“I’m Sorry, Dave. I Can’t Let You Get Groceries”

A reader left a comment that got me thinking. Are cars today better or worse than they were in the 1970’s?

Cars are safer now. Can’t argue about that. The also have more gadgets, like USB ports for music, DVD players, devices to heat and cool seats, recordable seat positions, and so on.

Cars are also faster now. Teslas are not even worth discussing in terms of comparison, because they’re faster than many professional drag cars. They also have high top speeds. You can buy a gas SUV that will take you to 185 mph now, just like Joe Walsh’s Maserati.

Cars go around corners better now. No doubt about it. My run-of-the-mill SUV, which appeared on the market about 13 years ago, corners far better than the Z28 I drove in high school, or that year’s Corvette.

Many parts in modern cars last a lot longer than the corresponding parts in old cars. Some things are much easier to maintain.

Now for the bad things.

The paint on modern cars is eco-garbage. It WILL peel off after about 7 years in the Florida sun, even if you wax it, wash it, treat it with every conceivable maintenance chemical, and cover it with kisses every night. It can’t be repaired. You can either paint your car, at enormous expense, or live with it. At the very least, you have to paint a panel, and the painter will not match the paint correctly.

Paint used to be permanent. Now it’s a consumable, like a spark plug or tire. If your car gets a lot of sun, you can expect to spend thousands of dollars before you’re ready to sell the car. The cost is about like replacing an engine.

The paint on old cars had no clear coat, so it could not separate into two layers. It lasted as long as the cars. If it got damaged, you could repair the area of the damage. If it got dull, you could buff it back up to a high polish. It’s cheaper and much less dangerous to apply. The new stuff causes life-threatening chronic asthma that never goes away.

New cars are impossible for owners to repair, apart from the basics, and many mechanics lack the mental horsepower to get up to speed on them. When they are able to figure them out, the repairs can be incredibly expensive because of the complexity and the way cars are jammed full of parts intended solely to improve mileage and emissions. A repair that might require an hour in a ’67 Impala might require pulling the engine in a 2023 car.

Modern cars are cramped inside. People love to say modern cars are actually roomier, but it’s not true. You can literally jump into the backseat of a 1970 sedan. Try that in my Ford Explorer, and you’ll end up in the emergency room. People used to have sex in their cars. Not possible now. When I was a kid, I used to lie across the rear windows of my parents’ cars, in what was called the parcel shelf. That shelf doesn’t exist now.

Modern cars ride very badly. Young people have been convinced that European cars were always better, which is not true, and that one thing that made them better was their superior handling. Now we make cars that handle better than they need to, and the price is a harsh ride with lots and lots of noise.

We stick low-profile rapper tires on cars moms use to take their kids to school. Those tires can’t absorb bumps, and when they hit large bumps, they can fail to protect the rims, which can be permanently destroyed.

Do you need a car with fantastic handling? No, you really don’t. Not unless you want a sports car. A 1970 Sedan Deville will go right around any curve in America if you’re anywhere close to the speed limit. Isn’t that how you drive 98% of the time? When you’re going to get groceries on a curvy road with a speed limit of 45, you’re not going to try to fly around curves at 65.

I owned a sports car, and I can tell you this: the time I spent putting it to the test amounted to less than 1% of the time I was in it, but the time I spent dealing with the ride and noise amounted to 100%.

A good ride and low noise are much more valuable for most people than European-inspired handling.

We forget that Europeans built cars and roads the way they did because they were unsuccessful, not because they were smart. They built narrow, winding roads, and their cars were light because they could not afford a lot of steel or gas. If they could have built Cadillacs and nice, wide roads, they would have.

America used to have extreme economic superiority, back before we started losing God’s favor by promoting sexual sin and every other type of evil. Now rich Asians buy our farmland because we can’t match their bids.

Here’s an interesting question: do modern cars get better mileage? The answer is: sometimes.

You can get a subsidized Prius and barely ever visit a gas station. On the other hand, my normal family car probably gets 15 mpg. I haven’t checked, because I have no incentive. I have to buy gas, and I have to drive, so there is no point in measuring my mileage. It would be like measuring the price of water.

I accelerate normally, which means not like an old lady, which is what you have to do in order to get the published figure of 20 mpg combined. No one gets car company’s published figures. They’re a joke.

My gorgeous 1970 Buick Electra 225 convertible had a 455 in it. That’s 7.46 liters, or more than twice the volume of my present engine. It was rated at 370 horsepower and 510 foot-pounds of torque. You can have a somewhat slow car with 370 horses, but if the torque figure is 510, it’s another story.

That car got 17.5 miles per highway gallon, at 70 mph. I checked it.

My boring Ford has about a thousand economy-related advancements in it, but it’s still pretty close to a 1970 455 in a glorious barge that made women swoon.

In terms of pleasure, the Buick and the Ford are in different universes. I felt like a celebrity every time I drove the Buick. I loved driving with the top down, especially on clear nights. Every time I approached it as I walked back to it in a parking lot, my spirit lit up.

When I approach the Ford, I think, “There’s a nice practical car. Thank God I don’t have more problems with it.”

I miss that Buick every single day of my life. It still hurts me that I lost it.

If somebody out there made a car like a Sedan Deville today, with the same nice ride, the comfort, and the giant trunk, combined with air bags, crumple zones, and ABS, I would be sorely tempted to get one. I think there would be waiting lists to the moon and back.

I’m thinking I may get rid of the Explorer and get a Toyota 4runner. This is a truck-based SUV, whereas the Explorer is half car and half truck. A real truck has body-on-frame construction, which is superior. You can work on a 4runner, because there is room around the engine.

The 4runner is more like an old car because it is an old car. It debuted in 1984. Through its generations, Toyota has been extremely slow to make changes. As a result, it is one of the most trouble-free cars in existence. Nearly everything that could have gone bad went bad years ago, and Toyota fixed it. Toyota has an obsessive model-improvement program even Honda can’t match. It approaches mental illness.

People put the 4runner down, saying it’s like driving a truck. I have a truck, and I love driving it, except for parking. The 4runner has high-profile tires, so surely it can’t have that driving-on-the-rims feeling nearly all ordinary cars have. It’s about the same size as an Explorer, so parking would not be harder. The Explorer is wider than other cars, and width is the main thing that makes parking difficult. The 4runner is 2″ narrower.

The Explorer is 191″ long, and a 4runner is 198″ long. My old Camaro, a small car for the time, was 198″ long.

People say the 4runner has a truck-like interior. “Bonus,” I say. I don’t know why that would be a disadvantage. Maybe it bothers men who wear women’s underwear and have a hard time opening jars. My truck has a truck-like interior, and it’s great. More comfortable than the Ford.

To get back to my theme, cars all look like suppositories now. They look like mints that have been sucked on for a while. Parallel evolution dictated by socialist nuts has made them all look alike.

Modern cars spy on you. Not all, but some. And they are starting to incorporate gadgetry that allows them to be shut down by other people, remotely. Cars record private data about their owners, and manufacturers sell it without permission. In the near future, if the left gets its way, the government and the manufacturers (and random criminals, possibly including rapists and wife-beaters) will be able to shut your car’s engine off from a distance.

Old cars don’t have that problem. We’re talking about a fundamental threat to liberty. If there is a schism between the states, who will the carmakers side with? Not conservatives. Not Christians. People in red areas will have to pay hackers to hack-proof the vehicles they paid for.

I would say cars are fundamentally worse now, but the safety upgrades are huge blessings. There is no reason those upgrades could not be incorporated in a car that’s actually a pleasure to drive and work on.

Questionable car expert James May says he doesn’t like old cars. He loves to rattle on about all the ways in which modern cars are better. Thing is, he’s rich, and most of the cars he has driven were handed to him, in perfect condition, by manufacturers who worked on them beforehand to make sure they were as good as they could be. He got to abandon nearly all of them before anything bad could happen.

It’s very different when you have to drive a car for 10 years, you have to pay for every repair, and the manufacturer sees you as an orange to be run through the juicing machine and discarded.

If James May had to pay $4000 for a water pump or $12,000 for new paint, he wouldn’t care. That’s like you buying a new shoelace. If one of his cars has a problem, he makes a call, someone comes around to get the car, someone brings it back fixed, and an inconsequential charge appears on his American Express Plutonium Card. He never has to touch a wrench or his savings. And what are the odds any of his cars have expired warranties?

Also, he drives on horrible, shoulderless British roads originally designed by the Romans for carts pulled by pigs. A real American car would occupy two lanes.

May is a leftist, so he can’t possibly fear having his car controlled by the establishment. He is the establishment. He doesn’t realize he’s a fascist. If our government starts bricking the cars of people who don’t believe in global warming or reject bizarre “pronouns,” he’ll probably be thrilled. I’ll bet he would have supported bricking for people who didn’t wear face diapers.

Many young people have no idea what riding in a real luxury car is like. They will never know what they missed. My dad had a 1985 Town Car, which was one of the last true luxury cars made. It was like riding around in an expensive hotel room. I loved it. No kid raised on Accords and Camrys will ever know that feeling. They’ll never know how it feels to be riding in the backseat of a car and turn around to face the person beside them. Do that in an Explorer, and you’ll tear an ACL. Your head will face one way, and your feet another.

I admit, the smaller cars of the past were worse than today’s small cars. They were just as cramped, and they had none of the advantages of modern cars. I would rather have my Explorer than a like-new 1970 Camaro or Cutlass. Economy cars like Mavericks and Vegas were actually insulting to buyers. Economy cars were almost always ugly.

I think the carmakers made them repulsive to shame buyers into buying more-expensive vehicles. I doubt anyone ever drove home from a showroom in a Vega, full of a sensation of triumph.

Maybe immigrants from poor countries.

The pleasure of driving a nice, big, powerful American car with high sidewalls and no emissions control. One more thing I got to experience that today’s kids can only dream about.

You are Smarter Than all of Ford’s Engineers

All sorts of nagging problems seem to be getting solved here. God’s grace in action.

My car has been annoying me. It’s a Ford Explorer. These cars have some really stupid–I mean seriously stupid–engineering.

1. They put a foam rubber cover on the engine. It has a very high R-value, so it’s like putting several inches of attic insulation on the motor. The general rule throughout the automobile age has been that you want your car to run hot enough to do its thing well, but no hotter. You don’t want to roast everything under your hood, like your expensive battery and all the weak modern plastic parts that eventually crumble after a lot of heat cycles. You don’t want to have to strain your cooling system to get rid of heat that would happily leave on its own if permitted. My car was designed so a rubber blanket would keep it hot while a complicated cooling system tried to get rid of the same heat. I have placed the engine cover where it can keep the garage floor warm.

2. They put the water pump–a cheap part that fails often because Ford makes junk on purpose–inside the engine. That sounds like something out of Dilbert, but it’s completely true. In about 1985, the water pump on my gorgeous 1970 Buick deuce-and-a-quarter convertible died, and with almost no mechanical skills, I replaced it by myself in an afternoon. The cost was probably around $30. The cost of replacing a Ford Explorer water pump can be as high as $4500 if you’re stupid enough to go to a dealer, and even private mechanics sometimes charge half that much.

Explorer engine pumps fail very, very often. So do their gaskets. The design is amazing. There are two gaskets, one inside the other. When your inner gasket fails, coolant goes out of the car through a hole between the gaskets. You’re supposed to see this even though it happens under the car. When the outer gasket fails, coolant goes into your oil pan.

