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Short-barreled rifles are, ridiculously, regulated by the BATF, under an outdated, Constitution-hostile, and absurd law called the National Firearms Act.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.

Life is Never Childproof

My wife and I have been talking about raising children.

One issue that came up was the nature of the property where we live. It’s mostly pasture and forest. I have a house and a workshop, and the rest of the property is full of things like nettles, poison ivy, blackberry briars, holes, and snakes. The house itself has no bedrooms for children on the first floor. We live on a private road that opens onto a two-lane highway with a 55-mph speed limit, so opportunities for riding a bike are not good, and the nearest house is probably 250 yards away.

I’m not sure what to do about the house.

We have two stairways. One is carpeted. The other is hard oak. If the kids live upstairs, what are we supposed to do to protect them?

When I was a kid, my grandparents had a two-story house. They moved into another two-story house when I was about 5. The second house had a set of steep concrete steps covered in thin, hard vinyl.

I never saw a baby gate until I was an adult. I don’t know if they existed. My grandparents had 8 grandchildren, and none of us ever fell down the steps or came close to it. Neither did my grandparents. Nobody did.

The cabinets had no childproofing. I used to play inside them. Whatever chemicals were in the house were available to all. The guns were not locked up.

I have never known anyone except me who had a poison scare as a child. I sampled some rat poison once, and nothing happened. They sent me home from the ER without doing anything for me.

I have never lived in a modern baby-safe house. I don’t even know what the rules are.

I have never known anyone who fell down the stairs as a child (or adult) and had an injury of any kind. Does that mean the concerns are overblown?

I don’t remember much of anything that happened before I was three. My dad bought a house when I was that age. It was one house over from a corner, and the street intersecting our street was somewhat busy. A block to the east, there was a big lot which was often flooded, and there were snakes.

My friends and I used to walk out the door early in the day and spend our time running around like wild Indians. We didn’t cross the busy street, but we could walk a block or two in the other direction, all by ourselves. No one cared. No one was afraid grown men would grab us and have sex with us.

We didn’t know what homosexuality was, and we didn’t know what sex was.

We built forts in the swamp area. We used to have wars. We would chase each other around and hit each other with sticks and branches. Houses went up sometimes, and we played on the construction sites. It was understood that the big sand piles were there for our amusement. I was probably in junior high before I realized people weren’t supposed to go onto other people’s property and play in their unfinished houses.

We played with what are now known as war toys. My parents got me a plastic machine gun and a plastic battleship. We always had cap pistols. I had boots and a cowboy hat. We played cowboys and Indians, and no one ever questioned the notion that the Indians were bad and had to be shot. Sorry about that. We learned from Hollywood, which is always a stupid idea.

No one I grew up with ever committed a gun crime. I did throw a knife at my sister when I was a kid, but most people would have done the same thing eventually. She was special. My gentle 103-pound mother went at her with both fists.

When I used to visit my grandparents, my grandfather would put his grandchildren in the back of a pickup and drive us around on mountain roads at up to 80 mph. We loved it. We never died. I was his favorite, and he used to let me “help” him on his farms. He would sit me on the fender of his tractor while he raked or mowed, and he would also let me steer. If I had fallen off the front of the fender, I would have gone under the rear tire.

We used to shoot together. I never had a lesson in gun safety. I think I was expected to be smart enough not to shoot anyone.

He taught my aunt to swim by throwing her in a river.

Kids were allowed to sit anywhere they wanted in cars. My father used to put me on his lap and let me steer. I sat in the front seat like other human beings. We had a station wagon, and I liked riding in “the very back,” next to the rear window. In sedans and coupes, there were “parcel shelves” against the rear windows. Flat places big enough for kids to lie down in. And we did. Sometimes we had to move the little air-freshener dogs with the bobbing heads.

There were no such things as baby seats.

When we got bicycles, we rode on the streets. There were no helmets. I knew one person who got hurt. He was a teenager who decided to ride down from the peak of Miami’s 79th Street Causeway bridge at top speed. He rode on a narrow sidewalk, and he lost control and hit a sign with his face. He ended up with dentures. A helmet wouldn’t have helped.

We didn’t wear knee or elbow pads. Sometimes we rode barefoot, which was really dumb. I tore half the nail off my big toe that way.

My elementary school was a mile from my house, and my junior high was half a mile farther away. I used to walk and ride to school. Not always, but sometimes. So did my friends. The whole time I lived in that area, I heard about one kid getting hit by a car.

It was bad. A teenaged girl with no license spread him out on the asphalt like chicken salad. There were big stains. We were told his brains were splattered. But the rest of us got by without school zones.

