Not Sure This is Pizza

So much has happened in the last few days. With the sound judgment for which I am so widely known, I bought a pizza oven, and I also decided to take another shot at making a bread starter.

There are two kinds of pizza that really float my boat: New York Style and Sicilian. I make good New York pizza, and I make the best Sicilian imaginable. I make both in a plain old wall oven. So why mess with success?

Can’t really answer that.

For years, I’ve been reading people’s impassioned words about Neapolitan pizza, and I haven’t paid much attention. It’s made in special high-temperature ovens, a lot of people claim you have to use 00 flour, it sounds like a pain in the butt, and the only two allegedly Neapolitan pizzas I’ve had weren’t good.

I ate at a chain called Anthony’s Coal-Fired Pizza near Hollywood, Florida. The pizza had very little sauce. It had some kind of meat on it, and it seemed greasy to me. The crust was sort of flat and useless. It wasn’t mediocre. It was a step down from that.

I ate a weird pizza at Mozza in LA, and it was like a bowl-shaped cracker with arugula and a fried egg on it. Two things that shouldn’t be anywhere near pizza.

Neapolitan fans rave about the crust. They say it’s puffy and delicate and crispy and so on. I haven’t seen that yet. It all seemed like crackers to me.

Nonetheless, curiosity overwhelmed me, and I started looking at pizza ovens. I learned that Walmart had released a really cheap one that works very well. I don’t want to blow hundreds or more on a big oven when I don’t know if I like Neapolitan pizza, but I am willing to spend a little on a small trial oven, and that’s what I did. Yesterday.

The Walmart Expert Grill 15″ charcoal-fired oven costs $117, and it takes about 20 minutes to put together. Hard to beat that. People say it will do the same thing a $700 oven will do.

They call it a 15″ oven, but there is no way you can get a 15″ pie in there. I think 14″ might be managed, but I have doubts. This type of oven heats more from the side than the top, and you have to keep turning pizzas in order to get every side evenly done. The bigger a pie is, the closer the rim will be to the hottest part of the oven, so it seems to me a big pizza will burn at the edges before the middle gets cooked. But I don’t really know.

The flames you see in the photo are not from charcoal. I dropped a couple of pieces of oak on the charcoal to see what would happen. People say a little wood adds flavor and heat.

I’ve gotten expert help, and I’ve learned some stuff.

First, the dough can’t have any sugar or oil in it, and the flour can’t be malted. Sugar and oil will burn. I don’t know what malting does. One reason people use 00 is that it’s not malted. I am told that any unmalted white flour will work, though, so I’m trying to make my first pie with Gordon Food Service Primo Gusto high-gluten flour, which I already had here. The text on the bag doesn’t mention malt. If I can make it work, I can avoid expensive flour.

Second, you’re supposed to use whole milk mozzarella. The squishy stuff. This type of cheese is completely hopeless in other types of pizzas. When you make a New York pie with it, the cheese shrinks, and all the water squeezes out onto the pizza, along with a lot of grease. I’m told this is not a problem at Neapolitan temperatures. I am also told that Belgioiso cheese is excellent for Neapolitan pizza, and that’s great, because it’s available everywhere.

Third, you’re not supposed to use pizza sauce. You use mashed-up peeled San Marzano tomatoes. I had no luck with these in New York pizza, but everyone says they’re what you need in Neapolitan. You mash the tomatoes up and add salt if you want.

Fourth, you want to let the dough rise at least overnight, and you may want to get fancy and use a starter to add complexity or whatever. I have found that starters are of no use whatsoever for New York and Sicilian pies.

Fifth, you want 60% hydration in the dough, which is a low for other types of pizza.

I fired my oven up today to burn the Chinese industrial waste out of it. The highest temperature I measured on the stone was 588°, and that disappointed me. Maybe I can fiddle with it and do better. I found out my infrared thermometer only went up to 600°, so I can’t do much research until a better one arrives.

As for starters, I have made them before, but they always grew so fast they got away from me, and they turned black and so on. Reader LauraW mentioned starters in a comment, and I started reading about them, and I learned that it’s normal for starters to get disgusting when they run low on flour. I also learned that you don’t need to buy bacteria or strange flour to make a starter. Plain old all-purpose flour works.

I got my new starter going about three days back. I used 100 grams of flour and the same weight of purified water. I didn’t want my well’s bacteria in there. As of today, the starter really stinks. Sort of like cheese. Sort of like feet. The web says this is okay, because it’s going through a phase. I hope so.

The starter should be ready to use in about 4 days, so I’ll try it in a Neapolitan pie if I haven’t given up on the oven yet.

My plan is to use fresh mozzarella and San Marzanos, along with some fresh basil. That’s all. I have a feeling I’m going to be disgusted, since these ingredients sound bland. That won’t matter as long as the crust is good. If the crust is worth all this effort, I can put real pizza ingredients on top of it eventually.

I have no interest in becoming a purist. If I stick with this, I want to be a guy who makes phenomenal pizzas with real Neapolitan crusts, no matter how much I have to bastardize the cheese, sauce, and toppings. If I like the traditional stuff, whoopee, but if I don’t, I won’t let it stop me.

If I get heavily into this, I’ll spring for a real gas oven and add it to my patio arsenal. I don’t want to keep dealing with lump charcoal until I die.

You’ll Have to Build Your Own

Today and day before yesterday, I used my new tractor fork to move a 70-foot oak. I feel like it’s safe to say this invention is a huge success and a giant improvement over what most people use.

The tines on the fork used to be 4 separate attachments. Each one had to be fastened to my tractor’s bucket with a chain and turnbuckle. They moved around when I used them, and I had to get on and off the tractor to put them back in place. When I tried to lift heavy things that were only a little wider than the gap between two tines, the tines would open up and drop the item. The chains were slowly destroying my bucket. It was stupid.

I hacked up the tines, discarding maybe 70 pounds of steel, including the chains and turnbuckles. I made a frame from heavy tubing, and I welded the tines to it. I made two plates that would connect to a quick attach adaptor, and I welded them to the frame. BANG. New fork.

If you look at it in a picture, it appears to be weak. You would think a heavy load would bend a tine downward. It looks like a blow to the side of a tine would bend it inward. No chance. I can stand on the end of a tine and jump up and down, and nothing happens. It’s much stronger than it looks.

A few days back, I was fiddling around in the woods, and I saw that a very tall tree had fallen across the dirt road that goes down the middle of the lot. It was stuck in another tree, so it leaned at about a 60-degree angle.

I had to move it. The road was unsafe with a big tree waiting to collapse on it. The cattle were in danger. Also, I didn’t want the leaning tree to destroy the tree that was holding its weight.

I went out with only a few tools. I had a hatchet, a tow strap, and an 18″ Makita electric chainsaw. Within about 90 minutes, the tree was flat on the ground, and I had moved about 15 feet of the trunk to the burn pile. By that time, the chainsaw batteries were dead, and I was dehydrated, so I quit.

Today I spent maybe two more hours, and I brought a timberjack so I could roll logs onto the fork. Now just about all of the tree is on the burn pile.

I had no problem lifting a 40-foot log that was about a foot thick on one end and 5″ thick on the other. This is the kind of thing buyers of $5000 grapples think is impressive. It’s like they have no idea a cheap, simple fork will do the same thing. I held the log up and sawed 5-foot lengths off each end until I had something I felt would be easy and safe to dump on the burn pile.

I could have carried the whole log to the pile, but that would have been dumb. Long objects can turn a tractor over if they’re not balanced right, and they can do funny things when dropped on a pile from 8 feet off the ground. Cutting the log up added maybe 10 minutes to the job, and it left me with a safer load.

I found something else the fork will do. If you lift the fork high and push it against a tree that’s rotten or just small, you can push it right over. No stump. The inner two tines prevent the tree from sliding out of the fork. The only problem is that the fork tends to slide up the tree. I can fix that by welding a piece of serrated steel to the frame to catch on tree bark.

I considered welding a hook to the frame in the same place, for chains and straps. I can’t do that if I put the log-catcher there. I can still put a hook on my bucket, though, and since I have a quick attach adaptor, switching to the bucket is fast and easy.

I’m thinking of things to do to my ballast box. This is a heavy steel box on the rear of the tractor. I put sand in it. It counteracts the weight of stuff on the front end loader and takes weight off the front axle. It’s not quite full of sand, and I can put a chainsaw and a few other things in the top.

I need more storage, however. I’m considering getting a Harbor Freight hitch cargo carrier. This is a cheap steel platform that goes in a trailer hitch receiver, like the one on my box. There are a couple of problems with these things. First, they are nearly bottomless. The bottom of a cargo carrier is just a few steel tubes several inches apart. I guess I could put expanded metal or plywood in it. The second problem is that cargo carriers can wobble around in receivers. I don’t know if that would bother me or not.

Right now, I have a big steel hook in the receiver. The purpose is to let me connect a strap, brush grubber, or chain, so I can do light pulling. I don’t think it’s a great idea to pull really hard on a ballast box receiver, but removing shrubs and little stumps should be no problem at all. If I don’t use the hook, I have to run the strap or whatever under the box to the tractor, and that’s kind of a pain.

Someone suggested I connect a short chain to the tractor’s drawbar. I guess I’ll do that. I will then be able to connect things to the chain without getting between the tractor and box. I’ll be able to rest the chain on the box or something when I’m not using it, so it will be handy.

I have considered buying or making a chainsaw holder. When I put a chainsaw in the box, I have to keep a scabbard with it. I have to make sure the scabbard is on the saw when it’s in the box so the chain doesn’t gouge things. Putting the scabbard on and taking it off gets to be inconvenient.

A company called Sawhaul makes a polyethylene saw holder you can mount on any flat piece of steel. It looks fine, but the price is insane. They want $150 for something that should cost $50, and people say the polyethylene gets torn up and has to be replaced. I’m thinking I might be better off making something from pressure-treated wood. I’m not sure. If I get a cargo carrier, a chainsaw holder will be pointless.

I’m also thinking of making a hook for my subsoiler. A subsoiler has a single bar of steel that goes down in the ground, and it has a flat blade attached to it. The bar has about a 45° bend in it. You can use the subsoiler to dig shallow trenches in a hurry. It’s also useful for lifting stumps, but because the bar has such a wide bend in it, it slips off the stumps. If it had a 90° bend, it would hold on and lift better. This would give me 3300 pounds of lift, concentrated on a very small area.

Stumps need vertical lift. They don’t resist it very well. They’re great at withstanding sideways force. Obviously, a 3300-pound lift will do more than a much smaller force applied at 45° from vertical.

A lot of guys use something called a stump bucket to remove stumps. This is a thing that looks sort of like the lower jaw on a tyrannosaurus. It goes on a front end loader. It has serrations where the dinosaur’s teeth should be, to prevent stumps from sliding off.

