Genocide Should be Harder Than This

Right now I’m thinking about Samantha Woll, the synagogue president who was murdered by an angry Muslim last week.

The police have no suspect, so why do I say a Muslim killed her?

1. Jewish victim
2. Killing occured while Muslims were calling for violence against Jews, after one of the filthiest attacks on Jews in history
3. Killed in Detroit, which has an enormous concentration of Muslims

It’s conceivable someone else did it. Maybe she has an ex-husband who thought this would be a good opportunity to kill her and blame Muslims. Probably not, though.

She was a leftist. Why do I say that?

1. Jewish
2. Female
3. Blue city
4. Blue state
5. Bigwig in a synagogue, though female. Not likely in a synagogue full of conservatives.

Also, I checked. She was a leftist activist. She used to be an aide for leftist Representative Elissa Slotkin. Go look at Slotkin’s website. It looks like Chuck Schumer programmed her.

Her synagogue is the last synagogue left in the city of Detroit, for good reason. I can see why other Jews fled. It’s basically kaput. It doesn’t even have sabbath meetings. The rabbi is a woman.

As blue as Michigan is these days, partly because Democrats and Muslims have realized they share so many progressive values, Michigan has some pretty good firearm laws. Better than Florida in some ways. Michigan allows open carry by default, and it’s a shall-issue state, so you don’t have to be a celebrity or prove you donate heavily to Democrat PAC’s in order to get a gun.

Somehow this lady was killed in her yard, with a knife.

A knife shouldn’t be underestimated. It can do a lot of gross things a gun can’t. Guns typically win in real-life encounters, though. They scare criminals, the noise attracts attention, they can do harm from greater distances, and so on.

Muslim terrorists overwhelmingly agree: women, the disabled, children, the elderly, and the weak are the best adversaries. Their principles bar them from attacking anyone who can fight back.

The odds this lady was armed are vanishingly small. Liberal Jews believe in waiting for the police. Criminals, on the other hand, believe in doing harm as quickly as possible and taking off while the police are still leaving the doughnut shop. It’s a good system.

She wasn’t armed. Her friends generally aren’t armed. American Jews are still crusading for unilateral disarmament. It’s an Islamist paradise. A stocked pond full of soft targets. The guy who killed her has no incentive to stop, and his pals have lots of incentive to follow his lead.

Here’s a question no one seems to be asking: given that most Jews will continue to support unilateral disarmament, what, exactly, are they proposing as a solution?

I haven’t seen a solution mentioned. Have you? I mean, sure…”Be vigilant.” Yeah, that will fix it. Because no one who is vigilant is ever attacked by terrorists. “Drop that axe! I can see you!”

I want to know what practical, effective solutions have been proposed. Because there aren’t any, other than buying guns. This is literally the only way for a targeted group to protect itself.

Community Center tae kwon do won’t do it. No martial art will do it. With my 10mm carry piece, I’d take on a young Mike Tyson, Conor McGregor, a Gracie to be named later, and the Butter Bean on PCP rather than join their side and give the gun to one of them.

I haven’t seen any police officials offering good advice to Jews, because they haven’t. What are they supposed to say? “Threaten to sue”?

Yesterday 150,000 people protested in London. They protested brutality and war crimes. They protested genocide. Perpetrated by…Israel. No joke.

That’s a big crowd. It proves a couple of things. 1. Letting Muslims immigrate by the hundreds of thousands is a really bad idea, and 2. people are much more antisemitic than is widely understood.

It is probably true that antisemitism has increased over the last 25 years, but here’s something that is definitely true: it was always here, and antisemites have been restrained only by the sense that they would face consequences for behaving badly.

Here is how a vicious crowd works. They will circle a victim and say mean things. Someone might throw an empty water bottle. Eventually, one of them finds a spine and throws a punch. The others look around, thinking, “Do I have permisssion now? Do I have numbers on my side?” Then everybody jumps in. The number or unfriendlies doesn’t increase after the punch is thrown. They were there already, waiting for permission from their peers.

If you can get 150,000 idiots to support genocide against Jews in the capital of London, how many idiots do you think we have here?

American blacks make up over an eighth of our population, and a huge percentage of them believe antisemitic conspiracy theories. These theories include the notion that blacks are the true Jews, and that Jews stole their inheritance. Many think Jews “ran” the slave trade.

Hispanics have always had rocky relations with Jews. There is also a small subset of ordinary white Americans who are also antisemitic. That subset is growing because young Americans are overwhelmingly leftist, and hatred of Israel is chic on the left. A lot of young Americans refuse to identify as liberal, but then their standards are so skewed, they can be pretty far out on the left and think they’re centrists.

It’s like America is a horse track, and the horses are held back only by the gate. When the gate opens, they will run.

I can’t imagine going to Detroit for any reason, but living there, being Jewish, being in charge of a synagogue, and not carrying a weapon…that borders on psychosis.

Most American Jews don’t feel they should take serious measures to protect themselves, but they have plenty of energy for gun control and disempowering their best friends: conservative Christians.

I don’t know what they’re going to do. Their old strategies won’t work here. They can’t give away land in America. No demon-possessed Muslim killer is going to agree to walk away if you give him your front yard.

I wonder how many English people were at the London protest. I mean ethnic English. Fact which is little-known in America: many ethnic British really hate Yeshua these days. It seems to be the majority attitude. They attack street preachers. The police arrest street preachers. The people curse them the way sane people curse pedophiles.

The further you get from Yeshua and the Holy Spirit, the more you will come to hate Jews and Christians.

The common English have really changed. Their language is foul, all the time. Their manners are beneath atrocious. When I was a kid, Americans thought of them as restrained people with good manners and refined speech. Not any more.

If there are 150,000 Londoners who are willing to march and be filmed, exposing themselves as haters of Israel, there must be millions of kindred souls in the UK who will come out of the woodwork when things get hot.

You know what they say about roaches. If you see one in the kitchen, there are dozens in the walls.

My prediction: Jews in the US will do very little to protect themselves, and they will pay the price. It’s already happening. Dumb political opinions are harder to cure than cancer.

What should people like me do? Should I put a couple of mobile homes on my property in case Jews need a refuge next year? If I did, admittance would be limited to those willing to carry guns. I wouldn’t put out bait for killers and then agree to try to protect myself and my wife without help from my guests.

Now Front Page has come out with a poll of American Muslims, and the conclusion is that 57% either strongly or somewhat approve of the Hamas butchery. I wonder what wonderful news tomorrow will bring.

Let’s Sit Down and Talk This Over

A reader suggested checking out Citizen Free Press, so I did. I used to read Drudge, but it turned into a bizarre anti-Trump site which seems to be run by RINO’s or cautious leftists who don’t want people to know Drudge retired.

Citizen Free Press comes up with a lot of useful information, as Drudge once did. Today it links to a story about American Jews who have decided to buy guns. The Holocaust never really ended, and Jews seem to be aware of it, but somehow most of them have no interest in protecting themselves, so it’s big news when they start buying guns.

Who, exactly, did they think would look out for them? Governments? Aren’t governments the entities that killed so many of them in the past? Perhaps I am ignorant of history, but as far as I know, relying on governments has done the Jews about as much good as it has American Indians. The damage done by private citizens throughout history is miniscule by comparison.

Pharaohs, Babylonians, Achaemenids, Greeks, Romans, Spaniards, the Portuguese…one government after another persecuted them. Haman was a government official who had the king’s support.

When the Nazis really got going, German war heroes protested. Jewish German war heroes. Loyal German citizens. I guess they could not believe serving in Germany’s wars didn’t entitle them to live. Their government gassed them anyway. There wasn’t much they could do to fight back.

Jews were instrumental in spreading socialism, but the USSR persecuted them just the same, even as they spread the worship of Karl Marx, an ethnic Jew.

The story quotes Simon, a 35-year-old Israeli-American:

Unfortunately for us Jews around the world, our security situation has worsened. Now is the time to arm myself and protect my family. So, I’ve decided to purchase my first firearm and undergo firearm, general situational awareness, and home defense training.

What?

“Now” is the time for him to arm himself and protect his family? Weren’t they worth protecting last year?

He’s buying his first firearm? So up until now, he chose helplessness. Why? What was he afraid of? Did he think owning a gun would cause him to join a gang and rob liquor stores? What, exactly, was the down side of owning a gun? There is none.

I wonder what percentage of Muslims who support Hamas have been reluctant to buy guns. It must be an agonizing decision for them.

I guess I shouldn’t talk. If memory serves, I bought my first pistol in 1991. I bought it in case I had to kill my sister’s junkie friends. She said she would send them to “take care of” me because I had helped my mother get her into rehab.

I already had a .22 rifle, and I had access to my parent’s guns, but I should have done better. I didn’t buy a real defensive rifle until maybe 2008, and it was set up for varminting, not home defense. It was an LR-308. Not the greatest choice in a home invasion.

On the other hand, I’m not a Jew, so no one is trying to exterminate me and my kind. Not yet.

I should have gotten an AK-47 as soon as I could own one legally. Pistols are second-rate defense guns. I should have gotten a carry license sooner instead of leaving my gun in my car.

I would think the events of the last century would have sufficed to convince Jewish people that owning, carrying, and hiding guns and ammunition were good ideas. I’ve known a lot of Jews, and I know that even though they are generally statists, they also see the government and their neighbors as potential enemies. That’s smart. If you know how things stand, why not govern yourself accordingly?

A Jewish friend of mine lost his dad to leukemia in about 1986, and he inherited hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash which had been sealed up in drywall in his living room. His dad didn’t do that because he sincerely trusted Uncle Sam. He wanted money no one could get at in a crisis.

Unfortunately, according to my friend, his brother and his dad’s lawyer stole the money. Interesting story. One day it was there, and the next, his brother and the lawyer claimed there had never been any money.

He filed a bar complaint against the lawyer, a man named Kaufman. I still remember. He said Kaufman called him when he found out, crying and begging him to withdraw the complaint. A little late.

There are really only two reasons to avoid having a gun close by. One is that you don’t trust everyone in your house to behave, and the other is that you’re afraid kids will manage to get at it. These dangers barely exist for responsible people. They can be negated. There comes a time when you have to admit the danger presented by your enemies is greater than the small risk someone in your household will misuse a gun.

The insanity and viciousness of the left are really fruiting now. Americans of Arab descent are protesting openly, cheering the terrorists on and making fun of Jewish tears. There is no helping most of these people. They are in the grip of spirits. Very few of them will ever come out of delusion and get to know the God who made Esau and Ishmael. Only the Holy Spirit saves people from delusion.

Strange Brew Goes from Grain to Glass in One Week

My newest beer is now drinkable, way before it should have been. And I am delighted and confused.

Way back in 2004, I decided to brew something resembling a heavy Belgian beer. In my eyes, the Belgians are the kings of brewing. At least they were, before Americans and Australians became the world’s best homebrewers and craft brewers. Belgians make all kinds of nutty beers. Germans make BMW beer. Boring. All about hitting certain targets as accurately as possible, as though brewing were F-class shooting. They obey crusty old rules that are, sorry to say it, arbitrary. Belgians make beers that are full of weird flavors. Complex. Surprising. In many cases, strong.

I liked Chimay’s beers. Chimay is or was a Belgian company. I believe it now belongs to a multinational conglomerate. It started in a monastery, with Trappist monks. Let’s put this on the table: historically, monks have really enjoyed getting drunk and eating great food. The Chimay monks made beers I would describe as flamboyant. Tons of flavor. Tons of alcohol.

