People Who Live in the Real World Wouldn’t Understand

I had to clean bird cages today, so now I’m in the mood for anything other than bird cage cleaning. I will write again.

Yesterday I was reminded of one of the big paradoxes of the Internet: being able to shop for things from the convenience of your home results in giant delays instead of time savings.

That’s kind of a distortion, but here’s what I mean: when you try to buy anything on the Internet–even paper clips–you will learn so much about the choices you have that you will spend more time studying and searching than buying.

Yesterday I had to solder something, and I saw that I was out of good solder. I still had bad solder; the kind that never seems to work right. I needed the good kind.

Two years ago, I would have driven to Radio Shack and bought whatever I saw. I would have been finished in 20 minutes. This time, it took me something like three hours. I learned things about solder while I was shopping, and I fell through the Internet-shopping looking glass, where you find out that the thousand things you believed before breakfast are, sadly, impossible.

There are lots of different kinds of solder. I did not know this. I knew about two types: lead-free, which sounded unwholesome, deluded, and leftist, and leaded, which, I figured, had to be the best, because, hey…lead. Anything that contains ingredients hippies hate will always turn out to be the best kind available.

I am not even a little scared of lead. I used to chew lead split shots because I liked the taste, and while I may be strange, I never got stupid or incontinent or whatever. Based on what I’ve read, I think the government keeps adjusting lead standards to silly levels in order to keep EPA bureaucrats employed. If lead was that big a deal, I’d be in an institution. I’m sure it’s toxic, but lots of stuff is toxic, and most of us manage to survive.

I started rooting around on the web, and I learned that there are lots of solder types. When it comes to electronics, the three main types are plain old rosin-cored, RMA (rosin mildly activated), and RA (rosin activated). Also, there are different leaded alloys. Two of the popular ones are 63% lead/37% tin and 60% lead/40% tin. I think. Maybe the tin goes first. On top of this, cored solder can contain 1.1%, 2.2%, or 3.3% flux. The word “flux” refers to the rosin, which is a substance that eats oxidation when it gets hot. Again: I think. Basically it cleans the joint.

Let’s see. There’s more. Solder comes in lots of diameters. You can get 0.015″, 0.020″, 0.025″, 0.031″, and up. If solder is too big, it tends to go all over the place when you solder little things. If it’s too small, it takes forever to fill a joint.

It gets worse. Chinese solder is not reliable. Big shock there. So you have to look for quality brands.

You have to wonder how bad Chinese solder is, since most of our electronic devices are full of it.

I also found out you’re supposed to clean solder joints. I had never heard of that. When you solder, you may unintentionally (or in my case, intentionally) leave melted flux on your joints. It’s ugly, and if I understand things correctly (doubtful), some types of flux can cause corrosion.

I went nuts researching this stuff. I looked at all sorts of nerd forums. I wanted to spend $20-$30 on a pound roll of solder, and I did not want to get the wrong thing.

By the time my eyes had gone buggy from scrolling, I had determined that what I wanted, probably, was 63/37 0.025″ 2.2% RMA solder, from Kester, AIM, Alpha Metals, or Multicore. And it’s impossible to find.

I’m sitting here thinking about the guitar amps I’ve built. Are they going to explode because I used the wrong solder?

I learned that it’s really hard to find the solder I specified above without paying a ton. I had to compromise and get 3.3% flux, which some people say is better anyway.

Now I have to wonder: was I better off when I simply drove to Radio Shack and bought the wrong thing?

The bad solder I already had came from Home Depot. I took a look at it and saw that it was Bernzomatic brand solder. It’s for electrical connections, but it’s not the right thing for electronics. I threw it out. Then I thought maybe I would need it for something, so I took it out of the trash. Then I thought about throwing it out again. Then I put it on the desk and stared at it.

I should also admit that I solder incorrectly a lot of all the time. When you solder, you are not supposed to heat the new solder directly and melt it onto the tip. You’re supposed to heat the wire and apply the solder to it, so the wire melts the solder.

Yeah, right. Try that some time. Your insulation will drip off or go up in smoke, unless it’s Teflon. In real life, you do whatever you have to. I plan to try to solder better, but I’m not going to melt components and insulation.

As for cleaning the joints, I don’t even know how. I think you use a Q-Tip with alcohol on it. I have never had a joint go bad, but maybe I need to try to do things right.

I read that rosin fumes cause asthma. Geez. What am I supposed to do? Solder in the front yard when the wind is blowing? Wear a sweaty respirator? But then I think about the hundreds of guys I know who’ve developed serious asthma from soldering. The ones who didn’t die first from lead poisoning.

I jest.

As I researched, I learned more stuff. You have to try to set your soldering iron so the heat is right. Different solders melt at different temperatures, and some electronic parts can be damaged by excess heat. I sort of knew that. My iron goes to 5, and I have been known to operate it at 4 because it seemed to be hard on PCB’s. But there are irons that actually display the temperature with digital meters. I’m not going that far. That’s just crazy.

