Another Feast for TMZ

I am waiting for a guy to install a garage door opener, so I figured I might as well blog.

Prince is dead. I guess everyone knows that now. Someone found his body yesterday, in an elevator at his home. Everyone is speculating about what happened to him. The world is overreacting, as though a president had been shot.

I figured I might as well weigh in with some observations. I don’t know what got him, but it looks a lot like opioid addiction, which is something I know about.

The mainstream news outlets are saying Prince was hospitalized on Friday, April 15. He was on a private jet, flying to his home in Minnesota. He had just performed in Atlanta. The jet was about 50 minutes away from its destination, but his situation was considered so urgent the flight had to be interrupted as soon as possible.

The plane landed in Illinois, where, according to TMZ, Prince received an injection of a drug that counteracts the effects of opioids. In other words, it looks like he overdosed and needed emergency treatment to save his life.

The official explanation is that he was feeling poorly because of a stubborn case of the flu. Does a flu relapse respond to treatment for opioid overdose? I’m not a doctor, but I’m willing to guess that it doesn’t.

The next day, he appeared in Minnesota in front of a small crowd. People are interpreting this as a move intended to assure the world that he was okay. He didn’t perform. He spoke to the crowd. He said, “Wait a few days before you waste any prayers.” That remark has the press buzzing. It sounds like a reference to suicide.

TMZ says that on April 20, Prince was photographed in the parking lot of a Walgreen’s drugstore near his home. They say he was sweating, and that he appeared agitated. He was pacing, as though he were feeling impatient.

I have decades of experience with a relative who is a painkiller addict, so the Prince facts remind me of a picture I have already seen.

People who are addicted to opioids get very impatient when they run out of drugs. They get pushy. They get whiny. They look for ways to manipulate others into getting drugs for them. I can’t say I’ve seen such a person sweat, but I’ve seen agitation, faking pain, and insistent demands for treatment.

People will wonder why a person would stand in a drugstore parking lot instead of going inside. His behavior makes sense if there was a reason why he didn’t want the employees to see him. You can’t say it was because he was avoiding the public, because if that were true, he would have hidden in his vehicle. He wasn’t afraid of being seen by random people, but he had some reason for staying out of the pharmacy.

It’s harder to get painkillers than it used to be. America has long been full of drug pushers with medical degrees who were eager to write prescriptions for money, but as time passes, awareness about drug-seeking behavior increases, and things tend to tighten up.

A famous addict could have a hard time getting prescriptions filled, especially if he lived in a suburb or the country, where druggists might be familiar with his problems. A person like that might rely on straw man purchases, which means he would get other people to get prescriptions and then have them buy drugs and give them to him. Elvis used to do that.

Buying painkillers for someone else is a serious crime. How would you get another person to commit a felony and buy drugs for you? That would not be easy for most of us. But what if you lived in a cocoon of your own creation, where you always got your own way? What if you surrounded yourself with sycophants who did whatever you told them to do? That’s supposedly how Prince lived. By show business standards, he was reclusive. He stayed in a compound, and he kept layers of people between himself and humanity.

Prince was not healthy. He needed to have both hips replaced, but he refused because he belonged to the Jehovah’s Witness cult. Jehovah’s Witnesses are non-Christians, and they have some odd rules. They won’t accept blood transfusions. Prince wouldn’t have his hips fixed without an assurance that no blood would be given to him. He probably had a lot of pain. It would be normal for a person like that to develop a taste for painkillers.

Let’s add it up.

Prince had a painful medical condition. He had recently been treated for a painkiller overdose. He had a strange get-together, and he made a cryptic remark about something that would happen in a few days that would make prayer for him a waste. He was seen pacing impatiently in a drugstore parking lot the day before he died. The details of the death itself–a sudden collapse–are consistent with an opioid overdose.

It would not be a big surprise to learn that he got someone to get him some pills while he waited in a parking lot, and then he took too many, possibly intentionally.

Of course, he was a 57-year-old black man, so it’s completely possible he had high blood pressure and died of a stroke or heart attack.

I find him an interesting figure. To me, he has always been in the same category as Michael Jackson, Elvis, and Madonna. He seems to have been a moderately talented, charismatic, troubled person who received inordinate adulation from the public. I think people like that are controlled by powerful spirits that crave admiration, and I believe Satan gives them favor so they can corrupt young people.

The folks Satan sets up as top-tier musical idols with god complexes often die humiliating or gruesome deaths. It’s as though Satan resents all the years he had to spend doing nice things for them. It seems like Satan gets tired of them, puts and end to them, and then rotates new dupes in.

People will disagree if I say Prince was only moderately talented. I’m talking about the music he produced, not his ability to play instruments. He appears to have been extremely good at picking up instruments and playing them well, but his songs were generally monotonous and shallow, and his singing was very ordinary. He created bubble gum music for teenagers.

He was an excellent showman, and he was good at shocking people. Those were the areas where he truly distinguished himself.

I never liked his music. It sounded pretty much like all other dance music to me. I also found his effeminate persona creepy. I can’t understand why any man would work hard to appear feminine. He came across like a prison “girlfriend,” desperate to attract other people to himself sexually. He seemed to reach out to everyone, including normal men, in order to get them to lust after him.

Some effeminate men are funny and likeable, but to me, Prince seemed phony, somewhat conceited, and gross.

Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t believe in salvation through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Like Mormons, they believe you have to qualify through works. They are not Christians. What happened to Prince is not good. For that matter, what he did while he was alive was not good. He lived for the trinkets that are available on earth. He has come to a very bad end, and he may well have missed out on salvation.

It will be interesting to find out what actually happened to him.

Someone Has Been Running the Milling Machine Again

Why is it that a tiny metal splinter in your finger can cause you incredible pain, yet taking tweezers and yanking out the clump of flesh surrounding the splinter–completely destroying an amount of flesh much larger than the spinter–relieves the pain?

And Shooting Them is Illegal

I have a friend who has dreams that have meaning, and he had a disturbing one last night.

He’s going to college, and he shares a house with some other students. They entertain a lot. Yesterday some young ladies came over, and there was dancing.

My friend was on the couch, and he fell asleep. When the dream started, he still saw the couples dancing, but they were dead. Their flesh was falling apart, and he could literally see a foul stench rising up from them.

He saw destruction all around him, complete with snakes and swarms of flies. He was fine, but he couldn’t do anything for anyone else. They wouldn’t listen.

It’s completely consistent with what I’ve been seeing, and it’s very appropriate for his situation.

He knows a lot of foolish people who pretend to be Christians, yet who never change. They cause him a lot of problems. He sinks his heart into trying to save people. He hates to let anyone fall through the cracks. In other words, he has unrealistic hopes. God keeps telling him he has to let people go, and it’s hard for him to comply.

It’s not a suggestion when God tells you to drop unproductive people. It’s an order, and it’s important. People who refuse to change are a burden. They discourage you. They destroy your peace and your faith, and they take you away from people who can actually be helped.

In the Bible, sometimes God listened when his servants asked him to be patient with others. Sometimes he didn’t.

It’s disturbing to realize America is lost, and it seems strange to be thinking about it on a quiet, sunny spring day with a pleasant breeze blowing. But it makes sense; death takes time to propagate through a body. If you put a tourniquet on your arm, your hand won’t die and fall off immediately. It will feel completely normal at first. It takes time for numbness to set in, and after that you still have a long time to take the tourniquet off and restore the blood flow.

I don’t think America’s sunset will look bad to the lost. Not at first. Sexual deviants are gaining new ground and finding new acceptance. People who have been disenfranchised for very good reason are receiving new power over the rest of us. It must seem like the dawn of an age of enlightenment and peace to them.

These are the people who celebrate the rainbow, which is something that appeared after God killed the human race. You have to be severely deluded to consider a rainbow a good omen. The rainbow is God’s promise that he won’t drown us again. The next time he massacred a large number of rebels, he rained burning sulfur and pitch on them, and he will use fire again at the end of the world. That’s not something to be happy about.

Being burned to death is very bad, but it’s surely worse when you’re covered in a sticky substance that burns. You can’t run away from it.

When things get worse, it won’t change the minds of the perverse. They’ll blame Christians and Jews. Sooner or later, a day will come when people who know God exists will blame him openly. In the past, we had to deal with atheists and idolaters. In the future, the gloves will come off, and God’s enemies will be people who acknowledge his existence. That will be weird. We already see it here and there, but in the future, it will be considered normal and acceptable.

Unbelievers criticize Christians for any faults they can find or manufacture. One of their favorites is self-righteousness. All correction is seen as hate and conceit.

Sometimes they’re right, but another person’s self-righteousness isn’t a valid excuse for rejecting the truths he speaks.

It’s not easy to talk about God and repentance without sounding proud.

When I look at the rebellious, doomed people around me, I don’t see myself as superior to them. I see myself as an eleventh-hour Christian who strove to be like them until it stopped paying off. I wasn’t pulled out of the fire because I was a great guy. I simply wasn’t strong enough or brave enough to keep fighting God. And Satan always cheated me. He offered me prizes and then kept them from me or made them sources of pain and regret. I had to turn to God. I had nowhere else to go.

In 1986, I knew what I was supposed to be doing, and I stuck with it for about five years. I had a prayer life. Things didn’t go as well as I wanted; I had limited knowledge and understanding, and I was easily defeated. After that, I gave up and tried things the world’s way.

If I had stuck with God’s program, I would have made a ton of progress. My life would be very different now; it would be much better. I really blew it. I turned myself into a tangled knot of problems, and the process of repair is very slow.

If I tell people that, it won’t matter. They’ll still say I’m full of hate and pride. They can’t detect the truth, and they swallow lies without hesitation, so whenever I say anything helpful, I will be abused for it.

