Your Kids Can be Just as Crazy as You

I can’t believe the world I live in.

In California, it is now possible for the state to punish parents who refuse to pay for the castration of their children.

Where did I wake up today? Is this Mars? Am I on life support, receiving a feed of AI-generated fiction while they get ready to pull the plug?

Pull it! Pull it!

The number of the relevant bill is AB-957, and the legislature just passed it. All it lacks is the signature of Gavin Newsom, which it will, of course, get.

Conservatives are oversimplifying the law, making it sound as though parents who refuse to support child mutilation or perversion will automatically lose custody. Leftist nuts are doing a poor job of defending the law, saying it only requires judges hearing custody cases to consider failure to support mutilation or perversion.

No matter how much lipstick you put on it, it allows judges to take custody away from parents who are terrified of seeing their children cut up and sterilized.

So what do you do now, if you’re a California father (it’s always the father), and you are terrified that a savage with a scalpel is going to slice your son’s penis open, scrape out the insides, and turn it inside out? What do you do to prevent your daughter’s breasts from being sliced off and discarded, her arm or leg skinned, and the skin being turned into a grotesque false penis?

This is what “bottom surgery” really means. Go Google pictures.

Talk about feeling powerless. Imagine having to stand in your house, looking out the window, as cops and social workers take your confused son off to have his testicles removed and incinerated.

This is enough. This age has lasted long enough. It’s time for Jesus to put an end to it. That’s my take, anyway. I don’t tell Jesus what to do, and maybe God has reasons for extending this ordeal, but if it were up to me, I’d remove Christians from the world today. I think we’re accomplishing nearly nothing here.

My wife should become a permanent resident in a few weeks. Then we will try to have kids. What planet are we supposed to raise them on? Assume one is born a year from today, which is about the best possible scenario. If things are this insane now, what will they be like when our child turns 18? I can’t even imagine it.

Are we supposed to live in a cave? Will we have to move to Africa and live in a country where sodomy is a crime and Christianity is in the constitution?

Right now, I have a great governor who shelters us, and there is a huge influx of sane, decent people, pumping up the conservative voter base. That won’t last forever. Sooner or later, Florida will go full-throttle pervert.

It’s bad even with DeSantis in charge. I listened to a legal “education” video the other day, and the participants were people who dealt with runaways and so on. These were people who are part of the system. Powerful people in low places. When you have a problem with your kids, you don’t get to deal with Ron DeSantis. You deal with these lunatics.

They insist–INSIST–that lawyers call runaways “absent from care.” The term “runaway” is somehow harmful, though completely accurate. If the cops rescue a child prostitute from captivity, you can’t use the word “rescue,” because–not kidding here–it implies all of the problems are solved. Of course, it implies nothing of the sort, but this is leftist insanity for you.

You can’t use the terms “prostitute” and “prostitution.” You can’t tell older kids who take drugs and turn tricks they are in any way accountable for what they do, even though they are. You have to tell them they’re victims, so they never take accountability and take control of their lives.

The whole thing made me want to puke.

These wackjobs come from the same milieu as the ones who come to take your kids when they think you’re misbehaving. I’m sure they would be forcing parents to support child mutilation if they could.

The Deep State isn’t just a federal thing. Every state has a deep state, and they are overwhelmingly leftist, i.e. psychotic and tyrannical. Government worshipers. People who gave their lives to the Beast without even believing he existed.

If you want to understand the level of religious freedom, and freedom to use common sense, that I now have, ask yourself what would have happened if I had objected to what the people in the video were saying. “I want to practice family law, but I insist on using terms like ‘prostitution’ and ‘runaway.'” Would I be allowed to practice? Would I receive a public reprimand?

Reproduction is important to God. It’s the reason he made the universe. We are supposed to generate his children through our bodies. I used to think I wasn’t obligated, but now I believe I am, so I plan to go through with it. I feel like I’m going to be holding drills on a destroyer while torpedoes close in on it.

There is no natural answer. You can’t fix it by voting. You can’t fix it with resistance or violence. It’s a supernatural thing, and repentance, prayer, and submission are the only way out, but Americans aren’t going to do those things in sufficient numbers to fix this country. We’re too busy thinking about red baseball caps and 3wning the libs on social media.

Man, I can’t wait to get out of this place. I don’t want to spend my few remaining years moving from refuge to refuge, ceding more and more of myself and my family to the deranged mob.

People I think of as Christians will turn. Same thing will happen in your life. Suddenly, they’ll be infected with wonderful rationalizations to justify siding with Satan’s herd, and they will come to your house and shame you for not seeing the truth. They’ll say, “If we don’t go along, what are we supposed to do?”, like it’s your responsibility to take God’s role and make things easy for them. I’ve seen this a zillion times. “If I do wrong, and you don’t give me another option, I’m innocent, and you’re guilty.”

The remnant of people who haven’t been corrupted will get smaller and smaller, like Gideon’s army. You’ll have to watch while people fall away and destroy themselves.

My children will want explanations. You know how kids are. If they’re not caught up in the derangement, they’ll want to know what I was thinking when I decided to bring them into this world. The answer is obvious: it was God’s will, so I had to do it. But I won’t be able to tell them things will get anything but worse, or that they have any hope of living in a decent world.

If there was a rocket to heaven standing in my yard right now, I would walk out and get in. Well…I’d do it if my wife had a rocket, too. I couldn’t abandon her here.

In brighter news, I ordered a camera. I was going to get a compact full-frame mirrorless camera, but I decided it would be better to deal with the added bulk and weight and get a real camera. Compact cameras have weird viewfinders and fewer features.

I ordered a lens somewhat like the one I use now. I ordered a Sigma 24-70mm zoom lens. It’s better than the equivalent Sony, and the better Sony that replaced the Sony costs over twice as much. I would have felt bad buying it, given my unending beginner status.

The 24-70mm will be great for almost all my shots, but I think I should still get a prime lens for things like street scenes and shooting in small spaces with dubious lighting. My plan is to use the 24-70mm until I have a clue and then pick out a prime.

A lot of people like the Sony 28mm f/2.8 lens. Seems like the zoom will duplicate its function, though. My understanding is that the zoom’s clarity and sharpness are not as good. Maybe I should go for a shorter lens. I should know in a few days.

I used B&H Photo. Amazon offers my camera at the same price, but you don’t get anything with it. B&H gives you a $100+ memory card, an expensive bag, and an extra battery. You can’t get the camera itself at a lower price by giving up the extras.

I think I know how this works. Sony tells B&H, “We’ll cut you off if you discount our cameras,” but it doesn’t tell them they can’t give things away with them, so B&H undercuts Amazon by giving you a lot of stuff.

I wanted the card and the battery. The bag is just a bonus. I’m sure I’ll find it useful, though.

So why buy a camera to preserve memories for the future, when I think there is no future? That’s a great question. I think the rapture is coming very soon, but God hasn’t sent out a printed bulletin with a date. What if it’s 20 years off? Besides, even if we only get a year of enjoying videos and photos, it will be worth it. I enjoy them now.

What do I do with my old Canon 350D? It’s not worth selling. It would bring about $20. I might be able to get a couple of hundred dollars for my lenses. I would rather just keep everything. A spare camera never hurt anyone. Maybe my wife could learn a few things with it. I would like her to develop basic competence with a camera. We may be in Rome this year.

I went pretty crazy ordering the camera body. I got a Sony A7IV. This is a very good camera when viewed in juxtaposition with my status as a total photo hack. It’s not a pro camera, but pros use it. It will do video and stills very well. It should have a useful life as a primary camera for a decade. It’s not as small or light as some models. I’ll just have to deal with it.

I didn’t choose Canon even though I’ve had two. This business with refusing to license their lens mount is not acceptable. It makes them sound like Apple. There are a zillion lenses for the Sony, and I mean lenses that are made for the Sony mount. No clumsy adaptors.

I should be up and shooting tomorrow. I will try the camera in places where the light was too low for my 350D. I hope it will get me shots I could not get before.

PIX

I’m starting to think I may have enough ability to take decent photos.

Today I was collecting all my Singapore and Hong Kong photos and videos, and I came across this picture of the Jewel building at Singapore’s Changi Airport.

This was just a phone snapshot, and I did not expect a lot from it, but it grabbed my eye. It looks considerably better when not shrunken down to blog size, but even here, you can see that there is a surprising amount of drama going on. If I had paid more attention and also made sure I took it at exactly the right time, it would be a very good picture.

There is implied motion, even though nothing except the water and the people is moving. On the upper right, the glass seems to be flinging itself up and to the right, like a pitcher’s arm, and the wall of plants seems to be swinging up to meet it. On the left, the little wall and the pavement seem to be shooting off down and left. The people look like they’re in a hurry, going somewhere important, even though they’re not. I think that’s because the image is slightly blurred.

There are little stories in the picture. Look at the lady staring at her cell phone. What’s going on with her? And whose kid is that way off in front of her, all by itself?

Never let a woman touch your phone. They put grease on their hands, and after they handle your phone, all the pictures will be blurry.

I also got this picture of a snake out on the patio. This thing was swimming all over the pool trying to get out, and it was going to drown. I saved it with a red plastic dustpan, and it was so wiped out, it just sat on it.

The curves of the snake and the texture of the skin are beautiful. There is something dramatic about the way the rear of the dustpan shoots off to the upper right while the handle breaks off to the lower corner.

The colors are vivid. The water drops add texture and context. It looks like I saved the snake in the rain.

I didn’t put a lot of effort into these pictures, but I did think before I pushed the buttons. They didn’t just happen. I thought about what I was seeing. I didn’t just think, “Now I have a picture of this snake, so I’m done.” That’s the attitude we have about photos before we learn anything. “I proved me and Sue were at Six Flags!” “Everybody stand in a row and smile!”

I have been looking at photography forums and photographers’ sites and videos, and I have noticed that most of the photos don’t look good to me. Guys with $10,000 cameras, who make a living with them, are putting up stuff I would delete right away.

On a forum, I asked what made this picture grab the eye, and some guy gave me a terse answer even I knew was wrong. He was a little rude. He said it was all down to a wide angle lens and doing something called “PC” with software. I don’t know what that is, but since this photo hasn’t been altered, I know he’s wrong. His analysis is shallow and unhelpful.

I asked my question in a beginner’s forum, so what’s with the attitude? A beginner’s forum is for stupid question, and mine wasn’t even stupid.

I decided to look up his photos, and they’re really amateurish. One level above high school yearbook shots. I take better photos right now. I can’t tell him his work is bad. The other forum members would be all over me.

Now whenever I ask anything on this forum, this guy is going to be my self-appointed Yoda, giving me bad advice and getting in the way.

A photograph is not just a visual record of a set of objects. It’s a painting with limited options. You start with whatever it is you’re photographing, and it is what it is, but once you accept it, you can do whatever you want with it within that constraint. Different lenses and lighting. Color and black and white. Software adjustments. Ansel Adams didn’t just shoot pictures and print them. He processed the daylights out of them. He never saw Half Dome the way it looked in his work.

Photography is really impressionism. You don’t just present what’s in front of you. You make it better. Van Gogh painted very ordinary things, but he changed them so much, they became completely new. He exaggerated colors and perspectives. He put in stuff that wasn’t there but should have been.

I think this is going to be easier than I expected. I may never be an expert at every camera feature or photo effect, and I may never be able to teach a class on lenses, but I am sure I can take photos that are worth displaying.

It’s Actually a First-Strike Weapon

I never thought I’d sink this low. Today I’m on the web looking at purses.

I have some money coming in, and my wife still needs to put a foundation under her wardrobe. She has some Michael Kors bags, but my unqualified guess as a straight (i.e. normal) male is that every American woman should have one big classic purse that isn’t a billboard for giant designer logos. I think it’s okay to have an old-style Vuitton bag with little V’s and L’s on it, but other than that, you should not be paying high prices to look like some greedy foreigner’s wind dancer.

My mother did not have the greatest taste. I have come to terms with this in my old age. I thought she had good taste, because it was something she talked about a lot, but she didn’t. Eastern Kentucky left its mark. She had a king size bed with a cast-iron headboard, painted gold, with a 6-foot-wide artificially antiqued mirror.

Oddly, her mother, who was an adult before she had a bathtub and didn’t cut her hair until her father died, had very good taste. I never realized what good taste my grandmother had until I got real about my mother’s taste. My grandmother got a new house in 1965, and apart from the couch my grandfather slept on for about 6 hours a day, it was decorated very well. She had a comfortable family room plus an elegant living room and dining room. She had silver and china. Her colors were subdued. Two of the four bedrooms were full of antiques. Not bad at all.

My mother had three wedding rings. The first was a simple band she lost while gardening. She got my friends and me to search for it, but it never turned up. My dad got her a pretty atrocious Lucien Piccard gold watch, plus a matching ring, in around 1968, and eventually he got her a bland and inoffensive ring set. When my mother died, my sister took the set, which is ridiculous, because when it comes to single people, only a lesbian needs a wedding ring. You leave your wedding ring to your son, period.

She also had a gold Rolex with a bright green Malachite face and diamonds around the bezel. Which my sister eventually pawned. A Rolex doesn’t need diamonds around the face. The green face was a little over the top, but not too bad for a woman.

