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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Obvious Things Pundits Have not Figured Out

In case anyone is wondering what’s happening with the Bidens, I can tell you, just from being old and very familiar with the baseness of human beings.

Bill O’Reilly published a big scoop right after the debate. He said Biden had decided to get out of the race, and the administration was delaying while deciding how to announce it.

I looked at that story and wondered why anyone with a hot tip would talk to Bill O’Reilly in 2024. He was a huge player before the scandal, but now he’s limited to Youtube and a personal website where he charges people to find out what he thinks. Like me, he is his own publisher. That’s fine for me, because I am obscure and not respected, but for the former king of news, it’s proof he is no longer an apex predator. These days, it makes no sense for an insider with good information to go to him. Why would you call Bill O’Reilly with red-hot news when you can call Jesse Watters or Sean Hannity?

Maybe bigger personalities got the same call before O’Reilly and turned it down because they considered it unreliable. Maybe O’Reilly took the bait because he can’t be as picky as he used to. People selling news stories often have to shop them around to find the right customers.

Shortly after O’Reilly published his scoop and promised more to follow, The Washington Post published the actual scoop: the Bidens were not giving up. They were holed up at Camp David, and Jill and Hunter were the loudest voices in the crew of what I would call abusers of the elderly. They were pushing Biden to keep going.

O’Reilly then offered a different story and admitted he was guessing.

My personal theory was that Biden would never quit, because his ego defies measurement and he has dementia. Stubborn, arrogant people with sound minds get worse, not better, when they become demented.

So what is on the minds of the Bidens? My theories:

1. Joe is humiliated and shocked. He knew he was slipping, but his handlers protected him from the full impact, as current stories show. They babied him and humored him, like managers of overrated champion prizefighters who haven’t faced any real opponents. oe is flustered, but that monster ego likes what his wife and son are feeding it, so he will keep going until enough powerful left-wingers pile on him to break his will.

Here is a sad video–no sarcasm–which may help people understand what Joe Biden has faced this week. Has it been unbearable for him, or has his staggering array of self-excusing mechanisms managed to keep his pride intact?

2. Like most women, Jill Biden really likes attention, even though First Lady is a position you can get merely by having a heartbeat. She does not want the attention to stop. Vogue just put her on the cover. Because Biden is going to lose the presidency, that will never happen again, but she thinks there is still hope, so she is doing everything she can to avoid becoming an elderly Wilmington housewife who no longer gets invited to national events.

3. Hunter Biden knows he is going to prison eventually, if only for a short time. He won’t go over the gun charge, but after that, he will face other convictions. With his father the bullying president out of the way, even some Democrats may want to investigate the Biden family in order to save face, so we could see charges extending far beyond guns and taxes. It is very unlikely anyone but Biden will pardon Hunter or commute his sentences, and no one but Biden can pressure the executive branch to go easy on him, so Hunter really, really wants Biden to win. Also, Hunter’s only immense source of income is influence-peddling, and he will never be allowed to practice law again, so once Biden is gone, Hunter has no job. No one will buy his paintings, either. At least not for $400,000 each.

4. The rest of the Bidens…see item 3. They are in the same boat as Hunter. Possible investigations and convictions. Abrupt end to influence-peddling.

What if thorough investigations fail to uncover trialworthy evidence of crimes? Hmm. That didn’t help Trump, did it? He committed no fraud, he was found guilty of sexual assault on evidence flimsier than Elvis sightings, he did nothing wrong on January 6, and look where he is. Same things can happen to a Biden who is no longer related to a president, and being tried and winning often bankrupts people.

It’s important to note that Biden never said he would not commute Hunter’s sentence. He never said he wouldn’t pardon him or commute his sentences in other matters. He never said he would go easy on the rest of the family. And he’s a horrible, shameless liar, so it doesn’t matter what he said. He may pardon Hunter on the gun charge.

I believe this is what’s happening.

I think Joe, as a man of influence, will fade quickly after he loses. He is fading now.

People keep saying he’s a decent man and that they like him. Those things are not true. Everyone over the age of 50 (most powerful people) knows Biden. He has been obnoxious all his life, even by politician standards. More recently, in 2022, he said, “No one f___s with a Biden!” Only a bully filled with bad intentions would say a thing like that, threatening people indiscriminately from the office of the presidency (or anywhere else). It’s something a drug kingpin would say.

People do not like Biden, and that includes Democrats. A lot of people, including administration insiders, will be glad to see him exiled to obscurity to have his fangs pulled. I don’t think we’ve had a president this disagreeable since Johnson. Nixon was crooked and vindictive, but he was way smoother about it. He wasn’t a shanty Irish hothead, and he didn’t extend his vengefulness to petty slights involving his family.

Nixon was never accused of influence peddling or funneling money to his worthless relations. He was never accused of going after their detractors. He and his family were not accused of receiving foreign funds in exchange for helping America’s adversaries. His daughter was never paid the price of a home by a Nixon ally for a painting. He was not unpleasant, personally. In these ways, he differs from Biden.

People will still talk to Bush and Obama because they are not senile and can be reasoned with. If you want to deal with them, it is not necessary to confine your conversations to the hours between eleven a.m. and four p.m. It is probably possible to get reasonable access to them instead of wading through layers of Howard-Hughes-style keepers who really run the free world.

Nobody of any significance is going to go through the ordeal of gaining access to an irksome, bullying, incoherent dementia patient who will never hold public office again and may be investigated for treason and bribery.

When nice people become demented, their families hire live-in help and keep them in their houses. People come to their birthday parties. Everyone looks for chances to hug them. When bullies who made people walk on eggs their whole lives fail, they get shunted off to isolation, and everyone breathes a sigh of relief. “When it goeth well with the righteous, the city rejoiceth: and when the wicked perish, there is shouting.”

Maybe I’m wrong, but I have been right sometimes.

I don’t think Democrats can push Biden out of the election. Seems like more than half of them are trying, but the rest are doubling down. It will be a contest of wills. I doubt they can get a behind-the-scenes supermajority.

I believe Hunter and Jill are squeezing Biden like a nearly-empty tube of toothpaste. I’ve seen it before. My sister tried it with both parents. “He’ll be dead soon. We have to go on living. Let’s get what we can.”

I don’t doubt that they love him, but not all love is pure, and rationalization is a hell of a drug.

I hope he stays in the race, because I think there is no way he can win, and if I’m wrong, Harris, who would take over soon, would be a great second choice. She is so unintelligent, she will be unable to function and dominate as president. She will be extremely weak, she will bring shame to her party, and she will cripple downstream Democrat candidates.

They say the other options are Whitmer and Newsom.

Whitmer put an entire state under house arrest. She is a sick, heartless tyrant. She is about as popular as norovirus. I don’t think she will be the candidate, because so many people hate her.

Newsom is slick and oily, and he lies to cameras without a trace of doubt or regret. He was one of the few people with a combination of dishonesty and boldness sufficient to permit him to say Biden won the debate. Most Americans are easy to fool, so ordinarily, he would be a great candidate. His problem is California. Streets full of human manure. Rolling blackouts worthy of a place like Namibia. Junkies turning sidewalks into tent neighborhoods. San Francisco retailers fleeing and leaving upscale shopping neighborhoods vacant. I think it will be hard to get him elected, because his opponents will just have to go to any city in California and shoot honest videos.

If Singapore annexed California, in a month, they would have to start importing canes.

As unpalatable as Whitmer and Newsom are, I would rather see Harris run, because everyone on Earth knows she’s weak and mentally slow. She has been babied all her life, failing upwards all the while. She can’t handle any kind of opposition. She runs. And she is also unable to self-monitor, so she thinks she’s smart. She talks to people much smarter than she is as though she were teaching retarded kids.

