Never Get Between a Hog and his Slop

Coronavirus is like political correctness. It’s a filthy enemy that waits till you think it’s dead and then starts to squirm again.

Something like three weeks ago, I started to feel a little off. I thought it was because I needed sleep, but within a couple of days I had chills, and then I had something like a mild cold. Then my sense of smell vanished for a day or two. I also had problems with my sense of taste.

I’ve been brewing beer since early January, so I am very excited about getting new beers in the can. Well, the keezer. I need to taste and smell things all the time. It was frustrating when I couldn’t smell beer and when perfectly good beer tasted like club soda with soap and hops added.

The problem went away, but I think it came back. A couple of days ago, I tried my latest beer, and it wasn’t good at all. It didn’t taste like it was oxidized or infected with exotic organisms. Those are the problems most failed beers have. The hops tasted metallic, and the malt tasted like horehound.

I also tried a new factory beer. It’s a Kolsch-style ale. Kolsch is a German ale style which supposedly tastes a great deal like lager. Brewing lagers, at least the old way, takes more time and effort than brewing ales, so if there is a beer style out there that will get me lager taste with ale effort, I want to know about it.

I poured this stuff into a glass, and the head disappeared right away. That’s not a great sign. It was extremely clear and light in color. I tasted it, and it was sort of like a combination of Miller and ginger ale or Sprite. Pretty bad.

I gave up on it and poured it down the sink. I got myself a glass of my own stout, which is magnificent.

The stout was only okay. It seemed more sour and bitter than it should have been. I wondered if I had somehow infected it with bacteria.

Last night, I decided to try an Old Rasputin imperial stout in order to see if my senses were working. I think this beer has no flaws. It could not be much better. If I tasted anything funny, the problem had to be with me.

Sure enough, the bitterness and acidity seemed high. The beer was only pretty good, and for Old Rasputin, that’s a disastrous performance.

I guess something is still playing around in my head, changing the way things taste.

I’m strong. My nose isn’t running. I don’t have a fever. My throat is fine. My bones don’t hurt. But I’m afraid to drink beer because I may find out it tastes bad, and then I’ll end up throwing out beer I’ve worked and spent to make. I’m also unable to get my hair cut, because I don’t want to make the barber sick. I’m starting to look like Phil Spector.

I suppose coronavirus must come and go until it disappears entirely. I don’t remember being warned about that.

In other news, the cousin I baptized sent me a photo of what looked like the roof of a church. Her text said, “I’m at Asbury.”

I figured Asbury was a church near her. I was glad to see she was together with believers. Then the next day, I saw a news story about the Asbury revival.

Asbury is the name of a Christian college in Kentucky. It’s an easy drive for my cousin. People say the Holy Ghost is falling on them, and the usual worship and joy are filling the place.

What are my feelings about it? I see both good and bad things about it.

First, it’s great whenever there’s a real revival. I hope this is one. Second, I think Christians will make too much of it and use it to feed the delusion that revival is going to sweep the world. It’s not going to. It did that already during the 20th century, and the world said it wasn’t interested.

I think it’s helpful to write about the Pensacola revival, which is known officially as the Pensacola Outpouring and the Brownsville Revival. A big charismatic revival took place near Pensacola between 1995 and 2000. People spoke in tongues. The usual things happened. Now it’s sort of like Woodstock for Christians. Old hippies are perversely proud they debased themselves at Woodstock, and many who weren’t there lie and say they were. Call it stolen degradation. Christians who visited Pensacola like to talk about it.

The Outpouring may have done a lot of good. Surely it must have. But there were excesses, and disgraceful characters like Todd Bentley showed up and used it to glorify themselves and turn people away from Jesus.

People think the Outpouring was a big deal, but was it?

Paul went from Israel to Italy on foot, evangelizing as he went. Some think he made it to Spain. He and a few friends turned entire nations to charismatic Christianity. Look at the cities of the seven churches of the Revelation. Were they in Israel? No, they were in Turkey, in places where demon worship had been dominant. All, or nearly all, of Europe became Christian because a few people passed through and did healings and so on.

What happened after Pensacola? NOTHING. Oh, sure, it’s probably true that a few thousand people were changed. But America was a nation of more than 300 million people, and overall, we paid no attention. Canada wasn’t transformed. Neither was Mexico. Neither was most of Florida. Not even Pensacola.

These days, revival is like a case of coronavirus that hits someone who has been vaccinated twice and infected three times. It flares up and burns out fast.

My prediction is that what’s happening in Asbury will do a small number of people a lot of good, and then life will go on as usual.

We have become like Catholics. They get very excited whenever a Catholic claims to have been healed. They ignore it when thousands of Protestants get healed, but if a spirit claiming to be Mary appears to a goatherd standing in a creek in Albania and his bunions go away, they build a shrine and start flocking to the place to buy creek water.

We have become like Jews. In the time of Jesus, they had no prophets and had not had one in 400 years. Not one they accepted, I mean. They had John the Baptist. They couldn’t get a miracle to save their lives. But they knew an angel occasionally troubled the waters of the pool of Bethesda, and whoever got into the water first after a visit got healed. So the pool became a destination for medical tourists. They lay around it hoping to beat each other into the water.

Miracle healings are commonplace, and so is prophecy. The Holy Spirit does amazing things for people every day. Jesus appears to people. It’s crazy to think an isolated event that helps almost no one is a good sign or in any way normal.

What’s happening at Asbury, if it really is happening, should be happening every day where there are Christians. Churches should always be full of people singing and praying in tongues and working miracles. Instead of being excited about one little revival, we should be sobered by it. We should realize that if God manifests himself to thousands of people and no wave of conversions follows, we are close to the end, because it proves we have rejected him. We have rejected Yahwah, Yeshua, and the Holy Spirit. God has no one left to send.

Thank goodness the Holy Spirit didn’t come as a man. We would be trying to kill him.

There was an outpouring at Azusa street over a century ago, and it spread all over the world. That does not happen any more. People need to wake up and see the obvious.

I had a dream this morning, and I didn’t think it was related to the revival, but maybe it was.

It was Thanksgiving day. I was with my family, meaning my mother’s relatives. We were having dinner. At first, it was just the actual family, but as the dream progressed, something like 75 people appeared in the room.

My relatives were sitting at tables, and the food was on the tables. That’s not how you serve dinner to a big group. You put the food on tables, and you seat the people at other tables. That way, everyone can get to the food. In the dream, the food was in the middle of the tables where my relatives were sitting, so they made it hard for anyone else to get any.

They were hunched over their plates like hogs or dogs, shoveling the food in and thinking only of themselves. They looked straight down at their food. They didn’t talk. Most of my relatives are only interested in getting whatever they can for themselves, and I can’t think of anything much they have done for the poor, so this made sense to me. But I don’t think it was just about my relatives. I think it was about all the people who are supposedly my brothers and sisters in Christ.

I complained because they weren’t putting the food on tables where other people could get at it.

I decided to try to get something for myself. I saw a buffet table that had been set up, and a friendly bearded man in a chef’s toque was serving. He seemed to be Australian. He asked me if I wanted mashed potatoes. I wasn’t all that interested, but then I remembered that mashed potatoes were customary on Thanksgiving, so I said I wanted some. He gave me a huge plate with a giant mound of potatoes on it, and he hid big pieces of turkey in it. Entire legs.

While I was going around looking for other food, I must have put the plate down, because one of my relatives stole it.

Given the way the distribution of my grandparents’ wealth has gone, this is not surprising, either.

I saw some ladies who had sort of a booth where they were giving away candy. As I walked by, I grabbed three packages of peppermints without asking and ate one. I felt like I was stealing, but the candy was free.

I sat down next to my aunt. This is the lady who had a delusional fit the other day because I complained about the way she mishandles family property and money. She accused me of living alone in poverty, but a recent real estate transaction made it necessary for me to inform a title agent I was married, so I guess now she has to live with the knowledge that I have a wonderful young wife. And I am not poor.

Anyway, she looked up from the food and said, “Isn’t this wonderful?” I said it was not, and I pointed out the obvious problems. She got very angry. She said she should know better than to ask me or my cousin Russ about things because we were always so negative.

My aunt is like an Asian. Appearance is everything. Admiration is everything. The truth is a threat that has to be kept out.

Maybe the dream was about the stunted revivals we have now. People who are supposed to be brothers and sisters show up to get whatever they can from God, they take things other people are supposed to receive, they reject and abuse anyone who points out the truth, and the revivals die like young tumors eating big doses of chemotherapy drugs.

I felt like I was starving when I woke up. I felt exactly the way you would feel if you showed up for Thanksgiving dinner and found out your relatives ate or hid every last scrap of food.

I told Rhodah. She said I should get a big, fat McDonald’s breakfast. So I did!

I think the Australian guy and the candy lady were angels. God uses angels to give us way more than we need, and then people do their best to steal it.

All sorts of suppressive spirits have been after me since before I was born. Some–probably the most effective ones–worked through relatives. My sister used to torture me while I was lying in my crib. She didn’t want my parents to bring me home from the hospital. When we got older, and there were big meals at my grandparents’ house, she always tried to make me sit at the kids’ table. I would go in and shove a chair in with the adults and the rest of the older children. When I was in my forties, it still infuriated her whenever I rode in the front seat of a car! That’s how crazy she is.

We all have enemies, and we all have friends. Some are natural, and some are supernatural.

My sister ended up getting a lot of what she wanted me to have. She got disinherited. She got lung cancer. She lost her law license. She lost the house she lived in. She was convicted of a felony. She will never have a husband or a baby. No one, not even other people who are close to Satan, can stand her. She can’t have friends. Only temporary hosts.

There are people who can only be cursed, and there are people who can only be blessed. If you’re the first kind, and you try to harm the second kind, the curses go back to you, multiplied, and they turn out to be great blessings to the people you tried to hurt.

Jesus told us to be good to our enemies. He said we would pile burning coals on their heads. That’s because they can’t be blessed. Every blessing you try to send a person like that comes back to you, and it turns out to be a curse to them because of what they do with it.

You can see this principle in the instructions he gave the disciples. He said:

And into whatsoever house ye enter, first say, Peace be to this house.
And if the son of peace be there, your peace shall rest upon it: if not, it shall turn to you again.

“Peace” is a bad translation. It’s a general term referring to a state of blessing.

What happens to the man who doesn’t receive your blessings? Here is what Jesus said about cities that wouldn’t receive blessings:

And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet.
Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgment, than for that city.

He meant that. There will be punishment.

This is one reason it’s important to pray for your enemies. You’re really praying for yourself.

I guess I sound like I’m not in favor of revival. That’s not true. I’m not in favor of mistaking small, fleeting revivals for important movements that indicate the world is going to be saved. It is not. The Bible is very clear about this, and so is the Holy Spirit, who wrote the Bible.

And Rape

The run-up to the rapture is proceeding faster than I expected. I guess I’ll be saying that several times a year until Jesus calls us. No matter what I expect, I’m always getting surprises.

I took a quick look at Fox News today and learned the following fact: A SCHOOL DISTRICT IS NOW TEACHING CHILDREN HOW TO MAKE AND SEND CHILD PORNOGRAPHY.

I put that in capitals, figuring it was the one thing anyone glancing at my site really needed to read.

A parent named Jay McDonald, who is an actual male who never had to have breasts removed, stood at a school board meeting in Anchorage and read from a book called Let’s Talk About it — The Teen’s Guide to Sex, Relationships, and Being a Human.

Could any title be more asinine? Leftists who are obsessed with sexual aberration are now proclaiming themselves experts on relationships and being a human? Even if the authors are experts on sex, which is surely not true, no intelligent person would go to a self-anointed sex expert for relationship advice, and there is a lot more to life as a human being than sex.

McDonald had the right to read the material. I should point that out. He had been recognized by the board. He didn’t crash through the doors in a pickup with Confederate flags mounted on the bed.

The book tells kids the Internet is a safe place to meet other people in order to learn about sex, and it tells them how to send each other pornographic photos of themselves.

Here’s something he read: “There’s nothing wrong with enjoying some porn, it’s a fun sugary treat. When consumed right, porn can help you discover new aspects of your sexuality.”

Obviously, this is not a viewpoint a school should be presenting to anyone, let alone children. Most Americans, Christian or not, belong to religions which holds that pornography is evil and harmful. Schools should not be giving kids books that tell them, flat-out, that their religions are wrong.

On top of that, it’s bad advice, even for atheists. Pornography is a real problem. Many people who appear in pornography are poor and desperate. Many are addicts. A lot of pornography is produced by human traffickers. Pornography degrades women and encourages boys and men to think of them as objects, like back scratchers or massage chairs, that are supposed to be used for physical pleasure and then ignored. Pornography addicts people. There are many, many people in the US who are so addicted they end up seeking treatment, and this is a problem that afflicts atheists and pagans, not just members of mainstream religions.

Even if pornography were not harmful, it would be wrong to promote it to minors. That’s exactly what Anchorage schools are doing. What else are they promoting? Cigarettes? Liquor? I’ll bet they’re not encouraging kids to use firearms.

Here’s another horrifying passage:

A great place to research fantasies and kinks safely is on the internet. There’s tons of people and communities out there who share your interests and have all kinds of advice.

So children are supposed to join internet forums and chat rooms and talk to perverts. And it’s safe?

My last pastor is on a fun website for adults who like to share their sexual interests with kids. It’s called the FDLE Sexual Offender and Predator System.

