Bugs are Demanding Models

It has been a while since I got my Sigma 105mm macro lens for my new Sony camera, and I still haven’t been able to accomplish much. It’s hard to get used to the controls, and the lens and camera, together, just seem hard to operate.

I went outside and looked around for macro opportunities, and as luck would have it, a big, fat carpenter bee started feeding on the blossoms on the weeds by my house. I ran over and started trying to capture him doing something interesting. It was pretty much impossible to focus in time to get a decent shot. I got one depressing picture of him flying out of the scene.

Later on, I saw some kind of wasp or bee on a blossom, and he was taking his time, so I didn’t have to chase him. I got all excited and tried to shoot him. Afterward, I realized I had forgotten to check the shutter speed and ISO. Here is the best picture I got, and this is AFTER a lot of doctoring. Of course, it’s slightly better at full size.

The exposure is horrendous, and it can’t be fixed.

Yesterday, I decided to try shooting in RAW format, and today I tried editing. I tried to photograph some lantana blossoms. I could not get a good sharp picture, and the photo seemed dark in spite of checking the exposure. I used Photoshop and Camera Raw to try to fix the picture up, but it’s still a mess. I only took one shot because I had to shoot from a very uncomfortable position.

I’ve been thinking maybe I got the wrong lens. The Sigma is heavy, and the best magnification you can get is 1x. A Youtube macro guy says the Laowa 58mm macro is the way to go. It’s small and light, and you can photograph things between one and three inches away, which makes life easier. It does 2x magnification, so you can get shots the Sigma won’t get.

I have a perfectly good APS-C Sigma macro lens for my old Rebel 350D, but I don’t want to spend the rest of the year taking 8MP pictures. When I first started thinking about getting better equipment, I assumed I would use my old lenses, and people said I should get a newer body that would fit them. They recommended the T7, also called the 2000D. It looked great compared to my 350D, but while I was researching it, I learned that DSLR’s are now obsolescent, so I didn’t go for it. I bought a mirrorless.

Today I started considering the T7 again. I found out the resale value on my old lenses is about enough to buy three pizzas, so selling them will not be very rewarding, and they are capable of very good work. I looked around, and I decided to pick up a used Canon SL2 body.

This body is considerably better than a T7. It’s lighter than my full frame. It does video. It has 24 megapixels. It will give me an excuse to keep my old camera bag. I can use it when I’m afraid to take the Sony out or when I travel to places where good cameras tend to get stolen.

Now I should be able to get some decent macro shots, one way or the other. Eventually, I should get somewhere with the Sigma on the Sony camera. Until then, I can produce some useful work with the Canon.

I have an external flash coming, along with a cheap flash diffuser. I learned that you need a fast shutter to do macro on anything that moves. Bugs flap fast. To get good lighting, you use a flash, and the diffuser prevents it from looking like, well, flash.

Working with raw files sounded intimidating, but it doesn’t seem too hard. It seems pretty much like fixing JPG’s in Photoshop Elements, but you have a wider range of adjustments, and you are a lot more likely to be able to save iffy shots.

Tomorrow my used Laowa 15mm zero-distortion lens gets here. That should be a lot of fun while traveling. We are hoping to go to Rome, and it sounds like the perfect lens for shooting inside old buildings. I don’t know what I’ll do with it here, though.

My wife should be here for good in as little as 5 weeks. It is possible I will meet her in another country and fly home with her. That would give us a lot of photo opportunities. She is very supportive of the whole thing, because like me, she has very, very few childhood pictures of herself. We want to do better.

Sorry for the lame pictures, but I am plugging away, and I expect better results before long.

How Low Can the Bar Go?

People like to joke that the movie Idiocracy was prophetic, but it’s not a very good joke, because it’s really happening.