To sum up, I believe the Bidens would rather see Joe die than quit. I think Trump will win. I think everyone will start ignoring Joe in mid-November. I believe Hunter will be imprisoned.

Nonetheless, I am confident America and the rest of the world are finished.

1. Roll up Their Windows 2. Lock Their Doors

Very interesting story in the news. Fox and The New York Post have it. So do some other outlets. A dozen people claim they saw something they thought was a spaceship, hovering near a place called Red Rocks in Colorado, near Golden. Red Rocks is an outdoor amphitheatre which is relatively well known.

It was hovering somewhere above the trees. It was disk-shaped. It had three rows of what appeared to be windows, one above the other. It was hundreds of feet long. This is what they claim.

They say that when the stared at it, it appeared to react. It “tipped at an angle,” started to move, and then dissolved into invisibility.

Is it a reliable report? Probably not. It’s almost certainly a hoax. But a couple of big news organizations are taking it seriously, as of three days ago.

It’s certainly as credible as the leftist press’s Russian conspiracy nonsense and their false debunking of the Hunter Biden laptop and the Ashley Biden diary.

The report appeared on June 11, on a site called NUFORC. That stands for National UFO Reporting Center. “National” appears to mean nothing, since anyone can call their website “national” this or that. Here’s some language from the site: “The National UFO Reporting Center was founded in 1974 by noted UFO investigator Robert J. Gribble.”

Any relation to Dale Gribble from King of the Hill? He was a big conspiracy enthusiast. The pages I looked at did not say.

We now know that our government admits there have been sightings, some caught on video, that it can’t explain. Is it time to conclude there truly are real objects up there that violate the laws of physics as understood by human beings?

A while back, a family in Las Vegas told cops they saw huge bipedal beings wandering around in a backyard. At least one cop thought these people were serious. To make the story more convincing, a meteor lit up the sky during the event. Thing is, the meteor was seen in Las Vegas, but it was actually hundreds of miles away, so there is no reason to think it was related to the sighting. Except that it provided a good opportunity to make up a story.

It’s hard to believe a bunch of people saw aliens up close and didn’t take cell phone videos. We put photographs of all our meals on Facebook, but no one thought it was important to shoot creatures from outer space.

A kid who claims to be one of the Las Vegas witnesses has gotten 1.1 million views on Youtube, telling his story.

Why didn’t the people in Colorado take pictures? It takes about 5 seconds to get a phone out and start shooting. Time yourself and see.

The thing that interests me about the description of the UFO is that it reacted to observation and did so slowly. I saw this happen in my dad’s house, in 1987. I was sitting on the couch in the middle of the day, and while I did not see a spaceship, I saw a creature clinging to the wall in the upper corner of a room.

The creature was oval in shape, around 4 inches long. It was clear and colorless, like glass. Its only features were a border going around it and a line that cut across it at the northern end, toward the corner. It divided the creature into what seemed to be a body and a head. The body was about three times as long as the head.

It looked like a long theta with the bar closer to one end.

I could tell it was not in this physical universe. It was somewhere behind this universe, like a mouse under a rug in an old Tom and Jerry cartoon, except it was in a three-dimensional space that was somehow under the physical space we live in.

Like the spaceship in the Colorado story, it realized I could see it. At first, it was motionless, but after I turned and stared, it reacted. It drifted slowly off the wall, about a foot and a half into the room. It rotated counterclockwise so the head was pointing up. A line appeared down the middle of the body, like the line between a beetle’s wings.

Two wings peeled up from the body, started to spin around it, and spun so fast they appeared to be a motionless glass disk. The body that was revealed when the wings opened was sort of funnel-shaped.

The being started to rise. It didn’t rise straight up. It moved a little bit this way and a little bit that way. Maybe three inches off course in either direction, zig-zagging lazily. It started out maybe 10″ from the ceiling, and when it got to the ceiling, it passed through it.

It didn’t vanish like the ship in the story, but it did react when spotted and start to flee. It went through the ceiling, indicating it was not limited by the physics we know of. Human beings can’t make anything go through anything. Not one thing.

Why would it stick to a wall if it could pass through things? I don’t know. It could not have been held up by a physical wall, since it was able to go through them, unless it had some way of making the wall seem solid to itself.

You and I can’t lean on rays of light or feel the edges of shadows, but this thing seemed to be able to rest on a wall when it wanted to.

So what’s happening?

I don’t think there are aliens from other planets. The Fermi Paradox is too strong. There should be trillions of advanced civilizations out there right now if life develops randomly and Earth is not special. Trillions of others should have come and gone by now, leaving traces such as radio signals. We have never seen any indication that anyone is out there. But we have seen indications that other beings are here on Earth.

If the laws of physics permit intelligent beings to overcome the speed of light, which they probably do when they are understood well enough, then trillions of civilizations should be sending ships all over the place. Various intelligent species should have met by now.

If we are seeing real signs in the heavens now, I would say we must be seeing sights produced by angels and demons. We know they exist. They are not from other planets in the physical universe. They live in the space behind our space, without physical bodies.

So are we seeing the heavenly signs Yeshua told us would be omens of the apocalypse? I don’t see why not, given that the apocalypse has started. It would be strange if we were not seeing them.

It would be great to find out the end is here. I can’t wait to leave. I don’t want to be here for cataract surgery and incontinence, especially with a medical establishment that has moved to the extreme left. I don’t want to live in a world that is even more crowded than today’s. There are twice as many people here as I feel comfortable with. The newfound ability of Chinese people to become international tourists has shown me exactly how crowded the world is. They overrun places I used to love, ruining them for everyone else. I guess Indians will be next, although they are much more pleasant. The Chinese are amazing. They spit on the floor in restaurants and defecate in the flowerbeds at Disneyland Shanghai. There are signs there, in Chinese only, telling people not to drop a deuce in the bushes.

I dream of the day I hear the horn blow.

I was talking to my wife. She was telling me about her feelings about giving up on law and dropping out of her bar-study courses. This was back in Zambia. At first, she felt it was irresponsible. Friends told her it was a mistake. But when she did it, she felt the weight of the world fall of her shoulders, and she never missed what she left behind. Later on, God told her that if she had made a disastrous mistake, he would have told her.

Hearing her story made me think of my own situation. I have lost enthusiasm for practical things. I hate dealing with business, for example. There are home repairs I dread making. Often I feel like I’m going to regret not working harder. But now I ask myself: am I just feeling the end of my relationship with the unsaved world? My wife says God raptured me away from it. Is God just preparing us to get out?

Do I dare even think it? If I’m wrong…what a letdown. Worse than anything except the realization one has been condemned to hell. Hell is the worst, and Earth is number two. Thinking you’re about to be raptured and finding out you have 30 more years to go would be like thinking you’re being sent home from a bloody war and then being sent back to the front.

I know my attitude toward this place is right. Yeshua said, “He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.” People like Joe Biden and Madonna are sick. For me, death will be a release from prison. For them, it’s a horrifying end to having their own way, having brainless people treat them like gods, and treating other people like props in a play.

On the one hand, my life and my wife’s life are very pleasant. On the other, I want out. I want to go home, to be among people who are like-minded. I am sick of death, suffering, temptation, and fighting. I feel like I’m going to be extremely traumatized the next time someone close to me dies. I am fed up with death.

Why do people want to live forever on Earth? The thought is horrible. More people and animals to love and then lose. More atrocities to witness. Less room as we multiply. The same types of unpleasant events, over and over, endured by one generation after another. The same experiences, millions of times. Imagine the boredom. Do you really think you would still be able to enjoy movies if you were 200 years old? You would have seen every possible story line 50 times.

I don’t want to be stuck here with disgraceful, infantile people who fight over garbage and excrement. The company would be unbearable. Like sharing an island with angry pigs, spewing dung on everything. It would be like moving back to Miami or New York.