As I told my wife today, if you want to rape and murder a little boy and bury his body in a field, the Internet is the customary place to start. It’s the best possible place to find victims. This is why we keep seeing stories about men who were convicted of crimes after Internet chats with policemen posing as children. I can’t believe I have to point this out. Hasn’t any one heard of To Catch a Predator?

If you want to rape children, and you don’t know how to use the Internet, what, exactly, are you supposed to do? Drive around in a van waving chocolate bars? That’s not how it’s done in 2023. It’s done through chats and forums.

“Kinks” are not harmless. They are mental illnesses which are often caused by demons. It’s not acceptable to promote them to children. Even if this were not the case, children should not be investigating them online with the help of adults. How can any school official not know this?

The book encourages kids to make child pornography and send it to other kids. So children should send other children material, which, if viewed by adults, would ground felony convictions. In its treatment of child pornography, it says, “So before you start sending your naughty masterpieces around the world, take some time to get friendly with photo editing, software and apps.” Don’t just make images people you know will keep and use to humiliate you forever; use technology to make sure you do a nice, professional job.

The school board illegally forced Mr. McDonald to stop speaking. To understand how insane that is, in your mind, project this event back to 1950 and imagine what would have happened. Anyone on the panel who tried to shut down a citizen exposing this book might have been beaten by the others. And that would probably have been a good thing.

The school board panel should have been outraged to learn that this book existed, let alone that they were providing it to children. They should have begged Mr. McDonald to forgive them. They should have pledged to remove every copy from their libraries, discard it, and give the same treatment to similar books. They should have promised to identify and fire every employee involved in approving the book and to provide their names to news outlets.

Evil can’t get much worse than this. In order to make things any worse, they would pretty much have to have classes where they put kids in front of computers and have them visit pervert forums.

So what else will God tolerate before he puts an end to this age and calls his children away? How much worse will he allow things to get before he gives up on evangelism and removes the Holy Spirit from the world? Not much worse, I hope. Humanity has proven conclusively that it will always reject God in the end. Before Jesus, men rejected Yahweh. Then men rejected Jesus. Jesus left and sent the Holy Spirit. Humanity saw signs and wonders. God gave us a big Holy Spirit revival during the last century. Humanity wasn’t interested. But mankind is very interested in sexual perversion, to the point where anyone who has a religious objection to advancing the cause of perversion risks being treated like a Nazi.

One of the strangest and most important things God has shown me is the importance of giving up on people. God has tremendous patience, and he expects us to have patience, too, but he also requires us to quit when the time comes. He gave up on the world and flooded it. He gave up on Sodom and Gomorrah and burned them. He gave up on the Canaanite cities and told the Hebrews to kill even the old people and babies. He gave up on the Jews and decided to kill them, but Moses interceded. About 2000 years ago, he gave up on the temple, Jerusalem, and the nation of Israel, at least for a time. God is not going to wrestle forever with a human race that spits on his gifts and abuses his children. He has proven, and stated, that his patience has limits. In both Testaments, he has commanded human beings not to go too far with patience.

My wife wants to have kids. Right out of the starting gate, we know we can’t send them to public school. In America. The nation that has done more evangelism than any other. How are we supposed to live in a world like this? If it’s like this for us, what will it be like for our children? Is there any hope they won’t go to hell? If they resist the world, is there any hope they won’t be treated like Jews under Hitler?

I hope God does whatever he has to do in order to prepare the two of us for the rapture, and I hope he comes as soon as possible. I don’t want to be here to witness the worst things of which the human animal is capable.

Next Up: Heavy Fake Belgian

I kegged my latest lager today. If I had to describe it, I’d say it’s an IPA made with lager yeast. I used a grain bill fit for an IPA and fermented it with lager yeast. This means I didn’t get the weird fruity flavors that make IPA what it is, and that sounds like a sacrifice, but it’s also nice to get the clean, unmolested flavor of a lager.

Is the lager any good? I’m not sure. I drank a glass because I’m impatient, and it seemed to me that it was too sweet and lacked the kind of aroma modern beers get from dry hopping, which is adding hops after brewing is over. I can’t be sure, though, because the beer still needs more carbonation. That will add carbonic acid, and that sharpens up the flavor. And lagers improve with age.

I fermented under pressure at about 66 degrees. Ordinarily, you would ferment a lager with no pressure down in the fifties, and after that, you would do various time-consuming things to perfect it. Pressure-fermenting allows brewers to create lagers fast, at relatively high temperatures, but I don’t know whether it completely does away with the need for aging. There isn’t that much information available for homebrewers yet.

The glass I drank was okay, but it needed to be colder and fizzier.

I transferred the lager from the fermenter to the keg under pressure. I cleaned a keg and hooked it up to the fermenter. I shot a lot of CO2 into the keg to reduce the O2 content. I then used my CO2 tank to pump the lager directly into the keg, with the keg and fermenter closed to the atmosphere. After that, I burped some of the gas out of the keg to reduce the CO2 further.

To really do it right, you fill the keg with sanitizer and water and use CO2 to pump it out, but I didn’t think that was necessary. That’s overkill. When you put 5 gallons of liquid into a Corny keg, you leave very little room for gas, and if you’ve already shot a fair amount of CO2 into it, you’re probably dealing with one gallon of gas which is mostly CO2.

I now have one incredible stout, a lager which will be, at least, okay, and a wheat beer which is drinkable. I had to fiddle with my draft setup a lot because it’s new, and I may have tainted the wheat beer with some kind of lactobacillus or something. It’s pretty sour, but not so sour it’s useless.

I have a wheat beer and an ale fermenting, and at least one will be ready to keg in a few days.

I need inventory. If you only have one keg of beer to drink from, you will empty it faster than you think. If you have 5 kegs, you will empty them slowly, and you will be able to maintain a variety of beers.

My stout is so wonderful, I’m afraid I’ll blow through it. I was so concerned, I ordered more ingredients yesterday, and they will be here tomorrow. I can’t even explain how good it is. I now think stout is my favorite beer. Oatmeal stout, which is what I made. Imperial stout. Wonderful stuff. Stout is full of sweet, sour, bitter, and full of flavors which have no right to be there. How can a beer taste like caramel, coffee, and chocolate when none of those things are in it?

I still can’t dispense 5 beers via mounted faucets in the keezer. I need four fittings to connect two more kegs to faucets, and the Ebay seller I used is taking forever. Once these parts arrive, I’ll be all set.

Every time I pour my first beer of the day, I raise it and thank Jesus for coming for us. I tell him I celebrate his return.

It’s too bad I have the tolerance of a medium-sized ant. Three beers, and my day of drinking is done. Things were very different when I was young, but of course, I was also an idiot, so there was a tradeoff.

Because I’m very interested in getting my beer endeavors working, I drink beer nearly every day, and I have realized it impacts my life. I’m not getting in the car if I’ve had more than one beer, so now I have to plan my errands and my drinking. Sometimes I ask myself what will happen if I really need to go somewhere and I’ve had two beers. I have to think ahead.

It looks like coronavirus is behind me, at least for the next few months. I think I can detect a tiny vestige of my symptoms, but it’s basically over. Looks like I’m not yet one of the cursed few who get the virus and die in two weeks.

I spend more and more time with God now. I see people I pray for and talk to doing better and better. Things are going extremely well. The revelation I got about closeness with God is paying off. It’s beautiful.

I have a friend whose wife is immature and malignant. She has put him through terrible suffering for 15 years. We pray for him all the time. She finally blew up and showed what she really was. She ran around with some man. She told my friend she would take his kids. She even beat herself up and told the police my friend did it, and she was dumb enough to do it in front of the children. She went on the web and researched poisons, and she left her handwritten notes where my friend could photograph them.

I keep sharing revelation with my friend, and he puts it to work. God has changed his mindset and set him free. The wife has done things so stupid, they pretty much assure he will get the kids and the house.

There used to be turmoil in his home. That was before she left. Now when I call, the kids are asking him what he wants for dinner. They’ve cleaned the house. They pray together every day. There is peace. They want him to get custody. He sent me a new family photo without the wife, and it shocked me. They seem to glow.

Things will keep getting better and better for people who stay close to God. Things will get worse for the rest. The world is being centrifuged. From my perspective, it’s beautiful. It looks different to people on the other side.

Get close to God. Let him fill you. Be like the ark of the covenant. Carry him with you everywhere you go. It will work. It’s his plan.

Goodbye Guinness

Yesterday, my new stout was finally ready to drink.

I kegged it a few days ago, but I made a mistake and confused two gas hoses, and I ended up pumping it full of CO2 when I thought I was hooking up beer gas, which is a nitrogren/CO2 mix. As a result of my mistake, I kept pouring glasses of foam, and when the foam subsided, the beer was flat. It was nasty. I have been letting the keg sit without pressure so CO2 would come out of it, and it has been working. Last night I poured beer I could drink.

It’s very sad. I guess I lost half a gallon of beer. But I’m still learning how to set up the system, and losses are unavoidable.

When I started drinking the stout, I thought it needed more alcohol, and it seemed too thick. As the carbonation balance improved, I realized there was nothing wrong with it at all. It was astonishing. For me, a two-beer day is a big deal, but I drank 4 glasses of stout, and I wished I could have kept going. It was mesmerizing.

I have several cold cans of Guinness pub draught stout, and I feel like pouring them out. I can’t drink that stuff any more. I used to think Guiness was wonderful, but comparing it to my stout is like comparing cube steak to a prime rib eye.

Guiness is a very light beer. It’s extremely dry. It has no body. It has very little alcohol. It’s low in calories. The aroma is lacking. The head is weak. It’s a very simple product.

It seems fantastic if Budweiser is what you’re used to, but the truth is that it’s just a cheaply made working man’s beer. A good product, but not something you can set beside a quality homebrew.

My stout tastes like coffee, dark chocolate, licorice, and dried fruit. It has a little sweetness, but not too much. It has a lot of body. The head looks like you could take it out and make couch cushions out of it. It’s not strong, but when you drink it, you can tell it’s beer. Guiness comes in at a little over 4% ABV, so it’s barely beer.

I can understand why a lot of old beers are weak. Beer used to be used like water. For example, British sailors drank a gallon of beer per day, at work. Moving a beer from 4.5% ABV to a respectable 6% would increase alcohol intake by a third. In the old days, people drank beer to get drunk, but they also drank it to stay hydrated, so I suppose weak beer was a necessity.

These days, beers fall into two categories: session beers and everything else. A session beer is a beer you can drink slowly all day. Guinness is a session beer. My stout is also a session beer, but it’s less sessiony than Guinness.

Budweiser has a reputation for weakness, but its alcohol level is around 5.5%, so it’s considerably stronger than Guinness. What’s really weak is the taste. Like carbonated dishwater.

My stout can be drunk liberally, but it would be hard to make myself do it. It’s too good. When I bring it up to my face, I have to stop and smell it. I move the glass from one nostril to the other and think about what I’m taking in. Then I take one mouthful and hold it briefly, experiencing the initial sourness, bitterness, and sweetness. Then I swallow, and all the flavors rise up in my head. After that, the beer seems to stick to my teeth. It makes my teeth taste good.

It reminds me a lot of Old Rasputin imperial stout, a much stronger beer with a more powerful flavor. It’s like Rasputin had a little brother. Old Rasputin is breathtaking.

In short, my stout is a success. I think I’ll still fool with it, though. I believe I’ll make a batch with a different finishing hop. The current version uses Kent Goldings, which are very good British hops. I think I’ll bitter with Kent Goldings and finish with Crystal, an American hop derived from European noble hops used in things like German lager. Crystal tastes like spices.

I’m a hack brewer, so when I drink my stout, I have to wonder what better brewers are making. I would think there must be some incredible stout out there in garages and game rooms.

I’m not sure, though, because I know most people can’t cook. Brewing is a form of cooking. If the ability to make and recognize good beer were common, Coors would have gone bankrupt decades ago.

It seems like a lot of new brewers are falling for gimmicks. When I got back into brewing, I was happy to see that a local grocery had a ton of different beers, but when I started looking for things I would actually want, I saw there weren’t many. A lot of kids are starting breweries and making ridiculous things. Strawberry cheesecake stout. Gluten-free hibiscus maple syrup IPA. Okay, these are slight exaggerations. But you get the idea. It’s like they’re trying to out-weird each other, and they are piling on flavoring ingredients instead of learning how to get flavor and aroma from grain, yeast, and hops. You can do beers that vary a great deal without resorting to dumping things like lactose and coffee into your wort.

Lactose beer is disgusting. Trust me. If you haven’t acquired a taste for actual beer, you may love milk stout, but if your palate is developed, you’ll be amazed that anyone would drink it.

Today I’ll try to make my wheat beer again. I think the first batch is infected. It tastes very bitter. I kept moving things around and changing things after it was kegged. I was trying to get the draft system right. I may have introduced bacteria or wild yeast.

I am now up to three freezers. A serving keezer, an upright fermenting freezer, and a new chest freezer for fermenting and storage. Because beers vary a lot in their temperature and fermentation-time requirements, one fermentation freezer is not enough. I could tie it up for weeks with one beer, and during that time, nothing else could go forward. If I have two freezers, I’ll always be able to ferment at least two beers at once and store maybe two below room temperature.

It sounds extreme, but I’m not so poor I can’t afford cheap freezers, and doing this wrong will take half the pleasure out of it.