At phys. ed. class, we were told to climb ropes to the top, or maybe 15 feet, above hard-packed ground. I was the kid who could never figure out how to climb the rope, but others made it. At playgrounds, we had merry-go-rounds, and naturally, we got them going at top speed and jumped off. We had see-saws, and we used to do things like jumping off while the other kid was up in the air.

I was probably 10 when I got my first pocket knife, and I got my first rifle at 12. No one thought it was weird to let me have these things. My best friend was a year older, and he was shooting deer and antelope.

My parents thought it was okay to buy me slingshots. Two neighboring kids had bows.

On Halloween, we went out without adult supervision, even though our mothers worried about us and believed legends about razors and drugs in apples and candy.

We always threw the apples out anyway. It was so unfair; giving us fruit. We got really angry at people who gave us things they knew we didn’t like.

Today, it seems like very few kids participate in Halloween. It seems like it’s more of an adult holiday. Adults go to parties and get high and drunk, and as a female comedian said, the women only have one costume: “It’s a slut.”

“Sexy vampire.” “Sexy nurse.” “Sexy witch.” “Sexy Disney character.” “Sexy nun.” Plain old whore. That about covers it.

When kids go out now, they form little squads behind adults with flashlights, they go to a few houses on prearranged routes, where they only see the same parents they see all the time, and they go home. Halloween was never really dangerous, but this is where we are.

Halloween is a Satanic holiday. It’s huge with the witches. That’s the reason to stay home and dress normally. The razor blades and drugs are mythical.

If your parents let you did things leftists from up north thought were unsafe, or they slapped or spanked you, leftists could not do anything about it. There were no powerful agencies roaming around taking children away from old-fashioned parents. If your parents took you to the emergency room with bruises, the doctors never called anyone to interrogate you and have your kids carted off to scary facilities where bullying and sodomy took place.

It must be true that kids used to have more accidents. Surely modern practices have made some difference. I’m sure government intervention saves more kids from abuse than it used to. I guess kids are safer if they can’t leave their yards. But I think some of our measures are overprotective. The truth is that a healthy upbringing in which kids face some risks is valuable. Probably so valuable that it’s better to lose some kids than to turn the rest into helpless basket cases.

Some kids have no common sense. Some kids are smart but make stupid mistakes. These things will always be true. Bad things will always happen.

Here’s a problem: now that we have all these safety policies, even if they’re overreactions, if your child has a very rare accident because you didn’t adhere to modern nanny standards, you will be considered a bad parent. Your spouse may agree. Society is destroying fathers’ ability to do a very important job: toughening kids up. It’s siding with destructive female neuroses.

Disempowering fathers and enabling neurotic women are almost always disastrous.

When I think of the terrible ways in which my parents failed me, I never think about not having a bike helmet. I think about my dad choking my mother. I remember my parents making no effort to teach me good habits or help me succeed. They didn’t teach me to do homework. They didn’t make me do chores. They didn’t show me how to defend myself. They taught me nothing about investing. My mother didn’t teach me proper hygiene. I was not introduced to the Holy Spirit, who is the only source of safety and success. The guns, skateboards, knives, fireworks…not issues.

What do we do about the house? Do we sell it? Do we seal off the upstairs, hoping there won’t be a fire? Do we put cameras up there?

The yard is both good and bad. It’s a world of adventure for kids. On the other hand, the grass in this area is thin and awful, so you wouldn’t want to lie down on it or do much of anything not involving being upright. It has a fence and gate, and that’s good for safety, but getting to other kids will be impossible without vehicles.

The workshop might as well have been designed intentionally to put kids in the hospital. Table saw, band saw, tractor, lawnmower, sharp things, pointy things, hammers, chemicals, torches…send them in there when you get tired of feeding them, and you might get lucky. I guess locks can solve the problem.

What about cars? My Explorer is turning out to be a lemon by design, and it’s a horror to work on. Ford designed it so stupidly it is likely to need thousands of dollars’ worth of repairs even if I take care of it, so I’m thinking of getting a Toyota 4Runner. But the 4Runner isn’t THE safest car on the road. What if my kids get in an accident, and I didn’t buy them THE safest car?

The guns can be locked in a storage room, and of course, the key will have to be hidden, and not in a place the kids will find it, unlike most things parents hide. Every dad who ever hid a dirty magazine, and every mother who ever hid a device or outfit from a dirty boutique, should be aware that their kids found them. It happens.