She had lots of very heavy gold chains. I never thought about it while she was alive, but once I started buying gold for my wife, I realized a) how excessive the chains were, and b) how much my sister wasted when she took them and ended up pawning them. A pretty small gold chain will run you $1200 or more these days.

I’m not saying my mother looked like Mr. T at his peak, but she definitely overdid it. I don’t know if she wore the chains all at once, like my sister did. When I started buying stuff for my wife, I felt I should use my mother’s possessions as guides, but thankfully, I now understand that it’s not necessary to get a woman jewelry that will give her a backache.

Here’s a tip about women: when they’re single, they dress partly to get men and partly for another reason. When they’re married, they dress solely for the other reason, and that reason is to make other women feel bad and wish they were dead. Men don’t realize this, but women look at each others clothing, shoes, and jewelry and rank themselves accordingly. If a woman’s outfit doesn’t make other women want to shrink into the floor and cut themselves, it’s a failure.

This is really true, even if it sounds funny. It’s kind of sick. It’s one of those things women don’t tell men about, like how your car really does matter.

Women also dress their husbands to hurt other women. Go figure. Remember all those times your wife tried you to get Bruno Maglis when you were totally happy with running shoes? Now you know what was on her mind.

Maybe my mother really liked big chains, but my suspicion is that she just wanted to compete in the arms race and also store up portable wealth.

My mother had one power item that was actually a good idea: a big Vuitton bag with a shoulder strap. The little letters weren’t obtrusive, and it lasted and lasted. My sister probably wears it today, wherever she is, unless there is a market for pawned Vuitton bags.

So anyway, here I am, looking for something for the wife, and I haven’t found it yet. I think my mom’s bag was a Vuitton Boulogne, but I’m not sure. The one I saw online doesn’t seem the same.

Maybe I won’t be able to find one. That would be fantastic, because there are big-name companies that make quality stuff for way less. You can have like 5 Dooney & Bourkes for one Vuitton. She needs something classic, timeless, and very sturdy. It doesn’t have to be super-expensive. A few bags fitting this description would make up as good a gift as one Vuitton.

My wife actually likes it when I choose stuff for her, because I have proven I’m good at it. Like I always say, I have very good taste; I just choose not to use it. I walk around in Rural King T-shirts, hiking shoes, Carhartt shorts, and lovely wool socks. My appearance could ground a competency hearing.

I never wear anything fancy these days. I wore a tie for my Zoom wedding. Prior to that, my last dress-up episode was in 2019, when my dad died.

I’m not even sure I dressed up for that.

I have to stop looking at this stuff. I sat through two legal education videos this morning. That’s enough suffering for anyone.

Missing Links

Want to feel old? Think about all the blogs that have died.

On very rare occasions, I go through my blogroll to find out if there is any point in keeping links. My standard is a little vague. Basically, if you haven’t posted in a year, your link is probably going to fall. Of course, I have not applied this standard to Acidman’s blog, Gut Rumbles, which is still maintained by his family, 17 years after his death. I also kept Lost in the Cheese Aisle, the blog of the late Steve Krodman, AKA Ellison. He was doing fine, and then one day he was diagnosed with ALS, and he was gone in something like a year.

Seventeen! If Acidman had had a son the day he died, the son would be getting ready to go to college.

No one reading this has any idea who Acidman was, I suppose.

I got rid of Sondra K. today. She used to be huge. Then something happened, and it seemed like the only person who continued posting was Doug M., who is not an adequate substitute. While I was doing my culling, I learned that Sondra’s blog has been replaced by something called Sondra’s Gulch or whatever, and when I looked at it, everything was written by Doug M.

I dumped Smoke on the Water, written by Jim Seigler. He hasn’t published in eternity. He visited the compound a few years back, though.

I got rid of Aaron’s CC, a blog written by my old college buddy. When you try to visit, you get a weird window asking you to download a php file. Maybe that’s a bomb for the folks who put a fatwa on him. In any case, there is no content now. I don’t think I should be sending innocent people to a site that appears to be a booby trap.

Is blogging finally over? Maybe it is. Let’s see if IMAO and The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler still exist.

The Rott is still up, but not much is happening. IMAO is running, but I don’t see “Frank” anywhere in the text.

Russ Emerson, AKA Tacjammer, has not updated since 2018, so he’s gone. I hope he’s okay. He developed hydrocephalus all of a sudden, and before they put in a shunt, he already had damage to his nervous system.

I wonder if conservative bloggers still think they’re doing something important. Are they still fighting for the cause? I dropped all that years ago.

If you’re still coming by, and I deleted your link, I apologize, but you weren’t using your blog anyway, so you probably don’t care.

You are a Termite

I am still trying to get a grip on photography and equipment choices.

So I did a macro photo of a tiny weed blossom, and it was so beautiful, I wanted to blow it up, print it, and put it on the wall. I went to the true photography experts: Walgreen’s.

Okay, Ansel Adams wouldn’t have used them, but there is a Walgreen’s near me, and I can submit photos online for printing. And their candy aisle is outstanding.

I uploaded the photo, and the website told me it was too grainy to be printed at 16″x 20″. The photo is nearly square, but I figured I would print it in a rectangular size, cut off the blank parts, and put it in a frame made to hold it.

Now I have to decide whether to put up with the graininess or print a smaller photo. Sad, because every photo is unique. I can’t go out and redo it.

This problem showed me a couple of things.

First, I really do need a better camera. My camera has an 8-megapixel sensor, so you don’t get a lot of pixels. It’s fine if you’re not doing too much cropping, and you’re not printing big pictures, but otherwise, it’s a huge problem. Until yesterday, I was going along with the people who told me it’s the photographer, not the equipment, that matters. Turns out they’re totally wrong. You can take great pictures with a bad camera, but you can’t take EVERY great picture. A camera’s limitations can limit what you can do, very dramatically.

Second, when taking macro shots, you need to get as close as you can and fill up the viewfinder. That way, you get as many pixels as possible, and when you crop later, you get the best resolution possible.

A few days ago, I was wondering if I should blow $400 on a cheap DSLR body that would make better use of my old lenses. Now I’m thinking I should spend a few thousand dollars and get it over with. I have a wife. I may have a child sometime next year. I can’t keep letting bad equipment cost me opportunities to do good photography.

I also have to get out and shoot several times a week, because lack of skill and lack of familiarity with the equipment also ruin opportunities. I don’t want to be the old guy who finds himself cursing at his camera and millennials and electric vehicles and soy while his son takes his first steps.

I don’t know too much, but it’s starting to look like I need to put at least two grand into a camera, along with a big sum for a very good zoom. The zoom I have is 17-70mm, and it starts out at f2.8, so it’s unusual to have to take it off the camera for anything. I have a prime lens I never use.

I don’t want to find myself on a trip with two annoying cameras, plus lenses, to lug around, so whatever I get has to be very good for both video and stills. That means I need a flip screen so I can see myself and/or others when I’m in the picture. There are still a lot of cameras without flip screens, and they’re not going to work for me.

I don’t want a DSLR because they’re extinct already, and they are completely inferior to mirrorless cameras with far better electronics. They miss shots. They focus on the wrong things.

It sort of looks like the camera I want isn’t available yet. I looked at a bunch of products, and it seems like the Sony A7CII is the answer, given what I am willing to spend. It does great stills. It’s pretty good for video. It’s water-resistant, unlike most cameras under two grand. It has a flip screen. It’s intended to be a smaller version of an existing Sony people like, so it saves weight and space. It won’t be available until later this month.

Sony mirrorless cameras supposedly take an extremely vast array of lenses, unlike Canons, which are limited by a greedy refusal to license. What if I want to do telephoto stuff a year from now? Do I want to be confined to a few overpriced lenses that may or may not be what I want?

It turns out cameras are like rifles. I can buy a phenomenal rifle for under a grand, but glass to make it work right will likely cost more than the gun.

Today I’m doing continuing legal “education” again. Right now, I’m playing a video about attorneys who use artificial intelligence. It’s really depressing.

Most people are not overly bright or perceptive, so most of us don’t really understand what AI is going to do to us. We have ideas about computers creating big machines that go around exterminating us, and surely that could happen after enough technological progress, but the real threat, which would come to pass much sooner, is that we will become startlingly stupid people who do almost nothing except serve as receptionists and mechanics for computers who do our actual work.

Apparently, a huge number of people are using AI to do things they should do for themselves. Kids make it do their homework. Students have found ways to make it take exams for them. Lawyers are making it do research and writing.

The speaker in the video talked about using AI for things like doing writing tasks lawyers don’t feel like doing or are, frankly, too dumb to do. She talked about using AI to beat writer’s block.

I don’t get writer’s block. If you tell me you need me to write 500 words, I can sit down in front of you and get it done in 15 minutes. I once wrote a very good legal brief, 48 pages long, in a day. It’s not a problem for me. Some people can dunk a basketball. Some people can write symphonies at the age of 7. I can write legal documents quickly, well, and without help.

So now people like me are going to compete with numbskulls who struggled to get through law school, who pick up their phones, log into AI sites, and tell them to do what I do. When the product spews out a few seconds later, their only job will be to review it and correct it, and if what I’m hearing is true, a lot of the numbskulls aren’t even doing these things. They are getting caught submitting things AI messed up.

If I practice law again, I may spend 20 hours putting a brief together for you, but opposing counsel, with an IQ of 95, may bark some commands into his phone in a strip club toilet instead. Then I’ll bill you $10,000, and he’ll bill his client $10,000, but I’ll be doing about 20 times the work he does.

If this is how it works, aren’t we going to end up with generations of utter morons who are not able to practice law when they aren’t plugged in? Even many of the smart ones will stop learning the second they pass their bar exams.

Also, what will happen to fees? How long will $500 per hour seem reasonable when machines that cost little to use are puking the work out almost instantly?

It will only be a few years before reviewing AI work will not be necessary, because AI will be much better at the work than we are. The tables will turn, and if we actually write anything, AI will review it for US.

Remember I, Robot? Will Smith had a self-driving car. He got in it with Bridget Moynahan. She started shrieking about how unsafe it was to drive a car for yourself.

Won’t there come a time when doing your own legal work will be considered negligent? Computers will be so much better at it, it will be foolhardy to let humans do it. What happens to lawyers then?

It will happen, and it’s going to happen very soon. Within 5 years, probably.

Judges, quite frankly, are already stupid, without the help of AI, and they are also biased and dishonest. Not all of them have these faults to problematic degrees, but many, many do. Should we have AI judges? Maybe they’ll miss some things human judges would catch. At first. But what if the down side is grossly outweighed by the up side?

When I practiced patent law, the country’s only appellate patent court was reversing 54% of the cases it heard. Federal district judges were just too stupid to do the job. There are other areas of law that are also too hard for many federal judges, who tend to be stooges with political appointments. Should we continue letting these people ruin lives and mishandle cases when we have computers that will do a better job?

What if the reversal rate for human judges is 54%, and the reversal rate for AI judges is 35%? Could we ignore this?

Is there a way to team humans up with AI judges to balance the disadvantages out? I doubt it would work well. Human judges have a limitless capacity to screw things up.

What about medicine? Let’s be honest. There is no way a human being can consistently diagnose physical problems, or prescribe treatment, as well as a really good machine. A machine will know the symptoms of every problem known to medical science, no matter how obscure. It will know every cause. Every treatment. What the outcomes are. Most medicine boils down to following flow charts. Human beings can’t do that as well as machines. In the future, doctors will probably be limited to examination and data entry.

For a long time, we’ve had robots helping doctors rip out prostate glands. How long will it be before machines do many procedures from beginning to end, with doctors standing by mainly to collect fees?

I would rather have a machine than a doctor most of the time. Doctors have misdiagnosed me and given me the wrong treatments many times. I have stumped them many times, which should not happen. They have tried to con me into undertaking unnecessary courses of supervised treatment, so they could make more money. Give me a machine any day.

What about an AI president? Sometimes I wonder if the Antichrist will be a machine or a huge leftist mob wired together with a central machine.

The millennials who teach CLE courses think AI is wonderful. They can’t wait to see it do more. They may feel different when they’re collecting aluminum cans for a living.

Another disturbing CLE taught about social media and the law. Boy, are you in for a surprise if you’re a social media addict and you find yourself in court. They will go after your entire history. Tiktok, Instagram, Facebook…even Myspace. You name it.

You should probably delete every account once a year. If you really have to, you can start new ones with less dangerous data stored in them.

They’ll also go after every email address you have. Probably every forum you’ve ever joined. I have no idea how many I’ve joined. I’ve been on the web since about 1992.

If you lie about your whereabouts, or you just make a mistake, they’ll dig up things you’ve put up on the web, along with times and locations, to prove you’re wrong. Can you imagine anything more invasive?

On top of that, there will be forgeries, and lawyers will have to hire expensive experts to validate or invalidate things attorneys want to introduce into evidence. This is how it works right now, so expect it if you get dragged into court.

What a nightmare. You’ll be sitting in court looking at subpoenaed copies of your neighbors’ Ring videos.