Hey, I’m no engineer, but let me spitball here a minute. My car has about 8,000,000 sensors, most of which were a bad idea to install. Why not have a coolant level sensor instead of using ME as a sensor?

Why not use three gaskets? Why not 4? If you’re determined to go stupid, go big. Maybe a lot of Explorer engines with three bad gaskets and one good one would still be running.

You read the stuff about the oil pan right. Ford designed its water pumps to shoot coolant into the oil pans of running engines. Guess what you have to buy when that happens? Starts with an “E.” For “Edsel.”

My car is probably worth $18000. Cost of a new “E”? Call it $8000 if you’re really lucky. Then you have the same kind of engine that committed suicide once already.

3. The car has shutters on the radiator. What can you say about a feature that dumb? At highway speeds, they close. That means you also paid for a shutter motor and a bunch of electronics and programming. When they close, the drag coefficient of the car drops by about 0.01%, and you gain half a mile per gallon. Look it up. I’m not lying. This is Ford’s way of trying to cope with ridiculous mileage mandates which, ultimately, come from allowing women to vote. Don’t get me started. Although I already am.

What happens if the shutters close at the wrong time, which they obviously will, because there are trillions of Explorers, and that’s how probability works? The radiator won’t get air. Personally, I would rather lose the half-mile per gallon, since this car gets bad mileage anyway, and not bake everything in my engine compartment.

My car has been sending me false overheating signals. This is disturbing, because when it happens, all you can think is, “IF I DON’T PULL OVER IN THE NEXT MINUTE, IT WILL COST ME TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS.”

Lots of bad things can happen when a car overheats. You can lose an engine. You can get hidden damage that causes you to lose the engine later, long after you congratulated yourself on dodging a bullet.

The car started beeping on a very hot day while I was in a Burger King drive-through. I went in and ate, and when I came out maybe 15 minutes later, the car was miraculously cool. That’s not long enough for a car to cool down.

I started out of the parking lot, and the temperature gauge shot up. Too fast to make sense. I got out of the lot, and it dropped within maybe 15 seconds.

I checked the coolant level, it was low. I topped it off. The car behaved for a while. Then it beeped again while the wife and I were running errands.

I started Googling. I interrogated people on a forum. I thought I might be looking at a second thermostat replacement, and I considered using a cooler thermostat than the super-hot job Ford installed.

The coolant level dropped again, after one day, so I bought some fluorescent dye and a UV flashlight. If there was a leak, I would be able to find it under the hood.

I added dye. I drove around. I saw a lot of coolant spillage lighting up under the hood. It occurred to me that I might have spilled dye myself, so I hosed everything off, topped off the coolant, and ran errands on a blistering-hot day.

Nothing happened. The coolant level stayed high. I saw no leaks.

I can’t figure it out, but it looks like I don’t have a problem after all. Maybe the people who replaced the first thermostat left the coolant low, and over time, it got so low it messed with the temperature sensor. Maybe the coolant level dropped after I added the first dose because it was being sucked into the system.

I don’t know. I do know I was planning to take the car to a shop tomorrow, and now that’s off. I bought a third thermostat and some coolant and distilled water, so I plan to flush the system. I’m hoping the car doesn’t really have a problem.

I was actually starting to look at Toyota Highlanders on the web. The Highlander is supposed to be a better car. Every car has weak points, and the Highlander is no exception, but not every car has a water pump inside the engine. A water pump which is known to go bad frequently. Along with a timing chain which has a predicted service life of 100,000 miles.

A modern car should go 300,000 miles without major problems if maintained well, so what kind of fool makes a car with a 100,000-mile timing chain that costs thousands to replace?

A Highlander timing chain is very expensive to replace, but on the other hand, Toyota says there is no recommended interval, so that means they don’t expect it to fail at 100,000 miles. I don’t know what Ford says. I don’t feel like checking. I do know that people all over the web say it’s a maintenance part, like a spark plug or air filter, as contrasted with a lifetime part, like a rear differential.

A maintenance part. Deep inside your engine. It’s like doing a tonsillectomy through your butt.

I think I got my Makita cordless chainsaw fixed.

The saw was running dry. It has an oil tank like a gas saw, and it has the same sort of pump, sending oil to the bar and chain through a hole in the saw body.

I was afraid the $22 oil pump had failed.I took the bar off and cleaned a lot of crud out, hoping crud was blocking the oil. Better than waiting for a pump.

I ran the saw with the bar off to see if the pump worked, and oil dripped out of the saw body, as expected. It seemed like less oil than a gas saw would drip, but that is supposedly normal. I closed the saw up and used it to move an oak I felled by the driveway.

Today I looked at the saw and noticed that the bar was blue around the edges, which some people say is a sign the saw ran hot and toasted the steel. Others say bars are blue from the factory because they harden the edges where the chains run. I don’t know what the truth is.

I opened the saw up again and saw something amazing.

When cleaning saw oil passages up in the past, I have thought mainly about the saw bodies. Wood dust jams into the little slots the oil comes out of, so you knock it out with something and go on. Exactly what I did the first time I checked the Makita.

What I did not know was that fine dust and bar oil could harden and turn into something like wood filler or just plain concrete.

On the bar itself, I found little accumulations of hardened dust shaped just like the oil slot. When the saw was closed up, these accumulations pressed into the slot and sealed it up like a gasket.

I had to scrape the bar itself. It took a while. That stuff was hard.

I learned something. When you run a saw, before you do anything, floor it with the bar pointed at something. If oil doesn’t spray onto whatever you’re aiming at, fix the saw, because the chain is dry. You can have oil dripping from the bottom of a saw without getting any on the chain.

I have 5 saws on the premises right now. I have had so many saw problems, my former biggest saw has an old bar that has been run so little, it’s practically new. Another saw is actually new. The rest needed to be sharpened. I knocked that off.

I generally use files, but I decided to try Pferd sharpeners because they file not just the teeth, but the depth gauges, which are the pointy things between teeth. Gauges tell your teeth how deep to cut, and if you keep filing the teeth and not the gauges, you end up cutting with the gauges alone, and that’s not very fast.

Pferd sharpeners are almost exactly the same as Stihl sharpeners, but when I got mine, they cost way less.

Sharpening your saw is very important. A dull chain can make a 70-cc saw cut like a 30-cc saw, and if you don’t know it’s dull, you may think a bigger saw is the answer. You may spend money needlessly. Also, a dull saw can make a saw overheat, destroying the piston, cylinder, and maybe some other stuff. A small saw with a sharp chain is better than a big saw with the kind of chain most people use.

Speaking of things that are better than a big saw, I have a phenomenal tip for you, born of experience. Buy a cordless pole saw, not a chainsaw. You probably don’t even need a chainsaw. They’re only appropriate for firewood and thick trees. No one says this, but it’s 100% true, and it should be considered canon by now.

With a 10″ pole saw, you can cut trees 12″ thick. Not gracefully, but safely and effectively. You don’t need a 16″ chainsaw, the homeowner’s preferred size, unless you’re cutting bigger stuff.

With a chainsaw, you have to stand right next to what you’re cutting, and believe me, you will make mistakes when you try to guess which way things will go when you cut them. The farther away you are, the safer you are. With a pole saw, you can be 6 feet or more away from your stupid mistakes.

Most chainsaw tree-whacking injuries occur within a couple of steps of the cut, and if you have a pole saw, you’re already two steps away when you need to run. This is a very, very big deal no one talks about.

If you have a pole saw, you can cut things higher than your shoulders. “I’m already doing that.” Yes, I know. You’re an idiot. You never raise a chainsaw above your shoulders. What do chainsaws do when operators have problems? They fall. They don’t levitate and fly away. The lower a saw is when you use it, the better off you are, because less of you is where it may fall.

When you cut your leg off with a chainsaw, why does it happen? It happens because the saw was higher than your leg when you had your problem, and because a chainsaw is so short, you were able to keep your finger on the trigger while the bar was cutting you.

If you drop a pole saw, it’s pretty unlikely the bar will come near you on the way down. Cutting your leg with a pole saw is virtually impossible.

You’re supposed to wear safety chaps when you use a chainsaw. They really work, and no one uses them. They’re hot, and they look kind of gay. If you’re using a tool that can’t cut your leg, the fact that you refuse to wear chaps won’t be a problem.

Even safety experts have no issues with operating pole saws overhead. It’s what they’re for. You can even use one from a ladder. You never, ever use a chainsaw from a ladder.

A pole saw will always turn off when you let go of the handle, and you have to let go of the handle in order to get near the bar. It’s brilliant.

You also get less sawdust on you when you use a pole saw because it’s not ejecting things directly at you from one foot away.

If you go cordless, you will never need ear protection. That’s a huge bonus. Earmuffs cause painful headaches, they’re hot, they may eventually smell, and they’re disgusting because they’re filthy. And they don’t really protect your hearing well. With a big saw, you also need plugs.

Unless you’re cutting things over 12″ thick regularly, or you’re cutting firewood, you don’t need a chainsaw, even though they’re cool and you want one. You should get a 10″ Kobalt battery pole saw from Lowe’s for less than the price of a homeowner-grade Husky 16″ gas saw that plugs up with ethanol gas at least once a year. Get an extra battery. Do it, and you will almost never need to reach for a chainsaw.

It’s so much safer, it’s in a different safety universe. It’s cheaper. It works better. It’s easier on your back. It can do lots of things a chainsaw can’t do. It can do nearly anything a chainsaw can do.

You won’t even have to adjust the chain. The saw does it for you.

You want it.

I have a tree crew coming this week to do major cutting and moving so I will never need hurricane insurance again. They need places to dump wood for burning, and they need to be able to get to the back of my shop, where some of the worst trees are.

I had two big piles of trash wood waiting to be burned, so yesterday, I called for a permit. They told me I could not have one. They said dispersion was too low. What?

I found out this meant there was not enough wind to disperse the smoke, and they were worried that soy people might get a widdle cough.

They said I could take a $50 course and become a second-level burn pile guru, and then they would give me permits when other people could not get them. I checked online. No courses were available. NICE.

Help me understand why being a burning expert should entitle you to burn more wood than other people. It produces the same amount of smoke. It must be a gimmick to direct money to the government or some contractors who bought the government some escorts.

Look how smart old people are. A young person would still be wondering.

Being old means you know how the world really works. This is one of the best parts of being old. And one of the worst.

I called today before 7 a.m., thinking they were more likely to be nice to me if I showed I was serious. They told me it was too early, so I called again at 7. I got a different person. Not the masculine-sounding lady who had been so terse and authoritative in the past and probably wears plaid shirts. Yes, I’m insinuating something. Just a guess.

The lady I got could not have been nicer. Same weather, but I got my burn permit anyway.

Now I have two smoldering circles of ash, and I won’t have to sacrifice pasture needlessly for extra piles.

I took the tractor out and moved all sorts of junk from behind the shop. My bush hog. Two rolls of fence wire. A bunch of treated lumber. A hay bale spike. A subsoiler. My debris fork. My tractor bucket. A harrow. Now there’s lots of acreage back there so they can get their machines in.

I was afraid I would need my truck because of the car’s problems, and it has refused to turn over. I finally decided to address it. I am charging the batteries up, and I checked the wiring. Yes, the horrible squirrels have nibbled a bit, but not enough to prevent the truck from running.

I think I have a ground issue, so I’m going to clean and grease every ground that looks relevant, and I’m hoping to get the truck going by Wednesday.

