Lessons I Should Have Learned Sooner

Some of you know I have written about supernatural experiences I had when I was young. I got some new revelation regarding those experiences, so I thought I’d share it.

On two occasions, Jesus manifested himself to me. I did not see him, but I felt his presence, and I knew exactly where he was. I could feel his presence physically, and in my heart and mind. I knew who he was, too.

The first time he showed up, I was driving from Milwaukee to Kentucky after a weekend of drunken partying. The roads were covered with ice, so it was slow going. I believe I was somewhere between Louisville and Lexington.

Without warning, I was struck by the realization that I was going to die that day. I say “realization” because I was completely positive it was going to happen. I pulled over and parked. I knew enough about God to believe a spirit had attacked me, so I told it to leave in the name of Jesus, and I called on Jesus repeatedly.

At first nothing happened, but soon I felt a warm presence enter the car, and the presence hovered over the center of the front seat. It was roughly spherical, and I felt a current of love, peace, joy, and faith pouring out of it. The love hit me like heat from a wood stove, and I knew everything was going to be all right. The strange conviction that I was going to die was gone as though it had never existed. The warm presence didn’t just drive it away. It negated it, the way light negates darkness.

The second time, I was in bed, and a warm beam of love and power shone down on me and moved over my body. Wherever it touched me, I felt the same things I had felt in the car. It didn’t touch all of me at once. The parts of me that were in contact with it felt peace, love, joy, and so on. They felt better than the rest of me. Your foot can feel those things while your elbow doesn’t.

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about the presence of God, and I believe we are supposed to live in it as much the time as possible.

I’ve also thought a lot about praise. I’ve been praising God as I know him from experience, and that means praising him according to what I sensed when he touched me. I tell him he is my infinite reservoir or bottomless sea of peace, love, joy, protection, faith and victory. If you praise God before you start praying, things work better.

All this has come together into a revelation that God is not just peaceful; he is peace. He isn’t just full of faith; he is faith. He is love. He is victory and protection. He is lie a sea that drowns evil and evil beings. There is no peace, faith, love, joy, victory, or protection except for God.

You may think you have victories without God, but they’re not real. Anything that’s real has permanence and invincibility. Temporary things (and temporary beings like Satan and the damned) aren’t fully real. They will be gone soon. Beings exist in a number of dimensions; that’s what makes them real. For example, a box has width, height, and depth. Time is also a dimension. If the time dimension of a thing isn’t infinite, it’s not as real as something that lasts.

I’m still burrowing through Augustine’s confessions, and it looks like God told him the same thing. Real things are permanent.

When we disobey God, we cut ourselves off from his presence, so things like defeat, unbelief, fear, bitterness, anger, and sexual perversion come in. In other words, things that are contrary to the nature of God’s presence come in. If you’re in God’s presence, you can’t have these things.

We don’t understand this. Instead of seeking God’s presence, we look for a set of rules to follow, and we look for preachers to help us wash ourselves once a week. We see God one of two ways. Either he’s a washing machine that rinses away our filth on a weekly basis, or he’s a diplomatic plate that gives us a license to sin as much as we want.

The hard truth is that we have to belong to him completely. We think that’s crazy, because we’ve been raised in a crazy world where right seems wrong. If you think about it, what’s wrong about wanting to be in complete alignment with the being that created everything and runs the universe? But for the lies we swim in, we would think it obvious that a desire to give ourselves to God completely was normal. To feel otherwise would seem insane.

We don’t understand this, so we live with one foot in heaven and one foot in hell. We don’t get the promises of the Bible with any kind of consistency, because they’re not meant for parasites who serve God’s enemy.

If we don’t belong to God without reservation, we limit his presence, so we limit the power he is willing to exercise on our behalf.

You can’t tell charismatics that. They think God makes no demands on us. They think we just have to give money to preachers and pretend other people’s sins don’t exist. We have to be full of nice thoughts and refrain from judging, while giving as much cash as possible to predators like Benny Hinn and Joyce Meyer.

Charismatics are in denial. They don’t want to hear about God’s demands. They think that stuff is only for old dried-out churches that deny the Holy Spirit. They think God is a butler and sugar daddy who wants to give us money so we can continue living pretty much as we please. We think faith is all that matters, and that the need for obedience disappeared with the crucifixion.

If Jesus had had that attitude, the crucifixion wouldn’t have occurred. He would have refused and then asked for forgiveness.

Your lifestyle affects the presence of God in your life. What you watch and listen to matters. What you say matters. Your friendships matter. Your job matters. God doesn’t want to inhabit a filthy toilet.

This information is disturbing in some ways, because it means I have to give up enjoyable things I thought were just fine. I’ve thrown out some music. I’m being more careful about the way I talk, especially about others. I feel a little bit like a dog whose owner won’t let it run off and chase rabbits; it’s not always fun to be restrained. But I want the correction, because there is no other way. There is one path that pleases God, and there is an infinite number of paths that lead to misery and defeat. You can’t have God the way you want him. You have to be molded to conform with his demands.

It’s a little upsetting to give up self-determination, especially if you’re a man. But it has to be done. If you won’t submit, you can’t complain about your defeats. You asked for them over and over.

This is a hard word, but it brings power and victory, so suck it up and be grateful. It serves no purpose to beat your head against the rock. Your head may be pretty hard, but in the end the rock will win.

Beware the BS Surge

I decided to check on “Hurricane” Matthew just now. It came ashore, which is a giant victory for the global warming people. A giant victory which can’t begin to offset eleven continuous years of total defeat. Still, congratulations.

Matt Drudge is being criticized for suggesting NOAA hypes storms intentionally, exaggerating the threat. Without going so far as to say Drudge is right (because I don’t have enough information to say that), let me point out some amusing facts.

1. The latest NHC assessment calls Matthew a Category 1 hurricane with 75-mph winds.

2. The current wind in Wilmington, North Carolina (where Matthew is now, according to The Weather Channel) is 6.3 mph. That’s 6.3, not 63. Now I’m watching some guy on the beach in Wilmington; the winds appear to be somewhere around 20 mph.