I don’t want to live in the world that’s coming. Take me now. The Borg is real. It’s already here. Our lives are suddenly losing all purpose. We are losing our value as individuals. We are like ants in a farm. Bees in a hive. Gather the nectar, make the honey, and then die.

Oh, well. Back to CLE. When Jesus comes, I’ll be able to say I finished this cycle.

“If you Truly Love Nature, you Will find Beauty Everywhere.”

My subtitle is supposedly something Van Gogh put in a letter to his brother Theo, and the web says it appears on page 88 of National Geographic’s Sublime Nature: Photographs That Awe and Inspire.

I decided to wander around today and try to get used to using my camera in manual mode. It’s very easy. I used to complain about it, but I was just lazy. Too bad.

I took maybe 25 shots, and I only came up with two that I thought were good enough to spend time editing. Here they are.

The first one is another weed blossom. I posted a weed blossom picture a couple of days back. It’s surprising how beautiful flowers on weeds can be, if you just zoom in and get the weeds out of the pictures.

The flower is no more than 1/2″ wide.

I was telling the wife I would like to blow a few of these up and put them on our walls. She thought it was a great idea.

I was thinking yesterday that if I keep shooting weed blossoms, I’ll turn into a low-budget Georgia O’Keeffe. That would be sad. That lady had no talent. I don’t care what anyone says. Her paintings were clumsy, ugly, and creepy. I have read that she painted flowers to look like women’s genitalia. Maybe women who needed surgery. Not normal women. And what kind of nasty old pervert would do that anyway?

Cracked Magazine says she denied the accusations, so maybe she was slandered.

Do modern artists absolutely have to be degenerates to get attention? I guess they do.

The second picture obviously a bull. This guy is very friendly, which is not normal as far as I know. I took several shots of him, and this one was the best. Not Pulitzer material, but I felt like it was acceptable for my purposes. The second-best of a bad lot, but too good to delete.

This camera is fine for macro shots, and I once took a pretty good photo of a friend from a couple of feet away. I don’t know if it will ever be good for shots taken at longer distances. The subjects would have to be pretty compelling to overcome the dubious resolution, I think. I don’t think every shot should be razor-sharp, and the history of photography is full of astounding pictures that were not clear by today’s standards, but it’s a shame to be unable to get good detail in today’s world, where cameras are so capable.

The camera also provides somewhat bland colors in JPG mode. That can be fixed with software, but it would be pleasant to have striking photos right out of the card. I wonder if the camera has an adjustment!

I shot in very bright sunlight. Looks like that’s a mistake for most shots. The grass in the photos looks extremely washed out.

I want to get decent editing software. I use a free website called Befunky for blogging, because my needs have been simple up to this point. I would like to have something like my old Photoshop Elements program. I downloaded Photoshop Express from the Microsoft store, and it’s awful. I looked up the new Photoshop Elements, and people say it’s terrible. I think Adobe made it that way so people would upgrade and subscribe to their annoying cloud program. I don’t want that. After 4 years, I’d be into it for around $500. I am not completely stupid. I can do multiplication.

I tried GIMP, and it’s atrocious. The interface is for the kind of geeks who run around insisting Linux is for everyone.

It’s not. And GIMP is no fun.

I will keep at this for a while. It shouldn’t take long at all to figure out which camera and/or lens I need to replace the creaky 350D and Sigma zoom.

Today I Learned how to Breathe

It’s CLE time again, so I am here to rant.

“CLE” stands for “Continuing Legal Education.” It should be “CCS,” or “Continuing Consumer Scam.” The purported purpose is to keep lawyers up to date on new developments that affect their jobs. The real purpose is to fool the public into thinking lawyers are staying up to date on new developments that affect their jobs, when they may or may not be doing it.

Lawyers have a bad reputation. I hate to say anything shocking, but it’s true. America is full of scum-sucking parasite lawyers who file frivolous tort claims that ruin life for everyone else and make things more expensive. Remember diving boards? Can’t have one now because of lawyers. Remember pool slides? Trampolines? Pools that didn’t have tiny, annoying fences 18″ from their borders? Tort lawyers, stand up on your mucus-oozing hind appendages, and take a bow. You took it all away.

Because everyone justifiably hates lawyers, we are continually making insincere efforts to seem like redeemable human beings. For one thing, they push us to do pro bono work. Some idiot sues McDonald’s for making hot coffee, so the Florida Bar tells me to make things better by donating $30,000 worth of work to some tattooed lady who wants custody of her sexually undefinable kids.

When I was practicing, I didn’t do pro bono. It’s all risk and work and no reward. I’m still on the hook for malpractice regardless of what I charge. I’m still on the hook for bar discipline if I screw up. I still have to pay my expenses, including any sanctions I incur. I end up burdened with lifelong loyalty to a stranger who didn’t pay me, along with his, her, or its confidential information. It’s quite a bit different from pro bono medical work, where you fix a cleft palate in Borneo and the happy patient vanishes from your life forever.

I think I’ll start Lawyers Without Borders. We’ll go to foreign countries and sue grocery stores when people fall down in the aisles.

People cheer when Doctors Without Borders show up. Imagine how they will run when my crowd lands.

“Doctors Without Borders is here! Roll out the red carpet and bring out the dancing girls!”

“Look! A plane full of lawyers! RELEASE THE DRONES!”

CLE is supposed to perform the same function as pro bono work. If the public thinks we’re working to stay current, they’ll have more confidence in us. Supposedly. In reality, the way to make people believe in you is to win cases.

As I have often said, every competent lawyer does CLE on his own, continuously. When you get a case, you do legal research. You find out the current state of the law. You find out whether procedure has changed. You adapt on the fly. This is business as usual. You have to do it in order to avoid screwing up. You bill clients for it. It’s part of every case that isn’t incredibly routine.

Forcing lawyers to take stupid courses and report to the bar is totally unnecessary for good lawyers, and it won’t help bad ones. And isn’t it possible that a farcical, insincere effort to keep lawyers informed will cause the public’s confidence in us to go down instead of up? Doesn’t it reinforce the notion that lawyers are always trying to fool people? Because with CLE, we are?

Then there is the dirty secret no one but me discusses: there are lawyers who sign up for CLE and then claim they did it when they really did not.

I worked for a patent attorney named Jack Dominik. He’s dead, so I’ll just name him. This man was a really excellent attorney. Extraordinary. Before I met him. By the time I showed up, he was in his late seventies, and he was making ethical mistakes, but other than that, he was very impressive. He used to buy CLE tapes and play them on a machine in my office, where he could not hear them.

My dad practiced for over half a century, and he was the best lawyer I ever knew. He bought tapes, put them in a drawer, and told the bar he listened to them. But he was extremely meticulous about preparing for cases properly. He was always ahead of the game.

I’m not sure any lawyer I’ve ever known has actually done CLE for real, when there was any kind of a choice. I think I may be the only one who does it.

Last time around, I downloaded some free CLE stuff, which brings me to the third purpose of CLE. It allows lawyers and companies to promote themselves and their products. You get to tell people about what you do or what your product can do, and you can provide web links and so on. A lot of the stuff I found last time was created for promotional purposes. Infomercials. A software company named Rocket Matters did a lot of it. This time, it’s a company named…I’ve already forgotten.

Anyway, I downloaded this junk and put it on a flash drive. Then I listened to it whenever I drove anywhere. I also used an Ipod, I think. Maybe it was my phone. I used 3M Worktunes Bluetooth earmuffs while I was riding the tractor and mower and when I was using loud tools.

While I was doing all this, it occurred to me that I could speed this stuff up. The time requirement was over 30 hours, but what’s time to a lawyer? We routinely charge people for three hours of work when we’ve actually done half an hour. Believe it or not, there are times when this is considered ethical. So I thought, “Why should I spend an hour listening to something when I can do it in 40 minutes?”

I’m not saying I ever did this, or that it makes no difference at all in the effectiveness of the teaching, because the material is often simple, and many CLE instructors talk way too slowly. But I will say the thought occurred to me.

I will admit that I looked, and do look, for courses with exaggerated time credit. Sometimes the bar will give an hour’s credit for a “course” lasting under 40 minutes, and sometimes a “course” will run almost 70 minutes, so which one would you choose?

I have wondered about the ethics of speeding up CLE audio, but yesterday, I saw something really funny that answered my question. On a CLE site belonging to the bar itself, I saw an audio player with a speed control.

The speed control isn’t small. It’s not hidden. It’s right out there where you can see it. Click a plus button or a minus button, and you can listen at whatever speed suits you.

Guess we know how concerned the bar is about speeding up the sound.

Who clicks the minus button? Who wants to turn 33 hours into 66? I want to meet that person. Is it some kind of exotic masochistic fetish? Anything is possible. Some people get off on watching fat women smoke.

The plus button would be a huge help to me (if I were using it). My mind works a lot faster than most people’s. When an audio presentation goes up to 1.5x or more, suddenly, I can stand to listen to it. Listening to accelerated audio, which I’m not saying I would ever do with crucial, case-saving CLE materials, helps me understand how great it would be if everyone in the world thought as fast as I do. I must have spent a hundred thousand hours, finishing people’s sentences in my mind.

“Hurry up. Hurry up. Hurry up. I know what you’re going to say. Spit it out. I can’t stand this. Get it over with. Self: concentrate. Concentrate. It’s really not that boring if you focus.”

“Should I make lasagna tonight? I don’t think I have ricotta. I need to clean out my dryer duct. What would happen if I made pizza dough with club soda? What’s so interesting about fat women smoking?”

I get really tired of the wokeness in the videos, even here in Florida. I also feel alienated by the mental health videos.

Back when life made sense, CLE was about practicing law. How to do discovery. How to identify unfair labor practices. Stuff like that. Now we get stuff about meditation and yoga breathing. No lie.

Mental health and wellness CLE’s help fulfill our professionalism requirement, so I listen to them even though my mental health is so amazing, it should be studied for the good of mankind. I’m totally normal. No problems at all here.

Okay, maybe not everyone believes that.

Anyway, yesterday I heard two videos about coping with stress. One said stress was good for us and helped us live longer lives. It really did. It was made by a lady who said she had had strokes and surgery because of stress. The obvious question: “Is this woman the best possible choice to teach about reducing stress?” How about some videos from people in their nineties with low blood pressure and clear arteries? Just a thought.

The second video was from a guy who said it was impossible to be stressed and happy at the same time. The lady who made the first video needs to watch the second video.

When he started talking about meditation, I skipped it. I have religious objections to weird mental exercises that come from Satanic religions, so, sorry. Not listening. I feel I should still get credit. You wouldn’t get mad if an Orthodox Jew took a break while a speaker put up pornographic slides. To me, advice about taking up paganism is worse than porn. Merely hearing it is harmful.

As I listened to these people, I realized how different I was from them and their target audience. I was riding around on a diesel mower, in my tranquil, gated, heavily-armed, rural Florida compound, without a care in the world. They were talking about using alcohol, drugs, and heathen religion to cope with the huge anxiety loads their listeners dealt with every day. I realized how blessed I was and how miserable people can be when they get shackled to Satan’s hamster wheel.

I wasn’t miserable or stressed when I practiced law, but I think most lawyers are.

I don’t know why I maintain my license. I never want to go back to the law. No one who leaves it does. When lawyers get together and one says he found a way out, everyone says the same thing. “Lucky you! I wish I could do that.”

I better fire up some videos before the compliance deadline passes. I hope my diligence gives you confidence in the competence of legal professionals everywhere.

Biden and his Weimar Scrip

What is happening to the dollar? Is there some explanation I don’t know of, or are we just reaping the harvest Bush and Obama sowed when they started pumping currency out of the Federal Reserve like it was Monopoly money? Sooner or later, something had to happen.

I have a warehouse. If memory serves, in 2017, it rented for about $1770 per month, tax included. Florida collects sales tax on commercial rentals, which is probably one reason there is no income tax.

The warehouse needs a new tenant. The lady who helps me with tenants just sent me comparable rentals. They average out to about $3888/month. I don’t know whether that includes tax yet. She is getting back to me.

Assuming tax is included, the increase is about 120%, over 6 years. The INCREASE, not the total. I’m going to charge more than twice what I did 6 years ago.

Where is the money supposed to come from? I know I’ll get it, because people have no choice, but where are tenants finding money to pay their rent now? Is their income 220% of what it was in 2017? I’m pretty sure only burger-flippers are doing that well. They can write their own ticket in Biden’s America, although they are rapidly being replaced by apps and electronic kiosks. I’ve probably been to McDonald’s 15 times in the last year, and I only ordered from a human being once, to add something I forgot to tell the app about.

Last year, a tenant called me about a rent increase. He was almost in years. He literally begged me to help him out. He’s a great tenant. Never a hint of trouble. Pays his rent. I didn’t want to raise his rent at all. But I’m not running a charity. I pay taxes, which go up. I support myself and my wife using tiny, shrinking Biden dollars.

What am I supposed to tell him at the end of his current lease? I’ll probably have to tack over a thousand dollars onto his monthly rent.

I have to do it. I assume he’ll leave. I have no reason to think his business will generate an additional $12000 next year. Who will replace him? I know someone will, but where are these willing tenants coming from? Dubai? Palm Beach? Beverly Hills?

