Archive for the ‘Main’ Category

Tribulations of a Second-Class Immigrant

Thursday, March 7th, 2024

Illegal Aliens Always Come First

The Italian Embassy in Zambia’s capital is pretty bad. Europe discriminates against honorable African tourist-visa applicants while, bizarrely, allowing itself to be overrun by undesirable African illegal immigrants who stay and commit crimes. Italy is totally on board with the mindless discrimination.

It’s a little weird when an African drug dealer or terrorist can travel to Italy without permission and be welcomed, while respectable people are barred. This is exactly what happens, however.

Back when my wife lived in Zambia, we wanted to visit Europe, and the lady in charge of visas told her she could not apply for a tourist visa until she had bought, not merely chosen, a flight to Italy. She also told her she would be granted a visa if she did this.

We bought tickets and submitted an application. Nothing happened. Long after the usual amount of time required for a decision had passed, she went to the embassy. The lady didn’t even meet with her. She yelled at her through a doorway and told her she was rejected. She was very rude, and she denied that she had ever promised us a visa.

We lost hundreds of dollars on my wife’s ticket, which had to be cashed in. United Airlines gave me a credit for mine. I still have not used it. It’s time to use it or lose it, because the deadline is three weeks off.

Now we have to choose: do we go to Mexico and get my wife some dental care, or do we go to Greece or Switzerland, where we would actually enjoy ourselves?

Mexico is a hot destination for Americans who need pricey dental work. My friend Mike has been there several times. There is an extraordinary clinic staffed with American-trained dentists, and they charge so much less that American dentists, you can pay for a trip and still come out far ahead.

It’s not a run-down place with prostitutes lingering outside the front door. Patients rave about it. It’s a seamless, professional operation. Having investigated it, I would rather have my teeth fixed there than here in Florida. I don’t have any real dental problems, so I’ll keep going to my local dentist, but if I did, I’d be on a plane.

I don’t want to go to Mexico. I think it’s a destination that appeals to the shallow. Most visitors go to beaches. I have never understood why beaches appeal to people. You fry in the sun, doing absolutely nothing, bored out of your skull. You can fish if you want. Afterward, you go to bars and get drunk on Corona and tequila, one of the lowest forms of alcoholic beverage. You’re constantly in danger of being robbed or worse. The police are just organized criminals, and government officials are pretty much the same thing. The cultural scene is awful. You can go see a couple of pyramids where they used to tear people’s hearts out, and that’s about it.

Contrast this with Paris. Paris has the Louvre, the Beaubourg, fantastic food, spectacular European weather, Versailles, the Eiffel Tower, what’s left of Notre Dame after restorers burned it down, walks by the Seine, Montmartre…I could spend all day writing about it. Sure, there are ghettos full of vicious Muslim thugs who are extremely dangerous and beyond the control of the police, but you don’t have to go to those places.

That’s just Paris. All over the world, there are other great destinations that beat Mexico to death.

Mexico is only appealing because it’s cheap. No one ever said, “I have more money than I know what to do with, and instead of Florence, I’m going to Mexico this year.”

Mexico is not a place I have ever wanted to visit, but my wife has a missing tooth. We can get that replaced for $1500 in Mexico. It would cost at least twice that here, and we wouldn’t even be able to say we saw a pyramid.

Why am I mentioning Paris and Greece as places to go? Because European nations make it very hard for green card holders to get visas. They seriously expect them to apply in person. Here are lists of countries and the places where they expect you to apply:

Austria – VFS Houston, Miami, DC
Czechia – DC
Denmark – VFS DC
Finland – DC
Germany – VFS Miami
Italy – VFS Miami
Luxembourg – DC
Netherlands – VFS Miami
Norway – VFS DC
Poland – DC
Sweden – VFS DC

Belgium – Atlanta
England – VFS Atlanta
France – VFS Atlanta
Greece – Tampa
Switzerland – Atlanta

VFS is a company that processes visas.

I broke this into two lists because there is zero possibility we will ever apply at the locations in the first list.

I would not go to Miami again unless Yeshua himself told me to meet him there. I literally–not figuratively–feel a little sick just thinking about it. I don’t like driving to Orlando and Tampa because when I do, I keep seeing signs showing I’m getting closer to el infierno pequeño.

Forget it, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands.

Washington D.C. is not even worth talking about. I’m not going to take a $1500 trip just to find out if the Europeans there are as bigoted as the ones in Africa.

Atlanta is doable. It’s about a 6-hour drive. The countries that operate out of Atlanta are good destinations, although Belgium is only good because if you’re in Belgium, it’s a short train ride to somewhere else.

Greece makes more sense than any other country, because Tampa is not far away, and once you’re in Greece, you can go anywhere you like in the Schengen area.

England is probably a good destination. Great history. For me, the appeal is weak because the British have changed. Seems like every third word out of their mouths is something filthy, and the problem extends to educated people. Americans used to admire their manners. The way things are now, forget that. I’m afraid that if we go over there, we will be subjected to a constant torrent of sex-related and scatological slang.

I rarely hear profanity from human beings (not screens) where I am. Generally, I hear it when I drop something or injure myself.

When I was a kibbutz volunteer, I arrived shortly after the departure of a bunch of British kids. Relations between kibbutzniks and volunteers were very bad. I don’t know what the problem was, but the British kids had shaved their heads to remind the Jews of the death camps, and one of them attacked the old man who managed the volunteers, beating him over the head with a soccer cleat. That memory makes me less inclined to visit England. Guy Ritchie movies don’t help.

We’ve been to Ireland, which is a lot like England. The cities were dumpy and something of a downer. The food was bad. Even the Irish food was bad. The people were great, except for the scary gypsies who lurked on O’Connell Street and attacked tourists. I have this feeling that England will be similar, except that the people in the cities will probably be less nice.

My take on Ireland, as I have said before, is that it looks like a nice place to live, but I wouldn’t want to visit.

If you live in Ireland, you can cook for yourself. Tourists are not so blessed.

I think the best thing to do is to forget Mexico and see what Greece will do for us. The food is great there. The history is unexcelled. The people were very nice when I visited. And we could leave after a few days and go to countries that won’t let us visit directly.

I’ll contact Greeks and see if they will do the right thing instead of putting on a virtue-signaling show and then turning us down without actually reviewing our application.

Out on her Fani

Thursday, February 15th, 2024

Teflon Don Slips Away Again

I watched a little bit of Fani Willis’s hysterical, implausible testimony today, at an evidentiary hearing to determine whether she should be removed from Donald Trump’s Georgia election case due to a conflict of interest. The hearing will continue tomorrow.

Let me save you some time. She will be forced off the case. She is likely to have serious problems with the Georgia Bar. She could also be tried for perjury.

I would say that she won’t be disqualified because she’s a leftist, but the judge hearing the evidence was the vice president of his law school’s chapter of the Federalist Society, so it’s not like one lawyer with an entitled ghetto mindset is looking after another.

Fani Willis did not grow up in a ghetto. Her dad was an attorney. But she has the entitled, emotionalist, race-card-playing ghetto outlook just the same. She has an ego the size of Ayers Rock, and she flies off the handle when challenged.

You don’t have to prove a prosecutor is an ax murderer to get him booted off a case. You just have to show an actual conflict of interest exists. Willis has one.

Willis has a sexual relationship with lawyer Nathan Wade. She paid him a lot of money to work on the Trump case, even though he’s not a prosecutor. He’s a tort lawyer. Wade took her on expensive vacations, for which he paid. Money in, vacations out. Conflict of interest.

Has this all been proven? No, but her defenses are ridiculous.

She admits she had a sexual relationship with Wade, but she claims it started in 2022, after he started working with her. Sadly for her, a friend of hers swears she saw them kissing and hugging in 2019. Whom will the judge believe? A combative, arrogant prosecutor who has to be admonished on the stand repeatedly about professionalism, or a disinterested party?

Sorry if I’m harsh, but Willis is a fat, ugly older woman with a nasty personality, and Wade is the most desirable type of male in America: a tall, straight, reasonably good-looking black man in a profession. It makes sense that she would demand that he escort her on trips as payback for improper and excessive fees for services he was not well-equipped to provide. It would be odd for what is now known as a “high-value man” to run off to exotic locations with an old woman who is unattractive and incapable of having children. Nathan Wade can crook his finger and have all sorts of beautiful, compliant young black women trample each other to be with him. Black women compete furiously for males who have money, degrees, and clean rap sheets.

Willis and Wade claim she repaid him for the vacations in cash. No adult who isn’t on drugs will buy that, and the judge isn’t on drugs. She claims she keeps up to $15000 in cash in her house. Very few people do things that stupid, and a single woman who has put a lot of vicious criminals in jail would be the last person to do it. It has to be a lie. Her denials may force the involvement of a forensic accountant, and then she and Wade may find out that lying about large financial transactions is not as simple as they thought. If you say your dog ate your homework, a forensic accountant will stick his finger down the dog’s throat.

You can say you paid cash, but you eventually have to show where it came from in a case like this. An accountant can look at all your accounts and recorded transactions. He can look at your financial past. If Willis was making big cash withdrawals, it will show. If not, where did the money come from? If Wade doesn’t have big deposits to show, why not? They’ll have to explain or take the Fifth. If they take the Fifth, they’ll be abandoning their defense to a large degree, and it will also draw the interest of the bar, possibly spurring criminal investigations.

In a criminal context, a finder of fact is not allowed to infer anything when a witness invokes the Fifth Amendment. In a civil context, at least in federal court, an inference may be drawn if there is other evidence of criminality. I don’t know if that applies here. I don’t know if this hearing, though contained within a criminal trial, is a civil matter. I assume it is, since Willis and Wade are not defendants. Anyway, in any context, invoking the Fifth can spur the bar or law enforcement to follow up and investigate. They are not finders of fact.

Women are afraid of being robbed. They are afraid of making big withdrawals. Many women will not use an ATM card because they don’t like to carry cash. It’s common for women to delay other customers in checkout lines by writing checks for things like one tube of toothpaste. A female prosecutor would be more wary than most. Not less.

Maybe Trump can’t prove Willis didn’t pay Wade in cash, but there is zero evidence she paid, and I guarantee you, the evidence will be consistent with her not paying. The judge can take notice of that.

The standard of proof in Trump’s trial is reasonable doubt, and that’s a tough standard to meet. The evidentiary hearing is not a criminal trial, however. As far as I can tell by Googling, the standard is somewhat lower. I think Wade and Willis are lying, because the alternative is absurd, and I think Judge McAfee knows it and may be willing to allow further investigation to expose their dishonesty.

As for trouble with the bar, a lawyer can’t lie to a tribunal. In Georgia, you can be suspended or disbarred for this. The Trump case has an extremely high profile, and bar associations are all about public relations. They are all about convincing the public lawyers can be relied upon to police themselves. They struggle to make us look honest. I think Willis will get a suspension at the very least, and if that happens, she can forget about working as a public-sector attorney. This may not happen, though, if the bar is sufficiently packed with DEI hires and appointees. That race card is some card.

As for perjury, I looked at the Georgia law, and it appears Willis and Wade are guilty. Here are the elements:

1. Knowingly and willfully making a false statement,
2. Material to the issue or point in question,
3. While under oath in a judicial proceeding.

An evidentiary hearing is a judicial proceeding. Lies about reimbursement and the timing of the relationship are material to the issue of conflict. Willis and Wade swore under oath, and they certainly knew what was true and what was not.