For some reason I no longer recall, I decided to see if I could make a wonderful beer that was sort of like what Chimay would make if it were me. I came up with a grain bill that was nearly half wheat. I added table sugar just to bump the ABV up, and I hoped it would add a cidery flavor, which sucrose supposedly does.

Belgians use something called candi sugar. I have no idea what it is, but experience brewers told me table sugar would have basically the same effect. There are dark candi sugars that color beer, but I wasn’t interested in that.

I came up with this, off the top of my head:

5 lbs Wheat Malt, Ger (2.0 SRM)
4 lbs Pilsner (2 Row) Bel (2.0 SRM)
2 lbs Pale Malt (2 Row) US (2.0 SRM)
1 lbs 8.0 oz Caramel/Crystal Malt – 60L (60.0 SRM)
1 lbs Munich Malt (9.0 SRM)
1 lbs table sugar

That’s how the brewing program Beersmith describes my grain bill.

I used Nugget and Crystal hops, which give a wonderful, penetrating aroma.

The beer was fantastic, and like a lot of heavy beers, it got better with age. A lot of people age heavy beers for a year or more before drinking them.

When I got back into brewing this year, I decided to redo this beer, but I chose to use Sabro hops. This is a new hop, and it’s pretty weird. It’s extremely bitter, so you have to be careful how much you add when you’re boiling. Boiling brings out bitterness. When you steep it or use it for dry-hopping, you get other things. It supposedly produces coconut and pineapple flavors and aromas. I thought Sabro was perfect for this beer, which is pretty sweet even after fermentation is over.

I brewed my new batch one week ago today. I have a brewing machine called a Braumeister, and it is rated for up to 6 kg of grain. My recipe goes over 6.1, and it contains wheat, which tends to gum things up and require the addition of rice hulls to make water go through it.

I chose to dump this stuff in the Braumeister and see what happened. I was only going over the published limit by a small amount, and the Braumeister does a great job with wheat. If it worked, I would know the machine could handle it, so I would be able to make future batches without changing anything. If not, I would know different.

I was shooting for an unfermented (original) gravity of 1.084, and I hit 1.073, assuming my measurements were okay. I had some issues with my cheap refractometer. I added dehydrated malt extract, which is mainly sugar, to make up the difference.

I fermented using Abbaye yeast, which is supposedly derived from Trappist yeast. It has a reputation for giving off esters that produce spicy and fruity flavors. I fermented at 65° to reduce banana-flavored esters and push spicy esters.

This beer went from 1.084 to 1.017 in two days. My target was 1.018. Heavy beers often take over a week to ferment. Wheat beers ferment very quickly, so I guess that explains what happened.

I sampled the beer when fermentation was over, and it was harsh. It had a solvent taste, which is normal for heavy beers that aren’t aged. I felt a burn when I drank it. This beer should contain about 9% alcohol by volume, and you can feel that when you drink, especially when a beer is young.

Yesterday, I sampled the beer again, and it was still harsh. I moved it to a new keg, to get it away from the hops I used to dry-hop it and the yeast that grew while it fermented. I decided to age the beer at 55° to kill the harshness. I expected weeks to pass before the beer was worth drinking.

Having no patience, today I checked the beer again, and it was perfect. Sweet, tasty, and free from solvent flavors. It no longer burned in my mouth, but I felt the burn down in my esophagus.

This is not supposed to happen. It should have taken a long time to improve.

I don’t know what’s going on. I’m sure the beer is finished. I had a pretty small amount tonight, and I have to say that I felt it. It was nothing like my other beers, which are considerably weaker.

I moved it to my keezer, where it will reach 35° by tomorrow. I see no point in keeping it at 55° when it’s so good right now. I know that if there is any fermentable sugar left in it, the residual yeast will consume it in spite of the low temperature. Anyone who tells you beer stops fermenting when you chill it and get rid of the yeast cake is dreaming.

I can’t figure out what’s going on, but good beer is good beer. If it’s done fermenting and the gravity is low, and the harshness is gone, it’s finished. It may not be as good as it will become later, but it’s ready to drink, weeks before I thought it would be.

It’s Beaujolais beer.

It’s unbelievably good. I thought my stout was good, and it is, but this is better.

Don’t do Your Enemy’s Job for Him

If you want to read about a confusing news story, you came to the right place. I just saw a Politico article about Israeli terrorism victims who blame Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for what happened to them and their neighbors during the Hamas atrocity. They were attacked on Nahal Oz, a kibbutz near the semi-fictional nation of Gaza.

Here is an excerpt:

“He [Netanyahu] needs to say: ‘I’m sorry, I failed you. It’s because of me and my pride, you were almost murdered,’” said Cherry, a 45-year-old Belgian-Israeli health economist.

Poterman and Cherry described how they shut themselves in safe rooms on the morning of the attack, and hunkered down for 12 hours, waiting for the Israel Defense Force to come to their rescue. Over those excruciating hours, rockets flew overhead and Hamas raided homes across the kibbutz shouting “Allahu Akbar” [God is greatest] and “Massacre the Jews.”

Poterman, who until last week worked as an after-school teacher, sent what he believed would be his last Facebook post from the safe room: “Half an hour, we are locked up with terrorists at home, no one comes.”

The 40-year-old said he sent the message as he stood next to the safe room door holding an ax, while his wife Maria held their seven-month-old baby girl in one hand and a knife in the other. Neither of them expected to survive, but a latch installed on the inside of the door by a previous tenant prevented the terrorists from bursting in.

In a separate safe room, Cherry, her husband Oren and their three children barricaded the door as best they could with a cupboard and chair.

The man who sent the message boxed himself up in a laughable “safe room” or “mammad.” This is a ridiculous structure intended to protect Jews from danger. Every new building in Israel has to have a mammad on every floor. It worked for this man and his family, but mammads failed for many others because breaking into a room isn’t that hard. Getting someone to open a mammad isn’t hard when you have hostages outside.

There is a lot of hype about mammads having thick concrete walls and steel doors. Sounds great, but not a problem for a terrorist with explosives. Also, older mammads don’t always have oxygen supplies, and incredibly, they have not all been retrofitted.

Bottom line: people in mammads died during the invasion. Some from suffocation. Some by being dragged out and killed.

A mammad is better than nothing, sometimes, and they protect people from missile shrapnel, which is what they’re really designed for. Having a mammad sounds like a great idea for people anticipating missile strikes. But against armed assailants, rifles are way better.

The man quoted in the article obviously knew disarmament was a big mistake, because he made a pathetic effort to gather arms. He tried to protect his family from machine guns with a knife and an axe. Words fail me.

If you’re all for arming yourself when people come to kill you, and you have proven you are, why were you against it before they showed up? You knew they were coming eventually.

The mindset of the victims is extremely disheartening. “The government was supposed to come save us.” They are Europeans by birth, and of course, they are Jewish, so small wonder they thought the god-state was their salvation.

Here in America, we have a saying: “When seconds count, the police are just minutes away.” It’s not unnuanced flyover populist tripe. It’s indisputable wisdom. The underlying truth is that the government is not able to respond to threats sufficiently quickly to protect people. It’s not even required to, under the law. Typically, the cops show up when the party is over, like roadies cleaning up a stage after a Grateful Dead concert.

It’s nothing less than astounding that there are adult human beings who can’t figure this out. And how can such people exist, in a country where terrorist attacks and surprise wars are certain to occur?

Israelis died because they trusted their government to do things only a god could do, and because their tragic biases led them to vote for laws that made them sheep for the slaughter.

Safe rooms. Really? Even if they worked reliably, how do they help when criminals are closer to them than their victims? How well do they work for people with wheelchairs and walkers? What good is your safe room when you’re on a bus or a tractor?

What percentage of the day does a typical Israeli spend very close to the door of a safe room?

Here’s what will happen if I think criminals are on my property. First, grab a high-capacity rifle and at least two magazines. I will already have a pistol with a laser in my pocket. If I have time, I will call the police, primarily because they might arrive on time to shoot, protecting me from liability. Next, I’ll pick the best defensive location I can, and I’ll wait as long as I can before doing my best to send my guests’ guts, skull fragments, and brain tissue flying onto the walls and floor.

All but the most determined or high attackers will be cowardly and lightly armed, so the odds they’ll run off are overwhelming. If they don’t, I’ll probably be much better armed than they are, and I’ll be able to rain lead on them for quite a while. If I manage to grab additional ammo, which is likely, I’ll still have hundreds of rounds handy when they’re down to one or two.

I will not lock myself in a ludicrous room and hope the criminals don’t have time to use an angle grinder or burn me out.

Who would you rather attack? Me, or an unarmed leftist kibbutznik?

As for attacks outside the home, I can put an AK-47 and a hundred pounds of cartridges in my car if I feel like it. Not in the trunk. Not unloaded. Beside me in the passenger seat in a bag I can open with one hand. And then there’s my carry pistol. I can take it nearly everywhere. Even banks.

It is astonishing that Israeli homes and business are soft targets. Who thought that was a smart idea? Was there a meeting where a bunch of Jewish politicians trying to come up with a homeland defense plan put “gun control” on a list on a whiteboard?

The victim named Poterman says he waited 12 hours for messiah government to come save him. Think what he and his friends could have done in one hour with rifles. You can Google and find out what other armed victims managed to do. Arabs are not known for their prowess as warriors. Much the opposite. They do poorly against resistance.

Israelis should be armed, and they should carry. They should be required to carry, like off-duty policemen in America. They should also be encouraged to keep automatic rifles and lots of cartridges. The government should allot money to buying them night vision gear. They should be building pillboxes, like the Nazis who defended the French coast and the Japanese who slaughtered Allied marines.

Go on the web and watch self-defense shootings. You’ll see that successful defenders sometimes produce and fire weapons in under two seconds. It is not unusual for a person to need to shoot in an extremely short time. A person who carries a gun has the ability to respond extremely quickly to danger, and he can do it wherever he is. Think how different the music festival would have been had the paragliding baboons descended into a crowd with hundreds of pistols, with rifles in their vehicles. A lot of the attackers would have died in the air.

The government may have failed to do things it should have done in order to detect or prevent this attack. Fine. Maybe Netanyahu needs to do better. But the people also failed themselves. They need to realize the government is never going to be able to prevent every attack or respond adequately. This should be obvious.

If you want to be safe from murderers, you should do your best. Disarming yourself is not your best. When you disarm yourself, you’re doing the first thing your enemies would put on their dream list of goals.

Israelis haven’t learned from their own history. In the book of Nehemiah, the Jews were surrounded by the ancestors of people who are trying to exterminate them now. As the Jews rebuilt the temple, the people who carried materials were required to hold the materials in one hand and a weapon in the other. The ones doing the buiding had to wear swords on their hips. Open carry was the rule in the past, but today a select few get a crummy 9mm pistol and 50 rounds of weak ammunition, and the rest get nothing.

Hamas was not afraid at all of Israeli civilians, but their cowardly assassins would never dream of attacking rural Florida or Tennessee. Terrorist bodies would fill dumpsters. Shouldn’t they be more afraid of Israelis than anyone?

Leftism is a luxury delusion that comes at a very high price. I don’t know what it will take to get Israelis to let go of it. I doubt they’ll do what they have to do. I think that if sane gun policies were in Israel’s future, Zechariah 14, which is certain to happen, would look very different.

My Phone is Now Antisemitic

Written on October 19.

I have an Android phone, and I do not use the browser it came with. I have never used it until today. I didn’t actually use it; it sent me some garbage I never asked for. It decided to put an AP story in a notification I never agreed to permit.

I’ll post a screen capture.