I hope the stories are true. If I have to witness one more idiotic presidential election after 2024, I don’t know what I’ll do.

Don’t Say “Insured”

Let me play the salesman to any Florida readers who may be trying to get insurance right now.

Buy home insurance without windstorm (hurricane) coverage.

Financial guru Suze Orman has a high-rise oceanfront condo close to Boca, AKA the Jewish Palm Beach (built in response to antisemitic ordinances and deed restrictions), and they tried to nail her for $28,000 per year. She’s a person people look to for responsible advice, and she more or less told her audience to forget home insurance, if only by example. Why?

I spent a month in a high-rise in Boca on the beach. Belonged to a rich Jewish family. They let my mother, my sister, and I shelter there during a crisis. There is zero possibility any windstorm that isn’t the product of a nuclear blast 100 yards away will hurt a building of this type. They are 100% reinforced concrete from top to bottom. Trees can’t fall on them. Their roofs are relatively tiny compared to house roofs, and they are flat and strong. They can’t flood. It’s impossible for flying debris of any size to make it above the third floor, and flying debris is not much of a problem anyway. I went through Andrew, and even at 180 mph, the bulk of the damage was from wind against structures. I was in a house that got over 160, the front was largely unprotected glass, and there were no projectile issues.

What did the insurer want $28,000 for? Theft and fire, I guess. Way too much. They were just looking for a way to make Orman pay for other people’s hurricane claims.

When was the last time a high-rise burned down in Florida? It’s extremely rare. Theft is a problem, but you would have to have a lot of stuff in a little condo to make $28,000 per year make sense. In five years, you would pay $140,000. In 10, $280,000. Come on. If you have Klimts and Picassos, you can insure them independently.

There is no way she could ever have had hurricane damage in that place. I’m surprised she ever chose to insure against it.

A high-rise in Miami Beach collapsed a while back. Should she worry about that? Insurance is not the answer for a building that is about to fall over. The answer is to get out and avoid buying a similar home. Insurance isn’t going to lift 15 floors of collapsed concrete off you. Since the panic that followed the incident, inspectors and county officials have been in high gear, identifying and fixing dubious buildings, so you should be able to avoid properties that have issues.

What I’m getting at is this: she would have gotten nothing at all for her wind insurance premiums, and spending $28,000 to insure for wind, theft, fire and liability is ridiculous when wind is most of the cost.

I think she should have looked for fire and theft insurance. I’ll bet it would have been an acceptable deal.

Here is what Orman said: “I’m not paying $28,000 a year when the insurer will probably contest any claim I get anyway. Luckily, I have the money to self-insure.” That is true for her personalty, but she can’t rebuild a high-rise if it burns. She’ll have to eat a loss that is probably in the area of 3.5 million dollars. If she can insure against that for a few grand, it’s worth it.

If you reject windstorm coverage, suddenly your rates will implode, and insurers that gave you silly pretexts for refusing to insure you will suddenly find that you’re a good prospect.

That’s what is happening to me, anyway.

The last year I had an insurance premium I thought was reasonable, I paid about $3400. The next year (last year) I hit $8000. Too much, but I thought I had no choice. Then they said they would not renew at any cost, supposedly because I was too far from a fire station. That was a lie; it was obviously because of hurricanes.

This year, I sent my agent a request, asking for insurance without wind coverage. He expressed doubt because I was allegedly non-renewed over fire. Then on the same day, he sent me an offer. Get this: $1300.

Dude.

So much for that fire story.

It is possible I may not qualify because they may not consider my neighborhood a proper subdivision, which it, technically, is. But it shows you have to be stupid to get hurricane insurance when you are not in danger of having hurricane damage.

I have other properties that don’t have hurricane coverage because they’re not the kind of properties hurricanes hurt. There has never been a problem. The money I save could pay the mortgage on another property.

I wiped out all the trees that could conceivably land on anything expensive, and now I don’t need hurricane insurance. My roof is not going to come off in the kind of maximum sustained winds this area has suffered since the dawn of history. I made sure this area was flood-proof before I moved here. Worst case: I have to move downed trees and repair some fences. Big deal. Did that already in ’17.

I guess a claim should have been filed for the cost of debris removal. It wasn’t a big deal. Might have netted a grand or two after the deductible, but probably not. I would have had to find people to move the wood, which didn’t seem possible. They would never pay me for moving it myself.

Removing the dangerous trees this year cost me $7500. Very, very cheap. If I am able to get the insurance I was offered, paying the new rate plus $7500, I will save about $6000 in the first two years alone. And having a tree land on your house is terrible, even if you’re insured. You don’t want it. Far, far better to avoid the problem entirely. Insurers will try to cheat you after your loss. They will not be able to replace the irreplaceable. You’ll have to move for a while. Forget that. Cut the trees.

I had to remove the trees anyway. Some were rotten. All were too close. If I had decided to continue to pay for hurricane insurance, I would still have had them removed. I’m going to stay on this personally from now on cutting trees myself before they become problems.

I have a 50-foot oak beside my driveway right now. It’s sick. Bet you I can have it gone in three hours. Just me and the saws and the tractor. It’s easy, as long as nothing breaks down. A tree surgeon won’t touch it for under a thousand. I know.

What if you can’t cut the trees that endanger your house? What if you have a mortgage and have to have insurance. Move to Tennessee, I guess. I don’t know what else you can do, unless you’re so rich you don’t care.

I may have my roof bulked up from below. I have wind straps that are not the very best. Better ones can be installed in existing roofs. But it would take an extremely strong storm to remove my roofs, and we just don’t get those. A tornado would do it, but what are the odds? One in 10,000?

My choice isn’t wind insurance versus no wind insurance. It’s no insurance at all versus insurance that doesn’t cover wind. The choice seems pretty obvious.

When I travel, I want to know there is some chance I will be compensated for whatever people steal. Theft is very unlikely here, but it would cost me a lot. I want to know that if my house burns, I’ll get at least most of a new house. The other stuff is not important. Insurance payments are generally half-assed, inadequate efforts to put Band-Aids on severed limbs. I want a decent Band-Aid at a decent price. I am not stupid enough to think insurance will make me whole.

I admit, sometimes insurance is pretty good. A property of mine was damaged by leakage from an upstairs property. I wanted to have a contractor fix everything at the insurer’s expense. Easy. They wouldn’t have it. When I quibbled, they offered me over $8000 for work I thought might amount to $4000, and I took it. They wanted to settle and get out fast. But they do cheat people whenever they can.

I am no expert, but it seems to me every Floridian who wants homeowner insurance, and who can reduce hurricane damage risks to near zero, should look into getting rid of wind insurance. I’m going to do it if I can work it out.

MORE

I am blogging again in order to avoid heat stroke. I’m yanking the awful hedges the original owner of this house put in by the driveway. Should have done it 7 years ago. My mouth got dry, and in the house I came.

I thought I’d comment on a story about Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s business partner. He is supposedly worth $2.6 billion.

His advice? Never pay for insurance. He says he doesn’t have home insurance because he can write a check and build a new house.

I have mixed feelings about this advice, because he’s wrong. Sometimes insurance is great. Examples:

1. Your house’s value is NOT less that 0.05% of your net worth. This applies to a shocking number of people, Mr. Munger. To many people, losing a house is worse than dropping a pizza. If my current insurance offer goes through, I can get a new house and new stuff for $1300. I may live 30 years, so ignoring inflation for obvious reasons, I might have to come up with $40,000 over that time to pay for a house that would cost way more than that to replace, along with new stuff. I would have to be quite stupid not to take that deal. It would take me lifetimes to pay the insurer the value of what I could lose. If I were worth $2.6 billion, I would still take that deal. Fires do happen.