I blew it, but I still had warm blood in my veins when I repented, so I’m okay. The thing that sets me apart from the lost isn’t good character; it’s the fact that I gave up. Now I have to get used to being blessed and having a hard time sharing it.

We can’t fix America or the world. The game is over. All we can do now is glean. Here and there we will come across people who will listen, and we can help them get out of the path of destruction. In doing so, we will make them enemies of the world, but that beats serving the devil and joining him in his stinking dungeon.

We have to have realistic expectations. To expect more than is possible is to set yourself up against God. It takes you out from under his protection, and it cuts you off from his help.

If we are content with what God tells us to expect, we’ll have peace and support. That’s a pretty good deal.

I guess now I’ll sit back and marvel as sick individuals succeed in demonizing those who try to keep men out of women’s locker rooms and showers. I would say I have never seen anything like it, but that’s not true. I’ve read Genesis.

They Won; Get Over it

In recent weeks I’ve been getting information that leads me to feel that things are worse than we thought, and that there is less time to repent than I had realized.

This morning during my prayer time I looked at my phone to check the news, and after I put it down, I noticed that the screen was still on, so I took a look at it. A Bible app was open, and the phone was displaying Romans 1, which was the last chapter I had read on that phone.

Here is the part that caught my attention:

[A]lthough they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man—and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things.

Therefore God also gave them up to uncleanness, in the lusts of their hearts, to dishonor their bodies among themselves, who exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.

For this reason God gave them up to vile passions. For even their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature. Likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the penalty of their error which was due.

And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a debased mind, to do those things which are not fitting. . .

I see now that I was mistaken about something.

I thought the startling, abrupt tide of support for homosexuality and sexual confusion was the cause of America’s falling away from God. That’s not right. It’s an end-stage symptom of falling away from God. The fall is over. As the above passage shows, sexual perversion has increased because God has abandoned us to it.

It’s true that sexual iniquity will screw up your relationship with God, and it will make you weak and vulnerable, but what we are seeing now is not a nation that is endangering its relationship with God through sexual iniquity. We’re seeing a nation God has given up to sexual iniquity because we gave up on him and exalted ourselves!

I’ve been thinking of the gay army as though they were a threat to Christianity. They’re actually proof that Christianity has already been defeated.

Oddly, there is some peace that comes with that. Knowing which battles to fight is extremely important. When you know a battle is lost, you can move on and work on something at which you can actually succeed. If you keep fighting the wrong battles, you live in perpetual frustration, and that’s not good. It takes away your peace. It erodes your faith. It kills your motivation to carry on. It also wastes your time.

When the Allies invaded Europe, they created fleets of phony tanks, trucks, and planes. Some were inflatable. They looked real from the air. They put them in position to attack Calais, a city about a hundred miles from the beaches where they intended to land. The Nazis saw the fake equipment from the air, and they thought the Allies would land at Calais. They moved a lot of their resources away from the actual landing site, making the invasion easier for us.

If you’re fighting the wrong battles, there must be important battles you’re not fighting.

Christians are out there screaming that God will judge America if we keep promoting perversion, but perversion IS the judgment.

People want to debate, or they want to yell on street corners. They want to hold giant prayer rallies to save America. In reality, we’re better off focusing on individuals who can be pulled out of the mess.

God is like a hobby machinist who buys ruined metal parts at a junkyard and turns them into useful projects. He shops at the dump. Now we’re faced with the same situation. America has become a dump, and we have to pick out whatever can be repaired.

It’s sickening to watch professional “prophets” like about the giant waves of prosperity and victory God is going to send over America. They spew that nonsense year after year. Have you ever seen it happen? Of course not. But plenty of individuals get plucked out of the mess.

These are the same ninnies who are going to start receiving “revelation,” saying God thinks homosexuality is great. Some are already publicizing their new views.

The less you exalt God, the harder it is for you to perceive the truth. It’s funny; Adam and Eve gave up their lives in exchange for the knowledge of good and evil, and now the devil has managed to bargain even that away from us.

You have to exalt God verbally. It’s not enough to try to please him with your actions. You have to say he is great. You have to say thank you, over and over. You have to say that you recognize Satan for a fool, and that you reject him. You have to say you repent. When you praise and honor God, and you show humility, you are lifted up toward him, and the fog of lies parts. When you fail to praise him, you sink into deception.

Satan is probably insane. People wonder why he fights God, having seen his power up close. Satan is probably so crazy he can no longer tell what’s right. He probably believes God is wrong, and that God can’t win.

It makes sense that people who listen to Satan would think it’s normal for two men to have sex, or that it’s a good idea to cut your body up to resemble a comic book character, demon, or animal, or that God wants them to cover themselves with “Christian” tattoos. There is literally no limit to the absurdity of what you can believe when you’re far from God. This is true of people, and it’s probably true of the spirits that deceive us.

I know a person who has Satan’s own personality. This person always loved lies and hated the truth. Now she appears to be genuinely mentally ill. She will lie to people about things she knows they witness together! Either she can’t discern the truth, or she know longer thinks the word “truth” has any meaning. If Satan’s children lose their minds through deceit, it has probably happened to him, too. God’s children become like God, so one would expect Satan to resemble his own children.

The more you exalt God, the more truth you perceive, and the more truth you perceive, the less you want to listen to the blather of deluded human beings who can’t hear what you hear.

More than ever, I understand why I had to dump social media. I was giving piano lessons to deaf people.

This morning, I realized I can go farther than that. There is no law saying I have to permit comments here, so I’m not always going to let people respond. I don’t want to get caught up in snipe hunts and diversions. If you think I’m wrong, talk to God about it. After all, he’s the source of wisdom. I’m not.

The Bible says we should enter God’s presence with Thanksgiving. I used to think that was like saying you should take a cake when you visit relatives. Now I think that’s wrong. I think the psalms are actually saying “come before his presence with thanksgiving” the same way you or I might say “enter the house with a key.” Thanksgiving and praise are the correct tools to use to get into God’s presence. They open the door.

When you pray, spend time thanking and praising God. Explain that you reject the devil, and that you know God is always right. Don’t just toss prayers out without warming up. Show a little respect. It will pay off.

Don’t feel like a nut if you choose to get rid of cable, drop certain friends, delete your social media accounts, and so on. It’s healthy, as long as you have God to replace all that. It’s normal. The constant bombardment with wrongness is what’s not normal.

Sorry about the comments. Don’t worry. You will not explode.

This Place is a Mess

Today I came across an apocryphal text I had never heard of before. It’s called The Ascension of Isaiah. It’s about a vision Isaiah had. I was very moved by it. Usually, when you read an apocryphal book, you can tell right away that it’s nonsense. Sometimes, though, they contain a lot of truth.

Isaiah lived during the times of Hezekiah and Manasseh, two kings of Judah. Hezekiah was not a bad king, but his son Manasseh was a murdering devil-worshiper. He welcomed the filthy false religions of the time, and he had prophets killed.

Isaiah told Hezekiah Manasseh would cause Isaiah to be cut in half with a saw. Hezekiah was very upset, and he decided to kill Manasseh, but Isaiah told him that the messiah (yet unborn) would not permit Hezekiah to do it.

Hezekiah died, and Manasseh began promoting idolatry. Manasseh listened to a false prophet named Belchira. Isaiah left Jerusalem and moved to Bethlehem, but Bethlehem was also disgusting, so he moved to a mountain in the desert. A number of prophets joined him.

Guess what made Belchira and the apostates mad? The real prophets predicted judgment for Judah and Jerusalem. The false prophets were just like Joel Osteen and Larry Huch. They predicted warm, fluffy things. It’s funny if you think about it; false prophets love to appear warm and comforting, but they’re also the people who are ruthless and sadistic to real prophets. Classic manipulation.

Belchira had the favor of the worthless king, and he was able to have Isaiah captured and tortured. He had the saw applied to Isaiah, and as the cutting started, he taunted Isaiah and tried to get him to recant. Belchira and the other false prophets were laughing and celebrating as the blade cut into Isaiah.

They were sort of like the people who are glad to see Christian bakers bankrupted by homosexuals who suddenly decide only a Christian bakery can fill their cake needs. They saw the righteous as wicked people who caused problems.

Here is what Isaiah said: “So far as I have utterance (I say): Damned and accused be thou and all they powers and all thy house. For thou canst not take (from me) aught save the skin of my body.”

Furthermore, Isaiah had a vision as he was cut, and after the vision began he was no longer able to see or hear Belchira. The Holy Spirit spoke through him during the murder, until it was finished. The book says he didn’t weep or cry in pain.

Other stories say Isaiah hid in a tree, and he was killed when the tree was cut. You be the judge.

There are a lot of interesting things about the book. For one thing, it predicts the rise of a world leader who is possessed by Satan. It says he will work great miracles, such as making the sun rise at night. He will call himself God and demand sacrifice.

Of course, this is the Antichrist.

Think how happy a man like that would make the gay army. Killing Christians who disagree with them, exalting every type of sexual sin, and appearing to confirm everything they believe…he would give them a god they could believe in and worship without reservation. He would turn the tables on generations of human beings who imposed harsh penalties for sexual perversion. The appeal is obvious.

Look what it says about the return of Jesus:

And afterwards, on the eve of His approach, His disciples will forsake the teachings of the Twelve Apostles, and their faith, and their love and their purity.

And there will be much contention on the eve of [His advent and] His approach.

And in those days many will love office, though devoid of wisdom.

And there will be many lawless elders, and shepherds dealing wrongly by their own sheep, and they will ravage (them) owing to their not having holy shepherds.

And many will change the honour of the garments of the saints for the garments of the covetous, and there will be much respect of persons in those days and lovers of the honour of this world.

And there will be much slander and vainglory at the approach of the Lord, and the Holy Spirit will withdraw from many.

