I expected my son to grow up gradually, but it seems like he changes in sudden jumps.
Maybe 6 weeks ago, we got him a push walker because he was standing and holding onto furniture. We thought a walker would help him learn to walk. A push walker is sort of like a lawnmower. Babies stand behind them. They don’t sit in them.
He started standing and grabbing it right away, but he could not figure out how to move it around. He kept pulling it backward onto himself. He banged his head on it. I put padding on it to keep him from getting bruised.
He wasn’t able to push it around, but it has a panel with a bunch of toys on it, and he loved using those.
Last night, I was lying in bed looking at my phone, and I heard a noise. I looked down, and I saw his funny little head smiling up at me from beside the bed. He had pushed the walker across the room and into the bed.
I was amazed. It happened very suddenly.
He pushed it all over the bedroom last night. He loves it. It’s very easy for him. He holds the top bar with one hand and takes off. He acts like he has been doing it for months.
He will be walking in a week or so. I am sure of it. He has tons of strength, and he can stand up and squat without support. I’ve only seen him stand unsupported once, and it was only for a few seconds, but he is changing fast. What he’s doing with the walker is very close to walking.
We had to buy him a bunch of toys because we realized he was bored. He was chewing on charging cables and playing with anything we left within his reach. We got him a little plastic table with toys in it, and we also got him a plastic fire truck and a little toy TV remote that plays songs and so on.
He loves all of this stuff. He has learned how to use the table toys, and he spends a lot of time playing with them. There may be one toy he’s not using; I’m not sure. He sucks on the remote and pushes the buttons. He takes the parts out of fire truck and throws them around.
Now he has moved to a new stage, so we have to figure out what else to get him. I don’t even know what babies play with, so I am researching.
I don’t believe giving kids things spoils them. I believe teaching them not to appreciate things spoils them. It’s important to give kids anything they can make good use of. Where would we be if the great pianists hadn’t had good pianos when they were little more than toddlers?
My dad made good money, but my parents deprived me in comparison to the kids who lived around us. My sister and I had toys, but not many. I actually received hand-me-down toys from my best friend. I should have been given music lessons and good instruments as soon as I could benefit from them. My dad should have bought me equipment and taken me hunting and fishing. He and my mother should have shown me how to use science and engineering toys. I should have been taught to use tools. We should have traveled to Europe and Israel instead of taking cheap trips to Kentucky over and over.
It’s sad that I was encouraged to write. My parents and my teachers let me down with that advice. As a hobby and a way to communicate with people you care about, writing is fine, but anyone who encourages his child to do it for a living is extremely foolish. I should have been helped along with STEM pursuits. I would have had a bunch of patents by the time I was 30.
Toys aren’t luxuries. For kids, play is work. It’s their job. It builds capable adults.
We should also get something better than a stroller to use for walks. I don’t know anything about babies, so strollers were the only things that occurred to me when we had to move him around. There must be other things, like wagons. I’m looking into it.
We like taking mile-long walks on our private road, so we need something that will work well for that.
This boy is in such a hurry. We need to enjoy him the way he is while we can.
I managed to bust out and get some things done. Jobs that have been weighing on me and making me feel trapped.
I have lost a bunch of oil seals lately. Utility cart rear axle. Excavator slew motor. Tractor front axle. Even my car is leaking around the oil sensor.
I finally took my tractor’s axle apart and replaced a seal and two bearings. I have been thirsting for the day when I could use the tractor again, and it has come.
I am moving more rocks out of my yard. I have some buried rocks and boulders that get in the way of the mower, and I also have–had–a big flowerbed surrounded by irregular native rocks placed there by the guy who built the house. In addition to all this, he and his wife dumped more native rocks in random places as decorations. He put a bunch of them in places where there should have been grass. I couldn’t mow over them, and they sheltered weeds.
Some people think there is nothing nicer than a bunch of crude rocks surrounding a flowerbed or a walk. I disagree. Pavers and curbs always, always look better. They do a better job of containing things. They make regular borders between things. It’s easy to get close to them while mowing without hitting them. It’s easy to clean them up with a weedeater.
An oval of irregular rocks in your yard says, “I am cheap and lacking in good taste and common sense.”
A natural rock formation can look nice, but decorating your yard with obvious landscaping debris is tacky and doesn’t fool anyone.
Putting these rocks around the flowerbed was extremely unwise. It looked bad, and it caused lots of problems. We have a neighbor who has flowerbeds with pavers, and his yard looks spectacular.
Today I put the bucket on the tractor and rammed it into the rocks surrounding the big flowerbed, dislodging them so I could move them. Some went right into the bucket. Most, I had to put there myself. There were a few big ones weighing up to, perhaps, 150 pounds. There were dozens of smaller ones ranging from maybe 100 pounds to the size of a golf ball.
The big ones, I rolled into the bucket. The smaller ones, I picked up and threw. In maybe 90 minutes, I must have moved over a ton. I wanted to do more, but it was getting dark.
I’m so grateful to God for my energy. I am too lazy to do serious exercise, but I had no problem yanking rocks out of the ground and getting them into the bucket. I worked fast. My heart rate was elevated. I was sweating. I didn’t die or anything. I felt great.
I have prayed for God to keep me going so I can be here on Earth for my wife and son. I got so used to envying Christians who died and left this place, I think I started to welcome death. I apologized to God and repented. I don’t like Earth, but I am eager to sacrifice in order to be with my loved ones and help them.
I won’t pretend my motivation is completely altruistic. I want to be with them. I would hate to find myself leaving them prematurely. I want to see him grow up, and I want him to know me.
I think God has graciously agreed to help me, in spite of my wickedness and selfishness.
I told my wife to keep my son away from me for a couple of minutes so I could drink something and get it together, but he just ran in, stood up beside my chair, and started clawing at my shirt while screaming with joy. Then he speed-crawled away. Now he’s back.
He seems to have the same kind of energy I have. God’s joy, I believe.
She came and got him. I have to get up and join him in playing with his toys in a minute.
I’m sure there are still rocks out there. I’ll have to take a pitchfork and sift through the dirt to get rid of the ones I missed. After that, I’ll be able to mow over the flowerbed every week to kill weeds and puree the dead leaves.
I have hit rocks by the flowerbed with mowers several times. The rock border was formed so irregularly, I could not guess where it ended.
My theory is that the original owner and his wife told their kids, “Take the rocks we’ve found in the yard and pile them up around those two oaks by the driveway! It will be a fun project!” Then the kids moved a couple of huge rocks there, realized they wanted to be doing something else, and started using smaller and smaller rocks and arranging them with a sloppiness that increased with time.
Then the wife planted a magnolia between the oaks, which were about 7 feet apart, leaving me no choice but to rip it out after I moved here.
My wife and I have decided to make this place our own and abandon all reverence for the original owners’ ideas. I used to give them deference, thinking they had to know things I didn’t know, but over time, I have realized they made lots of dumb decisions I need to undo.
I plan to leave the flowerbed alone so grass covers it. It’s in the shade, in a place where oak leaves fall and kill things. It would take a ton of work to keep it up and make anything grow.
They also left a huge, sick oak in the middle of the driveway island. I had to cut that and get rid of it after it snapped 30 feet up. Next to it, there was a dense shrub about three feet high, encircling a scraggly dwarf magnolia that looked like it had tuberculosis. You don’t plant a tree inside a shrub. Is this not obvious?
A few weeks back, I tore out the shrub and the magnolia. Of course, there were also two ugly rocks, which I removed. I am thinking of making a proper flowerbed there with pavers around it. I’ll fill it with mulch and put some kind of attractive low-maintenance tree in the middle. Maybe a peach tree or a crape myrtle. Around here, the crape myrtle is the go-to answer to poor soil and hostile bugs and weeds. It’s not the greatest tree, but it thrives, and it doesn’t need much care.
No one should ever buy a dwarf magnolia. They always look like the tree Charlie Brown brought to school for the Christmas play.
I also had a magnolia about 15 inches from my expensive brick front walk. That was not a smart choice. You never put a tree close to a house unless you like buying new roofs, siding, pavement, and ceilings.
I murdered that magnolia, too, and I’m also going to murder the two rows of boxwoods that line the walk. Boxwoods always look like they’re dying, and you shouldn’t use shrubs to wall a walk in and get in the way.
I have other boxwoods, and they will die soon. I also killed some kind of scraggly tree beside the workshop. It got in the way when I mowed, and it looked awful.
I bought a flail mower, and I finally assembled it. I have a couple of things left to do to make it work better. Then the boxwoods will meet its spinning blades and become sawdust.
This property will never make Architectural Digest, but I should be able to make it presentable and arrange things so taking care of it doesn’t break my back.
I killed the original owner’s wife’s roses a long time ago. Roses always look terrible unless they receive perfect care and pruning, and they were in a bad location. I’ve killed many of her plants.
She put hideous, enormous bromeliads near the front door. I paid a friends’ kids to do some weeding, and they tore them out because they didn’t know what they were doing. That’s fine by me, because I think bromeliads look sort of evil.
I had a very satisfying time with the tractor. I can’t wait to see this place looking better.
I feel like I was put on this earth to tell people to pray in tongues.
The benefits are so great they are beyond understanding, and the price of refusing can include things like loss of salvation and eternal damnation.
One of the things I love about praying in tongues is that it brings revelation. When I find myself praying in tongues for a very long period, I get excited, because I know God is about to teach me things.
If God isn’t teaching you things, you are likely to slide into beliefs and practices that will cost you salvation and put you at the mercy of evil people and spirits.
Hosea said:
My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children.
Hosea lived in a time when most people had to rely on scripture and special people who heard from God in order to receive knowledge, but that isn’t true today. By allowing the crucifixion, Yeshua made it possible for every believer to be filled with the Holy Spirit and hear directly from God. See what he said in John 16:
Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you.
John later informed us that the Holy Spirit, not men, was to be our teacher. Obviously, we have to hear from men to some degree, or most of us would never know anything about God. John was a man, and I am going to quote him. But men can’t be your primary source of knowledge, because they make mistakes and they also lie.
But the anointing which ye have received of him abideth in you, and ye need not that any man teach you: but as the same anointing teacheth you of all things, and is truth, and is no lie, and even as it hath taught you, ye shall abide in him.
And now, little children, abide in him; that, when he shall appear, we may have confidence, and not be ashamed before him at his coming.
This is interesting to me, because God told me that all authority comes from time spent with God, and all peace comes from authority.
Men who don’t hear the Holy Spirit hear every other spirit that shows up, and they repeat made-up doctrine that comes from those spirits. What can you say about these spirits? That they have no authority. If they contradict God, they contradict the highest authority.
To abide in God, as John tells us to do, we have to spend time with him. When you pray in tongues, you are spending time with God. As Paul says, when you speak in an unknown tongue, you speak to God, and he builds you up.
If you pray in tongues, you spend time with God. If you spend time with God, he teaches you from the position of complete authority. When you repeat what he tells you, you have authority and you are correct.
When you listen to men who don’t know God, you end up repeating unauthorized garbage that comes from demons. “Pray to dead people.” “The pope is infallible.” “Give money to me, and God will make you rich.” “You have to obey the dietary laws.” “God commands Christians to tithe.”
I have believed wrong doctrine propagated by preachers who listened to demons, but God has always shown me that they were wrong and helped me to escape the snares. I kept praying in tongues, and revelation came to me over time. As the word says, though I stumbled, I was not utterly cast down, because God upheld me with his hand.
The Holy Spirit was my compass. I was able to deviate from the course due to misinformation, but when I consulted the compass, I returned to the proper heading. When I got back on track, it wasn’t because I was smart. I was completely fooled before God corrected me. I thought Kenneth Copeland was a great preacher. I gave money to Robert Tilton.
I exchanged some emails with Robert Morris, because his teaching impressed me. How’s that for a confession? He has turned out to be a gigantic disappointment, not because he was sexually involved with a 12-year-old, although that’s not exactly inspiring, but because of the way he handled the consequences. He threatened the victim. He was even too greedy to pay her a modest amount of money, which is remarkable, considering his income.
He wrote, “My attorney advises that if I pay you any money under a threat of exposure, you could be criminally prosecuted and Debbie and I do not want that.”
Those are shameless lies. You can’t be prosecuted for extortion if the victim doesn’t press charges.
He is currently suing his church for millions. He wants over one million up front. Then he expects $800,000 per year until he hits 70, and after that, $600,000 per year as long as he or his wife lives. If he is suing for that kind of money, he was making similar money, or better, before the scandal broke.
That’s $4.8 million for the first 6 years, and assuming one spouse makes it to 84, $9 million more. Add the initial payout, and you get something like $15 million. He expects this from the church he built but also crippled.
The victim asked for $50,000, so what was that to the Morrises? Two weeks’ pay?
Was he ever the real thing, or did he steal his material from other people and make money from it? Does absolutely every charismatic preacher have to turn out to be a heartless, avaricious crook?
Ambition is the enemy of the Holy Spirit. It seems like every famous preacher is ambitious.