I made a light lager two days ago. I thought I was making wheat beer, but I got the bags mixed up. I was going to pressure-ferment the lager, which speeds things up, but my pressure fermenter already has a lager in it, so I’m using a regular fermenter at 66°. The yeast I’m using will tolerate that temperature.

I’ll make the wheat beer and put it in the new freezer with the lager.

The new lager is interesting. I created it years ago to see if I could win over a Bud addict. It has corn in it to make it taste more American, and I originally used what is believed to be Budweiser’s yeast. Bud has a green apple flavor which may be from the yeast. A chemical byproduct called acetaldehyde can cause it. Anyway, the beer is light and easy to drink. I love it. The guy I created it for had no interest, though.

Bad Priorities Destroy People

My site had some problems over the last couple of days. The comment page refused to load, and then the site started redirecting to the “About” page. I used chat to get support from my hosting company, but they were not helpful. They kept asking the same questions over and over, and it wasn’t until after I contacted them that the site started redirecting, making things worse than they already were.

The person I chatted with seemed offended when I pointed obvious things out, and he or she told me they were not responsible for fixing problems like the one I had. I was told they were doing me a favor by even trying. Of course, this is not true. If I set WordPress up wrong, that’s my problem, but I didn’t do that. Something had to go wrong with the data in the server, and that’s on them. Something must have been corrupted, and finding and fixing corrupted data is 100% their job. They have access to server backups, and the whole purpose is to recover data. I can’t do that as far as I know.

Anyway, I was disconnected from the person I chatted with, and I think he or she hung up on me.

So why would there be a server problem?

Most likely, it was one of those inexplicable things that happen to computers. A few electrons go to the wrong places, and errors pop up. Another possibility: a hacker figured out my password and went in and changed a few things to be an annoyance. Third possibility: a company employee with delusions about sex roles and Christianity didn’t like things I was writing.

I think it would be pretty hard for a hacker to get my password, but I know host company employees can mess with files without my password because I can also do it. I doubt they can create a new WordPress account, because that requires a password, and anyway, I would see it.

Whatever the explanation is, the whole thing is trivial, and it was a helpful taste of the future, when Christians will be banned from the web. If this blog vanished for good right now, I would not despair or threaten to sue people or call the FBI. I like blogging, but it’s not my life. I don’t make money from it. It serves no essential purpose. It would bother me if my data were destroyed, but I would be over it in an hour or so.

It’s not like we would be losing the works of Chopin.

I thought I should write about it, because ths blog still gets a surprising amount of traffic. How much of the traffic is human, I can’t say, but last time I looked, it was something like 1500 per day. Someone out there will be interested in what’s happening.

I always wonder what people thought when I vanished from Facebook. I announced it in advance, but I was the kind of person Facebook shadow-banned, so who knows if people saw it? I’ll bet a number of people thought I blocked them and still wonder why. You can’t shadow-ban a blog, so whoever looks at my blog regularly will read what I’m writing now and know I didn’t pull the plug.

Enough of that. There are more important things to write about.

I get a lot of revelation, and there is no way I can convey it all on a blog. If you really want to understand what’s going on in the universe, you have to hear from God directly. It’s too complicated and interwoven for one person to explain to another. I can relay bits and pieces, but the whole picture is multidimensional and can’t be transmitted well using a one-bit connection.

Or is it two bits? Is one wire a one-bit system because only one piece of information can be carried at a time, or is it two bits because it can send both 1’s and 0’s? I don’t know anything about computers. Anyway, writing comes out one character at a time, and nobody can read multiple sentences at once.

Yesterday, I really, really heard from God.

I was in my car, which is something I should write about. I had a huge music collection, and I used to listen to secular music in the car. Then I got to where I only wanted to hear certain Christian artists. Then I got to the point where I only wanted to hear the Bible. Now, I turn the Bible off because it drowns God out. I supposed this is how things are supposed to work as a person gets closer to God.

I’ll tell you some of the things I heard.

First, God is very angry at all the people who have abused me, and there are a lot of them. I don’t think about it a lot, because my life is very pleasant anyway, but he does. My life is better than the lives of all the people I know of who have mistreated me, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t do harm or that my life should not have been better.

People have cheated me out of many opportunities. They have lied about me. They have stolen from me. They have abused me verbally. They stabbed me in the back behind closed doors and kept it quiet, thinking they had gotten over on me for good. They set me back in life. My wife is in the same boat. She’s an orphan, and she literally had a wicked stepmother.

People who are stupid enough to participate in the occult have cursed both of us. I guess I should mention them. It’s worse for Rhodah, who lives in a country where cursing people is more popular than video games.

If you’re a Zambian, as soon as anything good happens to you, at least one of your relatives will put a curse on you. It’s expected, like sending a high school graduate a nice card.

When you curse someone God favors, the curse comes back to you, but when it returns, it’s a lot bigger than it was when you sent it, and you can’t do anything to defend yourself. Witches and various types of pagan nuts don’t believe this, so they curse themselves and their families all day, thinking they’re hurting people God loves. It’s very silly.

Think of Haman. He tried to kill the Jews and destroy his rival Mordecai, but Mordecai got to stand by and watch as Haman and his 10 sons dangled choking on ropes attached to the gallows Haman had built for Mordecai. This is a picture of what happens to people who have joined the supernatural underclass and decide to attach the nobility. The people God favors are the nobility.

To get back to my situation, I got an overpowering conviction that God was going to bless Rhodah and me very, very powerfully not just because he loves us, but to punish the people who have mistreated us. To an abuser, few punishments are worse than watching a victim succeed. It absolutely kills them.

I also learned about the rapture.

The rapture will be a gathering of wedding guests. Oddly, the guests will also be the bride, but that’s how it works. So what happens when you marry a woman? Do you burst through her front door unannounced and yell, “I just bought a tux! Let’s get married!”?

No. She would murder you. You get to know each other. You become engaged. You prepare yourself financially. You get your house ready. The bride, in all likelihood, tries to lose 25 pounds. You prepare for the ceremony. You plan a honeymoon. By the time the wedding rolls around, you and the bride are ready, if you’re doing it right.

When it comes to the wedding of Christ, it’s a little different, because he’s marrying a bunch of people who started out as dirty, crooked peasants. We have to be cleaned up a lot. He’s not going to drop out of the clouds and snatch Christians off prostitutes or out of crack houses. He’ll prepare us. The word says the bride will be without spot, blemish, or wrinkle, and those things appear to be people.

We are always in danger in this corrupting world, and if God leaves us here long enough and doesn’t step in frequently, many or all of us will backslide and go to hell. Human beings have peaks and troughs in their walks with God, like athletes who train for events and then eat cheeseburgers during their down time. God is monitoring our peaks and troughs, and he will time things so we will be on peaks when the rapture comes. I’m only referring to Christians who will make it. Most will be left here to suffer.

Three people have been raptured. We should look at them and ask ourselves why we would be raptured if we’re not like them. Enoch, Elijah, and Jesus walked with God. The Bible literally says Enoch walked with God, and then he was not. Elijah was a loner; he complained to God about it. Jesus was constantly wandering off to be with God, abandoning even the disciples. If you’re not walking with God before the rapture, why would you expect to be taken? It’s not speed dating. He’s going to take people he knows. Are you better than Enoch and Elijah?

There isn’t going to be any worldwide revival. Christians who think there will be don’t understand how the world works. We already had our big revivals. Generally, the world has chosen Satan over Jesus, and there is nothing God can do, because he will not interfere with free will.

I had a dream last night. I was invited to an event thrown by The Last Reformation, a pretty good charismatic ministry. They work miracles, prophesy, and baptize people with the Holy Spirit. They think they’re changing the world, though, and that isn’t true.

I was given a hand-drawn map. I was supposed to drive down a residential street, make a turn, and park by a house where people were meeting. A lot of people were supposed to be there.

When I got there, there was no house. There was a big building containing warehouse condos. They faced inward, opening onto an indoor hallway. It was a winding hallway just wide enough for a car. I got out and pushed my car up the hallway.

I ran into Torben Sondergaard, the imprisoned leader of TLR, and his wife. There were only a couple of other people there. The warehouses were empty.

I woke up, and later on, I dreamed I went to a similar building where my late father owned warehouses. This building doesn’t actually exist. My dad was there, working hard to get the warehouses in shape for new tenants. He was so tired, he was stumbling. He limped. He was sweating. I was afraid he would die if he didn’t quit. He said the people who built the warehouse had covered up a lot of problems. All I saw was a need for some paint, which I could have applied, personally, in a short time.

I marveled at the size of the warehouses and asked what they were going to rent for. He said they would go for around $4000 each. I was happy. I had this idea that 10% would go to me.

I believe the empty warehouses show what has happened to the church.

During the last century, pretty good evangelists filled stadiums and expensive venues. When they came to town, newspapers announced it without being paid, and people showed up to get help. It’s not like that now. A Satanic evangelist like Joel Osteen can fill a stadium, but Torben Sondergaard visits churches that meet in tiny warehouses. Warehouses are pretty much standard for serious charismatic churches now. It’s an insult to God. Catholics can teach demonic doctrine, own perhaps trillions of dollars’ worth of real estate, and build huge, grotesque churches, but a man who casts out demons will probably have to rent, not own, a warehouse surrounded by car repair joints and little businesses that fulfill Amazon and Ebay orders.

My dad represented misguided preachers who have great power. They work hard in the flesh to build churches, but very little comes of it. They are so busy wasting time, they don’t spend much time with God, and that destroys their effectiveness.

God also showed me that the most important thing for me to do was to spend time with him. It’s more important than going to church, being with Rhodah, helping the poor, or any other aspect of Christianity.

Your main job as a Christian is to see to it you hold onto your own salvation and continue to be improved by God. If you fail, nothing you have ever done for anyone else will matter. In order to fulfill your main task, you have to avoid becoming busy with other things.

There are Christians out there who are proud of themselves because they put in long days doing things for churches and people. They work so much they have no time to spend with God, and they think he will be happy about it. They’re wrong. The main thing he wants is you, not your ridiculous works.

He gave us Mary and Martha to show how he feels. Jesus was in their house, and Martha was serving people and cooking and cleaning and so on. Mary abandoned her, let her do all the work, and sat at the feet of Jesus. When Martha accused her to Jesus, he told her Mary was doing a better thing than she was.

It was better for Mary to sit next to Jesus and interact with him, while Martha worked like a slave, than it was for Martha to do the work of two people in order to look after a gathering of believers.

Many times, God has said, “Stay close to me and enjoy my love and my favor,” and I have asked him to help me do it. He’s doing it now. By turning off the car stereo, I’m getting closer, and I’m hearing more from him.

Jesus isn’t going to have an arranged marriage where he meets the bride for the first time and hopes for the best. Read the Song of Solomon. He will be marrying a bride he already knows very well, whose heart is aligned with his.

Revival is not coming. Not in any grand way. A few people here and there will be saved. The Last Reformation will not grow. Not unless they abandon their principles and whore out. Men who heal incurable diseases on Youtube will not get large followings. Things will get worse, because people’s hearts have gotten too hard for God to break.

That relates to another thing God showed me.

A tribulum is a board with nails driven into it. Sort of resembles a cross, now that I think about it, but that’s a digression. Tribulums were used to remove the husks from very hard grain. A man would stand on the tribulum, and an animal would drag him around over grain spread on a rock. Sort of like the rock the sower threw grain on, but that’s another digression.

The nails protruded from the bottom of the board, and as they ran over the grain, they would break the husk. Tribulation was only necessary for very hard grain. Other grain came out of its husk with less persuasion.

The tribulation will be God, using extremely harsh means to harvest a few of the extremely stubborn people who have not yielded to nicer means of persuasion. Some people are easy to bring to God. Others have to feel the flames charring their feet.

People who have already yielded to God will be raptured before the tribulation, because tormenting them would serve no purpose, and because God could not do it if they were on the earth to pray for it to stop.

How do you know it’s time to get the tribulum out? You get it out when only the hard grain is left. When using other means fails to produce results, you resort to tribulation.

God showed me this: we are now in a time where almost all the grain is hard. Even the little warehouses aren’t very full. God has sent us preacher after preacher. He has performed sign after sign, and we have ridiculed and rejected the people who were used to perform the signs. The soft approach has been exhausted, so the tribulation is about to start, for man’s own good.

The tribulation will be the last chance for the people of this age. Anyone who won’t listen when the world is burning up and the trees and the fish are dead will go to hell, and it will be the right place for them, because there is no reaching them.

Yesterday I heard Jeremiah in the car. All the bigwigs and clergymen in Israel hated him. They called for his death because he prophesied against Israel. They didn’t say he lied, which is funny. They said he prophesied. Maybe they knew, or at least suspected, he was right. Maybe they were willing to risk killing a man for repeating a message God had ordered him to give. No wonder God stopped sending the Jews prophets for 400 years. He had to be tired of watching them torment and kill them.

I can relate to Jeremiah. Every preacher and church rejects me sooner or later. They’re with me up to a certain point, and then they turn on me when I set God above them and their imaginative, self-serving doctrine. I could have been very, very helpful to the people at the churches I belonged to, but Christians drove me out. They do it to everyone who speaks the truth.

Christians love to look down on the Jews and talk about how stupid they were for rejecting Jesus, but we do the same thing every day. We torment and exclude everyone who goes a little too far in telling us what Jesus is saying.

