Sign the Papers and Don’t Look too Close

This is an interesting day for me.

Right now, the American public is doing its best to offend God by electing a candidate who loves abortion, homosexuality, the destruction of Israel, and the persecution of Christians. The other choice is an adulterer and blowhard who will probably support Christian causes only because Christians vote for him.

It’s not a great choice. Satan and Satan Lite. For that matter, even the “good” GOP candidates weren’t prizes. Ted Cruz appears to belong to a wacky dominionist cult. Jeb Bush is a RINO who probably doesn’t care about conservative goals. I don’t think any of these people compare to Joshua or Moses. They’re just secular self-promoters; blown-up versions of the annoying, narcissistic kids who ran for class president when you were eight years old.

If we voted with our hearts, Hillary would probably win. We love having the government force other people to give us their money. We love sexual sin. We love abortion. We want the government to be our daddy, because the alternative is God, and God will expect us to change. The Democrats represent the flesh, and we’re all about the flesh. I think it’s fair to call Hillary the people’s candidate.

What are the people? The Beast.

Today we’ll see if God can persuade us to accept the lesser of two evils. If he can, then we’ll get four years of conservative federal judges and a certain amount of protection from government-sponsored persecution. That would be nice.

That’s today, in a nutshell. What makes it interesting to me is that when I pray, I keep feeling that Trump is going to win. I feel faith moving through me. What if it doesn’t happen? Then I may have a major adjustment to make.

The polls don’t look good. The big states that matter are particularly disturbing. Then again, when I look at polls, I’m walking by sight, not faith. Moses had to march to the side of the Red Sea in front of millions of people who trusted him and then wait for it to part. That’s faith. He had more than polls to worry about.

Over the years, I’ve invested a tremendous amount of time in prayer. I have given my life completely to God. I don’t mean I do nothing but serve him, but I gave up worldly ambition, and I quit holding back. I don’t focus on asking him for favors. I ask him to help me give everything to him, without reservation.

I have developed a mindset and a spiritual skill set which I believe to be gifts from God. Supernatural faith is part of that. If the faith doesn’t pay off, what do I do? I can’t go back to the worldly way of life. It’s disgusting. I don’t want it. The world is revolting. I can’t be part of it. It won’t even have me!

It’s very unusual for me to feel this kind of faith about something and then turn out to be wrong. When it happens, it’s a serious blow.

Back when I was at my last church, we had a member who had cancer, and we prayed for him all the time. More than once, I felt huge surges of faith that he would be healed. Then one day I got a text from a friend. The man was dead. The church rolled right past this IED as though it weren’t important, but it bothered me a great deal. When you get a major alert from God, telling you you did something wrong, you don’t just pretend it never happened.

When I talked to God about it, the impression I got was that the man died because of his pride. He was popular; everyone liked him. But he was very proud. You couldn’t tell him anything. He argued with revelation as though it were opinion.

Unconfessed iniquity gives the enemy a foothold. Paul said people died because they took communion without examining themselves. I think my friend died because he believed God approved of him in every way. He wasn’t interested in change. He was primarily after God’s blessings. When I tried to talk to this man or the pastors about the need for repentance and confession, they blew it off. They thought faith was everything. Obedience wasn’t necessary. They left a door open, and I think he died because of it.

Will that explanation fit, if America chooses Hillary? I don’t think so. We are proud and filthy; no doubt about it. But I’m not asking for God to turn us into obedient children. I’m just asking him to sway an election.

America is finished. We have abandoned God, and his protection is disappearing, like sunlight moving away from a country as its planet rotates away from the sun. I have no illusions about a restoration of America. The only question is how quickly the ship will sink. It would be a big help if God delayed it and helped us to get aligned with him before the Rapture; that’s all I want.

Because I know America is washed up, I’m not that bound up in the results of the election per se. Even if Hillary wins, I should be able to get by during my remaining years. They’re not going to drag me out of the house and burn me the day after the inauguration. If Trump wins, we’ll be ruled by a liberal Republican who will almost certainly support homosexuality against us, so things won’t be that great. I’m just concerned about my faith and the mountain of revelation I’ve received since I turned back to God. If that is damaged, it will be a big setback.

Maybe it’s a mistake to yoke myself to America by praying for the nation.

I had a dream last night. I dreamed my dad brought a restored car to my house. It was a 1970 Buick Electra 225 convertible, like the one I had in the 1980’s. It was on a trailer.

I’ve wanted that car back for years. It broke down, and I had to leave it in a barn. Then the barn burned. To me, that car represents all the good things I’ve lost in life. I feel that way about it.

In the dream, some parts of the car looked really good. The restoration work seemed top-notch. Then a couple of brackets on the rear leaf springs bent, and the car sagged. I started seeing paint problems. My Electra was gold, and so was the one in the dream. I started seeing places where blue paint showed through; blue is the color of states that vote for Democrats. I saw big scrapes in the paint which were caused by carelessness in aligning the parts. Then the left fender fell off.