Arrgh. I’ll probably go that far. Some day.

It’s frustrating when you splurge for what you think is the best tool available, and then you find out it’s second-rate. I feel like a guy who bought a Bose stereo and showed it off for his friends before learning the awful, humiliating truth.

I’m not sure what my advice is. I’m tempted to tell people to pretend they never read this.

The solder I finally ended up with is Kester 24-6337-9718. If it’s horrible, I’ll tell you. I fully expect to be unable to tell the difference between this stuff and Radio Shack Random Idiot Solder.

If you’re still going to real stores and buying wrong stuff, you should probably keep it up. You will never know the difference, and you will save lots of time. I love the Internet, but sometimes you just want toothpicks; you don’t need the best OSHA-approved, fair trade, organic, North American hardwood toothpicks.

If you use rosin-cored solder and you get asthma, leave me alone. If I told you to jump off the Empire State Building, would you do that, too?

I See Why They Made This Guy Leave Halicarnassus

Committing to read Herodotus is like signing up for a hitch in the military. You can’t appreciate the obligation with which you have buried yourself until you’re in the midst of it. The book goes on forever, and it is literally impossible for anyone except a genetically gifted freak to keep track of everything.

I am not that freak. I am a different type of freak.

Herodotus got on my last nerve day before yesterday. He had the gall to introduce two totally different characters named Miltiades on one page. Come on, man. That’s inhuman. Can I have a roster or something? Maybe one of those photo charts the FBI uses to keep track of Mafia families.

“Here is Miltiades A, also known as ‘Milty Four Toes,’ and this line goes from his photo to Miltiades B, also known as ‘Milt the Stilt.’ He is frequently seen in the company of Aristagoras of Miletus (not Jersey City Aristagoras), sometimes known as ‘Ari Red Sandals,’ and he is believed to be the consigliere of ‘Darius the Bull,’ current head of the notorious Achaemenid Family.”

I stop constantly to Google stuff, but I know it’s hopeless. Herodotus is the unrivalled king of the digressors, and I will never be able to understand it all. It’s my punishment for all the digressions I’ve made on my blog.

I completely set aside Rick Renner’s giant books on the early church, because the reading I was doing on the ancient world was just too much. It will work out well for me in the end, though, because when I resume, I’ll have a few clues regarding the world in which early Christians lived.

I’m also watching Youtubes and shows about the ancient world. I saw a neat one yesterday about Roman engineering. They talked about the Coliseum, properly known as the Flavian Amphitheater. I learned something I had never known before: the Coliseum was paid for through the sale of the treasures stolen from the temple in Jerusalem, and it was built by 1200 Jewish slaves.

I had been under the impression that the emperor Titus was solely responsible for the destruction of Jerusalem, but that’s wrong. His dad Vespasian got the ball rolling. There was a revolt in Israel, and the Romans had to mobilize to squash the freedom fighters. Vespasian ran the Roman effort until he was drawn away to Rome after the death of Nero, and Titus, his son, took over. Titus besieged Jerusalem. He was in charge when Jerusalem fell, and that’s why the Jews complain about Titus all the time, to the point where you wouldn’t even know Vespasian was involved.

The Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the temple in 70 A.D., and the Coliseum’s construction started in 72. Vespasian died in 79. Construction was finished in 80.

It looks like “Colosseum” is the preferred spelling. Wikipedia says this popular, unofficial name may have come from the fact that a “colossal” statue of Nero stood nearby.

Anyway, I find the whole thing fascinating.

I don’t like professional sports. I’ve written about it a lot. Sports figures do silly, unimportant things for a living, such as throwing balls through hoops. They play games invented to amuse children. But we treat them as though they were gods. This problem is ancient; the Greeks did the same thing, and so did the Romans.

In Israel under the Greeks, many Jews wanted to assimilate into the Greek culture, which involved nude athletic competition. This is obviously incompatible with Jewish laws regarding nudity, and it also caused Jews to be ashamed of circumcision, which is an extremely important part of Judaism; it’s an outward sign of their unique contract with God. Many Jews refused to circumcise their sons, and men who were circumcised looked for ways to change their appearance.

The Jews call the Greek system “Hellenism.” There was great tension between the demon-worshiping Greeks and the Yahweh-worshiping Jews. You would think sports wouldn’t have a big impact on religion, but it did. It still does.

Sports corrupt our morals today. Sports make us aggressive, proud, wasteful, and somewhat stupid. We screw up our cities with gigantic, expensive stadiums the public has to pay for, we spend incredible amounts on athlete worship (tickets, licensed merchandise, ridiculous tattoos…), and we neglect useful activities so we can celebrate extremely trivial accomplishments. We encourage people to peak in high school, and we even replace church with an endless procession of Sunday sporting events.

It’s nice to go outside and exercise and enjoy friendly games, but it’s insane to pay an unintelligent person of low character fifty million dollars a year to carry a leather bag around on a field.

