“Thanks for Nothing” Would be too Kind

Gloria Copeland is dying from dementia. My wife told me.

She is the wife of prosperity preacher Kenneth Copeland. He is 88. He says he prevented his hair from turning gray by telling it not to, and he also says he and God have a deal which will keep him alive until 2056. He says he will die on his birthday at the age of 120.

While he was announcing the deal, he compared himself to an old car that had been restored, and he said certain parts had been repaired.

He also tells a story about being short of breath while getting on one of his expensive airplanes. He said he sat down and prayed, and God told him he was giving him a new heart.

He now has a pacemaker.

I used to love Kenneth Copeland back in the 1980’s. I didn’t know any better. He mixed the truth with very seductive lies, and he was an excellent speaker. I had had supernatural experiences, so I was looking for preachers who were in the same boat, so they could teach me. I was not able to sift out the truthful ones and discard the liars.

Things got worse when I got a supernatural healing by listening to Copeland. When I decided to find a church, I got a flu-like illness that persisted for weeks. I heard him say I should pray for healing and keep saying I was healed, so I did that. I was tenacious. One day, I walked into the kitchen, looked into the freezer, and saw a dark shape fly out of me and into the freezer. Then it turned and flew out of the house through a closed door. I was instantly healed of all symptoms.

It was my misfortune to get a powerful bit of truth mixed into a gruel of lies. The healing was wonderful, but it gave me the false impression that Copeland was a man of God.

It seems ironic that I got healed and the Copelands have not. I don’t think either of them seriously expected anyone who listened to them to receive a miraculous healing.

Copeland has a protege in Africa. His name is David Oyedepo. He apparently claims to have the same deal with God. He says he will die at 120. He is 70 now, so keep an eye on him for the next 50 years.

I used to listen to Gloria Copeland, too. She is also a fine speaker. Unlike her husband, she has always exuded a false aura of class and serenity. On first examination, she seems wise, mature, and gentle. Now that I think about it, I’ve seen Buddhists who come off the same way, and of course, they go to hell.

The self-righteous act is one of the most annoying thing about Buddhists. You’re supposed to be enlightened, so you act enlightened, and if you make a career of it, people pay your bills and treat you like royalty. And every truthful, perceptive person who gives you the emperor’s new clothes treatment is sloughed off as unenlightened and in need of a few more incarnations.

To be a successful Buddhist authority, you just have to smile constantly, trying to look benevolent, and pretend you’re not as upset as everyone else. That’s really true.

Another great thing about the job is that you never have to answer a question or give intelligent input. When someone makes a remark about Buddhism to you, you can grin and close your eyes, say something like, “Who can make the wind orange?”, or just say, “Yeah, mmm,” in a dreamy voice.

There is a mildly famous lady from Texas who does this act beautifully. She has a calm, hypnotic voice. She doesn’t show signs of irritation or anger. She gives ridiculous advice, like “Stop doing.”

People give her roses at her appearances, and they stand in awe and stammer rehearsed speeches about their own enlightenment process, trying to make it look like they’re “in” with the awakened one, just like she is. They work hard to say the right things, fearing she might expose them as unenlightened.

But, you know. Who can make the wind orange?

To get back to the Copelands, Gloria doesn’t know what’s going on any more. She looks fine. Always elegantly dressed and made up, as in the past. She can talk. But she has to be led around, and people have to explain simple things to her.

If she were not the wife of a billionaire or near-billionaire, she would be in a memory care unit. She will get worse and die soon.

Like many or perhaps all prosperity preachers, Kenneth Copeland has not healed anyone.

Yes, I got a healing, but I was on my own. He never prayed for me. I’ve never been in the same building with him.

I saw a recent video of Gloria Copeland with her husband. Her condition was startling, but it didn’t startle me as much as this: her husband was on the verge of tears as he spoke to her. I was shocked to see that Kenneth Copeland loved anyone other than himself and Mammon.

He makes his living making gullible people poor and buying himself airplanes he doesn’t need while they move in with their kids or go on welfare, so it was reasonable to assume he had no heart at all.

He knows perfectly well that he has destroyed countless lives. The lives of people who had less than he did and gave it to him.

It made me think of my sister, who used to send him money. It may seem odd that a narcissistic sociopath would support a ministry, but then the ministry taught selfishness, and sending money was a way to get admiration, which narcissists love.

Ever notice how sweet and full of admiration salespeople are when you’re buying expensive clothes or jewelry? That’s how crooked preachers and their employees treat people who give them a lot of money.

My sister gave preachers money. Then she quit. Kenneth Copeland’s people called her. They said they were worried about her. They didn’t worry when she was sending them money.

She was going broke fast, because she shopped but did not work. She could have used some cash to repair her house. Although it would not have helped her, a real minister would have offered counseling.

Not one ministry offered to give her back a single penny.

She gave to John and Lisa Bevere. I will give them this: Bevere’s mother called and seemed concerned. Somehow I ended up talking to her instead of my sister. I can’t recall whether I prayed with her.

They didn’t send a refund, however. They weren’t around later to help fund her cancer treatment or rehab expenses. My sister was there for the Beveres. They weren’t there for her.

“Minister” means “servant.”

I don’t know what to think of Bevere. I drove him around for a while when he visited Trinity Church in Miami. I still have his cell number. He seemed pretty sincere, and I don’t recall him pushing for offerings. On the other hand, he was a youth pastor under Benny Hinn, and he was involved in Joyce Meyer’s company. I won’t call it a ministry. He pals around with some truly slimy and dangerous preachers.

Doesn’t the Bible say God’s children should give? If that is true, why is it that when we connect with celebrity ministries, we expect them to take a lot, but it doesn’t occur to us that they might give us anything, even if we have given generously to them in the past?

The disciples had to choose deacons because they were so busy helping the poor.

T.B. Joshua’s ministry gave a lot. When my wife and I took our son to his first pediatrician, we picked a Nigerian. Somehow, we ended up mentioning T.B. Joshua to him. He told us that when his father got married, T.B. Joshua gave him and his wife 40 bags of rice.

Where is my sister’s rice, Mr. Copeland?

The charitable efforts of Joshua’s church were extensive and generous, and he lived in a modest house.

Kenneth Copeland is not very likely to live to be 120, and he will probably be a widow by 90, so living to 120 would really be a punishment.

I won’t prophesy, but I will predict. Copeland’s health will take a downturn, and he will realize he’s going to die. Then he’ll tell the world he decided to go ahead and be with his wife, deal notwithstanding. Either that, or he’ll give up public life and abandon his flock, because he never cared about them to begin with.

Yeshua spoke about religious Jews who were like the Copelands:

But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows’ houses, and for a pretence make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.

The Bible says a lot of scary things about those who swindle and those who oppress the poor. It says if you give to the rich, you will come to poverty.

Having your wife lose her mind and die is a very harsh punishment, but when you consider the hordes of people the Copelands and their friends have impoverished, it seems very lenient to me. Ananias and Sapphira were struck dead for much less.

In any case, Kenneth Copeland’s plans and his rich old age have been spoiled, and what’s in store for him afterward is much worse.

The world is really filthy. Most people have no interest in Yeshua. When you try to find him, people who claim to represent him do their best to make sure you find Satan instead. If you’re in one of the old churches, that’s about the worst of it. If you’re in a charismatic church, they also do their best to make you poor. It’s amazing that anyone gets to know God.

God Tells Everyone the Same Things

Last night before my wife and I prayed for other people, I asked her how she was feeling about the way things were going in the world. She said she felt detached.

That’s exactly how I feel.

Her sense is that this world is not a place where we can be accepted and build a future.

You turn on the TV or the PC and look at the world, and what do you see? Homosexuals, including cross-dressers, protesting in favor of Hamas, which has been known to throw homosexuals off tall buildings. Millionaire sluts rapping about their genitalia, saying things so crude, even a sailor would be grossed out. Satanists and witches praying aloud before government meetings. Transvestites reading stories to kids in libraries and schools funded by taxes. Many non-Muslim members of the United Nations accusing Israel of genocide for defending itself against…genocide. Public protests, some violent, against businesses that are Jewish but not affiliated with Israel.

Lesbians in colorful sashes, pretending to be priests, running large organizations that pretend to be Christian churches. Demoniacs vandalizing electric cars because Elon Musk helped a Republican get elected. Violence against Republicans that has become routine. Transvestites performing a big percentage of mass shootings for reasons they seem to be unable to articulate. Ads for Jaguar cars featuring sexual deviants but no cars and no normal men.

My wife watches a family on Youtube. Supposedly, this is a Christian family. She tells me they used to pray and talk about God on their channel.

Yesterday, I saw a video in which they dropped their daughter off at Berkeley, which stands out among schools dominated by left-wing insanity. They were thrilled for her. They toured her dorm floor. They went into the bathroom. It’s unisex. They thought it was funny that their daughter would be using the toilet and showers with young men.

If this is what Christians are like now, no wonder unbelievers are delusional.

I can’t send my son to Berkeley or any other far-left academic nuthouse. Any mainstream university, in other words. Imagine what they would put him through. Lectures about whiteness and patriarchy. Lectures about transphobia. If he stood up for his beliefs, he would be the most persecuted student on campus. He could never fit in or be treated fairly. He would be a target, and he would get low grades from vindictive instructors. He would be excluded from opportunities. He would receive negative recommendations. He would probably be thrown out of classrooms.

We had lunch at Costco yesterday. Costco is pretty woke. They gave us weird cup lids intended to discourage straw use, and they provided paper straws that leak and get soggy. To protect the sea turtles from plastic. In a country that dumps zero garbage at sea.

Before we visited Costco, we took my baby son to the dermatologist. They gave me a tablet so I could tell them his history. They wanted to know his gender identity. This is the second provider that has done this to us. A pediatric facility asked what my son’s preferred pronouns were.

“Detached” is the right word. We are now like disaster tourists. We are here. We observe. We can’t join, though, and we don’t want to stay. It’s like having a day pass at a mental asylum.

Both of us are aware there is no future for our family here within the system. We will live out our lives as outsiders.

This isn’t the old America. I watched World War Two veterans talking about their experiences the other day, and by modern standards, some of them sounded like religious fanatics. Mainstream guys. One said an angel had appeared to him to tell him he wasn’t going to be hurt. That kind of talk used to be considered normal.

The other day, I saw someone on the web suggesting that really smart people should be working to solve hard problems for society. Cancer and so on. As though able people owed society something. Not true.

I thought of what Yeshua said: “The poor, you will always have with you.” More broadly, he meant that the world’s problems were not going to be solved.

Mankind is cursed. It’s in rebellion. Things aren’t going to go as they should during this age, because we consistently reject the only source of real, enduring blessings. We will never have clean, cheap, inexhaustible energy. We will always have disease. We will always have violence and poverty. We will never stop doing the things that cause our misfortunes, so there is a limit to what we should do to fix the world. It’s a treadmill.

Secular solutions have some importance, but our main obligation in life is to expand the kingdom of heaven. Look after your own soul. Do what you can to help others become like Yeshua. Give to people who need help. Deliver people from demons and work miracles if God permits. You’re not really obligated to work 16 hours a day in a lab, trying to synthesize a chemical that obliterates every kind of tumor or cures AIDS.

Mary was right, and Martha was wrong.

It’s more important to help one person go on to eternal salvation than it is to fight global problems which are not going away. Salvation is permanent and priceless. Fighting worldly problems is Whack-a-Mole.

It’s hard for people who are close to God to position themselves so they have the power to do what unbelievers think is good. If you’re a genius Christian, and you try to do groundbreaking cancer research, Satan will probably see to it you end up assisting incompetent DEI hires or teaching biology to bored high school students. Satan’s kids blackball Christians.