When I woke up, I was very disturbed. I was afraid the car represented my faith and revelation. Maybe God was telling me I had been deceived, and that I was relying on something that couldn’t help me. Recently, I had a dream in which prosperity preachers were depicted as clowns who sold restored cars. The dream I had last night made me wonder: have I bought too much of their product? Even with the help God has given me, am I too close to their beliefs to be blessed?

I prayed for a long time, and now I believe the car represents Donald Trump and his leadership.

Trump loves gold. He puts it on his buildings. He had a yacht with gold plumbing fixtures. Gold means wealth. In the Bible, it also means excellence.

Christians are hoping Trump will be a vehicle which will carry them over the problems we face in America. But the car’s suspension was broken. I wasn’t even sure I could drive it back to the restoration shop to be repaired. If we put too much weight on Trump, he will let us down. He’ll be helpful to us, but he’s not one of us, and he can’t be trusted very much. He’s not the answer to our problems.

The paint shows that he’s not solid. There is a thin coat of excellence on him, but underneath, he’s just a trader. He’s in it for Trump. He will never be a statesman.

I think this is correct, but I won’t say I’m sure. I don’t call myself a prophet. The prophets didn’t make mistakes. I’ve made several in this area.

I think I’ll go look at Youtube and see what Christians are saying this week. Maybe someone reliable has a revelation.

I keep speaking defeat to Hillary and thanking God for preventing her from winning. We’ll see what happens.

I’m trying to be honest about this, and I’m writing about it before the election results come out, because it would be too easy to wait until the dust settles. I’m out here on a limb, hoping nothing snaps.

Plus Woodworking

I’m looking for something to do, so I’m writing.

It’s funny; to relax, I do something most people hate. Most people would lose their minds if someone said, “I need 1800 words in an hour.” To me, it’s like asking a cat to go sit in a box. Behind a keyboard is my natural location.

I thought it might be fun to tell about a few Youtube channels I like. They’re all related to tools in one way or another. I’ll do it in reverse order of how much they thrill me.

14. AvE. This guy is Canadian. To me, that means, “American in denial.” When the jihadis come screaming over the tundra from Siberia, he’ll start crying for American tanks to defend him; you just wait.

He lives somewhere near the North Pole, and he has no end of tools. I don’t know what he does for a living, but he seems to know absolutely everything about the tool world. Maybe he’s a mechanical engineer. Maybe he’s one of Santa’s elves, and he was discharged for using profanity.

One of his neat activities is taking tools apart to see if they’re made well. He looks at the quality of the plastic and tests the melting point with a soldering iron. He comments on the switches and fasteners. He checks the machining. It’s all great info. You can learn a ton from this guy. He is very, very smart.

Problem: his personality is so obnoxious it’s almost unbearable. He makes one infantile sexual joke after another. It’s like he has spent his life collecting prurient and scatological expressions. It never stops. It’s like his brain quit maturing at the age of three. It’s like listening to the internal monologue of a serial killer.

I can’t believe he’s married. Maybe he’s a different person around his wife.

I can stand him in short bursts, but I wouldn’t want to watch two videos in a row.

Here’s a video. I’m sure it’s filthy. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

13. Wortheffort. This man runs some sort of school for woodworkers. I don’t know what the deal is. Maybe he’s a preacher or a social worker. He has a beautiful shop and some nice tools, and he clearly knows what he’s doing. If you want to bone up on woodworking, Wortheffort is a good choice.

There are videos that tell about his school, but I don’t watch them, because I don’t care.

His personality can be a little grating, but it’s not too bad.

12. Stumpy Nubs. The name is a little disturbing, and he lives up to it. In one of his videos, you can see his blood all over one of his projects. He’s a woodworker, and he has a mountain of videos. Lots of projects. Lots of expert info. Here is a video, chosen randomly.

11. The Wood Whisperer. This young man does fairly orthodox woodworking, relying a lot on standard power tools such as the table saw and band saw. Manufacturers give him free stuff to use. I don’t know if that affects his judgment. He doesn’t seem to have the transcendent expertise of some of the other Youtubers, but he does good work.

10. The English Woodworker. You’ll enjoy this man’s videos. He has an excellent presentation style. He is passionate. He is interesting to listen to. So why is he so low on my list? Simple. He went to a pay model. He has a few great videos on Youtube, but he started putting things behind a pay wall, and the price was not reasonable. He needs to lower prices or get a Patreon page to bring in income.

6. Baconsoda. This man is nuts. He’s Irish, so maybe it’s not entirely his fault. He’s a woodturner. He has a number of nice projects. Unfortunately, he has like 9,000 videos about other less-interesting things, like his potato garden, which he seems to find very exciting.

I did say he was Irish.

9. Robbiethewoodturner. See if you can guess what his hobby is. He’s another Irishman. Either that, or he has a horrible speech impediment.

He makes neat items on the lathe. Maybe not the most dynamic host on earth.

8. The Tiny Trailer Workshop. When I feel bad about being eccentric, I think about this guy, and I realize things could be a lot worse.

He’s a blast. He lives in the woods somewhere, and he has a tiny trailer with a little wood lathe in it. He composes his own music, and he uses it to score his videos. He makes all sorts of weird things. Sometimes they fall apart. Who cares? He has a lot of fun.