I’ve had people try to sell me on long-term leases. “I’ll pay what you ask, but you have to let me stay x years.” I never go for it. Why would I? I have zero incentive. If you don’t accept my terms, someone else will jump in later the same week, and I won’t have to worry about being underpaid after a year or two of inflation.

No one has ever refused to rent from me because I wouldn’t accept a long-term lease. Not once.

They tell us inflation is at something like 8%. How can that be true when so many things have doubled in price? Are they cooking the numbers or what?

I watch a Youtuber named Louis Rossmann. He’s a New Yorker. Well…he USED to be. Not long ago, he took off from Manhattan and put his computer repair shop in San Antonio. He’s a big right-to-repair activist. He also criticizes the government, which is an easy thing to do in a giant pile of reeking excrement like New York City.

He criticizes landlords, too. He goes around filming vacant businesses in Manhattan. They’re everywhere. When coronavirus hit, a lot of people just went home, and instead of helping them, the government made things worse. They’re not going to return, but somehow, landlords are charging more than ever. He showed tiny spaces smaller than a Miami warehouse, going for numbers like $75000 per month. Per MONTH. Not for jewelry stores or Apple shops. For ordinary businesses.

Granted, some of the increases are necessary because of inflation, but in view of the fact that the vacancy rate is huge, one would expect things to balance out at a lower average price per square foot.

By the way, he mentioned something interesting. He said people who lease real estate in New York are allowed to lie about the square footage. Say you have a unit with about 1500 square feet of space. You can tell renters it’s 2500, and you can’t be sued. You can say you adjusted it to include the benefit of common spaces like the lobby or whatever. They call the additional pretend square footage “loss factor,” so they have an established, accepted term for lying to people. If you tried that in Florida, I think they would put you in prison.

If people don’t want to rent, how can landlords charge so much? Aren’t they destroying their own businesses? I could ask for a million dollars per month, but no one would bite, and if other people around me asked too much, eventually, the whole area would decline and turn into a slum. It could end up like Detroit, where you can buy a two-story house for a thousand dollars. Aren’t New York landlords concerned about this?

In a pre-move video, Rossmann said he was trying to think of things to tell his employees in order to get them to move to Texas. He said they would earn the same pay and spend way less for everything. He said he might help them move. Why wouldn’t they? I know there are psychotics out there who think Manhattan is paradise, and they wouldn’t move if the alternative was death, but why would any reasonable person choose Manhattan and living in a shoebox over San Antonio and having a house?

I still don’t understand how Americans are surviving. I’ve wondered about it for a couple of years. Where are they getting the money to pay their bills, with so many closed businesses? I know Trump and Biden gave us a few bucks off our income taxes, but it wasn’t much. I know we spent a few trillion on relief. Was it so much it kept America going? I don’t know. I’m not familiar with the figures.

Doesn’t the house of cards have to fall sooner or later? Have the basic laws of economics suddenly changed for no reason?

I bought big cans of pizza sauce a year or two back. About $7 per can, which was a big increase over $4 per can, which I had paid a couple of years earlier. This week, they cost $9.70 per can. This isn’t frou-frou stuff at Whole Foods. It’s grocery supply food, for business that think about profit and loss. The vendors can’t just mark it up because it’s chic. They have to try to keep prices down. What happened?

We all saw what happened to cereal boxes. General Mills and Kellogg’s made the boxes really thin while keeping the height and width the same. The boxes are so thin, they look like plaques.

It’s hard to pour cereal now because the boxes are so thin, the cereal can’t get out. You get a couple of bowls from a box, and you’re done. I’ve seen cereal for over $7 per box. This is sugary, low-production-cost garbage food people used to buy for $2.50. It’s not luxury food. It’s like Twinkies.

When things don’t make sense, there is a supernatural reason. That’s how the universe works. Economics no longer make sense because the apocalypse is here, and we are playing by the apocalypse’s rules. Prices go up and down. Shortages begin and end. None of it can be predicted, because spirits are pulling the strings.

I think we may see deflation soon. I know that sounds insane. It happens, though. It happened in 2007. I remember buying prime beef for $7.00 per pound. It seems to happen when reality sets in and people realize they can’t buy anything. Stuff sits on shelves, and prices drop. Maybe that will happen soon. People have loaded their credit cards to the breaking point because Americans have no common sense. Sooner or later, surely, they will have to stop.

Or will they? Maybe Biden will open the currency tap up like a fire hydrant in August, the value of money will go to nothing, and we’ll all be paper billionaires. It’s back door socialism. I save my money and pay my bills, and you sit around sucking up welfare and playing Grand Theft Auto. The government prints money and gives it to you so you will vote for candidates who give things away. My money is now worth less, the value went to you, and the government didn’t have to confiscate or tax anything.

I don’t know what to think. I am going to maintain my prayer life and not worry about myself or my wife. Other people, however, are a concern. What percentage of the world’s population is close enough to God to be safe? Perhaps one percent?

I keep asking God to end the world NOW. Just remove us. I don’t want to see any more fat, ugly old men dancing in thong panties for children. I don’t want to be here when President Harris giggles her way through the oath of office. I don’t want to see the next pandemic, which is 100% certain to come. We’ll get things that make coronavirus look like chickenpox.

I can understand why God is going to be so brutal during the tribulation. The truth is that there are a lot of people who really need to be killed. They are beyond redemption because of pride. They would stand in front of Jesus himself, with the gates of hell open behind them, and spit in his face instead of admitting fault and receiving his love. As Jesus said about Jews who rejected him, if people won’t listen to Moses and the prophets, they won’t listen to one who has returned from the dead. The Old Testament is all about Jesus, often very clearly.

Jesus isn’t the only person who has returned from the dead. It has happened to many people, and most people who hear their stories sneer and wave them off. What Jesus said is proven true every day.

I don’t want any part of the punishment of the proud. I want to be gone, along with everyone I love.

In other news, while I wait for the bus to heaven, I have been fiddling with cameras.

Years ago, in maybe 2006, I decided I wanted to learn to take better pictures, so I got me a Canon Rebel XT 350D and a couple of Sigma lenses. I took photos for a year or two and then tapered off. I don’t remember exactly what happened. Eventually, smartphones got to the point where I could take relatively nice photos, and when I used mine, I tried to do a good job.

Since I found my wife, I’ve had to think more about photography. On our first four trips, we got by with phones and cheesy action cameras, but we had some problems, and before our latest trip, I got a Sony mirrorless vlogging camera. This thing will shoot still photos or video, and it has a built-in zoom lens. It has some shortcomings, but it was worth the money because I got some priceless footage.

Right before the trip, I dug out the Rebel to see if I should take it with us. I thought it might be better for still shots than phones or the Sony. I didn’t have much time to make a decision, so I left the Rebel behind. Today I shot some photos with both cameras, and it seems pretty obvious that a dedicated still camera with lenses I can change is a worthwhile investment.

The Sony is nearly useless for really close up shots, and it’s very easy to make mistakes with it because it’s tiny, with tiny, complex controls. And I’m stuck with one lens which is intended for people who are very concerned with convenience and less concerned with image quality.

Why not use the Rebel? It still works. I certainly can. It produces beautiful pictures. The colors are not as nice as the ones that come out of the Sony, but that can be adjusted quickly with Photoshop Express.

Newer models, however, are better. More resolution for cropping, for example. Lighter. Better integration with new tech. And a new camera would shoot video, which the Rebel will not do.

I’m wondering whether I should get a newer Rebel body. I can keep my lenses.

If we start lugging a big DSLR around on our trips, we will pretty much have to start dividing the cargo business. As it is, I generally carry a backpack, and Rhodah flits around unburdened. This is one reason I lose weight on trips while she…doesn’t exactly do that. Creme brulee is another reason.

I talked to her about it today, and she thinks carrying a backpack would be a good move for her.

I didn’t make a strong effort to take good pictures today, since the purpose of my experiment was to test camera capabilities. Nonetheless, I took a couple of shots I really, really like. I edited them to make them more striking. You can see them below, 700 pixels wide. They look somewhat better with more pixels.

The second one is a lot better than the first, but it’s pretty good for something I shot in a few seconds to test a camera.

These are just quick photos I took in the yard, so I should be able to do very nice things with more effort, or with family photos.

That second flower is a terrible weed. The Spanish needle. Guess what its Linnaean classification is. “Bidens alba.” Funny. It products sharp, hard, needle-like sees that stick to your clothes like parasites. Interesting parallel.

It’s weird how a camera can make ugly things beautiful. I would not be ashamed to blow that second picture up and put it on the wall.

I may go for it. Life is short, and pictures are important. There are probably fewer than 25 pictures of me from my childhood, and there is zero video. My dad bought a Brownie movie camera and shot some film, but he didn’t take care of any of it, and it vanished. Can you believe that? Could we be any more dysfunctional? I don’t want my wife and kids to end up in the same situation. Actually, she already has. She was kind of a Cinderella as a child, so not many pictures.

Thinking it over. I may order a new body. In the meantime, I think I’ll take some more shots around the farm. Maybe I can eventually do some wildlife and non-wildlife (cow) photos.

Your Colon Will Thank You

My standard breakfast is vegetable stew with some kind of meat in it, but making it is a big chore with a lot of cleanup afterward, so lately I’ve been having my other standard breakfast: the kibbutz breakfast.

I learned about this in Israel, while picking grapefruit every day. Kibbutzniks are supposed to be atheists, because their movement began in Marxism, but they have two meatless meals every day anyway, perhaps to avoid offending old people who like to fool themselves and pretend they’re keeping kosher. I’m assuming they still eat what they did when I lived there.

They provided boiled eggs, various raw vegetables, plain yogurt, hummus, really bad white toast, and something called porridge, which seemed to be Cream of Wheat. I think they also served cottage cheese, but I don’t recall for sure. I believe they served margarine, which is disgusting and probably unhealthy. They also had terrible jelly. They may have had raw oats, too. Back when I was there, kibbutzniks were not known for good taste in food.

When I picked the right things from the menu, I ended up with breakfasts that were healthy and reasonably tasty. Now that I’m in America, and I’m not dependent on kibbutz kitchen workers who make bad choices and can’t cook, I can do a better job than they did. I use pita instead of toast. I get or make better hummus, with lots of hot pepper sauce. I use full-fat cottage cheese, and I eat sour cream instead of yogurt.

As for vegetables, I like carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes, red bell peppers, and hot pickled peppers.

It would be nice to have tahini, but making and using it are a lot of aggravation.

It works pretty well, and you can probably guess that constipation is not a problem for me. And I knock off my day’s fruit and vegetable requirement in one meal.

The big obstacle is the pita. It comes in tiny bags here, and it gets moldy fast, so I have to keep going to the store if I want to have pita on hand. The solution? Homemade pita.

I saw a bunch of recipes online, but they looked stupid to me. “Knead by hand for 10 minutes.” “Stir the yeast into warm water and wait until it foams up.” “Mix in half the flour and wait until it looks fluffy to add the rest.” Come on. Wives’ tales and mythology. I wasn’t going to mess with all that unnecessary labor. The fact that bakers did something stupid 500 years ago doesn’t mean I have to keep doing it today.

I got out one of my pizza dough recipes, and it worked great. In case you want to try it, I’ll provide it.

INGREDIENTS

180 grams flour
120 grams water
0.8 tsp. salt
1.5 tsp. sugar
1/4 tsp. instant yeast
1/2 tsp. oil, your choice

I used high-gluten flour, but I think flour with less gluten would be better, because eventually you get tired of chewing.

Blend the dry ingredients in a food processor with a chopping blade. If you make a lot of dough, use a dough blade. Add the water while continuing to process. As soon as the flour is wet, stop. A lot of flour will be stuck to the sides of the bowl. Use a silicone spatula to push it back down. Continue blending until you have something resembling dough. Wait 5 minutes. Add the oil and blend again for maybe 30 seconds. Done.

Remove it and stretch it in your hands a few times, turning it inside out and pressing it back together. Do this to put tension in the dough. Make a ball or disk and put it on a sheet of nonstick foil sprayed with a little oil. Cover with a glass bowl. Let it rise fully.

Preheat your oven to 500°, using a stone or pizza steel. Cut the ball in 4 pieces. Shape each piece into a new ball. Roll them out as thin as you can, like 1/16″. Let them sit for 20 minutes.

Throw each piece on the hot stone or steel. It will blow up magically by itself, creating an inner pocket. You know those bubbles that form in pizza crust? They’re the same thing as pita pockets.

Turn your dough after maybe 90 seconds and bake it until it looks right.

That’s it. Very, very easy. It will taste better than store pita, and you can make it every couple of days in order to avoid shopping trips. You can scale it up if you need bigger batches.

I use a lot of flour when rolling out dough, and instead of a rolling pin, I use a length of 2″ PVC pipe. Rolling pins are stupid. The only problem with the pipe is that I can’t put it in the dishwasher, but that doesn’t work well with rolling pins, either.

I suppose you could fry this stuff and end up with something like poori, but I don’t really know. I think you would have to replace some of the water with yogurt. The main blessing here is the method, not the ingredients. It should work with other kinds of bread.