It’s even hard to make headway in churches. I tried to work as an armorbearer. I created fantastic food for a church kitchen. I tried to get into prison ministry. I helped drive poor people to church. I shared revelation with people. My pastors and many of the other volunteers treated me like a troublemaker. They crippled and shut down programs. They promoted sychophants and nincompoops and made sure I was always an outsider.

I can’t complain. John the Baptist was a priest by inheritance, and instead of taking a position of honor in the temple, he had to live in the desert and eat bugs. Religious people beat Yeshua and had him murdered, and they murdered the prophets as well as many Jews who believed in Yeshua. A secular Jew whose father built the temple murdered John.

If you belong to God, you can’t join the herd. If you’re part of the herd, and you think you belong to God, you are deluding yourself. It’s normal for Christians to serve Satan and the flesh while claiming they’re sold out to God. Look at Chris Pratt. I could make a long list.

We always want to have our cake and eat it, too, and we are better at lying to ourselves than lying to other people.

My wife and I feel as though the end is just about here, so it doesn’t matter much what we do. America has fallen away for good. But does that mean the rapture is close? The area that is now Turkey used to be the boiler room of Earth’s Christian activity, but it went Muslim, and the world didn’t end. Europe took over the lead role in spreading the gospel, and then it turned on God, and the world didn’t end. Should America be different?

I think it is, because there is no other part of the world that can take our place. When Turkey fizzled, Europe took over. When Europe fizzled, America took over. All the other countries and continents have already been evangelized heavily, and they are not making progress. We’re not going to see China or Africa or India take America’s place.

When Europe faded, the US was ready to step in. Nobody is ready to step in now that the US is spiritually almost dead.

Chris Pratt is an interesting case. Unbelievers in Hollywood love him. He’s a nice guy, and he doesn’t make waves. That last part is important. Satan’s kids often take up for Christians who don’t make waves. If you actually accomplish anything, they go after you.

Pratt makes movies that endorse fornication. The characters aren’t Christians. God isn’t involved in the scripts.

Come on.

He’s a nice guy. A goodfella. A good old boy. Tamed and declawed.

I feel like the world is stuck, like a car that has run out of pavement and gotten stuck in mud. We seem to have reached the end of a journey. None of it seems to matter.

I don’t feel like attending to home repairs, yard work, or my other responsibilities. I don’t feel like planning. I don’t feel like watching our spending.

If the county had forced me to sell my house so it could be demolished, and I were outside waiting for someone to pick my family up and drive us to a new home, I wouldn’t run back inside and start painting the kitchen.

Maybe things will change, the rapture won’t come during my lifetime, and I’ll feel differently about the future. I hope not, though. It would be wonderful to be raptured and forget about this place.

I want to thank everyone who has expressed condolences in my comments, regarding my recent loss. It was very thoughtful.

I have been comforted by reminders that the living suffer more than the dead, except of course for the damned. For example, although I tend to remember my dad as a scary tyrant or the weak, prayer-loving old man he became, in reality, he is more like a god than a person now. He is younger than I am. That’s really something. He doesn’t wear glasses. His hair isn’t gray. He never gets sick. He never feels pain or sorrow. The greatest evil spirits there are can’t touch him or go anywhere near him.

Christian funerals used to be celebrations. Over time, pagan converts corrupted the church like Californians moving to Texas, and Christians started wearing black and focusing on the pain. I have to keep this in mind. I saw a recent video featuring Lester Sumrall, and he described moping over the deceased as feeling sorry for oneself. That sobered me up.

The condition of my heart will keep getting better, my blessed life will continue, and it won’t be long before I will be with God and all the dead people and creatures I have cared about, but for those who would not accept salvation. This life is but a vapor, as the word says. I am closer to heaven than high school, which seems very recent in my mind.

I will try not to be self-indulgent and make things worse than they are while my heart heals.

That’s a Wrap

It’s amazing how long it can take to do a simple job.

I bought a used Kubota ZD326 mower. I decided to adjust the rear anti-scalp wheels. This should take under two minutes. I am now weeks into it. They were seized to the deck by rust, due to Kubota’s stupid design. I had to drill one out, and I cut the other one off, along with its support, pushed it out with a hydraulic press, and welded the support back on the mower.

I also needed to replace a fender. Kubota’s plastic fenders break easily. My understanding is that they get brittle from sunlight, and the design is not strong to begin with. I applied a little pressure to a fender in order to make room so I could remove a fuel tank, and the fender split. Figuring I might as well have matching fenders, I ordered a fender for each side.

They arrived covered in bubble wrap. That seemed like a good idea, but when I tried to unwrap them, I learned that Kubota uses bubble wrap with glue on the back. This probably saves an enormous company a thousand dollars a decade in wages for cutting and applying two pieces of tape per fender.

The glue on my fenders was very strong. I had to pull very hard to get the bubble wrap loose. It took a long time because I was afraid I would break another fender if I wasn’t careful.

Great. Job finished. Right?

No.

The bubble wrap came off, but it left big spots of glue on the fenders.

I have a lot of respect for Kubota (still), so I thought maybe they used some new kind of glue that dissolved in water. I thought they might be that smart. I also thought no company could be stupid enough to ship a large, delicate product covered with glue that was hard to remove.

I tried a wet paper towel, and nothing happened.

In my experience, I have generally run into two kinds of glue. The water-soluble type, like the glue on the backs of stamps, and the kind that won’t come off without a solvent. When water didn’t work on my fenders, I started going through the solvent roster.

1. Alcohol. Worked very slowly, smearing the glue around over larger areas.

2. Goo-gone. About like alcohol. I didn’t try WD-40 or mineral spirits because they’re pretty similar to Goo-gone.

3. Acetone. Ate the plastic.

4. Lighter fluid. Better than 1,2, and 3, but not good.

5. Turpentine. This turned out to be the winner. It cut the glue quickly. I used it to clean both fenders, and then I cleaned them again, because when I did it the first time, the turpentine diluted the glue without getting all of it off. When I wiped a fender with turpentine, it cut the glue, but then the turpentine on the paper towel had glue in it, so you can see how that works.

Later on, a guy who works on Kubotas told me he used mild soap and water to take the bubble wrap off, and he says the whole process only takes him a few minutes. He claimed removing the bubble wrap was easy. Specifically, he mentioned fenders for a later model.

I don’t know what to say about that. Water was useless for me, so I had no reason to think soap and water would work. I would have used it if I had thought there was a chance, but I have removed all sorts of adhesive residue over the years, and not once have I seen a glue that dissolved well with soap and water yet resisted plain water.

As for removing the bubble wrap easily, my theory is that my fenders were hard to unwrap because the bubble wrap was old. My mower came out in 2007. The fenders I bought may have been sitting in hot warehouses for 15 years or more. A glue containing water would surely get thicker and harder over a period of years.

Before I used turpentine to finish the job, I used AI. I made it search the web, and when it failed, I made it do it over. It came up with stupid answers like vinegar. For some reason, everyone now thinks vinegar is a panacaea. It is recommended often for jobs it simply will not do. Maybe this has to do with the woke bias against chemicals that work. Better to waste your day trying to strip paint or kill roaches with vinegar than to use something Mother Gaia doesn’t like.

People also recommend Simple Green for a lot of jobs it won’t really do. I bought a gallon of it, and I found it nearly useless. The company has been sued by people claiming it’s not really good for the environment or human beings, and that’s pretty funny.

AI couldn’t find the correct answer, so you have to wonder how Kubota expected me to know it off the top of my head.

I still have the bubble wrap, and I am tempted to try removing the glue from a piece with soapy water.

I just tried it, and it seems to work. The soap makes a big difference.

By the time I was done with the bubble wrap, I had no appetite left for installing the fenders, so my wife and I went out to dinner.

At this point, I honestly wish I had bought a new $18,000 mower. My grass is a foot tall, and I still have at least 4 hours of unpleasant work in front of me, not including the time it takes primer and paint to dry, before I can mow.

After 18 years of collecting and using tools, I honestly thought I was capable of removing bubble wrap, but Kubota proved me wrong.

I find it remarkable that there is no readily-available information about this on the web. I searched. I made AI search. I made AI redo the search. It’s like no one has ever heard of sticky bubble wrap.

Now that I’ve written about it here, other people will be able to find the answer quickly.

I just wish a few other people had written about it before I did.

I Will Rule This Thing

Yesterday I moved one big step closer to having a working lawnmower.

The gauge wheel pins on my used Kubota ZD326 mower seized with light rust because Kubota made them too tight in their bare-steel bores. In a tight bore, even a tiny amount of rust will exert enormous internal pressure, to the point where a hydraulic press is required to fix it. This happened to me, or rather, it happened to the mower’s original owner, and I was stuck with the problem of fixing it.

The deck has two rear wheels, and they do not turn. The pins don’t move in the supports except when they are moved to adjust the height, and in a flat state like Florida, that may never happen. If they are moved often enough, presumably, the rust problem will be mitigated well enough to prevent seizing, but how often is often enough?

Kubota’s manual calls for zero maintenance of any kind on these pins, so you can do everything the manual says and still have the problem. It has also vexed many tractor owners, because some tractor decks have the same pins.

It’s a stupid and inexcusable bit of failed engineering, and 18 years after the mower was introduced, Kubota still hasn’t addressed it. The parts they sell for the affected decks have not changed, except that the plating on the pins is now inferior. They changed the assembly when they designed the next model, and they were definitely aware of it, because how could they not be?

I drilled one pin out, and it was a nightmare, so when I got to the other one, I cut its support off and put the whole thing in the hydraulic press.

Yesterday, I welded it back on the deck.

Welding was not fun.

One of the cardinal rules of welding is that you make yourself comfortable when you do it. If not, your hand may shake, you may have to change positions, and so on. You need to start with a comfortable positiong with good access and visibility.

In order to remove my deck, I have to turn the rear pins 90°. You can see the problem. The pins were locked. I couldn’t get the deck out without extraordinary exertions. Because the deck was on the mower, I couldn’t see well, access was poor, and I had to bend over in an uncomfortable position.

I got it done, sort of. I needed to replace 4 welds. I replaced three. The other one is under the mower, and I don’t want to flail at it blindly. What I have now is strong enough to allow me to remove the deck, improve the welds, and do the painting.

Not the prettiest welds on Earth, but in all likelihood, if I did nothing more, the mower would work just fine with three ugly beads until I died.

Look at that shoddy chrome. Nice work, Kubota.

I am trying to figure out how to prevent future seizures from happening. There are a few solutions.

1. Move the pins every single time I mow and several times during the season. The bore will never stop rusting, so the seizing process will start anew every time I get off the mower and move the pins. I don’t know how long it takes for the pins to seize, so moving them every week seems to be the only safe course. During the off season, I can take them out.

2. Slather the pins with anti-seize.

3. Reduce the diameter of the pins.

Moving the pins is not the answer. I’ll forget, for one thing. Even if I don’t, I may misjudge the necessary interval. Also, it’s a kludge, not a workmanlike solution.

Anti-seize is not the answer. Anti-seize is one of the messiest substances known to man. For some reason, it gets on everything. Worse than grease. I don’t want it all over me and my clothes every time I fool with the pins. It will also trap grit in the bores.

Now that I think about it, I have no reason to expect anti-seize to prevent corrosion. That isn’t exactly what it’s made for. Corrosion is what makes the rust form, and rust locks up the assemblies.

Trimming the pins is the way to go. On the lathe, it’s a sub-one-hour job. I happen to have a lot of copper sulfate, so I can plate the pins so the areas where I cut the chrome off will have some rust protection for cosmetic purposes. Later on, I can look into getting some zinc compound or other to put zinc on the pins.