And there will not be in those days many prophets, nor those who speak trustworthy words, save one here and there in divers places,

On account of the spirit of error and fornication and of vainglory, and of covetousness, which shall be in those, who will be called servants of that One and in those who will receive that One.

And there will be great hatred in the shepherds and elders towards each other.

For there will be great jealousy in the last days; for every one will say what is pleasing in his own eyes.

And they will make of none effect the prophecy of the prophets which were before me, and these my visions also will they make of none effect, in order to speak after the impulse of their own hearts.

What a picture of the modern church!

Forsaking the teachings of the Apostles…done.

Much contention…done.

Many love office though devoid of wisdom.

Look at the Pope. He’s just a common socialist. You could put his hat on Bernie Sanders and see little difference. He talks about worldly issues all the time. That’s because he knows virtually nothing about God. He’s just a politician.

Look at the prosperity preachers. They’re generally vulgar louts with no education and no class, but they live like emperors, surrounded by fawning toadies who bury themselves in debt to pay for tailor-made suits and jet airplanes.

It’s as if Isaiah had the Internet and cable TV.

There are other remarkable things in the book.

For one thing, Isaiah describes our flesh as “garments” and the skin of animals. I have often thought that the skins God gave Adam and Eve were probably their flesh bodies. It makes complete sense. Our flesh is exactly like animal flesh, right down to the DNA.

Isaiah describes glorified bodies as garments, too. And he describes the Rapture, in which we will leave the flesh behind and ascend to heaven.

Look at this:

And there I saw Enoch and all who were with him, stript of the garments of the flesh, and I saw them in their garments of the upper world, and they were like angels, standing there in great glory.

Another interesting thing about the book is that it confirms what God has shown me about the world: it’s a low, trashy place which is much more like hell than heaven. It’s a place where we fight over garbage, thinking it’s important.

Satan is “the Prince of the air,” which means he has power in the first heaven, which is the atmosphere of the earth. Because we worship him, the earth is like his realm:

And we ascended to the firmament, I and he, and there I saw Sammael and his hosts, and there was great fighting therein and the angels of Satan were envying one another.

And as above so on the earth also; for the likeness of that which is in the firmament is here ont he earth.

People like to think the fallen angels get along and obey orders, but why would they? One of the reasons mutiny doesn’t work is that the leaders have no authority. If the crew of The Bounty deposes the captain, who represents the British crown, there is no one with real authority in charge. It’s scary to attack someone who has the British navy behind him, but who cares about a man who only has his sword and whatever allies he can scrounge up among the mutineers?

The spirits that hate God don’t get along. They’re just like us. They fight for dominance all day, because they have to. They have no one on the throne of heaven to keep them in power. This is why Jesus said a house divided against itself would not stand.

Isaiah also spoke of supernatural blindness, saying only certain people who were present could hear what he said about his vision, and that when Jesus descended to earth, the spirits were not able to recognize him.

You have to exalt God if you want to perceive him, and if you contemn him, one of the penalties is supernatural blindness and lack of faith. It sounds strange, because the Bible says God isn’t willing for any to perish. You would think he would work hard to put faith in everyone, at all times. That’s not how it works. If you are sufficiently disrespectful, God himself will put blindness in you.

The scenario the book presents is not what you would expect to hear from a Catholic priest or a babbling idiot on TBN, but it’s very consistent with what the Holy Spirit says. There are levels to existence. This level is very filthy and cheap. The people who will be lifted out of it are the humble and teachable, not those who have perfect willpower. People who serve Satan on earth are deceived; they think evil is not merely good, but divine. They think God’s values are disgusting and vile.

The book seems inspired to me. If not, it must have been written by someone who had been exposed to the truth and who was familiar with it.

I also looked at Lot’s story today, in the Bible and in Jubilees. The destruction of Sodom is a picture of the end of the world. Before burying Sodom in flaming sulfur, God made a bargain with Abraham. He agreed to spare the city if ten good men could be found in it. That would be something like a tenth of a percent.

The ten men never turned up. Sodom was too filthy at that point. But it shows that God won’t completely withdraw his mercy while there are good people who will suffer with the bad. It makes a solid case for the Rapture. If God wouldn’t destroy Sodom for the sake of ten people, he can’t bring the Tribulation while hundreds of millions who worship him are here.

The closer you get to God, the more he will separate you from the world. People are filthy and deceived, and their problems are contagious. Lot suffered with his miserable neighbors day after day for years, and when they tried to rape the angels, God gave Lot relief. If you’re trying to please God, you’re not going to be happy unless there is some distance between you and the horde, and you’re not going to be able to focus on him.

Apologies to Whomever

I’ve been fiddling around with the Moxon-style vise I made for my workbench.

A Moxon vise is, of course, named after Mr. Moxon, and it’s just a board with two holes, two threaded rods, and two handwheels. The rods go through the board, the wheels go on the rods outside the board, and when you tighten them on the rods, the board squeezes stuff against your workbench.

The photo will make it obvious.

You can buy a kit to make a Moxon vise, but that would be lame, so I had to make one from scratch. That meant buying rod with Acme threads on it, and it meant putting inside threads on a couple of cast-iron wheels. I blogged about that already.

I was not all that happy with the threading. I made my own tool to do it, and it worked, but I was learning, so I did not do a great job. The wheels functioned, but not like they should have. I resolved to do it over, and I got new wheels.

One day I saw a good deal on an Acme 3/4-6 tap on Ebay, and I got weak and bought it. Tapping is much easier than single-point threading. Instead of using a lathe to do a million spiral cuts inside your work, you drill a big bore and tighten the tap into it. Threads done.

I got the tap and bored it out to about 0.590″, which–I cannot stress this enough–is the bore size I got after looking in numerous places.

Later I found out the correct figure is 0.610″, unless my current sources are also wrong. This would explain why my first two wheels weren’t right. I was starting with a bore that was too small, so even if the raised threads were right, the valleys between them would not want to go through the wheels.

But to get back to the tap, I stuck the wheel on the lathe and turned everything by hand, and it was a horror. The tap just did not want to turn. It was horrendous labor.

I got it partway in and decided to move the work to the drill press, and I rigged it up so I could turn the tap with two wrenches.

When I was finally done, I pulled the tap out and found that I had created a really big bore with no threading inside it.

Here is the funny part. The Ebay ad said the tap was a “stub Acme” tap. I figured, “Okay, that means it’s not a long tap.”

The 0.001% of my readers who know what stub Acme means are laughing really hard right now. The rest will Google the term and pretend they knew. Stub Acme is a type of thread used on hollow tubes. The threads are shallow. That means you have to start with a way-bigger hole. If not…smooth bore.

There is one nice thing about stub Acme. A stub Acme internal thread will work okay with a regular Acme external thread. You can thread a stub Acme nut on an Acme screw. Just don’t apply too much pressure, because there isn’t a whole lot of contact.

It works okay for a Moxon vise, so I was able to do another wheel and combine it with the better of my single-point wheels and come up with a vise that works. My plan for the future is to get two more wheels, bore them to 0.610″, and single-point thread them. But that can wait.

My vise is a little weird. Typically, a Moxon vise doesn’t open far, and the rods are fixed in place. Because they don’t go in and out of the bench, you don’t want them to stick out too far. They get in your way. I thought that was silly, so I fixed my screws so they could be screwed in and out of the bench. That means I can get an object maybe a foot wide into the vise, and when I’m done, the screws go back in.

The big problem with this is that turning the oily screws in and out by hand is not fun.

Today I fixed that. My original plan was to mill hex ends on the screws and use wrenches to turn them, but I decided to try something easier. I drilled two holes in the ends of the screws, perpendicular to their axes. Now when I want to move the screws in or out, I pop an Allen wrench in the holes and use it as a tommy bar. Simple and relatively cool.

If you really want a superior wood vise, get a Record or something similar. For a hundred-odd bucks you can get something really nice. But the Moxon is fun, and it has a very long jaw, which can be a plus.

I will put up a photo of the vise so you can see what I did.

One day I will get out of denial and do another project: a woodworking bench with a welded metal base. Woodworkers love wooden benches, but the reality is that metal is better. It’s way lighter. You can put a wooden top on a metal frame and save tons of work and weight.

My current bench probably weighs 300 pounds with the mechanic’s vise removed. It has a pleasantly solid feel, but hey, there’s a reason mankind started building things out of steel. If I make a steel base, it will be easy to put wheels on it. There will be more room under it to store stuff. I can simply replace the wooden top whenever it falls apart.

Woodworkers will excommunicate me. You know how people are.

Here’s a video of a surprisingly calm and likable Jamie Hyneman making the case for metal. He seems less irritable without his partner. That makes sense. I can see how dealing with Adam Savage would be like having a live squirrel turned loose inside your clothes.

“Completely,” I Said

I am waiting for a guy to give me an estimate on fixing the garage door on the rental house. My general contractor wanted about $1800. I’m guessing a reasonable price would be more like $100.

The door has a big dent in one lower corner, and some of the support stuff behind it is bent. I don’t see $1800 there. The door does not have to be replaced. It just has to be repaired. Even if it were replaced, I believe the cost of a new door would be more like $800, based on Internet research.

When we agreed to hire the contractor, he assured me orally that the house would be completely ready to move in, once the things in his proposal were done. Little things like the $1800 garage door and the $1200 shower enclosure must not have appeared essential to him. He isn’t even including shower rods.

I refused to tell the garage people the price the contractor quoted me. I said I didn’t want to tell them it was ten dollars and have them come back with $9.50. Common sense.

I don’t like it when workers ask what other people bid. It’s an open admission that they’re trying to stick it to me. I know you’re trying to cheat me; be tactful about it. Or you could be totally forthright. You could say, “Are you stupid?” I could then say, “Not completely.” And you could bill me appropriately.