We now have a brain-damaged senator who either will not or cannot wear grown-up clothes on the floor of the Senate, and instead of reprimanding him, the Senate has changed the rules to allow him to wear gym shorts and hoodies. Of course, it true leftist elite fashion, the Senate’s leaders did not apply the rule change to the little people. Everyone except senators has to show up dressed properly. Now it is quite literally possible for a senator to show up wearing only a jockstrap, while his underlings have to wear business clothes.

Remember Idiocracy’s President Camacho? Well, we now have a Senator Camacho, and his name is John Fetterman.

Fetterman actually showed up to meet the leader of another country in his bum attire. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s Fetterman, showed up in a sweatshirt to address the Senate, and Fetterman wore his usual gear. Bros!

Fetterman is pretty clearly crippled, intellectually. He has to use a captioning machine to understand people, and he can’t speak coherently. It may well be that his caregivers can’t put a suit on him in the morning because he throws tantrums or has some stroke-related mental issue that makes him unwilling to do what the other 99 Senators do.

Someone wrote a joke for Fetterman, and he has used it twice to criticize mature people who talked about him treating OUR Senate chamber like L.A. Fitness.

Nate Silver is a celebrity who makes money predicting outcomes in the political world. He made a joke suggesting he thought people were overreacting to Fetterman’s wardrobe choices, and Fetterman responded, “I dress like you predict.” He apparently lacks the mental capacity to tell critics from friends.

Later the same day, apparently pleased with himself, Fetterman responded to criticism from Governer Ron DeSantis, saying, “I dress like he campaigns.”

Maybe he has been using this line all week. “I dress like you made this Happy Meal.” “I dress like you answer my email for me.”

Later on, Fetterman blessed us all with an announcement that he would put on a suit when the House stopped trying to shut the government down and fully supported Ukraine. He referred to his colleagues in the legislature using slang describing males addicted to masturbation.

No mention of women. Sexism?

It’s reasonable to say that fictional President Camacho is more dignified than a real US Senator.

This isn’t normal. Most people have an extremely strong herd instinct, and they think whatever people around them are doing is fine, regardless of how different it is from what they were doing a short time ago. My herd instinct is not strong, and I have the Holy Spirit to tell me what’s normal. I remember what normal times were like. They were not like this.

Fetterman is disgracing himself these days by attacking people who comment on his disability, calling it “bullying.” He started crying about it yesterday. Shameless, dishonest self-pity. Just what you don’t want in a person in leadership.

If you’re disabled to the point where you can’t serve, you should resign. If you’re in the Senate, or if you’re any kind of man, you don’t cry when people criticize you. Imagine how he would cry as president, when confronted with a major disaster or a military attack. Democrat Harry Truman said, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.” Trump has been indicted falsely dozens of times, he’s facing the possibility of prison time, and he shakes it off like it never happened.

To make the picture even worse, yesterday Joe Biden proved, beyond any dispute, that he is demented. He’s still able to walk around and handle a lot of his daily tasks, but dementia has ruined his memory.

The commander-in-chief of the United States military should have a functioning memory. Is this a controversial statement?

He was speaking in Manhattan, and he told a false story about the well-known rally in Charlottesville. Then he moved on. Then he told the story again, in a way that proved he had no idea he had just told it. He repeated it nearly verbatim.

Repetition is part of dementia. My dad repeated things all the time, especially questions. At first, I thought he was doing it to be pushy, because he was that kind of person. Eventually, I realized he couldn’t help it. If he asked me the same thing twice in one minute, it wasn’t because he wanted to get on my back. He was just forgetful.

Anyone who has dealt with dementia patients can tell you how this works. It’s standard behavior.

He also walked into a flag yesterday while walking to a podium to appear with the president of Brazil, and then he walked off the stage without shaking his hand. His Brazilian counterpart made an angry gesture and walked off.

On top of all this, he spoke to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and told them how glad he was to be speaking to the Congressional Black Caucus. And they were sitting right in front of him, being mostly not black.