If you criticize sports, people act as if you’re blaspheming. They get very angry. Most trivial hobbies aren’t like that. Chess people won’t threaten to beat you up in bars just because you think chess is stupid. Sports people are under the influence of spirits that warp their perception.

Sports arenas are temples where the flesh is worshiped, and the worship of the flesh is the worship of Satan. You can’t exalt the flesh without exalting the devil. It’s not possible. There are only two paths in life: toward God or toward Satan. There are no alternatives. You can’t sit the game out. You’re playing right now, and you are making a choice.

The COLOSSEUM (might as well go with the weight of authority) is interesting, because it was a place where people were killed as part of the exaltation of the flesh. Criminals, Jews, Christians, and political prisoners were thrown into the arena to die in athletic contests. That makes it a temple where people (and animals) were sacrificed. Satan destroyed the real temple and used the proceeds to put up a false one. He replaced the sacrifice of ritually clean animals with the unclean sacrifice of Jews and Christians.

Furthermore, the real temple was a place that was supposed to help the Jews assure themselves a place at the top of the food chain. Worship was supposed to help them live victorious, peaceful lives. The Colosseum was a place where failed Jews were robbed, enslaved, and murdered. They were so defeated, their own treasures were used to build the facility where they were destroyed!

It’s a picture of what has happened throughout history. People who were supposed to serve God screwed up, and they became the slaves of Satan’s worldwide system. It’s a picture of what’s happening in America now.

It’s also very similar to Hitler’s system. The Nazis murdered Jews, took their wealth, and used it to exterminate them. They even made Jews do the dirty work. As Sonderkommandos, the Jews had to lead other Jews to their deaths, sort their belongings for the Nazis, and put their dead bodies in ovens. They were Satan’s sick imitations of the priests in the temple. They weren’t able to warn people; they were forbidden on penalty of death, and people didn’t believe them anyway. The Sonderkommandos were a lot like today’s preachers, who can’t seem to tell us anything that would help us save ourselves.

Jews were even transported in railroad cars designed to carry cattle, which are clean animals suitable for eating and sacrifice. That’s not a coincidence.

Sports fans hate this kind of revelation. They turn red in the face and talk about all the wonderful Christian athletes who pray in huddles and honor God when they win boxing matches. God has to work within the system we’ve given him; it doesn’t mean he endorses it. The first gentile to accept Jesus was a Roman centurion; that doesn’t mean God was a fan of Rome or the occupation.

The world is very, very badly screwed up. Even in America, power has shifted firmly into the hands of Satan and his children. Christians know almost nothing. They have almost no power. We’re like the disarmed Jews who were herded onto cattle cars. And no one cares. No one can hear it. You tell them, and they dismiss you.

I can’t wait to get done with this book. Someone ought to write a new version of it with the digressions separated as appendices. Better yet, a hypertext version with the digressions connected to the main text via links.

If you can hear the truth, be glad. Time is getting short, and you want to be on the right side when it gets completely crazy.

This is Where Trees go When They Die

Life is changing rapidly.

My dad’s problems took another plunge a couple of weeks back, and now I have to handle his business. I have to get his tax stuff fixed up. I have to sort his monumental collection of papers. I have to set his home office up so it actually functions. I also have to apologize to a few people, because some things got screwed up before my dad threw me in the deep end of the pool.

I have realized I don’t know how to set up an office. That’s today’s main challenge.

How can a lawyer not know how to set up an office? Actually, it’s not as crazy as it sounds. Practicing law at home requires very little paperwork. You create paper files for your cases, but as a sole practitioner (I hate “solo practitioner,” and I’m convinced it’s a corruption perpetuated by lemmings), you aren’t going to get into cases that generate tons and tons of discovery, invoices, and checks.

When you start fooling with business, you have to deal with more stuff. You have invoices coming in all the time. You have a lot more bookkeeping.

There is a hoarding streak in my family, and it comes from my dad. We hold onto junk. Over the last year, I’ve been going into my dad’s home office and throwing out pounds and pounds of papers. Do you really need ten pounds (or even one ounce) of The Florida Bar Journal, dating back seven years? I think not. You also don’t need ancient legal files or emails you, for some odd reason, felt the need to print.

Old people (older than I am) seem to think they are legally obligated to print everything they see. I think one reason is that they are way too lazy to learn to use the built-in filing systems on their computers. This takes about three and a half minutes, so I’m not sure why it’s intimidating. They prefer to print everything so they know where it is, and then they put it in random piles which people like me throw out without telling them.

Never buy a printer from an old person. They wear them out.

A friend of mine told me her mother has ONE Word document. When she writes something, she opens the document, modifies it, prints it, and closes it without saving. When she dies, there will be no record that she ever wrote anything. Well…there WILL be the giant, unconstitutional backup the NSA keeps, but they won’t let us access it. That’s a real shame. It would be great to be able to call Obama for a download, every time something important gets deleted. Fortyish wives could send their husbands the naked pictures of themselves they took when they were in their twenties.