The contractor’s people are working on the house now. I assume they will be there when I show up to parade the new garage guy through. Will the contractor be upset? Ask me about something I care about. It’s not my job to give “safe spaces” to tradesmen who charge me money and deal with me at arm’s length.

This is how competitive bidding works. It’s not about feelings. I have to get that door fixed, and instead of including the job in the contract, the contractor surprised me with a bid. He started the bidding process, so he should not be offended to see it play out.

You makes the rules; you lives by the rules.

Now I have to fill the time until the garage guy contacts me.

The contractor also tried to charge $400 for a new toilet in the mother-in-law room. I went over to see what was wrong with it, and it worked perfectly. I sent the contractor’s girl an email asking what the exact problem was, and she said their plumber had unclogged it, but that it was still slow to fill. And of course, I care a lot about how long a tenant has to wait for a toilet tank to fill up. That toilet has been slow since 1945. Its performance will not shock anyone, and what’s time to poop?

Do I even have to say that this is bad customer relations?

If something isn’t broken, you don’t ask for money to fix it. If you think something is broken, and you ask for money to fix it, and then you fix it for nothing in two minutes, you tell the customer instead of hoping he goes ahead and pays you.

I could never give this guy a reference.

In other news, I have a big achievement to report. I have concocted my own daily shower spray. No, it’s not for me. Would that it were. It’s like Clean Shower, except it doesn’t cost three dollars per bottle.

I had been using soap scum remover and a sponge mop. It worked great, but it was a pain. I tended to get water and soap scum remover on my clothes, and it was just not a quality experience. I decided to get some daily shower spray and see what happened.

If you’re not familiar with this stuff, I will explain. You spray your shower every day (the manufacturer hopes), and the spray dissolves soap scum before it can form. Your shower never gets dirty enough to need scrubbing. In reality, you can spray less often and still win.

It worked great, but a bottle lasts three days. Even with laziness and missed days factored in, that’s $250 per year. Seems like a lot of money for shower spray. Also, the fragrance in some of these products is overpowering, and it fills your house. It’s like being hugged by 50 elderly aunts at once. You know those flowery perfumes older women love.

I found some online recipes. The problem is that recipes for substitutes for household cleaners are generally thrown together by people who are not chemists. They just guess. Sometimes they guess wrong, or they put superfluous stuff in their recipes.

I tried a recipe that had vinegar in it. I don’t recall whether it worked, but it made the house smell like salad, a thing I scorn. Fail.

I found another recipe. It contained dishwashing liquid, dishwasher rinse agent, alcohol, and hydrogen peroxide. It seemed to affect the scum, but it wasn’t as good as the real thing, and I wondered about those ingredients.

Hydrogen peroxide, in particular, looked dubious to me. Maybe it eats soap; I don’t know. But it struck me as the kind of thing a person would throw in there on a whim.

I also figured the alcohol was unnecessary. It’s just a solvent, and I have no reason to believe it works particularly well on soap.

I made a new batch when the first one ran out. I left the alcohol in, just because I like spraying things with alcohol. I removed the peroxide. I doubled the dishwashing liquid, and I kept the rinse aid. I also added six ounces of Zep no-scrub soap scum remover. The whole purpose is to dissolve soap scum, right? Why not use what works?

You’re on the edges of your seats, right? And you’re not even paying for this.

This stuff appears to work as well as the real thing, and I believe it’s pretty cheap. It will be cheaper still when I remove the alcohol. I use it every other day, and I have not had to scrub the shower in quite some time.

Here it is:

6 ounces no-scrub soap scum remover
1 tablespoon dishwashing liquid
1 tablespoon dishwasher rinse aid

Put this in a one-quart spray bottle and fill the empty space with water. That’s it. You just spray the shower walls and floor after you get out. The dishwashing liquid costs nearly nothing, and the soap scum stuff costs 20% of the price of a full bottle of same, or maybe 50 cents. The rinse aid is also cheap. So I guess this puts you at a total of around 75 cents. That puts your cost for spraying one big shower at what? About sixty bucks per year? ACCEPTABLE.

It’s not like scrubbing your shower is free. You have to use products for that. They don’t fall from the sky. If you can avoid scrubbing by paying sixty bucks, you have scored, my friend.

If I knew what was in soap scum remover, maybe I could bring the price down more. It seems to be diluted lye. Maybe I should use a small amount of oven cleaner instead of soap scum remover!

I suppose I could read the label.

Does it really matter if I pay $250 to keep the shower clean? Of course not, but you know how it is. I feel better about spending a thousand dollars and getting a good deal than spending two dollars and getting ripped off.

This is why I quit going to Five Guys. They charged me $16.34 for a burger, fries, and drink. I can afford that, but I can’t enjoy my food when I feel like a moron.

DISCLAIMER! DISCLAIMER! DISCLAIMER! I promise nothing. This spray may blind you and cause severe birth defects such as red hair, outies, and “fivehead.” I have no idea.

You will want to start with a clean shower, because this spray probably won’t have much effect on caked-on soap.

Now if I could just find a way to prevent my body from ejecting 5000 hairs onto the white tile floor every day.

I guess that guy will get here eventually.

More

The gigantic garage inquiry is over. The results are not exactly surprising.

The door does not need to be replaced. It has some mashed-up bits on the inside, where an idiot backed into it, but it’s not visible from the street. The lower part of the door can be screwed together to work correctly. Cost: 0.

There are some little problems with the opening system. It’s ancient, and the remotes have disappeared. The wall switch is gone, and so is the wiring. Cost to fix: $215. Cost for a whole new opener with remotes and switch: $300.

So, yeah, $1800 is a little high for a door for a one-car garage.

The city may get on its high horse (I think it’s glued there) and insist on a newer door that meets hurricane standards, but then again, it may not. If it does, it’s another $900. It may sound crazy, but my thinking is that it’s better to let the inspector have a look at the old door before assuming he’s going to condemn it. Either way, the worst-case scenario is a $1200 expenditure, not $1800. I realize contractors have to mark things up, but 50% does not seem reasonable.

Separation

A little more info.

What’s going on in my life this weekend is a little like the Rapture, but it’s also a little like the Tribulation.

The Rapture will be the proximate cause of the Tribulation. God’s wrath is held back by the presence and prayers of people who believe in him. Once those people are gone, God will have nothing to hold him back. Virtually no one on earth will be praying for his help, and a great number of people will be insulting him and provoking him.

I have a prayer list. It’s a list of people I pray for every day. I pray for them to receive help in most areas of their lives. This morning, God shook up the list. I only prayed for two people.

When I was a physics teaching assistant, we had kids paired as partners. They did experiments together, and they were allowed to help each other write reports. When exams rolled around, though, they were on their own. The head T.A. I worked for said that if you want to see who’s pulling the train, you separate the cars.

Right now, God is separating the cars.

There are people who benefited from my prayers over the last several years, who are about to be tossed in the pool to see if they can swim. The objective of Christianity isn’t to carry people on your back forever; it’s to teach them to walk. They get a certain amount of help, and then they either walk on their own, or they sit and fail.

I’m getting some rest. Other people are getting a wake-up call.

I know most of them will not do very well. Most are stuck in churches that teach garbage, and they don’t listen to me. Some pretend to listen but do whatever they want on their own time. I am going to have to sit back and watch some people fail.

This is what God’s life is like. Even though he is exalted, he has abased himself in order to help us. Time after time, he has put himself out, stretching the envelope of what he can do without losing his status as God. He gives us everything we need to succeed, and then he rests, and we throw it all away and fail.

To be a child of God, you have to endure a certain amount of what he endures.

Am I wrong to quit praying for people? Don’t I have a choice? Not really. If you’re Spirit-led, you get guidance from God, and you’re supposed to listen and obey. God told Paul to avoid the people of Asia Minor instead of going to preach to them. You’re not always supposed to do every nice thing you can.

God brought about these events in my life by teaching me to exalt him. Once I started doing that. things started moving faster. He also showed me that exalting him is the key to protection.

God is a person of dignity and high office. He has to be treated with respect at all times. This principle applies on earth, too. It applies to human beings. He hates it when people mistreat and insult people who are better than they are.

There are certain things God will permit his children to suffer, but if you exalt him and give him his dignity, he will exalt you, and that makes him less willing to allow others to abuse you.

God limited the suffering of Jesus. He only suffered for one day, the Jews and Romans were only allowed to do certain things to him, and when it was over, God did not permit him to experience rot. His corpse was not left in the tomb long enough to stink.

God hates the behavior of brats and churls. He mutilated the children who insulted Elisha.

The world has become filthy and crass. The things people say to each other now are unbelievable. The problem is worst on the political left. They glory in filth and viciousness. They say things so disgusting that merely to read them is to be harmed.

When things get sufficiently bad, God is going to remove people he has exalted. Watch and see.

I started doing a better job of exalting God, and suddenly, I was pulled closer to him. I was pulled aside. I am seeing less of the world’s filth. I know I’m going to receive more protection now. As the psalms say, if you satisfy certain conditions, including contemning vile people in your heart, you will be protected; you will not be moved. Contemning the vile is just the flip side of exalting God.

We have a nation that exalts the vile. We have shock humor, musicians who literally receive worship, and a culture of cruelty and disrespect. No wonder America is defeated by people who used to run from us.

Learn from this stuff if you want to do well. Don’t wait for hard knocks to beat it into you.

I’ll Have the Penne Alla Arabbiata

I had to run an errand today, and while I was out, I thought a lot about how much I was enjoying not being on Facebook.

