More Proof Will Rogers was a Liar

I got my John Deere mower working, so I SHOULD be able to keep the lawn down until I get something better.

The repair was surprisingly easy compared to other problems this tractor has given me. I would say this should be a 45-minute repair for a professional who has done it before. I took maybe two hours. Couldn’t find my smallest inch-pound torque wrench, so that slowed me down.

In the meantime, I have experienced a big disappointment. A lady who is advertising a Kubota diesel for a very nice price appears to be a no-go. I can pay for the mower up front, right now, but she is just too weird to deal with.

When I asked if she still had the mower, she replied, “Yes,” without punctuation. No new details. No greeting.

I asked if she was okay with electronic transfers and said I couldn’t show up at a stranger’s house with cash. Check this out:

“I would never bring a stranger to my house. [My own neighborhood, misspelled] isn’t far from here”

What? What does that mean? Do you take electronic transfers or not? Why are you telling me you’re not far away? Are you planning to deliver?

I sent another message saying I would draw up a bill of sale, and I said I would need her ID. I said I would produce mine. So she would know I wasn’t a scammer, I provided evidence I was a lawyer. I also said I would need her to hold the mower until I sent a truck for it.

Here is what she said:

Great! I have no problem providing ID or signing a bill of sale. Please make sure it says the sale is “as-is.” I can take Zelle, a cashier’s check, or whatever works. We have a trailer, so we can do the sale at the police station, and we’ll drop it off at your place. Let me know if you what day is good for you.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Of course that’s not what she said. That’s what about 95% of the people in this area would have said. They’re really nice. Here is what she actually said:

You sound like a lot of work. You either pay [price] on Zelle or cash when I meet you somewhere or no deal. It’s that easy

Man, I really want that mower now. She’s a dream seller. I just know I can trust her.

It’s too bad, because the price was good.

All kinds of guesses are rolling around in my head.

Guess #1: this person is an alcoholic who is too drunk to respond coherently and too filled with bitterness and self-pity to be polite. She rolls over in bed occasionally and fires off a rude, terse response before passing out again.

Seems like self-pitying bitterness is a big thing among drunks.

Guess #2: this person is a couple of guys from Nigeria, and they want to kill me and take my money when I show up at the location of their choice.

Guess #3: her ex-husband bought the mower, and it’s obvious why he is gone. This is what his life was like every day. She says she is selling it because she moved to a smaller property, so that would be consistent with a divorce.

Guess #4: the person who owns the mower is on vacation, and her Facebook account is being used by a person who lives in her house. Maybe a junkie daughter who wants to sell it for drugs.

You can’t buy an expensive mower without the seller’s ID and a bill of sale guaranteeing the seller owns the item free and clear. You would have to be stupid. You could find yourself happily cutting your grass when a couple of big guys, at least one of whom is sleeping with the lady who sold you the mower, jump your fence and threaten to beat you up for stealing it.

I could save several thousand dollars by buying this mower, if it exists, but a long time ago, I decided not to let any more abusive people into my life. I’m not going to grovel before a person who seems like a nutcase in order to save money I don’t need. This is one of the greatest perks of not being poor.

I got a final message. She says I don’t need an ID. I assume she means her ID. Yeah, I do need it. This brings me back to guesses 2 and 4.

Her account doesn’t have any posts since 2022.

Said I had decided to buy something else. Meaning some as-yet-unidentified mower that does not involve this lady.

It’s so rare to encounter a jerk here. It’s like spotting a bird you thought was extinct.

I feel better already. It’s like this lady took me back to Miami for part of a day. It’s like my sister broke in my house and had to be removed by the police.

The account shows a lady who competed in an obscure beauty pageant. Maybe it’s just me, but I think that world is flypaper for people with narcissistic and borderline personality disorders. If you’re fortyish, which means you have no chance of winning a serious pageant, and you have to be Mrs. Acme Fertilizer Queen 2020 for Northern Idaho, and tell the world, in order to smother your self-hating inner voices, something is very wrong. You probably competed against 5 other people, none of whom is a day at the beach, or they wouldn’t have been there.

An obscure beauty pageant is a big nothing to everyone except the contestants and the people who make money from it. The whole point of a beauty pageant is to choose someone who competed against the cream, not the sour milk. Anyone who is quality will shoot for Miss America. Or would have, before they let misfits and tormented, sick men compete.

Miss America is the only real American pageant that ever existed. The rest are like Festivus, the holiday “for the rest of us.”

It’s nice to be old and know how to spot trouble. There are so many people I should have avoided when I was young. I wish I could go back, get between them and my young self, and deploy bear spray.

My Continuing Search for a Solution to a Problem God Already Solved

The mower saga drags on.

My old John Deere 430 tractor/mower is an end-of-life product, and it breaks down over and over. I need to put an end to my mowing problems.

I am torn because I love resisting impulsive purchases. I was a real spendthrift when I was a child, and I can’t help thinking of myself as one now. I like the idea of fixing things over and over and beating the repair-phobic system. It makes me feel righteous. On the other hand, I want to have faith in God’s provision. I don’t want to be cheap when I have more than enough money to spend fairly liberally.

I definitely want to give, because God has made it obvious that prosperity is connected to the generosity we show other human beings. By using the term “human beings,” I exclude greedy preachers. I think they’re another species.

Things that are rolling around in my head:

1. I can fix the JD forever if I want. I’m a machinist, so even though JD has discontinued some essential parts, I could make them when I need them. There is a guy who built his own 1935 Bugatti Aerolithe automobile from scratch. Fixing the JD repeatedly would cost very little.

2. Fixing the JD repeatedly would be a lot of hard work, and it would still mow slower than a new zero-turn mower and be a pain to maintain.

3. God does not want us to work hard. I don’t care what other Christians say. Hard work is very clearly a curse. When you have to work too hard, it means something is wrong with your walk with God. If you don’t think hard work is a curse, you should really read the Bible some day. God literally says it’s a curse. It was part of the first curse he pronounced on man.

I say “man” in order to stand up to the pronoun nuts. I will never say “humankind” except derisively.

4. If God gives you abundance, and you refuse to use it, why should he continue to send it? I can buy the nicest diesel mower on Earth without affecting our lifestyle. I don’t think I should, because it would be excessive, and it would not fit through our gates. But I could. It would be like buying a modest new car, and I can certainly afford that. The other day I was tormenting myself with mower thoughts, and I realized God had already solved the problem. I was just prolonging things by overanalyzing it, as though it really mattered whether I bought new or fixed old.

5. Ostentation is a sin. I never thought it was good, but recently God showed me it’s actually a sin. This is bad news for women, because their main goal when they get dressed is to show off clothes, shoes, and jewels in order to put other women in their places. Men are not quite as bad about ostentation. Anyway, I shouldn’t spend twice as much on a mower as I should, if people who come here will be bummed out about their own mowers if they see it.

Trying to impress people with a mower would be somewhat pathetic.

6. I don’t care too much about “waste.” I don’t think God cares. What we call waste is built into the nature of the physical universe. It’s written in the laws of thermodynamics. Unavoidable. God built it into our bodies. A man produces about 300,000,000 sperm cells every day, for example. I wonder who counted them. Even Elon Musk doesn’t have 300,000,000 kids. If an oak tree produces a hundred million acorns over its life, in all likelihood, none of them will become trees. The disciples caught a huge number of valuable fish when Yeshua showed them where to cast their nets, and then they walked off and left them to rot. God approved. Fish that could have fed the poor.

God approved when a grateful woman put maybe $30,000 worth of perfume on his feet. Judas the thief, on the other hand, practically had kittens.

God loves human beings, but he keeps creating people he knows will go to hell. Most people go to hell. It seems clear he considers it worth it in order to produce a smaller number of children he can enjoy forever.

I think destroying things for no reason is bad, and the word supports that, but I don’t think God is concerned about me throwing out uneaten food or mistakenly buying more mower than I need.

Worrying too much about economy can cause you to waste something really important and irreplaceable: your time.

7. If God doesn’t want me to work hard, why shouldn’t I hire someone to mow? That’s a good question I ask myself. I could do it, but I would feel helpless, which is something I buy tools in order to avoid. Also, it seems better to spend on something you can touch and maybe sell later than on someone else’s labor. When you pay a worker, the money goes away forever. All of it.

8. I think I blew it by not buying a new mower several years ago. Prices have gone up by thousands of dollars, for the same equipment. It’s natural to think delaying a purchase will save you money, but there are $19,000 mowers out there that seemed expensive to me when they were selling for $15,000. If I had bought one, I could have been enjoying it since maybe 2019. Do I want to have to say the same thing to myself when mowers go up another 30 or so percent?

9. I want to avoid buying too little machine, but what if I’m overcompensating because I’m not familiar with zero-turn lineups? What if I spend x and then find out 0.5x would have worked out just as well?

Sooner or later, I’ll have to reconcile all these things.

I thought I should go ahead and get a gas mower. I hate gas equipment, because it’s just plain inferior, and I have this stubborn notion that used gas engines are much less trustworthy. That’s probably true. Diesels are built for professionals, so they are built to run longer without problems. My Kubota tractor has 1,200 hours on it, and it shouldn’t need much of anything until 4,000. A low-end gas mower may start pooping out at 500, and a good one is doing well if it doesn’t need serious repairs before 1500.

I thought I should get a gas mower anyway, because they cost WAY less, and I’ll probably be all done with mowing, forever, before 1500 hours. But I hate gas. I hate it. Less torque. An ignition system full of parts that can go sour. Problems with leftist corn fuel.

A used diesel is probably better than a new gas mower, and they can be had for less. A good zero-turn can last 6,000 hours, apart from the engine, so as far as the body is concerned, it doesn’t matter much whether you buy new or used. If you buy a used diesel with several hundred hours, you still have a body which will last 20 years, and your engine is likely to last just as long in residential use, whereas a gas engine may have to be replaced, to the tune of maybe $3,500.

I was afraid of buying a used diesel because the JD was a used diesel when I got it, and it has been a spoiled, useless, sickly princess. But it was 27 years old when I got it, and in my opinion, the design was unusually stupid. JD made it hard to maintain and work on. Zero-turns are very simple, and in recent years, at least, they have been designed to be easy to deal with.

The JD has two PTO’s and front and rear hydraulics. You don’t need that junk to build a mower. The JD’s extra parts are jammed into the frame like JD was being charged by the cubic inch. A mower has more room for everything.

I’ll just reveal a figure. I looked at a $12,500 gas mower. That may not seem expensive to you, but it’s hard for me to believe a figure that high is possible. I can get a Kubota diesel with under 600 hours for a lot less. That’s a mower that runs $19,000 new. The gas mower would probably give me 1,500 more hours without real trouble. The Kubota would probably give me maybe 3,500, and then I could sell it and get more back than a gas mower with a dying engine would bring. I can save a lot by tempering my justified fear of used machinery with reason.

The local Kubota dealer is not great for repairs, but they do get the work done, and I probably would not need any work for 10 years.

I found a Kubota near me for a very good price, but the deck is 72″ wide. I wanted a 60″ deck like the one I have. I have to go out in the yard with a tape measure.

I have to have some blades spinning this week. That much is certain.

And the Stars of Heaven shall Fall, and the Powers that are in Heaven Shall be Shaken

My wife and I keep praying for God to destroy ministries, including prosperity ministries, that keep people from getting close to God. Whether or not our prayers have anything to do with it, he is doing what we asked. Tony Evans and Robert Morris are in trouble.

I don’t know much about Tony Evans, but he has a megachurch and tells Christians to tithe. Robert Morris teaches a lot about the Holy Spirit, but he also has (had) a megachurch, and he tells people they will be cursed if they don’t tithe.

I discovered Morris years ago. I saw him on some religious network, and I started watching. I bought a couple of DVD sets.

He talked a lot about giving and how God had rewarded him. He said God told him to give away all he had on at least one occasion, and he also told him to give away a new car. He said God restored more than he gave.

I actually corresponded with him via email for a while, until he quit responding. I was asking about the Holy Spirit. As I recall, he said water baptism had to precede tongues, and I sent an email saying it didn’t work that way for me. I spoke in tongues before I was baptized. I asked him about it. Prior to that email, he always responded, but when I sent him my question, he stopped with no explanation.

I believe it was only this week that I heard he believed non-tithers were cursed. I guess he’s just another prosperity preacher.

Tithing is not for Christians. It was never required of anyone but Jews. Morris says we are grafted into Israel, and that is true in some ways, but it does not make us Jews. Christianity is not Judaism. It’s not modern rabbinic Judaism, which is full of catastrophic error, and it’s not the Judaism of the ancient world. We don’t have to keep kosher. We don’t have to observe the feasts. We don’t have to sacrifice animals. Tithing is part of a set of laws we are not expected to observe.

Preachers who teach that we are supposed to tithe are either ignorant or trying to swindle us.

I don’t know whether Evans and Morris are swindlers. They may just be confused due to lack of exposure to the Holy Spirit. But it certainly looks bad when a preacher gets rich from offerings.