2. You live in an area where morons like to fall down and sue people. That covers a lot of the US. If you’re worth $2.6 billion, maybe you’re not afraid of a $2 million verdict for a con artist who says he can’t work because he fell in your driveway, but many people are worth considerably less than $2.6 billion and would feel the impact of a $2 million loss more than the loss of a coffee mug.

3. You rent cars when you travel to other states or countries. If you can rent a car for $300 without insurance and $375 with insurance, take the insurance, especially in a foreign country. American insurance generally doesn’t work in other countries. Do you really want a rental agency in some Stan country to put you in jail until you pay for a wrecked 2004 Scion with chicken manure in the glove box? I wrecked a rental car once while traveling. The lady in the other car claimed she had medical issues. I don’t know much about it, because they gave me another car, and when my trip was over, I flew home. I didn’t know she claimed she was injured until months later, and I had zero involvement with the whole business because I paid for insurance.

4. You travel abroad. See above. You can get a huge amount of insurance for a couple of hundred dollars when you go abroad for three weeks. Medical. Evacuation. Liability. How can you turn that down? I must stress that this is another situation in which my advice is intended for people worth substantially less than $2.6 billion. Travel insurance is just too cheap and helpful to pass up, unless you are filthy rich. The potential downside of not being insured is huge.

5. Sometimes a product is so awful, insurance is a smart idea. This used to be true of laptops. Maybe it is now. They broke down all the time. I bought an expensive laptop a long time ago, and I had no problem with the price of insurance. I would never insure something like a washing machine, but some products just can’t be trusted, and sometimes the cost of insurance is unrealistically low.

You may think your homeowner’s insurance covers stuff like this. Okay, sure. Do you know what your deductible is? I had a $2000 problem, and my deductible was $2500. This is why I keep my car deductibles as close to zero as they allow. A low deductible doesn’t jack the premiums up much at all, and it makes claims pleasant.

6. Dealing with a loss is just too much of a pain. What if you’re a contractor, and your ladder or impact driver breaks? Do you want to lose work while you send it to the factory, or do you want to pay 15% extra and have them hand you a new one at the store, no questions asked? Think carefully. This is not supposed to be a tough question.

If the downside is tolerable and the insurance is expensive, don’t pay. If it’s the other way around, pay. That’s what I think.

My dad taught me never to pay to insure anything I could insure myself. Basically good advice, but oversimplified. When Best Buy asks me if I want to pay $50 to insure a $200 item, it offends me, but I pay when the deal is right.

Maybe I’m missing something here. It has been known to happen. I do think extremely rich people should pursue different strategies from the rest of us. If I were Kim Kardashian, and I wrecked a Bentley, I would have a new one brought to my house, have an assistant file a claim, and give it away when it was fixed. If I were the assistant and I wrecked my 3-series BMW, I would probably take a different course.

So This is How Other Americans Live

This year, I am having a very welcome experience. I am sitting through hurricane season with the same degree of worry as a referee in a murderous MMA match. I no longer have skin in the game.

When I moved here, there were oaks all around the house and shop, and some were well over 100 feet high. Most were rotten, because they were trash oaks. Unlike live oaks, which live hundreds of years, trash oaks grow quickly, get eaten by bugs, and fall apart piece by piece. Here, they say they live for 20 years and die for 80.

I had oaks over two feet thick at chest height, held up by cylinders of sound wood with interiors made of something like rotten papier-mache. They were close enough to the buildings to fall on them if they blew over.

People call these oaks “water oaks,” although some are other species and even hybrids. Water oaks generally don’t fall over even if they’re rotten. Instead, they start dropping dead branches from near their tops. Sometimes the branches are a few feet long. Sometimes they’re 20 feet long and weigh a lot.

A typical water oak will self-destruct more or less in place, with the dead material falling close to their bases. But sometimes they just plain fall over. They can also fall just because they’re too tall and the soil here is too weak to hold them up in a blow.

We never, ever get hit by hurricanes here, but we do get hit by winds in the tropical storm range. Former hurricanes pass over us, and hurricanes that are still strong pass by within 100 miles. Tropical storm winds can’t blow a roof off or pick up a tree and throw it. They’re not dangerous to houses unless they can blow heavy stuff onto them, and that, they can do. If they are sufficiently close to tall trees.

Every year as the season started, I watched the NHC maps, wondering if I was going to have to file an insurance claim.

This year it’s very different. I paid a crew a lot of money for a day and a half of work, and now the odds of my buildings being damaged are right up there with the odds of Biden being reelected.

The first month of the season has been a big nothing. When we finally started to see activity, I was excited. Because my house might be crushed? No. Because I thought we would get some rain to fix the yard damage the tree service did. I actually HOPED we would get a tropical storm. That felt weird.

It wasn’t a smart thing to hope for. I can still lose electricity for a few days, and I shouldn’t hope for something that will harm people who are less prepared.

I still have properties in areas where hurricanes hit with full force, but they are not houses. I don’t care what happens. Andrew hit them about as hard as a hurricane can, and they weren’t harmed.

Because winds other than tornado winds (rare) can’t hurt this house, I don’t need wind insurance, and I don’t need flood insurance because before my dad bought this house, I checked the government’s satellite maps. This property can’t flood. There is one area where I can get a little standing water, but it’s maybe a quarter-mile from the house, and we’re talking about a couple of inches of water.

I am now looking for a company that will insure my house for everything except hurricanes. I don’t want to pay for insurance I will never use. Insurers are cutting customers off, citing stupid pretexts like the distance to fire stations. The real reason is fear of paying off storm claims. It seems to me there ought to be someone out there who will want to take my money, knowing they will never have to rebuild my house unless it burns.

They ought to love insuring people in my area because the storm risk is so much lower than it is in coastal areas. I’m not sure they know what they’re doing. Maybe the problem is that so many people in areas that don’t get really strong winds let trees grow close to their homes.

I’m turning into what most Americans already are: a person who isn’t interested in hurricane news. It feels great. I pray when I read about any disaster, impending or otherwise, but from now on, I won’t feel I have a personal stake in any of it.

Senile Biden Proves Dementia-Denying Leftist Press, Politicians Have to Go

Ordinarily, I don’t watch presidential debates. They are held on a 5th-grade level, the dishonest leftist moderators always do their best to destroy conservatives, there is zero possibility I will vote for anyone other than a Republican, I acknowledge God, not politicians, as our only savior, and the whole business makes my stomach hurt.

My wife, however, feels differently, so last night I heard some of the presidential debate as she listened on her phone, and we ended up watching most of it. We would have been better off having a prayer session.

We all know what happened. Joe Biden was proven senile, beyond any conceivable effort to deny it. CNN, which disgraced itself even more than usual by agreeing to conditions which essentially held Trump down so Biden could kick him, posted this headline: “‘We are f***ed’: Democrats despair over Biden debate performance.”

Publishing that was trashy, and I’m sorry I repeat it here, but this is the world we live in now.

Biden unraveled. He was terrible. He lost like no other candidate has ever lost. Sometimes it was painful to watch. That being said, he did better than I expected. I’m still amazed he got through his first year.

People are saying Trump did well. He didn’t. He just looked great because he was debating a corpse. He exaggerated. He probably said things that could be lies or could be mistakes caused by lack of preparation. I didn’t catch any lies except the ones Biden told. He missed opportunities. He obviously didn’t prepare the way a good attorney would prepare for oral argument. Along with his opponent, he descended into childishess. But he won the debate because Biden was effectively his teammate. I guess he could have won without Joe’s help, but Joe made it effortless.