If Jesus came back today under a different name, Christians would kill him as soon as possible. They hate being told this, but it’s true.

We would celebrate his death. We would say, “God really showed HIM.” We would post memes showing his dead body, taunting him and anyone who believed him.

Most Christians, including charismatics, hate the doctrine of Jesus.

If you think I’m wrong, read the Revelation and see what people will do to the two witnesses he sends. I’m sure nominal Christians will be among those who throw parties.

If you’re not rejected by the world and the church, which is really just part of the world, you’re doing something wrong. I didn’t say that. Jesus did. Look it up.

One of these days, this blog will be gone for good, because persecution will increase, and whoever takes it down will smirk, thinking I’m washed up. In reality, he will be driving nails through his own hands and feet. And things will keep going better and better for me.

Finally

This is a milestone. I finally tested positive for covid. A drugstore test shows the dreaded pink line. If I don’t have the rona, I must be pregnant.

I can’t be bothered typing “COVID-19.” I’m even getting too lazy to type “coronavirus.” Covid, covid, covid. This term is not case-sensitive any more.

Why do I say “finally”? Because I’ve had pretty much the same symptoms about 4 times, and the tests, including one PCR, always came out negative. The tests are lame. I’m pretty sure I had the virus.

I had covid in the US in 2020. I had it in Egypt in 2021. I had it in Turkey in 2021. I just had it here again. I think I had it one more time here, but I can’t remember. Maybe not. Maybe I’m remembering testing myself here after flying home from another country where a PCR test failed me.

So why do have I tested negative over and over? I follow the directions on the home tests, and you can’t screw up a PCR.

I’m thrilled I tested positive, because it shows I’m not one of those people who get covid one day and have to be flown to the hospital the next. Is this true of every strain or just this one? My guess: a whole bunch of strains. I’ve been sick several times, several different strains have been running around when I’ve been ill, and not one strain, including the one that got me when I was unvaccinated, amounted to anything. It is a virtual certainty that I’ve had whatever was around in 2020, plus Delta and Omicron.

So does this mean there is no strain that can get me? I would guess it means there is no strain YET that can get me, but covid changes. Who knows what the next variant will be like?

The virus can change, and I suppose I can, too. Covid really nails the very elderly, and presumably, many of these same people would have been fine had they gotten sick decades earlier.

Am I going to keep getting more and more severe cases as I get older? If not, will vaccines and earlier bouts build me up so I’m less vulnerable than old people who got sick during the first two years? No idea. I don’t know, and neither do the best scientists on Earth.

One thing seems to be clear, and I know people will hate reading it. Ivermectin seems to help.

When I have taken ivermectin as soon as I realized I was sick, my symptoms have improved a lot or disappeared within a few hours. When I’ve taken it after letting more time go by, when the symptoms have become more severe, my symptoms have changed less, but still significantly.

It’s not the placebo effect. The placebo effect doesn’t make snot stop coming out of your nose, break a fever, or make your throat feel better. It may be that my body just happened to bounce back after I took ivermectin, and maybe ivermectin did nothing at all, but the improvement wasn’t my imagination.

Don’t tell me about studies “proving” ivermectin doesn’t help. If you think that ever happened, you have a very shallow understanding of studies, statistics, word games, and politics. Doctors are generally bad scientists, and they’re the ones who do most studies. They ask the wrong questions. They choose the wrong subjects. They take money from entities that have an interest in cooking the results. They misinterpret the data. Their entire profession leans left, hard. Doctors have done some truly stupid studies over the years, and they have clung to them until they almost had to be beaten to get them to let go. Virtually no one who runs around claiming studies proved ivermectin has any idea what questions were asked, what kind of subjects were chosen, who paid for the studies, or what the raw data looked like. Give me a few million dollars, and I’ll do a study and prove dogs believe in Santa.

I don’t claim ivermectin helps. Maybe it doesn’t. I know what happened to me repeatedly when I took it, and that’s good enough. Experience is a good enough teacher in perhaps 99 out of 100 cases in a typical person’s life. You shouldn’t ignore it just because it involves health.

I remember being given an antibiotic called Levaquin. Every time I tried to sleep, I felt like I was in hell as soon as my head hit the pillow. I was instantly in a place of torment and screaming. Amazing nightmares. Nobody had to do a study to tell me to quit using it. I had a similar problem with hibiscus tea. Glad I quit taking Levaquin, because the same establishment that did studies proving it was safe later concluded it could cause permanent tendon damage.

My mother refused to take thalidomide when she was pregnant with me. Kind of glad she didn’t read the studies saying it was fine.

I think Rhodah had covid in Singapore. Snot, fatigue, and a bad headache. Didn’t want to get out of bed. I slept right next to her and never caught it. Then I came back here and lived like a hermit. Got covid anyway. She didn’t catch it when I had it in Egypt and Turkey.

Her version of covid was very minor, like mine. She didn’t want to get out of bed, but she was certainly able to. On her worst day, we walked around town and did things.

I’m overjoyed to have proof I had covid, because as long as you don’t know you’ve had it, you wonder how it will affect you. I’ve always hoped to test positive except when it endangered my ability to fly.

I have probably flown with covid. Oh, well. That’s on the governments who make the rules and the people who give the tests. I answered every question and did as I was told. I played their game and didn’t take it upon myself to add new rules. I gave them some credit for knowing what they were doing.

I never flew with symptoms. That much, I can say for sure.

So now what do I do? Hide in a hole and have people bring me food?

The web says people are generally no longer contagious after 10 days. I had a fever on January 29. When I got the fever, I realized I had felt funny for at least two days, pushing me back to January 27. That makes this day 13. Guess I won’t be eating Papa John’s.

I have been out several times. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that. I didn’t know what I had, though, and as I have said, I had had the same symptoms before, along with at least 5 negative test results.

I may not have covid now. The tests are not very reliable.

Here is good news: my inability to taste beer is almost completely gone. Maybe it is completely gone. I had to blow my nose earlier today, and I don’t feel totally right, but my nose works, and beer no longer tastes like seltzer with hops.

I don’t know what to say about the many, many people who started having symptoms, hoped they wouldn’t get really sick, and then went to the hospital or died. It has to be terrible, slowly realizing you’re one of the cursed ones. If you’re not fat, sick, or old, you’re very unlikely to get sick, but if you’re in the high-risk group, you have no idea whether you’re facing a cold, a couple of amputations, or death. You just have to wait and find out.

This illness is taking a long time, but on the other hand, it has amounted to nothing. For the first two days or so, I just felt like something wasn’t right. I wondered if I was dehydrated from drinking beer. Then I had chills for one night, and I actually enjoyed them. Then the fever broke, I had a very mild cold and a slight cough, and from time to time I coughed something unpleasant up while I was trying to talk. For one day, I could not smell anything at all, and then my sense of smell started coming back.

There were a couple of afternoons when I very suddenly felt like I had to go to bed right away because staying awake took a lot of effort.

I feel like Thucydides describing the plague, but my story is dull compared to his.

When I was in Egypt, feeling just like this only a little worse, I walked around all day on cloudless 114-degree summer days, looking at pyramids and temples. Rhodah could not keep up. I could do it right now.

God has been extremely good to me, as always.

Night before last, I had a dream. I was in bed, and a little transparent spirit was on my chest. It was about like a terrier. I couldn’t see the shape of it clearly, but it acted like a terrier trying to maul me. I felt nothing at all, and I kept telling it I spoke failure to it in the name of Jesus Christ. It didn’t run off, but it didn’t accomplish anything, either. I looked beside the bed, at the baseboard, and I saw big creatures like daddy longlegs, also transparent. They stood about 6 inches tall. They seemed confused. They were wobbling around, trying to walk. I hated them. I hit them with a gun and made them explode.

My experience with covid has been a lot like the dream. Harassment that hasn’t harmed me at all.

I hate to think about what I deserve. Different story.

In other news, the stout I kegged is finally showing signs of carbonation. I put it on 20 psi of CO2, and that was day before yesterday. That’s a lot. Stout is supposed to require only a tiny amount of carbonation, and I was warned to be careful, but it took maybe 36 hours before I got enough foam to feel like I could remove the CO2 and hook up the beer gas.

The stout tastes almost exactly like Old Rasputin imperial stout, except it contains a lot less alcohol. Except for the differences in ABV and intensity of flavor, these beers taste the same to me. I can’t complain about that, because Old Rasputin is the best factory beer I’ve ever had. I set out to brew something slightly dryer, though.

This beer may still have some fermenting to do, so maybe all is well. Past versions have dried out with time.

MORE

Funny; my comments quit working just as I tried to answer a question about ivermectin. Suspicious, but I suppose the leftist nuts who are killing freedom of expression have better things to do than interfere with my blog.

Anyway, here is the answer I was going to give:

I think I went with the dose the Indians claimed to get good results with. Twelve mg per day, I believe. Unless it was mcg. Anyway, it worked out to be what a horse takes for worms, corrected for my weight.

Not recommending ivermectin for anyone but myself. For all I know, you will die hideously.

Plus Hard Times for the Venereal Girl

The news makes me hope God pulls the plug on this planet quickly. What we are going through is too much, and it’s going to get worse.

I guess everyone knows about the Grammy awards. They’re like Oscars for musicians. The Grammys have a history of producing disgusting spectacles that insult God. In 2015, aging songstress Madonna sang and danced amid a throng of shirtless homosexuals made up to look like demons. Their costumes included fake horns. They worshiped her. In 2017, Beyonce did a ridiculous number in which she and other women had halos appear around their heads.

Now the Grammy people have outdone themselves. We were just subjected to an act featuring an obese homosexual dressed as Satan, dancing with another homosexual who had himself castrated and claims to be a woman. The one dressed as Satan is Sam Smith, the man who made people gag by singing a Bond movie theme song. Bond title sequences have historically featured songs performed by women, accompanied by lewd dance routines performed by dancers shown in silhouette. The other man in the act is Kim Petras, a German whose parents let a doctor castrate him when he was a minor.

A few years ago, no one disputed the fact that the age of castrati was over. Now it’s back. We used to look back on it in horror and disbelief. Things have really changed. In 2010, people generally agreed that castrating minors was barbaric. In 2023, people who object are considered barbarians.

Ever wonder who the greatest soprano of all time was? It wasn’t Beverly Sills or Kiri Te Kanawa or Leontyne Price. The greatest sopranos were men. As late as the 1800’s, greedy parents were having their sons castrated so they could become singers. Men, even eunuchs, have a stronger vocal apparatus than women. They’re a lot like the men who pretend to be women in order to win athletic contests.

Kim Petras looks like a woman if you don’t stare too close, but he’s a castrato.

It’s interesting how men are replacing women. Trannies are better athletes. Castrated ones have the potential to sing better. They are now taking over women’s role in feminism. It seems like we are constantly hearing from men who feel their mental aberrations and surgical successes entitle them to speak for actual women born with ovaries. The other day, one told the female author J.K. Rowling he was more of a woman than she would ever be, and people, including women, applauded him.

The Grammy performance was done by two men. If there were any women on the stage, and that would be hard to prove these days, they were relegated to supporting roles. Hollywood’s new take on barefoot and pregnant.

Smith and Petras sang a song with an extremely appropriate title: “Unholy.” I read the lyrics, and they are close to gibberish. Basically, it’s about people fornicating. That much I could figure out. It looks like it’s about a married man who has sex with female strippers or maybe other men who just claim to be female.

By “married man,” I mean a man who is actually married, not a man who pretends he’s married to another man.
A man who is married to a woman. Who was born with ovaries. An actual woman.

Here is what lyrics look like when intelligent people with talent write them:

And now the purple dusk of twilight time
Steals across the meadows of my heart
High up in the sky the little stars climb
Always reminding me that we’re apart
You wander down the lane and far away
Leaving me a song that will not die
Love is now the stardust of yesterday
The music of the years gone by
Sometimes I wonder how I spend
The lonely night
Dreaming of a song
The melody haunts my reverie
And I am once again with you

Here’s a little bit of “Unholy”:

Mummy don’t know daddy’s getting hot
At the body shop, doing something unholy
He’s sat back while she’s dropping it, she be popping it
Yeah, she put it down slowly
Oh-ee-oh-ee-oh, he left his kids at
Ho-ee-oh-ee-ome, so he can get that
Mummy don’t know daddy’s getting hot
At the body shop, doing something unholy (woo)

See if you can see the contrast.

People think Christians are crazy for saying Satan is real and that he is taking over the world. Okay; let’s try to imagine what he might do if he were in charge.

How about having two homosexuals (including a transvestite castrato) go on an award ceremony televised globally, dress like Satan and a damned soul, dance on a set designed to look like hell, and sing about a husband who has sex with strippers?

If what we’re seeing now doesn’t look like Satan’s work to you, what will?

It’s funny how women don’t see the threat feminized men pose. Women do more to promote them than anyone, but these men are replacing them. Gays are envious of women. They resent them and want to take their places. They are moving into fields women used to dominate. They are shaming women who disagree with them. They are taking achievements and income away from women.

Don’t be mad, ladies, but men are just plain better at a lot of things. It becomes more noticeable when they decide they’re women and compete with women.

I think the world is finished. Revival is going nowhere. Churches are drying up or endorsing perversion. Clergymen are being fired for refusing to endorse perversion. Imagine that happening in the time of David. What would David have done if the chief priest had expelled someone for not endorsing queer theory? What would Paul have done if the church of Philadelphia had insisted on ordaining homosexuals?