Okay, I’m not endorsing that.

Yo, Obama: we know you’re backing our stuff up, so why not let us retrieve it? We could save a lot of money on “cloud” services.

In the future, the government will be happy to produce everything bad we’ve ever said about homosexuality and socialism so they can persecute us. They will be happy to document our porn downloads and sexts in order to discredit us. Seems to me they should also be willing to provide copies when we accidentally delete term papers and family photos.

My dad had ONE folder for everything. Briefs, research, offensive chain emails sent by his incorrigible heathen friends…everything. It had thousands of items in it. Going through that was fun. I’m glad I got the opportunity, though, because it was like having a six-foot-tall pile of horse manure in the middle of the office floor.

As for objects that are physical, not virtual, I will guess that I have thrown out 350 pounds of useless items. As far as I know, he has never missed anything.

Here is a tip for anyone who has to clean up someone else’s business PC: get a solid state hard drive. If you have a separate drive for storage, replace the boot drive with solid state. This will speed the computer up like you would not believe. It makes a big difference when you have 12 years’ worth of files to go through, and you’re searching for every document that refers to “roof” or “plumbing.” You can get a very nice 240 GB solid state drive for sixty bucks, and they’re simple to install. I guess you will have problems if your computer doesn’t use SATA cables, but if it does, a solid state drive will pop right in.

I stuck such a drive in my dad’s office computer, and now Quickbooks opens in fifteen seconds instead of two years. The computer boots so fast you don’t even need to walk away and get coffee.

That boot thing is important, because it’s really hard to convince older people not to use “Shut Down.” They think “Sleep” wears out the computer and drives up their electric bills. Or maybe they think that if they click it, they’ll fall asleep. If you have to work on an old person’s PC, you will get really tired of doing a full three-minute boot every time you sit down.

Today I’m looking around for information on setting up offices; I do not want to reinvent the wheel, although I will probably have to. My dad has investments, so things come in, and things go out. I think I need to put an In/Out thing on his desk, but I’m not sure. I definitely need to cut a hole in his wall and install a new electric socket, and some of his cords and cables need to be made longer or shorter.

I learned something interesting while I was trying to use his PC. Windows 10 has a huge pile of spyware in it. I mean, more than I already suspected. It logs keystrokes. It tracks your location. It tries to send you ads it thinks you will like, so when you let your mom use your PC, it puts up banners advertising midget porn. It listens to you through your mike. It watches you through your webcam.

There is nothing we can do to bring privacy back; the inhuman sociopath nerds won that battle. But you can dig up your Windows 10 privacy settings and turn off a whole bunch of crap, making your PC run better. I had to do that today because I was getting keyboard hesitation. Seems like it’s all cleared up now.

Or not. I had a little issue there. Maybe the keyboard needs batteries. Maybe the computer hiccuped while the NSA installed new stuff to compensate for me turning their crap off.

You may be 95 years old and not too interested in Worlds of Warcraft, but if you have Windows 10, it is taking information from you and putting it in a database for gamers, and I think it’s safe to bet this slows down your PC. It’s hard to believe Microsoft/NSA/Hitler puts this worthless junk in computers by default, but there it is, so you need to root around and minimize the footprint.

I almost look forward to the day when Christians will be banned from the Internet. Think how relaxing it will be. Until they gas us, I mean. I suppose that will be relaxing, too, though.

I should put more thought into the things I write online. One day they may be downloaded and displayed at my homophobia/nondiversity/refusal-to-worship-Emperor-Warren trial, and I really want to make a good impression.

And now back to my search for office advice. I am not optimistic.

Learning Makes Your Head Hurt

One of many great things of getting off Facebook is that it gave me more time to read. Lately, I have been reading a lot. This may sound like nothing new, since I was already reading tons of stuff on the Internet. The difference is that now I’m reading actual books. Some of them are even made of paper!

The Internet is a phenomenal resource, the likes of which the world has never seen. But somehow books are better. When you read a book from beginning to end, you get one coherent viewpoint (if you’re lucky), without a lot of jumping around. Reading things on the Internet is like watching movies on cable. You pick up a little here and a little there, and the big picture suffers. Between the time cable became popular and the introduction of pay per view and the DVR, it’s completely possible that I never saw the beginning of a single TV movie.

At least it feels that way.

I am still working on Herodotus. I got into this book as part of my guilt-motivated program of trying to read the books I pretended to read for Columbia University’s Literature Humanities course, and once I was in, I was disturbed to see how long it took. I read very quickly, and it seemed like I was getting nowhere. Suddenly I had new sympathy for little twerps students who are currently struggling with heavy doses of assigned reading.