Orwell and Santayana

Today I saw a neat video about Nazi Germany and the way it looted the wealth of the Jews. By “neat,” I mean interesting. I don’t think looting is neat, and my personal opinion, like that of God himself as well as many American legislators, is that burglars caught in the act should be shot without consequences. It’s too bad Jews couldn’t shoot the Germans who stole their stuff.

I say “Germans,” meaning Germans and Austrians in general, not just Nazis. After the anschluss, Austrians were considered Germans, if memory serves, and not all of the looters were Nazis. Some were just there for the fun and the free stuff. And not all of them were German or inside Germany. A lot of Europeans of other nationalities got in on the action.

I’ll embed the video here. It came from Yad Vashem, the Holocaust-remembrance organization.

So what’s so interesting?

The apocalypse has started, and we see new signs of it every day. One sign: increased crime. Another sign: increased persecution of Christians (both real and nominal) and Jews. When I write about this, I usually mention something God revealed to me: the spirit behind all this is the spirit of antichrist.

It may sound weird to say the spirit of antichrist would go after the Jews, who are widely perceived as detractors (to put it mildly) of Yeshua. It’s not weird at all. In the Bible, the Jewish people are often conflated with Yeshua. There is at least one passage in which the word calls Yeshua “Israel.” The Jews were intended to be the body of Yeshua on Earth, and in the beginning, all believers in Yeshua were Jews, as was Yeshua himself.

Antisemitic Christians forget that Christianity is a sort of extension of Judaism. Even if it is not quite Judaism, it is the newest phase of the process that resulted in Judaism, created exclusively through Jews and headed by a manifestation of God who is, himself, a Jew. If you’re a Christian, you worship a Jew.

I think most Jews would not want to hear it, but the Jews are responsible for the existence of Christianity. If it hadn’t been for a small group of Jewish men who spread the good news 2000 years ago, facing brutal persecution that included murder and other types of physical abuse, there would be no Christianity. A lot of Jews have been treated badly by Christians, and they have a right to complain, but their ancestors established the faith they don’t like. Without Jews, it would never have started. It has nothing to do with any other religion.

As far as we know, Jews wrote the entire New Testament. It is, without possibility of contradiction, a Jewish work.

Regardless of the current state of relations between God and Jews, they are still special to him, and they play an important part in the future. Many will recognize their messiah and serve him, and Yeshua will be glorified. Satan doesn’t want that. When Satan gets idiots to pick on the Jews, he is trying to thwart God’s plans to establish the kingdom of Yeshua on Earth. He is trying to put an end to God’s plans so he can replace God’s scheme with his alternative. “Anti” means “instead of.”

The Bible is full of repetitive patterns. The universe is governed by certain supernatural principles, so when man behaves this way or that way, regardless of the era, similar things happen. We are now seeing events that are reminiscent of the fall of Sodom and Gomorrah as well as the ascent of Hitler.

If you watched the video, you saw the speaker talk about the way looting worked in Germany. He said Germans were taught that Jews had great wealth and that it had been stolen from Germans, so when Germans stole from Jews, they were really recovering their own stolen property.

Does this sound familiar at all?

How many times, during the last 10 years, have you seen American leftists say white people live on stolen land? Even blacks are saying it, which is weird, because blacks never had a claim to anything in the New World. If our real estate is stolen, so is theirs, but this is a point leftists don’t seem inclined to address.

What is happening in retail businesses across America? Looting. Where else have we seen this? If Jewish lore is to be believed, it happened in Sodom and Gomorrah. A merchant would arrive, and locals would descend as a mob, each taking one small item. The merchant’s wealth would be stolen in its entirety, but no one could be punished because each crime was so small.

In America, mobs of mostly-black people are swarming stores, cleaning out shelves, and store owners and the police are doing virtually nothing. In many areas, you can now walk into Home Depot or Nordstrom, fill your arms with expensive loot, and walk out. And what happens if you’re arrested? Bail “reform” may put you back on the street within hours, so you can resume stealing. After that, the charges are likely to be dismissed. Like the sodomites, we have effectively made theft legal.

In the video, you will see photos of the destruction Germans inflicted on Jewish property. They did exactly the same thing our modern mobs are doing. People who were raised to be law-abiding suddenly forgot their objections to stealing, and they cleaned out stores and other buildings, including homes.

In another video from Yad Vashem, the actions of German businesses are discussed. According to the video, at first, German companies were not all that interested in harming the Jews. Eventually, though, the government started trumping up charges and threatening businesses with prosecution. Things went better for business that purged Jewish employees. Also, business owners who saw that other business owners were looting Jewish property got in on it not out of a desire to harm Jews but out of fear they would miss out on an economic windfall that helped their less-scrupulous competitors.

Does any of this sound familiar? Consider all the conservatives who have been indicted and prosecuted for things they didn’t do, or for things for which Democrats are not prosecuted. Tom DeLay. Newt Gingrich. Trump. Paul Manafort. Michael Flynn. Roger Stone. Sarah Palin was sued out of office, and she did nothing wrong. Trump’s lawyer went to prison. His associates are being charged now. A bunch of overexcited protesters who participated in a minor riot at the Capitol are now getting sentences as high as 18 years, while the criminals who tried to murder Kyle Rittenhouse on camera have never been charged. In fact, the state treated them like victims.

If you’re a leftist, you can literally set a cop on fire with a Molotov cocktail and go home and sleep in your own bed, but if you’re conservative and you fail to register as a foreign agent, which is a trivial, obscure, and highly technical violation of laws most foreign agents ignore, you can be put in federal prison.

Alec Baldwin killed a woman and shot another person in front of witnesses, negligently, and at the moment, he is free, and criminal charges against him have been dismissed. Could that happen to Jon Voight or Gary Sinise?

I guess there are people who think I’m nuts for comparing the systematic, deliberate persecution of conservatives to the Nuremberg laws and Kristallnacht, but to an unbiased eye, the parallels are undeniable and strong.

I have given up on the world. I keep praying for God to send Jesus ASAP. I’m sorry people will have to go through the tribulation, but they’re doomed to go through it whether Christians are here or not, and I don’t want God’s children to have to put up with the hyenas and piranha any longer. I don’t think it’s worth it. We are accomplishing nearly nothing, and persecution is ramping up very quickly. It is no longer possible for a real Christian to live a normal life and raise children in the West. I have no idea how my wife and I are supposed to have a family here.

I never thought I’d see a day when decent people in the United States would have to run from purple-haired freaks who mutilate their bodies and worship demons. That day is here, and it arrived some time ago. People who think it hasn’t are in a state of deep delusion.

I suppose the Jews are in for more abuse and suffering than anyone, because the vast majority of them will not be prepared for the rapture, which is for the body of Yeshua and those who have not made an informed decision to reject him. Once Christians are gone, leftists will be able to focus their attention on Jews, and God has already shown he is willing to allow terrible things to happen to people who reject the messiah. He didn’t stop the Nazis, so there is no reason to think he will stop their spiritual descendants.

The nutty thing about Yad Vashem’s videos is that they feature commentators who are almost certainly leftist. I saw one video that featured a far-left American academic known for his fiercely anti-Israel blather. How stupid can you be, to lose something like a third of your people, strive to establish a safe homeland surrounded by murderous enemies, and then try to support your goals by giving voices to those who seek your destruction?

The Jews have a new religion: leftism. Their new God treats them very badly, but they keep washing his feet with their tears and drying them with their hair. I doubt the guy in the video about looting has any idea he’s describing not just Nazis, but modern leftists he probably supports. Jews worry about antisemitism from conservatives, when we’re actually the only powerful friends they have. Meanwhile, they promote leftists who are actively trying to destroy their homeland! They are the most politically-suicidal people in history.

Spared

In case anyone cares, Hurricane Idalia came and went and did nearly nothing in my county. God was kind.

It was an interesting few days.

Even though I am in an area which has never experienced a true hurricane, we do get winds high enough to make a real mess. They don’t push houses over or throw cars around, but they can down enough trees to result in a cleanup effort that lasts months. Also, because I lived and owned houses in Miami, where hurricanes hit with their full force, I am conditioned to stress myself while observing the progress of storms. I know what it is to go days without running water and weeks without power.

If you own commercial property, or you own a home that’s part of a bigger common structure, hurricanes aren’t much of a problem for you. It’s hard for winds to damage warehouses and condos. A house is another story. Houses are built and landscaped stupidly, as though daring hurricanes to come through and ruin people’s lives.

It wasn’t until surprisingly recently that Florida had quasi-intelligent building codes for houses, and it still hasn’t caught up with regard to landscaping. You can build a house with 100-foot-tall trees 5 feet from the eaves, and no one will bat an eye.

Should the government be involved in telling you what kind of trees you can have, at your own risk? No, but people should be using common sense without the government’s involvement.

The house I live in now had a 40-foot maple tree about 15 feet from the garage when I moved in. Lightning killed it soon after I arrived, but I probably would have left it in place had it not been destroyed by nature. I should have planned to get rid of it as soon as I saw it.

I still have some big, feeble trees within falling distance of my house and shop. I’m considering hiring a company to come in and knock them all over so I can move them. They’re going to fall on their own sooner or later, with or without hurricanes, so I might as well get ahead of them. For $4500, I can get a whole day of work from a crew with some pretty impressive machinery.

The guy who built this house did some surprisingly stupid things. I guess the trees I have to get rid of now looked neat when they were smaller and stronger, and his wife probably insisted on leaving them where they were.

I’ve learned some things about tree removal. First, never pay a tree service. Tree services use wimpy tools to peck at large problems. A couple of outdoorsy-looking ladies who run a local service tried to charge me $800 to fell one oak without bucking or removing it. This would have been a 10-minute job. If I had to pay them to fell the other trees I don’t like, I suppose I would be looking at a $10,000 bill. That’s ridiculous. For $4500, I can get 8 hours of tree destruction, along with all sorts of trimming, ground grooming, and rock removal.

The $800 tree ended up costing me $0 to move. It was a tall oak that had broken about 30 feet up. The top part of of it got caught in another tree, so the top was resting horizontally on the other tree, waiting to fall on me if I cut the trunk.

I took a fishing pole and cast a weight over the horizontal part. I used the line to pull a heavier line over the tree. Eventually, I had a tow strap and a chain attached to the tree, and I attached it to the tractor and yanked the tree down. Zero risk of injury and equipment damage. I used a chainsaw to get rid of the stump and waste wood, and that was that.

I like paying other people to do certain types of jobs, but if you’re going to yank my chain with an $800 bid for a job that will take you 10 minutes, I’m going to get creative and send you home with nothing. If these ladies had offered to do it for $250, they would have gotten my business, and I would have called them for all my future work. As it is, they will have to find comfort in the hollow victory of refusing to get realistic with their rosy pricing schedule.

I’m considering buying an excavator. I can get a decent one for $30,000. I wouldn’t buy a new one, because buying new equipment is stupid for amateurs and most professionals. An excavator would allow me to push most problem trees over, and I could also move trunks with it. I could remove all the annoying boulders in the yard and sell them for landscaping. I could pull stumps out quickly and easily. I could fix problems with soil distribution. I could build and repair berms and do light grading.

Biden and BRICS are probably going to destroy the dollar, so putting $30,000 into a machine that depreciates at a glacial pace is smarter than keeping the money in the bank. And who knows? I might even be able to make some money with an excavator if I had to.

I’ve pretty much decided that small landowners who don’t grow crops need two machines: a track loader, often misgendered as a skid steer, and a small excavator. A skid steer is a track loader with wheels. It’s not as good. It tears up the ground, for one thing.

A track loader can do everything a tractor can do except for farming, which I don’t do, and it does everything much, much better. It can lift at least twice as much for the same size machine. It can run bigger attachments. It can rip out stumps a tractor can’t budge. It can lift huge loads when rigged with a fork.

A track loader comes with a cage that protects the operator. A tractor will let things fall on you and kill you.

Track loaders cost more than tractors, but you get what you pay for.

I don’t need a track loader nearly as much as I need an excavator. The tractor, for all its shortcomings, does a whole lot of things reasonably well, and I improved it a lot by modifying it. If I can move soil, tear out stumps and rocks, and remove most trees with an excavator, it will be worth its weight in gold.

I’m always thinking of adding a building to hold stuff I don’t want to park in the rain. Problem: trees and rocks are in the way. With an excavator, I could clear the land myself, pretty easily.

As for Idalia, it made a big mess up the coast. I looked at videos of buildings besieged by storm surge, and it was disheartening.

The brutal truth is that most people who got flooded asked for it. It’s possible to build things on concrete stilts or raised mounds of fill, and people don’t do it, even though the cost of flooding is much greater than the cost of building correctly.

News stations always try to terrify us with claims that 12-foot storm surges are on the way. They’re not telling the whole truth.

First of all, the first three or four feet of surge only get the water up to the level of the ground in most of Florida, so those feet don’t count. Second, the worst storm surge I ever heard of in real life occurred during Andrew, and it was around 8 feet. This is a big deal if you’re right by the water and you built stupidly, but if you’re inland or you built correctly, it’s not a major problem.