This is outrageous. Why am I receiving anti-Israel filth I never told anyone to send me? I’m not supposed to receive ANY notifications. I didn’t even know they existed, and I’ve had this phone for months.

Someone in the tech/government complex signed me up. Someone with a hair color not found in nature.

The headlines deliver a pretty clear message: “You should sympathize with supporters of terrorists because Israel is bombing their ‘country’ in order to kill terrorists the people help hide. Israel is dishonest because it bombs areas it previously called ‘safe’.”

This is not journalism. It’s propaganda. Propaganda spam, from a company I bought a product from. What kind of morons is Samsung hiring?

Here’s a lesson for people who are truly so stupid they don’t understand how war works.

1. Collateral damage: what happens when you do your best to strike a legitimate military target while sparing noncombatants, and you harm noncombatants accidentally.

2. Atrocity: walking into a baby’s nursery and slicing his head off with a sheath knife while he screams and thrashes.

There is zero moral equivalence here, and you know it. If you hate Jews, just admit it. Don’t be a liar as well as a genocidal bigot.

The terrorists carried torture manuals with them when they invaded Israel.

Ordinarily, torture is intended to advance a political or military goal. Waterboarding, for example, was done by desperate, fearful nations in order to prevent nuclear, chemical, and biological attacks by Muslims. In the case of the Hamas raids, the purpose of the torture was recreational. Terrorists who were busy were not supposed to take time to torture people. Those who had more time were encouraged to torture Jews prior to killing them, and Hamas gave them a book to help them do it well. The purpose was to make the invasion more fun for the baboons who perpetrated it.

Israel does wrong from time to time because its enemies place it in very difficult situations with constant, unnecessary existential threats, but Hamas is in the terrorism and atrocity business, full time.

As for pitying the Palestinians, what is the rationale? When I see videos of feral teenagers destroying stores and hurting people in blue cities, I have no sympathy whatsoever, because the people in those cities voted for their own destruction over and over. They got what they fought for. I don’t care if Chicago or San Francisco is a pile of ashes this time next year, because it’s unhealthy to torment yourself over the self-inflicted problems of incorrigible people. I can’t fix it. I didn’t cause it. I’m not going to give myself stress over it.

If I can’t pity leftists in American cities, how can I pity Palestinians who gave terrorists a mandate?

Hamas got 57% of the vote in the last election in Gaza. It’s not like a minority regime took control by force. Palestinians knew exactly what they were voting for, and they got a majority the likes of which we generally do not see in our own presidential elections. They’re getting exactly what they voted for. They knew Hamas would stage large-scale terrorist attacks on Israel, and unless they’re stupid, they knew bombs would then fall on Gaza. They knew they were placing the Israelis in a position where they had to choose between extremely harsh military action and permitting and encouraging further atrocities against their own people. As people like to say on the web these days, the Palestinians found out. That’s on them. On the civilians.

As always, however, to the press, Israel is the problem. Just like Israel is the problem when terrorists blow up their own hospital.

The spirit of antichrist is becoming more transparent, to use a word Biden used insincerely about his administration. The spirit of antichrist has a body of people it uses against Jews and real Christians, and it’s helping its slaves come out of the closet. Not just Palestinians. The Antichrist has drones everywhere, especially among American leftists.

If you read the news, you must know that two male college professors who think they’re women have just drawn attention for going after Israel on social media. One called Israelis “irredeemable excrement” and “pigs,” and the other man said they should fear “us,” and he put up emojis of a cleaver, an axe, and drops of blood. So far, no outrage from the universities’ administrations.

Donald Trump is being tried because his efforts to stop a riot didn’t satisfy leftists. The idea is that an insufficient response is the same thing as incitement. If that’s true, what about a professor who encourages the slaughter of Jews with edged weapons in front of the entire world? Is that kind of speech legal?

Federal case law says speech can be censored when it incites violence. The Supreme Court failed to add something, though. They failed to point out that this only applies to conservatives. Al Sharpton and Maxine Waters incited a murder and riots and got in no trouble whatsoever.

You can disagree with Israel on certain points without being antisemitic. You can’t call all Israelis “irredeemable excrement” or threaten them with cleavers and axes unless you have a problem with Jews per se.

Antisemitism is cool now. That’s amazing.

The spirit of antichrist uses the flesh’s herd instinct against human beings. Only a few people out of a thousand do what they think is right. The rest look to the right and left to see what the imbeciles around them are doing, and they follow suit. This is how you get orderly, civilized Germans and Austrians to herd people into gas chambers.

“Cool” is a word that became popular about 60 years ago. Whatever you may think it means, it really means, “tending to evoke admiration and approval from others.” Coolness is sick. It’s pathological. Most people can be manipulated into doing nearly anything by the admiration and approval of others.

One of the most socially debilitating problems you can have is to be declared uncool. You become an object of ridicule. Nothing you say is taken seriously, simply because you’re the one who said it. You lose friends. You can lose your family. Cancellation.

Thanks to the Internet and things like Tiktok, we now have a world in which the promise of approval or disapproval is more strongly motivating than ever before. A complete pinhead with a million followers can get people to do things a monkey is too smart to do. Kids all over America have deliberately eaten laundry detergent in order to be admired.

This is one of the tools the spirit of antichrist is using to move the apocalypse along. “Agree, or live under a blanket of contempt and rejection.” People are being herded like pigs or sheep. They don’t think. They listen to their base drives to be admired and accepted. Because they don’t think, they do things that are clearly stupid and evil.

License. They have license from the mob, and it was handed down initially from the mob’s leader. The false shepherd. Satan.

Coolness belongs to the left. You can’t become cool by having a successful show on Fox News. Who are the coolest people? The biggest fools on the planet. Whore rappers. Spoiled athletes. Drug-addict actors who can’t work a crossword puzzle. By and large, leftists.

The antichrist’s zombies are freed from the heavy burden of reason. From the bonds of righteousness. “Righteous” simply means “correct.” “Righteousness” literally means “rightness.” People who don’t reason are unrighteous, because correctness comes from reasoning, and the righteous are their natural enemies.

Virtually no one on Earth has any idea what the spirit of antichrist is or how it works. I’ve never seen anyone but myself describe the way it uses approval and admiration to herd idiots to persecute their betters and destroy themselves.

The ignorance is amazing, and it is destroying billions. As God said once, his people were destroyed for lack of knowledge. It still happens.

Knowledge comes only from the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and you have to spend time with him, praying in tongues and so on. No Holy Spirit, no revealed knowledge. No revealed knowledge, no protection from destruction. If you are ignorant, you will be destroyed, and you will do most of the destruction.

Virtually everything I saw coming years ago is coming true now, and I predicted it would get worse, so you can expect that to come true, too.

It amazes me that my phone is being used to send me blatant antichrist propaganda without my prior consent. I wonder what’s next. Gradually, or not so gradually, we will have to cede more and more of our will, our privacy, and our dignity in order to be tolerated. Already, people have been fired for refusing to call male perverts women. Preachers in Western nations have been arrested for committing the crime of criticizing perversion. We’re being told we have to pay “reparations” to people we never harmed. Kids who want to play sports are ostracized for refusing to kneel and endorse a racist, Marxist, pro-perversion, anti-Christian, city-burning terrorist organization founded by three witches.

The mark is just one more straw on the camel’s back. When it comes, you’ll have to beg or grow your own food. You won’t be able to use stores or buy things online. Cancellation will be perfected.

Fortunately, the Bible says it won’t come until the beast is revealed. That happens in the middle of the tribulation, which hasn’t started.

You probably don’t realize how bad things are, because you’ve gotten used to it. I wish I could go back to 2000, bring my then-self to the present, and show him what’s happening. I would love to see what he said.

Hamas Should Send The Knesset a Fruit Basket

I have been reading about the Israeli government’s sorry response to the problem of unarmed citizens being murdered by imbeciles from Gaza.

I lived in Israel for 4 months, and back then, guns were everywhere, mainly in the hands of the omnipresent soldiers. I saw soldiers with M16’s on buses and city streets. I also knew a kibbutznik who had a rifle for hunting, and I was with him when he took it to an almond grove. I can’t find information on the history of Israel’s gun laws, but I know that prior to the Gaza ambush, it was very hard for Israelis to get guns. At best, you could get one pistol (pathetic) and 50 rounds of ammunition (enough to last a few minutes at best).

This, in a country where nearly everyone is forced to join the military for two years. It is no exaggeration to say Israel chooses not to trust millions of trained, patriotic soldiers with guns.

Now government officials are saying Israel must arm its citizens. It’s making some piddling, ineffective corrections that come too late and do way too little.

Israeli Jews are not the type of people who use guns to commit crime. The risk of a gun-fueled crime wave is not small; it’s imaginary.

I admit, there was a time when thousands of Jews committed very serious gun crimes in Israel. They gathered and stored illegal firearms under the British, and when independence came, and the Arabs made their predictable effort to exterminate Jews, the guns and other weapons came in pretty handy.

The predecessors of the government of Israel thought it was smart for Jews to hoard guns in their homes, in case of Arab attacks. When did they decide helplessness was better?

Did Israel turn its citizens into Hamas practice targets because it was afraid of ordinary crime, or was the government trying to prevent extremist nuts from mounting insurrections? I don’t know. I haven’t been able to find out by Googling. I do know a huge segment of Israel’s population is made up of Jews from Europe and America, and Western Jews love leftism and gun control. Jews always commit political suicide whenever possible. Give them enough rope, and they will give it to their enemies.

If Israel wanted to prevent deaths from gun crimes, it has failed catastrophically. More people just died from gun crimes committed by Arabs than would have died had every law-abiding adult Israeli been allowed to carry a loaded M16 this year. And Israel encouraged the murderers to attack by disarming the victims. Would Hamas have attacked an armed populace? It’s a valid question.

It looks like the leftist tech establishment is suppressing stories about Israelis who fought off terrorists, but they are out there. And you can find videos of the police slaughtering terrorists with pistols, which is remarkable. It shows how little good a rifle does an untrained coward.

It would be tough for an enemy like Hamas to invade rural America, at least in the areas where Trump got a lot of votes. Not only are rifles everywhere, including in vehicles, but there are many, many people who are trained to kill animals and/or people a long way off. Over the last decade or so, precision rifle shooting has taken off. I’m part of it. I went to a facility where I hit a man-sized target well over half a mile away. Thermal scopes are also popular, so a lot of men in America have the ability to kill underarmed assailants in the dead of night from hundreds of yards away. What works on wild hogs works on terrorists.

It’s bizarre that I, a fairly unskilled person who has never been a policeman or soldier, have the ability to kill more terrorists than the entire population of a typical kibbutz full of soldiers. If you’re a terrorist, you are literally better off attacking 2000 trained Israelis than you are approaching my house.

As for a Biblical perspective, the rapes and the murders of children and babies made me think of prophecy. I thought these things were predicted by Isaiah, but it turned out Zechariah was the prophet who spoke about what is happening now:

Behold, the day of the Lord cometh, and thy spoil shall be divided in the midst of thee.

For I will gather all nations against Jerusalem to battle; and the city shall be taken, and the houses rifled, and the women ravished; and half of the city shall go forth into captivity, and the residue of the people shall not be cut off from the city.

Then shall the Lord go forth, and fight against those nations, as when he fought in the day of battle.

Hosea also spoke about the fruit of rebellion:

Samaria shall become desolate; for she hath rebelled against her God: they shall fall by the sword: their infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their women with child shall be ripped up.