It’s a great tool. For a skid steer or track loader. A skid steer will lift several times what a tractor will, so the bad leverage you get from a long bucket out in front of a front end loader is not a problem. Stumps come flying out. A tractor can’t lift nearly well enough to make a stump bucket work well, unless the tractor is enormous. There are Youtube videos of skid steers and tractors using stump buckets, and the difference is disturbing, if you own a tractor. Guys on tractors have to nibble and nibble and nibble.

Tractor:

Skid steer:

A subsoiler with a hook would be very different from a long stump bucket. It would be right under the 3-point hitch, so no lifting power would be lost. If the tractor can lift 3300 pounds, I’ll get 3300 pounds of lift at the stump. I think it will work.

A guy in the Netherlands has a tiny Kubota with a front end loader attachment which is a single piece of plate steel on a quick-attach mount. The piece that does the work has a profile like a rhino horn. It seems to work much better than a stump bucket, probably because a bucket is a foot wide and spreads force out over a huge area. If he can do great things with a single piece of plate on a weak front end loader, I should be able to do much better with a subsoiler hook.

I bent my subsoiler working on stumps, so I welded gussets in and replaced the little lower pins with a solid bar of steel about three feet long. It should be way harder to bend now. If it does bend, I’ll reinforce it some more. Welders don’t have to put up with any BS from steel tools. It will do what I want, or I will add steel until it does.

Anyway, the fork is a total success. Wish I had had it 5 years ago. When you need the right tool, just buy it or make it. Don’t cuss and do nothing while life passes you by.

The Country That Put a Man on the Moon Still Can’t Make Good Cheese

Pizza is like golf. You always think you’ll do better the next time you do it. It’s full of variables, so you’re never really sure you’re doing it as well as possible.

Actually, this is not true. I make Sicilian pizza perfectly. I should have said “thin New York style pizza is like golf.” It’s very different.

In my pizza quest, which got going in earnest in about 2009, I have tried a zillion different things. Every flour known to man. Lots of cheeses, including Grande, which a lot of pros love. Many different tomato products. I baked with a stone. Then I moved to a steel. I baked at varying temperatures. I’ve tried everything except for a special pizza oven, which is not needed if you make New York style pizza.

I thought I was sure of two things: Sicilian pizza could be made well with any flour, but New York style worked best with bread flour. Now I question myself.

My friend Mike taught me how to make pizza, and he uses AP flour. I tried it in the past and didn’t like it. Then after I moved to the farm, I found out I had been using way too much yeast in my pizzas. This put me back into research. Change one thing, and you have to go back and look at everything else. I looked at flour again.

If you want to make pizza dough in the morning and have pizza later the same day, you need about 1/8 tsp. of instant dry yeast per 100 grams of flour. You can go higher for more speed, but as you cross the 1/2-teaspoon threshold, the flavor of the dough starts to suffer. There is really no reason to use a lot of yeast. If you want to speed up fermentation, you can make your dough with warm water and let it rise at 100°.

I used to use several times as much yeast as I needed.

By the way, there is nothing wrong with instant dry yeast. It’s more reliable than active dry yeast, and you get the same results. I’m not sure why people use other yeasts. You can always get fancy and make a live starter you feed every day like a pet, but if you’re satisfied with yeast, instant is the way to go.

Lately I’ve been using AP flour in thin pizza, and I have no complaints. I don’t think I’d use it for garlic rolls, but they’re not quite the same as pizza.

I used to be obsessed with crusts that were somewhat hard and chewy. In recent months, I’ve been more interested in softer crusts. I had tremendous success making hard crusts with high-gluten flour and little or no oil. To get a softer crust that isn’t like Wonder Bread, I am now using AP flour and about 3% olive oil. The percentage is figured in relationship to the weight of the flour. I like pies made with 180 grams of flour, so I use around 1.25 teaspoons of oil. The actual number for 3% is 1.16 teaspoons, but I’m not going to be that picky.

I’m also trying to process the dough as little as possible. Overkneading can increase toughness. I “knead” using a food processor, and it’s really fast, so I have to watch it carefully.

Cheese continues to be a challenge.

When I started, I figured whatever they had at the grocery store was fine, and then I learned it’s generally too dry or too oily. The shredded stuff is nearly always very dry, and they coat it with potato starch and/or tiny fibers of wood cellulose to keep it from caking. I think the cellulose turns the cheese into a hard composite, but I don’t know. Anyway, dry cheese gives you a texture like vinyl, and it burns fast.

I used to live near Costco and Gordon Food Service, and I found I could do very well with a 50/50 combination of Costco bagged mozzarella and GFS sliced provolone. Now, these stores are over an hour away.

Back when I was in Miami, I also tried a bunch of Grande products. They melt really well, but I thought they were a little bland. Not long ago, I was at the GFS in Orlando, and I saw they stocked Grande. On a lark, I bought a bag of East Coast blend, which is half part-skim and half whole-milk. It’s shredded, but they don’t put paper mill waste on the shreds.

For some reason, I like this cheese much better than I used to. Next time I’m in Orlando, I’ll get more.

I used to be frustrated by food service cheese because it came in big packages which got moldy in a hurry. Internet pizza nuts have shown me the light, however. Cheese companies say mozzarella should not be frozen, but the pizza nuts swear it does no harm, so I plan to buy a block, cut it up, and freeze one-pie portions.

The nuts say freezing block cheese is better than freezing shredded.

Because of my location, I have done a lot of testing to find better cheese locally, and one answer was Boar’s Head mozzarella from the Publix deli. It’s a low-moisture cheese, but it’s made from whole milk. It works, but it’s very greasy. It also costs nearly $11 per pound, which is more than twice what top-grade restaurant supply cheese costs.

I found a restaurant supply place near me, but they didn’t have any highly-regarded cheese. They had shredded Roseli cheese, part-skim. It’s made by U.S. Foods, a respected cheese supplier, but this particular product is made with wood dust, and it’s also too dry to make a good pizza. I know, because I bought a bag.

I was thinking of throwing the Roseli cheese out, but I got a wild hair and decided to try mixing it with Boar’s Head. Today I made a 60/40 blend, and it was not bad at all. It melted well, and it wasn’t greasy. It was slightly dryer than I wanted, however, so I think the key is to go 70/30.

It’s annoying that virtually nobody makes a proper shredded pizza cheese for consumers. Anyone who buys grocery shredded cheese knows it doesn’t work. It turns brown in a hurry, the top turns into leather, and it gets grainy. How is it that companies like Kraft and Sargento have been making pizza cheese since the dawn of time and haven’t noticed the problem? They’re not even trying.

The sauce problem is just as bad. I have to buy huge cans of Stanislaus Saporito sauce and freeze them in board-shaped portions I can cut up as needed. You would think there would be one really good national brand of pizza sauce or tomato paste, but there isn’t. I’ve done okay with Glen Muir organic paste and Winn-Dixie paste, but if I want a home run, I buy Stanislaus.

I have like 60 pounds of it.

Anyway, the big message I wanted to convey today is that you can make a pretty good pizza if you get Boar’s Head mozzarella and cut it with a little shredded low-quality cheese. It’s a pain, because you have to shred the Boar’s Head yourself, but you do what you have to do.

I should also say I found a pretty good pizza cutter. I have a big stainless rocking cutter, and most people love those. I don’t think much of it. I like 4″ wheels. I had one made by OXO, and I thought it was great until the hollow plastic handle came off and poured dishwater on my cheese.

It was surprisingly hard to find anything better. I decided to check sites that supply pizzerias, since they have to sell things that actually work. I found a Winco 4″ cutter with a solid plastic handle. So far, it works fine, and it can’t hold water. Winco is a well-known restaurant equipment company. I have their stainless bowls.

The Winco cutter is NSF certified, and it doesn’t seem to mind the dishwasher at all.

So, to sum up all the useful info:

1. AP flour works fine for New York Style pizza. I would stick with High-gluten or bread flour for garlic rolls.
2. Use very little yeast if you want a good pizza crust.
3. Instant yeast is preferable for people who don’t want to deal with starters.
4. Roseli shredded mozzarella is too dry to be any good, but if you mix it into Boar’s Head, which is too oily, you get a pretty decent pizza. This may also work with nasty shredded cheeses sold in grocery stores.
5. Grande makes hassle-free pizza cheese, both shredded and block.
6. Freezing mozzarella won’t hurt it, and you should probably stick with block cheese when freezing.
7. OXO 4″ pizza cutters have hollow handles that collect dishwater, so try a Winco.
8. If you like a softer crust, add more oil, use AP flour, and go easy on the kneading.

Carlson Harder to Find than El Chapo

I keep feeling like I woke up in a reboot of The Twilight Zone.

Today I came across something about Tucker Carlson, and I decided to see what was going on with his career. When he got booted from Fox for some pretty uninspiring behavior, I predicted he would fade away.

I don’t think he’s very good at what he does, as I said back when they made the mistake of giving O’Reilly’s golden spot to a person who had been failing at other jobs for years. I think the time slot is what makes 8 p.m. Fox hosts great.

He’s gone. Not just from Fox. Gone, period. The web says he started a Twitter show called Tucker on Twitter, which sounds like a confused man trying on bathing suits. I can’t find it. I can’t find his Twitter page, which is supposed to be at Twitter etc. TuckerCarlson.

What happened?

I know Fox sent him a cease-and-desist. The idea is that Carlson is still under contract to Fox until December of next year. The month after the next presidential election, I should note. That will sting, if Fox gets its way. “It’s me, Tucker, back with a bottle of Ensure and my take on the election I missed.”

I can’t find any stories explaining why Carlson is gone. My guess is that he and/or Elon Musk took his account down in order to minimize their exposure until the dispute is resolved one way or the other.

Why not tell the world what’s happening? It’s a bad idea to comment on potential lawsuits, but you can at least say there’s a potential lawsuit and that you are exercising caution.

I can’t find anyone talking about Carlson’s disappearance. That’s even weirder than the disappearance itself. Hasn’t anyone noticed?

We don’t even know what’s in Carlson’s contract. There must be some kind of non-compete clause or some other language granting Fox exclusive rights to his content. There are little snippets out there, but I haven’t seen anything really helpful.

I learned a little bit about non-compete clauses in law school. Courts do not like them. They stifle competition. They keep prices high. They starve people. In order to make one work, an employer has to make sure it’s reasonable. The duration and geographic scope have to be reasonable, for example. You can’t tell a barber who worked for you in Alaska that he can’t set up shop in Florida for 300 years.

The only kind of non-compete clause I know about kicks in when an employee leaves. Carlson, however, seems to be a current Fox employee. They’re claiming his contract has over a year left to run, so maybe Fox is still paying him, and he has no post-employment non-compete obligation. In that case, it seems reasonable to require him not to work anywhere else.

Another possibility is that the press has things wrong, as usual. Maybe when they say he’s “under contract,” they really mean he IS fired, he’s NOT getting paid, and he has a normal noncompete agreement and maybe a severance package.

I don’t know what’s happening. I can guarantee you Carlson’s lawyers are trying to fix it, or maybe Musk’s are, or both, or maybe Carlson and Musk are fighting over who has to hire lawyers and pay the bill.