If you go watch surge videos, you’ll generally see water coming up one to two feet on the sides of buildings very close to the water. Very bad, but not what the news nuts predicted. To listen to them, you would think houses were going to sink in up to their eaves. Real castastrophic, house-high storm surge is pretty unusual. You can find videos of it hitting places like the Bahamas, and it’s totally different from typical mainland Florida storm surge.

What they want you to think storm surge is like:

What it’s really like most of the time:

If you go on the web, you will see ridiculous stories claiming Katrina produced 28 feet of storm surge. Actual highest recorded value: 11.4 feet. Momentary waves aren’t storm surge. Flash floods from rain aren’t storm surge. Storm surge is standing water with a height that changes gradually. If 28 feet of water had gone across Mobile, it would no longer exist.

To Florida people, hurricanes are a lot like skin cancer. Except for melanoma, skin cancers are about as dangerous as hangnails, and you can cure them yourself with a can of computer dust spray and a Q-tip, in about two minutes. Floridians don’t get upset about them, but Yankees who get tiny basal cell carcinomas cut out have the gall to call themselves cancer survivors. As for storm surge, people who aren’t from Florida wave their arms and become incontinent when it’s mentioned, but most of the time, for at least 99% of the state, it’s not that bad.

I’m about 90 feet above sea level, I’m not in a flood plain (I checked before buying), and I’m in a place hurricane-force winds can’t reach. If I get my trees fixed up, hurricanes will mean nearly nothing to me. They don’t mean a whole lot now.

It’s terrible to see that people in Florida’s internal corner got surge flooding, but this is something you have to expect when you build a certain way. It’s not merely possible; it’s certain to happen sooner or later. It doesn’t make any sense to complain as though you had been hit by a meteor. You knew it was coming when you decided not to elevate your building.

I’m glad the storm is over, because I didn’t need any more stress after a 30-hour-long trip from Singapore. The flights alone accounted for about 24 hours, and the seats were like bricks situated under vises. The bricks pulverized my tailbone, and the armrests squeezed my arms against me. I made the mistake of buying exit row seats, and apparently, the seat bottoms are even less forgiving than the ones in the other coach seats. I was in real pain a lot of the time. A seat you can live with for three hours may seem a lot different after 10.

I think I also had coronavirus, which added to the suffering. I didn’t have a fever, a runny nose, a sore throat, or loss of my sense of smell, but I had a generally crummy feeling accompanied by the speedy and continuous accumulation of disturbing things in my nostrils. My wife had congestion and some throat problems, so I think I probably caught some of it, too. I wouldn’t have suspected anything had she not been sick.

Watching a storm approach is always draining, and combined with my other problems, it made for several unpleasant days during which I could not fully let go and recover from the trip. It was a little perfect storm that was reluctant to let go. Now I’m finally unwinding.

I Definitely Picked the Wrong Week to Stop Sniffing Glue

The Cone of Certain Death is once again upon me.

Before I went to Hong Kong and Singapore, I prayed repeatedly that God would keep hurricanes away from my house while I was gone. He came through. Now, three days after my return home, we are getting the usual pre-storm hype. MAJOR Hurricane Idalia is BARRELING DOWN on me, and doom is assured.

I never pay any attention to the Panic…I mean “Weather” Channel. I don’t listen to the TV nuts. I watch the NHC site and keep track of changes in the forecast paths and the expected width of the storms. Right now, things are looking good. I am completely outside the area where the eye of the storm is expected to go, by maybe 75 miles, and the path updates are trending westward, away from me.

When Irma hit in 2017, the remains of storm went pretty much right over my house, and a lot of trees went down. This time, the storm is going to be very far away. My best guess is that I won’t get much wind at all.

The wind forecasts over at Accuweather are disturbing but probably wrong by a wide margin. They’re calling for sustained winds of 55 mph at some point. I think that’s way off, based on about 30 years of observing storms and forecasts. Last year, a storm passed by, and I noticed a breeze of maybe 10 mph at the exact time the forecasters were claiming 50. It was amazing to watch. How can you keep a 50-mph forecast on your site when you know perfectly well you’re 40 mph off?

My theory is that they lie deliberately in order to cover their butts and increase ratings. Scared people keep their TV’s on.

It’s dismaying to live in a state with tropical weather problems and to know that the people I rely on to inform me are very nearly worthless.

People who don’t live in Florida like to tell me I live in a hurricane zone. Insurance people like it more than anyone. Thing is, hurricane winds have never been recorded where I live. I looked it up. You can’t say you’ve been in a hurricane unless there was at least one minute during which the wind never dropped below 74 mph. That does not happen here.

We barely get tropical storm winds, which start at 39 mph.

Forecasters deliberately conflate gusts with sustained winds. You can have hurricane-speed gusts without clearing the hurricane bar. It’s normal to have brief blasts of high winds when you’re not really experiencing a hurricane. Still, forecasters love to talk about the gusts and play down the low sustained winds, which are what actually count.

They are predicting tropical storm winds from around 7 a.m. to about 1 p.m. I will be amazed if we get them at all.

Accuweather is reporting a hurricane warning for my area. A watch is when you MAY get a hurricane. A warning is when you WILL get a hurricane. The warning here started yesterday at 5 p.m. and ends tonight at 1:15. Someone explain that to me. How can they be sure a hurricane will hit, when they, themselves, say it won’t? Why did the warning start a day and a half before the high winds were expected?

The storm won’t even be here by 1:15, so how can the warning end then? Whatever arrives will get here tomorrow morning at about 7.

I need to check the definitions. Here they are, from the NHC:

Hurricane Watch
A Hurricane Watch is issued when sustained winds of 74 mph or higher are POSSIBLE within the specified area of the Watch. Because hurricane preparedness activities become difficult once winds reach tropical storm force, the Watch is issued 48 hours in advance of the onset of tropical storm force winds.

Hurricane Warning
A Hurricane Warning is issued when sustained winds of 74 mph or higher are EXPECTED somewhere within the specified area of the Warning. Because hurricane preparedness activities become difficult once winds reach tropical storm force, the Warning is issued 36 hours in advance of the onset of tropical storm force winds.

Let’s see. A hurricane warning is issued 36 hours in advance of the onset of tropical storm force winds. So, if hurricane winds had been expected, that would have been 7 p.m. yesterday, which is later than 5 p.m. So 34 hours, not 36? Why? And hurricane winds were never expected, so why post the warning at all?

Am I wrong, or are they ignoring their own rules?

Okay, here is what’s certain: there will be no hurricane here. Period. Count on it. It just does not happen.

Here is what is extremely likely: we will not get a tropical storm here. We might, but we probably will not. If we do, it almost certainly won’t last long, because hurricanes are more or less circular, and circles are small far from their centers. I will be far from the center. The region of high winds that passes over me will be small, if it exists at all. Because it will be small, it will pass over quickly.

There is a small possibility we will get worse winds than I expect, along with a bunch of downed trees. That looks like the worst case, unless tornadoes count. You have to be really cursed to get hit by a tornado. They are not common during hurricanes.

It’s good that I’m on the east side of the storm, with a coast between me and the eye. The only possible high winds will be from the south and west, and they will have to go over land to get here. On the down side, I have some big trees to the south of my workshop.

I haven’t prepared at all except to get some water. I can bathe in the pool and use the water to flush the toilets. I can drive to get food if the power goes out. Not much can be done.

I have ingredients for pizza.

I prayed about the storm, and I cursed it and so on. I think God told me there was no reason to get involved in preparation, so I’m relaxing. Tomorrow we’ll find out if I’m hearing from God or just lazy and prone to believing what I want.

As for the rest of the state, things look good. Forecasters are certain it will hit land north of me and east of the panhandle. In other words, it will strike an area where very few people live. Not comforting to the inhabitants, but it’s better than seeing Fort Lauderdale slammed.

Here’s some idiocy from The Drudge Report’s leftist owners:

Honestly, it’s like they sleep on rubber sheets.

Deceased Bizarro Food Influencer Strikes Again

In case anyone who reads this blog is wondering where I’ve been, I have two things to say that might be clues. You really have to try Ki’s Roasted Goose in Hong Kong, and you should avoid the chili crab at Keng Eng Kee Seafood in Singapore.

My wife and I keep meeting abroad while we wait for her American visa, and we just spent two weeks in the Far East.

I have never had any interest in seeing Hong Kong (or any Far Eastern destination), but beggars can’t be choosers, and very few countries will let my African wife visit without a fight. China will not accept her, but Hong Kong, which is part of China, lets Zambians in straight off the plane. She wants to see as many countries as she can, and she didn’t want to revisit our prior destinations without including something new, so we threw Hong Kong into the mix.

Before the trip, people gave me a lot of bad information. Somehow, the Internet has made it harder to learn the truth about other countries. It should have made it easier. Because there is so much money to be made from cheap Internet exposure, people who have a lot of eyeballs on them are able to charge a lot for lying about hotels, restaurants, and attractions, and they are making the most of it. Also, forums are full of people who give bad advice for no clear reason.

Regarding Hong Kong, I was told I should get a hepatitis shot or immunoglobulin because something like 6% of the population has the disease. I was told I could get typhoid from eating raw food. People said I should avoid the tap water. I also read that I might be arrested and imprisoned for no reason.

Regarding hepatitis, it’s not easy to get without close contact, so that’s not a real problem. Typhoid affects people who eat dubious things like raw oysters, and I won’t even eat cooked ones. The tap water comes from a completely modern purification system, and it contains chlorine, just like the tap water you probably drink.

I think the people who get arrested are generally Americans with Chinese backgrounds, or Chinese people with American green cards. If you go to Hong Kong to protest the CCP, you may have a problem, but I went to eat restaurant meals and be with my wife.

I was also told people in Hong Kong would be rude, but they seemed fine to me. Of course, I spent most of my childhood in Miami, so I barely notice rudeness that would put most people in therapy.

I guess I can tell you some useful things about Hong Kong.

First, the food is generally very good. It’s not always fantastic, but you will find very little food that is truly disappointing. We went to a number of places, recommended and unrecommended, and the only truly worthless one was the Peninsula Hotel. Everything else was either good or excellent.

Singapore is different. People claim it’s the food capital of Asia, but that’s completely baseless. There is good food there, and there is also a lot of really bad food. You have to talk to locals in order to find out where you should eat.

The Peninsula has a famous high tea service. This is a British thing. “Tea” is a beverage, but the British think it’s lunch. They have a pretentious custom of sitting down in the afternoon and eating really awful girl food with hot tea. Scones and cucumber sandwiches figure heavily.

The Peninsula’s high tea is a tourist thing. It has no redeeming features whatsoever apart from the nice atmosphere. It has no inherent value. They charge you around $250 for tea and a weird three-tier tray of worthless food. You take selfies and enjoy feeling important, and then you leave.

The lowest tier on the tray holds cranberry scones which are overworked. A scone is a sweet biscuit, and when you work biscuit dough too much, it gets gummy, sort of like Pillsbury canned biscuits. The Peninsula’s scones were okay, but not like the real thing. The second tray held cucumber sandwiches with the crusts removed. If you have to remove the crust from your bread, you made bad bread. The crust is supposed to be the best part. The cucumber stuff is just cucumber mashed up with something resembling mayonnaise mixed with low-fat sour cream. Pointless. You also get weird little pastries full of a similar condiment mixed with lumps of bad smoked salmon. It’s hard to make me dislike smoked salmon, but the Peninsula Hotel pulled it off.

The top tier contains about three pastries per person. They are small and not very good. All you need to know. They had something on there that was sort of like a tiny raspberry shortcake, and it was acceptable, but the other items were gross.

We took a food tour in Hong Kong the day after we arrived, and it was really helpful. We had beef brisket and noodles in a soup pretty much like pho. Very, very good. The name of the restaurant is Sister Wah. We also had dim sum at the Imperial. Excellent. We finished up with roasted goose at Ki’s Roasted Goose, which is a chain. We met Mr. Ki himself. He happened to be at the location we visited that day. Very friendly guy. Funny.

Ki’s taught me that America’s rejection of goose is a huge mistake. It’s far better than our standard poultry, including duck. It’s sort of like fatty, juicy, delicious pork. Chinese people gut and clean their geese, and then they slow-roast them. They apply stuff to the skin. I would guess it’s mainly MSG and some kind of sugar solution. In the end, you get a very, very juicy goose with a crisp skin that will make your eyes roll back in your head. Sort of like Peking duck, but much better.

We had roasted goose twice, and it was fantastic both times. The vegetables were also very, very good. If you go to Hong Kong and eat every meal at Ki’s, no one will be able to criticize your judgment.

They give pork belly the same treatment. It’s nothing short of amazing.

The meat is served with plum sauce and beautifully prepared rice. It doesn’t need anything else. Adding too much stuff to it is like pouring sauce on a good steak.

We assumed roasted goose would be all over Singapore, but it isn’t. They use duck because of bird flu issues. It’s good, but you can’t compare it to goose, and Singapore cooks just aren’t as good as Hong Kong cooks.

The dim sum was wonderful, but I would recommend staying away from the steamed barbecue pork buns Youtubers brag about. They’re not great. The pork is very sweet, and there is no acidity or heat to balance the sweetness. Steamed pork buns are popular for breakfast. I would sooner hit the nearest McDonald’s.