Evans hosts cruises. You pay 4 figures, and you get to hang out with him. That’s creepy. Imagine Yeshua charging people for, well, anything.

Evans won’t say why he resigned from his position. He just says he sinned. Someone will out him soon enough. Morris made out with a 12-year-old girl when he was in his twenties. When he discussed this with his church’s elders, he did not exactly admit it. He admitted he did something with a minor, but his church says he didn’t say she was 12.

The girl tried to get money from him after she grew up, and he threatened her with prosecution. Then she went public. This certainly appears to be extortion, but somehow she and her lawyers thought it was a good idea.

I am not interested in condemning anyone for doing something gross many years ago. If we condemn everyone who has done slimy things, nobody, myself included, would be allowed to become a Christian and move on. We let murderers preach to us, knowing what they did. I suppose we should have the same attitude toward people who commit other sins, as long as they repented and changed their ways.

Is a man who made out with a 12-year-old worse than a murderer, an arsonist, a Satanist, or a terrorist? You tell me. I have no problem accepting those types of people. After all, I am pretty bad, and other Christians have accepted me. Sometimes I lie awake thinking about my past. Things I can’t undo.

The world is full of sex offenders. Can we really say we don’t want them to repent and become God’s children? That wouldn’t make sense.

I think he should have been a little more specific with his church, though.

My big issue with him is the prosperity stuff. A person’s past sins generally are not harmful to the church, but the prosperity gospel sends people to hell and causes them to live cursed lives.

He also seems to be proud, which is the worst fault a person can have. My own pride scares me, and I say that sincerely. I spend a lot of time talking to God about it and cursing spirits that drive it. God is giving me revelations which improve me.

Pride is a habit, like heroin addiction, and it’s very hard to drop a habit instantly.

There is always symmetry in the supernatural. If pride is connected to curses and humiliation, which it most certainly is, then humility brings blessings and exaltation. If pride keeps God far from you and brings demons closer, humility grieves demons and brings God close.

Who teaches these things? Nobody. I’ve never heard anyone but me say them, and I have nearly no platform. I should have been hearing these things all my life. But you can’t watch 10 minutes of TBN without seeing some wealthy, unsaved grifter tell you God will make you rich for giving him money. They should call TBN “Future Residents of Hell Network.”

The proud can’t learn. Stupid people learn faster than the proud. If you can’t listen and learn, you can’t receive salvation. How does faith come? By hearing.

The sad thing about Morris, to me, is that he was right about giving money to other people. He didn’t just preach tithes and offerings. God really will make you prosperous if you give other people things at the behest of the Holy Spirit. He promised it in Psalm 41, and it’s not just for Jews. You’re not going to assure your prosperity by supporting rich preachers, but God says he will repay you if you give to the needy.

Maybe people who see the prosperity gospel debunked will decide giving alms is also pointless. That would be terrible. We don’t give enough as it is.

You’re supposed to give, and you’re supposed to be quiet about it.

I hope he and the lady he wronged will get past this, get closer to God, and move into lives of blessing, but it doesn’t sound like they’re making much progress at the moment.

You Only Pay for Concrete Once

I got off my behind and looked at mowers today.

My prehistoric John Deere 430 diesel garden tractor is about as reliable as MSNBC. John Deere itself has moved the 430 to end-of-life status. They haven’t announced it, but when you stop selling hydraulic cylinders for a tractor you designed to have cylinders that can’t be rebuilt, the truth is obvious. They are still selling other parts, perhaps to get rid of existing inventory or because they also fit models that are not quite at the edge of the abyss.

I ordered parts to fix the mower’s suddenly-leaking injector pump, but I think I’ll still get a new machine. I can’t keep spending months at a time with no mower and tall grass and weeds.

Somewhat remarkably, I learned that one of my concerns with the mower is, perhaps, not all that valid. I was upset because I had to remove the deck to change the blades. It’s a dangerous job for one person, and I hate it. Well, today someone pointed out that I could jack the front of the mower up and remove the blade screws from underneath.

This seems really obvious, so I’m not sure why I never tried it. I must have considered it. Maybe I had concerns about being killed by a 1500-pound riding mower slipping off jackstands in a driveway. I don’t mind dying a Southerner’s death, but that’s just too stereotypical. It’s like being in a NASCAR infield and getting hit by a flying tire.

Also, you have to get the deck maybe a foot off the ground in order to get an impact driver on the screws, and you have to find a way to hold the blades on while starting the screws with your fingers.

It doesn’t sound great. It’s not necessarily intolerable, either.

If I get a new zero-turn, I will still have to lift the mower’s front end, but the screws go in from the top, so I can knock the nuts loose and probably drop the blades even before I lift. I will need to lift it to put the blades back on, but the process will be way easier, because instead of trying to insert long screws into spindles, I’ll be putting little nuts on screws.

“Little” being a relative term.

I should only have to lift a zero-turn a couple of inches.

A while back, I made the perhaps self-indulgent purchase of a commercial-grade chainsaw, and the main reason I chose the one I did was that the dealer was more competent than his competition. Seems like the same thing is happening now.

What I have gathered from other people, and which may be completely wrong, is that the two best brands of commercial zero-turns are Kubota and Scag. I am familiar with the local Kubota and Scag dealers. I have dealt with them before.

My tractor had a problem, and I took it to the Kubota people. They are very, very nice, very, very helpful people. I’ll say that up front. They agreed to fix a problem I caused, bending the rules somewhat in order to save me a lot of money. On the other hand, they were very slow. They said I could expect the tractor in a certain amount of time, and they were way off. And they could have done it faster. It wasn’t a tough job.

They also turned it over to me with a lot of rocks and wet sand in it, and it had some bad scratches I had never seen before. They charged me hundreds more than they quoted, and they charged me extra for “shop supplies.”

To me, “shop supplies” charges are like the tipping option at a burger joint. If you want more money, just put it on the menu. Don’t wait till I order, let me relax, and then try, with no hope of success, to shame me by spinning the tablet around while you watch me choose an option. If anyone is going to be shamed, it will be you.

If you want $1500 for your work, don’t tell me $1300 and then put $200 on the bill for shop rags and WD40. It’s shady, and it makes me want to go somewhere else next time. American mechanics have a very, very old tradition of not charging extra for little things which should be part of their cost of doing business. Imagine if I were practicing law, and I charged clients to sit in my chairs. What if I charged them for coffee?

I never charged anyone for things like paper, pens, copies, stamps, or envelopes. I never charged anyone for driving time or gas. When my dad traveled for work, he got reimbursed for some travel expenses, including food, but he ate gas station bills.

The Kubota place is more or less okay, and now that I know how they operate, there will be no more surprises if I go there again, because I will have them tell me about everything they could possibly charge for. As a potential mower buyer, I am still concerned about how long they take.

The other place fixed my chainsaw. It was a small job which literally took them 20 minutes or less, unless they started learning to fix saws the same morning. They took 4 weeks to get the saw to me. They also sharpened the chain, which I asked them not to do, making it unsuitable for manual sharpening. I bought a new chain.

This means the other place is also sort of okay, but it’s somewhat more okay than the Kubota place. They delayed me, but not as badly, and the things they did wrong were not as important. And they charged me what I expected, as I recall.

My understanding is that professionals get the fastest service because they need their tools to make money. That’s great, but homeowners who can’t get their tools also lose money, and their yards and farms fall apart. You can’t let a tree fall on someone’s house or car just because he’s not a professional tree surgeon. I routinely do thousand-dollar jobs with my own stuff. What if I had to pay crews whose tools were turned around faster so they could use them?

I went to the Scag place and checked out a Tiger Cat II mower. Most of their mowers were indoors, but the Tiger Cat was in a nearby building, in the heat. They moved it to the shade outside the showroom so I could see it. It looked pretty good. It seemed to me the company had worked very hard to add thoughtful touches. They tried to make it easy to operate, maintain, and repair. It seemed very sturdy. It had a Briggs & Stratton Vanguard engine, and they are highly regarded. The guy who showed me Scag mowers knew everything about them. They quoted me a firm price which was significantly lower than prices I had seen on the web.

I went to the Kubota dealer. I had to look at their mowers in the burning sun. The lady who helped me spoke what I would call B-in-ESOL English. She was fairly fluent, but not completely. She was very nice, but she didn’t seem to have any idea what I needed or what it was like to run the machines. She tried to show me a 25-horse diesel tractor, for mowing my lawn.

They didn’t have the diesel garden tractor that interested me. She showed me pictures in a catalog and on a website. She had to ask the guys who worked there how it worked.

She showed me a Z781 mower. Very nice. Comparable to the Scag. She did not show me all the thoughtful features. I don’t think she knew what they were. She didn’t know anything about the Kawasaki engine.

The dealership sells big machines. Hundred-horsepower tractors. Real excavators unsuitable for trailering behind little pickups. Could it be that she didn’t know what she was doing because I was looking for a small machine? I don’t think so. If you can understand an excavator, you can understand a zero-turn mower and a garden tractor. A lot of the vocabulary is the same. She spoke like a salesman’s wife, not a salesman.

She wrote me up a quote for the zero-turn and said she would email me a quote for the small garden tractor. I left the dealership feeling very unfamiliar with both products.

I had to go home and Google, which is what she was supposed to help me avoid. I’ve been Googling for days. I was ready for a different experience.

When she quoted me for the zero-turn, she added a $1200 warranty extension without asking me if I wanted it. So how much of that goes to her? Maybe $400? Salesmen should not be so obvious.

It makes me wonder if the “shop supplies” thing was an honest mistake.

She never sent me the tractor quote.

I wonder if they deal with a lot of rich idiots. Travolta lives here. Maybe he goes in once in a while and buys a $300,000 excavator without looking at the invoice. There are wealthy people here who pretend to be horse farmers, and they buy Kubotas.

I don’t think I looked rich. I haven’t worn an expensive watch or any watch in maybe 25 years. I never wear jewelry of any kind because it’s dangerous and effeminate. I wear Carhartt pants, hiking shoes, and a T-shirt everywhere I go. I showed up in my old Ford.

I went home and researched more. I figured out that the Kubota was about $1000 more expensive than the Scag, oranges-to-oranges. The Scag has a better motor. The Kubota has a better warranty. Kubota is an old, solid company. Scag is newer but doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

So that’s it. I’m buying a Scag or not buying anything. There is no point in fooling with the Kubota people, because I have to have a dealer who knows what he’s doing and provides information instead of just charging a markup for delivering a machine. A dealer that doesn’t tell you anything is a lot like a vending machine. You pick your product as well as you can, put your money in, and walk away hoping for the best. I might as well buy a mower from Amazon.

If the mowers sold for the same price, or the Kubota were $500 lower, I would still go for the Scag. I’m afraid to buy from people who don’t seem to know their jobs.

I would like to see both businesses do well. It is frustrating to watch people crash and burn unnecessarily when you want to work with them. The Kubota people could do so much better. I’m sure they could sell a lot more machinery.

I wonder if the machines on the lot are paid for.

I love the name of the mower. “Tiger Cat II.” If I ever start a toilet company, I’m going to name our flagship bowl the Tiger Cat II. It sounds so dramatic. TIGER CAT II! LET YOUR INNER BEAST OUT!

It’s a lawnmower. Come on.

It even has tiger stripes on it.

I guess it can’t hurt to make a menial job seem like an adventure. It probably helps.

I can still pave the yard and paint it Hialeah Pink. That option is still on the table.

Deliver me from John Deere

I am relaxing in a recliner today, and not by choice. TMI warning for those not interested in the medical issues of strangers. I had a hideous skin thing dug out of my back earlier today, so I am not allowed to bend over or do anything strenuous because of the stitches. I guess I won’t describe the skin thing, but I will say it was not cancer. And if you ever have the same problem and your skin thing opens up, afterward, you may never again be able to eat or be in the same room with Gruyere cheese.

I didn’t get a skin thing because I’m filthy. I scrub my back with soap every day.

As a Floridian, I am not very scared of skin cancer. People up north think it’s real cancer, but except for melanoma and maybe whatever it was that got Jimmy Buffett, it’s not. The vast majority of skin cancers are squamous and basal cell, and unless you let them go practically forever, they amount to nothing. You can actually cure little ones yourself with a can of computer keyboard spray. Freeze them, and they die and peel off.

If you get squamous and basal cell and you let it go until it burrows into your body, well, then you have real cancer.

Dave Portnoy is running around calling himself a cancer survivor because he had a superficial lesion cut out of his neck. Not impressed. That’s like saying you survived the Las Vegas massacre when you were blocks away at a crap table. He announced his survivor status in a pretty lighthearted way, so he is clearly no more impressed with his lesion than I am.

I’ve frozen quite a few things off in my bathroom. For all I know, I’m a cancer survivor.

I am not allowed to do anything, so suddenly I want to do all the things I’ve put off. I want to install a new pool filter. I want to burn a few tons of yard waste. No can do. I’ll be allowed to start doing things three days from now, but then I won’t want to do them.