I say she will be forced off the case, but I admit, that depends on the judge and Trump’s lawyers. If he is not determined to learn the facts, the judge will wrap the hearing up and say, “He said, she said,” and give up. If he takes the conflict and dishonesty issues seriously, he will let things continue until the truth is known.

Trump has a history of hiring stupid, crooked, and/or senile lawyers, so I don’t know if his current representation is smart enough to investigate Willis and Wade correctly.

I assume the burden of investigation is on Trump, since the court itself is not after Willis and Wade, the bar is not involved, and Willis and Wade are not being prosecuted yet.

My strong bet: Willis will be out on Monday. If the judge thinks either of these characters lied to him under oath, he will refer them to the Georgia Bar and possibly the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

I have read that if she is disqualified, her whole office is disqualified. If that’s so, who continues the case? Maybe someone who is less deranged and determined. Someone who didn’t campaign using an unethical promise to destroy one private citizen, before she had any evidence of wrongdoing. Good news for Trump.

This is my semi-baked, one-hour analysis, which is all you get unless you pay me. Let’s see what happens.

Dishing the Dersh

Tuesday, February 13th, 2024

Robert Hur; Defense Attorney and Prosecutor All in One

It amazes me how often Alan Dershowitz agrees with me.

Dershowitz is lauded as a true legal genius, if it’s possible for works of genius to exist in a field where true brilliance is unnecessary and not helpful. People talk about him as though he were the law’s Johnny von Neumann.

I didn’t say “Einstein,” because von Neumann was smarter than Einstein.

What about me? Well, I got a lot of B’s at my second-tier law school. A law school B is like an undergrad A, but still. I rarely visited the library. I did very little except right before exams. I drank a lot. I had a girlfriend. I was never invited to join the law review. I graduated cum laude, but that’s like being employee of the month at Arby’s. Summa is somewhat impressive, but magna and cum are not.

Graduate from college summa cum laude in physics, and you will really impress me. In law, all it means is that you’re pretty smart and you love to study. It also means you didn’t write anything in your exams that offended your deranged Stalinist professors, and it may also mean you’re black, Latin, or homosexual.

I don’t know if Dershowitz is an actual genius, but he’s very smart, and he’s fair. Functionally, fair people are more intelligent than unfair people, because unfair people reject things their reason tells them are true. Dershowitz is smart, and he knows more about law than I ever will. He’s like a student who never stopped cramming for the bar exam.

I mean a student who PASSED and never stopped cramming. Not someone who crams because they fail repeatedly. I know some of those.

Dershowitz just came out with criticism of the report special counsel Robert Hur just filed about Joe Biden’s criminal possession and distribution of multiple classified documents, which occurred over several decades and involved a dirty, messy garage which was open to his drug addict son, who is rumored to have had sex with a Chinese spy.

What does Dershowitz say? He says pretty much what I said. Basically, Dershowitz’s position is that Hur says Biden is guilty, but he refuses to prosecute anyway, and the reason is that he is afraid Biden will win a jury’s sympathy by selling himself as a well-intended elderly man with a bad memory.

Unlike me, Dershowitz goes on to talk about how improper this is. I don’t know a whole lot about criminal law. I do know that prosecutors and even police make unfair decisions every day, deciding whom to release and whom to nail to the wall, and courts have no problem with it even though it violates the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.

Prosecutorial discretion is a fact of life, and it will never go away, so I don’t think about it all that much. The justice system is not just. It never was. Like my dad said, its purpose is to end conflicts, not to bring justice. You say you got cheated in your divorce settlement? I believe you. That’s because the court’s real function was to put an end to your squabbling with your ex-wife. The judge probably made some effort to do the right thing, but maybe he didn’t. Tough. The best way to get justice is to avoid letting things make it to court.

“Trump’s case was worse! He did things Biden didn’t do!” Maybe, although it’s risky to say things like that without seeing all the evidence. Doesn’t matter ONE BIT. A felony is a felony. We don’t prosecute bad, bad felonies and leave bad felonies alone. Go commit a silly felony, like driving over 100 miles per hour in the wrong state, and see if the judge lets you go because it’s a bad felony but not a bad, bad felony.

If you’re guilty of one felony, no matter how little harm you’ve done, they’re supposed to indict, arrest, and prosecute you. You could go through all these things and then get a plea bargain and avoid a felony conviction if you pucker up and kiss whatever has to be kissed. You’re not supposed to get a lollipop and be sent home with a clean record, without even being booked. You should be indicted, arrested, and prosecuted. None of those things will happen to Biden, who unquestionably committed multiple serious felonies over decades.

“Your honor, my client murdered three children, but his cousin murdered three children and was also a habitual litterbug, so while I agree that the cousin should go to the death chamber, it’s clear that my client’s charges should be dismissed with prejudice.”

No.

Hur’s weird, shockingly honest reason for not prosecuting felon Joe Biden is that he’s afraid he’ll lose the case. Was he drunk when he wrote his report? What a great example of “I said the quiet part out loud.”

“I can’t indict, because I’m trying to get in bed with a sexy court reporter who voted for Biden.” “I can’t indict, because the other students in my hot yoga class will stop talking to me.” “I can’t indict because I like hanging out on Rehoboth Beach.” No difference. A prosecutor doesn’t let trivial personal interests deter him from doing what he swore to do.

It’s a shockingly stupid reason. He’s more worried about a tiny professional embarrassment than he is about prosecuting MULTIPLE FELONIES. Every prosecutor loses cases. Hur has lost many cases. It’s all in a day’s work. Imagine your doctor refusing to treat you because you might die.

Every day, prosecutors go easy on defendants they don’t think they can convict, but they’re not supposed to roll over and show their bellies PRIOR TO ARREST. They should indict anyway. If you think you’re likely to lose, you offer a plea after indictment. You don’t say, “I would rather see you get away with a crime than look bad in one of the thousands of cases I will handle during my life.”

Now people who are too stupid to understand the law are running around saying Trump is guilty but Biden isn’t. They’re saying Hur said Biden was not guilty. No; he said he was definitely guilty. He just decided not to do his job.

He thinks a jury will love cuddly, befuddled Uncle Joe. Hello? That’s what jury selection is for. Every competent lawyer strives to get the most biased jury conceivable without violating the law or the canons of ethics. Hur apparently knows he is incapable of making an effective attempt to get a good jury. Who admits that in a publicized report?

The best lawyers do not work for the government, unless you count a few scholarly judges who don’t represent anyone.

Once again, the gander gets sauce, but the goose gets a pat on the head and a juicy reprieve. Conservatives are blatantly abused and oppressed every day, by the government their confiscated tax dollars supports. And when civil war breaks out, leftists will say they have no idea what conservatives are mad about.

Termites and Probability

Monday, February 5th, 2024

Welcome, Friends

If you’re old and moderately good at math, and you know the Holy Spirit, you often know the answers to simple questions other people, oddly, find difficult.

This week, someone asked me if I thought Chinese spies were entering the US under our no-borders policy. I didn’t say I thought they were entering. I said they were, in fact, entering.

Imagine you’re a Chinese official. You want to have many spies in the US. That is not a statement a reasonable person can dispute. You have a choice between working hard to get them in legally, with lots of documentation the US government can rely on to track them, taking a great deal of time, or you can tell them to walk in from Mexico.

What would you do?

I’m sure many Chinese moles are coming in legally. There must be advantages to legal entry in many cases. But the Chinese would have to be morons to refrain from sending people in illegally.

Yesterday, I saw a news item saying Denver police had arrested 50 Al Qaeda members in two months. I can’t promise you it’s true. It comes from a popular Twitter channel. The proprietor says he got the info from a Denver cop who could not allow himself to be identified.

For a moment, let’s forget the question of whether this story is true. Let’s ask ourselves an easier question. Have a lot of Islamist terrorists, from numerous organizations including Al Qaeda, entered the US since we decided borders were racist and promoted global warming and transphobia?

Yes. Of course they have.

There are hundreds of millions of Muslims who want to destroy the US and Israel. There are millions who are willing to get involved personally. They have a long history of violating our immigration laws to enter our country and commit acts of terror.

Why would they choose not to take advantage of an open door policed by a lying dotard who cares a lot about himself and his degenerate children, but very little about his country? There is no plausible scenario in which that happens.

It doesn’t matter whether the Denver story is true, because Islamist savages are definitely coming in. It’s like asking whether fat women will show up if Cinnabon gives away rolls.

If Muslim terror countries let people cross their borders with no vetting, we would be sending people in to undermine them. Why would they behave differently? It’s common sense.

How many terrorists were on the hijacking teams on 9/11? Nineteen. By now, the number of terrorists Biden has let in must be thousands of times that number. If 19 killed over 3000 people in a few hours, what will thousands do?

“DHS will stop them. We have all sorts of top people, using brilliant strategies and great surveillance tools.”

Wrong. That’s not how the government works. That’s how Google and Facebook work, to deprive us of our rights.

We have surveillance and tracking tools that are easy to get around, and they are administered by…government employees and contractors. Chelsea Manning was a government employee. Edward Snowden was a government contractor. They guy who leaked Donald Trump’s tax returns was a contractor. Do I have to go on?

Joe Biden is a government employee surrounded by Secret Service agents, and he threw boxes of classified boxes into his garage and left them there.

It would be so neat if Secret Service agents were like Frank Farmer in The Bodyguard. They’re not. They’re not master martial artists. If a real agent got in a fight with a guy the size of Frank Starr, he would probably get squashed. They can’t shoot a fly out of the air at a hundred yards. They’re not particularly smart. Look at Dan Bongino. Reasonably bright. Not a genius.

Very smart people rarely become law enforcement officers of any kind. That kind of work grinds smart people down.

How many incredibly stupid things has the government done since you were born? Things you, personally, with zero training, would have prevented had you been in charge?

Think about January 6. Eighteen years after 9/11, a bunch of beered-up, unarmed, untrained, disorganized rally attendees walked right into Congress. They could have killed all sorts of legislators had they desired to. That tells you everything you need to know about the security our government provides.

If I were an ayatollah, I would have slapped my forehead on that day. “We plotted and struggled. We shot down complicated plans because we didn’t think they were sure things. We waited and waited, hoping for an answer. We could have just WALKED IN.”

If you think 15 Islamists with AK-47’s couldn’t jump the White House fence and kill the president in 10 minutes, you are way more charitable than I am.

They’re here. Don’t be stupid.

Reagan was surrounded by Secret Service agents, and he still took a .22 to the chest. A mental case with a Saturday night special shot him and two other people before the professionals managed to do anything. I doubt things are much better today.

We rely very heavily on the power of intimidation. We create the false appearance of competence and formidability, instead of taking realistic measures that work. And our enemies consistently fall for it, until they don’t.

You know who we should hire? Casino owners. They’re better at security then the government will ever be. They know when a grandmother from Des Moines is counting cards, and they ban her right away, sending her photos to every casino in America. We let the same deportees come in over and over until somebody gets raped or murdered. The only tools we have that stop illegals are prison and the death penalty, and they’re in the hands of the judicial system and the corrections system, not the State Department or our intelligence or security agencies, which fail every hour of every day.

Well, we have one other tool that works wonders. The Second Amendment.

Illegals swarming the borders remind me of vampires in movies, who have to ask permission to enter houses. If you let them in, it’s on you. It’s our responsibility to keep them out, and we could do it if we wanted. Easily. We have too many DEI concerns to do it right.

The stupidity we are witnessing comes from spirits. We have rejected God so we can have pride and so men can get at each other’s filthy anuses without legal or social impediment. It’s astonishing. It makes no sense. It is literally mental illness. It’s what happens when you get away from the Holy Spirit. You can believe anything, no matter how absurd, and you can think it’s righteous to murder those who tell the truth.