There is no longer any way for leftists to deny that Joe Biden is senile. Old people who are still smart enough to be president don’t tell the same stories twice a few minutes apart.

In English, Biden repeated a false story about a rally. The Chinese communists ran it through a translating device, and the output said, “INVADE TAIWAN NOW.”

So we have Dwayne Camacho in the Senate and Grampa Simpson in the Oval Office. Idiocracy is here. It has started, and it’s going to get worse.

We are told Rome was invaded and sacked by ignorant barbarians. America is worse. We’re becoming the barbarians.

In the background, behind the nutty political news, there are countless fathers watching helplessly while perverts with medical degrees and judge’s robes prepare their sons for castration and their daughters to have their vaginas sewn shut and their breasts sliced off and discarded.

It’s always the fathers. Sexual perversion generally enters a society with the fierce support of women.

The other day I read about a man in a blue state who is trying to prevent medical perverts from giving his daughter drugs to prevent her from becoming a woman. He is already under a court order forcing him to call his daughter by a boy’s name and pretend she’s male. How must that feel; being told what to call your daughter in your own house, when you know it’s factually wrong?

Imagine his frustration, sorrow, and anger. How must it feel to have strangers collude with your crazy ex-wife to drug, deform, and mutilate the child you held as a baby? What is it like to imagine your hopes for your baby’s future, resting in a cold, bloody, stainless steel pan?

This morning, I prayed for God to send spirits to evaluate the world the way they evaluated Sodom. I begged him to come for us before things get worse. This place is disgusting. It’s already intolerable for those Christians who are not fortunate enough to live in relatively safe zones like the one where I am. Even here, it’s going to get so bad, no decent person will be able to stand it.

Evil has a way of moving from cities to the country. I’ve seen it.

When I was a kid, men started wearing long hair in cities, and people in the country made fun of them. They said they looked like girls. A decade or so later, rural Appalachia, where I spent my summers, was full of men who groomed themselves like Phil Robertson and his sons. So was the rest of the South. Robertson wore his hair short in the Sixties, but he eventually went along with the crowd. The same kind of thing is happening with perversion. Count on it.

I’m not saying long hair is evil. I’m saying the long hair trend of the Sixties, which was spawned by an evil culture, spread to resistant areas quickly. If the Beatles had worn orange shirts, and people in the country had started wearing them, it wouldn’t make orange shirts evil, but it would show how influential evil people are.

It’s too bad we can’t go back in spaceships, abduct people from the Fifties, bring them here, put them in focus groups, and make them look at the news. I’d give anything to watch them react.

This planet is washed up. I can’t wait for this to end. I just want to be among my own kind.

Someone Wise Guy Would Sell a Product to Make Them More Comfortable

Yesterday, I resurrected my bush hog after several years, and I learned a few things that could help other people.

There are different names for bush hogs. “Brush hog.” “Rotary cutter.” “Brush cutter.” I call it a bush hog because that’s the term my grandfather used.

It’s a giant lawnmower you pull behind a tractor. A shaft connects it to the tractor’s motor, and a huge apparatus somewhat like a lawnmower blade spins underneath it, cutting weeds and even small trees. I call it a giant lawnmower, but it’s not for lawns. It’s for getting rid of stubborn plants you hate.

It’s a very crude tool, but when stuff gets deep, you need it. It’s also a cheap substitute for a flail mower, which is what you really want if you can afford it. A flail mower will really wipe out brush. It will have problems with saplings a bush hog will take down easily, though.

My bush hog is a 72″ model, so it’s very heavy. The tractor hitch keeps the front off the ground, and there is a little pivoting wheel in the rear that serves a similar purpose, although it’s perfectly okay to run the cutter with the rear wheel off the ground. I think it’s mainly there to keep the cutter from bottoming out.

When I tried to put my cutter back on the tractor, I ran into problems. There were two mysterious chains attached to the front, and I could not figure out where they attached to the tractor.

