Cut Big Wood for Small Money

Continuing the practice of blogging about inconsequential matters, I am about to divulge a couple of helpful tool-related things.

First, it looks like the lives of old car batteries all over the world may be extended in the future. Someone somewhere has invented a device that takes worn-out batteries and makes them usable again. It’s not a gimmick. It works.

I have done nearly nothing since the pandemic started, and I am only now coming out of my catatonia. I am trying to fix things I shouldn’t have allowed to have problems in the first place. I let the batteries in my truck, farm tractor, motorcycle, and garden tractor run down, and I had to do something.

The motorcycle and farm tractor responded to ordinary charging. The garden tractor did not. Putting a charger on it for a day would get it to the point where it started, but if I stopped the engine, I couldn’t start it again.

I got myself a NOCO Genius. This is a strange device that will charge various types of batteries and repair certain batteries that resist charging due to abuse. It’s about the size of a tender you would use on a car in storage. It has two leads with clamps. It will charge any kind of 12-volt battery, it will also charge 6-volt batteries, and it will often successfully repair 12-volt batteries.

The Genius did not work on my friend Mike’s AGM motorcycle battery. He had forgotten to attach the tender’s leads, and the battery had gone dead. We tried the Genius but got nowhere.

The Genius revived my garden tractor’s battery. I had to charge it conventionally in order to get the Genius to realize it was there, and after that, the Genius took over. The repair cycle lasted 4 hours, and after that, the tractor started repeatedly. Will it last? Not sure yet.

The Genius also worked on my truck’s batteries, although, to be honest, I didn’t try the conventional charger, so it might have worked, too. I didn’t feel like wasting my time. I gave the batteries a repair cycle, and then I left a conventional charger on them overnight. No problems yet.

Here’s what I wonder: should I use the Genius prophylactically? All of my batteries are getting old. Maybe I should give them a repair cycle once every few months, sort of like shipping Keith Richards to that clinic in Switzerland where he gets an annual total blood transfusion. I should do some research. If I can get 8 years out of a battery instead of 4, why not do it?

Here’s the other tip: whenever you install a light bulb with a threaded base, you should grease the threads lightly with Vaseline.

I have ceiling fans, and a couple are pretty cheap. Each of the cheap ones has 4 deep shades attached to it, and each shade contains one bulb. The bulbs on one started fizzling, and I decided to take a bulb out so I could identify it and replace it. When I started turning it, it turned and turned. The socket came loose from the shade, with the bulb stuck inside it.

I eventually managed to get the bulb out, but that left me with a lamp which was not in great shape. I didn’t know whether the wires had been broken by the twisting, and the socket flopped around loose in the shade. I was concerned that even if the wires worked, I would never be able to install another bulb.

Mike and I fixed the lamp. He removed the lamp unit from the fan, and I repaired it. I learned that the sockets in the fan were held in by right-hand threads, which is very stupid, because the bulbs also had right-hand threads. When I put torque on a bulb to remove it, I also put torque on the threads that held the socket in the shade. In a situation like this, when the bulb doesn’t want to come loose, you can end up unscrewing the socket instead, which is what I did.

Obviously, the shade should be attached to the fan with a left-hand thread. When installing bulbs, you don’t put enough clockwise torque on the socket to loosen a left-hand thread attaching the shade to the fan, but when you try to loosen a stubborn bulb, you may apply more than enough torque to remove the socket.

I Googled around, and I learned there are special greases for light bulb bases. They prevent bulbs from seizing in their sockets. I also learned Vaseline works just as well, and most American houses already contain Vaseline. From now on, I plan to use it.

I have some LED bulbs on the way from Amazon. Home Depot could not match the price.

Taking a fan lamp shade off the fan and reinstalling the socket is not fun at all, so my advice is to do anything you can to avoid loosening the socket. When I reinstalled the socket, I tightened it pretty good, and on one of our trips, my wife made me take a jar of Vaseline for dry skin, so I shouldn’t have to reinstall any more sockets. Assuming I can get the bulbs out of the other cheap fan when they fail.

I still have dry skin, and I’m not sure where the Vaseline is. Don’t tell the wife.

I might as well toss out one more tip. I learned there are Chinese companies making credible clones of high-end professional-grade Stihl chainsaws. Pro Stihl saws are great tools. You can’t get anything like them at Home Depot or Tractor Supply. A pro saw will make short work of things a homeowner saw will take a long time to cut.

No, I am not excited about buying more Chinese stuff, and it would be nice to support companies that invent things instead of imitators, but you need to hear me out.

1. I would never buy a $1300 Stihl chainsaw (or any other kind of Stihl chainsaw), so suggesting I go with the real thing is just plain dumb. It will never happen. Yes, I could get a used one, but it would take a long time to find it, and God only knows what would be wrong with it. Since I would not buy a real Stihl, I am not costing Stihl money by going Chinese. In fact, I would be making them money, because I would probably replace a few of the Chinese parts with OEM.

2. My biggest homeowner-grade saw is a 20″ Echo with a 59cc motor. It’s very nice, but I get some big, nasty downed trees here, so it can be quite slow. The Stihl clone would have 92 cc’s and a 28″ bar, and they scream through big logs. A larger saw would be a big help.

3. The patents on the original Stihl saws have expired, so I wouldn’t be supporting IP theft. If you want, you can go out tomorrow and start an American company making Stihl clones, and Stihl won’t be able to stop you. Expiration is a patent’s most important function, because the purpose of a patent is to get new inventions into the public domain. Using other people’s unprotected ideas is not immoral or illegal.

For about $360, you can get yourself a monster Stihl-like saw that will do a phenomenal job by homeowner or farmer standards, and all the parts are replaceable and easily sourced, so if you have a problem, you will be able to fix it. In fact, as noted above, you can replace iffy parts with Stihl parts.

You can spend more and get a Chinese saw with upgraded non-Chinese parts if you’re really worried about China quality.

You can also buy a parts kit and assemble your saw yourself, learning a lot in the process and saving maybe $80. If you build the saw, which supposedly takes less than a day, you will presumably develop the ability to repair it if it breaks, and that should calm your Chinese-warranty concerns.

The two Chinese companies I know of are Farmertec and Neo-Tec. Farmertec’s Stihl clones are called Holzfforma saws. I guess some Chinese guy thought that sounded German. People who have used both saws say neither is better than the other. Each one has pros and cons. Both are a whole lot better than Home Depot saws.

In some Youtube videos, the Chinese saws cut slower than Stihls, but a guy who did the intelligent thing and did tests using the same bars and chains found no significant difference. Testing using two different chains is ridiculous. Chains get dull fast, and when they do, cutting slows down.

I may build a saw. It sounds like fun, and given the problems my mid-grade saws have given me, I would like to know more about fixing saws. It would be great to have a saw that would cut a big oak log without me having to walk around and cut from both sides.

A Stihl would last me 50 years, because I’m not a pro. What if a Farmertec only lasted a quarter as long? Gee, that would be awful. I would still be dead long before the Stihl became cost-effective.

As long as I’m talking about chainsaws, I should let you know I have learned that premixed gas–the stuff that sells for $40 per gallon and promises no carb clogs–isn’t completely reliable. Sometimes it clogs saws. I thought I’d toss this information out for people who are trying to fix dead saws and who are convinced the gas isn’t the problem. Sometimes it is.

More inconsequential matters will be discussed here as they present themselves.

Illness or Nature’s Vaccine?

Bad news. My modified squirrel trap has not attracted any visitors.

Fed up with the continued destruction of my property by worthless rodents, I took a badly-designed trap and made some improvements. It has been in action for about 18 hours, and nothing has happened. I placed an order for a Squirrelinator, which is a factory-made trap dedicated to, well, you can guess. It should be here in the middle of next week.

I took a chunk of neurotoxic rat bait, smeared it with peanut butter, and put it in my chicken house, which the squirrels have turned into a resort. Later today, I’ll see if they’ve eaten it. I’m going to do whatever has to be done until I have a decent body count.

I have excellent rat baits made with an anticoagulant, but I was afraid to put them in the chicken house because I didn’t want hawks and owls to eat poisoned rodents and die. I’m reading up on it today. It looks like the Audubon Society recommends the anticoagulant as safe for predators, so maybe I should start using it.

In other news, I see another prediction of mine has come true. It’s not a big surprise, because I try not to predict anything that isn’t obvious. The Omicron variant has been found all over the place. Hawaii, New York, California, Colorado, Minnesota…it’s doing the blue state tour.

When we first heard about Omicron, which my wife inadvertently dubbed “the Unicorn Variant,” journalists and even scientists voiced “concern” that it “might” pop up in new places. I’m no epidemiologist, but I said that if you find one case, there are dozens of others you don’t know about. I said Omicron was already everywhere except places like Australia and New Zealand, which have sick, authoritarian rules. I was wrong about Australia, however. Omicron has been found there.

Australia is actually an Omicron hotspot, with more identified cases than America. Maybe arresting people and putting them in concentration camps isn’t working as well as they expected.

Of all the people on Earth, you would think Australians would be reluctant to put people in prison. You would think they had had their fill already.

The usual suspects also said they were worried the vaccines wouldn’t work well against Omicron. I wasn’t worried about that, because I already knew they wouldn’t. They don’t work well against any variant! Why would Omicron be different? The Dutch found 14 infected airline passengers, and today they’re telling us all 14 were vaccinated. If this surprises you, you should go in for cognitive tests and be very careful climbing airplane stairs.

A failure rate of 100% in 14 patients seems pretty bad to me, but then I am no doctor. I am no statistician, but it sure seems like the results could not have been worse. I can’t help feeling there just might be some predictive weight to this data.

I keep hoping Omicron will turn out to be a blessing. So far, there are no news reports suggesting the symptoms are anything but mild, but scientists say Omicron is extremely contagious compared to Delta. Put those things together, and Omicron might be the inoculation man couldn’t create. It might displace the nastier variants and give us resistance to them which would provide either immunity or safety from severe symptoms. It could turn coronavirus into the new common cold. Ineradicable, but not dangerous.

It may turn out to be the Omicron VACCINE.

Or it may kill a whole bunch of us.

We’ll know by the end of the month. That’s my new prediction, and like the others, it’s obvious. Omicron will hit thousands of people this month, if it hasn’t already, and it will have enough time to start producing deaths. If Omicron goes viral metaphorically as well as literally, and waves of deaths don’t materialize, sell your stock in mask manufacturers.

Now if we could just pay the Chinese to create a killer bug that only hits building contractors and tort lawyers.

And CCP members.

One thing is certain: if Omicron saves the world, the CCP will start pressuring smaller countries to call it the Xi Variant.

My understanding is that new diseases tend to become less severe as they mutate. Hope that’s correct. Didn’t pan out with smallpox, though.

If I get sick, my first move will be to blow my nose on my squirrel baits.

It’s amazing how dumb our statist overlords are. Why would anyone think it was smart to enact travel bans AFTER a new virus hit several countries? How badly did you have to do in elementary school math to think that was intelligent? We never find covid variants before they go around the world. By the time they’re detected, they’ve been carried all over the globe. Travel bans just add economic distress and feelings of powerlessness to our problems.

Speaking of feelings of powerlessness, I have realized they may be the worst consequences of covid. It has taught us man is weak and can’t fix his own disasters. It has taught us our governments have way more ability to control us than we had allowed ourselves to think. It has turned many of us into shuffling shut-ins who lack confidence in their ability to change their lives for the better.

It’s very important for people to think they can affect their circumstances. Take that away, and they develop what psychologists call “learned helplessness.” This is one of the reasons welfare states get worse, not better. People start sucking up government money, and they become convinced they need it. They believe going to school and applying for jobs won’t change their lives much.

When you pay someone so much for doing nothing he can’t significantly improve his lifestyle by going to work, he is likely to choose to stay home and make excuses. That’s exactly what’s happening right now. It’s turning America into a much more socialist state, and socialism is authoritarianism. Authoritarianism brings dystopia.

I believe feelings of powerlessness also breed hatred and resentment. If you’re helpless and someone else is responsible for your happiness, you will feel entitled to make that person miserable when things don’t go your way. This is one explanation for the intense anti-white racism in America. Blacks and Hispanics are taught that whites, Asians, and Jews cause them to live in squalor and crime through racism, but paradoxically, many think the people who caused their problem are the saviors who can fix it. They believe the rest of us have special powers we’re not using.

It’s crazy, believing a certain class of people is evil and responsible for your problems, yet running to them over and over again, expecting them to make things right at their own expense.

Why would you expect a malicious enemy to save you?

The rest of us didn’t cause the problems, we’re not malicious, we are not good enough to devote our lives to making things better for you, and even if we were, we couldn’t do it. You have to do some things for yourself.

Anyway, I’m convinced the pandemic has made things worse.

Maybe Omicron will save us from the pandemic. The apocalypse is a delivery process with labor pains, and labor pains come and go. Maybe we’ll get a few years of rest. I wonder. I tend to doubt it, because I have reason to think the rapture is imminent.