I also decided to check out a problem I had been dreading dealing with. My truck’s 4WD shift has been swinging freely as though it were not connected to anything. I got under the truck, and guess what? It’s not connected to anything.

Remember what I said about stupid engineering? Dodge makes these trucks so the transfer linkages fall out with no warning. A linkage is a funny-looking rod, and it has two weak bushings at the ends. The bushings WILL fail even if you don’t use the transfer case, and when they do, the linkage goes away without telling you, perhaps hitting the car behind you as it tinkles and bounces down the interstate.

I have parts ordered. I’m thinking of finding a way to make sure the linkage can’t fall out again. Dodge’s engineers couldn’t do it, but I can, because IT’S REALLY SIMPLE.

Dodge wants something like $60 for the parts, but the Chinese sell basically the same thing for $15. They’re all over Amazon because THEY FALL OUT ALL THE TIME AND DODGE CAN’T FIGURE OUT HOW TO STOP IT.

I looked up my Harley’s value, and I plan to put it on Craigslist so I can get the truck indoors away from squirrels. The title is around here somewhere, and as soon as I find it, goodbye, Softail.

I also found myself and my wife better car insurance. By going from GEICO to State Farm, we can cut over 50% from our bill and get nearly the same coverage. Insurance rates are insane. One company wants x. Another company wants 0.5x. Another company wants 3x. A 4th company will not insure anyone in Florida, for no clear reason. Rates bear no relationship to reality that I can perceive. I guess we’ll switch tomorrow.

Things are coming together. With God’s help, the car won’t blow up, the tree job will go smoothly, the truck will roar again, and my chainsaws will again be useful as well as ornamental.

You Can’t Stand Bad Company Forever

When I pray these days, I often complain to God about having to live in this world. I don’t blame him for anything. I just want someone to vent to. I keep telling him, “I hate this place.” I keep telling him he has been right about everything. The state of the world proves it over and over.

My life is excellent. I have health, prosperity, a wonderful wife, and a home pretty far from most of the vicious, demonized, leftist and Muslim nuts who are sincerely looking forward to a chance to kill every person like my wife and me. I enjoy life a great deal. I’m extremely grateful, because I know my blessings are extreme. But I will never feel at home here while demons rule the world. I always say it’s like I went to a Mexican resort for a luxury vacation and was not allowed to go home.

The Bible says Lot was in a similar situation. It says:

[B]ut he rescued Lot, a righteous man who was distressed by the debauchery of those unprincipled people; for the wicked deeds which that righteous man saw and heard, as he lived among them, tormented his righteous heart day after day.

I am not calling myself righteous, but I have some awareness of right and wrong. Enough to make the spectacle of the modern West revolting to me, every day. Enough to make me understand how much worse it will get.

Living on this earth is like living on a somewhat clean platform in the middle of a tank full of feces, urine, pus, menstrual fluid, dead bodies, rotten fish, and every kind of filth imaginable. The platform may be a big blessing, but you’re still in a bad place.

The other day I realized I should not say that I hate this place. The place is not the problem. A place can’t be good or bad. It’s the people.

I hated Miami because the people were rude and trashy. I could not wait to get out. What if the people were nice?

Miami has a magnificent bay and barrier islands. It has quick access to Gulf Stream fish. In a couple of hours, you can take a boat to the Bahamas. There is never any snow or ice. It’s sunny, and the sun improves people’s moods. It’s easy to grow fruit and ormamental plants there. Put the right people there, and it would be very nice.

What if you took all the Swiss and put them in Dade County, Florida, and you moved everyone in Dade to Switzerland?

Miami would be wonderful. People would get along. The economy would be fantastic. Crime would be almost nonexistent. The educational system would be tops. Switzerland, on the other hand, would be mostly ghetto, and everyone there would hate each other, because they hated each other where they came from. Crime would explode. The murder rate would skyrocket. Tourism would plummet.

God showed me this: I should not complain about a place. I should complain about the power and presence of the wicked. Where the wicked are few and weak, things are good. Where they are many and dominant, you end up with something like Somalia or San Francisco. Places where decent people are unhappy and persecuted, and the filthy are rewarded and promoted.

We hear a lot about genocide these days. From liars. Liars keep making the insane claim that Israel’s actions of self-defense are genocide.

Unlike Gazans, Israel and the Jews are truly threatened with genocide, and genocide is the openly-stated aim of their Muslim enemies. It’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s clearly true. The interesting thing is that genocide really is in the works from our side, but it will come from God, not his children or the Jews. God himself is going to clear the majority of those who hate Yeshua off the planet. He won’t send us out with ridiculous AR-15’s with skulls engraved on the magazine wells. He’ll do it personally, with the help of angels. He’ll also let the wicked kill each other off. He’ll even let animals kill them. That’s in the Revelation.

Eventually, God is going to decide he and his children have had enough of the presence and power of the wicked, and he will get rid of them and put the cleansed world back in our hands.

Genocide against the wicked is inevitable, because the mere presence of evil people and spirits is unsustainable for everyone else. It can’t be tolerated forever. Similarly, those who are against us are not looking for coexistence. They want us gone. Dead. Not just dead, but erased from history. Many religious Jews pronounce this curse on Yeshua: “May his name and memory be blotted out forever.” That came from Satan. Satan wants it for Yeshua and all those who are important to him. This is why Holocaust-deniers, and those who claim ancient Israel was not Jewish, exist.

It’s the people and the spirits. They ruin the world. When they’re gone, the world will be like a big petting zoo. Even animals will get along. Finally, the dream of leftists will be actualized: a vegetarian world. But they will be elsewhere.

I know what it is to have unbearable people removed from my life. My sister is the biggest example. It’s not enough to have peace with her. Having to interact with her is intolerable. The constant flow of lies, slanders, and emasculation can’t be tolerated. I can’t coexist with someone who pits everyone against me and tells lies to people who like me. She can’t be permitted to have a conversation with my wife. It would be like putting my wife on the phone with Hannibal Lecter.

My sister can’t be near me. I can’t have dealings with her. I’ve had enough. Having her in another state and not communicating with her are enormous blessings. She will probably die before I do, and I will not go to her funeral. She makes every interaction a source of persecution to me.

The children of Satan, on a large scale, are the same way. The worse and more numerous they get, the more they need to be gotten rid of. I understand why hell was created. There is no other solution.

Hell is full of beings who are against God, and even there, seeing where being hateful put them, they are still vile and sadistic. They could be trying to unite and make the best of it, but the fallen spirits torture dead human beings around the clock, for no constructive purpose. They literally make hell worse.

If there is a nice thing about hell, it’s this: there is no way for the dead to get here from there. The people who are there now will never, ever bother any of us again.

I keep praying for God to set his children aside in places where they are concentrated and dominant. I ask him to drive out the wicked and give their land and wealth to his children in these places. I ask him to keep the plagues of this time off these places. I say that if curses have to come, they should fall on places where he has been rejected openly, like New York City and Japan.

I want us to have some peace and comfort in places where we are improved and blessed while waiting to be extracted. Let the children of Satan torment each other, far away, if they have to be hateful. They can’t be saved, but maybe they can be kept away from us.

Has Anyone Seen my 56 Million?

The other day, I was confused about some things somewhat-conservative actor Tom Selleck said, and I wrote about it. He lives on a 63-acre avocado farm in California, and at the age of 79, after a very successful acting career (for a conservative), he says he may have to sell his farm in order to finance a pleasant old age.

Thomas Magnum, the eighties pinup man, is 79. About as old as Biden. Can you believe it? He’s not in the same boat, though. Biden looks like his father or even grandfather. I wonder how old Higgins is. I’ll check. The actor who played him would be 91 today. Zeus and Apollo have been dead since no later than 1995.

I looked up his taxes, and I found out he pays about a thousand dollars per acre per year, which is bad, but not shocking. My dad’s home near Miami had a tax bill not far from half that high one year, and it’s a merely somewhat above average home on half an acre. Thank God that place is gone. What a horrible area. Living in that miserable place is bad enough, but then they force you to pay an amount equal to a living wage in exchange for the privilege of suffering. I can’t understand the people who bought that house.

I wondered how Selleck could be worried about his finances given the money he has made, the value of his property (about $12 million), and the fact that he will almost certainly die within 15 years. His kids are grown. Even a reverse mortgage should keep him up in fine style, and surely he has assets other than his home.

Well, someone in Hollywood got mad at Selleck and criticized him for complaining. This person says he was paid $56 million over the last 14 years for his work on a CBS series. Maybe I’m easily impressed, but that seems like a lot of money to me.

Unless he has a drug addiction or a gambling problem, he should have been able to pocket over $20 million, even in California, even after paying his agent. That’s just the last 14 years. Doesn’t include Magnum, P.I., his movies, or his ad work.

I don’t know, man. I’m starting to wonder about this guy.

Maybe he doesn’t realize he will be dead by 2040. He has already exceeded the average American life expectancy, and he is about 7″ above average height. Tall people don’t live as long as short people. If he can support himself for 15 years, he’s okay.

I remember telling my dad he needed to get professional help with his weight, and he would always say his grandfather lived to be 100. That was true, but his grandfather didn’t drink and weighed about 140 pounds. My dad started to lose it noticeably at about 82, and he died in assisted living when he was not far into his 88th year, at the age of 87. His older sister had the same grandfather, and she died at 84. She was huge.

My mother’s father didn’t think realistically about age, either. He rented a farm to a 68-year-old man with the provision that the man could stay as long as he lived. When he was questioned about this, he said, “That old man can’t live long.” My grandfather was 72.

I think I’m pretty realistic about being old. When I think about taking up a new pastime, I think, “I’ll be dead before I get anywhere with it.” I have thought about planting trees here, but barring the rapture, they will still be small and useless when I die. When I work in the yard and I get tired, I go in the house, leaving branches and leaves and whatever on the ground if I have to. I’m not going to die for yard work. Heat exhaustion is something old people can’t play with.

When I put heavy things on high shelves, I wonder if I’ll be strong enough to take them down if I ever need them. I take that into account.

Regarding Selleck, maybe he has spent a lot of money enjoying life. Maybe he has put millions in trust for his two grown kids, where he and his wife can’t get it. I certainly hope he has arranged for his kids to be rich without work. That’s what you’re supposed to do. You’re not supposed to stuff yourself like a turkey and then die poor.

If every generation in a family has to start with nothing, it’s a stupid family. Inheritance is supposed to help people not to have to have the same problems their ancestors did.

We don’t force new generations to come up with their own languages, writing, and science. We don’t burn all the books every 20 years. We treasure and protect these things and do our best to pass them on. No one ever says, proudly, “No one gave me electrical engineering and medicine. I figured it out for myself!” But fools love to say, “I’m a self-made man!” Like it’s great that their parents and ancestors were also fools.

Money is no different from other good things. It should be passed along, and so should the ability to make and handle money.

Inheritance is one of the big differences between advanced cultures and backward cultures that amounted to nothing. Africans and American Indians didn’t preserve knowledge through writing. They didn’t build things that lasted so their descendants could use them. They didn’t amass wealth and pass it on. They managed to go millennia without developing technology. As a result, they ended up living like cave men while people in other places had running water and calculus. They died from diseases that can be prevented by wearing shoes and boiling water. When advanced people showed up where they were, they were running around just about naked, and they didn’t have things like chairs. They were worse than children.