What are we supposed to do about schooling? DeSantis has done a lot to help, but Florida schools are still dominated by leftist morons and affirmative action cases. They didn’t disappear when he was elected. They are burrowing and hiding, waiting for him to leave.

They will still try to groom our kids and, yes, turn them into homosexuals and phony, mutilated “transgenders.” They will still teach them that socialism is a great idea. It worked out so well in Cuba and Cambodia. They will teach them that rebellion is brilliant and that their elders, with all their wisdom, are silly imbeciles. They will still see our children–God’s children–as theirs.

Some day, this blog post may be seen as proof my children should be taken from me.

Homeschooling is a must. That or private schooling. What are the odds we’ll be able to find a good private school that acknowledges the Holy Spirit?

The kids won’t be able to walk past our private road. They won’t be able to ride bikes much of anywhere. The geography won’t permit a lot of wandering.

What do we do about phones? Thanks to Disney, Florida is a pedophile’s dream, so they flock here. You can’t turn a kid loose without some means of calling for help. But if you give them smartphones, they send each other naked pictures and videos, and they watch adult pornography. If you give them cheap phones, the other kids torment them.

We can’t protect them from society, which is now extremely filthy. They have to live on this planet. It’s not like it used to be. By the time they get to high school, they will know about sodomy, VD, pornography, and seductive causes that give them excuses to cultivate sadism, bigotry, and arrogance.

What do we do about the Internet?

It’s like we’ll be raising children in a building with walls, floors, fixtures, and furnishings smeared with excrement from diseased people, hoping they won’t get sick.

With regard to the physical dangers, we’ll have to make decisions about risk and accept the consequences. That’s all we can do. We can’t raise kids, especially effeminate boys, who can’t do anything but cry and operate phones and tablets with their stick arms and muscular thumbs.

I told my wife to expect our children to get cut, scraped, burned, and bruised. It’s not preventable. They will get sick sometimes. They will get scars. We live in a cursed world. If you don’t want your kids to suffer, have yourself sterilized. If you don’t want to risk losing children, don’t have them in the first place.

God risks it, and loses, every day. He loses most of the people he creates.

I have been concerned that I might love my children so much I smother them and stunt them. It will be hard, handing a kid a new pocket knife or even letting him ride a bicycle in public. It will be hard to let him associate with other kids without me, knowing about bullying and peer pressure, which is the voice of the antichrist. I have to remind myself that human beings like me ruined the world and made it an unsafe place, and now we have to live in it without hiding from it.

Regarding the spiritual dangers–the temptation and corruption–we will just have to stay close to God and do what we know to do. After that, we have to accept what happens. Short of joining a cult and moving to an isolated compound, I see no way to raise kids in anything resembling an acceptable environment.

This world is a rotten place, and it’s our fault. It’s disgusting and dangerous. Not really fit to live in. It’s getting worse rapidly. I wish we had somewhere else to go. But it’s either have kids here or die childless.

I hate this world. Having children will make me hate it more.

God created the world so he could reproduce, and he expects people to have children. We will play the ball as it lies, and we will rely on God, thanking him and never blaming him.

I Think I Hear Trees Crying

In an earlier post, I wrote about my victory over my stubborn Echo CS-590 60cc chainsaw. I got it in 2017, and although I made a pretty good effort to get information and find competent mechanics, I was rarely able to use it. It kept clogging up from ethanol, and I also did some stupid things like revving it with the brake on. I couldn’t find anyone around here who could fix it. It was the kind of saw you usually couldn’t start, and when you could, you were afraid to shut it down, because you knew that usually meant you were done cutting for the day. Probably for the week.

I finally got some good information. I did a half-rebuild on the carb, which is bigger than the one the saw came with. I installed two performance-enhancing parts: a flywheel key to advance the timing, and a less-restrictive exhaust deflector. I learned the right way (or at least an adequate way) to tune the carb, I found out how to make the saw start and stop (slightly different from the manual procedures), and I made the saw run.

From the factory, it was supposed to do about 12,000 RPM. With the new parts and tuning, I am now a little over 13,000, and chainsaw gurus insist it won’t hurt the saw. I think I could go higher if I twiddle with the carb a little more.

Sadly, although my saw was running like never before, I didn’t have a chance to try it on actual wood. I had a lot of stuff to do, and the few times I had time to cut wood, I dealt with things a little small for the Echo.

Today I got my chance. Last week, a crew came through and wiped out a bunch of dangerous oaks near my buildings, and they left a few things, including a big downed trunk. I could have used my cordless Makita, but I really wanted to see what the Echo would do.