3. If there were any good scenes of destruction or violent wind to show, they would be all over the TV. They are not. That proves they don’t exist.

I want to be fair here, but 75 mph is just barely a hurricane. And if you can stand on the beach during the height of a storm, it’s no hurricane. It’s impossible to stand steadily in sustained hurricane-force winds.

The gulf between the hype and the facts has been enormous ever since Matthew left the Bahamas. I sat here and watched the updates, and I looked out the window to see what was actually happening. There was no relationship between the weather here and the hysterical predictions on the monitor. Nothing at all happened. Not only that; long after the storm had passed this county, I was seeing tropical storm warnings for my area.

A watch means bad weather may occur. A warning means it’s expected to occur. NOAA appears to have kept warnings up for my area long after it became impossible for them to be fulfilled. What’s the explanation for that? Sure, there was a 0.000001% chance the storm could stop instantly, reverse course, and move to the west. And when you flip a coin, it can fall so it stands on its edge. We could also have been struck by a giant meteor. You don’t post warnings for things that improbable.

The storm is dead. I assume they’ll keep the cone of doom on the maps as long as possible, but tiny, weak storms don’t come back to life after going ashore and losing their hurricane status.

The talking heads are hyping the rain now. They know the wind is feeble, so they’re working with what they have. They’re not quitters.

A lot of people have lost power in Florida and Georgia, but you don’t need a powerful storm to knock the power out. Power goes out in different ways. When Andrew hit, it took power out by snapping telephone poles in half and twisting concrete power poles off at their bases. Weak storms take power out by snapping a few wires here and there. Also, power companies shut grids down before damage occurs, so some of the outages are man-made. You can’t just look at the numbers and say a storm that puts a lot of people in the dark is a big deal. You have to look at the time it takes to restore power. Andrew left damage that took about two months to fix.

When Andrew left my area, no one had power. No one. Maybe some hospitals and other facilities with their own generators, but the grid was down and could not be restored. There were no traffic lights. There were no open businesses. If you wanted a hamburger, you had to go to the next county. In areas that were hit by Matthew, power outages are hit and miss.

The flooding is bad, but it’s limited to low-lying areas, and the water goes down when the storm passes. They’re claiming the surge will hit “up to” seven feet. If I had to bet? Four.

They’re saying the storm will be expensive. Sure it will; it hit a huge area. But it’s no Katrina. Light damage over a large area equals big money. The cost doesn’t indicate the type of extinction-level event a crazed Shepard Smith predicted on Fox News.

Whether Drudge is right or not, the threat was grossly exaggerated, and the exaggeration continued even after the storm passed areas to which the hype was being applied.

Some wimp is on Wrightsville Beach right now, moaning about 35-mph winds as if the world is ending. I would be embarrassed to be seen doing that.

When the news people jump on chairs and raise their skirts over nothing, it trains the public to ignore them. They don’t think about that. Some storms are extremely intense, and the public needs to react correctly. When the pundits void themselves over minor storms like Matthew, it assures that the next big hurricane will claim more victims than it should.

The moral of the story seems to be this: turn on the Internet, follow the storms, and use your common sense, because the pundits do not have any. They just want to sell potato chips and land network jobs.

More

Things are getting truly ridiculous. Matthew is supposed to be moving at 13 mph, but somehow it’s also located over Wilmington, North Carolina, where it was hours ago. The maximum sustained wind speed is supposed to be 75 mph, but the current wind measurement in Wilmington is 12.3 mph, with gusts to 17.5.

Are they even trying any more?

Paint Delamination is Now as Certain as Death and Taxes

You won’t believe this. I’m picking one of my old hobbies up again.

That’s so out of character for me.

A very long time ago, I decided to put new side covers on my Moto Guzzi. The model I bought came with terrible, cheap side covers that crack and fall off. The problem is so bad, some guy on the Internet makes money selling covers he makes from thick fiberglass. I bought two.

Problem: the covers weren’t painted. So I found a source of base coat/clear coat products, and I bought paint. Then I procrastinated for practically ever. Then I went back to the project, bought the correct primer, and primed and sanded the covers. I didn’t quite finish. I sanded through the primer in a couple of places on one cover.

That’s where I stopped. Since then, the project has been in the gravity well of the black hole where my hobbies vanish.

I was intimidated by the prep work. I hate painting to begin with, because it’s very hard to do correctly. I hated priming and sanding the covers, because it was a big, tedious job. I thought I would have to repeat it with the paint and clear coat.

Sadly, I was laboring under a delusion.

My motorcycle painting knowledge came from a set of DVD’s made by a motorcycle painter named Fritz. The DVD’s are really good, but they weren’t completely applicable to my project. I didn’t know that.

Fritz didn’t use clear coat. He sprayed his stuff with primer, sanded it, sprayed it with some color or other, sanded it, applied graphics, sprayed it with another color, sanded it…he did a lot of sanding. I figured I would have to do that with my base coat and clear coat, and that would be a lot of work. Also, I would be pretty likely to have to do a lot of it over, because I would surely sand through something.

I was thinking about it today. I realized the DVD’s didn’t depict the kind of work I was going to do. I decided to check something out. I Googled to see if it was necessary to sand the base coat in a base coat/clear coat application. Guess what? It’s not.

Car makers like base coat/clear coat (“BC/CC” or “2-stage”) paint, because it’s cheap and requires little skill compared to real paint. The primer has to be done well, and the clear coat has to be done well. The base coat is just slopped on. You don’t have to sand it, because (apparently) the clear coat covers the crappiness of the base coat surface. And supposedly, clear coat is thick, so you stand a pretty good chance of sanding and buffing it to perfection without blowing through it.

Personally, I do not like clear coat. It always, always goes bad sooner or later, even if you wax it, unless you never park in the sun. When it goes bad and peels, it can’t be fixed. You have to sand it off and replace it, and that means redoing the base coat as well. You can’t dissolve it, so it’s impossible to paint more clear coat over it, expecting the new clear coat to bond with the old. It will just sit on top, so in order to fix a small peeled area, you may have to repaint an entire hood or door.