Now I am looking for information on machining chromed parts. Chromium seems to be right up there with plutonium on the hazard scale. It causes cancer and other things. Chrome plating is very hard, too. So I need to cut through hard plating, or remove it and then cut the steel under it, without poisoning myself.

Removing it with acid would release gas and put chromium compounds into a solution I would have to dispose of, and grinding it off would create a breathable dust.

I think the best thing is to just throw it on the lathe and see what carbide does. The lathe will produce chips too big to inhale. One hopes.

Before I can use the mower or remove the deck, I have to replace the plastic fenders. They are brittle from exposure, and I broke one by applying slight pressure in just the wrong way. The fenders attach to the mower with screws, and the screws go into nylon inserts that push into square holes in the fenders. Incredibly, Kubota sells the fenders without the inserts.

Removing the old inserts from the original inserts is an interesting process. They have little projections that extend outward to anchor them behind the plastic. I got two out using a screwdriver to push the inserts in, and then I realized I could just put the fender fragments in a vise and crush the parts that held the inserts. The plastic explodes, and the inserts fall on the floor.

Some day, I will mow again. And I will know more about this mower than the people who built it. Except for little things like the engine and transmission. But who cares about those, right?

Sometimes it’s not You

I am celebrating because I finally got the right-hand rear anti-scalp wheel shaft out of my Kubota mower deck.

What a nightmare this has been.

The old guy who first owned the mower failed to grease the front deck wheels, so the guy who sold it to me had to struggle to get rusted parts out of the tubes that supported them. That was consumer error. He also failed to remove the rear shafts regularly and apply anti-seize, which was not something Kubota mentioned in the manual, and which was only necessary because Kubota’s engineers created a laughably bad design. That was not the owner’s fault.

The front wheels turn, and their supports have zerks and grease journals. Greasing and reasonably frequent mowing might have prevented them from seizing. The rear wheels do not turn. They sit for years or months in the same position. There are no zerks. There are no journals. If you never have to adjust your mower’s height, and you have this mower, you could end up with stuck shafts.

The rear shafts are just about exactly the same diameter as the interiors of the bores they occupy. This is called a slip fit or transitional fit, depending on how tight the bores originally were. A slip fit, also called a clearance fit, involves a shaft small enough to go in a hole very easily. A transitional fit is very precise but not so tight it requires pressure to assemble the parts. A bore can be pretty snug without becoming a transitional fit. I think. Let me repeat: I took a wrong turn and got a physics degree instead of an engineering degree.

I believe the difference between the OD and ID I’m dealing with is under 0.005″, or 1/200 of the shaft’s diameter.

The shafts are carbon steel plated with what appears to be cadmium. Cadmium was commonly used in years past to prevent rust. The interiors of the bores are plain old steel. You can see the problem here. The cadmium should slow (not prevent) shaft corrosion, but it does nothing to prevent the bores from rusting. It’s also fragile, so it wears off. Then you have steel on steel.

Can you tell I’ve done a lot of research?

If even one part in the assembly is bare steel, the engineering is stupid and doomed to fail in any environment where there are temperature swings and condensation.

The reason my shafts sealed is that water condensed on their upper ends and then seeped down between the shafts and bores. This wet the bores and caused rust. Rust takes up more room than the steel it replaces. In a tight bore, this means you get pressure. You get a rusty shaft and a rusty bore pressing against each other, because there is no room for the rust to expand.

The pressure can become immense. In my case, heat didn’t work, and neither did a sledge or a three-foot pipe wrench.

Often, shafts are pressed into tight bores without adhesives or threads. It is common to press a shaft into a bore with an inner diameter smaller than the shaft’s diameter. This is called an interference fit. Rust can turn a slip or transitional fit into an interference fit.

A deliberate interference fit is not usually a problem to work with. Engineers usually design them so pins or shafts can be hammered or pressed out without trouble. Kubota’s accidental interference fit is different. It is way tighter, because it’s the result of an engineer’s failure to plan, not his careful and competent planning.

I really struggled to remove my left shaft. I knew I could take the support and tube off the mower and use the hydraulic press, but I tried to avoid it. I thought it wouldn’t be all that hard with the support still on the mower. Boy, was I wrong. It took hours and hours of miserable work.

As for the left shaft, I got smart. I cut the support off the tractor today, and I put it on the old hydraulic press.

The support is a piece of folded sheet metal welded to the tube the shaft goes through. To use the press, I needed something to support the tube, and it had to fit with the folded metal in place. I resigned myself to making something from metal stock I had lying around. I was going to fire up the mill and/or lathe. Instead, I decided to set the support on an impact socket with the shaft inside the hex end.

This worked perfectly, except for the fact that the ratchet end of the socket was obstructed. If I had used a simple tube, I would have been able to push the shaft all the way through in one shot. As it was, I had to flip the support maybe 20 times.

Talk about seized. The first time the shaft moved, it went about 3/32″ and then acted like it wanted to stop. Not wanting to damage the socket, I started the flipping process. I applied penetrating oil. I cleaned the shaft off between flips. It really did not want to come out.

I don’t think a 12-ton press would have done the job. A sledge didn’t, and my 3-ton arbor press didn’t do a thing.

Eventually, the shaft moved a lot farther, and it loosened up to where the arbor press would push it. I moved to the arbor press, which is easier to use. After a few more flips, I put the support on a vise and used a hammer and punch. Before long, the shaft fell out.

I used a belt grinder and wire wheel to clean the shaft up, and I used sandpaper inside the support’s tube. Then I tried to put the shaft back in. There was still friction. That’s how bad Kubota’s design is.

My John Deere 430 has similar shafts that are very loose. They can’t seize. Because they’re loose, water runs out of the tubes, and they dry instead of accumulating rust. Because of the gaps, the rust would have to be unrealistically thick to make anything seize. Because the shafts rattle a little, the rust can’t grow. I don’t like the 430, but JD’s anti-scalp strategy is completely superior, and they were using it at least as far back as 1984.

Kubota was watching them. That’s what companies do to their competitors. They still didn’t fix their own design.

Here’s a photo of John Deere’s utterly superior and obvious design:

This may be the only time John Deere did something as well or better than Kubota.

The only real difference is the clearance, which Kubota could not figure out.

It just occurred to me that there may have been a patent problem. That is easier to believe than the alternative, which is that real engineers thought tight-fitting shafts were a good move.

I don’t see how you could patent not making wheel support shafts too tight. Surely that was figured out in the 1700’s. The web says there were working metal lathes in the first quarter of the 18th century, so it was possible to size holes and shafts accurately back then. People would have noticed that tight bores caused problems, because people are smarter than monkeys.

I keep going on about how Kubota blew it because when I’ve looked for help on the web, people have gotten really angry at me for saying engineers made a mistake. Engineers, in particular, have gotten mad and said crazy, emotional things.

They are STEM people, and a lot of STEM people 1) don’t really grow up, and 2) lack a sense of humor.

When I was a physics teaching assistant, I was hit in the face with the reality of the STEM personality. It wasn’t much of an issue when I was an undergrad, because I knew people in Miami outside of physics, but as a grad student, STEM people were just about all I had.

All my life, I have made friends quickly, but in a year and a half in a physics department, the only friend I made was my girlfriend. Absolutely NO ONE cared when I left. No one ever visited my apartment. I never saw the inside of any of their apartments. Weird.

I saw the inside of the house where one of my students lived, so maybe that shows they were more normal than my peers.

I migrated to law school, and once there, I was the life of the party. Never lacked for company. Saw other people’s homes. Woke up on another student’s floor because I was so drunk I couldn’t drive home, and I didn’t even know her well. Took people fishing many times. Joined organizations.

I made friends at both of my last churches. I have godchildren. My friends still come to visit, and I left my last church in 2015.

I have probably written about one of my favorite TA’s. His name was Ian. His students called him “Fridge.” He had no facial expressions. He wore exactly what you would expect: non-denim pants and a plaid short-sleeve button-down shirt. Chuck Taylors.

Fridge told me he had no furniture in his apartment. I asked him where he did his homework. He said he held a clipboard and leaned against a wall.

Fridge was very droll, but you wouldn’t want to be his friend.

Then there was Todd. He liked Asian women. A lot. He told me, “It’s not a fetish. It’s a PREFERENCE.” The big smile on his face as he said “preference” was not wholesome. He said it in kind of a breathy way.

He said he was going to move to Japan to teach English. He told me other things I didn’t want to know.

Then there was an obese guy named Rich. The king of the TA office. He tormented other people for no reason. He was obnoxious to me. I think he may have thought this was the way to make friends, like a boy who can’t make himself say he has a crush. He had been in the department for a while, and I never saw any indication that he was friends with anyone.

Come to think of it, I can’t recall ever seeing anyone in that office who was there for social reasons, except for my girlfriend. One TA was married, and I think his wife may have made an appearance. Or maybe he just mentioned her.

Rich had a locking bookshelf, and he kept stealing my head TA’s expensive books and putting them in it. Like he was pulling his pigtails, I guess.

I wasn’t the problem back at the physics department, believe me.

I think the University of Texas (my school) did a horrible job of cultivating new physicists. It seems like most of the people I knew ended up doing other things.

My head TA, Bill, whose idea of useful activity was going on Usenet and telling people they should have read the FAQ before posting, ended up working at a civil engineering firm with no Ph.D., after working hard as a postdoc on accretion disk theory. Another guy left to create video games while I was there. The guy who shared my TA office desk got a Ph.D. in EE in 1999, which is what I should have done. It looks like Fridge teaches physics to high school students, but I’m not sure it’s him.

Rich was considered extraordinarily able, but the web says he is “self-employed” now.

UT really tortured the physics students, undergrad and graduate. The professors were so bad, they generally couldn’t teach poop to stink. They did stupid things like giving the undergrad students lab experiments about topics they hadn’t covered yet. I could not believe it when my lab students told me. I had to do Professor Frommhold’s work for him, in a few minutes here and there.

I’ve written about the quantum professor who gave my class a homework problem he couldn’t solve. Also, UT used an E&M textbook that was famous for making students want to kill themselves. It’s not like there weren’t better books. Jackson’s E&M was more like a hazing tool than a teaching tool. “We suffered with it, so you will, too.”

Jackson didn’t actually explain anything, so he didn’t perform the only essential function of a teacher. He was an idiot. He didn’t teach, and then he followed up with extremely hard problems.

Everyone in my TA office had the ability to get a Ph.D. in physics, including me. I was not the dunce in the room. The guy who seemed slowest is now an experimental physicist. But UT’s way of caring for students was like Roundup’s way of caring for weeds. It was like we had sprung up uninvited, and they needed to get rid of us. Unbelievably stupid.

It’s odd how really smart STEM types are known for doing some things that are brilliant and other things that are incredibly dumb, habitually.

Why would you invest time and other resources on collecting students, find most of them abandoned the entire field because of you, and then continue doing things the same way?

It is possible to teach students physics without abusing them, regardless of what bitter old academics may say. The end product would be a lot more working physicists. I understand the importance of weeding out the weak, but UT also weeded out the strong.

Part of it comes back to the “smartest boy in class” syndrome. Many physics people have had proud moms who showed them off all the time and talked about how smart they were. This makes them crave attention for their intelligence, which partly explains why so many of them get bullied. It makes them annoying. The physical bullying is sometimes revenge for intellectual bullying.

If you can drive off a bunch of students by teaching poorly and making them suffer unduly, you can then go sit with your colleagues and talk about how much smarter you are than the students who left. But it’s not true. Brilliant people leave physics every day. A lot of them do it to preserve their sanity.

Man, I should have been an engineer. It’s much easier. It’s practical. It leads to better jobs. The potential for high income is much greater. The people may be weird, but I don’t think anyone is weirder than physicists. Even mathematicians seem more human.