7. Carl Jacobson. Woodturner. He does meticulously turned pieces that show there is more to woodturning that cutting out bowls and slapping shellac on them. Very creative.

Now I’ll start writing about the people in my top tier.

6. Mike Waldt. I enjoy this man’s work more than the other woodturners. When he started, he wasn’t the most amazing woodturner around, but he turned that into a strength. He began shooting video as a beginner, and he kept chronicling his work as he matured and got better tools. His work is very good now. He talks a great deal about tools and methods, so if you want to try woodturning, he’s a good man to watch.

He developed Bell’s Palsy after he started making videos, and you can watch him as he gradually recovers.

5. Abom79. He runs the Booth Machine Shop in Pensacola. He’s a third-generation machinist. He welds, too.

He’s a real machinist, which means he feeds his family using machine tools. He takes real jobs.

He has some nice old tools, and some of his videos are about fixing them up. He has a 27-video playlist in which he makes a parking attachment for a K&T horizontal mill, which is possibly the coolest mill in existence. Don’t ask me what a parking attachment is. Just watch.

He makes mistakes; I wouldn’t say he’s a top-flight machinist. But he’s honest about his errors, and he’s patient with viewers.

12. Keith Rucker. He’s a volunteer at Georgia’s agricultural museum in Tifton. He collects old machines and gets them working again. He calls it restoration; sometimes it’s more like a paint job. Whatever. It’s pretty cool.

He has a barn-sized workshop at his house. He had it built. It isn’t air conditioned, so it proves he’s dedicated.

Last time I watched him, he was working on an old Monarch lathe the size of a VW bus.

His interests are very wide-ranging. He does trains, wood machines, metal machines…you name it. He is no noob. He knows some stuff.

His delivery has a halting quality which can get on your nerves, but still fun to watch.

4. Paul Sellers. You like wood? You like hand tools? This is your guy. He’s an expert woodworker with a passion for teaching. He seems to know how to do almost everything, and he is happy to pass it all on to you.

Some of the stuff he covers: refurbishing saw blades, sharpening plane irons. making bench dogs, building workbenches, hand-tool joinery, and using planes.

3. Oxtoolco. This is Tom Lipton’s channel. Tom Lipton has what may be the greatest machining job on earth; he works at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, better known as “the Berkeley Lab.” Berkeley U. has one of the nation’s top physics departments. They do lots of government-funded research. Big money means big toys and no brakes. I saw a video in which he gave another vlogger a tour, and I was flabbergasted by the size of the facility and the battery of megadollar tools it has.

He has his own shop as well. I’m not sure if it’s a business; I get the impression that it doesn’t make money. It makes my stomach hurt to look at it. It’s huge. It’s clean. It’s airy. I want it.

I don’t know too much about him, but he seems to be about as good as a machinist can get.

He doesn’t actually understand the purpose of some of the things he builds for the lab. He says sometimes they’ll run an experiment that lasts a few nanoseconds, and afterward, the physicists will look really happy. That means he did okay.

Here’s a great video in which he refurbishes a priceless family heirloom to get his mother off his back.

3. Tubalcain. Also known as Mrpete222, Tubalcain is a retired shop teacher. That means he will make you nervous. He has the archtypal crusty shop teacher voice. In fact, he has nearly the same voice as the actor from the old Lite Beer commercials. I think he’s the same guy. He’s just undercover.

Tubalcain has a nearly ideal life. He wanders around to auctions, buying used tools with his retirement money. Then he puts them in his shop and makes videos. He also buys and restores old tractors. Teaching must pay pretty good.

He machines, and he also makes his own castings. He doesn’t have any interest in woodworking. He calls woodworkers “wood butchers.”

If there is some simple machining task you don’t know how to do, chances are, Tubalcain has a video for you. Just make sure you sit up straight and wipe that smirk off your face.

Here’s another one:

I’m up to my second-favorite vlogger.

2. NYCNC. This is a channel run by John Saunders, a young man who didn’t know anything about machining ten years ago. He lived in an apartment in New York, and he wanted to make and sell an invention. Starting from zero, he learned about tools, and he started manufacturing.

Eventually, he was able to expand. He moved to Ohio and got a gigantic shop. It kills me to see it in videos. There’s so much room, you could roller skate.

He has a Tormach mill, and the Tormach CNC company is one of his sponsors. He makes all sorts of interesting stuff.

Why is he my second-favorite tool vlogger? For one thing, he went from ignorance to professional machinist in ten years. I’ve been fooling with tools as long as he has, and I’ve accomplished squat. For another thing, he has a great attitude. He loves what he does, and he loves teaching other people about it. There are better machinists out there, to be sure, but how many started in an apartment, ten years ago, from scratch?

For some reason, he reminds me of Bridget Fonda. Very distracting. Once you get that in your head, you keep seeing it over and over.

1. Keith Fenner. This man is the king.

As proprietor of Turn Wright Machine Works in Massachusetts, Keith Fenner does all sorts of machining and welding work for companies involved in various maritime pursuits. He makes and fixes prop shafts. He fixes rudders. He repairs cutless bearings. He puts new ears on backhoe buckets and line-bores them so they fit. He made his own gigantic purple wheeled log splitter. He made his own 50-ton press, with a chain-driven elevation adjustor you won’t believe.