That’s just stupid.

Old-style paint is different. If you screw up an area, you can sand it back and paint over it. If you have to completely redo it, you don’t have to fool with a clear coat. You just scuff it up and paint again. That’s my understanding, anyway.

Remember how long the paint lasted on your 1970 Buick? Remember how it didn’t peel after twenty-five years? Remember how it came back to life when you buffed it? Modern paint doesn’t work like that. It is 100% doomed to failure unless you park indoors. When it fails, you have to replace two finishes, not one, and you have to do entire panels, which generally means the whole car.

Many people think wax prevents clear coat peeling. That appears to be incorrect. People think clear coat peels because chemicals get to the clear coat. In reality, clear coat peels because it expands and contracts at a different rate from paint. Every time your car heats up, the clear coat and paint expand to different degrees. That puts tension between them; they pull sideways on each other. That loosens the clear coat. Then it comes off.

Wax won’t prevent that. Maybe it will block UV radiation, but it won’t turn clear coat into a material that expands and contracts with paint. Clear coat is plastic, like a billiard ball. Nothing dissolves in it. You can’t add a conditioner that makes it more elastic. It is what it is what it is, forever.

You can go to a junkyard in South Florida or Arizona right now and find a 1960 car with the paint intact, and you can wash, buff, and wax it back to a nice appearance. Try that with a 1990 car. I don’t think you will have much luck.

The two areas where two-stage paint seems to excel are shine and ease of repairing shallow scratches.

I may be totally wrong about this, but I don’t think I am. It’s very hard to get information. Car painters love 2-stage paint, because it’s easy to apply, and probably because they know it will fail and bring them more business. Manufacturers praise it because they sell it. Detailers and wax manufacturers love it because it gives them something fragile for their products to protect. On top of that, most people who talk about the subject are ignorant blowhards who repeat everything they hear without checking. If some uneducated doofus on a car website says wax protects clear coat, 95% of ignorant blowhards will repeat it and get angry if you disagree.

By the way, care to guess one of the big hidden reasons we use 2-stage paint now? If you guessed “EPA,” get yourself a cigar. Somehow or other, 2-stage paint is greener. It’s no surprise if it’s also inferior. How often do green alternatives work as well as the technology they replace? About as often as Mexicans buy Trump shirts.

Tonight I mixed a tiny amount of primer and touched up the bare areas on the side cover with a Q-Tip. That will make a lot of car nuts groan, because they think you can only apply car paint with a sprayer. That’s not true. It’s fast with a sprayer, but you can brush it if it makes you happy. I’ve already used a brush on the covers, and it worked perfectly. It sure beat mixing up a wasteful, expensive amount of primer to spray and then starting the compressor and air dryer and rigging up the spray gun. Ten minutes of effort as contrasted with two hours.

I’ll sand the cover down, and then maybe tomorrow (or not) I’ll hit it with the base coat and clear coat. I may wait until I come up with graphics; I’m not sure. I have to be ready with graphics when I spray the base coat, because you have to apply the clear coat within 24 hours of spraying the base. I want to have a plan before I go to work.

I look forward to getting these side covers off of my end table. They have been in my way long enough.

If what I’ve written is wrong, let me know, but please don’t be an ignorant blowhard. Don’t say, “Everybody knows…”, or, “I only use 2-stage paint, and here is what I think based on my limited experience.” Let’s have some science and engineering instead of mindless regurgitation.

He Said, Ze Said

I have a new hero.

The University of Michigan is sinking under the fetid waves of gender fascism, and they have enacted a bizarre new policy that will make everyone who cares about the truth cringe: students are allowed to choose the pronoun by which instructors refer to them, and the choices are not limited to “he” and “she.” They offer a third pronoun, “ze,” which presumably refers to people with genitals ordinarily found on extraterrestrials. If that’s not crazy enough, they permit students to make up their own pronouns.

I’m sure most people just groaned, turned off their computers or dimmed their phones, and blew it off. Conservative student Grant Strobl, however, had a greater vision. He saw the possibilities. His chosen “pronoun”: “His Majesty.” Capitalized.

I love this kid. I want to buy him a steak. A steak made from a very flatulent corn-fed steer that was raised in a factory with no windows. And posters of Ronald Reagan on the lead-painted walls. The AGW platter, with white privilege fries.

Maybe a half-baked potato, in honor of the school administration.

My guess, based on my knowledge of the hypocritical, petty, self-unaware nature of leftist academics (“leftist academics”…I repeat myself), is that the school will refuse to accommodate him, even though his “pronoun” is an important political and social statement and not a backhanded way of saying “fungible pants-wetting snowflake.”

This may be the greatest thing I’ve seen on the Internet in five years. Not that this is a high bar to clear.

I want a ticket to Strobl’s graduation. I want to see the lemon-sucking look on the dean’s face when he has to call out “His Majesty Grant Strobl.” The faculty will probably stand to turn their backs on him, much as they have done with regard to reality.

I wish he had had more time to think up his title. I would have gone for “His Serene Imperial Majesty,” at the very least.

Or maybe “Zorro.” Or “El Kabong.”

“Kommissar.” “Darth.” “Obergruppenfuhrer.”

Maybe something earthy and simple: “Nugent Rules.” “Give me your thoughts on the Malthusian Catastrophe, Nugent Rules.”

It won’t fly. I guaranteed you, they will find an excuse for denying His Majesty his due. They say a black person who murders white people for being white isn’t a racist; surely, they will come up with a canard “proving” personalized pronouns can’t be applied to conservatives. It will be a lot like the “research” the Nazis did, proving the Japanese were Aryans.

Maybe a legal name change is in order. They would have to comply. I should put up a Gofundme page, just in case. If it comes to that, he should change his name to “His Royal Eminence Trickle-Down Abortion is Murder McCankles.”

Students these days are amazing. They get top grades in aeronautical engineering, differential geometry, and Mandarin, but they can’t pass this one-question test: “Remove your clothes and look down. What does that tell you?”