I hadn’t realized how strongly Facebook influenced me. Every time I looked at it, I saw Christians posting toxic ignorance (“Do you love Jesus? Share this or go to hell”). I saw proof that God wasn’t getting through to people (who had no excuses). I saw half-naked or sometimes completely naked women. I saw unjustified anger, self-pity, and lots of victim behavior. I even saw Christians promoting Bernie Sanders, which is like Poles supporting Hitler.

Having worldliness in your face via the Internet gives your flesh strength in its battle against you. Even though there may seem to be no connection, it will cause you to give in to temptation more readily, even when you’re away from the PC. I’m doing better now.

I did not see that coming.

Jesus told the disciples that if a town refused to receive their blessings, they were to leave and shake the dust off their feet as a gesture of condemnation. He wasn’t just talking about dirt and towns. He was telling us about the Rapture.

We are God’s feet. The world is a big bowl of festering puke, but we are left here after we receive salvation so we can reach others and pull them out. Dirt is flesh. The flesh makes us dirty. It opens the door to iniquity and disease. It’s a handle and a doorway for Satan. We are stuck here temporarily, and it is inevitable that we will slip and do stupid things from time to time. The world is a terrible influence.

When the Rapture comes, God will shake the dust–our flesh–off of us, and it will be a gesture of judgment against the people who didn’t listen.

Life is full of little raptures. If you cancel your porn channels, it’s a rapture. If you quit arguing obsessively about politics, it’s a rapture. If you leave a prosperity church, it’s a rapture. I was raptured out of two diseased churches and a whole bunch of relationships.

Dumping social media is a rapture, too. It’s very good for me. It will help me stay cleaner. Blogging will follow if I live long enough.

My departure is not good for the people who saw the useful things I posted. That stuff is all gone now. It could have helped them. But the harm to me had started to outweigh the benefit to others, so I was told to quit.

I didn’t deactivate my account. I deleted it. POOF. Gone, entirely. No use playing around.

I didn’t say goodbye.

While I was driving here thinking about how great it was going to be to delete my account, I remembered a dream I used to have. Several times I dreamed I drove an SUV off an overpass, just like the Illinois Nazis in The Blues Brothers.

Each time, I thought it was real. I looked down through the windshield and saw the ground coming up at me, and I knew it was over. There was no way to survive. I felt exhilarated. Finally I was going to see the better part of life. I felt very sober and serious, but I felt no fear at all. I was eager to go on.

I felt that way today while I was driving. I felt as if I were about to go on a trip to Europe and leave this country and my American problems behing.

Does it mean anything? Pray and find out. I’m just telling you what I felt.

I used to assume that a person had to be super holy to get caught up in the Rapture. I thought it would only be for complete fanatics who almost never sinned. Now I’m not so sure. I fully expect 99% of Christians to be left behind, but I don’t think the people who make it will have to be carbon copies of Jesus.

The selection process probably has a great deal to do with humility, willingness to change, and the amount of hatred the world has for you. Part of the purpose of the Rapture is to protect people who exalt God. He himself is invulnerable, and the more you exalt him and humble yourself, the more he will exalt you and share his own blessings with you.

If the world really has it in for you, and you are treating God with the proper love, respect, awe, and gratitude, God has a lot of incentive to pull you out. A lot of our vulnerability comes from having the wrong attitude toward God.

I don’t know what’s happening. I’m not starting a cult. Don’t emasculate yourself, drink poison, or buy white sneakers. I’m just relaying my observations and experiences.

I always thought I would get a lot more done than I have, but who can say? If I have to be an eleventh-hour refugee, I am thrilled to get the chance.

I don’t care. I would be happy to go. This place is a mess. As far as I’m concerned, so long, and thanks for all the fish. I would rather go sooner than later.

Death doesn’t have to be a dumpster fire. My great-grandmother was a charismatic. She quit going to doctors at a certain age. She didn’t need them. When she was 85, she told her children she was going to die. My grandfather told her she had indigestion, and he went about his business. She got in bed and died while he was gone.

That’s how I want to go. Either that or a meteor. I have always hoped for a meteor. You can’t beat that level of surprise. Nothing knocks your consciousness out of a corrupted meat sack like a meteor.

Things are going to keep getting better. Worry is going to disappear. The sabbath starts a little early if you pay attention. Whether I’m here for ten minutes or another forty years (please, no), the future is brighter than I can imagine.

Keep moving forward. Good stuff lies ahead. You will see it in due time.

Maybe I’m not Applying Myself

It’s 10:31 a.m., and I’m already having an interesting day.

Every day I ask God to schedule my time and prevent it from being wasted. You would think the answers would be obvious. I would get up and clean and arrange and repair. I would study. I would help this or that person. It’s not like that.

God loves the sneak attack.

I watch the tube more than I used to. I watch when I’m taking the birds out for air, and I am hopelessly addicted to mealtime TV. But TV is terrible, so I have had to master Youtube and the DVR. If you can connect your PC to your TV, and you can learn to use the DVR well, you will always have something worth watching.

Okay, often. Not always.

I started recording old movies, because I felt like my cultural literacy was expiring. There are some movies everyone should watch, simply to have the experience in common with other people. There are also some old flicks that got very little attention, yet which have something to recommend them.

This weekend I watched Canon City, which is a 1948 movie named for a prison town in Colorado. It currently hosts the United States Penitentiary, an all-supermax facility. It’s the king of all American prisons. It’s the closest thing we have to hell. It’s where we put people we really, really do not want to see among decent people again.

Supermax is where you go when the thought of you escaping is too much for the corrections people and your judge to bear.

The movie was about another prison in Canon City; the Colorado State Penitentiary.

Canon City is a docu-drama. Some of the players were actual convicts and prison staffers, and it was about a real escape that took place in 1948. One of the escapees was James Sherbondy, a man who murdered a deputy when he was 17.

In the movie, Sherbondy is a model prisoner. He runs the prison darkroom. When the other prisoners come to him to try to get him to hide guns in the darkroom, he turns them down, hoping instead to make parole. They sneak the guns into the room against his will, and he decides to go along with the plan.

When the convicts escape, Sherbondy is the last one caught. He invades a home and holds the family hostage. One of the children, a little boy, has appendicitis, and the mother pleads with Sherbondy to let her take him to the hospital. After she promises to keep quiet, he lets her go. That actually happened.

Prior to the appendicitis scene, Sherbondy (the film version) stands up and makes a whiny speech about how hard his youth was, and he tells the family crime doesn’t pay. He praises the deputy he killed.

Of course, he gets captured, but not until the husband, moved by Sherbondy’s behavior, tries to drive him past the police.

Naturally, I had to look this up.

James Sherbondy killed deputy sheriff Oscar Meyer (his real name) during a traffic stop. Sherbondy was a truant and a thug. Meyer, who foolishly did his job unarmed, confronted Sherbondy, and Sherbondy shot him in the chest. Sherbondy fled in Meyer’s car and left him to die. A good Samaritan stopped, and Meyer fingered Sherbondy before he died.

Sherbondy never expressed remorse for the killing. He lived to be 49 years old, and he never said he was sorry.

Sherbondy was eventually paroled. He got into trouble again when the cops stopped a car he was riding in. They were looking for the three other occupants, not Sherbondy. Unfortunately, Sherbondy was armed, and he had some pipe bombs with him. He shot a policeman four times, and the police killed him.

There was a surprising deep message in the film’s narration. The narrator said the prison housed people who always had to have things their own way, and who were willing to break the rules to make it happen. That is a perfect summation of the criminal mind. I actually heard a psychopath say she took drugs because of the stress she felt when she didn’t get her way.

Why relate all this? Because it’s a lesson in misplaced sympathy.

James Sherbondy was hopeless. He was never rehabilitated. He tutored kids and did prison jobs in order to get time taken off his sentence, but he remained a criminal. Releasing him was a mistake that got a good man shot. It was a waste of effort.

The world is full of Sherbondys. I am related to at least one. They’re not rare. Like the clay bottles in the Bible that can’t be reshaped once the necks become stiff, people reach a point where they can’t be fixed, and the only rational thing to do is to put them in hell where they can’t torment the rest of us or contemn God any longer.

You can’t tell who is who, because you can’t see men’s hearts. A long time ago, I learned that I can’t tell when people are lying to me, and I can’t tell who is or is not worth saving. We tend to look for existing goodness in people. That’s wrong. The thing that qualifies people for help isn’t goodness; it’s the potential to continue becoming more good.

A child molester in a federal penitentiary may be worth more of your time than your local priest.

I wasn’t trying to connect molestation with the priesthood, but I’ll leave that anyway.

If you can’t change, you’re much worse off than someone who is filled with iniquity and evil yet who is willing to admit fault and submit to God.

Pride is what makes improvement impossible.

Our culture is in love with pride right now. We have become convinced that it’s a good thing. This is a new thing for America. In the past, we always thought pride was dangerous. Now we cultivate it.

Because of our love of pride, necks are stiffening all over the place.

The rise in immorality is very bad. It’s bad when we sin. But the thing that is bringing judgment on us is the pride more than the sin. You can get past sin and please God, but that’s not possible if you’re proud. Pride is a vaccine against sanctification.

I bring this up today because I keep feeling like it’s time for me to withdraw even more than I already have, and I think bad things are in our near future. Maybe I should say “your” near future, because I don’t see it landing on me.

I feel like God is helping me understand his actions before he takes them. We are becoming too proud to help, so abandonment will be God’s only rational option.

I don’t require any explanation from God. It’s not my place to demand one. But it’s interesting.

Sooner or later we will reach a critical point, and America’s protection will be gone in a hurry. We may be there right now.

I feel like it’s time to cut way back on the list of people I pray for. You’re not required to keep priming a pump on a dry well. You put in the time God thinks is appropriate, and then you move on. Hopefully there are some people out there who will respond better.

If you’re Spirit-led, you can’t really waste time. Everything is redeemed. Even the time you spend watching Turner Classic Movies. Things are planned in advance. They’re not always obvious.