I am not going to study the word all day to figure out whether Hosea was talking about the present day, but it’s pretty obvious Zechariah was, because he said his predictions would come to pass at the end. Hosea serves to point out the kinds of things that happen when Israel is detached from God and connected to idols, including the idol of self-confidence. Infants dismembered. People killed.

What Zechariah said about all nations being gathered against Jerusalem is clearly coming true. All over the world, Muslims and leftists have formed a bizarre coalition, and thousands, not dozens, of people are protesting Israel, the victim. It shows that antisemitism has increased greatly. There are millions of people out there who are just waiting to be allowed to do what they want to the Jews. A lot of them are in Jewish sanctuaries like New York.

Why did America ever start allowing Muslims to become residents? It’s amazing how stupid this country was. We now have entire communities where people who support Israel aren’t safe. And the rest of us are on the same list.

In Sydney, Australia, Jews have been warned to stay indoors in order to be safe from Muslims. Not in Syria or Iran, but Australia!

In the US, BLM has come out against Israel, exposing some of the all-too-common antisemitism among American blacks. We don’t call minorities out on their wickedness; just Caucasians. It’s too bad, because America is full of blacks who literally believe they are the real Jews. They think the Jews stole their inheritance. Hispanics also have issues with Jews. Small wonder. Look what their ancestors did.

I saw addled leftist Jake Tapper expressing surprise to see how many leftists were raging against Israel and the Jews. What a fool! For at least a quarter of a century, it has been obvious to anyone who can see that conservative Christians are the only American friends Jews have. The antisemitism of the left has been on display for ages, as has the support of the right, but people like Tapper are somehow unable to summon the honesty and integrity to acknowledge what has been right in front of them since before the turn of the century!

If American conservatives stopped supporting Israel tomorrow, the Muslim world would descend on Israel a month later. Leftists would celebrate, and only God himself could defeat the invaders.

God has done miraculous things to rebuild Israel, but as long as most Jews reject their true Messiah and the Holy Spirit, they will have much less protection than they need. Zechariah says God will eventually fight the nations that are against Israel, but only after a lot of damage has been done.

Some Jews are saying this feels like the Holocaust. Yes, it is like the Holocaust. It is the Holocaust. The Holocaust never ended.

The Old Testament is full of proof that Israel is on top when it pleases God and on the bottom when it doesn’t. Israel is surviving, but it’s still not on top, so even Jewish sages who hate Yeshua should be wondering what’s wrong.

My wife and I pray for Israel and the Jews every day. We don’t just ask God to open the eyes of the Jews. We pray for protection and abundance. Lately we have been cursing their enemies. We pray for their arms to malfunction. We ask God to cause the weapons to harm the enemy, not the Jews. We ask him to make Israel’s enemies fight each other, and we don’t limit it to those in the Middle East. We call on him to expose their filthiness.

We also pray for God to rescue Israel’s enemies from Islam.

Apart from prayer and blessing and cursing, though, we are just spectators. It’s too bad we can’t do more. We can’t go over and fight. We’re already buying weapons through our tax dollars. I vote for candidates who support the Jews.

There are ministries that help Jews. Jewish Voice is one.

If you’re a Jew, get yourself some rifles while you still can. You should really try to get in touch with Yeshua, because he’s much better than a rifle, especially in the afterlife. But rifles are better than nothing in the short term.

If you’re in a state where you can’t have semiautomatic weapons with large detachable magazines, get out, and take your children. If you can’t help your family when the murderers come for you, and you had a way out, how will you be able to excuse yourself?

All Beer Should be This Good

Today I’m drinking my lovely Great Again Lager, brewed to an orange hue to honor the president who stood up for our right to great showerheads.

I brewed on October 2, and today is the 10th. I kegged at a gravity of 1.013, which should have been rock bottom, judging from other iterations. I pressure-fermented in a stainless 6-gallon keg and transferred the beer to a smaller keg without exposing it to the air. The day I kegged it, I shot a teaspoon and a half of hydrated Knox gelatin into it to clarify it.

It has been 4 days since kegging, and I have been watching the beer closely, taking samples. Until yesterday it was too cloudy and yeasty to really savor, but today it is nearly normal, so I am having a full pint.

I think this beer will be a monster when it’s fully clear and mature. Assuming there is any left by then. It has always been wonderful in the past.

While I was waiting for this beer to be ready, I opened a can of Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA. My favorite factory IPA is Snake Dog, but I can never find it. Dogfish Head is very nice. Lighter in color than my Great Again Lager. They dry hop it, which means they dump additional hops into it after brewing, so they’re not boiled. These hops add raw flavor and aroma, so you really get the value of all that breeding.

I started to think Dogfish Head was better than my lager, and I wondered if I should dry hop my next lager and stout, but then I had second thoughts. The dry hop aroma and flavor were wonderful, but I felt the aroma distracted me from the taste of the beer itself.

When you cook, you don’t always have to give people both barrels. If you throw everything you have at them, you can overpower subtle qualities they would otherwise appreciate. For example, putting anything other than salt and pepper on steak is dangerous unless it’s a cheap cut, because a good steak fried in butter already has all the flavor you need. I would make an exception for Bearnaise sauce, but I believe nothing but salt and pepper should be applied prior to cooking. I don’t even use pepper.

What’s my favorite kind of pizza? Cheese, AKA plain. I like pepperoni, and I like Hawaiian, but nothing impresses like a good cheese pizza. A monkey can make an okay pizza with 6 toppings. It takes a good cook to make an excellent cheese pizza. All the flaws are exposed.

A good beer without too much frippery is like a good cheese pizza or a really excellent biscuit. It stands on its own.

The world is full of brewkids now, and they are always doing too much. They make “juicy” IPA’s. That means they have lots of sweetening malts and not much bitterness. Like juice boxes. They make “milk stout,” which is stout sweetened with unfermentable sugar. It’s gross. I saw one guy making Cinnamon Toast Crunch beer, named for the cereal. No, thanks.

They seem to dry-hop everything. I would not go so far as the Germans, who seem to think flavor and aroma are embarrassing, but if you’ve got something good to start with, why cover it up?

I now think I’m going to dry hop my next beer, a wheat, but I don’t think I’ll touch my stout, which is perfect. I might add a tiny bit of raw Crystal hops to my orange lager next time, but just enough to draw your nose to the glass, not so much it punches you in the face.

I’m always behind the times. Today I joked that my orange beer was really an India Pale Lager. It has a robust flavor and lots of hops, somewhat like an IPA. Then I Googled and found out India Pale Lagers exist.

It seems like a stupid name for a beer. “India Pale Ale” got its name for good reason, long ago. The Wikipedia page on IPA is interesting. British brewers made an amber ale called October beer. In Britain, people cellared it for two years before drinking it. It was also shipped to India, and it was discovered that the conditions of the trip improved it. Eventually, it became known as India Pale Ale.

The phrase “India Pale Lager” is a modern thing invented by brewkids. It didn’t exist until recently. The British didn’t send amber lager to India and all that. I guess I understand why brewkids call it IPL, though, because it makes it pretty clear what it is.

I started brewing again at about the turn of the year, and it looks like I have a pretty good system going. I can keep 5 kegs going in the kitchen, using both beer gas and CO2. I can ferment two beers at once at whatever temperature I want. I have the brewing machine figured out. I haven’t had a single infected beer. I think the brewing future is bright here at the Heavily Armed Gated Northern Florida Compound.

This is How You Get Your 72 Virgins

So Israel is at war again, and as always, it was the other side’s idea. The idiots of Hamas say they have fired 5,000 rockets into Israel, and they crossed in, killed people, and took hostages, including small children. Of course, they fired at non-military targets because attacking actual soldiers or anyone who might fight back would be a violation of policy.

As one would expect, there are slimy, ignorant, bigoted people on the left, claiming Israel deserves it. We have a vile Congresswoman named Tlaib, an Arab Muslim, who refuses to comment. Based on her past, it’s pretty obvious she sides with the terrorists.

Here is a screen shot of Orthodox Jews celebrating victory over a Palestinian combatant.

Oh, wait. Sorry. That’s a shot of Arab terrorists celebrating shooting an unarmed civilian woman in the head. They removed her outer clothing, because it was obviously necessary, and drove the body around, and other Arab Muslims spat on it. The video shows these proud Muslim warrior men playing with the body.

It looks like they snapped her knee to get her into their vehicle.

If you watch the video, you may breathe a sigh of relief, thinking Muslim culture is not lost, because the crowd is so appalled by the spectacle.

NO. You will see that everyone there is thrilled with what’s happening. Could this happen in a Jewish city if the tables were turned? Don’t even ask. Palestinians are not just regular people with a set of gripes. Compared to people in most countries, they are savages.

To anyone who is dumb or dishonest enough to equate Israel’s defense efforts to the habitual cowardice and cruelty of Arab Muslim soldiers and terrorists, I have to say this: when have Jews ever done anything like this? Arabs do it all the time. It’s nothing like the civilial collateral damage Israel sometimes inflicts unintentionally. It’s policy. Arab Muslims PLAN to do this, just as Israeli soldiers plan legitimate attacks on military and terrorist targets.

Imagine watching a video of US Army recruits in boot camp, training to go into houses, capture women and children, commit rape, kill some of the victims, and haul the rest off for imprisonment and torture. It’s unthinkable. But if Hamas and many other Arab organizations trained recruits for their actual missions, this is what it would look like.

This is the difference between human beings and talking baboons. Anyone who supports this kind of behavior is a baboon, not a person.

I guess people who read the news know the lady in the photo is a gentile, not a Jew. She was a German tourist. I’m sure she told the terrorists before they executed her. They shot her anyway. Imagine Israelis invading an enemy city and shooting foreign tourists in the head. It could never happen.

This kind of behavior is unusual even in battles between corrupt nations like Russian and Ukraine. It’s comparable to things the Japanese did in the last century.

This must be a consequence of Islam. The Koran is full of barbarism. Mohammed was a murderer, pedophile, and rapist who taught Muslims to form gangs of thieves and pillage their neighbors’ cities. This is his legacy.

Anyway, yes, Israel is better than its enemies.

Better.

There are people calling for Israel to cease hostilities, as though this were a normal war instead of a response to terrorism. I disagree. Go in there and level enough of Gaza to put the fear of God into them. Make life so miserable, the people will resent the terrorists and fight them from within. Make the terrorists so afraid they will think twice before doing this again. They’re cowards who only know how to fight unarmed civilians, so it shouldn’t be hard to scare them.

As for the government of Israel, fine job on gun control. Do you really trust your Jewish citizens less than you fear your sociopath neighbors? I’m a nice, law-abiding American, but if I saw terrorists coming across my property, I could fill my yard with bodies for hours, and I’m sure my neighbors could do the same. There is a reason it’s taking so long for leftist mob terrorism to move from blue cities to red counties.

In Israel, a citizen can have one pistol and 50 cartridges. First, he needs a license, and he has to show a special need. Isn’t being Jewish in a tiny Jewish state surrounding by terrorists a special need?

It’s amazing rifles aren’t allowed. They should be required. In the real world, a typical person will be lucky to hit an attacker once if he empties two pistol magazines. It’s very, very hard to aim pistols in actual attacks. A rifle is very different. Rifleman Kyle Rittenhouse hit everyone he aimed at, and part of the time, he was on the ground being beaten by a lynch mob. Also, a rifle round will do much more damage, as the maimed criminal who surived the shooting could tell you. He only has one bicep.

Any law-abiding Israeli should be allowed to have a semiautomatic rifle and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, and many, if not all, should be allowed to have automatic weapons. As it is, Israel just waits for people to be murdered and then responds after the fact.