On the big picture, Trump was perfect. He keeps making it clear leftists are ruining America. That’s the big picture. Inescapably true. And he did a good job of reminding black people, repeatedly, that leftists had brought in millions of foreign lawbreakers to take their jobs. Unfortunately, most black people don’t watch debates. They get their news from gossip, Facebook, Tiktok, and black celebrities.

There is no point in going over the debate and dissecting it moment by moment. Everyone knows what happened. Go ahead and try to debunk it. The deeper you dig, the more you will realize you’re making it worse. There is no hope whatsoever of spinning this.

Most people think the big story is that Biden showed himself to be senile. It’s sad that they missed the real story, which is this: the people who control us–politicians and journalists–have been lying to us systematically since 2020, and many of them, this very morning, are repeating the same lies.

“Biden is strong and sharp behind the scenes.” “He only looks bad in videos because Republicans edit them and use AI to make them.” “The claim that his handlers limit his appearances to prevent people from seeing that he’s senile is a conspiracy theory.” The dumbest lie: “Trump is the one who is really senile.”

Trump is running a multibillion-dollar empire while running for president and beating the incumbent, while dealing with bogus felony trials ginned up by prosecutors who should be imprisoned. He gives unscripted speeches two hours long, over and over. He travels constantly, on a plane with adult-sized stairs, which, unlike Biden, he does not negotiate tentatively in special sneakers colored black so people will think they’re dress shoes. He sleeps 4 hours a night. He is most definitely not senile.

The truth means nothing to the dementia deniers. NOTHING. As long as they get socialism and perversion, they are willing to tell us absolutely any lie they think we will swallow.

In 2020, it was obvious Biden was demented. You can prove it to yourself right now. You can look at him in 2018 and 2020 videos and see the enormous change. Didn’t matter to the left. They lied and lied and lied. Now he can’t even find his way off a stage, and they are still lying. His wife had to help him off the debate stage last night.

They lie about Trump. They lie about coronavirus. They lie about illegals. They lie about perverts. They lie about inflation. You name it; they lie about it.

A while back, God told me this: “The truth has been lost.”

That’s not a small thing. It’s catastrophic. People who don’t know it’s catastrophic are ignorant. They don’t know the Bible.

Who is the truth? Yeshua. He is the way, the truth, and the life. If you abandon the truth, you abandon Yeshua. You can’t have him unless you love the truth.

I complain about homosexual behavior, pointing out that it is abomination. Guess what else is abomination? A lying tongue. A person who lies habitually is an abomination, just like a homosexual who lies back in a dark bathhouse with his legs open for strangers. Sodomy isn’t the only abomination. Check a concordance.

To have salvation, you have to have humility. A person who is proud can’t admit fault. If you can’t admit fault, you can’t repent. If you can’t repent, you can’t ask for forgiveness. Not sincerely. You can’t be improved. You will continue to rot, adding iniquity to iniquity.

This is why Yeshua says he’s the truth.

Journalists and politicians didn’t see anything new last night. They knew Biden was demented in 2020, but here they are today, pretending they just realized it.

And who saw it coming? I did. I said that if Biden didn’t collapse in office, leftists would suddenly “realize” he had dementia and try to coerce him to resign. Now you see it happening. It started last night before the debate was over.

They knew he was demented. They just assumed that with enough cheating, he would get through the debate. Now that the cheating–the conditions, venue, and, most likely, drugs–didn’t work, they are doing what I said they would do. They are pretending they just realized he has a problem.

They’re saying very stupid things. They’re saying they doubt he has the ability to make it another 4 years. Hello? He has been like this for 3-1/2 years already, in charge of our military, including nuclear weapons. He has gotten us into wars during that time. He will be president until January, unless they drag him out in a straitjacket. What is their excuse for subjecting us to this? They knew what they were doing.

I also said I didn’t think Biden would agree to withdraw. They love telling us he’s a warm, friendly, humble man. As though nobody were alive to see him during the last century. He was one of Washington’s most notorious and abrasive buffoons and liars. He had to abandon a presidential campaign because, as he admitted, he lied too much. He made a fool of himself in Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

He is vindictive. He is petty. His arrogance and self-worship are immeasurable. He raised traumatized, failed children because of his ambition. He’s not going to quit unless they find a very big crowbar. He worships at the altar of himself. He has no capacity whatsoever to admit fault.

They’ll have to threaten him with something in private. That’s the only way.

Problem is, the biggest threat is Donald Trump, who will pursue investigations into the Biden family’s obvious influence-peddling. If Biden isn’t president, who will protect the Bidens?

Dementia makes the arrogant and stubborn worse. Believe me, as the son of a dementia sufferer, I know. Arrogant people don’t admit they’re demented. They revile and even physically attack people who tell them the truth. These things are normal.

Enormous loads of lies are being piled on our heads by the left, all day, every day, and the right isn’t a whole lot better. Ordinary Americans are just as bad as their celebrity keepers. This is why the rapture has to come. The only effective vaccine that has come out during the last decade is the one that makes people immune to truth.

We’re not just a banana republic. We’re something worse. A banana republic that thinks it’s a great nation of laws and principles.

I try not to get absorbed in politics, but it’s difficult, because leftism is driven by hatred of God, and because of it, I live in a doomed, cursed country where I am persecuted. I’ll say this: I manage not to think of politicians as our deliverers.

I’m a theocrat and a monarchist. I go along with the current system because I have to. I won’t make a fool of myself by taking part in an armed insurrection, but give me a chance to vote for a religious monarchy, and I’ll do it.

I saw that Oklahoma is forcing schools to tell kids about the Bible and the Ten Commandments. I have no problem with it. If Florida had a referendum on a law banning mosques, I would vote for it. I don’t care about religious freedom, really. I care about freedom to practice Christianity and Messianic Judaism. I will vote against pagan religions every single time I get the chance, and I will always vote for people who promote Christianity.

There is a huge, ugly Hindu temple near me. I would love to see it bulldozed. I speak a curse to it when I drive by. When my wife and I went to Egypt, we saw idols ancient Christians had defaced. We thought it was great. We should finish the job. We should destroy every image, turn every temple into rubble, and build urinals on the remains. God used to do this to pagan sites.

Revile me. Say I’m against democracy. You’re right. Democracy is degenerate. Yeshua was murdered through voting. Jewish majorities killed the Jewish prophets. A majority rejected Moses. A majority rejected theocracy and chose mad king Saul. Give me my perfect king. Now.

A fallible king who promotes Christianity is much better than democracy. The one perfect king, who is also God, is best.

Last night we found out we have no real president and no hope of having one until January. Biden is playing roller derby on one skate, and Kamala Harris is, truly, quite stupid. Our republic is decapitated. Now our enemies have had it shoved in their faces by CNN. What will Putin, Kim Jong Un, Xi Jinping, and the Muslims do, now that they are certain we have no leader, and they face the prospect of fighting a real man in February? I’m sure they are chattering, trying to make quick decisions.

Whatever they do, the press and our leftists will help them with lies, executive action, crooked judges, and toxic legislation. Corrupted nations always fight their friends and assist their conquerors.

I hope Trump wins, but this world is still finished.

I guess now I’ll go read the articles that are popping up, calling Trump a liar and grossly exaggerating the problems with his performance. I will definitely see them as soon as I leave this site.

You don’t always have to be a prophet to predict the future.

How Much Longer?

God keeps giving me revelation, and I will share it. I wish I could say it was good news for the world, but it’s not.

It’s hard to relate this stuff in a linear, easily-understood way, so I’ll just write and hope for the best.

I lived in Miami. As I grew closer to God, I grew to hate it. Miami is a city of pigs. People there are shallow, coarse, rude, and selfish. Racism is a big problem there. Cubans hate blacks and look down on all other Hispanics. American blacks hate non-blacks. Haitians can’t get jobs because Cubans won’t hire them. Most of Miami is a ghetto where you have to keep driving if you’re in an accident, because if you don’t, a black mob may beat you to death.