I don’t think Twitter is liable for anything, but Musk and Twitter have lots of money, so that makes them seem liable to opportunistic attorneys willing to roll the dice.

I think what’s happening is very bad for Carlson, because as people get used to not watching him, they may start to realize he’s not very good and not particularly smart. They may even start to think rationally about his bad behavior (alleged alleged alleged infinity no tags back) at Fox.

While he’s gone, Jesse Watters is filling the Fox Spot. Another great Fox move, right up there with The Half-Hour News Hour and hiring Rachel Marsden. Watters is smug and annoying. He also lacks O’Reilly’s gift for showmanship. He seems to share Carlson’s maturity issues. Will viewers want to watch him smirk every night for a whole hour?

Maybe they will. That time slot is really something.

I still think Carlson is headed for platform miniaturization, like Bill O’Reilly. O’Reilly now airs his views on Youtube. His videos are getting numbers like 7,000, 20,000, and 169,000. I watch a random guy who does things like covering steaks with Kraft macaroni and cheese sauce and cooking them, and he gets something like 10 times O’Reilly’s traffic. He just flew himself and his wife to Japan first class, at $25,000 per ticket. Of course, I’m assuming he paid. The airline may have given him tickets to get him to do a video.

I don’t think anyone will ever pay O’Reilly $50,000 to review a product. My bet is that he pays for everything now and has to wait in line at restaurants.

Are you still wondering who Rachel Marsden is? Should I have not mentioned her? You probably don’t remember.

Her career pretty much ended over a decade and a half ago. To me, she was a conservative cross between Mary Katharine Ham and the Glenn Close character in Fatal Attraction.

I think people have been watching Carlson on Twitter just to feed the delusion that they’re punishing Fox. I believe they have the same kind of enthusiasm you had the last time you started a diet on January 3rd. February will probably be a very cold month in Carlsonland.

Well, it already is, since Carlson is deplatformed. But I think it will continue to go badly for him.

I pushed the metaphor too far.

Maybe Carlson should pay Dylan Mulvaney to say he hates him. Mulvaney has incredible power to shape consumer behavior, and the Mulvaney Effect seems to have a very long half-life.

Maybe there never was anyone named Tucker Carlson. Maybe there was, in a different reality, but Joe Biden put on a shiny brass gauntlet, snapped his fingers or had someone snap them for him, and made Carlson vanish from the past, along with his memory. Carlson’s memory, I mean. And I was shielded from the effects by my backyard rifle berm.

Now it’s my fate to roam the world with a shaggy beard and long toenails, insisting Tucker Carlson existed.

He’s in the Phantom Zone, with Rachel Marsden and Brent Spicer. Sean Spicer, I mean. See?

When Carlson got the boot, conservatives put up all sorts of gloating memes. Carlson got tons of traffic on Twitter, so people concluded that he had totally 3wned Fox. Talk about celebrating early. Will people want those memes online a year from now?

I don’t care too much who does what at Fox, since I rarely see Fox material, but it would be neat if they gave the golden spot to someone smart and reasonably mature.

Clarence Thomas has an Heir

One of the things I hated about practicing law was watching lawyers rationalize.

People say lawyers lie all the time, and it’s not true in the way they mean it. They think lawyers lie to judges, juries, other lawyers, and opposing parties all day, as a matter of routine. This is untrue. Lying to a judge is a serious offense. Where I live, it can get you disbarred. Lying to opposing counsel will also get you in trouble with your bar association. If you lie to a jury, you can pretty well expect your opponent to have something to say about it, right then and there.

When lawyers deceive, they generally deceive themselves, their co-counsel, and their clients, about the facts and law surrounding their cases. Their untruths usually aren’t plain old lies. They are rationalizations. Things they can’t be punished for saying.

Example:

Lawyer Bill: So Tom, when you were driving home from the bar and plowed through the rec room of an old folks’ home, would you say your head hit the steering wheel?

Drunk Bob: Well, I think it may have brushed against…

Lawyer Bill: I’m sorry, did you say it DEFINITELY SLAMMED FORCEFULLY?

Drunk Bob: Well…

Lawyer Bill: Because if it did, then when you were found staggering around by the police, it may be that you were ADDLED by the blow and not stinking drunk on two-for-one margaritas.

Drunk Bob: Oh, it was forceful, all right. It’s amazing I didn’t get a concussion!

Lawyer Bill: Where did you go to medical school?

Drunk Bob: You mean before beginning my career hauling manure?

Lawyer Bill: Because if you’re not a doctor, you can’t possibly know if you had a concussion. So shut up about that. We will let my friend Prescription Factory Ben decide if you have a concussion. Let me get him on the phone. Ben, you’re on speaker. We need you to look at my client Drunk Bob and see if the steering wheel…

Prescription Factory Ben: Way ahead of you. Concussion for sure. Of course, I’ll have to examine him for the bargain price of $5000.

The unfortunate thing is that many lawyers actually buy into their rationalizations, so when they present them to finders of fact, they can’t really be accused of lying. And when rationalizations are being crafted, you don’t want to be the only one in the room who raises his hand and ruins everything.

I think about these things when I watch the nuts on the left, spewing their insane theories about victimhood and so on.

Today I saw a white girl say all white people are racist, without exception. When I say “white,” I don’t mean she was 100% white. She had olive skin, and she clearly had a few drops of black blood. But she was not nearly dark enough to be half black. She was white. Call it what you want, but if she has kids with a white man, it will probably be impossible to see any African influence in them.

She started talking about racism, which means animosity based purely on race. The definition of racism is old and correct, and I just gave you the whole thing. There are no asterisks. “It’s not racism if this.” “It’s not racism if that.” No. Doesn’t matter what the other facts are. Doesn’t matter whether the person with the animosity is white. Doesn’t even have to be a person. A dog can be racist.

She had a look on her face like she just figured out the cure for AIDS, and she started saying racism was about power. She said white people’s existence is racist because it supports a system that supports white supremacy.

She had convinced herself this was a brilliant revelation, but it was neither brilliant nor original. You can find all kinds of idiots on the web saying the same thing.

Today I feel very discouraged about humanity, because I am being reminded that there are billions of people out there who, when it comes to the capacity to admit error and improve, might as well be tree stumps. There is literally nothing you can say to these people, no matter how obviously true, that will change their corrupted, dishonest, arrogant, hateful minds. They start from anger and a desire to control and murder the rest of us, and that, not reason, drives their rationalizations. You can’t get rid of the lies because the hate which is their root can’t be pulled up.

The tribulation will be God’s last effort at evangelism prior to the millennium. He will not use gentle words or miracles. He will burn people with fire. He will starve them. He will let them torture and murder each other. He will give them agonizing diseases they can’t contain, mitigate, or cure. He will destroy their environment. He will even send animals to tear them up. The tribulation will be characterized by the harshest type of evangelism there is.

The Bible says stripes, meaning wounds from flogging, are for a fool’s back. It says, “The way of a fool is right in his own eyes: but he that hearkeneth unto counsel is wise.” If you listen to counsel, you don’t need to be flogged, so you are spared. If you think you’re always right, get ready for the lash, because it will come, and if you’re lucky, it will only come in this life.

Satan is gaslighting leftists, and they are gaslighting everyone who doesn’t hear from the Holy Spirit and pray in tongues. Many people think Christians are protected from deceit, but that’s not true. If it were, Christianity would not be disappearing, and it is.

Only Christians who are guided by the Holy Spirit every day will avoid being persuaded to join the body of the antichrist. Christians who are complaining about perversion today will be waving rainbow flags next year.

I come here and write this stuff, and maybe 5 people believe it. I feel like holing up here with my wife and baking cookies until Yeshua comes to extract us, because trying to help people is like trying to befriend rabid dogs. Yeshua said such people were swine, and they would turn and tear us up. It’s happening every day, so when do you know it’s time to throw in the towel and avoid them?

I feel like every Christian who knows the Spirit will eventually have a Scott Adams moment, but unlike Scott Adams, they will identify the hate group correctly. It’s not black people. It’s people who aren’t Spirit-led. It’s a big group.

If you’re tired of secular gaslighting, I have a resource you might enjoy. The other day, my wife and I discovered him independently. I saw him on Youtube, and she saw him on TikTok. He’s a Nigerian named Frank Stephen. He puts up brilliant videos debunking leftist gaslighting. It’s hard to stop watching him, because it’s so weird to have someone tell sane people they’re right.

Example: a morbidly obese singer named Lizzo is whining because people pick on her for being enormous. In her act, she wears things like thongs. It is almost horrifying. She is physically grotesque, she insists on displaying as much flab as she can, and leftists keep telling her she’s gorgeous.

Frank Stephen points out that there are a whole lot of really fat celebrities out there, and they are not crying about being persecuted. Maybe the difference is their choice not to put naked blubber in front of the camera and tell people they’re beautiful.

In case you want to check him out, I’ll try to embed a video, but Youtube is persecuting him dishonestly by age-restricting his material, so you may have to click a link instead.

I’ll embed it anyway, since it is just barely conceivable Youtube’s propaganda/censorship squad might make a mistake and remove the restriction some day.

My wife says she has been binge-watching him. He reminds me of Trump’s Twitter glory days. No one tweeted like Trump. Set up, debunk, accuse, withdraw.

Secular material isn’t always helpful, but God is being attacked via secular arguments, so I believe Frank Stephen is a healer. The left throws sand in our eyes, and he washes it out.

Leftists Infuriated by Threat of Fairness

I never thought I’d see it happen. Government-backed racism is dead in the United States, at least on paper. The Supreme Court has finally admitted that affirmative action is unconstitutional.

It has always been obvious to any thinking person that racist persecution is wrong, regardless of the segment of the population a victim belongs to. Nonetheless, America persisted in harming white gentiles, Jews, Far Eastern Asians, and men for decades. It never made any sense.

God has shown me that when things don’t make sense, there is a supernatural reason. We didn’t hold onto government racism for this long because there was a credible argument in favor of it. We held onto it because Satan supported it.

An earlier Supreme Court weaseled around the issue in the Gratz and Grutter cases, using diversity as a transparent pretext to continue the racism. This, in a country where Yale Law school professors tried to prevent Robert Bork from being hired because they feared his presence, as a third conservative, would tilt the institution’s political balance to the right. Leftists have never wanted diversity.

Diversity has always been a sham. The very word implies inclusion of people of differing beliefs and ethnicities and so on, but diversity programs have been used to exclude more than include. If diversity were the goal, leftist institutions would be trying to hire men, straights, Christians, conservatives, Asians, and Jews, and that has never happened.

So now that affirmative action is supposedly finished, what good will the change do? Not much, I would guess. I don’t think the tribulation is sufficiently far off to permit changed policies to have a great effect.

I believe one group will benefit a lot in the short term: Far Eastern Asians. They will fill up our best schools now. Until yesterday, orientals were pushed down in applicant pools simply because they were oriental. Under the new scheme, their blistering test scores and grades may result in some pretty funny-looking student bodies. Far East Asians will presumably start getting what they earned.