I’ve driven to church and back with a rifle and more than 50 cartridges on hand, but an Israeli on an isolated kibbutz has to depend on a pistol and one box of 9mm ammo, if he can get a gun at all. Do they stockpile illegal weapons under their own government, as they did under the British? Yes, if they’re smart.

I wonder what kind of gun and ammo restrictions the terrorists put on their teams.

Jews aren’t going to use guns to rob people. They’re not going to form gangs. They’re extremely unlikely to use guns in domestic abuse episodes. They have zero interest in overthrowing their government. I think gun control in Israel simply stems from suicidal Jewish leftism. American and European Jews make up over a third of the population, and these groups are hopelessly mired in leftism.

It’s like Israelis have forgotten what happened to unarmed Jews in Europe. And the harm wasn’t just done by their own governments and Nazi invaders. Their neighbors joined in. When the Nazis rolled into countries, antisemites saw it as a license to do what they had always wanted. For example, in the death camps, Ukrainian guards were feared much more than the Germans. I knew an Austrian Jew who had to hide in France as a girl, and she told me the French were much worse than the Austrians. The other kids held her down and pushed a thumbtack into her forehead to see if a Jew could bleed.

Pistols. Why does anyone rely on them? Too many movies, I guess. Some socialist Hollywood clown in lifted cowboy boots shoots a nickel out of the air at a hundred yards with a crude 1800’s revolver, with help from special effects, and people think that’s what pistol shooting is really like. They’re like the people who think coconuts are small and round because they watched Gilligan’s Island.

I carry a knife because it’s legally safer to draw a knife than a pistol, and also because everyone needs a knife. There are special penalties for brandishing a gun. I carry a pistol because a knife won’t always deter an attacker. Ideally, I’d go everywhere with a rifle in a sling. Maybe DeSantis will make it possible some day. I guarantee you, if it were legal, there would be several people in every local grocery with rifles right now, and shoplifters would be very nervous.

A pistol drills small, narrow tunnels in people. A rifle will tear them up and even blow out large chunks of them. When the criminal who ran up to Kyle Rittenhouse with an illegal pistol was shot, a large percentage of his bicep ended up scattered on the pavement. It wasn’t like TV, where a 5.56 round hits Magnum in the shoulder, he makes a bandage from a strip of his shirt, and then he uses the arm to punch out the villain and hug the girl.

I don’t understand why Hamas attacked, although they were probably encouraged by the huge cash gift Joe Biden gave their sponsor, Iran. They know they’re going to be crushed. Then the leftist gaslighters will chime in as Israel sends in bulldozers to build up the necessary buffer zone.

I don’t know why I write about this. No one who hates Jews will read this and come around.

Telling the Truth Gives Them Chest Pains

I can’t find my favorite chili garlic sauce. Like we need another shortage. And the people who claim global warming is the problem are apparently lying.

It’s very disheartening to see people blame everything on man-caused global warming, which probably doesn’t exist. Drought? Global warming. Floods? Global warming. Heat? Cold? No change? All caused by global warming.

There are people out there claiming sexual perverts are disporportionately harmed by global warming. Explain that.

The shortage began with Huy Fong sriracha sauce, which is a below-par sauce made in California. It’s the one with the chicken on the bottle. At some point, hipsters decided they had to put sriracha on everything, including things that taste bad with sriracha on them, and, being the mindless herd creatures they are, they decided Huy Fong was the only brand worth buying. This seems to have established a large consumer base.

A year or two back, Huy Fong’s production dropped. Hipsters lost it. They scrambled to corner the sriracha market. For a while, Huy Fong’s unimpressive sriracha commanded astounding prices. Now you can buy it on Amazon for the low, low price of $14 per bottle, which is still grotesquely inflated.

I didn’t care. I like sriracha on a few things, but Huy Fong’s product isn’t that great. It leans toward ketchup. I have an ancient, nearly-full bottle in my fridge.

You want good sriracha? Try Shark brand. It’s amazing. You can get it at a site called Import Foods. I have two bottles. The medium and the hot are virtually identical, so buy the cheaper one.

Shark is a real Thai product, made in Thailand. By Thais. The California guy who runs Huy Fong is Vietnamese. “Huy Fong” sounds Chinese to me, but let’s not go there.

The eco-nuts want us to think a drought in Mexico caused the Huy Fong shortage, but even the MSM says otherwise. It turns out Huy Fong committed fraud and nearly destroyed Underwood Farms, the CALIFORNIA (not Mexico) operation that supplied most of the peppers. Underwood Farms sued and won $14 million, and the verdict has been affirmed on appeal. The original verdict came down in 2019, so the problems existed before that.

Underwood Farms now sells its own line of sauces, and Huy Fong is hopping mad but can’t do anything about it.

I would have called the Underwood Farms brand “Su Yu,” but no one asked.

I don’t eat Huy Fong sriracha, so why do I care? Because now they aren’t shipping their chili garlic sauce, a different product which is excellent. It suddenly disappeared from stores. My guess is that they redirected a lot of peppers to the sriracha operation, because sriracha is now liquid gold.

I used to dump chili garlic sauce on my hummus when I ate breakfast. I did that until two days ago. Then I went to the store and saw no Huy Fong products at all. I Googled and saw Reddit posts in which people asked what else they could use. It looks like chili garlic sauce vanished quite a while ago in most places, but I didn’t know because I bought it in big bottles which take a long time to empty.

Now, breakfast is a sad and gloomy affair, during which I pretend Frank’s Red Hot is an adequate substitute for chili garlic sauce.

I managed to locate the sauce on the web at a reasonable price, in a very strange place. I haven’t bought it yet because I am looking at alternatives.

I read that you can make your own sauce from red jalapenos or Serranos, sugar, garlic, salt, and vinegar. These peppers are not hard to find because, hello, there is no pepper shortage. Peppers are everywhere, as are sauces that have no connection to Huy Fong.

I may make my own sauce before springing for the real thing. The site I found advertises two jars for an okay price, but it doesn’t say how big the jars are. That makes me want to wait.

I also learned that there are other Asian pepper sauces I should be looking at, so I may order a few. One is called sambal, and there are different kinds of it. At least one type is flavored with shrimp paste, which sounds pretty good. I found three varieties of sambal, and I may order all of them. Import Foods recommends sambal oelek to replace chili garlic sauce.

Asians make the best pepper sauces. Mexicans aren’t even in the running. I’ve tried all sorts of Mexican sauces. Some are pretty good, but nothing compares to Huy Fong chili garlic sauce or Shark sriracha. Yesterday, I bought a goopy sauce made by Thai Kitchen, and it’s fantastic. It’s not good with hummus, because it’s sweet, but it’s a wonderful discovery. It’s used on egg rolls. I may as well start looking around to see what else I’m missing.

Americans make a lot of bad hot sauces. I think Tabasco may be the most overrated sauce, after Huy Fong sriracha. It’s harsh and flavorless. Frank’s and Crystal are better, and you can get a quart of Crystal for 4 dollars.

It’s kind of strange that Mexicans make mediocre hot sauces compared to nearly everyone in the Far East. After all, the New World has had peppers forever, but the rest of the world didn’t get a chance until around 1500.

So in a nutshell, leftists lie again, Shark is better than Huy Fong, and it may be a couple of weeks before I can make breakfast great again.

What You Don’t Know You Don’t Know Can Hurt You

My latest beer, an orange lager, is nearly ready to keg, and I only started on Monday.

Brewing is like cooking, because it’s really a kind of cooking. It’s a culinary art. Beverages are part of every cuisine. I stand by that. Like all types of food and beverage preparation, brewing is full of myths and old wive’s tales. You know what I mean. “Steaks have to be rested.” “Dough has to be kneaded for 10 minutes.”

Traditional lager brewing takes a long time. Lagers are fermented at lower temperatures than ales, slowing the yeast down. Then they are “lagered,” which means they sit and age for weeks to kill the off flavors. How much of this stuff is really necessary? Not all of it.

There is a site called Brulosophy. The proprietor tests beer myths. For example, he may make two batches of the same beer, boiling one for 30 minutes and the other at 60. He then makes people taste the results and tell him whether they can tell a difference. He applies statistics to determine whether there really is a perceptible difference. He has brewed beers at different temperatures with excellent results. He has tested to see if lagering is needed. He has done all kinds of things to annoy traditionalists. There must be a bounty on him in Germany.

Also, homebrewing has changed over the last few years. For one thing, many people, myself included, now ferment some beers under pressure. The pressure suppresses off flavors that ordinarily arise when you ferment at higher temperatures. If you crank up the pressure, you can ferment faster and get the same results. Yeast likes heat.

I started pressure-fermenting as soon as I heard about it. I made the mistake of buying a plastic pressure fermenter called an All-Rounder. It’s made by Kegland, an Australian company. Actually, I think they’re Chinese, because they have a shop on Aliexpress, the guy who does their videos looks Chinese, and they have at least one product they can’t sell in the US because of patent problems.

The All-Rounder is just a huge plastic jug with a round bottom. The screw-on lid has fittings on it for disconnects, which are devices that let gas and liquid go in and out.

I got a decent lager out of my All-Rounder on the first try. I fermented at 75°, which was convenient. No fridge needed. It had a taste that reminded me of freshly-mown grass, but it wore off after a month.

I decided I did not like the All-Rounder. The jug is flimsy. It weakens with repeated use. You’re supposed to pressure-test it and eventually get rid of it. I don’t want a fermenter blowing up in my garage, and I don’t want to spend a lot of money on the same product, over and over. It’s like buying an inkjet printer for $50 and spending $5000 on ink.

I now use Torpedo Megamouth 6-gallon stainless kegs. These do not blow up if the pressure gets too high. Like ordinary homebrew kegs, they have pressure relief valves, and these valves release long before the pressure can hurt stainless steel. Plastic, not so much. Not if it’s old and weak.

I make 5 gallons of beer at a whack, so a 6-gallon keg will hold all the beer plus whatever foam grows on top. I add a product called Fermcap to prevent the foam from getting too thick.

I wondered if fermenting at 75° caused my off flavor. I also suspected oxygen, because I believe there was a point where I had to let a tiny bit of air into the All-Rounder. I decided to ferment this latest batch at 60° instead.

There are always a few little problems on brew day, but I got this thing into the fridge in the evening on Monday.

Of course, I always have to make a mistake, and this time, I failed to set the keg O-ring properly. As of yesterday, I thought the beer was doing nothing, because the pressure wasn’t building. I have a gauge on the fermenter, and it was stuck at zero.

Instead of doing the obvious thing and checking the seal with soapy water, I fiddled around for several hours. Finally, I got out the spray bottle, and I found the issue. I fixed it up and pumped 15 psi into the keg. While I was doing all this, I had to crack the keg lid open, and I saw all sorts of krausen, which means foaming yeast. The fermentation was flying.

Today when I checked, the pressure was way over 15. It was past the numbers. Maybe 25, if I had to guess. I adjusted it and tested the beer’s specific gravity, which drops as beer ferments. I got 1.013. That was a lot lower than what I expected. Things are going quickly.

I had some unusual problems measuring the gravity on Monday. Not sure what was happening. I was using a cheap refractometer which generally works fine. I have a theory that, because I was mixing boiled water into the wort to change the gravity, I got some samples which had more water in them than others. Or maybe stirring the crud on the bottom of the kettle up while mixing the water in increased the gravity for some readings. Anyway, my best guess is that the OG (original gravity) was 1.053, or 0.001 above the target. A bullseye, really, because refractometers and hydrometers aren’t as accurate as brewers like to think. This beer’s gravity plunged 40 points in under 60 hours.