I don’t see him winning his case. The church claims there is a morality clause in his contract, and a jury is not likely to want to help him.
If I had sat around listening to men and never questioning them, I would be in big trouble today. I might be a Catholic. I might still be a prosperity Christian. I might be an atheist.
One of the sad things about my experience is that some of the worst preachers who taught me lies were baptized with the Holy Spirit and had the ability to pray in tongues. They just didn’t exercise it. They were trying to impress God. They were too busy for God! Can’t talk now, God! I have to build a bigger church! I have to go look at a jet!
They had time to network and copy sermons, but they didn’t have time to pray in tongues, be with the person who loves them more than anyone else ever will, and listen.
I have no doubt that you can be baptized with the Spirit, be given the ability to pray in tongues, and then go to hell. You can always go to hell if you want to, regardless of whether you accepted salvation in the past.
If God leads you to water, you better drink if you want to live. God has called the world “a dry and thirsty land where no water is.”
This morning I was praying in tongues, and I started thinking about the filthiness of my life and things I still needed to clean up. As long as you’re not like Yeshua, there is cleaning to be done.
I thought about all the sleazy, disgusting things I had done and said in the past. I think I would rather be flogged every day for a month than have the whole world watch my life on a screen.
Things are much, much better than they used to be. I used to be fatherless, so I acted like a fatherless kid, disgracing myself daily. Now I am improving. I disgrace myself less frequently.
I keep asking God to raise my wife and me all over again, and he is doing it. I’m not good, but at least I’m not what I was, and I will keep getting better.
I was given a great revelation yesterday. A long time ago, God told me all my problems were caused by lack of prayer. Yesterday, he showed me the other way of looking at it: all my problems can be solved by prayer. That’s a big motivator.
I had a revelation this morning, and here it is: if God won’t let me have something in heaven, why would I want to have it on Earth?
Example: if God won’t let me watch a movie in heaven, why would I show it in my living room?
An awful lot of things fit that description. I still have some movie DVD’s somewhere. I am going to dig them up and throw them away. I’m not sure I should dump The Ten Commandments, but I probably will. I will dump Casablanca, which is my favorite movie.
The entertainment industry was created to destroy me and my children, so why cooperate with it?
I should throw out some books. I’m not sure what I have left that could cause problems.
When I was young, I read books by fools like Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Ernest Hemingway, and Fritz Perls. Real excrement. Did me a lot of harm. Those people are all in hell. I loved Hunter Thompson. He’s in hell, too, and he has dragged a lot of intelligent people down with his wake. He was a monumental buffoon.
People think only children need to be protected from bad influences. If that’s true, why are adults joining Antifa and trying to hurt the police? Why are there conservative Christian adults who don’t support Israel and who think Jews cause all the world’s problems?
It’s not true at all. If adults weren’t impressionable, there would be no advertising industry and no campaign consultants.
If I had started praying in tongues at 5, I would not have been damaged by filthy books and entertainment or by bad preachers. There was no one to teach me, however. They were too busy telling us to worship the pope or whatever.
My own mother, who was not Catholic, taught me to pray to Saint Anthony when I needed help finding things, and I did it. I hope Saint Anthony was saved, but I know he can’t hear anyone’s prayers.
If people had paid any attention to the Holy Spirit throughout history, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel wouldn’t be covered with paintings of naked people. If you think about it, it’s insane that anyone ever thought that was a good idea.
Imagine going to Yeshua today and saying, “We’re building a new sanctuary for you, and we’re planning on covering the ceiling with paintings of naked people.”
How do you think that would go over with him?
I wonder how many Catholics enjoyed that ceiling for the wrong reasons back in the days before pornography. I wonder how many sodomites enjoyed the paintings of men. People who remained in perversion because their church didn’t know how to deliver them. Like a huge percentage of current priests and cardinals.
If you like naked art in churches, enjoy it now, because God will eventually destroy it.
I believe God would now tell you this: “As you turn away from earthly culture, turn to me.” Don’t just give things up. Pick up better things.
I hope this is helpful and that you use it successfully to avoid my mistakes.
I am wiped out from installing a new dishwasher. It should have been pretty fast, but like most quick, easy jobs, it had complications.
I bought a Bosch dishwasher to replace a Bosch dishwasher in the same series, and of course, Bosch changed the inlet fitting and did not include a threaded elbow to connect to it. I went to the local Ace, and unfortunately, the person who helped me was a friendly and earnest young man who hasn’t learned everything about the hardware business yet.
We could not find the elbow, which was confusing to me because I knew it had to be a common part. Bosch equals Thermador equals Whirlpool and so on these days. He sent me home with a couple of parts to screw together as a substitute, and I had to locate the correct part on the web, go back to Ace, and show them the SKU.
I did an excellent job of installing it because a) I am capable of doing simple things well, and b) I actually care about the quality of my work, which may not have been the case with the guys Lowe’s wanted to send for $217.
I may want to adjust the dishwasher’s position in the sagittal plane by 3/32″ or so, but that can wait.
If you need a dishwasher right now, jump on one of these Bosches while they’re on sale.
I’m still waiting for something else I ordered. You will never guess. Yes, it’s a rifle.
Four or 5 years back, I bought a Thompson Center Venture bolt action rifle in .204 Ruger. I thought I was going to shoot a lot of varmints. So far, that has not been the case. I also hoped to use it for target shooting to improve my shooting without spending money on pricier ammo.
Until just now, I thought it was a Venture Predator, but it turns out it’s just a Venture. I believe “Predator” means “with a green plastic stock.”
We live in amazing times. Fifty years ago, which was the 1970’s, believe it or not old people, a rifle that shot maybe 5 minutes of angle (about 5.25″ at 100 yards) was considered very accurate. Now, any bolt rifle that doesn’t shoot 1.5 MOA is considered lame, and you can walk into any sporting goods store and choose from a selection of 1-MOA rifles.
I chose the Thompson Center partly because it came with a 1-MOA guarantee. Three shots at 100 yards. Based on photos of targets I shot back then with cheap Fiocchi ammo, it looks like the gun came through, although I also shot some bad groups. That guarantee was pretty clever, because any gun will eventually shoot one three-shot 1-MOA group if you keep trying.
I wasn’t ecstatic about the trigger, so I looked for options, and there were none. Sadly, TC was not doing well, and its guns were not all that popular. In fact, it was going out of business, even though it belonged to Smith & Wesson. I don’t recall how that worked.
TC has been bought by the guy who sold it to S&W, but I don’t think they’ve actually made any new guns. Will they ever start? Who knows?
If you buy a popular gun like a Remington or Tikka, you will be able to find a lot of aftermarket triggers for it. I suppose no trigger maker thought it was a good idea to spend time and money on a trigger for an unpopular gun, however.
I put a lighter spring on it, and that was about all I could do.
Flash forward to a year or two ago. Suddenly I had a silencer. I wanted to get back to shooting. But two bolt guns I wanted to shoot did not have threaded barrels: the TC and a Tikka T3x.
By the way, the Tikka IS a 1-MOA gun, with factory ammo and no excuses. I managed to shoot a few rounds to zero it. It seems like it always rained when I started shooting for accuracy, so I have had a lot of sessions cut short. Anyway, even the zeroing shots, made while I was turning scope screws, looked very good.
I’ll post photo of a target I shot with “garbage” Sellier & Bellot ammo. This is a modestly-priced deer rifle on a modestly-priced bipod, shooting cheap ammunition. I shot these rounds while still adjusting the scope. There is one flyer which was probably caused by me shooting one round and then cranking the screws, and then there are at least 6 rounds that are 1 MOA or extremely close to it.
Checking my blog history, I see that I went indoors because I wanted to see if the scope was loose, not because of rain. When I shot another target with different ammo, the point of impact changed in a way that didn’t make sense to me. And target above was shot at both 50 and 100 yards. I shot one round at 50. It was very low. I adjusted the scope and shot two rounds into the same hole. Then I backed up to 100 and shot pretty much into the same POI. I was confused, because the 50-yard POI was essentially the same as the 100-yard POI. I didn’t understand how flat the gun shot at these distances.
That S&B FMJ 6.5 Creedmoor is nothing to sneeze at, at least at 100 yards. I bought a ton of it. It shoots great in the Tikka and also in my RPR.
If the domestic enemies of Christ finally started their war and I somehow found myself in a situation where I had no choice but to go out with the militia nuts and fend off guerrilla murder squads in floral print dresses, I would be able to do what was necessary over and over while they were too far away to see me without binoculars.
I think I paid $16.00 per box when I bought them one at a time, and I didn’t buy most of mine one at a time.
Of course, I have zero interest in participating in a civil war. If it weren’t for my family, I think I would prefer being among the early casualties than staying here and treating demonized jerks like paper targets. The word says David was a bloody man. I have no desire to follow suit. I would rather be a man of love.
So anyway, I had the Tikka and the TC, and they were not threaded.
I looked into having them threaded. In spite of living in a huge 2A area, I could not find anyone close to me who would do it, and I really did not want to do it myself. Most machining is easy, but barrels are not made to fit in the usual lathe tooling, and they are hard to remove from actions. Also, it’s easy to mar them up, and aligning them in lathes so the bullets won’t hit the silencers later is more complex than you would think.
I found someone in the next county, and she wanted $195-$275, which is insane. I paid $450 for the TC.
I let it go, but recently I learned something that changed the picture. Silencer Central now offers mail-in threading for $165, including muzzle protectors. The price is lower if you ship two barrels at once. The shipping is about $40 whether you send one or two.
Great. I am sold. It’s fantastic news. I’m sending the Tikka in, because even though it is not a high-priced rifle, it is 100% worth it. But the Thompson Center?
I can’t get a trigger for it. I don’t know if I’ll ever get fun-level accuracy out of it. Thompson Center has been bought and reanimated, but there is no guarantee they will provide warranty service or that they’ll exist next year.
It looks like a quagmire to me.
I figure I can sell it for $350, so that’s $350 I can put toward something else. That something else is a Ruger American Predator in the same caliber. I want the same caliber because I have a boatload of ammunition, and I still think the .204 Ruger has potential.
It has a light, fluted barrel. The metal bits are Cerakoted. It’s threaded. It has a pretty good trigger out of the box. There are lots of aftermarket parts for it, including Timney triggers. It will probably shoot 1 MOA the day I bring it home. Lots of guys are getting that kind of performance in other calibers.
I’m sold. I don’t need any more hassle.
I’m getting the rifle plus a Timney. I’ll take the scope off my TC and put it on the Ruger. Done deal.
Now I have to ask: is it really necessary for two different companies to put “Predator” in the names of their guns? It sounds kind of silly. AMERICAN HE-MAN HAIRY-CHESTED CARNIVORE PREDATOR!
Yes, I am a predator. I have killed more fish than red tide, and I have managed to make a tiny dent in the hunting realm by murdering squirrels. And I eat hamburgers. But come on. You can call the gun something a little less steroidy-sounding, and I will still buy it. I mean, I did.
It bugs me that people call the Tikka, the Ruger, and the TC budget guns. Why do they do that? I guess you get more refinement in guns costing two or three times as much, and you get walnut instead of plastic, but I feel like any quality gun should be respected. If a gun can hit rats repeatedly at 100 yards, it is durable, and it is pleasant to shoot, calling it a budget gun sounds a little snobby.
I think the Tikka ran me $950 or so. Budget? Really?
The TC may not be long for my armory, but it seems very well made to me. All the machining is neat and tidy. It’s actually pretty tight because of the tolerances.
I don’t know if I’ll stick with .204 Ruger. It’s kind of a novelty round. I like it because it’s modern, with modern ballistics something like .223 can’t match, but on the other hand, .223 is more powerful, and it can hit anything I am likely to shoot at. It’s just as accurate, even if it doesn’t shoot as flat. I could blow through my .204 ammo and then rebarrel.
I have another .204 rifle besides the TC, so putting a .223 barrel on the TC would not deprive me of the ability to shoot .204 well even if I sold the TC.
Maybe I shouldn’t have bought the new rifle. It just bugged me that the TC had so many issues.
I have two exciting deliveries coming today. A new dishwasher and a less-than-mediocre art print.
My Bosch dishwasher left production in 2016, if the web’s guess is correct. I have had it for 9 years, and it may have been here almost 6 years when I arrived. A web source thinks it became available at around the start of 2012.
My dishwasher is not smart. I can’t communicate with it at all. No app. No wifi. No Bluetooth. But it did function for somewhere between 9 and 15 years with only a moderate amount of trouble.
I had to replace the front door panel containing the handle once. There is no latch. You just pull until it gives up. The part you pull on is around 3/16″ thick on each side, plastic, with no reinforcement. It eventually gave way because it was stupidly designed, and I had to spend about $80 on a new panel.
I got some special JB Weld for plastics, and before I installed the new panel, I shot the problem areas full. Now it has the strongest Bosch dishwasher door handle on Earth.
It also leaked a couple of times. I could not figure out why. I was going to tear into it, and then the leaking stopped.