The wealthy people who didn’t have to work to get wealth make up a tiny percentage of Americans. That’s disgraceful. The grandchildren of most wealthy people have to build their own wealth, and many of them have nothing. If your grandchildren end up worse off than you, what was the purpose of making yourself rich? Was it just to make your own life better?

Americans are hypocrites. They really hate heirs, but nearly all of them want their children to be heirs. We love making fun of wealthy people who have problems, but we all want to be wealthy.

Wealth is good. It is completely good. It has no bad qualities. Christians have given it a bad name, and that’s ridiculous. Saying wealth is bad is like saying health is bad. Good looks are bad. Nice weather is bad. It’s idiotic. God himself says wealth is good. In the Bible, he promises it to people who please him. Would he reward people he likes with a curse? Of course not. Wealth is only a curse when you make it a curse. Your nature is the problem.

Giving heirs things is very good. Spoiling them is not. Two different things. Wealth can’t spoil anyone. We all know or know of rich heirs who are not spoiled, and prisons and poor ghettos are full of the most spoiled people in America.

I certainly hope the Sellecks have set their kids up.

What if he gave most of his earnings to charity, and he hasn’t said anything? That would be better than wasting it on yachting vacations, Hermes, and Balenciaga.

Looking around, I see the web says Selleck has had other homes. In 2016, he was featured in Architectural Digest, a magazine devoted to showcasing homes owned by extremely self-indulgent people with sick fringe values. The article says he had an 1800-square-foot apartment in Los Angeles, and he covered the walls with expensive paneling. He and his wife brought in very, very expensive professionals to fix the place up. They spared no expense.

They will never get that money back. Most of it is not an investment. Spending tons of money decorating a house generally will not pay off. The furniture will be removed, and the kind of people who buy fancy homes will want to remove a lot of what was done and replace it.

I fixed up a house and sold it, and it was a terrible idea. If I had sold it as-is, I would be a lot better off today. I sold another one with problems, and it was a much smarter decision. House flippers only make good money when they get good renovation work, cheap. Most of us aren’t in their shoes. Contractors generally treat their clients badly, costing them huge sums of money and wasting valuable months. If you want to live in a torn-up house and be your own general contractor, it’s different, but Tom Selleck wouldn’t do that.

In the article, he speaks lovingly of a table in the apartment, saying it used to be used for slaughtering pigs. If your grandfather made a table, I can understand why you would love it, but the pig story sounds exactly like what a designer would say in order to get you to make a sucker purchase.

“In this very chair, Vin Diesel read the script for Fast & Furious 6.”

Selleck lived in Hawaii for a long time. That’s expensive. Everything except pineapples and sand has to be brought in on boats or planes. I don’t know how many homes he had there, but one is pretty nice. The address is 4161 Akulikuli Terrace, in Honolulu. You can see a video of it below.

Does he still have the L.A. place? If so, he is paying the state serious money.

Even if, by some unforeseen fluke, I become extremely wealthy, I will never have a home in Architectural Digest, nor will I ever pay a decorator. I made a decision. I decided my home would be usable. We expect to have kids. We will have guests. I have a parrot. We can’t have really, really nice things, and I don’t want them anyway. Things have to serve me. I can’t stand serving things. If I can’t sit on a couch without taking a shower first, I don’t want it.

We will have pretty good furniture. We will make a pretty good effort to make the downstairs look pretty good. Upstairs, I have a fairly cheap couch and a recliner no woman would own, and only one of the beds has a headboard.

I have a Ford and a Dodge. Both were bought used. The newest one is 9 years old. I may replace the Ford with a Toyota because the Ford I have has a reputation for turning into a money pit after a certain number of miles, but if I buy a Toyota, it will be at least a year old.

I think we will continue to live very well by global standards, even without Selleck’s earning potential, and I don’t think we will have to move. If you have a nice house, good food, good medical care, and somewhat nice stuff, you are rich as far as I’m concerned.

It looks like Tom Selleck has spending problems, not money problems.

My grandfather may have been worth what Selleck is now, in terms of buying power, and he lived in a nice, comfortable house that was kept up perfectly. He drove Buicks from his car dealership, bought at cost. He wore his pickup trucks out. He got his clothes from department stores in Lexington, Kentucky. He didn’t have a wine cellar or a tennis court. I would guess he never flew first class in his life.

He didn’t worry that he might have to move out of his house. When his television went out, my grandmother told the people at the store to bring another one, dismissing their concerns about her ability to pay, saying, “We’ve got enough money to burn a wet mule.”

He was generous with other people. He helped his children when they didn’t deserve it or show him gratitude. He didn’t spend his money on decorators so he wouldn’t feel bad when shallow rich people showed up for expensive parties he never threw. He left some money and land behind when he died, and so did his wife.

I think he handled his money very well. He was probably the only person in Eastern Kentucky who subscribed to The Value Line, and read and understood it, in the 1950’s.

My dad bought a lot of real estate, and he did some investing. He could not match my grandfather, but he wasn’t like some of his partners, who had to spend every dime they got before they got it. He never talked about having to move out of his house, and he eventually became very concerned about making sure what he had went to me smoothly. He could have had a new Mercedes every year, but he chose to fund his future, and that of his descendants, instead.

Any couple that can’t find a way to live well until they die, on what must amount to at least $30 million, is doing something wrong. With that kind of wealth, you can take two very expensive vacations per year, wear excellent clothing, drive very nice cars, and live on an avocado farm. You should be able to get excellent help when you become feeble. I’m sure of it. Maybe you can’t have three or four mansions, and you might have to shop at normal malls sometimes, but lots of movie stars shop at malls that don’t have Neiman-Marcus or Bulgari.

Selleck will be dead by 2040. His wife will be dead by 2055, tops. They’ll both be fine if they show even below-average restraint.

Ostentation is sinful. Spending to be accepted by trashy rich people is wrong. It stirs up resentment among people who have less. It makes you think you’re better than you are. It lands you among empty, disgusting people. It sucks money away from better causes. You can have an incredibly cushy life without making a spectacle of yourself and spending in order to obey your insecurity.

Ostentation is partly aggression. It’s a way of insulting others. The Bible says that if you mock the poor, you insult God himself.

I just happened to run into an article about Antonio Brown, who was apparently an NFL player. The article says his career earnings were about $80 million. Wikipedia says he signed contracts amounting to well over $100 million, and that doesn’t include earnings off the field. Now his net worth is negative, and his earning potential is not much better.

He’s not a smart guy, so he can’t run out and get another high-paying job. Football was all he could do, at least for more than $20 an hour. It’s a horrific story. Imagine making $80 million in about 12 years, losing all of it, and then having to think about how long it would take to make that much money with your other abilities. In his case, it’s about 2000 years. That is the actual figure.

He’s a friend of Kanye West. West has a very shaky sports agency firm called Donda Sports, and Brown is the nominal president. Brown appears to be nearly illiterate, though, so it’s not clear whether he can actually perform any duties. Maybe West will pay him a lot anyway. But if he does, Brown will lose it. It won’t help.

I understand the desire to spend money on fun things, and I have certainly wasted money, but you have to have some sense of proportion. If your net worth is two million dollars, and the Lamborghini you want costs $1.5 million, it doesn’t mean you can afford it.

I can waste money, but I don’t understand insane spending.

Give me a billion dollars, and I’ll get my pickup truck fixed up really well, I’ll move to a nice rural property in Tennessee, and I’ll probably get some better heavy equipment, used. A bigger tractor and an excavator. I’ll have trouble-free appliances. If I travel long distances, I’ll definitely go business class, because long flights in coach are very unpleasant. I’ll get survival supplies and a generator. Nice stuff for the wife, but not too nice. Can’t think of much else.

Prime steaks more often. I would do that. Beef is a luxury in Biden’s world. I would probably get a lawn service. I would want an air-conditioned workshop for sure. That’s like $45,000. I’d quit buying all forms of insurance not required by law.

I really like the shoes and shorts I wear. I like Hanes T-shirts for about $3 each. I could see getting a good horsehide jacket not designed for motorcycling.

No boats. Been there. No planes. No vacation homes. Absolutely no club memberships. No jewelry for me. Jewelry on men is effeminate. No servants except maybe a maid to come in weekly. No ridiculous assistants to stand between me and commoners. No bodyguards. No entourage. No public giving of any kind. It’s ostentation.

I’ll tell you what. A comfortable home in Tennessee, all my bills paid, good food, good vehicles, zero concerns when buying things like tires and refrigerators…what else could you want?

Then I could invite Architectural Digest in to photograph my synthetic area rug from Lowe’s and the good downstairs recliner.

I’m not great with money, but I don’t see myself auctioning off private planes and gold chains to pay my creditors. I should be able to avoid getting a real job. I hope so. If I ever have to sell this farm, it will most likely be because I am too old to maintain it personally.

I hope I continue to improve, increasing my income and net worth while having the privilege of giving effectively to people who need help.

Tremble at my Mastery of Unimpressive Low-Paying Tasks

I am now a master chainsaw mechanic.

When I moved here, I managed three weeks before a hurricane came, and although we didn’t get the actual storm, a lot of trees fell. I was desperate for forestry tools, but they were not to be had. I managed to scrounge up a small Jonsered (Husqvarna) saw and a bigger Echo CS-590.

I have been lazy, and I didn’t know much about saws, and I could not find anyone around here who could fix one, so I had all sorts of trouble. I made dogged efforts to get good information so I could help myself, but I got misled over and over. Seemed like I never had a running saw when I needed one.

I just broke down and bought a pro-grade saw with a little computer in it. People call cheap saws “homeowner” saws, but the truth, I think, is that homeowners need the best saws, because we need tough equipment that can stand poor management.

I bought the new saw because I was really tired of trying to fix the others. Then once I had the Husky to rely on, naturally, I wanted to make the Echo run. I have turned it into a project saw.

Last year, I believe, I put a bigger carb in it. The carb comes from a 620P, which is a stronger saw with the same displacement. A week or two ago, I put a partial rebuild kit in the carb, which had been sitting since at least last year. That made it run, which was a huge improvement.

Today I added two other things: a better exhaust deflector to get heat out of the saw, and a little doodad that bumps the ignition timing 6 degrees forward to make the saw run more like Echo’s true pro saws.

I also tuned the carb myself, using a cheap Ebay tachometer and directions I stole from the Youtube Channel Steve’s Small Engine Saloon.

Echo says the saw should run at between 12,000 and 13,000 RPM. Web denizens say the ignition limits it to 13,000. Not true. Today I fired my saw up, and I got 14,000. It sounded really, really nice. Too nice. I didn’t want to blow it up. But I could not get the top speed to drop.

I finally realized I was turning the saw’s high-speed jet the wrong way. With that in mind, I started turning it the right way, and I settled on 13,300 RPM, roughly. Another Youtube saw guy runs his modded saws a little faster than that, and everyone thinks he’s a genius, so I guess my saw can take it.

Now the saw starts within about 6 pulls. Three with the choke in, and another two or three with it off. To me, that is astounding performance. Some people say their saws start on the first pull. Not sure how that’s possible with a choked carb, but they say that. After what I’ve been through, 6 is wonderful.

The little things I’ve done so far are supposed to bump the saw’s cutting speed up considerably, like maybe 15%. If I open the muffler up, I may see nearly 25%. That would be pretty nice. In truth, choosing the right chain and keeping it sharp make more of a difference than anything, but power is good.