I wish God would end this age and get his children out of here. I feel like I live on the grounds of a mental asylum. No wonder they’re called “asylum seekers.”

Lord of the Fleas

Saturday, December 9th, 2023

The Forgotten Treasures of People who Died Intestate

The thing which I greatly feared is come upon me. I am domestic.

Before my wife moved in, things were pretty sweet. I had a plastic Home Depot folding table in the kitchen, surrounded by molded chairs that ran around $12 each. I had my mother’s terrible bedroom furniture, plus an $80 Chinese headboard from Amazon. I had two workbenches plus a lot of tools in the former dining room, along with an ammo press and a great deal of ammunition and components.

Now I have a vintage rocking chair and an oak kitchen table, and I am buying homey junk that will irreversibly remove the aroma of testosterone from my home. I spend my days on the web and in furniture stores, looking for the kind of things I would already have, had my relatives not looted my dad’s home and my grandparents’ homes.

Trivets. I have trivets on the way. My mother had cast iron trivets that probably came from her grandmother’s home. They vanished into the vortex known as my sister, never to be seen again, along with her display cabinets, my great-great-grandfather’s violin, art from my grandparents’ house, a lot of books she never read but did display, and, well, many things I no longer remember because I have not seen them in so long.

I remembered what my mom’s trivets looked like, and I knew a little bit about cast iron from buying skillets, so I found myself a couple of replacements made by the Griswold company. Griswold is my favorite cast iron manufacturer. My mom probably had some kind of knockoffs. Her #6 skillet, which I have, has no brand stamped into it. I have large-logo Griswolds and matching cornstick pans.

I also got a trivet just for the wall. While I was shopping, I remembered a little plaque my mother’s mother kept in her kitchen. It had a prayer on it, written by a lady named Klara Munkres. I could not find the exact plaque, but I did find a trivet with a tile on it inscribed with the prayer. A nice reminder of my grandmother, from whom I inherited virtually no objects.

We have kitchen wall space we need to fill, so I picked up some old copper Jell-O molds in the shape of various creatures. I don’t know if anyone has ever made gelatin or anything else in molds like this, but they are popular as wall art.

We saw a grandfather clock in a consignment store, very like the one in my grandmother’s living room. My aunt got that one. She deserved it. When my grandparents died, the family did her about like they did me.

Looking at the clock, I thought it might be nice to have it. I went home and Googled it. They wanted $395, but new ones sell for 10 times that. I thought I had the bargain of the century, and then I learned grandfather clocks have no resale value. If we decide we want one, we can get one better than the one my grandmother had for $150 or less. Many people put ads up asking strangers to haul them off for nothing.

Never buy a new grandfather clock. I’m not sure why people keep doing it.

My grandparents had a weather station. This is a carved wooden board with a thermometer, a barometer, and a humidity gauge on it. They were popular before the world turned into a giant computer. I plan to get one. They’re neat.

I’m getting stuff considerably nicer than the things my relations got. My grandparents had some nice stuff, and they also had some things aimed at the undiscerning. If I had inherited them, I would have to say, “It’s not great, but it belonged to my grandparents.” As things are, I say, “It may not have belonged to my grandparents, but when my kids inherit it, they won’t have to say, ‘It’s not great, but…'”

My belief is that old used furniture is the way to go. We just paid about $750 for an oak kitchen table and chairs, and the cost for Vietnamese junk literally made from rubber trees and soaked with pesticide is around $1600. The rocker we got is either oak or ash, and it was made by an American company called Bent Brothers. A Chinese rocker from Cracker Barrel costs $140, and we paid $65. I got a product called Restor-A-Finish to touch up the worn bits, and now the chair looks magnificent.

I draw the line at old cushions. When you buy a cushion that’s 70 years old, you have no idea how much dried pee is inside it. I won’t buy anything upholstered unless I think I can get it redone economically.

One thing that’s hard to get: bookshelves. I finally realized why there were so few. It’s because most Americans do not read books. TV cabinets…no problem. They’re everywhere. During the last century, many people spent a thousand or more dollars on a TV cabinet with a TV hole about 30″ wide, thinking no one would ever need anything bigger. Now these cabinets clutter Craigslist and Goodwill stores. They’re useless curiosities. Like film cameras and Biden ’24 hats.

On a whim, I decided to look for art prints by a woman named Nellie Meadows, the pride of Clay City, Kentucky. She’s dead, so I can be honest. She was a pretty bad artist. Appalachia is known for a near-total lack of artistic talent, however, so her work attained some popularity in Eastern Kentucky.

I don’t want to move back to Eastern Kentucky, and I distance myself from the worst parts of the backward culture, but it would be nice to have some decor touches that remind me of home, so I have looked around for Nellie Meadows prints. Turns out they are sold online occasionally, for princely sums occasionally bumping up against the three-figure mark. If I can find one of the ones my grandparents had, I’ll pick it up.

There was also a local artist named Al Cornett. Much better than Nellie Meadows but not likely to make anyone forget Thomas Eakins. I remember one of his paintings, so I may snap up a print if it becomes available.

He may still be alive. Hope he never sees my blog.

I recall throwing out some mold-covered prints from the house my sister wrecked, but I can’t recall whether they were by Nellie Meadows or Al Cornett.

Nellie was part of the Meadows family that built the Meadows Golf Course in Clay City, Kentucky. The guy that ran the place was named Forest, and he had a swing about like Charles Barkley’s. He made a couple of short fakes and then hit the ball. It was something to see.

I may buy a butter churn to put on the hearth, and I have a couple of my grandmother’s kerosene lamps for the mantel.

We found a neat old rolltop secretary desk to put in a dead space by the kitchen, but while we were thinking it over, they jacked the price from $125 to $395. I was planning to offer $80, and I thought that was too much. My grandmother had a secretary desk with a hinged lid outside her kitchen. A good place to throw mail and later forget about it.

I’m considering a braided wool rug for the living room. Another idea from my grandmother, who had astonishingly good taste for a woman born in 1910 in a place called Holly Creek. I think it was Holly Creek. Not sure. Somehow my mother’s taste was not nearly as good.

Three of the four girls had questionable taste. I would say the youngest led the pack.

Today we are planning to go to the local flea market, if my wife ever gets out of the shower. It occurred to me that while the flea market is nearly useless for buying things one might actually use, it’s good for the kind of junk you might see on the ceiling and walls at Cracker Barrel. Maybe we can find some old kitchen stuff.

Can I work all this Appalachian stuff in and still get a reclining couch? Don’t know yet, but I think it would be better to have clashing decor than a couch that won’t recline.

I better go in there and make sure she’s awake.

Why a Purse can Cost $50,000

Tuesday, September 12th, 2023

It’s Actually a First-Strike Weapon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Riot Stuff

Wednesday, August 2nd, 2023

Jack a Little too Nimble?

I skimmed the latest Trump indictment, and I was surprised.

I look at things like this as fairly as I can, and there is no doubt that Trump has done at least a few things that could justify some kind of legal response. He’s a bull in a china shop. He says and does what he wants. He’s very careless. He said the prosecutor working on his case looked like a crackhead. That being said, this latest thing looks even weaker than the New York case, which appears to be a complete scam.

Basically, it boils down to this, as I see it: Trump said he really won the election, and he made interference claims that were not true. Somehow this amounts to inciting insurrection. I would be astounded if this case went anywhere. After appeal, I mean. Juries are stupid and dishonest, and if you find the right area of the country, you can convict a conservative of anything.

What if we held leftists to similar standards? Al Sharpton encouraged rioting, and it resulted in the murder of an Orthodox Jew. Maxine Waters encouraged rioting. Celebrities have said stupid things like, “Rioting works.” Our country has been torn apart by riots based on lies that have been thoroughly debunked many times.

Far as I know, Trump always told his supporters to protest peacefully. If a few simpletons got carried away and listened to the beer instead of their common sense, and if they let undercover feds talk them into rioting, that’s not Trump’s fault.

Sometimes I think we could end the rioting problem simply by making the FBI stay home.

The theory behind the FBI agent-provocateur talk goes like this: people protest peacefully and legally, and it irks powerful politicians or swamp denizens because they can’t do anything about it. They send feds to The Gap to buy a bunch of matching outfits, they add masks, and then they merge with protesters and pretend to be on their side. Then they urge the protesters to do stupid things. When the protesters listen, they say, “This is an illegal riot, and we now have the power to arrest people,” and they put people in handcuffs and disperse the crowd.

First Amendment? No longer a problem.

Does it happen? Probably. Is it as widespread as people think? I would be surprised if it were. How can I know? I have no way of finding out.

We know the feds and local law enforcement have been very cruel and unfair to conservatives and Christians. So have corrections officers, who are part of the same organism. I don’t know how low they will stoop.

It’s unquestionably true that many government types hate the Bill of Rights. You can see them slobbering and raving on Youtube. You can read about their backroom discussions. The Bill of Rights means nothing at all to many Americans. Perhaps most. Law enforcement and other types of government work draw bullies and sadists; they always have. Even John the Baptist had to tell soldiers not to terrorize people. No one should doubt the government’s willingness to cheat or the eagerness of many government employees to do great harm to the innocent.

Encouraging people to riot is entrapment, and an entrapped person can’t be convicted or even arrested. Unfortunately, entrapment works, and it can be very hard to prove.

Seeing the shifty and cruel ways of today’s government makes it clear that one of the main purposes of the Second Amendment was to make our keepers afraid of us. They’re supposed to be part of us, but they go native. This country was founded by people who were fighting their own government, and they wanted people who came after them to be better able to do the same thing.

I think Trump will be cleared of nearly every charge once the process has played out. Then whoever is in office will have to decide whether to pardon him of any charges that stuck.

This is a time for Joe Biden to sit down and think about his future. It’s pretty obvious he took bribes and helped his family get rich by selling influence. If he isn’t impeached, it will be a miracle. He could also face criminal charges.

What happens then, if he has lost the election but refused to pardon Trump? What if a Republican is in the Oval Office? If Trump gets convicted of anything before the election, and he’s still polling well, Biden would be smart to give him a break.

I was thinking today that we might conceivably end up in a situation where two presidents who are bitter rivals have to pardon each other in order to save themselves. Biden pardons Trump, who wins the election, and then Trump pardons Biden. That would be funny.

Biden is somewhat stupid, and he is also senile and stubborn, so he may not be able to think clearly enough to consider the consequences of letting Trump convictions stand.

When the Jack Smith stuff started, I figured Smith was just a serious prosecutor who wanted to be thorough. Now he’s starting to look like a corrupt nut. But I could be wrong. Maybe when the evidence will come out, there will be some as-yet-unknown facts that justify blaming Trump for January 6. My bet: it won’t happen.

Arise, Aryan Sons of the Delaware Fatherland!

Tuesday, August 1st, 2023

Hunter Biden Does it Again

So what will have to happen before the leftist press admits there is a problem with the Bidens?

Yesterday’s hilarious revelation: Hunter Biden referred to himself and his friends as “Aryan godlike men.”

“Aryan.”

Try to imagine the array of instruments of torture that would be in preparation right now, had any member of the Trump family so much as said the word “Aryan.”

Here is an excerpt from a Hunter Biden email:

Your question — why does Super Chair love me so much? — is easily answered. It has nothing to do with me and everything to do with my last name (and I bring along very handsome Aryan godlike men wherever I go)

I don’t really know what an Aryan is, and I am too lazy to check, but my understanding is that the term is related to “Iranian,” and I believe it has nothing to do with blonde Europeans from countries where humor is believed to be a symptom of mental illness.