It leaked again recently, and it refused to repair itself, so I took to AI to figure out what was wrong. I had to keep correcting Grok, and eventually it led me to a couple of likely parts. One cost $20, so I ordered it and replaced it.
Installing it should have been an easy job, but I had to lie on the floor on my face and turn a hex fitting 1/16 of a turn at a time, and there were other issues. Bosch could have made it much easier by using some brains. The order of installation operations caused the problem. It’s much easier to remove the hose from the part if the part is out, but you have to remove the hose in order to take the part out. That kind of thing. Stupid.
It still leaked, so I looked into the other part. It was a pump, it was discontinued, it would have cost something like $250 if I had been able to find it, and replacing it would have been a very unpleasant job. I would have had to turn the dishwasher upside down, and there was no guarantee the new part would fix the issue.
I could have called a repairman and blown a hundred bucks or so to be told I was wrong, but I was almost certainly right, and other parts would have been replaced, so I would have been out maybe $200 at the least, and I would have still had an old machine with a vanishing parts supply.
I found a successor model on sale at Lowe’s for $400 off for no clear reason, so I jumped on that. They wanted $217 for installation, which I did not jump on. It’s two screws, two tubes, and a cord. I need to open a dishwasher installation business and charge $150 per trip.
I went with Bosch in spite of the stupid bits. Basically, the machine has impressed me. It worked well, and working on it was surprisingly easy for the most part. And the parts are not terribly expensive. It looks like they gave it parts support for a reasonable amount of time. Could have been better, but I have seen worse. And getting over 40% off the price was a deal I could not miss out on.
Oh, boy. Here comes the truck.
I’m paying them $50 to haul off the old machine. I could do that myself, but in a time when a visit to Cracker Barrel costs over $30, $50 seems cheap for what I’m getting.
It’s here. Life can now go on. We can cook again.
I know I’m spoiled, but if the dishwasher quits, it means I can’t cook. It doesn’t mean I can cook and wash dishes by hand. No.
My other package is a Nellie Meadows print.
Nellie Meadows was an artist from Clay City, Kentucky. My grandfather owned a lot of land in her area. Was she a great artist? No. Was she a good artist? Mmmm…no. Let’s be honest. I would say that she was not quite good enough to make it as a commercial artist drawing new Buicks for newspaper ads. She misunderstood perspective and composition, and she chose subjects poorly.
On the other hand, her work was very popular with people in the area because she, along with a guy named Al Cornett, was a scarce commodity. They were the only artists within miles.
Al’s work is better but still not good.
Actually, man who made quasi-pornographic sculptures lived about 50 yards from my grandparents, and his work is in the Smithsonian. His name was Edgar Tolson. I wouldn’t want any of that stuff in my house.
He carved anatomically-correct figures of Adam and Eve in the buff. He also did carvings that lacked genitalia. I guess it would be okay to have one of those. Antiques Roadshow appraised one of his pieces for $2,000-$3,000, so he’s not up there with Picasso.
I think the fuss over Tolson’s work is sort of like the reverse racism of soft expectations, applied to white people. If he had lived in New York, his work would all be in landfills.
My grandparents had some Nellie Meadows and Al Cornett prints in their house, and I didn’t get any of them when they died. My sister glommed at least one Cornett print and utterly destroyed it. I had never seen an art print stained with black mold until she got ahold of it. I would guess my aunt glommed the others while glomming things for her kids without going through the will or probate or my grandparents’ wishes. But I’m not sure.
My grandparents had a painting called “Kentucky the Great State;” a title which was not intended to be sarcastic. It wasn’t good, but I used to sleep in the bedroom where it hung, so I want a copy.
I have Ebay set up to send me Nellie Meadows and Al Cornett items, and it sent me a listing for a painting of Natural Bridge. This is a bridge created by erosion, and it is located in the Red River Gorge, near my grandparents’ town.
It’s one of her better works, meaning it’s good enough for a post card. It has what looks to be a wormy chestnut frame. It wasn’t expensive. I got the seller down to $42 plus shipping. I took it.
We plan to clean it up and put it in one of the upstairs bedrooms. It’s good enough for kids and guests. I already have one of her paintings in the guest toilet.
I have given up on Eastern Kentucky as a place to live or visit. The culture is just not up to par. The childishness, racism, violence, machismo, drunkenness, ignorance, spousal abuse, and so on are too much for me to deal with, and I would also find it awkward to live near my relatives who have pretty much rejected me in favor of bits of my grandparents’ estates. I’m also bummed out because so many people there are conservative in their hearts yet vote for Democrats so the government will give them money.
Nonetheless, I have very fond memories of Kentucky, and I often think about what it could be if the people would just grow up.
I hope the painting is in good shape when it arrives. Now I have to install a dishwasher.
The new dishwasher is “smart.” Notice the quotation marks. Bosch expects me to use an app to set it up and use it. I can do it without the app, but then I lose elite features. I won’t be able to set a delayed start, and I won’t be able to change the dishwasher’s gender.
I’ll bet that smart junk added $75 to the MSRP.
I wonder when we’ll get over the smart idiocy and resume making appliances that make sense.
Anyway, here’s to our mechanical and electronic slaves. Thank you, God, because I don’t have to wash clothes or dishes by hand, travel on foot or on a cart, take cold showers, or accept the climate nature gave me. I appreciate it more than I can say.
I saw a lovely video from Mike “Mike with the Mic” McCarthy today. He’s a brave soul who goes to public places in Australia and holds signs with “JESUS” and related verbiage on them.
Australia is not a friendly place for Christians now. Christianity is in sharp decline, with a minority now identifying as Christian. Perversion is one of the main drivers of the decline.
As God predicted to me, and I repeated, many years ago, homosexuality has turned out to be the club Satan uses to beat Christians.
I don’t know a lot about McCarthy, but his videos show him being abused by various people, ranging from atheists to homosexuals to, oddly, Maoris. Maoris are from New Zealand, which is almost a thousand miles from Australia at the closest point.
As far as I can tell, McCarthy does not yell at people or provoke them in any way.
The cops show up over and over and tell him he’s the problem. In one amusing video, they tell him he’s obstructing pedestrian traffic as dozens of pedestrians walk past unimpeded.
I wanted to repost a video in which a trans lunatic approaches him for no reason and starts screaming irrationally.
Of course, I use the word “trans” as a convenience. There are no transgender or transsexual people. There are only the demonized, the confused, and the attention-starved.
And there are real Trans, from Vietnam.
On a related not, the percentage of American college students identifying as trans has dropped by something like 40% since 2025, which means a lot of young women had their healthy breasts sliced off and burned as waste, and also had themselves skinned to manufacture false penises, in order to get attention and admiration.
What do you do now that your arm and leg are covered with skin grafts, your breasts are gone, and your genitals are ruined? There is no reset button for that.
It would take a very, very unusual type of man to fall in love with a girl like that and marry her. It is beyond sad.
“Trans” men are more likely to keep their bodies intact, because many joined the movement in order to gain access to women’s private areas so they could enjoy voyeurism and rape.
Here is the video:
Clearly, this man does not dress or act like a woman. His speech is a little effeminate, but that’s about it. And he is utterly deranged. He raves about the Christian lady holding the camera raping elders in their sleep, whatever that means. He says, “We’re not your fuzzy angels!” He says, “I’m married to daddy.”
Watch the whole thing.
This is demon-possessed behavior at its peak. Consuming rage. Complete detachment from reality.
What does “I’m married to daddy” mean? Is daddy the main demon who inhabits him?
These are the people who are going to come for us. This is the kind of person who shot Donald Trump, Cory Imperatore, David Dutch, and Charlie Kirk. Candace Owens is on her way to becoming such a person.
The man in the video shows what happens as people approach the final stages of demon control. It’s a progressive thing, pun not intended but appropriate.
The trans business is a tool Satan uses to separate people from reason. It’s like the little thin tool you slip under the case of your phone when you take it apart to replace the battery. The process starts with a tiny crack, and then your mind is opened up like a trash chute door, allowing no end of filth and derangement to enter.
Be watchful of your trans acquaintances, along with all the TDS sufferers you know. They may be relatively peaceful now, but they are sleepers who will one day be mustered against you.
I thank God they have been so slow to embrace firearms. But that’s coming, as Tyler Robinson, the actual and sole Charlie Kirk shooter, proves. He and Audrey Hale and the rest.
Am I living in a movie? Is that what’s happening? Does that explain all the astonishing and surreal events I’m witnessing?
I’ll embed a video below, featuring Candace Owens cursing Israel. She curses everyone who took part in this defensive war and in the establishment of the ceasefire.
I’ll transcribe her demonic vomit in case the video disappears. I will add some language that isn’t heard in this particular version of the video.
Trump wants a Nobel Peace Prize, by the way, for the planned ethnic cleansing, that they could profit on the land and turn it into a beach town.
This is our “Never again,” okay?
This is a holocaust. The holocaust just happened. A real holocaust just happened. We will never forget this. You can tell your children what happened in Gaza. You can tell them exactly who did it. Exactly whose families were involved in this.
Their children will be cursed. Okay? You go and you play in the sand where you know that your forefathers planned to mass-murder children; you will be cursed. Every person who steps foot on that. Every family that is set to inherit what they did. They wil be cursed.
Unbelievably, she goes on to quote the Koran, an accursed book sponsored by Satan.
Here is an except from the Koran about Jesus, who is speaking as a baby to defend Mary’s honor, said, “I am the servant of God. He has given me the scripture and made me a prophet, and he has made me blessed wherever I am. God is my Lord and your Lord, so worship him.”
She was reading a message from a Muslim fan, of whom she has many now. She went on to ramble about Charlie Kirk and Catholicism.
A real Christian who knows the Holy Spirit would have said, “The Koran is not scripture, and Yeshua says he is the only way to the father. Yeshua said he existed before Abraham, and that he and God were one.” But the person who sent the quotation had also sent her money, and she kept right on going without trying to dispel his fatal delusions.
The part about “planned ethnic cleansing” is a disturbing yet typical piece of cognitive dissonance. Trump and Netanyahu planned this war? They arranged the October 7th rapes, murders, castrations, and kidnappings? How did they get Gazans to play along?
Trump pulled that miracle off so he and some Jews straight off of Nazi propaganda posters could build beachfront hotels? Seriously?
Jews don’t like the word “holocaust” because it means “sacrifice.” I suppose they don’t want to be seen as burnt offerings. They prefer “shoah,” which means “catastrophe.” I use “holocaust” because most people recognize the term, and most have no idea what “shoah” means.
I guess the Jews who were burned by the Nazis truly were burnt offerings. They were offerings to Satan, the God of Nazism. The God of Candace Owens. Anyway, I use “holocaust” for convenience.
Owens is now claiming that a justified and measured response by a perennially-victimized nation was “genocide,” even though most of the population of Gaza is just fine and the death toll figures we are hearing come from savages and liars with a proven track record of worthlessness.
The language she used about Israel and the people in the Trump admnistration who arranged the ceasefire is classic Satan. Usurp. Project. Call evil good and good evil.
If you want to know what Satan is like, read what his children say about Christians and Jews, and you’ll have a pretty good idea. Read what pagans who hate Yeshua say about God. Satan takes every truth about himself and spews it back as a lie at God, the Jews, and God’s children.
Projection is a form of insanity. It can be severe, in that a person always projects, or it can be a lesser disorder, in which a person projects selectively. My dad and my sister both had it. I think it’s caused by demons, because it’s straight out of Satan’s playbook, and it doesn’t make much sense when you try to explain it supernaturally. If I have faults and do evil, why would I think other people had the faults and did the evil?
If you want to know my sister well, get her going about me and listen to what she says. Then apply it to her. The same principle applies to Jews and their demonized enemies.
I think the best projective canard is this: “Jews cause all the problems.” That is possibly the most absurd thing ever to pass between human lips. It’s amazing God doesn’t set people on fire when they say it.
Holocaust and genocide. This is what happened to the Jews, not the savages in Gaza. The ancestors of today’s Gazans were trying to exterminate the Jews while Hitler was still a small-time crank in Austria and Germany. Gazans chant about the destruction of the Jews. They create children’s shows featuring small children pretending to murder Jews. They murder Jews all the time, and when they do, they’re proud of it. They call their parents and show them the bodies, and their parents rejoice.
See that toy in the second photo? The one with the blue legs? My son has that toy. I put it together for him yesterday, and we spent a lot of time playing with it. Imagine your baby’s toys in that room.
Curses. This is what will happen to Candace Owens, Gazans, and those who side with them. God loves the Jews even though most are in rebellion (the same could be said of Christians). He has not given up on them. If there are curses facing them, it’s because they have been stubborn with God. It is certainly not because they took reasonable steps to prevent their own extinction.
Real Christians know that those who bless Israel will be blessed, and those who curse Israel will be cursed.
Owens is cursing her own children.
Never again. This is what Jews say about the first holocaust (the prophets predict another one). It means Jews will do what it takes to make sure it will never happen again.