The rapture can’t come soon enough for me. What are God’s children doing here? Not increasing their numbers. That’s obvious. More of us are falling away than receiving salvation. The kingdom is running at a loss. At least it looks that way. I can’t really know.

Today I had what I think is a revelation: while the kingdom of God is about love, and while God only leaves us in the world to reach others, your primary job is to look out for yourself and make sure you don’t go to hell. It does you no good to serve God all your life if you end up in the lake of fire. There will be no reward while you’re burning and screaming. You won’t be comforted by the thought that it was all worth it because you helped other people avoid the flames. Your consciousness is all you have, and if it’s in hell, what happens in heaven is of no importance at all.

I’ll be honest. I would rather see everyone I have ever known go to hell than go myself. Everyone who has ever been born, for that matter. That’s just common sense. I might be willing to die for someone, but I would have to be nuts to choose to burn for eternity.

The longer we stay here, the more of us will quit. Temptation is going to get worse and worse, and many of us will fall. The salvation of a few more souls does not seem worth the loss of so many people who have already been saved.

We have become such pigs. It’s astonishing. We barely notice blasphemy and obscenity that would have caused riots 60 years ago. We approve of these things. We celebrate them. We curse people who warn us about them.

Why hasn’t God destroyed us already?

Well, he has. In Noah’s time. But why has he let the current age continue so long? His patience is astounding.

Even if I were not a Christian, I would not want to live in this world any more. There is no place for sane people. We hide in the corners. We keep quiet. We hope no one will notice us. We hope they won’t come and make trouble for us and our children until we’re dead. It’s a sad way to live. Like a scared cockroach.

Certain types of things recur throughout history. Based on what we know of societies that become depraved, there are certain things we should expect to see. Sexual perverts should come to rule us, and they should start roaming in bands, raping men as well as women, with the government’s consent. Homosexuality should become the majority orientation. We should see more rioting. We should see more mobs looting stores and homes. We should see Holocaust-style persecution of Jews and actual Christians (not nominal Christians who support perversion and idolatry). Cuban-style confiscation of wealth must be on the way, too.

I think tattooing and mutilation will continue increasing. I believe demons use these things to deface the image of God and make people look the way they look.

One interesting casualty of the Grammys: Madonna. People are commenting on her looks. Her face is swollen and grotesque. The end has come. She’s shooting the messengers, claiming ageism and misogyny. That’s crazy. They’re just reacting to a freakish spectacle.

Rhodah and I were talking about her today.

I always think about Madonna and Cher when I think about people who have no hope for the life to come. Things went their way on Earth, while they were living in perishable bodies that had the potential to be attractive for 30 years at the most. Then their looks faded, and they scrambled to hire surgeons. They held onto youth every way they could. Who can blame them? If you’re a rich female sex symbol, no matter how well things are going for you, you are just a few years away from ugliness and rejection, and when you die, your wealth will vanish. In the afterlife, no one will give Cher a table at an expensive restaurant when it’s already full. No one will pay her just to show up somewhere. No one will care about her opinions. She’ll be just like everyone else around her. No one will know her name, because she won’t have one.

People call Madonna the Material Girl because she had a hit song called “Material Girl.” In the song, she confirmed everything I say about her, decades before I said it.

Some boys kiss me
Some boys hug me
I think they’re ok
If they don’t give me proper credit
I just walk away
They can beg and they can plead
But they can’t see the light (that’s right)
‘Cause the boy with the cold hard cash
Is always Mister Right
‘Cause we are living in a material world
And I am a material girl
You know that we are living in a material world
And I am a material girl

Rhodah said people like Madonna have to buy men when they get old. Guess what? It’s in the song.

Boys may come and boys may go
And that’s all right you see
Experience has made me rich
And now they’re after me

Imagine what dating is like for a single woman who looks just like Madonna and has no money or fame. Imagine Cher, working as a TJ Maxx saleslady and trying to find a husband.

Madonna relied on her body, which is a material object. Now she’s angry because the thing she used to manipulate people repels them. If she used it to build a following of people she knew were shallow enough to be manipulated by sexual temptation, why should she be angry if they drop her when she becomes sexually repulsive?

Look, if I baked a cake to get people to come into my house, I wouldn’t expect them to stick around after it got moldy.

Life is fleeting, and our bodies fall apart and die. We should look at our lives here the way kids look at McDonald’s jobs. They don’t provide security for the long term. They are stepping stones to better things.

Madonna is trying to turn McDonald’s into a career.

I wonder how Satan is going to top the Sam Smith act. Whatever he does, it will have to be something very, very special.

5,000,000 Dead Irishmen Can’t be Wrong

Brewing is going well.

Today I kegged a dry stout. To me, “dry stout” means something that isn’t a syrupy, overpowering imperial stout or a gross sweetened stout. I guess you could call it an Irish stout. Something that would please a Murphy’s drinker.

It was supposed to attenuate down to a specific gravity of about 1.012, but it got to about 1.016 and slowed down to the point where it barely moved. I am desperate to fill kegs, so I kegged it anyway. Today I stuck it in a new Torpedo Megamouth keg, and I put it on 20 psi of CO2. Tomorrow morning I plan to switch it to beer gas. My hope is that a night on CO2 will get enough CO2 into the beer to allow me to dispense it tomorrow.

Beer gas is a combination of nitrogen and CO2. Nitrogen makes stout silky and a little sweet, but it does not add the carbonation bite CO2 gives, and it leaves beer right after you pour it, so if you don’t have CO2 in your beer, and you dispense it with beer gas, it will go flat sitting in your glass.

In a perfect world, the stout would have been allowed to mature in peace. I would have given it maybe three weeks before kegging it. I just don’t have time. I’d rather have a somewhat imperfect stout than empty kegs. I can make the next one perfect while I drink this one.

I can’t be sure this one will not be excellent. It probably will be. But I am definitely rushing it.

I feel I should order more wheat beer ingredients. Between sampling and wasting beer to get my system working, I am running low. If I have wheat beer, my favorite ale, and stout on tap, I can relax and take time brewing other things.

I have ingredients for a lager and a heavy ale. The lager will take weeks, and the ale will probably be slow as well. I only have faucets for 5 beers, and it may be mid-March before I have the lager and heavy ale ready, so I have to keep reloading the three faster beers unless I want to run out of inventory.

My virus-related taste and smell difficulties are blowing over, but things still are not right. My ale tastes way too bitter. My wheat beer is good, but it should taste better. Another problem: beer seems to hit me way too hard. I had maybe a quart of fairly weak beer today, and I really felt it. Is that because of the virus?

The purpose of brewing is not to get drunk. I hope things go back to normal as this illness winds down.

I suppose coronavirus is also the reason it’s not possible to get every beer-related item I want in a timely manner. It wasn’t until today that I had enough parts to run 3 kegs at once. I still need two fittings in order to get two more kegs going. I expect to need to keg my latest ale in three days, and I ordered the remaining fittings today. They may be here in time. I hope so.

I started ordering dry yeast in bulk. I can pay $11 per batch or $5 per batch. I might as well face reality.

I think my best move right now is to give up on normal lager fermentation and use my pressure fermenter. If the stories are true, I can finish fermentation in under a week with no loss of quality. If I can pull this off, I’ll have an ale and a lager ready to keg in under one week. That leaves me with the heavy ale to work on, and with 4 other beers on tap, I will not be rushed.

After that, I should be able to slow down and act like a normal homebrewer, inventing recipes and making fine adjustments to my equipment.

If You Can’t Buy it, Mod it

God keeps giving Rhodah and me lots of revelation, and it gets hard to keep up with and document, so I write about beer instead.

I now have two beers fermenting, and I plan to brew another tomorrow or the day after. I am tired of fooling around. I have to put myself in a position where production is much faster than consumption and loss, or else I will always have idle faucets and frustration.

It appears the stout I brewed over a week ago still hasn’t given up. An occasional bubble still pops out of the airlock. Unbelievable. I checked the specific gravity last night, and it looks like it’s around 1.015, only .002 down from a couple of days back. I was thinking it would end up around 1.012. Am I asking too much?

On the one hand, it’s taking forever, but on the other, it’s still active, so I must be doing the right thing, waiting for it to die. It’s no good kegging a beer while there is still sugar in it.

My other beer may be a Belgian IPA. I learned this the other day. Before that, I didn’t know what it was.

I brew whatever I want, whether it fits a known style or not. Most guys choose a particular factory beer or style they want to brew, and they create or borrow a recipe within established guidelines. I think, “I’ll bet it would taste good if I did THIS,” and then I put together ingredients that sound like they would work. It annoys some people. I don’t know why. What business is it of theirs what I put in my beer? I can’t imagine getting upset at other people for creating recipes.

The grain bill I used is a lot like an IPA, only I added a little table sugar for some reason. Sugar increases alcohol without changing flavor much. I used Crystal hops for the finish. For IPA, you pretty much have to use something like Cascade or Centennial or people wonder what’s wrong with you. These are citrusy hops. To me, Crystal tastes very spicy. Somewhere in the realm of cinnamon and allspice.

For IPA, you’re supposed to use an IPA yeast like Wyeast 1056, and you ferment at 68 degrees. I use Belgian ale yeast. The stuff they use in tripels. I ferment at room temperature. Right now, the bucket is in my kitchen, burping away at 75 degrees, threatening to generate all sorts of aromatic chemicals and hangover-inducing heavy alcohols.

The other day, someone on a forum mentioned Belgian IPA, and I realized it sounded a lot like what I was making.

I pitched my yeast last night, and now the beer is burping like crazy. It may be done in 4 days. That’s how long the last batch took.

I don’t want an IPA. I feel like I’m drowning in IPA every time I go to the store. But BELGIAN IPA…that may be different. Because it’s not IPA.

Maybe it’s BPA.

My next beer will be either an amber lager or a very heavy Belgiany beer with some similarities to the one I just described. If Belgiany, it will be different from the quasi-IPA because of the weight and high alcohol content, not to mention several pounds of wheat. Also, I decided to use Sabro hops. This is a new hop which is said to generate creamy, coconutty flavors. Perfect for a sweet, heavy, aromatic ale. I hope. I don’t know.

My sense of smell goes in and out. A few minutes ago, I was able to smell Vick’s Vaporub. Maybe I can enjoy a beer tonight.

I am working on some cowboy mods to my Speidel Braumeister brewing machine. It’s great, but the user interface is garbage. The maker wants $400 for a wifi module so I can join their website, store my recipes there, and download them into the machine. That’s insane. I want a program on my PC or phone. I want to use wifi or Bluetooth like a sane person, for a few dollars. I do not want to join a manufacturer’s cult.

I have to be honest. The Germans are still a little scary. They seem to think customers should fall in line with the herd and do as they’re told. I’m an American. I eat things that travel in herds.

I guess Europeans think we’re nuts. They’re all standing at the government trough, eating that sheep feed and thinking how wonderful it is to be taken care of, have the government do their thinking, and to be just like everyone else, and many of us see it and want to throw up. It looks like a living death. My country isn’t my family. I don’t belong to it. I want to NOT fit in. I don’t want to melt into it. I just live here because God won’t let me move to heaven.

I spent a lot of the day looking at the Braumeister and the Internet.

I learned that the Braumeister only has three electrical connections other than AC in. It has a temperature probe, a heater, and a small pump. Simple. All I need is a bit of hardware that can run these things and connect to a PC. It has to have storage, like an SD card. A small SD card would give my machine millions of times as much storage as the manufacturer did.

I need a microcomputer that will operate two relays that turn the pump and heater on and off. I need it to listen to the temperature probe, because the temperature will guide the use of the heater. I need it to have a timer. I need it to be able to run programs I wrote. I need to be able to run the pump and heater manually.

I looked all over the place. I found what looks like a solution: Craftbeerpi. This is a program that hooks a Raspberry Pi up to a brewing system. You should be able to connect it to any system that has a pump and heater.

My heater, pump, and probe are modular. Among them, they use two types of connections. German and hard to source, of course. Stupid. Anyway, I can disconnect the Braumeister’s controller and rig up new cables coming from a new controller built by me. The Raspberry Pi will talk to a couple of big relays. The relays will turn the pump and heater on and off. The temperature probe will talk to the Raspberry Pi.

Craftbeerpi will let me use a program to store a limitless number of brewing schedules somewhere. On an SD card on the board, I guess. No more, “Drei zchedules iss all you get. If you have nussing to hide, ziss iss all you need.”

The only question is whether it will work. I guess it will.

I have some inquiries out.

I am convinced Germanness is the problem with Speidel, the outfit that made the Braumeister. I think these guys believe they know better than their customers. That’s almost never true. There are companies that have thousands of engineers but billions of customers. No matter which company you’re talking about, somewhere out there, there are a bunch of customers that make its engineers look like monkeys.

If an American company had made it, it would have Bluetooth built in. It would have a PC app and a phone app. The connectors would be mainstream. It would have gigs of storage, not bytes. If it needed wifi, it would include it, or it would use a $9 adaptor. If it needed a firmware update, you would use a $4 USB cable to connect it to your computer.

I think Germans may be overconfident when it comes to building things. There is a myth that says they do it better than anyone, but it’s a lie. Their cars are unreliable and impossible to work on. Their tools are overpriced and not the best. Their beer is very polished, but it tends to be boring and low on flavor and imagination. And anyone can make beer with finesse. It’s not like they figured out nuclear fusion.