The traffic is terrible. It’s a homosexual haven. The best-known beach has been taken over by topless tramps.

When I moved up north, I found I still hated Miami. In fact, my hatred of Miami life increased every day. It still does. I never think, “It wasn’t so bad; I should go back for a visit.” I never miss anyone from Miami enough to think about visiting. I always want to kiss the ground here. I thank God over and over. I look out the windshield of my car at the trees and farms, and it’s hard for me to believe I’m really here. All this, after nearly 7 years.

God will rapture real Christians away to him during the 7 years of tribulation, and I have been raptured away from Miami for almost 7 years.

My county is a sanctuary. I love it. The people are mostly conservative Christians. Joe Biden couldn’t get a job as a school crossing guard here. People are warm and kind. They’re extremely patient. No one honks. There are interracial families everywhere. When I meet black people here, it’s not like it was in Miami. There is no sensation of uneasy detente.

Still, I hate living in this world. My county is a little oasis. It’s an aberration. The rest of America is a pile of festering excrement full of maggots. Living in my little haven is like huddling in an airlock, waiting for the mothership. My life is easy, but America is not my home. The country that produced me hates me and loves my enemies.

I have realized my feelings about this world are like my feelings about Miami. The closer I get to God, the more I will hate being stuck here. It’s not abnormal. It’s not a problem that needs to be fixed. It’s what happens when your eyes are opened to the goodness of God and the comparative filthiness of humanity and evil spirits.

God isn’t just God. He generates heaven. His presence is heaven. Wherever he goes, heaven goes with him. The more time you spend with him, the more painful it will be every time you have to go back to earthly concerns.

Most human beings bring you closer to hell. They’re full of demons, and Satan is using demons to bring hell to the surface of the earth. Miami is more like hell than most areas of the US.

There is no future for any decent person in this world. If I raise my children here, they will have no idea what a decent life in a decent country is like. They will face temptation my grandparents could never have imagined. They may know kids whose mothers have Onlyfans ads on their car windows. They will know girls who send boys nude pictures. If they go to school they will be taught that anyone who believes abomination is bad is a Nazi.

They will be under attack every day, just as I am, simply because God loves them and their parents are Christians. The government will be on the side of their enemies, and so will most people.

The government may even try to take them from me because I side with the supreme being who loves me.

I had inadequate parents. They didn’t introduce me to God. My dad ridiculed God and Christians. My mother took my sister and me to church about twice a year. She didn’t know the Holy Spirit. She had no revelation.

My parents didn’t teach us much of anything. The other day I realized something: when I needed guidance, I didn’t think to go to my parents, because they never fulfilled their obligation to guide me and help me overcome. Also, while they were smart, they were not wise.

I grew up thinking for myself, with results that should have been predictable. Failure and misery. I was a loser, meaning spirits and people who were against me won, and I lost.

The other day God gave me a revelation about his nature as a father and the attitude I should take to him.

God knows my name. He knows everything about me. He loved me before I was created. I am very important. He wants me to be victorious and happy. He wants me to come to him all through the day with my problems. When I don’t know what to do, I should do what normal kids who have normal parents do.

Now I go to him and call him “dad.” I tell him I’m his son, and I need my father to show me what to do, because I don’t want to try to figure things out on my own. That’s what got me in trouble and wasted decades of my life.

It’s one thing to know God is your father, but when he tells you this by revelation, it becomes part of your heart. It’s not the same.

Yesterday, I read a story about Portland, Maine, handing out kits to people who like shooting drugs up their rear ends. The kits come with syringes and instructions. The instructions don’t just tell them how to get it done. They give suggestions to help people get the fastest, strongest highs.

With the story came revelation. We have given up. God expounded on the revelation today.

America used to be a Christian country. People deny it, citing the Constitution, as though it really controlled us. This was a Christian country. Laws and court decisions reflected this until we turned away from God.

We passed laws about things like sodomy, adultery, and fornication. We banned drugs, gambling, pornography, and prostitution. All those things are practiced freely now, all over the US.

Why did we stop trying to fight sin? We gave up. We decided we knew better than God. We didn’t like being told what to do. We didn’t like shouldering the burden of leadership. We were only rarely able to get God’s supernatural help.

Now we promote sin. We force better countries to let us fly sodomy flags over our embassies, and we tie humanitarian aid to the promotion of abomination. We encourage doctors to make it impossible for confused kids to become real men and women who can reproduce. We encourage them to castrate adults and give them unnecessary mastectomies. Casinos are all over. We are not merely legalizing drugs; we are helping addicts get hooked and stay hooked.

We now treat people who are against sin the way we should treat people who fight it. We call evil good and good evil.

We have given up not just on God, but on each other. We are supposed to help the lost find God. Instead, we help them destroy themselves, because it’s more convenient for us.

I always say the rapture will come when we give up on God and he realizes there is no longer any point in continuing with the present evangelism model. God has shown me there is more to it. He will give up on the world when we give up on each other, and that’s what we’ve done.

Conservatives have deteriorated. Many tell us to be fiscally conservative and socially liberal. Be selfish and try to cut your taxes, but let perverts rule the country. Let them take over our government and even the church.

It’s not going to get better. If you are attached to this place, and you think real Christians who criticize our culture are self-righteous kooks you should fight, you will stay here with the demons when the rapture comes, and there will be no children of God to pray for your protection.

It’s going to keep getting worse. Go ahead and vote for Trump. I know I will. But he’s one little hemostat on a severed leg. He can’t fix things. He’s no messiah, and the real Messiah himself can’t fix things, because he has to have our consent, which he will never get during this age.

Satan always wins the popular vote. My wife said it, and it’s true. Every time humanity gets a break from God, we descend into depravity again. Eden. The Flood. Abraham’s descendants, plunging into centuries of demon worship. The rejection and murder of Yeshua, by a coalition of Romans and Jews who claimed to represent Yahweh. The church’s rejection of the Holy Spirit. We do it every time.

The rapture won’t fix the world, even if God takes us in a spectacular way and everyone else sees it. The facts don’t matter to liars. They would come up with lies to explain it away. God showed up in pillars of fire and cloud, he showered the earth with manna and quail, and most Jews still turned on him. They turned on him again while he stood before them working miracles. As they were arresting him to murder him, he worked miracles, including raising thousands of dead people and knocking the priests and temple guards to the ground with supernatural power. They still murdered him, knowing who and what he was. After the crucifixion, the church experienced many great miracles and signs, and look how it turned out in 2024.

A spectacular rapture will only move people who choose to be moved. You choose what you believe, whether you admit it or not.

Most people would ridicule a spectacular rapture and double down on blasphemy.

So when is God going to come for us? It can’t happen soon enough. I don’t want to raise kids in this world until the ungodly are removed and Yeshua is here on a physical throne. How much worse will things get before that happens? How many martyrs will there be? Is there any kind of humiliation we will be spared?

I always pray for God to help me fear him. He is listening. I fear him now. I can’t stand this place. I don’t want to be left here with people who hate me, separated from God.

Living on Earth in 2024 is like taking care of a retarded person who smears excrement on the walls and furniture and urinates in the refrigerator. It doesn’t matter whether you love that person. It doesn’t matter how fancy the house is or whether you have some clean rooms you can hide in. The situation is unsustainable.

It amazes me to see how blessed my wife and I are. We don’t have to interact much with people. We are physically isolated. We have abundance. We get to have long prayer sessions when other people are working in offices where they can be abused and fired for speaking the truth. Our lives in our little cocoon of cleanliness are great. But we still need to go home.

I really hope I’m not stuck here waiting until I die.

Why, Exactly, did we Imprison El Chapo?