My target FG (final gravity) is 1.012, so 1.013 means the beer is either finished or nearly so. If it was actually lighter than 1.053 to start, it’s done. If it was heavier, it may have some time to go.

It tastes fine, except for the harsh yeast bite every new beer has before the yeast drops out. Yeast is bitter. I’m not getting any grass flavor.

It looks like I can ferment a great lager in 4 days at 60°, which tells me there is no reason to go to 75°. I remember when people were keeping lagers in their fermenters for much longer. Four days will be fine.

Now I have to decide when to clarify and keg the beer.

Conventional wisdom says beer doesn’t ferment after kegging, but I know this is wrong. It may be true for factory beers, some of which are pasteurized, but I know at least one of my beers (stout) gets dryer after kegging, and that means yeast is at work.

I would like to have yeast on the job after kegging, to continue to improve the beer.

What about clarifying? I will be adding gelatin to the beer, and this makes all the floating stuff fall out, presumably including yeast. If I clarify before kegging, will that be too much for the yeast to handle?

Stout isn’t clarified, so I can’t really judge by what it does.

When I got started in brewing, they told me not to touch a lager for weeks after I kegged it. Should I listen to that advice now? I don’t think so. Many people question it, and not just people who don’t know good beer.

I think this beer will be very good as soon as I keg it, and it will be perfect a month later. The plan is to keg it and then put it in the keezer at 35°. I’m a slow drinker, so I will probably take 6 months to empty it. I think it will age perfectly well during that time, and I think the beer will stop improving after a month.

Brewers who do lagers often do “diacetyl rests.” This means heating your still-unkegged beer a few degrees and letting it sit until the diacetyl goes away.

Diacetyl is the chemical they put on fake buttered popcorn. Sometimes beer generates it during fermentation. I don’t plan to do a diacetyl rest. My understanding is that warm fermentations don’t produce diacetyl. This is one of the reasons people use pressure. I have also read that commercial brewers use pressure for this reason.

I think I’ll just shoot gelatin into this beer tomorrow and keg it using a closed, oxygen-free system. I should be drinking it on Saturday.

Tomorrow I’m making stout. I haven’t finished my last keg, but the thought of being without stout is terrifying. After that, I might go nuts and make a wheat-heavy Belgiany beer I made in the past. It’s very strong and full of flavor, and you can literally age it for years without ruining it.

By the middle of next week, I should have a keg of orange lager and a fresh keg of stout ready to drink. After that, I’ll feel safe enough to play with other things. I don’t want to run out of staples. They come first.

I wanted to call my orange lager Mar-a-Lager, for obvious reasons, but someone took the name a long time ago. Same for MAGA Lager. “Bigly” is taken. “Covfefe.” I call it Great Again Lager. Best I could do.

Because the beer I’m making now is already under pressure, carbonating it should be either easy or unnecessary. Another benefit. Carbonating a flat new beer is tricky, and you can end up with a long period of foamy beer.

It’s nice, having kind of a system worked out. I don’t wonder what equipment I need or what changes I have to make. The basic plan is in place. Everything else is small strokes.

Reliably Unreliable

Here at the Armed Fenced Northern Florida Compound, we have an electric gate on the main approach road to discourage riff raff and also possibly function as a choke point in dark times. I had some problems with it, and they merely served to confirm what I already knew about human nature.

The gate has a box with a keypad, and you push numbers to get in. The opener was installed 19 years ago, so I would guess that by now everyone in the county has the code, but I still make delivery drivers and the power company use it because I don’t want to find out how to change it. You push the buttons, the gate opens, it stays open while you do what you have to do, and then when you leave, a sensor by the driveway tells the gate to open again.

UPS has the code, but lately, they have been refusing to put boxes on my porch. I’ve had to walk over 100 yards to the gate to get my wet boxes covered with leaves and lizard poop.

What do you do when you have a UPS problem? You use UPS’s website, which has all sorts of ways to put you in touch with caring UPS employees. Right? I mean, the site actually encourages you to try.

Thing is, UPS has deliberately changed everything so it is virtually impossible to have any kind of communication with them. You complain to Amazon, and they tell you to complain to UPS. Then you find out it’s easier to have lunch with the Great and Powerful Oz.

Amazon could complain to UPS, and UPS would listen. But Amazon doesn’t want you bothering Amazon. Just keep buying that Chinese stuff with the funny names Chinese people think sound American. “Honey, look at my new IZMURDNULL golf pants!”

I think those names are like the Chinese characters ignorant millennials have tattooed on their bodies. You think it means, “courage of tiger,” but it really means, “fat chick pay me $300.”

Maybe Chinese factory owners make their US-educated kids make up those names, thinking they must have learned something at UCLA.

Feng Sr.: What “IZMURDNULL” mean?

Feng Jr.: “Courage of tiger.” I need the Bugatti keys.

In the past, you could call the UPS number and yell “AGENT!” over and over until the phone tree wilted and gave you a person. Now you go to the site, get a bunch of prompts that don’t apply to your situation, and then receive instructions to get lost. If you call and yell “AGENT!”, the system tells you you can’t have one, and it hangs up.

None of the web prompts matched my problem, and that was deliberate on the part of UPS. I had a driver who would not put boxes where they were supposed to be, and probably three million people had the same problem today, so obviously, they do not want people with poorly-placed boxes calling them. They would be inundated.

You can’t just go to the local UPS hub and ask for help, because they will shoot you when you try to scale the fence. UPS doesn’t like riff raff any more than I do. Okay, perhaps they won’t shoot you, but you can’t complain in person. That’s my point.

I tried to use the site in spite of the lack of relevant options. I picked a prompt which was not very appropriate, figuring some human being might read it and decide to do something even though I had responded to the wrong prompt. Unbelievably, UPS contacted me. A guy named Bill at the local hub seemed to be very upset that my boxes were being rained on, and I think he really tried to help.

He thought I hadn’t entered my code on their site. I told him I had. He said he couldn’t see it, and that meant his drivers couldn’t see it. He was convinced this was the issue. He gave me a number for UPS tech support.

I called and got one of the Indian guys.

Here’s something you need to know about phone customer service people. Generally, they have no interest in solving your problem. What they really want is to get rid of you. They look for ways to justify sending you to other representatives in other departments, and one of their favorite tricks is to connect you without permission, very quickly, while talking over you, before you can scream and tell them they’ve made a mistake.

Aedidev the CSR: OkayIamtellingyoutheproblemisnotwithourdepartmentyoumusttalkto billingpleaseholdwhileIswitchyouhaveagooddaynamaste…

You: STOP STOP WAIT WAIT

Aanandaswarup the other CSR: Hello, can you please repeat the long story you told the other CSR and repeat all the facts he did not bother to provide me with?

The Indian guy told me the general tech support people could not help me. He said the UPS My Choice tech support people were the problem, so he gave me their number.

I called and got a lady with an accent so weird I suspect it was fabricated by AI on the spot. She told me all the My Choice people could do was track packages. Which is why their department is called “tech support,” I guess. Totally appropriate.

I think it was the next day when Bill called me again, and he was distraught to learn that UPS had been no help at all.

At some point, I started telling Bill I thought the driver was the problem. I said the gate had had some issues, and I had had another driver who was a trainee, and he had been too cowardly to drive through the gate because he thought he would hit it.

No, no. Bill was positive the driver could not see the code.

I ended up talking to another Indian guy. This one started talking over me and repeating things he would have known were not true had he actually listened to anything I told him. I was somewhat abrupt with him. I said things like, “PLEASE STOP TALKING” so I could get a few words in.

Eventually, he told me to wait, and then he stopped talking. But I could still hear everyone in the boiler room in New Delhi talking around him. And I heard something that sounded like labored breathing.

I started asking him if he was there. I asked if he was all right. I think he had some kind of fit. After a while, he started to talk. He said he could not help me and that he would send me to another department. Then a robot voice came on and asked if I wanted to take a survey, giving answers to be recorded. I took the survey, explaining my complaints in detail. Then the robot said the survey couldn’t be processed, and it hung up on me.

I followed up with Bill and told him the second Indian guy seemed to have some kind of problem, and maybe someone needed to check on him.

I really said that.

Bill and the foreign lady continued to call me, and Bill also emailed. The lady was really annoying. She would say she was going to call at a certain time, then miss the time, and then call me when I was doing important things.

She always sounded the same, but she insisted she was different people. I kept asking her if she was the person who talked to me before, but she denied it.

AI. It’s coming for all of us.

Packages kept landing outside the gate.

Today, I saw the driver by the gate, and I walked out to talk to him. He said he had the code, but the gate had refused to open twice, and it was closing so fast it hit his truck. He was leaving packages in the rain to avoid being trapped or hitting the gate.

Exactly what I thought had been happening, had happened. Being old is like being clairvoyant. You get so familiar with human failings and incompetence, you always seem to know what’s really going on.

We talked for a while and did some experiments, including one where he drove through the gate. He barely moved. No wonder the gate closed before he made it. A garden slug could have passed him. It was bizarre to watch. But he was right about the open time being too short. The control box needed to be opened up and looked at.

He seemed a little nutty to me, and he definitely could have made it through the gate (like the Fedex guy and me) had he not had a bizarre fear of normal acceleration. Still, the box needed to be worked on.

I decided to go ahead and pay a tradesman. The people who built the house left me an opener manual, and it had two phone numbers written on it. A guy named Kenny.

I called Kenny, and he was surly. He said you can’t get Powermaster parts. He said the cost for a service call was $150. I asked if he was planning to do service or sell me a new box. He said he would sell me a new box. Then I asked him whether he was planning to charge me a $150 service fee for giving me an estimate on a new box.

You can see how the conversation went. The only thing I was sure about after we talked was that I was not going to do business with Kenny. If you’re a crabby old crank when a new customer calls, you’re going to be a horror for the duration of the job. Kenny, if you ever read this, this is why you work from a cell phone and your competitors have big, beautiful websites and nice shops and trucks. Get a life.

The box is from 2004, and Powermaster, the company that made it, has decided to cut off parts and support entirely. Their rationale is that it’s too hard to upgrade the boxes to current federal safety standards, but that doesn’t really apply in situations where customers want repairs, not upgrades. Their new boxes cost $3000. Why would anyone buy one after being told to forget about parts for an older one?

They encourage people to contact them via email, and they do not answer emails. It’s a good system. It works.

I have some documents that have some application to this old box, so I took a look. I also took some gut shots of the electronics. I found the potentiometer that makes the gate stay open, and I fixed it so it holds the gate fully open for 70 seconds. Even Mr. Magoo should be able to get a UPS truck through in that amount of time. On a good day, Joe Biden should be able to get his Corvette through in 70 seconds.

So I called UPS and told them what happened. No, I didn’t! I’m not that stupid. I taped a note to the keypad by the gate, saying it had been adjusted and would stay open for 70 seconds.

I did try to email Bill. UPS rejected the email instantly.

“MAIL UNDELIVERABLE

This email conversation thread has expired, and your message will not be delivered. No further action will be taken by UPS.“

Yeah, that’s not rude or anything.

What’s with the boldface? Is that supposed to be scary? Am I being scolded?

The inside of the box has a lot of dirt and crud in it, so I plan to take half a day, put a tarp down by the box, open the box, undo and clean all the connections, apply terminal protector, apply sealant to the box’s access plate, and close it up. I should be able to get another 10 years. The Powermaster people may be a little jerky, but the components in the box look basic and tough.

I think I can put an electric eye on the box to let it know when cars are in the gateway, which would be nice, because no one wants a gate that closes on cars. Driven by people they want to see, I mean.