It’s funny, because my professors at the University of Miami were generally great, except for one ancient, smirking bully named Harry Robertson. The statistical physics guru. He was so sadistic and ineffective, he caused a riot once. Undergrads threw together a furious protest because he failed a huge percentage of them, and I know for a fact that he could not teach. This was before protesting was considered acceptable.

There was no humanity in this man at all. Other people’s feelings and futures meant absolutely nothing to him. He taught my advanced mechanics class, and a bunch of us failed the first exam. We met with him. He showed up in bedroom slippers, he smirked a lot, looked down at his desk, showed us a rattleback toy without explaining it in order to make himself look smart and us stupid, dismissed our concerns as though we were claiming we needed masseurs in class, and left.

To excuse his behavior, he pointed to the one student in the class who was doing well. A Chicom. Thing is, that guy probably had tons of support from China and other Chicom students.

If you think about it, it’s amazing that a statistics expert could claim a large group of students could slip by other instructors for years and then suddenly be exposed as morons by one professor. And that he could claim it had happened more than once. The undergrads he tormented would have numbered in three figures. So suddenly, UM admitted a hundred or more imbeciles, but it hadn’t happened the previous year, and it didn’t happen the next year. Okay, Harry.

Apart from Harry, who intentionally made things very hard for students and then blamed them, my profs at UM were exemplary instructors. I loved their classes. Same for my math and comp. sci. profs. For that matter, I had good instructors in the philosophy and literature courses I was forced to take. My UM instructors were generally much more effective than the instructors I had at Columbia University, now that I think about it.

Physics and math are beautiful and very enjoyable, they can be taught clearly and painlessly, and they deserve good instructors. Not guys who are still trying to get even with young people for being cruel to them in high school.

As for the mower, now I have to clean the parts up, removing burrs and oils, not to mention paint that could get in the way, and I have to weld the support back on the mower. Should be a one-hour job. Then I will apply primer and paint to the affected areas. After that, I should be able to put all my new parts on the mower and forget this problem ever happened.

I did not want to cut the deck up. It somehow seemed risky and almost presumptuous, although it was neither. The support is just a piece of sheet steel, like any other. It’s not like I’m cutting the fender off a Bentley.

There is a Youtube guy named Jimmy Diresta, and he makes all kinds of things. He welded some casters on a project. Usually, you use screws and nuts to attach casters. Using a welder seemed bold. He said, “I am the god of this thing.” He meant that if his welds turned out to be problematic, it didn’t matter, because he could do whatever was needed to fix it.

I would not call myself the god of anything, but I always think of him when I make what seems to be a bold use of tools. I can change it, so who cares? I have welded casters on a bunch of things, and I learned he had the right idea. Welding is better.

When you use screws, if you’re any kind of craftsman, you spend a lot of time locating the holes correctly. You use a punch to make dimples for the drill. Then you have to screw the casters on, using 8 washers, 4 screws, and 4 nuts per caster. With the welder, you just slap magnets down to hold the casters and let her rip. Then you get a cleaner project with casters that can’t fall off.

I can weld the support back on just as well as Kubota. I can make a new support. I can make a new tube. A new shaft. It’s silly to be intimidated.

I am really looking forward to mowing. I think it has been three weeks. I can’t stand the thought of giving up and using the John Deere, which I haven’t sold yet. The Kubota is a dream to use. Way faster. Better cut. Excellent mulching. I get a nice breeze because I sit in front. I don’t worry about breakdowns the way I did with the John Deere. It also holds lots of fuel, so I don’t have to fill it as often.

Nobody wants to be demoted after a big promotion.

As for the engineers who got mad at me, and the ones who claim most bad engineering is forced on engineers by people in management, accounting, marketing, and sales, I have an amazing story.

When the first Corvettes (plastic-bodied cars) were rolled out, they would not start. They had to be pushed out of the factory. Why? The batteries had been grounded to fiberglass.

Darn those accountants and marketers.

Engineers designed the Hindenburg.

No Wonder God Laughs

Am I the only one mystified by the AI boom? What is the purpose of making AI available to everyone who has a computer, free of charge? Why are they giving it to us for nothing? Where is the money coming from?

Google provides very annoying AI blurbs to every person who uses the search engine, without being asked. Many people look for ways to make this stop. The “feature” is called “AI Overview,” as you surely know. In addition to facts, it delivers erroneous woke lectures no one asked for. It is programmed to shame people who are correct.

It is clearly an effort to indoctrinate and pull people away from capitalism, common sense, and Christianity. We all know the Google kids are far-left social engineers who are against Yeshua; that is not news. But when did they become so militant they were willing to invest billions in a brainwashing feature that doesn’t seem to bring in money?

Why did it even occur to them to include lectures on morals and behavior? It’s very obvious that a person searching for a dry cleaner or a good hotel doesn’t want lectures written by fringe kooks.

Imagine if encyclopedias had done this. Your curious child looks up spider monkeys and gets an article shaming everyone who ever bought a product that came from a rain forest. No one would have bought them, and a set would have weighed 300 pounds.

AI is extremely expensive to produce. You probably know that “data centers” are popping up all over the US. I don’t know about the rest of the world. These are huge facilities full of computers hooked to the web. They consume gigantic amounts of electricity, and I have read they also need a lot of water. Who pays?

I’m not paying. I use Grok, ChatGPT, and Google AI (the one you actually request), and I have never paid a cent. The money must be coming from somewhere.

I suppose I should ask AI.

After a lot of babbling, Grok says:

In short, you’re not paying because companies prioritize growth over immediate per-user revenue, subsidizing free tiers through investors and high-value customers. If you exceed limits or need advanced features, that’s when payment kicks in. This model has fueled AI’s rapid spread but raises questions about long-term sustainability amid rising energy demands.

Grok also says businesses will pay for AI, subsidizing the rest of us. It says that for now, the money comes mainly from existing tech companies and investors.

By the way, you can fix your browser so you don’t see AI Overview. It’s like physically ejecting an angry, demented hippie from your living room.

Interesting fact: Google just reduced the frequency of AI Overview intrusions due to consumer annoyance. People don’t like being scolded. Wow. Who could have foreseen that?

The data centers I’ve seen in photos look like enormous, out-of-place warts on the landscape. They remind me of the machine-built structures we saw in the Matrix movies. They also remind me of hostile spaceships I’ve seen in movies about alien invasions. They seem threatening. Their presence announces the arrival of their age and proclaims that they will eventually cover a lot of the earth’s surface.

Basically, they tell me humanity’s ludicrous, pathological efforts to create shared omniscience will increase and become extremely oppressive.

I believe I’ve received revelation about technology.

To begin with, Satan has no Holy Spirit. Unlike God, he is neither omniscient nor omnipresent. Through the Holy Spirit, God can broadcast all sorts of things to all Christians. He fills us with information. He debunks disinformation. He gives us the gifts and fruit of the Spirit: wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, miracles, prophecy, discerning of spirits, tongues, interpretation, love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, goodness, humility, and self-control.

Most people who call themselves Christian don’t get much of this. Most churches reject the Holy Spirit. It’s all available, though. God hasn’t changed.

If Satan wants to copy the Holy Spirit for evil, he has to rely on agents that are sent. Little spirits and people. He can also use things like the printed word, video, and audio.

Through technology, Satan has been building his counterfeit Holy Spirit. He uses phones and the web to indoctrinate, slander, curse, tempt, instigate, and so on. Electronic connectivity has been very helpful to Satan in his efforts to corrupt us and harm us.

Consumer-level AI is a big leap forward in Satan’s efforts to control our minds and emotions. It can disseminate Satan’s wokeness around the clock, even to people who have no interest in it. It can generate the illusion of a reasoned consensus that is actually a tapestry of lies and distortions intended to make people reject holiness and God and rely on machinery and other people’s apish conceits.

We copy the Internet slavishly. We get our slang, which is a powerful indicator of whom we follow, from the Internet. We follow disgusting people just because other people follow them. We buy things people recommend on the web. We migrate to and away from Internet platforms along with the herd. As AI does its work, our beliefs will become more and more homogeneous. The Internet will play the tune, and the world will dance, like Orwell’s Proles, exercising in front of their telescreens.

Technology helps fill us with demons. We can get porn free of charge around the clock now, and it gives demons the power to enter us. We get types of porn other than sexual porn. We get cruelty porn. Violence porn. Pride porn. Covetousness porn. We get secular entertainment which seems harmless yet fills us with demons. Even the news helps them get in.

Smith Wigglesworth said this about newspapers: “If I read the newspaper I come out dirtier than I went in. If I read my Bible, I come out cleaner than I went in, and I like being clean!”

That is still true today. Think of all the lies we’ve been told.

Reagan didn’t do anything for AIDS sufferers. AIDS is a big problem for heterosexuals. Tawana Brawley was raped by white cops. George W. Bush, not local politicians, was the reason for Louisiana’s poor response to Katrina. George W. Bush invaded Iraq to take the oil. There were never any weapons of mass destruction. Iraq never had enough uranium ore to create weapons. Polar bears (aquatic) are drowning because the ice is melting. Oil is running out. Ethanol is good for the environment. Paper bags are better for the environment than plastic. Obamacare will save you money. George Zimmerman is a murderer. Michael Brown was a good boy who didn’t attack the police. Antifa doesn’t exist. Donald Trump is in cahoots with Russia. Donald Trump defrauded banks. Kyle Rittenhouse is a murderer. Donald Trump is an antisemite. Joe Biden isn’t demented. Joe Biden is sharper than ever. Donald Trump is demented. Joe Biden never discussed his son’s business or met his contacts. Voter fraud is rare. Homosexuals don’t prey on teenaged boys. Transvestites are women. There is a famine in Gaza. Israel, not Hamas looting, is the reason some people can’t get food. Gazans are innocent victims of Hamas. Israel targets hospitals.

The Holy Spirit tells everyone the exact same things. There are no opinions in heaven. There is only the truth. God has no opinions. Through the Holy Spirit, he fills his people with truth. He is against the ridiculous notion of “healthy debate.” Where there is debate, someone is wrong. God is righteous, which simply means he is always right. Because he wants us to be righteous (in one accord with him and each other), he tells us the same things.

Satan is somewhat different. He doesn’t always tell people the same things. He creates Christian denominations that disagree, along with other religions. He tells some people to be atheists. He gives people differing and conflicting believes and urges. At bottom, though, he is consistent in that he always tells people things that bring disunity and pull them away from the Holy Spirit.

AI has started behaving like a god you can talk to. I think everyone has thought about talking to God and getting answers on demand. This is something we crave. We love seeing people do it in movies. With AI, now you can get answers to all sorts of questions, very quickly.

Yesterday, I asked a question about a brewing machine I bought, and AI gave me a brilliant, long, detailed answer that could have been written by an expert brewer. It read as though a human being with a personality had written it. It took a few seconds.

AI generates wrong answers all the time, but it also generates excellent answers that would take human beings hours or days to create.

It is trying to simulate omniscience.

By simulating omniscience and a global consensus, AI is applying the main tool of the spirit of antichrist: peer pressure. Satan works through the voice of the crowd. We are supposed to look up for guidance, not to the side. By preaching wokeness to billions simultaneously, Satan is creating an astroturf consensus that will drag people into its wake. We are herd creatures, and Satan uses that to destroy us.

To belong to God, you have to be willing to be unpopular on Earth. This isn’t my opinion. It’s God’s truth. He said it himself.

AI is being used to take people who don’t know the Holy Spirit and merge them into a shoddy replica of a global consciousness. Like Star Trek’s Borg. The data centers are like big nerve clusters that generate and disseminate the thoughts, emotions, and desires new generations are generally going to adopt.

I don’t know if you will own nothing and eat bugs in the future, but thanks to technology, you are very likely to be even more of a conformist than you are now. People who will read this will generally be against God, and such people will be obsessed with fitting in and being popular.