Okay, I’ll look.

Wikipedia says it applied to Indo-Iranian people, whatever they were. They are remarkable for not having a noun associated with their place of origin. There are Indo-Iranians, but there is no Indo-Iran.

You know, it’s amazing how smart the Nazis were to settle on that term. Whenever I see video of Indians wandering around in Mumbai or Iranians burning American flags, right away, I wonder if I’m looking at Germany or Austria. It’s nearly impossible to tell Germans, Indians, and Iranians apart. Those square jaws. That fair skin. Those piercing blue eyes.

Shameless liars are trying to get Hunter off the hook by attributing the remark to a Chinese guy. It was Biden that wrote the email, and he doesn’t say he was quoting. There is no reason at all to think anyone but Biden chose the word “Aryan.”

Does it sound like something a serious business contact would say, or does it sound like a snotty, sarcastic, elitist, racist paraphrase from a spoiled rich kid whose life is one continuous toga party?

The words came from Hunter, not a Chinese contact. It’s clear.

As we all know, the Nazis had this idea that there was a race of Aryans who were innately superior to everyone else and destined to rule over other races. To the Nazis, “Aryan” pretty much meant white people from Europe. Officially, it even included swarthy Italians. In modern usage, we all know what it means. It means people who look like Chris Hemsworth and Uma Thurman, except they’re supposed to be intelligent and talented, not actors.

When you use the word “Aryan” in a positive way, to describe the people in your tightly-knit, exclusive work circle, it’s very likely you are something of a white supremacist. A real white supremacist, not the kind leftists keep moaning about.

The term “white supremacist” is thrown around very irresponsibly these days, almost always in a libelous, baseless way, but there truly are wealthy white men out there who think their kind is the acme of creation.

It sounds like Hunter Biden is way too excited about his whiteness, which is funny, because he’s supposed to be part of the political party that has turned whiteness into a bad thing. Democrats are constantly jousting at white supremacist windmills, imagining wrongs that haven’t taken place, in order to get power over innocent people and abuse them, but here is the son of a Democrat president, using the absolute worst kind of white supremacist language–pseudoscientific Nazi jargon–to describe himself and his buddies.

I thought Hunter’s choice of words was interesting, because it reminded me of the privileged Northeastern frat boys I knew when I was in college. Columbia didn’t have much of a frat system because it was dysfunctional. It had frats that were even more embarrassing and silly than real frats at normal schools.

Columbia had a frat which was officially named Delta Psi. It was commonly known by another name, and it was packed with Northeastern kids who looked like Brooks Brothers mannequins. People who went on to join the wealthy elite and glide above the unwashed herd of random riff raff with undistinguished DNA.

For a long time, I’ve referred to frats as “affirmative action for mediocre white men,” and I stick by what I said. The purpose of a fraternity is to promote people who don’t deserve opportunities, over those who have merit but lack connections. Blackball and boost. Shoot the innocent from cover, and promote the undeserving. This is the entire purpose of fraternities. If they didn’t help weak-minded members defeat abler competition, no one would join or pay dues.

My impression is that Hunter and his pals belong to the same social stratus as the Bushes and Romneys. The secret handshake club. The people who belong to country clubs you can’t join. It makes sense to me that they would see ethnicity as one of their unifying and empowering traits.

Donald Trump, in bizarre contrast, the supposed patron of elites and racists, is the son and grandson of immigrants. He’s still kind of an upstart. An outsider who has to be tolerated.

I don’t think the Illuminati exist, and I know the Jewish conspiracy is a myth, but there really is a powerful, secretive guild of wealthy elitist Americans, and Hunter Biden’s remarks seem to confirm that he has made it his business to be part of it.

So, what happens now? I’ll tell you. It will turn out to be perfectly okay for the son of the president to use Nazi terminology, which was a basis for genocide and conquest, in an admiring way, to cast himself and his pals in a favorable light. No problem.

CNN won’t even notice. A royal got in trouble for wearing a Nazi uniform in jest, but Hunter Biden will not be punished for proving he believes handsome “Aryan” men are godlike.

American Jews will stand with Hunter, because they always commit political suicide. They always side with their enemies in American politics. Maybe some Orthodox Jews will get upset, but nobody pays attention to them.

I kind of wonder what Netanyahu will be thinking the next time he has to show up to kiss Joe Biden’s ring.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the human race won’t disappoint me quite as much as it usually does. Maybe someone on the left will start a stampede and hold the Bidens accountable.

I guess it’s a bad sign when you’ve known someone all your life, and you’re still disappointed when they do what they’ve always done. Says something about your ability to embrace reality.

Print up Some Milk Cartons

Tuesday, July 4th, 2023

Carlson Harder to Find than El Chapo

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

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

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

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

What happened?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe they will. That time slot is really something.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I pushed the metaphor too far.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evidence of TLR’s Cult Status Still Sadly Lacking

Monday, December 26th, 2022

Frisky Persecutors Undeterred

I guess anyone who reads what I write about The Last Reformation will think I’m a hard core supporter who thinks Torben Sondergaard has all the answers mankind has been seeking. That isn’t true. I have never belonged to The Last Reformation, and I disagree with them on minor points of doctrine. I have some concerns that it could become a cult over time, and I think they may be making things too systematic. On the whole, though, I support them, and I know they do wonderful work.

All that being said, I am at it again.

Recently, TLR put up two videos about Torben, who is still in jail or prison or something. “Detention,” I think they call it. Makes incarcerating people who haven’t been found guilty of anything sound better. TLR is trying to set the record straight. I’m going to embed the videos here.

My only complaint with the videos is that comments are disabled. That’s a bad move. It makes TLR look like it’s afraid something will be exposed.

It’s fascinating how things unfolded. The videos contain new information. It turns out Danish TV, which belongs to the government, sent two spies to TLR’s facility, and they both told huge lies on camera.

The spies pretended to be Christians, and they asked to be baptized. They even went so far as to give false testimonies later to be used in videos.

As TLR’s second video says, these are people who have no fear of God. No one who believes in a just God would ask to be baptized while lying to the people doing the baptizing, and certainly, no real Christian would lie later in a video testimony.

The name of one of the spies is Sebastian Svensson. This man is accused of doing something so low, it’s hard to believe. The story: in private, he told Torben he had inherited a lot of money, and he said he wanted to give it to Torben. When Torben told him he could donate via the TLR website, he refused. He said he wanted Torben, not the ministry, to have it. Torben never took the money.

In America, this tactic is considered so unfair, law enforcement can’t use it. It’s called entrapment. Black’s Law Dictionary defines it this way: “a law-enforcement officer’s or government agent’s inducement of a person to commit a crime, by means of fraud or undue persuasion, in an attempt to later bring a criminal prosecution against that person.”

More simply, the cops aren’t allowed to go up to a person who has no plans to commit a crime and entice or pressure him until he commits one.

Svensson is a journalist, not a cop, and statutes barring entrapment don’t apply, but the principle underlying the prohibition still applies. Entrapment is a slimy thing to do. In some courts, a private party who entraps someone is considered guilty of the crime of aiding and abetting.

I don’t bring these legal points up to suggest Svensson broke the law. I’m just using them to highlight the vileness of the things TLR says he did.

Is entrapment considered ethical by journalists? If so, then a journalist’s job isn’t just to cover crime but to make it happen. Bribing a preacher with no record of dishonesty is like Woodward and Bernstein telling Nixon he should have people break into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.

When I was going to Trinity Church in Miami, a member tried to give the church a car, and Pastor Rich Wilkerson jumped right up and snagged it for himself. The church got nothing. Too bad Svennson wasn’t there.

Another journalist, Amalie Borup, filmed a private discussion with Torben and then published parts of it. According to TLR, she took things out of context and tried to make it seem that Torben had told her to stop taking a prescription.

TLR says he never does this, and I believe it. He’s not a moron. Obviously, telling people to abandon medical treatment can lead to legal problems, and aside from that, every Christian who knows anything about healing and deliverance knows that problems may return.

You can watch the second TLR video and see these schemers go under the water, wasting people’s time, and then testify about how it changed them.

Why believe TLR about the prescription story? Well, the journalists are proven liars, for one thing, and I have never seen anyone at TLR get caught in a lie.

The video also tells about random Internet warriers who put out rumors claiming Torben makes a lot of money from TLR and only cares about getting rich.

Is this true?

TLR is transparent, and no one has ever published a story saying he or she looked at the books and found wrongdoing. But apart from that, they don’t behave like greedy preachers.

I have been to several TLR events, I have received lots of their group emails, and of course, I have seen their website and videos. Here are my observations.

1. If they have asked for money, apart from taking quiet, unpressured collections at meetings, I am unaware of it.

2. I have no recollection of ever seeing a TLR person draw a connection between giving TLR money and receiving financial prosperity from God.

3. Torben and his family look like they dress from Kohl’s and Marshall’s.

4. Torben criticizes the prosperity gospel.

TLR also complains about people who call it a cult. The big problem with the proposition that TLR is that so far, no one has produced any evidence.

What are some things cults do? They control people. They isolate them from other people. They don’t permit dissent, so there is no accountability. They may expect people to turn over assets. Cults are often led by individuals who are considered infallible.

Now that I think about it, this describes the Catholic Church, back in the days when they still burned people alive.

It is true that TLR has enforced some annoying rules at some of its live-in retreats. For example, they have required people who live close by to sleep in dormitories and be in bed by a certain hour. These things did not sit well with me. I have enough problems sleeping at home, and I’m not excited about using a community shower or toilet. On the other hand, if you go to a TLR meeting, you will notice the following things:

1. You don’t have to pay a dime. You may be required to give a refundable deposit in order to reserve a spot, but they do this because people who hate them used to take up all the spots in order to kill attendance and leave them holding the bag when paid venues expected payment.

2. You can come and go as you wish. They don’t even notice. If you only want to see the second day of a three-day event, and you want to show up two hours late, that’s fine.

3. No one pushes you to join. They tell you how to do it, and they leave it at that.

4. People in attendance run around healing, praying, and casting demons out without direct supervision. If you want to cast a demon out of someone, you can walk into a TLR meeting from the street, find a person, and go to work. No one will question you. I’ve seen people ministering spontaneously, and I’ve done it, so I know what I’m talking about.

5. Torben is not the only one doing things, as #4 suggests. In fact, the other people there will correct you if you think you have to deal with Torben directly. You may, if you want, but they make it clear he’s not God’s unique emissary. A guy who prayed with me somehow got the idea that I thought Torben had to do it, and he gave me a little lecture. It is true that a lot of misguided people put him on a pedestal, but that’s their own fault. He doesn’t attend every event. Especially now, while he’s in jail.

6. TLR gives things away. They give away water, snacks, DVD’s, and books.

7. They have never told me who to associate with, although the Bible itself makes it clear we need to cut certain types of people off.

If this is a cult, it’s the sorriest cult in human history. They’re doing everything wrong. In comparison, Orthodox Judaism, the Masons, and even the Boy Scouts look like the Branch Davidians.

I have tried to find eyewitness testimony proving TLR is a cult, but I can’t come up with anything. I keep seeing Google results that look promising, but when I click on them, it’s usually some fringe kook claiming TLR is a cult because it disagrees with him about doctrine. Cessationists really love to call TLR a cult. It infuriates them when anyone claims to have received a healing, and talking about tongues is like jabbing them with a pointed stick. Some atheists also hate TLR, but what preacher don’t they hate?

A ridiculous site ironically labeled Rationalwiki says TLR is a cult, but all it publishes is innuendo. “Professionals” have criticized TLR! Professional what? Ballroom dancers? Drywall installers?

