Jethro Takes His Self a Trip

I’ll tell you what. You haven’t lived until you’ve taken a 30-hour plane trip.

I got home from Singapore this morning, and I haven’t slept in quite a while. My wife and I had a great time there, but the flights were really something.

Singapore is so far away from me, it doesn’t matter which direction the jets take. They could go north, south, east, or west and get there in about the same amount of time, as long as they didn’t run into fuel problems. My flights to Singapore flew east, and so did my flights home.

The web says Singapore is around 10,700 miles away, so it’s pretty much on the opposite side of the globe. The time difference is 13 hours in the fall. Until this trip, I had no idea two time zones could differ by 13 hours.

My first international flight took off from JFK and landed in Doha. It took off pretty late. It should have been empty, right? Well, it turns out Doha is hosting an event you may have heard of: the FIFA World Cup. An event of which I took no notice because I’m not the kind of person who cares about millionaires kicking a ball into a net.

People from Latin America were shoehorned into the plane’s every crevice. The aisle seat I had carefully chosen in hopes of getting an empty row turned out to be a waste of money.

Actually, I didn’t get to sit next to an empty seat on any of my flights. Not even the 15-hour one from Singapore to San Francisco.

I was spoiled when we traveled during the covid statistical hump. I got to lie down across rows of seats. People were terrified of flying, and Rhodah and I reaped the benefits. It looks like those days are gone. We flew on the slowest days of the week, and every plane was still packed.

I know this will sound insensitive, but I miss the slow tourist traffic of the pandemic. We flew on empty planes. We didn’t have to wait in line at restaurants. We had the Great Pyramid to ourselves. Looks like those days are gone, unless the black death makes a comeback.

What can I say about Singapore?

I was afraid it would be unpleasant because I hear bad things about Far Eastern destinations. I thought it would be like Blade Runner crossed with Slumdog Millionaire, sort of. I was afraid the people would be hard and selfish, and I was concerned about the weather. Singapore is nearly on top of the Equator.

Here is how I would describe Singapore now: it’s a little bit like Miami would be if the people were vaporized and replaced with better ones.

Singapore is very orderly. The streets are clean, and there is a great deal of beautiful, meticulous landscaping in public areas. People obey the traffic laws, which seems weird given the large number of ethnic Chinese. Everything is built well. Signs are in English, probably because there are three major ethnic groups, each with its own language. Or languages. Whatever.

The people in Singapore are very polite and helpful. We experienced nearly no rudeness. There is nearly no crime in Singapore.

Singapore is also wealthy. They have stores like Chanel and Bulgari everywhere. They have impressive skyscrapers. The cars are generally clean, dent-free, and relatively new.

There is food everywhere in Singapore. There are so many restaurants, it’s hard to understand how they can all make money.

The hotels are very nice. Ours was just about perfect. Spotless and quiet, with several restaurants and a gym. I think there was also a pool in there somewhere.

I just realized I forgot to tip the maid. Dang.

That’s okay, though, because tipping is not customary in Singapore.

Here’s something weird: the weather in Singapore is better than the weather in Miami. It doesn’t get really hot, and the island is in a breezy location.

Now I will digress and tell the world about a high school history teacher who told me a tremendous number of baldfaced lies. His name was Morgan Kelly. I guess it’s okay to mention his name, because he has surely been dead for at least 20 years.

My prep school taught grades 7 through 12, and when I arrived in grade 9, Mr. Kelly was already a legend among the core group of students who had started two years earlier. He was an amateur sailor. He had a lanyard with a spliced monkey’s fist for a keychain. He wore green coach’s shorts every day. He sounded like Burgess Meredith’s Penguin. He taught history.

Mr. Kelly impressed the younger kids by telling the time by looking at the sun. He claimed he could nail it within a few minutes. He would point at the sun with his extended left hand, look down his arm, pause briefly, and make his estimate. Over and over, he amazed the kids by proving to be right.

By the time they were sophomores, they started to realize his watch was on his left wrist.

Anyway, Mr. Kelly told all sorts of lies.

He claimed he was a tail gunner in World War Two. Ordinarily, I would not doubt a claim like that, but because I know he lied about other things, I don’t know whether he was really a tail gunner or even if he served.

He said that when he arrived at the place where they sorted out bomber crew trainees, the men were told to form a long line ordered by height. I would guess Mr. Kelly was about 5’4″ tall. Everyone at Mr. Kelly’s end had to become tail gunners because only short people could fit in the gunners’ stations.

Is this really how tail gunners were selected? I wonder. Maybe it’s true. Mr. Kelly had thick glasses, which means he wasn’t capable of the job, but maybe his eyes went bad after the war.

How likely is it that my school checked his military record? They might have checked to see if he had an honorable discharge, but I can’t imagine them asking for anything beyond that. I doubt they checked his record at all. They would have asked for his college credentials, but they wouldn’t have needed his military information.

I don’t think he was ever in a bomber, because he would have told us war stories.

He told a huge lie about the Chinese military.

He said he was on a troop plane going over the Himalayas, and there were Chinese soldiers on board.

Okay, right away you can see some issues.

Why would they fly troops over the Himalayas? It would be unbelievably expensive, not to mention dangerous. They would have moved troops with ships and trains.

Why would Chinese troops be on a plane with American bomber crewmen?

Okay, so now we get to the part I am sure is a lie. He said several Chinese were playing a game of chance. I think he said they were throwing down cards. He said they would play a round of their game, look at the results, grab one person who was playing, and throw him out the side door. While the plane was in flight.

We believed it. We were kids.

Of course, the Chinese military did not permit soldiers to murder each other in card games. This should not have to be explained to anyone. You can’t win a war by throwing your troops out of airplanes. Also, even if the game were permitted, how would you find people willing to play? If you did, how would you get enough men onto one plane to play the game? If you have to throw a man out after every hand, and you have 20 men, your game will last around 20 minutes. Not a great way to kill time on a plane.

Even if all the obstacles mentioned above were overcome, why would American servicemen sit and do nothing while people were thrown out of a plane?

So, yes, he was a big liar.

Here comes the lie he told about Singapore.

The British were building a bridge in Singapore. It was 120° Fahrenheit every day. The workers had to work outdoors, obviously, but at night they slept in air-conditioned barracks.

They were only able to cool the barracks to 90°, but it seemed so cold after working in 120° heat, the men had to wear winter coats indoors.

Lie number 1: 120° heat in Singapore. It doesn’t happen. It rarely goes above 92°, and that’s something you can’t say about Miami.

Lie number 2: men who found the 90° temperature in the barracks too cold would solve the problem by wearing winter coats. No. They would adjust the temperature.

I don’t know why Mr. Kelly lied to kids so much. I took Ancient History and Ancient Chinese History with him, and I guess I can discard everything he taught us.

I didn’t sweat much at all in Singapore. It was surprisingly comfortable. Rhodah, however, was shocked by the humidity. Apparently, Zambia doesn’t have any. In the past, she had heard me complain about the humidity in Florida, but she had no idea what I was talking about until we went to Singapore. We went to Egypt, which was hot but dry. We went to Turkey and Ireland, where the weather was cool. In Singapore, she suddenly understood why people buy anti-perspirant.

I just remembered another lie Mr. Kelly told.

Americans needed to land planes somewhere in China. There was no runway. The ground was covered with rocks. Fortunately, China was incredibly full of human beings. Their numbers were astounding.

The mayor of the city where the runway was needed told the people who lived there to go and stand where the runway had to go. Then he told them to pick up one rock each and leave. They did, and the runway instantly appeared.

I don’t know how we fell for that one. Having a lot of people doesn’t really get you past the problem that you can fit hundreds of rocks into the area one person takes up. Pick up one rock, and you still have hundreds more.

Man, that guy lied.

Another Mr. Kelly lie just popped into my head.

Some ancient Chinese pottery manufacturer had a slave, and one day, the slave got trapped in his kiln and burned to death. When the kiln was opened, the pots had a magnificent red color. The manufacturer couldn’t figure out how to reproduce the color, so he decided to throw a slave into the kiln every time he made red pots.

I’m starting to think we were really stupid.

Okay, Google and see if you can find this story, or any story about the ancient Chinese having a really gorgeous and highly prized red pottery glaze. I couldn’t find anything like that on the web. After that, try to find a story that mentions the part about murdering slaves.

Then ask yourself how many pots you would have to sell to pay for one expensive slave. And why use a slave when you could use a dead body or a pig or goat? Dead bodies would have been pretty easy to come by in ancient China or ancient anywhere.

How does a slave get stuck in a pottery kiln? Why wouldn’t he yell for someone to let him out?

I knew someone who served in Iraq, and he had a photo of himself shivering in a sleeping bag in a very hot room. He said the hot room seemed cold to him. Soldiers there wore a lot of hot gear, and the daytime temperatures sometimes broke 120°, so for all I know, the photo wasn’t a gag. But it never happened in Singapore or anywhere else in Southeast Asia.

Soldiers love jokes and pranks.

The food picture in Singapore is interesting. Nice restaurants and well-known restaurants there are unbelievably expensive, like $40 for Five Guys or $400 for two at Ruth’s Chris. On the other hand, there are cheaper places where locals eat, and they are real bargains.

It appears there are three types of restaurants in Singapore. Independent establishments, food court restaurants, and food center restaurants.

By “independent,” I mean restaurants that are separate from other restaurants. Food courts are about like American food courts, except the restaurants are jammed together very tightly, and a typical food court will have a huge number of them.

A food center is a concrete building with a roof and no exterior walls. Inside, there will be long concrete structures broken into stalls. Each stall will be around 8 feet wide, and most food center restaurants occupy one stall.

Between the rows of stalls there will be sturdy plastic tables and seats which are fixed to the floor.

You can get an incredible assortment of foods and beverages at a food center. Malay. Cantonese. Sichuan. Indian. A typical entree will run around 5 Singapore dollars, and that amounts to about 4 US dollars. Some stalls sell excellent food. Some sell food that is merely good. Some sell stuff you will prefer to discard.

If you want to eat well and adventurously in Singapore while saving a ton of money, food centers are the way to go. The trick is to keep ordering things until you find things you like. The initial investment may be $20 or so per person, but it will pay off in the end by helping you avoid unnecessary experimentation.

One tip: don’t go to the stall Anthony Bourdain recommends. His photo is still on the window. Bourdain was not a great cook, as he admitted, and his advice about food is not reliable. He went to the stall in question and ordered something called Hainanese chicken rice. He raved about it as though it had made the earth move for him, and Gordon Ramsay’s face also appears on the window on a sticker.

The stall usually has a long line of people waiting for chicken. There was a line on the day when we stupidly listened to Bourdain and Ramsay.

Hainanese chicken rice is basically a boiled or possibly baked chicken cutlet, skin on, sliced, and dumped across rice made with chicken broth. It is served lukewarm. It is limp. It tastes not quite as good as what you would get if you boiled chicken in Campbell’s chicken noodle soup. I am not exaggerating. It is worthless.

It may be that Chinese people who are raised on it like it. There is a big difference between authentic Chinese food and much of the Chinese food Chinese people make in America.

After we tried the chicken rice, I bought myself a Tiger Crystal beer (very good) from another vendor and told him the food was basically garbage. He agreed. He said all the people in line were tourists who had been fooled. He said the chicken rice was no good. He very kindly led me to another stall, where he recommended laksa, a pho-like dish with rice noodles, shrimp, and some kind of meat. Much better.

We liked the Maxwell Food Centre and the Albert Food Centre. There are others.

If you go to a food center, buy a package of paper towels and a package of antiseptic wipes first. Food stalls don’t provide napkins, and the tables and seats are often in need of cleaning.

I would advise avoiding fancy American chain restaurants. We tried Lawry’s, for example, and it was just plain bad. I think Asians sometimes copy the appearance of American food without capturing anything else.

We had Egg McMuffins in Singapore, because we had to, and they were good but not quite as good as American. They don’t toast the bread enough. We tried Five Guys, and it was better than American because they made the fries correctly. I think the reason is that they hire conscientious Singaporeans instead of American high school slackers who can’t be bothered to follow the formula.

We didn’t go in for sights much. The famous Marina Bay Sands, which is three buildings joined by a pool that runs across them at the top, did not get Rhodah excited enough to pay the $23.50 cost of going up for a look. She was pretty excited about the high-end mall at the bottom, however, much to my chagrin.

We visited the Singapore Botanic Gardens. If you want to see what Asians can do with gardening and landscaping, this is the place for you. All sorts of perfectly-tended plants and trees. They also have some weird wildlife. We walked right up on some kind of monitor rooting for food, and it didn’t mind us being there at all. We also saw some red jungle fowl, which are supposedly pre-domestication chickens. There are otters in the gardens, but they didn’t show.

The gardens has a huge orchid area. Pretty impressive, if orchids are your thing.

We went to the National Museum. It’s very small, and you can get in and out in less than an hour. They had some interesting exhibits, but not a whole lot has happened in Singapore, so there was a limit to what they could do.

We had a very satisfying trip in spite of Singapore’s limitations. It’s an extremely comfortable city to stay in. It will spoil you.

While I was there, I came to a crazy realization: I don’t actually hate cities. I hate AMERICAN cities, because of the people who live in them. Our cities accumulate the worst we have to offer. Singapore isn’t like that. You don’t have to be bullied by entitled homeless people or frightened by potential muggers. People don’t ignore you or abuse you. You can walk around at night and not worry that you’re in a neighborhood where your presence is considered consent to beatings, robbery, racist behavior, or rape.

There is no Antifa in Singapore. There are no self-pitying street murals that condemn the police while ignoring the people who do nearly all the damage.

I could live in Singapore without going crazy. I could even stand not being allowed to carry a pistol.

While the subject of bad behavior is on my mind, I may as well mention a remarkable conversation I had today. My aunt said a bunch of horrible things about me.

My aunt is in charge of some things related to my grandparents’ estates, and I am not very happy with the job she is doing, or, in my view, not doing. Everything should have been sold and distributed many years ago, but a few assets are sitting around doing nothing, and I would like to have my financial connections to my family cut. I’m just tired of being involved in it. I’m not very concerned about the money.

My aunt has Parkinson’s, and dementia is one thing Parkinson’s can cause. I can’t diagnose anyone, but I am wondering if she is getting close to the point where some decisions have to be made regarding her care and that of her husband. Today I had to tell him over and over who I was. I told him his wife had three sisters and I was the son of the eldest. I told him I was his nephew. I told him I was his wife’s nephew.

Anyway, she started the conversation by angrily criticizing me for being unavailable to discuss a deal involving a property. I received a text from her in Singapore, and I responded when I saw it, saying I was in the process of flying home and would try to get back to her the following day. She was very angry at me for taking the trip! This is someone who has never spoken angrily to me until this year, so it was strange to hear the tone of her voice and the openness of the hostility.

I didn’t get that at all. I said I had taken a vacation, and she demanded to know who takes a foreign vacation in winter, as though it was a hostile act no decent person would perform. She was seething. Why? She said, “I hope you had a nice time!” Still angry. I said, “I did!”

I have complained to her this year about her failure to take certain steps to get things sold. I have never been nasty to her, and I have never insulted her. I have been blunt, though, and Southerners don’t always take that well. It’s a serious failing we have. Often, we prefer to be passive-aggressive and treacherous. Smile in your face; stab you in the back later. Being blunt is like violating an unwritten code or something. It’s not done.

She said she needed to apologize for saying nasty things about my religious beliefs. She said she apologized wholeheartedly. I didn’t know what she was talking about. I said so, and that I accepted her apology anyway.

So has she been making fun of my beliefs to the family? I don’t know. When I have talked to her about my beliefs in the past, she has generally given me the impression that she was right there with me. I took her expressions of agreement with a grain of salt, but I didn’t have any reason to think she contemned my faith.

I don’t really care about this stuff. A bunch of family members are long dead, and the rest greatly reduced their involvement with my dad and me over a decade ago, so I haven’t been part of their circle in a very long time.

I wonder if we see things differently. Maybe it would bother her a lot to find out I had criticized her faith to the family, so she assumes I would be upset if she had done the same thing to me. I don’t really think or care about what they say about me, though. I have so many things to think about.

I’m just guessing here. Maybe there is no rational explanation.

Bizarrely, she accused me of taking off to Egypt to see if I could find a wife to come home with me. She, whose son is on wife three, was saying I was a loser with women. I was amazed. Where did that come from? How long had she been holding it in? Why did she pick Egypt? Does she know I went to Egypt? Why would anyone go to Egypt to get a wife? I can’t imagine a worse place, unless it’s the area where my family comes from.

I now know she doesn’t know I’m married. I didn’t correct her. I didn’t think it would help.

I have tried to get her to list properties on the web for sale, and I have mentioned the fact that I manage properties and have sold some. I guess she did not like that, because she blurted out, “My property is worth much more than yours!” I had no idea what she was talking about, so I asked her what she meant. I think she was saying she had a bunch of rental properties that were worth more than what I have.

I don’t have any idea what she has, and she has no idea what I have.

She said everyone else in the family had planned for retirement and I had not. Where she got this idea is a mystery.

Apparently, she thought I was trying to get her to liquidate things because I was desperate for money. I said, “Do you think I’m poor?” She said, “Fine. You’re filthy rich!” So first she wanted to insult me by saying I had nothing, and then, I think, she wanted to make me feel bad for bragging about being rich. Which I didn’t do!

She said she had her treasures, which were her grandchildren, and she said I had no one, except my sorry dog. What?? I didn’t know where to go with that. I said I didn’t have a dog.

I never said anything rude. For example, I didn’t try to come up with a snappy comeback about her pets.

She said the family was going to do whatever it wanted with or without me, so of course, I asked her why she had called me. What is the point of asking for my support when it doesn’t matter? She said I couldn’t do anything about it, which is not true at all.

I told her I would never sue or contact the attorney general or anything along those lines, because I’m a Christian and I don’t intend to live that way. But I’m not going to say things are going well when I think they’re not.

I said she needed to advertise properties on the web, like everyone else does now. She said she was in “the hot spot,” meaning the frantic world of undesirable Eastern Kentucky rural real estate. She wanted me to know she knew more than I did. She then told me I was ashamed of my people and my culture, which seems irrelevant. I think she was telling me I did not understand the mysterious and unique methods of selling property up there.

