Maybe Louis C.K. had the Right Idea

Russell Brand is going away for at least 7 years. That’s what the Internet says, anyway. Could be wrong. He was sentenced to 10 years and 6 months for various sex crimes, and if my information is right, the best outcome he can hope for is to be released in 7 years and then get probation.

This case is interesting to me.

Do I think Brand is guilty? Yes. I haven’t looked at the evidence. I may be wrong. But a whole bunch of women accused him, and the finder of fact believed them strongly enough to take away his liberty and ruin his life. I have not seen any evidence that they were lying, unless you count letting him run wild for years after the alleged crimes, and then filing charges much later.

The weird thing is that I instinctively feel bad for Brand, but I had to force myself to consider the suffering of the victims so I could feel sympathy for them.

He seems like such a nice guy. I couldn’t stand him in the only Brand movie I saw, because he was annoying, but he seems nice in his videos.

I am very used to misandry. I am used to seeing false accusations exposed in the news. I’m used to seeing lying women on the web, posting videos falsely claiming oblivious innocent men in gyms were harassing them. Misandry has gotten so bad, it seems natural to assume it’s in play.

Women really do make a lot of false rape accusations. They get exposed all the time. My own sister falsely accused three different men; two in my presence.

My best guess is that Brand did what he was accused of, and if that is true, there are probably other women he has demeaned and made to feel worthless.

A lot of people refuse to accept the verdict. They say there was a conspiracy of leftists. They say Brand was accused solely because he moved away from the far left and became a Christian.

I have no idea whether any of that is true, but it is not reasonable to assume it is.

Here is what I don’t like about the case: assuming Brand is guilty, they let him run amok for over 20 years. While he was perceived as a reliable leftist and eroder of Christian and conservative power, they let him slide.

Why?

It’s just like the Cosby case. Cosby is definitely a rapist. People knew it for a long time. Why didn’t anyone expose him until he told black men to pull their pants up? That is literally what put the wheels of justice in motion.

In his old age, Cosby abruptly decided to break from the left on some small issues, and the next thing you know, leftists suddenly realized he had raped a whole bunch of women.

Showbiz is full of rapists and people who, if not guilty of rape, are guilty of egregious, chronic sexual abuse. Seems like the thing that makes conviction most likely isn’t rape. It’s disagreeing with the woke herd.

Strange times we live in.

I am trying not to feel sorry for Brand. I wouldn’t want him to continue harming women.

One big lesson here is that there is no free sex. Men and fathers love this saying, but for some reason, it makes a lot of women angry.

Fornication carries lots of risks, and some are worse than disease, pregnancy, and child support. Wealthy people who are highly promiscuous trust random individuals with their futures. Any consensual act can later be characterized as rape, and the kind of person who would allow a celebrity or tycoon to fornicate with them is also the kind of person no one should trust.

If you weren’t there, you don’t have to claim it was consensual. That’s the bottom line.

Proud Moment for Philadelphia

The gloves (and masks) are finally coming off. Leftists, sexual deviants, and Muslims have brought Kristallnacht to America, openly persecuting Jews in Philadelphia just for being Jewish. Not Israelis. Not IDF personnel. People who run small businesses. A lady who sells macaroni and cheese.

I always say it’s nice when leftists and Muslims drop their masks. It is helpful. Their defensive, gaslighting lies create a barrier rational people have to break down before they can expose the ugly truth. By attacking Jews for their Jewishness, in one of the largest cities in America, they are making it clear their hatred is grounded in antisemitism, not concerns about Israel overdoing it in a defensive war against savages.

People are saying Christians should pray for Western countries. Big waste of energy. The West is antisemitic and antichristian now. Westerners have exercised their free will, which God allows them to do. You can pray for God to part a sea or send fire to eat a sacrifice. Those things don’t require human cooperation. Praying for God to turn a nation Christian is different. He’s not going to force-feed faith into people as though they were pate geese.

Yesterday or the day before, I was thinking about free will, and I saw some things.

God created us for company. That is clearly stated in the Bible. He wanted us to love him and each other. He wanted others. Creatures with separate consciousnesses. He couldn’t get them without giving them free will. If he sat on the throne correcting people’s minds and hearts instantaneously, he would be alone. The slaves he controlled would be extensions of his own heart and mind. They wouldn’t be fully real.

God doesn’t play with dolls.

God isn’t going to magically replace the thoughts and desires of Westerners. He has given us 2,000 years to get to know him. He has sent countless servants to help us. We, the jury, have voted against him and made Satan and our monkey flesh our gods. He will not continue trying to persuade us forever, any more than he continued working with Noah’s generation or the people of Sodom and Gomorrah.

I now pray for God to defeat the government in America, federal, state, and local, in its efforts to persecute Jews and Christians. I pray for him to protect us.

I’ll obey the law. I’ll do jury duty if I have to. I’ll pay taxes honestly, and in the incredibly unlikely event our military drafts old men, I’ll probably go (depending on the mission), but I will always see America as a dangerous host that supports my enemies against me, and I will never again pray for America per se.

I think America is part of the Babylon system John referred to. The Revelation says that toward the end, an angel will cry that Babylon has fallen. Obviously, this does not refer to the dumpy town in Iraq that used to be Babylon.

The Revelation seems to say that Babylon is a religion and the great whore. Biblically, whoredom often means divorcing God and taking up wrong religions. The Revelation seems to be saying that the majority of the world will belong to Satanic faiths and will make a strong effort to do away with Israel, Jews, and Christians.

For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication . . .

The Revelation says Babylon will fall suddenly. Her plagues will come in one day. As technology improves, that is becoming more plausible, without the need for miracles. We have drones that can carry nuclear weapons and bioweapons. We have AI hacking that can empty bank accounts suddenly, driving famine. The ice gets thinner all the time.

We saw a picture of this in the fall of the original Babylon. Belshazzar and his buddies were getting drunk, using the sacred cups from the temple in Jerusalem. Even as they celebrated in confidence, their enemies were entering the city from below, and Babylon fell immediately.

Now that the US has voted to join to the enemies of God and made itself an enemy of Israel and Christians, the prophesied scenario in which the entire world is against Jerusalem has become possible.

I expected all this, but it’s still amazing to see it happening. Kristallnacht breaking out in the United States of America. Perpetrated by leftists in a leftist city formerly known for being Jew-friendly. Going after Jews who vote left by a margin of something like nine to one.

Seeing homosexual-hating Muslims join hand in hand with sexual deviants should amaze everyone. What will happen as the coalition builds? Will Muslims put deviants to death once they feel they don’t need them, or will their leaders make up some kind of Islamic revelation, saying that perversion is okay after all? I wonder.

Things will get worse. Count on it. Vote red all you want. Can’t hurt. But things will get worse.

God has been reminding me of something. As long as I spend enough time in the Spirit every day, praying in tongues and so on, he will defeat all my problems. All of them. Now I have more motivation than ever to stick with it.

I don’t have any advice for people who reject the Holy Spirit. God only has three parts, and if you reject the Spirit, he has no fourth part held in reserve to help you.

Revelation 18

1 And after these things I saw another angel come down from heaven, having great power; and the earth was lightened with his glory.

2 And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.

3 For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies.

4 And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.

5 For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities.

6 Reward her even as she rewarded you, and double unto her double according to her works: in the cup which she hath filled fill to her double.

7 How much she hath glorified herself, and lived deliciously, so much torment and sorrow give her: for she saith in her heart, I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow.

8 Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire: for strong is the Lord God who judgeth her.

9 And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication and lived deliciously with her, shall bewail her, and lament for her, when they shall see the smoke of her burning,

10 Standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come.

11 And the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her; for no man buyeth their merchandise any more:

12 The merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and of pearls, and fine linen, and purple, and silk, and scarlet, and all thyine wood, and all manner vessels of ivory, and all manner vessels of most precious wood, and of brass, and iron, and marble,

13 And cinnamon, and odours, and ointments, and frankincense, and wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, and beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and souls of men.

14 And the fruits that thy soul lusted after are departed from thee, and all things which were dainty and goodly are departed from thee, and thou shalt find them no more at all.

15 The merchants of these things, which were made rich by her, shall stand afar off for the fear of her torment, weeping and wailing,

16 And saying, Alas, alas, that great city, that was clothed in fine linen, and purple, and scarlet, and decked with gold, and precious stones, and pearls!

17 For in one hour so great riches is come to nought. And every shipmaster, and all the company in ships, and sailors, and as many as trade by sea, stood afar off,

18 And cried when they saw the smoke of her burning, saying, What city is like unto this great city!

19 And they cast dust on their heads, and cried, weeping and wailing, saying, Alas, alas, that great city, wherein were made rich all that had ships in the sea by reason of her costliness! for in one hour is she made desolate.

20 Rejoice over her, thou heaven, and ye holy apostles and prophets; for God hath avenged you on her.

21 And a mighty angel took up a stone like a great millstone, and cast it into the sea, saying, Thus with violence shall that great city Babylon be thrown down, and shall be found no more at all.

22 And the voice of harpers, and musicians, and of pipers, and trumpeters, shall be heard no more at all in thee; and no craftsman, of whatsoever craft he be, shall be found any more in thee; and the sound of a millstone shall be heard no more at all in thee;

23 And the light of a candle shall shine no more at all in thee; and the voice of the bridegroom and of the bride shall be heard no more at all in thee: for thy merchants were the great men of the earth; for by thy sorceries were all nations deceived.

24 And in her was found the blood of prophets, and of saints, and of all that were slain upon the earth.

And No One Hit me or Anything

Mark Hemans is visiting the US, and he appeared in Tampa this weekend. My wife and I decided to go. I like his ministry, even though he says Christians shouldn’t criticize destructive, cult-forming preachers like Benny Hinn and Kathryn Krick. Everyone has a blind spot or two.

Another issue: he has a history of engaging demons in conversation during deliverance. This is a bad idea, in my opinion. You’re talking to a spirit that loves lying and hates humanity, and you’re putting him in front of thousands of people so he can have a big audience. Doesn’t seem wise to me.

The meeting was held in a small church near Tampa. It was about half full. No one will ever be able to lump Hemans in with the soulless megachurch preachers who contaminate thousands at a time.

I would guess most people were there for healing, since that is what Hemans is known for.

There were a bunch of autistic kids there. That was upsetting. Autism seems to be everywhere now. I don’t have a big social circle, but I can think of three autistic kids I know personally. People blame vaccines and, of course, Donald Trump, because there is nothing the left can’t pin on him.

Seems to me autism is caused by demons. Autistic kids do things similar to the things demoniac children did in the Bible. Many can’t talk, and they harm themselves.

Directly in front of me, there was a boy who looked to be about 8. As we sat down beside him, he smiled at me and grabbed my foot. I thought he was just friendly, but then I noticed other things. His father had to hold him in his lap, restraining him. He had something resembling a dog chew toy on a string around his neck. From time to time, he would throw his head back as hard as he could, trying to hurt his father. Although his dad was used to this, he took at least one hard strike that clearly caused him a lot of pain.

The boy smiled most of the time and seemed very happy, even as he was trying to knock his dad’s teeth out.

To the right of these two sat a lady with a sweet-looking girl who was probably about 4. She was smaller than my son, who is not yet two. Her mother held her most of the time. She also had a chew toy. She didn’t try to hurt anyone.

Behind us, there were two disabled kids in one family. They sat in special wheeled contrivances. One had her head down in front of her and couldn’t do anything but move it slightly. My wife told me. I didn’t want to turn and stare. The other was a little better off. One of them had a machine that went on periodically and made sucking noises. I believe it sucked liquids out of her throat to keep her from aspirating them.

My guess is that they had genetic deformities, since they were sisters.

There were other people there who were not doing well. Most were adults. Nobody else looked as bad as the paralyzed kids. There was an old lady with a walker.

Hemans came in after a while and prayed for various people. He says the Holy Spirit locates the ones he wants to heal or deliver, so it’s not like Hemans goes immediately to the people who seem to need help most. It’s not predictable.

After a while, he turned his helpers loose on the crowd. I got prayer for a minor shoulder problem, and my wife also received prayer. We didn’t meet Hemans.

Did we get any miracles? Did we see any miracles?

One odd thing happened. After they prayed for my left shoulder, which is taking a long time to get over an injury, my left shoulder seemed to feel better, but my right shoulder started hurting. Did a demon move from one shoulder to the other? No idea, but my right shoulder is fine now, and my left shoulder doesn’t seem to be improved.

Hemans went to the lady with the walker. She had bad disks, as I recall. He prayed for her, and she left the walker behind and walked around the church with him. I don’t remember the details, but she seemed better.