Last week I discovered the problem. I had misread the syllabus. Somehow this seems like a fitting punishment for a person who got B’s for doing as close to nothing as possible. I thought I had to start off with pages 1 through 140. Looking at the syllabus through bleary eyes after cracking the 140 mark, I discovered I was supposed to read paragraphs 1 through 140. Or something like that. Herodotus is divided up into little sections which look like paragraphs to me. I would speculate that they are the original Greek page divisions, but it’s my understanding that his work was first written on scrolls.

Whatever.

I was reading well over twice as much as I had to.

The nice thing about this is that my contempt for college students was restored. Little sex-crazed goofs, whining about safe spaces and roofying each other.

When I discovered my error, I decided to keep going, because I knew I would eventually want to finish the entire book, and it would be a bummer to have to go back and read the stuff between the parts I had already read.

So now I’m stuck in the 300’s, plowing through a lot of small talk. It’s really difficult, because he talks about 5,000 ancient countries and cities, and each one has 15 names which he uses interchangeably. I read The Iliad and The Odyssey last month, and even after that, I didn’t know until last week that Lacedaemon was Sparta.

Also, the book must have 3,000 characters, and he brings them in the way pigeons poop on expensive suits. No warning. BANG…there’s Adrastus. Is that the same Adrastus he talked about fifty pages ago? Danged if I know. Flip, flip, flip, flip, flip…

I’m actually looking for a book on the Ionian Revolt, because I have realized that there is no way on earth a human being can understand Herodotus’s summary without help. The weird thing is that any book I read will be based on Herodotus, but at least the author will, hopefully, have unraveled the digressions and put it in order.

Writing the previous paragraph reminds me of another annoying issue that has come up: the proper way to use apostrophes when turning names that end in “s” into possessives. My Lit. Hum. professor taught my class that we should avoid the common practice of simply adding an apostrophe to the end of the word, and I figured he must be right, since he swam in a sea of terminal-“s” names all day, every day, with a Ph.D. to back him up. I stuck with that for decades, but then a few years ago, I read that it’s only okay to add an apostrophe and a new “s” when the result is easy to pronounce. So it’s okay to write “Jesus’s,” but you should never write, “Cambyses’s.”

It’s bothering me right now, so I think I’ll check The Gregg Manual, which is a neat reference book. I probably have Strunk & White somewhere, but I don’t know if they cover this problem.

Well, Mr. Gregg and The Macmillan Handbook of English (saved from my college days) agree: you use an added “s” except when the result is hard to pronounce. But Mr. Gregg says “Jesus’s” is hard to pronounce. Geez. Doesn’t seem hard to me.

One of the aggravating things about grammar is that authorities disagree. People who have different authorities run around correcting each other (especially in Internet comments) when neither side can really claim the high ground.

I may not be able to find a book on the Ionian Revolt. Given that they all pretty much have to restate Herodotus, maybe the people who have considered writing such books have changed their minds. This is a good example of a gap the Internet can fill. Somewhere out there, I promise you, there is a web page that sums it up in an organized manner. There are probably a bunch of websites that will do. Even Wikipedia is better than fighting with an old Greek who loved to gossip.

In addition to ancient history, I’ve been reading up on the Holocaust and submarines. I’ve always wondered how submarines work, and it occurred to me that it’s possible to find out, so I downloaded a free book, and I bought a couple of videos. I also watched some stuff on Youtube.

Torpedoes always mystified me. How can you make an engine burn alcohol under water in a sealed tube? Turns out they had compressed air tanks inside them, to feed the engines! That’s why they left bubble trails. Submariners liked electric torpedoes because they didn’t leave trails. The problem with the trails is that they were like arrows guiding destroyers’ guns directly to the submarines.

If you combine things like books, video, and the web, you can learn a lot in a hurry, in much greater depth than any student could have only 25 years ago. And yet somehow Americans are more stupid than ever! How did we pull that off? It must be the damn cat memes. They take up all the bandwidth and keep us distracted.

I’m making good use of Google Books, Google Play Books, Amazon’s Kindle Store, and Scrib’d, along with various public domain downloads I’ve found, but paper books are still hard to beat. You can make notes in them. You can draw diagrams. You can make corrections. Try that with a tablet. Maybe in ten years. Also, I don’t have to worry that Big Brother Bezobama is going to get mad some day and suck all my books out of my electronic devices. He’ll have to send the jackbooted thugs. And I have all sorts of bullets. He can get at a few things, but the rest are here moldering safely on shelves, coffee tables, and exercise equipment seats.

I feel so smart these days. And I didn’t even have to stay at a Holiday Inn Express and catch a disease from the bedspread.

Before I sign off, I may as well admit that I have a new Facebook account. Because I’m a hypocrite. No, it’s because I wanted to put up a message to the people who wonder where I went. People thought I blocked them and unfriended them. Facebook doesn’t put up an announcement when you leave. So I put up an account with a brief explanation, but I refuse to add friends or spend time on the site. I may use it when necessary; some companies use Facebook to communicate with people, so if I deal with such outfits, I will have access.