It’s still starting reliably. Cold, it takes about three pulls with the choke on and one to three with it off. Takes right off. It idles nice and fast so it won’t stall, but the chain doesn’t move. Hot, it starts with one or two pulls. I’m not afraid to shut it down.

When I started cutting, I felt like I was in chainsaw heaven. The reborn saw ripped through everything. It sounded enraged. Granted, semi-rotten oak isn’t the best test, but I cut enough solid wood to know the saw was doing great. I’m pretty sure it’s better than it was new, which it should be, given that it’s a different saw.

The fork I built for the tractor is doing great, too. I picked up most of a medium-sized tree with no problem. I used the fork to hold it up so I could cut it without getting the saw bar close to the dirt, and everything went smoothly. A breeze.

I look forward to using the Echo now, which makes me wonder if I was smart to blow money on my new 24″ Husky. I was, though. Either saw could have a problem I can’t fix quickly, and repairs, even with the new shop I found, take over two weeks.

If I had known anything about saws back in ’17, and if the entire nationwide inventory of decent new and used saws had not evaporated right when I needed a saw, I could have saved a lot of money. I could have snapped up some lightly-used saws belonging to people who didn’t know how to fix them, and I could have turned them into reliable tree-eaters.

Even though I’m getting better at this, I dumped my Echo pole saw and 16″ Jonsered at the shop. They’re ready to pick up now. I feel a strong temptation to modify the muffler on the Jonsered. I’m even itching to put a new cylinder on it.

The Jonsered is the same saw as the Husky 435, which is identical to the 440, except for the cylinder. The 440 makes almost 10% more horsepower. How can I live without that 10%? It’s embarrassing.

No idea why Husqvarna would make two saws that are identical except for one part, just to squeeze $30 more out of customers for better performance. Seems like bad marketing.

Anyway, it’s great to see the Echo come back to life, improved. Maybe now that I can tune a saw, I can avoid repair shops altogether.

Well. Unless something awful happens.

Who Was That Guy I Was?

Yesterday I dug up some things I wrote about 18 years ago. At that time I thought I was a Christian, but the things I wrote were awful. Cruel and full of R-rated language and subjects. Impossible to distinguish from things an unbeliever would write. Immature.

It was a good experience, because it helped me with pride. When you’re a Christian, it’s easy to feel as though you were born holy. You can forget what you were before you surrendered. You can find yourself being too hard on people who are actually doing better at their ages than you were.

Today I got some revelation about it. I realized that if God kept improving me, in 18 years, I would look back on the person I am today and be disturbed. That’s not flattering, but the up side is that it means God can keep blessing me with improvement. Being made better is good. Obviously.

Last week, I had some dangerous trees removed from around my buildings. I thought after that happened, I would find myself outside more, cleaning up the damage and getting the pool and yard in shape. That didn’t happen.

There is less shade than there used to be, and we are in a period of really unpleasant weather. It feels like clouds have gone away for good. The second half of May was very hot. My car’s external thermometer hit 100 one day, and that was while I was driving, not while the car was sitting in the sun.

Since the tree-cutting stopped, I have been sitting in the house doing nearly nothing. The unjust and absurd Trump verdict came in on the day the tree service left, and I felt like it was strong confirmation that normal American life had ended permanently. The viciousness of Satan’s children is blossoming like never before in my life, and worse, they now have unprecedented favor from their father. And Christians are becoming like them, so our own favor has shriveled. Satan’s children are dominant, like Muslims in Hamtramck or homosexuals in San Francisco. We are the counterculture, and we are on the decline. We’re not going to rebound.

I have been discouraged by two climates: physical and supernatural. The physical climate will recover when the heat wave passes, but the supernatural weather is going to keep getting worse.

There is a real climate change, all right, but it has nothing to do with the temperature.

I have been reading the book of Enoch. It’s an interesting book. The idea is that Enoch and his great-grandson Noah had prophetic experiences and wrote them down. Jews don’t consider the book to be scripture. Some say it’s because of the clear references to Yeshua as Messiah and God. The book was written before Yeshua was born, so these references would be problematic to the post-Malachi version of Judaism that continues to the present day.

Here is some material that very clearly refers to Yeshua:

And there I saw One who had a head of days,
And His head was white like wool,
And with Him was another being whose countenance had the appearance of a man,
And his face was full of graciousness, like one of the holy angels.