I want to go look at a new lawnmower. I am considering dropping what I think is an enormous sum on a commercial zero-turn, because my geriatric John Deere tractor is ready for assisted living. I’ve already written about it.

I keep turning it around in my head. Do I want the mower because I’m a covetous, pampered spendthrift who hates working on machines he should be grateful to have, which is a proposition that could be defended with a colorable argument, or is it because it is legitimately stupid and cheap to keep relying on a machine that makes me miserable?

I could get a new but not-too-expensive machine, but their engines last a third as long, and they are not as sturdy as the better models. They’re only less expensive if you die before they wear out. If they die first, they’re actually more expensive than better machines.

Having no 3D flesh and blood people to teach me anything, I have joined a lot of forums in order to learn things. Recently, I’ve been engaging on a forum related to outdoor work. People were taking about heat stroke and safety, and I offered my always-coveted and respected two cents’ worth, which I will paraphrase here, because I’m sure you want to read it.

When I’m working outside, and I start to feel like the heat is getting to me, I put my tools indoors, go inside, take a shower, and hit the recliner. If the yard is full of tree branches, I don’t care. I don’t have an HOA. I answer only to God and Ron DeSantis.

I also try not to lift anything heavy. Sometimes I’m too immature to follow my own advice, but I do try to find help or use machinery to pick up things I could pick up if I exerted myself. When it comes to trees, I cut branches and logs up to make them lighter. I never carry brush or limbs more than maybe 25 feet. I move the tractor or cart to the mess.

Young men always want to impress other people with their strength, which is usually nothing impressive and not something other people care about. I have lifted things in order to impress people, and I’m sure I failed. When I got older, I got somewhat less stupid, so I developed my current policy.

The amazing thing is that when you look out for your body, other men make fun of you.

My sister dated a deaf bodybuilder much younger than herself. One day, they were present when I needed to move a boat propeller which weighed maybe 75 pounds. I had moved it many times before, but I was getting wiser, so I suggested dividing the load between myself and my sister’s escort. He sort of smirked and picked it up by himself. Like I was some sort of disgrace even to men unlike himself who were not products of illegal drugs combined with suboptimal priorities.

I didn’t care. God bless him. I didn’t have to exert myself, and I didn’t risk injury. He thought he was putting me in my place by doing my work for me, and of course, while I didn’t think much of his attitude, I was very happy to stand by and do nothing.

I used to be an armorbearer at Miami’s corrupt Trinity Church up on 2nd Avenue. One day, we had to come in for some pretty amateurish “training.” As one of our tasks, we were supposed to pick up another armorbearer and carry him across the stage, running.

I flat-out refused. My knees were good, but not perfect. I didn’t see any reason to risk screwing them up. I didn’t care about the inappropriate, manipulative, and mindless appeals to teamwork, loyalty, and self-sacrifice. I hate manipulation more than, probably, anyone else on Earth. I don’t even like being manipulated to do things I already want to do.

If you paralyze yourself at Trinity Church, jumping in front of a bullet for Pastor Rich Wilkerson, all you will get from the church is a warm thank-you followed by stonewalling from its attorneys. They weren’t going to pay for knee surgery or back surgery, which often doesn’t work anyway.

My best friend at the church had a back problem that day. He was not supposed to lift things. I told him this in front of the other guys: “These guys won’t be around to help you if you hurt yourself.” That was a major no-no, but I said it anyway. He had kids to support, and he had to be able to move and carry things.

They kept hooting at him to do the exercise, so he picked a guy up and ran. Thanks to God alone, he was okay, but I thought he was nuts, and he probably agrees today.

You can do things faster and sometimes better and easier if you forget about safety. No doubt about it. I don’t care. You only get one body, and once you have a permanent disability, you won’t get relief until you die.

I’m writing about safety because I’m thinking about my mower. The deck under the mower weighs around 340 pounds, and it’s very difficult to remove and replace. You have to remove it in order to sharpen the blades, which should be done at least once a year. You also have to remove it to change the oil, although it is possible to suck oil out with a pump if you’re satisfied with an imperfect job, and you can install a long tube that moves the oil plug out from above the deck.

I have removed the deck several times, and I have lifted it up onto its side and removed and replaced the blades. If I keep the mower, I’ll have to keep doing this until one of us is too far gone.

This is a real problem, and the older I get, the scarier the possible consequences are. A back injury from lifting can put you on a walker and leave you peeing in a bag for the rest of your life. Or you can have both types of incontinence and end up wearing diapers.

Remember the Butterbean? He is a fierce stump of a man who overpowered opponents in mixed martial arts and the WWE. A very scary guy. Today, I could beat the daylights out of him, and so could you. He’s in a wheelchair, not because he had a disease or accident he could not avoid, but because he did not take basic measures to look after himself, like finding a better way to make a living. His problem? Back and hip injuries. Needlessly self-inflicted.

He did impress a lot of strangers who don’t care about him, though.

My best friend is a very big guy, and he has always been proud of it. He lifted things he shouldn’t have. He hurt his back throwing a jockey. He had to have two disks fused, and it didn’t work.

In no time, you can go from being a superior and intimidating physical specimen to being someone who can be bullied by average guys and who is down at the bottom of the list as a potential mate.

I feel impressed with myself when I manage to get the mower apart and lift the deck onto its side. I won’t lie. But just about any guy could do it, and it’s a stupid thing to do without a machine.

Pulling the deck out from under the tractor has to be done by hand. There is no machine that can do it. Shoving the reluctant deck driveshaft onto the PTO shaft is a recipe for back spasms and disk injuries.

The more I think about it, the more I think the best choices are to hire a lawn service or buy a new mower. But if I get a lawn service, I have no idea how high their rates will go as inflation continues. Buying a mower is a simple matter of swiping a card and paying once at the end of my cycle. The freedom and relief would be immense.

I am thinking about the mower I need. It has to be very tough, because this property is the Bermuda Triangle of mowing. New rocks seem to create themselves and pop out of the ground, and there are always sticks falling from the trees. It has to be reliable, because repairs are high on the list of reasons for ditching the old mower. It has to be very easy to work on, because when I work on the old mower, I have black thoughts about the engineers who designed it. It has to have good parts support from the manufacturer. Finally, the local dealer who services it can’t be a complete idiot. That’s a tough one.

It doesn’t have to be extremely fast. My time is roughly as valuable as that of a goldfish. I would love a diesel, but I will not live on Earth long enough to take advantage of the longevity, and if I treat a 4-stroke gas engine well, it should be willing to start when I need it.

A new diesel garden tractor is a possibility, and they cost about as much as good zero-turns. They are more versatile. On the other hand, a zero-turn will be more maneuverable, and while I don’t need light speed, I would like to move faster than I do now. I mow at a snail’s pace. I think zero-turns move faster.

The new fuel lines for the John Deere have arrived, and the other little parts should be here shortly. Maybe I’ll be able to get it put together on Sunday. After that, will my motivation to buy new stand fast, or will I, once more, cave in to a possibly misguided desire to be financially responsible?

Or I could go the Miami Cuban route, pave my yard, and coat it with pink house paint.

Ask me next week.

Pistols with Stocks Clearly as Dangerous as Nuclear Weapons

The pistol brace ban is dead. Get ready for mass shootings in every Walmart and preschool in America. All is lost.

There I go, channeling Elizabeth Warren again.

For a long time, I’ve been following the pistol brace mess. A brace is a buttstock pretending to be something else, except for a few pistol braces that really are what they say they are. A real pistol brace lets a handicapped shooter use his wrist to support his gun. The pistol braces that drove the ban are just buttstocks trying to be cute. You can buy a short-barreled rifle which has no buttstock and is therefore legally sold as a pistol, and you can put a brace on it in order to be able to shoulder it.

Why would you do this?

Short-barreled rifles are, ridiculously, regulated by the BATF, under an outdated, Constitution-hostile, and absurd law called the National Firearms Act. Congress, incredibly, wanted to ban pistols, along with silencers and machine guns. They wanted to ban all firearms that were easily concealed, so they included shortened long guns. It was an astonishing assault on our civil rights, but for the most part, it worked.

In 1934, they managed to pass the act, and as a result, you can’t own a sawed-off shotgun or short rifle without applying to the feds, putting yourself on a list in DC, and paying $200. The fee has not changed since 1934, when you could buy your own ocean liner for $200. It was a lot of money. A web source puts it at about $4600 2024 dollars. This was supposed to be a de facto ban.

They were not able to ban pistols, but being incompetent and caring very little about the Bill of Rights, they left the stuff about short shotguns and rifles in the law. It shows how close we always are to losing everything. Government officials do not care about our rights very much. This law was passed in 1934, when America was a lot less crazy, and look what they did.

Is a short rifle more dangerous than a long one? Obviously not, but here we are.

Clever 2A people started selling pistol braces in order to get around the law, and for years, the BATF said it was okay. Then Biden got the BATF to change the rules. Then gun owners sued the BATF. The BATF just lost, and the new rule has been vacated nationwide Now you can have your pistol brace.

I see rumblings out there about the BATF continuing to fight, but as of today, you can have a braced “pistol” and not worry about being arrested. That’s good, because there are 10,000,000 in circulation. How many owners is that? Maybe 5,000,000? That’s a lot of prison construction. Prosecution was never really practical.

Now that braces are legal, I’ll just say it: I think they’re fantastic. A rifle is the best possible weapon to use to defend yourself, and in a confined space, a short rifle is king. Swinging a long barrel in a truck is not easy, and you could also have problems in your house.

For a figure in the general area of a thousand dollars, you can get a short AK-47-type rifle (“pistol”), a brace, and a laser. Put it by your bed, and you have an excellent home defense solution. You have 31 very powerful rounds ready to go, in a package which is easier to use than a long gun or ordinary pistol, and it is much, much safer than a pistol, because it’s hard to point it at yourself.

Pistols are not good weapons. They are compromise weapons. They’re like the tiny, fake spare tires carmakers use to cheat customers. You should only defend yourself with a pistol when there is some reason you can’t get ahold of a real gun. You will probaby miss the perp, and if you hit him, you will do less damage than a rifle would do. You will have fewer rounds on tap, and they are much more likely to be blocked by things like walls, furniture, and vests.

You want a projectile which is easy to aim, goes through lots of stuff, does terrible damage to people, and has lots of company. What you really want is for the police to do the shooting for you, facing the physical danger and tort liability, but they almost never make it in time.

Shortened rifles are called “SBR’s,” or “short-barreled rifles.” I call pistols with braces “LBP’s,” or “long-barreled pistols.”

I don’t think braces will be banned again any time during the next few years. Congress would have to do it, and I doubt a new law will find support. I think the federal courts are a dead end for the currently-vacated rule, because the final stop is our conservative Supreme Court.

I have a short AK, and I put what is supposed to be a very good flash hider on it, so a braced pistol will be my number one bedside companion, along with electronic earmuffs that block loud noises but amplify the sounds of a scared burglar trying to hide and ambush me.

This is all good news, but what about the restrictions on machine guns?

Bump stocks can’t be banned by the feds now, so that’s nice. The BATF lost another case. This doesn’t help people like me who live under state bans, but it might help some people. Bump stocks aren’t very accurate, so it’s not like you can go out and get real full-auto legally.

Full-auto guns are still regulated by the NFA, and they are banned by the Firearm Owners’ Protection Act (originally known as the Freedom is Slavery Act), which limits us to old, creaky guns made before May 19, 1986. This is not good, considering the current state of things.

First of all, all sorts of good citizens need full-auto weapons. A lot of people have special security needs. That is obvious. And they should not be limited to incredibly expensive vintage guns that will eventually fall apart.

Second, illegal machine guns are everywhere now, and they’re in the hands of awful people. They are extremely popular in ghettos, where non-blacks and conservatives are considered by many to be legitimate targets for gun crimes. As are blacks, now that I think about it. They make up most of the victims.

Right now, you can go to a website on the regular old Internet and order something called a Glock switch. This is a $20 item, more or less, which allows you to take a Glock or Glock clone and turn it into a select-fire weapon. You would think the feds would have made it impossible to sell these things online, but they have not. They can also be printed at home in plastic, and it is not illegal to own the files needed to print them.

Full-auto crime used to be rare, but it’s becoming common fast. You can easily find videos of stupid kids showing off their machine guns.

They say converted Glocks are hard to control, and I’m sure that’s true, but it’s possible to put contraptions on them to make them easier to hang onto, and even if they’re not all that accurate, how accurate do you have to be at 1200 rounds per second? You can fire two 15-round bursts in the general direction of someone you don’t like and have an excellent chance of hitting him and a 100% chance of forcing him to run off in a panic.

You can also put a longer barrel on a Glock. Long barrel, rifle stock, switch…party time.

Now any imbecile can have a machine gun, but for law-abiding people with a legitimate need to even up, they are unaffordable.

This could be a real problem as society continues to melt.