I don’t know what’s going to happen, but stay in prayer and keep your knees bent. It’s working for me.

Blot it Out and Find Rest

I’m red-hot this month. I used to blog several times a day. Then I went away for weeks at a time. Then I came back and blogged a couple of times per month. Yesterday I blogged twice.

It’s an eruption. I’m a juggernaut of Internet bombast.

I do not know how long it will last.

A few days back I dumped Twitter and Instagram. I thought they were boring, and Twitter was also tawdry. I rarely participated in either service. Today I woke up and prayed, and I started to feel like it was time to cut back on Facebook.

How will my 61 “friends” live? I’m sure it will be rough on them.

When I went back to church in 2008 (is that the right year?), I started making new friends. I found myself faced with a new experience. For the first time, I had to deal with Christians who were complete hypocrites.

That’s harsh, isn’t it? But it’s true.

I went to Miami’s Trinity Church, which is something like 80% black. The pastors there (white) only cared about fame and money, so they were extremely reluctant to correct anyone. They were terrified that people might leave and take their credit cards with them. The people were generally on board with this. Correction wasn’t their favorite thing, either.

As a result, the parking lot was full of Obama stickers. How can you have Obama stickers on cars in a charismatic church? It’s like swastikas on BMW’s parked at a synagogue. But there they were.

I couldn’t tell anyone anything. That’s an exaggeration, but it was nearly true. The people were used to being told they were victims. They were never held accountable, except for not giving the pastors enough money or free work. They didn’t want to hear that it was hypocritical to vote for convenience abortion, or that socialism is covetousness. They just wanted the false monetary promises of trashy preachers who dressed like rodeo clowns.

If you read this blog post to them today, 90% would have no idea what I was talking about. That’s how ignorant people at Trinity are.

I was not the greatest Christian on earth, but I was not completely dim, either. God told me more and more about the problems with the church, and as I wised up, I went from ardent supporter to supporter with reservations to happy refugee.

I knew more than they did when I got there, and by the time I left, God had shown me so much, I felt like I might as well have been attending a Hindu temple.

I moved on to New Dawn Ministries, and they were a lot better, but they had horrendous problems with pride and anger, and the pastors were very lazy. They grew a certain point and then got hung up, like breech-birth babies digging their heels into the side of the birth canal.

The pastors were rude to me publicly, even though I was a deacon, so I took the hint and stopped going. But I continued writing stuff about God on Facebook, as I felt moved. I would get up and pray every morning, and God would show me great things, and I would pass them on. I figured God had a purpose in it.

Now I feel like letting Facebook go. Anyone there who is willing to listen has already listened, and the rest are a waste of time. It’s a bummer, looking at the same people posting the same garbage over and over, proving their development is arrested. It affects my own morale; that’s not a small thing. I have a right to consider that and protect myself.

Apart from that, Facebook is a plantation, like The Huffington Post. It runs on unpaid labor.

Arianna Huffington managed to convince dozens of people she was doing them a favor when she allowed them to write for her for nothing. Jeff Zuckerberg has done more or less the same thing. Every day millions of people fill his site with free content, and they surveill themselves continuously, which is a big help to the government. In exchange we get almost nothing, and when we have issues with Facebook, they treat us like the unimportant, powerless, fungible creatures they perceive us to be.

That’s how life is, when you’re the tail and Jeff Zuckerberg is the head.

People are getting strongly addicted to the Internet plantations. Sooner or later, people like Zuckerberg will have a lot more power over us than they do now. There will be a price for the free advertising and networking.

If you’re not dependent on it, you won’t care.

A blog is more like a ranch than a plantation. A blogger owns his medium. Until persecution gets really bad, I’ll be able to say anything I want here. No one can report me to a gang of pimply genderless twerps who have the power to censor me. That’s nice.

There is a dark side to all this. I definitely get divine revelation, and I have been sharing it. If I feel that I should stop doing that, then it’s likely that God is giving up on some people.

Hunter Thompson, the immature, miserable humorist who died in disgrace and defeat, once wrote about going to a doctor. He complained that he was sweating a lot. He was taking a lot of drugs and drinking a great deal. He said the doctor told him he shouldn’t be worried unless the sweating stopped, because the sweat was his body’s way of flushing out the poisons Thompson ingested.

People who tell others about God are like Thompson’s sweat glands. While we maintain the flow, there is hope. If we stop, it means God is giving up on people who wouldn’t listen. It’s a bad sign.

If you serve God, you’re supposed to have a life of victory and peace. That can’t be true if you spend the entire thing pleading with people who waste your time and refuse to listen. There is a limit to what God will require you to do. He will take you aside when needed and give you rest. I believe that’s what’s happening to me. It doesn’t mean I’m a great person. It just means I’m not the world’s toilet paper. I have certain rights as an heir, and they can’t be entirely nullified, with no respite.

Just as you have to approach God with gratitude, thanks, and humility, you are limited in what you can do to his people. God can’t be God if you treat him like a churlish servant who owes you, and a Spirit-led person can’t function correctly if he is perpetually frustrated and disrespected.

I feel that things are getting worse faster than I expected. Jesus said he would return at a time when we didn’t expect him, and he was not a liar. We’re waiting for God to count to three, but he’s actually going to say, “One, two,” and then drop the boom on us.

My emotions are mixed. I am tired of this world. It has a stink that rises to heaven. Americans have no gratitude or humility. They have no sincerity. This is one of the better places on earth, and we have made ourselves disgusting. I would love to see the world reformed.

On the other hand, I am one of the reasons the world stinks. I didn’t get pulled aside as a reward. I was helped in spite of what I was. How can I be happy to see other people like me miss the boat? “Reform” also means the destruction of a whole lot of people.

You can’t question God’s choices, though. He chooses whom he will, and he is right.

I have been thinking about Enoch. I envy him. If what old books say about him is true, he spent less and less time with people as he aged. Eventually, he appeared once a year. Other men showed up to hear what he had to say (not to argue and spew), and then he would leave again. He didn’t have to mud-wrestle every day and stain himself with the manure of the pigs he tried to feed.

Paul, on the other hand, spent a lot of time in the mosh pit. During his ministry, he was beaten and stoned. He appears to have been very engaged with humanity. I don’t find that appealing at all.

The more you understand the world, the more you want to put a buffer between the world and yourself. I suppose this is why God’s throne is in heaven, not Las Vegas.

You don’t actually have to wade into the throng every day to serve God. There are different ministries. Maybe God will have the extraordinary kindness to limit my dealings with people who are sources of frustration. That means nearly everyone!

I can’t make demands, though.

I hope I will not have to fool with Facebook any more. I would love to delete my account completely. That would require some help, because I have the habit of looking at it throughout the day. I deleted the application from my phone, but that just makes getting to Facebook a little harder. It’s not the same thing as quitting.

Look around and see if other people are shutting down. If so, God’s patience is probably just about out. If not, maybe I’m just tired of banging my head against the same stones.

But Will the Global Warmers be Able to Swim When the Water of Truth Rises?

I want to add a couple of things about the global warming…I am looking for a word that doesn’t sound like “fundamentalists” or “Taliban”…adherents. Yes…adherents. I went with that before, and it worked.

The GWA’s (save me some typing) have done something scientists should never do. They have painted themselves into a corner and provided themselves with a compelling interest in seeing themselves proven right. To be more accurate, they have a compelling interest in not being proven wrong. It’s okay if they’re not proven right, but being proven wrong would be catastrophic. They would look like idiots and cultists, and their professional credentials would be cheapened considerably.

Because they have been so adamant and intolerant, the only way they can be sure of avoiding disaster is to force the rest of us to go along with their strange, draconian “reform” proposals, even if they don’t work.

I will explain.

Let’s say they get their way, which is likely. Let’s say they get us to spend astronomical sums, choking industry and crushing progress, putatively in order to reduce global warming.

By the way, I don’t call it “climate change,” because that’s weasel language. They used to call it global warming, and then certain places got very cold, appearing to disrupt the whole theory. They switched to “climate change” so they would be able to say that any change, cold or hot, was due to bad old greenhouse gases. I think that was disingenuous and contrived. I think they’re hedging their bets. So I will stick with global warming.

Say it’s going to warm up, or say it’s going to cool down. Man up and take a position, or admit you don’t know the truth.

To get back to our scenario, they get their way. They stuff socks in all our tailpipes. They make us ride bicycles and use abominable poisonous light bulbs that don’t work. They make us turn off our lights at 8 p.m. They remove the element carbon from all future periodic tables and replace it with an element called “Priusine.” Whatever it is they want, they get.

That gives us three possible outcomes.

Outcome 1: nothing happens. They can say they arrested the progress of global warming. Their grants are saved. Comrade Lysenko smiles down from atheist heaven, where he spends eternity waiting in line to buy toilet paper. All is well.

Outcome 2: the planet heats up. They can say we didn’t do enough. It’s still George Bush’s fault. We didn’t listen in time. We didn’t give them enough government money. We didn’t go to Burning Man and pray to Cthulhu with them. Our fault. They still look good.

Outcome 3: the planet cools down. It worked! They were right! It’s just amazing how smart they were. Time to put the rest of us in vegetarian gulags where everyone gets to use whatever bathroom they want, which was obviously the right move to begin with.

Now, what if we do nothing?

Outcome 1: nothing happens. They were wrong. They look stupid. People distance themselves from them. College students start demanding safe spaces to get away from them.

Outcome 2: the planet heats up. Thank Gaia. They were right. We should have listened. Now we need to give them more power, because it would be even hotter if they hadn’t gotten their way. Fire up the bongs with the special carbon traps and put on some Justin Bieber!