I say “Far Eastern Asians” because I’m acknowledging something no one wants to talk about: Indians aren’t as smart as the Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese. Sorry. It’s true. Thais don’t seem exceptional either, and people from Cambodia and Laos don’t appear to match the ability of their neighbors to the north. Maybe I’m wrong.

You can’t say “Mongoloid” now. Science used to divide human beings into Caucasoids, Mongoloids, and Negroids, and it was a pretty good system. Indians are Caucasoids, and Far Eastern Asians are Mongoloids. Or they used to be, before things changed. As everyone knows, “mongoloid” became medical slang for “person with Down Syndrome,” and of course, it became a schoolyard insult. I assume this is one of the reasons “Mongoloid” with a capital M went out of style. Also, anthropologists have been trying to deny that race exists. Not an easy case to make, in view of reality.

It’s sort of ironic that some large Mongoloid groups are smarter than Caucasoids.

I think the main significance of the new decision will be that it provokes leftists to violence. I think Satan let it happen for this purpose.

The Revelation says the world will come to be filled with lack, death by various causes, and murder. You need anger in order to have murders. The anger has to come from somewhere.

Over the last decade or two, we have seen conservatives, whites, and Christians hit with extreme provocation. Our enemies keep filing meritless civil and criminal suits against innocent right wing politicians, from Newt Gingrich all the way to Donald Trump. They have started marching in sodomy parades while chanting, “We’re coming for your children,” which is about the most provocative thing a person can say. They prevent us from getting jobs. They get us fired. They force us to take sensitivity training when we’re in the right. They force us to lie about gender in order to avoid destitution and ostracism. They close businesses that don’t bend the knee. They castrate and skin confused children. It really does look like the last election was stolen, even if machines weren’t rigged.

People on the right are more mature and slower to anger than leftists, so we haven’t responded with the level of vitriol they have displayed. I think we’ll catch up.

What about the things that provoke leftists? It’s easy to name things. Bush won twice, fairly. There have been a lot of victories for people who read the Second Amendment correctly. Trump won. Roe was overturned. DeSantis exists.

I think Satan allowed affirmative action to be taken away to drive leftists even crazier than they are.

The court also says it’s illegal to force people to say things they don’t want to say. It ruled in favor of a website owner who did not want to produce pro-perversion content. Presumably, the ruling will also apply to bakers, the great public enemies of the left. This is another decision that will enrage leftists.

The decisions were made by a court that exists because of actions that enraged leftists. Clarence Thomas was cleared of ridiculous harassment allegations from an eccentric coworker. Neil Gorsuch was appointed after Merrick Garland was shot down because Ruth Ginsburg died so late in the last Obama term, and leftists somehow concluded this made Gorsuch illegitimate. Kavanaugh made it to the bench in spite of asinine and libelous accusations of harassment dating back decades, and leftists assumed the accusations were true.

Many leftists don’t care what the Constitution says. They think Trump himself was an illegitimate president because Hillary Clinton got the popular vote. Never mind what the Constitution says about the Electoral College. They think an illegitimate president appointed illegitimate justices who make illegitimate decisions.

You could fill a book with a list of exceptional provocations that have occurred since 2000.

We have two perfect storms: one that provokes the right, and another that provokes the left, and they combine to make a single perfect storm that will lead to guerrilla warfare across the country.

To me, this is the real significance of the two decisions that were announced today.

What about me? Should I be siding with leftists? My wife and I intend to have kids, and they will be black. Don’t I want them to have every advantage?

Well, here is the thing; our kids will be intelligent. I mean, barring genetic problems, accidents, disease, and so on. My wife and I are smart. My parents were both over 140 on the IQ scale. Our kids should be able to get good test scores and grades. And if they’re not smart or they don’t make an effort, why should they get things that should go to smart kids who do the right things?

I don’t want to be the father of the next Kamala Harris.

I hope to raise kids who know the Holy Spirit and depend on him, not nutty, slow, malevolent human beings, for advancement.

Speaking of kids, my friend Mike has a real problem. His ex-wife has become a godless leftist, and her mother is a witch. His ex pretty much abandoned his two sons, and now that they’re grown, she curries favor with them. One son is way out on the left, and so is his wife.

Mike has a baby granddaughter, and his ex gave her a book: The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish. This book was written by a man named Harris Kornstein, whose drag pseudonym is Lil Miss Hot Mess. He’s a professor. The book is about a bunch of homosexual men who dress like women and dance through a town.

How this book is supposed to be helpful to a little girl several years away from literacy is not clear. The ex says her favorite TV program is the Rupaul show, however.

This is a person who used to be a Republican and made her kids go to church. Before moving away and leaving Mike to raise them.

Mike called his ex and tried to talk to her about God and the problems with perversion, but she has serious mental issues (my opinion), and there is no talking to her. She did what you would expect. She accused him of not wanting his kids to be happy.

He wants to hide the book where his granddaughter will never see it. He ought to burn it and keep quiet so they don’t replace it.

As everyone knows, “swish” means “effeminate man.”

Kornstein is big in the drag story hour business. Yes, they really are coming for our children. Present perverted men reading perverted stories to very young children, and at least some of the kids will grow up to think perversion is normal and fun, and the flip side is that they will see normal people as hateful, stupid, and primitive.

This girl (the granddaughter, not the tranny) has no shot in life. Only God can rescue her. My wife and I pray for her all the time.

To get back to the main point of this post, I don’t think favorable court opinions are as helpful as many conservatives think they are. They are just pushing us closer to civil war, and if the rapture comes soon, we won’t have much time to enjoy any benefits they bring.

Trump could be acquitted and/or reelected. Can you imagine the riots? If Trump isn’t the last straw, something else will be.

My response to all this is to try to spend a lot of time inside the presence of God. Last night he gave me a real revelation about what the Bible means when it calls him our fortress and refuge. The presence of God is like a cloud you can sit in. When you’re there, you can feel it around you, and the insanity of the world seems much less important, because it is. When God surrounds you, he protects and improves you.

I believe that if you want to be raptured, you need to be close to God when the moment arrives. We know of three people who were raptured, and they were all close to God. In fact, the Bible actually says Enoch “walked with God.'”

I hope God pulls the plug on this planet soon, and I don’t feel bad about saying it. I want the best for people who are already his, and the tribulation will help everyone who is left behind and who is capable of repentance.

“Tribulation” refers to harvesting useful grain through harsh means. The tribulation will be the world’s last big revival, in a way. It will save millions. When you ask God to rapture his people soon, you’re also asking for the tribulation to start, but the tribulation will bless many, many people, and they are people who can’t be helped by anything short of the tribulation. The Bible says stripes are for a fool’s back.

I wouldn’t wish hell on anyone, because it’s final, but many people need the tribulation.

Stripes are for Fools’ Backs

This morning, I received a lot of disturbing information about the state of the world.

The thing that distressed me most was a report that Sir Ephraim Yitzchak Mirvis, the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, had publicly stated that Orthodox Jewish parents should not be informed if their children come out as sexual perverts at school.

I took a look at a PDF of the Rabbi’s remarks, and this looks to be the money part:

All staff should be clear that a pupil coming out is not a safeguarding issue. They have simply shared an aspect of their identity. Like any other personal information, any information about staff or pupil sexuality or gender identity should be treated as confidential. Unless there is a risk of harm, this should not be disclosed to anyone, including their parents. Making a pupil’s parents aware of their child’s sexuality and gender identity can itself be a safeguarding risk, particularly as the school cannot know how parents or carers might react.

The rest of the PDF is a mix of Jewish tradition and law, the Gemara, a small amount of scripture, and leftist boilerplate.

It is reasonable to extract this conclusion from the above text: the Rabbi believes that when Jewish children tell their teachers about their issues with sexual perversion, which the Old Testament refers to as “abomination,” the teachers are to be trusted with handling the situations, and the Jewish Orthodox parents…are not.

Jewish scholars have twisted the scriptures a lot over the millennia, but so far, they have not tried to repeal them. It seems odd, then, that a Rabbi would show so little concern about extremely great sins. Also, the idea that parents should have less authority than teachers seems inconsistent with scripture, which gives Jews a lot of power over their children.

In the Old Testament, parents had all sorts of leeway when it came to deciding whom to bless and who inherited what. Also, Jephthah was allowed–required–to kill his innocent daughter as a result of a poorly-conceived vow. There is also a passage in Deuteronomy which authorizes parents, not rabbis or lawyers or kings, to execute their own children.

If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them:

Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place;

And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard.

And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear.

Jewish law is extremely complex, and it frequently produces conclusions that seem incompatible with the Bible. I suppose I should not be shocked to see yet another weird decision from a major rabbi. I don’t think Moses would be on board with it, however, nor do I think the God who burned Sodom approves.

The booklet containing Rabbi Mirvis’ strange recommendation was written in collaboration with leading Jewish Biblical scholars. Wait…no, it wasn’t. It was written in collaboration with leading pro-perversion activists. Check it and see. Strange bedfellows, no pun intended.

I had been under the impression that Orthodox Jews would be among the last holdouts in the battle against perversion, but it looks like they may be abandoning the field and leaving it to Spirit-led Christians and hard core Muslims.

I also read about a couple of naked parades.

To be fair, not everyone in the parades was entirely naked.

There were pro-perversion, pro-pride parades in New York and Toronto, and nude men and women marched and rode bicycles in full view of assembled crowds containing parents and minor children.

How did I end up in Bizarro World? How can this be happening? Even 25 years ago, this would have been impossible. If Earth were a person, I would want to check its ID.

I can’t make myself sit here and try to explain why nude homosexual parades are bad. It’s like telling people not to eat peanut butter and mercury sandwiches. If it’s not obvious, there is something wrong with you, and you can’t be made to understood.

In another story, pro-perversion people marched down a New York City street chanting, “We’re here! We’re queer! We’re coming for your children!”

What?

I guess they didn’t get Rabbi Mirvis’ memo. He doesn’t think our children belong to us. That is the position leftists take these days. It should be, “We’re here! We’re queer! We’re coming for the state’s children!”

Here’s a great question for leftists: if I have children, but they belong to the state, why is it that if I move to another country, I get to take them with me?

Do I also get to stroll into Fort Knox and fill my luggage with gold bars?

What do they mean when they say they’re coming for our children? Is it a joke? Do they mean they want to convert them to homosexuality and perform sex acts on them? Are they saying they will get our children to side with them, so we’ll die out and leave a pure rainbow world behind?

Has a judenrein sound to it.

It won’t really be a rainbow world, because the rainbow flag is gone. Confusion is increasing so quickly, there is now a new flag with a triangle of new colors next to the pole. There is also another flag with stripes in ugly colors. It is now literally impossible to say how many recognized genders there are.

A teacher in England recently told sane students feline was a gender. If your son decides he’s a cat, that’s his gender.

No one asked her whether it mattered if he was a male of female cat, but I guess that question would be transphobic.

Try and imagine what would have happened to a troop of perverts who marched in the most liberal city in the US 25 years ago and said they were coming for their opposition’s children. Even that recently, they might have required police help to escape without serious injuries.

