and when we had to cancel things, we had big institutions behind us to make sure everyone stayed honest.

I also bought her wedding ring with a card. What’s better? A wedding ring, or a wedding ring plus a new pair of work boots?

6. Cards make doing your taxes easier. You have a nice record of everything you buy. No stuffing receipts in bags and trying to organize them later. You can have a card for business, making it even simpler. And vendors who take credit cards usually include sales tax so you don’t have to pay it to your state using a horrible website.

How does Dave Ramsey pay for things online with cash? If he’s using a debit card, he’s risking disaster. Is he sending checks to Amazon and Ebay? Welcome to the world of one-month delivery. Is he driving every time he needs a roll of tape? That’s not cost-effective.

If you pay your balances every month, employers, insurers, and potential creditors will love you, and you won’t pay a cent in interest. What’s not to love?

Ramsey also pushes conspiracy theories to make you think credit card companies are so much smarter than you, you can never get a fair shake. He says credit card companies give you special representatives when you call. He says they check your location using your phone number, and they set you up with people who sound like you.

No, they really don’t. He claims that if you’re in the South, they’ll give you a person with a “syrupy Southern accent.” That doesn’t actually happen. I would know. I have actually asked people where they were. Brokerages don’t do it either. I called a brokerage and got a deep-voiced Northerner who said his name was Isabel.

Big Brother is pretty bad, but he isn’t a god. It’s not responsible to call yourself a financial advisor and make things up. People will end up stuffing their mattresses with cash.

You need credit cards. You should have American Express and Visa or Mastercard. Face it. If you live in a Unabomber cabin with no electricity and eat potatoes you grow in your own excrement, maybe you’re an exception, but the rest of us have lives.

I’m sure Ramsey is way,way better with money than I am, because I do a lot of stupid things, and he will probably die sitting on 9 or more figures, but telling people not to use credit cards is nuts in 2024.

I don’t like his advice on credit cards, and I think he needs to work on his manners. He sneers at people unnecessarily. He is condescending. He seems haughty, and the word says haughtiness is abomination, just like sodomy. It’s something I am trying to correct in myself, because I have been guilty too many times to count.

If you’re going to hold yourself out as a Christian celebrity, you should exhibit patience, humility, and love. And no, “tough love” is not an excuse for popping off on people who have been nice to you and who build your business by consulting you.

Yeshua was often very rude, but 1. he was God and knew what he was doing, and 2. he was going after liars who dragged people down to hell with them. He was not tormenting poor people who wanted to use Mastercard to go to Five Guys once a month. There is a difference. If Ramsey wants to be mean to active pimps and child molesters, fine, but he shouldn’t vent on the people who make his fame and fortune possible.

The word says a haughty spirit goes before a fall, and if Ramsey is really worth 9 figures, he has a long way to drop. He should be more careful.

I don’t see him pushing charity as a way of becoming financially blessed. Maybe it’s in his work somewhere. It’s very clearly Biblical. I can’t recall ever seeing a professional Christian promoting this teaching. I can’t recall anyone but me teaching it, now that I think about it. The word says God repays those who give to the poor, and it says those who give will be blessed right here on Earth and that they will not be delivered to the will of their enemies.

Look at this:

There is that scattereth, and yet increaseth; and there is that withholdeth more than is meet, but it tendeth to poverty.

The liberal soul shall be made fat: and he that watereth shall be watered also himself.

He that withholdeth corn, the people shall curse him: but blessing shall be upon the head of him that selleth it.

I try to remember these things because I am naturally stingy and afraid of poverty. Either these things are true, or God is a liar.

I have had concerns about keeping too much, but the other day, I read about Lazarus, whom Yeshua raised from the dead. His sister Mary poured something like $30,000 of perfume on Yeshua’s feet, and Judas the thief practically had kittens. Judas acted like a model “good steward” by modern Christian standards.

Ask yourself this: what kind of person has $30,000 worth of ANYTHING in their house? And perfume is a luxury. This wasn’t a car or a cache of merchandise used to support a business. Lots of people have expensive items they use for work, but not everyone can put down a year’s pay for perfume.

I think Lazarus and his sisters were doing fine.

Cornelius was the first gentile to receive salvation and the Holy Spirit, and he was a wealthy Roman who gave to the poor and supported a synagogue. The Bible doesn’t say he gave until he was poor himself, and it never says God had any problems with his wealth.

What was God going to do? Make him poor so the poor and the synagogue did without?

I think charity is much more important for building wealth than financial planning will ever be. If you depend on your own work and planning, you will spend a lot of time doing things you hate, and the wealth you gain is very likely to be a curse to you and your family. If God gives you wealth for being generous according to the orders of the Holy Spirit, your wealth will be a blessing to you, and you won’t have to sit at a desk for 200 hours a month, drinking Mylanta and wondering if your investments are going to tank.

I believe these things. I do not believe Yeshua wants me to sit around counting my money, being so frugal I make my wife miserable and worrying that I’m not a good steward if I don’t know where every cent is. When Yeshua needed money, he pulled it out of a fish’s mouth.

Yeshua told us to take no thought for our earthly needs. Where did he tell us to listen to Dave Ramsey and pour over the S&P for hours a day? I can’t find any advice resembling that, but he talked about giving frequently. You only have so much time per day. Does he really want us to spend that time ignoring people so we can grind out more dollars? It makes no sense.

I think you should have credit cards and use them with common sense and no worries. Seems to work for me.