Outcome 3: the planet cools. Wow, do they look stupid. They risk being beaten to death by mobs swinging pillowcases full of coal.

If we do what they want, they can’t lose. If we don’t do what they want, the planet absolutely has to heat up, fast, or they’re toast.

Surely they’ve figured this out, so now we can count on them putting on a full-court press, not out of confidence that they’re right, but out of terror that they might be wrong.

Personally, I think they’re wrong. I am not a meteorologist or climatologist, but the people who are against them seem more credible than the liars and hysterical polemicists who get attention for backing them.

I was not favorably impressed by the famous global warming fraud scandal, nor am I impressed by the fake movie polar bears which were used to convince us that aquatic mammals, for the first time in history, can’t swim. I am not impressed by Al Gore, who, to me, appears to be mentally ill and incapable of telling the truth. He got rich off of global warming, after his family got rich from oil, and his house, which is clearly visible from Venus, uses more energy than the entire northeast power grid.

“Carbon credits” are not only silly, they’re an insult to my intelligence. If carbon credits made sense, wives would sell their husbands adultery credits, and the cops would sell angry people murder credits. When Leo Dicaprio travels to complain about fossil fuel, he uses a private jet. Come on. If you’re going to pull my leg, at least pretend you’re serious. When Bruce Jenner decided he was a woman, he grew breasts, wore makeup, and made sure he shaved every day. A quality hoax demands a certain level of commitment.

If they prove AGW (figure it out) exists, fine. I’ll be quiet. But the way they’re handling it now is a disgrace.

We’re About to Get a Global Worming

I tell you what. You can learn a lot about the increasing danger of mob-think from watching the global warming crowd.

They have no notion of basic scientific ethics. They don’t understand the importance of impartiality. They don’t understand the importance of free discourse, which is a nice way of saying they don’t understand the importance of not threatening and insulting every person who thinks they may be wrong.

I’m a scientist, technically. I have a BS in physics plus some grad school. I was not the world’s premier physicist, or I would have gone on to get my doctorate, but I have a basic grasp of the scientific method and the dangers of bias. These are things you learn about in grade school (maybe not, if you’re going to “school” now), but just to assure people that I have a clue, I went all the way to 25th grade or whatever it was, and I heard a little bit about scientific ethics and professionalism.

I’m also a lawyer. In law school, I was drilled pretty thoroughly on the importance of fairness and civility (at least in the courtroom). Lawyers are taught that certain evidence can be excluded based on its tendency to inflame emotion to the point where it counteracts reason. We are taught that certain hearsay evidence can be included if the emotional state of the speaker meets certain standards. We are taught that there are certain causes we can’t take up, because of conflicts of interest.

It may seem like conflation when I mention conflicts of interest and emotion in the same paragraph, but it’s not. In the law, conflicts of interest pervert justice, and emotion creates conflicts of interest. For that matter, conflicts of interest can give rise to emotion.

Either way, you end up with something on your mind, other than the truth.

This stuff is extremely important in the law. You can get in serious trouble for continuing in a representation when you have a conflict of interest. You can be forced off a case. It’s not trivial.

It’s also important in science.

Bias is so hard for scientists to avoid, we had to invent double-blind methods and endure the misery of statistics in order to try to drive the partiality out of our work.

Here I will tell the story of Clever Hans.

Clever Hans was a horse that supposedly did math. Its owner or trainer or whatever would ask it questions, and Hans would tap out the answers with its foot. Problem: it only worked with one person. When that person was out of the room, Hans lost his mathematical ability.

The reason? The person who worked with Hans was giving off unintentional cues. Hans was not really solving the quadratic equation; he was just banging his hoof when he saw the owner make an unconscious movement.

Now I will tell the story of M rays. I’m not sure M is the correct letter, but it will do.

Back when scientists were discovering a new form of radiation every week, a man said he had discovered M rays. Some people believed it. Some people didn’t. Naturally, the man who discovered M rays really wanted to believe it. Grants, jobs, whatever type of seductive groupies scientists attract…all that lay before him.

He put on a demonstration. He had some sort of apparatus, and he got an audience together. He turned on the machine, and voila…M rays.

Then a man in the crowd stood up and held up a part of the machine, which he had removed earlier. The machine could not work without it, but people’s imaginations could.

This is why we don’t go to the doctor for M rays today.

These are historical anecdotes, so they may be 95% false, but the principles they illustrate are true, and there are plenty of other examples.

The point I’m getting at is that people believe what they want to believe. This is why nine Supreme Court justices who were top-five in their classes can look at the same cases and draw two equally firm, completely incompatible opinions. And it’s why you usually don’t get three opinions. The division is usually conservative/liberal. The political spectrum has two wings, not five.

Liberals want to see a right to publicly funded sex changes in the Constitution, and conservatives don’t, and they see what they hope to see.

The global warming gang has no ethics. This applies to the lawyers, scientists, and engineers among them, not just the yoga instructors, welfare recipients, and medical marijuana addicts. They don’t understand the importance of free discourse.

Their favorite term for anyone who disagrees with them is “climate change denier.” The term itself is a breach of ethics. It comes from “Holocaust denier,” which comes from the discussion of neo-Nazis and Muslim extremists who pretend the Holocaust never happened. It comes from the discussion of rabid idiots who killed tens of millions of people. It equates scientific disagreement with claiming Dachau was a spa for fat Germans.

Not acceptable.

We shouldn’t have to have this discussion. Maybe the climate is changing, and maybe it’s our fault. Maybe the answer is more socialism and the crippling of industry in certain nations (USA cough cough). That doesn’t mean it’s okay to form lynch mobs and drive people out of their jobs for thinking otherwise.

You don’t have to be a moron to think climate change is a crock. Freeman Dyson agrees. William Gray agrees. But even if agreeing does reflect poorly on your intelligence, you should not have to deal with labels like “denier.” You should not have to worry about losing your job or having your academic credentials revoked.

When people are afraid to talk, science dies. It’s that simple.

The Soviets tried persecuting scientists (as did the Catholic church before them). A character named Lysenko came up with a bad theory of genetics that somehow seemed to support leftist notions, and the government got behind him. He said what they wanted to say! Amazingly, they agreed with him and helped him out. Who could have seen that coming?

Lysenko’s followers persecuted other scientists. This is probably why we don’t hear a lot about great Russian advances in genetics in that era.

Lysenko was such a big deal, a movement was named after him: “Lysenkoism.” Today it’s a synonym for persecution of scientific dissenters. In other words, it’s practically a synonym for “anthropogenic global warming.”

In Russia, scientists succeeded not because they discovered and disseminated truth, but because they pleased a bunch of fat murdering imbeciles in Moscow.

Today’s Lysenkoists see nothing wrong with what they’re doing. And it’s not subtle. It’s not like trying to measure the spin of tiny particles in a supercollider. It’s extremely obvious. It’s like going to church expecting to attend mass and finding pole dancers up at the altar.

Why is this interesting to me? I gave up science. Thank God for that, because had I not, look at the people whose boots would be on my neck right now. It’s interesting to me because it’s a measure of Satanic power of the mind of the mob.

People have more than enough brains to make good decisions about simple matters, but we screw up all the time, and often we screw up in huge waves. We screw up en masse, as though choreographed by an invisible George Balanchine. When that happens–when large numbers of people draw the same patently stupid conclusion simultaneously–the supernatural is at work. We’re stupid, but we need help to be that stupid.

People have a natural herd instinct, and it easily outweighs the mind. Probably ten billion psychology experiments have proven that. It’s why Goebbels said it was important to repeat lies. Satan whispers in the ears of the herd, and they have no resistance. The lie is supernatural, and in order to defeat it, the immune response has to be supernatural. People don’t hear from the Holy Spirit, so they don’t hear the response.

It’s okay to persecute people who disagree about weather. It’s okay to fire people and destroy their families because they won’t bake cakes for homosexuals. Bruce Jenner is a woman. A pervert who wants to display his genitals to your little girl in a locker room (or on the street in New York or San Francisco) is a victim, not a predator. These statements are obviously false, but the little Goebbels demons have been hard at work turning us into suckers, so we think they’re true. Worse than that, we think anyone who disagrees is evil. Not wrong. Evil.

So anything society does to people who disagree with the devil’s lies is okay.

When the Germans machine-gunned Jews beside ditches, they didn’t think they were doing something bad. They thought they were getting rid of wrong people. The Jews weren’t victims, and the object wasn’t to take the things they had earned. The Jews were subhuman monsters who were destroying Germany. Killing them was a good deed. It will be the same way when non-Christians and weak Christians start killing the Jews and strong Christians in America.

The Bible talks about people having veils over their eyes. It’s not a joke. It’s real. You can tell supernaturally deaf people the obvious truth all day, and they will never get it. They’ll just feel enraged.

It’s not that important whether the leftists cripple our economy with ridiculous environmental measures. It’s important, yes, but it’s not the big enchilada. What’s important is that we are seeing the sharp end of the nail. A few crazy ideas got past us, and now the point of the nail is past our defenses, and the shaft of the nail is right behind it. The shaft is bigger.

Man-made disasters start small and then take off. That’s what happened in Germany.

I don’t care that much whether the greenies force me to use terrible light bulbs, or whether they force me to pretend to recycle paper, which actually goes to the dump because no one will buy it. Things like that are going to happen, so I don’t want to get accustomed to having high blood pressure over it. I can’t stop it. They’re going to win big.

I do care about guarding the gates of my mind.

If you’re not praying in the Spirit, you will be susceptible to deception. If you can be deceived sufficiently, you can be turned. Then you have a real problem. The mark of the Beast won’t seem like such a bad idea. Denying God will seem like the smart move; you can always acknowledge him in private, and anyway, he knows your heart, right? You’ll rationalize and go along, and the first thing you know, you’ll be outside of God’s protection. You may lose your salvation, and then what do you have? Eternity in agony.