His main tools are old junk, but he’s so good, it doesn’t matter. He has an old Clausing lathe and a belt-drive drill press which must be twelve feet tall. He also has a K&T horizontal mill which he repaired himself after he bought it. He has a CNC plasma table he put together.

There is nothing this man can’t do. If you bring him a cast iron pump housing with a big chunk missing, he can put new metal into it and machine it back to original specs. I am in awe of his capabilities.

I haven’t seen him do woodworking. Maybe it’s beneath him.

That’s it. That’s my Youtube tool pantheon. I hope you check some of these guys out.

The main thing is this: I feel much better now that I’ve written this. I spent three hours today dealing with a cable guy who literally knew three words of English (he didn’t know what “remote” meant), and I needed to get my mind off it.

Enjoy.

Witness Me, Blood Bags

Sorry for the Mad Max references. I couldn’t resist.

What an awful movie.

To get back on track, I had a couple of good experiences this week, and I felt like I should share.

Since about 2007, I have been trying to become proficient with tools, and I’ve bought lots of stuff. Table saw. Three lathes. Milling machine. Plasma. I’ve had a lot of fun, and I’ve also done lots of very, very bad work. It turns out owning the tools is not the same thing as being able to use them. What an unpleasant surprise.

Sometimes I do good work, though, and I improve all the time. Occasionally, something happens that makes me feel like I’m making progress.

Lately, I’ve been watching a lot of tool Youtubes. There are some wonderful providers out there. They’re just regular guys, shooting video in their garages and shops. They do marvelous work (sometimes), and they share what they know. These Youtubes certainly beat the garbage available on network TV. I think. I don’t actually watch network TV, other than Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

I’m not sure who hosts the current crop of late shows. I know Jimmy Fallon and that other guy have shows. I had his name a second ago. Kimmel! He has a show.

There are still some tools I would like to have. I want TIG and an acetylene rig. I want a surface grinder. I would love a CNC mill more than life itself. But from watching the videos and seeing what professionals get by with, I realize I’m not doing too bad.

This week, while I was watching tool videos, I had a wonderful realization: the guys in the videos were doing things wrong. They did things I could do better. Now that I’ve said that, I can’t say who I was watching, because for all I know they Google themselves.

One guy is a professional machinist, and he uses manual tools. By that I mean he doesn’t use CNC. He has been working for maybe 20 years. He has a huge TIG machine, a stick welder, and a bunch of machine tools.

He was making a part for a machine, and it was a long job. Lots of videos in one playlist. He did a lot of things I couldn’t do if you held a gun to my head, but he also did things I can do, badly. He oriented parts in inconvenient and inefficient ways while machining. He used the wrong tools for certain jobs.

I felt great about that, not because he screwed up, but because my perception of his mistakes showed that I had learned a few things, and that I was not as hopeless as I had thought.

He machined a long part, and I would guess the ratio of chucked metal to unchucked metal was 1:6. It was way out there. Ordinarily, you want at least a third of a part to be in the chuck, so it doesn’t fly out and kill you. I was practically punching the couch, hollering that he could just center-drill the far end and put a live center in it for support. It would have taken two minutes.

I watched a CNC guy do his thing. He has wonderful tools and a clean, spacious shop that makes me swoon every time I see it. I can’t believe he makes a living with that much empty floor space. You could literally roller skate in his shop. Anyway, he’s great with CAD, but when the time came to machine a part, he made workholding and locating errors I would not [necessarily] have made, and he sometimes did things the hard way. The part he ended up with was not that great.

I can’t mention his name, either.

It’s nice to feel borderline competent.

The CNC guy had a part in his vise, and one end was a few thousandths lower than the other. What do you do when that happens? You loosen the vise and bump the part until it’s level. Hello? You can use a screw jack. You can use a shim. You don’t just leave the part sitting there, because the measurement isn’t critical. Saying a measurement isn’t critical is like saying an ugly loaf of bread is “rustic.” It means “I am not very good at this.”

I’m not picking on him, because let’s face it: he knows a thousand times what I do. But it’s great to know I could have offered him a useful suggestion.

Now that I think about it, I had another similar experience. A guy was “restoring” (painting) an old lathe, and it took him forever to realize a wire brush was better than a putty knife for removing paint.

Why do people call paint “restoration”? How would you like it if you went in for a knee replacement and the surgeon painted your leg and sent you home?

If you’re not scraping or grinding your machine to remove the wear, you’re not restoring. Deal with it.

I love watching these guys. I learn a great deal every week. I even ordered a couple of their promotional T-shirts, to support their channels.

Maybe this week I’ll get back to CNC and make the lathe work. I’m 99% of the way there. I just have to conquer one programming glitch which has proved to be elusive. Then I can order a proper ball screw and make the lathe accurate.

Then I’ll still wish it was a mill. Oh well.

Guess I’ll go out in the garage and move things around until I can see the floor. Maybe I can get a few things done this weekend.