And I asked the angel who went with me and showed me all the hidden things, concerning that

Son of Man, who he was, and whence he was, (and) why he went with the Head of Days? And he answered and said unto me:
This is the son of Man who hath righteousness,
With whom dwelleth righteousness,
And who revealeth all the treasures of that which is hidden,
Because the Lord of Spirits hath chosen him,
And whose lot hath the pre-eminence before the Lord of Spirits in uprightness for ever.

And this Son of Man whom thou hast seen
Shall raise up the kings and the mighty from their seats,
[And the strong from their thrones]
And shall loosen the reins of the strong,
And break the teeth of the sinners.
[And he shall put down the kings from their thrones and kingdoms]
Because they do not extol and praise Him,
Nor humbly acknowledge whence the kingdom was bestowed upon them.
And he shall put down the countenance of the strong,
And shall fill them with shame.

And darkness shall be their dwelling,
And worms shall be their bed,
And they shall have no hope of rising from their beds,
Because they do not extol the name of the Lord of Spirits.
[And raise their hands against the Most High],
And tread upon the earth and dwell upon it.
And all their deeds manifest unrighteousness,
And their power rests upon their riches,
And their faith is in the gods which they have made with their hands,
And they deny the name of the Lord of Spirits,

And they persecute the houses of His congregations,
And the faithful who hang upon the name of the Lord of Spirits.

Whether the book of Enoch is scripture is not for me to say, but Jude quoted it in the New Testament as an authoritative reference, so at least part of it is correct. There are a few other New Testament passages that some believe to be references to Enoch.

Enoch confirms some things God has been telling me: he really hates punks, and those who belong to him praise and honor him. Read it yourself and see. Enoch predicted destruction for those who didn’t praise the name of God. If you refuse to praise Yeshua, you’re refusing to praise the name of God, because Yeshua and Yahweh are one. Bowing down before Allah or Yahweh while blaspheming Yeshua is not helpful. Rabbis and Imams aren’t men of God. They make a living blaspheming God. You can’t have the father if you reject the son.

Look at this:

And the wisdom of the Lord of Spirits hath revealed him to the holy and righteous;
For he hath preserved the lot of the righteous,
Because they have hated and despised this world of unrighteousness,
And have hated all its works and ways in the name of the Lord of Spirits:
For in his name they are saved,
And according to his good pleasure hath it been in regard to their life.

That could not be more Christian, but it was written before the Christ was born. Just like Isaiah 53, Psalms 2 and 22, and Proverbs 30:4.

The above passage from Enoch is consistent with what God has been telling me and doing in me. I say we have to distance ourselves from the world. The culture of this world is sick and leads to damnation. Popular Christians, like the Hollywood stars who acknowledge Yeshua weakly while advancing a filthy system dedicated to sin, are failures. Christians who want to be everybody’s friend are barely Christians, if at all.

Enoch tells of a time when the wicked will be removed from the world and it will be turned over to God’s children. That’s consistent with the Revelation and with things Yeshua said. It’s what he was talking about when he said the meek would inherit the earth.

Enoch mentions God’s anger at the people and spirits who have prevented God’s children from succeeding and getting the blessings that were intended for them. Satan’s children are like their father: squatters, murderers, and thieves.

It is disturbing to see the things God shows me confirmed. It would be nice to think I could have a pleasant life in America, like people in the 1950’s, surrounded by people who had some understanding of kindness, decency, and humility. Instead, we are led by famous whores and pimps. Not just whores and pimps, but unusually gross and stupid whores and pimps. Public discourse is as revolting as the discourse of sailors 70 years ago. Economic opportunities are shriveling, and to get them, you have to bend the knee to the most disgusting sorts of perverts, racists, witches, and liars.

The world has always been bad, but not like this. Not in America. We literally have perversions the Sodomites were not able to come up with in their time. At least sexually, we have outdone the filthiest people in the Bible.

It’s sad that so many people claim Sodom was only destroyed for selfishness. Not true. The Bible makes it clear that sexual sin was a big factor.

Jude said:

Even as Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.

A guy who seems to be a prophet just spoke a word in which God said he was sending famine and confusion. He said they would not touch his own children. I hope the second part of the prophecy was genuine. I don’t want to find myself eating squirrels because I have to, not just because I want to. I don’t want my wife to go from African poverty to global poverty, just when she thought she had escaped.

I don’t want to be swept up in the confusion. I can tell men from women, so I think I’m okay.

Actually, I can’t always tell men from women. Sometimes it takes a little study. That’s new. But I know that a hairy, bearded fool in a dress is not a woman. Many Americans can’t say that, and the government is on the side of the fools.

This stuff is really happening. Confirmation keeps coming. The question that obsesses me is how long it will be before we can get out of here. I am ready to go today. My wife and I keep praying God will call his children soon, and that he will do whatever it takes to help the two of us make it.