When I asked for help on the web, I was told these were “check chains” or “limiting chains.” They keep the rear of the cutter up. I was told you can omit the top link and rely on these chains instead. Because chains bend, they give when the rear of the cutter hits the ground, allowing it to swing up. This supposedly prevents pressure off the top link, which would otherwise be compressed.

It looks like this is a giant load of steaming BS. The chains appear to be unnecessary. My cutter, which is still made, doesn’t come with chains. The guy who sold it to me must have bought them.

There is a company that has gone so far as to manufacture these chains as a kit, complete with little bars to use to connect them at both ends. To me, this seems like selling people umbrellas because they’re too dumb to come inside.

My tractor’s first owner was a dentist. He and his wife seemed like wonderful people, but he was not a mechanical or landscaping genius. If you’ve seen the way he had my old brush fork tines attached to the tractor’s bucket, you know what I mean. It was a disaster. He used 4 turnbuckles to chain the tines to the bucket, bending it, and the tines were never rigid. They moved around all the time. He jammed two pieces of 4×4 in the bucket to resist the pressure from the chains.

The tines probably cost him two or three grand. They were made very well, apart from the design. They appeared to have been made in the USA. I didn’t care, because I could not stand using them any more. I cut them to pieces and reassembled them as one quick-attach unit, and it’s fantastic. I converted the bucket to quick-attach, too, so now I have two useful attachments instead of one attachment what works poorly.

If you can’t do steel fab, you are at a big disadvantage in this life.

I still have maybe 45 pounds of steel to throw out. Not sure what to do with 4 huge turnbuckles.

He also sold me a tractor with serious hydraulic leaks, which I cured in a short session with one wrench. Two fittings weren’t tightened enough. He told me I would need new fittings, or I could do what he did: top off the tractor after every use. Meanwhile, the shop floor kept getting oiled.

To get back on topic, I found out my cutter was put together wrong. This appears to be the sole reason it needed chains. I don’t think the chain company puts this information in its ads.

My cutter has a couple of flat bars that reach up to the tractor’s top link. At the top, between them, there is a U-shaped bar with two sets of holes in it. Whoever put this cutter together ran two bolts through the bars and the U-shaped part. In this configuration, the U-shaped bar serves no purpose, and it can’t move.

In reality, the U-bar is supposed to be held in place by one bolt. It’s supposed to swing freely. The other holes are for the top link pin. When the rear of the cutter hits something, the U-bar swings, allowing the cutter to swing upward.

I learned this stuff from a great video, which I will embed here. It will explain the situation so I don’t have to post pictures.

I learned something else about my bush hog. It has parts it may not need.

On the front of the deck, there is a bar with little places where short chains can be attached. There are only a few chains on the cutter now. They are maybe a foot long, and they hang down in front of the cutter, which is open so weeds can go in. It looks like they’re supposed to stop flying objects the blades kick up.

I used to think I should go to Tractor Supply and get more chains. I now suspect the dentist had a totally useless item welded onto his cutter. It’s obviously not factory.

When things are thrown out from under a bush hog, they can move pretty fast. I know this because there is a hole around 5″ long in the side of my bush hog. Something took off from under the cutter while he was using it, and it flew so fast it went right through steel plate. This probably happened right before he got the hanging chains.

It may be that the item that flew out was a piece of a blade. I think this is probably the case, because it left a long, thin hole. A rock would have left a round hole. Actually, a rock that small would surely have broken up.

I see some people on the web saying chains are great, but if objects can fly so fast they go through steel plate, what is a little wimpy chain going to do? Maybe they work. I don’t know. I plan to keep researching.

I don’t get off the tractor while the blades are moving fast, and I wouldn’t let anyone get near me while I’m using the bush hog. Best to keep them off the whole parcel where I’m working.

Hooking the PTO shaft up was no fun. The button that releases the coupler was stuck, so I had to hit it with a hammer. I got some good tips about making it easier.