One nice thing about proof the variant has spread is that it should convince the nations of the world to drop recently-imposed travel bans. Rhodah and I were planning to visit the Netherlands, and they have an Omicron ban. Maybe they’ll show some common sense and relent.

As for the rapture, I had a disturbing dream last night.

For years, I’ve had dreams about airports. There are things about airports I don’t like. When you’re in an airport, you’re not where you want to be. You want to be somewhere else, which is why you went to the airport. Airports, then, are inherently representative of not having arrived.

Also, airports are dirty, the food is bad and overpriced, and while you’re in airports, you are subjected to degrading control through unreasonable rules.

At least the Hare Krishnas moved out.

Last night, I dreamed I was in the imaginary airport again. My second-oldest friend had been there, but he had left. His family was still there. He had gotten on an elevator to turn himself in.

In the dream, Nazis were in power. My friend and his family are Orthodox Jews. The Nazis were allowing people to turn themselves in. In the dream, you could get on an elevator, and as soon as you got to the bottom, you would be in Auschwitz. You would go through the death camp process and be killed and incinerated. By the time you turned yourself in, you were doomed. There was no way to change your mind and go home, and no one could rescue you.

I couldn’t believe what my friend had done. Why did he trust the Nazis? Even though it wasn’t possible, I tried to help. I saw another Jew, and I ran up to him and tried to tell him what had happened. I wanted to know if he had any idea what to do. He thought I was Jewish and that I was asking him to help me.

Nothing was done. It was already over when I asked for help. I knew my friend was somewhere down below, beyond help, regretting his choice.

I now think the airport I dream about represents the earth. You spend time here on your way to heaven or hell. You get routed one way or the other depending on what kind of ticket you chose. This place isn’t your permanent home.

I don’t know if my friend represented himself, someone else, or a class of people.

The Nazis were the state-worshipers and man-worshipers of the Earth. The beast’s troops. The vaccine-lovers and distancing freaks. People who are willing to give up all their rights because they’re terrified of death. They say, “Trust us, and everything will be fine.”

If the airport represents the earth, then there must be departing flights. You can either go up or down. That seems to be a very Jewish idea. Moving to Israel is considered a move upward, and people who leave are called “yardim,” meaning they descend. The name of the Jordan River comes from the same root.

That’s it for today. Two containers of maple syrup have arrived, and I need to test them. I might skip dinner food and make waffles.

Taking Ecclesiastes 10:18 to Heart

I learned something useful today. Putting a small amount of ginger in beef jerky really improves it.

I made another batch yesterday, and while I was mixing the marinade, I thought about teriyaki. My best guess is that teriyaki jerky requires replacing all of the Worcestershire sauce with soy sauce, but for some reason, I stuck with half and half, and I added about a quarter of a teaspoon of ground ginger. I didn’t have fresh ginger.

It made a big difference. I wouldn’t say it tastes gingery. It just has more zing to it. I think powdered ginger will actually work better than fresh, because it has a sharper flavor.

So that was nice.

I grabbed the wrong cut of meat by mistake. I wanted eye round, and I think I bought bottom round. Anyway, today, the surface of the jerky has oil on it. It’s not congealed fat. Just oil. They say you should use beef with as little fat as possible. This cut seems to have more fat than eye round. The danger of using fatty meat is that the fat will go rancid. Will that happen when the meat is still lean but slightly fattier than eye round? I don’t know, but it tastes better. I’ll keep an eye on it, and if it doesn’t go bad, maybe I’ll switch to this cut permanently.

I also got new gutters installed. This house had only one roof gutter when I moved here, and it was between the roof and the patio enclosure. There was no guttering over the garage, so big, fat raindrops fell directly on the driveway. They were starting to wear it away, and I couldn’t leave the doors open when it rained, because so much water splattered into the garage. I had them run guttering over both doors. Feeling smug about that.

There was also an issue over the front porch. The roof was designed in such a way that a huge amount of water was directed onto the porch roof when it rained. It caused some rot, and I had to spend a grand on repairs. Now there is some hope the new guttering will direct the rain elsewhere.

The strangest part of the roof design was the lack of guttering on the workshop roof. The rain fell straight onto the grass, in front of a concrete porch. The rain destroyed a strip of grass beside the concrete and washed out a lot of the dirt. I could not grow anything in front of the porch. Rain also threw dirt all over the concrete. Now I have a gutter that runs the length of the building, and I may go crazy and plant something in the ugly rut where the rain used to fall.

I don’t know what’s happening in the world, and that suits me very well. I have plenty of jobs to keep me busy. I don’t need to read fake news to kill time as well as my digestion. The election will have an outcome whether I read about it or not, and if the rapture comes, it won’t matter. It shouldn’t matter, regardless, because God looks after me very well.

It has occurred to me that readers may be confused because I say I feel like the rapture is upon us, but I also talk about planning for shortages, civil war, and so on. I’m writing about different possible futures. One involves me being here while leftists torch the country and force sane people to dig in and defend, and the other involves me being somewhere above, gleefully oblivious to everything that happens here. I keep feeling powerful indications that I won’t be here, but I have been wrong before.

Today I prayed God would see to it I never found myself in a situation in which I would truly need to use a firearm. I have asked for that before. I don’t want to be pulled down into the mire with the pigs. I don’t think Christians were put here to shoot people. I think when you find yourself in a situation like that, it means something has gone wrong in your relationship with God.

The ammunition situation has gotten even worse. I set up alerts so a search site would tell me when certain types of ammunition were available. This morning I got an alert, and when I checked before 8:30 a.m., the site was sold out. People are hovering by their computers, snapping ammunition up as soon as it appears. Either that, or George Soros has a bot doing it to keep patriots from getting cartridges. Of course, people have been storing up ammunition since the Obama years, so Soros and Bloomberg could bankrupt themselves and still fail to accomplish their goal.

I don’t really think billionaires are buying ammunition to cause problems, but it would make a great conspiracy theory.

I wonder what life in blue America is like. Hell, I suppose. Terrorism, lack, and irrational fear surrounding a mild disease. My cousin near Chicago still can’t buy disinfectant wipes, but they’re slashing them to $2.98 per can at my local Walmart, just to get rid of them. My cousin near Atlanta says they finally have meat in stores, although restaurants can’t get what they want because they’re last in line. My Illinois cousin is visiting my aunt in Kentucky, and she can’t get wipes there, either. Of course, Kentucky isn’t all that red. Not down deep, regardless of whom they voted for. They love government handouts too much.

There are two realities, and I’m very satisfied with mine. I have zero interest in experiencing or even witnessing the false, unnecessary reality of leftists.

If you think about it, the two-reality solution continues after death. It might as well start now.

I Have a Panic HOUSE

Today I am having my roof fixed. I’m paying $1000 for something I could probably do myself, but I am not interested in rolling off the roof and becoming a permanent yard ornament. I’m also not excited about having my ceiling fall because I didn’t know how to do roofing correctly.

I wanted to put blinds in my former dining room before the roofers showed up. Why? Because it’s a workshop/gun room now. I have a lot of ammunition in that room, and anyone looking into a window would know what it was. These days, ammunition is like gold. You can buy it, but if it’s a popular caliber, you’re likely to shell out three times what it cost last year.

Roofing companies are a top resource for released prison inmates. If you can’t get a job anywhere else, a roofer will probably take a chance on you. Good information to have, if you’re a homeowner or, perhaps more importantly, a homeowner’s wife or daughter. The thought of an electrician or plumber seeing my stuff doesn’t concern me all that much. Roofers are different.

Sadly, I signed a contract before buying blinds, and I didn’t think I had time to get them installed before the roofers showed up, so I didn’t do anything.

Today the roofers showed up without warning, so moving my ammunition out of sight, one container at a time, was not an option. Someone was looking out for me, however, because I had my ammunition loaded on a wheeled shelf unit. I rolled it into a hallway, and I was all set.

I should have bought these shelves a lot sooner. I cheaped out at first. I bought plastic shelves from Home Depot. I wrote about this a couple of days ago. They run $40 each, and when you overload them, they bend. Mine bent. The shelves I have now are fancy chromed Seville Classics jobs from Amazon. I have two units. One is mostly dedicated to ammunition. The other is for reloading components and other items. I have hundreds of pounds on the first one, and it’s not sagging at all. Wish I could say the same of myself.

I moved one of my plastic shelves to the laundry room, where it has become my paranoia storage area.

I went to Walmart yesterday for dishwashing powder and salt, and I bought a big, heavy bag of jasmine rice. I also picked up 4 pounds of great northern beans, canned salmon, two large jars of Skippy, and 6 pounds of pasta. This is a lot of food. One person could probably go a month on it. I also have 6 gallon cans of Stanislaus pizza sauce.

You would think a long-term food supply would take up a lot of room and cost a lot of money, but you would be wrong. My shelf unit is maybe 25% full. My total bill at Walmart was around $80, and I bought a lot of things unrelated to preparation.

I plan to add more rice and maybe some different beans. I have 48 cans of tuna on the way. I want to dry apples. When you’re from Appalachia, not having dried apples is uncivilized. Ordinarily, drying apples is a pain because of bugs, but I have a screened-in pool, so no flies.

I checked into generators. Not a great option, unfortunately. I would have to spend close to $20,000 to get a whole-house rig that would cost me $5 per hour to run. That’s about $3600 per month for electricity, assuming diesel would even be available, and the price would go way up in a crisis. Unless you have your own natural gas well or hydroelectric plant, I think you can pretty well expect to do without power in a hard core prepper scenario. Maybe you can run your laptop off solar panels.

I wonder if people are buying manual pumps for their wells.

There is zero fresh water near me, unless you count swampy ponds.

I suppose I’ll have to hope we still have power during the civil war.

The Internet says my power company uses a mix of coal, uranium, “biomass,” and natural gas. What is “biomass”? Chicken manure, maybe? Is there anything chicken manure can’t do?

Let’s see. Coal comes from the South, so that may still be available after the North turns on us. Natural gas comes from the South. I would guess that biomass comes from the South. Would we still have nuclear power? The plants are in-state, but would we be able to get uranium? Maybe the Chinese would sell it to us on Alibaba or Banggood.

There is a lot of oil in Jesus-friendly areas, and there are also many refineries. That’s good.

If you would like to dry your own apples, I have the ultimate tip. Spend $25 on an apple peeler. They really work. You can core, peel, and slice an apple in 5 seconds. I should go get apples today. You can dry them by setting them on a window screen.

I don’t like factory dried apples, because they put a chemical on them to keep them white. It kills the flavor. To get the real flavor of dried apples, you need to avoid that stuff. Real dried apples taste like apple butter. Factory apples taste like air.

The future is uncertain. Are we looking at a few weeks of pro-Biden terrorist riots followed by a crackdown and resumed calm, will we have a full-blown civil war complete with drawn borders, or will we simply move into an Israel-type situation in which terrorism is a normal part of daily life? Actually, we’re already in that situation, except that the acts of terrorism committed here haven’t been as serious as the ones Israelis face.

A full-blown civil war with new borders would be a catastrophe, because leftists would freeze or simply steal the bank and security accounts of conservatives and centrists, and they would also cut off our access to phones, the Internet, and credit. Leftists would probably be massacred routinely due to their inferior capacity for violence. They’re pretty good at throwing bottles of pee, but they would do poorly while trying to familiarize themselves with firearms, camouflage, tactics, and so on. Jesus people have been shooting, hunting, and serving in the military for centuries.

My hat is off to people who think they can do well after a total breakdown of society. It would be very hard to prepare sufficiently well to guarantee that. I figure it’s realistic to prepare for a bad month or two, tops, and I see no hope of providing my own electricity over long periods. I will have to bank on a future in which companies in my area adapt and continue producing power.

Should I cut some firewood? Arrgh. Anything but that.

In my area, I would probably need wood for maybe 45 days. That’s a lot of wood. To prepare it, I would need to create huge snake-infested piles which would eventually attract termites and rot.

I have a lot of downed wood already. Maybe I should just wait and see what happens. I can cut it into firewood if I have to. I was going to burn it, but maybe it has value.

In any case, there is no possibility my ammunition will get the roofers excited today.

Next: I Cut Down the Mightiest Tree in the Yard With a Herring

It’s time for me to pat myself on the back again. I made my own hummus today, and then I installed some new shrubbery beside my house.

I’ve made my own hummus many times. Recently, I started making it again, because I eat it for breakfast nearly every day, and the store kind costs over 4 bucks. The price of the ingredients is around a dollar, so it irks me to get ripped off like that.

I found some recipes online. I wanted to see if I could do better than I had in the past. I learned something. The reason your hummus is coarse is that you’re not peeling your garbanzo beans.

Arabs remove the skins from their garbanzo beans, and it makes hummus very smooth. I guess it also removes most of the fiber, but I don’t care about that.