Hong Kong is also known for egg tarts. An egg tart is a tiny pie crust filled with egg custard. Maybe it’s exciting to Asians, but I’m used to flan and creme brulee, so I found it lacking. I would not order one again.

We didn’t eat any expensive food in Hong Kong, and by “expensive food,” I mean legitimate expensive food, not garbage like the Peninsula Hotel’s farcical tea. I don’t think there is any point in looking for high-end restaurants in Hong Kong, because the food is so good everywhere else.

Hong Kong is hot, and the wind never blows. Well, it blows, but you feel it mostly when you’re up on a hill or a building, because Hong Kong buildings are tall and close together. The humidity is amazing, and I am saying this as a person who lives in Florida. Laundry takes forever to dry. There is mildew everywhere. When you walk down the streets, water from air conditioners drips on you no matter where you are.

Hong Kong is built below some steep hills, and the buildings pretty much stop at their bases, so the hills are not very developed. We took a tram up the side of Victoria Peak and shot some video. We were around 1800 feet above the narrow streets, and the difference was amazing. The air was cooler, and it actually moved. And we were in the clouds part of the time. Worth the money and time. Victoria Peak is not an alp, but it punches above its weight.

I picked up some camera stuff in an area known for electronics stores. The selection was fantastic, as was the help. Much better than the US. Prices were about the same, though.

The subway and buses were wonderful. When you get to Hong Kong, you buy something called an Octopus Card, and you load it with money. After that, you use it to take you everywhere. We only took two cabs the whole time we were there.

The subway I know best is the one in New York. It stinks of urine, it’s a great place to get beaten or killed, and passengers are constantly harassed by young fatherless morons. It’s really dirty. You can’t use the restrooms because they never work, they are never cleaned, and they belong to violent drug dealers who don’t like visitors. Hong Kong and Singapore have clean, efficient, safe subways. Very different. Best way to get around.

The harbor is nice. You can take a ferry for almost nothing, and it gives you good views of the impressive skyscrapers and peaks. When tiny waves rock the boat, the Chinese people go, “WOOOOOOOO!” Makes a big impression on them.

We stayed in Sheung Wan, a real Hong Kong neighborhood a short distance from the busier areas. We used an apartment-hotel, so we had the luxury of access to washers and dryers. Unfortunately, the staff and other guests were always using them. In the future, I would choose a place with laundry machines in the suite itself.

The neighborhood was full of conveniences such as 7-Eleven, McDonald’s, and bakeries. Very livable.

American cities are full of grandmother-raised, fatherless minority kids who are constantly looking for victims. It was strange to be in busy cities where you don’t even think about things like that. It was very strange not to see ghettos. A typical big American city is MOSTLY ghetto.

Singapore was great, as always. They have cards similar to Octopus Cards, and we used ours to go all over. Our experience with the food was not all that great, though. Liars like Anthony Bourdain have polluted the world with corrupt reviews pushing bad restaurants, and we got burned again.

Bourdain and a popular food vlogger with a channel called Marion’s Kitchen have promoted Keng Eng Kee for seafood. We tried it. Disgusting.

They sold us a $95 chili crab. They said it was a whole kilogram. It looked like a crab, but it was really a collection of shell parts from unrelated crabs, piled up to look like one creature. It appeared they had boiled a lot of crabs in a sauce much like the glop in a can of Spaghetti-O’s. If you took that stuff and added a small amount of Texas Pete and a ton of sugar, you would have nearly the same thing.

There was no meat inside the crab body. The sauce was full of tiny slivers of overcooked meat, however. I believe over 3/4 of the kilogram was sauce and shell.

Our “crab” had three claws. They were poorly cracked, and the meat wasn’t worth the effort of extraction.

We also had deep-fried prawn rolls. Imagine balls of almost-decayed shrimp and vegetables, battered by a machine in a factory and fried in old oil. That’s what we got, as far as I can tell. No salt or seasoning. Worthless.

My wife ordered chicken wings seasoned with shrimp paste. Take several old chicken wings, salt them very lightly, and fry them in old oil. You will get pretty much what she got. The shrimp flavor was barely detectable. A total waste of money.

We also had pork ribs in coffee sauce. They fry boneless pork in breading. It’s almost certainly cheap pork shoulder. There are no bones. Then they soak it in a sweet coffee-based sauce. It’s okay, but the sauce takes all the crunch out of the breading. I think they let the ribs soak in it en masse instead of applying it right before serving.

Anthony Bourdain and the other people who recommended Keng Eng Kee knew they were lying, but I guess they got some cash. Locals recommend a chain called Jumbo. We didn’t try it.

Would I go to Hong Kong again? I guess so, if it were convenient. I would go for the food. My wife would go for the shopping. Hong Kong has huge Western-style malls. I don’t think Hong Kong can sustain a tourist’s interest for more than 5 days, but it’s pleasant.

Having visited Hong Kong, I now realize Singapore’s reputation as a food city is undeserved.

On our last visit to Singapore, we found some good places to eat, but we also found bad ones. Just like this time, Anthony Bourdain’s lack of integrity figured in our misfortune.

Singapore has facilities known as food centers or hawker centers. They are similar to American parking garages. They have no outer walls. They contain rows of food preparation stalls made of stainless steel, and every stall is a separate business. You can get many types of food in a food center. Chinese is most common, but you can also get Indonesian, Indian, Thai, and Malay food. Food centers are very cheap. You can get a good meal for about $7.50 US.

Before his ignominious demise, Bourdain the pretend regular guy hyped a food center stall known as Tian Tian Chicken. It sells Hainanese chicken, which is a bizarre dish consisting of limp, lukewarm steamed chicken draped over rice. For some reason, Chinese people love Hainan-style chicken. I don’t think anyone else does.

We went to Tian Tian, and we had to wait in line for about 10 minutes. It’s always busy. They sold us a plate of food, and we tried it. The chicken looked almost as though it had been boiled. It had almost no flavor. The rice was anointed with a sauce pretty much like the liquid from Campbell’s chicken noodle soup, only not as good. We threw out most of the dish and found a local guy who showed us better places. He said only tourists ate at Tian Tian.

I’m not sure Anthony Bourdain even knew what good food was. He raved about Waffle House. I’m not from Mars; I’ve been to Waffle House. They give you 20% of the pleasure you get from Cracker Barrel, for 80% of the money. Waffle House is where you go when Cracker Barrel and McDonald’s are closed. It’s kind of astonishing that a renowned food authority would be willing to endorse a place everyone knows is a dump, but somehow Bourdain did it and got away with it.

On this latest trip, we hit the food centers again. Some food was very nice. Some was pretty bad. Just like last time. You really need local guidance or the willingness to buy several plates of food and throw out the ones you don’t like.

We only saw one food center in Hong Kong, and we didn’t get around to trying it. Based on our other experiences in Hong Kong, I’ll bet the food is good.

We found a good Chinese chain in Singapore: Din Tai Fung. It’s based in Taiwan, where leftism has not yet succeeded in destroying the character of the people. Din Tai Fung is basically a dim sum joint. A huge variety of dumplings and similar items, served by hustling waiters who never stand still.

The big problem with the Din Tai Fung we tried is that it’s too busy. It’s in the basement of the Raffles City hotel, which sits on a mall, and there is a ton of foot traffic. You have to wait up to half an hour to get into Din Tai Fung there, and dishes you want disappear from the annoying electronic menu while you’re trying to order them. Nearby, in the Suntec City mall, there is another Din Tai Fung, and you can walk right in.

Unfortunately, Rhodah discovered Shake Shack during our trip. We ended up visiting twice. I don’t like Shake Shack. It’s a costlier version of Five Guys, which is a costlier version of Wendy’s. It sells pretty good burgers and fries, along with mediocre shakes and very bad ice cream. Unlike Five Guys, it doesn’t offset the enormous cost of the burgers by giving you three times as much fries as you actually want.

Rhodah thinks Shake Shack is wonderful, so I guess we’ll be buying more $25 fast food meals in the future.

We also visited Five Guys twice. I can take it or leave it, but Rhodah loves it. We paid about 45 US dollars for two burgers, a soda, a shake, and one order of fries. That’s even worse than the price here.

One of my big gripes with Shake Shack and Five Guys is that they serve big balls of grease that harden in your intestines and resist expulsion. I love fattening food as much as anyone, but there is a point where it becomes overkill. When you do something to a dish to make it fatty, there should be some purpose other than one-upping the restaurant next store.

We hit Ruth’s Chris again, but this is our last time, because it costs twice what it costs in America, and the food isn’t that great. Her steak was undercooked, which is inexcusable. What is Ruth’s? A steakhouse. How do you cook steak to medium doneness? Well, figure it out after 96 years of serving steak. I can teach a person how to do it in 30 seconds, so Ruth’s should be able to get it done in 96 years.

Ruth’s also served me crab cakes that didn’t taste great. Making a good crab cake is extremely simple. The final insult was banana cream pie made with green bananas. Singapore may well be the banana connoisseur’s Mecca. You can go into a market there and see numerous varieties of bananas. Ruth’s ought to be able to find decent ones for pie, and a competent chef will not put green bananas in anything.

If we ever go to Ruth’s Chris again, it will be in the US, and we will stick to steak and potatoes.

We ended up taking a food tour, even though we were familiar with Singapore. I arranged it because the Hong Kong tour was so helpful. We tried Malay, Indian, and Chinese food.

Malay food looks great but doesn’t have much zing to it. It’s on the bland side. They sometimes supply pepper sauce, and my advice is to ladle it on. When a plate of colorful Malay food arrives at your table, you may expect all sorts of powerful flavors, but it’s an illusion.

I can’t say enough about Indian food in Singapore. We tried it in a number of places, and apart from one food center stall, every place did a fantastic job. Whether the bill was $135 or $58 (Singapore dollars), the food was about the same.

On our first trip, we blundered into a place called HeritageOne, in Little India. The food was top notch. Better than the expensive places we visited. I recommend it highly, even though they don’t serve samosas. It was so good, we made a second visit when we returned to Singapore.

On our tour, we were given Indian pancakes and puri with various sauces. Wonderful. The food was so good, I was able to forgive the name of the restaurant: Kamala.

Having spent a total of around 24 days in Singapore, I feel like I know a little about it now. My conclusion is that you can get good food, and you don’t have to pay a lot for it, but there is also a lot of expensive food that isn’t great. It’s best to avoid tourist-heavy areas. The food will cost you twice as much as food elsewhere, or more, and it won’t be any better.

We did some things we didn’t do on our first trip. We rode the big Ferris wheel in Singapore, and we visited Gardens by the Bay.

I guess soon every big city will have a Ferris wheel. London has one, and so does Hong Kong. Singapore’s wheel is named the Singapore Flyer, and it has big air-conditioned cars. Not much to say about it except that I guess it’s worth the money.

Gardens by the Bay is a big landscaped area featuring a couple of indoor gardens and several big steel towers shaped sort of like trees. They’re actually shaped more like funnels. Little steel tornadoes.

The main indoor garden is not great. Just a bunch of well-tended plants with little signs on them. We didn’t see the second indoor garden. It’s based on the movie Avatar, and we both hate Disney. James Cameron makes fairly good movies, but as a human being, he’s kind of irksome. A billionaire whose moneymaking enterprises burn enough oil to run a major city, yet who preaches environmental asceticism to the peasants who pay his bills. He also claimed he found the tomb of Jesus Christ, which is pretty funny. I mean the tomb where his dead body was buried and rotted. Cameron apparently thinks any ossuary in Jerusalem with the name “Yehoshuah” on it must belong to Jesus. “Yehoshuah” was a common name in Israel during the life of Jesus. Like “Bob” in the US today.

The funnel towers look great in photos of Singapore, but in reality, they’re a lot like carnival construction in ordinary attractions like Six Flags. They’re also much smaller than the photos lead you to believe. You can go up to the top of the main funnel and take photos of Singapore. That’s fun.

We were suckered into riding on Singapore’s only cable car development. It takes you to a tourist island known as Sentosa. The cars are not cooled, so you get hauled up near the sun, right by the equator, in a little glass box.

The ride was okay, but Sentosa itself is run-down and boring. Not much to see. We paid for two cable car trips, but we only used one. We used it to get to Sentosa, and then we used it to leave.

Singapore is great, and I enjoyed both of my trips a great deal. If I sound negative, it’s because I’m mentioning the lows as well as the highs.

I feel like I was blessed this time when I found my flights. Nothing over 24 hours long. I still suffered quite a bit. My first flight went over the North Pole, and it lasted about 18 hours. That’s 18 coach hours. With no empty seats to speak of. On Cathay Pacific, which has tiny seats apparently designed for Asians. On the way home, I had to take a 15-hour flight from Dubai at 2:30 a.m., and it was jam-packed. If a flight leaving at 2:30 a.m. on a Sunday is popular, when are the slow times?

On the flight, I learned something interesting. Indians have body odor problems. That’s not me being racist. It’s a fact. For some reason, Indians have resisted taking anti-B.O. steps Westerners have come to consider normal. You can read about it on the web. The flight I took from Dubai was very popular with Indians, so there were some pretty fragrant people on board, including the guy sharing my row with me, who also appeared to be mentally ill. They always find me.

