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.