Removing the skin is a royal pain. You have to heat the beans with baking soda and then rinse them with cold water. This is supposed to make the skins “float off,” but it doesn’t. It only loosens them. Then you have to get in there with your hands and rub them off. It took me maybe 20 minutes. Maybe there’s a better way.

When I was done, I had very smooth hummus, so I would have to say that removing the skins is important.

As for my hedge, I killed the old one because it looked bad, and I had to put something in its place. You would not believe how many choices there were. Over a hundred. I decided to let the lady at the nursery tell me what to get. She gave me 4 choices, and I picked the one I disliked least. I came home yesterday with 6 Indian hawthorn plants, or, as we snowflakes call them, First Nations Oppressed Little Brown People hawthorn plants.

Today I learned that the name of this plant has no “E” at the end. Exciting.

You know what? There are no native Americans. Little fact there for you. Neither science nor the Bible says human beings are native to the Americas. And white people were never illegal aliens. The Indians didn’t have real borders or immigration laws, and many of them were fine with Europeans living here. I’m not saying white people turned out to be great neighbors, but then many legal immigrants end up causing problems, so nothing new there.

Yesterday, I used my Root Slayer shovel to rip out the old hedge, and today I went over the dirt. I hit it with my electric edger to sever any roots the shovel left behind, I torched it for a while, and I added a pre-emergent herbicide to keep weeds from coming back. I put down 4 cubic feet of expensive dirt, shoved the plants in, and covered the works with melaleuca mulch. I hope it works out.

I plan to poison the ground pretty heavily with imidacloprid, so that should also help.

I came in and had a burger, and I saw some news. Louisville malcontents are rioting over the Breonna Taylor shooting. Is this a surprise? No. I guarantee you, BLM terrorists have been going to places like Best Buy and the Timberland store, picking out things to steal during the inevitable riots. I am sure they do that. If you’re a thief, and you know your in competition with at least hundreds of other thieves, you’re going to do your best to get to the good stuff first.

Terrorists are out and about because the grand jury’s announcement came out. No homicide charges. Unfortunately, news sources are saying things like, “No charges in Breonna Taylor death.” To low-information, riot-prone people, this looks like, “Cops did everything right in Taylor case, and no one will be held accountable.” That’s not what happened. One cop apparently sprayed the place with bullets without thinking, he got fired, and he has been charged with a crime. He didn’t hit Taylor, and the cop who did shoot her obeyed the law, so that’s why there is no homicide charge.

Interesting fact: the cops identified themselves more than once. Everyone is having conniptions, claiming the people in the apartment didn’t know who the police were. Not true. They knew perfectly well, and one of them shot at the cops anyway. This is what caused Taylor’s death.

Yes, they had a no-knock warrant, but they announced themselves anyway. But news outlets are not making much effort to point this out, and some are still saying the cops didn’t identify themselves.

It doesn’t matter, because thieves and terrorists were going to riot and loot no matter what, but the rest of us might as well understand the facts.

No-knock warrants seem pretty risky to me. If cops broke my door down at 3 a.m. and didn’t identify themselves, I would do my best to kill as many of them as possible, and I’m a law-abiding citizen. You don’t lie in bed next to an unused rifle and hope the people breaking down your door turn out to be the police. It doesn’t work that way.

So now that opportunists are out in the streets looking for free stuff and a chance to do racist violence, what are they protesting? That’s not clear. Are they protesting no-knock warrants? The no-knock warrant had no effect on Breonna Taylor, and reforms are underway, so I would say there is no legitimate reason to protest. Are they protesting the racism of the police? That seems foolish. The police always shoot back when people fire guns at them, regardless of race. Are they protesting the grand jury’s racism? That would be a bit odd. Grand jurors are random citizens who have zero affiliation with the police, prosecutors, or the judiciary. They don’t belong to a secret organization that meets to burn crosses. For all we know, they were all black.

I’ll just pull back the curtain and tell you how juries are selected. Lawyers pretend it’s all above board, but the truth is that you try to get the most prejudiced people you can find. You want people who already think your client is right, without hearing the evidence. The procedure by which they find this out is called “voir dire,” which comes from an old phrase meaning “speak the truth.” It’s not the same as “voir” and “dire” in modern French. Attorneys ask a bunch of questions, jurors answer them, and then the attorneys try to eliminate anyone who might not see things their way.

Grand juries are different. Voir dire is basically about your ability to serve. They don’t ask you dog whistle questions to try to find out what your biases are.

The people who didn’t hand down a homicide charge in the Breonna Taylor case were not chosen for their unwillingness to indict. They were chosen at random.

I suppose the prosecutors may have steered things this way or that, but in the current atmosphere, and given the way unethical hack prosecutors railroaded George Zimmerman and Kyle Rittenhouse, I would not bet on anti-black prosecutor bias in this case.

Of course, it doesn’t matter. Free TV’s, and a chance to curse the police out and throw things at them without having your head slammed on the trunk of a cruiser…that’s what matters.

I’ll bet looters get into violent confrontations over who got the best stuff. You know they do.

Today I was praying about the rapture, and I asked God again if it was coming this year. I felt an overpowering surge, telling me the answer was yes. Can it really be true? It would be so beautiful to leave this place behind. It’s getting extremely filthy and violent. I would love to live somewhere where I belonged. I would love to stop seeing people who hate the truth, marching in our streets and tormenting the innocent with the consent of the leftist half of the population. I would love to know I would never have to see that type of person again. And what will the 7-year marriage of Christ be like? Best vacation ever.

Please, let it happen. I am ready TODAY. NOW. I intercede for people all the time, and I try to tell people helpful things, but there doesn’t seem to be much more I can do for God while the world is sliding into insanity. I don’t think there is a lot I can still accomplish.

Home Improvement Follows Spiritual Improvement

I am back to blog. Not because I have something to say, but because I am tired and want to relax.

I got lot more done today.

My house had dubious landscaping when I arrived, and part of the problem was aging hedges around the house itself. Apparently, hedges don’t last forever. Mine were about 20 years old, and some of them were not looking good. Also, I suspect there were problems with bugs. I kind of think you have to poison everything in order to keep plants alive here, and I didn’t do that. I came here from Miami, and whatever that area’s faults are, you don’t have to bomb your plants with poison down there in order to get them through a season. This is also true farther north. It seems like I’m in a strange belt of territory which is abnormally hostile to landscaping.

I had some kind of crummy, spindly, partly rotten hedge on the south side of the house, and a few months back, I got tired of it and hit it with 2,4-D, which is a weed killer. I figured dead plants would be easier to remove than half-dead plants. Today I went in with my Root Slayer shovel, and in about half an hour, I had ripped out 18 feet of dead and dying hedge.

That was nice.

I drove to a nursery and told them I needed 18 feet of shrubs, and the lady who worked there gave me a tour and provided suggestions. I sprung for some Indian Hawthorne. I don’t know much about it, but she said it would probably not die immediately, so it sounded good to me.

I also had some annoying plants in the flower box by the pool For some inexplicable reason, the patio has a concrete flowerbed built into it, right beside the pool. So leaves, insects, and dirt, beside a temperamental tub of water that doesn’t deal with contaminants well. The previous inhabitants put at least two different kinds of trees–not shrubs or flowers–in the flowerbed, along with ferns and some kind of ornamental thing. The trees got way too big. I murdered one a few months back and hauled most of it off. I also killed what I think was a banana tree and dumped it in the woods. Today I cut most of the remaining tree–a big fishtail palm–out, and I carted off the debris and hosed the raw stumps with 2,4-D and glyphosate. I’ll leave them there in hopes they suck up the chemicals and die fast. Then I’ll go after the roots.

I’m going to make the pool area my own. I’ll go ask the nursery lady what to put in the flowerbed. I’ll obliterate every trace of living plant matter, and then I’ll plant one kind of ornamental, and I’ll make sure I pick something that doesn’t grow over 18 inches tall.

My well has a big pressure tank over it, and someone made a terrible effort to hide it with a cluster of unkempt flowering shrubs. I was thinking about it the other day, and I realized there was no reason to hide it. A clean, orderly well looks better than a bunch of annoying weeds. Maybe I could paint Trump’s face on it.

This afternoon, I took the plant-massacre solution and doused all the plants around the well. When they die, I’ll rip them out and dump them. Then I’ll think about ground cover. Maybe grass will grow there. The weeds were an aggravating obstacle when I mowed. If I put grass where they used to be, I’ll have a straight shot all the way to the workshop.

I think I should plant another peach tree. They do well here. I poisoned my tree today to keep webworms off of it, and it needs a friend. I still have to do something about squirrels. They hammered the tree last year.

Squirrel season doesn’t start for 18 days, but I emailed the wildlife nanny agency, and they said I was free to kill them out of season when they caused problems. I haven’t taken advantage of this loophole for a long time. I’ve been planning to wait for the season this year, simply because I am not totally certain I trust the wildlife nannies to keep their word if I get caught. Once I get started, I plan to kill every squirrel I see. I may give up on rifles, which are the most enjoyable squirrel-control weapons, and use the Sweet Sixteen. I can’t shoot squirrels out of trees with a rifle without risking sending bullets onto my neighbors’ land, so I have to wait for squirrels to show up on the ground. A shotgun is less challenging and therefore boring, but it gets the job done more efficiently, and the pellets don’t fly all that far. If pellets make it off my land, they’re so small, they won’t be able to hurt anyone or damage anything.

Squirrels must die. Coons must die. Coyotes must die. Nothing else here gives me problems.

I showed mercy to a coon the other day because it had a youngun with it. That was a good deed which is certain not to go unpunished. I didn’t like the idea of shooting a coon’s mother in front of it. They’re horrible pests, though, so I can’t give it a lifetime pass. They’re so bad, there is no coon season in Florida. You can kill them every day and even at night.

I talked to the nursery lady about squirrels, and she suggested putting a plastic snake in the peach tree. I mentioned my preferred method of dealing with them. Hope she wasn’t triggered. I am not against buying a plastic snake, but I will definitely shoot squirrels anyway. I have grave doubts about the snake theory.

I would have had a couple of dozen peaches this year had it not been for squirrels. I got three.

I need to fix the island in my driveway. When I moved here, it had ferns, some scrubby ornamental plants, a bizarre doughnut of aging hedge, a huge rotting oak, a spindly magnolia, and some other kind of tree which promptly died. I got rid of the oak and the dead tree. I think I should scorch the earth and start over with bare ground. Maybe I can find some ideas on the web. I could stick an ornamental tree in there maybe. Perhaps I could make a raised bed rimmed with pavers. That would give me a well-defined perimeter for weed-eating and mowing. As it is now, I’m never sure whether I’m mowing grass or ornamental plants. They blend into each other.

The irrigation system is screwed up. They set it up so it only irrigates places that don’t need water. It wets the ground up against the house, in the driveway island, by the gate, and in the patio flowerbed. I haven’t turned it on in maybe a year, and it hasn’t mattered. Maybe I could find a place that actually needs water and put irrigation only in that area.

I have a big green electrical transformer box in my side yard. It has a rickety rail fence on three sides of it, and the fence used to have a horrible Florida fire vine on it. I killed the vine, mulched the whole area, and put in blackberry briars and grapevines. The blackberries are not doing great, and the grapes grow very slowly. One vine died mysteriously, on a property where grapevines grow so fast they cover the floor of the woods. It has occurred to me that I could tear out the fence, take up most of the mulch, poison the ground by the vines and briars to give them a boost, and let grass move in.

My guess is that the lady who lived here thought the transformer box was an eyesore. I am a man, so I think it looks swell. It would be better to put a little solid wooden fence around it than a rail fence that looks like it was moved here from Haiti.

I’m planning to take the rails out this week with the tractor. Then I can haul the mulch off.

I don’t know if my house will look better after I get done with it, but it will certainly look like someone tried, and that’s worth something.

Guess I’ve relaxed enough. Time to hang out with the birds.

Dry Bones of Neglected Projects Receive Long-Awaited Rain

My propane cart is all done. I finished welding, and I taped around the bare parts and hosed it with truck bed coating. Looks pretty good.

I decided to try my gas outfit. It had been sitting in a box since last September. The hose was still coiled neatly in the box. When I started taking parts out, I saw a big ball of woolly stuff in the coil. I thought Victor/ESAB had put some kind of filler in there for shipping purposes. No, it was a mouse nest. Thankfully, no one was home. Unfortunately, it smelled like infected mouse butt, and that smell is still clinging to the hose.

I was under the impression that I had bought a propane outfit, but it turned out to be set up for acetylene. It had an acetylene regulator instead of a propane regulator. That was a speed bump. I thought I would have to order a new regulator. Then I Googled around and learned that an acetylene regulator will work fine. The hoses are rated for propane, so that was not a problem.

I didn’t have a propane heating tip. I Googled again, and I found you can use an acetylene tip if you clamp a little shield around the end. I fired the acetylene tip up, and it worked fine. I just need to put a shield together. A propane tip costs $158, so I might as well try the jury rig method first.