Driver: STOP! I just wanted to tell you about the Jehovah’s Witnesses!

Gate: GATASAURUS CRUSH!!

They sell aftermarket electric eyes. I just have to find the right contacts to attach one to, and then I have to modify the box so I can run a wire into it without letting rain in. Pretty simple compared to other things I’ve done. I would rather just call someone, but I can hear the spiel already. “They don’t sell parts for this old box, but I can get you a new Liftmaster…”

If I get a new Liftmaster, guess who will install it? Me. There are like 4 wires involved. I can take it from here, chief.

In short, as has happened many times before, I was sitting here looking for people to take my money, but I could not find anyone worthy.

As for UPS, I hope Bill and the Indian guy with the anxiety attacks are doing well. Base pay at UPS amounts to $170,000, so I guess they’re fine.

Wonder what that comes out to in rupees.

Fungal Bungles

Today I had an interesting experience involving photography and the lawnmower.

I was riding along beside the fence that separates the pasture from the yard, in a long, grassy strip that resembles a road. I looked ahead and saw a couple of clusters of mushrooms. They were pretty new. Ordinarily, I would have splattered them with the mower, but I realized I was seeing something I could photograph, so I mowed around them.

When I went back later, I realized I only liked one of the clusters, so I tried to take a few shots with a Sigma 105mm macro lens. I was carrying it because I hoped to find some small things to shoot. Smaller than mushrooms.

Fortunately, not every shot I take with this lens has to be a real macro shot. I was able to shoot from far enough away to get the whole mushroom cluster in the photo.

I shot some more stuff I will probably delete, and then I edited two raw photos. You see them below.

I’m reasonably happy. The focus is bad, because I keep overestimating the depth of field, but the pictures showed potential. I picked a fairly good subject, the composition is okay, and but for the depth of field issue, these pictures would have been pretty good.

I like editing raw photos. Seems like I can stretch my work a lot closer to adequate. I am using the trial version of Photoshop Elements, and I plan to buy it.

The second photo is a little disturbing to me, because Photoshop cropped it. I did a crop first, and then I saw that the program was recommending its own crops. A couple were hideous, but then I saw the third, which was just like mine, only better. So am I still a photographer if a program crops my photos?

I learned I should not be afraid to clean up the area around things I shoot. I thought the blades of grass in the foreground would add context, but they are just distracting.

I tried to get a shot of another mushroom I spared with the mower, but the depth of field problem was so bad, it’s not even worth posting. I need to make a strong effort to preview depth of field in the future. It’s not all that easy when you’re on the ground looking down at your camera, especially if the sun is bright.

I tried to shoot some little weed blossoms, but this lens is not great for really small subjects. Disappointing. There is a very good Chinese manual focus lens that could be better. It has 2x magnification.

I’m not afraid to give up autofocus. I don’t really like it. It seems like it’s not as trustworthy as manual, and it doesn’t always want to focus on the right thing. I can spend the rest of my life mastering the camera’s focus programming, and I guess I’ll get sharper shots than I get now, but I already know how to focus manually.

Great photographers took very good photos for decades with manual focus, so I feel like I should be able to pull it off.

I would like to shoot more bugs, but they don’t like to pose. I had an idea: pour sugar water on things and wait for the bugs to arrive. A weak solution should dry and become invisible, but the bugs should still smell it. I’m trying it now. Tomorrow I’ll go out and see if anyone has shown up.

I have to be more serious about recognizing subjects, I saw some interesting mushrooms at the base of a tree, and I kicked them to see if they were mushrooms or edible fungus. It wasn’t until later that I thought about taking a picture.

I also have to learn not to go out and shoot things on the ground right after dinner. It’s not the best time to be squatting and bending over.

These mushrooms should keep popping up until the cold weather comes, so I should be able to get some really neat photos once I figure the depth of field out. As it is, I am a disgrace to the body of people who own this lens, which is supposed to be excellent.

I could have done better with the DSLR, but I’m not going there. I have to master this camera.

Shouldn’t we Run TOWARD the Light?

Seems like I am constantly reminded that I can’t trust anyone who claims to represent God.

Years ago, when I was an armorbearer at Miami’s Trinity Church, inadvertently helping “pastor” Rich Wilkerson and his son, Rich Wilkerson Junior, in their efforts to con the poor out of what little money they had, a man named Bill Wiese came to speak at the church.

Wiese wrote the book 23 minutes in Hell. He says God took his conscousness out of his body and put it in hell so he would be able to come back and warn other people.

Wiese was a pleasant, soft-spoken, sincere-sounding guest. He didn’t clamor for money or promise people God would make them rich if they gave him offerings instead of paying their electric bills. In this respect, he was unlike the Wilkersons.

I read his book, and the story seemed plausible to me. It appeared to be consistent with scripture as well as the things God had revealed to me. I figured the story was probably true.

He has a Youtube channel, and he has put up a lot of material my wife and I have concluded was helpful. I subscribe to his channel.

A while back, though, after he refused to answer a question I asked him, I started to wonder about him. Yes, he seems sincere, but then he’s a professional salesman. Before he wrote the book, he sold real estate for a living, and I believe he still does. The best salesmen are the ones who can convince you they’re pure and meek, regardless of what’s going on inside them. I’m not Jesus. I can be fooled. The fact that a man seems innocent and guileless to me doesn’t mean much. Wiese seems earnest and humble, but who knows what’s really in his heart?

He does not respond to comments on his Youtube channel, but he encourages people to submit them on his website. I had a question, so I submitted it.

In his book, he says hell is filled with the sound of screaming and crying. That makes sense to me. He also says there is so little air in hell, you have to gasp for every breath.

It occurred to me that it would be hard to scream continuously if I couldn’t breathe, so I submitted the obvious question.

I wasn’t trying to catch him in a lie. I thought maybe he had some kind of explanation. I can think of one myself, but I’m not going to mention it here and give people ideas.

Months have passed, and neither Wiese nor his wife have responded.

It’s a very reasonable question, and if he’s a truthful person, he should be eager to answer it. I would if I had been to hell. I would thank the person who asked it, because I would realize other people might doubt my true story if I didn’t explain.

So that looks bad.

He’s not Ryan Reynolds or Taylor Swift. He’s not a big celebrity. He doesn’t have a huge following, so I know he’s not inundated with questions. He or his team saw my question, and they chose to ignore it. Either that, or they ask for questions but don’t look at them.

He recently put up a video asking people what their lives say about them. In the video, he criticized people who criticize preachers, suggesting it’s a bad thing to do.

Naturally, I had to comment.

If you took the New Testament and removed the parts where the writers and Jesus criticized religious authorities, you would end up with a pamphlet. I exaggerate, but Jesus went after them many, many times. So did Paul, naming names. Jude went after them. I’m sure other authors laid into them, but I can’t remember the entire New Testament in order to name passages.

What about the Old Testament?

The prophets criticized priests, prophets, and kings, in addition to other people. This is why the Jews killed so many of the prophets. Eli was the high priest, and his sons were priests, and God sent a prophet to tell Eli God was going to cause them to die.

What would Bill Wiese have thought of that prophet? Would he have shamed him in a Youtube video?

The idea that it’s bad to criticize preachers is not found in the Bible anywhere. In fact, it’s extremely important to vet them. We are taught to test the spirits.

It’s extremely important to rip dishonest preachers PUBLICLY, before as many people as possible. Lying is different from other sins. You don’t have to expose a murderer or a burglar who did bad deeds in the past, but a liar has to be exposed, because if he isn’t, his lies will continue to hurt people.

In my comment, I named prosperity preachers who destroyed countless lives, and I gave my testimony. I said I had criticized them openly by name on the web and, instead of being cursed, I received lots of money I didn’t work for, a wife, a wonderful farm, and good Christian friends. I don’t have to work.

If you read my blog, you’ve read the story already. Preachers turned on me. People told me I was going to get it for touching God’s anointed. Meanwhile, my blessings did nothing but increase. And my last pastor, Alberto Lee Santiago, who denounced me and told people to shun me, went to prison for molesting a little girl, beginning when she was 6. While he was awaiting sentencing, his abusive wife, who also hated me, died from a brain tumor. His church vanished. His son is a job-allergic atheist who promotes drugs and posts blasphemy on the web.

Rich Wilkerson has artificial knees, terrible back problems, kidney stones that require lithotripsy, some kind of weird stones that grow in his chest, a rare blood disorder that requires regular draining, and diabetes. His church is going nowhere. He has had a problem with the young men in his inner circle running through the local girls. His megachurch pals rake in the dough and write bestsellers, but his Youtube videos never seem to break 300 views, his church can’t pay its mortgage, and no one knows who he is.

If what happened to me is punishment, perhaps I need to look the word up. If the “anointed” ones who denounced me are blessed, I need to look that word up, too.

Today my wife tried to look up my comment, and she could not see it. Wiese or his wife, or someone on their team, had muted it.

Muting is a sneaky tactic. You fix a person’s comment so he can still see it, but no one else can. It’s dishonest. It’s like the social media dirty trick known as shadow banning. You think you still have a voice, but it goes nowhere.

It’s a slimy thing for a preacher to do, especially to a person who is giving his honest testimony.

So, if Bill Wiese would do this, what other dishonest things has he done? Did he make up his hell story?

The web says he sold a million copies of his book, so that means he made at least hundreds of thousands of dollars. He speaks at big churches that take offerings. He speaks at prosperity churches, and they commonly make deals with speakers, dividing up the spoils of collection. Is Wiese bringing home bundles of tax-free cash? Could be. He may have made himself rich with his story.

I don’t know the answer. Maybe he pays his own expenses when he speaks, and he doesn’t accept offerings. I do know that muzzling other Christians who provide honest testimony is not something you would expect an honest person to do. It’s disgraceful. My wife thought it seemed crooked, just as I did.

I won’t accuse anyone of lying without proof, but he did mute my comment. That’s a fact, and it’s hard to imagine a good excuse for it. It’s hard to imagine a legitimate reason, but other possible reasons are obvious.

Christians should not run from the light. You know who runs from the light? Cockroaches. It’s not a good sign, and when people see you doing it, they suspect the worst.

I hope he has some kind of explanation, but I don’t think I’ll ever find out. I am presenting my story here so other people can pray and judge. It would be great to find out there is some explanation that absolves him.

So Much for European Enlightenment

Got some pretty interesting news this week.

First of all, my wife’s final embassy interview was postponed 10 days. No explanation given. We got the news earlier this week. Today, the embassy’s Facebook page (which, incredibly, exists) said 10 embassy employees had been fired for corruption.

Postponement explained.

My hope, of course, is that they fired people who were likely to DELAY issuance of visas. I hope they kept the ones who rubber-stamp everything.

The second bit of news is that the Europeans have denied her a visa again.

We were trying the Czech Republic. They respond to requests pretty quickly, and they seemed to have a relatively positive attitude toward Africans. For example, the Czechs have a scholarship program that brings Zambians to Czechia to study. We told them we would go to Prague and then Rome.

We weren’t all that excited about visiting Eastern Europe in November, but we knew a Schengen visa would get us into Italy as well as Czechia, so we were willing to take the bad with the good. Actually, I was hoping to change our travel plans after we arrived and cut our Czech time to three days. Once you’re in Europe, they can’t do anything to make you go where you said you would. Nobody needs to spend a whole week in the Czech Republic.

Today we found out we were rejected. They had a ton of documentation proving my wife was not going to stay there illegally and clean toilets for a living, but they didn’t care. We showed them she was about to be cleared to move to the US. We proved assets way beyond what was needed to pay for the trip. We showed them we had already paid for accommodations and tours. We gave them our original marriage certificate, which, bizarrely, they required. Didn’t matter.