Now what do I do? Use my big Husky because it’s almost guaranteed to work, or use the Echo in order to keep my nice new saw from getting dirty?

My plan is to put both in my cart when I cut big stuff. I’ll use whichever one works.

I feel almost competent.

The Real “Big Tent”

Yesterday I got some more revelation. It was not pleasant.

We’re always pushing for God to do something about the world. Open people’s eyes. Change their hearts. Give them ears to hear. Show them how good he is.

He’s already doing all those things. He’s God. He’s not lazy. He’s not incompetent. He knows what to do. Whatever he’s doing, it’s the best possible thing. It always has been.

We are the problem. The people who will not listen and the slum spirits that are already permanently lost and headed for the flames.

I was thinking about how evangelism had slowed down. The results these days are tiny compared to other centuries. It’s like we’re scraping cake batter out of a bowl after pouring the bulk out into a pan. Not much is happening.

Christians deny this with bad evidence. They say the church is growing in this country or that country. They’ll say they saw some guy hosting a big altar call somewhere. That’s denial. You can’t compare things like that to what used to happen.

Paul wandered around on foot before cameras and microphones and the printing press and reached about half of the Mediterranean coast. The charismatic revival reached hundreds of millions. We don’t see anything like that these days. It’s just a trickle. No new countries are opening up, and the ones that used to know God are attacking Christians for criticizing filthy, disgusting male perverts who want to dress up in women’s underwear and teach children in schools.

I was talking to God about how nearly everyone had rejected me when I told them things he had showed me. At Trinity Church in Miami, “Pastor” Rich Wilkerson held secret meetings about me to find out what I was up to and whether I was leading people away from his horrible church. At New Dawn Ministries, pedophile rapist “Pastor” Albert Santiago and his wife told people they were not allowed to associate with me or be my friends. My crime was that I exposed the prosperity gospel, which keeps people poor and keeps them from getting to know God.

I have had some squabbles with unbelievers, but at least 95% of my problems have come from Christians. Pastors and volunteers.

Some people have said I was too blunt, so it was my fault. It was never my fault. When people don’t want to hear the truth, it doesn’t matter how you present it, and when they love the truth, they will love harsh correction. Who was more blunt than Yeshua? Unlike him, I never stood in front of exalted religious leaders and told them they were sons of hell.

Was it his fault so many prominent Jewish priests and scribes went to hell?

While I was talking to God, I started finding myself imagining what it’s like for him. I imagined myself above the world, looking down on a filthy cloth suspended over it, between me and the earth at a considerable height. Imagine a dark brown cloth stained with blood, feces, urine, menstrual fluid, and every other disgusting thing. It completely blocked people’s view of the heavens. It was a thin, hollow ball that surrounded the planet.

Somewhere under the cloth were the people of the world, and my daily task was to try to talk to them through the cloth, which they had put up by choosing Satan over me.

I realized this was a picture of the fig leaves and the veil in the temple.

When Eve, a witch, feminist, and drug user, gave Adam, the first male feminist and beta, a drug to expand his consciousness, they both became aware of sin, and what was the first thing they did? They covered themselves up. They did not have cloth, so they used leaves which they picked, doing work with their hands. They knew it was not safe to present evil to God.

To rigid people, it may sound wrong to call the forbidden fruit a drug, but that’s what it was. Most popular recreational and ritual drugs come from plants. Tobacco, marijuana, heroin, cocaine, LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline are examples. There are lesser-known drugs that are literally fruit. Coffee comes from a fruit. Eve’s fruit altered minds.

Adam and Eve were supposed to fall on the ground, remain exposed, and beg forgiveness. Instead, they tried to hide their shame from the one who sees everything, and then when he came to them, they lied to him. They made excuses and denied fault.

Excuses are lies. God told me that.

God gave them animal skins to replace the leaves, because there is no remission of sin without the shedding of blood.

Think of the temple’s veil.

The holy of holies was the place where God’s presence was concentrated. The ark was a seat where he could sit, between two cherubs. The same cherubs that walked with him when he visited Abraham. They destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. The same cherubs that appeared at his tomb when he was resurrected after being murdered by religious Jews and their pagan masters and accomplices.

The temple had several areas. The outer court was open to everyone, even gentiles, except for menstruating women. The inner court was for Jews only. There were areas that were only for priests. The holy of holies was a small area behind a huge woven veil, and only the high priest could go there, once a year, to atone for the sins of the Jews on Yom Kippur.

The veil was no ordinary cloth. It was as thick as the width of a human hand, or about 4 inches. It always had dried blood on it because of the sacrifices. It would have been pretty dirty. It smelled. When Yeshua died, it was torn in half, from the top to the bottom. No human being could have done that. It would take internal combustion or hydraulics. Horses, at least.

The veil separated that which was holiest from that which was less holy or profane.

It served the same purpose as the leaves and the animal skins. People on one side of the veil were safe. If they went to the other side without preparation, they would be killed by divine fire.

When the veil was torn, it was a picture of a hymen being pierced. The man of the house was entering the body of the wife, symbolically. The high priests who had entered the holy of holies for generations were showing what Yeshua would do, as the only real high priest, as he was murdered. Only his blood could purify the temple.

The temple represented the Jews themselves. The proper and intended bride of the Messiah. Most of them rejected him, and gentiles took their places.

We use clothing to hide things. It’s disgusting to talk about, but we all know it. Every one of us has a crotch that produces things no one wants to see or smell. Clothing hides these things, absorbs them, and keeps them off of things like furniture.

Clothing makes us look better than we would naked. Most of us look fitter, stronger, and more beautiful with clothes on. This is even more true when we get old. No one stays beautiful. Nobody wants to see Jane Fonda’s body now.

The cloth I saw was like the veil and like clothing. It was a fabric woven of threads of denial. Excuses. Pride.

We deny our sins. We call them good deeds. We attack and slander God, saying the things he wants from us are actually evil. This is the person who told the Jews to execute sodomizers and witches. How can he be good? He wants to kill our cute, snarky wedding planners and hairdressers. He wants to kill nice ladies who read our palms and do our astrological charts.

Many of us, when we become Christians, twist Christianity to accommodate our preexisting, evil natures. This is where the prosperity gospel comes from. We want money. We don’t want to repent. We want to believe we get salvation that can’t ever be lost, just for one altar call.

We’re supposed to appear naked, figuratively, before God, but instead we hold onto our soiled underwear and hold it between him and ourselves like a shield. It deflects all that troublesome correction.

In Zechariah, the prophet saw Yeshua standing before the throne of Yahweh, clothed in a filthy robe. It is described as filthy, as with excrement. Not stains from spilled soup. The Bible says our own righteousness is like used menstrual rags.

Our God himself appeared in a robe caked with our feces. Yahweh forgave him, because he had never sinned, and he commanded the spirits to bring Yeshua fresh clothes.

The Bible itself confirms that sin is like a garment stiff with feces.

I am very frustrated because Christians reject the best things God shows me. Well, that just means I get a small taste of what God puts up with. He’s up there on the other side of the feces and menstrual fluid barrier, watching people march to destruction with their hands over their ears.

It’s normal. I should not have the feeling that something unusual is happening. This is how human beings have always been, and they will never be any different. Even during the millennium, when there are no evil spirits on the earth and Yeshua is here in the flesh, people will continue to sin and think they’re better than God.

This shows what pride looks like to God. A stiff garment reeking of urine, feces, dried blood, menstrual fluid, mucus, semen, sweat, sebum, pus, and every other disgusting thing. Things that come from the flesh itself. This is what homosexual activists are waving in God’s face every day. Their flag. The more colors they add, the more it looks brown. No wonder.

Preachers preach as though rejection of God proved there were something wrong with the church. That’s not quite right. It’s true that bad preaching drives people off unnecessarily, but Yeshua himself came down and preached perfectly, and he was still rejected by nearly all Jews who heard him.

The closer you get to God, the smaller your circle gets. That’s why the holy of holies was smaller than the inner court, and the inner court was smaller than the outer court.

Pride is the very worst iniquity, because it protects all the others. It’s better to be a humble rapist than a proud homosexual priest who feeds the poor. The rapist can change and be forgiven. The priest will die guilty and burn.

God told me pride was a fence we put around our sins, to protect them.

I hope this is informative to anyone who can accept it. Maybe understanding your world will help you be less disturbed by it and by the fact that it won’t be long before you are separated from most people you know and they are sent to burn. You can’t help them.

Even Better Than a Butt Lift and Taylor Swift Tickets

When I moved here, and I was looking after my dad, I was too careful with money sometimes, because most of his cash was tied up in unneeded properties that weren’t selling. I didn’t want to start dipping into my own money to deal with his problems, not knowing for sure that I would be the sole heir. What if I never got the money back? What if he proposed to an assisted living attendant?

I could have gotten rid of some dangerous trees on the property–trees I didn’t think I should cut on my own–but I was concerned about his liquidity. Every time hurricane season rolled around, instead of relaxing in safety, I counted on the odds to keep trees off my buildings. I couldn’t be completely calm. I lived for the day hurricane season ended, meaning I went through six months of rolling the dice.

I continued doing this until today. I just fixed the problem. I was going to get on it a year ago, but with all my wife’s immigration issues, I let a lot of things go.

Next week should be very, very interesting. I am paying for one and a half days of work from a crew with some very intimidating machinery. The guy who owns the company just came by, and we made a deal. He is going to do things like lifting full-grown oaks out of the ground. He is removing so much stuff, he wants to put it in three burn piles.

One burn pile will hold tons and tons of debris, so any job that fills three has to be big.

This is going to be very nice. We never, ever get hurricane-force winds here, but we do get tropical-storm-force winds sometimes, and they can knock trees down. If a tree hits your house, it’s a disaster at best, and because hurricanes damage so many houses, it can take forever to get repairs.

Insurance here is going nuts under Biden, and DeSantis hasn’t been able to fix it. I may not be able to insure my house at any price next time around. If I can insure, it will not be cheap. People with inferior properties are paying between $20,000 and $30,000 per year in some places. Suze Orman, the money guru, has a little high rise condo that can’t possibly be damaged by storms, and she says she refused to pay the $28,000 she was quoted. I’m not paying anything like that, but insurance costs me almost as much as property taxes.

Insurers blame storms for most of it. When I think about possible losses, I think a fair amount about theft, a little bit about fire, and a whole lot about storms. If the trees are removed, and the house doesn’t burn down, I can insure against theft on my own. I will not need storm insurance at all.

I might be able to retrofit a sprinkler system to make fire less of a problem, and I’m already doing a lot to keep burglars away. The political spirit of the area and the normality of the non-feminized males keep the relatively bright ones in terror, and the local cops openly say they like it when homeowners kill undocumented guests, so things could be worse.

When my dad bought this place, the appraiser raved about it. Underpriced, he said. That may have been true, but the driveway was looking shabby, the roof only had a couple of years of life in it, and the trees, he ignored. I now have a new driveway and roof. That should hold me for 20 years. The trees are the last major concern that has to be addressed. The rest is all piddly stuff.

When you buy a house, look at the trees around it, because in all likelihood, no one else will. How close are they to the foundation and the roof? How fast do they grow? How long do they live? How strong are they? Do the analysis before you buy so you won’t be sandbagged later. That’s my advice.

Man, I can’t wait. I arranged the work at the last minute. The first named storm will be here this month, barring a statistical anomaly. All the people who procrastinated worse than I did will be looking for tree surgeons, and they’ll be busy. I took too long, but I took care of business just in time, and I’m not paying the mid-season price.