I don’t have any interest in full-auto guns, but as we descend into chaos, I might need some because of packs of punks roaming around with switched Glocks. Oh, well. BATF knows best. Sometimes you have to take one for the team, allowing yourself and your family to be murdered, robbed, and raped in the name of safe streets.

You can make an AK or AR full-auto very easily, so maybe I should not be concerned. New machine guns owned by civilians are not common now, but if we end up in a situation where people are more afraid of each other than the BATF, conversions will be done nationwide at a rapid rate, as they have already been done in ghettos.

At that point, I would really rather be among the raptured. This place is bad enough as it is. Even if your side wins, living in a constant state of guerrilla warfare is a dreadful prospect. Ask anyone who makes under $200,000 per year and lives in a blue county.

I think the Supreme Court should strike down much of the NFA and FOPA. It’s hard for me to believe the Founding Fathers wanted us to be sitting ducks or that the NFA and FOPA are completely consistent with the Bill of Rights. They certainly go against good public policy.

Our nation started with militias, and a militia armed with substandard weapons is a massacre waiting to happen. One likely reason militias are mentioned in the Second Amendment is to make sure effective weapons, not puny ones, are made available to citizens before the need for militias arises. Militias are armed with privately-owned weapons held by citizens before the action starts. A militia armed with blue-state weapons will have serious problems.

We will almost certainly put together many, many militias before long, and thanks to bad legislation, we will be farther behind than we should be.

Leftists are wrong to think short barrels will cause pandemonium, but arming criminals and disarming the rest of us will have consequences.

Patience With John Deere Wearing Thin

I’m trying to figure out what to do about my lawnmower.

I am really tired of fighting with my John Deere 430. It’s supposedly a very tough machine. It cost about $9000 new, 34 years ago. That makes it, roughly, a $20,000 item today. Okay, let’s assume it’s extremely well-made. It still needs repairs all the time. Was it like this in 1995, or is it just age? No idea. Doesn’t matter, because I can’t snap my fingers and make it new.

I could send it to the local dealer and spend maybe $1500 on it to get it fixed. Towing both ways. New fuel lines. Fluids. Fix a small hydraulic leak.

That would probably take a month, during which my grass would grow to thigh height, leave me with an old tractor that could get me through 5 more years. The parts supply is drying up, so I can’t keep fixing it forever at the dealership.

I got frustrated and started thinking about buying a new commercial-grade zero-radius-turn mower, or “zero-turn.” But a good one with a reasonably wide deck would cost over ten grand. Is it worth it, or am I letting fatigue and extreme annoyance cloud my judgment?

The web says a gas mower goes 500-700 hours before dying. I assume this means an amateur-grade mower, because I can’t imagine a lawn service replacing mowers, what, every 125 workdays at 4 hours per day? That’s maybe $17,000-$26,000 per year.

If people are saying they run 500-700 hours, that means they run 500 hours. For me, that ought to be about 8.5 years, assuming the yard doesn’t expand too much. It does expand as trees fall over or have to be cut.

Various people discussing commercial gas mowers on the web cite figures of 1500-2000 hours before problems pop up, and the 1500-hour problem I see mentioned is burning oil, which is not fatal right away. If these figures are based in reality, a commercial mower’s engine should be good for 2000 hours. I see people guessing at much higher figures for the other parts. It ought to be possible to get 3500 hours with one repower job. I may be raptured or reduced to bone by 1000.

So if this information is correct, a commercial mower will go about three times as long as a Lowe’s mower, for roughly twice the price, with, presumably, less aggravation. Surely there have to be perks other than longevity.

I don’t like the idea of buying a cheaper mower and putting up with a flimsy chassis. This yard is crazy, and I also mow weeds in my pasture. Even now, I occasionally hit a rock or a piece of wood.

What about buying a used commercial mower? I think that’s what I already did. The John Deere 430 is not a homeowner machine. When my tractor was new, a homeowner model cost a lot less. Zero-turns were just getting popular when my mower was made, so I suppose tractors with belly mowers, like the 430, were still mainstream at that time.

This means I bought a used commercial mower, and it has been an instrument of torture. If Kafka had worked on one, he would have written several more short stories. I lose several months a year because it comes up with new ways to break down. I could send it to the dealership and spend a grand a year, but based on my experiences with dealerships, they would keep it for at least a month at a time, so it wouldn’t help much.

I think buying used is stupid. The choices are: fix the 430 again myself and hope for the best, pay the dealer to fix it and hope for the best, and blow a huge wad on a new commercial mower. And be substantially less delusional when hoping for the best.

I don’t want to give up the tractor features, but what do I do with them? Let’s see. I pull a cheap harrow. I think I used it two years ago.

I have a real tractor. It runs a bush hog. It will hold over half a ton on its fork. It has a big bucket. It will rip stumps up and dig trenches with a subsoiler. The Deere will not do any of that. It’s a little tractor for pixies. The Kubota has 37 horsepower, and the Deere has 20. You would think the Deere would still be a pretty respectable machine, but it’s in a different universe.

I think they’re good for plowing snow in small driveways. I recall seeing them rigged up for snow on the web.

It would be good to have the 430 if the Kubota refused to start and had to be moved. That’s about it. I could do that with the car, though.

The Deere’s muffler fell off. The alternator died. The alternator belt broke, and replacing it was a horror job. Removing the belly mower to fix the blades is a ticket to back surgery. The PTO switch died. The rear hydraulic cylinder had to be replaced. The grill fell off, and I ran over it because I couldn’t see it.

I could probably get $2000 for it, because people with no common sense love the John Deere 430.

If I get a new commercial mower, I’ll be paying, realistically, about $950 per year to use it during the 5-year warranty, all-inclusive. Afterward, ignoring inflation because I can’t predict it, that figure could be maybe $1100 per year. Call it $90 per month over 15 years. I’m assuming I’ll still be able to mow when I’m that old. What does a landscaper charge here? More than $90, but how much more?

That may not be much more than keeping the John Deere going, now that I think about it. Or maybe I could get several years out of it with no big repairs. It’s a crapshoot.

I could go for a cheaper commercial zero-turn and reduce my monthly figure to maybe $60 per month.

I am sick of this tractor. I would love to sit down, turn a key, back out of the shop, mow the yard, pull back in, and go have a beer. Every time. These days, I sit down, turn a key, back out, mow for an hour, have a problem, limp to the shop, sit down at the PC, and order parts while my yard grows.

The Kubota has only had two problems I didn’t cause. The shutoff solenoid needed a zip tie to line things up so it worked, and a safety switch on the forward/reverse pedal needs to be fixed, which is a small job once you find out what the problem is. The Kubota is great. It’s everything the John Deere is not.

The dealer here is very slow to fix Kubotas, but I’m not sure there is such a thing as a dealer who will fix a homeowner machine in under three weeks. And when your machine rarely needs help, slow dealership shops cause limited pain.

I’ll pray about it and decide what to do. One thing is certain: I am about to have a mower I can rely on, whether it’s a repaired John Deere or something else.

My Blood Runs Anything but Green

Every time I think I’m done fixing my outdoor power tools, they pull me back in.

Now it’s my John Deere garden tractor, again.

When I bought this thing used, I read up on it, and I found that odd people who made landscaping a kind of sick hobby thought it was wonderful. They said this tractor was coveted and would last forever. I saw nasty old ones selling for over $3000.

Since then, the rear hydraulic cylinder has failed, a big spring on the belly mower has snapped, and the PTO clutch has refused to work. All this, under very light use. If this is what a great, dependable old mower is like, what are the bad ones like?

The cylinder is what turned me off John Deere forever. Even buying a John Deere hat would make me nervous.

The rear seal failed, and oil gushed out. This is the same oil that runs the transmission and steering.

A normal hydraulic cylinder has a removable cap on one or both ends. When your seals fail, you unscrew a cap, pull the rod out, pull the old seals off, put new ones on, seal everything up, and go back to work. Back when my cylinder’s seal failed, a similar cylinder from a different company might have cost $100. My cylinder was around $180, I believe, and now they are discontinued.

The John Deere cylinder was welded shut on both ends. Welded. Seals are expected to fail. It’s not a sign something is defective. A seal is like a spark plug or shock absorber. They have to be replaced every so often. And John Deere gave me two cylinders that were welded shut. This is like selling you a car with the lug nuts welded on.

I managed to install a new cylinder. I could have used the lathe to cut the old one open, and I could have done a lot of welding and threading to turn it into a new cylinder, but it was May, it was hot, and my yard was a mess.

Installing the new cylinder was a nightmare because John Deere made the tractor as hard as possible to work on.

When the next cylinder fails, I will have to find a way to rebuild an old one or replace it with something different. Even if the replacement is Chinese, it will be better than the original.

Right now, my fuel lines are leaking. If I had written this two days ago, I would be able to say my fuel LINE was leaking, but I screwed up another line when I tried to fix it.

The injector pump has three rigid plastic lines going into the top. They have 17 mm hex fittings, and the fittings are so close together, there is no kind of wrench that can be applied to the center fitting without removing one of the others. Guess which fitting was leaking?

When I turned the front fitting, instead of getting easier to turn, it got harder. I found out this was because the fitting and line were stuck together. The fitting should have turned around the line, but it twisted it instead.

After a lot of fruitless work, I started the tractor and limped it into the workshop so it would be sheltered while I looked for answers.

Finding answers was hard. I started yesterday, it’s about noon, and I finished about half an hour ago.

John Deere’s shop manual is useless. John Deere’s site is useless. The site showed me fuel lines, and I bought two, but it did not mention the crush washers and O-rings that also have to be replaced. I got that information elsewhere.

These parts are not shown on Deere’s online diagrams. I finally found a fuel injection manual published by Yanmar, the maker of the engine, and that gave me Yanmar part numbers. For parts legitimately worth about $10, I just spent about $50. That doesn’t include the lines. The local Deere dealer doesn’t stock any of these things, so I ordered everything online.

Someone else out there will have this problem and need help, so I will cut and paste some information including part numbers.

Fuel lines:
Front – AM100753, replaced by AM876210
Middle – AM100754, replaced by AM876211
Rear – AM100755, replaced by AM876212

O-ring (Yanmar): 124550-51370
Packing (Yanmar plunger barrel 28): 174307-52170
Packing (Yanmar delivery valve seat 19): 124550-51350

***CORRECTION: someone who asked me not to reveal the correct numbers for the Yanmar parts says my numbers are wrong. I already used these numbers to order, so I am going to order the other parts and see how they compare. I guess I’ll have to eat some shipping costs.***

The delivery valve seat packing goes under the O-ring and a couple of other things. The other one (plunger barrel) goes farther down. See Yanmar manual.

I may not have parts for a week, and my yard has been growing ever since the tree crew massacred a bunch of dangerous oaks. They wiped out a lot of the yard, and then we had very hot, dry weather, so I had to let the grass rest. Yesterday would have been a great time to start mowing again. Now I’ll have to deal with deep grass and seed heads.

Should I complain about the failure of these 34-year-old parts? No, but John Deere could make some effort to help people get new ones. The site doesn’t list them or provide diagrams, and when you use the tool that tells the site to list parts appropriate for your product, it won’t let you.

My plan for this tractor is to keep it going until it blows up or until I can no longer stand fixing it. Then I’m getting a gas zero-turn, or, if Jeff Bezos gets high on mushrooms and sends me a hundred million dollars, a diesel zero-turn, which would last longer and be less trouble.

My real tractor is also acting up.

Modern tractors have a bunch of irritating parts designed by lawyers, not engineers. They have all sorts of switches that turn them off when you really need them. For example, I had to bypass a switch on the John Deere that shut the engine down whenever I got off.

The other day, I got my newly-revived and modified Echo chainsaw out to cut a big oak that fell unexpectedly, and it would not run. For the 3000th time. I finally guessed it might be the fuel filter, but none of the new ones I had were the right size. I rinsed the old one with brake cleaner, and now the saw runs.

This took up a lot of my time. When it was over, I got back to work, and my Kubota tractor, which I needed to move wood, refused to start.

After a lot of who shot John, I realized it would start if I jiggled the forward/reverse pedal. I got some wood moved.

I went on the web asking people if they had any idea where the safety switch on the pedal was. I could not find it. They said there was no safety switch. That was last week. Finally, today, someone told me where it was and how to fix it.

The tractor works, but I have to fiddle with the pedal, so I am going to have to creep under it in the summer heat and handle the problem, which will turn out to be harder to fix than I now expect.

I don’t know what other obscure problems the John Deere will have in the future. Another failed hydraulic cylinder is a certainty. Maybe I should buy a used one now and modify it. I hope the next bad cylinder will be the one on the steering, because that one is easy to get to.

I understand when products have unavoidable problems due to their nature and the natures of their jobs. Stupidity is another thing. Deliberately sabotaging customers, which John Deere did, is yet another. They could have used the same kind of cylinder everyone else uses. They went out of their way to make things hard and expensive. Would I buy more John Deere products? No. The whole business makes me hope they go bankrupt. A John Deere bankruptcy would benefit the consumer by allowing better companies to fill the void, just as the huge defeats the Big Three experienced gave us access to Toyota and Honda.