A former member says TLR is heretical! What? By whose standards? Jesus was labeled a heretic. Protestants consider Catholics heretics. Again, disagreement over doctrine does not form a basis for labeling TLR a cult.

Irrationalwiki says TLR “abused” a handicapped woman who developed psychosis caused by the abuse. It says she had to receive 24-hour care for years. Who defines “abuse”? Not Rationalwiki. What was the abuse? What were the symptoms of psychosis? Who made the diagnosis? Who says it was caused by TLR? Rationalwiki does, and that’s good enough for you. It provides a link to a Facebook post to prove it. If you don’t have Facebook, too bad.

The psychosis claim comes from an entity called InsideOut. This outfit claims Torben performs “violent” exorcisms. Excuse me; I’ve been there. The only thing resembling violence comes from the people being delivered. They often thrash and yell. There is no violence. The people around them comfort them and help them not to injure themselves.

Try to find information on InsideOut. You’ll find it’s extremely obscure. TLR-bashers call it “a Danish anti-cult corporation.” People love using words like corporation and coalition to describe a nut with a Wix website. The leader of InsideOut is named Camilla Johnson. Try to find her on the web. Good luck, because I got nowhere.

My bet is that InsideOut’s headquarters is her apartment.

A number of the powerful arguments Rationalwiki confidently presents are simply references to people who think Torben is wrong to believe basic Christian tenets. In other words, atheists. To most atheists, I guess every religion is a cult.

Here is a quotation Rationalwiki presents, approvingly, on its page about Jesus:

“Jesus was no perfect man, no meek or wise messiah: in fact his philosophies were and are largely immoral, often violent, as well as shallow and irrational.”

“Rational”…wiki.

You should always look out when a person claims to be rational. It’s funny, but people who claim to prefer logic and science to religion never seem to notice that science has proven that human beings can’t be rational. Look up “Clever Hans.” Look up “double blind.”

Too often, “rational” really means, “motivated by an irrational hatred of religion.”

Persecution is amazing. It doesn’t have to have a single grain of truth in it to motivate people.

I have a relative who is convinced TLR is a cult. Strangest thing. She doesn’t actually know much about it. She thinks its leader is a criminal, and she hasn’t even heard about the immigration thing. She doesn’t know TLR’s name. The other day, I heard she was concerned I was running around with “NRA.” I wish she would read up and find out how mistaken she is.

Maybe some preacher she likes, who sees Torben as a threat, said some bad things about him. Torben is definitely a threat to big, profitable churches.

I have wondered why Torben ended up in jail, given that you would expect God to look after him. I wonder if it has to do with putting his trust in carnal people and the United States government. It’s just my impression. Maybe he would have been jailed no matter what.

His US asylum case has been rejected, and many people think it’s unfair. I have no idea whether that’s true or not. I don’t know the law surrounding asylum. Maybe his case is completely normal, and he doesn’t meet the criteria for asylum. I know it’s a big mistake for laymen, and lawyers who are not familiar with a case, to draw conclusions.

TLR is no cult, so don’t be nervous about visiting their meetings. The rumors about leather straps and electrodes are grossly exaggerated.

From the Desk of Mr. Smith

Friday, December 9th, 2022

“Smitty,” They call Me

Reader LauraW posted some interesting comments about my recent dealings with my elderly aunt.

My grandparents left some property to their descendants, and my 78-year-old aunt is in charge of getting rid of it and distributing the proceeds. She should have been finished with nearly everything in about 2012. She doesn’t provide bank statements or reports, and she says she doesn’t have to, which is something most prosecutors would disagree with.

She has Parkinson’s, and her health is very, very bad. She has trouble speaking and walking. She has been hospitalized at least once. Her husband is 89 and appears to be senile. He is also in bad health, and he is not expected to stay out of assisted living long. He takes care of my aunt, so a crisis is expected soon.

My aunt has two grown children. I can’t imagine her son offering to care for her. It would be very unlike him. I think her daughter and her son-in-law would want to do the right thing, but they have kids to deal with, and their house is not that big. In all likelihood, my aunt will have to choose between 24-hour live-in help or the local nursing home.

While I was in Singapore, my aunt texted me and said I needed to contact her right away about a property she wanted to sell, and I responded, saying I was in the process of flying home and I would try to contact her the next day. When I arrived, I called her. She was very angry with me from the second she answered the phone. She was angry with me for taking a trip, and she demanded to know why I had done it.

She asked me who goes on vacation during November, as though I had done it to offend her, personally. Well, can anyone think of a day in November when people like to travel? And who calls his aunt for permission to leave town? No one thinks, “I want to go to Fiji, so I better call all my elderly relatives who almost never talk to me.”

While we were talking, I spoke very bluntly about her poor performance, but I was not rude. She apparently felt she was being attacked personally. She said a lot of very insulting things about me which were shocking and untrue, and she speculated that I was poor and desperate and had no one in my life except a “sorry dog.” Paradoxically, she also criticized me for bragging that I was “filthy rich,” which I did not do. I didn’t tell her anything about my financial situation.

You can read more details in an earlier post.

LauraW says she was an RN, and she worked with psych patients and old people. She said urinary tract infections sometimes cause old people to go nuts, and she said antibiotics bring them back.

I don’t know anything about my aunt’s urinary health. We are not close these days, and even if we were, I would not be connected with her care in any way. She has her husband and children, and aside from that, she is not inclined to take advice.

I decided to look up Parkinson’s. I knew it caused dementia and other mental problems, but that was about the sum of my knowledge.

Parkinson’s is incurable and fatal. The web says it isn’t fatal, but that’s not really true, because it causes problems that shorten life. When it sets in in late middle age, you can expect to live about 20 more years, depending on the breaks. My aunt is at the upper range of that period now.

When I was a kid, and people got fatal diseases, doctors either told them they were going to die, or they told their families and let the families keep them in the dark. Now, the fashionable thing is to refuse to say conditions are fatal. It doesn’t mean they’re not. It just means the medical establishment has developed a bias against saying so. The official dogma appears to be that Parkinson’s isn’t fatal, but on the other hand, you can find all sorts of sites discussing deaths caused by Parkinson’s, so, yes, it’s fatal, unless something else gets you first. The same could be said of any fatal disease. You can get rabies and die from an unrelated heart attack.

We think of Parkinson’s as something that causes tremors, but it also causes hallucinations, delusions, and dementia.

I found out it can make people paranoid and likely to argue. They may become physically violent.

It is common for people with Parkinson’s to see things that aren’t there, like brightly-colored animals.

My aunt said some weird things to me, causing me to wonder if she was experiencing psychosis. She seemed panicked because I was questioning her actions as my fiduciary. Panicked people often lash out. Proud people with dementia do this when you question their faculties.

She seemed to feel it would help if she criticized my life to make me feel like a loser. Thing is, she doesn’t know much about my life because her side of the family started excluding me a long time ago. She had to guess. She attacked in various areas, including the area of romance and family. She said I had flown to Egypt to try and find a woman who would agree to come home with me and marry me. That was weird.

Did someone tell my aunt I went to Egypt last year? I don’t know. I don’t believe she knows. I know she has no idea I’m married, because she said she had grandchildren and all I had was the dog she imagined. One of her longstanding traits is that she wants people to admire her life and feel bad about their own.

My grandparents had eight grandchildren, and by God’s blessing and no virtue of my own, I turned out to be the smartest. I think this gnaws at my aunt. She used to tell me how brilliant her kids were, even though it wasn’t true. Then it was her son in law, who went on to die in a plane crash, removing him from the arsenal. Now it’s the grandchildren. Evidently, they are all prodigies, although no one else in the family seems to have noticed. She also tells me how incredibly intelligent various local eccentrics are, even though there is no truth at all in that. Smart people get out of Eastern Kentucky.

I think she was guessing about the trip I just completed, which had nothing to do with Egypt. If she had heard anything substantial about last year’s Egypt trip, she would know I was married. I took that trip with my then-fiancee.

I didn’t mention my marriage because I felt it could be helpful to me to hold onto that information, and I didn’t feel any motivation to get into the process of arguing with her about whether I was a loser and she and her family were to be greatly admired. That kind of bickering is not important to me. I didn’t insult her kids or her life, and I certainly had room to do so.

It would be pretty strange to go to Egypt to find a wife. The prime countries for foreign brides are the Philippines and Thailand, as far as I know. I believe Ukraine is also high on the list. Egypt is a Muslim country, so it’s not a great hunting ground. Nothing spoils a wedding night like a honor killing.

Finding a wife in the US is not exactly hard, so it makes no sense to suggest I would fly overseas if I were desperate. If you’re a desperate American male, stay where you are. You just have to make yourself available, have a net worth, and stop saying no. Finding a wife you actually want is another story. Only God can arrange that.

In any case, if I had been desperate for a wife, I would have looked here first. In fact, I did, when I decided to check out online dating. The Americans who popped up…there was just no way. Unthinkable.

My aunt must have come up with Egypt through a coincidental delusion or a guess. My wife and I have been to 4 countries, so the odds of her randomly picking one we had visited were not all that low.

I don’t think American brides will ever be hard for American men to find, and I doubt they will ever be in big demand overseas, because they tend to be spoiled, selfish, conceited, and misandrist. And they’re not especially attractive compared to the competition. Far Eastern brides get the best marks in that area, and Eastern European girls are also very impressive compared to Americans. American women also have a very high obesity rate. Over 40% of American women are obese, and 12% are severely obese.

I can say these incendiary things now, because I’m married and have nothing to be afraid of. Although, to be honest, I would have said them anyway.

I am checking Wikipedia, and it looks like I’m right. It says:

The majority of the women making use of these services in the late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century are from Southeast Asia and from Russia and other countries in the former Soviet Union.

It also backs up what my friend Mike, who does business with Ukrainians, has told me:

52 percent of Russia’s workforce is made up of women, yet according to some sources they often hold low positions of prominence in their home country and work jobs with less respect and lower wages (such as teaching or physician positions); and women earn 43 percent of what men do. Marriage is a substantial part of Russian culture, with 30 years being the age at which a woman is considered an “old maid”. With 4,138,273 more females than males from the ages of 15 to 64, marriage opportunities are slim at home and worsened by the life expectancy difference between men (64.3 years) and women (73.17 years), as well as the fact that a large portion of successful males are emigrating out of Russia.

I realize Ukraine is not Russia, but the foreign-marriage business is big not only in Russia itself, but also in countries like Ukraine which have similar cultures and are part of the same general area.

Foreign men who pursue American girls are generally looking for money or temporary non-Muslim demi-wives to serve as unpaid servants and sex providers.

For all their problems, I don’t think American men are as undesirable as American women. If you think they are, I have three questions.

1. Why is “bridezilla” a word, while “groomzilla” is not?

2. Why do American women crave marriage while most American men fear it?

3. Why are American men lining up to find foreign brides while almost no American women are looking for foreign men?

In at least three places, Proverbs cautions against the horror of an combative wife. I go further. I always say marrying the wrong woman is, literally, worse than cancer. America is a great place to find the wrong wife.

My aunt seems way more argumentative than she used to be, which could be a Parkinson’s symptom. I’m not sure, though, because I used to be one of her favorites, so I may not have seen what others have been seeing all her life. I have been told my sister and my other living aunt were chewed out royally by her. I have heard stories that made her sound pretty awful. Maybe she has always been nasty to other people.

In conversations with me, she always sought approval. I think she wants validation from people who didn’t grow up in Eastern Kentucky. I think she perceives them as more sophisticated, which is true.