We did not see anything happen with the autistic kids, although I’m sure all received prayer eventually. We had our son with him, and there was no childcare, so we had to leave after a couple of hours. We did not see everything.

Sooner or later, the highlights will probably appear on Youtube.

He said that it was common for autistic kids to seem unchanged during a meeting and then recover quickly afterward. There are a number of testimonies about this on his channel, and they are very impressive. Kids who couldn’t talk, speaking suddenly. Kids who had never shared affection with their parents, hugging and loving them.

I thought it was great. I hope some people got healed and delivered. It was the kind of service I like. Generally, churches have people sing for a while, they provide boring sermons telling us to be nice to each other, and then they ask for money. We sang, and then there was a long healing session. Then Hemans talked about being Spirit-led. Then the helpers started doing healings.

It’s strange that most churches don’t send teams out to pray, deliver, and heal during services. We are supposed to do these things. Yeshua and the apostles did. The church gave up on the Holy Spirit about 1800 years ago and became powerless, and since then, most churches have spent their time making excuses for being impotent and attacking Christians who do what Yeshua did.

As of Friday morning, I did not plan to go to the service. I was a little disappointed in Hemans because he had defended awful preachers. Also, I know you don’t have to go see any particular preacher to get supernatural help.

Later on, I realized I wanted to be around Christians. Last week, America rejected God and put its antisemitism and love of covetousness and murdering babies on display in front of the world, and I was grieving because I knew my nation was finished. I thought being around Christians would soothe and encourage us. It did.

I have given up on America. It is hostile to people like me. I am not America’s enemy, but America is an enemy to me. The nation of my birth has chosen conceit, sexual sin of all types, greed, cruelty, idolatry, and persecution over the God who made it great. It’s not a Christian nation; Barack Obama was right.

In this world, Christians who are Spirit-led, as they are supposed to be, are foreigners with green cards. Nations tolerate us, as many nations have tolerated Jews without really accepting them, but we are also like Jews in that nations turn on us for no reason.

I don’t know why I should feel bad about losing enthusiasm about America. The people who won the election aren’t enthusiastic, either. They hate America. They are bringing in other America-haters as fast as they can to destroy the country.

I knew all these things before the election, but the election reopened the wound and rubbed salt in it. Americans–I almost said “We”–are descending into tyranny and turmoil. America will probably become a second-world nation soon, and China and other pagan countries will continue to ascend.

They are talking seriously about doing away with the Electoral College now. This is just more proof that the left is insane and has no principles. They falsely accuse conservatives of trampling the Constitution, but here they are, attacking an institution created by the Constitution; one of the institutions that makes us a republic, not a fascist, centrally-governed state.

Like the Senate, the College was created to prevent populous states from enslaving the rest of the nation. It wasn’t about the difficulty of counting ballots, as leftists would have you believe. It seems to me that if they get rid of the College, the Senate will probably be their next target, and after that, they can pass legislation to get rid of the state governments. Then we’ll all be forced to use invalid pronouns, and they’ll arrest us for tweets they don’t like.

Without the College, hostile foreigners and woke Americans will know that if they systematically move to California, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Texas, they will run the country. They’ll be able to abuse the red people as much as they like.

Can they get rid of state governments? Of course they can. Congress can pass any law it really wants. It created the Constitution, and it can amend it.

The Civil War showed how little respect the federal government has for states’ rights. Personally, I am repulsed by the notion that people should be prevented from seceding and governing themselves. It’s what the CCP believes. But it has been federal policy since at least the 19th century.

The best way to start a civil war is to make part of your country subject to laws the people can’t endure. When they prefer risking their lives in war to living under your laws, they will put their lives on the line and try to break free. It appears that leftists will push and torture sane people as hard as they can, so I think civil war is highly likely.

Seceding to prolong slavery is obviously morally repugnant, but seceding to save yourselves from woke tyranny will make perfect sense if the suffering gets bad enough. There are worse things than civil war.

Because gun rights have expanded so much in recent years, and for other reasons, conservatives are not like prewar European Jews or other oppressed groups that have had to accept unbearable yokes. This isn’t 1860. The feds would not be up against a poor enemy with no industry, a small population, and limited weapons. The feds are having trouble with Iran. Fighting the red states would be much harder. It would never end unless the blue states agreed to a split.

I don’t want to be here when division and hatred get even worse. I am not going to sit on the sidelines and cheer for Americans killing other Americans. I don’t want to have to choose a side. This is not what God put me here for.

Patriarchal God Unpopular in Feminized World

My wife and I talked this morning about the horrors of feminism. It’s amazing how much damage it has done to our world.

We now live in a nation where most white men consistently vote correctly, and most other groups, including white women (married as well as single), vote for whatever Satan puts on the table. If women hadn’t voted, we would have had wonderful conservative God-friendly presidents for much of the last century.

In America, we think there is nothing wrong with a marriage in which the man and woman vote against each other. That is astonishing. Women commonly say they want husbands who will be leaders. If you reject your husband’s leadership in the areas of religion and politics, which are impossible to disentangle, he is not your leader. He’s more like a piggy bank, security provider, and sperm donor.

If a person is your leader, you let him guide you. That is what the term means.

Women have a long history of leading people into trouble, going back to Genesis. It’s because they are easily led astray, which is odd, given that they are hard to lead otherwise. I was thinking about this very thing when my wife interrupted my thoughts by saying it, herself.

You should marry a person who shares your thoughts, emotions, and desires as much as possible. It’s not enough to really like them, although that is the standard in modern America.

Look at J.D. Vance and his wife. He’s sort of Christian, and she’s a Hindu. They are raising children who will be given a choice between Yeshua and the large array of evil spirits Hindus worship. Vance supposedly believes in Yeshua, who said everyone who rejects him goes to hell. Presumably, Vance loves his children, but he sees nothing wrong with them being exposed to a faith his own religion says will put them in the lake of fire, where he will never see them again.

Does this make sense? Of course not. It serves to illustrate the catastrophic ignorance of people who marry for the wrong reasons.

Paul made it clear we are not to have unequal yokings, and somehow, most Christians (who believe it at all) think this only applies to the workplace and friendship. What yoking could be more powerful and more likely to corrupt than marriage?

Yeshua himself said, “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand.”

He said “house,” meaning “family,” not just “city.” Like “the house of David.” Good luck finding a preacher who will apply this to marriage in America.

A rebellious woman is a horrible curse to a man and his children, and the Bible is full of them.

Unreliable legend aside, Eve was the first feminist, pagan, drug user, and drug pusher. Sarah was a cruel and rebellious wife who gave rise to nations that hated the Jews and also sent a woman and her son to die of thirst in the desert. This was the woman Sarah forced to get pregnant with the son. Rebecca was a lying manipulator. Lot’s wife orphaned her children through rebellion. Lot’s daughters raped him and created more enemies for the Jews.

Zipporah refused to let Moses circumcise her son, and God almost killed Moses for letting her get away with it. Michal ridiculed her husband and king publicly. Bathsheba bathed naked in the sight of David, and preachers expect us to believe she didn’t intend to entice him, like everyone bathes naked with the windows open, across from a palace. Solomon’s wives led him into idolatry so he died a failure and a disgrace. Jezebel dominated her husband, made Baal worship the religion of the Jews, and murdered priests and prophets.

Herodias and Salome had John the Baptist murdered. Job’s wife told him to curse God and die. Delilah, who sat in the place of a wife, helped the Philistines blind and enslave Samson, a judge of Israel. Potiphar’s wife had Joseph imprisoned, no doubt hoping he would be executed, with a false rape accusation.

Balak used pagan women to lead the Hebrews into fornication, idolatry, and curses. Women had sex with the angels and produced the Nephilim, abominations that tormented human beings.

Notably, very few helpful and submissive women are mentioned in the Bible. But then people aren’t supposed to be praised highly for living up to their basic obligations.

In a godly marriage, women should always vote as their husbands do. Period.

We also have a plague of women preachers. Paul made it very, very clear that this was impermissible. Now the world is full of overwhelmingly-leftist female preachers and rabbis, and they work every day to destroy God’s kingdom. They claim Christianity is a philosophy, not a supernatural practice that unites us with a unique supreme being who is male. They claim other faiths are just as valid. They embrace sexual perversion. They clamor to open our borders even wider, so parasitic immigrants who have no loyalty to the US can help the left take over.

The female-preacher problem is really something. Feminism is so ingrained in preachers, even those who acknowledge the Holy Spirit commonly support women in pulpits. Mark Hemans, a conservative preacher who goes around performing miracles, recently said we should not criticize Kathryn Krick, a cult leader whose mentor is Geordavie, a notorious African man who leads a sex cult of his own. He called her “anointed.”

It’s as though Elijah were telling Jews to submit to Jezebel.

Who should we listen to? Mark Hemans or Paul? Hemans quotes Paul as an authority, so that should answer your question.

Paul foresaw what we were going to do to ourselves. We didn’t understand it, so we dismissed his instructions. That’s called “rebellion.” If you are truly submissive, you don’t need to know why every command is important. You’re supposed to obey now and understand later.

Only obeying when you agree is not obedience. It’s rebellion.

Men have abdicated their role as priests and kings in their homes, dedicating themselves instead to materialism, trivial amusements, and glory. They think working 60 hours a week is virtuous even though it necessarily means neglecting the religious instruction of their wives and kids. No wonder the women went nuts en masse.

If you don’t submit to the Holy Spirit, your wife and kids probably will not submit to you or him.

Women are really out of hand. They are more antisemitic than men; they are more likely to support Palestine, which necessarily means they choose to ignore the facts and hold Israel to a higher standard than Palestinians, the Chinese, every Muslim country, Myanmar, North Korea, and Cuba, to mention but a few. That choice is antisemitic.

Women have become extremely dangerous to babies and children. They kill millions of their young every year, and over 99% of the killings are for trivial reasons. Women rose up to support Lindsey Clancy, a woman who plotted to strangle two toddlers and a baby to death, and very few women expressed outrage or sorrow over the murders.

Men are certainly involved in the millions of infanticides that take place year after year, but overwhelmingly, women are the killers. There are places where a baby is more likely to be killed by its mother than be delivered alive. Globally, women murder about 1/3 of their babies, and that doesn’t include babies that have already been born. It’s kind of amazing that women continue to hold themselves out as men’s nurturing moral superiors.

Women are the main drivers behind the increase in witchcraft. They see it as a feminist faith. They literally gather in groups to curse conservatives and Christians. There are also men involved, but they are in the minority.

Women promote sick religions of all types. They are almost always the first to join and strengthen cults. This is why Mormons instituted polygamy. Men refused to join at first, so there were not enough husbands to go around.

Women are much more heavily represented in the socialism movement. Socialism has caused more death and suffering than all other causes combined, but women keep running back to it because they have an emotion-based craving for security, which socialism fails to provide.

Women have created an atmosphere of vile sexism. Misandry is standard in the US. Men suffer from a presumption of fault in nearly every area of life. Mainstream women now say insane things about men. They say they would prefer being alone with a bear than a man. They say they don’t need men; never mind all the vital jobs women refuse to do and can’t do.

These days, men talk a lot about “nose ring theory.” Young women are moving to the left in droves, and two of the best indicators are nose rings and tattoos. Men generally hate nose rings because they are ugly and resemble the rings worn by hogs prone to rooting. This is one of the main reasons young women wear them. The purpose is to challenge and offend men. Then many of the same women appear on social media, crying because no one wants them.

There are two types of rings that don’t go together: nose and engagement.

A lot of modern young women think two things are simultaneously true: they should offend and criticize men every chance they get, and men should desire and marry them. That’s not how it works. That’s Satanic delusion, not logic.

Research, and you will learn that nose rings were popularized because women knew they were ugly. The original purpose was to punish men for looking at them. Don’t believe me. Google for yourself. It’s remarkable that young women wearing rings designed to repel men make weepy videos complaining that men don’t want them.

Remember what Hollywood executive Samuel Goldwyn said: “If people don’t want to go to the picture, nobody can stop them.” Facially wrong, but fundamentally right.

People, including single men, have free will. If men don’t want to marry nose ring girls, nobody can stop them! I doubt men will ever want this type of woman, no matter how crazy we get, except for quick sex followed by ghosting.

Most men don’t want to bring abusers into their lives. Or pay for the abuse. Or give abusers their houses and live in small apartments, alone.

It should be very obvious that women need the leadership of men and God. As evidence, consider the vileness of the kind of people who get angry when this is pointed out.