Does any intelligent person want to be here after this year’s presidential election? No matter who wins, there will be pandemonium, and I choose the word deliberately, since it means, “all demons.” I think Trump will win, and if he does, the left will erupt, as it has been trained to do. If Biden wins, who knows what the right, the military, and our police will do? Trump supporters will say the election was stolen, and this time, they will indisputably be right. The unfair things that are being done to Trump and his supporters will not be forgotten.

When I think of the post-election turmoil, I can’t help thinking of it as entertaining, like a disaster movie. I think that’s because I’ve spent my life watching shows and movies made by an industry that teaches people to be jaded. I’ve seen so many people pretend to suffer and die, I have to pause and remind myself that real people really suffer.

The post-election fighting will be an engrossing spectacle. No doubt about that. But it won’t be like watching chaos on a screen. The pain, hunger, poverty, and horror will be real.

I feel as though the world were standing still while Yeshua prepares his entrance. I feel as though I could hear the trumpet at any second. I wish it would sound. I heard it in a dream, and it made me feel like weight was falling from my shoulders.

Trump Convicted of Mystery Crime by Prosecutor With no Jurisdiction

It has been said that a New York prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. Getting indictments is pretty easy. Now we have seen that ham sandwiches are also in danger of conviction. A biased New York judge, a New York prosecutor with no ethics, and a jury set on vengeance have convicted Donald Trump of crimes he did not commit, in an area where state prosecutors have no jurisdiction.

The world is populated by two groups: the children of God, and the children of Satan. If you haven’t accepted Yeshua and become Spirit-led, you are not a child of God. You are just a creation of God. The Bible calls the children of Satan “lawless” and “workers of iniquity.” Increasingly, as the tribulation approaches, we are seeing just how little the law means to Satan’s family.

My wife and I have been praying for Trump to be exonerated, which will now have to be left up to the appellate courts, the Supreme Court, or history. It didn’t happen. Why is that?

I prayed yesterday about the decision, and I felt that God told me it was nothing out of the ordinary. We live in a time of furious, escalating persecution, and anyone who seems to side with God can expect to be attacked and defeated unless he is close to God. These defeats will increase, and there will be nothing we can do about it.

Donald Trump is some sort of Christian, but we have to be honest. He is not Spirit-led. He is probably not baptized with the Holy Spirit. He has surrounded himself with destructive people like Paula White and Bill Johnson. White is a tramp who takes husbands away, and Johnson is a heretic. Trump has associated with a number of prosperity preachers, and they are lower than street whores. He has not learned much of value, and he has not been transformed.

Trump is a friend of the church, but he lies constantly. Not about important things like whether you can keep your health insurance, but about stupid, petty things. He is arrogant. He credits himself much more than God. He has a long history of the lowest kinds of fornication and adultery. He is a reviler. He has all sorts of issues he has not addressed with the Holy Spirit.

Trump is very busy. He sleeps 4 hours per night, and he is on the move all day. You can’t have a good relationship with God if you’re busy. Being overly busy, of your own free will, usually comes from pride. Donald Trump thinks he’s getting important things done, but he is not doing the most important thing: spending time with God.

You can’t expect to dwell in God’s secret place and be insulated from severe persecution if you aren’t with God for a substantial part of every day.

Trump doesn’t know how to bless and curse. He probably hasn’t experienced or assisted in demonic deliverance. He has probably never been involved in healing or prophecy, except to receive false prophecies from greasy liars who say God makes people rich for buying them jets. Trump doesn’t know the Bible. He is spiritually weak and uneducated.

I’m not saying I dislike him or that I think he shouldn’t be President. I like him as a person, and I will definitely vote for him as the lesser of two evils. But he’s not Yeshua. His faults are not hard to identify, and they open him to defeat.

It seems pretty clear that he had sex with a sleazy prostitute actress, even though he denies it. Then he tried to cover it up. While these things are legal in man’s world, they should be expected to bring a bad harvest in the supernatural, especially to a man who doesn’t admit fault or repent. If Donald Trump had behaved like most Christian men, Stormy Daniels would not be part of his life.

Once things started to go sideways, he should have admitted guilt, repented, and gotten into supernatural warfare. That’s not what happened. He hired lawyers and started blaming everyone but himself.

I’ve had sins come back to bite me, and because I am not as hard or self-confident as Donald Trump, God managed to get me to repent and handle things his way, and I have come out all right. If Trump had surrendered to God, this case probably would not have been filed. God doesn’t control our enemies. Their free will is too important. But he can see to it that they are heavily influenced to leave us alone, and he can do things to hinder them. He can even kill them.