My wife and I pray for my relatives. That’s all we can do. When thinking about what’s happening makes me angry, and it does, I use my supernatural tools to end it and get God’s help to love them. I don’t want pettiness to damage my relationship with Him.

Unsaved people who are too close to you will be used to drag you down to hell. This is why we are not to be unequally yoked. Provocation is one way they do it.

I’m very glad my relatives are only connected to a small part of what I have. Such independence is a gift from God, and it is an extraordinarily great gift I did nothing to deserve. I deserve poverty, but God lifted me up. Many, many people are in horrible marriages or are caught up in family turmoil or have cruel employers and jobs they can’t quit. I have been spared in spite of inviting these problems.

My aunt criticized my parents and me, saying we were ashamed of our people and our culture. Don’t ask me to explain it, but she felt this disqualified me from telling her she should advertise real estate on the web like everyone else, including people in Appalachia. She thinks I should be ashamed because I don’t admire my people, or former people. I thought about her remarks a lot yesterday.

If you’re a Christian, it’s very important to reject your earthly culture and to be ashamed of it, especially if you come from a backward place like the one where my aunt lives.

It goes beyond rejecting certain earthly cultures. You have to reject the culture and ways of the earth as a whole. Things that work to make you successful as an unbeliever don’t work for Christians. To make it without God, you are expected to be proud, aggressive, relentlessly self-promoting, greedy, and way too devoted to hard work. To succeed as a Christian, you have to be humble, peaceful, self-abasing, generous, and unwilling to sacrifice your relationship with God in order to make money.

Backward cultures are worse than relatively healthy ones, emphasizing stupid things like fighting, drinking, emotionalism, ethnic pride, racism, fornication, adultery, and contempt for education. All these things are celebrated in Eastern Kentucky.

My wife rejects Zambian culture. People ask me why I don’t go visit her, and I tell them she doesn’t want me to. We have no incentive to get together there. There is nothing in Zambia except wild animals and Victoria Falls. Her parents are dead. The relatives who looked after her when she was young treated her badly, and a number of them are witches who put curses on her.

Rhodah used to want to enter politics so she could fix Zambia. Now she wants to get out and move to America. She’s not stupid. She can look around and see that her country isn’t going anywhere. There are a lot of good Christians there, but they are outnumbered by pagans and Catholics. America is doomed, but it offers a better standard of living and a husband who will be unified with her in her relationship with God. Most importantly, I think, it will get destructive relatives out of her life.

You have to hold onto the family God gives you, but you should also cut the old one loose.

Yesterday we talked about our names. She said she wants to dump both of her names, both first and last. She was a neglected child, and her first name was issued as an afterthought. She was so neglected, her birth date is uncertain because no one cared enough about her to keep good records. She says I should pray for God to tell me what to name her.

I plan to get rid of my dad’s last name. I like the idea of taking my mother’s father’s name, which is a very common one. I want to get rid of my middle name because a middle name is one more thing to write down on forms, and it makes you easier to trace. We can have nice, common names that are very hard for people to use to look us up on the web. Perfect for making a new start. I don’t want people from my past, especially hopeful divorced women, bothering me. My life and my real brothers and sisters are in the future.

I don’t know how my aunt feels about people of other races today, but I know what she said in the past. I have to wonder what will go through her mind if Rhodah and I show up with a mixed-race son who has my grandfather’s first and last names. I think my grandfather’s family name is a bit like an Hermes “H” to her.

Time for yet another digression. A year or two ago, my dad’s email address got a message from a woman who used to work for him. She was an associate in his firm. She wanted to know how he was doing. Mind you, this was a person who probably had not contacted him in 10 years, and she had no idea he was dead.

I emailed her back, letting her know my dad had passed away. So of course, she responded with condolences, asked what happened, and said she hoped I was okay.

No, she didn’t! She didn’t respond at all. And I know her and her husband. We are not strangers.

Googling, I see that she and the man I knew as her husband now live in different states.

Here’s what I think: she took her shot. Best guess. Maybe she emails other elderly single men.

I don’t think she had a heartfelt interest. My dad was rude to his subordinates and said all sorts of offensive things to them. I recall two colorful terms he used to refer to this lady.

I don’t think she’s a malevolent person, but it’s common for older women to need money, and marrying is one of the most common ways to fill the need.

The older a man gets, the more women will see him as a potential musical chair. Something to be aware of.

To get back on track, I am expected to be excited about my people and be loyal to them, but who are my people? Not my grandfather’s descendants. They don’t care about me at all. My people are those who are Spirit-led. Jesus said the same thing. He said, “whoever does the will of My Father in heaven is My brother and sister and mother,” and the word says it is impossible to please God in the flesh, so he was talking about Spirit-led people.

Maybe we should call ourselves Mr. and Mrs. Jim and Mary Smith. Does it matter whether our earthly names have any connection to our ancestors? People who claim to have died and visited heaven sometimes tell us we have new names there, which is probably true. I can’t imagine heaven having three million people named John Jones.

I used to think Eastern Kentucky was my refuge and a sort of paradise on Earth, but now I have no desire to go there again. It’s like Miami to me. I hope I never have to visit again. Drugs, laziness, violence, racism, self-inflicted poverty, childishness…these are the things it offers me. It offers to pull me backward and take away whatever improvements God has made.

Eastern Kentucky is rich, or it used to be before leftists killed the coal industry. It should be like Texas. Instead, Kentuckians sold their mineral rights to less-backward people from places like New York City, and they became laborers for the people who owned the coal. It wasn’t theft, regardless of what apologists say. They did what Esau did. They gave their birthrights away for fleeting short-end benefits.

Fools are supposed to lose their money to responsible people. It’s not an aberration, and it certainly isn’t unjust. Appalachia has poverty because it earned it.

The funny thing about what my aunt said is that it applies to her, too. She is also ashamed of her culture and her people. She’s always trying to make them look better, and she likes to claim accomplished people who came from the area. The problem is that she claims people whose parents got out before they were born. She likes to talk about J.D. Vance and Cameron Crowe.

Until my aunt told me, I had no idea who J.D. Vance was or that he was connected to Breathitt County, Kentucky, where my grandfather sat as judge. I didn’t know who Cameron Crowe was or that he had a parent from Powell County, another county on my grandfather’s circuit. Vance is a senator-elect who wrote a bestseller about toxic mountain culture, and Crowe wrote Jerry Maguire.

The problem with using them to prop up Kentucky is that both these men are from other places. Like many Kentuckians who wanted better lives, Vance’s parents moved to Ohio, and he was born there. Crowe has only one parent from Kentucky, and he was born in Palm Springs.

Obviously, the Vances and the Crowes were unhappy with our culture, and their sons probably would not have succeeded had they stayed in Kentucky. Furthermore, Vance clearly has a low opinion of his parents’ culture, because his book, Hillbilly Elegy, has a slur in the title and depicts a family destroyed by mountain ways.

If you thought Mexico had a great culture, would you write a book about car thieves and gangs in Los Angeles and call it Wetback Memories? The name of Vance’s book killed my interest in reading it. I don’t think anyone should call another person a hillbilly.

J.D. Vance has no accent. How about that? Neither does Crowe. Losing your accent is considered one of the most important steps in masking your Kentucky roots. It’s a tradition among social climbers who leave.

Loyalty to earthly connections is a tool of the antichrist. The spirit of antichrist pulls people backward and makes them feel a groundless loyalty to the cultures of the earth. Satan wants us to put our families and ethnic groups above God. Clinging to degenerate ways out of mindless loyalty is a great way to make sure you are never transformed by the Holy Spirit, and it can also help you on your way to hell.

It’s also a great tool for starting wars. We identify with nations instead of the family of God, so instead of having the unified interests of God, we have the conflicting interests of squabbling countries.

I don’t know what will happen with my biological relatives, except maybe the one I baptized, but I have a great Christian wife and a number of friends who are my true brothers and sisters. My biologicals distanced themselves from me a long time ago, so I don’t feel much of an attachment now.

Kentucky is getting worse and worse. I was there in 2019 for my dad’s burial, and my second cousin told me she had told her kids to leave the area. Appalachia had its big revival about 80 years ago. Since then, in Eastern Kentucky, there has been more deterioration than progress.

I still like the idea of moving to a Christian area in Tennessee. Kentucky and West Virginia are a mess, but it seems like there are places in Tennessee where a Christian could enjoy life.

There is a guy in Scotland who pops up occasionally and makes Youtube videos about things God has shown him. He has nearly no subcribers. He just put up a video in which he discusses the fact that Spirit-led Christians lose their interest in carnal pursuits and the things of the world. To me, it’s obvious that maintaining your unity with stubborn unsaved people is an example of a worldly pursuit.

Spots and Blemishes

Saturday, June 11th, 2022

Gaslighted by the Medical Profession Again

My wife and I were discussing the new monkeypox outbreak. In case you don’t know, monkeypox is related to smallpox, and it is endemic in Africa, where people butcher monkeys. It’s not a big deal there. Suddenly it’s popping up in other places around the world. It causes things like fever, bone pain, and huge pus-filled blisters that leave scars. It kills weak people.

Why is the outbreak interesting? Because it’s a homosexual plague. The vast majority of people who are falling ill are homosexual men. The press loves to say “men who have sex with men,” as though it’s possible for a man who has sex with men to be anything but homosexual. Voluntary sex with other men is the act that defines homosexuality. Getting ambushed on a Navy ship doesn’t make you homosexual, but lying down willingly does.

The press is trying to convince us we’re all at risk, but that’s untrue. Monkeypox has been in Africa forever, they don’t have lockdowns or quarantines, and the disease isn’t all that common. People with normal sexual inclinations don’t get it all that easily, even though it can be spread through casual contact. The authorities are reluctantly admitting you can’t catch it just from being in a room with someone. It requires prolonged face-to-face contact, at the least.

Why are homosexual men getting it? Because they are unbelievably promiscuous and do all sorts of things other people are less likely to do. It’s not rare for a homosexual to have hundreds of sex partners per year, and they congregate in dark rooms (actually referred to as “dark rooms”), anonymously, often having sex with multiple partners they never even get a good look at.

Right now, you can go online and find an article by a major news outlet, saying it’s hard to track monkeypox exposures because of anonymous sex. Not “casual.” ANONYMOUS. That’s a veiled reference to homosexuals. Anonymous sex is not part of heterosexual life. It’s rare. To homosexuals, it’s normal. It’s one of the main things that drives homosexual tourism. They literally ride from airports to clubs with dark rooms, where they get down to business right away. Google and see.

Homosexual men penetrate each other’s anuses. The anus is not engineered to be a sex organ. It’s too fragile, and anal sex damages it. Unlike a vagina, it rips easily, allowing whatever microbes and fungi the penetrating individual has to go right into the bloodstream of the one playing the female role. Feces enters the urethra of the man playing the male role, and from there fecal pathogens have access to his mucous membranes and his urinary tract. Homosexual men lick each other’s anuses. They perform oral sex on each other. They urinate on each other. Many of them enjoy playing with feces; that particular diversion is called “scat.”

Homosexuals are also heavy drug users compared to the rest of us, and that includes intravenous drugs, so needle-sharing is a problem. And drug abuse weakens people’s immune systems even when they don’t share needles.
In short, if you wanted to be as diseased as possible, taking up homosexual-style sexual activity would be the best way to do it. There is no better way to catch infections of all types.