If your wife votes against your choices, your family doesn’t exist politically. It has no power. And you chose it, so you are the problem. You probably knew what she was when you proposed. But is it fair to blame you and no one else? There was no one to warn you. Society was telling you fiery relationships were cute. It was telling you anyone who wouldn’t marry outside his religion was a bigot. It told you men should spend their lives apologizing and being corrected. If you didn’t know the Holy Spirit, who was there to set you straight?

I completely understand the millions of men who have decided never to get married. Most of them don’t know God, so they don’t expect miraculous matchmaking, and short of that, things look very bad. Hateful women with delusional expectations. Obligation without power. Expense without gratitude. Courts that treat men badly.

In their hearts, these men have reinvented scripture without knowing it. The Bible states their concern twice, word for word:

Proverbs 21:9: It is better to dwell in the corner of the housetop, than with a brawling woman in a wide house.”

Proverbs 25:24: It is better to dwell in the corner of the housetop, than with a brawling woman in a wide house.”

When God says the exact same thing twice, it means it’s important.

Here is another valuable insight:

Isaiah 3:12: As for my people, children are their oppressors, and women rule over them. O my people, they which lead thee cause thee to err, and destroy the way of thy paths.

God obviously wanted to rule us through men.

That isn’t going to happen again, so batten down the hatches and weather the storm with the Holy Spirit. America has made its choice. And if you find a real Proverbs 31 woman, not just one who has “Proverbs 31 Lady” tattooed above her buttocks, do your best to make her yours.

He’s More Upset Than we Are

I wrote about last night’s election catastrophe, which my GOP Governor Ron Desantis, no weak-kneed chicken little has referred to as a “near extinction-level event” for the GOP. I think I need to add one more thing.

I don’t get angry at God. I used to, but eventually he helped me understand the filthiness and absurdity of being angry at someone perfect, who allowed himself to be tortured to death so he could take the punishment for the evil things I had done to him.

That being said, this morning, there were times when I started to feel annoyed with him. I cut it off. I told God I stood with him against my own flesh. I apologized. Nonetheless, I did have the beginnings of irrational irritation.

Here are some things to think about.

God isn’t up there glowering at us, taking pleasure in giving us leaders who will torment Jews and Christians. He is grieving. He is sad about what happened, just as we are. We should see ourselves as sitting beside him, sharing his grief.

God didn’t do this to us. People did. Mainly women and minorities, but people.

We have free will. God allows us to choose between him and Satan. Overwhelmingly, Americans have been choosing Satan for a long time. That’s how we ended up here. The human race let God down again.

This is nothing abnormal. People who know God expected this to happen sooner or later. I expected it sooner. It should not hurt anyone’s faith. It’s completely consistent with the Bible. How many times did God let heathens sack Jerusalem?

I suppose that is an appropriate thing to bring up, because Jerusalem is one of the left’s targets. Its political walls are coming down now. Antisemitism was one of the main reasons for the election bloodbath. People will say they oppose the government of Israel, not Jews as a group, but that’s generally not true. If they didn’t hate Jews, they would have looked at the evidence and judged Israel fairly instead of blaming it falsely for what its enemies do to Israel every day.

Where are Jews supposed to go now that Israel is losing its biggest earthly ally and antisemitism is going mainstream in America? I see no hope, given that very few of them are likely to get close to their Messiah.

Americans love to pat themselves on the back. Politicians love to tell us how wise and fair we are. Not true. A lot of God’s children live here, but the majority belongs to Satan.

It’s important to remember this: the conditions you and your family live under do not depend on your country. They depend on your relationship with Yeshua and the Holy Spirit. When the atrocities start, you don’t have to be included.

My dad was a horrible father for most of my life, and he taught me very little, but he taught me one thing that was very wise. He said, “Always look after yourself.”

He said it in connection with national elections. He wasn’t talking about selfishness. He meant that we can’t trust the government not to turn on us, which it just did.

Stick with God. Look after yourself.

I hope this helps people feel better. Anyone who thought Trump was the Messiah needs to wake up.

By the way, get ready for gun and ammo shortages as well as tyrannical anti-freedom laws that will shock even Hillary Clinton. Expect to lose your legal guns within the next ten years.

America Flushes Herself

I didn’t think a lot about elections yesterday. My wife and I have prayed about elections a lot, but, perhaps by the mercy of God, I didn’t find them very interesting on voting day. I call that a blessing, because I hate feeling stress on election days and sitting at the PC, refreshing results to find out whether America or my state has committed suicide.

Last night, my wife told me Byron Donalds had won our governorship, and I asked her not to tell me about the other elections. I wanted to sleep.

Today I checked the news, and I saw that America had voted decisively against God, Christians, Jews, Israel, sanity, and love. America voted for arrogance, hatred, socialism, poverty, perversion, weakness, the persecution of Yeshua and his children, and the extermination of Jews.

Not a surprise. I have been expecting this for years. For a long time, it has amazed me that we have done as well as we have. God gave us George Bush and Donald Trump twice each, and he gave us a sane Supreme Court. Now, having rallied for a while, we go back into our declining trend.

Last time I looked, the US Senate was set to have 54 leftist seats and only 44 GOP seats. The mob was set to win a 19-41-seat majority in the House. Brutal.

In a development that is probably related on the supernatural level, Donald Trump, in cooperation with Benjamin Netanyahu, has decided to cut off aid to Israel.

What will happen now?

First off, I think we can kiss President Trump goodbye. He will most assuredly be impeached next year, and the most reasonable expectation is that our leftist-dominated Senate will convict him. That will leave us with J.D. Vance, unless he is impeached as well. If he is, we get the speaker of the House, Hakeem Jeffries. A fool for a nation of fools.

In the unlikely event Trump is not removed from office, he will be tied up in House hearings for the rest of his tenure, and he will not be able to get any laws passed. The party is over.

I will be very surprised if the new Congress doesn’t try to have his children imprisoned.

I can also say with confidence that our efforts to correct the federal judiciary, which runs our lives on a day-to-day basis by deciding what our laws mean, will be crippled. With a majority of at least 10 seats, the left will have little motivation to confirm Trump’s nominees.

There is a fair chance Thomas and Alito will die or have to leave office before 2028. That would give us a 4-3 court. Still mostly sane, but without two of the strongest conservative voices. One or both of them should announce his retirement today, to get things moving before power changes hands. That is extremely unlikely.

What will happen in 2028? My best guess is that we will elect a Democrat president, because Americans have become stupid and childish, our younger generations are more depraved and delusional than ever, and people who vote wisely are dying out.

For years, I have been criticizing conservatives for dancing on the grave of leftism in America. The main problem is that God has warned us that he may stop opposing our enemies if we gloat over them, which we have, over and over. Apart from that, it should have been obvious to anyone that the overall trend was leftward. Now it looks like we are getting our reward for arrogance and failure to credit God.

Consistently, I have been saying that conservative victories were brief reprieves, not signals of a rightward shift. I believe God showed me this. Now we see how correct this was. We didn’t have a minor tremor last night; the earth gave way under us and swallowed us up. The left’s victory wasn’t modest in scope. The GOP was obliterated, showing that our electorate is not conservative at all. It blows with the wind.

All the people who have been saying liberalism is dead need to go sit in the corner now. Gloating over the death of the left is like gloating over a warm day in November and wearing a hat that says “Make Summer Great Again.”

Winter has begun.

For the foreseeable future, and probably until the rapture, left-wing demoniacs will choose our judges and make our laws, and they will probably take the White House in 2028.

Conservatives and Christians who complain about tyranny now haven’t seen anything yet. Things are about to get a lot worse, and there is no limit to how bad it can be.

Cambodia can happen here. The USSR can happen here. Cuba can happen here. Americans can have their homes, businesses, and money confiscated. They can be imprisoned and killed for religious and political speech. They can be lined up beside ditches and shot by leftists. American Jews can be incinerated to extinction. America can go to war with Israel and do very great damage.

Christians and Orthodox Jews love to say God protects Israel and that Israel will never lose. Unfortunately, God has said invasion is coming. Prophecy says all the nations of the world will assemble against Jerusalem. That has never happened, so it’s going to happen in the future. Jerusalem will be taken. Houses will be confiscated. The women will be raped. Hostages will be removed. In short, October 7 on a nationwide scale.

Can you imagine the gloating and dancing we will see on the left when these things happen? It may make us wonder if God can vomit.

When these things start to happen, Yeshua himself will step in and defend Israel personally, but a lot of terrible things will have been done before he comes.

Netanyahu is tired of having America tell Israel what to do, and this is his motivation for winding down aid. Donald Trump is caving to the will of the American people, many of whom want to see Israel cut off. The big problem here is that God curses those who curse the seed of Abraham who came through Jacob, and he blesses those who bless them. We are inviting curses and throwing away blessings. We just endured a self-inflicted catastrophe, and by abandoning Israel, we will make it worse.

Americans forget that America is not mentioned in the Bible. It was not established by God. There is no promise that God will stand by us. America is not God’s nation. America is temporary.

Israel is the only nation God created and set apart for himself. It is David’s kingdom; that is still true. An heir of David, Yeshua, is the current king. He will always be the king. Donald Trump is just a minor figure whose time is passing away, and America is as vulnerable as Babylon and Rome.

Israel will survive, but the Jews will pay a terrible price. America will become just another Gentile-run adversary, and God will take vengeance on us. Imagine God treating America as his enemy. Seems unthinkable, but it will happen. We will be lumped in with nations like Egypt, Greece, Assyria, and Persia.

I don’t pray for America per se. That would be stupid. America is against God. America is doomed. I pray for God’s people in America, and I pray for Israel and the Jews. God made Joseph great in Egypt. He made Mordecai great in Persia. He looked after Daniel and Nehemiah in heathen palaces. We know he is willing to protect his own, regardless of where they are and what kind of evil jackasses rule them.

We prayed for God to do everything possible to make the GOP win. We prayed for God to cause leftists to get flat tires on the way to vote. We prayed they would vote sanely by mistake. We prayed the voting machines would be hacked. I asked God to break man’s laws, because man’s laws are garbage.

It didn’t work. Man has free will. We are in charge of this world. God won’t prevent us from destroying ourselves forever. Generally, you can’t expect much when your prayer requires God to interfere with free will. God respects free will so much, he casts people into hell all day, every day, instead of making them behave and believe in him. He has cast hundreds of people into hell while I wrote this piece.

I don’t want to live in this world any more. Every day, I pray God will bring the rapture that very day. I ask God to help his children conform to his wishes so they will be taken. I am sick of this place, just as God is. I don’t want to be here to see a Christ-hating eunuch in a dress, with breasts created by hormone injections, sitting in the Oval Office at the Resolute desk. That spectacle will be here soon if the rapture doesn’t come first.

That’s it, then. The voice of the Beast has spoken again, proving once more that democracy came from hell. I hope my family and my brothers and sisters rest in God’s palm until he comes to get us.

Be a Man and Save $500

I had an annoying experience last night, and it goes to show that no woman should marry a millennial, because they can’t do anything.

Air conditioning is what made life in Florida possible. I’m not sure what people did here, or why they ever entered the state, before air conditioning. I believe the moon landings took place, but I have doubts about all those photos of people living in Florida before air conditioning. I don’t see how a person could have stood it.

Of course, I have central air. For some reason, the people who built the house put two units in it, and each one has a condenser in the yard. This is the thing that compresses the refrigerant and sends it into the house.

For reasons known only to AC manufacturers, condensers are made to fail. You may possibly get 15 years out of a condenser, but you can also expect it to fail at least once during its life due to the low quality of one important part: the run capacitor.

Residential AC condensers have single-phase condenser motors, and that means each one has to have a big capacitor that makes the motors run. Manufacturers have two choices when specifying capacitors for their products: American-made capacitors likely to last as long as the condensers, or Chinese garbage that blows out every third July on a Friday night when it’s 105 degrees outside. This is just how life is.

The Chinese-cap blowout phenomenon is particularly likely to happen if you’re over 80 years old, bedridden, and unable to open a window.

In Florida, where the weather is warm in the winter, it is also likely that the capacitor will fail late on New Year’s Eve or Christmas Day.

I don’t know what a good capacitor costs a manufacturer, but I can buy one for $24, so it’s not like they’re prohibitively expensive and stuffed with caviar. If I can get one for $24, Rheem and Carrier must be able to get them for half of that. Nonetheless, they keep using Chinese caps that blow up.

Last night I noticed that the temperature in our master bedroom (“master,” wokies) was 78°. Way too hot. My wife hadn’t noticed, probably because she’s a woman, and women are cold-blooded, like frogs. I don’t know how long it had been that high. A respiratory bug hit our house a while back, so I started sleeping in the nursery. Then when I was ready to go back to the MASTER bedroom, my wife caught something else. I was about to resume normal sleeping arrangements when I saw the temperature problem.