I want to replace the shaft with a better one. Squirrels chewed up some plastic shielding around the shaft, and it looks like it’s so messed up it can’t be used without falling off. I don’t want to buy replacement parts if I can get something superior.

The shielding is hard to put on correctly, unless I’m doing it wrong. Far as I know, I have to use a huge screwdriver and pry a tough stainless ring out in order to remove the shields, and then I have to find a way to get it back in. I didn’t put it in yesterday, and the shields slipped back and let the weeds wrap up.

I only need to bush hog a couple of times per year. Thank goodness for that. But even at twice a year, I don’t want to spend 40 minutes attaching or detaching an implement.

If your bush hog is rigged up wrong, this post should be very helpful to you. If you know anything I don’t, let me know in the comments.

I Think I See Waldo Behind a Tree

My efforts to become an award-winning photographer are going poorly at the moment.

I took some okay photos with my old Canon 350D and my new Sony ZV1M2, and I got all excited and bought a Sony A7IV, which is sort of a low-end pro camera. I got myself a 24-70mm lens and started shooting.

First problem: macro is not really an option.

I had been doing macro photos with the Canon, and I was extremely pleased with them. My farm is a good place for macro photos. I guess any place is good for macro photos, because you’re shooting things the size of a quarter. Shrinking the size of your subjects increases the number of potential subjects per unit of area. You can spend all day shooting macro in your house.

The new lens does not like macro. You can’t get close enough to little things to really fill the screen, so you end up with longer shots you have to crop, and even with this camera’s huge sensor, you can only crop so much. Also, I’m not very good at using the camera.

In addition to these problems, I have a lot of mosquitoes right now, and I need to get on the tractor and bush hog a lot of the farm. Thorny, unproductive blackberry bushes are taking over, and there is also some kind of stinging weed that sets your ankles on fire. The farm is not the most pleasant studio at the moment.

Giving up on macro puts me in a position where I have to find bigger things to shoot, so now I have many fewer subjects to choose from. I am struggling to find subjects, and it is not going all that well.

I ordered a real macro lens, and while I wait, I’m shooting bigger stuff, including landscapes.

I think my farm is beautiful. I treasure it. God used it to save me from Miami. But let’s get real. The land is flat by landscape photo standards, there are no creeks or rivers, there is no lake, there aren’t many big flowers…it’s not like the same size parcel in Switzerland or Norway.

Yesterday I walked all over, trying to find things to shoot. My understanding was that it was best to shoot when the sun was low, so I went out in the afternoon. The sun was still blazing like a thermonuclear blast, which, I guess, it was. The grass looked bleached. I didn’t know how to cope with the light.

I shot a bunch of garbage anyway, because I knew it would help me learn. Trying to find subjects is good practice even when you fail, and I was also getting familiar with the camera.

The landscape shots, apart from being shot in kind of a boring area, seem like subjectless photos. Photoshop people into them, and they would be fine. As it is, they’re like big empty frames.

I’m starting to wonder: are there places where you just can’t take a lot of wide shots, even if you’re good? I’m not saying I’m good, but I have taken some decent pictures.

I think a lot of people would say a good photographer can take great photos anywhere. I’m guessing, because that sounds like the kind of thing people would say, because they say things like that. But I have to point out that when Ansel Adams wanted to take great photos, he went to Yosemite. He didn’t hole up in his house, shooting dust bunnies and refrigerator magnets.

I Googled his photos, and I don’t see any shots of his toaster or recliner.

The macro lens will arrive tomorrow, and I expect it to save my life. You can never run out of macro subjects.

So, getting back to things like landscapes and street photos, I’m wondering if I’m going to have to start getting in the car and wandering around in public. Also, am I going to live for traveling with my wife? When you travel, you run into good stuff all the time.

I think I should get a wide angle lens for the future. I mean like 12mm or so. Not a fisheye, either. One that leaves straight lines straight. A really wide lens will give me stuff which is very different from my current minimum focal length of 24mm. It will also let me shoot in very small places without losing everything except someone’s elbow or a napkin dispenser.