I AM ashamed of my people and my culture! Every mature person who has come out of Eastern Kentucky is ashamed of the people and the culture. I used to be proud of my roots, but I was deluded. Immaturity, racism, illegitimacy, toothlessness, violence, adultery, drugs, generations of welfare recipients, hatred of learning…yes, of course I’m ashamed of my people. I didn’t say so, however.

I’m ashamed of being like them in counterproductive ways.

I used to love Eastern Kentucky, but the smart people left a long time ago. For years, my aunt has tried to promote the area as unappreciated and full of brains and talent, but that’s not even a little bit true.

Think about Singapore. In 1965, it had to start out as a new nation. It was poor. It was in the middle of nowhere. Now they call it the Switzerland of Asia. Money everywhere. A harbor full of ships. A highly educated populace. Skyscrapers. Safety.

Now think of Eastern Kentucky. It’s loaded with coal. All they had to do was keep their mineral rights, sell the coal, develop other industries, and invest, and it would have become the Kuwait of Appalachia. Instead, they sold their inheritances to outsiders and became their laborers. They never built a decent university. No infrastructure. No industry other than coal. They kept their corrupt politics and courts. They held onto racism. They fell in love with handouts. They planted marijuana patches full of booby traps. Since 1965, Eastern Kentucky has gotten worse.

Yes. Sure. I’m ashamed of it. Why would I not be?

Maybe “ashamed” is the wrong word. I’m critical of it. I am honest about it. I reject a lot of it.

She went on to accuse my parents of being ashamed of it. That’s true. They were. They didn’t try to disguise themselves or cure their accents, but they were realistic. My dad used to quote Kentucky author Harry Caudill, who said that everybody who had any get-up-and-go got up and went.

My dad was the best lawyer I ever knew or knew of. He flew all over the country representing companies like PPG, UPS, and Nabisco before the NLRB and the federal appellate courts. He was the head of litigation in one of Florida’s top firms at the age of 33, three years after joining as an associate.

My mother loved classical music. She read. She loved good restaurants and trips to Europe.

What were they supposed to do in Eastern Kentucky? My dad wrote a brief for my grandfather once, and my grandfather told him it was too good for the judges up there.

Since my beliefs have been mentioned, I’ll talk about some of them.

I am certain everyone has demons. They are around us all the time, influencing, or trying to influence, our hearts and minds. Many of the thoughts, desires, and emotions we think are ours really come from demons, and some, in some people, come from the Holy Spirit.

Demons use people to express themselves and fulfill their desires. They give us habits and leanings. Some try to turn us into the people they would be if they had bodies. They get us to wear things they like. They get us to cut ourselves up and get tattoos.

They manifest in things like overeating, pornography, rage, depression, delusions, to name a few.

I believe that when people become demented, the demons get promotion. Before dementia sets in, people resist them to a certain extent. They also cover their influence up, pretending to be nicer and better than they really are. Once the host loses the ability to steer things, he or she becomes more like the demons.

My grandmother liked to boss people. She covered it up when she was young and able, but she became demented, and one day, she announced, “I want to be the boss!” I believe that was her demons talking. Sometimes my dad, who had vascular dementia, would curse me for no reason and then forget instantly. I think that was demonic, too.

Now my aunt is fading, and she seems like a different person. Maybe she is a different person. Maybe other beings are finally getting to spit poison at me, after veiling their feelings for decades. She used to tell me she admired me. She tried to impress me, probably because I grew up in cities and had more sophistication than the rest of the family. She’s done with that now.

God has told me all kinds of brilliant things, which makes sense, because he is God. He told me this: “Things get better, or things get worse.”

It sounds extremely simple and obvious, but it’s important. Every day, you improve or deteriorate. You never stand still and remain unchanged. Nothing does, except God. Troubled people who don’t know the Holy Spirit deteriorate. Whatever is wrong in their hearts and minds gets worse.

God brings improvement and order. Where God is absent, rot and chaos are unstoppable. God told me this: “Bring order.”

I’ve talked to Rhodah about my family, and she feels the same way I do. Don’t sue. Don’t turn anyone in. Don’t wade into the food fight. The amounts at stake are too small to make a real difference in our lives, and getting into unforgiveness and juvenile squabbling would take all the joy out of life.

Paul said it was better to suffer wrong than to take another Christian to court. I would only call one or two of my relatives Christians, but I think Paul’s advice applies anyway. If anything is taken from me, God will repay it with interest, and He will be pleased that I’m pursuing his presence instead of playing verbal laser tag with people who are in real supernatural trouble.

We have been praying for my family. It doesn’t seem to help them. I don’t know what else we can do. I thought about contacting relatives to raise awareness about my aunt’s condition, but they know already, and nothing is being done.

It seems likely a very abrupt move to assisted living is in her near future, and I am told nothing is being done to prepare. If she’s angry with me for questioning her actions as my fiduciary, you have to wonder how she will handle assisted living staff telling her what socks to wear.

It’s very unfortunate. I used to have a great relationship with her. I don’t see that being restored any time soon. If my grandfather had done a better job planning his estate, maybe the family would still be whole.

At least I can say I never took advantage of any of the others. I’m not the world’s finest person, but I have managed to avoid that.

I Get It

I have more input on Starlink Junior, my new ISP.

I put the dish up last week, and I have been doing speed tests. I put the dish in my old Dish dish mount, and then I rigged up a dubious pole to raise the dish another 8 feet.

Sometimes my download speed goes up to around 60 megs. Usually, it’s closer to 10. It has tested as low as three. The high figures are way better than anything I get from AT&T, the company from which my old connection was bought. The low figures aren’t much worse than the performance AT&T provides when things aren’t going well. AT&T doesn’t seem to like heavy rain.

Uploads with Starlink are pretty bad. I have seen 15 Mbps, but I think three is more typical.

I still think I’ll hold onto Starlink. It should improve, and the more time I spend online, the more it seems smoother and more reliable than AT&T. The old upload speeds I got were pathetic, so Starlink uploading doesn’t seem like a downgrade.

Musk needs to provide more help with locating dishes. They should send people out to look around. I have to guess where to put the dish. The phone app that detects obstructions doesn’t really work.

Should I turn my dish a little to the right or left? I don’t know. Should I put it on the other side of the house? Should I buy a 50-foot tower?

The Starlink stuff is like the monoliths in 2001. You can’t ask it questions. It just sits there and does what it wants. No explanations. No manual.

I feel like I bought an Apple product or a German car. “SHUT UP! We do the thinking for you! It’s good enough for you!”

Starlink somehow relies on cell networks to do uploads. I can’t find good information on how this works. At first, I thought maybe it was downloading straight from satellites and uploading to local cell towers, but that can’t be right, because Speedtest tells me it’s uploading to places like Gainesville and Atlanta. It appears I am sending uploads to space, and from there they go to ground stations. If this is true, then why are uploads so slow?

Is my little dish too weak to shoot a good signal up to the motherships, or are the motherships slow when they shoot my data down to the ground stations? No idea.

Speaking of German cars, my friend Mike continues to have fun with the Mercedes lemon he bought.

This thing has been going into “limp mode” for something like a year, for no discernible reason. Mercedes dealerships can’t figure it out. He has spend a lot of money on parts. Right now, he’s visiting New Hampshire, and he has no car because the wiring caught fire.

They’re telling him he may need a new wiring harness, and the cost would be $20,000. For wires. The car only cost him $27,000. He doesn’t know the whole story, because the dealership that has the car won’t get to it until Tuesday. Is it possible to get a wiring harness during Biden’s reign of inflation and shortages? No idea. What if they have to keep the car a month?

He took a trailer with him. He was going to fill it with his belongings and bring it down here. If the work takes a month, what happens to the trailer? And where is he supposed to stay?

I do not like German cars. They are as overrated as Wonder Woman and The Black Panther. They are very unreliable, working on them is a nightmare, and parts are astoundingly expensive.

I don’t know why people think the Germans are good at engineering. They’re not. They do a very good job of making things that don’t work. Making things cute and clever and pretty is only part of engineering. The primary goal is to make them practical, so German engineers are not very good, regardless of how impressive their products are when they work.

This is not new. Porsche lost the contract for the Tiger tank. Another company built a competing prototype, and Porsche’s prototype–a hybrid (seriously)–broke down and got stuck during the trials. The competitor offered to use its tank to pull the Porsche free.

Oh, yeah. There is no substitute.

Daimler-Benz made the Panzer, and it helped lose the war for the Germans because it was always in the shop. I’m not kidding. Look it up. When Panzers broke down, they were a nightmare to fix, but a tank crew could replace a Sherman engine in the field in a few hours. Shermans ran. The disparity is one reason we were able to field more tanks. People say the Panzer was better than the Sherman, but Shermans obliterated a whole lot of Panzers, as did Soviet T-34’s. Allied tanks proved better in terms of winning wars.

Incidentally, it’s not true that Shermans burned easily. It’s a myth. And the crew of a burning Sherman could escape in less than 5 seconds. To get out of a burning Panzer, you had to fill out forms, have them stamped by the local burgermeister, mail them to Berlin…well, not really, but it took a very long time, so you were just about certain to be burned to death.

The Japanese do better than the Germans. The Germans will never be able to match Toyota engineering. A Porsche can go around the Nurburgring faster, but the Toyota will go around it 23,000 times with basic maintenance, and the Porsche will be lucky to complete 5 laps.

Mike’s battery died the other day, and I helped him replace it. Guess where they put it? Under the passenger seat. You can’t fully expose the battery hole without removing the seat. Mercedes didn’t put a strap on the battery to lift it out of the hole, so there was no way to grip it. We had to cut slits in the carpet to move it. No joke.

I replaced two batteries in my big Dodge in less time.

Maybe I’ve written about the Mercedes before. Can’t recall. I really do not like German cars.

Another friend of mine bought a used Mercedes, and she liked it because it was cheap. Then it needed a trivial repair, and she couldn’t afford it. The parts cost too much.

This, incidentally, is why you don’t buy a $5000 vintage Bentley.

Or any BMW Mini Cooper.

If German cars were any good, they would hold their value, and they don’t. Mike’s car had low miles when he bought it, and his $70,000 vehicle only cost $27,000. What does that tell you? I can get most of what I paid for my diesel Dodge, and I bought it in 2009, 13 years ago. It has three times the mileage it came with. Doesn’t matter.

It’s worth a lot more than Mike’s $70,000 2014 diesel Mercedes with lower mileage. Think about that.

Musk needs to communicate with customers. Oddly, by making Starlink a product that does everything itself, he has made it necessary for customers to do things they shouldn’t have to do.

I found out about splicing the Starlink cable. It’s just standard Cat5 data cable, covered in a rubber sheath and imprisoned in Musk’s cruel proprietary connectors.

It’s really dumb. If Musk had done things right, he would have used plain old Cat5 connectors and made things easier for everyone. No, in a quest for needless control, he made his own connectors, which are probably patented so no one can sell them cheaper except the Chinese.

Because of what he did, running a cable through a wall requires a 1″ hole instead of a 1/4″ hole.

Or does it?

Being a clever person, I am not afraid to cut Musk’s cable and splice it myself. You just sever it and put your own Cat5 connectors on the cut ends. You can’t connect it to the dish or router without modifying them, but you can run it right through a 1/4″ hole, and you can add all the length you want. You can even cut into existing cables already present in your house.

Take that, Tesla Boy.

If you want to know how to splice Starlink cable, go to Youtube and find out.

I already have the things I need to do my splicing, so I’m going to cut the cable and run it through my obsolete cable TV hole.

I don’t know of any way to hardwire the router to my existing Ethernet wiring, but I’ll be looking into it. Wireless everything is inferior to hardwired everything. Wireless connections are a downgrading concession to reality. If hardwiring were always practical, no one whose data and speed were important would have any interest in wireless.

If you could put a wire on your phone, your calls would never drop, and your speeds would be incredible.

I installed my first wireless printer yesterday, which is why I posted a crabby rant about new tech products. The installation should have taken 10 minutes, but Brother turned it into a painful ordeal lasting over an hour.

Anyway, one less cable to deal with, and now I can scan things without going to my office.

Brother put a ridiculous password on my printer, and I had to use it more than once. I had to turn the printer over, put on my reading glasses, read the tiny password label, and transcribe the password to a file so I wouldn’t have to turn the printer over any more.

Here is my printer password: password. Want to hack it? Knock yourselves out. I wanted to forgo a password or use “1,” but [Big] Brother wouldn’t let me.

If you can get close enough to my house to get a printer signal, you can print whatever you want, but don’t forget that wireless range is a lot smaller than rifle or pistol range, and you will be well within Florida’s open-season-on-trespassers radius.

I can bury you in 10 minutes. I have a tractor.

It’s time to go ahead and do the splice so I can shut my upstairs window and run the Starlink cable through a hole. Then I’ll probably find out I put the dish on the wrong side of the house.

It Pays to Have Connections

I have some testimony to report.

My wife and I visited Ireland. We did a great deal of shopping for her. In addition, I brought her things from America. I got her expensive Keen hiking shoes, wool socks, MAC cosmetics, an insulated Carhartt jacket, a bunch of wigs, a costly Spyderco knife, and at least two pounds of homemade beef jerky. I can’t recall all the things we bought in Ireland or all the things I brought, but when she got ready to fly home, her checked bag felt like it contained a dead body. The value was in the thousands of dollars.

She used Aer Lingus, Air France, and Airlink South Africa to get home. Aer Lingus took her to Charles de Gaulle in Paris. Air France took her to Johannesburg. Then she flew to Zambia on Airlink, which is called Airlink South Africa in South Africa and Airlink Zambia in Zambia.

We checked her bag in Dublin using the confirmation code we received when we bought her ticket from KLM, which is the same company as Air France. The claim ticket said the bag was going to Charles de Gaulle. We thought nothing of it, because routing bags was not our job. For all we knew, all bags on multiple flights had tags that only mentioned first destinations. The airlines knew where she was going, and we assumed they knew what they were doing. When I check bags, I never look at the tags. I rely on the billions of dollars’ worth of computers use to keep track of them.

Before she landed, I got an email from Air France, saying her bag had been delayed. It said we should file a report online. I forwarded the email to her. Her bag was not in Johannesburg when she arrived, so she went home.

I tried to file a report, and Air France’s site would not accept it. It is not possible to use Air France’s global site to report bag problems in South Africa. Air France had told us to do something impossible. When I called Air France, they said it wasn’t their problem. They said we had to deal with the last carrier in the chain, which isn’t really true. They were lying in order to avoid paying for the bag if they couldn’t find it.

Airlines steal luggage all the time. “Lose” is the wrong word. They don’t just lose it. They sell it. If Air France keeps your bag and refuses to file a report, they can sell it for a profit and save the cost of reimbursement. There are companies whose only business is buying “lost” bags and reselling them.

An Aer Lingus employee at its central baggage facility told me Air France was lying in order to avoid responsibility. Aer Lingus also told us Air France had flown the bag to Johannesburg two days after Rhodah’s flight, so we knew Air France had the bag.

When we called Johannesburg, they lied to us. They hung up on us. I got Skype so I could call them, and Skype banned me for life because I called so much. I would call, the system would hang up, and I would call again. Microsoft decided I was some kind of criminal, so there was no appeal.

Airlink’s Zambian employees filed what is known as a “courtesy report” solely for tracking purposes. This kind of report doesn’t include an admission of liability. I was able to access this report online for a while, but then the airlines–probably Air France–locked me out.

We had insurance through another company, Heymondo. They refused to compensate us without documentation from the airlines, which the airlines refused to give us.

Of course, Heymondo knows this happens, so their bag insurance is not very good. If an airline accepts responsibility, the airline pays a lot of money, and Heymondo may be off the hook. If the airline doesn’t accept responsibility, Heymondo doesn’t pay you anything. It looks like their coverage only works after the airline pays its share.

It’s a racket, all the way around.

Rhodah went to the Lusaka airport over and over. I spent a ton of money on calls to South Africa. In the end, nothing happened.

Rhodah had a vision during this time. She saw a strange woman wearing her Carhartt jacket.

We pray together every day. In prayer, I kept cursing the spirits that were trying to keep what belonged to Rhodah. I cursed the people involved with defeat. I felt as though God were telling me the bag would come back, but my faith was nothing to write home about.

I bought Rhodah a new jacket, knife, and shoes for our upcoming trip. I replaced the wool socks she had lost. I told her she should replace what she could in Zambia because we didn’t save much by stuffing my bag, and we could always lose things again.

Today Rhodah sent me this photo.

There is the bag, nearly 4 months after they stole it. Airlink brought it this morning after an unexpected call. The jacket is gone. The knife appears to be gone. That’s about $350 right there. The rest of the things seem to be present, so we have avoided a loss amounting to several thousand dollars. She has yet to comb through the bag carefully. Of course, they beat it up.

We should now be able to force the airlines to pay for her stolen items, and if they won’t, the insurer should have to pay. The fact that the bag came back 4 months late should be good evidence that there was a problem.

I took Rhodah a lot of homemade beef jerky, and it was still in the bag. She got so excited, she started eating it even though she was supposed to be fasting. I’m glad it was in there, because it took a lot of raw beef and time to make it.

I still have to take her the new jacket. I’m putting the new shoes in my closet. The ones she recovered should last years, so there is no point in taking new ones to her. I can’t return them to Amazon because I gave the box to Marvin, and he ate holes in it and pooped all over it. When the old shoes (which have about two weeks’ worth of mileage on them) wear out, she will have a fresh pair ready to go.

I still lost the money I spent on calls.

So who stole the jacket and knife?

I considered the possibility it was a South African or Zambian. South Africans are very violent, and they like to use knives on each other. Zambians are not very inclined to violence. I think most French bag thieves would find knives uninteresting, although there are a lot of criminals in France who come from Muslim countries and Africa, and a really good lock-blade knife would appeal to such people. There is a lot of Muslim knife crime in France.

Rhodah thinks it was a white woman. The wigs in the bag were worth something like $800, and the cosmetics were also expensive, but they were not touched. A white woman would not have been able to use them. A black woman would have wanted them. The jacket was small for a man, so the thief was probably female. Maybe our things were stolen by a Caucasian Muslim woman in France who thought her husband would like a good knife to carry in their dangerous Muslim neighborhood.

People think Muslims don’t steal. Wrong! They steal like crazy when they aren’t afraid of Muslim justice in the form of unneeded surgery. Islam teaches that Allah encourages stealing from non-Muslims. Somali pirates are Muslims.