It would help. Or would it? The other companies may be just as bad. I tend to doubt it, based on the scuttlebutt about John Deere’s attitude toward hosts. I mean customers.

You poison Kim Jong Un, his sister steps in, and she’s even worse. That’s how the world often works.

I spend a fair amount of time on tractor forums, and my understanding is this: all small tractors (below 100 horsepower) are equal in quality. Except Mahindras, which are worse. They’re all made overseas. They all last about the same number of hours. The key to a good tractor experience is picking a good dealer, not a good tractor. You need someone who will be helpful when you need repairs.

The local Kubota place is pretty good. I’m afraid to enter the Deere dealership.

Buying a John Deere will not guarantee you a superior tractor made by American hands. It will get you a foreign tractor just like every other company’s tractor, but the service and parts picture may be much, much worse.

If you absolutely have to have green, there is always Krylon.

Just for fun, I’ll price zero-turns.

Were they Sarcastic When they Coined the Term?

Coronavirus keeps getting more interesting.

Certain facts are now known and beyond dispute.

1. The evidence overwhelmingly points to a man-made virus released accidentally from a Wuhan lab. It’s not proven, because it’s unprovable, but our universities teach “facts” that have a lot less support.

2. The vaccines didn’t prevent nearly everyone on Earth from getting infected, so they weren’t very effective at slowing transmission.

3. The conventional vaccines cause dangerous blood clots in some people. Our medical establishment admits this and has placed restrictions on these vaccines.

4. The mRNA vaccines are associated with higher rates of myocarditis and pericarditis, which kill some people.

5. Masks work so poorly they are virtually useless.

6. Covid can’t produce serious health problems in the vast majority of human beings.

7. Covid is nearly risk-free for minors.

8. Fauci made up the oppressive social-distancing rules based on the general idea that the disease might spread more slowly if people stood farther apart. He did not have science to back him up.

9. Natural immunity is exactly the same as vaccine immunity, except for the lower risks of blood clots, myocarditis, and pericarditis.

10. Ivermectin, which was developed for humans, is harmless when the dosage is correct, even if you take it in veterinary form. The veterinary stuff is exactly the same, except it has edible goo added to it to make it taste better to horses. You can eat anything a horse can eat. Leftists told us it was only safe for animals.

There is a new vaccine coming because the establishment thinks a new variant is going to spread. The new vaccine is mRNA-based. I’m not taking it. Are you? I have done a lot of stupid things in my life, but I have never knowingly taken an mRNA vaccine.

People like Fauci would force us to take it if they could. He has been recorded talking about coercing people, so his position is not subject to reasonable debate. Given the problems with the existing vaccines and his reputation, it will not be possible to force us to take it. Thank goodness for that.

Even now, leftists are snotty and irrational about covid. I just had two leftists say insulting and ignorant things to me because I said I was going to skip the myocarditis this time around, meaning I would not take the new shot.

One of them questioned the heart-disease link as though it were an Infowars theory. That’s amazing. Go Google. The establishment itself openly admits the problem exists. How can anyone not have noticed? You really have to bury your head in the sand to miss things like this.

Another one suggested I was “spewing BS.”

I get it. You think capitalism is bad. You don’t like conservatives. You’re against people who believe the Bible because you think Christianity retards progress toward a man-made utopia. Why should that have anything to do with drawing conclusions about coronavirus? Where is the link?

Another guy, who was not snotty, said the risk of heart problems was lower than his risk of having problems with covid.

First of all, I question that. Just about everyone on Earth has had covid several times. If you’re going to have severe symptoms, you should know it by now. Second, I do not get severe symptoms. To me, covid is like a cold, with a few extra symptoms that don’t amount to big problems.

I had covid in 2021 when I went on a Nile cruise. I can’t prove it, but I had typical symptoms for covid. My wife and I pranced around the pyramids and demonic temples in the burning sun, in heat approaching 115°. I blew my nose a lot, but I was fine. Never slowed down. I had to slow down for her.

I had covid in Turkey. I had an hour or so of mild nausea, and I felt like I had a little cold. Then I was fine. Never stopped walking several miles a day.

My worst episode was my first, in early 2020. I had conjunctivitis in one eye. I threw up exactly 4 times and then stopped. I had diarrhea for a few hours. I had a mild sore throat. I had chills for one night, but they weren’t bad. I actually enjoyed it. I turned up the electric blanket.

What purpose will it serve if I get vaccinated again? I may risk dying from cardiac arrest. The vaccine will not prevent me from getting sick. If I get sick without the vaccine, I won’t be very ill. If I get sick after vaccination, it probably won’t be much different.

“You’ll be less likely to infect other people.”

You know what? If you’re one of the unfortunate people who get severe covid, you should stay home. I don’t mean social distancing. I mean quarantine. Nothing else will prevent you from catching the disease. The shots might reduce your symptoms, so go ahead and get them. But don’t tell me to risk my life for you, even if the risk is small. You WILL be exposed to covid over and over for the rest of your life, even if they vaccinate us every day, so grow up and take measures that work instead of living in a fantasy world where vaccines can save you.

Maybe the caregivers who slide food through the slot in your door should take shots. Maybe it will result in some small mitigation of risk.

It is possible to isolate yourself and others from a virus effectively if you’re serious. Maybe not if you’re a Wuhan scientist, but it’s possible for the rest of us.

Very few people who are actually allowed to walk around in public are going to take the new shots, so if you think it will decrease your exposure odds if I take them, you must be thick. If you and I are in the same Walmart, and there are 500 people there, and only 30 have been vaccinated, the figure might as well be zero.

I, quite literally, can do nothing whatsoever to help you. There is no way I can reduce your risk of dying or suffering permanent damage.

I still see people with masks sometimes. Not just fat old people, but thin young people. What’s the story? Do they have AIDS? Are they transplant recipients? Maybe they’re just unable to admit they’re wrong.

There are at least two Chinese restaurants near me with plastic curtains between the customers and staffs. I went to China and didn’t see that. I was in Hong Kong. Is it a mainland fad?

Leftists are much more afraid of death than Christians. This is one aspect of the problem. I see death as a ticket to heaven, where there will be no leftists. They have no idea what happens after death. They think prolonging life is as important a goal as there is. Except for babies and healthy depressed people who want doctors to kill them. Leftists fear death and love abortion and euthanasia. That’s weird.

Leftists are terrified of their own deaths but not yours.

I still remember a wonderful statistic from the pandemic hysteria. When polled as to how likely covid was to kill an infected person, the average figure they gave was 40%. Can you imagine what the world would look like if that were true? Around three billion people would have disappeared by now. We’d all be rich, just like people who survived the Black Death.

They kept yammering that we should follow THE SCIENCE, which said the risk of death was way below 1%. How could they miss that?

I shouldn’t ask. Without cognitive dissonance, there could be no leftism. And leftists are heavily influenced by demons of delusion. They can believe nearly any absurdity.

Did I write “nearly”? I should correct that.

I listed facts above, but there is also anecdotal stuff out there.

When it comes to covid, leftists love to shout “anecdotal,” because they think it means “false.” Boy, is that crazy. If it weren’t for anecdotal data, most of modern medicine would not exist. Just about all known health problems began to be recognized because of rumors and stories, and many of history’s most important medicines became popular because people told each other they worked, without studies.

ANECDOTALLY, doctors are saying cancers among young people have increased a lot. Old-people cancers like colon cancer. We’re hearing about this at about the same time we’re hearing that the mRNA vaccines were contaminated in ways that could cause cancer.

ANECDOTALLY, we are hearing a lot of tales about young people who dropped dead. Athletes, especially. As though they had some kind of unusual heart problems rarely seen before 2020. Hmm.

Back when the leftist CCP was hiding coronavirus, evidence of the disease was strictly anecdotal in the West and much of China. It had to be anecdotal, because no one in the Chinese government or medical establishment was allowed to publish facts we now know to be true.

Why am I writing this? I’m yelling into a hole again. Screaming at fence posts. No one’s mind will be changed. Things won’t change in the least. Those who know I’m right already know, and the others are immune to correction.

I admit, reinforcing the truth in the minds of people who are resisting propaganda has value.

What a time we live in. We went through several years of the most amazing, flagrant, unopposed censorship in American history. People were fired from jobs unrelated to healthcare for questioning Fauci. The socials deleted our posts and banned us. A president coerced them to ramp it up, and there were no consequences. Doctors have had their credentials threatened.

Things have only improved slightly.

I can blog here and say anything, but Facebook reduces people like me to shooting blanks. You write a post, and then people tell you they can’t see it. Youtube still censors people. The more popular you are, the more they censor you. I’m unpopular, but my comments get deleted all the time, with no explanation at all. They don’t even tell me which comments they deleted.

We keep lumbering along like happy cows. Everything is okay as long as there is enough grass right in front of us. In 1784, patriotic mobs with fresh scars and stumps would have protested the First Amendment deniers and driven them from their jobs. They would have treated them the way modern First Amendment deniers treat rational people.

America is an apartheid state. No, it’s not as bad as the old South Africa, but conservatives and Christians are oppressed by leftists, who are privileged. They sue and prosecute our candidates and government officials unjustly. They imprison conservative rioters and reward leftists. They drove us out of the arts and journalism. They drove us out of academia. They get us fired from jobs. They ban and shadowban us, and they delete what we say on the web. All so they can promote Satanic foolishness and error without opposition.

I guess I’ve written enough. I pray for the rapture every day. Human beings are not going to fix the world. Voting won’t help much. Armed resistance is an unbelievably bad idea that would make us like our oppressors.

Whatever. I’m not taking any more shots I don’t trust. And my choice doesn’t make me more likely to die.

Loving Those Common-Sense Gun Laws

I don’t know if I should write about this, but common sense has never been my long suit, and I have already been banned by the DoD and Communist China, so I know it’s too late to worry about being on lists: I bought a couple of silencers.

I didn’t bother paying for tax stamps. I just went on Aliexpress and clicked a few buttons. I also ordered some grenades. The neighbors throw loud parties.

Of COURSE I paid for tax stamps. Put down your car keys, agents. I’m glad I paid. I think it’s wonderful that I was forced to pay $400 for permits for two completely harmless safety devices that are available for around $150, without permits, in gunphobic Western Europe.

It’s pointless to worry about your silencer finding its way onto a list, because they won’t let you have it until it’s on one list and the feds have tried to get you on another. The BATF knows you have the silencer, and just to be pure jerks, they notify your local sheriff. No state requires your sheriff’s consent for you to have a silencer.

The joke is on the BATF. If they think Sheriff Billy Woods is keeping a gun registry, they don’t know him very well. He encourages citizens to shoot burglars, and he made his department start giving civilians shooting classes.

So why did I buy silencers? Obviously, because I want to sneak into the houses of innocent people and kill them without making a sound.

Oops; sorry. I think I was channeling Elizabeth Warren or some other gun ignoramus. If you want to kill people quietly, a suppressed firearm is not going to work.

Should people be disturbed that I was banned by the DoD of the United States of America AND Communist China? Is anyone bothered by the fact that our military complex is just as threatened by my blog as a regime that has done things like forced abortion and the Cultural Revolution? Who will ban me next? North Korea? Andrew Tate?

As far as I know, the first time I heard a “silenced” weapon was in 2020, at a precision rifle class. I was “that guy.” Everyone else had at least a Ruger Precision Rifle, and most had Nightforce scopes. I showed up with a Leupold varmint scope in MOA and an LR-308 with a mil-spec trigger. A guy down the row from me asked if it was deer season.

A mil-spec trigger is the worst possible trigger you can manufacture for our military and expect to be paid for it. It will not provide optimal results in precision shooting. A good precision rifle will have something better. I believe I paid $200 for my only really good trigger.

Back when I took my class, a Ruger Precision Rifle, or RPR, was THE way to creep into precision rifle from the bottom. They exploded onto the market for something like $900. That was an insane bargain. You can spend up to, I would guess, infinity on a good rifle if you want to. You can have one built. You can buy a high-end gun already made. Grabbing a $900 gun and heading straight to the range was a big deal when the RPR came out.

Some guys in my class had weird guns you can’t just snag at Bass Pro on the way home from work. They had weird calibers, too. They had .338 Lapua and .300 Win Mag.

And they had silencers.

Not everyone had a silencer. Some just had brakes. The brakes were annoying, because if you’re next to a guy with a brake, it may redirect the blast from the front of the gun to your location.

The “silenced” guns were surprisingly loud. I knew not to expect the ridiculous “pyoonk pyoonk” sounds I had heard in movies, but these things sounded like rifles. If someone were shooting a suppressed 6.5 Creedmoor in my pasture right now, I would hear it through my double-paned windows.

I don’t know how moviemakers make those funny fake silencer sounds. They always sound exactly the same. Did someone record a cat sneezing in 1960? Weird.