It makes no sense to apply this to Gazans, since they continually provoke conflict with unnecessary and appalling genocidal attacks. All the Gazans have to do to make themselves safe is to stop trying to mass-murder Jews and get rid of Israel, a nation established by God.
It’s amazing how demons have transformed Owens. Hate animates her, like an electric current animating a fresh corpse. She squirms in her chair, shows her teeth, and narrows her eyes while striving to come up with words that adequately express her deranged rage.
I always say female demoniacs have “crazy eyes.” You’ve seen this condition in people like Jasmine Crockett and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Now Candace Owens has it.
She claims she’s doing her libeling for God and the papist church, but how can that be true? She and her husband are close friends with Andrew Tate, a Muslim pimp and pornography creator. She has had Tate as a guest on her podcast, and she defends him. How do you rationalize that?
A Christian should be good to the lost, when possible. He should not have close friends who reject Yeshua, and he definitely should not be close to Muslim pimps who create and sell pornography. We are not to be unequally yoked.
Yes, Yeshua talked to drunks and prostitutes. He spoke to them as a leader, not a follower or a partner. Try and imagine him packing the Tate brothers around Israel. The very notion is asinine.
I keep telling my wife it’s like there is a disaster movie, and instead of watching it on a screen, we’re inside it. Things are happening that could not have happened even 10 years ago. They would not have been permitted by the American public.
There will be a second Jewish holocaust. I am sorry to say it, but the truth is the truth. Ezekiel, Isaiah, and Zechariah predict it. They weren’t talking about ancient events. They weren’t talking about Hitler. They were talking about the latter days. When I watch Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and their mouth-foaming followers, I know in my heart, not just my mind, that it can happen here, and it is. It’s already in the works.
I used to say Jews should move to Israel in order to avoid slaughter. Now I don’t think that will help. The word says the next holocaust will take place in Israel. Should they stay in America? I don’t think that will help, either. The next holocaust will be global, leaving only a remnant.
The only safety is in closeness to Yeshua, who will pull his children out before the tribulation gets going. This is not an option that attracts a lot of Jews.
Check out these fawning comments from Owens fans who think they’re Christians.
Alright guys,
a MOMENT OF SILENCE FOR CANDACE OWENS. Let us pray that GOD protects her of any and all evil coming up against her or that will try and destroy her good work. It’s very important that those reading this say a prayer for her. ??
We need Candace to continue doing her good work ?
Enjoy your vacation! Christ is King.
You are doing the Lord’s work. Thank you
I saw a report that evangelicals are multiplying in France. It’s supposed to be encouraging. It’s not. “Evangelical” covers all sorts of people who are demonized and on board with Owens. The only people who are saved from derangement are CHARISMATICS who spend time with the Holy Spirit every day.
It’s not enough to claim you’re charismatic. Charismatics go to hell in droves. You have to be charismatic and also spend time with God.
People claiming to be evangelicals will kill Jews, and they will also kill people like me if they can.
I can’t imagine how much God hates the sea of lies we now swim in. The truth got lost, lies took over, and what did Satan’s children do? They complained about the truth being lost and lies taking over, except they went after the people who told the truth, and they told the lies. Owens could fill the Pacific with lies all by herself. Eventually, many innocent people will die because of her lies.
Get ready for murder in the streets. The apocalypse is here. The only question is how quickly things will progress.
Regretfully, I Must Pass on the Queers for Palestine Silent Auction
Today is this family’s day of rest and prayer. No laundry, no mowing, no welding, no painting, no repairs, no business.
We expect to do what we always do on Sunday: eat at Costco. I often wonder what my high school classmates would think of that. At least two were the children of a billionaire, and many were snobs. I really look forward to those cheap pizza slices and free-refill beverages, eaten on fiberglass picnic-style tables.
I have no interest in seeing any of my classmates again. Maybe one guy, but that’s it. When I knew them, they were unhappy worldly people with poor values.
I dreamed of one of them last night. John. We were in high school together. I would say we were friends, but we weren’t. Sometimes you spend a lot of time with a person and consider him a friend, and then after you part ways, you realize you just kept company for the sake of having company.
John isn’t an awful person, but he is insecure and competitive. He is selfish. He is extremely rigid. He has never thought for himself. Whatever the herd says is right is right. He finds people who reject the herd amusing, and he feels he is better than they are. Sometimes they make him angry, just because they’re different.
I don’t think he has changed. Maybe he has. I ran into a store maybe 10 years ago, and he seemed about the same. Personable, but condescending.
I cut back on hanging around with him because I realized he was condescending and didn’t treat me as an equal. Also, he stole a girl from me, which is a huge violation of the male friendship code.
The desire for a gradual parting was probably mutual. I don’t think he liked me all that much.
In high school, friendship is like looking for a seat in the lunchroom. You go where you’re accepted, and you take the good with the bad.
I couldn’t help John in his ambitions, so I don’t think he had much motivation to be my friend.
We didn’t have much in common. I had all sorts of interests. He was just an inside-the-box guy who wanted to watch sports, go to law school, practice law, and make money. If you know John, he isn’t inviting you to his house to see his paintings. He’s not climbing mountains in Nepal. He’s not composing music or fly fishing. He probably owns less than 10 tools.
I should have dropped him sooner, but I was too much of a person-pleaser. I think I’ve gotten over that! Most people who know me would surely agree.
In the dream, I was living in the house I lived in during high school. John came to the front door, dressed in his lawyer attire minus the jacket. He wanted to show me his car, which was parked by the curb behind him.
He said it was a Charger. It was very special. It had a thousand horsepower. He wanted me to see it.
When I walked out to see it, it was across the street. I had to walk a long way. I wondered why he had moved it. It was inconsiderate.
The car became a very fancy bicycle. It had big balloon tires, and at first, it had some kind of propulsion. The tires were not attached to the bike. They had no spokes. Somehow they stayed in place and spun anyway.
He started riding through a grassy field while telling me about the bike. He never offered to let me ride it. That was like the real John. I had to jog beside him.
I said there was no way it had a thousand horsepower.
For some reason, after a while, he had to pedal, so I guess it turned into a regular bike.
My high school was about half Jewish, and some of the Jewish guys were very competitive. Most were not competitive at all. If you befriended one of the competitive ones, you couldn’t be on the same level. You had to be above or below. John was like that. They said a lot of resentful things about other Jewish guys whose families had more money. There was a lot of competition when it came to bar mitzvah gifts.
I had another competitive friend. Ken. He tried to make valedictorian, but he was caught cheating. Got into Princeton anyway. He switched to the University of Florida because they had a short program that would give him a BS and an MD in a hurry.
Ken was miserable. One of the other Jewish kids came from a family worth hundreds of millions, and he used to tell Ken he would never be worth as much as he was. It bothered him. Ken’s father died, and Ken said his father was laughing at him from the afterlife because he would never be as successful as he had been.
Ken had his MD when he shot himself at 25. Seems like he was doing just fine in terms of worldly success.
His dad was tormented, too. Lots of money, but he was always anxious, driven, and unfulfilled, and he projected it onto Ken. When Ken said he wanted to play football, his dad said, “I’ll break your hands myself.” He had decided Ken was going to be a surgeon. He didn’t want him injuring his hands.
Anyway, I live on a farm, I wear work shorts or work jeans every day, I drive a 2016 Ford, and I love taking my wife and son to Costco for lunch. I drink XO brandy; that’s true. But it’s Kirkland XO, for $48 per fifth. An amazing bargain.
I wonder what would happen if I went to a high school reunion wearing work jeans and suspenders and proceeded to be very open about myself. “I voted for Trump three times.” “I pray in tongues every day.” “I have a law license, I was very good at law, and it was easy, but I refuse to practice.” “I carry a 10mm pistol with a laser everywhere.” “I drive a tractor and cut my own trees.” “I mow my own yard.”
“My wife believes in submission to her husband.” That would go over great. Among the divorcees and spinsters. Those fulfilled modern ladies. Living their best lives.
One girl from my school went on to become the top dog at Miami’s Planned Parenthood branch. A long time ago, they sent me an invitation to a fundraiser. I tore it in half and mailed it back.
“Come on down and help us fund tearing apart babies in the womb for selfish, irresponsible sluts in the hope of reducing the black population!” No, and I don’t thank you for asking. God will judge you.
Why would anyone assume I supported abortion? Talk about a faux pas. “We went to high school together, so I just assumed you would want to come help my organization burn a cross and lynch a black man!”
I have always hated abortion, but now that I have a son, my understanding of the evil involved is much deeper. My wife and I prayed so hard that he would be born alive and without problems. We still pray for him and bless him all the time. Like all normal parents who aren’t sick in the head, we would give our lives for him without thinking. The thought of seeing his little body torn up in a pan so his mother could look better in a bathing suit or avoid suing me for child support is as horrifying as any thought I could ever have. I would much rather see myself in that condition.
Not to defend lynching, but at least some of the victims were murderers or rapists. What crime has a baby committed other than wanting to live and be loved by his parents?
I don’t have to worry about how I would be received at a reunion because I would never to back to Miami again unless I were forced by a court. I don’t even feel comfortable in Gainesville.
It’s amazing what feminism has turned mainstream Americans into. What could make a woman proud she tore her precious, helpless baby up? It comes straight from hell. God is male, period. He expects men to lead families. He never wanted us to be ruled by women; in Isaiah, it is mentioned as a curse.
Feminist brainwashing made it challenging for me to take over as a proper patriarch. I have been indoctrinated for over 50 years. It hasn’t stopped just because I overcome it. Every day, I have to dismiss it all over again.
What if God hadn’t pulled me out of it? I might be a Will Smith. A defeated cuckold with a demonized wife who humiliates me in public. A beaten father who raised an androgynous homosexual son, along with a lesbian daughter who is considerably more masculine.
No man wants to see his seed fall to the ground and rot.
My wife tells me she will be ready to go soon. She is fasting, and she wants to be at Costco when it ends.
I was praying this morning, and God showed me some things that will be extremely helpful.
My wife is always telling people that Christianity is not “transactional.” What a great way to put it. She has been trying to help an Indian friend understand this. He tells her about all the things he has done for God, and he wonders why things aren’t going better for him. She says Hinduism is transactional, and he has brought the Hindu mindset to Christianity.
Generally, around the globe, the forms of Christianity churches teach are transactional and therefore corrupt. Do this, stop doing that, and God will bless you and give you salvation.
This isn’t real Christianity. It’s the way pre-Messianic Judaism, Islam, and just about all the pagan religions work. Burn baby son alive at altar; get social credit and wealth. Cut off finger; get more help from voodoo spirits. Pay to put in football field at Catholic high school; get dad the whoremonger out of a part of hell that doesn’t really exist.
There is no one in purgatory, because it’s a fictional place, like Portland or Seattle. Oh, wait. Those places are real. It’s just hard to believe. Okay, let’s say Oz or Pandora.
Jews tell Gentiles–even Christians–they can get into heaven by obeying the seven Noahide laws, which, of course, are not in the Bible and not even a little bit valid. Transactional. Quid pro quo.
If it’s not about what you do for God, what is it about?
Pre-crucifixion Judaism was pretty transactional. There were a whole lot of laws to obey. This included the sacrificial system, which made the temple a place of continual butchering and roasting. It must have smelled wonderful.
Before the crucifixion, Jews generally didn’t know the Holy Spirit. God put his Spirit on a few here and there, and he didn’t rest in them all the time. The Jews had prophets and so on, but they were unusual.
Back then, Jews were not required to know God personally or exhibit the presence of his Spirit. They had to obey the rules, try to be good, and rely on sacrifices to get them past their failures.
After the crucifixion (after the first Shavuot–which we call Pentecost–following the crucifixion), Christians were fully expected to have the Holy Spirit live in them. Every Christian. All were supposed to know God personally, speak in tongues, receive revelation instead of relying on corrupt denominational doctrine, operate in the fruit and gifts of the Spirit, and so on.
The Holy Spirit is not an “it.” He is a person. We know “he” is appropriate, because the Holy Spirit inseminated a woman. Under pressure from Satan’s feminism, some churches have decided to claim the Holy Spirit is the feminine side of God, but that’s just misandry. No human woman can nurture like God, and God is male.
If he weren’t male, he wouldn’t have a bride.
I know the Holy Spirit. For that matter, I know Yeshua. I can’t summon Yeshua and have him come over for barbecue, but he came to me twice that I know of for certain, and the Holy Spirit’s presence is on me all the time, sometimes in an overpowering way and sometimes in a quiet, unintrusive way, like an engine at idle.
Sadly for me, knowing the Holy Spirit hasn’t instantly transformed me into a good person. The Bible compares God to a farmer and a potter; people whose work takes time to produce results. God keeps giving me correction over time, and the more time I spend with him, the faster the process goes.
I haven’t become perfect, but I really do hear from God all the time, and I get prophetic dreams. I receive miracles. I get special, generous, gentle treatment when other people who don’t listen to God have problems. For example, I had a blast in 2020, when everyone else was miserable. I loved that year.