I’m paying less than the cost of a year’s property insurance.

I am going to hate losing the shade, and the trees looked very nice. It’s worth it to know my wife and I will not even have to think about seeing our house crushed.

Removing some trees will help with the leaf problem here. Our oaks produce thick, heavy leaves that feel like leather. They sink in water. When you shoot a leaf blower at them, they actually seem to grip the ground harder. They resist mulching and raking. When you burn them, they burn for days and can’t be put out. They kill grass but somehow allow weeds to grow freely. I hate them. Destroying a dozen or so major leaf droppers should improve things a great deal. I’ve managed to make great progress with a mower mulching kit and the world’s most powerful backpack blower, but having fewer leaves would be better.

Maybe I could plant some decent trees to take their places. Mulberries. Bushy magnolias. Pecans. I’ll be ancient before they grow tall, but at least they’ll get a start.

As a person who loves tools, I am eager to see what kind of tree can lift a grown oak up out of the ground. Whatever it is, I want one.

Stop Being a Fruit and Buy Man Tools Before It’s Too Late

Cutting up fallen trees is maybe 95% of my tree work. On this property, they fell themselves due to rot, so I don’t have to do it. And I’m afraid to fell them, because a lot of them are rotten and could drop logs on me if disturbed.

Nonetheless, I decided to fell a water oak today.

When this house was built, someone who didn’t know what he or she was doing allowed several oaks to remain right beside the driveway. I mean RIGHT beside it. Within two feet or even one foot.

This was stupid. Pavement and tree roots don’t get along, and oaks grow silly horizontal branches from their trunks whenever they feel like it. On a tree close to a road, these branches block cars. Pushing a tree over is the safest and cheapest way to get rid of it, but if you push over a tree next to a road or sidewalk, the roots may lift the pavement or concrete. The trunk acts like a prybar. This means you have to cut the trees the hard, slow, unsafe way.

It’s also a pain to make it up a curved driveway with oaks up against it. Your guests are likely to ding their cars.

Today I was mowing, and I decided to try to cut the tree, even though the top was rotten and could conceivably drop wood on me.

The tree was about 12″ thick at knee level, and I would say it was 50 feet tall. It was in a place where it couldn’t hit anything expensive when it fell, except for me. I looked at it carefully, and it seemed to be leaning slightly over the driveway.

I got out my 18″ Makita cordless saw, because it’s strong and handy, and I made a homeowner-grade notch on the side to which I thought the tree would fall. Then I started the back cut.

The saw got pinched. How? If a tree is leaning away from a back cut, the cut should get bigger, if anything, as the cut progresses.

I had to pound a wedge in to get the saw out. Then I got a 10″ EGO cordless pole saw and continued working, thinking a few feet of pole length would make me less likely to be crushed.

The tree started to move, and I fled like Biden from an unscripted interview, only the soles of my footwear actually left the ground. It fell exactly where I thought it would. So why did the saw get pinched?

The wood was very wet, and wet wood likes to swell. I don’t know if that explains it.

Getting rid of the tree was real work, but it wasn’t unpleasant. A tractor, a great brush fork, a timberjack, gloves, and some good saws made everything go smoothly. I am old, but I can get rid of a pretty big oak in about two hours.

The stump was a problem. When I used the Makita to cut it close to the ground, it didn’t want to finish. I fired up the new Husqvanra 562XP with its 24″ bar, and it slid right through the stump. That saw is perfect for this property. It has enough grunt to make a 24″ bar work, and it’s not too heavy.

Where I cut the stump close to the ground, it was around 20″ across.

I poured pure Roundup concentrate on it, like I did some other stumps. Is it legal? Don’t really care. Come arrest me. If I had any used motor oil, I would have used that, too. “Here’s one for my homies at Exxon Mobil. Deepwater Horizon style, y’all.”

This is all fun, but I will probably still have to pay to get some things moved. I have big trees too close to the shop and house, and I can’t make them all fall where I want with the tools and skills I have. Tomorrow a guy is coming to give me an estimate.

I’ll miss the shade very badly, but you would have to be an idiot to keep trees like these. The guy who built the house was not thinking. Maybe his wife put her foot down, thinking trees were more important than shelter and their life savings. I want the problem trees gone before the hurricane season really gets going. If my buildings are safe, I will be at peace all season long instead of hoping trees fall the right way.

So how much money have I saved this weekend? Based on previous estimates from arborists with unrealistic conceptions of my unwillingness to handle my own problems, I would say at least $2500.

That is offset by the grand or so I spent on a new saw and some parts for other machines. Maybe I should have made my old Echo function instead of springing for a second big saw, but based on my horrible experiences with shops and trying to do my own repairs, I think I did the right thing. From now on, I will ALWAYS have one big saw ready to cut. I will never again have to wait three months and put up with downed trees while shop nincompoops keep my only big saw.

I’m not counting the other stuff I’ve done for myself when I figure what I’ve saved. I had to go to a neighboring property to cut trees rooted on my side of the fence, and that had to save me another $2500. I must have done $15,000 worth of work since I’ve lived here, not including this year.

Arborists charge too much. If you’re an uneducated tradesman, and you can’t make a very good living charging $500 for an hour’s work, you are incompetent. If you insist on getting over twice that much, go ahead and lose your business and find a job shoveling manure. I was willing to work with you. I’m not your sugar daddy.

An arborist here should be able to gross three grand a day without pushing it or overcharging. He should be able to keep half of that. That’s $7500 per week, assuming he doesn’t have a subordinate who can use his equipment to handle Saturday jobs and bring in another $750.

Keep $2000 to live on, and invest the rest in your business. Get a second lift truck. Find a guy to run a second crew. There’s another $6500 per week.

Am I wrong? I doubt it. I think an arborist who charged reasonable prices would be booked up solid, all the time. The volume would pay off much better than sitting idle while trying to talk people into giving you their IRA’s for quick, easy jobs.

Quick nickels make people richer than slow dollars. Sam Walmart died a billionaire because he got that.

If they mess with me tomorrow, I am completely capable of renting a cherry picker and removing most of the problem trees. It’s not that hard if you take things slowly and minimize the risk. The smaller the pieces you cut, the safer you are. It’s hard to hurt yourself if you’re willing to spend hours cutting three feet at a time.

I should rent one anyway, just to get over the intimidation.

Moving the pieces is easy. It’s a joke. It’s safe. The fork I created for my tractor is nothing short of amazing. It does nearly everything a grapple will do, much, much better. The other things a grapple will do, I generally don’t need, or I can easily work around them.

I was told I could get this place cleaned up by a crew for $4500. If that’s true, consider the check signed. If not, I’ll be renting, doing most of the work by myself, and then paying a much lower figure for the rest. The $4500 figure I heard was unreasonable, but not so high I would refuse to pay it in order to avoid a huge hassle. Let’s see what happens.

I have 4 new wedges coming tomorrow, because I cut up and/or lost the ones I already had. One vanished into thin air while I was cutting a leaning tree. The parts I ordered for hot-rodding the Echo will arrive tomorrow, too. I finally got a decent helmet with a mesh mask and ear covers.

I need to start killing more small trees before they cause problems. Letting small trees grow in bad places is like encouraging small amounts of immigration from Muslim countries. Decades later, you will pay a large price.

It’s Working

Here’s to traditional marriage. I think my wife will agree.

Today I decided to make a big step on making this property my own. Sometimes I’m intimidated because I can’t help thinking the original owners knew what they were doing when they made bad landscaping decisions. I am getting over that. Today I killed a magnolia and two bottlebrush trees.

It seems like I fix just about everything these days. My tractor’s poorly-situated steering cylinder started gushing oil, so I took it out, modified the frame (drilled and painted a big hole) to make it easier to remove next time, and took it to a hydraulic place for a rebuild. I would have rebuilt it myself, but there were problems identifying the parts. Now I have the numbers, because they were on the receipt.

I managed to bust the engine’s front cover while putting the cylinder back in, necessitating an expensive visit to the dealer, but at least I know how to deal with the cylinder in the future. And I painted up the new cover I bought, so it looks a lot better than the old one.

The house’s original owner had some horrible brush tines that were held on with chains and chunks of wood. I cut them in pieces and turned them into a quick-attach fork which is a thousand times as good. Welding, cutting, painting. Got it all done without help. No one else has a fork like this one. It’s fantastic.

I put a Pat’s quick attach set on my 3-point hitch, and it made it easy to switch attachments. Totally superior to the heavy, overpriced adaptors other people still, for unknown reasons, buy. I stuck a ballast box on the hitch, so now I have a compact ballast and a great brush fork to work together.

Today I went out and ripped my bottlebrush trees out because they were sick and planted two feet from my workshop. You never plant anything two feet from a building. Not even shrubs. The trees threatened to beat up the eaves during storms, and if they had been big trees, their roots would have threatened the foundation. They were in the way. Planting them was a bad choice. I pulled one out pretty easily with a chain and strap. The other one took more work, but now it’s on the burn pile. I plan to replace them with this: dirt. Or maybe two small shrubs with roots at least three feet out.

The magnolia was maybe 15 feet from the workshop and 10 feet from a water oak. It had to go. It had no future. It could have fallen on the shop. Every tree that poses a falling hazard is on the way out.

I am terrible at felling trees because I rarely have to do it. To gain practice, I tried to lean the magnolia away from the shop. When it started to move, I ran away like Sir Robin facing the Mad Chicken of Bristol, and the tree decided to stop falling. I decided brute force was the answer, as it so often is, so I chained it to the tractor and pulled it over.

I cut it in pieces and got rid of it, and now the cattle are snacking on magnolia leaves. I put glyphosate concentrate on the stumps.

When I came back in the house for breaks and to shower, my wife stared at me. I think she was starting to appreciate what I do around here. I was soaked in sweat. I had a mashed fingernail from a farm jack. I had a stick in my hair.

I had done maybe $1000 worth of work in around 3 hours. I base that on absurd quotes I’ve received for tree work. It was definitely work, but I enjoyed it. I have good tools, and my skills are adequate.

When I started taking off my work clothes, I was going to put them in the laundry room, but she told me to leave them where they were and let her know when I wanted food.

I showered, drew myself a Yard Boss Lager, put on my new glasses, sat in my new recliner, and relaxed.

My wife doesn’t know how to weld, cut metal, paint, fix chainsaws, cut trees, take a tractor apart, or operate tractor hydraulics. She can’t cut a tree. She has no idea who to call for a burn permit. She doesn’t know what one is. These things are not her problems. On the other hand, I don’t do laundry any more. I don’t wash dishes. I open drawers, and my ironed clothes are there. I open cupboards and see clean dishes.

It’s a pretty good system. God knew what he was doing when he designed it.

I got up yesterday, prayed, ate, dealt with a business lease for a rental property, fixed a cabinet door my wife had leaned on…I did all sorts of stuff. I can handle things that would leave metrosexual modern husbands in tears. I can drive a manual transmission. I can shoot, and it doesn’t bother me to kill cute animals that cause problems. I can make ammunition. I own taps and dies.

In return, my wife looks after wife stuff. She doesn’t compete with me and try to find an edge every day. She leaves the toilet seat up.

Satan has turned modern marriage into an endless competition. A series of selfish negotiations. It was never supposed to be like that. We were supposed to know and love our roles.

When you drive a car, the engine doesn’t decide it wants to be an air conditioner. The battery doesn’t decide it wants to be a transmission. The parts of a family should work together the same way.