I heated a piece of 1/8″ by 1″ bar, and it turned red in a hurry. This outfit is going to be very useful. I ordered a couple of propane cutting tips. I already have a pair, but since I put them aside a year ago, I have lost track of them. Some day they’ll turn up.

I need to create some kind of hanger I can weld on the cart to hold the torch and hoses.

I got a lot of other things done yesterday. I put a new seat on the garden tractor. This is the one part John Deere doesn’t overcharge for. The Chinese knockoff costs $90, and the real thing is $109, so I went with OEM. My old one had cracks in it, and they let rain fill the padding. I cover the tractor, but you only have to have the cover blow off once to get a seat full of rain, and it never evaporates completely. Now I should be able to mow with a dry rear end.

For some reason, the people who built this house left two humps in the yard, roughly the size of pitchers’ mounds. I have often wondered what they were for. It occurred to me that dogs and cats might be buried under them. People do that. As bad as I feel for people whose pets are dead, I am not going to screw up my yard for a dead cat. This week, I used the tractor’s front end loader to start scraping the dirt away. A few days back, I annihilated a hump in the front yard.

Yesterday, I worked on the hump next to the workshop. I unearthed one corner of a 6′ by 8′ blue Home Depot tarp! What on earth was that there for? Maybe somebody didn’t want Fluffy or Snowball to get rained on in heaven. Whatever. I could not budge it with a shovel because roots had gone through it, so I ripped it off with the tractor, smoothed the ground out, and took the tarp to the dump. I didn’t dig up any collars, so if there is a dead dog down there, he’s still resting peacefully.

Here’s a tip: if you bury your pet in your yard, don’t expect the buyers to leave it there when they want to put in a pool or plant a tree, and that goes double when you don’t disclose it during the sale. If you really have to bury dead stuff in your yard, pick an area that’s out of the way, and bury everything at least three feet deep. Don’t let the kids scoop out a little hole with their hands and then pile a little dirt on top of the departed.

The prior residents did a lot of bad landscaping, and I have been reluctant to dismantle it because I trusted their judgment more than my own. That’s all over with. I’m going to rip out a lot of annoying shrubs, along with some bad decorations. Nice grass is better than sloppy shrubbery and floppy rail fences.

The stumps from my ill-fated citrus trees are gone, and I’ve been running the mower over the locations to smooth the dirt down. I don’t plan to put anything in to replace them, although I might relent and plant a single peach tree. Something useful that won’t die from a Chinese disease.

Peach trees do great here, as long as you poison them to kill bugs. That reminds me; I have to start killing squirrels to protect the peaches. I don’t think I’ll eat the squirrels. I plan to throw them in the woods. Crows and foxes enjoy them.

I have a roof issue. I’ve been working with contractors for two weeks. One crew wandered off after giving me an estimate, so I got another one. Glad that happened. The first guy gave a high estimate and didn’t tell me anything helpful. The second guy gave me a painfully long, boring lecture about roofs and what does and does not work. It was dull, but I kept quiet and let him talk. I learned a lot of great things, and I realized he was going to do a better job for less money. I’m hoping to have everything fixed in around 10 days.

I got nervous and invaded the attic to inspect the roof from underneath. This was a horrible experience. It was over a hundred degrees, and I had nothing to stand on except widely spaced trusses covered with fiberglass insulation. I had to twist and contort my body to move a few inches at a time. The good news: no serious problems. That roof should be good for 5 more years, once I get my patch done.

I understand the roof a lot better now.

I’m having my satellite dishes yanked. They cause leaks, and there is no way I would ever have Dish or DirecTV in this house.

I still have one major boulder issue in my yard. I went out the other day and started blasting it with a jackhammer, and of course, it started to rain about 10 seconds in. The weather is getting cooler fast, and the rain is drying up, so I hope to have that boulder leveled soon. Then I’ll have more grass and one less mower obstacle. There are some small boulder tips nearby, sticking out of the ground. The tractor can’t move them, but the jackhammer will take them down below mower level.

I bought a propane weed torch. Wonderful tool. I’m thinking of using it to char steaks. It will also be great for starting burn pile fires. The tank is heavy, however, so I may go to Home Depot, buy another handtruck, and modify it to hold the tank. A cart made for the tank runs over $60, and that’s ridiculous, because it’s a cheap, embarrassing cart. I can get a real cart and modify it for less.

I feel like God has given me relief from demons that discouraged me. I speak defeat, binding, and muzzling to them every day. I know people don’t believe in demons, and they think people who do are nuts. Jesus believed in demons, and he talked to them. This has always been a nominally Christian country, yet we still assume people who say they have experience with demons are mentally ill. I don’t care. I’m old, and the older I get, the less I care what unintelligent, low-information, insecure people think about me. I’ve had demons cast out of me, and they’re as real as you are.

You can physically feel it when a demon leaves, and afterward, you notice your mind is quiet. The thing that was inspiring counterproductive words to form in your mind is gone. I’m careful not to call it a voice. I don’t hear voices. I can just see what would happen if I said I heard voices. “Your honor, clearly this man can’t be allowed to possess firearms or live on his own, so let’s take his guns and his house and turn his property into a BLM safe space for LGBTQ-trans-mutant-googolsexuals.”

You are surrounded by demons. You are inhabited by demons. They corrupt your thoughts and emotions, they hurt your body, and they destroy your success. It’s the truth. They’re not just for crazy people.

Why am I getting so much help from God? Why am I doing so much work on my responsibilities? I wonder if I’m getting this property ready for the people who will move in after the rapture.

Here’s something interesting: I expect to be here on earth after the tribulation.

I used to wonder if we would return after the tribulation. This week, something occurred to me. We are not going to die; we will be assumed in to heaven as we are, in the flesh. There will be no reason for us to die or age in heaven. If you’re raptured alive, you should be alive 7 years later when the tribulation is over. Jesus will return, in the flesh, at that time. The word says people will return with him and rule with him. It makes sense to believe the raptured will come back.

If these things are true, then a lot of redemption is coming our way. People who were crippled when they left, or who were old and single, or who lost all their children, or who always lived in poverty will be able to lead happy, successful lives on earth. They will be physically perfected.

Will they have marriages and children? Things don’t look so good. Jesus said, “at the resurrection, people will never marry nor be given in marriage.” Does that mean we won’t reproduce, or does it mean we’ll reproduce, but we won’t be bound permanently in pairs? Will there be a universal state of open marriage during the Messianic Age?

Jesus said people who gave up children for the kingdom of heaven would have children multiplied to them on earth and in the world to come, and it seems harsh for people who were trapped in solitude during their lives to have that condition continue after the tribulation, but I’m sure whatever happens will be great.

Was he speaking of the post-rapture return when he said “resurrection,” or did he mean the final gathering at the end of the Messianic Age?

Don’t know.

In any case, it looks like I will be back after 7 years, assuming I manage to be raptured. It would be nice to get a chance to do a few things over, correctly and without opposition or curses.

How do you get raptured? Jesus said he wanted to find his servants giving food to his household. Food appears to mean instruction in the ways of God. The Bible calls basic instruction “milk” and advanced knowledge “meat.” I think that if you want to be raptured, you should be involved in relaying knowledge when Jesus calls.

I keep this in mind these days.

I truly think we will be taken before the tribulation. Leaving us here with the willfully obtuse boneheads and God-haters doesn’t make any sense. God got the Jews out of Egypt, and the plagues didn’t touch them. God took Lot out of Sodom before he burned it. God lifted Noah above the flood. There has to be some reward for obedience.

On the web, I see leftists, literally shrieking about 2020. There is a famous lady on TikTok, screeching profanities like a severely autistic kid having a fit. There are many like her. Most are female. They are losing their minds. Ginsburg’s death pushed them over the edge. My response: 2020 has been great for me. Your reality depends on your relationship with God.

In April, my friend Travis died unexpectedly. I had hoped he would be my compensation for not having a son. I had a very bad month after he died. Other than that, this year has been wonderful. It has been peaceful. Annoying people haven’t been bothering me. I no longer had to care for my demented father. I had two properties that drove me crazy. They were sold last year. I’ve been getting things done. I’ve been doing things I wanted to do in the past but couldn’t seem to get on top of.

I have lacked nothing of importance. My health has been good. I stopped worrying, with God’s help.

My 2020 and the 2020 of people who hate God and authority are two different years. It’s as though they live on the other side of a gulf, like the gulf in the story of Lazarus the beggar.

It surprises me to see how miserable the Antichrist’s people are. I’m not in touch with them day by day, so it’s a shock when their rage and horror pop up on my monitor and in my speakers.

People really need to get to know God. If they’re this miserable now, in the world’s richest country, living in security, surrounded by opportunity, simply because democracy isn’t working out in their favor and the world refuses to mold itself to their pathetic, infantile fantasies, how crazy will they be when Trump wins the election and when his justice is seated?

It’s going to be an astonishing spectacle. They’re at the breaking point already. Full-blown psychosis is just a heartbeat away. They just need Trump to light the right match, and he will do it with the eagerness of a D-Day soldier tossing an explosive satchel into a pillbox full of Nazis.

The rapture will be a division. The Antichrist’s black-clad people will be stuck here, raging at each other and screaming in anguish, much as they are now, and we’ll be at a marriage feast in heaven, free at last from their incessant squawking and abuse. The division seems to be accomplished already, within us. Now it just has to be completed physically. When we’re gone, the Antichrist’s mob will get everything it has clamored for, and it will burn them like flamethrowers around the clock. They think we make life painful. In reality, our presence is the only reason it’s as pleasant as it is.

I can’t think of a time I have enjoyed as much as the last few months. I know that’s God’s work. I’m sure other people can get it, too, if they will just listen.

Thank you, God, for 2020. I hope you will see fit to continue things as they are.

Ginsburg Cements Conservative Future of Court

A couple of things are on the menu today.

First, I made biscuits with White Lily flour, and they were no good. Second, Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, taking us one step closer to civil war.

People sing the praises of White Lily flour. It’s THE biscuit flour, as far as many Southerners are concerned. I have tried it in the past, and I was not thrilled. The biscuits were rigid and had no flavor. Today I tried it with my proven recipe, and things didn’t go any better. The biscuits were almost crunchy, and they tasted more like crackers than biscuits.

I would stay away from it if I were you. I get beautiful results with King Arthur bread flour, so that’s all I’m going to use from now on. If not King Arthur, then another brand of bread flour. There is no point in tampering with perfection.

I’m wondering if White Lily will make a good thin pizza crust. It should be good for baguettes, and baguettes are a lot like pizza crust. I’ll try it and see.

Now…Ginsburg.

I’m not going to pretend I’m grieving. I did not know this woman. In order for me to get weepy over the death of a celebrity, there has to be some kind of connection. I don’t think you have to pretend to grieve in order to show proper respect.

I prayed for her and her family while she was alive. I prayed for her family last night. She is beyond help now.

I won’t say she was a great legal mind. I don’t know that to be true. There have been some Supreme Court justices who did such good work, they are remembered for making positive changes to the law. Benjamin Cardozo probably takes the top honor. I don’t know of any evidence that Ginsburg did work that was brilliant or illuminating. She generally toed the leftist line. I haven’t seen any evidence that she thought for herself.

She did very well in law school. Well, law isn’t that hard, and grades have a lot to do with a special set of skills that impress instructors. Grades aren’t that closely related to brains, unless you’re in a tough field like math or physics. I’m a lot smarter than people who graduated summa cum laude in my class. Spend your life in the library, hang out with your professors, kiss up, and always parrot their beliefs back to them. You’ll do well, even if you’re not a genius.

Michael Avenatti was first in his class, and he went to a very good school. That should tell you a lot.

People are honoring her for serving the public all her life. She did that, but so do street sweepers and game wardens. She was paid well, she got great benefits, she had incredible job security, she didn’t have to pay for malpractice insurance or deal with real responsibility while working as an academic or judge, and she was allowed to thrust her extremist beliefs on hundreds of millions of people.

She was a very able litigator and judge. She wasn’t Sir Isaac Newton.

People are saying her nomination was historic because she was female. It wasn’t. It’s amazing how barrier-busting Republican nominees and appointees are forgotten. No one remembers Reagan nominee Sandra Day O’Connor, the somewhat inept judge who joined the panel in 1981, and O’Connor is still alive.

Ginsburg even gets praise for having cancer. People say she’s incredibly tough, and they praise her for fighting. The thing is, everyone who gets cancer does what she does. They go to the doctor and get treatment. Very few people choose to let cancer take its course.

Leftists are losing their minds because she died under a Republican president, but very few are blaming the person who actually caused the problem. That person is Ginsburg herself. She knew she was dying. She knew Trump was likely to be reelected. She rolled the dice.

If you try to understand why she did this to her fellow leftists, two possible explanations come to mind. Either she genuinely saw the court as an apolitical institution, and she thought she should not consider politics when making decisions about retirement, or she was just selfish and unwilling to let go. It’s hard to think of a third explanation, and the first one doesn’t pass the laugh test. Ginsburg was a leftist firebrand who said she didn’t want to die under Trump, so it appears selfishness is the reason she held on.