The obvious problem–one of them–with the university’s Orwell-staggering, bullying, unconstitutional policy is that it serves the opposite of a university’s ostensible primary goal. It bans the dissemination of truth.

In reality, a person with male organs is “he.” There is no such thing as a “ze.” When the university forces employees to use pronouns that conflict with reality, they force them to lie in order to keep their jobs.

For people who hate the truth (most people), being forced to lie is no burden at all. They could not care less. So the punishment strikes only the principled.

What a surprise. Knock me over with a feather from Bruce Gender’s favorite boa.

That’s how the Beast is going to do things. Do this little thing you know is wrong, and we’ll let you earn money to buy your bread. Now do that little thing. Now do this great big thing you really can’t stomach. Now take the Mark. Now help my thralls put your Christian neighbors in hybrid vans so we can take them to a green facility where we address the Christian Question with finality.

It’s funny; the Bible refers to sexual deviation as “confusion.” Have you noticed how appropriate that is? As trendy imaginary genders multiply, a simple job application will grow to three or four pages. Ten years from now, a gas station may have to have five bathrooms. Or just one, with no stalls, because stalls are triggers to voyeur-Americans.

Maybe stores will have big storm grates in their parking lots, under the lights, and we’ll just drop our pants and let go. Festival seating.

The raft Christians are packed into is getting smaller, and one day it will sink. Might as well keep a sense of humor.

I applaud His Majesty. I would not want the grade point average he will have when his Marxist professors get done rewarding him, but I applaud him.

Maybe universities should replace desks with toilets, so each imperial snowflake can have zis very own throne.

God 1, Pundits 0

What a great day I’m having. There is nothing like the day after a hurricane misses you.

Matthew did a great deal of damage in Haiti. I read that the death toll is 283. It’s very sad, but it’s to be expected. Haitians don’t build well, they don’t have money to prepare for storms, and according to what I’ve been told (lots of Haitians in Miami), they ignore storm warnings because of their culture. Problems that would be minor in the US or other developed countries are disasters in Haiti.

In Florida, Matthew accomplished virtually nothing. The storm never came ashore. The wall of the eye sort of scraped Cape Canaveral, but that, after all, is a cape. It projects several miles into the Atlantic. A storm with an eyewall that hits Canaveral misses the mainland.

The storm is now projected to miss Florida and Georgia entirely. It’s supposed to bounce off South Carolina as a Category 2. That’s a far cry from the coast-sweeping monster we were expecting day before yesterday.

Matthew is not going to be a big problem for Americans. Even if it hits South Carolina, the storm surge will be small, and the winds will not be too bad. Life is about to return to normal.

Predictably, some Miamians have behaved like predators. I checked Craigslist for tool postings yesterday, and there were a lot of ads for generators. One lout put up an ad asking $475 for a generator that costs $275 new. The Miami mindset is incurable.

I’m so grateful to God for moving this thing away from me and from everyone else in America. What a miserable week this could have been.

“Matthew” means “gift of Yahweh.” I couldn’t have put it better.

At Least People Stopped Saying “Hunker”

Hello from not far outside the cone of aggravation.

It’s a little after 9 a.m. here. I can’t tell what to make of the weather. If you look outside, there is no rain, and nothing is moving. I would say the wind is below 5 mph. One weather site says the wind is 18 mph, and another says 8 mph.

The forecasts I’ve found vary widely. Some say we will have a long period of wind above 60 mph, which is enough to cause considerable destruction. Others say sustained winds will only hit the mid-forties. That would be much better.

I am inclined to believe the tamer predictions, because the pessimists are already wrong.

I just heard a few raindrops.

Now it’s raining. I’m sure it will come and go. That’s how it works.

Anyway, if the bleaker predictions are already off by 10 mph, they will probably continue to be off. Sure hope so.

The projected storm path has moved eastward a little, and now it looks like the eye will land north of Palm Beach, somewhere in Palm Beach County. I would have preferred Greenland, but I’m very grateful it’s not hitting me.

If the winds stay under 50, there is a very good chance I won’t lose electricity or phone service. If that happens, I’m golden. I don’t care about the traffic lights or the obstructed roads. I can sit at home and eat lunch meat. I do care about cold showers and enduring the misery of 24-hour profuse sweat.

The Maslow Hurricane Hierarchy of Needs goes like this:

1. Electricity
2. Water
3. Internet/wireless phones
4. Telephone (wired)
5. Transportation
6. McDonald’s breakfast

Actually, you can put anything you want after 5. Compared to 1 through 5, all things are equally trivial.

In a really bad storm, you could put “Shelter” at the top, or maybe “Life.” Andrew pulled the roofs and ceilings off of people’s houses in the middle of the night.

The phone used to be more important than Cyberia (3), but those days are over. They ended almost silently. Did you notice? Now there are many people who don’t have land lines. If you have Cyberia, you have communication, news, and a lot of entertainment. The temporary loss of a land line won’t hurt you much.

Where I live, we don’t receive white-page phone books any more. That’s really something. Also, it appears to be impossible to get directory assistance. When you call them, they give you a machine that can’t understand the names you ask for, and after a few tries, it hangs up. Also, cell phones are generally unlisted. I wonder if people are aware of these things. In a world where we are inundated with information and stripped of privacy, it is now almost impossible to get a person’s phone number.

I decided to fast and pray today. I am speaking defeat to the storm, and I am asking God to destroy it, send it out to sea, and keep it away from the property of the people who belong to him. Maybe it would have been smarter to do this three days ago, but I didn’t feel led to do it until today.

Prayer is the only option right now. We haven’t developed a machine that eats hurricanes yet.

The storm looks pretty bad, from a non-me-centric perspective. They think it will hit the coast and then follow it north, sweeping it like a demonic Roomba. If the wind and surge are severe, there will be a huge amount of property destruction. Usually, a hurricane will hit the coast, and then it will go inland and die, or it will cross the state, pop out on the other side, and go somewhere else. This one is trying to slide up the coast, hitting many of our most densely populated areas in serial fashion. A path like that would multiply the storm’s destruction; it would be one storm that does as much harm as several.