I have looked at photos from different wide angle lenses, and I feel like a person’s first wide lens should be very, very wide. When you spend a lot on a lens, you want it to do something very different from what your old lenses do. If all you have is a 24-70mm, you don’t want to buy a 20mm lens.

I like the dramatic feel of wide angle photos, and it’s neat, the way they can make the observer seem isolated from the subject matter. When a lens pushes people away, it lets you know you’re not part of the action. You’re like John Cusack, in the portal, watching a lesbian live his intended life with his ex-girlfriend.

In Singapore’s airport, I used my phone to take a wide shot I really liked. It helped motivate me to think about wide lenses. I tried to find out what sort of lens the phone had. I figured that if I could find this out, I could get a lens just like it.

It turned out the center lens on my phone was (allegedly) a 24mm. I have that already, in my zoom.

If I lived in Singapore, I could go to the airport and take the same shot with my zoom, to see if the 24mm measurement is really correct. Can’t do it from here, though.

The web says my phone’s sensor has 50 megapixels. Can that be true? That’s insane. I think the Hubble only has 40. You get 50 with the center lens, 10 with the long lens, and 12 with the telephoto. On one $750 camera. Which is supposed to be a telephone.

The world has gone nuts.

The wide lens on this phone is said to be 13mm. If I had started thinking about still photography before the trip, I could have done more wide shots.

Is 13mm on the phone the same as 13mm on a full-frame camera? You tell me.

Really good wide lenses, like nearly all really good lenses, are really expensive. I found one that could be a bargain, though. A company named Laowa makes a 9mm job which features zero distortion. It’s affordable, it’s very small, and it’s light. It gets good reviews. The only problem is that it does not do autofocus.

Do you really have to have autofocus all the time, especially when you’re doing crazy-wide shots? I don’t really see myself suddenly developing an urge to shoot moving subjects at 9mm. Also, the depth of field is always large with this thing.

It’s difficult to make equipment decisions when you know as little about photography as I do. I am seeking advice on the web. Maybe trial and error are inevitable.

When the macro lens gets here tomorrow, I should be able to produce some acceptable shots. It should keep me supplied with subjects for, well, ever. Meanwhile, I’ll keep looking for ways to get good material out of the zoom. I might pick up the Laowa.

At ISO 2000, I Don’t Mind the Grey Skies

My new camera arrived today. I decided I can now call myself a photographer. I have decent equipment that will allow me to create really excellent photos. Can you call yourself a photographer when you’re not highly trained? Yes, if you are capable of doing acceptable work. This is my ruling, based on the fact that there are innumerable experienced professionals out there, making a living, who couldn’t take a decent passport photo on the best days of their lives.

Maybe someone else out there is trying to decide which mid-range mirrorless camera to get for travel, so I will issue a couple of conclusions.

I was torn between two models: the Sony A7IV, which is full-size, and the AC7II, which is nearly the same camera in a compact package. I fretted a lot about this. I am a pretty experienced world traveler, and I know what it’s like to lug heavy stuff around while walking several miles per day.

Get the bigger camera. The difference between the compact and full-size jobs is nearly nothing, and once you put a huge lens on your camera, you will realize how stupid you were to worry about it.

I bought a 24-70mm zoom, and it’s as big as a can of corn. It’s bigger than the 17-17mm EF lens I had on the old Canon 350D. Attaching it to a camera that weighs 4 ounces less and is about 1/4″ shorter across the front is going to make no difference at all, and bigger stuff works better because there are fewer internal compromises. Big stuff overheats less. It has more features. It’s what you want.

This camera has a much better viewfinder than the small one, and it’s in the center, the correct place. It’s also shaded, unlike the one on the AC7II. You don’t want to fight with the sun when you look through a camera with old creaky eyeballs.