Giuliani is another proverb in the making.

I remember Giuliani as one of the greatest prosecutors and mayors of all time. He crippled the mafia, and he cleaned up New York City. Those are astounding feats. He was admired even by Democrats.

Now we have learned that he’s pretty depraved. He had a bizarre, degrading relationship with a female employee who is now suing him. She says he ordered her to work naked. She has recordings of him saying the kinds of things you would expect Andrew Tate to say to a sex slave.

He appears to have started descending into senility maybe 15 years ago. When he represented Trump, he said things no competent attorney would say. He started spouting defamations. He opened himself up to attack, and now he has to pay a $148 million verdict. The sex lawsuit has not been resolved, so another verdict is in the works.

He has been humiliated publicly. He has declared bankruptcy, and he had to expose a lot of private information to the court. Hostile journalists have needlessly revealed that one of his Amazon purchases was a video intended to help people with pornography addiction.

Many people don’t know it, but Giuliani used to share his apartment with homosexuals. He has appeared in drag. He hasn’t led a wholesome life. He has stood up for what secular people would call decency, but he’s not a Christian, and he hasn’t stood up for God.

Now his mind is gone, he can’t pay his lawyers, and unless he moved a huge sum into trusts or gave it away, his children can’t expect to see much of the enormous fortune he amassed.

As the tribulation approaches, persecution will get worse and worse, and nominal Christians will be harmed more than anyone. Their defeats and their humiliation will expose them.

I’m not saying there are special Christians who have been so good Satan won’t be able to touch them. I’m saying people who repent and work to unify themselves with the Holy Spirit will have more protection than anyone else.

It’s hard to accept my own fate: living in a world where the worst sort of punks go after people I like and torture them into the grave.

God really, really hates punks. People need to understand that. Since about 1960, we have been building a punk culture. We have been teaching generations to be punks and to admire punks. We humiliate people we are supposed to honor. Parents. Teachers. Judges. Scholars. Employers.

We have become disrespectful brats, and because we don’t know anything about God any more, we don’t realize we have cursed ourselves. The Bible makes it clear that God loathes brats, not just their sins, and he curses them.

In the past, people of accomplishment, authority, and good character were respected, and God restrained the riff-raff that longed to destroy them. That has changed. Now the police get on their knees in front of brats with long rap sheets, apologizing for standing up for their victims. Now cities pay sexual degenerates to paint perversion symbols on our streets. We have frequent events in which young people with no brains and no fathers swarm and abuse people, including the police, and destroy property.

It wasn’t our greatness that restrained these people in the past. It was our own willingness to respect the authority of God. Take that away, and the brats grow like mildew.

God makes us go through what we make him go through.

We have tried to emasculate and humiliate God, and now the same things are happening to us.

God showed me that the mob takeovers we’ve been seeing are pictures of what is happening to America as a whole. Base, ignorant, malicious people are being built up in power.

God showed me how important praise is. You can’t expect a pleasant existence as a Christian if you don’t praise and honor God. Even saying simple things like, “I praise you,” over and over has a powerful effect. We have to honor him if we want him to look after us and defeat our enemies.

Praise is the way to stop being a punk. When you praise God and honor him, you do the opposite of what brats do, and you get blessings, not curses.

It is extremely unpleasant to be in a position of honor and receive humiliation instead. It’s intolerable. Any adult who has been abused by young people knows what I mean. We hate it, and God hates it.

Personally, I have withdrawn from every low, abusive person in my life. Going back to them would be like returning to prison. God does the same thing. He eventually retreats from people who treat him disrespectfully, and when he moves out, evil spirits move in and tear the brats to pieces.

When God raptures us and lets the tribulation begin, he will be isolating the respectful and those who should be honored (himself included) from the punks.

When punks treat God disrespectfully, it grieves the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit leaves you, along with his blessings. This is why the Holy Spirit opened the gate of the temple in Jerusalem and left before Titus sacked the city and dispersed the Jews. He shook the dust off his feet because the Jews who ran the temple refused to accept his shalom. His peace and wellbeing. These things are for people who honor Yeshua, not just Yahweh. To contemn Yeshua is to contemn Yahweh.

I’m fighting my own punk inclinations, which I built up in stupidity. I don’t want to be left behind because I belong here.