Every year since then has been great, too, although these were years when the suffering of humanity was not as great as it was in 2020, so the contrast is not as stark.
Even though I know the Holy Spirit and believe in being blessed by grace, not as payment for services rendered, my relationship with God has continued to be somewhat transactional. It has been motivated partly by the knowledge that God does great things for me and saves me from horrible suffering. I should be motivated mainly by my love for God as a person; for his personality.
I have a wife. She does things for me, but not all that much. It’s not like she pays my bills or bakes me a cake every day. It’s unusual for me to ask her to do anything for me. I do more for her than she does for me. She says so herself, so stifle your feminist comments.
Taking her on increased my burdens a lot. I spend a lot on her. I have to consider her when I make plans and do things. Sometimes I have to wait a long time to get in the shower. I can’t always eat what I want, because she can’t stand some things I love. She rearranged my kitchen, which I had set up just the way I wanted it. She comes to me with her relatives’ problems.
I still love my wife. I want her to stay. I consider her a great gift. I don’t add up what we do for each other, compare, go to her, and complain. I’m very happy with our situation. Seems like I have a better attitude toward her than I do toward God, who has saved me from hell and set me aside from much of the misery other people endure.
The other day, God gave me a revelation of favor. He showed me that his attitude toward me was that of a father toward a favorite son.
We do more for our favorites. We give them much more slack; when they act up, they get reduced punishments or no punishment. The others get less from us. We just plain like our favorites better. We click with them. We want to do things for them, even when they’re out of line.
This revelation changed my life. It made it much easier for me to believe God would do things for me in spite of my past and ongoing sins. If I do something bad, I’m still his favorite. It’s just a bump in the road, to be driven past and forgotten. He’s not going to stop doing things for me, and he is also not going to stop battling my enemies.
We become furious at anyone who threatens a favorite. In that respect, we take after God. For example, the Bible says anyone who harms the Jews touches the pupil of God’s eye.
It’s not about my goodness, which barely exists. It’s about my status as his son, which Yeshua bought for me. I plead the blood of Yeshua as the basis for forgiveness and entry into the family of God, and God puts me in the VIP section. God bought me a relationship with him. He bought it from himself.
I am a favorite because God loves me, not because I build orphanages, give Kenneth Copeland Swiss watches, mention Yeshua sometimes while arguing with college students and being paid a king’s ransom, or walk to counterfeit Catholic shrines on my knees.
I should love God not because of what he does for me, but because he is the kind of person who does such things. I should love his personality and want to be with him just as I like being with friends.
We are told the dead surround God in heaven and praise him. They have nothing to gain from it, so why are they doing it? It has to be because they love him for what he is.
No one has to pay me to pick up my baby son or be with my wife. No one has to pay me to visit my friends.
When I get revelation, I always ask, “Why doesn’t anyone teach this?” Churches don’t teach it because the church was corrupted about two millennia ago. The ambitious people defeated the Spirit-led people, or, rather, they rejected them and the one who sent them. The Spirit-led continued to lead victorious lives and went on to heaven, and the ambitious people landed in hell, where they are to this day.
Revelation reminds me that “gospel” means “good news.” When you really know what God is up to, you realize it’s fantastic news. Being told you will go to heaven if you raise your hand for Joel Osteen, but that you shouldn’t expect to know God personally here on Earth, is not the kind of good news that makes people shout. Being told you have to sit through masses, bored to the edge of death, while effeminate old men mumble in Latin, and that this might eventually save you from hell, is not that kind of good news, either.
You can know God personally, and although you may be stuck here for a few decades, he will be with you, defeat your enemies, fill you with blessings, and let you feel his love and peace. You will know him as the best, most loving father there is, and not an absentee father.
The other night, my wife and I were talking, and we kept talking about how indispensable the Holy Spirit is. Every one of us is supposed to be taught by him directly, and only he keeps us from error. The vast majority of Christians reject him, and they believe any lie a crooked old pope or TV evangelist tells them.
Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson are great examples of carnal people who claim to be Christians and even to be doing God’s work, yet who are enemies of Yeshua. They are hostile to the Jews. Yeshua is the king of the Jews. It wasn’t just a derisive joke the Romans made. The Bible actually calls him “Israel.” Owens and Carlson are against the king’s subjects, so they are against the king.
America is full of Christians who insist opposing sodomy is unchristian. It’s full of Christians who think God loves socialism, which has been used to separate people from Yeshua and even the awareness of his existence all over the world. People can believe any stupid thing if they don’t know the Holy Spirit personally, and they do.
You can’t succeed with two-thirds of God.
Your pastor is almost certainly teaching you garbage along with the truth, and you need to learn directly from God so that when your pastor goes down, you will still be standing.
I make my own pizza. My New York Style pizza is what I would call 75th-percentile quality by restaurant standards. Sometimes better. I keep changing it. My Sicilian is sublime and unrivaled.
Recently, I found out Restaurant Depot had opened a branch near me, and last week, I got a membership. Bliss.
I thought they would have Grande pizza cheese, because Grande is THE standard pizza cheese, but they did not. I tried what they had.
Their shredded offerings were no good. They had cellulose grit on them, and that ruins pizza. I tried two blocks of mozzarella. One was made by Saputo, and the name was Stella Top Grade. It wasn’t good, even for putting on salads. It might be good in lasagne or melted over spaghetti, but I wouldn’t count on it. I’m probably going to throw it out.
The other block was Restaurant Depot’s house brand, Supremo Italiano. Full-fat; low moisture. Back when I bought the cheese, I made a thin pie with Supremo Italiano on one side and Stella on the other.
They both seemed salty. I don’t know why, because that has not held up in further testing. The Stella threw off more grease, and while it was okay, it wasn’t great. The Supremo Italiano had a better texture, and the flavor was also better.
Later, I made a Sicilian with Supremo Italiano and Publix provolone. I am used to mixing mozzarella and provolone. The pizza was very good. I felt it could have been a little more tangy.
Today, I made an 8″-square Sicilian, and I changed a few things at once.
First, I used King Arthur Bread Flour, or, as pizza people call it, KABF. I have reason to believe I should be using it for NYC pies, so that’s why I bought it. I think it will improve the crust.
I have never been disappointed by any flour I used in a Sicilian. They all have different qualities, and I like them all. Thin pizza is more challenging.
Lately, I have been trying to make my Sicilians fluffier and taller. I have cut the salt to 1.5%. That’s supposed to help. Until today, I hadn’t used KABF in my fluffiness quest.
Second, I used Stanislaus 7/11 ground tomatoes for the sauce.
I have tried this product before. It was a long time ago. I was trying to recreate the sauce from a joint where I ate in college, and I found that Stanislaus paste sauces (paste, basil leaves, and citric acid) were closest, so I stuck with them. The one I really liked was Stanislaus Saporito.
In recent months, I have been thinking about sauces that taste different, so I have been fiddling with my Saporito sauce. Today I thought I should try ground tomatoes instead, since a lot of restaurants use them.
Third, I used Supremo Italiano on top. No provolone.
I baked this pie at 500, which is pretty hot, and the top didn’t burn at all except around the edges where the cheese touched the hot pan and fried.
It was very good. The crust was fluffy, and it was crunchy on the bottom. The sauce was a nice change of pace, and it was easier than diluting paste sauce. I didn’t have any Grande cheese to compare the Supremo Italiano too, but it seems to be just as good and possibly a little better.
The crust got damaged a little. It stuck to the pan in places. I think my wife may have washed the pan too hard.
I like cheese that doesn’t brown easily. Most pizza cheese we get at retail stores burns in a hurry. If a cheese doesn’t burn quickly, and you want a pizza that is fairly brown, you can make it happen, but if your cheese burns in a hurry, there isn’t a whole lot you can do. Maybe put foil on the rack above the pie.
I think I paid $2.15 per pound for the cheese. Maybe it was $2.17. Locally, the only other good mozzarella I can get costs about $10.20, which is outrageous.
This is the kind of cheese they used to use at Ray’s Pizza in New York. It didn’t burn, and it didn’t congeal fast as the pies cooled.
The crust on this pie was sufficiently similar to Pizza Hut pan pizza, I believe I could clone their product if I wanted. Pizza Hut is circling the drain, and I like their pan pizza. It would be great to make it at home once in a while.
That’s my story. I’m going to use KABF in a thin pie, and I expect to have even better news.
I Want Basic Fitness, not a Special Reinforced Toilet Seat
I mentioned my hopes of adding a very short strength-exercise routine to my life, and a commenter directed me to a guy named Mark Rippetoe, who runs an outfit called Starting Strength. It looks like this man trains competitive lifters as well as people who just want to be strong and resistant to injury.
I don’t plan to make major changes to my life, because those tend not to be permanent, but today I looked Rippetoe up out of curiosity. I don’t think he’s for me.
While I was looking into strength exercises yesterday, I saw that deadlifts were recommended by many sources. To do a deadlift, you lift a barbell from the floor, drag it up your legs until your back is perpendicular to the floor, and lock it in place. This is my own description, which may be flawed.
To me, this is a scary exercise. Anything that involves putting a lot of strain on my back while it’s in a horizontal orientation could cause something in the lumbar region to pop and be ruined forever.
Bruce Lee crippled himself lifting with his lower back. He put a 135-pound bar on his shoulders, bent over, and then straightened up. Something popped, and he spent the next 6 months in bed. He was in pain for the rest of his life.
The pathetic thing is that Lee was doing something he didn’t need to do. He weighed around 135 pounds, just like the bar, so he was lifting a lot of weight for his size. He was trying to build freak strength in a part of his body that didn’t need to be freakishly strong in order for him to make martial arts movies.
He wasn’t a professional martial artist. He never fought in a competition because he knew a loss would kill his reputation. He was a martial arts teacher and an actor who used martial arts in films. Steven Seagal made a lot of money in martial arts movies, and I’m not sure he was even able to squeeze through a gym door. Betty White could have made martial arts movies. She could have beaten up Chuck Norris, Seagal, Jason Statham, and Iron Man.
Movies aren’t real.
My back is strong and straight. I really try to resist lifting anything that could change that, even when other people are watching and I feel the nonsensical and unrealistic male urge to try to look strong.
I was checking out Rippetoe videos today when I saw him talking about the trapezius bar, which is a frame that replaces a barbell for some exercises. You stand inside it, and you grab two handles that run from back to front outside your feet.
A trap bar is supposed to make deadlifts safer because it allows you to do a very similar motion without cantilevering your back as much. All sorts of gurus recommend it. The Army’s experts decided to recommend it for soldiers, and Rippetoe made his video because this didn’t sit well with him.
He said the trap bar was less safe than a barbell, which is the opposite of what just about everyone else says. He says that during a deadlift, the pressure against the legs keeps a barbell from swinging around. He said the swinging was not a big deal with a 135-pound bar, but it could be dangerous at 400.
He kind of lost me there as a potential follower. When am I ever going to lift 400 pounds?
If I ever deadlifted even 200 pounds, I would be a very happy and surprised old man.
I would think that a good strategy would be to use the safer trap bar to build up to big weights and then switch to a barbell when my body was ready for it, but I’m just guessing. It seems like it would be easy to ruin my back by bending over a barbell long before I got to the weight level where the swinging of a trap bar could hurt me.
Today I read that a trap bar is much better for developing “explosive” strength, which is supposedly something you need for sudden everyday movements requiring substantial force. Things like catching yourself when you start to fall. That sounds like a good kind of strength to have.
I also saw him talk to a competitive powerlifter who said he was 6’4″ tall and weighed 215. Rippetoe told him he needed to weigh over 300 pounds, and the way to get there was to overeat.
Rippetoe is an older guy. Looks like he might be 70. He is clearly and indisputably obese. He looks unhealthy. I don’t think he’ll set a longevity record.
He told the young guy that if he stuffed himself with food, he would only put on muscle. He had another obese guy in the studio with him, and they were pushing the idea that the young guy would never become overweight by following Rippetoe’s plan.
Two obese guys, giving that advice on camera.
I did not find it credible.
Yesterday I saw a guy named Mike Burch on Youtube. He was 65 when he made a video. It showed him bench-pressing 405 pounds in a flannel shirt with no trick gym clothing. He said he weighed 165 pounds.
I guess my standards are low, but I thought that was pretty good. I would be quite satisfied with that. Half of that would be pretty good.
I did some rooting around on the web yesterday, and I learned that my notions of what a good bench press was were inflated. I thought all sorts of people were lifting 300 pounds, but it turns out anything over maybe 220 is very good, and not many men are legitimately benching a 300-pound bar with no funny shirts, drugs, or short strokes.
Men lie a lot about what they lift, of course. Sonny Barger, the despicable Hells Angels leader, claimed he benched 500 pounds. Never happened. Richard Marcinko led SEAL Team Six, and he claimed they all benched 500 pounds. Never happened. Lyle Alzado was one of the strongest men in the NFL, he was huge, he was as full of roids as a Mexican drugstore, and regardless of his impressive claims, when he had to lift on camera, he only made it to 400.