They seem to make things in an overthought way, and that creates the illusion of superiority while making things worse for everyone concerned.

Doing things differently without a good reason is incompetence in the tech world. It causes a lot of unnecessary expense and suffering. Ask anyone who ever needed an Apple cable in the middle of the night.

I will digress.

The other day, I asked some Internet beer people if they were their own favorite brewers. Did they like their own beer better than anyone else’s? One guy responded, “I live in Germany.” That was a stupid remark. He was saying German factory beer had to be better than anything he could make, because all German factory beer is perfect. Not true. And what he said would have been closer to true in the US than Germany. We make the best factory beer on Earth now. We have almost 5,000 breweries, competing hard to innovate and make the best beer possible. Germany has about 1500, and they crank out the same things they cranked out in 1800. Germany is a beer backwater. We’re the leaders now.

There are several companies that make small brewing machines for hobbyists, and as far as I know, they all have problems. Some have build issues. Speidel’s products work very well, and the construction is good, but they have serious user interface deficiencies. It’s like marrying a beautiful woman in a titanium chastity belt.

If Toyota had made this brewing machine, I would never have had a problem with it. Everything would have been worked out before I bought it. They would never have let it out the door with a user interface like this.

I hope to hear back about the Raspberry Pi solution tomorrow. If it looks good, I’ll go for it. Can’t be very hard. Two relays, a Raspberry Pi, a screen, a mouse, a keyboard, and some cables and connectors. If it works, I’ll kiss Speidel’s support team good bye, and maybe next time I’ll build my own machine. A lot of people do.

Nose Caught in Kung Flu Grippe

I have fantastic news to report! This morning, I smelled coffee! And that’s no metaphor.

Earlier this week, I came down with what I thought was covid. It wasn’t severe. Mild aches. A mild headache. A mild fever. A very runny, stuffy nose. Fatigue in the afternoon. Not that bad.

A couple of days ago, I noticed that things didn’t taste normal. A sandwich tasted funny. The beer I had made was kind of gross.

As of yesterday, I couldn’t smell much of anything. I put Vaporub right up against my nose, and while I wasn’t sure, I thought I could smell a very faint menthol aroma.

Sure looks like covid. Other things can mess with your sense of smell and taste, but covid is the worst offender among common diseases, and my symptoms don’t match other illnesses well.

The web says I could have sinusitis, but I don’t think that’s true. We’re in a pandemic, for one thing, and it’s not a sinusitis pandemic. Also, I’ve had all sorts of upper respiratory bugs during my life, including bugs that affected my sinuses, and I have never lost my sense of smell to the degree I lost it this week. Not even close.

The weird thing is that some things taste almost normal. People like to tell us most of taste is really smell, but that appears to be an exaggeration. Out of self-pity, I’ve been eating breakfast cereal instead of healthy food when I get up, and Grape Nuts taste completely normal. I made beer cheese spread which I eat with Ritz crackers, and those things taste fine.

I always lose weight when I have a cold or anything like a cold, and it doesn’t matter what I eat, so I am indulging myself. I got an Entenmann’s raspberry coffee cake. It tastes just fine. Today I decided to have some coffee with it.

For some reason, I really like instant decaf. I made myself a big mug a short time ago, with sugar and real cream. When I opened the coffee jar, I decided to see if I could smell it. I inhaled deeply, and I was shocked by a strong wave of coffee aroma.

It was exciting. I inhaled more than once, just for the joy of smelling anything.

The sad thing is that I have two homebrews on tap, a third about to go into the keg, and three more waiting to be made, not to mention three factory beers I bought because I thought I was going to have a homebrew shortage. Drinking this stuff is like drinking thickened club soda with an extremely high level of hop bitterness. A waste.

I bought Boddington’s Pub Ale, Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA, and Old Rasputin Imperial Stout. Boddington’s is a beer made with profit, not quality, in mind, but I still like it. Old Rasputin is extremely heavy and dark. It’s full of crazy smells and flavors. When you lower your nose into the glass, the aromas surround you and pummel you like an evangelist at an Antifa riot. Boddington’s is very mild.

Last night, Boddies and Old Rasputin didn’t taste much different at all.

The coffee I’m drinking tastes a lot like coffee, so at least I have that.

I ordered myself two new fermenters, which means I bought buckets. They’re a like Home Depot buckets, but they hold almost 7 gallons. I make 5-gallon batches, and beer makes foam when it ferments, so it’s not wise to use 5-gallon buckets. You need extra space.

I can’t find bigger buckets locally, so I gladly paid about $20 each for buckets with lids, spigots, and airlocks. With tax and shipping, I was up around $55. Insane, I know, but there was no cheaper way to do it. Ebay had nothing. I could drive to Orlando, but then I would only save the shipping fee, and the tolls and gas would cost more.

I discovered Hearts Home Brew in Orlando, and it’s now my go-to supply store. For big orders, it’s worth driving or paying for shipping. Their prices are low, and they’re fast. I ordered buckets yesterday, and they will be here today.

This week will be Brewapalooza, AKA Brewing Man. Today I’ll make an ale that ferments at room temperature. Tomorrow, I’ll make a lager. At some point during this time, I’ll put a stout in the keezer. Before the week is out, the ale should ferment fast enough to let me make another ale; something wheaty but based on a tripel.

I think I need to face reality and get one more freezer so I can do lagers properly.

The word “lager” means “to store.” I guess this is why prison camps were called stalags. I don’t know. When you make a lager, you ferment it, and then you let it sit for a long time at a low temperature. This is the lagering process. It supposedly kills off-flavors.

These days, there are new ways of doing things. By fermenting under pressure, many people are making lagers at higher temperatures and in shorter times. They say it works. There are also new yeasts that work better at high temperatures. I’m not sure what to do. I would like to get a lager in the box, so maybe I should take a chance. I have a pressure fermenter. On the other hand, because I’m still working out the kinks in my techniques, it would be safer to use the old methods for my first post-comeback lager.

I can’t lager anything in my keezer because the temperature is wrong. If I use my fermenting fridge, I won’t have any place to ferment things while the lagering is going on.

It looks like a lot of the changes in brewing have been driven by Australians. They started Kegland, a leading manufacturer of brewing gadgets. They made my pressure fermenter.

Australians drink way too much. Many have a bad attitude toward drunkenness, like high school boys who never grow up, and their alcoholism rate is very high. It is claimed they drink more, and get drunk more, than all the other nationalities in the world. Think about that. The world includes places like England, Ireland, Scotland, Belgium, Germany, Russia, Finland, and the Czech Republic. When you’re drunker than the British, you need an intervention.

I guess it’s not good that homebrewing has taken off in Australia. It should be about making quality beer, not getting ripped with your pals and passing out face-down while singing “Waltzing Matilda.”

Homebrewing should never be about drunkenness, any more than French cooking should be about eating contests.

If you’re determined to be a drunk, you should probably drink wine or screwdrivers all day. Cheap alcohol buffered with a lot of liquid and maybe some nutrients. Pretending you’re a brewer just adds expense and effort, and beer makes you fat.

When my senses come back, I may make a Boddies clone with Amarillo hops and a little bit nicer grain bill. Amarillo hops have a strong lemon flavor, and that’s just what Boddies needs. The problem, though, is that Boddies goes well with beer gas.

I have a 4-body secondary regulator so I can dispense beer with CO2 at 4 different temperatures. I also have a beer gas tank with one disconnect, so it will only serve one keg. I plan to have stout in the keezer, on beer gas, all the time. If I start fooling with an ale that needs beer gas, I’ll have to fix things up so I can run another keg off the same bottle.

That would mean getting another secondary regulator. I think it’s fair to assume I’ll never have more than two beer gas beers in my keezer at once, so two bodies ought to get it done.

If trying to keep 5 kegs going sounds extreme, think about the guy I talked to the other day. He has 27 active.

Whatever this illness is, it’s progressing fast. Every day I feel much better than the previous day. My nose doesn’t run now, the stuffiness is nearly gone, and I rarely cough. I didn’t hit the energy wall until around 8 p.m. yesterday, so I’m getting two more hours than I did earlier in the week. No fever, either.

Maybe now Budweiser Will Taste Good

Well, this is interesting. I think I had covid last night.

A few days back I stayed up until three in the morning. Little tasks kept popping up, and I just went with it, even though what I really like is to be in bed by 9:30. The next day, I felt bad, and I thought it was because I needed sleep. I continued to feel off for the next couple of days, though, so something wasn’t right.

Last night, something hit me. My bones started to ache. I got a headache. I stopped sweating; my skin got very dry, so I knew I had a fever.

I went to bed, wrapped myself in an electric blanket, put it on the highest setting, and lay there. All night. Unable to sleep.

Of course, I took ivermectin, vitamin D, and vitamin C first.

I wasn’t very sick. Last night I had a runny nose for about 10 minutes. I sneezed a couple of times. I coughed a few times. My throat wasn’t quite right, but I can’t say it was scratchy.

In some ways, the experience was pleasant. I couldn’t sweat, so I lay there all night wrapped up comfortably in hot, dry bedding. It was like a long, padded sauna. If the aches aren’t too bad, a fever can have its enjoyable side.

I got up today and prayed with my wife. I put oil on myself, and she prayed for me. The dryness left my skin. Now I feel just about completely normal. My only problem is that there may be something going on with my sense of taste.

My understanding was that Omicron was not allowed to mess with your sense of taste. That’s supposed to be a Delta thing. I ate a slice of pizza and a ham sandwich this morning, because that’s the kind of junk I eat when I’ve been sick. The pizza was okay, but the sandwich seemed to taste a little metallic.

Here I am with three batches of beer on hand, a batch of grain in the spare fridge, and two more batches of grain on the way. What if I can’t tell if the beer is any good?

Yesterday I had a small serving of wheat beer early in the day, and then I had some more later. The first serving was a lot better. Was coronavirus messing with my perception? The second batch tasted odd.

The web says that if coronavirus changes your sense of smell or taste, it can take weeks to get over it. I would hate to have to wait that long to get back to work.

Whenever I start to feel sick, and I’m not very sick at all, I hope it’s coronavirus. If coronavirus can’t make me very sick, then presumably my immunity is good, and every episode ought to improve it. I’ve had three or four mild cold-like illnesses since the start of 2020, and all were very, very mild. I always test negative, but on the other hand, the symptoms always fit coronavirus better than a cold, and the tests are not very accurate.

A little part of me always wonders: “What if this is the first time I’ve had coronavirus? What if it gets really bad?” I must have had coronavirus by now, though. I’ve traveled all over the world. I’ve been to restaurants. I’ve gone to stores. I’ve been on crowded trains.

I’ve listened too much to leftists who are pushing lies about coronavirus for political reasons. They want us to think everyone faces a high risk of serious problems, and that’s complete garbage. If you’re not fat, sick, or old, you are extremely unlikely to die and very unlikely to be really ill. I’m getting old, but I’m not in the age group coronavirus hits hardest. I’m not sick, and I’m not all that fat.

Young, thin, healthy people who have real problems with coronavirus are outliers. They’re like nonsmokers who get lung cancer. Leftists like to point to a few here and there, as though one robin made a summer. They did the same thing with AIDs. They tried to tell us it was going to be a big problem for heterosexuals, so we would clamor for research funding and so we wouldn’t rightly point the finger at the depraved homosexual lifestyle that spreads disease, but widespread heterosexual transmission never happened. Just about all the people who got AIDs from normal sex were women who slept with men who were closet homosexuals. It’s nearly impossible for a man to get AIDs from a woman.

People think Magic Johnson got AIDs from a woman. If that’s true, why didn’t it happen to the thousands of other sports figures and entertainment figures who have had sex with dozens or hundreds of women per year? Why just one?

I just saw an article with the title, “COVID-19 isn’t discriminating by age — younger people are dying, too.” That’s a lie, straight out. A tiny percentage of the dead died young, but coronavirus definitely discriminates by age. The CDC says about 19000 people in their twenties have died, but the number for people over 85 is nearly 300,000. What it doesn’t tell you is that there aren’t many people over 85. There are around 3 times as many people in their twenties. So Americans over 85 aren’t 15 times more likely to die. They’re around 45 times more likely.

A 45-fold difference doesn’t represent discrimination by age? Sorry. That’s a lie.

I still only know one young person who got really sick, and frankly, he’s obese. He has to be 80 pounds overweight.

My beer recipes are already fixed, so coronavirus can’t do any real harm while I’m brewing. It’s not like I’ll be tasting the beer and making changes. But I could be delayed in evaluating it.

Stout on the Way

I had a busy day today. In addition to taking care of some nagging tasks, I made a pizza and a keg of Irish-style stout, and I worked on problems with my first post-hiatus wheat beer, which I kegged yesterday.

The pizza was nothing remarkable. An 8″ Sicilian with Boar’s Head pepperoni. I can crank those out all day. The beers were more interesting.

I drew my first wheat beer today. Sour with lots of head. The sourness concerned me a little. Wheat is supposed to produce tart beers, but you can overdo it, and I used about 75% wheat in this beer. A lot of so-called wheat beers are down around 30%, and back during the Bush II years, when I drew up my recipe, people thought I was nuts to go to 75%. Nonetheless, this beer is working.

You can’t judge a beer by the first few samples if you are drawing beer off the bottom of the keg. Yeast and hops flakes will make it bitter and sour. I threw out a little bit of beer, and after that, it seemed the balance between crystal malt sweetness on one hand and wheat acidity and hops bitterness on the other was way better.