I think it is somewhat unlikely that a Zambian woman would steal a highly distinctive American jacket and wear it in Zambia, especially in an airport where her coworkers knew a passenger had reported such a jacket lost. A thief in France or South Africa could be certain the victim would never see her with the jacket.

Today we prayed for the thieves and their families.

I have given Rhodah a lot of money for redundant purchases, so this event is a score for her.

When I found out the bag was back, I felt bad for not having more faith. Yahweh is the master of the tiny, weak spirit Muslims worship when they use the name “Allah.”

What happened is remarkable. When a bag is gone for almost 4 months, generally, you can consider it lost.

In other news, I kept hearing something strange last night during prayer: “Rejoice! Your day is here.” I’m grateful for the luggage, but somehow I don’t think God would say my day was here just because my wife got a lost bag back. Either he was talking about something else, or the bag is part of a bigger event, or I imagined everything.

If the words came from God, then whatever has happened is very good, because “rejoice” was in there.

I am ready to rejoice. My life is easy, as is my wife’s life, but I have been rejected and hindered since before I was born, and so has she. A lot of Christians go from acceptance, wealth, and successful marriages and families straight into Christianity. Many people who become Christians are doing very well before the change comes. I had a brief period of fitting in and doing well during and after law school, but other than that, I have always been an outsider, and I didn’t marry until I was old. I have been cheated out of one thing after another.

Yesterday I was thinking of prominent Christians who have been treated very badly, and I thought it was strange that things were going well for Rhodah and me. I wondered if it meant we were not good Christians. Then I thought about all the rotten things that had happened to me when I was younger. It may be that most of my suffering is behind me. I have heard that in prophecy a lot.

I always tell people two things: I wouldn’t go through my childhood again for anything, and anyone who wants to prolong his life on Earth is insane. I have been abused since before I was born, and I am tired of this place even though life is pleasant now. Maybe God’s exasperation with the people and spirits that have mistreated me is greater than his motivation to let me be tested further.

I believe we are also spared because we ask for it. Jesus said we should pray that God would not lead us into temptation and that he would deliver us from evil. Rhodah and I ask for those things every day. They must not be automatic, or we would not have been told to ask.

Satan is a bully, and he has favorites, like any bully. Some people get more of his abuse than others. Surely God will provide favor that outweighs Satan’s disfavor. And eventually we’ll get to see Satan thrown screaming into the fire, which will erase all the pleasure he got from hurting people.

We now have to contact Airlink and tell them our items are lost. I do not have high hopes, given the way we have been treated so far. After that, we will try Heymondo. It would be nice to have a few hundred dollars returned to us.

I am working on getting us into Czechia. I accidentally reserved a hotel room in a place where they are not allowed to install air conditioning. It’s a historic building. Forget that place. I don’t care if King Wenceslaus himself slept there. I’m not going to Europe to sweat.

I sent the Zambian embassy in Rome an email, detailing the way the Italian embassy in Lusaka lied to us and treated Rhodah rudely. They claim they are taking it seriously and following up. I hope so, because the nasty lady who caused our loss needs to be fired or corrected. Someone else should be handling visas. Maybe she can be reassigned to the copier room where she can hurl abuse at the guy who delivers toner.

The Zambian embassy helps Italians the way the Italian embassy is supposed to help Zambians, so they should be very angry to learn how we were treated. I don’t think I have to check when I opine that the Zambians in Rome are much more honest and kind than the Italian lady in Lusaka.

We prayed for this lady and her family, but that doesn’t mean she what she did should be ignored.

This time, I will tell Rhodah to be careful not to pack anything she is afraid to lose. We will photograph everything we pack, and we will check bag tags very carefully.

Not the Kind of Leak I had in Mind

The festival of sudden inconvenient repairs continues here at the compound.

Let’s see. I put in a new air conditioner last week. My garden tractor’s alternator quit. My other tractor still has a broken front gear case, and the steering cylinder is not connected. I had to clean my roof gutters. I had to fix a windshield leak on my Dodge Ram. I am still trying to build a new welding cart.

My well pump’s expansion tank pipe broke three days ago, and I had to fix that. Day before yesterday, in a completely unrelated surprise, the pump stopped working. I found out the on/off switch was a mess, and the pressure switch didn’t look too good, either. Worked on it in the heat and humidity until I realized it was going to require an expert.

The pump guys came, and they put in a new pressure switch and replaced a burned relay. Along the way, they learned that the check valve was finished, so that accounted for the rest of the $392.50.

I still have to replace the on/off switch. I am tempted to leave it as it is; three sets of wires held together with wire nuts. The circuit breaker is 25 feet from the pump, so the on/off switch is more or less redundant.

I will put a new switch in anyway.

Before the pump guys arrived, I had to bathe in the pool twice. After they fixed the pump, I thought everything was grand. My bidet attachment was working again. That’s something you really miss when it’s gone. I thought I was in for some smooth sailing. Then I noticed the water on my bathroom floor.

I had been using a bucket and pool water to flush the can, so I thought I had spilled water on the floor. No; no such luck. The toilet was leaking where the fill valve met the tank. I tried to fix it last night, and then I gave up and shut off the water supply. This is why I have a guest bathroom.

Today, I fooled with it again, and I got some wonderful news.

I have a Briggs Vacuity toilet. This is a green marvel from the infancy of hippie-approved toilets. Under the hood, there is a Rube Goldberg contraption that would drive Montgomery Scott himself to find a way to freebase Romulan ale.

I can’t explain it because I don’t understand it. Inside the porcelain tank, there is a smaller plastic tank. Inside that tank, there is an upside-down plastic jug. There is an air tube that comes up from the bowl.

Because of the plastic tank, you can’t get by with a single gasket that surrounds the fill valve pipe inside the porcelain tank. You have to have a gasket between the plastic tank and the porcelain. Guess what that gasket does. It goes bad. Guess how you replace it. You remove the entire porcelain tank, remove the plastic tank from the porcelain, install the gasket, and put it all back together. Along the way, you have to replace a bunch of other gaskets because only an idiot replaces one gasket when he has something taken apart.

Guess what the geniuses at Briggs did. They stopped selling gaskets. This toilet is unbelievably stupid, and Briggs knows it. They abandoned it.

That’s not completely true. You can still buy other parts that can’t save the toilet once the $1.51 unobtainable gasket goes bad.

Guess how many Briggs Vacuity toilets I have. Four.

I see the future, and it is not good.

I looked at this thing for a long time, and I came up with ideas.

1. Take the tank apart, cut off all the environmentalist bits of plastic except for those required to make the toilet function, plug the vacuum-tube hole permanently, and reassemble what’s left as a normal high-flow toilet. This will happen eventually, but not today, because I needed my toilet ASAP.

2. Buy a big rubber washer with a 1″ hole and put it on the outside of the toilet around the fill valve pipe. The other gaskets are all inside the tank. If there is a good solid gasket on the outside, they become irrelevant. I suppose some water inside the tank will go where liberals don’t want it to go, because it will be able to move from the plastic tank to the porcelain tank, but it will fill and flush just fine, it won’t run, and it won’t leak, and also, who cares what liberals want?

3. Buy and install a new toilet. I have never installed a new toilet, and this is not the weekend to start.

If I did buy a toilet, it would be a Toto one-piece toilet.

I have had two Toto toilets in the past, and they made defecation something to look forward to. They worked flawlessly, they were comfortable, they came with slow-close lids, and I’m pretty sure they would have flushed bricks.

Toto is a Japanese company, and we all know the Japanese have a sick obsession with quality toilets. They make toilets that massage and sing and so on. Japanese toilets are the Swiss watches of toilets.

Today I learned that one-piece toilets are totally superior to two-piece toilets. They are much more reliable. That’s all I need to know. There is no more important toilet attribute.

I think I should eventually try to convert one of my Briggs socialist hippie toilets to full-flow, and if it doesn’t work, I’ll install one Toto a month until they’re gone.

I really hate all the green garbage they’re selling us. Green products don’t work. They cost more. They kill American jobs. They kill great companies that employee huge numbers of people. They waste a huge amount of man hours, materials, and resources, just so we can be fashionable. Yes, there are fantastic green products, but we never seem to get those until our landfills are full of the bad green products that came first.

I am hoping I can go to bed tonight. I mean, just go to bed. Without hearing funny noises from the air conditioner or seeing water on the carpet or smelling smoke or having the ceiling collapse.

It’s a Saturday, and that’s bad. Friday night is the most likely night for something expensive to fail, and Saturday comes next.

In better news, I had a great Christian encounter today.

Five years ago, when my dad and I moved here, the man who owned the house sold me his two tractors and utility cart. He offered all three for much less than the big tractor alone was worth. I had to have someone look the machines over before writing the check, so I Googled and found a mechanic.

He checked the machines out and said they were okay, I sent him money, and that was that.

When I damaged the Kubota so badly I was no longer willing to try to fix it myself, I thought of this mechanic. I called him, and he said he would take the job. It took weeks for us to work things out, and he arrived today.

While we were talking, it became obvious to me that he was not a Democrat, and that meant he might be a Christian. I steered the conversation toward God, and then things took right off.

Like me, he has met Jesus. I mean personally. I don’t mean he suddenly believed and calls that meeting Jesus. Jesus himself came to him.

He was a kid, and he and his friends fished together. They liked to fish under a bridge. Over time, they had dug back into the dirt under the bridge, creating a little cave they could sit in. The mechanic, whose name is Paul, couldn’t go with them one day, and on that day, a truck crossed the bridge while they were sitting under it. The cave collapsed, and they all died.

Later, Paul prayed about it. He was very disturbed. While he was praying, something came to him and started trickling into him. While it was there, he felt complete peace and love. He knew nothing bad could happen to him while it was there.

I told him it was Jesus, because the same thing had happened to me. He agreed, saying that was what he had thought.

We must have spent an hour and a half talking about this. We learned we had a lot of common interests. He showed up in a 28,000-pound Dodge truck with a crane and a Miller Bobcat welder/generator on it. He loves guns and shooting. He hates what the world is turning into. His wife home-schooled his kids.

My buddy Mike is living here now, and I got him to come over and meet Paul so they could share their experiences.

I don’t know if we’ll become friends, but for the first time since I’ve moved here, I felt like I had met someone I wouldn’t mind knowing.

Later, I was talking to my wife on Whatsapp, and I told her about it. She said that when she has an encounter like that, she has an unusual feeling: the feeling that she and her new acquaintance can be close. Good friends. I didn’t coach her. She said that before I told her what I had felt.

We prayed for Paul and his family. I told him a few things about the Holy Spirit and tongues. Maybe it will go somewhere.

He didn’t fix the tractor because there was an issue he was not sure he had the tools to handle. He usually works on big machinery, not little tractors. He called a friend of his who works on small machines, but he didn’t get a call back while he was here. We agreed on one thing: we would get it done.

I felt a lot better about the accident. God used my broken front gear case to bring Paul here when he needed to talk to me and have my wife and me intercede for him and his family. The repair may cost me as much as a couple of grand, depending on who ends up doing it. The dealer might have to be involved. I don’t care. If God is behind what’s happening, it’s more important than a little money.

Confused Danish Preacher Housed with Mexican Criminals

Yesterday, a reader posted a comment saying evangelist Torben Sondergaard had been arrested. I started checking the web, and at first, it looked like a hoax. The story only appeared on obscure wackjob sites, and there were no details. The facts presented seemed inconsistent. I read that the FBI had arrested him for smuggling weapons into Mexico, and I also read he had been arrested in Orange County, Florida, where he was detained in the county jail.

Clearly, Florida does not border Mexico, and smuggling weapons into Mexico would be a federal crime, so why jail the suspect in a county facility?

Today I finally got some confirmation. Torben has a Facebook account, and he put up a post. I will take the liberty of republishing it here.

Torben Søndergaard
July 3 at 9:27 PM ·

BREAKING NEWS!!! – FOUNDER OF THE LAST REFORMATION TORBEN SONDERGAARD HAS BEEN FALSELY ARRESTED AND DETAINED BY THE FBI AND HOMELAND SECURITY AS A NATIONAL THREAT FOR SMUGGLING WEAPONS TO AMERICA… ??????

Hello everyone out there. I, Torben Sondergaard, am sharing this message with you from a phone call in Bakers Jail near Jacksonville, Florida, where I have been detained for two days in isolation after the most crazy days of my life. I don’t remember all the details, so maybe I will be wrong about some of the details I’m saying here, so I need you to forgive me, but I don’t have any pen or anything to write with, so this is just coming out of my memory through a phone call to my wife Lene, so we can get it up here on Facebook and YouTube to all of you out there.

First, I know many of you have heard about it and are praying for me, and I thank you so much. It means so much to me to know that you are out there praying. This Thursday, I was invited to a meeting with Homeland Security who wanted to talk about my asylum case – a case where I, in Denmark three years ago, was accused of doing many things I had not done, and where I ended up fleeing to America seeking asylum.

But then, they suddenly said that the real reason I was there was because they had been notified that I was smuggling weapons from Mexico to America, and I was in shock.

I have been staying in California with my wife and kids and we have just finished up a Bible school over the border in Mexico, where many of our helpers traveled from Mexico to America several times a week, but NONE of them were smuggling weapons, and I have NEVER had anything to do with smuggling weapons. I know NOTHING about smuggling weapons.

But there, they brought it up on the table and said that because of what they have heard, and because of all the crazy things happening in America right now, they see me as a national threat, and therefore they have chosen to detain me. Afterwards, I was put up against the wall, put in handcuffs, and led into a room. Later I was put in handcuffs again on my hands and on my feet, and then brought to Orange Jail where I was sitting on a chair for eight hours waiting, before I was put into a room with twenty other people. This was one of the most unreal experiences in my life. I talked with my wife Lene on the phone and we talked about that maybe God brought me there for a person, and it so happened that I prayed for one guy who got healed and he started to cry and said, “Whoa, God has truly sent you here to me because two days ago I prayed that God would send somebody to me.” So I had a beautiful moment with God even though it was terribly hard.

I almost didn’t sleep that night. The next morning they came and picked me up again with handcuffs on my hands and feet, and put me in a car, and I was driven three hours to Bakers Detention where I am now, where I’ve been sent to isolation for seven days. To come here was a shock. My room is very small. It is 7.13 feet or 2.3 meters. I am in isolation 24/7, where I can come out a half hour per day, and use the phone as I’m doing right now. Otherwise, I have nothing in there. The room is very dirty and moldy. I have not talked with the lawyer yet and I actually don’t know what is going on yet.

But, I want to say to all of you out there, I’ve tried many crazy things in my life, but nothing like this. I want to encourage you all to pray for me and stand together with me, because this is an attack on me because I’m preaching the Gospel. I am encouraged, because Jesus says, “Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves. Therefore be wise as serpents and harmless as doves. But beware of men, for they will deliver you up to councils and scourge you in their synagogues. You will be brought before governors and kings for My sake, as a testimony to them and to the Gentiles. But when they deliver you up, do not worry about how or what you should speak. For it will be given to you in that hour what you should speak; for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father who speaks in you. And you will be hated by all for My name’s sake. But he who endures to the end will be saved.” (Matthew 10:16-20, 23) And He also says, “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”

(Matthew 5:10?-?12) This is what is happening right now.
It has been hard, and it is hard, but I also see that God is changing me in all of this. To be in isolation, with no windows, and no clock, and talking with no one is just a weird experience. People are sometimes shouting from one cell to another, but it seems like almost everyone here speaks Spanish except for me.

I’m reminded of Paul’s words when he wrote, “But I want you to know, brethren, that the things which happened to me have actually turned out for the furtherance of the Gospel, so that it has become evident to the whole palace guard, and to all the rest, that my chains are in Christ; and most of the brethren in the Lord, having become confident by my chains, are much more bold to speak the Word without fear.”

(Philippians 1:12?-?14) Paul said that his chains would give them more boldness, and I’m encouraged that even with my chains, that you will get more boldness to preach the Gospel out there!
This is what I want to say to you out there – BE BOLD! PREACH THE GOSPEL! STAND FIRM on the WORD OF GOD, and please pray for me, and pray for my family. Pray that everything will turn out good here. This will also have an influence on my asylum case, so I will hopefully know more in a few days, and I will keep you updated here on my Facebook page and YouTube.

Again, I cannot answer anything. Please pray for me. If you know somebody in a high position, somebody who can help, then please reach out to us. All communication can happen via email at The Last Reformation website, where I have friends who are checking the emails, and you are also welcome to reach out to my wife.

I have probably forgotten to say a lot of things in this message since I cannot read it, I just have to quote it, so please bear with me. But I want to say, these last days have been something I have never, ever experienced before, and I never thought I would experience – being jailed this way, and for something as crazy as smuggling weapons from another country to America. Nothing could be further from the truth.

So please keep me in your prayers, and pray that God will continue doing work in me. I feel that every day He is changing me, and doing great work in my heart. When I do nothing else than sleep and pray and eat. God bless you all out there. Remember my family in your prayers.

Blessings,
Torben Sondergaard

It appears he is in the Baker County ICE detention center in MacClenny, Florida, since it’s a federal lockup full of people who speak Spanish. I don’t think he’s in a county jail.

I very much doubt this man has been smuggling weapons. No one but a lunatic would abandon his own country due to documented religious persecution, move himself and his family to the US, apply for asylum, spend years building a prominent ministry, and use it as a cover to move guns. The very suggestion is just stupid. If you want to make money in America, and you’re a popular preacher, all you have to do is teach the prosperity gospel, and you’ll be set for life. It’s not necessary to risk federal prison.

The Obama administration smuggled guns across the Mexican border. Torben Sondergaard…probably not.

My guess is that some Christian who disagrees with him, or maybe an LGBT activist, made a false report in order to torment him and get him deported.

I don’t bet, and people surprise me all the time, but I think he’ll be out in a few days with no stain on his record.

There is a kooky preacher on Youtube talking about Torben, claiming to be his friend. He calls his group the Gospel Gunslingers, and he is apparently obsessed with armed resistance. He says he’s in Mexico seeking asylum for some reason or other. I have to wonder if he’s involved in this. Would he or his associates do something like this in order to get attention for his movement?

Why would any American need asylum in Mexico? It makes no sense. In terms of human rights, a move to Mexico is a step backward.

The preacher did a long video which was supposedly about Torben, but I quit watching because he talked incessantly about himself. I didn’t get any real information about the arrest. The video was disturbing and came off like an exercise in self-promotion.