I will be the only person on Facebook with NO friends. A new low. At least on Myspace I would have Tom.

I never hear from Tom. I quit looking at Myspace, and he cut me off dead. Some friend.

That’s all I have now. Wish me luck with the Ionian Revolt thing. Agent Mulder has to be right; the truth must be out there somewhere.

You Only See What God Lets You See

You really have to start asking God what you’re doing wrong. It seems extremely obvious once you see that in front of you, but were you putting it into practice before today?

Once you understand that the purpose of your relationship with God is to change you, a lot of missing parts start falling into place. Things you should have realized long ago are brought to your attention.

I inherited some property from my grandparents. My grandfather died first, and he left two very bad, somewhat frivolous wills. The end result was that the things he gave away ended up belonging to six people. We had to pay a law firm $750,000, and every time we wanted to do anything, we had to herd six uncooperative cats and get them all to agree.

Between his death and my grandmother’s death, my grandmother’s estate was planned as well as could be done under the circumstances, but the problems with my grandfather’s stuff bled over into it, so things are still tied up. People have rolled over and given up. It was like trying to push a dead whale up the beach.

I thought about this last week, and I thought about the lessons God had been teaching me. I asked him what I was doing wrong. The answer was that I wasn’t thankful enough. I thought a lot about the aggravation and the screwups, but not as much as I should about the blessing. Naturally, I started working to thank God and praise him.

I felt like I should contact my cousin and see if he wanted to get things moving, but I put it off because my dad was in the process of dropping all of his business affairs on my shoulders. I figured I would do it in a couple of days.

On Wednesday, my cell dinged, and I looked at my messages. My cousin had texted me to ask me for my current email address. He wanted to get moving on the estate stuff.

This is someone I probably haven’t communicated with in five years.

This stuff works. Don’t fool yourself.

One of the problems with getting the estates in order is that my sister has dropped off the face of the earth. She ended up in a shelter before Christmas. My dad and I could not take it any more, so we did not intervene. If that sounds bad, all I can say is, you don’t know her. Everything we try to do for her makes things worse, for her and for us. If you think you can do better, take her in and show me how it’s done.

After talking to my cousin, I knew I had to dig her up so she could receive and sign papers. I didn’t know where she was, so I went through my emails and found the name of the shelter. I prayed for help with this unpleasant job, because I expected to be hit with accusations, slanders, threats, claims that I was persecuting God’s anointed one, and remarks to the effect that I was going to hell. I called the shelter, and the person manning the phone told me they could not confirm or deny that she was there, but they could give her a message.

Thank you again, God. I did not have to talk to her.

I guess the phone person wondered what was wrong with me, because I said “That’s fine!’ in a tone of voice you would expect from a person who had just been told he was healed of cancer. I left my cousin’s contact information with him, and off I went, about my business.

The same basic thing happened with me and my dad.

My dad has memory problems. His doctor called me in last year and told me he had “mild cognitive impairment,” which was a considerable understatement. Things keep getting worse, and I keep getting more involved with my dad’s business affairs. The odd thing about it is that it’s not a gradual decline. It happens in sudden lurches. One month will be like the last, and then there will be an instantaneous change during the course of one week.

Judging by what I’ve seen, he will need an attendant this year, and he will have to stop driving. Truthfully, I don’t think he will be around that long, because the deterioration is accelerating, and dementia eventually causes death. My big goal is to get him to accept salvation. Anything beyond that is just gravy.

One of the big problems with the responsibility transition is that my dad has been claiming his mind was fine. He has held onto responsibilities he should have handed over, so I’ve tried not to push him. As a result, things have gotten somewhat screwed up.

I asked God what I was doing wrong, and I asked him to put an end to the struggle and help me with it. Again, I saw I was not thankful enough. I’m going to inherit what my dad has. That’s a gigantic blessing. I should be more grateful, and I shouldn’t focus on the aggravation. So I tried to correct that.

Yesterday I was talking to my dad about his bills and so on, and he announced that the reason things were in a mess was that two people were trying to run one operation. He said I needed to take everything over, and that he would just sign checks. It was a shock, but it’s exactly what needed to be done. It would have been nice if he had confronted his problem three years ago and started moving responsibilities into my hands, but failing that, this is the best solution.

We all have nagging problems we can’t beat, and one reason–possibly the only reason–is that there are lessons we are resisting. We have an obligation to ask God what we’re doing wrong. Until you do that, you can’t expect much help.

If you look at the Bible, you will see that ancient believers lived under the same conditions. When the Jews had problems, either they asked God why, or a prophet went and told them, in spite of the fact that they hadn’t asked. When they changed their ways, things improved. When they didn’t, things stayed the same or got worse. Sometimes, by the time the prophet showed up, God’s decisions were sealed, and nothing could be done. God knocked Paul off his donkey and told him what he was doing wrong. Jesus himself appeared and told the seven churches what they were doing wrong. It’s not just an Old Testament thing. It’s eternal.