When I was younger and looking for instruction, no one told me these things. They were too busy promoting weird dead-church rules or trying to get my money. They were ignorant, so when I listened to them, I was ignorant. We have become like the Jews of the time of Yeshua, who said, “Let them alone: they be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.”

Ignorance is lack of knowledge, and the word says God’s people are destroyed for lack of knowledge:

My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children.

The lowest, most disgusting segments of society are rising up against people who used to be honored and even feared, and it’s because we did the same thing to God.

The Vatican just sponsored a male pervert who dances in women’s clothing. They used to put people like that on trial. Such people feared exposure. Now we run from them.

I think Donald Trump will win the election, and I think some of his ridiculous court losses will be reversed, but America will be destroyed anyway, because we continue to sow the seeds of our destruction. I don’t know how to cope with having to watch it happen, even though my wife and I are safe.

I felt very tired last night. I think it was the fatigue of the Holy Spirit.

If you lose when you think you should win, you should examine yourself. Things that don’t make sense have supernatural explanations. A lot of prominent conservatives are going to lose because they will look in the wrong places for help.

Goodbye, Shade

When I moved here, one of the things I liked best was the woodsy location. The area of the property where the house is located had a lot of big oaks close to both buildings.

Since then, I have reconsidered.

The oaks drop leaves that are like little pieces of leather. They drop tons of them, literally, on the lawn. They kill the grass, but they seem to let weeds through just fine.

The trees rot. Here, whenever you cut an oak more than 10″ thick, you can expect to find a big brown spot in the center of the trunk, if not a hollow area full of giant cockroaches. The trees rot from the inside out, and they die from the tops down. Eventually, big rotten logs start to fall straight down. When a tree gets sufficiently rotten, it snaps and falls over.

The roots of these oaks are amazing, because they don’t hold the trees in place very well, but they are nearly impossible to dislodge after the trees are gone. The trees rot fast when standing, but the stumps seem to last for eternity.

Because the roots aren’t great, you never know when a strong wind will push a tree over.

The people who built this house thought the trees were cute, and they were, but a house with a tree on the roof is less cute, so today a bunch of guys who looked sort of like Vikings came and murdered most of the trees that menaced my house. The rest have a date with the saw tomorrow.

Where I used to live, arborists climbed trees. I used to work for an arborist from time to time, and he would put spikes on his feet and go right up an 80-foot Australian pine and start cutting. It was terrifying to watch. When you’re way up on a tree, and a piece of the trunk weighing 500 pounds falls off, the tree swings back and forth like a spring, and there you are with the trunk a foot from your face.

Also, when the tree snaps as you cut it, you have to be sure you did it right, because when you’re right next to a tree in the process of snapping, lots of bad things can happen. This is especially true if you’re tied to the tree.

Here, I have not seen anyone in a tree. They go up on lifts.

I think it may be because the trees are so treacherous here. The tops are full of rotten wood. If you were to climb one, the motion of your body could make the top snap off and hit you on the way to the ground. You might also anchor yourself to something rotten without knowing it.

The tree guys surprised me. I didn’t see ear protection on any of them, and they were running very big Stihls. None of them wore chainsaw chaps. The only guy who had a helmet was up on the crane, and he was the one dropping logs, not one of the ones dodging them.

I don’t know how they can hear anything after running saws every day for years.

I now have two really large piles of dead oak to burn. They’re not far from the house. I would ordinarily have the wood put in the pasture, but because the machine that moves wood is slow, it would have slowed down the work and cost me money. I’m going to go out and see if I can move one of the piles myself tonight.

The yard looks like someone fought a war in it. The grass here is feeble. If you walk across it three times, it starts to look bad. If there is no rain for 5 days, it turns brown. We have had several dry days. The grass was not ready for a crane, a grapple, and a lift.

I’m going to miss the shade, but it was an unaffordable luxury. We have an insurance crisis here, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to get a policy next year. I am not going to sit through hurricane season wondering if I’m going to have to build a new house at my own expense.

From now on, I’ll have fewer leaves, the grass will look better, and my house will be in no danger whatsoever from hurricanes. Well worth losing some shade.

The people who built the house should have removed the trash oaks and planted better stuff that would stand up to wind. Now I have to plant that stuff, and I will be dead before it looks good.

I’ll have to poison my new stumps, and later I’ll think about ways to remove them. A rented track loader with a stump bucket sounds good. Or an excavator.

If you build or buy a house, don’t be stupid. Don’t doom it with inappropriate vegetation. It will rob you of peace, and it could squoosh your investment.

Fox’s site says Trump has been found guilty in Alvin Bragg’s kangaroo court. Another big oak nibbled by bugs.