Interestingly, in news related to old guys with rural properties, I have read that Tom Selleck is afraid he will have to sell his farm.

Tom Selleck must surely have a lot of money. He was in a very successful TV series 40 years ago, and he made a number of okay movies. He did a bunch of Hallmark movies. He has been in a CBS series for the last 14 years.

He lives on an avocado farm in Ventura County, California. Reports about the size of the farm vary, but it’s around 60 acres. He says he may have to sell if his series is cancelled, in order to have a good lifestyle until he dies.

How can that be true?

I looked it up. You can find the address on the web. He pays about $65,000 per year in property taxes. He may live another 15 years, so let’s say $1.5 million yet to pay, with numerical increases for inflation. Shouldn’t he be able to pay that?

His home is an avocado farm. Aren’t avocados expensive? Shouldn’t there be at least six figures of net income from that?

I decided to find out what John Travolta pays in my county. It’s about $27,000 per year. He has a smaller property, but on the other hand, the improvements are nuts. An incredible mansion that connects to a system of runways. He has carports with jets in them, at his house! One jet is a commercial airliner QANTAS used to own.

Travolta pays no state income tax, unless he has property in other states. He pays no county or city income tax. His property tax, during the same period during which Selleck will pay $1.5 million plus increases, will be about $400,000 with increases.

He can have all the guns he wants. He can keep an AK-47 in his car. If he shoots a criminal, our sheriff, Billy Woods, will probably take him to Dairy Queen.

He doesn’t have rolling blackouts. The power is always on.

I wonder what Tom Selleck is paying California, his county, and his municipality. And why is he there? He’s supposed to be conservative. My guess is that his wife won’t let him move. Or maybe he’s a RINO.

He could be in Tennessee or Florida right now. Or Idaho. Or Wyoming.

Zillow says his property is worth about $12 million, and Zillow is usually pretty accurate. Zillow thinks Travolta’s house is worth $3.5 million, which is very modest considering his wealth. The acreage is about a third of Selleck’s, which is still pretty good for a non-agricultural property.

If you don’t need runways, I guarantee you, you can get 60 acres here for what Travolta’s house is worth. With an agricultural exemption, your taxes will be around $16,000 per year.

You can have horses, cattle, goats, sheep, ostriches, emus, donkeys, or just about anything else you want. What you can’t have is California.

Selleck should not have a mortgage right now. Unless something is wrong, his home is paid for. He should be able to sell his ranch, pocket maybe $9,000,000 after capital gains, move to a better state, buy a better farm, and have well over $5,000,000 in additional retirement funds. He should have something saved up from his work. He should have the maximum Social Security benefit.

Maybe he just spends too much. When you’re 79, and you’re worried about your future, you ought to be able to rein in your spending and survive on a net worth of over $12 million. Even if all he has is a reverse mortgage, he should be able to fly business class to nice places every year and eat anything he wants.

If he moves in next door, I’ll be happy to help him and his wife find the best local barbecue.

Consider Your Chains Broken

I’m starting to feel like my mission in life is to shame manufacturers who make it hard to get parts and information.

Today I’m going after Textron/EZ-GO. This annoying company makes good carts, but finding parts on their antiquated site is impossible, and their customer service is bad. On top of that, they charge like crazy.

Right now, I have a request for information waiting, and I am not sure they’ll ever respond.

I did something stupid, causing a wheel to fall off my ST350, and I messed up some lug studs. I fixed them with a die, but I don’t trust them, so I need new studs. Problem: it’s very hard to find them.

If you look for EZGO studs on the web, you will see endless ads that say “except ST350.” Sites that sell all kinds of EZGO parts generally don’t sell these studs. You can get a new rear hub with studs in it, but expect to pay at least $85.

Some kind person found a site that sells the studs. It’s called Country Cat, probably because all us cats in the country have carts. I’ve used it before. I bought a $250 OEM carb for about $125. I have a China carb that works, but I wanted insurance for the future because of the difficulty of getting EZGO parts, and the price was impossible to turn down.

In case anyone else out there wants these studs, here is a link:

LINK

You can try a car parts place, hoping a similar stud will work, but only one place near me had a book listing studs by measurements. Generally, they are sold by car model. The studs I found would have required precision boring, which I did not want to do.

If you have an EZGO Workhorse, you should buy these studs and set them aside, and you might consider buying a carb, because the Subaru Robin engines in these “old” (two short decades) carts get very bad support.

I’m compiling info on my power equipment, and I just got my Husqvarna 125B blower figured out. This is a very small, light gas blower which is very handy for things like blowing crud off a porch or out of a garage. If you’re very old, it’s good for birthday cakes and discouraging old women who want to kiss you.

The carburetor in the 125 series is a Zama C1Q-W37. The Husky part number is 5904601-02. Unfortunately, Husky makes it hard to find the carb partial rebuild kit, which is what is needed in nearly all cases when a 125 blower won’t run. The Zama carb kit’s part number is RB-47. It’s very cheap. This is a total rebuild kit. The diaphragm kit is GND-18.

I have a Chinese carb in the blower, and it runs nearly perfectly, so I have little motivation to change it, but I probably have the Zama in a box somewhere, so I ordered the kit, and I’m going to try to repair it.

The OEM carb is cheap, so don’t pay the highest price you find. You can get it for something like $35.

I looked into my new Husqvarna 562XP saw so I would have a rebuild kit on hand. The carb is from Zama. The entire carb designation is C1M-EL48, and the diaphragm kit from Zama is the GND-105, which is cheap. The total rebuild kit is the RB-181.

This is only for saws from number 20121401173 forward. Before that, the saw came with an EL44 or EL46 carb, and they are not as highly regarded.

Excuse me if any of this stuff has already been published here. It’s hard to keep it all straight.

Not Even the Kragle Can Ruin Small Engine Thursday

Today is Small Engine Thursday. The first of its kind.

I’ve been struggling to pull myself out of the sludge of years of small engine problems, and it’s starting to come together. I bought a new Husqvarna 562XP chainsaw. I got my Echo CS590 running. I took my small Husky saw and my Echo polesaw to the shop.

I decided every Thursday would be Small Engine Thursday. Start every small engine on the property, let it warm up, and make sure all is well.

Today I ran the CS590, the 562XP, my Husqvarna 125B miniature blower, my Echo SRM-3020T trimmer which has a circular saw blade on it instead of string, and my huge Echo backpack blower. The 125B could probably use a carb rebuild and a return to the original non-Chinese carb, but it moves dirt and leaves and doesn’t quit.

I have several parts on the way to make things better. I’ll be modding the Echo saw and stashing carb rebuild kits away for later. I bought some more tools, of course.

Yesterday I put a new oil cap on my Makita cordless chainsaw and cleaned it up to confirm it was pumping oil.

The EZGO ran a couple of days ago, so I’m not worried about it. I don’t want to fool with it until tomorrow because I did something dumb. I removed a wheel to fix a tire, and I must not have torqued the nuts correctly when I put it back on, because the wheel fell off just outside my gate. I had to jack it up, put it back on with the one nut I was able to find, and limp it to the garage. I had to order new lug nuts and a die to clean up the lug studs. The die arrives tomorrow, but if I can find new lug studs, I’ll just buy them.

Both tractors run now.

Things are good. Now if I can just find out why my car is throwing false overheating alarms.

Maybe Some Day Manufacturers Will do This

I am doing something I should have done long ago. I am studying my yard tools and writing down useful things.

I’m writing stuff down here because I know other people have pulled their hair out trying to get this information.

My Echo chainsaw is a CS590 Timberwolf. It uses the same carb rebuild kit as Echo’s other 60cc saws. The part number is P033000000. The carb is made by an extremely annoying company, Walbro, which has horrible customer service. The Walbro part number is K22-HDA.

My Echo pole saw is a PPT-280. The carb part number is A021001340. It’s a Walbro WYK-233A. The rebuild kit’s part number is P003001120. The Walbro kit number appears to be K13-WYK. It replaced other kits with other numbers. The kit is hard to find due to poor support from Echo, which (apparently) is also Shindaiwa and Yamabiko.

My Echo weed trimmer is an SRM-3020T. It’s a monster. The carb is a Walbro WYG-11A, which you can get for about $80. Echo part A021004831. There are two repair kits. One is a tune-up kit which doesn’t include carb parts. It contains an air cleaner and spark plug and so on. The part number is 90181Y, and it costs over $30. The ECHO number for the carb kit is P003005940.

Check your weed trimmer’s serial number to make sure the carb kit fits. There were multiple versions.

Echo’s website is useless. It doesn’t function.

My Jonsered CS2240 (Husqvarna 435) saw has a Zama C1T-El41 carb. Easier to find than Walbro carbs. The rebuild kit has two part numbers. RB-149 and Z000-001-K035. Don’t ask me why. You can get one for around $12.

Only Took 7 Years to Get it Working

I got my Echo Timberwolf chainsaw running, finally. I did two things. I did a half-rebuild on the Walbro HDA-327 carb (same rebuild kit for all 60cc Echo saws), and I finally got straight information on the starting procedure. I learned some simple things which, oddly, are not widely known.

If you have an Echo CS590 saw, I can help you start it.

First, you need to know about the choke. It’s not just a choke. It also holds the throttle open. It does this when it’s engaged, and it also does it after you disengage it, so if you pull the choke and then push it back in, the throttle will stay open.

With that in mind…

1. Lift the on/off toggle switch that controls the spark. Without this, you have no chance of starting it.

2. Engage the choke. Leave it engaged. This chokes the engine and opens the throttle so the saw will get a lot of gas when it tries to start.

3. Depress the compression release. Some people claim it keeps saws from starting because you need compression to start, but my saw starts with it depressed, so that can’t be true. It makes it easier to yank the cord.

4. Engage the brake. No one listens to this advice, but it’s bad to have a saw start at high speed with the chain spinning like crazy.

5. Put the saw on the ground and put your foot through the handle to hold it down. No one does this either, but it’s safer than the showoff way. One problem: it’s not actually possible to put your foot in the handle unless you have tiny feet. Put a piece of wood through the handle and step on it.

6. Pull the cord out a couple of inches and then yank as hard as you can. After a few pulls, the saw should make some kind of noise. When you hear that, disengage the choke. It doesn’t matter how feeble the noise is. If you keep yanking, you will flood the engine.

7. The saw should start within a few pulls. When it does, tap the throttle to release the detent that holds it open. The extra gas is only to make the saw start. If you run it fast with the brake on, you’re going to fry your clutch.

8. Release the brake.

That’s about it. If it doesn’t work, your saw is badly tuned or has some other problem. Fix it.

Other tips:

1. Avoid canned fuel. This one surprised me, but there is a very sharp saw mechanic on Youtube who says she has repeatedly “fixed” dead saws by pouring out Trufuel and other canned gas. Get yourself some ethanol-free gas if possible. If you can’t find it, get ordinary gas. Treat it with Echo Red Armor oil and Biobor EB to make it last longer. Don’t use Sta-Bil red. The blue stuff might work. Supposedly, you can get 6 months out of regular gas treated with the right things. Biobor EB promises “up to” 18 months, but it doesn’t mention “down to.”

2. If your saw won’t start, dump the fuel and replace it before doing anything else. Just find a quiet corner of your yard and dump it on the ground. No one will get cancer.