Beer starts out as a sugar solution, and sugar is heavier than water. Alcohol is less dense, so as yeast does its work turning sugar into alcohol and CO2, beer gets lighter, and the alcohol content increases. This beer went from a specific gravity of 1.053 or so to about 1.0115, and this suggests it should have a light character and around 5.8% alcohol, which is not a lot. It’s very easy to drink, and cold temperatures don’t detract a lot from the experience. This means it’s a lawnmower beer, even though it’s a quality homebrew and not big-beer industry swill.

“Lawnmower beer” is a term homebrewers use to describe beer which goes down easily and isn’t very heavy. It’s a hot day, you’re mowing the lawn, and for some reason, you think it’s a good idea to quench your thirst with an alcoholic beverage while riding a 20-horsepower machine that can cut a person’s feet off. You want a lawnmower beer. It means you’re probably an alcoholic, but nonetheless, the term itself is useful.

Most people who think it’s intelligent to operate dangerous machinery while drinking will favor gross corn-and-rice-based beer substitutes like Bud and Coors, but any beer that goes down well on a hot day is a lawnmower beer, and it is possible for a truly good beer to fit into this category.

I have another lawnmower beer recipe. A long time ago, I tried to convince a Bud addict he should like real beer. I made a light lager that was partly corn-based, and I used a yeast similar to the one Bud uses. It turned out to be great, but I got nowhere with the conversion because my friend was an alcoholic and drug addict who was not interested at all in the quality of what he drank. He just wanted to stay high and drunk so he didn’t have to face himself and admit he treated people badly. I didn’t understand that at the time.

When I think of alcoholics, I think of vodka, not beer. When I was a kid, an older Irish lady lived next door to me, and she was a good example of a vodka alcoholic. My mother saw her turn up tumblers of pure vodka, and she said that as she drank it down, her Adam’s apple moved up and down like a jackhammer. One tumbler like that would make me very drunk and might even stop my heart, but she was used to it.

Addicts like vodka because they have the mistaken belief other people can’t smell it on them, it’s less likely to cause headaches than brown liquors, and there are a lot of cheap vodkas. But there are beer and wine alcoholics, too.

Anyway, what I drew from my keg today was full of yeast and hop sediment for various reasons too boring to go into. It will clear up as the beer at the bottom of the keg is consumed. The yeast and hops gave the beer sharp acidic and basic flavors, and the live yeast may produce astounding CO2 flatulence, but as I go through the lower layers of beer, the hops and yeast will be removed, and the beer will be outstanding.

What I have now could be called a beer lemonade. I used Amarillo hops, and they produce a strong lemony flavor. They belong to a family of hops, and believe it or not, related hops like Centennial and Cascade produce orange and grapefruit flavors. That’s how crazy hops are. I don’t know of any lime-flavored hops, though.

So I have a light, lemony beer that tastes great on its own, but what about adding things to it?

Ordinarily, I think adding things to beer is an indication that someone is misguided. Generally, really good beers don’t need any help. Wheat beers, however, seem to lend themselves to flavorings. Adding fruit syrups to wheat beers is a pretty old practice even in Germany, where people are so uptight about beer they take all the fun out of it.

I am thinking I may try adding grenadine, which is really cherry syrup. I may try to find raspberry and strawberry syrups. People add these things to German wheat beers from really stuffy companies, so I would not be committing heresy.

Today I brewed an Irish-style stout, sort of like Guiness and Murphy’s. It’s one of my old recipes. At the time, I wrote this:

It’s a bit like Guinness or Murphy’s, but it has tons of body and a silky feel to it. The chocolate malt gives it a wonderful chocolate smell and flavor. I used Munich malt and Maris Otter to make it rich, but it’s not TOO rich. The bitterness is high, at 47-something, but it’s still very smooth. I think it might be better if I dropped it slightly.

It’s in the fermenting freezer now. I have high hopes for it, but I don’t know if it will pan out. As you drink better and better beers, you lose your enthusiasm for old favorites because you grow up. I had a pub draught Guinness yesterday, and I found it thin, too dry, and lacking in complexity. I hope I won’t find these same flaws in my own stout, which I created during a time when I thought Guinness was pretty good. I liked Murphy’s better, however, and it had a friendlier taste, with less of an edge. I hope my feelings for Murphy’s pushed the recipe toward the sweeter, more complex end of the stout spectrum.

Incidentally, stout is dark because it’s made with barley that has been roasted until it turns dark brown. Now you know.

Next up is my orange lager. I am not all that excited about lagers because they are boring compared to ales, but this one can hold its own against an ale. It’s about the color of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, and that means it has a lot of malt flavor. It has crystal malt to prevent it from being abusively dry. It’s smooth and full of interesting aromas and tastes. It’s like a lager that wishes it were an ale. Very, very good.

The big problem with lagers is that they have to be lagered. Lagering is storage at low temperatures. Lagers need it to refine them and dissipate off flavors. I’ll have to leave the keg in cold storage for several weeks.

I’ll just blurt it out: in my mind, lagers are generally inferior to other beers. They are the vodka of beer. If you want something extremely polished and inoffensive, there are a lot of lagers that will make you happy, and there are subtle pleasures in lagers. Those pleasures are real and not to be contemned. Still, if you want to get lost in a beer, it’s easier to do it with ales. That’s my opinion, but there are way more beers now than there were when I formed my ideas about beer, so I may be wrong.

I do appreciate a good lager. I love Spaten and Gosser. But I’ve had a lot of very good lagers that were like BMW’s. Well-behaved. Faultless. Relentlessly similar.

I don’t like dark lagers at all. They taste like light lagers flavored with burned sugar. A good dark ale is another matter. It’s a forest of unexpected flavors and aromas.

In a week or less, I should have stout ready to serve. It would probably be best to wait a couple of weeks after that to serve it, but I don’t plan to do that. I need to get a beer inventory going so I don’t empty kegs prematurely, and besides, the fact that a beer gets better with time doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start on the keg before it hits its prime. You can enjoy it for what it is as soon as it’s ready, and then you can enjoy the way it changes later.

I have this idea that God, or “Tod,” as I call him when I hit the wrong keys, would like me to be able to talk to ordinary people leading ordinary lives. That means not surrounding myself with Jesus buffs who only associate with each other. Beer, strange as it seems, could help me bridge the gap. I think self-righteous teetotaling Christians repel a lot of people. They make them feel dirty and ashamed. Maybe if I can have a couple of beers with people who have tattoos and spit cups on their dashboards, they will understand that Jesus, not I, is the one I want them to admire and love.

Invest $2000 in Equipment and Get all the Cheap Beer You Can Drink

I feel like writing about the beer business.

I can give new people some advice.

1. Don’t bottle your beer. It’s a miserable job, your beer will get infections, you won’t be able to adjust the carbonation, and there is nothing like the convenience of draft. If you’re excited about taking your beer on the road, use small kegs. You don’t need bottles.

2. Build a keezer (freezer converted to hold kegs) instead of buying a kegerator (refrigerator made for kegs). It will hold more kegs. It will look better because you can put all the tanks and junk inside it. You can build it so all the beer stuff lifts off and onto a new freezer if the old freezer dies. Virtually all fridges and freezers are Chinese now, so they are poorly made. Finally, appliance repair people often refuse to work on kegerators, and manufacturer support is negligible. It’s better to spend $250-$400 on a new freezer than it is to spend hundreds more on a new kegerator.

3. Use dry yeast whenever possible. Wet yeast requires making a starter, which is a batch of fermented liquid that increases the number of yeast cells. It’s a pain. It also requires adding oxygen to the wort before you add (“pitch”) the yeast. It has a short shelf life, it has to be kept refrigerated, and it’s more expensive. With dry yeast, you just open the fermenter and pour it in.

4. If you can afford an electric brewing machine, or all-in-one (AIO), get it, because it will cut the work in half. But realize you may have to brew smaller batches when you want to make heavy beers. AIO’s only hold so much grain.

5. Use Star-San to sanitize. Forget iodophor. Star-San is colorless, and you can use whatever you spray it on right after you spray it. No rinsing.

6. Get yourself some push-fit fittings and EVAbarrier tubing. Forget barbs and hose clamps. This stuff makes things much easier. If you find you have a place where you have to have a hose clamp, use a stepped or Oetiker clamp instead of the worm clamps they sell at the hardware store.

7. Buy brewing software. It will keep track of your recipes and your progress. It will do a lot of the math for you. Be careful, though, because it has been said that some calculations done by beer programs are better done by hand.

8. Keep very detailed notes, like a scientist. Every time you brew a batch, create a text document and write down everything that happens. Date every entry. This will help you repeat your successes but not your failures.

9. Figure out how to serve your beer correctly. You want a system that carbonates it enough while not blasting beer out of the faucet so hard you get a ton of head. Look into things like flow control faucets, beer line length, and flow control disconnects. You should also skip gas manifolds and go right to a multiple-body gas regulator so you can give every beer the right pressure.

I am still not positive I have my serving setup optimized, but then 23 days ago, I didn’t even have beer to serve. All I had was a bucket of unfermented beer.

It’s possible to have a situation where your beer has too much carbonation in the keg, too much head, and no gas in the glass. You can have a lot of head and flat beer. It’s important to get things right.

My second beer, a wheat ale, is done fermenting. I have a way of kegging it, but it’s not ideal, so I won’t be able to drink it until Saturday at the earliest.

When I started getting equipment, I decided to get a Fermzilla All Rounder fermenter. This is a round plastic jug with a bunch of valves and whatnot attached to it. The advantages are 1) you can see what’s happening through the plastic, 2) it’s easy to clean because it’s short with a big mouth, 3) it can be used for fermenting under pressure, which can be helpful with some beers, and 4) you can serve beer from it because it’s made for pressure.

I now think this thing was not a great investment. I can ferment under pressure in a dedicated keg, and a keg is easy to handle. I can put my wort in a keg and put the keg in the pool to cool. The stainless steel will conduct heat well and cool the wort quickly. I can’t drain hot wort into an All Rounder because it can’t stand anything higher than 130°. Finally, Kegland, the company that makes the All Rounder, stamps an expiration date on them because they get weak with time. No problem if you’re not pressure-fermenting or kegging, but what if you are?

I kept it anyway. But I don’t plan to use it to keg the wheat beer. It’s fat, so it will prevent me from putting a total of 4 kegs in the bottom of the keezer. I can’t have that.

I should probably send it back.

I found a salvage guy online selling used Cornelius kegs. Not really Cornelius kegs, but kegs made for dispensing soft drinks. Cornelius was a company that made kegs for Pepsi, and people tend to call all pop kegs Cornelius kegs, but a number of companies have made them. Homebrewers use them.

This guy said he had ball lock kegs, and he would sell them for $75 per pair plus shipping. “Ball lock” refers to the orifices that let CO2 in and beverages out. Most homebrewers like ball lock kegs.

He sent me 4 kegs, and they turned out to be pin lock kegs. Pepsi used ball locks, and Coke used pin locks. The hardware used to connect to them is different.

I complained, and he told me to keep the kegs. He refunded everything except about $37. Under Ebay’s terms, he was supposed to refund everything, and I was supposed to send the kegs back at his expense. I let it go, because I found a way to turn pin lock kegs into ball lock kegs. I bought some parts. For around $55 plus $37, I should end up with 4 good kegs, and that’s a great price.

In case a homebrewer is reading, turning Cornelius-brand pin lock kegs into ball lock kegs is very simple. Just order new gas and beverage posts for Cornelius kegs. Cornelius used the same thread on pin lock kegs and ball lock kegs. The story is not so simple for other brands like Firestone and Alloy Products. You’ll need to buy conversion kits. Right now, they run about $15 per keg. Different companies used different threads, so be informed before you buy.

Back to my problems. In the meantime, I had ordered more used kegs–ball lock–from another company. So when the smoke clears, I should have 8 ball lock kegs. Do I need 8? No. Let’s see. I can use 4 in the keezer and one in the fermenting fridge. That means I need 5 kegs. But it’s conceivable I may want to do a other things in the future, and Corny kegs, as they are called, never do anything but appreciate.

Ball lock kegs are thinner than pin lock kegs, so they will make my keezer less crowded. For that reason, I plan to make as much use of ball lock kegs as I can.

I hate to say this, because it’s just like me, but I could see getting a second keezer. Not a real keezer with taps. Just a small freezer for the garage to hold kegs of finished beer until the ones in the house run dry. As things are now, I will be able to store one new keg, but it will have to go in the fermenting fridge, so I won’t be able to brew anything else while it’s in storage unless I want to ferment at room temperature.

A second freezer would also let me store beers that benefit from aging. I make a stout that tastes too fruity for a few weeks, and I made a tripel-style ale that became transcendent after sitting in a freezer for months.

Over the last couple of weeks, I have developed a new appreciation for beer, and that’s saying a lot.

The only beer I’ve kegged so far continues to amaze me. The head is like the head on a Kirin, except that it has some color and tastes good. Kirin is like Budweiser made by Japanese brewers; an extremely well-made version of something no one needs. My beer is a little darker than a typical lager but not quite orange. When you smell it, multiple aromas come at you. They seem to pulsate. First you smell one, and then then another, and so on.

There are odors of spice, iced tea, caramel, and other things I can’t name. It’s hard to believe I didn’t throw a handful of spices into it.