Should I even mention the 18-year-old California girl who is suing her insane doctors for slicing her breasts off when she was THIRTEEN? This woman will never enjoy normal sex, if she manages to marry. She will never breastfeed. She will always feel like she is less than a woman. And why? Because idiot groomers on social media convinced her a childhood phase was a good basis for breast amputation.

Today a friend said he wondered when the world would reach the tipping point, meaning the point where things were so far gone, there was no longer any hope of recovery. I said I believed we had passed it some time ago.

This planet is done. There is no hope. Where do sane people go now?

I Wouldn’t Let These Guys Change my Oil

I’m waiting for my wife to call, so I am killing time with you.

Today we all know what happened to the Titan sub that was on its way to visit the wreckage of the Titanic. It blew up, or more accurately, in, on Sunday. Our Coast Guard found the pieces near the Titanic. I have heard they were 600 feet away and 1300 feet away. Maybe someone knows the correct figure.

I was surprised to see that the most intelligent, or seemingly intelligent, analysis of the accident came from film director James Cameron, who directed the movie Titanic. He has a lot of contacts in the general area of things that go down deep in the ocean.

He says the sub probably imploded way above the depth to which it was considered safe. The Titanic rests at around 12,500 feet, and the sub disintegrated at 3,500.

That’s not the kind of failure a company can come back from without a whole new design. The sub fell apart at less than 30% of its working depth, so it experienced less than 30% of the pressure it was designed to endure every time it was used. It’s like having a hitch designed to pull 12,500 pounds snap in front of a 3,500-pound trailer. It suggests the design was totally worthless.

How would you like it if you were on an elevator rated for 2,000 pounds, and you and the other occupants weighed, say, 500, and the cable snapped?

Cameron says he emailed people on the day of the implosion, telling them the sub’s occupants were dead. He says he was very confident.

According to Cameron, the sub lost communication and tracking when it imploded. He says the tracking equipment had its own pressure-resistant housing outside the sub, as well as its own power. His conclusion when he learned this information was that the sub had been torn apart, because gentler failures wouldn’t have interfered with the tracking equipment.

That sounds pretty smart to me. Of course, Cameron is a movie guy, known to have a monumental ego, so it could be that he’s just good at looking smart. And he’s the same guy who thinks he found the bones of Jesus, which Jesus is still using.

He also says Oceangate, the tourism-sub company, was urged repeatedly to have its vessel certified, whatever that means. Experts wanted it to receive proper testing, and Cameron says that never happened.

He also says the composite hull was a stupid idea.

A composite is a material made up from at least two different materials. Two examples are fiberglass-reinforced plastic, which is used in boat hulls, and steel-reinforced concrete, which is used in nearly everything made from concrete. A composite will combine desirable qualities of different materials. In concrete, adding rebar allows the concrete to bend more without cracking.

The Titan’s hull was shaped like a watermelon (the old kind). The ends were titanium domes. The middle was a carbon-fiber tube. “Carbon fiber” is shorthand for “carbon fiber imbedded in something else.” Plastic, maybe?

Cameron used the word “horrible” to describe the decision to use this composite. He said the problem was that the carbon could start separating from whatever it was imbedded in, and that eventually, this would produce weak areas that would cause implosion. He believes this is what happened.

I would guess it works like this: carbon fiber and plastic are not equally stretchy, so whenever pressure produced tension inside the hull, the fibers would try to stretch more or less than the plastic around them. After many repetitions, the fibers would start to come loose and move slightly. When that happens, you don’t have a composite or its virtues. You have two different materials rubbing against each other.

Again, just my wild guess.

Something like this happens to car paint in the sun. Cars are now painted with stupid two-layer coatings. The bottom layer is colored, and the top layer is clear plastic. When the car heats and cools, the layers expand and contract at different rates, causing them to try and slide past each other, and a few years down the road, your clear coat falls off and can’t be replaced unless you redo the entire paint job at enormous cost.

Cameron claims it’s not possible to do a quality analysis of a sub made from a composite. He says one “contiguous” (he means “homogeneous”) material can be tested using finite element analysis, but composites can’t.

I think he is getting in over his head, because the web says finite element analysis works on composites. In any case, as far as I can determine, the sub never got any kind of creditable certification.

I see someone in the submersible community, if there is such a thing, is now claiming the sub must have been engineered well because an expert went down in it with the rest of the dead. The idea is that he wouldn’t have done that if the sub had been unsafe.

That doesn’t convince me. A 2012 article from the New York Times says that up until that time, only 5 people had died in submersibles, and there had been plenty of descents. The first bathyscaphe was launched in 1948.

If Titan was so safe, why did it implode? If implosion is a risk that can’t be mitigate well, why have all those other vessels done just fine?

I would have more faith in the Titan design if they built another one, had it tested with extreme rigor, and got the company’s top remaining employees to do a hundred safe descents. My bet: plastic deep-sea manned submersibles aren’t coming back soon.

If Cameron is basically right, the vessel was doomed by third-rate engineering. In that case, even if the company can somehow hold together and get over its now-abysmal reputation, it will have to splurge on a real sub. No one wants to enter a demolition derby in a Ford Pinto.

I don’t think anyone seriously believes the company can survive, though. On top of all its other problems, the guy who ran it is dead.

Some people are calling for new laws. That’s ridiculous. You should be allowed to go down to the Titanic in a cheap sub if you want. It’s not like this is a significant threat to the public. So far, the death toll, since the beginning of time, stands at 5. Also, the people who rode in this sub all signed a disclaimer that made it very clear the company thought there was a good chance they would die. I don’t know what more we should do to protect people from their own bad judgment.

Over 1500 people died when the Titanic sank, they died due to incompetence and greed, and humanity continued using ships. That was the right decision. If rich people want to continue risking death in tiny subs, they should be allowed to do it. As for disclaimers, liability, negligence, and all that, we already have laws covering those things, as will become obvious when the lawsuits start.

Yesterday I read about a high school classmate of mine. He died on a mountain in the Himalayas at about 33 years of age. He had kind of an ego. He decided to leave his group for a while, and he fell into a snow-covered crevasse. They found his sunglasses, journal, and trekking poles next to the hole he made, and that was it. There was nothing they could do. For all the world knows, he was wedged between two walls of ice, dying, for several days, watching light appear and disappear above him as the sun rose and set.

He is still there.

We still let people climb mountains.

Mount Everest is not the world’s hardest mountain to climb. Not by a wide margin. Annapurna has a fatality rate of about one third. Still, 1% of the people who try climbing Everest end up dead. That’s a horrible record. No one is trying to end the lucrative Mount Everest extreme-tourism trade, and people are allowed to climb mountains that are much more dangerous.

It’s sad the Titan’s occupants died. It’s even sadder that their deaths appear to have been caused by incompetence and recklessness. It’s a good lesson for anyone who thinks fancy-looking equipment, a cute logo, vehicle wraps, and custom golf shirts make a company trustworthy.

People are Disappointing

Today the Titan submarine disaster is on my mind. Apologies to anyone who gets upset when people call it a submarine. The definition of “submarine” is “a ship that can travel underwater,” so it fits.

Now someone will pipe up and say submarines are boats, not ships.

So this thing is somewhere in the ocean with 5 people aboard, and it has been sealed up for around 100 hours. If the press is correct, the oxygen ran out several hours ago, so, barring some kind of misreporting, everyone on the sub has been dead for some time. They may have died on Sunday, the day it was launched.

My understanding is that there are two likely ways to die in a sunken sub. Either it implodes instantly from water pressure, killing you so quickly you may not even feel anything, or you sit and run out of air, banging on the hull and hoping someone is trying to save you.

So what’s worse? Dying in a second or two with no chance of praying and saving your soul, or spending days in a cold, possibly pitch-black place, unable to stand, breathing recycled breath, struggling to find a solution, and realizing you are extremely unlikely to be saved?

Dying instantly is worse. There is no way around it. Eternity in hell can’t be compared to a few days of fear and physical discomfort.

This story is horrible. I can’t imagine what the families of the sub’s occupants are going through.

Of course, my wife and I have prayed for the people on the sub. That being said, there are some interesting things to learn here.

Human beings overestimate each other. For example, NATO overestimated Russia. We thought they had fantastic, state-of-the-art weapons, and we have learned that a lot of their stuff is primitive and ineffective. They don’t even have a way to keep drones off the Kremlin. How is that possible?

We thought they would blow through Ukraine like the US and England through Iraq. Not hardly.

A bunch of beer drunks walked right into the Capitol last year and raised Cain for a long time, and the government wasn’t able to prevent it or fix it after it happened. They had to wait till everyone calmed down. They didn’t even have cameras with facial recognition outside the building, like they do at certain Home Depot stores.

Similarly, we are learning that the people who ran, past tense, the company that owned the sub didn’t prepare very well, and neither did the many governments that have been called on for help.

There are reports saying the sub was controlled with a $29 Logitech video game controller. That is mind-blowing.

When lives depend on a product, it has to be very reliable. For example, I carry a Glock. These things have been frozen, dropped in mud, run over by trucks, dropped on concrete from considerable heights, and otherwise abused, and they still work. Guns are commonly subjected to lots of safety and reliability testing. You have to wonder if it can be true that Oceangate, the company that operated the sub, really believed it was a good idea to send people two miles down in the ocean, hoping a $29 plastic toy made in China would bring them back.

Ask yourself if you’ve ever had a battery-operated electronic toy fail for no apparent reason. Have you ever forgotten to change batteries? Have you ever spilled a drink and ruined electronic components? Have you ever had a problem with a cable or Bluetooth connection? Have you stepped on a smartphone? Has anything ever just plain crashed?

Here’s something else I read: the sub was supposedly considered crush-proof down to 13,500 feet. The tourist site it was headed for is located at 12,500. If this is true, it routinely operated at 92.6% of its maximum operating depth. That means it experienced 92.6% of the pressure it would be subject to at the very limit of its permissible range.

Can that be true?

When you want a rope to lift a ton every day, you don’t buy a rope guaranteed to lift 1.08 tons. The working strength of a rope will always be much lower than its breaking strength. The same principle applies to just about everything engineers make.

Web sources which may be totally wrong say military subs have “crush depths” set at 150% of their maximum operating depths. That sounds more like it.

Oceangate’s CEO, who is on the sub, supposedly said he didn’t want to hire fifty-year-old white guys with military experience to run it. He said it was very simple to run, and that he wanted young people who were inspiring.

Surely he was joking.

When we put rockets into space, guess who we hired? Old white guys with military experience. Granted, at the beginning, they weren’t all that old, but they weren’t spring chickens. They were also smart. They were engineers and so on. They had MENSA-level IQ’s.

They also knew how to handle themselves when things went wrong. We don’t have any records of them crying or wailing in despair in times of crisis.

Obviously, they didn’t have to be white or male, but you see what I’m saying.