Don’t ever try to tell me the world we knew isn’t finished.

Portland, Maine, is providing kits to drug users so they can shoot opioids up their anuses.

Their anuses. No joke. Fentanyl and heroin. Meth. Anuses, people.

I’m talking about a local government. A local part of the same big system that, right now, is holding drug dealers in prisons across the country. Some for smuggling heroin…you know where.

The Onion and The Babylon Bee could never have published something like this. It’s too bizarre to make good satire.

Picture this on TV in the 1960’s. On a show about local government. Say The Andy Griffith Show. Barney goes to release Otis from the drunk tank but turns away. In horror. Should have searched him the night before.

The kits come with lubricants, and Portland provides advice as to how to get the most powerful high. That’s certainly helpful. Coming from THE GOVERNMENT.

I feel like going out in the yard, looking up, and trying to spot Yeshua. Blow, Gabriel. Please blow.

You Don’t Have to be Jewish to Want to Disempower Dangerous Loonies

Why was I too blind to see this? Apparently, the Global Jewish Conspiracy is stealing elections from liberals now.

Isn’t this the same Global Jewish Conspiracy that makes about 90% of American Jews vote for liberals? It sounds like someone forgot the mission statement.

I keep saying black Americans have a huge antisemitism problem, and no one believes me in spite of how obvious it is, because that’s how my life goes. No one ever believes anything I say. Look around the web, and find out for yourself. See what mainstream blacks say about Jews. A huge number of them claim they’re the real Jews. They think actual Jews are Russians and Cossacks. Popular entertainers who do business with Jews say it, proudly.

Calling a Jew a Cossack is like calling Aztecs conquistadors.

Black soon-to-be-former Representative Jamaal Bowman lost his primary election. He is a “squad” member and a close pal of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He is about as nutty and truth-immune a leftist you will ever see. Who are liberals blaming? Him and his genocidal insanity? No. They blame AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. As we all know, this is a lobbying group committed to helping Israel.

They say Bowman’s enemies are “buying” elections. Hmm…who could buy elections? Rich people who like to pull strings from behind the scenes. Which group has been accused of that the most. Let me think.

It’s a dog whistle Helen Keller could hear.

AIPAC claims it’s nonpartisan. Yeah, and it’s a total coincidence that Supreme Court justices tend to vote along with the parties of the presidents who nominated them. AIPAC is in the business of sending money from CONSERVATIVE donors to Democrat candidates who are farther to the right than their competitors. It also supports Republican candidates. AIPAC is a conservative organization no matter how much they shuck and jive.

They pretend they’re nonpartisan because Jews are political kamikazes. They attack their allies and help their enemies. Conservative Americans are pretty much the only significant allies Israel has, but most American Jews think conservatives are the ones who are out to get them. Most American Jews are more afraid of Christian conservatives, without whom they can’t survive, than they are of Muslim terrorists who admit they want every Jew dead.

If AIPAC came out and admitted it was basically conservative, many Jews would quit donating.

For conservatives and Christians, helping Jews is like feeding an injured wild animal and trying to keep the human scent off the food so it won’t reject it. But they gobble every bait the left puts out.

Okay; AIPAC is pro-Israel. But that doesn’t mean “the Jews” shot Bowman down. It means a number of conservative Christians, as well as some Jews, shot him down.

In any case, left-wing nuts are now blaming the Jews, using not-clever veiled terms to describe Jews, so they can unpersuasively deny their antisemitism. Someone should make a list of these terms. “Zionists.” “Bankers.” I wonder if “New World Order” is code for “Jews.” One Jewish organization thinks so.

Bowman has done some things in support of Israel in the past, perhaps as a nod to the necessity of wooing New York Jewish voters, but he is now an October 7 denier and says Israel is committing genocide, which is somewhat like saying European Jews committed genocide in the 1930’s and ’40’s.

The more time passes, the closer we get to the day when leftists stirring up hate in front of cameras stop saying “Zionism” and “Israel” and start saying “the Jews.” Some are already doing it.

Jews will never be popular. Never. Antisemitism is a permanent feature of human interactions, because Satan hates Jews even more than he hates most people. Most people listen to Satan. Jews keep trying to appease. It’s a pointless strategy; feeding a wolf your fingers, hoping he won’t take your arm.

The things I thought God told me many years ago are coming true. I believed they came from God, but it still amazes me to see myself proven right.

No one listens. Well, a majority put Jeremiah in a cistern for telling the truth. Nothing changes.

Now I have to go check Venmo for my payment from the Elders of Zion.

Mower Buyer Battles Iron Dome of Incompetence and Lies

Buying used stuff online seems to be getting harder now that Facebook has taken over.

I don’t have a Facebook account, so I don’t have Facebook Marketplace. If I signed up today, it would probably be 6 months before they would let me use Marketplace. They don’t accept new users, and you have to have “friends,” i.e. strangers you have no interest in knowing yet who read about your life every day. To look at items, I have to use my wife’s account, which she needs to delete for her own good.

Maybe I shouldn’t complain about the strangers, given that I blog, but here, no one is collecting my data, and I don’t have to worry about college and being looked up by old acquaintances I’m hoping I never hear from again.

Craigslist is drying up, and Facebook won’t let you play unless you join the slimy collective.

My mower saga started with a rude lady who treated me like a terrorist. Then I messaged another seller, and she didn’t even answer. She just changed her listing so it said the mower was sold. I reported her for not responding. You can do that.

I found a mower with 22 hours, listed under what looked like an individual’s account. In reality, the listing came from Crystal Tractor, one of the only two big Kubota networks here. They have a store in Deland, and that’s where the mower was, supposedly, at one time.

I messaged the account holder, and he said he would check on the mower. That was days ago. I messaged him again yesterday. No answer.

I Googled to find out who really advertised the mower. It wasn’t hard, because the ad photos and video matched photos from Crystal Tractor’s website.

Today I called Crystal Tractor, and they said the mower had sold long ago. They didn’t offer me anything else. Small wonder, because their online used inventory is pathetic.

I reported the guy who advertised the mower falsely and did not respond.

Why is Crystal Tractor advertising under individual accounts?

I think I understand why my local dealer has a whole herd of unsold mowers. It looks like Kubota doesn’t require franchisees to maintain basic competence or ethics.

I went to Ocala’s inaptly-named Florida Coast Equipment, and the nice lady I dealt with had no idea what she was doing. Didn’t know how the products worked. Didn’t seem to know Kubota made garden tractors. Didn’t know what mower buyers need. Didn’t offer to scan the chain’s inventory to see if they had anything I might want. It was like they had just hired her away from Olive Garden. How do they sell anything?

To sell people expensive machinery, you have to know your products. People don’t want to hand over 5 or 6 figures without some reason to believe they’re getting what they need and paying a fair price. You have to make them comfortable. The guy who showed me Scag mowers knew everything about them, and he clearly knew what mowing was like. If I decided to buy a mower from him tomorrow, I wouldn’t have to ask him a thing.

I’m so frustrated, I have considered the unthinkable: buying a John Deere.

I dislike the John Deere company because they treat customers so badly. Other companies make products that are just as good or better. Nearly all small tractors, for example, are of equal quality, regardless of what people with green hats and face tattoos tell you. But John Deere, like BMW, promotes a perception of nonexistent exceptionalism. As though they’re doing you a favor by selling you something exclusive and exciting, which is not an accurate description of their run-of-the-mill products.

John Deere charges way too much for parts. They fight people who want to repair machines they paid for. On the other hand, they do make good zero-turns, and if I had one, I could probably do all the repairs myself and never see the inside of a dealership.

I could paint it orange.