If you think human beings can fix the world, you disagree with God.

I don’t understand people who crave popularity, but apparently, it is one of humanity’s strongest drives. I saw an old video of high school students a day or two back, and when they asked kids what they were most afraid of, they mentioned not fitting in. That amazed me. How can that be anyone’s biggest fear? It’s sick.

If you have to be afraid, be afraid of God. Failing that, pandemics. Nuclear war. Car wrecks. Death. Disease. Poverty. Heights. Clowns. Being afraid you won’t be popular is evil, and it says there is something badly wrong with you. You have no moral anchor.

Everyone has a certain amount of desire to be accepted, but it shouldn’t be the center of your being. I don’t want to know people like that. They are disgusting, not to mention dangerous. They will always side with the crowd against its victims. They turn on people they claim to love. They are born liars and traitors. They’re like the kids who turned their parents in to Hitler, Stalin, and Castro.

I suppose this explains the “likes” craze. People will do things for worthless likes which they would not do for their own children.

Leftists are promoting the creation of a huge communal human organism. We are all supposed to be part of it, sharing the same beliefs and drives, working together to achieve left-wing goals created through central planning. It’s inexcusably naive. It’s practically psychotic.

I don’t want to be part of the communal organism. You can’t be part of the communal organism and also be part of God’s family. The communal organism will always pit you against Yeshua, and you owe him complete loyalty.

It will be interesting to see what happens as the data center plague covers more and more of the earth. Human individuality appears to be on the way out.

Time to Inventory the Chemicals

My son keeps surprising me.

Last week, if memory serves, I started whistling to him. They say you need to stimulate babies’ brains, so I make an effort, as does his mother.

A couple of days ago, she told me he was whistling. I didn’t pay much attention. I had a lot on my mind. Today I saw him do it. He looked me right in the face and whistled on purpose.

It wasn’t great whistling, but it was whistling, and it was deliberate.

This morning, my wife called me to come to the bedroom. I went to the door and asked her what she wanted. She told me to look down. My son was on the floor by the doorway. I hadn’t even seen him; I could have stepped on him. I expected him to be on the other side of the room with his mother.

He had crawled about 15 feet from my wife’s recliner. He drops out of her lap on purpose, onto his feet. He can’t stay on his feet, and his crawling form is not very good, but he took off anyway.

A short time ago, she called me again and had me look at what she referred to as “the scene of the crime.” He was on the floor on his back, in front of our dresser, with a knob lying next to him. He had somehow unscrewed a knob from a drawer. Now we have to take measures to keep him from eating drawer knobs.

I put him on the bed and sat him up. He can sit up just fine now. I put the TV remote about a foot and a half away from him. He flopped on his belly, grabbed the remote, rolled back into a sitting position, and started trying to eat it. As of around three weeks or a month back, he hated being on his stomach. Now he doesn’t care.

He has an exercise mat he lies on. At the foot end, there is a plastic keyboard with 5 or 6 keys that look like piano keys. They make sounds and play annoying songs. Until recently, he had banged on the keys randomly, without seeming to realize what they did. Now he is kicking them on purpose in order to hear the sounds. He kicks them randomly, too, though.

He tried to imitate a word yesterday. We took him to Costco last week, and he sat in the cart like a toddler. He has a high chair, and he sits in it for long periods.

He had a checkup today. The nurse said he was way ahead on everything. We don’t know much about these things. We haven’t raised any other kids. We have to look them up.

She was impressed with things he had been doing for months. She thought he had just started doing them. She said he had great core strength. I could have told her that. He has been like a two-by-six since he was maybe two months old.

He may turn out to be extremely intelligent. If so, he is going to need some guidance. He will need help dealing with other kids, because he will find taking to normal children frustrating. He will eventually need to know some kids who are like him. He will have to be taught humility and gratitude so he doesn’t get on the other kids’ nerves and spend most of his childhood stuffed in lockers. He will need to know that brains are nothing to be proud of, and that they don’t make him better than anyone else.

It’s good that he’s so strong. Being a smart kid is no fun if you’re weak.

You shouldn’t be proud of anything, and that goes double for things that were handed to you without regard to effort or merit.

It would be great if he were very smart, but the important things are humility and a good relationship with the Holy Spirit.

His first word must be right around the corner. That will be legitimately spooky.

The Long View Must Prevail

A thoughtful reader asked whether it was possible I was depressed. The answer is yes, and I appreciate the question, which helped me consider the issue.

I was completely miserable during the last two days. My friend Marvin was dead, my faith was under attack, and a loving member of my household, with whom I had interacted nearly every day for 29 years, was gone, leaving a gaping hole, like a crater where the living room once was.

Something I had dreaded and dreamed about for years, which I had fought as hard as I could, had happened. My emotions were drowning me.

It made me think about Job. All the children he had hugged and loved as babies, and for whom he made daily sacrifices, had died in a moment, and his body had broken out in boils. He said, “the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me.” Although his misfortune was much greater than mine, I think I understand the nature of what he felt. I don’t think he was talking about the boils. He wanted to save his children.

I am not habitually depressed, though. That hasn’t happened to me since the ordeal I went through as a graduate student, when I was away from God and pumped full of ADD drugs, socially isolated and watching my dream slip away from me despite my best efforts. That was almost 30 years ago.

I have sometimes said I was depressed by proxy, however.

I have a great life. My relationship with God lifts me up above the turmoil, worry, and failure that are inundating most people. I know I’m saved. God answers my prayers over and over. I have a wonderful wife and son. My health is good. I don’t have to work. I live in an area full of warm, kind Christian people.

On the other hand, I see the world collapsing around me. Satan won the popularity contest, and even in formerly-Christian countries, people are turning to Satan in droves. Here in America, our culture is hateful and nauseating compared to the culture of 2000, and the farther back you go for comparison, the worse 2025 looks. In videos about the 1940’s, people who were considered normal then seem like those who are considered religious freaks today.

I can’t help people. Not many, anyway. No matter how good things get for me, I can’t get other people to listen to my testimony and give the Holy Spirit a try. I have to sit back and watch them destroy themselves needlessly. I know it won’t change to the point where the tide goes the other way.

I coined the term “depression by proxy” to describe this situation. Depressed people have no hope for themselves. I have no hope for the world.

God clearly agrees with me about the world. He told us the tribulation was coming. He didn’t say it might come. It will happen.

I would be much happier if I were not surrounded by people who are doomed, but I am not depressed. Not ordinarily. I was depressed this week, and I was depressed when my other bird died, but these were brief intervals. I haven’t gotten depressed when human beings died.

One mark of depression is predicting your own future irrationally. I have been doing this to some extent. I predicted that I would be stuck here for the rest of my life, watching other people crash and burn, and I thought it would be very hard to bear. Now I am leveling off. I realize my prediction about other people was correct, but I also know God will not allow me to be miserable on a chronic basis. Depression is the opposite of joy, and the Holy Spirit provides joy. It is named as one of the fruit of the Spirit. I feel it today. It displaces grief.

I don’t feel great, but today is much better than yesterday, and things will get better as God supplies me.

My Boys Went on Ahead

Today I took a box out of my spare refrigerator, took it to an animal hospital that does cremation, and said goodbye to my little friend Marvin. I did not open the box. I have also thrown out nearly everything that had anything to do with her or my other deceased bird, Maynard. I don’t want that stuff around me. I threw out food. I threw out vet bills. I deleted emails from vets. I didn’t keep their bells or toys. Just photos and videos, as well as a few old feathers.

The hospital says Marvin will be part of a communal cremation, and then the remains will be scattered on a horse farm. I hope that is true. I can’t say it actually matters, because Marvin is not in that body.

I have lost other pets, but losing a parrot is worse. A dog is likely to be with you a dozen years. You expect a dog to die after a short time. Marvin was nearly 29 when he died, and Maynard was 30, and they were fairly young. To say I was used to having them around is an understatement. I expected them to outlive me. I felt as though they would always be there, like the walls or the floor.

My habit is to greet Marvin by exclaiming “MARV!” as I come in the door. I used to greet both birds. Now I walk in the door, and I realize no one is there, and no one will ever be there again. The greeting sticks in my throat. I keep walking.

Last night I got up to use the bathroom. To avoid disturbing the baby, I like to leave the bedroom and walk past the kitchen. I always say something to Marv along the way. Not any more.

We went to a fried chicken joint today. Usually, we ask for containers for scraps for Marvin, which he loved. Not today.

For the first time since early 1991, parrots have absolutely nothing to do with my life. That is so strange. I have old books on parrots. I belong to parrot forums. I’m used to thinking a lot about parrot food, toys, and cage upgrades. Instantly and forever, that ended.

It’s like losing a hand. You feel you can look over and see it whenever you want, but it’s not there, and it will never be there again.

A life without parrots.

I was going to take Marvin’s cage to the dump. I gave away my other cage after Maynard died. I started feeling guilty about throwing out Marvin’s cage, so I put it on Craigslist in the Free Stuff area. I thought there might be some little bird out there whose owner could not afford a decent cage.

I got emails right away. When I asked the senders what kind of birds they had, they had nothing to say. I asked because I didn’t want scammers to take the cage and then try to sell it at thrift shops or on Facebook. Three senders didn’t answer, and one admitted he wanted to flip the cage.

Of course, none of the senders admitted they didn’t have birds up front. The whole business made me feel very bad. I didn’t need to have people try to take advantage of me on this particular day.

Now, for the next two days, I am stuck with a cage I will probably have to take to the dump. I can’t get rid of it until Wednesday. Maybe someone who actually has a bird will get in touch.

As for me, I do not feel good at all.

My faith has been attacked. I stood on the word of God, and then Marvin died. I felt faith when I prayed for her, and it didn’t work. I have been talking to God, asking him to help me know what’s real and what isn’t. My wife and baby son depend on my relationship with God. It has to be sound.

I am more tired of death than ever. I can get new pets and meet new people, but I will still see more deaths, so it’s an imperfect solution.

I would say I want death for myself, to get me out of this world, but that’s not true. I don’t want to die, and I would never, ever harm myself. I just want to leave. I wish Yeshua would come get us. I want to move to a place where things that go well. A place less like Omaha Beach.

Today in one short car trip, I saw sick people and crippled people. I saw poor people who clearly didn’t have it together. I kept thinking about how much suffering there was in the world, how little I could do about it, and how I was going to keep seeing it. I know what I’m in for. I could conceivably live another 30 years, and the world will be as it is now or worse. Will I ever be able to do anything real for people? I keep asking God to use me to heal people. I would love to heal people’s children and even their pets, so they would know this world doesn’t have to win. I sound like Holden Caulfield.

I am blessed, but those around me keep dropping. Being blessed is wonderful, but if you live among people who suffer horrible fates, it’s natural to want to be somewhere else where things are different.

God has said, “A thousand shall fall at thy side and ten thousand at thy right hand, but it shall not come nigh thee; only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the wicked.” Sounds wonderful at first glance, but who wants to see other people destroyed over and over?

If it were not for my wife and son, I would be glad to leave this minute. My family is my only reason for choosing life.

When my dad was alive and I was single, I wanted to see him saved, and I wanted my pets to be taken care of. Other than that, I was happy to leave whenever God called me. Now my dad is dead and in heaven, and my pets are presumably with him. But I am still attached to this miserable planet by my family. I have to watch out for them. I have to prepare them. They are surrounded by enemies, natural and supernatural. They are swimming in a sea of lies. Abandoning them is not something that could ever be on the table.

I hope my friends and relatives do well on Earth, but I would not stay here just for them. Maybe that’s a flaw. I care more about my wife and baby.