It’s impossible to reconcile this with the selfless-public-servant narrative.

She was like a man who spends his life amassing wealth and then dies intestate, leaving his children to devour each other in court. She made it extremely likely that her own legacy would be dismantled, and in so doing, she may have largely nullified her own existence.

I can’t help being relieved that she’s gone, because all I can think of are babies being torn apart in clinics and hospitals. She was in favor of that. Yesterday, she had her first conversation with the God of her forefathers, and surely this subject came up. I am glad I didn’t have to watch. She supported the right of a frivolous, irresponsible woman to pay a man to take scissors and sever the spine of her live, healthy child while its struggling body protrudes from her vagina. That is ghastly. It’s as bad as anything the Nazis and the Japanese did to their victims. I can’t pretend I don’t think it’s good that a person who was working to protect systematic atrocities is out of the way.

They say she was a very nice person in her interpersonal relations. It’s strange that a nice person would have no feeling for the weakest and most innocent.

Now that she’s gone, we have yet another factor which augments the perfect storm that drives us toward civil war. The left is unhinged over the bad treatment a few people–nearly all criminals resisting arrest–have received from the police. Riots are now considered acceptable mainstream methods of influencing voters. Democrats are pushing mail-in voting, which is certain to generate a great deal of voter fraud and prolong the election process. Now we face the prospect of seeing Trump install a hardline conservative on the court toward the end of an election season. On social media, leftists are already saying they will “burn it all down” if he does that, and at least one is calling for the burning of Mitch McConnell’s house.

Imagine what could happen. Trump could win on election night, and then the ridiculous, unnecessary mail-in votes could be counted, putting demented Biden on top. Then Republicans would contest the votes, and we would be plunged into turmoil that would make the Bush/Gore mess seem quick and painless. The matter would likely end up before the Supreme Court. Right now, the court is 5/3 conservative, so things look bad for the left regardless of whether Trump gets a new judge, but 6/3 would enrage the left even more.

If you think the tantrum-throwing brats are mad now, imagine how they’ll act when they think Biden won and a packed Supreme Court didn’t give him a fair hearing.

I don’t really understand the rationales for delaying or not delaying justice confirmations during election years. It all seems like puffery and rationalization to me. McConnell says a delay is crucial when the president and the senate are on opposite sides of the aisle. I don’t see why this is true. He also says there should be no delay when they’re on the same side. I don’t get that, either. In any case, it appears that there is no firm law controlling the matter, and I don’t expect the GOP to put things on hold out of pure principle. I think Trump will put Amy Cony Barrett on the court, and the Senate will confirm her, perhaps with one or two Republicans abstaining.

To the left, having Ginsburg replaced by Barrett will be like the Soviets having Stalin deposed and replaced with George Patton. To snowflakes who can’t tolerate the pain of seeing a red hat in a mall, the pain will be unbearable.

Dana Coverstone, the preacher whose end-time dream went viral, may truly have foreseen our future. He said he saw UN soldiers with blue helmets in the US. That kind of thing happens when nations go berserk over questioned elections.

Leftists have to stop questioning everything’s legitimacy. Trump really is the president; the popular vote means nothing at all. Clinton and Trump both ran campaigns calculated to win the electoral vote, not the popular vote, so they have to live and die by the results. If Trump installs a new justice, she will be legitimate, too. Kavanaugh is legitimate. People have to stop dragging out the asinine, fabricated rape stories. If you can ignore a very credible rape story about Joe Biden, you should be able to ignore implausible stories about Justice Kavanaugh.

Of course, leftists will not stop. They don’t care about reason and truth. These are the people who rioted in Pennsylvania when a cop shot a man who was chasing him with a huge knife.

I wonder what else will go wrong before January. Are there other surprises that will pop up and work to funnel us into a state of endless internal violence? It’s fascinating to watch the process. It’s as though a scriptwriter planned it all. The synergy can’t be coincidental.

I don’t know what I’ll do if the rapture doesn’t come this year.

I published my ideas about the rapture recently, and someone who thinks he’s a prophet showed up to instruct me. He said weird things like, “ASK the prophet,” and, “I am not a prophet by my choosing, Numbers 12:6. ASK are the initials to my name.” I don’t even know what this stuff means. He said Satan was deceiving me in order to destroy me. He apparently thinks being wrong about the rapture’s date leads to destruction. He says that if you expect to be taken before the tribulation, you won’t “prepare” for it.

The obvious question is this: how do you prepare for the tribulation? It can’t be done.

The tribulation will be very, very bad. Right now, we walk around in masks, and a miniscule percentage of the population is sick. We have minimal shortages. We have a few areas where terrorist riots are a problem. During the tribulation, we will have worldwide plagues that will resemble the Black Death in their magnitude. We will have plagues of disease, lack, murder, and natural disasters. A huge percentage of human beings will die, along with trees and sea life. Americans will run around murdering each other for food. People will long for death.

You can’t prepare for that! Do you seriously think a pallet of canned tuna and 10,000 AR-15 rounds will help you? The whole point of the tribulation is to show you you can’t prepare or protect yourself. People are interconnected. To have an acceptable quality of life, you need fuel, electricity, and all sorts of goods and services. When everything collapses, you won’t have those things any more. Whatever you’ve stored up in your shed or under your bed will not get the job done.

I don’t want to be here during the tribulation, eating dried beans and shooting my neighbors. That is not “life.” It’s just existence. Death would be much, much better.

You can say God will provide special cocoons of safety for believers. Where does the Revelation mention that? And if God plans to set us aside and keep us safe and prosperous, wouldn’t heaven be the best place to put us?

A pre-tribulation rapture makes the most sense to me. I could be wrong. What does NOT make sense to me, even if the post-tribulation theory is right, is preparing by carnal means. I would expect God’s children to have to stay very close to him and to be so strong in faith they would get supernatural provision, as Elijah and the Hebrews under Moses did, day by day.

Trump should go ahead and nominate Barrett. He is going to be hated regardless of what he does, and he will be lied about and condemned. He might as well do the best thing for Christians, Israel, and the unborn.

Once you reach the point where you can’t do anything to appease your persecutors, it’s okay to do as you please and let them scream. At least one party will be pleased.

I want out of here before the real insanity starts. This place is just too crazy.

No Longer Stumped

Something has come over me (or left me), and I am getting on top of a lot of jobs I’ve put off.

I had a big rock in my yard. It was the size of a couch, minus the backrest. My tractor’s bucket will lift 1500 pounds, and I was not able to get it up using the forks. I would guess the rock is around half a ton. I dislodged it from the yard last year, if memory serves. A tiny stone protrusion was in the way when I mowed the yard, and when I decided to remove it, I found the giant rock attached to it.

Since then, I’ve had a big hole in my yard, next to another big hole from which I extracted a similar rock which was just small enough to lift with a rope. I had to mow around a big rock and two holes. It was worse than the original situation.

Yesterday I lifted one end of the rock, tied a tow strap around it, and dragged it out of the yard. Now the cattle can deal with it. Maybe they’ll use it to scratch themselves.

I had a sweet gum stump by my gate. Again, a mower obstacle. It had been there since Hurricane Irma. I put stuff on it to make it rot, and it paid no attention. Yesterday I decided to test it. I shoved the tractor’s forks under it, and up it came, along with half of the yard. I dumped it in my pasture on my shooting berm, and I used some of the berm to fill the hole. Very nice.

I had another stump which was nearly level with the ground but still in the way. I had to take the forks off the tractor in order to move dirt, so the bucket was ready for use. I scraped the stump away with ease. Excellent.

There is a huge stump just outside the yard, from Irma. It’s from a very big water oak I cut up. Chemicals didn’t bother it, and there was too much dirt in it for the chainsaw to be an option. Yesterday I ripped up the sides of it where it was rotten, and I tore up a bunch of the dead roots around it. I used the tractor to smooth out the ground around it and fill in the low areas. It’s still there, but it’s not nearly as annoying.

Today, I got rid of my citrus trees. I cut them a while back, but the stumps were still there. I had to cut them because it’s no longer possible to have citrus. Citrus greening is everywhere except the west, so if you have trees that still look good, you don’t have much time to enjoy them before they go bad. My trees were sick and produced disgusting fruit, and the people who built this house planted them way too close together anyway. Today I used my middle buster to rip the stumps out, and I dumped them in the woods.

My middle buster’s ears are bent because I’ve used it so much for clearing stumps. By “ears” I mean the thick metal tabs that hold the pins that attach it to the 3-point hitch. The steel is nearly half an inch thick. To fix the ears, I have to heat the steel, so I need to get my propane outfit running. I haven’t used it because I’ve been waiting for a unicorn to call me with a great deal on an oxygen bottle. I gave up today and got a price from Airgas, so tomorrow I’ll buy a bottle of my very own, and I’ll heat the ears and bend them back into line. Then I’ll weld some gussets in the corners to make them stiffer.

My pins are also bent. I guess that’s because they’re Chinese. I’m thinking I’ll replace two short pins with one long 7/8″ bar of solid steel. Not sure yet. It would be a pain to remove if it got bent. I could put some kind of coupler in the middle of it. It doesn’t have to be that strong in the middle. It just has to resist flexing, and there would be very little torque in the middle.

When I get the gas, I’ll pick up gusset material and a steel bar. I also plan to get an 18″ square piece of 1/4″ steel to turn into a steak griddle. I’m going to use my Offroad SWAG finger brake to turn it into a pan, and I’ll weld the corners shut to keep grease from pouring out.

That finger brake is a godsend. It opens up a whole new world of projects most people can’t hope to do even with a $1500 standalone brake.

I’ve also cut a bunch of annoying trees that looked like they had STD’s. Good riddance.

It’s nice to be going into fall in an industrious mood. Generally, my pattern is to work hard during the summer, which is miserably hot, and then sit around doing very little when the weather is good. It’s not a great way to get things done, and it can lead to additional problems such as death from heat stroke.

If I can get these things done, it almost seems like I should be able to blacktop the driveway. Is that hubris? I already have a bucket of goo and a squeegee.

I wish I could go to Airgas right now for my oxygen, but they won’t have any until tonight. Guess it’s time for a propane burger.

Are These Kids or Oompa Loompas?

My friends Alonzo and Teri–newly-minted members of the landed gentry–just left with 4 of their 5 kids. About three weeks back, I helped move them into their first home, less than an hour away. They decided to drive up and see how I was doing.

Generally, when friends visit, I have to brace. In addition to cleaning up my house so I look much neater than I really am, I have to buy food. I usually have to cook. I have to do a lot of cleaning while my friends are here. This time, it was very different. My friends brought me food, and then their kids cleaned my house.

They brought fried chicken. I hope it’s okay for a white person to have fried chicken with black people. Maybe no one will find out.

The weather was somewhat cloudy, so the kids were not allowed in the pool. There was some concern about lightning. We had lunch by the pool, and afterward, Alonzo and Teri and I sat outside and talked. My goddaughter Gabriella asked for a broom. The next time I went in the house, it looked wonderful. I had it fairly clean before they arrived, but they took it to a new level.

It should be unbearable outside, but while we talked, the sun was buffered by clouds, and it was so cool, I didn’t even sweat. It should have been about 95 with harsh sun and high humidity. It seems like we always get unseasonal nice weather when we’re together. Alonzo said he had noticed a pattern. We get together when it’s cloudy, and then the sun comes out. It happened when I went to help them move. It’s hard to explain how odd it is, having pleasant weather in Central and Northern Florida at this time of year. It isn’t supposed to happen. Warm days in winter are common everywhere. Cool days in summer in Florida are freak events.

It’s relaxing, being in a house someone else cleaned up. I haven’t had this experience since the last time they visited. Before that, you have to go back to the last time I rented a hotel room.

I don’t know where they got these kids. They don’t whine. They don’t break things. They don’t fight. They don’t talk back. They’re very quiet. They clean people’s houses for fun. I told their parents they could leave them here.

I always say I was a good kid when I was young, but I wasn’t. I was awful. I just thought I was a good kid because I was comparing myself to liars, thieves, tantrum-throwers, crybabies, dopers, and bullies. I didn’t know any families that had good kids, so I didn’t know any good kids I could compare myself to.

I did just about nothing to get ready for the visit, apart from cleaning. I had to fell and cut up a big oak this week, and I didn’t really feel like shopping and cooking after working hard outdoors.

We had a great conversation. They talked about our friendship, which is now about 12 years old. They said it was strange.

They lived in a ghetto suburb in Miami, and they seemed about like everyone else there. Then God started changing them. They moved to better and better areas as he did his work. They moved to Orlando, and now they’re in a very rural town called Tavares, in a 5-bedroom house they own. They’re surrounded by conservatives, and they’re happy.