People should be astonished that in 2024, there are still legislators stupid enough to think silencers are really silencers. If they’re that wrong about silencers, imagine how wrong they are about everything else. They’re not even trying.

Well. I guess you already know how wrong they are about everything else.

If you don’t hate the BATF, I have a story that will change your mind. One of my instructors told it. He was a military veteran who had, presumably, killed a lot of terrorists, risking his life for you and me. He was teaching a class. A BATF agent was taking the course. He saw the instructor’s silencer, and he demanded, right then and there, to see his paperwork. If the instructor had gotten lazy and left it at his house, he would have had to abandon the course and go for a drive. The law requires you to present your papers to the BATF on demand.

I got myself a silencer for a Ruger Charger pistol, which is more like a rifle than most pistols. It shoots .22LR. Tons of fun. Very short and handy. I put a Sig red dot on it. I don’t think I could hit a squirrel with it with sufficient accuracy to be humane, but it is the ultimate plinking pistol. Buy a 12-pack of store brand diet soda, toss the cans in your yard, step back 75 feet, and go to town. Can’t beat it.

I can’t remember why I chose to start with .22LR. A .22 is not very loud to begin with. But it sounded like fun, and it made for a cool utility cart gun. It was also a lot cheaper than a .308 can.

We silencer experts call silencers “cans.” Try to keep up with the cool kids.

Here’s something crazy: the BATF has started speeding up the approval process. Under Biden, no less. What on Earth is happening? Someone call Bill Murray and see if cats are living together with dogs.

Here I am, at the beginning of the apocalypse, still making apocalypse jokes.

It hasn’t been long since they were telling us to expect a silencer application to take at least 11 months. Here’s the current low figure: two days.

Two. Days.

How is that possible? The BATF is known to be hostile to gun rights, and the man who runs it is an old Jewish liberal who can’t tell one end of a pistol from the other. On the other hand, I’m sure they like money. Maybe they’re like the Patent and Trademark Office, which gets to keep whatever you send it. Faster processing equals increased consumer interest.

My .22 application has been approved, and by the time the can gets here, the process will have taken about 7 months. I decided to go for a .308 silencer as well. I hope it’s faster.

The company I used told me individual applications are typically very fast now, but gun-trust applications can still take 4 months.

What is a gun trust? I don’t really understand it because I don’t care enough to study, but more or less, you pretend you’re an organization, and the organization owns the silencer. This makes it easier to allow other people to use the silencer and receive it when you die. Something like that. I did a trust. I guess I should not have, but I don’t want my wife to have problems with her suddenly-illegal silencers if I get struck by lightning or offer to testify against Boeing.

I’ve learned a lot of things about silencers. One important thing: if you have a lot of calibers, get a .308 silencer. You can use it for anything down to .17 HMR. I’m not sure why anyone buys a .223 silencer. The .22LR silencer makes some sense, because it’s very small and relatively cheap.

Sooner or later, I plan to shoot big guns again. I do not trust ear plugs and muffs. I don’t think they work very well. I think most gun owners are poorly educated about such things. If your ear protection is rated at -30 dB when used perfectly, and your gun’s report is 40 dB past the safe zone, maybe you’re fooling yourself.

Whatever hearing I still have, I would like to keep, even though I am married.

I’m paying a screaming fortune for these things. That’s a shame, and Democrats should be held accountable for denying people protection at a reasonable cost. I thought about it, and I decided it was better to get gypped than to go deaf.

In some places in Europe, silencers are not merely legal; they are mandatory. Leftists think Western Europe is paradise. They think we should turn America into a big IKEA. If Europe is perfect, how can Europe be wrong about hearing safety?

The literature on the .308 can I ordered says it suppresses .308 down to ear-safe levels. I find that hard to believe, based on what I’ve heard with my own ears. I hope it’s true, but even if it isn’t, it should make my other protection do a much better job.

It’s amazing, the shooting technology we have now. I’m an amateur bozo shooter, but with my low-end precision rifle, I can shoot into 1/2″, center to center, all day at 100 yards on a reasonably calm day. The triggers, barrels, and cartridges are that good. Not two inches. Not one inch. Half an inch. Makes me wonder what a really good shooter with better stuff can do.

He can’t shrink my groups by more than half an inch. That’s for sure.

To do better at longer distances, you need more than good equipment. Past 100 yards, you need to be able to deal with things like wind and heat mirage and so on. I’m a rock star at 100 yards. Don’t ask me about 500.

The new cans will suppress every rifle caliber I shoot. I’ll have to think about getting some barrels threaded, though, because not every barrel I have is silencer-ready.

If you’ve been wanting a silencer, this may be a good time to get one. And the sooner you do, the less likely you are to have hearing trouble.

From Lone Wolf to Lamaze Partner

Breakfast was very peaceful today. My wife slept late, which is not unusual. Marvin and I ate together in the kitchen. I looked out over the tranquil scenery of my rural yard. The shade trees. The chicken house. The bull 20 feet away eating grass by my flower bed. The clouds.

The bull. By the flower bed.

A big tree snapped recently, and it fell in the pasture closest to the house. Yesterday I went out and cut it up. My newly-restored Echo chainsaw decided not to run. Again. I had to get another saw out and go back and forth from the shop.

My tractor decided to refuse to start. I got a blower and blew the poo and twigs out from under the seat. I thought mice had eaten the seat safety switch. I fiddled with other things. Finally I realized the tractor would start when I jiggled the forward/reverse pedal. Another safety switch.

Lawyers.

By then I was tired and dehydrated, and when I went in the house, I forgot to close the gate to the pasture.

I called the bull’s owner, and I went out and yelled at the bull. He did not seem as impressed as I wanted him to be. I herded him on foot. I herded him in the cart. When he got close to the gates, he refused to go through.

He had been staring at my grass and shrubs for years, and now that he had his chance, he intended to stay and make the most of it. I could not reason with him.

I didn’t want to force the issue, because this bull approaches people. He came up to me twice, so close I could rub his head. Did that mean he was friendly? Did it mean he was trying to run me off? I certainly hoped it didn’t mean he had romance on his mind.

The owner says he has always been friendly and has never been aggressive, but a bull is a bull. One killed my cousin. Swung his head into his belly and tore up his liver.

I don’t have a water trough in my yard, so I knew Mr. Independent would realize his mistake eventually. I went inside and waited for him to get thirsty.

Eventually I saw him trotting back and forth along the fence closest to the trough in the pasture. I had him. I opened a gate and negotiated with him until he left. Even then, he stood in the opening and stared at me, like he expected me to give him a pizza.

He likes mimosa trees. That’s good. These trees were imported from China for ornamental purposes, and they have become invasive. I saw him chewing on a couple of little ones. I should have let him finish.

In other news, I have reached that fateful moment so many American men reach. I have admitted this to myself: minivans are superior to SUV’s in almost every way. Sooner or later, I will drive a minivan.

It’s not quite as bad as deciding to wear an apron to the supermarket, but it’s a milestone.

My Explorer turned out to be a money pit due to amazingly bad Ford engineering, so I was concerned about having to get more expensive repairs in the future. It just ate nearly $3000 because a water pump failed, and the new pump is the same kind of pump. I want to keep this car for 200,000 miles, because that’s what intelligent people do, but at what cost?

I started thinking about Toyota SUV’s, which are fantastic for what they are. Unbelievably reliable. Easy to work on. Eventually, though, the truth became clear to me.

Minivans:

1. hold more people,
2. hold more stuff,
3. have sliding doors kids can’t slam into other cars,
4. get good mileage,
5. are very safe,
6. are also easy to work on,
7. and cost less for what you get.

Why do people buy SUV’s? Because they’re cool. Simple question.

It won’t be long before before our numbers exceed two. There will be at least three of us in the car, along with a stroller and who knows what else. A minivan is the obvious answer.

I think Toyota is the right choice. As one would expect, they are said to make the best minivan in the world: the Sienna. Honda’s minivan has some problems. I wouldn’t buy another Ford if I needed an artificial heart and Ford held the patent.

I think men resist minivans because they think they make us less attractive. But do they?

The most attractive thing in a man is the sense that other women want him. If a woman thinks other women want a man, he can be in an iron lung and be in prison for kiddie porn, and she will want him.

When you have a minivan, it is clear you are married, and you probably have kids. That means a woman wanted you. It makes you a prize.

I think wedding bands make men more attractive. Yes, only to the wrong kind of women, but most women are the wrong kind.

I no longer care if I’m attractive, because whatever attractiveness I had has served its purpose. I am married. These days, I see strange women more as pests than anything else. If a minivan makes me repulsive, excellent. If it draws skanks, that’s still okay, because I don’t like skanks. They’re not going to get anywhere.

When a man is single, he feels like advertising his husband qualities to every attractive woman he sees. He will be nicer to women than they deserve. He will think about his apprearance. When he’s happily married, he sighs a sigh of relief, stops sucking his gut in, and quits offering to change strangers’ tires. Your Miata died beside the interstate? Wow. That’s a bummer. Have you called AAA? I have a date at Chuck E. Cheese.

It’s really hard for a woman to borrow money from a man who likes his marriage. Women never repay loans, so this is a blessing.

I can burp in front of women now. I don’t have to hold it in. I’m so free.

Don’t judge me. Women are exactly the same way. Dieting and exercise cease on the day of the wedding.

I looked at numbers, and I think I should keep the Explorer a while longer. We don’t have a baby seat just yet. It’s hard to know what to do. We will get more if we sell it now than later, and that will make a newer car more affordable. But driving it longer will make the money we already have in it go farther.

I always buy used cars, but things are upside-down now. The gurus say that if you want a Toyota Sienna, it’s actually smarter to buy new. How crazy is that? Something to do with Bidenomics and the Hong Kong Fluey.

Chinese virus. Chinese virus. Chinese virus. Chinese virus. I love saying that in public.

Lab-created CCP Chinese virus. Even better.

The Sienna has one big problem: it has three rows of seats, and the second one requires tools to remove. I want that cargo space. I guess I can pull the seats and put them in my storage room.

I got my first real eyeglasses the other day. I’m sitting in a new leather recliner. I’m thinking about a minivan. What’s next? Insipid horizontal-stripe golf shirts and stretch khakis? “Honey, look! Two-for-one Bubba Burgers!”

Loafers. Not loafers, please. If loafers, not tassels. I couldn’t bear it. I already have loafers to wear with sportcoats, but I hope I am never seen wearing them at Walmart along with Tommy Bahama shorts.

The Harley is about to be sold. It’s okay to be smeared all over the pavement if you’re single, but if you’re a dad, the kids won’t like it. And it takes up room in the garage, where I need to put the pickup to keep squirrels off of it. It’s going to be fixed and painted this year.

My wife is trying to get me to moisturize. Wow. I told her I like being dry.

There are now 4 pillows on my bed. The wife wants to add at least two more. This is the price I pay.

Where do the pillows go when we sleep? On the floor. Of course. Explain that.

Have to go. My wife says she dreamed about midgets. We have to pray our children will be tall.

Maybe that bull is onto something. I notice he escaped by himself.

Enjoy the Rage of the Marginalized

Looks like something informative has taken place in New York City.

There is an art museum in Brooklyn, aptly named the Brooklyn Museum. I took a look at the website, and it appears to be a plain old art museum. Not a museum of Jewish or Holocaust art. Not involved with Israel or Judaism. But the lady in charge, one Anne Pasternak, lives in an apartment building with about 100 residents. Based on what I see on the web, it looks like many or all of the residents are Jewish.

I haven’t found any connection between Pasternak, the museum, the apartment building, or its residents with Israel or the IDF.

A bunch of pro-Hamas (not just pro-Palestine or anti-Israel or anti-IDF or anti-war) criminals have defaced Pasternak’s apartment building with antisemitic graffiti in red paint, calling her a white supremacist Zionist and saying she has blood on her hands. They sprayed a red triangle on the building. Hamas uses red triangles to label locations that will be targeted for violence, so it’s fair to say Pasternak and her neighbors have been threatened with death.

They also defaced art at the museum.

Pasternak is way out on the left. I could tell you that without Googling, because she is a Jewish female New Yorker who runs an art museum in a heavily-Jewish area. I don’t have to check. Any conservative or centrist who applied to run that place would be blackballed instantly. But I did Google, and yes, she is out there on the left. So she has been targeted by people who are supposed to be her friends.

The great thing about this act of terrorism–and that’s what it is, because there is a murder threat–is that it tells the world so much.

As some Babylon Bee character said the other day, hating Jews is now cool. That is not an exaggeration. The people who decide what “cool” is–leftists–have put antisemitism and Hamas on the cool list. So burning babies on purpose and raping women while mutilating them are pretty darn cool.

Jew-hating is now accepted by a very large percentage of Americans, and they are tormenting Jews in the very places where Jews felt most safe and powerful. The Brooklyn Museum terrorism exposes the problem. The potential murderers are going after people whose only crime is EXISTENCE. As Jews. You don’t have to be in the Israeli government or the IDF. You don’t have to be an Israeli. You don’t have to support the war on Hamas openly. You just have to do two things: 1. be Jewish, and 2. exist. For these crimes, in the United States of America, in Brooklyn, you are considered fair game by terrorists.