My uncle was a NASA mechanical engineer in Huntsville. When I asked him why the Challenger shuttle went down, he said two words: “affirmative action.” He said they were no longer hiring the best. You can bicker about O-rings and weather, claiming better engineers wouldn’t have helped. Well, better engineers are better at predicting and preventing problems.

If I had to get on a sub 350 miles from shore and go see a pile of wreckage on the bottom of the ocean, you can bet I’d want the smartest, bravest, most highly trained guy available running it. You couldn’t get me on a thing like that without a pistol, but if I had to do it, I’d want Chuck Yeager, not Dylan Mulvaney.

People who know about the sub are talking, and some say they would never get on it. A guy who viewed the Titanic from a real sub made by the Russians said he wouldn’t do it. Obviously a brave guy, but he didn’t think Oceangate’s people knew what they were doing.

I saw a reporter reading the disclaimer Oceangate made tourists sign. It was incredible. I would paraphrase it like this: “This thing was built cheaply, by people who may have done a lot of things wrong, no one with proper qualifications has checked the entire sub out, and you are rolling the dice if you give us your money.” Who signs a thing like that?

They say the hull itself has been properly checked out, but you can sink and die in a sub with an intact hull.

The reaction of the world’s governments has been amazing.

Our government’s unmanned vehicles arrived this morning, 4 days after the sub went down, presumably hours or more after the occupants died. I realize it’s not easy moving stuff long distances over water, but these things were in the Northeast, not that far from the tourism site. People involved in this mess are citing the difficulty of coordinating efforts involving multiple countries and multiple organizations. So, bureaucracy. That’s the correct word.

The world’s governments are not competent to help people in lost subs. There’s the bottom line for you. The rest is just chatter.

They couldn’t even save our people in Benghazi.

We are told a billionaire and his son are in the sub. I have to ask: did they understand how badly prepared the company and the world’s governments were? Did they ask anybody?

If I had to do something like this, I would research as much as possible. I would want to know what kind of emergency plans had been made. I would demand that the sub’s owners contact the Coast Guard and Navy and gave them every detail of the mission.

Another question: why would you take your son down in a backyard submersible that had already had at least two failures, with no rescue plan and no credible hardware to fix things in a crisis?

It’s bad enough to go by yourself. Putting your child at risk is beyond explanation.

The facts surrounding this disaster will be clarified later. Maybe some of the criticism will turn out to be wrong. But if even some of it is right, the whole thing makes no sense. And it goes to show you how we overestimate human beings.

I hope to be surprised soon.

It Picks a Side or it Gets the Hose

My wife and I are waiting for her final immigration interview. I don’t know if anyone who reads this blog cares, but I am providing this information anyway.

The whole process could have been considerably shorter. I am responsible for most of the unnecessary delay, but neither of us is rushing around as, perhaps, we should be.

We haven’t seen each other in a long while. We talk and pray every day, though. Because things were up in the air, we were uncertain about traveling.

It’s possible we may see Europe soon.

Our government has a crazy requirement: to come to the US, you have to provide an original marriage certificate at your interview, and the interview doesn’t take place in America. We have a digital certificate which is authenticated by blockchain technology, but Uncle Sam won’t take it, so I had to ship the original to Zambia.

The last time we tried to go to Europe, we applied at the Czech embassy, and they rejected us because the marriage certificate was in the States. Now that it’s in Africa, they might, conceivably, let us visit.

Once we’re in the Schengen area, we can go anywhere we want, so a Czech visa would get us into Switzerland, France, Austria, and Italy. My favorite destinations.

My big concern these days is that Uncle Sam will find some unexpected nit to pick, and I will end up living in Zambia. This is extremely unlikely, but what if it happened?

Down side: Zambia. A poor country. Hard to get things we want or need. Lots of witchcraft. I would have to get rid of all my US assets. I would miss a lot of things and a few people.

The power goes off frequently in Zambia, so in that regard, it would be a lot like California, except no one poops on the sidewalk.

Up side: Christian country, in spite of the paganism. Surrounded by Christian countries. No more pronouns. No more sexually indeterminate people humiliating the rest of us with forced compliance. No more legal elective murder of the unborn. No humidity. Moderate weather.

If I moved there, I guess I would renounce my American citizenship in order to avoid paying income tax. The likelihood of moving back to the US would be small in the extreme, so citizenship would probably be about as helpful as an appendix or a sixth toe.

In the past, America seemed like a stable shelter, but now it’s like living in a wooden building with several fires already started. Zambia actually looks more stable. No one wants to invade, and rioters aren’t burning cities or killing bystanders. That kind of thing is reserved for South Africa.

We just had at least 14 mass shootings in one weekend which combined Father’s Day with Juneteenth. That shows you the state of the American urban temperament. MLK Day and Juneteenth are constantly compared to the movie The Purge. If you can’t get away with a crime the rest of the year, just wait.

When the ship starts to sink, a floating milk jug starts to look a lot better.

I used to think Americans who left America or gave up their citizenship were nuts, but I lived in a different country then. I felt like an American. Now I feel like a splinter a boil is trying to push out. I am not wanted here.

I have been blogging for over 20 years. A very long time ago, I started saying it would be very bad when Christian America ceased to exist, because there was nowhere else to go. Was I right, or is Christian Africa going to be the lifeboat?

South Africa is not a possibility, so it has to be written off. It’s no place for white people. There are other places between South Africa and Nigeria that could work in the short term.

I’m pretty old now. If I make it another 30 years, it will be a surprise. First, the world will have to last that long. On top of that, I’ll have to take good care of myself, and I’ll have to turn out to be a person who is blessed with longevity. I think 30 years would be a worst-case scenario. With any luck, I’ll be gone in fewer than 25.

The thought of growing old and feeble in the new Sodom is scary.

Right now, I’m strong, I have money, and I live in a very conservative county in a fairly conservative state. I have never had to lie about anyone’s sex or praise BLM. I have never had to take sensitivity training. I have never been at the mercy of perverts or socialists. I’m in a low-priority area for murderous rioters, and I can sleep with a high-capacity rifle beside the bed.

When I’m really old, in the fairly near future, things may be different. You can’t assert your rights when you can’t walk or you have to be helped to the toilet. You’re at the mercy of whoever is paid to care for you, and if that’s a squad of shemales who enjoy abusing old Christians, you’re out of luck.

Longevity and youth used to be blessings. Now they’re problematic.

It would be much better to die prematurely or move to Zambia than to live in a country where the spirit of antichrist is in near-complete control.

Assuming my wife gets here, I suppose the best thing will be to keep asking God to move us to the best possible places. Maybe I already live in one. There will be peaks of relative sanity, and they will go under the water later than the rest of the world.

I believe I truly understand what God meant when he had Moses write that Lot was “worn out” from his exposure to Sodom. Living in a world that is like an arm turning gangrenous is tiresome. Being under attack every second of every day, from people and spirits, is tiresome. Having to treat mindless leftist brats as though their deranged opinions are important is tiresome.

Accomplishing nearly nothing is tiresome. Being rejected by unbelievers is not great, but I’ve been rejected by Christians, too. When God tells me things and I pass them on, Christians are usually the ones who “correct” me or tell me I’m an enemy of God. God has told me a lot of extremely useful things, but nearly no one is interested, so I feel I’m doing very little.

When I was in high school taking psychology, my (angry atheist) teacher taught us about extinction, as the term was used by psychologists. It works like this: a dog barks for attention. You ignore it. The dog doesn’t get its reward. It stops barking. The behavior has been extinguished.

I feel kind of extinct. I wonder how God must feel, when he looks down from a very great distance, from his place in a world of love and total agreement, and sees Americans castrating themselves and their kids because of gender delusions. I wonder what he thought of the LA Dodgers, honoring a bunch of male perverts dressed as nuns. It can’t be encouraging. I’m sure he’s not saying, “Things are going great. I’ll just keep investing in this race.”

Today my wife told me she feels lazy because she feels she can’t move on with life until she gets here. I told her I feel the same way about the rapture.

Civil war seems more likely than ever. Hunter Biden just got a light sentence for some felonies, and it looks like he may not be punished or fully investigated for influence-peddling or bribery. These were the crimes that concerned people.

No one cares if a tax cheat or someone who lied on a NICS form gets off, but if the president and his family appear to be involved in a huge bribery scheme, and the government decides not to investigate it, it’s a very big deal, especially when a former president is being prosecuted for non-crimes in New York and federal crimes that are very similar to things a Democrat Secretary of State got away with.

Corruption nullifies democracy. It’s not a small problem, so it causes a lot of anger.

I actually prayed for Hunter Biden to get leniency, because Joe is a horrible father who seems to have predestined his kids for failure, but I felt the truth should come out, and the bribery mess should be exposed. I’m fairly cool-headed, so if I’m disturbed by the prospect of an abandonment of the bribery investigation, there must be many people who are not cool-headed who are about to blow their tops.

I don’t want to be here for the hot war. I don’t want to join a militia. I don’t want leftist nuts trying to kill me and my wife. I don’t want far-right nuts abusing me because I won’t go out and shoot hippies with them. I don’t want vigilantes confiscating my guns and ammunition and whatever else they want for the cause. I don’t want to hear about what I owe my neighbors.

I don’t know too much about civil wars, but I think boundaries are important. It seems like a civil war between enemies with boundaries is not as bad as a civil war in which enemies are mingled. There are a lot of places in the US where it may not be possible for front lines to be drawn, and I would expect people in that situation to live in rage and terror all the time. There would be no civilians, in the sense that everyone would be considered a legitimate target. Every able person would have to be viewed as a potential killer.

I hope the end comes before people have to choose sides.

Kenya Says No

Yesterday I saw a leftist podcaster criticizing the Democrats for warmongering. He said they were pushing other nations into the arms of the Russians and Chinese, more or less. And that includes the Russians and Chinese.

He mentioned something we don’t hear much about here. The dollar is being phased out as a global currency.

Many nations pay each other in dollars. They don’t have to, however, and some are flexing their currency muscles because they are unhappy with us.

Kenya is one of the nations that have given up on the dollar.

I asked my wife about this, because she lives one country away from Kenya, and she told me Africans now call the dollar “gay money.” They also say “pro-gay money.” They laugh at us because, well, they should. You would have to be deranged not to laugh at America.

The L.A. Dodgers just had a special celebration for perverted men who put on clown makeup and dress as nuns. We have gay breakfast cereal now. Johns Hopkins now calls lesbians “non-men” who are attracted to “non-men” because the word “woman” is being driven out of public discourse by people who very literally can’t tell you what it means.

They can’t tell you what a woman is, but they are positive Caitlyn Jenner, a castrated man, is one.

Our inexplicable involvement in Ukraine, combined with Biden’s needlessly hostile relations with OPEC, combined with our determination to force African Christians to adopt sins God calls “abomination,” appear to be killing the dollar’s popularity.

So what happens when countries start using yuan, rubles, and Euros instead of dollars? I don’t know, but my wild guess is that the value of the dollar will plummet even further, and that means increased inflation, just when it’s the last thing we need.