A lot of guys lift a bar off the supports, lower it three inches, push it back up and say they benched 350 or 400 or whatever. If it didn’t touch your chest, you didn’t bench it.
Yesterday I wrote about Volodimir Shmondenko, the Ukrainian lifter who weight about 175 pounds and benches 330. Again, I consider this acceptable. Right now I’m more like 330 with the decimal point moved one space to the left.
Both Burch and Shmondenko compete effectively, so I don’t know if Rippetoe’s advice makes any sense at all. Maybe it does, though. He’s a professional, after all.
If you deliberately make yourself 100 pounds overweight, you have some things to look forward to.
1. Insulin resistance
2. High blood pressure
3. Arthritis, especially in the knees
4. Exacerbated prostate enlargement
5. Blocked arteries
6. Diabetes
7. Impotence
8. Dementia
9. Reduced testosterone
10. Increased estrogen
11. Breasts
There are others.
My impression is that Rippetoe is looking to give people optimal, and I mean optimal, strength at any cost, and he seems pretty excited about competition, which is a bad mindset for a person who trains old ladies and dentists. I would think it would be hard to prevent advice for competitors from leaking into his advice for normal people who would like to live to be older than 60.
I would like to do very little work, take as little risk as possible, and get pretty decent results in comparison to the effort I put in. That would be great.
If there is one thing I know about exercise, it’s that the topic leads to constant feuds. Gym people are more obnoxious than the rest of us, and every trainer thinks the other trainers are wrong. Some people think Rippetoe is a genius. Others insiste he’s a moron. I don’t expect to be certain of the truth about his methods during this lifetime.
Either I’m on fire today or I’m just willing to do anything other than clean the pool, so here comes more blogging.
My wife tells me Candace Owens has published authentic texts from some snitch, revealing that Charlie Kirk was, maybe, not happy with Jews because a Jewish donor that gave TPUSA two million a year cut Kirk off for refusing to denounce the raving, ignorant, immature, frat-boy antisemite Tucker Carlson.
Supposedly, Kirk said something about his Jewish donors living up to stereotypes. Maybe I can find it.
I got it! Here: “Just lost another huge Jewish donor. $2 million a year because we won’t cancer Tucker. Jewish donors play into all the stereotypes. I cannot and will not be bullied like this. Leaving me no choice but to leave the pro-Israel cause.”
Kirk supporters will say the texts were taken out of context, but my response to that is that there are many things context can’t fix.
This reminds me of some lines from a Woody Allen movie. A Latin American dictator has been deposed and replaced by a rebel leader who will, of course, be the next dictator, because Latin America. When they try the former dictator, this exchange takes place:
Rebel Leader: You are accused of killing over a thousand people in your term of office… of torturing hundreds of women and children. How do you plead?
Diaz: Guilty… with an explanation.
There are a couple of things wrong with what Saint Charlie said.
1. There is something wrong with anyone who won’t “cancer Tucker,” because Tucker is rapidly moving into Josef Goebbels territory. It’s not subtle. There are no grey areas. It’s not debatable. Reasonable minds may not differ.
2. “Jewish donors play into all the stereotypes” is, well, antisemitic.
I’ve known more Jews than Moses, and while every ethnic group has people who live up to and even exceed stereotypes, I have not found Jews to be particularly stingy or manipulative. Actually, if I had to come down on one side or the other, I would say that on the whole, Jews are more generous than Gentiles, and I haven’t noticed any difference when it comes to manipulation.
I have known some Jewish people who were a bit aggressive, but I can’t say they seem more aggressive than Gentiles. Except with women. That, I have been a witness to. But only in Israel. I don’t know what it is with Israeli men, but they hound women relentlessly,like they have a quota. I haven’t seen it here in America.
There are definitely Jews who don’t like Gentiles, but I don’t think that makes Jacob’s children any worse than the rest of us. It’s not like Gentiles are free of bigotry.
Just to open myself to criticism, I have found other groups to run more truly to stereotypes. American ghetto blacks are frightening. Cubans are hard to live among because of the materialism, machismo, and corruption. Many of my own people are just emotional ghetto whites. I have found Jewish people to be less consistent with stereotypes.
They tend to promote antisemitic notions in their own self-deprecating humor. Maybe they should reconsider that. I learned the only antisemitic jokes I know from Jews.
The third thing wrong with Saint Charlie’s text is that he says he is abandoning Israel because a few Jews quit sending him money.
So he was not Saint Charlie after all. He was Charlie the Whore.
All you folks who got mad when I said he wasn’t a real minister, line up and have a plate of crow with kreplach on the side. I didn’t even insult him. I wrote of him approvingly. I just said he wasn’t a minister.
For the slow, I will explain. You do not change your support for a country or anything else because people stop paying you. Support is supposed to be sincere. If you pretend to support anything just because you are paid, you are a huge and despicable whore, and if your work endangers a small and perpetually-beleaguered country that continually faces unfair existential threats fomented by Satan himself, you may be among the kings of whores.
Is Kirk even in heaven? I doubt it now. How can a professional liar go to heaven? The word says the lake of fire was prepared for “all liars.” It says lying is abomination, just like sodomy.
Everyone lies, but not everyone makes it a career and refuses to repent.
If he lied about Israel, what else did he lie about? Maybe he was not even conservative. Maybe he was like Candace Owens and Arianna Huffington, who defected overnight when they saw the side where the grass was greener.
No one becomes conservative or liberal overnight. This should be obvious.
Andrew Breitbart worked for Drudge, then for Huffington, and then for himself. He flapped like a windsock in a tornado. He was a snake. He was no conservative. I said so, and the usual toadies criticized me for being right. Don’t speak ill of Saint Andrew. Kirk looks even worse.
If there is anything positive in the new Kirk revelations, it’s that it makes me, the main character of the universe, feel even better about not worshiping Kirk. I did think he was a good guy who helped Trump get elected, but I never thought his shtick of sitting in a chair and arguing with unprepared liberals made him a great man.
I guess the fact that I feel better is not all that helpful to the rest of the world, but it’s something.
I told my wife I was upset with Jews for not sending me money. I will be happy to “cancer” Tucker. I do it all the time. I cancered Candace. I’ve cancered all sorts of enemies of Israel. I do it sincerely. Still, no checks.
The fact that I am obscure and have no impact on society could be part of the reason.
I’d settle for hamantaschen. A big tray, once a month. Cherry and apple. I know apricot is more traditional, but cherry and apple would be better. Made with butter. No Crisco. I’ll be watching my doorstep. I’ll even put up a mezuzah.
In other news, I am thinking about resistance training.
Back when I was in law school, I lifted weights a lot. I maxed out almost every machine in the University of Miami Wellness Center (gym, for normal people). I never got big or bulky, except for a 48″ chest. It always blows up, even with slight exertion. A genetic aberration, I guess. Too bad it’s localized.
I thought machines were pretty good, but it turned out they were not. For example, I used to lift 300 pounds very slowly, with deep motions, for 8 reps at a time. I didn’t bounce the weights three inches from full extension and claim I had lifted 300 pounds for real. Then a guy asked me to try a barbell, and I managed one repetition of 220. My strength was real, but it was only good for motion in a straight line with no freedom in any other direction. I could not stabilize a 300-pound bar.
Also, I wondered why I never looked particularly strong. People who were a lot weaker than I was looked better.
Lately, I have been considering doing a little resistance training. I did some last year, but I let it go. I am not trying to look buff or compete in contests. I just want to avoid crumbling faster than necessary in old age. I don’t want to have to ask the wife to open jars for me, and I don’t want to be easily injured because my frame has atrophied.
I learned a few things this week. I sort of knew most of it already, but I didn’t bother to put it all together until today.
A guy calling himself Anatoly popped up in my Youtube feed. He weighs about 180 pounds, but he looks more like 150 because he has no fat. He’s skinny.
He goes to gyms dresses as a janitor. He goes up to guys who are so full of steroids they will definitely die by 60, and he asks if he can try the weights. They laugh at him and make condescending remarks, and then he lifts more than they do, effortlessly.
I must make a disclaimer: I am assuming the bodybuilders in his videos are not shills. They could be.
He’s a powerlifter. He has benched 330, and he has deadlifted 640. People say he has lifted more and that these are old records. His real name is Volodymyr Shmondenko.
Benching 330 is not amazing, but it’s 110 more than I ever lifted. I don’t think he uses drugs, because his numbers are really good but not shocking. I could be wrong, though, because he could be someone who has limited genetic potential and looks like a good natural bodybuilder when he’s on the juice.
I found out that the bench press is not a great exercise. It makes you strong for doing one highly unlikely motion you will never make except when working out or trying to impress someone.
So anyway, I looked at this guy, and I thought I should think about powerlifting.
Here’s something weird: muscle size doesn’t correlate well to strength. For example, Schwarzenegger used to lift something like half of what his workout buddy lifted. His buddy Franco Columbu, was 5’6″ tall. Schwarzenegger’s claims have gone as high as 6’3-1/2″, but some witnesses say 5’11” is more like it. At least he’s taller than Burt Reynolds, who wore three-inch heels.
In any case, he was a lot bigger than Columbu. I saw Columbu lift the back of a Fiat and move it. I think it was in Pumping Iron.
Found it.
I had a fake friend in law school, and he was 6’6″ and weighed 330 (that he would admit). In the gym, he benched less than half of what I did, and I was not maxed out. The machine wouldn’t go high enough.
It’s not because my arms are shorter. I have long arms for my height. He was just naturally weak.
Bodybuilders commonly get two things wrong: they think they’re strong, and they think they can beat other men up. They’re not as strong as they could be, because they work out the wrong way. They can’t beat other people up unless they’re fighting untrained people. Fighting requires skill. Strength is not very useful if you have no skill and your opponent has lots of it.
Most untrained men can’t hit another guy with their left hands. It’s just right-right-right-right. That’s really something. And the rights are usually looping love taps that leave their faces and bodies open.
Bodybuilding is not about being strong. It’s about looking strong. This is why we now have men paying doctors to insert big pieces of plastic in their bodies to look like muscles.
What I’m getting at is that the majority of weight-training wisdom in America is aimed at making men look strong, and the things most men do actually limit their strength gains while filling them with relatively weak muscle.
I should have learned about this back when I was really working out, instead of waiting until I was ready for the shuffleboard court.
I have studied up, and I have learned a few things.
1. Bodybuilding is not a good way to build strength.
2. The really strong guys are powerlifters and strength trainers.
3. Powerlifting is a competitive sport, and while it shares things with strength training, it’s not the same thing. If you want to be strong, you want to use strength-training methods and forget about powerlifting.
4. Isolating muscles, which bodybuilders love, severely limits real-world strength. To become strong, you want exercises that involve multiple groups. The reason to isolate muscles is to make them big and impress all the other possibly-latent dudes in the gym shower.
5. To get strong, you want sets with low repetitions. A maximum of 5. Not the 8 or 12 you may have heard about at the gym. You set weights so you can lift them safely a maximum of three times. You lift until you can lift them 5 times. Then you increase the weight.
This is great, because it means less work.
6. Strength training, which involves heavier weights, is less likely to injure you than vanity training, which requires you to use your joints over and over. This surprised me.
I was very glad to learn that isolating muscles was stupid, because the more you isolate groups, the longer and more miserable your workouts will be. Your body has a lot of muscles to isolate.
It speaks poorly of humanity that so many people are lifting for stupid reasons. Why would anyone want to be weaker than necessary while working out harder than necessary? It’s effeminate, prancing around in shiny thong panties with other men, hoping your calves are more cut than theirs.
Different types of workouts build different types of muscles. Low reps build strong muscles. Supposedly, they also increase your body’s ability to “recruit” muscle fibers, so you get more power out of the muscles you have.
With all this in mind, you can see that it’s incredibly stupid to lift like a bodybuilder. You will work harder, be weaker, and endanger your body more. Also, if you’re looking for workout advice on the web, you have to be careful to detect bodybuilder garbage. Any fitness guy who says the words “big” or “bigger” while demonstrating an exercise should be ignored.
If you look around the web, you can find pictures and videos of men who look like refrigerator repairmen or Uber drivers, lifting enormous weights with their seemingly-flabby, untoned bodies.
All this makes me think of Dwayne Johnson, AKA “the Rock.”
People love this man. He’s a professional nice guy. He tries to avoid saying anything negative. He always smiles. He wants you to see him with his tiny daughter and his tiny dog. He gives people supportive shoutouts. I don’t like him.
I used to think Johnson was great, because I was foolish. Back in law school, I thought WWF wrestling was a hoot, and I watched it diligently. I loved the Rock character. The funny eyebrow. “It doesn’t matter what your name is!” The people’s elbow. Hilarious.
I should not have let the WWF’s excrement enter my mind, but I did.
He became an actor, and eventually, he hit the juice really hard. And lied about it. He says he hasn’t used drugs since he was a teenager, but the world is full of men his age, and so far, he is the only one out of hundreds of millions who has managed to look like the Hulk at age 55.