They talked about the things we’ve gone through together. They said it was strange to be so close to an old white man and so distant from old friends and their own relatives.

It is strange, but it’s what happens when people base their relationships on God’s word instead of blood and culture. God’s word says he divides families, but it also says he puts the solitary in families. He divides us from blood relations and friends who belong to Satan, and he puts us together with people who may look different yet listen to the same Holy Spirit.

All over the US, people are fighting to protect their segments of society. People of different ethnicities are clashing with each other. People with different religious beliefs fight. Men are against women, and women are against men. It’s because churches generally reject the Holy Spirit. He is the only unifier. Where he is allowed to work, Jews and former Muslim terrorists worship together. People intermarry. National identities become less important. Where he is silenced, people behave like team athletes, fighting anyone who wears the wrong shirt. If you’re on God’s team, you don’t define yourself by the skin you wear as a shirt in this world.

Is life supposed to be like this for everyone? Can life really be this good on this cursed earth? Can every person who is Holy-Spirit-led have nice kids, a supportive spouse, friends with whom they have no friction, financial success, and a peaceful home he owns?

Maybe life really can be this good, and we don’t know it because almost none of us try doing things God’s way.

I have often told my Christian friends I didn’t want anything to do with my own sister. Once a hard core addict reaches a certain age, behaves badly enough, and proves he or she will never change, you cut the cord. It doesn’t just happen with addicts. There are many people who are so unpleasant and stubborn they have to be cut off. Today Teri said she used to wonder why I was so mean about my sister. Now she understands. Her mother has a very dark heart. She is angry. She is controlling. She is very unpleasant to be around. Alonzo and Teri had to take her in for a while, and she made their home a miserable place. They finally had to make other arrangements for her, and she calls and threatens them over it. Teri says peace left their house while her mother was there, and it returned when she left. She understands that there are some people you have to remove from your life if you want to be blessed.

It’s not just individuals. There are cities and neighborhoods people have to cut off. Nations. Entire cultures. You can only do so much to turn others around, and then you have to move on. This is what the rapture is all about. We’re not going to succeed in changing the world, and the time to break with it is approaching.

It’s hard for me to believe the relationship I have with this family. I’m so used to worldly people who can’t listen and never change. It’s strange to be accepted and agreed with. I can’t imagine what it will be like to be in heaven, where there won’t be a single person who doesn’t appreciate me, agree with me, and get along with me. Imagine a world in which you never have to walk on eggs around anyone or debate anyone.

It’s hard to believe the rapture is coming, but then it must have been hard to believe when a virgin gave birth to a man and that man was killed, resurrected, and assumed into heaven. It must have been hard to believe when the ground swallowed Korach, when God parted the Red Sea and made the sand dry so the Hebrews could walk through, and when the fire of God came down for Elijah and ate two steers and the water in the trench that surrounded them. All these things did happen, and the rapture will happen, too.

It’s going to be wonderful. I feel like I’m getting a taste of it. The peace and victory will be overwhelming. The absence of obnoxious people and spirits will be more beautiful than anything I’ve experienced in this life.

Imagine a world with no election signs and no arguments. Imagine a world with no riots. Imagine a world where there are no preppers because there is never anything bad to prepare for. No illness. No crime. No failure. No lack. No taxes. No pain. No prisons.

Actually, there will be a prison. It’s called hell. The earth is a sorting facility.

Today while we talked about the peace and prosperity we’ve experienced during the coronavirus months, I said it was as though God had separated us into a corral to wait in peace for the rapture. It’s like he put us aside so we can be cleaned up and readied.

I would love to be gone before the election. Failing that, I would like to be gone before the inauguration.

I think Trump will win, and I think there will be a Satanic leftist tantrum that will fill city streets with furious left-wing racists. I think the current riots will seem feeble compared to what’s in store. I suspect that rioting will also ramp up before the election, driving fair-weather hobby socialists to drop the pose and vote for Trump in order to restore order. I wouldn’t be surprised. I think many, many people will vote for Trump and claim they voted for Biden.

The voting booth is like the confessional booth. Or Vegas.

I can’t help wondering what Earth would have been like had people listened to the Holy Spirit. I guess we’ll find out during the Messianic Age.

Trump Admits He’s not God

I suppose I should blog about God a little bit.

First of all, I wonder how many people have seen Trump’s recent remarks about God. He was in Minnesota, giving an unscheduled talk beside Air Force One. He was talking about the economy, and he said this:

“You know what that is? That’s right. That’s God testing me,” Trump explained. “He said, You know, you did it once. And I said, ‘Did I do a great job, God? I’m the only one who could do it.’ He said, ‘That you shouldn’t say. Now we’re going to have you do it again.’ I said, ‘OK. I agree. You got me.’ But I did it once. And now I’m doing it again. And you see the kind of numbers that we’re putting up. They’re unbelievable. Best job numbers ever. Three months, more jobs in the last three months than ever before.”

I think this is great. I believe he talks to God. I don’t think he’s lying. There is too much evidence out there to deny that he has turned to God in recent years, whether or not you think he’s a good example to other Christians. I am pleasantly surprised to see him show some humility. I didn’t think he knew pride was bad. If he believes God told him he shouldn’t take credit for his success, it’s an indication that he’s growing.

We all know his faults. There is no point in denying them. But Christianity is a process, not a state. We accept Christians who do yoga and have illegitimate babies in strings, but we get upset because Trump owns casinos and has a history of adultery. Who knows what he’ll be like 5 years from now? If your direction is right, your location can’t stop you.

Here’s another thing: I got a nice revelation yesterday, and it looks like it’s surprisingly powerful. It’s very simple. When I interact with another person, or I think of another person, or I see another person, I think, “What can I do for him?” Generally, there is nothing I can do by earthly means, but I can still pray, so that’s what I do.

It sounds like a big nothing, but it isn’t. When you ask yourself what you can do for someone else, it changes your inclinations. Maybe the person is someone who makes you angry. Maybe it’s someone you like. Maybe it’s someone you feel a counterproduction sexual attraction to. When you ask yourself what you can do for that person, your attention shifts away from selfish ideation, and you get a chance to pour God’s benevolence into the world through prayer or other means.

I believe in charity. It’s extremely important. It’s important to do things for people. I have felt this way for many years. Having these beliefs isn’t as powerful as asking yourself what you can do for people. I can’t explain it, but I suggest you try it. I’m making it a habit.

Praying for people isn’t a negligible service. Prayer is more powerful than anything else you can do. You shouldn’t feel you’ve done nothing because all you did was pray. That’s crazy.

The Bible says faith works through love. My sense is that love behaves like a supernatural lubricant that allows faith to flow. I suppose this is because we should be exercising our faith to get things we pray for out of love, not selfishness or duty.

We always wonder why our prayers aren’t answered. Maybe a lot of answers are stuck in the pipe because there is no lubricant. I’ve seen healers tell people they can’t be healed because they don’t forgive. It’s consistent with the notion of love as a supernatural grease.

This morning, I thought about a Bible passage:

There is that scattereth, and yet increaseth; and there is that withholdeth more than is meet, but it tendeth to poverty.

The liberal soul shall be made fat: and he that watereth shall be watered also himself.

The second verse says the generous “soul” shall be made fat. To me, that suggests it’s important to be generous in your mind and heart, not just in your actions. If you make a practice of asking yourself what you can do for other people, you make your soul serve God.

The word translated “made fat” can mean “oiled.”

It all makes sense. The Bible says we are servants. What do servants say when they meet people? What does every clerk in every store say when you walk up? “How can I help you?” They know they’re servants, and Christians generally don’t have the same mindset. We’re always running around squawking, “God heal me! God protect me! God give me stuff so I won’t be poor!” We’re too busy on defense to think about offense. Conquest is all about offense. You can’t conquer by sitting behind a wall, hoping your enemies go away.

Anyway, try it. See what you think. It costs you nothing, and it’s as easy as a thing can be.

Final thing: something wild is going on with my shoulder. My gallbladder is not exemplary, although it’s not bad enough to cause attacks or require surgery. The main problem it causes me is shoulder pain. For some reason, gallbladder issues can generate referred pain in your shoulder, neck, or back.

For quite a while, I’ve had a problem putting my right arm behind my back. I didn’t go to a doctor. I try to get God’s healing and correction when I have a problem, and doctors are useless when it comes to gallbladder disorders. Generally, their kneejerk response is to remove your gallbladder, leaving you unable to digest fat, with a high probability of continued pain from stones. They don’t even try to fix gallbladders.

I didn’t think there was anything wrong with the shoulder itself.

The other day, I moved my arm around to loosen it up, and I heard crackling sounds. I wondered what was up. Maybe my gallbladder wasn’t the problem. Maybe the cartilage in my shoulder had disintegrated. I wondered whether I would have to give up and go to a witch doctor (my term for MD’s). I moved my shoulder vigorously, trying to reproduce the sound. The more I moved it, the less noise I heard. When I stopped, my shoulder felt better and had more mobility.

For the last few days, I’ve been doing this from time to time. It’s better than going to a witch doctor and letting him cut up and damage something God might be planning to heal.

This morning, I reached behind myself for some reason. I can’t remember what it was. Maybe I was scratching. Anyway, I realized my arm was way back there, and I wasn’t feeling pain. I did it without thinking. So now I can reach maybe a foot farther back before I feel discomfort. The change coincides with the revelation about doing things for people.

Thought I should put it out there. I don’t know what will happen next, but I’m thrilled to be feeling better. I went to a Last Reformation event in 2019 and asked for prayer for my shoulder, and I didn’t get results. Maybe God was telling me I needed to think about other people differently.

Yesterday I bucked and moved a tree by myself. I think I took 5 tractor loads to the burn pile, and a lot of the wood had to be lifted onto the tractor by yours truly. I’m out of shape. I don’t exercise. I’m old. I feel great today. I’m not sore or stiff. That’s a blessing. I’m thinking of cutting the rest of the tree down today.

I cut the tree in the middle of the day in August, in Florida. It was not raining. The temperature should have been 98 degrees, and I should have gotten a sunburn. My clothes should have been drenched with sweat. The sun was very gentle. I don’t think we ever broke 90. I didn’t sweat much at all. No problems.

I think I’m doing well for my age. I may look like Wilford Brimley’s dad, but I have a lot of energy, and everything works pretty well. I’ve seen other people my age, or younger, whose condition scared me. I keep hoping I can improve my body’s state by finding out what God is trying to get me to confess and repent of.

People get mad when you say their physical problems come from sin and ignorance. Where else would they come from? Are diseases rewards for righteousness? If the suggestion that your sins or your ignorance are making you sick makes you angry, you have exactly the kind of problem that perpetuates curses. You need to grow up and stop playing the victim.

It may be time to fire up the pole saw. Can’t wait to get the rest of that tree out of my life.

Tree? What Tree?

It’s amazing how many things you can do when the alternative is shoveling out a big wad of cash.

The people who built my house left a large mangy oak in the driveway circle out front. It was originally a double-trunked tree, but by the time I got here, one trunk was gone, and the other leaned away from the house at a 20-degree angle. This remaining trunk had a fork about 30 feet up. A few weeks back, I felt the house shake, and I went out and saw that one fork was lying in the driveway.

I was glad to see it, because I had been wanting to cut the tree, and cutting a leaning tree with a big fork is not easy to do safely.

Yesterday, I went outside and saw that the other fork had snapped off. Great news, right? Not really. It had fallen into another tree. The broken tree was bent at a 90-degree angle, and the upper fork was resting in the top of the second tree. The trees were on different sides of the driveway, so the upper fork was set to land in the driveway as soon as the joint gave out.

Trees and tree parts that hang over areas where people are likely to be found are called “widowmakers” for obvious reasons. Tree surgeous hate them. A widowmaker can fall with tremendous energy, very quickly, without making much of a sound.

I stared and stared at the tree, trying to figure out what to do. I could not cut the base of the broken tree, because that would release the widowmaker, and there was no way to tell what would happen. Also, the part of the tree that was still standing was rotten and might split, creating what’s known as a “barber chair.” A barber-chaired trunk can spring up in one direction and come down in another very quickly, and what happens to you if you’re under it is like what happens when you step on a roach.

I called a local service with great reviews. I didn’t call my usual service because they had given me a $1000 estimate to put the entire tree on the ground. I thought that was insane for 20 minutes’ work. The new outfit came out, left, and sent me an estimate: $1300. For that, they would drop the widowmaker, get rid of a nasty smaller tree nearby, and haul the debris, which I had told them I would do myself.

They also said they might not be able to do the work for two weeks. During that time, I would have to worry about UPS and Fedex drivers who might drive around my pickup, which I had parked in the driveway to keep traffic out.

Suddenly, I had a lot more enthusiasm for cutting the tree myself.

I went to Tractor Supply and bought a 30-foot tow strap, 100 feet of thin nylon cord, and one of those nylon straps you use to buckle cargo down.