I’m interceding for God’s people; that’s about all I can do, and of course, it’s the most powerful thing anyone can do. I hope the suffering is very limited. Nothing is worse than having your home or business screwed up by a hurricane.

I’m grateful for the motivation to pray. God keeps reminding me of this: when you feel unsteady or worried, it’s just hunger for prayer in tongues. It really is that simple. When I do it enough, things work. When I cut back, the shipworms start to bore into me. I can’t complain when things go badly, because I have the power to prevent it.

If we all belonged to God, we wouldn’t have to worry about natural disasters. We wouldn’t have to worry about illegal aliens, terrorism, sexual-confusion fascists, or persecution. America has rejected God, so we get what we sow for. I wish it were otherwise, but prophecy proves we are not going to win. The world will continue to rot, and we will be removed from it so God can sanitize it. In the meantime, we have to do what we can, gathering new people to us and fighting the problems our rebellion creates.

I keep feeling like the end is closer than we think. I want to see the world last long enough so we can maximize the harvest, but I truly look forward to the end of the rot and violence.

I’m pretty old now. My life is as good as over. There are more years behind me than in front of me. I may have thirty or forty years to go; I hope God removes me from this place before that much time passes.

It would have been nice if I had done more with my time, but I’m glad I won’t be here too much longer. My future is a world without hurricanes, riots, diseases, bills, and vexatious people. I wish I could take a furlough and visit it now!

We caused this hurricane. We caused terrorism. We caused the leftist takeover of America. The smart thing is to admit your role in it to God, repent, and try to serve him. He’s not going to fix America, but he will make your life much easier, and he will give you a future to retreat to when it’s all over.

It’s 9:40, and we still have eight mph. I hope to see you on the other side tomorrow!

More

It’s 11:20. The forecast says the wind is 20 mph, but it’s not. It’s 10. Every so often, a few drops of rain fall as something passes over, but it goes away in a minute or less.

I’m pretty happy with the way things are turning out. I misunderstood a forecast yesterday, and I thought we were going to get high winds at dinner time, so everything that has happened, or failed to happen, since then feels like a bonus. Now I understand the forecast correctly, but the winds are still over an hour late. Winning! I guess. Suffering delayed, like justice delayed, is denied.

If the forecast is correct, this storm will never get more than maybe 70 miles closer to me than it is now. I certainly hope that’s right.

I found an online distance calculator, and it says Matthew is about 190 miles away. That’s from me to the eye. The smallest distance I expect to see will be around 120 miles. That’s well into the tropical-storm-force area, but I’ll be on the nice side. The wind pattern on the west side of the eye doesn’t extend out as far as it does on the east. From the online wind pictures (the ones that show how far out the winds extend), it looks like I won’t be far inside the tropical-storm-force area.

I’m writing because I’m bored.

It’s 11:42 now, and we’re up to 12 mph.

Thanks for your prayers.

1:14 P.M.

The craziest thing is happening. I keep waiting for the wind to increase, but it doesn’t. I’ve been watching the forecast graph at Weather Underground, and they are changing it retroactively to cover up the failure of their predictions.

Take a look at this capture. See the wind graph near the bottom? You will note that it kicks upward sharply after 12 p.m. That upward bit used to be somewhere around 11 a.m. They moved it to the right when the forecast failed. It’s still wrong. It’s after 1 p.m., and nothing has happened.

Higher on the page, above the capture, there is a wind indicator. It went to 27 mph a while back. Now it’s at 10. We were supposed to have winds of over 40 mph by now.

Based solely on the geometry, I can’t see how things can get really bad. The storm is passing by us tangentially, so the distance between the storm and me is changing relatively little as it moves. It’s not going to get a whole lot closer on this course. Fifty or sixty miles can make a big difference, but not that big.

The storm track is also moving east. It’s headed for Cape Canaveral now, and that’s not very close to the Palm Beach County destination they were predicting earlier in the day.

Man, I hope it keeps moving east, for my sake and everyone else’s. I had a power glitch a while back, and I thought I might be losing electricity long before I had thought it possible. I would rather not eat in the dark, and I really don’t want to have to try to sleep without air conditioning or a fan. I just washed my sheets.

I am going to keep praying and so on. The results so far are wonderful.

2:02 P.M.

I thought people might say I was lying about Weather Underground changing its forecast retroactively, so here is another capture.

I just captured that.

Take a look at the upturn in the wind graph. They moved it. It used to start at 12 p.m. Now it starts at about 1 p.m. But 1 p.m. is long gone, and there is no wind. The wind indicator says 11. They got it wrong again. Will they move it again?

I am not criticizing Weather Underground. I love that site. I’m just proving the forecasters were very wrong. I was supposed to have high winds two hours ago.

I just checked the NHC’s site. The storm is NORTH of me. I’m not kidding. The current latitude is 25.7 N. I’m at about 25.4. That means the storm has already passed me. It doesn’t mean it can’t get closer, because the storm is moving northwest, but the forecast track doesn’t take it much closer to me than it is right now.

I don’t know what to make of this. I am fasting, praying, and speaking defeat, but this is a whole lot better than I expected. I have had ZERO…ZERO adverse effects from the weather so far. It’s very pleasant outside, if you don’t mind drizzle.

Maybe things are going to go much better than I thought.

2:59 P.M.

As further evidence that I am not insane, let me present another screen capture from Weather Underground. They just killed the forecast for afternoon wind. Take a look and compare to the other screen caps.

As you can clearly see, they no longer predict significant wind before 6 p.m., and after that, it peaks at 40.

I know prayer works, but this is just spooky.

I took a ruler and lined stuff up on the monitor, and it sure looks like the tropical-storm-force area will miss me by 15 or 20 miles. It’s incredible. Maybe there is something I’m missing, which would be obvious to a meteorologist, but I sort of doubt it.

5:03 P.M.

People in Miami are getting bored, sitting indoors while nothing happens. A friend called, and since the storm didn’t seem to be accomplishing anything, he came over for a prayer session.

At a time when the wind was supposed to be at 50 mph.

People are surfing off North Miami Beach.