I’ve also thought a great deal about what a bad person I’ve been and how I’ve let my loved ones and pets down. I don’t like thinking about it, but correction is like free money. I won’t turn it down. I wish I had done less evil.

I will surely feel better as time passes, but I don’t think the weariness will ever leave me. The future of this world is dim. I don’t expect the constant flow of bad news for humanity to stop or even stop accelerating.

I don’t think I’ll have much reason to mention my birds in the future.

“Marvelous” is Long for “Marv”

My sweet little buddy Marvin just left us. It was around 3:15. I had just put him in the car to take him back to the animal hospital. He was one day short of his 29th birthday.

This is something I have always dreaded. I have had many dreams about it. Now I don’t have to worry about that any more.

He was the funniest bird ever. He had incredible empathy. He read my moods. He adored me. He was far better to me than I could ever have been to him.

I didn’t deserve Marvin. This is for the best. Parrots were not created to be pets. They live too long. They’re too smart. They love too intensely. It’s better that my little friend is with Yeshua. I wish I could be there, too. I am so sick of death. I am sick of watching people destroy themselves and not being able to get them to listen to me when I try to help them. I wish Yeshua would come get us.

I don’t think Marv suffered much. He never seemed to be in pain. Even today, when he was declining, he wasn’t sad.

I may have caused this. Bad diet, maybe. Not enough sun. It’s impossible to know.

I will never have another parrot again. I don’t want the guilt of buying a pet that needs more care than I can give and which will probably outlive me. The only exception I would make would be for a rescue bird that needs a lifeline.

I wish little Doug could have known Marvin. He should have inherited him.

I call Marvin “he,” but he laid an egg when he was 26. I could never get used to “she,” and Marvin didn’t care.

I must have kissed him ten thousand times. I blessed him every morning and every night. I rubbed him all the time and told him not to worry. I held him to my face and thanked him for being here.

Yesterday he was not so sick. I took him out to weigh him and hand-feed him, and although he was weak, he refused to get off my hand. I blessed him and kissed him and thanked him again and again for being here; being mine. I asked him to stay a little longer.

I talk to him all the time instead of talking to myself. Sometimes I find myself doing it out in the yard, where he can’t hear me. I’ll have to stop now.

Thank you God, for all my undeserved blessings. Thank you for rescuing my baby bird from this horrible world. I can’t wait to be with him again, along with Maynard and all the people I know who died in Christ.

His toys, possessions, food, and medicines are on the way to the dump. I don’t want to see them. I will get rid of his cage as soon as I can.

I have contacted someone about communal cremation. I can’t bury him here. It would kill me to walk past the grave over and over. I don’t want to see his ashes. They will be scattered on a horse farm.

It doesn’t matter. He won’t be there. He is already in heaven, where he belonged from the start.

If You Don’t Want Roaches, Take the Trash Out

Derek Prince was an extraordinary preacher. He died in 2003, and I still learn things from him.

Yesterday, I saw one of his videos, and I learned that Yeshua never called Satan “the god of this world.” I didn’t learn that directly from the video. In the video, Prince said Paul (not Yeshua) had called Satan the god of this age, not the god of this world.

People like me believe that God has broken history into distinct ages. I don’t claim to belong to any particular recognized brand of Christianity, but I would say I could be considered a dispensationalist. It appears that the history of humanity, prior to the return of Yeshua, is like a week of thousand-year “days.”

Abraham existed around 4,000 years ago, and it looks like that was the start of the age of the Jews. They were God’s main representatives on Earth. Then came Yeshua, and that began the age of the Gentiles. After this age ends, we get a thousand-year Messianic Age, during which Yeshua is present on the earth in the flesh and rules as king.

God likes the number 7, and it appears to be associated with completeness. Seven days per week. Seven millennia for humanity. Seven Spirits of God. The seventh millennium will be a long sabbath, like the seventh day of every week.

Eight seems to be associated with new beginnings. Jewish boys are circumcised on the eighth day. God saved 8 people during the flood to repopulate the world.

In 2 Corinthians 4:3-4, the King James Version says:

But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost:

In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.

This is not correct. The Greek calls Satan “the god of this age.”

Yeshua himself called Satan “the prince of this world,” not the god.

There is some debate as to whether “god of this age” refers to Satan or Yeshua, but I think it’s safe to say it has to be Satan, because Yeshua is the God of all ages. It would be odd to call him the god of a particular age.

The Greek version of 2 Corinthians 4:4 makes more sense than the English translation. Satan won’t be in power forever. He’s an upstart, and he has to be slapped down eventually.

I believe the two millennia since the crucifixion have been the Age of the Gentiles. During this time, God revealed himself to billions of Gentiles through Christianity. Most Jews were expelled from Israel, the temple was destroyed, the Jews were dispersed, and mainstream Jews haven’t accomplished much of anything in the way of spreading the knowledge of God since before Yeshua. Meanwhile, the handful of Jews who accepted Yeshua and the baptism with the Holy Spirit evangelized millions, and Gentiles who believed them evangelized the world.

I complain to God a lot about this age. Humanity has become like a rotting trash heap. We give power and praise to astoundingly filthy people. This, in formerly Christian countries. We think abomination is good. All fornication is abomination, not just homosexual acts. Cross-dressing, idolatry and witchcraft are abomination. Pride and swindling are abomination. So is oppressing the poor. We are now solidly in favor of most of these things.

Increasingly, we are convinced we can solve all our own problems. We are like the college kids who keep telling us socialism will work if we just do it right. We never learn. We want all the blessings life has to offer, but we want them on our own terms, not God’s. We want sexual sin and pride. We want idolatry and drugs. We want to make up our own rules.

I believe the principle of rapturing doesn’t just apply to the rapture. It’s really just holiness. “But know that the Lord hath set apart him that is godly for himself,” as Psalm 4 says. When God lifts the people who love him off the earth and leaves the rest behind, he will be pulling that which is holy away from that which belongs to Satan.

When God tells you to give up secular entertainment, rapturing you away from it, he is making you holy. When he helps you to hate pride and love humility, he is making you holy. When he helps you spend hours praying in tongues, he is making you holy. He is preparing you for the big jump.

This process also brings you blessings and protection. It puts you inside God’s hedge with him. The word says, “Whosoever breaks a hedge, a serpent shall bite him.”

There is a wall or hedge around you right now. You’re inside with God and humility or Satan and pride. If you’re with Satan, through rebellion and pride, more bad things will happen to you, and you will miss out on blessings. Things that may seem harmless, like listening to secular music or watching movies, can put you inside the wrong hedge.

I think clinging to worldly culture causes things like cancer, dementia, poverty, miscarriage, birth defects, accidents, attacks from criminals, and just about every other type of misfortune. We tend to think bad things should only happen to those who do things like murder, rape, and theft, but there is no Biblical basis for that idea. I think showing your kids Disney videos or watching filthy Hollywood shows and movies will suffice to attract harm.

When Job wondered why his family had been killed and his body had been disabled by disease, he named all the harmful things he had not done. He included looking at young women. Sounds harmless to us, but Job apparently understood that it was dangerous. Try and sit through a week of TV without seeing a woman dressed like a whore.

Job wasn’t ignorant. He lived for hundreds of years. He knew things we don’t know. If staring at young women was dangerous, what about all the other things we consider normal?

At my last two churches, they played secular music to convince the kids Yeshua and church were cool. I wonder how much damage they did. I remember seeing the old fool Steve Munsey dance to Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” on the stage at Trinity Church in Miami. That song is about a woman who had sex with a man in order to get him to marry her. It’s about abomination. Nobody in the Trinity hierarchy heard from the Holy Spirit, so they saw nothing wrong with Munsey’s antics.

This is normal in 2025.

I have found that the more God renews my heart and helps me feel love and empathy, the more I hate this age. I hate the suffering and failure. It makes me wonder how God, who is love itself, can stand it.

We harden ourselves and make ourselves get used to the suffering of those around us. I don’t think God wanted us to do that, but it’s a normal survival skill. We laugh at things that would have brought our grandparents to tears. I’m a huge offender. I made a deliberate effort to cultivate that type of sense of humor. I didn’t think it mattered to God.

I often pray for God to show my family evil. For example, I ask him to show us the worthless people around us, and I ask him to rid us of them permanently. It seems like he has come through. Lately, I have been asking him to show us the Spirit-led people around us, so all the exposure to the others won’t destroy our morale.

People in formerly-Christian nations are pursuing curses now, like never before. We get more and more loathsome. I find it oppressive now. I keep asking God to come now and rule.

John, who was closer to Yeshua than anyone, said this at the end of the Bible: “He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.”

He was talking about the end of this age, which the Revelation describes. It’s about the decline of man, the rapture, the tribulation, the millennium, the battle at the end, and the New Jerusalem. He was telling us Yeshua had said surely, he was coming quickly. Just like me, John said, “So be it. Even so [quickly], come Lord Jesus.” John was sick of this place, too.

I have about had it with this place. I want the rapture to happen now. Today. This minute. Barring that, I have to stay as close to God as possible, because that is the only way to have the blessings, protection, and strength to tolerate this place. It’s like living in a big building with adults who run around smearing poop on the walls and furniture. Enough.

Marvin has had some ups and downs with his medical situation. He got worse a day or two ago, so I had to drive him to a hospital in Orlando. His condition has been a very unpleasant ordeal for me. It has gone on for two weeks.

I prayed on the road in both directions. I was thinking about how miserable this world is and how I still had to stay here for a while. I was trying to have faith for Marvin’s recovery.

I got stuck in a traffic jam on I-75, and I found myself behind a semi. In the dirt on the back of the trailer, someone had written, “Bee [sic] the good. You are ENOUGH! Don’t quit. Pray for my Aunts Susan + Shelly. It’s gonna be okay Love God.”

Cars and trucks were shifting positions, but this truck kept ending up directly in front of me. I had to sit behind it.

It made me think of Belshazzar’s feast. Belshazzar and his pagan buddies were in Babylon, getting drunk using the sacred vessels of God’s temple, and a finger appeared and wrote, “You have been weighed and found lacking.” As my wife put it the other day, “not enough.”

The writing on the truck used the same word. “You are enough.” I took it to mean that though I was not very good, I was doing well enough to get God’s help and make it in the rapture.

I found that and the assurance that things were going to be okay very comforting. I prayed for Aunt Shelly and Aunt Susan, and my wife and I prayed for them again last night.

What Belshazzar went through was like the rapture and tribulation. God’s protection left him suddenly, and he was destroyed.

Today Marv is doing better. I got a call this morning. He’s on a better antibiotic, and he has capable people looking after him. I am planning to move him to UF as soon as he seems strong.

I don’t know when the rapture will come, but the way the walls are closing in, it can’t come fast enough to suit me.

Curb Your White Knight Privilege

It has been a trying month, but things have gotten a lot better.

It looks like I accidentally poisoned Marv, my African grey. He appeared to be at death’s door twice. He spent two nights in the hospital. Over the last week or so, he has consistently gotten stronger and feistier, however.

Yesterday, I heard him fall off the perch. This is not all that unusual for greys even when they are well. They get overly ambitious when they climb. Marv became very weak and wobbly after he was poisoned, however, and it is wearing off slowly. I think this made him fall.

It’s not a big deal when a parrot falls off a perch. Because volume and weight increase with the cube of linear measurements, and strength increases with the square, small animals weigh a lot less for their size than animals with greater linear dimensions. For example, a horse that is two times the size of a pony will weigh eight times as much. Weight is most of what determines how dangerous a fall is, so small animals can fall from great heights without harm. You can throw a mouse off a tall building without hurting it, and a man can survive a fall that would kill a horse. A short fall won’t usually mean much to a parrot.

Still, a parrot can get banged up in a fall if he does it just right. I have seen Marv with little bruises and even black eyes over the years.