More

To make up for all the criticism, I’ll post one of the videos I’ve enjoyed. This guy has a hilarious, but typical, problem. A relative wants something fixed, and HERE YOU ARE, WITH ALL THESE TOOLS AND NOTHING TO DO.

He’s not one of the people I mentioned above.

I Wish Mitch the Kool-Smoking Mormon Were Here

I have my belt grinder in more-or-less usable condition.

It was quite an ordeal. Jobs like this remind me of what Charlie Baltimore said in The Long Kiss Goodnight: “Yeah, well, that’s the thing about being a secret agent, Mitch. Nothing is ever simple.”

I love that movie. Brian Cox should have gotten an Oscar for the scene with the dog.

I ordered a metal box for the VFD, because you can’t mount a VFD in areas where metal filings and abrasive dust are loose in the air. Had I been aware VFD’s were so fragile, I would have ordered a KBAC VFD with it’s own little hazmat suit. I had to pay over thirty bucks for a metal box from BUD Industries.

The box had knockouts all over it, and you can’t screw anything to a knockout. I had to cut a piece of aluminum channel on the band saw and then turn it into an adaptor plate using the mill. I then had to drill and tap holes in the plate so I could screw it to the box and screw the VFD to the plate.

I got the VFD installed in the box, and then I had to run the AC and motor wires to it. That was fun. I had one knockout that refused to move, so I had to spend half an hour ripping it out and polishing the hole with a rotary tool.

The plan was to have this: 250V plug ==> cord ==> box ==> VFD ==> motor wires ==> VFD. I got it all put together, and then I had to deal with the control panel.

No one wants to use a tool that has a control panel inside a metal box with no windows. It’s a pain. Luckily, I had a VFD with a panel that detached. You can run an ethernet cable from the VFD to the panel, and you can put the panel out in the dangerous world of grinders and dust, where it’s easy to reach. This was my plan.

How do you run an ethernet cable through the side of a steel box. You don’t. You have to find a special coupling that has an ethernet jack on each end. You mount it in the box, and you run a short cable from the VFD to the coupling. Outside the box, you run a long cable from the coupling to your control panel.

Here’s the coupling.

Ordering this stuff is simple, right? No. First you have to know what to call the coupling. I finally found that out, and then I was able to search on Ebay. Almost no one in the US sells these things. I finally found one, and then I had to wait for shipping. I also found two cables at Monoprice, which allows you to buy cables in any length you specify. Neat.

Today I finished throwing it all together. I put the coupling in the box, and I ran the cables. I made a little aluminum mount and screwed it to the grinder platform. I screwed the panel to the mount. I was ready to go.

I did one other thing I’m happy about. I put a twist-lock plug and receptacle between the VFD box and the motor, so if I have to work on this thing, I can break it down into two major parts without opening anything up. Very nice. I love using twist-lock plugs on motors. I don’t know how OSHA feels about it. They are welcome to drive out here and give me a citation.

My final accomplishment was programming the VFD so the cooling fan didn’t run all the time. The VFD box is not vented, so a fan inside the box will actually heat it. Not good. Also, it wears out the fan. I found a programming parameter that makes the fan turn on when the VFD is hot. I have to wonder why that wasn’t the default setting. Why would a cold VFD need air?

I couldn’t find an ideal location for the panel, so I just put it in front of the grinder, out of the way of the belt. We’ll see if it blows up. Here’s a photo.

This is excellent. I now have an abrasive cart with two variable-speed belt grinders. What useful machines. I actually used them to make the aluminum panel mount. Abrasives are seriously underestimated. If you can’t grind and sand, you’re handicapped.

Now I guess I can make knives.

On to the next challenge. The excitement, as always, is palpable.

Assange gets Podesta’s Goat

In Greek mythology, the daughter of the king of Troy was cursed. She was a prophet, and she was always right, but no one believed her. She went through life telling people about their mistakes and the pain they would cause, but they never listened, so she had to stand by and watch while they did the lemming mambo off various cliffs.

Her name was Cassandra. That was her other curse. Sounds like a girl who wins 4-H prizes for being able to lift a heifer without assistance.

I can relate to Cassandra. I am not always right, but I’ve been right a whole bunch of times, and most people haven’t listened to me. People don’t have much respect for me. I suppose that’s fair, because I don’t respect them much, either.

Most prophets are unpopular. Cassandra’s situation was very realistic.

Just about anyone who tells the truth will be unpopular.

Today I read something which confirms something I always say. I tell people the Democratic Party belongs to Satan. No one listens; they say Republicans are evil because they don’t want everyone in the world to come here and get welfare money and the right to vote, without any vetting. They say we’re evil because we support the right to carry arms. It doesn’t faze them that the vast majority of violent criminals, drug dealers, and career thieves are leftists. It doesn’t bother them to see the Democrats restricting the First Amendment rights of preachers or using the courts to close Christian businesses over wedding cakes. Occultists almost invariably support liberal candidates and policies, but no one listens. They’re as blind as bats.

This morning the news says John Podesta’s brother invited him to a Satanic ritual hosted by a wacky performance “artist”. It doesn’t say he attended, but it’s clear from the email that Podesta’s brother has no problem with the event, and it’s also clear that he knows the “artist” well. It appears that Podesta’s brother, who presumably knows him well, has reason to feel that Podesta will not be offended by the invitation.