No complaints here. Things are quiet, and the roads are clear. It’s nice to drive without traffic for once.

8:33 P.M.

I give up on this hurricane. It has been a complete failure.

It’s 8:33 p.m., and the real-time wind measurement on Weather Underground’s site is 17 mph. According to the little forecast graph, the wind should be at its peak now. The graph thinks the peak is something like 37 mph. Whatever you say, graph.

My best guess is that the folks at Weather Underground will go back and revise their forecast again, to make it look as though they had gotten it right. I don’t understand this. What’s the point? No one needs a rearcast or a postcast. We are already familiar with past events. It serves no purpose to try to predict them. It certainly isn’t challenging.

I am done hedging my bets. I’ll just say it: I have seen the worst this storm has to offer. I feel confident about that. It’s way up by Palm Beach now.

It’s really something. Where I live, it’s not unusual to have power outages due to wind when there are no hurricanes around. Today a hurricane blew right by me, and the power is fine.

Enough about me. Matthew is still a big threat to people up the coast.

According to the news, people in evacuation zones are not taking the storm seriously. That’s a big mistake. Before the storm arrives, you can get in your car and leave. That provides a false sense of security. By the time things get bad, the roads may be closed, and it may be impossible to drive due to flooding or wind. Then where are you? Stuck, hoping the roof doesn’t come off. And the cops can’t get to you to help you.

Concrete blocks hold up to hurricanes just fine. They stood up to Andrew. But a lot of people have houses built from various types of ticky-tacky, and they can do upsetting things like falling over. My guess is that the farther you get from South Florida, the weaker the houses are, because no one up north worries about hurricanes.

The thing that makes the difference in dealing with hurricanes is experience, and people who have never seen a city destroyed don’t have experience. They don’t know what it’s like to be unable to go outside and walk ten feet. To a person like that, a drunken hurricane party seems like a great idea. There are probably half a million people sitting in their living rooms right now, with extremely unrealistic expectations about the way things will go if Matthew hits.

On top of that, a huge amount of property is at risk, and losing and replacing property is a miserable thing to go through.

I’m going to bed at the usual time tonight, but until I conk out, I plan to pray for the people Matthew hasn’t visited yet. I hope you will join me. I also plan to pray that if God delivers them, he does it in a way that leaves them with a healthy respect for danger instead of a juvenile sense of invincibility. I will pray that his help glorifies him and helps people see their need for him instead of convincing them they’re fine without him.

One day, Christians who are close to God will leave the earth, and people won’t realize we were one of the main reasons things went as well as they did. They won’t know our prayers helped hold the earth together and prevent God from afflicting or abandoning them. They won’t feel it when God’s help leaves them, but once he’s gone, things will turn very sour. They’ll know something is wrong when problems they used to coast over kill them or destroy what they have.

I was talking about this today with the friend who came over to pray. Supernatural affairs are like economic affairs. When it comes to money, a certain percentage of the population works and creates wealth, and the rest are leeches who destroy and consume. When it comes to the supernatural, a certain percentage brings God’s blessings and protection down, and the rest benefit just by being near them. Sooner or later, supernatural socialism will come to an abrupt end, because the supernatural red-staters will be unhooked from the plow and taken to the barn. That will be a horrible thing to see.

I hope my prayers do some good. Might as well do some good while I’m still here. I remember what Jesus said: “I must work the works of Him who sent Me while it is day; the night is coming when no one can work.”

As long as we’re here, the sun is shining.

Quick mathematical observation: Matthew has high winds, but here’s something no one is talking about. There is a big difference between hurricane-force winds and maximum sustained winds. If a storm has maximum sustained winds of 130 mph and it has an area of hurricane-force winds 50 miles wide, it doesn’t mean everyone within 25 miles of the center will get 130 mph. The highest winds are just outside the eye, very near the center. Unless the storm comes very close to land, we shouldn’t expect extremely high winds to hit Florida. Matthew could get very close and never manage to blow harder than maybe 75 mph on land. If prayer pushes this thing ten miles off the coast it will make a huge difference.

Andrew surpassed 160 right where I’m sitting. Completely different scenario.

Food for thought.

I Need Counseling and a Big Giant EBT Card

I have a few more tips about hurricane preparation.

1. Never, ever trim your trees around power wires. Like I just did. I guess I don’t agree with this one. I mean, sure, okay, if you’re completely inept, don’t trim your trees. Don’t tweeze your own nose hairs. Sit in bed and wait for someone to put your shoes on for you. Because you are dangerous. But the rest of us have to take chances once in a while. I figured a 1% chance of instant death was well worth the near-certainty of being able to surf the web and look at lolcats after the storm.

I don’t know a whole lot about power lines, but I’m pretty sure 250 volts can’t blast through rubber insulation, run through a tree branch, and kill a guy wearing rubber-soled shoes.

It didn’t today.

2. Hire other people to do all the work. I kind of dropped the ball on this one. Now I have this strange, weak, droopy feeling all over my body, and a mysterious clear fluid is coming out of my skin. According to WebMD, it’s called “perspiration.” Nasty.

They wouldn’t have helped, anyway. I don’t speak Spanish. I would have been yelling at them to trim the tree, and they would have been trying to fix the toilet. Or using my computadora to register to vote in los American elections.

3. Forget your diet. If you have one. Eating during a hurricane scare is like eating junk food that says “natural” on the package. It doesn’t count.

4. Lunch meat, lunch meat, lunch meat. If you remember nothing else, remember this. When the power goes out, you will feel stupid with all those cans of cold soup. Lunch meat and a cooler will power you through the lean days. And you have a great excuse to use paper plates and plastic cups.

This is a great time to stock up on bagged chips. They last forever, they have tons of calories, and they’re chips. For the sake of comparison, salad will wilt in two days, it has the same amount of calories as fog, and worst of all, it’s salad.

I laid in two bags of Ruffles cheddar and sour cream flavor. Or is it “chedder ‘N’ sour cream”? Can’t recall.