Meanwhile, most American Jews continue to support the two-state solution. Many are on the side of Hamas. Most are likely to think Republican Christians are their worst enemies, even though we are the only reason America hasn’t turned on Israel. An overwhelming majority are in love with gun control, which has left many disarmed in the face of leftist/Muslim aggression.

“Two-state solution.” “Final Solution.” Suddenly, the similarity strikes me. What are we trying to solve? Obvious. The Jewish Question. It’s back.

Nothing has changed. The cancer just went into remission for a while.

There is no Jewish Question. Nothing needs to be done to protect the world from Jews. Their existence is not a pandemic or a problem. But the quest for the Final Solution has been revived anyway.

I feel like I’m yelling down a hole. Not many people read this blog, many who read what I’m writing will dismiss it because of their groundless biases, and people like me will never have platforms as big as the ones the Jew-haters have. I’m not going to change anything. Why do I even write about this? It just sets me and my wife apart as future targets.

People say Donald Trump was convicted for falsifying records in furtherance of a crime which has never been named. Similarly, Jews have been convicted of crimes that have not been named, because they do not exist. I guess they’re Jewing. That’s what we should call it. Jewing. Conspiracy to commit Jewing. Suborning Jewing. Incitement to Jew.

Any Jew who thinks appeasement is possible is insane. It was never possible. How long have Jews been trying it? Centuries. If it was going to work, we would know by now. You can’t make people happy when they think your existence is a crime.

State worship is a huge problem among Jews. They expect gentile governments to save them. I wonder how they can feel that way, given the success gentile governments have had in preventing them from multiplying. Pharaoh. Haman. Nebuchadnezzar. Hitler. Who has done them as much harm as gentile governments? If not for gentile governments, there would probably be half a billion Jews instead of fewer than 20 million.

What’s happening worldwide is a lot like what happened in the USSR. Jews were big factors in deposing the Czar, getting his family slaughtered, and turning a big piece of Russia and Asia into a communist state they thought would solve all their problems. Then the USSR, of which they had made themselves defenseless captives, turned on them. Same thing is happening with the global left. Jews were instrumental in setting it up, and now it is trying to annihilate them. Literally. Reduce them to nothingness.

The people who need weapons most are among the most vocal in calling for their own disarmament. How would you like to be a rabbi who dresses traditionally and live in Brooklyn right now without a gun? That must be fun. I suppose Jews will come up with a novel plan: they’ll call on our gentile government to protect them.

It will get worse, and I hope I am not on Earth to see it. A small percentage of Jews will accept Yeshua, have their blinders removed, and knock off their suicidal behavior. But most will be vulnerable.

God has said that the entire world will turn against Israel, and it looks like it’s happening right now. Biden is doing terrible dishonest things to rein in Israel’s efforts to protect itself from an existential threat, and America is supposed to be Israel’s shield. If we give up on Israel, the world gives up. Are we there?

I was thinking it was a good thing to see Jew-hatred exposed for what it is, but maybe it isn’t, because almost no one will learn from it or make any changes to respond to it. People who point the problem out are like the mythical figure Cassandra, who always prophesied truthfully but was never believed.

Should I even publish this? I don’t know. Here I go.

Years of Hard Work and Consistency Pay Off

Hunter Biden has been convicted of three felonies. The details are not important. He was habitually on drugs, and he lied in order get a lame Colt revolver. He got burned twice lying and once for possessing the gun.

So will gun people celebrate today, since nearly all of them are conservative? If so, I have not seen it yet. I checked one of the big gun forums.

I think most of us feel some sympathy for anyone convicted of a gun crime involving something like possession or skirting background-check laws. If Biden had used the gun in a violent crime, gun people would surely be happier about his fate.

This may sound like a weird question, but should we really be taking 2A rights away from everyone who uses illegal drugs or has an addiction? Because over 1/6 of us fall into that category. If you smoke or otherwise ingest weed without a prescription, you are breaking federal law. If you have a prescription and are addicted, which does happen regardless of what goofy libertarians claim, you are not breaking the law, but you still fall under the federal firearms prohibition.

What percentage of gun owners are alcoholics? Not zero or anything close to it, believe me.

Hunter Thompson was an extreme case of alcoholism and drug abuse, and he had all sorts of guns, which he used in the open, on video. No one cared, even when he shot the roof of his head out a few feet from his 6-year-old grandson. Why is that? Probably because no one thought he would ever shoot another person.

Did anyone seriously think the other Hunter would shoot anyone? No. Be serious.

If the prohibition’s motivation makes sense, it must be to keep guns away from junkies, street crackheads, and people who get dangerously drunk. I doubt it was drafted in order to keep guns away from Drew Barrymore and Robert Downey, Jr. Or Chevy Chase. Or Betty Ford or Kitty Dukakis.

I don’t think Biden’s addiction or even his generally bad personality inclined him to physically harm people with guns.

Is it bad that he lied on a federal form? Well, yes, but who has never lied to the government? Most lies told to the government are trivial, but lying to Uncle Sam is still against the law in many cases, and surely some decent people who will read this blog post are guilty.

Sometimes government forms are so badly conceived, they make it impossible to squeeze the truth into them. There are forms that only offer options, that, for many people, are all untrue. If you sign one after saying something not quite true, which you know to be inconsequential and irrelevant, should you be charged with perjury?

The other day I lied to an insurance company, sort of. They wanted to know how long I had been with my previous insurer. I wasn’t sure, and my insurance documents didn’t say, but I had to write something if I wanted a quote, so I made my best guess. That’s kind of a lie. Who cares? My record is excellent. I’m not trying to convince them I’m a safer driver than I am. Did I commit fraud?

They also wanted to know the mileage of my cars. I knew one of them, but I didn’t feel like walking out to check the other. I knew the figure to within three digits, but I wasn’t sure about the other two, so I guessed. Turns out I was within 10 miles, but I was wrong. Should they cancel my policy if the actual mileage was 45,678 and I said it was 45,687? They shouldn’t, and they wouldn’t. If I called right now and confessed, they would laugh at me.

If you have a normal-sized social circle, and you’re conservative, you definitely know someone who lied on a Form 4473. You may know their identities. Run to the phone now and turn them in.

I guess at my weight when I fill out 4473’s. No gun shop has a scale. Bring out the cuffs.

Lying about something which is clearly very important is different. Form 4473 requires you to tell whether you’re a citizen. It requires you to say whether you’re making a straw purchase. If you lie about the big things, you should be prosecuted. But lying about being a rich white-collar cokehead whose life consists of using hotel pool slides naked with hookers…I would be happy if all he got was a fine. He does deserve some punishment, simply for being an entitled creep about the whole thing. Fine him $5000 and make him write, “Hunter is a jerk,” 100 times on the blackboard.

I’m more concerned about him selling his dad’s influence to people. It sure looks like he did that in collusion with his dad and his uncle. For activities like that, all three should go to prison.

I don’t like him lying to Congress about important things related to bribery and our national security. He should answer for that.

If he were a street crackhead, running around shoving guns into people’s faces, I would understand the importance of keeping him disarmed, but I think that kind of behavior is covered by other form questions.

It’s amazing how unreasonable gun laws can be. Going to DC with a suitcase that has a misplaced and empty 15-round magazine under the lining can get you prison time. Having a short barrel on an unregistered rifle can get you prison time. A short-barreled rifle is not a particularly dangerous weapon. Having an AK with a magazine that has a European baseplate instead of one made in the US can be a felony.

Liberal spinmasters are in a tough spot now. Do they rail against the politically-motivated persecution of Hunter Biden by his father’s Democrat-dominated DOJ, or do they stand up, as usual, for unreasonable gun control that is inconsistent with the Bill of Rights?

Maybe this will be one of the straws that breaks Joe Biden’s back. Many in his party are dying to bolt and cut their losses. It would be great for them to cut Hunter loose, let him drown, stop making excuses for his dad, and try to find someone to take Joe’s place. It’s going to get worse. Hunter has more trials ahead, and he will be convicted again because he breaks laws with the same kind of immortality complex we see in teenage drivers.

Personally, I’m amazed that Hunter got away with referring to himself and his frat-bro buddies as “Aryan godlike men.” The implicit racism is off the charts. It’s not just antisemitic. It’s anti-every-nonwhite-race. It comes from the very heart of white supremacy. Real white supremacy. Not the imaginary white supremacy we keep hearing about. Comparing Northern European men to gods is about as bad as it gets. In Hunter’s mind, to be white and Northern European is to look like God. That should have turned leftists against him forever.

What do I think will happen to Hunter? I think he’ll get a little prison time, if his appeal fails. Looking around the web, I see that the feds do take Form 4473 seriously when it comes to sentencing. And the DOJ and the judge will have to think about their reputations, as the judge (but not the DOJ) did when rejecting Biden’s ridiculous sweetheart plea.

I think his big problems will come later, when he is convicted of other crimes involving dishonesty. I’m not a criminal attorney, so I don’t know, but I would guess that any felony conviction involving flagrant dishonesty would affect sentencing in any felony of the same fundamental nature. Just a guess.

You only get to be a first-time offender once.

Whether Hunter is being treated fairly or not, I’m getting tired of America’s new obsession with sending prosecutors after people connected to politics. Seems like everyone is going to be indicted or impeached eventually. Some prosecutions are necessary, but I feel like we’re headed for a system in which corrupt private attorneys, prosecutors, judges, juries, and impeachment committees, not the ballot box, decide who rules. Instead of democracy, we’ll have what some have termed “judocracy.”

When that happens, goodbye, GOP. Boxes full of leftist morons will put us all in the hoosegow.

It’s all part of the apocalypse. Life will continue to make less and less sense. Things that shouldn’t happen at all will be the rule, not the exception.

It would be great if God would rapture us before my next American Express payment.

God Turns Arrows into Gifts

I don’t get a lot of hostile comments any more, but I got one the other day. When you get nonsensical, angry comments with fake email addresses, you have to wonder if they come from people you know. People who sit on boiling resentment every day but never confront you.

There were a couple of truly miserable people among my law school acquaintances. People who were petty enough to read my blog every day long after I dropped them and went on with life. I heard from them. I also got a drunken comment from an angry relative after I wrote a piece in which I discussed the racism and insincere leftism of some of my relations. I told the truth about them, and what I said was important and useful, so I don’t feel all that bad. My relative died young, so he’s not reading my blog.

The commenter I heard from recently responded to a piece in which I told how disturbed I was to look back and see the kind of person I used to be. I didn’t say I had since been perfected. I said I expected to be disturbed in the future if I looked back at things I write now. The commenter said I had not changed and that I was more self-righteous than ever.

That mystified me, because I knew it was not true. I can see disagreeing with me about my positions. I can see criticizing me because I’m not always consistent. Sometimes I write more like the old me, and sometimes less. Saying I’m more self-righteous than I used to be doesn’t make much sense.

Last night, I was thinking about it, and I remembered something: to many people, anyone who offers any kind of moral judgment is self-righteous. They don’t know what the term means. They think anybody who criticizes any type of sin is self-righteous.

We hear this all the time from leftists and uninformed Christians. They misquote Matthew 7. Even the atheists. “Judge not!”, they like to say, like that’s the entire Bible. But Matthew 7 doesn’t really say that. If you say, “Judge not,” you mislead, because there is more to the chapter.

In Matthew 7, Yeshua told us to judge ourselves before giving others vital constructive criticism. He told us to remove the beams from our eyes, and then we would be able to remove the specks from other people’s eyes. He expected us to give other people correction. Otherwise, the passage makes no sense and runs too long.

Satan is a slanderer. “Devil” literally means “slanderer.” A slanderer is a person who makes false accusations. False accusations are incredibly popular among leftists. People who are against Christianity are leftists, even if they’re politically conservative. They are leftists in the supernatural. Satan was the first leftist. He stood up and rebelled against the divinely-imparted authority of his betters. Every human leftist, political or spiritual, is descended from him.

This weekend, leftists surrounded the White House and rioted. They battered the police. One put on a Hamas headband and waved a plastic replica of Joe Biden’s head, covered with what one hopes was fake blood. It was a call for assassination. They were shouting slanders, blaming the Jews for antisemitic violence of a type that was actually worse than typical Nazi activity. They slandered America and Joe Biden, blaming them for the Palestinian-caused war deaths of Palestinians.

Leftists have literally turned slandering white people into a profession. Universities pay people to help students and professors slander white people. BLM is a slander machine, and its witch founders have become wealthy in a few years, taking money from donations.

Satan hates correction, because it restores order and allows people who are corrected to be blessed and saved. For this reason, he has taught his children to slander and harm everyone who corrects. That includes everyone who testifies. The powerful Jews of the time of Yeshua conspired to murder Lazarus for the crime of being resurrected. His presence was testimony to their errors and corruption.