If you don’t think this says something about the Democrats, try to picture a prominent Republican in the same position. Try to picture Sarah Palin’s sister sending her the same email. It could never happen. Not unless she had a crazy sister who liked provoking her.

The notion of a powerful Democrat attending a Satanic ritual isn’t jarring at all. It’s perfectly consistent with what we know of them. They love abortion. They hate the church. They love drugs. They love arrogance and disrespect. They’re a lot like their dear old dad.

It will be interesting to see if John Podesta attended the revolting ceremony. I assume he’s huddling with spin doctors, trying to figure out whether he should address the leak. Maybe we’ll never know what happened.

When I tell liberal Christians (oxymoron) the Democratic Party belongs to the devil, they start criticizing Republicans. Trump is an adulterer, Mitt Romney is rich…I’m struggling to think of examples of the issues they cite, because there aren’t many solid criticisms. Anyway, they try to suggest Republicans are just as bad. My response? The GOP is not a religious organization, and there are plenty of worldly, godless people in it, but the Democrats belong to the devil and make no bones about it. They openly serve all sorts of evil goals. The comparison is ridiculous. It’s sort of like saying Christians are just as likely as Muslims to commit acts of terrorism in the US…wait; that sounds sort of familiar.

There’s a big difference between serving evil willfully and proudly and serving good very badly.

Obvious?

All over the world, pagan nuts are cursing Trump every day. Read about it on the web. Do you seriously think an equal number are cursing Hillary? Of course not. She supports just about every cause they love.

This election isn’t Hillary versus Trump. It’s Satan versus God, and the candidates are just proxies. Hillary will bring a more rapid descent into chaos and suffering. Trump will delay it. That sums it up.

I believe the things I’ve just written, but I’m also disgusted with Christians who have decided Trump is a devout believer. Come on. He’s a weak Christian who does pretty much what he wants. He loves admiration. He loves wealth. He likes to bicker. His sexual sins are so numerous, he’s probably 10% as bad as Bill Clinton. His daughter, raised with his values, left the church and converted to Judaism. He is not a holy man. Let’s admit it. Why should we destroy our credibility, pretending Trump is something he is not?

Denial is not supposed to be part of the Christian makeup. Excuses and spin make God angry, and they cut us off from his help. Christians who claim Trump is one of us are not pleasing God. They’re just giving ammunition to God’s enemies and driving people away. No unbeliever with any common sense believes Trump cares about God.

You don’t have to be a good Christian to be a friend of the church. I see Trump as a borderline unbeliever God can use to protect us for a while. That’s all I expect from him.

It’s not hypocriticial to vote for Trump. We only have two viable candidates. We can’t vote for the holy candidate, because there isn’t one. It therefore makes sense to vote for the one who will harm us the least.

I’m amazed that there are people voting for Gary Johnson. Fine, he’s a wonderful human being, and libertarians are right about 90% of the time. It doesn’t matter. He will never be President, and neither will any other libertarian. Libertarians love to vote spitefully; if they can’t have a perfect president, they deliberately render their votes ineffective, to put on a defiant display no one even notices. Instead of voting booths, libertarians should have special areas where they can use government-supplied knives to cut their noses off.

If you’re a libertarian, life will be better for you under Donald Trump than Hillary Clinton. You can choose the best life currently available or the worst our system has to offer. It really is that simple.

The libertarians should have a slogan: “Letting the perfect be the enemy of the good since 1972.”

If libertarians had been dumped in the water during the sinking of the Titanic, they would have drowned while criticizing the seating arrangements on the lifeboats.

They wouldn’t have suffered much, though, because libertarians are usually high on weed.

What is it with libertarians and weed? They adore it. If you want to have fun with a group of libertarians, make an offhand remark about how everyone who smokes weed is a loser. Their faces will turn bright red, and their eyes (red already) will bug out. It’s amazing how many of them love dope. It’s a major issue with them. It may be the single most important issue separating them from Republicans. Sometimes I wonder.

I’ve tried weed. I didn’t think much of it. It wasn’t good enough to turn me into a user or drive me to flush my votes down the toilet.

I wonder if Gary Johnson is high right now.

“Vote libertarian! Let’s send a message!”

Yeah. To each other.

Pagans are cursing Trump every day. I curse the Clinton campaign every day. I think I outweigh a considerable number of pagans, because my god really is God, and their gods are a bunch of loser spirits who are terrified of him. I hope so.

I can’t wait for this mess to be over with. I’m glad I’m not as emotionally invested in it as I used to be. I used to think we could save America. Now I know America is lost, so I’m just hoping Christians can do as well as possible and achieve as much as possible for God in our remaining time. If Hillary wins, I’ll be okay with it, because America deserves her, and because my protection doesn’t come from Washington.

Get out there and vote. If you’re libertarian, just open the window and yell “Johnson!” It will do just as much good, and you will save yourself a drive.

My Telephone Circle Becomes Less Diverse

I guess I’ll sound giddy and foolish for saying this at my advanced age, but here I go: I’m in love.