So what’s the explanation? Prejudice is the only plausible answer. They just don’t want Africans. They don’t trust them. Maybe they let a few students in, to take study positions where they can be closely monitored, but forget visiting as a tourist. They don’t care how obvious it is that you won’t be a problem. They don’t want to look at the facts.

They put her application in a pile or threw it out, and they waited for her to come back for an answer. Then, without looking her documents over, they told her to take a hike.

The good news is that I’m glad, because this means she will be her sooner, and we will avoid spending a huge amount of money on a trip to a third-rate destination in bad weather. They did me a big favor. Now I don’t have to go to Prague.

I’m sure Czechia is nice, and Prague may be the most beautiful large city on Earth, but it’s a historical and cultural backwater compared to places like Paris and Rome, and these days, it is jam-packed with tourists, even in winter. Tourists are thicker than TBN preachers in hell.

Also, the food looks unbelievably bad. There is a reason we never see Czech restaurants in malls. Remember the dinner scene in Top Secret?

The farther north and east you go in Europe, the more off-putting and strange the food gets. Spain, Italy, France, Greece…excellent. Germany…passable. Scandinavia, England, and Russia…like prison food.

Based on Youtube videos I’ve watched, it appears Russians are swarming Prague. I don’t know how well they mix with tourists from NATO countries. I am not all that eager to mingle with Russian tourists. I suspect they are like British tourists. Drunken, loud, and likely to vomit at any second. Dublin sidewalks are always decorated in British vomit.

Russians sound like the kind of people I would have wanted to hang around with in college.

Americans used to be the problem tourists on this planet. As other countries have accumulated wealth and started to travel more, that distinction seems to have become harder to award. The mainland Chinese do unspeakably rude things, for example. Communism makes people coarse. The Taiwanese are probably great guests.

To get back to Prague, it looks a lot like Disney World. Throngs of tourists everywhere, even in the slow season. Tons of businesses designed for tourists. Lots of scams.

If it’s bad in cold weather, imagine the summer.

Rome sounds better, but my research suggests it’s not what it once was. It’s hard to book activities in November. The crowds are legendary. Also, tourism forums warn about the omnipresent pickpockets, who have formed a de facto industry.

I wasn’t excited about this trip. Wrong season. Lackluster primary destination.

Now that Europe has once again shown us its true, hypocritical nature, my wife should be able to arrive here a week earlier, which is fantastic. We lose 10 days because Zambia is crazy, but we gain days we would have spent traveling. There is absolutely no reason to expect anything but a quick visa issuance. America isn’t Europe. We actually let people in. Boy, do we let people in.

We feel cheated because we didn’t get a second trip this year, but hey, America is huge, and my wife hasn’t seen it. Maybe we can see the Smokies before the leaves fall off. Meanwhile, we can apply for a visa to visit Israel, which is a better destination than any European country.

European visas are not that hard to get once you have a green card. I think the Europeans don’t want to make Uncle Sam mad, and besides, they realize nearly no one wants to leave the US and move to Europe. Half of them are trying to move here.

American winter destinations are generally pretty bad. There are the beaches, which neither of us wants to see. The beautiful non-beach areas will be cold, there will be no leaves on the trees, and many locations will be rainy and muddy. Most of our big tourism cities have turned into mental asylums. Neither of us ski or plan to learn, so forget the western mountains.

Maybe we’ll never see Prague. That’s okay with me. I’ve never wanted to visit. It makes me think of Franz Kafka. Prague will never see my dollars, so it’s a two-edged sword.

When I got the news about the visa, I went online and canceled a whole lot of engagements. Around $3000 for hotels and an Airbnb. Another grand or so for activities. Thank God I didn’t buy airline tickets. There may be some long faces in Czechia and Italy today. Nothing I can do.

I feel God has blessed us once again.

It’s Good if You Think it’s Good

It’s a milestone day. Last night, ghetto kids, and probably many people who were not kids, sacked an area of downtown Philadelphia like Nazis raiding Jewish stores. They fought the police, of course. At about the same time, Target announced it was closing a whole bunch of stores, including locations in Harlem, Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco. Hmm. What do those locations have in common? The amazing thing is that Target came out and admitted crime was the reason. Not just crippling theft, but violence which exposed the company to lawsuits from employees, customers, and their families.

Target snitched on its urban customer base. The gloves are off.

What were the stores most prominently mentioned in the Philadelphia story? Apple (phones treasured by ghetto kids), Foot Locker (expensive athletic shoes), and Lululemon (major vendor of trashy twerking pants). Is it a dog whistle if a news organization mentions the companies?

WGN, a big Chicago news station, just ran a story about a Democrat mayor (El Paso) busing illegal aliens to a “sanctuary” city (Chicago) with a black mayor. Two things to take away once you’ve seen the video: Democrat mayor doing what DeSantis and Abbott did, which was supposedly cruel when they did it, and the WGN team sympathizing with him and making it clear the invasion is a problem.

When a major news organization in Chicago starts repeating conservative talking points about illegal aliens, it’s a day of note.

The world really is ending. It’s amazing, watching videos about our sudden plunge into chaos. I feel like I’ve been sucked into the TV screen during a disaster movie. You know how they create fake news shows. “Godzilla just used San Francisco’s South of Market area as a litterbox, and he’s headed for Palo Alto!” “The asteroid has hit, and here’s a live feed of a tsunami swallowing Leonardo Dicaprio’s house!” It’s all happening now, but it’s real.

I predicted this years ago, and even though I believed what I was saying, it’s still hard to fully accept as reality. Vote for whomever you want. Buy a solar roof. Learn to grow potatoes. It won’t help.

Sit back and enjoy the ride. I don’t know what else to say. Sooner or later, the wave will make it to your area.

Every big city in America is becoming Detroit.

Businesses are boarded up all over America. Crime and covid ended them. Covid drove people to remote work, which they really like, because it’s easier to get away with doing very little at home. Now they don’t want to go to cities and support stores, restaurants, and landlords. BLM and Antifa taught people crime was a human right, so even if people wanted to return, many are afraid to. Commercial property values are tanking. Maybe next year you’ll be able to buy the Chrysler Building for a thousand dollars.

A long time ago, I saw Detroit described as a doughnut. The suburbs were the ring, and the center, which was destroyed by the people of Detroit, was the hole. I guess we’re going to see a lot of doughnuts in the near future. A lot of worthless toilets that used to be centers of commerce where decent people could live decent lives.

In other news, I saw a great video about photography. It was about photographer Vivian Maier, sort of. Really, it was about the importance of taking pictures primarily to please yourself.

Maier worked in Chicago, and she left hundreds of thousands of negatives behind. She did not exhibit her work. Somehow, she was discovered after she died. Her photos are excellent. Truly exceptional.

Was she a great photographer, or will anyone who takes half a million pictures produce extraordinary work inadvertently? Is it a million-monkeys thing? I think the explanation has to be talent. There are millions of monkeys out there taking hundreds of thousands of pictures each, and most of them don’t produce much of value.

The gist of the video seems to be that you shouldn’t feel you have to post everything you shoot on the web in order to justify what you do. If it’s satisfying to you, that’s enough, and it’s more validating than likes from people who think Kim Kardashian and Joe Biden are saving the world.

I have been caught up in the mechanics of taking photos. F stops. Lenses. Figuring out endless camera menus. I should be thinking more about whether I like the pictures, and I should not be eager to discard pictures I think are flawed. Sometimes a picture that is over- or underexposed or blurry can be very satisfying.

I should know this better than anyone, because I write and cook primarily to suit my own tastes. I can’t say I would write as much if I knew no one would read it, but know NEARLY no one reads, and I still sit down and type.

As noted in my last post, I decided to get a used Canon SL2 to replace my 350D. I couldn’t make myself sell my lenses, which are nearly worthless, and the camera is worth so little, I would have to either throw it out or let it sit in a closet until my heirs threw it out. I felt like dropping $300 on a new body would make me happier. It arrives today.

I think it was a smart move. I’ll be more willing to risk damaging or losing it than the big new Sony, and the photos should be just as good, albeit a little smaller.

I got a flash for the Sony. I am getting nowhere with it. It works in either TTL (through the lens) or manual mode. My understanding is that TTL is for idiots. The flash receives data from the camera, as though looking through your lens, and it decides what kind of light to give you. The lens tells the camera your F stop and focal length, and your camera relays the information to the flash.

I tried idiot mode yesterday, and I got idiot photos. I turned the light in my dining room down to restaurant levels, and I tried to shoot as though I were taking travel photos in a restaurant. I got very grainy, poorly focused pictures. Because I was using a 15mm lens (I surmise), I also got something resembling vignetting. There were shadows around the photo’s center. I think the flash was not prepared for the wide field of view. The lens I used doesn’t tell the flash anything. It’s a manual lens.

I also tried a longer lens that was not manual, and things were little better, although turning the flash upward and back for indirect light killed the vignetting.

I kept getting really slow shutter speeds, and when I used automatic ISO, it went way up. This increases noise.

As a photo ignoramus, I just assumed a good flash would let you take decent pictures in a restaurant. I didn’t think the shutter would slow down to nothing. I didn’t expect the ISO to skyrocket. I thought the whole purpose of a flash was to fix those problems.

I have not tried using the flash’s manual mode yet. It seems to me that if idiot mode is too hard, manual, which requires knowledge, is still a ways off.

Of course, now that I have a good APS-C camera on the way, to save money, sort of, I am starting to want a new APS-C lens. As was said of King Lear, “He hath ever but slenderly known himself.” I should have seen this coming.

APS-C is good for travel because the camera and lenses are smaller and cheaper, and travel is upcoming.

My wife’s arrival here appears to be very close. The other day I was cleaning up the kitchen, and I considered giving away the T-Fal deep fryer. I find it useless and unpleasant to handle and clean, and it takes up room. She said I should keep it until she gets here, and they we can decide. Her expected arrival is so close, it actually made sense to say that.

If she gets the go-ahead, and we also get a European visa we applied for, we will visit Prague and Rome, so plenty to photograph and film.

My macro efforts are going badly. Part of it is getting use to the new lens and camera, but I’m also having a hard time finding critters to shoot. I had an idea: spray some plants with sugar water. It won’t show on film, and it will draw bees and flies. I may try it.

The guy who did the video I posted did another video about exercises to help photographers make the most of their surroundings. They are intended to help you see potential in things you would usually walk by. I may try them.

Having seen the videos, I feel like I need to amend my photography philosophy. I have been dividing photos into two types: documentary (Louanne and I were at the world’s largest ball of string) and artistic (Check out the amazing bokeh on this tiny orchid). Now I think I have to create subcategories: photos that obey the rules, and those that don’t. People keep telling photographers to make everything sharp and look for textbook composition and lighting, but sometimes a photo is better because it breaks those rules. I think I have to start throwing photos out because they’re bad, not because they would get me bad grades in a community college course. I should hold onto strange photos that are still pleasing.

I like photos that tell a story, but today I realized I also like photos that suggest there is a story no one is telling you. Sometimes a photo is telling you a story, just like a Normal Rockwell painting. “These boys got caught skinny-dipping.” Other pictures suggest something is going on, but you can’t figure out what it is. “This man is grinning, and the woman is furious, but why?”

Lots of things to think about when you take a photo. There are lots of things that can give a photo merit in one way when it appears worthless in other ways.

None of this philosophizing will do me any good until I learn how to work the equipment. I’ll get back to it today.