If all I had was a pancake (stubby non-zoom) lens, maybe I could bring myself to care about the difference in camera body size, but with this mechanical whale hanging off the front, the body doesn’t make much difference.

One disappointment: no charger tray. There is a charger, but you can’t attach it to the battery. You have to plug it into the camera itself, so if you have multiple batteries, you can’t charge one while using another. Amazon has a fantastic charger tray for $19. It takes two batteries, and it accepts USB-C and that other connector which is shaped like a “D.” It will charge two batteries at once, and it will give you a use for your old USB cables.

The bag B&H included with the camera at no charge is great. It’s a high-quality bag, just like the Lowepros I’ve had. The free memory card is a $120 Sony. The free second battery is a somewhat questionable brand, but they are all somewhat questionable, and this brand, Watson, is the least questionable. It costs something like $60 by itself, so no complaints here. A new Sony battery runs $80, so if this one is any good at all, I will be very pleased.

Sony sent its own battery empty. Bummer. I stuck the Watson in the camera, and it said it was at 58%. I’m charging it while I type this, and I’ll have to survive the weekend using the camera as a tray. Then the new one will arrive. This camera will supposedly take nearly 600 shots on one Sony-battery charge, so I should be okay. It will do two hours of 4K video, which I never plan to shoot. I’m a 1080p guy until someone changes my mind.

The Sony strap is not great. It’s thin, so it will cut into my neck. I’ll have to find a replacement.

I’m going to take the camera outside and see what I can shoot. I hope it’s less annoying than the 350D. The 350D is a fine camera, but it does some irritating things, like shutting off the internal display right before you take a picture.

I might conceivably read the new camera’s manual, but I doubt it. That would be cheating.

The lens looks perfectly fine to me. I’m not much of a photographer, and I try not to be a cork-sniffer. I know serious pros can criticize any lens. I’m going to shoot some regular shots and some extreme closeups and then render a premature, poorly-informed verdict. My bet is that if this lens has any real issues, it will be at least 6 months before I realize it.

I don’t look forward to lugging this thing around, and I hate looking like a Japanese tourist, but I should be rewarded abundantly for the effort.

I’m really happy about this. I did the right thing. I didn’t worry too much about saving my pennies, the way I did when I got the Canon and the small mirrorless Sony. I got something that will get the job done for a good long while. There will be fewer times when I can’t do something well because the camera won’t let me, and years from now, if the rapture is that far off, my family will have a lot of wonderful imagery to help us relive shared history.

I’ll tell you something weird about doing little bits of nature photography. It relaxes me to look at my own work. I don’t know why. When I take a shot I like, and I put it on the TV and stare at it, my blood pressure plummets. All my worries vanish. It makes me wonder if putting a few framed photos up in the house will improve my health and mental state.

I did not see this coming.

I generally don’t feel this way when I look at other people’s photos.

I supposed it makes sense that looking at God’s work is a little bit like being with God, who radiates peace in all directions.

Guess I should order a strap and then put the camera to the test. It will be a big relief, taking the ISO above 200.

MORE

I fired the new camera up and wandered around looking for things to shoot.

First thing I realized: this is not an ideal macro lens. You can get some good shots with it, but it’s not all that easy, and when you shoot things that are really small, you have to crop a lot.

Here are a couple of things I shot. I don’t think the first shot is great, but it’s acceptable for today’s purpose, which is to get the camera to work. It’s a bunch of leaves on a tree in the side yard.

Here is another weed blossom. The depth of field is too shallow, but I love the dark green background. It’s less grainy at the original resolution. Still too grainy to blow up.

Here’s one more weed blossom, cropped two different ways.

Finally, a shot of the goat shed. Here, I was learning how to avoid lying in the manure by using the flip screen. I extended the screen and looked at it while I lowered the camera.

I am able to take shots that were out of reach for the Canon 350D, and I have a lot more room to crop, so all is well.

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.