I just upgraded from DSL to cable Internet access.

For years, Comcast bugged me to get rid of my old landline/DSL provider and add their service to my cable package. I told them to get lost, because I knew that traditional phone lines were way more reliable after hurricanes. The cable people used to take forever to get back on their feet, but the phone company either stayed in service or recovered fast.

I’m working to get out of this area now, so I don’t think I’ll be here for the next hurricane season. I don’t care if the lines come down. I moved over to Comcast, and I’ll be saving a pile.

It had to be done. I was getting like 4,000 telemarketer calls every day. I didn’t actually count them, but it definitely felt like 4,000. “Hello? You need diaper? You diabetic? We have supply for you!” It was killing me.

Internet and wireless companies are great about squashing telemarketers. A genius who was tired of robocalls invented a system that routes all of a person’s voice calls through a screening system that checks them against a blacklist. He named his company Nomorobo. If a caller is on the list, the call doesn’t go through. Unfortunately, landline companies aren’t that great about working with Nomorobo. I had to make a switch in order to be eligible for the service.

I talked to a phone company rep, and she didn’t even know what robocalls were. My best guess: she has no landline. She and I live in different universes.

I don’t really understand the no-landline crowd. Cell phones are unreliable. They drop calls. You can’t have extensions, so you have to carry the phone everywhere you go. You have to keep your phone on all the time in case of emergencies. The timing of cell calls is messed up; when you talk to people, you step on each other’s words. I have to have a landline. The cell is just for moving around.

Anyway, when I changed my phone service, I had to change my Internet service as well. The speed difference is incredible.

I didn’t know I needed more speed until I had it. Sales people used to call me all the time, bragging about their Internet speeds. I didn’t care. I don’t steal movies or music, I think video games are for metrosexual punks with saggy pants, and I don’t like Netflix, so why would I need fast Internet? I was happy in my Slowsky world. But these days, websites are packed full of truly worthless garbage that makes them slow to load. They’re no better than the websites we had five years ago; they’re just bulkier and noisier. Whatever. I was starting to be annoyed with waiting.

On top of that, I made some Youtube videos, and it was taking me eight hours to upload each one. No, no, no. Not acceptable.

It’s nice to see Drudge load almost instantly instead of taking an interminable 20 seconds.

I used to try to avoid loading Drudge too often, because I knew Breitbart worked for Drudge, and Breitbart didn’t like me. I was afraid he would get some of the pennies generated from the ethically questionable automatic page reloads. Now that he’s gone, I let it reload at will. I figure his widow and kids can use the money.

I’m still working the kinks out of the system. I can’t use my email server, and the most convenient cable line in my house won’t work with the modem, but I guess I’ll be okay. I can’t wait until the phone lines move over.

The telemarketers have been a real challenge. I work on reducing my anger all the time, and telemarketers are incessant provocations I do not need. The other day one called and asked if I was “one of the diabetics” in the house. I said, “We’re all diabetics here. We also have constipation, flat feet, and leprosy. Like your mother.”

I guess that’s funny, but I was not happy with myself. Now that Nomorobo is in my future, maybe I’ll get a break from my tormentors so I can continue working on my character.

I’ve made all sorts of progress cutting out profanity, too, but just when I seem to have forgotten a really choice expression, a telemarketer calls, and I remember it.

Most of my phone calls are telemarketers. Not some. Most.

I wish I had their home numbers.

No I don’t. Forget that thought.

I feel like ranting about the ridiculous overstuffing of websites, but I will try not to. I hate having videos come on without my involvement (in spite of my add-ons and browswer settings), and I really don’t need to see animated GIF’s all over the screen when I’m trying to read a news story. If your site has music that comes on automatically, or it has an introduction video, you should be dropped in a hole in a glacier. That’s just how I feel.

Okay, okay. I repent.

I’m pooped. I’ve been on the phone with tech support for about a century today. I had to write to release the pressure.

I hope the Nomorobo tip helps a few people. It works for cell phones, too. It’s too bad they can’t fix it so it sends electric shocks to the callers.

I repent.

My Vote is in the Hands of People who Actually Admire Barack Obama

My ballot is in the mail. I can’t quite believe I voted for Donald Trump. Who’s next? Simon Cowell? John McAfee? Will annoying tycoons be standard fare for future voters?

I suppose they’re no worse than the corrupt, egotistical people who usually run for office.

I voted by mail today. I kind of wonder what will happen to the ballot. The lady who carries my mail is black, and I happen to know her family is not conservative. One of my best friends is her nephew. Maybe I should have put a Hillary sticker on the envelope.

Funny things happen in and around Miami. Democrat operatives walk into black polling places openly and yell at people, pushing them to support Democrats. No one does anything about it, because apparently, acknowledging the very existence of black people is now considered racist.

Now that I think about it, a lot of nutty stuff goes on in black neighborhoods. It’s as if there’s a special exemption from normal behavior.

The friend I mentioned above told me about Martin Luther King Day. Many people in Liberty City and the other black areas look forward to this day, because it’s a day of wild drunkenness, dope-smoking, theft, fornication, and other non-helpful activities.