During the afternoon, I saw a bulge on Marv’s neck, and I had no idea what it was. I Googled, and my best guess was that it was an air sac rupture. Air sacs are weird cavities in birds’ bodies that connect to their lungs. An air sac rupture is not always a serious injury, and they usually heal on their own, but web sources suggested it was worth a vet visit, so we left the house at about 7:30 p.m. and got back at about 2:30.

Bottom line: it’s probably no big deal. They gave us an anti-inflammatory which I don’t plan to give Marv because it’s dangerous, and they sent us home.

Of course, the vet who saw him didn’t know much about birds. This is the big problem with parrot medical issues. Generally, if you have an emergency, you will end up with someone who isn’t trained to fix the problem. She was able to call other vets, though, so I think we are okay.

Interesting thing: the standard remedy for a ruptured air sac has changed. A rupture causes air to be released under the skin, so your bird blows up in the area of the injury. A small hole in the skin will deflate the bubble. They used to tell bird owners to poke their birds carefully with needles, but now they say to leave the bubble alone, because if you pop it, air continues to come out through the rupture, interfering with healing.

Marv already looks better, but he is still wobbly. He will be seeing a real vet later this week. Best I could do.

I lay hands on him and declare his healing, and I praise God, who said that if we lay hands on the sick, the SHALL recover. Not “might.” God is true to his word, because he is his word, and he is the truth.

I have also been slaving away, fixing the used mower I bought. As noted earlier, the deck has 4 one-inch pipes that hold anti-scalp wheels, and all of these pipes galled to the parts inside them. The seller or the old guy who originally owned the mower used heat to get the stuck parts out of the forward pipes, but it came to me with the rear wheel shafts lodged firmly. I found out when I tried to adjust them.

I tried everything anyone could possibly suggest, other than cutting the pipes off the mower and mounting them in my hydraulic press. That is coming.

Kubota’s design is really, really stupid. There is no room between the shafts and the bores, and everything is made from carbon steel. In a humid climate with temperature swings, water condenses on metal over and over during the year, and on a vertical shaft, it’s going to run downward. That puts it inside the pipe holding the shaft, where even a thin film of rust will unite the parts as though they were welded.

At first, I thought an air hammer would be overkill. I used a sledge, heat, and cold, and then I tried the air hammer, which did nothing. I tried a three-foot pipe wrench. Of course, this was after letting penetrating oil soak in for days.

I ended up drilling the left shaft out, killing my cordless drill in the process. I was using about a 1″ bit.

The drill left me with a pipe inside a pipe. I used a carbide burr, hacksaw, and sawzall to cut the pipe from inside. I ended up putting a punch between the inner and outer pipes, and I hammered to peel the inner one off. Eventually, I heard a clanging noise and saw something brown on the ground. It took me a second to realize it was the shaft. I was so used to feeling like it would never come out, it was hard for me to accept what had happened.

The miserable thing was barely rusted. Just enough to turn the shaft brown. It felt smooth. That was enough to lock it into the mower. It was covered with oil, showing that penetrating oil doesn’t do any good in some circumstances. Most, I would say.

This process involved work done over several days in the blazing sun. I strained my back in the process.

I was hoping to avoid cutting the other pipe support off the mower, but now I am committed to it. I can slice it off, put the whole business on the press, mash the shaft out, and weld the support back on in a day. That looked like a lot of work before I tackled the first one. Not any more.

I have lots of tools, and I can do lots of things, but sometimes it’s hard to take the leap and do what I can do. I know I can cut this part off my mower and put it back, better than before. It still feels wrong, somehow, but I have to do it. Sometimes I tell myself, “If you’re not willing to use your tools, sell them.”

The seller seemed like a very earnest guy, but it looks like he committed fraud. People are disappointing.

The final (!) parts for the mower arrive tomorrow, so there is hope I’ll have it together for the weekend. I hope so. I really do not want to revive the old John Deere.

People on forums are angry with me for saying Kubota’s anti-scalp-wheel engineering is stupid. It’s amazing how people white knight for big companies that don’t care about them, while persecuting fellow consumers they abuse or let down.

Brand loyalty is like a mental illness. If I say Kubota’s engineering is stupid, and you have a good counterargument, it’s fine to present it. Getting angry with me because you love Kubota makes no sense. Kubota isn’t your mother. It’s not Jesus Christ. It’s a faceless company that has no feelings. It doesn’t care about you or anyone else.

I tend to think inappropriate emotional investment in businesses is a sign of both immaturity and low intelligence. You won’t see many septuagenarian mathematicians getting in fistfights in bars because one roots for the Gators (a business) and the other roots for the ‘Noles. It’s the kind of guys who drive lowered pickups with tinted windows, loud pipes, and everything blacked out. The kind of guys who let their rottweilers run loose and get tattoos advertising Harley-Davidson.

That last thing has to be difficult to bear now that Harley-Davidson has become a major promoter of sodomy and cross-dressing.

Here’s something I find weird: people get in fights over the college teams they root for, even though no one in their families has gone to college. I have two University of Miami degrees, and I see a lot of people who clearly didn’t go to college, displaying UM paraphernalia. I have no interest in that stuff, so why should they? I have never been to a UM game, except once when I was in high school. My ultimate Frisbee team played theirs, and they killed us, although they were smoking weed on the field.

UM is a private school, which makes it even weirder. You can say you root for UF because it’s your state’s school and your tax dollars support it, and this would almost make sense to some people, but why root for a private university that doesn’t represent a city, county, state, or nation?

If you bleed green and orange, drive down to UM and ask for free season’s tickets. See how UM feels about you.

If you refuse to talk to your brother-in-law because he drives an F250, there is something wrong with you. You failed to develop to full adulthood. If it makes you mad when someone says Dodge diesel pickups have weak transmissions, you have a lot of growing up to do, but it probably won’t happen.

Getting angry at companies is perfectly reasonable. It’s normal to get angry at anyone who mistreats you. It makes me angry when companies let bad engineering a child can correct slide, causing it to fall on my head. There is no excuse. It also bothers me when a product flaw causes many people suffering and expense, and the company lies and says it’s not a known issue.

Praising companies doesn’t do much good at all, but criticizing them makes them better. They’re not like people, who draw strength from encouragement. Praising companies breeds an entitlement mindset and causes them to take consumers for granted.

People have tried to tell me a consumer should follow the manual and grease the rear shafts on my mower’s deck. Wrong. It’s not in the manual or the shop manual.

They’ve tried to tell me it’s just common sense to grease the shafts, so a person who doesn’t figure it out on his own is to blame when his mower locks up. That is SEVERELY wrong. The engineer is to blame.

1. Good engineers foresee obvious problems and take reasonable steps to prevent them from arising. Kubota didn’t do this. They made their shafts too tight. Other mower companies don’t do this, and their decks last for decades. A tight fit isn’t necessary or helpful.

2. Grease isn’t intended to prevent corrosion. It’s for lubricating moving parts. Anti-seize is the correct thing for galling prevention.

The rear shafts on my deck aren’t moving parts. For lubrication purposes, a part that moves rarely is not a moving part. The shafts have no zerks or journals. If you put grease on one, it would have to be coated by hand, end to end. Grease doesn’t distribute itself on stationary parts.

The shafts only move when you need to change the height of your deck, which could be once a year or never. The shafts lock in place after an amount of corrosion that could easily take place in one off-season.

Some guy claimed a mower would cost $40,000 if Kubota did the things I suggested. I asked him how much it would cost to change a few lines of code on a CNC machine to make the shafts slightly thinner.

He came back with an appeal to authority; his own. I didn’t understand how industry worked, but he did because he had seen it, so I had no right to speak. Removing 0.050″ from the diameter of one part would call for meetings and all sorts of other corporate turmoil. It would cost Kubota hundreds of thousands.

I told him Kubota had designed and built an entire new model after mine, full of changes much bigger than making a shaft thinner, and I asked him why it didn’t cost $40,000.

He got mad and insulted me. I’m not the one who made him walk into a door.

Imagine if the world of industry worked the way he claimed it did. “We’re thinking of replacing the 2026 Dodge Ram with a 2027 model.” “NOOOO! We’ll have to charge $200,000!” Somehow car companies manage to make changes every year. Bigger changes than thinning down one shaft.

My mower’s model comes in two versions. One before a certain serial number, and one after. The price of the mower didn’t change.

People argue with me, not because I’m wrong or rude, but because I gored their sacred ox. Kubota good, therefore anyone who criticize it very bad enemy. Must take down. Sing Kubota company song over dead body.

Another guy got mad at me, saying I was bashing all engineers. I got him to admit he was an engineer.

Engineers are wonderful. Bad engineers and bad engineering are not. I wish I had gotten an ME and an EE instead of a physics degree. I love what engineers do. I admire their accomplishments, but because I said they often did stupid things, which is so obviously true it’s almost a tautology, he felt threatened.

I took my mower’s starting system, which causes many people horrible problems, and I did and published what is probably the only thorough analysis on the web. Thanks to me, people with bad control modules can Google and make their motors run in 10 minutes. I revealed the simple answer to the deck’s galling problem, which other people have dealt with. I found a cheap source for the nylon push rivets Kubota dealers charge $2.60 for, and I revealed it on a forum. Cost: $.03 each. But I’m the bad guy because I won’t run into battle behind the Kubota flag with my chest painted orange.

I don’t care if Kubota goes bankrupt. I just want good machinery for everyone. Kubota can make it, or a company that destroys Kubota with better products can make it. I am not Kubota’s keeper.

I love Kubota products. I should stress that. My tractor is great. My zero-turn is utterly superior to my John Deere garden tractor. But nearly every complex product has flaws, and in many cases, they are stupid flaws, even when the companies that make the products are generally exemplary.

The flail mower I ordered has arrived, and it’s sitting in the driveway. Tomorrow I have to put it together and try it out. I look forward to seeing it run, because the bush hog is crude and difficult to work with.

Meanwhile, the house is a mess. I took the kitchen apart in order to paint, and then Marv got worse, so I stopped. I was in the process of fixing the pool, but I found myself driving back and forth to the animal hospital. The mower problem took up my time. The weather was unbearable for a couple of weeks. I am really hoping I can come back to life now.

Does God Consider This Charity?

I had an interesting experience this morning. I realized a guy I thought of as big-hearted and kind of a salt-of-the-earth person had treated me very badly. I already knew what he had done, but somehow it didn’t affect my feelings about him until today.

His name was Don. He died 5 years ago. He was my dad’s partner. His wife’s name was Claudine. She died a decade earlier. I did a considerable amount of legal work for Don.

Don was eccentric. When I worked for him, he and my dad had separate offices. He worked out of a high rise condo on Miami Beach. A residential apartment. I used to drive there and use a converted bedroom for an office.

Claudine was his office manager. A former IRS attorney, she did not practice. She spent a lot of her time dealing with projects that arose from the death of their son, who was raped, murdered, and dismembered by an illegal alien. She knew John Walsh. She helped police departments get bloodhounds to track criminals.

Claudine was also eccentric.

Don snagged a beautiful client. It was part of a huge European corporation. I think it was Parmalat, but I don’t recall. It’s now part of UBS. The subsidiary that hired Don invested in several expensive high rise condo units, but construction was never finished.

The man who represented the client in America was named Giancarlo. He was a short, wiry Italian guy. Whenever I asked him how he was doing, he would thrust his fist in the air and say, “Like a LION!”

To hear Don tell it, Giancarlo had essentially handed a Miami Beach shyster a 7-figure check based on a handshake, and his employer wanted the money back.

There were boxes of badly-prepared documents. Duplicates. Irrelevant material. Don told me only a lawyer could fix it, so he told me to sift out the junk, dump it, and present him with the rest.