He lies and says it’s all about diet and exercise, like no one ever dieted or exercised before. Like no one else on Earth worked hard until he invented work.
He claims he has been a workout fanatic since he was a little child, but somehow he was bigger in his mid-fifties, with almost no body fat, than he was at any point earlier in his life when he was blessed with more natural testosterone and better recovery abilities.
People say he’s naturally big because he’s a Samoan, and many Samoans really do have a genetic edge. Well, he’s only half Samoan, his non-Samoan dad was on steroids, and no other Samoan has ever looked like him without drugs, so BS on that. He was half Samoan when he was working out like crazy and 30 years younger, and he was smaller.
Now he has given up drugs because he has clogged arteries, which steroids cause. He has dropped 50 or 60 pounds, or maybe one third of his total muscle weight. People are not 100% muscle. He claims he did it for a movie role. No; he did it to avoid an early grave.
He is a role model for kids, and they go to the gym and try what he claims he does, and they get lackluster results. They don’t look like he does, because they’re not on drugs yet, and they don’t get as strong as they should because they’re doing glamour exercises that make weaker muscles.
Then what do they do? Many do what he really does. They use drugs. Then they blow up and look like him. They go bald early. They get scarring acne. Their testicles all but vanish. Like Johnson, they grow breasts that have to be cut out. They have rage problems. They suffer from depression. They cry for no reason. They remain short because steroids end natural growth.
This is all bad, but it looks like he hurt his health and hurt kids without even getting as strong as he could have. He blew himself up so he could be a shirtless dandy for all his little bros, but smaller guys who don’t look like dangerously overinflated tires are much stronger.
On top of that, many women find grotesque steroid physiques a little repulsive. Steroid users tend to look like they’ve been skinned.
I am probably never going to work out seriously, because I am too lazy. I know I will never do long workouts assiduously, so I have reasonable goals.
I came up with an exercise which turns out to be very, very good for strength development. I put two dumbbells by my feet, I squat to get them to waist level, I curl them to my shoulders, I press them overhead, and then I do it all in reverse.
I don’t strain my back the way squats or deadlifts could. I give both sides of my body the same treatment instead of allowing a barbell to shift the work to my right side. It’s not bad for an old guy who has modest expectations.
I haven’t done any resistance training at all at least since the beginning of the year. I started up today, and I managed 5 reps with 42.5 pounds on each side. It will never win me any prizes, but it’s an okay start for an old man who mostly lifts a fork. Lifting dumbbells is harder than lifting barbells for the same reason lifting barbells is harder than pushing machine handles, so you end up using less weight.
If things go well, I should be up to maybe 60 pounds per side in a few months. I may add another exercise if I think I’ll keep up with it. I should get back to climbing stairs with a weighted vest.
I almost never feel I’m not strong enough, although putting tires back on hubs while sitting on the ground is an area where more power would be nice. I’m doing okay, but I think it’s wise to try get a little better and avoid falling apart too fast.
Preventing injuries is important at my age (or any age), and stronger muscles are harder to hurt.
Hopefully, my arteries will remain clear, my strength will be optimal in relation to the amount of exercise I do, and I will never have to drop 50 pounds in three months and come up with lies to explain it.
Last night I wrote about a three-part dream I had, and the dream included me being raptured by two angels.
The meanings of some parts of the dream were not clear to me at first, but now I think God has shown me what they were about.
I
I was at a corrupt church where I used to serve, and a well-meaning but ambitious and attention-loving person was trying to start a new ministry. He was about to speak. The pastor of the church, who has appeared in other dreams representing a spirit of church corruption, supported him. I wasn’t interested in watching the new minister speak, so I went outside.
This represents me leaving the world of big, established churches. By that I mean anything bigger than house meetings. God told me the age of churches was over. They are corrupt because they teach people to worship and follow men, not the Holy Spirit. Satan corrupts the men, and the men corrupt the church.
II
I was in Kentucky, on my grandfather’s patio. As a child, I defaced this patio while the concrete was still wet, writing my name in it. My relatives said I was in big trouble, but when my grandfather saw it, he was thrilled. He took me on his lap and told me one day I would show it to my son.
In the dream, I saw angels coming down from heaven. I lost all strength and lay down on my stomach on the patio. They lifted me up and raptured me. I was consumed with joy and relief.
Why does God do things for certain people? Because we are his favorites, as I was my grandfather’s favorite grandchild. It’s not because we’re good; we are not. God prefers one person to another for reasons we don’t know.
We see this in the story of John, the disciple who was closest to Yeshua. He was “the one Yeshua loved.” It is believed that every original disciple except John met with a violent death, as did Paul and Stephen, but when Domitian tried to fry John in a cauldron in front of a crowd of pagans, nothing happened to him. He died at a very advanced age, and before he died, he saw the kingdom of heaven come and wrote of it in the Revelation.
Israel preferred Joseph to his brothers. God preferred Israel to Esau. He preferred Isaac to Ishmael. He doesn’t make excuses for favor. He never says he will treat us alike, and it isn’t our place to question it.
Those who don’t have God’s favor hate those who do, and they say it’s not fair. This attitude started with Satan, and it prevails today. The hatred worldly people feel for the favored is like Satan’s hatred for humanity or an older child’s hatred of a younger child with a nicer personality that brings him more attention.
The other day, I heard Lester Sumrall say that the people who are against us, like the atheists and leftists, are just losers trying to “get even.” They refuse to do things God’s way, and they don’t get favor, so their response is to kill those who have it and steal from them.
In English Bibles, we see the word “love” a lot, and we think it only means affection, but it also means preference. God preferred Jacob to Esau, and God’s word puts it this way:
Was not Esau Jacob’s brother? saith the Lord: yet I loved Jacob,
And I hated Esau, and laid his mountains and his heritage waste for the dragons of the wilderness.
Esau’s children, who inherited disfavor from Esau, tried to take the good things God gave Israel, but the word says this:
Whereas Edom saith, We are impoverished, but we will return and build the desolate places; thus saith the Lord of hosts, They shall build, but I will throw down; and they shall call them, The border of wickedness, and, The people against whom the Lord hath indignation for ever.
Actually, Esau himself brought this on his descendants. He sold his birthright for a bowl of soup. Not even a pizza or a prime rib eye.
We see the spirit of envy among the disfavored today. They say Israel, whose inheritance is still largely in the hands of thieves, has too much. They say white people, Christians, heterosexuals, and men have privilege, meaning it’s unfair that we have more blessings than others. They say America is rich because it oppresses and steals, which is patently absurd.
They want to exterminate those who are favored and take what they have, not realizing that without us, the world would be a much worse place for them. They treat each other much worse than we would ever treat them.
I really enjoy knowing I was my grandparents’ favorite, my father’s favorite, and my mother’s favorite. I didn’t appreciate it until I was old, but it was a tremendous gift. Thinking about it warms my heart in a way that brings me new humility. In particular, it makes me love my grandfather more. I wish I had been better to him, although I was better to him than most of my cousins.
I feel safe and comforted. More securely than ever, I know my blessings don’t depend on perfect obedience or past service. I feel I am living within God’s warmth.
I have been bad to people and animals. I haven’t become a missionary. I haven’t given everything I have away. I haven’t packed stadiums and seen thousands rush to the altars. I have sinned a lot. I still have favor. It’s not based on my deeds.
This is where Jews, Muslims, and many Christians get it wrong. God doesn’t weigh your deeds and let you into heaven if the good outweigh the bad. He weighs his love for you and the righteousness of Yeshua, which is imputed to you.
Speaking of people who are called holy because of their conspicuous accomplishments, my wife says Billy Graham is in hell because he fawned on Muhammad Ali and called him a follower of God. Muhammad Ali rejected God when he rejected Yeshua and became a follower of the famous rapist and murderer Mohammed, so he was a rejecter of God, not a follower. Graham was supposed to understand this.
My wife says Graham denied the cross, and as she says, this is the one thing that will definitely send you to hell. You can molest children and then repent and receive salvation, but if you deny the cross and you don’t repent, you are definitely going to hell. Preach all you want. Call a billion people to the altar. It won’t help you.
If being “good” could get you into heaven, then Yeshua was a fool to allow himself to be tortured to death instead of taking his throne and taking back the planet.
Graham was a shameless and spineless sycophant of celebrities, the rich, and the powerful, and he didn’t teach people about the Holy Spirit, so my wife is probably right. He was the Joel Osteen of his time.
People point to his deeds–his crusades and the apparent salvations that took place–and say he was a great man of God. But even if those salvations were proper, which many were not, they wouldn’t overcome rejecting Yeshua, who is God. To reject Yeshua is to reject Yahweh, as Yeshua said.
It appears he also bought into the Jewish media control myth, which is not a sign that he was hearing from God. It’s hard to judge him, though, because the accusations are based on quotations from a tape recording, the quotations were reported by leftists, and we can’t hear the entire conversation to see if there are any exculpatory words in it.
Graham is just one example of people who are widely praised by transactional Christians yet who are probably in hell or headed there.
Now that I’ve had my dream, I think of God, I think of the way my grandfather felt about me, and I know in my heart, not just my mind, that God feels the same way about me. This helps me have faith that he will give me good things and help me improve. My grandfather used to slip me money and do things for me, and God loves me more than he did.
On his patio, my grandfather showed me favor. I think he would have been very angry if any of the other grandchildren had carved their names into the concrete, but he didn’t just let me get away with it; he loved me for it.
In the dream, God showed me favor in the place where my grandfather, who was a figure of God to me, also showed me favor. My grandfather showed me favor even in my transgression, and so does God.
In the dream, God showed me very great favor by removing me from the presence of the rotten human race and all the rotten spirits that conspire with people against God and his favorites.
III
In the third part of the dream, I woke up in a shabby hospital bed in a poor country, wearing clothes someone had put on me. I had been found somewhere, and the people found me unconscious and took me to the hospital because they didn’t know why I was there or what I had come for.
Several young schoolgirls stood at the foot of my bed and stared at me in wonder. A doctor came in to check on me, and I asked him, “Who am I?” I knew, but I wondered if he did.
I think this is about the return to Earth, after the wedding in heaven. We are told we will have to rule here under Yeshua.
When we rule, it will have to be by consent of the ruled. Otherwise, Yeshua will have to destroy them. We will rule because of our identity, not our own righteousness or ability. We will rule by heredity, because we will be kings and queens, not presidents and governors. That means our authority will depend on who we are, and if people consent to be ruled, it will be because they recognize us as members of God’s ruling family.
The other day, God told me something interesting. I already knew he hated democracy, which is an invention of pagans and sexual perverts, but I didn’t realise this: it is only because of the privileges of monarchy that he will be able to return to Earth, take it back, and rule.
If King Yeshua were President Yeshua, he could be voted out permanently. He would have no title. He would be like a tenant, and the Bible shows us owners are better than tenants. If he were voted out, he could never return except as an illegitimate conqueror, usurper, and squatter.
Because Yeshua is a king, his title is eternal. He can’t be voted out. His title can’t be taken away. He can consent for his enemies to occupy his land for a while, but he has the right to return, kill them in spite of whatever improvements they have made, cut off their children’s inheritance, and give the inheritance to Christians.
This is why Israel will never belong to anyone but the Jews.
Yeshua is the king of the Jews, and Israel (not just modern Israel) was given to him and to them by Yahweh, through Abraham. Palestinian savages who are worse than Nazis can cause trouble, and they will eventually overrun Israel in a nationwide campaign of rape, theft, destruction, and murder just like October 7, but in the end, a remnant of the Jews will be preserved, their enemies will be slaughtered by God himself, and the land will be returned to them.
We know from the Bible that Israel’s history of victory will be broken soon, and human animals will invade and have their way, but even if millions are murdered, in the end, Israel will exist, Jews will own it, Yeshua will be on the throne, and his kingdom, which is a continuation of the Davidic dynasty, will be restored.
Thinking about my dream makes me feel loved and comforted. I am not a Catholic or Baptist or Muslim, trying to score points and earn a ticket to God’s presence or heaven. I am a son and heir whom God loves based on my identity. God is willing to give me good things I ask for, just as my grandfather was happy to slip me a 50-dollar bill.
Favor is nothing to be proud of, because pride is always wrong, and it’s nothing to show off, but it’s something to tell the world about. By telling the world, we dispel the myths that keep people in self-condemnation and pride and block their blessings.
I believe being favored by God allows me to help others. When Job’s friends made errors in trying to correct him, God said Job would intercede for them. He was more inclined to listen to his favored one than to ignorant people who wronged him, even if they meant well.
I believe this is a pivotal moment in my life and for my family.
I had a wonderful dream last night, or maybe it was three consecutive dreams.
I
I was back at Trinity Church in Miami. I served there as an armorbearer. We had three armorbearer leaders during my time. In the dream, the second guy was about to start a church of his own.