I feel good about the day’s work. I have increased the likelihood of continued phone and power service from maybe 15% to 75%. Tomorrow I will have ample food. I am certain to have light, because in addition to the tree job, I found some yahrzeit candles at the store. These are depressing Jewish candles you’re supposed to light on the day someone died. It may be disrespectful to use them as emergency lighting, but they were really cheap, and they’re not perfumed, so they were just what I needed. Besides, I’m sure someone has died on October 5.

If the tree thing had gone poorly, those candles would have been really handy.

I decided to check. This is horrible. On October 5, 1763, August III, who as you all know was the king of Poland, died at 66. He was probably one of my three favorite Polish kings. Little-known fact: he invented the accordion. To scare cats out of the palace.

I may be slightly loopy right now, so bear with me. I got up at 4:30. And that’s not Warsaw time.

The weather is beautiful right now, if you consider the inside of a rice steamer illuminated by a MIG arc beautiful. It’s bright and painfully sunny, with very little wind. The humidity makes the air feel like molten rubber. It’s hard to believe the world is going to be over in a few hours. Usually, before a hurricane, you get creepy overcast days with breezes and intervals of rain as the cloud bands pass by.

I’m going to charge up the compressor in case I need to use the air hammer to get into those Ruffles in a hurry. Preparation is everything.

I’m pretty sure those chips are all-natural.

Depending on the quality of my tree trimming, you may hear from me tonight and tomorrow. If not, assume the worst. It will make the week more exciting.

I Hate Hurricanes

It is 6:16 a.m., and I have already been shopping.

Hurricane Matthew is not cooperating as well as I would like. We are still looking at tropical-storm-force winds, not hurricane winds, but the storm’s projected track is too close to me to make me happy. It might move a little bit to the west, and then I could be eating out of cans for a few days.

Fortunately for me, people here are not flipping out, and CVS is piling in supplies, so I was able to get water and lots of ice very easily. Now if I can get some candles and a few groceries, I’ll be set. Unless you get a direct hit from a major storm, you don’t need to prepare for more than a few days of limited supplies.

At times like these, I feel I should have had more empathy for all the people who were hit by the storms that missed me. Being hit by a strong storm is a miserable experience. I don’t know what happened in Haiti and Cuba, but Haitians always die when hurricanes hit.

It’s very unlikely that I’ll suffer a lot. The storm would have to kill the power at several locations in order to deprive me of electricity, and the threat to the water supply is negligible.

I had forgotten how much I hate hurricanes. Andrew literally filled the streets with downed trees, and it destroyed all the shade. For several days people had to walk wherever they went, stepping over limbs and trunks as they traveled. I had to stay with my dad on his boat for weeks, waiting for electricity. Thank God he had a diesel generator. To get real food and even ice, it was necessary to drive to Broward County. The locals here were gouging everyone ruthlessly on generators and bottled water. On top of that, there was absolutely nothing to do. Once the branches were cleaned up, you just sat and waited for the government to fix everything and turn the world back on.

Speaking of the government, they don’t seem very excited. Schools will be open today, and the authorities haven’t yet decided whether they will be open tomorrow. I hope the government knows something we don’t, and by that, I’m not referring to predictions their algorithms make based on scanning all of our emails and storing our phone calls. I’m just talking about the weather.

Sometimes I feel like I haven’t fully absorbed the fact that we live in a police state. But I digress.

I’m watching one of the local channels, to get weather news. I have no idea who most of the personnel are. I go months without looking at a local channel. I have zero interest in what happens to Miami. It can’t be much worse than what has already happened.

Channel 10 has a lady with a tight, very low-cut dress talking about Matthew. She has obvious breast implants, so large they seem to imply deep insecurity. Do I really need to see that? It’s not even seven in the morning! What does her chest have to do with weather? I feel like she’s exposing skin so she can deduct the cost of the surgery.

Women are very disappointing these days. Class is dead.

Right now the weather people are trying to scare us, suggesting Matthew will hit Florida, make a loop, and hit us again. Stuff like that actually happens, but I’m not holding my breath. All the dominoes have to line up just right. Still, it’s fun for the weather people.

I guess I should sit and try to think of other things I need to do.

Pray this storm dries up. I could use another ten years of calm winds.

Matthew Threatens to Kill my A/C

I can’t remember the last time this happened. A hurricane is going to come close enough to me to force me to pen up the lawn furniture.

I still recall the hysterical atmosphere of the “Global warming is going to kill us all with giant hurricanes” days. I got whacked by Rita, Wilma, and Katrina, all in the space of one week. Okay, maybe I remember that wrong. But they were fairly close together. Liberals were beside themselves with glee, hoping to see the world destroyed by Mother Gaia’s vengeful huffing and puffing. “Take that for the great auk, you swine!”

Then it all went south. From a liberal’s point of view. The rest of us were thrilled. The hurricanes dried up, and they have not returned. Al Gore is probably still furious.

By the grace of God, literally, Miami hasn’t had a hurricane since…now I have to look it up…well, it turns out Rita didn’t actually hit Miami. I guess the peripheral winds messed things up, and I remembered it as a hurricane. Wilma sort of went north of us, but it made a big mess here. Katrina actually hit us. All three storms hit in 2005.

I remember thinking Wilma wasn’t that bad. It hit in October, so when the power went out, the temperature in the house was maybe 84 degrees instead of infinity. Sleeping was not possible, but one did not necessarily leave a wet spot when one got off the couch. Katrina was an August storm, so the lack of A/C was ample grounds for suicide. I remember sitting very still, watching drops of sweat pour off my nose.

The center of Matthew is expected to pass about 150 miles to the east, and given the size of the storm, that makes it unlikely that I will see hurricane-force winds. The weather people are projecting 40 mph or so. I can handle that. I’m not even sure I need to take the garbage cans in.

Hurricanes swirl counterclockwise. That means they push water toward the west on their upper sides. We will be to the west of Matthew. Storm surge (rising water due to hurricane winds) should be very light, due to the distance between us and the eye. Andrew put big steel commercial ships on dry land; that won’t happen this time. Not here!