This took days. I sat in that bedroom for hours going through this stuff.

Don and Claudine were both disorganized. I’ll give you a Don story so you will understand.

Don took a trip for a client back in the Seventies. Being Don, he parked his c. 1970 Toronado in a short-term garage at Miami International. When he came home, he did not use his car to leave the airport. I don’t recall the reason. Maybe it wouldn’t start, or maybe his then-wife picked him up.

He kept procrastinating, and eventually, the bill became enormous. MIA kept pestering him. He decided to abandon the car.

MIA would not let him abandon the car. Eventually, he had to pay them a visit, give them a big check, and take his car.

When I worked with Don, he and my dad were no longer part of the first firm my dad led. Don got fired by that firm.

My dad really liked Don, but he eventually had to go along with the rest of the partners when they fired him. Don didn’t record his hours, so they couldn’t bill clients. Don told them he was so good, his value as a resource somehow made him worth keeping anyway. My dad had to explain that nobody was worth keeping if they didn’t generate income.

Because Claudine was lazy and disorganized, she put off checking my hours. When she and Don finally look at them, I had spent a number of full days on the boxes, unsupervised.

Don got upset. He looked panicked. He said he could never get the client, which had extremely deep pockets (especially compared to mine) to pay so much. His solution was to tell them I had spent much less time on the boxes, and I was underpaid accordingly.

Had I been a partner, there could have been some colorable argument that Don wasn’t on the hook, but though I worked as a partner with my dad, I was an associate as far as Don was concerned, so he owed me for every hour I spent.

As an associate, I was an employee. A subcontractor, really, because I was paid by the hour and had no expectation of severance pay if I was canned. If you hire a subcontractor, you pay him, whether you get paid or not. Let’s say you have an AirBnB. You pay someone to paint it because you think a rapper is going to rent it for 6 months. Then the rapper goes to prison for multiple counts of statutory rape. You still owe the painter.

For some reason, I let it go and didn’t hold it against Don and Claudine, and I kept working with him.

On another occasion, a man who owned delivery trucks asked us to write contracts for his drivers. He was a subcontractor for Fedex. Don told me to get to work, but he failed to get a retainer. When I was finished, the client refused to pay, and I got stiffed for 4 figures. Don, not the client, owed me the money, but I got what I got.

I don’t know why I continued working with Don and Claudine or why things remained cordial among us. I will never be able to explain that. I liked Don. I thought of Don as a very good person. I always looked forward to seeing him.

I got stiffed by other employers, and afterward, I didn’t think of them as good people. Why were they different?

My first boss in the legal world was the late Jack E. Dominik, a brilliant but nutty patent attorney. He had a domineering secretary he feared and obeyed. I worked for him as a law student.

One day, Jack told me and another student he would hire us after we graduated, and we would receive $50 per hour for our work, which was very good at the time. We worked assiduously, and I thought I had a good job waiting for me. Then I got an unexpected call from Jack.

He told me my services would no longer be required, blah, blah, blah, best of luck with my career.

I later learned that his secretary had told him to fire me. I was always courteous with her, but she must have seen me as a threat to her domain, so out I went. I learned this from his paralegal, a brilliant Swiss polyglot who understood Jack’s work better than he did. She is one of the most amazing human beings I have ever known. The secretary was just a blob.

The paralegal got an important job at Motorola. She probably runs the company from her desk. It will probably collapse if she quits.

Anyway, Jack owed me money.

We had a system. Our computers were networked. I kept a file in mine. In the file, I recorded my hours. The office manager, a friend of Jack’s daughter, was to go into my computer every so often, collect my information, pay me, and bill clients. The office manager called herself Jenae. It was not her real name. She just thought it was cool.

Jenae did not collect my information. Instead, she spent tens of thousands of dollars on Beanie Babies. Jack’s dollars. I think this was her retirement plan.

The plan did not pan out. Jenai was finally caught when Jack decided to look at his books, and she went to prison. I don’t know who got custody of the Beanie Babies.

When I asked Jack for my money, which was nothing like the cost of the Beanie Babies, he got very upset. He wrote me an emotional letter saying that writing my check made him “sick.” Jack liked money a lot, so this was true. He said there was no way his clients would pay him. Probably not true. Jack was not all that honest, and I suspect he managed to find a way to add my $2,200 to his own hours, which would have been fair, if not quite kosher.

After Jack sent me the money, he softened up and became more cordial. He told the paralegal he should never have fired me, and he said I would make a fine litigator. Well, thanks, I guess.

I didn’t think highly of Jack after this. I thought he was an untrustworthy jerk.

The other law student, Larry, left, too. I think Jack was just too wacky and erratic for him. He ended up working for a big firm farther up the coast.

While working for Jack, I met another lawyer who stiffed me. I did 30 hours of work for his client, I was owed $1500, and I never saw a dime. The other lawyer kept telling me the client was a standup guy who would pay up eventually, but it never happened. The problem was not the client, however, because I never contracted with the client. My agreement was with the lawyer, and he owed me the money regardless of what the client did.

I’m not naming this guy. His law practice is dead, and he may be, too, but for all I know, he’s sitting in a one-room apartment, Googling himself furiously in hopes of suing someone so he can pay his rent.

I don’t think of this lawyer as the salt of the earth. He’s a deadbeat who took advantage of a young lawyer who trusted him and did good work for his clients. He could have paid me.

Diane, Jack’s secretary, made a huge blunder. I was a good attorney, and Jack was about 77 when Diane had me fired for no reason. He quit about 5 years later, I believe. That’s when he stopped filing reports with the Department of State.

He had a disabling stroke in 2005 or 2006, and he ended up dying in California in 2009. I guess one of his kids put him in a facility. He was estranged from his son. Maybe it was his daughter.

I used to know the details, but I forgot.

Diane’s job ended with the stroke. Had she stayed out of my way, I would have kept the firm going, and I would have kept her on as long as she did her job. She had a cushy position in a very comfortable and spacious law office, there were tons of clients, and she could have ridden it into old age instead of setting fire to her own bed.

She should have done everything she could to help Larry and me succeed, but instead, she sacrificed her future for some petty reason Jack did not have the courage to articulate. She probably ended up with a menial job.

It’s interesting that I could have such low opinions of two lawyers who cheated me while continuing to think highly of Don, who underpaid me by much larger amounts, twice.

I forgive Don, Claudine, Jack, Diane, Jenae, and the guy who stiffed me for $1500. They did what they did, though.

If You Care, be the Bad Guy

My friend Marvin the parrot got sick because I made the mistake of using bifenthrin spray on a loveseat that had carpet beetles in it. We bought the loveseat from a place called Koontz Furniture and Design. My wife liked a bigger couch that matched it, and they showed us the loveseat, which was a like-new return.

They said they had taken it back after 6 months. I asked why. They said the customer didn’t like it. I thought that was odd, but their explanation was that the boss was a really nice guy who wanted people to be happy. I was suspicious, but then people here are very nice.

The loveseat was discounted heavily, and it looked unused, so we bought it. Weeks or months later, we started seeing little black balls on the floor around it. I thought maybe a roach was wandering around in the living room, and the balls were roach poops.

I knew nothing about carpet beetles. Eventually, I dug up the truth on the Internet. Carpet beetles are tiny, round, black bugs about the size of roach poops.

I tried imidacloprid on the loveseat and couch, and things got a lot better, but the loveseat appeared to continue to produce some bugs. This is why I tried bifenthrin, a “safe” chemical that leaves a dry residue that kills for months. I have used it in the house for years with no apparent problems.

A lot of spray got into the air, and Marv got sick the same day. Seizures and weakness. Short of watching your baby son die in your arms, nothing could be worse. But God was gracious, as always, and Marv did not die.

He spent two nights at the small animal hospital at the university, and he improved a great deal, so we brought him home.

Then I very stupidly let my wife push me into painting the kitchen. Most of the interior of the house looks fantastic, but the kitchen and two stairwells need paint.

I have told my wife not to nag me. Nagging is evil, and doctors believe it actually shortens husbands’ lives by ruining their cardiovascular health. My wife’s response was to cite the story Yeshua told about the widow who kept bothering the wicked judge until he granted her wish.

That’s not a good analogy. The judge was not her husband, so he was not the king and priest of her house, to whom God expected her to submit. Also, the judge was not subject to nagging all day, like a husband. Finally, she had been wronged, and she was asking for justice. My wife was not wronged.

I told her to knock it off, but I decided to start on the kitchen all the same. The pressure had an effect.

The day after I started painting the kitchen, Marv took sick again. The obvious reason: paint fumes. Birds have very sensitive lungs, which is why canaries used to be used to let miners know about gas accumulations. Marvin was getting better, but his lungs were still unusually sensitive, and he is a bird.

I felt like an idiot, because that’s what I was. I should never have let my wife goad me into doing something dumb. If I had not let her rush me, I would have thought more carefully, and common sense would have told me not to paint the kitchen until Marv was fully well.

Here’s something you really need to know about God: he can’t be rushed, and he does not want his children to be rushed. When someone rushes you, it’s nearly always for an evil reason. If you’re in a burning building and someone tells you to get out fast, that’s fine, but what if you’re at a car dealership and the salesman tells you a deal is only good for 24 hours? Walk. He’s not looking after you. He’s trying to get you to make a decision that will harm you.

A long time ago, I heard God say this while I was with him: “I will not be rushed.” I said it in the first person, but it referred to both of us. He will not be rushed, and he wants me to refuse to be rushed, too. I should have thought about this when my wife was in error, pushing me to do something dumb.

I sprayed the couch because of her impatience. She was pressing me to call Koontz and demand they take the loveseat back. When I finally called them, they said the sale was as-is, but they offered to send a bug guy.

What happened to the nice guy who took furniture back just because customers didn’t like it? He must have retired. Or maybe they took the couch back because the customer found bugs in it, they sprayed it until they didn’t see any bugs, and then they dumped it on me.

Oh, well. A $9,000 mistake and a lesson learned.

I sprayed the couch myself because I was concerned the bug guy might use something that would harm Marvin or my son, and I picked the wrong spray.

If you’re a husband, and you don’t want curses to fall on your house, you have to learn two things. You have to learn that you’re the leader, not a partner. You also have to learn to be willing to be unpopular in your own house. When your wife or child goes against God, you have to stick with God. This is one of your main purposes. It sounds odd, but battling your own wife and children for their own good is one of your primary functions. You should expect it and try to be grateful for it.

I put Marv in our son’s nursery, closed off the air conditioning vent, opened the windows, put towels under the doors, and gave him food and water by hand. My son rarely sees the nursery, so it didn’t matter to him. Of course, I humbled myself before God and used all my supernatural tools and weapons. After two nights of misery (for me), Marvin has perked up and started eating and playing in his water. It looks like he’s okay. I will be babying him for at least a month.

I told my wife to go ahead and put the kitchen back in order, because there was no way I was going to resume painting it until it was safe. I didn’t ask her if this was okay with her. I said this was how it was going to be, end of story, and she was fine with it. She feels very guilty.

Women resist leadership, but they like decisiveness. A woman who will fight a polite suggestion will be completely content to comply with a stern command. The same thing goes for men when they deal with their superiors. No one trusts a leader who cajoles and waffles. It encourages argument and plants doubt.

The truth is that I let my wife down by trying to please her, just as Adam, Abraham, and Moses let their wives down. I let her down, and I definitely let Marvin down. I know God forgives me, but I will never forget what I put Marvin through with my 20th-century feminist brainwashing. The things I saw and heard will live with me for the rest of my life, as they should. I deserve that.

It is inevitable that wives will rebel, but it wasn’t necessary for me to fail to lead properly, so who is more to blame?

I intend to be more forceful from now on. My family is depending on me, and so is Marvin.