Of course, I went to A.I., and after a lot of fiddling with my system’s silly computer, I confirmed that the capacitor was probably to blame. I went outside with a light strapped to my head to check.

I pulled the cover plate off the electronics area on the unit, and long story short, there was a big smear of carbon on the sheet metal inside, and one of the wires had melted completely off the spade connector on the capacitor.

Big problem, right? Time to call an air conditioning outfit, have them come out, pay them overtime, and be charged $250 for the new $6 Chinese capacitor, labor not included.

No, that’s what happens to millennial men who shave their chests and wear women’s underwear. I am old, so I know stuff.

By the way, the numbers I quote are not fantasy. You may have to shell out $500 to get a cheap part replaced with another one that is just as bad.

I went to the kitchen, where I kept two fresh Amrad capacitors. I grabbed one. I went to the shop and got crimpers, pliers, and the correct size female spade connector, which, of course, I had. I pulled the disconnect. I cut off the burned part of the wire, installed the connector, replaced the capacitor, and turned the unit back on.

Total cost: price of one capacitor and one spade connector.

Afterward, I went to Amazon and ordered a new Amrad. It cost $31 this time, but that was the price of speedy delivery. I didn’t want to be empty-handed if the new capacitor blew.

The old capacitor, of course, has “China” stamped on it, but there is no brand name. Even the Chinese don’t want credit for this junk.

So what is an Amrad capacitor?

Amrad Engineering is a company in Palm Coast, Florida. They’re the people who make the good capacitors. I bought mine not long ago when I was getting my system up to speed, maintenance-wise.

I had both units checked over this summer, and I even bought a membership for VIP service which includes two checkups a year, but not being stupid or a millennial, I realized there was no way the AC people were going to replace my still-running Chinese capacitors, so I bought some and set them aside. A millennial wouldn’t have known an AC system needed maintenance, he wouldn’t have known what a capacitor was, he wouldn’t have signed up for semiannual visits, and he definitely would not have heard of Amrad.

I was going to change the capacitors in both of my condensers right away, but I put it off, so I ended up out in the yard at night.

My advice: find out what size run caps your system uses, today, and buy an Amrad. Also, make sure you have the correct nut drivers to remove your access panel. The brilliant minds at Carrier made my condenser with both 1/4″ and 5/16″ screws, just to make sure more customers would have to call repairmen.

It only takes 10 minutes to change a capacitor, and smart people dump the Chinese originals as soon as their condensers are installed. You should do that. You should buy one capacitor to install today, plus one to install later in case it blows.

It’s hard to believe AC manufacturers are sufficiently incompetent or cheap to use Chinese capacitors, but they do, so govern yourself accordingly. And if you’re a millennial male (XY, not just confused), stop shaving your chest and buy some tools.

As for the ladies (XX, not just confused), I guess it’s not practical to tell you to marry old men who actually know how to do things, so maybe someone needs to devise some kind of test so you can weed out the young men who are even more feminine than you are.

Your Camera May be Smarter Than You Are

My photography journey keeps reminding me what a filthy world we live in. Sin, filthy, useless people, and filthy, useless spirits are why we can’t have anything nice.

I would say that over 95% of the shots I take now feature my son. He is the most photogenic person I have ever seen in my life. Before he was born, I hoped he would be a child of God, and I hoped he would be smart and free from physical problems, but I didn’t expect him to be extremely good-looking and photogenic. Everyone hopes their kids will look nice, but it wasn’t something I thought about much, and as for being photogenic, which is a completely different thing, who considers that while waiting for a baby to arrive? Maybe shallow celebrities.

I like using my blog to share the things I do, but it’s not working for photography. Because my photos generally feature my son, I can’t post many here. I already had one sick idiot stalk me by reverse-searching a photo of my son which I put on a forum, and on top of that, there are the pagan kooks who go to Christian sites to get photos of people they can curse. And then there are the pedos.

I deleted my Flickr account. I removed photos of my son from forums without warning the mods so they could get in the way. Now I am very reluctant to put any shots up here. Maybe I’ll start again. I am not sure.

Upshot: here I am, writing about photography without posting photos. Again.

Anyway, I learned something interesting which could help other photographers. If you own an Olympus/OM camera and you are getting one blurry shot after another with autofocus, you need to turn off “release priority.”

I keep my OM System camera on continuous autofocus, so it is constantly trying to focus on whatever I shoot. That’s great, but it gave me a false sense of confidence. I thought the camera would always do its best to focus before I shot. That isn’t true.

When you shoot in release priority, the camera’s prime directive is to shoot as soon as you push the button; no delay at all. If the focus has drifted, tough. You get a blurry photo.

The purpose of release priority is to help photographers get clear shots of moving subjects. Imagine you’re shooting an athlete doing the long jump. You’re at the end of the pit, and he’s flying toward you. You push the button, and the camera shoots a rapid flurry of photos. Autofocus can’t keep up, so you use release priority. At the end of the day, you sift through the shots, and you hope there is one good one that is in focus.

That’s how it was explained to me.

If this is correct, then release priority will work against you nearly all the time unless you’re shooting things like flying birds. It explains why I’ve gotten so many awful, unusable photos with my OM-1II. I changed my camera’s setting to focus priority, and now things are much better.

OM System cameras are very weird. They are niche cameras for unusual people. They are very tough; you can take one out on a windy day on a sailboat and then bring it home and rinse it off under the sink. They are the absolute best for macro. They are great for wildlife photography because you can have a very long lens that doesn’t weigh 15 pounds. They have all sorts of computational features Sonys and Canons don’t have. But you really have to study up in order to use one.

My camera came with an excellent 12-40 mm lens. I’m going to get another one because this one is just too long. It shoots like a 24-80 mm full frame lens, and that means no wide-angle shooting. Some people would say 24 mm is wide, but it’s not. I have 9 mm lenses for my A6700. To get the same angle, I would need 6.5 mm on the OM.

I decided to try a Panasonic 8-18 mm zoom. It’s pretty fast, the image quality is very good, and it doesn’t weigh a ton. It won’t go as wide as I would like, but it will be considerably better than 12 mm. When I sit at restaurant tables with my family, I sometimes have to lean back to shoot them at 12 mm. With 8 mm, things should be much easier, and I’ll get that nice, dramatic wide-angle look.

I considered getting a zoom that goes up to around 100 mm on the long end (like 200 mm full-frame), and I may do it to round off my kit, but I almost never want a lens that long. Of course, that may be partly because I rarely use long lenses. Maybe if I had one for the OM, I would fall in love with it.

I’ve been getting fantastic photos, even with the phone. My son makes it easy. I told someone that if I were shooting a young Christy Turlington, I would get more duds than I do with this kid. When I go through raw photos, the hard part isn’t finding good ones. It’s deciding which good ones I want to develop.

Because I was frustrated with the focus issue, I went to a forum, and once I solved the problem, I posted a magnificent photo of my son. Right away, people started telling me I had cropped it wrong. It showed a chair to his right, and it showed a fair amount of his kitchen. I told them the composition was intentional and that I was only asking for help with focus.

Photographers are herd creatures, so it is frustrating to deal with them. They get certain ideas in their heads, and they turn them into the law of the Medes and Persians; everyone must obey at all times. When it comes to portraits, which means any photos that showcase people, they think every shot has to be cropped closely, and every background has to be blurred.

Anyone who thinks every portrait has to be cropped closely knows nothing at all about composition. That is obvious and indisputable, so I’m not going to spend a lot of time explaining it. I shot a photo of my toddler son, for people to look at 50 or 100 or 500 years from now. I shot it in my kitchen, in the house where he is being raised. I want his kids to see the chair and the background. I want him to look at it when he is old and remember that kitchen. That can’t happen if I mindlessly cut the background out.

The same principle applies to blurring. If the background is too blurry, no one will be able to identify anything.

It amazes me that people pull out these rules and apply them to travel shots. “I went to Paris. Here I am in front of the Eiffel Tower. But you can’t see it in the background because I cropped most of it and blurred it out, so I might as well have taken this shot in my bathroom.”

You spend $10,000 on a trip, and then you blur out everything you paid to see. Yeah, that makes sense.

Remember the famous WWII VJ-Day kissing photo? Of course you do. What if the photographer had cropped out the crowd and buildings and blurred every background feature that remained? It would have been ridiculous. A rude sailor assaulting a nurse on the street.

Go look at Vivian Maier’s photos of people and try to find one with heavy bokeh (background blurring) and the background ruthlessly cropped. Good luck with that.

OM cameras aren’t the best for bokeh, and for travel and family portraits, that’s fine. I want to make my OM my travel camera because it’s tough and light and takes great pictures, and any bokeh issues it has won’t matter much.

These days, you can use software to add blurring, so it’s not that big a deal if your raw photo doesn’t have it. Is it fake? Well, sure, but so is in-lens bokeh. Photography is art. Everyone manipulates images. Even your phone never gives you raw photos unless you force it. Every shot is heavily manipulated before you see it. Does that make you a fraud? Come on.

I use Photolab a lot, and it keeps getting better. It rescues noisy photos without making them look fake, so I can shoot in bad light and still get great results. It lets me brighten things I want to emphasize and darken things that are too prominent. It will probably have fantastic fake bokeh soon, because they improve it all the time, but for now I have Lightroom. Am I wrong to use these tools? The results look more like what I saw than the original photos.

Here’s a good life lesson: if you’re doing something original and useful, you shouldn’t require other people’s approval. If what you’re doing is original, they are not doing it. If they understood it, they would be doing it already, and you wouldn’t have to come up with it yourself. Expect to be criticized and laughed at, like Beethoven, Galileo, and Tesla. If you listen to people who can’t understand what you’re doing, you will quit and remain just like them.

Nowhere to Go From Here

The news from the barbecue front is both good and bad. Good, because I am making better barbecue than I have ever had; better than I ever thought possible. Bad because I have eaten pork sandwiches for the last 4 days.

To recap, I moved from pork butts to pork bellies, using the new Weber Smokey Mountain smoker and hickory chunks. The resulting product was like barbecue from a dream. Chewy, delicous bark. Smoky fat with a decadent texture. Truly shocking.

I started reheating slices for sandwiches. That worked out extremely well, to the point where it made me think pulled pork sandwiches were probably a waste of time. And pulled pork is marvelous.

Yesterday, I made a mustard sauce without tomatoes, and it blew my mind. Best sauce I have ever had. Nothing else comes close, and I have had plenty of good sauce. The simple recipe is in yesterday’s post.

Today, I went even further. I heated up the pork, toasted some buns, and made sandwiches using pork, big dill pickle slabs, and slices of raw onions. I applied sauce above and below the meat.

I don’t see how a sandwich could be any better than this. The onions added crunch and, well, onions. The pickle slabs made the sandwich juicer, and the pickle flavor improved the meat and sauce exponentially.

I have never had barbecue anywhere that was anywhere near as good as this. I wish one of the local joints would start making these sandwiches.

From now on, we are not going anywhere without this sauce. We may go out for ribs, but we are not relying on restaurant sauce. Without shame, I will stride through the door with a squeeze bottle of my own sauce in my hand.

I’m also going to ask for pickles and onions.

I don’t really know what to do now. My motivation for continuing to experiment is gone. I don’t particularly want barbecue to be better than this.

Brisket…the Wonder Woman of Meats

I continue to improve my barbecue knowledge and form opinions that may or may not hold water. Today I’m thinking about brisket.

As you may know, beef brisket is an inherently undesirable cut of meat that can be redeemed by prolonged smoking at low temperatures. In other words, a typical barbecue cut. It’s tough as leather.

Brisket gets a lot of attention from barbecuers because it is hard to cook properly. It comes out dry and/or tough. The bark doesn’t develop. It’s tricky. It has to be cooked for a minimum of 10 hours. As a result, there is a lot of conversation out there about how to get it right.

I just saw a video by a guy named Steve Gow. He’s some sort of engineer, and that’s a good thing. Cooking is full of old wives’ tales and fables, like the one that says you should rest steaks. Engineers who turn to cooking can apply their analytical skills to wash away the horse manure and find out what actually works.

Gow did a lot of experiments, and he says he found the best way to get perfect brisket. Sounds great. Uh oh…one small detail: it takes 24 to 32 hours. You have to smoke it and then hold it for half a day at something like 140°.

I thought the video was interesting until I got to the time punchline. Over a day for barbecue? No. That’s ridiculous.