Obviously, I am a person who disapproves of homosexual activity, because I know it wrecks a person’s relationship with God and is likely to end with damnation. Nonetheless, objectively, any person with common sense should be able to see that the homosexual lifestyle, as engaged in by real homosexuals (not imaginary ones who are very careful) is an extreme invitation to infectious disease.

Recklessness is, and always has been, a huge problem among homosexuals. It’s the reason the AIDS epidemic never went away among them. People like to tell us education will stop VD, but most people who get VD know exactly how to prevent it and choose to do otherwise, and people who don’t know much about VD and who behave themselves are so safe they might as well be immune.

Back during the first AIDS panic, Miami had a gay gym that had an interesting story. To normal people, a gym is a place to exercise. To gays, it’s very different. It’s a place to pick up sexual partners and, often. to have sex with them on the premises. I suppose a homosexual at a homosexual gym must be like a normal man at a women’s gym where he gets to shower with the girls and have sex with them in the locker rooms. Most of us would show up early, leave very late, and never miss a workout.

The gym in Miami was called Body Positive. They created a program of AIDS education. Men met in the gym and took classes. They got an award for this.
After the program had been going on a while, it was noticed that people who took the class were dropping dead from AIDS. Why? Because after class, they had orgies without protection.

These were people who knew men who had died from AIDS. They had seen the skin lesions, the vomiting and diarrhea, the dementia, the pneumonia, and the slow deaths of living skeletons. They still pounced on each other after their classes.

This is a good illustration of the mindset that has made AIDS so devastating to homosexuals. Their aberration doesn’t just cause them to prefer men; it causes many of them to be unable to control themselves and exercise ordinary responsibility. They don’t just have DIFFERENT sex. They have much MORE sex, with much less care.

I risk being be called hateful for repeating the indisputable, well-known facts about AIDS. Back when it first appeared, the same facts were disseminated by journalists who thought homosexuality was just fine, and it was considered okay for them to bring up the behavioral problems that were killing so many men. They were obviously trying to help by bringing attention to the root of the problem. I’m trying to help as well, but this is 2022, and the cancel kids rule the world.

Syphilis and gonorrhea are not common among normal people these days, but due to irresponsibility, they have never stopped raging among homosexuals. Right now, journalists are trying to avoid confronting this truth. There are stories saying monkeypox is more common among people with syphilis and gonorrhea, but they’re not admitting these are predominantly homosexual diseases, which is true. They also say monkeypox is typically presenting on the genitals and anus, without pointing out that this used to be atypical. Historically, monkeypox lesions have appeared first on people’s faces. Initial anal and genital lesions are new aberrations, and the cause is obvious.

A few days ago, the politicized CDC came after us again, telling us to mask up on airplanes in order to avoid monkeypox. Airplanes. The places where, according to the best science, masks do about as much good as seat belts on cruise ships. They knew masks weren’t helpful, so why recommend them?

I think they did it to bulk up the illusion that normal people were at risk. Fortunately, the CDC contradicted its own recommendation almost immediately.

Here’s a question no one is asking: how many frauds will be exposed by monkeypox? The blisters it causes can’t be prevented, and they leave big scars in obvious places like the face and arms. How many liars will start developing scars? How many actors? Will they be able to cover them up? Will we see certain actors start to wear unusually thick makeup, with no explanation? Will actors disappear from public view for weeks, so they can let their sores heal in private?

How about priests and other clergymen? How about scoutmasters and gym teachers? Certain occupations and activities attract men who are on the down low.

Monkeypox may well serve as a blacklight, lighting up people who would prefer to stay in the shadows. It will be interesting to see if that happens. It all depends on how responsible homosexuals decide to be. The scale of the epidemic, if it becomes one, will depend on their actions.

I believe the apocalypse has started, and the Revelation says death will be part of it. Death by pestilence, not just starvation or war. Since coronavirus popped up, I have been posing the question, “Which disease will be next?” We have our answer.

Monkeypox isn’t that bad, so that’s fortunate. Another disease will follow, and then another. Things will keep getting worse.

When a disease crops up and homes in on a group of people who do certain things which God calls sinful or, worse, abomination, we ought to ask ourselves why. We should ask if it’s really coincidence. Pride shouldn’t blind us to information that could help us.

There used to be no VD. No VD is mentioned in the Bible. Syphilis was unknown in the Old World until Columbus returned home. Gonorrhea appears to have popped up over a millennium after Christ. Over the centuries, the situation has deteriorated.

When I was a kid, there were syphilis and gonorrhea, and they were all we heard about. They were always mentioned together, because lay people didn’t know of any other diseases. They summed up “VD” for most of us. Both could be cured with one shot. Now we have HPV and the cancers it causes, chlamydia, AIDS, herpes, bacterial vaginosis, hepatitis, and probably some others I can’t recall at the moment. We have things that can’t be cured at all. Because God’s punishment is progressive, we should expect new forms of VD to show up in the future.

People should ask themselves why there are no sexual infections associated with monogamy and abstinence. If abstaining from sexual sin prevents infection, and sexual sin causes it, and the correlation is many times worse among male homosexuals, shouldn’t you wonder if God is involved?

Pretending monkeypox is a heterosexual problem doesn’t help homosexuals. They need to know they are getting messages from the supernatural realm. They need to know spirits that are truly hateful, not merely in disagreement with them, are trying to destroy them here on Earth and then in hell. God wants them with him for eternity, in a state of perfect health and safety, surrounded by love, not toxic, selfish lust. To be with him, they have to do things his way, just like everyone else. As God once told me, denying a sin is worse than the sin itself.

MORE

Amazon is now putting this warning on order status reports: “Please give drivers at least 6 feet of space to safely complete your delivery.”

Funny how we didn’t see that during the pandemic, but it popped up quickly after monkeypox arose. Think there’s a connection?

Push! Push!

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2022

Hell Keeps Freezing Over

Yesterday, my friend Mike told me Roe v. Wade had been overturned, and he said the news came from a site with a name like “topnewznowlulz.biz.” Based on the facts that I thought it would be a very long time before Roe would come under attack, and that the site was obscure, I scoffed. But I Googled anyway, and we all know what happened.

What APPEARS to have happened. What MAY happen. I should be careful.

I say, “What APPEARS to have happened,” because I read the opinion, and the tone is a little like that of a Yahoo News article from a leftist agitation site. “Sam Alito SHUTS down far-left Roe Jurists.” Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but you will see what I mean if you read the opinion. As of this writing, I haven’t seen any confirmation that the opinion is real, so I am hedging my bets.

Ordinarily, court opinions are very restrained, but Alito says Roe was “egregiously wrong,” and he really drops the hammer on the justices and other leftists who formed Roe’s murderous, imperialist conclusions.

I say, “What MAY happen,” because the opinion is not published, unless publication by news sites counts. It’s not law until other courts get notice via official notification.

When I saw that the news was probably real, I rejoiced, but I’m sorry to say it wasn’t because I thought the unborn were finally being rescued. It was because I thought the ruling was going to spur conflict and disorder, and I thought this was probably one more indication that the end of the age was very close.

That’s how tired I am of this crazy planet.

A friend of mine had a baby, and when I visited her, she said that during labor, she would have done anything to get him out of her. She wasn’t embarrassed about being seen naked by other people. She didn’t care what she had to do. She wanted him OUT, OUT, OUT. The new ruling (I am too lazy to write “alleged” or whatever over and over) made me think of my friend. When a crisis gets bad enough, your values change, and you just want it over with.

The left loves the word “unsustainable,” and they use it to manipulate us, so naturally, I don’t like it. But I will use it. The world’s current course is unsustainable. We can’t continue in a world in which people and even animals are constantly dodging an infuriating, mutating, capricious disease. We can’t continue in a world where hatred and lawlessness are considered normal. We can’t have lives that are bearable in an atmosphere of forced participation in sexual perversion or where we are expected to submit to technology and completely abandon privacy and free will. Fundamentally, to use a word that is appropriate in more than one way, we can’t continue in a world where God is hated and Satan is openly crowned in his place.

Things have to come to a head, because the strain we live under is unendurable.

Actually, that’s not quite true for people who are close to God and have his blessings and protection. But even such people long to get out of a world where they are completely out of place.

The leak of the opinion is a great example of what’s wrong with the world right now. God tells us Satan’s children are lawless. We see lawlessness everywhere these days. People have turned civil disobedience into an obsession. Many people go so far as to endorse rioting openly. States refuse to obey federal law. Local governments refuse to obey federal law and state law. It’s not just individuals running amok. It’s rulers.

What does the Bible call the Antichrist? “The Man of Lawlessness.”

The person who leaked the opinion is lawless. She (the pronoun I choose) doesn’t care about preserving the order our government is designed to maintain. We have three branches of government. The judicial branch is supposed to make unbiased decisions regarding the actions of all three branches. The judicial branch is supposed to be the final arbiter of existing laws. It is extremely important for the judicial process to be untainted by outside influences. When judges are manipulated, the judiciary becomes a powerless farce, justice is perverted, and people who depend on the judiciary and who rightly feel cheated are likely to be motivated to stop obeying the law.

The leaker is almost certainly a left-wing justice or clerk. There is no conceivable reason why a conservative would do something like this. No conservative would be outraged by the opinion. No conservative would be so highly motivated by dissatisfaction with parts of the opinion that he would abandon his ethics and risk his career by leaking it.

Leftists also have a history of stealing and leaking private and confidential information regarding conservatives. Conservatives are not as prone to these slimy tactics.

What is the purpose of leaking the opinion? Good question.

Is the traitor trying to influence the outcome of the case? Maybe, if she is sufficiently hysterical. Leftists now have greatly increased faith in the public’s ability to coerce judges through protesting and other forms of pressure, and they have lose all scruples about doing so. They don’t care at all about impartiality or justice, and they have a history of pressuring courts. But if the leaker is a justice or clerk, she is also a lawyer, and she has to be pretty smart to be where she is, so she should know the leak has a very slim chance of saving Roe.

What about the midterm elections and the presidential election? Now we have a scenario that makes a little sense. The leaker may be trying to motivate female voters to stop the anti-Biden stampede that is projected to inundate the polls in November. We won’t be voting on a new president, but if Roe is undone, the states will have the power to ban various types of abortions, and leftist women will feel motivated to storm the voting precincts in order to put more leftists in power on the state level.

Of course, by and large, women vote more destructively than men. They are much more leftist than we are. If men didn’t vote, only a small percentage of our elected officials would not be extreme leftists. Many women want the government to be their husband, so they are willing to give up more of their liberty than men.

If the leaker can get more women to the polls, their influence will increase, and effectively, conservatives will be disempowered.

Will the leaker be caught? I think she made a good effort to avoid it. The opinion draft that was published appears to have been scanned, not uploaded directly. I assure you, internal communications at the Supreme Court are purely electronic except for documents obtained externally, and even those documents would be transmitted electronically after being scanned once.

The leaker appears to have given the press a printed copy in order to avoid having the federal marshals trace her through electronic accounts.

Is this a great day for the unborn? I guess. I suppose many children who would otherwise be murdered will be protected by sensible new abortion laws. But many states will persist in supporting infanticide, so the effect will be limited.

Jesus told us the problems of the end time were labor pains. Someone is being born. Who is it? Can it be Jesus? He was already born, so why would he be born a second time?

I suppose you could say that everyone who is raptured is born a second time, because the rapture changes people, but it’s pretty well agreed that “born again” refers to internal transformation by the Holy Spirit.

Is the Antichrist the one who is being born? I tend to think so, but it’s obviously a guess.

The world can’t stay in labor forever. I don’t want to root for the coming of the tribulation, but I am ready for change. If we’re about to descend into global conflict and misery, I say better sooner than later. The sooner we see the rapture and the tribulation, the sooner we will see a world free of Satan, demons, and crazed leftists and pagans who make the world the cursed place it is.