God is not telling Christians to shoot it out with the authorities, Antifa, BLM, the Illuminati, the Trilateral Commission, or anyone else. If God were interested in having us form private armies and shoot unbelievers, there would be at least one clue in the New Testament, and there is not. There are plenty of martyrs in there, but no John Wicks.

We and our unreliable AR-15’s are not going to fix America. It’s not going to be fixed at all. People need to understand that so they can spend their time drawing close to God and assuring their salvation.

Honestly, it’s better to be killed and go to heaven than to live like a scared ape or rodent here on Earth, behaving exactly like the hateful people we were put here to reach. This place is disgusting, and it’s only going to get worse. Why would you become a killer just to stay here? Heaven is real. If you are killed, you go there instantly, and you can forget this awful place forever.

I want no part of gunslinging for the gospel or any other cause. It’s true that large numbers of Christians will eventually be killed here in the US, just as we are in foreign countries, but that’s just how things work. Satan is real, and only a small percentage of human beings are outside his control. He will use them to get rid of us during the apocalypse. So what? Jesus told us it would happen, and the same thing happened to him. It’s not a good excuse to start worshiping Eugene Stoner.

If they come for me, all I want are a moment to pray and a good clean kill shot. The Gospel Gunslingers can stay here and suffer if they want. I am ready to go. When I’m gone, they and the leftist nuts can fight over my ammunition and use it to send each other to hell if they really want to.

They have a web page. It says this: “If you found this page, you probably already are a Gospel Gunslinger and concerned about keeping America free and great.”

No, I am not. America is neither free nor great now, and I am not planning to try to change it, because that ship sailed long ago. It beats Somalia at the moment, but I’m not willing to prance around with an AR-15 in order to get lower taxes and an end to gay marriage.

Okay, I found some information about the asylum story. The Gospel Gunslingers guy says he has filed for asylum because Biden is persecuting him as a dissident. I really don’t think so. I think it’s more likely that he’s a tremendous liar and possibly a sociopath.

The Gunslingers guy, not Biden. I realize that was ambiguous.

I doubt Biden knows who he is. I would be amazed to learn otherwise. My gut says this man is just desperate for attention.

I will pray for Torben and his family. It will be interesting to see what develops, especially if the feds identify and try to arrest a lying snitch.

The Day we Prayed for Doesn’t Feel That Great

A couple of days back, my wife had visions. I thought I would post details here in case they turn out to be from God.

She was awake when the visions took place. She was on her couch, and it was during the day.

In one vision, she went into Buckingham Palace. There was a small table there. On the table, there was a small tree. It was not a real tree. It was jewelry. It appeared to be made of white gold, and it had pearls on it, like fruit. One of the pearls dropped off, and God told her there was going to be a funeral soon.

The queen is very old, so I don’t think skeptics will think much of my wife’s vision if the queen dies and fulfills it. There are other royals, though.

In the other vision, Russia attacked Japan. She was surprised, because she thought Taiwan, not Japan, was in danger, and everyone thinks China will attack.

In other news, it is now legal for any American to carry a firearm in every city in America. Thanks to the Supreme Court, New York City’s fascist laws restricting people’s civil rights have been struck down. I assume leftist nests like New York will pull a Brown v. Board of Education and do their best to nullify the decision through specious reading of the opinion. Then there will be more lawsuits.

During the same week the Second Amendment was partially restored nationwide, Roe v. Wade has been struck down. It’s wonderful to hear, but I wonder if it will matter a great deal. My hope is that many lives will be saved. Convenience abortion is murder, and God hates it.

I don’t know if the law itself interests God all that much. Maybe it does. My feeling is that he is more concerned about the sick, evil attitudes of the people who think preventing the murder of unborn babies is wickedness. If our hearts were not twisted and cankered, our laws wouldn’t matter, because women would still have their natural revulsion toward turning their wombs into slaughterhouses, and convenience abortions would not be happening.

When God looks at America, even with Roe overturned, he sees a place where a big percentage of the people think ripping a baby’s belly open and tearing out his intestines while he is still alive is an important practice that should be protected. Is he really impressed that some of us managed to get pro-life justices appointed and that they changed the law? I wonder.

Obama and Biden are encouraging protestors. They appear to think it’s great that actual terrorists are standing outside the homes of Supreme Court justices, threatening their families in order to influence court decisions. It’s not a big shock that Biden would back them, because he is something of a dunce, as shown by his 11th-percentile law school class ranking. Obama, while not known to be highly intelligent, is certainly brighter than Biden, so he must be aware that he is supporting the destruction of the legal system and our judiciary branch. It’s disgraceful that he would take that position.

It’s remarkable that two extremely divisive, infuriating cases would be decided the same week. It can’t be coincidence. The supernatural world is setting us up for intramural violence. More fodder for the red horseman of the apocalypse.

My wife and I have been reading Ezekiel together this week. It’s amazing how it applies to our time. God was furious at the Jews for chasing evil spirits and worshiping them. He blessed them, and they ran after false gods, gave them the credit, and murdered their children to please them. We are doing the same things. You may not think you’re sacrificing to Molech when you murder your baby, but in a way, you are. You are killing in obedience to evil spirits, in order to get blessings.

God considered the Jews to be idolaters, just like slutty women who committed adultery. He said adulterous women were worse than whores, because whores get paid, while Israel and Samaria paid their false gods.

It’s interesting; the Jewish law says an adulterous woman must be killed, but it doesn’t say that about prostitutes.

America is a monstrous slut these days.

Ezekiel spoke of ancient kings and nations and said God would destroy them, but his words were also aimed at spirits that opposed him and end-time nations that served them. Ezekiel called Satan the King of Tyre, for example. He criticized the King of Tyre and then said he had been present in Eden and that he was the anointed cherub. Obviously, the King of Tyre was never a cherub, and Eden was locked up before the King of Tyre was born.

The Bible is true, but a lot of it is only metaphorically true. For example, God says things that are untrue when taken at face value yet true when understood as metaphor. For example, God said David’s kingdom would last forever, but David died, and his kingdom disappeared. God was talking about the kingdom of Jesus, a descendant of David.

Bad things are coming. They’re already here. When I say they’re coming, I mean they will get much worse. The way to get through it and avoid the pain is to get close to God and develop a loving relationship with him. He is going to end this place and call his own people out of it. You want to be one of those people, and you can become one if you want. It’s not difficult. God wants you to make it.

You Can’t Really Make This Shot

I did it again. I provoked white-hot rage on an Internet forum.

I asked a shooting question. I asked whether I was wrong to doubt people who said they could shoot squirrels in the head, killing them cleanly, with an ordinary .22 rifle, shooting from the shoulder, unsupported, CONSISTENTLY, from 100 feet. I said I thought anyone who made that claim was either lying or letting pride overcome memory.

Boy, did people get mad. One actually cursed at me. And I was polite the whole time!

Men popped up, telling me I was a bad shot and insisting they could do it.

I still say they’re, well, wrong, to be nice. And I’m not a bad shot.

I have shot a number of squirrels near my house in order to protect my trees and plants. What I found was that a .22 head shot couldn’t be trusted to drop a squirrel, and I also found that making such shots over about 50 feet, offhand, was very hard. This is why I force myself to use the shotgun now. With a 16 gauge and #6 shot, it’s hard to miss within 100 feet, unless the squirrel acts up. Which they do.

On one occasion, I made a nice .22 shot on a squirrel and hit it in the head. I thought I had missed, because it ran off. The next day, I shot it again. I didn’t know it was the same squirrel. It was trying to feed. When I picked it up, I saw part of the front of its head was gone. I had shot it off the day before. You would think the shock of a .22 slug hitting a squirrel’s face would knock it out, but no such luck.

I put a three-target spinner setup in my yard, 100 feet from my bedroom door. I measured the distance with a tape. When I used a scoped gun and aimed at a target about as wide as a squirrel brain, I found the crosshairs wobbled about 2″ no matter what I did. Sitting down, I would have had a much steadier picture, but standing up, I knew I would be doing well to hit a squirrel at all, let alone put one through its brain.

Allowing for the fact that a better amateur shot might be able to cut the wobble to 1″, I still concluded it wasn’t possible to make the shot reliably. A squirrel’s brain, from the side, is about 1-1/4″ by 1/3″. It’s like shooting at half of a ping pong ball.

A good mall-grade .22 with mall-grade ammo will shoot into about a 1/2″ circle at 100 feet, with an occasional bad round outside the circle. I mean it will do this when glued to a bench, not when held at the shoulder. Add the size of the target, the inherent wobbliness of offhand shooting, and the inaccuracy of rimfire ammunition, and you get a circle bigger than a squirrel’s brain.

I just don’t buy it. With a more accurate rifle, like a 6.5 Creedmoor, surely there must be a few non-professional shooters who can do it. There are plenty of rifles that will shoot into an area only slightly larger than the size of their bores at 100 feet, but a Walmart .22 with Walmart ammo won’t do that.

Hitting a squirrel brain consistently at 100 feet is a little harder than hitting half a TUMS tablet at 33 feet. That’s not easy!

After reading some angry responses, I went to Youtube to see what a truly good shooter can do offhand with a .22. I checked out Paul Harrell. He’s a champion marksman. He produced a video in which he covered a folding table with some of his awards. One person couldn’t carry them all.

In another video, he shot three .22 rifles offhand at 75 feet, producing three groups. Every group was too big to guarantee a dead squirrel with every shot. Every single group. And 75 is smaller than 100, right?

I thought he shot very well, and he wasn’t ashamed to post the video, so he must have been satisfied, too. So if he can’t hit squirrel brains at 75 feet, how can some guy with a Rural King hat and a mouthful of Skoal do it over and over at 100? I don’t think he can.

Here’s my arbitrary standard for an easy shot on an animal: you should be able to kill the animal cleanly 98 times out of 100. No less. If you can’t make a shot 98% of the time, it’s not an easy shot.

Here’s what I think of as an easy shot on a paper target: a random mall-grade pistol with cheap FMJ at 25 feet, shooting offhand into a 4″ circle. I can do that all day, and unlike most men who say they can make a shot all day, I am serious. I will very rarely miss. If I miss, it means I did something unusual or I got a bad cartridge. At 2″, I will still succeed the vast majority of the time, but not 98%. At 1″, I will probably be at about 85%. That’s not an easy shot. The 98% shot is easy. If you’re not surprised when you miss a shot, it wasn’t an easy shot. If you’re stunned, it was easy.

For someone better than me, or someone with better stuff, the “easy circle” will be smaller. For others, such as most police officers, it will be a lot bigger.

I don’t know why men let their insecurity make them lie about unimportant things. A long time ago, I learned that most 6-foot-tall men are really 5’10” or less. Sylvester Stallone and Robert Redford are both legitimately short, and Burt Reynolds was inches shorter than the 6’1″ he claimed.

Here’s something I love hearing: “I’m 6’1″ in boots.” Okay! And I’m 29,038′, standing on Mount Everest!

Men lie about their strenght. They’ll say they bench-press x pounds when the number is really 0.75x. I used to work out with 300 pounds, lifting it 8 times slowly, pulling it back all the way to my chest. But when I mentioned it to people, I always said this: “on a machine.” Free weights? Forget it. I found 220 unpleasant. I was honest with people. Machines make lifting easy.

Men lie about their height and their athletic abilty, and they are the same way about shooting.

I remember a funny example of insecurity-related fibbing. When I was a kid, I had the fastest car in school. It was not very fast, but it was the fastest. It was a Z28 with a 3.73 rear, positraction, and a 4-speed transmission. It was on the high end of the Camaro spectrum. Still your hearts, ladies. A guy named Jake Stryker (not really) had a base-model Firebird. He put some fat tires on it and claimed the dealership had worked some kind of wizardry on the motor, which wasn’t true. Dealerships didn’t do that.

He said he feared his younger brother would take it out and drive it at 140 miles per hour, which was considerably faster than a Corvette at that time. To make a Firebird do 140, you had to drop it out of a plane and put rockets on it.

Everyone knew he was lying, and there were jokes, but no one said anything to him, because they knew how he was. It was important to Jake to convince me and other kids his car was faster than mine. If his dad had really wanted him to have a fast car, he would have bought him a Trans Am with a 400-cubic-inch motor, a manual transmission, and 3.56 gears. He wouldn’t have paid a dealer to upgrade a base car, spending more than a Trans Am would have cost in the first place. Hello?

The Trans Am, Pontiac’s best Firebird, had thick sway bars, the big engine and manual transmission, the low gearing, and probably a few other things, from the factory. Putting all that junk in a baby blue girl’s Firebird with factory automatic, like Jake Stryker’s, would have cost a ton.

Back then, bragging about your automatic-transmission Firebird was pretty silly. They were all slow, and nobody who wanted to go fast drove automatics in those days. That reminds me of another Firebird driver I knew. I knew a girl named Kate, and she had a Formula, which was just below the Trans Am. I expressed shock because she got an automatic. She said she didn’t like the manual because it had three pedals. She didn’t know what they did. Wow. Hilarious.

Kate was not a car person. She picked her car because it, like Jake Stryker’s, was baby blue. Really nice girl.

I was not a cocky kid, and I didn’t go around bragging about my car. I didn’t race. I didn’t do anything to get Jake going. That was all him. People used to make fun of him a lot, but they didn’t tell him. It was very strange. He ran with the cool kids and thought he was one of them. They let him think that.

Some total strangers are pretty mad at me right now, for no reason at all. Oh, well. I still think a .22 brain shot on a squirrel at 100 feet is hard for nearly everyone, if not everyone. Too hard to be close to a sure thing. Anyone who wants to change my mind can put up a target 1-1/4″ long by 1/3″ high, shaped like a squirrel brain, shoot it 100 times in a row, and put it on Youtube. No editing.

I don’t see that happening.

In case anyone wants to try, remember:

1. Regular .22; nothing you can’t buy at a mall.
2. From the shoulder, no support at all.
3. Regular ammo, like Mini-mags.
4. Squirrel-brain-shaped target.
5. One hundred feet, measured on camera.
6. No cuts in the video.
7. Amateur shooter, not including people who used to be pros.
8. One hundred shots with at least 98 hits.

If you pull it off, here is the prize I offer: nothing. I will definitely say I’m impressed, though.

God’s People are not Responsible for Other People’s Violence

The recent shooting in Buffalo is consistent with my view that the apocalypse is underway.

People are making wild judgments about the killer, without learning any facts in advance. Nothing new there. A silly woman who writes for Rolling Stone claims he’s a mainstream Republican. Some conservatives are hollering “false flag!”, which is one of the dumber things conservatives say whenever an event has the potential to embarrass them.

The killer, Payton Gendron, did what many delusional mass murderers do. He published a manfesto. I’m starting to think publishing a manifesto should, itself, be a crime carrying a prophylactic life sentence. I don’t know which mass killer was the first to publish a manifesto, but he really started a trend.

Unlike over 99% of the people who are making assertions about Gendron, I looked at the manifesto. It’s available at Scrib’d, unless our keepers have taken it down. I didn’t read the whole thing, but I learned enough to make me more informed than almost every journalist who claims to be informing us about Gendron.

Bad news for leftists: Gendron is not a Republican, he is an atheist, and he hates capitalism. Bad news for conservatives: he is not a Democrat or true leftist, and he used an AR-15, adding more weight to the irrational campaign to ban these mediocre but much-loved semiautomatic weapons.

Leftists should be encouraging people to buy AR-15’s, because they jam all the time and, when chambered in .223 or 5.56mm, have terminal performance inferior to that of 7.62x39mm guns.

Gendron is a white supremacist. He states it clearly, so there is no point in arguing about it. He believes America should be a white country. He wants to end immigration and somehow get rid of non-whites. He hates Jews more than anyone and claims they are less intelligent than the rest of us. He hates blacks quite a bit, and he thinks they are stupid and incapable of self-control. He thinks Jews cause most of the world’s problems, and he thinks it’s necessary to get rid of them. He believes blacks are not quite as bad, but he thinks they are easier to defeat, so he believes they should be attacked first.

It appears Gendron learned most of what he believes from Internet kooks. His manifesto is full of racist memes. It looks like there is no neo-Nazi canard too crazy for him to swallow and embrace.

Gendron wrote references to the Waukesha “Dancing Grannies” murders on the handguard of his gun. It appears he thought the attack was racially motivated, although the authorities think that is not true. He was clearly trying to avenge the victims.

Gendron wants to start a race war. He was hoping to spur reprisals which would bring things to a head.

He is a very intelligent boy, but he is also insane. Some people have argued with me when I called him insane, thinking I was suggesting he was not responsible for what he did. They had the wrong idea. “Insanity” has more than one definition. There is a medical definition, a legal definition, and a common sense definition. Legally, Gendron is almost certainly sane. He knew what he was doing. He understood the consequences. He will be convicted. From a common sense point of view, he’s as crazy as a treeful of coons. He believes things no rational person could believe.

I think his story is interesting, because the Revelation says the lawless will take over the world, and he is a great example of a lawless person. He felt his personal convictions entitled him to disobey very sound laws enacted by democratically elected legislators. In this respect, he is just like Antifa terrorists, BLM terrorists, sanctuary city mayors, people who harass Supreme Court justices, and Second Amendment sanctuary sheriffs. He feels he is above the rules. People like him are becoming more and more common and influential, and our ordered society is breaking down because of it. Joe Biden is lawless, and he’s the president. He backs the people who are destroying our government by terrorizing Supreme Court justices he disagrees with, and he refuses to enforce our immigration laws.

Gendron is also interesting because he is trying to get people to murder each other. The Revelation says a spirit of murder will be released on the world, and people will kill each other under his influence. I am convinced that spirit is already at work, and Gendron is probably controlled by demons he commands. Sooner or later, violence will erupt everywhere, and people like Gendron will be the ones who light the fuses that set the rest of humanity off.

As an atheist, Gendron is unacquainted with Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. Because he isn’t baptized with the Spirit and does not pray in tongues, he has very little resistance to delusion. This is why he believes the weird things he does. He seems like a freak, but the truth is that he is typical. Most people aren’t planning to shoot up supermarkets, but only a tiny percentage of people are close enough to the Holy Spirit to avoid believing nonsense. I would guess that less than one percent of human beings spend enough time in the Spirit to avoid being duped.

Not everyone is a firestarter like Gendron, but nearly everyone is dry tinder. Nearly everyone is a sleeper, waiting for someone with more initiative to supply the impetus that will drive us to start a murder pandemic. Anyone who isn’t protected from delusion by the Holy Spirit is a potential murderer or accomplice of murderers.