Every glass seems to taste a little different. Some seem sweeter. Some more bitter. It’s like looking at a gem in different lights.

I have realized something interesting about beer. It differs from wine in that you don’t want to swish it around in your mouth. Not all beers are this way, but most of the time, swishing a beer around detracts from the experience. You smell it carefully. You taste certain things as you put it in your mouth. Then you taste and smell other things as you swallow it. If you hold it in your mouth, it feels uncomfortable.

Wine is not like that. If you don’t hold wine in your mouth for a little bit, you miss out on half the experience.

I am no connoisseur, but I can tell bad wine from good wine. I can tell Macallan 15 from Macallan 18, which isn’t as good. Maybe I’m not fit to judge, but I think beer is just as rewarding and interesting as wine. We think of beer as unsophisticated because we are used to bad beer, not because beer can’t be complex or refined.

Beer is a lot harder to make than wine. To make wine, you press grapes, ferment the juice, and put it in bottles. Done. Beer requires you to choose different malts, a yeast, one or more hops, a mash schedule, a fermentation temperature, a carbonation level, a serving temperature, and possibly other things like flavoring additives.

I am thinking of making mead because it’s so simple. It’s wine made from honey. Dissolve honey in water, add yeast, wait, and you have mead. So easy.

We are living in a golden age of beer. The big boys are still dominating the market with swill, but we now have more breweries than we did before Prohibition. It is now impossible for anyone to say he has tried everything. You can no longer be familiar with every beer sold in America. Even competition judges only get to try some of it.

There are 4 breweries in my rural Southern county, not including homebrewers. I don’t know if all are legitimate. There are probably people in America cashing in on the craft beer wave by offering crummy Bud-like beer in settings that resemble real breweries. It’s still impressive, and one place near me has won a statewide competition, so I would guess it’s the real thing.

In 2000, people here were probably suspicious of anyone strange enough to drink Heineken. Look where we are now.

Unpersons, Unite!

Wow. Every day brings a reminder that Satan runs modern society.

I used to comment on Yahoo News stories, but I quit because it drew me into childish squabbles and also because Yahoo started censoring comments very dishonestly.

Today I fell to temptation and made a comment. I responded to a story about Adam Schiff, who is pushing for a Constitutional amendment to limit corporate contributions to political campaigns.

Here is what I said:

Weird, since the Democrats are more in debt to corporations than Republicans. Big corporations pour much more money into Democrat campaigns, and Democrats reward them by passing laws that cripple small businesses.

What I said is true, and it’s not inflammatory, obscene, anti-trans, or whatever else Yahoo is not supposed to like. It’s a bland, factual comment. In sincerity, I was surprised to see a Democrat go after corporate donations.

I guess he’s just grandstanding for the unsophisticated. “Look how I stood up to the Man.” Surely he doesn’t want to cut off the hand that feeds his whole party.

Today I got this in my email:

Your comment on Democrats introduce constitutional amendment to reverse Citizens United campaign finance ruling violates the community guidelines and has been rejected

Yahoo apparently does not use periods.

I think this is excellent. It’s wonderful to be reminded that the secular world is completely corrupted. God has shown many Christians that the entire world is going to be just as insane as the Germans and Austrians were 75 years ago. Christians and Jews will be driven out of commerce, education, government, the press, the arts, and everything else Satan runs. Eventually we will see mass, nationwide riots like Kristallnacht, and they will be endorsed by the government. Our wealth will be taken. We will be imprisoned and murdered. It will be the new normal.

The world was much more sane when I was growing up. For that matter, it was much more sane 10 years ago. We have entered an age of demonic psychosis. This psychosis is the real pandemic. Coronavirus, in comparison, is a minor inconvenience. Diseases will come and go, as will famines and disasters. Delusional hatred will continue to increase until the tribulation ends and the raptured return to Earth.

The person who rejected my comment knows it’s exactly the kind of comment Yahoo pretends to want. He or she or ze or whatever didn’t care. “They” just wanted to snuff out the voice of a person who disagreed. It’s a manifestation of a deeper desire to kill us off. Conservatism is identified with Christianity, and leftists want conservatives off the planet.

Oddly, they have no problem with Muslims, of whom many millions endorse wife-beating, honor killings, ripping out the clitorises of young girls, and the execution of homosexuals. In America, Muslims herd with the leftists. They stand among the rainbow flags at their conventions, and then they go home and practice a religion that conflicts with nearly everything leftists believe.

Here’s interesting reading: Google “gay Muslim marriage.”

If I posted the comment again, it might get through, because Yahoo has many censors, and not all of them automatically reject conservative comments. There are a number of comments more forceful of mine on the site.

I supposed I shouldn’t assume that some of Yahoo’s censors try to be fair. There may be another explanation. Some may be careless, I may be on a special list, or they may have quotas. Anyway, conservative comments do go through frequently.

Yahoo instituted its moderation policy because conservative responses to new stories dramatically outnumbered leftist responses. It’s like Youtube, which stopped displaying “dislikes” because so many popped up on videos about Biden. At first, Yahoo banned comments altogether. Then they brought them back with censorship.

It’s fitting that Yahoo’s founders choose the name “Yahoo.” It comes from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Gulliver encountered a land of man-like beings who were filthy and stupid. They were hateful, violent, and materialistic. They preferred garbage to food. They were obsessed with pretty stones they dug out of mud. Our modern Yahoos may not be quite the same, but they are nearly as brutish. They are hateful and just as obsessed with earthly things.

I’m submitting the comment again just to see what happens.

Let go of this world. It’s never going to be good to you, no matter how many times it tells you you’re about to break through. Stop taking the bait. Go to the sidelines and do God’s work behind the scenes. We were never intended to be mainstreamed.

Ice Breaks Under Hollywood Favorite

I just found out Alec Baldwin will be charged with involuntary manslaughter in the killing of Halyna Hutchins. This does not surprise me at all. I wrote about it a long time ago here, and I quoted the applicable law. I also discussed fundamental principles of firearms handling which are relevant to negligence, which is an element of involuntary manslaughter.

Every crime has a list of elements. An element is something you have to do in order to be guilty of the crime. Involuntary manslaughter is what they charge you with when your negligence kills someone, so negligence is an element.

Here is how New Mexico’s Supreme Court defines involuntary manslaughter:

All that it is necessary to establish for involuntary manslaughter by the use of a loaded firearm is that a defendant had in his hands a gun which at some time had been loaded and that he handled it, whether drunk, drinking or sober, without due caution and circumspection and that death resulted.

“Without due caution and circumspection.” Negligently.

How is negligence itself defined in a particular case, beyond the general definition? It’s not necessarily defined by laws or court rulings. It may be defined by common sense. It may be defined by rules and practices of everyday activities.

In Baldwin’s case, we have to look at the rules surrounding firearms use. Those rules prove his negligence. Every firearm user is obligated to follow them, even though they are not laws.

When someone hands you a gun, you open the chamber and look inside. You do this even if they just did the same thing in front of you. After that, regardless, you tread it as though it were loaded. You make sure you don’t touch the trigger unless you’re shooting, you don’t point the gun at anything you don’t want to shoot, and you make sure nothing you don’t want to shoot is in the bullet’s potential path.

While rehearsing for his film, Alec Baldwin 1) didn’t check the chamber, 2) put his finger on the trigger (and pulled it), 3) pointed the gun at someone he did not want to shoot, and 4) didn’t make sure nothing important was in the potential path of a round. As a result, he fired unintentionally, he hit a cinematographer, and he also hit the director, who was standing behind her.

The rules about not pointing at anything you don’t want to shoot and making sure nothing important is in the bullet’s potential path aren’t all that distinct. Not pointing at anything you don’t want to shoot, and making sure nothing you don’t want to shoot is downrange, are almost the same thing, but the latter concept is intended to apply to things behind your target. It’s primarily about things like shooting a rifle at an animal and hitting property or a person off in the distance. It also applies to things that are not far behind whatever you shoot at, like the director.

Baldwin didn’t do what every gun user is supposed to know he is supposed to do. That makes him negligent. That makes him guilty. If he didn’t know the rules, he was negligent because he didn’t learn. If he knew the rules, he was negligent because he didn’t obey them.

Ordinarily, it’s foolish to make decisions about a person’s guilt without seeing all the evidence, but sometimes the available evidence stands on its own and can’t be overcome. This is such a case.

I’m not surprised the set armorer and a producer were also charged with crimes. I discussed that here in 2021. It’s very clear that anyone whose actions put a loaded gun in an actor’s hand is guilty of something. I was surprised to see the people who supposedly used the gun for target practice were not charged, but the report says the target practice claim was untrue.

Baldwin’s post-shooting behavior was not good. He was very arrogant. He tried to throw his employees to the wolves, in the bizarre hope professional investigators and prosecutors would take the bait. They did, and then they took him, too. You can’t just tell a prosecutor to go away because someone else did it. They don’t let defendants tell them what to do. It’s amazing that Baldwin’s attorneys let him make crazy remarks and argue with people. Unless they’re incompetent, they must have advised him to shut up.

What he was really saying was this: “Don’t arrest me. Please don’t arrest me. Maybe if I keep arguing, you won’t arrest me.” His posts were aimed at the police and prosecutors. He hoped they would read them and let him go. Law enforcement doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t respond to transparently manipulative Internet tweets.

Now his Twitter account is private. That suggests he hasn’t learned. Saying unwise things to a smaller audience isn’t going to keep other people from seeing them. Anyone can cut and paste, and prosecutors can get private tweets if they want. His “protected” tweets have been republished from time to time. Someone has surely saved all of them.

So what will happen to him?

If there are technical errors in the case, or if he gets a really good jury, he’ll walk. If not, he will be convicted.

His lawyers will do their best to pick a sympathetic jury. Defiant juries turn murderers loose every day. O.J. Simpson murdered two people, was proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and went home acquitted because a jury of black women wanted it that way. Maybe Baldwin’s lawyers will figure out which potential jurors like Baldwin.

They will hire experts to help them pick jurors. This case will be a windfall for experts of all sorts. Baldwin will not hesitate to get out the checkbook.

As for errors, Bill Cosby is definitely a rapist, but he is home now because of a technicality. If your case is sufficiently tainted, what you actually did is irrelevant.

Baldwin should have kept quiet. He should not have antagonized people in public after the shooting. It will make him look bad if he is sentenced, and it will also make this whole affair much more humiliating than it had to be. His enemies will be dancing on his prostrate body for at least the next two years.

He reminds me of Michael Avenatti, the Trump-hating lawyer who disappeared into the black void of the federal prison system not long ago. He was brash and self-righteous even after convictions started dropping.

He was still tweeting two days after his last sentencing. That is amazing. Federal prison–real federal prison–is like hell. It’s a Jonah fish that swallows you alive. Smart people drop their attitudes when they land in federal prison. It’s a subtle clue your pride is not helping you.

God punishes the proud and self-righteous, sooner or later. When it happens during this life, the punishments generally escalate with time. If you repent, things start to get better.

There are many people who double down with punishment. The harsher the punishment, the worse they get. There is no hope for those people. There is no limit to the suffering God will let them experience. I have no doubt there are people cursing God and saying he wronged them, even as they burn in hell. People are just that crazy. They are just that stubborn and dishonest.

That’s why hell exists. It’s for people who don’t listen.

What kind of sentence will Baldwin get? No idea. I assume it’s impossible for a healthy man to avoid prison time in a manslaughter case in New Mexico, but assumptions aren’t worth much. Right now, lawyers who like appearing on TV are looking for the answer so they will have something to say tonight. They will let us know. All I know is that the maximum is 18 months.

I just checked, and apparently, he is looking at a 5-year minimum because a gun was involved. The DA says so. Does that mean anything? Not in Florida. My last pastor raped a girl over and over and got two years, which was nothing like the mandatory minimum. A close relative was convicted of felony fleeing and evading, which carries a mandatory minimum, and she got probation. Maybe New Mexico is like Florida.

My guess is that he’ll get whatever minimums apply, at the very least, because this is a high-profile case. If my last pastor had been on the news and people had followed the trial, I think the judge would have applied the law correctly in order to avoid a backlash.

I don’t like Alec Baldwin because he’s a nasty person, but I don’t want to see him go to prison. He’s not a career criminal. He’s not going to shoot anyone else; I think we can be sure of that. I have prayed for him. In my mind, a dislike for an obnoxious person doesn’t justify wishing that person will go to prison.

I have done stupid things, myself. I have done things that could have killed people. You have, too. Own a car? The only big difference between Alec Baldwin and me is that the egregious risks I took didn’t produce disasters. I could have been in his shoes.

I have been arrogant. I have been nasty. It makes no sense to hope for mercy for myself and wish prison on someone else who is annoying but not really a major problem for the world.

It’s not like he’s going to go out and commit a slew of involuntary crimes.

I do think he needed to be charged. He needed to be alerted to his issues with pride.

Maybe they’ll offer him a juicy plea. I think I would jump for it if I were him. If he is sentenced at age 67, he could be looking at release at the age of 73, not counting time off for good behavior. The web seems to say he could be out by 70. That’s not great for an old man who has young children. In his situation, I think I’d be happy with anything under a year.

It may be that the only person who is really surprised today is Alec Baldwin. Someone should have sat him down after the shooting and told him this was coming.

They probably did.

I’ll keep praying things go as well as they can for him.