Stop This Klan Rally Immediately

Saturday, January 1st, 2022

Having Ruined Christmas, the Left Moves on to New Year’s Day

The habitual victims among us now have something new to feel bad about! Surely this is cause for rejoicing, because feeling bad is their bag.

It’s kind of surprising I didn’t see this coming. It turns out New Year’s Day is racist!

Some delightful person who works for The Daily Beast just wrote an article saying that in the state of Rhode Island, New Year’s Day was known for a statewide orgy of slave transfers. A sort of Black Friday, but not the kind where you come home with a video game console. Evidently, the event wasn’t limited to Rhode Island. It was a nationwide thing. New Year’s Day was called Hiring Day, and it is said that on Hiring Day, slaves were commonly sold for year-long terms, after which they went back to their owners.

If there is anything to be praised about this article, it’s the astounding admission that Northerners had slaves. They always pretend 1) there were never any slaves in the North, 2) Northerners never profited from slavery after it was banned in their states, and 3) Southerners invented the institution of slavery.

Hello? All of the colonies permitted slavery at first, and Northerners have always had lots of investments below the Mason-Dixon line. Southerners have a long history of selling their natural resources to Northerners for pennies. Maybe a few people have heard the name “Andrew Carnegie.”

Here’s the money part: :

When the American Revolution began in 1775, “Rhode Island was the largest slave trading colony in British America,” according to Leonardo Marques, author of The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas.

Mike drop. Bazinga.

Is it true? Could be. The fact that a liberal quoted it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a lie.

Slaves were afraid they would be rented out on New Year’s Day, if the story is true, and they feared their families would be broken up.

Okay, that was extremely bad. Over a century and a half ago. It’s 2021.

About a third of the Jewish people were exterminated around 80 years ago, and the Jews were pretty much back on their feet 20 years later. Just saying. I have never had a Jewish person accost me and tell me I should be ashamed of myself because America rejected Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler. America did that, but no one has ever tried to make me feel like it was my fault.

For God’s sake; the Germans, Japanese, and Vietnamese have forgiven America.

It doesn’t matter, because it’s official now: we are no longer allowed to celebrate the new year. Just stop. You’re probably too hung over to celebrate, but if you were starting to feel better, knock it off. Racist scum.

I’m glad this happened, because I had this feeling there were still too many things left for people to enjoy.

I don’t celebrate New Year’s Eve because it’s one of the dumbest holidays of the year, and also because I like knowing where I am when I wake up, but I’m glad to see someone is working to make sure no one else has fun.

Several black people have texted to wish me a happy new year today. Those racist jerks! Clearly, they are white supremacists. At best, they are Uncle Toms. I need to put some white liberals in touch with them to happiness-shame them and teach them the correct way to be black.

Groundhog Day comes in one month. I’ll be ready. I’ll have my offense face on. I shouldn’t have to explain why Groundhog Day is racist. That’s obvious. At least it’s not as bad as Valentine’s Day, when men give women packages wrapped in red, to symbolize the blood of the slaves, and the women chew up chocolates which just happen to be BROWN. Some women receive diamonds. You know where those come from. AFRICA!

My computer is racist! I’m typing little black letters, forcing them to serve me, on a big white page symbolizing white privilege! Why didn’t I see this before? Those poor little letters probably only get 5% of the page.

I’m typing on stolen screen space!

I hope everyone is suitably miserable today. I am, and it feels great.

The Unicorn Variant

Friday, December 3rd, 2021

Illness or Nature’s Vaccine?

Bad news. My modified squirrel trap has not attracted any visitors.

Fed up with the continued destruction of my property by worthless rodents, I took a badly-designed trap and made some improvements. It has been in action for about 18 hours, and nothing has happened. I placed an order for a Squirrelinator, which is a factory-made trap dedicated to, well, you can guess. It should be here in the middle of next week.

I took a chunk of neurotoxic rat bait, smeared it with peanut butter, and put it in my chicken house, which the squirrels have turned into a resort. Later today, I’ll see if they’ve eaten it. I’m going to do whatever has to be done until I have a decent body count.

I have excellent rat baits made with an anticoagulant, but I was afraid to put them in the chicken house because I didn’t want hawks and owls to eat poisoned rodents and die. I’m reading up on it today. It looks like the Audubon Society recommends the anticoagulant as safe for predators, so maybe I should start using it.

In other news, I see another prediction of mine has come true. It’s not a big surprise, because I try not to predict anything that isn’t obvious. The Omicron variant has been found all over the place. Hawaii, New York, California, Colorado, Minnesota…it’s doing the blue state tour.

When we first heard about Omicron, which my wife inadvertently dubbed “the Unicorn Variant,” journalists and even scientists voiced “concern” that it “might” pop up in new places. I’m no epidemiologist, but I said that if you find one case, there are dozens of others you don’t know about. I said Omicron was already everywhere except places like Australia and New Zealand, which have sick, authoritarian rules. I was wrong about Australia, however. Omicron has been found there.

Australia is actually an Omicron hotspot, with more identified cases than America. Maybe arresting people and putting them in concentration camps isn’t working as well as they expected.

Of all the people on Earth, you would think Australians would be reluctant to put people in prison. You would think they had had their fill already.

The usual suspects also said they were worried the vaccines wouldn’t work well against Omicron. I wasn’t worried about that, because I already knew they wouldn’t. They don’t work well against any variant! Why would Omicron be different? The Dutch found 14 infected airline passengers, and today they’re telling us all 14 were vaccinated. If this surprises you, you should go in for cognitive tests and be very careful climbing airplane stairs.

A failure rate of 100% in 14 patients seems pretty bad to me, but then I am no doctor. I am no statistician, but it sure seems like the results could not have been worse. I can’t help feeling there just might be some predictive weight to this data.

I keep hoping Omicron will turn out to be a blessing. So far, there are no news reports suggesting the symptoms are anything but mild, but scientists say Omicron is extremely contagious compared to Delta. Put those things together, and Omicron might be the inoculation man couldn’t create. It might displace the nastier variants and give us resistance to them which would provide either immunity or safety from severe symptoms. It could turn coronavirus into the new common cold. Ineradicable, but not dangerous.

It may turn out to be the Omicron VACCINE.

Or it may kill a whole bunch of us.

We’ll know by the end of the month. That’s my new prediction, and like the others, it’s obvious. Omicron will hit thousands of people this month, if it hasn’t already, and it will have enough time to start producing deaths. If Omicron goes viral metaphorically as well as literally, and waves of deaths don’t materialize, sell your stock in mask manufacturers.

Now if we could just pay the Chinese to create a killer bug that only hits building contractors and tort lawyers.

And CCP members.

One thing is certain: if Omicron saves the world, the CCP will start pressuring smaller countries to call it the Xi Variant.

My understanding is that new diseases tend to become less severe as they mutate. Hope that’s correct. Didn’t pan out with smallpox, though.

If I get sick, my first move will be to blow my nose on my squirrel baits.

It’s amazing how dumb our statist overlords are. Why would anyone think it was smart to enact travel bans AFTER a new virus hit several countries? How badly did you have to do in elementary school math to think that was intelligent? We never find covid variants before they go around the world. By the time they’re detected, they’ve been carried all over the globe. Travel bans just add economic distress and feelings of powerlessness to our problems.

Speaking of feelings of powerlessness, I have realized they may be the worst consequences of covid. It has taught us man is weak and can’t fix his own disasters. It has taught us our governments have way more ability to control us than we had allowed ourselves to think. It has turned many of us into shuffling shut-ins who lack confidence in their ability to change their lives for the better.

It’s very important for people to think they can affect their circumstances. Take that away, and they develop what psychologists call “learned helplessness.” This is one of the reasons welfare states get worse, not better. People start sucking up government money, and they become convinced they need it. They believe going to school and applying for jobs won’t change their lives much.

When you pay someone so much for doing nothing he can’t significantly improve his lifestyle by going to work, he is likely to choose to stay home and make excuses. That’s exactly what’s happening right now. It’s turning America into a much more socialist state, and socialism is authoritarianism. Authoritarianism brings dystopia.

I believe feelings of powerlessness also breed hatred and resentment. If you’re helpless and someone else is responsible for your happiness, you will feel entitled to make that person miserable when things don’t go your way. This is one explanation for the intense anti-white racism in America. Blacks and Hispanics are taught that whites, Asians, and Jews cause them to live in squalor and crime through racism, but paradoxically, many think the people who caused their problem are the saviors who can fix it. They believe the rest of us have special powers we’re not using.

It’s crazy, believing a certain class of people is evil and responsible for your problems, yet running to them over and over again, expecting them to make things right at their own expense.

Why would you expect a malicious enemy to save you?

The rest of us didn’t cause the problems, we’re not malicious, we are not good enough to devote our lives to making things better for you, and even if we were, we couldn’t do it. You have to do some things for yourself.

Anyway, I’m convinced the pandemic has made things worse.

Maybe Omicron will save us from the pandemic. The apocalypse is a delivery process with labor pains, and labor pains come and go. Maybe we’ll get a few years of rest. I wonder. I tend to doubt it, because I have reason to think the rapture is imminent.

One nice thing about proof the variant has spread is that it should convince the nations of the world to drop recently-imposed travel bans. Rhodah and I were planning to visit the Netherlands, and they have an Omicron ban. Maybe they’ll show some common sense and relent.

As for the rapture, I had a disturbing dream last night.

For years, I’ve had dreams about airports. There are things about airports I don’t like. When you’re in an airport, you’re not where you want to be. You want to be somewhere else, which is why you went to the airport. Airports, then, are inherently representative of not having arrived.

Also, airports are dirty, the food is bad and overpriced, and while you’re in airports, you are subjected to degrading control through unreasonable rules.

At least the Hare Krishnas moved out.

Last night, I dreamed I was in the imaginary airport again. My second-oldest friend had been there, but he had left. His family was still there. He had gotten on an elevator to turn himself in.

In the dream, Nazis were in power. My friend and his family are Orthodox Jews. The Nazis were allowing people to turn themselves in. In the dream, you could get on an elevator, and as soon as you got to the bottom, you would be in Auschwitz. You would go through the death camp process and be killed and incinerated. By the time you turned yourself in, you were doomed. There was no way to change your mind and go home, and no one could rescue you.

I couldn’t believe what my friend had done. Why did he trust the Nazis? Even though it wasn’t possible, I tried to help. I saw another Jew, and I ran up to him and tried to tell him what had happened. I wanted to know if he had any idea what to do. He thought I was Jewish and that I was asking him to help me.

Nothing was done. It was already over when I asked for help. I knew my friend was somewhere down below, beyond help, regretting his choice.

I now think the airport I dream about represents the earth. You spend time here on your way to heaven or hell. You get routed one way or the other depending on what kind of ticket you chose. This place isn’t your permanent home.

I don’t know if my friend represented himself, someone else, or a class of people.

The Nazis were the state-worshipers and man-worshipers of the Earth. The beast’s troops. The vaccine-lovers and distancing freaks. People who are willing to give up all their rights because they’re terrified of death. They say, “Trust us, and everything will be fine.”

If the airport represents the earth, then there must be departing flights. You can either go up or down. That seems to be a very Jewish idea. Moving to Israel is considered a move upward, and people who leave are called “yardim,” meaning they descend. The name of the Jordan River comes from the same root.

That’s it for today. Two containers of maple syrup have arrived, and I need to test them. I might skip dinner food and make waffles.