As Jesus said, those who are not with him and his people are against them. You can’t be neutral. If the Holy Spirit doesn’t rule you, Satan and his imps can get at you and transform you into a vicious creature who is impervious to reason. The fact that you’re a nice person now doesn’t mean anything. Nice people supported apartheid and made snacks for Nazis who were busy abusing the innocent.

A lot of people who used to be nice run around in black costumes throwing frozen water bottles at the police and trying to burn government buildings.

America’s leftist lunatics are making things less and less tolerable for sane people. They are pushing us to the point where we will snap. School districts are now punishing children for refusing, truthfully, to use incorrect pronouns. That’s pure Nuremberg. A child who refuses to lie can end up labeled a disciplinary problem, and that can follow him through his scholastic career and limit his opportunities. Colleges are run by utter fruitcakes now, and if they see that a teen refused to mislabel girls and boys, they will wholeheartedly agree with the assessments of the nuts who slandered him in high school, and they are likely to deprive him of positions he has earned. The likely end result is that many young people will be barred from positions of leadership and wealth that they deserve. They may effectively be banned from many professions. I doubt my law school would have accepted me had I told the admissions committee God was against sodomy.

The Germans moved incrementally to get rid of Jews. They started limiting their participation in society, and they slowly tightened the noose. At first, the restrictions were tolerable. Eventually, Jews were banned from many professions. Then they had to move into ghettos, and their wealth was taken. In the end, the Germans deprived them of the right to live. The same pattern is developing in the treatment of people who oppose the enemies of Jesus, who is unquestionably God.

It’s amazing that sexual perversion turned out to be the most powerful weapon used to destroy us. I predicted this over and over, publicly, years before it happened, and people said I was crazy. Now we live in a country where your child’s future can be jeopardized simply because he refuses to pretend the delusions of mentally ill children and adults are correct. I was right, and the reason I was right is that God was the one who told me what would happen. I couldn’t have figured it out on my own. I had no reason to think about it, and I probably lacked the capacity to see what was happening without help.

Gendron is nothing like me or most conservatives or Christians, but he will become our public face, at least for a while. Perhaps for a long time. He is much more like Antifers and BLM terrorists. They ought to bear a resemblance to each other, because they have the same father. He is not part of the right wing, but there are people like him on the far, far right, and their numbers are increasing in response to leftist aggression. There are many extreme-right characters who are not Christian at all or who claim to be Christian but reject the Holy Spirit and do not pray in tongues. Those people are just as vulnerable to radicalization as Gendron, and they are starting to show the world they are also sons and daughters of the father of Antifa and BLM.

When the rapture comes, nearly everyone left on Earth will be a child of Satan, and the pandemic of murder and abuse will, for the most part, be a family dispute. There will be a remnant of people who turn to God, but their numbers will be insignificant. While God’s children are on the earth, God has a compelling interest in tempering the suffering of humanity. Once they are gone, he will have much less incentive to intervene. He will sit back and let Satan’s children do what they want to each other. They will not belong to him. Then they will learn that the presence of God’s children on the earth was the only reason this place was ever significantly nicer than hell.

I’m sure they will still whine about imaginary unfairness, and they will look for scapegoats to torment, but we won’t be here to be hurt and have our wealth looted, so they’ll have to torture and kill each other and loot each other’s wealth instead. Meanwhile, we will be in heaven, at a marriage feast. Out of their reach for eternity.

I say these things as though I know I will be there. That is presumptuous. I certainly hope I will.

Now we should sit back and see whether Gendron succeeds in starting the conflagration he hoped to start. Will he pull it off, or will others have to complete his work? Maybe they’ll go out like Samson’s foxes, ripping at each other and running in terror because they’re tied together and they see fire chasing them.

They would be Satan’s apostles.

I bear no responsibility for what Gendron did, any more than I bear responsibility for BLM’s arson and murder. I’m just a man who believes we should have a godly, orderly society guided by love. I am not responsible for what anyone else does. People can blame me all they want. Like God told me a few years back, an excuse is a lie. And the word says liars will have their place in the lake of fire.

My wife and I prayed for Gendron, his family, his victims, and their families. Maybe God will help them not to be destroyed by things like delusion and unforgiveness. That would be nice. The only thing worse than going to prison for life is going to prison for life and then going to hell.

Don’t Let This Happen to You

I used to recommend a Christian teacher named Perry Stone. He got all sorts of revelation from God, and he taught about the deep truths of the Bible. He connected things in various books. He explained the meanings of symbols. It was something to see.

He didn’t ask for money, and he made it clear he never intended to. He counted on God to bring donations in. He gave materials to people who couldn’t pay, such as prisoners. He called his ministry Voice of Evangelism instead of putting his name on it.

Over time, he started to become somewhat crazy. He was angry a lot, and sometimes he relayed stories that were not true. He hadn’t checked them. He supplied information that wasn’t reliable.

He started to seem very proud of himself. He seemed to think he was always right. He wouldn’t admit it when he was wrong.

Eventually, he started asking for money. God didn’t give him what he wanted, so he appealed to people to help him build a big campus. He started calling his business Perry Stone Ministries.

I used to support his work, but it seemed to me that he was going astray, so I stopped. It was particularly ominous to see him appearing with Steve Munsey, a crooked megachurch grifter who is known for helping preachers get people to give them money. Rick Wilkerson Sr., the failed pastor of my old church in Miami, idolized Munsey and let him ruin his church. He thought Munsey was a genius because he had a Starbucks in his church.

I used to post comments on Stone’s Youtube videos, warning him to get away from Munsey.

In 2020, women associated with Stone accused him of gross sexual behavior, including things like showing them how sexually aroused he was. One said God had told him his wife Pam would be dead soon and that he needed to be with another woman. He took time off from preaching, but he went back very quickly.

He began attacking the victims and messengers. A lady stood up in church and called him a “nasty perv,” and he threatened to have her arrested and sue her, neither of which were credible options. He said those things because he panicked. His pride had been breached publicly, while he was on camera, in the pulpit, and after years of being surrounded by yes-men, he could not handle it.

He claimed he had a divinely-inspired dream about “ugly fish,” which represented women interfering with his ministry. He said he expected bad things, such as death, to happen to them.

In short, he went off his nut.

Recently, highly disturbing audio emerged. He had a meeting with two men who were close to him. One was a ministry leader, and the other was a cop who handled security for him. They tried to talk sense to him and calm him down. He cursed and said he was going to kill himself. I’ll provide quotations.

I’m going to go commit suicide up in the mountains and end this thing.

Listen to me, before God, I’m going to go take pills in the mountains … because I can’t put up with this. I am a very sincere person but I have almost no friends, man. And I have almost no friends because of s— like this.

I can’t shake a woman’s hand, “Oh, he’s coming on to me!” Pat them on the back, “Oh, he’s coming on to me!”

I will take my life before I let the ministry go down. I swear to God I’ll take my life!

No, no, no, no. This is going to get bigger. If he’s got letters, it means they’re talking. The ministry is ruined. I’m going to shut down and sell the building. I need to. I need to shut OCI down and sell the building and forget everything I’m doing. And if Pam Stone knows this, Pam Stone will leave me. Oh, she’ll find out. She’ll find out. And by accusations I’ll be destroyed, so what do I have to live for?

This is not your ordinary TV preacher scandal response. Stone reacted like a scared little girl, and he was caught up in selfishness, threatening to spite the world by depriving it of his exalted self. We haven’t heard any audio indicating remorse or a rational response. I doubt there is any.

The voice is undeniably Stone’s. You can go hear him on Youtube, and the story appeared in a reputable paper.

I looked at Stone’s Youtube channel last night. Videos are still popping up, many without Stone. Comments have been turned off. This is one of the signs of a ministry’s death. Crooked preachers like Kenneth Copeland, Paula White, and John Gray don’t let people comment on their videos. Cockroaches run from the light, as conservative Twitter users know.

I know what happened to Stone. Lust wasn’t his big problem. Pride was. He became so full of himself, he could not accept any kind of correction, and he craved wealth and admiration. After he became incorrigible, lust was able to get in and control him, and then after he sinned, pride made him lie.

God told me this: “The concealment of a sin is worse than the sin itself.”

I know why pride defeated Stone. He didn’t pray in tongues enough. He told people they should do it, but his own prayer life was scant. He bragged about the long hours he spent studying the Bible and other books. You can’t put in long hours every day and have a prayer life that works. It’s not possible.

He used to praise old mountain people who prayed in tongues “excessively,” and to him, “excessively” meant 20 minutes. That’s not excessive. That’s just a beginning. If you only pray in tongues 20 minutes a day, you aren’t winning at life. You are being deceived and defeated.

Stone thought a 20-minute session was a big deal, so he must have been putting in much less time than that.

One of the signs that you’re not praying in tongues enough is that you become deceived. Stone is clearly deceived. He isn’t being corrected by God, and he appears to be somewhat insane.

He needs to go home, quit preaching, get his prayer life going, and let God fix his life. He needs to repent publicly, for real, not like he did the first time, and apologize to the people he wronged. He needs to have demons cast out of him.

It’s a shame to see him taken down like this. He has become so deranged, he is willing to consider killing himself–going to hell–in order to avoid more embarrassment. His pride is worth more to him than avoiding eternal torture by an enemy who will have special punishments waiting for him.

Because he is crazy now, people will assume he was always crazy. They will be less inclined to look at the sound, valuable work he did years ago. Nice work on the part of Satan. He has retroactively defused bombs that were wrecking parts of his kingdom. Fewer people will benefit from Stone’s earlier teaching, so more people will be more vulnerable to attack. If he gets to torture Stone in hell, it will be the cherry on top of the sundae. What a trophy.

Stone didn’t teach people how to protect themselves, so many of his followers are sticking up for him. They’re not praying in tongues enough. They’re not seeking correction. As the Bible says, a bad tree bears bad fruit.

I was praying about this last night. I told God it was discouraging, because if a man with Stone’s background can fall, what could happen to me?

I have been proud and extremely resistant to correction from other people. I have been hostile to people who were right when they argued with me. I keep trying to improve, but what I say about myself is true.

God has given me grace to pray in tongues. That is what will save me. I am doing what Perry Stone does not do, so I should avoid the snares he fell into.

I hope he doesn’t kill himself. He should have enough money to have a soft retirement, so he should be able to stay home and stay out of trouble. The problem with disgraced preachers, though, is that pride usually drives them back into the limelight. Alberto Lee Santiago, the pedophile who ran my last church, went to prison because he insisted on preaching after he was caught, and I don’t think he is any crazier than Perry Stone.

In other news, the gardening project is going well.

The tomatoes we repotted the other day are all alive. Mike was sure it was good to put tomatoes in a 50/50 mixture of peat and dry cow manure from the pasture, but I insisted on checking the web, and I settled on a mix of peat, potting soil, composted manure, and perlite, along with epsom salt and lime. We repotted 10 plants, and we did 9 my way. Mike insisted on doing one his way. As of today, 9 are doing well, and Mike’s plant is somewhat yellow and is losing…is “branches” the word? He is full of remorse. I think the 9 healthy plants will thrive pretty well and produce tomatoes. They are looking stronger by the day.

I am planning to try Ruth Stout no-till gardening, which could also be called “no-character gardening,” because it requires little work. A lady named Ruth Stout decided to try throwing seeds on the ground and covering them with old hay, with no other preparation, and she found she got better harvests than people who worked hard tilling, enriching, and weeding the soil.

You can see why this appeals to me. First, I am somewhat lazy, second, I want big harvests, and third, my soil is like beach sand. Growing things in the ground would be very hard.

I found out Yukon Gold and LaSoda potatoes grow well here, and I also learned you can grow beans and tomatoes the Ruth Stout way. I have seed potatoes and sweet potato slips coming. I have pole beans on hand. I may get more tomato plants.

I think potatoes and beans are important, because they have calories. You can’t live on cabbage and cucumbers.

Getting a lot of hay seemed like an obstacle. It’s expensive. Then I remembered the round hay bales in my woods. My tenant farmer puts them there for his cattle. I can’t take the edible hay, but the cattle have left a gigantic amount of old poopy hay strewn around, and it’s free. I got myself a manure fork today, and I loaded up the utility cart. It took about 10 minutes, so getting enough for a bed should be fast work. As of today, I own a manure fork, so I’m armed with the correct tool.

Better news yet: you can plant vegetables in oak leaves. I only have a few thousand tons of those. They’re acidic, which is a problem. If only I had a source of something to cut the acidity. Like the gigantic pile of ashes under my burn pile.

I think I’ll put down a layer of hay and then pile leaves over it. The leaves will trap moisture for sure. Or maybe I should put the leaves down first, because they will definitely kill all the grass and weeds under the bed. They have killed enough of my grass to make me confident.

We have not built a structure to protect plants yet. The potatoes won’t need protection, because squirrels are too stupid to dig potatoes. My understanding is that they will eventually discover pole beans. Tomatoes will definitely be attacked. I was thinking of building a greenhouse-like thing, but the more I think, the more I believe I just need a frame covered with chicken wire. It’s not cold enough here for a real greenhouse.

The war on squirrels goes better and better. I have learned that trapping nuisance squirrels is legal here, and I have also discovered conibear traps. These are little snap traps you can bait with marshmallows and peanut butter. You tie them to trees, and squirrels climb up and grab the bait. They’re extremely humane (mainly to me, I admit). They crush a squirrel’s neck instantly. I plan to try them. I got squirrel-thinning permission in writing from the state, so there is no reason to hold back. During the past week, I have executed so many squirrels, I have lost count. There are three in the yard now, waiting for their rides. From hawks.

In past years, I spent a lot of time sitting in the woods in a blind I bought, failing to shoot or even see squirrels. I wish I had known what I know now: the best blind is my house. I shoot most of them from the front door and bedroom.

Being a Southerner is so great.

Tomorrow, I plan to pick a spot for my bed, amass a large amount of leaves using the blower, and put them in place. Then I plan to cover them with poopy hay. Then I have to wait for my seed potatoes and sweet potato slips.

I need to learn this stuff before Biden starves us all. I don’t want to be unable to find carbohydrates because I sat on my rear end and trusted the government. I would be a lot better off had I started two years ago.

I don’t know what Biden-trusting people will do in cities. Eat each other, I guess. What if they start driving to the country to steal food? Good recipe for the wave of killings predicted in the Revelation. When times are good, shooting people who steal crops and livestock seems barbaric. When your chickens and vegetables affect what your family weighs in the spring, or how many members make it through the winter, all that changes.

For the first time in my life, I understand why my great aunt Berthy shot at a man who tried to steal her chickens. I get it. As a Christian, I don’t see myself doing that, but other people would.

I learned I can eat wood ears. They call them “chicken of the woods.” I will never run out of those here. I wonder how many calories there are in a serving. Coons and possums are edible, too. You can even eat a coyote or bobcat if you need to.

The recent improvement in my squirrel tactics could serve me well in the future, if I’m not able to thin them out and they remain in good supply. Two people could fill their meat needs with a weekly tally of 8 squirrels. When things get bad, no one will care much about whether they’re in season, and since they will be nuisance animals when they’re close to my house, killing them would be legal anyway.

If all this sounds crazy to you, ask yourself how crazy a 5-dollar carton of eggs would have sounded last year.

Hopefully the rapture will lift me out of here before I start putting moles in my soup.

That’s Some Privilege, That White Privilege

More apocalypse news: proud celebrity cuckold Will Smith has started a fad. As you probably know, a young man named Isaiah Lee attacked pro-transsexual comedian Dave Chappelle while he was performing. I didn’t expect to blog again so soon, but news that seems important to discuss has popped up twice in three days.

I call Chappelle “pro-transsexual” because he is. A contingent of perpetually enraged leftists have decided he hates transsexuals because he talked about them in his act, but he supports them in their efforts to destroy themselves.

Lee appears to be some kind of mixed-race person with black blood. He has been charged with assault with a deadly weapon, and he supposedly had a replica gun which contained a knife blade. What goes through the mind of a person who designs a silly weapon like that is not clear to me.

I just saw new information. The replica “ejects a knife.” Why not get a real gun that ejects BULLETS? After all, leftists keep telling us buying a gun is quick and easy.

Lee may be a woman. You know how that works these days.

Is Will Smith responsible? He has definitely made it more likely that other immature people will physically attack speakers. On the other hand, you can’t really be responsible for what other people do. Your guilt for encouraging them is not the same as their guilt for acting.

Satan, or as I often call him through clumsy typing, “Stan,” has done a great job, providing leftists with incredibly stupid arguments that allow them to rationalize violence and various crimes. They say it’s violence when other people SPEAK against their beliefs. That means violence in response is justified, even long after the fact. Then they say their own violence is expression, like speech, so it doesn’t justify any type of physical response.

“My violence is protected expression. Your protected expression is violence.”

The dissonance is remarkable, but if you can seriously believe Caitlyn Gender is a woman, what can’t you believe?

Delusion is possibly the primary symptom of demonic influence. We are neck-deep in it now, and the waters are rising faster than ever. Either the end is not far off, or God’s people are in for a very rough ride. Anyone crazy enough to think Chaz Bono is a man is crazy enough to make a coat from the skins of Christians.

Lots of things are happening here at the compound. Mike found a lady who sells tomato plants, including heirlooms, so now we have Better Boy, Cherokee Chocolate, and Mortgage Lifter plants. I’m trying to determine what kind of enclosure to build them. I have never had a greenhouse. A simple structure covered with plasticized fabric is said to be enough to kill a squirrel’s interest, but I am told such a greenhouse will get too hot in the summer and kill the plants. I am thinking about chicken wire, but some people claim squirrels will chew through it.

I feel less and less when I kill a squirrel. I see why the old timers in Kentucky were so hard. They needed crops and livestock in order to keep their families alive, and I am starting to think the same way, given the Biden Catastrophe. I no longer have any patience with vermin.

The squirrel trap I bought is finally working, so that’s interesting. Peanuts pay off. I have a bigger trap baited with a peach and a chicken leg. I want to save a few of my peaches this year. I saw a rabbit eating one. The problem varmints here are squirrels, coons, coyotes, armadillos, and possums. Bobcats can also cause problems. Rabbits aren’t a big deal, because there are so few. I blame the coyotes.

I always take the squirrels, put them in the car with me with lots of air conditioning, buy them a few things at Louis Vuitton, and then check them into nice hotels, safe and sound. Don’t worry about them.