Let me say something that will make gatekeepers and fanatics (and Texans) steam like a freshly-unwrapped 32-hour brisket: it’s not worth that kind of time. Brisket just is not that good. It’s like Black Panther. Overrated due to a passing fad.

Am I saying it’s bad? Of course not. I like it. I’ve eaten it. But here is the truth: in restaurants, I have probably ordered brisket less than 5% of the time. Pork is just plain better. It has more flavor. It takes sauce better. It is compatible with every type of flavor: sweet, hot, smoky, salty, fruity, umami, fishy…anything. It’s the king of meats and the meat of kings.

Ribs are better. Pork butt is better. Pork belly is better. I’ve had tender, juicy brisket in restaurants, and if I had to put a number on it I would say it’s 60% as good as spare ribs. Why would I spend 32 hours ruining my sleep rhythm as well as the day on which I plan to eat, to get a B- meat when I can have A+ in 7 hours?

Brisket is what you eat when you’ve had so many ribs, you need a short break. That’s what brisket is.

I think Texans have made brisket an obsession and spread it to the rest of us. Texas is the leading beef-production state, and it trails other states badly in pork production. I think they’re just pushing what they know.

As I have often said, I lived in Austin for three years, and the barbecue was disappointing. Brisket in steam table trays floating in sauce just like the juice from pork and beans. Little dry ribs. Food service white bread, untoasted, unfried, thrown on the plate cold. It must be better now that the Famous Franklin’s is there.

The food in Texas was generally disappointing, but you couldn’t tell Texans that. The best food I had, that I didn’t cook, came from a chain of restaurants run by Greeks who had zero Texas heritage. The Pappas family.

I will probably smoke a brisket eventually just for the experience, but I see no reason to make it a regular thing when the workload is outlandish and the product is second-tier. Also, the financial risk is high. Brisket runs $7 per pound now, and a whole brisket is not small. I may blow it, or I may just end up with a brisket that lacks potential because of the way the fat is distributed. You have to be careful when you choose a brisket. It’s not like pork, which is just about always fine.

Who wants to spend $150 on a piece of meat, waste a day and a half on it, and then have to drive to Burger King?

Time to warm up some pork belly.

MORE

I have been trying to work up some sauce recipes. There are some store sauces I like pretty well, like Sweet Baby Ray’s and Sonny’s Sizzlin’, but I have always wanted to try Carolina-style sauces, which are not widely available here. I have made some things with cider vinegar and ketchup, and they were okay, but I wanted to do better.

The only store Carolina sauce I could find around here was Southern Living Carolina Gold, which has no tomatoes in it. Just mustard. It doesn’t taste bad, but it’s too sweet, it has no heat, and it’s bland. The nice thing about it is that it helped me understand the concept of mustard sauce.

Today I rooted around on the web for ideas, and I ended up making this:

INGREDIENTS

1/2 cup French’s
2 oz. maple syrup
2 oz. cider vinegar
2 tsp. Frank’s
3/8 tsp. ground pepper
1/2 tsp. chipotle powder

I didn’t measure the liquids carefully, but I know I’m not far off.

I warmed up some pork belly slices in the microwave, put them on a potato bun, and applied this sauce top and bottom.

Not a great picture. Sorry.

It was fantastic. I didn’t know a tomato-free sauce could be this good. I didn’t miss the tomatoes one bit. Best sauce I have ever had.

It was so good, I didn’t even think about the bun. I like onion rolls better than potato buns, but when I ate this sandwich, all I could think about was the meat and sauce.

I believe this would be astonishing with some thin slices of Bermuda onion and dill pickle chips on top of the meat. I like pulled pork on garlic bread, but I think pork belly is too rich for that. It doesn’t need any help.

Next time:

3/8 cup French’s
2 tbsp. hot Mister Mustard
2 oz. maple syrup
2 oz. cider vinegar
1/2 tsp. white pepper
chipotle powder to taste
2 tsp. raw pressed garlic

I Will Miss This When They’re Making us All Eat Soy

I am learning (Or is it “learing”?) more about the fine art of barbecue.

The other day I smoked a pork butt using my new Weber Smokey Mountain smoker, and it was so good, it changed my understanding of what barbecue could be. My old Smokin-It electric smoker is a good machine, but the WSM gave me superior texture, excellent bark, and much more smoke flavor, which is the main reason smokers exist.

I cut squares into the fat of the butt and smoked it fat side up with a rub and some homemade vinegar sauce. The side of the butt with the fat was really something. Chewy bark combined with fat that had a texture sort of like a soft, delicate cheese.

I decided to see what it would be like to smoke a fattier cut, so on our last Costco mission, I got myself a slab of pork belly, the stuff bacon is made from. It was about $38, and I would say it was ample for four meals for my wife and myself. Maybe 6.

I did the same thing I did with the butt. Scored the fattiest side, put the other side down, applied my rub, took the water pan out of the smoker, and smoked the meat directly over the coals. I used hickory chunks. I tried to keep the temperature at 300°, but I don’t really know what I’m doing, so I only got close to that temperature during the last half-hour or so. The rest of the time, I was down around 240-250°.

I smoked until I got an internal reading of 165°, and then I applied the sauce and put the meat in the oven on a broiler pan at 300°. I took it out at 200°.

The butt was dryer, and when I put it in the oven, I covered the pan with foil to keep the butt from getting too dry. The belly was a lot wetter, so I didn’t use foil.

Was it good? Yes. Wonderful. Same bark. Same flavors. Lower ratio of the good stuff to the best stuff. It could have been a little juicier, but it wasn’t dry. It was so good, I could not make myself put sauce on it after it was cooked. The vinegar sauce I applied during cooking was very thin, so the finished meat did not look like it had sauce on it. The sauce went into the bark and flavored it.

I believe this meat will be excellent for sandwiches, although it’s so rich, I think they will have to be small.

Brisket gets a lot of love from pitmasters, but truthfully, this pork belly was better than any brisket I had ever eaten. I can’t say that means pork belly is generally better than brisket, though, because recent experience has taught me that I can’t judge meats based on the past. I have to run them through the WSM to see if I’ve been missing anything.

Next time, I plan to do a better job of keeping the heat high. I think the low heat gave the water too much time to get out of the meat. I used to think barbecue always meant 200-225°, but that was wrong.

I now have a stainless aftermarket door on the smoker. The Weber door is widely hated because it bends and lets too much smoke out. The door I bought will not do that, and it has a little hook on the inside so I can hang it on the smoker when the door is off. It came as a set of parts, and assembling and adjusting it was a big pain, but it works now.

I’ve been learning more from Harry Soo, the prizewinning pitmaster who filled his house with trophies using WSM smokers. I plan to do more of what he does. He uses a lot more wood, and he puts it under his charcoal. Other pitmasters say to avoid lump charcoal for various reasons, but he uses it, so I will, too.

He has an electronic gadget hooked up to a blower that connects to smoker bottom vents. It checks the temperature and blows the right amount of air toward the fire to keep the temperature within a narrow range. I don’t see myself trying that. The food is so good already, I don’t see the point. Maybe I’m wrong.

It’s nice to be on the path to better barbecue, because as people who are trying to limit carbs and get a lot of protein, it gives us pleasant options. We have been eating a lot of prime Costco strips as well as that gorgeous red Costco frozen shrimp, but you can’t live on that stuff every day.

Bottom line, I am claiming barbecue is health food. Yes. Health food.

Definitely.

We found a really neat product: Walmart Great Value frozen mixed vegetables. It’s a combination of corn, green beans, and carrots. You toss it in the microwave for 6 minutes, apply butter and salt, and you’re done. The quality is remarkable. You could mistake it for non-frozen. It’s not all that carby, and it’s quick and easy. Cost per bag: 97 cents. Works with barbecue, steaks, and shrimp. It’s pretty neutral.

I see people with $4,000 offset smokers on Youtube, and the natural inclination is to wonder if I went too cheap with the WSM, but that’s irrational. Far as I can tell from researching, there is nothing an offset does better than a WSM, but they cost a lot more (for good ones), and they are a real pain to use.

I suspect offsets are obsolete. I think it’s just taking the world a long time to admit it. An offset is a really neat device, and it lets you enjoy the fun of standing over it all day and being the captain, steering it back on course as it veers off over and over, but really, if you don’t enjoy facing a smoker for 6-10 hours, why would you put yourself through that just to get the same food a $550 WSM will give you with little effort? Actually, you get better food, because you don’t make as many mistakes.

If Harry Soo can defeat the offset guys and the guys who use every other kind of smoker hundreds of times in contests, cooking several different types of meat, then the WSM has to be as good a smoker as there is. Unless there is something wrong with meat that wins competitions.

The small footprint is nice, too, and once I get casters and side handles on the smoker, storing it will be a joke. And because it’s built heavily and covered with age-defying porcelain, a WSM will last a lifetime. Soo has smokers he has used for a very long time.

A UDS seems like a bad idea all the way around. It does exactly what a WSM does. It’s very heavy. The paint burns off. It’s hard to clean. It’s very expensive. And a WSM will do things it can’t do.

I believe the big benefit of a UDS is that the adjustable air inlets are up high, so obese pitmasters don’t have to bend over.

I think offsets and UDS’s are popular mainly because of blind loyalty at this point. Best guess. Maybe I’m wrong. I think bricks and cement are best, but after that, I like the WSM.

The Smokin-It was a bad choice as a barbecue smoker, plain and simple, although it makes very good food most people would be thrilled with. It’s not that much easier to use than a WSM, and the meat flavor, while excellent, and the bark, will never compare.

Will I get rid of it? No. I am going to put an external temperature controller on it so I can use it for a wide range of temperatures, from very low to over 300°. There are things a Smokin-It can do better than a WSM. It can hold meat at a desired temperature in a humid environment for as long as you want, and it can be rigged up for cold-smoking. It can be used as a spare oven on holidays. It can keep side dishes warm. You can roast a turkey in one, although you will need to move it to the oven to brown the skin.

This is how it looks to me now. I hope I’m getting close to the truth.

Mountain of Flavor

Although I am trying not to get back into cooking and gluttony, I have to confess that I am making some improvements in my barbecue technology.

I bought a Smokin-It electric smoker back in 2020. I had read great things about them. Very small quantities of ash to deal with. No charcoal. No smoker-tending; just turn it on and watch the meat thermometer. People said they made barbecue as well as any smokers.

Lately, I haven’t been as happy with my smokes as I used to be. I have gotten some overly-dark meat that didn’t taste as good as earlier cooks.

I started researching, and I learned some new things. Evidently, there is a hierarchy of types of smokers, from those considered best to those considered worst. The best is a brick smoker. After that, an offset made from heavy steel. Then there are vertical smokers that run on charcoal. After this, there are lighter offsets that don’t keep a temperature as steadily. Farther down, there are pellet grills and electrics.

The big knock on electrics is the flavor. Supposedly, they don’t give you as much smoke flavor, and you can’t fix it by adding wood. It just makes the meat dark.

I don’t know how true all this is. People are biased.

Since learning all these things, I found out that one of the world’s top barbecue chefs, a guy named Harry Soo, only uses a certain type of smoker: the Weber Smokey Mountain. He wins tons of prizes, so how bad can his work be?

I don’t want an offset. They are a lot of trouble, and a decent one would fill my patio. That means that if I want to go past electric, I have to look at masonry and vertical smokers.

I would love to have a brick smoker, and I have room for it. I could put it in the yard near the patio. One great thing about brick smokers is that they don’t make messes close to your house. I could pull the tractor up to a brick smoker and sweep the ashes into the bucket. No grease or soot on the patio or porch.

I may build one eventually, if I can get help.

The most popular vertical smokers are the UDS (Ugly Drum Smoker) and the Weber Smokey Mountain (“WSM”). You can make a UDS for a few hundred bucks if you like cutting up oil drums and welding, or you can buy a nice one already made for around $1600. Seems like a ton of money for a simple product. Also, they are hard to clean, and they are painted. Paint does not last on smokers. A WSM costs way less than a factory UDS, and they are porcelain-coated.

I decided to get a WSM. I was concerned about the hassle of charcoal, but life is too short to die without a really good smoker.

While I was going through the choices, and after I bought a WSM, I looked back at electric smokes I did a long time ago, and I saw that I had gotten better results back then. I intend to go back to what I did then. Mainly, I used less wood, and I put a charcoal briquette in the smoke box with it. Some say they have gotten more flavor by adding a smoke tube, which is a perforated stainless steel tube you fill with wood pellets and place in the smoker. I’m going to try that, too.