We pay pensions and Social Security in dollars. We give government handouts in dollars. We save dollars for retirement. Think about these things. What will we be able to buy to stave off poverty? Maybe land? I don’t think precious metals will work. They’re only precious when people agree that they are.

America is supposed to have the freest press on Earth. For all I know, that is true, but it’s not very free. If I were not married to an African woman, I would have no idea Africans were calling the dollar gay and saying they don’t need it.

A lot of us like Fox News for being willing to air stories the other networks ban, but Fox is fairly pro-perversion. They call castrated men “she” and “her” even while running stories about pro-perversion excesses. I think that when Fox runs stories that reflect poorly on the perversion community, it’s just pandering to its audience, which it expects to come around and grow up in the future.

Conservatives love to say, “Get woke, go broke.” We think it’s funny and fitting when it happens to companies, and it is. But it also happens to nations, and we have to live here. Most of us.

It can happen to a world.

Sometimes I wonder if I’ll have to move to Africa eventually. I really do not want to. Africa is poor, and the power grid is about like California’s. Witchcraft is everywhere. But America’s future may be worse than Africa’s. Also, persecution may reach Nazi standards. Better to live in modest circumstances in Africa than to be silenced, beaten, and imprisoned in the US.

The Fat Transvestite is Singing

These days, we often find ourselves saying things we never thought we would say. Today, I am here to say our president just hung a huge sodomy flag on the White House balcony, between two American flags in positions of lesser honor.

Here’s another one: at the event where the flag was displayed, a man claiming to be a woman put on a display of his own. He exposed his grotesque Frankenbreasts to a camera and jiggled them. The video was posted to TikTok.

Biden provided our White House to perverts in order to celebrate Pride Month, which is June. Blacks get February, the coldest, ugliest, shortest day of the year, for Black History Month, but sodomites get June, the nicest month, and they also get October for pervert history month.

Liars are now claiming the sodomy flag wasn’t honored above the actual flag because there is another American flag on the White House roof, higher than the balcony where the sodomy flag was displayed. The roof flag is inconspicuous and small, so it’s very obvious our flag was in a place of lesser respect.

One of the biggest problems I cope with these days is discouragement. It’s a peculiar type of discouragement. My future could not be much brighter, nor could my wife’s. Things get better all the time, and I know in my heart this will continue. I don’t just know it; I feel it in my heart.

My discouragement isn’t about us. It’s about the world. There is no hope for its recovery.

For years, I’ve known the world was washed up, but the end seemed far off, and I felt it would be possible to lead a somewhat normal life for quite a while. It’s different now. We are already at the point where normal life is impossible. You can hide in a conservative area and get a little more peace than the damned, but you can’t expect to have a career and kids and grandchildren who live in relatively safe world.

I feel like I’m sitting in an airport, killing time, looking at my phone, wondering when my plane is going to come. I have zero interest in joining society or accomplishing worldly goals. It’s no longer possible for me to belong.

The fool who exposed himself is named Rose Montoya, and fashion houses pay him to model women’s underwear.

Are you paying attention? Don’t sit there and snore. Don’t get used to this. Men are being paid to model women’s underwear, by major corporations. That is far from normal.

I thought it was bad when Bill Clinton let his white trash brother marry a pregnant woman at the White House, but I would trade today for that day in a heartbeat.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the value of human lives, and I have begun to feel Christians overestimate it. We don’t want to be self-righteous, and we want to extend our hands to the lost so they can change, but eventually, God has to come down here and remodel this planet. A lot of people will be killed, many by God himself, and many will go to hell, but something has to be done about this place. God has already shown that he is willing to kill the damned in wholesale fashion when things get bad enough.

The West has gone past the point of redemption, and Asia never accepted Jesus to begin with. Evangelism on a large scale is going on between the Sahara and South Africa, but African Christianity tends to be modeled on the worthless American prosperity model, so you can’t just think about numbers. Also, many African “Christians” also worship demons, and a person who worships demons is no Christian, regardless of what he may think he is. Christianity is not experiencing a real net expansion. It’s going away.

The rapture must be coming shortly, and we have to be willing to give up on people. The word says God will make us the head and not the tail, and that is an obligation, not just a privilege. We are not to be led by people who hate the gospel. The more time you spend chasing fools who will never listen, the more likely you are to end up following them instead of the Holy Spirit.

Jesus never chased anyone, and he told the disciples to present their message and then leave if it wasn’t accepted. America and the West have had every opportunity to do the right thing. So has the rest of the world. Continuing to beg and manipulate will not bring enough profit to make our attempts worth the effort and suffering.

The other day, I saw a Bill Wiese video about the rapture, and he countered the argument that every single people on Earth has to hear the gospel before the rapture can come. He pointed out that Jesus said this would happen before “then end” would come. The rapture is the end of the age of the church, but it’s not necessarily the end Jesus was talking about. He will return after the tribulation, ending the rule of man and Satan. This may be the end he had in mind.

I don’t think we have to evangelize every Indian in the Amazon and every savage on North Sentinel Island before the rapture can come. Things are too far gone right now. I don’t think God will leave us here to be abused just because his enemies have kept the gospel away from a few individuals.

Leftists agree with us on our desire for us to be removed from the world, although they prefer violent and cruel means. They think everything will be rosy when we’re gone. In reality, they will be in agony every day. We are the reason God mitigates the world’s problems, and once we’re gone, giving the same help to those who hate him would be like continuing to support a placenta after the baby is delivered.

The purpose of the tribulation is to save people through extreme punishment, the likes of which God is not willing to pour out on the world while his children are here.

Putting this abominable flag on the White House is like making an obscene gesture at God and daring him to do something about it. Forty years ago, it would have been a good, if far-fetched, idea for an apocalypse movie, but now it’s reality. What can we do that would be worse? There aren’t many tricks left in Satan’s bag.

Perversion is not an unimportant matter. It is abomination. God truly hates it. He required the Jews to execute people for it. Mainstreaming abomination destroys peoples.

Yes, he imposed the death penalty for other things, like adultery and drug use, and those activities are also bringing the world to its end, but perversion is special. You can see it in the stories of Sodom and the Benjamites. It is peculiarly hateful to God.

I know progressively (appropriate word) worse things will happen between now and the rapture, and I wonder what we’ll see before the end of the year, but what we’ve seen already is enough to destroy all hope for the world.

I can’t wait for the end of this world. I want to be in a world without demons, blasphemy, and disagreement, and I never want to see any nation insult God like this again.

Cheaper, Better, Faster?

I am still trying out my new tractor debris fork.

I was worried that it wouldn’t be strong enough, because the tines are held on by welds at the very rear, where they experience a great deal of force when the tines are pushed up, down, or sideways. When I designed this thing, I considered putting struts between the tines, close to the back, to back up the welds.

Today I shoved the fork under an oak log about 15 feet wide and 18″ thick. I lifted one end off the ground with no trouble, and then I moved that end a few feet without hearing steel snap.

This suggests the tines will handle the heaviest loads I am likely to put on them.

I used the fork to remove a bunch of brush from the yard. Branches were growing this way and that, threatening to block Amazon trucks, and I also cut a magnolia that was growing in the wrong place.

Here’s a photo of the loaded fork.

I just can’t make myself believe an expensive grapple would hold all of that. I would guess there are about 200 pounds of junk on the fork, and that isn’t much, but look how much space it takes up. I’m pretty sure grapples only hold small loads.

Can it be that grapples are useless and overpriced? Sure seems like it.

I gathered, moved, and dumped two loads that size in maybe 20 minutes. It amounts to something like 1000 cubic feet of brush. Very easy. Think a grapple would have turned this job into 4 loads.

A grapple would cost somewhere between $2400 and $4000, before tax and shipping, and it would require additional hydraulics. Figure $5000 to do it right. For that, I would get…what? I could pick up logs. I can do that now. I could move debris. I can do that now, much faster. I could remove stumps, badly and slowly. I can do that with my sub-$200 subsoiler.

I see videos of guys scraping weeds off the surface of the ground with grapples, but a bucket will do that, and I have a bucket. Once the weeds are down, a fork will move them faster than a grapple, and switching from a bucket to a fork takes two minutes.

I think I did good here. I’m glad I didn’t blow thousands on a toy that wouldn’t do what the fork does.

Since building this thing, I learned that I could have bought a manure fork, which is very similar to this, for under $2000. Maybe I would have bought one had I found it sooner.

I’m extremely happy with this tool. I also bought a Kobalt cordless pole saw on sale for $100, battery and charger included, so I am taking branches down like nobody’s business. This pole saw only has an 8″ bar, but it will cut small stuff like butter, and because it’s cordless, it’s immune from socialist ethanol gas woes. When I want to use it, it will work. No carb cleaning.

The battery is only 2Ah, but I used it for about an hour, and it was still working when I put it on the charger. It may be a long time before I use my gas pole saw again.

Hard to think of anything else I really need right now.

Amateur Lawyers Dust off Their Nooses

Man, the supernatural civil war machine never stops.

You probably know that a white woman near me shot a black woman who was standing on her porch. For some reason, leftist nuts are trying to turn it into a crusade.

Susan Lorincz, who is white, ALLEGEDLY (so tired of that word) killed Ajike Owens, who was black. Apparently, Owens’ kids annoyed Lorincz repeatedly, and Lorincz did not respond with great maturity. She is accused of calling one child “black slave” and throwing roller skates, hitting a child.

The press says Owens went to the Lorincz home and stood on the porch, arguing with Lorincz. The stories say Lorincz shot her there. Four days later, Lorincz was arrested and charged.

This is exactly how the law is supposed to work in Florida. Lorincz killed someone. The cops and state’s attorneys investigated, they determined that there was probable cause to arrest her, and off to jail she went.

So why did it take 4 days to arrest her? Same reason it took a year to arrest Alec Baldwin. Legal and factual issues needed to be resolved.

Florida, like most states, has the castle doctrine. It’s like stand your ground, but it only applies to certain places, like your home and car. It says that if you are attacked in these places, you don’t have to run away. You can stay where you are and use deadly force.

Florida has a statutory presumption that a person who is breaking into an occupied dwelling intends to do great harm. This means you can shoot a burglar who is halfway through your window.

Before arresting Lorincz, the county had to consider the possibility that Owens was trying to break in and hurt Lorincz. It’s not a simple determination.

Some people say Lorincz shot through a locked door. That makes her look bad, because it’s hard to believe a woman could get through a locked exterior door. On the other hand, many people have shot criminals through locked doors, legally. If a strong person is kicking your front door in, and you shoot, you may well be within your rights.

What if Owens claimed she had a gun or other weapon? What if she made Lorincz believe she could get through the door? What if she said male helpers were on the way? A lot of questions needed to be answered. That took time.

In America, we are not supposed to arrest people because we think they MAY have committed crimes. The police have to believe crimes were committed, are in progress, or will be committed.

The sheriff here said investigation was needed because of the stand your ground doctrine. I don’t know if he understands the law. Cops are not lawyers. In Florida, we have stand your ground as well as the castle doctrine. One is more general than the other.