I know I said I had no patience with vermin, but I feel a little sorry for rabbits, because something is killing the daylights out of them, and the rabbits here always look miserable. I guess I’ll shoot next time, though. Rabbits are tasty, and there is no season because everyone hates them.

We plan to grow things in buckets. The lady we got the tomatoes from has a true survival farm on half an acre of sand, so I know I have no excuse for starving. She has tomatoes, squash, onions, garlic, peppers, tomatoes, chickens, potatoes, and probably some other things.

If I can grow food here, maybe moving to Tennessee is a bad idea. Heating a house up there with limited electricity due to Biden would be a lot of work.

The lady who sold us the tomatoes said a lot of locals are moving to Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina.

That’s about it from the compound. Stay prayed up and don’t make any trans jokes unless you’re packing.

It’s not Something in the Water

Rhodah and I are going through the Bible. She decided she wanted to start at the Revelation and go backward. We are now on Romans. We haven’t discussed it yet. We will probably do it today.

While I was reading today, I came across a passage which is very relevant to our time. Really, it’s almost an entire chapter. It shows why America is in the state it’s in.

Homosexuals and the people who want to give in to them in order to have peace sometimes say Jesus never said anything about homosexuality. Of course, that’s ridiculous.

First, Jesus is not the only person who spoke by God’s inspiration in the New Testament. The entire Bible is full of the words of prophets and apostles, and these people spoke with God’s authority. It would be asinine to claim to be a Christian and insist on discarding the entire Bible except for the words Jesus spoke. Sexual sin is criticized throughout the Bible in both testaments, and Jesus approves of the Bible. If you doubt that Jesus approves of the Bible, and you insist you’re a Christian, you are beyond the reach of reason.

Second, people who had the authority of Jesus criticized homosexuality repeatedly in both testaments. Jesus is God. He has always been God. If you don’t believe that, there is no point in engaging you in an effort to determine which Christian doctrines are correct, because you deny Christianity as a whole. Jesus gave Moses the law. Jesus created Adam and commanded him. Jesus spoke through people like Elijah and Jeremiah. When any anointed person criticizes homosexuality, he speaks for Jesus.

Paul had the authority of Jesus and Jehovah, and he said these things:

For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:

Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.

Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,

And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.

Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves:

Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.

For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature:

And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.

And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient;

Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers,

Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents,

Without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful:

Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.

It’s undeniable. Paul condemned homosexuality in both men and women. You can find other similar material in the New Testament.

What’s interesting about the passage is that it provides an explanation most serious Christians aren’t even looking for. Most of us are busy complaining about persecution from pro-perversion people, without trying to find the root cause. Romans 1 tells us the cause. Men rejected God, so God stopped protecting them from perverted desires.

I believe Christians tend to think of perversion as something that popped up on its own and motivated people to attack the church. The truth is that it became widespread because people gave up on God. The church helped that process along. If I’m a Christian, and I fail to help people avoid idolatry, and then they become perverts, I am responsible for the sin of not warning them and praying for them. I’m not responsible for their choice to be perverts or the things they do; that’s on them, and they have no excuse. But I have done wrong.

Paul says men turned to idols, so God gave them over to sexual perversion. Giving men over to something isn’t the same thing as inflicting it on them. When Paul gave a sinner over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, he didn’t invite Satan to attack him; Satan was already trying to do that. He is always looking for ways to attack every human being. Paul merely quit praying for God to spare the sinner the consequences of his sin, and then the man had no protection, so Satan had better access to him.

For a long time, I’ve believed the decline of England was caused by greed and pride. England was once a powerful Christian nation. The British evangelized the world. When they became wealthy and amassed an empire, they became proud and obsessed with wealth and power. I believe the men turned work into an idol and abandoned their families.

By the beginning of the 20th century, England was pretty godless. The English elites accepted perversion in private, regardless of what they said in public. The men had become effeminate, and they still are. A typical British man who is not from the working classes is hard to distinguish from a flaming American homosexual.

Put Elton John in a business suit and a fake beard and tell people he was a straight English businessman, and no one would doubt it.

It became common for British men to ship their sons off to boarding schools so they could succeed. A British boarding school is essentially a sodomy academy. British men made their sons fatherless voluntarily, and Satan stepped in and filled the paternal role.

English men have become effeminate. Even the straight ones seem gay to Americans. To me, it appears that the British received the punishment of Romans 1, and Americans are receiving it now. We succeeded them in evangelism, and we have also succeeded them as idolaters and perverts.

It’s as though Christianity were a wave that moved through nations. It starts small, builds to a peak, and then disappears. When it’s building, things are wonderful, but afterward come chaos, hatred, defeat, and depravity.

Gay activists, who somehow love to teach Christianity in spite of their hatred of it, like to tell us Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed for selfishness, not for perversion. That’s not true. They were destroyed for both. The Bible mentions both as the causes of the rain of fire. It makes sense. It is believed that their area was very wealthy, and that they abused the poor as well as anyone who came to visit. They became powerful, they made wealth and heathen deities their gods, they became selfish and cruel, and they became sexually perverted.

After they became perverted, they became so depraved God was no longer able to reach them, so he rained fire on them. He burned them all, including old people, babies, women, pets, and livestock. Just to get rid of them for the sake of future generations they were going to contaminate.

Now America is like Sodom. By and large, we have no interest in God or righteousness. We love money, power, and admiration. We are obsessed with pleasure. We are also so sexually perverted, about one quarter of our young people claim to be LGB-something. That’s a big jump from the 1% we dealt with in the past.

In addition to these problems, we are much weaker and more vulnerable than before. We have to bow and scrape for China. That could never happen to a nation that had God’s favor. We got hit worse by coronavirus than anyone else. We are watching our wealth evaporate under Biden, as he drags us into an unnecessary conflict and kills American jobs. Our government is paying millions to put illegal aliens on planes and fly them to cities where they can settle and work against us.

For decades, we’ve been marching to the top of a cliff, and I think we are finally in the process of sliding off.

As written previously, my wife dreamed she was in a field with another woman, running from vicious dogs. The world was falling apart. They saw people running in various directions. People were running from one place to another, thinking they were headed to safety, but they passed people running in the opposite directions. No matter where people came from, they thought things had to be better elsewhere, but things were just as bad in the places they were running to. There was no escape.

My wife and the woman tried to go through a gate and into a house where people seemed safe. The woman was allowed in, but when my wife begged to be allowed in, a tall man with goat’s horns and charred skin came out. He owned the house.

It was obviously a picture of the tribulation and the mark of the beast. Things are going to be very bad everywhere, and Satan will offer people false safety in exchange for taking the mark.

Money won’t protect you. Buckets of freeze-dried disaster food won’t save you. Underground bunkers, real estate, stocks, ammunition, solar power, private wells, and militias won’t save you. The beast definitely won’t save you. God is shaking the world to show us he is the only thing we can hold onto. He will show us none of our false gods can help us.

It’s just like what he did in Egypt, which was a picture of the rapture. He sent 10 plagues, and each plague was designed to humiliate one of Egypt’s false gods. For example, the plague of darkness humiliated Ra, the false sun god.

We wanted to have our own way. We wanted to find security through wealth and political power, not prayer and submission. We wanted to appease perverts and pretend their disgusting activities were not sins, contradicting God himself. Now God is showing us where our safety and stability really came from. He is showing us they can be taken away.

Patriotism can be idolatry. Many conservatives worship America. They think it can never fall. The Roman Empire fell, and so did the British Empire. The Ottoman Empire fell, too. The various empires based in Babylon fell. The monuments of the pharaohs ended up buried in sand. We can fall, and we are falling. Your collection of AR-15’s won’t help you in the long run.

Many conservatives want nothing to do with humility, prayer, patience, or love. Many conservatives are just like the people they hate. Tattooed. Pierced. Proud. Fornicators without shame. Eager to shoot and kill. Some even worship ridiculous European deities and pretend to be Vikings. Many of us have rallied behind homosexuals like Tammy Bruce and Milo Yannopoulos. Many people think the battle is between right and left, but fundamentally, it’s between God’s family and Satan’s. Conservatism is a natural manifestation of closeness to God, but plenty of conservatives have nothing to do with God.

In short, a lot of people aren’t getting it. Not getting it is what causes plagues and floods.

The church should be standing up for righteousness, confession, repentance, Bible study, and prayer in tongues. We shouldn’t be compromising, because compromise is idolatry, and idolatry leads to destruction.

We shouldn’t be so afraid of other people. The only power they have to harm us is the power God gives them.

Folly is Set in Great Dignity, and the Rich Sit in Low Place

Today I offered a friend of mine some advice on getting rid of mice, and she did not want to hear it. She let me know I was not to bring the subject up any more.

Why did she respond this way? Because the thought of killing mice bothers her. That got me thinking about the way the authority structure works in God’s kingdom, so I thought I might write a blog post that could be helpful to other people.

Of course, we are supposed to kill mice, as well as other creatures. It’s one of the less-pleasant obligations of life. God is 100% behind killing other living things under certain circumstances. In fact, the ancient Jews were obligated to kill all sorts of animals every day. Veganism was not an option; it would have been an extremely sinful lifestyle under the Jewish law. Cain was cursed because he tried to sacrifice plants instead of killing animals. God has always required blood as payment for sin.

Jews were also obligated to kill certain types of people, although that’s a different subject. The law doesn’t say, “I suggest thou kill witches.” It says, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” God required the Hebrews to take cities and kill everyone in them, including babies.

The Jews suffer and die to this day because their king refused to slaughter every last Amalekite. He was nice, though. He was nonconfrontational. You have to give him that.

The King James Bible says, “Thou shalt not kill,” but in Hebrew, it prohibits murder, not killing. Murder is illegal killing, and not all killing is murder.

God put us in a world where we have to do harsh things sometimes. He did this so we would understand what it’s like to do harsh things. Our sins made it necessary for him to permit great suffering in the world, and they make it necessary for him to put people in hell, so we need to know how it feels to do harm when we do not want to.

To get back to animals, our grocery stores are full of their body parts, we wear their skins, we ride them, and we test drugs and other products on them. No sane person ever runs to the altar and begs forgiveness for eating a Slim Jim, not that I’m positive they contain meat, but you see what I mean. If it’s okay to eat a steak, it’s okay to step on a live mouse, which I have done.

A century or so ago, nearly no one had qualms about squishing bugs, trapping rats, or shooting pest animals. As people moved into cities and forgot what life was really all about, many human beings developed unhealthy concerns about the welfare of animals, to the point where, in their minds, animals became more important than people.

It’s sick and evil to set animals above people, and it leads to some crazy behavior, such as animal hoarding. It can drive people to deprive others of the consideration God expects them to give, in order to spend their time helping animals.

I know a lady who keeps unwanted animals in a barn, at the expense of a person who would much prefer not to support them. Knowing a tropical storm was coming, she chose to cut dangerous trees around the barn, but she left trees in place beside the home where her grandchildren lived. The barn was unscathed, but the home was destroyed by an enormous tree and had to be replaced. There is no way to justify that kind of perversity and self-righteousness. The animals should be sold, given away, or killed. It’s that simple. Given the chance, I would shoot them all in the head if it was the only way to spare the kids another episode of homelessness.

Here where I live, the Humane Society has a thrift store, and the Salvation Army has one right next to it. I went to donate things, and I found that the Humane Society’s store was huge and stocked with expensive items. The Salvation Army’s store was small and poorly stocked. That’s disgusting and wrong. It made me angry. God will judge the people who drove past a Christian organization that helps addicts and the homeless in order to donate money to help stray animals, most of which should be gassed humanely and cheaply.

There is a hierarchy in the universe. God is on top. Human beings who belong to him come next. Animals and demons are below us. If animals have too much priority in your life, you are also subordinate to demons and Satan.

I often tell a story about my sister and a dog I used to have. This dog was very submissive to almost everyone. He had no respect for my sister, however. She hated authority, especially when males were involved. She hated masculinity itself. She liked palling around with homosexual men. They were little nonthreatening men who were easily commanded, so they made her happy.

She could not submit to our parents and grandparents. She was extremely disrespectful to all of them, even when she was sponging off them and could be turned out into the street at their whims. Which happened more than once.

She had a habit of obtaining small dogs and spoiling them. She made them unbearable to other people. She didn’t housetrain them; they did their business wherever they happened to be, including on beds and couches. She bought them rib eye steak from Whole Foods. When she entered a room, the dogs got what they wanted, and everyone else in the room had to submit and suffer or deal with my sister’s tantrums and torrents of abuse. The dogs ruined floors and carpets.

The dogs had authority over her. She loved evil, she served Satan, so the authority structure was inverted in her life. Satan was at the top, then came demons, then came her dogs, then came her flesh, and then came the people she and her dogs made miserable.

My father, my mother, and I killed some of her dogs and turned one loose. I took one to be euthanized, and so did my mother. She took two, actually. She claimed a mean, untrained poodle got sick and didn’t make it, but in reality, he got an injection and blessed us all by expiring. One of her dogs bared its teeth at my dad at the front door of the house, so he stepped aside and invited it to leave, which it did.

My dog treated me with deference, but he considered himself dominant over my sister.

One day he entered a room where my sister was sitting. He climbed on the couch next to her. He put his feet up against her. He shoved her onto the floor. Then he stretched out in comfort. That’s what he thought of her. He knew she was a loser. He saw something people could not.

If you’re always looking after animals and putting their needs first, you have made yourself subordinate to them. If you’re subordinate to them, you also lack authority over your flesh and demons. You will be subordinate to evil people who don’t know God. You will always be pushed around.

When I see a spider or roach, I kill it. I don’t run for a paper so I can scoop it up, gently deposit it outside in a sunny spot, and pat myself on the back. The other day, I trapped a female coon in my yard. Coons kill livestock and pets, and they spread rabies. I stuck a pistol through the bars of the trap and shot it in the head, and then when it stopped jerking, I threw it over the fence to rot. I shoot squirrels, which damage my property, and throw them into the woods. I poison all sorts of bugs.

I have used glue traps for mice. Sometimes the mice were still alive when I got to them, so I stepped on them to kill them in a hurry. I didn’t like the suffering glue involved, but I thought glue traps were the best type, so I used them. I found that plastic snap traps were better. I use peanut butter to glue smelly anticoagulant rat bait to the traps. When I find a dead mouse, I flush him down the toilet, remove his dried blood from the floor, clean the trap, and start over.

Animals don’t push me around. I’m like Redd Foxx, who said he would run over Bambi if he got in his way. I am better than an animal. I am more important. I love animals, but I also know my place in the universe, and I want to keep it. I don’t want to offend God by discounting my importance and disregarding his right to establish hierarchy.

Under the right circumstances, I won’t hesitate to kill a pest animal that has legal protection. I don’t care how sacred it is to tree-huggers. Good luck catching me out here. Some laws are stupid.

I used to be on the bottom in life. Unpleasant people used to push me around. I had to work with them. I dated them. I tolerated things no one should tolerate. I couldn’t get free. It was humiliating.

When I started putting God first and praying in tongues every day, I started to get promotion. The Bible predicts this. It says promotion comes from God.

When I was away from God, I was putting God at the bottom, whether I realized it or not. When I put God at the bottom, I put Satan at the top. You worship God or Satan. There is no third choice. You may think you worship another God, or that you worship nothing, but if God is not your god, you are a worshiper of Satan.

Because I put God at the bottom, he was not there to lift me above Satan, demons, lower creatures, and rotten people. I was not part of God’s organization, so when I asked him for help, it was as if I worked for Apple and called Bill Gates for help. He was not interested. When you choose your god, you choose the one you go to for help.

Over the years, I have been exalted a step at a time. The people who used to make me miserable are gone. I don’t have a single one left in my life. I never hear from my sister, for example, and I will never tolerate involvement with her again. I would let her live in a refrigerator box before I would be involved with her and subject myself or my wife to abuse. I live in a Christian area. I don’t have to work for a godless boss. I don’t have to walk past gay parades and BLM terrorists to get groceries. I don’t have to wear a mask or hide in my house. I don’t have problem neighbors. I have no creditors.

If you’re giving animals inordinate consideration and honor, your life is in grave disorder. This is especially true if you set them above your spouse or children. It’s a terrible sin to make a person suffer so an animal can do better than it should. If you teach your kids to coddle roaches and mice, you also teach them people, many of whom are sons and daughters of God, are not as important as vermin. You teach your kids they, themselves, are not important or obligated to respect God’s hierarchy.

Mice and rats carry things like Lyme disease, hantavirus, leptospirosis, plague, salmonellosis, and rabies. Some people hoard dogs and cats. Well, they carry lots of diseases, including coronavirus (which rodents also carry). There are people who suffer from the delusion that spiders are our friends, so they never kill them. Nearly any kind of spider will bite, and they cause huge, pus-filled boils even if they’re not poisonous. Happened to me twice.

It may be unpleasant, doing your duty and putting animals beneath human beings, but it’s still your duty. Animals were not created in God’s image. Exalting an animal above a person is an insult to God. God isn’t going to pat you on the back in heaven and congratulate you on leaving your fortune to a cat shelter; he will be very displeased if you do something like that. For $350, you can move a starving Jew to Israel, permanently. You can give money to World Relief and send African girls and boys to school or buy them Bibles or vaccines. In view of facts like these, it will be hard to explain your cat resort in the throne room.

It’s extremely important to recognize and correct an authority inversion in your life. Authority inversions show that you are disrespecting God and that you live a life of abasement and defeat.

If you are on the bottom in life, something is wrong, and it’s not okay with God if you tolerate it. You are supposed to be on top. I’m not saying everyone is supposed to be rich and in charge of other people. I’m saying you shouldn’t be pushed around every day. Horrible people should not run your life. You should be able to cast out demons without much difficulty. Your prayers should get answers. You should receive healings. You should be serving God, and he should be exalting you.

What if you were in the army, and you were a major, and you decided to let privates tell you what to do because you wanted to be popular or you just were not a confrontational person? What would happen if a general showed up and saw you doing their laundry and cleaning their latrines? Would he be understanding? He would relieve you and have you charged with dereliction of duty. Someone else would get your job. When you’re appointed to a position of command, you are required to lead and make tough decisions. It’s not optional. We have to kill mice and rats. We have to put human beings above animals. We have to rule over demons. We don’t get to decide what we will and will not do.