There were chairs set up in a small area, and he was about to speak about his plans. Several people were there, getting ready to sit. Trinity’s pastor, Rich Wilkerson, was one of them. That’s odd, because as far as I can tell, he never supports new ministries he doesn’t control and make money from.
In a dream I had long ago, he appeared as an evil force. I was at a different church by then. In the dream, it was night. The church was dark. I went in, and in a room in the back, with no windows, Wilkerson was sitting at a desk under a lamp, in a little cone of light, hiding. He was running an adding machine and counting money. I took that to mean the church’s pastors had greed issues, and that turned out to be true. Then one was outed as a child rapist, refused to step down, and went to prison.
The guy who was about to speak is a friend, but I wouldn’t want to see him run a church. He is headstrong, and he thinks he knows more than he does. He likes attention and admiration. He likes to be in charge. Basically a good guy, but not pastor material.
I left the room and went outside.
II
Once I was outside, I was not in Miami. I was behind my grandparent’s house in Kentucky. I loved that place when I was a kid. I thought it was heaven. I was my grandfather’s favorite grandchild. My grandparents treated me very well. They treated me like a son. Even as an adult, I could show up at their house whenever I wanted and treat it as my own.
The house had a small patio out back, and one day (not in the dream), my grandfather had it extended. I was probably about 8. When I saw the wet cement, I wrote my name in it with a slingshot handle.
I was told I was in big trouble. I was going to get it when Grandpa got home.
When he saw what I had done, he put me on his lap, and with a big smile, he told me one day I could show my own children what I had done. He thought it was terrific.
In the dream, I was on that patio, which I will never see again, for one last visit. It was dark. It was cool. I was wearing a winter jacket.
I looked at the sky. It was mainly clear with some clouds that shimmered around their borders. There was bright moonlight but no moon. Near where the moon should have been, I saw what looked like a little ship flying around. It was just an outline, like the little ships in the old Asteroids video game. I knew I was seeing something involving spirits. I have seen a spirit clearly, and it was clear with an outline.
At first, I saw one ship. Then I saw that there were two, and they were diamond-shaped. They were circling without changing their altitude. I knew something very important was happening.
My strength left me. I could not move. I lay on the concrete on my stomach. While I was lying there, two angels I couldn’t see lifted me up without changing my position, and we started to rise together.
I knew it was the rapture. I can’t explain how glad I was. I was done with this place. At last. Sometimes it seems like this experience will never end, and in the dream, it was over. Suddenly.
I believe I thought about my wife and son. They weren’t nearby. I believe I thought they were being raptured wherever they were and that we would meet shortly.
III
I woke up in a hospital bed. It was a cheap single bed with a white metal frame. I was in a hospital in a poor country, and they used whatever they could afford.
There was no sheet over me. I was wearing a T-shirt and gym shorts which didn’t seem to belong to me. I got the sense that I had been found somewhere, brought to the hospital, and examined. I was fine.
At the foot of the bed, there were about 5 little girls. I would say they were around 10 years old. They looked a lot like upper-class Indians. They weren’t wearing typical Indian clothes, but they looked like light-skinned Indians. They were carrying schoolbooks as though they had just been walking home from school. They were curious about me.
A doctor in a white coat came in. He also looked like an upper-class Indian. He was there to see how I was doing. I guessed he had been treating me.
For some reason, I said, “Who am I?” It was as if I wanted to find out what he knew about me.
I don’t remember anything that happened in the dream after that.
I woke up full of joy. Even though I had not been raptured, the joy of being lifted up to heaven and dropping all my earthly problems stayed with me for a long time. I feel it now as I type this.
I have died in dreams, and I have been raptured in dreams.
From dying, I know I’m not afraid of it. When I died in dreams, I really believed it was happening, so I know how I’ll react when my time comes.
If I were in a plane right now, and I knew it was going to hit the ground and kill me, I would not feel afraid. I would have an overwhelming sense of the gravity of the situation. I would feel very solemn. I would try to pray to make sure there was nothing to keep me out of heaven. I would be full of excitement, thinking about the fact that I was about to be in heaven with Yeshua. I would be glad my tour of duty here was over. I would look forward to having my curiosity about Yeshua and the afterlife answered.
Being raptured feels very similar.
When I say I’m not afraid of dying, I don’t mean I’m not afraid of what it takes to get there. I don’t want pain or mutilation. I don’t want to be burned. I’m just saying I’m not afraid to see this life end. In my dreams, I found myself in situations where I knew there was no hope of survival, and my end would be quick and painless. If I had been thrown into a tank full of hungry sharks, it would have been different.
I hope I have more dreams like this. I wish I knew how to make myself have more of them. Just thinking about them makes me feel great.
I got annoyed yesterday because I realized I had wasted $429 on a vacuum cleaner which is not as good as a $130 shop vac from Home Depot. Today I’m annoyed about refrigerators.
I had been hearing a lot about Samsung’s new policy of forcing refrigerator owners to allow fridges to display ads in their kitchens. You didn’t dream that last sentence; it’s actually happening.
Today I decided to take a look.
First, let me say that we have all been hoodwinked when it comes to fridges. We pay too much for refrigerators that do things 1) other than refrigerating 2) which are not actually very helpful.
When I was a kid, a fridge was a fridge, not a TV, video game console, telephone, camera, therapist, sex surrogate, French tutor, urologist, dog trainer, palm reader, thought leader, icemaker, or water fountain. Fridges had excellent mechanicals, they lasted 40 years if treated well, and they could be repaired easily.
In the 1960’s, things started to change. Clever marketers decided people wanted their fridges to make ice automatically and dispense cold water through the door. Over the ensuing decades, fridges got more complicated, the mechanicals started to fail after 10 years, and repair became less and less practical due to the use of cheap parts.
My grandparents built a beautiful home in about 1965. My grandmother put two deep freezes in the basement, along with the fridge from her old home. When she died in 2003, these appliances were still working, as were her Speed Queen washer and dryer.
I have seen modern fridges fail in under 5 years.
Consumers love shiny gadgets, so as technology improved, we started seeing truly ridiculous features in refrigerators.
Now you can talk to your refrigerator in America while you vacation in New Guinea. You can tell it what to do. You can make it show you video of its contents. If it gets lonely, it can text you.
They make fridges with external TV screens that allow you to see what you could see if you took your precious little hand and opened the doors.
I thought my old refrigerator was dying last year. Turned out it wasn’t true. We had been blocking the air from the freezer. Moving food around fixed it. Before we got it straightened out, we went to look at new fridges.
Spoiler alert: there aren’t any good refrigerators now. You think your Sub-Zero or Fisher & Paykel is going to last longer than a Frigidaire? It won’t. I talked to an appliance guy who was working on a dryer, trying to find out which brand of refrigerator was best. He was familiar with every brand. He said, “They’re all junk.” I asked if that included the boutique brands. Yes, it did.
Interesting side note: your new refrigerator is full of flammable gas. FLAMMABLE. Isn’t that nice? Good thing to know if you have a house fire. The greenies have panicked us through several iterations of refrigerant, probably needlessly, and now we have reached the point where they think it’s better to have a giant bomb in your kitchen than risk damage to the ozone layer, which seems to be doing very well.
We decided we did not want an icemaker or any type of dispenser. My current fridge has a door dispenser, and we almost never use it.
Here is the dirty little secret of all door water dispensers: they dispense warm water, not cold. At least compared to actual cold water you might keep in a jug inside the fridge. If “cold” means 5 degrees cooler than the tap water from your sink, then yes, they dispense cold water. To me, it means 35 degrees.
Icemakers fail frequently. They are the parts that go bad most often on refrigerators, and they aren’t very good. They have evolved to the point where they dispense ice in awkward semicircular chunks that block the flow of liquid to your mouth. Seems like the ice always smells, too. These machines make so much ice, it sits around absorbing odors for weeks or months. Are you a fisherman? Get ready for gin, tonic, and perch.
Another issue: icemakers and water dispensers kill cubic footage. They take up room. If you see a refrigerator advertised as 22 cubic feet, you have to deduct the volume of the water and ice apparatus, because the manufacturer won’t.
There’s more: these machines have unnecessary water filters. My water is just fine. The manufacturers have started putting digital chips on their filters so you get no ice and no water unless you use their OEM filters, and those can cost $50 to $80 each, although a filter probably costs Frigidaire $5. I saw a guy claim he needed to spend $250 per year to keep up. That’s like 70 cases of bottled water.
My fridge has a filter cartridge (non-OEM), and I never replace it. The water keeps flowing. Sometimes when I feel like it, I push the little button that says to reset the filter life, and the fridge obeys as though I had installed a new cartridge. It has no idea whether the filter is full. It apparently goes by time.
Making your own ice isn’t really that tough.
If I want a big, shiny stainless bottom-freezer fridge from one of the least-worthless brands, it will cost me at least $1500. That’s on sale. I can get a plain old white top-freezer fridge for $850. Nearly the same cubic footage. Maytag sells a 22-cubic-foot model for $1800 (regular price), and I can buy a 21-cubic-foot top-freezer fridge for half of that.
Am I being cheap? Well, sure, but the main thing is that I don’t have to be concerned about repairs to parts I don’t want to buy in the first place. I don’t like waiting for repairmen. I don’t like paying them. I don’t trust them. I don’t enjoy doing appliance repairs.
I could buy a top-freezer fridge and a standalone ice maker for less than the cost of a fancy fridge with no ice maker or dispenser.
The thing that really sticks in my craw, however, is not the ice and water problem. It’s the ad problem.
People bought Samsung refrigerators, thinking they were getting cool gadgets they actually owned, and then Samsung updated their firmware without permission and started showing them ads. That’s immoral. You don’t change a deal once you make it.
I hate unsolicited ads. When I see ads playing on a gas station pump, I face the other way until my tank is full. I have smart TV’s, and I do everything I can to disable their ad functions (which didn’t exist when I bought them). I block and report all spam emails. I put a spam filter on this blog. I pay for Youtube Premium because it kills ads. I quit watching Amazon videos for multiple reasons, and one was that they swindled me on ads. They sold me Prime with the promise that I would see no ads, and then they started showing me ads anyway.
Call me spoiled, but I would rather watch nothing than watch a really good show interrupted by the same ad 30 times.
Video ads are pathetic these days. Some shows can’t get a lot of sponsors, so they run the same three sponsors’ ads over and over. They also increase the frequency of ads as the shows progress. You get a short interruption every 8 minutes toward the beginning, then you get hooked, and then you get a longer interruption, featuring the same ads, every two minutes until the show is over.
It’s also common for video providers to lock up ads while you look at other browser tabs. You move to a new tab while the ad is running, hoping to avoid it, and when you go back, the ad resumes at exactly the same point where you abandoned it.
If I don’t want to buy your silly product during the first three seconds of the ad, I still won’t want to buy it after being forced to see the other 27 or 157 seconds.
I quit watching secular entertainment, so I suffer much less than I used to. I still watch videos related to my interests.
I can’t imagine the misery of going through the work of minimizing the ads in my life and then having them forced on me, on a big screen, in my kitchen.
Do they have sound? Can you shut it off? I certainly hope they default to silence, but I’ll bet they don’t.
The ad-forcing TV’s don’t cost less than the ones that have no screens. They cost more. So where is the ad revenue going? To Samsung, of course. Samsung is subjecting you to torment and taking money for it. You get nothing for your service.
You’re like a prisoner on a chain gang, working for 50 cents per hour while the state charges private land owners for your services. Except you don’t get the 50 cents.
If Samsung put a billboard in my yard, they would have to pay me, not themselves. Common sense?
Samsung fridges have cameras inside them. I’m not kidding. I’m going to guess they film your food and send you ads based on what you eat. They sell the information to other jerks.
I hope some prankster starts putting dummy grenades and pipe bombs in his Samsung fridge.
Samsung says the ads are “curated.” This is a nonsense term intended to make products seem special and consumers feel important. It just means someone chose the ads. This is true of all ads. Also, Samsung’s “curator” is a computer that belongs to Samsung. It’s not a human being. “Curated” means “chosen to appeal to you based on information we shouldn’t have, and provided by predatory corporations.”
It’s odd to use the term “curated” to apply to products which are…advertisements. Ordinarily, marketers use it to apply to things we like and want, not things we hate. Assortments of skin care products. Music playlists.
“We hope you’re enjoying your stay at the Tower of London. Next in our series of curated experiences for valued subjects, the iron muzzle with spikes on the inside!”
Samsung lies and says the ads are intended to benefit you. It’s all about you. For the children. So you can live your best life. Because we are stronger together. And it takes a village. Love trumps hate. Coexist.
If you’re going to lie, at least try to come up with lies that would fool a two-year-old. The lies make this worse, not better.
It will get worse. If our government wanted to do anything about it, they would have done it by now. Our laws are made by people lobbyists pay for service, lobbyists have lots of money, and you can’t expect the same people who take bribes to ban bribes.
Here’s a critical video about Samsung’s disgusting actions. Here is the height of irony: the video was clearly made using AI. AI will defend you against creeping tech tyranny. Yeah. That will happen.