I don’t want to give the impression that I judge my relationship with God by looking at financial issues, but at the same time, financial issues are part of the package. Poverty is not a good thing. It’s a sign that there is an underlying problem. God never “blesses” people with poverty! And the principle I’m talking about applies to relationships, diseases, and all other areas of life. The only reason I’m talking about breakthroughs related to money is that they happen to be the breakthroughs I experienced this week.

What are your stronghold problems? Do you seem destined to die single? Do you have a health problem that won’t go away? Are there vexing people you can’t get away from? Whatever it is, ask God what you’re doing wrong, and remember that if you want him to help you consistently, you have to give 100% of yourself and your wealth to him. You can’t buy blessings a la carte. If you don’t belong to him, you belong to the devil, so there is a limit to what God will do for you.

God has said that his people perished for lack of knowledge. It’s absolutely true. The flip side is that knowledge can make you victorious. Don’t complain and criticize God because he didn’t tell you these things sooner. He told people who came before us, and they let us down. That’s not God’s fault. And anyway, were you even trying? How do you know what God would have told you, had you gotten with his program?

I really want to get my wealth detached from that of my relatives. I don’t want to be unequally yoked with them. I don’t want to share in their curses and problems. I can’t wait to see things start moving.

This morning I asked God about a lot of other problems I have. I expect relief. Finally, I have good reason to expect success.

I feel like I should write more and try to drive important truths home, but there is only so much you can tell people. Sooner or later they have to go to the source and experience things for themselves.

The More Special You Think You Are, the More Special it Gets

I’m always looking for something to watch while the birds are out of their cages. I found a channel that runs old episodes of Barney Miller in order; that was kind of fun, until I got tired of the Seventies a second time. I watch car shows, restaurant improvement shows…just about anything that isn’t the news and doesn’t feature naked people.

The other day I saw a short documentary about a documentary. A man named Klaus Lanzmann made a 10-hour documentary called Shoah, between about 1974 and 1985, and the newer documentary was about the difficulty of creating the longer one.

I had never seen Shoah, so I looked for a copy to buy. I tried to find a legitimate used copy, so the royalties would be paid, but the one I bought turned out to be Korean, which means its legitimacy is dubious. Oh, well. I did try.

The word “shoah” is Hebrew for “destruction.” Some Jewish people prefer it to “holocaust,” which describes an animal burned as a sacrifice. I suppose the notion of sacrifice seems to suggest that God sanctioned the millions of murders and other crimes.

Personally, I think “Holocaust” is the right word.

Not all sacrifices are holy. Pagans have always sacrificed animals. Satanists are known for it. If what happened to the Jewish people was a sacrifice, it doesn’t mean it was a good thing.

When I visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and saw their tabletop model of the killing area at Auschwitz, I was surprised how much it reminded me of the temple in Jerusalem. The people who were gassed were treated a lot like sacrificial animals. They were stripped (Jewish priests had to be covered, so that their private parts were not exposed from below; also, Jewish law requires modesty), and everything useful they had was harvested from them. Then they were killed with the blood remaining in them (Jewish sacrifices have to be bled out), and they were burned (Jews are not permitted to cremate their dead). The whole enterprise was hidden, and the point of it was to remove all evidence that the murders and the Jews themselves had existed. One of the worst curses in Jewish culture is to be forgotten; Jews who hated Jesus have written, “May his name and memory be blotted out.”

Auschwitz was a place of unclean sacrifice. It was a parody of the temple. It was Satan’s deliberate insult to God. “You like sacrifices? Here you go.”

The documentary (Shoah) tells a great deal about the extermination camps, using eyewitness testimony. Lanzmann even tricked Nazis into giving interviews. He and his assistant got a bad beating for doing that.

I will watch the remaining minutes of the documentary today. When it’s over, I will have finished it in three days. It’s hard to stop watching.

All the time that I have been watching it, God has been reinforcing a message he gave me a long time ago. The world belongs to Satan, and God is not as closely involved in it as we think. In fact, the world is a death camp. The majority of human beings who are born live as slaves to Satan, and then they die and go to hell. Not just people who aren’t nice; most people.

The world is a failure. It’s as if someone baked a beautiful cake, and before it could be served, a dog lifted his leg over it. It’s not basically okay with pockets of evil. It’s extremely evil with pockets of good. When God comes here, he doesn’t come as the hands-on supreme being who runs the operation. He comes the same way Red Cross volunteers go to POW camps, or the same way spies go into hostile countries during war. He is an insurgent leader, not a resident monarch.

We can’t get this through our heads. Human beings have the unfortunate ability to get used to anything; we laugh at funerals, and even people doing life in prison have days they enjoy. We are used to this horrible world, which is full of murder and anguish, so we think it’s not a bad place. The Holocaust serves to remind us that we don’t live in heaven’s waiting room; we live on hell’s roof, literally.