If I shoot you in a mall and refuse to retreat, it’s stand your ground. If I shoot you in my house and refuse to retreat, it’s stand your ground plus the castle doctrine. Take your pick.

Incidentally, George Zimmerman was not able to retreat because Trayvon Martin was sitting on him trying to kill him, so stand your ground was not involved. You have no duty to do the impossible.

In Florida, we have a statute that says you can use lethal force in order to prevent a “forcible felony.” Invading an occupied dwelling is a forcible felony, just like rape and arson. We are even allowed to shoot people who are committing treason, believe it or not. I don’t think that one comes into play a lot.

What the sheriff says is not that important. Sheriffs work with state’s attorneys who call the shots and make the legal determinations. He did whatever the state’s attorney told him, and he may or may not understand the law.

A lot of people are angry because Lorincz is supposedly a racist. Maybe she is. Thing is, racism is legal, and even if it were illegal, it’s not homicide. Even if Lorincz had worn a Klan robe while shooting Owens, investigation would still have been necessary. Racism may be relevant to motivation, but the authorities still have to show there was an illegal homicide.

You can put on a shirt that says all blacks should be gassed, tattoo a swastika on your forehead, and still be within the law if you kill in self-defense.

If racism were a crime, half of the rappers on Earth would be facing charges. So would a lot of university employees. Al Sharpton would be in prison.

There is a tremendous amount of racist crime perpetrated by minorities. It doesn’t make the news because it’s not news. It’s normal. Somehow a possible white racist criminal is more newsworthy.

I guess the newest woke rationale goes like this: Lorincz is a racist nut, Owens was an angel who definitely did not try to break in, Lorincz shot her purely because of racism, the racist police and prosecutors tried to bury it for 4 long, long days, and it proves America is a white supremacist country. The problem is that nothing was buried, and the shooter was arrested promptly.

Unfortunately, it may be that more hate will be stirred up by the verdict. Don’t get mad at me, but Lorincz could be innocent, and even if she’s guilty, she may walk like O.J. Simpson.

The evidence isn’t available to the public yet. Maybe Owens said she was coming in to kill her. Maybe she said friends were right behind her. Maybe none of these things were true, but a good defense attorney might make a jury think they were true. Maybe Lorincz is guilty, but a well-chosen jury, like the one O.J. got, could refuse to convict.

So what happens if she walks? Regardless of whether she’s innocent, expect more turmoil.

I know black people whose friends and relatives have committed crimes, and I’ve been among those who were asked to pray for them to get away with it. I’ve heard black people clap when they were told God caused the system to let a guilty person off. A young black man accidentally shot and killed another young black man I was looking after, and I prayed he wouldn’t be arrested. Black people who knew the victim had no interest in seeing him charged. Seems like there is a double standard. The same one you see when black people shoot over 50 other black people in Chicago in one weekend, and BLM doesn’t show up.

I wonder what would have happened if I had shot my friend accidentally. Would black people I thought were friends have turned against me?

It’s not the end of the world when a criminal isn’t punished. America is full of killers who have never been charged, and this is particularly true in black ghettos, where people are afraid to talk to the police. Fomenting violence over one white defendant would be hypocritical.

I should also add that lay people’s opinions about guilt and innocence are usually worthless. The fact that you think someone should have been convicted probably doesn’t mean anything.

Whatever happens, one more cup of gasoline has been tossed on the embers of civil unrest, and Americans are not handling it like honest, mature adults.

Elective Interference

Here’s something I’ve been saying for several years: not only is the world going down the toilet faster than we expected; the speed at which it goes down the toilet keeps accelerating.

America was deteriorating at a certain pace in 2020. Now the deterioration is faster. What 2024 will look like, who can guess?

Yesterday brought me some disturbing new data.

First, I saw a video of San Francisco cops saluting the sodomy flag. They put it on a pole beneath the American flag, and they stood in formation and saluted.

If you’re a millennial twerp with no idea what a sane world looks like this will seem like a strange thing to get triggered about. It may seem completely normal to you. Anyone who was born before 1971 understands how bizarre it is for cops to salute sodomy.

One of the cops had a silly rainbow sodomy cowboy hat on. Cast your mind back to 1980 and picture Clint Eastwood shooting it out with criminals…wearing that hat.

Picture John Wayne wearing it.

Second, I saw a story about sodomy flag rainbow rocking chairs at Cracker Barrel.

Obviously, Cracker Barrel isn’t a chain of churches. It’s not a Christian business. Still, it’s a chain non-leftists tend to like, and for some reason, leftists really hate it. Maybe it’s because Cracker Barrel sells gifts with crosses on them, or maybe it’s because there was a racism kerfuffle that took place years ago. Or it could just be because it’s a Southern chain serving Southern food. Leftists hate the South.

Cracker Barrel is a big secular business, and it’s not realistic for it to try to please God by refraining from pandering in order to broaden its customer base. While this is true, it’s surreal to see sodomy chairs on Cracker Barrel’s famous front porch. Cracker Barrel has always been a nice refuge for people who are nostalgic for a sane world.

Third, and this is something you probably expected me to mention: President Trump was just indicted for 7 federal felonies.

I am sad to see this happen. I am not one of those conservatives who is unable to tolerate the prospect of a non-Trump victory in 2024, so I’m not flipping out over the likely destruction of his campaign, but Trump has been a great friend to the church, Jews, Israel, and the unborn, and I don’t believe he deserves this. I don’t want to see our friend in prison over something like this.

I am also disturbed because this prosecution appears to be selective, and it underlines the fact that conservatism and Christianity are being criminalized in America and the rest of the West. It reminds me that Rome-style persecution can, and does, happen in a modern nation where Christianity used to be the dominant ethos.

Hillary Clinton created an email address for the specific purpose of violating the law, she hid classified documents on non-secure computers, and when the FBI asked for her computers, she deleted the contents of the hard drives before handing them over. She is sitting in Chappaqua enjoying her hundreds of millions with no fear of prosecution.

Destruction of evidence and other forms of interfering with criminal investigations can be worse crimes than the crimes being investigated, as Richard Nixon could have told you. It’s not clear yet, but it appears Trump is in trouble for the way he responded to the investigation, not just holding onto documents.

If Hillary got a complete pass, how can Trump be charged with felonies?

Hillary crony Sandy Berger stole classified documents from the National Archives in 2004, he then lied to investigators, and he was only charged with a misdemeanor. He literally stuffed things into his socks, and he hid documents under a trailer belonging to a construction company. He never did time. He got probation.

It will probably be impossible for Biden and the DOJ to convince reasonable people this prosecution is fair or merited. I may be wrong, but I don’t see it happening.

A major problem is that millions of people may reach the conclusion–likely justified–that Biden and the DOJ are breaking the law in order to take away their ability to vote for the candidate of their choice. If enough people believe that, guerrilla warfare in our streets becomes a serious possibility. We may have a civil war, and worse, it may be justified.

Trump’s lawyers were working with the DOJ while this whole mess was brewing. It’s not like he hired a Craig Livingstone to rent a van and hide documents in a cave. To many people, it’s going to look like the DOJ is trying to imprison a great president simply for hard negotiating, in good faith.

If you had asked me, in 2000, how people who do what Hillary and Berger did should be treated, I would have said they should be prosecuted in some way or another. Now that Berger has received a slap on the wrist and Hillary has been given a free pass, how can I say that? There has to be some kind of consistency.

Leftists will do what lawyers do. They will harp on the differences between Trump’s case and the others, magnifying them and making it seem like Trump is in a different class. Conservatives will hammer on the similarities and the apparent unfairness. In the end, a whole lot of conservatives who are already angry about being systematically abused will feel more provoked than ever. Maybe the left will get the real insurgency it seems to want, instead of a tiny, ad hoc, mock insurgency like January 6.

Biden’s DOJ pseudopods should have bent over backwards to deescalate. If they could work with Hillary, they could work with Trump. No one was going to die because Trump was holding onto the documents. It was not a crisis. Instead, an Attorney General Trump’s party prevented from achieving a dream Supreme Court appointment is pulling out all the stops.

Prosecutors have huge discretion. People ignore that. Hillary could have been convicted. Hunter Biden could have been convicted of lying on his background check form by now. Bill Clinton could have been convicted of perjury. These three haven’t even been charged. Trump didn’t really have to be indicted.

As I have written, there is some evidence that the rapture will take place this coming winter. I would welcome that. I’m worn out, as the Bible says Lot was. My wife and I are fortunate in that we do not have to appease or obey deviants or socialists in order to have a decent standard of living, and we are not forced to lie about people’s gender, but the little oasis we live in is getting smaller every day, and even if we’re fine, it’s distressing to see other people who are a lot like us abused.

When I was a kid, my dad used to beat my mother, and he was nastier to my sister than he was to me. I was treated better than they were, but I still wished he would leave. I’m in a similar situation now. I’m doing fine, but I’m tired of reading stories about the cruelty inflicted on others, and I’m tired of knowing I will never belong.

I dread the day when we start seeing videos of conservatives acting like Antifa. Leftists like to riot, but they’re very bad at it. Conservatives are much better at doing real harm. They are more familiar with weapons and tactics than leftists. If they snap, they are likely to swarm the streets with newly-converted automatic weapons. If that happens, the final resolution will probably derive from violence, not debate.

It’s very simple to turn a Glock or an AR-15 into an automatic weapon. Banning machine guns only prevents people from getting weapons that are already automatic. It won’t help in a world where anyone can make an AR-15 automatic using a part made from a coat hanger.

Liberals don’t understand that people can make weapons they can’t buy. Ghettos are full of kids with automatic Glocks right now.

I’m not interested in joining up. I don’t even feel good about having to defend myself, my wife, or my house. If I wanted to shoot people, I would have joined the military. Barring the rapture, it may be better to be killed early on than to live in a filthy post-apocalyptic world full of immature people living out a video game.

MORE

Things look somewhat different now. The indictment has been released.

They are charging Trump with 37 crimes, not 7, which is the number I heard earlier. They are also alleging he told someone to hide documents from the FBI, which sounds something like Hillary Clinton erasing hard drives prior to making computers available for examination. I didn’t know he was going to be accused of this.

Trump is an interesting guy. He did wonderful things as president, but he has a strong self-destructive streak. He doesn’t seem to think about what will happen to him when he makes decisions. Maybe he’s so used to winning, it’s hard for him to imagine taking a serious loss.

I can’t even guess what he wanted with classified documents. I don’t know why he would poke the Deep Swamp bear without a good reason. It doesn’t make sense.

God has shown me that when things that don’t make sense happen, there is a supernatural cause. There is no way to rationalize holding onto classified material after leaving office, so I assume supernatural forces are at work.

This whole business feeds into the civil war scenario we’ve all been half-expecting, and if you spirits are pushing Trump and the DOJ to do things that will escalate the anger and lead to pre-tribulation strife, then what happened suddenly makes sense.

If we really are in the home stretch now, then both sides of the political spectrum will continue to escalate things, and people who call for peace and maturity will find themselves wasting their time.

I just hope people who are close to God will be gone before things become intolerable.