In addition to Harry Soo, I learned about another chef who gets tremendous respect: Malcom Reed. That is the correct spelling. He put an interesting recipe on Youtube. Most people think barbecue always has to be low and slow, but he smokes pork butts at 300 degrees. The results, he says, are just as good as low and slow, but the time is way shorter.

He uses a drum smoker made by a company called Gateway. Very expensive. He smokes directly over the coals, about 22″ up. He says the fat from the butt hits the hot coals, burns, and adds extra flavor.

A WSM ordinarily has a big pan of water between the coals and meat. This lowers the temperature and adds humidity, which is supposed to make smoke stick better. To make a WSM work like a UDS, you just remove the pan.

I’m giving this a shot today.

I made a butt a couple of days back in the Smokin-It. I was waiting for the WSM, and I wanted to see if I could do something like Reed does using electricity. I cranked the heat up as much as I could. I believe that got me to something like 260. When the smoke was finished and I was somewhere near 160, I wrapped the butt in foil and kept going until I hit 205. I was supposed to go for 195-200, but I missed it. Then I put the wrapped butt in towels in a cooler and waited until it sank to 165. The purpose is to let the fat cool and settle to prevent it from shooting out when the meat is pulled.

I was not very happy with the result. For one thing, the batch of chipotle powder I got for my rub is too strong. For another, when I opened the foil, I saw a lonely little butt half-submerged in juice.

I made a perfect butt in ’23, and I did not wrap it. I don’t like the results from wrapping. I don’t want the outside of the meat to be soggy. It should have a nice bark on it.

Today I put a 4.7-pound butt in the WSM. I made a new rub and halved the chipotle. I chose hardwood briquettes and hickory chunks I dried in my oven.

I have learned one thing: you don’t need 8 pounds of charcoal to hit 300° in this smoker. I got up close to 400° and had to remove a lot. I couldn’t put the meat in until I fixed this. I thought this meant I needed to go easy on charcoal, but about an hour later, the new briquettes were almost gone, and I was at 220. Threw some more in, and I am trying to manage the vents to get me back to 300. I guess this smoker eats a lot.

The charcoal mess isn’t really that bad. The smoker’s base holds the ashes, and it’s small and light enough to tilt into a trash bag.

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I got the smoker under control, more or less, and I took the butt up to about 160 degrees. It looks great.

Not positive it got enough smoke. It looks darker in person, so maybe I’m just letting the photo rattle me.

The WSM comes in three diameters: 14″, 18″, and 22″. I went for the 22″. I saw people saying it was possible to feed an enormous crowd with an 18″, but then I thought about all the times I had bought things that were too small and then been bitten in the rear end, so I bought 22″. I’m glad I did, because it turns out it’s big enough to hold a broiler pan.

Malcom Reed takes his butts out at 160°-170°, drizzles barbecue sauce on them, wraps them in foil, and bakes them until they hit 200°. At least, that’s what he did in the video I saw. I’m not wrapping this one because I don’t like the “butt soup” presentation with a soggy bottom. I put today’s butt on the broiler pan, wet the top with a vinegar sauce I made a long time ago, covered it with foil, and put it in the oven. Any liquid that comes out will fall into the pan instead of soaking the butt and ruining the bark, and the steam will help keep the meat from drying out.

Yes, I said I was glad the WSM could hold a broiler pan, but the oven is so convenient, and if the smoker is idle, I can start cleaning.

The meat is covered in foil. It can’t tell whether it’s in a smoker or an oven.

I know Malcom Reed is a barbecue genius, and I’m a dabbler who has made a lot of bad barbecue, but I can’t help myself. I just can’t make myself wrap that butt.

It’s funny how cooking works. These days, I really try not to let pride prevent me from trying other people’s respected, seemingly-proven ideas. On the other hand, when I do, I often find out they are wrong and I’m right. So sometimes the price of humility is bad food.

I’m not doing anything interesting for sides. This is just an ordinary weekday lunch. I’m going to open a can of baked beans and doctor them slightly with barbecue sauce and maybe some onions, and I’ll roast several ears of corn. Done.

I heard that some people smoke corn on the cob, so I tried it last time. Buttered some ears and put them in the Smokin-It. They tasted like creosote, so I think I’ll give up on that idea.

Reed says to put a finished butt in a cooler to bring it down to pulling temperature. I think that’s wrong. Pardon the hubris. Far as I know, the meat will be tender as soon as I get it to 200°, so I don’t think cooling it slowly is helpful for the texture. I think it will be fine if I let it cool on the counter.

I am checking A.I., and it says coolers are for situations when you need to hold the pork for a while before serving it. I guess that’s what the pros have to do in competitions. I don’t have any reason to wait. I’m not going to be submitting this butt to a panel.

I’m going to skip the cooler. This worked before. It works for pork roasts in the oven. It will work now. I’m confident enough to roll the dice, anyway.

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The pork has been served.

All I can say is, this is a pivotal day in my personal barbecue history.

I have eaten at highly-regarded restaurants. I have made my own barbecue at home, and it was better. I have even eaten weird, expensive Chinese barbecued pork in Singapore. None of it is even on the same planet as the pulled pork I just smoked.

Tender, juicy, nice smoke ring, gentle smoke flavor that seems to go all through the meat, chewy, delicious candy-like bark, aroma straight from heaven…I didn’t know what pulled pork could be until today.

If it’s this good when I screwed up so badly, what is it going to be like when I actually know how to use the smoker? What must a competition-winning butt be like? What are people making that I don’t even know about?

The fat is the best part. Like Malcom Reed, I scored the fat cap into little squares, and when the bark settled on them, they were tiny black cubes of concentrated ecstasy.

I thought I liked the barbecue sauces in my pantry, but I was afraid to let them get too close to this pork. Buc-Ee’s, which seemed good until today, seemed to overpower the pork with the smell of liquid smoke. Sweet Baby Ray’s was too thick and sweet. Sonny’s Smokin’ sauce somehow didn’t make it. I squirted sauce on my plate and barely dabbed the pork in it.

If it’s this good now, it will be incredible once I get the hang of this.

It could have been slightly juicier. I think I should have salted it the day before, to get more salt into the meat. Maybe I should brine the next one.

It stalled at 199 degrees, so I let it sit in the oven for a very long time. I think that was a mistake. Also, I think I should put it in the oven earlier, soon after the smoke thins out. I think I should remove it at maybe 150 instead of 160.

Other than that, I can’t think of any way to make it better.

That’s it, then. The WSM is a winner. Next time, spare ribs.

Go Ahead and Cry “Wolf!”

Every Christian is supposed to be God’s child, not his grandchild, slave, or employee.

Often, misguided Christians say famous TV preachers are “God’s generals,” as though they consult with God in a War Room like the one in Dr. Strangelove, and we are supposed to stay outside and wait for them to come out and tell us what God said and what we should do. Is that consistent with the New Testament’s clear assertions that we are God’s sons and daughters through the Holy Spirit? Of course not. If you had 10 siblings, and your dad called a meeting about an important issue, would it be acceptable for him to invite three into the room and only allow you to come in to bring everyone snacks and coffee? No. It would be absurd and insulting.

Personally, I refer to the big-name preachers who teach poison as “Satan’s generals,” because that’s what they are. They play on our fleshly inclination to be wowed by fame and wealth, not our desire to know God or be filled with righteousness.

Under the old covenant, very few people knew the Holy Spirit, and it was normal for people like Moses to go off, be with God, and bring his commands to the rest of us. Under the new covenant, everyone is supposed to be filled with, and led by, the Spirit.

Before I go on, I should say what “anointing” means. People think it means they feel the Holy Spirit in the room. That’s not true at all. It means “authorization.” In the Bible, a person who was given authority was anointed with oil. Prophets poured oil on kings.

An anointing is not the same thing as a gift. You can have a gift but not be entitled to guide other people or tell them what to do.

Under the new covenant, an anointed person will certainly have some supernatural gifts, but a gift isn’t proof of anointing. There are people who display supernatural gifts yet who should not get the idea that they are leaders or teachers.

Fame and money are not evidence of anointing. The people who murdered the prophets and Yeshua were rich and famous. Jim Bakker was rich and famous. Popes who persecuted Jews were rich and famous. Mother Teresa was famous, and she didn’t believe in God.

Peter Popoff was one of the most famous American evangelists. He was caught using a radio apparatus with an earpiece to fake messages from God. They actually came from his wife, who was in on the hoax. He had a huge following. He had money. Was he anointed?

A lot of Christians think you measure a preacher’s worth by the number of TV cameras he has pointed at him or the number of people he packs into stadiums. There is no reason whatsoever to think this is true.

Another point: every Spirit-led Christian is accountable to every other Spirit-led Christian, as well as being accountable to people in general. The fact that you stand in front of crowds or you built a big church doesn’t mean you are exempt from righteous criticism. In fact, we all depend on criticism, from God and from other people, in order to be sanctified and improved.

It’s important to note that God never said prominent men of God could only be corrected by other bigwigs. Every Spirit-led Christian can correct every other Spirit-led Christian.

Finally, God does not actually need famous preachers who reach millions of people, so famous preachers are not more important to the kingdom than the rest of us. The world has a population of over 8 billion. There are millions of anointed people out there, reaching others every day. They reach more people than the TV idols while doing less damage.

God’s kingdom can get by very well with millions of obscure Spirit-led Christians. If every Spirit-led Christian had converted two people since the Spirit fell in the Upper Room, almost everyone on Earth would be Spirit-led by now.

Now let me discuss judgment and criticism.

As I have often pointed out, many Christians think the Bible only has two words: “judge not.” Of course, this is not true. The prophets, Yeshua, and the apostles judged other people constantly.

Go find me a prophet who showed up to tell the Jews what a great job they were doing. There were none. The same Bible chapter that contains the smaller two-word false Bible contains more words that expand on, and clarify, “judge not.” We are required to judge ourselves before we judge others. That’s what it says.

What about “speaking evil” of other Christians? James said we shouldn’t do it.

It doesn’t mean what many people think. It comes from a Greek word, katalalia. The New King James says we should not speak katalalia, not that we should never criticize. How much shorter would the New Testament be if we deleted all the harsh, critical things the apostles and Yeshua said about religious figures?

Katalalia refers to slander. It’s about using speech in a malicious manner to harm others. For example, if I say, “When Perry Stone sexually harassed his employees, and when he was rightfully exposed, he failed to accept the blame and even threatened to sue people who spoke the truth about it,” it’s not “speaking evil” in the sense English Bible translations suggest. I’m saying something truthful in order to protect other Christians from harm. The purpose isn’t to destroy Perry Stone or to make him suffer. It’s to let people who revere him know they need to be careful.

In writing all this, I’m doing what my Elements professor taught me to do in law school. I am laying out rules and principles so I can put them together and apply them to a situation.

I have really enjoyed watching the preacher Mark Hemans. He heals people. He casts demons out of them. He tells them hidden things about their lives, on camera, to help them. He relays a lot of things God has told him. He doesn’t teach the false prosperity gospel or ask for money. He is coming to Florida in November, and my wife and I have been planning to go watch him in person.

Yesterday, he posted a short Youtube video criticizing (ironically) Christians who criticize other Christians. He went after people who criticized famous TV preachers. He named names. Kathryn Krick. Benny Hinn. Joyce Meyer. He named some of the worst, most destructive preachers. He said people who criticized them were touching God’s anointed and that God would “protect” the ones who were criticized.

He is out of line.

The preachers he defends are, legitimately, evil and destructive. Their teachings are very harmful. They literally lead people into defeat and damnation. They are wrong about major, fundamental things. They have to be exposed for the good of the flock.

Just as Yeshua, the prophets, and the apostles exposed frauds, heretics, and apostates openly, people who are exposing these crooked preachers are doing an important thing of which God approves. God requires it of us.

He said the preachers who were under fire were “God’s anointed.” That is simply not true, for reasons I named above. They are famous, not anointed. They are rich, not anointed. Some of them have done supernatural things. That doesn’t make them anointed. There are many successful preachers of whom we can say there is no reason to think they were chosen and given authority by God. In other cases, people who were anointed to begin with have lost their anointing, which means they no longer have authority.

God has never anointed any person to lie. He has never anointed anyone to rob the poor. He has never said any preacher was above criticism.

God didn’t anoint Benny Hinn to fake healings, tell people God would make them rich for contributing to his ministry, or sell prophecies, but he did all those things, and now that his ministry is a tiny operation that runs out of a warehouse, he roams Africa vouching for crooked preachers who pay for his endorsement.