The Jews are precious to God, but he stood by while terrible things happened to them, just as he has stood by while terrible things have happened to Christians. He stood by because he had been rejected. He had one plan, and man had another, and when man chose his own plan, God folded his arms and waited. That’s how life works, for all of us.

I am tempted to say God is hard, but that’s not sufficient. God is infinitely hard. Stones are hard, but they can be scratched. God is perfectly just; his justice can’t be altered or defeated in the slightest way. There is no bad deed that will not be noted and dealt with justly. God’s commitment to justice is so strong, he came down and let himself be abused and killed by people who were like filthy apes compared to him. He had to have a release for his anger, so he released it on himself. If he will do that to Jesus, who was the only good person who ever lived, of course he will allow evil to land on the rest of us, who are extremely corrupt.

Americans are among the most spoiled people on earth. We feel entitled. We think everyone is entitled to good health, a wonderful spouse, a strong income, a nice home, and happy children who make us proud. We get extremely resentful when we don’t get these things. We have the audacity to go to God and say, “Why me?” We should be saying, “Why me?”, when things go well. Every one of us deserves to be dead, in a pit in hell, burning and waiting for the final judgment. The suffering of persecuted Jews and Christians should remind us that we are entitled to nothing, and that there is no limit to the anguish God will permit for those who rebel.

We are inundated with mercy and patience, and we think it’s approval. We think it’s a reward, when it’s just God, withholding punishment as long as he can. So we go on dancing on thin ice.

Meanwhile, hell continues filling up, and many of the people filling it are Christians.

If you want to do well in this life, you have to stop defending yourself and claiming you’ve been cheated. You have to stop complaining about your problems, as though they were unfair. All the bad things that happen here are more than fair. If it’s better than hell, it’s more than fair. Imagine how you would feel if you had a rotten, murderous child, and you helped him in ways he didn’t deserve, and all he did was complain and accuse you of unfairness. Would you keep helping him?

The world is Satan’s death camp. Before Satan, there was no death. He practically invented it. The world may be more pleasant than Treblinka and Birkenau, but it’s still a death camp. We should not be surprised if Satan allows things to go well enough to convince us life is good; the guards at Auschwitz told their victims they were going to be showered and given nice jobs. They lied right up to the point where the gas chamber doors were shut.

Between God’s mercy and Satan’s propaganda, it’s no wonder we expect too much from life. It’s no wonder we can’t see doom looking us in the face.

I have found that if I praise and thank God correctly, and if I take blame on myself instead of lying and saying I’m a victim, things go better. Problems I couldn’t beat disappear quickly. God works most strongly where he is welcome, and where he is not slandered. The more you defend yourself, the worse your life is likely to be.

When I think about these powerful lessons, I get very disgusted with the preachers I’ve known. I am exceedingly disgusted with the false “house prophet” at my last church. I am very unhappy to realize they poisoned me when they told me I was doing great, and that good things were right around the corner.

These people held me back! They made my life harder! They made me more of a failure! How can you claim to serve God if you reinforce the chains Satan puts on other people? When Jesus announced his status as Messiah, he said he had come to set the captives free, not to make them more the slaves of hell.

These churches taught people that “blessing” means something like money, power, advancement at work, children, or marriage. Totally wrong! Yesterday God reminded me: we are not rewarded for being good; being good is the reward.

Yes, if you improve, good things will come to you, and life will be better, but the real prize is the inner change wrought by the Holy Spirit. Under the law, men were required to behave well. Under the new covenant, we are expected to change so that bad behavior and evil thoughts don’t appeal to us any more. That’s “setting the captives free”; the evil inside us holds us captive. The disciples thought it meant routing the Roman occupiers. Before the Holy Spirit fell on them and changed them, they had the same materialistic mindset modern prosperity Christians have.

I realize why God has kept telling me to speak up. Many times, he has told me to be more outspoken, when people around me were telling me I was too loud. I could have helped more people if I had been louder. That may be held to my account eventually, as Ezekiel predicted.

God owes you nothing. You cause your own problems. Because you cause your problems, you have the power to fix them. The correct way to fix them is to become Spirit-led, ask God what you’re doing wrong, and ask him for grace to change. That’s how life works. You may be looking at painful lessons which are intended to be beneficial and regarding them as unjust attacks from the devil. If you don’t know help when you see it, you will never benefit from it. Help doesn’t always look like a box of frosted doughnuts. Sometimes it’s a disease or a problem with your marriage. The way you react determines whether it’s a curse or a blessing. The outcome of a thing, not the beginning, determines its nature; the outcome determines whether it goes in the plus column or the minus column.

I’ve complained about things I should have thanked God for. No wonder they didn’t work out well. What else should an ingrate expect?

I am closing comments on this post because I don’t want people to be distracted by misguided remarks from folks I am offending. Sorry about that. I hope you understand. I want people to be helped by what I write, so I don’t want the message to be lost in tangential noise.

Put this stuff to work in your life. Don’t wait till the floor caves in under you.