This information can be very helpful to people who can’t figure out why they’re losers. If you can’t win, put God first. Get baptized with the Holy Spirit. Confess, confess, confess. Repent. Pray as much as you can. Ask for correction and treat it like the treasure it is. Become a warrior who defeats demons. Help other people. God will exalt you sooner or later. He won’t leave you on the bottom if you put him on top.

I was a loser, so I know what I’m talking about. Now I win, win, win. God gave me a wife who is a winner, too. She made mistakes, her life went badly, and she got back on the path. We do spiritual warfare together every day. We get revelation. She has visions which turn out to be true. I have dreams that guide me. We are one because we submit to the Holy Spirit as well as we can.

We don’t have to suffer in miserable workplaces where we are taught to fall on our faces before sexual perverts and entitlement junkies. We don’t live among hostile people who vex us with their trashy ways. God did all this for us. We used to lose, and we deserved it, but now we win, together, under God.

My wife is a real treasure. She has exceeded my hopes in every way. I’m so glad I didn’t marry a neurotic American woman with a bridezilla complex and misandry issues; they are very common. I’ve known lots of women, and I can honestly say the thought of being chained to any of them is repugnant now that I know what a real wife looks like. I thought some had potential, but now I know they were snares.

The productive marriages I am familiar with can be counted on the fingers of one hand, but I have seen dozens of scary marriages.

My wife and I are a team, together with God. He is helping us to improve, every day. We don’t have power struggles. I don’t have to worry about her having a fit because I didn’t recycle something or because I couldn’t care less about my carbon footprint. I don’t have to apologize for voting for Trump; she is with me all the way on that. She doesn’t scold and try to correct me like a typical American woman. She doesn’t have gay friends or bitter female friends I have to humor and accommodate. I have no mother-in-law trying to suck the joy out of my life.

Rhodah isn’t a dead weight or an adversary in my walk with God. Whenever I share a revelation with her, she chimes in and completes it with revelation of her own. She maintains her relationship with God because she wants to; I am not the driving force.

When I was a loser, I was not fit for a daughter of God, so I kept running into women who were losing, too. When I put God on top, he changed me so I would be an asset, not a liability. After that, he had an incentive to help me marry well, and look what happened.

I know she reads my blog. Good! She needs to know these things so she will be encouraged. We are one, permanently. Doesn’t matter if praising her bothers other people. She is my flesh, and they never will be. No other person will ever have the special position she has in my life. In comparison, even my best friend is an outsider. I will side with her against anyone but God.

I’ll give you an example of how authority works. A kitten showed up in my wife’s house. It seemed very nice. My wife took pity on it and gave it some food. It decided it loved my wife, because cats love everyone who feeds them. It would dart into the house when she opened the door, so she had to throw it out. It rubbed against her ankles. Did she decide she had to be the cat’s mother? No. She said, “I don’t want a cat.” Period.

She started giving the food through someone else so the cat would not associate it with her. I told her to make sure she didn’t touch the food, so the food would not smell like her.

We were concerned about the cat’s future, and it was also getting on our nerves, so we prayed for it. A couple of days later, the security guard where she lives took it home to his family. Problem solved. The cat didn’t make my wife a slave, because my wife is better than a cat, but the cat still got what it needed. It is no longer our headache.

There was nothing we could do for it in the natural. You can’t bring a cat from Africa to the US, and she didn’t want the cat anyway. Things worked out great.

One nice thing about Africa is that they know the difference between an animal and a person. Dog sweaters and boots will never be big sellers there.

When you put God on top, he puts other creatures beneath you. He defends you from manipulation.

I hope this material helps people. If you feel beaten down, and you can’t understand why you can’t get away from people who ruin life, you need to put God first so he can put you first. Don’t believe the garbage about God giving people “grace” to live contentedly as punching bags. That’s not what the word “grace” means. If you live a life of defeat, it’s because you LACK God’s grace. “Grace” means supernatural help, and God has repeatedly promised his children they will be the head and not the tail.

Proud people may read this and think, “Just you wait. You are lucky, so you don’t understand. Wait till it happens to you.”

It already did happen to me. Defeat was my lifestyle. God showed me the way out. You can have relief, but if you prefer to hold onto unprofitable ideas, you certainly may.

In Which Your Host Fails Yet Again to Heed Proverbs 26:4

From time to time, I have written things about Massad Ayoob’s really bad legal advice. He is a non-attorney and freelance writer who worked as a part-time cop in a town containing several times fewer people than a college basketball stadium. He has also worked as an expert witness from time to time, and many people consider him an authority on firearms tactics.

Mr. Ayoob is not a ballistician, gunsmith, engineer, physician, military veteran, or lawyer. He didn’t have gunfights with criminals when he was a cop; if he had, we would never have heard the end of it. Far as I can determine, his education is limited to a bachelor’s degree.

A number of people have given me hell for criticizing the Great Ayoob because he makes videos and writes articles in which he pretends to understand the law. He may be a true expert on protecting yourself with a gun, but he has no business talking about legal matters. He did an inept analysis of the Zimmerman case, and he has also coached people on the things they should say to the police after a shooting. Real attorneys coach them on what they should not say, which is…anything. Ayoob tells people to say nasty things about the deceased and claim innocence, and these are real stupid ideas.

An Internet commenter has accused Ayoob of propagating “Fuddlore” on the web. That is funny. I almost never type this, but LOL.

One thing that bugged me about this man’s uninformed, intractable defenders was that they often claimed he was a legal expert because he had testified in court cases as an expert witness. An expert witness is legally barred from testifying about the law. In a court, attorneys try to tell the judge what the law is (because often, he has no idea), and he makes all rulings of law. No witness gets to butt in. If Matlock himself were giving testimony in a case, and he tried to talk about the law, he would be interrupted and told to knock it off.

You don’t have to be a big brain to be an expert witness. If you go to sites listing the areas in which expert witnesses offer to testify, you will find they list things like marijuana cultivation. In South Florida, a portly local personality and famous fishing captain named Bouncer Smith has worked as an expert. He used to be the voice of the fishing hotline, which I called from time to time for tips on catching dolphin and sailfish. He got in trouble once for refusing to move his boat to help a man who was nearby, drowning. Hey, he had paying customers.

Imagine his expert testimony.

Plaintiff’s Counsel: Dr. Bouncer, let’s say it’s 10 a.m., mid-June, two to four-foot seas, a nice weedline but no birds working, nice color change, sunny, and you’re in 1200 feet of water off Haulover Beach with a heading of 172°. Finger mullet on a bead rig, or a staggered spread of Dolphin Jrs.?

Dr. Bouncer: That’s a trick question! No one uses a bead rig with finger mullet!

Defense Counsel: Bastard!

Would you hire Captain Bouncer to represent you in a divorce?

I looked up some things Ayoob allegedly said about his experience as a witness, and I found them pretty silly, not to mention impossible to believe.

Ayoob said he was a witness in a “court” case involving Christine Hansen, a disgruntled FBI agent, and other members of her class. He said, “I testified. The court listened.”

The obvious implications here are 1) there was a court case, 2) Ayoob testified in court, and 3) the court delivered an order implementing changes based on Ayoob’s remarks.

Today I learned that none of those things are true. There was no court. That’s the thread you pull to unravel the sweater.

Ayoob calls the case Christine Hansen et. al., v. Federal Bureau of Investigation. I used to try to look it up, and I couldn’t find it anywhere. I couldn’t understand why. You can find any federal case online, as long as an opinion was published. Today I found out there was no court, therefore no court case, therefore no Ayoob in-court testimony.

What actually happened, then? Hansen felt women were facing discrimination from the FBI, so she filed an EEOC complaint. Ayoob talked to the EEOC, which is the farthest thing from a court. The EEOC took Hansen’s side to some extent, and it supposedly made recommendations. The DOJ, which owns the FBI, had a special officer named Squire Padgett issue an internal opinion, and in that opinion, he agreed with the EEOC on a number of points, but not all. The DOJ made some changes based on the EEOC’s “recommendations.”

I use quotation marks because I have worked with the EEOC, and I don’t recall seeing them issue recommendations. They make findings and tell people they can sue. Maybe they do make recommendations. It has been a long time, and I have forgotten a lot of what I knew. Making recommendations would carry zero legal weight and add work (the civil servant’s kryptonite), so it would be pointless.

In certain types of employment cases, a plaintiff can’t run out and sue an employer right off the bat. Federal law requires the filing of an EEOC complaint, and after the EEOC makes its findings, it issues a right to sue letter. Then you go to federal court, and the actual case begins. If the EEOC takes too long to issue the letter, you can go to court without it.

The EEOC is kind of a joke. Forcing attorneys to work with it is almost a harassment tactic. They can’t stop lawsuits from going forward. All their investigations do is waste people’s time and money. Lawyers (plaintiffs’ lawyers, anyway) want to get into court and get their money. They are not interested in kissing and making up before the EEOC.

The EEOC has “investigators.” Unless the ones I know about are unusual, they don’t really do anything. I had an investigator call me, an attorney with a clear agenda, asking for facts. This made it unnecessary for this person to get out of a comfortable chair and do real work, and that was probably the goal.

I am amazed to see that Ayoob says he “testified.” I didn’t know the EEOC had hearings with witnesses, and I was an employment lawyer. Maybe I once knew and forgot. I don’t recall having a hearing in any of my cases. The web says they have examiners who function as administrative judges, so the EEOC is apparently like the National Labor Relations Board and the Florida Public Employee Relations Commission.

An administrative hearing is not court, so talking to the EEOC is not court testimony, and your words would presumably be inadmissible hearsay in a court anyway. I believe a court would expect you to show up to testify again. I can’t think of an applicable hearsay exception offhand. I don’t think Ayoob knows the definition of hearsay or how courts feel about it.

Thinking the EEOC is a court would be proof one doesn’t know much about the legal system.

Before my first visit to the EEOC, my dad told me what to expect. He let me know I was in for a laugh. When I arrived, I saw exactly what he described. Big, pleasant women padding around in houseshoes. The office was more like their apartment than a place of business. They had made it downright homey. It was like a slumber party at Oprah’s house.

Walking into a federal courtroom is a lot different. After you show the marshals you’re not armed, you go into a big, cold room where people’s lives are completely destroyed every day, and you wait with armed bailiffs and whoever else works there. You turn your cell phone off, and you check it and recheck it, because God forbid it should ring while Judge Thanos is talking. He may confiscate it and give it to a homeless shelter, and if he’s really nuts, you may get fined or held in contempt. There is no refrigerator with grandchildren’s drawings on it. There are no cookies. Forget about wearing houseshoes.

I can’t find the Hansen documents online. I could look them up somewhere with additional effort, but it would be a pain. What I know, I found in news articles.

The FBI has had problems with female agents, including their physical weakness and their unwillingness or inability to learn how to shoot a 10mm pistol. The FBI’s experts recommended the 10mm in the wake of the famous Miami shootout, which suggested their existing firearms weren’t too good. Female agents and near-men said it was too much for them, so, famously or infamously, the 10mm was cut down for girls and sissies, and the .40 S&W was created.

Anyway, Hansen and the gals complained about a number of things including transfers, assignments, and being weeded out through difficult-for-ladies firearms requirements. They probably complained about sexual harassment, too, because every big organization has a harassment problem.

Obviously, Ayoob couldn’t testify as an expert about everything, so it is extremely unlikely that he was asked about anything other than firearms. No one wants to know what Massad Ayoob thinks about punitive reassignments.

The DOJ’s man, Padgett, supposedly agreed with some or all of the EEOC’s recommendations. Hansen is quoted as saying she was not going to appeal the DOJ’s decision. It was good enough for her.

Did Ayoob persuade Padgett? Maybe, but maybe his input wasn’t needed. Government employers are not known for standing up to feminists. My best guess is that the DOJ planned to buckle from the word “go.” It was the Carter/Reagan era, and times were changing fast. The FBI may have been in the wrong on some issues, the government definitely didn’t want the limitless financial exposure of a trial, and the DOJ probably wanted to score PR points with the public.

If I went outside on a cloudy day and yelled “RAIN!!!”, and then it rained, it wouldn’t mean the clouds listened to me.

I don’t think it would.

The gals got some money, some FBI policies were changed, and the case never went to court. This is what is known as an out-of-court settlement, not a verdict.

Ayoob later made it look like he was very brave to testify, saying something about how he was told (by unnamed persons) his career would be over if he did. This, I do not believe. Maybe a bartender told him that. Maybe his wife told him. Maybe a bored federal prosecutor in a courthouse elevator said it as a prank. No professional would have said it with any seriousness.

No one cares what expert witnesses do. It is understood that they will show up and say whatever their clients want them to, to the greatest extent possible without having their pants, on the witness stand, actually burst into flames. No one ever leaves a courtroom and whispers, “That accountant is DEAD.”

It’s also unclear what repercussions Ayoob expected. Surely he didn’t expect a rendition to a CIA safe house stocked with rubber hoses and, maybe, a VCR and a shelf full of Mork and Mindy tapes.

Actually, that last part might not work on Ayoob, but it would definitely work on me. I would roll on my own mother to avoid hearing Robin Williams say “shazbat” again.

It has been suggested to me that Ayoob might have feared that law enforcement agencies and prosecutors would never hire him to testify again. The problem with that idea is that in criminal cases, he was a defense witness, and the government is not in the defense business. If he really testified in lots of criminal cases, he did so for defendants, against LEO’s and DA’s. If he testified in civil cases involving the government, he worked as a plaintiff’s witness, and the government is not in the business of suing itself.

Look, the government doesn’t need to pay self-taught magazine writers for expert testimony. They generally use people they already employ. People like Dr. Michael Baden and Dr. Martin Fackler. People like “Dr. Lak” in the OJ farce. They don’t have to pay these people insane expert witness fees; they’re already on salary. And they have lots of degrees.

If you’ve seen any criminal cases involving forensic experts, you’ve probably noticed the government’s witnesses were government employees. There must be exceptions, but the government probably never hired Ayoob, and I’m sure it wasn’t making his monthly nut. No DA ever said, “Send the pathologist from Johns Hopkins home! We found a guy who writes for Guns & Ammo!”

The government couldn’t retaliate by refusing to hire him again, because it never hired him to begin with, except to write speeding tickets in New Hampshire. It couldn’t tell lawyers not to hire him, either. First, it would be free advertisement for Ayoob. Second, lawyers would’t pay any attention to the FBI’s requests. Third, there would be ethical problems which would guarantee Ayoob more free advertising. “Hire the man who got 10 prosecutors disbarred!”

It makes no sense to say Ayoob was afraid of offending LEO’s and their pals. He has buddied around with that exact crowd his whole life. It’s strange, but he seems very popular with them even though he has tried to help free people, probably including guilty ones, they strove to imprison.

I don’t know how effective Ayoob was, but all over the US, really good expert witnesses make prosecutors and cops like like morons every day, they never turn up floating in canals or scattered around wood chippers, and they don’t get blackballed. No one cares.

Retaliating against an expert who testified in an EEOC hearing would be like hiring a hitman because you lost a nursing home shuffleboard tournament. “I’ll teach YOU to wax your pucks!!!”

It’s inconceivable to me that he was worried at all. If he was, he was deluded. I think he just wants people to think he’s a hero who took on the MAN and risked it all, when in reality, he was doing what thousands of expert witnesses do every day. Anyone who works in a town with 4 or 5 police officers, puts two bars on each side of his collar, and calls himself Captain Ayoob has to be eyed critically.

From now on, I’m Captain Steve, heading my farm’s private police force. I live alone with Marvin the parrot, so he’s my lieutenant. That makes the wife Officer Rhodah. I won’t tell her Marvin outranks her. I wonder if there is any way I could locate and buy Inspector Clouseau’s Silver Hornet.

Captain? What am I thinking? General. Generalissimo. Generalissimo Esteban.

You’re all errand boys sent by grocery clerks to collect bills.

The more I learn about this guy, the less impressed I am. His legal advice is crazy wrong. I used to think he was a useful source of information on defending myself, but now I question even that. I have read two of his books, and the information in them seemed basic, intuitive, and unproven. Anyone could write 300 pages of his best guesses and call it a treatise. There are zillions of real cops and veterans out there who have actually used firearms successfully, so why would I listen to a guy who has no real-world resume? A good Grand Theft Auto player probably knows more about the subject.

You don’t have to be John von Neumann to come up with good ideas for dealing with burglars.

Let me write a treatise right here, off the top of my head.

Don’t open the door to strangers. Get a camera system and identify everyone who comes to your house. If someone enters your house, lock yourself in a bedroom, call the police, and get your gun ready. If someone enters your yard, stay indoors, call the police, watch from a safe place, and get your gun ready. Do not go outside unless you like being bitten by dogs and shot full of .40 S&W.

Being a he-man sounds exciting, but the cops will do it for nothing, and you get to stay inside, alive, with your cocoa. If someone kills a burglar and gets charged with a crime, it won’t be you. You’ll be safe at home, watching him get the Chauvin treatment on TV. Never engage or even make your presence known unless you have no choice. If you can do it, run away and conceal yourself on another property until the cops arrive.

Use a rifle with a big magazine for home defense. If you use a pistol, you may shoot yourself, you’re likely to miss the burglar, and if you hit him, he may keep right on coming. A good rifle will shred his organs. If you’re really serious, get night vision and kill the lights.

Don’t use a shotgun. They hold too few rounds. If you use a shotgun anyway, use a semiauto. Pumps are unreliable, and they are slow for repeat shots.

Keep your cell phone charged all the time. Keep it on you. Keep shoes, a jacket, a flashlight, and ear protection beside your bed.

Use a pocket holster for concealed carry. Other holsters are very hard to draw from, and they can get you killed. A pocket holster is fast and safe, and you can put your hands in your pockets when confronted without letting anyone know you’re already holding your gun. Carry as much ammunition as you can stand to. No one ever walked away from a gunfight complaining about having too much ammo.

Get a Crimson trace pistol laser. They really work, and they require no brains to operate. They turn on automatically. Get a pistol with no manual safety, because you will forget to disengage a manual safety when you’re scared, and you will look like an idiot confidently pulling the trigger on a gun that won’t fire.

Keep a round in the chamber. You will never remember to rack the slide when you need to.

Learn to shoot well. A .22 short in the middle of the face can better than 10 9mm rounds in nonvital areas such as walls. Practice with whatever you choose to use.

Get bulletproof bedroom and closet doors with gun ports. Why not? Can’t hurt. Your walls won’t stop anything, so you might as well have something.