God didn’t anoint Perry Stone to make excuses for, and dishonestly minimize, his egregious, persistent sexual misdeeds and then threaten to sue truthful people who told the world about them. God didn’t anoint him to claim he had had a prophetic dream in which the accusers were fish that got eaten by a bigger fish that symbolized God’s punishment. He didn’t anoint him to promote lying prosperity preachers. He did all those things.

God didn’t anoint Joyce Meyer to teach the prosperity gospel. He didn’t anoint her, as a woman, to lead a ministry at all. He didn’t anoint her to tell people that if they gave her donations, God owed them money. She did all that.

God didn’t anoint Kenneth Copeland to make himself a billionaire by teaching the prosperity gospel to poor people whose donations only made them poorer, but he has been doing it for over 40 years. He didn’t anoint him to spend donations on multiple jets or use the jets for vacations. He never told Copeland, who is in bad health and not long for this world, that he would live to be 120, but Copeland says he did, and he says he accepted his badly-needed pacemaker “by faith,” whatever that means.

How do you receive a pacemaker by faith? We receive healing by faith, not pacemakers. A pacemaker is for a person who can’t get healed. An atheist can receive a pacemaker.

God didn’t tell Copeland that his wife Gloria, who is severely demented and soon to die, was also going to live to be 120, but Copeland says he did. Gloria herself claimed it. She is almost certain to be dead within 5 years, as is Copeland. The last time she appeared in public, she didn’t know what was going on. She can’t perform basic life functions.

God has never had anything to do with Kathryn Krick’s cult. Mark Hemans has no business threatening good people who tell the truth about her. She is disgusting, and so is Geordavie, her African preacher idol.

I could go on all day with this. The general rule with famous preachers is that they are out of their lane. It’s not exceptional. It’s normal. People who become famous generally do so by their own efforts. They do it out of ambition, egotism, and/or greed. This applies to preachers just like everyone else. It’s not like the world of rich preachers is a meritocracy.

Mark Hemans clearly thinks that criticizing famous preachers for good reason is persecution. That’s not even close to right. By extension, he is telling us Yeshua and the prophets persecuted God’s anointed. The disturbing truth is that Hemans himself is guilty of persecution. He is trying to shame and scare people who tell the truth about predators in the church. We are all anointed to expose predators, and trying to scare us for doing it is persecution.

We’re not just talking about people who have great intentions but occasionally miss the mark in some small way. We are talking about sociopathic liars who drive people away from God and eat their savings.

He’s also demonstrating hypocrisy. In his services, he criticizes Christians constantly in order to help them. On camera, he reveals their porn habits. Their drug habits. Their pride. Their unforgiveness. He tells them to repent. So somehow, he is entitled to correct other believers, but we, the little people in the pews, are not. That is absurdity.

We don’t have a system in which Mark Hemans or Benny Hinn is special and the rest of us are not. There are two levels in the kingdom: God’s level, and ours. There is no officer class. There is no VIP room. There is no gold card or business class. Sure, God favors some Christians more than others, but favor doesn’t put anyone above justice.

The Bible says we are kings and priests. It doesn’t mention dukes, earls, barons, knights, and pew-filling, chair-stacking peasants who don’t get to speak. You’re a king and priest, or you’re nothing.

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard Mark Hemans say something that wasn’t correct. The other day, I heard him praising Charlie Kirk as a man of God. Kirk was no man of God at all. He was an ambitious man who wanted money and power. His main interest was politics, just like Caesar’s.

Since Kirk’s death, we have seen a lot of his private communications. They’re not about God. They’re not even about what’s good for America. They’re about his “brand,” his donations, and his strategies for becoming more successful. One communication also shows an antisemitic streak.

Sure, he promoted Christianity. As a side dish. You could say the same of Nicki Minaj.

Praising Kirk as a man of God shows a lack of divine insight. It’s simply wrong.

I also saw him tell a lady pastor she got a huge stomach tumor because she ate a meal without saying a blessing. First of all, why didn’t he tell her women shouldn’t be pastors? Paul made that clear. Second, I just don’t believe one missed blessing can bring a person a demon that creates football-size cancers. That is over the top.

I can’t say I am positive he was wrong, and maybe I’m the one who is wrong, but what he said suggests a lack of patience that is uncharacteristic of God as I understand him.

Please don’t tell me women should be preachers because Paul said a woman named Junia was “outstanding among the apostles.” That’s a mistranslation. He said she was well-known among the apostles. They knew who she was.

Don’t start lecturing me about Phoebe, the female deacon he mentioned. The Greek word he used means something like servant or waiter. Deacons are not preachers. In modern churches, they do things like taking out trash and parking people’s cars.

I was disappointed when I saw the video about God punishing those who expose preachers, so I wrote a comment in dissent. Today I checked to see if there was a response. Not only was there no response; Mark or his Internet employee had removed all comments. Commenting on that video is now impossible.

This is worse than persecuting whistleblowers. God once told me, “The concealment of a sin is worse than the sin itself.” I hate to see any preacher shut down dissent.

It’s fine to filter out the kooks who show up to say God is imaginary, or who inject wacky doctrine from dead churches, mainstream Judaism, Islam, or other counterproductive religions. It’s dangerous to shut down responses from people who know what they’re talking about, simply because you don’t want to admit you might be wrong.

Comment-banning is a common thing among preachers who are in the wrong and reject correction. Perry Stone started doing it after he got caught telling a woman God had told him it was okay for him to commit adultery. Kenneth Copeland has done it for years. It makes you wonder if there is anything else Mark Hemans doesn’t want people to hear about.

When a preacher bans comments, he builds a wall of sycophants around himself, and they reinforce his errors and sins.

My wife and I often talk about Eddie Murphy when we talk about those who surround themselves with yes-men. Eddie Murphy did some embarrassing things back during the last century, and when he talked about it, he said one problem was that everyone around him praised him no matter what he did. Whatever he suggested, they said, “Eddie! You a GENIUS!” He was aware that this drove him to do stupid things he regretted.

Now we have messengers from Satan, surrounding preachers who cut off correction, standing around saying, “Benny! You a GENIUS!” “Joyce! You a GENIUS!” “Bishop Jakes! You a GENIUS!” The next thing may be, “Mark! You a GENIUS!”

Stifling speech is what demons do when they attack people in their sleep. They choke them to keep them from casting them out. Christians shouldn’t do it to cover up their own problems.

This all underscores the importance of praying in the Spirit. All Christians fall into error, but if we listen to the Holy Spirit every day, he pulls us out of it. He shows us what we need to stop doing. He shows us which friends and preachers to drop. He shows us what is wrong with our doctrine. As John said, he teaches us all things. If you’re not spending time in the Spirit, you’re just listening to gossip.

I’m not saying Mark Hemans is a bad preacher. I have gotten a lot from watching him. But anyone can stumble, and if you take away your correction safety net, you may not get back up. Enabling predators who destroy millions is not a small error. It is a huge, dangerous misstep.

I have decided we are going to skip his appearance in Florida. I thought it would be a very pleasant excursion, but we don’t worship preachers, we know God is here with us and inside us, and we are aware that nobody has to get in a car and go see an apostle in order to have a great relationship with God.

Of course, we are praying for him. That is an obvious response to a problem like this. I hope he snaps out of this. I thought he was doing such wonderful things.

Since I started writing this, God has shown me something interesting: he has become a homeschooler.

I don’t go to church, but I am very serious about God. My wife and I spend all sorts of time in prayer, we discuss God, we try to implement his correction, and we try to do what he wants us to. Things are going much better for us than they did when we were preacher-followers.

Years ago, God told me the age of the big church was over because churches had become so corrupt, they drove people away from him. He told me real Christianity was moving to other venues like homes.

It’s just like homeschooling. We can’t send our kids to Caesar’s schools because the people with rainbow hair will tell them to become socialists, engage in sodomy, and have themselves sexually mutilated. We have to educate our young at home now. Well, God is doing the same thing.

Churches always reject me. They accept Mark Hemans and the frauds and scoundrels he tells us to protect. I shouldn’t let myself think too highly of Mark Hemans. He may be an apostle, but he is not my chief authority, and he can lead me astray like any other man.

I plan to keep watching him, because a lot of great things happen at his services, and he does useful teaching, but as always, I will rely on God to tell me what I should and should not accept.

It’s Time to Start Over When Your Chainsaw Starts Showing You Ads

I did it again. I bought another chainsaw.

Back in ’24, I got fed up with my saws because they were failing to start when I needed them, and I also thought my 20″ Echo CS-590 was too small for this farm. It’s a pretty powerful saw, but the bar was short for some of my work, and going to 24″ on that saw was a stretch.

I needed something big, powerful, and reliable. Reliability was the key goal. Not all that long ago, chainsaw mechanics were charging $25 per hour. Now, $125 is a low price. Ridiculous and unjustified. I’m all for capitalism, but a guy who does small engine work should not be making over $200,000 per year.

On top of the price, I had been unable to find anyone around here who knew what he was doing. Chainsaws sat at repair shops for months and then came back unfixed. And because I was not a professional tree surgeon, I was at the bottom of the list for customer service. If you’re an amateur, when you take your saw to be repaired, the shop puts it on a shelf and works on saws that belong to professionals. Your turn may come weeks later.

It was an interesting scenario. My most expensive saw cost $400, and I was paying $125 per hour for incompetent mechanics to work on my equipment, often unsuccessfully, and in the process, they kept my saws while trees and logs rotted on my property, in the way. I once lost the use of a saw for a whole summer.

It seemed strange to pay a huge fraction of a saw’s new cost for one hour of repair work.

I decided to buy a pro saw with a fancy electronic brain. I thought it would be easier to start and run, and pro saws are more powerful for the same displacement. Also, they come with full-chisel chains that cut faster than the safety chains all homeowner saws comes with.

Turned out I was overly optimistic. I bought a Husqvarna 562XP, which is a little bigger than the CS-590. It had something called “Autotune,” so it was supposed to run trouble-free all the time. It was more than adequate for a 24″ bar. Sadly, I later found out this was one of Husqvarna’s problem models. For one thing, it was known to overheat its fuel line and then refuse to start when warm.

I got what seemed like a great deal on it, but then I found out it was because they were clearing out the “Mark I” saws. The 562XP was such a pain to use, Husqvarna upgraded to a second version, the Mark II. If I had known, I would not have bought the Mark I. When I bought the saw, I thought the man who sold it to me was wonderful, but I now think he would have been more wonderful if he had said, “Look, this thing is a mess. Spend a little more and get the new one that works better.”

Because my saw was made late during the Mark I years, I got some upgrades Husqvarna had added to patch it, but it wasn’t the equal of a Mark II. It was hard to start warm. I began taking the Echo with me when I used it, so I could begin jobs with the 562 and finish them with a saw that actually started.

To get this saw, which was a disappointment, I had to give up user-serviceability. The computer has to be updated and fiddled with at an authorized service center. This means that if I have fuel and ignition problems, I am back to the $125/unpredictable-delay plan.

I should say that the guy who sold me the saw is also a mechanic, and while he is not cheap, he was able to do competent repairs for me in less than two weeks. Still not acceptable, but better than three months and failed repairs.

During this time, I learned a lot about keeping saws running, and I realized I could get by without computers. I bought a second pro saw: an Echo CS-501P with a 50cc engine and a short 16″ bar. I chose a short bar so the saw would be overpowered. I wasn’t planning to use it for big wood, and I wanted it to handle bucking with great ease.

Echo’s strategy is to sell very tough, simple saws without computers. That applies to the CS-501P. It doesn’t have as much crippling homeowner-coddling stuff as a comparable Echo 50cc amateur saw.

It has been a great saw. Cuts beautifully and starts every time. I opened up the muffler so it could actually breathe and release heat. I tuned it correctly instead of keeping the wimpy factory tune. It’s a joy to use. I will never have to take it to a mechanic unless it has a horrible, catastrophic problem. I can fix just about any problem it will ever have.

I have gotten better at humoring the Husky, so it has started for me the last few times I have used it, but it’s not the savior saw I thought it would be. And the CS-590 is a lot better than it once was. I advanced the timing, opened the muffler, put in a better carb, replaced the carb’s crippling main jet, put a full-chisel chain on it, and tuned it for a man. It cuts about as well as a 60cc saw can, short of having it ported and putting a weird saw-fanatic muffler on it.

The other day I used the Husky to take down a rotten oak, and I would guess that where I cut the stump close to the ground, I was dealing with 28″ of diameter. The Husky did not fly through it. I made it eventually, but the experience didn’t make me think, “Wow! This was totally worth $750!”

I have been trying to restrain my spending, so even though I started having thoughts about a next-level saw at least two years ago, I have been trying to resist upgrading. Cutting that stump got me thinking again, however.