I like Kubotas for their quality and the easy availability of parts, but I also like a feature their zero-turns have. The decks lift up without floor jacks. Kubota builds jacks into the decks of some models. I don’t want to buy a mower without this feature if I can avoid it, because blades have to be removed and replaced once in a while.

My Bronze Age Deere tractor is repaired, maybe. I started it up, and it did not leak. I’m going to see if I can cut my waist-high grass, and I’ll keep looking for something better.

What if it keeps running? Should I forget about a new mower? I don’t think so. I don’t trust my mower, and thanks to leftists and their demented king, product prices keep skyrocketing. I think I already lost about $3,000 by not buying a couple of years back.

I really don’t like the idea of spending money on a gas zero-turn when a used diesel what will outlast it can be had for less money.

I have learned what a good used diesel should cost. With a few hundred hours, no more than $10,500. A mower with very low hours…maybe $12,000. In terms of what you get, there isn’t a big difference between new and 500 hours.

Hope the old mower will get me through a few more months. It will probably take me that long to find a replacement.

A Bargain that Robs You of Peace is too Expensive

I’m learning more about buying and selling online.

I was interested in a used mower. I contacted the person who claimed to own it. She was really rude and gave me problems over things like photographing her ID. She wouldn’t give me useful answers to questions. She did not make a normal effort to make things work, as you or I would. There was no way to work with her, so I cut her loose. I couldn’t figure out what was happening. I wondered if she was a criminal or maybe a drunk.

I discussed this with some people online, and most thought she sounded like a scammer, but some thought I was the problem. They thought it was crazy to ask someone for an ID, and one even said I looked like a scammer because I had no trailer and would have to send a truck.

These people have no common sense. They’re like people who have successfully gone through dozens of sex partners without catching a disease or getting pregnant. They recommend stupid practices because they haven’t been burned yet.

If you get on a motorcycle without a helmet right now and weave through traffic at 150 miles per hour, the odds you will be fine are over 99%, assuming you know how to ride. If you do this and come out okay, should you then tell people what you did was smart? Should you come down on people who won’t do it? If so, you’re the reason doctors call motorcycles “donorcycles.” You are not smart.

We are always surrounded by people who seem fine even though they do stupid things. People who have nice homes, cars, phones, and toys and owe hundreds of thousands or millions to credit card companies and banks. People who have had hundreds of sex partners. People who bought British cars. You have to see through the surface when you make decisions.

You don’t know who has herpes, HPV, or HIV. You don’t know whose car is leased. You don’t know who is going to end up paying $20,000 for an $8,000 couch because of interest.

I’m talking about a principle Christians should understand. We are surrounded by people who ignore God’s warnings, and most of them don’t spontaneously combust or get sucked into the bowels of the earth as soon as they sin. They seem fine a lot of the time. Many never seem to face consequences. It’s an illusion. A trap. God is not mocked, and mercy isn’t approval.

Beyonce Knowles, who promotes slutty behavior, seems fine. Taylor Swift, who promotes perversion, seems fine. Sean Combs, a proud criminal, seemed fine until recently. Kanye West, who says he is “the god of me,” appears to be in good health, and he’s still rich. Elon Musk keeps a demonic charm on his nightstand, and he’s doing well. Their current status doesn’t mean they’re not in trouble or that they’re in any position to serve as role models.

I can tell you some things I have decided. These things apply to substantial purchases, not little things like lamps and drills.

1. Always insist on an ID from a seller unless there are circumstances proving he is legitimate.

2. Never, ever do business in cash.

3. Always try to meet at a police station the first time around.

4. Accept the fact that you may have to let someone see where you live and enter the driveway. You can’t hide in a hole if you want to sell things. If you’re dealing with something large, accept the fact that someone will probably have to know someone else’s address and enter their property. That being said, don’t let anyone in your house if you can avoid it. It’s usually not necessary to let them inside. Keep your garage door closed. Don’t show them your tools or anything else they don’t need to see. You should probably avoid going into other people’s houses.

5. Be aware that if you receive stolen merchandise, you may be charged with a felony, not a misdemeanor, even if you didn’t know the merchandise was stolen. You need a signed bill of sale stating that the seller owns the property outright. You can be convicted because you didn’t do your due diligence, and a bill of sale with an affirmation of ownership will be something the court looks for. Put any guarantees or conditions on the bill of sale. Every party has to have a copy.

6. Never deal with snotty people unnecessarily, online or elsewhere. It makes you a man-pleasing self-sellout with no self-respect, and nasty people often cause problems later. They rob you of peace, and peace is not a luxury. It’s a basic need.

7. If you buy something big, and you have to send for it, give the seller a $100 deposit to hold it, good for a specified period, after which it becomes his. On the bill of sale, specify that the deposit will be refunded in full if the item disappears, regardless of how it happens. Pay in full when the item goes on the truck.

People with no common sense told me I looked like an identity thief because I wanted to see an ID. That’s just plain dumb. If I pay you 4 or more figures for something, I am eventually going to know who you are, and I will be able to find out where you live in a couple of minutes. This is the Internet age. You might as well show your ID when you meet to make the exchange, because you’re not sharing information the other person won’t eventually have, and criminals hide their identities.

You can’t sell someone a table saw or tractor anonymously. Life doesn’t work like that. They’ll see your face. Your car. Your license tag.

As for cash, look at it from a criminal’s point of view. A person is going to a known location, or departing from a known location, at a known time, with over 4 figures in cash. Let’s get rid of the police station argument right away. Who looks after you on the way to and from the station? Who looks after you when you leave the bank? A criminal who may be totally uninvolved with the purchase may force you off the road and take your money. It happens every single day. Google it.

Who will keep thieves out while you’re keeping the money in your house, waiting to deposit it?

I don’t care if you exchange the money in a bank lobby or in the White House with the Secret Service watching. Sooner or later, you will be on your own.

Even if you’re sure you won’t be robbed, don’t take cash. Counterfeit isn’t something that only exists in movies. It’s all around us. Remember George Floyd? Counterfeiters make phony bills in many denominations. Do you want to trust yourself to examine dozens of bills? You’d have to be an idiot.

That means I was an idiot, because I did it twice.

No cash. Period. There are cashier’s checks. There is Zelle. There are wires. There are credit cards. You want a data trail.

As for meeting at a police station the first time around, it will give you a chance to check each other out, exchange ID’s, and, if things are going well, exchange the item for the money electronically. You should to it if you can. But it won’t protect you from cash thieves.

If you can’t stand the idea of someone else knowing where you live or parking in your precious, secret driveway no one could ever, ever find unless you told them where it was, the burden of moving the goods somewhere else is on you, so work something out. But they will still be able to find out where you live if they want.

If you want guidance about dealing with sellers, look no further than Florida’s Pawnbroking Act. A pawnbroker has to copy a seller’s ID and make him affirm that they own whatever it is he’s selling. You should do no less.

In Florida, a pawnbroker who receives stolen merchandise and an ordinary citizen face different penalties. The penalty for you–felony prosecution–is worse. It’s not worth it just to get a good deal on a guitar. You should know the law where you live.

What if you can’t prove the seller owned what you bought? Does that sound unlikely? Women who have had breakups or divorces sell marital property every day. People who owe money on things sell them. People who are in bankruptcy sell things. Addicts sell things that belong to their relatives. Whether the thing you bought is stolen or just obtained improperly in a way that is less incriminating, you can lose it.

As for new rule 7, what do you think a seller will do if you give him $5,000 for a trailer, and when you or your agent arrives to pick it up, it’s gone? Would you expect him to give you your money? He’ll say you assumed the risk. Meanwhile, your trailer is sitting behind his brother’s house.

No delivery, no money.

People who won’t do business responsibly will make you suffer if you deal with enough of them.

This is where I am now. If anyone has corrections or additions, please put them in the comments.