It seems like a paradox. Strong Christians will attract persecution, but you need to be strong when persecution comes. It’s not a paradox. They’re going to hate all Christians who have any sincerity in them at all. You will be hated one way or the other. But if you’re full of the fruit and the gifts of the Spirit, you’ll have more tools to help you bear it and win individual battles.

Things seem to be coming to a head faster than I expected. Technology is very close to destroying free will, which will negate God’s incentive to keep the world going. America has already been defeated by Satan, and if we elect the wrong people this time around, our problems may accelerate drastically. It may only be a couple of years before we’re just like the Jews under Hitler. I can’t see it taking longer than ten under the best circumstances, but I’m a pessimist. Maybe we can stretch it out.

I wouldn’t tell people to pray for God to spare America now. That bus has left the terminal. I would tell them to ask God to slow things down and help the humble prepare. I think that’s the best we can do.

I’m going to try to quit arguing with global warming adherents. It’s a complete waste of time as far as I can see. I learned a lot from it, but I’m pretty sure no minds were changed. After all, I was using natural tools.

Draw close to God. Ask him what you’re doing wrong. Pray in the Spirit all you can. Whatever happens will be a whole lot better than what would have happened had you done nothing.

Every Dam has a Bursting Point

Right before a hurricane, you get a day or two of weather which is peaceful yet has an ominous feel to it. It brings overcast skies and gentle breezes that raise the hairs on your neck, with a few drops of rain now and then.

I have that same feeling now, as if the earth is charging up to receive a lightning strike. I feel like the USA is about to be hit by something.

God doesn’t write things down on pieces of paper and hand them to me. I haven’t received a fax saying a nuclear weapon is about to go off here. But things don’t feel good at all.

Maybe it’s just me.

Respect Will Turbocharge Your Prayers

New stuff.

Well. Old stuff I should have known already but didn’t.

Our little monkey brains aren’t very big. We can’t contain enough information to understand everything that goes on around us, and we can’t process it adequately. You may be smart by monkey…I mean “human”…standards, but you’re crazy if you think that means your brain is up to the challenge of taking care of you by itself.

I get glimpses of things, but I can’t really understand them completely. That’s where submission comes in. You have to let God be the smart one. You don’t have to understand. You just have to accept the fact that he knows what he’s doing.

He has helped me to understand that the universe has a hierarchical structure. Beings exist on various discrete levels of authority. God is at the top. Satan is at the very bottom; all of his authority is stolen, or more accurately, provided by beings he conned into giving it to him.

If you’re having problems that drive you nuts, you’re going to have to move to a higher level of authority, by drawing closer to God. If you stay where you are, you can push things around, like rearranging furniture, but you can’t really improve your situation.

Relying on carnal solutions is like buying a bear to chase your mice. You end up swapping problems, with no real progress. In fact, you go backward, whether or not you realize it. God is your only source of real, permanent help that comes without regret.

You have no alternative. There are opiates and delusions that can ease your pain, but God is the only answer. This is why Jesus kept telling people he was the only way.

In order for a person of authority to function correctly, he has to have honor and cooperation. That’s just how it is. You can’t be an authority and grovel, beg, and manipulate, which means 95% of charismatic preachers are not effective authorities.

Being in authority is like being a parent or a husband. In order for you to function, when you show up, everyone has to shut up and defer to you. Otherwise, extremely offensive words and acts are performed and spoken, and nothing gets done. It is very offensive when a true authority is treated with contempt.

Gender feminism (male-hating feminism) is a great example of rejection of the benefits of authority.

It’s not easy to be a husband and father. You fight the world all day, and then when you come home, you’re expected to have all the answers. You’re expected to provide a cocoon of safety and abundance for your family, and that’s a scary burden.

If you come home to a spoiled, emasculating witch and a bunch of kids who think your purpose in life is to be corrected by pimply twerps with safety pins in their faces, it’s not going to work. You won’t be able to teach them anything. You won’t be able to bring healing order. If you have anything useful to tell them, it will go to waste.

Your wife will become even more of a shrew, your kids will grow up to be old, incorrigible morons, and you will accomplish nothing.

Feminism is Satan’s way of making this happen.

Men haven’t listened to the Holy Spirit. They haven’t submitted. They haven’t developed true authority. God hasn’t backed them up. That opened the door to feminism. Their women and children treat them like retarded toddlers. In a proper household, God commands the man, the man commands the wife, the wife commands the kids, and the kids suck it up, listen, and thrive. In a feminist household, everyone just rots.

There is also an anti-age movement, but Satan has managed to prevent us from naming it. I would call it “youthism,” for lack of any other term. “Mom is dumb, but Dad is an utter imbecile, and Grandma and Grandpa are basically chimps.” That’s what the youthists think.

You can’t bless the feminists and youthists. It’s as if they and wisdom were both positively charged; they actively repel it. They literally (not figuratively) hate it. Many of them dedicate their lives to the destruction of wisdom. It’s an amazing spectacle. It’s the mindset that caused God to schedule two annihilations for mankind.

When a plant needs water, you water it, and it grows. No problem. When a plant becomes unable to absorb water, you have to pull it and burn it, because there is nothing else you can do for it, and it takes up valuable space on the earth.

I really don’t care who disagrees with this stuff. It’s revelation, so believe it or don’t. Misguided opinions mean absolutely nothing to me.

Satan is like God in that he tries to turn people into little copies of himself, and that’s unfortunate, because Satan is living excrement. He has no future other than eternal suffering and humiliation. Satan loves feminism and youthism, because they make our hearts like his.

God is like a husband in heaven. He took care of everyone there. He had all the answers. There was no basis for anyone to worry. But Satan decided he knew better, so shrew that he/she is, he came to earth and tried to replace God’s perfect plan with his idiotic plan. He decided to treat God with contempt, put him aside, and be the dad. And it worked. Because of Satan’s program, most people live like monkeys and then go to hell.

In order to be God, God has to receive a certain amount of honor. It is not possible for him to abase himself past a certain point without ceasing to be what he is. He already allowed himself to be murdered by a bunch of beings who were like insects compared to him. That’s abasement enough. Now, if you want something from him, you have to approach him with awe, respect, and the intention to obey. You have to acknowledge the fact that he owes you absolutely nothing good, and you have to be grateful for whatever you get.

We don’t approach God correctly. Charismatic Christianity is full of standup comedians posing as men of God, and they teach us that God is our buddy. They teach us we can go to him abruptly and demand things, with no preparation and no respect. As a result, he is not able to give us many of the things we ask for. To allow himself to be contemned successfully would be to disrupt the order of the universe.

Preachers are unbelievable. They tell us to pray on the toilet. They tell us to pray while we’re drunk. They tell us to be familiar with God, the way we would be with a little brother or a drinking buddy. No wonder our prayers aren’t answered.

If you’re in a hurry, pray however you have to. But if you have time, give God honor before you start in with the begging. Exalt him. Tell him how much higher he is than you. Tell him how low Satan is, and how you hate him for lying to you about God. Think of the things God has done for you in spite of your evil nature, and thank him sincerely.

When you ask for things, be humble. Behave like a convicted child molester who got paroled and wants a cookie from the pantry at the halfway house. We’re not taught to do that. We’re taught to ask for silly things and then say, “I pray in the name of Jesus, so now you have to do it.”

Jehovah is a judge. He sits in a big chair before an audience, like a human judge, and he listens to evidence and requests, and he makes decrees. When you go to court, you don’t wear a thong and a straw hat and hold a beer in your hand. You don’t interrupt the judge. You don’t insult him or argue with him. You kiss his feet and give him honor, and if you blow it, you can be jailed indefinitely for contempt. “Contempt of court” means showing contempt for the court.

The reason contemnors are jailed is not to pump up the egos of judges, although many judges see it that way. We do it because to permit contempt is to threaten the functioning of the court. It threatens the order that holds society together.

Honoring God is necessary because it preserves the order of the universe.

The ancient Jews were allowed to kill their children. That sounds crazy, coming from a pro-life Christian, but it’s true. Look it up. If you had a worthless, snotty, disrespectful son, you could take him to the city gate and have him stoned.

A woman who showed contempt for a man by squeezing his genitals to make him lose a fight had to have her hand amputated. Look it up. God does not like emasculation of authorities. He really hates it.

God showed me another aspect of the principles of honor and authority: you have to limit your circle.

Depending on where you live and who you know, you may be surrounded by people who are impossible to save because of their pride, cruelty, and contempt. This is especially true if you live in a ghetto. There are places where anyone who submits to God and spreads knowledge will be treated with extreme contempt and brutality. You need to avoid those places. You need to cut off people who won’t change, even if they’re your parents. You can’t complain about the way you’re treated if you seek out imbeciles.

God himself only permits a certain amount of contemptuous behavior, and then down comes the water or the burning sulfur. The rapture will be God’s way of removing people of authority and humility from the presence of people who are determined to act and think like monkeys. God drowned such people in the flood, and he’s going to kill again.

He’s going to kill again, and it will be a relief to the rest of us. That sounds awful, but it’s true. The presence of the incorrigible is painful, and we are not going to miss them all that much, because we will be too dazed by the pleasant sensation of their absence.

I have cut a lot of people off. Sometimes it made me feel cruel and self-righteous, but now I know how right it was. I don’t miss a single one. When I imagine having them back in my life, it makes my stomach hurt. May I never see any of them again, unless they change. I can’t thank God enough for removing them from me. I know I have made him suffer the way they made me suffer. My presence was a burden to him.

Next time you talk to God, remember to honor and thank him. Approach him the way a guilty murderer would approach a judge. Expect help and have faith, but remember that it’s charity, not your paycheck for being awesome. You will get better results.