For quite a while, I’ve been considering getting a bigger Echo: the CS-7310P. This is a 73cc job that will pull a 28″ bar pretty easily. Like the other Echos, it has no computer. Just a carburetor I can work on myself. Stihl and Husqvarna make saws that are a little faster through wood, but their saws have fancy-saw issues, and I would not be able to do all my own repairs. They’re also more expensive than Echo, although Echo has stupidly increased prices to the point where the difference is not worth much consideration.

I bought the CS-501P largely for fun. The CS-590 will do what it does, and more, just fine. I wanted the new saw mainly so I could enjoy modifying it and seeing what it could do. But when I bought it, a hurricane had just passed by, so people in Florida were snapping up saws and choking the supply.

The company I bought it from (Saw Suppliers) was great. They were excited about helping Floridians get saws for hurricane cleanup. They gave me a nice discount and then, without being asked, gave me free two-day shipping. I thought that was fantastic. I was very grateful. Because of that, I decided that I would buy my next saw from them, if I ever bought a new saw.

When I started looking at the 7310 again, I went to their site. Their price was not as good as Home Depot, but I didn’t care. I felt I should show some gratitude. Now my order is in.

I never thought I would spend this much money on a chainsaw. Even in 2026, I can still get three CS-590s for the same price. But tree services are very expensive, and life is too short to put up with frustrating tools.

I’m looking forward to using the new saw. My new go-to lineup will be three Echos (50-73cc and 16″-28″) plus an electric Makita. I don’t think I will ever want to use the Husky again. Time to sell it, maybe.

I’m already looking into modding the muffler and doing whatever else I can to void the warranty and improve performance. I really do not care about saw warranties. Given the cost of tree services and saw mechanics, along with the time it takes to get saws fixed, I consider warranties worthless.

I’m planning to start using a 40:1 fuel:oil ratio in all my saws. I have read a lot of mythology about oil ratios, and most of it clearly came from guys who had no idea what they were talking about, but now that AI is here, I have been able to do better research, and I have been told that more oil equals less heat and longer engine life. That’s good enough for me. The new higher ratios are intended to protect precious Mother Gaia, not saw engines. As I often tell my wife, the environment can drop dead. After all the trouble green policies have caused me, Mother Gaia owes me more than she can ever repay.

I case anyone out there is looking for a good saw fit for homeowner use, I would recommend a 16″-18″ electric saw and the CS-590, with the caveat that the CS-590 benefits from some simple mods. Open up the carb. Buy a new key that advances the timing. Get rid of the main jet and replace it with one that doesn’t have a second hole in it. Buy a real chain, not the sad semi-chisel that comes with the saw. Tune the saw properly. Use Biobor EB and Echo Red Armor in your fuel, and get zero-ethanol gas if you can. Avoid Sta-Bil. It does not work unless you use the blue version.

My Makita cordless is a wonderful tool. Requires almost no maintenance, always starts, and if you have a few batteries, it will get you through most homeowner jobs without a charging session.

I hope this helps other people who have problem trees.

A Motherboard is not a Mother

I believe God is giving me more revelation, and it should have a very positive affect on my son.

I have been determined not to let him become whiny, rebellious, or belligerent. Three of the main traits that define Americans born after 1950. He is becoming all of those things anyway, and I believe electronics are largely to blame.

Of course, his mom is enabling him, and that’s a deeper cause which is independent of electronics. This is what mothers generally do. They think babies are more fragile than they are, so they don’t like to challenge them, and who doesn’t like giving babies what they want?

Dads exist to keep kids from turning into Jaden Smith.

I try not to enable his mother to be an enabler, but I know I do it sometimes. It’s laziness, in large part. I don’t want to tussle over every decision. Also, it’s unrealistic to insist on fighting every possible battle. If I do that, she may become resentful and uncooperative, and she may become discouraged because she gets so much criticism and so little praise.

A lot of the time, she goes along with me right away when I lay down the law, but there are more disagreements than there should be.

With regard to the toys, I think God showed me they are sugar for the mind.

When you ingest too much carbohydrate, your glucose and insulin levels shoot up and your metabolism becomes permanently corrupted; permanently in the sense that it never goes away without a change in diet. This leads to shorter height, obesity, type two diabetes, rotten teeth, strokes, heart attacks, arthritis, ugliness, dementia, poor marriage and employment opportunities, and all sorts of other problems. Amputations. Impotence. A smorgasbord of destruction.

It used to be hard for people to jack up their blood glucose. Human beings weren’t good at raising grain, and honey was pretty much the only source of purified sugar. We ate things that didn’t support glucose spikes. Then we got better and better at refining carbs, and people got shorter and less healthy. That’s where we are today.

Electronic toys are like big bowls of sugar. Before electronics, if a kid wanted to make interesting sounds with an instrument like a toy piano, he had to bang around on it and experiment. This took determination and effort, and the rewards were slow to come, but adequate. Now my son uses the same finger to push the same button over and over, and he can hear the “B-I-N-G-O” song 300 times in a day if he wants. He doesn’t have to learn which piano keys do what. He doesn’t have to experiment or use his memory. He expects, and gets, instantaneous hypergratification.

Naturally, this conditions him to have no attention span and zero perseverance (except when whining), and it teaches him that anything other than whining that doesn’t give him an instant, overwhelming reward is not worth pursuing.

It makes him feel that something is wrong when everything isn’t exactly to his liking. This is what destroyed my sister. She once admitted that the reason she became a drug addict was that she could not stand the way she felt when she didn’t get her way. She has always been willing to sacrifice huge future blessings in order to get her way for the next 60 seconds. The Esau mindset.

I hope he enjoyed that soup.

My son is not old enough to be permanently damaged. His brain is still very plastic. He’ll recover fast. This will help him not to become a little socialist cyborg ninny who lets Tiktok do all his thinking for him. He will realize electronic doodads are not necessary or part of him and that he can think and act on his own. He’ll develop the ability to put off gratification. He’ll be able to make himself work.

My wife and I are working to wean ourselves as well. I’m getting much better about stepping away from the PC. She has developed a hump on her neck from looking at the phone, so I keep reminding her to turn off the garbage and do something else. She asked me to hold her accountable.

Feminism is a horrible thing. One of the important things it has untaught us is that a proper husband is a parent to his wife as well as his child. Women rage and scream when they hear things like this, but it’s true. A man is supposed to rule his house. Women are less stable and reliable, and nutty ideas tend to enter families through them, just as they come in through kids. The man is the woman’s anchor, and God is the man’s anchor. His seabed, really.

It doesn’t work when the man is a typical post-1980 baby who sits around playing video games and watching sports all day instead of submitting to the Holy Spirit. An anchor is useless without something to hold onto.

I suppose people will say that if you raise a kid without screens in front of him all day, he will be socially crippled and unfit for employment in the modern world. That’s a load of manure. I was 24 the first time I used a personal computer, and I do just fine with technology. Bill Gates is older than I am. So was Steve Jobs.

In related revelation, I have been learning a lot about the power of influence. I really have to do more to disconnect myself from non-Christian culture.

Last night before going to sleep, I watched a few minutes of Anthony Hopkins at work. I was thinking about how I enjoyed the way he delivers the English language. He takes pretentious Hollywood drivel and speaks it in ways that make it sound wise and deep. It’s very pleasant. Like having your wise old father calm your fears by taking away your uncertainties. What he actually says doesn’t matter.

I turned off the tube and started praying, and I found that when I talked to God, I sounded a little bit like Anthony Hopkins.

I have no respect at all for Anthony Hopkins. I don’t mean I dislike him or think of him as a low life. I just mean he’s an actor, not a man of conspicuous virtue or intellect. He plays make-believe for a living. It requires very little effort or training. It requires almost no intelligence at all. Actors are like mynah birds. An actor who is barely smart enough to read may be able to mimic brilliant people so well that everyone who watches him feels they are watching a true genius. This happens all the time. I have no reason to listen to anything Anthony Hopkins says. There is no evidence that he has anything intelligent to say.

Nonetheless, for a short time after I watched him briefly, he influenced me. It was as though his spirit had soaked into me like water into a ball of rags. Then it wore off like water evaporating.

I’ve noticed this behavior in myself many times. Sometimes it’s helpful. You can put me in a room with nearly anyone, and I will be able to talk to them about their little corner of existence as though I knew more about it than I do. I seem to become like them, like the main character in Woody Allen’s Zelig.

My wife saw me do this in Turkey. Some guy dragged us into a rug salon, and the first thing you know, I was talking about my dad’s Isfahan Mashad rug that got stolen, and little things I knew about rugs came out. I probably told him about my dad’s valuable Bokhara prayer rug, which I gave to the Salvation Army. The guy was surprised. He got a completely unrealistic impression of my knowledge of rugs, and we made a connection because of that. I couldn’t help it.

My experience with Anthony Hopkins and his worthless, idiotic TV show drove something home to me: I have to cut off bad influences in my life. I have to do more than I have done. Americans love to say bad influences are fine for adults, as though we were immune, but it’s not true. We’re just tall, hairy kids.

The principle doesn’t just apply to speech and mannerisms. It applies to our beliefs, drives, and desires.

Decades ago, God showed me that if I spoke in tongues a lot every day, he would transform me so I would be like him in my heart and mind. Recently, he pointed out that the time I spend away from him has the opposite effect. The Spirit pulls me forward, and non-Christian activity pulls me back. I keep fighting for the same ground over and over when I could be moving forward and taking new ground.

Last night he reminded me that actors and singers are mainly degenerates. They are failures with no future beyond this life. They have no souls. They will do or say absolutely anything to get approval, fame, money, and power. They are just carnies with more money.

Most are not bright or educated. Most have destructive, Satanic morals. They go in and out of rehab. They kill themselves. They commit every imaginable type of sexual sin. They get rich and die broke. Their kids are worse than they are. They are very trashy people. Yet we pay to subject ourselves to them every day, and we don’t foresee the problems this causes. We don’t see that it harms us in making us pattern ourselves after losers.

Cindy Crawford is an amazing person. Her son just died from a drug overdose, while staying at a rehab facility. I’ll explain why she amazes me.

Was it really a rehab facility? I have to digress to ask. Rehab, which only works (long-term) something like 20% of the time, takes over a year. Anything shorter is just detox. I doubt he was in a true rehab facility. The places that take actors in and then vomit them back out in a month to go back to their sets aren’t doing real rehab.

Anyway, he died in a rehab facility, so someone gave him fentanyl there, or he smuggled it in on his own. Do I know it was fentanyl? No, but it was. Wait and see.

What did he do for a living? He was a model. He has one sibling. What does she do for a living? She’s a model. Modeling isn’t acting, but it’s part of the same big industry.

Cindy Crawford is amazing to me, because she took the time to raise kids she loved and then helped them become models.

By the time her son started modeling, it had been around 35 years since her own debut. She knew all about the modeling/fashion/entertainment industry. The sex-for-work system. The rapes of kids as young as 14. The forced starvation. The drugs and drunkenness. She knew the kind of degenerates who run things. She posed naked countless times. She did a nude fornication scene in a bad movie. She was familiar with the sleazy atmosphere. She had seen countless people destroyed by the industry. And she led her beloved children into it.

Why?

Because she wanted them to be successful? Not a good excuse. Their dad is very rich. Their mom is very rich. They have connections. They have the power to set kids up in business. They could have put them in professions. They could simply have given them investments, which doesn’t harm kids who have been raised with good character. Crawford could have worked hard to keep her kids out of the snake pit that made her famous, but she encouraged them to jump into it, and look what happened. It was foreseeable.

There were other ways to make the kids wealthy, and in any event, you don’t have to be as wealthy as Crawford or her husband to have a wonderful life. An awful lot of people with much less wealth have excellent lives and healthy families.

Clearly, she thought she was doing something smart. She thought her kids would be fine. She was thrilled with their career choice. She was proud of her children. She loved her son. She didn’t want his job and his milieu to kill him at 27.

This shows the kind of decisions we make when we don’t have the Holy Spirit in our ears. Incredibly stupid. Obviously stupid. But we don’t see what’s wrong. We listen to other voices.

I guarantee you, millions of people around the world admire Crawford today, in spite of knowing the poor choices she made. They think she did a great job, because her kids were famous.

The herd instinct has lulled us to sleep. We think whatever everyone around us does must be jim dandy. We don’t even give common sense a nod.

I have been foolish. I have pulled back from the world, but not far enough. Our culture is worthless. It is dangerous. We are soaking ourselves in poison and excrement every day and expecting the best.