Carry a really big, really sharp knife. A machete would be good. A pointed sword is better. If you can’t hit the perp with your gun, you will need something else. The general rule with knife fights is that the long knife wins. This is why swords exist.

Buy a big, illegal laser pointer and the proper eye protection. You can blind your burglar from a good distance, and there will be no recoil or reloading to deal with.

Get three really big pit bulls or something similar. Before you shoot, turn them loose. Maybe you can prevent a gunfight, and they will be hell on destructive squirrels and coons.

If you’re the shooter, make someone else call the cops. Everything you say is admissible in court to put you away. You can deny anything someone else says, and it will also be hearsay, which may be excluded from evidence. Meanwhile, call your attorney. When your helper calls 911, they start recording while the phone is still ringing. Keep that in mind. Don’t say, “Remember the lies I told you to tell after I murdered this guy.” Actually, don’t use the advice in this paragraph. I’m not your attorney, and my legal advice may be wrong. See how I’m smarter than Massad Ayoob?

I just made all that stuff up, but it looks pretty good. Is it right? Am I an expert?

Should I write a book? Don’t think so.

Now that I seem to know what actually happened in the FBI case, I think I can rest.

When Leftists do the Math

I can’t resist posting this.

Florida has been catching hell ever since covid arrived in the US. Our wonderful governor refused to panic and turn us into prisoners. We ended up with a high infection number. It’s about like New York State’s. New York’s governor, the notorious ejectee Andrew Cuomo, who had a habit of fondling women without consent, put many thousands of infected people in old folks’ homes, causing a tremendous number of unnecessary deaths.

Florida’s population is bigger than New York’s, partly because New Yorkers move here to die. It’s not like Florida is a tiny state with a gigantic covid toll.

Cuomo got in trouble for molesting women, which is a very bad thing, but the leftist press didn’t care when his pandemic mistake caused the deaths of thousands of people who would otherwise have survived. That mistake was many orders of magnitude worse. Florida’s Governor DeSantis, on the other hand, has been continually slandered, excoriated, and belittled for a coronavirus outcome which is pretty similar to Cuomo’s and which did a much better job of preserving our liberty.

Now we have the Omicron variant, and it’s hitting New York State hard. You would think journalists would shut up about DeSantis, right? You’d expect them to say something about New York and other states which have very serious coronavirus problems.

No, you wouldn’t. They are paid liars now. Objectivity no longer exists. They are still hammering DeSantis, and to look at the news, you would barely know Cuomo existed.

Problem: Omicron is way worse in New York. It has already peaked in Florida. You can look at the graph for yourself. It will probably keep declining. The latest daily number is around 30,000, and the 7-day average is about 16,500. New York State’s latest daily number is about 87,000 (not a typo), and their average is about 36,000. New York State hasn’t peaked yet, either. It will probably get worse for at least a couple more days.

New-York-based journalists had a bigger problem with a one-man handemic than the pandemic.

I can’t be sure, because I only took around 8 semesters of calculus, but I believe 36,000 is bigger than 16,500. I’m not saying I’m smart enough to read news off a teleprompter or get a liberal arts degree, ride on my dad’s coattails, and run for governor, but I feel confident my conclusion is correct.

It literally makes no difference what DeSantis says or does or what happens in Florida. It could be raining money here, and leftists would still be crucifying him over useless mask rules and claiming falsely that he’s against vaccines. What purpose is there in looking at the news? Just imagine what leftists wish it were, and whatever you conjure up will be close what’s actually being published.

I always like to talk about Africa and Zambia when I write about coronavirus. Zambia’s omicron wave is drying up as quickly as it came, and it never compared to what happened in any large American state. South Africa, which used to be considered Omicron’s epicenter, is nearing the end of its wave almost as quickly as it got to the peak.

Omicron is infecting people on an unprecedented scale, and it’s still not producing many deaths. It’s milder than the other variants. It’s probably a huge blessing. It may “vaccinate” us against future strains. Saying this to leftists is like saying “ni” to fictional knights who crave shrubberies. It infuriates them.

Leftists are never happy. They think happiness is collusion in a nonexistent global white supremacist sexist conspiracy. They were utterly miserable all through 2020, they were only slightly less depressed and enraged this year, and now that coronavirus seems to be going away, they can’t stand that, either. If coronavirus goes away, they lose one of their big talking points, which is that everyone still needs to lock down and wear a face diaper.

I think the pandemic is ending. I think it will eventually start up again due to a new mutation, or we’ll get something even worse, but I believe omicron will put a giant dent in the rationales for masks, lockdowns, and shots.

As the numbers decline and the public gets more angry about continued infringements of its essential freedoms, leftists will start appearing on TV, trying to minimize the recovery and looking for ways to continue oppressive pandemic measures. They’ll keep pushing governments to pay people to stay home, because people who get government checks vote for socialism and the persecution of individuals who refuse to pretend homosexuality and gender confusion are normal and healthy.

If covid bounces back with a stronger variant, leftists will experience a rare sensation: joy. They’ll say they were proven right, just like they say a hot week in St. Louis proves the oceans are going to rise and swallow us.

In their hearts, leftists are conflicted. They hate life even more than usual during the pandemic, but they also love the power it has given them. It let them turn people into welfare-addicted loafers. It let them tell people what to do and where they could go. It gave them an opportunity to protest vaccinations and say vaccines were deadly, until Trump, the man who pushed vaccines into existence, left office. Then it gave them an opportunity to oppress the evil, stupid Trumpers who criticized vaccines, which were clearly safe and necessary.

Leftists have been more unhappy than anyone during the pandemic, and that unhappiness, I think, has made them happier than at any time in recent history.

I had a great 2020. I did what I pleased and rarely had to wear a mask. I had a great 2021; I got married and traveled with my beautiful wife. I have been happy, so I guess things haven’t been going very well for me by leftist standards.

I think the last time I wore a mask was in October. I had to fly. I see a few people in my local stores wearing them, but they’re outliers. Probably snowbirds.

I believe 2022 will be a great year for me, too. My only big problems are coronavirus and immigration. Coronavirus appears to be self-limiting through mutation, and the State Department will eventually let my wife in. It would feel weird to get a break from coronavirus. Even a few months of restored communal sanity would seem strange.

Every day without a mask or a gene-damaging mRNA shot is a victory. I don’t know how people in blue states can stand their lives. What must it be like to wear a sweaty, smelly, glasses-fogging mask 8 or 10 hours per day? What is it like to roll up your sleeve and take an untested shot you don’t want, because you’ll get fired if you don’t? I can’t relate, any more than I can relate to having to walk the streets of Baltimore or DC without being allowed to carry a pistol or a knife, or having to cower in San Francisco as organized gangs of violent morons loot stores I depend on.

They say global warming will make the oceans rise until huge areas of low-lying land disappear and everyone has to move to points of high ground. That has already happened to Christians and conservatives. The rights of human beings have disappeared below the water, and God has moved people like me to little oases that protrude from beneath the waves. I can go to the store with a loaded gun in my pocket and a sheath knife displayed openly. If I wanted to, I could celebrate my Southern heritage with a Confederate flag windshield sticker. I can use any pronouns I like. I hunt in my yard. When I feel like it, I take a high-powered rifle out back and shoot 5/8″ 5-shot groups at 100 yards, and my neighbors couldn’t care less.

I don’t have to recycle. I could put old car batteries in the dumpsters at the local collection center if I felt like it, and no one would care. I can give off all the carbon I want. I get a free permit every time I burn a couple of tons of dead trees in my yard, but if I didn’t, nothing would happen.

No one has taken over a local neighborhood and put angry lesbians with rifles in charge of security. No businesses have been burned. No gangs have surrounded me at restaurants and tried to force me to give black power salutes.

If I got in my car, I could drive into the swollen sea and visit the poor people who live on the bottom. I could go to Atlanta or Miami and get a taste of how the cursed are spending the apocalypse. I don’t plan to go to cities any more than I have to. If I didn’t have to travel to see my wife, I would have no desire to enter any major city ever again. Like Robert Redford said in Jeremiah Johnson, I’ve been to a town.

If God gives you favor during these accursed times, you live in an upper-class universe. You have Christian privilege. He separates you from the angry, depressed, carnal hordes and puts you down in a place of safety. People who reject God are living under self-imposed supernatural apartheid.

Anyway, here’s to Omicron. Hope it lives up to its potential.

In Heaven as it Was on Earth

I hope everyone had a great Christmas.

I am physically separated from my wife, but we spent a long time together using video chat. I have great friends, so we had presents to open and people to message and chat with. Even though we were both technically alone, we had a holiday of love and warmth, and we were encouraged by the knowledge that we would probably get together for good soon.

On Christmas Day, I had a wonderful revelation about Christmas.

I realize December 25 probably isn’t the date of Jesus’ birth, and I have heard all the overthought arguments against celebrating Christmas. Some of them aren’t true. For example, it isn’t true that we got Christmas from the pagan holiday Saturnalia. I don’t think Christmas trees honor the devil. There are plenty of real problems with our modern traditions without making up new ones.

Christmas is imperfect, but it’s still very important. We need to acknowledge Jesus as a nation and as families. The fact that most people think Christmas is about elves and going into debt doesn’t mean you and I can’t do it right.

When I was a kid, my life was miserable. My dad was a wife-beater who drank too much. My mother was a defeated pessimist who failed to introduce her kids to God. My sister was a jealous, sadistic sociopath who resented my existence. Our house was a depressing place of fear and dreary expectations. Nonetheless, I loved Christmas, because we used to visit my mother’s parents in Kentucky. They were wealthy, they had a big house, they always decorated, I got to see my aunts, uncles, and cousins, and I was their favorite grandchild. Kentucky was a place of escape for me. The impression it made in my heart was overly idealistic. It wasn’t hard for Kentucky to look like heaven after what I went through in Florida.

We always had lots of presents and two big dinners. We got to play with great toys. Sometimes there was snow, so we could ride a sled.

It was very comforting to feel I belonged to a loving family. Every branch of the family was somewhat dysfunctional, but at Christmastime, we all came together to form a much more pleasant-looking whole.

On Christmas Day, I started thinking about the passage where the Bible says that through the Holy Spirit, we cry out, “Abba, Father!”, to God. “Abba” is a Hebrew word, and it’s an affectionate term meaning “father.”

Sometimes preachers talk about it, saying it means “daddy.” Personally, I never called my dad that. It always seemed childish to me. It was okay for girls, but “mommy” and “daddy” sounded awful coming from boys. I called my parents “Mom” and “Dad.”

I could never call God “Daddy,” because it would be insincere and make me feel uncomfortable, but I can call him “Dad.” There is no one else here to answer to that now.

I decided to make a special effort to use “Dad” in my prayers. The Bible says Spirit-led Christians are literally the children of God, so we shouldn’t be reluctant to call him what he is.

I had tried this in the past with limited results, but doing it on Christmas day, I felt a real connection. I got a stronger revelation of who I am; what my identity is and what my rights and privileges are. It gave me a sensation of belonging.

It made me think of those Christmases in Kentucky. We gathered at the home of a wealthy, powerful male figure, and we enjoyed his generosity and the warm oasis he provided for us. I can’t speak for everyone else, but I felt that special connection only family members feel. If you’ve ever felt you could show up at your grandparents’ house or an uncle’s house uninvited and unannounced, use your own key to get in, raid the fridge, make long-distance calls from the phone, and move into the guest room, you know what I mean. I felt we were more than separate individuals. We were woven together so none of us had to face the world with only our own strength.

People who say they have seen heaven tell us there are countless radiant beings around the throne of God, inside walls and gates of pearls and precious stones, looking at their father and praising and thanking him with love pouring from everyone, in every direction.

This Christmas, in my heart, I realized what we experienced in Kentucky was a picture of what residents of heaven enjoy every day. It made me feel warm and safe. I was in my big house all by myself, my grandparents were dead, my aunts and cousins generally were no longer interested in relationships with me, my wife was nearly 8,000 miles away, but I had the same basic feeling I used to get in my grandparent’s family room as the kids tore wrapping paper off presents.

Now that I think about it, my house, more than any of my aunts’ or male cousin’s houses, is like my grandfather’s house. I have no kids, but I have brothers and sisters my father in heaven gave me, and I have two godchildren and a bunch of other kids who care about me. They are always welcome to visit. They are safe here, to relax and enjoy each other’s company.

When I was young, I had the feeling I was my grandfather’s son. My dad had this feeling, too, but he would never have said it. He knew his bad behavior had made it impossible for me to look up to him the way I looked up to my grandfather, and when he got older, he developed the habit of saying “your father” when he really meant my mom’s dad.

In my heart, I felt my dad was a problem, not an asset. He was just someone I had to manage and humor in order to avoid problems. My grandfather was different. I was proud to be his grandson. Everywhere we went, people gathered around us to talk to him. Men wanted his counsel and his help. Women wished they were married to him. With my dad, it was different. When I walked around our neighborhood, I knew everyone there had seen police cars outside our house, and maybe they had seen him half-dressed, taunting the police because they knew he couldn’t be arrested for public drunkenness or disturbing the peace as long as he didn’t leave his doorway. I knew the other dads bought their wives and children more things than my dad bought for us, and no one was afraid when those men entered a room. My dad was not very violent with me, but because of the way he had treated my mother in front of me, I couldn’t help being scared of him.

My dad became a loving, doting, Christian father during the last years of his life, but things were different when I was young.

My grandfather didn’t have any boys. He had 4 girls, and he made considerable effort to get the same things from them he would have gotten from sons. He tried to interest two of them in the outdoors, which didn’t work. He sent my mother to law school, where she promptly selected a fiance, got married, and quit. His first male grandchild was older than I was, but my mother was his favorite daughter, so the first male didn’t get the bond I got. I was the one. The next male that arrived was a terror the adults fantasized about slapping, so among the first 4 children, I looked pretty good, and my position was safe.

Now that I’m an adult, I feel I am more of an heir to my grandfather than the others. I didn’t inherit any more wealth than they did, but my place among the people close to me is more like his.

My life is largely shaped by my experiences with him. The pleasure I got from being with him shaped my desires. Like him, I love the country. I live on a farm. He had cattle; I have cattle, although the ones on my farm belong to a tenant. I have tractors because he used to set me on the fender of a Massey-Ferguson and let me ride while he raked and mowed. He used to put me in the driver’s seat and let me drive while he shouted instructions. I love guns because he and I shot and hunted together, and like him, I have a gun room in my house.

I think of myself as someone who turned out barren, but I am more of a patriarch than my 4 male cousins, all of whom had kids. Like my grandfather, I participate in other people’s upkeep. He let my divorced aunt live on one of his farms rent-free for years. He bought cars for his daughter. He paid my sister’s high school tuition even though my dad was wealthy. He gave my mother money to invest. One of his sons-in-law was a hateful, black-hearted drunk who was very hard to like, but my grandfather invested a lot of money trying to keep his car dealership open. He gave his grandchildren calves and paid them the proceeds when they were auctioned. When I was a kid, sometimes he would slip me a fifty when no one was looking. He loved doing things like that. He never expected me to do anything for him.

When I got married, it never occurred to me that my wife should work. I would have been ashamed to let her do that. She doesn’t pay for anything. Yesterday, a cousin who still talks to me said that was remarkable. I was surprised. I had always assumed people would look down on me if I let Rhodah look after herself in Zambia.

When I call her every day, I love hearing her tell me she has spent her day relaxing. That’s exactly what I want to hear. She should shop, cook nice food, read the Bible, pray, minister to others, drive around to see people, and watch good teaching. She should enjoy the home she lives in by herself. The less work she does, the better I like it. I don’t think my male cousins have that attitude. Two are divorced, and I believe the wives of the other two work. The cousin who was surprised I supported my wife is divorced, and her husband abandoned her son. I have another female cousin who seems to have done better. Her first husband was man of good intentions, and I hear complimentary things about the man she married after he died.

Sometimes when I ask my wife what she has been doing all day, she grins and says, “Sitting!” I always tell her I hope she didn’t overexert herself.

I think it’s okay to say I do things for my wife. Jesus cautioned us against telling others about our charitable deeds, but supporting your wife isn’t alms. It’s the fulfillment of an obligation. Bragging about doing things for your wife is like bragging that you brush your teeth. No one should be impressed.

When my mother and father got married, my grandfather bought them a new DeSoto. It was extremely ugly. It was grey with an orange roof. He paid to have the paint improved. He put a red roof on it! At least he tried. Of course, he paid for the wedding, including my dad’s clothes. He rarely drank, but he had a few drinks at the wedding, and before my parents drove off, he took all the money in his pockets, which would have been a lot, and he made them take it for their honeymoon.

That’s the kind of person I want to be.

Maybe God gave me my grandfather and made me a little like him so I would understand what it felt like to be the patriarch. To be a patriarch is to be like God. It’s a very good thing to provide abundance, safety, and shelter. It’s good to overcome the selfishness of my youth so it can’t disgrace me in my old age.

When we are together in heaven, it won’t be like being in church. When I used to go to church, I liked the people around me, but the bonds weren’t that strong. Many of them were hypocrites who didn’t really belong to God’s family. Most of them didn’t know me. When I stood among them during services, it was not much different from standing among total strangers. In heaven, we will feel a family bond like the one I felt in my grandparents’ house as we stuffed ourselves and opened presents. It will be a family reunion, very literally.

Sometimes I have been concerned, and occasionally resentful, about the demands people have made on me. It has annoyed me to hear new requests from people who weren’t making much effort to fix their lives. I believe that feeling is evil, and I try not to cling to that mindset. I always tell Rhodah it’s much better to be the one who gives than the one who takes, because if people are coming to you for help, it means you have, and they don’t. You are more blessed than they are. Rhodah feels the same way.

I can see why leftists, who hate the principles of God’s kingdom, hate Christmas and work so hard to erase it from the public’s culture. Their father is Satan, and Satan doesn’t want us to know we can be a family. He doesn’t want us to love patriarchy, because God is a father, and men who worship God correctly are patriarchs. He doesn’t want us to see the parallel between Christmas togetherness and the unity and love we will one day feel, assembled around the throne Satan will never again see.

Satan’s children want us to be a family, too; the fear-driven, self-centered, ruthless children of the global government and the Internet. He wants to hide the breast and give us a pacifier dipped in poison.

If my revelation from God helps you, then let it be my Christmas present to you. You have 364 days to prepare to receive the benefit.