A lot of people flip out with preparations. I do virtually nothing. Unless a true monster storm hits, things go back to normal in a week, and you can buy ice and batteries (and McMuffins) the day after the storm. If another Andrew were coming, I would be pretty depressed right now. I would be wishing I had a diesel generator and 500 pounds of Beef-a-Roni, because I would be looking at maybe six weeks without power, along with maybe three weeks without water. But Andrew was special.

I served with Andrew. I knew Andrew. Andrew was a friend of mine. Matthew, you’re no Andrew.

Maybe I shouldn’t joke. I’m sure terrible things have happened in Haiti. They build flimsy houses, and it seems like every storm that passes kills a lot of people.

I hate a stinking hurricane. I just hope I dodge this latest bullet.

If you live in a place where you might get a real hit, you should get a generator and a huge cooler. Fill the cooler with sandwich stuff and ice. Get jugs of water. If you don’t have a real phone (not mobile or portable), get one, because only hardwired phones work after storms. Get a flashlight for everyone in the house, and get batteries for two weeks.

That’s about all you can do.

Oh…do your laundry.

Don’t worry too much about fuel. Gas stations don’t stay closed long unless your area is totally flattened.

If you don’t hear from me, it means Mother Gaia finally got me. So what? My demise is a drop in the bucket compared to all the times I’ve used my septic tank.

I win on points.

Leaving Santeriaville

Yesterday I found out the house that used to belong to my sister is ready to rent.

It may not be ready physically; there is still some fine-tuning to do. But it’s ready legally. The contractor is waiting for his final check, and the inspection for the overall remodeling is done.

I thought this day would never come.

My sister was supposed to get this house, free and clear, when my dad died. He bought it for her, and she was going to receive it, on top of half of his estate. We tried to get her to move out while we fixed it, and we were then going to return it to her, but we were not able to get her cooperation. She didn’t maintain the house. Code problems kept piling up, and because my dad’s name was on the deed, he had to do something. He bought her out, and since then, we have been suffering through the miserable process of fixing it.

What did we have to add? Not a whole lot. New yard, new walls, new floors, new subfloors, new doors, new kitchen and bathrooms, new lawn and landscaping, new roof, new air conditioning system, new appliances, new security system, new phone and Internet wiring, new garage door, new windows, new paint…just a few things. We were able to keep the outside walls. Termites and rats can’t eat concrete.

If you want to destroy a house and yard, here’s what you do: nothing. You don’t have to bulldoze it. You don’t have to set fire to it. Just sit. In ten years, the house will be in such bad shape, you may be legally compelled to demolish it. Until I witnessed the slow destruction of this house, I had no idea how hard time is on houses.

Right now Hurricane Matthew is getting ready to pass this area, so there is a limit to what I can do to the house. Once things stabilize, I will be touching up a few things, and it should be ready to advertise next week.

This is significant, because my dad and I have a deal. I agreed not to leave him alone in Miami, and he agreed to buy a big place farther north, with room for both of us. Now that this aggravating project is almost done, we are going to focus on moving.

I would love to move to a place like Ocala or the panhandle, but it’s looking like God wants me in Broward County, which is the county where Ft. Lauderdale is located. It’s not the greatest place on earth to live, but it’s much, much better than Miami. Most people there speak English, and they are not as aggressive, rude, or inclined to practice various types of voodoo. I’ll take any improvement I can get.

I’m not kidding about voodoo in Miami. We have Cuban voodoo, Haitian voodoo, Puerto Rican voodoo, Jamaican voodoo…you name it. Cubans call their voodoo “Santeria,” but if you look it up…it’s voodoo. There are little shops called “botanicas” all over Miami, and they sell voodoo paraphernalia. When you deal with Cubans, you never know whether they’re into voodoo or not. It draws even educated Cubans.

If you live in Miami, sometimes you’ll notice a person who wears white all the time. That’s a voodoo thing. I don’t know much about it, but the scuttlebutt is that when you get into Santeria, you have to wear white for a year. Also, some people wear cheap, colorful voodoo bracelets.

I don’t want to be around these people any more. Evil has a stink, and people who love evil emit that stink to their surroundings. I would like to be in a place where the stink isn’t as thick.

You would think that a person would miss a place where he has spent much of his life, but I won’t miss Miami one bit. There is absolutely nothing here that interests me. The climate is unpleasant. The people have no class. The traffic is a nightmare. There is no culture. People who don’t speak Spanish are being shut out of everything. When I say it’s literally like living in a foreign country, I am not exaggerating at all. When you walk around in public, you expect to hear the people around you speaking Spanish, not English.

I look forward to being farther from the ocean. I’ve had all I want.

If you fit in here, it’s a very bad sign. It says a lot about your values.

Sadly, the Broward housing market is not the buyer’s paradise it was a few years back. There are still real bargains in the panhandle, and Ocala is also better for buyers, but Broward is drying up. Why? Because people hate Miami. They move to Broward to get away.

Small wonder. How can you feel comfortable in an area where pagans are literally cursing you every day?

My tenure here was my own fault. I rebelled against God, and he didn’t help me. I belonged here. The Bible says rebellion is as bad as witchcraft, so here I sat, among the witches. How can I complain?

I look forward to being able to drive five miles in less than 20 minutes. I look forward to not having to repeat myself over and over to people who don’t speak our national language. I look forward to letting my guard down to some extent. I can’t wait to lose my Miami manners. Maybe I should wear a gag until they wear off.

If you want to help me out, you can pray this hurricane misses my property, and that God helps me get out of this awful county. I would appreciate that.

It would be so nice to move to north Georgia or southern Tennessee.

Best not to think about it.

The US is falling apart even faster than I believed as recently as two weeks ago. Persecution is really coming down. If Hillary Clinton wins, a Cambodia scenario may be less than a decade away. Our cities are becoming dens of feral losers; I don’t want to be very close to one when things get really nasty.

If you want out of the mess you’ve landed yourself in, God is your ticket. Don’t wait as long as I did. Get started now. It won’t change overnight.

I am out of here, as soon as humanly or divinely possible. So long, and thanks for all the fish.