My friend told me his dad used to have everyone stay home on MLK Day, so they could be there, armed, to protect the house. He also said it’s a day for settling scores. If there’s someone you want to mess up, you wait for MLK Day. I guess the idea is that the cops are so busy on that day, they can’t enforce the law very well.

One other fun MLK Day activity: large groups of people on illegal, unlicensed dirt bikes ride around the streets at high speed, running red lights and causing problems. This is an accepted activity year-round, but on MLK Day, the gangs get bigger and bolder.

In the black areas here, many people ride dirt bikes on the street. An NFL player from the area died on a dirt bike recently. The cops don’t do much about it. The rules are different in some neighborhoods.

Everywhere else, a bike has to have turn signals, a license tag, and headlights. I don’t think 2-cycle motors are allowed on the street; I’m not sure. In Liberty City, you can ride a bike powered by an unshielded nuclear reactor if you can build one.

Very strange. It’s even stranger that no one knows about this stuff. The press never mentions it. It would be racist!

Life is so weird.

You have to wonder what Martin Luther King, Jr. would think. “I got shot in the face so we could do THIS.”

In order for my vote to count, the mail lady has to agree not to throw it out. Then the Post Office people have to agree not to throw it out. Then the people who count the ballots have to choose to record it. Then the people who run the computers have to agree not to hack the system. It’s a wonder any Republican votes are counted. Maybe my 3/5 will be recorded. I hope so.

Anyway, it’s out of my hair.

I keep feeling like Trump is going to win. I feel it when I pray. I certainly hope it’s not my imagination.

I had some help marking my ballot. The ballot always contains a bunch of obscure local crap I don’t care about, so it’s hard to know what to do. I found out The Daily Kos has helpful information. If you go to the site, you will find recommendations for your area. All the nutbars, left wing nuts, potential terrorists, and champions of sexual deviation will be on the list. I took a look and voted against them. Thanks, Kos.

I voted for medical marijuana. Do I think it’s a good idea? I don’t know. Do I think it will be abused. Yes. I know it will be abused. Very heavily. Do I care? No. I’m tired of watching us make drug dealers rich. Let people over the age of 21 smoke anything they want. They can have heroin and bath salts too, for all I care. I would like to see an America where it’s not possible for a moron with gold teeth and a MAC-10 to get rich selling poison. Drug users will use drugs regardless of the law, so let them have at it.

Having dealt with a hopeless addict for a very long time, I have learned that other people’s behavior doesn’t affect addicts much. Keeping drugs away from law-abiding citizens sounds like a great idea, but we’re not trying to get drugs in the first place. Addicts will cause their families to go bankrupt in order to get drugs. They will commit several violent felonies a week to get drugs. They will abandon their children. They will sell everything they have. Obviously, they are willing to go to drug dealers.

Yay, “medical” marijuana. Stoners of the world: enjoy. Come back when you’ve wrecked your lives and want to repent.

The product is not the problem, any more than guns are the problem. You could move me into a house made of heroin with a sinsemilla lawn, and twenty years from now, I would still not be an addict. Other people become heroin addicts–trying heroin for the first time–in federal penitentiaries, where you would expect drugs to be very hard to find. Where there’s a will, there’s a way, and where there’s no will, there’s no problem.

What will happen if Trump wins? Can you imagine the rioting? Maybe this is the day we’ve been buying guns for. Obama ruined race relations and class relations, and he inspired a gun-buying craze that lasted eight years. If Trump wins, some of us may have to use the stuff we bought, in order to avoid being dragged out of our vehicles and homes and being raped and murdered.

On the whole, it would be considerably better than President Hillary. If she wins, she will spend the first four years testifying, committing perjury to avoid incarceration. What a drag that will be. If you think politics is annoying now, wait till we get four years of something that makes the Watergate ordeal look like a weekend at Disney World.

I remember Watergate. It ruined TV. Week after week, the hearings were on. It was very unpleasant. Hillary’s misdeeds are much worse than Nixon’s. His people burglarized a shrink’s office, and then he lied about it. I think they also bugged DNC headquarters. Anyway, it was not a complicated affair. Hillary has a giant cauldron of scandals that will take years to investigate, and unlike Nixon, she will not have the grace to concede. Democrats don’t do that. You have to haul them away in shackles. They keep expecting the press to save them, and it almost always does.

Can’t we just throw a bucket of water on her?

Six days from now, the pain of election anticipation will be gone, and we will be dealing with the new pain of a new administration. If it’s not Hillary and her flying gay and illegal monkeys, it will be Trump and his wake of riots.

Liberals love to say they’ll move to France if a Republican is elected. Sadly, they never follow through. I would like to move if my candidate loses, but I don’t want to go to France. Take me to heaven. You can have my stuff. I am ready to go.

Heaven isn’t very diverse. There are no gays there. Now that I think about it, there are no heterosexuals, either, because there is no sex. There is no Islam. There is no atheism. There are no illegals; if you don’t meet the entry requirements, you go somewhere else. There will be people of all races, but we won’t be at each other’s throats.

Sign me up. I want to be gentrified.

Pray my ballot survives. I give it one chance in three.