I came back to the house, tied a weight to the end of a fishing line, and made a cast. On the first try, the weight went over the widowmaker and landed on the driveway. I tied the thin nylon rope to the fishing line and pulled on it, and that gave me a widowmaker with nylon rope draped over it. I joined the new strap to my old one, end-to-end, giving me a 60-foot strap. I used the nylon line to hoist the straps over the log. Then I ran a 3/8″ chain through the free ends of the straps. I tied a rope to my tractor and connected the chain to the rope.

After a few pulls, the widowmaker came down. Wonderful. I was 40 feet away, in no danger at all. An hour or so later, the widowmaker was out in the pasture, and the cows were eating its leaves. They’re so weird. They think my tractor is the ice cream truck.

I saved myself $1230, and I came out of it with some rope, a tow strap, and a cargo strap. Instead of nothing.

I still have to cut the rest of the broken tree down. I’ll put the cargo strap around it to prevent it from barber-chairing, and I’ll drop it in the driveway. Two to three hours of easy work. The difficult job will be removing the stump.

I would have been happy to give the tree people $500 or even $600, but $1300 seemed like robbery to me. They would have been here about an hour, and they wouldn’t have saved me much work. Maybe I’m cheap. I thought the estimate was way out of line. Even if they had left the tree on the ground, they would have expected $1100, and I would have provided 90% of the labor.

If an old man like me can do a job in an hour without breaking much of a sweat, you probably shouldn’t try to charge $1300. I think they’re overcharging right now because it’s hurricane season. They said people were bugging them to cut trees because of that.

I’m so glad that tree is going away. It was a thorn in my side. I told the tree people they could give me an estimate for grinding the stump, but I have a feeling they’ll be too high. I can get rid of it myself with a chainsaw and a shovel, so I am not open to high three-figure estimates. Time to look for a second peach tree.

It was beautiful, watching that weight sail over the widowmaker in just the right place.

Of course, I prayed about everything in advance.

Now all I have to worry about is a minor roof issue. Wonder what they’ll try to charge me for that.

Mike Tyson has Been Punched in the Face More Than Your Whole Family

Not much has happened today. For some reason, it didn’t rain. That was shocking. I was able to mow the yard.

While I was mowing, my tractor pulled one of its tricks on me. I drove through the web of a gigantic spider, and after I stopped the tractor to flail and scream and knock the webbing off of me, with great dignity, the tractor would not start. I put jumper cables on it and went in the house to Google a solution. While I was walking in, a very useful phrase came to me: “I’ve already won.”

I have been saying this a lot lately. Years ago, on a certain day, God told me I would have total victory from then on. At least I believe he did. Since then I have had a lot of very annoying challenges leap up and bite me in the rear end. Things don’t always go smoothly. I used to ask God how that could be considered victory. Then I realized victory is not the same thing as peace. Muhammad Ali defeated George Foreman, but he had to fight several rounds with a broken jaw in order to do it.

I used to feel beaten when things went wrong, because it seemed to happen so often, when it seemed I had done everything right. Now I remind myself: I’ve already won.

If the tractor won’t start, or the new stove won’t fit in the hole in the granite counter, or the people at the ALF where I put my dad for several days are overcharging me and turning bill collectors loose on me, or GEICO is trying to blame me for being backed into in a parking lot, or I just slipped and committed a sin I thought I was done with, it doesn’t matter. I’ve already won. I’ll react. I’ll get God’s help. A solution will come. When it’s over, I will have won.

You can project this principle to life itself. I’m surrounded by sick people. A man who thinks he might be a prophet says we’re going to have 80% inflation next year. Trump is polling badly, and God-haters may put Kamala Harris in the White House next year to abuse people like me. Maybe the rapture won’t come this year, as I feel it will, and I’ll be stuck here to cope with a bad situation when I’m no longer young enough to start over. It does not matter. I’ve already won. The very worst thing that could happen is that I could have 35 bad years and then go to heaven. They can’t keep me alive when my body quits. Escape is guaranteed. Sooner or later, I will be with Jesus, and I will have won everything.

It’s a good thing to keep in mind. It will give you strength.

In other news, we had another day of pre-hurricane weather here. I’ve written about this before. In the days prior to a hurricane, the air is still. Everything is quiet and peaceful, but there is a feeling of impending misfortune in the air. Often, the sun isn’t as bright as it ordinarily would be. Today was like that. It was overcast much of the time, but there was no rain.

Is the storm really coming this year? I’ll admit it: I hope so. Not so much the storm, but the rapture that precedes it.

I know that’s selfish. I’m just tired of living among hostile, impudent, underdeveloped, ignorant boneheads who won’t be helped. I want people to be saved, but I want to live in my own world, with my own people. I want rest.

We have a tropical storm headed for Florida. Isaac. The son of promise. Not a big deal.

I no longer own a single property that can be damaged badly by a hurricane or tropical storm, so this year is completely different from years gone by. It’s a new feeling. I hope Miami doesn’t get pounded this season, but I have no personal stake in it, so I have new peace. I guess heaven will be like that. Right now, my flesh is down here in a world full of microbes, violence, accidents, economic threats, and natural disasters. Once I am removed, I will have no vulnerable parts left on the earth, and most of the people I care about will be safe with me. That will be a nice change.

I’ve already won, and you can win, too. Think it over. You’ll never get another offer this good.

Plus Cheery Thoughts About the Apocalypse

It’s a frustrating day. My Ruger Precision Rifle arrived at the pawn shop yesterday. I have seen it. I have touched it, with quivering, eager, enraptured fingers. But my background check is still adrift in cyberspace. I have not been allowed to bring the new baby home.

In Florida, background checks go through the Florida Department of Law Enforcement; wonderful, wonderful people, doing a hard job and doing it well. I want to emphasize that last part. While they are diddling around with my rifle.

They match your name up to lists of people they know can’t buy firearms. If there are no matches, they clear you. If anything they pops up, they look into it, and eventually, they clear you. Or not.

The shop owner told me he was seeing two types of checks: the kind that take 5 minutes, and the kind that take 4 hours. It looks like I’m in the latter category. Last time, I had to fill the form out one day and pick the gun up the next. Same thing is happening now.

My guess is that someone with a name somewhat similar to mine did something bad this year. This is my second long background check in a row. Something changed between my last reasonably fast check and the two long ones. It can’t just be the backlog caused by increased gun sales, because I bought a gun a month or two back and got cleared while I was still in the store. There was a backlog then, and they still got me out the door in less than an hour.

I used to wonder if they were deliberately messing with me because I bought so many guns. Thing is, they’re supposed to destroy all background check records, so when I buy a gun, the FDLE should have no idea whether I’ve ever bought one before. Would they lie? Here’s what I think: they are wonderful, wonderful people, doing a hard job and doing it well.

The current administration is pro-civil-rights (more accurate than “pro-gun”), and Florida law enforcement people have a reputation for feeling the same way, so one assumes they would not do anything to reduce gun sales.

The delays are irksome, because they amount to a de facto waiting period. I’m not supposed to have a waiting period. I have a carry permit, and for some reason, this means I don’t have to wait. It’s a little odd, because the waiting period exemption applies to long guns, and a carry permit does not. Maybe the assumption is that if you’re already carrying, a waiting period won’t prevent you from shooting anyone. You’ll just tell the clerk, “My wife burned the taters again, and you guys are holding me up, so I guess I’ll have to shoot her with my carry piece. Thanks for ruining our anniversary.”

I looked up the numbers to see how many checks are done in Florida every month. Guess how many they did last month. Wrong. They did over 200,000. A lot. It makes me wonder how many guns Americans actually have. Anti-civil-rights nuts like to say we have 300 million, but even if you cut Florida’s current monthly total in half to reflect more typical times, Florida alone must be adding a million guns per year, not including private transactions. Wouldn’t that mean Americans are adding something like 10 million per year, making allowances for snowflake states where the serfs don’t get to buy many guns?

If the numbers are right, we should have added something like 200 million guns since 2000, and America has been around a lot longer than that. Guns don’t disappear very often, and most are used very little, so most old guns are still around. Maybe we have more than half a billion guns.

That’s fine with me. The more good people are armed, the more motivation bad people have to leave them alone. We worry a lot about bad people getting guns, but we should probably worry more about good people not having them. The kind of people who want to go after the innocent in America are generally cowards, and they avoid confrontations with anyone who can retaliate.

My guess, based on what the pawn shop guy told me, is that I’ll be getting a call between one and two.

I think I’m getting over the AR bug. I was not a fan of the AR platform, but I bought an AR-15 anyway just for the experience. Then I made fun of it. Then I improved it and started loving it in spite of the design’s obvious silliness. I thought I might build a second AR in 6mm ARC for fun. Today I read some statistics about reliability issues, and now I’m off the AR again.

I read that 19% of troops surveyed said they had experienced an AR failure DURING A BATTLE. When I say “AR,” I mean all types. The M16, for example, is really an AR-15 with full-auto included.

It would be bad if 19% of troops said their guns had failed at any point in their service, including during training, but having it happen during a battle is really bad. It means a lot of Americans have been killed by AR malfunctions; when your rifle fails during battle, you can die. That’s not a small thing. Also, remember, the men who were killed by malfunctions didn’t get to take the survey, so 19% is probably lower than the real figure.

I read an article by a Green Beret, and he pointed out something I hadn’t thought of. The AR has a buffer tube which has to be in line with the barrel, and if the tube gets bent, the gun can’t shoot.

Rifles have bolts, and when they extract and eject cartridges, the bolts have to go backward. There are plenty of semiauto and automatic rifles that don’t have foot-long bolt-and-spring assemblies, but for some reason, Eugene Stoner put such an assembly on his guns. It looks like it was totally unnecessary. The buffer tube is a pipe that holds a spring that operates an AR’s bolt, and in order for the bolt carrier to go backward, a big piston has to travel down the pipe toward the shooter. If the pipe is bent, you’re done. You can’t shoot until you buy a new pipe.

Many guns give you the option of hitting your enemy instead of shooting him. It looks like you can’t do that with an AR. If you hit someone with the butt, you can bend your tube, and then all you have is an expensive club. You can say the answer is to avoid hitting people with your gun, but tell that to someone in combat. What if a soldier is right in a terrorist’s face, and his magazine is empty? Sorry; go get a pugil stick instead. Say, “Time out.”

Even if you don’t hit people with your gun, what if you drop it and step on it? I think that happens in combat. Just guessing.

Another problem with the buffer tube is that it forces you to use a stock which is at least as high as the barrel. There is a reason why long guns have had bent stocks for maybe 500 years. You need to be able to sight down the barrel. You need a place to put your face.

The stock height doesn’t seem to be a problem for me, but I’m not the only person who owns an AR-15.

I may still get another AR15, but I’m afraid I’ll be tempted to set one up for self-defense, and that’s a bad idea. It’s obvious to me that .223 and 5.56 are very poor home defense calibers, but 6mm ARC would be phenomenal. It would cry out to be used against burglars. The caliber would be better than the rifle.

Maybe if I get one, I should weld a long-range scope to the receiver so it could never be used for self-defense distances.

Just kidding.

People get furious when you criticize the AR-15. You should see all the filthy language they use on the web. It’s bad even by Internet standards. “Rage” is the correct word; it’s no exaggeration.

I don’t understand that. You can criticize any product I buy, and I won’t care. I’m not a rifle. Why does it upset other people? Criticism is good. It helps you to stop screwing up. You have to have a serious maturity problem in order to be infuriated by mean remarks about something you bought. People are way too emotionally invested in products. Insecurity leads to bad decisions.

Years ago, at a gun show, some kid heard me talking about my LR-308. He was walking around with an AR-15 on a sling. He had to know what kind of LR-308 I had; it was important to him. I told him it was a DPMS. He was so happy; it was cheaper than what he had. His superiority had been confirmed.

He comforted me, saying my gun was as good as one from Spike’s, a company I had never heard of. I don’t know what he was carrying, but based on his age and attitude, it was probably a $4000 gun he hadn’t finished paying for. He obviously wanted people to see it, since he was lugging it around at the show.

I could have walked up to a table in that very show and bought any AR-15 in the place, and I could have paid cash. I could have bought 10, just to impress the cool kids. What for? I had a 1-MOA rifle from a very reputable company, capable of doing anything you can do with a gun costing three times as much.

I admit, I didn’t have a portrait of Col. Jeff Cooper [genuflect] laser-engraved on the stock, and the bolt carrier wasn’t platinum-plated. If you want economy, little sacrifices have to be made.

Try what I did. Do two Google searches. Here they are: 1) “AR-15 problems,” and 2) “AK-47 problems.” The search results speak for themselves. They are in no way comparable.

Today, out of idle curiosity, I looked around for AR alternatives. The best one for under a thousand dollars is the Mini-14, which is superior in every way except accuracy, which doesn’t matter for self-defense. But the Mini-14 is still expensive, and it shoots the same crummy .223 cartridge. I thought about a Mini-14 in a better chambering. Then I realized I already had Eastern bloc weapons that do exactly what a .30-caliber Mini-14 would do. There was no purpose in changing anything.