Will we return to Singapore? Not soon, I hope. In fact, I have reason to hope we won’t be traveling much in the future. Rhodah finally has her embassy interview appointment, so if things go as they usually do, she will be here before the end of October.

Our immigration saga has taught us to feel like making overseas trips twice a year is normal, and of course, it isn’t. We want to see Israel together, and I would like to take her to Europe, but this business of constant foreign travel will presumably have to stop. We have to have money to live on when we get old, and neither of us wants to work.

We both wonder if God has a reason for sending us to Singapore and making us like it so much. Sometimes I think he’s showing us a place we can escape to when perverted America becomes too dangerous for us.

It was very strange, being in a country where no one is afraid of sodomites or rioting punks.

While we were there, the city was having some kind of night festival, and there were activities and displays all over the place. One night while we were walking home, we went through Fort Canning Park, which is a big green space in the middle of town. We saw many people walking with their children, enjoying the festival. We never thought about street crime, except to notice that it wasn’t an issue. We didn’t have to worry about riots or fights. None of the parked cars we saw that night had broken windows. No one tried to sell us drugs. No whores accosted me. We didn’t smell weed. It was completely different from the filthy international disgrace which is urban America.

It occurred to me that life there was normal. It was the way it was supposed to be, and it was something I could not have in my own country, the world’s biggest Christian nation.

I don’t want to take Rhodah to New York. How would I keep her safe? I would be surrounded by armed punks, and I would not be allowed to have a pistol. We would have to play roulette with our lives and property. I can’t even take her to Paris or London without careful research about the safe areas.

We will never have safe cities again in America. That’s amazing. We just have to support the police, punish and restrain criminals, and allow people to carry guns. It’s that simple. But it will never happen. As long as this age lasts, our cities will be disgusting cesspools of cruelty.

I’ll probably write more about the trip when my brain gets over 12 hours of jet lag.

Truth is Simple

The other day, God told me this: “When the truth is lost, everything is lost.”

Sometimes the things he says sound trite yet turn out to be very deep and important. For example, he told me he created the universe for love. Sounds like a Seventies greeting card, but it’s actually true. Often people wonder what their purpose is. The Bible actually tells us. We were created for God’s pleasure. So what is his greatest pleasure? God said, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”

So it should be clear his top priority is love. If that is so, then it must be the reason for the creation of the human race.

Also, love is the reason Yeshua chose to be tortured to death. He didn’t do it because we deserved salvation. Far from it. The Bible says all have fallen short of the glory of God, and that includes people like Moses and Daniel. Without the cross, both would have gone to hell.

The Bible says God chose to be crucified because he loved the world. He was like a mother jumping in front of a bullet to save a child. Justice didn’t enter into the decision, except in that justice was the bullet.

As for the truth, it’s so important, it’s one of the things God identifies himself with. He says he is love, and he also says he is the truth. I shouldn’t have to name the verses. If you’re a Christian, and you don’t know where he said these things, you need to start reading the Bible. It says God’s people perish for lack of knowledge, which is what you have if you’re not reading.

I am a lawyer and a physicist. Maybe I shouldn’t say I’m a physicist, having forgotten nearly everything I learned in college and grad school, but anyway, I was trained in law and physics. One thing the study of law emphasized in my mind is this: a determined idiot can make an argument for anything. My dad always said he wouldn’t give a dime for an associate who couldn’t argue both sides of a case.

As a lawyer, you’re not allowed to lie, but you are supposed to present your client’s case in the way most likely to help your client, and along the way, you may end up relaying lies your client told, because you don’t know they’re lies. If you do your job well, you present arguments that make it sound like truth and justice are on your client’s side, even if he’s a filthy rodent who ought to be sterilized for the good of future generations.

Judges are often stupid, not to mention lazy, so they often don’t know what the law is until a lawyer tells them, and they aren’t expected to research the facts of cases. Lawyers count on the limitations of judges when they do their work. They also count on the incompetence of their adversaries. You present the facts and laws that make your client look good, and you hope no one in the courtroom will be smart enough to find the weak points.

We’ve all seen lawyers argue passionately, as though from righteous indignation, when representing people who were very clearly guilty. A smart person knows better than to believe anything a lawyer says, when the lawyer has an axe to grind.

As for the rest of the population, they are considerably worse than lawyers, having no bar associations or judges to answer to. A huge percentage of human beings don’t care at all about the truth. It’s just a baby gate between them and whatever it is they want.

Our schools, politicians, and journalists now push woke canards; outright lies anyone can disprove with a few minutes of Googling. The people who profit from the lies don’t care. “White people invented slavery.” “Masculinity is toxic.” “Women are more peaceful and reasonable than men.” “Black people can’t be racist.” Every day, conservatives who haven’t learned anything about human nature waste their time trying to 3wn the libs, debunking claims everyone already knows are false. I’ve done a lot of it right here.

I shouldn’t say the time has been wasted. It’s a response to gaslighting, and when you’ve been gaslighted, it’s important to repeat the truth to yourself and others so you don’t end up in the Goebbels gravity well, where a lie has become the truth. But it’s a waste to the extent that you hope you’ll convince the liars they’re wrong, and that they will admit it. Many of them already know they’re wrong. Many have become so deceitful, they literally can’t tell the truth from lies. Many don’t care whether what they say is true. Truth, like math, is one of those things leftists claim is inherently racist, patriarchal, and Eurocentric. It’s white. I’m not kidding; you can use your browser and find them saying these things.

People who can’t be corrected suffer from what Dietrich Bonhoeffer erroneously called “stupidity.” Actual stupidity means lack of intelligence. Bonhoeffer used the term “stupidity” to describe a willful blindness to the truth. We have always had lots of people who suffered from this problem, but today, it is reaching an unsustainable crescendo. When you’re so “stupid” you are willing to devote your life to causes you know are completely wrong, there is no point in trying to save you. It’s time for you to die and burn in hell, because otherwise, for the rest of your existence, you will be a source of unbearable misery to others.

These days, the truth is lost because people do not care about it. Even when you try to determine the truth, it may evade you. Go to “authoritative” sources, and they will tell you ridiculous things.

They will say homosexuality is normal and healthy. They will say a man who says he is a woman is, in fact, a woman, even if there is nothing remotely feminine about him. He can even keep his genitals and his beard and continue to dress and behave like man, including in his romantic life. Still a woman.

Joe Biden is the perfect president for this time, because he is competely unfamiliar with the truth, except perhaps as a thing that occasionally derails his career. People who haven’t gotten the message argue with him as though he were a decent person who cares what’s true and what isn’t. It means nothing whatsoever to him. No more than it means to a monkey. He gets a stimulus. His little brain whirs briefly, searching for an answer that will bring him the best possible result over the next 24 hours or 30 seconds, and then it spews out, often in a raised voice and with a furious expression (to the extent permitted by botox), as though the person who he’s talking to should be put in a gulag for insulting his exalted holiness.

He has always been a tremendous, fluent liar, and now that he’s demented, he appears to be merging deliberate lies with the delusions that characterize dementia. He really seems to believe his own shtick now. He may well think Hunter Biden is a smart person, which, only too clearly, is like thinking a hamster should try out for Jeopardy.

When my dad became demented, he told his dentist we had taken his 46-foot yacht to Italy. And she bought it. Probably voted for Biden.

Back when covid was big, I used to use the infection numbers to construct differential equations in order to predict how it would spread. It worked incredibly well for a time, and then one day, I realized the numbers the press/government leftist establishment was feeding us were pretty much imaginary. Or maybe they were complex, because they were partly real as well.

We were bribing hospitals with tens of thousands of dollars per patient to diagnose them with covid, and there was no reliable test. There still isn’t. The guidelines, which I read, said you could base a diagnosis on symptoms, which covid shared with things like the flu. I feel like one of two things, or a combination, was happening. Either I was failing to predict the real spread accurately because the numbers were imaginary, or I was doing a great job of predicting the imaginary spread.

I really tried to learn the truth, but I could not. The American government was exercising censorship, including prior restraint (look it up), of speech regarding an extremely important matter involving both politics and the public good. People were fired for discussing covid. For example, universities fired people who were not even health workers.

I couldn’t find out whether ivermectin worked, because there was so much censorship and disinformation. I couldn’t find out whether masks worked. The definitive answer was yes for several years, and now it’s no, and it turns out the people who said it was yes always knew it was no.

It was a bat virus transmitted by pangolins in a wet market. It was a man-made virus that escaped from a lab in a city with wet markets. Take your pick. Our keepers insisted it was natural. Now most of them quietly admit it came from a lab, but the establishment refuses to confront the more-important question: how is it okay that we were lied to for so long, or that people who told the truth were abused like political dissidents in South America or Russia?

There were so many lies, and the truth was so successfully suppressed and punished, that I truly could not find out what was happening. Neither could you. You still can’t. You may think you can, but if so, you’re dreaming.

We are drowning in lies every day, in all sorts of areas of conversation. To fight it is to bear the curse of Sisyphus. You fight every day, and in the end, you get nowhere.

If we can’t learn the truth, we can’t be saved from hell. We can’t plan intelligently. We can’t identify our friends or our enemies. We become our own enemies, because we draw invalid conclusions and labor under their weight, working against our own good.

One of the great things about being Satan and having a Biden-like view of the truth is that he is able to use his enemy’s soldiers to fight his battles. Why send your own troops out when you can get the enemy’s troops to kill themselves and each other? Imagine how different World War Two would have been, had Hitler been able to convince Allied servicemen to poison themselves and shoot each other. Think how much money he would have saved on arms and ammunition. A liar enslaves other people, making them the eager, convicted servants of their enemy. It’s amazing, really.

This is why women lie so much, instead of attacking directly. A man will start a fight and risk being beaten up, while a woman will simply tell lies until innocent dupes harm whomever she’s mad at. This is why there are so many false rape accusations. No work. No expense. Little risk. Pull the strings, sit back, and watch. Why wear yourself out battling an ex-boyfriend when you can pick up the phone and make the government put him in jail, charge him with crimes he didn’t commit, and confiscate all his firearms? You can’t show up at his house in 4 squad cars, hold several guns on him, beat him up, give him a rectal search, and put him in jail, but you may be able to make somebody else do it.

Even our courts are losing the power to force people to listen to the truth. They make legal determinations, and government officials simply ignore them. They create sanctuary cities, for example. They refuse to enforce abortion laws. The truth is that what you want to do is a serious crime? So what? We’ll pretend the law says something else. Enjoy yourself.

If God is the truth, and God is salvation, and we have rejected the truth, then we must have rejected salvation, and the rapture must be at hand. A world where the truth can’t function is a world where evangelism is crippled and not worth the effort, and I am sure God doesn’t waste his time or ours.

To sum up, what God told me isn’t trite at all. It’s not a platitude. It’s an explanation for what is about to happen.

More Rot from Tinseltown

Paul Reubens, AKA Pee Wee Herman, is in the news today. He just died from cancer. All sorts of touching tributes are appearing.

Unfortunately, the admiration is badly misplaced.

Reubens was caught with numerous images of underage boys performing sex acts. He managed to plead down to a misdemeanor, but pleading to a lesser doesn’t mean you’re not guilty of the original charge. Prosecutors and judges like to clear their calendars, so they love plea bargains, and Reubens was connected.

After he was convicted and forced to register as a sex offender, he made a lot of claims, suggesting the illegal images were nothing like the description the DA gave, but the DA’s office responded and said they were much worse than what Reubens described to the press.

Unfortunately, it is very fashionable to admire men who spend an inordinate amount of time with other people’s children, and women are largely to blame. Women are generally blind when it comes to male perversion, and they often jump on and berate anyone who says men who hang around kids shouldn’t be trusted. They end up enabling perverts who do great damage to children. Scoutmasters. Priests. Youth pastors. Everyone knows a horror story.

Paul Reubens shot to fame by creating a children’s TV show. If you’ve seen the show, you know how creepy it was. Not as creepy as Mister Rogers, but still, pretty strange. He built a character who was a male adult who seemed to have bypassed puberty. The other characters were too hip for a kids’ show. Children should not be made to find the counterculture alluring.

I call it “the counterculture,” but of course, it’s the establishment culture. Conservatives and Christians are now the counterculture.

Since I brought up Fred Rogers, I might as well point out that he admitted he was attracted to men. Big surprise there. He was extremely effeminate.

I never liked his show. For that matter, I never liked Sesame Street. When I was a kid, I watched Superman, Batman, and cartoons. Now that I think about it, Batman and Robin were not quite normal. They inspired the Ambiguously Gay Duo. But the show I used to watch was free from rainbow references. Anyway, Sesame Street was boring (How many times can you get excited about counting to 8?), and Mister Rogers seemed to be aimed at toddlers.

I suppose Rogers and Reubens helped set us up for the perversion wave that destroyed America permanently. They got young males used to things their dads had no use for.

If you let the TV raise your kids, they will grow up to have the TV’s values, and they will side with the TV against you, because the TV is their real parent.

This country is all done. God is completely out of place in the world he gave us. We’re like teenage punks who smoke weed and lock their parents out of their rooms.