If you have good intentions, and you try to be humble, and you point out sin in order to help people, you can expect to be called self-righteous in an absurd and mindless kind of way. It’s a way to put you on the defensive and turn you into the topic of discussion. It’s deflection. It helps people avoid life-saving reproof.

Many sinners feel they’re being put on trial when you mention their sins, so they put you on trial instead. This is how Yeshua and the prophets died.

It’s projection. Satan is the king of projection. He invented negative campaigning. He doesn’t just tell you he’s warm and fuzzy and brilliant, and that he will be a better savior than Yeshua. He tells you Yeshua is vicious and uncaring, and he says his followers are all hypocrites and sadists who get off on controlling other people unjustly.

It works very well. Even 2,000 years after Satan was defeated on the cross, most people, including many Christians, still go to hell, and they serve Satan, only, while they live. And many Christians are intimidated into silence.

As for me, however bad I may still be, I am definitely less self-righteous than I used to be. I often lie awake at night talking to God about how contemptible I am, based on what I am without him. Sometimes I think about things I said and did, and part of me wishes I had never existed. I wish I could start over with a clean slate. I may be forgiven, but what happened, happened. It can never be undone.

I may be more critical of sin than I was, but I am definitely less self-righteous. Whatever the motivation for the comment was, it wasn’t an increase in my self-righteousness. I know what I was, and I know what I am now.

I was raised very badly. I was left ignorant. My parents were immature, and they didn’t know God. My parents did a great job of ruining me, and instead of seeing the problem as an adult and trying to fix it, I doubled down. I was truly their son.

My dad was far and away the most successful of my grandfather’s sons-in-law, and I have relatives who will never accept any complaints about my parents simply because my sister and I had more than they did. It’s a little odd when this kind of thing comes from an aunt, since the father of my aunts was richer than my dad, and my grandfather helped two inept sons-in-law a great, great deal with their careers, which still did not amount to much.

My criticism of my parents is true, though. My dad was not just an atheist for most of his life; he was a childish, angry, vengeful atheist. He didn’t just fail to teach me about God; he taught me that God and Christians were ridiculous. My mother was loving and unselfish, and she battled my abusive father for me, but she was also rebellious and emotional, and she didn’t introduce me to God, which was her most important responsibility.

Often, my parents knew they were doing wrong. I can’t pretend that isn’t true.

If I had to guess at a number, I would say I learned over 95% of the useful things I know from God himself, my own experience, and people other than my parents. This is why I did so many stupid things and sabotaged myself over and over. I still fight bad habits my parents taught me.

When I was young, I thought I was the smartest person around, and that I should “listen to my gut,” “listen to my heart,” and emulate famous people who went to hell. I was proud of thinking for myself; I didn’t know thinking for yourself leads to damnation. I was proud of my exceedingly backward Eastern Kentucky culture, even though many people there were childish, emotional, vindictive, selfish, rude, violent, extremely racist, underdeveloped, uninterested in education, stubborn, and proud of drunkenness.

Southerners are generally very polite and considerate, and somehow, I never noticed that people were not like that in Eastern Kentucky. They were not like the kind, gentle, slow-to-anger people here in Northern Florida. As critical as I have been of Eastern Kentucky, I never thought about this until recently. The South isn’t a monolith.

I come from a disguised white ghetto, and other than the parts of me God has changed, I am ghetto. Trashy. I used to think of myself as a person God took on because I was somewhat better than other people. Boy, was I wrong about that. Thinking I was better was the thing that made me worse than other people.

I thought I was a victim, but I wasn’t. Not after I became an adult and failed to change. If you persist in thinking you’re a victim, you’re going to go to hell. You’re going to rationalize doing terrible things to other people and failing to grow up. Look at Palestinians. Not just Hamas. Muslim Palestinians as a whole. They teach 4-year-olds to murder Jews, in schools financed by the United Nations.

Ghetto.

Slanders can be useful. They can motivate you to investigate them and see if there is any truth to them. If you find any, you may be able to improve. Even if you don’t, you are likely to be reminded of your real faults, and that’s helpful.

That being said, I will continue to exclude dishonest, manipulative people from my life. Limiting your circle to constructive Christians is a source of peace and growth.

And Here I Thought $20 Hamburgers Were Bad

So my Ford Explorer is in the shop getting a $2500 water pump.

That’s best-case. It’s possible the water pump is bad because the timing chain system that drives it is bad. There is no sign the rest of the engine has problems other than being a Ford.

I will surely repeat a lot of things here, but off I go anyway.

Cars don’t really have water pumps. They have coolant pumps. No car uses plain water to cool its engine. But coolant pumps are called water pumps.

In the past, a water pump was a cheap part, and you could expect it to be on the front of your engine where it could be swapped by turning a few bolts and removing a couple of things. Even if you were a fool, you could do it in an afternoon.

There are good reasons for putting water pumps outside of engines. It makes them easy to replace. It also makes it impossible for them to shoot coolant into your engine where it will mix with oil and destroy the engine very quickly.

Ford and a couple of other companies, much like the ignorant children in every generation who reject time-tested wisdom and decide socialism is a smart new idea, have decided it’s best to put water pumps inside engines. This is like changing melanoma, which starts on the skin where you can see it quickly and have it treated relatively cheaply, so it appears first in the center of your brain.

Famous Youtube mechanic Scotty Kilmer says Ford had a very good reason for making their engines this way. It saves Ford money.

Well, that makes it okay, then.

Ford did some other brilliant things.

Ford made the water pumps inside Ford engines poorly so they were likely to fail early. It also designed them to be driven by timing chains. When timing chains go funny, they rattle around. This can make the water pumps fail even earlier.

My understanding is that when a pump fails, it means water is going out through the bearings, which should be sealed forever.

Ford came up with a genius solution to the problem. It did a recall, replaced all the affected motors, and redesigned the water pumps so they were harder to ruin.

No, it didn’t! Are you crazy?

Ford refused to recall anything, even after being sued in a class action. It chose not to change the pump design so new pumps that replaced ruined pumps would not fail. When you pay to have your old pump replaced, you’re buying a pump just like it. You might get 150,000 miles out of it. Or 10,000.

Ford also put two gaskets around the water pump cover. When the coolant breaks through the first gasket, it starts going out through a tiny hole between the gaskets. This hole is called a weep hole, because when coolant comes out, owners weep.

If you don’t know coolant is coming out of the weep hole, you keep driving, and soon the coolant wrecks the second gasket. Then coolant goes into your engine, and your engine falls apart. Scrap metal. Hence the phrase “Ford Exploder.”

In order to help owners find out when their coolant was leaking, Ford put the weep hole about three feet down a crack between the engine and the fender, in an area where it is impossible to see it.

If a lot of coolant comes out, you will see it under the car. If only a little comes out, you will have no idea unless you’re that 1% driver who opens the hood every day and checks his coolant level. Your engine can be totalled by a leak that never makes it to the garage floor.

You should be able to replace your own water pump on a Saturday for maybe $200. Dealerships quote figures more like $4500. That’s assuming the timing chain isn’t bad. Add maybe $500. Independent shops are cheaper because their customers are more intelligent.

There is, literally, no conceivable excuse for making a car this way. They can’t blame mileage or emission standards. They can’t blame safety standards. Ford is just incompetent.

If Ford is not incompetent, then Ford is evil, because it decided this plan was a good idea: create cars that need extremely expensive repairs other cars do not need. Then make money on the parts and repairs later.

The big problem with this plan is that people who have to have this repair stop buying Fords, because they can’t believe Ford is that dumb.

So if this is the plan, Ford is incompetent after all, but also evil.

I’m not too happy with this problem. Even if the timing chain is fine, I’m looking at about $3,000 in repairs and related expenses. That leaves me with the same setup that failed already.

Once the repair is done, I have to go and get multiple safety recalls fixed. On one car.

When I was a kid, I hated Fords. I had a great reason. My grandfather had a GM dealership. Later on, I realized that was silly, and I became open-minded. Since then, my family has bought a few Fords and GMS.

Let’s check their histories. To save space, I’ll just say that we had more than 10 GM cars, and not one major repair.

Let’s look at some Fords.

1985 Lincoln Town Car: trunk filled with rain
1991 Lincoln Town Car: caught on fire
1994 Ford Explorer: tranny failed, 4WD refused to engage, heating system failed very expensively, two wheel bearings failed
2003 Ford Thunderbird: ignition coil failed because all 8 were put in depressions that filled with rain, AC failed and started blowing very hot air, took nearly a second to respond to the throttle (normal behavior for the model)
2016 Ford Explorer: AC failed, water pump failed, timing chain may be gone

I had the idea that Fords were okay even when I told my dad he should get the second Explorer. I hadn’t considered making a list like this. Had I done so, I think I would have pushed for something else.

Dementia had set in, but he was still in need of a vehicle. We had reached the point where I had to take him to doctors, getting in my truck was hard for him, and his other cars were in such bad shape they were not good enough to keep using. And he was still sharp enough for short errands. Or so I thought. He had to quit driving a few months after we got the new Explorer. He only drove it once.

He loved his first Explorer in spite of the problems, so I thought the car-buying process would go easier if we got another one. I should have pushed for a Toyota.

I think I’ll end up buying a new timing chain, because you know how it is with expensive repairs. “As long as you have it apart…”

Some time this week, I’ll have a running Ford with a warrantied repair. Do I want to keep it?

Tough call.

The car is really nice apart from the fact that it could blow up at any time. It’s comfortable. It has creature comforts even luxury cars didn’t have when I was in college. It holds a lot of junk. It has zero rust.

On the down side, other than the horrific engine, it has a very harsh ride. The road noise and wind noise are bad. The GPS is 100% useless. It can’t compare to the GPS from a 2005 Toyota.

We are using a rented Nissan Rogue right now because my Dodge has an electrical issue. This is a cheaper SUV, and it shows. Nonetheless, the ride is way better than the Explorer’s ride. It goes over the dips in our private road with no problems. When you hit small bumps in the Ford, it’s “BAM! BAM! BAM!”

It’s those stupid rapper rims. I think. Tires used to have nice, high sidewalls that absorbed bumps and protected rims. Not any more. Now the tires are an inch high. Everybody’s ride has been pimped. Ridiculous.

I have been thinking about ditching the Ford and getting a Toyota 4Runner. It’s an old design. It’s a real SUV, which means it’s a truck station wagon. A Toyota Tacoma with a hatch. The Ford is just a tall car. The 4Runner has a full frame. The Ford is unibody. Like most trucks, 4Runners have real tires and grown-up-style rims.

People say the 4Runner is not hard to work on. Also, repairs are less frequent and cheaper. It’s a little bigger than the Ford, so maybe the engine area is not so jammed up. The water pump is not inside the engine.

Toyota is a much better company than Ford, which is why Toyota is the world’s largest carmaker and Ford, the company that invented the assembly line and the once-ubiquitous Model T, is third in its home country. Behind Toyota. Toyota obsesses on quality. It’s a sickness. They constantly improve things. Because the 4Runner is old, they have had a lot of time to improve it. There are no surprises left.

My wife wants a Land Cruiser. This is a big SUV. In the past, it was kind of like an Expedition, except it was a good vehicle. It was absent from the US market for a couple of years. They just brought it back. It has a 4-cylinder engine with two turbos, and it’s a hybrid.

Good luck getting me to buy that. Sell it to Buck Rogers. It’s exactly what I’m trying to get away from, except made by a good company instead of Ford.

Also, it would probably cost $90,000, so no. And you can’t buy one used yet.

The complaints people make about the 4Runner actually make me want it more.

“It’s dated.” YESSSS. MORE!

“The interior is old-fashioned.” What does that even mean? To me, a 2000 interior seems just fine. I love the interior in my ’07 Ram. I was madly in love with the interiors of my dad’s ’80 Cadillac and ’85 Lincoln. Does it mean there’s no big screen TV next to the driver’s seat? Does it mean each kid can’t watch a separate godless Disney movie with a homosexual POC protagonist? Where is the problem?

Maybe women complain about the interior. Surely it’s not men.

“It gets bad mileage.” So does the Explorer. The 4Runner is about 2 mpg worse, but we don’t drive much. If, may God forbid it, one of us has to get a job, we’ll get a Prius or something.

If we get a used 4Runner, we’ll take a net hit of maybe $25,000, which is a lot. It will be about 7 years newer than the Toyota, though, and we should expect to get 230,000 miles out of it without any major surgeries. For me, that’s nearly 30 years of driving. That’s 250,000 minus the 20,000 I will accept from a used car. Cars will probably be banned before then, and I may be with Jesus.

The 4Runner is what men buy when they have had it. When they want the most bulletproof gasoline-powered modern car known to man. Also, Toyota supports old models with parts for a very long time.

I don’t know. Maybe I’ll just drive the Explorer into the dirt. It will probably be cheaper in the long run. I know I’ll be mad the next time I have to buy a water pump. With leftists on the rise, it will probably cost $10,000.

I believe my family’s involvement with Ford is coming to an end. It’s unfortunate that Americans can’t run a car company.