3. If you’re storing your saw for a while, dump the fuel, put canned fuel in it, and run it dry, pulling the choke to get all the gas out. The big problem with this is that a dry saw may have problems with dry seals later, but you can’t have everything.

4. When you treat your fuel, take a Sharpie and write the date on the jug. Never use a jug you also use for gas that has no oil in it, because you will get confused and ruin your engine. If you know how old your fuel is, you can make intelligent decisions later.

5. Start your small engines every week. Pick a day and start them all. If you avoid letting your saws sit idle, you should be able to avoid the business of running them dry.

6. If you flood your saw, make sure the throttle is open and try again. Engage the choke and disengage it. You can also put a velcro strap around the trigger to keep it depressed. This sometimes works.

To start your Echo warm:

1. Make sure the switch is on.

2. Engage the choke.

3. Disengage the choke. Now the throttle is open.

4. Engage the brake.

5. Put saw on ground and immobilize it.

6. Yank until it starts.

7. Tap throttle.

8. Disengage brake.

Here’s something really important: whenever you see the saw when it’s not running, turn the switch on. It won’t hurt anything to have the ignition on when the saw is not running, but if you leave it off, you will forget to turn it on before starting the saw, and you will flood it.

Here’s some more interesting info. Heat ruins saws. How do you get rid of it? A few ways.

1. Keep your blade as sharp as possible. Believe it or not, pulling a dull blade will overheat your saw. You will ruin the cylinder, piston, and possibly other things inside the engine. When that happens, you have a parts saw.

2. Ask around and see what knowledgeable people think about your saw’s factory exhaust. Some saws have pretty restrictive exhausts, and they contribute to heat. There are known ways to fix this, and they are simple.

3. If you have an old-fashioned bar with a lube port, lube it.

My saw runs like an F1 car now.

Echo CS590’s come with plastic caps on the carb screws to keep people from adjusting them too far. You will eventually want to get rid of these caps and adjust the saw correctly, but this will probably violate your warranty, which is generally regarded as worthless anyway. It doesn’t even apply to carbs.

The carb has a main jet with a hole in it to prevent it from running too lean, and this causes problems. You can buy a better main jet, pound the old one out, and pound the new one in.

I put a bigger carb (from the 620P) in my saw because it allows for upgrades later on. I’m also getting a new exhaust deflector to reduce back pressure and heat, and I will be putting two small holes in the muffler for the same purpose. I’m going to install a new key on the flywheel to advance the timing and give the saw more power.

Once all this is done, I’ll have a saw about as capable as my new twice-as-expensive Husky 562XP, which is not modified. I might put a 24″ bar on the Echo, because it’s the perfect size for this farm. A 20″ bar is a bit handier, though.

I’m going to take the Echo to the shop to have a pro tune it before I use it. If the carb isn’t right, I could damage the saw, and I would rather pay than see that happen. As I learn more about carbs, I’ll be more confident about fixing it.

I found out that 2-stroke carbs usually don’t need full rebuilds. I watched a Steve’s Small Engine Saloon video, and all he did was replace the diaphragms, internal fuel screen, and needle. I did the same things, and my saw started running. I squirted some carb cleaner into appropriate places while I worked on it.

My carb will start if the H and L screws are out 1-3/4 turns, so yours should too, if it has the same carb. Doesn’t mean these settings are optimal, but if you can get the saw to run, you can adjust the screws.

This is a good saw, and for the price, it’s fantastic, but it has a reputation for flooding very easily, and the advice you will get on the web and in the manual will generally make things worse. If you don’t know the secrets, this saw will make you wish you were dead. It’s worse than having no saw at all.

I would advise people to avoid the 60cc Echo saws and get saws that are less troublesome. If you’re a pro, you will not notice any problems with these saws, but an uninformed amateur with dubious tools and skills can make better choices, in my opinion. Any saw that works is better than a garage princess.

A bargain saw that ends up costing you hundreds in parts and labor, in addition to preventing you from clearing your land, is no bargain.

I’ve been relying on new Chinese carbs for a long time, but if I can fix up my OEM carbs with rebuild kits and get good results, I’ll continue doing it. I can’t keep supporting my local shop as though I had two X chromosomes and a dresser full of skinny jeans and yoga pants.

Dignity has its Price, and now we Have a Firm Quote

Candace Owens is smart. Candace Owens is fairly pretty. Candace Owens is thin. Candace Owens isn’t ghetto. She dresses and speaks like a lady.

And she’s conservative.

Kind of looks like these are the only things Ben Shapiro thought about when he took the Candace Owens bait and gave her a job.

Now she has turned out to be an enthusiastic consumer and repeater of absurd antisemitic libels. She has used the word “apartheid” to describe Israel. A nation that has Muslim MK’s and IDF generals. A nation that begged Muslims to stay in 1948.

It’s so stupid, I feel stupid “debunking” it. Is it “debunking” when you tell your three-year-old cartoons aren’t real?

I never accepted Candace Owens. I admit, I thought Ann Coulter was great until I learned more about her, but I was not dumb enough to fall for the Owens show.

The main thing I didn’t like was her secular approach. She has made uninformed, half-baked forays into the promotion of Christianity, but she’s a political person, and her answers to the world’s problems are political. The fundamental problems are supernatural, and so are the answers. She doesn’t know that yet and may never know it. Purely political solutions don’t work.

No solutions work, in the short term. The world is going to descend into chaos before things get better. Yeshua will have to come back to fix the world.

I was also put off by her obsession with angry argument. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Sweet burn. Shutdown. That stuff is childish and doesn’t help anyone. I’ve done plenty of it myself. It was a mistake. She hasn’t learned that.

It’s also important not to get excited by recent converts. By that I mean converts to conservatism. Owens talks about her leftist past, which didn’t end all that long ago. People who were recently leftists tend to be unreliable conservatives, either because they’re lying to get money, or because they haven’t finished the process.

It’s interesting. If you’re black, you can get affirmative action as a conservative political commentator, by criticizing a philosophy that includes affirmative action.

Now we have some pretty hard evidence that Owens is a bit off. She has joined Minnect, an extremely peculiar company that sells phone time with minor celebrities. Other famous Minnecters: Sammy the Bull Gravano, Michael Franzese, and Chazz Palmintieri. It looks like they scoop up non-leftist people who are at least moderately famous but need money anyway.

If you use Minnect, you can talk to Candace Owens and get her advice or just shoot the breeze. Advice on what? Her resume seems to be full of puffery. CEO of this company no one has heard of. Founder of that media organization no one watches. A person who has really made a dent in this world will generally have a resume that makes it obvious. Founded Tesla, the Boring Company, and Starlink. Invented the automotive assembly line. Runs Berkshire Hathaway.

The impression I get is that her lifestyle is on one level, and her current income is on another, so she is willing to risk her reputation to bring in revenue.

How much revenue?

If Internet reports, including purported screenshots, are correct, she originally wanted at least $75,000 per chat. That would have bought you 15 minutes; the minimum. I’ll bet if I try, I can get 15 free minutes with Elon Musk in 60 days.

The reports say she started at $5,000 per minute and dropped to $1500. Now, you can talk to a mid-level political hustler in her mid-thirties for 15 minutes for only $22,500.

You can add time during the call. Oh, boy. Isn’t that how a peep show works? The girl takes off a few things and holds her hands over what you really want to see, and when the blind starts coming down, you know you have to pay up if you want what you came for. “I’ll tell you everything you want to know about my dust-up with Ben, but…oh, no! Your 15 minutes are almost up!”

I doubt it works that way, but I think it’s a certainty that at least some Minnect personalities have made a conscious decision to make calls last longer.

Back during the $5,000 period, her Minnect page supposedly said she had already had 7 chats. So she made $525,000 before anyone even knew what Minnect was.

No. That did not happen. Not unless her husband called 7 times and got refunded. No one on Earth is that stupid and rich. Taylor Swift? Beyonce? Okay; there are thousands of people who would pay that much to talk to them. Candace Owens? Only if she knows some unbelievably wealthy conservative donors who don’t like Jews.

It’s the tip jar principle. You work for tips, but people don’t like to tip people who do what you do. The answer is to take about $30 of your own money and put it in your tip jar. Then other people may feel more comfortable about tipping, because they think others have already done it. I don’t think Owens had a single paid call, and I don’t think any money was spent, but I do think the fake call count was created to fool potential customers.

If she were charging $500 per call, she would probably do okay for a couple of months. She would be busy. As it is, she just looks crazy, and that is not something she needs right now, because the apartheid stuff has already pushed her into the “possible crazy” category of minor celebrities.

It does not look respectable. It looks desperate, which it surely is. It looks tone-deaf. Whatever her brand is, it will be cheapened severely.

What can Candace Owens tell you that justifies paying her money? She’s not an attorney. She’s not a financial advisor. She’s not a therapist. She could give hair, makeup, and diet tips, because she clearly has those areas of her life under control.

I don’t get it.

Franzese is interesting. He’s a former mafioso who was imprisoned for years over an extremely profitable tax-skimming scheme. He may be the only intelligent person who has ever been in the mafia.

Like the fraternity system, the mafia is affirmative action for mediocre white people. It takes people with laborer abilities and puts them in mansions.

He says he’s a Christian now, and he has a popular Youtube channel, but he rarely mentions Christianity. He talks about his life in the disgraceful sewer of organized crime, and he seems proud of it. I have never heard him talk about the Holy Spirit or give people spiritual advice, and I’ve seen a bunch of his videos.

If you’re a serious Christian, and you’re in the public eye, you will talk about God a lot, because he will be the most exciting, interesting thing in your life.

I don’t know how legitimate Franzese’s conversion is, but his Minnect goals seem a lot less delusional. He expects $25 per minute. That should get him some traffic. That’s $375 for 15 minutes, which is a lot, but it’s not implausible.

He’s also more interesting than Owens. What are you going to ask her? I can’t think of anything. Franzese is different. You could try to get him to open up about Jimmy Hoffa or any of a number of famous unsolved crimes. You could ask him what John Gotti was like.

Maybe if you call on the right day, someone will whack Franzese on camera.

I wouldn’t spend $10 to talk to him, because I think bothering celebrities, even minor ones, is weird and creepy. I barely call people I know. I’ve asked for one autograph in my life, and my mother made me do it. I’m sure other people will call him.

Where does Owens go from here? She should have studied up on Israel before making baseless remarks, because now The Daily Wire is gone, and it’s not like she’s popular in the realm of media types who give people jobs. If she were, she would not be on Minnect.

If she had done a little research before speaking, she would have realized the things she has said about Israel were lies. I don’t think she would have spread lies on purpose.

If anyone is interested, I don’t have much wisdom to confer, either, and I’m obscure, but I’ll be happy to give 15 minutes of phone time to anyone who will Paypal me $50,000 in advance. That’s a huge discount from Candace Owens’s rate, and I promise not to say anything antisemitic.

Child Expected to Answer Question Three Supreme Court Justices Can’t Handle: LGBTQΦ(x,t)

Before I stop writing today, here is another video about perversion.

Here is a three-year-old video of a woman who looks exactly like Rachel Maddow. She has two big, sturdy boyfriends or husbands or something, and they are raising a child without giving it (her, I think) any clues as to whether it’s a boy or girl.

The lady says the kid’s gender is something she (I will commit) “will have to figure out and then tell us.”

So this child has Schrodinger’s gender. There is no gender until the child observes it, and then it becomes definite.

Or not. This poor kid will probably cross the line many times throughout her sad life.