I made the right choice years ago when I decided to keep a Vz58 beside my bed, and nothing has changed. It was a great move. An AR-15 would be a big step backward.

Flame away.

I have a ton of .223 ammo, and I don’t regret buying it, because the AR-15 will be a blast at the range and for shooting irritating four-legged mammals. Reliability issues don’t matter when you’re shooting a target or a coon that keeps knocking over your potted plants.

I haven’t shot a living thing since my dad died last year. I lost my taste for it during the grief. I have to go back to firearm pest control. It’s something responsible men have to do. You don’t let squirrels and other pests screw up your property just because every death makes you think of your late dad.

Will I get many chances to shoot the Ruger Precision Rifle before the world ends? I wonder.

Yesterday, a longtime reader provided a link to a disturbing video. A pastor in Kentucky had a couple of dreams. In one, he saw sick people all over the US. Then the coronavirus epidemic hit. In another, he saw chaos which was supposed to take place in the fall of 2020.

I’ll embed the video here. It’s both disturbing and tedious. Sorry if it bores you.

He says the dream indicated that people would be fighting and killing each other in our streets. That, you don’t have to be a prophet to predict. If Trump wins, there will be terrible violence, because leftists have decided rioting is good. If Biden wins, there shouldn’t be rioting, because the people who riot will be celebrating, but as leftist oppression set in, there would surely be widespread civil disobedience in the areas of firearms ownership and carry.

Conservatives just don’t riot. It doesn’t happen. If you see conservatives fighting in the street, it means they were attacked.

I don’t think that will change.

He also said there would be inflation, and he mentioned an 80% drop in the value of money. That concerns me more than rioting. I can’t keep other people from killing each other, I have done what I could to get away from cities, I have encouraged other people to move, and I am able to deal with the stress of watching stubborn people destroy themselves. Inflation would be bad, however, because I need to eat, and I can’t grow much of anything.

Is he right? I am not able to get a clear impression from God. Most of the time, people like this turn out to be wrong, even if they’ve been right before.

I’m wondering if I should buy a property in Tennessee, ASAP, not just for a refuge, but as a hedge against inflation. Land will always have value. Cash and securities won’t. Even gold and silver can become useless.

I keep asking God to tell me what to do. I don’t want to move after it’s too late. I don’t want to beg and live in a shed on someone else’s land. I definitely don’t want to be an agricultural laborer at my age.

Truthfully, I don’t want to be here. If this is the end, may the rapture come ASAP. I have no desire to live in squalor or die at the hands of vicious, unthinking people who have the hearts of apes.

Last night, a young lady I know called me, and she asked if I had seen the same video. That was not comforting. I hadn’t mentioned the video to her. She found it on her own.

She talked about being bound to South Florida for many years. She said she didn’t have the same ties now. I told her she had to get used to cutting people loose. It’s a big part of Christian life. She’s a Haitian girl who grew up in the suburbs, but she has always wanted to live in the country. She had a dream about Tennessee, before I ever mentioned it to her. Weird.

I told her one of my burdens was the knowledge that I couldn’t help most people I knew. I have a good number of friends, and they like to visit. I have spare bedrooms. I have land. Still, I can’t house three dozen poor, unprepared, unskilled, unarmed people and look after them. This is especially true given that I live on sand. Growing food for one person would be hard enough.

I can help a couple of people, but friends who think their families are going to be able to show up and move in are going to be out of luck. Whoever gets here first will win, and the others will have a problem.

The young lady who called is married. Two small children depend on her. Her husband had very little interest in God when they had their first child and became entwined. She knew better. He’s coming around, but it’s very late, and he hasn’t laid any groundwork for the future.

I don’t think I can do much for them. I could take on a wife. I could conceivably shelter an orphan or two. It’s not my place to be a husband to a husband. A married man should be in God’s presence every day, getting God to provide for his family. It’s not my job.

Don’t marry anyone who isn’t close to God. You will regret it.

Here’s a funny thing: I live like a hermit, and I don’t see people often, but there are a bunch of people who depend on me in one way or another. Most of my friends fit this description. They need counsel and other things all the time. I know some of them see my home as a potential haven. I don’t know if they understand how many people want my help or how hard it is for a single man to carry several families. I can’t do it. I need a helper, not people who ride on my back. They need to get ahold of God’s favor, just as I do.

As for my feelings about the future, for a long time, I’ve had the feeling that it doesn’t matter if I let my responsibilities go. I’ve felt that if I chose, I could ignore them, and it wouldn’t make any difference. I’ve felt that if I decided not to do my taxes, it wouldn’t matter, because by the time the IRS would normally have noticed, they would be unable to do anything about it. Maybe chaos really is coming, and the government will be unable to keep up with what we do.

I know I have to live in the country among peaceful Christians. I have to get God to provide abundance for me no matter what happens to America. I will help other people if I can, but I’m not a lifeboat.

Decide What You Stand On

For some time, God has been teaching me about the problems white people are having. He has shown me that we lost favor because we turned away from him. I’ve been thinking a lot about the problems associated with this change, but today he helped me see the opportunity it presents.

It’s natural to be concerned when you find that the group to which you belong is besieged and disempowered. People like me look around at 2020 America, not to mention the world, and we see we are standing on an island which is getting smaller and smaller as the water rises to drown us. Anti-white racism is red-hot, and it’s becoming white-hot. It’s not going away, and the people who are against us sincerely want to inflict terrible pain on us, as well as humiliation. They’re going to get what they want. Favor has left us.

While it’s reasonable and normal to be concerned about our future as a group, those of us who know God should be happy about the opportunity we now have. We can focus on building a holy family which destroys the barriers of race and nationality and includes brothers and sisters from every background.

Yesterday I got around to fixing my new audio Bible. I had been listening to a Zondervan Bible, but it wasn’t that great. The man who did most of the talking mispronounced things. It was clear Zondervan hadn’t spent much time preparing him. I downloaded a different dramatized KJV, and I turned it into MP3 files, but when I was done, my televisions couldn’t use the files. I had 1189 files in one folder, and the televisions refused to index them. I had to consolidate them into 66 files or one per book.

This morning, I got up and turned on the bedroom TV. Somehow I found myself listening to Joshua. I went to the living room to make breakfast. I turned on the living room TV, and I played Joshua in that room. I didn’t really think about the choice.

I was already prepared for Joshua, because earlier, during prayer, God had give me this word: “I am victorious because of you.”

The book of Joshua is a story of dominance and conquest. Moses led the Hebrews into Israel, but he didn’t enter the country. He died to the east of Israel, and his body was left there. God put Joshua in charge, and he told him to subdue the inhabitants of the land. Israel had been given to Abraham and his descendants, but others were squatting there, and they were idolaters.

The Hebrews fought people God told them to fight, when God told them to fight them. When they were in good standing with God, they defeated their enemies easily. When they displeased God, they were routed.

The Hebrews attacked a city called Ai. Scouts told Joshua it wasn’t necessary to send a big force. They said a few thousand would do, because Ai didn’t have many warriors. The Hebrews sent several thousand soldiers, and the inhabitants of Ai defeated them.

When Joshua complained to God, failing to ask what the Hebrews had done wrong, taking a victim attitude, God told him to get up and asked him why he was lying on his face. God said someone in the Hebrew ranks had taken something cursed in the conquest of Jericho. God had told the Hebrews not to take any treasure, but a man named Achan stole a Babylonian garment and some silver and gold and hid them in his tent.

God singled Achan out as the culprit, and the Hebrews stoned him and his family. They burned their bodies. Then the curse was lifted.

I don’t know what the significance of the gold, silver, and clothing was. Maybe the clothing was associated with demon worship, and its presence would have threatened the Hebrews with the spread of idolatry. Maybe there were pagan images on the silver and gold.

Once the transgression was dealt with, God resumed giving the Hebrews victory.

After the Jews rejected their Messiah, white gentiles were chiefly responsible for spreading the gospel. God gave them favor over peoples who worshiped evil spirits. They ended up ruling every major land mass except for South America, and even there, the dominant group was European, if not quite white. No one could stand before white people. They turned a huge part of the globe’s surface into Christian territory, and God was with them in spite of the fact that they, like the peoples they subdued, did considerable evil. The heathens were a good deal more cruel and bloodthirsty than whites were; no one seems to want to talk about that.

When whites in Europe rejected God, Europe’s favor diminished. The British were great missionaries, but England walked away from God, and the British empire was stripped away. People they used to dominate drove them out.

Here in America, too many whites have chosen godlessness. Now whites are off their pedestal, mobbed by groups to whom they thought they were superior. They credited themselves with their success, claiming they were smarter, harder-working, and so on, but in reality, brains and work will get you nowhere without God. Asians are smart, and they work harder than westerners, but Asia was inferior to the west until very recently.

Now the age of the gentiles, in which white people spread the gospel, is ending or over, and white people have lost their dominance. Those conservatives who are proud and godless think prepping and buying rifles and voting Republican will save them. They’re completely wrong. You can’t replace favor with work. One of the main purposes of favor is to show you how ineffective your plans and works are.

If you’re a white American, you can’t keep hanging onto the shield and weapons that seemed to work for you in the past, because they won’t work unless God is backing you up. The security you used to have because you belonged to the herd is disappearing.

The good news is that without the illusion of racial superiority, white people, and the rest of us, have an opportunity to find favor by aligning ourselves with the family of God.

We can’t turn the clock back and regain dominance as a group, and it’s not a desirable goal anyway. Our segment of the population is vulnerable as a whole, and that won’t change. What we, and everyone else, can do is to find favor as individuals. We should have been doing this in the first place.

If God favors you, it doesn’t matter which ethnic group you belong to. You will be dominant. I don’t mean you’ll be able to push people around. I mean you will be victorious when you’re attacked. You will have a lot of insulation from hostility. You will have provision when godless preppers and militia nuts lack.

One of the best things about seeking favor as an individual is that your status will transcend race and nationality. You may still be targeted by BLM and Antifa destroyers, but you will be united with Holy-Spirit-led people of every type. When you’re with family, race and nationality won’t matter. The anxiety and wariness will be gone. They will be replaced by love and trust.

There is no such thing as racial unity on a nationwide scale. We try to implement it, and we fail. We got rid of segregation laws, and minorities responded by segregating themselves. If you want to find someone who hates interracial marriage, go to any black or Asian neighborhood. Most white people don’t care about it. White people changed, but the rest of America wants no part of it. They want black colleges and Muslim neighborhoods with sharia patrols. They want La Raza and Mecha. They want non-white gangs. Young Asians excoriate girls who marry whites, saying they suffer from self-hate. They say whites who marry Asians have a fetish. Most non-white Americans don’t want unity, and many whites agree.

We can’t have unity as a nation, but you can have unity with the brothers and sisters God has given you, regardless of what they look like. Together, you can step back from the fray and watch the unenlightened tear at each other. You don’t have to let BLM and Antifa screen your friends.

The Bible is full of promises of help and favor, but somehow, Christians have decided they’re not intended seriously. We have cultivated the notion that a really good Christian lives on a sidewalk in a box and preaches love and kindness while people spit on him. The Bible says God gives us victory, healing, joy, peace, strong families, and prosperity. It says our enemies will flee before us. Who is right? God, or the people who preach defeat?

Favor is real, and the stronger the destroyers get, presumably, the more favor God will be willing to give his children. And surely he will want to unite Christians of different backgrounds in order to shame the destroyers and give the lie to their racist nonsense.

There is no black student union in heaven. There is no Italian social club. There are no whites-only golf courses. There is no yeshiva that doesn’t accept gentiles. Jeremiah Wright won’t have a black church in heaven. He’s probably going to hell. Segregating people according to the flesh is a Satanic notion. God unites people according to the Spirit, regardless of what their flesh looks like.

Man’s protection is falling away from me and every other white, male, Southern, Christian, Jewish, or heterosexual American. That’s fine, as long as I move into God’s protection. Man required me to compromise and tug the forelock. God gives favor along with dignity, with no self-betrayal.

People who take sides according to the flesh are going to get nowhere. The word says God will release a horseman to take peace from the earth, and he may already be here. You can’t fight that with earthly weapons. The only real peace is among God’s children.

If Joshua and Caleb throve while surrounded by enemies in superior numbers, so can you. God says he prepares a table before us in the presence of our enemies. He struck the gay rapists of Sodom blind so they couldn’t find the door to Lot’s house. When the rain lifted the Ark, not one pagan was able to break in.

Too many people are taking the wrong messages away from the successes of the destroyers. They’re becoming more carnal, not less. They are following the destroyers instead of standing up as leaders.

I’m glad God showed me the positive side of what has happened to America. I have felt a lot of grief over the spectacle, but in Christian thought, birth comes after death. I should have considered that. Most people will fail and be destroyed, but eventually, the people who are spared and delivered will make me and other Christians forget all about the lost and the pain they caused us.